Posts by breakfast 1557 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007
That is less than nine hours per year of downtime - come to think of it I think the big outage last month broke that - but the neat thing is that the agreements are set up so if they fail to meet that target you're going to be lucky to claw back fifty pence and a red button.
When I ventured from not-very-yokel Surrey up to slightly-less-yokel London a few weeks ago I was amazed to see a symbol on my phone that looked like the number three followed by the letter 'G'. Although this mysterious sigil was something I had heard of, as an EE customer outside of the M25 I had never seen any evidence of its existence.
As the saying goes: "Everything Everywhere except for phone signal in your phone."
The jarring mode-shifts and complete uselessness of the interface as sold ( as a mouse and keyboard user ) is a good starting point- if I have to install extra software to make a consumer operating system usable at all, that is not my problem, that is the OS Designers'. But that isn't all.
Originally with 8 it was very hard to shut down your computer- a three step process where it used to be one-step. All of these places where they make it more difficult to do things that every user needs to do on a routine basis, they are failing.
When I want to browse through images in a folder, Windows 8 jumps me to a full-screen ( or tile or whatever it is ) gallery application and after the initial image I have opened it just seems to pick at random from the pictures stored on my machine. It is massively unintuitive and means that this is another function for which I simply don't use Windows any more.
A few months after I set up the machine, I edited a couple of photographs and deleted the originals. For some reason Windows 8 interpreted "delete" to mean "Smear file contents across everything on the hard drive" and proceeded to wipe out half of my music library and cost me weeks of work. Call me old-fashioned but I consider manipulating files to be the primary purpose of an operating system. If it can't do that, then no amount of annoying interface tics is going to win me over.
The desktop search in Windows is very good, enough so that I use it a lot of the time. But in 8 it can be hard to know whether when you're looking for a way to change system configuration you are going to get bounced into a Tile Interface view or something useful.
The Windows Store- they obviously want to drive people there, but they have done a terrible job of making it useful and it is largely full of junk. I wouldn't buy from it, in fact I would go out of my way to avoid buying through it.
Compatibility is surprisingly poor - the other day I used a USB display adapter that caused the system to bluescreen at boot. Not Microsoft's fault, of course, but it all makes the operating system seem bad. If I have a new piece of hardware that doesn't appear to work in Windows, I can boot into Linux on the same machine and test it there. With Mint I find the hardware I add works first time every time, which used to be the case in Windows during previous versions. When the 8.1 update came in my wireless card started randomly dropping connectivity. It's an Intel card on a Windows system, which is about as mainstream as you can get, and they have hundreds of reports of the same problem for the same card. It's still marked on Microsoft and Intel's sites as "Compatible With Windows 8" even though this is self-evidently a lie.
All these things create cognitive friction. In almost all cases, when a user notices your operating system that is a bad thing, and I am constantly being reminded that I am using Windows 8 in a way that hasn't happened with any of the previous versions of Windows I have used.
Also, by way of comparison, I have found Mint to be smooth, easy to use and very reliable. If I had to choose between that and Windows 8.1 when setting up a computer for my mum, I would choose Mint.
I don't have a passionate dislike of Microsoft ( my day job involves using their development tools so I benefit from their work and understand their systems reasonably well ) but I have developed a passionate dislike of W8, even once I got a start-menu replacement installed and curbed it's most irritating excesses. Hopefully 10 will be a little less tiresome.
I have been surprised to find that on my dual-boot laptop, I use Mint to troubleshoot the hardware when Windows 8.1 won't play nicely with it. As yet the only thing that worked better under Windows is the SD card reader- everything else that has been problematic under Windows ( including external microphones and the wireless card ) work perfectly on Mint. Consequently it sees the vast majority of my usage on a daily basis, although when the alternative is Windows 8 being dragged face down through mud behind a donkey is a preferable option.
I am now imagining two driverless cars doing a high-speed version of that thing where you try to get out of someone's way in a corridor and they do the same to you and before you know it you're just stuck, doing some kind of weird corridor dance, desperate to get to your destinations.
The important thing is that the Azure status page informs us that "Everything is running great" and as far as I can say that message hasn't changed at any point.
It comes across as a touch insincere, even just a tiny bit like they are taking the piss, when that is followed by a long list of problems, failures and outages.
Also I don't know how everyone else is getting on, but there still seem to be a lot of problems with it here.
I have been doing a little dabbling in Java lately, for the first time in about ten years, and having worked with a bunch of different languages - including C# - since it just felt really old and clunky. Everything about it was like a clunky and awful version of something I have seen well implemented elsewhere.
I was interested to realise reading this that I trust Microsoft to manage .Net more than I trust Oracle to run Java. At least they pretend to care about developers.
If this new .Net allows decent cross-platform UI development that doesn't look horrible on any platform then it might be quite convenient, though I suspect the days of the native UI are coming to a close.
So just to be absolutely clear, the US Government is perpetrating constant surveillance against everyone inside and outside the USA at all times, and yet they had to be notified by an Ally of attacks against the Whitehouse???
Has anyone got some palms large enough for the huge faces on Mount Rushmore?
The problem that researchers are facing now is certainly philosophical more than technical. People always underestimate philosophy until they start running into it's harder problems.
In the long run I think Strong AI probably both can and will be developed, although it will take a long time and the nature of that intelligence will probably be incomprehensible to us. There is a good chance that the consequence will be some kind of mayhem.
If we want it to be anything like us, AI researchers need to be placing their work in the physical world and giving it access to the sense data that we build our understanding from. Then at least we will have some common experience to build communication up from.
It's great to log in to G+ when you want some peace and quiet. Just you and the tumbleweed rolling past in the howling wind, that bell tolling in the distance...
Actually the more I see of the kind of bullshit that goes down on Twitter with all the hate groups and whathaveyou, the more I start to think that Google may just have to wait until other social networks shoot themselves in the foot once too often and it's community-of-communities approach may just win out.
I haven't read outside the Malazan series, but I don't think his intention with those was to create a cohesive narrative- it was a tapestry of stories that pretty much managed to keep me interested throughout. Very much ideas-fiction, rather than story oriented, though. Perhaps like some sci-fi in that respect.
Although I enjoyed them, I haven't been driven to pick up any of his other work. Given that this one seems to be a distillation of his most irritating qualities, I guess I won't be getting this either.
The thing about everything over IP is that it anticipates that you have strong IP connectivity at all times, which cannot be assumed among us yokels. Everything Everywhere does not include phone signal in my phone. They should probably rebrand to "some things in some places" if they care about accuracy for anybody more than six miles outside London.
Of course, DAB isn't great for anybody on the move but I had a phone with an FM receiver which I used a lot, I will certainly keep an eye out for that as a feature next time I'm shopping for one.
As a sunday-evening family drama goes it's fine. Better than most other things.
I am enjoying Capaldi's more cantankerous persona, it's a refreshing change. Also contrary to some of the article I feel like Clara is finally getting some character in this series. That said, she always comes across as a bit too playschool presenter for my liking, which is ironic because everyone knows that the best companion started out as a playschool presenter.
Mr Moffatt has some very bad habits as a writer but he does seem quite conscious of them and maybe one of these days he'll stop walking into the same annoying traps or trying to wring our emotions with a consequence-free and ultimately trivialised fatalities. Also the "flagshipness" of the show seems to make it harder for him to be allowed any subtlety ( "our studies show that the C1 through D4 demographic won't get it" ) so I suspect there is a certain amount of limitation on what he is able to do.
I have 8.1 on my laptop and the major improvement the 8.1 update brought was that the drivers for my wireless card stopped working ( my fault I guess for having bought a system with card from a no-name brand like Intel ) and consequently it's all Linux all the time as far as I'm concerned now. Aside from occasionally wishing I had a working office suite - and Google Docs gives me most of that - I can't say I miss Windows at all.
In one way, since the technology became sufficient many of the stories that can be told with the current generation of gaming tools have now been told, so many things are effectively remakes.
However the other side of that is that people with a big-money franchise are inherently conservative because they are terribly and intensely afraid of killing off the goose that lays the golden egg for them. So they can't take risks or do anything new.
New games will come predominantly out of small and independent development houses. Once something becomes a safe bet ( moderately recent example might be Dark Souls ) then a big publisher may pick it up and start making sequels, but those will be more of the same.
Ultimately companies investing large amounts of money in games expect to see ROI, so they end up producing games designed by market segmentation research rather than by people who care about making games fun, original or interesting. This is a place where Kickstarter is proving to be somewhat disruptive, which is good news for people who like good games.
Perhaps they felt it might be more effective for the poster to discover that in the judgement of the vast majority of their peers they are a ridiculous scrotewit clinging with slithy tenacity to repugnant opinions that bring nothing of worth to any discussion and serve no purpose beyond making them look like a tiresome, self-entitled, plank-faced tosswizard.
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