I've got all of the programs I frequently use assigned to keyboard shortcuts already, through the Windows start menu.
Ctrl-Alt-C brings up Calculator Ctrl-Alt-N brings up Notepad
All you need is a shortcut to that application (or file, or website) somewhere in your Start Menu. From that shortcut's Properties, you can assign any key combination you like in the "Shortcut" textbox.
And while the unified spellcheck is a nice feature, I use Microsoft Office for nearly everything I do... so, I already have that. It shares the dictionary across applications.
Yes I'm a "fanboy", but it's hardly FUD. Some were power users and most were not. The change to the interface was most certainly done with non power-users in mind.
PowerUsers can just as easily turn off the new interface and go back to the old ways, just like many people didn't like the new XP-style start menu and went back to "Classic". I'm one of them.
I don't have any plug-ins to try yet, but mail merge was great and even easier than 2003.
I'm a database and VBA developer for my clients and have created a number of applications using Excel, Word, and Access for Office 2003. I've just tested three applications (one in Excel, Word, and Access) in 2007 and they worked perfectly.
So my question to you is, did YOU try it? Sure you looked at it. Icons were missing. You said "What the hell is this?" But then did you try any of your old stuff to see if it broke?
And even if it did, that's beside the point. With every upgrade there will be new problems and developers will have to update their code, or their clients cannot upgrade. That's part of the development cycle.
If the end-result is a product that reduces' employees worktime, and/or create better output, then it's a sound business decision to upgrade. "What the hell is this" is an emotional decision... from a developer that represents 1% of the Office user base.
I've been showing Office 2007 off for quite some time now to my clients, people I work with at the local university, and friends of mine.
Not once has their response been "where is the file menu?" or "where are my icons?" Each time they've seen the ribbon and thought "Oh, that is smart!" They see how easy it is to change margins or add a Header/Footer and immediately want to know when they can buy it.
Will businesses think it's worth $400 per desk? If it saves that employee about an hour of time every month, because they can do tasks faster now, then it pays for itself quite quickly.
That's not mentioning how much *better* things look when created in Office 2007 using their new features. Have you seen the new shape rendering tools? Professional looking slides can be created in PowerPoint without the aide of the graphic design guys. Same goes for charts.
Employees will make better use of styles in Word, conditional formatting in Excel, all because the features are easier to find now.
People who boo-hoo Microsoft really need to sit down in front of Office 2007 for ten minutes and just check out its new features. Throw out your old ideas of menus and icons and just give it a try before you bash it.
Outlook 2007 supports HTML and CSS quite well. Many of you should know this, as you've had the chance to beta test it for about a year now. I have, and all of the HTML newsletters I subscribe to look just fine in Outlook.
In fact, Microsoft has even gone a step further and provided a free CSS/HTML validator that developers can use to make sure their messages will be rendered correctly.
I've only been using the Customer Preview #1, so I can't speak for the final version that is to ship. That being said, everything has worked perfectly with a few minor exceptions:
- ATI hadn't finished their Vista driver quite yet. It worked, but it wasn't as snappy as they promise it to be
- An occasional unexpected crash here and there, of which half reported "this bug has been fixed" when I submitted it
It was actually quite stable for a pre-release that came out six months ago. Yes, the interface is pretty, and yes I will probably never use the Gadgets (Widgets?). The frequent prompting for admin rights was a little annoying at first but I got used to it, and certainly see the value in it for non-geeks.
And I think a lot of us are missing all of the enhancements that Vista will bring to the corporate world with additional Group Policy settings, the bit locker, etc.
Every problem you mentioned has to do with a third-party application or peripheral. How is that Bill's fault?
And you're telling me that Linux apps are any better?
By the way, Windows calls the SSID a "Network Name". And it quite correctly calls the WEP key exactly what it is, a WEP key. Just because your manufacturer calls it something else does not make Windows incorrect.
I learned recently (it took me a while to really learn this lesson) to stop recommending computer systems to friends and family.
I used to go as far as helping them pick out peripherals, specs, and even order it with them on the web. Now I say "Go to dell.com and get at least a gig of RAM." The conversation stops there.
Why? Because the more I help influence their decision, the more they expect me to support that decision afterward. They're not being mean, they're just naturally extending the help I initally offered them.
Why would I want to give a non-geek a Linux disk? They're going to come back to me with all sorts of questions about software compatibility, drivers, printing, etc. No one else they know will support them, even paid companies like their OEM or their ISP. And if they're running a business off this computer, then now I'm liable for what may happen to it.
When will the geek world realize that Linux is not the answer to everything?
This seems like a journalist trying to come up with something good to write about and slashdot forwarding it on as anti-ms fud. And either of those actions surprise you, how?
I know many of the Linux zealots here will bash HP for not offering alternative OSs as an option, but remember that when your average consumer (ie: grandma) purchases a PC they expect a certain level of support and functionality.
If grandma has a choice between:
A) Desktop + Windows for $800
B) Desktop + Linux for $600.. it's quite likely she may want Option B. Then when she gets home to install it, and then has any number of problems (her ISP won't support her, her printer doesn't work, her nephew can't email her, her bank won't support Firefox, her old copy of MS Office won't load, etc etc etc) then she's going to call HP.
At that point, HP's costs increase trying to support Grandma, or HP risks seriously upsetting a customer and possibly getting into further legal troubles. It's a lose-lose for HP and Grandma.
A business should never have be forced to give its customers a choice. If it makes business sense to only bundle Windows, then it should be free to do that. Let someone else sell a Linux box, take the risk, and see what happens.
1) "Emotiflags" is a brand new term. A search on Google only showed 5 hits, all of which were emoticon flags (as in country flags), not emotional flags like:) and:(
2) One of the biggest problems people have with email is that it doesn't convey emotion. If the use of this concept becomes commonplace, it could mean good things for email. Being able to look at the emotion prior to opening the message will mean a lot less miscommunication.
3) While message forums have been doing this for ages, this is the first time I've seen it applied to email as some kind of header deta along with the to, from, subject, importance, etc.
And for what it's worth, the patent was filed almost a year and a half ago.
From the article:
Exploitability due to the corruption of the adjacent heap block's header is assumed likely but research is ongoing. It's "likely"?
That sounds to me like something could *potentially* happen, but they haven't been able to actually prove it yet. And, the date on this discovery (according to the source article) was over two weeks ago. By now, wouldn't they have concluded something with their research?
The company does, however, sell a product to help mitigate "issues" like this.. which they link to at the bottom of their article.
I think what you're dealing with was a DRM issue. The changes to WM9 probably required that VOB files (which are supposed to be encrypted onto a DVD I believe) simply cannot be played off a hard disk. You can probably blame Microsoft for that one, but I suspect that Hollywood was the one pulling the strings there.
When I want to change my IP address... I want a wizard to make sure I'm doing everything correctly. You can change almost every network setting through command line or script if you learn the NETSH command from the shell.
I don't care if my OS has 3D icons or fancy clear windows... I want it to be out of the way, and just RUN THE PROGRAMS I WANT! You can turn of nearly every feature of the new interface. In fact, when I booted Vista using my Active Directory profile, nearly all the eye candy was already turned off.
Not to take up 4 gig of hard drive space because Grandma wants to print pictures of her grandchildren. That might be true for you, but for Grandma (and the rest of the world who doesn't read Slashdot) they DO want to print pictures of grandchildren and a wizard to help set them up with a network.
... let me choose my preferred programs to look at pictures, play MP3s, and watch videos- none of which come with your OS. When has Windows ever stopped you from running a preferred program via filetype? In fact, that feature has become easier to do with every new version of Windows. Not only did XP introduce the "Set Program Access and Defaults" menu, but to change the association of a filetype is as easy as right clicking on the document, choosing "Open With", and checking the box that says "Make this my Default".
You assume that the way YOU want a computer is the way the rest of the world wants a computer. Likewise, you haven't even taken a moment to learn what XP or Vista can do for a power user, as demonstrated by your rant against features that can be turned off, easily changed, or accessed via command line.
While driving around between clients, I've often found myself wondering about traffic signs and signals and such, and why we need them or how they could be improved. Yeah, I was bored.
One thought I have is that the majority of our signs are horribly inefficient for communicating ideas. Most icons used on signs are poorly designed, have limited information, and often come way too late to do anything about it.
Another thought is that we often have too many signs. Thankfully, with color our brain can associate a priority with these signs. Red is very important (STOP), orange is a potential hazard, green is directional, blue is hotel/gas/food. The problem are all the other ones, including advertising, that distracts us and lowers the noise:signal ratio.
I'm convinced, though, that any attempt to improve the system would get shot down because of the funding it would take to replace/remove all these signs. They are not cheap, but they do get replaced every 10-or-so years.
Seems to me a simple solution to this would be to have the software do an automatic calibration each time someone steps up to vote.
Put a small "Touch Here to Start" button on the center of the screen and use that for calibration. Put some error-checking in place if the person "clicks" way outside the button.
Couple that with extra large voting buttons and I doubt you'll have any calibration issues.
So for this attack to work, according to the article...
1) The attacker has to be on the LAN already, or executing code from a PC on the LAN
2) The LAN has to be connected to the internet through a PC using ICS, and
3) There can be no external firewall device such as a router sitting between the LAN and the internet
While this is certainly a valid attack... so are a lot of other attacks once you're already in the LAN. This one just happens to nuke a software-based firewall from the inside. Big deal.
No. According to MSDN, only URLs that are not common are sent to the Microsoft server for verification. This list of not-common URLs sit on your machine, and even then only the base of the URL is sent to Microsoft for analysis.
Phishing Filter does not check every URL on the Microsoft server. It only sends those which are not on a known list of OK sites or those that appear suspicious based on heuristics. If an URL is checked on the Microsoft server, first the URL is stripped down to the path to help remove personal information, then the remaining URL is sent over a secure SSL connection. The communication with the Microsoft server is done asynchronously so that there is little to no effect on your browsing experience.
So, for example, if you were to visit http://www.msn.com/ nothing will be checked on the Microsoft server because "msn.com" and other major websites are on the client-side list of OK sites. However, let's say the URL looked like this: http://207.68.172.246/result.aspx?u=Tariq&p=Tariq' sPassword, in this scenario phishing filter will remove the query string to help protect my privacy but it will send "http://207.68.172.246/result.aspx" to be checked by the Microsoft Server because 207.68.172.246 is not on the allow list of OK sites. As it turns out, 207.68.172.246 is just the IP address of MSN.com server, so its not a phishing site but this example should help you understand more about how Phishing Filter checks sites on the server.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got all of the programs I frequently use assigned to keyboard shortcuts already, through the Windows start menu.
Ctrl-Alt-C brings up Calculator
Ctrl-Alt-N brings up Notepad
All you need is a shortcut to that application (or file, or website) somewhere in your Start Menu. From that shortcut's Properties, you can assign any key combination you like in the "Shortcut" textbox.
And while the unified spellcheck is a nice feature, I use Microsoft Office for nearly everything I do... so, I already have that. It shares the dictionary across applications.
We all know that porn and spam block tubes, causing the internets to be congested and slow down.
Will this new service allow for online gambling to "flush out the tubes", since poker chips are round?
Yes I'm a "fanboy", but it's hardly FUD. Some were power users and most were not. The change to the interface was most certainly done with non power-users in mind.
PowerUsers can just as easily turn off the new interface and go back to the old ways, just like many people didn't like the new XP-style start menu and went back to "Classic". I'm one of them.
I don't have any plug-ins to try yet, but mail merge was great and even easier than 2003.
I'm a database and VBA developer for my clients and have created a number of applications using Excel, Word, and Access for Office 2003. I've just tested three applications (one in Excel, Word, and Access) in 2007 and they worked perfectly.
So my question to you is, did YOU try it? Sure you looked at it. Icons were missing. You said "What the hell is this?" But then did you try any of your old stuff to see if it broke?
And even if it did, that's beside the point. With every upgrade there will be new problems and developers will have to update their code, or their clients cannot upgrade. That's part of the development cycle.
If the end-result is a product that reduces' employees worktime, and/or create better output, then it's a sound business decision to upgrade. "What the hell is this" is an emotional decision... from a developer that represents 1% of the Office user base.
I am thinking that your hatred towards PowerPoint stems from an unhealthy, uncomfortable experience you may have had with a PHB some time ago.
You might seek professional help for that.
PowerPoint can be used for Good as much as it can for Evil.
I've been showing Office 2007 off for quite some time now to my clients, people I work with at the local university, and friends of mine.
Not once has their response been "where is the file menu?" or "where are my icons?" Each time they've seen the ribbon and thought "Oh, that is smart!" They see how easy it is to change margins or add a Header/Footer and immediately want to know when they can buy it.
Will businesses think it's worth $400 per desk? If it saves that employee about an hour of time every month, because they can do tasks faster now, then it pays for itself quite quickly.
That's not mentioning how much *better* things look when created in Office 2007 using their new features. Have you seen the new shape rendering tools? Professional looking slides can be created in PowerPoint without the aide of the graphic design guys. Same goes for charts.
Employees will make better use of styles in Word, conditional formatting in Excel, all because the features are easier to find now.
People who boo-hoo Microsoft really need to sit down in front of Office 2007 for ten minutes and just check out its new features. Throw out your old ideas of menus and icons and just give it a try before you bash it.
The headline and summary are 99% wrong.
Outlook 2007 supports HTML and CSS quite well. Many of you should know this, as you've had the chance to beta test it for about a year now. I have, and all of the HTML newsletters I subscribe to look just fine in Outlook.
In fact, Microsoft has even gone a step further and provided a free CSS/HTML validator that developers can use to make sure their messages will be rendered correctly.
In Soviet Russia, communist icon supports YOU.
I've only been using the Customer Preview #1, so I can't speak for the final version that is to ship. That being said, everything has worked perfectly with a few minor exceptions:
- ATI hadn't finished their Vista driver quite yet. It worked, but it wasn't as snappy as they promise it to be
- An occasional unexpected crash here and there, of which half reported "this bug has been fixed" when I submitted it
It was actually quite stable for a pre-release that came out six months ago. Yes, the interface is pretty, and yes I will probably never use the Gadgets (Widgets?). The frequent prompting for admin rights was a little annoying at first but I got used to it, and certainly see the value in it for non-geeks.
And I think a lot of us are missing all of the enhancements that Vista will bring to the corporate world with additional Group Policy settings, the bit locker, etc.
Every problem you mentioned has to do with a third-party application or peripheral. How is that Bill's fault?
And you're telling me that Linux apps are any better?
By the way, Windows calls the SSID a "Network Name". And it quite correctly calls the WEP key exactly what it is, a WEP key. Just because your manufacturer calls it something else does not make Windows incorrect.
I learned recently (it took me a while to really learn this lesson) to stop recommending computer systems to friends and family.
I used to go as far as helping them pick out peripherals, specs, and even order it with them on the web. Now I say "Go to dell.com and get at least a gig of RAM." The conversation stops there.
Why? Because the more I help influence their decision, the more they expect me to support that decision afterward. They're not being mean, they're just naturally extending the help I initally offered them.
Why would I want to give a non-geek a Linux disk? They're going to come back to me with all sorts of questions about software compatibility, drivers, printing, etc. No one else they know will support them, even paid companies like their OEM or their ISP. And if they're running a business off this computer, then now I'm liable for what may happen to it.
When will the geek world realize that Linux is not the answer to everything?
I know many of the Linux zealots here will bash HP for not offering alternative OSs as an option, but remember that when your average consumer (ie: grandma) purchases a PC they expect a certain level of support and functionality.
.. it's quite likely she may want Option B. Then when she gets home to install it, and then has any number of problems (her ISP won't support her, her printer doesn't work, her nephew can't email her, her bank won't support Firefox, her old copy of MS Office won't load, etc etc etc) then she's going to call HP.
If grandma has a choice between:
A) Desktop + Windows for $800
B) Desktop + Linux for $600
At that point, HP's costs increase trying to support Grandma, or HP risks seriously upsetting a customer and possibly getting into further legal troubles. It's a lose-lose for HP and Grandma.
A business should never have be forced to give its customers a choice. If it makes business sense to only bundle Windows, then it should be free to do that. Let someone else sell a Linux box, take the risk, and see what happens.
Say what you will, but:
:) and :(
1) "Emotiflags" is a brand new term. A search on Google only showed 5 hits, all of which were emoticon flags (as in country flags), not emotional flags like
2) One of the biggest problems people have with email is that it doesn't convey emotion. If the use of this concept becomes commonplace, it could mean good things for email. Being able to look at the emotion prior to opening the message will mean a lot less miscommunication.
3) While message forums have been doing this for ages, this is the first time I've seen it applied to email as some kind of header deta along with the to, from, subject, importance, etc.
And for what it's worth, the patent was filed almost a year and a half ago.
That sounds to me like something could *potentially* happen, but they haven't been able to actually prove it yet. And, the date on this discovery (according to the source article) was over two weeks ago. By now, wouldn't they have concluded something with their research?
The company does, however, sell a product to help mitigate "issues" like this.. which they link to at the bottom of their article.
I think what you're dealing with was a DRM issue. The changes to WM9 probably required that VOB files (which are supposed to be encrypted onto a DVD I believe) simply cannot be played off a hard disk. You can probably blame Microsoft for that one, but I suspect that Hollywood was the one pulling the strings there.
... let me choose my preferred programs to look at pictures, play MP3s, and watch videos- none of which come with your OS. When has Windows ever stopped you from running a preferred program via filetype? In fact, that feature has become easier to do with every new version of Windows. Not only did XP introduce the "Set Program Access and Defaults" menu, but to change the association of a filetype is as easy as right clicking on the document, choosing "Open With", and checking the box that says "Make this my Default".You assume that the way YOU want a computer is the way the rest of the world wants a computer. Likewise, you haven't even taken a moment to learn what XP or Vista can do for a power user, as demonstrated by your rant against features that can be turned off, easily changed, or accessed via command line.
While driving around between clients, I've often found myself wondering about traffic signs and signals and such, and why we need them or how they could be improved. Yeah, I was bored.
One thought I have is that the majority of our signs are horribly inefficient for communicating ideas. Most icons used on signs are poorly designed, have limited information, and often come way too late to do anything about it.
Another thought is that we often have too many signs. Thankfully, with color our brain can associate a priority with these signs. Red is very important (STOP), orange is a potential hazard, green is directional, blue is hotel/gas/food. The problem are all the other ones, including advertising, that distracts us and lowers the noise:signal ratio.
I'm convinced, though, that any attempt to improve the system would get shot down because of the funding it would take to replace/remove all these signs. They are not cheap, but they do get replaced every 10-or-so years.
I'm waiting for them to come out with a GUI interface called ThunderFox.
After deleting the logs, does the ISP have to delete the letter that requested the logs be deleted?
What does Microsoft do that Yahoo, AOL, and Google haven't been doing for their search/advertising for years now?
Seems to me a simple solution to this would be to have the software do an automatic calibration each time someone steps up to vote.
Put a small "Touch Here to Start" button on the center of the screen and use that for calibration. Put some error-checking in place if the person "clicks" way outside the button.
Couple that with extra large voting buttons and I doubt you'll have any calibration issues.
If Microsoft were to allow third-party search engines to be chosen upon installation, how would you determine *fairly* which engines got to show up?
If they just picked the big ones, then couldn't the little ones sue for discrimation or something?
If they charged a fee, like they have done in the past for ISPs, then that might ruffle some feathers.
And if they just allowed every "search engine" to sign up then we'd have complete chaos.
I don't see any problem with letting the user choose once they get connected. It's even easier to do now with Vista.
So for this attack to work, according to the article...
1) The attacker has to be on the LAN already, or executing code from a PC on the LAN
2) The LAN has to be connected to the internet through a PC using ICS, and
3) There can be no external firewall device such as a router sitting between the LAN and the internet
While this is certainly a valid attack... so are a lot of other attacks once you're already in the LAN. This one just happens to nuke a software-based firewall from the inside. Big deal.
For the paranoid, just turn the option off.
For the extra paranoid, monitor the IP packets and see exactly what they are tracing.
No. According to MSDN, only URLs that are not common are sent to the Microsoft server for verification. This list of not-common URLs sit on your machine, and even then only the base of the URL is sent to Microsoft for analysis.
Here's the blurb from MSDN:
But thanks for spreading the FUD.