8 ms·
Pivot (from Microsoft)
- AndrewDucker 17y agoIt's an interesting visualisation technology - but I'm yet to be persuaded that it's not just a neat toy.
- mattmanser 17y agoThey seem to be suggesting that they 'invented' collections, bizarre.
- martinkallstrom 17y agoInteresting interface, but they call data sets of "hundreds of thousands - maybe even millions" items "massive". Ridiculous.
- Tarks 17y agoIt's all in context. That's a "massive" amount of data for one human to swim in in any reasonable level of depth.
- bbuffone 17y agoThe one thing that I find impressive is the look of the video in SilverLight. The video is crystal clear and no artifacts.
- mhb 17y agoIt was great using Silverlight to watch online video during the Olympics.
- riffic 17y agoa) not everyone can install a native app or plugin. I expect web apps to work everywhere, on any device. b) not everyone uses or will use a traditional pc.
- est 17y agoplus more bandwidth.
- jacobolus 17y agoAs far as I know, it’s using the same H.264 codec that is also used by many Flash videos. The “crystal” clarity comes from higher resolution and less compression, and you could do the same thing with Flash, Quicktime, &c.
- bbuffone 17y agoThat maybe true, but everytime I see a video on silver light it always better than flash videos. It maybe that the users of silverlight understand; video, lighting, sound and encoding better, or just care more about what it looks like.
- jacobolus 17y agoOr don’t have as many people watching, and can afford the bandwidth?
- Quiark 17y agoSo they are planning to supply software for screens displayed in hollywood movies? Like you know, images flying across the screen, zooming in and out and so on? :)
- rbanffy 17y agoYou have to find something for all those cores, CPU and GPU, you have in your computer.
- gfodor 17y agoOne has to wonder how the reaction would differ if the headline said "Pivot (from Google)"
- dchest 17y agoAt least, Google's thing would work when I clicked the link. For this one I have to install some latest Microsoft browser-disruption technology.
- riffic 17y agoMicrosoft doesn't give two shits about emerging web standards or cross-platform compatibility. it's like they have their fingers in their collective ears going "LA LA LA I can't hear you"
- Teulon 17y agoI had a similar thought. Once I saw that it required Silverlight there was no point in learning more.
- DrJokepu 17y agoThank you for sharing your well-researched insightful opinion that clearly reflects many decades of experience in the industry. It's exactly for comments like this I come to Hacker News every day, I feel like I learn new things all the time. (Sorry for the rant)
- dschobel 17y agoTaking issue with the requirements is a perfectly legitimate technical complaint and you see lots of people complain when some new web application is flash-only. There's some hyper-sensitivity going on here today.
- rbanffy 17y agoHyper-reactions are always telling. My bet is that these people feel somewhat threatened. The fact some Microsoft users and enthusiasts feel that way here is, itself, very interesting.
- ct 17y agoIt looks interesting just from the few mins. of video, but I'd have to play with it to make a more informed decision as to it's usefulness. Unfortunately it's only invite only beta.
- bd 17y agoFor those without Silverlight here is a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZuFUZpEZ-A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZuFUZpEZ-A BTW it's crystal clear also on YouTube (HD), so I suppose it's simply a well made video, not some special Silverlight codec.
- kierank 17y agoI would recommend watching this instead of waiting for your browser to unfreeze after 20 seconds.
- ig1 17y agoIt's definitely an interesting area, lots of people have datasets without any real ability to analyze them. Even something basic like creating a pivot table is outside the capabilities of your average excel user. So if someone (Microsoft or otherwise) can figure out a way of making that easy to do, then there's a huge amount of value in that.
- raquo 17y agoThat's all great, but imagine how much self-evident patents were probably filed. Like that sparklines-in-a-document patent.
- physcab 17y agoIt's an interesting piece of software. I look at massive amounts of data all day and I'm constantly trying to glean out features of the dataset. Having a visual tool that can instantly represent the dataset in various forms would be indispensable. Right now I have to do a lot of custom visualization work in Matlab, which is great on a case by case basis. I would deeply consider something like Pivot if it can generalize whatever I'm throwing at it. But my two main concerns: 1) This being a MS technology, is it going to have the unnecessary overhead like other MS products (Excel, Vista, etc) 2) Are these "collections" free? Can we import our own? It seems like if the data was already pre-processed, then that wouldn't be the case.
- xpaulbettsx 17y agoYou can make your own collections, it's relatively easy unless you have 100k+ items, then you have to write some custom server software
- est 17y agotl;dr silverlight deepzoom (aka seadragon) from files, db and the web. citation: http://www.getpivot.com/images/collections/image012.png http://www.getpivot.com/images/collections/image012.png
- xpaulbettsx 17y agoYep - DeepZoom a PivotTable of Wikipedia
- bretpiatt 17y agoThis has the potential to be the way we see search results in the future, imagine when you search it creates a collection automatically out of the results and you can filter through it visually like that... We still need more computing power but Moore's Law will take care of that over the next decade. With the anti-MSFT bias, don't hold it against their research teams. They have great people. You can disagree with their commercialization strategy but that isn't coming from the technologists.
- riffic 17y agoThe difference between good and great is that great works everywhere.
- dmvaldman 17y agoI'd like to know how their collections are sorted. I think the hard problem in all this is, given a vast data set, find the parameters that give the optimal organizational scheme. But all the pretty transitions are a nice touch :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis
- jsz0 17y agoI wanted to try it out but after installing SilverLight on my Mac the Download button gives me a .MSI installer that tries to open in VMWare. Good work Microsoft, as always.