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Recent Posts

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3076
General Software Discussion / Re: Can 'Captor' go LITE like "Greenshot"!?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 05, 2012, 11:45 AM »

I used to use Snippy before I ...uh... asked ... Mouser to add my use case as a feature to SC Captor, and I've been content with a "Click Icon and Drag" style without getting into the fancy stuff. But it's fun to know all that cool stuff is built in there : )
3077
Living Room / Re: Files aren’t property, says US government
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 05, 2012, 08:12 AM »

I'm kinda amazed that the big Cloud guys aren't upset by this. It's that social division by zero thing again. This is basically becoming Calvinball. If files aren't property then if it worked it would be a hysterical defense to the Copyright problem. (Remember the P part of Intellectual Property?)

But if files aren't proprietary property then a whole lot of law precedent is going to break.
3078
Living Room / Re: Hurricane Sandy Discussion Thread
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 01:50 PM »
Because it takes too much effort to bust every single flaw the pol's produce. We shouldn't have to audit every line our politicians say. That's already the wrong path.
3079
Living Room / Re: Now this is a Windows 8 review I heartily applaud
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 01:40 PM »
It's not even dripping sarcasm, it's kinda fairly asking what was the whole eye-candy movement of Windows Vista about.

MS has really struggled lately to find a consistent tone and slam it home. They keep coming through with half baked partial answers to 2-years-ago.

3080
Living Room / Re: History of CP/M
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 01:31 PM »

I bought one of those too. What a crazy machine. It had both the Zilog Z-80 and a Motorola 6502 CPU chips in it. Two separate CPUs from two completely different manufacturers! Talk about a kludge - although it was an extremely clever one. And it worked very well too, although IIRC sometimes switching from C64 mode back to native C128 mode was a little dicey and required a power cycle. CP/M, in true CP/M style, worked beautifully on it. Like CP/M did on everything it was ever ported to.

The only real "problem" (challenge?) with the C128 machine was programming it. And by programming I mean in assembler. The C128 had the weirdest memory architecture I had ever seen. The whole V20/C64 family's architecture was pretty weird to begin with since the memory map got shifted around whenever a cartridge was plugged into them. The Vic-20 was the most confusing. They fixed that mess somewhat with the C64. But not by much.

The C128, however, was a complete nightmare to get your head around. I must have spent hundreds of hours pouring over the Commodore 128 Reference Guide for Programmers and Mapping the 128 along with the other 4 or 5 books Compute Magazine published for the C128. This box was being viewed as a "very serious" machine back then because it had 128 kilobytes of RAM - which was huge for the time. Easily twice that of any of it's competitors. And the programmers were drooling! IIRC even Sams Books had a few programming titles out for it.

Too bad it was so complex not much got written to take advantage of the native mode. And since the 128 could run virtually all the old C64 programs (compatibility was close to 100%) - and the C64 was still selling well - most developers took the safe route and just continued to crank out C64 software. And the business programmers just continued to release their stuff for CP/M, so the native 128 mode never really took off.

Commodore also didn't market the C128 anywhere near as hard as they had the C64. Which greatly puzzled most industry watchers.

I was in a weird age bracket for Commodore. I was some 9 years old for a Commodore 64, a little too young for the Peek-Poke madness.

I was about 12 when we got hold of a Commodore 128. I mostly ignored the crazed Bank-Switching stuff and wrote about 10 simple games using the new commands... (then I never programmed again. yikes!) Those were the days when games could be made by one guy, before MS lock-ins and million-dollar studios. Bonus trivia for the hardcore gang, "Keypunch Software" (or some such) was cheap C64 gaming with terrible graphics but it was written for what 1984 wanted, for some $10 a copy, so you just laughed and played it anyway.
3081
Living Room / Re: Hurricane Sandy Discussion Thread
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 09:54 AM »
@Ren - re: above prediction - you nailed it I think.  ;D
http://thetimes-trib...artial-law-1.1396770
:(
Even the thought...

Good for the mayor having a grip. That's almost a fourth tier in our "let's take away civil rights" theme, "police need all that unlimited power to keep you safe in the storm!" I'll say I never expected that even to be a proto-meme.
3082
General Software Discussion / Re: Browser Bunch 1.4.2.0 - with BBSS
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 09:11 AM »
Heh is that the graphic depiction of ROFL?  ;D

I'm not even sure what to add, without getting more tangled. It was more like a quirk I've seen a ton of programs do.
3083
Living Room / Re: Win 8 Zero-Day Exploit
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 09:06 AM »
Sometimes I can't help wondering if some of this activity is being financed by parties interested in building the case for closed software ecosystems and single-source app stores.  :o

Well I wouldn't put it past Apple to poke holes in MS software, that's a cinch to see. But for MS to do it to themselves gets all into Tin Foil Hat territory that I don't wanna get dragged into : (
3084
Living Room / Re: Win 8 Zero-Day Exploit
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 09:01 AM »
Boot-level attacks are on the rise according to security experts. Attackers have found great success with rootkits that infect a Windows machine’s BIOS or Master Boot Record, giving them persistent and often undetected access to a machine. Boot-level attacks can also lead to further malware infections where an attacker can harvest credentials and use an infected computer as a pivot point for attacks on other machines in a network.
-The Article

I've been seeing many of the MBR variety in the field lately, but hadn't realized the BIOS exploits were off the drawing board and in the wild. Any ideas how one would even go about trying to detect/remove one of those??

I think Mark Russinovich led the way on these when he busted Sony's Rootkit attempt back in the day. I think he has a couple of utilities (now owned by MS) that compares boot records with raw data dumps to look for boot level problems.
3085
Living Room / Re: History of CP/M
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 01:30 AM »
  MS excels at Marketing and adaptation; they just really suck at originality. :) :two:

Maybe they used to, before Apple took the banner on Marketing. Or rather, maybe the whole Borg meme was right, they didn't really market anything, they Excel'ed (TM!) at simply making copies of competitor's software then doing smokey back room deals with the OEMs to get lock in agreements, which is maybe promotion, but not marketing.

Circa about 2004 with PlaysForSure, MS seems to have lost their edge in tech domination because the subsequent 8 years proved a total mess in both Music and Phones. Apple marched on in and crushed those so badly everyone else is picking up the scraps.
3086
Developer's Corner / Re: FTC to give $50,000 for robocall solution
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 01:24 AM »
I do not believe that the problem can ever be "solved", but only "tamed" somewhat.)
I do have a very nasty solution though... Diabolical if I might say...
I like your style! :Thmbsup:

Wait, you just solved it! Play Gangnam Style to all RoboCalls until they hang up!  ;D
3087

This is the first I've heard about the Classes for trademarks, so that's informative. Probably the same thing was going on with Apple Music via the Beatles vs Apple Computer way back when.
3088
Living Room / Re: Smartphone Jailbreaking and Video Remixing Rights
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 12:32 AM »
"However, the Copyright Office declined to expand that exemption to tablets and video game consoles, arguing that the category of "tablets" is not well defined."

Sounds to me like the negotiators for the copyright office wanted a bone to save their hides from their superiors so that the press articles wouldn't declare a universal victory. Hmm, "Well, the tablet category is not well defined so let's not give it any rights."



3089
Living Room / Re: NSA Wiretapping Secrets
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 04, 2012, 12:16 AM »

Look, I found Cody's cousin working for the NSA!

http://blogs.compute...less_wiretapping.jpg

3090
Hilarious!  More at link...

You missed the part where they opened "Dear Sithizens" !   8)
3091

"The Money is Strong with Disney. They want to produce a new movie."
3092
Living Room / Re: Confusing Apple Promo (Spoof)
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 03, 2012, 01:52 PM »
And here, the new iPad Mini commercial (courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel)


Unfortunately by now, I am unable to load this and get an "unavailable" message.

It's still there... so try again. :)

I see it now, that's great. : )

3093
General Software Discussion / Re: Browser Bunch 1.4.2.0 - with BBSS
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 03, 2012, 01:47 PM »
Not really, it's kinda easy to reproduce, it's when I SHOW the file type setting the first time, then when I save the files if I don't manually type ".txt" at the end of my file name it happens. Then when I later hide file extensions it was still producing "un-typed files".

I see those kinds of problems with the file extensions on a lot of apps, which is why I had a widget that toggled that setting on 1-doubleclick (though I lost it somewhere, it's probably in a "utilities 7" folder somewhere.)
3094
Good time to use --->  :-*

 :D

Does this call for sending the Mexican dept a Christmas present?  ;D
3095
General Software Discussion / Re: Browser Bunch 1.4.2.0 - with BBSS
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 03, 2012, 11:29 AM »
There's no stipulation in either program for the files to have ".txt" extension. Only that they be plain text in content. First thing I do when I get a new PC or install Windows is turn off the "hide extensions" setting. Don't know what good it does, but the harm has to be at least an order of magnitude greater. On Windows forums I think about 10% of the posts for help disappear once the poster turns that off. :)

Well, per my "resident pest" self awarded title, under certain settings when I was saving the resulting files, Windows couldn't figure out what type they were.  ;D

<--- Continues to find obscure bugs that apparently no one else gets.
3096
Does anyone remember seeing this the one and only time it aired?

Hehehehe~!

(Raise your hand if I've permanently scarred or traumatized you! :P )

Oh. Dear. Gawd.  Did that really air!? It's not a brilliant spoof?
3097
General Software Discussion / Re: Browser Bunch 1.4.2.0 - with BBSS
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 03, 2012, 05:20 AM »
Misc Note:
Strange things can happen when you toggle on/off "hide extensions for known file types" in MS Windows. I do that a lot when I want to save twin copies of stuff like a .txt and a .html copy of web pages for example. But when running BBSS if it's toggled off and when you are saving the files if you forget to manually type .txt at the end of the file names then you get "unknown files".

So it can get a a bit confusing, but I figured it out.
3098
Living Room / Re: Confusing Apple Promo (Spoof)
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 03, 2012, 04:50 AM »
And here, the new iPad Mini commercial (courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel)


Unfortunately by now, I am unable to load this and get an "unavailable" message.
3099
Living Room / Re: Confusing Apple Promo (Spoof)
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on November 03, 2012, 04:49 AM »

(Satire)
No, this is not epic. Because epic means big. The iPad Mini is small. Very Small. You can't fit big into a small package. What we do at Apple is fit Meaning, into that small package. Epic Meaning. Because you can have lots of meaning and it doesn't take up more space. That doesn't our previous products mean less. They were epic. Because they were bigger. And Big means something. But so does being small. And Small is the future. Except for the iPod Nano, which was too small, we admit, that our customers lost the meaning. Or something.
3100
More copyright fun:

http://torrentfreak....ng-10-movies-121101/
BitTorrent Pirate Ordered to Pay $1.5 Million Damages For Sharing 10  (porn!) Movies


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