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4976

Official Announcements / Re: ZillaRank: An improved search for smf forum

« Last post by Darwin on August 23, 2007, 12:07 AM »

It's like someone opened the blinds and threw the window open! Fresh air and sunshine where before there was only stale air and gloom... Thank you Wordzilla, thank you!

After usig the new forum search feature for a week or so all I can say is "Wow!" What a difference.

4977

Living Room / Re: Life without XP SP2 - is it possible?

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 11:58 PM »

OK, this begs a further question: do you have a wireless network of your own, or that someone in your residence maintains?

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Living Room / Re: How do you organise your 'My Documents' folder

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 11:57 PM »

Interesting comments, momonan. I couldn't agree more, particularly with your point about the visual aspect of effective file/folder management. This is precisely why I prefer to use both an organizational system AND an indexer. I simply meant to point out that anyone who simply dumps everything into My Documents is far less likely to be "lost" than I was 20 years ago when I started out using computers! Back then, and for years afterward, my sanity depended on my being able to locate files by dint of having them organized...

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Living Room / Re: Life without XP SP2 - is it possible?

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 06:44 PM »

The reboots to get to wireless would worry me (are you using D-Link's wireless app or the built in XP one to connect to your wireless network and configure everything? I had trouble with Cirond Winc and finally uninstalled it and just used the XP component. No problems whatsoever in three years! Just a thought, anyway. Can't comment on the general lack of responsiveness - I didn't experience it when I made the transition.

WRT the RAM... If you can get the RAM cheaply, go for it anyway. I don't *think* you'll see a massive improvement but who knows? Multi-tasking will be improved, that's for sure... They do say that a gig of RAM is the sweet spot for XP so if you're content with your hardware and XP for the foreseeable future you certainly won't be losing anything by upgrading. If nothing else it might help with the unresponsiveness?

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Living Room / Re: How do you organise your 'My Documents' folder

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 06:16 PM »

With desktop search technology what it is today, My Documents organization is probably not really such a big issue. Still, being old school, I am anal about my file structure... Anyway, I doubt that those of you, like nite_monkey, who don't organize at all suffer very much as a result!

4981

General Software Discussion / Re: What do you think of PCTools' Spyware Doctor?

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 06:13 PM »

Hmm... interesting. Thanks Lashiec. I just uninstalled Spybot 1.4 from an old Win2k notebook and installed Spyware Terminator (too early to say how I feel about it - I love the real-time protection but find the popups annoying...). I'll have to revisit Spybot when 1.5 is released.

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Living Room / Re: Life without XP SP2 - is it possible?

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 06:11 PM »

I didn't notice much  in the way of a difference between Sp-1 and Sp-2 - are you sure that Sp-2 makes a profound difference?

Note: when I did the Sp-1 - Sp-2 upgrade I was running 512MB RAM but have since upgraded to 1024MB... Wish I could tell you that the difference when I did this was dramatic, but it wasn't...

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General Software Discussion / Re: What do you think of PCTools' Spyware Doctor?

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 05:01 PM »

Just an update - I got a no-hassle refund on the upgrade to Ad-Aware 2007 so no harm, no foul from Lavasoft (though people do seem to be complaining elsewhere about their support/inattentiveness to refund requests, but no complaints from me!). 

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Living Room / Re: Outpost - why do I bother ... or am I just paranoid!

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 02:56 PM »

None here. Odd, too, as my computer usually attracts any and all software problems... I'll look at MSCONFIG and the resident scanner issue next time I reboot.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Why don't all software files go into a single directory?

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 01:11 PM »

Amen, brother! I hear and share your pain. I still wistfully remember Win 3.11 and being able to move software between computers by copying the program's folder... Ah, there it is... I suspect that there is probably an element of early, and now holdover, "DRM" at work here.

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Living Room / Re: Outpost - why do I bother ... or am I just paranoid!

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 01:05 PM »

You know... to a degree I think we're suffering from the cure being worse than (or at least as bad as) the disease. With all of our paranoia surrounding online security, we're driven to install heavy, complex apps to shield us from the threats that await us online. All of these "solutions" seem to create problems these days as the vendors find themselves competing with more and more offerings and rush to give their apps that "gee whiz, neato" factor (doesn't help that as consumers we fuel this by being distracted by bells and whistles AND by seeking all-in-one solutions to our problems).

Knock on wood (Darwin gives his head a good thumping), my system running behind a hardware firewall and running SpySweeper with A/V seems to be the sweet spot (though I must confess that this setup consumes more resources than did AVG Pro and SpySweeper w/o A/V). Pretty content, overall.

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General Software Discussion / Re: WinSplit Revolution

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 12:59 PM »

Hmm... interesting. From the subject, I *thought* this was going to be a painful take on Dance, Dance Revolution. Pretty glad to be proven wrong...

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Living Room / Re: download all updates for XP in one go?

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 08:34 AM »

Tom - all you need is Sp-2 (it supersedes Sp-1) but that only helps if you can find the disc you burned it to!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Avoid: Jriver Media Center, if you believe in your right of free speech

« Last post by Darwin on August 22, 2007, 07:59 AM »

Grorgy - good points. However, in this case there is a wealth of choice in both FOSS and shareware.

Good points as well, app, and I did wonder about those issues too. However, a thought has occurred to me - is the forum policed by the developers or by users? If it's users, this is unfortunate but not the fault of the development team. What happens if you e-mail support with bug reports, feature requests, etc.? Just curious.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Avoid: Jriver Media Center, if you believe in your right of free speech

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 11:32 PM »

from a DC perspective, i wonder how many times mouser had to listen to comparisons to other launchers, screenshot programs and etc.. in fact, i've made several references myself..

-lanux128 (August 21, 2007, 10:05 PM)

True, as have I. However, mouser actually encourages people to post about alternatives to his products as he likes to see how other developers resolve the problems that he is attempting to solve. He also encourages people to post about their reactions to other apps, and what they prefer about other apps so that he can get a better sense of what people are looking for, respond to, etc. It's his attitude and approach that has brought knocking on 84,000 people (and growing daily) to this site. 

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General Software Discussion / Re: The software awards scam

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 07:23 PM »

Interesting story, Mark0 - thanks for highlighting it. I sort of feel for the guy - people were ripping him off and I guess he felt that if he couldn't beat them, he could join them. I'm a bit unclear as to whether he set up a site to do exactly what was done to him or if he set it up so that both he and the software developers were able to get a piece of the pie (I *hope*, without much conviction, that this is what was done), so don't know if he is Prince John or Robin Hood here. Oh well, either way, interesting.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Avoid: Jriver Media Center, if you believe in your right of free speech

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 06:19 PM »

 

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General Software Discussion / Re: Avoid: Jriver Media Center, if you believe in your right of free speech

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 05:45 PM »

My point is that it's somewhat spacious for someone to go to anothers paid

spacious, specious - who's really paying attention... Certainly not me. I'd be the last person to start arguing semantics here!

Sorry, couldn't resist!

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Living Room / Re: 2007 Worst dialog nominee, spelling category

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 03:28 PM »

to be frank, i actually had attempted to learn Brazilian Portugese a few months ago

Don't be Frank: I've been shouting at him for ages, he must be deaf!

-cranioscopical (August 21, 2007, 02:16 PM)

Surely you're mistaken?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Avoid: Jriver Media Center, if you believe in your right of free speech

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 02:02 PM »

OK. I'm glad we've gotten the definition of "free speech" and "human rights" out of our systems, out into the open, and hope that we can move on... Semantics aside, Urwolf, though regrettably invoking a term or two that are not perhaps applicable here, has posted about an issue that is pertinent and important and should be discussed:

Hostility and intolerance toward the mere mention of a competitor's product or toward a whiff of criticism toward the product being discussed, while well within the rights of the person/people/organisation paying for the forum, are hardly tactics that invite open discussion and a warm cuddly feeling of loyalty toward the product. Further (and more importantly), it sets up an environment in which bugs go unreported, novel feature suggestions go un-suggested and no one dares mention that the latest version of a competitor's product just introduced a killer new feature and wouldn't it be great if it could be included in JRiver, etc.

Well, really! WTF is the point of a users' forum if not to raise these kinds of issues? Sounds like the developers have just created a "love-in" for their product and are not interested in improving it or, for that matter, developing it. Yawn.

I, in turn, am not interested in using applications for which my participation in the development process is actually discouraged.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, urlwolf!

4996

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 09:34 AM »

Doh! I'm getting really perturbed (ie pissed off) about Clipmate's habit of dropping copy actions. As I "run" without the sound notifications enabled (find them annoying) I am not aware sometimes of this occurring...

 

EDIT: PS thanks for pointing this out to me - I've corrected the URL 

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General Software Discussion / Re: really good spell check tool wanted

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 09:27 AM »

Thanks for pointing me toward Spell Catcher Plus, sgtret. I'm trying it out now and it's great!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 09:02 AM »

PS Andrea - I'm going to try out the AHK script that Zaine linked to earlier in the thread.

4999

General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on August 21, 2007, 08:57 AM »

Thanks for the reply Andrea - no I've never used AHK before, so don't have any autocorrections set up for it.

I'm trying out Spell Catcher Plus at the moment -very impressive (and plays well with DA). I spent yesterday afternoon and evening trying out: As-U-Type, Tiny Spell, QuickSpell, and Spell Catcher. Spell Catcher is the best of the bunch by a long shot. I found this review of it this morning - I'm in good company! Thanks to sgtret for pointing me in its direction in this thread.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Organizing Reviews

« Last post by Darwin on August 20, 2007, 07:45 PM »

I'm a bit naive about the financial side of the internet... WRT wikis, is the expense due to bandwidth, hardware, software, or personnel requirements? Or a combination of all of the above? If it's personel, could the cost be defrayed by using and abusing the good members of this community in a volunteer capacity?

Just curious because I like the idea (of the wiki - the use and abuse of dc's membership is just a possible peripheral benefit!).