When it comes to the last point, Apple will NEVER EVER change. The whole "Think Different" mantra is left in the dust by the new "Jobs knows best" theology of Apple.
Yes, because if there's any crowd that has a reputation of being adverse to spending obscene amounts of money on the latest and greatest everything for their PCs it's PC gamers...
XP was old when Vista came out. XP is archaic now. Move on. Fight other battles.
My recollection of Office 2003 was that not every menu item had a key combination, and certainly not every tool bar had a way to access it via keyboard.
However, in Office 2010, pretty much everything you can see is keyboard accessible, directly.
And hence, I was not responding to
When Microsoft started Windows, that was also true. There were rules for how to do GUI stuff and if you implemented that "GUI stuff" you also had to implement the keyboard version of the navigations.
but rather
Over time, Microsoft lost their interest in efficiency of the individual and traded it for the the easiest way for a beginner to use their product.
because I hardly think that providing keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything, not to mention some of the other added features, like the advanced paste options that are quickly accessible, actually demonstrates losing interest in the efficiency of the individual. Rather, I think it demonstrates that they care a lot about that, and the reaction against it had very little to do with efficiency, and much more to do with "new is bad".
Are you kidding me? Things like, oh for example the Ribbon interface in Office 2010 make using just a keyboard even EASIER. EVERYTHING is accessible by keyboard, with key combinations that could be memorized, as opposed to having to navigate menus with the keyboard for anything where there wasn't an assigned keyboard shortcut.
Really? Why wouldn't they stop people from loading a custom OS the same way they did with all iPods released after the 5G video?
(You STILL can't load a custom OS on a 6G classic, and it's been years since release).
Re:This is seriously a world first?!!??
on
USB Foot Controls
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· Score: 1
There are plenty of midi foot controllers, and midi interfaces for computers are cheap. For guitar stuff, you'll definitely want something like that because it'll play better with DAW software than this device will.
Not to mention that these numbers are still based on the one post of a debated blog that targets marketing people, and uses stats that facebook releases to marketers so that they can target ads, etc. The methodology of the original sources of data is not explained. There is no discussion as to whether privacy modes, ad-block, anything like that might impact those numbers. There is very little analysis as to whether or not there are usage patterns that vary over time with some periodicity. And this is now the what, 4th major article I've read that takes the original blog post from "Inside Facebook", and adds to that absolutely nothing but conjecture and opinion, and a few random personal examples, which everyone on slashdot knows are pretty damned meaningless.
I'm getting really sick of this type of article in the tech world - tech journalists should realise by now that it's trivial to follow their sources, and they should be doing a much better job at vetting their sources not just for headline potential but for reasonableness.
I'm actually surprised he didn't just go along with the laptop but try to attatch a whole bunch of crap. Like charging $100 to install free av and anti-malware. My managers for the week I was working would get really angry if we went to the back to get a laptop for a customer if we hadn't managed to upsell on something. To the point where they essentially told us it was better to lose the sale entirely if they didn't attach. So ridiculous.
If you're too educated on technology, they're worried you'll be a bad sales person because you're likely to have a bad attatch rate. You might be able to direct a customer to the laptop that meets their needs, but when it only has a VGA port, you're not likely to atttach a $300 HDMI cable to the purchase. The more ignorant you are about what they sell, the better your attach rates are going to be as a sales person, because you're more likely to attatch the shiney rather than the applicable. And many Best Buy managers treat their sales staff like staff that work on commission, even though they make an hourly wage. I had a manager once tell a room of applicants of which I was one, that they might have interests, and knowledge, and personality, but the value to the company was how much money they could bring in. Not everyone in the company is like that, but the culture certainly exists in some places.
I only ever shop at Best Buy for two groups of items. 1) DVDs/BluRays/New Video Games - they don't make any profit on those items. A lot of the time when they are on sale, those items are actually loss leaders to get you in the store.
And 2) Any item I need and KNOW is a loss leader, or I can convert into a loss leader by attatching a service plan to lower the original price. Managers will make that deal often, they'll lower the price of the main object so you can affoard a service plan. And then... you can (or at least could in the past, I can't guarentee it now) - with the occasional hassle, return the service plan (or whatever else attatch you had to buy to get the manager to lower the price on that TV or soundsystem or computer) and not the item, and get your money back. You can't do it too often, and it's a strategy best used cycling around a variety of stores, but it's a great way to save money if you have the extra cash or credit floating around for a couple of days.
So pretty much every purchase I've made at Best Buy (and Future Shop - I live in Canada), over the past 2-3 years... since I had that experience in the hiring process and then was treated like crap in my trial week (and then got fired before they gave me my blue vest when I called in 2 hours before my shift, I couldn't make it that day because a relative was in the hospital and I needed to visit them, at which point they told me "If you want to keep working here, you have a decision to make, which is more important, your family or your job" - so - yeah - crazy insane crap) - has lost the company money. The sales people still get paid, the managers still get paid, but the store loses money, and nobody gets bonuses from attatching crap I don't need to stuff I do.
Well, I just checked Word 2010 in a bit more detail, and my results were thus:
1) The equation when entered appeared in the document.xml file as pretty human readable XML data, though with a whole bunch of math tags I didn't understand. However - it didn't appear to be OLE (I could be wrong I suppose)
2) The text in equations themselves in Word 2010 seems pretty tied to the Cambrai Math font, for better or worse, so duplicating symbols exactly in text might be as easy as writing them out in Cambria Math, but at the same time, inserting an equation in Word 2010 is a single keypress, so, for instance, while preparing math homework for my proofs class at university, I don't find it difficult to switch between the two and just insert the equations for every symbol, variable, whatever, because it's just so easy to do...
3) Search COMPLETELY ignores equations. This is frustrating, because for instance, typing some random text like "This math is fun" in an equation doesn't turn up anything for "math", but do the same in the raw XML file and the text is plainly visable. So in the sense that search ignores equations, yeah, it definitely seems to ignore anything enclosed in equation type XML tags, but I'm pretty sure 2010 isn't using OLE at all for equations, at least in Word.
There's never a need for shades of grey. If they did a blu-ray version of TNG they could just skip that episode completely, never release it, and I don't think anyone would even notice.
Unfortunately the problem is that even when RIM brings in hundreds of millions in profits, investors are still the same group petulant babies that use democracy to pad their pockets at the expense of society, and use paper wealth as a replacement for a penis, who say "Damn it! I'm not making as much money as my unrealistic expectations lead me to believe that I should have, hence I will join in this all out media attack on the Berry because I want to be cool and don't care enough to research the companies I'm investing in myself, relying instead on the ocassional single column article in the free newspaper I get everyday to determine my views".
People are aweful. When can something be done about them...
But yes, RIM needs to continue to focus on being the be all and end all of mobile communication, and as far as I've seen, it doesn't look like they're changing that focus. Even with the Playbook, which really should have been marketed as a blackberry accessory at this point, the focus is still clearly on communication. The way it bridges with blackberries is just awesome. But I bet they felt a hell of a lot of pressure to "do something with the QNX purchase" in the "next couple of quarters" because the investors in the tech market are rarely people who understand that taking an extant operating system and developing it in a secure way that seamlessly integrates into extant enterprise environments with the full benefit of the secuirity affoarded the current line of devices isn't a "next couple of quarters" type task. And business reporters certainly don't seem to give a damn about operational details of a company or realities of specific markets.
That may be the case, but the boxes they buy benefit from the economy of scale offered by being able to seperate those components. Every time I go to a computer store, I'd say that within the boxes people can buy, there's a wide variety of CPUs and GPUs in those boxes - in many combinations. This allows customers to buy what they need. For some, that's a moderate processor with moderate graphics, for others, it's a moderate processor with relatively decent graphics (to play blu-ray discs or 1080p flash videos), for gamers they want specific GPUs mixed with specific CPUs to give them the best performance in the games they care about. In professional workstations, you want a workstation GPU that's going to have similarities to consumer GPUs, but will focus on different tasks. For home recording enthousiasts, as they delve deeper into the field, they need to have control over those elements in order to avoid potential conflcts with audio hardware. Some people need to be able to support more than 1 monitor, but others only need 1. Some people need to be able to output to S-Video to connect to an old projector - but might not need that feature in a year, when the projector is set to be upgraded to HDMI, at which point the IT team will want to replace some graphics cards.
Essentially, there are damned good reasons to have things seperate, because computers, as much as they are general purpose machines - aren't actually that generalized to the point where one can say "You only need 3 different kinds of computer." If that were ACTUALLY true, Apple would be doing a lot better than they are in computer sales.
But it's not true. So hopefully intel WON'T push the same thing, because then pretty much every application that matters will have to still support the current model with all of its difficulties, but likewise all of its benefits
Only part of yrademark law is that you aren't allowed to trademark something that is the generic term for that item. For instance, you cannot make a cola flavoured softdrink, and trademark the name "Cola". You can't trademark the word "Windows" in the field of glass panes that fill holes in your walls. THAT'S what the contention is with "App Store" - that it is the generic term for a place to buy "Apps", and that "App" is a generic term that describes the collection of products sold. Amazon would never argue "We were using it first, therefore it is ours to use."
So again to review: 1) Trademarks are only valid within a given limited field. 2) Whoever uses the trademark first, is the person who owns it. They do NOT have to register a trademark. Many trademarks are not registered. These are designated "TM" as opposed to (R). 3) Generic terms cannot be trademarked.
(Of course IANAL, and everything I learned about trademark law was from some highschool classes years ago, and the internet.)
See, my guess is that it would help an already highly ranked result become more attractive because that highly ranked result would become a highly ranked RICH result, and therefore appear to be "special" somehow relative to the other results - so even if your page is ranked 3rd or 4th, if the result has more contextually helpful information presented to the searcher than the highly ranked page, it'll perhaps be more likely to get a click.
So if you had a site that tried to game this system, because the content you are trying to game the system with would be presented to the user BEFORE they click through to your site, if you actually don't provide useful content to turn into a rich result, you won't get the click.
I mean, it really depends on how the search engines actually implement both crawling and displaying this kind of data, but if they are using it to actually provide data to the user at the result page in some rich way, garbage data will be obvious.
I agree that people will try to game the system, but gaming this will be DIFFERENT than gaming meta tags, even if only slightly.
Agreed - the eventual limited machines... "consoles" essentially, though for 'work' instead of 'games', will be quite popular. Which does kind of suck for geeks, because our specialty hardware will no longer benefit from the economies of scale, at least not to the same degree.
Sure, but if that became a problem then I'd imagine that a) It would show up to the user whenever Google, Bing or Yahoo presented a "RIch search result" from a page trying to game the system, and b) The search engines could look at the size of the text by analyzing the markup, and demote pages with a whole bunch of these tags surrounding really tiny text - bonus marks for detecting low contrast or unreadable text by analyzing the markup.
There is also no suggestion that this markup will be the primary factor in ranking search results.
"More is better, except for hidden text" - I think this is the key difference between this and meta tags - the emphasis is on adding markup to text/content you provide to the user, in a way that makes it more quantifiable to search engines. Metatags weren't visable to the end user, and didn't particular concern specific content, but rather pages as a whole. I mean, that isn't to say that this system won't be scammed, but it does at least have a different focus of providing context for extant data, not additional data from which to help create a context.
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to the last point, Apple will NEVER EVER change. The whole "Think Different" mantra is left in the dust by the new "Jobs knows best" theology of Apple.
Yes, because if there's any crowd that has a reputation of being adverse to spending obscene amounts of money on the latest and greatest everything for their PCs it's PC gamers...
XP was old when Vista came out. XP is archaic now. Move on. Fight other battles.
Your 25" screen only has 1080p? What a waste of a screen. You know there are screens with higher resolution, right?
However, in Office 2010, pretty much everything you can see is keyboard accessible, directly.
And hence, I was not responding to
but rather
because I hardly think that providing keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything, not to mention some of the other added features, like the advanced paste options that are quickly accessible, actually demonstrates losing interest in the efficiency of the individual. Rather, I think it demonstrates that they care a lot about that, and the reaction against it had very little to do with efficiency, and much more to do with "new is bad".
Which are hard to generate when all ads are blocked...
Are you kidding me? Things like, oh for example the Ribbon interface in Office 2010 make using just a keyboard even EASIER. EVERYTHING is accessible by keyboard, with key combinations that could be memorized, as opposed to having to navigate menus with the keyboard for anything where there wasn't an assigned keyboard shortcut.
Really? Why wouldn't they stop people from loading a custom OS the same way they did with all iPods released after the 5G video? (You STILL can't load a custom OS on a 6G classic, and it's been years since release).
There are plenty of midi foot controllers, and midi interfaces for computers are cheap. For guitar stuff, you'll definitely want something like that because it'll play better with DAW software than this device will.
MediaMonkey. Works great.
Not to mention that these numbers are still based on the one post of a debated blog that targets marketing people, and uses stats that facebook releases to marketers so that they can target ads, etc. The methodology of the original sources of data is not explained. There is no discussion as to whether privacy modes, ad-block, anything like that might impact those numbers. There is very little analysis as to whether or not there are usage patterns that vary over time with some periodicity. And this is now the what, 4th major article I've read that takes the original blog post from "Inside Facebook", and adds to that absolutely nothing but conjecture and opinion, and a few random personal examples, which everyone on slashdot knows are pretty damned meaningless. I'm getting really sick of this type of article in the tech world - tech journalists should realise by now that it's trivial to follow their sources, and they should be doing a much better job at vetting their sources not just for headline potential but for reasonableness.
I'm actually surprised he didn't just go along with the laptop but try to attatch a whole bunch of crap. Like charging $100 to install free av and anti-malware. My managers for the week I was working would get really angry if we went to the back to get a laptop for a customer if we hadn't managed to upsell on something. To the point where they essentially told us it was better to lose the sale entirely if they didn't attach. So ridiculous.
I must have missed the part where the still working XBOX 360 version doesn't have DRM?
If you're too educated on technology, they're worried you'll be a bad sales person because you're likely to have a bad attatch rate. You might be able to direct a customer to the laptop that meets their needs, but when it only has a VGA port, you're not likely to atttach a $300 HDMI cable to the purchase. The more ignorant you are about what they sell, the better your attach rates are going to be as a sales person, because you're more likely to attatch the shiney rather than the applicable. And many Best Buy managers treat their sales staff like staff that work on commission, even though they make an hourly wage. I had a manager once tell a room of applicants of which I was one, that they might have interests, and knowledge, and personality, but the value to the company was how much money they could bring in. Not everyone in the company is like that, but the culture certainly exists in some places.
I only ever shop at Best Buy for two groups of items. 1) DVDs/BluRays/New Video Games - they don't make any profit on those items. A lot of the time when they are on sale, those items are actually loss leaders to get you in the store.
And 2) Any item I need and KNOW is a loss leader, or I can convert into a loss leader by attatching a service plan to lower the original price. Managers will make that deal often, they'll lower the price of the main object so you can affoard a service plan. And then... you can (or at least could in the past, I can't guarentee it now) - with the occasional hassle, return the service plan (or whatever else attatch you had to buy to get the manager to lower the price on that TV or soundsystem or computer) and not the item, and get your money back. You can't do it too often, and it's a strategy best used cycling around a variety of stores, but it's a great way to save money if you have the extra cash or credit floating around for a couple of days.
So pretty much every purchase I've made at Best Buy (and Future Shop - I live in Canada), over the past 2-3 years... since I had that experience in the hiring process and then was treated like crap in my trial week (and then got fired before they gave me my blue vest when I called in 2 hours before my shift, I couldn't make it that day because a relative was in the hospital and I needed to visit them, at which point they told me "If you want to keep working here, you have a decision to make, which is more important, your family or your job" - so - yeah - crazy insane crap) - has lost the company money. The sales people still get paid, the managers still get paid, but the store loses money, and nobody gets bonuses from attatching crap I don't need to stuff I do.
Well, I just checked Word 2010 in a bit more detail, and my results were thus: 1) The equation when entered appeared in the document.xml file as pretty human readable XML data, though with a whole bunch of math tags I didn't understand. However - it didn't appear to be OLE (I could be wrong I suppose) 2) The text in equations themselves in Word 2010 seems pretty tied to the Cambrai Math font, for better or worse, so duplicating symbols exactly in text might be as easy as writing them out in Cambria Math, but at the same time, inserting an equation in Word 2010 is a single keypress, so, for instance, while preparing math homework for my proofs class at university, I don't find it difficult to switch between the two and just insert the equations for every symbol, variable, whatever, because it's just so easy to do... 3) Search COMPLETELY ignores equations. This is frustrating, because for instance, typing some random text like "This math is fun" in an equation doesn't turn up anything for "math", but do the same in the raw XML file and the text is plainly visable. So in the sense that search ignores equations, yeah, it definitely seems to ignore anything enclosed in equation type XML tags, but I'm pretty sure 2010 isn't using OLE at all for equations, at least in Word.
And yet, the ribbon has been the number one feature that I LOVED about Office 2007 and Office 2010. It lets me get work done SO much faster.
Of course Office 2010 has in document support for equations in Word. And I'm pretty sure 2007 did too.
There's never a need for shades of grey. If they did a blu-ray version of TNG they could just skip that episode completely, never release it, and I don't think anyone would even notice.
Unfortunately the problem is that even when RIM brings in hundreds of millions in profits, investors are still the same group petulant babies that use democracy to pad their pockets at the expense of society, and use paper wealth as a replacement for a penis, who say "Damn it! I'm not making as much money as my unrealistic expectations lead me to believe that I should have, hence I will join in this all out media attack on the Berry because I want to be cool and don't care enough to research the companies I'm investing in myself, relying instead on the ocassional single column article in the free newspaper I get everyday to determine my views". People are aweful. When can something be done about them... But yes, RIM needs to continue to focus on being the be all and end all of mobile communication, and as far as I've seen, it doesn't look like they're changing that focus. Even with the Playbook, which really should have been marketed as a blackberry accessory at this point, the focus is still clearly on communication. The way it bridges with blackberries is just awesome. But I bet they felt a hell of a lot of pressure to "do something with the QNX purchase" in the "next couple of quarters" because the investors in the tech market are rarely people who understand that taking an extant operating system and developing it in a secure way that seamlessly integrates into extant enterprise environments with the full benefit of the secuirity affoarded the current line of devices isn't a "next couple of quarters" type task. And business reporters certainly don't seem to give a damn about operational details of a company or realities of specific markets.
The Bold 9000 had a wonderful keyboard, and the 9900 is bringing back that keyboard.
That may be the case, but the boxes they buy benefit from the economy of scale offered by being able to seperate those components. Every time I go to a computer store, I'd say that within the boxes people can buy, there's a wide variety of CPUs and GPUs in those boxes - in many combinations. This allows customers to buy what they need. For some, that's a moderate processor with moderate graphics, for others, it's a moderate processor with relatively decent graphics (to play blu-ray discs or 1080p flash videos), for gamers they want specific GPUs mixed with specific CPUs to give them the best performance in the games they care about. In professional workstations, you want a workstation GPU that's going to have similarities to consumer GPUs, but will focus on different tasks. For home recording enthousiasts, as they delve deeper into the field, they need to have control over those elements in order to avoid potential conflcts with audio hardware. Some people need to be able to support more than 1 monitor, but others only need 1. Some people need to be able to output to S-Video to connect to an old projector - but might not need that feature in a year, when the projector is set to be upgraded to HDMI, at which point the IT team will want to replace some graphics cards.
Essentially, there are damned good reasons to have things seperate, because computers, as much as they are general purpose machines - aren't actually that generalized to the point where one can say "You only need 3 different kinds of computer." If that were ACTUALLY true, Apple would be doing a lot better than they are in computer sales.
But it's not true. So hopefully intel WON'T push the same thing, because then pretty much every application that matters will have to still support the current model with all of its difficulties, but likewise all of its benefits
Only part of yrademark law is that you aren't allowed to trademark something that is the generic term for that item. For instance, you cannot make a cola flavoured softdrink, and trademark the name "Cola". You can't trademark the word "Windows" in the field of glass panes that fill holes in your walls. THAT'S what the contention is with "App Store" - that it is the generic term for a place to buy "Apps", and that "App" is a generic term that describes the collection of products sold. Amazon would never argue "We were using it first, therefore it is ours to use."
So again to review: 1) Trademarks are only valid within a given limited field. 2) Whoever uses the trademark first, is the person who owns it. They do NOT have to register a trademark. Many trademarks are not registered. These are designated "TM" as opposed to (R). 3) Generic terms cannot be trademarked.
(Of course IANAL, and everything I learned about trademark law was from some highschool classes years ago, and the internet.)
See, my guess is that it would help an already highly ranked result become more attractive because that highly ranked result would become a highly ranked RICH result, and therefore appear to be "special" somehow relative to the other results - so even if your page is ranked 3rd or 4th, if the result has more contextually helpful information presented to the searcher than the highly ranked page, it'll perhaps be more likely to get a click. So if you had a site that tried to game this system, because the content you are trying to game the system with would be presented to the user BEFORE they click through to your site, if you actually don't provide useful content to turn into a rich result, you won't get the click. I mean, it really depends on how the search engines actually implement both crawling and displaying this kind of data, but if they are using it to actually provide data to the user at the result page in some rich way, garbage data will be obvious. I agree that people will try to game the system, but gaming this will be DIFFERENT than gaming meta tags, even if only slightly.
Agreed - the eventual limited machines... "consoles" essentially, though for 'work' instead of 'games', will be quite popular. Which does kind of suck for geeks, because our specialty hardware will no longer benefit from the economies of scale, at least not to the same degree.
Sure, but if that became a problem then I'd imagine that a) It would show up to the user whenever Google, Bing or Yahoo presented a "RIch search result" from a page trying to game the system, and b) The search engines could look at the size of the text by analyzing the markup, and demote pages with a whole bunch of these tags surrounding really tiny text - bonus marks for detecting low contrast or unreadable text by analyzing the markup.
There is also no suggestion that this markup will be the primary factor in ranking search results.
"More is better, except for hidden text" - I think this is the key difference between this and meta tags - the emphasis is on adding markup to text/content you provide to the user, in a way that makes it more quantifiable to search engines. Metatags weren't visable to the end user, and didn't particular concern specific content, but rather pages as a whole. I mean, that isn't to say that this system won't be scammed, but it does at least have a different focus of providing context for extant data, not additional data from which to help create a context.