Recent Posts

5376

Site/Forum Features / Re: Suggestion for Modify of your last post

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 28, 2011, 07:34 PM »

Crap, I just noticed you could change the subject

I thought you could only do that if you're the thread starter?

5377

Site/Forum Features / Re: Suggestion for Modify of your last post

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 28, 2011, 07:31 PM »

Does seem like there should be some way of signifying a post has been edited with new information though.  In the general case if you cannot add another reply(say you already have your software listed in a thread about programs that will run on a particular OS.)   If you edit with new info like a version update, nobody knows. It keeps its position in the thread.  Everyone only looks at the tail end.

Seems like there should be some kind of button to take you to the last edited post or something. Don't know if the logistics support it though.

5378

General Software Discussion / Re: I have to admit defeat ... I cannot format a hard drive ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 28, 2011, 07:27 PM »

They used to say "you can't hurt hardware with software." 

-MilesAhead (February 28, 2011, 07:18 PM)

I have managed that, actually  I found a 'poke' that activated a relay in my old BBC micro. Coupled with a timer, it made a faintly musical whizzing noise. Then it went bang... 

-timns (February 28, 2011, 07:24 PM)

I think it was more or less to keep us assembly language guys from getting paranoid after locking up the machine again.   I was too poor to get a break-out switch. Had to cycle the power every time.

5379

General Software Discussion / Re: I have to admit defeat ... I cannot format a hard drive ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 28, 2011, 07:18 PM »

BTW,

Thanks everyone for responding  .  Seems some things just can't be fixed .

-barney (February 28, 2011, 06:48 PM)

They used to say "you can't hurt hardware with software."  Apparently it works both ways. You can't fix it either.

5380

General Software Discussion / Re: I have to admit defeat ... I cannot format a hard drive ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 28, 2011, 06:16 PM »

He mentions not being able to get rid of Windows directories.  Sounds like he tried to delete stuff rather than just cleaning the drive off with the appropriate command.  I would think diskpart would be in the repair utilities but you never know.  There must be a rescue CD out there somewhere with it on.

edit: according to this article it's on the install DVD for W7. Follow the step by step how to access command prompt.  From there you should be able to run diskpart.

http://itexpertvoice...ive-minutes-or-less/

(skip over the stuff about automatic repair and just scroll down to the section about command prompt)

5381

General Software Discussion / Re: I have to admit defeat ... I cannot format a hard drive ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 27, 2011, 11:54 PM »

It sounds like it was the system drive with multiple OS on it and now he's trying to boot a CD and work it while it's in the machine. More details would be helpful.

5382

General Software Discussion / Re: I have to admit defeat ... I cannot format a hard drive ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 27, 2011, 09:43 PM »

This is one of those tasks made a lot easier if you have a docking station. Once you clean, create a partition and format, just pull the drive and it's all ready to use in any machine or in a dock.  Plus it makes it obvious which drive you are cleaning since it will usually refer to USB something or other when the do List Disk command.

5383

General Software Discussion / Re: I have to admit defeat ... I cannot format a hard drive ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 27, 2011, 08:54 PM »

Did you try diskpart on cmd line?

Commands should run something like this in an admin prompt:

diskpart

list disk

{ make sure you correctly select the disk you're going to erase }

select disk n    (where n is the number shown by list disk to be the erasure candidate)

clean  (this cleans everything off so get the right disk)

create partition primary


Now you should be able to format NTFS or whatever.  Here's the ref page:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415



edit: should be "select disk n" not "select n" but in any case, follow the MS docs. But I've used this sequence to format new disks I've purchased and also to erase format and create bootable USB keys.

edit2: many of the online tips regarding diskpart leave out the clean step. So you mess around and no matter what you do you can't format or create partitions because the disk was never blanked.

5384

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred font?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 27, 2011, 08:44 PM »

That IS cool.  I like that.  Gives it almost a comic book feel to it.

-superboyac (February 27, 2011, 08:26 PM)

I'm glad I got the borders to show black because I kept moving my head when the subs were over a white background, as if that would help me read them.  Drove me nuts.

This WD box ain't so bad.  Main thing is 1st gen doesn't automatically down sample DTS. I have to convert the audio track to AC3.  Still, it handles just about any format. .mp4 .mkv .m2ts and HD .avi all look great.

The other downside, if you have a DVD image or VIDEO_TS folder with a main movie it's ok.  But if it's an episodic DVD like from a TV show you can't get by the first title set. No menu support. For $100 it ain't bad though.

5385

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred font?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 27, 2011, 07:54 PM »

Here's how it looks in the preview, but on the WD player it looks a bit different. I little more angular probably because the anti-alias isn't as good as on the PC.




edit: I also just ran across a mono-spaced font, Crystal, that may be better for subs. I'll have to experiment with it for a bit.

You can get Crystal free here:

http://www.urbanfont...om/fonts/Crystal.htm

edit2: RayGun is available at urban fonts and Softpedia. I ran md5 and RayGun downloads from both locations are exactly the same files.

edit3: here's a preview with the Crystal mono font:

5386

General Software Discussion / Re: What is your preferred font?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 27, 2011, 06:03 PM »

I finally found a good use for the RayGun font. It looks good as idx/sub subtitles made by AviAddXSubs.  After experimentation I found out that my WD HD TV for USB set top box will show the subtitle border if YUV option is checked on Configuration 2 page.

Unfortunately I have 1st gen WD player and it does not display colors for external idx/sub subtitles.  But at least this scheme stands out even over a white background. With YUV option checked it shows a funky color on the PC which deterred me from trying the setting earlier.  But on the WD box it looks like the standard white characters with black border.

I think the RayGun font looks much better than Tahoma or Ariel for subs. It doesn't have the puffy periphery I dislike.

5387

Living Room / Re: We are doomed: IBM's Watson debuts on Jeopardy today (14 Feb 2011)

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 26, 2011, 08:20 PM »

I liked Eccleston when they restarted Who.  The guy after kept pissing me off by not dying.  The regeneration tease(tm) was really annoying.

Trouble with Who is they appeal to the soap opera watching female demographic by using homely companions.  It would be better with a bit of eye candy.

That's one reason I like Asian TV shows.  They may be formulaic but there's usually several hot babes in the regular cast. If the female lead isn't beautiful, only cute, then the evil chick ruining her life is.

5388

Living Room / Re: We are doomed: IBM's Watson debuts on Jeopardy today (14 Feb 2011)

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 26, 2011, 04:03 PM »

I just saw that in an episode of Doctor Who.

Hmm, I got the "meat bags" from the movie Surrogates.  Haven't watched Dr. Who in awhile.

5389

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 25, 2011, 08:43 PM »

To me all the political parties are the same.

-MilesAhead (February 25, 2011, 04:12 PM)

+1 

From Ambrose Bierce's famous The Devil's Dictionary:

POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When we wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

-40hz (February 25, 2011, 05:38 PM)

5390

Living Room / Re: We are doomed: IBM's Watson debuts on Jeopardy today (14 Feb 2011)

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 25, 2011, 04:58 PM »

I wonder if Alex Trebek knows he's training his own replacement?

With Watson the answer board could be integrated into the Watson OSD.
He could be the answer board and the master of ceremonies.

Then to make it even more fun, the 2 contestants who do not come up with the correct question get tazed while Watson says "take that meat bags!" or something equally silly.

5391

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 25, 2011, 04:12 PM »

OK everybody? He never said that!

Guess that's the mechanism. Just repeat the lie often enough and it sticks out there in the ether someplace.

To me all the political parties are the same.  They just come up with different excuses to raid the treasury.  They are all the "Pillage Party" as far as I can see.  They should put all the anarchists on the moon and see if it works.

edit: I am talking about how it is in USA where the 2 parties have the game all locked up. I've never lived under a parliamentary system, benign dictatorship(in the oxymoron list I'm sure) or tribal system.  Maybe they are more tolerant of individuals getting over. I dunno'.

5392

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Internet Explorer Address Bar Search Utility

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 24, 2011, 03:35 PM »

(I could be wrong, but...) You really don't need a tool, unless you're going to be doing a large number of them at once. It's really just a matter of doing a search on the given target site to see how they pass in the search string to what. Then set the @ value to that string, give it a new alias, and reapply the new .reg patch file.

-Stoic Joker (February 23, 2011, 11:37 AM)

I never tried the .reg approach for this purpose with other browsers. Kind of interesting.

With Chromium It took me a bit to grasp that it's transparent.  I used to go to the search site, do a search so I had keywords to find to substitute "%s" for, then manually enter the stuff.  Then I realized if I did a search at an engine site, Chromium added it to the list.  All I had to do was change the alias to what I wanted, say 'y' instead of "yahoo" or whatever, substitute "%s" for the keywords and it was done.

5393

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: WinX DVD Author, Free & Clean

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 24, 2011, 03:30 PM »

@MilesAhead: thanks for the feedback. it seems that the WinX series doesn't really add much to the already crowded field of video converter suites.

-lanux128 (February 24, 2011, 07:03 AM)

Sure. I hate to bash something that's out there for free.  But if something looks like a cul de sac I'll mention it.

5394

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 24, 2011, 03:20 PM »

She prefers Gnome to KDE

Mandrake 9.1 made it a one click to choose either. I remember using both and it was no big deal to switch around. I think I eventually settled on Gnome just because much of the software I downloaded seemed to be tuned for it. But it's been a long time.  Many of the sites I used to visit to check out the latest developments don't even exist anymore.

5395

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 24, 2011, 02:51 PM »

@40hz

I think the argument got confused between those saying "Ubuntu is way easier than Slackware" or other nuts and bolts distros where you had to dig into scripts(which is certainly true) and my point, which is Ubuntu didn't spring out with a new system that's easier. In fact just refreshing my memory by checking the Wikis it seems it's initial release was 4.10 since it was a Debian offshoot so to speak and is dated 2004.  The Mandrake 9.1 I used was released in 2003.  So my only point is that Mandrake did it earlier and implemented it better in my opinion.  Mandrake too used the APT packaging system but it didn't go around shouting like it invented it. It just made a distro easy to use that still catered to developers. It made it very easy to install software development tools as well as user apps.

I guess it's kind of like Al Gore "inventing" the internet. If you are a Democrat ward boss then I'm sure for you he did.  Other people think internet developed for quite awhile and zoomed to popularity in the early 90s.

Perhaps because Ubuntu is a Debian offshoot then the dude felt justified with the hoopla.  But I would recommend before anyone with broadband  makes up their mind, try the Mandriva one CD install, then try Ubuntu equivalent.

As much as some of the Linux programming was fun and I could obtain incredible database software, even Corba development systems for the download, I started in Dos so I guess I have a masochistic streak.  Linux is too easy to maintain now. If you have a UPS and a journaling file system the damn thing never breaks!! Windows otoh requires constant tweaking for those of us who feel we have to "improve" something every day.

5396

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 23, 2011, 03:55 PM »

It's all a matter of where you look and how you see it.

I don't see innovation as taking credit for other people's work.
I started with Slackware having to edit the scripts under /etc to
get the system to boot with the options desired and recompiling
kernels to get driver support. To me the first innovation was modules support.

People will go by their own experience. If you tell them Lexus invented the automobile and it's the only car they've ever driven, then that's the fact until they learn better.

In any case, Linux to me is "been there done that."  The guys who really wanted to make a living at it didn't have multi-boot with Windows there as a crutch like I did.  They just did Linux. Maybe they came from a unix environment and saw a free PC equivalent.  In any event when I first started some of the stuff you'd never figure out on your own. You had to get a book on configuring Linux, then go on usenet and carry water for a guru until he gave you a hint where to look.  Some script under /etc that calls another script that calls another script that sets an environment variable.

If there's any props to easy Linux it's probably deserved by Debian.

5397

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 23, 2011, 03:47 PM »

I did.

I handed a copy of a Ubuntu 6.06 live CD to my GF Alexis who, though very bright (and not afraid of technology), is definitely not a "computer person" like most of us here are.

She got it installed with no help from me. And she used it regularly, with very little hand holding afterwards. And that included installing/upgrading software and sorting out the occasional "missing dependency" problem when not installing from a repository.

But did you hand her a copy of Debian or Mandrake?  I think what happened is Ubuntu basically took credit for the Debian Advanced Package Tool.  As I noted, the easy install up to an X window manager with all your programs condfigured, including C/C++ compilers, interpreters like Perl and Python, was there with Mandrake, which used APT. It wasn't an innovation of Ubuntu.  They just started shouting as if they thought of it. So I guess the "innovation" was to shout loud enough that people who might not try Linux would try it and think what they saw was "new."

Also a lot of the ease of installing and configuring Linux programs came after 2 things.  PCI winning the bus wars, and developers standardizing on APT using standard directories to put things. Instead of fiddling with a tarball for 3 days I ran the installer for the APT package. Most of the time the app worked with maybe a tweak or two.

None of this stuff is a Ubuntu invention.

5398

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 23, 2011, 02:18 AM »

Seemed to me like the buzz was manufactured before anyone even tried it.

-MilesAhead (February 22, 2011, 06:16 PM)

Be interested in hearing you expand a bit on why you feel that way.

Because I can't think of anything that occurred that would give me any reason to think that. And I go back a long way with Linux. The first distro I ever successfully loaded was Softlanding's SLS back somewhere around 1994. We were trying (unsuccessfully ) to get a version of the Fido BBS to run on it.

-40hz (February 22, 2011, 06:49 PM)

I can remember loading up Slackware 3.0 and being amazed how solid the 2.0 kernel was.  First kernel I used seriously was 1.39 I think.  The reason I felt that way was because there's all this talk Ubuntu Ubuntu this revolutionary stuff. I load it up and nothing special at all. How else should I feel?  All air and no balloon.

I'm no guru but when I started with Linux if you wanted a window manager you had to either copy X-Files(pun intended) off the CD if it came with them, or download off the net, set it all up and tinker with the configuration file until you got it to come up without crashing or hanging.

It was common to boot into console mode, then run X to start X and load a window manager. I think Red Hat 6.0 was the first one I tried that did it all for you.

I haven't tried Ubuntu after the first couple of releases since I saw no reason to.  Other distros such as the Mandrake I mentioned not only set you up and booted right into a Window manager, but downloaded the packages you wanted so the first time you came up into your account everything was set up.  I think apt-get was more responsible than anything for making Linux easy to mess with. I can remember downloading tar balls and spending several days to get something to install and load correctly.  After apt-get it was mostly push button.  Nothing to it.

I didn't see the innovation. All I saw was hype.

5399

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 22, 2011, 06:16 PM »

I never really understood the buzz about Ubuntu in the first place. To me, Mandrake, now Mandriva, has a much better one CD install if you have broadband.

Seemed to me like the buzz was manufactured before anyone even tried it. A big nothing as far as I'm concerned.

5400

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Internet Explorer Address Bar Search Utility

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 22, 2011, 05:22 PM »

The way they do it in Chrome/Chromium is preferred. Unless you have an absolute need for some IEism I'd say just use Chromium.  Even the nightly build zips are pretty stable.  You can look in the xml file to see if there's a bunch of issues or tests with that build. Or just wait until one is noted on Softpedia.  Those tend to be very stable.

Also the main bug I've noticed in Chromium that pops up now and then is losing the favicons.  That's pretty minor.  To me the Chromium nightlies for Windows are more stable than most beta releases I've tried with other browsers.

It helps if you have some memory/horsepower since coming up to a blank page is uses like 8 processes.  But it snaps open, unlike FF.

I can't see going back.
For privacy concerns if you uncheck all the options under the Privacy setting then at least in Chromium it shouldn't track you.

I wrote a little script just to visit all the pages in my bookmarks file to restore favicons as that seems to be the most popular bug if you get a bug.

Oh, almost forgot the main point.  With Chrome/Chromium you can set up aliases for search engines.  Say google is your default, just typing keywords in the address bar searches google.  But if I want to search d-addicts for the titles of Asian TV Dramas, I just prefix the search with alias "da" in the address bar.  I have "av" to use AltaVista and so on. Very flexible.