* Posts by Paul Shirley

2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

AMD promises 100 gigabyte/second memory

Paul Shirley

@AC Bulldozer speed bump?

Bulldozer gave approximately zero average improvement over Phenom 2 in typical workloads. The SSE improvements are still going unused because SSE is so fragmented devs don't bother. The fx8370 I'm running is faster than the Phenom 2 it replaced... The clock hike and 2 more 'cores' explain almost all that increase, IPC is barely changed.

Paul Shirley

It's initially going into devices that stream to/from memory so latency isn't much of an issue. However 'latency = clocks*clock period' and lower clock rates don't guarantee higher latency, though rounding usually will, latency is a constant the clocks*period simply has to match or exceed.

In normal CPU's it's going to hit streaming modes less often and that might be a problem, increasing the average latency. We'll just have to wait and see.

Microsoft's Surface 3 is sweet – but I wouldn't tickle my nads with it

Paul Shirley

Re: RT was essential.

@PleebSmash

Intel have indeed been very good at burning less power than AMD's efforts (and delivering more performance).

They've been rather less successful against ARM unless you believe Intels own propaganda and it's ARM they were fighting for Microsofts business.

World of the strange: There will be NINE KINDS of Windows 10

Paul Shirley

Re: @dogged

"If MS had removed the "theming code", Start 8 could not exist."

They didn't remove all of it, just the bits Metro didn't need and the code to read many preferences. In prerelease builds much of it was just a regedit away from resurrection, then they excised the code they didn't want anyone using.

Through subclassing pretty much anything can manipulate the UI. Having to install a 3rd party theming driver to actually do that is a security hole waiting to be exploited.

Paul Shirley

@Michael Habel

"lord only knows how many Vulns Start8 brought / brings with it?"

With Win8 onwards Microsoft created the *need* for products like Start8, they share responsibility for any resulting issues.

MS didn't need to actually remove the theming code from Win8 that would have let dissenters safely revert the hideous new look&feel - they deliberately chose to take that choice away permanently, they share responsibility for issues hacking it back in cause.

Chill, luvvies. The ‘unsustainable’ BBC Telly Tax stays – for now

Paul Shirley

Re: keen for a pay for you watch.

...and what was your plan when the viewers that do watch only popular TV like Strictly and Eastenders decide they're no longer prepared to subsidise your viewing?

You say you want a musical revolution. Actually, have three

Paul Shirley

American Pop music history has been marked by three distinct revolutions

Apparently things like punk never reached the US ;)

Facebook echo chamber: Or, the British media and the election

Paul Shirley

Re: I read somewhere...

Ask yourself if you'd be living in a better country if the Cons weren't forced by coalition to abandon some of their most extreme policies? I've spent 30+ years watching lab&con take turns screwing up the country, it was nice seeing them slowed down for 5 years.

Apple taxpayers swarm to stone-age iPhone 6+ purely for the bigness

Paul Shirley

Dell first making 'phablet' phones (Dell Streak 5). Everyone ignores it. Years later Samsung get it right, then everyone else copies Dell.

Rip up your AMD obits: Gaming, VR, embedded chips to lift biz out of the red by 2016, allegedly

Paul Shirley

Re: Faulure to understand

AMD claim 40% IPC improvement. That will bring them to parity with *this years* Intel chips but a year late (at least). But AMD have consistently missed their promised IPC increase for several generations now, there's no reason to believe they'll actually hit 40%.

The FX series just aren't credible as performance CPU's any longer. Worst of all they won't worry Intel at all so won't even function as much needed competition.

Paul Shirley

FX probably too late

AMD let IPC fall so far behind Intel it's hard to believe they can catch up. Throwing more cores at FX will only help some workloads and it's a game Intel can play if they feel threatened. So far they can still beat AMD with less cores.

FX seems destined to remain the budget option, not the higher margin line they need. By the time they ship even die hard fans will have jumped ship, whatever the price advantage.

Windows 10 bombshell: Microsoft to KILL OFF Patch Tuesday

Paul Shirley

I'm not fine with any automatic update or deferring reboots. Been caught too many times wondering why my PC doesn't start properly after putting off the reboot for days, or the time wasted trying to guess which accumulated patch broke it.

...and intercepting the 'more adverts in Skype', 'Win10 upgrade nagware' or the regular offer of broken device drivers is pretty vital to me.

Paul Shirley

Re: Just like Windows Phone

"Google recognised this and de-coupled everything they could from the base OS and included it in Google Play."

...and the same people that complain about G's failure to override the carriers also complain loudly about Play services, the only way G has found to override them!

I can understand why some people think G could do more, the daily drip feed of 'Google are evil, Google are abusing their power, Google only do what's right for Google' clearly is affecting some (along with all the other BS being spouted). But they're fighting carriers with a decade more experience being genuinely evil. Even Microsoft playing Google against them couldn't get carriers to allow direct push updates without built in delays.

Microsoft discontinues Media Center with Windows 10

Paul Shirley

so will they ship media codecs?

Ummmm, Win8 shipped without it (a downgrade for many Win7 users) to avoid the codec licence fees. I wonder how Win10 upgraders will react if the MPEG2 and H264 codecs don't ship with it, it's not hard installing replacements but hard enough that ordinary users won't manage it.

Media Centre might have made it easy using TV tuners but it made very poor use of them and I believe had low limits on how many you could use. Possibly the only DTV current app that can't simultaneously pull more than 1 channel from each mux on each tuner.

Tesla Powerwall: Not much cheaper and also a bit wimpier than existing batteries

Paul Shirley

Longevity and ability to handle high current flows was what made the Al batteries so interesting. Less need to have excess capacity if you can safely pull huge currents and no need worry about badly behaved loads like kettle and fridges. As well as being inherently cheaper we could get away with using less of them.

Why should I learn by ORAL tradition? Where's the DOCUMENTATION?

Paul Shirley

Imaginary manuals

Just a few days since I opined that "I must get round to reading the imaginary manuals" to my lead...

Tesla reveals Powerwall battery packs for homes, Powerpacks for cities

Paul Shirley

Re: Fires

Making boilers safe is a *maintenance issue* and it's far from solved, we still have deaths and CO monitors.

Given the tiny number of Tesla's, 2 years since the last fire proves very little. We want considerably lower rates for devices meant to ship millions and able to destroy houses.

Paul Shirley

Think I'll wait...

... For those cheap aluminium batteries we were talking about a couple of weeks ago. Unless Musk has cracked lithium cell degradation rates that 10yr guarantee seems hard to take seriously for a device expected to be continuously cycled.

Not having an explosive that large in my house either!

'Android on Windows': Microsoft tightens noose around neck, climbs on chair

Paul Shirley

Re: Times change, business does not

While G did argue that APIs could not be copyrighted they actually failed to establish that (pending however many appeals it goes through). They only managed a narrow ruling that the Java code they were using wasn't protectable.

MS cloning the services without an expensive trip to court might depend on just how much MS manages to piss off Google before trying it. The current EU shit stirring might already have done the trick.

REVEALED: The 19 firms whose complaints form EU's antitrust case against Google

Paul Shirley

Re: A question

Special purpose sites like Nextag (and Foundem) are doomed because what they're doing *isn't specialised*. It doesn't take any special knowledge to rank prices from shopping sites, little more than scraping and a day in a real search engine finding the sites to scrape.

Genuinely specialised sites leveraging special skills&knowledge have a future, at least till powerful AI takes over search.

The few that try to add extra value by mashing up other information (like delivery time+cost, reputation etc.) I've found so error prone and incomplete it's hard to actually trust them. At least on general search sites it's credible funding is independent of organic results, however offended you are by advert placement.

Paul Shirley

Re: @Trizone - "And in any event, the search engine is not installed on PCs, it's selected."

"And in any event, the search engine is not installed on PCs, it's selected.":

Strange. I don't remember choosing to install Bing on Win8.1 but I do remember having to tell built in search to stop using it. Just before I uninstalled the Metro apps. Win10 won't even let me disable the steaming POS and desktop search is damn near crippled by it.

Paul Shirley

Nextag

I can understand why Nextag are pissed, not so long ago their utterly useless comparison pages popped up in every search for any electrical product. Even if I only wanted the manual or a review. Never once looked like the results were remotely relevant to a uk user. Then they vanished from the top results, a wholly deserved vanishing IMHO.

Another company so reliant on unfairly high rankings they have only lobbying to fall back on when the system caught up with them.

FT and Guardian eagerly grab Google's 30 pieces of silver

Paul Shirley

"it made $100m a year indirectly from Google News"

In the overall business that's small enough G could shut down News without even noticing. Not sure how the companies or EU could prevent it, though I'm sure there's plenty of wishful thinking spread around Europe.

Console makers game the EU Commission to avoid energy-use law

Paul Shirley

@Rimpel

Supporting 1080p and actually being able to deliver it are very different. There are very few true 1080 last gen games and many 720p ones actually render at lower res then upscale to 720.

Halo3 is a typical example, XB360 renders 1152x640@30fps vs XB1 1920x1080@60fps. That's 5.625x more pixels for 2-3x the power draw. Better power consumption would be nice but its not getting worse.

Microsoft: Profit DECIMATED because you people aren't buying PCs

Paul Shirley

"Unbelievably, it went up after yet another loss announcement."

...they noticed Ballmer hasn't tried reclaiming his job, so there's still hope!

Apple Watch: Exactly how many vids does it take to teach a fanboi to tell the time?

Paul Shirley

Re: Look like Tag Heuer

If you paid a heavy premium for the Apple brand why would you want to replace the branding?

Google versus the EU: Sigh. You can't exploit a contestable monopoly

Paul Shirley

Re: Monopsony not Monopoly?

@strum: "Google Maps didn't get to be top of the pile because it was better than all the rest"

Google maps got to be better because Google invested VAST amounts of money making it better.

You could try arguing that's unfair to smaller competitors who cannot match the investment in servers or mapping but if they couldn't afford to do that they simply couldn't deliver the same level of service anyway. Simply spending money to build *better* product is not abuse, however much it buggers up someone else's business. It's abuse when you spend money only to screw with competition.

Some tasks need scale to do well, that's why we allow large corporations to be large, why we allow monopolies rather than aggressively breaking them up before they do wrong. Maps would seem to be one of them.

Paul Shirley

Re: Monopsony not Monopoly?

"after a time lag where you lap up the gravy"

That's a big flaw in the economic theory. I don't care if the market corrects abuse, harm is occurring in that lag time and that lag can easily stretch to years - even decades if you look at examples like Microsoft. As usual when economic theory hits the messy real world, it falls short.

Regulation is often needed even in a self correcting market and it's needed here to keep everyone honest *today*, not at some unpredictable time in the future.

Ex-Windows designer: Ballmer was dogmatic, Sinofsky's bonkers, and WinPho needs to change

Paul Shirley

Re: So blameMicrsoft because it doesn't innovate...

@LDS "You're saying basically there should be no innovation because people should never change habits"

I'm saying: innovation != improvement and the public get to choose which innovations they want to use, not inventors.

Innovation is great but when it fails to deliver better or more desirable products you need to accept that and try something different, not endlessly bang on about everyone else being wrong. Windows is currently demonstrating how to innovate a product into a worse one, WP innovated itself into irrelevance right from the start.

Paul Shirley

Re: I don't get the hate

Some of the hate is a byproduct of the astonishingly aggressive astroturfing Microsoft indulged in right up to ballet quitting. BS of such orchestrated consistency might have influenced the ordinary public to buy, addressed at geeks who'd seen the same gameplan before it was a disaster.

Astroturfing justifiably breeds hate and that spills over onto the product.

The only successful marketing Microsoft managed was getting so many European carriers to hard sell windows phones with contract renewals. That's how my only wp owning friend got lumbered with a phone he's increasingly regretting being talked into taking.

Uh oh, it's Mobilegeddon! Your site may lose, well, pennies

Paul Shirley

The BBC site isn't even desktop friendly! A twisty maze of passages, all alike, none leading where you expect.

Paul Shirley

so much mobile viewing

With the increased use of mobiles to view the web it seems a reasonable idea to encourage sites to get mobile friendly. Hard to see any real competitive advantage it increases for G either, every mobile platform gets the 'better' sites whether Android,IOS,WP or something minor.

EU says dominant Google illegally alters search results

Paul Shirley

Re: Dog food eating

"we just assume Google search is better"

Many of us *remember* Google Search actually being MASSIVELY better than anything else and see no point switching to an unfamiliar alternative while G search remains competitive. What's really degraded G search down the years is persistent attacks from SEO, given the relentless gaming and cheating it's a miracle search works at all. But other search engines are at least as degraded.

I don't miss the days aggregators and meta comparison sites regularly managed to hijack entire pages of results till the link farm banhammer hit them. Some of the loudest complainers are really whining about their scuzzy SEO efforts no longer being tolerated. I say fuck'em, they just waste my time.

Paul Shirley

the only certain thing...

...is Foundem really won't like the result, whatever happens, they still won't have a product anyone wants to use and no amount of fiddling the search results will change that.

'We STRONGLY DISAGREE' that we done WRONG, says Google

Paul Shirley

Trying to 'kill' your competition is *not illegal*, but the methods used may be. That's true even for (near) monopolies, we just tend to pay little attention until a monopoly forms and allow them to do much less.

It's not yet decided if Google did more than was allowed at the time they did it. It won't be a politician deciding that with Microsoft funded campaigning ringing in their ears.

Paul Shirley

Re: I google for "Webmail" on my Nexus 5

Well... the settlement discussions last year did seem somewhat focussed on ensuring paid ads would retain prominent positions on G search results. Quite how Foundem thinks they can afford to buy those positions is a mystery however.

Since 'fixing' the algorithm seems off the table, Foundem's best bet is buying ads. The good news for them is it will be a fair contest for those valuable slots from now on ;)

In some ways, dating apps are the anti-internet

Paul Shirley

"You're confusing the total number of acts with the total number of participants. Elementary logical failure."

or more likely, the willingness to perform is higher than success rates in men, lower in women.

Microsoft cramming free stuff into Galaxy S6es? Not so fast – US telcos

Paul Shirley

@MikeS "take up any further storage"

Yes, bloody annoying. They steal valuable storage so the system partition is big enough for the crapware, then updates end up using the user partition anyway. And there's not much chance of recovering the wasted space even rooted.

Install packages can happily flash user space, there's not technical reason they have to abuse system space like this.

Life after Nokia: Microsoft Lumia 640 budget WinPho blower

Paul Shirley

...except they haven't fixed the desktop yet. I don't believe they're even trying to fix what's broken in Win10's UI. Won't stop them bringing the same pain to mobile though...

Am left wondering: they shrank to Start Screen, bolted it onto the classic desktop and called it the return of the Start Menu (it's not). Will they do the same to WP and give us a Start Menu\Screen so small no-one can read it? I won't be surprised if it happens ;)

Radio 4 and Dr K on programming languages: Full of Java Kool-Aid

Paul Shirley

Re: “Goto statement considred harmful”

@ScottME and I see you're missing the point that half the goto commenters make - that sometimes the GOTO simplifies programme structure, sometimes massively.

I strenuously avoid goto more because of the historical behaviour of compilers, treating the branch and it's target as barriers, neatly disabling most compiler optimisations. Today's compilers handle it better but still aren't perfect and it's used so little they have no incentive to improve that. Most programmers don't need to worry about that level of performance.

Paul Shirley

Re: Those who can, do, those who can't, write about it...

I quite like Java for the sheer speed of 'recompiles', something I miss badly every time an unlucky header change forces a 40min C++ recompile on the current project (we inherited this mess and it's too tangled to fix). But I did miss the astonishing expressive power of C++, Java is dumbed down to very few choices and the semantic differences with C++ are a constant annoyance.

I find myself wondering how to elegantly express ideas in C++, compared to wondering if what I'm trying is even possible in Java - it takes the joy out of programming. The Java is probably more productive if you aren't working on extremely high performance applications though ;)

Lib Dems wheel out Digital Rights Bill pledge as election sweetener

Paul Shirley

Re: [the Lib Dems have] never broken an election promise before.

@AMBxx ...and whichever scum get in we desperately need some of their election promises to be broken. Every time.

If there was a 'hung parliament' option on the voting form I'd use it, keep the bastards from pretending we voted for their batshit insane policies because they bundled them with less unpalatable ones than the other side.

Videogame publishers to fans: Oi, stop resurrecting our dead titles online

Paul Shirley

As an occasional game designer my position has always been that you're buying a licence to play my *content* and the playback tech is secondary but covered. Resell my content and I'll sue you. Resell my playback tech, I'll sue. Keep the content and playback tech working, I'll try to avoid paying you for your hard work but you're safe.

But publishers create very little, own a lot. And want your money more than they want to accept any obligation to past customers. They want to rent content, not asign you any rights. A pox on them.

Nokia may tell struggling HERE Maps division to get lost – report

Paul Shirley

Deadly obsession

Time to remember the part Here played in pushing Nokia to Windows rather than Android. In a small way (compared to the total mismanagement) that obsession with the mapping crown jewels killed Nokia as a mobile supplier.

Even now they've allowed it onto android the app can be a PIA to use.

Android alt-wars: OnePlus looses Cyanogen-slaying OxygenOS firmware

Paul Shirley

Just what oneplus needs

More work to distract them from creating a usable customer service setup.

... although that presumes they have any intention of doing customer service, it feels like they invested more resources in selling overpriced addons than anything else. Not a company I would trust to get an OS right before much pain has been suffered.

Aluminum bendy battery is boffins' answer to exploding Li-ion menace

Paul Shirley

Re: For once the news on the battery front may actually lead to something.

@Lee D: all true for portable uses but you ignore the mention of grid storage. High energy density is less important than not blowing up/burning easily, long lifetime and low cost. A stack of these sitting in garages or cupboards soaking up PV panel output would pretty much solve the intermittency problem. Could go a long way to fixing it in wind power, which aren't short of space to pile up batteries.

This isn't a replacement for lithium cells, more suitable for displacing lead acid. You wouldn't put them in your car but might put them in the garage to charge that car.

Got an Android mobe with a virus? Congrats, you're The One Per Cent

Paul Shirley

Re: Ouch

Can't disable those permissions (without rooting) but its not hard to take the hint and just not install any of that suspicious crapware, when the installer warns you. I can't remember any app that asked for blatantly unnecessary permissions so useful or tempting it was with worth ignoring that warning.

Unfortunately the world is full of stupid people that do ignore those warnings, do install complete crap and there's no good way to stop them doing it. Bit of a miracle infection rates aren't 50%+.

The coming of DAB+: Stereo eluded the radio star

Paul Shirley

Re: " it is harder to spot in a car most of the time."

That's a huge part of the problem, a substantial fraction of shipped DAB are in cars or used in cars and high quality is pointless in most of them, most of the time. That's a powerful disincentive to bother upping bitrates or risking DAB+, the users with least alternatives are the ones least likely to notice an improvement.

Fixed locations are similarly affected, if your FM, DVB or IP is seriously bad there's no pressure for DAB to do much better. If it's not bad there's even less reason to use DAB at all.

DAB service providers got away with a barely tolerable service when they had no competition and still have too little competition in key market niches to improve their offer. Alternatives have now shut them out of most niches and that can only get worse. It's a dead tech.

Smart meters are a ‘costly mistake’ that'll add BILLIONS to bills

Paul Shirley

Re: short term benefit @John 48

"You have a very good point, but that is not what Tezfair was talking about."

What he described was reducing what the *power meter read*. For the tubes it's unlikely there was a matching real power reduction and who needs a smart meter to tell them low power bulbs will reduce consumption?

Useful in the same way a placebo is, just there to remind you to actually replace and turn off powered stuff. But that means they might as well loan people cheap power meters for 3 months instead of mugging them for smart meters (and doing it every time they try to change suppliers).

Forum chat is like Clarkson punching you repeatedly in the face

Paul Shirley

Re: Poor Oisin

It looks very like the knobend might have got away with it if he'd kept his mouth shut. No sign the producer was going to report the incident, though it's hard to believe it wouldn't have hit the newspapers and forced the issue anyway, too many people witnessed it. I have to assume the knobend worked out he wasn't going to get a "jim'll fix it" free pass this time without heroic efforts, so he shopped himself.

Not heroic enough. Oh... Supposedly he did try the groveling apology... Didn't bother doing it publicly where it might have made him look less like a sacked dickhead.