I've seen and worked with Vista also. Here were my impressions: - losing work has not been a problem for me since W2K.* - I've also never had trouble finding my files. - It is uglier and comes with a bunch more crap I have to turn off - I spend very little time working with "the system." I use applications. Overall, I find that applications and the OS, from 95 through XP, look pretty consistent already.
So my conclusion is the same as what the summary says Dvorak's is**: it'll make MS some money, 'cause it'll be on every OEM box, but otherwise no one will give a shit either way.
The real question is what will MS do next. Windows has gotten so mind-bogglingly huge that I don't see how they can possibly do anything but toss it all, start from scrartch, and do a whole new OS with Vista running in a VM for compatability. Apple did this when they went to OS X six years ago. MS should have started doing this the day after XP shipped. Now they're very far behind.
It has been said many times before, but I think it's really true right now: Apple is doing some great stuff, and MS is playing catch-up, and losing. Badly. Look at everything that Apple does with as little as 16 MB VRAM, then ask yourself what you get from MS with your 128 MB. Just like a dork trying to be cool***, MS is copying every feature Apple has put out in the last five years, and doing it worse, and making it uglier. Look at the 3 modes Expose has**** and compare that to the ONE thing Aero offers--that dopey 3D window scrolling thingie. Really, which looks more productive: the ability to see every window in an application or the whole system with a single keystroke or mouse motion, or something that looks like a special effect from a late-1990s movie? It's plain to see that MS knows the words but not the music.
On a related note, the ribbon in Office looks decent, but not mind-blowing. It's a little better than menus, 'cause more stuff is shown at once, but you still need to dig a bit to find what you need. The live preview of formatting changes, rather than menu -> change -> apply -> repeat, is a bigger gain, but not much different from what Photoshop and other apps have had for a decade plus, so no points for innovation there.
* even so, I think Leopard's Time Machine is an absolutely great feature. ** no, I didn't RTFA. *** no offense, fellow Slashdotters. **** I'll grant you that MS beat Apple to the "Show desktop" punch by about a decade, and they had alt-tab first, too. BTW, I never use Expose--just command-tab and command-H.
"From the article: 'We were not created to sit down for long hours...' "
Um... so, what are we supposed to do all day long? Stand? Walk? Lay? I'm pretty sure the idea of sitting came about from the first cavemen who noticed that sitting on rocks* made it possible to sea each other, and their surroundings, better than when they were laying down, and more comfortably and easily than standing. I think this is a flawed premise--nothing is "ideal" to do all day long. I get sore from laying for a long time, and standing and walking are too much work to do for hours at a time.
Wood is a hard material to join really well... Because it's got grain and fiber, you need a lot of bearing surface to avoid the connector pulling out. Screws do great at that, but have less shear resistance, and lower cost screws are too brittle and crack right off in shear (and sometimes in tension). Nails are great at shear and are made out of alloys that rarely crack, but can pull right out.
So... why not alternate? And maybe use 50% more connectors overall? I.e., instead of 100 nails or 100 screws, use 75 nails and 75 screws. Actually, 60 of each would probably do nicely. Yes, I know that costs more, but it would seem to give the best of both worlds if you're in a position to care more about quality more than costs. The screws supply the tensile strength and the nails supply the shear strength.
I see that lots of people comment the current office versions are good enough - indeed they are to the casual user who sparingly uses them. However to the power users and developer community, they've been pretty lousy till now.
I disagree on your distinction between 'casual' and 'power' user--I know plenty of people who can make Excel walk, talk, and run a 3-minute mile--but that aside, the current version of Office (or 2000, or 97) is "good enough" for literally 95%+ of the people out there. Maybe 98%. Maybe 99%.
The ribbon UI may have its uses; but I guess its just a gimmick.
That was my first thought too. I started using the Beta, expecting to hate it, but it's not bad, and in some ways, it's really better than menus. The best things about menus are that they're compact (less and less important every year--I don't like waste, but c'mon, I've got 1600x1200 on my desktop now) and that you're used to them. The ribbons are actually not bad.
The big improvement in Office for me is live previews of formatting. I don't format stuff often, but when I do, it has to be juuuuust so, and it really is a pain to go menu -> palett -> OK -> crap, that's not it -> repeat.
That said, I'm planning to stick with Office 97 on Windows and Office X on a Mac for as long as the hardware and OSs I use support them. And I'll continue to try OpenOffice every year or so until they come out with a version I like, but unfortunately they seem to have rocketed past ever putting out a nice release--they started rough and have moved straight to bloated. They seem to be trying to copy the entire corpus of MS Office while also adding their own features. KOffice looks pretty nice & clean from what little I've used it, but I don't use Linux as a desktop.
"One of the biggest challenges... is to fight that perception that old versions of software are good enough."
He misspelled 'fact.'
I, like many users, am coming up on my 10 year anniversary of using Office 97. I wouldn't be surprised to find myself still using it in 2017. All it'll do is get quicker and quicker on newer hardware.
I'm a huge fan of SVG. Not because it's a replacement for Flash, but because it's just XML, which means you can create data-based SVG images "out of thin air" with PHP or the scripting language of your choice. But now that Adobe has bought Macromedia (and with it, Flash) it looks like they're going to give up on SVG. I'm sure their apps will let you save as SVG, but they're going to quit supporting the viewer on 1/1/2008. And theirs was the dominant viewer. Mozilla has native support, and Safari is getting it, but that's nowhere near the adoption rate of MSIE or Flash.*
I was really hoping that they'd go the other way--that with the purchase of Macromedia, they'd roll SVG support into the hugely popular Flash plug-in. I wish I were wrong, but my guess is that Adobe, just like MS or anyone else, would rather back a proprietary solution (that they own) than an open one.
* and, the funny thing is, the MSIE/Adobe combination--on Mac and Windows--was the best. You could print a page with lots of embedded SVG images, and it worked! Safari with Adobe's plugin, or Mozilla with the plugin or natively, would print each image on a separate page, if at all. (Though I haven't tested FF 2.0 yet.) But MSIE/Adobe printed just as you saw on screen.
Sweet! Are they hiring? The 2.8 GHz/WinXP/Office XP Dell I got at work is slower than the PIII/933/Win2k/Office2k Dell it replaced. I'd take the old one back if I could.
Seriously, Microsoft is its own worst competition. I'm still on w2k/Office97 at home. The new live preview in Office 2007 is nice, but I don't format things that much so it's not that compelling of a feature.
50 quintillion atomic bombs? Reminds me of the Seinfeld bit:
Why do we even use the term 'horsepower'? Is that to further humiliate horses? The space-shuttle rockets have 20 million horsepower. Is there any point in still comparing it... to the horses? Any chance of going back to using rockets with horses, trying to keep track of how many we're gonna need? "Hey, horse. There's a rocket engine that broke down. Can you get 20 million friends together really fast?"
Part of the problem is that fingerprinting doesn't work when the bots are programmed to create unique messages. When you aren't paying for the CPU time, why send 1,000,000 identical, easily-fingerprintable messages when you can send 1,000,000 unique messages?
And as for natural language parsing, a circa-1986 grammar checker would be fine, except for one thing--lots of spams now just have a paragraph or two from Project Gutenberg texts.
My theory is that the amount of spam will *finally* start to decline over the next 5-8 years as all those unpatched Windows boxes finally start dropping off the Net. XP-SP2 has been pretty good, I assume Vista will be at least as good, and assuming there are no major holes in those--I know there will be some flaws, but not the gaping holes we saw in 98-XP--things will finally start to turn around over the course of the next decade.
Woo hoo! Email will be usable again in 2016! Just like it was in 1996!
Furthermore, its security problems had very little to do with these "hooks" aside from the fact that since it was used by 95% of the browsing public it became a great attack vector for Windows.
Are you really saying that the primary reason that IE had so many problems with spyware and other malicious code is the fact that it is so popular? That it had no other notable flaws that made it, say, easier to exploit than anything else?
I suppose it's not so much "Browsers have been running in protected mode on Linux for years" as much as it is "Browsers in Linux have never had deep hooks into the OS in the first place." Better?
Great. Just in case I wasn't already waste enough time on YouTube, I now have all these ads to look at. Eds: please rename this thread The Slashdot Guide to Wasting Time on YouTube.
Bug Report ------------------- Problem: Apparent memory leak Symptoms: Browser goes slow Steps to reproduce: 1) Launch Firefox 2) Use images.google.com to search for porn for 6 days straight Possible workaround: Don't leave a dozen windows open with 30 tabs each
> Though they do now have the ability to catch the really stupid ones it seems.
We had a sliding screen door that didn't work too well. My wife left it half-open one day. I asked her how many flies she thought that would keep out: a) all of them b) half of them c) none of them d) just the dumb ones
Considering that the icon has been used once before this year (also by kdawson) and only 4 times in 2005, maybe they just want to use it some so it doesn't rust or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen and worked with Vista also. Here were my impressions:
- losing work has not been a problem for me since W2K.*
- I've also never had trouble finding my files.
- It is uglier and comes with a bunch more crap I have to turn off
- I spend very little time working with "the system." I use applications. Overall, I find that applications and the OS, from 95 through XP, look pretty consistent already.
So my conclusion is the same as what the summary says Dvorak's is**: it'll make MS some money, 'cause it'll be on every OEM box, but otherwise no one will give a shit either way.
The real question is what will MS do next. Windows has gotten so mind-bogglingly huge that I don't see how they can possibly do anything but toss it all, start from scrartch, and do a whole new OS with Vista running in a VM for compatability. Apple did this when they went to OS X six years ago. MS should have started doing this the day after XP shipped. Now they're very far behind.
It has been said many times before, but I think it's really true right now: Apple is doing some great stuff, and MS is playing catch-up, and losing. Badly. Look at everything that Apple does with as little as 16 MB VRAM, then ask yourself what you get from MS with your 128 MB. Just like a dork trying to be cool***, MS is copying every feature Apple has put out in the last five years, and doing it worse, and making it uglier. Look at the 3 modes Expose has**** and compare that to the ONE thing Aero offers--that dopey 3D window scrolling thingie. Really, which looks more productive: the ability to see every window in an application or the whole system with a single keystroke or mouse motion, or something that looks like a special effect from a late-1990s movie? It's plain to see that MS knows the words but not the music.
On a related note, the ribbon in Office looks decent, but not mind-blowing. It's a little better than menus, 'cause more stuff is shown at once, but you still need to dig a bit to find what you need. The live preview of formatting changes, rather than menu -> change -> apply -> repeat, is a bigger gain, but not much different from what Photoshop and other apps have had for a decade plus, so no points for innovation there.
* even so, I think Leopard's Time Machine is an absolutely great feature.
** no, I didn't RTFA.
*** no offense, fellow Slashdotters.
**** I'll grant you that MS beat Apple to the "Show desktop" punch by about a decade, and they had alt-tab first, too. BTW, I never use Expose--just command-tab and command-H.
"From the article: 'We were not created to sit down for long hours...' "
Um... so, what are we supposed to do all day long? Stand? Walk? Lay? I'm pretty sure the idea of sitting came about from the first cavemen who noticed that sitting on rocks* made it possible to sea each other, and their surroundings, better than when they were laying down, and more comfortably and easily than standing. I think this is a flawed premise--nothing is "ideal" to do all day long. I get sore from laying for a long time, and standing and walking are too much work to do for hours at a time.
* or sitting down cross-legged, or squatting
Where is all this new wealth accruing?
You have to ask? Hint: it ain't us.
Wood is a hard material to join really well... Because it's got grain and fiber, you need a lot of bearing surface to avoid the connector pulling out. Screws do great at that, but have less shear resistance, and lower cost screws are too brittle and crack right off in shear (and sometimes in tension). Nails are great at shear and are made out of alloys that rarely crack, but can pull right out.
So... why not alternate? And maybe use 50% more connectors overall? I.e., instead of 100 nails or 100 screws, use 75 nails and 75 screws. Actually, 60 of each would probably do nicely. Yes, I know that costs more, but it would seem to give the best of both worlds if you're in a position to care more about quality more than costs. The screws supply the tensile strength and the nails supply the shear strength.
>> LCDs also burn in.
> No they don't.
Yes they do. Want to come to my office and look at some nice 20" LCDs with Apple menus burned into them?
I see that lots of people comment the current office versions are good enough - indeed they are to the casual user who sparingly uses them. However to the power users and developer community, they've been pretty lousy till now.
I disagree on your distinction between 'casual' and 'power' user--I know plenty of people who can make Excel walk, talk, and run a 3-minute mile--but that aside, the current version of Office (or 2000, or 97) is "good enough" for literally 95%+ of the people out there. Maybe 98%. Maybe 99%.
The ribbon UI may have its uses; but I guess its just a gimmick.
That was my first thought too. I started using the Beta, expecting to hate it, but it's not bad, and in some ways, it's really better than menus. The best things about menus are that they're compact (less and less important every year--I don't like waste, but c'mon, I've got 1600x1200 on my desktop now) and that you're used to them. The ribbons are actually not bad.
The big improvement in Office for me is live previews of formatting. I don't format stuff often, but when I do, it has to be juuuuust so, and it really is a pain to go menu -> palett -> OK -> crap, that's not it -> repeat.
That said, I'm planning to stick with Office 97 on Windows and Office X on a Mac for as long as the hardware and OSs I use support them. And I'll continue to try OpenOffice every year or so until they come out with a version I like, but unfortunately they seem to have rocketed past ever putting out a nice release--they started rough and have moved straight to bloated. They seem to be trying to copy the entire corpus of MS Office while also adding their own features. KOffice looks pretty nice & clean from what little I've used it, but I don't use Linux as a desktop.
"One of the biggest challenges... is to fight that perception that old versions of software are good enough."
He misspelled 'fact.'
I, like many users, am coming up on my 10 year anniversary of using Office 97. I wouldn't be surprised to find myself still using it in 2017. All it'll do is get quicker and quicker on newer hardware.
I'm a huge fan of SVG. Not because it's a replacement for Flash, but because it's just XML, which means you can create data-based SVG images "out of thin air" with PHP or the scripting language of your choice. But now that Adobe has bought Macromedia (and with it, Flash) it looks like they're going to give up on SVG. I'm sure their apps will let you save as SVG, but they're going to quit supporting the viewer on 1/1/2008. And theirs was the dominant viewer. Mozilla has native support, and Safari is getting it, but that's nowhere near the adoption rate of MSIE or Flash.*
I was really hoping that they'd go the other way--that with the purchase of Macromedia, they'd roll SVG support into the hugely popular Flash plug-in. I wish I were wrong, but my guess is that Adobe, just like MS or anyone else, would rather back a proprietary solution (that they own) than an open one.
* and, the funny thing is, the MSIE/Adobe combination--on Mac and Windows--was the best. You could print a page with lots of embedded SVG images, and it worked! Safari with Adobe's plugin, or Mozilla with the plugin or natively, would print each image on a separate page, if at all. (Though I haven't tested FF 2.0 yet.) But MSIE/Adobe printed just as you saw on screen.
Sweet! Are they hiring? The 2.8 GHz/WinXP/Office XP Dell I got at work is slower than the PIII/933/Win2k/Office2k Dell it replaced. I'd take the old one back if I could.
Seriously, Microsoft is its own worst competition. I'm still on w2k/Office97 at home. The new live preview in Office 2007 is nice, but I don't format things that much so it's not that compelling of a feature.
50 quintillion atomic bombs? Reminds me of the Seinfeld bit:
Why do we even use the term 'horsepower'?
Is that to further humiliate horses?
The space-shuttle rockets have 20 million horsepower.
Is there any point in still comparing it... to the horses?
Any chance of going back to using rockets with horses, trying to keep track of how many we're gonna need?
"Hey, horse. There's a rocket engine that broke down. Can you get 20 million friends together really fast?"
Can someone write a greasemonkey thingie so I never have to see 'itsatrap' again? And maybe strip out 'fud, notfud' as well?
Actually, there are protections in place, but Aggressive Botnet Activities are Behind this Dupe Increase. You just can't fight numbers!
the Web Porn initiative has worked out amazingly well. Good to see him moving on to new challenges.
Part of the problem is that fingerprinting doesn't work when the bots are programmed to create unique messages. When you aren't paying for the CPU time, why send 1,000,000 identical, easily-fingerprintable messages when you can send 1,000,000 unique messages?
And as for natural language parsing, a circa-1986 grammar checker would be fine, except for one thing--lots of spams now just have a paragraph or two from Project Gutenberg texts.
My theory is that the amount of spam will *finally* start to decline over the next 5-8 years as all those unpatched Windows boxes finally start dropping off the Net. XP-SP2 has been pretty good, I assume Vista will be at least as good, and assuming there are no major holes in those--I know there will be some flaws, but not the gaping holes we saw in 98-XP--things will finally start to turn around over the course of the next decade.
Woo hoo! Email will be usable again in 2016! Just like it was in 1996!
Furthermore, its security problems had very little to do with these "hooks" aside from the fact that since it was used by 95% of the browsing public it became a great attack vector for Windows.
Are you really saying that the primary reason that IE had so many problems with spyware and other malicious code is the fact that it is so popular? That it had no other notable flaws that made it, say, easier to exploit than anything else?
I suppose it's not so much "Browsers have been running in protected mode on Linux for years" as much as it is "Browsers in Linux have never had deep hooks into the OS in the first place." Better?
Our top story tonight: Those clowns in congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.
Wiki-based script? Sweet! At least it'll have lots of nudity!
Earth Abides, 1949
Great. Just in case I wasn't already waste enough time on YouTube, I now have all these ads to look at. Eds: please rename this thread The Slashdot Guide to Wasting Time on YouTube.
Bug Report
-------------------
Problem: Apparent memory leak
Symptoms: Browser goes slow
Steps to reproduce:
1) Launch Firefox
2) Use images.google.com to search for porn for 6 days straight
Possible workaround: Don't leave a dozen windows open with 30 tabs each
> Though they do now have the ability to catch the really stupid ones it seems.
We had a sliding screen door that didn't work too well. My wife left it half-open one day. I asked her how many flies she thought that would keep out:
a) all of them
b) half of them
c) none of them
d) just the dumb ones
Um... you know you don't *have* to listen to him if you buy the service, right?
Considering that the icon has been used once before this year (also by kdawson) and only 4 times in 2005, maybe they just want to use it some so it doesn't rust or something.
kdawson: this is what the big E means.
In case the clever mods aren't out in force today, I just wanted to let you know that at least one person got your Highlights reference. :-)