Ask Paul: July 6 (Premium)

This was a short week with two Mondays, but here’s a pretty long “Ask Paul” to cap it off. Happy Friday, everyone!

Everyone is taking credit for Andromeda

kzrystof asks:

Windows Central’s Daniel [Rubino] stated that they were the first ones unveiling that Microsoft was working on the Andromeda foldable device, back in October 2017. [The Verge’s] Tom Warren and others were quick to point out that WC were not the first ones: it was actually a French website that published the news a few months earlier, in May 2017.

I am not asking you to write about Andromeda; I just wonder if you add any similar ‘issues’ regarding breaking news that you thought you were the first one breaking but turns out you were not? Is there anything that a journalist has to do to avoid this when publishing ‘breaking news’?

This is a big issue in my sad little industry. We’re all jockeying to be the go-to source of information, and we often step on each others’ toes rather than work together. In some bad examples, we steal from each other, pretend to corroborate information so we can be part of the story, or don’t cite original sources. It’s the modern blogosphere. We are all guilty of this to some degree.

(There are worse examples. In some extreme cases, Microsoft was found to have seeded a single blogger with a certain news angle so that they can ensure it’s written about in the way that they prefer. Here’s a great example.)

With regards to the two individuals you mention above, I know them both and like them both very much. I like seeing them and hanging out with them on work trips, and I have no issues with either personally. In fact, one of the best things about these trips is the reunion nature of catching up with others in the industry. We always have a great time together.

Their publications are a bit more problematic for different reasons. What I’ll say here is that trust is something that is built or destroyed over time. And it is a personal goal of mine to be trustworthy, to not take advantage of the base desires of Windows fans, and to leverage decades of experience when analyzing what Microsoft may be doing. I try not to steal credit from others and pretend that I have sources that corroborate a story that first appeared elsewhere. In short, I take the trust thing very seriously. I can’t speak for others. But no one likes to have something they created stolen. Or repeated without giving any credit.

Anyway, these two issues, not coincidentally, came up within the context of the Andromeda story. In June, Brad published an Andromeda report, based on Microsoft documentation, noting that the device was “pocketable.” This was the first time that I had personally seen Microsoft documentation using that term, and I called it out on a podcast as being confusing. Someone on Twitter was aghast at this assertion, because some other tech blog had been saying that for months.

But I wasn’t aware of that as I don’t read the site in question. And I had already seen a lot of information, over a long period of time, about Andromeda. I’ve spoken to people working on this project, and “pocketable” was never part of the conversation. It just never came up. So that was news to me, since the mention that I saw came, literally, from Microsoft documentation.

Ultimately, what I see with the Andromeda reporting is a natural “Look at me! Look at me!” jockeying for position. The story deserves this level of attention, given the drama around Microsoft’s mobile defeat and questions about its ability to create another new form factor. And we all have our own way of covering it, just as we all have our own way of monetizing traffic and making a living.

And engaging in a public pissing contest is never smart or productive.

Photo file/folder naming conventions

staganyi asks:

I’m curious on how you decide to name your files/folders related to your personal pictures/videos. I want to clean up that stuff on my end and trying to figure out how I should best approach it. Do you keep the generated file names from the phone or do you rename? Furthermore, do you keep the pictures and videos in the same folder or do you separate the videos out (if using the Windows/Onedrive Pictures & Videos folders)?

Curious as to what you and others do.

This is an excellent question.

I optimize folder names for me (and other humans), so that when I navigate through the folder structure on, say, my NAS, I know exactly where I am. I am not as good about the filenames: I have named photos logically in some cases but left the default names in others. And as we’ve moved into this cloud era, I’ve found that services like Google Photos are generally pretty good about understanding what’s what. If I search for “Paris,” for example, Google Photos will show me my photos of Paris, and I believe some of that is regardless of file or folder names.

Looking at my NAS, then, I have a top-level share called Photos. Within that are three folders: _other (which contains unsorted photo scans and smartphone photos, mostly), Home movies, and Photo collection. In Photo collection, I have folders for each year (2000-2018, plus Old pictures, which has folders for 1965-1999). For older years, each year folder has folders for each event, and they are named YYYY-MM-DD so that they are in order.

Around 2013, we started taking all of our photos on smartphones, and then the number of these photos grew such that organizing them the old way no longer made sense. Plus, the geo-tagging information in those photos makes searching for things easier. So I do big file dumps from the phones from time to time now.

And these are less complete: There are many more photos in the cloud than I have locally. This is part of the “giving in” thing when it comes to cloud computing. At some point, having local copies of this stuff will probably just disappear.

Regarding videos and photos, I do not separate out the short videos I record on phones from the photos. The older videos, like when my kids were little and we actually had a video recorder, are in their own folder (Home movies, as noted above.)

Basically, it’s getting less and less manually structured every year.

1980’s BBS

ErichK asks:

Paul were you part of the BBS scene back in the ’80s? Was there much of an Amiga presence in that area? That’s one of the reasons I switched to PC back then … seemed like the vast majority of them ran IBM.

Not in the 1980’s, not really. I did have a 300 baud modem for my Commodore 64, and I did use it to access services like Quantum Link (Q-Link, a predecessor to AOL). But I have no real memory of it.

My first real BBS activity, I think, was via FidoNet on the Amiga in the very late 1980’s and early 1990’s. And by the time I moved to Phoenix in 1993, it was crucial for me to find local BBSes, which I did. There was a developer BBS I was pretty active on, and then others where I would download PC games in parts, over subsequent nights, because they had bandwidth restrictions. At that time, I was going back to school, and I had to use an IBM-compatible PC. And I was curious about the gaming scene, thoughCastle Wolfenstein had already happened and DOOM was about to happen, or was then happening.

By the mid-1990’s, I had moved on to USENET, which I first accessed (if you can believe this) via AOL. And I had one of my first experiences with the Internet making the world smaller when I found a video game store at a local flea market that was selling mint-condition, never opened classic video games (Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800, Intellivision, and ColecoVision/Adam) for just a few dollars each. I bought dozens, maybe hundreds of them and sold them for $10-$15 over USENET to people all over the country. (The store had gotten the boxes of games wholesale from a California-based video game chain that had gone out of business years earlier.) Thanks to this experience, I was able to connect collectors with perfect products, and to contribute to the collective knowledge of these platforms. In fact, my name is still on an Intellivision FAQ out there somewhere.

Sweden

matsan asks:

IIRC you said you were doing a home-swap to Sweden this year.

As a Swede, just curious what part of the country your are going to, when and why. I won’t stalk, I promise.

Yes, we are going to Stockholm, Sweden for three weeks starting on July 20 (just two weeks from now, suddenly). Our plan is to mostly stay in the area, and visit the city and the surrounding archipelago as much as possible. We are also taking a short side-trip with the kids to Berlin. (Where, coincidentally, I plan to meet with the Microsoft To-Do team, which is located there.)

If you are in the Stockholm area, I’m happy to meet you if that makes sense.

Microsoft support questions

A couple of semi-related questions which fall into the “will Microsoft ever…?” category…

ommoran asks:

My perennial question – I’m just wondering if Microsoft is making any progress towards allowing a user with multiple MSAs [Microsoft accounts] to merge them into one? I have one for my Xbox Live account and one for everything else (stupid me…), and am forever hopeful that Microsoft will figure out how to merge the two together. As that happens, though, it gets more and more complex as more and more things are tied to an MSA, so it seems to be a very remote proposition.

I’ve not heard anything on this or asked recently, so I will do so now. Obviously, this is a huge need.

Also, RobotRaccoon asks:

Will we ever get generic CardDAV and CalDAV support in out of the box Windows 10 apps or Outlook (installed version)?

I’ve not heard of this. Obviously, both support Gmail/Google Calendar to some degree. But when you ask about generic support, I assume you mean broad, service-agnostic support for these protocols?

Surface Non-Pro

RawkFox asks:

Can you speculate a bit on the supposed impending release of a new, non-pro Surface? Who is Microsoft targeting with these devices (I’m assuming the education market)? Do you think Microsoft’s decision to go with Intel’s Pentium line was wise compared to using one of Intel’s m-series or even one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips?

Since you asked this question, Mehedi wrote something up about the many rumors we’ve seen. But I think a low-cost, Surface 3-like Surface tablet fills a need, both for customers who cannot afford most Surface products and for specific markets like education, where Microsoft is keen to fight off iPad and Chromebook tablets. I view Microsoft’s recent Surface price cuts as part of this same effort.

With regards to the rumored Pentium processor, I feel like Qualcomm’s current-generation Windows 10 on ARM processor, the Snapdragon 835, just isn’t powerful enough to provide a good experience. And that since its next-generation processor, the 850, won’t ship until late 2018, that Microsoft needed to look elsewhere. One has to assume that Microsoft would go ARM if they could here. And that they will, if possible, in a future update.

My only real concern is the price: $400 is a bit steep when you consider that the education market can get an iPad for under $300. Granted, it’s less capable. But Chromebooks tend to be pretty inexpensive too. Until I know otherwise, I’ll have to assume this is as low as Microsoft could go and still eke out a profit.

Live tiles

wolters asks:

Hey Paul, I enjoyed your Windows 10 at 3 article. One thing you didn’t mention (and often seems to not get mentioned in blogs) is the state of “live tiles.” In my current work environment, we have over 60 workstations, all with Windows 10 and I am the ONLY one who seems to utilize and organize the live tiles. At home, I’ve taught my wife and daughter how to organize them and make them useful. Do you think live tiles may be removed one day or is Microsoft still banking on it as it’s “Launcher”? And do you bother organizing them?

I don’t feel that live tiles make any sense on a PC. They were designed for the “glance and go” nature of smartphones, where you raise the device, see notifications and alerts, and then lower it and move on. But that’s not the way we work on PCs.

That said, because I am compulsive and weird, I do, in fact, arrange the Start menu on my PCs. But then I almost never use any of the tiles, ever, because I launch apps in two ways: Via the taskbar for frequently-used apps and via Start search for others. I just feel like a Start menu with just an apps list is ugly.

Here’s what it looks like on my desktop PC:

Is there some other way that live tiles might make sense on a PC? Maybe via bigger, tile-like taskbar buttons or a sidebar? I doubt it: They would just be distracting.

Windows 10’s real hardware requirements

hrlngrv asks:

I’ve tried running Windows 10 Insider builds in a VM with a 32GB VHD, and it just doesn’t work. Is MSFT being disingenuous with Windows 10 specs: Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS? Or is disingenuous too mild? Is MSFT trying to maintain a fiction that Windows 10 needs no more system resources than Chrome OS?

I’ve found that virtual machines do not have the same performance characteristics as physical machines. And that they perform worse in some ways and, curiously, better in others. But Microsoft’s system requirements have always been minimums. And they have always been ludicrous.

In the Windows 10 Field Guide, I offer my own recommendations, which are much higher. Avoid lower-end processors like the Intel Celeron, Pentium, Core m (or equivalent) if possible. At least 4 GB of RAM for basic usage, but 8 GB of RAM is preferable for most people. (Or 16 GB for power users.) At least 128 GB of fast SSD storage, and not the slower eMMC-style storage that is still found on some low-end PCs. And so on.

Frankly, the experience of running Windows 10 on low-end hardware is miserable, and while I still come across people who claim that a lowly Surface 3 (with an Atom processor, 2 or 4 GB of RAM, and slow eMMC storage) is “just fine for their needs,” I feel that’s somewhat delusional.

Meanwhile, Chrome OS runs great on much lower-end hardware than does Windows 10. That’s kind of curious given the overhead of running the Chrome web browser on Windows (or the Mac). But it’s a fact.

Android rot

Finley asks:

Seems my Samsung A5 I got just under a year ago is showing signs of “Android Rot”, as it has become noticeably slower with frequent app crashes. It is becoming a bit of a pain and I am wondering my best course of action. I don’t want to do a complete wipe and reinstall (though I am confident I could) to gain short term improvements. So I can only see 3 options going forward:

1 – Replace with a higher end android phone and hope the higher price tag comes with longer lasting performance

2 – Replace with a lower mid-tier android phone that is in the price range I am comfortable spending yearly on a phone

3 – Go with an iPhone

Is there a way around the performance Rot of Android or do I have to go boring but reliable (I assume) iPhone?

I have experienced Android rot consistently across a range of devices (from my early Androids, like the Nexus 5 and original Nexus 7, through the high-end Pixel XL and Pixel 2 XL), and know this to be a very real issue. Getting a more expensive phone will not solve this issue.

Conversely, I’ve owned almost every single iPhone ever made, and I have never experienced performance rot, even when upgrading multiple times a year via beta iOS versions through Apple’s Developer Program. (The recent Batterygate performance issues never affected me, personally.)

Given this, your choices are to reset the phone on some schedule, which is what Windows power users still do with their PCs. Or get an iPhone. I’ve gone in both directions at various times. (And am currently on Android. I’ve hard-reset my Pixel 2 XL at least twice now, though I feel like it’s been working fine since I started down the Android P beta path.)

I have a friend who is not as taken with smartphones as many, and he buys a very cheap (like, free or nearly free, from the carrier) phone every year. I think it’s a Samsung Galaxy J-something through T-Mobile. His attitude is to just replace it.

Also, you will absolutely hear from people with Android devices who will claim to have never experienced this. Not sure what to say to that. But I feel that performance rot is an endemic Android issue, and it’s something I’ve always experienced. As has my non-techy wife, who has gone through several Samsungs over the years.