Let me sum this up for you.  MS Office is similar to the QWERTY keyboard.  It was conceived at a time when limited technology imposed restrictions on its functionality.  As time went on, everyone understood how to use it even though it wasn’t optimal.  Now, after years of ingraining certain expectations into users, Microsoft is trying to take advantage of new technology by gutting and rebuilding the user interface.

 Gone are the familiar File, Edit, View and other drop-down menus; instead, major functions will be grouped into task-specific tabs at the top of the window.

…..

And rejoice if you’ve raged for eight years against Clippy. The dorky paper-clip cartoon is really dead; Office Assistant suggestions will no longer glibly interrupt your tasks. 

….

If you’ve spent the past two years mastering Office 2003, prepare for Microsoft Office 12.0′s potentially steep learning curve. You may moan to hear that the Alt keyboard shortcuts will change; luckily, shortcuts using the Ctrl button will stay the same. While the more visual and tabbed layout may reduce mouse clicks, it eats up more screen real estate than Office 2003 does.

Steep learning curves await.  Corporate adoption will be painfully slow and sales to consumers will be fraught with complaints and bad reviews.  +100 for getting rid of Clippy though.

I will be hunting for a copy of this game.  My son has expressed quite a bit of interest in programming lately and explaining the basics can be a bit tough.  Especially since I speak php and he only speaks Apple BASIC.

Learning to Code with a Boardgame – markmcb writes "While some of us cling tight to our memories of Apple-filled classrooms playing The Oregon Trail and driving our Turtle around in Logo, children today have many other ways to learn about the inner-working of computers and the code that drives them. Wired.com is running an interesting article about a boardgame in which players must use simple logic similar to that used in programming to get their skier down the mountain. From the article: ‘Using basic math, players have to figure out which paths are open to them and then decide the fastest way to the finish line. The trick, however, is learning which paths are open to you using only programmer jargon like ‘if (X==1)’ then you can take the green path or ‘while (X4) you can take the orange path,’ where X is the roll of the die.’"

(Via Slashdot)

 I don’t care if its real or not.  I will stop every day of the week and twice on Sunday when a story leads with a picture like this.

 Droooool…
 

Athens Multi-Screen Monitor Makes Me Cry –

I took one look at this and started to weep. I weep because this Athens five-screen Bluetooth-enabled monitor is so beautiful, so stunning, and would be so awesome with Doom 3. The resolution is a jaw-dropping 19200 x 2400 pixels with 16.7 million colors. And the whole thing has a depth of only 2.5 inches. You could also get it in a 2 to 4 display screen configuration (dubbed Gemini, Cinerama, and Grand Canyon, respectively) if you don’t have the cash for the big Athens. Speaking of cash, that’s another reason why I weep—because there’s no way I’ll ever be able to afford this thing. No price listing so far, but we suspect it’ll be astronomical. And did we mention this is fake? Yes, it seems our friends at Liebermann are up to their tricks again.

Product Page [Liebermann via Oh Gizmo]

(Via Gizmodo)

 So Alberto Gonzales is starting an anti-porn task force in the FBI.  Metafilter is on the case with pithy commentary to spare.

"Honey, it’s work related, I swear!" – Want to watch porn for a living? The FBI might have a job for you. Yes, AG Gonzales is launching a crackdown on porn — the "consenting adults" kind. After all, it worked so well for Ed Meese’s legacy. The memo specifically mentions "sadistic and masochistic behavior" — isn’t it ironic that that DoJ could soon be bringing charges against people who take pictures of acts which the Attorney General has stated were perfectly legal when carried out in Guantanamo Bay?

(Via Metafilter)

 I mentioned this before in relation to Firefox, but I am really excited to see this trend continue.  Essentially carrying my home computer on a USB drive is great, but I am waiting for the next phase when they are making PDA sized devices with PC capabilities that will boot in seconds.

U3 Preps PC on a USB –

More "smart" products coming your way. U3 LLC is readying its new USB drives, based on a "smart computing platform," allowing you to basically carry around your entire PC on a USB drive—independent of any other storage device, and not tied to any specific computer. Vendors such as SanDisk and Verbatim are looking to supply the hardware, and software companies including AOL and Mozilla are planning to announce products that "run directly off the USB smart drives." The system software on the drive takes up 6MB of storage and loads 30 seconds after you plug it in. Yowza!

U3, partners add intelligence to USB drives [InfoWorld]

(Via Gizmodo)

 Rather lengthy article but fascinating stuff.  The history of The Pill and how the creator’s Catholic faith shaped the common perception about menstration.  Do women really require a 28 day cycle for a healthy life?

we menstruate too often – What the co-inventor of the Pill didn’t know about menstruation can endanger women’s health: "The passion and urgency that animated the birth-control debates of the sixties are now a memory. John Rock still matters, though, for the simple reason that in the course of reconciling his church and his work he made an error. It was not a deliberate error. It became manifest only after his death, and through scientific advances he could not have anticipated. But because that mistake shaped the way he thought about the Pill–about what it was, and how it worked, and most of all what it meant–and because John Rock was one of those responsible for the way the Pill came into the world, his error has colored the way people have thought about contraception ever since."

(Via Metafilter)

 We will also file this one under… BRILLIANT!  Great use of such a simple thing.  And the comments are outstanding.

Speech bubble sticker gallery – Mark Frauenfelder: Ji Lee printed 50,000 of these speech bubble stickers and stuck them on "movie posters, ads and signs all over New York City," and then went back and took photos of what people wrote.
Link

(Via Boing Boing)

 This cracks me up.  World of Warcraft has been infected by the plauge.  Not a computer virus, but an honest to goodness disease which affects people’s characters.  A little too much reality for me.

WoW Plague – Plague in World of Warcraft.

(Via Metafilter)

From Shacknews forums:

Heres the skinny: Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). GM’s even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarantine and infecting other players.

 

 This is almost as bad as when they made Timothy Dalton a one woman Bond.  Bond is a playboy.  He is a man of mystery and dammit, he’s a tech hound too.  And with John Cleese now in the role I was looking forward to the new stuff.

Bond without Q?  This can’t end well. 

Bond to fly solo without Q in Casino Royale? –

Say it ain’t so! Apparently the next bond film, Casino Royale, will do without an older, more distinguished Bond (he’ll be a spritely 28) but more importantly—brace yourself—it’s going to go off without Q and his gadgets. Seriously, they’re writing Q out of this one. The film’s screenwriter, Paul Haggis, is calling this a Bond “reinvention,” but a 007 flick without Q’s toys, that’s like a day without sunshine, or like an Engadget post about an upcoming movie… just plain wrong.

[Via The Raw Feed]

(Via Engadget)

Forwarded from my father.  Proof positive that the MBA running your department probably is as stupid as you thought he was.

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