Recent Posts

7451

Living Room / Re: New Time management system from Mark Forster

« Last post by wraith808 on March 14, 2012, 11:47 AM »

I could copy and paste his email but I think that would probably be against his wishes. Hopefully he'll "out" it on his site soon.

If I get the time to have a closer look I'll report back.

-tomos (March 14, 2012, 11:06 AM)

I agree. I don't like his approach - although he may also have a very good reason for doing it this way he hasn't shared with us yet.

And...he is the author...so I think it's only right we respect his wishes and not broadband his emails if we do decide to receive them.

-40hz (March 14, 2012, 11:38 AM)

Oh, I didn't mean the contents of the e-mail (and totally agree with you), but the impressions of the system once you have time to peruse it more closely.

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Living Room / Re: New Time management system from Mark Forster

« Last post by wraith808 on March 14, 2012, 11:03 AM »

^ This.  Maybe someone that has it can give more information?

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Living Room / Re: Paypal: Censors in the name of Profit

« Last post by wraith808 on March 14, 2012, 06:31 AM »

Smashwords PayPal Censorship Update via (Author Steve Perry's Blog)

From Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords:

"Great news.  Yesterday afternoon I met with PayPal at their office in San Jose, where they informed me of their decision to modify their policies to allow legal fiction. Effective last night,we rolled back the Smashwords Terms of Service to its pre-February 24 state."

How about that? Now and then, the Forces of Evil lose a round.

Way to go, Mark.

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Living Room / Re: Whats the point of subcribing to a youtube playlist/show?

« Last post by wraith808 on March 13, 2012, 11:17 PM »

I think playlists can act like channels now, i.e. the subscription lets you know when the playlist is updated- either changed or added to.

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Living Room / Re: Cute jokes' thread

« Last post by wraith808 on March 13, 2012, 08:03 PM »

A husband and wife are shopping in their local Wal-Mart.

The husband picks up a case of Budweiser and puts it in their cart.

"What do you think you're doing?' asks the wife.

"They're on sale, only $10 for 24 cans," he replies.

"Put them back, we can't afford them," demands the wife, and so they carry on shopping.

A few aisles further on along the woman picks up a $20 jar of face cream and puts it in the basket

"What do you think you're doing?" asks the husband.

"It's my face cream. It makes me look beautiful," replies the wife.

Her husband retorts, "So does 24 cans of Budweiser and it's half the price."

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DC Gamer Club / RYG: SecureROM DRM Integrated into Origin, Traces found in ME3

« Last post by wraith808 on March 11, 2012, 04:04 PM »

RYG: SecueROM DRM Integrated into Origin, Traces Found in Mass Effect 3

Reclaim Your Game tweeted that they had found evidence that despite EA's claims to the contrary, they are still using SecueROM, and haven't notified their customers that this is the case.

I have a big problem with this if it's true.  Use whatever form of DRM you want.  But you'd better let me know what you're putting on my system.  There are certain DRM methods that I just don't want to have on my system.  TAGES is one, and SecureROM is the other.  If you have to get your hooks deep into my system, and possibly cause problems, or limit the number of installations I can have, I just avoid the game.  So not to let me know?  That's just wrong...

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Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by wraith808 on March 11, 2012, 03:14 PM »

I just watched an interesting movie too Repo Men (2010)^w.  It's decent movie, if a bit gory.  But a couple of the quotes stuck with me, and reminded me of the excuses given to justify the behavior that goes on towards copyright.

Repo Man justifying what he does

"Now what do you think keeps a world like this ones' sh*t together. It's not magic. It's not. It's rules. It's people abiding by the terms of the deals they sign themselves. It's rules. You know what is more important that the rules though? It's the enforcement of those rules."

Repo Man in his memoirs

"So what is it I'm writing? It's not just some cranky memoir or even an attempt to apologize indirectly for what I've done. This is a cautionary tale. I hope that you might learn from my mistakes because in the end, a job is not just a job. It's who you are. If you want to change who are you have to change what you do."

You can't absolve the people that make the decisions because the company and the rules tell them that this is required.  If you see such decisions being made, you have to have the moral fortitude to stand up to them.  But, when placed in a position where morality conflicts with career, most ignore the morality of the situation.

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini-Review of Fineprint (Virtual Printer)

« Last post by wraith808 on March 11, 2012, 03:00 PM »

I've found them very helpful on that regard also.  When I upgraded to W7, I had problems.  I e-mailed to purchase a new license, figuring I had to upgrade.  I *did* have to upgrade FinePrint, but they told me I could keep using the same version of PDFFactory- that it worked with one change.  I really appreciated that!

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Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by wraith808 on March 10, 2012, 05:41 PM »

None of this will ever go anywhere until both parties to the debate about creator's rights and consumer's rights agree to put the past behind them and stop looking to assign ultimate blame to someone. Because all of  that really is tangential to what all parties to this debate are hoping to accomplish - finding a way out of the mess we've created for ourselves over this.

Both sides have been guilty of selfishness, excess, and dishonesty.

How about clearing the tables and entering into some constructive dialog for a change?

-40hz (March 10, 2012, 12:44 PM)

Well said, and seconded!

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: WebDrive Mini-Review: Caching FTP-to-LocalDrive Mapping Tool

« Last post by wraith808 on March 09, 2012, 03:59 PM »

I still wonder if these tools are made obsolete by the likes of wuala and dropbox.

-urlwolf (March 09, 2012, 03:34 PM)

I guess it depends on your need.  When working with websites that don't have built in FTP, I love using this as it saves me a step.  Dropbox nor wuala solve this problem.  The best use (for me) for this is when you work from things in a variety of locations from tools that don't support those locations.  Also, if you don't *want* to use some service to store your things in the cloud, this really helps.  You can set up your own cloud and not be dependent on others.

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Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by wraith808 on March 09, 2012, 10:30 AM »

In short, the consumer is at least as important as the producer. They have to discuss their relationship and come to an agreement. Attempting to *control* something *generates* the piracy.

-vlastimil (March 09, 2012, 04:06 AM)

+1.  But this idea that you have a *right* with anything intellectual when you have to depend on other people to consume whatever you do with intellectual work is where the insanity comes in.  It's just like a lot of other things today- there is no moderate position.  Whatever happened to not just agreeing to disagree, but compromise?  And to get around it, in a lot of case we say that *they* (pirates, media creators, etc) are worse that we are.  And that it's their fault.  And when the other side is pointed out and explained, we let our emotions get in the way and completely dismiss the statement instead of analyzing it to find out what parts of their mindset we can integrate in order to make their radical stance a bit less radical, and move more towards the center ourselves. 

I think this is one of the failures of our digital world- things move so fast, and we lose such nuances that we are rapidly becoming a world of extremes, and this is one of the cases where that becomes evident.  Both sides have valid points.  And in the case when we were dealing with something physical, we'd have to come to that realization.  Look at the devices we make to consume these digital things- the devices make that compromise, and we don't have the same problems.  Another good example is art.  If it's in a digital format, it's very hard to get someone to pay for it.  However, if it's in a printed form, that possesses a more tangible value, and is easier to get someone to pay for.

This is becoming a rambling treatise, so I'll stop there.  But it is troubling, at least to me.

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: WebDrive Mini-Review: Caching FTP-to-LocalDrive Mapping Tool

« Last post by wraith808 on March 08, 2012, 06:34 PM »

Another choice for this functionality that I'm using (purchased on BDJ): http://www.expandrive.com/

Very similar, and offers  FTP, SFTP AND Amazon S3.  It also offers Putty Pagent integration.  It was cheap, and it just works.

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Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by wraith808 on March 08, 2012, 04:48 PM »

The board of director types see your downloading exactly as that. They see you using megaupload as competing with their not free version.

-rgdot (March 08, 2012, 03:05 PM)

But does that make them right?  Or misguided?  As I said, I don't pirate.  But my buying habits have definitely changed because of their actions.

I had a DVD I bought.  I'd already seen the movie, but I bought it because I liked it.

One night before bed, one scene was on my mind.  So I decided I'd look at the end of the DVD.  I had about 15 minutes before I wanted to be in bed... plenty of time.

I put the DVD in.  First I had to watch the warnings.  In 3 different languages.  With no way to get past them.

Then there were the trailers.  The standard buttons didn't get past them.  I finally figured out how.

Then, it advertised the publisher.  I fast forwarded past it as I couldn't automatically get past them.

I prepared for the menus to come up.  But the warnings came up again.

Long story short, I spent 30 minutes trying to get to the scene I wanted.  But all I ever saw was the promotional material and warnings against copying.

It was at that point that I stopped buying DVDs immediately when they came out.  Not because of that one instance- that was just the straw that broke the camel's back.  But a series of decisions by the same executives came to the point where it reduced me from buying almost every release of action, sci-fi, and many other movies when they came out, to buying them for vastly discounted prices later, to just not watching many theatrical releases on DVD.

So how did their decisions to inconvenience a paying customer result in increased revenues?  It's not just the file sharing people they're alienating.

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Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by wraith808 on March 08, 2012, 03:01 PM »

Protecting their way is part of the "profit". How? they will go down in flames otherwise so lower profits for longer time is better than conceding.

-rgdot (March 08, 2012, 02:19 PM)

How do they know that?  And if they go down in the process because they hung on to the old ways in the interest of protecting perceived profit instead of adapting to change their business model to keep up with their consumers, then don't they lose out in the end?  Because that's the way things are going...

Even the language- conceding instead of serving.  In the end, if you depend upon a consumer for your livelihood, you are in the business of serving, not competing with your clientele.  So in order to serve them (and in the end yourself), it would seem to behoove you to listen to and work with your customers instead of digging your feet in an alienating your client base.

Thoughts?

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Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by wraith808 on March 08, 2012, 02:09 PM »

Living in a society/system where in some jurisdictions public companies are required by law to maximize profits it is almost naive to expect less from them. They will suffer some of the consequences - it is irrelevant how much those consequences are exaggerated by them - but will not stop, guaranteed.

-rgdot (March 08, 2012, 02:00 PM)

But I've heard it's insanity to continue to do the same things and get the same (or worse) results.  Their current tactics are *not* resulting in increased profits.  The amount they spend on lobbyists and the amount of ill-will they create far outweigh the few results they do get.

Even when shown the truth, they still fight against it.  Case in point- Apple wanted to increase the length of the samples available in iTunes because research had shown that this increased purchases. [1], [2]

Even given this, the music industry fought against it, first saying no, then attempting to get performance rights for a 60-90 second clip.  Greed is the only explanation for something that's better for the consumers and the publishers to be held for ransom like this.

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Living Room / Re: For the LULZ or for the FBI? (Get ready to cry...)

« Last post by wraith808 on March 08, 2012, 02:03 PM »

Here's a good Zen koan for would-be revolutionaries: What is the sound of one cell door slamming?

-40hz (March 08, 2012, 01:02 PM)

I like that.  And it doesn't just apply to revolutionaries.  That's one of the main things they show on Beyond Scared Straight... when people come in and are friendly, they show how easy it is to turn them on each other.

7467

Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by wraith808 on March 08, 2012, 12:43 PM »

The tl;dr version - basically:

• Give your customers the opportunity to try your product in full
• Make it available unrestricted
• Make it available to all markets at once
• Price it realistically
• Cut out any unnecessary steps between loading the product and watching/listening/playing it
• Be honest to your customers (both in terms of trailers & PR)
• Add value not blockages
• Make it as easy to buy as it is to pirate.

And accept that not everyone will buy a copy but more will buy it than would have under your current tactics.

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Living Room / Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by wraith808 on March 08, 2012, 12:10 PM »

https://www.insightc...-to-content-creators

One 'pirate' explains why he downloads for free, and how to get his money.

Reading this, I saw echoes of my experience.  When I was a teen with no money, I obtained cracks and warez off BBSes, and distributed it through sneaker-net to my friends.  As I grew older and left college and got a job, I stopped, and started buying to support the industry, because I liked the games they were putting out.

Then it all started to go to crap, as the industry became larger and more exposed to those that wanted to make money and didn't care about games.  I still don't pirate out of principle, but it is very rare that I'll buy new games now.  One, I have a large backlog.  But that's not the real reason.  The game industry itself has made me not buy new titles off the shelf.  For one, there is a lot of signal to noise, especially with the pressure to release on a certain date rather than complete a good game.  For two, because the fact that most games aren't finished and aren't good, they go down in price really quickly.  And for three, because they have started to really overprice games, just for the sake of all of them being at the same price point, and, in the name of one game exec, "because they can".  As the writer points out, the internet took that away- they have to convince the consumers to buy, because their content is not held and their leisure.  I hope that the game industry can learn easier than the movie and recording industries because of the difference in the structure of the industry (i.e. no MPAA/RIAA to tell them that they're right and everyone else is wrong).  But I have my doubts.

One final thing I wanted to highlight, and it echoes something Renegade has been saying for a while:

I will still give you my money if you make me happy. The sad part is there are still times where I would gladly pay for something but the content creator has left me no choice but to download it. Techdirt seems to post a story like that once a week. I'm not going to deny myself the enjoyment of your creation just because you haven't figured out how to collect.

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General Software Discussion / Re: In search of: Tool to show multiple (hard drive) temperatures in the system tray

« Last post by wraith808 on March 02, 2012, 06:54 PM »

I like Speed fan but it cannot show multiple tray icons (one for each hd) -- at least as far as i can tell.

-mouser (March 02, 2012, 04:41 PM)

I don't think multiple icons, but it can show the temps for all in one icon, IIRC.

We have a winner.  CrystalDiskInfo is free and great. 

My system tray: (see attachment in previous post)
Thanks Nigel!

-mouser (March 02, 2012, 05:49 PM)

Cool... glad you found something!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Superboyac is throwing in the towel: I'm going to transition to Linux

« Last post by wraith808 on March 02, 2012, 06:49 PM »

A timely article on Lifehacker: How to Find the Perfect Linux Distribution for You.

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General Software Discussion / Re: In search of: Tool to show multiple (hard drive) temperatures in the system tray

« Last post by wraith808 on March 02, 2012, 04:21 PM »

HD Sentinel Pro is larger and more expensive than you'd probably want, but I still wanted to recommend it; though it does a lot, the footprint is still small and it is portable.  Other than that, of course there is SpeedFan.  I've used both, and they both will do what you want (except for the color change on speedfan).

There was also a thread on Tom's hardware a while ago, and there were several recommendations:
HDDTemp
Hardware Sensors Monitor
Argus Monitor
SensorsView (google it- it was blocked from work as malicious services, so I didn't want to post the link)

I didn't any of them (I used speedfan at the time), but I figured I'd pass the recommendation on.

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Living Room / Re: Stiff sentence for sending child to wrong school district

« Last post by wraith808 on March 02, 2012, 08:08 AM »

As a rule I detest the "what about the children" defense

-Stoic Joker (March 02, 2012, 06:40 AM)

I had to take this opportunity to inject this PSA:

NSFW

Fuck The Children! (courtesy of George Carlin)

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Living Room / Re: Stiff sentence for sending child to wrong school district

« Last post by wraith808 on March 01, 2012, 07:11 PM »

Did she deserve to go to jail?

Purely on the charge of sending her kid to school where she shouldn't have? I personally don't think so. And neither does anybody else I've talked to.

As far as the drug possession and sale charges go, reaction is mixed. Almost everybody I talked to thought 12 years was very harsh, but that automatically suspending it after 5 actual years served was reasonable. I still think it's a little heavy. But I'm dubious about the value and effectiveness of incarcerating people for long periods of time unless they've committed an act of extreme violence and we're concerned they'll do it again if released. But that's just me.

-40hz (March 01, 2012, 03:58 PM)

Let's not forget that there is a child here.

True story.  My cousin was shot and killed by his wife.  They showed that though it might have started as an argument, that she put the gun against his head and fired after she shot him from across the room and severed his spinal cord.  She was found guilty.

His own mother plead for leniency.  Why?  Because she was not a career criminal.  Because sending her to jail wouldn't bring him back.  But most of all, she had come to know the woman, and knew that her four kids would be put into the system while their mother was in jail for a crime that she would never commit again.

If we're really about rehabilitation, and getting people out of the system, the effect on the children should be considered.  Should these people not be punished?  No.  But is jail an effective punishment or deterrent in cases like these?  Studies have proven otherwise....

...and what about the child?  After being in the system, there is a higher than normal chance that he will stay in the system, either as a dependent of the social services program, or incarcerated just like his mother.

We are all of us pieces in many different hidden games.

-40hz (February 29, 2012, 06:36 PM)

*sigh* 

-wraith808 (February 29, 2012, 08:53 PM)

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Living Room / Re: Paypal: Censors in the name of Profit

« Last post by wraith808 on March 01, 2012, 01:43 PM »

I have personal premier and I always get fees for incoming money.

-mahesh2k (March 01, 2012, 01:24 PM)

You have to explicitly say that it is for a personal transfer.  There's an option that you select... I can't remember what it is right now.

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Living Room / Re: Software Alliance's FRAND proposes to have Free software outlawed in the EU?

« Last post by wraith808 on March 01, 2012, 01:42 PM »

Hey, I think my circle is funnier.

...ok, not...