Since enterprise support was a major part of his division (certainly much more profitable than the fledgling cloud services) perhaps he will. Enterprises, of course, are not at all thrilled with Win8/Metro.
Open Office/LibreOffice are both so obsessed with competing against MS that they, just like Microsoft, have no interest at all in people who actually write narratives for a living. As a desktop publishing package, LibreOffice is constantly improving. As a tool for corporate administrative assistants, it may very well be wonderful. As a useful tool for someone who actually writes stories, it is becoming increasingly more of a pain in the rump that it is worth. It is a painful truth that Word 2000 (shudder) is honestly more writer friendly than anything, commercial or open source, that has been put out since then. FYI, just in case someone mentions yWrite5 and/or Scrivener (someone always does) they are not writing programs. They are organizing programs. RoughDraft, and some others like Jarte, can be used for small stories or articles. But they are old and not being maintained. Plus they lack the necessary fonts and/or other tools for modern submission requirements. Many of us would gladly invent something for ourselves, but we are wordsmiths. We don't program. So we're screwed.
Just curious, what specific features are needed for writing prose that aren't available in MS Office or LibreOffice? What does Word 2000 do right that later versions do wrong?
Nobody can, at least until Microsoft opens up their entire API library. Until then, when someone gets close enough to endanger Microsoft's cash cow, they will change just enough stuff to keep them at arm's length. Repeat ad nauseam.
All of the MS Office file formats, both legacy binary and OOXML, are publicly documented. The binary documentation, I think, was released at the insistence of the European Union regulators.
Now, it is true that the formats are really badly designed and inelegant, and that there are a lot of MS Office "guts" spilling out of the specs. They are not easy to implement. But with enough time and effort, it should be doable. And MS is not introducing new breaking changes – to the contrary, they are finally introducing compliance with OOXML 'strict', which fully complies with the ISO standard. (MS Office 2010 can read 'strict' OOXML documents, and MS Office 2013 can both read and write them.)
Can LibreOffice guarantee 100% compatibility (both read and write) with MS Office documents?
If the answer is no, then it doesn't matter how many other features are added, most businesses aren't going to use it. You can't risk the possibility that a PowerPoint slide in your quarterly board report will show up as garbage because of a compatibility issue.
What you need to understand is very simple: financial privacy is illegal in the United States. If you run a bank, or any other form of money-transmission service, then you are legally required to report all transactions over a certain amount (I think it might be $10,000, but I'm not sure) to the U.S. government. You are also required to obtain and keep personally-identifiable information on all of your customers, and to report if someone is "structuring" transactions to get in under the limit.
If you don't do these things, you can get arrested even if you knew nothing about the illegal activity your customers were involved in.
Furthermore, PC gaming hasn't been killing console gaming. What's been killing it has been the flattening of genres. Everything now is some kind of generic 1st or 3rd person shooter. And THAT is thanks to the much lauded PC Gaming Master Race.
Agreed. FPS is played out; can we please move on and do something else?
Bear in mind that prices for AMD GPUs are a little inflated at the moment because of the crypto mining craze.
Price inflation is mostly affecting Tahiti (7950/7970/280X) and Hawaii (290/290X). The Pitcairn-based cards (7850/7870/270/270X) haven't moved much. The deals aren't as good as they were in the run-up to Christmas, but that's true of just about everything else, not just AMD video cards.
The 7870 always had a street price of a bit under $200; the 2GB 7850 was usually around $150, with the 1GB version somewhat less (but not in much demand). I paid $179.99 for my 7870 and thought it was a pretty good deal.
. Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point.
The PS4 GPU is about as powerful as an AMD Radeon HD 7870. So, no, it's not true that a "moderate PC" outperforms the new consoles. A "moderate PC" these days has integrated graphics, which are nowhere near that good. Most people aren't spending ~$200 for video cards.
PS4 should be able to do 1080p@60fps in most games; XB1 will struggle a bit more, due to its use of DDR3 instead of GDDR5.
Even simpler fix: if the user has tabbed browsing enabled (does Chrome even work any other way?) then web pages should never be allowed to open in a new window. If they ask for a new window, give them a new tab instead. 99% of the time, this is what the user wants (assuming they even want the content at all).
If the hackers decide to use a dictionary attack, then an xckd-style password is about as good as one 4 characters long. It needs to create randomness in the domain where the hackers might be looking for it. Of course, the old method of switching out letters for number or whathaveyou don't really fare well either.
That kind of attack only works if the hacker knows everyone is using those type of passwords, and if the passwords contain only common words. You could foil it by making sure at least one word in the sentence is relatively unusual – or someone's name, which probably won't be in the dictionary. The hackers aren't going to be able to run an attack like this using the full unabridged dictionary – they'd have to use a list of only the most common few thousand words.
What sort of site is storing their passwords in plaintext to allow this study to be done? Probably the crappy sites that people use throwaway passwords on. Value of study? zero.
If they use a non-salted hash, they could do a database query to get the top 25 hashes by count, and then run rainbow tables on those hashes. That might not work if any of the top 25 were strong passwords, but they're all simple alphanumerics, which a rainbow table should be able to chew through in short order.
How do you check it, and yet have it so no one can crack it?
At the time the user specifies or resets their password, the system handling it has access to that password in plain text. Of course it should be salted and hashed before it gets stored in a database, but that happens afterward. All they have to do is check it against an array of the 25-100 most commonly used passwords, and if it matches, tell the user it's being rejected and why.
Chrome recently added a speaker icon to indicate which tabs are playing sound. Why not add a corresponding microphone icon to indicate which (if any) tabs are recording it? Since this would be implemented in the browser, it shouldn't be possible for sites to bypass it.
With features that are cheap enough to add, this sometimes happens already. My 2010 Honda Fit base model, for instance, did not come with a remote lock/unlock feature from the factory. You can buy the "keyless entry system" from the dealer for about $150. What does it consist of? A key with the remote control features in it. That's all. The solenoids for locking and unlocking the doors are already there, they just aren't used. I was able to get it working for much less by buying a blank key from an online shop, following the directions to sync up the remote, and having it cut to fit at the local shop.
But, as others have noted, there are limits on the extent of this kind of practice. Shipping extra bits with a software package costs basically nothing, Shipping extra hardware in a car can get expensive quickly. They have to balance whether it costs less to ship all vehicles the same (economy of scale) or whether it would save money to leave a feature physically omitted from base trims. Then they have to decide whether they will get more money by including it for everyone (and thus using it as a selling point to drum up volume) or by charging it as an add-on.
If they get too greedy, then yes, buyers will just hack the car (or have someone else do it) to enable the missing features. As noted, this already happens sometimes. I wouldn't exactly call buying a key and following the official factory sync process a "hack", but it worked and it saved me some money.
The first question is, does a consumer modified ECM violate the whole warranty for the car? If a side mirror falls off, does the manufacturer have to replace it? What if you modify the tuning of the engine and it throws a rod? There are a number of laws out there regarding aftermarket products for automobiles, but they tend to vary by locale.
Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, unless the modification was actually responsible for the issue, the manufacturer can't legally use it as an excuse to void the warranty.
The real question is whether this kind of push-back from OEMs will convince Microsoft to let Windows 9 users fully opt-out of Metro in favor of a classic desktop experience. Individual users are easy to ignore, but when OEMs (not to mention large businesses with volume licenses) are telling MS that Metro just isn't happening on the desktop, maybe they will have no choice but to listen.
I don't understand why anyone would use GTK. It's not noticeably easier to use than other toolkits. It doesn't have a "native" look and feel on any system (if you run GIMP on Windows, you'll notice how all the dialogs are much different than what you're used to seeing in other applications). It's cross-platform, but so are Qt, WxWidgets, and probably a bunch of other GUI toolkits that don't come to mind at the moment. So what's the appeal?
I don't understand why something like this would be included in Photoshop. "Kitchen sink" applications are usually a bad idea: you want your app to do one thing very well, not a bunch of different things poorly. "One thing" can be defined pretty broadly (2D still image editing, in Photoshop's case), but you need some level of focus. And it's not like there aren't still more important things to fix: the Windows version of Photoshop still does not play nice with HiDPI, and there is still no support at all for the Windows Ink API (so tablets which don't support WinTab for patent reasons can't even get basic pressure sensitivity). Adobe is aware of these issues, but they'd rather add silly glitz that no one will use instead of fixing these rather significant bugs.
The reason why people keep using Windows PCs is simple: the huge installed base of existing software. While there are plenty of applications for iOS and Android, the really important ones still aren't there. Until there are full versions of MS Office, Photoshop, and AutoCAD (just to name a few) for iOS/Android, these systems will not be serious competitors in the prosumer/business market. (Yes, MS and Adobe have applications that bear the Office and Photoshop names on the portable devices, but these are just toys, not anything even close to the full desktop versions.)
The story is their current line of business of basically just buying out blogs and operating them is panning out.
I thought their current line of business was taking monthly fees from gullible old people who still think that AOL is "the internet" and that they need to pay them in addition to their cable or DSL bill.
Hell, 24/96 output support is already a massive overkill for anything that is in a tower simply due to the fact that you'd need to start isolating your dedicated sound card from the rest of the tower to avoid interference not to mention having four to five digit costing speakers to get to hear it.
Or instead of trying to isolate your sound card, you could just use a digital output, thus using the higher-quality DACs on your receiver.
They don't really need to write a launcher API. It would help a lot if they opened up the theming system, which has existed since Windows XP but, for some reason, has always been restricted to running the tiny handful of signed themes that come with the OS. Just as Firefox's UI is designed around XUL, the Windows interface is largely designed around XAML – it's just that with Windows, it is deliberately made inaccessible to users.
Of course if they do this, there has to be a group policy to lock themes (or force a desired theme).
It fascinates me that they added Aero as eye candy that no one needed in Vista, then in Windows 8 they not only took it away but also took away the minimal, though longstanding, eye candy of rounded corners. So do we need eye candy or don't we?
Personally, I think this Win8 hack would be a good design to go with. It keeps the clean lines of the new interface, while restoring transparency to increase visual interest and make overlapping windows a bit more usable.
That said, I'd be fine if they just went back to the Win7 Aero interface. But I do want to see glass transparency in some form – this isn't just eye-candy, it does serve a useful purpose when multi-tasking. (Apparently Microsoft has forgotten that some people actually use their PCs for work.)
Just calling the new release "Windows 9" isn't going to do the trick. They need to listen to what customers, especially power users and enterprise administrators, are saying. Grandma has already moved on to an iPad and she doesn't spend much money anyway; she's a lost cause. Forget about pandering to the lowest common denominator. Stop trying to beat Android and iOS at their own game. Emphasize that Windows is a tool while Android/iOS is a toy. Windows is what people use to get work done. That means a renewed focus on the desktop. Because, let's face it, if you're willing to ditch the desktop and legacy compatibility, you might as well ditch MS altogether.
Specifically, Microsoft needs to make it possible for desktop users to never see, or interact with, Metro. Yes, I know they want us all with touch screens and buying apps from their app store, but it isn't going to happen. All they are doing is alienating their most important customers. Bring back the real Start Menu so that people who have been using Windows for 10-20 years aren't confused and baffled by the new interface. (Remember that many people who use Windows at work are not technically oriented. Re-training costs money, and IT departments often don't have it to spend.)
Also fix the little things. These are important. An example: After using Windows since 1995, my eyes are used to seeing the title on the top left side of the window frame. Win8 centers it, for no good reason other than some designer's dubious sense of aesthetics. That completely breaks my eye-tracking and costs a second or two every time I have to look at the title. It doesn't sound like much, but little things add up, and minor issues of fit and finish are often the difference between a successful product and an unsuccessful one.
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Since enterprise support was a major part of his division (certainly much more profitable than the fledgling cloud services) perhaps he will. Enterprises, of course, are not at all thrilled with Win8/Metro.
Open Office/LibreOffice are both so obsessed with competing against MS that they, just like Microsoft, have no interest at all in people who actually write narratives for a living. As a desktop publishing package, LibreOffice is constantly improving. As a tool for corporate administrative assistants, it may very well be wonderful. As a useful tool for someone who actually writes stories, it is becoming increasingly more of a pain in the rump that it is worth. It is a painful truth that Word 2000 (shudder) is honestly more writer friendly than anything, commercial or open source, that has been put out since then. FYI, just in case someone mentions yWrite5 and/or Scrivener (someone always does) they are not writing programs. They are organizing programs. RoughDraft, and some others like Jarte, can be used for small stories or articles. But they are old and not being maintained. Plus they lack the necessary fonts and/or other tools for modern submission requirements. Many of us would gladly invent something for ourselves, but we are wordsmiths. We don't program. So we're screwed.
Just curious, what specific features are needed for writing prose that aren't available in MS Office or LibreOffice? What does Word 2000 do right that later versions do wrong?
Nobody can, at least until Microsoft opens up their entire API library. Until then, when someone gets close enough to endanger Microsoft's cash cow, they will change just enough stuff to keep them at arm's length. Repeat ad nauseam.
All of the MS Office file formats, both legacy binary and OOXML, are publicly documented. The binary documentation, I think, was released at the insistence of the European Union regulators.
Now, it is true that the formats are really badly designed and inelegant, and that there are a lot of MS Office "guts" spilling out of the specs. They are not easy to implement. But with enough time and effort, it should be doable. And MS is not introducing new breaking changes – to the contrary, they are finally introducing compliance with OOXML 'strict', which fully complies with the ISO standard. (MS Office 2010 can read 'strict' OOXML documents, and MS Office 2013 can both read and write them.)
Can LibreOffice guarantee 100% compatibility (both read and write) with MS Office documents?
If the answer is no, then it doesn't matter how many other features are added, most businesses aren't going to use it. You can't risk the possibility that a PowerPoint slide in your quarterly board report will show up as garbage because of a compatibility issue.
What you need to understand is very simple: financial privacy is illegal in the United States. If you run a bank, or any other form of money-transmission service, then you are legally required to report all transactions over a certain amount (I think it might be $10,000, but I'm not sure) to the U.S. government. You are also required to obtain and keep personally-identifiable information on all of your customers, and to report if someone is "structuring" transactions to get in under the limit.
If you don't do these things, you can get arrested even if you knew nothing about the illegal activity your customers were involved in.
Furthermore, PC gaming hasn't been killing console gaming. What's been killing it has been the flattening of genres. Everything now is some kind of generic 1st or 3rd person shooter. And THAT is thanks to the much lauded PC Gaming Master Race.
Agreed. FPS is played out; can we please move on and do something else?
Bear in mind that prices for AMD GPUs are a little inflated at the moment because of the crypto mining craze.
Price inflation is mostly affecting Tahiti (7950/7970/280X) and Hawaii (290/290X). The Pitcairn-based cards (7850/7870/270/270X) haven't moved much. The deals aren't as good as they were in the run-up to Christmas, but that's true of just about everything else, not just AMD video cards.
The 7870 always had a street price of a bit under $200; the 2GB 7850 was usually around $150, with the 1GB version somewhat less (but not in much demand). I paid $179.99 for my 7870 and thought it was a pretty good deal.
. Fact remains that even moderate PCs today outperform both the PS4 and Xbox One at a similar price point.
The PS4 GPU is about as powerful as an AMD Radeon HD 7870. So, no, it's not true that a "moderate PC" outperforms the new consoles. A "moderate PC" these days has integrated graphics, which are nowhere near that good. Most people aren't spending ~$200 for video cards.
PS4 should be able to do 1080p@60fps in most games; XB1 will struggle a bit more, due to its use of DDR3 instead of GDDR5.
Because it's in a different window not a tab?
Even simpler fix: if the user has tabbed browsing enabled (does Chrome even work any other way?) then web pages should never be allowed to open in a new window. If they ask for a new window, give them a new tab instead. 99% of the time, this is what the user wants (assuming they even want the content at all).
If the hackers decide to use a dictionary attack, then an xckd-style password is about as good as one 4 characters long. It needs to create randomness in the domain where the hackers might be looking for it. Of course, the old method of switching out letters for number or whathaveyou don't really fare well either.
That kind of attack only works if the hacker knows everyone is using those type of passwords, and if the passwords contain only common words. You could foil it by making sure at least one word in the sentence is relatively unusual – or someone's name, which probably won't be in the dictionary. The hackers aren't going to be able to run an attack like this using the full unabridged dictionary – they'd have to use a list of only the most common few thousand words.
Bioengineer RFID chips into all the NYC rats so you can tell where every one of the little bastards are at all times.
What sort of site is storing their passwords in plaintext to allow this study to be done? Probably the crappy sites that people use throwaway passwords on. Value of study? zero.
If they use a non-salted hash, they could do a database query to get the top 25 hashes by count, and then run rainbow tables on those hashes. That might not work if any of the top 25 were strong passwords, but they're all simple alphanumerics, which a rainbow table should be able to chew through in short order.
How do you check it, and yet have it so no one can crack it?
At the time the user specifies or resets their password, the system handling it has access to that password in plain text. Of course it should be salted and hashed before it gets stored in a database, but that happens afterward. All they have to do is check it against an array of the 25-100 most commonly used passwords, and if it matches, tell the user it's being rejected and why.
Chrome recently added a speaker icon to indicate which tabs are playing sound. Why not add a corresponding microphone icon to indicate which (if any) tabs are recording it? Since this would be implemented in the browser, it shouldn't be possible for sites to bypass it.
With features that are cheap enough to add, this sometimes happens already. My 2010 Honda Fit base model, for instance, did not come with a remote lock/unlock feature from the factory. You can buy the "keyless entry system" from the dealer for about $150. What does it consist of? A key with the remote control features in it. That's all. The solenoids for locking and unlocking the doors are already there, they just aren't used. I was able to get it working for much less by buying a blank key from an online shop, following the directions to sync up the remote, and having it cut to fit at the local shop.
But, as others have noted, there are limits on the extent of this kind of practice. Shipping extra bits with a software package costs basically nothing, Shipping extra hardware in a car can get expensive quickly. They have to balance whether it costs less to ship all vehicles the same (economy of scale) or whether it would save money to leave a feature physically omitted from base trims. Then they have to decide whether they will get more money by including it for everyone (and thus using it as a selling point to drum up volume) or by charging it as an add-on.
If they get too greedy, then yes, buyers will just hack the car (or have someone else do it) to enable the missing features. As noted, this already happens sometimes. I wouldn't exactly call buying a key and following the official factory sync process a "hack", but it worked and it saved me some money.
The first question is, does a consumer modified ECM violate the whole warranty for the car? If a side mirror falls off, does the manufacturer have to replace it? What if you modify the tuning of the engine and it throws a rod? There are a number of laws out there regarding aftermarket products for automobiles, but they tend to vary by locale.
Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, unless the modification was actually responsible for the issue, the manufacturer can't legally use it as an excuse to void the warranty.
The real question is whether this kind of push-back from OEMs will convince Microsoft to let Windows 9 users fully opt-out of Metro in favor of a classic desktop experience. Individual users are easy to ignore, but when OEMs (not to mention large businesses with volume licenses) are telling MS that Metro just isn't happening on the desktop, maybe they will have no choice but to listen.
I don't understand why anyone would use GTK. It's not noticeably easier to use than other toolkits. It doesn't have a "native" look and feel on any system (if you run GIMP on Windows, you'll notice how all the dialogs are much different than what you're used to seeing in other applications). It's cross-platform, but so are Qt, WxWidgets, and probably a bunch of other GUI toolkits that don't come to mind at the moment. So what's the appeal?
I don't understand why something like this would be included in Photoshop. "Kitchen sink" applications are usually a bad idea: you want your app to do one thing very well, not a bunch of different things poorly. "One thing" can be defined pretty broadly (2D still image editing, in Photoshop's case), but you need some level of focus. And it's not like there aren't still more important things to fix: the Windows version of Photoshop still does not play nice with HiDPI, and there is still no support at all for the Windows Ink API (so tablets which don't support WinTab for patent reasons can't even get basic pressure sensitivity). Adobe is aware of these issues, but they'd rather add silly glitz that no one will use instead of fixing these rather significant bugs.
The reason why people keep using Windows PCs is simple: the huge installed base of existing software. While there are plenty of applications for iOS and Android, the really important ones still aren't there. Until there are full versions of MS Office, Photoshop, and AutoCAD (just to name a few) for iOS/Android, these systems will not be serious competitors in the prosumer/business market. (Yes, MS and Adobe have applications that bear the Office and Photoshop names on the portable devices, but these are just toys, not anything even close to the full desktop versions.)
The story is their current line of business of basically just buying out blogs and operating them is panning out.
I thought their current line of business was taking monthly fees from gullible old people who still think that AOL is "the internet" and that they need to pay them in addition to their cable or DSL bill.
Hell, 24/96 output support is already a massive overkill for anything that is in a tower simply due to the fact that you'd need to start isolating your dedicated sound card from the rest of the tower to avoid interference not to mention having four to five digit costing speakers to get to hear it.
Or instead of trying to isolate your sound card, you could just use a digital output, thus using the higher-quality DACs on your receiver.
They don't really need to write a launcher API. It would help a lot if they opened up the theming system, which has existed since Windows XP but, for some reason, has always been restricted to running the tiny handful of signed themes that come with the OS. Just as Firefox's UI is designed around XUL, the Windows interface is largely designed around XAML – it's just that with Windows, it is deliberately made inaccessible to users.
Of course if they do this, there has to be a group policy to lock themes (or force a desired theme).
It fascinates me that they added Aero as eye candy that no one needed in Vista, then in Windows 8 they not only took it away but also took away the minimal, though longstanding, eye candy of rounded corners. So do we need eye candy or don't we?
Personally, I think this Win8 hack would be a good design to go with. It keeps the clean lines of the new interface, while restoring transparency to increase visual interest and make overlapping windows a bit more usable.
That said, I'd be fine if they just went back to the Win7 Aero interface. But I do want to see glass transparency in some form – this isn't just eye-candy, it does serve a useful purpose when multi-tasking. (Apparently Microsoft has forgotten that some people actually use their PCs for work.)
Just calling the new release "Windows 9" isn't going to do the trick. They need to listen to what customers, especially power users and enterprise administrators, are saying. Grandma has already moved on to an iPad and she doesn't spend much money anyway; she's a lost cause. Forget about pandering to the lowest common denominator. Stop trying to beat Android and iOS at their own game. Emphasize that Windows is a tool while Android/iOS is a toy. Windows is what people use to get work done. That means a renewed focus on the desktop. Because, let's face it, if you're willing to ditch the desktop and legacy compatibility, you might as well ditch MS altogether.
Specifically, Microsoft needs to make it possible for desktop users to never see, or interact with, Metro. Yes, I know they want us all with touch screens and buying apps from their app store, but it isn't going to happen. All they are doing is alienating their most important customers. Bring back the real Start Menu so that people who have been using Windows for 10-20 years aren't confused and baffled by the new interface. (Remember that many people who use Windows at work are not technically oriented. Re-training costs money, and IT departments often don't have it to spend.)
Also fix the little things. These are important. An example: After using Windows since 1995, my eyes are used to seeing the title on the top left side of the window frame. Win8 centers it, for no good reason other than some designer's dubious sense of aesthetics. That completely breaks my eye-tracking and costs a second or two every time I have to look at the title. It doesn't sound like much, but little things add up, and minor issues of fit and finish are often the difference between a successful product and an unsuccessful one.