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7051

Mouser's Zone / Re: Im going to be mostly away from the internet this week (Aug 29 - Sep 2, 2011)

« Last post by 40hz on August 28, 2011, 03:48 PM »

Have a nice trip! We'll hold the fort while you're gone

-jgpaiva (August 28, 2011, 03:11 PM)

Hold the fort? That's the code phrase for 'stage a coup,' isn't it?

7052

Living Room / Re: Centurylink is on CracK

« Last post by 40hz on August 28, 2011, 03:17 PM »

Flowcharters!!!   "Step one. Then step 2. Don't ever think - just do."

Last time I dealt with someone like that they brushed what I was telling them aside, netted in, and then proceeded to remotely "brick" my client's main data switch. ("Yes Rashmi - ALL the friggin' panel lights are simultaneously blinking on and off - and NO, holding in the reset button and cycling power isn't fixing it. C'mon! We've already done this five times in a row....What?... What's that?..."We" need to try doing it one more time just to be sure?  Ok...)

Good thing (for them) it happened after business hours on a Friday.

7053

Living Room / Re: GOD IS DEAD~! =P

« Last post by 40hz on August 28, 2011, 09:39 AM »

It may be because of social media explosion but never found so much buzz around events of "bill gates stepping down" or "orcable buying sun". Steve jobs is getting lot of fan love in return for his hard work.

-mahesh2k (August 28, 2011, 08:49 AM)

It's very nicely orchestrated. But "smart mobbing" and evangelism (along with dead-catting) is something the Apple fanboys have always excelled at. Contrast fanboys with Apple users who merely hope Apple doesn't go out of business before their AppleCare contract expires.
 

7054

Living Room / Re: Donation gamer: Games to give

« Last post by 40hz on August 28, 2011, 08:13 AM »

@iphigenie - I just wanted to commend you for your generosity. With all the hoarding going on, it's nice to see people sharing what they no longer have a use for. I have the same attitude towards my own stuff. These days, if I'm not currently using something (or keeping it as an emergency spare) it's out the door in a heartbeat. I'd much prefer to see something I bought put to use rather than gathering dust on a shelf.



The sole exception is my book collection. Those I keep more of than I probably should. Gonna have to get my head around doing something about that too.

 

7055

Living Room / Re: Goodnight Irene

« Last post by 40hz on August 28, 2011, 07:43 AM »

+1 w/J-Mac.  

The reports of our total destruction and the extirpation of all sentient life has been greatly exaggerated.

We're about 3.5 hours away from the eye passing over us in SW-CT and nothing major is happening so far.

Some rolling blackouts and a lot of rain seems to be about it. Which is to say no excitement beyond what a Nor'easter provides.

And as J-Mac pointed out, we get those several times a year.



Onward!

7056

Living Room / Re: GOD IS DEAD~! =P

« Last post by 40hz on August 28, 2011, 07:18 AM »

Excellent article putting Steve Jobs and his contributions into perspective can be found here.

ITWire writer Sam Varghese echoes many of the things tech writer and industry watcher Robert Cringely has said over the years - that there's a bit more legend than man in much of what's been said about Jobs.

If one were to go by the reaction to the news that Steve Jobs would no longer be the chief executive of Apple Computer, the man is Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Henry Ford all rolled into one.

Hard-core journalists appear to have put all their scepticism aside and wallowed in trying to outdo each other in superlatives.

The emotional tributes give Jobs the credit for anything and everything that Apple has ever done, especially its achievements in the noughties.

The reality is a bit different. And if one strikes a sour note, there are no apologies - this is not a reality TV show where selective reality is played out. No, this is life and the warts and sores are as real as the plastic and the botox.

.
.
.
While people continue to paint him as some kind of technical genius, the truth is that Jobs is nothing of the sort. What he is, is a supreme salesman. Apple was built on the back of technical geniuses like Steve Wozniak, the late Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, Randy Wigginton, Bill Atkinson, Rich Page, and Bud Tribble.

Page and Tribble left Apple with Jobs when he quit in 1985 and went off to found NeXT, the company that would come up with an operating system based on a BSD core which has morphed into Mac OS X. Page was in charge of hardware development and Tribble took the equivalent role in software at NeXT. Again, Jobs did not create anything.

The iMac was the result of the imagination of Apple design engineer Jonathan Ive.

Take the iPod. It was created by Apple's hardware engineering chief, Jon Rubinstein with his entourage who were given a year to build the device. Michael Dhuey, Tony Fadell and Ive were part of the team.

The iPad? A team led by Ive was responsible for it. Jobs created nothing.

The company has never given credit to anyone for anything, retaining Jobs as sole marketing point, creating legend after legend about him. This was done in the early days too, to the point where a much younger Jobs began to actually believe the hype.

In Accidental Empires, his history of the PC industry, veteran technology journalist Robert X. Cringely quotes an Apple marketer standing up and telling Jobs: "Steve, we wrote this stuff about you. We made it up."

Having watched the trajectory of Apple from it's inception (and owning a series of it's products starting with an Apple][ and hopefully concluding with the purchase of my iPhone 3G) - I'm amazed at the reality distortion field that's come into effect once Jobs returned to Apple after his NeXT debacle.

When it comes to Steve Jobs, I hope the industry wakes up to the fact its not so much that "God is Dead!" It's far more accurate to say, "There is no God."

Perhaps the best way to look at this can be found in the words of poet and lyricist E.Y.Harburg (most famous for the lyrics, and much of the dialog, in The Wizard of Oz movie):

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree;

And only God who makes the tree
Also makes the fools like me.

But only fools like me, you see,
Can make a God, who makes a tree.

                                       — Yip Harburg


How true... Like James Thurber once said: Mighty oafs from little icons grow.

 

7057

Living Room / Goodnight Irene

« Last post by 40hz on August 27, 2011, 04:32 PM »

My town, along with much of the eastern seaboard, is bracing for some unusually heavy weather.



Wishing all who are in the path of Irene a safe night and a safer tomorrow.

 

7058

Living Room / Re: Seriously, Youtube is becoming impossible!

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 11:24 PM »

Admuncher here also, and after using it for a while I upgraded to the "lifetime license". (Just don’t know whose lifetime they're talkin's about!)

Jim

-J-Mac (August 26, 2011, 11:10 PM)

Yours or theirs - whichever comes first.  

7059

Living Room / Re: Seriously, Youtube is becoming impossible!

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 10:32 PM »

what if your hardware breaks and you didn't uninstall or revert to trial mode and then you had to reinstall it on the same machine (with new HDD for example) or on a new machine?

-Deozaan (August 26, 2011, 03:21 PM)

Best bet is to ask them.

But any reputable company should be willing to reset their DRM to allow a reinstall if you lost a hard drive. Usually all it takes is phone call or a few e-mails to get it straightened out. I've only had one company, in all the years I've been using a PC, absolutely refuse to let me reinstall their product following a disk crash.
 

7060

General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 08:31 PM »

@Seth - I can't help but ask, what is CNET's position about one of their employees speaking to the general public about a controversial issue surrounding the company.

Most corporations have fairly strict rules about employees not doing that sort of thing.
 

7061

General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 07:18 PM »

i think you're talking about a distinction without a difference.

-mouser (August 26, 2011, 07:12 PM)

+1. 

7062

General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 06:32 PM »

This is not an official CNET response...

-m0rn1ng5t4r (August 26, 2011, 02:33 PM)

@Seth - Thanks for joining in the discussion. Always glad to get some perspective from a person who's on the 'inside' so to speak.

Just out of curiosity, is there an official CNET response?  Or is the prolonged silence as much of an "official response" as we can expect to get?

I would like to point out that perhaps the reason they're seeing a much higher completion rate than before is because not enough people are aware of the change that's taken place. And also that the "wrapper" has effectively hijacked much of the direct download traffic that could not previously be monitored.

I do find it interesting that developers still need to opt out of having a revenue generating installer placed around their application when they didn't request their software be carried by CNET to begin with. I'm not quite sure what could have ever made anybody at CNET think doing something like that could ever be completely legal - or even moderately ethical.

Now if CNET had first contacted the developers; announced a change to the rules; and then required them to either opt in - or be automatically dropped from download.com - that would have been one thing. (The right thing in fact.) But I suspect that doing so would have drawn far more attention to what was about to take place than some parties at CNET wanted, hence this unannounced (and frankly sneaky) change.

Just my tuppence.   This is wrong on so many levels.

7063

Living Room / Re: Seriously, Youtube is becoming impossible!

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 11:20 AM »

Ad Muncher is terrific and takes care of the problem in all browsers, desktop RSS readers, etc..  

-app103 (August 26, 2011, 09:49 AM)

NSFW

+1 Ad Muncher is probably the best of breed. We have it on my GF's laptop and I'm very impressed by it.

Only drawback to Ad Mucher is that it gets a little expensive if you regularly use more than one machine. It's licensed per seat rather than per user. (For obvious reasons.)

And multiples must be purchased at the same time as the original license to qualify for the quantity discount. You can't pay to "extend" your license after the fact.

I don't have a problem with any of that. It's just something you need to be aware of.

7064

Living Room / Re: 'Work Done' Lists Sofware, any ideas ?

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 10:46 AM »

I use workflowy.com for this. Make an entry per week inside that the schedule and one entry per day and inside that a worklog of things I did that day.

-justice (August 26, 2011, 09:24 AM)

Couldn't you do much the same thing just using any outliner app - and optionally hosting or (preferably) syncing the data file with something like a free Dropbox account? That way, if workflowy ever went out of business, or changed hands, you'd still be set to go.

 

7065

Living Room / Re: 'Work Done' Lists Sofware, any ideas ?

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 09:05 AM »

It seems like what your looking for is a "time sheet" program.

Take a look at Grindstone2 by Epiforge. The desktop app is free. They also offer online accounts if you want to sync among multiple machines. Once it's installed however, you can easily make it portable by copying a few files and changing the preferences to reflect the new location of the data file. Some very slick features too. Look at custom fields and think of all the clever uses you could find for them.

Good hands on review and discussion here.
 
 

7066

Living Room / Re: Seriously, Youtube is becoming impossible!

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 08:45 AM »

I haven't seen a youtube ad ever in my life.

-superboyac (August 26, 2011, 07:52 AM)

That's because the unicorns love you!

 

7067

Living Room / Re: What Happened to Genie Backup Manager?

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 06:46 AM »

I've had so many bad experiences with supposedly "good" and "verified" backups that I've given up on them for most purposes.

I will sync. I will mirror. I will version. I will copy. I will image...

But anything that backs up files in a format that isn't usable without the utility that created them is no longer welcome in my toolkit.

Classic backup utilities made sense when we were using tape drives. Because you needed to use compression and incremental strategies to save space and minimize wear & tear on your DAT or DLT media. But with fast and reliable hard drives dropping below $80 for 1TB of storage, doing 'incrementals' or using compression isn't worth the grief involved. If you run short of space, just buy an additional drive (or two  ) next time NewEgg puts them on sale.

If you do want a classic backup utility (with some nice modern touches) try Cobain Backup. Cobain is the only backup tool I never experienced a problem with. Which is more than I can say for some very expensive and highly recommended commercial programs I've used.
 

7068

Living Room / Re: Seriously, Youtube is becoming impossible!

« Last post by 40hz on August 26, 2011, 06:05 AM »

Has YouTube made some major changes recently?

Because the FF Adblock Plus browser extension always used to do a good job of eliminating them. It's true those miserable adverts will reappear every so often. But the developer stays on top of things and updates regularly. So whenever adverts change tactics, the very next update to ABP (or one of its filter subscriptions) starts catching them. At least so far. Worst case (for me) has been having to put up with those ads for about a day before they magically vanish once again.

I take Adblock Plus for granted so much that I'm always stunned at what places like YouTube get up to whenever I use a browser that doesn't have it. Which is why Adblock Plus (and NoScript  ) are the first extensions I load whenever I'm installing Firefox.

ABP and NoScript are two extensions I also regularly send in a contribution for. I'd have gone crazy by now without them.

Note: There's also versions available for Chrome and K-Meleon if you're not a Firefox user.

7069

General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by 40hz on August 25, 2011, 11:48 AM »

Anyone at DC feel particularly motivated and qualified to start a new site to establish guidelines for such things and evaluate sites for good behavior?

-mouser (August 25, 2011, 09:43 AM)

That would make for an interesting discussion since so many of the stakeholders (i.e. developers) seem to have mixed and migrating opinions as to what is acceptable - and isn't. As do the end users, whose opinions frequently clash with those of the development community.

So exactly who could best be considered qualified to establish such guidelines? And more to the point: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Apparently the Romans had a bit of experience with this sort of thing.  

7070

Site/Forum Features / Re: Posting from Mobile View

« Last post by 40hz on August 25, 2011, 08:54 AM »

How do I get to the mobile view?

-phitsc (August 25, 2011, 08:29 AM)

Try this URL:

https://www.donation...orum/index.php?;wap2
 

7071

Living Room / Re: GOD IS DEAD~! =P

« Last post by 40hz on August 25, 2011, 07:55 AM »

<orchestra plays softly>

Don't cry for me Cupertino
The truth is I never left you
All through my wild days
My mad existence
I kept my promise
Don't keep your distance

Have I said to much?
There's nothing more I can think of to say to you
But all you have to do
Is look at me to know
That every word is true...

(with apologies to Andrew Lloyd Webber)

7072

General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by 40hz on August 24, 2011, 09:27 PM »

The bigger you are, the more evil you can be and get away with it. So, that's why I am not sure about the practical upshot for pulling software from there,

-Renegade (August 24, 2011, 08:47 PM)

                                       

Rolling over and playing dead has never been a good response to 800lb gorillas misbehaving.

At the very least, standing up to them makes it very clear that their behavior is not being given your tacit approval. Because there's a great deal of truth to the old saying "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

In the end I think it all comes down to how much respect you have for yourself and what you believe in. If you allow yourself to knuckle under without firing a single shot, you were already defeated before the conflict even began.

Just my tuppence.

7073

Living Room / Re: U.S. East coast quake - Everybody OK?

« Last post by 40hz on August 24, 2011, 02:32 PM »

I kind of enjoy them!

-JavaJones (August 24, 2011, 01:35 PM)

My GF gets off on violent thunderstorms and major blizzards.

You two really need to get together! 

 

7074

General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by 40hz on August 24, 2011, 02:24 PM »

I personally don't think there's any conspiracy involved at all.

I think somebody in management over at CBS took a look and said: "We've got this ultra-popular website that's getting X number of hits per day. Why aren't we making more money off this than we are?" After which the proverbial unspoken remark was left dangling in the silent room: Because if we don't start making more bucks off this real soon - it's gonna be shut down.

Next followed a mad scramble of meetings as all the people involved with Download.com put on their thinking caps and thrashed about for ways to 'monetize' the site.

And the rest, as they say, is what you're seeing now.

I don't think it was evilly motivated. It's just a bad decision made by some people who have their heads in a noose.

The real problem is that many developers don't have the resources in time and money  to advertise and host their own downloads. So once download.com goes away (which there's a 50-50 chance it will if it either can't "make it's numbers" - or generates enough negative publicity that it becomes seen as a pariah) it's the developers that get hurt in the end.

Boned if you stay; or double boned if you leave - or it shuts down. In the end it amounts to the same hard thing. Those who create (software developers, artists, writers, musicians, etc.) pay a heavy price to do what they do.



Nothing new there. It's been going on since the first Renaissance prince appointed a court composer, and then put his own name on everything the poor composer wrote after that.

7075

General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by 40hz on August 24, 2011, 12:51 PM »

So after the aliens landed, bringing world peace, immortality, and all the unicorns back ... They created a magic toolbar...

-Stoic Joker (August 24, 2011, 11:19 AM)

...and sprinkled gobs and gobs of silvery glitter over everything!