Laptop.

[The Natural Philosopher]

75/1200. the original ADSL...;-)

[Bambleweeny57]

5 bit chars ?

BW

[Tim W]

Adrian C wibbled on Saturday 17 October 2009 12:41

Haha - very good :')

But why would Tux use WD40?

To unjam a deadlocked process? Reset sticky bits?...

[Tim W]

Owain wibbled on Saturday 17 October 2009 18:55

When we managed to overdrive the link to the pad to 9600 we danced naked by the moon and sacrificed a virgin.

[Tim W]

Chris Bartram wibbled on Saturday 17 October 2009 17:30

When SWMBO was doing her PhD, I looked at all the MS Word books in the local (big and academically inclined) bookshop.

I was looking for a book that told you how to use Word to manage giant documents spilt into sub documents, achieve correct and consistent formatting and generate tables of contents etc.

There did not seem to be any such book. All were pretty much 200 page variations on "Word in 21 days" or whatever. No thanks - I know how Help works... No wonder no one really uses it "properly".

Binned that and made her learn LaTeX instead - which was less than trival as it had to do Chinese characters too (on linux in 1997).

[John Rumm]

Some of the missing features I alluded to in another post. This is an area that highlights just how poor it is for technical documentation or any quantity.

(I believe for many many years Microsoft's legal departments still used (may still do - I don't know!) WordPerfect due to the lack of decent support for legal capabilities like pleading tools, table of authorities etc that were missing from word (and most other WPs to be fair).

The moment you want bidirectional cross references up and down a hierarchy of dependent docs you are stuffed. Something one meets with regularly when you need conformance cross reference tables for requirements traceability. (i.e. to be able to look in a requirement spec and immediately see on which pages of the design spec a given requirement is satisfied, or look in a detailed design document and be able to trace your way back to its requirement, or its implementation in the high level design etc).

That will achieve a level of consistency or presentation that is very hard to achieve with a wysiwyg word processor. A good commercial example would be Andy Tanenbaum's book "Computer Networks" - produced entirely using LaTeX type tools.

[John Rumm]

Indeed, I have had clients ask "how can we include our logo in the legal disclaimer on all our emails?" many times. Even if you point out that a good number of recipients won't be able to see it, and some will even be annoyed by it, they still insist.

[John Rumm]

Flush the water out of his AK47s obviously ;-)

[John Rumm]

When I splashed out £250 (a damn good price at the time) on my first V22bis modem (when bis was new, and MNP4 & 5, data compression, and error correction were something to boast about), I did worry for a couple of days prior to its arrival whether I had made the right purchasing solution spending the extra on a 2400 bps unit - would the phone lines hack it, would I find enough other equally fast modems to talk to to make it worth while!

(need not have worried - the adaptive equalisation employed in the V22bis standard actually gave more reliable comms that the previous generations of 1200/1200 modems).

[John Rumm]

I have an ubunto system (plus various others) running inside MS VirtualPC[1] That lets windows see it (and all other OSes) as a single application, and it can see windows drives etc. They share network (but each has its own IP address etc). Inside the virtual box, the OS sees a single processor system. The file system, and any partitions used by the virtual PC are held in a single file visible to windows.

[1] VMWare would probably be a better choice - it can be a pain getting decent screen resolutions setup under VirtualPC for ubuntu

[Rod]

Quite a few years ago I was tasked with producing quite a large, complex document. Handling it as multiple sub-documents with a master seemed the perfect solution. Launched on that path and initially all seemed well. But as I worked I found more and more problems such a Table of Contents being entirely un-regenerateable and styles not working properly. Eventually the whole thing became corrupt and unopenable. Luckily I only lost a few minutes of work but I was forced to revert to a single huge document - which also worried me.

Only then did I start searching the internet (it was in the days of dial-up only for ordinary mortals and no access at work) and read some of the horror stories. I got away lightly.

Which all seemed such a pity given the way I had first learned Word (Word 5 on a Mac) and what I had achieved with it. And at that time it still made sense.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Word is OK for reports and letters. You don't write books in word, nor do you do graphics if you can help it.

For a program that merely has to place printed words on paper, interleaved with text, its hugely too complex.

Not sure what the definitive book writing software is..possibly LaTex or maybe quark...

[Rod]

A lot of the time for the simple stuff the old Write application was acceptable. Or even, just about, WordPad.

If you are into DTP, maybe InDesign? I certainly have enjoyed playing around in it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Mmm. Quark is THE definitive type SETTING software. InDesign is not as good, but its easier to use.

[Dave Liquorice]

This is marketing stuff not business email, they are trying to sell me something about their wonderful product/service/offers but the first thing they say is that my mail client is broken! Not good to tell your prospective customer that they have a broken mailer when the real problem is their broken understanding of the medium they are trying to use to communicate.

Business email is a bit different but most of that arrives as a Word or Excel attachment anyway, unless it's the informal memo type communication.

[Owain]

What, a whole virgin each?

Owain

[John Rumm]

Quark *was* the default app of choice. They did little in response to InDesign 1, and the result was later versions are now eating their client base! Many publishing houses are moving over to InDesign now.

[Rod]

Including the Ikea catalogue producers and many magazines, so I understand.

Really didn't help that Quark couldn't natively produce PDF output for the printers (for quite a long time after it became a common approach). That Quark charged a fortune for the international edition which was required for everyone who needed anything other than US.

[Mark]

There isn't one for MS Office '97!

[Mark]

I still see this and indents created with a mixture of spaces and tabs. Worse still multiple hits on the return key to put text on the next page and even headers and footers manually placed within the main document.