For people who already know what they want, they would be using keyboard shortcuts anyways which beats the mouse every time.
Thank GOD for that. That's been the only saving grace for '07 for me: the keyboard shortcuts for the tools I use most don't seem to have changed much, which is good because that's often the ONLY way I've been able to find commonly-used commands. I just don't have the time to play the usual hide 'n' seek game that Microsoft seems to think makes using Office '07 "fun".
It's dynamic, but only in relation to the menu which is maximised. All of the other options are there, you just need to click on them.
Compared to 'dynamic' menus in the old version (i.e. everything greyed out), it's much better. Plus it's right 80% of the time, which means greater productivity 80% of the time at the cost of an extra click 20% of the time.
First of all, I'll concede that 80% figure. If it were any lower no one would ever use the damn thing.
But, it's not "an extra click" the other 20% of the time. In my experience, and that of my cow-orkers, it's more like "roll the cursor over every icon in the current ribbon thet you don't immediately recognize and read the Tool Tip, in case the command you want is cleverly hidden in plain sight, and if you don't find it there, click through ALL the tabs at random and repeat the Tool Tip thing until you stumble upon the command wherever Microsoft decided to hide it, and when that doesn't provide joy, open Help and click on a half dozen different topics until you find the treasure." That's the part that gets really, really old, really, really fast.
Listen, on a certain level, I give Microsoft a lot of credit for trying to simplify their UI, and take it to another level. But as it always is with MS products, the problem is in the implementation. It is NO exageration to say that 90%+ of the people I now and work with who've had the misfortune to be forced to use Office 2007, hate it with a white-hot passion generally reserved for child molesters or GWB. If it works for you, then vaya con dios, muchacho. You're one of the blessed.
Microsoft sees that as a plus: customize the UI based on what Office thinks the user is trying to do. Nice, in theory. But it depends on a level of application telepathy that doens't exist. (Yet?)
Users see it as a minus: the commands they want aren't always where they expect to find them, so they end up wasting productive time trying to find them. More than a little frustrating when you have a deadline bearing down on you.
If Office did a better job of reading the user's mind, the Ribbon would rock. But since that's not likely to happen, Microsoft should go back to UI Design 101: a good UI is a consistent UI.
Don't suprise users by capriciously moving tools, or they'll hate you forever. Which is pretty much where 90% of Office '07 are right now.
I have been thinking very seriously to introduce a recorder in my life to settle arguments with my girlfriend (yes yes, here's my geek card). Arguments often boil down to who said what. On rare occasions, there is a record of that, email for example, and I can show exhibits and win.
The actual problem is resolving all external dependencies of Windows-bound binaries. If the Win32 API is somehow emulated (see Wine project for some "minor" details), this leaves (an ungodly mess of) COM interfaces. Then even if this is taken care of, Apple is going to be quite exposed to a legal beating from MS.
True, but with Boot Camp, all the MS DLL cruft is only a partition away.
I admit, I'm not an OS dev, but wouldn't it be possible for Apple to write a linker that could map Windows OS calls to an installed copy of Windows? The DLLs are all there...
Laws aren't like some magical "wand of protection +5". Sure, they give people incentive to do something, but they can't actually stop the dishonest people, nor do they protect us from the incompetent until after the damage is done.
You're missing the point.
Right now, the companies whose data is stolen have no financial incentive to beef up their security, but they have plenty of PR incentive to cover up breaches. If such breaches were to hurt their bottom line, the shareholders would make them take their security seriously.
As for the effectiveness of laws, look at Sarbanes-Oxley: corporations have created whole departments just to manage compliance. Sure, they bitch and moan abotu the hassle, but they comply because it's the law. Why can't they be obligated to put the same effort into customer data security?
Why do manufacturers lock phones and reduce features? Because consumers in America want free or cheap phones with long contracts. It's ridiculous.
Well, you're half right: American consumers don't "want" long contracts, but they *do* want a "free" phone.
Americans are basically cheap. I'm always amused by the people who will spend $10 in gas to drive to four different stores to try to save $5 on some item. Or spend 40 hours on the internet to save $25 on plane tickets. And of course, a "free" *anything* is always better, not matter the costs down the road. It's a false savings, but a lot of people will fall for it every time.
American wireless carriers know this, and so they play the "give away the razor and sell the blades" game: pad up the monthly bill to subsidize a "free" phone, but lock out the useful features to force customers into spending extra money for simple things like SMS, internet, IM, BlueTooth, etc.
Wrong sort of compression. All audio CDs are compressed heavily so that this week's Best Thing Ever sounds just that little bit louder than last week's Best Thing Ever.
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
The sad part about it is that the kids I've tried to explain this to, actually like their music to be a dull wall-of-noise. And sadly, by the time they're mature enough to perhaps appreciate the subtleties of properly-recorded music, their hearing will be too damaged to do so.
Unless, of course, you're bitching about the professionals that record and mix the tracks? I find it hard to believe that they would use lossy compression techniques.
That's exactly what they do, and exactly what the OP is talking about.
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
In bringing iTunes to Windows, Apple broadened the market for song downloads (which, admittedly, they don't make that much on) and iPods (which they do make money on). I don't see a similar market opportunity in a free browser.
And if they just want to expose Windows users to The Macintosh Experience, I'm not convinced that a (probably buggy) public beta of a Web browser is the way to do it.
So, I just don't see what their play is here, other than a thumb in Ballmer's eye. Am I missing something?
A sitting US president is assassinated in public, a shoddy cover-up is hastily staged, and then for forty years, despite mounting evidence contrary to the oficial story, all three branches of the Federal government continue the cover-up. I damn sure want to know who, why, and how. And if you consider the United States to be a nation of laws, and morally superior to the sort of banana republics that change regimes at the point of a gun, you should too.
Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows they will be able to run.
The summary is right, all the people who own first-gen Intel Macs, and want to run Windows on them, are thoroughly heartbroken.
Obviously this idiot doesn't have broadband access from a US telecom (DSL) or cable company. Every single one of them explicitly forbid any sort of "server", and enforce it by blocking nearly every port from 1-1024.
My ISP, OptimumOnline, is a great example; for years I've been getting around their blocks by using high ports and/or ssh tunneling, but just last month they essentially NATted the whole network -- I can't ssh to my home box, no matter what port; Hell, I can't even ping the thing.
But there's a lot of "prior art" that shows you can achieve the same effect through the retina with a bluish light... specifically, that from a television.
Easy. Stop allowing patents for concepts, knowledge, ideas, methods, algorithms, etc.; and allow them only for things. Ideas are easy; it's implementation, marketable products, that are hard, and worthy of economic protections.
Patents are founded upon the concept that we all benefit as a society when those who develop products that make our lives better and/or easier are given a chance to benefit financially from those products, and hence have an incentive to undertake the often difficult development and production of them in the first place. Allowing patents on ideas, etc. has no such benefit, other than for the patent holder.
Hey, if I was a smart guy, I could sit around in my underwear, simply thinking up ideas and filing patents on those ideas, and possibly end up very rich someday; but what have I provided society as a whole? Squat. Less than squat, in fact, if I use my patent to club someone who decides to actually bring my idea to fruition, preventing, deterring or delaying that idea from implementation.
Which is exactly what's happening under the current system: anyone who actually wants to create a product, whether it's a next-generation power source, a ginchy playtoy, or a cure for cancer, first has to evaluate the risk of some "submarine patent" held by some patent troll robbing them of the fruits of their work -- the real work, that of actual implementation.
"Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." -- Thomas Edison
Quit letting lawyers and speculators control the 1%, and set the 99% free.
Why not just get Office for OSX? Granted, it doesn't have Outlook (it has Entourage instead), but that's not necessarily a bad thing...
If, like me, you're a Mac user who's trying to use a Mac in a corporate environment, Outlook is THE app you need to run. Like it or not, American business runs on Exchange/Outlook.
That's precisely why Microsoft doesn't include Outlook in Office for the Mac. That way they can say they support the Mac, but ensure that the Mac can never be a true equal in the enterprise.
As pointed out elsewhere, Entourage is a very poor substitute for Outlook. Most of the basic mail/calendar/collaboration functionality works OK, but with just enough incompatibilities to drive you, and they people you try to collaborate with, bonkers.
My solution? Parallels running a slimmed-down WinXP and Outlook 2003 in 256MB. I just upgraded to a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM, so it runs comfortably side-by-side with Mac OS X and native Mac apps.
Just because your kids dont want you to know every single detail of their life doesnt mean that they are hooking up with 35 year olds.
Well, see that's exactly why parents get paranoid: their kids refuse to divulge even scant details of their personal lives to their parents, but cheerfully share their most intimate secrets with complete strangers, including said 35 year olds, on a public site for all the world to see.
Would you tap your teenagers phone calls? If not whats the difference?
The difference is, you can only receive calls from people you've given your number to, and only call people who's number you've been given. That's a small, manageable threat space. MySpace and their ilk increase their exposure by several orders of magnitude.
If I had a teenager who took out personal ads in most major newspapers, filled with all their personal details and listing all their insecurities and vulnerabilities, along with their phone number and a plea of "PLEASE CALL ME!!! I'M SOOOOOO TROUBLED!!!11one11one", you bet your ass I'd want to know what he/she was talk about, and with whom.
Then eventually guns got more and more powerful and all the weight was concentrated in a super-thick breastplate and helmet... at the price of leaving the arms and legs completely unprotected again.
Actually, it wasn't until the advent of smokeless powder that firearms really got the upper hand.
I've seen several (U.S.) Civil War-era breastplates in museum collections. They weren't common, hardly rare; they aren't seen in period photos, because they were worn under the uniform.
Most I've seen had a dent or two from bullets that faile to penetrate; apparently even those big, fat.69 caliber Minie balls weren't powerful enough to get through a well-made breastplate.
I can recall seeing only one breastplate that failed: the officer who wore it took a direct hit from a 3" cannon at a range of just a few feet, while storming an artillery emplacement. I don't think it's unreasonable for such armor to fail in that circumstance!
Generally good post, very informative. But I have one correction:
1) True for NiCD, but absolutely not true for NiMH. NiMH batteries will hold their charge for months.
Actually, the newer NiMH formulations that allow those crazy high capacities (2400mAH+ in AA, for instance) do have this problem. Bad. I deal with this myself; the 2500mAH Energizer NiMH's for my digital camera won't work if they've been sitting more than a couple weeks after charging. I have to leave them in my smart charger if I expect them to be full when I need them.
In fact, while most manufacturers keep pushing capacities higher, some are selling NiMH batteries designed for minimal self-discharge, like these Titanium brand cells. They arent' available in as high capacity, however.
(I just noticed that those Titaniums recently improved from 1800mAH to 2100mAH; hopefully this means that we won't always have to sacrifice capacity for low discharge.)
YMMV, but NIMHs are a good way to go. LiPo and LiIon I dont think are really as common or as inexpensive.
Lithium batteries aren't a direct replacement, because they run at waaaay too high a voltage.
The voltage of a battery is determined by it's chemistry. Different formulations give different voltages:
Alkaline (non rechargeable): 1.5-1.6V fresh, decreasing steadily with use; most devices quit when the voltage drops to ~1.0V.
Energizer Lithium (non-rechargeable): ~1.7V, dropping very little in use to perhaps 1.5V, before they just die. Although the voltage runs a tad higher than alkaline, it's still within the range most devices expect to see.
Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH): ~1.3V-1.4V when fresh, dropping quickly to 1.2V in use, with little further drop until they just die. Like the Energizers, the voltage range differs from alkalines, but in most devices it still within the expected range.
Lithium primary (non-rechargeable): 3.1V-3.0V fresh, with little drop before depletion. Note these don't normally come in the standard AAA, AA, C or D sizes; using 3V batteries in a device designed for 1.5V can easily damage circuitry.
Lithium Ion (Li-Ion): 4.0V-4.2V when fresh, dropping quickly to ~3.6V in use, with little further drop until depletion. Obviously, using 4.2V batteries in a device that's designed for 1.5V batteries can easily damage circuitry. Also, some devices designed for 3V Lithium primary cells can be damaged by 4.2V Li-Ion cells.
Lithium Polymer (LiPo): I don't have as much experience with these, but I believe they're rated for 3.1V-3.0V, so they're better rechargeable replacements for Lithium primaries than Li-Ion.
I loathe these "web-page" emails. I'm trying to think of a single one of them that's ever been of use to me or gave me pleasure.
If you want me to see a web page, please send me a URL in the email. Give me the choice.
Please.
You've obviously never worked in marketing.
Marketing is all about that first impression. The marketer wants to impress the message on you the moment you view the email in your Preview Pane. User choice has nothing to do with it. Heck, the marketer doesn't want you to have a choice to view the message or not, because you might choose not to.
I know this is Slashdot, where alpha *nix geeks prefer editing text files to using a GUI, and design and typography are considered just useless fluff. But in the Real World, appearances do matter. If your message is pleasant to the eye, it's more likely to be read. Even better if it grabs attention, compelling the user to look. ASCII text doesn't have that sort of impact; HTML can, if done right.
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For people who already know what they want, they would be using keyboard shortcuts anyways which beats the mouse every time.
Thank GOD for that. That's been the only saving grace for '07 for me: the keyboard shortcuts for the tools I use most don't seem to have changed much, which is good because that's often the ONLY way I've been able to find commonly-used commands. I just don't have the time to play the usual hide 'n' seek game that Microsoft seems to think makes using Office '07 "fun".
It's dynamic, but only in relation to the menu which is maximised. All of the other options are there, you just need to click on them. Compared to 'dynamic' menus in the old version (i.e. everything greyed out), it's much better. Plus it's right 80% of the time, which means greater productivity 80% of the time at the cost of an extra click 20% of the time.
First of all, I'll concede that 80% figure. If it were any lower no one would ever use the damn thing.
But, it's not "an extra click" the other 20% of the time. In my experience, and that of my cow-orkers, it's more like "roll the cursor over every icon in the current ribbon thet you don't immediately recognize and read the Tool Tip, in case the command you want is cleverly hidden in plain sight, and if you don't find it there, click through ALL the tabs at random and repeat the Tool Tip thing until you stumble upon the command wherever Microsoft decided to hide it, and when that doesn't provide joy, open Help and click on a half dozen different topics until you find the treasure." That's the part that gets really, really old, really, really fast.
Listen, on a certain level, I give Microsoft a lot of credit for trying to simplify their UI, and take it to another level. But as it always is with MS products, the problem is in the implementation. It is NO exageration to say that 90%+ of the people I now and work with who've had the misfortune to be forced to use Office 2007, hate it with a white-hot passion generally reserved for child molesters or GWB. If it works for you, then vaya con dios, muchacho. You're one of the blessed.
Why do we hate the ribbon? Because it's dynamic.
Microsoft sees that as a plus: customize the UI based on what Office thinks the user is trying to do. Nice, in theory. But it depends on a level of application telepathy that doens't exist. (Yet?)
Users see it as a minus: the commands they want aren't always where they expect to find them, so they end up wasting productive time trying to find them. More than a little frustrating when you have a deadline bearing down on you.
If Office did a better job of reading the user's mind, the Ribbon would rock. But since that's not likely to happen, Microsoft should go back to UI Design 101: a good UI is a consistent UI.
Don't suprise users by capriciously moving tools, or they'll hate you forever. Which is pretty much where 90% of Office '07 are right now.
That would be a pyrhhic victory at best.
As my wise old grandfather told me soon after I was married, "When dealing with a woman, you can be right, or you can be happy. Choose carefully."
Hope your "victory" keeps you warm at night on the sofa. ;{D
True, but with Boot Camp, all the MS DLL cruft is only a partition away.
I admit, I'm not an OS dev, but wouldn't it be possible for Apple to write a linker that could map Windows OS calls to an installed copy of Windows? The DLLs are all there...
You're missing the point.
Right now, the companies whose data is stolen have no financial incentive to beef up their security, but they have plenty of PR incentive to cover up breaches. If such breaches were to hurt their bottom line, the shareholders would make them take their security seriously.
As for the effectiveness of laws, look at Sarbanes-Oxley: corporations have created whole departments just to manage compliance. Sure, they bitch and moan abotu the hassle, but they comply because it's the law. Why can't they be obligated to put the same effort into customer data security?
Well, you're half right: American consumers don't "want" long contracts, but they *do* want a "free" phone.
Americans are basically cheap. I'm always amused by the people who will spend $10 in gas to drive to four different stores to try to save $5 on some item. Or spend 40 hours on the internet to save $25 on plane tickets. And of course, a "free" *anything* is always better, not matter the costs down the road. It's a false savings, but a lot of people will fall for it every time.
American wireless carriers know this, and so they play the "give away the razor and sell the blades" game: pad up the monthly bill to subsidize a "free" phone, but lock out the useful features to force customers into spending extra money for simple things like SMS, internet, IM, BlueTooth, etc.
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
Once again, the Wiki is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
The sad part about it is that the kids I've tried to explain this to, actually like their music to be a dull wall-of-noise. And sadly, by the time they're mature enough to perhaps appreciate the subtleties of properly-recorded music, their hearing will be too damaged to do so.
(If only they'd GET OFF MY LAWN!)
That's exactly what they do, and exactly what the OP is talking about.
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
This YouTube video demonstrates the effect of overcompression very well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
If you find a congress critter who has balls, let me know. I doubt they actually exist in the wild.
In bringing iTunes to Windows, Apple broadened the market for song downloads (which, admittedly, they don't make that much on) and iPods (which they do make money on). I don't see a similar market opportunity in a free browser.
And if they just want to expose Windows users to The Macintosh Experience, I'm not convinced that a (probably buggy) public beta of a Web browser is the way to do it.
So, I just don't see what their play is here, other than a thumb in Ballmer's eye. Am I missing something?
Right, just like dual-layer DVD-R's are available for $12 a spindle... oh, except they aren't.
Bet the licensing fees are kept high to ensure that burning a copy of a 8.4GB movie DVD costs almost as much as just buying the DVD from MalWart.
Hell no.
A sitting US president is assassinated in public, a shoddy cover-up is hastily staged, and then for forty years, despite mounting evidence contrary to the oficial story, all three branches of the Federal government continue the cover-up. I damn sure want to know who, why, and how. And if you consider the United States to be a nation of laws, and morally superior to the sort of banana republics that change regimes at the point of a gun, you should too.
The summary is right, all the people who own first-gen Intel Macs, and want to run Windows on them, are thoroughly heartbroken.
All three of them.
Obviously this idiot doesn't have broadband access from a US telecom (DSL) or cable company. Every single one of them explicitly forbid any sort of "server", and enforce it by blocking nearly every port from 1-1024.
My ISP, OptimumOnline, is a great example; for years I've been getting around their blocks by using high ports and/or ssh tunneling, but just last month they essentially NATted the whole network -- I can't ssh to my home box, no matter what port; Hell, I can't even ping the thing.
Just great.
Microsoft can't figure how to make a secure OS easy to use, so they push to make more secure OS's more annoying.
"You are coming to a sad realization, Confirm or Deny?" Indeed.
Good point.
But there's a lot of "prior art" that shows you can achieve the same effect through the retina with a bluish light... specifically, that from a television.
Easy. Stop allowing patents for concepts, knowledge, ideas, methods, algorithms, etc.; and allow them only for things. Ideas are easy; it's implementation, marketable products, that are hard, and worthy of economic protections.
Patents are founded upon the concept that we all benefit as a society when those who develop products that make our lives better and/or easier are given a chance to benefit financially from those products, and hence have an incentive to undertake the often difficult development and production of them in the first place. Allowing patents on ideas, etc. has no such benefit, other than for the patent holder.
Hey, if I was a smart guy, I could sit around in my underwear, simply thinking up ideas and filing patents on those ideas, and possibly end up very rich someday; but what have I provided society as a whole? Squat. Less than squat, in fact, if I use my patent to club someone who decides to actually bring my idea to fruition, preventing, deterring or delaying that idea from implementation.
Which is exactly what's happening under the current system: anyone who actually wants to create a product, whether it's a next-generation power source, a ginchy playtoy, or a cure for cancer, first has to evaluate the risk of some "submarine patent" held by some patent troll robbing them of the fruits of their work -- the real work, that of actual implementation.
"Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."-- Thomas Edison
Quit letting lawyers and speculators control the 1%, and set the 99% free.
If, like me, you're a Mac user who's trying to use a Mac in a corporate environment, Outlook is THE app you need to run. Like it or not, American business runs on Exchange/Outlook.
That's precisely why Microsoft doesn't include Outlook in Office for the Mac. That way they can say they support the Mac, but ensure that the Mac can never be a true equal in the enterprise.
As pointed out elsewhere, Entourage is a very poor substitute for Outlook. Most of the basic mail/calendar/collaboration functionality works OK, but with just enough incompatibilities to drive you, and they people you try to collaborate with, bonkers.
My solution? Parallels running a slimmed-down WinXP and Outlook 2003 in 256MB. I just upgraded to a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM, so it runs comfortably side-by-side with Mac OS X and native Mac apps.
Well, see that's exactly why parents get paranoid: their kids refuse to divulge even scant details of their personal lives to their parents, but cheerfully share their most intimate secrets with complete strangers, including said 35 year olds, on a public site for all the world to see.
The difference is, you can only receive calls from people you've given your number to, and only call people who's number you've been given. That's a small, manageable threat space. MySpace and their ilk increase their exposure by several orders of magnitude.
If I had a teenager who took out personal ads in most major newspapers, filled with all their personal details and listing all their insecurities and vulnerabilities, along with their phone number and a plea of "PLEASE CALL ME!!! I'M SOOOOOO TROUBLED!!!11one11one", you bet your ass I'd want to know what he/she was talk about, and with whom.
Actually, it wasn't until the advent of smokeless powder that firearms really got the upper hand.
I've seen several (U.S.) Civil War-era breastplates in museum collections. They weren't common, hardly rare; they aren't seen in period photos, because they were worn under the uniform.
Most I've seen had a dent or two from bullets that faile to penetrate; apparently even those big, fat .69 caliber Minie balls weren't powerful enough to get through a well-made breastplate.
I can recall seeing only one breastplate that failed: the officer who wore it took a direct hit from a 3" cannon at a range of just a few feet, while storming an artillery emplacement. I don't think it's unreasonable for such armor to fail in that circumstance!
Generally good post, very informative. But I have one correction:
Actually, the newer NiMH formulations that allow those crazy high capacities (2400mAH+ in AA, for instance) do have this problem. Bad. I deal with this myself; the 2500mAH Energizer NiMH's for my digital camera won't work if they've been sitting more than a couple weeks after charging. I have to leave them in my smart charger if I expect them to be full when I need them.
In fact, while most manufacturers keep pushing capacities higher, some are selling NiMH batteries designed for minimal self-discharge, like these Titanium brand cells. They arent' available in as high capacity, however.
(I just noticed that those Titaniums recently improved from 1800mAH to 2100mAH; hopefully this means that we won't always have to sacrifice capacity for low discharge.)
Lithium batteries aren't a direct replacement, because they run at waaaay too high a voltage.
The voltage of a battery is determined by it's chemistry. Different formulations give different voltages:
You've obviously never worked in marketing.
Marketing is all about that first impression. The marketer wants to impress the message on you the moment you view the email in your Preview Pane. User choice has nothing to do with it. Heck, the marketer doesn't want you to have a choice to view the message or not, because you might choose not to.
I know this is Slashdot, where alpha *nix geeks prefer editing text files to using a GUI, and design and typography are considered just useless fluff. But in the Real World, appearances do matter. If your message is pleasant to the eye, it's more likely to be read. Even better if it grabs attention, compelling the user to look. ASCII text doesn't have that sort of impact; HTML can, if done right.
This should be a real boon to identity thieves.
Putting all your eggs into one pasket just makes it easier for someone to steal all your eggs. Won't people ever learn?