Correlation does not imply causation...

...however it does waggle its eyebrows and wiggle its hips while cooing suggestively "lookie, over here!"

Re: Aha!

" I confiscated the pupils that had better phones than me!"

Now then now then.

Re: Tumbleweed...

Hi.

Microsoft are fucking shit, and you're wrong. Try reading the posts.

Re: Maybe I'm cynical, but...

You do remember when IE had 90-odd percent share of browsers due to the tactic, and Microsoft started trying to use that to pwn Web standards?

Yeah. Browser ballot screen is not bullshit, even if you don't understand the need for it.

Re: Not so difficult to port games to Windows Phone 8

Yeah.

Anybody ever bothered looking at the cost involved in buying the full Unity3D, the full Autodesk creative suite, MS visual studio, a proper version of Windows 8 and all the other various things that people think you have to have to develop software?

Might as well just buy a house, sit on it for 6 months and re-sell it. You'll make more money and it'll probably be a lower outlay, and definitely less risk.

Re: $8 (eight) for the introductory offer.

"MS are not going to buy your development hardware for you."

Since when is having to pay $99 to use your own device translate to Microsoft buying my hardware for me?

"Really, it's pretty much necessary that there be some barrier such as a fee, to stop anything being installed on a device by anyone otherwise the whole security model collapses."

Really? I would think just a simple username/password attached to an admin account would work. That or just not lending your device to all and sundry. Don't make excuses for Microsoft trying to monetize the shit out of everything. A fee is entirely unnecessary to allow someone to do what they want with what they own.

Re: This Facebook thing is getting way too much attention.

"Back in the 80s, almost every rich geek or geeky kid with rich parents subscribed to some sort of BBS."

Fixed it for you. Anyway, "ISPs" weren't really around in the 80s. Neither was the Internet as we know it today.

Re: Harder to ignite...

Diesel can be burned like wax. Dip something porous and somewhat flammable in it (like a rag, paper, whatever), and burn that. In fact I've seen candles that use diesel instead of wax, with the wick on a floating thing atop a pool of the stuff. Cheaper than lamp oil, I guess.

Re: Only one accurate name

Bidsum.

Re: Rights don't exist in isolation

"Namely that if you copy, you have a duty to publish everything."

Uhm, no you don't. I have copies of GPL software here that I'm not distributing. You should try reading the GPL some time.

As for "publish all work using it".. depends on what you mean. I don't see many of the commercial developers (yes they do exist) being forced to give their stuff away for free just because they made a Linux version.

Now if you're on about making your own Linux, taking the hard work of thousands of others who have given their work to the community, locking it up behind a pretty veneer and a layer of proprietary binaries.. no, no you can't do that. And quite right too.

Re: Plus, Apple are very busy alienating developers...

No I'm not a phone developer, but is the above pseudocode really that hard?

Re: Isn't it ironic?

Don't you mean the comments section of a Nexus 7 article got hijacked by a few sour Apples, and the rest of us are too busy laughing to pour on any real amount of hate?

Really, if you don't care for Android, just ignore it and the gazillions of manufacturers that produce devices running it, please. Care for what you like and use and buy.. or come on here and and say how your Ferrari is so much better than my Fiesta, or something. I really can stand lots more.

Re: I call FAIL

Stupid servers that let you direct link then don't let you direct link. This Win8 screenshot should work.

Re: I call FAIL

"Win 8 OS looks too much like a damn Android screen."

You sure?

Positive about that?

Or as Jim Carey might say...

REE HEEE HEE HEEEEEEEEALLY?

Sorry, I call shenanigans.

Re: ...third-party developer....

Really, don't go there. The "west" might not be perfect, but compared to a fuckload of other places it's a goddamned paradise.

How much more useful is Facebook compared to, say, a CC/BCC email list?

Then you own your own damned contact list. Hardly an inconvenience. "Ohai, I want to send this mail to..." *click each user name or select groups/all*

I'm pretty sure people used to use these things called "email clients" that did something surprisingly similar to this at one point, before Facebonk decided to get a whole load of suckers (Zuck's words, not mine) signed up.

Re: I want a really high resolution display for reading

Sub-pixel accuracy. Well, sub-cone-and-rod accuracy anyway.

That's why.

Really, if the tech is going that way anyway, then whyever not use it? Games, especially polygon-based, will use whatever resolution you throw at them and are not limited by the resolution the video was recorded at. Plus give it a couple of years and you'll be downloading 2K and 4K movies, you mark my words.

You can develop for a laptop on the laptop you're developing for, and no need to pay a tax to a price-gouging vendor with a history of lock-in.

Oh, wait.

Come on Microsoft, Apple. Catch up, won't you?

Re: $8 (eight) for the introductory offer.

They would be stupid not to put a phone emulator in their IDE.

However, how is a 32" not-touch monitor going to emulate multi-touch? Or non-mocked GPS? Accelerometers? Gyroes? Cameras? Any of the myriad extra bits of hardware on a real phone or tablet?

That and emulators have a tendency to run like frozen pigshit uphill in Winter compared with the real hardware. If you want to see how your app will really run, you really need a really real device. Really Microsoft, are you so stingy as to charge $99 to give someone the ability to do what they want with what they own? How much does it cost to give out an unlock key? About 0.000000001p for the cost of the electricity to run the server? Why do you even need to dev-lock the device in the first place?

Oh yes. Copying Apple.

Re: $8 (eight) for the introductory offer.

$99, apparently.

There's a very limited, crippled unlock for $9.

Re: developer tools for android suck

Or buy AIDE Premium and develop your app on the same device you're deploying it to. £7.99 in the old empire money, which is not bad for a full IDE with Dropbox and Git integration that can take your eclipse project files and import them directly. There's a free version for you to play about with to see if you like it, too.

Re: @AC 12:42

you're right... you'd have to pay me a lot more to be seen in a BMW than a Fiesta.

Upvoted. Not because I hate BMWs. I think their addiction to rear wheel drive is lots of fun.

However that was an awesome one-liner.

Re: @AC 12:42

And then you show them a decent Droidslab, one of the Nexus devices or something by Asus, and suddenly it swings the argument again.

There was a company in the 80s and 90s. Amstrad. They sold on the principle of "stack it high, sell it cheap", and did more to put a computer into people's homes than any amount of price gouging by Microsoft or Apple. This is the same thing, but 30 years later. Trying to say "well I have a Ferrari and you have an icky little 1.1L A-reg Ford Fezzbomb" is just elitism, and sounds maybe a little bit like sour grapes. I know people who have more fun in their Fiesta than you'll ever have in your delicate little Precious. That's probably what hurts the most, isn't it?

Also https://wiki.goonfleet.com/images/Dinc-noammo-ruinyourlife.jpg - just because.

Re: "I advocate them for professionals"

" a gaming laptop for any serious deployment in a work environment where there is demand for high-end mobile computing performance."

Games aren't high performance?

T'aint' all about the GPU you know, and I don't think you can get 16-core server-class CPUs in laptops quite yet anyway.

Really, if it can do high end gaming, it can do just about anything. Asides maybe run cool.

Re: > "Tech used to be exciting. "

"Now there is little appreciable benefit to buying a faster CPU/GPU/disk"

Games.

"I don't know of anyone who's considering 128bit cpu's."

Only because it's not hitting the mainstream yet. When it does? Games.

"We could get better GPUs for realtime photo-realistic rendering but that isn't needed by most people (at least, not to the point where they want to pay for it).

Don't know many serious gamers, do you?

I still remember a friend splunking five thousand pounds on a gaming rig. A grand of which was the cooling system. He was running Crysis at full tilt when magazines were saying it was impossible and marking the game down for it.

Don't underestimate the power of shiny.

Ahem.

When I said "combination of operating systems", I was trying not to attract attention by saying "Linux".

Good luck getting anything Microsoft to work there.

Re: Rights don't exist in isolation

" If you don't accept the concept of copyright, there's no reason to obey the terms of any open-source licence, after all."

You know why the GPL is referred to as "copyleft", right?

Re: Apple never dominated anything.

My dislike of Apple is far from irrational. If it was, I wouldn't mention "proper web browser in a phone".

My dislike of Apple comes from their attitude of locking people into an expensive ecosystem, in ways that Microsoft only wish they could emulate. It's been going on for far longer than the iThings, too. Want a new power supply for that G3 power mac? Sure, that'll be a couple of hundred quid please. Never mind that it's a bog standard ATX power supply with the pins changed and a 21V line for some reason. The iThings with the curated app store, no other way other than Apple's of doing anything at all, and every chance a popular app could be emulated by Apple and then banned due to replicating functionality, is just a logical progression for this company.

Ignoring that in an attempt to make me look irrational is, well, just sad.

Re: The problem with the 'give it away for free' model

Upvoted, because I've been downvoted a few times for stating facts.

For "sell it at cost" model, see Playstation, Xbox and Wii. Oh, and Geohotz.

Re: Real attempt at a new UI

Tiles are not new.

Even mixing tiles with traditional icons is an old idea.

However I will admit, making them look like Tomy toys and removing half the functionality is uniquely Microsoft.

Re: A reasonable priceplan

You sure you own a smartphone? I'll give you a clue: Some ancient Nokia or Alcatel with a two-line text display is not a smartphone. If you even think about using the features of a smartphone you can easily exceed 500MB/month.

Re: Data Caps

"Here's what people do without data caps:"

So? 0s and 1s don't cost anything to make. So long as a couple of heavy users aren't swamping the cell - something which a few people including myself have already mentioned can be dealt with by careful use of throttling - who cares?

Three should be congratulated for understanding what the word "unlimited" means.

...and I'd rather have a throttle than a nasty bill or getting completely cut off.

Seriously, why are there data caps these days? What decade is this?

Re: The way I thought this worked:

And you're an anonymous bell-end who likes to downvote people for missing out an "n".

Sorry for offending your sense of grammar.

Uhm

I'm pretty sure many games run on an event driven routine where mouse, keyup/keydown and joy events get pumped into a handler. I'm also pretty sure at least in SDL's case, that mouse events only happen when the mouse is inside the SDL window, and keyup/keydown events only happen when the SDL window is active.

So, no I don't see the need for a system wide hook on human interface devices in games.

Re: One day old, a generation ahead...

I really don't see how the Android UI has improved much over Froyo. Battery life, sure that's better (and not part of the UI). Things run a little smoother, but it's still the same old icons+widgets affair unless you're running a tablet. In that case, the notification bar becomes part of the non-removable waste of screen space at the bottom along with the Home, Menu and Recent Apps "buttons".

On a phone though? You could show someone every version of Android from Donut onwards and they'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. Android might have had some stuff added under the hood, but the UI is pretty much the same as it's always been.

Anyway, wonder how long until Google sue Microsoft for copying Android's widgets and calling them "tiles"?

Re: "on grounds that it does not accurately reflect user intent"

Indeed.

It's a little like Silverlight. Or Windows.

Re: Use case

"...None of those require either a keyboard..."

I'm sure you can write War and Peace on a slab of glass, but some of us like to know what letters we're hitting and not take half an hour to write a 200 character email to someone.

Not required perhaps, but very very much desired, especially for email and "social" (yuck) media.