xerxes1405241546

OpenOffice is good when it comes to standards uniformity, but it's still quite large if you just want some spreadsheet operations. A windows version of Gnumeric can do well in most circumstances as well. I've been using it together with Abiword (great, small, and simple word processor) for some time, until I needed the more advanced functions of the whole OpenOffice suite. I guess there are some other open-source alternatives to Powerpoint as well. If you just want to view Powerpoint files there are different versions of Powerpoint Viewer available from Microsoft's website for free. You can find the newest version here, while the older one (much smaller but still handles a lot of newer PowerPoint files) is available here.

Guys you miss the point - such plastic blood would be only a temporary solution, until the patient receives proper help. As I've written above, if the idea does get implemented that would be a tremendous breakthrough. Imagine everybody having such a small kit in their car med-kits. How much less accident victims would die of blood-loss. The sole consequences for police/military would be worth spending extra buck on health insurance, I think.

The real problem is the word count. You can see the page count easily, but to see the word count you have to click through several menus. And then you discover that you've missed the spot by several hundreds, so you have to go back and rewrite half of the story. That's really annoying, especially with school papers.That's true even in OpenOffice.

Have you guys watched the gameplay trailers? It does seem that just by adding a 3D environment, Blizzard added a lot depth into the gameplay. New units (and the new abilities of the old ones) aside, the battles seem much more visually attractive, and much less randomly-chaotic than before. Is almost feels like they have added quite a good physics system into the engine. You can also operate a larger number of units, which is a nice treat as well. These alone make me horny already...

I have a particular difficulty in understanding why no company has actually tried to break the vicious circle:You invest big bucks in ineffective anti-piracy systems, the prices of copyrighted media go sky-high, less people can afford your products. Where's the logic behind that? If somebody would cut the whole security-thing out, the prices would drop and less people would rely on piracy. Look how the companies were scared of releasing DRM-free media on iTunes, and it came out to be an enormous success, not mentioning the original idea, where songs are offered cheaply. Let's agree on one thing - figures that are displayed by big corporations are wrong, people who rely on piracy would not buy a record if there was no piracy. So fighting piracy is basically pointless, as you still need money to buy the original. If there is no money, no one buys anything. How much more resourceful would be to cut the prizes by 50%, instead of drowning that money in senseless pursuits. How many of you would actually buy a game if it would be 50% cheaper? I say it's worth a try, and you?

I'm constantly playing the first part with my friend over LAN. While I was checking for updates on Blizzard's page, I was stunned to notice the SC2 banner. I was literally speechless, since it was my strongest belief that the developers being focused on their fantasy Warcraft universe, will not pay attention to its S-F counterpart any more.For me personally, it would be enough if they put the whole first part into 3D. The sole results of that would bring so much more depth into the game play. From what I have seen in the trailers though, is seems they did much, much more. New units, new strategies, and whole new level of visually-stunning gameplay. It seems they won't rush it out too soon. Everything looks like being well-thought out.I'm waiting. Hopefully only till Christmas.PS. Have you noticed that the SC2 cinematic trailer downloaded is actually a bittorrent client? Just another example of how this brilliant technology can be used to means other than piracy.

I prefer open-source Miranda for the time being. I love their approach, where you start with small, bare minimum and you can customize it anyway you like with a plug-in system. There is a huge number of protocol and interface plug-ins so you can face-lift the program anyway you like, and the protocol support is not limited in any way. Even in terms of a single protocol, there are usually many ways to interact with it. It's makes my life much easier, since I have to monitor 3 protocols, two of which would not be supported by Pidgin for example. If you like the idea of Pidgin, but it's not enough for you, try Miranda and come back here to tell us about your experiences.

You'd be surprised. I was thinking exactly the same thing until I've changed my old 64MB mp3 player to a new one which can operate flash cards of up to 2GB. That is insanely handy: instead of replacing my songs with other ones every day, I can store all the songs I'm listening to at the moment, and carry them with me all the time. I can listen to any of them, at any time. The storage capacity is especially important if you have a really good player and you value high-quality music, which takes even more space. I assure you, you can run out of 8GB quite fast. Seeing that you have a hard time filling even 2GBs of storage space, I guess it depends on personal tastes mostly, with some people just needing more songs at hand. Flash uses less power and has no moving parts (=longer MTBF); HD offer more storage space and they are faster for the same price. No matter the mp3s case we are all discussing, the important thing is that the faster such new and good technologies (faster and larger flash memory in this case) are introduced into popular uses (cell-phones), the sooner they will become cheaper and affordable in less popular areas (I'm still waiting for regular flash-based computer "hard" drives). Therefore, any news about such useful technologies being advanced, are very, very good news.

A sound idea I must say . Too bad it looks like faulty.lee explained. When it come to wireless audio I'm still waiting for "digital signal over radio waves" to hit affordable prizes and single-user market (ex. Fantaay audio systems). Regular radio-based systems provide too much noise (even if the system is really high quality, like those by Sennheiser, there is still chance for plenty of external interference) and the infrared-based sets are far from being comfortable.

Actually, the copyright holders could give a permission for one/first episode (or the first 30mins of a movie) to be available on-line so people would buy those more often. The quality of the episodes on-line is far from HD or what DVD offers, and such sites would encourage people to buy stuff they can't see on TV, otherwise who would buy a TV series on DVD or in HD without even knowing if they like the series; if they see it on TV, not much sense in buying it either. In fact, that may the reason why the sites haven't been taken down already.

Well come on, if the same user is posting the same thing over and over (and it IS illegal), there is a pretty limited number of tools you can use. The key is not copyrighted in itself, making it public is illegal as doing so serves no other goal but disabling the encryption of the original media (which is, in the light of law and the license you agreed to obtaining the media, illegal).

To be honest, being a die-hard OS tweaker, I've tried nView several times, and every time I was left with only partially stable system. Don't get me wrong, I've read everything before going with that piece of software but some pieces of code are so deeply integrated into the (closed-source) system, that you don't really know what will fail after you finish cutting the crap out. Having said that, I do believe that nView is a unique kind of software, and I find it extremely helpful in automating some rather tedious tasks during installation of Windows XP. Let's hope that the cutting engine will reach perfection in the upcoming versions.

You may start with the Announcement forum, where all the basics has already been explained.

There are some programmes (ZoneAlarm, Spybot Search & Destroy) that can mark your hosts file as "read-only" so it cannot be modified so easily. I'm not sure if doing the same thing manually gives the same effect.

Brilliant in its simplicity! I'm actually a manager at the place where I work but the tech guys had to disable the command prompt due to constant misuse by people with lower access classes. This way (especially the MS Office trick) I will be able to use the CMD (which will ease my work a lot) not only from my own machine, but also from the terminals all over the place. Thanks!

Gimp is simply different. It has a different user interface, which probably scares a lot of die-hard Photoshop fans. Then again I used Photoshop in the past and I had no problems switching to open-source. Anyway, these days it's even easier to switch since mods exist, which make Gimp's interface exactly same as the ones within the "big league brothers."I won't argue that Gimp is better than Photoshop, I'm not a professional. But I do believe that they are aimed at different styles of usage. Just compare the sizes of both programs (few MB vs. few hundred MB). In addition, I think the learning curve in Adobe's software is a bit more steep. Bottom line, if you need a small but advanced software for simple (and sometimes complex) image editing, why not to try the handy, open-source Gimp instead of the enormous and pricey Photoshop?

Well, in my opinion the limits were imposed due to excessive usage and a large number of users the system wasn't really able to handle efficiently enough.Such measures are usually introduced for the good of all users, which leads to higher service quality for all of them (shorter waiting times, faster speeds). If some of those users abuse the system, all the other get lower quality service in the long run. Keep that in mind, when you are about to cheat a service that is provided to you free of charge...

Thanks, must have missed the big cPanel tutorial.

Your computer needs to connect to DNS servers whenever a domain is specified (http://www.domain.com/) instead of a raw IP address, so storing any addresses locally is way faster. To put it clearly: adblock lets you download the add but blocks the display of such ad, other mentioned programs block the computer from even connecting to the ad server, effectively halting the add download. Again, adblock just blocks the display of ads, not their downloading. If you have an old machine (and slow net connection) the machine will probably be more burdened with the download processing rather than the sole display of said ads. Then again, there are flash ads which slowly make Internet unusable on old machines anyway. A known problem in Windows XP and 2000, following is a solution: I agree with that absolutely. When I was starting my "adventure" with broadband Net I was so much into ad blocking... But then I've realised that blocking stops revenue site owners expect to get, which in turn may destroy the pages I surf through, in the long run (especially the private or non-profit ones). Let's remember that hosting is not always free, and not everybody has so much luck to be able to pay for services like those of Xisto. If somebody is putting an ad on his site, they have a reason for that, and we should respect it. If you don't like some particular kinds of ads, just don't visit the sites that employ them. On the other hand, I agree that most commercial pages overuse different ads systems considerably, and more efficient ways should be found to stop intrusive pop-ups of all kinds. Still, ads integrated into pages don't bother me at all. Let's remember that on a secure system, unexpected pop-ups are usually a sign of an unwanted malware infection. If a trojan gets installed on my system, I would like to see the pop-ups as a warning and take action ASAP.

I'm hosted here, with a domain I got elsewhere. People I got the domain from claim that if they don't host me, they can't change the Mail Exchange entries for me. Should I do it here?

tomshardware.com released quite a review of Vista's Performance Indices. It shows perfectly how far those benchmarking tools are (in)accurate.

Well I'll join the minority and say I do shut the thing down, along all power to my rig (one switch for them all). I do this every night. Reason? Perhaps, like WeaponX, in part due to habit. Still, lifespan is out of question for me since, let's face it, I will probably have several new routers with newer technology before my current one dies of natural causes. Other than that, I don't feel like wasting electricity without a reason (and it's not about the money). Then again, I haven't known about dry joints thing. I'm off to read about it.

nicholas2, you mentioned that WinXP is better than Linux. May I ask in what way (apart from gaming of course)? What distro are you using?

I've heard about them before, but never checked them out myself... And now I see they even have Hackers! I'll be needing a lot of free time then. But seriously, I wonder how come they are not afraid of lawsuits, I mean even torrent trackers were shut down while only providing "links" to content not provided on their own servers. Here you have direct access to clearly illegal stuff. I'll be watching them closely just to see how the bullies will try to tackle them. EDIT: Now, that I think of it, they can't even take the stance similar to that of a search engine (where the content is found "accidentally"). Their site was built specifically for providing access to copyrighted material, and only administrators can post the links (unlike torrent browsers, where links are submitted by users). This case is really curious.

As I've mentioned, ease of use is one thing. Compatibility is another. No way an OS is becoming popular if it cannot run newest PC games. As for business use, I guess MAC OS X isn't more compatible than linux, and the latter one has the enormous advantage of being free...