Messages

8376

Living Room / Re: More April fools stories

« on: April 01, 2008, 05:24 PM »

Don't forget to add <a href="http://www.youtube.com">youtube</a> to the list.... all featured video's have a lil something something behind it.

-jazper (April 01, 2008, 03:43 PM)

Spoiler

I hate it when people pull the race card, but I can't help but laugh at the fact that the black guy is scrubbing tables while the white people dance around and sing.

8377

General Software Discussion / Re: Sony BMG Sued For Using Pirated Software

« on: April 01, 2008, 05:12 PM »

April Fool's?

EDIT: Guess not. The original (French) article was published on March 21st.

8378

Living Room / Re: Kodak (Complaint)

« on: March 31, 2008, 12:34 PM »

So when I was trying to find names and addresses of people I decided to use Kodak's contact form to ask. I was a little misleading in my request, but it got some information. The response is funny as well. Both are below:

My Request

I would like to have the name and corresponding address to the
President/CEO of Kodak so that I may write him or her a letter
expressing my gratitude for services provided and comment on the quality
of the products.

I would love to write similar letters to all of the heads of the company
as possible as a token of thanks, so the more names and addresses you
can provide me, the better. Thank you very much.

The Response

Greetings,

We received your e-mail and are happy to hear of your complete
satisfaction.

You may write to our CEO, Mr. Antonio M. Perez, at:

Eastman Kodak Company
343 State Street
Rochester, NY  14650

Thank you for visiting the Kodak Web site.  If you should have future
questions on Kodak products or services, please be sure to revisit our
Web site as we are continually adding information to enhance our
service.

Sincerely,

Kodak Information and Technical Support

8379

Living Room / Re: RAPIDSHARE.COM sucks!

« on: March 31, 2008, 12:05 PM »

Of all the rapidshare links I have ever seen posted anywhere, I can't remember one that was for a legal stuff.

-tamasd (March 30, 2008, 05:30 PM)

I don't know about the majority of it, but just yesterday I was feeling the same way here about the captcha. I was trying to download some graphics for Dwarf Fortress and I had to try the captcha a couple times because those dogs and cats made it too hard to see the letters.

8380

General Software Discussion / Re: mp3 Audio OUTPUT volume normalizer? Any such thing?

« on: March 30, 2008, 12:55 AM »

...
I think overall it feels a bit quiet
...

-Deozaan (March 29, 2008, 08:02 PM)

Good ear (I think)!

I'm pretty sure ReplayGain normalizes to 97% volume... I can only offer guesses as to why...

-Hirudin (March 29, 2008, 10:50 PM)

According to the website, it normalizes to about 89db. And yeah, most of my music was in the 90-96db range.

8381

Living Room / Re: We need to do something about Skrommel.. but what?

« on: March 29, 2008, 08:23 PM »

1) Send him real snacks!

2) Make him a "candygram" using Alphabet Cereal shaped into some code.

8382

General Software Discussion / Re: mp3 Audio OUTPUT volume normalizer? Any such thing?

« on: March 29, 2008, 08:02 PM »

Well I let MP3Gain do it's thing and am going through several of my songs. It did a nice job. Volume seems relatively consistent. Techno, loud rock, and quiet music all feel about the same volume. I think overall it feels a bit quiet, but since my primary computer isn't working, I'm not hearing it from my good speakers. I'm listening to it from built-in speakers on my monitor that crackle if the volume is up too loud. I'm sure it would sound much better on my good speakers and subwoofer.

I didn't play around with any settings and I wasn't really sure what I was doing. It was easy for me, but the process of scanning and saving changes to all my files took several hours.

Looking in the settings, apparently it's designed to run as a background process with "Idle" priority, so that's probably why it took so long. I could have made it use more priority which most likely would have resulted in a faster scan time.

8383

General Software Discussion / Re: Monster Cables- The World should know!

« on: March 29, 2008, 07:48 PM »

Fine, you want (monster) quality cables without paying the 800% markup.  www.MONOPRICE.com  That's all one needs to know. No one in the WORLD could tell the difference. NO ONE.

-vegas (March 29, 2008, 05:57 PM)

Thanks! I just got 480p cables for my Wii for < $6.50 including shipping! Going to the store to buy them would have cost me at least $15 or $20!

8384

General Software Discussion / Re: Magix (Xara) rant...

« on: March 29, 2008, 07:35 PM »

I'm surprised you don't know this!

In Xara the term Extrude is a short form of Extra Rude.
So, for example, one click on the extrude-tool icon and the program
pops up a requester bearing an insult and then draws a vector image
on your screen representing a vulgar gesture. (What's really
impressive about this is the speed with which it can insult you!)

-cranioscopical (March 29, 2008, 06:01 PM)

I bet you love Balderdash, don't you?

8385

Living Room / Re: Computer will not start!

« on: March 29, 2008, 07:30 PM »

Some motherboards fail to boot without memory installed - you will just get beeps. A graphics card is useful if you want to see any error messages  .

-Carol Haynes (March 29, 2008, 07:04 PM)

The screen doesn't ever show anything when this happens. The PC turns on, runs through a couple numbers on the display on the motherboard, then beeps and shuts off.

8386

General Software Discussion / Re: Monster Cables- The World should know!

« on: March 29, 2008, 01:34 PM »

This topic is kind of funny because just in the past week or two was a Law and Order show where some guy who owned a winery was labeling his wine as being really old but it was actually very young. One of the ways the police became suspicious of it was to bring in a wine connoisseur and he "tasted" the difference. Said it was too sour, had a particular flavor, etc.

I've never had a drop of alcohol, so I don't know if that's realistic, but all these anecdotes about water, wine, popcorn, etc. lead me to believe it's just as much bull honky as these examples.

I just found this reference in a news story about a new wine scandal:  "Citing the Giscours affair, several French wine commentators noted that when one property is accused of fraud, suspicion quickly falls on the entire region. They recalled the scandals of 1972 and 1973 in which one of the most famous exporters, the Cruse firm, was found guilty of offenses similar to those with which Giscours is charged. In the aftermath, the entire Bordeaux market collapsed. Chateaus were shuttered or sold, and the wine business did not recover until the end of the decade."  It is from an article in the NY Times.  Here's the headline:  " Bordeaux Winemaker Is Charged With Fraud Over Contents of Its Products"

-oldfart (March 29, 2008, 10:16 AM)

8387

Living Room / Re: Google

« on: March 29, 2008, 02:04 AM »

What happened to Google?

OH NOES! Mah internets R gone!

8388

Living Room / Re: Made the JUMP! --- X-STATIC About it!

« on: March 29, 2008, 02:01 AM »

Hehe, after reading the title, I thought you made the JUMP to Vista

-Lashiec (March 28, 2008, 08:48 PM)

or OS X-Static!

or LinuX-Static...

or something

8389

Living Room / Re: Who else is sick of difficult word verifications on the web?

« on: March 29, 2008, 01:59 AM »

A few interesting links:

PWNtcha - captcha decoder

-PhilB66 (March 28, 2008, 08:57 PM)

I just saw "Goatse" for the first time from that link! Where's the emoticon for stabbing out my eyes?

8390

General Software Discussion / Re: are email clients sofware a dead industry ?

« on: March 29, 2008, 01:48 AM »

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

I used to pity people who used browser-based e-mail. I always had client-based e-mail. Then I got Gmail, and now I pity people who use anything but Gmail (except for offline access like what cthorpe mentioned).

Seriously, the ease of archiving and searching from Gmail is the greatest thing to happen to e-mail since e-mail was invented.

8391

General Software Discussion / Re: Cause of Vista crashes

« on: March 29, 2008, 01:43 AM »

allen: drivers have to be signed, generally... especially for x64 systems.

-f0dder (March 28, 2008, 07:00 PM)

Yeah, I think that's his complaint. He's saying that laptop drivers have to be issued by the laptop manufacturers, so they have to be re-signed, which means he has to run old drivers until his laptop manufacturer gets around to updating their version of the driver.

I would have expected ATI to be worse than nvidia, though.

-f0dder (March 28, 2008, 07:00 PM)

I was thinking the same thing. ATI's drivers have had quite a poor reputation the past few years. Strange to see nVidia acting up so badly. Although, when I think of when I had Vista on my PC, the default ATI drivers that were installed using Windows Update crashed my system a couple times.

8392

Living Room / Re: Computer will not start!

« on: March 29, 2008, 01:37 AM »

So, which is your PSU?

-Lashiec (March 28, 2008, 08:59 PM)

My PSU is an Antec SP-350

Couple of thoughts:

1) Check all the capacitors on the motherboard - if any are starting to bulge that could be your problem ...

2) How old is the machine? When did you last change the NVRAM battery on the mobo - losing NVRAM can cause odd problems.

3) If you remove everything from the system except the graphics card, one memory stick and a floppy do you still have the same issue? If so it would suggest PSU

-Carol Haynes (March 28, 2008, 09:27 PM)

1) I checked the capacitors, they look fine.

2) Built the PC myself in May 2006 from all new parts. I did pop out the battery and pop it back in, hoping it would reset the NVRAM. Maybe that was a bad idea, but it's started up since I last popped it out. And actually I vaguely remember buying another one of these batteries because I thought mine had died last year. So it should be newer than the mobo.

3) I already tried removing everything but the CPU and PSU. Is there a reason why you're suggesting these specific items? I could try the video card and 1 stick of RAM but I don't have a floppy drive.

For all of the below, the symptom was that the computer would not power on.

1)
Problem: DVI port on graphics card died.
Solution: Don't use DVI. Only use the other port.

2)
Problem: Motherboard...
Solution: Replace it with the same model.

3)
Problem: A few actually -- Same computer with the DVI problem above. CPU fan came loose too.
Solution: Replace video card & CPU fan. Still didn't work. Replace power supply. Worked.

There are lots of points of failure, and you really need the right tools (physical ones that is) to diagnose them. I don't have those tools, so I just took it into the shop to get fixed.

Not sure if that helps or not...

-Renegade (March 28, 2008, 09:02 PM)

Maybe I should also mention that as of now, nothing but the power cable and the keyboard and mouse are connected to the input panel. No monitor, speakers, or anything else.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I think the POST code should provide some sort of clue what's going on, but I can't decipher it. It also emits a beep code, but the beeps don't match up anything I found at the Abit website and I've since unplugged the PC speaker because I got tired of hearing it beep several times with each attempt, so I don't remember it exactly. I think it was 1 long, 4 short.

8393

General Software Discussion / Re: mp3 Audio OUTPUT volume normalizer? Any such thing?

« on: March 28, 2008, 11:09 PM »

MP3Gain says it doesn't alter the quality of the music file. It just changes the volume, it doesn't re-encode the file. I downloaded it and have been just performing an initial scan of the changes that need to be made to my music to normalize them. It's been going for hours and only at 60%...

8394

General Software Discussion / Re: How often do you reinstall Windows?

« on: March 28, 2008, 04:06 PM »

I usually do it about once a year, but now that I think about it I think that's because I usually upgraded something that often. Something like a new hard drive, where I wanted to reorganize everything.

Sometimes, though, on my secondary computer (this one I'm typing on actually, since I can't get my primary computer to start) when it gets filled with crap I just format and reinstall. But I think it was late 2006 since I last did it on this machine.

@PPLandry: System Restore does stuff for you? Any time I try to restore to a restore point, it takes forever to reboot and it just tells me that it was unsuccessful. System Restore has always been worthless to me because it always tells me after the fact of doing it that it couldn't do it.

8395

Living Room / Re: Kodak (Complaint)

« on: March 28, 2008, 03:58 PM »

Thanks again Phil!

8396

General Software Discussion / Re: Cause of Vista crashes

« on: March 28, 2008, 03:56 PM »

I didn't read any of the linked articles, but my guess is that the chart just shows what programs/drivers/services were running when Vista crashed (or caused the crash). It makes sense that most of them would be Microsoft applications or drivers, or video drivers, since those are probably the primary things the average Vista user will be running at any given time.

My quick little guess here is obviously not studied or thought out well enough to have any significant meaning, but hey, it makes me feel smart by thinking I've got it all figured out!

8397

Living Room / Computer will not start!

« on: March 28, 2008, 03:52 PM »

Turning off my computer is a gamble these days, and the risk is higher and higher every time. For Spring Break I took it with me to visit my family and I haven't been able to get it to start since coming back home on Easter. I turn it on and it beeps at me a few times and then shuts off.

So here are the details:

I have an Abit AX8 K8T890 motherboard. It has two LED digits that show what it's doing when it starts up. The numbers and codes and their meaning can be found here: Award BIOS POST Codes.

When the computer is off, the digits show 0.0. When I turn it on it starts going through some numbers at the bottom of the codes list on that site I linked. It goes through a couple really fast, but I manage to see 8.3. then it flashes FF then just 2. for about a second. Then it goes to 8.3. then 8.b. and that's where it stays until it beeps a few times, flashes FF and sits on 2. for half a second then goes back to 0.0.

So the strange thing is that it seems to shut itself down during the bootup process when it goes to F.F. then 2. for a second before resuming the POST codes. In fact, even the fans and hard drives and anything that was making noise goes silent (unpowered) while it is showing the 2.

There's also a red LED on the motherboard that lights up when the system is on, and it turns off during that second.

So I'm wondering exactly what the post code means. Since 8.b. means "AGP voltage ready" does it mean that it shuts down on 8.b. because that's where it failed, or did it successfully complete 8.b. and get stuck on the next part of the POST? The next part would logically be "8.C. - 3VDUAL voltage ready" if it goes in order.

So I guess my question is, is it failing at 8.b. or at 8.c.?

To me, 8.b. doesn't make much sense because my motherboard doesn't have an AGP slot. So unless it's talking about some other kind of AGP, that doesn't make any sense at all for that to be failing.

But if it's 8.c., and the 3V DUAL voltage is failing, I guess that could make sense. If it's a power issue that could explain why it seems to have a temporary power failure in the middle of booting up, and could also explain why it only happens when I shut the computer down.

Eventually I've been able to get it to start by trying lots of times and wiggling wires around inside, but I'm not sure if I just got lucky when it started or if the wire wiggling made any difference. This time, though, I haven't been able to get it started since I began trying on Tuesday.

As for troubleshooting: I've cleared the CMOS, I've removed everything but CPU and PSU (and mobo of course) and it still has the problem. I just got the PSU last year when the last one failed. One concern I have, but I'm not sure how much of an issue it is, is that this PSU is only 350 watt and my old one was 400w or 450w. This problem has been happening sporadically over several months and I'm not really sure when it began. It is possible it began when I got this PSU but I can't say for sure.

When it first started up, I'd usually only see the problem happen if the power went out. i.e. If there was a complete interruption of power. I'd usually just have to unplug and replug the power cord and flick the power switch to get it to start up again. But lately (as in the past few months) if the power goes out or I turn off the surge protector due to going on an extended trip, it will take hours to get up again. This last time, days, and it's still not up.

Any tips?

8398

Living Room / Re: Made the JUMP! --- X-STATIC About it!

« on: March 28, 2008, 11:23 AM »

Congratulations! Best of wishes in your new start!

8399

Living Room / Re: Kodak (Complaint)

« on: March 28, 2008, 11:17 AM »

Thanks Phil! Those pages are very useful for names. I wonder what address I can send the letter(s) to. I'll look around a some more.

8400

Living Room / Re: When a Brain Scientist Suffers a Stroke

« on: March 28, 2008, 11:10 AM »

The euphoria and feeling of being one with the universe is probably very unlikely to happen to someone who is healthy.

-Deozaan (March 27, 2008, 11:38 AM)

I can't second that. After some years I'm now able to experience this feeling of 'oneness' and inner peace quite often, it's more a way of being for me now instead of a rare event - and I don't need drugs (not even legal ones). It's not euphoria, but it surely feels good!

-brotherS (March 28, 2008, 06:02 AM)

I can't help but feel that there is a difference in what we're talking about.

When I talk about a feeling of "oneness" with my surroundings, I am not talking about living in harmony, being content and happy. I mean literally not being able to distinguish your own identity or physical body with those things around you. Like Dr. Taylor describing how she wasn't sure where the boundaries of her arm and the wall were. She literally felt as one with everything around herself because she couldn't distinguish or individualize herself from the objects and energy and space around herself.

I might be misunderstanding you, BrotherS, but when you say you have feelings of "oneness" and inner peace, it sounds to me more like you're just describing your ability to reduce your anger to zero and fears to nearly zero. Being happy and at peace with your life is not the same thing as the oneness I'm trying to describe; nor do I think it's the same thing Dr. Taylor was describing either.