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...but it totally screwed me over because of this problem. I have an Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott Core) and a Shuttle SB61G2 that I bought about five months ago. It just so happens that this particular processor/mobo combo causes WinXP to totally hang.

And as an added bonus, when I tried to update my BIOS to fix the problem, it appeared to work, right up until I restarted and got nothing but a black screen. Thankfully it was all still under warranty, and NewEgg is replacing the Shuttle (with the latest version). All I was out was the $6 for shipping and the week without that computer. Still sucks, but it could have been worse.

1) Differences between RP on windows and Linux. RP10 on Linux is, as I mention on the player project page, an effort at creating a easy to use, functional and fast media player for Linux that works hard at confirming to standards and being a good citizen in the linux world. The design focus for us thus was to find a balance between advanced functionality and most used functionality. Whenever in doubt the vote went for keeping things simple than complex - a decision that has been well recieved by the thousands of users who downloaded the player. On the whole, RP10 for Linux is all about creating a solid platform on which we can build exciting features. RP10 for windows has passed that phase and has a lot more features (premium content and services, media management, cd burning, portable device support etc.) Some of these features will surely find their way into RP10 for Linux, but the idea has not been to create a clone of the windows player. Hopefully the increasing number of helix developers will influence positively the direction that Helix Player will take, adding innovations that propel themselves into the next versions of the Linux RealPlayer as well.

2) BHOs
This is tricky. BHOs are a microsoft/IE invention. The idea is very typical of how microsoft does things - give a lot of power to the developer/sitedesigner. And as it often happens with such ideas, they are double edged swords - BHOs have become notorious by their association with spyware. Nevertheless, a lot of companies (including Microsoft) install BHOs to offer rich functionality to the end users. My only comment here is that with the advent of Windows XP SP2 which includes a feature called "Internet Explorer Addon Management" the BHOs will become less maligned and more manageable.

Those links all go to his (slow) Web site, which then redirects to the mirrors themselves.

Direct links:
WMV: External Overview of Creative Zen PMC: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
WMV: Demo of Portable Media Center UI: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
Gallery of Images from Creative Zen PMC Mirror 1 Mirror 2

Those links all go to his (slow) Web site, which then redirects to the mirrors themselves.

Direct links:
WMV: External Overview of Creative Zen PMC: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
WMV: Demo of Portable Media Center UI: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
Gallery of Images from Creative Zen PMC Mirror 1 Mirror 2

Those links all go to his (slow) Web site, which then redirects to the mirrors themselves.

Direct links:
WMV: External Overview of Creative Zen PMC: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
WMV: Demo of Portable Media Center UI: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
Gallery of Images from Creative Zen PMC Mirror 1 Mirror 2

Here you go. The short reason why there is no "Reveal Codes" option is because Word doesn't work that way.

If you know a way to make this problem stop, please do tell me (but don't just say "well you must not have told the installer to install onto the disk", because I did).

I've never seen that problem, and I've used all of the Office products since Office 2000 (and before). While you don't want me to say so, it does sound like an installation problem on your part. You might try the Word MVP site for more help.

Word has plenty of problems, especially in the realm of lists and numbering (I can never seem to get my lists to number correctly, or consistently, or indent properly, if I'm working on a sufficiently large file). However, the complaint that makes up nearly half of Dvorak's article is his own damned fault. Why? He obviously doesn't understand the Office installer. When you install, you're given several choices for how to install the feature:

• Install to the hard drive
• Install to the hard drive on first use (requires CD)
• Run from the CD (never installs to the hard drive, but will prompt you for the CD)
• Disable (don't install the feature, don't prompt for the disk, not available for all features)

His other points are trivial, or have already been addressed.

• Ever-changing .doc format: Yes, the doc format changes. How else are new features supposed to be saved? However, Office has XML-based formats that work quite well now, too (since Office2K, even!)
• Poor HTML output: This is not Word's domain. Yes, Word can save to HTML. Yes, it's gotten much better since it was introduced in Office 97. No, it's still not all that great. However, it's a workable solution if you need a quick 'n dirty solution to turn a Word document into HTML. If your target is HTML, with no requirement at all for a doc version, you should use Frontpage. Frontpage has gotten much better as well, and actually generates fairly clean HTML. No, it'll never be as clean as if you had done it by hand, but it's still damned good.
• Plain-text in Word: Who does this? Why? Get a real text editor. Even Notepad is preferable to Word when dealing with plain text. That's fine, because plain-text is not Word's domain either.

Found a hosts file "configured" for extensive "parasite" blocking from an unexpected source
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

just replace 127.0.0.1 with 0.0.0.0
and remember to change localhost back.

Or a host file update! I use the host file from this website: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/ it's updated every month. That in conjunction with Firefox and no ads! Yay!

For those wondering, "MVP" is a title bestowed by Microsoft basically to people who help out others in the microsoft.* newsgroups and such. You can find a webpage of a couple of these peope at http://www.mvps.org/.

These aren't Microsoft partner companies or licensee developers by definition, an MVP can well be just some pimply 13 year old that happens to now a whole lot about IIS and shares it with others. As you'd expect there's a lot of emphasis on getting Microsoft applications to work, arcane Internet Explorer settings, scripting, that sort of thing.

These people, for the most part, aren't kernel hackers. If they were, they'd be busy hacking away at *BSD or linux, not figuring out VBA stuff in Excel.

It's hard to see how this will benefit Microsoft directly, in the way of open-ish source. It's not like an elite squad of kernel hackers will be pouring over the source code to find race conditions in inter process communications or something like that. Though perhaps it will help MVPs to explain to others what suitably vague-enough error messages actually mean by looking at the source code that produced it.

(I'm no kernel hacker myself by a long shot, and given the source code to windows I'd.. well.. shrug, I suppose).

All good suggestions.. I also like Toolbarcop .. to see if anything snuck itself in. Great for cleaning systems infected to the tits with BHOs that Adaware/Spybot don't find (yes, these do exist).

Base: An up to date host file. This can probably block 95% of web nasties, regardless of source, yet is overlooked by most people.
Second: Proxomitron. The second browser-independent tool, it's a relatively little-known local proxy that filters the crap (including more ads than virtually every other solution) from a webpage before feeding it to your browser. Also handily removes most of the ActiveX and Javascript that causes these exploits. I simply cannot recommend it enough. In addition, it's fully configurable, and there are plenty of people out there who will write custom filters to get rid of any sort of ad that slips through.
Third: Firefox. I hesitate to suggest Opera because I don't feel it's as high a quality a product, and is closed-source, meaning it could be almost as susceptible to this stuff as Internet Explorer, should the bad guys aim their sights on it.
Fourth: In-browser plugins such as Adblock, which probably won't do much to stop this particular problem, but are nice to have around regardless.

How to avoid corrupt documents
TipsAndGotchas
In one of these links they say that cut-n-pasting from the web will break documents. I agree since I actually experienced it and switched to OpenOffice!

How to avoid corrupt documents
TipsAndGotchas
In one of these links they say that cut-n-pasting from the web will break documents. I agree since I actually experienced it and switched to OpenOffice!

A counterexample

Mock me if you will, but there was once a book called Hardcore Visual Basic. It was one of the few intelligent books written on the subject. I'm not a big VB fan, but I can appreciate how it once was a great RAD tool. I wished all of Microsoft's VB-like documentation looked like this. It was rigorous and concise.

I remember all of the laughs I got when I went around the office asking if anyone had ever heard of a VB book written for C++ programmers. Of course, my smart-ass smirk probably didn't help. Ironically, I found out that a good dose of the Win32 API in C++ and a 20-minute tutorial from a fellow colleague would have probably been the best route. Still, half of VB's problem is Microsoft's overall tendency to suck the brain out of the developer's head. While this might be okay for an end-user, I can't recommend doing this to developers.

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."

Like everything else in life, there's nothing wrong with bragging if you can do it. Sure, we mock such cliché verbiage, like the line above. Dickens' can pull off such an overdramatic line. I can't. I can't make a 1000 page tome interesting. Tolstoy could. So, if a book is hardcore, let it be. If it isn't, it will make a mockery of itself.

The cruel irony

Apparently the author got so sick of Microsoft ruining a perfectly good thing, he decided to stop coding VB altogether. You can see a copy of his vented frustrations here. His fellow VB coders mocked him for trying to get a language to do more than it was supposed to. If that ain't hardcore, I don't know what is. I think he's writing Java code now.

That's funny, explain to me how WhenU (WhenU Search, USave!) suddenly appeared on my friend's computer without any action on his part, and without any EULA being displayed. Actually, I'll tell you. As he told me "I was just reading an article online, and all of a sudden, this big window popped up, a bunch of new icons appeared on my desktop, and I have this new toolbar in Internet Explorer. I never clicked 'yes' to anything!"

The icons on his desktop (o, o.bat, and some executables whose names I forget) were part of a CoolWebSearch infestation. If you look here you'll see that this installs by itself using a vulnerability in Internet Explorer. One of the packages it had downloaded was WhenU. Now I'm sure WhenU will say "This was done by an independant contractor. We had no knowledge of it!" but they still pay this "independant contractor" for the ad revenue. These guys have just as much right to forcefully install advertising software on my computer as I have to break into your house and paint "visit slashdot.org" on your wall. Which is to say, none.

How can I recover a corrupt document or template - and why did it become corrupt?

Some Tips and "Gotchas" for those who are new to Word

How can I recover a corrupt document or template - and why did it become corrupt?

Some Tips and "Gotchas" for those who are new to Word

please tell me where the Word reveal codes command is

Tools -> options -> "view" tab -> reveal codes

That's the global setting, if you just want to reveal a particular code (or only for part of a document), select and use shift+F9

http://www.mvps.org/word is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn to use Word more effectively.

I know this is unlikely to get me anything other than slated on slashdot, but if you take the time to learn to use it, Word is actually very powerful.

For those of you who want to eliminate a ton of ads using this method, you can find several friendly host files on the net.

Here a couple that I have used:

mvps.org

yoyo.org

AC

Are there other, genuine examples of MS community sites? Or alternatively, attempts that are obviously MS driven? I'm just interested to compare the strength of the OSS community with the MS community (yes I know they are not logically exclusive, but in reality it seems to be pretty much the case).

Yes. http://www.mvps.org/

It's a community-run site for assistance and aid in using Office. I've found it rather invaluable in figuring out Office.

There are a lot of good lists of sites to block.

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
http://www.smartin-designs.com/ (discontinued, but links are good)
http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

See here, and here to disable them (Win2k/XP only). For Linux, I assume you know how to remap your keyscan codes.

"ms-word cant do automatic page numbering? huh? perhaps you meant the user was just too dumb to be using a computer"

Nice as it would be to dismiss computer users like that, the page-numbering error was actually a well-known bug in MS-Word. FAQ

Affected: Word 97, Word 2000, both in different ways, both have workarounds rather than fixes, and some only become apparent when you print a document, which could be an expensive mistake if you have something large to print, and only notice "page 351 of 1" too late.

"One interesting thing we've found is taht there are many issues resolved by "the community", i.e. non-MS employees that are subject matter experts. I don't know the details on this but I think we make an effort to track who is and isn't a great contributor and maybe they get some sort of compensation or recognition or something."

Due to customer feedback and requests for more direct Microsoft involvement, we are changing our newsgroups strategy. ... The MVP program will no longer be in operation effective 12/1/99.
--Joseph Lindstrom, Director Business Development, October 22, 1999

It implied it was only interested in who provides community support to whom, which implies they are only tracking the microsoft.public.* groups, which they own, host and propogate.

I don't think they're interested in who's posting to alt.binaries.linus.naked. More Slashdot FUD folks, nothing to see here.

Have any of you heard of the Microsoft MVP program? It is a way to recognize the people who provide free peer support in the MS newsgroups. To be nominated as an MVP you must have a certain number of correct and relevant responses in the newsgroups. How else are they going to pick someone to be an MVP if they can't track?

If you really want to, you can always put the host in your /etc/hosts file so you won't have to see em again.

Or, just use this: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

Word takes a more modern (but not necessarily better) approach by applying styles to containers. I imagine that OOo works the same way. Note that both have much better style sheet abilities than WordPerfect..

See this page for details.

Here's a free clue: VB.NET != VB7. Let me know when you can port your code verbatim into VB.NET and we'll talk.

Right off the bat, you just fucked up your elegant flame. Feeling stupid already?

Even if that was true (it's not)

My, my. Did I get you all riled up because of this? Yes, they skipped versions. Big fucking deal.

total poser

Bwahahaha. I guess that must be true, since "SecretAsianMan" says so. "Poser", that's quite a word. You must be fresh out of high school.

Me. At you.

Well now, that hurts.

Have you seen the HTML produced by the current "Save as webpage .." options in Word? shudder. The vast majority of semantics are actually embedded in XML islands hidden inside HTML comments. I see no reason why Microsoft would change their tune now (they'll simply change the DTD from one inappropriate document model to another one IMHO).

Those are there so you can "round trip" a file from doc/xls/ppt to ms-htm and back, without losing all of your MS-only formatting.

MS has a utility, which I use on a regular basis at work to strip out the HTML for you. It's called HTML filter

(Go to http://www.mvps.org/word/ for more useful bits about word.)

XML, unlike HTML, actually can express everything that office does. MS will use it 99%, possibly adding their 1% extra back into the spec, and let their penetration and familiarity secure their market share.

Trust me--if MS can get Wordperfect 2004 to use XML to "keep up," they'll be able to beat out their last real competitor in the few markets were it's still entrenched. The biggest problem with MS Word has been roundtrips to Wordperfect; XML can solve that problem if done properly, far better than HTML can.



I'm sorry, you don't appear to have a StandardsEnhanced(tm) word processor.
--

Not going to happen. I could cut and paste some code from a MS-Office HTML file right into this slashbox, and you'd be able to read it just fine. (assuming the lameness filter doesn't get me first.)

MS Word does not create documents like Wordperfect does. It's more like a CSS file than HTML, keeping track of the formatting of each letter, word, paragraph, page, and section seperately, rather than having "start formatting" and "end formatting" tags.

To get word to work right, turn off the "define styles based on your formatting" function in the Autocorrect menu ("Autoformat as you type" tab). Then use files for any difference in font or heading, making new ones as you go.

Using word this way lets you seperate the content from the presentation (as much as a word processor can), and allows for rather easy editing.

Wordperfect lets you reveal codes, but Word doesn't litter extra codes everywhere.

See http://www.mvps.org/word/Default.htm for more information on Word. I wish that the help file was half this good...

You can do pointer arithmetic in VB - see http://www.mvps.org/vb/index2.html?tips/varptr.htm . Don't ask why I needed to be able to do this - it's a sad sad tale.

Dunno about inline ASM, but I'd like to see an example of how to if it's possible...

It seems to me that good developers are those who can
*) develop code on their own
*) collaborate with others to produce code
*) apply code that has already been developed to a new project

And the job of a CS program is to produce people who can do all three of these things.

In my experience, collaborating and applying pre-developed code is an important part of development in The Real World. It's pointless to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already come up with a workable solution. That's why there are websites like the Access Web.

It's also seems to me that it's fairly likely that people will create similar looking (and even identical) code independently, especially for basic programs, given the push for coding standards.

Now, none of this suggests that Georgia Tech is wrong to use their cheat-finder program, but I'd be wary about relying on such a program as your sole gauge as to whether a person is cheating (or, more importantly, if it's your sole gauge to determine if a person is *learning*) which, thankfully, doesn't sound like it's the case at GA Tech.

In response to the comments about bad developers, it seems to me that if people are getting CS degrees (or any kind of certification) without the basic skills, the problem isn't just that they're cheating; the problem is that the institutions that are granting those degrees are not teaching their students the right skills and/or are not testing those skills rigorously enough. And simply saying "write a program that does X and doesn't look like anyone else's" is not enough, IMHO.

But then, I *don't* have a CS degree, so what do I know? :-)

-- D.

Hmm, hard to find a definitive source. But, some support for that assertion is here ("10Eh : 320x200 64k-colour (5:6:5)", "111h : 640x480 64k-colour (5:6:5)", ...) and here ("16 bit color depth is supported through several different bit arrangements, including 5-5-5 and 5-6-5.").

Microsoft = Worst manuals, ever! They're really of any use once you've gone through some of the better IDG publications and have an idea what tool you're really going to need for the application, as some manuals are organized by alpha, and have no index at all (e.g. Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Language Reference)

IMHO, the best first book for VB is O'Reilly's VB in a Nutshell, if you care to even learn the language. The M$ books are matches of what comes with the online help, and it's ok for some things, but the depth just isn't there. I've coded for over 20 years in a dozen languages and have some pretty definite ideas of my approach to a problem, when I can't get it to work in the language and the help only goes so far I hit msdn, pbdr.com, vbnet, and anything else I can find with Google. Ultimately, for sophisticated code, VB is just plain weak. Nice visual interface and builder, but the language should have died at Quick Basic.

As far as the code-less application, yeah, try to do any _real_ database work that way. Foo.

try this book :
The Microsoft File by Wendy Goldman Rohm
or this one
Undocumented Windows by A Schulman
or this one
Unauthorized Windows 95 by Andrew Schulman

or this one :

Undocumented Windows NT, by Prasad Dabak, Sandeep Phadke, and Milind Borate
example chapter

Here's a whole bookstore making money from undocumented Windows API calls :
http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/bookstore.html

what something online?

try here http://www.vbworld.com/api/shelldoc/

a password cracking utility that uses Win32 undocumented api calls to display the currently logged user's password

API: Access/Office and AddressOf Operator

some more software

is that enough yet ?


.oO0Oo.

a famous example is Microsoft's interpretation of the scope of variables declared inside the conditional section of a for loop. with "for(int i..." in standard C++, i's scope is for the duration of the loop