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826

Living Room / Re: I hate Valentine's Day!

« Last post by Darwin on January 24, 2010, 08:44 AM »

I lived in US (New England) for a year with an american family - on valentines day they made cards (no bought cards!) for parents & grandparents (& possibly for friends as well - it was years ago so no longer 100% sure) - I thought it was really nice & presumed it was typical for over there, but reading this thread that doesn't seem to be the case...

-tomos (January 24, 2010, 03:45 AM)

Can't speak for the US... Oh crap, who am I kidding? I can - we're inundated with American advertising and television - ANY holiday, on either side of the border, is crass, commercial, devoid of its original context... Valentine's cards, candy, and advertising were in the stores here (western Canada) by the first week of January. The two biggies, though, are Christmas and Easter.

827

Living Room / Re: I hate Valentine's Day!

« Last post by Darwin on January 23, 2010, 01:46 PM »

How about a day for sad and depressed singles?

It all really annoys me - Christmas (nothing to do with Christianity), Easter (all about bunnies and eggs for some reason), Valentines Day (aka commercial and sick making crap day), Mothers Day (bastardised regligious day), Fathers Day ('cos mothers had one and Dad's felt left out).

When's my F*****G day?

-Carol Haynes (January 22, 2010, 07:19 PM)

In South Korea they cater to everyone, they have Red day (Feb. 14), White day (March 14) and Black Day (April 14):

Red day: guys take gals they like out
White day: gals take guys they like out
Black day: those who were not asked out go out and eat Chajang-myun, which is Korean-Chinese food (black bean sauce with vegetables over noodles).

I've probably bungled that a bit, but that's the essence, anyway...

828

Living Room / Re: I hate Valentine's Day!

« Last post by Darwin on January 23, 2010, 01:36 PM »

Easter (all about bunnies and eggs for some reason)

-Carol Haynes (January 22, 2010, 07:19 PM)

Wonder no more, Carol!

Why do we associate chicks and eggs with church doctrine? Why do we color Easter eggs and arrange them carefully in Easter baskets? We're glad you asked.
The Easter holiday dates back to a pagan holiday called Ostara, a holiday dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility. Over time, language changes changed the spelling (and pronunciation) from Ostara to Easter. Legend has it that Ostara, wanting to please some children, changed her pet bird into a rabbit; the rabbit then laid colored eggs for the children. The children wove birds' nests out of grass and put the colored eggs inside. Then, the children continued the ritual yearly, thinking that having colored eggs in the baskets brought good luck.

Finally, I've found another use for the practice reading comprehension passages in the SSAT Prep Book that I use with my students!

829

Developer's Corner / Re: Resources for learning git?

« Last post by Darwin on January 23, 2010, 11:44 AM »

O/T - I thought being a git came to all men of a certain age?

-Carol Haynes (January 23, 2010, 11:38 AM)

I suspect that most North Americans won't be familiar with the term "git"...

830

General Software Discussion / Re: FinePrint vs. priPrinter

« Last post by Darwin on January 20, 2010, 06:03 PM »

Hmm... interesting, Curt. I wonder if "current" means "beta" and that if you find you want the Pro version of 3 when it goes live that you'll also find that you have to pay that 40 Euro premium?? I have licenses for FP 6 and for Clickbook 12... I don't know why I even care about any of this...

831

General Software Discussion / Re: FinePrint vs. priPrinter

« Last post by Darwin on January 20, 2010, 04:53 PM »

Ouch!

Professional Edition

priPrinter 3 comes in two variations - a Professional Edition and a Standard Edition and are available for 64.95 Euro  and 24.95 Euro respectively.

The Professional Edition of priPrinter 3.0 includes all of the functionality of the Standard Edition with the following additional features:

    * PDF output directly from priPrinter application.
    * Text redaction, highlighting, coloring and deletion.

Thanks for clarifyling that, Carol   I had visited the beta page before, but hadn't scrolled down far enough.

EDIT: PS Ouch again! To upgrade to the Pro version will cost (gasp!) 40 euros!

832

General Software Discussion / Re: FinePrint vs. priPrinter

« Last post by Darwin on January 20, 2010, 03:35 PM »

payment type; free e-mail addresses are accepted for those payment types. Alternatively, you can place your order via fax for manual processing. However, since online orders are processed automatically, they take less time than fax orders.

my emphasis

payment company is shareit.com - I guess they do it for security, but they must lose *so much* business because of it...

-tomos (January 20, 2010, 07:42 AM)

This always gets me, too. Perhaps you are meant to remove "are" from the web address?

EDIT: fixed quote formatting

833

General Software Discussion / Re: FinePrint vs. priPrinter

« Last post by Darwin on January 20, 2010, 03:33 PM »

I've looked through the developer's website (priPrinter) and cannot find any mention anywhere of a Pro version.

@Curt: when I visit Bits Du Jour I get offered a 51% discount, from $39.43 to $19.71:

834

General Software Discussion / Re: Just discovered a HUGE annoyance in Windows 7

« Last post by Darwin on January 19, 2010, 09:09 AM »

Ditto for me, WRT folder sharing with XP. It was one checkbox but it only worked about 30% of the time, and this was when networking three XP machines. Drove me nuts. Haven't had a problem with 7 and Vista.

835

General Software Discussion / Re: Ready Boost?

« Last post by Darwin on January 18, 2010, 03:53 PM »

f0dder - my experience now and a year ago when I last ran it are pretty much in accord with your views. I *think* eBoostr *might* be useful on XP or Win2k systems with USB 2.0 ports and fast USB drives in the same way that Ready Boost is useful on low powered Vista and Windows 7 machines. If I had USB 2.0 ports on my Win 2k machine (512MB RAM) I'd test this hypothesis, but sadly, I do not... Of course, this supposes that Win2k would benefit from more than 512MB RAM - I've never had a problem with Win2k on this configuration, but then I'm not running any memory intensive software, other than Office 2003.

At any rate, to reinforce my comment from my last post: eBoostr doesn't do anything that I can see on a system with "adequate" amounts of RAM installed (to paraphrase those old Bentley commercials  ).

836

General Software Discussion / Re: Just discovered a HUGE annoyance in Windows 7

« Last post by Darwin on January 18, 2010, 09:10 AM »

- so what may be the reason cmpm and tranglos are having a quite different experience?

Oh, yes, that really IS the question, isn't it

-Curt (January 18, 2010, 09:00 AM)

Like Carol, I upgraded from Vista (Ultimate) to Windows 7 (Ultimate). I did this on October 12 and have had no problems whatsoever. I *think* the answer to Curt's question probably lies in the fact that we both upgraded from clean Vista installs (I believe Carol did a clean Vista install, as I did) whereas cmpm and tranglos upgraded from XP, no?

837

General Software Discussion / Re: Ready Boost?

« Last post by Darwin on January 18, 2010, 09:03 AM »

Don't really have to wait a week... I uninstalled the beta last night (because of a perceived conflict with another piece of software) and rebooted. This morning I've replicated the "stressed" working environment that I was tooling around with last night and can't "feel" any difference. Bottom line for my system is that it is very responsive with either eBoostr installed or not...

FWIW, I'm going to give it another go as I discovered today that the conflict that I thought I had identified last night was a bug in the beta version of VIPRE's AV/AS that I am running. I don't really expect the outcome to be much different, though.

Sorry to have taken this thread off-topic (I think). I originally posted thinking that cmpm was specifically asking about eBoostr, but reading through it - particularly his OP - it appears that I was wrong.

838

General Software Discussion / Re: Ready Boost?

« Last post by Darwin on January 17, 2010, 12:59 PM »

To quote one of my favourite of Hirudin's phrases, for "shits and giggles" I installed the beta of version 4 and am giving it a whirl under Windows 7 64 bit. I've installed it, rebooted, and created two 4GB caches. I've moved both VueMinder Pro and Firefox 3.6 beta to the caches and will see if Firefox is better behaved. I'll report back in a few days with the results. I remain skeptical about how useful eBoostr will be under 7, but we'll see...

PS Have now enabled the System Memory cache as well, so I'm now using the default recommended settings. Note: the developers claim that hidden system memory (presumably the difference between 4GB and what is used by Windows 32-bit systems) can be used as well. I can't test this because my only 4GB machine is running Windows 7 64-bit...

839

Living Room / Re: Snow Leopard - Slow Network Printing

« Last post by Darwin on January 17, 2010, 12:24 PM »

Okay Joker's asking a Mac Question, and yes you're all allowed to laugh at me for it...

-Stoic Joker (January 17, 2010, 12:10 PM)

Sorry, couldn't resist...  

840

General Software Discussion / Re: Ready Boost?

« Last post by Darwin on January 17, 2010, 12:18 PM »

Does ebooster disable windows built in Superfetch?
Also the limits of Vista are removed in W7 (which is really a Vista overhaul) from what I read.
Of course anything can be said on the net.

-cmpm (January 17, 2010, 10:25 AM)

Can't answer either of those questions as I've not used eBoostr under either Vista or Windows 7 and have never even tried ReadyBoost under Windows 7 (did try it briefly under Vista, though).

Note: eBoostr 4 is in beta and promises:

...full Windows 7 compatibility and an exciting new option of using hidden system memory for caching.

eBoostr 3 is touted as enabling:

Vista’s ReadyBoost and SuperFetch benefits on your Windows XP PCs;

841

Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by Darwin on January 17, 2010, 11:50 AM »

How about 17 page long threads filled with nothing but people griping?

-Innuendo (January 17, 2010, 11:12 AM)

842

General Software Discussion / Re: Ready Boost?

« Last post by Darwin on January 17, 2010, 10:12 AM »

ReadyBoost is built into Windows 7. Inserting a usb stick will trigger the option to use the stick for Ready Boost if the stick can be used for it, which mine can.

-cmpm (January 17, 2010, 09:30 AM)

Yes, and in Vista as well. When I moved from 2GB to 4GB of RAM, I also upgraded (by virtue of buying a new notebook) to Vista 64 bit. At this point, I did try ReadyBoost, but couldn't see any benefit to it. I never did try eboostr under Vista/Windows 7 - hardly seemed worth it.

Perhaps there are some usb sticks specifically designed for Ready Boost, I don't know.

-cmpm (January 17, 2010, 09:30 AM)

I don't know if there are sticks specifically designed for ReadyBoost, but there are definitely sticks labelled "ReadyBoost Capable" or something along those lines. I have two such Sandisk drives. The rating has to do with the transfer speeds that the USB drive are capable of maintaining. I have a couple of older Kingston drives and ReadyBoost rejects them as being too slow. eBoostr will allow you to use these slower drives. It will also allow you to use whatever number of caches, of any size, that you like, whereas ReadyBoost limits you to a single cache, not to exceed 4GB. This is one (or is that 2?!) reason to use eBoostr under Vista/7.

843

General Software Discussion / Re: Ready Boost?

« Last post by Darwin on January 17, 2010, 08:56 AM »

I ran it under XP Pro Sp-3 with 2GB of RAM. I bought an early license for the Pro version and received two years of upgrade protection. During the first 8 months, I rand v.1, v.2. and started beta testing v.3. With the right USB thumb drive (ie one rated for ReadyBoost), I saw a small benefit in terms of overall system stability. Once I moved to a main system running 4GB of RAM I stopped using it. It's definitely no substitute a RAM upgrade...

844

Living Room / Re: Need NAS Enclosure recommendation

« Last post by Darwin on January 14, 2010, 07:59 AM »

(Via WLAN.)

-Tuxman (January 14, 2010, 05:55 AM)

Don't expect to get super high performance enhancements from a new NAS device if you're going to access it over WLAN...

-f0dder (January 14, 2010, 07:44 AM)

Agreed - I tried two different NAS enclosures in late 2008 over my WLAN and they were ULTRA disappointing. f0dder's a master of understatement here because the speeds I was seeing over G Wireless were slower than USB 1.1, which means that of the 150GB of data that I wanted to write to the drives, only about 500MB had written after about three hours. Of course, I might be exaggerating a bit here - I didn't keep notes - but take it from me, it was slow. Slower than molasses running uphill in January.

845

General Software Discussion / Re: Has anyone discovered any cool Windows 7 third-party utilities?

« Last post by Darwin on January 14, 2010, 07:15 AM »

can anyone recommend a simple startup utility (I mean that you can check/control what's starting with the OS) for 64bit Win7 ?

-tomos (January 14, 2010, 06:00 AM)

I use WinPatrol Pro (which comes with a lifetime license), but there is a free version as well. Works very well.

846

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: AnVir Task Manager 5.0.4 at GOTD

« Last post by Darwin on January 13, 2010, 12:51 PM »

The subscription fee for AnVir Task Manager Pro is also steep, in my humble opinion - I haven't bothered since the year that I got courtesy of a DC discount ran out. For that matter, I no longer have it installed, either.

847

General Software Discussion / Re: At last: MP3 Lossless!!!

« Last post by Darwin on January 13, 2010, 12:27 PM »

So,
can anyone recommend the least damaging way to rip CD's to mp3 (with preferably a reasonably priced or free app) ??  ...seeing as it looks like the MP3HD sounds (har har :p) like a bit of a dead dog

-tomos (January 13, 2010, 12:07 PM)

Presumably, you mean the least lossy way, no? I don't think it is possible to physically harm the media itself when ripping CD's.

848

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by Darwin on January 11, 2010, 10:59 PM »

when you said "slightly" you weren't kidding.

-mouser (January 11, 2010, 04:20 PM)

[img]https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/esmileys/gen3/4Medium/LaughAtYou.gif[/img

Very catty...

849

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

« Last post by Darwin on January 10, 2010, 01:51 PM »

Welcome, vaib! I hope that you do find the time, if not for coding, at least for exploring and interacting on DC 

850

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

« Last post by Darwin on January 10, 2010, 09:07 AM »

Welcome, FCM and John-Paul