I own a Zune HD as well and love it. In fact, with the launch of windows phone 7, Zune is now a higher priority than ever. Also the only people I know who don't like Zune either refer to Gen 1, or have never used it, especially the HD.
Then there are things like iWork for the iPad which costs $10 per app. MS doesn't even comprehend that space.
As an iPad owner.... iWork for iPad is in a completely different league (the bad way). It's useful for making changes to documents, but not for creating documents from scratch. You'll spend four times as long working with your fingers as you would with a keyboard and mouse, and you won't have access to even a third of the features. If you expect to use iPad to replace office, you'll be very sore.
Same way of all the features you find in an office suite, some 10% of it gets used very very heavily and another 20% of it would play spoiler in interoperability. Rest of the features are essentially bells and whistles meant to be used as bullet points in presentations made to top clients by the salesmen.
Not quite. Sure any individual user might only use 20% of a given feature set, but across all users (who have different needs) you'll find 100% of your feature set is being used. Take away any feature, and you're sure to have a subset of users who object. This is a fact of life when your user base is as diverse as Office.
I remember reading a MS Dev blog entry about the ribbon development. It said they constantly get feature requests for features which are already in Office, and what they did with the ribbon is directly address this and make feature discovery easier. To a large extent I think they were successful
I have not seen any new feature in the last 5 years in MsOffice that is a must have feature or a killer feature.
One Note comes to mind for me. It's come from a second rate product to a must have for anyone who takes notes. As a student, this piece of software is unrivaled and keeps getting better and better.
Also, after using the ribbon, I find charts in excel particularly easy. I tear my eyes out when I have to format charts in 2003 or OO.o, but the ribbon makes it so much easier. That's a killer feature in my opinion. In line charts and conditional formatting also come to mind as features I can't live without. Further, automatic table of contents, bibliography, captions, and indexing are features I started using in 2007 because I was able to discover them in the ribbon. If these features were in 2003, I wouldn't know because they were hidden in a maze of menus.
Finally the software costs have soared. It used to cost 50$ for MsWord and 1900$ for a desk top in 1995. Now it is 100$ for a decent desktop and 300$ for MsOffice (more if you want these ultimate, professional versions).
Office Home and Student gets you Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote for $150. If you need Outlook, Publisher, and Access you're probably not a home user. If you're a student your institution also most likely provides office for free, or for cheap ($10 or so).
There's no such thing as 8.9999....9991. You can't have an infinity followed by anything. It's like saying "after the end of time." As soon as you say the 9 repeats infinitely, you've committed it to never ending. As soon as you put the 1 in, the 9s end.
1) How do you say go-oo in conversation? Gooo. Or you could say the mouthful Go Open Office. Either way, the long name encourages users not to use the name, and the abbreviated alternative is even worse.
2) What does clay used for making houses have to do with manipulating photos? Well, nothing, but that's what makes it trademark-able.
3) "some clever acronym/metaphor for a name I generally appreciate the humor behind it" I agree, it's usually cute and clever, but only to people in the know. That is, people who already use FOSS, or tech people. Other wise the reference is lost
2 is not equil to 1 and there is no intger between them.
Why did you assume integers? Obviously there are plenty of rational numbers between 2 and 1. But you can't show me any real number between 0.999... and 1.
On the real number line, there is always a number in between two other numbers. There is no number between 1/3 and.333... because it's the same number. There is no number between.999... and 1 because it's the same number.
You can pin any option you want to the top of the screen on the title bar, next save, undo, redo. Click the down arrow, then click more commands. You can see you can go through the tabs and add whatever you want.
Alternatively, Office 2010 lets you customize the ribbon itself..
Who in their right might thought "gooo" would be an acceptable name for a professional office suite? How can you get to the product if you can't get past how ridiculous the name is?
Unfortunately, I think a lot of open source software suffers from lack of branding identity, which in the long run hurts the movement. They're either a generic word with a k- or g- prefix, or something ridiculous like OpenOffice.org (is it a website or an office suite?) or the aforementioned go-oo.
Sorry, I think you're one of the people Benfea is talking about.
0.0000...1 is not a real number. You can't have anything after an infinity because then it's not an infinity. Infinity goes on forever. If you put something after forever, you don't really have forever in the first place.
How is bringing all 90% of the functionality within 3 clicks hiding functionality? Common tasks like page formatting are brought front and center in Office, whereas in Open office it's buried in a tab in a sub menu of a sub menu.
Further advanced functionality, like ToC, Indexes, Bibliography, are made accessible to the user, rather than languishing unused in the menu system.
You state the ribbon doesn't make sense, but you don't back that up. From my perspective it's perfectly logical. Want to change page dimensions and orientation? Page layout. Want to insert a picture? Insert. Want to add a citation? References. There are some odds and ends out of place, but it's not as bag as putting Bibliography in "Tools" and Citations in "Insert > Indexes and Tablet" as in Open Office.
So your argument amounts to change is bad, and making software more accessible and easy to use is not worth while. Do you have any actual criticism? How does the Ribbon actually stack up against OpenOffice's menu?
Let's take changing page dimension for instance. In Office 2007, it's 3 clicks (Page layout > Size > Select). In Open Office 3.2, it's 6 clicks (Format > Page > Page > Format > Select Size > Ok). To change the size again (if you don't like it for instance) in Office it's 2 clicks, and in Open Office it's 5 clicks (you save a click since the page tab is pre-selected).
Or consider footer, for instance. Say I want to add a footer and adjust its height. In Office, I double click on the footer, and the footer ribbon is brought up where I can adjust all aspects (including height) and see how my document changes. In Open Office, I have to go to Format > Page > Footer > Footer On > Adjust Height > Ok. The footer ribbon at the same time gives me helpful options I might need. If I didn't know how to add automatic page numbering in Office, I can easily find out because that option is made obvious. For open office, (I actually had to search online where to find this option) you have to go into Insert > Fields > Page Number.
These are all low level, basic operations any user might want to do. I haven't even addressed things like, how do I change the color and style of fonts in the document. In Office you simply hover over the options to see how they look and pick one. In open office styles are represented by text, so you can't quickly see what each represents.... needless to say it's a pain.
I think I've made my point. I could probably choose any given task or function in Office and Open Office and demonstrate how it takes more time or is inefficient in Open Office. The only thing you can say about the ribbon is it's different from before. Through converting, I hardly had to hunt for options as they are not only logically displayed (I want to change the page layout. Maybe I should go to the page layout ribbon), but also only 3 levels deep at maximum. With a menu system, related options are only sometimes found together (The bibliography database and insert citation options in Open Office are in two entirely different menus), and there is no limit to the depth of the menu. You admit yourself that novice users easily get lost in large menu structures, and that only expert users find this system workable. Why should a consumer office suite only be usable by experts?
Open office even implements some of the features of the Ribbon. Go ahead and insert a table, and you'll see a context box for table formatting options, just like the ribbon. It's kind of nice, since you can access the menu with this toolbox open, but the ribbon address this in that the options you want are still on average less clicks away.
Personally I haven't stated my Ph.D. thesis, but I've written plenty of term papers and research papers in Word. I find the auto index, ToC, Bibliography, and caption tool very useful for longer documents, however I don't see how Open Office is any better for this application. I also use Excel for some of my research (not all) because it's easy and accessible, leaving me more time to do research. I'm very happy with the 2007 ribbon interface, as it's drastically increased my productivity and introduced me to features which are either new, or at least new to me.
If you don't want people to use it, it's a trivial matter to configure your router to stop inviting people to use it. Turn off SSID. Lower the signal strength so it stays on your own property and out of public spaces. Implement WEP or WPA.
You dismissively state that configuring wireless security is trivial, when most people don't even understand why wireless security is important, let alone how to go about implementing it. Everything you listed there makes no sense to the person who can just go to best buy and hook up a router. Open wireless networks are real easy to set up. As soon as you as security, it's an entirely different matter.
First you have to go to http://192.168.1.1/ or some such, which is a completely foreign address to most people that it becomes confusing. You don't know how many times I've seen people go to http://www.192.168.1.1.com./ Then you type in the admin/admin login, which usually stays that way. On to configuring the wireless, which grants you options for SSID, channel, a,b,g,n, WEP, WPA1, WPA2... all without explanations of the options or which are best to use.
Most likely you'll go through some automated setup which will ask for an SSID and set a default encryption type with a random key. Here's one for you: d&K8EHg%K!JOEHK!sMisapTic7j\CgKqbexpwSj7I\VX0pN$1\jbk30B9t7KOQ/
Now go enter that in all your wireless devices. Half your devices enter a masked password, like your TV, so you spend an hour just typing it in there, only to figure out it doesn't support WPA2 or whatever you chose. So you're back to reconfiguring your network.
It's at this time you throw up your hands and say "fuck it, I'm leaving it open"
It has been proven that radio waves transfer their energy to nearby tissue
"Proven?" It's elementary physics. Energy is transfered to and from your body all the time from the air, objects, sound, light, and yes, EM waves. This isn't a point of contention (unless you're from the 1600s). The question is to what degree do radio waves stimulate cancer growth, and that is still open.
That was the case with the iPad. It was predicted since the Newton, and never came to fruition until 2010. If you predict something even remotely likely for long enough, it's bound to come true.
At my university, we have a computer security lab just for this purpose. It's completely isolated from the internet and the campus network, with all computers, servers, switches, etc. available for student access.
As with all dangerous things, the key is to make everyone aware of the dangers and the consequences, and then closely supervise them. A lab course I took actually required us to use plutonium for neutron activation. As far as dangerous things go, that's on the top of the list. But we wore film badges and were supervised, and everything turned out okay.
I earned an undergraduate physics degree and computer science degree using a Windows tablet (several in fact). I'm not in graduate school, and own both a new tablet PC and an iPad. Although the iPad is great for reading e-books, general reference, basic productivity (there's a great scheduling app for students called iStudiez), and casual media consumption (web, photos) I can't actually do much with it.
The general theme of the uses I outlined above is unidirectional. That is, iPad -> me. It's an information consumption device. So more and more when I find something I would like to do with it, I actually can't, whether because of lack of input options or the Apple walled garden.
On the other hand, I do all my serious work on my tablet PC. Aside from taking class notes (which the iPad is terrible for), I grade papers on my tablet, conduct lectures (drawing on power point slides), draw circuit diagrams, mark up textbooks and papers as I read them, and copy sections of textbooks (drawings, figures) into my notes. These are all things that are not possible on the iPad (Well, some are to a degree, but I've found them highly deficient. For example, projecting to the screen is enabled on a per app basis. That means if you have something to show students, the app has to enable it. The solution I've used is to sit the iPad under the document camera, but then you have my hands in the way most of the time.).
The bulk of my work is done working in ROS (Robot Open Source), and writing papers (the kind that get published). These are both no possible with a tablet PC, but at least I can attach a keyboard accessory and then do these (using grown up software). With the iPad, after you attach the keyboard accessory you are still limited to apps written specifically for finger input, and they do not implement the keyboard well (keyboard shortcuts? What are those? Sure you get the standard copy, paste, but that's about it). Also, I would love to see someone try to format a paper to journal specs with Pages for iPad. The iWork suite for iPad is very feature deficient and hard to use. It's best for making small edits to documents.
Also, ctr-alt-del and alt-f4 are handled elegantly by the on screen keyboard. I can tell you haven't actually even used a tablet pc. My particular screen is multi touch, so it's just a matter of pressing ctrl+alt+del.
[quote]apple computer... has passed Microsoft in... Gross revenues[quote]
I'm assuming you're referring to the Q3 2010 income statements, where Apple posted 6B on 15.7B revenue, and Microsoft posted 12B on 16.0B revenue. So for every dollar Apple makes Microsoft makes about 2.
Let's talk about yearly earnings. Let's be generous and say Apple makes 10B profit this quarter. That still only brings their yearly profit to a little over half Microsoft's.
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I own a Zune HD as well and love it. In fact, with the launch of windows phone 7, Zune is now a higher priority than ever. Also the only people I know who don't like Zune either refer to Gen 1, or have never used it, especially the HD.
Then there are things like iWork for the iPad which costs $10 per app. MS doesn't even comprehend that space.
As an iPad owner.... iWork for iPad is in a completely different league (the bad way). It's useful for making changes to documents, but not for creating documents from scratch. You'll spend four times as long working with your fingers as you would with a keyboard and mouse, and you won't have access to even a third of the features. If you expect to use iPad to replace office, you'll be very sore.
Same way of all the features you find in an office suite, some 10% of it gets used very very heavily and another 20% of it would play spoiler in interoperability. Rest of the features are essentially bells and whistles meant to be used as bullet points in presentations made to top clients by the salesmen.
Not quite. Sure any individual user might only use 20% of a given feature set, but across all users (who have different needs) you'll find 100% of your feature set is being used. Take away any feature, and you're sure to have a subset of users who object. This is a fact of life when your user base is as diverse as Office.
I remember reading a MS Dev blog entry about the ribbon development. It said they constantly get feature requests for features which are already in Office, and what they did with the ribbon is directly address this and make feature discovery easier. To a large extent I think they were successful
I have not seen any new feature in the last 5 years in MsOffice that is a must have feature or a killer feature.
One Note comes to mind for me. It's come from a second rate product to a must have for anyone who takes notes. As a student, this piece of software is unrivaled and keeps getting better and better.
Also, after using the ribbon, I find charts in excel particularly easy. I tear my eyes out when I have to format charts in 2003 or OO.o, but the ribbon makes it so much easier. That's a killer feature in my opinion. In line charts and conditional formatting also come to mind as features I can't live without. Further, automatic table of contents, bibliography, captions, and indexing are features I started using in 2007 because I was able to discover them in the ribbon. If these features were in 2003, I wouldn't know because they were hidden in a maze of menus.
Finally the software costs have soared. It used to cost 50$ for MsWord and 1900$ for a desk top in 1995. Now it is 100$ for a decent desktop and 300$ for MsOffice (more if you want these ultimate, professional versions).
Office Home and Student gets you Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote for $150. If you need Outlook, Publisher, and Access you're probably not a home user. If you're a student your institution also most likely provides office for free, or for cheap ($10 or so).
There's no such thing as 8.9999....9991. You can't have an infinity followed by anything. It's like saying "after the end of time." As soon as you say the 9 repeats infinitely, you've committed it to never ending. As soon as you put the 1 in, the 9s end.
I'm surprised you've taken a course on discrete mathematics and have never heard of a geometric series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series#Proof_of_convergence">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series
Take a look at that = sign. That's right, the infinite sum is EQUAL to (not approximate to) 1/(1-r). For your example, the sum is equal to 1
Try it out, 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8.... you're going to end up with .999...
But it can be proven the sum is equal to 1. Guess what? .999... = 1.
1) How do you say go-oo in conversation? Gooo. Or you could say the mouthful Go Open Office. Either way, the long name encourages users not to use the name, and the abbreviated alternative is even worse.
2) What does clay used for making houses have to do with manipulating photos? Well, nothing, but that's what makes it trademark-able.
3) "some clever acronym/metaphor for a name I generally appreciate the humor behind it" I agree, it's usually cute and clever, but only to people in the know. That is, people who already use FOSS, or tech people. Other wise the reference is lost
2 is not equil to 1 and there is no intger between them.
Why did you assume integers? Obviously there are plenty of rational numbers between 2 and 1. But you can't show me any real number between 0.999... and 1.
On the real number line, there is always a number in between two other numbers. There is no number between 1/3 and .333... because it's the same number. There is no number between .999... and 1 because it's the same number.
You can pin any option you want to the top of the screen on the title bar, next save, undo, redo. Click the down arrow, then click more commands. You can see you can go through the tabs and add whatever you want.
Alternatively, Office 2010 lets you customize the ribbon itself..
Who in their right might thought "gooo" would be an acceptable name for a professional office suite? How can you get to the product if you can't get past how ridiculous the name is?
Unfortunately, I think a lot of open source software suffers from lack of branding identity, which in the long run hurts the movement. They're either a generic word with a k- or g- prefix, or something ridiculous like OpenOffice.org (is it a website or an office suite?) or the aforementioned go-oo.
Sorry, I think you're one of the people Benfea is talking about.
0.0000...1 is not a real number. You can't have anything after an infinity because then it's not an infinity. Infinity goes on forever. If you put something after forever, you don't really have forever in the first place.
How is bringing all 90% of the functionality within 3 clicks hiding functionality? Common tasks like page formatting are brought front and center in Office, whereas in Open office it's buried in a tab in a sub menu of a sub menu.
Further advanced functionality, like ToC, Indexes, Bibliography, are made accessible to the user, rather than languishing unused in the menu system.
You state the ribbon doesn't make sense, but you don't back that up. From my perspective it's perfectly logical. Want to change page dimensions and orientation? Page layout. Want to insert a picture? Insert. Want to add a citation? References. There are some odds and ends out of place, but it's not as bag as putting Bibliography in "Tools" and Citations in "Insert > Indexes and Tablet" as in Open Office.
So your argument amounts to change is bad, and making software more accessible and easy to use is not worth while. Do you have any actual criticism? How does the Ribbon actually stack up against OpenOffice's menu?
Let's take changing page dimension for instance. In Office 2007, it's 3 clicks (Page layout > Size > Select). In Open Office 3.2, it's 6 clicks (Format > Page > Page > Format > Select Size > Ok). To change the size again (if you don't like it for instance) in Office it's 2 clicks, and in Open Office it's 5 clicks (you save a click since the page tab is pre-selected).
Or consider footer, for instance. Say I want to add a footer and adjust its height. In Office, I double click on the footer, and the footer ribbon is brought up where I can adjust all aspects (including height) and see how my document changes. In Open Office, I have to go to Format > Page > Footer > Footer On > Adjust Height > Ok. The footer ribbon at the same time gives me helpful options I might need. If I didn't know how to add automatic page numbering in Office, I can easily find out because that option is made obvious. For open office, (I actually had to search online where to find this option) you have to go into Insert > Fields > Page Number.
These are all low level, basic operations any user might want to do. I haven't even addressed things like, how do I change the color and style of fonts in the document. In Office you simply hover over the options to see how they look and pick one. In open office styles are represented by text, so you can't quickly see what each represents.... needless to say it's a pain.
I think I've made my point. I could probably choose any given task or function in Office and Open Office and demonstrate how it takes more time or is inefficient in Open Office. The only thing you can say about the ribbon is it's different from before. Through converting, I hardly had to hunt for options as they are not only logically displayed (I want to change the page layout. Maybe I should go to the page layout ribbon), but also only 3 levels deep at maximum. With a menu system, related options are only sometimes found together (The bibliography database and insert citation options in Open Office are in two entirely different menus), and there is no limit to the depth of the menu. You admit yourself that novice users easily get lost in large menu structures, and that only expert users find this system workable. Why should a consumer office suite only be usable by experts?
Open office even implements some of the features of the Ribbon. Go ahead and insert a table, and you'll see a context box for table formatting options, just like the ribbon. It's kind of nice, since you can access the menu with this toolbox open, but the ribbon address this in that the options you want are still on average less clicks away.
Personally I haven't stated my Ph.D. thesis, but I've written plenty of term papers and research papers in Word. I find the auto index, ToC, Bibliography, and caption tool very useful for longer documents, however I don't see how Open Office is any better for this application. I also use Excel for some of my research (not all) because it's easy and accessible, leaving me more time to do research. I'm very happy with the 2007 ribbon interface, as it's drastically increased my productivity and introduced me to features which are either new, or at least new to me.
Please look up the concept of an infinite series, and in particular what "convergence" means. Here is a start : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series
I remember being told this in highschool. There was much objection, but the teacher shut us up by simply saying "give me a number in between them."
I'm glad you recognize it's an uninformed guess. Just so you know, visible light is EM radiation, and it has a much higher frequency than radio waves.
With respect to the issue of cancer, it's not a simple matter of "What frequency resonates with cells"
If you don't want people to use it, it's a trivial matter to configure your router to stop inviting people to use it. Turn off SSID. Lower the signal strength so it stays on your own property and out of public spaces. Implement WEP or WPA.
You dismissively state that configuring wireless security is trivial, when most people don't even understand why wireless security is important, let alone how to go about implementing it. Everything you listed there makes no sense to the person who can just go to best buy and hook up a router. Open wireless networks are real easy to set up. As soon as you as security, it's an entirely different matter.
First you have to go to http://192.168.1.1/ or some such, which is a completely foreign address to most people that it becomes confusing. You don't know how many times I've seen people go to http://www.192.168.1.1.com./ Then you type in the admin/admin login, which usually stays that way. On to configuring the wireless, which grants you options for SSID, channel, a,b,g,n, WEP, WPA1, WPA2... all without explanations of the options or which are best to use.
Most likely you'll go through some automated setup which will ask for an SSID and set a default encryption type with a random key. Here's one for you: d&K8EHg%K!JOEHK!sMisapTic7j\CgKqbexpwSj7I\VX0pN$1\jbk30B9t7KOQ/
Now go enter that in all your wireless devices. Half your devices enter a masked password, like your TV, so you spend an hour just typing it in there, only to figure out it doesn't support WPA2 or whatever you chose. So you're back to reconfiguring your network.
It's at this time you throw up your hands and say "fuck it, I'm leaving it open"
It has been proven that radio waves transfer their energy to nearby tissue
"Proven?" It's elementary physics. Energy is transfered to and from your body all the time from the air, objects, sound, light, and yes, EM waves. This isn't a point of contention (unless you're from the 1600s). The question is to what degree do radio waves stimulate cancer growth, and that is still open.
That was the case with the iPad. It was predicted since the Newton, and never came to fruition until 2010. If you predict something even remotely likely for long enough, it's bound to come true.
At my university, we have a computer security lab just for this purpose. It's completely isolated from the internet and the campus network, with all computers, servers, switches, etc. available for student access.
As with all dangerous things, the key is to make everyone aware of the dangers and the consequences, and then closely supervise them. A lab course I took actually required us to use plutonium for neutron activation. As far as dangerous things go, that's on the top of the list. But we wore film badges and were supervised, and everything turned out okay.
The plural of virus is viruses. Just like the plural of abacus is abacuses, not abacai. Viri (or even worse, virii) annoys the hell out of me.
I earned an undergraduate physics degree and computer science degree using a Windows tablet (several in fact). I'm not in graduate school, and own both a new tablet PC and an iPad. Although the iPad is great for reading e-books, general reference, basic productivity (there's a great scheduling app for students called iStudiez), and casual media consumption (web, photos) I can't actually do much with it.
The general theme of the uses I outlined above is unidirectional. That is, iPad -> me. It's an information consumption device. So more and more when I find something I would like to do with it, I actually can't, whether because of lack of input options or the Apple walled garden.
On the other hand, I do all my serious work on my tablet PC. Aside from taking class notes (which the iPad is terrible for), I grade papers on my tablet, conduct lectures (drawing on power point slides), draw circuit diagrams, mark up textbooks and papers as I read them, and copy sections of textbooks (drawings, figures) into my notes. These are all things that are not possible on the iPad (Well, some are to a degree, but I've found them highly deficient. For example, projecting to the screen is enabled on a per app basis. That means if you have something to show students, the app has to enable it. The solution I've used is to sit the iPad under the document camera, but then you have my hands in the way most of the time.).
The bulk of my work is done working in ROS (Robot Open Source), and writing papers (the kind that get published). These are both no possible with a tablet PC, but at least I can attach a keyboard accessory and then do these (using grown up software). With the iPad, after you attach the keyboard accessory you are still limited to apps written specifically for finger input, and they do not implement the keyboard well (keyboard shortcuts? What are those? Sure you get the standard copy, paste, but that's about it). Also, I would love to see someone try to format a paper to journal specs with Pages for iPad. The iWork suite for iPad is very feature deficient and hard to use. It's best for making small edits to documents.
Also, ctr-alt-del and alt-f4 are handled elegantly by the on screen keyboard. I can tell you haven't actually even used a tablet pc. My particular screen is multi touch, so it's just a matter of pressing ctrl+alt+del.
I'm assuming you're referring to the Q3 2010 income statements, where Apple posted 6B on 15.7B revenue, and Microsoft posted 12B on 16.0B revenue. So for every dollar Apple makes Microsoft makes about 2.
Let's talk about yearly earnings. Let's be generous and say Apple makes 10B profit this quarter. That still only brings their yearly profit to a little over half Microsoft's.
Probably 90% of corporations out there making money are using Microsoft software.
Yes, because when it comes to foreign policy, we should always ask ourselves, "What would a 5 year old do?"