The entire Office UI team, that's who. Ever seen that Customer Experience Improvement Program that you probably disable? Well, they collected and analysed data, and found that people simply weren't discovering Office features. The Ribbon is a good way to expose these features for everyone. If you take the time to learn it and then customise it, you may easily change your opinion.
If you're having difficulty locating commands, check the Office website http://office.microsoft.com/ for an interactive demonstration: choose the Office 2003 command, and it will show you how to get to it 2007.
Also, IIRC Outlook 2003 has a downgrader for.pst to the earlier versions, in the File menu.
Slashdot: Your source of daily anti-Microsoft FUD. I'm going to get modded down as troll/flamebait for this and probably lose my karma bonus, but I've noticed kdawson is the worst. Sorry to call you out.
> First of all, not all hardware from XP is supported (I suspect the new DRM requirements in the OS for my difficulties here)
You can suspect anything you like. Doesn't make it true, however.
> Then, there's the user interface. Not as ugly as XP's Fischer-Price interface, but nothing to write home about, either.
I kind of like it. I hate all the themes that come with an Ubuntu default install. Pretty subjective.
> I'd rather not waste the CPU and GPU cycles on it, thank you very much.
Then turn it off. Go ahead.
> The first example that comes to mind is mapping a network drive. Why the heck they moved it off the My Computer (what do they call it now, "Bill's Computer"?) window I'll never know.
They haven't. Stop lying your ass off. And no, it's just "Computer".
> Then, there's the fact that Vista is a big fat pig when it comes to resources.
For several reasons. Tell me, did XP have full-fledged system-wide indexing of files? Did XP have a fully composited hardware-accelerated desktop.
> I gave it the old college try, but Vista's just a piece of crap.
"I gave it the old college try, but Ubuntu's just a piece of crap hurrrr."
Well, companies have always waited before deploying a new OS -- and for good reason too. Vista is definitely not bug free.
Your first article: December 2006. It makes the point that there are no new 'killer' features in Vista. Are you aware that most of the new Vista features are back-end? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_ne w_to_Windows_Vista Back-end features simply cannot be appreciated by the average user. I'd expect better from the Slashdot user, of course. Second: November 2006. As I said. Third: February 2007. Pretty old, and times have changed since then.
FUD. Yes, the interface is "shiny", and does use resources, but the main resource intensiveness comes from the new features (like indexing) and the fact that it is a fully hardware accelerated desktop. If you actually disable these new features, Vista runs the same as or faster than XP.
> It has levels of DRM heretofore unseen in an operating system.
There's ONE new DRM thingie over XP. ONE. YOU WILL NEVER EVER SEE DRM IF YOU DO NOT USE DRM FILES. Vote with your wallet. I don't use DRM'd files either. I rip CD music. Vista WILL NOT ADD DRM TO NON-DRM FILES.
> It is claimed that it is secure, yet still has gaping security holes.
You use one.NET article from TWO THOUSAND FUCKING FIVE, one BY DESIGN article and one article from JULY TWO THOUSAND FUCKING SIX to say that Vista has "gaping" holes. If that's the best you can do, I think Vista has mostly succeeded.:)
The fact is that there has been one exploit (ANI) so far, and due to UAC and IE protected mode (sandboxing) that exploit couldn't work in Vista as well as it did in XP.
> It is claimed that it is safe, yet has to be made un-safe for users to be able to do anything with it.
FUD. FUD. FUD. UAC DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DISABLED FOR A VISTA COMPUTER TO BE USABLE. I haven't seen a UAC prompt in weeks now -- of course, it helps that I've updated all my apps for them to not require admin permissions.
Not when you factor the new things in. If you remove speech recognition, C/J/K language support, Media Center, and a few other things (eg using vLite) an install of Vista comes to around 3.5 GB. Anyway, hard drives are big enough for it, it isn't too much of a factor now.
> privacy invading
Oh dear, more unsubstantiated FUD. Why am I not surprised?
> insecure
The FUD this time, for a change, is not from you, but from Symantec. The fact is that better companies like Eset have no problems programming for Vista. Symantec uses several KERNEL HOOKS which are disallowed in Vista x64, in favour of Microsoft APIs.
> unsafe, and is more interested in protecting the interests of major Hollywood distributors than its users.
I'm tired of this BS. Look above.
Get your facts straight first before starting your standard FUD.
Why, yes! Of course there is! There are two ways to go about this: 1. Install XP, then all the patches later, and manually. 2. "Slipstream them" -- replace the files on the XP CD with the newer ones. nLite http://www.nliteos.com/ is pretty good for this stuff.
If you want to download all the patches so that you can slipstream them or install them later, AutoPatcher http://www.autopatcher.com/ is the way to go.
If you have a Windows server somewhere, WSUS is a good option (though somewhat heavier).
My REALLY, REALLY bad.:( I was simply thinking of something entirely different. The correct formula is SIN(RADIANS(30)), which is indeed a lot more clunky than SIN(30 degrees). Sorry.
Understanding ISC Mathematics (part 1, for class 11), by M.L. Aggarwal: "If an angle is given without measuring units, it is in radians." As I said, almost every angle in the book is in radians. A table is given in the very first chapter, and only that mentions "30 degrees or pi/6". Face it, sin(30) isn't 1/2. I remember my teacher deducting marks for not writing the degree sign once.
The double standard baffles me: if Office took its angles in degrees, half of you would be jumping all over it, claiming radians as the standard.
My old 11th and 12th grade book. Almost every angle in the book is given in radians, and wherever the angle is mentioned in degrees the degree sign is given. A quiz in the book even has the old question: Which is bigger, sin(1) or sin(1 degree)? A full page mentions why when the unit of the angle is not mentioned, it is in radians. Essentially radians are dimensionless numbers.
As I said, type in =SIN(30 degrees)! So the sine function effectively accepts both radians and degrees.
Touche on the high school part, forgot about that.:) The main customers are of course still enterprises. I still think the default argument should be radians.
BTW, my high school in India always taught me radians as the default argument. Guess US school standards are falling. I swear, the level of the SAT is going down at least. I had a chat with someone here who scored 4750 (I-2350, II-2400) last year and he said that the Math II paper was ridiculously easy.
Type in =SIN(30 degrees) if you want degrees. I'm sorry, Excel doesn't pander to high school students. In the real world, when the sine of an angle is mentioned, it is SUPPOSED to be radians. Every programming language I know accepts arguments for trig functions as radians.
The driver bugs of course aren't the fault of Vista. ATI (very surprisingly, considering their Linux support) has much better graphics drivers than nVidia at the moment. I've been using a very old D-Link 538TX NIC on an old machine using Vista. With the November '06 drivers (latest) there are zero issues. A lot depends on the individual hardware manufacturer.:)
Is it just booting that is slower, or is it general operation? FYI, the hard disk will stop thrashing a lot later in Vista than in XP. This behaviour is pretty much by design, as it caches data to fill up memory which XP doesn't do. Also, is this installation of Vista a clean one or is it jacked up with crapware? In general, I've noticed a difference between pre-installed Vista and a clean install of it.
Did I ever say anything about NN? I'm torn on it too, like the OP.
On one hand, the US telcos are really government granted monopolies. The situation, not ideal, can call for regulation if necessary. (Consider Muslim drivers being forced to carry passengers against their wishes. Ideally the matter would have been private and they would have gone out of business or been fired for such a stupid move. HOWEVER, since there are a limited number of licences granted by the government, the regulation was necessary.)
On the other hand, a POTENTIAL possibility is taken to be a DEFINITE result. It is POSSIBLE, hell even PROBABLE, that the telcos will misuse it. However it is not CERTAIN.
Have a monopoly allows a company to deliver the highest quality goods to its customer by removing inefficiencies inherent in competition.:)
Lifted that out of The Godfather, didn't you?;)
As for IP law: it is meant *both* to foster innovation and to protect the rights of the inventor. Ripping off a product as soon as it is invented will not protect the rights of the inventor, nor foster innovation in the long run. I really have no problem with copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets: all foster innovation and protect the rights of the inventor in different ways. The current implementation isn't really great, though.
Slashdot Mirror
You can set the default format to be .DOC, twitter. Word Options.
Of course, given that you've never used it, it's probably too much to expect from you.
The entire Office UI team, that's who. Ever seen that Customer Experience Improvement Program that you probably disable? Well, they collected and analysed data, and found that people simply weren't discovering Office features. The Ribbon is a good way to expose these features for everyone. If you take the time to learn it and then customise it, you may easily change your opinion.
If you're having difficulty locating commands, check the Office website http://office.microsoft.com/ for an interactive demonstration: choose the Office 2003 command, and it will show you how to get to it 2007.
Also, IIRC Outlook 2003 has a downgrader for .pst to the earlier versions, in the File menu.
Slashdot: Your source of daily anti-Microsoft FUD. I'm going to get modded down as troll/flamebait for this and probably lose my karma bonus, but I've noticed kdawson is the worst. Sorry to call you out.
He hasn't posted with his Erris account for almost a month now. Looks like he forgot the password to it, heh.
Actually, no. No data mining was going on there. I explained it in the /. topic, the article is full of hot air.
> Or scroll down today's submissions to.. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/14/043200 [slashdot.org]
/do under XP.
Do you think that is actually INCLUDED in Vista? STFU.
> don't mind your games running slower than they would
What explains some games already running faster in Vista than in XP, then?
> First of all, not all hardware from XP is supported (I suspect the new DRM requirements in the OS for my difficulties here)
You can suspect anything you like. Doesn't make it true, however.
> Then, there's the user interface. Not as ugly as XP's Fischer-Price interface, but nothing to write home about, either.
I kind of like it. I hate all the themes that come with an Ubuntu default install. Pretty subjective.
> I'd rather not waste the CPU and GPU cycles on it, thank you very much.
Then turn it off. Go ahead.
> The first example that comes to mind is mapping a network drive. Why the heck they moved it off the My Computer (what do they call it now, "Bill's Computer"?) window I'll never know.
They haven't. Stop lying your ass off. And no, it's just "Computer".
> Then, there's the fact that Vista is a big fat pig when it comes to resources.
For several reasons. Tell me, did XP have full-fledged system-wide indexing of files? Did XP have a fully composited hardware-accelerated desktop.
> I gave it the old college try, but Vista's just a piece of crap.
"I gave it the old college try, but Ubuntu's just a piece of crap hurrrr."
Well, companies have always waited before deploying a new OS -- and for good reason too. Vista is definitely not bug free.
e w_to_Windows_Vista Back-end features simply cannot be appreciated by the average user. I'd expect better from the Slashdot user, of course.
Your first article: December 2006. It makes the point that there are no new 'killer' features in Vista. Are you aware that most of the new Vista features are back-end? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_n
Second: November 2006. As I said.
Third: February 2007. Pretty old, and times have changed since then.
> It has a resource intensive "shiny" interface.
.NET article from TWO THOUSAND FUCKING FIVE, one BY DESIGN article and one article from JULY TWO THOUSAND FUCKING SIX to say that Vista has "gaping" holes. If that's the best you can do, I think Vista has mostly succeeded. :)
# Tasks_that_trigger_a_UAC_prompt This is a perfectly reasonable list. All the points on that list deserve to be there.
s /m/30710428/search=Vista%20Ultimate/qlty=o
s /m/31221707/
FUD. Yes, the interface is "shiny", and does use resources, but the main resource intensiveness comes from the new features (like indexing) and the fact that it is a fully hardware accelerated desktop. If you actually disable these new features, Vista runs the same as or faster than XP.
> It has levels of DRM heretofore unseen in an operating system.
There's ONE new DRM thingie over XP. ONE. YOU WILL NEVER EVER SEE DRM IF YOU DO NOT USE DRM FILES. Vote with your wallet. I don't use DRM'd files either. I rip CD music. Vista WILL NOT ADD DRM TO NON-DRM FILES.
> It is claimed that it is secure, yet still has gaping security holes.
You use one
The fact is that there has been one exploit (ANI) so far, and due to UAC and IE protected mode (sandboxing) that exploit couldn't work in Vista as well as it did in XP.
> It is claimed that it is safe, yet has to be made un-safe for users to be able to do anything with it.
FUD. FUD. FUD. UAC DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DISABLED FOR A VISTA COMPUTER TO BE USABLE. I haven't seen a UAC prompt in weeks now -- of course, it helps that I've updated all my apps for them to not require admin permissions.
Go look at the Wikipedia article to know what triggers UAC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control
> It is expensive
Not when you factor inflation in. In any case, a deal with Ultimate (this is the full edition) is available for US $165. http://software.pricegrabber.com/windows-family-o
Most will need a Home Premium upgrade, which starts from LESS THAN $100. http://software.pricegrabber.com/windows-family-o
> clunky
WTF?
> space consuming
Not when you factor the new things in. If you remove speech recognition, C/J/K language support, Media Center, and a few other things (eg using vLite) an install of Vista comes to around 3.5 GB. Anyway, hard drives are big enough for it, it isn't too much of a factor now.
> privacy invading
Oh dear, more unsubstantiated FUD. Why am I not surprised?
> insecure
The FUD this time, for a change, is not from you, but from Symantec. The fact is that better companies like Eset have no problems programming for Vista. Symantec uses several KERNEL HOOKS which are disallowed in Vista x64, in favour of Microsoft APIs.
> unsafe, and is more interested in protecting the interests of major Hollywood distributors than its users.
I'm tired of this BS. Look above.
Get your facts straight first before starting your standard FUD.
Why, yes! Of course there is! There are two ways to go about this:
1. Install XP, then all the patches later, and manually.
2. "Slipstream them" -- replace the files on the XP CD with the newer ones. nLite http://www.nliteos.com/ is pretty good for this stuff.
If you want to download all the patches so that you can slipstream them or install them later, AutoPatcher http://www.autopatcher.com/ is the way to go.
If you have a Windows server somewhere, WSUS is a good option (though somewhat heavier).
Yes, correct. I'm really sorry for the wrong information.
My REALLY, REALLY bad. :( I was simply thinking of something entirely different. The correct formula is SIN(RADIANS(30)), which is indeed a lot more clunky than SIN(30 degrees). Sorry.
OK, OK, after further reading NOW I understand the argument, that a spec shouldn't leave anything to doubt.
:)
The AVEDEV function is implemented correctly in Excel 2007. I just checked.
Yes, yes, Microsoft and ECMA rushed it.
Bullshit? Really?
Understanding ISC Mathematics (part 1, for class 11), by M.L. Aggarwal: "If an angle is given without measuring units, it is in radians." As I said, almost every angle in the book is in radians. A table is given in the very first chapter, and only that mentions "30 degrees or pi/6". Face it, sin(30) isn't 1/2. I remember my teacher deducting marks for not writing the degree sign once.
The double standard baffles me: if Office took its angles in degrees, half of you would be jumping all over it, claiming radians as the standard.
My old 11th and 12th grade book. Almost every angle in the book is given in radians, and wherever the angle is mentioned in degrees the degree sign is given. A quiz in the book even has the old question: Which is bigger, sin(1) or sin(1 degree)? A full page mentions why when the unit of the angle is not mentioned, it is in radians. Essentially radians are dimensionless numbers.
As I said, type in =SIN(30 degrees)! So the sine function effectively accepts both radians and degrees.
:) The main customers are of course still enterprises. I still think the default argument should be radians.
Touche on the high school part, forgot about that.
BTW, my high school in India always taught me radians as the default argument. Guess US school standards are falling. I swear, the level of the SAT is going down at least. I had a chat with someone here who scored 4750 (I-2350, II-2400) last year and he said that the Math II paper was ridiculously easy.
Name me one programming language that does not take trigonometric angles in radians.
Very true. If you say that sin(90) = 1, YOU'RE WRONG. You have to say sin(90 degrees) = 1. Mathematics, and the radian concept, is universal.
Type in =SIN(30 degrees) if you want degrees. I'm sorry, Excel doesn't pander to high school students. In the real world, when the sine of an angle is mentioned, it is SUPPOSED to be radians. Every programming language I know accepts arguments for trig functions as radians.
The article, or at least this part, is FUD.
The driver bugs of course aren't the fault of Vista. ATI (very surprisingly, considering their Linux support) has much better graphics drivers than nVidia at the moment. I've been using a very old D-Link 538TX NIC on an old machine using Vista. With the November '06 drivers (latest) there are zero issues. A lot depends on the individual hardware manufacturer. :)
Is it just booting that is slower, or is it general operation? FYI, the hard disk will stop thrashing a lot later in Vista than in XP. This behaviour is pretty much by design, as it caches data to fill up memory which XP doesn't do. Also, is this installation of Vista a clean one or is it jacked up with crapware? In general, I've noticed a difference between pre-installed Vista and a clean install of it.
*shakes head* You knew it had to be a Vista bash. Listen, Vista FULLY FEATURED works on 2-3 year old MIDRANGE hardware just fine.
Also, the Core 2 Duos are faster and consume less power than P4s. OMG CONTRADICTION. You haven't the faintest idea about this.
I hope you realise I was being sarcastic. :)
Did I ever say anything about NN? I'm torn on it too, like the OP.
On one hand, the US telcos are really government granted monopolies. The situation, not ideal, can call for regulation if necessary. (Consider Muslim drivers being forced to carry passengers against their wishes. Ideally the matter would have been private and they would have gone out of business or been fired for such a stupid move. HOWEVER, since there are a limited number of licences granted by the government, the regulation was necessary.)
On the other hand, a POTENTIAL possibility is taken to be a DEFINITE result. It is POSSIBLE, hell even PROBABLE, that the telcos will misuse it. However it is not CERTAIN.
Have a monopoly allows a company to deliver the highest quality goods to its customer by removing inefficiencies inherent in competition. :)
;)
Lifted that out of The Godfather, didn't you?
As for IP law: it is meant *both* to foster innovation and to protect the rights of the inventor. Ripping off a product as soon as it is invented will not protect the rights of the inventor, nor foster innovation in the long run. I really have no problem with copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets: all foster innovation and protect the rights of the inventor in different ways. The current implementation isn't really great, though.