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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Directory Opus 12 - 40% discount
« on: December 22, 2018, 05:08 AM »
Ha, ha, ha, just do your maths.

DO 12 is fighting its last battle here, early Summer of 2019 should see DO 13. So the only relevant "question" - well, not really, I think I know the answer - here is, is the major upgrade 12>13 included or not, i.e. will it cost the usual price instead.

Christmas 2017, they did NOT have any such offer, and of course not, since there was no to-be-paid-then upgrade in sight, but now it is.

Years ago, they were on bits, within the same scheme, just months before the end of the line of the current version, but early enough for the then pending upgrade to be regularly-priced.

And since there's not a thing about this situation in the ad above, I suppose they try to treat us here as dumb as many bits customers are.

Minus 40 p.c. and then just months later minus 40 p.c. again is, well, above 100 % in total.

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Comparative Review of Writers' Tools (INITIAL DRAFT)
« on: December 21, 2018, 06:41 AM »
E.g. for RightNote: "Organisation: Multiple outlining options", and then, not so good for creative writing.

There a catch: You should not get to conclusions without mentioning the technical details which get you there.

For example, RN is one of those db-based 2-pane outliners which do NOT offer item / sub-tree cloning ("live" duplication, i.e. not copying, but replicating them to other branches); such critera are very important / decisive, so not mentioning them in part invalidates such, should I say "comparisons"?

Then, the "discussion" in this thread has become meandrous, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm ready to admit that even the original purpose of this thread would have been an impossible one, "writers' tools" being too much of a scope, since it would include any sorts of adjacent tools, too, whilst there's obviously not enough room left for the core applications, and even there, the core concepts ain't that much individualized.

(I've said it on the outliner forum recently, any text's striving, texts beyond say 1-page, and even that's debatable, should be for its optimized construction, that paradigm implying, of course, that in due course of optimizing construction, lacks in topic development should become evident, and should be handled, too.)

But whatever, the core problem with such tools is the fact that most characterists in them are implemented in a resolutely "me-too"-fashion, not taking account of writers' needs, so...

I'm not going to steal my, and yours, time, by dissecting, e.g., an application like "Final Draft", but you see, even the name of the "game", the application's name, indicates that it has never been devised for intermediate stages of writing, but in order to stay "competitive", they add all sorts of crap to it, making believe possible users that they could do construction work, too, with that application, which of course isn't true but to a really imagination-crippling degree, and as for quite another kind of writing, it's appalling of course that some application as UltraRecall isn't able to let you replace some term, "book"-wide, project-wide, sub-tree-wide, let alone file-wide, with some other.

And that's not even speaking of above-mentioned RN and other applications which are me-too from a to z.

Thus, any imaginable "comparison" is an elude in frustration, but that's not a reason for leaving out core criteria to begin with, I'd say.

8
Living Room / Re: Does Al-Tubaigy Has Free Dates?
« on: December 08, 2018, 01:35 PM »
Well, mouser, I had presupposed

- that readers recognize my irony; this thread's only on the spectacular primitivism of some people posing as threads and trying to extort big money, not on torture (wants), not on software - hence the "Living Room" subforum I chose for it

- that your yard dogs recognize my pen name (as non-spamming; as never-spamming, and that should be totally independent of my respective titling).

And, with all due respect, I don't see what your post, except for its inherent (i.e. not outspoken) thread (which I think is in relation to my analysis of the wraith808 experience), would add to mine, except that it implies our readers will NOT have got my message; yours just translating it for the imbeciles (of which we don't have any here I hope).

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General Software Discussion / Re: Why AdGuard? Why do they detect ad-blockers to begin with?
« on: December 08, 2018, 06:56 AM »
ATTN Sophists You Can Learn Something Here (no, not from me for once):

Even some 3-years-olds in the sandpit are able to play foul already; if you have such people as our boss, more than 20 years later, you're more or less done; change employer asap, without them letting the time to destruct in part your credentials.

When you do the "complete style" (or whatever you like to call it), you type lots of characters, and if you don't redact then - being paid for what you will have written -, there will not only be typos, but also sometimes some obscure elements where you will not have formulated your thought to the best; in many occurrences, the context at least will then indicate what you will have meant.

On the other hand, if you do the very sparse style, there is no context to explain if needed, so you better be perfectly clear, and the above specimens are such wonderful examples of being almost inscrutable that you invariably end up - at the very moment the author announces the break of the "conversation" - with thinking that that's been on purpose; as implied above, we know that style from within the corporate world when it's not about clarifying things together, but to butcher an opponent/subordinate.

For example, if you're able to make any sense of "There are cases where the images are encoded in the streams, but they wouldn't be for this.", you're really, really strong; being sparse, AND leaving out core elements then, is no "conversation" at all.

Btw - and not even mentioning the fact that the usual meaning of streaming is "sending data to the pc, without that data being stored on that pc" (so the usual downloaders cannot save it but by filming the screen) - e.g. pics are indeed embedded in a very weird way sometimes, e.g. in rtf where the whole pic code is simply replicated (copied) into the rtf text, just with some special code before and after that, in case, millions of characters describing the pic; on the other hand, I've never heard of such a thing in web programming, where the pics and other elements are not embedded within the page's code - would that be even possible? -, but linked, for separate download indeed (i.e. all the pic or other code is within its own, dedicated file), be that from the same server or from others; as said, some code complicates things in order to make downloads more or less impossible, by the http links referring not to the special files, but back to the php server code which then sends back (or not) the data, perhaps even just "streaming" it, so that it doesn't get onto your hdd (browser cache) - don't know how they make it, but doesn't matter here.

The above "conversation" is a classic exemple where one participant naively thinks of getting things clarified, whilst the other strives to make appear his "opponent" stupid, systematically just giving away tiniest bits, from which the naive participant tries to get some meaning, instead of saying, early on, if you express yourself in just some sparse words, make them meaningful; just the sudden aggression some sparse posts later will then open his eyes and make him discover the foul play he's being subjected, his naive thinking "he doesn't do it on purpose, he just expresses himself badly, so let's see if we can make any sense out of it anyway" prevents him from seeing the situation as it is.

When in the corporate world, such people begin to aggress you openly, in the end, it'll be already too late, so you're probably well-advised to never even enter such foul play of others, and that means, never try to obscure things but immediately say you don't understand - of course, and as you see here in this current example, they will say that's your fault, so be it, but break their foul play and get a new employer, but don't enter their scheme since you will end up with taking decisions "for them" they will then fervently disown, making you responsible for big losses for the corporation (of which these people give a shit, their agenda being a sadistic one).

Many of you will have (out)lived (or will have been broken in) such a situation, which is a frequent one in the corporate world (or, of course, in public administration); of course, you will not be aware of such a stratagem in "play" situations like ours here, but you should be, at any moment, in professional ones:

Trying to fill up the allegedly unintentional omissions of others is among the most dangerous situation you could ever encounter in your professional life; you'll find yourself on some icecap which then will break under your feet.

Of course it's a shame you'll need to be paranoid in order to survive, but there are indicators for WHEN it's necessary to enter paramode, and the above "conversation" is a classic example of the victim not having seen the strong indicator, so you can indeed learn something here indeed, and be it just for a refresh and reminder.


P.S. That's "website assets" indeed, but quite rarely "assets"; even on Quora, you'll find a "what the hell is that", and the problem doesn't lie within the (unusual) expression, but in the obvious and repeated (above) refusal to clarify, i.e. the will to maintain the misunderstanding.


EDIT: Oh, I forgot: In the old days, there were even school teachers for whom the day wasn't a successful one if, in the way described above, they hadn't made cry at least one of their pupils (10, 12 years old) in at least one of their classes. Those times are over now in civilized countries; corporations and administrations, as said, remain a jungle in which such predators can run rampant still.

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General Software Discussion / Re: How NOT to Conceive Software Trials (and some new ideas around them)
« on: December 08, 2018, 05:36 AM »
Offer a now-to-be-installed 6 months trial for which the prospect will probably be in need of in some 7, 8, 9 months - and possibly get even good "reviews" for spending big ad money, speaking in general here and not in allusion to any specific software (it's just an idea of mine)


Some mass-market computer journals, in their (more expensive) DVD version, often come with a "full version" of "Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery" (preposterous name if there is any), and that's also here and then on some give-away sites.

Just some days ago, I saw it again in some of these journals, so I looked into the latter, and right, in quite tiny character size, they told you, somewhere, that it's a "fully-functional 6 months license" you had to install almost immediately so the counter could start to run.

I had installed that thing, from another, similar source, some 18 months ago, and then, some 9 month ago, I made a little mistake - I mean the harm done was not so big -, and was in need of such a program, on a comp no other tool of this kind was installed; I had the spectacular GetDataBack installed on another pc only - Kroll's is as good as the latter (I had tried both, both with success, and many others of which most failed, some years ago on a real ugly problem, some unreadable usb stick), but incredibly overpriced (subscription).

So from that "Stellar" thing, I got told, "your license has expired"; the problem here, I hadn't had the slightest idea of the time limit of my "license", and I pay attention to such things, so I'm quite sure that at the time, they didn't say a word about that, but I can't pretend for sure they didn't,

Fact is though, currently (at the very least), they say so, except of course for the fact that many a people buy those crap journals, with a big, fat "Full license of Stellar included" on the cover, FOR that "full version", and then will (hopefully, but it's too late anyway for not spending the money) discover at home they will have got an extended, but very probably useless trial.

Btw, when I had installed my "full version" of that thing, there was NO mention that it was limited to 6 months on the screen - but perhaps somewhere within the "endless" general conditions nobody reads for such things; I don't know about the current state of affairs though.

Anyway, if there is no such info (as was in my case) you think there will be help in case of data loss, and there is not; people who lose data every some weeks, so that they will really and possibly take advantage of this tool, should not work on computers anyway.

So what's the outcome? If you KNEW about the limitation, you possibly say to yourself, my fault; I buy it then (and that's the idea here); on the other hand, if you remember you had bought the crap journal for this tool, without knowing it'd work for just 6 months in case, you will probably NOT buy, so they clearly play with your memory limits here; but if this info comes as news for you now (as in my case), I cannot imagine somebody masochistic enough in order to buy the license.

Sometimes - this is not the case with "Stellar" -, those journals print a tiny "special edition" beneath the name of the software, and "special edition" invariably means "crippled and/or time-limited version"; for details, you must then search thru the journal.

There's another aspect to this form of marketing, done within mass-market journals: You probably get lots of good "reviews", because you're a good customer to those journals - of course, you (i.e. the developer) pay lots of money for this prominence -

whilst the naive journal reader might think it's the journal which pays the developer, in order to get the chance to spice up the journal, so that it gets more buyers on the newsstand.

Fact is, in the case of data loss, it's a very good thing for the recovery tool to be already installed in your system, so just buying a license may be tempting if, well, if, you're not sufficiently in anger against that tool which now lets you down if you don't pay something around 100 bucks in order to get help, from a program which you will not have chosen by any criteria, but which just sits there, already installed but not working before paying:

It's not a trojan, but you see what I mean: There are (far) more than a dozen such programs, and this one here got its way into your system in quite a vicious way; in some way it's certainly a smart way to beat the competition, but then, you feel the (lack of) "choice" you have now (paying, forgetting your data or getting out your hdd into another system, for the installation of some OTHER, probably better data recovery tool not further harming your lost data) has been FORCED upon you, by some marketing geeks:

In other words, if being buggered isn't your thing, you will not be happy with the situation.

On the site of PCMag - PCMag being one of those mass-market computer journals which have been done this add-on software marketing for more than 20 years now - "Stellar", together with Kroll, is the "Editor's Choice", whilst GetDataBack is not even mentioned, whilst I can confirm it's on par with Kroll, and of course I don't have the right to infer any conclusions from this, but I have the right to ask, how many times "Stellar" has been a free add-on in PCMag over the years, how much did "Stellar" pay for this, in case, and did PCMag seriously review GetDataBack, too, before leaving it all out of its comparison table?

In any case, this "Stellar" marketing can be described as "very aggressive" and "not very open" - even today, you only get the limits by searching inside the journal for them, so it would be of high interest for the competition to know about the conversion rate when users get their "your license has expired" slap into their face.

What the competition could do, in the meantime, though:

Market a journal version which really works once (and even after 6 months), and then, AFTER the (hopefully) successful recovery, invite the user to buy it now, with 40 p.c. off, for further use. (The question which arises here, being: Will journals even charge you for this, real, added value to the journal? Not even thinking of them paying you for it...)


If I ever find back that "unreadable" usb stick (which, as said, GetDataBack and Kroll could read, without any fault for both, but which even TestDisk, the mythical read-it-all tool could not), I'll promise I'll try with "Stellar" and update this.

In my case some months ago, the harm wasn't so much as to justify getting the hdd out, so I tried - unsuccessfully - with (the also-installed) Recuva, then left it at that.

And of course, even if functional tools are installed already, pull the LAN plug as early as possible (and close down the WLAN connection, too).

Btw, it's a known fact - also proven in numerous legal proceedings over many countries -, that again and again, so-called financial advisors very often recommend - what do I say: push - those investments that pay them the highest commissions; it's another fact that those mass-market journals I regularly see the software offers of on the newsstand, with few exceptions, do not offer some tool today, and then, some months later, the respective tool from another competitor, but those very same tools again and again, as if there were no other in that category: Even if you just superficially monitor those journals, month after month and over the years, you will discover this - you just don't have the right to draw any product-specific conclusions from your observation.

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