I think a lot of people misunderstand the purpose behind Microsoft doing this. This is to aid debugging by allowing you to see what that mysterious function is actually doing. The fact this then makes it easy for people to report bugs is a very welcome by-product.
I have to say it's a shame it's not free, because it's a great piece of software, but I don't think many will pay for it with dozens of free equivalents on the market. I've been on the beta team and I have to say it functions better than any of the others I tried. It has the best discoverability of any of the launchers I have tried, drawing from several sources. The interface is the nicest I've used, using toasts that fade when the user moves the mouse and just generally being a nice experience to use. It's large, clear but doesn't often get in the way. It's a shame it lacks somewhat in features. However there is going to be an API which I very much look forward to. I think shortly you will end up with functionality equal to the other launcher.
The stronger the filters get the more needs to be done to improve how we are shown spam. The filter can say that it's 40% sure that that email is spam, but I can tell 100%. There needs to be better interfaces for manualy monitering what it has deemed by the filter to be spam implimented in major clients. My prefered solution is to expose how certain the filter is that a message is spam via a colour coding system, and enable users to filter and sort via this certainty. You can then review only the top nth percent of your spam to make sure that it is definately spam. Combined with the hopeful move in improving interfaces I welcome ideas like this that should, fingers crossed, help catch more spam. It also has interesting applications in other areas, as the article mentions, and AI as a whole.
I don't think TV would cause Autism, I think it could indeed agrivate it.
One suggested cure for Autism is to enforce socialising on them. I'm dubious about the effectiveness of this, but I think if done in the right way it does help. However, the opposite is very possible and highly likely, a lack of socilising will make them worse.
Relating to studies in areas such as dyslexia it has been shown that television cannot replace true human interaction for things such as language aquisition. It would not suprise anyone if the same is said for social development.
If the children are not able to learn interaction from an early age, but instead are sat in front of a TV then their Autistic tendencies will become worse.
However I don't think it is a cause, there is evidence to suggest that any amount of a social environment from the earliest of ages still is not enough to negate Autism developing in some cases.
Like most things, it's a case of a predisposition that is helped or worsened by environmental factors.
"Not only this, but.NET was supposed to be a common language runtime environment, and now it's encompassing APIs that are not specific to the environment but specific to a certain version of Windows." I've not seen any official word that.NET is supposed to be fully cross platform. Whats more is that it will actually be limitedly cross-platform. They are developing a small subset of the.NET Framework and WinFX to be deployed on other OS's such as linux and OSX (primarily for use with the web but as I understand you should be able to create small desktop apps). WinFX, or.NET 3.0, will be (and the beta is) available on Windows XP (not sure about 2000)..NET has always encorperated Windows specific things, the entire WinForms namespace is predominately wrappers for Windows controls. If anything, WinFX is less specific in that if you can impliment WinFX, as Mono has.NET, you can run your apps on any platform and it will be alot easier to make the controls fit the OS it is running on.
The article seems very confusing. Some details seem not to work in mine, and it seems, others head. But from reading the article, one technique seems doable: The host runs the connection through the PC and then temporarily blocks the connection to certain players.
"Menus have the advantage of being out of the way, displaying the keyboard equivalent, etc."
Actually, hover over an item in the ribbon and it will display the keyboard shortcut. Press Alt and little letters and numbers appear over every componant in the ribbon. Press that letter/number to use that componant. The keyboard accessability is very good in Office12.
I have seen alot of people, and some people here, make parallels between the contextual UI and adaptive UI's and making the same conclusions as to the problems. They are, however, NOT the same thing and don't have the same problems.
Adaptive UI's are constantly changing, so you cannot learn where things are because they will not be there the next time.
Contextual UI's DO NOT CHANGE. All your old tabs are still there, all the Write, Review, Insert, all in the same place. If you need to get to something, it will always be in the same place.
Contextual tabs just hide the things you don't need when you don't need it. Who the hell EVER needs to have the "Format Table" options unless you are inside a table? Ever? So why not hide it until you are in a table, and then show it? That is what the contextual UI does and that is how the improved vastly on the mass of toolbars of old.
If you look at the research they did (echoed by many people), they found litteraly hundreds of people would have dozens of toolbars open because they were afraid if they close them, they would lose them and not be able to find them again. But most of them are things like Format Image, which are dissabled the whole time until you select an image. The new UI open and closes the relevent things for them, meaning the UI cleans up after them as they go, making the whole experience alot nicer.
"Also, multiple calendars have been available in Outlook for ages. Multiple calendar viewing has been available since 2003 as well. Not the best summary in the world."
You can now overlay them (not sure if that was in there before. Don't think it was).
"Among the more significant new features: Excel 2007's new ways of visualizing data. For example, you can use conditional formatting to color the background of cells based on their value..."
Surely the most significant new feature in Excel are the tables? You can now turn sections of your spreadsheets into tables, which allow you to manipulate them as tables. There is alot surrounding tables that I wouldn't be able to cover well here, but they are *very* useful and are by far the biggest change in Excel. If you use Excel every day, your now going to use the tables feature every day.
I often "Shoot the duck" or "Stomp on the spider" or "Kill the ninja" or whatever while I'm waiting for a page to load (as pages that tend to have these adds tend to load slow). I use Firefox so when I "win" the popup doesn't appear. I just get to have a little bit of guilty pleasure.
This is an interesting more. It seems to be on the face or it a poor one from what I can see, similar to what people have already states, advertisers aren't going to be happy. Then again, Google ads are very popular because they are non-intrusive. If you have non-intrusive video adds you will still be reaching the large audience Google Ads already reaches. And don't forget, if they don't click on it, its still a picture add (presumably). I guess Google are banking on advertisers realising this.
See annoying add. Block it/Ignore it. See picture of something interesting. Click to play, go to website. Which would get more? Time will tell I guess.
Don't teach them in a full blown IDE. But I'd say definatly use some form of advanced text editor like TextPad with color formatting etc. It will make it easier to learn without so much of the dependancies.
I would make a guess and say that malicious software that accesses things that would require admin rights are probably the easiest to find and solve. Firstly, they have the biggest potential for harm and so are more well known. Secondly, you can look through what are uses admin rights and filter them. It is the ones that run at a user level that are harder to catch, and those are the ones that a "This is doing something potentialy dangerous. Are you sure?" will not catch. I for one would like to see an improved install system. Alot of the time malware and spyware are installed via a seperate instal process when installing some other piece of software. If I could tell what install processess are running, I could catch more.
Personaly I'm not terribly excited over the tab preview function. I tend to just move my mouse up to the tab area and scroll my mousewheel to preview what pages I have open and stop on the relevent one. The interface looks like it's trying to be slick, and reserve as much screen space as possible to display the webpage. Kudos to them, except that without mouse gestures etc. they still need all the buttons etc. making it look cluttered. I think I'll stick with Firefox and my two line interface (File menu and URL bar on top line, tabs on row below) with mouse gestures for the time being.
It's saddening also that it seems the requirements of "able to use Word" is that people can insert a Word Art rather than using Paragraph Styles and such.
Indeed, I am slightly annoyed at having to do my entire Computing AS course in Delphi next year. Whilst I recognise it would be difficault to move it to a more modern, say.NET language (which I would most prefer), C++ and Java have been around long enough to migrate the course too, and ime, they are much more useful languages.
We survive all over the world by adapting our envionment to best suit us.
More land without sea levels rising and flooding and destroying will benifit us etc. Now I am by no means authoritive on this subject at all, but it seems to me that we are surving well as it is now, so surely we want to adapt our situation to enable our survival, i.e. avoid global warming.
The argument comes down to will we be better off with a pre or post global warming enviornment, and it seems to be the general concencus is pre.
Or perhaps TF2, which is already in the works?;) But yah, thats bound to be different. TFC:S would be quite nifty, but I think my above logic is all you'd get from Valve:)
HL1 lives so long partly because of the modding community. So while official HL2DM maybe won't last so long, the mods will still be around for a while to come.
There are several mods aiming to do co-op. It may even become a part of BM:S (http://forum.leakfree.org/index.php?c=7&sid=629a4 2bbd709745ea4b071f7ae3570d5
Indeed, I don't entirely get what people complain about. It's not like Steam is forcing you to download it in one big, broadband only chunk. Indeed, it's quite the opposite. You can leave it to download in the background, and if I'm not much mistaken (I've never used the feature) limit the bandwidth it uses. You have control over what it downloads when. It has all features of downloading any patch off any site with 56k.
The only benifit (and imho a big one) to seperate installer downloads is that you can store them, back them up, but them on cover CDs. I think Valve should seriously consider investing in making some package format that you can then load with steam that will install it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a lot of people misunderstand the purpose behind Microsoft doing this. This is to aid debugging by allowing you to see what that mysterious function is actually doing. The fact this then makes it easy for people to report bugs is a very welcome by-product.
I have to say it's a shame it's not free, because it's a great piece of software, but I don't think many will pay for it with dozens of free equivalents on the market.
I've been on the beta team and I have to say it functions better than any of the others I tried. It has the best discoverability of any of the launchers I have tried, drawing from several sources. The interface is the nicest I've used, using toasts that fade when the user moves the mouse and just generally being a nice experience to use. It's large, clear but doesn't often get in the way.
It's a shame it lacks somewhat in features. However there is going to be an API which I very much look forward to. I think shortly you will end up with functionality equal to the other launcher.
The stronger the filters get the more needs to be done to improve how we are shown spam.
The filter can say that it's 40% sure that that email is spam, but I can tell 100%. There needs to be better interfaces for manualy monitering what it has deemed by the filter to be spam implimented in major clients.
My prefered solution is to expose how certain the filter is that a message is spam via a colour coding system, and enable users to filter and sort via this certainty. You can then review only the top nth percent of your spam to make sure that it is definately spam.
Combined with the hopeful move in improving interfaces I welcome ideas like this that should, fingers crossed, help catch more spam.
It also has interesting applications in other areas, as the article mentions, and AI as a whole.
From what I recall of the liscencing and things, they may have a hard time doing so. Though thats a whole different argument.
I don't think TV would cause Autism, I think it could indeed agrivate it.
One suggested cure for Autism is to enforce socialising on them. I'm dubious about the effectiveness of this, but I think if done in the right way it does help. However, the opposite is very possible and highly likely, a lack of socilising will make them worse.
Relating to studies in areas such as dyslexia it has been shown that television cannot replace true human interaction for things such as language aquisition. It would not suprise anyone if the same is said for social development.
If the children are not able to learn interaction from an early age, but instead are sat in front of a TV then their Autistic tendencies will become worse.
However I don't think it is a cause, there is evidence to suggest that any amount of a social environment from the earliest of ages still is not enough to negate Autism developing in some cases.
Like most things, it's a case of a predisposition that is helped or worsened by environmental factors.
WPFe - http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1933 67
"Not only this, but .NET was supposed to be a common language runtime environment, and now it's encompassing APIs that are not specific to the environment but specific to a certain version of Windows." .NET is supposed to be fully cross platform. Whats more is that it will actually be limitedly cross-platform. They are developing a small subset of the .NET Framework and WinFX to be deployed on other OS's such as linux and OSX (primarily for use with the web but as I understand you should be able to create small desktop apps). .NET 3.0, will be (and the beta is) available on Windows XP (not sure about 2000). .NET has always encorperated Windows specific things, the entire WinForms namespace is predominately wrappers for Windows controls. If anything, WinFX is less specific in that if you can impliment WinFX, as Mono has .NET, you can run your apps on any platform and it will be alot easier to make the controls fit the OS it is running on.
I've not seen any official word that
WinFX, or
The article seems very confusing. Some details seem not to work in mine, and it seems, others head. But from reading the article, one technique seems doable: The host runs the connection through the PC and then temporarily blocks the connection to certain players.
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/ and search tables (the search isn't working atm, so I can't link you directly). That has several posts on tables.
"Menus have the advantage of being out of the way, displaying the keyboard equivalent, etc." Actually, hover over an item in the ribbon and it will display the keyboard shortcut. Press Alt and little letters and numbers appear over every componant in the ribbon. Press that letter/number to use that componant. The keyboard accessability is very good in Office12.
I have seen alot of people, and some people here, make parallels between the contextual UI and adaptive UI's and making the same conclusions as to the problems. They are, however, NOT the same thing and don't have the same problems. Adaptive UI's are constantly changing, so you cannot learn where things are because they will not be there the next time. Contextual UI's DO NOT CHANGE. All your old tabs are still there, all the Write, Review, Insert, all in the same place. If you need to get to something, it will always be in the same place. Contextual tabs just hide the things you don't need when you don't need it. Who the hell EVER needs to have the "Format Table" options unless you are inside a table? Ever? So why not hide it until you are in a table, and then show it? That is what the contextual UI does and that is how the improved vastly on the mass of toolbars of old. If you look at the research they did (echoed by many people), they found litteraly hundreds of people would have dozens of toolbars open because they were afraid if they close them, they would lose them and not be able to find them again. But most of them are things like Format Image, which are dissabled the whole time until you select an image. The new UI open and closes the relevent things for them, meaning the UI cleans up after them as they go, making the whole experience alot nicer.
"Also, multiple calendars have been available in Outlook for ages. Multiple calendar viewing has been available since 2003 as well. Not the best summary in the world." You can now overlay them (not sure if that was in there before. Don't think it was). "Among the more significant new features: Excel 2007's new ways of visualizing data. For example, you can use conditional formatting to color the background of cells based on their value..." Surely the most significant new feature in Excel are the tables? You can now turn sections of your spreadsheets into tables, which allow you to manipulate them as tables. There is alot surrounding tables that I wouldn't be able to cover well here, but they are *very* useful and are by far the biggest change in Excel. If you use Excel every day, your now going to use the tables feature every day.
I often "Shoot the duck" or "Stomp on the spider" or "Kill the ninja" or whatever while I'm waiting for a page to load (as pages that tend to have these adds tend to load slow). I use Firefox so when I "win" the popup doesn't appear. I just get to have a little bit of guilty pleasure. This is an interesting more. It seems to be on the face or it a poor one from what I can see, similar to what people have already states, advertisers aren't going to be happy. Then again, Google ads are very popular because they are non-intrusive. If you have non-intrusive video adds you will still be reaching the large audience Google Ads already reaches. And don't forget, if they don't click on it, its still a picture add (presumably). I guess Google are banking on advertisers realising this. See annoying add. Block it/Ignore it. See picture of something interesting. Click to play, go to website. Which would get more? Time will tell I guess.
Don't teach them in a full blown IDE. But I'd say definatly use some form of advanced text editor like TextPad with color formatting etc. It will make it easier to learn without so much of the dependancies.
I would make a guess and say that malicious software that accesses things that would require admin rights are probably the easiest to find and solve.
Firstly, they have the biggest potential for harm and so are more well known. Secondly, you can look through what are uses admin rights and filter them.
It is the ones that run at a user level that are harder to catch, and those are the ones that a "This is doing something potentialy dangerous. Are you sure?" will not catch.
I for one would like to see an improved install system. Alot of the time malware and spyware are installed via a seperate instal process when installing some other piece of software. If I could tell what install processess are running, I could catch more.
The interfsce, I'm pretty sure, isn't final. Far from it.
The interface is not the final. It is a functional beta interface.
Personaly I'm not terribly excited over the tab preview function. I tend to just move my mouse up to the tab area and scroll my mousewheel to preview what pages I have open and stop on the relevent one.
The interface looks like it's trying to be slick, and reserve as much screen space as possible to display the webpage. Kudos to them, except that without mouse gestures etc. they still need all the buttons etc. making it look cluttered.
I think I'll stick with Firefox and my two line interface (File menu and URL bar on top line, tabs on row below) with mouse gestures for the time being.
It's saddening also that it seems the requirements of "able to use Word" is that people can insert a Word Art rather than using Paragraph Styles and such.
Indeed, I am slightly annoyed at having to do my entire Computing AS course in Delphi next year. Whilst I recognise it would be difficault to move it to a more modern, say .NET language (which I would most prefer), C++ and Java have been around long enough to migrate the course too, and ime, they are much more useful languages.
We survive all over the world by adapting our envionment to best suit us. More land without sea levels rising and flooding and destroying will benifit us etc. Now I am by no means authoritive on this subject at all, but it seems to me that we are surving well as it is now, so surely we want to adapt our situation to enable our survival, i.e. avoid global warming. The argument comes down to will we be better off with a pre or post global warming enviornment, and it seems to be the general concencus is pre.
Time to learn Lojban ;)
Or perhaps TF2, which is already in the works? ;) :)
But yah, thats bound to be different. TFC:S would be quite nifty, but I think my above logic is all you'd get from Valve
HL1 lives so long partly because of the modding community. So while official HL2DM maybe won't last so long, the mods will still be around for a while to come. There are several mods aiming to do co-op. It may even become a part of BM:S (http://forum.leakfree.org/index.php?c=7&sid=629a4 2bbd709745ea4b071f7ae3570d5
Indeed, I don't entirely get what people complain about. It's not like Steam is forcing you to download it in one big, broadband only chunk. Indeed, it's quite the opposite. You can leave it to download in the background, and if I'm not much mistaken (I've never used the feature) limit the bandwidth it uses. You have control over what it downloads when. It has all features of downloading any patch off any site with 56k. The only benifit (and imho a big one) to seperate installer downloads is that you can store them, back them up, but them on cover CDs. I think Valve should seriously consider investing in making some package format that you can then load with steam that will install it.