will live tiles ever update more frequently than every 30 minutes?

[ChMar]

Yeah sorry about that. It's my fault mostly

 

[kriz225]

Well in media one that is hired to do nice looking stuff (images, print, whatever) will sure like to work on a beautiful mac air or something rather than a perceived ugly and using windows machine so the company pay the price and accommodate. But mac is not popular in corporate because of enterprise needs in it management and interoperability with the current enterprise infrastructure. Just wait for more stuff to migrate to the cloud by using http stack (private clouds or public clouds with VPN) and you will see many more adopting mac in to enterprise once the old way of using enterprise software is moving towards the cloud.
As for the stuff with the pool of professional this is not chicken and the egg this. I Autodesk pay universities money and give licenses and computers for their labs and in exchange they train the next wave of professional. This is what Autodesk does and this is what Microsoft does for exactly this reason. WP8 programming is used in universities curricula because MS pays for this. Because market share and installed base of devices does not warrant this to be used. So you can see what comes first.
Windows Phone 8 is and will be in the 3rd ecosystem. About what apple does in enterprise apple lacks the tools needed to appeal the enterprise software development and there is no pool of trained professionals there. Independent app developers are teenagers in principle and they give a false sense that a large pool of professionals is available for Linux development or mac osx development.

I'm sorry but I'm going to have to ask for actual substantial proof of what you claim because it sounds like utter nonsense. Apple has just as much if not more cash than Microsoft. Why, then, are they not top dog of the enterprise, if as you say the key to it is pumping money into training new generations of professionals?

A more logical conclusion in regards to WP8, in my opinion, would be that with BlackBerry going south and Windows running the corporate sector it simply makes sense to support Windows Phone as a 3rd ecosystem; if only for the simple reason that it is bound to eventually gain a better foothold in the corporate world than iOS or Android.

Insofar as Linux is concerned, I don't dabble in it much but my understanding is that there's quite a bit of love for it in the techie community. Particularly from a lot of people who are professionals and rather skilled individuals. After all, Linux is broadly open platform and made and modified by people with a wealth of knowledge who are frustrated by existing retail operating systems. As for why it isn't popular, I'd wager it's mostly for the same reason I never stuck with it. Doing anything in Linux, even simple tasks, is typically a chore - at least the first time or two. Windows and Mac just work, anything else you think of them (and all BSOD jokes) aside.

Now look at MS choose path. They looked at their pool of people and they choose something to say this is the way to code for WP. They choose silverlight since is well entrenched in enterprise is similar to WPF for desktop and there are enough people knowing this stuff already. Now here comes the problem silverlight developers WPF developers are working professionals with day jobs in this area of software development. They are not hobbyists they are good people with jobs. They don’t care to invest time in making apps for wp rather than spending time with their families after their day at work. On the other platforms you have mostly teenagers and college students that are independent app developers. They have time and they choose apple and / or android platform because it’s cool. But the apps people use and care are not usually made by hobbyists and persons with an interest for making apps. One reason is because the app gold rush is over and it’s a known fact apps don’t make you money the other is that WP is not entrenched in US so less people are willing to step up with cash to outsource coding and making a pass for the app market. iOS sparked a wave of authors of books in US on how you can use 200$ and outsourcing the code from chinese and indians and launch apps and become rich. But it’s not the case here since US market share is small and most of the ground made by wp is in europe and asia. So about app this is what people want the big online services available as apps: Instagram, google maps, youtube their mobile banking not as web pages but as apps, etc. Basically on desktop we get to see a move towards web page and on mobile devices a move towards more friendly (as in touch friendly) native experience.

This is interesting, although I'm not quite sure what your point was.

You get a rather insistent message in windows xp about not having an antivirus.

No. I was insistent about XP (and its predecessors) not having any form of active malware / virus protection as provided by Microsoft. The whole reason I even said this was to point out how Microsoft's own lack of (perceived) regard for security has earned them infamy, one which has cost them OS sales over to Mac.

Lots of OEMs embedded AV in their sold computers. They did not push Windows Defender to not be perceived as using their monopolistic advantage to gut AV companies. They were mostly forced in this regard.

Poor lil' Microsoft being bullied by the likes of Symantec and McAfee? Unlikely. These third parties simply filled in the gap that Microsoft left open and profited from it. This does nothing more than support my argument as to Microsoft's failure to recognize the security issues with their OS and properly address them (until recent times, at least).

AV are not proactive since they know only what has been reported (the heuristic algorithms can be bypassed obviously). Ask any programmer and they will tell you that the first viruses to appear were disruptive viruses that did simply DOS attacks on the local resources (security is large topic not just about having your home page redirected in browsers). So running rampant (I say rampant as in unrestricted not that background code should be disallowed but rather be made conformant to a more restrictive API set) in background does allow any malevolent piece of code to starve legit processes of resources (CPU by running, disk, GPU, network bandwidth etc). Running in background also means user is not aware what that piece of code is doing so you can’t have true background stuff running unless you give them freedom to use resources as they see fit (meaning background code can download, upload and generally use resources without your knowledge).

Antivirus programs do offer proactive measures of security. Though I suppose it would be more accurate to call them security suites. A firewall is one example of such measures (Microsoft has offered this for some time, but their implementation is poor by comparison). Running applications in sandbox mode is another. Stopping code that is perceived as malicious before it fully executes is another.

Of course, any new virus or malware must first be noticed by the companies making the security products before they can do much of anything about it specifically. That makes the software reactive in the first cases, but proactive to anyone who benefits from the implementation of updated security measures after the initial discovery.

At any rate, this is completely off topic now...

About Unix / Linux / MacOSX stuff it’s not silly just because you want to believe so. Kernel has it’s API points directly mapped to POSIX standard so in essence they are all the same since they are POSIX conformant.
Let’s do this. You can bash me professionally only with solid arguments otherwise I will bash back telling you that you are not a programmer and you don’t know what you are talking about. So I will do this now since you do have no idea and you pretend to have even if you did not state any qualification in the area.

I'm not trying to bash you professionally. I didn't start doing it, either. You're the one who keeps clamoring on about being a programmer, but offer very poor arguments from a programming standpoint, as perceived by someone who only possesses basic conceptual understanding of the subject.

No, I am not a programmer, but I do work in IT and I know basic things such as the fact that software coded for Linux won't natively run on Mac and vice versa. If you are truly right and I am so wrong then simply enlighten me and I will shove my foot in my mouth; why, if Linux and Mac are "in essence [...] all the same," does software have to be coded differently for the two platforms?

Windows registry is just that a registry a dictionary of key value pairs not a simple command you control everything stuff. First the registry is made accessible based on security credentials. So a ordinary program has access only to it’s registry, a program run as a specific user has access to that user registry a program run with admin credentials has access to the machine registry. In registry you can register components for interoperation between apps and if you run as admin you can modify how many icons you have on desktop what shell will run etc. BUT AGAIN YOU ARE WRONG. Every OS has such a “configuration file” for such stuff. Otherwise it won’t allow you to customize stuff. The windows registry is nothing more than a configuration file metaphor. So you are wrong, you are bashing others with more knowledge just for the sake of argument. Please don’t do that since it’s just wrong. I did not attack you personally just your ability to comprehend the stuff and your knowledge and you again proved me that I was right.

Again, my intent here isn't to bash you. You simply continue to make statements like those quoted above. You say basic things about the registry, which everyone knows, and then proceed to say that I am wrong in my statements. You completely forget to tell me why or how I am wrong.

I simply said that the registry in Windows makes it easy for malware to cripple the OS to suit it's needs. I say this with a background in computer repair, where I consistently repaired registry corruption either manually or with software aides so as to undo damage caused by harmful software. You are right in that everything offers some sort of alternative to a registry, be it .xml or .ini files or whatever. The difference is that the registry in Windows offers a single, universal placeholder for all of this, which makes for a juicy target.

How am I wrong in any of that?

UAC is inefficient but user won’t accept even this compromise. How could they accept running their computer with a limited user as it should be then? Again people usually think they know better but they don’t. A lot of people consider that since they read tech news and used a computer for years they know.

I agree with you here. It's just that UAC is neither here nor there. It doesn't really solve the problem for any conceivable demographic. Again, those who think they know what they're doing and those who really do will simply turn it off, to their peril. Those who don't know what they're doing will simply ignore the prompt. So what purpose does it serve?

To give you a personal anecdote of the issue, consider this:

There is a woman at my place of work who is very much "technologically challenged." She couldn't figure out which way an optical disc goes in a CD drive if her life depended on it. I decided to play a little prank on her and made a simple .bat file which ran a bunch of echo commands to make it look like a malicious application that was going to purge her data. I scheduled a Windows task to run the .bat file automatically at a certain time, about 15 minutes after we both started our shifts.

So... the clock ticked... the time approached, hit and passed and.... nothing. Everything was completely normal. I simply assumed I had made a mistake.

I later asked her about it and found I had done everything right. "Oh, that?" she said to me, "yeah, I saw it but thought it was a DOS prompt I'd left open from earlier and closed it." She didn't even read it. She saw a black DOS prompt and instinctively clicked the red x.

That's the type of situation that Microsoft needed to address with a dummy proof solution to the issue of administrative rights being granted willy-nilly. It is my opinion that they failed quite miserably in their implementation, even if the thought was in the right direction.

About the OS restrictions they are there for a more secure environment they are not there so MS can control you. Imagine the medicine progress if it will not be bound and enforce by law and doctors will be allowed to experiment on children in the name of progress of course. Security is a compromise not a limitation. So don’t tell me how unrestricted brings faster progress because then you will have unrestricted progress for everything (medicine, war, energy, etc) at any cost.

You, again, miss my point entirely. Microsoft implementing OS restrictions is them controlling me, you and the rest of us. Whether that was the original intent or not is irrelevant. That is the single biggest reason why I dislike Apple as a company. They make their products to work the best they can, as they see it. What's that, you want to change the background picture on your phone? No, no, no. That degrades performance and ruins our chic interface. Oh, you wanted a larger screen on your phone with an aspect ratio that makes sense for watching media that we profess to excel at in every aspect of? No, no, no. That would ruin it because your thumb wouldn't reach, even though it totally does on other devices from other companies... somehow.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic again...

You jump from one extreme to the next. Real life rarely dwells in extremes. I am not saying that everything everywhere ever should be allowed to progress unchecked for the sake of rapid evolution. I'm saying that, conceptually, if medicine was not bound by moral implications it would advance more rapidly. I didn't offer judgment as to whether or not that's a good thing. That's an entirely different philosophical debate which has no place in this forum. But more to the point, the more venues for change are offered the more likely a system is to see varied evolution.

All I'm saying is that there is a trade off between security and ease of use. I feel like the security trade off to allow the customization that this topic is about - more frequent live tile updates - could be implemented in such a way so as to have a minimal negative impact on the OS' security while providing an ease of use feature that customers obviously want. That, and that Microsoft has generally been liked for offering products such as Windows which allow for a great deal of personal freedom, which is highly contrasting to Windows Phone.

Yeah sorry about that. It's my fault mostly

There is an edit button, you know? :wink:

TLDR: If I have offended you I am sorry, it was not my intent. I did not mean to challenge your authority or capacity in your field of work. You have made some good points, even if I don't necessarily agree with all of them. I'm simply trying to show that, although you think otherwise, it is possible that the feature the OP wanted be introduced to the OS without ruining its security.

 

[Marco Gomes1]

This is a bit of a newbie question but does this mean there can never be a live tile (or something similar) that lets me have a clock in the home screen of my 920, besides that tinny little clock on the top left corner? Or is there such a feature and im a bigger ***** than i thought? :-D I was an android user and ditched it for WP/Nokia (1 month or so ago) and that home screen clock is the ONLY thing i miss.Thx in advance for any answers.

 

[Ganesh Venkat]

This is a bit of a newbie question but does this mean there can never be a live tile (or something similar) that lets me have a clock in the home screen of my 920, besides that tinny little clock on the top left corner? Or is there such a feature and im a bigger ***** than i thought? :-D I was an android user and ditched it for WP/Nokia (1 month or so ago) and that home screen clock is the ONLY thing i miss.Thx in advance for any answers.

I think there is an api which can be used to create live tiles for third party apps just like that of the native messaging app which can provide real-time info and give us instant notifications! Also htc wps show the clock on live tiles suggesting that it is possible even now and there is no need for an update to do that

 

[manicottiK]

First-party (Microsoft) apps and second-party (handset manufacturers) apps can do things that third-party apps (everyone else) cannot. This includes things like running continuously in the background or changing the periodic task frequency to one faster than once every thirty minutes.

A third-party developer could write an app that does nothing but register for push tile notifications and then write a server-side tile pusher to update the tile of the "do nothing" app, and a web app to generate the clock image when the handset receives new tile data. However, sending 1,440 tile notifications a day would use a lot of data (particularly if the tile update pointed to a network-based image to show) and would require an SSL certificate. Cutting back to 5-minute updates would work without a cert. However, this is a fair amount of work for a clock.

 

[a5cent]

This is a bit of a newbie question but does this mean there can never be a live tile (or something similar) that lets me have a clock in the home screen of my 920, besides that tinny little clock on the top left corner? Or is there such a feature and im a bigger ***** than i thought? :-D I was an android user and ditched it for WP/Nokia (1 month or so ago) and that home screen clock is the ONLY thing i miss.Thx in advance for any answers.

Like Ganesh mentioned, there obviously is an API for creating live-tiles, but he's wrong in stating that it allows any developer to create something like an on-screen clock. The OS itself is perfectly capable of running tasks in the background, as it does so itself, permanently, but that functionality isn't available to the average developer. Only MS, or OEMs working together with MS, have access to that sort of functionality, which is how HTC created their on-screen clock for their WP devices.

As such, calling this inability an OS limitation is incorrect, as the OS is capable of doing exactly that. Rather, it's a deliberate design decision that MS made, to ensure that WP can always focus all of your devices hardware resources on the task that you, the user, are currently working with, and postpone live tile updates to a more appropriate time (when the device is idling). This prevents those hardware resources from being diverted by arbitrary apps, to do arbitrary processing at arbitrary times. The most visual benefit is the fact that WP is largely jitter and lag free, even on low end devices. Like every software engineering decision, this too leads to something gained and something lost. It's up to every customer to decide if the trade-off was worth it.

The likelihood of this basic principle changing is very low, probably zero, but that doesn't mean you'll never get what you want, e.g. MS might decide to deliver a clock live-tile as part of WP. You just won't get it now, at least not without owning a HTC device.

 

[ashwin pillai]

do u really own a L1020