That 70s Show: Windows sprouts Sets and Timeline features Microsoft isn't short of good ideas – but getting good ideas into Microsoft products, which then stay alive for a long time, is another thing. New builds of Windows 10 will feature a couple of these – and they're features that hark back to the utopian computer labs of the 1970s. One feature, Sets, yokes related documents …
the most tasteless decade in the 20th century, from hideous polyester patterns to disco "music".
Plaid Stallions Fashion Mockery is also a favorite of mine. "Virgin powers, activate!"
the most tasteless decade in the 20th century, from hideous polyester patterns to disco "music".
Wasn't most of that late in the 70's?
Any hoo, on the other hand, quite good Sci-fi movies, some rather good cop Tv shows (maybe Bob prefers TJ Hooker), Prog Rock and the early days of electronic music...
Compared to the 80's....it's 'woody' to 'tinny'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg
...oh, yes, rather a lot of Python too.
The 70s also produced a lot of excellent, highly-creative rock music.
Otherwise, you sound like the kids from my junior high back in the late 80s — they started out bashing "70s music" (defined only as 'disco'), then in high school just a few years later, were instead bashing "80s music" (with a similarly narrow definition) and playing 70s rock on the quad during lunch.
As for fashion, pretty much every decade & generation has its share of wince-worthy fads.
high school just a few years later, were instead bashing "80s music" (with a similarly narrow definition) and playing 70s rock on the quad during lunch.
I worked with one of those guys. I used to have a bunch of tapes in an unlocked cupboard, and he'd been surreptitiously taking a couple home to listen too. Eventually he started asking questions "Er when was this recorded?" 71, "when was this recorded?" 75. "When was this done?" 72. "What about X?" 72.
Lets just say that the decade started with "Bitches Brew" - now let the millennials top that.
John Lilburne Lets just say that the decade started with "Bitches Brew" - now let the millennials top that.
Counterpoint, or "hot take" or whatever the kids say these days: Terry Wogan and The Floral Dance. Middle Of The Road. Boney M. Dan The Banjo Man. Demis Roussous.
And that's just a small selection of the more cringeworthy stuff from my MP3 70's folder!
But on the other hand, The Undertones, Strawbs, Motorhead (can't do the metal umlaut on my current keyboard, sorry), Fleetwood Mac's golden era.... hmm. I am conflicted.
Oh Dave, that was *pop*, not rock.
You want some equivalent nasties from the 80s?
"Dah dah dah".
"The Devil Went Down To Georgia"
"Karma Chameleon" and "Do You Really Want To Squirt Me (Do You Really Want To Hose Me Down)"
"I Just Called To Say I Love You"
Phew. For a moment there, Stevie, I thought you were going to give some examples of bad 80s music.
Just kidding. And yes I know the pop/rock distinction thank you. My point was that there was a lot of utter dross in the 70s.. just like every decade before and since.
RE: "...there was a lot of utter dross in the 70s.. just like every decade before and since"
I know I may be seeing through rosy spectacles (or X-Ray Spex - making teeth braces cool) but...While it may be true there is a lot of dross in every decade, there are few decades that can compare with the highs of the 70's except maybe the 60's. The highs are much lower through the 80's onwards. IMHO obviously.
These are the issues that matter in our turbulent times.
Geoffrey W "While it may be true there is a lot of dross in every decade, there are few decades that can compare with the highs of the 70's except maybe the 60's. "
Agreed. Plus, I'll argue that by the 70s, recording technology had pretty much reached a great standard, after the crackle-and-fuzz of the 30s-early 60s.
But what would I know? My friends would say that having me opine on matters of music is like asking Dwayne Dibbley for his guidance on power-dressing.
I offer as proof my last 3 music downloadslegitimate purchases:
Melanie - Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)
Cat Stevens - Father & Son
Jack Johnson - My Mind is for Sale
Stop sniggering. Anyone else here brave enough to offer their own list?
With the exception of Jack Johnson (who he?), whom I know absolutely nothing about at all, there is nothing to snigger at. Melanie and Cat Stevens are fabulous. Especially Melanie who is a goddess who I am unworthy to kiss the feet of. Do not, thou who knowest not, do NOT judge her by the huge hit "Brand New Key"; she is so much more, and even brand new key has its little bit of sly subversion too. I adore her and spent half my life looking for my own Melanie.
Last music new to me? Sally can't dance (Lou Reed - he should have stuck with Cale and the Velvets), and the first three Fairport Convention records.
Oh, oh...while I'm here and still awake, I must tell you all about another singer from the 60's I only just discovered and have to proselytize to everyone who will stand still long enough to listen. Judy Henske! Listen to her song "Snowblind" and tell me she hasn't one of the best voices ever. Janis Joplin eat your foot stomping heart out.
Geoffrey W - we seem to be turning this thread into our own version of the Old Grey Whistle Test.
Jack Johnson is a contemporary singer/songwriter. The track I mentioned sounds rather like mid-70s Paul Simon ("Mother and Child Reunion", etc.), for better or worse - it's on Youtube if you care to listen. And I agree re Melanie! Besides, everyone knows Brand New Key was just a rip-off of the Wurzels. (...trollface icon for a reason...). Fairport Convention also excellent (Matty Groves, Rising for the Moon, Fotheringay).
Other good-but-lesser-known? 70s tracks I'd suggest you might check out: Medicine Head ("Rising Sun"), Labi Siffre (listen to "I got the..." from the 1m49s mark and reflect on how much royalties he's earning from Eminem), Bob Seger ("Turn the Page"), Don Fardon ("Indian Reservation"), Tanya Tucker's version of "Blood Red and Goin' Down", and J.J.Cale (whose version of "After Midnight" I think I prefer to Clapton's cover).
RE: "the most tasteless decade in the 20th century, from hideous polyester patterns to disco "music"."
One begs to differ: Prime Bowie (Ziggy) and Punk, plus lots of other stuff you are cringing and squinting too hard to see. Plus Peter Hammill at his psychedelic best, and pop music, if that's what floats your boat, that simply lays waste to everything the kids are popping to today. Shitty politics though, plenty for proto anarchists to rail against. I think the internet is responsible for flattening and removing all flavour and savour from our culture.
There were *some* good things about the 70's...
One of them being prog music. The other is that I became a teenager during the 70's.
Meh, being a teenager in the 70's gave me PTSD (important to include the "P" in that abbreviation, lest you think I had one of the other).
I'll never be nostalgic for the 70's, but at least I don't hate them anymore.
Fuck everyone who says what is in the Title bar.
Whole genres of music were being invented and improved on in the 70s. All the Old Wild Men bands still drawing mega crowds today were coming of age in he 70s.
Industrial Light and Magic were being invented in the 70s
Clive Sinclair was still On Topic in the 70s.
Dr Who was still going strong in the 70s. It died in the shoulder-pads-and-big-hair 80s.
70s girls were cute and approachable and not completely fucked-up because of the lastest flavour of STD or what some idiot on arsebook just said in the 70s.
The Campaign for Real Ale was founded in the 70s.
You're right. The 70s were great for those that lived through 'em. Those that grew up in the Duran Duran/Soft Cell/Ultravox/ decade have my sympathy. We had "Maggie May", they had Maggie Thatcher.
I got about halfway through the 80s and bailed for the States in disgust.
"Microsoft isn't short of good ideas".
YES THEY ARE. They *are* long on stupid ideas, like 'take away the start menu button', 'enable user activity tracking on a server OS and require a non-obvious means to turn it *down* (not off!)' and 'forced upgrades to crummy operating systems via the security update channel', for starters.
I'm waiting for Server 2016 R2 (or whatever they are going to call the next proper release of it) to see if they've actually turned telemetry to "security" by default, instead of defaulting it to "Basic". (Desktop Users can only turn it down to Basic, and it's cranked all the way up by default.).
as there were NO support docs of any kind
Of course not. This *was* the 70's! Where anything to do with computers was mysterious and involved techo-geekology.
(My first computer was a Nascom-1. It arrived as a bag with a motherboard and lots and lots of components. ISTR that a lot of soldering was involved. I think I'm going to blame everythings that's happened since on inhaling lots of lead vapours in my teenage years..)
Technical documentation in the '70s and earlier simply destroys the pitiful documentation we get today for hardware and software. When was the last time that your computer came with a schematic, or your software came with a nice, thick, complete manual?
Hypercard excepted -- but that wasn't really a '70s thing.
"A previous Microsoft attempt at keeping all your project parts together was Office Binder - but that only linked up Office documents and was dropped with Windows XP as so few people ever used it."
I tried Office Binder in its Office 97 guise and couldn't get it working reliably.
A good concept which I could have used, but I found it unworkable in practice.
How do we get a review of Binder and Journal that doesn't mention the previous incarnations? Firstly, because MS press releases never mention previous incarnations of the product: acording to the MS journalist kits, all MS product releases are ex-nova.
And secondly, I can only assume that the author was an Apple user who never used Windows in the 90's and 00's.
"It's the best argument ever against "teaching everybody to code", and illustrates why it is not an imperative like "teaching everybody to read", or "teaching everybody to swim" at all."
When only the 'educated' could read and write, the 'average quality' of literary output would have been higher. So, was it a good thing that it was taught to everyone...?
Thing is, everyone needs to read, write and do sums - even if it's to a basic functional standard. At least to study to the age of 18 or so, and at least from time to time for the rest of their lives. And most people need to do these things a lot. But not coding. You don't need to code to be able to access the school curriculum. Nor to be able to do any job outside of engineering or technology. And being able to do some limited amount of not very good coding is of even less utility. (I know, because that was my level - which is partly why I was never a full time IT Pro).
Coding is the 21st century equivalent of metal/woodwork - the largely useless working class subject(s) that my generation was pushed through for no other reason than that we were working class.
Which is a good reason to teach logic and reasoning. There are plenty of schemes of work that will do this.
http://www.philosophy4children.co.uk/
https://www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.org/
http://www.sapere.org.uk/
https://depts.washington.edu/nwcenter/
And so on.
And these are all directly applicable through the entire school curriculum and into everyday life, develop language skills and improve thinking. But coding isn't.
"(Philosophy) And these are all directly applicable through the entire school curriculum and into everyday life, develop language skills and improve thinking. But coding isn't."
I'm currently embroiled in an argument between two entities. One made a request, relative to their local frame of reference. The other interpreted the request, relative to their local frame of reference. A fight is going to ensue, because neither have realised their contexts are our of sync, and neither will be particularly amenable to synchronisation, as both consider their reference to be the Master.
Imagine a philosophy debate, where you sent your philosophy, instead of yourself. Imagine receiving new reasoning, already perfectly aligned to and enhancing your own understanding.
Imagine business processes, in version control, with test suites, and "import uk-tax.law".
If they just taught predicate logic I'd be happy with that for now. I don't honestly know what philosophy does for me. As far as I know, it's just for arguing :)
Logic and coding are two different things, but software engineering is built on logic, so they they are inseperable subjects. Coding, however, is a specific skill that provides little actual value to people who aren't interested in coding. Logic is a general skill that serves literally everyone well through their whole life.
So, if we're talking about what every student should be taught, ditch programming and adopt logic.
"metal/woodwork - the largely useless working class subject(s) that my generation was pushed through for no other reason than that we were working class."
Maybe your school was different to mine but nobody asked what class we were when drawing up the curriculum. So, yes, woodwork and metal work were not optional in earlier years, neither were Latin nor PE to my chagrin. And guess what - we working class kids were allowed to study real subjects such as physics, chemistry and biology. Is that chip on your shoulder a wooden one left over from woodwork?
he largely useless working class subject(s) that my generation was pushed through for no other reason than that we were working class
Well - we did those too (and cookery, needlework and art - we all did 6 months in each of them) even though the majority of my school were from firmly middle-class origins..
And I still use the small table I made at school some (counts on fingers, takes shoes and socks off to count further) 40 years ago..
"And being able to do some limited amount of not very good coding is of even less utility."
A little basic "coding" could be useful to many people, just not you. Scripting repetitive tasks the GUI can't do being the most obvious example, even it's little more than a one liner for or while loop. Bonus points for finding a use for if/then/else constructs, a transferable skill between basic scripting and spreadsheet formulae.
Dammit! I'd forgotten about that. FFS! why did they take it away? I used it so much a few years back. Need to find out when ( or if) you, or a user you are supporting, worked on a missing document or email and where they saved it. Or just be able to refer to the date of an event when a given document was produced for discussion . Even if the document had gone to that big recycle bin in the sky you could still find out if it had ever been written/sent, and go looking for it elsewhere, even a printed copy in the files or a reference in the minutes of the meeting from that date. Sometimes you just need that record.
I suppose they decided that ***Search*** meant that tracking wasn't need any more. Idiots!
This post has been deleted by its author
"Hopefully, as with Activities, it will be possible to ignore it."
And, at least with KDE you can just link whatever you want into a directory (or a folder in KDE speak).
I was intrigued to see on the video something called a research feature or words to that effect. I take it it's Bing embedded into whatever application was being used. Good luck with that if you want to research a geographical location - all you'll get is bloody estate agents.
Now, the idea by itself isn't too bad. Having several programs being able to interact with each other has existed for a long time already, tools like OLE (Object Linking & Embedding) for example. In Microsoft Office they even took this one step further by providing us with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) which in its turn has access to an API which provides access to all Office components and a whole lot more.
I know not everyone enjoys VBA but I personally quite like it and believe it still has huge potential.
The problems though start when one program begins to negatively affect the other. If that happens then you don't want to be fully dependent on a shared link between those but you'll want to be able and work with them individually. This is also why Windows eventually adapted a model in which programs were treated more individually, because in the beginning one malfunctioning program could easily take down the whole system (mostly talking about Windows 3.11 / 95 here).
And that brings me to my concern: although the idea to have all your work grouped together in one 'Set' might sound like a good one, I can't help wonder what's going to happen if - for whatever reason - your Set suddenly crashes and stops working. And don't tell me that won't happen: every Windows user has experienced a crash and loss of work at some point in time.
If you have one program which crashes then the risk of data loss is somewhat reduced. But now if all the stuff you're working on crashes at the same time then I think you might be in for some pretty unpleasant moments.
Go Microsoft! :P
... how different programs can interact with eachother. Unixoid systems have raised the bar rather high in that respect, as they managed to do it (mostly) without extra code.
This here is yet another one of the experiments. Of course it will fail, because nobody wants to adapt their code for this to work. It's like interprogram "drag and drop", which may work for some software written in some part of the 1990s, but for the rest it's rather hit and miss.
Workplace Shell was also object oriented and extensible. With WPS when you right click on a folder the folder responds and decides what should appear in the menu. When you right click a folder under Windows Explorer decides what it thinks ought to be appear in the menu. That's a subtle but powerful difference.
One (both good and bad) example of this was ccMail for OS/2. Its UI largely consisted of subclassed folders. That made it act like an extension of the desktop which at the time made it very powerful. Of course the code underneath was shite so it crashed a lot but it was a clever way of integrating mail into the desktop.
Put another way: WPS maintained a hierarchical collection of objects. When it needed to render them it asked them to paint themselves. They did so according to their own rules.
Here's an idea: why don't you just stick to building an OS, and leave all the "helpful features" out?
I don't need or want "Sets", which I assume will be introduced without my consent or knowledge, and automatically enabled. When I want to group all the documents from a project together, I use something already present in Windows, called a "directory". I can even have "sub-directories" for different parts of the project. Same goes for "Timeline". I don't even want to know what that does, and I don't care. Time, in my job, is done with dates in the filename, or revision numbers. It has worked for me for many years, and I don't feel like changing.
I came in one morning and all my incoming mail had been helpfully sorted into a new folder called "Clutter". Microsoft had introduced a new feature, designed to automatically de-clutter my Outlook inbox. Of course, it was enabled by default, and I had to spend a half-hour figuring out how to disable it.
And you can just forget about converting all my windows to a single "Tabbed" window. You see, sometimes, I refer to one document while creating another. I need two windows open simultaneously for that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
