converting to other formats like MP3 is a hassle most consumers would prefer not to be bothered with.
That may be true, since if you have no reason to convert to MP3, then why bother? However, it wouldn't be hard to convert DRM-free AAC files purchased from iTunes to MP3. iTunes has the functionality built in. Basically, you could select your whole library and click on "convert to MP3". A little while later (depending on how big your library is) you'd have all your music converted into MP3.
2) Same as #1, except they claim the songs are not selling better, and declare that DRM isn't an obstruction
Would this really matter? Microsoft might not get better sales, but I would bet some money that Apple's sales will increase when they're offering higher-quality DRM-free songs. Unfortunately for Microsoft, what happens with iTMS is going to matter much more that what happens with MS.
It's going to be pretty funny to watch what happens to WMA now as people drop DRM. Will Microsoft miss the boat by continuing to sell an iPod-incompatible format? Or are they going to suffer the humiliation of having their own store sell a non-Microsoft format?
No, people use the iTunes store because it's a really good store that works well
Well, I said it was "part of the reason". You can't deny that it helps drives sales to the iTunes store when you can't buy a song from Napster, for example, to play on your iPod.
Seeing as the other stores suck - people who use other players can now start buying their songs from iTunes...
That's a very good reason why iTunes' dropping of DRM would be likely to increase iTunes sales, but not as to why other stores using AAC would increase iTunes sales.
More importantly, a little rectangle with a USB port doesn't have to present itself as a removable disk. It can present itself as, say, an input device, and then type arbitrary strings into the user's computer.
Interesting idea. Has this been done? What's required to make a USB drive present itself as a keyboard and type arbitrary strings? Would that require hardware hacking?
I'm not sure it would be a good attack, though, since it would be highly visible. I mean, you could execute some key sequences to bring up a terminal/command window and execute a command, but it would be pretty easy for a user to see this happening and to interrupt the procedure before it was complete. Even as a video capture device, it would require that the user run some software to push video out to the device. The fake network device mitm attack also seems a bit complex. Would any of these really work?
The interesting thing to me is that would be a victory *against* Microsoft but not one *for* any other company in particular.
It's a victory *for* everyone who isn't Microsoft, particularly for consumers. This is how standards should work-- not favor anyone in particular, benefit people in general.
Believe it or not, MP3 actually has more patent issues than AAC at this point. Supposedly, if you run an online store, you have to pay royalties on every song sold to MP3-related patent holders. AFAIK, AACs don't require royalties to be paid per-song. There are also outstanding lawsuits regarding MP3.
So even though it may make sense to you, as a consumer, to stick with mp3, it may not make sense to a business. So if you imagine that MP3 is disqualified, what else is likely to become the defacto standard for online music stores? To answer that, you might want to ask yourself, "Besides MP3, what other formats play on the most popular portable music player?"
Yeah, that pretty much means AAC. It's not that I wouldn't like it to be something that's completely unencumbered by patents, but either way, it's better than dealing with Windows Media files.
I don't see why. Part of what drives iTunes sales is that it's the only online store that can supply music to your iPod (except those that sell MP3s already). Therefore, if everyone starts selling DRM-free AACs, it's unlikely to drive more business to iTunes. Also, it means that pretty much all new MP3 players will support AAC (if it's really so common-place), and therefore it won't necessarily boost iPod sales.
In the end, this wouldn't help Apple except by reputation (by having bet on the winning horse). Apple still has to make sure they're selling the best portable device in order to keep selling them. There isn't anything shady about it.
Yes, apparently you were. You missed various people trying to make various arguments about what "outsourcing" was really about. Often, the arguments were from someone with an agenda, and sometimes arguing, essentially, that there just weren't enough Americans who needed jobs.
Well, like I said, I probably wouldn't run any executables on a found USB drive. It's generally not a good idea to run any executables when you're unsure of their origin. However, I'd probably be willing to plug an unknown USB drive in and see what's on it.
As much as people have tried to confuse the issue, "copyright" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the right to copy. If I own the copyright to a work, I can copy it all I want, and I can give out all the free copies that I want. However, the people who receive these free copies do not have any copy right, and so they are not allowed to copy those copies.
Really? How many viruses can be transmitted through simply mounting a drive? Of those, how many are very dangerous? Of those, how many will go undetected by antivirus software?
I'm generally pretty cautious, but I think that I'd plug a USB drive into my computer without being sure what was on it. I wouldn't necessarily run any programs on that drive, but I'd be willing to risk plugging it in. You wouldn't?
It just doesn't seem like a great attach vector for spreading malware en masse.
A few weeks ago, I wanted to test Vista with one of my volume licensing licenses with SA. I figured my best candidate for a test machine was a Dell I had just bought which was advertised as "Vista ready". When I installed it, Vista didn't recognize my Creative X-Fi sound card (installed by Dell at purchase time), and the Creative drivers from their own site couldn't recognize the card. I tried Dell's site, and they didn't offer any drivers.
Another story, with Windows XP this time. I had a Dell system where Windows Update offered an upgrade to my disk controller. I installed the updated driver through Windows Update, rebooted, and got errors that Windows couldn't find some system files. It wouldn't even boot into safe mode, and so I had to reinstall Windows and avoid that disk controller update until it eventually disappeared from Windows Update.
Buying from Dell doesn't proclude you from having driver problems.
That's not irony? Consumers who've been too non-technical to hate DRM for all the real reasons might suddenly start hating it for the one possible reason that's actually not valid? Due to that very same technical ignorance?
I don't know if it's ironic. It happens all the time. If you're completely ignorant and you make a good decision, you've usually come to the correct conclusion but for the wrong reasons.
I'm posting this right now from Vista, running on a Macbook Pro. The new Bootcamp has Vista drivers.
It's really just for testing. I have a mixed Windows/Mac environment and I've installed Vista and Office 2007 so that I can decide whether there's any reason to consider upgrading. So I'm doing my own little "30 days" expirement, except not as rigid. I go back to OSX pretty often (being in IT, I'm switching between OSX, Windows, and Linux all the time, and OSX is my default desktop).
So here's my overview: I haven't had any crashes or instability, but I do get random indecipherable error messages every now and then. Everything does seem a bit slower. Things are slightly prettier. Freecell never looked better and the Aero glass theme is kind of neat. Some of the new icons are nice.
In pretty much every case where the interface behavior has changed, I prefer the Windows XP behavior. Maybe it's only because I'm used to it, but I remember being a bit jazzed about almost all the interface upgrades between Win95 and WinXP. I haven't really measured, but I feel like it takes more clicks to get to the same place and everything feels a little unintuitive.
I like the fact that Windows Update doesn't require going through a web browser anymore, but I feel like it's trying to hide the updates from me. It takes an extra step to view what the updates are, when I'd rather it present me with a list and ask me to approve them. I might not feel that way if I was less computer literate.
Overall, what stands out for me as being good is the new Aero theme, the frosted-glass visual, the new fonts, and prettier solitaire games. However, if you could move those to Windows XP, I'd rather use Windows XP.
The Bad: It's slower, more confusing, forces you to activate even in the volume licensing copies, and UAC pops up at weird times.
The indifferent: I'm looking for substantial benefits over XP, but I honestly can't find them. Beyond the visual improvements, I just can't detect any way in which people will find Vista more useful than Windows XP.
That's really what I was suggesting. People were complaining that your kid might bypass your computer security, and I was saying that if your kid is smart enough to do that and motivated enough to do that, he's probably a crafty teenager and not a dumb 5-year-old.
Never underestimate the ingenuity of a crafty teenagers when sex is at stake.
Honestly, though, you can't expect that your average user is going to do this sort of research, or even that he'll choose his own components. Whether it's Joe Sixpack or Granny Sixpack, there's a good chance they'll just go to Dell or BestBuy and pick something, expecting it should work. Part of what's at issue here, in my mind, is whether these people have the right to expect that these systems will be relatively trouble-free.
I think that they should be able to have that expectation, and I think that expectation is being let down on a regular basis. You could blame Microsoft, or you can blame companies like Dell or companies like Creative. Somewhere in the chain, the customer is being let down, and because Microsoft has taken so much power onto themselves, they're the only company that could possibly strong-arm some of these companies into making things work properly.
Personally, I like Apple's approach of controlling both the hardware and software. The end result is a very reliable package. However, Microsoft absolutely should not do this (start making their own computers) unless their market share drops to the point where they can't be considered a monopoly anymore.
I agree. If I gave the impression that I was against visual aids entirely, I must not have been clear enough. Let me see if I can be more clear. Here are some things to think about:
If you are give a presentation, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to use any kinds of visual aids.
If you are going to use visual aids, that does not mean you need to make a slide show.
If you are going to use a slideshow, that doesn't necessarily mean you should have your slideshow run through the entire duration of your presentation.
If you are going to have a slideshow, that doesn't necessarily mean that you must represent all the information that you're presenting in that slideshow.
Unless you are directly talking about your visual aid, your visual aid will necessarily distract people from the words coming out of your mouth. Before you decide to use your aid, make sure that it adds enough clarity to be worth the distraction.
What I'm really suggesting is that people should think more about the purpose of their slideshows in their presentation. Sometimes they're helpful or even necessary, and sometimes they're not. Writing an outline of your speech in powerpoint and showing it while you speak is generally a bad idea. It's better to print your outline and give it to people. Most often when I've seen people do this, people aren't actually using it as a visual aid to clarify anything, but the speaker is using it as an outline to read from while he speaks so that he won't have to rehearse as much. This is a mistake and it makes for bad presentations.
If you want to use the slideshow to mark off the subjects you're talking about, do not write out your outline. Use very vague headers. For example, if you're talking about the mistakes people make in Powerpoint presentations, do not write out a list of the mistakes as bullet points. Instead, hand out that outline on paper, put up a big slide that says, "PowerPoint Mistakes" and nothing else, and talk about the mistakes people make in powerpoint presentations. When it comes to some specific layout issue, flip to a slide that displays the issues (a real visual aid) so that people can understand things easily. Then, when you're done talking about it, flip back to a slide that says, "PowerPoint Mistakes". When you're done talking about the mistakes, then you can flip to a slide that says, "Solutions" or whatever. This will help your audience know when you've changed topics without being terribly distracting.
To sum up what I'm saying: when using powerpoint (or some other program like it) it's best to be a minimalist. Don't use it unless it's helpful, and if you do use it, don't put anything in the slideshow that you don't need to have in slideshow form.
I have noticed that Windows fans' excuse for crashing on other people's systems is something along the lines of "Jeez, they must be stupid if they couldn't figure out what was causing their problem". I don't understand how that response is helpful or accurate. If you need to be that smart to use the OS, something is wrong. You said it is probably the sound card driver.
Besides any talk about how you figure out it's the sound card driver, I think there's something wrong with the attitude that, "Windows is completely stable. If it's crashing, it's probably just the [software/driver]!"
To clarify, I acknowledge that, very often, people having serious problems with Windows stability have usually installed some kind of 3rd party software (or driver) that has messed things up. My problem is that this acknowledgment isn't a solution. Blaming the sound card doesn't make the system run any better. For example, Vista has been having lots of problems with sound drivers. Vista is lacking drivers altogether for many Creative cards, and from what I can tell, even when you have one of the Creative cards with drivers for Vista, the drivers are unstable. In fact, I would say that, in my experience, Creative's drivers have always been unstable, even when Microsoft has certified the drivers.
Now, you might be inclined to say, "That's not Microsoft's fault!" I guess it might not be, but this is cold comfort to the people who have problems because of faulty drivers. After years of Microsoft dominating the market and having nearly unlimited resources to deal with these problems, the situation doesn't seem to have improved substantially since Windows 2000. If you ask the people who have been displeased by Windows, almost none of their complaints have been addressed in the past 7 years, and Vista does pretty much nothing to improve the situation. Even if it isn't Microsoft's fault, they've shown an inability to formulate a solution. It would have been better if Microsoft had used their position to bully Creative into producing better drivers, but instead they used their position to bully their own customers.
I think it's a pretty good idea to have some sort of open, transparent, public categorization of web sites based on the possible offensiveness/annoyingness of their content. However, the main thing is that it must be completely voluntary.
I don't think it's generally a good idea to censor things on the internet, but I'd like to see a comprehensive unbiased service that would allow me to filter what I do and do not want to see, and what I do and do not want my children to see.
I don't think it should be limited to porn, either. We should be able to filter out whatever we want, whether it's religious sites or anti-religion sites, advertisements or communist rhetoric, Microsoft propaganda or Linux propaganda. I mean, I really don't know how a filtering system could be so fine-grained as that, but ideally, I'd like to be able to tell my computer/browser, "I have no problem with seeing [subject A], but I absolutely don't want to see [subject B]," and then have things filtered according to those rules.
However, it's a really bad idea to have a single body in charge of the categorization, to have anyone given the ability to shut a site down, or to have any mandatory filtering. The internet should be giving people power, freedom, and choice. As someone with a server, I should be able to post what I want to and not post what i don't want to. As someone with a browser, I should be able to view what I want to and not view what I don't want to. Basically. So long as you aren't talking about something like gross copyright infringement or child porn, which I agree should be shut down.
More to the point, if your kid is smart enough and crafty enough to download and burn a Ubuntu liveCD, open the case, trip the jumpers to wipe the BIOS password, and set the computer to try booting to the CD before the hard drive, then I have some news for you: your kid will be able to get pornography.
I mean, you try to preserve your kids in a kind of safe-bubble where bad things don't happen to them and dangerous, scary, or sexy things don't enter-- and that's fine. But at a certain point, your kids get curious and they get smart, and they'll find their own way out of that safe-bubble no matter what you do. Luckily, the age when they're able to find their way out of the bubble is usually pretty close to the age when they're becoming able to handle those things you're protecting them from.
You forgot sounds. Add lots of sounds to your presentation. Every time you switch slides, there should be a different transition animation and a different sound.
5) Do not put too many words/graphics/etc because people will be looking at the slide trying to decipher it instead of listening to you.
In fact, I'd say you should keep your Powerpoint stuff to a minimum. Really.
I'm not saying visual aids are bad, but if you're giving a presentation and you're going to tell people something, you don't need to plaster that same thing behind you for people to look at. You don't need, "This is my presentation in visual form." You don't even need your outline plastered up behind you. Really!
It's a good idea to print out an outline and other materials and give it to your audience either before or after the presentation. The key thing here is that it gives them something they can take some notes on, and take home with them. You don't need that same outline for your slideshow. If you're going to have a slideshow at all, don't try to put your whole presentation in it.
It's perfectly fine to make slides that have nothing but a single section header-- with no bullet points. You know, something that says, "This is the subject that I'm talking about now". Start your powerpoint by putting those in, and only those. Next, if you have any diagrams that will actually increase your ability to explain, put those in. Don't put in pictures or diagrams just because you have them. Only put them in if you're going to describe something in your presentation and the visual aid actually makes your description more clear.
Next, think about whether there are any particular points you want to stress. Think, "Is this a really big deal? Is this one of the top couple of things I want to say in my presentation?" If the answer is yes, go ahead and make a slide that says that and only that.
And you know what? Most of the time you should stop there. You want to give your audience an outline-- fine, print it out and give it to them. It'll be more effective and less distracting. The good thing about slideshows is that they hold the audience's attention. The problem with slideshows is that they hold the audiences attention. DON'T put any more in your slideshow than is necessary, or it will steal attention from what you're saying.
Is it PowerPoint's fault, or the fault of the Powerpoint creator?
Of course you didn't RTFA (I didn't read the whole thing either), but did you even click on it? At the top, there's a picture, and underneath a caption:
University of NSW research shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.
So it's not exactly powerpoint's fault. It's not as though it's a design flaw in PowerPoint that's responsible for the problem. The problem, I guess, has something to do with switching between different kinds of input.
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converting to other formats like MP3 is a hassle most consumers would prefer not to be bothered with.
That may be true, since if you have no reason to convert to MP3, then why bother? However, it wouldn't be hard to convert DRM-free AAC files purchased from iTunes to MP3. iTunes has the functionality built in. Basically, you could select your whole library and click on "convert to MP3". A little while later (depending on how big your library is) you'd have all your music converted into MP3.
Would this really matter? Microsoft might not get better sales, but I would bet some money that Apple's sales will increase when they're offering higher-quality DRM-free songs. Unfortunately for Microsoft, what happens with iTMS is going to matter much more that what happens with MS.
It's going to be pretty funny to watch what happens to WMA now as people drop DRM. Will Microsoft miss the boat by continuing to sell an iPod-incompatible format? Or are they going to suffer the humiliation of having their own store sell a non-Microsoft format?
No, people use the iTunes store because it's a really good store that works well
Well, I said it was "part of the reason". You can't deny that it helps drives sales to the iTunes store when you can't buy a song from Napster, for example, to play on your iPod.
Seeing as the other stores suck - people who use other players can now start buying their songs from iTunes...
That's a very good reason why iTunes' dropping of DRM would be likely to increase iTunes sales, but not as to why other stores using AAC would increase iTunes sales.
More importantly, a little rectangle with a USB port doesn't have to present itself as a removable disk. It can present itself as, say, an input device, and then type arbitrary strings into the user's computer.
Interesting idea. Has this been done? What's required to make a USB drive present itself as a keyboard and type arbitrary strings? Would that require hardware hacking?
I'm not sure it would be a good attack, though, since it would be highly visible. I mean, you could execute some key sequences to bring up a terminal/command window and execute a command, but it would be pretty easy for a user to see this happening and to interrupt the procedure before it was complete. Even as a video capture device, it would require that the user run some software to push video out to the device. The fake network device mitm attack also seems a bit complex. Would any of these really work?
The interesting thing to me is that would be a victory *against* Microsoft but not one *for* any other company in particular.
It's a victory *for* everyone who isn't Microsoft, particularly for consumers. This is how standards should work-- not favor anyone in particular, benefit people in general.
Believe it or not, MP3 actually has more patent issues than AAC at this point. Supposedly, if you run an online store, you have to pay royalties on every song sold to MP3-related patent holders. AFAIK, AACs don't require royalties to be paid per-song. There are also outstanding lawsuits regarding MP3.
So even though it may make sense to you, as a consumer, to stick with mp3, it may not make sense to a business. So if you imagine that MP3 is disqualified, what else is likely to become the defacto standard for online music stores? To answer that, you might want to ask yourself, "Besides MP3, what other formats play on the most popular portable music player?"
Yeah, that pretty much means AAC. It's not that I wouldn't like it to be something that's completely unencumbered by patents, but either way, it's better than dealing with Windows Media files.
This may drive iTunes sales
I don't see why. Part of what drives iTunes sales is that it's the only online store that can supply music to your iPod (except those that sell MP3s already). Therefore, if everyone starts selling DRM-free AACs, it's unlikely to drive more business to iTunes. Also, it means that pretty much all new MP3 players will support AAC (if it's really so common-place), and therefore it won't necessarily boost iPod sales.
In the end, this wouldn't help Apple except by reputation (by having bet on the winning horse). Apple still has to make sure they're selling the best portable device in order to keep selling them. There isn't anything shady about it.
Was I too busy working?
Yes, apparently you were. You missed various people trying to make various arguments about what "outsourcing" was really about. Often, the arguments were from someone with an agenda, and sometimes arguing, essentially, that there just weren't enough Americans who needed jobs.
Yeah, I usually disable it. And I don't run as admin. And, well, to be honest, I avoid using Windows.
Well, like I said, I probably wouldn't run any executables on a found USB drive. It's generally not a good idea to run any executables when you're unsure of their origin. However, I'd probably be willing to plug an unknown USB drive in and see what's on it.
As much as people have tried to confuse the issue, "copyright" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the right to copy. If I own the copyright to a work, I can copy it all I want, and I can give out all the free copies that I want. However, the people who receive these free copies do not have any copy right, and so they are not allowed to copy those copies.
Really? How many viruses can be transmitted through simply mounting a drive? Of those, how many are very dangerous? Of those, how many will go undetected by antivirus software?
I'm generally pretty cautious, but I think that I'd plug a USB drive into my computer without being sure what was on it. I wouldn't necessarily run any programs on that drive, but I'd be willing to risk plugging it in. You wouldn't?
It just doesn't seem like a great attach vector for spreading malware en masse.
A few weeks ago, I wanted to test Vista with one of my volume licensing licenses with SA. I figured my best candidate for a test machine was a Dell I had just bought which was advertised as "Vista ready". When I installed it, Vista didn't recognize my Creative X-Fi sound card (installed by Dell at purchase time), and the Creative drivers from their own site couldn't recognize the card. I tried Dell's site, and they didn't offer any drivers.
Another story, with Windows XP this time. I had a Dell system where Windows Update offered an upgrade to my disk controller. I installed the updated driver through Windows Update, rebooted, and got errors that Windows couldn't find some system files. It wouldn't even boot into safe mode, and so I had to reinstall Windows and avoid that disk controller update until it eventually disappeared from Windows Update.
Buying from Dell doesn't proclude you from having driver problems.
I don't know if it's ironic. It happens all the time. If you're completely ignorant and you make a good decision, you've usually come to the correct conclusion but for the wrong reasons.
I'm posting this right now from Vista, running on a Macbook Pro. The new Bootcamp has Vista drivers.
It's really just for testing. I have a mixed Windows/Mac environment and I've installed Vista and Office 2007 so that I can decide whether there's any reason to consider upgrading. So I'm doing my own little "30 days" expirement, except not as rigid. I go back to OSX pretty often (being in IT, I'm switching between OSX, Windows, and Linux all the time, and OSX is my default desktop).
So here's my overview: I haven't had any crashes or instability, but I do get random indecipherable error messages every now and then. Everything does seem a bit slower. Things are slightly prettier. Freecell never looked better and the Aero glass theme is kind of neat. Some of the new icons are nice.
In pretty much every case where the interface behavior has changed, I prefer the Windows XP behavior. Maybe it's only because I'm used to it, but I remember being a bit jazzed about almost all the interface upgrades between Win95 and WinXP. I haven't really measured, but I feel like it takes more clicks to get to the same place and everything feels a little unintuitive.
I like the fact that Windows Update doesn't require going through a web browser anymore, but I feel like it's trying to hide the updates from me. It takes an extra step to view what the updates are, when I'd rather it present me with a list and ask me to approve them. I might not feel that way if I was less computer literate.
Overall, what stands out for me as being good is the new Aero theme, the frosted-glass visual, the new fonts, and prettier solitaire games. However, if you could move those to Windows XP, I'd rather use Windows XP.
The Bad: It's slower, more confusing, forces you to activate even in the volume licensing copies, and UAC pops up at weird times.
The indifferent: I'm looking for substantial benefits over XP, but I honestly can't find them. Beyond the visual improvements, I just can't detect any way in which people will find Vista more useful than Windows XP.
That's really what I was suggesting. People were complaining that your kid might bypass your computer security, and I was saying that if your kid is smart enough to do that and motivated enough to do that, he's probably a crafty teenager and not a dumb 5-year-old.
Never underestimate the ingenuity of a crafty teenagers when sex is at stake.
Honestly, though, you can't expect that your average user is going to do this sort of research, or even that he'll choose his own components. Whether it's Joe Sixpack or Granny Sixpack, there's a good chance they'll just go to Dell or BestBuy and pick something, expecting it should work. Part of what's at issue here, in my mind, is whether these people have the right to expect that these systems will be relatively trouble-free.
I think that they should be able to have that expectation, and I think that expectation is being let down on a regular basis. You could blame Microsoft, or you can blame companies like Dell or companies like Creative. Somewhere in the chain, the customer is being let down, and because Microsoft has taken so much power onto themselves, they're the only company that could possibly strong-arm some of these companies into making things work properly.
Personally, I like Apple's approach of controlling both the hardware and software. The end result is a very reliable package. However, Microsoft absolutely should not do this (start making their own computers) unless their market share drops to the point where they can't be considered a monopoly anymore.
I agree. If I gave the impression that I was against visual aids entirely, I must not have been clear enough. Let me see if I can be more clear. Here are some things to think about:
What I'm really suggesting is that people should think more about the purpose of their slideshows in their presentation. Sometimes they're helpful or even necessary, and sometimes they're not. Writing an outline of your speech in powerpoint and showing it while you speak is generally a bad idea. It's better to print your outline and give it to people. Most often when I've seen people do this, people aren't actually using it as a visual aid to clarify anything, but the speaker is using it as an outline to read from while he speaks so that he won't have to rehearse as much. This is a mistake and it makes for bad presentations.
If you want to use the slideshow to mark off the subjects you're talking about, do not write out your outline. Use very vague headers. For example, if you're talking about the mistakes people make in Powerpoint presentations, do not write out a list of the mistakes as bullet points. Instead, hand out that outline on paper, put up a big slide that says, "PowerPoint Mistakes" and nothing else, and talk about the mistakes people make in powerpoint presentations. When it comes to some specific layout issue, flip to a slide that displays the issues (a real visual aid) so that people can understand things easily. Then, when you're done talking about it, flip back to a slide that says, "PowerPoint Mistakes". When you're done talking about the mistakes, then you can flip to a slide that says, "Solutions" or whatever. This will help your audience know when you've changed topics without being terribly distracting.
To sum up what I'm saying: when using powerpoint (or some other program like it) it's best to be a minimalist. Don't use it unless it's helpful, and if you do use it, don't put anything in the slideshow that you don't need to have in slideshow form.
Besides any talk about how you figure out it's the sound card driver, I think there's something wrong with the attitude that, "Windows is completely stable. If it's crashing, it's probably just the [software/driver]!"
To clarify, I acknowledge that, very often, people having serious problems with Windows stability have usually installed some kind of 3rd party software (or driver) that has messed things up. My problem is that this acknowledgment isn't a solution. Blaming the sound card doesn't make the system run any better. For example, Vista has been having lots of problems with sound drivers. Vista is lacking drivers altogether for many Creative cards, and from what I can tell, even when you have one of the Creative cards with drivers for Vista, the drivers are unstable. In fact, I would say that, in my experience, Creative's drivers have always been unstable, even when Microsoft has certified the drivers.
Now, you might be inclined to say, "That's not Microsoft's fault!" I guess it might not be, but this is cold comfort to the people who have problems because of faulty drivers. After years of Microsoft dominating the market and having nearly unlimited resources to deal with these problems, the situation doesn't seem to have improved substantially since Windows 2000. If you ask the people who have been displeased by Windows, almost none of their complaints have been addressed in the past 7 years, and Vista does pretty much nothing to improve the situation. Even if it isn't Microsoft's fault, they've shown an inability to formulate a solution. It would have been better if Microsoft had used their position to bully Creative into producing better drivers, but instead they used their position to bully their own customers.
I think it's a pretty good idea to have some sort of open, transparent, public categorization of web sites based on the possible offensiveness/annoyingness of their content. However, the main thing is that it must be completely voluntary.
I don't think it's generally a good idea to censor things on the internet, but I'd like to see a comprehensive unbiased service that would allow me to filter what I do and do not want to see, and what I do and do not want my children to see.
I don't think it should be limited to porn, either. We should be able to filter out whatever we want, whether it's religious sites or anti-religion sites, advertisements or communist rhetoric, Microsoft propaganda or Linux propaganda. I mean, I really don't know how a filtering system could be so fine-grained as that, but ideally, I'd like to be able to tell my computer/browser, "I have no problem with seeing [subject A], but I absolutely don't want to see [subject B]," and then have things filtered according to those rules.
However, it's a really bad idea to have a single body in charge of the categorization, to have anyone given the ability to shut a site down, or to have any mandatory filtering. The internet should be giving people power, freedom, and choice. As someone with a server, I should be able to post what I want to and not post what i don't want to. As someone with a browser, I should be able to view what I want to and not view what I don't want to. Basically. So long as you aren't talking about something like gross copyright infringement or child porn, which I agree should be shut down.
More to the point, if your kid is smart enough and crafty enough to download and burn a Ubuntu liveCD, open the case, trip the jumpers to wipe the BIOS password, and set the computer to try booting to the CD before the hard drive, then I have some news for you: your kid will be able to get pornography.
I mean, you try to preserve your kids in a kind of safe-bubble where bad things don't happen to them and dangerous, scary, or sexy things don't enter-- and that's fine. But at a certain point, your kids get curious and they get smart, and they'll find their own way out of that safe-bubble no matter what you do. Luckily, the age when they're able to find their way out of the bubble is usually pretty close to the age when they're becoming able to handle those things you're protecting them from.
At some point, you have to let go.
You forgot sounds. Add lots of sounds to your presentation. Every time you switch slides, there should be a different transition animation and a different sound.
5) Do not put too many words/graphics/etc because people will be looking at the slide trying to decipher it instead of listening to you.
In fact, I'd say you should keep your Powerpoint stuff to a minimum. Really.
I'm not saying visual aids are bad, but if you're giving a presentation and you're going to tell people something, you don't need to plaster that same thing behind you for people to look at. You don't need, "This is my presentation in visual form." You don't even need your outline plastered up behind you. Really!
It's a good idea to print out an outline and other materials and give it to your audience either before or after the presentation. The key thing here is that it gives them something they can take some notes on, and take home with them. You don't need that same outline for your slideshow. If you're going to have a slideshow at all, don't try to put your whole presentation in it.
It's perfectly fine to make slides that have nothing but a single section header-- with no bullet points. You know, something that says, "This is the subject that I'm talking about now". Start your powerpoint by putting those in, and only those. Next, if you have any diagrams that will actually increase your ability to explain, put those in. Don't put in pictures or diagrams just because you have them. Only put them in if you're going to describe something in your presentation and the visual aid actually makes your description more clear.
Next, think about whether there are any particular points you want to stress. Think, "Is this a really big deal? Is this one of the top couple of things I want to say in my presentation?" If the answer is yes, go ahead and make a slide that says that and only that.
And you know what? Most of the time you should stop there. You want to give your audience an outline-- fine, print it out and give it to them. It'll be more effective and less distracting. The good thing about slideshows is that they hold the audience's attention. The problem with slideshows is that they hold the audiences attention. DON'T put any more in your slideshow than is necessary, or it will steal attention from what you're saying.
Is it PowerPoint's fault, or the fault of the Powerpoint creator?
Of course you didn't RTFA (I didn't read the whole thing either), but did you even click on it? At the top, there's a picture, and underneath a caption:
So it's not exactly powerpoint's fault. It's not as though it's a design flaw in PowerPoint that's responsible for the problem. The problem, I guess, has something to do with switching between different kinds of input.
I'd settle for the sweet job of living in a zoo.