Yeah, I forgot to mention I was talking about the Windows version.
I read about manually changing resolutions by modifying the config file. However, to begin with, setting that to a widescreen mode led to situations where the area you needed to click to continue to next level was off-screen.
They apparently hacked together a fix for that, but from what I've read it's still cuts off parts of the screen, just not enough to render the game unplayable.
Indeed. It's idiotic of Windows to not simply remember icon positions per resolution.
In my case it's further complicated by running a dual screen setup. All sorts of fun stuff happens to my secondary screen when the primary one lowers its resolution.
Unfortunately that would not solve my widgets issue. Also, I run another application (Fences) that interferes with other icon positioning apps. I've sent them a bug report on that, hopefully they'll get it fixed.
True. One could argue the widgets should figure out when things return to normal and reposition themselves, and that the same should go for how Windows handles icon positions.
But they don't. Which means I either have to forego this one game, or accept the hassle of manually fixing my desktop every time I play it. It's a pretty easy choice.
I think the game seems well worth its asking price (from the three times I played the demo), and the lack of DRM should be encouraged, but I'm not going to buy a game I'm not going to play.
Yes, I read about this workaround in the forums. At that time it cut off parts of the visible area making the part you need to click to finish a level unavailable.
Apparently they hacked together a fix so "not as much" is cut off making it possible to finish the levels. Last I read there were still issues though.
I assumed they would make a proper fix, so I decided to wait for that rather than take the chance at the time. Apparently they have decided not to do so, and unless they've updated the demo to the new code I'd have no way of testing the workaround before buying.
I see you completely ignored what I wrote. It doesn't _matter_ how great the game is, if running it leads to me having to reorganize my desktop afterwards each time.
I would have bought it if it had properly supported current resolutions. I kept tabs on it a few months but eventually gave up waiting for it to happen.
Any game that won't run on my desktop resolution, I steer clear of. It messes up my desktop icons and widgets and resorting those afterwards every time is too annoying to be worth it.
I have to wonder how two apparently experienced game developers could overlook such an apparently small issue. Is it really very tricky to do?
People vote based on a single issue they feel strongly about all the time. This would be no different.
It's important for democracies that "silly" parties like this can be formed, and that they can be voted on. Otherwise how will you send your message with your vote if none of the regular parties are taking your stance?
They'll never get a significant amount of votes, but they might get enough to show the parties that there are voters out there that feel strongly enough about this to "waste" their vote. That means there are certainly a lot more that feel almost as strongly about it. And that might contribute in shaping another party's policies for the next election. From what I've gathered their message isn't "everything should be free", it's that the current copyright legislation is about as suited to current technology and trends as the flat earth society.
The embarrassment here is that the movie industry is making the exact same mistakes the music industry did. They have no service that comes even close to the speed and convenience of illegal downloads. When they do dip their toes into digital distribution, it's inevitably as low quality streaming services. Where is the non-DRMed HD file I can put in my hard drive based media jukebox? Why do we still have region codes? I think it's been pretty well proven they are totally ineffective. Will it be another decade before digital distribution of movies moves over to the side of sanity like music has started to do lately (though they too are struggling with the whole region thing still)?
At least Blu-ray protection is getting close to as transparent as DVD protection. The tools are there and easy enough to use that I finally feel comfortable enough to buy Blu-rays. It's still bloody annoying having to pay for software to secure my own access to the movies I've bought though. Almost enough to refuse to buy any even now. But only almost.
Where I live we just broke a 70 year old record for snowfall in a given period. I see no sign of global warming making this place snowfree anytime soon.
I keep my car running 24/7 to try to help it along, but I still have to shovel the snow _upwards_ when clearing it off the roof.
Recently read that the ski resorts in the Alps are also struggling with the highest snow fall in a decade.
I'm not disagreeing, in principle. What I started out trying to say was that if it's between UAC, and an application, UAC will pretty much always lose.
With UAC like it is now I rely on people fixing their apps to prevent it from appearing. With whitelisting capabilities in UAC I could "fix" those apps myself and let UAC run. It doesn't do me much good if those apps get fixed a few months after release. Once UAC is off odds are it will remain that way.
But that's just it, in my Win7 beta, they do. That doesn't mean the applications won't behave differently on release, but currently I have at least three applications that do it (and I've probably used Win7 less than five hours total, so god knows how many of my daily applications do it that I haven't even tried there yet).
If we were to play devil's advocate, none of us would ever be able to turn on our computers. Who knows what kind of bugs could be lurking just waiting for the magical combination of things to manifest itself.
Back on point. I've not needed UAC before, I don't _need_ it now. But I'm all for an extra layer of security as long as it stays out of my way as much as at all possible.
If it's going to keep nagging me whenever I start some application I use several times a day, UAC will lose the battle between whether to kill UAC or stop using the application. It doesn't matter to me whether it's UAC being stupid or the application requesting elevation it doesn't really need.
So, the options here in my case are: Lower security a bit by allowing users that claim they know what they're doing to white-list some applications (by all means, make it a manual registry tweak to enable for all I care) - or get turned off completely.
I should add that I'm fine with all of this being UAC settings and keeping it working like now by default.
That way UAC specifying _what_ the application is trying to elevate in order to do won't confuse the average user, while giving me the information I need to make a judgement.
At some point you have to trust something. I've installed and ran thousands of applications over the past few decades, never has one included a time bomb that suddenly turned it into an evil machine-destroying demon.
If this by some miracle became a common thing to do for application developers, well, that's what we have anti-malware software for.
Point is, it _is_ an issue. It wouldn't be if UAC would let me tell it I trust the application I'm about to run, and accept that I won't be changing my mind about that between now and the next time I choose to start it.
I don't have a computer for the OS it runs, I have it for the applications. I'm not going to stop using an application because its developer can't wrap their heads around how to not trigger UAC. I'll disable UAC. Which defeats the purpose completely, as opposed to allowing me to selectively defeat its purpose for the applications I choose. If UAC is finely grained enough, there should be no problem with it alerting me if the application tries to elevate to do something it has never attempted before. So it won't alert me cause of some updater triggering the UAC, cause I told it not to, but it will when it tries to format my drives.
Bottom line, I know better than UAC. If not, it'd never need ask me anything at all. All I'm asking is for it to stop asking me again and again about the same thing. If it won't, I'll turn it off and either use a third party HIPS, or nothing at all.
We can always dream of them sitting down and agreeing upon one way of doing things. Or for Microsoft/Apple to lay down the law and make an "application update" API and forcing developers to use it.
But what they could do, right now, is use the scheduling service included in the OS. Instead of starting processes and leaving them running. Hell, I currently have three GoogleUpdate.exe processes running. THREE! God, Google, get a grip.
Bibblepro does an excellent job for me and my Canon 350D, including with tethered shooting. It's not free, but neither is the Windows software you're using:)
True, nothing is free. But on the other hand there's no way to avoid paying whatever part of the price of the camera that's covering the cost of the included software.
Bibble does not even support my camera's RAW yet (it's been available since November). I assume that will get sorted at some point, as for live view I have my doubts. It doesn't seem to have it for any of the other cameras that has this functionality (though my source is a single Google and a peek at their home page so I may be wrong)
Honestly, I think your requirement of a GUI is short-sighted here. Backup configuration is much better done with configuration files, and the actual backup process is ideally headless so it can be run from a cron job.
I don't share your opinion. I want a GUI to manage my configuration in. I see no sense in having an application where I can't use its GUI to manage my exclusions, for example. I also want to be able to select and mount images etc, of course. And I want to be able to pop it up and start a backup when it suits me, not on a schedule.
I don't really care about whether it uses an image or something else. I do care about being able to add a blank drive, boot from CD, show it image and a less than an hour later rebooting to that drive and have it start up exactly as my OS was when I did the backup. No fiddling.
You'll have to tell me what those are before I can tell you if there are equivalents.
Not worth the time for either of us really. I have all I need now in Windows and am not in the market for trying to make the switch at the moment. But I have made efforts in the past to try to find Linux equivalents for some of those. While it was possible to get the basics covered for most of them, the Linux versions were extremely immature.
Now there I can't even comment. I'm staying far, far away from Blu-ray until it's thoroughly hacked and I can copy the movies to my video server as easily as I can with DVDs.
That's exactly what that does. Well, no, it's not one-click. It does decrypt and rip for you though. After that I just remux into an mkv container for my jukebox (it's a bit shaky on m2ts).
It's just in trial here so far, but the "test family" for my ISPs 1Gbit connection has so far managed to measure 920Mbit on it.
Unfortunately, the details are rather slim. All they say about the specifics is that they had a very hard time digging up a way of managing to utilize the bandwidth. My personal guess is they finally found a popular enough torrent to seed. Since they specified the test was done on upstream speed.
Of course, it's a far cry between a single family having it and them opening it up for their entire customer base. Currently the max they offer without having to get approval on a case-by-case basis is 50Mbit (up/down).
I'm sorry that, even though you really want to run XP and keep trying to make the switch, find it lacks the application and hardware support you require.
Maybe you'll have better luck with Windows 7. Keep trying!
The only major obstacle in the face of Microsoft really is public perception that "Vista sucks"; and most of the people who think it sucks haven't even tried it, and won't.
You know what they say, it takes a long time to build trust, seconds to ruin it.
The release state of Vista *did* suck. And why should anybody that did try it, and hated it, bother trying it again at this point? There's not exactly an ocean worth of vital "Vista-only" software or hardware around. With Windows 7 almost certainly less than a year away, it makes no sense at all to spend money on Vista at this point.
Gee, I wonder if this online service might have some sort of - I don't know - webpage, maybe, that contains that kind of information?
Oh. My. God! It does! Who would've thunk it.
Dropbox is supported on Windows XP and Vista (32 and 64-bit), Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, as well as Ubuntu 7.10+ and Fedora Core 9+.
We've also had users report success running Dropbox on Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Gentoo as well as several other distributions of Linux. While Dropbox may work just fine on other platforms, we don't officially support them.
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They fixed the showstopper. Before they did you were unable to finish a level in most (all?) widescreen resolutions.
The problem is widescreen resolutions. Checked the Goo forums just now and the latest patch still cuts screen so you see less than in 800x600.
For non-widescreen higher resolutions it seems to be working fine now.
Yeah, I forgot to mention I was talking about the Windows version.
I read about manually changing resolutions by modifying the config file. However, to begin with, setting that to a widescreen mode led to situations where the area you needed to click to continue to next level was off-screen.
They apparently hacked together a fix for that, but from what I've read it's still cuts off parts of the screen, just not enough to render the game unplayable.
Indeed. It's idiotic of Windows to not simply remember icon positions per resolution.
In my case it's further complicated by running a dual screen setup. All sorts of fun stuff happens to my secondary screen when the primary one lowers its resolution.
Unfortunately that would not solve my widgets issue. Also, I run another application (Fences) that interferes with other icon positioning apps. I've sent them a bug report on that, hopefully they'll get it fixed.
True. One could argue the widgets should figure out when things return to normal and reposition themselves, and that the same should go for how Windows handles icon positions.
But they don't. Which means I either have to forego this one game, or accept the hassle of manually fixing my desktop every time I play it. It's a pretty easy choice.
I think the game seems well worth its asking price (from the three times I played the demo), and the lack of DRM should be encouraged, but I'm not going to buy a game I'm not going to play.
Yes, I read about this workaround in the forums. At that time it cut off parts of the visible area making the part you need to click to finish a level unavailable.
Apparently they hacked together a fix so "not as much" is cut off making it possible to finish the levels. Last I read there were still issues though.
I assumed they would make a proper fix, so I decided to wait for that rather than take the chance at the time. Apparently they have decided not to do so, and unless they've updated the demo to the new code I'd have no way of testing the workaround before buying.
I see you completely ignored what I wrote. It doesn't _matter_ how great the game is, if running it leads to me having to reorganize my desktop afterwards each time.
No game ever released is worth that hassle to me.
I would have bought it if it had properly supported current resolutions. I kept tabs on it a few months but eventually gave up waiting for it to happen.
Any game that won't run on my desktop resolution, I steer clear of. It messes up my desktop icons and widgets and resorting those afterwards every time is too annoying to be worth it.
I have to wonder how two apparently experienced game developers could overlook such an apparently small issue. Is it really very tricky to do?
People vote based on a single issue they feel strongly about all the time. This would be no different.
It's important for democracies that "silly" parties like this can be formed, and that they can be voted on. Otherwise how will you send your message with your vote if none of the regular parties are taking your stance?
They'll never get a significant amount of votes, but they might get enough to show the parties that there are voters out there that feel strongly enough about this to "waste" their vote. That means there are certainly a lot more that feel almost as strongly about it. And that might contribute in shaping another party's policies for the next election. From what I've gathered their message isn't "everything should be free", it's that the current copyright legislation is about as suited to current technology and trends as the flat earth society.
The embarrassment here is that the movie industry is making the exact same mistakes the music industry did. They have no service that comes even close to the speed and convenience of illegal downloads. When they do dip their toes into digital distribution, it's inevitably as low quality streaming services. Where is the non-DRMed HD file I can put in my hard drive based media jukebox? Why do we still have region codes? I think it's been pretty well proven they are totally ineffective. Will it be another decade before digital distribution of movies moves over to the side of sanity like music has started to do lately (though they too are struggling with the whole region thing still)?
At least Blu-ray protection is getting close to as transparent as DVD protection. The tools are there and easy enough to use that I finally feel comfortable enough to buy Blu-rays. It's still bloody annoying having to pay for software to secure my own access to the movies I've bought though. Almost enough to refuse to buy any even now. But only almost.
No. I do, however, see a problem with your humor-gene.
Where I live we just broke a 70 year old record for snowfall in a given period. I see no sign of global warming making this place snowfree anytime soon.
I keep my car running 24/7 to try to help it along, but I still have to shovel the snow _upwards_ when clearing it off the roof.
Recently read that the ski resorts in the Alps are also struggling with the highest snow fall in a decade.
We clearly need bigger cars.
I'm not disagreeing, in principle. What I started out trying to say was that if it's between UAC, and an application, UAC will pretty much always lose.
With UAC like it is now I rely on people fixing their apps to prevent it from appearing. With whitelisting capabilities in UAC I could "fix" those apps myself and let UAC run. It doesn't do me much good if those apps get fixed a few months after release. Once UAC is off odds are it will remain that way.
The three I've noticed so far are O&O Defrag, Xfire and manually starting an Avast update check.
But that's just it. It doesn't.
But that's just it, in my Win7 beta, they do. That doesn't mean the applications won't behave differently on release, but currently I have at least three applications that do it (and I've probably used Win7 less than five hours total, so god knows how many of my daily applications do it that I haven't even tried there yet).
If we were to play devil's advocate, none of us would ever be able to turn on our computers. Who knows what kind of bugs could be lurking just waiting for the magical combination of things to manifest itself.
Back on point. I've not needed UAC before, I don't _need_ it now. But I'm all for an extra layer of security as long as it stays out of my way as much as at all possible.
If it's going to keep nagging me whenever I start some application I use several times a day, UAC will lose the battle between whether to kill UAC or stop using the application. It doesn't matter to me whether it's UAC being stupid or the application requesting elevation it doesn't really need.
So, the options here in my case are: Lower security a bit by allowing users that claim they know what they're doing to white-list some applications (by all means, make it a manual registry tweak to enable for all I care) - or get turned off completely.
I should add that I'm fine with all of this being UAC settings and keeping it working like now by default.
That way UAC specifying _what_ the application is trying to elevate in order to do won't confuse the average user, while giving me the information I need to make a judgement.
At some point you have to trust something. I've installed and ran thousands of applications over the past few decades, never has one included a time bomb that suddenly turned it into an evil machine-destroying demon.
If this by some miracle became a common thing to do for application developers, well, that's what we have anti-malware software for.
Point is, it _is_ an issue. It wouldn't be if UAC would let me tell it I trust the application I'm about to run, and accept that I won't be changing my mind about that between now and the next time I choose to start it.
I don't have a computer for the OS it runs, I have it for the applications. I'm not going to stop using an application because its developer can't wrap their heads around how to not trigger UAC. I'll disable UAC. Which defeats the purpose completely, as opposed to allowing me to selectively defeat its purpose for the applications I choose. If UAC is finely grained enough, there should be no problem with it alerting me if the application tries to elevate to do something it has never attempted before. So it won't alert me cause of some updater triggering the UAC, cause I told it not to, but it will when it tries to format my drives.
Bottom line, I know better than UAC. If not, it'd never need ask me anything at all. All I'm asking is for it to stop asking me again and again about the same thing. If it won't, I'll turn it off and either use a third party HIPS, or nothing at all.
We can always dream of them sitting down and agreeing upon one way of doing things. Or for Microsoft/Apple to lay down the law and make an "application update" API and forcing developers to use it.
But what they could do, right now, is use the scheduling service included in the OS. Instead of starting processes and leaving them running. Hell, I currently have three GoogleUpdate.exe processes running. THREE! God, Google, get a grip.
the one thing that will make me consider not turning it off. A "do not ask again for this application" checkbox.
Come on. Every firewall/HIPS system I can remember trying the past decade or so has an option to remember the answer.
This obviously won't work for settings, but for when starting an application? God, it's so needed.
Bibblepro does an excellent job for me and my Canon 350D, including with tethered shooting. It's not free, but neither is the Windows software you're using :)
True, nothing is free. But on the other hand there's no way to avoid paying whatever part of the price of the camera that's covering the cost of the included software.
Bibble does not even support my camera's RAW yet (it's been available since November). I assume that will get sorted at some point, as for live view I have my doubts. It doesn't seem to have it for any of the other cameras that has this functionality (though my source is a single Google and a peek at their home page so I may be wrong)
Honestly, I think your requirement of a GUI is short-sighted here. Backup configuration is much better done with configuration files, and the actual backup process is ideally headless so it can be run from a cron job.
I don't share your opinion. I want a GUI to manage my configuration in. I see no sense in having an application where I can't use its GUI to manage my exclusions, for example. I also want to be able to select and mount images etc, of course. And I want to be able to pop it up and start a backup when it suits me, not on a schedule.
I don't really care about whether it uses an image or something else. I do care about being able to add a blank drive, boot from CD, show it image and a less than an hour later rebooting to that drive and have it start up exactly as my OS was when I did the backup. No fiddling.
SnagIt. Camtasia. Newsbin Pro. Spotify. LogMeIn. ObjectDock. Widgets.
You'll have to tell me what those are before I can tell you if there are equivalents.
Not worth the time for either of us really. I have all I need now in Windows and am not in the market for trying to make the switch at the moment. But I have made efforts in the past to try to find Linux equivalents for some of those. While it was possible to get the basics covered for most of them, the Linux versions were extremely immature.
Now there I can't even comment. I'm staying far, far away from Blu-ray until it's thoroughly hacked and I can copy the movies to my video server as easily as I can with DVDs.
That's exactly what that does. Well, no, it's not one-click. It does decrypt and rip for you though. After that I just remux into an mkv container for my jukebox (it's a bit shaky on m2ts).
It's just in trial here so far, but the "test family" for my ISPs 1Gbit connection has so far managed to measure 920Mbit on it.
Unfortunately, the details are rather slim. All they say about the specifics is that they had a very hard time digging up a way of managing to utilize the bandwidth. My personal guess is they finally found a popular enough torrent to seed. Since they specified the test was done on upstream speed.
Of course, it's a far cry between a single family having it and them opening it up for their entire customer base. Currently the max they offer without having to get approval on a case-by-case basis is 50Mbit (up/down).
I'm sorry that, even though you really want to run XP and keep trying to make the switch, find it lacks the application and hardware support you require.
Maybe you'll have better luck with Windows 7. Keep trying!
The only major obstacle in the face of Microsoft really is public perception that "Vista sucks"; and most of the people who think it sucks haven't even tried it, and won't.
You know what they say, it takes a long time to build trust, seconds to ruin it.
The release state of Vista *did* suck. And why should anybody that did try it, and hated it, bother trying it again at this point? There's not exactly an ocean worth of vital "Vista-only" software or hardware around. With Windows 7 almost certainly less than a year away, it makes no sense at all to spend money on Vista at this point.
Gee, I wonder if this online service might have some sort of - I don't know - webpage, maybe, that contains that kind of information?
Oh. My. God! It does! Who would've thunk it.
Dropbox is supported on Windows XP and Vista (32 and 64-bit), Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, as well as Ubuntu 7.10+ and Fedora Core 9+.
We've also had users report success running Dropbox on Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Gentoo as well as several other distributions of Linux. While Dropbox may work just fine on other platforms, we don't officially support them.