Lynn Ayres: What is Windows Live ID?

CplCarrot wrote:A new definition of frustration: Seeing a video you want to watch but finding that the global caching systems wont serve it up to you
I can download it which at the Channel 9 Ultra HD size will take 2 Hrs + or wait for the caches to catch up. FRUSTRATING.
Charlie
Great video, thanks. Favourite quote:
"If you were the Bill Gates of the 15th century, you might have had twelve books."
I really enjoyed this video, Bill Hill is great.
Great video.
One thing I would like Bill to comment on is a recent post here that linked to an article that insinuated that MS's screen text display technologies (hinting, ClearType) are holding back the need for high-DPI displays. Any chance Bill is reading this and would
care to give his thoughts on that?
I also have to disagree with his assertion that eBooks were a success. Technologically, sure, but as someone who reads a lot of eBooks on my PocketPC, certainly not from an acceptance point of view. My current approach tends to be to buy a book in paper form,
then download an illegal eBook version, because more often than not the books I want aren't legally available as eBooks. That's a shame I think.
It's also something I've noticed here in Japan. Japanese people basically do one out of three things when they're in a train: sleep, read or play with their mobile phone. Even my phone, which is pretty much the cheapest phone you can get in Japan, has a high
resolution display, it has eBook capability and I can even read comics on them. But they don't do it. When they're reading in the train, they use books (Japanese books seem to be made so you can easily read them with just one hand). When they're using their
mobile, they're either playing a game or they're sending e-mails, they're not using them to read. Why is that?
A lot of the resistent towards moving newspapers, magazines, books, etc over to a digital distribution and reading environment comes from the same kind of resistence that Bill was talking about. There are still a lot of film photographers who believe that
digital will never equal film. I'm sure that there were a lot of scribes and copyists who resisted the printing press.
There has always been the problem of the established technologies fighting against the new stuff. This usually seems to be because of their perception of the new technology. Often they see a transition to new technology as being too difficult, too expensive,
when it isn't any of those things.
I do some amature photography, and I hang out at a couple of photography websites. There are a lot of professional photographers (not artists, but people who do weddings, portraits, etc...) who use film. Many of them don't want to use digital because they feel
that it is too expensive and too complicated. Yet, those who use digital feel that film is too expensive and too complicated. Who is right? Ultimately neither is correct. Both mediums end up being about the same price in equipment and time. However, the real
value of a digital workflow comes from being opened up to a universe of possibilities beyond anything film offers.
Another reason why supporters of older technologies don't like newer ways of doing things is that they new ways are generally easier. Yes, they resist the democratization of media. Going back to the subject of photography, try going to a photography forum and
reading what the film based photographers have to say. Many of them despise the idea of digital, because digital technology has made it possible for anyone to take photos and manipulate them into perfection. Digital has taken away the mystique of photography.
Most PHD (Push Here Dummy) cameras can take great pictures without messing with shutter speed, aperature etc. Also the price of digital has basically put a powerful DSLR into the hands of anyone who wants one (me included). There are hundreds more silly reasons
that some of these old fogeys give, so I won't list them all here. However, you can easily imagine ancient scribes ranting about the printing press making it so
anybody could make a book.
The same principle can be applied to print vs. digital. Bill really nailed the non-challenge of digital publishing, and why people are slow to adopt.
I'm with Sven. Ebooks are a wonderful concept, but thus far they have been a failure. I think that part of the reason is that right now there is a lot of Not-Invented-Here going around. There is lots of hardware, and lots of eBook formats. It's probably going
to take a while for the dust to settle.
On the topic of eBooks, if Bill does happen to read this thread and for anybody else who reads eBooks: What ebook format/software would you recommend for various form factors? Obviously the best solution is going to allow you to buy one file and use it on any
platform you want. Who's the best?
eagle wrote:Bill has obviously never been to the C9 coffeehouse where anonymous trolls and gremlins with multi aviators are reinforced by the C9 Team.
kettch wrote:On the topic of eBooks, if Bill does happen to read this thread and for anybody else who reads eBooks: What ebook format/software would you recommend for various form factors? Obviously the best solution is going to allow you to buy one file and use it on any platform you want. Who's the best?
Sven Groot wrote:
kettch wrote:
On the topic of eBooks, if Bill does happen to read this thread and for anybody else who reads eBooks: What ebook format/software would you recommend for various form factors? Obviously the best solution is going to allow you to buy one file and use it on any platform you want. Who's the best?
On the PocketPC, I prefer Microsoft Reader. Nice, legible text, all you need to use while reading is the "right" button to go to the next page, and it remembers where you were.
Quite the reverse, I think. ClearType will make it possible to give us all the resolution we need nfor human vision - without requiring crazy graphics processing.
Here's my reasoning (which I've been evangelizing inside Microsoft for some time).
Human visual acuity is about 600ppi.
However, to go from ~100ppi screens today to 600ppi hardware means 36 times as much graphics processing (n-squared # of pixels).
ClearType, however, by using the RGB subpixel triad, is a multiplier.
So I have a 204ppi display in my office. With ClearType, it's as good as the best printed magazine. (forget the ultra-high-res imagesetting they use, that's really only required because the printing process is so lossy)
Now, you can see how my screen could be made the tiniest bit better. But the cost of producing a screen that good, plus the graphics processing you'd need, puts you squarely into the Law of Dimishing Returns part of the curve. What I mean is, you can throw
lots more in, but you get only tiny advances in quality out.
That screen, from IBM, was a great purchase if you really need that much resolution for research. But it went on sale at $20,000, and even after several years never got below $6000.
I believe a great compromise resolution is 180ppi + ClearType. That will give great text, not only for Latin-based languages, but East Asian languages like Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
That's not too far above the 147ppi Dell's been shipping in Inspiron laptops for about eight years. So that's quite a reasonable step for the hardware folks to take.
The real issue that's been holding back high-resolution displays is not ClearType.
Website designers, and applications vendors (and Windows) have been assuming forever that all screens were about 96ppi.
There are fixed pixel dimensions built into everything - websites, applications dialogs, etc etc. So, while text scales well, it often gets clipped. Or a website only take up one-quarter of the display on my 204ppi display because it's been designed for 1000
pixels wide, and my screen in 3840 x 2400...
All of these things have to become resolution-independent. That means a lot of work by everyone. Line-of-business applications have the the same challenges.
I have to say, the best-behaved application (or really, set of applications) at high dpi, is Microsoft Office. Since Office 2003 they've had full support for high resolution. So on my display it behaves perfectly, whether I'm using Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
or anything else. The Office team did a great job, especially given the complexity of their task, with so many applications to rev. I really take my nhat off to those guys for showing the way.
So don't blame ClearType for holding back improved resolution. We're at the forefront of the push!
It's a big, complex ecosystem and can't be changed overnight.
bill hill wrote:So don't blame ClearType for holding back improved resolution. We're at the forefront of the push!
bill hill wrote:I worked on MS-Reader, so I'm biased. But we did the best job we could to analyze the reading experience and build all that knowledge into the software.
bill hill wrote:I love it on a PocketPC (Dell Axim v50 with 208ppi screen, which I think they stopped making), on a small TabletPC. Some of the TabletPC are too big and heavy for comfortable reading.
W3bbo wrote:
BTW Bill, you make the claim of creating ClearType a while ago, and whilst it's true it's the first commercial implementation, the internets say that IBM first made it in 1988. What's the word on that?
The postings by littleguru and LaBomba hit a hot button, and highlight something else which needs fixing on the Web.
littleguru points out the problem, LaBomba a workaround which I use myself - Outlook email and Internet Explorer side-by-side - and which in fact I'm looking at right now.
At the risk of boring Niners, I'll try to explain what's wrong, and how it can be fixed.
Human beings (which I assume covers most C9 readers) need to read text that's between 9 and 13 points high at normal reading distance, and that's set in columns 55-65 characters wide.
Not like to read, need to read.
All humans are the same. We're all Africans, really. So far, despite extensive sampling, no human has ever been found who does not share the same DNA marker with a man who left Africa about 50,000 years ago. (Great book to read on this if you're interested
is "The Journey of Man: A genetic odyssey" by Spencer Wells).
The important point here is we all have the same visual system.
Our peripheral and distance vision is where we triage information. We're homo sapiens v. 1.0, hunter-gatherer, so what's important here is "Is this a threat - or lunch?".
The part of the eye that handles that is the parafovea, the area around a tiny part of our retina (0.2mm in diameter) called the fovea, which we use for high-resolution vision.
It's the fovea we use for reading. The size of the fovea dictates the size of text we can read comfortably and easily. Our eyes are moving rapidly all the time as we read. The muscles moving the eye only deflect comfortably (without uncomfortable stretching
or head turns) to the extent of about 55-65 characters wide at 9-13 points.
Books are not the size they are by accident. They evolved over 5500 years of writing and reading. What worked best with human vision survived, what didn't work died along the way (there have been many experiments).
The first Web browsers took zero account of any of this. So your choices were exactly as described: Scale your browser window to a size which works with your visual system, or make reading text like watching a game of tennis from the net line - line-lengths
which are impossible to use.
Problem is that the design community has been working for 35,000 years to the same law - what I call the First Law of Design: First determine the size of space you have to fill, then use that dimension to drive all of your design.
The First Law is now broken, and people don't realize it yet. We live in a new world where you design one piece of content, but people may view it on many different devices with completely different characteristics (cellphone, laptop, flat-panel TV etc).
In other words, we need a completely new paradigm for design: dynamic design for a world of dynamic content.
Most designers on the Web are still trying to drag the old world of fixed dimensions into the new world where it doesn't work: hence we get websites desgned to fixed-pixel widths etc.
The best reading experience I've seen on a screen so far - by a very long way - is the New York Times Reader. We used every technique typographers and designers have learned and developed over the 550 years since Gutenberg. Then we went beyond that by developing
dynanmic layout which intelligently adapted the design to the device on which it was running.
So you can look at the New York Times on your laptop (1600 x 1200), or your TabletPC in portrait mode display (1200 x 1600). The layout adapts to give you the optimal reading experience on each device. So the number of columns, say, changes automatically. It
always fills the screen. The software even re-sizes the adverts to fit - pulling in more content to the ad if required. But it still looks and reads like the New York Times.
Because it fills the screen, there are no distractions from reading. Which is why the two-windows-side-by-side option is only a workaround, not a true fix.
I read the New York Times Reader every day. I wish all websites could be this easy to read. It's not perfect yet, it's still evolving. But it's miles ahead of the Web.
I first got involved in hypertext in 1985 (long before there was a Web) when I wrote the software manual for Guide, the first hypertext program for the Apple Macintosh.
I realized back then that fixing reading on a screen was a huge task, but it was critical.
I first wrote about dynamic design at Microsoft in 1995 (the year I came). We developed some basic technology in this area in 1996. Things have been happening in many places (including the Reading layout View in Microsoft Word - which again is a long way from
perfect, but at least is a start).
It's been only 12 years. It takes longer than that to change 35,000 years of information design (the first cave paintings).
My life's mission is to get us there. That's why I come to work. And it's why I came to Microsoft. Reading's a core human task. People spend more time at their computers reading than doing anything else.
Make Windows and Microsoft applications like Internet Explorer and Office truly readable, and you change the world. Because you change the lives of a billion people who use them every day. And then open that up to the next billion...
Bill Gates got that a long time ago. I sent him my "Digital Reading Dreams", and asked him for his thoughts.
At the end of a detailed mail, he told me:
"Keep on dreaming, and keep on forcing us to dream, too!"
How cool is that?
bill hill wrote:At the risk of boring Niners, I'll try to explain what's wrong, and how it can be fixed.
bill hill wrote:The Digital Declaration of Independence
We hold this truth to be self-evident: That every human has an equal and unalienable right to the means to create, distribute and consume information to realize their full potential for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - regardless of the country they live in, their gender, beliefs, racial origin, language or any impairments they may have
bill hill wrote:Lived in Shettleston for the first two years of my life. Moved to Pollokshaws untiol I was about 7. Then we moved back to the East End, to the Barlanark housing scheme. Lived there until I was about 18.
bill hill wrote:Well we're not talking about future IE plans yet.
But I did say in the interview that Dean, the IE GM, said to me "Come and help us make reading great!"
So let's see what unfolds...
Let me just say, since it's already a matter of public record, that our first dynamic layout example at Microsoft back in 1996 involved innovative use of CSS.
bill hill wrote:While I'm on my soapbox:
The two worst things you can do to people who're trying to read:
1. Make them scroll. Designers and typographers have spent 550 years developing optimum combinations of line legnth, leading etc to avoid reading the same line twice. When you force people to scrooll, they always end up reading some lines twice which breaks the flow of meaning. That's why the New York Times Reader is paginated - there's no scrolling.
2. Flashing things. Homo sapiens 1.0 has a visual system which makes movement a Priority0 interrupt: it takes precedence over everything else (because it's a survival mechanism). You can't stop it, it's totally automatic. So reading a website with flashing or moving stuff is like trying to read a book in a cage full of lions. Advertisers know all about the Pri0 interrupt - that's exactly why they do it...
The Digital Declaration of Independence
We hold this truth to be self-evident: That every human has an equal and unalienable right to the means to create, distribute and consume information to realize their full potential for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - regardless of the country they live in, their gender, beliefs, racial origin, language or any impairments they may have
ive had my eyes well up twice....half way through....
edit:
human network +10
home schooled +interesting
charles change topic back to paper books after amazing talk -1
its a time for dreams +10
non fixed space environment = wmf - the real one! +1
ie team? +1
no strokes!
bill hill wrote:The mountain lion word for jogger is "lunch"...
Seriously though, it's great that you're a tracker.
A family of wolves and a 175-pound male cougar taught me everything I needed to know about human perception.
I live in cougar country. That 175-pound male once followed my trail back from where I'd found his family was denning to my front door. He just looked in the glass, scoped us out, stepped back and faded into the woods. "You know where I live, I know where you live..."
I was taught wilderness and tracking skills by Jon Young, who was Tom Brown's student.
When you go for a walk where I live, you'd better be paying attention. There are often cougars around. If you're jogging - especially with your iPod - you're not paying attention.
In mountain lion world, if it runs, it's prey. They much prefer deer to people, but that doesn't do you much good if you're dead by the time he finds out you're not a deer. (Favorite kill method: a leap from the side, hit the deer in the shoulder with two front paws, break its neck instantly. It's all about economics. So minimize the effort and avoid the risk of being injured yourself by flying hooves).
Now, one problem with mountain lions is that when young males grow up, Dad chases them off his territory. They have to find their own. Often they're very hungry at this point, and will eat anything.
They also tend to wander into suburbia, where they have to be tranquilized and released in a wilder place. I have friend who does this for Fish and Wildlife in Washington.
Once you've rediscovered your submerged wilderness perception, you see lots that other people never notice, as you say.
And until you understand how that perception works, you'll never write software that's ideally suited for humans,
bill
dentaku wrote:It's good to know that tablet PCs adjust the cleartype when you switch to portrait mode because I've rotated regular desktop LCDs on their side then used the Nvidia rotate feature and cleartype becomes very messy.
I'm assuming it's because Windows didn't know I rotated the screen so it never had a chance to adjust.
I don't know if it's just me getting used to it but Cleartype on my 19" Trinitron CRT is actually pretty good in Vista. I never used Cleartype on my CRT in XP.
I still use a CRT as my main display because of how well it adjusts to different resolutions and how even the brightness is from top to bottom.
I just can't use Adobe Illustrator on a regular inexpensive LCD, it's hopelessly inaccurate. Maybe one of the high end models with better backlighting would suit me better. At the moment I only use my LCD as monitor #2 in a dual monitor setup.
NOW, if we could have an OS behave the way many of us hoped for when we first heard about WPF an LONG time ago (then we quickly found out that it wasn't going to work that way) that uses scalable vector graphics for it's interface we could start using high ppi displays more comfortably.
I know a guy with a 22" Dell LCD who runs it at 1024X768.grrr....
figuerres wrote:
I do think that the newer LCD displays with the DVI or HDMI cables are a *LOT* better with a DVI out video card then an older VGA cable attachment.
for example i have a gateway wide screen 1600x1050 I think ... not at home right now to check that...
it's using the DVI-D cable and is sweet as heck! very sharp and good colors. now when I got it the thing only came with a vga cable....
Uhhh.... that was CRA99y as heck!
right now I have at work a sony laoptop and an external lcd via vga... the laptop is great, the ext display is "ok" for checking stuff and long distance viewing but the details are hosed -- somehow the vga connection and vista can't figure out what to send to that display to makeit look right. it's an older samsaung and I can't find a vista config file / inf file to set it up with...
but heck the 1600x1050 big display I have at home was only about $400-500 bucks and that was a year ago...
so I think the displays are getting better in price and features....
now we gotta get the OS to use the GPU all the way !!!
But if your just looking for quick reference, say to back up an argument/discussion your having on a internet message board, than you can make use of a wikipedia, it's fast easy and convenient. Just like people using google, only what your looking for doesn't require you to wade thru 10-15 different pages.
Wikipedia is randomness, because the stuff you look up on it will be random...it's not work related stuff, it's stuff you come across and want to know what it is, doesn't matter how obscure it is, chances are someone on the vast intarweb has come across
it before and has typed up something and posted it to wiki.
Not perfect, but it's not required to be, that's after all a rule of the internets.
bill hill wrote:I took a look today.
The randomness is appalling. Not to demean Shirley Chisholm, but is she really the most mportant subject in the past or present under the heading of "Politics"? The article on her is the only one under that heading so far "approved", which means the only one to have gone through the full process.
Who made that decision? Or even worse, did no-one "decide", except the author and the people who reviewed it?
I to have looked over that edge. It took all the strength I had to scrape my self off of the floor I had been sprawled on for the past 3 days to walk my self into a free clinic. I was extremely dehydrated and had pneumonia. They gave me fluid and strong anti biotic interveinously and let me go. I sat in the waiting room trying to gather enough strength to go home. I recovered. Im greatful to the the doctors, clinicians and nurses who gave me that day, more time.
ZippyV wrote:How about we crank up the default dpi setting in the next version of Windows?
TommyCarlier wrote:Yesterday, we discovered some of the problems with a higher DPI: applications have to be designed to work with a higher DPI. We installed one of our applications on a PC with a DPI of 120, and some of the controls in our application had lost their text. We noticed that the windows and controls that did look good did not use absolute pixel coördinates and sizes, but used AutoSize and flexible layout (docking, TableLayoutPanel, FlowLayoutPanel).
bill hill wrote:I'll stick with Britannica or Encarta, where I know someone decided what was important, subject matter-specialists were commissioned to write about it, and their work edited by professionals. People whose living depends on their performance.
Would you follow the instructions of an Internet Brain Surgeon?
TommyCarlier wrote:It took me half a day to fix the DPI issues in our WinForms framework and in our application. I've discovered that it's actually not very hard to design a new Form (window) in a flexible way: just use one or more TableLayoutPanels for the global layout, and use AutoSize as much as possible. If you play with margins and paddings a bit, you can get some nice and clean results that scale very well.
steveWD wrote:Hi,
I enjoyed hearing Bill Hill talk about the changes and advances in technology and the digital print world. It was very informative.
I would like to know though, where I can contact the Microsoft ClearType team and or the related IE team to discuss the ClearType feature.
I'm in a different mindset for ClearType. I personally hate it with a passion, because 95% of the text I read is black text, on a white background (or very close to that scenario).
I'm not sure if my eyes are better than others (I don't yet wear glasses), but even on the highest resolution screens that I use daily, with ClearType turned on, all I can see is the blurry colors (red, blue, green) that appear along side the letters on screen.
I physically have to squint my eyes so that the color "bleeds" into the black, so that my brain
isn't cramping trying to un-blur the image.
Its not just on curved letters, or angled letters either. Even the lowercase letter "L" is a blur.
Are their tools to only apply ClearType to fonts over 24pt in size? or only to text that is not close to black on white?
In the mean time I've turned ClearType off, and the headaches have all gone away, but I would have to suspect by the ammount of effort
that has gone into ClearType that there must be some benifit for the other scenarios, so I would like to know if I can use it there (or at least try it out)
Thanks,
Steve
steveWD wrote:Hi Bill,
Sorry for the delay in replying, I was out of the country for a while.
Yes, I've tried tinkering with the ClearType tuner tool, and each choice was no better than the first.
I'm trying an experiment.
I have started a new blog at
http://billhillsblog.blogspot.com/
Please come and visit!
bill