Ok, so what is the program? In terms of advanced photoediting I've heard of Photoshop, Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP. GIMP is free but not really windows oriented, the rest are more than $50 last I checked. I like having a powerful photo editor, and don't necessarily like ripping off companies. Do you have an evaulation version? Or at least screenshots on the web? Your program sounds like it might hit that niche of doing what I want when I occaisonally mess with digital camera pics etc... for a price I might be willing to pay(if it truly meets my needs and feels worth the price).
I thought about getting PSP awhile ago but I got used to photoshops interface in college classes, and that's what I was taught to use. Photoshop elements sadly doesn't actually have the photoshop interface(you know same pallet stuff just less filters or what have you) so I won't buy that.
Interestingly enough in my college - BSC, Res Life says they cannot come into our dorms unless we are there. I wanted verizon to come in and fix my phone, but they wouldn't do it unless I was there(these verizon people actually work on/for the college), and I couldn't even give them permission to do so.
But that is missing the point that in their class (and to some extent above that class) Wal Mart has some of the best service along with low prices.
Compare to the other national chain(that I am aware of) K-mart. At Wal Mart, you can almost always find an employee that is able and sometimes even happy to help you find what you are looking for. At K-mart, you are lucky if you can find anyone who is not at a register with 5 people in line.
Warrenty - Wal Mart warrenties most non consumables for 1 year. They even gaurentee those 7 year lightbulbs for the 7 years. Now I'm not saying walmart is losing money on this, but they make the manufacturers live up to the claims on the box.
K-Mart? - You have to buy an extended warrenty, or it's manufacturers only.
Returns - Much easier than any other store I have ever gone to. You don't need a recipt, they just need to scan the barcode to see if it was sold there. The refund is in cash, you can exchange it by buying another of the same item with the money they just gave you.
K-Mart, Bon-Ton, Circuit City etc... - you need a recipt. You have to be back withing 7,10,14,30 days depending on what it is you are returning. They often don't do refunds, but give you "store credit". I'm sorry, but store credit is to refunds what flex time is to overtime. Give me the real deal!
Indeed they do exist. I am one of them. I have never called the help desk, and only went there once when their campus wide login was on the fritz, but it blipped back by the time I got any attention.
And I do wish more ports were open, but if they aren't, well - that's what port 80, 443 etc and tunnels are for.
If there's a problem with their webpage(there is, an outdated sniffer script) so it doesn't render properly in Opera, I don't call the helpdesk, I email the web admin with the information about the script being broken, and where they can find an updated version of that script(by the script developer) ONCE, then I just have proxomitron rewrite(or spoof IE in this instance) the page on the fly from then on.
If my computer foobars, I restore a recent drive image (you do back up right?). Fixed in under an hour. I certainly have NO interest in any tech support as they always waste my time, and have no idea what I am talking about. Many won't let you describe the issue and what steps you have taken already, and get lost at the concept that there are web browsers besides IE, and e-mail clients beside Outlook Express.
Interestingly in a good college this is different. I went to RIT for a while, and their sysadmin classes were 9 weeks of linux, and 1 week of here's windows, you ought to be able to click it to what you need with what you know of linux and of using windows at home.
I'm not arguing data backup here, nor storage. That of course is useful.
But the company isn't marketing this as a storage device, they are selling it as the new movie medium. So most people aren't going to care if a movie medium holds 8GB or 1TB, they will care how good it looks, what extras it has, and how many shows, movies or whatever is on it.
I was under the impression that kilo meant base^3 so because computers use base 2, then... I get confused. Why is kilo for computers 2^10?
Anyway, it has to do with powers, so no 2^x will give you 1000. Besides, it also seems like false advertising, how many users understand why their 160GB drive is 149GB in windows? It's not just formatting, and explaining differences in measuring by base 10 vs base 2 to some power is beyond where you ought to have to go.
But the point is that the entertainment industry doesn't do this.
Take CD's, we all know they can usually hold 18-22 songs, but how many Albums have more than 12 songs? Some of the greatest hit's ones, often it is 10 songs, about the same # that fit on an LP.
What about MP3 CD's? There are plenty of MP3 CD players being sold by many manufacturers, but I've never seen an MP3 CD for sale in Walmart. Here they could fit 140 songs or so on that CD, but they don't.
What about the - say Anime DVD's? They put 2-3 episodes on one DVD, where 6 will fit easily with extra features.
So just what precedent makes you think they will ever release an entire season of episodes on one disc?
But one thing I have to ask is, will this format actually look higher quality on a normal TV? Cause if it doesn't no-one will upgrade till HDTV or whatever becomes far more commonplace.
Hell, the average person cannot tell the difference on a TV of a DVDShrink transcoded disc to 47% quality and an original DVD disc. It's a limitation of the standard TV's. On a computer screen it looks like crap, but on TV looks the same.
My point then is that, this may be 1000 times better quality, but if you need the next resolution leap past 1080p to see it, quality will not sell the players and discs.
And convienience won't either. DVD's were a major step up from VHS. Noticable quality, sound, no reqwinding or wearing out/strectching of the tape, smaller, easier seeking/skipping etc.
But what do these have over DVD? They are the same size, and presumably will have the same navigation abilities. The quality improvement won't be noticable on the next generation system of audio and video, much less what is in homes now, and for at least 5 yrs to come I would guess. So what makes these attractive?
All 3 LOTR extended edition movies and appendicies on one disc? Ok there that is a draw, but really - how many movies are just - hollywood homocide - not epic, not a trilogy, no real interesting advances to make it... So no big extras. So what is the draw?
Maybe your experiance is different from many others. For instance:
it loads fast(er).
The first load is actually the same ~3-5 seconds depending on load on the computer with Opera 7.54. However, Opening a new tab in Opera is instant, another IE window is another 3 or so seconds, plus it spends time re loading the same page I already have up.
it renders pages well.
That often depends on the page. It also is dog slow compared to Opera on my machine, often 2-5x slower - though this varys by a lot depending on spyware and other machine config.
it handles plugins well.
I always had problems with java and IE6, none with Opera. Otherwise, you are right... however so does every other browser I've tried(handles plugins just fine).
tabbed browsing isn't all that hot.
Many can't live without it, myself included. I got into it to beat pop-ups, now its for the lighter/faster browsing experiance.
but i like to quickly, conviently, reliably access the web
Well, so do I, but IE for me is slow as hell, inconvienient as I have to keep opening more windows/closing them, watch for pop-ups, wait, wait,wait, and hope it doesn't crash.
in a properely maintained and secured environment
But how do you do that when just browsing to a certain page - sometimes major sites - compromises you?
I'm sure our experiances with IE have been different, but one of my definitions of a properly securied environment is one in which IE can't get past the firewall unless monitored by a sysadmin.
I find the most effective spam blocker is DEA's. You either use something like spamex with it's bookmarklet(well worth the 9.95 a year to me) or get an ISP that provides the service(more and more do), or do it with your own Domain/E-mail server.
Then, DON'T ever use your real e-mail address. Make a new DEA for every e-mail address you have to give out, and turn it off if it starts getting spam, or when you're done with it.
Also, use some common sense about where you place an e-mail address.I have to use a DEA for every online purchase, but only once got spam from the account, and rarely get monthly e-mails from the company I bought from - and those opt out easily in my experiance.
Conversly, when I used a DEA for Usenet posts, I got spam in a matter of minutes, but just turned off the account.
But then you have the problems that RR and other cable co's at least do not support connection problems with any network on the other side, IE they make you take out the router if your connection goes down.
Well, I'm certainly not stupid, but every time I put XP on the net - dialup or broadband, without a software firewall already installed, it has blaster or some other worm before I can even begin to connect to windows update, much less install the multitude of patches. I'm talking less than 30 seconds here. You must be very lucky.
Well, I use Sygate 5.5 and think it is great compared to ZA, much lighter on the resources, no "privacy" features I just have to turn off as Opera through proxomitron has no privacy issues.
The main problem with Sygate is that it does not notice changes to programs that access the net through a proxy - a possibly security flaw, depending on your knowledge. I may give tiny a try because of it's more powerful sandboxing features, but for now Sygate 5.5 is fine for me.
What I've started doing to majorly improve my system performance while keeping the fast searching and backup is this. Take the indexing and backup out of running constantly, and instead have it run every night or every few nights when I am asleep.
To do this, I disable the windows features, and use MaxLister and Ace Macro for searching/indexing at scheduled times, and Drive Image 2002 for backups. Granted, I can't use my computer while either is running, but I find that I'm not fighting a slow computer all the time - and if I have these run at say 3 in the morining, I'm sleeping anyway.
Plus, I trust restoring a drive image much more than a windows system restore. I can also have multiple images and switch back, foward or "sideways" if I want.
Yeah, the best price for reliable, speedy downloads I've ever seen would get you only 10,000MB for your $10 (www.streamload.com). I can't imagine anything working without some per MB charge nowadays (though at the above rates it'd be 1/10 a cent per MB)... Of course with iTunes this is worked into the per song cost.
Of course, if someone could work in some decent per song cost to deliver right to a service like StreamLoad(A huge online storage space) I think it would be great. A basic monthly fee, say 10-15 cents a song(what I would be willing to pay if I am forgoing the CD, Case, Liner Notes etc...) and a continual online backup for your music.
Yeah, I've been learning how useful it is for a fast search in my bookmarks in Opera, and I've been trying for forever about to get decent search across my "offline" media i.e. CD's etc. Putting two and two together for searching leaves me with thinking maybe searching my harddrives would be more productive than wondering if I stored that install in my FTP server directory, or my downloads directory, or maybe on Drive G cause I needed that much extra space or my desktop cause I was in a hurry with the downloader....
As you can see, I try and organize things, but sometimes it could be in multiple directories. So rather than looking in each myself, why not have the computer do it for me. All I have to do now is start naming things somewhat descriptively.
I always wondered why MS built in search is painfully slow... I really don't know why. And why it's indexing has to run all the fricken time, I turn that off right away.
So, that leaves me with a 3rd party solution. The best I've found so far is MaxLister as freeware and being pretty competent as software. It's indexing is fast, it's searches are near instantanious, it remembers what databases you searched last so I can just have a "global" search always set up... The only thing I don't like is I have yet to figure out how to have it reindex certain drives every 12 hrs or so. I would guess it can't as it is primarily designed for removable media. I hope I can come up with some sort of macro or something just for my hard drives, but probably not.
OT, but as to your signature - I can't comment on Kerry's plan as I have no idea what it is.
However, I don't know what Bush's plan is either, especially as he isn't supposed to release the next term plan till the RNC as I understand it.
I can only comment on what I have seen Bush do, in my experiances.
One, he has stated a desire (And carried it out once) to attack any country that might be against us - especially in the middle east. This seems like it could easily expand across the globe - and is hardly a good strategy.
Two, he seems to support various laws or ammendments designed to limit civil liberties, privacy rights, and research. IE The stalled ammendment to prevent same sex marrige, the ban on federal support for stem cell research, USAPATRIOT act.
Three, his plan seems to be to remove many environmental protections, IE Clean Water act change, Suddenly pulling out of Kyoto convention, drilling in the artic wildlife reserve.
Four, cutting taxes, raising spending hugely - run up a huge deficit. Also, the tax cuts for a middle american seem unclear to me, I recieved a check for $400 but then my tax return (on unchanged income and circumstances as far as I can tell) was $1000 less than previous years. I don't feel like I got a tax break.
Five, Geneva Conventions violations at guantanimo bay. Holding people without charges, indefinately.
Overall, if his plan is at all close to his actions (and not just hugely bungled) than I certainly don't think he's a good choice for maintaining the American Ideal.
If he meant to do something else - the famous no nation building promise from his campaign - and ended up with this, I am almost more scared. It would be like I set out to make a cake, and ended up with a car. Of course I don't know what his original plan was, but poor execution seems to be a very bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
[2] As always, IE-only.
But not when running on OSX I would guess.
Ok, so what is the program? In terms of advanced photoediting I've heard of Photoshop, Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP. GIMP is free but not really windows oriented, the rest are more than $50 last I checked. I like having a powerful photo editor, and don't necessarily like ripping off companies. Do you have an evaulation version? Or at least screenshots on the web? Your program sounds like it might hit that niche of doing what I want when I occaisonally mess with digital camera pics etc... for a price I might be willing to pay(if it truly meets my needs and feels worth the price).
I thought about getting PSP awhile ago but I got used to photoshops interface in college classes, and that's what I was taught to use. Photoshop elements sadly doesn't actually have the photoshop interface(you know same pallet stuff just less filters or what have you) so I won't buy that.
Interestingly enough in my college - BSC, Res Life says they cannot come into our dorms unless we are there. I wanted verizon to come in and fix my phone, but they wouldn't do it unless I was there(these verizon people actually work on/for the college), and I couldn't even give them permission to do so.
But that is missing the point that in their class (and to some extent above that class) Wal Mart has some of the best service along with low prices.
Compare to the other national chain(that I am aware of) K-mart. At Wal Mart, you can almost always find an employee that is able and sometimes even happy to help you find what you are looking for. At K-mart, you are lucky if you can find anyone who is not at a register with 5 people in line.
Warrenty - Wal Mart warrenties most non consumables for 1 year. They even gaurentee those 7 year lightbulbs for the 7 years. Now I'm not saying walmart is losing money on this, but they make the manufacturers live up to the claims on the box.
K-Mart? - You have to buy an extended warrenty, or it's manufacturers only.
Returns - Much easier than any other store I have ever gone to. You don't need a recipt, they just need to scan the barcode to see if it was sold there. The refund is in cash, you can exchange it by buying another of the same item with the money they just gave you.
K-Mart, Bon-Ton, Circuit City etc... - you need a recipt. You have to be back withing 7,10,14,30 days depending on what it is you are returning. They often don't do refunds, but give you "store credit". I'm sorry, but store credit is to refunds what flex time is to overtime. Give me the real deal!
Indeed they do exist. I am one of them. I have never called the help desk, and only went there once when their campus wide login was on the fritz, but it blipped back by the time I got any attention.
And I do wish more ports were open, but if they aren't, well - that's what port 80, 443 etc and tunnels are for.
If there's a problem with their webpage(there is, an outdated sniffer script) so it doesn't render properly in Opera, I don't call the helpdesk, I email the web admin with the information about the script being broken, and where they can find an updated version of that script(by the script developer) ONCE, then I just have proxomitron rewrite(or spoof IE in this instance) the page on the fly from then on.
If my computer foobars, I restore a recent drive image (you do back up right?). Fixed in under an hour. I certainly have NO interest in any tech support as they always waste my time, and have no idea what I am talking about. Many won't let you describe the issue and what steps you have taken already, and get lost at the concept that there are web browsers besides IE, and e-mail clients beside Outlook Express.
Interestingly in a good college this is different. I went to RIT for a while, and their sysadmin classes were 9 weeks of linux, and 1 week of here's windows, you ought to be able to click it to what you need with what you know of linux and of using windows at home.
I'm not arguing data backup here, nor storage. That of course is useful.
But the company isn't marketing this as a storage device, they are selling it as the new movie medium. So most people aren't going to care if a movie medium holds 8GB or 1TB, they will care how good it looks, what extras it has, and how many shows, movies or whatever is on it.
I was under the impression that kilo meant base^3 so because computers use base 2, then ... I get confused. Why is kilo for computers 2^10?
Anyway, it has to do with powers, so no 2^x will give you 1000. Besides, it also seems like false advertising, how many users understand why their 160GB drive is 149GB in windows? It's not just formatting, and explaining differences in measuring by base 10 vs base 2 to some power is beyond where you ought to have to go.
Yeah, even Streamload, a MAJOR online filestorage company only has I believe 4.5 Petabytes of storage.
But the point is that the entertainment industry doesn't do this.
Take CD's, we all know they can usually hold 18-22 songs, but how many Albums have more than 12 songs? Some of the greatest hit's ones, often it is 10 songs, about the same # that fit on an LP.
What about MP3 CD's? There are plenty of MP3 CD players being sold by many manufacturers, but I've never seen an MP3 CD for sale in Walmart. Here they could fit 140 songs or so on that CD, but they don't.
What about the - say Anime DVD's? They put 2-3 episodes on one DVD, where 6 will fit easily with extra features.
So just what precedent makes you think they will ever release an entire season of episodes on one disc?
But one thing I have to ask is, will this format actually look higher quality on a normal TV? Cause if it doesn't no-one will upgrade till HDTV or whatever becomes far more commonplace.
Hell, the average person cannot tell the difference on a TV of a DVDShrink transcoded disc to 47% quality and an original DVD disc. It's a limitation of the standard TV's. On a computer screen it looks like crap, but on TV looks the same.
My point then is that, this may be 1000 times better quality, but if you need the next resolution leap past 1080p to see it, quality will not sell the players and discs.
And convienience won't either. DVD's were a major step up from VHS. Noticable quality, sound, no reqwinding or wearing out/strectching of the tape, smaller, easier seeking/skipping etc.
But what do these have over DVD? They are the same size, and presumably will have the same navigation abilities. The quality improvement won't be noticable on the next generation system of audio and video, much less what is in homes now, and for at least 5 yrs to come I would guess. So what makes these attractive?
All 3 LOTR extended edition movies and appendicies on one disc? Ok there that is a draw, but really - how many movies are just - hollywood homocide - not epic, not a trilogy, no real interesting advances to make it... So no big extras. So what is the draw?
Interestingly enough, at least since 1986, when I can remember back to.
Maybe your experiance is different from many others. For instance:
it loads fast(er).
The first load is actually the same ~3-5 seconds depending on load on the computer with Opera 7.54. However, Opening a new tab in Opera is instant, another IE window is another 3 or so seconds, plus it spends time re loading the same page I already have up.
it renders pages well.
That often depends on the page. It also is dog slow compared to Opera on my machine, often 2-5x slower - though this varys by a lot depending on spyware and other machine config.
it handles plugins well.
I always had problems with java and IE6, none with Opera. Otherwise, you are right... however so does every other browser I've tried(handles plugins just fine).
tabbed browsing isn't all that hot.
Many can't live without it, myself included. I got into it to beat pop-ups, now its for the lighter/faster browsing experiance.
but i like to quickly, conviently, reliably access the web
Well, so do I, but IE for me is slow as hell, inconvienient as I have to keep opening more windows/closing them, watch for pop-ups, wait, wait,wait, and hope it doesn't crash.
in a properely maintained and secured environment
But how do you do that when just browsing to a certain page - sometimes major sites - compromises you?
I'm sure our experiances with IE have been different, but one of my definitions of a properly securied environment is one in which IE can't get past the firewall unless monitored by a sysadmin.
Right out of The art of War.
I find the most effective spam blocker is DEA's. You either use something like spamex with it's bookmarklet(well worth the 9.95 a year to me) or get an ISP that provides the service(more and more do), or do it with your own Domain/E-mail server.
Then, DON'T ever use your real e-mail address. Make a new DEA for every e-mail address you have to give out, and turn it off if it starts getting spam, or when you're done with it.
Also, use some common sense about where you place an e-mail address.I have to use a DEA for every online purchase, but only once got spam from the account, and rarely get monthly e-mails from the company I bought from - and those opt out easily in my experiance.
Conversly, when I used a DEA for Usenet posts, I got spam in a matter of minutes, but just turned off the account.
But then you have the problems that RR and other cable co's at least do not support connection problems with any network on the other side, IE they make you take out the router if your connection goes down.
So, wait - you can do most(all?) of Tiny Personal Firewall's sandbox features with some windows feature? Is this easier or harder than using TPF?
Well, I'm certainly not stupid, but every time I put XP on the net - dialup or broadband, without a software firewall already installed, it has blaster or some other worm before I can even begin to connect to windows update, much less install the multitude of patches. I'm talking less than 30 seconds here. You must be very lucky.
Well, I use Sygate 5.5 and think it is great compared to ZA, much lighter on the resources, no "privacy" features I just have to turn off as Opera through proxomitron has no privacy issues.
The main problem with Sygate is that it does not notice changes to programs that access the net through a proxy - a possibly security flaw, depending on your knowledge. I may give tiny a try because of it's more powerful sandboxing features, but for now Sygate 5.5 is fine for me.
The Proxomitron. Been doing that for weeks now, well not for that specifically - used CSS instead, but been editing url's on the fly for months.
Have you tried either Opera or K-Melon, the other two browser engines for Windows?
What I've started doing to majorly improve my system performance while keeping the fast searching and backup is this. Take the indexing and backup out of running constantly, and instead have it run every night or every few nights when I am asleep.
To do this, I disable the windows features, and use MaxLister and Ace Macro for searching/indexing at scheduled times, and Drive Image 2002 for backups. Granted, I can't use my computer while either is running, but I find that I'm not fighting a slow computer all the time - and if I have these run at say 3 in the morining, I'm sleeping anyway.
Plus, I trust restoring a drive image much more than a windows system restore. I can also have multiple images and switch back, foward or "sideways" if I want.
Yeah, the best price for reliable, speedy downloads I've ever seen would get you only 10,000MB for your $10 (www.streamload.com). I can't imagine anything working without some per MB charge nowadays (though at the above rates it'd be 1/10 a cent per MB)... Of course with iTunes this is worked into the per song cost.
Of course, if someone could work in some decent per song cost to deliver right to a service like StreamLoad(A huge online storage space) I think it would be great. A basic monthly fee, say 10-15 cents a song(what I would be willing to pay if I am forgoing the CD, Case, Liner Notes etc...) and a continual online backup for your music.
Yeah, I've been learning how useful it is for a fast search in my bookmarks in Opera, and I've been trying for forever about to get decent search across my "offline" media i.e. CD's etc. Putting two and two together for searching leaves me with thinking maybe searching my harddrives would be more productive than wondering if I stored that install in my FTP server directory, or my downloads directory, or maybe on Drive G cause I needed that much extra space or my desktop cause I was in a hurry with the downloader....
As you can see, I try and organize things, but sometimes it could be in multiple directories. So rather than looking in each myself, why not have the computer do it for me. All I have to do now is start naming things somewhat descriptively.
I always wondered why MS built in search is painfully slow... I really don't know why. And why it's indexing has to run all the fricken time, I turn that off right away.
So, that leaves me with a 3rd party solution. The best I've found so far is MaxLister as freeware and being pretty competent as software. It's indexing is fast, it's searches are near instantanious, it remembers what databases you searched last so I can just have a "global" search always set up... The only thing I don't like is I have yet to figure out how to have it reindex certain drives every 12 hrs or so. I would guess it can't as it is primarily designed for removable media. I hope I can come up with some sort of macro or something just for my hard drives, but probably not.
Any suggestions of course are welcome.
OT, but as to your signature - I can't comment on Kerry's plan as I have no idea what it is.
However, I don't know what Bush's plan is either, especially as he isn't supposed to release the next term plan till the RNC as I understand it.
I can only comment on what I have seen Bush do, in my experiances.
One, he has stated a desire (And carried it out once) to attack any country that might be against us - especially in the middle east. This seems like it could easily expand across the globe - and is hardly a good strategy.
Two, he seems to support various laws or ammendments designed to limit civil liberties, privacy rights, and research. IE The stalled ammendment to prevent same sex marrige, the ban on federal support for stem cell research, USAPATRIOT act.
Three, his plan seems to be to remove many environmental protections, IE Clean Water act change, Suddenly pulling out of Kyoto convention, drilling in the artic wildlife reserve.
Four, cutting taxes, raising spending hugely - run up a huge deficit. Also, the tax cuts for a middle american seem unclear to me, I recieved a check for $400 but then my tax return (on unchanged income and circumstances as far as I can tell) was $1000 less than previous years. I don't feel like I got a tax break.
Five, Geneva Conventions violations at guantanimo bay. Holding people without charges, indefinately.
Overall, if his plan is at all close to his actions (and not just hugely bungled) than I certainly don't think he's a good choice for maintaining the American Ideal.
If he meant to do something else - the famous no nation building promise from his campaign - and ended up with this, I am almost more scared. It would be like I set out to make a cake, and ended up with a car. Of course I don't know what his original plan was, but poor execution seems to be a very bad thing.