Recent Posts

5801

fSekrit / Re: Congratulations on fSekrit

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 02:59 PM »

Well done there

5802

Site/Forum Features / Re: First Fabulous Forum Feature Request From Frover

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 11:37 AM »

You can use the NOTIFY function (located at the bottom right of the last post in each topic) to receive an email update each time someone posts to the topic. Will that work?

-Josh (June 10, 2006, 11:17 AM)

You can also use Notify on each forum too so that replies to a board are sent to you.

For example Notify will subscribe you to emails from  the forum containing this thread ("Site and Forum Features")

5803

Best Music Service / Re: tech crunch article comparing music services

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 11:34 AM »

but, why justify allofmp3.com, does anyone believe the royalties are passed on - the company has said themselves that they are in negotiation with artists to sort things out - why bother doing that if everything is sweet already.

The two Russian copyright bodies have confirmed that they do pay royalties. The reason they are changing what they do is because a new copyright law is coming into force in September and they have stated they want to comply by the new regulations.

5804

Living Room / Re: Intresting tad bit - MS Windows Genuine Advantage Phones Home Every day

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 10:49 AM »

WGA stops you downloading updates but not installing them. If you have access to a legitimate copy of Windows with WGA then you can simply download all the patches manually and move them any other computers you like.

Personally I think WGA is a bigger security risk and won't prohibit piracy. I guess that a lot of patches will appear on P2P networks and cracker sites to avoid WGA and then God alone knows what will be in those payloads! The nasties probably won't just affect the idots downloading them that way but have a knock on effect to the rest of us with new viruses/trojans getting into other people's systems.

5805

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows VISTA review by Scot Finnie

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 10:41 AM »

No it will never be in the cards - Apple have always seen selling their own hardware as their key market. To be fair one of the reasons they have the reputation of a stable OS is the restrictive nature of their hardware. I also think they are too short sighted to release MacOS into the world - I'd guess they are worried about piracy, but fail to see MS has built its reputation on volume sales including piracy which has forced their market growth more than they will admit.

5806

Living Room / Re: Maybe the First TV on Cellphones in S.A.

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 10:25 AM »

I thought Orange already had such a product ready for the market place ?

5807

Best Music Service / Re: tech crunch article comparing music services

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 10:24 AM »

my point is simply this (and always has been): why pay someone when they do not own what they are selling? why pay someone when they haven't the consent from the manufactures of the goods being passed on? why knowingly pay a criminal for stolen goods?

The trouble is that this doesn't seem to be correct.

The people who are the representatives of the music industry - not the artists. They are effectively a trade body that also acts in various illegal ways (like international price fixing which illegal), restrictive practices and victimizing anyone (including artists) who disagree with their views. What the articles express is their opinion of the law.

According to the criminal prosecution services in Russia - where allofmp3 trade - there is no case to answer. They have been repeatedly accused and there have been attempts to take them to court but as of today they have not been charged with any crime - despite the interets of mulitnationals with their lawyers.

If you are going to take partisan statements as true then surely Allofmp3's 'putting the record straight statement must also be taken into account too. They claim to pay all royalties required under Russian law and the organisations responsible for the collection of these fees have confirmed that they do pay what is required under Russian law.

I am not sure how Americans or Brits would react if the Russians started to try and dictate laws applicable in other countries ?

5808

General Software Discussion / Re: recommend a good world cup scores/reminder/etc tool for system tray/desktop?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 08:57 AM »

last message updated with extras ...

5809

General Software Discussion / Re: recommend a good world cup scores/reminder/etc tool for system tray/desktop?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 08:47 AM »

You could try http://www.softpedia...ament-Calendar.shtml

It is an active desktop tool rather than tray tips but seems to do what you want

Sorry got the wrong link try this one ...

http://www.xemico.co...center/worldcup.html

or how about http://www.mp3cdsoft...r-download-22079.htm

or http://fifaworldcup....aya.com/fungames.asp with a news update screen saver here: http://fifaworldcup....oads/avaya_saver.exe

And this looks interesting: http://www.eurodownl...06-Manager-2006.html

5810

Living Room / Pioneer to cease DVD recorder production

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 07:02 AM »

Interesting article on AfterDawn.

If Pioneer (as fourth largest producer of DVD Recorders worldwide) can't make a profit ...

Read the article here: http://www.afterdawn...ews/archive/7630.cfm

5811

Seedling's Software / Re: Display bug (WIN95)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 06:51 AM »

Welcome - can't help with the problem but am impressed that there is anyone out there still using Windows 95 !!!

5812

Best Music Service / Re: tech crunch article comparing music services

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 06:49 AM »

Now their traditional reasoning has been that marketing, production, and distribution costs are very high and this must be accounted for. Well, you can get rid of production and distribution costs for downloaded music. So shouldn't the music either be less expensive or the artists should get more? In fact neither one is true. Go figure. The music industry is woefully corrupt and hoping to support artists by utlizing its services in any way is a lost cause.

-JavaJones (June 10, 2006, 02:22 AM)

I listen to a lot of classical music (amongst other types) and regularly find that buying plastic is actually cheaper than downloading from iTunes or the others - even when you take postage into account ... this is just plaine ridiculous.

This is also true for a lot of classic pop music (eg. check out the David Bowie Platinum Collection on iTunes and at Amazon - which would you buy?).

The trouble with the current royalties setup is that as far as I can tell the roaylties still go to the record companies - not the artists.

This isn't a new problem though. I remember an interview with Freddie Mercury after the mega hit Bohemian Rhapsody. They were still driving to gigs in a borrowed van and couldn't afford to rent somewhere to live because they were so screwed by the record company even back in the early 70s.

5813

Best Music Service / Re: tech crunch article comparing music services

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 06:42 AM »

that is a good point but i doubt it will influence the industry. maybe if allofmp3.com had the backing of the artists that it was selling it would work.

-nudone (June 07, 2006, 01:36 AM)

Not sure about that - it was the Napster debacle that forced them into the MSN and iTunes (amongst others) model of internet selling. The music industry beofre that was absolutely opposed to anything but selling plastic.

5814

General Software Discussion / Re: Scott Finnie unimpressed by NOD32 ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 06:40 AM »

I have to confess I was a bit nonplussed by his osession with silent operation. Personally I let NOD32 set itself up when it installs (just default settings) and then make a couple of tweaks which take about 30 seconds. After that the only time I ever see NOD is a brief popup when it updates itself (which can be switched off) and when it spots a virus.

I have to confess that I did think it checked outgoing mail and was surprised to read it didn't.

Plus I do think the interface (when you do want to make any tweaks) is very porly designed. The multiple obscurely named modules with duplicated sets of configuration options is esp. bad - but then how often do you actually go in there to change anything?

Hopefully the update to version 3 will solve all of these issues.

5815

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows VISTA review by Scot Finnie

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 06:33 AM »

If Apple had any sense at all they would produce a generic version for all current Intel boxes out there and do what MS did in their IBM heyday.

Could you imagine the take up of MacOSX if it were made available for every Windows box at 50% of the price of Windows. I think the market would flip - certainly now that Windows Vista is about to be released in a bewildering range of flavours. The big advantage over Linux would be that so many premium software packages work as well or better on MacOS.

Hey ho - Apple haven't got the sense/imagination to understand that that is why MS have the big bucks and 92% market share - they never did and they never will.

5816

Living Room / Re: Intresting tad bit - MS Windows Genuine Advantage Phones Home Every day

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 10, 2006, 06:26 AM »

Yes, that was a rumor started by an news reporter after the law officials overseas tried to get MS to PUT a backdoor in vista to decrypt bitlocker volumes. Microsoft has already acknowledged that no backdoor would be provided.

-Josh (June 09, 2006, 04:52 PM)

Well none that they will admit to publicly 

If it ever became public knowledge that MS had backdoors into Windows the business world would leave like lemmings - doesn't mean that there aren't backdoors that are only suspected though!

There have been plenty of exmaples of backdoors left in systems by developers as insurance against dismissal that have then caused fun and games when the inevitable happens.

Can't help wondering whether a lot of the potential security problems are purely bad programming or whether some of them were deliberate and now attributed to programming issues.

5817

Living Room / Re: Intresting tad bit - MS Windows Genuine Advantage Phones Home Every day

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 09, 2006, 04:36 PM »

Try some of these links for stuff on MS Backdoors ...

http://www.google.co...icrosoft%20Backdoors

I have no proof that MS has backdoors into their software but I would be very surprised if there weren't some! I've seen 'War Games' ... 

5818

Living Room / Re: Intresting tad bit - MS Windows Genuine Advantage Phones Home Every day

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 09, 2006, 09:11 AM »

It is listed in my firewall apps as WGATRAY.EXE

5819

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Encryption software

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 09, 2006, 05:33 AM »

You can use the Group Policy Editor in Windows XP Pro and 2003 to force Windows to purge the page file when you restart the machine. Given the number of times the Pagefile gets written to during a windows session this should be a pretty efficient way of removing an paged out traces of information.

5820

General Software Discussion / Re: Browser racism???

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 09, 2006, 05:29 AM »

It may be me but I get the impression that since MS released ASP.NET 2.0 there seems to be all sorts of problem - lots of MS pages (and other ASP based sites) don't display properly in Firefox.

Can't help feeling this is deliberate on the part of MS trying to force people back to using Internet Explorer.

5821

General Software Discussion / Re: How to monitor and fix corrupted files on the computer?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 09, 2006, 05:24 AM »

Actually chkdsk /r c: on windows xp is best as it scans file contents and free space too. Note that running chkdsk on drive C: (with /f or /r) requires a reboot as it needs exclusive access to the disc to do the repairs. Also if you run chkdsk c: with windows running you will more than likely get errors displayed. I get "Run chkdsk again with the /f switch" promts - this is purely because files are open or in use at the time - when I do a reboot with chkdsk /r c: it doesn't show up any errors.

A corrupted file is just that - corrupted ... not what it is meant to be. Basically the data has either not been written to the disc correctly or some of the data has been accidentally been changed or deleted so that the checksums for the file does not match its contents.

This is often associated with files not being completely written to disc. Basically when Windows writes data to disc it generally does it in chunks of data rather than byte by byte - when there isn't a complete chunk to write it tends to wait - leaving the data in a buffer until it is time to write to the disc again. Logging off or restarting the computer should flush the buffers to disc but if something goes wrong it may not happen properly. MS have tried to fix this a number fo times and generally under NTFS things are much better than they were under FAT32 systems but it still can happen occasionally.

On idea for checking file integrity is to use something like WinRAR to produce archive copies with a recovery record. You can then test the archive and if it is damaged the recovery record may be able to salvage the files.

5822

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 08, 2006, 07:40 PM »

Don't know about those particular drives but microdrives are hardware compatible with CompactFlash cards.

I think microdrives are becoming obsolete because the capacities and prices of CompactFlash are growing where as the microdrives hit a wall at about 1Gb.

5823

Backup Guide / Re: Acronis now does backup of individual files/folders

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 08, 2006, 03:46 PM »

It is quite common for imaging software to exclude the page file and hibernation file since the contents of these are not used when the system starts normally.

5824

Backup Guide / Re: Acronis now does backup of individual files/folders

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 08, 2006, 12:17 PM »

You will duplicate any nasties (like viruses etc) but also if you have a corrupted file that windows hasn't reported (not uncommon) it will be duplicated removing the only good copy you have! I have had this problem a number of times when I have discovered that a backup contains files of 0 bytes. Luckily old (even ancient) backups have meant I can find copies.

5825

Backup Guide / Re: Acronis now does backup of individual files/folders

« Last post by Carol Haynes on June 08, 2006, 11:59 AM »

Biggest one is any problems will be duplicated along when synchronised so you have no way back!