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So with that level of control, do you honestly think they can’t write code that reliably transforms onscreen action to screen brightness when you can reliably slap any OS onto a computer and do something similar,

When did you last use a computer that had an AMOLED display? PCs are LCD, brightness→voltage→backlight. As I explain that’s a totally different situation.

or slap Android on practically anything and have screen brightness work (maybe not auto-brightness, but you get my point).

OEMs can rewrite any bit of Android they like to achieve their aims, look at the insecurity Samsung put into the kernel to support their Exynos SoC. Android’s model makes this easy.

That’s drivers. That “transformation” you’re talking about is taken care of by the display control hardware. All the software does is hand it a percentage (in a sense). The hardware takes it the rest of the way, via either ACPI or a graphics driver (depending on the OEM).

The display control hardware is the SoC, which is also stipulated by Microsoft, there almost certainly isn’t an OEM supplied driver for windows phone graphics, they’re trying to avoid a DLL Hell in mobile, which makes sense, so probably it’s pure microsoft code. All OEMs are supplying are a few calibration details.

about 2 hours ago on Brightness slider - will it be available in WP at least by 2015?

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No – there are three sides, publisher, retailer, consumer.

Maybe this is confusing, let’s consider the market for milk, Farmers milk cows, farmers aren’t allowed to set the price in collusion with other farmers (except in cases where laws explicitly allow for this). Stores buy milk from farmers and sell the to consumers, stores aren’t allowed to collude with each other either in setting a buy price from farmers, or in setting a sell price to consumers. Consumers are incapable of colluding even if they wanted to.

But stores and farmers don’t collude with each other, can’t collude because they’re in opposition, stores want a low buy price from farmers, farmers want a high sell price to stores. They’re not colluding when they discuss prices, they’re negotiating.

about 2 hours ago on Steve Jobs's email to James Murdoch 1 recommend

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Correct, which is why overseas income is held offshore, but domestic income is invested through Nevada to avoid certain state taxes.

about 20 hours ago on Tim Cook defends Apple ahead of Senate hearing, reveals more about US manufacturing plans 1 reply

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But Apple and HC aren’t on the same side, HC is on the same side as Random House and the other publishers, Apple is on the same side as Amazon and the other retailers. Different sides.

about 23 hours ago on Steve Jobs's email to James Murdoch 2 replies 1 recommend

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From what I see, All they want to do is to raise the regular price from 10 to 15. Am I missing something?

You’re missing something key.

The old model was that the publisher would sell to Amazon at the wholesale price, say $12, with an RRP of $15, that Amazon would then discount to $10. Amazon was losing money on every sale, and this made it uneconomical to compete with them.

Apple’s point was that eventually Amazon would exploit the monopsony power that they were expensively acquiring to force the publishers to drop their price to say $7.

about 23 hours ago on Steve Jobs's email to James Murdoch 1 recommend

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That’s not collusion – that’s a single email to a single publisher – for it to be evidence of collusion it would have to include an indication that HC was going to go in with Apple along with a group of publishers, and dependent on those publishers also doing it.

A negotiation is not the same thing as collusion.

1 day ago on Steve Jobs's email to James Murdoch 4 recommends

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Hypothetically speaking it’s still a terrible idea, for all the same reasons why it would be a terrible idea for Google or Microsoft.

If you buy one carrier you are suddenly competing with all the other carriers who are your existing customers. Those carriers are going to do everything they can to migrate their users to another platform. That’s before you get into the anti-trust issues, the regulatory burden etc.etc.etc.

1 day ago on Apple's Cash + Carrier =?

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Skype has a lot of users but not a lot of user satisfaction.

1 day ago on MS should probably just give up in the consumer space 2 replies 1 recommend

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No. 2015 is the scheduled release for custom notification tones and a kids corner update

looks around nervously

Ok, don’t freak out but I’m gonna defend Microsoft on this one, I’d prefer it if this didn’t get bruited about, it won’t do my street cred any good.

A brightness slider is actually quite a difficult thing for them to implement, which seems ridiculous I know, but it’s true. Firstly it sits right on the hard edge between the OS and the specific hardware implementation, which means they can’t just hand it off to a random code monkey to implement, but there is more.

For LCD panels brightness is just a number which is going to be turned into a voltage on the backlight. It’s incredibly easy, and if WP was LCD only then there would be no good reason not to have a completely variable slider.

For AMOLED panels things get hairy fast. First off the brightness is a transformation you apply to every pixel, but worse it’s not a linear one, and it’s different for each of the 3 colours. When you add in the fact that AMOLED’s output efficiency changes significantly with temperature it gets worse still. AMOLED brightness calibration is a bitch to do properly and is highly panel dependent. That’s not such a problem for Android because there the OEMs have the full source and can make changes anywhere in the display stack, from the SoC to the OS. It is however a problem for WP.

It was no doubt simpler and safer for them to provide a means for OEMS to customize a small number of response matrices than to allow them to supply drivers for something as core as this.

Now all this is irrelevent to the consumer, and I am not arguing that consumers shouldn’t be pissed at missing this feature, but it’s not as simple as adding more doodads like Kids Corner.

1 day ago on Brightness slider - will it be available in WP at least by 2015? 1 reply 3 recommends

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It’s pretty simple, if your product is market leading and dominant you can use it as an exclusive to drive users to your platform (see iTunes), but at the risk that your product will lose relevancy in the market and end up not being market leading/dominant (see BBM).

If your product is a niche one that hardly anybody uses then making it exclusive is not going to help, and if it’s a new product that you’re just launching into a crowded market then that’s just going to result in a failed launch (BB music).

Would you have bought a blackberry just to get blackberry music? Would an average consumer even have known exactly what blackberry music was if they didn’t already own and love a blackberry? Or would they just have said ‘no itunes/google play/xbox music/whatever’ so I’ll stick with my iPhone/Android/WP?

1 day ago on MS should probably just give up in the consumer space

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bright isn’t bright enough to use in daylight outdoors

That at least is almost certainly not the OS’s fault. If the brightest setting isn’t bright enough then the problem is the panel/backlight

1 day ago on Brightness slider - will it be available in WP at least by 2015? 1 reply

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Are you high? Her waist is beyond skinny and well into anatomically implausible. There’s no way the image on the right represents a healthier person than the image on the left.

2 days ago on Disney abandons sexualization of 'Brave' heroine after public backlash 2 replies 2 recommends

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Yearly Updates are pretty much the way things are in the industry. Anything in between is merely bugfixes (and those have been more frequent on WP as well).

HDR photography mode was a bugfix? Game Centre was a bugfix? (4.1)
AirPlay and AirPrint were bugfixes? (4.2)

Small pieces of functionality (like say orientation lock) have absolutely been delievered in .x releases, pure bugfix releases in iOS are .×.y

2 days ago on New Windows Phone updates this summer ! Yaah /s 1 recommend

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Well it says more about the mass of unprofitable Android OEMs than it does about Samsung.

2 days ago on 95% of sold android phones are Samsung phones 1 reply

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Chomebooks are still relatively new

Out of curiosity how old do you consider it would need to be to not be ‘relatively new’? As old as the iPad? As old as Android? As old as Windows?

When does ‘relatively new’ stop being an excuse for non-existent sales?

2 days ago on Google just pulled a Microsoft 1 recommend

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Facebook?

2 days ago on Larry Page on Robert Scoble's Google Glass stunt: 'I really didn't appreciate the shower photo' 3 recommends