No need to defend yourself, I think. Being helpful is good, and thanking someone else for help is good. Glad to be of assistance!
The Ctrl-F1 tip was new to me as well. I wish he'd stopped there, it would have been fine.
The chevron is only in Office 2010 so far. It isn't in 2007, which was the chief offender to most of us. It isn't immediately obvious in the normal GUI nor was the hiding functionality shown or mentioned in any demo I ever saw... and I saw quite a few when MS was developing the technology... so I don't know which demo that poster saw, but apparently there was no overlap among the demos we've seen.
Indeed you will. So will I, because I use the hotkeys as well.
However, there exists a great majority of office users who can't be bothered to learn those hotkeys. Go work in an office, and see if any of the management wants to waste their time learning hotkeys. Chances are, most of them are barely functional on the computer, and think that sort of thing is a waste of their time. So having a bright colorful icon right in front of them really improves their speed. Ask your IT staff, if you aren't part of it. (Sounds like you could be, though.)
The Ribbon was invented for those people. Not you or I. I hide it, I turn off the menu bar, and I close everything that's taking up space on my screen.
Nothing personal to you guys who have this INTENSE BURNING HATRED for the Ribbon UI. I just disagree with you, let's stay civil in here.
But... you just double-click the tab, and it goes away, taking up even less space... it's easy! This new design will actually do wonders for your average user. You know, good old computer illiterate hunt-and-peck J. Random User, who doesn't know any keyboard shortcuts and really can't be taught to use them.
I agree. I issued myself the same challenge and it was exactly as you say. It's hard to break old habits but the new way actually does let you get complex things done faster.
You can also hide the ribbon when you're not using it, to get more usable screen space than previously possible. Do that by double-clicking the current "tab", and the 2010 version has a little chevron arrow you can click for the same effect.
I used to work at a helpdesk at a college. Macs, in our experience at the helpdesk, suffer the same defect rate as other brands.
None of my friends have had a Macbook for longer than 18 months without having to bring it in for repairs. These people aren't abusing their laptops, mind you. It's just that they aren't really special - they are decently good quality, and that's it.
But it also keeps 'em off the playground, and out of the woods, fields, and streams. Heck, kids are only visiting friends to sit in front of THEIR screens nowadays.
Don't forget to send 'em outside to play once in a while. Even the most computer-addicted of us needs some fresh air and sunlight to be healthy:)
It wouldn't be sold in one piece. You can bank on that. Also, I bet ownership and "land" claims would be a really hot topic.
If it were feasible to get it to a nearby stable orbit and not wreck the Earth or any of our stuff in the process, then it would cost an immense amount at first. Prices would get progressively lower as the technology evolved to "mine" and transport the pieces. The market would reach its saturation point eventually, too.
Space diamonds would probably always cost more than diamonds originating here on the planet, though, because of how expensive it is to safely retrieve objects from space.
Okay. I am not employed by a computer manufacturer or distributor, so you know. I don't even really like the brand I'm about to talk about. I'll probably catch flak for using this particular brand as an example, but it's pretty common that people consider it when buying a PC.
Take for example the Dell Vostro, the "home user" aka consumer grade model. Then look at the Dell Latitude. They can be ordered with similar specs, but the Latitude costs a lot more for the same specs. Why? Well, besides the obvious "because a business will pay more" factor, they have sturdier mounting hardware that holds everything in place inside the chassis. That means when you carry it around every day, it won't fall apart as fast. It WILL fall apart eventually - that's always been my experience with laptops in general - but the Latitude will reliably outlast the consumer class Vostro by a great amount. Then again, you've still got a Dell.
When you call the company for support on an enterprise class laptop, you'll have a different number to call, with a different length queue, and different agents to talk to. Even the website you visit is different. They have to maintain a specific level of service or businesses wouldn't do business with them, so you get in on that if you spend enough money on the computer.
So you're absolutely right. It makes a difference.
That's an excellent tip. I'd mod it up, if I wasn't the parent poster.
Perhaps I should have been clearer. UN*X / Linux users still need to back up SOME things, just not normally the entire drive. Although, I've occasionally wished I'd backed up my entire drive back in my masochistic Gentoo-stage-1 days when I had approximately 1 day of useful computing time per week...
Whilst you rightly point out that there is no standard filepath system for Windows to differ from, it's a shame you fall into the same trap of criticising another OS for no better reason than you are unfamiliar with it.
You are correct, I allowed my opinion to get into a post that was supposed to be facts. I did have to use VMS for a few years, but I never liked the design.
It's not so much a matter of losing it. It's the fact that it gets filled up with obsolete crap over time. Which was always the primary reason Windows slowed down over time and eventually needed reinstalling. The registry is one of the worst software design blunders of all time.
I completely agree that it got filled up with crap and that it was a terrible design. I'm not sure I agree that it was the primary reason Windows needed reinstalling - I think a lot of that had to do with users littering their computers with whatever flavor of the week virus-laden shareware they acquired, file system corruption from people shutting down using their chassis' power switches, and terrible swap/registry/file system fragmentation problems. Sometimes it was faster to reformat and reinstall than to fix all of the above. Users always filled up their hard drives to the point where you couldn't defrag anyway if you wanted to.
The mess of INI files from pre-Windows-95 needed to be fixed. UNIX people have it good with the somewhat disciplined usage of/etc by most programs' authors. Windows coders didn't have that same discipline. Just about every program had at least one INI file, and most installers even added things to WIN.INI and sometimes SYSTEM.INI via various hand-rolled code and wouldn't you know it, things broke all the time, and the shareware authors were quite prolific. You'd sit down to fix someone's slow computer, and they would have hundreds of them and their WIN.INI would be totally bloated and ridiculous. Microsoft fixed the INI situation, but the fix was pretty bad too. Somehow people seem to think I'm defending its honor or something like that.
What I'm saying is: People, back up your systems so you can restore them if something gets borked. The Registry doesn't corrupt or delete itself (since Windows XP anyway, thanks for the correction) so if it's corrupt or missing, you undoubtedly have other massive failures happening and will need your backup anyway.
Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT. I think the last time I heard of that was when someone's hard drive started going bad, and they were running Windows 95, and had never backed up anything in their lives. Why wouldn't anyone back up their hard drive regularly, anyway? Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.
No, the main reasons are: it's a recognizable brand, employers provide Photoshop for their employees, colleges have it in their labs, it supports most digital cameras' RAW formats, and everyone freakin' pirates it when they're studying photography or design or print media or whatever other visual art. Seriously, it's rampant. I know MANY people who pirated Adobe products and continued to use them in their careers. Basically, nobody ever paid for it except the odd one or two. I feel like the oddball, having actually purchased Photoshop CS rather than pirating it back when I was in college - my peers even made fun of me for it. "You mean you actually paid for that? Why didn't you just download it? I would have given you a copy." (Of course, mine actually worked properly, and theirs didn't always.) You'd think that would be something you could buy with your student loans, even though the 'student price' is still rather expensive for an average photo student.
GIMP is poised to be at least average in digital photo manipulation. It doesn't stand out as a shining example of technological achievement, but it's at least average.
Most digital photography goes straight to the Web, and you don't need CMYK for that. You need sRGB. If you're the one sending images to a printer, yes you want to handle CMYK. Once you profile your average photo printer, as long as you're outputting in the right color space - you should get really good results. CMYK is mostly of interest to electronic prepress: think books and newspapers. But your average photographer doesn't need that. They have a prepress department to handle the conversion and bit depth reduction. In fact, many printers and RIPs accept profiled RGB images these days, so converting to CMYK may or may not gain you anything in the end. Your mileage will most definitely vary.
Your point about HDR is valid. HDR has been the new hotness for years.
One thing Adobe products do well is decoding Camera RAW formats. That's a big deal, since you can slightly adjust your exposure post-shoot. Otherwise you have to either use 8-bit-per-channel JPEG, or pay the manufacturer for the full software. The 'lite' version usually comes with the camera but you can't do everything Adobe does. GIMP could really break into the market if they packaged UFRaw with the software.
Remember how banner advertisements used to only be JPEGs and sometimes-animated GIFs? Then they started using plugins, eventually settling on SWFs, Java and later on JavaScript.
I foresee the same thing happening on set-top boxes. They already have Java content on Blu-Ray discs. I'm pretty sure digital cable boxes do something similar with these "enhanced content" options for shows. I've never used that feature, so it's just speculation on my part, but the Java logo is still printed on the box.
You'd think that big media companies would do a better job. You really would. But then they farm out their ad banner management to another company because it reduces their internal costs, and you get drive-by malware on the Wall Street Journal's website. True story, it happened to me twice. After the first time, I thought, "Nah, there is NO WAY the WSJ would allow that. Must have been one of the tech news sites." But then I watched what my computer was doing when I loaded the same article, and sure enough... it hit me with the same malware. So imagine what happens when the same ad management companies make a pitch to smaller organizations with fewer resources!
Slashdot Mirror
I now feel the uncontrollable urge to find some way to insert the phrase "moose vapor" into a conversation today. Thanks!
Yeah, those Opteron lights are really killer.
Chex armor!
Is this a private argument, or can anybody join in?
Well, we can at least find his lack of faith disturbing.
I see. And how does got two chatbots to settle down for a short interaction make you feel?
Good point :)
No need to defend yourself, I think. Being helpful is good, and thanking someone else for help is good. Glad to be of assistance!
The Ctrl-F1 tip was new to me as well. I wish he'd stopped there, it would have been fine.
The chevron is only in Office 2010 so far. It isn't in 2007, which was the chief offender to most of us. It isn't immediately obvious in the normal GUI nor was the hiding functionality shown or mentioned in any demo I ever saw... and I saw quite a few when MS was developing the technology... so I don't know which demo that poster saw, but apparently there was no overlap among the demos we've seen.
Indeed you will. So will I, because I use the hotkeys as well.
However, there exists a great majority of office users who can't be bothered to learn those hotkeys. Go work in an office, and see if any of the management wants to waste their time learning hotkeys. Chances are, most of them are barely functional on the computer, and think that sort of thing is a waste of their time. So having a bright colorful icon right in front of them really improves their speed. Ask your IT staff, if you aren't part of it. (Sounds like you could be, though.)
The Ribbon was invented for those people. Not you or I. I hide it, I turn off the menu bar, and I close everything that's taking up space on my screen.
Nothing personal to you guys who have this INTENSE BURNING HATRED for the Ribbon UI. I just disagree with you, let's stay civil in here.
But... you just double-click the tab, and it goes away, taking up even less space... it's easy! This new design will actually do wonders for your average user. You know, good old computer illiterate hunt-and-peck J. Random User, who doesn't know any keyboard shortcuts and really can't be taught to use them.
I agree. I issued myself the same challenge and it was exactly as you say. It's hard to break old habits but the new way actually does let you get complex things done faster.
You can also hide the ribbon when you're not using it, to get more usable screen space than previously possible. Do that by double-clicking the current "tab", and the 2010 version has a little chevron arrow you can click for the same effect.
I think you were unusually lucky.
I used to work at a helpdesk at a college. Macs, in our experience at the helpdesk, suffer the same defect rate as other brands.
None of my friends have had a Macbook for longer than 18 months without having to bring it in for repairs. These people aren't abusing their laptops, mind you. It's just that they aren't really special - they are decently good quality, and that's it.
Keeps 'em off the streets, for sure.
But it also keeps 'em off the playground, and out of the woods, fields, and streams. Heck, kids are only visiting friends to sit in front of THEIR screens nowadays.
Don't forget to send 'em outside to play once in a while. Even the most computer-addicted of us needs some fresh air and sunlight to be healthy :)
Okay, okay. Uncle! I give!
Yes, the Vostro is a SOHO model. The Inspiron is the consumer model.
It wouldn't be sold in one piece. You can bank on that. Also, I bet ownership and "land" claims would be a really hot topic.
If it were feasible to get it to a nearby stable orbit and not wreck the Earth or any of our stuff in the process, then it would cost an immense amount at first. Prices would get progressively lower as the technology evolved to "mine" and transport the pieces. The market would reach its saturation point eventually, too.
Space diamonds would probably always cost more than diamonds originating here on the planet, though, because of how expensive it is to safely retrieve objects from space.
Indeed. Business class laptops are better built.
Okay. I am not employed by a computer manufacturer or distributor, so you know. I don't even really like the brand I'm about to talk about. I'll probably catch flak for using this particular brand as an example, but it's pretty common that people consider it when buying a PC.
Take for example the Dell Vostro, the "home user" aka consumer grade model. Then look at the Dell Latitude. They can be ordered with similar specs, but the Latitude costs a lot more for the same specs. Why? Well, besides the obvious "because a business will pay more" factor, they have sturdier mounting hardware that holds everything in place inside the chassis. That means when you carry it around every day, it won't fall apart as fast. It WILL fall apart eventually - that's always been my experience with laptops in general - but the Latitude will reliably outlast the consumer class Vostro by a great amount. Then again, you've still got a Dell.
When you call the company for support on an enterprise class laptop, you'll have a different number to call, with a different length queue, and different agents to talk to. Even the website you visit is different. They have to maintain a specific level of service or businesses wouldn't do business with them, so you get in on that if you spend enough money on the computer.
So you're absolutely right. It makes a difference.
That's an excellent tip. I'd mod it up, if I wasn't the parent poster.
Perhaps I should have been clearer. UN*X / Linux users still need to back up SOME things, just not normally the entire drive. Although, I've occasionally wished I'd backed up my entire drive back in my masochistic Gentoo-stage-1 days when I had approximately 1 day of useful computing time per week...
Whilst you rightly point out that there is no standard filepath system for Windows to differ from, it's a shame you fall into the same trap of criticising another OS for no better reason than you are unfamiliar with it.
You are correct, I allowed my opinion to get into a post that was supposed to be facts. I did have to use VMS for a few years, but I never liked the design.
It's not so much a matter of losing it. It's the fact that it gets filled up with obsolete crap over time. Which was always the primary reason Windows slowed down over time and eventually needed reinstalling. The registry is one of the worst software design blunders of all time.
I completely agree that it got filled up with crap and that it was a terrible design. I'm not sure I agree that it was the primary reason Windows needed reinstalling - I think a lot of that had to do with users littering their computers with whatever flavor of the week virus-laden shareware they acquired, file system corruption from people shutting down using their chassis' power switches, and terrible swap/registry/file system fragmentation problems. Sometimes it was faster to reformat and reinstall than to fix all of the above. Users always filled up their hard drives to the point where you couldn't defrag anyway if you wanted to.
That sounds like what I remember, although it only happened a scarce few times that I was aware of. Those memories are rather dusty!
I never liked the Registry. I wish it had been done differently. Bill Gates even disliked it, see? http://gizmodo.com/5019516/classic-clips-bill-gates-chews-out-microsoft-over-xp
The mess of INI files from pre-Windows-95 needed to be fixed. UNIX people have it good with the somewhat disciplined usage of /etc by most programs' authors. Windows coders didn't have that same discipline. Just about every program had at least one INI file, and most installers even added things to WIN.INI and sometimes SYSTEM.INI via various hand-rolled code and wouldn't you know it, things broke all the time, and the shareware authors were quite prolific. You'd sit down to fix someone's slow computer, and they would have hundreds of them and their WIN.INI would be totally bloated and ridiculous. Microsoft fixed the INI situation, but the fix was pretty bad too. Somehow people seem to think I'm defending its honor or something like that.
What I'm saying is: People, back up your systems so you can restore them if something gets borked. The Registry doesn't corrupt or delete itself (since Windows XP anyway, thanks for the correction) so if it's corrupt or missing, you undoubtedly have other massive failures happening and will need your backup anyway.
Oh, kids these days just don't troll like they used to. How about we get some facts in here, instead?
There is no standard directory separator:
/ is UNIX and derivative OSes since the beginning of subdirectories
: was the separator on MacOS from the 1980s until MacOS/X
\ is DOS and Windows, from the 1980s
VMS was this massive mess: http://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/V73/6489/6489pro_010.html
(Were there others?)
Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT. I think the last time I heard of that was when someone's hard drive started going bad, and they were running Windows 95, and had never backed up anything in their lives. Why wouldn't anyone back up their hard drive regularly, anyway? Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.
No, the main reasons are: it's a recognizable brand, employers provide Photoshop for their employees, colleges have it in their labs, it supports most digital cameras' RAW formats, and everyone freakin' pirates it when they're studying photography or design or print media or whatever other visual art. Seriously, it's rampant. I know MANY people who pirated Adobe products and continued to use them in their careers. Basically, nobody ever paid for it except the odd one or two. I feel like the oddball, having actually purchased Photoshop CS rather than pirating it back when I was in college - my peers even made fun of me for it. "You mean you actually paid for that? Why didn't you just download it? I would have given you a copy." (Of course, mine actually worked properly, and theirs didn't always.) You'd think that would be something you could buy with your student loans, even though the 'student price' is still rather expensive for an average photo student.
GIMP is poised to be at least average in digital photo manipulation. It doesn't stand out as a shining example of technological achievement, but it's at least average.
Most digital photography goes straight to the Web, and you don't need CMYK for that. You need sRGB. If you're the one sending images to a printer, yes you want to handle CMYK. Once you profile your average photo printer, as long as you're outputting in the right color space - you should get really good results. CMYK is mostly of interest to electronic prepress: think books and newspapers. But your average photographer doesn't need that. They have a prepress department to handle the conversion and bit depth reduction. In fact, many printers and RIPs accept profiled RGB images these days, so converting to CMYK may or may not gain you anything in the end. Your mileage will most definitely vary.
Your point about HDR is valid. HDR has been the new hotness for years.
One thing Adobe products do well is decoding Camera RAW formats. That's a big deal, since you can slightly adjust your exposure post-shoot. Otherwise you have to either use 8-bit-per-channel JPEG, or pay the manufacturer for the full software. The 'lite' version usually comes with the camera but you can't do everything Adobe does. GIMP could really break into the market if they packaged UFRaw with the software.
Now with SOAP.
I'll see myself out now.
Remember how banner advertisements used to only be JPEGs and sometimes-animated GIFs? Then they started using plugins, eventually settling on SWFs, Java and later on JavaScript.
I foresee the same thing happening on set-top boxes. They already have Java content on Blu-Ray discs. I'm pretty sure digital cable boxes do something similar with these "enhanced content" options for shows. I've never used that feature, so it's just speculation on my part, but the Java logo is still printed on the box.
You'd think that big media companies would do a better job. You really would. But then they farm out their ad banner management to another company because it reduces their internal costs, and you get drive-by malware on the Wall Street Journal's website. True story, it happened to me twice. After the first time, I thought, "Nah, there is NO WAY the WSJ would allow that. Must have been one of the tech news sites." But then I watched what my computer was doing when I loaded the same article, and sure enough... it hit me with the same malware. So imagine what happens when the same ad management companies make a pitch to smaller organizations with fewer resources!
Interesting times are coming.
Someone appears to have obtained some more common sense over at MS and the basic dev tools including the IDE are free nowadays.
See? It even comes with Expression Blend. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/windows-phone-developer-tools
* Yet.
Lots of newer TVs and Blu-ray players now have Java... it's only a matter of time, I think.
Scary thought!