It was said that the introduction of the unified ribbon toolbar in Office 2007 would increase the productivity and efficiency of its users. With my experience thus far, this has really yet to be the case.

However, today, I accidentally stumbled across and interesting feature that I think could be wisely used in other tab controlled interfaces (e.g. modern web browsers). While your mouse is in the boundary of any of the application ribbons in Office 2007, if you scroll your mouse wheel, the tab index advances (scroll up) or regresses (scroll down). It seems to be very quick and responsive on my system.

I find this to be very useful for getting to content even quicker and would be quite cool to see this in Firefox or even other applications like Photoshop and Illustrator where tabbed content lives on.

Unlike what I did with the pre-release of IE 7, I downloaded IE 8 Beta 1 today to give it a swing.

Upon first start up, everything seems pretty much like IE 7 (good, I am glad Microsoft did the consistency thing this time). There is also a new button that allows the browser to "Emulate IE7".

When you first start up the browser (after you have restarted your computer), it walks you through a little setup wizard thing to get stuff like your search engines, and activity searches setup etc.

Afterwards it takes you to the actual Microsoft.com pages to set that stuff up. Right away I wanted to add Google, so I click on the Google search link to add it to my browser...nothing. Clicked it again....nothing. I decided to try their manual process of setting up a new search engine and received the following message:

Heh, well I'm confused as to what browser I've been using then!

Anyway, I installed it, so I will give it a try here and there and I might report back progress.

While reading through the release notes for Windows XP SP3, I was surprised to see a heading labeled "Apple computers." Curious, I read further to see what it said:

Apple computers

This issue affects the Windows XP Home Edition and the Windows XP Professional operating systems.

If you attempt to install this release candidate on an Intel-based Apple computer (Mac Pro, Mac Mini, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or iMac) that is running Windows XP SP2, installation may fail with the error "Out of disk space."

To avoid this, manually create a necessary registry key as follows: To create the registry key

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and click String Value.
4. In the text box under the Name column, type BootDir and press ENTER.
5. Right-click the name BootDir, and then click Modify.
6. In the Edit String Value dialog box, type the drive letter for your system drive, and then click OK. For example, if your system drive is C:, type C:\.
7. Close Registry Editor.

After you have created this registry key (or if you created this key when you installed a previous version of this Service Pack), you can proceed with the installation.

While this may not be terribly interesting to most people, I like it because it shows that enough people are using Windows on their Macs for Microsoft to test and debug it's operating system on them (not to mention beta testers as well probably pushing for this). Of course, we all know the real reason why Microsoft would have Macs lying around the offices.

There is no stopping it, the unstandardized high definition video disc technologies have been released out into the open, with free reign and and with every intention to compete with one and another to see who will gain the largest market share as consumers eagerly jump on the 1080p advantage. With Toshiba, Microsoft, NEC and Sanyo, RCA and Intel backing the HD DVD format and Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Apple Inc., Dell, and Panasonic supporting the Blue-ray disc, there is no telling what these technology giants have up their sleeves to joust the other off their high horse.

Naturally, one would assume that the company with the bigger better product would win the battle. With this scenario, Sony's Blue-ray disc (BD) would tower it's rival in capacity as a single layer disc is only 5 gigabytes short of the dual-layer option of HD DVD and the BD's double-layer option is a capacious 50 gigabytes. With this advantage alone the Blue-ray disc has a tremendous lead. It would be one thing if the HD DVD technology could play on existing DVD players. Unfortunately, this is not the case and for a consumer who wants to upgrade to the new high definition home movie technology, either format forces them to buy new proprietary equipment.

The next major item to compare is what major movie studios are supporting the two formats. As of right now four Hollywood studios are exclusively supporting the Blue-ray Disc: Columbia Pictures, MGM, Disney and 20th Century Fox. Three Hollywood studios are supporting both formats: Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema. Finally, two hollywood studios exclusively support HD DVD: Universal Studios and Weinstein Company. A layman's tally would show Blue-ray having the support of seven major Hollywood studios and HD DVD having only five.

A trend will and has already started to occur and it is only a matter of time that the exponential curve will take form. The issue here is not what format will win and what technology leader will claim the throne of the high definition optical disc standard, the issue is, what consumers are they going to step on in the process. When the war is over, what are those consumers to do that bet on the losing horse but to either stick with their undeveloped movie collection and obsolete player or to once again rebuild and provide money to the victorious challenger.

To the high definition home theater shopper, take heed when approaching this war. It is quite a mess right now. It will phase out soon enough. My bid is on the Blue-ray disc and other's may agree.