topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Friday March 29, 2024, 3:18 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - atkinsod [ switch to compact view ]

Pages: [1]
1
There are more and more programs that stop working after the license has expired. This is very common in the commercial world, and license management is big (and a big pain as well).

I kind of like the phrasing of: the software does not expire, you can receive upgrades within major versions for free. Upgrades between major versions cost a fee." or something along those lines.

A new twist was recently put out by Sunbelt software's VIPRE (which is a great anti-virus, by the way). They recently offered a lifetime subscription, but it turns out the lifetime is that of the PC! As long as you keep the same system, you can update in major/minor versions, but when the PC is replaced, you have to start over.  The license allowed for OS upgrade and a one-time re-install if your hard drive crashes (I guess two crashes means your PC died), and it was not transferable to other PCs. I purchased a Family Lifetime license when it first came out (before all these details were released. Since the Family license is supposed to apply to all PCs in your household, under the old license I could buy a new PC tomorrow and add VIPRE to it, covered under the family license. I'm not sure how it was supposed to work with the lifetime license.

Now that GFI bought out VIPRE, I'm not sure how well it is going to do. In fact, I just went to the website and couldn't even find any references to the lifetime license! Probably an idea that they realized wasn't going to work well...

Doug

2
Lots of good points here. I don't think it is (yet) as bad as a monopoly. Apple is just being who Apple always was.

I always loved Apple; I remember back in the day when we had Zenith Z248's desktops running DOS, and then we got in a Macintosh computer with the windowing interface; wow what a difference!

As much as I liked the Mac, though, it was pricey and you were locked into Apple hardware - no 3rd party hard drives available. Thus, I always stayed away as I simply couldn't afford it and didn't like the idea of being locked in.

The advantage of this strategy to both Apple and the consumers, however, is that it just works (mostly). Everything for an Apple product is designed to work with it, and for the most part it has always been just plug and play.

By "monopolizing", the theory is that Apple products will work with minimal hassle. Is it always successful? No, but for the most part seems to have worked well for them.

In theory, with Apple reviewing the products going into the App Store, the end user should be assured that the product has gone through some level of testing in order to be approved. Not so in the wild wild Internet. I love freeware utils, and am always trying things out, but there are TONS of products out there that should never have seen the light of day.

I did recently buy an iPad and am enjoying it, but I don't like the idea that I can ONLY buy through Apple either; I like the Android model better. With and Android device, while I could go through an official store, I could also get apps elsewhere if I dare tread. But, right now, there are no Android tablets that work as nicely as the iPad...

I suppose the real fear for those of us who love experimenting would be that all the manufacturers jump on the exclusive App Store model. Microsoft limits all purchases for Windows to the WinApp Store, Google Android to their store, and so forth. I don't think we have to worry about that yet, though...

3
Living Room / Re: Some initial reflections on using an ebook reader
« on: August 16, 2010, 02:43 PM »
Great overview, and I agree completely.

I purchased the Pocket Sony from a sale at Woot at just over $100. It is bare bones (no dictionary or annotations; just reading) and simply love it for fiction and sequential reading (I'm going through the Bible right now). I find myself reading much more than I did before, as I can easily pick up the eReader on my way out the door to walk the dog, and don't have to worry about losing a bookmark, etc.

For PDFs, I'm saving up for an iPad.

Doug

4
Skwire,

For the number of times I would use this, the command line approach is probably fine.

I guess this request should be moved to the "rejected" folder since an app already exists...

Thanks!

Doug A.

5
The site: http://www.quikmaps.com/ lets you draw on top of Google Maps, with icons for start location, stop location, etc.

I've only taken a brief glance at it, though.

Doug A.

6
Okay, I found one!

The old unzip command line from Info-Zip (www.info-zip.org) has a -T option that takes a wildcard and seems to work, at least in my limited test!

If there are any other tools, for example if any of the current archive tools (I use IZarch, for example) have this ability in a GUI, I'd still be interested in knowing. IZarch does not seem to have this, by the way.

Thanks again.

Doug A.


7
Thanks for the try - I couldn't get it to work for the automatic dating of the ZIP file to the date of the latest file in the Zip.

The instructions state it should be able to do what I wanted, but dragging a file to the "middle" area didn't do anything.

Ziptouch does it's main task okay: you can open a ZIP file, set a date through the calendar tool, and then "touch" all the files in the zip and/or the Zip archive itself with the selected date.

It doesn't seem to just tag the container file with the "newest" file date, however, at least not in my testing on an XP SP3 system.

Doug A.

8
Back in the 90's there was a utility called Zipdate that allowed you to specify a ZIP file or a directory, and it would modify the date attribute of the ZIP files to correspond to the newest file contained in the ZIP.

That is, you might have a ZIP file named Tools.zip, with a "modified" timestamp of 07/14/2009. However, the latest tool in the zip file might be dated 03/12/2004. You would prefer the ZIP date to match the 2004 date, so that at a quick glance you know how "old" the files contained in the zip are.

I've done a quick search here and on the Net, and even downloaded a new version of the PKZIP utilities and haven't found this capability. The Zipdate util from SIMTEL only seems to handle short file names...

Does anyone know if any of the newer archive utilities provides this function, or could such a thing be coded easily?

Thanks!

Doug A.

Pages: [1]