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Recent Posts

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551
Screenshot Captor / Re: Grab Active Window - Grabs current screen instead
« Last post by Lashiec on September 08, 2008, 04:55 PM »
Use Ctrl + Shift + PrtScr instead to select the form you want.
552
Circle Dock / Re: Can you think of a way to add tabs to the circle?
« Last post by Lashiec on September 08, 2008, 04:47 PM »
Oh, you mean something like Stacks in Mac OS X, and how it looks when you expand it?
553
Living Room / Re: 32-bit Windows and the dreaded (and misunderstood) 4GB RAM limit
« Last post by Lashiec on September 08, 2008, 04:41 PM »
Whoo, I'm having a déjà vu sensation with this thread :-D

The limit of memory supported by Windows 32-bit is a minefield. Even if people with less than 4 GB suffer it, something I was unaware of before. Mark Russinovich published a good write-up of how Windows works in this respect. Of particular interest is the section titled "32-bit Client Effective Memory Limits". Highlights:

While 4GB is the licensed limit for 32-bit client SKUs, the effective limit is actually lower and dependent on the system's chipset and connected devices. The reason is that the physical address map includes not only RAM, but device memory as well, and x86 and x64 systems map all device memory below the 4GB address boundary to remain compatible with 32-bit operating systems that don't know how to handle addresses larger than 4GB. If a system has 4GB RAM and devices, like video, audio and network adapters, that implement windows into their device memory that sum to 500MB, 500MB of the 4GB of RAM will reside above the 4GB address boundary.

(...)

The result is that, if you have a system with 3GB or more of memory and you are running a 32-bit Windows client, you may not be getting the benefit of all of the RAM.  On Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista RTM, you can see how much RAM Windows has accessible to it in the System Properties dialog, Task Manager's Performance page, and, on Windows XP and Windows Vista (including SP1), in the Msinfo32 and Winver utilities. On Window Vista SP1, some of these locations changed to show installed RAM, rather than available RAM, as documented in this Knowledge Base article.

(...)

Even systems with as little as 2GB can be prevented from having all their memory usable under 32-bit Windows because of chipsets that aggressively reserve memory regions for devices. Our shared family computer, which we purchased only a few months ago from a major OEM, reports that only 1.97GB of the 2GB installed is available.

For example, I have 2 GB of RAM installed, but after reading the article I checked the system, and turns out I don't even have 1.5 GB available.

Erm, not, forget about this line, I looked in the wrong place :-[
554
Living Room / Re: Crash course in MUSIC: mp3/meta_Data/compilations/download_sites
« Last post by Lashiec on September 08, 2008, 04:27 PM »
1) By the looks of it, you're probably downloading music from Archive.org. I'm unaware of players recognizing .xml files with metadata, mostly because it's unnecessary as most file formats have their own tagging system, so in theory those MP3s should be correctly tagged. If not, either someone comes up with a recommendation, or you have to do it by hand.

2) If possible, get FLAC, it's smaller than WAVE, it has support for tags, so when burning the files the program will recognize them, and label the CD correctly (for CD-TEXT, although it's not that important), and they're easier to work with as well.

Between Vorbis and WAVE, which to choose as a second option is difficult. Vorbis is far smaller due to being lossy, but burning it to a CD will yield a negligible loss in quality (it depends on how good it's the decoder), and uses tags. WAVE, on the other hand, is lossless, but it's bigger and does not have support for tags, so it's not really an option if you intend to do something else with the file after burning it.

MP3 is a choice similar to Vorbis, except that is practically ubiquitous, and it's practically impossible to find a player that does not support it, which is not always the same with FLAC and Vorbis (WMP, QuickTime, iTunes and similar apps do not play them out of the box). Vorbis used to be of higher quality than MP3, but the LAME encoder quickly closed the gap, although no one assures you if the MP3s you download were encoded with LAME.

3) Duh, difficult question. The real reason why Amazon can't sell you music is because they also have to renegotiate the rights for the European market. While the credit card restriction is probably true (although I can buy other items from Amazon without problem), even if it wasn't, Amazon would get in trouble if they sold music to markets outside its agreement with labels and music copyright associations.

It's the first time I hear about Ligamusic, but a quick gaze over the Terms and Conditions page mentions something about the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, which leads me to think this is something similar to AllOfMP3, which also claimed it was legal because they paid royalties to this copyright association. While this seems to make the business legal in Russia, I'm unaware if they also makes it legal outside it. The RIAA and other associations claims that it does, but the company that started AllOfMP3 opened new sites after the others were taking down, and they continue to operate normally under the Russian law, so at least they're quasi-legal.

In any case, I would be wary of putting my credit card details in a site that does have so little references on the net.

Personally, my recommendation is to continue to buy good old-fashioned CDs. Or LPs if you fancy :)
555
Living Room / Re: Win XP auto-update query
« Last post by Lashiec on September 06, 2008, 06:17 PM »
Ah, OK, I understood you feared they could never update to SP3 because they ignored it :D. In any case, I think it will not, but never found myself in a position to actually verify this, as SP3 is the first Service Pack Microsoft released I had the option to ignore, and opted for not doing it.

If the computer is up to date, the package won't be as big as a full update. And, unless there are reasons why is preferable to do an offline installation (say like, monthly usage caps), it won't eat their connection due to what I explained before. Did I get it now? :)
556
Living Room / Re: Win XP auto-update query
« Last post by Lashiec on September 06, 2008, 02:34 PM »
I don't think so, but you can always try. Remember that you can also install SP3 via Windows Update, it's the first thing it will offer to you, and you can undo the "Ignore update" action there. Also, updates do not get downloaded if the connection is busy, and they're resumed automatically once it's free. Even if you reboot the computer, or don't use for several days, the downloading will resume once everything is running again.

Gee, I wish all programs would use BITS (the component that makes all this possible) :(
557
DC Gamer Club / Re: Spore out the 4th of september
« Last post by Lashiec on September 06, 2008, 12:49 PM »
Yeah, 4 MB pictures is overkill :o

Hehe, I'd really like to see the Cody tribe during the galactic conquest phase :D
558
Living Room / Re: The Great International Newsletter Project !
« Last post by Lashiec on September 05, 2008, 06:23 PM »
Duh, housetier post reminded me about the newsletter that the association I belong to issues in a yearly basis :-[. It's pretty simple, and just highlights the events of the year, along with various articles of interest often accompanied by some drawings by the president of the association. It might be difficult to post a scanned copy though.
559
Living Room / Re: 'FaceBot' PoC Demonstrates Vulnerability of Facebook Apps
« Last post by Lashiec on September 05, 2008, 05:28 PM »
Well, wasn't Facebook all about a social network? :D
560
Living Room / Re: Relax, The Internet Backbone Still Has Room For Your lolcats
« Last post by Lashiec on September 05, 2008, 04:50 PM »
The "OMG, BitTorrent is going to bring down the whole Internet" stories varie from ISP to ISP, and from country to country as well. The exaflood catastrophe is mostly told by certain U.S. ISPs, for economical reasons as housetier points, and also to back up some of their "secret" practices towards controlling bandwidth. In South Korea or Japan (with their monthly upload limit of 250 GB), the exaflood does not seem it's going to happen by looking at their ISP plans. In Europe most cable providers are also testing DOCSIS 3.0, which also means better plans for the customers who can't afford the new and speedier plans.

Let's see if those P4P projects mature as well, for they mean even less chances of P2P-complaining by ISPs. Everything is not enough for LOLCATS!
561
Found Deals and Discounts / And... The Ultimate Steal makes a comeback
« Last post by Lashiec on September 03, 2008, 08:55 PM »
So, yeah, Microsoft decided again to offer its entire suite for nothing, or almost, just $59.95. Just a catch: you have to be a student, and live in one of the countries that offers the promotion (hover the mouse cursors over the flag to see them).


Screenshot - 04_09_2008 , 3_46_06_thumb003.jpg

Frankly, if I knew Microsoft would get ODF support right with the SP2, I would buy it right away :D

via One Microsoft Way
562
Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?
« Last post by Lashiec on September 03, 2008, 07:32 PM »
What happened with Anne? Shouldn't be any program in the middle. I don't use any proxies, ad blockers or anything of the sort.

A cookie thing. Unless we're talking about M2 + GMail, and not about checking GMail by going to the site... in both cases I'm afraid there's not an easy solution. With M2 it seems to be because of sloppy coding on the part of Google, and with the browser it depends on the phase of the moon. I remember seeing some other people complaining about GMail problems in the Opera forums, but not immediate solution, apart from cross-browsing, of course :)
563
Whoo, in just one day the browser has more market share than Opera.
564
The developers have released a few follow ups which have all been good.  Now comes word they are working on a full sized commercial adventure game called Machinarium set to be released in early 2009.

Cool, I was wondering what happened with it. Adventure games will rise up from the tomb and take the world by storm! (or something :P)
565
Living Room / Re: Has your phone replaced your camera?
« Last post by Lashiec on September 03, 2008, 10:40 AM »
f0dder, what's that you have inside the paper roll? ;D
566
General Software Discussion / Re: Google Chrome -- key reasons for its debut
« Last post by Lashiec on September 03, 2008, 10:36 AM »
I couldn't help but chuckle when I saw this on Digg. This is not the EULA of Google Chrome, it's for Google the service. Go to google.com with Firefox or IE and you can find the same terms of service.

Errr, then why it's in the Chrome EULA? Firefox and Opera license agreements don't have such provisions.
567
Lashiec, is this what you mean by Opera's adblocker:
http://mtsix.com/art...a-9-ad-blocking.html

It's primitive as hell, you have to select ads you don't want to see by hand!

There, a more modern version (click on the Opera logo), it even has an Element Hider, and performs mostly like Adblock Plus on Firefox.
568
General Software Discussion / Re: List of newbie questions regarding software
« Last post by Lashiec on September 03, 2008, 10:17 AM »
Take notes in the shower? What the...? :huh:. I'll try to answer a couple questions, anyway.

What offline rss reader has the best specs or is configured for lots of rss but slow reading (I think online rss readers tend to remove articles of a certain date or number)

I'm currently using Google Reader now but to be honest I'm not really comfortable using it. I much preferred the lightweight feeling of a desktop rss reader outside my browser but when I try to set all my feeds to update, it just slows down my 1gb ram pc.

At first I settled for Opera's RSS Reader but then I got annoyed because I realize I still needed to open a browser everytime and I'm already in tab hell. Then I settled for nfreader and at first it was the lightest rss reader I used but then it slows down too. This isn't helped by the fact that I have a disorganized list of RSS that I'm still organizing that has around 300 feeds. Around 50 probably not so important ones like programming blogs because I don't know how to get into that and hope to gleam some information from those, craigslist and other blogs for monitoring and the usual about.com, wired.com kind of feeds with several categories.

We already have a few threads about those around here, but personally I recommend Feed Demon. It's quite fast, with an excellent interface, and various features to control how you read the feeds, and when they should be eliminated from the system, although by default it stores up to 200 entries per feed subscription. It's also the one that gives fewer problems with feeds, others tend to have problems with certain feeds, or ignore parts of them. You can do all the reading inside it as well, as it uses tabs and the IE engine to show them. But feel free to try the rest as well, I also recommend Newzie, for its unique set of features.

Programs with plugins, is there an easier way to learn them? Besides the new FF3 plugin search, every program with plugins seems to be overwhelming to figure out. Sure, some are manageable because there are few plugins or that a non-expert can differentiate between a plugin that they need or don’t need but once it devolves into something like Miranda plugins or bblean, plugin searching devolves into looking for pages and pages of features trying to sort them out and often times asking for help results into what I need but many of the plugins I want often times come from me not even considering them. (Ex. FF Taboo’s firefox extension) or worse, from me realizing that I don’t need them or I'm so messed up that I don’t realize I need to learn them first but have tried them already. (Ex. Losing Scrapbooks because I never thought of focusing on exporting/importing because at the time I wasn’t educated to the need for backups)

Don't even try to go through all plugins of a certain application, most times you are just losing time. The best approach IMO is to search for a plugin that provides some functionality you need, trying everything is fun for a while, but no recommendable. Like, "Wow, I'd like to do x with the browser", and you go to the plugin page, and search for it.

Is there an easier way of previewing RAM without using a RAM optimizer?

The Task Manager?

How do you use advanced clipboard manager’s options? One of the features or habits I’m looking for is to be able to copy paste multiple entries in any order and then be able to re-arrange them so that each ctrl+v results into the next entry and the next entry being pasted but using basic clipboard managers, I only go so far as two copies before I have to self organize the entries.

That sounds like Skrommel's ClipStep. Or try ClipX if you want some basic interface to manipulate clipboard contents, apart from extending it.
569
Will we be able to browse the net without ads in chrome?

See here. Or try similar programs, like Proxomitron, Privoxy or a customized HOSTS file.

As for Opera and Firefox, really, use the adblocker in the first, and Adblock Plus in the second. Google sites work fine with them, and you can deactivate them in a snap if needed.
570
Yeah, mouser quoted Mozilla's CEO in another article which also mentioned the extension of the deal. Firefox also has another deal with Yahoo! IIRC, but if Google is intimidating Firefox with this, perhaps something should be done. For now, I don't think this is a possibility, Google enjoys a nice 1st place in the search engine business, and there's no reason to believe someone could challenge them in the short-term, at least not in a way that Firefox could switch its main source of revenue.

Perhaps this is why they're developing things like Prism, Weave and Fennec, to diversify its product line, and be able to score deals with other search engines, software companies or hardware makers, much like Opera Software does (which also depends on Google's deal to fund Opera for Desktop).
571
I suppose it was improved in the 0.9 versions, when I tried it months ago during my search for the perfect Exposé + Spaces clone (result: there's no acceptable clone), the description sounded fantastic, but I never witnessed a program failing to live up such claims so spectacularly. And it leaked memory like hell.

BTW, Dexpot was updated a couple of days ago. Better Vista support, and now runs in x64 Windows.
572
Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?
« Last post by Lashiec on September 02, 2008, 07:34 PM »
Ah, that sounds like someone who did not have an Internet connection for a few days :P
573
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Game Review: Toribash
« Last post by Lashiec on September 02, 2008, 07:33 PM »
Looks like what Ballz should have been in the first place, might take a look at it.
574
Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?
« Last post by Lashiec on September 02, 2008, 07:16 PM »
Opera + gmail is pure shit. I love Opera and keep trying to use it, but every time I check my e-mail I want to scream and find myself scrambling for file -> exit.

Earlier in this thread, it was mentioned that Opera and gmail play well together... what am I missing? Because for me, it hangs for everything. Changing folders is 50/50, reading a message is 50/50. Sending messages? I have about a 5% chance of actually getting it sent. Useless.

I don't know, really. The old version worked fine from day one on Opera 9.2x, and the new 2.0 design started to work without any trick on Opera 9.5x since a while ago. And it never fails. Perhaps something is misconfigured, like it happened to Anne, or another program in the middle is breaking everything?
575
Well, the browser is sleek and fast, all agreed. Actually, it's almost too fast, my guess is they're using Google Web Accelerator inside the browser for that extra speed, it's not the same in all pages, but to see some heavy ones load in a flash with my connection amazes me.

It shows it's a beta: Java does not work, opening tons of tabs is a recipe for a graphical disaster, it's almost in pants when it comes to features (I almost forgot what it's to surf without ads, and it almost scared me what lurked in some pages), and takes too long to exit the browser after running for a while, even with a minimum amount of tabs. There's nothing revolutionary into the browser, although the more technical features like the task manager and the JavaScript console look nice. And those little things here and there, like the interface for history searching, very fast and using an excellent way to show the results, or how it uses the scroll bar to indicate where page search results are located, nice touch. The way to send bug reports from the browser should be cloned by the competition, it includes screen captures and everything.

I guess the nonstandard way to install the browser is because of the UAC, they would not want to bother in programming a installation routine that does proper elevation.

All in all, it looks like we have a decent WebKit based browser for Windows, and a competitor for Internet Explorer and Safari, as Firefox, Opera and the rest of the alternative browsers are in another level so they don't have to worry for now (in theory). In fact, as a lightweight alternative to IE, it's indeed very recommendable.

Still, I wonder what's the reason of its existence, Google does not really need to launch a browser. I hope mouser's theory it's not the answer, otherwise both Opera and Firefox could be in BIG problems. The fact that the Chromium source code is available, and that the Chrome license agreement says you can't mess with the program (ya know, all the usual reverse engineering) it's suspicious.

Oh well, it's BSD-licensed, so anyone can take the code and run with it :D. BTW, it's V8 really developed by Google, or just enhanced?

V8 assembler is licensed as follows:

Copyright (c) 1994-2006 Sun Microsystems Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
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