Posts by Paul Shirley

Re: Google should tell Almunia to feck off

You may be right. AFAIK they've not actually done any investigation at all yet, just compiled that 400 page list of allegations, cherry picked a couple of them and asked for Google to bend over.

But we have good reason to believe most (if not all) those 400 pages were submitted by a coalition of Googles less honest competitors, led by whatever the group of scumbag search hijackers are calling themselves (Fairsearch? can't be arsed looking it up) we all hate and backed my Microsoft.

I doubt it will harm the eventually result if Google make them prove everything in court because it seems unlikely they'll manage to prove anything worthy of a painful fine or restraint. If they prove anything at all. Most likely outcome is pissing away millions on the process, then imposing face saving but empty restrictions. Google might as well just let them waste the time and money instead of volunteering more than the courts are likely to compel.

Re: scale matters

Would anyone seriously consider ordering 1,2 or 3 pages online and having them delivered the next day to be preferable to printing them at home?

Re: HTCs are the WP8 flagship devices

Thought I read it didn't have NFC. Anyway, overall the HTCs are more 'completely' featured.

And they exist today ;)

Re: Very strange

...why, it's almost as if the case doesn't matter at all. Just the chance to get him into custody for the yanks...

Re: It's a thinner longer iPhone with patent infringement suit magnet LTE

...there, corrected your title.

I guess the Samsung paperworks already delivered to the ITC and various US courts and the ban hammer is swinging.

Signs give the information needed to let viewers navigate. ALL they need to do is present that information clearly and easily, they have no active involvement in navigation. A computer UI needs to present navigation information BUT it's also the navigation tool.

Those appear to me to be different requirements. It doesn't matter how space wasting, clumsy or whatever road signage is, it's a different system to navigation and once familiar with a route I don't use it. Once familiar with my UI I still need to use it constantly. I want signs optimised for legibility, my UI optimised for navigation.

Metro de-optimises my navigation to present information I won't need after the 1st few uses. Worse it doesn't even manage to show navigation information better, with hidden controls, acres of wasted space and the 1 size window fits all idiocy. The control elements in my UI are there FOR CONTROL not to show information. The navigation elements are there to let me NAVIGATE not tell me where I'm going.

This whole UI is backwards, designed by idiots so in love with an abstract idea they forgot what the fscking system is meant to do.

Re: I hate Task Centric

While reading the description of WP's task centric behaviour I was more than a little puzzled at why Android is described as app centric. I click on an a link/document/launcher in a hub app OR anywhere else and Android goes off to find the correct app for me, which seems no different. It appears the difference between app and task centric is in the bias of the commenter!

You hate task centric *without user control*. Android embeds its task->app mapping in the OS, not the apps and it gives the user control of that mapping. I don't need to trust anyone else to choose what service my phone chooses, I tell it which to use, I decide if it should remember that choice or ask every time.

My biggest task centric problem has always been making sure all FaceBook tasks die a swift death. Maybe Android is app centric because I can remove the FB apps and the FB tasks die with them ;)

Apparently you slept through Microsoft announcing the ui would no longer be called Metro... or noticing Not Metro shortens to Notro. Microsoft fanboism taken to a new low to whine about this!

Re: FacePalm.

It's not even the 1st that does image stabilisation by moving the sensor - Konica Minolta were doing that in 2004 in the DiMage Z series.

Re: Way to go.....

Seems you forgot MS plan to transcompile the existing WP7 apps in their store to run on WP8... you just won't be seeing any magical new WP8 features used for a looooooonnnnnnngggggggggg time.

Re: the other apps are just gimmicks

It's worse. All of them are things IOS,Android,Blackberry (and probably Symbian and Java feature phone) users have been able to download of their respective app stores for a long time. Free downloads apart from offline maps.

Seems the only innovation in the phone is from Nokia hardware and it's not enough to survive today's market. Or maybe Nokia will pre-emptively sue Samsung before they can drown Nokia in similarly featured phones ;)

Re: Tired of MS playing politics

WebGL... I hear echoes of MS trying to kill OpenGL on Windows. The market overruled them back then, it will this again if WebGL takes off.

"on anything vaguely modern, it "just works" and always has"

Yet I have 4 supposedly supported DVT-T tuners here and over the years (all the way back to having just 2 tuners 5+ years ago) I've not found a distro+kernel combo that supports all of them simultaneously, rarely found one that actually works for more than of the tuners.

Every update just shuffles the pack. Open source drivers stop compiling when they change the video API, closed source blobs just break, drivers compile install and load but just don't work or in 1 case the driver maintainer gets so pissed with the endless changes and intransigent attitudes that he quits and no-one takes his place. OEM maintainers generally try once or twice then give up chasing the runaway driver model.

Step even slightly off the common path and Linux hardware support goes MIA and a lot of it is due to the shitty attitude the (equally shitty) GNOME devs point out.

It's not just the product cycles are much shorter, for software the time to independent (re)discovery is so short patent protection serves no purpose.

That's partly because the ideas being patented right now are so ludicrously primitive they would inevitably be 'discovered' by average programmers as soon as they needed to solve that problem. Patent protection is about scarcity of innovation, encouraging sharing for the good of all. But the patents being issued aren't for innovation with any sort of scarcity to it.

More important: software is the 1st example of the 'infinite monkeys typing' concept. We have so many people writing software, sufficient of them being creative doing it that invention is a tidal flood, not a scarce trickle.

What's wrong with software patents is the failure to properly account for both those aspects, that without scarcity there's no need to protect trivial discoveries. Instead the patent offices have stampeded the other way and allowed everything, however trivial or obvious to get protection.

Re: A little harsh

All the variants I can see that specify it say Win7 Home Premium 64... TBH I wouldn't expect anything new to ship with a 32bit OS.

Yes, we all know all MS really did was remove that pesky start button, nothing else changed at all...

The quality of fanbois comment has declined far below 'pathetically out of touch with reality' well before Win8 even launches.

Power users are going to just bypass all the new crap while subconsciously downgrading support for MS products. Ordinary and new users are going to wonder WTF just happened when Win8 switches UI modes, wonder WTF the controls are hidden in Metro. The missing Start menu will be the least of their worries.

Re: Of course the fact that they had just spent

Steve Todd:"Unfortunately for Samsung the test is "no reasonable jury" would have made the decision that they did"

The juries own statements establish this was not a 'reasonable jury' as jury's are meant to be formed and act and everything they decided is open to challenge.

Unfortunately for Apple and Apple fanbois the problem here is the jury justified their decisions based on the lack of prior art, prior art the court withheld from them. If they'd just shut their mouths it would probably end with 'no reasonable jury' but they A: established prior art is too important to be excluded the way it was, B: raised enough questions about jury corruption that A will get considered as a side effect.

So the question becomes: if all the prior art was seen what would a 'reasonable jury' decide. And this jury is no guide to that because they don't look remotely like a 'reasonable jury'.

This is going to retrial. That's not that interesting though, the real issue here is whether this threatens the rest of the Android world. As the days pass, as I consider it more, it seems less important. Samsung aren't innocent and certainly aren't as skilled at surfing right on the edge of what's legally permissable as Google showed in Oracle vs Google.

Android was created by an entity more aware of what they could get away with and with more ability to fight the nonsense patents Apple are using. The real battle hasn't begun and it will be brutal and hopefully put us back 30 years to a world where innovation has to be real to survive the market, not imposed by a parasitic legal system.

Re: Just what we need

...or if you remember to delete the cache and have no data cap... no need to run at all but all the bandwidth costs for Microsoft, over and over again.

Re: why?!

"this had been done for years before by other companies"

True but no-one else managed to create a critical mass of installs. Probably more copies of GEM shipped on the Atari ST than sold to PC users. The best selling apps ST just dumped GEM and used their own UI ;)