VB also doesn't have true polymorphism, one of the "accepted" attributes of an OO language. In VB you have to fake it with late binding (dim "as object" now, SET later)
As long as each successive gear chain "link" reduces the final ratio further, it should be infinite. Rather, it *could* be infinite, as in, an infinite number of gears. This would make an interesting physics problem. I'm sure it's already been done somewhere. You'd be adding up a series of terms based on the drive ratio of each pair of gears (where each driven gear has a pinion attached that drives the next driven gear), figuring out the speeds and thus the amount of power required to turn each gear which depends on the speed each gear is turning. So, as the number of gears approaches infinity, what does the function for the required power input look like? Assuming it's a simple scenario where all of the driven/pinion gears have the same ratio.
Now if you're increasing the speed with each gear, the power required will skyrocket, friction will take over and you'll break your legos. Fortunately, theoretical physicists and mathematicians only have to deal with massless, unbreakable gears with precisely known friction functions...
Nothing fundamentally new has been added to the cars. Cars have been transitting real-time telemetry data and video to the pit crews for a long time already-- much more data than what you're seeing on the site. Lately that data has been fed to the television broadcast and now the web.
Granted... even today there are people who will still only use true x0x boxes (and not emulators or x0x samples) then MIDI wouldn't be used. That's actually a pretty small segment as far as popular music goes, I was speaking in more general terms. Hopefully it doesn't dilute my point of "MIDI is everywhere, and it's not General MIDI" though.
The MIDI class I took in college was one of the most engaging classes I took! Of course it depends on the professor. It was a combination MIDI/recording/sound engineering/composition class. For the first 2 weeks, we didn't even touch MIDI, we explored the good 'ol reel-reel tape decks. Lots of cutting, inverting, splicing, speed adjusting. It gained me plenty of new respect for reel tape decks. The final exam consisted of everybody doing a final project using a mixture of techniques, and then PERFORMING them in front of about 300 people at a spring concert. "Performing" involved your piece playing over the speaker system while you have some sort of performance art thing to go along with it. Some were hilarious, and mine was real abstract--- called "Paranoia." I can't really explain it, but it involved me running around with a black scarf over my face and a mannequin torso attached to my side. Um, you had to be there. I'm not a performance artist which is what made it so much fun. But anyway... um, what were we talking about again?
Just to elaborate on the other responses (Just Some Guy summed it up nicely), what you're thinking of is the General MIDI standard. MIDI is just a protocol. It's a serial protocol that runs at 38.4kbps. General MIDI standardized 128 instrument sounds (so that patch 0 is a piano, patch 50 is "synthstrings," etc), that way.MID files that conform to the general MIDI standard sound roughtly the same on any GM-compliant synthesizer. To me, that just means all General MIDI files sound equally cheesy on everything. MIDI itself doesn't specify any instruments. It just specifies (among other things) that you can have 16 channels on a port, 128 instruments in a bank, and 128 real-time controllers (pitch wheel, pressure, et al), and it's up to the MIDI module/synth/sampler to interpret all that data in new and exciting ways.
You see, the MIDI protocol is ubiquitous in the music industry. Kind of like TCP/IP. Danny Elfman and James Horner use MIDI in their film scoring, combined with live recording. Nine Inch Nails-- MIDI out the arse. Moby... MIDI! Anything techno, trance, industrial, all 100% MIDI. In fact just about any popular studio recording, even some "acoustic" uses MIDI somewhere, if just for synching. Hell, Gary Rydstrom uses MIDI for his sound design work, such as Titanic, Jurassic Park, Phantom Menace, Saving Private Ryan, & other movies he's worked on. Why does it all sound so good? Because the sounds are coming various mucho-$$$ samplers and synthesizers. But you have to have a way of controlling the samplers via input devices. And you do that with a highly versatile protocol known as, you guessed it, MIDI! MIDI ain't going away. But I wish General MIDI would die, along with the "extensions" such as GS and XG. So you see Timmy, you wouldn't want to live in a world... a world without MIDI!
Yup, MIDI is far from dead, but it desparately needs an overhaul. 38.4kbps doesn't cut it-- it takes over a minute just to dump new user banks to my wavestation via SYSEX, and it's not even PCM data. That's not an issue with PC-based synthesis, but it'll still be awhile before everybody is using their computers alone for synthesis.
Seems to me that I read about a new MIDI standard using UTP, but I could be hallucinating. Actually I think that was digital audio hookups from guitars to amps.
Drum notation is a royal pain, and this is coming from a percussion major. Especially when you have to invent your own notation for instruments that historically have never had written notation to begin with.
I don't see this being much use for me. If I'm at home, anything I'm thinking up just goes right into my computer. If I'm anywhere else, I prefer just to jot down my ideas on paper. It's always right there and there's no interface to get in the way. It remains to be seen if the interface will be a limiting factor for real work. Besides... I hate general midi!
Even with a non-T&L card, I'd be willing to bet a reasonably fast chip (750 MHz Intel or AMD) will handle the geometry just fine. I don't think RealMYST is the kind of game that will demand 60fps. I'd rather see it at 30fps on my Voodoo5 with full scene anti-aliasing.
But then, RealMyst would also look stunning at 1600x1200 resolution on a GeForce2 GTS card... but who knows what hardware will be available when this game ships.
Since video card technology is progressing so quickly, human visual perception will become the system's last bottleneck. The only logical outcome is for people to start overclocking their eyeballs.
I was only *mostly* mistaken in the first half of my previous, ahem, "flame" (??) but I can safely say that the implementation is still not the same. The difference is that on these color LCD's you can directly reference a specific red, green, or blue element, something that can't be done on a CRT. Illuminating one green pixel will illuminate more than one green phosphor, unless you're running in high resolution on a large dot-pitch monitor... On an LCD you always know exactly where each subpixel (ie, R G or B element) is going to be in relation to each screen pixel. That's why a diagonal line drawn by an AppleII on a color TV will appear fringed by green and purple, while appearing blurrier (which I had always just attributed to the nature of the CRT until now). The ClearType implementation evidently attempts to, in effect, balance out the color fringing (on a sub-pixel basis) so that it's not noticeable, using Patented Advanced Algorithms(tm) or something. So it's a slightly different implementation, though the general idea is old.
If I'm mistaken on some detail, feel free to kindly correct me, as I have not taken the time from work today to read all of the links, articles, references, posts, supporting material, theory, and dissertations.
Apple had color LCD screens in 1985? I'm pretty sure what they had was whole pixel (monochrome) anti-aliasing as opposed to sub-pixel rendering. It's different.
And of course this does absolutely nothing for screens other than LCD..
This is akin to complaining that the latest rechargeable laptop battery technology isn't good for anything other than laptop computers. CRT's don't even need this technology-- it's designed specifically to enhance the text quality on portable color LCD devices.
First, IWAPMBHFMN (I was a physics major but have forgotten much now)
... in which an atomic nucleus can be spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time
This is really a misnomer. It's a misinterpretation of intrinsic spin. Each particle in the nucleus possesses it, but the physical spinning (clockwise/counterclockwise) of the nucleus itself is not a quantum state. If it's a hydrogen atom, the nucleus is just a proton, so you can't really define a physical spin (in the rotational sense) although it will have an intrinsic spin. I think you can have an effective spin for a multiparticle nucleus, by summing up all the spins for the constituent particles, but I just made that up and it could be wrong. Labelling this peculiar quantity "spin" doesn't actually mean anything is spinning, in simply arises from the fact that particles appear to have angular momentum.
It is a bizarre world in which matter itself dissolves into a ghostly blur of possibilities as soon as you try to look at it.
Er... the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that the error in position times the error in energy must always be greater than some minimum value. This means that the more precisely you measure ("look at") one quantity, the less precision you have in the other quantity at the same time. By that equation, if the error in one quantity approaches zero (meaning you're measuring near absolute precision), the error in the other quantity approaches infinity.
The leads to the old Quantum Physics homework excuse: "Professor, I calculated the energy in problem #3 so precisely that now I have no idea where in the universe my homework is!"
Forget it- what you're seeing is essentially conceptual art.
What exactly do you think E3 is about? Most everything there is "conceptual art" or more correctly "work in progress."
No way are you seeing genuine output from the thing- I doubt any exist.
Come to my place and watch some of nVidia's real-time (interactive) demos that ship with the GeForce2 GTS cards, like the shader and reflecting pool demos. You won't believe that's genuine output either. But I assure you-- it is.
The ping-pong and butterfly demos are a testament to the high-polygon throughput that can be achieved when you write directly to nVidia's T&L hardware. Unfortunately, PC-based games won't see those benefits for a while longer. But after seeing the nVidia demos on my own PC, I have no reason to believe the xbox demos aren't genuine.
Obviously they weren't even using anti-aliasing in the demos. It will probably do FSAA the same way the other nVidia chips do, but probably better. Should be easy enough to enable, maybe they just haven't yet. Of course, the PSX2 doesn't do it either, or the Dreamcast... but you knew that already. Right?
Safe to say, I'm sure it'll handle hardcore gaming at least as well as a PSX2. Then again, there's no reason to assume a PSX2 will handle hardcore gaming well either, considering they're not shipping in America yet and we've only seem demos of that system.
I guess you haven't been keeping up with the 3D technology that's developed on the consumer level over the past few years. Those shots look really good, but there's no reason to assume they can't be done with current technology. Ever seen the nVidia GeForce2 demos?
BTW, I'd say the clips are not so much valid examples of MS technology as they are examples of Intel and nVidia technology, because that's the hardware in the box. And both Intel and nVidia are quite proven when it comes to technology.
Considering that Looking Glass's Flight Unlimited III models the Seattle area in stunning realism, including Microsoft's corporate campus and even Bill Gates' house, MS probably got a little too urked at the idea that gamers all over the world were repeatedly Kamikaze-bombing both places with the Beechjet 400A.
MS flightsim wasn't always that way. When Bruce Artwick's company was bought out by microsoft, FS started getting that distinct "Microsoft" flavor (ie buggy, with more unneeded features to appeal to a broader audience). Honestly, the graphics don't look like they've changed a whole lot from FS95 to FS2000. Ground textures different, more airports, and more detail, but it still looks like a cardboard world. I will admit I like the clouds in FS2000 better than FUIII, and well.. flying the concorde is cool. I like to see how fast I can get it going to crash straight down from 60k feet into a heavily populated area-- that's always fun.
I had to buy FS2000 just because I've owned every version of FS back to Flight Simulator II on the apple. I also own every version of FU-- including both the DOS and Win95 versions of the original.
I was immediately hooked on FU the first time I did an inverted spin in the Sukoi(sp?) and watched it from the "flyby" external view. Just starting that thing up was fun to listen to with a subwoofer. It was the first ever simulation with lens flare (OK, Falcon 3.0 had sun glare). It was the first ever (consumer) flight sim with real physical modelling for the flight model. It even had voice training, with an instructor that responded to your moves! And it didn't require a patch for several months, incredible. That was some amazing stuff, and it even ran on my 486-80!
One of the senior designers at LG posted in rec.aviation.simulators that they were still working out if/how to finish up Jane's Attack Squadron which was nearing completion. Here's a snippet:
Third, I want to comment on Jane's Attack Squadron (err, we STILL call it Flight Combat in the pit). There is a good chance that we may actually finish the game. It's been a LONG haul for the team, 28 months to be exact, and with about 2 months left to go it would be a shame to not see it ship. We really want to finish it. And although I can't speak for EA, we think that they want to finish it too. But it's all up to the creditors (the game is bonded, which is a good thing), who are coming in tomorrow to look at the game. And that's all I can really say about that. I'll know more by tomorrow afternoon.
I don't know if anybody here is a flight sim buff, but I am, and having the graphics engine + flight model of the Flight Unlimitd series, combined with the ability to SHOOT STUFF (finally!) would make me..... so happy......
And remember, whenever you make an Assumption, it only makes an "ASS" out of "U" and "MPTION." Or something. Obviously there are quite a few stupid *nix users here too, and probably a lot of Windoze users who never clicked on the bad link (including me.)
OTOH, the high Stupid-Windows-Users count here could be explained by the fact that MS employees regularly scan Slashdot for copyright violations.
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Especially since this is the the second(?) season after the "full disclosure" 2-part episode which was supposed to answer all the questions.
I'm not even interested in the episodes that deal with the long-term plot anymore (Mulder's quest for truth/sister, who's the smoking man, etc). I think even Chris Carter is getting tired of trying to come up with new material. I'm not quite the X-files freak I used to be either, but I still love watching shows from the first 4 seasons or so.
Outlook does this as well, but that's not the problem. Few people actually have macros in Outlook, but if they do, by default they'll see a message box saying "This outlook session contains macros..." yadda yadda. The problem is not outlook's internal VBA macros, but external programs being able to automate outlook so easily, due to its exposed object model which WSH/VBScript (among others) has easy access to with no regard for security.
Slashdot Mirror
VB also doesn't have true polymorphism, one of the "accepted" attributes of an OO language. In VB you have to fake it with late binding (dim "as object" now, SET later)
As long as each successive gear chain "link" reduces the final ratio further, it should be infinite. Rather, it *could* be infinite, as in, an infinite number of gears.
This would make an interesting physics problem. I'm sure it's already been done somewhere.
You'd be adding up a series of terms based on the drive ratio of each pair of gears (where each driven gear has a pinion attached that drives the next driven gear), figuring out the speeds and thus the amount of power required to turn each gear which depends on the speed each gear is turning.
So, as the number of gears approaches infinity, what does the function for the required power input look like? Assuming it's a simple scenario where all of the driven/pinion gears have the same ratio.
Now if you're increasing the speed with each gear, the power required will skyrocket, friction will take over and you'll break your legos. Fortunately, theoretical physicists and mathematicians only have to deal with massless, unbreakable gears with precisely known friction functions...
Nothing fundamentally new has been added to the cars. Cars have been transitting real-time telemetry data and video to the pit crews for a long time already-- much more data than what you're seeing on the site. Lately that data has been fed to the television broadcast and now the web.
Granted... even today there are people who will still only use true x0x boxes (and not emulators or x0x samples) then MIDI wouldn't be used. That's actually a pretty small segment as far as popular music goes, I was speaking in more general terms.
Hopefully it doesn't dilute my point of "MIDI is everywhere, and it's not General MIDI" though.
The MIDI class I took in college was one of the most engaging classes I took! Of course it depends on the professor. It was a combination MIDI/recording/sound engineering/composition class.
For the first 2 weeks, we didn't even touch MIDI, we explored the good 'ol reel-reel tape decks. Lots of cutting, inverting, splicing, speed adjusting. It gained me plenty of new respect for reel tape decks.
The final exam consisted of everybody doing a final project using a mixture of techniques, and then PERFORMING them in front of about 300 people at a spring concert. "Performing" involved your piece playing over the speaker system while you have some sort of performance art thing to go along with it. Some were hilarious, and mine was real abstract--- called "Paranoia." I can't really explain it, but it involved me running around with a black scarf over my face and a mannequin torso attached to my side. Um, you had to be there. I'm not a performance artist which is what made it so much fun.
But anyway... um, what were we talking about again?
Just to elaborate on the other responses (Just Some Guy summed it up nicely), what you're thinking of is the General MIDI standard. .MID files that conform to the general MIDI standard sound roughtly the same on any GM-compliant synthesizer. To me, that just means all General MIDI files sound equally cheesy on everything.
MIDI is just a protocol. It's a serial protocol that runs at 38.4kbps.
General MIDI standardized 128 instrument sounds (so that patch 0 is a piano, patch 50 is "synthstrings," etc), that way
MIDI itself doesn't specify any instruments. It just specifies (among other things) that you can have 16 channels on a port, 128 instruments in a bank, and 128 real-time controllers (pitch wheel, pressure, et al), and it's up to the MIDI module/synth/sampler to interpret all that data in new and exciting ways.
You see, the MIDI protocol is ubiquitous in the music industry. Kind of like TCP/IP. Danny Elfman and James Horner use MIDI in their film scoring, combined with live recording. Nine Inch Nails-- MIDI out the arse. Moby... MIDI!
Anything techno, trance, industrial, all 100% MIDI. In fact just about any popular studio recording, even some "acoustic" uses MIDI somewhere, if just for synching.
Hell, Gary Rydstrom uses MIDI for his sound design work, such as Titanic, Jurassic Park, Phantom Menace, Saving Private Ryan, & other movies he's worked on.
Why does it all sound so good? Because the sounds are coming various mucho-$$$ samplers and synthesizers. But you have to have a way of controlling the samplers via input devices. And you do that with a highly versatile protocol known as, you guessed it, MIDI!
MIDI ain't going away. But I wish General MIDI would die, along with the "extensions" such as GS and XG.
So you see Timmy, you wouldn't want to live in a world... a world without MIDI!
Yup, MIDI is far from dead, but it desparately needs an overhaul. 38.4kbps doesn't cut it-- it takes over a minute just to dump new user banks to my wavestation via SYSEX, and it's not even PCM data. That's not an issue with PC-based synthesis, but it'll still be awhile before everybody is using their computers alone for synthesis.
Seems to me that I read about a new MIDI standard using UTP, but I could be hallucinating. Actually I think that was digital audio hookups from guitars to amps.
Drum notation is a royal pain, and this is coming from a percussion major. Especially when you have to invent your own notation for instruments that historically have never had written notation to begin with.
I don't see this being much use for me. If I'm at home, anything I'm thinking up just goes right into my computer. If I'm anywhere else, I prefer just to jot down my ideas on paper. It's always right there and there's no interface to get in the way. It remains to be seen if the interface will be a limiting factor for real work.
Besides... I hate general midi!
You just need a video card with T&L acceleration!
Even with a non-T&L card, I'd be willing to bet a reasonably fast chip (750 MHz Intel or AMD) will handle the geometry just fine. I don't think RealMYST is the kind of game that will demand 60fps. I'd rather see it at 30fps on my Voodoo5 with full scene anti-aliasing.
But then, RealMyst would also look stunning at 1600x1200 resolution on a GeForce2 GTS card... but who knows what hardware will be available when this game ships.
Since video card technology is progressing so quickly, human visual perception will become the system's last bottleneck. The only logical outcome is for people to start overclocking their eyeballs.
I was only *mostly* mistaken in the first half of my previous, ahem, "flame" (??) but I can safely say that the implementation is still not the same.
The difference is that on these color LCD's you can directly reference a specific red, green, or blue element, something that can't be done on a CRT. Illuminating one green pixel will illuminate more than one green phosphor, unless you're running in high resolution on a large dot-pitch monitor... On an LCD you always know exactly where each subpixel (ie, R G or B element) is going to be in relation to each screen pixel.
That's why a diagonal line drawn by an AppleII on a color TV will appear fringed by green and purple, while appearing blurrier (which I had always just attributed to the nature of the CRT until now). The ClearType implementation evidently attempts to, in effect, balance out the color fringing (on a sub-pixel basis) so that it's not noticeable, using Patented Advanced Algorithms(tm) or something.
So it's a slightly different implementation, though the general idea is old.
If I'm mistaken on some detail, feel free to kindly correct me, as I have not taken the time from work today to read all of the links, articles, references, posts, supporting material, theory, and dissertations.
Apple had color LCD screens in 1985? I'm pretty sure what they had was whole pixel (monochrome) anti-aliasing as opposed to sub-pixel rendering. It's different.
And of course this does absolutely nothing for screens other than LCD..
This is akin to complaining that the latest rechargeable laptop battery technology isn't good for anything other than laptop computers. CRT's don't even need this technology-- it's designed specifically to enhance the text quality on portable color LCD devices.
First, IWAPMBHFMN (I was a physics major but have forgotten much now)
... in which an atomic nucleus can be spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time
This is really a misnomer. It's a misinterpretation of intrinsic spin. Each particle in the nucleus possesses it, but the physical spinning (clockwise/counterclockwise) of the nucleus itself is not a quantum state. If it's a hydrogen atom, the nucleus is just a proton, so you can't really define a physical spin (in the rotational sense) although it will have an intrinsic spin. I think you can have an effective spin for a multiparticle nucleus, by summing up all the spins for the constituent particles, but I just made that up and it could be wrong. Labelling this peculiar quantity "spin" doesn't actually mean anything is spinning, in simply arises from the fact that particles appear to have angular momentum.
It is a bizarre world in which matter itself dissolves into a ghostly blur of possibilities as soon as you try to look at it.
Er... the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that the error in position times the error in energy must always be greater than some minimum value. This means that the more precisely you measure ("look at") one quantity, the less precision you have in the other quantity at the same time. By that equation, if the error in one quantity approaches zero (meaning you're measuring near absolute precision), the error in the other quantity approaches infinity.
The leads to the old Quantum Physics homework excuse: "Professor, I calculated the energy in problem #3 so precisely that now I have no idea where in the universe my homework is!"
Forget it- what you're seeing is essentially conceptual art.
What exactly do you think E3 is about? Most everything there is "conceptual art" or more correctly "work in progress."
No way are you seeing genuine output from the thing- I doubt any exist.
Come to my place and watch some of nVidia's real-time (interactive) demos that ship with the GeForce2 GTS cards, like the shader and reflecting pool demos. You won't believe that's genuine output either.
But I assure you-- it is.
The ping-pong and butterfly demos are a testament to the high-polygon throughput that can be achieved when you write directly to nVidia's T&L hardware. Unfortunately, PC-based games won't see those benefits for a while longer. But after seeing the nVidia demos on my own PC, I have no reason to believe the xbox demos aren't genuine.
"How horrible that anti-aliasing is?"
Obviously they weren't even using anti-aliasing in the demos. It will probably do FSAA the same way the other nVidia chips do, but probably better. Should be easy enough to enable, maybe they just haven't yet.
Of course, the PSX2 doesn't do it either, or the Dreamcast... but you knew that already. Right?
Safe to say, I'm sure it'll handle hardcore gaming at least as well as a PSX2. Then again, there's no reason to assume a PSX2 will handle hardcore gaming well either, considering they're not shipping in America yet and we've only seem demos of that system.
I guess you haven't been keeping up with the 3D technology that's developed on the consumer level over the past few years.
Those shots look really good, but there's no reason to assume they can't be done with current technology.
Ever seen the nVidia GeForce2 demos?
BTW, I'd say the clips are not so much valid examples of MS technology as they are examples of Intel and nVidia technology, because that's the hardware in the box. And both Intel and nVidia are quite proven when it comes to technology.
Considering that Looking Glass's Flight Unlimited III models the Seattle area in stunning realism, including Microsoft's corporate campus and even Bill Gates' house, MS probably got a little too urked at the idea that gamers all over the world were repeatedly Kamikaze-bombing both places with the Beechjet 400A.
MS flightsim wasn't always that way.
When Bruce Artwick's company was bought out by microsoft, FS started getting that distinct "Microsoft" flavor (ie buggy, with more unneeded features to appeal to a broader audience). Honestly, the graphics don't look like they've changed a whole lot from FS95 to FS2000. Ground textures different, more airports, and more detail, but it still looks like a cardboard world. I will admit I like the clouds in FS2000 better than FUIII, and well.. flying the concorde is cool. I like to see how fast I can get it going to crash straight down from 60k feet into a heavily populated area-- that's always fun.
I had to buy FS2000 just because I've owned every version of FS back to Flight Simulator II on the apple. I also own every version of FU-- including both the DOS and Win95 versions of the original.
I was immediately hooked on FU the first time I did an inverted spin in the Sukoi(sp?) and watched it from the "flyby" external view. Just starting that thing up was fun to listen to with a subwoofer.
It was the first ever simulation with lens flare (OK, Falcon 3.0 had sun glare).
It was the first ever (consumer) flight sim with real physical modelling for the flight model.
It even had voice training, with an instructor that responded to your moves! And it didn't require a patch for several months, incredible.
That was some amazing stuff, and it even ran on my 486-80!
I don't know if anybody here is a flight sim buff, but I am, and having the graphics engine + flight model of the Flight Unlimitd series, combined with the ability to SHOOT STUFF (finally!) would make me..... so happy......
And remember, whenever you make an Assumption, it only makes an "ASS" out of "U" and "MPTION." Or something. Obviously there are quite a few stupid *nix users here too, and probably a lot of Windoze users who never clicked on the bad link (including me.)
OTOH, the high Stupid-Windows-Users count here could be explained by the fact that MS employees regularly scan Slashdot for copyright violations.
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Especially since this is the the second(?) season after the "full disclosure" 2-part episode which was supposed to answer all the questions.
I'm not even interested in the episodes that deal with the long-term plot anymore (Mulder's quest for truth/sister, who's the smoking man, etc). I think even Chris Carter is getting tired of trying to come up with new material. I'm not quite the X-files freak I used to be either, but I still love watching shows from the first 4 seasons or so.
ROFL!
It makes perfect sense now!
Seems like the "view demo" link on l0pht's site just goes back to the same page, or maybe I missed something obvious.
Outlook does this as well, but that's not the problem. Few people actually have macros in Outlook, but if they do, by default they'll see a message box saying "This outlook session contains macros..." yadda yadda.
The problem is not outlook's internal VBA macros, but external programs being able to automate outlook so easily, due to its exposed object model which WSH/VBScript (among others) has easy access to with no regard for security.