Posts by El Andy 416 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jul 2011
You should not be allowed to patent ideas, period.
The whole purpose of patents is to protect ideas, period. Take that away and there's nothing left.
What really needs to happen is shorter patents and much stricter control to protect against "obvious", pre-existing or just plain vague patents.
Microsoft haven't "abused DNT" at all. Their implementation is entirely compliant with the specification *and* it's highlighting the option that most people will want, i.e. not to be tracked online, as part of the install process (which the standard *explicitly* allows).
The real truth here is that the advertising industry wants the option to exist, but be so buried in the UI that basically nobody uses it. Then they can claim in places like the EU that all their tracking is entirely legitimate, because users aren't opting out. If every browser had a prominent message when you first used it asking for you to set a DNT preference, they'd be just as keen to find an excuse to ignore that too.
Because that's important in a tablet.
When you consider that the point of that little stunt was to demonstrate how tough the surface is and the kind of battering it can withstand (very important if your fondleslab is ever going to leave the lounge) then yes, it really is quite an important feature
"Or more importantly you go to a site that requires specific software installed to work.
ie a site you currently use a lot that has a player you have to install to watch videos. If there is no app for that then I can see a lot of people being quite upset."
Except that those were the exact same arguments levelled at the iPad, which would supposedly be useless because it's web browser didn't support any plugins.
"The author's clearly trying to show that Win8 sucks by confusing n00bs. Duh. Grow up El Reg."
And yet, somewhat ironically, the only thing that really needed explaining seems to be the hot-corners - something that would have been shown to the users had they sat through the intro tutorial (which they apparently weren't given the opportunity to do, judging by their comments)
You're probably closer to the truth than the conspiracy theories about iTunes or whatever. The simple fact is that very few people really need optical drives, so companies are increasingly cutting costs by using cheap components for them, which ups the failure rate significantly. Removing yet another moving part from the machine will probably save Apple a fortune in repairs. It's probably only cost that stops them going the whole hog and ditching the mechanical disk in favour of SSD to (and that can only be a few years away).
Except that WSUS has been capable of differential patching and combining updates into a single reboot where possible anyway, so you end up with pretty much the same result as rolling out a Service Pack without having to actually re-test another update (heck even when it does roll out SPs, it only actually applies a diff between what you already have installed and what is in the SP anyway). And doing it that way is *much* easier than re-ghosting machines with a completely new OS image (especially since you'd need to maintain a WSUS or similar setup anyway).
"Service Packs" are just a relic of old-school thinking. I'm pretty sure the only reason there is an SP1 at all is simply to placate those stuck in the "wait for the first service pack" mentality, which is equally flawed/
Monolithic bundled up Service Packs made sense back in the NT4 days, when you could "get away" without applying intermediate patches and the lack of controlled deployment tools for OS patches meant that deploying and testing minor fixes was a major hassle.
These days the security landscape has changed and with an ever increasing number of zero-day vulnerabilities it's no longer worth the risk to hold back on patching. And with free tools like WSUS to manage the process in larger environments, as well as Automatic Updates for standalone machine, there really is little point in bundling updates into a single big bulky patch as opposed to just letting the system update itself.
It's mostly because they're crap. And pointless. After a brief period of getting used to the change, they just seem as clunky as the Start menu does. It's the same argument as was heard when Program Manager/File Manager were replaced by Explorer and the Start Menu, yet you don't see everyone clamouring for their return.
"I do hope I can get a blank ARM system"
Absolutely zero chance. Precisely because of the licensed/customized design of ARM chips, so unlike with x86 no two ARM devices are necessarily the same and each requires a custom OS (which is why Windows RT is limited to a subset of ARM devices). It's not all win-win as the author suggests. Nearest you'll get is something like Raspberry Pi.
Also, for the record, Windows RT does have a desktop and you can fiddle in Explorer et al to your hearts content. You won't be able to run third party desktop applications, but that's not (quite) the same thing as no desktop at all.
"Does anyone honestly believe anything in the WP8 UI is worth stealing"
Actually, yes. That's why it's won more design awards than any other phone OS. Of course if you're naïve enough to believe that Apple got the phone UI perfect in v1 and that nothing can possibly ever be better (hence all the shameless rip-off Android UIs), that's all fine and dandy, but those of us that have actually used Windows Phone are well aware of the things it does better.
"They should bake in an adblock+ type thing and enable it by default rather than a useless token flag that every advertiser chasing the profit dragon will ignore anyway."
But the aim is not to stop advertising, it's a completely legitimate way to fund sites and using tools like AdBlock to get the content without letting the site owner recoup their costs through ad revenue is morally dubious at best.
DNT on it's own would certainly be easy for admen to simply ignore, that's unavoidable, but with an increasing amount of privacy laws coming in to force doing so in a situation where you've explicitly stated a preference not to be tracked puts them clearly on the wrong side of such laws. That's why the admen would prefer the option to exist, but so hidden away nobody knows it. Then they can happily claim their tracking was entirely legit, because you had the ability to opt out, but didn't. They don't want this option to be easily discovered, because the honest answer to "Do you want to be tracked online?" is going to fall heavily on the side of "No" to most people.
Would this site be free without adverts?
No, it probably wouldn't be free. However having Do Not Track enabled doesn't mean sites can't display adverts. It might mean they can't build up a database of an individuals habit to show them personalised adverts, but that's a subtly different issue.
The truth behind all of this is that the big Ad companies (which includes Roy Fielding's employer, Adobe) are not going to be happy unless next to nobody uses DNT. Which is why anything that makes it a prominant choice in browsers is going to get complained at. In their ideal world, the setting would exist (so they can happily claim they only track people who don't mind) but nobody would ever have it turned on.
Paul Allen is incorrect regarding IE, the tile and the desktop version both share bookmarks, or "favorites" as IE calls them.
Not incorrect, per se, just that he was using an older pre-release version in which some of the little niggles like IE's favourites hadn't been sorted out. Which is worth bearing in mind with all the little bits and pieces he mentions.
"Now when I'm explaining to someone over the phone how to get their network working, I don't have to say: "see the little computer and cable icon in the bottom right, it will look like a little monitor with a cable on the left"
+1
Explaining how to get things done in Windows 8 is immeasurably easier than in previous versions of Windows. Sure, you have to learn some new ways first, which might initially seem less intuitive (precisely because you're used to the old way) but once you've grasped it it's al fairly simple. If we'd left things the same because we knew the old way, you'd still be spending days tweaking autoexec.bat every time you wanted to get a new app running.
One of the little cafes in my area actually runs exactly that scheme. For £1 a time you can get parcels dropped off there and then collect at your convenience. I've never actually tried it out, as I tend to favour the 'deliver to work address' approach, but it seems like a pretty good idea (assuming, I guess, it doesn't get so popular that the café ends up looking like a shipping depot).
I think it's mostly a case of the drivers trying to avoid unloading the heavy/large packages, carry them all the way to the door and then having to load them back up again. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than the HDNL/Yodel typical strategy of dumping potentially expensive parcels in "a safe place", which is usually anything but.
Indeed, as MS have been allowed to produce a mapping app for iOS6, Apple are obliged to allow Google to also do so.
They're not obliged to do any such thing. They have every right to simply say 'No' to Google without any justification whatsoever, if they choose to do so. And until someone takes Apple to court, they will retain that right.
The exact same Intel whose hardware isn't ready for Windows 8's launch? The exact same Intel who might very well benefit from users waiting till next year before buying a tablet instead of getting an ARM version this year and taking away some of their share of the precious Wintel tax?
As always with comments like this, follow the money.
The complexity of the process to decide which Windows Update gets delivered to which PC and when is enormous. I don't really think it's that hard to beleive that a particularly obscure one accidentally got overlooked (after all a pre-SP fix usually ends up rolled into the service pack, but couldn't in this case because it's location specific).
Now that's no excuse and Microsoft deserve another slap on the wrist for failing to meet their requirements. However it's a bit of a push to suggest it was a deliberate decision rather than an unfortunate oversight. Never attribute to malice that which can equally be explained by stupidity and all that...
IE being "part of the OS" is one of those confused ideas that gets blamed for much that doesn't make sense. It's only "part of the OS" in the sense that it is packaged as a shared library that other applications and services can use. Beyond that it's just a user-mode application like anything else.
As for bypassing ASLR, I'm not convinced that's too big a deal - it's never been a particularly strong way of protecting an OS anyway. It'd be rather more useful to know whether the exploit can break out of Protected Mode IE (whereby IE normally runs with less permission than a standard user as long as UAC is enabled) as neither the Rapid7 post or MSFT's advisory is entirely clear on that one.
Rapid7 might look a bit more knowledgeable in all this if they actually managed to make their own website correctly detect browsers, instead of putting up an "Attention IE6 user, you need to upgrade your browser" when visited in IE10. What exactly is the point of an advisory that the very users you're supposedly warning can't read because you don't know how to write HTML properly??
For WP7, at least, the much stricter sandboxing present on WP7 coupled with the requirement that all applications were in .NET code would have pretty much ruled out an Android emulator type app. That might change to some degree in WP8 (though I suspect the sandboxing will still be too strict) but only the elite few who've been granted access to the SDK could know for sure. At least for now.
Yeah, you lost me on the contacts thing too. Not only is it really easy (and mostly automatic) on Windows Phone, I think I had two or three cases I had to add manually, but if (when) you go to Windows 8 all that translates directly into the People hub there too. It's the first time I've ever known a contact sync process that is so reliable and seamless, regardless of which computer/device you're accessing it from.
And, in my experience, it errs heavily on the side of caution when it comes to the initial auto-linking (which is only done when you first add an account), so managing to have all the contacts linked to one is either the sign of an exceptionally strange set of contacts or something done deliberately .
"That's odd, since login by clicking/tapping on a photo was in XP. One wonders just what the audience had been given for lunch. But anyway..."
XP let you associate a picture with your login, but still requires a traditional password (unless you have something like a fingerprint reader). Windows 8 picture passwords are entirely different, it shows you a photo and you make a guesture based on that photograph and if you get it right, you are logged in. It sort of sounds weird, but works remarkably well on touch based devices, offering a higher level of security than a simple pin number approach.
Hate to break it to you, but Windows 9 will most likely be NT6.3, the 6 being something that internally has gained a lot of traction for just keeping constant since rather too much engineering effort goes into deciding what applications need the VersionLie shim applied to them because devs rarely bother to run stuff through the appcompat toolkit before shipping (the HighVersionLie test would flag these bugs).
Still, have fun spotting imaginary patterns in release cycles and numbering. Maybe if you get bored of that you could try Scientology? I hear it's super scientific too.
The *only* reason Firefox didn't gain massive support in the Enterprise sector years ago was because those at the top (and in particular Asa Dotzler) decided it was more fun to stick two fingers in their ears and ignore all of us who were literally begging for a handful of Enterprise management features to be included. An easy way of configuring settings via Group Policy and rolling out updates and they would have cleaned up the market, allowing legacy internal apps to sit on IE and all new ones to be fully standards compliant. Everyone could have moved on in the most painless way possible and IE could have happily died off completely.
All the Firefox team succeeded in doing by ignoring this was to demonstrate quite aptly to the pointy-haired bosses that all the claims IT guys had made about how buying into web-based applications would save the company money in the long run and reduce upgrade pain were false. It's stupidly ironic that a company running only desktop applications can upgrade from XP to Windows 7 with far less pain than one whose apps were supposedly all web-based and independent of the client.
The really sad part is seeing web developers become increasingly focused on being WebKit compatible at the expense of everything else, slowly but surely re-creating the whole horrible IE6 mess all over again, just with a different browser.
Part of the difference is that Kinect being used for gaming is deliberately trying to see everyone in the room, because they might be potential players. It's quite capable (especially the newer for-Windows versions) of picking out the person closest to the screen and happily ignoring other gestures from other people it can see.
The really tricky part is actually defining a "gesture language" that is simple enough to quickly perform the tasks you'd want, without being too easy to mis-gesture and trigger something by mistake.
If your applications don't work on anything newer than Windows XP, maybe it's time to go out and get new applications. It's clear you're dealing with (effectively) abandonware at this point and you'll probably be much better off getting software that's being actively developed (and security patched!) Don't give your business to developers who clearly don't care about their users.
And without Aero on the desktop I wonder if those pinned icons will actually give me jumplists like I have now.
Yes, they do.
because you're in TIFKAM you can't simply right click and use the option "run as administrator", which you can in Win7
Yes, you can. (Aside from actual Metro apps, which never run elevated, by design)
On Win7 I hit the windows button, start typing and get my results nicely sorted in sections, where programs are obviously on top because those get started most often. But I also see control panel options, documents, etc. All nicely sorted.
Well you see maybe one or two of them, before the Start menu "helpfully" crops the list to fit everything in a small amount of space. Wheras Windows 8 shows you everything. And let's you search across services and applications in the same interface.
And almost nobody used Progman,exe even in Windows '95, despite the fact that in all the build up all the tech crowd were insisting that there was absolutely no way anyone would ever be able to cope with the crazy new interface. The "stupid" new Start button interface was awkard and illogical and everybody was obviously going to hate it. Sound familiar?
The shocking truth is that people cope with new interfaces. In fact, they typically cope better when the change is significant enough to break their old mental associations with how things work rather than a handful of minor, incremental changes.
. Providing the OPTION hurts no-one, because people DO work differently.
It does though. It's expensive for one thing, every single option literally doubles the size of the test matrix, so adding more choices pushing up the cost of development exponentially.
For another thing, it means you have to come up with multiple ways of surfacing each new bit of functionality, made worse by the fact whichever way you chose to expose it in the "old" arrangement will be changed functionality there anyway, so you're effectively changing functionality in the old feature even though you're supposedly keeping that there for people who don't want change.
Finally, but perhaps more importantly, it's lazy. It's so easy when designing a User Interface to sidestep every difficult decision by just saying "Well we'll include both solutions and just make it optional". This is a disservice to end users, leaving them with something that just feels unfinished and clunky. As a designer you have to make the hard choices and come up with something that works. Users might complain about change at first, but, if you made good decisions, they will thank you in the long run when they adapt to the change and find themselves becoming more productive as a result. The is one of the reasons Apple products are always held in such high regard, because it's something they tend to be much stricter on than anyone else
There is seemingly some specific feature they're trying very, very hard to keep secret. Presumably because they're expecting a bunch of Android phones to clone it ASAP and they want to get the maximum head start possible. It seems to be related to the People hub, based on what those who've got near to the devices have said they were prevented from seeing.
It's certainly curious.
1) No, you already bought those WP7 apps, so you'll re-download the one you want to your new WP8 phone, just like you do if you replace your WP7 handset today. It may well be a recompiled binary that you receive but what possible difference do you think that makes to an end user? The apps you bought on WP7 you will have available on WP8. That's the only thing people actually care about.
2) Unsupported apps are unsupported. Er, WTF? So you've hypothetically gone down the route of breaking your phone to allow non-store apps to run and whomever supplied you those apps now decides not to give you a WP8 version without you buying a new one and you think this is anyone's fault other than your own?
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