Posts by nkuk 181 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2013
To be fair, having multiple lenses with differing focal lengths in a phone is huge technical innovation. Its not Apple innovation, Android phones have had these, and even 4 tiny lenses, for quite a while.
Once you use a phone with ultra wide and 5x optical zoom in addition to a standard lens there is no going back, it really is a game changer as far as leaving a DSLR at home and just making do with a phone. To fit the lenses in such a small space requires some clever tech like periscope lenses, and the image quality for such minute sensors is a technical marvel.
Same here, my OnePlus 6 is far better engineered and reliable than the Xperia Z2 I used to have. The X2 was one of the worst phones I have ever owned and the screens had a bad reputation for an unresponsive touchscreen, brittle glass front and back and overheating problems. I was so put off I will probably never buy another Sony phone.
This is the gotcha, it is not a fair swap, they are getting the Linux patents but not giving the Windows patents.
"Now, that's not all of Microsoft's 90,000-odd technology patents. It's keeping the ones that cover specifically Windows and other products."
In other words they're giving away their chaff for others wheat.
"My question to you though is, why do you care? If the films aren't for you, don't watch them."
I care because virtually all the Hollywood money is being pumped into formulaic comic-book pap, cheap horror movies and animated kids films. Theres precious little films of any substance to watch any more, and almost nothing coming out on Blu-Ray worth watching. I used to have a cinema card and used to find something to watch weekly. Now I go to the cinema probably twice a year. At least its saving me a load money.
It was the apps..
..and being years and years behind the competition feature wise, and leading their customers up multiple dead ends with incompatible software versions, and un-upgradeable phones, and un-upgradable apps, and screwing their developers over multiple times, and the horrendous UI, and the clunky animations that slowed everything down, and burning their bridges with the phone manufacturers and ISPs, and the useless solution in search of a problem Continuum, and the un-navigable Store, and lack of search features in the Store, and the huge amount of crapps. And the epic lack of apps.
WP was probably Microsofts biggest ever cock up, 8 years of ineptitude.
Surely by now developers are sick and tired of the moving target for Windows UI design, by the time their app would be written the guidelines would have changed. Haven't they been burned too many times already by Microsoft?
Also as a user, who would want a constantly shifting UI. I think its an indicator that Microsoft has run out of ideas. Just like Office, Windows is now so mature that the only way to keep selling "new" updates is to shuffle the icons and redo the UI.
Disney sure is milking the franchise for all its worth. Its already become too diluted and dull. If you are making a conveyor belt of movies for the sole purpose of making money, it loses its prestige and appeal.
China has already had enough of the IP, the rest of the world is losing interest movie by movie, so by the time these are released there may be few people that care enough to make it worthwhile.
Its not a storm in a teacup compared to Facebook and other social networks. Those social networks only harvest what you choose to feed them. On the other hand Windows 10 has access to all your confidential data, keystrokes, what applications you use and when, full telemetry of your browsers and all the data that is coming in and out of your PC, etc, etc.
Lumping in crash reports with all the other harvesting is disingenuous, it could, should, and used to be completely separate.
Its also not anonymous.
So it could be distinguished from zero with unavailable means :) Even infinitesimally small is an infinitesimally little bit bigger than 0.
He is making an assertion about all the microorganisms in the universe and assuming that they all behave in the same observable way as Earth microorganisms when he has no way of knowing that. He's saying that he knows all the unknowns, which he doesn't.
But thats taking Earth science and microorganisms and applying it to a different planet with different characteristics. The branches of evolution (if any) and pathogens may be totally different to what we have observed on Earth.
The article is taking huge leaps of logic about many unknowns, and also is contradictory -
"The chance that an alien bacteria would have evolved to stick to that protein is infinitesimally small." So not Zero as he claims after all.
Linux has made huge, huge, strides in gaming. The platform itself isn't the problem, there are thousands of games on Linux and I no longer have a Windows partition for gaming.
The only blockers at the moment are companies like EA, Activision and Ubisoft not releasing a Linux version of their games. They will say it's because of a lack of marketshare (which is fair enough) but it creates a chicken-and-egg situation where a large percentage people won't move because FIFA and COD aren't available, and they're not available because the big userbase isn't there.
I have more than a lifetimes worth of good/great/exceptional games on Linux so as long as you don't expect everything (and having a console to fill in the gaps can help) its perfectly viable for gaming, depending on the games you like to play.
"Plusnet defended the ad, claiming that because the adverts were aimed at business users, who they described as having a "higher level of competence and knowledge than a typical consumer", the exclusion of line rental from the headline price was acceptable."
That's a nice assertion from Plusnet that their "consumers" (I dislike that word, why are we never "customers" any more!) are less intelligent and more easily misled.
"that the only thing the trump campaign really came out with against Hilary was the email saga and some potentially dodgy money coming to her foundation says to me that she's relatively clean (on a politicians scale of cleanliness)."
Thats got to be the funniest thing I've read all year. There was a lot more than that. I dislike Trump as much as the next person, but Hillary is as corrupt as they come. The US election was about choosing the lesser of two evils once Bernie was out of the running.
@Updraft102, I completely agree with your comment. Windows 10 is a major step backwards.
The migration is already happening and Windows is dying, Windows 10 only has 29% marketshare even after force-feeding it onto PCs and giving it away free. Windows 7 still has almost double the marketshare at 47%. Windows 7 share is static and Windows 10 usage has stalled and even dropped. (https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0)
Windows mobile is also dead. The future is mobile except old legacy programs and niche markets, most people in business and at home do not need a Windows PC any more to accomplish their work / hobbies / gaming / research / etc.
Hi Shadow Systems, your second hypothesis is correct, the flat UI style is similar to a piece of paper with all the elements drawn on the same plane with no 3D, shading or embellishments.
The design typically has all the text, graphics and the UI elements within flat rectangles on the flat 'paper', and the icons as just more text within another rectangle. Kind of like a piece of paper with various rectangular post-it notes of different sizes arranged on the paper containing the text, images, and navigation elements, but the post-it notes have been ironed perfectly flat onto the paper so there is no visual cue to any depth or priority. Opening another page typically lays one flat element on top of another flat element, and the scroll and navigation bars are also flat so it becomes more of a challenge to navigate around the user interface. In addition to this, the icon design has also become flat in the same way, and the colour palette has been reduced to mostly primary colours to un-necessarily simplify the user interface.
I hope I have described it adequately, someone else may have another description.
I'm not surprised that flat user interfaces are slower to navigate than interfaces with more obvious visual cues. That's a no-brainer. What does surprise me is that "creatives" just follow the trend like zombies when its obvious its a step backwards. Microsoft makes a UI style change for the worse and the industry mindlessly follows like sheep.
I think even the most ardent of Microsoft fans have given up on it now, and have moved on to thinking the next vapourware "Andromeda" is going to somehow right all the wrongs of the last 7+ years even though all the developers, customers and mobile providers have given up and moved on.
Even gamers are getting off the endless upgrade cycle. Graphics have plateaued so there isn't a need any more for a new PC/graphics card every few years, plus with an increase in Indie games, and the big budget AAA games being developed as cross platform and generally not pushing the limits of PC's, there isn't a good financial reason to upgrade so often.
Steam survey stats show the vast, vast, majority of gamers have lower spec PCs than high spec/"modern" PCs.
They already did that, paying developers to develop apps. It didn't work out as no-one bought the apps, and each update of WP made the apps obsolete and they had to be redeveloped. Developers got sick of developing on a platform made of shifting sand. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
"The answer may be for Microsoft to produce an official AV Tool API that the third-party AV vendors can use, with some validity checking (code-signing, etc) so that only approved AV Tool vendors can use the API ... but that would need to be done very carefully, as errors in the API validation could lead to a very bad exploit."
Thats how it already works.
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