Re: Wanted: Android install for Windows Phones
I suspect they know there's no way to even start until someone manages to unlock the bootloader and Microsoft probably got that one thing right.
2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
That will somewhat depend on how long Microsoft are contractually obligated to continue using it. If Microsoft ever decide they can make Bing maps successful they won't hesitate to drop Nokia.
Of course losing any business Microsoft are throwing their way may not make a measurable difference ;)
If Nokia want to grow it fast they should consider building Android support. They originally blamed rejecting Android on not being able to *replace* Google Maps but that wasn't quite true. They can't remove Google Maps, they might even have problems shipping a full replacement on the Play Store, they *can* build and ship a 100% replacement and let users choose which to use. Androids intents system allows that and Nokia should be able to convince suppliers to preinstall their alternative - just like my wifes phone came with the highly inferior Orange maps prominently placed.
Otherwise they're back where this started, in a world where Android is sucking up even low end sales and devices like Asha just slow down that loss.
In the far distant past I applied for a job at their Martlesham Heath research centre, duly trekked halfway across the country for a full days interviewing, then spent 30min being interviewed for the tech job, 60min getting the tour and the entire rest of the day being tested on my customer handling skills. For a job that would never see me meet a domestic customer and not involve business support at all.
BT have always valued the ability to bullshit customers over ability to do the job of building working systems.
[Another interview around the same time: I apply for a job in office automation, 1st question in the interview "are you happy to sign the official secrets act" and a rapid admission I'd actually be designing missile guidance systems. They at least had the decency to end the interview there and we just talked about beer for a while instead of really wasting my time]
64 bit ints would help Android a lot, thanks to the casual use of longs all over the Java framework and apps. ARM8 also has double the registers and that should also boost the JIT, especially on virtual register heavy Java/Dalvik bytecode. Sounds well worth adding to Android, even if you ran Dalvik VM 64bit and everything else 32bit it would still give a significant boost.
Not sure there's a problem with code size, 64bit mode still uses 32bit wide instructions so there shouldn't be much code inflation to hurt bandwidth or cache.
Have to check how improved Neon is, that could make a difference to AV and in turn battery life.
What's so predictably depressing about all the cheerleading and Win8 defence is the complete and utter failure to accept THERE'S NO SINGLE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT. While 90% of my launches are indeed from 6 pinned apps, I also use desktop icons, folders of launch links on the desktop, search and the old Start Menu. The tools I use most (File Explorer, Firefox & Eclipse) I launch least, just leave them running till they crash.
I don't value the Start Menu because it can do everything, I value it because it can do some things I value better than the other options. I'd really like people and Microsoft to stop trying to take away my options.
Fanbois persistently tell me the Start Menu never went away, that the Start Screen is the Start Menu.
A flat 2D, barely organised, space wasting, context breaking, excessive mouse motion provoking barely usable Start Menu. If it offends you so much ask Microsoft to actually remove it... they've done more stupid things ;)
Or if you wait a few days after release *and* someone more talented shares you're hatred of the Start *button* the put back, I'm sure there'll be a 3rd party hack to remove it again.
" I decided that the best time to do this was at fiscal year end,"
Translation:" I decided that the best time to do this was just before a company wide reorganisation kicked me out"
If the upcoming reorganisation doesn't kick out a large proportion of parasitic managers they might as well not bother. The ones with a less than spotless past will be 'considering their options' right now.
>The future is touch and gesture, and Microsoft are ahead of the curve!
Meanwhile in our reality, touch and gesture is the present and recent past back to at least 2007 and Microsoft are (as usual) late to the party.
Not surprising for the company that had the lead with pen based computing and still got nowhere.
They botched the storage architecture so badly that external SD tends to get used for things that should not be taken offline - like app storage. Yank the SD and "bad things" happen. Google applied their usual lazy response to problems, don't fix the problem, remove it by removing the feature.
I still remember the pain being online on dialup brought to my phone bill every month and the rapidly building stack of computers I already owned in 1986, I'd already given away my Oric just to clear space.
Was the Reg told 1976 and heard 1986? That would just miss the 1st wave of all in one computers like the CBM PET and Apple II (both 1977). Even then there were computers in homes in 1976 (Apple 1 for instance).
This utter horseshit needs to die today. There was never any need for so restrictive an online policy to implement the ill defined and unexplained 'digital age' features, despite the whining of the fans.
Don't believe me? Microsoft just announced the return of the first group of those supposedly lost features!
There was no legitimate reason for the compulsion for anyone not using the features. There was never an excuse for needing a connection just to play any arbitrary game. And Microsoft finally got round to admitting it can all be done voluntarily with a hell of a lot less intrusive and potentially experience wrecking connection requirement.
Time to STFU
Fanbois are definitely the issue, pro fanbois can be relied on to facilitate launch sell outs with only minimal effort. That means launch day sales aren't reliable indications of anything - unless of course even the fanbois boycott the product OR you have enough stock to cover massive walk-up sales.
Selling out on pre-order pretty much excludes any non-fan sales, ordinary uncommitted buyers just don't do it. Xbox 180 was well on the way to pissing off enough XB fanbois to cause a problem though, hence the desperate u-turns. XB 180 is firmly in that 'no-one knows what it means' part of the graph. Back in the real world XB 360 is where the new games are and most owners aren't feeling any pressure to upgrade.
Me? I might throw £200 at a better-than-XB180/PS4 GPU and some more RAM for my PC. Cheaper games on a better box they already own seems to be interesting many of the console owners I've talked to as well.
It's a fair claim that no number of available apps you don't want to use matters. That all that matters is if the ones you do want exist. Fair but incomplete.
A strong market does matter. It increases the chance that rare niche app only you and a 100 others want exists. It gives you a decent choice of competing apps where there is duplication - despite coming with built in browser, calendar, media player and clock apps I currently use better 3rd party versions on my phone.
If nothing else if spurs the platform holder to try harder with their own built in apps. Lack of a strong app environment is a sign of a weak platform in many different ways and affects even users that claim not to use downloaded apps.
The big problem is lots of keyboards of all sorts of form factor have been offered to the market and (apart from BlackBerry) the market consistently said 'meh'.
I think there are 2 issues:
1: Most people just see no need, once they learn how to thumbtype SMS and email on a touchscreen they see no advantage to physical keyboards on small devices. TBH after typing on an iPad I can't see much need for anything better for what I'm going to use and despite loving the hard keys on my old G1 I can type just as fast on my newer 4" device touchscreen.
2: most of them are so poor to use in practice. And you're going to need to prop up or otherwise support the screen somehow, maybe cart around a stand and have severe constraints on positioning - just holding the device in a comfortable viewing position can feel easier and have better ergonomics. If you're going to inflict a flat, feedback free keyboard you might as well just use the flat version on screen, especially as the onscreen versions get smarter. The ergonomic issues make this a hard sell.
I can see other input methods (voice is nearly there) completely supplanting these clumsy hacks.
So:
MS fail to negotiate a Nokia buyout around 2 months back
Last week or so we discover Lenovo failed to negotiate a buyout
Today MS rush into a buyout
Tempting to think someone just shafted MS before Elop could destroy enough value, using Lenovo to panic them into hasty action. Wouldn't want them talking to Google or Samsung and buggering up the plan. Helped by Ballmer quitting, any trojan horse plan would need finishing in a hurry while people that knew about it were still employed - there won't be a paper trail.
If true, just how little is Nokia really worth right now if $7.2bil is assumed more than it's worth?
Given how buggy I find Win8 I struggle to see how 8.1 could make things worse, especially since they didn't touch anything in desktop mode where I'm daily confronted by glitchy shit. A 'let's block Start Menu workrounds' button is insignificant.
The strong suspicion has to be another last minute hack is about to be perpetrated on 8.1 to further discourage use of desktop mode, just like they yanked the actual menu code out of 8 RTM days before release. If they can delay fixes and break Classic Start Menu/Startisback etc. for even a week, that's a couple of users that might fall in love with Metro.
Except of course users installed those work rounds because they already rejected Metro, so hardly likely to work.
There's a 2nd economic force at work, the demand for more power is all but over in significant parts of the market. Not only is it getting more expensive to ramp up performance, the value of that extra performance to buyers is falling - once your PC is fast enough 95% of the time that next 5% isn't worth paying a lot for.
It's the same effect that's driving the move to lower power tablet and mobile devices, laptops before that and the massive slow down in PC replacement. Concentrating computing resources in data centres can keep the quest for more performance alive a while but we're heading for a world without a driving force behind extremely costly measures to keep Moores law going.
If you use NDK there's no other option but compiling for each target. NDK is there for raw speed and any platform you fall back to Java for (or rely on Intel's ARM->x86 translator layer) is crippled.
As I said up the page, with no x86 competition to monkey wrench there's no obvious downside to using Intels compiler. Apart from the insanely restrictive platforms it runs on. TBH though there's also not much point using it over gcc, there's so much variance in performance across Android devices losing a few percent hardly matters.
Outstandingly good at optimising *for genuine Intel* silicon. There have been consistent, believable claims of dirty tricks in the Intel compilers. Not just generating code poorly optimised for rival silicon, claims that extra code is inserted specifically to slow them down.
As a result Intel's compilers should be avoided unless you know the programmes will run on Intel silicon.
Luckily there doesn't seem much scope for fun&games on the Android version, with no hint any other x86 CPUs will ever be inflicted on it. There is the slim niche of Android on PC, it would be interesting seeing if the compiler messes with AMD machines even without any real reason to do it.
http://uxstyle.com/ for the theming engine. Puts back about half what MS ripped out going W7->W8
http://xxinightxx.deviantart.com/art/Royale-8-337121007 will restore some XP/W7 polish to the window chrome
There are fixes for some of the remaining rough edges (like rounding off title bars properly) I haven't bothered with.
And 1 tip: don't touch the Win8 theming options once you add the above. If you do, uninstall/reinstall seems to be the only reliable way to restore the hacks.
Not quite. BASIC probably did copy the 4K character ROM into RAM at the same mapped address (not going to find the manual to check). Everything else was simple bank switching, the RAM was still writable and usable for graphics even banked behind ROM.
The default memory map had 40K of contiguous user RAM, 38K available to BASIC and another 4K high block for direct access before doing anything tricky. Any graphics was on top of that, not taken from it. I had little problem using 60K of the RAM for games.
Was fairly similar on the other machines of the time, only the Electron and BBC seemed to have such crippling hard limits. I remember the painful explanations our BBC porting guy gave about squeezing games onto the Electron, requiring slicing the graphics then reassembling mirrored and rotated pieces in realtime. Further sapping performance.
Even lowly machines like the Oric were fully capable of paging large amounts of RAM into a simple, >32K memory space. Have to wonder what they were thinking at Acorn.
...and that's why I'm not even considering IOS or WP and checking each Android device for strong customisation support, both stock and 3rd party replacement.
I'll be sticking to the market with a wild jungle of competition built over a core of compatibility. I choose what my device does and get a damn wide set of choices to make but still get to run all the apps.
Now remember that sales only crept upward when Lumia prices shot down with multiple budget builds. Nokia already played the 'budget' card and it's moved them from 'totally insignificant' to 'insignificant' in the smartphone market.
At some point it's time to give up pretending Nokia can compensate for the buyer repelling use of Winphone with better hardware and lower prices. It's visibly not working for them.
The spooks are also allowed to think their orders are idiotic and conterproductive. They might not be able to tell the idiots ordering stupidity that with any effect, can't refuse to obey, but don't have to go beyond symbolism or make any attempt to make an action look less cretinous. After all, their names won't go public.
And unlike the police, they're usually smart enough to know when what they're doing makes no sense.
So yes, theatre. Perhaps not the theatre the politicians wanted though.
The licensing issue that screwed them is the problem: they have a choice of 2 licenses to provide YouTube (or 3 if you include handing the job off to the users browser), instead of picking 1 and complying with it's conditions, they've used the permissions of one and the obligations of the other.
They invented their own licence in effect. They either need to get fully compliant with a real licence on offer or stay blocked. Tweaking just parts of the non-compliant behaviour doesn't fix that. But Microsoft aren't in a mood to ignore any excuse to throw more shit at Google so this farce continues.
"Whether Google are within their rights to subsequently block anything with a Redmond whiff knocking at their API... "
Their licence is for accessing YouTube data. How they do it and then use that data is controlled by the licence. How they got the api doesn't matter even if it was protectable. It's all about the data, which definitely is protectable.
BTW The oracle v Google judgement did not say all APIs aren't protectable. It explicitly states the ruling is specific to that one case, not a general precedent.
It's hard to understate just how mind numbingly bad the MegaCD was, little more than a bare CD drive with no useful firmware or tools, most annoyingly no file system - you had to write your own ISO driver and file system builder. Acceleration functions barely faster than using the 68K CPU, probably unavoidable in a system without direct frame buffer access.
A system doomed for failure, painful to work with and I was very glad when the project I'd been working on got cancelled.
The FX chip had a big advantage, even sitting on the wrong side of a cartridge, it had more direct access to memory, instead of injecting graphics through a narrow write port. Hardly surprising it did the job so much better. If they really did pull out of Playstation because MegaCD failed, that's really unfortunate, it should have performed much better.
Still, we did get the Sony version out of that withdrawal.
email is the equivalent of sending a postcard, you hope no-one bothers reading it but that's all it is - hope. Anyone the data transits through can intercept your mail, always been that way and until we get a universal secure delivery system it will continue that way.
Want privacy, put it in an envelope, encrypt your mail end to end. Disappointing but that's the ongoing reality of email.
Even more disappointing that new users only discover that when a shock headline appears, though quite how anyone could miss the constant warnings that Google do this is a mystery. Microsoft alone seem to have a whole PR operation endlessly grinding out reminders about it.
...the lawsuits for neck pain will start rolling in. Staring at where you hands comfortably sit on a desk is not something anyone should do all day.
When will people finally accept that touch is a solution to specific problems (like tiny devices with nowhere to put any other input), not something worth chasing for it's own sake and definitely not something to force into all use cases regardless of common sense. Allowing it everywhere for occasional, optional use makes sense, enforcing it everywhere never will.
Remembering that MS were yanking out desktop code just a week before Win8 RTM, it's hard not to wonder what last minute monkey wrenching they have planned this time.
Luckily, by installing into a 32Gb partition it looks like I can't actually apply this update without wasting a whole day resizing partitions. So no temptation to waste time on it.
It's pretty simple Larry E:
1: hire lawyers to check the licences
2: follow their advice scrupulously about what is allowed under those licences
Ellisons problem is Google understands Oracles licences better than Oracle does. Not a big surprise someone like Larry E didn't understand the implications of permissive licences, even ones deliberately booby trapped like Java. As it is, having been alerted to just how screwed they are, Oracle are busy trying to find loopholes to make the licence rights less useful. Not working out well for him.
Meanwhile, those of us that were paying attention (or not being paid to post BS) noticed XBone and PS4 are all but identical. Same CPU, same GPU, same memory architecture, same RAM count. OGL and DX11 are almost interchangeable.
The differences: to help it's slower DDR3 keep up with the PS4s DDR5, XBone wasted transistors on extra cache and lots of RAM<->cache copy hardware. Transistors PS4 spent on 25% more GPU stream processors. Meaning XBone is both fundamentally slower AND harder to program this time round!
Of course you can just as easily put the equivalent hardware in a PC now. The one difference is only OpenGL added support for unified memory architectures as a core function, so PS4 games will be easier to port to those PCs. Can you guess which one developers are likely to gravitate towards?
...which won't disable the 'sensitive microphone array' built into Kinect.
Arguably audio surveillance would be more worrying than grabbing video. Depending on exactly how sensitive that array is it could cover much more than the camera sees and it's more likely to disclose genuinely worrying stuff - your bank passwords, security question or details for example. Block video and no embarrassing YouTube posts, audio is where you're life will be fscked over for identity theft or blanket state spying.
The original XBone plan definitely left the microphone array permanently enabled...