Posts by Tim Cowley

N00bs vs Windows 8: We lock six people in a room with new OS

Re: Oh and Linux has similar available too.

you know about the win8 'edgy' touch commands, right? the same ones you've been using in iOS and on the apple trackpad?

Re: Windows on a Mac as a test?

Having spent the last two years running windows 8 every day across many machines - VM and physical - I completely agree with you. This is as absurd as the demo of winXP RTM being owned in 20 minutes - well after winXP SP2 was the only version available to buy, even in brick-and-mortars.

I've relied on The Reg for hyper-critical, no-pulled-punches info for years but this farce shows that they just wanted to make win8 look bad. Normals aren't going to run it in a damned VM, and they're not going to use a mac keyboard.

Windows 8: Microsoft will declare victory, but will anyone believe it?

Re: Who wants to upgrade to Windows 8?

you should use windowskey + 'x' , it'll get you there faster

Microsofties lose their iPhones

insider viewpoint

@Giles Jones: absolutely right. No company can afford to only hire it's customers. We never would have gone from single-user win9x to making server OSs without that.

here's the deal with personal phones at MS:

we have phone salesmen (winmo only, heh) in the cafeterias. They are even allowed to put up huge posters* in the hallways advertising deals on phones. The only other posters are from minitruth, internal advertising. 5 years of working there has me cynical enough to believe that the company takes a cut, or perhaps a flat fee, from these guys in exchange for sales turf.

*My favorite poster was one offering a free coffee in exchange for looking at phones. We've got Starbucks iCups on every floor of every building!!

12 of the best... mice

FINALLY, an RSI-aware review of mice

So few tech reviewers even know about the 3M ergo mouse, or Evoluent's device. Well done, well done indeed. I've toured MS's ergonomics and assistive devices lab (I work at MS's main campus) and gone through increasingly expensive gear (up to a $300 smartnav head tracker) to try to preserve both my wrists and my career. This is simply the best researched review of this incredibly important and potentially career-ending input device. Thank you.

For anyone with serious problems, I'd recommend _good posture first_ then foot pedals and whichever of the devices is most painless to point with.

For what it's worth, here are my ratings of speed/precision vs wrist-saving

Smartnav headtracker: slow but painless. Add speech recognition and you're gold.

3M ergo mouse: awkward and never easy, but -nearly- painless with good posture

Logitech trackman: speedy and nearly as good as the 3M device if you prop it up at a 45 degree angle.

nitpick: I have a logitech trackman wheel at home and have to regularly pop the ball out and clean the contact bearings of gunk. Since that takes all of 5 seconds I'm not too sad to do it.

Unpatched Windows PCs own3d in less than four minutes

let's not forget mac 10.2

... which shipped without its firewall turned on. Pathetic.

Google penetrates fake sex world with Lively

@madra

Let go of the hate. You're straw-manning this. It's not about assuming given roles, it's about playing the ones you want, and connecting with other people with matching ideas. The human connection.

WoW roleplay, colored balls, and SL imagination

I feel I'm the only commenter who has actual knowledge of this material.

soaklord: the 'colored balls' referred to are poseballs. They're the 3d representation of animations in SL. You have one per person-to-be-animated, they're fixed in place, usually. Click on them and your avatar starts the animation loop. Typically arranged in red/blue pairs for obvious reasons. (or trios of red+red+blue or whatever) Only relied on by people who don't have the talent to roleplay through text.

as for adult roleplay in wow - there's PLENTY. Head over to rh.greydawn.net, (an adult roleplay profile site) and search for profiles with world of warcraft as their location. You will find no shortage of personas. Again, since all good roleplay happens in text it's not a problem.

and finally - imagination. People who've never used SL pretend to have insight into SL's inability to represent text. Once you've spent more than 2 minutes using it you learn that you can resize the chat window. After 10 more minutes you find out about 'groups' and group chat, and the tabbed group chat window interface. I spend a great deal of time with my chat window covering most of my view, with my avatar sitting somewhere.

I've spent a lot of time in SL, in communities very similar to the MUSHs (that's multi-user shared hallucination) and MUCKs (~ Construction Kit) of old. Just like the old days, people create roleplay their areas and personas with total committment. Not everyone, of course, not the lazy people or the unimaginative. Naturally these communities are self-protecting, with strict membership trial periods and vetoing by the founders and organizers. Hard to break into if you're a lamer. Harder if you're a journalist with a deadline. Impossible if you have no imagination or creativity.

US Congress members push Gates's line on visas

As one of the aforementioned

I was recruited by MS 4 years ago, came down from Canada. The most striking thing about MS's employee base is how varied they are - from basically everywhere in the world. Salaries and salary ranges are Known Quantities - everyone knows what their peers make, and how their salary compares. I make the same as the homegrown people around me. It's asinine to think that _any_ tech worker would be productive when they were making less than their domestic coworkers.

With how much it costs (moving, lawyers for visa and citizenship) MS _does_ try to recruit from here first. The less cynical types (ie: people who don't read the Reg) get to go on recruiting trips to their home US schools regularly.

People hassle me and ask why their kid doesn't have a job at MS. I tell them MS is too big a company to only scout local talent. What I don't tell them is that their kid just isn't smart enough. Many of my domestic coworkers have never used a command line OS, not *nix, not even DOS. I cut my teeth on HPUX, Solaris, and Linux at the U of A.