Recent Posts

576

General Software Discussion / Re: is there an ultimate file extension manager (to work with windows 7, at least).

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 11:14 PM »

Yeah... I'm almost ready to give Firefox another chance. I got REALLY fed up with its resource utilization and the fact that it (seemed to have) caused explorer.exe to crash with alarming frequency on my setup (no longer recall if this we under Vista or Win7, but suspect the former). IE8 seemed like a breath of fresh air, but lattterly it's hogging resources and freezing too... Maybe I have too many accelerators (99% of which I don't use anyway)... Hmm... for for thought!

577

General Software Discussion / Re: If you think OpenOffice is a competitor to MS Office 2010, think again

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 09:24 PM »

When ("if"?) it comes, I am expecting SoftMaker's version to be absolutely fantastic, considering how many years they have been "working on that one"... 

-Curt (June 16, 2010, 04:59 PM)

The thing is, I've been waiting, now for well over three years (if memory serves) and it's STILL not even in public beta! I bought the 2006 suite in anticipation of DataMaker being released soon thereafter (and on the understanding that it would be a paid add-on) and then, about a year and a half later upgraded to 2008 before 2008 was even released because it looked like DataMaker would actually be part of it when it went gold. Now 2010 is out and no sign of DataMaker...

PS to be honest, a big factor in both my Office purchases was the fantastic apps that DO comprise it in its current form, TextMaker in particular.

578

General Software Discussion / Re: is there an ultimate file extension manager (to work with windows 7, at least).

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 09:17 PM »

Strange - Aero Snap works perfectly across monitors on my setup (but then I've onlly a notebook monitor and one secondary to switch between).

Sounds like you should revert to Vista and try again when 7 Sp-1 comes out. As I've noted, I loved Vista, so I can certainly see the attraction of going back to it. Heck if it works, use it 

579

General Software Discussion / Re: theremin hero...

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 12:08 PM »

f0dder beat me to it 

I'll have to go with:

Killer!

Yes, I am a product of the 80's...

580

General Software Discussion / Re: is there an ultimate file extension manager (to work with windows 7, at least).

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 12:00 PM »

BTW, regarding Win 7 and the new taskbar, I love it! However, note that Bitsdujour has TrueLaunchBar Pro on today for $9.95... It will provide all the functionality of the Vista and earlier Quicklaunchbar and then some. Of course, if you don't want a quick launch feature at all it's easy to remove the pinned items from the taskbar.

Just a thought... I love Loved LOVED Vista but find Win7 subtly superior, or at least more enjoyable, in many ways. Most notable of these is a reduction in RAM and CPU usage (not that I had any complaints about Vista). I also like things like Aero Snap. Thought it sounded ridiculous when I read about it, but use it all the time. The new gadgets feature is vastly superior as well. I disabled and did not use gadgets in Vista's sidebar but use them happily in Win 7.

581

General Software Discussion / Re: If you think OpenOffice is a competitor to MS Office 2010, think again

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 11:52 AM »

I tried the 64 bit beta at the start of the year and really liked it. However, none of my 32 bit plugins would work with it (obviously) so I reverted to 2007. I'm hoping that the college that I work at will get academic priced copies in soon. I'm faculty, so can't (legally) take advantage of the $80 student offer, sadly (otherwise I'd be downloading it as I type this).

I'm not sure that there are any must have features in 2010. However, having a unified interface would be nice, the tweaks that have been made to things like the paste function were enough to make me want it permanently, and, finally, when I'm teaching I live in Powerpoint, so welcome more flexibility with the master sldie editing function. 2007, in my opinion, was a bit of a step backward in many ways WRT slide layout and design, though slowly I have adjusted over the past three years.

582

General Software Discussion / Re: is there an ultimate file extension manager (to work with windows 7, at least).

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 11:48 AM »

Hmm... interesting about StrokeIt. I haven't tried in years, perhaps it's time to have another go. However, I'm so used to life without it, I'm not sure that I can be asked to iron it out on my system 

WRT IE8 accelerators, the blue arrow appears automatically. All  you have to do is click on the accelerator that you want and it performs it. So the steps to search would be:

1. highlight the term/phrase with the mouse
2. click on the arrow that appears
3. click on the accelerator that you want

  O guess that only saves on click!

583

General Software Discussion / Re: is there an ultimate file extension manager (to work with windows 7, at least).

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 11:24 AM »

Heh, heh - no worries, nudone! I went to Maxthon - Firefox - IE8 route myself. I'm sick of all browsers - I simply cannot believe how resource hungry they are. At any rate, there is no super drag and drop feature built into IE 8. What it does have are accelerators, so if you highlight a word an arrow appears:



clicking on it yields a context menu, populated by search accelerators:



There are more options when you click on "All Accelerators"

I use this fairly often and it works well.

BTW, do you like StrokeIt? I tried it a few times and couldn't get it configured to work like Maxthon so gave up.

Oh dear, out of context the above sentence is a bit risque!

584

General Software Discussion / Re: is there an ultimate file extension manager (to work with windows 7, at least).

« Last post by Darwin on June 16, 2010, 08:58 AM »

nudeone - I used to be a Maxthon fanatic but no longer use it. IE8 allows me to do just about everything that I used to do in Maxthon. The only thing I initially missed were the wonderful mouse gestures built into Maxthon. At any rate, why not try removing Maxthon, rebooting, and see if that solves your problem?

585

DonationCoder.com Newsletters / Re: --> Newsletter for June 10th, 2010 - "Second Summer Winds"

« Last post by Darwin on June 13, 2010, 02:06 PM »

Thanks for another great newsletter, mouser  I missed every step of the production of this one - sorry! I've been buried under midterms, term papers, and lectures to prepare and give. Yeah, yeah, I know... excuses 

586

General Software Discussion / Re: is there an ultimate file extension manager (to work with windows 7, at least).

« Last post by Darwin on June 11, 2010, 06:42 AM »

WinPatrol does this for me... Everytime an application tries to change a file association WinPatrol pops up to confirm that I want the change made.

587

Living Room / Re: The 'iPad tax', or 'how not to bailout journalism in America'

« Last post by Darwin on June 09, 2010, 08:25 AM »

Thanks for getting us back on track, Edvard (and sorry for hijacking your thread). I got so carried away about "the-headline-that-shall-go-unmentioned" that I didn't even read the original article to which you linke  I have done so now... totally agree with Renegade that this is the most worrisome implication of what the author is saying:

Most dangerous of all, the FTC considers a doctrine of "proprietary facts," as if anyone should gain the right to restrict the flow of information just as the information is opening it up. Copyright law protects the presentation of news but no one owns facts -- and if anyone did, you could be forbidden from sharing them. How does that serve free speech?

588

Living Room / Re: The 'iPad tax', or 'how not to bailout journalism in America'

« Last post by Darwin on June 08, 2010, 05:18 PM »

Ooops, there wasn't any plural on the headline

-Lashiec (June 08, 2010, 02:25 PM)

No worries! Entirely conicidentally, about three weeks ago I taught a class on Crime and the media and used that picture as an illustration of the maxim "If it bleeds it leads"! Never thouight I'd be able to put it to good use again so soon 

589

Living Room / Re: The 'iPad tax', or 'how not to bailout journalism in America'

« Last post by Darwin on June 08, 2010, 12:20 PM »

Then again, we're talking about the newspaper that published legendary headlines like "Headless Bodies in Topless Bars", and looking around their webpage, calling the job they do "journalism" is stretching the concept of it quite a bit.

-Lashiec (June 08, 2010, 09:20 AM)

590

Living Room / Re: Is a college education worth the money?

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2010, 10:09 PM »

Good point, superboyac. This is EXACTLY what I stress to the students that I tutor - have a plan!

591

Living Room / Re: Is a college education worth the money?

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2010, 06:43 PM »

I think that gwen7 is on the right track: it's a screening requirement now. They screen out applicants without degrees because they can.

592

Living Room / Re: Is a college education worth the money?

« Last post by Darwin on June 07, 2010, 04:04 PM »

I think... the cruelist piece of advice you could give someone just starting out is:

1. You don't really need a college degree to land a good job.

-40hz (June 07, 2010, 03:02 PM)

This truly is a cruel piece of advice. Sadly, when I went off to university at 18 it was still received wisdom that a BA/BSc degree was all one needed to acheive in order to have a competitive advantage in life and to get a good job. The argument went something like "you go to university and learn how to problem solve and think and demonstrate that you can finish something that you've started, work to deadlines..." yada, yada, ydda.  By the time I graduated with a BA 7  years later (I took three years off to work), it was no longer enough to have a BA/BSc degree. This was 1994. At that time, you needed to have the "right" BA/BSc - ie one was now required to demonstrate that they had taken a particular course of study related to the job (ie the major had to be "right"). 16 years later we've gone from that to a lot of jobs requiring masters degrees or even PhDs in particular fields of study.

We've become "credential" obsessed.

593

General Software Discussion / Re: PikyBasket replaced by Copywhiz

« Last post by Darwin on June 05, 2010, 07:46 AM »

Thanks Conceptworld - I've been playing with it some more and have watched the slideshow feature demo. There is functionality there that I doubt I can do with Dopus easily. However, in my case, I wonder if Copywhiz isn't a solution waiting for a problem!

I'll keep demo-ing!

594

General Software Discussion / Re: PikyBasket replaced by Copywhiz

« Last post by Darwin on June 04, 2010, 08:38 PM »

I installed the demo and gave it a whirl. I live in Dopus and don't think I need this. I just send files to a file collection and then perform actions on them that way... or am I missing something?

595

General Software Discussion / Re: PikyBasket replaced by Copywhiz

« Last post by Darwin on June 03, 2010, 07:47 PM »

Can anyone here compare CopyWhiz to TeraCopy? I have a lifetime license for TeraCopy and it works pretty well on my 64 bit system, but I'm curious how Copywhiz compares.

-Darwin (June 03, 2010, 05:24 PM)

I can't say anything too intelligent since I haven't used PikyBasket or Copywhiz (though I've considered looking at PikyBasket in the past), but my understanding is that Copywhiz and TeraCopy address 2 different use cases: TeraCopy is intended to perform high speed file copies in the background, while PikyBasket/Copywhiz is intended to let you 'gather together' items from different sources to  paste elsewhere in a single shot (the destination might not be folder).

-mwb1100 (June 03, 2010, 07:04 PM)

OK, thanks mwb1100 - I've just re-read the CopyWhiz blurb and you're right. My earlier impression was that it was closer to TeraCopy in functionality. Looking at the features list, it seems quite an interesting product. So... you've actually managed to be quite intelligent (moreso than me at any rate, though that's not too difficult at the best of times).

I guess I'd better re-phrase my question and ask if TeraCopy and CopyWhiz will coexist nicely or not... In the meantime, I'll download the demo, as per Curt's suggestion 

596

General Software Discussion / Re: PikyBasket replaced by Copywhiz

« Last post by Darwin on June 03, 2010, 05:24 PM »

Can anyone here compare CopyWhiz to TeraCopy? I have a lifetime license for TeraCopy and it works pretty well on my 64 bit system, but I'm curious how Copywhiz compares.

597

General Software Discussion / Re: X-Setup Pro now free, but abandoned

« Last post by Darwin on June 03, 2010, 05:21 PM »

-a month ago I managed to purchase a license key for two more years...

-Curt (June 02, 2010, 11:55 AM)

  me too! Irony is that I'm on a 64-bit version of windows and extended to support development... Oh well... I should install it on my wife's 32 bit machine, I suppose.

598

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by Darwin on June 03, 2010, 03:13 PM »

Currently reading Greg Bear's "Blood Music". I'm on a sci-fi/fantasy kick of late. Recently, I've read all of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians novels, Greg Bear's The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage (together known as Songs of Earth and Power), and Jack L. Chaulker's Changewinds series.

599

General Software Discussion / Re: What to use to back up 1:1 ?

« Last post by Darwin on June 01, 2010, 07:39 AM »

Isn't Seagate owned by Western Digital (or vice versa)?

600

Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« Last post by Darwin on May 31, 2010, 08:43 PM »

Great info. You all have been labeled. Now I know who to blame for...

-PhilB66 (May 31, 2010, 07:39 PM)

"Blame Canada"!