Posts by Paul Shirley

Re: How will it make money?

They've already been effectively giving it away with every Lumia shipped thanks to those support payments and cheap Lumia's are essentially the entire WP market. So far it's the only thing that's worked to drum up sales and they can't afford to stop.

As the new owner of the phone business they were laundering the subsidy (AKA free licences) through they're forced to offer everyone the same deal or face a visit with regulators.

The alternative is giving up on the big 'Win8 ecosystem' plan. Amazon have just screwed the XBox1 side of that deal with FireTV, Win8 continues it's slow train wreck and WP is just about holding on. They're desperate, half the company is staked on that ecosystem and it's not going well. They're aiming for survival right now, not making money.

Re: Time gentlemen, please.

Time is an inherent requirement of the way neurons work, both as individual analogue 'devices' and networks of them. Accumulating charge and generating pulses are inherently time domain behaviour.

While it's reasonable to supposed evolution has worked out use that to create intelligence, it's foolish to dismiss alternatives as wrong. Brains may be our best known example of intelligent hardware and well worth study and replication, but that's all they are - 'the best known example'.

Also surprising to hear that he's the only one considering time as vital to AI, it's implicit in everything that can learn yet built, since it's difficult to learn anything without some acceptance of cause&effect.

That £70 price tag was for an unlocked, SIM free 520 from Amazon a few months back (other places actually managed a little cheaper). No hint of a carrier subsidy. The price still bounces between that and £90 with no ongoing commitment.

I can very easily believe management at Nokia were unaware they were almost giving the stock away ;)

Re: A lobbyist lobbying nightmare.

It barely matters whether you believe MS are right,wrong about the complaint (or equivalently whether on not Google are guilty).

MS and their posse of failure vertical search rivals don't want a fair or just settlement, measured by what's fair for EU citizens. Their self-serving interference has delayed any action and given Google opportunities to subvert the whole process in it's favour.

Almunia has listened to the wrong people giving the wrong advice, people that benefit from Google polluting search, that want to keep it polluted but change who gains from that. It's only going to get worse, whatever the ruling.

Re: Will anyone still care?

>>It was hard to ignore Windows 8.

Surely the problem was it was far too easy to ignore win8...

Re: Ten Percent?

Someone I know finally got one, so I've finally actually seen one in real life.

Thing is, it's not the phone he chose when the carrier made him "an offer he couldn't refuse". Maybe all the better options really were out of stock and it wasn't just a marketing subsidy. He seems quite happy with it but the tariff was the important thing, any usable phone would have done.

Microsoft aren't just selling them cheap, they're giving them away.

JPEG2000 failed because it was chock full of patents and a suicidal hard line licensing policy. The critical mass needed for success never happened, too few developers felt like paying for a unproven format, it never proved itself because so few used it.

@DavCrav

"they may pull these levers with impunity"

That *possibility* is why the EU feel entitled to regulate.

The near total failure of the complaining competitors to convince anyone (but each other) that it's actually happening is why the neither the EU or Google are in any apparent hurry to settle.

The ongoing reality is, even completely neutral and fair search ranking inherently facilitates and accelerates competition and that's extremely bad news for poor products. And that's half the problem, producers of bad product are being hurt by their own poor quality more than ever before, unable to find enough clueless buyers because search is giving too many clues.

While I ordinarily wouldn't care how much bad products get fscked, I have some sympathy with a view that page1 results are so powerful even if they were perfectly ranked that would still not be good for overall market(s). The other problem is the whiners are so used to using SEO to abuse search engines, they haven't even been asking for a neutral, accurate search engine. Instead they want to carry on as usual, buying visibility, they just don't want Google doing it.

It's a mess but not one I see the complainants coming out ahead from because none of the solutions give them what they want, an even more broken system that happens to favour their interests.

Re: @Test Man

"send e-mails using your already-existing GMail address"

...you mean, exactly the same as I'm doing with Thunderbird right now? email clients stopped being service specific decades ago. If MS have done something clever, this ain't it.

Re: Now try these same tests outside of the US

After the last search update I'm finding Google no longer recognises my English accent often enough for even simple requests. 'Wake me at"+time used to be reliable, now it hasn't once recognised the spoken time and misses the 'wake' part >50% of the time.

Perhaps not surprising, it struggles to even start on my 4.2.1+underpowered Xperia Play combo. But it worked a month ago on the same phone, seems to be going backwards ;(

Re: Re :- "The update also cleaned out a vast amount of accumulated bloat"

By bloat I mean the 5+gb of leftover files 12months updates, installs and uninstalls had scattered throughout the system folders, with no way to tell what was deletable and no tool able to deal with them. In some cases with permissions preventing even administrator accounts deleting them.

My console gaming friends&acquaintances adopted a 'wait&see what Steam,Nvidia,AMD and Intel could do for PC gaming' policy. It's no longer an XBox/PS choice.

There's also a growing realisation that if you buy a lot of games the console tax soon adds up and they're overpaying for the console hardware. Much better to spend it on cheaper PC game builds and regular PC upgrades.

Re: No infra red port

Hey, if it's good enough for XBone it's mandatory for Android!

Re: With MS I wait for the fourth.

Don't you mean 3.1th go?

Re: "50Hz TV input is snapped alongside a 60Hz game"

That could neuter any frame rate adaptation the TV is performing. Instead of being able to detect duplicates every 6 frames and deduce it's really 50Hz, the 60Hz elements make every frame unique. Sets are going to be optimised to handle 50<->60Hz conversion well, but only if they can detect the need to convert.

While Samsung have been caught bumping GPU clock speed, it's not the only way to game the scores. Nvidia used to get caught regularly dropping in custom shaders, dropping precision and changing texture modes in benchmarks. Sometimes that had zero effect on render output and is actually an acceptable approach in non-benchmarking contexts, drivers usually have game specific hacks built in - nowadays with en\disable control.

Even GPU overclocking isn't always easy to detect, or likely to decrease battery life enough for certainty.

It's a repeat of the NVidia+ATI+others situation, with the same solution - repeated public exposure till they stop.

competition between software publishers

...and since the hardware is all but identical, competition isn't coming from Sony+Microsoft, unless you're one of the few people that think gamers will actually buy into Kinect this time round. They'll both get the same games, the PS4 will run them faster or prettier, the XB180 builds will have superfluous Kinect gesture support grafted on (but left unused by players). In a years time they'll have equivalent social network support, and video+media hub functions.

And they'll both have increasingly overpriced software in a world of mobile and resurgent PC gaming, markets that do have actual competition instead of a phony platform war based on theatrics more than actual competition.

Re: Security?

In also struggling to see how an essentially brute force hack is "clever". Hard work but clever?

A clever solution would have isolated all app components in their own pseudo VM and shimmed emulation under it, allowing some amount of security to be enforced.

Re: "in the future accessing the Public Service Broadcasters by IP"

Someone just needs to remind them that without including Freeview radio in their total, they'll never hit the threshold for turning off FM. Should hold the idiots up for a few years trying to decide which plan to sacrifice.

The PS4 won't do DNLA out of the box, that's not the same as won't do it ever.

But it does illustrate the most significant difference between the consoles, the PR Microsoft and Sony wrapped around them. Sony promised a gaming device that could be a media player, Microsoft a media hub that could play games. Both ship unfinished but right now Sony delivered more of what they promoted than Microsoft have.

...and I'd choose something a lot smaller, cheaper and with lower power consumption for media duties than either of them ;)

Re: Monopoly

"Just because one provider of a service captures the majority of the market does not make it a monopoly."

It's a pretty good description of a monopoly and a monopoly is NOT ILLEGAL. The simple existence of a monopoly is never the issue: it's whether that monopoly is being abused or was gained by abuse. The response should be to repair any damage already caused and prevent future abuse. Microsoft get hammered because they keep gaining monopolies by abuse.

Right now it's now exactly clear what damage has supposedly already been done, mainly because the whining competitors are so bad at competing they actually need Google to help them. Action to stop future abuse is now being botched because the pack of vermin are too busy working for personal advantage to consider what a fair solution would actually be.

Re: Not all bad

"That it hasn't tanked faster is a testament" is a testament to their monopoly control of so much of the IT world. It only visibly started failing when the market moved out from under them, while Ballmer ignored that shift. That's not competence, he somehow managed to piss away a position of overwhelming strength through complacency.

Re: Microsoft is late on tablets

Right there in the product name is the mistake they keep making: "Tablet PC"

People are happily buying tablets. Less of them are still buying PCs. But almost no-one is trying to buy a 'Tablet PC', they didn't in the past and don't seem interested in the present.

How many times do Microsoft have to repeat the same mistake before learning?

Re: Because they could.

What makes you think this is exclusively political? The US has never been afraid of supporting US commercial interests by fair means or foul. I find it implausible that commercially advantageous information would just be filtered out, that they were really only looking for the claimed communist/terrorist/crime info.

It just wouldn't be the American way.

Re: uncritical acceptance?

I have the distinct feeling this gimmick falls into the 'Samsung and LG have already done it' category.

Re: "90% of what's needed"

Not telling Bing+Microsoft "everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you read, everything you watch etc." seems like an excellent feature.

Re: Here we go again...

AC@11:36:"Anyway, Blackberry is a brand I associate with people who" were given it by their employers and don't need to worry about what it cost, which isn't the headline price thanks to tax deductions and possible bulk purchases!

I'd also associate it with a lot of people that hate their phone. Couldn't possibly say whether my admittedly limited exposure to BB owners reflects the whole population and I know absolutely no youngsters with one but 2/3rds of the adult owners I do know hate theirs. The other 1/3 don't love it though ;)

Re: Nokia saves another MS OS?

The problem is Microsoft made a point of never clarifying the difference between RT and Pro in any promotion aimed at the buying public. They didn't really do it for more knowledgeable audiences. Even worse they flat out lied about platform convergence to the developer audience, claimed convergence that still hasn't happened.

None of us had gagging orders stopping us pointing out what Microsoft deliberately avoided and you can only blame Microsoft for creating that information vacuum. The general public still don't know what they're getting if they choose Surface and bundling that bastardised version of Office on RT just adds to the confusion.