Windows 7 Bible

A beautiful and compelling novel, Elif Shafak's The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others

"I didn't say anything. I didn't return his smiles. I looked at him in the wide mirror in front of where I was sitting. He grew uncomfortable and avoided my eyes. I hate those who think fat people are stupid.'

An obese woman and her lover, a dwarf, are sick of being stared at wherever they go, and so decide to reverse roles. The man goes out wearing make up and the woman draws a moustache on her face. But while the woman wants to hide away from the world, the man meets the stares from passers-by head on, compiling his 'Dictionary of Gazes' to explore the boundaries between appearance and reality.

Intertwined with the story of a bizarre freak-show organised in Istanbul in the 1880s, The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others.

"Beautifully evoked" - The Times

"Original and Compelling" - TLS

"Plays with ideas of beauty and ugliness like they're Rubik's cubes" - Helen Oyeyemi

"Entertaining and affecting" - Publishers' Weekly

Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.

Hundreds of thousands of IT administrators, network administrators, and IT support technicians work daily with Windows 7. This well-organized, portable reference covers every facet of Windows 7, providing no-nonsense instruction that is readily accessible when you need it. Designed for busy administrators, it features thumb tabs and chapter outlines to make answers easy to find.

• Windows 7 administrative and support personnel need quick answers to situations they confront each day; this Instant Reference is designed to provide information, solutions, and best practices on the spot
• Designed for quick navigation, with thumb tabs, chapter outlines, tables, lists, and concise answers in a conveniently sized, portable volume
• Covers disk configuration, desktop management, remote assistance, security, and much more, with step-by-step instruction

Take your pick of applications from the Office 2010 suite and your choice of leading experts to show you how to use them. This Office 2010 Bible features the best-of-the-best content from the Excel 2010 Bible, by "Mr. Spreadsheet" John Walkenbach; the Word 2010 Bible by Microsoft MVP Herb Tyson; the PowerPoint 2010 Bible, by PowerPoint expert Faithe Wempen; and coverage of Access 2010 from Microsoft MVP Michael Alexander. If you want to quickly and effectively begin using Office 2010, start in the experts' corner with this must-have book.

• Gives you the best-of-the-best content on Office 2010 from the leading experts, authors, and contributors to our Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Access Bibles
• Includes content from John Walkenbach, aka "Mr. Spreadsheet"; Word expert and Microsoft MVP Herb Tyson; PowerPoint expert Faithe Wempen; and Excel and Access expert and Microsoft MVP Michael Alexander
• Takes you beyond creating simple text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to help you use multiple Office applications at once to conquer critical business tasks
• Hones in with expert coverage of the topics within each application that you need to know most
• Covers even more from Outlook and other key Office topics

The Design of Active Crossovers is a unique guide to the design of high-quality circuitry for splitting audio frequencies into separate bands and directing them to different loudspeaker drive units specifically designed for handling their own range of frequencies. Traditionally this has been done by using passive crossover units built into the loudspeaker boxes; this is the simplest solution, but it is also a bundle of compromises. The high cost of passive crossover components, and the power losses in them, means that passive crossovers have to use relatively few parts. This limits how well the crossover can do its basic job.

Active crossovers, sometimes called electronic crossovers, tackle the problem in a much more sophisticated manner. The division of the audio into bands is performed at low signal levels, before the power amplifiers, where it can be done with much greater precision. Very sophisticated filtering and response-shaping networks can be built at comparatively low cost. Time-delay networks that compensate for phyical misalignments in speaker construction can be implemented easily; the equivalent in a passive crossover is impractical because of the large cost and the heavy signal losses. Active crossover technology is also directly applicable to other band-splitting signal-processing devices such as multi-band compressors.

The use of active crossovers is increasing. They are used by almost every sound reinforcement system, by almost every recording studio monitoring set-up, and to a small but growing extent in domestic hifi. There is a growing acceptance in the hifi industry that multi-amplification using active crossovers is the obvious next step (and possibly the last big one) to getting the best possible sound. There is also a large usage of active crossovers in car audio, with the emphasis on routing the bass to enormous low-frequency loudspeakers.

One of the very few drawbacks to using the active crossover approach is that it requires more power amplifiers; these have often been built into the loudspeaker, along with the crossover, and this deprives the customer of the chance to choose their own amplifier, leading to resistance to the whole active crossover philosophy. A comprehensive proposal for solving this problem is an important part of this book.

The design of active crossovers is closely linked with that of the loudspeakers they drive. A chapter gives a concise but complete account of all the loudspeaker design issues that affect the associated active crossover.

This book is packed full of valuable information, with virtually every page revealing nuggets of specialized knowledge never before published. Essential points of theory bearing on practical performance are lucidly and thoroughly explained, with the mathematics kept to an essential minimum. Douglas' background in design for manufacture ensures he keeps a wary eye on the cost of things.

Features:

• Crossover basics and requirements
• The many different crossover types and how they work
• Design almost any kind of active filter with minimal mathematics
• Make crossover filters with very low noise and distortion
• Make high-performance time-delay filters that give a constant delay over a wide range of frequency
• Make a wide variety of audio equaliser stages: shelving, peaking and notch characteristics
• All about active crossover system design for optimal noise and dynamic range
• There is a large amount of new material that has never been published before. A few examples: using capacitance multipliers in biquad equalisers, opamp output biasing to reduce distortion, the design of NTM^TM notch crossovers, the design of special filters for filler-driver crossovers, the use of mixed capacitors to reduce filter distortion, differentially elevated internal levels to reduce noise, and so on.

Douglas wears his learning lightly, and this book features the engaging prose style familiar from his other books The Audio Power Amplifier Design Handbook, Self on Audio, and the recent Small Signal Audio Design.

• As the industry-standard image-editing software for print and digital media, Photoshop has a phenomenally broad reach and, if you’re a user, then you’re anxious to get started with CS4!
• This authoritative guide to Photoshop CS4 shows you how to retouch, color correct, manipulate, and combine images
• Sheds light on optimal ways to create cutting-edge special effects for digital or film-based images, and then use them on the Web or in print
• More than 1,200 pages are packed with advice that demystifies even the most complex Photoshop tasks
• Covers everything from image-editing basics to techniques for working with camera raw images
• Also discusses the file browser, histogram palette, lens blur, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and more