Recent Posts

326

Living Room / Re: Comic blogs — I love 'em

« Last post by Crush on July 26, 2007, 12:16 PM »

  Codpiece is one of the best comics on earth:    http://community.liv...ns_daily/372729.html
The other comic-scans in this community are also great.
Only good pictures in comic-style are here: http://www.comicartfans.com/

327

General Software Discussion / Re: Am I the only one who hates smooth scrolling?

« Last post by Crush on July 16, 2007, 12:14 PM »

I prefer full-page-scrolling (also the pgup/pgdn-keys).

328

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: AcroLiminator 0.1 Beta

« Last post by Crush on July 08, 2007, 02:37 PM »

You could also include smiley-to-text-translation.

329

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on May 25, 2007, 05:09 AM »

Thanks for answering to this discussion! I didn´t knew wether I should post this link or not. Sorry, I didn´t read anywhere that Axiope-Desktop is licence-free so I thought you have to licence the non-profit version of it - the next time I´ll take a closer look. Nevertheless, I took a copy of it yesterday and will test it during the next weeks.

The first thing I saw was the shocking high price. I admit that on the first look at the functionality of creating catalogs, data sets and viewing masks, it´s the most flexible program I´ve seen till now. I didn´t mention at what customers you´re aiming: chemists, biologists, geneticists and other scientists that have enough money for something like Axiope.

330

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on May 23, 2007, 11:47 AM »

Hey! I found the most expensive File/Disc-Cataloger on the world today (not yet included in the list).

It´s Catalyzer http://www.axiope.co...p/importheaders.html
This is a real bargain for only 9000$/8000€ commercial licence (ok for 5 installations).
The cheaper version for non-profit-usage costs only the half of it 

I cannot believe that its features are as ultimate, superior & overwhelming that it is worth this much.
The screenshots in the userguides seem to me very very poor of features. I look forward to test this super-cataloger  !
You can also use it as a notepad.

Catalyzer seems to be a Java-Prog with web-server. I´ll take a look at it.
How could you call such a pricing? Harakiri-Marketing?

331

Living Room / Re: Why don't you pay for software?

« Last post by Crush on May 23, 2007, 08:31 AM »

There are 3 different kinds of software-developers.

No.1 creates software for their own needs or to gather experience with programming special things. Often they make programs to show possible clients what they are able to do - especially if they don´t have a higher education. Sometimes a few of them only code for fun - this changes after leaving school/university. You cannot live from fun alone. The amount of "newbies" & funcoders is high enough to seem like software is made on-the-fly for free. The most of them are showing to the Linux-World and community and say: "Hey, it´s all secure and for free!" but if you take a look at the creators of this idea - you´ll nowadays find them sitting in firms doing a normal job, earning money for their families and have no time for creating more "free" software.

No.2 creates software they think others could possibly use for their needs/hobbies and they develop for a market that hopefully exists and has enough money and honesty to pay for what they use. They don´t know how many will use their program and how much they will earn. After development they offer their product in many different ways (distributor, shareware, donationware or anything else) and pray that they´ve done all right and will have success.

No.3 creates software only if the need for it exists from a client that wants to have it to be better than their rivals and someone signs a contract with all it should be able to do for their personal needs, including the time and money for development and further support in creating new features or make the software work with others´ changing software and processes. They cannot rely on perhaps not regularly earning money for their invested time and money.

Sooner or later you´ll have to jump from 1 to 2 or 3 if you don´t have another profitable job and perhaps a very understandingly partner that helps you living your hobby.

People that only use free software stop honest developers from doing their job and the rich world of a bright palette of software is shrinking more and more and in some special cases the development stops. Do you think the hardware and software would have the actual state and speed if all would have used "free" software?

As a teenager I never bought an original game (only 2 or 3 I think), no tools and all had been copied illegal - only hardware had to be bought honestly. That changed after I left school and started a career within the software industry. I understood how life works and from this moment, I stopped all illegal actions and today have 99,9% originals I payed and registered as a normal customer.

I had a lot of contacts to game-developers, crackers and swappers all over the world and now - 20 years later - I see that nearly all changed to legality - some of them joined the software industry they fighted against with cracking their copy-protections - others couldn´t and stopped most computer activities. Only very few continued their former illegal hobby. Why? Because they understood what they´ve done and they wanted to adjust former faults somehow or only want to use their gained knowledge to make things better and live from their technical skills.

Pupils or student´s often don´t think too much about the money until they need it regularly. Therefore the most of them are working in No.1.
The computer world is working as any other markets - only with the problem that you can use it without asking using cracks or other tricks. Could you eat something looking in the eyes of the person that produced it being kicked out of his house with his whole family, because all (including you) have stolen their food that growed only from hard investments of work and money from the fields? Wouldn´t you be disappointed if you´d lose your job because someone has stolen your products? Wouldn´t you be angry if the money you earned very hard during years or decades will be stolen from your account?

Even if you use free software it´s like buying all products from the cheapest producer. How would the world look like if all people would only use products that costs nothing or are the cheapest they could get? If all would be bought from the chinese market where some people work for 10 ct per hour you´ll all lose your jobs and comfort. I think free software is ok in a healthy amount but not only insisting on it only for personal convictions against the behaviour of some big companies. It should be used as a concurrent against commercial products pushing them alive to develop further features, as insurancy against monopolistic intentions or as a start into the computer-world without having enough money to afford commercial products.

If you wouln´t make money floating around and no investments would be done the majority of mankind would be in a very poor state today. Don´t look only at yourself - take a wider look at the community of your town, country, continent or the world - only then you will understand all consequences of each little decision and act you make.

I see some frontiers what is good for you and others and what isn´t. The frontiers are only very fluently und unsharp to see.

If you don´t pay for good software that deserves it and you often use - you slowly kill development of great software and sometimes whole families! Think about it until other kill yours!

Something have to change in your head so that you can clearly see what´s happening around you and how the world is working. Perhaps then you start paying for software you are using and don´t insist only in using free software.

Besides: Open Source software is not in every case good as this week showed QEmu that has been infected with a keylogger. I don´t want to know how many "free" and "open" things are infected with spyware, controlling software and keylogs that have never been recognized and used in a very intensive way in high security domains that have very explosive datas about you, companies or military.

332

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on May 15, 2007, 12:05 PM »

Hi Lanux128,

Thx for the link! 

AFO is a few times faster and more stable than Whereisit (V2.61 was one of the fastest in my tests and V3 seems to reach at least the same speed - some other programs got slower during further development steps).

Hurry! Get it while you can!

333

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on May 14, 2007, 12:36 PM »

I also thought at the beginning that the users will be interested mostly in speed and stability - but nearly all comments to my request showed me that special features and a nice GUI are requested more often. Flexible databases and browsing functions are more preferred than highspeed searches. Therefore I asked everywhere for user experiences with catalogers on large databases. Now I dither what points are really most important for cataloger-users?!?!?

334

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on May 14, 2007, 11:27 AM »

The first excel-table I started before this cataloger-list was a speed comparison benchmark of some catalogers - the remarks were technical problems and software-issues (that are at the moment only german and have to be translated first). Some results of this list have been posted here: https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7183.0.
Perhaps we should also release this list if someone´s interested in benchmarking?

335

Developer's Corner / Re: Overview — D Programming Language

« Last post by Crush on May 13, 2007, 01:37 PM »

D is nothing new for me. I think D is a great coding-invention.
I remarked, that the language-comparison-table showing the features and differences to c, c++, c# and java has been cut-down: http://www.digitalma...om/d/comparison.html
If you like to see the real full comparison, take a look here: http://web.archive.o...om/d/comparison.html

336

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: ConceptDraw VI Standard on Giveawayoftheday today

« Last post by Crush on May 11, 2007, 08:36 AM »

Great! I have 4 & 5 and look forward to see the changes to 6! It´s a great Visio-clone. On the HP I found 2 additional diagram-libraries to download.

337

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on May 10, 2007, 06:40 PM »

Will we ever find a good solution? (rethinking how to solve this problem)

338

General Software Discussion / Re: Converting from FLV to AVI

« Last post by Crush on May 10, 2007, 06:28 AM »

The Video-Lan-Player http://www.videolan.org/ should be able to convert from each format it can play to each other codec that is installed on the computer. Also Streams can automatically be "ripped" and converted in an absolutely flexible way no other program offers.

339

Living Room / Re: Today I was searching for interesting software...

« Last post by Crush on May 07, 2007, 07:37 PM »

A bit different but it fits in here, I think:
I´d like to know how many people are practising Air-Sex in their spare time?  (http://youtube.com/r...ex&search=Search)

340

Living Room / Today I was searching for interesting software...

« Last post by Crush on May 04, 2007, 04:34 AM »

... therefore I looked at some software-sites and to save time I took a peek at the top-rankings...

AND FOUND THIS:  http://www.softsland.com/top.html ... also shocking  was the ranking of the games-list: http://www.softsland.../category-5-0-1.html

Is www.softsland.com a playground for perverts or are there other software sites with similar rankings?

341

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on May 03, 2007, 05:48 PM »

WhereIsIt? Is still very good and a top-notch-cataloger because of it´s features and speed. It was the reference at the start of my disc-cataloger benchmark/comparison with Heavy-Data-Tests. I haven´t tested all of them, but WhereIsIt showed some very hard issues and terminating exceptions turning my good and shiny view to a dark and bad one now. The tests showed that about 50% of the programs on the market seem to be very very buggy - and a lot of them are not worth their money (my personal opinion). I posted this somewhere on the board with the test-results. At the first sight with normal usage the most appear to work ok. Only deep tests show their flaccidities.

342

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on May 03, 2007, 01:27 PM »

Tomos, you can create such a table with saving to .html in OpenOffice. You only have to copy the result into the modify-Message Window.
Otherwise there are tools like http://www.winload.d...9.7.html?empfehlung2 or http://www.hidekik.c...sv2html/csv2html.cgi to convert .csv-files.

Did I tell you that there are now 213 Entries in my list?

343

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on April 25, 2007, 11:50 AM »

As I see till now - the most of these progs don´t support merging of catalogs. You can usually create different catalogs and sometimes it´s possible to search them all together - in most cases only the pre-loaded ones. WhereIsIt! seems to have a maximum size of 1GB/catalog as I read somewhere - and it´s not supporting unicode. A funny cataloger is giving some sidekicks to whereisit calling itself "HereIsIt!" 

The list is still growing - 4 new entries added today = 203 catalogers at the moment

The UI is a double-sided sword: Using standard Win-UI and Libs give in big result-lists an extreme heavy slowdown. Some have seen this and coded own output-windows to speed all up - and these windows often have a different look and behaviour as normal ones.

CDs and DVDs have been a main criteria for me to call something a Disc-Cataloger. All should be able to do this.

CDDB-Lookups are not included everywhere and should not be a main criteria. I personally want to search files by their tags and names. Catalogers specialized at Music-Collections are existing that all do CDDB-support but haven´t reached this list.

Good export functions are only rudimentary supported. You get only a small part of the stored informations as exports. So this also was no main point for me.

344

Developer's Corner / Re: The Best Introductory Language

« Last post by Crush on April 21, 2007, 09:32 AM »

I think the best for beginners is Assembler to understand the basics of the machine and help underständing how later developed languages are working inside. So you´ll be able to create more efficent code. Learning too much languages is only disturbing and confuses. It´s better to stay on a few and study them more intensive.

345

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on April 16, 2007, 12:11 PM »

I don´t think that people lose interest by the size of the list - they lose interest if the tools they look at doesn´t meet their needs.

To make them comparable you have to pick out the most interesting features people are searching for. The first one finds it more interesting to have thumbnails for pictures, the other one is more fascinated in MP3-Tagging-features, others prefer high speed searches over a very big list of files (perhaps with features to look inside archives) and less memory usage. Some wants to give out money for a good product - others don´t have enough money for that and need full featured freeware-versions and so on. I now can say that out of these huge list only a few meets my personal needs and no one has all the features I´d personally like to see. Such complex programs like catalogers are too different to say what are the "best". You can only say there´s a best one for a special usage.

Which one´s the right for you depends on whatfor you want to use it!

You can believe me that most people doesn´t want to spend hundreds of hours gathering all relevant entries (like I did) and then test them on their own. I´m glad to have this list now and others perhaps, too. The list with intensive reviews is gold for everyone who´s in urgent need of a cataloger. At the moment anything comparable to this review-project is available in the internet. You find only the same few of these programs in the shareware-lists, but other very unkown with creamy facilities and outstanding ideas you don´t find within the "normal" commercial progs are also out there. These were the ones I was especially looking for. I made this especially for myself but would be happy to also help others who can profit somehow from this hard work.

The biggest comparison list I found also had only very few and old entries but this was ok: http://www.cdfinder.de/list2.html The only problem is that this list is looking at rather old and only 68K-/powerpc-processor Mac-Software. This type of list is very helpful to make a good decision. A personal review also would be an addition to something like this. What do you think about it?

346

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by Crush on April 14, 2007, 04:34 PM »

This one also seems quite useful

Notelens: http://www.notelens.com/ is now free! (The only disturbing thing is the automatic reply of the software activated as standard, but it can be turned off after installation)

347

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on April 12, 2007, 02:50 PM »

Tomos started this big list and I talked to him - he wants to make a nearly complete list of all catalogers with short reviews and I told him I´ve found more than the few he listed. I see that the interest in such tools and reviews about them is growing, but I don´t think I´ll write a full review of all. Only the creation of the list took more than 5 days fulltime. The list could only be a source for writing reviews if someone likes to. I used it for myself to see how many progs are existing, how good are they and what are the shiny pearls (best features) of them, how many are still in development and I wanted to see the amount of free/commercial software and the prices of them. That´s all.

The list is now nearly at the end with nearly 200 entries. Now it´s the question how I could post it here. The best thing would be if others could update or add new programs to the list.

348

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: List of disc catalogers

« Last post by Crush on April 09, 2007, 08:43 AM »

I started some weeks ago a complete Disc-Cataloger-List (all I´ve found that deserve the name cataloger in my opinion - specialized ones like Music-CD or Movie-DVDs are excluded).

This list has the names, the site-links, perhaps download-links if the sites aren´t existing anymore, Freeware/Shareware/Commercial, the actual/last price, the last update or relase of the program.

I think it will take a while to complete all fields in the list, but only to get you shocked  : There are over 170 entries at the moment and about 1/4 of them are Freeware (sometimes former commercial software)! I expect over the half of the entries are absolutely unknown. This list could be used step by step for reviews.

@Mouser or other Boardowners:
There´s only a big problem: The list is a rather big Opendocument and it would kill the thread with the datas. Is it possible to get it somewhere hosted on Donationcoder? Perhaps others could add updates to this list this way?

349

General Software Discussion / Re: Free 3D Box Shot Maker

« Last post by Crush on March 27, 2007, 04:29 PM »

Aren´t real 3D Renderers better in visual quality, features than such simple boxshot makers? Where´s the big advantage of such specialized software? With Real3D V4, Truespace 3 and Blender you can get killer-quality for free.

350

Living Room / Re: YouPorn: Like YouTube, but with a triple x rating

« Last post by Crush on March 20, 2007, 03:28 AM »

Funny thing with father & son at the movies! 

I also remember that I entered with 18 the first and only time a porn-cinema  . The film was nothing special worth to remember, but the most interesting part was a quite young couple that was  fucking  half an hour during the show in the last row (only 2 rows behind me). They were much louder than the film so that all guests - about 60 I think - were looking at them and not at the boring film until they successfully ended their job