docduke

I am brand-agnostic. My objective is to find a reliable (and hopefully cheap! ) platform that supports either Android or some similar programmable operating system. Phones do lots of "interesting" things, but I would like to add some boring stuff.For example, most of them have at least a few megabytes of storage. What can we do with that? Play music? Not for me! I would like to be able to record my calls, so when someone tells me their phone number, or a great website they have just found, I don't have to take my hands off the steering wheel and write down the information!That should be a simple thing to program, but I don't know of any phone, or add-on, that has it.I'm sure you can think of lots of similar, simple things you would like to add to a phone! Why not?

Thanks for the tip on Liberty Reserve. I had never heard of it before. It is reviewed here. As is typical, the world is divided into "U.S. citizens" and everybody else. I have seen several money exchange services that simply won't touch Americans. LR seems not to care. However, the reviewers comment that the technical arrangements and legal issues seem to be hidden. Anyway, it seems worth a look. Thanks

My experience is like yours, except that I am a very conservative trader -- I don't put money on trades until I have paper-traded it for a while and shown a paper profit. I have tried several "systems" on Forex, actually currency futures options, and never found something that didn't produce triple-digit losses when annualized.My question for you is "Where is the meat?" I have clicked several links on the left side, and everything is generalities. Where is specific information about specific systems or market activity that is remarkable? I'm sure it is there, but it was not easy for me to find it.Actually, I found a method to answer my own question: I searched on "yen" and found several articles with "meat."Well done!

Functionally, you use SSL when you begin a hypertext interaction with "https:". That tells your browser you want your session encrypted. Most often, you do that by simply clicking on a link at, for example, a bank. The result is that a "layer" of software is added at both the bank and in your computer, to encrypt communications between you and the bank. The encryption takes place using public key cryptography. When you use this method for email, it is truly a "public" key. It can be looked up in a database, such as the MIT keyserver. When SSL is used between a personal computer and a bank, each of them creates a public-private key pair just for this session, and sends the public key to the other. I hope this helps!

I believe only Pentium IIIs have machine-readable serial numbers. That was a deal between Intel and Microsoft. When AMD refused to play that game, Intel also dropped them, for competitive reasons. If you check out XP-Info, you will see that one of the "votes" that M$ uses to determine whether you need to reactivate is the Processor serial number, but in most cases today, that item will be greyed out (and checked). So even if you change from one serial-number CPU to another, that only counts once against you. You have to get four unchecked boxes, as I recall, to require re-authorization.

Can you use Linux? I haven't done this myself as an edit, but I've read at least a dozen threads where others have done it. I routinely use loopmount to read the contents of an ISO without burning a CD. I did a google search on editing iso loop and this was the first hit: Tool to Open and Edit ISO . When Unix was originally designed by Bell Labs, the underlying concept was that everything was a file. Loopmount is the standard method of making that explicit. Hope this helps! P.S.: If you really want to do it in Windows, here is a specialized tool that may help: nLite. It is an ISO editor, specifically designed to edit (clean up) Windows XP. The folks on their forum may be able to tell you how to do it more generally in Windows, or a search on slipstream may get you what you are looking for in the Windows world.

Thanks for the testimonials! I'm looking to change services soon. Skype has had a good reputation for a long time and now it appears to have better prices at least in the U.S. It also has something you might not realize the significance of: It now includes encryption. That is significant, since it has been reported recently that VoIP is routinely hacked, allowing "bad guys" to listen for your account numbers, etc. I am amazed at what Gizmo5 now offers! I last checked them out shortly after they changed their name to Gizmo5, and concluded that they were one of the "also-rans." They clearly have been doing a lot of development. I am particularly impressed that they now have a download for lots of cell phones, and they also interoperate with Asterisk! Clearly, phone services are changing rapidly!

This strategy goes back a long way. I was in college at MIT from 1959 to 1963, and during that time IBM "gave" several generations of computers to the college. At the time, very few businesses used computers. IBM's strategy, which worked very well, was to teach the students to use IBM computers, and expect those students to recommend IBM to their employers when they got out of school. At that time, the mainframe computers IBM sold were quite expensive, so giving them (actually loaning them) to the universities seemed like a big financial risk, but it paid off handsomely for IBM. If it hadn't been for the space program, and its funding of microprocessors, IBM might well be the dominant computer company at this time, and we would be using terminals at home connected to mainframes somewhere else. Interesting how software folks like to use acronyms. I didn't recognize "UAC" so I did a search on it. Indeed, Microsoft is learning to give credit where it is due: Windows UAC compared to Linux Sudo. Now I know, finally, that UAC means User Access (or Account) Control. Actually, the general concept goes back to the 1970s, when remote access via terminals first became common. The thing that makes it more complex now is the very widespread access to the internet, which invites the introduction of malware. If somebody around here can point me at a basic explanation of which UAC systems are really effective at preventing malware infections on any platform, I would like to see it. Thanks!

My first question is: What tools can you use? My choice is Python.As an example, I took your items and made them into a list of characters:>>> x = ['A' , 'A' , 'B' , 'B' , 'C' , 'A' , 'B' , 'F']then I got rid of duplicates by converting the list to a set and back to a list:>>> y = list(set(x))Printing the result gives>>> y['A', 'C', 'B', 'F']You can then tell how many duplicates there were by counting and subtraction:>>> print len(x) - len(y)3>>>Extending this example, you can build lists for each item and the corresponding userids, and remove duplicates for each item.Hope this helps!

I have two tabs open on my screen. Looking at the bottom of the two windows, I see times that are within a minute or two of the correct time. However, if I use the "Back" function to look at the page from which I started this post, the time is "stale" by about 30 minutes. I suspect that the Xisto website (or possibly my browser) does not update the time after the page is initially loaded. I believe websites (like DrudgeReport) can tell the browser to reload the page frequently (thus upping their page count). Alternatively, the browser can set itself to regularly update the page. In the absence of either of these options, the "time" display may stay stuck at whenever you first loaded the page.Try a "reload" if you want a current time.

At the time that Windows ME was introduced, Windows NT was struggling for acceptance. It was quite different from Windows 95 and 98, and had many detractors. The two architectures: Win 9x and NT, are very different, and Microsoft wanted to maintain cash flow from its customer base, so it needed a new version. Windows 2000 (the successor to Windows NT) was not ready, so they added more "features" to Windows 98, and marketed it as Windows ME.I got a copy of Windows ME with a laptop I bought. After I realized its limitations, I bought a retail copy of Windows 2000, and tried to install it on the laptop. After about half an hour of spinning its wheels, the Windows 2000 installer reported (I paraphrase): "Ready to perform installation. By the way, I don't have a driver for this hard drive, so after I complete the installation, the computer will probably not run at all. Press "y" to proceed." I aborted the installation, installed BootMagic (from PowerQuest, which no longer exists), and set the computer up for dual-boot between Windows ME and SuSE Linux. Needless to say, it spent over 95% of its time in Linux. In fact, it ran an Apache server hosting Wikipedia and phpBB services for 3 or 4 years until the hard drive died.Basically, if you liked Windows 98, in Windows ME you get a similar, fancier, slower version with feature-heavy multimedia extensions that guaranteed you wouldn't have enough memory for what you wanted to do. However it did meet Microsoft's objectives: it kept the cash flowing.

Actually, USB to USB between computers is not only possible, it's reasonably fast. This isn't a free solution, but one piece of software I have been using for more than a decade is FastLynx (not the ISP). Their $50 package includes the two-way USB. If you want to save money, you can get a cheaper package with just serial and parallel cables. The software is specifically designed for computer-to-computer transfers. One side has a graphical interface that displays navigable directories in both computers, and the other has a slave which does what the other package tells it to do. Simple, but very effective for file transfers. Especially for older computers that don't have USB connectors. Full disclosure: I was a beta-tester for the USB version.

I just ran into something Microsoft has improved on. They have previously made a practice of creating new versions of Word, Excel, etc. which used incompatible versions of their data files (word documents, spreadsheets, etc.). This is in marked contrast with Word Perfect, for example, which had the same file formats for more than a decade. Recently, I was emailed a .docx and a .xlsx document, both created by Office 2007 (2008?). Since I have only Office 2003, I couldn't read them. I went looking for a converter. It turned out that Microsoft has such a converter at Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. However, Ms seemed to have real problems with it. It published Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack Service Pack 1 (SP1) less than one month later, and the "Service Pack" is about the same size as the original Converter! I put them both into my computer, and the result did the conversions I wanted. Why the big "Service Pack"? The "conversion" of my files took a long time getting started. (Each was only 2 or 3 pages in length, with nothing fancy inside.) My guess is that it was taking time to make sure I had a legal copy of Ms Office. I don't know what it would have done if I was doing the conversion to read the files in Open Office, but I think there's a good chance the conversion would "fail" if a legal copy of an earlier Ms Office wasn't around.

First and foremost, Linux: SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian, and the variant of Xandros that comes with the Asus Eee PC. An early question in this thread was whether Free Download Manager is useful. Yes!!! Especially when downloading iso images of CDs or DVDs. My ISP is Comcast, and I couldn't understand why Torrent wasn't working the way many had claimed, until I started reading about Comcast's deliberate throttling of Torrent. For many Linux and other download servers, FDM will open up 8 simultaneous connections to the server, and run the Comcast connection at full speed, 750 KB/s here. I don't know why Comcast allows that, but won't allow Torrents to do the same thing, but I've gotten the message! Next, don't forget Java! I prefer to program in Python, but Java is easier to get set up on Windows, Linux, Mac (I'm told) and even Android phones, so it provides system-independent support of lots of other useful software. For example, Arachnophilia, which I like when I'm constructing web pages from scratch. Actually, I most frequently construct a (custom) web page by composing it in Wikipedia (my local, free of course, copy) and then copying and pasting the html from there. I don't think anyone has mentioned Open Office yet. Except for Firefox and Thunderbird, that is probably the free software I use most often. The writer, spreadsheet and graphics tools are great for normal activities. Gimp in Linux is where I go if more powerful graphics tools are needed (but I have trouble remembering how to use it! ) Regarding Thunderbird add-ons, it is worth mentioning one built-in. Click Tools | Options | Advanced | Certificates, and you will find that Thunderbird has encryption built in! All that is missing is your personal certificate. If you go looking for certificate vendors, you will find most of them want money to generate a certificate for you. There are two exceptions that I know of: Thawte and Comodo. Thawte wants positive ID for you (Passport, etc.). Comodo just wants your name, country and a valid email address (at least, that's the case for a U.S. resident). There is a temptation to divide "free" software into the Windows, Mac and the Linux worlds, but Live CDs are creating a whole new system-independent class of software for any computer that can boot from a CD. One I have just found, and hope I am going to like (I've downloaded it but not yet tried it), is Clonezilla. It is based on Partition Image (which I use and like) and related products, and is designed for backup and restore tasks. I hope a few of these items are of interest to Xisto readers!

Here is a test of ImageMagick with more output details: <html> <head> <title>Test for ImageMagick</title> </head><body> <?function alist ($array) { //This function prints a text array as an html list. $alist = "<ul>"; for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($array); $i++) { $alist .= "<li>$array[$i]"; } $alist .= "</ul>"; return $alist;}exec("convert -version", $out, $rcode); //Try to get ImageMagick "convert" program version output.echo "Version return code is $rcode <br>"; //Print the return code: 0 if OK, nonzero if error.echo alist($out); //Print the output of "convert -version"?> </body> </html>It defines a php function "alist" that parses the output of the "version" query and formats it so that a browser can display it. Copy and paste this code into a .php file and upload it to somewhere that it can be accessed by your (PHP-supporting) web server. Then load it into a browser. It should tell you just about everything that ImageMagick knows about its environment. I put a tutorial up on it a while ago: How To Find And Test Imagemagick Using Php. If that doesn't help enough, take a look at Basic Usage on the ImageMagick website. By the way, when you do your command-line check, note whether the version number is above or below 5.5.7. There was a significant change in the way it processes arguments at that point. Hope this helps!