Posts by Paul Shirley

Re: Nokia Lumia 620 ...

...especially was the 2010 phone was at the budget end of midrange at launch!

Re: Trade war

A Korean ban on component exports to America would be more effective.

Re: " its not hard to point it at a wall or put a duster over it"

...won't disable those oh-so-sensitive microphone arrays in the Kinect. The ones that listen for the 'on' command even with Kinect supposedly disabled. No chance of abusing that...

Re: 12 Contenders - No, No only 11

Once you dump cow juice in the mug they'll taste the same anyway.

Re: bad bad bad design!

I'd guess the thinking was that a device designed for use off grid in rough conditions isn't something you'd casually leave lying in the sun when not using it. Leave it deliberately in charging configuration yes, otherwise keep it safely in its case. Still a serious oversight though.

Even better if they could safely build a backpack that exposed the panels while trekking, a very likely use.

Re: 4 SPACES?!

"And why does an if need a block after it?"

Defensive programming. It stops you making an idiotic mistake later when adding a 2nd statement to the if. We've all made that mistake... not that I'm claiming I always do the bracing, it has however saved me a lot of debugging time since I got into the habit.

Re: If your priorities are price and storage why are you considering a Surface pro?

That seems to be exactly the question potential buyers are asking themselves.... and not buying Surface.

@danny: seamless migration of applications from XP

Epic Microsoft stupidity (or arrogance). Normal users face a choice of losing everything or sticking with XP. IT geeks install a dual boot so they can take time rescuing old data and apps.

I've had to drop back into my XP backup several times to fix Win8 problems or where it's easier than trying to reinstall and configure programs. The temptation to just switch back is strong and the lack-of-upgrade process just makes it easier. Of course during those sessions I went online, bumping that XP count an insignificant amount!

That must have been a frosty management meeting, where the engineers tried explaining why they couldn't make this a one way only update this time ;)

Re: 98% of nothing

Remember, O2 had to be *forced* to honour their 3G coverage agreement. Even after several years frantically upgrading to keep the licence their service is still shite in large areas and they've done little to deal with congestion. So more coverage but it's still not actually usable in my local city centre.

So you're gambling the regulator will proactively coerce O2 into reaching those targets. That's not a bet I'd take.

Re: The basics

I believe you meant to type 'how fast it is to uninstall the Facebook crapp' ;)

By and large any recent smartphone is good enough at the 'things phones do' that it doesn't merit mentioning. It's no longer a differentiator.

Orlowski used to endlessly bang on about the supposed superiority of WP7's people hub/unified messaging (or whatever it's called). Even he's given up flogging that dead horse, WP wasn't first with the idea and some of us don't find the implementation or concept superior anyway. Where software's involved your idea of 'working well' may be radically different to mine.

Re: I've got a solution!

No need. There are already only a handful of good channels... and the others repeat so often you can check them infrequently without missing anything ;)

Re: No mas

You were asleep when judge Koh tried that. She repeatedly ordered them to take part in settlement talks and somehow thought, if she kept on doing it something would change. Another sign of how little she understood what and why Apple were using the courts.

In fact Koh seems to have had little interest in anything but getting the case out of her court as quickly as possible. Her post trial comments strongly suggest seeking actual justice wasn't a big concern, less important than following the legal process, where ever it led - just as long as it looked like getting there quickly. The only good thing she managed was making public statements that should guarantee a new trial, with a different judge. A trial that won't happen because by then there won't be any claims surviving the PTO's real final decisions.

Re: Stream local files from the browser?

All sounds great BUT: I want to see it working, with an unmodified DLNA source before buying into this.

There's zero chance either of my DLNA capable NAS will see another firmware update, streaming clients need to work with standard DLNA (laughable though calling anything DLNA *standard* is) or I'm simply wasting my money.

...and this is Google, where stuff just get's thrown at buyers with no guarantee of ongoing support, development that heads in whichever direction Google and it's commercial partners need more often than serving users. And where projects just get cancelled on short notice if they don't achieve market dominating success quickly enough.

Definitely waiting to see if Google push this in the direction I need. Odds are I'll already have a stick PC doing the job before they get there, for not much more than the cost of a Chromecast+decent remote for it.

Re: No Radiation?

Jim O'Reilly:"Since Fukushima, we've discovered that the number of deaths expected is ZERO."

Disingenuous at best.

Mass evacuation may well have dropped the directly attributable deaths to zero. It may even be true few or no deaths would have occurred without it (unlikely given the lack of success in cleanup efforts). Evacuation itself is stressful and has health consequences, this evacuation was larger and longer than the hurricane can be blamed for, it's ongoing.

Research after Chernobyl established that the fear or suspicion of contamination is enough to significantly reduce life expectancy. The only truly safe reactor (in terms of public health) is one that needs no emergency plan.

It's laughable to equate 'no direct deaths' with 'no deaths'.

Re:we don't need Microsoft for that 'third ecosystem'

1: Samsung+Android

2: Apple+iOS

3: everyone else+Android

At least from the publics POV. The fragmentation MS endless portrays as bad makes Android a flock of closely related systems, albeit in a very limited sense. MS can hope to beat some of that 3rd tier but not sell enough for anyone to care.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are more phones running the MIUI version of Android than total WP phones.

Re: What took them so long?

"I feel most laptop keyboards are also painful"

When I try to do real work on mine I always use the wireless keyboard from my desktop PC. Laptop keyboards are just crap. Test still preferable to the onscreen keyboard on tablets.

... though I am enjoying the new Google keyboard on my phone. Can't imagine using the slide mode would be as useful on a much larger pad screen though.

Royal Mail optout

Here in the UK, 1st sign up to the Mail Preference Service @ http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/ to stop the majority of mail. It actually seems to work.

To nail most of the remaining stuff read http://www.royalmail.com/personal/help-and-support/how-do-I-stop-receiving-any-leaflets-or-unaddressed-promotional-material, has been claimed it's a sacking offence for you're postie to tell you about the opt-out!

Re: Clue up

Nope, MS took care to not be specific so readers would jump to conclusions. If anything it's hurt them badly, when the false conclusions many reached were proven false those same people jumped to the false conclusion it was a problem across the whole Win8 line!

They just tried the same scam with XBone but botched it more badly, not enough people imagined the wonders a tightly DRMed digital distribution model might bring. Interestingly MS still haven't officially commented on what those wonders might have really been, just left it to the rumour mill and had unconfirmable employee comments seed that mill.

Re: Extras?? We just needed an internet connection

They don't serve ads to "faculty, staff, or students" on Education versions. Can't comment on whether they trawl the content.

Re: The title is not the patent!

You describe how the process is supposed to work not how it actually works (where works->fails to work). In reality the USPTO does very little filtering until faced with a legal challenge and for software what's granted is rarely much different to what's claimed. That 90% of claims get shredded when challenged doesn't help, it's too bloody late by then.

Guess what, there is a DVD full of tests for all those edge cases. I never ran the whole set - needed a spare hard drive just to collect the results and it would have taken days just pulling the results off the mobile, for a codec that never aimed to pass all tests.

Raises suspicion that MS don't follow their own certification procedures. Wouldn't be the first time there were different rules for internal and external MS developers.

Re: " there was a significant change in specificatio"

If Winphone continues to restrictively specify the design of new devices it has no future. Apple already captured the minority happy to all own the 'same' phone, the majority stampeded toward the 'fragmented' world of Android.

Microsoft really got this wrong, avoiding fragmented hardware only sounds good in business meetings but it's not what the buying public actually want... the share of the public not already tied to Apple that is. MS aren't ever going to shift enough iOS users to WP and have contracts with Apple preventing them copying the look&feel of iOS to ensure it.

Quite how MS managed to build an OS unable to cope with varied hardware is hard to understand, device abstractions and wide driver support is what created their desktop OS success. Seems certain it was a deliberate decision, I'd guess driven by Apples success when they started work on Winphone and the endless fountain of PR castigating Android fragmentation strongly suggests they've always wrongly believed it was a crucial sales feature.

The problem is they completely forgot to check with the market, a market with thousands of different devices before smartphones rose and with a thriving customisation aftermarket even on locked down iPhones. Most buyers want variation, even if only cosmetic and Microsoft went out of their way to not offer that. Huge mistake when you're this late to a market.

The end result is a engineering mindset at Microsoft that means they aren't building each version of WP with the flexibility to deal with off-spec hardware. I don't believe that attitude will change in time to make WP9 support WP8 spec hardware, they need to acknowledge a central part of the sales plan is wrong and Microsoft haven't yet accepted they need change to rescue the products.

Re: @mmeier

Mediaportal is not a 'badly behaved' program, at least as far as it's install process and links is concerned.

It installed 16 links in my Start Menu, split between front and backend sub menus, both contained in the Team Mediaportal main menu and easily navigable. The Start Screen picked 8 of them to dump into it's grid and didn't even keep them together in the jumble. The 'all apps' view at least clustered them into 1 group but discarded the front/backend distinction and only found 13 of the links. Not only did it flatten the hierarchy, it couldn't even find all the links... beyond useless.

It's probably the most links an installer added but far from unique - I see 4 TortoiseSVN links on the Start Screen, worse than useless because the main one is a context menu that only works in explorer on the desktop!

What's this 'install everything' setting?

Anyway, the problem here is not lack of signature checks, the device signature check itself is broken. Its easy to spot tampered with apps but you're now more reliant on trusting the distribution chain to actually do it.