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81
Found Deals and Discounts / Re: JetDrive Defragmentation Suite
« on: March 14, 2011, 07:16 PM »
I have always been hugely sceptical about defragging software. Then recently I upgraded my home network to gigabit, but was disappointed by the network speeds from one particular (XP) machine. It was achieving half the speeds of other machines on the network.

It turns out the hard disk was badly fragmented -- the 10 most fragmented files averaging more than 20,000 fragments each! In fact it was so bad that XP's built-in defragmenter wouldn't work. I tried it a couple of times, and it just played with the files but didn't fix them. Just kept reporting that I still needed to defragment my disk!

I turned to JKDefrag, and it did the job. It took 12 hours, but it worked. So yes, in my experience, an occasional defrag is probably a good idea and yes, if your disk is in a bad way, trying a specialist program like JKDefrag is worth a shot.

82
General Software Discussion / Re: The best RSS reader?
« on: March 14, 2011, 06:40 PM »
+1 for FeedDemon. I see you've tried it. What was missing? It does have a "prefetch items for offline reading" option.

83
Living Room / Re: England Is Grinding To A Halt.
« on: March 11, 2011, 06:18 AM »
I say we impose a "plutocracy tax" on the rich and let their wealth bring down/pay for higher crude! (In the US, they just buy the candidates who will vote exactly how they want -- if not this election, surely the next.) It's depressing to be at the mercy of idiots. Greedy idiots.
-zridling (March 10, 2011, 10:14 PM)

Always an easy target, but the rich are so small in number that they're not really relevant. If you took every taxpayer in the UK who earns more than £1 million (just 14,000 people), and took every penny they earned (i.e. taxed them at 100 per cent), it would net another £20 billion a year or so (source) -- enough to pay less than half of the annual interest on the country's debt. And that's before you work out how many jobs you would have killed off by taking all the money from the rich.

84
Living Room / Re: Should ebook users have any rights?
« on: March 10, 2011, 05:25 PM »
What a frustrating situation to be in as a consumer.  On one hand, you don't want to do anything illegal.  On the other hand, attempting to do something that is ethical so that your needs are met is illegal.
-superboyac (March 10, 2011, 12:18 PM)

I think people worry about this too much. Let's go back in time. Way back when the VCR was at the cutting edge of technology, people used to swap video tapes all the time. If you missed an episode of your favourite programme, you went into the office the next day and got a tape from someone who had recorded it.

This was entirely, unambiguously, unlawful (I'm talking about UK law here). But everyone did it. No one was ever prosecuted. Why? Because no court in the land would ever find someone guilty of a crime, and the copyright holders knew it.

Fast forward a few years, and people started making copies of their music CDs for personal use, as MP3s, or CD copies for the car, or whatever. Again entirely illegal. No prosecutions. Same reason. In fact, in the UK at least, the music companies have said that they will not prosecute people for copying their own CDs. Because they know it would be a waste of time.

The real problem here is that, in the UK at least, the copyright law is so out of date. The only protection given to consumers as far as copying copyrighted works is concerned is the right to record TV programmes to watch later. That's it. And that law is more than 20 years old. And because the government has failed to produce modern laws based on principles of fair use, people are having to make it up for themselves as they go along. That's not necessarily a bad thing. At least it seems to have worked so far.

85
Living Room / Re: England Is Grinding To A Halt.
« on: March 10, 2011, 02:42 PM »
No offence but frankly, if it caused 50% of the cars currently on the UK roads to not be on the road, that would be a Good Thing.   :Thmbsup:

-4wd (March 09, 2011, 09:32 PM)

How would it be a good thing?

This is hitting small business owners and the poorer communities whose only means of getting to work each day, is by car.  If they cant afford to work, they dont turn up, business goes slow, eventually closes down, people starve and England becomes a third world country very fast because people simply cannot afford to travel to and from work.
-Stephen66515 (March 10, 2011, 12:43 PM)

There are two ways of seeing this, of course. Jump back a generation to when I was starting out, and you generally lived close to the job. I moved house several times to live close to the workplace. Today, some people in Britain commute hundreds of miles each day. Because they can. You either see that as a great freedom, or an environmental and social disaster.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the price of petrol is reaching a level where it is making people think twice about taking jobs that involve hundreds of miles of commuting a week. That may not be a bad thing.

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