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376

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 as an Internet service?

« Last post by dr_andus on January 26, 2015, 03:11 PM »

Gavin Clarke over at The register puts his two cents in. Read it

-40hz (January 26, 2015, 11:57 AM)

Interesting article, thanks for this. One thing I don't get it why MS thinks being so cryptic about their plan is a good thing. Their event raised more questions than answers, and now everyone out there is reading the tea leaves and trying to make sense of stupid things like what did MS mean by a "device". They could have just spelled out the plan, rather than allow for all these speculations to proliferate (and most of them seem to draw negative conclusions).

Could they be really so bad at marketing? What is that about? Or maybe they haven't actually agreed on a plan yet (which is not a good sign either)? Or maybe the plan (the truth) is even more negative than the speculations? I just can't see how it could be a good thing to leave millions of customers out there scratching their heads.

As for the free upgrade, I will probably wait until the last week of the 11th month to see all the feedback on the bugs and issues etc., whether it's really worth it or better to stick with Win7 (unless the early feedback will be really amazing). But to be honest, all I heard so far is that they bring back features for which there are already better 3rd party tools anyway (like the Start menu), so I'm not seeing yet the fabulous benefits of upgrading.

377

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 as an Internet service?

« Last post by dr_andus on January 21, 2015, 04:52 PM »

And furthermore, I feel the zeitgeist of today is prematurely pushing for the eradication of the desktop pc.  I don't understand why we are so eager to get rid of them as a society.  For the longest time, desktop pc's were the territory of the super nerds and geeks...like from the 80s until the iphone era.  With the smartphones, all these people that were not computer people all of a sudden had their eyes opened up to the possibilities they present.  And now we're all over apps and phones and internet of things...but they all still pale in comparison to the desktop.  And the other weird thing is that despite how little talk there is for the desktop and the fascination with the mobile stuff, most people still have a desktop in their home somewhere.

-superboyac (January 21, 2015, 04:39 PM)

I empathise with what you're saying. But the trend seems to suggest that businesses (such as Apple, MS, Google etc.) had figured out that much more money can be made out of uninformed users who can be continuously milked, than from savvy power users. The tablets and other gadgets are perfect for monetising clueless consumers, while power users are hard to please. Just give Chromebooks and their Windows lite equivalents a bit more time to iron out the hickups (like printing and PDF support), and pretty soon there will be fewer reasons to have a PC at the average home. Let's face it: the readership of DC is a niche audience. I wonder if the price of full-on desktops will start to climb at one point, once they're not subsidised by the mass market....

378

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 as an Internet service?

« Last post by dr_andus on January 21, 2015, 04:43 PM »

Thanks for the clarification (shouldn't MS be doing that, though?)

I suspect they're mostly trying to speed up adoption by the Windows 7 users (remember XP?) without making the Windows 8 users feel like they got taken for a ride like the Vista users did. It's clever too in that because it's free for the first year, corporate IT departments will have a huge amount of trouble justifying to their upper management any decision to stick with 7 if they let the opportunity for that freebie to slip by.

-40hz (January 21, 2015, 04:18 PM)

I imagine that many of the 'corporates' sticking with XP and Win7 are small businesses, one-man bands, and then consumers. There must be good reasons probably why they stuck with those OS's (e.g. that they run well on their ageing machines). It would make sense to try to get the maximum return on investment on the licenses and hardware. So they might not be that easily fooled by one year of free subscription, especially if it's then not transferable to replacement hardware. The big question is how much the subscription is going to cost afterwards, and whether your current hardware can handle Win10.

379

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 as an Internet service?

« Last post by dr_andus on January 21, 2015, 03:30 PM »

21 Jan 2015 at 17:46, Iain Thomson
The upgrade will only be free in the first 12 months after release and will last for the "supported lifetime of the device."

I looked around a bit and it seems I'm not the only one confused by the phrasing of this new policy. There are some very different interpretations out there, and none of them good.

So this could either mean that I wouldn't be able to move my license to a new machine (Win10 will be free for that upgraded device but a new device will require a new subscription?) or that the new business model is based on planned obsolescence, i.e. MS can decide to stop supporting a type of device, at which point it becomes obsolete or at least much impaired?

My iPad 1 experience is a case study of how the latter would work. Apple decided not to update the OS at some point, after which gradually more and more developers stopped supporting the apps for that OS version, which in many cases meant that apps I've paid for stopped working altogether.

That's very different from having your device and the apps you paid for and using them until the hardware wears out. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with my iPad 1 hardware. It's the OS that has been abandoned.

380

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 as an Internet service?

« Last post by dr_andus on January 21, 2015, 01:53 PM »

21 Jan 2015 at 17:46, Iain Thomson
The upgrade will only be free in the first 12 months after release and will last for the "supported lifetime of the device." Microsoft said the new OS will run on PCS, tablets, phones, and a new device to be announced later today.

-40hz (January 21, 2015, 12:05 PM)

What does this mean? Do they mean for the lifetime of my current Win7 PC that will give up the ghost one day, or do they mean until the day they decide they no longer want to support my device, at which point it becomes unusable, forcing me to buy a new device?

21 Jan 2015 at 17:46, Iain Thomson

This will involved "universal apps," software that works equally well on the phone, tablet, and PC. The Office applications will be included in this, but developers will be encouraged to do the same with their own code.

-40hz (January 21, 2015, 12:05 PM)

I thought the whole Metro, RT etc. fiasco had shown that it's a bad idea to try to run the same OS on very different devices (which is why Apple doesn't do it)??

381

General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

« Last post by dr_andus on January 16, 2015, 06:20 AM »

I think it may still be doing regular content search.

-Jibz (January 16, 2015, 01:21 AM)

Oh, yeah, searching the content is not instant, it does take time to get the results for a sizeable folder full of large PDF docs for instance, so it's probably not indexed then, which might be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you prefer.

I also have Copernic 3.7, which is supposed to index when the PC is idle, but especially in recent weeks I've been finding that it does it all the time and it takes up a huge amount of RAM (1.2GB at the moment, so I'm shutting it down), and started to crash often. I don't know why it started to behave like that recently... I rarely use it for search, but it's been a constant drain on resources, so I might just have to disable it permanently. So for me the FileSearchy approach probably makes more sense.

382

General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

« Last post by dr_andus on January 15, 2015, 01:43 PM »

Does FileSearchy need to index file content (how does the content search work) ?

-Armando (January 14, 2015, 03:03 PM)

It looks like it. When I launch it, for a minute or so there is a little indicator in the bottom left corner that says "indexing". Then it says "Index: ready."

383

General Software Discussion / Re: What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

« Last post by dr_andus on January 14, 2015, 07:14 AM »

FileSearchy is another one to keep in mind. It can search both file names and their contents and order them by the number of matches ("relevance") and show the density of matches within each document (besides other filtering options). It was a while ago I compared them but I think I preferred FileSearchy to DocFetcher (I think the search was more complete or something along those lines).

384

General Software Discussion / Re: editor with built-in column or tiling facility - (Listhings comes close)

« Last post by dr_andus on January 04, 2015, 05:01 PM »

The idea would be to have a group of Sticky Ntes that pretty much fill up the screen, that can be opened as a group and then closed as a group.

-Steven Avery (January 04, 2015, 12:33 PM)

You could try TaskSpace and/or TaskLayout for that.

385

Developer's Corner / Re: New EU VAT rules change the game for digital businesses

« Last post by dr_andus on December 31, 2014, 05:30 PM »

I still don't understand how or why I should pay taxes to a foreign government, or under what authority they're going to try to force me to do so. This is so confusing. . .

-Deozaan (December 31, 2014, 04:27 PM)

I'm not an expert and I haven't read through all the documentation, but I can see a logic to it. E.g. if a US based business sells a product to an EU customer online, than that's either a cross-border transaction (the US business is exporting its product to the EU, and then customs duty applies, as it has done for centuries), or the US website when it's available in the EU is like a subsidiary operating in the EU (since it has access to the customers there), and therefore it should collect all the same applicable VAT taxes on the transaction as all the other local businesses and pass them on to the government (otherwise local businesses would be less competitive). In a way the EU is just catching up with a loophole in tax collection, the Internet being the new frontier that it is. So I can see the logic. But as for the implementation, I hope the outcome of this will not just be US websites declining to sell to EU customers. But if your payment gateway service does this for you as part of their service anyway (and many have been doing it for years), then the US business doesn't even need to know that it's happening.

386

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by dr_andus on December 29, 2014, 01:30 PM »

It doesn't look like Tile Tabs has been mentioned in this thread yet (apologies if it's common knowledge). I've just discovered it today and like it a lot. Their customisation options are impressive. I need it for splitting a WorkFlowy page vertically in FF.

387

General Software Discussion / Re: Editable daily plain text reminder

« Last post by dr_andus on December 29, 2014, 07:42 AM »

For simple once per day(on first boot) launch this is fine
http://www.karenware...powertools/ptoad.asp

-MilesAhead (December 29, 2014, 07:09 AM)

This does the trick, thanks very much!

388

General Software Discussion / Editable daily plain text reminder

« Last post by dr_andus on December 29, 2014, 06:32 AM »

I'm looking for a simple app that can display a plain text window with some text that I can edit (for things I want to remind myself about at the start of every working day). I'd like it to pop up once a day at a set time (or whenever the PC boots/wakes up for the first time that day, if it's later than set time).

So the key requirements are:
- editable text file
- contents of the text file are displayed in full as a pop-up window (or scrollable, if text gets too long)
- ability to choose daily time when the app runs

Not essential but nice to have:
- the app could be set to stay on top of other windows until dismissed (closed)
- to be able to call it up (e.g. to edit contents) from the taskbar tray
- if it could be set to pop up multiple times during a day.

Is there a DC app that can already do this?

389

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 11 Released!

« Last post by dr_andus on December 24, 2014, 04:20 AM »

maybe it's not about the specs but something else.

-dr_andus (December 22, 2014, 03:12 PM)

One suspicion I have is that running a bunch of Chrome services was affecting my PC's performance, and somehow especially that of DO11.

Normally I have a Chrome browser open with Calendar, Drive, and several Google Sheets, as well as WorkFlowy running in a stand-alone Chrome app. (The local Google Drive directory was also pre-set in a Dopus tab, although it was set not to load automatically.) This normally would result in a large number of Google processes running under the hood, with significant RAM usage.

After I shut down Chrome and ran the same Google and WorkFlowy web pages in Firefox instead, the performance of my PC had improved significantly. Unfortunately I can't test this theory with DO11 because I uninstalled it, but even DO10 performance had improved noticeably.

---

P.S. And the other suspicion is about a scheduled Malwarebytes scan kicking in without me realising it, which slows things down... It was set to kick in daily (by default, I presume), so I just changed it to weekly...

390

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 11 Released!

« Last post by dr_andus on December 22, 2014, 03:12 PM »

I havent found DO11 to be more resource hungry (but that's with i5+8GB ram)

-tomos (December 16, 2014, 08:34 AM)

Unfortunately DO11 continued to be too slow on my system (i7+8GB ram). But I saw someone on the Dopus forum having a similar issue on brand new gear, so maybe it's not about the specs but something else.

Too bad, as I would have gladly upgraded, even just to support the developers, as Dopus is one of my favourites. It's just that it needs to be working out of the box for me right now as I don't have the time for troubleshooting.

I have reverted to DO10 and things are back to running fine.

391

General Software Discussion / Re: Tool to facilitate transcribing speech

« Last post by dr_andus on December 22, 2014, 04:57 AM »

I use Olympus DSS Player Plus (v. 7), which comes bundled with some of the Olympus digital recorders, in combination with Olympus foot pedal. But I'm not sure if it's possible to buy the software separately. Another option is f4.

The foot pedal frees up your hands for typing, as you can rewind, stop, start with it. Otherwise those functions can be performed by using assigned F keys using the above software.

----

P.S. I just remembered that the Olympus foot pedal might come with its own transcription software called the Transcription Module. But it's a lot more complex and sophisticated than the DSS Player Plus, so I never needed it. But I'm just saying that getting the pedal probably supplies you with prof grade transcription software.

392

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Re: NANY 2015 Pre-release: Active Text Notes

« Last post by dr_andus on December 20, 2014, 07:26 AM »

Well, it just doesn't seem to work and I can't see a way to work around it. Maybe you have a different version?

-IainB (December 20, 2014, 07:12 AM)

No, I have the same version. I have it installed under C:\Program Files (x86)\Samurize and I'm not even running it in compatibility mode. But I'm only using it to display a few lines of static text permanently from the Config Editor, so it's perfectly possible that some more sophisticated features might not work.

393

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Re: NANY 2015 Pre-release: Active Text Notes

« Last post by dr_andus on December 19, 2014, 01:07 PM »

This is almost exactly the sort of thing I have been looking for ever since I had to abandon Samurize (it didn't work after Windows XP).

-IainB (December 19, 2014, 12:33 PM)

Out of curiosity, what was it that didn't work for you post-XP? I'm running Samurize under Win7, 64-bit, and I didn't run into any problems. But I've only ever used it for one tiny feature, so maybe that's why...

394

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Re: NANY 2015 Alpha Release: MarkdownBuddy

« Last post by dr_andus on December 15, 2014, 10:25 AM »

Sorry, wraith, I can't test this version any longer as I had to delete it from my system. I suspected that the PDF widget in there may have interfered with my PDF-Xchange Printer Lite 2012 driver. When I tried printing a PDF from MS Word today, it all came out blank, which never happened before. I can't be certain that it's your app, as I also had Acrobat Reader updated yesterday (so it could be that), but after deleting the Markdownbuddy folder and restarting the system my driver came back to life. As I said above, for me there is no value added in having the PDF save option, as I can do that myself.

395

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 11 Released!

« Last post by dr_andus on December 15, 2014, 10:19 AM »

You are persuading me to stick with 9 LOL

-wraith808 (December 15, 2014, 09:55 AM)

That was certainly not my intention... But it could be that my 4-yr old machine might be just too old for v. 11? BTW, I was pretty happy with v. 10.

396

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 11 Released!

« Last post by dr_andus on December 15, 2014, 08:54 AM »

A variation on the problem is that I have deleted a file from a folder but it was still there. When some 15 sec later I wanted to delete it again, it would give me an error message (i.e. it was already deleted but it wasn't cleared from view). I had to navigate to another folder and then back to "refresh" the folder and get rid of the 'nonexistent' file.

397

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 11 Released!

« Last post by dr_andus on December 15, 2014, 06:57 AM »

No, I haven't had that experience. Check this thread for troubleshooting tips:

http://resource.dopu...viewtopic.php?t=1873

-Innuendo (December 14, 2014, 08:06 PM)

Thanks, will do.

In the past, when I'd download a file with Firefox, the downloaded file would show up immediately in the download folder when open in Dopus. With v. 11 however I thought something was wrong because I was looking all over the place in the folder for the latest downloaded file and couldn't find it. It was only after some considerable time that the file eventually showed up.

Has anyone else had that experience?

-dr_andus (December 14, 2014, 06:40 PM)

Yes, but it's always been some retarded AV that was the cause - the download would sit in Firefox/Pale Moon/etc at %100 for up to 15 seconds before the AV program would finally decide it's OK.

It's why I always try to use an AV where I can set at what point a file gets scanned, and writing it isn't one of them.

-4wd (December 14, 2014, 08:21 PM)

This could be part of it. But even launching Dopus 11 seems to take longer than Dopus 10 did. Maybe it is AVG messing things up in the background (recently switched from Avast).

398

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 11 Released!

« Last post by dr_andus on December 14, 2014, 06:40 PM »

I'm a Dopus 10 user. I'm tempted by the latest upgrade offer,  so I've been trying out v. 11.

My first impression is that it is running quite a bit slower (or is a bit more resource hungry), at least concerning the following operation.  In the past, when I'd download a file with Firefox, the downloaded file would show up immediately in the download folder when open in Dopus. With v. 11 however I thought something was wrong because I was looking all over the place in the folder for the latest downloaded file and couldn't find it. It was only after some considerable time that the file eventually showed up.

Has anyone else had that experience?

399

N.A.N.Y. 2015 / Re: NANY 2015 Alpha Release: MarkdownBuddy

« Last post by dr_andus on December 14, 2014, 03:57 PM »

UPDATE: Added HTML Export.  Need feedback on whether its confusing- instead of putting some dropdown or something, I just used the expedient of the selected file filter, i.e. if you choose PDF in the save dialog, it will export in PDF- otherwise it's HTML.

-wraith808 (December 07, 2014, 11:07 PM)

It's not confusing, but it didn't work on my system. Even when PDF is selected (which is the default option), it still saves it as HTML (and so does the HTML option). Personally I don't need the PDF option. Normally I print to PDF, and looks like CTRL+P does trigger the printer, so that's sufficient.

Clicking on the Information icon crashes the app on my system (Win 7, 64-bit).

Also, I had some encoding issues, with dashes, apostrophes, quotation marks and French accented characters being replaced by a dark square with a question mark.

I wasn't sure what the button before the close button is for. It didn't seem to do anything.

Otherwise it works fine, renders Markdown correctly. Aesthetically speaking, I'd prefer if it didn't justify paragraphs or at least the headings (i.e. align text left instead), as it makes the text look messy, by stretching it out (actually the paragraphs look fine, it's the longer headings really that are a problem).

But it's coming together nicely, so keep up the good work! Thanks!

400

General Software Discussion / Re: Extremely simple and minimal sticky notes for windows

« Last post by dr_andus on December 08, 2014, 07:55 AM »

GumNotes.com is fairly minimal.