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User: JediTrainer

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  1. Re:Brother printers are your friends. on Lexmark Sues 24 Companies Over Toner-Cartridge Patents · · Score: 1

    You can fight this nonsense by not buying Lexmark, Canon, HP, Epson, etc.

    Must depend on the Canon printer. I've got one that's happily working away, that simply uses an optical sensor to see if the ink is low. Granted it's old (Pixma MP750 - I think about 5 years old now) but it's been a great workhorse. Ink cartridges run about $16-18 CAD. Should be trivial to refill, from the looks of them, but at that price point I don't need to bother.

  2. Re:What a coincidence on RIAA President Says Copyright Law "Isn't Working" · · Score: 1

    You know, when individuals start to exhibit this kind of behavior we stick them in a padded room somewhere with medication and therapy till the symptoms go away :)

    Or we charge them with mischief?

  3. Re:Tech is still Tech, yucko! on The 'Net Generation' Isn't · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm in the late 20s/early 30s bracket, the gen who grew up having to fiddle with DOS just to get games to run.

    Oh the memories (me too - same age bracket here)

    Tweak the order in which things will load in your config.sys and autoexec.bat. Work like hell to squeeze that extra few k out of your memory. Special boot disks just to play one game. Practice your swear words trying to get the Gravis UltraSound to work properly as a Sound Blaster emulator. Goddamn it, I bought a new game that needs 45MB and my whole hard drive only has 80 - beg, borrow, steal space. Stacker is a godsend. No, it's not - doesn't work nearly as well as advertised. Goddamn it, I'm out of IRQ ports. Plug and play will never work, no way, no how. And we liked it that way.

    Now get off my lawn :)

  4. Re:I'll probably be dead by then, right? on 1-in-1,000 Chance of Asteroid Impact In ... 2182? · · Score: 1

    Imagine the fireworks! Talk about going out with a bang...

    Some choose not to wait

  5. Re:I don't get it. on To Ballmer, Grabbing iPad's Market Is 'Job One Urgency' · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Really? Ask Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBaseIII, Netscape, and countless other companies what fat lot of good the early lead did for them?

    I'm no giant MS fan, but at the same time with most of these should serve as an example as to why if you're in the lead, you can't rest on your laurels. Stop innovating, and your product becomes inferior over time. Your competition will catch up (and with that momentum, quickly leave you in the dust). I stuck with Wordperfect, Lotus and Netscape for the longest time. I resisted, but eventually the realization came that something better has come along and everyone else has moved on already.

    So I used IE for a while. Then Firefox came along. Et al, et al.

  6. Re:Yes and no... on Oracle's Java Company Change Breaks Eclipse · · Score: 5, Funny

    It'll be even more fun when they decide to rename the com.sun.* packages :)

  7. Re:death by manhole cover? on AI Predicts Manhole Explosions In New York City · · Score: 1

    They should just put them on bungee cords so they shoot into the air and then slam back down in place.

    Now that we can detect when they will occur, I'm smelling a new opportunity for a Darwin Award winner....

  8. Re:Canada doesn't have any saturday deliveries on Amazon Opposes Plan To End Saturday Mail Delivery · · Score: 1

    Not Canada Post, not FedEx, not UPS, not DHL, not Purolator. Nobody delivers on saturday except pizzerias.

    Swiss Chalet, FTW! :)

  9. Re:Cosmic rays, my ass. Occam's Razor time. on Tracking Down a Single-Bit RAM Error · · Score: 1

    I agree, but I would start thinking even simpler. My wife and I had all sorts of weird issues with our computers a few years back.

    My biggest clues were that the issues all appeared shortly after we moved, and with 2 out of 3 of our machines.

    Long story short, after much hair pulling, a decent UPS solved the problem. Our machines were acting weird and random things weren't working because of unclean power, and apparently the PSUs weren't tolerating this all that well.

  10. Re:Now What? on Intel Says Farewell To PCI Bus · · Score: 2

    I still have my two ISA Gravis UltraSound cards (1 MB DRAM! Whoo!) that I can't bear to throw away. Sigh.

  11. Re:No, it's just HP bei on HP Explains Why Printer Ink Is So Expensive · · Score: 1

    I've got a Pixma MP750 (it takes 5 cartridges). Had it for 5 years now - the original print heads are still working great. Photos are still coming out of it looking good (though I don't print pictures often, it's nice to still be able to).

  12. Re:So what? on Hacking Automotive Systems · · Score: 1

    I thought those types of explosives were only armed when you hit 50 or so. They blow up when your speed drops below 50.

    Think I saw a documentary on that once... name escapes me. Velocity? Momentum? Something like that. I think I saw it during a bus trip.

  13. Re:Horizontal vs. vertical space on Canonical Bringing an Instant-On Ubuntu · · Score: 1

    Ugh. Indeed but I think the problem is more widespread. To my dismay, Excel 2007 makes it really, really hard to open up two separate Excel windows. You can open two documents within the same Excel instance, yes. But it looks really awful when I'm trying to use my dual-monitor setup as God intended. Was never an issue with MS Office 2003.

    Window Managers and applications should be capable of elegantly handling widescreen and dual-monitor situations by now.

  14. Re:Pokeberries? on Purple Pokeberries Yield Cheap Solar Power · · Score: 2, Funny

    Thank you for that. You just made my day.

  15. OneNote + Sharepoint on Simple CMS For Mixed Mac/Windows Team? · · Score: 1

    OneNote as a desktop app, linked as a shared notebook on Sharepoint.

    Everything dropped into OneNote can be easily managed through drag+drop. Works offline with synchronization when online. Auto-merges most things at the paragraph level (and has ability to manually merge other stuff). Sharepoint can handle the version control and you can fish older versions of each document out of there if needed.

    Much content can be thrown in there (text, emails, screenshots dumped from clipboard, whatever), annotated and/or drawn over, and external files can be dropped right into it or linked via URL.

    Using it internally for our team and it's bloody fantastic. The issue we had trying other CMSs (including various types of Wikis, shared folders, vanilla Sharepoint etc) is that they're tedious to use, therefore they don't get used. Our staff love using OneNote so it's being used extensively now. Don't know about its search capability (both OneNote and SP have search but I have no idea how good they are) but we have our folder layout carefully chosen so we can find what we need pretty quickly.

    Have even used it recently on a larger project to assign tasks, with milestones and due dates, each one linked to their corresponding Bugzilla ticket that the owners can update as needed. For our small team this worked pretty well.

    Not sure about sharing, but some ideas: OneNote can email individual pages as needed, or you could create separate notebooks per client (and let Sharepoint handle the security). Or you could print to PDF and email that out as well. Depends on what your needs are whether this would be a good fit.

  16. Re:how about cellphones first? on Japan To Standardize Electric Vehicle Chargers · · Score: 1

    Funny thing, that. The idea that USB automatically gives me the ability to swap plugs. Then I made a discovery:

    I have a TomTom ONE XL, and a Motorola RAZR (yes, it's old). Both have mini USB connectors.

    Both will happily charge off the Motorola car adapter. Yet the TomTom adapter will only charge the TomTom (the RAZR will say 'unable to charge' connected to the TomTom cigarette lighter adapter).

    Seems that proprietary connectors are still possible if the plug refuses to give the device enough juice, depending on the device. I'm not quite sure how they pulled that off, or whether the TomTom adapter simply doesn't provide the amount of power that the cell phone is requesting. Maybe someone who knows something about these plugs could comment?

  17. Re:Print Screen on Does Your PC Really Need a SysRq Button Anymore? · · Score: 1

    Both still add an unnecessary step if I can do all of this at the point of capture. If it's just for one image, then fine. Gets pretty tedious if I need to do 100 for a manual.

  18. Re:Print Screen on Does Your PC Really Need a SysRq Button Anymore? · · Score: 1

    I'm aware of this as well, but alt-printscreen still suffers from two things

    1 - being unable to capture part of a window (w/o cropping). Happens all the time when doing documentation

    2 - being unable to capture multiple windows side by side, if I want to illustrate an overlay of some sort

    Being able to select an area of the screen to capture to clipboard is infinitely more useful

  19. Re:Print Screen on Does Your PC Really Need a SysRq Button Anymore? · · Score: 1

    Yes, I'm aware of that tool. I guess I shouldn't have digressed so much, but screen capture wasn't the primary reason why I wanted OneNote on Linux - the anecdote was more of a side note.

  20. Re:Print Screen on Does Your PC Really Need a SysRq Button Anymore? · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't even bother with that anymore. If you have it, OneNote puts a better screengrabber into Windowkey+S which lets you select the part of the screen that you want to capture (no more cropping!)

    I managed to get that part of OneNote working on Ubuntu as well, although through the tray icon instead of the hotkey. Unfortunately most everything else that I need in OneNote remains broken under the version of CrossOver I have.

  21. Re:Divergent Interests on Best Open Source Business Tools? · · Score: 1

    Guess what? SAP doesn't work the way the way the really big business who use it want either. They change their entire business process to use SAP.

    But that's not how it's sold. The business is adopting best practices, you see.

  22. Re:Presumably... on Synthetic Stone DVD Claimed To Last 1,000 Years · · Score: 1

    LOL

    "Writing is easy. Someday I hope to learn how to read."

  23. Re:How Much Damage? on Unknown 7m Asteroid Almost Impacted Earth · · Score: 1

    What about tsunamis?

  24. Re:joystick vs k&m on Toyota Experimenting With Joystick Control For Cars · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wicked. Hold down ALT and now I can strafe to parallel park.

  25. Re:Software freedom is "really the way to go". on IBM's Answer To Windows 7 Is Ubuntu Linux · · Score: 1

    Well to be a bit fair the guy is talking about how awesome open source is when it benefits him and how much more awesome closed source is when it benefits him. Not that I mind the infighting, but it sounds pretty hypocritical to me too.

    There's a time and place for everything. I don't understand why everyone is getting so hung up on this when the fact is that he is using the libraries as the original creators intended. They were licensed to allow this. Sometimes you don't have the option of going open source with your own code, but you can find other ways to contribute to OSS (like bug reports or patches returned to the authors of libs you use, or donations or whatnot). Who's to say he's not doing that?

    Why does it have to be so black and white?