Have you ever felt frustrated when working with MS Word's tabs? I mean, you're trying to set up your tab stops, but you're finding it difficult to ensure that they are placed properly between the margins.

You've got the ruler displayed (View menu, Ruler choice), but it's still a bit of a pain to double check that you've got it "just right." It's easy to get lost in all those eighth of an inch marks or the even more abundant millimeters.

So, the next time you find yourself in the old click, hold and drag routine cialis 100 mg to place your tab stops across the top ruler and you become frustrated with the placements, give this quick trick a try!

Before you click on the tab stop to move it, hold down the Alt key.

Yep, that's right. The whole trick is in the Alt key.

With just that one extra key, you'll turn your usual display of tab stops (like this one):

Into a clean display like this:

What you have here is an obvious and easy to read placement guide for your tabs. (The tab stop clicked is 2.5" from the left margin and 4" from the right margin).

In place of the ruler, you'll be able to read the distance the tab's current position is from the left and right margins, which allows for an exact placement.

While holding the Alt key down, drag the tab stop back and forth across the ruler. You'll find that the measurements adjust to your every move.

No more getting lost trying to count the millimeters, centimeters or a fraction of an inch. With a quick tap of the Alt key, you'll have Word doing the measuring for you!

Posted by Ed Bott @ 4:43 pm

October 12th, 2007

The response so far to my digital media ethics poll has been overwhelming. More than 7,500 votes have been cast so far, with nearly 500 comments posted in the Talkback sections for the introductory post and the poll itself. I plan to keep the voting open at least through the end of the weekend. So if you haven’t voted yet, do it soon.

Here’s a summary of the results so far, followed by some preliminary analysis:

• The overwhelming majority (96%) think that buying a CD and making a copy for personal use is OK. But 40% think that some types of copies are more acceptable than others. I’m sifting through the comments to see if I can refine that conclusion. Vote or see detailed results here.
• More than four out of five respondents so far think it’s wrong to rip a CD to your hard drive and then sell the original CD. More people approve of simple CD sharing among friends. I’m struck, though, by a significant gap in perceptions: A total of 32% of respondents think it’s always or sometimes OK to buy a CD and make a copy to give to a friend. But 41% think it’s OK to borrow a friend’s CD and rip it to your hard drive. I’m not sure I see the distinction. Do you? Vote or see detailed cheapest price for cialis font-family: Verdana”>results here. Then add your comment in the Talkback section.
• A large majority (82%) believe that stripping copy protection (DRM) from purchased music files is perfectly OK. On the other hand, three out of four readers think it’s wrong to copy a rented DVD. Vote or see detailed results here.
• And finally, 75% of you think it’s just fine to download a torrent of a recorded TV show from a broadcast network, but a significant percentage (34-42%) think the rules should be different for premium services like HBO or for programs that are available through authorized channels. Vote or see detailed results here.

The entertainment industry wants you to believe that making a copy of a music CD or a DVD for a friend is digital shoplifting (or, in their cringe-worthy neologism, “songlifting”). Based on the preliminary results of this poll, with more than 40% of respondents giving a thumbs-up to some forms of casual copying among friends, the RIAA is clearly losing that battle of ideas. And the technically savvy ZDNet readership might be more sympathetic to the RIAA’s position than the rest of the market; a 2006 Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg News survey found that 69% of the teenagers they polled think it’s not just right but it’s legal to copy a CD from a friend.

I’ll have some more thoughts on why the entertainment industry has done such a crappy job of coping with the analog-to-digital conversion next week, with a much more detailed look at this poll’s final results and your comments.

Pasted from <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=317&tag=nl.e539>

Posted by Mary Jo Foley

October 15th, 2007

A (slight) update on last week’s report that some Windows users are seeing their Vista PCs automatically update themselves and reboot.

From Nate Clinton, a Microsoft Update Program Manager, via the Microsoft Update Product Team blog:

“We have been hearing some questions recently regarding Tuesday’s update release changing automatic updating settings. We have received some logs from customers, and have so far been able to determine that their AU settings were not changed by any changes to the AU client itself and also not changed by any updates installed by AU.

“We are still looking into this to see if another application is making this change during setup with user consent, or if this issue is related to something else. We are continuing the investigation, and as I have more information I will update this post.

“If you are running into this issue, your help would be greatly appreciated. You can contact support, and they can walk you through the steps necessary to provide logs and other useful data.”

So, it doesn’t seem to be Automatic Update (AU) or the patches themselves at fault. So what caused last Past Tuesday’s patches to be installed automatically and machines to be rebooted for a group of cheapest generic cialis users who had chosen not to allow automatic installation of patches — as originally reported on the AeroXperience site? It’s still not clear whether it is Vista only (or also XP) that is affected and whether Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) users have seen the same problem.

More to come when there’s new info to share.

Pasted from <http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=832&tag=nl.e539>

By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet

Posted on October 10, 2007

My social world is divided into two camps: people who use instant messaging and people who don't. When I start my workday by booting up my computer, I consider myself to have arrived at the office when my IM program comes to life and is suddenly populated by dozens of tiny names and faces. In fact, it's sometimes hard for me to work with people who aren't on IM. E-mail just isn't fast enough. And the telephone is too fast.

I find meetings on the phone frustrating because I cheapest cialis prices can't multitask easily while talking. Sure, I can check e-mail or browse the Web, but usually the person on the other end of the line notices. All of those awkward pauses between sentences make it obvious that I'm only giving this call 85 percent of my attention. That's considered rude on the phone, but not so with IM. Sometimes I'll be exchanging a flurry of messages with a colleague on IM when suddenly she'll take five minutes to answer a question. And that seems normal. She's dealing with another task and will get back to me when she can, and we'll resume where we left off.

Although IM technology has been around for years, I feel like it's reached a kind of singularity that early users of "chat" would hardly recognize. There's an etiquette culture that's grown up around IM, a set of appropriate and inappropriate behaviors that varies across groups of IM users. For example, most of the people I talk to via IM are colleagues. I work from home, so most of my human contact during the day comes via quick exchanges and meetings on IM. Nearly everyone on my IM list has their status set to "away," which is technically supposed to mean they're not at the keyboard. But in reality most of us set our status to away because we're at work and don't want to be disturbed by random people or purely social messages.

That's why every time I IM somebody who claims to be away, I discover they aren't. Acknowledging this, we add custom messages to our away flags to tell the truth about our status; "work only pls" is a common message, as is "on deadline do not disturb unless urgent." Other people set their messages to explain where they are: "in a meeting" or "in New York" or "eating lunch." What's great about the away flag, though, is that it gives you plausible deniability if you don't want to talk to somebody who has messaged you. After all, you might really be away. Who knows?

For a couple of years Sun Microsystems researcher Nicole Yankelovich has been studying the habits of people like myself who work remotely. What she's discovered is that people who don't work in a physical office tend to miss the casual chatter and bonding that happen before meetings or at lunch. These social interactions wind up improving work flow because people come up with good ideas while chatting casually, and brainstorming is easier in an informal environment. IM is how many of us are filling the gap. IM is our office space, where work chatter can become casual chatter. Like a closed office door, the away flag means "Please knock." And once you're in the office with the person, you can have a pretty interesting talk, even though you're supposed to be concentrating on your work.

It's funny how software that was first used primarily as a goof-around, social tool has become a way for people to have business meetings and talk shop.

Other groups of people who IM, however, do it mostly for social reasons. These people are generally flagged "available," and they have vast contact lists that look more like MySpace friend lists than office contact sheets. Occasionally, these social IM users and I have passed in the night, as it were: one of them will casually message me because they don't consider it weird to approach a stranger on IM to chat. For them, IM is like a giant nightclub or a college campus. Usually my away flag wards these people off, but sometimes it doesn't, and I have to politely tell them I'm busy. And I frankly refuse to respond to a repeated "Heya wassup?" from anybody whose name is something like SFKitty233. Unless, of course, SFKitty233 happens to be my colleague. Which she just might be.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who is probably messaging somebody on IM right now.

Pasted from <http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/64950>

Has your Recycle Bin icon ever disappeared from your desktop? Perhaps the icon was in place one night before you went to bed, but in the morning when you started up your computer again, it was long gone. Where did it go? What happened to it? But more importantly, how can you get it back? Well, there are a few things you can try to get your Recycle Bin icon back where it's supposed to be. So, if you've run out of options, give these a try!

The first thing you can do is right click on your desktop and choose Properties. Once there, hit the Desktop tab and then click on the Customize Desktop button. In the middle of that box, you will see some of the more common desktop icons. Click on the one for the Recycle Bin (it looks like a trash can) and then hit the cheap generic cialis Restore Default button. Click OK and then go take a look at your desktop. The Recycle Bin icon should be back, but if it's not, don't lose hope, because there are a couple other things you can still try!

For the next option, go down to your taskbar and right click in any open space. From the menu that pops up, click on Toolbars, Desktop. The word "Desktop" will then appear at the end of your taskbar with a double arrow beside it. Right click on those arrows and you will see an option for the Recycle Bin. Next, drag and drop that Recycle Bin icon to your desktop. That should reinstate your icon for you, but if you're still having trouble, try this. Right click on your taskbar again and go to Toolbars, New Toolbar. There should be an option there for the Recycle Bin as well. You can then drag and drop that icon to your desktop. Doing either of these three things should bring your Recycle Bin icon back and you can get on with your daily computing!