Recent Posts

726

General Software Discussion / Re: Someone MUST make a new PowerMarks program.

« Last post by J-Mac on March 30, 2011, 10:10 PM »

Hi Tom.

If you remember I have to use Linkman Pro installed to my hard drive but using the "USB installation", because if I install directly to Windows it crashes every time. If there were a portable installer I could just swap out the necessary files in my Linkman USB installation folder. If instead I must use the regular Windows installer to USB it completely wipes out all my settings and I am then spending the next day resetting everything! Only takes less than an hour to redo  most of the Preferences but then I keep finding other little things I need to change. E.g., I have to remember to change the database locations, backup locations, browser to launch URLs in, browser to receive URLs from, etc. (Firefox is set as my default but if I set Linkman to use the default it often uses Chrome instead - Chrome was my default at one time and Linkman finds something that makes it think it is still default.) Whatever the reason, it is a pain to have to redo everything.

Any chance of getting just the files needed to manually update my 7.076 "USB on HDD" installation?

Thanks!

Jim

727

General Software Discussion / Re: FileBox eXtender now works under Vista

« Last post by J-Mac on March 29, 2011, 09:35 PM »

I did not realize that fBx was updated to work on Windows 7!

Thank you!

Jim

728

Living Room / Re: Fascinating story about the consequences of sharing your art in the Internet age

« Last post by J-Mac on March 22, 2011, 12:17 PM »

Regarding protecting yourself from copyright claims, 40hz makes a good point. Reminds me however of some cases involving friends of mine. Magic sleights and effects are considered "ideas" and thus are not protected by copyright as intellectual property, though within the magic community such property is very much recognized and is critical. Yet some magicians have found themselves the target of idiots who try to come after them for copyright infringement anyway; most are just ignorant of the law. Yet while legal action will not be successful against them, the "stink" that comes within the magic community of having "stolen" someone else's work can be even more devastating. So their only real protection of that is to keep fastidious records of exactly when and where they published and/or first performed the effect. Proof of the date of publication/initial performance is often the only defense against claims of having "stolen" it from someone else.

All outside the actual copyright laws but at times even more pressing and devastating, believe it or not!

Jim

729

Living Room / Japan Earthquake and Tsunami - Before & After Pics

« Last post by J-Mac on March 21, 2011, 11:51 PM »

Take a look at this page:   http://www.abc.net.a...2011/beforeafter.htm


All the photos have a mouse-over before & after feature. I've seen a lot of images and videos of the devastation there but these images in particular struck a chord.

Jim

730

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your music player of choice?

« Last post by J-Mac on March 21, 2011, 10:38 PM »

I play only my music with WMP11. All video and DVDs are played with VLC Player. It lets me take snapshots from videos, place a Faster and Slower button to speed up or slow down videos, and I can stream any video from the Web and then save and convert it. Has a few buggies every now and then but overall VLC is rocking for me here!

Thanks!

Jim

731

Living Room / Re: Fascinating story about the consequences of sharing your art in the Internet age

« Last post by J-Mac on March 21, 2011, 10:13 PM »

The "Copyright Office"? As soon as you publish any work publicly, in any format that the public has access to, it is automatically copyrighted. No registration is required unless you want to sue someone for copyright infringement. Otherwise you don’t need to do anything. Here's some quotes from the US Copyright Office's FAQ:

What is copyright?
Copyright is a form of protection grounded in the U.S. Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Copyright covers both published and unpublished works.

What does copyright protect?
Copyright, a form of intellectual property law, protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section "What Works Are Protected."

How is a copyright different from a patent or a trademark?
Copyright protects original works of authorship, while a patent protects inventions or discoveries. Ideas and discoveries are not protected by the copyright law, although the way in which they are expressed may be. A trademark protects words, phrases, symbols, or designs identifying the source of the goods or services of one party and distinguishing them from those of others.

When is my work protected?
Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration.”

Why should I register my work if copyright protection is automatic?
Registration is recommended for a number of reasons. Many choose to register their works because they wish to have the facts of their copyright on the public record and have a certificate of registration. Registered works may be eligible for statutory damages and attorney's fees in successful litigation. Finally, if registration occurs within 5 years of publication, it is considered prima facie evidence in a court of law. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration” and Circular 38b, Highlights of Copyright Amendments Contained in the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), on non-U.S. works.

732

Living Room / Re: Fascinating story about the consequences of sharing your art in the Internet age

« Last post by J-Mac on March 21, 2011, 01:05 PM »

Or is anyone suggesting that a 1 day of work  is supposed to bring you money for the rest of your life?

-rxantos (March 19, 2011, 04:16 PM)

Depends...  If he worked at a video store - or at any "job" - for a day, the paycheck he receives is all he gets.

But he created a piece of art - and though it is only a photograph, it is still his "art" - not just performed one day of work. As long as other people decide to sell his art and make money, then yes, that is supposed to bring him money for as long as anyone is using his art commercially!

Not my opinion, but black letter law.

As of his work stolen, either he was really really REALLY dumb to put work on flickr and expect that no one will use without telling him. Or he did it on purpose to get publicity for his work. Either way, he does not deserve pity.

Really dumb? Maybe so. How does that make it OK to steal his art? And yes, that is stealing; how can you honestly think otherwise? People do "dumb" things all the time, but that still doesn’t give anyone the right to steal from them because of it! Do you really believe what you said there? If a person performs a "Dumb" act then nothing that happens as a result is wrong? Nothing can be considered criminal because after all, the person did a "dumb" thing? Please tell me that you don’t truly believe that. Sure, there's a lot he could have done to protect his work... Well, actually the only real protection is to not put anything of value online for display. Of course the value of anything isn't really determined until you find out what people are willing to pay for it.  But in no case should theft have to occur in order to find out.

Jim

733

Living Room / Re: Fascinating story about the consequences of sharing your art in the Internet age

« Last post by J-Mac on March 20, 2011, 09:42 PM »

I'm really surprised by a lot of the comments here. It is HIS creation! And others are taking credit for it and selling it. And now I see that many don’t even consider him as victimized!?

Baffling.

Jim

734

Living Room / Re: Windows Install Date Thingie: I made it!

« Last post by J-Mac on March 16, 2011, 11:01 PM »

Just ran fine for me on Windows 7 a few minutes ago - except for the pop-up a few minutes later saying Windows thinks the program was installed incorrectly.    Weird since it doesn’t actually install to Windows!

Can't say if the "Born on" date was correct exactly, but it was close IIRC. The last reboot matched my "Tray Up Time" last reboot measurement except it is exactly one hour more, which I attribute to Daylight Savings Time being in effect. (Can anyone tell me WHY we even still use that now?)

Jim

735

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: JetDrive Defragmentation Suite

« Last post by J-Mac on March 16, 2011, 10:45 PM »

I've been running PerfectDisk Pro for a few years now. To be honest I wondered about the need for a stand-alone defragger in Windows 7 also, but PerfectDisk charges me a maintenance fee of, I think, $8 or 10 every two years to be entitled to all upgrades so I have just paid that and kept right on using it. Don’t know if it really helps but I am definitely defragmented all the time!!

Jim

736

General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support

« Last post by J-Mac on March 10, 2011, 11:45 AM »

I used to use Pocomail and I loved it. Excellent client in its time - but that's the real problem: its time is no more! Pocomail basically stopped development after 2008. And while it will still work in Windows 7 it lacks any decent IMAP support and it was built with similar safeguards in it regarding HTML email as The Bat. At one time HTML email was considered a security threat by many. Nowadays, though bugs can still be transmitted via HTML email, almost any A-V software package will clean up any HTML security issues and the threats from attachments, well, they will always be there. But a lack of support for reading and/or sending HTML email today is a deal killer for most. Too much of our email consists of newsletters that are virtually all HTML.

So I sadly kissed Pocomail goodbye a couple years ago and have never found a replacement that was even close to being as useful.   

Jim

737

General Software Discussion / Re: My new program : Calibre2Opds

« Last post by J-Mac on March 09, 2011, 09:21 PM »

I just installed Calibre for the first time and imported a few folders with about 5 dozen ebooks, mostly all PDF. I like the UI though it seemed somewhat slow to respond. E.g., I need to edit a lot of the ebooks as Calibre didn't pick up the title or author, and just entering a title rendered Calibre non-responsive for maybe 5-8 seconds before the edit showed. Also after editing about 2 dozen I decided to take a break and browse a bit - I think I came here to DC for ~20 or 30 minutes - but the PC was slow and I noticed that my CPU resources were running thin; checked Task Manager and Calibre was using 46-50% CPU. Doing nothing I could tell. Just sitting on the taskbar inactive. So I shut it down. Haven't opened it again yet.

Anyone know if this is common?

Thanks!

Jim

738

General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support

« Last post by J-Mac on March 09, 2011, 03:56 PM »

Yeah, for example: on an existing thread a lot of posts had already been made requesting the same thing, a fairly common feature. If Postbox's junk filter automatically marks a message as "Junk" and sends it to the Junk folder, and the user recognizes it as a false positive and marks it as "Not Junk" it should go back to the Inbox automatically. In Postbox it didn't; it just stayed in the Junk folder and it was up to the user to manually move it back. The only Postbox comment was that it was the accepted way that junk mail is treated, as if that behavior is the industry standard. I posted and pointed out the many well-known and respected email clients that moved it back to the Inbox automatically, as opposed to Postbox's behavior. Postbox just reiterated their previous comment, so I pointed out that they were the founders of Thunderbird and that they designed Thunderbird to auto-move junk marked as Not-Junk back to the Inbox; I might have also wondered which other clients used the behavior they claimed was "standard". They didn't like that. But they had allowed the non-feature to stand as "normal" for so long I didn't just want to add another "me, too!" post. There were a few other poor "features" that I suggested fixes for that they apparently didn't want to fix. A problem may have been that after I would question something a number of others would join in, and the PB folks seemed to be accustomed to their users not questioning any design features.  Oh well.

Thanks!

Jim

739

General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support

« Last post by J-Mac on March 09, 2011, 11:26 AM »

Speaking for myself, I suspect that part of the reason many of us are no longer seduced by expensive, feature-rich e-mail clients (says he who uses Outlook!), is that e-mail seems to have SERIOUSLY declined in use over the past five or so years. The decline may well have started before then, but I don't receive or send anything near the volume of e-mail that I did in the past. This is a general trend, not just my experience, I *think*, non?

-Darwin (March 09, 2011, 08:22 AM)

I still use email quite a bit and I DID purchase an "expensive, feature-rich e-mail client" fairly recently: Postbox. I purchased their "lifetime license" which was offered for a limited time shortly after its release from beta. And already I have dumped it! And they dumped me as well!

Postbox is nice in some ways but also lacking in too many ways. Especially after Thunderbird 3 was released and included virtually all of the "extras" that Postbox originally touted that supposedly separated it from Thunderbird. Only a select few of Thunderbird's extensions work in Postbox, and a few of those even have problems. The Postbox developers - who were actually the original Thunderbird developers - still carry with them the same disdain for extension authors that they did while at Thunderbird. They stress that they do NOT support extensions and that you use even the ones that they list on their site at your own risk. They pointedly do not let any of the extension developers know what changes they are making in Postbox until they are made. Then it's up to the ext. authors to catch up. With TB3 at about the same level feature-wise there isn't much difference at all between the two clients. Postbox developers bragged about their more advanced search features but then TB3 came out with the same search engine. (Both, BTW, fail quite often at simple text searches within the body of the messages.)

They changed their forum software to one which they control tightly. The developers rarely respond to any significant questions or suggestions in the forum, and woe to the users who post about issues there that they would rather not address. After I posted some concerns I felt were too important to gloss over they wrote and told me that it was apparent that I didn't like their software  issued me a refund of my purchase price and told me that I was welcome to continue using Postbox with my "lifetime license" intact.... but they removed my login access to there forum and removed most of my posts that they didn't want there. Email said:

"You can use Postbox in perpetuity, for free. We do ask, however, that you refrain from participating in our forums moving forward.  It's obviously not working out for you, and we cannot afford to spend much more time on the matter."


Cool - Never got kicked out of an entire software before!

Fortunately I only use my email client for my IMAP accounts. The one POP account from my ISP is auto-forwarded to an IMAP account so all my messages are contained in the two IMAP accts, which are both archived by MailStore.

Jim

740

Mini-Reviews by Members / OT---Re: Mini Review of SugarSync and DropBox

« Last post by J-Mac on March 08, 2011, 11:41 AM »

amkbcn,

Your avatar is sooo familiar - not quite Wilma, though. Who is that? Or is it a photo of you?  

BTW, welcome to DC!

Jim

Ahh - Jane Jetson! Takes me a while anymore!!  I knew it was either her or my dear Aunt Peggy...

741

Living Room / Re: Reverse Phone lookup

« Last post by J-Mac on March 07, 2011, 11:38 PM »

Yeah, when I saw all the sites listed in a previous post I recognized most as once-decent free look-ups but AFAIK most had gone to showing you a tiny bit of limited info and offering to show you the rest - with links mostly to Intelius unfortunately.

I actually used to have an account at Intelius but at some point they hooked up with one of those scummy outfits that quietly invoice you monthly or quarterly for some non-existent service. I never got caught up in that but it was enough to keep me away! The shame of it is that if I need to do a background check on anyone now I have to go to one of the expensive firms - and most are really, really expensive!

Thanks!

Jim

742

Living Room / Re: Reverse Phone lookup

« Last post by J-Mac on March 07, 2011, 10:50 PM »

Deozaan, are they listed publicly? I just tried a handful of folks whom I know aren't listed in the public directory (meaning the regular old-fashioned phone company phone book!) and didn't get anything. Also appears that you need a pretty accurate address to search successfully. I put in only the state on some, and only the street without a street number on some.

Of course I probably haven't tried enough to validate or invalidate.

Thank you.

Jim

743

Living Room / Re: The March 2011 6th Anniversary Fundraiser Has Begun! Cheer for Victory Thread

« Last post by J-Mac on March 05, 2011, 02:05 PM »

Cool! We should let mouser take charge of the IRS....   

On second thought, maybe Chris Krainioskoppcialxxit..   errrrrr   

Jim

744

Living Room / Re: The March 2011 6th Anniversary Fundraiser Has Begun! Cheer for Victory Thread

« Last post by J-Mac on March 04, 2011, 01:33 AM »

C'mon all.... Keep it coming! Give up just a few latte's and we'll blow that thermometer up.      

Jim

745

General Software Discussion / Re: Serial Key Storage for Windows

« Last post by J-Mac on March 03, 2011, 12:58 PM »

Thanks Stoic Joker and f0dder!

Jim

746

General Software Discussion / Re: Serial Key Storage for Windows

« Last post by J-Mac on March 03, 2011, 01:03 AM »

Does fSekrit work on Windows 7?

Thanks!

Jim

747

Living Room / Re: Reverse Phone lookup

« Last post by J-Mac on March 02, 2011, 10:20 PM »

Now don’t be too relieved! With just a few dollars almost anyone can still find out almost anything about you. Ever see a report from LexisNexis? Pretty scary!

My comment was mostly just to point out that the reverse lookup sites for the most part are no longer free; they just pass you on now, oftentimes to Intelius.

Thanks!

Jim

748

Living Room / Re: Truly Stupid Email from Companies! Show Us Yours...

« Last post by J-Mac on March 02, 2011, 01:09 AM »

I don't have a copy of the email any more...wish I did...

Back when my daughter was in middle school, I signed up for a service run by a major news radio station where they would contact you by email if the schools in your town were closed or delayed because of snow. I figured this would be a lot faster and easier than tuning in to the station and waiting for them to announce it.

One warm sunny Sunday in late spring, my daughter and I decided to go to the park for a picnic. I was checking my email before we left and received a school closing notification from this mailing list, announcing that my daughter's school would be closed that day because of snow.

Yeah, right...snow on this beautiful warm sunny day.

And the school was closed because of that and not the fact that school is always closed on Sundays?  

-app103 (March 02, 2011, 01:07 AM)

Wow! Was it an accidental sending? Or a "stuck" Outbox? Outlook used to do that back a ways.

Jim

749

Living Room / Re: Truly Stupid Email from Companies! Show Us Yours...

« Last post by J-Mac on March 02, 2011, 12:46 AM »

OH, I have no doubt that Yahoo paid them, as they do for all developers who stick that toolbar in their installers. I just have not seen any other developer notify their users and try to sell the darn thing as a benefit like this!

Jim

750

Living Room / Re: Unsubscribe to 404

« Last post by J-Mac on March 02, 2011, 12:27 AM »

My biggest bitch about Unsubscribe links are the ones where they want even more personal information to unsubscribe you! I started getting emails from, of all people, both the Democratic and Republican political parties, local, state, and national organizations. I never visited their web sites or signed up for anything but I guess someplace did me the "favor" (Grrrr..) of sharing their email list with them. At all levels when I clicked on the Unsubscribe links it brought me to a page where they wanted me to fill out a web form that asked about every bit of personal information imaginable. They supposedly needed it to make sure that I was really me - yeah, right! So they earned an automatic spam report. Now all their emails go to the Junk folder daily.

Another major annoyance was Panda Anti-Virus. Biggest spammer I have ever encountered. I used their online virus scan once several years ago and you had to enter your email address first. Foolishly I entered my daily-use email address. Actually back then I think that was the only address I had; I hadn't started using a throwaway service yet. Spam wasn’t a big problem for me at the time. Boy, did Panda ever give me a wake-up call! Started with a few emails per week but soon grew to daily emails, selling their AV products. The more I tried to get them to stop, the more I received from them. Last I remember I was getting an average of 8 to 10 spam emails daily from Panda, ironically many of which were trying to sell me their new anti-spam program!

Jim