Posts by Paul Shirley

"I've always found", you missed a word.

I'm genuinely surprised this is news, FB has been a notorious battery killer for as long as they've had an Android app. It's why my current LG G2 is the 1st Android device I haven't rooted, it doesn't have that crap built in so doesn't need heroic effort to tame it. Had to remove 14 separate APKs from system to kill all the FB,Twitter and other crap on my last (ever) Sony phone.

They regularly throw in a placebo 'fix' for it, only very occasionally does it improve till the next update. I suppose relatively few noticed it because so many phones ship with this shit deeply embedded, where it can't be removed and in earlier Androids couldn't be disabled - easy to spot a new install hammered battery, not so when it's always been there.

Twitter has been pretty bad at times but they seem to have got better at making it behave itself, concentrating on breaking the apps functions instead ;)

Re: manually punch in someone's IPv6 address

Android already has that covered (a little), to call my home SIP line (no DID) I just use the contacts book as normal... if it ever becomes necessary to use IPV6 raw addresses contacts will have support added. They might already, never bothered checking ;)

Does anyone punch in numbers more than once anyway?

Re: Quicker and smoother

"dragging a tab off to another display" like Firefox? Pretty useful with iPlayer, drag, maximise, carry on browsing on the main display while waiting for the rugby to kick off ;)

Re: Rules are great, but how to enforce them?

We will eventually end up enforcing it by fining local EU entities that buy the affected services. If the US thinks they can just secretly carry on as normal, they don't understand the problem, any leak or even the suspicion of infringement will render them all toxic to EU business.

Any direct arrangement with end users will render them directly liable.

Either way, US companies will find the EU becoming a very unprofitable environment if they cheat.

Re: EU businesses: PLEASE STOP SHARING WITH THE US, STAT!

I think what you really mean: nothing will happen until bribing,suing and/or blackmailing the US government to change costs less than US companies lose on EU trade.

But you're right, while US politicians are pretty cheap to buy, over here we still need to raise the costs till US companies feel compelled to actually start buying votes.

Safe harbour died because US law overrides it's protections. The same argument makes this illegal, all that changed is there's no ECJ decision confirming that yet.

Re: "Windows is not exclusively developed for IT professionals"

@dotdavid it's worse than that: Win8 onwards weren't developed for PC users of any kind. The whole mess is firmly aimed at tablet and mobile, the market Microsoft had no foothold in and the store environment riding on it.

The problem is the lowest common denominator across mobile,tab&PC is a screen + OS. Can't assume a keyboard,mouse,touchscreen,microphone or even speakers. Not even internet access is guaranteed. So they picked the things they wanted to support (the mobile market and associated monopoly store) and assumed the desktop monopoly would force acceptance on the desktop.

If only they'd killed off the real desktop OS *before* trying to kill off the desktop. Monopoly pressure doesn't apply if there's actually a choice.

Re: The problem is, usually Linus is right

@Bazza "First, it was not "her responsibility", she is a volunteer. No one obliged her or paid her to do that work."

The moment she accepted the role, she accepted responsibility to do the job right. To be clear: I'm *not* accusing her of not taking the work seriously, it's just ludicrous to suggest volunteering absolves people of responsibility. The world needs less 'volunteer' timewasters.

Re: Give it time

Even in the consumer space it's hard to see massive scope for growth. You don't need large SSD's to gain most of the speed benefits and given a decent amount of RAM the advantage mostly vanishes once drive caching kicks in in Windows.

Adding more flash won't make boot any faster, it won't even make much difference on PCs short on RAM. If you've gone cheap on RAM you're probably going to cheap out on the drives as well and buy spinning rust. And if you've gone big on RAM there's even less reason to avoid big, cheap hard drives!

Re: "Beards are seen as a symbol of power and virility,"

c) extremely lazy

Been lazily not caring what I look like since i was a teenager ;)

Re: how in the hell it took 9 years to grant.

That normally implies the patentee was playing the system, refiling with modified claims to extend the patents effective life or add claims, sometimes claims that would have prior art if not attached to an earlier claim date. The US patent system is almost designed for abuse by trolls. It sometimes looks like troops deliberately file defective claims knowing they can take their time fixing the mistake, without the patent life clock even starting.

Re: Your data pays for your 'free' OS.

It's not free, you paid for the os it upgraded and you still had years of support prepaid on it.

After the win 10 upgrade borked network access to my htpc, my microphone and a whole pile of app problems because it didnt manage to migrate settings correctly, I'm severely annoyed with this fugly mess and ready to rollback. Except i don't have that option if i want to stay employed :( so I'll have to clock up more time defanging win10 on top of the hours wasted already.

Re: It’s easier to list what you do get rather than what’s missing.

"apps might assume they are given the access they ask for"

Yes, it's not hard to check for permissions before using them but no-one does it or bothers catching the exceptions. Or carry on working after. That's going to change with Android 6 many years from now.

The 'correct' solution is to feed lies back to the requesting app instead of denying permissions. Not aware of any manufacturers shipping that, so users have to root and install the fix themselves. Not ideal.

Re: Hmmm

@Hans 1

You understate the problem. Your data is effectively only as secure as the physical security of the device holding it. For a phone, that's 0% secure. They're easy to lose, easy to steal and there's a non-zero chance of being snatched while powered up and logged in.

Store nothing on one you can't afford to lose.

...not that I'm claiming your PC is much more safe. I let mine have unimportant passwords only. I am beginning to hate 2 factor authentication though :(

Re: Meh?

After running some tests it does look like they carefully cherry picked the publicised performance, what I saw was a nearly random pattern of relative compression compared to lzma and deflate. In one test deflate beat it by >10%!

The lzma comparison was more interesting, with the quality at usable settings it was comfortably faster with roughly the same compression ratio. That's pretty surprising given the use of huffman coding. Will definitely be trialling it some more, lzma just isn't fast enough for us (neither is lzham), this might just be.

A future version with arithmetic coding could be very interesting, once the current patent woes on ANS are dealt with.

Re: magic crap

You've assumed a few things: that those middle age people were human, that the Doctor didn't know it was a trap, that what you saw was what was really there, that there was evidence left or anyone left to influence after that scene.

It's a clever ploy, guaranteed to get watchers debating furiously till next Sat, when we'll find out how much the Doctor and the story teller lied this time.

Re: Lewis doesn't reject all comments critical of his stance

Have to cover the paucity of the claims with some vigorously encouraged SHOUTING.

Re: Personal anti-favourite-

It's well accepted that drinking 2 halves takes less time than 1 pint. I suspect the same applies to food ;)

Re: HOW does that translate into the article?

Lewis is simply relying on the observation that "believers" on both sides won't bother reading the sources. It's almost pointless arguing with believers because their belief is religious (as i believe Lewis managed to point out a few weeks back, overlooking what it said about his own faction!).

Religious belief is the promise to believe despite any evidence or lack of it. Scientific belief is the promise to follow where the evidence leads. One requires ignoring inconvenient data, the other requires questioning what you believe faced with contradictory evidence. I'm going to put my faith in the scientific version, it corrects mistakes a few millennia quicker

Re: Positive

Not sure carefully checking helps any longer since they stated they'll stop giving detailed explanations of updates. You'll actually need to search non Microsoft sites to find out which updates are Trojan horses from now on and i won't be trusting a Microsoft owned search engine for that.

One bunch a week or so ago gave no useful info on the Microsoft kb pages, took 30min identifying the rotten ones :(

Re: Spin your first sentence, as usual

@Big John: Somehow I get the impression you're wilfully forgetting that's exactly what the denial camp claimed.

And no, you can't hide behind 'climate is variable' because that's the whole point of extracting long term trends in the data. Also why it took so many years to even notice something was amiss with the results and why in context it looks like a damn rapid change. The unfortunate reality that annual variation far exceeds the cumulative trend is very convenient for some but doesn't change the results, it just makes them easier to ignore.

Re: Colin Baker, by a mile.

Capaldi: grumpy old arsehole in a zimmer frame.

Maybe the writers will work out how to script around a near pensioner actor, last season felt so slow and static. Clara is the only thing holding it together right now, much like the semi clad eye-candy did in the Davison and Baker days. Which is very sad :(

Re: Too many processors will confuse the market

Intel have that solved, 3/4 of then will be so expensive the average punter simply won't consider them!

Oh, I'm sure there are some fans who genuinely believe it.

It's completely possible for better tech to fail by being prohibitively costly or have low availability - but neither apply here. This time there just aren't enough people that think it's an 'astonishingly good' anything to succeed. Shouting a lot from positions of supposed influence (like say, news site editors) is no substitute for willing customers.

I'm not sure Andrew is ready yet to accept Microsofts Win8/10/WP strategy has nothing to do with what we need, it's a cynical strategy to impose what's good for Microsoft and only Microsoft. They couldn't push a phonified OS on desktop users so now they'll try it the other way. Eventually they'll either die or do the right thing and use the right OS on each class of device instead of the jack-of-all-trades cockup we're seeing now.

Re: Something Missing

@Skydweller is not just bandwidth, the fuckwits dump it on the system drive. So my nightly backup just grew by 3Gb per machine. My sys drive is deliberately small and 3Gb represents a substantial proportion of its free space, all versions of windows behave badly when free space shrinks too far.

In one case it tried downloading the update with less than 3Gb free, would have crashed windows if i hadn't caught it (then removed another few gb of shit update hadn't bothered cleaning up, 3gb is below what i normally try to keep free).

Re: "Why can't we have a phone that has all these decent specs"

...perhaps because those 'decent specs' require a bigger battery and battery size is constrained by screen size? There's a reason all the 'S' versions of flagships have lower specs, not just a smaller screen. How much battery time do you want to sacrifice and/or how much fatter do you want the case for a thicker battery (in a world that overwhelmingly wants thin phones).

Or maybe you don't need a flagship and the problem is imaginary.

Re: Meaningless.....

Here in England I simply wouldn't believe a number that high, seems pretty encouraging even for the continent with lower language barriers. But that interpretation doesn't fit the tale Andrew wants to spin.

The reality is my wanting to watch Irish sport in England isn't helping Hollywood sell anything, it's helping keeping my local Irish bar funded though - they've jumped the hurdles to get it so I don't have to bother fighting geolocking.

The US has already flooded the whole of the EU with their 'product', they stand to be hurt just as much (or little) an locals.

Would be nice if the EU sorted out the inequalities that allow differential pricing to succeed *before* full scale harmonisation but that's never likely to happen so market forces will have to do the job.

Re: ITC seems to not care about discrimination

Those arguments are from Microsoft's suit against Interdigital, not the ITC.

If the decision is poorly worded that weakens it as a defence in ongoing or future lawsuits. Normally the courts would be inclined to rubberstamp an ITC decision. Microsoft's problems aren't necessarily over yet, this was the fast track process, now Interdigital will probably carry on in the courts.

Re: Everything or nothing

I think they've committed suicide. The most likely outcome now, presaged by the creation of Alphabet, is Google splitting search from the problem services completely destroying leverage for Fairsearch & co.

More worrying for them is my most recent experience of their shopping service. I actually tried Googles travel insurance comparison partly because this whole shitstorm had kicked off again. It was a revelation, an absolutely minimal search, 100% relevant results, enough detail to narrow the choice upfront... and most astonishing, the prices quoted there matched the ones on each sellers site I tried! Easily deserving of a high rank in organic search in the 'level playing field' Fairsearch claim to want.

Comparison sites are so universally bad even Google can put together something better. The complaining competition should be very frightened and they'll go to their bankruptcy without ever considering building a better product. Still, it will be a "fair" bankruptcy for most of them ;)

Re: D-Wave processors are like GPUs

We largely abandoned analogue computers because of noise problems, which limits accuracy AND slows them down as a side effect, plus we've thrown more research at miniaturising digital components which increases speed.

The quantum effects in annealing make it converge faster than a classical annealer. It's possible D-Wave made the reasonable assumption that miniaturising their device would increase speed, supercooling would improve noise and quantum annealing would be massively faster on top, making for a very fast device. What probably happened is, it's inherently a slow analogue computer, miniaturising made noise much worse, quantum effects are either being drowned in that noise OR prevented by it and the actual speedup is much lower than predicted. Result: an accelerated slow device that's just about able to compete with much cheaper digital devices.

Their best hope is that it's not yet doing anything quantum accelerated. Looks very like a dead end, hobbled by noise. Noise tolerance is why digital can be pushed so hard and why quantum computing is so hard to implement.