Posts by Paul Shirley

The only problem is if it encourages someone with smelly feet to join you. Rather than take that risk I kept a pair of slippers in the office ;)

Re: SatNad?

If Microsoft stopped preferring to hear only what the fanbois say and perhaps asked (or bothered listening to) the non-users, they'd have a product with less astonishing design mistakes and more willing users.

At least the phonification of desktop Windows has been slowed, but not reversed, by this market failure.

BT Sport in on a commercial mux (COM6 ATM), as are the subscription streaming channels in the mid 200's. The old terrestrial channels fill PS1,PS2&PS3.

The BBC did encrypt the HD programme guide to force manufacturers to agree licences and DRM restrictions. It was broken before they even turned on my channels ;)

There's no point bewailing the nonsensical naming conventions and near total lack of clues about performance. AMD don't advertise to the public, Intel does. A lot.

When most people think 'Intel good' they don't have a clue why, it's simply the only brand they can remember that has something to do with the 'stuff' powering their PC.

AMD do throw money at promoting the graphics products but it's little more than maintaining brand awareness, those enthusiast customers understand the products. They're currently mightily annoyed that AMD rebranded last years product then pretended it was something new.

AMD are now the budget brand, not valued by end users, not chosen by them, just the default when they buy something cheap and low margin. Even the fans stopped caring after the misguided Bulldozer shared core fiasco.

The 'shrieking hysterics' are fully justified and history has shown it's the only way to get Microsoft to even consider changing policy. It's sad that Microsoft only hear feedback that agrees with them unless you shout but that's the way it is, shouting is not optional when they screw up :(

Re: designed for games

"WTF?? Every Amiga I ever used had fast ram as well as chip ram."

So you never used the best selling A500 512K version, all of it ChipRam?

The one game devs had to build against because it was A: more popular, B: so much slower due to RAM contention. And it's wonderfull (NOT!) RAM expansion slot that combined the bus contention of ChipRam with the inaccessibility to the chipset of FastRam! The Amiga where we used the CPU for some graphics tasks because otherwise the clock cycles would just be lost.

Re: Ha

"Win10 requirements are the same as Win7"

The difference is Win8.1 was the first time Microsoft made an effort to actually reduce Windows footprint, turning a laughable min spec that only applied to a bare install into one that works if you install things and use it in anger. A usable Win7 min spec should have been higher, as my brother discovered the hard way with his unusable Win7 laptop - even after we cleaned all the crapware off it.

So far Win10 looks like it inherited the 8.1 slimline footprint. And the same lack of drivers I was hit by in Win8 ;(

Re: We can only hope it was the Chinese government that got it

Dropping a few million extracts in hacking forms would cause chaos and the US is not going to go to war with China even if they could prove it. Repeat for a couple of years. Watch the US government make increasingly stupid and freedom destroying choices.

If a government has this and is not one of your allies, you're screwed. You're less screwed of an ally has it... they might use lube.

Re: That's in in a nut shell

Remember though, windows started as just a gui loaded in DOS. Then it acquired DOS extender features and device drivers but still over DOS. It didn't subsume the OS layer till 95. A better complaint is why the hell an OS needs to be part of a GUI ;)

Or why an internet browser should be hooked so intimately into an OS,

" At least Ballmer tried to get MS to go forward in the right direction, Nadella has just put MS in reverse gear."

You assume reverse isn't the 'right direction' and confuse Ballmer 'trying to go forward' with Ballmer 'succeeding in going forward'. Quite a lot of us would welcome some genuine reversing, instead of the pretending MS have been doing.

This isn't reversing, it's MS skipping the temporary sideways excursion into WP. If the end goal was Win10 everywhere then WP had no long term future, it would be just another view of Win10. Given the state WP is in heading straight for the unified endgame is almost no risk. What damage can they do to a failed product they have to give away for free?

Re: I had a cider last week

"Anybody looking to emulate this should satisfy themselves with a 2 litre bottle of Old Rosie...."

I still remember the morning ritual of upending trade jars of Old Rosie to stir the artificial clouding agent back in. I'd advise anyone that actually likes cider to avoid the stuff and order a 20l box of something real, take out a shelf and it will fit comfortably in even a small fridge. It's also a lot more thermal inertia.

Of course you'll have to pre pour to let the heavenly juice warm up to proper 12deg drinking temp ;)

Not so much fanbois as a demonstration of what Google haters try to forget, most western Android users want the Google experience enough to jump through hoops if deprived of it. The few that don't want it just root and remove Google. That and some blatant ignoring this is a grey import from a region that doesn't feel any need for more than the G Play Store on their phones.

For the professional haters it's probably best to keep quiet, reminding the world that Google has no control over large parts of the Android market doesn't fit the fiction they want to spin ;)

"so they could find someone who would do what they wanted with the AMA"

Half the issue is whether the mods will cooperate with that. It's not just about the vital organisational aspect, she was what stopped AMA degenerating into a pure PR and/or advertising opportunity. Simple things like making sure the celeb being questioned was the one actually answering the questions.

Redditors are crusty folk not likely to put up with that, readers or mods.

Re: "for the supported lifetime of the device" £50 tablet?

The network PVR I built last week on top of Win8.1 with Bing seems to think it's authorised for the upgrade... it's also imaged so I can revert if it all goes horribly wrong ;)

Re: Translation

Drivers on Win updates servers are usually written by chipset providers not OEMs, OEMs just wrap them lightly if at all. Even if the OEM provides a working copy to Microsoft, update is prone to supplying a different version that matches the chipset signature.

That in itself would be just annoying if the drivers work, the real problem is piss poor testing from Microsoft. I have a DVBT card with working drivers that update persistently tries to 'update' to broken versions. A WiFi dongle that has no known working drivers but Windows still tries to install them - causing an instant kernel crash and making Windows unbootable. Both driver are WHQL certified.

Win update is quite capable of breaking PC's and leaving no clue about how it happened if you let it run automatically. At least they allow me to hide specific updates or the backup image would get more use.

Re: "30 OEMs to get them preloaded"

Even worse, if they put it in system space, that's 500meg of flash that could have been allocated to the user partition and after an update it will gobble another 500meg of userspace for the new apks.

Let's hope they have the sense to not install in system space. And why would anyone want software of typical Microsoft quality running with system privileges anyway?

"If he couldn't work out that it'd leak..."

...or that quite a few employees would realise they wouldn't have a job much longer or any reason not to leak it...

It continues to mightily piss me off that both sides are so loud in their ranting and obstruction that things we should be doing don't happen if it looks remotely like climate change mitigation overlaps in purpose. That research is constantly under attack - very much like neither believers or deniers want to know the truth.

That no evidence is too large to ignore or too small not to shout about, depending on the needs of your argument.

And I'm still surprised Page didn't throw a frothing fit over the recent 'warming pause was a measurement error' stories...

Re: @Paul

Yep, my mistake after a year+ dealing with legacy 32bit crappiness all through a 360 port, because they could assume pointers never needed to be >32bit.

Re: What the...?

Or did England vote to avoid ukip replacing the libs in another coalition after believing all the black publicity? An absolute masterpiece of manipulation, blame the libs for everything then threaten the country with something much worse if they don't just vote Tory.

I tried using my tablet first but echo cancellation was terrible in Skype on it... then I went straight to desktop Skype. The morning conference call works much better if you can access work windows while using it.

"That's a bit silly, having a euro coin that isn't legal tender across the whole of the Eurozone."

Not silly at all, it's why the French can't veto it.

Re: Pretend hippies?

A friend in his 70's will be there. I think he'll probably avoid Judas Priest in favour of something a little newer ;)

Going to be fun hearing his opinions next week.

Re: Odd...

Skype under MS failed to fail because they kept it free of established MS management and engineering culture. The relative success of XBox was similar, fenced off from the parent company right up till the XB1 fiasco, the moment MS management thinking arrived it all started going sour.

Why does MS need to buy in product? It's the quickest way to change corporate culture and lost it's toxic effect on the products. The alternative is an unpredictable number of years waiting for organic change to actually take hold, longer than they can afford to wait.

Re: What changed - the network

Amazons server farms are still too far from the endpoints for low latency and it's unlikely they're equipped with suitable hardware for even casual gaming. Building out more distributed server infrastructure runs counter to their current concentration in datacentres but Amazon could afford it.

My personal belief is the shear crapness of the Onlive experience was only part of why it failed, the market it worked best on (mobile) just wasn't interested in more than native gaming. Actual gamers didn't accept the performance. If you overlook the rented aspect, the passes were pretty good value, yet few bought in.

I'm struggling to see this as a sales driver. More of nice freebie that most will ignore, while passively consuming video.

Re: New install upgrade vs "in place"

@dogged: I can see the 'clean install' bit (completely expected since every paid upgrade has allowed this). I don't see mention of downgrading however.

One new thing he let's slip is a Windows Store account is now mandatory for the upgrade - even with a clean install. So a step back from Win8, though we were compelled to have the otherwise useless account to get Win8.1.

Re: system requirements:

"You don't have to buy it."

... but won't be setting much support for win8.x after it launches. Win7 is trickier for them to kill but you can expect neglect. With an endless flood of security patches hitting my win8.1 box not buying won't be an option for long.

Re: Bit of love for BlackBerry?

I miss my HTC G1, sadly the market voted for touch screen slabs and slider keyboards vanished on Android. Completely agree the onscreen keyboard can be an unusable PIA.

However I don't miss it enough to use a BB style small screen+small keyboard solution (or regularly plug in the keyboard I bought more than a year ago) and suspect BB is the uncontested owner of a shrinking niche format.

The market continue to care more about the case the phone is in than the phone in the case ;)

Re: Java's only impact.

The workarounds for Java's many failings largely seem to involve reflection hackery or delegating to someone else's hackery in a lib.

Patterns are something else, any Java connection accidental. 'Patterns' are useful as documentation and shared naming of techniques and philosophy, describing things that previously had a myriad of different names (if named at all) with few programmers knowing more than a few of them - mostly invented on demand rather than learned.

But I agree that languages now being capable of directly representing them is a mixed blessing ;)