Office 2007 was the first implementation of the "Fluent" UI, but it is not necessarily the best. This is the doc that convinced me to use the ribbon for a UI redesign:
The goals of the Fluent UI design matched our needs almost perfectly. I think it works better for us than it does for Office. Many things seem rushed or forced in the Office 2007 implementation of the ribbon. Maybe Office 2010 will better deliver.
(It is interesting to note that this doc talks about the ribbon being custiomizable by the user, which is decidedly NOT the case in Office.)
With MPEG-style video compression, it's not just the CPU cycles for encoding that's the problem, it's the way the codec itself works. A great deal of the data reduction comes from most frames being based on frames before and *after* it.
The output stream is always several frames behind the source stream. You can eliminate predictive frames, but your compression is largely the same as JPEG stills at that point. So your choices are: looks bad, uses way too much bandwidth, or has too much lag to be usable for most types of games.
Even if the technology was there to support it, what's the point? "Buy this so you'll never have to buy anything else" stuff is always just snake oil.
Excellent points, but another that is often overlooked is how Flash would perform on a mobile processor.
It's a serious CPU hog -- Even a Pentium-4 PC can't keep up with all sorts of sites/apps. Performance on any mobile processor would suck hard. Surely that's part of the reason NO ONE has it.
For me, the "real web" is the part that doesn't use Flash. Except for a few video sites, I've missed it maybe twice in almost a year of putzing around with an iPhone. A basic SFV player and a few sites that integrate with it would take care of the video, and then I wouldn't miss Flash at all. I can live without homestarrunner for short periods of time.
Yes, many people are doing something you are not. Try fitting multiple OSes on a laptop, when you have things like Vista sucking untold Gigabytes in the "winsxs" folder.
I've even seen the "disk space is cheap, so why worry about it" argument on Vista developers' blogs, and it really chaps my hide. Even if I *do* have space for it, I'd rather use that space for something else.
It seems to me they are missing a golden opportunity. Instead of policing and preventing use of copyrighted material, why not link to an online music store so you can BUY the songs to use with the charts?
> The difference is even less for PAL (625 lines rather than 480 - why anyone imports Region 1 DVDs is beyond me).
Nitpick: PAL has 576 visible lines.
Re Blu-Ray: Remember laserdisc? It had many of the same advantages over VHS that DVD has. It never caught on, largely due to high prices. Well, that and having to change discs/sides six times on a Super-Deluxe CAV Edition of a long film...
As much as I hate to be drawn into the endless PC/Mac debate, I must point out that part of the reason that Macs have a 'high end' reputation is simply because they are so expensive. They are perceived as premium products by the price alone.
I recently purchased my first Mac (MacBook Pro 15"), and I can say that the *actual* quality is something of a mixed bag. When I loaded XP via Boot Camp, I was surprised to see that a lot of the hardware is from what I consider less than top tier vendors -- Broadcom WiFi, Marvell ethernet, Realtek audio.
At first I was a little let down, but on further consideration it is acceptable. They likely get better attention from these vendors, so everything does Just Work (even in Windows!) Combine this with the excellent keyboard, GPU, weight, battery life, quietness, and overall fit & finish and I think it was well worth the expense. I buy Dells at work all the time, and they are essentially a cheap, disposable way to get the job done.
With an academic discount it was $200 off and came with a free iPod touch, so cost-wise it wasn't in the stratospehere anyway. I'm enjoying learning the ropes in OS X, and honestly, all the griping I was doing about Windows and Microsoft's direction seems justified.
To the people who claim Adblock/Flashblock are deal-breakers, I've found a combination of the F12 quick menu to disable plug-ins/java/gif-animation, plus a custom hosts file that redirects doubleclick and the like, works quite nicely.
I mostly like Opera because navigating forward/back pages and between tabs is near-instant and can be done with simple keystrokes (Z&X, 1&2). There are tons of other shortcuts that help as well. I'm a madman on eBay and forum sites, plowing through stuff faster and more easily than I could with anything else. My Slashdot un-productivity is fantastic.
I also like that I don't have to deal with finding/installing/updating all sort of plugins on every machine I use. Opera has most, though not all, admittedly, of what I want built in.
To each his/her own, naturally, but Opera is well worth, er, exploring...
Did anyone else notice that the Vista screenshot in the photos has far more than 1024x600 resolution? Vista would look *terrible* on the lo-res screen it actually uses.
It's obvious it's pasted in (it's even clipped at the edges of the screen), but it still seems a little disingenuous to imply such "big laptop" capability.
I have no great love for Symantec, especially their retail products, but their Mail Security for Exchange (SMSE) has been fantastic for us. I believe it's based on the BrightMail engine they bought a few years ago, and they don't seem to have screwed it up yet.
After a Spamhaus RBL check, we still get ~20,000 spam messages a month (quite a bit for an office of 25 people.) I used to have a manually-maintained keyword / regexp list, which caught about 75% of this without much maintenance effort. After using SMSE for a few months I gave it up, since SMSE caught all of them but maybe 2-3 a day.
The detection rate is excellent, and I have yet to see a false positive that wasn't pretty close to spam anyway (legit hotel/airline offers and such.)
Your mileage will certainly vary (and will probably be less), but spam gives us very little trouble at this point. It's made my job easier, or at least allowed me to make better use of my time elsewhere.
I can't believe I just wrote glowing praise for a Symantec product, but there it is.
> One would expect that a company of MS's size could catch this stuff earlier in there development/release process
I would say that they missed it *because* of their size. The number of products/versions/editions they have, each with various patches installed or not installed, is effectively infinite.
> It's even extra-funny when people spend these kind of prices for digital cabling.
While I agree that $300 cables are excessive, the "bits is bits" argument doesn't always hold true. WHEN you get those bits and getting ALL of them are both important, and cables can have a significant impact on this.
If a cable has poor high frequency response, the pulses are smoothed out and become less precise. Capacitance causes ringing that further distorts them. (Think: PC monitor ghosting from using a long cable of poor quality.) This makes the start of the pulses less precise, causing clock jitter. If it's really bad, you'll lose bits altogether.
In the early days of S/PDIF digital audio connections, the receiving device was clocked directly to the incoming signal. At that time, I had an outboard DAC that sounded *obviously* cleaner with a heavy RF grade cable than with the cheap line-level RCA variety. Other people commented without being asked or even told about the switch.
There is some speculation today that HDMI suffers from the same timing/jitter problems on uncompressed PCM soundtracks, but I am skeptical of this, given that adding clock recovery to a VLSI chip is trivial and essentially free at this point.
With this sort of thing in mind, if you've spent thousands on your gear, it's well worth spending a *reasonable* amount of money on high-quality digital interconnects. (This is much more about large conductors, heavy shielding and impedance matching than it is about gold-plated this and oxygen-free that, but this isn't the point.) If nothing else, it's worth it for peace of mind that you aren't missing something.
Analog NTSC has no pixel structure, so there is no specific number of pixels on a line. A broadcast channel has 6 MHz bandwidth, so there is a physical limit to the number of 'lines of resolution' before it blurs together.
The broadcast standard is 720 pixels wide, as this can represent the full 6 MHz range. It includes 8 pixels of the blanking area on each side, which, when eliminated, leaves 704 pixels. 640 is commonly used by PCs/consoles because it results in square pixels, and gives sufficient detail with slightly less storage/processing overhead.
As for the frame rate, it is 30 frames per second (not 24 as a previous post indicated), which are made of two interlaced fields (240 visible lines each.) Most games don't draw complete frames at 30fps, though -- they draw independent 640x240 fields at 60 fields per second, as it gives smoother motion.
So compare 640x240 60fps to what a gaming PC has to pump out, and clearly it's a much smaller task for the GPU. Hi-Def TV shifts the balance, though, as full 1920x1080 60fps is more than most desktop PC monitors support.
Microsoft's use of the word "Open" for licensing is nothing new. There has been an "Open License" program for years. It simply means that it is open to small businesses that don't qualify for the enterprise licensing deals. (All that's new is the "Subscription" part, which has some interesting and troubling ramifications.)
If you are going to be outraged, you need to go back in time a few years...
> I can't imagine a normal person saying "I can't connect to the Internet, let me call Microsoft".
This highlights a key benefit of Apple's closed environment. You *can* contact Apple, or go to the "Genius Bar" or whatever they call it, and get credible help.
I'm firmly in the never-call-support-for-anything camp, but I often recommend Macs to people who don't know and don't want to know the finer and uglier points of computing. I also see it working out well for several of IT and developer folks I know, though I'm not ready to join them, yet...
>Since when does Nostalgia equate to news and stuff that matters?
I think the 'news' here is that TFA is from CNN. It's interesting to see how geek culture is portrayed and reported in the mainstream.
And yes, I'm one of 'those' who believe there will never be another computer as beloved as the C64, unless perhaps you count all Macs combined. The sound of SID is imprinted on my brain, and now evokes memories of many great times, back before computers needed to be useful. No 'day job' to take the fun out of it...
>nLite can also completely frak up an XP install. One specific instance that we encountered when someone in our office used nLite was the inability for anyone who was not an administrator to use USB devices.
I ran into this exact problem. It took me days (off and on) to figure it out. Strangely, there wasn't any reference to it, so I actually had to figure it out myself -- rare these days, it seems.
The cause is that nLite replaces a couple of windows system files so it can monkey with some of the XP setup features.
syssetup.dll sfcfiles.dll
The original versions are signed, and the nLite versions are unsigned. Windows won't let non-admin users install hardware, even if the drivers are already on the machine, when the install files are unsigned.
Replace these files with the original MS versions from a clean XP install, and you're good to go.
I hope this helps somebody. It sure would have helped me!
It's less true today, but in the early days of SPDIF the transmit/receive ICs were notorious for timing jitter. A better quality cable between them could make a fairly obvious improvement.
There's no external clock or bidirectional communication, so the receiver is at the mercy of the sender for keeping a steady bitstream. Newer ICs have some fancy buffering and reclocking methods that largely eliminate the problem, though.
CGE is mostly about home consoles (though some folks usually bring some arcade cabinets), but there's a show next-next-weekend called California Extreme that's all about arcades:
Actually, in a way it's better for MS if people buy their PCs with XP installed now. They make money now, and will nail them again when they are forced to upgrade to Vista (or its successor.)
FWIW, if you buy a PC with pre-installed Vista Business or Ultimate now, you are legally authorized to downgrade to XP, and can install Vista at any point in the future. Normally downgrades aren't allowed for retail or OEM products (only volume corp licenses), but they made this little-publicised exception for OEM Vista Business and Ultimate.
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phone providers literally don't need to lift a finger to activate new service, yet they routinely sock people for $50.
Office 2007 was the first implementation of the "Fluent" UI, but it is not necessarily the best. This is the doc that convinced me to use the ribbon for a UI redesign:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5ae8ea78-6ba9-4de4-aabd-2616d010caa7&displaylang=en
The goals of the Fluent UI design matched our needs almost perfectly. I think it works better for us than it does for Office. Many things seem rushed or forced in the Office 2007 implementation of the ribbon. Maybe Office 2010 will better deliver.
(It is interesting to note that this doc talks about the ribbon being custiomizable by the user, which is decidedly NOT the case in Office.)
With MPEG-style video compression, it's not just the CPU cycles for encoding that's the problem, it's the way the codec itself works. A great deal of the data reduction comes from most frames being based on frames before and *after* it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures
The output stream is always several frames behind the source stream. You can eliminate predictive frames, but your compression is largely the same as JPEG stills at that point. So your choices are: looks bad, uses way too much bandwidth, or has too much lag to be usable for most types of games.
Even if the technology was there to support it, what's the point? "Buy this so you'll never have to buy anything else" stuff is always just snake oil.
Excellent points, but another that is often overlooked is how Flash would perform on a mobile processor.
It's a serious CPU hog -- Even a Pentium-4 PC can't keep up with all sorts of sites/apps. Performance on any mobile processor would suck hard. Surely that's part of the reason NO ONE has it.
For me, the "real web" is the part that doesn't use Flash. Except for a few video sites, I've missed it maybe twice in almost a year of putzing around with an iPhone. A basic SFV player and a few sites that integrate with it would take care of the video, and then I wouldn't miss Flash at all. I can live without homestarrunner for short periods of time.
Yes, many people are doing something you are not. Try fitting multiple OSes on a laptop, when you have things like Vista sucking untold Gigabytes in the "winsxs" folder.
I've even seen the "disk space is cheap, so why worry about it" argument on Vista developers' blogs, and it really chaps my hide. Even if I *do* have space for it, I'd rather use that space for something else.
It seems to me they are missing a golden opportunity. Instead of policing and preventing use of copyrighted material, why not link to an online music store so you can BUY the songs to use with the charts?
Am I missing something here?
> The difference is even less for PAL (625 lines rather than 480 - why anyone imports Region 1 DVDs is beyond me).
Nitpick: PAL has 576 visible lines.
Re Blu-Ray: Remember laserdisc? It had many of the same advantages over VHS that DVD has. It never caught on, largely due to high prices. Well, that and having to change discs/sides six times on a Super-Deluxe CAV Edition of a long film...
As much as I hate to be drawn into the endless PC/Mac debate, I must point out that part of the reason that Macs have a 'high end' reputation is simply because they are so expensive. They are perceived as premium products by the price alone.
I recently purchased my first Mac (MacBook Pro 15"), and I can say that the *actual* quality is something of a mixed bag. When I loaded XP via Boot Camp, I was surprised to see that a lot of the hardware is from what I consider less than top tier vendors -- Broadcom WiFi, Marvell ethernet, Realtek audio.
At first I was a little let down, but on further consideration it is acceptable. They likely get better attention from these vendors, so everything does Just Work (even in Windows!) Combine this with the excellent keyboard, GPU, weight, battery life, quietness, and overall fit & finish and I think it was well worth the expense. I buy Dells at work all the time, and they are essentially a cheap, disposable way to get the job done.
With an academic discount it was $200 off and came with a free iPod touch, so cost-wise it wasn't in the stratospehere anyway. I'm enjoying learning the ropes in OS X, and honestly, all the griping I was doing about Windows and Microsoft's direction seems justified.
And no, I didn't go for the upgraded RAM.
To the people who claim Adblock/Flashblock are deal-breakers, I've found a combination of the F12 quick menu to disable plug-ins/java/gif-animation, plus a custom hosts file that redirects doubleclick and the like, works quite nicely.
I mostly like Opera because navigating forward/back pages and between tabs is near-instant and can be done with simple keystrokes (Z&X, 1&2). There are tons of other shortcuts that help as well. I'm a madman on eBay and forum sites, plowing through stuff faster and more easily than I could with anything else. My Slashdot un-productivity is fantastic.
I also like that I don't have to deal with finding/installing/updating all sort of plugins on every machine I use. Opera has most, though not all, admittedly, of what I want built in.
To each his/her own, naturally, but Opera is well worth, er, exploring...
Did anyone else notice that the Vista screenshot in the photos has far more than 1024x600 resolution? Vista would look *terrible* on the lo-res screen it actually uses.
It's obvious it's pasted in (it's even clipped at the edges of the screen), but it still seems a little disingenuous to imply such "big laptop" capability.
I have no great love for Symantec, especially their retail products, but their Mail Security for Exchange (SMSE) has been fantastic for us. I believe it's based on the BrightMail engine they bought a few years ago, and they don't seem to have screwed it up yet.
After a Spamhaus RBL check, we still get ~20,000 spam messages a month (quite a bit for an office of 25 people.) I used to have a manually-maintained keyword / regexp list, which caught about 75% of this without much maintenance effort. After using SMSE for a few months I gave it up, since SMSE caught all of them but maybe 2-3 a day.
The detection rate is excellent, and I have yet to see a false positive that wasn't pretty close to spam anyway (legit hotel/airline offers and such.)
Your mileage will certainly vary (and will probably be less), but spam gives us very little trouble at this point. It's made my job easier, or at least allowed me to make better use of my time elsewhere.
I can't believe I just wrote glowing praise for a Symantec product, but there it is.
> One would expect that a company of MS's size could catch this stuff earlier in there development/release process
I would say that they missed it *because* of their size. The number of products/versions/editions they have, each with various patches installed or not installed, is effectively infinite.
> It's even extra-funny when people spend these kind of prices for digital cabling.
While I agree that $300 cables are excessive, the "bits is bits" argument doesn't always hold true. WHEN you get those bits and getting ALL of them are both important, and cables can have a significant impact on this.
If a cable has poor high frequency response, the pulses are smoothed out and become less precise. Capacitance causes ringing that further distorts them. (Think: PC monitor ghosting from using a long cable of poor quality.) This makes the start of the pulses less precise, causing clock jitter. If it's really bad, you'll lose bits altogether.
In the early days of S/PDIF digital audio connections, the receiving device was clocked directly to the incoming signal. At that time, I had an outboard DAC that sounded *obviously* cleaner with a heavy RF grade cable than with the cheap line-level RCA variety. Other people commented without being asked or even told about the switch.
There is some speculation today that HDMI suffers from the same timing/jitter problems on uncompressed PCM soundtracks, but I am skeptical of this, given that adding clock recovery to a VLSI chip is trivial and essentially free at this point.
With this sort of thing in mind, if you've spent thousands on your gear, it's well worth spending a *reasonable* amount of money on high-quality digital interconnects. (This is much more about large conductors, heavy shielding and impedance matching than it is about gold-plated this and oxygen-free that, but this isn't the point.) If nothing else, it's worth it for peace of mind that you aren't missing something.
Analog NTSC has no pixel structure, so there is no specific number of pixels on a line. A broadcast channel has 6 MHz bandwidth, so there is a physical limit to the number of 'lines of resolution' before it blurs together.
The broadcast standard is 720 pixels wide, as this can represent the full 6 MHz range. It includes 8 pixels of the blanking area on each side, which, when eliminated, leaves 704 pixels. 640 is commonly used by PCs/consoles because it results in square pixels, and gives sufficient detail with slightly less storage/processing overhead.
As for the frame rate, it is 30 frames per second (not 24 as a previous post indicated), which are made of two interlaced fields (240 visible lines each.) Most games don't draw complete frames at 30fps, though -- they draw independent 640x240 fields at 60 fields per second, as it gives smoother motion.
So compare 640x240 60fps to what a gaming PC has to pump out, and clearly it's a much smaller task for the GPU. Hi-Def TV shifts the balance, though, as full 1920x1080 60fps is more than most desktop PC monitors support.
Microsoft's use of the word "Open" for licensing is nothing new. There has been an "Open License" program for years. It simply means that it is open to small businesses that don't qualify for the enterprise licensing deals. (All that's new is the "Subscription" part, which has some interesting and troubling ramifications.)
If you are going to be outraged, you need to go back in time a few years...
> I can't imagine a normal person saying "I can't connect to the Internet, let me call Microsoft".
This highlights a key benefit of Apple's closed environment. You *can* contact Apple, or go to the "Genius Bar" or whatever they call it, and get credible help.
I'm firmly in the never-call-support-for-anything camp, but I often recommend Macs to people who don't know and don't want to know the finer and uglier points of computing. I also see it working out well for several of IT and developer folks I know, though I'm not ready to join them, yet...
This is a preliminary doc that explains why they did what they did:
2007 Office System Document: Developer Overview of the User Interface
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5ae8ea78-6ba9-4de4-aabd-2616d010caa7&displaylang=en
I feel a LOT better about the ribbon now that I've read this. Office 2007 seems to be a so-so implementation of some really clever UI concepts.
I work for a Windows development shop, and we've decided to use the ribbon for our UI redesign. It addresses some of our biggest goals quite handily.
Does this make me evil...?
>Since when does Nostalgia equate to news and stuff that matters?
I think the 'news' here is that TFA is from CNN. It's interesting to see how geek culture is portrayed and reported in the mainstream.
And yes, I'm one of 'those' who believe there will never be another computer as beloved as the C64, unless perhaps you count all Macs combined. The sound of SID is imprinted on my brain, and now evokes memories of many great times, back before computers needed to be useful. No 'day job' to take the fun out of it...
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,287,042.PN.&OS=PN/7,287,042&RS=PN/7,287,042
That's quite a URL. If only they'd licensed a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.
>nLite can also completely frak up an XP install. One specific instance that we encountered when someone in our office used nLite was the inability for anyone who was not an administrator to use USB devices.
I ran into this exact problem. It took me days (off and on) to figure it out. Strangely, there wasn't any reference to it, so I actually had to figure it out myself -- rare these days, it seems.
The cause is that nLite replaces a couple of windows system files so it can monkey with some of the XP setup features.
syssetup.dll
sfcfiles.dll
The original versions are signed, and the nLite versions are unsigned. Windows won't let non-admin users install hardware, even if the drivers are already on the machine, when the install files are unsigned.
Replace these files with the original MS versions from a clean XP install, and you're good to go.
I hope this helps somebody. It sure would have helped me!
> Coax for SPDIF promising better sound.
It's less true today, but in the early days of SPDIF the transmit/receive ICs were notorious for timing jitter. A better quality cable between them could make a fairly obvious improvement.
There's no external clock or bidirectional communication, so the receiver is at the mercy of the sender for keeping a steady bitstream. Newer ICs have some fancy buffering and reclocking methods that largely eliminate the problem, though.
> when I looked at it the whole case was drooping and had his thumbprint in it
Well, after all, it *is* a thumbprint reader!
(I agree with other poster, there's no way a USB device can suck enough power to melt itself.)
CGE is mostly about home consoles (though some folks usually bring some arcade cabinets), but there's a show next-next-weekend called California Extreme that's all about arcades:
http://www.caextreme.org/
(The only thing that is 'extreme' is the nerdiness, but it's a fun show.)
I mod you +5000, Insightful.
Actually, in a way it's better for MS if people buy their PCs with XP installed now. They make money now, and will nail them again when they are forced to upgrade to Vista (or its successor.)
9 533-169d-4996-b198-7b9d3fe15611/downgrade_chart.do c
FWIW, if you buy a PC with pre-installed Vista Business or Ultimate now, you are legally authorized to downgrade to XP, and can install Vista at any point in the future. Normally downgrades aren't allowed for retail or OEM products (only volume corp licenses), but they made this little-publicised exception for OEM Vista Business and Ultimate.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/2/3/d23b
Because of this, I may actually buy some new PCs for our office this year, which I was loathe to do otherwise.