h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

See? I can't even use a REGULAR keyboard!!!

I thought that I would share this joke before I went to bed...
A byte walks into a bar and orders a pint. Bartender asks him "What's wrong?" Byte says "Parity error." Bartender nods and says "Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off."

Marv, you are such a .

*top hat sounds in the distance*

Funny you should be talking about keyboard commands -- I just came across a floppy with Wordstar 4 on it. I always assumed that it was the origin of Ctrl-C, -V, -X, -K and so on. If it didn't pre-date the mouse, I'd use it still.

Is the Convergent Technologies Operating System still around? I used CTOS machines way back in the early 80's. Now ~there~ was an open OS.

Ah I was more of a wordperfect guy myself. Now that had some convoluted keyboard shortcuts (but by golly it worked and worked very well - was WP5.1 the best msdog word processor ever, better even than early versions of the windows equivalents).
Anyhows I've spent most of the day sitting round twiddling my thumbs while files copy themselves around a bunch of macs in our new building. Cloning a lab of 40 machines is tedious especially when to start with you can only do 2 at a time and finally we're up to 8 in one go (the max number of firewire cables we have). Ah well. We'll finish it up tomorrow and then it's copy down the serial numbers and mac addresses for our files and to setup the dhcp server. I just wonder why with supposed identical machines they can take different amounts of time to clone.

Phil, I had a similar experiance using Ghost at one gig long ago. Some of the boxen that I would image would take hours while others took minutes. I think that it was actually the swerver causing issues with only havign so many threads available for the imaging.

But this is just cloning from an external hard drive to a directly connected machine! OK so there was only a 5 minutes difference (25mins instead of 30 mins) but I do wonder why.

I had fun writing a bash shell script today. It takes a folder full of TIFF images, converts them to postscript and then combines them into neatly organized PDF documents. And it worked much better than Acrobat, which put the pages out of order.

Disclaimer: I am not, and have never claimed to be, very tech-literate. Hence the fact that this is my first visit to this part of the atelier. But I'm hoping that you guys can set my mind at rest, or suggest a solution to what I fear is a stupidly self-inflicted problem. I think I may have made a major blunder by believing that I could get a free lunch from Bill Gates.

What happened was that various friends, at various times, had sent me Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint documents that I couldn't open, on account of not having those programs on my 'puter. I did, however, have Word on my 'puter: it had been ready-installed when I bought my hardware.

Trying to open those Excel documents led me to the Microsoft site, where I saw an offer for a free one-month trial of Office 2003. I applied, and a disk came in the post, which I duly installed. The good news is that I was then able to open all those files at last. The bad news is that when I installed the new stuff, it uninstalled the version of Word that came free with my 'puter. I'm now more than a little concerned that I won't be able to get it back when the one-month trial of the upgrade expires; at which point the Office 2003 programs go into 'restricted use' mode, meaning that I'll be able to open documents but not edit them.

It could be much worse, because I do have another word-processing program on my 'puter, as part of Microsoft Works. But I like being able to send people attachments in a format they can open.

Micro$oft, free lunch?

You have a few choices. You can try to find the original CD that came with your computer, it should be able to restore the valid copy of Word. But there was a time when manufacturers were being a little bit cheap and not supplying the CDs - you were expected to backup your hard disk yourself. And sometimes those disks do a complete wipe of your entire hard disk, which you probably don't want.

You can continue to use Works, which should save as... into .doc format, or at least as .rtf, and other people will be able to open .rtf documents in Word, though it may occasionally show as gibberish in the body of their e-mail (zipping helps).

You can use WordPad, which opens and saves in Word format.

Or, my favorite suggestion, you could try OpenOffice http://www.openoffice.org/ - completely free, and mostly compatible with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Actually my favorite suggestion is "switch to Macintosh" but that won't help you in this case.

The software that came with the laptop I just bought is like d'E describes - it would require me to wipe the entire hard drive to use it. So be careful when you use your restore disk/CD.

I suggest use open-office too, but forget Mac - go straight to Linux. Why settle for the imitation when the real thing is free?

I third the motion to go to openoffice. It's open source, decent, and free as in beer.

Panic over, guys. Following d'Elaphant's advice, I had a search in the dusty depths of my document box, and found a backup CD that came with the computer that is specifically for restoring Word in case of malfunctions.

I'll take a look at openoffice anyway - it sounds very useful!

I've just installed Thunderbird and, while I love the image blocking and all, the trash folder is kind of weird. I had to close and re-open the app in order to find it again, and while it was lost I couldn't delete messages!

But it's definitely a much more watertight mail handler than OE.

I use tbird at home, but I still think that I prefer pegasus.

luckily I'm provided with Eudora, which is pretty nice and isn't a MS product.

I was a long-time Eudora user, but it started to get too cluttered for my taste. Almost everyone in my office is using Thunderbird, it does that disappearing mail thing every so often (and infrequently) but the mail always comes back.

d'E, you will be happy to know that I will be assigned an Apple Powerbook when i start next week. It was a choice between a 17" powerbook and a 14" thinkpad.... I am going with the unfamiliar OS just to get the screen ,grin>