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Messages - Nudel [ switch to compact view ]

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1
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: February 14, 2013, 04:11 PM »
In fact, it's perfectly possible to buy a decent MS Office (= 2010, = not the latest, very problematic version) for LESS than this D "Opus" costs.

That does not seem true to me.

Even with academic discounts, I cannot find a version of Office 2010 (not the latest version, not being updated) that costs less than any version of Opus 10 (the latest version, regular and significant updates). Even if you ignore differences in the number of machines you can use, the old version of Office still costs far more than the latest version of Opus.

Office 2010 prices from Amazon UK, Opus prices from the GPSoft website using Google's exchange rates.

£299 Microsoft Office Professional 2010 (2 PCs)
£247 Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 (2 PCs)
£185 Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 (1 PC)
£125 Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 (3 PCs)
£82  Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 (1 PC)
£65  Microsoft Office University 2010 Academic (1 PC)
£46  Opus 10 Pro (1 PC + 1 Laptop)
£39  Opus 10 Pro (1 PC + 1 Laptop) with Academic discount
£20  Opus 10 Light (1 PC)
£17  Opus 10 Light (1PC) with Academic discount.

But, hey, if you want to buy a copy of Opus 9 (not the latest version) from us for £65 (the cheapest version of Office 2010 I can find on Amazon, and that requires proof that you're an academic) then I'm sure we can work something out!


Edit: I'll spare everyone the thread bump but, responding to the post just below this one, getting Office for €13 via the Home User Program is hardly relevant here. To qualify for that you must work for a company that has committed to paying Microsoft thousands and thousands in regular licence fees. Again, I'm sure we could arrange something similar if someone wants to throw that kind of money at us. The total cost of Office is still higher, however you look at it; with the HUP you get Office cheap because your company has already paid for the bulk of it. And most people don't qualify for it anyway.

2
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: February 10, 2013, 06:35 PM »
As I see the amount of "hate" that type of interface creates among users, I can imagine that GPSoftware is not likely to implement it soon. Personally, I wouldn't mind having to work with this type of interface at all. But I think the sales of this DOpus version would never cover for the amount of work GPSoftware would have to do.

You can do something very similar to that Opus 5 UI example (and I guess the GIMP UI, although I haven't used GIMP much so I may have misunderstood) in the Windows versions of Opus using floating toolbars. I think that's what they were originally added for in Opus 6 (the first Windows version). There may be some caveats that I'm not thinking of right now, but I think setting a floating toolbar to "Keep On Top: Opus Only" would be quite similar to what Opus 5 had. There's also a "same size buttons when not docked" setting for each toolbar under Customize -> Toolbars, which exists to let you make grids of buttons like Opus 5 had.

I wouldn't use floating toolbars for this myself, as I think it becomes fiddly when you have to manage the toolbar(s) as a separate window, but it might suit some workflows. Personally, I tend to open, move, resize, close windows quite dynamically so it would be a pain to manage the toolbars on top of that, but I know other people do things very differently and e.g. always keep particular apps in particular spaces on the screen, or use virtual desktops, etc. So what doesn't work for me might be great for someone else. The option's certainly there.

I do have one floating toolbar, but it's docked to the bottom of my second monitor, a bit like a second taskbar, and is used for launching various apps and documents that I used often enough to want quick access to but not often enough that I want them pinned to the taskbar itself.

The real prob with DO is elsewhere: It's considered superior, and whenever you ask for a function that isn't there, you get the answer, "it's possible", without anybody telling you which way it could be possible.

We sometimes answer dozens of questions a day on the Opus support forum, going into great detail if it's needed, at least if the person asking has linked their account. (Sometimes when they haven't linked their accounts as well, but we don't always have time to help everyone in detail and it's only right to focus on the paying customers.)

If something can't be done then we'll typically just say so, too. (And if we thought something could be done but then, looking into the details, it can't or it doesn't work very well, then we'll correct our mistake and say sorry pretty quickly.) Opus does enough that we don't have to be shy about what it doesn't do. And while we're always working to make it do more, there are some things we don't want it to do, because everything is a trade-off in design and complexity, both for us when writing the software and for everyone else when using the software. (Even with those, we change our minds sometimes.)

From this and the Two Classes of Membership Here? thread, you seem to have a chip on your shoulder about Opus for some reason. I don't know the history, so maybe it's justified (apologies, if appropriate), but I'll just say that people would be more inclined to help you & consider your ideas if you didn't escalate every difference of opinion into insults and personal attacks.

3
General Software Discussion / Re: Two classes of membership here?
« on: November 24, 2012, 02:31 PM »
Have a look at the forum policy (you must accept before entering the forum) at the Directory "Opus" forum. Isn't it illogical to pretend your sw is the best of its kind, and then not allow any mentioning of competition sw's, when it should be of much interest rather often to discuss the respective realization of a feature in similar sw? (x2, XY and SC all permit this kind of discussion, and I own a paid license for any of those - not for DO, and that's not a coincidence: If you allow sw developers to treat you like s*** - delete the paragraph here -, they will never cease to do so, hence the interest of buying 3 competing products instead of just 1. And then, DO ist not THAT splendid, e.g. compare processing of metadata in x2 and DO.)

I'm the Opus forum admin these days, and I take issue with this.

Here is the wording of the relevant part of our forum rules (which have not changed recently):

These forums are not for the discussion of other companies' products unless they are directly related to the usage of Directory Opus. You may post about products which other users will find useful in concert with Directory Opus (e.g. tools suitable for integration into Opus toolbar buttons). You may post about products you are having problems using alongside Directory Opus (e.g. if you need help figuring out how to make Opus and another program talk to each other). Most other mentions of third-party products will be considered off-topic and unacceptable.

The forums have a "Coffeeshop" area where rules are more relaxed and off-topic discussions are allowed provided they are not spam, abusive, illegal, etc.

That rule is there so that people don't post questions about using Windows or Photoshop or whatever to our forum. They are there because people do it a lot, even with the rule there. (I imagine many people don't read the rules.)

People ask questions about general Windows usage and completely unrelated software on our forum because -- and they've said this themselves -- we tend to be better at answering questions than the support for the other software they were asking about.

I'm not saying we're better than the support for all other software, but we do engage with our users and spent a lot of time trying to help them. Some software authors don't even have support forums. Some have forums where posting is about as useful as firing your message into a black hole. (Ever had Microsoft or Adobe care that you're found a bug in their software, let alone actually fix it, let alone within several years of the report? We don't solve every problem, but some companies don't solve any problem, at least if you're Joe Public. So people sometimes come to us for those problems as well.)

People get used to us answering their questions and helping them, and forget that we are not a general "help you do anything with your computer" support forum. We sometimes answer those threads in our spare time but we obviously don't have the resources to do it all the time and for free, and we'd rather people went to whoever makes the software they bought to get support for it, rather than provide free support for someone else's software while whoever wrote it takes the money and ignores their users.

People can, and do, mention competing products on our forum. Where it's relevant we are fine with that. Where it's not relevant, and just someone having a cheap dig at us, it can be annoying. -- e.g. People fixate on a pet feature and say "program A does this so why doesn't Opus?" when that has little relationship to whether or not the feature is a good idea or a sensible use of our limited resources, and when there are a larger set of true statements of the form "Opus does this so why doesn't program A?" -- Even then, we don't generally do or say anything unless someone does it repeatedly and is basically trolling us and our forum.

And, as it says in the rules, we have an area where people can talk about more or less anything they want (as long as it's legal and decent).

We run a tech-support forum for Directory Opus, and the rule is just there to make it clear it isn't a tech-support forum for anything else.

4
I went off Daemon Tools when I noticed it installed a new root certificate authority on your machine, which essentially makes it possible for whoever controls (or gains access to) that root CA to sign any code so it appears to be from any publisher.

I don't know if it still does this as I haven't gone near it since then. I switched to Virtual CloneDrive which is free and works great, at least for my needs. (There are a few things DT does which VCD doesn't, but I don't need them.)

Daemon Tools is not the only tool to install a root CA but the one it installed seemed to be from a company who only created it to avoid paying money for code-signing, which isn't how things should be done. Code-signing certs are expensive, and the "proper" CAs can be leaked or tricked as well, but if every company creates their own root CA then the whole signing system is useless.

5
General Software Discussion / Re: Is WinZip still worth updating?
« on: February 12, 2012, 05:36 AM »
Igor's incorrect about drag & drop, FWIW. Drag sources can provide the files via IStreams and do not have to write the data to temporary files. The data can be sent to the drop target directly from memory if you want.

Re Winzip, I installed it recently to test something and I was really, really impressed... by the amount of garbage they had managed to cram into the installer of what should have been a simple archive tool. It must have taken me 10 minutes to install the stupid thing, click through all the prompts about other software I didn't want and similar nonsense... Really incredible how bad it is now, even before you get to the program itself (which then tries to get you to install even more junk the first time you run it).

6
General Software Discussion / Re: fast pdf preview
« on: February 12, 2012, 05:24 AM »
Adobe Reader will provide both thumbnails (1st page of the document) and viewers/previewers, and I guess is what most people use.

If you are on 64-bit Windows, Adobe still haven't fixed Reader to generate thumbnails, but I fixed it for them:

http://pretentiousna...f_x64_fix/index.html

With Adobe Reader, plus that fix installed (or on 32-bit Windows), you could get an instant preview of the first page of all PDFs by switching to thumbnails mode. In Directory Opus you can also get the same thumbnails in the infotip you get when hovering over a PDF, if you put {thumbnail} into the PDF intofip definition. (Or, like I do, into the All Files infotip definition.)

You can also open the preview pane for Adobe's preview handler, which lets you scroll through the whole file. (The same preview handler that Windows Explorer uses, although in Opus we have some extra code that detects Adobe's preview handler and fixes several bugs in it, e.g. not repainting properly and not responding to the Tab key correctly. There's a list of those on the page I linked above.)

Last I looked, which is a while ago and may no longer be true, most other file managers didn't support preview handlers but would show PDFs via Internet Explorer which in turn would use Adobe Reader's ActiveX control. You can use that in Opus as well if you want, but it's not the default as it doesn't work very well on Windows 7 and/or later versions of IE, thanks to Adobe's brilliant programming no doubt. :)

PDF-XChange is an alternative PDF viewer that supports both thumbnails and preview handlers, without needing any fixes like my ones for Adobe, so you might want to look at that as well, and how well it works with Windows Explorer or whichever file manager you prefer.

7
Sure does seem like Microsoft lied about this before. I don't remember (and can't find from a quick look) any qualifying clauses in their previous statements that made them only apply to Intel Windows and not ARM.

Secure Boot would be a much better idea if the user got to decide which keys the hardware trusted. If you're running Ubuntu, or whatever, they should be able to sign it with a key that you tell the BIOS to trust, and you can go about your business with the benefit that any unwanted changes to the bootloader will be flagged.

8
That's what I think the problem is with a lot of s/w like Opus. "It's a file manager." "Yeah, so? So's Explorer, and I got that already." "But it does this, and this, and this." "Huh? What use is THAT?" And so it goes on. You don't know what someone will find useful and they believe there's lots of useful stuff, if they but knew how to get at it.

Totally. I still don't know what to say when people ask me about Opus in real life. I still haven't been able to explain it to my dad. "It, um... It lets you do stuff... to files..."

Knowing which specific examples to give is hard because you don't know what people do all day with their computers. And what's amazingly useful to one person often looks utterly pointless and stupid to another person.

That was why I wrote my "Getting to Know..." guide back in the day. (Hopefully I'll get around to updating that one of these years. Always end up writing code instead.)


And that was the point I was trying to make way back when v8 was released. I had a spirited discussion with Dr. Perry regarding archive formats & how the limited support for ZIP & RAR were not going to be enough & that no one was going to take on the daunting task to write them. Dr. Perry just took awhile to come around to my way of thinking.

I can't argue with that. The community's willingness/ability to write plugins was overestimated. Some people have written viewer/thumbnail plugins for Opus but most of the time people look to us to do it (but there's only so much we can do at a time). Total Commander is the only file manager that seems to get a lot of love from plugin developers, for whatever reason, but I think we've got the important stuff covered now; it just took us a while to write all that code ourselves. :)


I'm not sure DOpus would be nearly successful as it is today if some driven fellow hadn't taken the time to make that DOpus discussion group on Yahoo! Groups all those years ago. Thanks, Leo!

I think Wayne Howard gets the credit for making the Yahoo! group; I just posted on it sometimes.

I should also mention Steve Banham for starting the Opus Resource Centre web forums (which I admin these days, but Steve got the ball rolling and ran it for years first), which replaced the old user-to-user mailing list that GPSoftware used to run.

9
That member has also let me see a draft copy & I've already sent over my feedback. (He even implemented some of it.)

Ah, cool. You are one step ahead of me. :)

Not a misunderstanding...a typo. I meant to say implement support for archive formats *other* than ZIP and RAR. Oops.  :-[

Ah, fair enough. It makes sense now.

Yeah, the plan back when Opus 8 came out was to provide a plugin API and a sample RAR plugin and leave it to the community to create plugins for other formats. (Keeping in mind that 7z wasn't that popular back then, and there wasn't a lot of demand for it or any other archive format. Zip and RAR were the main ones. A few people wanted other formats but, at the time, not so many that it seemed like the right priority for GPSoft themselves to work on it, especially when -- as the theory went -- other people could write them and leave GPSoft to work on the stuff that only they could work on.)

Problem was, only one person tried to write such a plugin and they didn't get very far. Archive plugins are pretty complicated to write (especially with formats like 7z where solid archives do not allow you to access the files in any order, or .tar.gz where you've got an archive in an archive) so it's not surprising, in hindsight, but it took a while to realise that nobody else was going to do it and we had to do it ourselves, during which time the demand for 7z also increased as the format became more popular.

I say "us"... What happened is I quit my job (which was unrelated to Opus) and took a holiday to write the Archives plugin that eventually shipped with Opus 10. Somehow that holiday never stopped and I'm still working on Opus stuff today (and quite broke compared to before, but also getting to spend a lot more time with my cat). So, in a way, the Archives plugin was written by a member of the community... who became a member of the team while writing it. (Writing it took ages, too. It's one of the most complex things I've written, even though it's 'only' a wrapper around 7z.dll and a few other things. Making archives look like random-access filesystems, and doing it well, is quite complex. :))

While the main aim was 7z support, 7z.dll also provides loads of other archive formats, so with a bit of extra work we got a bunch of others as part of the deal. (A lot of extra work in some cases, e.g. so that you can modify a .tar.gz and Opus re-compresses the outer archive on-the-fly. And for the WinRAR stuff, too, of course, although in the end that only took a few days to write on top of the existing framework that the plugin had made for itself.)

We've thought about rolling a lot of the Archives plugin code into Opus itself and providing a simplified API for other archive plugins, which could take advantage of the framework that the plugin uses internally so that other developers could write their own archive plugins without re-doing that difficult work. There's probably no point, though. There aren't many archive formats left that we don't support now and if there is demand for one in the future then it'd be easier for us to add it to the Archives plugin instead than to provide and support another API. The existing VFS API is easy to use for plugins that talk to proper filesystems (i.e. not archives) so it doesn't really need simplifying for other VFS plugin types, and it'll probably stay as it is now (although we're happy to improve the API for plugin authors who write to us with issues).

The version of DOpus I tested would open RAR archives, but open them outside of the lister.

FWIW, there's a FAQ about how to change that in earlier versions of Opus: http://resource.dopu...viewtopic.php?t=1366

10
Check out the various Downloads / Tutorials areas on the Opus forums for people's shared configs, advice, etc. Lots of good stuff there. There's also a very long & detailed customization tutorial soon to be posted by one of the forum members, who let me see a draft copy recently, so keep an eye out for that.

partly because the DOpus authors have finally caved on their long-time insistence that they'd never write archive plugins for either RAR and ZIP (and let's face it, their support for RAR in the past has been very weak and very much and after-thought)

I think there's some misunderstanding there. :)

Opus has never needed a Zip archive plugin because Zip support has always been built-in. (If my memory serves me, that's been the case since the first Windows version more than a decade ago.

(Maybe you meant 7z rather than Zip? But nobody ever refused to write a 7z plugin either. It took until Opus 10 to happen but that wasn't for lack of desire.)

As for RAR, Opus has had a RAR archive plugin since seven or eight years ago.

It's possible I've forgotten a very old statement but I don't think anyone ever insisted that archive plugins would not be written, for any filetype. Adding the archive/VFS plugin API back in 2004 (or whenever it was) would've been pretty pointless if the aim was to never write any plugins for it. :)

There were issues with making the RAR plugin anything other than read-only, because while the RAR decompression code is available for anyone to use/licence, the RAR compression code is not made available to anyone in the world, for love nor money, except to RARLabs themselves. We've always wished the code was available and always wanted a fully read-write RAR plugin but it's also always been impossible to write it how we wanted to.

In Opus 10 we addressed that by making Opus able to automate WinRAR.exe, if it is available, to modify RAR archives. (Extraction is still done without WinRAR, as it always was.) Automating WinRAR is a kludge and something we were reluctant to do, but I have to admit it works pretty well in the end. It's not perfect but it's better than I thought it would be. (It was me who wrote the code to do it and I was not sure, until it was finished, if it would work well enough to release, or if it would provide any real value over simply using the WinRAR context menus which already worked with Opus. In the end it did both and was worth spending the time on. I'd still re-write the code to use a RAR compression library if one actually existed, though.)

Like probably every tool except RAR/WinRAR itself, support for updating RAR files isn't as good as for updating Zip, 7z, TAR, etc. For example, some complex operations have to be done, behind the scenes, in multiple stages instead of in a single update. (While Opus handles the details and sets up each stage of the operation automatically, it means some RAR updates take longer than similar updates for other archive formats. There are also some things you can do in Opus with other archive formats that you cannot do with RAR, due to limitations of what WinRAR can be asked to do. For example, you cannot rename files on the fly while adding them to RAR archives. But, on the whole, modifying RAR archives via Opus works well. (Unless there are loads of complaints that nobody has sent in. :-))

I think Total Commander does something similar, with RAR.exe instead of WinRAR.exe. I went with WinRAR.exe at the time because it had better Unicode support (not sure if that's still the case with RAR 4) and so that any errors from the RAR program could appear in the program's UI. (The WinRAR UI is kept hidden normally, though; you see standard Opus progress dialogs instead.)

Automating (Win)RAR.exe is as good as anyone can realistically do unless the makers of RAR become willing to licence their proprietary compression algorithms as is done for other archive formats. I've long wished for them to do that, but also long given up hope that it will happen, and for that reason I still personally choose and advocate using other archive formats over RAR, but I can't change what other people want.

11
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: September 19, 2011, 11:55 PM »
DOpus 10 was released more than four years after DOpus 9, yet it has not much in the way of new features; mostly improvements in its existing features.

Have we read the same release notes? :-)

My opinion is obviously not unbiased (given that my name is in the About dialog these days :)), but I can't think of much other software where updates add the amount of changes that Opus 10 added.

Of course, if all the changes happen to be things that don't really interest you then it won't seem like a big update, but I think there are a lot of changes in Opus 10, many of which a lot of people had asked for. I think there has been a positive response to the update.


However the number of bugs in DOpus 10 - and I am speaking of more than just my own recent rants here - seems disproportionate with the time they had to get this version ready.

I guess we need better beta testers. :) I don't think there are many bugs left now, though.


All I know is that this version is still giving me fits and taking up hours on some days to try and get something done

Can you point me to the support or forum threads about that?


and I purchased and installed the DO10 upgrade on 1-May-2011! That's almost five months and for the most part the advice I get is "try installing the newest beta and see if that helps". Grrr...

I can only apologise if the issue you've been seeing hasn't been investigated properly, but without knowing which issue/thread we're talking about I can't investigate (or explain) further. Let me know and I'll look into it.

12
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: June 02, 2011, 02:17 AM »
you're looking at images in the viewer and you see one you want to open in your image editor - you have to take note of the name, go back to the main window, find the file. A simple open [current image in viewer] in external app, or even just copy filepath would solve this.

Drag the viewer's window icon (top-left of the titlebar) on to your image editor.


Problems zooming into images - on my machine I often cant get over 200%

It only happens when zooming very large images and does not happen on newer versions of Windows, so it's a pretty low-priority issue for us now. It is still on the list, but requires some low-level changes to how the viewer works and it's under a pile of other to-do items.


Also problems with one bit Tiffs only showing as an enlarged thumbnail. Again, yet to be reported officially but reported in the Dopus forum here.

That turned out to be because of the resolution set in those TIFFs, and some 'feature' someone asked for years ago to do with fax images. We might remove the 'feature' as it doesn't seem that useful and it'd make sense to just do what everything else does.

13
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: May 07, 2011, 01:46 AM »
And can I disable that "styled" context menu? I always have to scroll.

Not sure what you mean. Which context menu?

14
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: May 02, 2011, 10:39 AM »
BTW, when the website says an upgrade quote is only valid until 15th May, I think it just means that particular quote. You can ask for another quote after that time.

I don't know exactly how long the 40% offer will exist for but I'd be surprised if it was only for two weeks. A lot of people won't even realise Opus 10 is out in that amount of time.

15
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: May 02, 2011, 04:33 AM »
In general, DOpus is immensely configurable, which is a good thing too, because many of the default behaviors and settings are quite peculiar to say the least, especially if you're used to another file manager.

I've been making a list for a tutorial on "settings you might want to change", which I hope to put out after I update/re-write my general introduction to Opus (which has taken days to do so far; sometimes I wish Opus did less :) ).

Some of the default settings did get changed in Opus 10 -- including the red and green colours you mention -- but if you update over Opus 9 (or import an old config from it) it will keep your existing Preferences settings. You can reset some or all of them using the Prefs window, if you want.

Once I finish my guide/list, if there are still defaults that seem wrong I will try to them changed. I wanted to do a full pass through Preferences checking the defaults before Opus 10 was released but time ran out. (It's not just finding them, it's making the case to other people and discussing them. Sometimes it turns out there's a good reason for how they are, sometimes there's a clash of opinions, and sometimes it's a no-brainer, but you have to go through that for each thing.)

(There are also settings which don't make sense as a default even though many people would like them. Trivial example: Some people want the tree on, others want it off; no default pleases everyone. Another example: Some people love being able to double-click the empty space in a dir to go up a level, or turn on dual-display, but if that was on by default nobody would know it was there and people who triggered it by accident would be confused. That kind of thing should stay opt-in, but I think it'll be useful to point out things like that in a guide.)

I don't know if past versions allowed installation on a laptop with a normal license, but I don't recall ever seeing that.
-cthorpe

It's not new but it wasn't pointed out very well in the past so hardly anyone knew. The new GPSoft website mentions it more prominently as well.

16
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: April 30, 2011, 02:56 PM »
Let me guess: They still can't see a reason to provide lifetime updates?

Funnily enough, most people still don't want to promise to do work for you indefinitely for a one-off fee.

Lifetime updates still seem the exception to the rule to me. Especially for products that actually get worked on full-time and have significant updates. (It's easy to promise lifetime updates if you never do much in the updates.) (And where the lifetime update option doesn't cost multiple times the standard update option for the same product, which again is easy to offer but doesn't make sense for the customer. And where the "lifetime" offer isn't effectively withdrawn a few years later by changing the product name or something, as we've seen happen in a few cases now.)

I'm sure there are a handful of products that do meet those criteria but, come on, it isn't the norm. If you require that of every piece of software you use then you must not use much software. And why would you be interested in a Windows file manager in the first place when Windows itself does not, has not and never will offer lifetime updates? :)

17
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9
« on: August 20, 2010, 07:36 AM »
(look at product activation as a really bad example)
It's all about the implementation for me. I use a few games & apps (plus Windows itself) that use activation and I don't mind it at all because it doesn't get in my way and is reasonable (e.g. usually allows re-activation if you don't do it too frequently, so you can reinstall you machine every so often even if you forget or are unable to deactivate things).

I did cause Windows to deactivate once when I was troubleshooting some hardware (added/removed something enough times that it decided something was up), but that was resolved with a 5 minute phone call, even though it was midnight on a weekend, so it didn't bother me.

On the other hand, there are products I want but will not buy because of the DRM. e.g. Some Ubisoft single-player games now require that they can talk to authentication servers constantly; if the server or your net connection has a hiccup (or god forbid you want to playing the game because the net is down and you have nothing else to do!*) then the game exits. That's taking things too far and I won't pay for it.

(*Then again, that problem affects things like Steam -- you need to be online to start it unless you've planned for offline usage in advance -- but I still buy games on that. Steam's DRM does annoy me in some ways but it also provides a lot of convenience on the flip-side so it's sort-of even, I guess.)

For me, it comes down to "does it get in my way or bog my machine down?" If it doesn't then I don't mind it. I know other people feel more strongly, though. Maybe they've run into issues that I haven't.

and MS is dropping upgrade pricing on flagship products such as Office. What's the betting that Windows 8 won't have upgrade pricing.

Wow. I had to look that up to confirm it. I hadn't heard about it and thought surely there was some caveat or something, but you're right.

That seems really wrong to me, unless what they've done is reduce the full-version pricing to what the upgrade pricing used to be, in which case it's to the customer's advantage (or no different for people upgrading) and fine.

(But otherwise, they're effectively asking people to pay full-price again for something that they already own a large part of. That seems especially poor with Office where, aside from the 2007 update, new versions typically don't change that much stuff that people actually use.)

Maybe it was just that home users don't tend to upgrade Office in the first place so why bother with the upgrade SKUs. :)

18
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9
« on: August 19, 2010, 08:45 PM »
I like DOpus a lot but I'm still pretty disillusioned by their approach to upgrades in the past:
they gave a fair upgrade price for a limited timed after the new version is released. After that time the upgrade price was increased to around 90% of the full price.
FWIW, the time limit (before the upgrade discount was reduced) was 2.5 years after the previous purchase, which doesn't seem too bad to me.

I dont think this is a very nice way to treat your customers....
If you haven't bought something from someone for 2.5 years, are you really still a customer of theirs? :)

19
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9
« on: August 19, 2010, 08:16 AM »
This might indicate that ver 10 is right around the corner. It's about that time.

I don't think the deal is related to Opus 10. On the previous page someone said the same about a similar deal from the same people in January.

I love DirOpus and think it is worth the high price but, be warned that the upgrade costs are usually quite high also.

In the past, when new versions came out people who bought the old ones recently were given more discounted upgrades. People who bought really recently got upgraded for free. I can't speak for GPSoftware and say for sure what they'll do when Opus 10 is finally ready but they seem to understand it's good not to punish people for buying at the wrong time and good to reduce the amount of second-guessing people have to do about upgrade timing.

(With that in mind, in general the upgrade prices are not high when you consider how often you're asked to pay them, which is every 3-4 years for a substantial update (with lots of free, and sometimes substantial, ones in between). It's not one of those products where you get charged for a minor update every year like clockwork. :) What they give away free between version-changes is better than the updates many companies ask people to pay for.)

Of course, there are times when buying gets you more free updates than others but it you do buy when Opus 10 is imminent then you'll probably get a very discounted, or even free, update.

20
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9
« on: January 27, 2010, 05:05 AM »
If they lower the prices, they (probably) have a good reason for that. v10, hm.
It's not GPSoft themselves lowering the price; it's a reseller, and only for one day, so doesn't really indicate anything except that you can get it cheaper from one site for one day if you want to.

(GPSoft themselves did just have an end-of-year sale but they do that almost every year.)

Maybe released with some serious price increasement.  :P
-Tuxman
Not sure why you'd infer that from this. :)

wonder is version 10 around the corner . . .
-Tomos
Depends how big your corners are. :) v10 is in development but it's not coming out tomorrow or anything like that. (More than that, I can't say. In fact, I don't know.)

FWIW, v9 is still being supported and updated w/ free fixes & features, almost 3 years after its release. Last update was 3 weeks ago and the free 9.5 point release which added Win7 support was about 3 months ago.

21
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9
« on: October 14, 2009, 04:18 PM »
If I rename 20 files here (one after the other, not mass rename) and later 20 files there, it might come to my mind that the first 20 files should not have been renamed the way I did it.

FWIW, there is a separate log that would (if configured to) record the old + new names in that situation. You can set that log to retain 1,000 (or more) operations if you want, and it'll retain them across reboots. Obviously it'd be a pain to undo those renames if they fell off the end of the undo-log, but it'd be possible by manually looking up the old/new names from the (other) log if it came to it.

If you think you'll run into the problem a lot then it won't help much but if it's a "just in case" thing then maybe it's enough. I use it very rarely but it has saved me a couple of times when I wonder where the heck I moved a file two days ago. :)

(Ofc. this log can be turned off for those who don't want it recording everything they do.)


22
General Software Discussion / Re: Win7: Anyone else getting excited?
« on: October 14, 2009, 04:00 PM »
Is that still the case? I did a search for any recent reports of UAC issues and couldn't find any. The results that were returned by Google all related to either the beta or RC with MS promising to address those issues for RTM

My proof of concept UAC-bypass app still works in the Windows 7 RTM if you're using the default settings.

Whether or not it's a big deal is a matter of debate. Personally, I don't care if the UAC prompts are on or off by default; I just want something that is fair to all apps and whose design and implementation actually makes sense, rather than the current worst-of-both-worlds solution which seems to be driven more by appearances than anything else.

Aside from that, and a few minor bugs I've run into on the API side, I quite like Windows 7. It's definitely an improvement and not something anyone should avoid (e.g. if getting a new PC or if they have to reinstall anyway). Once again, Media Center has the biggest set of improvements and, like Vista was to XP, it's a must-have upgrade for people who use that. For everyone else, it's nice and there are some cool tweaks that, IMO, don't justify the upgrade by themselves but that you'll miss if you switch and then have to switch back for some reason. I can still happily use Vista, though, or even XP (although XP feels pretty clunky in a few areas now).

23
I hate this practise as well.

It makes developers use generic names for their installers (e.g. ProgramSetup.exe) instead of including a version (ProgramSetup1234.exe) so if I want to keep old versions (just in case, or for testing) I have to rename the installers every time I download them. :(

(I suppose you could maintain an "always latest version" URL which links to the latest installer but maintaining that would be a pain. You just shouldn't have to.)

I also hate those sites where you can't even find the developer's site. How do I know if the installer on offer is out of date or not infected? How can I see what the developer's support or other products are like? It's annoying. :(  (OTOH sites that re-host the files, not just link to them, are handy every so often when the real site is down/gone... Not often enough to stop me hating them, though!)

24
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9
« on: April 01, 2008, 06:46 AM »
Handling it privately doesn't add any balance to what he keeps saying in public. That's the problem. I've tried posting comments on his blog. None of them make it through or get a reply. I've never been more rude to Zaine than he has been rude to Opus, so I don't see any reason for him not to publish my comments and questions/challenges about what he has written, but he either chooses not to or fails to configure his blog properly.

He keeps saying stupid things no matter what, so I doubt a private message would make him change his ways. I know he reads here, and other people who know him read here, so my choices are either to ignore what he says or post about it here. Or to start my own public blog purely for the sake of debunking what Zaine says on his, I suppose; but isn't it better to reply to someone's comments in a place where people who read those comments are likely to see?

Usually I just try to ignore it, but sometimes I feel like I have to say _something_.

Anyway, this sub-thread is probably going to annoy uninterested people even more, so I'll shut up now.

PS: Josh, you replied to me in public here rather than sending me a PM. Maybe you understand why I am responding to Zaine in public more than you think? :)

25
General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9
« on: April 01, 2008, 06:31 AM »
While you might not have been able to post to zaines blog, there is probably a reason. I would delete comments by someone who seems to have an insatiable interest in my own reviews.
Please have a look through the history of this thread before you judge my word vs Zaine's word, and to get an understanding of how Zaine has been antagonistic towards Opus. Surely you can understand me being annoyed at this? Wouldn't you be annoyed if someone kept dragging something you liked through the mud unfairly and without reason?

I am sorry, but this type of posting (which you seem to do repeatedly) actually hurts DOpus and it's reputation as it makes you appear desperate to have to debunk any and all negative comments.
I don't debunk "any and all negative comments," I debug false and unfair comments. If you disagree please show me an example where I've done otherwise. :( Even within this very thread I have confirmed several things that Opus can't do or doesn't do as well as other things. I don't claim Opus is perfect and nor do I try to silence anyone who says they think something else is better for their needs. I went out of my way to make that clear earlier in the thread and I've done my best to be helpful with people's questions regarding Opus in this thread and elsewhere... It's just that Zaine's constant BS makes my blood boil, TBH.

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