Recent Posts

1501

Living Room / Re: 50 Places Linux is Running That You Might Not Expect

« Last post by JavaJones on March 24, 2010, 01:30 PM »

Hmm, I'd say only about half of those are any surprise at all. I mean come on, Google, Amazon? *shock* At first I thought "Well maybe the list is made for the less informed "average user"", but then I realized that pretty much anyone using Linux would probably know that Google uses it.

I thought it was interesting that US Navy submarines apparently use Linux though...

- Oshyan

1502

Living Room / Re: Any long-time DC members near a MicroCenter?

« Last post by JavaJones on March 24, 2010, 01:14 PM »

I am near-ish, but "near" in this case is about a 45 minute drive, hehe. If I happen to be going down there for some other reason in the very near future I'd be happy to pick one up. What's your time frame?

- Oshyan

1503

Living Room / Re: Google demonstrates new communication platform "WAVE": mail, chat , wiki, ..

« Last post by JavaJones on March 24, 2010, 01:02 PM »

While the performance issues and other little bugs previously were an annoyance, I think what stopped me from continuing to use Wave is 1: nobody I know is using it or has interest in or need to use it (not to say that people I know don't need/want collaboration platforms, just that Wave didn't *appear* to fill their needs at the time) and 2: when I did try to use it for serious work, while the results were ok, they didn't seem to be particularly better than say working on a Google Doc with someone else, or using Redmine for that matter. It's supposed to be better than those systems with large numbers of concurrent users, but I just found it scattering and overwhelming with anywhere above 2 or 3 people, especially since replies/changes could be made anywhere. At least in e.g. IRC, even if there are 20 people actively chatting, the messages are sequential and I can pay attention to them all in one place and reply as needed. It's less organized theoretically, since you can't thread conversations and whatnot, yet somehow it seems much less chaotic and difficult to manage. One could argue that you don't *need* to keep up with every change *as it's happening*, but if that's true then what's the point of the "realtime" part of collaboration?

All that being said I think with some more education on how Wave works it would be easier and more pleasant. But I have existing tools that I find more functional for the purposes it supposedly exists to fulfill, e.g. Redmine, and even though they may not be as "slick" or full featured (in theory), Redmine at the least is somehow infinitely more intuitive to me. Maybe it's because it uses familiar tools, just in a well integrated way, so I don't have to change the way I work for it to enhance my workflow. Whereas Wave seems to require re-learning some skills and changing work habits. Now, like the Dvorak keyboard layout, it may be better in the long run, but I think few are going to want to re-learn how to type (in a manner of speaking) just to get their planning work done e.g. 25% faster (made-up percentage).

I'll keep watching Wave and if anyone I work with has any enthusiasm for experimenting with it I'll gladly participate. But I don't have any such enthusiasm personally at this point.

- Oshyan

1504

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Dr.Explain 4.0 -- Rapid Creation of Help Systems to Speed up Software Rollouts

« Last post by JavaJones on March 23, 2010, 12:58 PM »

I'll probably be upgrading just to get the PDF output and single page editing for control texts. But I'd really, really (really) like to see a better web component for this. Something that hooks into a CMS or a wiki would be awesome. As it is I've had to "roll my own".

- Oshyan

1505

General Software Discussion / Re: Waze - crowd sourced navigation

« Last post by JavaJones on March 22, 2010, 02:48 PM »

[...] by leveraging an existing mapping service and laying their data on top, e.g. Google Maps API.

-JavaJones (March 22, 2010, 02:17 PM)

That could have been possible in some places, maybe specifically in the USA, but non everywhere. In the USA, Google have now his own cartography, so they can use it, share, etc. as they see fit in their strategies. Elsewhere, for example in Europe, Google use data licensed from Tele Atlas (and maybe Navteq), with some specific restrictions on the usage: turn by turn direction come to mind, for example, and that explain why Google Maps Navigation isn't available (officially) here.

Waze anyway does have some deal with other cartography providers; in some regions they used such data to draw a basic grid of unnamed roads.
But I think that their general idea is in facts to come up with new, user generated maps.

-Mark0 (March 22, 2010, 02:32 PM)

I wasn't even so much referring to the map data as the user interface and speed. Google Maps (and Yahoo Maps and Bing Maps for that matter) performs much better than this thing on 2 test machines so far, and multiple different browsers. It's just slow and clunky. So even if they weren't able to use map data from the provider outside the US, the API and map display technology is still useful IMO.

- Oshyan

1506

General Software Discussion / Re: Waze - crowd sourced navigation

« Last post by JavaJones on March 22, 2010, 02:17 PM »

Having had more time to test it, it's pretty rough at present. Search doesn't work well, at least not for the specific addresses I tried, the map view is slow and clunky and doesn't always update, and features are not obvious. There's a lot of promise in this, but I think they could have avoided reinventing the wheel by leveraging an existing mapping service and laying their data on top, e.g. Google Maps API. That would help a lot with the "nothing in my area" feeling which really discourages use IMO, and would also mean their maps are driven by a major technology provider who will continue improving their maps systems and has a greater ability to provide good performance. By comparison Google Maps is very smooth...

P.S. Stoic, text message to this system from a user on the road... "Traffic is really heavy at 4th ave and... scratch that, accident at 4th ave and Lincoln, I just rear-ended someone."

- Oshyan

1507

General Software Discussion / Re: Waze - crowd sourced navigation

« Last post by JavaJones on March 22, 2010, 03:00 AM »

Looks very cool, similar to an idea I had on the way home from work a few months ago. Not surprising it wasn't a unique idea. I'm glad to see this actually exists and, with time, it could become a major source of one-of-a-kind info, or at the least a great crowd-sourced aggregator of info like Wikipedia. I'll definitely keep my eye on it...

- Oshyan

1508

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by JavaJones on March 21, 2010, 02:24 AM »

Wow, that is a weeeird video. I'm actually a big fan of Hot Chip, they're awesome live. Going to see them in April in Oakland in fact. But that video is... weird.

- Oshyan

1509

Living Room / Re: Flattr: New Micropayment System - Gets the Model Right

« Last post by JavaJones on March 21, 2010, 02:17 AM »

Cool idea mouser, for sure. If it could be boiled down to absolute simplicity, it might even catch on... with the backing of a major player, heh. Breaking into the financial transaction market is tricky.

- Oshyan

1510

General Software Discussion / Re: my server life - setting up a local server

« Last post by JavaJones on March 21, 2010, 01:16 AM »

Let us know what you think of Alpha 5. I've been really interested in it since I discovered it a year or so back, but haven't had the chance (or necessarily the knowledge) to tinker with it.

- Oshyan

1511

Living Room / Re: moving outlook express to a new computer

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 02:32 PM »

Tbird definitely supports POP3! In fact IMAP is the less common use, as far as I understand. And it's fine for "average" uses I guess. But if you have say 20,000 messages in a folder, it really bogs down. Now I'll grant maybe having 20,000 messages in one folder isn't a great idea, but some of the people I've dealt with do have that, and it's kind of hard telling them "You shouldn't be doing this, that's why this new program I migrated you to is performing *worse* than the old one that isn't Win7 compatible. There's nothing I can do to fix it, you need to change your email habits." Hah!

Anyway, I don't want to pull this too off topic. Hehe.

- Oshyan

1512

Living Room / Re: moving outlook express to a new computer

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 01:10 PM »

A very fair point. That being said I've realized Thunderbird just might be a steaming pile of crap. So, any other free suggestions?

- Oshyan

1513

Living Room / Re: moving outlook express to a new computer

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 12:14 PM »

Isn't OE discontinued now? So it does make sense to migrate sooner than later, especially if there is already a migration being forced...

- Oshyan

1514

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 12:10 PM »

AS5 will do you fine. The only people who should care about the differences are overclockers.

- Oshyan

1515

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 12:03 PM »

The case is a Silverstone Icon Aluminum with a large side window and interior lighting, 24" deep, 20" high, and 8 " wide - I think I could crawl into it and hide if needed!

-J-Mac (March 17, 2010, 02:01 PM)

I just googled that case & that's a pretty sharp looking enclosure you've got there, J-Mac! That should last you through your next two or three builds. I've always liked the look of Silverstone's cases, but they are a little expensive.

-Innuendo (March 18, 2010, 10:04 AM)

Is this the picture you found? Because I can see the appeal...

http://img.tomshardw...ilverstone-model.jpg



- Oshyan

1516

DC Gamer Club / Re: Sniper Elite for $2 on Steam

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 12:01 PM »

Hehe, yeah I figured any game focused on sniping would be pretty hardcore. And I read the description. So I pretty much knew what I was getting into. Haven't tried it yet, but I'm ready to *try* to be serious about sniping...

- Oshyan

1517

DC Gamer Club / Re: Sniper Elite for $2 on Steam

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 12:36 AM »

Hehe, ok. Now to go sign up for Steam.

- Oshyan

1518

DC Gamer Club / Re: Sniper Elite for $2 on Steam

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 12:33 AM »

Ooo, I loooove sniping in other FPS games. Should I get this?

- Oshyan

1519

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by JavaJones on March 18, 2010, 12:29 AM »

As I pointed out above, you can get a "bare bones" i7 system for under $600, shipped (free shipping, no tax from Tiger Direct).

The E3300 is also dual core. The main difference between those two is clock speed and cache size. Neither should make a huge difference. The x800 will probably be a bigger bottleneck for a 3D game like Sims 3 than the Celeron would be. Then again the difference is only $20, and it gets you 200Mhz more speed *per core*, so... *shrug*

- Oshyan

1520

General Software Discussion / Re: my server life - setting up a local server

« Last post by JavaJones on March 17, 2010, 03:40 PM »

An alternative to MoWeS would be Bitnami Stacks, but if you've already got a more general environment going (XAMPP), then that's probably best.

- Oshyan

1521

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by JavaJones on March 17, 2010, 03:05 PM »

The article about a lack of 64 bit software doesn't really suggest *not* upgrading, it just shows (truthfully) that upgrading doesn't get you a lot of improvement in your apps, depending on what apps you use (in the 3D industry 64 bit apps have been available for several years now in many cases). However that doesn't mean it's not good for other reasons to upgrade, especially since 32 bit software works virtually without a hitch. The access to more memory alone is worth it.

Most of the problems people have had, particularly in XP and lingering through Vista, were issues of driver support, not software support. And those are legitimate issues. I've used 64 bit versions of Windows since XP x64, and it's gotten a lot easier with each version. Even XP was quite usable, you just felt a little more limited in terms of hardware options, so you sometimes had to choose carefully. For those using high-end graphics apps though it was worth selecting the right hardware so they could get 8GB or more of RAM into their rendering workstations.

Once Vista arrived, a lot more 64 bit drivers came on the scene and the 64 bit versions of Vista were a lot more visible and available too (recall that XP x64 was a later release, never something you could purchase in a store at retail, and even on MS's site was hard to find info about). Now with Win7 it's even more mainstream and, as others have said, 64 bit OSs are starting to ship as the main OS for many newer systems, which is as sure a sign as any that it's probably ready for "prime time". You can bet manufacturers aren't going to be installing a 64 bit OS for Average Joe if they know he doesn't *need* it and they feel it increase support costs and problems.

Honestly I think the Windows Secret article is just trying to stir up some trouble (and page reads) based on older user fears. That being said I can't read the article as I'm not a subscriber.   But I *do* know that Windows 7 64 bit is pretty much problem-free, or at least no more problematic than the 32 bit version.

- Oshyan

1522

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by JavaJones on March 17, 2010, 02:58 PM »

Things *have* changed quite a lot from the old Celerons (which actually, before the days of the P4, were well respected in many cases, particularly for overclocking - P4 gen Celerons were terrible because P4 depended so much on its caches).

The newer Celerons are based on the "Core" architecture, are quite efficient and, while having smaller caches and in many cases no 64 bit support and no virtualization support (although in this particular case both appear to be included), are still quite good in performance, especially for the price. The equivalent "Core" architecture speed to a P4 is almost 50%, e.g. a 1.5Ghz Core CPU can do about as well as a 3.0Ghz P4. That particular Celeron being 2.5Ghz *and* dual-core would pretty much kill the P4, believe it or not.

This is why I say it's not worth upgrading the existing components, because a $50 CPU can give you 2x or more the performance of an old P4 these days.

- Oshyan

1523

Living Room / Re: Donationcoder: How did you find it + What has your experience been like so far.

« Last post by JavaJones on March 17, 2010, 01:18 PM »

Ah, thanks to packrat email habits and Gmail search, I have unraveled the mystery. Straight from the horse's (er my) mouth:

"Btw I registered specifically because of interest in the "Clipboard Help+Spell" program. It sounds fantastic. Simple and elegant but very powerful. Exactly what a scattered guy like me needs! Currently I use a sort of "Diary"/journal program to take care of this, but since it's organized by date it can be very scattered and confusing. It's a great app actually, just not the right thing for my needs. And the higher end "brainstorming" apps are overkill, and usually expensive.

Incidentally I came across the site through your review of archiving programs. Tugzip is also my archiver of choice right now, and in fact I believe they've addressed some of the concerns raised in the site review as of version 3.4 which was recently released. But in any case it's a great review, and your other reviews also impressed me. Keep up the good work!"

Sadly Tugzip appears to be a dead project now. New forum threads seem to mostly consist of spam bots talking to each other:
http://www.tugzip.co...dex.php?topic=1270.0
Which is interesting actually. I'm sure many of you have seen how clever some of these automated spam bots can be, selecting bits of semi-relevant text from their vast stores of collected material to match with snippets of presumably original material in the thread they're posting to. I wonder what would happen if you had a forum made up entirely of 1000's of spam bots parroting each other. Anyone else think we could get brilliant literature in less than a million iterations, say a month of back and forth?

P.S. Wow, I end my posts with grins a lot, eh?

- Oshyan

1524

Living Room / Re: Donationcoder: How did you find it + What has your experience been like so far.

« Last post by JavaJones on March 17, 2010, 01:02 PM »

I don't remember how I got here. But probably some random software-related search, or possibly, just possibly, a newsletter from some techie-type person out there. If anyone has any further info on my superhero back story, please share.

- Oshyan

1525

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by JavaJones on March 17, 2010, 12:58 PM »

This is so confusing. I think you're making it harder than it needs to be by trying to stick with older hardware that you have. If you need a new graphics card and can only get that by having a new motherboard, then you'll need a new CPU regardless, and good luck finding an Athlon for less than you could buy a much faster modern CPU. I really recommend looking at going with mostly or entirely new hardware, especially if price is not a big concern. You'll get increased reliability, longevity, and upgradeability with new hardware. Trying to cobble together an "upgrade" out of parts lying around is often tempting, but usually not that fruitful in my experience.

That being said, if you're set on utilizing the spare AMD motherboard you have, I think I've got an Athlon 64 X2 CPU just sitting around collecting dust, so if we can verify it's compatible with the motherboard, then you can have it if you're willing to pay shipping.

- Oshyan