Messages

476

Living Room / Re: Goodnight Irene

« on: August 30, 2011, 12:29 PM »

The NH Line commuter trains use an overhead catenary wire/pantograph combo (like a trolley - see above) rather than the more common third-rail system for train power. (And the NH rail power mains are all above ground AKAIK.)

-40hz (August 30, 2011, 10:48 AM)

Actually, the New Haven line uses both.  The sections inside the NY city limits have run on under rail DC for decades -- You really don't want overhead catenary AC power in the tunnels leading to Grand Central Station.  New York finished converting the section from Pelham to the CT line in 1993. Connecticut is now converting the section inside CT to under rail DC power, a process they currently estimate will be finished by 2021.

477

General Software Discussion / Re: Flexible List (data) Management - ListPro and the Alternatives

« on: August 30, 2011, 10:29 AM »

I used ListPro when I had a Treo, but have stopped since I switched to an Android phone.  I still use their eWallet software to keep passwords and a wide variety of other sensitive information. eWallet uses the same database engine and is extremely flexible in that regard. It has limited auto-login capabilities, which is fine by me, but may be a no-go for others.

Unfortunately, while Ilium has good support for the iPhone, they don't seem to have much interest in Android.  They do provide a free eWallet viewer for Android, which is what has allowed me to keep using that program, but nothing for ListPro.

478

Living Room / Re: Goodnight Irene

« on: August 30, 2011, 10:04 AM »

The catastrophic damage from Irene did not come from wind downing power lines but from the huge amount of water dumped on already saturated ground in a very short time.  I live in Western MA, probably about 125 miles north of 40HZ, and the eye passed within miles of my house.  It had already been downgraded to tropical storm status and there was no wind damage in our neighborhood -- we had far more from a micro-burst during a frontal storm a few weeks ago. But we did get about 6 inches of rain in less than 20 hours. Some of the nearby hill towns got as much as 9 inches.

Vermont and the Hudson Valley and Adirondacks in New York suffered more from the rain than we did, as is typical of areas west of the path of a large hurricane.  Most of the state of Vermont is currently a disaster area, with many communities completely cut off by flooding. Search Google or YouTube for "Queechee Covered Bridge" or "Bartonville Covered Bridge" to see some stunning videos.  Upstate New York is also suffering major flooding, with many roadways (including parts of I-87 and I-90) still closed.

Buried electric lines don't help when you have mostly flood damage, and may actually have contributed to the problems with Metro-North commuter rail lines and Amtrack in the areas surrounding New York City.

479

General Software Discussion / Re: looking for a [i]single[/i] pane file manager

« on: August 24, 2011, 09:41 PM »

XY:
come as single pane as default. You can enable dual pane via menu.

-AbteriX (August 24, 2011, 02:28 PM)

You can toggle single/dual pane view via a toolbar button or hotkey (F10) in XYplorer, as well as toggle between panes in single pane view .

Since XYplorer allows you to have multiple tabs within each pane, you effectively get two separate sets of multiple explorer environments, which you can toggle between, or show side-by-side if you have the screen space. The trick (which is not obvious), is to enable separate histories for each tab under Configuration\Advanced\Remember list settings per tab.

I personally find the multiple tabs in a single pane view much more flexible and intuitive than dual pane view, but one of the nice things about XYplorer is that you can customize nearly everything about it. You can also save and load settings, so you can easily set up different layouts for different environments or tasks.

480

Living Room / Firefox Permissions Manager

« on: August 16, 2011, 05:26 PM »

Firefox 6.0 (released today) implements a truly useful new feature called the Firefox Permissions Manager. Essentially a database that allows you to set a limited number of permissions on a site-by-site basis.

For some reason, they don't seem to want users to know about it, so it is only accessible by typing About:Permissions in the address field.

481

General Software Discussion / Re: Speech to Text Software?

« on: August 14, 2011, 08:18 AM »

The quality of speech recognition depends on a lot of factors. If you want to use it for yourself, you can usually adapt your speech patterns to optimize results. If you want to capture speech from others and convert it to text, what you get is pretty unpredictable.

I moved my "business" phone # to Google Voice last year, which allows me to check messages as text transcriptions on my personal Android phone instead of listening to them.  Some people's voices don't "take" and either don't get transcribed at all, or get horribly mixed up, even though the voice message is perfectly clear to me. Others come through flawlessly, even though they are more difficult for me to hear.

Although it's not a publisheedl API and is not supported by Google, some folks have used Google Voice for voice recognition. See here for an example.

There are a number of voice recognition engines available for IVR (Interaactive Voice Recognition), which more and more firms (in the U.S., anyway) are turning to automate the initial contact phase of their telephone support services. Microsoft's Tellme is supposed to be built into Windows 8, and is available now for integration into commercial IVR solutions.

Unfortunately these IVR solutions are also being used for automated telephone marketing and polling, which is one reason I prefer to check my voice mail via transcription.

482

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Zentimo 40% off until August 14, 2011

« on: August 10, 2011, 05:54 PM »

Sorry 'bout that.     Thanks for fixing.

483

Living Room / Re: Opera wand. Does it work well? Enough to abandon lastpass?

« on: August 09, 2011, 06:25 PM »

A good reason to stay away from Wand is that it stores the form fill info in operaprefs.ini in the "Personal" section in clear text. Previous Opera versions had the same  section only the file was opera6.ini. It's been that way for quite awhile. It's not like it's a secret known only by a few.

-MilesAhead (August 08, 2011, 08:15 PM)

That section contains only info like name, address and phone number, and they don't get entered automatically into forms, so they aren't visible unless someone has access to your system outside of Opera. If that's the case, you have worse problems than having your name and address listed in plain text in an .ini file.

Opera's logins and passwords are stored encrypted in a file called Wand.dat in the Opera\Profile folder.

I personally dislike software that tries to automate things like logins without my active participation and prefer the way Wand works.

484

General Software Discussion / Re: Syncing Google / Outlook calendar

« on: August 09, 2011, 04:03 PM »

I'm looking for a tool that will sync my Outlook calendar with two Google calendars. Doesn't necessarily need to be free. I want the following feature though: the tool needs to be able to selectively sync Outlook events with two different Google calendars. I don't care about how it does this (category, keyword, some Outlook flag are all fine).

-phitsc (August 08, 2011, 04:28 AM)

Companionlink for Outlook will allow you to selectively sync Outlook and different Google calendars based on a variety of criteria.

But what you need is the ability to have two separate profiles, since changing settings each time will get old fast.  Companionlink also sells a Pro version (which I haven't tried) that claims to be able to sync multiple databases and might fit the bill. It is expensive: $49.95 for Standard and $129.95 for Professional.

485

Found Deals and Discounts / Zentimo 40% off until August 14, 2011

« on: August 09, 2011, 03:42 PM »

Crystal Rich is running a summer special on Zentimo until August 14.

40% off personal license only: $17.94 instead of $29.90.

486

Living Room / Re: Want to see impressive numbers?

« on: July 28, 2011, 03:11 PM »

One person’s debt is another person’s asset. These are merely the two sides of the same coin. When you borrow money from the bank, the bank shows your loan on their books as an asset. When you pay the bank back, the bank’s assets are reduced by that amount, which is why the bank is always eager to make loans.

The bank needs to make a profit to stay in business, so it charges interest. If the risk of default is low, that interest will be low, because you are a good investment. If the risk of default is high, the bank needs to charge a higher interest rate to protect itself against the expected number of loans that will default.  That’s what credit ratings are (or at least should be) all about.

When you buy savings bonds or your retirement fund buys Treasury notes you are, at the same time, increasing the national debt and investing in your future in the least risky way you can. The reason the risk is low is that the government’s expected revenues (e.g., taxes) are expected to be adequate to provide you with a return on your investment when the time comes for you to draw on it.

This whole system of debt/investment is the basis of modern economic development.  Government debt is what puts money into circulation.  Without it, we would return to a feudal subsistence economy, which seems to be the unstated goal of some of those complaining about it.

A deficit, on the other hand, is a short term imbalance between revenues and expenditures.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with governments running deficits to correct for a bad economic climate, so long as they balance these deficits with surpluses when the economy is doing well.

The problem the US faces now is that it ran deficits during the boom years 2000-2007, which was a political choice to reduce taxes, mostly for the benefit of the very wealthy. These are the same people who now want to slash expenditures so that they don’t have to give back any of their gains.  Doing so would make permanent a well documented transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich over that period. That’s a losing political argument, so the tactic of choice has been to try and scare people about the size of the national debt, which is terrifying to the economically ignorant. 

Unfortunately, there are many economically ignorant voters, and lots of money behind the effort to scare them about the size of the national debt.

Debt and assets are basic principles of accounting that have been well known since the Renaissance. Actually, they were known in ancient Babylon, but then forgotten for centuries.  Given the current panic over debt, perhaps we are in for a new Dark Ages.

487

Living Room / Re: Android tablets to rival iPad

« on: July 27, 2011, 09:12 PM »

Found a good short overview over current Android tablets:

14 best Android tablets in the world

and in the first comment the amazing:

http://www.android-tablet-comparison-world.com/

-phitsc (July 26, 2011, 08:38 AM)

Here's one none of them mention yet but that looks promising: the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet. Supposedly available within the next few days starting at $499.

Similar in many respects to the Toshiba Thrive in terms of size and connectivity (full size USB host, HDMI out, connector for a dock with or without a keyboard).  Some interesting touches, like a pen digitizer (and a slot to store the pen) to write on the screen, which is made of Gorilla Glass, and physical Android navigation buttons .

It looks like there is a split developing in the Android table market. Computer manufacturers like Toshiba and Lenovo (and possibly also eventually ASUS and Acer) are looking to compete with Apple in the tablet market much as they compete with it in the laptop market, that is, offer more functionality for the same or less money, and ignore the cool factor.  Mobile phone manufacturers (Motorola, Samsung, LG), on the other hand, look to compete with the iPad much in the way they compete with Apple in the mobile phone market, by trying to impress with their cool designs.

488

Living Room / Re: REQUEST: Print APA Style/Format Guide Needed

« on: July 24, 2011, 09:20 PM »

Try looking at the official APA Style Guide web site.

In addition to the official guide, Amazon sells several other less formal, but possibly easier to use, books on the subject.

489

Living Room / Re: I Finally Bought a Kindle Book...

« on: July 05, 2011, 10:03 PM »

According to a recent Pew Internet study, ownership of e-readers is now growing much faster than tablets.

As a new owner of a Nook Simple Touch Reader who is still undecided about what tablet I will (eventually) acquire, I'm not surprised.

There isn't much to differentiate the Nook and Kindle ebook stores, but even though I buy far more books from Amazon than B&N, there were several reasons I chose the Nook,

For one thing, there's a lot more available in ePub format than in Mobi. It's also easy to create ePub ebooks from all kinds of documents using Atlantis. Converting to Mobi isn't hard but takes more effort.

I didn't like the previous Nook models, but the new STR is much nicer to use than the Kindle, and although it has the same size screen, is physically smalller and lighter.

But the killer feature for me was the ability to take the Nook into a B&N store and read any book available in Nook for up to an hour a day.  The in-store reading is over Wi-Fi rather than from a local copy on the device, so you can't search or add notes, but it will still save me from wasting money on a lot of books that I might have bought but don't really want.

490

Living Room / Re: The law is for YOUR protection. Honest!

« on: June 27, 2011, 10:36 PM »

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

   Adam Smith - An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, V.i.b (12) - Glasgow Edition p.715.

491

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of an alternative to InfoSelect ...

« on: June 06, 2011, 09:54 PM »

The URL is a document attribute in UR. You can view the attributes for any document by selecting Tools/Attributes from the menu. You can also copy the URL into the document itself if you want to see it there.

While I have been using UR of late for collecting stuff from the web, I must say that it is NOT intuitive or easy to work with.  I much preferred Evernote 2.x for that purpose, but it is now history and Evernote 3+ costs $45/year to be really useful. Also, for some purposes, I want a local database.

492

General Software Discussion / Re: Goodbye OpenOffice, Hello LibreOffice

« on: June 03, 2011, 09:54 AM »

Once Microsoft had demolished the competition, it added copy protection to its office software.

-xtabber (June 01, 2011, 10:02 PM)

Can't really fault them for that. The casual theft of Office and Windows was completely out of control for about 20 years. Even normally honorable companies and organizations were pirating copies like there was no tomorrow because nothing was stopping them from doing it. It almost became a habit after a while. 

I'm not a Microsoft apologist, but they do have a business to run. And activation and "genuine advantage" aren't too burdensome the way they've implemented it. I only know of one person that had a legitimate tech issue with it. And a simple phone call got it cleared up in less than fifteen minutes. Everybody else I've run into that had problems was playing licensing games with Microsoft.
 

-40hz (June 02, 2011, 01:20 PM)

I think you missed the point. Microsoft could afford to allow piracy 20 years ago because Word and Excel were not their main source of revenue and were not major players in the office market.  They winked at unlicensed users because they knew that would get them a huge share of the market among those who could or would not pay for WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 or other programs that typically cost $300 and up per user at the time.

Microsoft later bundled free or very low cost copies of Office with computers running Windows 3.1 and 95, which further undercut the comptetion.  The approach was purely predatory, and it was successful. Microsoft Office became the single standard in the workplace, after which they were able to raise prices and institute draconian anti-piracy measures, both techonolgical and legal, to preserve their position.

Microsoft continues to provide free or very low cost legal copies of Office software to students and academics, not out of generosity or social conscience, but because they know that keeps new workers entering the job market from bringing other, lower cost alternatives into the corporate workplace.

You are right, of course, that they have a business to run, and while bare-knuckled, these practices were not necessarily abusive, unlike some of their others (e.g., IE vs. Netscape).  But it does illustrate the importance of preserving a competitive marketplace in software, as in any other product.

493

General Software Discussion / Re: Goodbye OpenOffice, Hello LibreOffice

« on: June 01, 2011, 10:02 PM »

Even Microsoft knows that by now.
 

-40hz (June 01, 2011, 05:30 PM)

In the early days, when there was real competition among word processing and spreadsheet programs, Microsoft Word and Excel were not copy protected, whereas the market leaders, WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were.

Once Microsoft had demolished the competition, it added copy protection to its office software.

494

General Software Discussion / PC Lock software for "Free"

« on: May 16, 2011, 09:11 AM »

Laplink Software is giving away their new disk encryption software PC Lock for free ("Regularly $29.95") today as an introductory offer.

So why am I not posting this in Deals and Discounts?

Because of the following in the user's guide (but not on the web page):

  IMPORTANT:  When you purchase PC Lock, you are purchasing a single
  license.  This license is a 12 month subscription to PC Lock.  For
  complete details, refer to the End User License Agreement (EULA).

  If you would like to uninstall PC Lock, you must be running PC Lock and
  logged on.  If your subscription ends and you have not uninstalled the
  program, all your files will remain encrypted.  You must extend your
  subscription to PC Lock or contact customer service to gain access to
  your encrypted files

Most of the other software titles from Laplink are also on sale today for up to 75% off, if you think you can trust these folk.

495

General Software Discussion / Re: PDF to Word converter comparison

« on: May 15, 2011, 11:17 AM »

of course today's Bit du Jour offer is also capable of converting from PDF to Word:

http://www.bitsdujou...m/software/pdftiger/

-Curt (May 15, 2011, 03:30 AM)

So they claim, but not this document. 

I downloaded PDFTiger from the BDJ site and tested it against the file I used for the tests above, and the result was a completely unreadable mess. It couldn't even get the plain text elements right, let alone the formatting.

That's not much of a bargain.

496

Living Room / SSD Drives - something to consider before taking the plunge

« on: May 11, 2011, 10:20 PM »

Many tech pundits (who are generally no better informed than other pundits) tell us that within a few years, we will all be running on SSD drives and only using rotating media for videos and other huge infrequently accessed files.

This cautionary tale should make folks think twice about going that route, at least until SSD devices get a little more reliable.

Note that the author is so impressed with the speed of SSDs that he is willing to live with the risk of his data drowning in the bit bucket at any moment.   Can't say that I could work that way, even though I am religious about backing everything up frequently and keep ongoing work mirrored on two desktops and a laptop.

The sword of Damocles is just too distracting to be constantly worrying about, to say nothing of the cost.

497

General Software Discussion / PDF to Word converter comparison

« on: May 11, 2011, 09:56 PM »

I had need today to convert a very complex document (a 20 page syndicated media questionnaire form with thousands of items in a wide variety of tables, multi-column lists and other difficult layouts) to a format that would allow me to extract text labels for use in statistical processing.

To do so, I tried two free online PDF to Word converters provided by major PDF conversion software vendors and using their software:

PDFtoWord.com is provided by Nitro.

PDFtoWordConverter.org is provided by Able2Extract

The original PDF file is 337 Kb and 20 pages long.

The Word document from Nitro is about 3 Mb and 36 pages long (some of them blank). The formatting was mostly good, except for a tendency to wrap some lines, or place the last column of a multi-column layout on an addititional page. Pagination was generally way off from the original.

The Word document from Able2Extract is about 1.4 Mb and 21 pages long.  Formatting was generally much closer to the original and pagination was preserved, except for one inserted page that contained an attempt to reproduce a set of navigation arrows (which Nitro completely ignored).

Interestingly, both programs converted the thousands of checkboxes used in the questionnaire to somtehing else: a dagger for Able2Extract and an ellipsis (3 dots) for Nitro.

Assuming that these results are representative of the respective desktop versions of the software, I would have to say that Able2Extract is clearly superior to Nitro for converting complex documents.

498

General Software Discussion / A sneaky new attack on privacy

« on: May 05, 2011, 10:29 PM »

Here's an interesting new scam business model: AppsBar

I haven't tried it, nor will I, but it claims to let non-technical folk build apps interactively for Android and IOS devices, and then publish them to the Apple or Android markets, all for free.  AppsBar gets to insert advertising into these apps and collect the revenue from them.

That would be a fair bargain, IMO.

What is not is that, if you actually read through their terms of use and privacy policy pages, you find that by creating an account and using their app builder, you have opted in to their marketing database and, among other things. expressly agree that " Appsbar may sell, rent, lease, share or exchange your Personally Identifiable Information with any third party."

You won't make any money off of your AppsBar app, but you'll surely be guaranteed to get plenty of spam forever after.

499

Living Room / Re: The internet in 1990 -- holy smokes!

« on: May 05, 2011, 09:49 PM »

I was there, and I don't remember the graphics, just the text.

-zridling (May 03, 2011, 05:09 AM)

BBS systems and services like Compuserve transmitted ASCII text and could be used on a monochrome (text only) screen, but Prodigy had a pure graphical interface. They transmitted no text at all -- characters on the user's screen were formed graphically. The GUI was designed to work on a 640x480 CGA color monitor under MS-DOS, so pictures and text looked pretty crude, but it was the first service that could provide the kind of graphic environment that we take for granted today.

500

Living Room / Re: Easiest laptop (brand) to take apart ?

« on: April 25, 2011, 01:10 PM »

Strikes me the question is "which laptops have the best access to service manuals?" and only then "which models are easiest to disassemble?"

At least with a manual you get some clues how to get into things without breakages and lots of frustration!

In my experience Toshiba and Dell seem to have the best access to service manuals - almost all other makes seem reluctant to release their manuals.

-Carol Haynes (April 23, 2011, 07:35 PM)

I mostly agree.  Toshiba and Dell generally have good access to service information, although Toshiba can be very variable from one region to another and Dell tends to deepsix information on older systems.  I consider IBM/Lenovo to have the best documentation and software support for those who do their own servicing, at least for their Think product line (ThinkPad and ThinkCentre).

The first laptop I ever got to take apart was the Zenith 181, the first real laptop (as opposed to transportable) computer. For a few days, I think I was the only authorized laptop service person in New York City.