the dark grey/silver streak is probably the same size of a regular CD tray, so measure it up in pixels, measure up the dimensions of the existing xbox cd tray, do some maths and then you should have some idea as to the size of this guy.
oh come on, surely we can't be that obtuse to believe that one can rule out the OS?
i need:
* Adobe Photoshop (or alternative)
* Word (or...)
* PPT
* XLS
* Visio
* iTunes
let's take iTunes as an example - if it has to synch with my iPod, it needs underlying OS to drive USB etc.
google are capable of delivering thin-client software for certain types of application. i very much doubt we will be seeing web-delivered Office applications like Word, Photoshop etc.. within the next 5 years. and don't say citrix, that's not the same thing at all.
if i can download and synch a radio show overnight so i can listen to it on the underground (where there is no radio reception) and discover new music, then why not.
it's obviously quite difficult to argue against someone of mark's technical acumen, but i feel that he's wearing a pair of rose-tinted-server-side glasses...
let's think about it... salesforce.com - easy to ship software, you replace some stuff on a web server amazon.com - see above google.com - see above linux - um... no. download source code, compile, blah blah windows - er, right. although, give them some credit, windows update is easy to use and does a good job of shipping security patches openoffice.org - either download new rpm, install or build from source
it's VERY easy to ship server-based software. until google, or anyone else for that matter, is able to build a server-based (or easy to ship?!) microsoft office competitor i will not believe for one second that shipping software is any different. microsoft have spoken about smart clients and one-click deployment, and it appears to be emerging. perhaps mark will be eating his words come 2006/7, by which time i very much doubt he would have shipped any productivity-related software.
(yes, you could argue that search is productivity orientated, but i think you get the point!)
as a sort-of-pointy-hair-type, i find this quite amusing: "Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? "
so basically, because minix was working just fine - he created a new project just because;)
I think that's a big US trend, I've seen it many times when I've been over there; in general, one in the lounge, one in the bedroom and one in the kitchen. In Europe, generally, people try to keep television away from invading their lives and just have the one in the lounge. Although bedroom tellies are begining to creep in - scary!
oh don't go there! my ipod (gen 3)...2 months after the warantee ran out just stopped working. looks like the HDD went tits-up. anyway, phoned them and they told me it was going to cost £199 to repair!!!
my mother, bless her, ordered me a new one from Amazon (for Xmas) on the 24th of November and - obviously - it still hasn't arrived. so i've been ipodless for about 2 months now as well!
i'm having a spell of bad techkarma right now...must be because i told someone the other day that MS have a really good product stack:/
just to point out the obvious... if, God forbid, your TV took a dump on you, then you can't watch TV, a VHS tape or play a game on your console. so all you could do is check your email on your computer...so you almost do have a central point of failure as it is anyway.
i only mention this 'cos my telly just "took a dump" on me and i've been medialess for 2 weeks as i run xboxmediacenter for all my music - and that's dependant on screen-based navigation!
one of the major changes to the office suite was it's support of XML file formats. Word, Excel and PPT all have the ability to save to XML and the specification is published. you can also programmatically edit the document through automation using XPATH, which should be cross platform as well.
your point on cost is very valid. although it can be done for cheaper, we just spent short of £10, 000 doing an intensive 18-user usability testing study on our software.
one thing that is important here is that you do need a usnability expert to coduct the review. of course if you can find one that's willing to work for free for the sake of the open source movement, that's just great.
another thing is that you generally do have to incentivise the candidates with somewhere around £50.
outside of usability testing we do a lot of goal-orientated design, prototyping (paper -> photoshop -> powerpoint -> code). we have 2 graphic designers that we share with the marketing department who do all of our icon work and rich dialog work and at least two of our developers are very UI-focused. so it's not a light investment that we've made...
and even then we don't get it 100% perfect (is there a 100% perfect UI? don't say the iPod, it is not). investing in usability is something that we have taken seriously and have seen the positive affects on the sales of our products. it's not just making it look pretty, it's making it NOT look scary, making training costs for your client minimal and making it a pleasure to use for our end-users to use.
my tip of the day on usability: considering "personas" and always referring back to them when designing your product is a good place to start. think of their goals, not what features they want.
I've seen adverts for it and SURELY this would be the most annoying thing ever - every time you change lane or drive over lines (like in the middle of traffic light intersections) your car beeps at you.
Has anyone actually used this for a few weeks that can provide an opinion?
Some really good things about SP2 and security that people like my mother would benefit from:
1) Application warnings In a similar way to some adware programs (such as WinPatrol), SP2 warns when new applications are trying to add themselves to your startup and gives quite a good explanation as to what is going on.
It also warns if applications are trying to contact the internet like some of those personal firewall things.
2) Internet security warnings You know those dialogs "This is a really complex technical thing about running ActiveX controls and you know nothing about them, hey, so just click Yes or press Enter because that's what we've decided to default this dialog to". Well those are now quite different. The Action button to say yes is actually disabled for about 5 seconds or so to encourage reading of the dialog (and its better worded) and they also don't default to evil actions.
A few other things I like: * They've hidden all of those pesky updates from Add/Remove programs, you can turn them on with a checkbox. My Add/Remove was becoming ridiculously long with all the automatic update patches showing up as installed applications. * Much improved Wireless networking capabilities. Made it user friendly enough for lusers to understand and configure without impacting on advanced capabilities.
I haven't had any major problems as some others seem to have had (and neither have the 100 odd people in my company who have also updated), so I can't comment on that. All I can say is that I've updated certain "stuff" on my linux boxes before that has broken other things, so lets not get overly critical about one or two teething problems.
As much as I hate to admit this, I think that MS have actually done quite a good job with SP2.
"...I don't care for Firefox as the rest of the web doesn't really support it and pages don't render correctly...".
although i agree with you on this one (i have IE lying around and am FORCED to use it for certain sites/pages), surely this is a chicken and egg...
...the reason that these pages don't render correctly is that nobody cares about non IE browsers these days. back in 1997ish days we used to test all of our web sites on ie and netscape. i doubt as many poeple do this today.
so if firefox does start gaining momentum and eating into % then one could anticipate better support for it.
No, that's not quite true. Longhorn's implementation of WinFS has been scaled down. Longhorn will still have improved desktop searching, but perhaps not as advanvced as they initially anticipated (extensible metadata attributes and the search thereof - eg. who is in the picture).
Neal, I read a lot of science fiction (yourself, gibson, asher, mm smith, banks...to name a few) and as much as enjoy reading the genre I can't but help get mildly depressed by the fact that I know that all this stuff will eventually happen in some way/shape/form and I won't be around to experience it.
And I'm not just talking about tech (eg. molly's eyes in Neuromancer) here, I'm also talking fundamental societal shifts and advancements that often underpin the great SF works.
Do you ever get depressed or get this sinking feeling that you were born a century or two too early, and how do you deal with it?
Surely this is a blend of vapour ware and some truth. Games, for instance, could perhaps work - but what about applications that hook into operating system fundamentals?
The first example that springs to mind is Microsoft Word. Say you ran Word on this UberEmulator and you clicked File-Save. What would happen? Would you get a Win32 Network Neighborhood/My Documents type dialog? If so, it would probably blow up with some unhandled C++ exception either before it managed to display or upon user input. Or say the Word document had a embedded object in it from Excel or Vision and you double clicked on the object - then what would happen? Without OLE/DDE present (provided by the O/S) then things wouldn't work either.
once again I'd like to pull my mother out of my pocket... magic!
she's been a windows user for over 10 years now - and, like many other older professionals, doesn't use Windows by choice but basically because its there and everyone else uses it and it is what she is used to.
put her in front of a brand new mail client and calendaring system and it would take her some time to adapt. she cannot afford this time, her "switch" needs to be as seemless and as comfortable as possible.
this is why i think its great that Ximian Evolution is rather similar to Outlook - note that in its first release it was almost identical, today it has evolved to be, and i repeat, similar.
i think we have to keep in mind that the real users out there are not/. readers. they are not bash script junkies. they think perl is something that you wear around your neck. so if the community is to ever topple microsoft, it needs to embrace this fact. miguel and ximian have done just this and i applaud them for their efforts. hell even as a geek their stuff (evolution in particular) enabled me to run linux in a corporate/MS/Exchange environment - whereas previously i had to connect to exchange via imap and wasn't able to view others calendars, accept meeting requests etc...
"Not very intuitive. Unlike Windows where everything is easy. Like when you want to get rid of those annoying balloon tips in XP. All I had to do is open the registry, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, find Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer \Advanced
change the dword value of EnableBalloonTips to 0, restart the computer and I was done!"
i wouldn't call that INTUITIVE at all - i would say that you are FAMILIAR with Windows' registry.
"I still can't really rid myself of the nagging suspicion that the extensibility of an XML-driven anti-spam system plays into the hands of 'embrace and extend' that MS has used successfully since time began..."
isn't that what the X in XML stands for? you seem to be under the impression that XML is evil because MS embrace it so heavily. ok, i'm putting words into your mouth, but that's what I read nontheless. personally i don't see the difference between RCPT-TO: blah@blah.com and blah@blah.com. both of them require string parsing, perhaps a tad (and i'm talking nanoseconds here) more for the XML. there would be nothing stopping MS from embracing and extending current SMTP fields, in fact i'm sure they do it with Exchange.
so what i'm saying is that XML should not be seen as an issue here. i do take your point about ms's history of extension, but they can do that with or without XML.
Slashdot Mirror
you probably could tell if it's much smaller by using a bit of, er, relativity?...
this pic: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000293041091/
the dark grey/silver streak is probably the same size of a regular CD tray, so measure it up in pixels, measure up the dimensions of the existing xbox cd tray, do some maths and then you should have some idea as to the size of this guy.
oh come on, surely we can't be that obtuse to believe that one can rule out the OS?
i need:
* Adobe Photoshop (or alternative)
* Word (or...)
* PPT
* XLS
* Visio
* iTunes
let's take iTunes as an example - if it has to synch with my iPod, it needs underlying OS to drive USB etc.
google are capable of delivering thin-client software for certain types of application. i very much doubt we will be seeing web-delivered Office applications like Word, Photoshop etc.. within the next 5 years. and don't say citrix, that's not the same thing at all.
if i can download and synch a radio show overnight so i can listen to it on the underground (where there is no radio reception) and discover new music, then why not.
it's obviously quite difficult to argue against someone of mark's technical acumen, but i feel that he's wearing a pair of rose-tinted-server-side glasses...
let's think about it...
salesforce.com - easy to ship software, you replace some stuff on a web server
amazon.com - see above
google.com - see above
linux - um... no. download source code, compile, blah blah
windows - er, right. although, give them some credit, windows update is easy to use and does a good job of shipping security patches
openoffice.org - either download new rpm, install or build from source
it's VERY easy to ship server-based software. until google, or anyone else for that matter, is able to build a server-based (or easy to ship?!) microsoft office competitor i will not believe for one second that shipping software is any different. microsoft have spoken about smart clients and one-click deployment, and it appears to be emerging. perhaps mark will be eating his words come 2006/7, by which time i very much doubt he would have shipped any productivity-related software.
(yes, you could argue that search is productivity orientated, but i think you get the point!)
PS. And please put a frikking Windows key on your ThinkPads.
...break it.
;)
as a sort-of-pointy-hair-type, i find this quite amusing:
"Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? "
so basically, because minix was working just fine - he created a new project just because
I KNOW I KNOW
Ok, so I have Firefox 1.0 with the following info in the Help->About:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Am I ok? If not - I went to use the Check Updates feature and it told me there were no updates, which would be a big problem.
I think that's a big US trend, I've seen it many times when I've been over there; in general, one in the lounge, one in the bedroom and one in the kitchen. In Europe, generally, people try to keep television away from invading their lives and just have the one in the lounge. Although bedroom tellies are begining to creep in - scary!
oh don't go there! my ipod (gen 3)...2 months after the warantee ran out just stopped working. looks like the HDD went tits-up. anyway, phoned them and they told me it was going to cost £199 to repair!!!
:/
my mother, bless her, ordered me a new one from Amazon (for Xmas) on the 24th of November and - obviously - it still hasn't arrived. so i've been ipodless for about 2 months now as well!
i'm having a spell of bad techkarma right now...must be because i told someone the other day that MS have a really good product stack
just to point out the obvious...
if, God forbid, your TV took a dump on you, then you can't watch TV, a VHS tape or play a game on your console. so all you could do is check your email on your computer...so you almost do have a central point of failure as it is anyway.
i only mention this 'cos my telly just "took a dump" on me and i've been medialess for 2 weeks as i run xboxmediacenter for all my music - and that's dependant on screen-based navigation!
Access is not a database, it's a visual designer for light-weight database applications.
one of the major changes to the office suite was it's support of XML file formats. Word, Excel and PPT all have the ability to save to XML and the specification is published. you can also programmatically edit the document through automation using XPATH, which should be cross platform as well.
cowboy neal has a sense of humour... :^)
no, it's called a matter compiler. the feed supplies the base elements - so it's sort of like the difference between a telephone and a telephone line!
your point on cost is very valid. although it can be done for cheaper, we just spent short of £10, 000 doing an intensive 18-user usability testing study on our software.
one thing that is important here is that you do need a usnability expert to coduct the review. of course if you can find one that's willing to work for free for the sake of the open source movement, that's just great.
another thing is that you generally do have to incentivise the candidates with somewhere around £50.
outside of usability testing we do a lot of goal-orientated design, prototyping (paper -> photoshop -> powerpoint -> code). we have 2 graphic designers that we share with the marketing department who do all of our icon work and rich dialog work and at least two of our developers are very UI-focused. so it's not a light investment that we've made...
and even then we don't get it 100% perfect (is there a 100% perfect UI? don't say the iPod, it is not). investing in usability is something that we have taken seriously and have seen the positive affects on the sales of our products. it's not just making it look pretty, it's making it NOT look scary, making training costs for your client minimal and making it a pleasure to use for our end-users to use.
my tip of the day on usability: considering "personas" and always referring back to them when designing your product is a good place to start. think of their goals, not what features they want.
I've seen adverts for it and SURELY this would be the most annoying thing ever - every time you change lane or drive over lines (like in the middle of traffic light intersections) your car beeps at you.
Has anyone actually used this for a few weeks that can provide an opinion?
Some really good things about SP2 and security that people like my mother would benefit from:
1) Application warnings
In a similar way to some adware programs (such as WinPatrol), SP2 warns when new applications are trying to add themselves to your startup and gives quite a good explanation as to what is going on.
It also warns if applications are trying to contact the internet like some of those personal firewall things.
2) Internet security warnings
You know those dialogs "This is a really complex technical thing about running ActiveX controls and you know nothing about them, hey, so just click Yes or press Enter because that's what we've decided to default this dialog to". Well those are now quite different. The Action button to say yes is actually disabled for about 5 seconds or so to encourage reading of the dialog (and its better worded) and they also don't default to evil actions.
A few other things I like:
* They've hidden all of those pesky updates from Add/Remove programs, you can turn them on with a checkbox. My Add/Remove was becoming ridiculously long with all the automatic update patches showing up as installed applications.
* Much improved Wireless networking capabilities. Made it user friendly enough for lusers to understand and configure without impacting on advanced capabilities.
I haven't had any major problems as some others seem to have had (and neither have the 100 odd people in my company who have also updated), so I can't comment on that. All I can say is that I've updated certain "stuff" on my linux boxes before that has broken other things, so lets not get overly critical about one or two teething problems.
As much as I hate to admit this, I think that MS have actually done quite a good job with SP2.
"...I don't care for Firefox as the rest of the web doesn't really support it and pages don't render correctly...".
...the reason that these pages don't render correctly is that nobody cares about non IE browsers these days. back in 1997ish days we used to test all of our web sites on ie and netscape. i doubt as many poeple do this today.
although i agree with you on this one (i have IE lying around and am FORCED to use it for certain sites/pages), surely this is a chicken and egg...
so if firefox does start gaining momentum and eating into % then one could anticipate better support for it.
No, that's not quite true. Longhorn's implementation of WinFS has been scaled down. Longhorn will still have improved desktop searching, but perhaps not as advanvced as they initially anticipated (extensible metadata attributes and the search thereof - eg. who is in the picture).
(insert all the usual kudo's here)
Neal, I read a lot of science fiction (yourself, gibson, asher, mm smith, banks...to name a few) and as much as enjoy reading the genre I can't but help get mildly depressed by the fact that I know that all this stuff will eventually happen in some way/shape/form and I won't be around to experience it.
And I'm not just talking about tech (eg. molly's eyes in Neuromancer) here, I'm also talking fundamental societal shifts and advancements that often underpin the great SF works.
Do you ever get depressed or get this sinking feeling that you were born a century or two too early, and how do you deal with it?
Surely this is a blend of vapour ware and some truth. Games, for instance, could perhaps work - but what about applications that hook into operating system fundamentals?
The first example that springs to mind is Microsoft Word. Say you ran Word on this UberEmulator and you clicked File-Save. What would happen? Would you get a Win32 Network Neighborhood/My Documents type dialog? If so, it would probably blow up with some unhandled C++ exception either before it managed to display or upon user input. Or say the Word document had a embedded object in it from Excel or Vision and you double clicked on the object - then what would happen? Without OLE/DDE present (provided by the O/S) then things wouldn't work either.
once again I'd like to pull my mother out of my pocket... magic!
/. readers. they are not bash script junkies. they think perl is something that you wear around your neck. so if the community is to ever topple microsoft, it needs to embrace this fact. miguel and ximian have done just this and i applaud them for their efforts. hell even as a geek their stuff (evolution in particular) enabled me to run linux in a corporate/MS/Exchange environment - whereas previously i had to connect to exchange via imap and wasn't able to view others calendars, accept meeting requests etc...
she's been a windows user for over 10 years now - and, like many other older professionals, doesn't use Windows by choice but basically because its there and everyone else uses it and it is what she is used to.
put her in front of a brand new mail client and calendaring system and it would take her some time to adapt. she cannot afford this time, her "switch" needs to be as seemless and as comfortable as possible.
this is why i think its great that Ximian Evolution is rather similar to Outlook - note that in its first release it was almost identical, today it has evolved to be, and i repeat, similar.
i think we have to keep in mind that the real users out there are not
oh my god, i hope you aren't serious there!
r \Advanced
"Not very intuitive. Unlike Windows where everything is easy. Like when you want to get rid of those annoying balloon tips in XP. All I had to do is open the registry, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, find Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explore
change the dword value of EnableBalloonTips to 0, restart the computer and I was done!"
i wouldn't call that INTUITIVE at all - i would say that you are FAMILIAR with Windows' registry.
Do you know how this would differ from something like WDS (Wireless Distribution System) which allows for bridging and repeating?
"I still can't really rid myself of the nagging suspicion that the extensibility of an XML-driven anti-spam system plays into the hands of 'embrace and extend' that MS has used successfully since time began..."
isn't that what the X in XML stands for? you seem to be under the impression that XML is evil because MS embrace it so heavily. ok, i'm putting words into your mouth, but that's what I read nontheless. personally i don't see the difference between RCPT-TO: blah@blah.com and blah@blah.com. both of them require string parsing, perhaps a tad (and i'm talking nanoseconds here) more for the XML. there would be nothing stopping MS from embracing and extending current SMTP fields, in fact i'm sure they do it with Exchange.
so what i'm saying is that XML should not be seen as an issue here. i do take your point about ms's history of extension, but they can do that with or without XML.