I don't like the ribbon layout, as it makes it hard to find less frequently used features than a menu system,
WHAT "less frequently used features"? Theres like a grand total of 20 things you can do in a file manager; its not like you have to hunt for mail merge or something.
Actually, statistically, a sizable percentage of users [noahmasterson.com] never open a second tab,
Thats 15% of a badly sampled group of 46 users. No matter how you look at it, it is neither "statistically significant" (as it doesnt really qualify as a good sampling) nor is it a major percentage. He also interprets his data badly and injects his own bias: I believe the participants who use tabs “some of the time” probably veer closer to “never” than “always.” What is his grounds for that statement?
In other words, nothing about that conclusion is trustworthy.
Is it obvious that putting "Zip" (compress) under a "Send" label is remarkably confusing? Of course. Don't get me wrong, labels on individual buttons are very useful. Labels on segmented controls and similar are also useful. Labels on groups of loosely related buttons... not so much.
Once again you have no data to back up your statements. They may be true in YOUR opinion, but to declare them true for large populations of users is just not a valid statement without some kind of evidence.
Probably this, but it's also possible that some other aspect of the experience is broken, so people do tasks frequently that they shouldn't have to do frequently. In general, if you're doing the same thing over and over, that's usually an indication that the application is failing to store some preference that it should be storing.
Im going to disagree. You may cut and paste several thousand times while attempting to sort out a music library; but to say that explorer is supposed to be smart enough to figure out how to arrange my files the way I want is ridiculous. Explorer is a file manager, not a guessing machine. Its supposed to show me my files and enable me to work with them, not try to automate tasks.
Collapsing the ribbon would defeat the purpose of having the ribbon, which would defeat the purpose of showing why the ribbon is TEH AWESOMES! Therefore you cannot collapse the ribbon
Thats some fallacious reasoning if Ive ever seen any.
The fact remains that for those of you who want that extra space and dont care about ribbon / organizer, you can minimize both to no negative effect. For the rest of the world, they have the ribbon which really is better for a touch interface. And for me, I dont care because I use keyboard shortcuts.
As for your comments about "some people just adapting fine", there are a number of people who have issues dealing with and manipulating files; menus can be confusing to explain to a first time user (as in, someone who has never used a computer before and is over 50).
the thing they forgot is that nearly everyone access the paste command via the keyboard.
They didnt "forget" it, their telemetry captured that info as well. And Im really not convinced that its accurate that "most people use the keyboard option". Some people do, but the vast majority of people using computers arent IT folk and programmers, and of the remaining portion only some learn the shortcuts.
For the rest of us, it's a bit of a retrograde step.
I fail to see why, I basically never use the menus anyways and it would be nice for a touch interface to have a paste button (since I wouldnt have keyboard or rightclick). This doesnt take away the ability for me to keep doing what Ive always done.
The degree of misinformation in your post is astonishing.
Problem the first: If you do not have admin rights, you will get "access denied" on your attempt to upload anything to the Windows global temp folder. You will only have access to your own profile.
Problem the second: Any program that you launch from the RDP "on connect" feature will share your context, and your privileges. This is not a privilege escalation, since it grants you no additional rights than those you already had.
Problem the third: Server 2008 restricts which programs are allowed to run after logon, so your exploit vector will simply get access denied even if you DID find a privilege escalation with this method and were able to stick the program in Temp.
Further, even if you got around all of THOSE issues, the "on connect" program does not run until after the "applying group policy" phase of login ANYWAYS, which makes your entire attack moot. Policies remain in place, and there simply isnt some magical privilege escalation exploit hiding in the Remote Desktop Connection GUI, as much as you might think so.
Do you have usability data to support this? I see a lot of claims about how bad ribbon is, but the only one Im aware of doing usability studies on it is MS. If thats not correct, perhaps you wouldnt mind linking us to your non-anecdotal source.
Oh good gracious, how many people do you think will actually come to you and say "im a power user and I HAVE to use details browsing mode, but I cant figure out which picture on the ribbon corresponds to that"?
I mean, whens the last time you used the menus in explorer, and you werent just going to "folder options"? For me, I think it was the third of never, Im always using keyboard shortcuts or rightclick. That is to say, the menu has been utterly worthless.
And for the folks who can neither figure out rightclick nor keyboard shortcuts, pointing them to the gigantic "CUT" and "PASTE" buttons is a lot easier than watching them struggle thru the menu.
I can see some complaints about losing the menu in Word where there really are a zillion little options, but if the ribbon shines anywhere it is where there ARENT many options, and I honestly cant figure out what you would want to do with your files in explorer other than "cut" and "paste".
You may have some points about icon size etc; but I take issue with a few of your statements:
Tabbed navigation is assumed to affect the contents of the screen as a whole. It is a fundamental abuse of the metaphor to use it to choose between banks of controls.
Says who? The point of the ribbon was that they were trying to be innovative and change the way we do things. We got to "tabbed controls" by "violating the single document per window" paradigm. Yet noone seems to mind that today.
You can argue that its confusing and doesnt accomplish its task, but youre setting forth some rule as universal here and I dont think that holds water.
Although conceptual grouping of icons can be useful in terns of keeping related things together, it is generally not useful to label those groups. This wastes valuable vertical screen real estate and adds nothing to the user's understanding
Youre making a number of statements here; do you have usability studies that you can reference regarding the labels "doing nothing"? I would assume MS did SOME usability studies (certainly theyre using telemetry data), which would put some onus on you to come up with more relevant data if youre going to claim that their data is wrong.
Most people don't add or remove columns in their views regularly
Once again, the article references how they used "millions of instances of telemetry data" to determine what UI elements were most relevant. Are you claiming that their data is flawed, or that they did NOT use the data in their design (as is strongly implied)? Do you have any concrete data to back this up, or are you just going off of anecdotal evidence?
Again, im not going to defend the ribbon on technical merits; I happen to like it and find it intuitive, but I am by no means a UI expert. However your statements need a heck of a lot more substance to them than "I declare this UI usage to be bad".
It leaves less room for viewing my email, or my document, or my spreadsheet.
Whether or not you like ribbon is a personal opinion; this statement, however, is NOT, and in the case of explorer, it does NOT leave you with less space. If you read the article / view the pics, youll note that they specifically address this and have done "ribbon" in a way that results in more viewing area.
So If you hate ribbon and wont upgrade, fine, thats really a personal choice. But dont make false claims about what issues it has.
You should actually check the pictures. They way they are doing it makes a lot of sense, and actually results in 2 more lines worth of space in "details" view.
The fact that theyre adding "command prompt here" to the default install is also really sweet-- i know its a simple reg hack, but this means that fixing friends' computers is now even easier/
I dont believe that the user password hashes are stored in the local SAM of a domain controller; Im fairly certain it is stored within directory services. Certainly samdump does nothing on a DC.
.local is there for a reason. It ensures that if you do not want any internal DNS to resolve externally and are not answering DNS requests from the outside, that your Domain Controller's DNS doesnt supercede legitimate domains.
Take for example a company that wants to use foo.com as their internal domain. If they host all external foo.com services "in the cloud", naming their internal dns domain "foo.com" will hose the ability for anyone on the domain to properly resolve the external addresses. To fix it you would have to manually update your internal DNS A records every time you made a "cloud" change; you would no longer have a single place that lookups occurred to.
To fix that easily, you use foo.local. Foo.com addresses will properly be resolved at the authoratative NS, and the foo.local records are guarenteed not to be resolvable on the internet (as there is no.local root nameserver).
Way to read the article. Tyler specifically mentions in the first 10 sentences that he love Rapid Release, and it has absolutely nothing to do with his departure.
His complaint is the same as the complaints have always been for Firefox-- it takes forever for bugs to get fixed.
Just to clear some things up and possibly prevent irrelevant posts...
This has nothing to do with the rapid-release; he states in the 2nd paragraph that
First off, I did not leave because of rapid release. I love the idea of rapid release, and I think the recent spurt of posts to the planet on how Rapid Release will be beneficial in the long run does a great job of explaining it.
His issue is that Triage isnt good enough for rapid release-- not that rapid-release doesnt work with Triage (but thanks for stirring the muck, anonymous reader / soulskill).
But Id like a clarification-- if there were 13,000 bugs 15 months ago, and now there are 6000, doesnt that speak to massive improvement? Why not leave back in spring 2010?
Most sane states allow for termination of employment by either employer or employee for any reason at any time. That doesnt seem like "too much control".
That is I suppose a fair answer; but a 10+ character "strong" (by server 2003/2008 standards) password should be strong enough to resist eons of brute force.
SMIT i think IS the gui, but theres also (IIRC) a smitty command that works from the command line (possibly thats a pun, SMIT- tty?). Its still menu driven, and drives me bananas, but it works from console.
Using a mouse on an IBM AIX machine makes me feel dirty, honestly.
Um, VPN connection can be bruteforced too. Why is it more secure to offer a service to the internet which grants access to the whole network, than to open a service which grants access to one machine?
Im not really clear on this. RDP uses SSL and is generally regarded as secure. You can easily limit the rate at which passwords can be tried. Please, explain.
Im not really clear why. If you have remote access, and you travel, you probalby have SOME method of getting in, whether it be VPN or RDP or LogMeIn or whatever. All of those are hackable, using VPN instead of RDP doesnt really save you from someone doing a bruteforce on the VPN.
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I mostly agree but...
I don't like the ribbon layout, as it makes it hard to find less frequently used features than a menu system,
WHAT "less frequently used features"? Theres like a grand total of 20 things you can do in a file manager; its not like you have to hunt for mail merge or something.
Actually, statistically, a sizable percentage of users [noahmasterson.com] never open a second tab,
Thats 15% of a badly sampled group of 46 users. No matter how you look at it, it is neither "statistically significant" (as it doesnt really qualify as a good sampling) nor is it a major percentage. He also interprets his data badly and injects his own bias: I believe the participants who use tabs “some of the time” probably veer closer to “never” than “always.” What is his grounds for that statement?
In other words, nothing about that conclusion is trustworthy.
Is it obvious that putting "Zip" (compress) under a "Send" label is remarkably confusing? Of course.
Don't get me wrong, labels on individual buttons are very useful. Labels on segmented controls and similar are also useful. Labels on groups of loosely related buttons... not so much.
Once again you have no data to back up your statements. They may be true in YOUR opinion, but to declare them true for large populations of users is just not a valid statement without some kind of evidence.
Probably this, but it's also possible that some other aspect of the experience is broken, so people do tasks frequently that they shouldn't have to do frequently. In general, if you're doing the same thing over and over, that's usually an indication that the application is failing to store some preference that it should be storing.
Im going to disagree. You may cut and paste several thousand times while attempting to sort out a music library; but to say that explorer is supposed to be smart enough to figure out how to arrange my files the way I want is ridiculous. Explorer is a file manager, not a guessing machine. Its supposed to show me my files and enable me to work with them, not try to automate tasks.
Collapsing the ribbon would defeat the purpose of having the ribbon, which would defeat the purpose of showing why the ribbon is TEH AWESOMES! Therefore you cannot collapse the ribbon
Thats some fallacious reasoning if Ive ever seen any.
The fact remains that for those of you who want that extra space and dont care about ribbon / organizer, you can minimize both to no negative effect. For the rest of the world, they have the ribbon which really is better for a touch interface. And for me, I dont care because I use keyboard shortcuts.
As for your comments about "some people just adapting fine", there are a number of people who have issues dealing with and manipulating files; menus can be confusing to explain to a first time user (as in, someone who has never used a computer before and is over 50).
the thing they forgot is that nearly everyone access the paste command via the keyboard.
They didnt "forget" it, their telemetry captured that info as well. And Im really not convinced that its accurate that "most people use the keyboard option". Some people do, but the vast majority of people using computers arent IT folk and programmers, and of the remaining portion only some learn the shortcuts.
For the rest of us, it's a bit of a retrograde step.
I fail to see why, I basically never use the menus anyways and it would be nice for a touch interface to have a paste button (since I wouldnt have keyboard or rightclick). This doesnt take away the ability for me to keep doing what Ive always done.
The degree of misinformation in your post is astonishing.
Problem the first: If you do not have admin rights, you will get "access denied" on your attempt to upload anything to the Windows global temp folder. You will only have access to your own profile.
Problem the second: Any program that you launch from the RDP "on connect" feature will share your context, and your privileges. This is not a privilege escalation, since it grants you no additional rights than those you already had.
Problem the third: Server 2008 restricts which programs are allowed to run after logon, so your exploit vector will simply get access denied even if you DID find a privilege escalation with this method and were able to stick the program in Temp.
Further, even if you got around all of THOSE issues, the "on connect" program does not run until after the "applying group policy" phase of login ANYWAYS, which makes your entire attack moot. Policies remain in place, and there simply isnt some magical privilege escalation exploit hiding in the Remote Desktop Connection GUI, as much as you might think so.
Is that seriously what youre concerned with, what number is tacked onto the end of firefox?
What real relevance is there WHERE the decimal is?
Do you have usability data to support this? I see a lot of claims about how bad ribbon is, but the only one Im aware of doing usability studies on it is MS. If thats not correct, perhaps you wouldnt mind linking us to your non-anecdotal source.
In other words, [citation needed].
Cant the ribbon be collapsed? Pretty sure it can. Theres your 6 files back.
Oh good gracious, how many people do you think will actually come to you and say "im a power user and I HAVE to use details browsing mode, but I cant figure out which picture on the ribbon corresponds to that"?
I mean, whens the last time you used the menus in explorer, and you werent just going to "folder options"? For me, I think it was the third of never, Im always using keyboard shortcuts or rightclick. That is to say, the menu has been utterly worthless.
And for the folks who can neither figure out rightclick nor keyboard shortcuts, pointing them to the gigantic "CUT" and "PASTE" buttons is a lot easier than watching them struggle thru the menu.
I can see some complaints about losing the menu in Word where there really are a zillion little options, but if the ribbon shines anywhere it is where there ARENT many options, and I honestly cant figure out what you would want to do with your files in explorer other than "cut" and "paste".
You may have some points about icon size etc; but I take issue with a few of your statements:
Tabbed navigation is assumed to affect the contents of the screen as a whole. It is a fundamental abuse of the metaphor to use it to choose between banks of controls.
Says who? The point of the ribbon was that they were trying to be innovative and change the way we do things. We got to "tabbed controls" by "violating the single document per window" paradigm. Yet noone seems to mind that today.
You can argue that its confusing and doesnt accomplish its task, but youre setting forth some rule as universal here and I dont think that holds water.
Although conceptual grouping of icons can be useful in terns of keeping related things together, it is generally not useful to label those groups. This wastes valuable vertical screen real estate and adds nothing to the user's understanding
Youre making a number of statements here; do you have usability studies that you can reference regarding the labels "doing nothing"? I would assume MS did SOME usability studies (certainly theyre using telemetry data), which would put some onus on you to come up with more relevant data if youre going to claim that their data is wrong.
Most people don't add or remove columns in their views regularly
Once again, the article references how they used "millions of instances of telemetry data" to determine what UI elements were most relevant. Are you claiming that their data is flawed, or that they did NOT use the data in their design (as is strongly implied)? Do you have any concrete data to back this up, or are you just going off of anecdotal evidence?
Again, im not going to defend the ribbon on technical merits; I happen to like it and find it intuitive, but I am by no means a UI expert. However your statements need a heck of a lot more substance to them than "I declare this UI usage to be bad".
It leaves less room for viewing my email, or my document, or my spreadsheet.
Whether or not you like ribbon is a personal opinion; this statement, however, is NOT, and in the case of explorer, it does NOT leave you with less space. If you read the article / view the pics, youll note that they specifically address this and have done "ribbon" in a way that results in more viewing area.
So If you hate ribbon and wont upgrade, fine, thats really a personal choice. But dont make false claims about what issues it has.
But at least the solution will be really really cool, and you might end up blowing some minds in the process.
Takes up more space
You should actually check the pictures. They way they are doing it makes a lot of sense, and actually results in 2 more lines worth of space in "details" view.
The fact that theyre adding "command prompt here" to the default install is also really sweet-- i know its a simple reg hack, but this means that fixing friends' computers is now even easier/
I dont believe that the user password hashes are stored in the local SAM of a domain controller; Im fairly certain it is stored within directory services. Certainly samdump does nothing on a DC.
.local is there for a reason. It ensures that if you do not want any internal DNS to resolve externally and are not answering DNS requests from the outside, that your Domain Controller's DNS doesnt supercede legitimate domains.
Take for example a company that wants to use foo.com as their internal domain. If they host all external foo.com services "in the cloud", naming their internal dns domain "foo.com" will hose the ability for anyone on the domain to properly resolve the external addresses. To fix it you would have to manually update your internal DNS A records every time you made a "cloud" change; you would no longer have a single place that lookups occurred to.
To fix that easily, you use foo.local. Foo.com addresses will properly be resolved at the authoratative NS, and the foo.local records are guarenteed not to be resolvable on the internet (as there is no .local root nameserver).
Yes. Convince your targets to grant VPN access to you and to everyone else in the world, and to implement a once-a-day log deletion policy.
Otherwise, no.
They already have addons which automate it, and have since like firefox 1.0. Mr Tech's nightly tester tools I think theyre called.
Way to read the article. Tyler specifically mentions in the first 10 sentences that he love Rapid Release, and it has absolutely nothing to do with his departure.
His complaint is the same as the complaints have always been for Firefox-- it takes forever for bugs to get fixed.
Just to clear some things up and possibly prevent irrelevant posts...
This has nothing to do with the rapid-release; he states in the 2nd paragraph that
First off, I did not leave because of rapid release. I love the idea of rapid release, and I think the recent spurt of posts to the planet on how Rapid Release will be beneficial in the long run does a great job of explaining it.
His issue is that Triage isnt good enough for rapid release-- not that rapid-release doesnt work with Triage (but thanks for stirring the muck, anonymous reader / soulskill).
But Id like a clarification-- if there were 13,000 bugs 15 months ago, and now there are 6000, doesnt that speak to massive improvement? Why not leave back in spring 2010?
Most sane states allow for termination of employment by either employer or employee for any reason at any time. That doesnt seem like "too much control".
That is I suppose a fair answer; but a 10+ character "strong" (by server 2003/2008 standards) password should be strong enough to resist eons of brute force.
SMIT i think IS the gui, but theres also (IIRC) a smitty command that works from the command line (possibly thats a pun, SMIT- tty?). Its still menu driven, and drives me bananas, but it works from console.
Using a mouse on an IBM AIX machine makes me feel dirty, honestly.
Um, VPN connection can be bruteforced too. Why is it more secure to offer a service to the internet which grants access to the whole network, than to open a service which grants access to one machine?
Im not really clear on this. RDP uses SSL and is generally regarded as secure. You can easily limit the rate at which passwords can be tried. Please, explain.
Wait, youre tunneling port 3390 to port 3389 so that you dont have port 3389 listening on the internet?
Is some kind of rube goldberg machine like this supposed to increase security, somehow?
Im not really clear why. If you have remote access, and you travel, you probalby have SOME method of getting in, whether it be VPN or RDP or LogMeIn or whatever. All of those are hackable, using VPN instead of RDP doesnt really save you from someone doing a bruteforce on the VPN.