Since this is slashdot and being pedantic is a requirement for membership:
Lion - near threatened
Snow Leopard - endangered
Leopard - near threatened
Tiger - endangered
Panther - not even a species
Jaguar - near threatened
Puma - least concern
Cheetah - vulnerable
I am just shocked at how quick you are at repeating the publishers' party line and refusing to even consider whether other opinions may have merit.
If you notice, every argument I’ve put forth has been from the perspective of the researcher and the scientific community. I have not laid out any of the myriad legal/business objections a publisher might have to self-plagiarism, since I don’t care about them. I also never said I would never consider the merit of other options. You certainly have not convinced me with your vision of a world where it’s acceptable for the same paper to be published multiple times. I do believe this practice wastes just about everyone’s time. Let’s image a world where republishing old work is an acceptable practice:
You’re wasting reviewer/editor time because they are reviewing a paper that has already been peer reviewed. This is great for you as a scientist, as you get a different take on your paper, but it’s terrible for the community, since time spent on your old paper could be better spent on reviewing new cutting edge research, effectively draining the resources of the collective peer review process.
You’re also wasting the reader’s time. I don’t want to read your paper in every journal I subscribe to. It’s redundant and unnecessary. Actually, as the case usually is these days, if I have an interest in your field I will find your paper through a keyword search. I will most likely stumble upon the journal’s repository, hit a paywall, search for the article title, and find the fulltext on your webpage.
You’re wasting the researcher’s time. If I’m doing a literature review I’m going to face an exponentially lager number of papers to sift there, most of which are duplicate results of the same paper in multiple journals. Further, you disrupt the confidence a researcher has that any given article represents new, original work. If you can publish an old paper at any time in any venue, whenever I read a new paper I now have to go through and look at your citations and see when the first time you published this paper was. If I’m reading a new publication in 2012, I’m pretty sure the research has been done in the last 6 months.
Finally you’re wasting your own time too. Publishing the same paper over and over with maybe small tweaks isn’t going to get you any kind of reputation that is good. Even if you pad your resume with multiple high impact journals, any person who looks at your resume is going to see it for what you are. You’re better off publishing once, and then actually moving the state of your research forward to publish new, original research.
Impact factor. Prestige of the new journal. The obscurity of a random researcher's website. Minor corrections to make the work easier to follow. Publishing in a completely different venue. Accessibility.
The first two, as you note, have no scientific bearing. If you want to publish in a high impact prestigious journal, submit there. If you get rejected, move down the ladder. There’s no reason to publish in both high quality journals and low quality ones, and frankly, all this would do is weaken your own reputation.
The obscurity of your own random website is offset by the power of search engines. If I’m searching for keywords related to your field, I’ll find your paper in Google Scholar and other academic search engines like Mendeley, no matter how obscure your own site is. Further, you are allowed to post your paper in not so obscure funding agency repositories and institutional repositories.
Publishing the same article in a completely different venue, as I address later, is definitely an issue. There should be some appreciable difference between an old paper and a new one. Add a new take, a new analysis, some new experiments, write for the specific audience, etc. If there is no difference, the m
For most journals out there, publishing in only one of them ensures that the paper is not already in the community - it is only available to those who purchased that particular journal.
Not in the journals I publish in. IEEE, ACM, and Springer all allow an author to publish an article on his own website, an institutional repository, and a funding agency repository, available to all for free. I have not published with Elsevier, but I know they have a similar copyright policy. With Nature the author actually retains the copyright and you license them the ability to publish your work.
Not to mention translations, which are also considered self plagiarism, and which quite obviously increase the audience of the paper.
True to a point. In my field, the top international journals are written in English. If you want to communicate to most researchers in your field, you write your paper in English. If you want to, you're certainly free to translate your paper and publish it internally at your institution or on your website, available to all. This, again is permitted by IEEE, ACM, Springer, etc.
specially in the light of the "taking space" argument (really, it does not make any sense whatsoever. Space where? On the website, where you have nearly unlimited space?).
There are other resources required to publish a paper aside form physical space (and yes, many periodicals do still come in physical bound paper form). But imagine if I submitted my paper to every publication out there, both high and low quality (much like a student applying to college). I'd be taking up dozens of hours of time from reviewers and editors to review my publication. There would be a massive backlog of papers to review, and it would take forever for new research to make it in to a publication. It already takes months, maybe half a year to get through the peer review process for some publications.
If they really cared about disseminating research, a much more efficient way is to let the authors state "this work was been previously published in so and so journal", rather than accusing them of fraud.
So then the question is... well why are you trying to publish it here if a reference to x journal is good enough? Why don't you just read it in so and so journal? Or better yet, just link to your webpage. Why should you publish old research in multiple journals?
No, I'm sorry, the only real reason to publish in multiple periodicals, especially given the lenient copyright policies of the publishers I know of, is to pad your own CV.
1) When you publish in an academic journal, you transfer the copyright for your paper to the publisher.
2) As a reviewer, if I see you published your paper elsewhere, I will immediately reject it. Publishing a paper more than once is called self plagiarism, and it's unethical. The purpose of publishing is to disseminate your research to the community. Publishing your work in more than one journal is counter to that goal because your research is already in the community, and you're taking up space in the journal for research that hasn't yet been published.
Honestly, this does suck. Wearing my engineering hat, it is next to impossible to pay all the IEEE, ACM, what-not subscriptions I would need to access papers in my field as a private company
I do a lot of publishing in IEEE conferences/journals, and I also do a lot of citing of papers in these same venues. I've never really had a problem finding an open access paper from IEEE publications. Usually a quick search on Google scholar will link me to the fulltext paper on the researcher's homepage. This is because IEEE allows authors to publish accepted publications in open access repositories and their own homepage.
When you publish a paper, you are expected to transfer the copyright of that paper to the publisher. However, publishers like IEEE allow you to post the accepted version of your paper on your own website. See the full policy here. This is in contrast to the published version, which contains all the journal specific markup like headers and page numbers. IEEE also allows you to publish the accepted version of your paper to any funding agency repository to comply with free-access requirements. I don't know how it works in other disciplines, but in engineering, IEEE is the place to publish and it works like this in pretty much all our periodicals. I take an extra step and on my website and add a note that all articles posted are for timely dissemination of information and all work is the property of respective copyright holders and may not be reposted without explicit permission. But the links point straight to the fulltext of the research.
This policy is pretty permissive, and I've never seen the need to submit to an open access journal of lesser quality when I can submit to a top journal and be assured my research will be just as accessible.
Like every problem in every Windows version, it should be gone in the next version.
So like every problem in every piece of software since always? Platforms have problems. Android has problems. iOS has problems. OSX has problems. Those problems get fixed and they you can focus on a new batch of problems to fix in the next version.
Google could have had advance knowledge of the iPhone before it was released, either through tech demos, partners, ex-employees, etc.
A Mr. Eric Schmidt happened to be on the board of directors of Apple until August 3, 2009, almost a year after Android 1.0 was released. Conflict of interest much?
And some teachers teach better that way too. A good lecturer tailors his lecture to his audience. If she explains something and its apparent the class doesn't understand, she can try a different way of explaining. Or a student can ask a poignant question to clarify something. With a video, the lecture is set and if you don't understand something, you can watch the video as many times as you want but it will never be explained in a different way. With a video, the lecturer is talking to a camera, not a human being, and has no way to gauge if what he's saying makes any sense. Sure he might be able to modify the video for the next course iteration, but you don't get the same realtime feedback.
With menus, things are not buried as much as with ribbons which gives a better chance at self discovery. Ribbons by their nature tend to bury things under multiple layers.
I spent the last 5 posts giving you concrete reasons for why your assertions are wrong. You can't just contradict me with no reasons or evidence. I've argued that:
A) there are more options available in total on the default ribbon (197 options in Word 2010 compared to 148 in Writer 3.3). Since the ribbon organizes items in 2D and take up more space then a menu, by their very nature they allow more items to be displayed at once and better organize those items using pictures, size, and text. Given that there is more space for more items, and there is a higher item count, how can you claim that the ribbon is hiding functionality more than a menu?
B) Menus by *their* nature tend to bury things in layers. I have evidence for this: click on a menu and you see a bunch of sideways pointing arrows that denote a flyout. Those are layers under which functions are buried! Ribbons are only 1 layers deep. You click on a layer, and you see everything at once. No need to go through a bunch of flyouts. This improves discoverability over the menu.
C) Self discovery is improved in the ribbon, for all the reasons I listed in my last post that you have yet to comment on. You keep asserting that the ribbon is not obvious, yet provide no evidence or reasons to back this up, in spite of the reasons I enumerated for you.
Time and time again I keep saying the same thing. I am not responsible for your lack of understanding.
My advice is don't reply with the same thing as you have been, because I read it and I understand it, but I think you are wrong for all the reasons I posted here and above (which you seem to have not read, since you haven't refuted any specific point). You have yet to present any evidence to support your point of view, and you have yet to refute my point of view. You just keep saying the same thing. That's not my fault, that's yours.
The default toolbar layout is Caption/Menu/Standard Toolbar
No, the default layout in Writer is Caption, Menu, Toolbar, Toolbar, Ruler. The distance between the two from the top of the window to the top of the document is the same. If you scroll down in the document, the difference is a whole 21px, less than one toolbar.
You could hide the toolbars, have as much functionaility and still have more space (only a few pixels, remember the caption is taller)
If you have the same functionality without toolbars, what is the point of toolbars? No, you loose all the functionality of the toolbars! Of course, if you hide ribbon, you don't lose any functionality because they are still 1 click away, and you have the same vertical space as the menu system without toolbars (actually more, see below)! If you are hurting for vertical space, the minimized ribbon is far superior to menu without toolbars.
only a few pixels, remember the caption is taller
The caption is taller but the ribbon tab menu is smaller. Actually, if you do the math (which you should because you seem to be basing your argument from incorrect assumptions), the caption + menu is 1px *taller* than the caption + ribbon menu. Thus for the minimized ribbon you have 1px more vertical screen space than with menu without toolbars. And you can bring back the ribbon in 1 click whereas the toolbars.
There were keyboard shortcuts to every menu item.
I don't know about Office 2003, but Libre Office writer is certainly missing shortcuts.
There is room for only a handful of buttons in the quick access toolbar. Unlike the multitude of toolbars and buttons from before.
The quick access toolbar can hold as many functions as you want. It goes until it runs out of space, and then puts options in a drop down. For even more space, put it below the ribbon. If you minimize the ribbon you have a familiar caption,menu,toolbar interface. If you have only one toolbar row in writer, the behavior is the same (to hide items once you run out of horizontal space).
huh? Everyone has the same ribbon unless they customize it. Obviously someone who customizes the ribbon is more advanced and isn't going to need an explanation on how to do or find something.
If the total number of items is the same, then the search time would be the same. But lots of options are not IN the ribbon, and for those the search time is a lot higher.
In the menu system I have to scan every menu, moving the mouse up and down to open all the flyouts to scan all the options. In the Ribbon I just have to scan every tab, moving my mouse across to click on each tab. Much easier. And by my count, there are 197 selectable items by default in the Word 2010 ribbon, whereas in Writer 3.3.0 there are 148 selectable items in the menu. This of course includes the "table" menu in Writer, which is mostly grayed out until you select a table. When a table is added in Word the Ribbon grows by 58 selectable functions.
The whole point of the Ribbon is it allows access to *more* items in fewer clicks. You're the first person I've ever seen claim that the ribbon contains less items. Many options like page orientation are right in the ribbon whereas in Writer they are 3 layers deep in a new window.
Menus also have icons. Thus the menu has both the icon AND the word. In the ribbon I have put my mouse over each icon, wait for the tooltip to pop up and then quickly read the text, hoping it doesn't disappear before I've read it. That takes a LOT more time than scanning menus with text+icons.
Sparsely... less than half the items have icons, and there's no clear reason for which have icons and which don't. In Office, every function is accompanied by an icon and text except the most common like "bold" or "justify" an the like. The only time icons don't have text are when the ribbon begins to compress on a very small screen. You wouldn't happen to be using it in less than 1000px of horizontal resolution?
Also, hovering over an item in the ribbon doesn't just give you its name (and it stays as long as your mouse is there. Have you even used Word 2010?); it gives you a little description of what that function does and in some cases a picture preview. Hovering over an item in a menu does nothing because hovering is reserved for opening flyouts.
And of course you have your toolbar which is icons only, even for uncommon functions. Or you could change it to icons+text, but then it takes up an enormous amount of space due to the 1D layout and gets truncated,so that half of the functions are hiding. The 2D layout of the Ribbon allows for icon+text and doesn't hide anything.
Further, you didn't address the ability of the ribbon to show style previews. Its size allows this, whereas the menu+toolbar do not have enough room to provide this convenience.
Logical grouping is not specific to menus or the ribbon and thus irrelevant.
It's highly relevant when every menu system out there can't do it right. The ribbon has labels for each of the groupings in each tab, which makes the ordering more logical and decreases function search time. In the menu system, there are horizontal rules that separate each group, but there is no indication as to the contents of the group. You have to infer this based on group membership, which is counter productive. Until the menu system changes to add semantic context to the groupings they create, this is indeed specific to ribbons.
Context specific ribbons are horrible because they make the structure change meaning I keep having to search. On top of that, I can not discover what is not there. With a greyed-out item I can at least find the item, and it being greyed-out is a good indication my context is wrong.
Menu+toolbar systems have context specific toolbars as well. For example, Writer has a table menu, and when you create a table, a table toolbar appears. Greyed out items are unhelpful because a) they don't need to be there taking up space if you can't use them and b) give you no indication on how to use them anyway. Discoverability of these context specific ribbon tabs is easy, as they appear as soon as you insert their context,
Yes, you need to go further. With respect to vertical screen realestate, when maximized, from the top of the screen to the top of the word document, Word and Writer use the SAME amount of vertical space. Further, you can minimize the ribbon and bring it back in a single click. Cannot do that with toolbars in writer. Especially on a 1080 screen, this is not an issue.
Second, icons are not hidden until the window is about 960px wide, and only the least used functions are grouped at that point. Most used functions like font tools are not hidden until the window is around 440 pixels. Note that toolbars will also hide functions depending on window size. The different and benefit of the Ribbon is that large icons are turned into small icons before they are hidden, allowing more functionality to be present at smaller resolutions compared to the toolbar.
There's also the nice new equation editor that only works in one font, Callibri, when most of the universe specifies either Times or TeX Computer Modern for equations, but that's not a ribbon fail
The font is Cambria Math, and you can change it as long as you have a font that supports all the math. I've done it just fine.
For example in Excel in 2003 if I wanted to insert a row, I'd go "Insert -> Row"
The insert tab is for inserting objects into the document. You'll notice none of those functions modify the layout of the document. However, the best way to insert rows and columns is to right click on the actual row, column, or cell and click insert. Clicking on the cell, and then going to a menu to do this operation makes no sense.
But if I make the window a little narrower it becomes just an icon and it's not exactly obvious until I click on it what that might do.
As the window gets narrower, the icons get smaller. There is never an icon without a label, as far as I can tell. The benefit of this is better scaling for smaller screens. Whereas a standard menu would simply hide these options by truncating the menu or toolbar, the ribbon can adjust until it gets very very small, where each group is a single icon.
Then there other features like the fact the "File" menu now takes over the entire window of the program.
I like this because it allows easier print and new documents menus. I've never encountered an instance where I needed to see the document at the same time I was browsing the file menu.
Now with the old system I had drop down menus which makes it much quicker to go through and find all the options then go through the ribbon, click each button and navigate through all the various drop downs off those buttons. The pull down menus also made it very easy for me to find the keyboard shortcuts for an option, so I can quickly learn to use the program more efficiently. All this is now hidden in the help system
Searching the old menu takes time O(m*n*p) to go through each menu (m), all the menu items (n), and all the flyouts (p). Since the ribbon displays menu items and flyouts at once, searching the ribbon takes time O(n*m) to search everything.
Further, keyboard shortcuts are learned by pressing alt. You then follow the letters just as you would in the menu interface. Any user of the old interface should know this, and any novice user probably doesn't care either way since they don't tend to use keyboard shortcuts for anything more than copy and paste.
However for me the worst of all is the inconsistency. In years gone buy these things were defined in a style guide so if I used one program I could quickly get familiar with others as many of the options would be called the same and in the same menus
This is a pretty rosy picture of the past. There is no "style guide" that forces developers to do anything, and interface are inconsistent between applications, ribbon or no ribbon. Is "preferences" under "file", "edit", or the "tools" menu? Further, other applications do use ribbon menus. Solidworks comes to mind as an example. Microsoft even offers tools to add ribbon interfaces into your application.
Now we're stuck with a horrible interface (in my opinion) that has very few possible customisations.
You can create your own tabs and add any functions you please to it. You can customize any existing tab to your heart's content. You can even pin functions to the quick access toolbar. How is this any worse than a single toolbar? It's the same as a toolbar with tabs.
That assumes a linier upgrade path. Companies just don't work that way. A lot of them went from Office XP to Office 2007. Office 2003 only worked with XP plus and it came out during a time when a lot of companies were doing OS upgrades. They don't like to deploy office suites until they have a year or two of service packs and fixes out.
While this is true, I think more people would have avoided 2010 if 2007 was such a productivity killer, just as they avoided Vista. Office 2007 sold very well, and if the general consensus was that the ribbon absolutely killed productivity (just as was the general consensus that Vista killed productivity) we would see very different sales numbers for Office 2010.
However, that does not mean that the significant subset of Office users who really do intimately understand their way around a tried and tested combination of keyboard shortcuts, toolbar icons, menu commands, dialog tricks and so on will appreciate having the new UI and the underlying models forced on them as well.
I'm one of those users who have been using Office since the 90s, and was very used to the old menu system. I adapted fine and prefer the ribbon, so it always makes me wonder whether these people who dislike the ribbon are numerous or simply very loud. As you can tell I lean toward the latter. I think they are a small group and my personal experience with others combined with usage statistics seem to back up my position.
The Ribbon caters very much to cosmetic hacks and a quick-and-dirty approach. Don't bother defining styles, structuring your document systematically, or understanding how to present your data effectively!
While office does allow for the quick and dirty document as you say, it has plenty of features for the advanced user. Honestly, it's just a tool and if the majority of people find it easier to use, does that make it bad because they could have a "better" document if they typeset with LaTeX? No. The majority of documents out there *deserve* a quick and dirty treatment because their purpose is to get a point across. The ribbon however allows easier access to more features, so the "quick and dirty" user who never heard of styles and cross references and table of contents can now discover those features insert them without a hitch. I see more and more documents produced with these features and they're better for it.
Microsoft sells about three individual licences a decade for Office applications and about a bazillion copies through mass licensing or preinstallation deals every year. The number of sales really doesn't tell us anything meaningful about what the people using Office actually think of the new ribbon.
The telling part is that these numbers are for Office 2010, 3 years after the ribbon was introduced. When something is a productivity dog, word gets around fast, as evidenced by Vista. If businesses who adopted Office 2007 were seeing major productivity hits (and 2007 sold at a rate twice as fast as 2003, so it was a major seller as well), you can bet Office 2010 with the same interface wouldn't have been as big a seller as it was.
So my anecdotal evidence includes just under 3500 co-workers, and just under 14,000 students.
And I can speak for 200 million people who have bought and used Office 2010 every day in the same way you can speak for those 3.5k coworkers and 14k students the vast majority of whom you've probably never spoken to.
My personal beef with the ribbon is that there's no organisation to it. It's just a mishmash of large icons, small icons, text, jumbled together.
The organization is very clear, and not that different from the old menu system. The primary structure is the tabs, analogous to the menu titles of the old system. The secondary structure is the groupings in each tab, analogous to menu items. The tertiary structure is group items, analogous to menu flyouts. Aside from the home tab, which uses common icons found in all word processing software to represent Bold, indent, etc. the function size indicates a fourth structure. For example, in the references tab the insert citation function is very large, whereas style or manage sources is smaller, since they are less used. Also aside from the home tab every uncommon icon is accompanied by a text description and a hovertip that tells you what the function does. This cannot be done in a regular menu because the hover gesture is used to open flyout menus.
A toolbar has every icon the same size, and organised according to a grid.
A menu has every entry the same size, and organised according to a grid.
And yet a toolbar and menu contain items that don't lend themselves to being the same size and in a grid. For example, the toolbar contains a style box... which shows text for styles. Why not show the actual styles applied to text as in Word? The constant size/grid layout of the menu also does not scale well. It handles low resolutions by hiding items which you have to expand. The ribbon adjusts icon sizes so that more items are on screen at more resolutions.
And, the biggest thing, is that if you turn off the annoying "personalised menus" feature, everything is in the same place, everytime. Nothing moves, nothing jumps around.
While things may move on the ribbon spatially, they never do items always maintain the same position in the hierarchy I described before. Further, while context tabs may appear and disappear, this is for good reason, as the items are only functional for a specific context. This has more benefits than drawbacks.
You don't need to say it slower. I understand what perfectly what you're saying. I just think you're wrong.
My point is that you cannot know to customize the ribbon without precognition. This is true of menus, ribbons, whatever.
This is not the point you made originally. You're backtracking now. You asserted that the problem with the ribbon is that it assumes what you need and don't need and hides the rest. Now you say this is a problem with any menu system. So we are in agreeance now.
It is not a solution to the problem at all.
I'm not so sure this problem needs to be solved at all. How often do you need to find uncommon functions. By definition... not often. If you find you do need one often, just make a shortcut. You seem to want an interface that can read your mind and always activate the function you have in mind. This is unrealistic.
You make this assertion that "The ribbon makes it harder to do by MS purposefully obscuring what it considers less used feautures 2 or 3 menus deep. With the old way, it was there and more easily discoverered." But you have yet to substantiate this. I have provided several examples and reasons why the ribbon makes functions more easily discoverable. Let me enumerate and expand them for you and add a couple more.
1) The ribbon layout decreases search time. Finding a function in the old menu takes time O(m*n*p) where m is the number of menus, n is the number of items in the menus, and p is the number of flyouts. Finding a function in the ribbon takes time O(m*n) where m is the number of tabs and n is the number of items in the tabs.
2) The layout of the ribbon allows for more items to be displayed at once. Thus the number of items 2 clicks away are much higher than in the old menu. Thus the need to drill down into sub menus is decreased compared to the old menu.
3)The ribbon uses icons and words to represent functions, which makes them not only easier to remember but easier to scan quickly. In a menu system you have to read each of the words, one after another to find the one you want. And sometimes, a picture is a better representation for a function, like a style or a shape or a chart. For instance, the ribbon allows plenty of space to visualize all of the text styles. Rather than reading "heading 1" "heading 2" "text body" etc... as in Open Office Writer, you see them visually in Word due to the Ribbon.
4) The ribbon has more logical groupings for functions due to more space. Like the example I gave, Bibliography functions are under reference. In the old menu system, several related functions might be spread across different menus.
5) Context specific ribbons bring together common tools. For example with graphs, all graph functions are available in context tabs. In the old menu system, they try to replicate this with context toolbars, but the toolbar changes depending on the part of the graph you have selected. So rather than having everything in front of you, you have to click on the different chart pieces to try and find the function you want. Not very discoverable.
Now, how exactly does the old menu system beat these features of the ribbon in terms of discoverability?
The file formats are pretty portable. I can open a docx or xlsx file in LibreOffice or Google Docs handily. Office even opens and saves open office files formats just fine. Where's the format lock-in?
Like I said, classic slashdot logic. Businesses around the world are running entirely on Office, and of course it could *never* be because the software has any merit. No, it must be that people don't realize there are "better" options like LibreOffice out there. So you're trying to tell me that a hundred million people out there bought Office 2007 and productivity took a nose dive, and then they went on to buy the SAME software after nothing got done at the company? That's a pretty big stretch of logic if you ask me. Not buying it. We're talking about a population of 200 million here, where these corner cases you think represent the whole population have really no bearing.
If people were so unproductive with Office 2007, you would see a major increase in adoption of competitors like LibreOffice and Google Docs. You certainly wouldn't also see EVEN MORE people buying in to Office 2010, with the same ribbon interface.
But you can turn off all of the toolbars, and still have everything reachable form the menus in less mouse movement than from a hidden ribbon (although more from an unhidden ribbon).
Not sure I buy that. Less mouse movement maybe, but the targets are larger in Office, so it's unclear which interface has less target time according to Fitts Law. I think the Ribbon still wins overall since there is more functionality within 2 clicks than in the old menu.
Unlike the more conventional shortcuts, these are not side-effect free. They change the currently exposed tab on the ribbon. If you have your quick access tab open, and you save with alt-f-s (for example) instead of control-s, then you will now have the file menu open and need more mouse movement to return to the old state.
I see what you're saying, but you chose a bad example since that particular shortcut does not change contexts. Either way, if you're using keyboard shortcuts to save time ostensibly your hands should never be on the mouse. Thus it doesn't matter what context you're in, it's the same situation you're at with the old menu system: a series of keyboard shortcuts with the addition of visual feedback for to get to an item you never used before, thus keeping your hands off the mouse longer, thus increasing productivity.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I don't know why Google even reports those numbers. They could be randomly generated for all we know, since no one ever goes past the top 10.
Since this is slashdot and being pedantic is a requirement for membership:
Snow Leopard - endangered
Leopard - near threatened
Tiger - endangered
Panther - not even a species
Jaguar - near threatened
Puma - least concern
Cheetah - vulnerable
I am just shocked at how quick you are at repeating the publishers' party line and refusing to even consider whether other opinions may have merit.
If you notice, every argument I’ve put forth has been from the perspective of the researcher and the scientific community. I have not laid out any of the myriad legal/business objections a publisher might have to self-plagiarism, since I don’t care about them. I also never said I would never consider the merit of other options. You certainly have not convinced me with your vision of a world where it’s acceptable for the same paper to be published multiple times. I do believe this practice wastes just about everyone’s time. Let’s image a world where republishing old work is an acceptable practice:
You’re wasting reviewer/editor time because they are reviewing a paper that has already been peer reviewed. This is great for you as a scientist, as you get a different take on your paper, but it’s terrible for the community, since time spent on your old paper could be better spent on reviewing new cutting edge research, effectively draining the resources of the collective peer review process.
You’re also wasting the reader’s time. I don’t want to read your paper in every journal I subscribe to. It’s redundant and unnecessary. Actually, as the case usually is these days, if I have an interest in your field I will find your paper through a keyword search. I will most likely stumble upon the journal’s repository, hit a paywall, search for the article title, and find the fulltext on your webpage.
You’re wasting the researcher’s time. If I’m doing a literature review I’m going to face an exponentially lager number of papers to sift there, most of which are duplicate results of the same paper in multiple journals. Further, you disrupt the confidence a researcher has that any given article represents new, original work. If you can publish an old paper at any time in any venue, whenever I read a new paper I now have to go through and look at your citations and see when the first time you published this paper was. If I’m reading a new publication in 2012, I’m pretty sure the research has been done in the last 6 months.
Finally you’re wasting your own time too. Publishing the same paper over and over with maybe small tweaks isn’t going to get you any kind of reputation that is good. Even if you pad your resume with multiple high impact journals, any person who looks at your resume is going to see it for what you are. You’re better off publishing once, and then actually moving the state of your research forward to publish new, original research.
Impact factor. Prestige of the new journal. The obscurity of a random researcher's website. Minor corrections to make the work easier to follow. Publishing in a completely different venue. Accessibility.
The first two, as you note, have no scientific bearing. If you want to publish in a high impact prestigious journal, submit there. If you get rejected, move down the ladder. There’s no reason to publish in both high quality journals and low quality ones, and frankly, all this would do is weaken your own reputation.
The obscurity of your own random website is offset by the power of search engines. If I’m searching for keywords related to your field, I’ll find your paper in Google Scholar and other academic search engines like Mendeley, no matter how obscure your own site is. Further, you are allowed to post your paper in not so obscure funding agency repositories and institutional repositories.
Publishing the same article in a completely different venue, as I address later, is definitely an issue. There should be some appreciable difference between an old paper and a new one. Add a new take, a new analysis, some new experiments, write for the specific audience, etc. If there is no difference, the m
For most journals out there, publishing in only one of them ensures that the paper is not already in the community - it is only available to those who purchased that particular journal.
Not in the journals I publish in. IEEE, ACM, and Springer all allow an author to publish an article on his own website, an institutional repository, and a funding agency repository, available to all for free. I have not published with Elsevier, but I know they have a similar copyright policy. With Nature the author actually retains the copyright and you license them the ability to publish your work.
Not to mention translations, which are also considered self plagiarism, and which quite obviously increase the audience of the paper.
True to a point. In my field, the top international journals are written in English. If you want to communicate to most researchers in your field, you write your paper in English. If you want to, you're certainly free to translate your paper and publish it internally at your institution or on your website, available to all. This, again is permitted by IEEE, ACM, Springer, etc.
specially in the light of the "taking space" argument (really, it does not make any sense whatsoever. Space where? On the website, where you have nearly unlimited space?).
There are other resources required to publish a paper aside form physical space (and yes, many periodicals do still come in physical bound paper form). But imagine if I submitted my paper to every publication out there, both high and low quality (much like a student applying to college). I'd be taking up dozens of hours of time from reviewers and editors to review my publication. There would be a massive backlog of papers to review, and it would take forever for new research to make it in to a publication. It already takes months, maybe half a year to get through the peer review process for some publications.
If they really cared about disseminating research, a much more efficient way is to let the authors state "this work was been previously published in so and so journal", rather than accusing them of fraud.
So then the question is... well why are you trying to publish it here if a reference to x journal is good enough? Why don't you just read it in so and so journal? Or better yet, just link to your webpage. Why should you publish old research in multiple journals?
No, I'm sorry, the only real reason to publish in multiple periodicals, especially given the lenient copyright policies of the publishers I know of, is to pad your own CV.
1) When you publish in an academic journal, you transfer the copyright for your paper to the publisher.
2) As a reviewer, if I see you published your paper elsewhere, I will immediately reject it. Publishing a paper more than once is called self plagiarism, and it's unethical. The purpose of publishing is to disseminate your research to the community. Publishing your work in more than one journal is counter to that goal because your research is already in the community, and you're taking up space in the journal for research that hasn't yet been published.
Honestly, this does suck. Wearing my engineering hat, it is next to impossible to pay all the IEEE, ACM, what-not subscriptions I would need to access papers in my field as a private company
I do a lot of publishing in IEEE conferences/journals, and I also do a lot of citing of papers in these same venues. I've never really had a problem finding an open access paper from IEEE publications. Usually a quick search on Google scholar will link me to the fulltext paper on the researcher's homepage. This is because IEEE allows authors to publish accepted publications in open access repositories and their own homepage.
When you publish a paper, you are expected to transfer the copyright of that paper to the publisher. However, publishers like IEEE allow you to post the accepted version of your paper on your own website. See the full policy here. This is in contrast to the published version, which contains all the journal specific markup like headers and page numbers. IEEE also allows you to publish the accepted version of your paper to any funding agency repository to comply with free-access requirements. I don't know how it works in other disciplines, but in engineering, IEEE is the place to publish and it works like this in pretty much all our periodicals. I take an extra step and on my website and add a note that all articles posted are for timely dissemination of information and all work is the property of respective copyright holders and may not be reposted without explicit permission. But the links point straight to the fulltext of the research.
This policy is pretty permissive, and I've never seen the need to submit to an open access journal of lesser quality when I can submit to a top journal and be assured my research will be just as accessible.
Like every problem in every Windows version, it should be gone in the next version.
So like every problem in every piece of software since always? Platforms have problems. Android has problems. iOS has problems. OSX has problems. Those problems get fixed and they you can focus on a new batch of problems to fix in the next version.
Google could have had advance knowledge of the iPhone before it was released, either through tech demos, partners, ex-employees, etc.
A Mr. Eric Schmidt happened to be on the board of directors of Apple until August 3, 2009, almost a year after Android 1.0 was released. Conflict of interest much?
And yet, some people learn better that way.
And some teachers teach better that way too. A good lecturer tailors his lecture to his audience. If she explains something and its apparent the class doesn't understand, she can try a different way of explaining. Or a student can ask a poignant question to clarify something. With a video, the lecture is set and if you don't understand something, you can watch the video as many times as you want but it will never be explained in a different way. With a video, the lecturer is talking to a camera, not a human being, and has no way to gauge if what he's saying makes any sense. Sure he might be able to modify the video for the next course iteration, but you don't get the same realtime feedback.
What kind of bandwidth do you get for $15?
With menus, things are not buried as much as with ribbons which gives a better chance at self discovery. Ribbons by their nature tend to bury things under multiple layers.
I spent the last 5 posts giving you concrete reasons for why your assertions are wrong. You can't just contradict me with no reasons or evidence. I've argued that:
A) there are more options available in total on the default ribbon (197 options in Word 2010 compared to 148 in Writer 3.3). Since the ribbon organizes items in 2D and take up more space then a menu, by their very nature they allow more items to be displayed at once and better organize those items using pictures, size, and text. Given that there is more space for more items, and there is a higher item count, how can you claim that the ribbon is hiding functionality more than a menu?
B) Menus by *their* nature tend to bury things in layers. I have evidence for this: click on a menu and you see a bunch of sideways pointing arrows that denote a flyout. Those are layers under which functions are buried! Ribbons are only 1 layers deep. You click on a layer, and you see everything at once. No need to go through a bunch of flyouts. This improves discoverability over the menu.
C) Self discovery is improved in the ribbon, for all the reasons I listed in my last post that you have yet to comment on. You keep asserting that the ribbon is not obvious, yet provide no evidence or reasons to back this up, in spite of the reasons I enumerated for you.
Time and time again I keep saying the same thing. I am not responsible for your lack of understanding.
My advice is don't reply with the same thing as you have been, because I read it and I understand it, but I think you are wrong for all the reasons I posted here and above (which you seem to have not read, since you haven't refuted any specific point). You have yet to present any evidence to support your point of view, and you have yet to refute my point of view. You just keep saying the same thing. That's not my fault, that's yours.
The default toolbar layout is Caption/Menu/Standard Toolbar
No, the default layout in Writer is Caption, Menu, Toolbar, Toolbar, Ruler. The distance between the two from the top of the window to the top of the document is the same. If you scroll down in the document, the difference is a whole 21px, less than one toolbar.
You could hide the toolbars, have as much functionaility and still have more space (only a few pixels, remember the caption is taller)
If you have the same functionality without toolbars, what is the point of toolbars? No, you loose all the functionality of the toolbars! Of course, if you hide ribbon, you don't lose any functionality because they are still 1 click away, and you have the same vertical space as the menu system without toolbars (actually more, see below)! If you are hurting for vertical space, the minimized ribbon is far superior to menu without toolbars.
only a few pixels, remember the caption is taller
The caption is taller but the ribbon tab menu is smaller. Actually, if you do the math (which you should because you seem to be basing your argument from incorrect assumptions), the caption + menu is 1px *taller* than the caption + ribbon menu. Thus for the minimized ribbon you have 1px more vertical screen space than with menu without toolbars. And you can bring back the ribbon in 1 click whereas the toolbars.
There were keyboard shortcuts to every menu item.
I don't know about Office 2003, but Libre Office writer is certainly missing shortcuts.
There is room for only a handful of buttons in the quick access toolbar. Unlike the multitude of toolbars and buttons from before.
The quick access toolbar can hold as many functions as you want. It goes until it runs out of space, and then puts options in a drop down. For even more space, put it below the ribbon. If you minimize the ribbon you have a familiar caption,menu,toolbar interface. If you have only one toolbar row in writer, the behavior is the same (to hide items once you run out of horizontal space).
If there are certain features you use over and over just pin them in the quick access. It can hold as many functions as you want.
huh? Everyone has the same ribbon unless they customize it. Obviously someone who customizes the ribbon is more advanced and isn't going to need an explanation on how to do or find something.
If the total number of items is the same, then the search time would be the same. But lots of options are not IN the ribbon, and for those the search time is a lot higher.
In the menu system I have to scan every menu, moving the mouse up and down to open all the flyouts to scan all the options. In the Ribbon I just have to scan every tab, moving my mouse across to click on each tab. Much easier. And by my count, there are 197 selectable items by default in the Word 2010 ribbon, whereas in Writer 3.3.0 there are 148 selectable items in the menu. This of course includes the "table" menu in Writer, which is mostly grayed out until you select a table. When a table is added in Word the Ribbon grows by 58 selectable functions.
The whole point of the Ribbon is it allows access to *more* items in fewer clicks. You're the first person I've ever seen claim that the ribbon contains less items. Many options like page orientation are right in the ribbon whereas in Writer they are 3 layers deep in a new window.
Menus also have icons. Thus the menu has both the icon AND the word. In the ribbon I have put my mouse over each icon, wait for the tooltip to pop up and then quickly read the text, hoping it doesn't disappear before I've read it. That takes a LOT more time than scanning menus with text+icons.
Sparsely... less than half the items have icons, and there's no clear reason for which have icons and which don't. In Office, every function is accompanied by an icon and text except the most common like "bold" or "justify" an the like. The only time icons don't have text are when the ribbon begins to compress on a very small screen. You wouldn't happen to be using it in less than 1000px of horizontal resolution?
Also, hovering over an item in the ribbon doesn't just give you its name (and it stays as long as your mouse is there. Have you even used Word 2010?); it gives you a little description of what that function does and in some cases a picture preview. Hovering over an item in a menu does nothing because hovering is reserved for opening flyouts.
And of course you have your toolbar which is icons only, even for uncommon functions. Or you could change it to icons+text, but then it takes up an enormous amount of space due to the 1D layout and gets truncated,so that half of the functions are hiding. The 2D layout of the Ribbon allows for icon+text and doesn't hide anything.
Further, you didn't address the ability of the ribbon to show style previews. Its size allows this, whereas the menu+toolbar do not have enough room to provide this convenience.
Logical grouping is not specific to menus or the ribbon and thus irrelevant.
It's highly relevant when every menu system out there can't do it right. The ribbon has labels for each of the groupings in each tab, which makes the ordering more logical and decreases function search time. In the menu system, there are horizontal rules that separate each group, but there is no indication as to the contents of the group. You have to infer this based on group membership, which is counter productive. Until the menu system changes to add semantic context to the groupings they create, this is indeed specific to ribbons.
Context specific ribbons are horrible because they make the structure change meaning I keep having to search. On top of that, I can not discover what is not there. With a greyed-out item I can at least find the item, and it being greyed-out is a good indication my context is wrong.
Menu+toolbar systems have context specific toolbars as well. For example, Writer has a table menu, and when you create a table, a table toolbar appears. Greyed out items are unhelpful because a) they don't need to be there taking up space if you can't use them and b) give you no indication on how to use them anyway. Discoverability of these context specific ribbon tabs is easy, as they appear as soon as you insert their context,
Yes, you need to go further. With respect to vertical screen realestate, when maximized, from the top of the screen to the top of the word document, Word and Writer use the SAME amount of vertical space. Further, you can minimize the ribbon and bring it back in a single click. Cannot do that with toolbars in writer. Especially on a 1080 screen, this is not an issue.
Second, icons are not hidden until the window is about 960px wide, and only the least used functions are grouped at that point. Most used functions like font tools are not hidden until the window is around 440 pixels. Note that toolbars will also hide functions depending on window size. The different and benefit of the Ribbon is that large icons are turned into small icons before they are hidden, allowing more functionality to be present at smaller resolutions compared to the toolbar.
There's also the nice new equation editor that only works in one font, Callibri, when most of the universe specifies either Times or TeX Computer Modern for equations, but that's not a ribbon fail
The font is Cambria Math, and you can change it as long as you have a font that supports all the math. I've done it just fine.
For example in Excel in 2003 if I wanted to insert a row, I'd go "Insert -> Row"
The insert tab is for inserting objects into the document. You'll notice none of those functions modify the layout of the document. However, the best way to insert rows and columns is to right click on the actual row, column, or cell and click insert. Clicking on the cell, and then going to a menu to do this operation makes no sense.
But if I make the window a little narrower it becomes just an icon and it's not exactly obvious until I click on it what that might do.
As the window gets narrower, the icons get smaller. There is never an icon without a label, as far as I can tell. The benefit of this is better scaling for smaller screens. Whereas a standard menu would simply hide these options by truncating the menu or toolbar, the ribbon can adjust until it gets very very small, where each group is a single icon.
Then there other features like the fact the "File" menu now takes over the entire window of the program.
I like this because it allows easier print and new documents menus. I've never encountered an instance where I needed to see the document at the same time I was browsing the file menu.
Now with the old system I had drop down menus which makes it much quicker to go through and find all the options then go through the ribbon, click each button and navigate through all the various drop downs off those buttons. The pull down menus also made it very easy for me to find the keyboard shortcuts for an option, so I can quickly learn to use the program more efficiently. All this is now hidden in the help system
Searching the old menu takes time O(m*n*p) to go through each menu (m), all the menu items (n), and all the flyouts (p). Since the ribbon displays menu items and flyouts at once, searching the ribbon takes time O(n*m) to search everything.
Further, keyboard shortcuts are learned by pressing alt. You then follow the letters just as you would in the menu interface. Any user of the old interface should know this, and any novice user probably doesn't care either way since they don't tend to use keyboard shortcuts for anything more than copy and paste.
However for me the worst of all is the inconsistency. In years gone buy these things were defined in a style guide so if I used one program I could quickly get familiar with others as many of the options would be called the same and in the same menus
This is a pretty rosy picture of the past. There is no "style guide" that forces developers to do anything, and interface are inconsistent between applications, ribbon or no ribbon. Is "preferences" under "file", "edit", or the "tools" menu? Further, other applications do use ribbon menus. Solidworks comes to mind as an example. Microsoft even offers tools to add ribbon interfaces into your application.
Now we're stuck with a horrible interface (in my opinion) that has very few possible customisations.
You can create your own tabs and add any functions you please to it. You can customize any existing tab to your heart's content. You can even pin functions to the quick access toolbar. How is this any worse than a single toolbar? It's the same as a toolbar with tabs.
That assumes a linier upgrade path. Companies just don't work that way. A lot of them went from Office XP to Office 2007. Office 2003 only worked with XP plus and it came out during a time when a lot of companies were doing OS upgrades. They don't like to deploy office suites until they have a year or two of service packs and fixes out.
While this is true, I think more people would have avoided 2010 if 2007 was such a productivity killer, just as they avoided Vista. Office 2007 sold very well, and if the general consensus was that the ribbon absolutely killed productivity (just as was the general consensus that Vista killed productivity) we would see very different sales numbers for Office 2010.
However, that does not mean that the significant subset of Office users who really do intimately understand their way around a tried and tested combination of keyboard shortcuts, toolbar icons, menu commands, dialog tricks and so on will appreciate having the new UI and the underlying models forced on them as well.
I'm one of those users who have been using Office since the 90s, and was very used to the old menu system. I adapted fine and prefer the ribbon, so it always makes me wonder whether these people who dislike the ribbon are numerous or simply very loud. As you can tell I lean toward the latter. I think they are a small group and my personal experience with others combined with usage statistics seem to back up my position.
The Ribbon caters very much to cosmetic hacks and a quick-and-dirty approach. Don't bother defining styles, structuring your document systematically, or understanding how to present your data effectively!
While office does allow for the quick and dirty document as you say, it has plenty of features for the advanced user. Honestly, it's just a tool and if the majority of people find it easier to use, does that make it bad because they could have a "better" document if they typeset with LaTeX? No. The majority of documents out there *deserve* a quick and dirty treatment because their purpose is to get a point across. The ribbon however allows easier access to more features, so the "quick and dirty" user who never heard of styles and cross references and table of contents can now discover those features insert them without a hitch. I see more and more documents produced with these features and they're better for it.
Microsoft sells about three individual licences a decade for Office applications and about a bazillion copies through mass licensing or preinstallation deals every year. The number of sales really doesn't tell us anything meaningful about what the people using Office actually think of the new ribbon.
The telling part is that these numbers are for Office 2010, 3 years after the ribbon was introduced. When something is a productivity dog, word gets around fast, as evidenced by Vista. If businesses who adopted Office 2007 were seeing major productivity hits (and 2007 sold at a rate twice as fast as 2003, so it was a major seller as well), you can bet Office 2010 with the same interface wouldn't have been as big a seller as it was.
So my anecdotal evidence includes just under 3500 co-workers, and just under 14,000 students.
And I can speak for 200 million people who have bought and used Office 2010 every day in the same way you can speak for those 3.5k coworkers and 14k students the vast majority of whom you've probably never spoken to.
My personal beef with the ribbon is that there's no organisation to it. It's just a mishmash of large icons, small icons, text, jumbled together.
The organization is very clear, and not that different from the old menu system. The primary structure is the tabs, analogous to the menu titles of the old system. The secondary structure is the groupings in each tab, analogous to menu items. The tertiary structure is group items, analogous to menu flyouts. Aside from the home tab, which uses common icons found in all word processing software to represent Bold, indent, etc. the function size indicates a fourth structure. For example, in the references tab the insert citation function is very large, whereas style or manage sources is smaller, since they are less used. Also aside from the home tab every uncommon icon is accompanied by a text description and a hovertip that tells you what the function does. This cannot be done in a regular menu because the hover gesture is used to open flyout menus.
A toolbar has every icon the same size, and organised according to a grid. A menu has every entry the same size, and organised according to a grid.
And yet a toolbar and menu contain items that don't lend themselves to being the same size and in a grid. For example, the toolbar contains a style box... which shows text for styles. Why not show the actual styles applied to text as in Word? The constant size/grid layout of the menu also does not scale well. It handles low resolutions by hiding items which you have to expand. The ribbon adjusts icon sizes so that more items are on screen at more resolutions.
And, the biggest thing, is that if you turn off the annoying "personalised menus" feature, everything is in the same place, everytime. Nothing moves, nothing jumps around.
While things may move on the ribbon spatially, they never do items always maintain the same position in the hierarchy I described before. Further, while context tabs may appear and disappear, this is for good reason, as the items are only functional for a specific context. This has more benefits than drawbacks.
You don't need to say it slower. I understand what perfectly what you're saying. I just think you're wrong.
My point is that you cannot know to customize the ribbon without precognition. This is true of menus, ribbons, whatever.
This is not the point you made originally. You're backtracking now. You asserted that the problem with the ribbon is that it assumes what you need and don't need and hides the rest. Now you say this is a problem with any menu system. So we are in agreeance now.
It is not a solution to the problem at all.
I'm not so sure this problem needs to be solved at all. How often do you need to find uncommon functions. By definition... not often. If you find you do need one often, just make a shortcut. You seem to want an interface that can read your mind and always activate the function you have in mind. This is unrealistic.
You make this assertion that "The ribbon makes it harder to do by MS purposefully obscuring what it considers less used feautures 2 or 3 menus deep. With the old way, it was there and more easily discoverered." But you have yet to substantiate this. I have provided several examples and reasons why the ribbon makes functions more easily discoverable. Let me enumerate and expand them for you and add a couple more.
1) The ribbon layout decreases search time. Finding a function in the old menu takes time O(m*n*p) where m is the number of menus, n is the number of items in the menus, and p is the number of flyouts. Finding a function in the ribbon takes time O(m*n) where m is the number of tabs and n is the number of items in the tabs.
2) The layout of the ribbon allows for more items to be displayed at once. Thus the number of items 2 clicks away are much higher than in the old menu. Thus the need to drill down into sub menus is decreased compared to the old menu.
3)The ribbon uses icons and words to represent functions, which makes them not only easier to remember but easier to scan quickly. In a menu system you have to read each of the words, one after another to find the one you want. And sometimes, a picture is a better representation for a function, like a style or a shape or a chart. For instance, the ribbon allows plenty of space to visualize all of the text styles. Rather than reading "heading 1" "heading 2" "text body" etc... as in Open Office Writer, you see them visually in Word due to the Ribbon.
4) The ribbon has more logical groupings for functions due to more space. Like the example I gave, Bibliography functions are under reference. In the old menu system, several related functions might be spread across different menus.
5) Context specific ribbons bring together common tools. For example with graphs, all graph functions are available in context tabs. In the old menu system, they try to replicate this with context toolbars, but the toolbar changes depending on the part of the graph you have selected. So rather than having everything in front of you, you have to click on the different chart pieces to try and find the function you want. Not very discoverable.
Now, how exactly does the old menu system beat these features of the ribbon in terms of discoverability?
The file formats are pretty portable. I can open a docx or xlsx file in LibreOffice or Google Docs handily. Office even opens and saves open office files formats just fine. Where's the format lock-in?
Like I said, classic slashdot logic. Businesses around the world are running entirely on Office, and of course it could *never* be because the software has any merit. No, it must be that people don't realize there are "better" options like LibreOffice out there. So you're trying to tell me that a hundred million people out there bought Office 2007 and productivity took a nose dive, and then they went on to buy the SAME software after nothing got done at the company? That's a pretty big stretch of logic if you ask me. Not buying it. We're talking about a population of 200 million here, where these corner cases you think represent the whole population have really no bearing.
If people were so unproductive with Office 2007, you would see a major increase in adoption of competitors like LibreOffice and Google Docs. You certainly wouldn't also see EVEN MORE people buying in to Office 2010, with the same ribbon interface.
But you can turn off all of the toolbars, and still have everything reachable form the menus in less mouse movement than from a hidden ribbon (although more from an unhidden ribbon).
Not sure I buy that. Less mouse movement maybe, but the targets are larger in Office, so it's unclear which interface has less target time according to Fitts Law. I think the Ribbon still wins overall since there is more functionality within 2 clicks than in the old menu.
Unlike the more conventional shortcuts, these are not side-effect free. They change the currently exposed tab on the ribbon. If you have your quick access tab open, and you save with alt-f-s (for example) instead of control-s, then you will now have the file menu open and need more mouse movement to return to the old state.
I see what you're saying, but you chose a bad example since that particular shortcut does not change contexts. Either way, if you're using keyboard shortcuts to save time ostensibly your hands should never be on the mouse. Thus it doesn't matter what context you're in, it's the same situation you're at with the old menu system: a series of keyboard shortcuts with the addition of visual feedback for to get to an item you never used before, thus keeping your hands off the mouse longer, thus increasing productivity.