Recent Posts

851

Living Room / Re: WikiLeaks: Important petition for all Australians and supporters of free speech

« Last post by J-Mac on December 13, 2010, 09:43 PM »

Reminds me of the book '8 days of the condor'.
Later made into a movie, '3 days of the Condor'.
Quite prophetic, or was it already in play.

The UK has contributed much to free speech.
How soon is it forgotten?

http://www.phrases.o...upts-absolutely.html

-cmpm (December 11, 2010, 05:09 PM)

OT:  Ahem... That's "Six Days of the Condor"... I still have my original 1974 copy. Great book, and not too bad of a movie.

Thanks!

Jim

852

Living Room / Re: Crime pays - and our governments love it.

« Last post by J-Mac on December 13, 2010, 08:25 PM »

Here's a quick glimpse of the top 14 "Most Shocking" recipients according to Businessinsider.com:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-surprising-things-about-the-feds-emergency-loans-2010-12?slop=1#slideshow-start

(Click on the "View as one page" link at bottom right of the photo).

Jim

853

Living Room / Re: Crime pays - and our governments love it.

« Last post by J-Mac on December 13, 2010, 01:44 PM »

You really should have mentioned that this news is from February 2009. According to a search on Google, most seems to have been in the form of "overnight emergency loans" to member banks and Wall Street firms and supposedly has been since repaid.

More disturbing IMO is the list of whom received money from the financial bail out - like McDonald's, Harley Davidson, Verizon, GE...

Jim

854

Living Room / Re: ESPN AutoPlay settings are fake

« Last post by J-Mac on December 12, 2010, 01:06 AM »

The way they save your settings is with a browser cookie. If your privacy settings are set to remove all cookies at the end of each browsing session, any such site customizations will be lost.

Jim

855

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint: FeedDemon is now adware, but does not disclose it

« Last post by J-Mac on December 11, 2010, 11:15 PM »

I may be reading more into than necessary, though!

-Darwin (December 11, 2010, 11:01 PM)

Ya think?! Can you tell me what the US stock markets will do next month? Wow - I wish I had your abilities!     

Thanks!

Jim

(Just messin' with you, Mikie!)

856

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Database Oasis for $21 on Bits duJour Wed, 4/14/2010

« Last post by J-Mac on December 11, 2010, 10:26 PM »

Same here. I want the report writer capabilities because currently I can't print reports from my databases - which is just plain stupid. Since when if printing reports a Pro-only type feature?! But I'm not going to pay to upgrade the same software twice within a month.

Thanks!

Jim

857

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint: FeedDemon is now adware, but does not disclose it

« Last post by J-Mac on December 11, 2010, 10:23 PM »

Darwin,

I agree with most of your post - except I don’t see as clearly as you why he can't/won't offer a discount to those who purchased the last version of FeedDemon that was a paid version, V.2.

Thanks!

Jim

858

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Database Oasis for $21 on Bits duJour Wed, 4/14/2010

« Last post by J-Mac on December 10, 2010, 12:15 PM »

Sorry about resurrecting this thread but Database Oasis Professional Version was offered at BDJ on Thursday, December 9, 2010 (yesterday) with some unusual circumstances IMO. As posted above I purchased the Basic version of Database Oasis at BDJ in April. The Professional version wasn’t offered at that time. BTW, the term "Professional" as used in this case is a bit misleading as is often the case with software. Some developers try to separate home/personal usage from business/enterprise usage to distinguish Basic from Pro versions of their software. However many just hold back some key features from Basic versions in what I suspect is a ploy to push the more expensive Pro versions to personal users as well as SOHO users. Database Oasis takes this concept to another level! Their Basic and Pro versions are pretty much identical except for a very few features which are in the Pro version only, like filtering by more than one term, the ability to link files to DB records, and a report writer. Other than that they are the same, except for the price: $69.99 for Basic and $119.99 for Pro. I purchased the Basic version in April at the BDJ discounted price of $21.00; great deal! Till I realized that there is no report feature at all in Basic. Look at your data but no reports. Blah! You can print screens and basic list of records but that's it. WTF.

Now the Pro version was on sale at BDJ yesterday for $36.00, which is a lot cheaper than $119.99! And that's even less than the usual upgrade price from Basic to Pro of $50.00! But...

..... it seems that someone noticed that their current Pro version is at 2.97 so might a new major version be on the near horizon? Of course, which is fairly common for really big discounts at BDJ. But in this case I discovered that the major upgrade will be released in January 2011 - just a couple of weeks away. And due to the upgrade the price will be increased. After some coaxing the Database Oasis rep said that they don’t usually offer discounts for the Pro version but the reason for the BDJ discount offer was specifically because of the short remaining life of the current version (yeah, like less than a month!) and no upgrade pricing is available yet. Whatever deals are usually offered to customers who purchased the software in the last 30 or 60 or 90 days - whatever their policy normally is for recent purchases - the BDJ purchasers yesterday would not be eligible.

What a deal, huh? Here's the link to the BDJ page with the Comments section that contains a good bit of the back and forth about upgrades and pricing: http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/database-oasis-professional/#comments . I don’t know; maybe I'm just becoming more jaded in my golden years but this really seems to suck. Just thought I would throw this out there for anyone considering Database Oasis. I'm not saying not to buy it, but just be aware of the sort of pricing games they play.

Jim

859

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Sagelight Image Editor - pay what you want promo (Apil 2010)

« Last post by J-Mac on December 06, 2010, 10:32 PM »

I purchased Sagelight in September - full-price; not the Gizmo promotion - but I cannot remember if it is a lifetime license. I had thought that it was but I can't find anything that says so now. Rob, were previous full-price licenses considered lifetime?

Thanks!

Jim

860

Living Room / Re: What the heck has happened to Google search?

« Last post by J-Mac on December 06, 2010, 01:33 PM »

OK, another complaint about Google Search:

I don’t mind the auto-complete drop-down search term suggestions; they are sometimes useful, saving me a bit of typing if the terms I was going to use are there...

I don’t mind (too much) the spelling correction drop-downs; these mostly occur for me if I am changing the search terms of an existing search and the space between two words is deleted - Google suggests putting the space back in before I get a chance to do so... I usually just ignore those.

But now Google decides that I have misspelled some search words and silently "corrects" it for me! Aaarrgghh!! An example is shown below:

[attachthumb=#1][/attachthumb]

Why do they assume that they know what I want more than I do?!?

I can't find a setting to disable this; just have to be more vigilant.

Thanks!

Jim

861

General Software Discussion / Re: Adobe Acrobat's crop tool is garbage!!

« Last post by J-Mac on December 04, 2010, 01:51 AM »

Is it possible that it is reading your initial single click as a double click? Sounds like...

Jim

862

General Software Discussion / Re: Total Commander and Win7

« Last post by J-Mac on December 04, 2010, 01:48 AM »

Don’t know - I'm running TC from the default folder - C:\totalcmd - but on Win7 32-bit. Maybe it's different for 64-bit?

Jim

863

Living Room / Re: The conflict of interest that is Google

« Last post by J-Mac on December 02, 2010, 01:14 PM »

Corporations are like drug dealers. They give you something for free in order to hook you up.

BTW: This is interesting. Google is next to useless when you are searching for something like a car.

The Incredible Stupidity Of Investigating Google For Acting Like A Search Engine

-rxantos (December 02, 2010, 12:37 PM)

Uhh... maybe it's just me, but... does anyone really expect a Google search for any topic to show links to the results for the same topic on other, competing search engines? That expectation sounds so out of place with, well, everything I have ever expected from a search engine! C'mon, really? This guy truly expected to find results from Bing, Yahoo, and a host of other search engines in his Google search results?

 

Thank you.

Jim

864

General Software Discussion / Re: Need to track missing space on my Hard Drive

« Last post by J-Mac on December 01, 2010, 09:06 PM »

Hi Maureen.

Now I just keep very good and up-to-date backups and also regular disk images with Acronis. BTW I also tried Returnil but it - like most similar apps - take up so much room on my HDD that I eventually give up on them. I have an 80GB SATA drive that the Windows system is installed on and two other internal drives with 500GB each, not to mention external drives. Unfortunately this type of app must keep its partition on the system drive - or so their developers tell me - and that is the smallest drive in my case.

Jim

865

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint: FeedDemon is now adware, but does not disclose it

« Last post by J-Mac on December 01, 2010, 12:56 PM »

Nick Bradbury addressed the issue of v2 license holders receiving upgrade discounts in the comments section of the blog posting about v4. The answer is essentially that they are unable to offer us discounts. So, if you have a v1 or a v2 Pro license for FeedDemom you'll have to upgrade at full-price. I think I'll probably just stick with v.3...

-Darwin (December 01, 2010, 12:25 PM)

Well, you can try but V.3 has been broken a number of times due to Google changing their Reader configuration and Nick has had to release fixes to keep up with it. Won't be seeing those fixes anymore.

Jim

866

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint: FeedDemon is now adware, but does not disclose it

« Last post by J-Mac on December 01, 2010, 10:44 AM »

Same here, Jibz. I paid for a license for FeedDemon 2 - two licenses actually as I also purchased a Windows Mobile license shortly thereafter. If I am locked out of any discount then I'll just keep living without FeedDemon, as I am now.

Thanks!

Jim

867

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Security Essentials

« Last post by J-Mac on November 27, 2010, 12:34 AM »

I just read up on uninstalling Eset NOD32 and it looks like a bear also - have to use their uninstaller/cleaner apparently. (I hate that!)

Jim

868

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Security Essentials

« Last post by J-Mac on November 26, 2010, 12:08 PM »

Thanks all for your comments. All are very helpful.

I'll give the beta a try on one box and see how it goes. 

Jim

869

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Security Essentials

« Last post by J-Mac on November 25, 2010, 11:40 PM »

Thanks Steel. Yes, just the AV for me. I don’t have any problem using the Windows Firewall, plus I am behind a router with SPI so I'm OK there. I really have to at least give it a try, but I did want to see if any actual users of MSE here had any hard issues with it. Sounds like it might work out for me.

Thanks again!

Jim

870

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Security Essentials

« Last post by J-Mac on November 25, 2010, 10:03 PM »

Thank you! That is important to me as I have three internal drives - 1-80GB and 2-500 GB - plus two external drives - 1-1TB and 1-340GB - so a full scan is literally days! However since I started clean and have had NOD32 actively scanning ever since the box is clean.

Well, what I probably will do is replace NOD32 with Microsoft Security Essentials on one machine and see how it works out. If it does well then I will load it on the others as the Eset licenses expire. Five licenses gets kinda pricey!

Thanks!

Jim

871

Living Room / Re: Going online @ DonationCoder on Thanksgiving Day

« Last post by J-Mac on November 25, 2010, 09:02 PM »

Well, I'm here! As always.

Hey, I have no life anyway...   

Jim

872

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Security Essentials

« Last post by J-Mac on November 25, 2010, 01:09 PM »

This thread isn't that old so I hope no one minds me resurrecting it now.  

A couple of my Eset NOD32 AV licenses are coming due shortly (though I also have a few more that have anywhere from 3-4 months to more than a year left on them) and I am looking real hard at Microsoft Security Essentials. Eset has done well for me over the last five or six years but it ain't cheap! Don’t get me wrong: it does a great job and that certainly is more important than cost IMO. Yet if others are doing just as well at considerably lower cost then it would be wise for me to at least take a good hard look at them. Plus Eset is still in the dark ages in a lot of commercial aspects. E.g., though I have five active licenses with Eset - all for NOD32 AV - I still am required to monitor the expiration dates and renew the licenses for all of them separately. I ask every year if they have altered their policies and allow customers to consolidate their licenses so that I would only need to keep an eye on one license expiration/renewal date, but no such nicety appears to even be in their sights. So I must keep monitoring the five expirations and renewals individually. Oh, and they don’t notify you when expiration is approaching. I had a long conversation with Eset support the first time that happened a few years ago and was told that it is up to the user to remember the expiration dates. The tech agreed that this wasn't an optimum situation but he had no control over such things of course. Now they have the tray icon turn yellow when you are within a couple days of expiration, but it only stays yellow for that one session; reboot and it is green again. Plus they simply will not combine licenses and allow multiple licenses to be handled in one account - unless you purchase them that way up front. Of course I added individual licenses as needed so they weren't purchased together.

Anyway, enough on Eset. I would love to use MSE but only if it is truly worthwhile. I have read many reviews and it appears that Microsoft has made MSE into a worthy security program. Earlier reviews though cautioned that users do not have a lot of detailed control over the settings, and that would be a very big potential deal killer for me. I have Eset never clean any file on my computer until after I have reviewed it - they have too significant a history of false positives for me to ever allow NOD32 to delete files as it sees fit. But I read earlier that MSE was similar in that respect. Has this changed with later releases? Is anyone here who is using MSE knowledgeable regarding the "configurability" of MSE's settings? Also, I don’t have Eset scan on a schedule currently; instead I perform a full scan every three months and start it only when I know I can leave the computer alone for at least two days. Yes, two whole days to scan my rig here! Since I have the box actively scanned 24/7, I don’t feel the need to run full scans very often. Does MSE allow me to NOT schedule scans and instead scan manually periodically? Any other major issues I need to know before switching?

Thanks for any info!

Jim

873

Living Room / Re: The conflict of interest that is Google

« Last post by J-Mac on November 23, 2010, 10:39 PM »

Maybe you can all try BING (Because Is Not Google)

Seriously, any business will seek to make a profit (thats the way they pay bills and employees). And the pressure is more on coporations (as they need to show profit to shareholders).  Thus any company will have a conflict of interest, but, as long as there are alternatives,  I do no think there is anything to worry about.

-rxantos (November 23, 2010, 07:10 PM)

I do jump around now to a few different search engines, including Bing. Though my results at Bing are often lacking even more than Google's results lately. I don’t know - the better I get at narrowing down my search terms the worse the results are sometimes. It seems that almost any time I try searching for information about a product - reviews, test results, any info that will help me to make a decision about purchasing - the first couple hundred results are all sites trying to sell the product, not information. It used to be a lot easier to find the info you were looking to find. I'm not certain exactly when it started breaking down but it feels like it was about three to four years ago.

Thank you.

Jim

874

General Software Discussion / Re: My new program : Calibre2Opds

« Last post by J-Mac on November 23, 2010, 12:19 PM »

Sorry for "necromancing" this thread       but what do most use for managing their PDF ebook collections? I just downloaded the latest version of Calibre which calls itself an "ebook management program" but I haven't installed it yet; I wanted to ask first what others here are using and to see if anyone has any comments about Calibre before installing it.

Calibre2Opds looks nice but I don’t have any ebooks in that particular format.

Thanks!

Jim

875

Living Room / Re: The conflict of interest that is Google

« Last post by J-Mac on November 20, 2010, 12:35 PM »

mouser,

This entire thread in a way sounds like WalMart and the loss of smaller, Mom & Pop stores. I know that WalMart has been blasted - in many cases without valid cause - for the way they come into a market and plan out how they will drive local retail establishments out of business before they start creeping the prices up. Very similar to what you are saying about Google's tactics.

Thank you.

Jim