Posts by AndrueC

Re: Love that pic on the WeExchange site

Marketing 101.

Buy this car, you'll enjoy traffic free roads and beautiful countryside.

Eat this cereal and you'll enjoy a happy family life with two kids (one of each sex) and a golden retriever.

Re: Every so often a market develops around something improbable

Gold, you almost have a point here, but gold has alternate applications where there are no alternatives. Additionally, people like shiny, shiny which ultimately pushes the price of it up given it's rarity.

Yah, shining nicely is an application the same as facilitating the free flow of electrons at connection points. Ultimately nothing has value outside of what humans credit it with. Everything is worth what the people trying to acquire it think it's worth - it's just that if you're basing off a physical thing then you're more subject to the foibles of the real world. Typically that tends to introduce price stability but it doesn't always.

It's all part of a game we choose to play called 'civilisation'.

And no, I don't mean Sid Meier's.

:)

Re: 'tarded

Killraventard?

:)

Re: The music industry: Still late for their own funeral

I held out on digital downloads for a long time. Preferring to get the CD then rip to a lossless format for my server and players. But I gave in last year. I eventually got tired of waiting for lossless downloads and with the crappy production standards of modern music (things like The Loudness War) and advancing age I decided I was probably deluding myself that I could hear a difference. And if I could I might be hearing defects rather than music anyway.

I think the simple answer is that most people just don't care enough. A true music enthusiast might find that appalling but I'm more sanguine. Music doesn't exist 'just because' - it exists to entertain and give enjoyment. It still seems to be doing that so I struggle to get really worked up over the issues of delivery media.

Re: Microsoft still hasn't learned..

Makes you wonder... if VS2012 was such a PoS, what are MS developers using to as a coding environment?

vs2012 is quite good in my opinion. Definitely better than previous versions. It does require you to install a widget to gain control of the colour scheme and another to set up better bookmarking keys (seriously why does MS think that 'go to next/previous' is enough. I want to be able to go to a specific bookmark not cycle through them) but overall it's a good release I think.

Re: Bottom line

Um, the GUI has been uncoupled from the Kernel for a long time. Probably for ever. The graphics engine got moved back in with the Kernel but not the GUI. You can replace the Windows 'shell' very easily and have always been able to.

List of replacement shells

Some of those are actual replacements, others just resource changes but Classic Shell addresses your main point by providing a Win7 or XP experience for Windows 8.

There's no technical reason why MS had to provide the same experience on all versions of Windows. It's purely a marketing choice. They obviously felt - wrongly in my opinion - that Windows should mean the same thing and look the same regardless of hardware.

Re: At least two sides to this story

There are still villages and towns today which are derelict and depressed, and full of unemployment and all the social ills.

Really? 30 years (an entire generation later) and you want to blame her? How about blaming the politicians who came after her. The world has changed a helluva lot over the last 30 years and to blame Maggie for the current state of affairs is pretty ridiculous. There's been plenty of time and opportunity for those who came after her to fix the damage. Or hey - maybe you want to go back and blame Gladstone next?

Re: Between The Unions and Thatcher

The UK has F*&k all manufacturing base left.

Actually we're still in the top ten - number six or seven I think. But hey - with people like you talking it down all the time and putting people off careers in that sector it might eventually fall further. Way to go - nothing like supporting your own country, eh?

Re: Agreed

"BT generally only rollout FTTC in areas with a high concentration of Virgin Media customers

Your anonymous source was spouting crap (fairly typical for a BT employee). I have FTTC and Brackley has no VM presence. Almost all of Bicester can get FTTC yet less than a third of the town can get VM cable. My brother in Carlisle can get FTTC and there's no VM there.

It's true there is overlap but frankly VM should take some of the blame for that. After all the years they've been around they still don't have market dominance in the areas they serve. They are obviously doing something wrong given that cable is a perfectly reasonable way to deliver TV, phone and network services.

Re: Spamhous must really be hurting those parasites

It's difficult to run a mail server at home any more due to the lengths mail server administrators must go through to limit incoming spam

I manage it. I'm not running it on a souped up Cray either. Just a Fit-PC2. 1.1GHz of Intel Atom goodness(*) with 1GB of RAM and Windows 7. On a typical day it gets several dozen spam mails sent to it and sometimes a week or two of someone attempting a dictionary attack. Seems to run fine for me. I'll concede that since we use disposable addresses 99.9% of the spam is sent to the bit bucket without ever reaching a users inbox but since I'm filtering by RCPT TO it still has to be downloaded.

Good old VPOP3.

(*)Stop laughing at the back. It consumes less than 10w of power an hour.

Re: Its the people, not the computer

You don't trust everyone you meet face-to-face, so don't trust people you "meet" on the Internet.

Nor every aspect of the APIs you use :)

Re: Its the people, not the computer

Its not the computers which make everything easier; its the people who lost their curiosity and interest to find out and discover for themselves why and how things work

Or maybe they are paid for the work they actually produce and can't justify spending hours discovering how the wheel was invented.

Sorry. I didn't mean that to sound snide - you make a good point. I just don't think it reasonable to expect today's software developers to understand every last aspect of their trade. Or where does it end? Am I to be prevented from writing software until I can describe the design of logic gates for AND, OR, NOT? Or perhaps I have to demonstrate an understanding of electron flow inside a transistor? Or perhaps being able to quote Farraday's various laws is essential?

Unfortunately we have to draw the line somewhere and today's IT markets are fast paced and schedule driven. Very few people in IT can afford to devote time to wondering about the how and why of a black box whether it be a logical black box or one that a courier has just delivered. What we need to do is make better black boxes not require everyone to understand them :)

Anyway just to repeat, I liked your post :)

Re: set the controls for the heart of the sun

The other kid then proceeded to drive it around some random and very unsolar directions :(

That was probably me. Back when I was young and daft. I'm not young any more though :D

Re: Probably a memory issue

Is there enough memory to do this?

To play devil's advocate that's probably not want you want to do. The reason being that out of memory is actually a rare condition these days. So constantly checking for it is something of a waste of CPU cycles. What you should do is:

<try>

<begin transaction guard>

<do stuff>

<end transaction guard>

<catch>

<message user about lack of resources>

<end>

In other words you react to a rare condition rather than constantly checking for it. Not only avoids wasting CPU cycles but with the transaction guarding (or at least well implemented fixup/tear down) you only have to catch the error in a few places. If you use RAII it mostly falls out of the design as the stack unwinds while the exception propagates back up the stack looking for a handler.

Re: There is a simple explanation

That's an extraordinary claim, and as such requires extraordinary evidence.

Evidence 1

"Usability at Microsoft has come a long way in the 10 years it's been around. When the group started, there was one small lab in building 5, in the middle of the oldest part of the Redmond campus. Today there are over 30 individual labs, and even more usability engineers that work with product teams to run the studies"

Evidence 2

Just sayin' ;)

Re: There is a simple explanation

It never ceases to amaze or sadden me that apparently the Word UI is the result of extensive testing in usability labs. I'd like to meet some of the people they've been testing it on. Or maybe not. I suspect some of them may not be house trained yet.

This is exactly the problem with a lot of technology: they try to shape usage in preconceived patterns.

As you say - if you drive the software like a noddy you have fewer problems but as soon as you try to drive it like someone who knows what you're doing it starts to go pear-shaped. Perhaps we need a special 'geek' mode where the UI doesn't do anything more than is directly requested by the operator.

And is this intelligent UI the reason why basic functionality seems flaky now? Going back to text selection - why is that in recent years it's been so easy to miss the first letter off what you want to select? It's like the OS hesitates before accepting what you're doing as a selection. Or how come sometimes the clipboard just doesn't accept new items? It's odd. Back in the 90s the Windows UI seemed fine but it seems to get less responsive and less reliable as time goes on now.

This does not mean anything

Well..okay. I wasn't going to bother quantifying it but as you asked:

Very few calls or texts.

Checking my POP3 server every 10 minutes.

Listening to music for an hour every day.

And a little bit of general use now and again but not that much. For what it's worth on the standard Desire battery I could just about go 24 hours between charges but that meant charging when it was showing orange. At present I'm charging on Monday mornings and Friday mornings and the display is still green.

I'm just not that much 'into' phones. Never have been. It's just a useful thing to have in my pocket (the sum of it's features rather than any single feature and making calls/texts is actually the least used) and I don't want to become a slave to chargers or be constantly bothering people to borrow theirs.

If I get invited to a dirty weekend on Friday (sadly, not common) I can just get in the car and drive off without having to worry about charging my phone. I know it will comfortably get me through to Monday.