Messages

101

Living Room / Re: How Much RAM? 4GB vs. 8GB vs. 16GB Performance - TechSpot

« on: August 21, 2015, 05:08 PM »

Having more RAM is actually mostly *not* about raw performance, although it obviously has an effect as you can see in those benchmarks. The problem with their testing is it was purely performance-oriented and thus was single-task, which of course is the most reliable way to get consistent benchmark results. It does not, however, address common and average use cases. It's only *really* valid if you're the kind of user who closes every application before you game, for example, and never does more than one thing at a time. Me? I have Chrome open with 38 tabs and I'm not going to close it just to play a game for an hour. I *might* close Lightroom or other applications, if I wasn't in the middle of something, but I have 32GB of RAM so I don't *have* to. RAM is not at its cheapest point now, sure, but it's still pretty inexpensive and so I see little reason to recommend less than 16GB of RAM to *anyone*. You don't have to be a power user to benefit from it at some point, especially with ever-increasing complexity of web pages and all applications in general.

- Oshyan

102

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« on: August 17, 2015, 09:32 PM »

Macadamia never made sense anyway. It's a nut, not inherently a sweet. Marshmallow, I mean duh, why was that *not* the front runner?

- Oshyan

103

General Software Discussion / Re: Is Windows 10 a trojan?

« on: August 16, 2015, 09:54 PM »

Oh, well there you go! I'm not yet on Win 10, so I'm not certain of the possibilities yet.

So yeah, for me that option being there is enough. Though again I think this should be one of the few option prompts during install (and defaulting to yes is OK IMO *if* people don't respond). Better yet, as 4wd said, default to "PCs on my LAN", although I get the benefit for MS in doing it across the Internet and how the feature is a lot less useful for them with LAN-only. I *do* feel it's reasonable to balance the needs of the company and the users, to some degree. The current approach is certainly imbalanced though.

- Oshyan

104

General Software Discussion / Re: Is Windows 10 a trojan?

« on: August 16, 2015, 03:22 PM »

I'd love an option to specify between "share downloaded update data between computers on my local network" and "share downloaded update data with the entire goddamn Internet". But I agree the option could/should have been in the installer, maybe even a time-based auto-selection (i.e. it defaults to "yes", but pops up on screen as a question for 30 seconds to a minute while other stuff is being done in the background, and if no answer is given it becomes yes, but you *can* choose no if you care to). With a time-based option they could avoid the problem of added complexity in choice in the installer to some degree.

Btw in this thread I'm really wishing for a "like" option for posts.

- Oshyan

105

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Privacy Concerns

« on: August 16, 2015, 03:15 PM »

So why are we OK with our phones working this way (at least more of us) and not our desktop operating systems? Yes, this is a Devil's Advocate question, but objectively speaking is it really illogical to ask?

- Oshyan

106

Living Room / Re: Robert A. Heinlein - atmospheric processor question

« on: August 16, 2015, 03:11 PM »

I don't know, the hottest part of a candle flame is quite far from the source of combustion. Relevant to the sun? I can't say, but the whole universe (including our planet) does not necessarily work in an intuitive way.

Is there any actual evidence *for* the EU theory (not just evidence against other theories, e.g. the strangeness of barred spiral galaxies)?

- Oshyan

107

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« on: August 15, 2015, 03:38 PM »

Laser printers are a lot cheaper than they used to be as well. I have a Canon MFC 4770n (mult-function with scanning and networking) that I'm quite happy with. I think it was less than $100 when I bought it...

- Oshyan

108

Living Room / Re: Robert A. Heinlein - atmospheric processor question

« on: August 14, 2015, 06:37 PM »

Read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy". All your questions will be answered, and in the context of entertaining sci-fi no less!

- Oshyan

109

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft "Hyperlapse" tech is finally available to play with

« on: August 14, 2015, 01:34 PM »

Oh bummer, wonder how much it will cost. I personally think it's a mistake to charge, they'll never make much money on it and they were getting lots of good press about it. Most people who will use it will probably be just home users who probably won't pay... My assumption anyway. We'll see. But they're certainly limiting their potential audience now...

- Oshyan

110

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10: Migration-woes thread

« on: August 08, 2015, 02:32 PM »

let me suggest that this advice:

So, long story short: When upgrading a similar RST equipped PC, make images of your entire harddrive before attempting the in-place upgrade!

be turned into:
When upgrading a pc, make images of your entire hard drive first.

-mouser (August 08, 2015, 07:11 AM)

I second this! Always make a backup.

- Oshyan

111

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« on: August 06, 2015, 04:04 PM »

I cannot believe what I just read about the Win 10 start menu and "all apps" view (plus search!):
http://arstechnica.c...-the-bugs-get-fixed/

In Windows 10, it's... different. Windows creates a per-user database containing all the entries that are in Start, both the live tile portion and the All apps portion. This database is (inexplicably) maintained by a system service running as the super-privileged SYSTEM identity. And at the time of writing, this database has the oh-so convenient feature of being limited to around 500 entries.

Holy shit, it shipped like that!?!?!? What. The. Actual. Fuck!?

I can only describe that as asinine, *especially* since massive crapware bundling is still rampant on new PCs you buy. It is entirely plausible that one might buy a computer preconfigured with so many applications that they would never see their own applications after they began installing them! Even without 3rd party stuff many computers come with 10-15 branded "utilities", e.g. "Toshiba Ecorecover", "Lenovo Cloud Aware", each of which may have 5-10 Start menu entries of their own (e.g. license, systray util start, app start, help/docs, etc.). A 500 item limit is nuts.

- Oshyan

112

General Software Discussion / Re: PSA: Woe to Thee Who Performs a Windows 10 Clean Install

« on: August 05, 2015, 01:13 PM »

Gotcha, yeah that all makes sense (more so now with clarification). I can see that the clean install was not as smooth as it should have been. And certainly *features* like moving user data folders (including Desktop) should be tested and should work. I wouldn't be prepared to call it an all-out failure until others test it as it may be something unique to your configuration or some other quirk. That doesn't mean it's "OK", it still should work, I just mean that it *may* have been tested and worked fine ("Works for me!"), and still it could cause problems for you and others (but not everyone).

Anyway, I did want to do a clean install of at least two of my machines, but I'll be trying an upgrade of one as soon as it's made available to me. I'll do a full system image and then report results afterward.

- Oshyan

113

General Software Discussion / Re: PSA: Woe to Thee Who Performs a Windows 10 Clean Install

« on: August 04, 2015, 07:19 PM »

It's an entertaining story of wonk, but... isn't most (if not all) of this due to A: old hardware/software, and/or B: semi-unusual configuration changes (e.g. moving the Desktop folder)? Don't get me wrong, I get that this stuff worked in your previous setup (also a Microsoft Windows OS) so you have reason to believe it should still work (though you did seem aware that moving the user data folders has some risk/wonk to it). But as far as a general warning goes, it seems more like "If you're a power user who likes to heavily customize your OS, be gentle with Win 10 for now". Honestly I'm not even clear on what problems were unique to the clean install vs. the upgrade...

- Oshyan

114

Post New Requests Here / Re: Caption jpg files

« on: July 31, 2015, 05:25 PM »

For me having to use multiple programs for similar tasks contributes to cognitive overload, it's "scattering" and makes me less expert with a given program's full feature set (I would suggest that perhaps not knowing XnView has these kinds of features speaks to this being somewhat true for others as well?).

XnView has a primitive "paint" plugin, but it's not an MS Paint replacement. So if that's a need, then indeed Irfanview may be superior. Personally I never used MS Paint for anything useful so I don't have that need. The stuff XnView *does* do (boxes, lines, arrows, captioning) suits my needs, and if I need more MS Paint-like functionality won't help me, I need something like Photoshop. But that's just my needs.

I can understand that Irfanview may have just the right feature set for some people's needs, while XnView may be missing some key thing. I still don't entirely understand using both, but admittedly I do have more than one image viewer (Faststone and XnView) installed, so who am I kidding...

- Oshyan

115

Post New Requests Here / Re: Caption jpg files

« on: July 30, 2015, 04:40 PM »

Well, if you have any interest in reducing the number of applications you have installed, and the number of UIs you have to deal with for various tasks (in this case particularly image-related tasks), then I would definitely suggest giving XnView a try as default image viewer. It has a fairly wide variety of options which should allow you to set it up as you like it, including scaling and single-instance options. And it is, in my experience, also quite fast, both on initial open and on moving forward/backward between images as it has some simple caching and read-ahead stuff (optional), and also I think the newer MP version might be even faster...

- Oshyan

116

Post New Requests Here / Re: Caption jpg files

« on: July 30, 2015, 04:16 PM »

I've never understood why people use Irfanview with XnView is available. Irfan is so much clunkier to me. What's the advantage for viewing single images vs. Xn?

- Oshyan

117

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Not-so-mini review of CrashPlan backup software

« on: July 29, 2015, 03:05 PM »

I was with CrashPlan for years, like you, and client improvements seemed to be minimal. I think they might have to transition off of Java entirely in order to fix the memory use issue, for one thing. And for me it was really starting to be unacceptable, 2GB+ at all times with CrashPlan in the background!

In my relatively short time using iDrive I have at least seen one bug fixed, which had to do with automatic updates not working on some people's machines (including mine). On the other hand perusing their forums you see a lot of unsatisfying answers to questions, a lot of "contact us directly for support" diversion (and you never know how the issue was resolved then, if at all), and a number of complaints about similar issues. In fact, I would suggest browsing the support forum of *any* backup application you are considering. It can be eye-opening.

- Oshyan

118

Post New Requests Here / Re: Caption jpg files

« on: July 29, 2015, 02:27 PM »

XnView is the Swiss Army Knife of image viewers/editors (I use "editor" 2nd as it is not Photoshop-esque in its editing abilities, but it does include many tools including crop, color adjust, etc.). Its batch processing capabilities are actually quite strong, and very useful. And it has a very good JPG compression engine, as well as support for Lanczos image resizing, which makes it a great tool to use for resizing lots of images for example. It also does lossless JPG rotation, which is handy.

- Oshyan

119

Post New Requests Here / Re: Caption jpg files

« on: July 29, 2015, 01:55 PM »

It does exist and it's called XnView, the world's greatest (free) image viewer and converter.
http://www.xnview.com

Once installed just go to Tools -> Batch Processing (Ctrl - U), add your folder of images on the first tab, then go to the Transformations tab, under Image double-click Add Text, then on the right where you see Parameters, click the button with two arrows >> and select Filename (or whatever other info you choose). You can then specify text color and background color, font, and positioning. You will probably want to experiment with one or a couple images to find the ideal combo, then once you do you can apply it to all of them.

XnView is great.

- Oshyan

120

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Not-so-mini review of CrashPlan backup software

« on: July 29, 2015, 01:52 PM »

Without the discount iDrive's choice of 1TB or 10TB doesn't really work, I feel. 10TB is both too much space *and* too expensive. And their sales team doesn't seem that interested in offering an in-between product. Since that deal is now expired, I don't know what other options you have for long-term affordable renewal. I can give you a referral code that will give you 50% off your first year, which makes 10TB $250, but that doesn't help you in subsequent years unfortunately. Here it is if you want it though:
https://www.idrive.com/?uid=S1B6C9L6O4

As to the issues you describe with CrashPlan, I think iDrive has some of its own, a few of which I've described in this thread. Its implementation of incremental backup seems similarly problematic for example (although it may in practice be better than your experience with CrashPlan). Also, with the amount of data you have, their "express" service is going to be a cost and time savings over almost any other service. Still, I'm afraid I can't *unreservedly* recommend iDrive. It is working acceptably for me, and I definitely like the memory use improvements, but there are still issues. Hopefully they will continue improving their client as I do think they have a ton of potential.

- Oshyan

121

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Not-so-mini review of CrashPlan backup software

« on: July 28, 2015, 01:22 PM »

Yes, the "universal backup and access" is indeed nice. I only have 1 PC and 1 Android device (plus Facebook), but that could easily grow. Nice to have a service that will accommodate that...

Honestly I think if they can gain more business and choose to invest the revenue in improving support and dev resources they could have a class-leading solution.

- Oshyan

122

Non-Windows Software / Re: Thoughts on "next generation" forum systems? (Discourse, nodeBB, etc.)

« on: July 27, 2015, 03:22 PM »

Yes, it's still "infinite scroll" and yes this is - in general - a really annoying thing to me. However I think Discourse is actually doing it right (or certainly *trying* to), and that it does have some benefits in theory. One of the devs has written a couple of articles about it that are interesting to read, partly in that they do point out *bad* infinite scroll implementations and then what they are doing to try to make a better one.
http://blog.codingho...e-end-of-pagination/

- Oshyan

123

Living Room / Re: Incredibox - Express your musicality!

« on: July 27, 2015, 02:00 PM »

It's almost *too* easy to make things that sound cool. Definitely check out the leaderboard for ideas on how to make best use of it. I setup a full "board" of "boxers" which sounded pretty cool, but once they were all going I felt pretty limited, like "where do I go from here?". I didn't think, somehow, of doing a "live" mix edit during a recording, adding and removing voices dynamically! So while it's definitely easy to make something that sounds good, there is also some real skill involved in the realtime mixing aspect if you want to go there.

- Oshyan

124

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder Major Upgrades - Progress Report Thread

« on: July 27, 2015, 01:57 PM »

I use the links to the right of the avatar at top, on every single SMF forum I use. Is there a good reason to remove them? It's a standard feature and while I'm for change if there's clear benefit, it *would* be something I'd have to deal with being different between otherwise very similar environments that I use daily.

- Oshyan

125

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Not-so-mini review of CrashPlan backup software

« on: July 27, 2015, 01:55 PM »

Yes, Java. *sigh*

iDrive is still chugging along, doing... *OK*. It's better than CrashPlan... mostly. "Better enough". I *have* seen them fix one or two issues I had, for example with auto-update not working, so that's encouraging. And supposedly they're working on better change detection and stuff. So we'll see...

- Oshyan