What Does Rubber Bands On Wrist Mean

The mystery of the hard drive capacity. Or the proper use of standard office

In recent years, computer users are surprised by the difference between the stated capacity by hard drive manufacturers, and actual capacity announced by the operating system. Thus, a 80GB drive only shows he that 74.5 GB in Windows.

Whence the difference? Some explanations heard here and there talk about the effect of formatting, which would "lose" space on the disk. Why not? But loss of nearly 7% for formatting, that's a lot.

And if the truth was both simpler and more obscure? Simple as mathematics, and dark as a truth ignored by the media.

blame the IEC!

Everything is explained on the website of the IEC , venerable International Electrotechnical Commission (or International Electrotechnical Commission).

The IEC is the source of a standard, in force since December 1998, which adds to the Système International (SI) a new standard "binary prefixes".

recall here that the SI defines a set of seven basic units: the meter for length, for the second time, the ampere for electric current, kelvin for temperature, the mole quantities of matter and the candela for luminous intensity.

It also defines the SI multiples and their abbreviations, yotta (10 power 24) to yocto (10 power -24) including of course per kilo, mega, giga.

kilo, mega, giga

Precisely, these prefixes are well known to computer science have long been used (incorrectly) to mean multiples of 1024 (2 ^ 10) instead of 1000 (10 ^ 3). In the early days of computing, the difference was not great, but with higher capacity, it becomes more visible. 2.4% across the kilo it is 20% across the exam.

Since 1998, therefore, the IS clearly defines the kilobyte has 1000 bytes and not 1024. To please the computer, the IEC had the good taste to create new prefixes for binary multiples. We must therefore use the kilobinaire to designate 1024, which gives the kibibyte (KB) for 1024 bytes. Binary multiples are as follows (click on picture to enlarge):



So the explanation of bytes lost in "format": in fact, drive manufacturers offer their capacity in kilobytes, while the operating system himself, account kibibyte without saying. When Windows says the drive has 74.5 GB, it should be understood Gio 74.5, 74.5 * 2 ^ 30 (or 79.99 GB).

It is therefore urgent that everyone get into the habit of speaking the same language, or at least the same measures. Either we accept that a kilogram is 1000 bytes as in all other measures, or we must learn to handle binary multiples.

I confess to a weakness for the latter option. Just to poetry: what a pleasure to handle the strips of 256 mebioctets, tebibytes several disks, or network flow more gibibits! The Shadocks would have loved ...

I Want A Nickname Gantas

again: the contradictions of

I just noticed that the removal of custom bar borders on the ridiculous.

Always concerned about the effectiveness, I discovered on the site ... Microsoft, bars customized for the insertion of characters "International". The tool is quite official (see here ). It is found on Office Online with a search on "international character".

After installation, Word is equipped with a set of custom rods, allowing the use of specific characters, not only French but also in 28 other languages.

An absolutely essential tool to insert these characters in one click. At screen, we get it (here, the bar setting, the bar for the French and the bar for English):



The perfect tool. And pressing the Shift key is obtained accented capitals. Bravo Microsoft! Yes but ... Obviously it does not work with Office 2003 as custom bars no longer exist in Office 2007.

But Microsoft has the solution. It is found, always in Office Online with the same search. It lies beneath the title
" Keyboard shortcuts for international characters .
Seeing is believing:



fact is simple: live multiple keys!

particular note is the emphasis circumflex: we are asked to support both the [Ctrl] [Shift] and [^]! And besides, it does not work! In any case, not with my keyboard. Maybe with an English keyboard? Moreover, for the circumflex accent, the "standard" method is much simpler: [^] followed by the letter, lowercase or uppercase.

In conclusion, to use Microsoft tools, it is better not to speak a language "exotic" flourishes with diacritics unknown in English.

In typography unified unique thought there was only one step.

Free Pic Of Sixty Year Old Ladies

About Microsoft "Ribbon" Office 2007: disappointment annoyance, surprise, anger and anxiety

That's it! Office 2007 is there. And you can use it without too much difficulty even without upgrade to Vista.

First observation: the famous "ribbon" of the new interface is probably very enjoyable for a novice who can navigate intuitively in better conditions than with previous versions.

For the user "warning" or "advanced", the situation is more mixed. Changing the interface to lose all the marks gained and enriched since the early versions of Word, Excel or Powerpoint. The result is a real loss of performance using both the command search the tape is different from the old hierarchy of menus.

Deception

So you tell yourself, informed user can use the "Quick Launch" as he used the custom bar in previous versions. Indeed, this bar allows you to store and organize the icons of frequently used commands.

But what a disappointment! After a quarantine order, the bar retains its linearity and additional icons are only accessible by an extension: they are not displayed at all times on the screen.

Chagrin

Disappointment turns into annoyance when it comes to find the personal tools developed with earlier versions.

With Office 2003, I developed an array of such tools, to facilitate my own task as custom bars where, according to my needs, I position my favorite commands. For example, in Excel, direct access to "Paste values" and "Paste format" that I use frequently and whose access is through a menu intermediary, as well as inserting cell line, etc..

I also created very basic macros are particularly useful for the many repetitive tasks. Thus, perform a standardized layout when creating a new worksheet becomes a macro personal, whose creation requires no knowledge of programming since it is sufficient to record a series of actions.

Another use of macros is to create specific buttons in the personal toolbar in Word, pour obtenir certains caractères spéciaux, tels que les majuscules accentuées. (Rappelons que pour la langue française les accents ne sont pas facultatifs sur les majuscules : l’absence des accents n’a été tolérée qu’en raison de la difficulté de les produire avec les machines à écrire mécaniques).

Lorsque j’ouvre un document Word, j’ai toujours à ma disposition cette barre personnelle

où j’accède en un seul clic au majuscules accentuées, aux caractères spéciaux les plus courants («e dans l’a», «e dans l’o», espace insécable, hyphen, etc.)..

Dazed

To find my usual tools, so I went around Word and Excel. I scoured every corner of the "ribbon", asked dozens of questions to the online help. And I found nothing.

I then continued my research on the Internet, questioned the conventional engines, scanned the forums, and there ... surprise: the custom toolbars are no longer part of Microsoft products. Not only have they been removed, but in addition, Microsoft justifies this development backward as if it were an asset to humanity.

The head seems to be one Jensen Harris, one of the bosses of the "Microsoft Office User Experience Team." This team is responsible for the overall design of the interface of Office programs. He published a comprehensive blog about these activities, which he admits his misdeeds ( http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/default.aspx ).

According to Jensen Harris, customizing the interface was very complex to manage. To create a new look, it was considered "a highly customizable framework where you can never predict where a function, and how it can be presented to the user. " But this is a concern of designers and programmers. And users that they think?

Microsoft has studied the behavior of its customers. It shows that the hundreds of millions of users, only 2% of sessions using personalization, and only 15% of them for more than 4 orders. The alibi was therefore found: not worth to flog so few people (see http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.aspx )

Anger

If one considers the number of users of Office is about 400 million, customization is performed, according to Microsoft, with "only" 1.2 million people, whose activity is considered negligible.

This is all the more surprising in terms of volume of usage, they certainly represent a far more important because it is the most sophisticated users.

To summarize the reasoning of our friend Jensen: since most customers use Office in a timely and rudimentary simplify the design, and too bad for those who use it constantly.

This way of treating customers makes me angry.

And more so it shows the part of Microsoft incredible contempt for all of its market and its partners. Having spent years require software, a unified interface (the menus of Windows), and customers get used to this standard interface, teams Jensen unilaterally decide to abandon this interface in favor a ribbon tasteless.

And at a time when most vendors offer personalization features of the interface, that Microsoft decided to return to the single option. A change in total current cons of current trends.

Concern

This evolution of the office suite from Microsoft is also a worrying sign of a sort of "group think" imposed by Microsoft with its software. After

PowerPoint and "models" that are found in all the conferences, their layout uniform frozen and structuring of thought ...

After endless doodles black library "clipart" ... After the apostrophe

mismanaged by the same PowerPoint, and the space above the default all slides ...

That tape that you can not touch, for not disturbing the appearance of windows well organized by the development team in Redmond.

"But if," says Microsoft, you can customize the Ribbon. However, this is reserved for developers as explained three feature articles in the MSDN ( http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.aspx ) that detail how to write additions (add-ins), COM, or extensions XML. Not really within reach of a user's desktop even warned.

A glimmer of hope

In this situation a developer had the clever idea to create an extension of the ribbon that finds a certain flexibility of customization. It is available as a demonstration site http://pschmid.net/index.php .

While the product RibbonCustomizer is paid (invoice Patrick Schmid 29.99 euros) but it can regain some flexibility, although some limitations remain, imposed by Microsoft. Thus, it is not possible to edit or delete the names of icons.

And here is my personal tab on the Ribbon of Word 2007:

It is always better than nothing.

can now hope that other solutions will emerge, perhaps more sophisticated and more flexible. As

to imagine a return to custom "made in Microsoft," my "friend" categorically excludes Jensen Harris in his blog.