Messages

251

General Software Discussion / Re: Digsby: How about a little respect for your users?

« on: August 17, 2009, 11:58 AM »

Not totally fair comment - you can download QuickTime without any additional software.

The reason you can't download iTunes without QuickTime is that iTunes uses QuickTime as part of its functionality.

I am not commenting on the quality of either product (IMHO they both deserve to be called crapware) but I thought it only fair to set the record straight.

-Carol Haynes (August 15, 2009, 06:22 AM)

Actually, both are of you are correct . At some point in the past, it was impossible to download QuickTime separately, because the ever classy Apple decided to wipe off that option from its website. The situation continued for a fair bit of time, until pressure from the users forced them to relent. They haven't learned anything since then, anyway.

Commenting on Digsby: To use it, the software requires you to create a Digsby account, which will conveniently store both your IM login details along with configuration options from the program (with the latter effectively taking advantage of the strengths of local apps and cloud computing). No way in hell I'm giving them such details. One can only have nightmares about what they could with their userbase contact details and now this joke.

252

Living Room / Re: When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom

« on: August 05, 2009, 08:56 AM »

Hm, I don't think the problem lies within the use of technology, and more with the use teachers make of technology.

Many teachers tend to rely solely on PowerPoint presentations or transparencies to impart their classes, effectively turning such class into a boring monologue which consists on one person speaking (actually reading what it's projected on the screen), and a bunch of youngsters simply listening to that person for one or two hours straight (although they can read the projected materials faster than the teacher can explain them), which as you may conclude it's an awful way to transmit knowledge to your pupils (the common opinion in my degree is that the worst teachers we ever had are those using such methods). This ends up wasting everyone's time, yours and your pupils, which could be invested into more productive matters, like allowing the students to read the materials at home and trying to understand them on their own.

I supposed that in other countries and colleges with a longer tradition of using audiovisual media in class would no longer have such problems, as the mantra used by those in charge of designing each faculty plan of study which consists in: "use transparencies, presentations, and other media to support your classes" would have long netted an actual effect on teachers, but sadly it looks like it's not the case.

253

LaunchBar Commander / Re: McAfee again. Don't ask.

« on: August 04, 2009, 12:26 PM »

I wouldn't get Avast. It's real-time monitoring interferes with too many programs, but maybe you should download a trial version of NOD32 or Kaspersky & give them a try?

-Innuendo (July 27, 2009, 01:18 PM)

254

Living Room / Re: Interesting Development on GOG.com

« on: August 04, 2009, 10:33 AM »

If I had bought either of these two games from Steam... where would I be now?

-wraith808 (July 30, 2009, 11:08 AM)

Probably in a different situation... or not. Steam already removed several games from their catalogue, but AFAIK they're all available for re-download to those who bought them.

I assume the problem lies within the scope of the licenses Codemasters acquired for the games development, which also prompted the removal of the two games from the store. The guys at GoG can't really detail everything that is going behind the scenes, but it looks like the problem doesn't lie within GoG nor within Codemasters, and the situation looks to be pretty similar to the Kindle fiasco with George Orwell books a while ago (with the exception that, in this case, you can make backups). As for TOCA still being available in Steam, the GoG team said that it was probably due to Valve scoring a better deal with Codemasters than them, although something tells me after the 29th of August, the game will no longer be available...

Remember that, in any case, you can re-download the games using other methods. You paid for it, you're in your right to keep it.

255

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 31-09

« on: August 04, 2009, 09:22 AM »

I wonder why that opposition to ID cards (well, in UK's case, it's pretty understandable, giving their awful privacy protection track record). As if governments already didn't have all that information and more about citizens...

256

General Software Discussion / Re: Harvest email addresses?

« on: July 23, 2009, 08:35 AM »

Perhaps he wants to set up an e-mail distribution system?

Otherwise, I'm a bit lost here. What he exactly want to achieve with this? I think it would be easier to asks for e-mail addresses at the various companies he wants to do business with, than to harvest God knows how many addresses without any contact info attached. Not to mention all the implications such practice have attached.

257

Living Room / Re: RIAA Says DRM is Dead

« on: July 21, 2009, 12:49 PM »

You can always mark the option to not upload anything. There, solved

258

Living Room / Re: Apollo conspiracy's doom

« on: July 20, 2009, 10:34 AM »

Conspiracy theorists will love this documentary. The raw truth exposed

The rest can read about the premise in its Wikipedia page, although I strongly advise to view it if you can. It's extremely well done. Heck, I saw it one night on TV without knowing anything about it, and I promptly believed everything they said

259

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: need license key

« on: July 20, 2009, 10:27 AM »

need a license key for advance system care pro 3.3

-treep (July 20, 2009, 09:33 AM)

Sorry, but DonationCoder only provides free licenses for its own software. If you want a license for this app, head over to its webpage and buy one. Alternatively, you can use the free version of the product.

260

DC Gamer Club / Re: STEAM... Can Someone in N. America Give me a "Gift" please?

« on: July 18, 2009, 04:59 PM »

You got burned by the Brothers in Arms restrictions, huh?

261

General Software Discussion / Re: Mozilla Contest: How Would You Improve Tabbed Browsing?

« on: July 18, 2009, 04:51 PM »

The winners have been announced. I haven't see any of the videos yet, just skimmed through the descriptions, but frankly, I don't find anything groundbreaking. That could change after seeing the ideas in action though (the TabViz extension refuses to work correctly)

262

Living Room / Re: From the BBC science desk: Cats 'exploit' humans by purring

« on: July 15, 2009, 08:43 AM »

Microsoft will release a patch on tuesday for this latest exploit affecting windows owners.

-justice (July 15, 2009, 07:59 AM)

Cat owners using Mac OS or Linux are unaffected, I presume

263

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« on: July 13, 2009, 10:38 AM »

Drop those apps in a virtual machine, and call it a day

264

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP & sata drive

« on: July 13, 2009, 08:51 AM »

I don't think so. My drives are all SATA, and I did not have any problem installing Windows XP right from the CD. It did have SP2 slipstreamed, so as long as you have it slipstreamed in the installation CD too, you won't have any problem.

265

Find And Run Robot / Re: Latest FARR Release v2.107.04 beta - Sep 23, 2012

« on: July 11, 2009, 11:36 AM »

Yup, it used to work on older versions (AFAIK in all I ever had). I'm on Windows XP SP3, 32-bit. Yeah, the ones showing up incorrectly are the ones who use DropMyRights to reduce the rights of the launched applications, like so:

"C:\Archivos de programa\DropMyRights\DropMyRights.exe" "C:\Archivos de programa\Opera\Opera.exe"

Also, the Steam icon shows an unknown icon (looks to be part of Windows standard icons). This is one of these strange shortcuts which does not specify a program to be launched, the "Target" field is greyed out, and simply reads "Steam". Plus, the Half-Life shortcut shows the Steam icon, instead of the usual encircled red lambda.

266

Find And Run Robot / Re: Latest FARR Release v2.107.04 beta - Sep 23, 2012

« on: July 11, 2009, 11:00 AM »

[BugFix] Attempt to fix icon display and launching for some .LNK shortcuts (especially x64 programs on x64 OS); let's see if this breaks anything for other users.

-mouser (July 08, 2009, 10:06 AM)

It did . All my customized links for Internet-facing applications are showing a generic executable icon, and other icons are not being shown correctly (Steam, for example)

267

Living Room / Re: Advice on Netbooks

« on: July 11, 2009, 10:56 AM »

You might want to look at Moblin, I remember seeing somewhere that Intel have given it their stamp of approval recently and it does use Intel open technologies and has "Atom specific technologies".

-4wd (July 07, 2009, 11:32 PM)

Actually it is co-developed by Intel . Looks like a great option for netbooks, when they hit the final version, that is

268

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« on: July 11, 2009, 10:08 AM »

If you don't do games and have a decent (256Mb or higher) video card, you can use Windows (and standard Office apps) already at 512Kbyte RAM. It is not nearly as resource hogging as Vista is. Of course, it thrives with 2Gbyte or more.

-Shades (July 09, 2009, 08:54 PM)

Impressive optimization work by Microsoft

269

DC Gamer Club / Re: Square Enix's New Take on Tower Defense: My Life as a Dark Lord

« on: July 06, 2009, 12:00 PM »

If there's anything Square Enix does well these days is money

270

Living Room / Re: Torrent Giant, The Pirate Bay sold, will go legal

« on: July 02, 2009, 09:35 AM »

Or how soon a compromise will be reached for all kinds of media - something like Spotify has (apparently) done for music. Any Spotify users here who can vouch for how good or annoying it is?

-nosh (July 02, 2009, 02:27 AM)

I'm completely sold on Spotify. I no longer have to hit the torrent sites to hear new music, since their catalogue is enormous, although it still lacks (and will probably lack forever) certain groups (The Beatles, Metallica, Pink Floyd...), as well as many independent groups (local efforts, mind you), and certain albums or artists due to regional restrictions (just off the top of my head, this includes Foo Fighters "In Your Honor", Katie Melua and Lady Gaga. A great loss not to be able to hear the latter, for sure :-P).

The sound quality is outstanding (Vorbis at q5, ~160 kbps, for all effects completely transparent), and premium users (10 € per month) can go up to Vorbis at q9 (~320 kbps). Spotify runs almost unnoticed by me, while the free accounts are ad-supported (using banners in the program interface, and sound ads roughly every 20 minutes between songs), you can minimize the program in the system tray and thus only have to suffer through the sound ads. The only thing that you could call annoying is its reliance on the BitTorrent protocol to ease the load on their own distribution servers, since it's non configurable, a while ago I had several speed problems with web browsing probably due to high use of my upload bandwidth, though I've not experienced anything similar in a while.

Plus it has has some nice perks included. Volume normalization and Last.FM scrobbling included in the program for all users, and certain niceties for paying users (albums available before they are released, just like any torrent site :-P, and ticket giveaways for concerts). While is not enough for me to consider paying for it (with 120 € a year I can easily buy more than 20 albums with no restrictions included), it certainly is pretty nice. I mean, the first time I heard about it I signed up without giving it a second thought, which hardly is a normal thing for me :-D

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271

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3.5 [FINAL]

« on: July 01, 2009, 09:02 AM »

The new icon looks gorgeous, except the 16x16 version, which looks quite funny

Some pages perform much better, namely Yahoo! Mail and many of Google services, except GMail, which seems as fast as always. Even Facebook seems to work faster, although the real test will be using Facebook Chat and see if it still brings the computer to a halt like before. In the other hand, the comment system in /. keeps freezing the browser. Oh well.

Also, it may be my computer, or DropMyRights not playing nice with Firefox, but a cold start is significantly slower than with 3.0. And when I say, "significantly slower" I mean it. A warm start is much faster than before, though.

I'm eager to see sites taking advantage of the new core features, especially <audio> and <video> support, even if the standard is not completely finished. Bye, bye Flash, I won't miss you :-P

272

DC Gamer Club / Re: STEAM... Can Someone in N. America Give me a "Gift" please?

« on: June 27, 2009, 10:13 AM »

Is there any sound logical reason why this game was classified to be North America only?

-Innuendo (June 27, 2009, 09:50 AM)

The usual regional restrictions due to different publishers. The game will be available in less than three days according to Steam.

Also, with the "parity" between the dollar and the euro, it's cheaper to buy the game in the American store

273

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Browser - No, Not Chrome! (what's that?)

« on: June 18, 2009, 09:05 AM »

And here I thought not bundling IE with Windows was going to be a minor inconvenience... this explains many things about the relationship between normal users and modern computers.

274

General Software Discussion / Re: fully free software utilities for biz use

« on: June 17, 2009, 09:55 AM »

btw I forgot to say nice idea for a thread Steven

I also asked here before about a 'fully-free' Anti-Virus without success . .

-tomos (June 17, 2009, 09:14 AM)

I assume only ClamAV can be used everywhere. Not as full featured as avast! or AntiVir, but better than nothing.

275

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera Unite: a server within the browser. Opera innovating as it used to

« on: June 17, 2009, 09:49 AM »

The user interface and associated jargon will make or break the product, and given that 50% of the comments on this and every other site on the web are of the nature "Eh? What? Can someone explain what this actually is?" today's launch seems to be doing more harm than good!

-Ampa (June 16, 2009, 09:43 PM)

Heh, looks like we're reading different sites :). Most people seem to understand what Unite is about, and negative comments are mostly directed to the possible security and copyright implications, apart from the typical "Opera" comments, ya know ;)

The idea surely sounds nice and cool, its success depends on what developers achieve with it, and what hurdles Opera create for the service, I hope they do not go their own way as always, and that they learned something from the iPhone App Store (treat your users and your developers right). If it goes well, I can see people using this to set up access to their home computer from everywhere and using any device, kind like a personal file server, but with more possible uses in the future (your own Remember the Milk, for example?). Also, developers could create replacements for popular web services, and in case one of them go down, you could continue to use it from your own computer.

After a sympathetic opinion, a critical analysis. He gained a reader, and Asa Dotzler recovered one feed subscription :D

The most impressive thing about Unite is that Opera managed to generate buzz and get everyone talking about it in a couple of days. Well done, even more considering that the release of the first beta of Opera went mostly ignored by the tech pundits, while broken alphas of Chrome for Linux and Mac received widespread coverage.