Posts by Paul Shirley

Re: otherwise untouchable bloat

No, I mean fun like stripping 15Mb of foreign language dictionaries out of the keyboard apk and still having a working keyboard. Probably with a broken signature (not checked) but working. 15Mb I'd rather waste on games ;)

Anyway, had a look at the purported bug fix and it looks like Google (for a change) haven't overreacted and outlawed all zip file manipulation.

But it's a serious bug, trivially simple, trivially simple to exploit. Also however trivially simple to detect exploits and it looks like that detection could be added without a full OS update. Just don't wait for Google to get off their lazy arses and actually do it.

...although modifying the actual dex chunk does have it's appeal. Just tends to be easier to find a less abusive app than recompile one.

AC:"Your argument is the same that was used about the Windows 3.x->95 move. People actually stuck with the program manager for years in some cases, despite the start menu being obviously better"

Pretty much sums up the 'fuck you' thinking coming out of Microsoft right now, channelled by their army of shills.

Apparently you are allowed to think the 95 era 'Start Menu' was *obviously better* but I'm not allowed to think the Win8 era 'Start Screen' is obviously worse on the desktop. Neither am I allowed to continue believing it after trying to use the sorry POS and finding it defective.

With Win95 Microsoft had the confidence to leave the old style launcher shell in place and let users choose. They even left it there in XP for any remaining holdouts. This time round though they seem to lack the confidence to just let the new out compete the old... as if even they know that's doomed to fail.

But the greater needs of forcing Windows onto the tablet and phone market requires that letting users decide what works best on users desktops is not an allowable option. If that impoverishes the set of tools I have available, neither you or Microsoft cares.

Re: the Start Menu

I strongly suspect part of the apathy for the XP style Start Menu springs from Microsoft completely failing to tell ordinary users how to manage the thing. It's sometimes obvious when the haters post about it's deficiencies they've just let Windows drop crap into it, without ever sorting additions, adding categories to the tree, removed junk or done anything to manage the ensuing mess. Without even noticing drag'n'drop works on it and takes seconds to undo what installers break.

Yet the same 'unstructure list' behaviour on the shiny new Start Screen is somehow magically more efficient...

My start menu has ordered imposed on it and in return I no longer need to remember where things are. I've effectively offloaded some of my cognitive load on the machine. It seems that I'm in a minority of people able to manage what installers throw at me, a minority that can be ignored in favour of dragging me back into the same mire the majority put up with.

To much concentration on metrics just drags us all down to the same level.

Re: Strong typing?

You need to actually read the source article, strong typing would have exactly NO effect on the stupid programming they did. This wasn't a type problem, it was the crap they put into the type.

Strong typing can only give you a hint about impending stupidity. It can't make you take the hint.

"very good backwards-compatibility"

...just a pity you have to explicitly turn it on for so many desktop applications.

Re: Motorola

Google didn't own Motorola when they shipped this 2011 phone...

Remind me why adding a touch interface REQUIRES the non touch UI to be degraded?

Re: Governments moral right to the money?

Rol:"governments around the world will have no choice but to get together and come up with a universal plan"

In direct contrast to how we got in this mess, with governments competing to attract business by offering tax incentives. When times were good they conveniently managed to overlook that they weren't just shafting other governments but forgoing vital income themselves.

It's hard to belief greedy halfwit governments willing to win business at literally ANY cost could ever agree to stop shafting each other. In the unlikely event any agreement is ever reached I doubt it would last long enough to actually collect the tax before our corrupt politicians kick off another round of suicidal tax giveaways. They really are that corrupt and that stupid.

Re: Error

At the time a friend described the 8086/8088 as 2 8080's badly stitched together and in many ways it literally was just that and as flaky as it sounds.

Saddening to think there were so many interesting and architecturally superior CPUs around at the time, all killed by Intels ability to throw a couple of billion transistors at the job of hiding the true horror of the x86 design. There are no x86 CPUs any longer, just a lot of silicon emulating them.

Re: And in other news...

Eadon is at Build 2013, he'll be back to cleanse the dirty feeling when he's done lying in the keynote speech...

Re: Windows 7?

If only Microsoft didn't keep telling us it's listening to customers (and even remote monitoring them) to give them what they want... and apparently what they wanted was a Fisher Price drag along cart, in bright shiny colours and reduced functionality so they could skive off work better ;)

"they monitor the use of thousands upon thousands of Windows users"

Measuring a minority does not justify everything you want to do to that minority.

Does not take away that minorities rights to comment.

Never magically makes a bad change good.

Win8 withdrew or damaged features to support Microsofts market planning, not for users benefit. The plan isn't even working so everyone loses.

Re: can use black title bars with white text?

I wasted half a day trying to retheme the window chrome to something with more visual clues. Turns out they didn't just create pastel, low contrast themes, they decimated the theming options so it's hard to create anything else. With less granular control every thing you change has unforseen consequences somewhere else. At one point I thought I'd cracked it, only to discover dialogs were showing text black on black!

Even the hi-contrast settings don't help, they have the same problems. They look so ugly because they can't be made nicer and still work everywhere.

If you really want to restore some much needed chrome you'll need a 3rd party theming engine to restore more settings. UxStyle works nicely and with the Royale 8 theme a casual observer would think I'm running XP.

(And UxStyle is an early casualty of Win8.1. Thanks MS ;( )

A while back Gamasutra (I think) had a long discussion about the use & abuse of motion blur in gaming. It was surprising how few understood why it makes sense on a 30fps console (the same reasons film does it) but not on a 60/75/100fps PC game.

Till now it's not been a real choice for developers though, with current gen consoles frequently only able to support 30fps without heroic efforts. Hopefully the next gen will change things.

...and I miss my 160Hz CRT ;(

Re: Just what Microsoft needs

A worldwide whispering campaign against the big chinese manufacturers leave Microsoft free to play the good guys and rescue Nokia.

How very convenient. If they get lucky state interference will keep the bidding low as well.

(With current MS management, there's no believable hint of planning for this specific route to owning Nokia though... the incompetent idiots just got lucky)

Re: What about standby power consumption?

While I'm surprised at this test (and frankly want proof before I believe), the power saving changes we already know about should have fixed standby performance, if it needed fixing.

Another aspect is how significant CPU power is in overall consumption. If you're gaming all day or playing video it's going to be important but the screen is still likely to top power use. My elderly and not too efficient phone with it's ancient Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon shows battery usage of 43% screen, 19% WiFi, 23% standby+idle. That's just 15% power used for the couple of hours it was actually working hard (gaming+browsing). As screens get bigger an efficient CPU becomes even less important.

Re: point 2

point 2: if government after government had spent less time enticing internationals to set up shop in blighty by offering not to tax them, maybe those internationals wouldn't take them up on the offer.

Politicians have spent decades saying we'll liberally reward anyone that brings collateral benefits, set up taxation to do it, trained HMRC to implement the ensuing free for all. Too fscking late to dodge the blame, politician monkeys did it, politician monkeys need to fix it. Only then do they get to blame others.

Re: 40 somethings

You're right about them having no loyalty. Couple of weeks back I chatted with 3 20something, XBox360 owning gamers and it turned into the 2 younger gamers convincing the other to get back into PC gaming!

Cost was a large part of what had been putting him off the PC based on the cost of building a gaming PC compared to XBox. Well, XBone and the inexorably march of progress on the PC wiped out that difference and the murky resale position just raised the expected cost of content on XBone.

It's a double hit and you're mistaken to think cost is not a problem. ATM console gamers reduce their costs by resale, where PC gamers don't really need to due to frequently lower content pricing. What my chat established is none of them feel any loyalty to their current console, they'll go where the gaming is good but not at any price. And the PC is back in the game after many years of decline.

(It also established that they all gamed on mobile as well, which probably is a bigger threat to traditional consoles and the insane XB policies)

Re: Training - oh yeah.

Didn't Microsoft already nail that by selling $20 add-on keyboards for $129...

Re: Fewer towers (masts) also means poorer capacity

In urban areas lower frequencies penetrate walls better allowing more of the mast bandwidth to actually be used. Where demand is being met, less towers at higher bandwidth efficiency can deliver the same capacity to users as more, low efficiency ones.

O2 massively increased service where I live but still can't get a 2 or 3G signal to me in many pubs I use. It's not the number of towers or their capacity, it's whether I can even connect to them to use the bandwidth!

Re: 70% of Android users can get this

Still seeing 40%+ still on 2.x on my app stats page (and another 1% for 1.x and 3.x!). Seems enough to warrant reporting.

Re: Microsoft: "We're always listening to our customers"

Someone has to trade in every used game before it can be resold and many of those users factor that into the price of new games. By raising doubt about resale Microsoft are discouraging a large group of new game purchasers.

Unless this translates to much cheaper new sales there's no upside to this for anyone. Since figures of £35 have been suggested for minimum 2nd user prices that seems unlikely.

Sony already won this round by having a more game focussed and powerful console, if they react appropriately to the public response Microsoft are getting they could annihilate xbone.

Re: waste silicon

When your core is inherently tiny and a low performance version can dispense with many 'go faster' transistors by cutting back on cache, pipeline depth or fat register files, there's not much silicon being wasted. Even less waste if you can avoid complex power control logic and any extra logic needed to safely bring logic units up or down.

In exchange you get a much easier chip to design, test and get working. Something a small company without Intels resources can manage. You also get designs that better fit the ARM licensing model, of cut&pasted together modules that any chip foundry can successfully manufacture.

Intel have a harder problem because their cores are now so complex even extra, cut down cores will waste too much silicon. So they have no option but to deep dive into the architecture and try to tame its power sucking greed by adding even more complexity.

Re: This is old news

The Reg has been very poor recently at seeking out news, apart from the endless desperate attempts to find dubious support for the editors non-IT related crusades.

Still, confirms that Microsoft didn't want this pushed through normal PR channels and the attention that would bring. With so many bargain reporting sites and a growing trend of companies spamming into them it's become easy to reach the public without the normal PR grind or the press even noticing.

Even the press that don't just sit on their arses waiting for stories to be handed to them...

Re: hmm

...and this stock response from the Win8 marketing team is getting tired.

Been using since launch, still haven't learned to love Metro, the shitty driver support, the bugs in Explorer, the gratuitous and unneeded detheming of desktop mode, or any of the other annoyances. But apparently to merkins like you 'I haven't used it enough' to have an opinion!

In it's favour: I can finally use all the installed RAM and plugging my phone in doesn't crash it (like under XP). Pity I spent more replacing hardware it no longer supports than the sodding OS cost ;(