The worst thing that MS ever did was set a default to "hide extensions for known file types". That turned a whole generation mostly-unaware of what is a file extension and what type of files could potentially be fatal. They were taught to double-click if they recognize the icon. Great.
right click an empty quick launch area(unlock the taskbar if necessary) and choose view -> large icons. now drag the label area marked with:::: of the tasks underneath the quick launch. you'll have a long row with large icons for applications and underneath a long row for many tasks. far more usable and without any software installs.
Ive been trying to teach my not so into IT friends whats the taskbar, whats the quick launch toolbar and whats the system tray for about 5 years now. The single thing that works well is something like "look in the bottom right corner, where the time is displayed... right click the blue flickering icon".
Regular people dont get the difference between a running task and a shortcut that starts an application only after some long exposure to it.
Everyone gets instantly that clicking on the fox, will run firefox. So if they need firefox, it does not matter whats already running. They just click the fox. Thats why is always common to see noob folks running 15 instances of a browser and then complaining that the computer is slow.
This is precisely where Apple stepped in. Oh, you dont get whats running and what's not? No problem. We wont try to impose it on you. And if you wonder whats that glowy light under the icon, well that means its already running. But it really doesnt matter. Result? Grandma is happy cause it clicks and works. We get mad because we cant make what's what.Majority wins.
What M$ did? You dont make the difference between a running app and a shortcut to run an app? No problem. We have this area called system tray. It holds the smallest icons and those are applications that are already running in background. See, now thats features.
A lot of us still retain the fear that wrongly clicking an application icon that is already running will stuck the computer for the next 1 min as it did years ago. This is not the case anymore.
Desktops nowadays are like neverending stacks of clean dishes. As long as the computer manages, you never clean or close anything behind.
agree, consumers want convergence even if they dont look for it per se. the do-it-all device will probably win. nobody wants to carry hundreds of power adapters and complicated combos of connectors.
while do-it-all gadgets still cant do "all" as good, thats only a matter of time.
the ipod has long reached its maturity. ok, storage grows, display resolution grows, maybe we can add in a few software extras, but the essence cannot be anymore improved. iphone is the next logical step forward because it adds another layer of the do-it-all functionality.
in time even the price difference wont be that steep so there wont be any logical reasons to go for a simple mp3 player when for maybe 50$ extra you can get the same thing + a phone. expand the theory for the next 10-15 years.
In Europe you are actually allowed to bring liquids on board, as long the total quantity does not exceed 200ml and as long each recipient is no bigger than 100ml. just hand the bottles upfront. they will check them for their size and probably seal them in a plastic bag. I've seen people complaining with a bottle of coke half full, that somehow the quantity is legal. Yes, the liquid quantity can be obviously less than 200ml, but its not only the liquid but also the size of the bottle that matters.
I like to travel as light as possible, sometimes only with hand luggage. Ok, Ill buy the showergel and some toothpaste upon arrival. But I do need to carry in my bag a specific bottle of hypo alergenic after-shave and maybe a small syrup medicine, perhaps a small creme for a bruise. You cant always presume that people dont need specific stuff that is hard to grab on.
But thats related to the hand luggage only. For the big luggage in the hull. Well, nothing stops me to stuff there 2L of 70% tough plum brandy and an FM receiver. To hell, I might even manage to set the whole plane on fire. Also. What if several passengers would bring each 100ml of the same unsafe liquid and just mix it on board after take off?
Nothing is certain or safe enough if you look at it from several angles.
Regarding wireless devices. It is not cost or time feasible for the FCC to check every possible wireless signal device with every possible plane model in order to maybe discover some extremely marginal situation in which interference may cause problems. So they just ban it all and check visually for people to use as few as possible. This suggests that if a problem might occur its only extremely rare. Lets not forget that statistics show that airplanes are the safest way of transportation. And no, 9-11 did not screw those statistics.
I travel frequently inside Europe. The only thing that they sometimes (keep in mind, sometimes) check is they ask you politely to power it up and they take a look while you're holding the laptop if its actually a real laptop. That is that it boots to some kind of desktop or user login. Its just a method to make sure the laptop battery is not made out of C-4 wired to an electronic board or that somehow the entire device is not a bomb.
My advice, I would just hibernate the device, no password, have it boot up to the desktop with a mexican themed wallpaper. Thats about as normal one would get upon returning from Mexico. Burn the data on a dvd, just to be on the safe side. And stop being so paranoid. Its this type of mentality that further enforces f**ked up policies.
it all sounds so logically and easy in theory but I am willing to bet that although you seem to have part of that knowledge you did not program that bot and never will.
Maybe you thought a great deal about it but that is a long way from a bot that "You would never know it's a bot". What you are essentially telling everybody is that all the data is finite, is not so big and is out there and once you gathered it in your own usable formats all the algorithms just somehow seem to fall into place with easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP.
give us a break dude
i know its frustrating to farm 8-10 hours/day but that's not a reason to come here and brag about things that you wish you'd do.
After all, they did a hell of a job with every project so far and Im pretty confident they'll also nail this one.
What you see so far is only a tiny part from a far bigger game. There's more to come and Im sure there will be enough for everyone in there.
You have been served olives so far and some people are complaining that are not black olives. Wait until the whole table is set with candles, great music and loads of foods.
Satisfaction will be guaranteed. You will be rushing through hordes of minions with your heart pounding in your neck screaming for more blood.
But until then, u know, lets look at every square inch of the olive and find something wrong with it. Like a true warrior.
The GUI is one of the later things to be implemented in a windows development cycle, of course it's going to look like Vista.
Which is precisely a bad thing because after an year or so of development, there's a huge amount of things to rearrange and redesign. Not to mention that however bad the interface was initially, internally everyone got somehow used to it and the new design will stir a lot of controversy.
In other words, the design team will have a huge pile of work to do, under the pressure of the upcoming launch while also dealing with newly found interface-frustrated upper management.
This is not the right way to do it. And the results will be obviously mediocre as with every release of Windows so far.
From the start point the design needs to work hand in hand with the engineering and the users. They need to asset everything that was beautiful/working/usable and everything that was ugly/not working/not usable in the old release.
Establish a vision, make every guy in the dev team try to follow the new vision. That will get you an aesthetically pleasing and usable interface.
Or else people will ditch W7 cause it looks just like vista. Especially since this time around they want to do a quick delivery.
Lets not forget that everyone had so many years of XP, that in the end everyone learns its mood. Out of the box, XP is not that usable.
You still have to tune it, stop a few services, hide/show some icons, give it a full tour of control panel in order to tame the confusion. Fortunately, by now, everyone know what is doing.
This is also true for Windows Vista. You have to stop UAC, disable indexing, find a way to stop Defender, you know, tame the horse. The full tour of control panel is also a must.
Second of all, nowadays laptops and, generally speaking, portable computing has taken way off. People prefer to buy mediocre laptops for obvious reasons while most of the time they forget to realize that for the same price (ex. 1,000$) they can buy a desktop box that beats their laptop on every performance aspect (double the ram, better cpu, way faster and bigger hard drive, quite decently dedicated gaming gfx).
The obvious bad result is that they run a new generation of OS, that they dont know how to tame on mediocre hardware.
Of course, you're not supposed to tame anything as a regular user. But thats Microsoft. But im tired of hearing people that XP is i dunno how better and Vista is i dunno how worse.
To sum things up. I chose the new desktop which was cheap but is way better than a 1000$ laptop. I installed Vista Ultimate SP1 with full Aero. I made the control panel tour in one hour and thats it. I have a machine that runs smooth, looks better than XP, crashes less often than XP, it feels and acts more modern. And everyone is impressed when they get to use it. If you come with a 1000$ laptop, Ill do the same, in the same amount of time. It will just be XP.
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The worst thing that MS ever did was set a default to "hide extensions for known file types". That turned a whole generation mostly-unaware of what is a file extension and what type of files could potentially be fatal. They were taught to double-click if they recognize the icon. Great.
right click an empty quick launch area(unlock the taskbar if necessary) and choose view -> large icons. now drag the label area marked with :::: of the tasks underneath the quick launch. you'll have a long row with large icons for applications and underneath a long row for many tasks. far more usable and without any software installs.
Ive been trying to teach my not so into IT friends whats the taskbar, whats the quick launch toolbar and whats the system tray for about 5 years now. The single thing that works well is something like "look in the bottom right corner, where the time is displayed... right click the blue flickering icon".
Regular people dont get the difference between a running task and a shortcut that starts an application only after some long exposure to it.
Everyone gets instantly that clicking on the fox, will run firefox. So if they need firefox, it does not matter whats already running. They just click the fox. Thats why is always common to see noob folks running 15 instances of a browser and then complaining that the computer is slow.
This is precisely where Apple stepped in. Oh, you dont get whats running and what's not? No problem. We wont try to impose it on you. And if you wonder whats that glowy light under the icon, well that means its already running. But it really doesnt matter. Result? Grandma is happy cause it clicks and works. We get mad because we cant make what's what.Majority wins.
What M$ did? You dont make the difference between a running app and a shortcut to run an app? No problem. We have this area called system tray. It holds the smallest icons and those are applications that are already running in background. See, now thats features.
A lot of us still retain the fear that wrongly clicking an application icon that is already running will stuck the computer for the next 1 min as it did years ago. This is not the case anymore.
Desktops nowadays are like neverending stacks of clean dishes. As long as the computer manages, you never clean or close anything behind.
agree, consumers want convergence even if they dont look for it per se. the do-it-all device will probably win. nobody wants to carry hundreds of power adapters and complicated combos of connectors.
while do-it-all gadgets still cant do "all" as good, thats only a matter of time.
the ipod has long reached its maturity. ok, storage grows, display resolution grows, maybe we can add in a few software extras, but the essence cannot be anymore improved. iphone is the next logical step forward because it adds another layer of the do-it-all functionality.
in time even the price difference wont be that steep so there wont be any logical reasons to go for a simple mp3 player when for maybe 50$ extra you can get the same thing + a phone. expand the theory for the next 10-15 years.
In Europe you are actually allowed to bring liquids on board, as long the total quantity does not exceed 200ml and as long each recipient is no bigger than 100ml. just hand the bottles upfront. they will check them for their size and probably seal them in a plastic bag. I've seen people complaining with a bottle of coke half full, that somehow the quantity is legal. Yes, the liquid quantity can be obviously less than 200ml, but its not only the liquid but also the size of the bottle that matters.
I like to travel as light as possible, sometimes only with hand luggage. Ok, Ill buy the showergel and some toothpaste upon arrival. But I do need to carry in my bag a specific bottle of hypo alergenic after-shave and maybe a small syrup medicine, perhaps a small creme for a bruise. You cant always presume that people dont need specific stuff that is hard to grab on.
But thats related to the hand luggage only. For the big luggage in the hull. Well, nothing stops me to stuff there 2L of 70% tough plum brandy and an FM receiver. To hell, I might even manage to set the whole plane on fire. Also. What if several passengers would bring each 100ml of the same unsafe liquid and just mix it on board after take off?
Nothing is certain or safe enough if you look at it from several angles.
Regarding wireless devices. It is not cost or time feasible for the FCC to check every possible wireless signal device with every possible plane model in order to maybe discover some extremely marginal situation in which interference may cause problems. So they just ban it all and check visually for people to use as few as possible. This suggests that if a problem might occur its only extremely rare. Lets not forget that statistics show that airplanes are the safest way of transportation. And no, 9-11 did not screw those statistics.
I travel frequently inside Europe. The only thing that they sometimes (keep in mind, sometimes) check is they ask you politely to power it up and they take a look while you're holding the laptop if its actually a real laptop. That is that it boots to some kind of desktop or user login. Its just a method to make sure the laptop battery is not made out of C-4 wired to an electronic board or that somehow the entire device is not a bomb.
My advice, I would just hibernate the device, no password, have it boot up to the desktop with a mexican themed wallpaper. Thats about as normal one would get upon returning from Mexico. Burn the data on a dvd, just to be on the safe side. And stop being so paranoid. Its this type of mentality that further enforces f**ked up policies.
it all sounds so logically and easy in theory but I am willing to bet that although you seem to have part of that knowledge you did not program that bot and never will.
Maybe you thought a great deal about it but that is a long way from a bot that "You would never know it's a bot". What you are essentially telling everybody is that all the data is finite, is not so big and is out there and once you gathered it in your own usable formats all the algorithms just somehow seem to fall into place with easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP.
give us a break dude
i know its frustrating to farm 8-10 hours/day but that's not a reason to come here and brag about things that you wish you'd do.
After all, they did a hell of a job with every project so far and Im pretty confident they'll also nail this one.
What you see so far is only a tiny part from a far bigger game. There's more to come and Im sure there will be enough for everyone in there.
You have been served olives so far and some people are complaining that are not black olives. Wait until the whole table is set with candles, great music and loads of foods.
Satisfaction will be guaranteed. You will be rushing through hordes of minions with your heart pounding in your neck screaming for more blood.
But until then, u know, lets look at every square inch of the olive and find something wrong with it. Like a true warrior.
The GUI is one of the later things to be implemented in a windows development cycle, of course it's going to look like Vista.
Which is precisely a bad thing because after an year or so of development, there's a huge amount of things to rearrange and redesign. Not to mention that however bad the interface was initially, internally everyone got somehow used to it and the new design will stir a lot of controversy.
In other words, the design team will have a huge pile of work to do, under the pressure of the upcoming launch while also dealing with newly found interface-frustrated upper management.
This is not the right way to do it. And the results will be obviously mediocre as with every release of Windows so far.
From the start point the design needs to work hand in hand with the engineering and the users. They need to asset everything that was beautiful/working/usable and everything that was ugly/not working/not usable in the old release. Establish a vision, make every guy in the dev team try to follow the new vision. That will get you an aesthetically pleasing and usable interface.
Or else people will ditch W7 cause it looks just like vista. Especially since this time around they want to do a quick delivery.
Lets not forget that everyone had so many years of XP, that in the end everyone learns its mood. Out of the box, XP is not that usable.
You still have to tune it, stop a few services, hide/show some icons, give it a full tour of control panel in order to tame the confusion. Fortunately, by now, everyone know what is doing.
This is also true for Windows Vista. You have to stop UAC, disable indexing, find a way to stop Defender, you know, tame the horse. The full tour of control panel is also a must.
Second of all, nowadays laptops and, generally speaking, portable computing has taken way off. People prefer to buy mediocre laptops for obvious reasons while most of the time they forget to realize that for the same price (ex. 1,000$) they can buy a desktop box that beats their laptop on every performance aspect (double the ram, better cpu, way faster and bigger hard drive, quite decently dedicated gaming gfx).
The obvious bad result is that they run a new generation of OS, that they dont know how to tame on mediocre hardware.
Of course, you're not supposed to tame anything as a regular user. But thats Microsoft. But im tired of hearing people that XP is i dunno how better and Vista is i dunno how worse.
To sum things up. I chose the new desktop which was cheap but is way better than a 1000$ laptop. I installed Vista Ultimate SP1 with full Aero. I made the control panel tour in one hour and thats it. I have a machine that runs smooth, looks better than XP, crashes less often than XP, it feels and acts more modern. And everyone is impressed when they get to use it. If you come with a 1000$ laptop, Ill do the same, in the same amount of time. It will just be XP.