Messages

76

Living Room / Re: Want to backup your music collection? Tough...It's illegal.

« on: August 06, 2015, 10:36 AM »

Uhh... I honestly am looking forward to the day the vinyl generation of judges die off (of natural causes), and get replaced by mp3 generation ones.

77

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox: I got stuck on 'search as you type'. Any way to get back?

« on: August 05, 2015, 05:28 AM »

I guess an add-on may be the culprit.

78

Living Room / Re: New printers that come with refillable ink tanks?

« on: August 05, 2015, 04:17 AM »

Uhh... didn't we already have such printers called 'enterprise' (or equivalent word) solutions? I distinctly remember buying a $12K laser printer for the department I worked at. Its toner cartridges were cheaper than those of a $100 model, and lasted 8 times longer.

-eleman (August 05, 2015, 02:29 AM)

yeah, but laser and inkjet are very different beasts...

-tomos (August 05, 2015, 04:14 AM)

But the same story applies. There are dirt cheap lasers with expensive tiny toners, and there are expensive lasers with affordable toners.

Even in case of inkjets, HP's officejet pro models had much cheaper ink prices compared to deskjet models. I'm sure other brands also offer such distinctions.

I feel this article is rather a piece of advertorial paid by Epson.

79

Living Room / Re: New printers that come with refillable ink tanks?

« on: August 05, 2015, 02:29 AM »

Uhh... didn't we already have such printers called 'enterprise' (or equivalent word) solutions? I distinctly remember buying a $12K laser printer for the department I worked at. Its toner cartridges were cheaper than those of a $100 model, and lasted 8 times longer.

80

General Software Discussion / Re: What's living in your taskbar notification area right now?

« on: July 27, 2015, 03:28 AM »

perhaps this is the reason.

Dropbox may seem like it doesn't need a lot of RAM to operate. The truth is: there's a lot of complexity under the hood!

For instance, Dropbox has to keep track of a lot of information about your files in order to make sure it can sync files quickly and efficiently. The more files you have in your Dropbox folder, the more memory Dropbox will need to keep track of them. That said, we are constantly working on making Dropbox more memory efficient and we continue to have significant improvements with each major release.

For our advanced users

Want more details? Dropbox stores metadata on your files in RAM to prevent constant and expensive database lookups while syncing. The metadata includes paths to files in your Dropbox, checksums, modification times, etc. We are working hard on making this information more compact and are working on several fronts to improve memory usage. Our techniques are not limited to rewriting pieces of our source code and writing custom memory allocators.

Source: Why is Dropbox using so much RAM? - https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/144

-lanux128 (July 27, 2015, 03:10 AM)

Translation from corporatespeak to plain English: We can't be bothered to write optimized code for each and every OS. Instead we chose to waste your ram on generic libraries which are built to work on multiple operating systems, rather than for efficiency.

81

General Software Discussion / Re: What's living in your taskbar notification area right now?

« on: July 25, 2015, 11:50 PM »

but I'm gonna give Greenshot a go...

-kyrathaba (July 25, 2015, 02:30 PM)

I did give it a go... But it apparently uses 15 times the memory used by FScapture, with one fifteenth of the feature set. Mouser's Screenshot Captor beats it handily.

82

General Software Discussion / Re: What's living in your taskbar notification area right now?

« on: July 23, 2015, 05:31 AM »

7+ Taskbar Tweaker
StrokeIt
idiot windows flag
FastStone Capture
Archivarius 3000
Breevy
Homemade autohotkey thingie
Ditto
USB thingie

Volume thingie
Pidgin
Wireless thingie

83

General Software Discussion / Re: SourceForge in Maintenance Mode

« on: July 21, 2015, 02:08 AM »

I never thought such long-lasting outages would happen to such well-known sites. But I'm not very experienced in these matters anyway.

84

General Software Discussion / Re: Managing Flash in your browser

« on: July 07, 2015, 08:02 AM »

Here are a few adages I came to live by, as I have to rely on my computer for my livelihood:

• 32 bits beats 64 (except for the case of the OS). Maybe because of laziness at the time of compiling, or a lack of awareness of intricacies of 64 bit memory management, more often than not, the 64 bits version of a software which hitherto worked fine, will cause problems. There are some software which benefit from having or need more than 2 gigs of process memory, but browsers aren't among them.
• If your cpu (assuming it is not an Atom) utilization is more than 10% for any extended length of time, while you're not doing any cpu-intensive tasks, then there is definitely something wrong. Modern cpus like my 7 years old core 2 duo are capable of handling flash with just half a core. Check the processes to see which one is the culprit.
• If you aren't into graphic design or 3d rendering (or some other memory-hog profession), you most probably don't need more than 4 gigs of ram. If you are regularly running out of free memory, then there is, once again, definitely something wrong. Check the processes to see which one is the culprit.
• If you feel the need to try 5 obscure rebranded firefox or chromium versions, the problem is definitely not about the browser. Neither the 6th, nor the 7th weirdly named fox will help.
• Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things. --Elise Boulding

85

General Software Discussion / Re: Managing Flash in your browser

« on: July 06, 2015, 06:40 AM »

I had to disable Flashblock [FB] with it, in order to play YT videos - they showed with FB on, and thought about starting - but would not play properly.

-tomos (July 06, 2015, 06:37 AM)

Flashblock has a whitelist. Add youtube in that list.

Also take a look at YouTube High Def to make youtube behave as you like, rather than as google likes.

86

General Software Discussion / Re: Managing Flash in your browser

« on: June 15, 2015, 02:31 PM »

Your best option is still Firefox (I use 32 bit ESR, not the latest shiniest coolest one) + flashblock + yesScript (for worst offenders) + adblock plus (or edge, whatever).

I know, memory use skyrockets upwards to 900 MB after a while, but the three add-ons I mentioned help keep it manageable.

87

General Software Discussion / Re: Multiple Partitions on USB Flash Drive

« on: June 06, 2015, 01:48 AM »

Gparted

88

General Software Discussion / Re: Caveman NoScript?

« on: June 04, 2015, 09:59 AM »

I'd be a sucker for that one.

89

Living Room / Re: Http vs Https Universally

« on: May 16, 2015, 08:15 AM »

What "problem" are "we" trying to solve here?? MITM attacks...on what exactly?? It's publically available content ...

-Stoic Joker (May 16, 2015, 07:42 AM)

Take the case we have here in Turkey. The government liberally censors the web, and the next logical step is keeping a log of who reads what. Then I'd be in deep trouble for just reading something like this.

1984 feels very real in this part of the globe. https may delay it for a while, and I'd support that.

90

General Software Discussion / Re: Chrome Portable in a RamDisk = decadence?

« on: April 29, 2015, 07:15 AM »

The problem with Firefox is not that it frequently reads and writes to the disk. It almost never does, especially if you disable the cache on the disk.

The problem is it handles a huge amount of memory just to display the pages. The engine is inefficient and it leaks like there's no tomorrow. To be fair, it was even worse.

Anyway, as the working space used by Firefox approaches to 10 figures (in bytes), just occupying that large a space becomes a burden on the CPU. Hence we have the unresponsive Firefox problem.

Moving the application to ramdisk would not reduce its working space, so it would not have any appreciable impact on the responsiveness front.

Chrome is simply more efficient in terms of memory use, so, ramdisk-or-not, it would work faster than a Firefox.

I still use Firefox though, as (i) I'm hooked on the add-ons, and (ii) I'm not inclined to have another piece of software to report everything I do to the US government. I know Chromium is open source, but I don't trust Google period. And yes, I feel hypocritical while typing these on IE. But that's a story for another day.

91

General Software Discussion / Re: Tweaking.com Registry Backup

« on: April 28, 2015, 07:26 AM »

Why backing up just the registry instead of taking an image of the boot partition?

Registry backup won't save much, and a restore will likely cause more problems than it may fix. The DLLs etc. on the system would have changed by the time you restored an old registry backup, so you would get problems which do not present any intelligible symptoms. I guess it would just be asking for trouble.

92

Living Room / 23rd Century here we come

« on: March 23, 2015, 12:26 AM »

Apparently plasma torpedo is invented.

Looking forward to McCoy's miracle curing device.

93

General Software Discussion / Re: Need help guidance as a beginner of Android world

« on: March 12, 2015, 11:45 AM »

Also I need anti-virus.

-anandcoral (March 12, 2015, 11:37 AM)

No, you don't.

94

General Software Discussion / Re: Need help guidance as a beginner of Android world

« on: March 11, 2015, 01:00 AM »

Evernote is on my list but it is very big with options I may not require. A smaller simple would be better for startup.

-anandcoral (March 10, 2015, 12:04 PM)

How about Google Keep?

-dr_andus (March 10, 2015, 03:54 PM)

What will you do when Google decides to abandon it?

95

Living Room / Re: Stuff you need to know

« on: March 10, 2015, 08:04 AM »

2. If you sit for more than 11 hours a day, there's a 50% chance
 you'll die within the next 3 years.
 

-dantheman (March 10, 2015, 08:01 AM)

Honestly, I can't think of a more ignorant phrase of pseudo-statistics.

96

General Software Discussion / Re: Need help guidance as a beginner of Android world

« on: March 10, 2015, 03:46 AM »

3. Call Recorder - Simple, record both in coming and out going, with playback. Need it for client job specifications done on phone.

-anandcoral (March 10, 2015, 03:13 AM)

I'm happy with this one. The free version does the job. But the thing with call recorders is that they don't work on all android phones. Hardware implementations vary, so some are incapable of recording your voice, or the other party's. You'll have to try and see.

97

General Software Discussion / Re: Vivaldi, the new Web browser for power users

« on: March 09, 2015, 08:41 AM »

Aren't the vast majority of power users hooked on add-ons? How will they switch to a new browser? I honestly can't, without at least 8 add-ons I consider must-have also making the jump.

98

General Software Discussion / Re: Reliable Web Hosting for $5 or less?

« on: February 16, 2015, 02:19 PM »

-eleman: i don't think the people you like will let you distribute software from a shared server account. you couldn't last time i looked at their policy when i was shopping for a host. you needed to make special arrangements with them to do that. but maybe they allow it now? :-)

-Gwen7 (February 16, 2015, 01:37 PM)

Uhh I didn't really think of that scenario. Yeah, it looks like a "special arrangement" is needed.

99

General Software Discussion / Re: Reliable Web Hosting for $5 or less?

« on: February 16, 2015, 11:22 AM »

I host my blog with these guys, for 6 years now. I'm happy with them, and the price of 12 dollars a year is really as cheap as it gets.

Yes, there's a huge difference between 99.999% uptime guarantee and 99.9%. But come on, 1 dollar per month.

100

Living Room / Re: License, registration, and insurance...or your cell phone

« on: February 10, 2015, 07:57 AM »

Here's what would happen in Turkey, if you let a cop touch your phone. In a nutshell, the police saved known terrorists' phone numbers to the phone of the detainee. Then the detainee was kept in prison for 33 months pending a ruling in court. Then he was acquitted of all charges.

The whole evidence against him was cooked.

So, no, I would never let a police touch my phone.