"Guy Macon" skrev i meddelelsen news:U8WdndT-kL snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...
But, predictably, they screwed that up too: CloneDVD f.ex. installs and runs just fine on Vista and one can rip as much as one likes.
I am still considering if I should try Ubuntu+WINE instead because file copying and moving really, really sucks and Vista simply does not deliver anything new at all. Disks still fragment, Network drives are single-user-logon only, power-manglement does not work unless a luser has logged in which occasionally causes the lapdog to self-discharge.
It does require its own macro set, although it's freely redistributable. The LaTeX it makes isn't particulalry messy at all -- at least in recent editions. And it can import regular LaTeX, although it imports some blocks of LaTeX commands (e.g., for graphics, tables, etc.) with "Code Block" icons since they don't contain the "secret sauce" needed to tell SWP how to display them properly.
I think SWP's biggest drawbacks are that (1) ongoing development seems to have ceased and (2) if you *do* end up getting an error while running LaTeX, it can be that much harder to debug due to having to figure out what SWP's own macros are doing.
WinEdt (not to be confused with WinEdit) is a good "middle ground" in that -- at its core -- it's just a regular old text editor... but contains lots of handy mini-wizards/tools/etc. to help generate LaTeX code for you.
Of course, the most important thing is that you have a flow that works for you, and it sounds as though you do.
I think it has a lot to do with their size as well... they've got over 30,000 folks up there in Redmond, and around 35,000 others spread around the globe. I fully realize that Microsoft is a lot more than Windows, but still -- if I had 65,000 employees, I'd be expecting something closer to a cure for cancer than a few dancing animations and flashly 3D effects.
Tektronix had huge layoffs and never returned to their original level of brilliance after management got too big for their britches. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened to Microsoft in the next few years -- they're betting a significant fraction of the farm on Windows 7, at this point.
I'd suggest that OpenOffice Calc is your friend, but I personally I was surprised they didn't even include engineering notation in the standard cell formatting options.
Probably. Some programs are polite enough to tell you that they are "phoning home" every time you start it (usually once at install time). It is easy to see on "dial-up" connections, not so visible for "always on" connections.
Agreed. But Excel 2003 rocks. '97 was even better. (at least from a VBA coding perspective.) That dot-net stuff really didn't help Excel in my humble opinion.
Sorry John. I forgot I was involved in this thread.
I do have a couple tricks for you that will help your aggrevation with Word.
When you want to place an image (JPG, etc..) in your Word Document. Insert a Text Box first. Then place your image in the text box.
If you want, you can later select the text box and get rid of the border (a little tricky to do with the mouse, because the text box and image handles almost overlap, but you'll get the hang of it.). Unless you like the border, of course.
By using a text box to hold the image, you can place it anywhere you want, whereas an image will move around a lot depending on where your other text is on the page. You can also set the wrap style for a text box directly, drag the image to the desired size, along with lots of other familiar properties, etc...
Try it out. I guarantee you you will never go back to the old way of doing it!
The command are: (In page view, preferably) Insert - Text Box, then drag out a text box where you want it. Immediately after that (the cursor will be inside the text box, click: Insert - Picture - From File (or Clipart, or ??) Boom. Problem solved.
As for changing fonts, I'm guessing it's the style that changing, not the font attribute directly. You do have to pay attention to the use of Style, or it can get pretty confusing. Especially when cutting & pasting. Sometimes the results can be unexpected.
If this happens, don't start changing the font directly. Just make the selection and change the style (dropdown). The selection will inherit all the properties of the selected style. Done!!!
Oops - I left something (minor) out. Pay some attention to where you drop the text box. If you put it too close to the edge of a page, your printer driver may not print it.
By edge, I mean too close to the physical page edge, not Word's margins. A text box (or images in a text box) outside Word's margins will still print, as long as the printer driver is OK with it. (It has to do with the way the paper transport mechanism grabs the page.)
Generally you don't want stuff that close to the edge anyway, so this trick is hardly ever a problem. -mpm
Why doesn't it just put a picture where I drag and drop it?
Interestingly, the Mac version of Word does this a lot better.
Macs do everything better. When I got my wife a Mac, the only thing that didn't work right was Word. So we gave up and shut it down. Next day, it worked great. I'm convinced that the Mac OS includes a background Word repair demon.
It's like DOS. It wasn't a total piece of Microcrap because IBM QC'd the hell out of it at source-code level.
Both the page, and the text box, are "containers" for the image. The difference is a text box does not move on its container (page), but an image does.
You know what they say.... "It is a poor workman who blames his tools."
But I do hear you loud and clear. Microsoft Word is not exactly user-friendly, and is crammed packed with a lot of features the average Joe neither wants nor uses. It's not that difficult to learn, though I agree word processing should be appliance level by now. Like a toaster oven. :)
One of my clients recently introduced me to a new phrase, using it to describe a Cadence schematic-entry product, "User carnivorous" ;-)
...Jim Thompson
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Al Gore is the Pied Piper of "Climate Change"
Alarming you with Bull Shit
While quietly sucking the IQ out of your head
I use Crimson Editor for the plain text stuff. It does everything fast and right, doesn't crash, and has sensible options.
But modern documents need graphs and pictures. I'd love something like Crimson that allowed pics and a few font effects.
I don't use Word enough to be an expert, and it's not friendly to the occasional user who just wants to type text. It's another Microsoft hack that was designed badly, in a rush to kill competition, and then featurized to death by thousands of programmers.
Of course Crimson is good: it was written by one person.
I've used Crimson for several years as my programming editor. It's quite nice and has decent language support (VHDL included ;). There are a few things I'd like to have though. There always are, so we get bloat.
That's no longer a simple editor. Images and graphics complicate things immensely. Hell, I'd like an editor with a decent graphics. Visio is ok, but has some silly defaults (like humpy wire crossings) I can't seem to get rid of. It seems to always be missing something I need too.
Sure, but like all the rest of the M$ crap, it works, sorta.
Dunno, everything is packed (moving this weekend, all the stuff in a couple of weeks). It's fairly recent because I've only been here nine months. Before that I was attempting to get SuSE working satisfactorily.
They certainly tried very hard to become a significant player in 3D as well, but were one of the first casualities of the great 3D video card wars between ATI, nVidia, 3dfx, and Matrox.
Kinda ironic that while nVidia, 3dfx, and Matrox were battling it out, ATI was just sitting on the sidelines, emphasizing cheap cards for OEMs and VIVO cards for enthusiasts. It was only after 3dfx and Matrox had died that ATI started really competing in 3D again...
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