Messages

251

Living Room / Re: How to prevent screen flickering when scrolling chrome? (nvidia issue)

« on: May 21, 2013, 08:06 PM »

If you are using VMware on there it has a lot of services running all the time that won't give you a clean audio environment!

252

Living Room / Re: MySQL hacked

« on: May 21, 2013, 08:04 PM »

To be fair the hacking isn't their fault - part of it rests with me as I still have some websites using Joomla 1.5 because extensions I used are not available for 2.5 or 3 or it is going to be a massive undertaking to upgrade them because of built in forums or shopping carts and the site owners don't want to pay me to maintain or upgrade their website. I can't really afford to upgrade those sites gratis as it is going to be a lot of hours of work. As it stands I am going to make it clear that I have a clean copy as of today and if there is a problem in the future that is the site that will be put back if they don't want my support - alternatively they can make their own backups and then the ball is in their court!

To be honest I think the simplest solution is to move those sites to individual hosting solutions off my VPS and let them deal with the headaches rather than have them let hacking issues affect the whole server.

253

Living Room / Re: MySQL hacked

« on: May 21, 2013, 06:43 PM »

A VPS on nativespace.co.uk

254

Living Room / Re: MySQL hacked

« on: May 21, 2013, 06:33 PM »

Thanks - getting there slowly.

Not helped by the data centre not maintaining backups as promised.

Today they restored a backup from 2012!!! Then, having spent half the afternoon working on it, they suddenly restored all the corrupted websites again undoing everything I had achieved (well mostly as I was backing up as I went along).

Why does this sort of crap give script kiddies such a thrill - it isn't even as if they see me squirm! Bastards should be castrated!

255

Living Room / Re: MySQL hacked

« on: May 21, 2013, 02:29 AM »

I have - but a lot more malicious activity has occurred since.

FWIW I have lost total confidence in nativespace.co.uk - I have been using them for a number of years and am paying a premium price because they are doing daily backups offsite. Now turns out they take the money and don't do the backups.

Up shit creek in a big way.

256

Living Room / Re: MySQL hacked

« on: May 20, 2013, 03:59 AM »

I know it seems an odd thing to do deliberately??

I could understand websites being defaced or other malicious things to do - this just seems strange.

To the best of my knowledge no one has done any many SQL queries and all the databases are separated by user under CPanel and each has its own single user and unique strong password so how could a rogue script on  one user account affect the databases on all user accounts?

257

Living Room / MySQL hacked

« on: May 20, 2013, 03:36 AM »

Yesterday my server was hacked.

The behaviour was malicious and basically went through every database on the MySQL server and changed all user names to admin and all passwords to a single password.

This must have happened via the MySQL server directly because it affected all databases on the server for all client accounts.

As far as I can see no other damage was done.

Does anyone have any idea how this could have happened and how to prevent future attacks?

Currently a backup is being restored from before the incident but I don't want to have to go through this again if I can avoid it.

258

Living Room / Re: How to prevent screen flickering when scrolling chrome? (nvidia issue)

« on: May 16, 2013, 03:34 AM »

How about simply uninstalling the card and trying the one from MS update if there is one. The drivers usually do the job but are pretty basic - having said that there seem to be fewer latency issues.

259

Living Room / Re: How to prevent screen flickering when scrolling chrome? (nvidia issue)

« on: May 14, 2013, 10:17 AM »

Hate to say it but did you check to see if that as an issue fixed in new driver build?

How about the original graphic driver from HP? Does that suffer the same problem.

I suppose you could always cut your losses and just swap to FireFox or even Internet Explorer.

Reducing latency for DAWs usually means keeping it lean and mean, preferably not even connected to the internet and therefore no need for security software etc.

260

Living Room / Re: Where Is Windows 8.1?

« on: May 14, 2013, 06:23 AM »

What I have noticed with the app store (with the few clients I have that use it - most have Start8 installed) is that there tends to be an indiscriminate downloading of apps to do things - such as email clients I have never heard of.

In the long term there is going to have to be a whole lot of education about this sort of thing or there is going to be real problems - especially when locked into programs with no export features.

261

Living Room / Re: Where Is Windows 8.1?

« on: May 13, 2013, 03:46 PM »

My question exactly... and perhaps the link should be taken down?

-wraith808 (May 13, 2013, 12:55 PM)

Link removed

262

Living Room / Re: Adobe drops the gauntlet - going forward it's cloud - or nothing.

« on: May 09, 2013, 07:07 AM »

Another thought is:

Physical upgrade = new features and better be something useful otherwise users will skip it (esp. true of MS and Adobe).

Cloud solution = lots of money = minimal new development (what is the incentive when you have the market cornered and professionals by the short and curlies).

Over time I can't see MS or Adobe adding much to the feature set if the regular income is assured without any work. All those annoying developers expecting payment ... why bother.

Corel has pretty much taken this approach over the past decade with physical products and now their market share is down the toilet. With a bit of imagination and a few decent developers they could make a big comeback so long as they don't see dollar signs for cloud solutions.

In the short term I would guess people like Xara and some of the other photo editing titles will grab a chunk of the market for small companies and individuals that don't want a large regular outlay.

263

Living Room / Re: Adobe drops the gauntlet - going forward it's cloud - or nothing.

« on: May 09, 2013, 04:09 AM »

u know, I've been noticing that the media seems to insist that the benefits of subscription cloud services are "undeniable".  And I'm getting really annoyed by it.  Not because there are no benefits, there are.  But the way they say it, it makes it sound like the local installation does NOT have any benefits.  And those who don't understand the differences hear this and it seems like it is gaining momentum.

-superboyac (May 08, 2013, 03:28 PM)

The media is behaving like any good lapdog and doing exactly what they're told. The one pivotally critical detail that the cloud shills miss/overlook/ignore is the simple fact that the internet does not exist as a singular thing. It is a ramshackle group of discontiguous networks that just-so-happen to share relatively well with their neighbors. but any break in the chain of resold (to the Nth power) services that comprise the sum total internet could quite easily cripple a company if it decided to have a hiccup either at the right time, or for a long enough time. I've already had a (client's) cloud provider claim that a problem had to be on my (our collective) end because they could access the servers (INTERNALLY!!!) just fine... Yet I'm looking right at a trace route report that clearly says that their up level provider just took a shit because that is exactly where all the packet movement stops!

I've already gone ballistic on the phone when one of the cloud sales drones made the mistake of telling me that their total downtime for the previous year was only 11 minutes. Because I don't give a flying what their down time is ... I need to ensure that everybody between point A, and point B stays just dandy so my company's down time doesn't spike us right into the toilet. Because if a drunk hits a pole up the street from me, and the local utility company doesn't get it fixed really soon... Guess what? My company is blind as a bat trying to function .. Regardless of whether or not the "cloud" is allegedly construed as being "up" (I'm still getting fisted).

-Stoic Joker (May 08, 2013, 05:38 PM)

Somewhat 'prosaically' put - but pretty damn accurate (fisting or not).

At the end of the day none of this stuff is about customers or cloud benefits or anything that matters to users  - it is all about assured and large revenue streams for US corporations. Corporation - business (extortion) as usual.

264

Living Room / Re: Adobe drops the gauntlet - going forward it's cloud - or nothing.

« on: May 08, 2013, 08:12 AM »

Adobe will love the idea that nobody will ever be able to pirate Photoshop ever again. Everyone that wants to use it will have to pay for it, monthly.

-https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=29203.msg270859#msg270859

Another inch closer!

 

-app103 (May 07, 2013, 10:26 PM)

How long do you think before someone produces copies with the activation and online check code stripped out or the activation period updated to 1000 years?

If anyone thinks this will stop piracy they are not in the real world - this is a HUGE gauntlet to throw down to hackers and what's more some loyal customers who feel ripped off will contemplate using cracked software rather than be extorted on a monthly subscription.

People aren't totally stupid- they can do their sums! If you only use a product like PhotoShop and aren't interested in the rest of the suite Adobe's prices basically mean that you are buying the product over and over again every few months.

If you use a lot of CS products and are the kind of person who likes to keep software up to date Adobe Cloud is a no brainer at current prices - it is a lot cheaper than paying for regular updates. That's not to say Adobe won't hike prices once everyone is resigned to the Cloud coup.

Personally I am moving in the opposite direction. I want at least a couple of computer systems that do not connect to the internet at all and are used for specific tasks - for me Adobe products would be on one of those machines as I don'y want or need internet connectivity to edit video, audio or photographs - plus I want a DAW which needs to be as uncluttered with crap (and especially security products) as possible to work well.

265

Living Room / Re: Adobe drops the gauntlet - going forward it's cloud - or nothing.

« on: May 07, 2013, 06:24 PM »

Not that long ago they did a nice thing with their CS2 (or was it 3?) product give-away and now they do this. Ah well, lets hope this move will make them see how the bottom of their "war chest" looks like.

-Shades (May 07, 2013, 06:07 PM)

Hmmm - no they didn't. They turned off their activation server for CS2 and had to provide legitimate users with an activation free version of the software. They turned a blind eye to others downloading the software but it was never officially the intention to give a free copy to anyone that wants one.

266

Living Room / Re: Adobe drops the gauntlet - going forward it's cloud - or nothing.

« on: May 07, 2013, 05:59 PM »

Actually in the long term this might be a big boost for Linux - for me one of the big draws of Windows platforms is Adobe's products - if (as is likely - either by design or by accident) the hard copy versions cease to function at some point there is no incentive for me to stay with Windows. MS Office is already looking pretty dead to me in the long term so why do I need to stay with Windows?

267

Living Room / Re: Adobe drops the gauntlet - going forward it's cloud - or nothing.

« on: May 07, 2013, 09:50 AM »

Strange I posted a reply this morning but it seems to have disappeared into the ether ...

There hasn't been a hugely compelling reason to upgrade PhotoShop wince version 7 (except to keep compatible with Windows). It will be interesting to see how quickly CS products on disk become unusable on Windows platforms (? collusion between MS and Adobe to push the cloud agenda).

For now I use CS3 and I don't really see any reason to upgrade to a later version and certainly won't be paying a large monthly subscription.

Two things will happen: hackers will have a field day (and the growth in use of cracked software will grow) and third party developers (if they have any sense) will cash in by making plugins for CS3, 4 and 5 to fill in the gaps with the new releases.

268

Living Room / Re: What to do with an SSD after it fails

« on: April 24, 2013, 03:49 AM »

Seems to me it depends on why the drive failed. If it is a controller issue the only real option would be to find an identical controller and do surgery to get the drive working. If you can't find a suitable controller then the only options are storage (why?) or destruction.

269

Living Room / Re: What to do with an SSD after it fails

« on: April 23, 2013, 03:03 AM »

Did you buy it online? You might be able to find the invoice/receipt there.

270

Living Room / Re: What to do with an SSD after it fails

« on: April 22, 2013, 07:00 PM »

Beat the crap out of it with a hammer (also good therapy) 

271

Living Room / Re: "Admin" is a BAD user name for anything! Change t!

« on: April 16, 2013, 03:02 AM »

IIRC, my router actually offered to change the default admin password when I first logged in.  I hear a lot about Buffalo routers being junk, but this one came pre-installed with DD-WRT and has worked like a champ since I first got it. 

-Edvard (April 16, 2013, 01:36 AM)

May change the password but a lot of routers don't change the default user name - hell some routers don't even have a user name - just a password.

272

General Software Discussion / Re: Registry cleaning software debunked...

« on: April 01, 2013, 08:10 AM »

IMHO registry cleaners are a waste of time and money - and worst they cause random problems that don't immediately appear (and so never get associated with the 'clean up').

Try running a registry cleaner before and after installing any version of MS Office and you will find dozens of new 'errors'.

273

Living Room / Re: Pirate Vinyl Records! :D

« on: March 31, 2013, 05:01 PM »

Sound balance varies tremendously within a venue, and what musicians hear on stage is not what you hear in the audience.

-xtabber (March 31, 2013, 03:40 PM)

That is true but the sound heard by musicians is a lot different to what is presented on CD or vinyl or even DTS on BluRay disks and in a good concert hall, with well chose seats, you will not be far off what the musicians hear.

Recorded sound is the sound agreed between engineers, producers and performers and the balance is almost always heavily bent towards soloists. I can only assume that the engineers and producers have the biggest say in the final product because recordings never seem to reflect the balance sought in the live hall.

274

Living Room / Re: Pirate Vinyl Records! :D

« on: March 31, 2013, 02:12 PM »

Classical music, and to a lesser extent, Jazz, provide a better test of recording techniques.

-xtabber (March 31, 2013, 01:44 PM)

Classical recordings are generally pretty dreadful - especially when soloists are involved. The only place to hear classical music as it should sound is in the concert hall. On recordings the balance of instruments is always wildly different - and usually REALLY unbalanced.

Classic example a few years ago - I was at a live concert with a guitar concerto that was recorded. In the concert the players worked together to get a superb level of balance and integration of sound (all the more so as the soloist was playing with an orchestra for the first time). On the recording it sounded like the soloist and listener were in one room whilst the orchestra was in another. Been my experience of most classical music recordings.

Can't help wondering some times if soloists are to blame as they want their sound to the front!

275

Living Room / Re: Pirate Vinyl Records! :D

« on: March 31, 2013, 12:06 PM »

I generally use a flat EQ with no effects. Why mess with what the band and recording engineers intended? Sometimes I'll put up the bass for some music, but in general, I listen to it flat.

-Renegade (March 30, 2013, 09:28 PM)

Because there is a difference between what is heard in a studio with studio monitors and what comes out of, even expensive, domestic audio equipment.

-Carol Haynes (March 31, 2013, 07:52 AM)

The difference is because of the location, not the speakers.  You can put the same exact speakers in your living room that are used in a recording studio, but the sound will not be the same because of a different acoustic environment.  The best sound in any given room will be obtained by matching the capabilities of the speakers to the characteristics of the room, and also to where listeners will be positioned.

Sound is the result of complex interactions of pressure waves and it varies as you move around a room, or how many people are in that room.  Newer home audio equipment can do a pretty good job of emulating the ambiance of different concert halls, and the effect can sometimes sound more "natural" than straight reproduction, but neither is more "accurate" than the other.

-xtabber (March 31, 2013, 10:20 AM)

True - but domestic speakers are going to have different response profiles to studio speakers (actually any two different speakers will have different response profiles). So if you are using different speakers in a different environment you won't hear what the engineers heard by using a flat EQ.

As you say you won't even hear what the engineer heard even if you steal their whole set up and take it home - that is why EQ is used to tweak the sound you hear.

At the end of the day it is all a matter of taste - even if you do hear what the engineer hears it still isn't necessarily the best sound. IMHO engineers in concerts can't mix a decent sound at all - I have yet to go to a concert of any band and not be irritated by the bad mixing!