topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Sunday December 21, 2025, 8:01 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Recent Posts

Pages: prev1 ... 132 133 134 135 136 [137] 138 139 140 141 142 ... 470next
3401
General Software Discussion / Re: Shift to Linux
« Last post by 40hz on June 08, 2013, 01:25 PM »
^Out of curiosity - was your new machine preloaded with Windows and UEFI/Secure Boot enabled?

Because if it is, it won't boot Linux (or any other non-Windows OS) off a CD until some changes get made in the hardware setup to allow it.
3402
Pres. Obama was saying stuff like "this is a compromise that Americans can be happy with..."?!

Simple assertion does not establish the truth of a statement or conclusion. And begging the question still remains a fallacy of logic. Even when the President resorts to it.
 8)
3403
An opinion piece well worth reading can be found here at The Register.

Some highlights:

For all that I am frequently accused of being "anti-American" I hold the US Constitution up as one of the most sacred documents ever written by mankind. (The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights would be the item I consider to be the single most important document in our history as a species.)

The creation of the US Constitution was a symbol of a radically different way of thinking about our place in the world. Others had believed in the same ideals that were embedded in the Constitution long before the founding fathers, but none had ever made it stick. It was perhaps the most important turning point in the social evolution of our species since the development of agriculture.

...While I do not believe in overarching conspiracies of evil, I do believe that the structure and format of the American political system has become so damaged that the corruption of some individuals in positions of power is inevitable.

Transparency is virtually non-existent, accountability laughable and at the end of the day people unworthy of the power and responsibility they obtain are repeatedly given absolute control over the lives of millions...

...The Constitution of the United States of America is not a declaration of rights and freedoms granted to its citizens by the government. That document is a declaration of the limitations of powers granted to the government by the people that allow said government to exist.

According to the founders of the US, rights are not something that natural persons are given; that which is given can be easily taken away. Rights are innate and inalienable. All human beings are born with them and they cannot be taken from us....

Those with more to lose are far more willing to reduce the liberty of all in the vain hope of defending their monetisable assets. This is perhaps an explanation for why so many have come to associate freedom with "security at all costs".

Nowhere is this more evident than in the words of politicians themselves. Representative Xavier Becerra (D-CA) crystalises the viewpoint evidenced by those governing the US over the past few decades in just a few words: "To me, what makes us such as great country, is that we cherish freedom so much. But you can't have freedom without security. So you have to find the balance."

"You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it." - Malcolm X

As the US has spend the past 30 years going completely off the rails we've spent that same time becoming absolutely addicted to the technology and services it produces. So deeply embedded are we that disentangling ourselves from American technology providers, cloud vendors and what-have-you is a process of years, even decades.

While undertaking this difficult, painful and expensive task may not be absolutely required for pragmatic business reasons, I argue that it is a moral and ethical obligation we collectively bear to defend that which we believe. We could simply remain apathetic and allow privacy to evaporate as our laws are synchronized with those of the US, but it that what we want to have occur?

No terrorist actions, war, trade sanctions, international politics or other traditional tools of revolution and statecraft will turn America around. Americans have so deeply forgotten the concept of "liberty" that they no longer speak of their freedoms as innate but rather as rights granted them by their government. They see themselves as helpless before an unstoppable and inscrutable juggernaut and their own belief in this makes it so.

Read the entire article here.

Read it, discuss it  - and hopefully summon up the resolve and courage to become involved and legally act upon it. Because it is going to require both before much longer.

(NOTE: a record of this communication has been transmitted to US government monitors.)
3404
General Software Discussion / Re: Shift to Linux
« Last post by 40hz on June 08, 2013, 10:19 AM »
For some reason the live CD's I've already got have refused to run on my new PC, they boot OK and then throw up file system errors.

Could be either a bad download or a problem with the drive that was used to burn the disks.

Anytime you download a very large file there's always the chance of some corruption Happens a lot with some slower DSL services where there's a significant number of lags and timeout/resumes during a download - which your DL manager usually won't tell you about.

99% of the time there's a file error it's because the ISO download got corrupted. First thing to do following a download is to verify the MD5 or SHA-1 checksum. If there's a mismatch, the download is corrupted and you'll have to download it again.

If you don't have a utility to verify checksums, I'd recommend grabbing a copy of Colony West Software's freebie digestIT.

If the checksum is ok, then there might be an alignment issue with the burning drive. Usually the problem occurs with higher R/W settings. So when in doubt, the old trick is to try burning the CD at a lower speed like 8X or 16X. Virtually any drive can read any disk duped at those speeds.

If you don't want to chance wasting a disk, you can always load a live distro image onto a bootable USB key and play with that. It's faster than loading from CD anyway.

3405
Can the beginning of your reported problem maybe be dated to an automatic update?

Possible, with AVG being the most likely culprit. Will have to check that out.

Is user account domain or LM admin?

It's LM for both. These guys use an open source NAS box without a domain for filesharing.

Are Application Policies being used?

AFAIK they're using Windows policy vanilla defaults since the only person who does have enough systems knowledge to even know what a policy is said she hasn't touched anything.

IIRC there is an auto elevate install option in GP but I do not recall where it is. Have you run an RSOP to see if anything (in LM policy) looked hinkey?

Good call! Will need to try that.

I've never used/recommended AVG - actually have a shoot on sight policy - and have never run across this issue (Just an observation).

I have used AVG. And I too have a shoot on sight policy regarding it. ;D

Ditto for most of the other "all-in-one plus snazzy-interface" security suites. My experiences with them consistently rams home the message: Less is More. I still prefer the old warhorse "do one thing well" AV utilities - and I've currently standardized on Bitdefender as my AV recommendation for all my clients.
 8)
3406
General Software Discussion / Re: Shift to Linux
« Last post by 40hz on June 08, 2013, 07:28 AM »
can it be run as a live CD/USB do you know?

It can. I have a copy on USB which I take with me everywhere "just in case."  :Thmbsup:

(Note: I'm a big fan of live CDs and portable apps.)  :)
3407
General Software Discussion / Re: Shift to Linux
« Last post by 40hz on June 07, 2013, 07:44 PM »
@Deo - CrunchBang is my favorite go-to distro for laptops. Works very well with lower powered boxes too. Glad you found it. The interface is a little different if you're used to more traditional window managers like MSWindows or Gnome or KDE. But in may respects it's more flexible and configurable than most if you put a little time into learning about OpenBox and how to configure it.

It's also based on pure Debian so you can sidestep and not indirectly support Ubuntu's lack of etiquette in the FOSS community.

Looks pretty cool too IMHO. I always have somebody ask me what I'm using if I'm doing something on a CB laptop when I'm in a coffee shop, library or similar place. 8)
3408
I've just run into this problem with the second client in about the last 4 months. I was wondering if anybody knows what might be causing this:

Symptoms:

This is an issue with permissions.

Without warning, the default user with administrative elevation rights is suddenly no longer able to install anything - or run most programs - EXCEPT using the "Run as Administrator" option under Windows 7 Pro.

Additional info:


a) The system has been checked for both malware and rootkits, and has been reported  as being 'clean' after using multiple anti-malware/spyware scanners in both normal and safe mode bootups.

b) The system has been checked and does not have the infamous KB2823324 installed

c) The user profile does not appear to be corrupted

d) The user profile is flagged as an Administrator

e) The machine is current with all Windows critical updates

f) No new apps or app updates have been recently installed

g) Completely disabling UAC is not an acceptable option

Possible smoking gun:


Both affected machines were runing AVG AntiVirus 2013 - although so is every other machine in both client offices. No other machines experienced the symptoms either of the problem machines were experiencing.

Current workaround:

Going back a restore point (or two) has fixed the problem in both cases

---------------------------------

images.jpg

That's about it. No weirdness I can spot - other than this problem - which starts happening without warning. I'm fairly certain it involves some issue with the user profile although I wasn't able to diagnose anything wrong with the profiles on either machine. Just plain weird.

So...anybody know what might be causing this?

3409
Living Room / Re: International Currency Transfers
« Last post by 40hz on June 06, 2013, 05:34 PM »
@Pilgrim - If you do end up going with something like CurrencyFair could you do a write-up of your experiences with it? I think that information would be useful to several members here at DoCo.
 :)
3410
OK...a joke is a joke - but jeez guys!  :tellme: :o :'(

As reported by BoingBoing:

clown.jpg

This horrifying clown mannekin was reportedly placed on a hiking trail deep in the Oleta River in Aventura, Florida by a park employee who got it from the Enchanted Forest Elaine Gordon Park in North Miami.

If you went hiking through Oleta River in Aventura Florida last year, you probably shit your pants a couple miles in. (imgur.com)



3411
Living Room / Re: Movies or films you've seen lately
« Last post by 40hz on June 06, 2013, 12:09 PM »
The Raven (2012) directed by James McTeigue of V for Vendetta and The Matrix fame.

poe.jpg

From IMDB:
In the 19th century, a serial killer begins murdering victims using methods from Edgar Allan Poe's stories. Poe himself teams up with a young Baltimore detective to get inside the murder's mind and try and stop more of his fictional works becoming grisly fact. As the hunt intensifies, Poe's own love, Emily Hamilton, becomes a target for the killer.

It opens with the last few minutes of Edgar Allen Poe's life. Alone on a park bench in the early morning we find Poe dying under those actual mysterious circumstances which have puzzled scholars and amateur historic investigators since 1849.

The rest of the film becomes an extended flashback of what lead up to that moment. And all in all, it looks very promising.

Set in foggy mid-1800s Baltimore with a cast that includes John Cusak, Luke Evans, and period piece veteran Kevin McNally, what could possibly go wrong?

The short answer is: Plenty.

Within  the first 20 minutes you understand why Ewan McGregor and Jeremy Renner were originally cast as the leads only to drop out before shooting began - and why Joaquin Phoenix and Noomi Rapace turned down offered roles outright.

Seriously...

If you're going to do a period film, there should beat at least some a token nod towards the times by adopting the images, gestures, speech and culture of the era being presented. But in this case, about the only thing that came close was the sets and cinematography - which were gorgeous for the most part.



Where it fell down was in the acting. For some reason, all the characters used their natural voice - which is to say 21st century tone and idiom. Seriously, how much historic tone can you set when the characters toss around such modern terms as 'serial killer' and act and talk like some of today's city cops?

Also, if this is 19th century Baltimore, shouldn't there be at least a few characters with a hint of a Southron's accent? The weird mincing voice Cusak's Poe used is almost painful to hear coming from a guy we all know can act.

If the cast had been unknowns it would be one thing. But this cast has credentials and experience - so there's really no excuse for them destroying the illusion they way they did - script or no script.

Which brings us to the flawed screenplay. Which is a shame because the overall story concept was quite solid even though the writers never quite refined it enough to tie up all the loose plot ends - or fix some glaring holes in the script. Something about this script made it feel like it got rushed into production. It easily could have benefited from a major rewrite. Or two.

Oh well... :-\

Give this film a solid 5 for cinematography, costumes, and set design - and a low 2 for just about everything else.



3412
Our accountant is in his late 70s. He is not an advanced user by any measure. He recently made the jump from XP to Win8 on his home computer. Neither he nor his wife have had any major issues adapting to the new UI.

I think that may be more a function of their level of useage rather than an indication of how usable the interface actually is.

My experience with my clients seems to indicate that the more trivial (for lack of a better word) a user's involvement is with the underlying OS, the easier it is for them to become trivially proficient at using a different one. The more 'professional' and savvy users are another story.

As my grandfather used to say: Anything is easy if you aren't trying to get good at it.

I think the old man was onto something when he said that. ;D
3413
Living Room / Re: If Wikipedia existed back in the DOS era
« Last post by 40hz on June 06, 2013, 05:33 AM »
I think so. You're looking at EGA resolution if I'm not mistaken. 16 colors @ 640x350 with a .28 dot pitch. So don't try to play it full screen using today's resolutions.

Forgot how bad it used to be huh? ;D

But ... but ... the good ol' days! ... (mumble mumble sputter)

: )



Yes. It's true. They sucked.  :)
3414
Living Room / Re: Looking for a launcher
« Last post by 40hz on June 05, 2013, 09:39 PM »
@Tinman - regarding SlickRun -  it does look like it lives up to the name. But is it still being actively developed? It's 32-bit AFAICT and the last update was released on June 28, 2009.

UPDATE: Oh wait...this guy has it running under Windows 8 so maybe it doesn’t matter....
3415
Living Room / Re: Magnetic North Pole migration seems to be accelerating.
« Last post by 40hz on June 05, 2013, 09:24 PM »
If polarity reverses, True North and Magnetic North would be opposite, which would take quite a bit more calculations along with the confusion.....

Am I missing something? :huh:

If the polarity reverses, wouldn't it just be easier to announce that south is now the colored end of the compass needle and north is the silver end? That and simply recalibrate electronic compasses since it shouldn't matter if true north is out from magnetic by 4 or 184 degrees as long as you know how much the deviation is?

It would only be a real problem while it's shifting. Once it stabilized it shouldn't matter.

Fortunately, GPS and gyrocompass systems shouldn't be affected.
3416
Living Room / Re: If Wikipedia existed back in the DOS era
« Last post by 40hz on June 05, 2013, 09:10 PM »
 Was the blurriness supposed to be part of it?

I think so. You're looking at EGA resolution if I'm not mistaken. 16 colors @ 640x350 with a .28 dot pitch. So don't try to play it full screen using today's resolutions.

Forgot how bad it used to be huh? ;D
3417
Dear Microsoft:

Here's my suggestion for what to do with the audience after your next Windows 8 dog & pony show:

simpsons_mob2.jpg

 :-\
3418
(cringing)
iPhone user... yes
fanboy ... no! Whew! Safe! ;)

me too. ;D
3419
And of course got the reactions "what is wrong with you?!" from all my iphone peers.

iPhone fanboy users are nowhere close to being the peers of anybody here IMNTHO ;D
3420
I still want to see it boot to the desktop. I can't help but think there's some catch to it they're not letting us in on.

Somebody on another site also pointed out he couldn't help but want to scream since there's this big honkin' START button on the screen that this talking head won't so much as acknowledge - let alone press the friggin' thing.

And yeah... he  does seem to have a certain unholy fascination with an assassinated movie star doesn't he? Man...and here I thought my Nicole Kidman  :-* was weird enough.

niki.jpg

At least my little crush is still alive... :P ;D


3421
Well...it's gotta start somewhere...and this is how they chose to do it.



Microsoft has released a short official video preview of Windows 8.1 that neatly sidesteps all the things real users want to know about, like: how is the revived Start button gonna work...and how well does it work with a mouse in a non-touchscreen environment...and with a large or dual monitor setup.

But you get none of that. Just Jensen Harris (who looks like Mini-Me's bigger sibling) smiling like a dork and talking about things like "cool" and being "excited" about cosmetic features and eye candy while demoing it on a (surprise! surprise!) Surface tablet.

I had hopes. But it looks like Microsoft still isn't quite ready to directly address the concerns and wishes of a very large part of their customer base. So instead we get more Metro, puff features, plus a low key pitch for Skydrive, and the Surface.

Guess we're just gonna have to wait until it's released before we have any real answers. :-\
3422
XYPlorer - one day giveaway on 05-Jun-2013. Details and download link here.
3423
Living Room / Re: Patent wars - again
« Last post by 40hz on June 05, 2013, 11:37 AM »
I wonder how much of Obama's motivation comes from Microsoft and Apple starting to run into problems in places like the EU and China over the very patent quagmire they themselves helped create?

Now that major American business interests are starting to get hurt I guess there will finally be some action taken. Unfortunately, one of the qualifying points that makes one not a troll is if there is already an ongoing business and manufactured product to go with  the patent being asserted. That condition could leave all the small startups and kickstarters twisting in the wind if they try to enforce their patents against one of the big companies.

I think this is ultimately going to mostly benefit the large established businesses which are patent holders and hang all the small innovators and new businesses out to dry. I'd like  to hope this isn't really all a plan to shut out new claimants and hand the field over to big business. But I've been around long enough not to have much hope for that.

I'm guessing whatever gets done will likely benefit everybody at first. But afterwards, certain clauses and interpretations will inevitably pull the rug out from under all but the biggest corporations when it comes to patent protection.
 :tellme:

3424
Living Room / Re: Looking for a launcher
« Last post by 40hz on June 05, 2013, 11:17 AM »
That or Everything. It supports regex. But it only works with local NTSF formatted drives. It doesn't do FAT32 or remote disks.

Guess again :)

@4wd - Thx!  :Thmbsup: I stand corrected. Been a while - and I'm mostly Linux these days so I don't stay as current with my Windows software as I used to. :-[
3425
Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?
« Last post by 40hz on June 05, 2013, 11:05 AM »
Just finished Clive Barker's Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium - a series of six short stories released as individual chapters packaged with an action figure. I thank my friend Mike for letting me borrow his collection (sans figures) to read.

If you're a fan of Clive Barker, or just curious to delve into more of the vision that produced the Cenobites and the Hellraiser universe, this is a disturbing addition to the corpus.

Cautionary note: Mssr. Barker has both a vision, and a very good descriptive handle, on a dark realm of absolute evil and those that call it home. Clive's bad guys go well beyond the baddest of the bad. We are talking stark satanic evil here. Not for the faint hearted or those who are easily shocked. I'm fairly hardheaded when it comes to fiction since I know it's just a story. But some of Clive's scenes and concepts even I found to be more than a little disturbing. Reader discretion advised.

Here's an excerpt from the first book. It deals with a character called Agonistes. It is implied (though never stated) that Agonistes is the creator of the Cenobites found in Hellraiser. Those who follow the Hellraiser series will probably recognize him/her/it as the enigmatic creature the Cenobites call The Engineer.
 :tellme:
Pages: prev1 ... 132 133 134 135 136 [137] 138 139 140 141 142 ... 470next