All this will really do is decrease your user-base. If I download some source and it's lacking the necessary scripts to compile and install the thing, I move on and find another solution that does what I need. I don't have time to write my own make files to get the thing working.
People launched apps from start button once, and once it is launched they pin it to the task bar.
This is kind of the point, but you don't seem to get it. The start menu is like a swiss army knife. It has 100 different functions, and does none of them well. It's kind of a search area, kind of contains all your programs but they're unorganized, it's another place to pin programs but not too many, it's a place to launch explorer windows but only specific ones and not too many, and it's a place to manage sessions. And you're right, the data is showing people just access it to find items to pin. So what good is it doing all those things?
In terms of your food analogy, it's like using a large spork to serve the pasta. Microsoft is replacing it with a fork and a spoon, each which do their job better separately. You can still access all your apps. You can still pin them from the start screen, that hasn't changed. But there's a separate search window that is more useful. Ways to launch explorer are redundant in the start screen, but there are new ways to launch handy items by right clicking in the lower left corner.
In terms of your programming analogy, it's the difference between spaghetti code all piled into a main function, and separating it out into different functions and classes.
If you're on a laptop or keyboard made in the last 17 years, there is a button specifically designed to access the start menu. If you buy a new tablet, there will be a windows key specifically on the tablet that access the start menu. If you're using a mouse you have the option to click in the same place you've always clicked.
As far as discoverability, you might have to learn about it before you can use it. But that's no different from invisible UI elements like context menus. Are right click context menus UI disasters because you have to know about them before you can use them? And what about the original start menu? Users didn't know what that did either. They put a label on it and even popped up a tutorial in Win 95 on how to use it and what it did. Today, after everyone is used to it, we're treating it like some kind of pinnacle in UI design.
In this case, Microsoft put it in the trunk, under the spare tire.
Yes, because clicking in the same spot where the start button used to be, or pressing the same key that always accessed the start menu, is exactly the same to putting it in the trunk under a spare tire. Very apt analogy.
That was a terrible system, since to move to an item, you had to move over other item which would inadvertantly open them up, covering the item you were really going for, so you'd have to do this roundabout path with your mouse to close the window you opened accidentally. Or the other case is when you're drilling down the start menu to try to get to an item 3 layers deep, if you moved off the 15px target area it would open up a new item so you had to start over again. Very frustrating to people who do not have good eyesight or hand dexterity.
For a desktop, the power button will do that. For laptops, I never turn them off; they always go to sleep mode. For any other time there's ctrl+alt+del.
The Start menu was at least somewhat intuitive to find buried settings in Control Panel or seldom used programs.
And how is the new solution not? There is a new applications list for seldomly used programs. Maybe you're confused because the new start menu isn't supposed to just be a place for things you never use. That's kind of what this entire article is about; they're trying to turn it into something that you actually use instead of being a closet for all your old junk that you only look through when you need to find your tennis racket you haven't used in 3 years.
Right, because Microsoft hires exactly 0 competent people who know what a representative sample is. I'm sure they have dozens of different methods to collect this data, one of which is the automated usage data built within Windows. I know in one blog post they addressed concerns that corporate users don't have this on, and therefore were not represented in the sample. Microsoft responded that they have other methods for collecting data from corporate users.
Hello, let me introduce myself. I do not use the start button. I access the start menu for two reasons: to access the search function (95% of the time) and to access a little used program (5% of the time, maybe once a month). Otherwise, my complete workflow is pinned to my task bar. I even access explorer from there and from keyboard shortcuts.
Windows 8 has completely changed that, and I'm thankful. There is a separate, more useful screen for searching and accessing little used apps. Now the start screen is much more useful, and I have a reason to actually access it.
If you don't like it, you have many options including not upgrading to Windows 8, or applying what will most certainly be a large array of hacks, tweaks, and UI modifications to get windows working the way you want it to, just as there have always exists in Windows.
"Why should I pay an extra $600 for a tablet PC when I can use a laptop just as easily?"
Anytime someone asked me that I'd respond with "Type for me this equation." or "Type for me this diagram." I majored in physics, so about 90% of what I had to put in my notes was some form of drawing or symbol that didn't exist on the keyboard. For the other 10%, handwriting served me just fine. It's true not many apps were geared for touch specifically, but digital note taking was the definition of a killer app for me, it didn't matter.
One note for iOS has about 10% of the features that make the real One Note the killer app that it is, most important of which are the myriad digital ink capabilities. The iOS app is more along the lines of a viewer than anything else.
Sorry, you're not up to date on your technology. One of the tablets I owned was a Dell Latitude XT, which has dual digitizers: one for pen input and one for capacitive multitouch touch input. When the pen was near the screen, it switched off the touch input so there was no issue with palm reading. The Microsoft stated the Surface Pro will have the same technology.
You can actually buy relatively inexpensive devices (smart pens or smart paper) to accomplish this
Not quite. My notes were very elaborate in college. I digitzed all my textbooks, and would have them open during class. Then when we reviewed readings or other information I would paste charts into my notes and annotate them, as others were busy needlessly recreating the visuals. I also tagged all my equations, theorems, and definitions and could compile them into formula sheets while I was studying with the click of a button.
Yes! I used One Note for all my note taking through college. Best piece of software for tablets out there. Sadly, nothing compares in the current generation of content consumption tablets. Surface will change all that though.
Every single one of those points, except the point that the iPad has limited multitasking capabilities (and that's somehow a good thing in the classroom), applies to laptops.
SD Unified Purchases 26,000 iPads For District Students:
At 30 kids a classroom, they could have afforded to give 866 teachers a much needed $17k raise with the money they spent on this technology push that will end up abandoned in 3 years. Better yet they could hire new teachers. Watch as those iPads become outdated and can't run the latest OS with the latest and greatest educational apps in 3 years time. Oh, and that's another $260,000 in a couple years to replace the batteries as they go. How often do you have to replace the batteries on a textbook?
That's what a stylus is for. You know, the input device missing from 99% of "tablets" these days. I had a Tablet PC all the way through college, and I used it for every class. Still have all of my notes, and still reference them in my PhD work, which is easy since they're completely digitized and search able. Can't do that with Pen and paper. Can't do that with iPad either.
Thanks for the inflammatory headline Slashdot. According to TFA, this is what he said:
Q. Tablet computers are big these days. The Surface tablet was just released by Microsoft last week, and iPads are all over campuses, but it doesn't sound like your approach has been to give devices to students and hope things change that way. What do you think needs to happen for factors like tablets to really make a difference? Or is that not even part of the equation?
A. Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.
And he's RIGHT. We've seen this time and time again: some school gets some tech grant and goes on a tech spending spree on crap that in the end do nothing to aid in education. When I was in school, we had initiatives like smart boards, which were expensive and broke so much, teachers ended up using them as expensive whiteboards. Then we had laptop carts, where you trucked around this 10 ton cart to classrooms where none of the laptops were charged all the way and they never worked. And when they did work, they added nothing that a trip to the computer lab would have done.
So just giving students tablets isn't going to work. They'll be fun little novel gadgets, but students need to do real work which includes writing, typing, and other things you cannot do with your fingers. I used a tablet PC throughout college, and it was the best technology investment I made. It was one of those convertible tablets that switched from keyboard mode to laptop mode, and a had a stylus for writing notes. Classmates were constantly begging me for copies of my notes, since I was able to annotate book excerpts and capture chalboard derivations easier than they were able to with traditional PnP. Then the iPad came out and everyone said it was a godsend. I bought one in the hopes of replacing my tablet PC, but I was sorely disappointed at its capabilities. From a student's perspective, it was nothing more than a toy compared to my tablet PC, and I think that's what Bill Gates is getting at.
The submitter seems to think that Bill's words contradict Microsoft's efforts with the Surface, but the Surface is everything I wanted the iPad to be. It can run serious note taking software like One Note. It can *truly* multi task applications. It has digital pen input. It has a slim attachable keyboard. And when I'm at a desk I can connect it to a monitor and keyboard and use Office, Matlab, etc. as many students need to.
The NPD Group has reported that Apple is market share at retail store fronts for the first quarter in the U.S. is 66 percent, but only for those PCs costing more than US$1,000. For all PCs, it is 14%.
You used 4 qualifiers (bolded) to find a niche subsegment where Apple performed well. Moreover, your "report" is from 2008, before Windows 7 was released. Since then, Microsoft has sold 600 million copies of Windows 7, whereas Apple estimates only 66 million people use Macs in total. The PC market is fantastically huge, which is what makes it such an appealing target for malware.
According to Apple, there are only 66 million Mac users out there. This is in contrast to Microsoft, who sold over 600 million copies of Windows 7 alone, which does not count everyone still out there on XP, which is probably another couple hundred million. Let me put it this way: more people use Windows Vista than use a Mac.
It is precisely those unequivocal words like "nothing" that get people into trouble.
I like how you deride him for making a blanket statement, and then go on to do just that yourself. Are you just being ironic? The "architecture" is a sweeping generalization which you need to qualify. What about the "architecture"? What aspects?
The intelligence is not only in the brain, but it is also in the architecture of the system, including mechanical infrastructure.
This is very true. Some other examples are salmon, which swim upstream even when they're dead. Their bodies are designed in such a way that when a current moves past them they create a swimming motion and move up against the current.
Another example are albatross. They glide for hundreds of miles without flapping their wings, and their heart rate doesn't rise much above their resting heart rate. They do this by somehow sensing wind gradients and exploiting them to gain energy, and their wings are the perfect length/width (very long and skinny) to be the ideal gliding mechanism.
Instead, the whole system is build anew, from a scratch, intelligently.
That would be nice, but it's very impractical. For instance, I can build a robot car *today* that can drive perfectly on a road network without crashing into anything and doing it as efficiently as possible. That's easy.... the problem is designing and implementing the road network across the entire world. So we have a choice, build a robot to fit our current environment or build an environment to fit our robots. I think the former is more cost effective even though the realization of such a machine is further out.
It's hard to say which one is correct. Look how far we've come in the last 50 years.We went from computers the size of a room, to computers on every desktop to computers in every pocket. Technological capabilities definitely are increasing at an exponential rate, and the capabilities of robots are closely correlated with these developments. 50 years ago the best robots relied on sonar, then with the development of LIDAR they became several orders of magnitude more accurate. The invention of GPS also took place in the last 50 years, along with MEMS technology for tiny inertial measurement systems embedded in practically every robot today. Even the proliferation of the Microsoft Kinect represents a similar leap forward in widespread technological capacity of robots.
So you see, with each technological innovation, the capabilities of robots don't increment slightly; they jump to a new height altogether. I don't know if anything like a "sigularity" will happen in the next 50 years, but I suspect the difference capabilities of robots from 2012 to 2062 will be much greater than the difference between robots in 2012 and 1962.
Disclaimer: I am also someone working to implement "the singularity"
Slashdot Mirror
All this will really do is decrease your user-base. If I download some source and it's lacking the necessary scripts to compile and install the thing, I move on and find another solution that does what I need. I don't have time to write my own make files to get the thing working.
People launched apps from start button once, and once it is launched they pin it to the task bar.
This is kind of the point, but you don't seem to get it. The start menu is like a swiss army knife. It has 100 different functions, and does none of them well. It's kind of a search area, kind of contains all your programs but they're unorganized, it's another place to pin programs but not too many, it's a place to launch explorer windows but only specific ones and not too many, and it's a place to manage sessions. And you're right, the data is showing people just access it to find items to pin. So what good is it doing all those things?
In terms of your food analogy, it's like using a large spork to serve the pasta. Microsoft is replacing it with a fork and a spoon, each which do their job better separately. You can still access all your apps. You can still pin them from the start screen, that hasn't changed. But there's a separate search window that is more useful. Ways to launch explorer are redundant in the start screen, but there are new ways to launch handy items by right clicking in the lower left corner.
In terms of your programming analogy, it's the difference between spaghetti code all piled into a main function, and separating it out into different functions and classes.
It's just another way to access the start menu.
If you're on a laptop or keyboard made in the last 17 years, there is a button specifically designed to access the start menu. If you buy a new tablet, there will be a windows key specifically on the tablet that access the start menu. If you're using a mouse you have the option to click in the same place you've always clicked.
As far as discoverability, you might have to learn about it before you can use it. But that's no different from invisible UI elements like context menus. Are right click context menus UI disasters because you have to know about them before you can use them? And what about the original start menu? Users didn't know what that did either. They put a label on it and even popped up a tutorial in Win 95 on how to use it and what it did. Today, after everyone is used to it, we're treating it like some kind of pinnacle in UI design.
In this case, Microsoft put it in the trunk, under the spare tire.
Yes, because clicking in the same spot where the start button used to be, or pressing the same key that always accessed the start menu, is exactly the same to putting it in the trunk under a spare tire. Very apt analogy.
That was a terrible system, since to move to an item, you had to move over other item which would inadvertantly open them up, covering the item you were really going for, so you'd have to do this roundabout path with your mouse to close the window you opened accidentally. Or the other case is when you're drilling down the start menu to try to get to an item 3 layers deep, if you moved off the 15px target area it would open up a new item so you had to start over again. Very frustrating to people who do not have good eyesight or hand dexterity.
For a desktop, the power button will do that. For laptops, I never turn them off; they always go to sleep mode. For any other time there's ctrl+alt+del.
The Start menu was at least somewhat intuitive to find buried settings in Control Panel or seldom used programs.
And how is the new solution not? There is a new applications list for seldomly used programs. Maybe you're confused because the new start menu isn't supposed to just be a place for things you never use. That's kind of what this entire article is about; they're trying to turn it into something that you actually use instead of being a closet for all your old junk that you only look through when you need to find your tennis racket you haven't used in 3 years.
Right, because Microsoft hires exactly 0 competent people who know what a representative sample is. I'm sure they have dozens of different methods to collect this data, one of which is the automated usage data built within Windows. I know in one blog post they addressed concerns that corporate users don't have this on, and therefore were not represented in the sample. Microsoft responded that they have other methods for collecting data from corporate users.
Hello, let me introduce myself. I do not use the start button. I access the start menu for two reasons: to access the search function (95% of the time) and to access a little used program (5% of the time, maybe once a month). Otherwise, my complete workflow is pinned to my task bar. I even access explorer from there and from keyboard shortcuts.
Windows 8 has completely changed that, and I'm thankful. There is a separate, more useful screen for searching and accessing little used apps. Now the start screen is much more useful, and I have a reason to actually access it.
If you don't like it, you have many options including not upgrading to Windows 8, or applying what will most certainly be a large array of hacks, tweaks, and UI modifications to get windows working the way you want it to, just as there have always exists in Windows.
"Why should I pay an extra $600 for a tablet PC when I can use a laptop just as easily?"
Anytime someone asked me that I'd respond with "Type for me this equation." or "Type for me this diagram." I majored in physics, so about 90% of what I had to put in my notes was some form of drawing or symbol that didn't exist on the keyboard. For the other 10%, handwriting served me just fine. It's true not many apps were geared for touch specifically, but digital note taking was the definition of a killer app for me, it didn't matter.
One note for iOS has about 10% of the features that make the real One Note the killer app that it is, most important of which are the myriad digital ink capabilities. The iOS app is more along the lines of a viewer than anything else.
You can't simply add a stylus to a modern tablet.
Sorry, you're not up to date on your technology. One of the tablets I owned was a Dell Latitude XT, which has dual digitizers: one for pen input and one for capacitive multitouch touch input. When the pen was near the screen, it switched off the touch input so there was no issue with palm reading. The Microsoft stated the Surface Pro will have the same technology.
You can actually buy relatively inexpensive devices (smart pens or smart paper) to accomplish this
Not quite. My notes were very elaborate in college. I digitzed all my textbooks, and would have them open during class. Then when we reviewed readings or other information I would paste charts into my notes and annotate them, as others were busy needlessly recreating the visuals. I also tagged all my equations, theorems, and definitions and could compile them into formula sheets while I was studying with the click of a button.
Yes! I used One Note for all my note taking through college. Best piece of software for tablets out there. Sadly, nothing compares in the current generation of content consumption tablets. Surface will change all that though.
trying to save is legacy Dale Carnegie style by educating himself on many of man kinds most daunting challenges and attempting to solve them.
Perhaps you're thinking of Andrew Carnegie? A bastard in life, accumulated more money than God through his steel empire, then turned to philanthropy.
10 WAYS THE IPAD WILL FOREVER CHANGE EDUCATION
Every single one of those points, except the point that the iPad has limited multitasking capabilities (and that's somehow a good thing in the classroom), applies to laptops.
SD Unified Purchases 26,000 iPads For District Students:
At 30 kids a classroom, they could have afforded to give 866 teachers a much needed $17k raise with the money they spent on this technology push that will end up abandoned in 3 years. Better yet they could hire new teachers. Watch as those iPads become outdated and can't run the latest OS with the latest and greatest educational apps in 3 years time. Oh, and that's another $260,000 in a couple years to replace the batteries as they go. How often do you have to replace the batteries on a textbook?
That's what a stylus is for. You know, the input device missing from 99% of "tablets" these days. I had a Tablet PC all the way through college, and I used it for every class. Still have all of my notes, and still reference them in my PhD work, which is easy since they're completely digitized and search able. Can't do that with Pen and paper. Can't do that with iPad either.
Q. Tablet computers are big these days. The Surface tablet was just released by Microsoft last week, and iPads are all over campuses, but it doesn't sound like your approach has been to give devices to students and hope things change that way. What do you think needs to happen for factors like tablets to really make a difference? Or is that not even part of the equation?
A. Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.
And he's RIGHT. We've seen this time and time again: some school gets some tech grant and goes on a tech spending spree on crap that in the end do nothing to aid in education. When I was in school, we had initiatives like smart boards, which were expensive and broke so much, teachers ended up using them as expensive whiteboards. Then we had laptop carts, where you trucked around this 10 ton cart to classrooms where none of the laptops were charged all the way and they never worked. And when they did work, they added nothing that a trip to the computer lab would have done.
So just giving students tablets isn't going to work. They'll be fun little novel gadgets, but students need to do real work which includes writing, typing, and other things you cannot do with your fingers. I used a tablet PC throughout college, and it was the best technology investment I made. It was one of those convertible tablets that switched from keyboard mode to laptop mode, and a had a stylus for writing notes. Classmates were constantly begging me for copies of my notes, since I was able to annotate book excerpts and capture chalboard derivations easier than they were able to with traditional PnP. Then the iPad came out and everyone said it was a godsend. I bought one in the hopes of replacing my tablet PC, but I was sorely disappointed at its capabilities. From a student's perspective, it was nothing more than a toy compared to my tablet PC, and I think that's what Bill Gates is getting at.
The submitter seems to think that Bill's words contradict Microsoft's efforts with the Surface, but the Surface is everything I wanted the iPad to be. It can run serious note taking software like One Note. It can *truly* multi task applications. It has digital pen input. It has a slim attachable keyboard. And when I'm at a desk I can connect it to a monitor and keyboard and use Office, Matlab, etc. as many students need to.
The NPD Group has reported that Apple is market share at retail store fronts for the first quarter in the U.S. is 66 percent, but only for those PCs costing more than US$1,000. For all PCs, it is 14%.
You used 4 qualifiers (bolded) to find a niche subsegment where Apple performed well. Moreover, your "report" is from 2008, before Windows 7 was released. Since then, Microsoft has sold 600 million copies of Windows 7, whereas Apple estimates only 66 million people use Macs in total. The PC market is fantastically huge, which is what makes it such an appealing target for malware.
According to Apple, there are only 66 million Mac users out there. This is in contrast to Microsoft, who sold over 600 million copies of Windows 7 alone, which does not count everyone still out there on XP, which is probably another couple hundred million. Let me put it this way: more people use Windows Vista than use a Mac.
It is precisely those unequivocal words like "nothing" that get people into trouble.
I like how you deride him for making a blanket statement, and then go on to do just that yourself. Are you just being ironic? The "architecture" is a sweeping generalization which you need to qualify. What about the "architecture"? What aspects?
Until then, have a look at the following video of Gluesenkamp's awe-inspiring record flight
I'm sorry, I didn't even realize he had lifted off the ground. Awe-inspiring isn't exactly the word I'd use.
The intelligence is not only in the brain, but it is also in the architecture of the system, including mechanical infrastructure.
This is very true. Some other examples are salmon, which swim upstream even when they're dead. Their bodies are designed in such a way that when a current moves past them they create a swimming motion and move up against the current.
Another example are albatross. They glide for hundreds of miles without flapping their wings, and their heart rate doesn't rise much above their resting heart rate. They do this by somehow sensing wind gradients and exploiting them to gain energy, and their wings are the perfect length/width (very long and skinny) to be the ideal gliding mechanism.
Instead, the whole system is build anew, from a scratch, intelligently.
That would be nice, but it's very impractical. For instance, I can build a robot car *today* that can drive perfectly on a road network without crashing into anything and doing it as efficiently as possible. That's easy.... the problem is designing and implementing the road network across the entire world. So we have a choice, build a robot to fit our current environment or build an environment to fit our robots. I think the former is more cost effective even though the realization of such a machine is further out.
It's hard to say which one is correct. Look how far we've come in the last 50 years.We went from computers the size of a room, to computers on every desktop to computers in every pocket. Technological capabilities definitely are increasing at an exponential rate, and the capabilities of robots are closely correlated with these developments. 50 years ago the best robots relied on sonar, then with the development of LIDAR they became several orders of magnitude more accurate. The invention of GPS also took place in the last 50 years, along with MEMS technology for tiny inertial measurement systems embedded in practically every robot today. Even the proliferation of the Microsoft Kinect represents a similar leap forward in widespread technological capacity of robots.
So you see, with each technological innovation, the capabilities of robots don't increment slightly; they jump to a new height altogether. I don't know if anything like a "sigularity" will happen in the next 50 years, but I suspect the difference capabilities of robots from 2012 to 2062 will be much greater than the difference between robots in 2012 and 1962.
Disclaimer: I am also someone working to implement "the singularity"
A human servant will be much cheaper than a robot that can do that for many years to come.