Recent Posts

2076

Living Room / Re: England Is Grinding To A Halt.

« Last post by Shades on March 11, 2011, 05:30 PM »

If you live near a harbor where cargo ships dock, forget about doing anything against pollution by legally reducing emissions in cars/trucks/buses. The engines of these ships run on the garbage of garbage from (any part of) the oil industry...and whenever "they" get the chance they mix it up with other dangerous materials to get rid of those as well.

See the link to this Dutch website (including video) that shows what happens with the fuel of those ships, even in a country that is quite strict on international regulations. The translated text from the site already will explains already a lot of it.

2077

Living Room / Re: England Is Grinding To A Halt.

« Last post by Shades on March 10, 2011, 03:20 PM »

@johnk:
Moving for a job is a lot harder if you are a house owner. At least that is the case in the Netherlands. Which also has more rules and regulations that make it more difficult to move. And in the rural areas it is the same with public transport.


Although the buses here in Paraguay are not new and/or nice looking, there are a lot of them and they do drive a very big part of the day (05:00 till 23:00). Not according to any time schedule, but it hardly happens that you have to wait 10 minutes and you have some lines that transport you about 20 kilometers out of the city center (Asuncion) for 40 euro cents.

Ok, sometimes the bus is very crowded but during office hours it is the fastest way to travel.

Buses in the city suburbs drive less frequently and there are less of them, but the price also drops to 25 euro cents.

2078

Living Room / Re: Mirageman : Brilliant Flick

« Last post by Shades on March 06, 2011, 09:59 PM »

Sounds a bit like 'KickAss' and that movie I liked a lot. And as I live in Paraguay (Chile is its neighbor) it should not be too hard to get it...not sure about the subtitles over here in these parts of the world.

Can you tell me if there is a lot of dialogue and/or heavy accents? I have to shamefully admit that my Spanish is not great.

2079

Living Room / Re: Win 7 XP mode

« Last post by Shades on March 06, 2011, 09:48 PM »

What about getting your parent's PC over to your place, hook it up to your internet connection and start downloading the necesaary stuff?

2080

General Software Discussion / Re: DVCS ?

« Last post by Shades on March 04, 2011, 04:50 PM »

The 'portable Git preview' software (for Windows) you can get from softpedia looks to be very promising.


And together with SmartGit (free for personal use) it starts to look quite nice as well.

One hell of lot better than WinCVS at least 

**EDIT
Added the SmartGit part.

2081

Best Archive Tool / Re: Versions??

« Last post by Shades on February 27, 2011, 03:05 PM »

@IainB:
With better interface I meant that WinRAR's interface is more functional when compared with the 7-zip one, there is a lot of functionality is not working when clicking on it.

In another thread here at the DoCo forum one of my posts mention that I regularly need to pull database dumps with a size of several hundreds of gigabytes through a limited internet connection. Well, for these parts of the world the connection is a rather good one, but pales in comparison with the connections available in the northern hemisphere. Unfortunately the amount of money spent on my connection is similar or higher to the prices charged over there.

The point I want to get across is that for me compression ratios matter because of the internet connection. You are right when working on your own system/LAN, because of the technical advances you accurately described.   

2082

Living Room / Re: Micro Reviews of Board Games From a Non-Competetive Perspective

« Last post by Shades on February 27, 2011, 02:48 PM »

The game mechanics are not that great and that is likely the reason why you don't like it.

What made the game fun for me was always the "social" trading of goods/resources between players which allows you to try reading their tactics and reveal your own as much as possible. But that requires good other players as well...never found those after losing touch with the playing group I was part of when moving to South America.

The only kind of board game that people (in my age/social range) play here is when it shown in a computer screen. Which is a shame as I spent many afternoon/evening playing board and table-top games and loving that. But now it is reduced to an occasional game of chess during a brown-out/power failure.

2083

Best Archive Tool / Re: Versions??

« Last post by Shades on February 26, 2011, 08:37 AM »

WinRAR has the better interface, but I use mainly the context menu to create and unpack archives, so that whole interface thing is rendered moot to me. As 7-zip has a better compression ratio (using the 'ultra' settings) which requires only slightly more time to create than a WinRAR archive (using 'best' settings), my personal preference goes out to 7-zip.

2084

General Software Discussion / Re: Program to beautify crappy exports from other applications?

« Last post by Shades on February 26, 2011, 08:21 AM »

In theory, I like timns' solution. However, Stylus Studio -- even if great -- is at least 99 $... A tad expensive if all you want is to a few xml exports here and there. I also wonder how much energy and learning it would take to learn XML's basics and design nice templates in Stylus. It doesn't seem that hard, but... all that is very relative.

-Armando (February 26, 2011, 12:34 AM)

The emphasis is mine. XML does not look that impressive when learning it, but that is deceptive. Proper XML + XSD is a lot harder than it looks...at least when communicating database content with SAP software.

Maybe it is different with beautifying output but I would not get my hopes up too high. Then again, I do not have any experience with both Stylus and CR, so it is quite possible that my fear inspiring text is simply solved by a wizard in Stylus or CR.

2085

Living Room / Re: A point of grammar

« Last post by Shades on February 25, 2011, 04:57 PM »

Don't know if I read it here on DoCo, but here goes:

Perl, the only language that looks the same before and after encryption...

2086

Living Room / Re: 3Tb Drives are Here! That's 500,000 songs. Enough yet?

« Last post by Shades on February 19, 2011, 06:17 PM »

If you sit down and watch each and every still frame of your movie, spending several seconds analyzing each one, you'll sure see a lot of difference - the compression algorithm isn't magically ~7x better (oh, and the size is going to be larger for 1080p, I'm used to 720p ).

Thing is, when you watch a movie, you aren't spending several seconds per frame - iirc BluRay runs at ~24fps. So yes, while you do lose some information, you're unlikely to notice it while the movie is running. I'm the kind of guy that rips my music collection to FLAC instead of lossy formats, but for the most part I'm perfectly happy watching movies in 720p x264 rips. For my viewing distance and TV (a 1080p 32" Sony), the result is very nice

-f0dder (February 17, 2011, 01:32 PM)

Flac, eh?  If you do that, I'm surprised you don't go lossless on the video also.  But you justify it well.  Heck, i don't even do flac yet.  My collection is still mostly mp3.  But I do intend to one day explore the whole audiophile experiment with the expensive headphones and headphone amps, etc. just to see if there's something to it.  I'll be pissed if I need to redo everything in FLAC.

My plans for my HTPC is to have a HUGE projector, like 10' wide.  So that's why I figured I'd just go lossless on the video.  And makemkv makes it so easy to convert.  I'm going to stick with that for now.  Hard drives are so cheap anyway.

-superboyac (February 17, 2011, 02:46 PM)

That i because your brain/ears notice the smallest "hiccup" in listening to music. Your eyes perceive quality loss with video, but you hardly see it happening on the screen, depending on the screen/resolution you are using to watch the compressed video.

To put it (very!) simply, ears have a higher "resolution" than your eyes.

2087

General Software Discussion / Re: Well, actually... or... What you need to understand is...

« Last post by Shades on February 19, 2011, 02:10 PM »

Well, actually... I do get laid.

(Sorry, someone had to say it.)

-nudone (February 18, 2011, 09:17 AM)

[dark humor]

Being "assaulted" the minute you leave the house does not really count, or does it...? 

[/dark humor]

2088

General Software Discussion / Re: What's the best SQL software for writing queries?

« Last post by Shades on February 16, 2011, 12:34 PM »

yes, TOAD...the tone from their sales pitch goes bad after '...or else...' and

And the free one is quite limited in what it can do, even after they updated it to a more recent version of their pro product and extended the default time-limit. Granted, that is their prerogative, but it drove me into the arms of Oracle SQL Developer, which is free and practically does what the free one does. I do not have experience with the pro product from TOAD as I think they are way too expensive and have a nasty attitude regarding sales. Then again, that is the way Oracle does business, so why not affiliated 3rd party developers...

And Renegade is right, Oracle Enterprise runs countries. But their free XE version (based on 10g) is actually quite a nice product if you can live with some missing (Enterprise-related) functionality and a limited database size of 4 GByte. Ideal for home use and/or study.

2089

General Software Discussion / Re: What's the best SQL software for writing queries?

« Last post by Shades on February 15, 2011, 01:37 PM »

Looking at the answers above it appears to be Oracle

2090

General Software Discussion / Re: What's the best SQL software for writing queries?

« Last post by Shades on February 15, 2011, 01:33 PM »

Personally I use the free Oracle SQL developer software the most.

But it is resource hungry. SQLtools is one hell of a lot smaller, open source and actually quite powerful and extended, given its size. It is not actively developed, but it is rock solid working with Oracle 9 and 10 databases on XP and lower (personal experience). Expect on windows 7 (UAC) problems.

There is also TOra, another open source project with more recent development activity. Seems to be interesting as well.


EDIT:
Added the TOra part

2091

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... Disk Doctor equivalent & image analyzer/verifier ...

« Last post by Shades on February 11, 2011, 04:57 PM »

@f0dder:
MHDD checks the hardware, but shows you the bits of the hard drive that are (too) slow and/or have a hardware problem. And there are a lot of those...which Windows and SMART just report as "bad".

2092

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... Disk Doctor equivalent & image analyzer/verifier ...

« Last post by Shades on February 11, 2011, 01:56 PM »

+1 for MHDD

A bootable CD/DVD which interface will take time to get through, that takes it time checking a disc, that is brutally honest about the state of your hard drive. A no-nonsense piece of software that will tell you exactly what is wrong, what is (too) slow etc.

A brilliant tool that you actually never should lay your eyes on, but are glad that you did in case of troubles.

2093

Living Room / Re: CPU Question: More Mhz per core or more cores?

« Last post by Shades on February 09, 2011, 03:54 PM »

Is she all the time busy with Photoshop/photography or just the basics? To me it sounds that the basics take more of her time than the other part. As AMD processors are most of the time quite a lot cheaper while not that lacking in computational power, I would go for the AMD and spend the money you save on item(s) she can use with her photographing/photoshop hobby. With the saved money I would max out the system RAM as much as possible, that helps tremendously with processing of photo's / video's.

  

2094

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Using a cracked version of DU Meter?

« Last post by Shades on February 08, 2011, 03:33 PM »

Let me add this one to the mix: athtek NetWalk (free for personal use)

The options in this one are amazing.

2095

General Software Discussion / Re: Link Checker with built-in HTML editor freeware?

« Last post by Shades on February 08, 2011, 04:47 AM »

Likely the free HTML-kit software has either this option already included or a plugin that does just that.

2096

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: pmG's messiahStudio5 *Dare To Share Challenge*

« Last post by Shades on February 08, 2011, 04:30 AM »

Crap, now I wished I had a credit card...the full blown edition looks very interesting!

2097

Living Room / Re: how do I figure how much bandwidth streaming audio, video, YouTube, etc use?

« Last post by Shades on February 07, 2011, 05:33 PM »

NECRO-THREAD-Revival!!!!!

Just found this piece of network traffic analysis software that can be used for free (personal use only!).

It installs WinPCap software as well. It certainly looks like you get a real good look about what is happening in your network.

The only reason I mention the software in this thread is that this seemed the most relevant and recent one (after using the DoCo search functionality).

2098

Living Room / Re: Why does the Mayan calendar end on....?

« Last post by Shades on January 31, 2011, 05:39 PM »

It appears that at that date earth will go through a universal barrier (our milky way moves in a wave-like pattern), which could possibly result in reversing the magnetic poles of the earth, the transference of the equator and for one half of the planet the sun will net set for three days while the other half will have night for the same period. Those events can be the catalyst to a new ice age.

The earth's internal core is moving at a continual decreasing speed until we hit that barrier and that will have it's effect. Electricity only flows because the earth rotates around its axis. And at that date the earth is at a practical standstill. With our society and our dependence on electricity I can see some problems arising.

Earth as we know it will cease to exist...you could say that our planet will be "rebooted" in a galactic way. The Mayan calendar predicts just that. It appears that every 5000 years this happens.

The above is all the predictions from a Vincent Stein (iirc his name correctly). He has actually a quite convincing story to tell.

2099

General Software Discussion / Re: computer system info software

« Last post by Shades on January 29, 2011, 05:41 PM »

The version of SIW that I have is portable and does show you the license key of Windows itself (check 'Software > Operating systems), the license keys from installed applications (check 'Software > Licenses) and passwords to websites (check 'Software > Secrets).

The SIW version that I use is 'build 2008-07-15 freeware'.
Hmmm, it looks like I need an update from this piece of software...

2100

Living Room / Re: The Coolest Macintosh I've Ever Seen!

« Last post by Shades on January 29, 2011, 02:12 PM »

See the 'Underworld' trilogy for both brunettes 40Hz is talking about...(part 1 and two have Kate Beckinsale, part three has Rhona Mitra).