(1) Make no mistake, semi-autonomous cars are useless, but meaningful collision avoidance systems are useful and that's the first stepping stone in the process
(2) Autonomous cars are still decades away from any sort of real adoption and automobile manufacturers should (I suspect they are...) develop them in the context of a shared usage vehicle given their much higher utilization than a regular car (an autonomous car could be in use 100% of the time as opposed to how most cars sit parked most of their time). As such, most users of such vehicles will use them like taxi's but they would cost much less, be safer, and would be available anywhere and for any length trip unlike just metropolitan areas.
They will charge you though the nose for a "dry" internet connection (i.e. when you only have internet service with them). The delta between internet and TV with internet is just about $20 and add phone for another $10 (with per/min charges). Add a few dollars for the cable box and this deal will only be a small gain over an internet connection and TV.
Perhaps so, but I have TWC in NY and pay just $34.99/month for a 50/5 connection (granted, I think it is rated lower but if you use a docsis 3.0 modem on an otherwise slower priced connection, you get higher speeds) and just use a few shared accounts for netflix/hbo go/nimble tv/amazon/WatchESPN all on a Roku3 that come to something like $10-15/month
perhaps doing this is somewhat against the TOS of those services, but last time I checked, TWC bundling prices is against the terms of service of the federal government...
-We can think of all sorts of analogies for intrusive ads (which are perfectly valid) but the truth is is that most people don't block ads on most sites unless someone can cite some statistics suggesting otherwise so I suggest a technologically feasible approach to serve unobtrusive ads to adblockers.
-As such, if website publishers want to get paid more for their content and think they are being shortchanged by ad-blockers, they could insist that the networks they work with provide them with a less interactive/obtrusive (i.e., non-flash, etc.) ad which will display when the user is using adblock (presumably in conjunction with the functionality already embedded in adblock to allow for those unobtrusive ads; presumably in the form of a cookie that an ad server could read then determine what th serve the user?)
(1) Our tax structure isn't going to change meaningfully anytime soon
(2) The IRS won't allow or enforce any sort of efile for everyone in the short-term
(3) The IRS does allow you to file Form 14039 which puts a flag on your account which will make it harder for someone to cheat you out of your refund because your account will go through extra checks (such as making sure that your address and other information hasn't changed from last year since most information breaches don't contain all of the information necessary to file your tax return) and will reject fraudulent looking returns http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf...
(4) The IRS might decide to, upon filing form 14039 or if you have experienced a fraudulent return filed for you, a distinct PIN which is like a PIN for a credit freeze
Morale of the story if you're concerned about not getting your refund
-file form 8822 when you change address and notify your employees and other agencies which file forms on your behalf to have your current address so all filings point to the same physical address
-file form 14039 to have the identify theft flag added to your profile
-always try to arrange so you owe a little money come tax time (but not so much that you owe a penalty) so your refund is not in purgatory in the event of a fraudulent return filed on your behalf
-if you do indeed get a refund, try to file as early as possible to beat out a fraudster
I emailed the author of the Ars article, this is what he said though I can't opine as to whether or not it is truly applicable (though I'm certain Aereo's attorney's would know for sure though it seems too low to me intuitively...):
The fee is (more or less) 1% of gross revenue if you're a cable system.
(F) If the actual gross receipts paid by subscribers to a cable system for the period covered by the statement for the basic service of providing secondary transmissions of primary broadcast transmitters are more than $263,800 but less than $527,600, the royalty fee payable under this paragraph to copyright owners pursuant to paragraph (3) shall be—
(i) 0.5 percent of any gross receipts up to $263,800, regardless of the number of distant signal equivalents, if any; and
(ii) 1 percent of any gross receipts in excess of $263,800, but less than $527,600, regardless of the number of distant signal equivalents, if any.
the royalties are set by the government, not the broadcasters
--> Is the above true, does someone know this for certain?
--> If so, what would the marginal cost be per user?
One other thing to consider is that Aereo has pretty good software developed right now and if they don't need farms of antenna's with local presence anymore, they could theoretically be located anywhere if they are, effectively, a retransmission service and would no longer need to build out local infrastructure (i.e., which I suspect was one of their larger costs) and could just use cloud type services (e.g., amazon/rackspace) to host their DVR/transcoding/etc. services
I, embarrassingly and sadly, live in Excel through my job as a CPA and as a frequent reader and occasional contributor here, unsurprisingly have a little bit of a programming/IT background.
I fully appreciate that the ribbon interface is better for novice users and has a flatter learning curve compared to the 2003 conventional interface but what really got me about the new versions is the slowness (only minimized slightly by being on a well configured new core i7, etc.). The new versions are so poorly engineered that they:
(1) frequently miss keystrokes/combinations that I enter
(2) calculate generally more slowly and/or less intelligently
(3) execute vba substantially more slowly
As such, my preferred setup is that I have Office 2003 and 2010 installed on the same machine (2010 via sandboxie which is tricky but doable to get right except that I use Outlook 2010 directly as opposed to sandboxed instead of Outlook 2003 since the newer Outlook is a real improvement and the ribbon doesn't bother me in that context of lighter usage)
I use Excel 2003 for almost everything and, only when I need to, I open up files in 2010 if they won't open in 2003.
Office 2007 is crap
Office 2013 is crap
Office 2010 is the least bad version of the new Office's
...as someone who has scoured and mined the NYC health department data (not to mention the review / grade pending period making the data even more worthless; i.e., most restaurants receive a hidden "C" at which point they display a "Grade Pending" sign then have a month to get their "A" at their reinspection and then most likely go back to their "C" ways --> to all those statisticians out there, which rating is the real one? the first one when they weren't expecting it or the one where they had a few weeks notice?
My hope and wish is that the letter grades determined by the score would be meaningfully correlated to the risk of food poisoning in the restaurant however there is little relationship between those things and that restaurants wouldn't have a chance to get a reinspection which clearly defeats the purpose of the test in the eyes of anyone with even the most minimal statistical/scientific education.
Instead of using google glass, the health department should reevaluate their methods of inspection and reinspection grading policy where part of their inspection relates to testing actual prepared food instead of seeing if a mouse or roach might have been on the floor (oftentimes they can just scurry in from the sidewalk and have zero impact on the food)
Based on what I get on my TV when I press the Mute button, they really shouldn't be...
Most of the time when you view closed captions, it is typed up, not automatically transcribed by a computer program - link
Further, for live events, it is typically typed live by a stenographer which yields the inherent delay
As for errors, I personally have mostly seen errors when I'm watching over the air and the reception isn't very clear (though I don't often use closed captioning so my sample size is limited)
My employer's IT department has misconfigured the VOIP voice system so poorly, I much prefer to use my cell phone for phone calls as the sound quality is vastly superior...Now I just can't wait until my plan upgrades to unlimited minutes
I do the same thing (re: custom email addresses) though since I use gmail to manage the domain, I also use subdomains as well to sort them (i.e., in order of importance of general class of address)
note that the free gmail version using a "+" both exposes your address and doesn't work with a lot of sites whereas subdomains work just fine (if you host a domain w/gmail)
While I'm a CPA but not a tax accountant, I'd suggest asking a tax accountant about the option of "underwithholding" to the tune of $1500 for this next year and apply this unpaid refund against your balance
a method to avoid this issue, at least in part, is to structure your tax payments and withholding to never yield a refund from the IRS in the first place which is not a perfect science but can be pretty close in most cases if you're organized...
...in terms of real cost, my guess is that even if you buy whatever licenses you need/want from Microsoft for whatever software you have a need for, it won't really be that expensive compared to irritating your users (also, just use hosted exchange as $10/month/user should be a non-issue).
Before making any decisions, I'd consider asking your admittedly tiny user base what software/suites they need/want instead of just making blind purchasing decisions
How a person can know the intricacies of double entry bookkeeping but fail to understand why opening every single attachment they receive is verboten is beyond me.
Being both a CPA and someone who does lightweight programming (mostly scripting via VB, VBA, SQL and some macro languages) and occasional light IT work (setting up computers/routers/small networks, building/repairing computer hardware, etc.), most accountants are, at best, not interested in engaging in real abstract reasoning or learning. I assure you that accounting is really quite simple and there are very few intricacies (except perhaps in the design of their terrible accounting software database which have thousands of tables as a simple report's underlying query could require multiple "union's" for pulling the same type of data...)
I've been doing something very similar to this once I took the plunge into using Gmail.
I only keep the emails that require some action in my inbox and everything goes into an archive folder.
The two secret sauces of my email system are this though:
(1) A series of well written rules to tweak what of a few folders email arrive in such as to tweak my level of attention to the arriving email:
(a) if I'm only on the "cc" it goes into a "cc" folder
(b) if it goes firmwide, it goes to a firmwide folder
(c) if I'm on the "to" it stays in my inbox
(d) if it's one of a series of automated emails, it is automatically sent to archive
(2) http://lookeen.com/ --> the best outlook search tool I've ever used but it requires some understanding of how it works to most effectively use it
(a) you can only search its index and it can't reliably update it index in realtime (I believe as a function of outlook's terrible internal I/O// pst/ost filesystem...)
(b) the speed of lookeen and outlook by extension appear to be related to the degree of fragmentation of the underlying indices and datafiles so I configure lookeen to rebuild its index (2-3 gb of emails takes 10-15 minutes to index on an older computer) and also to selectively defragment both lookeen's database and outlook's files each night
This approach yields lightning quick searches where I'm frequently telling people I work with when I sent them what email over the phone so they look it up the old fashioned way...
Usually I'm translating a spreadsheet that's been helpfully locked into.pdf form by another government agency back into a usable spreadsheet, and being able to glance back and forth without sacrificing the full screen view is sanity preserving.
Having done that sort of task before, and typically, en masse in the context of electronic discovery, I strongly recommend a suite a software to assist in that task:
(1) ABBY FineReader 8.0 -- (primarily for scanned spreadsheets) an OCR program, granted an older version, it's the best they ever made and is still available if you ask for it
(2) AbleToExtract -- for documents which have been printed to pdf and don't require OCR
(3) pdf tools command line suite -- useful when dealing with large volumes of pdf's
(4) any pdf password remover -- if you can view a doc, the "edit" password for using the above software (to extract images or content) is usually inherently "crackable"
(5) the newspaper -- good for reading with the all the time you save above instead of getting fired for not having work to do and not looking like you're working anymore
The orb is gone in Office 2010. Microsoft listened to that feedback and changed it.
Good for microsoft, it took them a few years to fix that one
Access is not just a database, but a forms engine. You can't replace Access with Postgre, it's only part of the solution. What people like about access is that it's a single file that you distribute, double click on it and your app runs, including the database. Postgre simply can't do that, even if you use some other forms engine.
Number one, it's called Postgres or PostgreSQL, not Postgre which suggests to me you're either not detail oriented or are not familiar with the actual product. That said, you're right about the forms engine positioning of Access but in reality, virtually all of the "applications" I've seen built in Access are crap and slow. I've intentionally avoided learning Access's VBA because the application is so terrible and having "skills" in it of any substance are nearly worthless. Also, in the consulting world of sorts, I see people all the time tinkering with Access typically producing wrong results or getting odd error messages because of Access's jet engine [intentionally built-in] failings. That said, in very isolated situations where the amount is data is pretty small (typically fewer than 1 million records w/o many sophisticated fields) and it has to be sent to someone who wants to run "their queries" it's acceptable.
Lots of people were constricted by Excel 2007's 64k row limitation. Excel is a useful tool for a lot of people who aren't database experts. You can call them clueless, but they are getting their jobs done just fine with Excel.
I frequently work with these people who allegedly "get their jobs done fine". These are the sort of people who sometimes ask me for help and then I do 1 to 2 weeks worth of their work in 10 minutes of my time while they watch dumbfounded since they are so ridiculously clueless. I've seen people run counts in SQL on massive servers across a wide variety of tables, one at a time. Keep in mind these tables were never indexed because these "individuals" don't understand what indexing is (to Access's credit, it does have some rudimentary indexing which you typically have to manually enable depending on the situation...). As such, these "individuals" spend days just counting records in tables whereas I'll write a script which will index all of the relevant fields and record all of the counts, typically taking a few minutes instead of days...
If you look at your first article, and read all the way to the bottom, you'll find that Office 2007 was slow to execute macros at first, but later hotfixes solved that problem.
Office 2010 is also significantly faster.
I saw that too, but wouldn't you say that if their first "upgrade" is actually a downgrade in terms of performance, then the developers didn't have their priorities straight? After all, why should it takes a few hotfixes and a version that comes out ~6 or 7 years later only to get back to where you were?
I can't speak to the VBA argument, but as for the ribbon taking lots of screen space, have you tried minimizing the ribbon? Right click on it and choose "Minimize the Ribbon". You'll suddenly have more screen real-estate than any previous version of Office.
Yes I have, but I'd rather always have something visible which takes up less space than the huge ribbon (I believe every other piece of software has it including 2003, called a toolbar)
In 2003, I have more screen real estate available all the time, a fully customizable toolbar and one click access to lesser used functions on the toolbar. In 2007 to have admittedly slightly more screen real estate, I'd have to maximize the ribbon and potentially navigate to a subribbon of sorts (i.e. at least one extra click if not more)
With a combination of this, keyboard shortcuts (you know those, right?) and the Quick Access Toolbar, you can assign and access all the functions you need easily and without taking up much screen at all.
I know all manner of keyboard shortcuts -- they are not as responsive in 2007 as in 2003 so I have to enter them twice sometimes which sometimes defeats the purpose.
The quick access toolbar is also not very customizable.
Long story short:
(1) I've never met an office user at my level who prefers 2007 or 2010 to 2003
(2) I have no problem if MS or any developer wants to add features, just make it backwards compatible and offer the old interface
(3) Anyone who tries to use Excel's "large data" functionality is clueless and shouldn't be trusted with that much data
(4) Access is admittedly an intentionally crippled version of SQL Server and anyone with such data needs should, in most cases, be using PostgreSQL (that said, on occasion I'll use Access as a dumping ground for big files so clueless users can more easily navigate database extracts...)
(5) What do I call the "Orb" to novice users when I want to describe it to them? "the ball in the upper left"?:)
The only personal experience I have with this is that, among many other things I do professionally, usually at any organization I'm at (as a consultant or otherwise), I'm embarrassingly the "Excel guru".
Using Excel a moderate amount, I do try to use VBA pretty sparingly given its obvious slowness compared to other methods of calculation, but on occasion, it's markedly more efficient than other designs (e.g. testing for a series of involved conditions which would otherwise process extremely slowly using a formulas, etc.)
I've found that even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 VBA execution, of identical code, is much slower than Excel 2003.
For that reason, along with the sheer inefficiency of the ribbon design in terms of responsiveness and usage of screen real estate, I keep all Office 2007 usage relegated to a VM which I rarely even need.
To further clarify the issue, I have developed a personal library of macros I use in simply navigating spreadsheets efficiently. Even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 cannot keep up with my usage of these macros and throws errors repeatedly whereas I never see such errors in Excel 2003. Keep in mind, this is on modern hardware.
My interpretation of this is that speed and efficiency were low priorities for the Office development team. Given that their interface redesign was, I believe admittedly, largely geared towards novice users, these alleged low priorities make more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
It's one of the reasons I signed up is that they offer a free security token for signing in.
There are no fees and sadly, when I asked them how popular it is, they said virtually no one uses it.
I suspect it's not so popular because most accounts are insured against most fraud so there's little incentive to using them for most users.
What I'd like is to use that token (or even SMS) for an ATM pin...
To address the two common themes I see here:
(1) Make no mistake, semi-autonomous cars are useless, but meaningful collision avoidance systems are useful and that's the first stepping stone in the process
(2) Autonomous cars are still decades away from any sort of real adoption and automobile manufacturers should (I suspect they are...) develop them in the context of a shared usage vehicle given their much higher utilization than a regular car (an autonomous car could be in use 100% of the time as opposed to how most cars sit parked most of their time). As such, most users of such vehicles will use them like taxi's but they would cost much less, be safer, and would be available anywhere and for any length trip unlike just metropolitan areas.
They will charge you though the nose for a "dry" internet connection (i.e. when you only have internet service with them). The delta between internet and TV with internet is just about $20 and add phone for another $10 (with per/min charges). Add a few dollars for the cable box and this deal will only be a small gain over an internet connection and TV.
Perhaps so, but I have TWC in NY and pay just $34.99/month for a 50/5 connection (granted, I think it is rated lower but if you use a docsis 3.0 modem on an otherwise slower priced connection, you get higher speeds) and just use a few shared accounts for netflix/hbo go/nimble tv/amazon/WatchESPN all on a Roku3 that come to something like $10-15/month
perhaps doing this is somewhat against the TOS of those services, but last time I checked, TWC bundling prices is against the terms of service of the federal government...
-We can think of all sorts of analogies for intrusive ads (which are perfectly valid) but the truth is is that most people don't block ads on most sites unless someone can cite some statistics suggesting otherwise so I suggest a technologically feasible approach to serve unobtrusive ads to adblockers.
-As such, if website publishers want to get paid more for their content and think they are being shortchanged by ad-blockers, they could insist that the networks they work with provide them with a less interactive/obtrusive (i.e., non-flash, etc.) ad which will display when the user is using adblock (presumably in conjunction with the functionality already embedded in adblock to allow for those unobtrusive ads; presumably in the form of a cookie that an ad server could read then determine what th serve the user?)
(1) Our tax structure isn't going to change meaningfully anytime soon
(2) The IRS won't allow or enforce any sort of efile for everyone in the short-term
(3) The IRS does allow you to file Form 14039 which puts a flag on your account which will make it harder for someone to cheat you out of your refund because your account will go through extra checks (such as making sure that your address and other information hasn't changed from last year since most information breaches don't contain all of the information necessary to file your tax return) and will reject fraudulent looking returns
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf...
(4) The IRS might decide to, upon filing form 14039 or if you have experienced a fraudulent return filed for you, a distinct PIN which is like a PIN for a credit freeze
Morale of the story if you're concerned about not getting your refund
-file form 8822 when you change address and notify your employees and other agencies which file forms on your behalf to have your current address so all filings point to the same physical address
-file form 14039 to have the identify theft flag added to your profile
-always try to arrange so you owe a little money come tax time (but not so much that you owe a penalty) so your refund is not in purgatory in the event of a fraudulent return filed on your behalf
-if you do indeed get a refund, try to file as early as possible to beat out a fraudster
...turn of events is that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler must have moved recently and big telecom didn't know where to send their "support" checks in time.
--> Is the above true, does someone know this for certain?
--> If so, what would the marginal cost be per user?
One other thing to consider is that Aereo has pretty good software developed right now and if they don't need farms of antenna's with local presence anymore, they could theoretically be located anywhere if they are, effectively, a retransmission service and would no longer need to build out local infrastructure (i.e., which I suspect was one of their larger costs) and could just use cloud type services (e.g., amazon/rackspace) to host their DVR/transcoding/etc. services
I, embarrassingly and sadly, live in Excel through my job as a CPA and as a frequent reader and occasional contributor here, unsurprisingly have a little bit of a programming/IT background.
I fully appreciate that the ribbon interface is better for novice users and has a flatter learning curve compared to the 2003 conventional interface but what really got me about the new versions is the slowness (only minimized slightly by being on a well configured new core i7, etc.). The new versions are so poorly engineered that they:
(1) frequently miss keystrokes/combinations that I enter
(2) calculate generally more slowly and/or less intelligently
(3) execute vba substantially more slowly
As such, my preferred setup is that I have Office 2003 and 2010 installed on the same machine (2010 via sandboxie which is tricky but doable to get right except that I use Outlook 2010 directly as opposed to sandboxed instead of Outlook 2003 since the newer Outlook is a real improvement and the ribbon doesn't bother me in that context of lighter usage)
I use Excel 2003 for almost everything and, only when I need to, I open up files in 2010 if they won't open in 2003.
Office 2007 is crap
Office 2013 is crap
Office 2010 is the least bad version of the new Office's
...as someone who has scoured and mined the NYC health department data (not to mention the review / grade pending period making the data even more worthless; i.e., most restaurants receive a hidden "C" at which point they display a "Grade Pending" sign then have a month to get their "A" at their reinspection and then most likely go back to their "C" ways --> to all those statisticians out there, which rating is the real one? the first one when they weren't expecting it or the one where they had a few weeks notice?
My hope and wish is that the letter grades determined by the score would be meaningfully correlated to the risk of food poisoning in the restaurant however there is little relationship between those things and that restaurants wouldn't have a chance to get a reinspection which clearly defeats the purpose of the test in the eyes of anyone with even the most minimal statistical/scientific education.
Instead of using google glass, the health department should reevaluate their methods of inspection and reinspection grading policy where part of their inspection relates to testing actual prepared food instead of seeing if a mouse or roach might have been on the floor (oftentimes they can just scurry in from the sidewalk and have zero impact on the food)
Most of the time when you view closed captions, it is typed up, not automatically transcribed by a computer program - link
Further, for live events, it is typically typed live by a stenographer which yields the inherent delay
As for errors, I personally have mostly seen errors when I'm watching over the air and the reception isn't very clear (though I don't often use closed captioning so my sample size is limited)
I would too :)
I pay about $0.27/kWh in NYC for what's that's worth...
I only wish I had that problem
My employer's IT department has misconfigured the VOIP voice system so poorly, I much prefer to use my cell phone for phone calls as the sound quality is vastly superior...Now I just can't wait until my plan upgrades to unlimited minutes
Case in point
AOL Search Data Leak
I do the same thing (re: custom email addresses) though since I use gmail to manage the domain, I also use subdomains as well to sort them (i.e., in order of importance of general class of address)
note that the free gmail version using a "+" both exposes your address and doesn't work with a lot of sites whereas subdomains work just fine (if you host a domain w/gmail)
Can't you apply non-yet received refunds against your liability though?
While I'm a CPA but not a tax accountant, I'd suggest asking a tax accountant about the option of "underwithholding" to the tune of $1500 for this next year and apply this unpaid refund against your balance a method to avoid this issue, at least in part, is to structure your tax payments and withholding to never yield a refund from the IRS in the first place which is not a perfect science but can be pretty close in most cases if you're organized...
...in terms of real cost, my guess is that even if you buy whatever licenses you need/want from Microsoft for whatever software you have a need for, it won't really be that expensive compared to irritating your users (also, just use hosted exchange as $10/month/user should be a non-issue).
Before making any decisions, I'd consider asking your admittedly tiny user base what software/suites they need/want instead of just making blind purchasing decisions
Being both a CPA and someone who does lightweight programming (mostly scripting via VB, VBA, SQL and some macro languages) and occasional light IT work (setting up computers/routers/small networks, building/repairing computer hardware, etc.), most accountants are, at best, not interested in engaging in real abstract reasoning or learning. I assure you that accounting is really quite simple and there are very few intricacies (except perhaps in the design of their terrible accounting software database which have thousands of tables as a simple report's underlying query could require multiple "union's" for pulling the same type of data...)
I only keep the emails that require some action in my inbox and everything goes into an archive folder.
The two secret sauces of my email system are this though:
(1) A series of well written rules to tweak what of a few folders email arrive in such as to tweak my level of attention to the arriving email:
// pst/ost filesystem...)
(a) if I'm only on the "cc" it goes into a "cc" folder
(b) if it goes firmwide, it goes to a firmwide folder
(c) if I'm on the "to" it stays in my inbox
(d) if it's one of a series of automated emails, it is automatically sent to archive
(2) http://lookeen.com/ --> the best outlook search tool I've ever used but it requires some understanding of how it works to most effectively use it
(a) you can only search its index and it can't reliably update it index in realtime (I believe as a function of outlook's terrible internal I/O
(b) the speed of lookeen and outlook by extension appear to be related to the degree of fragmentation of the underlying indices and datafiles so I configure lookeen to rebuild its index (2-3 gb of emails takes 10-15 minutes to index on an older computer) and also to selectively defragment both lookeen's database and outlook's files each night
This approach yields lightning quick searches where I'm frequently telling people I work with when I sent them what email over the phone so they look it up the old fashioned way...
Having done that sort of task before, and typically, en masse in the context of electronic discovery, I strongly recommend a suite a software to assist in that task:
(1) ABBY FineReader 8.0 -- (primarily for scanned spreadsheets) an OCR program, granted an older version, it's the best they ever made and is still available if you ask for it
(2) AbleToExtract -- for documents which have been printed to pdf and don't require OCR
(3) pdf tools command line suite -- useful when dealing with large volumes of pdf's
(4) any pdf password remover -- if you can view a doc, the "edit" password for using the above software (to extract images or content) is usually inherently "crackable"
(5) the newspaper -- good for reading with the all the time you save above instead of getting fired for not having work to do and not looking like you're working anymore
Good for microsoft, it took them a few years to fix that one
Number one, it's called Postgres or PostgreSQL, not Postgre which suggests to me you're either not detail oriented or are not familiar with the actual product. That said, you're right about the forms engine positioning of Access but in reality, virtually all of the "applications" I've seen built in Access are crap and slow. I've intentionally avoided learning Access's VBA because the application is so terrible and having "skills" in it of any substance are nearly worthless. Also, in the consulting world of sorts, I see people all the time tinkering with Access typically producing wrong results or getting odd error messages because of Access's jet engine [intentionally built-in] failings. That said, in very isolated situations where the amount is data is pretty small (typically fewer than 1 million records w/o many sophisticated fields) and it has to be sent to someone who wants to run "their queries" it's acceptable.
I frequently work with these people who allegedly "get their jobs done fine". These are the sort of people who sometimes ask me for help and then I do 1 to 2 weeks worth of their work in 10 minutes of my time while they watch dumbfounded since they are so ridiculously clueless. I've seen people run counts in SQL on massive servers across a wide variety of tables, one at a time. Keep in mind these tables were never indexed because these "individuals" don't understand what indexing is (to Access's credit, it does have some rudimentary indexing which you typically have to manually enable depending on the situation...). As such, these "individuals" spend days just counting records in tables whereas I'll write a script which will index all of the relevant fields and record all of the counts, typically taking a few minutes instead of days...
I saw that too, but wouldn't you say that if their first "upgrade" is actually a downgrade in terms of performance, then the developers didn't have their priorities straight? After all, why should it takes a few hotfixes and a version that comes out ~6 or 7 years later only to get back to where you were?
Yes I have, but I'd rather always have something visible which takes up less space than the huge ribbon (I believe every other piece of software has it including 2003, called a toolbar)
In 2003, I have more screen real estate available all the time, a fully customizable toolbar and one click access to lesser used functions on the toolbar. In 2007 to have admittedly slightly more screen real estate, I'd have to maximize the ribbon and potentially navigate to a subribbon of sorts (i.e. at least one extra click if not more)
I know all manner of keyboard shortcuts -- they are not as responsive in 2007 as in 2003 so I have to enter them twice sometimes which sometimes defeats the purpose.
:)
The quick access toolbar is also not very customizable.
Long story short:
(1) I've never met an office user at my level who prefers 2007 or 2010 to 2003
(2) I have no problem if MS or any developer wants to add features, just make it backwards compatible and offer the old interface
(3) Anyone who tries to use Excel's "large data" functionality is clueless and shouldn't be trusted with that much data
(4) Access is admittedly an intentionally crippled version of SQL Server and anyone with such data needs should, in most cases, be using PostgreSQL (that said, on occasion I'll use Access as a dumping ground for big files so clueless users can more easily navigate database extracts...)
(5) What do I call the "Orb" to novice users when I want to describe it to them? "the ball in the upper left"?
Okay, let's say it's 50%
The only personal experience I have with this is that, among many other things I do professionally, usually at any organization I'm at (as a consultant or otherwise), I'm embarrassingly the "Excel guru".
Using Excel a moderate amount, I do try to use VBA pretty sparingly given its obvious slowness compared to other methods of calculation, but on occasion, it's markedly more efficient than other designs (e.g. testing for a series of involved conditions which would otherwise process extremely slowly using a formulas, etc.)
I've found that even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 VBA execution, of identical code, is much slower than Excel 2003.
For that reason, along with the sheer inefficiency of the ribbon design in terms of responsiveness and usage of screen real estate, I keep all Office 2007 usage relegated to a VM which I rarely even need.
To further clarify the issue, I have developed a personal library of macros I use in simply navigating spreadsheets efficiently. Even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 cannot keep up with my usage of these macros and throws errors repeatedly whereas I never see such errors in Excel 2003. Keep in mind, this is on modern hardware.
My interpretation of this is that speed and efficiency were low priorities for the Office development team. Given that their interface redesign was, I believe admittedly, largely geared towards novice users, these alleged low priorities make more sense.
To appeal to your sense of empiricism, which I appreciate, please see (perhaps not of the greatest quality...)
http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=81967
http://www.excelbanter.com/showthread.php?t=137875
http://www.ozgrid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78673&page=1
for what it's worth, I always disable screen refresh and calculation during a macro (except in rare circumstances when that behavior is necessary)