Recent Posts

2526

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Text Editor just for text (stay with me)

« Last post by JavaJones on June 11, 2006, 12:37 AM »

For a Windows Lyx installer go here: ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/contrib/LyXWinInstaller/LyX141/

Lyx requires the following for full functionality:
special math fonts
python and UNIX-shell files
basic installation of MiKTeX
ImageMagick
Ghostscript
Aspell
GSview (optional)

So if you don't have any of that then you should go for the "Complete" install as it includes it all.

- Oshyan

2527

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Text Editor just for text (stay with me)

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 04:13 PM »

Has anyone ever tried Lyx? Ok, perhaps not what the OP is looking for, but on the subject of dedicated text editors it's quite interesting.

- Oshyan

2528

Best Music Service / Re: tech crunch article comparing music services

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 04:10 PM »

I am 100% bothered when artists don't recieve royalties. That is precisely why I don't like supporting record companies. Supporting them just *perpetuates* the ugly situation we have now. I mean talk about legalized immorality - the way copyright law works has basically allowed these giant record company monopolies to control almost all for-sale musical expression for decades, and they pay the artists a pittance. It is truly ridiculous.

I think the missing piece of the puzzle here is that you think if they were doing things legally then artists would be getting royalties and all would be well. OK, they *would* be getting royalties, but such a small amount compared to the total cost that it's insulting. So I will gladly agree that what AllOfMp3.com is doing may be immoral and potentially soon illegal, but I think that being the case you simply can't ignore the immorality of the record industry itself.

- Oshyan

2529

General Software Discussion / Re: programmes that use little system resources.

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 03:54 PM »

Agreed f0dder. I'd really like to see someone make OOo.org leaner and more efficient. It seems like they've done pretty well as far as functionality to this point. Now if they focus on optimization they'd have a real winner.

- Oshyan

2530

General Software Discussion / Re: vibe streamer - your own personal mp3 server software

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 03:44 PM »

Hmm, looks interesting. I have used a combination of Shoutcast and WWWinamp in the past, which worked well and was actually pretty cool. But a more "turnkey" solution would be welcome.

[edit] Ok, this is pretty cool. I don't like not being able to specify the details of my stream quality, but you can specify total quality *per user*, which is pretty cool. Speaking of which the multiple user management in itself is a cool feature - it supports lots of things like specific IP's per user, directory access permissions, etc. It also supports playlists which is pretty cool. All this through a web browser. Working with playlists isn't necessarily immediately intuitive, but basically you just create a new playlist, name it, then queueu up whatever tracks you want on it into the current playlist, then click Save and it moves the tracks into the currently named playlist. Unfortunately queueing up multiple tracks seemed to be a slow affair - no way to do whole directories or even multiple files?

I did have a problem playing it through Opera where if I minimized the browser or even switched away from the player's tab it would stop playing, so that sucks. But I've got it open in IE and minimized now and no problem. I'm not sure if the Opera problem is just my install, or perhaps IndieVolume or something, but unfortunately there's no forum to explore and find out if others have the same problem. I think a forum would help a lot as the documentation is rather sparse.

All in all it's a cool little app, it just needs a bit more development. It's great for simple music streaming and playing now, and with better support for adding multiple songs/directories and maybe some id3-based features, it'd be great. I'd love to see it able to display cover art by loading a named .jpg in the current folder for example... [/edit]

- Oshyan

2531

Best Music Service / Re: tech crunch article comparing music services

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 03:36 PM »

So, if I'm understanding you right, you wouldn't have any problem if AllOfMP3.com were free? In other words if people weren't "paying criminals" but just taking stuff from them for free?

- Oshyan

2532

Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 03:34 PM »

Righteo, just made my 100th. Whee! And it was very appropriately a characteristically long post.



So, my experience? Well, I actually joined DC quite a while ago, but didn't start posting until 2 months ago or so. It's been a quick ramp-up though. I'm at 100 posts already and have also participated in my first podcast ever. Good stuff. This is one of the most enjoyable communities I frequent and I'm sure I'll be here for a long while.

- Oshyan

2533

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows VISTA review by Scot Finnie

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 03:30 PM »

Frankly I just don't think they want the mass market. They *like* being a "premium" hardware and software provider. They've built the majority of their marketing around it and it allows them to charge very tasty prices. It'd be like Porsche manufacturing a mass-market car for the $15,000 price range. It's just not what they do nor what they want to do. It would dilute their brand. And yes Porsche, like Apple (remember the clones?), have tried that before and it didn't work out too well. So neither company is about to try to tackle the respective mass-market leaders of their product niches.

The Apple situation reminds me of Nintendo a lot actually. Ever since the Nintendo 64, and now more than ever, I have been of the opinion that they should just go 3rd party and not make hardware anymore; at least not home consoles - they still do very well with hand-helds. The reasoning for this is that almost everyone thinks of Nintendo consoles now as a 2nd console, something *additional* that they have to buy. As a result a lot of people simply don't bother. Sure there are exclusive games for Nintendo consoles (mostly Nintendo games), but are they worth buying a whole 'nother console? How much more likely would people be to purchase a Nintendo game if they could play it on their own console of choice? Now Nintendo would argue that if they went 3rd party they wouldn't have control over the hardware and wouldn't be able to customize it to their needs. However both the XBox 360 and PS3 are by Nintendo's own admission going to be more powerful than the "Wii"/Revolution, so clearly going 3rd party would only increase their capabilities. Now they would say the ease of development is not there with either platform. Fair enough, make a custom development environment at far less cost than creating your own entire custom console, and make it super easy to develop with. It'll probably be slower than the native IDE for a given console but Nintendo is already clearly willing to accept less performance for ease of use and development. What about their innovative remote control pointer for the Wii? There is absolutely no reason that could not be done as an addon peripheral for any other console. They do get 100% of sales on their own titles now, which would be less if they went 3rd party because they'd have to pay the console manufacturer a percentage, but on the other hand being Nintendo I'm quite sure they could negotiate a very sweet deal with whichever manufacturer they chose to support. I think if you totalled up the cost of designing, developing, producing and marketing hardware and the slightly lower per-game profits due to royalty percentages and then measured it against the increased profit on peripheral sales (the Wii controller could fetch a handsome price on its own, and it can't be that expensive to make) and the increased market share due to lower barrier of entry in not having to buy a whole different system, you'd see Nintendo gome out ahead in the end, possibly by a lot. All this makes it quite clear to me that Nintendo *and its fans* would be better off if they went 3rd party. And yet they don't...

Anyway it's also very, very true that Apple has enjoyed a lot of its higher reliability reputation (which has been decreasingly so ever since Win2k was released) due to their relatively small level of hardware diversity as compared to x86 PC's. People complain about issues with Windows, about one or another unusual or obscure device not working, but we can't forget that it's really something of a triumph that Windows works so *well* on such an enormous variety of hardware. There are 2 completely different CPU manufacturers, something like 5-7 motherboard chipset manufacturers, with about 30-50 different motherboard manufacturers, many of whom create their own BIOS's and custom drivers for their hardware. Then there's 4 or 5 major graphics chip manufacturers, each of which sell to a hundred or so resellers who create their own designs and often their own driver variants. There are 5 or so audio card manufacturers, not to mention onboard. There are 20 or 30 network product manufacturers, etc, etc. On the Apple side there's AirPort, now 2 CPU manufacturers (IBM and Intel), a single manufacturer for all/most motherboards and a single provider for BIOS and drivers (Apple), and then a very small range of approved/workable hardware upgrades like graphics cards. It would really be pretty shameful if they weren't able to get more stability than Windows. Given that XP is in my experience about as stable as OS X, I'd say MS is doing pretty darn good.

Ultimately I think if anything Apple will simply pursue better virtualization and/or dual-boot technology and eventually buying Apple hardware will be a no-risk proposition because you'll be able to run Windows on it completely seamlessly. People will be able to make the transition to OS X less painfully by not having to leave behind everything they already use, and that will actually increase Apple sales and OS X uptake. It reduces the barriet to entry, just like if Nintendo went 3rd party. And *that* makes good business sense.

- Oshyan

2534

Best Music Service / Re: tech crunch article comparing music services

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 02:46 AM »

Hear-hear! There are some decent services out there for this. They just need support from big names. It's funny too because it's not like they'd really lose a lot of fans just changing record labels - as long as the same merchandise/media were available (and they could/should be). Considering they'd be making more money on every sale most big artists would probably make heaps more with alternative services like Magnatune. Are they simply afraid of change? I know a lot of them have long-term contracts with the record companies, but that can't account for everything.

There's some hope though. Artists like Wilco and others of semi-renown are pushing the boundaries. Hopefully this trend will continue.

- Oshyan

2535

Best Music Service / Re: tech crunch article comparing music services

« Last post by JavaJones on June 10, 2006, 02:22 AM »

Nudone, what are your thoughts on how the record companies do business? You're aware of how poorly they treat most of their artists, right? They may not be doing something illegal, but legality is just government endorsement, that's it. The difference between a legal and illegal drug is essentially an arbitrary decision. How many people does marijuana kill a year? How about alcohol? Which one is illegal?

Anyway, tangent, my point is the legality of something has little bearing on its *morality*. So I would say the record company's business practices are *immoral* and that they too are crooks. This is not to say that AllOfMP3.com is morally in the clear, but it seems kind of hypocritical to say "I won't shop there because it doesn't support the artists" then buy CD's or iTunes or other tracks that goes through the record companies who, as others have said, pay their artists something like 3% of what they make on each sale. Now their traditional reasoning has been that marketing, production, and distribution costs are very high and this must be accounted for. Well, you can get rid of production and distribution costs for downloaded music. So shouldn't the music either be less expensive or the artists should get more? In fact neither one is true. Go figure. The music industry is woefully corrupt and hoping to support artists by utlizing its services in any way is a lost cause.

- Oshyan

2536

General Software Discussion / Great little app for sharing/transferring files to others (or yourself?)

« Last post by JavaJones on June 09, 2006, 08:52 PM »

I ran across this great little app today called HFS (HTTP file server) that allows you to very simply share any files on your system through HTTP. Yes, it's just a basic web server, sure it may not be super secure or anything, and yes it depends on your IP (can use dyndns or whatever you want though) and local outgoing bandwidth. But as far as ease of use and plug-and-play functionality, this is tops. I've definitely setup web servers on my system before and found some very good free apps to do this, but this one is really much more of a start-and-go solution for simple file sharing rather than a complete web serving solution, and as such it's the kind of thing you'd keep on a thumb drive or utilities disk. It's one of those "just works" apps and, considering its simplicity and ease of use, it's remarkably powerful.

http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/?f=intro

It's not too big at 600kb, it requires no installation and it is incredibly easy to use. It starts out in easy mode and set to "On", so file sharing is immediately available. To share something just drag it into the HFS window. It operates on a "virtual file system", which is fairly flexible and cool. This allows you to create virtual folders to sort your shared files into, irrespective of what real folders the content might be sorted into. It also means you don't have to copy the data anywhere in particular or setup specific location links to anything to share a file. You just drag and drop, or right-click and choose Add Files or Add Folder From Disk. The virtual file system (VFS) can also optionally be saved to a file. This allows you to easily have multiple sets of different shared files/folders and switch easily and quickly between them. You can have the VFS saved automatically on exit and reloaded on startup. Once you have shared your files just select the file or directory you want to share in the tree view then copy the address shown at the top and send to whomever you want.

It's actually surprisingly powerful and configurable too, including options to change ports, throttle bandwidth and max users, ban people, etc. What's cool about it is that you don't *have* to mess with any of the powerful stuff to get it to work. You just start it and it's on. Share your files, send the address, and you're done. Couldn't be simpler really. They don't have to have an account with any website or have any special software, just a web browser. Of course it depends on your own outgoing bandwidth, but that's not too bad, especially to share smaller things.

Anyway, I'll stop gassing on. Again this is really nothing new, it's just well designed and setup.

Edit: The deeper I dig into this the more full-featured it seems. Which makes it all the more remarkable that it's so easy to use and setup. It has individual user/pass functionality for any file/folder, editable content presentation templates, display file in browser (MIME type support), logging, etc, etc. I dunno, maybe this will start a thread on good, free HTTP servers, but I've never found one easier or "lighter" (no install, etc.) that is also easy to use.

- Oshyan

2537

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows VISTA review by Scot Finnie

« Last post by JavaJones on June 09, 2006, 07:53 PM »

*sigh* I used to be excited about this OS. Is it really *that* hard to do things well? In some aspects OS X suggests not. I get the distinct feeling that if Apple weren't up their own backside about how fantastic they are, and so concerned with making sure not to go back on previous "Apple Wisdom" (like 1 button mice are better), they'd actually have a really obviously superior OS. As it is I think it trades blows with XP. It comes out ahead in a lot of areas, but also behind in many, and those latter areas are the ones I often care about. :p But again, if Apple just opened their minds a little more I think OS X could really shine. I can sort of say the same about MS, except that MS doesn't seem to have the raw ability (or a good core to work on?) to do it. Apple has continued to innovate and dramatically improve OS X since its introduction with regular updates. MS meanwhile have really only focused in *fixing* XP since launch. The major substance of the service packs were security updates. Beyond that we have not seen cool functionality like Spotlight, Dashboard, etc. come along. Sure MS has created these things separately, and I agree they shouldn't be *mandatory*, but sometimes you have something that should just be *a part of the OS*. Apple seems to have a pretty good clue about what that stuff is, MS not so much.

Ah well, here's hoping Windows ReallyLonghorn will be better.

- Oshyan

2538

General Software Discussion / Re: programmes that use little system resources.

« Last post by JavaJones on June 09, 2006, 06:34 PM »

OpenOffice does not use Java for the core, as far as I know. Java is used for macro support and other things, if I recall correctly. You *can* turn off Java use and it speeds up loading time and general use, although I do fine it still slower than it should be. This is the main barrier to me switching everyone in my office to it and that's very frustrating. I don't know of a general office solution that is faster and free, but there have been some good suggestions from others. If formatted text editing is not a necessity than I recommend PSPad as a light but extremely capable general text editor. Although it's not for the faint of heart or novice user.

I actually find Adobe Reader 7 to be faster than almost any previous verson. *Maybe* 5 is faster, but certainly not 6. 7 is slow but the main issue with it is RAM use. If you have enough RAM it's reasonably fast, it's just on lower RAM systems it bogs heavily due to swap file use. In any case Foxit is much better for the majority of uses. I haven't seen it bog down much on more complex PDF's, but I admit I don't read complex PDF's much. Hopefully someone on an old system isn't doing that anyway.

For a browser yeah I'd say an IE variant probably would be lowest on resources, but be careful with using a tabbed browser (of any kind) and then opening a lot of tabs. Opera is probably a close 2nd to IE and is actually faster in general operation, but if memory use is the concern it might not be better. It does seem at least comparable to Maxthon, etc. though if you'll be using tabbed browsing and as I said it's faster (measurably so).

Finally, AVG is a good choice for a light AV application. CA eTrust is also available for free and is fairly light, but not as much as AVG I think.

Ultimately you'll probably have to make some sacrifices to get decent functionality with low resource use these days. For example using Wordpad for all document editing - very basic, but hey it works! If this is acceptable then all should be well. Otherwise tell 'em to spend just a couple hundred bucks and upgrade.

- Oshyan

2539

General Software Discussion / Re: Free PDF creation (PrimoPDF)

« Last post by JavaJones on June 09, 2006, 12:21 AM »

Cool, I'll have to check out Bullzip. In fact, maybe I'll add it to that long-overdue freeware PDF review I'm working on.

- Oshyan

2540

Living Room / Re: Access all your bookmarklets at once

« Last post by JavaJones on June 09, 2006, 12:16 AM »

Thunder, I'd like to better organize and merge several different bookmark files, and remove dead links of course. But I'd be glad to trade then.

- Oshyan

2541

Living Room / Re: Making the Bellagio fountain with soda and Mentos...

« Last post by JavaJones on June 09, 2006, 12:15 AM »

Hey, thanks for screenshotting it. I knew it would need something more interesting than my vague description but I was too lazy to spruce up the post.

I haven't tried this yet but I do very much intend to!

- Oshyan

2542

Living Room / Making the Bellagio fountain with soda and Mentos...

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 02:22 AM »

Ok, not exactly, but it's damn impressive either way! And looks like a fun experiment.

http://eepybird.com/

- Oshyan

2543

General Software Discussion / Re: Scott Finnie unimpressed by NOD32 ...

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 02:19 AM »

Hmm, interesting indeed. I should watch his research closely as this is something I've really wanted to look into for a long time as well. I really feel the majority of antivirus "tests" out there are pretty poorly conducted and the criteria are often stupid. Aside from the focus on "silent" operation - which I agree with mouser on, it's not vital - Scot seems to have similar needs/priorities to my own.

- Oshyan

2544

General Software Discussion / Re: If you're developing a game, here's the way you should feel about it!

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 02:05 AM »

This guy is hilarious. I can just see him banging his action figures together with those dramatic arm motions.

- Oshyan

2545

Living Room / Re: A USA company doing it right ...

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 02:00 AM »

Haha, I've always loved these guys. Very clever and funny.

- Oshyan

2546

General Software Discussion / Re: Free PDF creation (PrimoPDF)

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 01:56 AM »

I use Primo a lot and it's great. Better for less experienced users than PDFCreator (if it's the app I'm thinking of). If I recall correctly PDFCreator is more customizable but the simple controls and defaults in Primo seem to work great for my users.

- Oshyan

2547

General Software Discussion / Re: Flashget is now freeware

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 01:49 AM »

Hmm, I liked Flashget quite a bit a few years ago, if I recall. Stopped using it because of Adware, etc. issues. But free again? I may just have to check it out! Maybe I'll fall in love with it like I did with Opera when it became free.

- Oshyan

2548

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 01:46 AM »

I've never had any problems with WD, so that's good. But it's all a numbers game and statistically if you buy a lot of HD's you'll have at least one fail eventually. The problem with HD reliability is you only know *in retrospect* what HD's *would have been reliable*, generally speaking. Sure you can pick a manufacturer based on *past history* of reliability, but talk to long-time IBM HD customers about how well that strategy can work out. IBM went from one of the most reliable HD manufacturers around to basically the worst and Hitachi's purchase of their drive division takes that stigma with it to some degree. One batch of bad tech can ruin a whole cycle of drives and even the manufacturer may not know about it until a whole slew of drives start coming back and a class action lawsuit is slapped on them. The best you can do is keep your data backed up and keep your HD's in reasonable operating conditions - i.e. well cooled.

eSATA is nice from a speed standpoint, but very, very few systems support it. One of the advantages of a USB drive to me is being able to just take it over to a friend's and hook right up. Most systems, even older ones, have USB these days, even if it's slower USB 1.x. Comparatively few have Firewire and even less have eSATA. But if it's just for use in your own home then it'll surely be the fastest external solution.

- Oshyan

2549

Living Room / Re: Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager - see how choices of of names change in time

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 01:38 AM »

How did people ever survive without cool ways to interactively visualize random statistics?

- Oshyan

2550

Living Room / Re: Access all your bookmarklets at once

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 01:36 AM »

58,000 bookmarks  Wow, and I thought I had a lot with about 5,000. Good lord man, how can that even be useful? How do you find anything? Anyone who manages a collection that big has *got* to have some pretty good advice about link management.

- Oshyan