I think it's all a big game, but seriously I think there's a point where you have to cave in and raise the numbers. Developers can't be all gung-ho about NOT raising the version numbers cause otherwise users will never feel the need to update to the newer version. Example :
You have FireFox 1.1, Now FireFox 1.2 has come out... probably not a big change, not going to upgrade. Now 1.3 comes out, same thing, who cares. 1.4 hmmm they must just be fixing minor things. 2.0 comes out, hmmm gotta get that right now, must be something important.
You have IE 5, Now IE 6 comes out... gotta upgrade, something important. Now IE 7 comes out, gotta upgrade, something important.
Yes, there can be too many version changes (case in point Opera)... but sometimes there can be too few also.
For something like a web browser the version number has not been critical; it's a testosterone driven publicity marker. It's mostly hype and anything that's broken in a new version can be re-enabled via an extension.
If you look at other open source projects you can see where version numbers are very useful when used inteligently.
First decimal - Major changes of file formats, features, and api's
Second decimal - Features and requirement changes, but still backwards compatible
Third decimal - Bug fixes
For example, a content management system like Subversion has big problems when they change repository formats or api's for their clients. Paying attention to their own version numbering rules ensures that their file formats and apis will work for well-established, numerically-obvious periods, but they don't require that developers will be enslaved by poor choices they may make today in the far future. Looking at their release history it's refreshing how few "red releases" (which require a reload of the repository) there have been in the past, and it's also how nice it is to see that they do have some logic in their version numbering that has worked back then and appears to work when talking about major changes to the version++ release.
"Copland is to Mac OS 8 as Longhorn is to Vista" seems to be becoming more true every day.
Though it was promised as a fundamentally ground up re-invention (Pink, Copland, System 8), the Mac OS 8 product that was actually shipped was mostly a cosmetic upgrade with the bits of the promised technologies that could be made to work. The new graphics architecture became a new font subsystem. The new document archicture (without developed parts making use of it) became a built-in web architecture. System wide document content searching became better file finding. The goal became to try to keep whatever anticipation was already built but jettison the "hard problems" of making it actually work in the ways that were promised. Tell everyone that Feature X has evovled into something beyond what we had ever anticipated rather than the world passed us by while we were shooting for an old target.
It may be that Microsoft still has the inertia to pull off an almost completely cosmetic update, but it's going to get pretty ardurous environment on the development teams. After all, the goal isn't going to be to even ship a feature reduced product. It's going to be to ship cosmetic filler that covers up the need for what was really promised. Maybe Blackcomb or Fiji or whatever it's called now, will become a stage for the proper solution, but that's a very big IF.
I don't see the similarity in marketing beyond "It's mass produced. Actual product may vary." between burgers and computers.
Taste and aroma don't market easily, but a computer doesn't have those problematic senses. Computers are actually easier to market in their raw form. You don't actually try to lick the screen in Apple's OS X do you?
Risking a disagreeable meal is simple, common, individual decision. Risking the price of an Origami device means checking bank statements, arguing with your spouse, and saving from paycheck to paycheck. People are screaming bloody murder about scratches on their iPods because it's a $300 device rather than a $30 device.
Computer advertising inevitably raises questions. Will this help me? Can I afford it? Is it compatible? Fast food advertising is in the group that provides an answer to questions they know you're already considering at just the right time (before their competition suggests an alternative answer).
Food items are easily modifiable and improvable. If you don't like onions on your burger, you can order it that way or just scrape them off yourself. Computers are not modifiable or improvable to the mass market. A buyer has few ways to vent their frustrations other than return the product and/or bitterly complain about it to others.
So, Microsoft hyped a product (that seems to do take a good jab at it's niche), and someone says it *looked* like it might have done something else. When I see an add for a BigMac on TV, and go in to buy one, it's not *as* big or *as* juicy as in the commercial, but still worth it. So, marketers promoted a product? Big deal.
The issue was that the hype raised expectations higher than what an actual product could deliver. The buzz about Oragami was that it was going to be a revolution in portable computing. This was going to be the device that made the PDA market irrelevant and that would make traditional laptops seem arcahic. It was going to be a birth of a new form factor that would solve the most difficult compromises of moblile computing and consolidate the market rather than fracture it further. It wasn't going to be just another way to package the cooked cow carcass we're so familiar with.
Were the orgami companies developing the actual products completely suckered by the hype themselves? Or was the company doing the marketing simply out of touch with what the market could deliver? Though backwards, it's like NASA getting the writers of Star Trek to write up their annual budget to justify their funding from Congress. Star Trek writers could come up with enchanting arguments and get lawmakers on the edge of their seats to throw money at NASA technologies, but without being able to produce holodecks, transporters, and phasers, they'd never be able to meet the hype.
Proprietary software development companies have found that promoting (or even acknowledging) developers causes a problem where the developers can be hired away. When the most knowlegeable developers disappear, there's a huge learning curve even for the "second tier" that must come to fill the void. It's a well-known risk for proprietary companies to have these "assets" so exposed and open to theft by other HR departments. Even if they aren't hired away, superstar developers mean that they can leverage huge salaries. Proprietary software companies have found that keeping their development staffs unacknowledged and easily replaceable means they keep costs down. They've developed a way to keep the developer a cheap, replaceable asset.
It seems that this article is trying to focus on how this applies to open source software development companies. It's not open source development in general, but companies which profit from open-source as an integral part of their business (admin services, proprietary add-ons, special distributions, etc). Even if the source for a critical part is open, the company will only have a handful of developers who understand the code inside and out on staff. This is a potential liability.
Accountants and capitalists don't want to consider developers as "artists" or "superstars", they'd much rather consider them as sheep to be sheperded. Simple, replaceable, interchangable. The article tries to make the point "Don't assume open source means your paid development staff will become a constantly refillable, always-replaceable, cheap resource." It doesn't change the problems of hiring developers that you had when you considered proprietary software funding.
"It's not likely that Ballmer will stay on as CEO after Gates steps down as the company's chief software architect", says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, who has watched Microsoft (Charts) for almost 20 years. "When you get into a cycle like this, the founders go reasonably soon after each other," says Enderle.
Putting aside Rob Enderle's other failures as an analyst, I see him as simply trying to get back up on the wave of punditry that he completely missed with the revelation of Bill Gates leaving. If Ballmer doesn't leave, no one will care. If he does, then Enderle looks like he has an inside connection or excellent prognostication ability.
In reality, I don't see Mr. Ballmer leaving any time soon. The revolt wasn't due to the shareholders as much as Bill Gates just (apparently) getting sick of the day to day. Steve doesn't seem to share that boredom and he certainly doesn't have the hubris to realize that his leaving would be more beneficial to the stock price than any policy he enacts while in the driver seat.
One of the big arguments against use of illegal drugs is that it financially supports an immoral, illegal, and corrupt system. Even though you may use your stash at home and in a manner that doesn't hurt anyone else, your money goes to the drug dealers, crime lords, and liberal democrats... err... god-forsaken hedonists that are corrupting the very soul of this country.
Is Microsoft saying that they actually handed over money, got sentences reduced, or somehow offered compensation to the black hat hackers that they've been so anxious to bring down in the past? Isn't this in itself immoral?
Symantec AntiVirus products for Mac (in my experience) are incredibly popular among people moving from PC's to Macs: the so called "Switcher" market. It's really just a matter of having built a reputation on fear in one market and the user feeling naked without that product.
Some argue that it's not bad to have a security infrastructure in-place, even if theres very little self-propagaiting malware out there. It makes one "ready" to deal with the inevitable threats when they are discovered. It makes one confident that they will be the first ones to recognize and recover from any future infection.
That seems like a good idea until you realize that to install and remove malware means the software will need to operate with very high permissions. Installing programs like Clam or Symantec Antivirus are possibly giving hackers more potential ways to exploit your system than if you hadn't installed the anti-malware to begin with. I think there actually have been low-level, local security holes found based soleley on security software that the user has installed.
On the Mac, I think there is more harm than good done right now with anti-virus products. It's almost like feeling you must hang that lucky pair of fuzzy dice in your new car because you think it helps you not have accidents, when in fact their interference in your driving might be what causes you to have one.
I think there's a dubious market for malware. (Okay, so my old boss might be the type to commission a new virus, but most aren't.)
The anti-malware markets need a continuous set of threats to be taken seriously and though they don't write the malware themselves, it's integral to their success in business.
Advice from industry experts giving 'analysis' such as "The smarter virus writers won't deploy their security compromises until after Vista actually ships." practically tells malware developers "If you're smart, you'll hold off on deploying your next big hack until after Vista ships so that your security hole won't be patched up before then."
When their analysts actually look seriously at alternitives that will reduce the scope of malware (such as moving to Linux or Mac OS X) then we may have real separation between the markets. Until then the anti-malware camp probably the most able to profit from (and legally disclaim responsibility for) the existence of malware.
Whether artificial or not, let's send a bit of what the Bush Administration has done to the American people over to our heroic men and women stationed in Iraq.
The Core 2 Duo benchmarks we ran were not completed in our own labs and we have used some unfamiliar tests in order to establish how well the new Core architecture performs. This was because we were not allowed to tweak the system or install our own benchmarks - the machine was built and configured by Intel engineers.
So if Intel provided hardware, chips, and tests themselves, isn't this more of a write-it-yourself press release from Intel than a real independent review? If they provided "some unfamiliar tests" then that would seem to indicate Intel doesn't know what common and familiar tests should be run, or (more cynically) that they didn't want potentially bad or uncontrolled results polluting their positive reviews.
The copyright on a number of songs first graders might still find entertaining have expired. Things like:
Old McDonald
I've Been Working on the Railroad
99 Bottles of Beverage on the Wall
Ring Around the Rosie
She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain
and many, many more
Yes, the performances of the songs may be copyrighted, but even that isn't a certainty. There is a Public Domain into which the performing artist may release their performance.
If the tune, lyrics, and performance aren't protected intellectual property then the first grader should call the police and have Captain Copyright arrested for child molestation. Okay, there wasn't any sexual molestation involved, but a man in a skin tight costume who constantly barges in on first graders in their homes will have a very difficult time convincing a jury of that fact.
One of the articles arguments is that Apple needs to make games. This isn't something new for Apple. They made a number of games for the Apple ][ product line (including Apple Adventure). They even made and marketed the game "Through the Looking Glass" for the Mac back when it first came out. Today, however, I think Apple wants developers to make their own products rather than compete with developers in the games marketplace. If Apple's games are perceived as lame, that makes the platform undesirable to consumers. If Apple's games are hot, then that eats up the customers for the products of other game developers.
Another argument of the article is that there are rumors of Apple hiring game developers. This purported fact goes on to suggest that Apple will be turning the iPod and the Mac into gaming platforms. I think that this is way too far of a leap. My first bet is that Apple is looking for OpenGL developers to speed up and fine tune OpenGL development in the undercarriage of Mac OS X's graphics system. Where else would you look for such knowledgeable people so focused on speed and performance of imaging than in the world of games? If development goes further than this, I expect that game developers are being paid to port the platforms games are built upon to Mac OS X to make it easier for developers to move their apps over.
Would Apple co-develop the next big game on Mac OS X with LucasArts (or whoever)? While not out of the question, I doubt Apple would want to be included in the credit and liability of such a game. Violence. Sex. and worse, a lame final result, might ruin the potential of the Mac for other game developers. One of the hottest games for the Mac when I was in college was MacPlaymate. It was an exercise in virutal dildonics and let the user get the on-screen half-toned bitmapped woman to emit orgasmic sounds of ectasy. It wasn't ported to other platforms (that I'm aware) but it probably sold more Macs on my campus when a cracked version made it to the campus computer labs than any other pirated app. Was Apple appreciative of these sales? Probably. Would Apple want to build a marketing campaign on such a unique product to the Mac platform? Probably not.
The Aqua user interface is something that Apple prides itself on. It isn't a gaming interface though. It's a standard user interface for business, education, and scientific apps, and it goes out of its way to tell you to follow our rules for making your app, or don't use Aqua at all. That doesn't mean that Apple is discouraging game developers, but it doesn't want corruption of its crown jewels in the process. Games that follow the rules are great (A board or card game for example) but if you go beyond that then you need to design your own user interface and immerse the user in that instead. Perhaps Apple will come out with a game interface that's themeable and radical and immersive and looks nothing like Aqua (just as it provides non-Aqua elements for Dashbaord widgets). But it's still not a certainty that game developers would want to use that interface.
Most likely in my mind is if Apple wants a hot gaming platform, it will start out by trying to convince other gaming platforms to come to Mac OS X. Play on the fear of Microsoft's Xbox to get Sony or Nintendo to develop a partial console that uses Mac hardware to make itself complete. I can see Apple throwing money at getting an existing game development environment onto the Mac, but I can't see Apple trying to enter this world by itself.
Oh well, back to running MacPlaymate under classic:-)
A big feature touted in Vista is the Instant Search feature. Will it become a new security hole?
If it can search and index file contents, then it has full access to my data. If access to that index or search feature is insecure then it's taking control of my data out of my hands and giving it freely to others. Why should applications need to access files that I created but which I haven't explicitly opened for their use?
Will the security be in place in both the API and data storage files so that instant search won't just become a new way for malware to quickly focus on the data it wants (e.g. Credit Card or Social Security Numbers)?
I never thought this was a real question which people actually even considered debating. The answer was always clear and straight-forward depending on whether you favored evolution or creation as the source of life. If you favored the idea that God created the whole world and its inhabitants as adults you obviously thought the chicken came first. If you favored the Darwinian evolution, then you state that it was the egg and that the chicken came from a pairing, mutation, or other accident of birth in an evolutionary manner. Beyond using this to summarize (and probably short-circuit) debates on evolution vs. creation, I don't think the question would have made it into popular culture.
A similar question was "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" (to my understanding) wasn't really about angel-packing theory but was a question about whether you believed that there was a spiritual world coexisting with ours or whether spritual ideas came strictly from men and inhabitants of this world. If you believed in a parallel spiritual world the answer was infinite angles. If you thought that angels were butterflies or people or something with mass then the answer was non-infinite. There wasn't any real debate (do hallucinations of angels count?) but it was another question that simply summarized a particular stance of ideas.
All that comes to mind right now is that horrible song on Sesame Street or the Electric Company or something where they show chickens and eggs and chickens hatching from eggs and a country singer fiddling away singing "Which came first the Chicken or the Egg? The chicken or the Egg? The Chicken or the Egg? Which came first the Chicken or the Egg?" ad smeging infinitum. Grrr. There's going to be an infinite number of angels hunting down whoever posted this and reawakened that memory for me.
If you or your company considers this, get ready for more incompatiblities with previous generations, and retro installation of plugins. That's okay within a company (to some), but think carefully about the impedance mismatch with the rest of the world.
It's not just backward incompatibility. In this case, doing away with the traditional menu and toolbar structure is going to seriously impact forward compatibility as well.
A spatial interface like the ribbon will require serious retraining whenever that spatial interface changes. Microsoft may change it for non-productive reasons like adding more eye candy to boost sales or for more significant reasons like adding (and removing) functionality. Whatever the reason, the interface will change in the future and any motor memory you have built will be lost (or worse cause you to select unintended options).
Most of the user interface studies Microsoft quotes describe how easy it is to adapt to the interface from a menu based system. But that's as shortsighted an argument as judging 'file format' compatability based only on whether a new verison of Word can easily convert your old documents. While that is an issue, compatability judgement should consider the future and how much has to be thrown away when future changes come around. No doubt the 'ribbon' has two dozen patents on it so only Microsoft will be able to provide true forward compatability, but with something like a Word processor I don't think MS will have the patience, restraint, and concern to make sure future interface changes are as motor-friendly and compatible with older interface users.
While I'm sure it's fun to play with for a few days, the Office 'ribbon' is not a tool that I'd want to get hooked on. To my knowledge, the ribbon tech is unique to Microsoft Office. Will we be seeing ribbons in Print Shop Pro and Mathmatica using standard OS services? Will the ribbon organization be consistent across applications? Why would Microsoft want to chuck and undermine the standard GUI on their OS product with a horribly non-standard, incompatible interface like the one in Office? Because it will become like an addiction. Users will be unable to get along without it and unable to give it up for something else.
Perhaps we'll need to start a twelve step program like Office Anonymous to get people onto a forward compatible product.
I think the terms 'Admin Rights', 'Admin Responsibilities', or even just 'Superuser' is a bad way to describe to the non-technical what's really involved and unsecure by granting these accounts this level of access.
I used to work for a large publication which meant most people ran on Macs. Of course admin access isn't required to just use a Mac under OS X, but many non-technical people and especially the higher-ups saw this as a threat when I mentioned we should force people to run without administrator 'privileges'.
It was only when I started calling it by the term 'Administrator Responsibilities' did people stop insisting that they needed this level of access. They really didn't want the 'responsibility' involved in running a computer, they just wanted to 'use' it. Things went very well (in this regard at least) from then on.
pla wrote under the subject So... Uh... Just use Windows?:
A few companies will see the profit motive of targetting a (excuse the pun) captive audience, and if you need such software, you should support those companies by buying their products.
One of those companies is Apple. There's a technology built in to every copy of Tiger called VoiceOver that is a pretty good screen reader both for the blind, limited visibility users, and users helping them. (It's activated by command-f5, but you may need to hold down the function key on notebooks also). Most people don't even realize that it's there though if they didn't go through the tutorial in the Tiger installer. You probably will need to refer to a tutorial to figure out how to work it since the GUI is so dominant for sighted users, but the cost of the technology is simply part of the Mac "premium".
In Apple's marketing documents, it seems pretty clear that they don't see supporting VoiceOver as a burden. They see it as opening up new markets in government and big company purchases that must support blind and limited sight users without question. The additional developer "burden" is pretty small when using Cocoa for development. VoiceOver makes pretty good guesses just from the arrangement and nesting of standard gui elements even if developers choose to do nothing. But enhancing is pretty trivial even for more advanced needs.
I don't think there is a word processor on the Mac that supports ODF at the moment, but I suspect that will come rather quickly (as a plugin or a new app). The screen reader support is pretty good already. If you're willing to pay the Mac premium it seems like a pretty good choice for a screen reader to use or just to play around with if you're trying to understand what sort of compromises you need to make as an application author to support this market.
What true microkernel are/were there?... OS X? Ok, I guess, but it is slow and no more stable or secure than any other Unix. In fact, I've had OS X machines crash far more than any Linux or FreeBSD systems I've used.
Mac OS X is not a true microkernel architecture. Apple has a kernel plug-in architecture and allows drivers to run in kernel space which goes against true microkernel design principles.
How can the average user see this? When "Software Update" runs, almost any update to the system (not updates to an Apple application like iTunes) will require a restart of the whole machine. In a true Microkernel design you might need to relaunch the Finder or restart the communications architecture, but unless something changes kernel space code you wouldn't need to restart the whole computer.
The uptime command would give Apple proponents much more to brag about if it were a true microkernel, but beyond hardware abstraction I don't think Apple has the same needs for a microkernel architecture as others. Since that's the case, I don't think it's fair to hold it up as an example of the fatal sins of microkernels in general. Nor do I think dragging in your personal valuations of speed and stability are rigorous indictments of Mac OS X's performance either.
If this isn't news for nerds then I don't know what is...;-) Well done Improv'ers...
I agree heartily, but beyond the humor aspects I'm a geek who has a hard time with fashion. This mission has solidified in my mind exactly what I'll wear whenever I have to go into a #@%*ing Best Buy store in the future.
You really should try and get ahold of a copy to try out before jumping to all these conclusions. You seem to be looking for reasons criticize it, and are inventing them wherever a demo doesn't explicty show you something.
I'd love to get a legal, unencumbered copy of Office 2007 to play with before it goes live, but because that's not an option for me I have to rely on screenshots and marketing materials such as the Microsoft movie. The goal of this video is marketing rather than education and Office 2007 comes off being easy, approachable, and fun. But my impressions are through a critical eye and having dealt with similar interfaces like this in the past is a feeling of dread at the help requests I'll get with the debut of this new interface.
Hands on interfaces (like those of Kai Krause) are fun for a new user, and the ribbon takes a lot of inspiration from interfaces like this. The down side is that it they are very spatially dependent. These interfaces make it very hard to jump ship to a competitor's product, but besides locking the user in to "the one true interface" the app maker locks themselves into backwards compatibility problems when they try to change things in the future (or perhaps the Office interface is perfect and will never change). Spatial buttons make phone help difficult ("No the button on the left that looks like a box with arrows on it. No the one on the left side.") If the app maker moves a button from the one side to the right you'll disrupt what people have learned even if all the features are still there on the same tab. If you insert a new tool in the midst of others you'll break a lot of people's spatial habituation. "Darn it! I keep hitting that ligature tool they added next to the style options rather than the word count tool that used to be there" This happens a bit when you rearrange the top level menu items in a menubar (like exchanging Insert and Format) but that's minor compared to making everything spatially dependent in such a wide and tall area like the ribbon. While these types of interfaces benefit the illiterate or novices to a new tool (like photo enhancing or character animation) I certainly hope literacy isn't a problem with Microsoft Word users.
My problem with popup action menus is the difficulty differentiating them from very similar popup data menus. Are you choosing which printer you want to send to when you print or will you actually fire off a copy to the printer right now? I see little in the video that shows how to differentiate one type from the other and unless they've done away with popup data menus completely I think this will bite people. This isn't specifically an Office 2007 problem, but it is a problem that doesn't appear to be addressed in their GUI elements.
I really tried not to be baited by the marketing hype in the video like "We've done away with the need for Undo in your workflow" and "We've expanded tooltips". Sorry, but if they can throw out the menubar they can certainly throw out the evolved interface elegance of these long time tools as well. I'm glad to know they may not be as dead as implied in the video.
Paragraph length balloon help seems like a great idea, but it has already been tried and received very nasty complaints. Maybe they've added transparency, maybe it expands based on how long you hover. At least in the video it was not explained why this will work when past implementations were extremely problematic.
I'm glad that undo isn't gone from the workflow all together as the woman in the video implies, but they do seem to be obfuscating it a bit. In addition to the act of undo and redo, the verbage itself helps tremendously in learning the vocabulary of a new application. Was the work I just did cell formatting, table formatting, or text formatting? Undo text helps me know what vocabulary the app makers used when I'm looking for help. Hopefully this helpful text will still be present in the status area when I hover over the undo button on th
But when M$ comes knocking and tries to sell them an upgrade to Office200x, the answer will be "if we have to upgrade anyways, as you have just elaborately shown, then we'll upgrade to OpenOffice, thank you". Especially if the new Office they release with Vista changes the interface considerably, and requires re-training anyways.
On the topic of Office 2007's user interface, the recent promotional movie published on the Microsoft web site seems like they're trying especially hard in this next release to be different for the sake of being different. So hard that some of their innovative ideas may prove better in concept than implementation. Here were some of my thoughts on this 12 minute video.
They've done away with cross-application familiarity by doing away with the menu bar. With one exception, they put everything in tab like toolbars at the top of the window called the "ribbon". The one exception is the Microsoft Office logo icon in the upper left corner of the screen that, when discovered you can click on, opens a menu with unimportant options like "Save" and "Open".
The "ribbon" has some sets of checkbox buttons (for settings like applying bold and italic styles) but mostly it's littered with icon popup buttons where your choice causes an action to happen. There's text labels on some buttons but text is minimized as much as possible including removing keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps they've been placed in the "tooltips".
Speaking of tooltips, the video touted that Microsoft has revolutionized tool tip technology by making them larger providing fuller explanations of what you're looking at. The demo looked suspiciously like Apple's horrible Balloon Help feature from System 7.1. This was useful for about the first five minutes of using an application but quickly became obtrusive and annoying. Unlike balloon help though, they they showed no way to turn these new "wordy" tool tips off.
Can't find which button you're looking for in the ribbon? That's probably because it's contextual. If you drop a photo into word, a special toolbar appears that gives you options you can only see if the photo is selected. Or rather, you must see if the photo is selected. Now we're looking at the days of 1998 with OpenDoc that promised to give you custom options for your web browser embedded in your MacDraw document: any accidental context selection or de-selection will drive you crazy looking for options that don't apply. Additionally you have duplicate options that would apply to all contexts, but in different places of the ribbon.
Big features like Footer, Header, and Cell Format have been reduced to action popup buttons with about a dozen Microsoft designed templates in each. There's an option for you to customize your header/footer/cell format, but that was apparently not demonstrated. Like the Microsoft clip art that came with Word For Windows I think you'll get pretty sick of seeing many of these templates pretty fast. Hopefully there's a way to add 3rd party templates instead of the Microsoft defaults, but the size of those popup menus just won't show more than a dozen or so options in a comprehensible way.
Changes from those popup action buttons happen automatically. You don't even have to select the option, just hover over it in the menu and the change happens automatically. The demonstration of previewing changes to typeface and typestyle just seems easy. Apart from performance issues. Apart from making concepts like style sheets even more abstract. Apart from accidental selection issues. But you can't see your whole document at once so your hip red and grey Microsoft excel template may look fine on the selection you can see, but look awful on a part you can't see. This isn't a new problem with the new office, but it easier than ever to do now.
They claim these new popup action icon buttons in the ribbon does away with the need for "Undo".
I realize that this award is only in it's third or fourth year and I don't mean to be a party pooper, but we're talking about a ubiquitous industrial arm, a robot toy, and three movie icons from 1927, 1951, and 2001. My first impression is that these are big enough losers to have not been chosen in the previous years of this award.
Other than "We ran out of other good nominees", why is 2006 a good year to recognize this particular group?
It sounded like the opening volley of the second great Unix war, only this time instead of pitting proprietary Unix vendors and systems against each other... it is two open source ones. It will be interesting to see what weapon the BSD crowd will retaliate with.
Unfortunately, Linus's targets (BSD and Mach) are the foundation of Darwin a.k.a. Mac OS X. I argue that this was the wrong target to throw unqaulified, and technically irrelevant insults toward. Rather than disparaging the concepts, he insults the developers and their work directly, which is easy to extend to an insult of the users and adopters of that work.
If noticed, the provocation will harden many non-technical Mac faithful against Linux in ways that can not be amended and atoned later. If one side's methods trump the other's, the technical geeks will see the truth and forget the provocations. Most of the Mac faithful will not see these technical resolutions but they'll remember only the venom that Linus spouted here and now.
Does this have any impact on acceptance of Linux? It's questionable but I'd say it does. People and markets imitate Macs, and Mac users therefore have a much bigger impact on market and user acceptance than their size indicates. Linux has a huge, rapidly evolving developer community, but not a solid user-only community. Digging yourself into any sort of hole with the potential user-only group is bad no matter how shallow the depth seems now.
I just hope Linus' little tirade blows over without making headlines on the mac evangelist web sites first.
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For something like a web browser the version number has not been critical; it's a testosterone driven publicity marker. It's mostly hype and anything that's broken in a new version can be re-enabled via an extension.
If you look at other open source projects you can see where version numbers are very useful when used inteligently.- First decimal - Major changes of file formats, features, and api's
- Second decimal - Features and requirement changes, but still backwards compatible
- Third decimal - Bug fixes
For example, a content management system like Subversion has big problems when they change repository formats or api's for their clients. Paying attention to their own version numbering rules ensures that their file formats and apis will work for well-established, numerically-obvious periods, but they don't require that developers will be enslaved by poor choices they may make today in the far future. Looking at their release history it's refreshing how few "red releases" (which require a reload of the repository) there have been in the past, and it's also how nice it is to see that they do have some logic in their version numbering that has worked back then and appears to work when talking about major changes to the version++ release."Copland is to Mac OS 8 as Longhorn is to Vista" seems to be becoming more true every day.
Though it was promised as a fundamentally ground up re-invention (Pink, Copland, System 8), the Mac OS 8 product that was actually shipped was mostly a cosmetic upgrade with the bits of the promised technologies that could be made to work. The new graphics architecture became a new font subsystem. The new document archicture (without developed parts making use of it) became a built-in web architecture. System wide document content searching became better file finding. The goal became to try to keep whatever anticipation was already built but jettison the "hard problems" of making it actually work in the ways that were promised. Tell everyone that Feature X has evovled into something beyond what we had ever anticipated rather than the world passed us by while we were shooting for an old target.
It may be that Microsoft still has the inertia to pull off an almost completely cosmetic update, but it's going to get pretty ardurous environment on the development teams. After all, the goal isn't going to be to even ship a feature reduced product. It's going to be to ship cosmetic filler that covers up the need for what was really promised. Maybe Blackcomb or Fiji or whatever it's called now, will become a stage for the proper solution, but that's a very big IF.
The issue was that the hype raised expectations higher than what an actual product could deliver. The buzz about Oragami was that it was going to be a revolution in portable computing. This was going to be the device that made the PDA market irrelevant and that would make traditional laptops seem arcahic. It was going to be a birth of a new form factor that would solve the most difficult compromises of moblile computing and consolidate the market rather than fracture it further. It wasn't going to be just another way to package the cooked cow carcass we're so familiar with.
Were the orgami companies developing the actual products completely suckered by the hype themselves? Or was the company doing the marketing simply out of touch with what the market could deliver? Though backwards, it's like NASA getting the writers of Star Trek to write up their annual budget to justify their funding from Congress. Star Trek writers could come up with enchanting arguments and get lawmakers on the edge of their seats to throw money at NASA technologies, but without being able to produce holodecks, transporters, and phasers, they'd never be able to meet the hype.
Proprietary software development companies have found that promoting (or even acknowledging) developers causes a problem where the developers can be hired away. When the most knowlegeable developers disappear, there's a huge learning curve even for the "second tier" that must come to fill the void. It's a well-known risk for proprietary companies to have these "assets" so exposed and open to theft by other HR departments. Even if they aren't hired away, superstar developers mean that they can leverage huge salaries. Proprietary software companies have found that keeping their development staffs unacknowledged and easily replaceable means they keep costs down. They've developed a way to keep the developer a cheap, replaceable asset.
It seems that this article is trying to focus on how this applies to open source software development companies. It's not open source development in general, but companies which profit from open-source as an integral part of their business (admin services, proprietary add-ons, special distributions, etc). Even if the source for a critical part is open, the company will only have a handful of developers who understand the code inside and out on staff. This is a potential liability.
Accountants and capitalists don't want to consider developers as "artists" or "superstars", they'd much rather consider them as sheep to be sheperded. Simple, replaceable, interchangable. The article tries to make the point "Don't assume open source means your paid development staff will become a constantly refillable, always-replaceable, cheap resource." It doesn't change the problems of hiring developers that you had when you considered proprietary software funding.
Oh, just give it time. The Supreme Court gutted the Fourth amendment yesterday. They can't strike all our Constitutional rights down at once. :-)
Putting aside Rob Enderle's other failures as an analyst, I see him as simply trying to get back up on the wave of punditry that he completely missed with the revelation of Bill Gates leaving. If Ballmer doesn't leave, no one will care. If he does, then Enderle looks like he has an inside connection or excellent prognostication ability.
In reality, I don't see Mr. Ballmer leaving any time soon. The revolt wasn't due to the shareholders as much as Bill Gates just (apparently) getting sick of the day to day. Steve doesn't seem to share that boredom and he certainly doesn't have the hubris to realize that his leaving would be more beneficial to the stock price than any policy he enacts while in the driver seat.
One of the big arguments against use of illegal drugs is that it financially supports an immoral, illegal, and corrupt system. Even though you may use your stash at home and in a manner that doesn't hurt anyone else, your money goes to the drug dealers, crime lords, and liberal democrats ... err... god-forsaken hedonists that are corrupting the very soul of this country.
Is Microsoft saying that they actually handed over money, got sentences reduced, or somehow offered compensation to the black hat hackers that they've been so anxious to bring down in the past? Isn't this in itself immoral?
Some argue that it's not bad to have a security infrastructure in-place, even if theres very little self-propagaiting malware out there. It makes one "ready" to deal with the inevitable threats when they are discovered. It makes one confident that they will be the first ones to recognize and recover from any future infection.
That seems like a good idea until you realize that to install and remove malware means the software will need to operate with very high permissions. Installing programs like Clam or Symantec Antivirus are possibly giving hackers more potential ways to exploit your system than if you hadn't installed the anti-malware to begin with. I think there actually have been low-level, local security holes found based soleley on security software that the user has installed.
On the Mac, I think there is more harm than good done right now with anti-virus products. It's almost like feeling you must hang that lucky pair of fuzzy dice in your new car because you think it helps you not have accidents, when in fact their interference in your driving might be what causes you to have one.
I think there's a dubious market for malware. (Okay, so my old boss might be the type to commission a new virus, but most aren't.) The anti-malware markets need a continuous set of threats to be taken seriously and though they don't write the malware themselves, it's integral to their success in business.
Advice from industry experts giving 'analysis' such as "The smarter virus writers won't deploy their security compromises until after Vista actually ships." practically tells malware developers "If you're smart, you'll hold off on deploying your next big hack until after Vista ships so that your security hole won't be patched up before then."
When their analysts actually look seriously at alternitives that will reduce the scope of malware (such as moving to Linux or Mac OS X) then we may have real separation between the markets. Until then the anti-malware camp probably the most able to profit from (and legally disclaim responsibility for) the existence of malware.
Whether artificial or not, let's send a bit of what the Bush Administration has done to the American people over to our heroic men and women stationed in Iraq.
Are reviews like this of any real significance?
Yes, the performances of the songs may be copyrighted, but even that isn't a certainty. There is a Public Domain into which the performing artist may release their performance.
If the tune, lyrics, and performance aren't protected intellectual property then the first grader should call the police and have Captain Copyright arrested for child molestation. Okay, there wasn't any sexual molestation involved, but a man in a skin tight costume who constantly barges in on first graders in their homes will have a very difficult time convincing a jury of that fact.
One of the articles arguments is that Apple needs to make games. This isn't something new for Apple. They made a number of games for the Apple ][ product line (including Apple Adventure). They even made and marketed the game "Through the Looking Glass" for the Mac back when it first came out. Today, however, I think Apple wants developers to make their own products rather than compete with developers in the games marketplace. If Apple's games are perceived as lame, that makes the platform undesirable to consumers. If Apple's games are hot, then that eats up the customers for the products of other game developers.
:-)
Another argument of the article is that there are rumors of Apple hiring game developers. This purported fact goes on to suggest that Apple will be turning the iPod and the Mac into gaming platforms. I think that this is way too far of a leap. My first bet is that Apple is looking for OpenGL developers to speed up and fine tune OpenGL development in the undercarriage of Mac OS X's graphics system. Where else would you look for such knowledgeable people so focused on speed and performance of imaging than in the world of games? If development goes further than this, I expect that game developers are being paid to port the platforms games are built upon to Mac OS X to make it easier for developers to move their apps over.
Would Apple co-develop the next big game on Mac OS X with LucasArts (or whoever)? While not out of the question, I doubt Apple would want to be included in the credit and liability of such a game. Violence. Sex. and worse, a lame final result, might ruin the potential of the Mac for other game developers. One of the hottest games for the Mac when I was in college was MacPlaymate. It was an exercise in virutal dildonics and let the user get the on-screen half-toned bitmapped woman to emit orgasmic sounds of ectasy. It wasn't ported to other platforms (that I'm aware) but it probably sold more Macs on my campus when a cracked version made it to the campus computer labs than any other pirated app. Was Apple appreciative of these sales? Probably. Would Apple want to build a marketing campaign on such a unique product to the Mac platform? Probably not.
The Aqua user interface is something that Apple prides itself on. It isn't a gaming interface though. It's a standard user interface for business, education, and scientific apps, and it goes out of its way to tell you to follow our rules for making your app, or don't use Aqua at all. That doesn't mean that Apple is discouraging game developers, but it doesn't want corruption of its crown jewels in the process. Games that follow the rules are great (A board or card game for example) but if you go beyond that then you need to design your own user interface and immerse the user in that instead. Perhaps Apple will come out with a game interface that's themeable and radical and immersive and looks nothing like Aqua (just as it provides non-Aqua elements for Dashbaord widgets). But it's still not a certainty that game developers would want to use that interface.
Most likely in my mind is if Apple wants a hot gaming platform, it will start out by trying to convince other gaming platforms to come to Mac OS X. Play on the fear of Microsoft's Xbox to get Sony or Nintendo to develop a partial console that uses Mac hardware to make itself complete. I can see Apple throwing money at getting an existing game development environment onto the Mac, but I can't see Apple trying to enter this world by itself.
Oh well, back to running MacPlaymate under classic
If it can search and index file contents, then it has full access to my data. If access to that index or search feature is insecure then it's taking control of my data out of my hands and giving it freely to others. Why should applications need to access files that I created but which I haven't explicitly opened for their use?
Will the security be in place in both the API and data storage files so that instant search won't just become a new way for malware to quickly focus on the data it wants (e.g. Credit Card or Social Security Numbers)?
I never thought this was a real question which people actually even considered debating. The answer was always clear and straight-forward depending on whether you favored evolution or creation as the source of life. If you favored the idea that God created the whole world and its inhabitants as adults you obviously thought the chicken came first. If you favored the Darwinian evolution, then you state that it was the egg and that the chicken came from a pairing, mutation, or other accident of birth in an evolutionary manner. Beyond using this to summarize (and probably short-circuit) debates on evolution vs. creation, I don't think the question would have made it into popular culture.
A similar question was "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" (to my understanding) wasn't really about angel-packing theory but was a question about whether you believed that there was a spiritual world coexisting with ours or whether spritual ideas came strictly from men and inhabitants of this world. If you believed in a parallel spiritual world the answer was infinite angles. If you thought that angels were butterflies or people or something with mass then the answer was non-infinite. There wasn't any real debate (do hallucinations of angels count?) but it was another question that simply summarized a particular stance of ideas.
All that comes to mind right now is that horrible song on Sesame Street or the Electric Company or something where they show chickens and eggs and chickens hatching from eggs and a country singer fiddling away singing "Which came first the Chicken or the Egg? The chicken or the Egg? The Chicken or the Egg? Which came first the Chicken or the Egg?" ad smeging infinitum. Grrr. There's going to be an infinite number of angels hunting down whoever posted this and reawakened that memory for me.
A spatial interface like the ribbon will require serious retraining whenever that spatial interface changes. Microsoft may change it for non-productive reasons like adding more eye candy to boost sales or for more significant reasons like adding (and removing) functionality. Whatever the reason, the interface will change in the future and any motor memory you have built will be lost (or worse cause you to select unintended options).
Most of the user interface studies Microsoft quotes describe how easy it is to adapt to the interface from a menu based system. But that's as shortsighted an argument as judging 'file format' compatability based only on whether a new verison of Word can easily convert your old documents. While that is an issue, compatability judgement should consider the future and how much has to be thrown away when future changes come around. No doubt the 'ribbon' has two dozen patents on it so only Microsoft will be able to provide true forward compatability, but with something like a Word processor I don't think MS will have the patience, restraint, and concern to make sure future interface changes are as motor-friendly and compatible with older interface users.
While I'm sure it's fun to play with for a few days, the Office 'ribbon' is not a tool that I'd want to get hooked on. To my knowledge, the ribbon tech is unique to Microsoft Office. Will we be seeing ribbons in Print Shop Pro and Mathmatica using standard OS services? Will the ribbon organization be consistent across applications? Why would Microsoft want to chuck and undermine the standard GUI on their OS product with a horribly non-standard, incompatible interface like the one in Office? Because it will become like an addiction. Users will be unable to get along without it and unable to give it up for something else.
Perhaps we'll need to start a twelve step program like Office Anonymous to get people onto a forward compatible product.
I think the terms 'Admin Rights', 'Admin Responsibilities', or even just 'Superuser' is a bad way to describe to the non-technical what's really involved and unsecure by granting these accounts this level of access.
I used to work for a large publication which meant most people ran on Macs. Of course admin access isn't required to just use a Mac under OS X, but many non-technical people and especially the higher-ups saw this as a threat when I mentioned we should force people to run without administrator 'privileges'.
It was only when I started calling it by the term 'Administrator Responsibilities' did people stop insisting that they needed this level of access. They really didn't want the 'responsibility' involved in running a computer, they just wanted to 'use' it. Things went very well (in this regard at least) from then on.
One of those companies is Apple. There's a technology built in to every copy of Tiger called VoiceOver that is a pretty good screen reader both for the blind, limited visibility users, and users helping them. (It's activated by command-f5, but you may need to hold down the function key on notebooks also). Most people don't even realize that it's there though if they didn't go through the tutorial in the Tiger installer. You probably will need to refer to a tutorial to figure out how to work it since the GUI is so dominant for sighted users, but the cost of the technology is simply part of the Mac "premium".
In Apple's marketing documents, it seems pretty clear that they don't see supporting VoiceOver as a burden. They see it as opening up new markets in government and big company purchases that must support blind and limited sight users without question. The additional developer "burden" is pretty small when using Cocoa for development. VoiceOver makes pretty good guesses just from the arrangement and nesting of standard gui elements even if developers choose to do nothing. But enhancing is pretty trivial even for more advanced needs.
I don't think there is a word processor on the Mac that supports ODF at the moment, but I suspect that will come rather quickly (as a plugin or a new app). The screen reader support is pretty good already. If you're willing to pay the Mac premium it seems like a pretty good choice for a screen reader to use or just to play around with if you're trying to understand what sort of compromises you need to make as an application author to support this market.
How can the average user see this? When "Software Update" runs, almost any update to the system (not updates to an Apple application like iTunes) will require a restart of the whole machine. In a true Microkernel design you might need to relaunch the Finder or restart the communications architecture, but unless something changes kernel space code you wouldn't need to restart the whole computer.
The uptime command would give Apple proponents much more to brag about if it were a true microkernel, but beyond hardware abstraction I don't think Apple has the same needs for a microkernel architecture as others. Since that's the case, I don't think it's fair to hold it up as an example of the fatal sins of microkernels in general. Nor do I think dragging in your personal valuations of speed and stability are rigorous indictments of Mac OS X's performance either.
I'd love to get a legal, unencumbered copy of Office 2007 to play with before it goes live, but because that's not an option for me I have to rely on screenshots and marketing materials such as the Microsoft movie. The goal of this video is marketing rather than education and Office 2007 comes off being easy, approachable, and fun. But my impressions are through a critical eye and having dealt with similar interfaces like this in the past is a feeling of dread at the help requests I'll get with the debut of this new interface.
Hands on interfaces (like those of Kai Krause) are fun for a new user, and the ribbon takes a lot of inspiration from interfaces like this. The down side is that it they are very spatially dependent. These interfaces make it very hard to jump ship to a competitor's product, but besides locking the user in to "the one true interface" the app maker locks themselves into backwards compatibility problems when they try to change things in the future (or perhaps the Office interface is perfect and will never change). Spatial buttons make phone help difficult ("No the button on the left that looks like a box with arrows on it. No the one on the left side.") If the app maker moves a button from the one side to the right you'll disrupt what people have learned even if all the features are still there on the same tab. If you insert a new tool in the midst of others you'll break a lot of people's spatial habituation. "Darn it! I keep hitting that ligature tool they added next to the style options rather than the word count tool that used to be there" This happens a bit when you rearrange the top level menu items in a menubar (like exchanging Insert and Format) but that's minor compared to making everything spatially dependent in such a wide and tall area like the ribbon. While these types of interfaces benefit the illiterate or novices to a new tool (like photo enhancing or character animation) I certainly hope literacy isn't a problem with Microsoft Word users.
My problem with popup action menus is the difficulty differentiating them from very similar popup data menus. Are you choosing which printer you want to send to when you print or will you actually fire off a copy to the printer right now? I see little in the video that shows how to differentiate one type from the other and unless they've done away with popup data menus completely I think this will bite people. This isn't specifically an Office 2007 problem, but it is a problem that doesn't appear to be addressed in their GUI elements.
I really tried not to be baited by the marketing hype in the video like "We've done away with the need for Undo in your workflow" and "We've expanded tooltips". Sorry, but if they can throw out the menubar they can certainly throw out the evolved interface elegance of these long time tools as well. I'm glad to know they may not be as dead as implied in the video.
On the topic of Office 2007's user interface, the recent promotional movie published on the Microsoft web site seems like they're trying especially hard in this next release to be different for the sake of being different. So hard that some of their innovative ideas may prove better in concept than implementation. Here were some of my thoughts on this 12 minute video.
Other than "We ran out of other good nominees", why is 2006 a good year to recognize this particular group?
If noticed, the provocation will harden many non-technical Mac faithful against Linux in ways that can not be amended and atoned later. If one side's methods trump the other's, the technical geeks will see the truth and forget the provocations. Most of the Mac faithful will not see these technical resolutions but they'll remember only the venom that Linus spouted here and now.
Does this have any impact on acceptance of Linux? It's questionable but I'd say it does. People and markets imitate Macs, and Mac users therefore have a much bigger impact on market and user acceptance than their size indicates. Linux has a huge, rapidly evolving developer community, but not a solid user-only community. Digging yourself into any sort of hole with the potential user-only group is bad no matter how shallow the depth seems now.
I just hope Linus' little tirade blows over without making headlines on the mac evangelist web sites first.