voluntaryXchange

Office Trivia

The most used keystrokes in Office are:

Ctrl-v (paste)

Ctrl-S (save)

Ctrl-C (copy)

Ctrl-z (undo)

Ctrl-b (bold)

Via OFFICE Watch.

Reusable Paper

Xerox is developing paper that can be used, erased (quickly, easily and completely), and re-used - check out the video.

The reason is that it takes 20 times the energy to make a piece of paper than to print on it, and yet 50% of office paper is thrown out after less than a day of use.

Technorati Tags: reusable,paper

Retroactive Consumer Surplus Destruction - The Death of DRM?

Here's a new topic for managerial economics: what do you get when you combine a standards war with digital rights management (DRM)?

In particular, we've just had a standards war over the next generation of DVDs, with Blu-Ray beating out HD-DVD.

When consumers purchased HD-DVD content on disks, they did so to obtain consumer surplus.

But, with media, the consumer surplus is a present value obtained from the future stream of services.

That stream of services can continue to be consumed as long as the HD-DVD hardware is running.

But, when it fails, the potential future consumer surplus is lost because of DRM; the only way to get that consumer surplus back is to copy the disk, which is precisely what DRM protects against.

I see grounds for a lawsuit here.

This is contrary to the typical story with standards wars. These are usually held to benefit consumers, who get surplus from network externalities associated with a winning standard.

DRM is usually held to benefit producers of content by preserving their surplus.

The combination of standards wars with DRM will, in this case, lead to a transfer of consumer surplus over to producers after that surplus has been fairly paid for.

Last I checked, that's call theft.

Technorati Tags: hd-dvd,blu-ray,standards,war,drm,surplus

Laying Undersea Cable

Cool (and short) photo spread on how they lay a broadband cable from Australia to Hawaii. Some text descriptions, and interesting stuff in the comments too.

 

Via ZDNet

Technorati Tags: undersea,cable,australia,hawaii,photo

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Word Tip # 2

Very cool. Very useful. Very hidden.

Didja' know that Word can add up numbers in your text?

This doesn't seem too useful ... so let me explain.

Bureaucrats require paragraphs like the following.

The Accounting department has 25 rooms, consisting of 18 offices, 2 graduate assistant offices, 1 computer room, 1 library/conference room, 1 break room, and 1 supply room. 

What if you need to either produce that total or check the math. You get out a calculator, or you do it in your head. Ugh ... so 20th century.

Wouldn't it be cool if Word could check this for you?

Guess what? It's been able to do it for a while ... you just never knew. Me neither.

And ... it's so simple!

This gets really cool if you notice that there is an addition mistake in that paragraph. If you follow the directions below you can check that math by highlighting this scrap of text "18 offices, 2 graduate assistant offices, 1 computer room, 1 library/conference room, 1 break room, and 1 supply" and clicking a button on your Word screen for the right answer.

The directions and lots of details are available at OfficeWatch.

Excel Tip

You can put two labels into one cell, separated by a diagonal line; this would be useful if you want to label columns and rows from the same cell at the top left.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Internet

Iran.

New Scientist reports that they buttoned up pretty tight prior to the election won this past week by the current rulers.

Maps of internet filtering available at the OpenNet Initiative show Iran with the highest level of filtering in 3 out of 4 categories (and the second highest in the 4th one).

Any familiarity with ethnography will show a Moslem belt of internet filtering running from Morocco to Pakistan. A few Moslem countries on the east and south of that belt seem freer.

The other problem areas are China and Myanmar, and much of the former Soviet bloc.

What are they so afraid of? Britney? ope

Word 2007 Tip # 2 - Making Your Pastes Look Better

When you cut/copy and paste, you can control the formatting of the pasted text: it can either match the source that you took it from or the destination where you want it to go.

I generally prefer the latter.

You didn't used to be able to control this at all (although there was a "trick" in the last version).

Now you can control this, but the default in Word is to retain the formatting from the source rather than to match the formatting of the destination.

To change this, click on the Office button at the top left, then on "Word Options", then "Advanced". There are 4 settings for this towards the bottom right.

Via TechRepublic.

Create Your Own Characters for Office

Here's an interesting tip - you can create your own characters to be used in Office documents.

This is a potentially useful idea if you've ever had to include a GIF or JPEG of a character into a document to get it to look right. Lots of folks do just this to include their signature. If you were really ambitious, you could even create your own font this way. The nerds I hang with might also see that this is a way to add mathematical characters to your documents that are too obscure for Microsoft to have included.

Anyway, it's pretty easy: there is already a little program in Windows to do this. It's called Private Character Editor. It's not on your Start menu. But, you can add it there, or click "Run" from the start menu and then type "eudcedit". Then you just use Character Map to access the character.

It took me under a minute from reading the directions to having a workable signature available for use in Office.

Having YouTube Trouble Today?

YouTube disappeared in the U.S. for an hour Sunday, and I've noticed a slowness problem or two today.

This may sound like something worthy of South Park ... but ... blame Pakistan!

The truth is, Pakistan wants YouTube banned because it shows naughty stuff, an ISP addressed this directive in a clumsy manner, and bye-bye- YouTube for everyone.

The method used is brazen and totalitarian: Pakistan Telecom sent out messages to autonomous systems worldwide claiming to be able to serve all of YouTube's traffic - then they dumped it somewhere of their choice. This is called IP hijacking, and it is a practice used by organized crime for identity theft.

The root problem here has not been solved. The band-aid solution has been to remove the entire country of Pakistan from the internet for the day.

Free market and civil liberties types should note that Pakistan has been taken off the internet shortly after their president - who no one seems to like - has lost an election and refused to take the hint from the U.S. that it might be time to go quietly. Funny that ...