Thursday, January 4, 2007

Office 2007 [~] Better But a Tough Switch. Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Office 2007, coming out Jan. 30, is a 'radical revision,' writes the Wall Street Journal's Walter S. Mossberg. 'The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone [~] every one. None of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen called the Ribbon. And there is no option to go back to the classic interface.' He adds, 'It has taken a good product and made it better and fresher. But there is a big downside to this gutsy redesign: It requires a steep learning curve that many people might rather avoid.'" -- this follows in the steps of the wordstar debacle, but for the woder circle of users the "classic" spreadsheet has decades to go (recall that Bricklin's Visicalc was the first productivity application that made computers worth the price tag). -- BL [Slashdot] 12:40:50 PM      Google It!.

Back to the Future: How the Brain "Sees" the Future. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that the human mind taps into the same parts of the brain while imagining the future as it does when recollecting the past. This means that the brain apparently predicts the course of future... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 12:36:43 PM      Google It!.

Hearing Machines. While hearing in machines lags far behind vision in machines, the potential is great, and researchers are beginning to make impressive progress.... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 12:34:52 PM      Google It!.