MS makes MS Works filters available for Office. The support for Works word processing documents is pretty good. Odds are that importing a Works document will be fine. The support for Works spreadsheets is spotty. Some versions are supported and some aren't. Works databases are pretty much completely hopeless. The following links will get you started:
Have your Office CD on hand when you install any of these or just Run All from disk when you install Office. That is much easier and drives these days are big enough for Kitchen Sink installs of Office.
There are also some commercial solutions if encounter one of the holes in Office's support for Works. I don't know how well any of them work.
The Linux kernel is very aggressive about caching and buffering memory. I suspect the subsequent relaunch performance would drop a bit if you loaded up and stopped a few other large apps or even better a few large files in Gimp. That would kick a lot of those cached memory pages out of the caches.
They're still trying to glom onto the mantal of "Old SCO". They have tried to imply that Caldera == "Old SCO" to both the market and the courts. Flatly not true. This is not true irregardless of what they happen to sell in addition to their primary business of trying to steal Linux from it's rightful creators with lawyers.
They don't want anybody to remember that they were Caldera. That effort is what we should not permit.
I think the idea is to keep it clear that SCO is a failed Linux company that bought a dying UNIX for the purpose of fomenting lawsuits. SCO wants very much to be thought of as a legitimate UNIX company. Let's not permit that.
I've wondered how much dealing with animals is part of the martial arts. Surely the ninja or samurai on a midnight mission has had to deal with the odd dog or two.
You have to do some digging but there are unofficial OS X builds that even do the ".app" stuff properly and launch X and so forth transparently. It looks and feels quite nice (though not "Maclike") for all that it is an X11 application. A major fly in the ointment is that it only uses fonts that come with it and can't recognize the Mac format fonts on the system (dfonts and so-forth). Additional fonts can be installed but the process is clunky.
Reiser4 implements it own VFS and does intrusive things to the host OS' VFS. Kernel coders don't want a duplicate VFS and want to incorporate features at the appropriate level of the kernel. Reiser wants his filesystem to be differentiated on features and most clearly does NOT want other filesystems gaining them (futile) and that requires the duplication which the kernel devs (rightfully) don't like.
I doubt Mr. Reiser would have much better luck with the kernel devs on any of the BSDs.
Even a five dollar off coupon on the upcoming DVD would go some little way towards easing that bruised sensation in my rear anatomy that going to movies gives me. And I'm not referring to the mere discomfort from those weedy airline seats all the theatres seem to be using these days.
Modern kit that has been well designed should not introduce perceptible distortion unless operated out of spec. The distortion levels of even moderately priced kit have been ridiculously low for years. As I pointed out in my earlier post, tube equipment that hasn't been designed for linearity will color the sound even when clipping is not involved. Tube equipment also tends to have fairly large transformers in the output stages. This too can color sound unless the amp's designer accounts for it. Some people like it but it isn't particularly correct unless maybe listening to really old recordings engineered with old tube gear in mind.
The harmonics you speak of are indeed a consequence of clipping either in a preamp or final stage. If a sine wave fundamental and successive odd-number harmonics are added to each other one at a time, the result will resemble a square wave more and more as each harmonic is added. Modern solid-state amps operating in the linear region of their power band should not introduce perceptible distortion. Of course, overly cheap solid state kit doesn't have the headroom to prevent this at more than low listening levels. There is no longer any such thing as cheap tube gear. If the same money is spent on solid state kit that is spent on tube kit, then even vs. odd distortion shouldn't enter into which amp is better. By the time you've spent that much money, you'll realize the room and the speakers make a much larger difference than what the amps are made of.
Incidentally, for those who like the sound of the old tube gear, you can buy line level tube amps that even let you control the amount of "warmth" in the sound. Unless the solid state finals you drive them with are cranked too high, the difference is imperceptible.
IIRC Gibbs Phenonemon is the latest evil to be recognized by vinylphiles.
The vinylphiles may have point there. I wouldn't any Gibbs on my equipment either. Be it Andy, Barry, Maurice, or Robin, I don't wan't it going through my speakers. 100% Pure Evil.
It is a quantifiable phenonenom. When solid state devices are overdriven , the tops and bottoms of the waveforms are sharply clipped off. The result resembles square waves. When tube devices are overdriven, the tops and bottoms of the waveforms take on a rounded "squashed" appearance. Both of these effects can easily be seen on o-scopes and heard by not particularly discerning ears. The distortion produced by overdriven tube equipments sounds more pleasant and accounts for the "warmth".
If we are talking about correctly designed playback equipment being operated properly, there is no audio quality reason to prefer one over the other. Clipping only occurs when an amplifier cannot amplify a signal further. This is not the regime you want your home stereo equipment to be operating in. Tube playback equipment that is not particularly linear (the amplification curve of indifferently designed tube equipment is gently "S" shaped) can sound "warm" even when not overdriven. I'd rather leave how the audio should sound to the artist and trust my equipment to accurately reproduce the artist's intention. Other than basic adjustments like volume or compensating for speakers that don't have a very good low or high end, I don't want my stereo coloring the sound for me.
If we are talking about playing music rather than mere playback, then tube amps have considerably more merit to them. A guitar player may intentionally choose to overdrive his amp or preamp as a way of altering timbre. Tube guitar amps are even set up to allow control over when and how this overdrive occurs. Typically, this will done in a preamp rather than the final amps as any device in the overdrive state is running very hot and using more power. For that matter, even solid state guitar amps can be intentionally overdriven although the idea is to intentionally introduce harshness rather than warmth.
Distros tend to bundle an older version of the mplayer plugin that is flakier, feature stripped, and isn't as compatible with sites. Most of my mplayer plugin problems went away when I built a 3.x version of it myself.
Pop artists are backed up by a stable of studio musicians and probably songwriters for that matter. Someone like Britney may sing well but she doesn't even have to do that because her voice can be tweaked in real time by equipment. For that matter, the band only has to play somewhat compently although studio musicians tend to know what they're doing technically even if they are discouraged (probably) from applying any of their own imagination. The entire performance can be tweaked in real time now.
Billy Ray Cyrus came from the area I grew up in. When he was signed, his band thought they had hit the big time too. Wrong. After the summer road tour and maybe a demo tape, his band was dropped like a bad habit and replaced with studio guys. On the other hand, Steely Dan was doing that long before it occurred to the labels to do it. They write good pop but aren't all that good live. Going to a Dan show won't be unpleasant though because they have always surrounded themselves with competent sidemen. Come to think of it, Jean-Luc Ponty did the same thing. Did anyone ever go to one of his shows to see the goofy violin player with an overinflated opinion of himself? His bands made him look better than he really was too.
Britney's voice all by itself wouldn't carry her. Pavarotti she is not. Without the sideman and technical help and the all important hype and branding, she'd be flipping burgers somewhere. I have absolutely no guilt about ripping on the likes of Britney Spears.
The version of this everybody was talking about two years ago didn't work that way. These things came in either oxygen-proof or light-proof packaging. As soon as the disc was exposed to the environment then the clock started ticking. You could use the disc as a normal DVD for 24 hours before the data layer degraded beyond readability. So if you had to leave the house, go back to the beginning, take out the DVD for a bit, or whatever you could. You just had to be done within 24 hours is all.
There are a quite a few major transistions all happening at the same time. Debian is adopting the GCC 4.x ABI for C++, going from XFree86 to X.Org, and there are new releases of KDE and GNOME. Because of when Sarge froze, these all started hitting Unstable at the same time. I went through this with Breezy over the summer. There just isn't a smooth way for a development distro to handle this many at once. I'm sure Gentoo's dev branch went through it to but I bet they only got them one at a time. Come to think of it, they went GCC 4.x pretty early. That is the ugliest one and has directly affects KDE and GNOME.
Once these are over, Debian Unstable will be its usual not-really-unstable self.
Is "homebrew software development" the new euphemism for "piracy"?
Check out www.atariage.com. The homebrew scene around the A2600 is quite healthy. The other Atari consoles also have homebrew scenes although A2600 development is the most active. There have also been some nifty ColecoVision homebrews out lately as well. AtariAge sells many of these.
Slashdot Mirror
Sir, I wish I had mod points. +5 f'ing hilarious.
Some of us DID understand. Sadly, you have gotten your wish.
MS makes MS Works filters available for Office. The support for Works word processing documents is pretty good. Odds are that importing a Works document will be fine. The support for Works spreadsheets is spotty. Some versions are supported and some aren't. Works databases are pretty much completely hopeless. The following links will get you started:
a milyID=b9e11e83-f51b-4977-b572-8c042df802c1&displa ylang=ena milyid=9B16EB3C-6DF6-4545-89FF-05C627FBA36B&displa ylang=ena milyid=CF196DF0-70E5-4595-8A98-370278F40C57&displa ylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?f
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?f
Have your Office CD on hand when you install any of these or just Run All from disk when you install Office. That is much easier and drives these days are big enough for Kitchen Sink installs of Office.
There are also some commercial solutions if encounter one of the holes in Office's support for Works. I don't know how well any of them work.
The Linux kernel is very aggressive about caching and buffering memory. I suspect the subsequent relaunch performance would drop a bit if you loaded up and stopped a few other large apps or even better a few large files in Gimp. That would kick a lot of those cached memory pages out of the caches.
They're still trying to glom onto the mantal of "Old SCO". They have tried to imply that Caldera == "Old SCO" to both the market and the courts. Flatly not true. This is not true irregardless of what they happen to sell in addition to their primary business of trying to steal Linux from it's rightful creators with lawyers.
They don't want anybody to remember that they were Caldera. That effort is what we should not permit.
I think the idea is to keep it clear that SCO is a failed Linux company that bought a dying UNIX for the purpose of fomenting lawsuits. SCO wants very much to be thought of as a legitimate UNIX company. Let's not permit that.
Tom cats go for each others balls doing that. Nasty.
I've wondered how much dealing with animals is part of the martial arts. Surely the ninja or samurai on a midnight mission has had to deal with the odd dog or two.
I have a Bengal cat, and let me assure you, its serious shit when he does this.
I've had cats that do that and it was indeed serious shit...for the cat.
http://www.bartleby.com/30/16.html
Go down to figure 133. Around the turn of the century, there were devices even more elaborate than that one.
You have to do some digging but there are unofficial OS X builds that even do the ".app" stuff properly and launch X and so forth transparently. It looks and feels quite nice (though not "Maclike") for all that it is an X11 application. A major fly in the ointment is that it only uses fonts that come with it and can't recognize the Mac format fonts on the system (dfonts and so-forth). Additional fonts can be installed but the process is clunky.
Why are you getting so excited about one day? There's no need to get all cheesed off.
Reiser4 implements it own VFS and does intrusive things to the host OS' VFS. Kernel coders don't want a duplicate VFS and want to incorporate features at the appropriate level of the kernel. Reiser wants his filesystem to be differentiated on features and most clearly does NOT want other filesystems gaining them (futile) and that requires the duplication which the kernel devs (rightfully) don't like.
I doubt Mr. Reiser would have much better luck with the kernel devs on any of the BSDs.
There's no need for everybody to get cheesed off about it.
Even a five dollar off coupon on the upcoming DVD would go some little way towards easing that bruised sensation in my rear anatomy that going to movies gives me. And I'm not referring to the mere discomfort from those weedy airline seats all the theatres seem to be using these days.
Just after the fire broke out, eyewitnesses heard a high screechy voice proclaim "It's a surprise! Yuck! Yuck!"
Modern kit that has been well designed should not introduce perceptible distortion unless operated out of spec. The distortion levels of even moderately priced kit have been ridiculously low for years. As I pointed out in my earlier post, tube equipment that hasn't been designed for linearity will color the sound even when clipping is not involved. Tube equipment also tends to have fairly large transformers in the output stages. This too can color sound unless the amp's designer accounts for it. Some people like it but it isn't particularly correct unless maybe listening to really old recordings engineered with old tube gear in mind.
The harmonics you speak of are indeed a consequence of clipping either in a preamp or final stage. If a sine wave fundamental and successive odd-number harmonics are added to each other one at a time, the result will resemble a square wave more and more as each harmonic is added. Modern solid-state amps operating in the linear region of their power band should not introduce perceptible distortion. Of course, overly cheap solid state kit doesn't have the headroom to prevent this at more than low listening levels. There is no longer any such thing as cheap tube gear. If the same money is spent on solid state kit that is spent on tube kit, then even vs. odd distortion shouldn't enter into which amp is better. By the time you've spent that much money, you'll realize the room and the speakers make a much larger difference than what the amps are made of.
Incidentally, for those who like the sound of the old tube gear, you can buy line level tube amps that even let you control the amount of "warmth" in the sound. Unless the solid state finals you drive them with are cranked too high, the difference is imperceptible.
IIRC Gibbs Phenonemon is the latest evil to be recognized by vinylphiles.
The vinylphiles may have point there. I wouldn't any Gibbs on my equipment either. Be it Andy, Barry, Maurice, or Robin, I don't wan't it going through my speakers. 100% Pure Evil.
It is a quantifiable phenonenom. When solid state devices are overdriven , the tops and bottoms of the waveforms are sharply clipped off. The result resembles square waves. When tube devices are overdriven, the tops and bottoms of the waveforms take on a rounded "squashed" appearance. Both of these effects can easily be seen on o-scopes and heard by not particularly discerning ears. The distortion produced by overdriven tube equipments sounds more pleasant and accounts for the "warmth".
If we are talking about correctly designed playback equipment being operated properly, there is no audio quality reason to prefer one over the other. Clipping only occurs when an amplifier cannot amplify a signal further. This is not the regime you want your home stereo equipment to be operating in. Tube playback equipment that is not particularly linear (the amplification curve of indifferently designed tube equipment is gently "S" shaped) can sound "warm" even when not overdriven. I'd rather leave how the audio should sound to the artist and trust my equipment to accurately reproduce the artist's intention. Other than basic adjustments like volume or compensating for speakers that don't have a very good low or high end, I don't want my stereo coloring the sound for me.
If we are talking about playing music rather than mere playback, then tube amps have considerably more merit to them. A guitar player may intentionally choose to overdrive his amp or preamp as a way of altering timbre. Tube guitar amps are even set up to allow control over when and how this overdrive occurs. Typically, this will done in a preamp rather than the final amps as any device in the overdrive state is running very hot and using more power. For that matter, even solid state guitar amps can be intentionally overdriven although the idea is to intentionally introduce harshness rather than warmth.
Distros tend to bundle an older version of the mplayer plugin that is flakier, feature stripped, and isn't as compatible with sites. Most of my mplayer plugin problems went away when I built a 3.x version of it myself.
Pop artists are backed up by a stable of studio musicians and probably songwriters for that matter. Someone like Britney may sing well but she doesn't even have to do that because her voice can be tweaked in real time by equipment. For that matter, the band only has to play somewhat compently although studio musicians tend to know what they're doing technically even if they are discouraged (probably) from applying any of their own imagination. The entire performance can be tweaked in real time now.
Billy Ray Cyrus came from the area I grew up in. When he was signed, his band thought they had hit the big time too. Wrong. After the summer road tour and maybe a demo tape, his band was dropped like a bad habit and replaced with studio guys. On the other hand, Steely Dan was doing that long before it occurred to the labels to do it. They write good pop but aren't all that good live. Going to a Dan show won't be unpleasant though because they have always surrounded themselves with competent sidemen. Come to think of it, Jean-Luc Ponty did the same thing. Did anyone ever go to one of his shows to see the goofy violin player with an overinflated opinion of himself? His bands made him look better than he really was too.
Britney's voice all by itself wouldn't carry her. Pavarotti she is not. Without the sideman and technical help and the all important hype and branding, she'd be flipping burgers somewhere. I have absolutely no guilt about ripping on the likes of Britney Spears.
Of course, all this begs the question, is Oracle the Target or the Sears of Databases?
Nope. I'd say Oracle is the Bloomingtons of Databases.
The version of this everybody was talking about two years ago didn't work that way. These things came in either oxygen-proof or light-proof packaging. As soon as the disc was exposed to the environment then the clock started ticking. You could use the disc as a normal DVD for 24 hours before the data layer degraded beyond readability. So if you had to leave the house, go back to the beginning, take out the DVD for a bit, or whatever you could. You just had to be done within 24 hours is all.
There are a quite a few major transistions all happening at the same time. Debian is adopting the GCC 4.x ABI for C++, going from XFree86 to X.Org, and there are new releases of KDE and GNOME. Because of when Sarge froze, these all started hitting Unstable at the same time. I went through this with Breezy over the summer. There just isn't a smooth way for a development distro to handle this many at once. I'm sure Gentoo's dev branch went through it to but I bet they only got them one at a time. Come to think of it, they went GCC 4.x pretty early. That is the ugliest one and has directly affects KDE and GNOME.
Once these are over, Debian Unstable will be its usual not-really-unstable self.
Is "homebrew software development" the new euphemism for "piracy"?
Check out www.atariage.com. The homebrew scene around the A2600 is quite healthy. The other Atari consoles also have homebrew scenes although A2600 development is the most active. There have also been some nifty ColecoVision homebrews out lately as well. AtariAge sells many of these.