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3826

General Software Discussion / Re: Are you testing XP SP3 RC ??

« Last post by Darwin on November 30, 2007, 11:19 AM »

...Since upgrading to SP3, explorer hasn't crashed once (strange...very strange ). I'll give it a couple days and see what happens...

-Nighted (November 29, 2007, 09:09 AM)

I'm comforted by this statement - for some reason explorer.exe crashes every other day on my system (XP Pro Sp-2) and often sits at 70-90MB of RAM usage (~50MB VM). The other bizarre thing is that often I have two instances running. Can't recall ever seeing this before. Anyway, the upshot of this is that I *hope* that from what Nighted is reporting I can infer that this has been dealt with in Sp-3 (please, pretty please with sugar on top).

blarson and Nighted, you brave souls, please keep the updates on your experiences coming 

3827

General Software Discussion / Re: Acronis release new version of TrueImage Workstation

« Last post by Darwin on November 30, 2007, 08:09 AM »

  I didn't know you could already explore images without mounting them... mea culpa

3828

General Software Discussion / Re: Acronis release new version of TrueImage Workstation

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 08:38 PM »

Point taken, Ralf. Like you, the only feature that "sparks my interest" is the ability to browse an image without mounting (why do I always feel so dirty when I talk like this?) and I did the same mental gymnastics that that you did and they led me to the same conclusion: sounds cool, but so what? I'm actually better off mounting the image anyway, so what's the point?

They need to stop tweaking True Image before they wreck something important, like... I don't know, its ability to reliably make backups and restore them.

Too late. Check out the support forums. Every single version is bug ridden on initial release. This is one of those apps that probably qualifies for "Perfect Software" status (see, I'm already quoting you back to yourself) but bloat creep to justify ongoing revenue is killing them (without fail they release a new version - paid upgrade - every 12 months). If they really want to make money at this, they should go slow and easy on development and simply force users to pay $10 a year to use it, after the initial purchase price of course. I know, I know, nobody likes this kind of licensing model, but if they keep the yearly subscription fee reasonable and deliver a ROCK SOLID product I, for one, would not complain.

EDIT: OK, I'd still complain. A leopard can't change its spots!

3829

Living Room / Re: Seriously, wtf is going on with Apple's Mac vs. Pc ads?

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 07:44 PM »

As did this:

For Leopard, the sad bundled app-as-feature is Time Machine. To hear Mac moonies tell it, this is the best thing to happen to backup since the letter b. In reality, however, it sucketh and it sucketh huge.

Okay, the screen looks like Star Wars. That's cool in an I-want-to-stay-a-virgin kind of way. But "easy to use"? Which groupie said that? Try putting a new Apple user in front of this app and see what happens. For one, you can't set up Time Machine from within Time Machine. How is that easy? You'll find some of the settings buried in System Settings and others in Time Machine. And if you want to kick off a manual backup, you've got to know to right-click on the Time Machine icon in the dock. Is Britney Spears moonlighting as Apple's UI designer?

Note: careful observers will have now clued in to the fact that I am just now actually reading the article 

3830

Living Room / Re: Seriously, wtf is going on with Apple's Mac vs. Pc ads?

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 07:32 PM »

PS This line had me laughing out loud (yes, I'm juvenile):

But Apple marketing has the swinging pair of crabapples to actually print "Leopard Just Works" on its Web site.

3831

Living Room / Re: Seriously, wtf is going on with Apple's Mac vs. Pc ads?

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 07:26 PM »

Here's an interesting piece on Leopard from a columnist at PCMag, who warns:

Before Apple makes any more smug OS-related attacks on Microsoft, it ought to take a good look in the mirror.

Leopard is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off

3832

General Software Discussion / Re: Acronis release new version of TrueImage Workstation

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 07:20 PM »

I dunno... it's actually a bit confusing as TrueImage Workstation 9.1 has disappeared from their website AFAICT. The blurb about Echo indicates that it can both backup and restore a network AND backup and restore an individual workstation. I've requested keys for it and the new version of Universal Restore but haven't downloaded/installed it yet...

3833

Living Room / Re: Top 10 Signs You May Have Overclocked Your PC Too Much

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 03:40 PM »

Pas devant les enfants

-cranioscopical (November 29, 2007, 01:56 PM)

3834

General Software Discussion / Re: Another Directory Opus issue... Care to try reproducing this one too?

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 10:50 AM »

I'll do this this afternoon, Scott - I have to run out to sub a first year class in criminology. I know next to nothing about criminology other than that staying on the right side of the law is good and straying from that position is bad... Gulp!

3835

Living Room / Re: Top 10 Signs You May Have Overclocked Your PC Too Much

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 08:56 AM »

Well... with a tin jaw you must be used to that sort of reaction, no?

3836

Living Room / Re: Pop Quiz

« Last post by Darwin on November 29, 2007, 08:54 AM »

Heh, heh, I would have asked an ethicist (assuming that that is even a job title  )!

I probably would have broken down in laugther, remembering the joke from about grade 5 (10 or 11 years old):

Little Johnny Rotten: Mum! I hate Fred's guts!
Mum: Shut up and eat your dinner.

3837

General Software Discussion / Re: Could a Directory Opus 9.0 user PLEASE try this for me?

« Last post by Darwin on November 28, 2007, 08:29 PM »

Me too - running XP Pro, followed your directions and Dopus crashed the second I right clicked on the folder I had just extracted from your attachment above!

3838

Living Room / Re: Pop Quiz

« Last post by Darwin on November 28, 2007, 07:31 PM »

Brilliant! Thanks for the link, Chris. I've just ordered the book! Should prove invaluable with my five year old and my three year old 

3839

General Software Discussion / Re: AutoPatcher's Back!

« Last post by Darwin on November 28, 2007, 04:42 PM »

That's old news Maximus!

-PhilB66 (November 28, 2007, 08:04 AM)

Not to me! Thanks Ralf 

3840

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use Desktop Widgets?

« Last post by Darwin on November 28, 2007, 04:41 PM »

Widgets got old for me about a year ago. Now I just don't think they provide enough usefulness for the resource usage.

-dlagesse1992 (November 28, 2007, 04:12 PM)

Well said, sir! EXACTLY my experience 

3841

Living Room / Re: Top 10 Signs You May Have Overclocked Your PC Too Much

« Last post by Darwin on November 28, 2007, 11:40 AM »

Great idea, mouser! How about an inaugural "Top 10 reasons we should include Ralf's top 10 lists in every newsletter" OR "Top 10 reasons you should donate to Donationcoder during Decembers funding drive"?

3842

Living Room / Re: Seriously, wtf is going on with Apple's Mac vs. Pc ads?

« Last post by Darwin on November 28, 2007, 08:48 AM »

I just wanted a faster computer that was more reliable. Instead I was handed the utter mess that is Vista Explorer, and my brand new expensive, superfast computer ran slower with Vista than my 5-year old machine ran XP! And for that fact alone, I call bullshit on Microsoft.

Thank you Zaine! I had the same experience and have posted about it a number of times here. I've been secretly wondering if I was being histrionic, so it's nice to read that someone else had the same dramatic result. BTW, I'd add to the following to your list of Vista blunders:

• I can buy Tiger in Canada for ~ $99. This is one version to rule them all - virgin install, upgrades, Home, business, Pro, etc. Compare this to Vista's pricing and you start reeling and vomiting in the street
• Vista breaks many applications - either they don't run at all under it or that run with broken functionality. Many 3rd party suppliers are releasing new versions to run on Vista but guess what, they're CHARGING for them, in some cases BIG money. This isn't in and of itself a terrible thing, and it happened at the 95 and NT/2k/XP transitions, but it is a coinsideration because it greatly increases the cost of upgrading - either via OS install or through a new computer purchase

Crazy. I'm telling you, if Steven Jobs got his head out of his own rearend and released Tiger into the wild to run on non-Apple machines, Apple would exponentially increase its market share in weeks. I'd buy it just to try it out - for the price, why wouldn't I? My hope if this happened would be that Microsoft would get their collective act together and respond with something amazing. Actually, I think XP is great - a service pack that added some of the features of Vista, like its searching capabilities, would be great. Heck, they could even charge $99 for it...

3843

General Software Discussion / Re: Are you testing XP SP3 RC ??

« Last post by Darwin on November 28, 2007, 08:32 AM »

f0dder, I agree with you. I just want to make sure that I've got the RC archived so that if in future it IS verified that it significantly improves performance, that it is not in any other way deleterious to a machine, and that that performance boost disappears in the final release (my suspicion is that it will) that I have around to install! Yeah, twisted logic, but it's my logic!

3844

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by Darwin on November 27, 2007, 07:10 PM »

You're just a black sheep, Tom?

3845

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by Darwin on November 27, 2007, 06:53 PM »

But what if there's a chance it could be proven right? Hypothetically, if Christians are right about their beliefs, eventually Christ will return and everyone would know there is a God, He created the world/universe (disproving the Big Bang theory), He created mankind (disproving the theory of Evolution), etc. I'm not trying to get into a religious debate. I'm honestly just curious about this from a scientific standpoint.

It's an odd situation because it can't ever be disproved, but it could potentially be proved.

-Deozaan (November 27, 2007, 06:04 PM)

Absolutely, but it still doesn't qualify as a scientifically explorable proposition (did that sound good? I just made it up  Aw, c'mon...) because the key criterion is that the explanation must be falsifiable, not proveable. This doesn't invalidate your point of view or make you "wrong" it simply means that at a practical level Christian beliefs cannot be investigated scientifically. Why? Because we have no way of either proving or disproving the existence of something that is absent (ie that is not directly observable). Which is a hamfisted way of saying that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

3846

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by Darwin on November 27, 2007, 05:27 PM »

Just found this quote about theories from Stephen Hawking courtesy of wikipedia:

a theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model which contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations". He goes on to state, "any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation which disagrees with the predictions of the theory.

3847

General Software Discussion / Re: Are you testing XP SP3 RC ??

« Last post by Darwin on November 27, 2007, 05:24 PM »

BTW, to anyone else tempted to download the torrent and archive it - it's a fast download - took about 50 minutes on my end

blarson - please do post back later in the week with your impressionS of/experiences with Sp-3.

3848

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by Darwin on November 27, 2007, 05:14 PM »

Deozaan - I don't have a problem with you rejecting Darwinism and/or evolution but puh-lease don't dismiss it as just a theory! When you do so, what you are really implying is that it is just an educated guess, and an untested one at that. In reality, what you should be saying is that is an hypothesis (although as we'll see even an hypothesis is much more than "merely" an educated guess). A very simplistic definition of an hypothesis is that it is an educated guess. What we mean by an educated guess is that when we seek to explain some phenomenon or phenomena that we observe around us we draw upon existing knowledge to explain it - ie  we generally base hypotheses on previous observations or on extensions of scientific theories. Key to being able to describe an educated guess as being a hypothesis rather than, well, a random guess, is that a hypothesis must be both falsifiable and repeatable. So, anyone reading the hypothesis should be able to test it themselves and it must be possible to negate the hypothesis - ie provie it wrong. This does not mean that all hypotheses must be wrong, what it means is that it must be possible to come up with If...then statements to test it with. That is, if my hypothesis is true, then x,y, and z must also be true (or be wrong). So, if an hypothesis is tested against one of these (or many of these) if...then statements and the statement holds true, the hypothesis has passed that test. Two points here, even though the hypothesis passes a particular test it may fail another one today, tomorrow or a thousand years from now. Thus, no hypothesis is ever proven to be 100% true. Rather, hypothese can only ever be proven wrong. Now, a theory is a hypothesis, or group of hypotheses, that have been tested many, many times and that have thus far passed every test. A theory, then is a very rigorously tested scientific explanation for something. Finally, a law is a theory that has been tested so many times that no one expects it to fail and eveyone accepts as being as close to "true" as we can hope to get. Note though that if a law were to fail a verified scientific experiment and if the results are replicable the law would have to be rejected.

Wow. While I typed this the thread has moved on! As nontroppo correctly notes, individuals come up with hypotheses while theories are the result of many individuals working independently on the same problem. Deozaan - you are right: if a statement or series of statements cannot be falsified (ie there is no conceivable event/observation/outcome that would lead to it being rejected) then it is not a theory.

3849

General Software Discussion / Re: Are you testing XP SP3 RC ??

« Last post by Darwin on November 27, 2007, 03:51 PM »

Thanks for the torrent link, nighted! I'm downloading it now. At least this way I'll have it archived and can make an informed decision about it in the future 

3850

Living Room / Re: Interesting article on homeopathy - from a medical perspective

« Last post by Darwin on November 27, 2007, 03:27 PM »

Lashiec - don't even get me started on the scientific method. One of the great trials of daily life is dealing with people who absolutely refuse to accept the differences between an hypothesis, a theory, and a law. How many times have you heard something dismissed as being "just" a theory?

Hey, Darwin, more reading for you

-Lashiec (November 27, 2007, 09:18 AM)