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I think the vast majority of people using Google, Facebook, and many other free services don't really (actively/consciously) recognize that they're the product, that the company is making money off of them. If they do know, they don't care that much, and it's not the reason they feel entitled to get things free nor expect to get new features implemented, etc. I don't know precisely the reason that *is* the case, but I don't think it's to do with the fact that money is being made somewhere. The *opposite* effect - paying customers generally being nicer - may have more to do with the "overjustification effect" than anything, in fact.

As to the potential success of "freemium", well of course there always needs to be *some* source of profit. But there's no reason that sales of an application needs to be its sole or primary source of income, or indeed generate any income at all. Many other industries have done this for years. Newspapers sell advertising. Websites have web ads. Free-to-play MMOs have add-ons and trinkets you can buy. Money is always being made somewhere, it's just a matter of how palatable it is to your overall user base.

- Oshyan

Getting rather off-topic now I guess, but in regards to fluoride in the water, let's consider not what harm it may be causing (which is debated but documented), rather what *good* is it doing, if any. The evidence for any positive benefit from fluoride at concentrations as low as in our water supply is... scant. In other words we're ingesting fluoride for no good reason. There are a variety of theories, ranging on the "conspiracy spectrum" from "We had good reason to believe it was beneficial when the policy was implemented" to "We needed a good way to get rid of excess fluoride from other manufacturing processes" (the latter of which seems rather far-fetched but quite scary if even remotely true).

Regardless of the reason it's there, the only useful question in my view is whether it actually does any *good*. Continuing something simply because it does not/may not do any harm is not reason enough to continue.

- Oshyan

Congrats everyone and thank you for sharing your coding talent and time with us!

- Oshyan

Or you could save all the swapping around, which is *hands-on* time, and just let Memtest run over night. But I'll agree I've done my share of swapping things about for diagnoses purposes too. Usually when I'm impatient.

- Oshyan

9 times out of 10 I find 1 or more references to say the logo file and then I can replace them on a case-by-case basis or do an automated search-and-replace.

That's not quite what I meant though - I know I can be long-winded and that doesn't help clarity. It's not about finding the image. It's about making your own image, with your text and maybe a logo, that fits the style of the theme. If you take the theme I used as an example and replace the brown-and-blue "obsidian" header picture with, say, Google's logo, the effect will be rather crappy, wouldn't you agree?

So basically when you buy a commercial template like this, you may also need to buy the services of a professional graphic designer who will make a logo for you that goes well with the theme. That, or you have to name your site "Obsidian"

Ahhh yes, I see what you mean. Unfortunately that's much more a matter of artistic/design skill (which I too lack). As you say, hiring a graphic designer would be the best bet in that case, but not cheap.

- Oshyan

Ads are common and are often integrated into the video (overlaid actually). The video uploader doesn't put them there but they *can* benefit from it if they sign up for ad revenue share or something. Hence the benefit to the uploader.

- Oshyan

J-Mac, nice one on the new Puget system! Let us know what you think of it (and your overall experience), I still haven't reported on mine, but I'm still loving it 2+ months later.

SBAC: Your BSODs could be Comodo, that's definitely something I'd check early on, but do seem potentially hardware-related. Run a memory scan (Memtest86+ is my recommendation). Also, did you actually move/change any hardware *inside* the case recently? If so you might have bumped something...

- Oshyan

I'm glad they show view numbers on search results, I use those as indicators a lot of times and while total number of views sometimes steers me wrong (depending on the search), it's still useful. But use thumbs up/down numbers on search results would also be nice.

As to whether there's money in this, do you see ads when you watch the videos? If so then your answer is most emphatically yes, there is money in it.

- Oshyan

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces#plain
http://ftp://ftp.fu-berli...pub/misc/movies/database/

- Oshyan

Concrete 5 has some niceties but IMO is no better than Joomla in terms of overall comprehensibility, and a large number of its better extensions are commercial, unlike Joomla and Wordpress. If the capability you want is part of C5's default setup I *might* recommend it - its front-end editing and previewing capability with built-in versioning is pretty dynamite - but overall I'm not a huge fan.

Regarding how to replace a logo, I'm far, far from an HTML or CSS expert, but I manage to muddle through stuff like this fairly often. The main method I use with that sort of thing is a combination of "inspect element" (Chrome, or Firebug in Firefox, etc.), finding an image name or relevant CSS id, etc., and then doing a full text search on a folder full of my CMS files using e.g. PSPad (my editor of choice). 9 times out of 10 I find 1 or more references to say the logo file and then I can replace them on a case-by-case basis or do an automated search-and-replace. That's just an idea of how to get started, but if you were able to code anything at all, as you said about Wordpress, then I'd say your chances of understanding this stuff are well above mine and it's worth knowing a *bit* even if you *do* have someone else convert the template.

I think you should take Carol up on her offer to solve your Joomla issues though.

- Oshyan

There are cheap overseas companies out there that will do this for probably $500. I have no specific recommendations and haven't worked with any, but if you don't go that route I suspect it will be at least $1000, if not more.

Personally I think you'll run into issues with any system you choose. Wordpress is likely to be *less* flexible and able to "host simple software downloads" (because it's designed to be a blogging platform first). So I'd recommend asking in Joomla forums how to solve your problems rather than taking time and paying money to switch to another system that may cause as many - or more - headaches. But I *do* understand that you like the way Wordpress seems to work better than Joomla and while I'm ok with Joomla, I'll grand Wordpress is seemingly more friendly. I do think part of this is just due to lesser capabilities though.

Joomla's menu/linking system *is* one of the most confusing things about it in my view, but it's also fairly powerful. In your case I would suggest doing things a bit differently, by making an additional menu module that appears dynamically when you're on a product page. Have *only* the download and screenshot links (and any other app-specific links) appear in that menu. You could put it below the main menu, or on the right-hand side, or even above the article. Frankly I don't think deeply nested cascading menus are all that good an idea in general. If you really want to do it that way I'm sure there's a cascading menu component that will keep state per-page for you or do something like "open cascading menu to current nav position always".

- Oshyan

The memory adviser on Crucial.com consistently provides good recommendations and is generally the 1st place I tell people to go. Once you have the  memory specs you can shop around for better pricing, but their prices are not bad either and Crucial is good memory.

About the only real (normal person) 'workstation' intensive process I can think of is CGI rendering. And if you're doing a lot of that, having more CPUs (as in a small cheap render farm) is far more efficient than having a single beefed-up workstation. And that includes those that support dual chips.

As someone who does us rendering software (mostly Terragen) I can say in fact that a single system is *more* efficient, if you're talking about power use and quick turnaround time. For absolute rendering power yes getting a bunch of cheaper machines focused on CPU and RAM to make a mini render farm will crank out renders the fastest, but it will take up a lot of room, generate a lot of heat, and cost a lot in electricity. My overclocked i7 2600k at 4.6Ghz is twice as fast as my old i7 920 (no slouch itself), and doesn't really use much more power (same TDP for the CPU and I don't think it's been overvolted for the OC).

* Note: I seem to recall a few DCers (Carol or f0dder maybe?) were running with 16Gb. Maybe they and some of 'those that have' could weigh-in on this? I'm curious too since I'll need to seriously start thinking about a new build sometime this year.

I'm one of those people. I have 16GB of RAM in new primary workstation, 15GB in my secondary workstation/render box, and 10GB in my laptop. And while I did say I do rendering and that's certainly one of the things that uses a good deal of RAM, I actually find image editing to be at least as demanding. The combination of Photoshop and Lightroom, or a panorama stitcher like Kolor Autopano working on full resolution RAW source images, or an HDR app doing image stacking like Photomatix. Now run any one of those simultaneously  (which is often advantageous), along with a web browser or two (I usually have Firefox and Chrome open at the same time), and RAM quickly gets eaten up. I am indeed a power user but then so are most people here.

- Oshyan

A nice, simple tool. I hope you'll continue to increase the number of features, i.e. add borders around the photos, control the distance between, etc.

- Oshyan

Happy (late) New Year everyone! I had a great NYE, hope you all did too.

- Oshyan

My company currently uses WorldPay so support for that would definitely increase the likelihood we could use this system. We'd be happy to pay for it too, just that most existing solutions are either very expensive or highly proprietary. Anyway, this is definitely of interest, I'll keep an eye on it. And thanks for sharing it with DC!

- Oshyan

Oho, this looks quite interesting. How will it integrate with Paypal and Mailchimp? Will there be a web component? Any other integrations planned (e.g. Virtuemart, WorldPay, Authorize.net)?

- Oshyan

Twitter is also "something to sign up for" if, like me, you don't use Twitter. And though Twitter is a popular service, it's nowhere near the popularity of say Facebook, so it's more than possible some of your users would have to sign up. Not to mention that Friendfeed allows people to sign up with their Twitter or FB accounts anyway.

There's also Meebo Me: http://www.meebo.com/meebome/

- Oshyan

hopefully something similar is available in one of the other suggested apps

If you do find that feature elsewhere, please do report back, I'm interested.

Well, I just looked through Picasa and Photoscape, neither seem to have that capability, though they do both have lots of other great options. I'm surprised Photoscape in particular doesn't have a "cross-fade" option. Maybe something to suggest to the dev.

- Oshyan

No worries, just good to be aware of all options when you have time to actually properly look into it. But, as I said, unless your needs are very in-depth you might not even want to bother opening the can of worms that dedicated boxes like that and dedicated Linux router builds entail. Tomato does everything I need, we only use PFSense at work because we run a VPN between 4 locations and have multiple subnets and whatnot, plus network partitioning at each location for public/student and private/staff access.

- Oshyan

I don't have much to add, I feel pretty similarly to you. Over the years I've made it my primary browser for some period of time, in one case up to a year I think, but it has never totally "stuck". I eventually run into some problem I can't just leave alone and decide to switch, or some new browser comes out that seems better (e.g. Chrome, the last time I switched away).

I actually haven't given the latest versions of Opera a try for a while, but I'm pretty happy with Chrome and don't really have the time to tinker for tinkering's sake, though I might like to. I know that means I could be missing out on some great stuff in Opera, and to this day I still feel it might have the best overall "feel" of cohesiveness and feature stability (as in they don't change things capriciously/arbitrarily/stupidly with each new version as Firefox lately, and Chrome to a lesser degree has been - Chrome, why is the new tab page SO FUCKING STUPID now?). But still with the support that Chrome and FF have together due to their much larger user bases, it's inevitable that actual page rendering works better in one or both of those, and in the end that's most of what browsing the Internet is about.

*Ahem*, so yeah, not much to add.

- Oshyan

Wow, I would have missed a lot if I hadn't read through this list. Cyberduck does indeed look great. Imported my Filezilla bookmarks on startup. Nice!

It's also interesting to have a new contender for the compression app crown brought to my attention. I've gone through ZipGenius, IzArc, and now 7-Zip phases in the past, I've been reasonably happy with each but eventually run into annoyances (in some cases it's just a slow update cycle as has been the case at times with both ZipGenius and Izarc, though both doing better now I think).

Also have to check out Freemake after its recommendation here as well as in the recent video converter thread here on DC.

- Oshyan

I wonder how big the market for desktop email clients really is at this point, or will be in years to come. On sites like DC I see relatively frequent requests for recommendations and just as frequent (or more) laments that the current crop of options is mediocre at best. There seem to be very few modern, up-to-date, and still supported options, commercial or otherwise, so it must just not be a lucrative market. I suppose Outlook is king of the heap and leaves only scraps for everyone else...

Unfortunately I have nothing to contribute here, I just use Gmail/Google Apps.

- Oshyan

I got very few gifts, for which I am grateful! I don't really need much. I bought myself a computer back in October, I guess I could consider that an early Christmas present to myself, hehe. I narrowly escaped buying an HD Hero2 camera, as discussed here (I still might get one in 2012, no promises that I won't, hehe). As far as gifts from others (the usual kind? haha), I don't know what my mom got me as it's still in shipment and she won't tell me. The only other gift I got was some rather nice matcha tea from a friend of mine. Nothing like drinking the whole leaf! I'm a bit of a tea nut these days, so it's very appropriate.

(Semi)off-topic, this is my thought on new year's resolutions:



I don't plan to make any formal ones this year. Every year is an opportunity to learn and grow, right? Or to screw up royally.

- Oshyan

Er, Barney, you might want to take a look at the actual "little box" link I put in my post. The box in question is the size of - if not smaller than - most routers and uses similar amounts of power, generating little to no heat. The board is 6 inches square and the case for it is not much bigger. As a bonus it's also more powerful than most consumer-level router hardware. A bit more expensive but not that much really. But again this is only a suggestion for people who are talking about DD-WRT offering lots of power and flexibility on consumer-level routing hardware. I'm just saying if that's your interest/aim, might as well get something like the Alix box and run Pfsense. For your purposes I'd much sooner recommend Tomato.

- Oshyan

Thanks for another recommendation. I like the effect Microsoft Autocollage produces, though I think I would want to use that less than ones with borders. Unfortunately I don't think it's worth paying $20 just for that one effect and limited options, but hopefully something similar is available in one of the other suggested apps or will be implemented at some point.

- Oshyan