

Pivot (from Microsoft) - vijayr
http://www.getpivot.com/

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bd
For those without Silverlight here is a video:

<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.

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kierank
I would recommend watching this instead of waiting for your browser to
unfreeze after 20 seconds.

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bretpiatt
This 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
The difference between good and great is that great works everywhere.

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ig1
It'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.

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gfodor
One has to wonder how the reaction would differ if the headline said "Pivot
(from Google)"

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dchest
At least, Google's thing would work when I clicked the link. For this one I
have to install some latest Microsoft browser-disruption technology.

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gaustin
Do you have a Flash player installed? If so, what's the difference between
Adobe's browser-disruption technology and Microsoft's?

I'd agree that content requiring either is almost universally annoying, but at
some point you have to compromise if you want to investigate something that
may be worthwhile/interesting/worth ridiculing.

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simonw
It's not just Silverlight - I installed that, then tried to access the demo
URLs and was told I needed to install Pivot as well. Which isn't available for
the Mac.

[http://content.getpivot.com/Collections/dogbreeds/dogbreeds....](http://content.getpivot.com/Collections/dogbreeds/dogbreeds.cxml)

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pavs
Why would expect it to be available for the ma?. The headline clearly said its
from Microsoft.

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allenbrunson
are you aware that word, excel, powerpoint, and yes, even silverlight are all
available for the mac?

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windsurfer
Although you are right, they are, they almost certainly weren't when they
first came out.

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tremendo
Excel, the first GUI-based Word and Powerpoint were out for the Mac first in
mid-to-late 1980's. Windows wasn't ready for them. Multiplan and the original
Word were DOS apps.

I know it's irrelevant to this Post, just a historical note.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word>

~~~
allenbrunson
yep. it's hard to believe now, but microsoft was one of the early champions of
the mac. i don't know if it's still true, but at one time, microsoft's macbu
employed more mac programmers than apple itself.

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Quiark
So 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? :)

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rbanffy
You have to find something for all those cores, CPU and GPU, you have in your
computer.

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bbuffone
The one thing that I find impressive is the look of the video in SilverLight.
The video is crystal clear and no artifacts.

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jacobolus
As 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.

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bbuffone
That 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.

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jacobolus
Or don’t have as many people watching, and can afford the bandwidth?

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physcab
It'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.

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xpaulbettsx
You can make your own collections, it's relatively easy unless you have 100k+
items, then you have to write some custom server software

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est
tl;dr

silverlight deepzoom (aka seadragon) from files, db and the web.

citation: <http://www.getpivot.com/images/collections/image012.png>

~~~
xpaulbettsx
Yep - DeepZoom a PivotTable of Wikipedia

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ct
It 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.

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dmvaldman
I'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>

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AndrewDucker
It's an interesting visualisation technology - but I'm yet to be persuaded
that it's not just a neat toy.

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jsz0
I 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.

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martinkallstrom
Interesting interface, but they call data sets of "hundreds of thousands -
maybe even millions" items "massive". Ridiculous.

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Tarks
It's all in context. That's a "massive" amount of data for one human to swim
in in any reasonable level of depth.

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mattmanser
They seem to be suggesting that they 'invented' collections, bizarre.

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raquo
That's all great, but imagine how much self-evident patents were probably
filed. Like that sparklines-in-a-document patent.

