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Comment Re:Doesn't believe in design? (Score 1) 224

by CokoBWare (#33952286) Attached to: Ray Ozzie Quit... What Took Him So Long?

You're right... I'm a douche for not English grammar checking. You're a douche because you can't help it...

To clarify:

At the time I worked at MS, the Hardware User Experience (UX) team was a leading force in UX design at Microsoft. During my employment at MS, I asked the folks who lead UX training for Microsofties who would I talk to at Microsoft to discuss some outside educational opportunities pertaining to UX in post-secondary education. They pointed me to the MS Hardware UX team, stating they would be the best team because they were considered leaders on the UX in Microsoft. This was prior to Windows 7 or Office 2010 hitting the market.

Things might be different now, as other teams within Microsoft have pushed hard to include UX principles in their products (Windows 7 and Office 2010 launched, and they are arguably better products than their predecessors have been). It's hard to say if the Hardware team is in a position of UX leadership today, but at the time, they were highly respected within the company (around 2007).

God, nitpickers are annoying. But useful at times :)

Comment Doesn't believe in design? (Score 2, Interesting) 224

by CokoBWare (#33949274) Attached to: Ray Ozzie Quit... What Took Him So Long?

The OP is full of sh*t. I worked in MS Hardware at one point, and the UX team there led the way in many aspects of UX in MS's hardware products at one point. This spilled over into their supporting software products too. The company as a whole has been pushing hard in the UX space for quite some time, and there just aren't enough UX specialists to go around... the industry has been in a deficit for quite some time. Apple learned early on the UX side and this has been a tenet for them for quite some time. This is blatant trolling to say MS doesn't believe in design... making broad statements without really knowing what they are talking about. Windows 7 and Office 2010 represent a new era of MS apps with a strong emphasis on UX. IMHO, I think they are great advances in making MS products better overall for the user.
Canada

Ontario School Bans Wi-Fi 287

Posted by samzenpus from the balance-the-humors dept.
St. Vincent Euphrasia elementary school in Meaford, Ont. is the latest Canadian school to decide to save its students from the harmful effects of Wi-Fi by banning it. Schools from universities on down have a history of banning Wi-Fi in Ontario. As usual, health officials and know-it-all scientists have called the move ridiculous. Health Canada has released a statement saying, "Wi-Fi is the second most prevalent form of wireless technology next to cell phones. It is widely used across Canada in schools, offices, coffee shops, personal dwellings, as well as countless other locations. Health Canada continues to reassure Canadians that the radiofrequency energy emitted from Wi-Fi equipment is extremely low and is not associated with any health problems."
United Kingdom

Oxford Expands Library With 153 Miles of Shelves 130

Posted by samzenpus from the card-catalog-of-the-gods dept.
Oxford University's Bodleian Library has purchased a huge £26m warehouse to give a proper home to over 6 million books and 1.2 million maps. The Library has been housing the collection in a salt mine, and plans on transferring the manuscripts over the next year. "The BSF will prove a long-awaited solution to the space problem that has long challenged the Bodleian," said its head librarian Dr Sarah Thomas. "We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years." The 153 miles of new shelf space will only be enough for the next 20 years however because of the library's historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in the UK.
Handhelds

2011, Year of the Tablet? 324

Posted by CmdrTaco from the doesn't-fit-in-the-palm-of-your-hand dept.
frontwave writes "After the huge success of the iPad, with over 4 million units sold since its introduction, all major hardware vendors of PCs and mobile devices are coming out with new tablets in the next few months, including Apple with a smaller version of the popular product. Analysts estimate the market for tablet devices (over 6" screen size) to be around 25 million units for 2011."
Cellphones

Hands On With the BlackBerry Torch 9800 126

Posted by kdawson from the rim-shot dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Research in Motion announced the company's first slider-style BlackBerry, the Torch 9800, which is also the first BlackBerry with both a touch screen and hard keyboard, and the first device to run the new OS 6. The Torch feels and looks very much like a BlackBerry, with the proper BlackBerry Bold-style arrangements of plastic, metal, and glass; there are also BlackBerry fonts on the keys and the now-standard BlackBerry trackpad. The Torch's 3.2-inch, 360-by-480 screen is a standard capacitive LCD touch screen. The screen is bright and sharp, but it's obviously behind the competition in terms of resolution. The Torch has a 5-megapixel camera with VGA video recording, Bluetooth 2.1, 512 MB of program memory, 4 GB of built-in storage, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. The Torch has the same 624-MHz Marvell processor as the existing BlackBerry Bold. The new BlackBerry 6 OS adds touch to the interface mix. RIM appears to have totally rewritten its media apps. There's a new Desktop Manager coming with BlackBerry 6, and a Social Feeds app that combines Twitter, Facebook, and various instant messaging conversations."
Apple

iPad Is a "Huge Step Backward" 1634

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-needs-rights-anyway dept.
An anonymous reader writes "FSF's John Sullivan launches the Defective by Design campaign and petition to rain on Steve's parade, barely minutes out of the starting gate. 'This is a huge step backward in the history of computing,' said FSF's Holmes Wilson, 'If the first personal computers required permission from the manufacturer for each new program or new feature, the history of computing would be as dismally totalitarian as the milieu in Apple's famous Super Bowl ad.' The iPad has DRM writ large: you can only install what Apple says you may, and 'computing' goes consumer mainstream — no more twiddling, just sit back, spend your money, and watch the show — while we allow you to." What is clear is that the rise of the App Store removes control of the computer from the user. It makes me wonder what the next generation of OS X will look like.
Image

Prolonged Gaming Blamed For Rickets Rise Screenshot-sm 254

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-let-the-scurvy-get-you-down dept.
superapecommando writes "Too many hours spent playing videogames indoors is contributing to a rise in rickets, according to a new study by doctors. Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have written a paper in the British Medical Journal which warns of the rickets uptake – a disease which sufferers get when deficient in Vitamin D. The study boils down to the fact that as more people play videogames indoors they don't get enough sunlight and this has meant the hospitals are now having to combat a disease that was last in the papers around the time Queen Victoria was on the throne." At least the kids are eating enough snacks with iodized salt that we don't have to worry about goiters.
Music

ASCAP Seeks Licensing Fees For Guitar Hero Arcade 146

Posted by Soulskill from the understanding-is-too-much-effort dept.
Self Bias Resistor writes "According to a post on the Arcade-Museum forums, ASCAP is demanding an annual $800 licensing fee from at least one operator of a Guitar Hero Arcade machine, citing ASCAP licensing regulations regarding jukeboxes. An ASCAP representative allegedly told the operator that she viewed the Guitar Hero machine as a jukebox of sorts. The operator told ASCAP to contact Raw Thrills, the company that sells the arcade units. The case is ongoing and GamePolitics is currently seeking clarification of the story from ASCAP."
Image

Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next Screenshot-sm 193

Posted by samzenpus from the fattening-up-on-brains dept.
ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Google

Submission + - Chrome OS: Is it just about more AdWords? (koski.ca) 1

Submitted by CokoBWare
CokoBWare writes: There's a lot of hype about Chrome OS today in the news, because naturally, it was just released and is open source. Cory Koski suggests that Chrome OS isn't about the AdWords and all the advertising that is going to display in their new OS, but maybe it's more about getting third-parties to deploy their applications to the Google platform, to run on the Google App Engine (which we all know isn't free to third parties). Maybe this is Google's way of beating Microsoft to the punch. Microsoft may be right, and that applications will eventually run in the cloud, but Chrome OS seems to be poised to make sure the cloud we use is Google's cloud, not Microsoft's or Amazon's.

Submission + - LHC gearing up to restart this weekend (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Godskitchen
Godskitchen writes: The world's largest atom smasher – a giant scientific instrument that was designed to recreate the big bang but was broken by a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird. – has been repaired and scientists hope to restart it this weekend.

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