Recent Posts

2351

General Software Discussion / Re: How the mighty have fallen: TuneUp Utilities 2010

« Last post by Shades on November 01, 2009, 08:37 PM »

A "rollback" feature is a step into the very wrong direction. If you don't have it, you'll consider twice if you should really perform an action. If you have it, you'll think "oh well let me delete anything and I can still recover it"... which is wrong, because it may be hard to recover something when you can't even log in anymore.

-Tuxman (November 01, 2009, 06:13 PM)

On this I totally agree with you. On every system I own all delete actions are real delete actions...my recycle bin is as clean as a brand new one, no thrash comes in it...ever. Brings a whole new level of file awareness and how to handle those with the proper amount of caution.

2352

Living Room / Re: Google vs. the rest: Is it fair?

« Last post by Shades on November 01, 2009, 08:27 PM »

Speaking form outside of the U.S.

Google is the one who delivers the best results in search, Bing delivers quite useless content when searching for things outside the U.S. The same is true for the other products from Google.

To me, if you live outside the U.S. the best deal (by far!) is Google. Alternatives only care for the U.S. Rather limiting in my point of view, but hey, what do I know right? Not to be trolling or something, but in that sense Google is more of a global player than any of the alternatives (including Microsoft).

Furthermore I can confirm that MS and other alternatives handle anything outside of the U.S.  I have (very sparingly used) mail accounts with Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (since Hotmail)...and guess which account is getting the least (directed) spam. Again, privacy is not a word in the vocabulary of Microsoft or Yahoo!

Ok, a bit of explicit NSFW language follows: For me it is hard to understand that somebody complains about what Google might do regarding privacy, while the alternatives already sell us non-US'ers out

Spoiler

, in essence, fornicate non-US'ers from behind using sand as vaseline

while not even trying to keep up with what Google actually delivers. Because of that Google has a tremendous amount of goodwill all over the globe and (generally speaking) people are not that bothered with the advertisements that Google fires in their direction.

Let me put it this way, why people call searching on the internet 'googling' and not 'binging'? The latter term does not bring such a nice association to my mind...but again, what do I know?[/rant]

2353

Living Room / Re: Best Free and Pay FTP Client

« Last post by Shades on November 01, 2009, 05:46 PM »

Filezilla would get my vote. It is able to continue downloading files even after my VPN connection to the FTP server is disconnected. It is very nice to have an overzealous ISP that throttles longer ongoing connections by simply cutting those sessions off.

Now I have to mention that the ISP is also the national telephone company and it wants to make money by selling overpriced telephone ticks on international lines... so any connection that is open for a longer period (like Skype) through this ISP will be cut short without warning and at their discretion.    

Ah well, such is life...
[/rant]

2354

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: Trout (audio player)

« Last post by Shades on November 01, 2009, 12:22 AM »

Likely not the correct place to mention an reproducible error in build 158 (portable version), but here goes anyway.

Explanation of my setup:
When I doubleclick on a mp3 file in DOpus v9.x the Trout app starts with only the selected file in the playlist. OK.
Because the file would not autoplay, I enabled 'Resume playback on start' in the options.
Running WinXP pro SP2 (Dutch edition) on a dual core Intel PC

Explanation of procedure:
Double-clicking (and auto-playing) only works the first time. The second time the list is updated correctly, but the song does not start (although the 'Play' button suggests otherwise). Only after pressing the 'Stop' button the intended music starts playing. At this point Trout consumes 49%-50% of my CPU resources. Double-clicking on a new mp3 file results in a 'frozen' Trout which can only be terminated with the TaskManager.

2355

Living Room / Re: For the person who has everything - an € 800 Mouse

« Last post by Shades on October 27, 2009, 06:15 PM »

Likely those shitty ones that only last a month or so 

2356

Living Room / For those about to Wave...

« Last post by Shades on October 25, 2009, 12:27 AM »

Just now I received my invitation to Google Wave. To my surprise I saw that I could invite others as well.

And guess what, there is still  0  invitation left.

So if you want one, please PM me (with an email address) so it will make it easier to invite you.


That is it, I'm out of invitations.

2357

Living Room / Re: Unauthorized Contest: Who's been the most helpful in the last 3 months?

« Last post by Shades on October 24, 2009, 09:18 PM »

Just finished holding up my end of the deal by voting for you Mouser.


Thanks again 

2358

Living Room / Re: Unauthorized Contest: Who's been the most helpful in the last 3 months?

« Last post by Shades on October 24, 2009, 04:55 PM »

For a free DC membership I would vote on Mouser   

2359

General Software Discussion / Re: Wanted: Freeware (commercial use allowed) Anti-Virus Tool For Small LAN

« Last post by Shades on October 24, 2009, 08:06 AM »

Avira has a nice (but not free) solution for your setup and management requirements. Their license is cross platform (Linux/UNIX included) so you can protect your Linux box as well and make sure that bad software/internet packages are intercepted at the gateway instead of landing at your .

As a happy Avira user with a big aversion towards anything Symantec/Norton/McAfee related, I could not pass up the opportunity giving you the link above. You will find other links to more specific solutions if you so desire. With more than 5 users they are even giving you a 30% savings deal.

Sorry if all of the above sounds too much like a commercial. Rest assured there's no affiliation of any kind going on, just a happy user.

EDIT:
just read the comment from 40Hz. Untangle seems also a very nice product. Definitely something I will look further into. Thanks 40Hz 

2360

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free WinX DVD Author for download

« Last post by Shades on October 23, 2009, 06:47 PM »

Sorry to rain on your parade, sajman99

Downloaded both the decrypter and author software and both fail. the author doesn't even start because of a specific dll file that it installs. The decryptor has the same problem, but  a different dll.

The text on their webpage is also some weird (definitely non-native) English.

One good point though, the software from WinX comes with a de-installer...

2361

Living Room / Re: INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY - OCT 22 & JUNE 28

« Last post by Shades on October 22, 2009, 09:25 PM »

I think that should have been TWO days...

...or for the purists:

OCT22 AND JUN 28, THAT'S TWO DAYS

2362

Found Deals and Discounts / One year of IObit's malware protection for free

« Last post by Shades on October 18, 2009, 08:34 PM »

See this blog [www.raymond.cc] for a free subscription (one year) of protection against malware with IObit Security 360 Pro.

They (IObit) also have a free version, but getting the pro version for no money sounds better. The only requirement is your email address, which is kinda standard these days.

And no, I'm not affiliated with the blog or IObit.

2363

Living Room / Re: Man names son 2.0

« Last post by Shades on October 12, 2009, 07:14 PM »

And when the kid is lost, he has to ask for bi-directions?

2364

General Software Discussion / Re: Volery Makes Installing Software Incredibly Simple

« Last post by Shades on October 11, 2009, 12:25 PM »

Since there is 7-zip why even include WinRAR? 7-zip can extract rar archives is 95% of the time more effective when (re-)archiving in its native format.

Case in point, I have here a Oracle database dump with a size of 90Gbyte. When archived with 7-zip the result is a file of 1,8 GByte. Using that same dump with WinRAR results in a file of 5,6 GByte. Both use their ultra mode for creating the archive.

I like WinRAR, but you will not see me getting a new license for their latest version. The file manager from 7-zip is quite limited especially when compared with the one from WinRAR but that part of both applications is hardly used by me anyway.

OK, back to the point. As it looks like, the items in the screenshot show that most of them are paired up (utorrent and emule, VLC and KMPlayer etc.) The WinRAR slot could be filled with a more useful piece of similar software like PeaZip [sourceforge], another service for on-line backup or even better...off-line backup like Yadis! [codessentials]

2365

General Software Discussion / Re: Wndows Home Server as a SOHO business server. Your thoughts?

« Last post by Shades on October 08, 2009, 09:06 PM »

Here I have an old(!) Pentium II 350MHz 196MB RAM old 'clunker' PC that runs SBS and Exchange (windows 2000 based) in Google server style (as naked as you want it to be)...

That PC is one of the most stable and trouble free systems here. And it's performance totally exceeds my expectations.

So I totally agree with Stoic Joker, if you install only the parts of what you need from SBS it is stable and really does not require (much) hands on time.

2366

Living Room / Re: Help? Learning how to drive...

« Last post by Shades on October 06, 2009, 10:06 PM »

Hey....those 'horsies' in front keep working and working...when on the autobahn (Germany) you really have to take evasive actions all the time to show off those 'ponies' for those who are speed challenged. 

And I owned 5 of them during my Dutch driving career. Yep, I'll admit to being a fanboy.

Currently I don't even own a car but a motor cycle. All the evasive 'training' did pay off however. Entering the traffic here on my bike can be really hazardous. There are more than enough people here that have just bought their driver license. Unfortunately this is no joke.

Luckily there are not too many BMW's out here     

2367

Living Room / Re: DC-IRLDD Champaign, IL - Aug 29, 2009

« Last post by Shades on October 04, 2009, 12:15 AM »

But there is nothing wrong with keeping the master on his toes...

2368

Living Room / Re: How much Soda/Energy-Drinks you drink / week?

« Last post by Shades on September 30, 2009, 09:49 PM »

Don't you guys know that three day old cold pizza and a (2 liter) bottle of Coke is the breakfast of champions?!??!??   

Although I don't do the pizza, there is always Coke besides my bed (in summer) and it is always the first thing I drink to wake up. Besides that at least 10 liters of the same brown gold is poured down my throat on a weekly basis. And doing that for years and years.

Sometimes I switch between the products of the C. C. company, the local one here in Paraguay is called 'Guarana' but that stuff I hardly can handle because of the tremendous amount of gas.

Tea is nice, coffee is poison.

2369

Living Room / Re: Help? Learning how to drive...

« Last post by Shades on September 28, 2009, 08:38 PM »

And besides that, a BMW is a rear wheel driven car. Those behave (really) different when you encounter a traffic situation where drastic action is required. Front wheel driven cars are behaving more "friendly" in those situations.

Having said this, I like the driving experience that is BMW (yep, I'll admit it....BMW fanboy here). 

2370

General Software Discussion / Re: Copy a bunch of cd/dvd

« Last post by Shades on September 26, 2009, 12:51 PM »

Hardly any of the NAS solutions I saw support CVS (or something similar). Maybe the ones in the upper echelon of this market  support such systems (natively). However, there is a limited budget I have to work with.

NAS is useless to me without version control capability...hence I still use optical media. And yes, I am starting to realize that with current prices hard drives are becoming a more sensible choice (when used with exchangeable tray enclosures).

 

2371

General Software Discussion / Re: dell laptop, vista won't activate

« Last post by Shades on September 25, 2009, 09:50 PM »

This link to Raymond's blog will explain how to backup and restore Vista OEM activation license.

2372

General Software Discussion / Re: video player software.

« Last post by Shades on September 24, 2009, 09:40 PM »

Hmmm, it does take quite some time for the spam to appear...come to think of it, the other very able and very free VLC player is more active with bringing out new releases than this guy 

2373

General Software Discussion / Re: Need help in installing RSSOwl

« Last post by Shades on September 23, 2009, 10:56 PM »

It could also be that sri's problem was that the first mentioning of Java in the PATH variable was the 1.4.2 version. Oh what a fun you can have with an up-to-date Eclipse IDE and installing the Oracle 9 client software. 

Suddenly you go back to using Java 1.3 as the installer puts this version of Java as first entry in the PATH variable from Windows. A simple swap from the Java versions was the fix in my case.

   

2374

General Software Discussion / Re: Virtual PC 2007 Final

« Last post by Shades on September 20, 2009, 04:02 PM »

Virtual Box is regarded to be the better one. VirtualPC does Windows and a small set of Linux distributions (according to its documentation) while Virtual Box does not impose those limits. Besides that, it has a 'community' edition (open source) next to their business version.

Virtual PC is only available on Windows, while Virtual Box is available for Windows, Linux and if memory serves me correctly,  Solaris/OpenSolaris. Virtual PC is arguably faster with Windows based virtual machines when compared with Virtual Box/VMware. For me, I didn't experience a speed gain with those VM's when testing Virtual PC.

At the moment I am using VMware, mainly because I am too lazy to create native Virtual Box VM's. Never tried Virtual Box's  ability to read VM's created with VMware, though.

PS:
Do not use the free VMware server v2.x!!!
This software is a true abomination to look at, uses a very resource hungry Tomcat webserver and hardly functions with older VM's created with VMware server 1.x. Do not 'upgrade' those to the new format from the 2.0 version. I lost two VM's that way! 

2375

DC Gamer Club / Re: Tales of Monkey Island (Episode 1) - for free

« Last post by Shades on September 19, 2009, 10:53 PM »

Downloaded it, installed it, played it and love it...the wishing well is funny