Posts by Paul Shirley 2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Wow, you're right, computers do indeed run programs. Some of those programs interpret scripts. Some of them were interpreting scripts long before the 80's.
I also remember using more descriptive terms like OS,game & application back in the 70's more often than 'program'. We were still arguing about the correct spelling of that one back then. 'Script' had to wait for the 80's... I wrote a lot of scripts building data for games back then. Didn't right many 'programs'...
Let's try to remember: as a very rough&ready approximation, publisher!=content creator. Even where they fund creation it's often more like dealing with a loan shark than mutually beneficial.
It looks worryingly like he's spent more time with publishers than actual creators, yet those creators far too often need protection from publishers more than from pirates. Little chance of positive change then ;(
..yet the majority of CM users first action is installing the Google software that so offends you! One of the earliest things CM had to do was negotiate with Google to ensure users could continue to get the Google core stuff.
Bloated and intrusive, yes. Still doesn't seem to worry normal users at all. The outrage has been manufactured and grossly exaggerated so far.
Quite a lot of us that have used CyanogenMod started trusting them a lot less when it went commercial. I moved away from pure CyanogenMod before that, device support was patchy and all the interesting things were happening in other forks.
With Murdoch onboard, think I'll be avoiding it from now on.
"What on earth are these smart meters meant to achieve?"
They're meant to allow gas suppliers to sack all their meter readers, low paid workers so my small share of the wage reduction will never cover the cost of installing the meters. The companies involved will turn a profit though, so that's alright with politicians sucking at the corporate teat.
...and nothing I've seen to date convinces me they will achieve any useful reduction in energy use. I'll vote for keeping a few more folk employed.
I didn't read anything suggesting this is more than feature query support in the article.
Android supports runtime permission and api presence checks. The problem is few programmers use them or deal with unexpected errors gracefully, I cant see them doing any different on Windows. Unless 'API Contract' involves the user and becomes widespread in practice we'll continue assuming the permissions we asked for are what we have. It's a compatibility wrecking change - again, don't see any suggestion of that in the article. Be nice to have as a user but lazy programmers (or plain malicious ones) will carry on ignoring it.
Or maybe all it means is, when I call an API and it doesn't instantly crash, the call actually worked? Unlike the empty stub functions Microsoft so loved inserting without warning in my past encounters with Windows programming ;)
Indeed. It's an ancient idea that dates right back to the first GUI's and I can't remember any layout manager that does does it particularly well without some programmed assistance.
Even if the MS effort works better than anything before it, they'll inevitably bind in the the look&feel choices their designers want to inflict on us. We could easily end up with apps that look equally ugly on all formats - great auto-layout but still the wrong result!
I doubt the days of supplying multiple layout files to help nudge layout in the right direction for formats are over, even with the woefully dull 'Modern' look&feel.
Unfortunately the native SIP support seems to be optional, it came and went at random as I replaced firmware. I don't remember it ever working with my sip provider on my last phone in any case and I can't find any sign of it on my LG G2.
Luckily CSipSimple has worked reliably and integrates with the normal dialer.
You're assuming the us *believes it needs* German cooperation. They've shown no hesitation to spy on allies to date or lie about it in public.
In any case the overriding concern is to ensure no one else ever dares leak their misbehaviour. Only fleeing to a country able to obliterate the US and run by a leader that might actually do it stopped the chase this time.
One thing we learned from the Win8 fiasco is how determined 10's Microsoft is to impose change on Windows look&feel. So desperate to become relevant on mobile, they ignored the sheer ugliness of the resulting desktop, ignored public feedback and we've recently heard insiders claim they ignored 80% unfavourable feedback from their own employees.
They tried so hard not to look like IOS or Android and succeeded. Like or loath it, Googles flat icons look good (but are so cryptic I struggle to use the apps), IOS at least looks well drawn (in a childs toy way). Microsoft just look amateur and lacking in visual cues.
While the functional parts of Win10 are still in flux, the UI is heading in only one direction. It remains to be seen if enough pressure can be applied to force change. My bet is they'll need catastrophic take up of Win10 upgrades before that happens. Which means I'll be risking the security of Win10 with even more 3rd party fixes, I'm already running multiple UI hacks to make 8.1 acceptable :(
Very wrong, it's pretty clear they're fuglyfying at least the icons and if we don't comment on that hard and often that's what will ship. I hope someone is saving the old icon resources right now ready to hack them back in over this eye bruising mistake.
I can live without pretty but nothing needs to be this pointlessly fugly and waiting won't magically make it look better. Some things need stomping on fast and vigorously, Microsoft still aren't good at listening.
gotes:"A few years down the line you find that less and less apps are supported"
What actually happens is Google removes a permission or 2 with each release, borks up some other support (usually claiming 'it was never meant to work that way') and generally breaks existing apps. Some apps will be fixed, some won't. In some ways it's better to *not* upgrade Android devices, my old Xperia never performed properly after upgrading past Gingerbread.
But the poor manufacturer update support will be a massively more dangerous problem for this market. I can afford to store no sensitive information on my phone, I have a more secure PC for that. These devices are going to be the only computing device for many and handling sensitive data. And they won't be secure enough.
@Big Ted
My wife's Linux box comes in and out of sleep mode in seconds and isn't tied to anyone's cloud. Think I'll skip crippling it with cloud based crapness. Oh, I turn my PC off when it crashes, start:stop time isn't something I work about, Microsoft's inability to have working sleep mode on so many desktops does Anjou me.
512mb ram was already a problem for universal apps, most of us aren't going to risk dealing with floods of complaints when resource heavy apps fail on under specced devices. We'll just continue writing for desktop mode and leave universal for toy apps.
Luckily for Microsoft most users only use toy apps on their low end devices, just a pity their strategy will create a further dumbed down PC experience. As if the metro fiasco wasn't enough damage.
Spooky action is what you have to assume if Bell's inequality is a correct description of reality and there's no hidden variable carrying the entangled state. But if this theory can supply that hidden variable then superluminal information transport is not needed, the state was always there waiting to be measured.
Got to say it's a hard sell, but not necessarily harder to believe than other interpretations of quantum behaviour.
Can I say 'pilot wave theory' and suggest this is not exactly new.
It probably can be fixed in firmware by adding the right guard pages around critical structures but knowing where those pages need to be will require ram manufacturers input, component databases in each os and probably won't happen.
What's more likely is they'll need to reduce power saving tweaks (like under volting and reduced refresh rates) and everyone gets lower battery life on their laptops. No idea why they think more than a tiny minority of desktop machine are using ECC.
The 'new' Start menu isn't so much fugly as crippled by design.
Without hierarchical menus it's reliant on search on well populated systems and the users perfect memory of app names.
It wastes a large chunk of space on the tile interface - even if you remove ALL the tiles.
The actual menu part seems to totally lack any configurability - haven't found a way to add shortcuts to it yet and that's part of what I want a start menu for because many of my tools don't show up without it. Sure, you can do some rearranging of the tiled area but we said no to the start screen, sneaking it back in as the only working bit is not acceptable.
Microsoft need to give up playing bait&switch with this, just promise never to disable Classic Start Menu and stop wasting time on anti features.
As an upgrade, I doubt there'll be any advantage sticking with 8.1, if there is expect MS to update 8.1 till its removed! Win10 isn't very different to 8.1, a better backend with a different fugly, impoverished UI pasted on. Equally as in need of 3rd party UI fixes. 8.0 is already abandoned.
The most likely outcome is the BBC abandoning terrestrial broadcasting for some or all of their output, as the only viable way to shift users to CA capable platforms. That puts them in a really bad bargaining position with the cable+sat platform owners, utterly incapable of coercing viewers to actually pay for their channels, let alone pay enough extra to cover the carriers profit margin. The idea this will increase BBC income is beyond optimistic.
Secondary effects are it becoming unsupportable to impose obligations more onerous than existing commercial channels have. Looking at some of the fckwits making stupid decisions inside the BBC today, that's a recipe for catastrophe. The many commenter claiming they don't watch BBC may actually stop watching.
Still, it's likely to happen, this is a key part of how the gov clear the airwaves ready to sell off TV bandwidth to the mobile industry.
The ui vandalism is up there with win 8. Tried a vanilla install yesterday while trying to fix the plugins 36 broke and it took a couple of minutes trying to guess where the About menu was hidden. They've evolved the ui past useless into wtfville. I dread the day they break the addons that restore sense to the madness.
I think the Verge has it right, being Winphone only is a fatal flaw for any social application. Not fitting the new MS vision of getting their cloudy offerings onto other platforms signed it's death warrant, why try to port it and it's unlovely interface when they have Skype already ported and plans to make it a jack of all trades trojan.
...just a pity my hate for Skype is increasing with every update Microsoft makes. I really didn't need the advertising, or it firing up the browser when it thinks I *really* need to see one.
"I think many people could achieve a similar standard of living with just a part time job"
But the downside of extreme labour specialisation is the masses condemned to unskilled work because the process requires nothing better, with pay driven too low to make life comfortable on part time hours. Their cheap labour undeniably makes me richer but it's not quite so clear it works well for them, that's not something economists tend to worry about.
...so I can start the day talking to the android phone next to my bed in the morning?
I fear ms will be disappointed when I don't rush out and replace my phones and tablet with win10 devices, even if it works much better than the utterly incompetent google now ;)
Or allow Cortana to infest my PCs. Given their history deeply embedding unwanted and insecure apps in the core os that might become a problem :(
"Much of that software is seen as crucial by many of Microsoft's customers"
What worries me is how much software will be seen as crucial by *Microsoft*, so critical to Microsofts plans users aren't allowed to remove or control it. Or how much "as a service" really means enhanced "lockin" to Microsoft, their cloud and the MS products I have no need of.
The massive problem with going to IP broadcasting is things like live sport that sometimes millions of viewers want to watch live and in real HD. Not timeshifted, not delayed by buffering and not breaking up at crucial moments because bandwidth goes MIA and not the piss poor resolution we normally see.
IP has miserably failed to deliver that quality of service to audiences that large so far and there's little sign of it improving in any short timescale.
I'll agree most of the DTT bandwidth is wasted on complete crap and many of those channels aren't any better than internet channels but if this sell off to profiteers goes ahead we'll lose them all, the good with the bad.
It's another signal that 8.1 is going to join 8.0 in 'essential updates only' mode shortly after 10 ships. MS really want to forget Win8.x ever existed and this is just deliberate neglect.
They intend neglecting it to death, starved of updates, starved of killer apps.
I have a bad feeling AMD & nVidia are too busy with DX12 right now. I'm sure Khronos announced a big change in approach for OGL as well last year that will also need their attention.
Also not seeing Qualcomm or ARM mentioned, it's pretty unthinkable launching a new graphics API without mobile support.
Oh well, new toys to play with whatever happens ;)
... Is the reality or not of agw hardly matters. The technology we could have started creating 25+ years ago to deal with the problem would have made us all better off *even if there's no problem*. Instead we ended with denial shortchanging us of investment and believers pushing through any desperate political fix they could as time ran down.
We know it's worth dumping carbon fuels, it's probably really worth bankrupting many of the suppliers along the way and taking out their corrupt states and terrorist support. None of it depends on agw. But we just have bickering aresholes delaying like it was an Olympic sport.
Sickening tribalism.
"If it's able to solve a particular problem in a time which is very very improbable"
D-Waves problem is every time they claim that, someone comes along with a faster algorithm on a classical computer. The speed improvements they claim were never 'improbable enough' to convince anyway.
The problem with D-Wave is it doesn't seem to be faster for the algorithm it supports than non quantum solutions. So slow it's debatable it's taking advantage of quantum effects for the actual computation. Even worse no one knows yet if that's because it's just a bad quantum annealer or quantum annealing itself is a dead end.
One thing is certain, it should never be confused with a general purpose quantum computer.
This is how they plan on forcing devs to write Modern apps instead of desktop versions, make sure large chunks of the market can't run desktop apps. They couldn't get anyone to choose modern over desktop willingly, not users, not devs, so its time to apply pressure.
Again Microsoft's dream of the same apps running on everything is revealed as the same apps running dumbed down on everything. Modern apps may well run on the desktop now (as they always should have done) but it ain't pretty and it ain't a good use of my valuable screen space.
I'll be hanging onto my rich and densely packed desktop ui and continuing to ignore the wasteful toy modern versions. Both as a dev and a user.
...and what extra powers SOPA did hand to copyright owners were almost designed for abuse by the traditional copyright pantomime villains, rather than helping artists. Rotten all the way through and no amount of 'big copyright' PR is going to change that.
'Stronger copyright' is a dangerous tool, more likely to be abused wholsesale than help.
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