What is there to figure out? Styles used to be relatively hidden. I don't know any novice users that discovered styles on their own before the ribbon, but with it all styles are on the home tab. If you want to change the styleset, you can just select one from the dropdown, or assign your own styles from the selection without opening another window. I really don't understand why people are so affronted by the ribbon. All it does is place commands in a more logical arrangement, and that's coming from someone who knew the big Office apps inside-out before the switch. If anything, I know them even better now. As a software developer, I can appreciate that users don't want an interface they've been using for a long time suddenly turned on its end, but seriously, the UI before the ribbon was incredibly arbitrary in its arrangement, and the ribbon is cleaner in almost every way. It's not like it takes any time at all to adapt to it. All of the keyboard shortcuts from earlier versions still work too, even the alt- menu shortcuts (although they also have new mappings). As a matter of philosophy, I consider being able to adapt to such changes (especially for the better) without a hiccup a prerequisite of working in this industry, and certainly of being an engineer/developer/creative person. I also find that the people who were most angered by the change were those who didn't really have a good working mental model of the programs to begin with. The Office ribbon is much more in-line with how they were designed to be used. That aside, I don't consider the ribbon to be much different from old fashioned toolbars. The idea of licensing Fluent is crazy and the idea that the licensing requirement would hold up in court is ludicrous. The big jump was simply Microsoft's step to making toolbars do the work of arranging themselves for you. The toolbars did some of that before, but they were also smaller, harder to see/find, and would often jump around. The ribbon sizes buttons based on their importance and arranges them based on their use. Cheers!

You should try Firefox 4.0 beta, or else the nightlies, which I use as my day-to-day browser. I pretty much think Firefox 4 is the best browser right now, even pre-release (well, a few weeks away from release they say). It does Direct2D hardware acceleration like IE9, plus it has just about all current web standards supported. The JavaScript engine is also really fast, very close to Chrome and IE. If you noticed, blog posts by IE9's development team seem to have stopped comparing current Firefox builds, perhaps because they are so competitive. I'm not sure what makes them say that IE9 is the only browser to have hardware acceleration because Firefox's D2D layer has been there for nearly a year of development builds. They are definitely really slow to release major releases, but if you use their development builds, it's pretty impressive. As fast as Chrome seemed when it first came out, I think Firefox 4.0 puts it to shame both with its architecture and with its speed. If they finish all of the little UI tweaks that they had planned for 4.0 but that haven't yet made it in, it would be just about perfect for me.

Why shouldn't "architected" be a word? http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/architect[^] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/architect[^] It also appears in the Word dictionary (which that blog post was probably originally checked against). Admittedly, Merriam-Webster does not list it as a verb, but it is perfectly acceptable to "verbify" a noun (get it? I "verbified" "verb") if there is a need for a word with a particular connotation. I would argue that "architect" is such a case. It can be compared to adding the "ish" modifier to change a noun to an adjective or using "ly" to change an adjective to an adverb. Almost all words are created this way. While us English-speakers tend to consider language in terms of "words", it is much more accurate to define things in terms of roots, suffixes, prefixes, and other modifiers. This thinking is much more prevalent in the romance languages, I think.

Just for future reference, the reason that VirtualPC doesn't like Ubuntu is because Ubuntu defaults to 24-bit color, which VirtualPC doesn't support out of performance reasons. You can get Ubuntu to work by editing a configuration file at the comand prompt. For more information, there is an article on their forum about it.

shohom67 wrote:

I have some stitches from surgery I had. But, when I had some teeth pulled, once upon a time, I asked if I could keep them and the Dentist said no, that it was illegal to let us take the teeth. Still can't figure that one.

I have one or two teeth around here actually. I've never heard of it being illegal to give them back. My logic would be: "I spent ten years growing those, so I'll take them." Lol.

Um, wouldn't "Zune Bus" be the server that your Zune connects to in order to sync wirelessly?

But Windows does support soft links (called junctions)! They also support hard links. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365006.aspx[^]

I'm working on a shell replacement for Windows. I only have two big problems left. One is how to create my own system tray implementation. I thought that you could simply create a window of the class "Shell_TrayWnd" and receive icon notifications. I do that, but I never receive the notifications! From the look of other shell replacements, I'm supposed to receive messages in the form of WM_COPYDATA containing notify icon messages (and also appbar messages?). However, I never do! My implementation right now consists of calling RegisterClassEx, then calling CreateWindowEx. RegisterClassEx is given a pointer to the function I'm using as the WndProc. I can receive messages through it, but I never get the system tray ones. Is there something I'm missing?

This really doesn't affect end users who pay for Vista. All you have to do to activate Vista is type in the license key the click the activate button. It automatically knows what version and edition of Vista you have and knows to give you the number of licenses you paid for. As far as cracking Windows goes, stopping some pirates is better than stopping none.