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!

I have had that kind of problem over the years on several computers. As others have said, it can be a driver problem. I have a machine that dual-boots Windows XP Home and SuSE Linux. In Windows, I can let it idle for days, and nothing happens. However, when I am in a word processing program or graphics program, I typically lose a half-hour of work when it reboots, usually when I use the mouse to do something. In Linux, this machine is rock-solid -- it has never, ever rebooted in Linux.I had another computer with a Gigabyte motherboard, vintage 2001. After 3 or 4 years (long enough to outlast the warranty), several of the capacitors on the motherboard started leaking. That produced spontaneous reboots. The difference there was that I didn't have to be doing anything -- it would just reboot when it felt like it, and the reboots gradually became more frequent. Fortunately, I got worried and backed up the computer before the motherboard died completely. Similar behavior can also be caused by a slowly-degrading power supply. If that is the case, it is simple to diagnose and fix. Modern BIOSes can read out the voltages. If they are below spec, it is time to replace the power supply, which is usually the least expensive problem you can have.

Agreed. But I'm lazy, and I was typing your script directly into a console. When bash complained, <up-arrow> got me that one-line version complete with semicolons, which I could easily edit to identify and correct the bugs. Then, when I had running code, I was lazy again, and just copied the running code and pasted it into my post. That way, I could be sure I wouldn't break anything by "pretty-printing" the code. Anyway, this thread is doing what it is supposed to -- teaching each of us little bits of useful information. I am now scratching my head over xboxrulz's final version, with for file in $(ls -a $1). I am trying to figure out how that is interpreted, and will have to try it. Very educational thread. Thanks guys!

I'm not sure whether I'm one of yordan's friends, but I am definitely someone who needs more exposure to scripts, so I tried using it. The result was bash: [: missing `]' I visited Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide and the man page for bash, to remind me how to construct an if-test. It reminded me of enough that I thought I could fix it. I tested it, and bash no longer complains. [Gee, the forum just cleaned up my alternative term for "complains": b**ches. I had no idea it did that! ] In one short line, a running script is for i in `ls'; do if [ -e ../u/$i ]; then echo "first"; else echo "second'; fi done The things that needed to be fixed were (1) second if -> -e (or -a), (2) blank before the closing bracket (]) and (3) "done" at the end of the script. Thanks for the exercise -- it's been a long time since I've used all those script elements!

Actually, "the military" of the U.S. is a relatively complex organization, at least in part because the U.S. Congress gives it many mandates that have nothing to do with what a citizen would consider a military mission. One of the things it contains is the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its prececessor was known as ARPA, because the first word, "Defence," was absent from its name -- and mostly absent from its objectives. A lot of university research was funded by ARPA, including what became the internet. As Wikipedia explains it: The ARPA network began with three different computers which ARPA was funding: one for the SDC Q-32 in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley, and one for Multics at MIT. I was at MIT at the time, and I can assure you the Multics guys could not have cared less whether the military was funding it. They were just enjoying playing with the very new (at that time) networking concepts, in an environment that did not include security (secrecy). The computer and the space program were also initially funded by the U.S. military. The military wanted light-weight electronic circuits for space applications, where weight is the dominant restriction on what could be sent aloft. The microprocessor was a military-funded, industry-built solution to that problem. At the time, the military objective was just to improve spaceborne sensors, but the resulting chips had much broader applications, and gave birth to the computers we now take for granted.

yordan's repair install proposal is a good idea. I have tried that for a friend who had a lot of viruses in his computer, thanks to grandchildren who liked to download lots of stuff. It worked well for him, and he didn't think he lost anything, but that is the risk -- the reinstall may remove or overwrite something you don't want to lose. If you are concerned about that risk, I have another suggestion that you can try without making any changes on your computer. That is, assuming you know how to make it boot from a CD. I use Avira antivirus. Their RescueCD is a small, bootable CD that contains an antivirus scanner. Because it is a bootable CD, your computer operating system is not running when it is, so no virus can interfere with it. Avira is #1 according to About.com, so it is very generous of them to make a free version available for personal use. I usually download it directly from rescuecd.iso, but you can get more information and alternatives from the Avira download page. In either case, burn the ISO image into a CD and boot it. It should do a thorough scan of your computer, and tell you what it finds. You can also set it to try to remedy any infections, though I have not tried that. (Fortunately, never needed to!) Hope this helps! docduke

Most people don't know what's going to happen, including me! From what I have read, this is an "inside job" that has been in preparation for at least 30 years, and is a power and money grab by very influential people. See, for example: How We Got Here: It was a Deliberate Policy. As a result, we "normal people" are not going to be able to predict even the near future until more events unfold, and it is going to be complicated by the fact that several other large players, like Russia, China and Iran may not have been "in on" the plans, but certainly want to take advantage, however they can, of the chaos. Over here in the U.S., we are closer to what is going on, and it is apparent that both President Bush and the Democratic Congress have enabled the process. There is a very liberal MIT Professor by the name of Noam Chomsky. I seldom agree with him, but Der Spiegel quotes him as saying: The United States Has Essentially a One-Party System. Having seen recent events, I am forced to agree with him in this case, and that single party appears to be motivated by greed. Alexis de Tocqueville said: A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. The recognition of this flaw goes back a lot further: See: Obama, Joe the plumber, and the gospel of envy. In this case, the representatives of the majority are voting the assets of minorities for their own benefit and for the benefit of the super-wealthy, rather than for the benefit of the majority. That is possible because of the distance they have put between themselves and their constituents. "Our" Congressional representatives fully expect to be rewarded for their actions by being returned to office next month! We may be watching the endgame of American Democracy. docduke

Great! I'm certainly glad I asked! Your comment about ClamWin is an very valuable. I have always been concerned about sticking a USB drive into an unknown computer, and getting back more than I wanted. Do you know anyone who has tried Mac-on-a-Stick? Can we really run Mac software without careful tuning on a PC? Does it require Mac-formatted drives, or can it read FAT and NTFS files? This is the first time I have seen something that doesn't claim it takes lots of hard work, like this: Run Mac OS X on a PC, which says it's hard, and many drivers aren't available; and Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800, which starts with PC hardware and customizes it to run OS-X. Windows is clearly designed to force software to get attached to a specific computer and operating system in a way that prevents its portability. It is really nice to see that many useful portable programs have been collected in one place. Thanks! docduke

Could you be more specific? Gimp is here, the download page for the Windows version is here, but the name of the file is gimp..setup.exe so it looks like a Windows installer, though the download page does not say. Actually, the page title is Gimp - Windows installers, so I guess it really does say! I also tried a Google search on "standalone version of gimp" (without the quotes), and didn't find anything useful. So, yordan, could you please be more specific about where to find the standalone version? Thanks! docduke

"Social" is a general term. If you are looking for something specifically to facilitate group communication, you might consider already existent software such as phpBB. I have a preference for MediaWiki. I use it for structured note-taking, and find it invaluable. It can use either MySQL or PostgreSQL. I use MySQL. It happens to have an extension which I am intrigued by, but have not yet used: SocialProfile. This contains many of the things you would want in a "come to meeting" system, tuned more for extended personal interactions than a plain bulletin board. MySQL and MediaWiki are open source, MediaWiki is in PHP, and SocialProfile is designed to plug directly into MediaWiki. SocialProfile is GPL 2.0 licensed, is also written in PHP, has been actively developed over several years, and has a recent update (20th of September, 2008). If you try it, please let us know how well it works!

Over the years, a problem called "memory" in rechargeable batteries has been worked on. "Memory" means that the battery "remembers" its charge-discharge cycles. In older batteries, the manual instructed the user to fully discharge the battery on a regular schedule -- once every month or three months. Newer batteries are advertised to have much less "memory." Independent of that, a rechargeable battery typically loses a few % of full charge every month of non-use storage. One of the serious problems with charge system design is that a fully-discharged battery has a very low impedance, so it "needs" a high current to get it started charging. The charging circuits always have some current-limiting built in, so that they don't fry anything if the load looks like a short circuit. On low-cost laptops, that may cause a problem when charging a fully-discharged battery. Some repair shops have battery testers, which contain a much more sophisticated charging circuit. You might call around to your local computer repair store, and see if it has such a device, or knows someone who does. Modern laptops are engineered to be as light as possible. One major source of weight is the battery. Therefore, the internal conductors in a battery tend to be just thick enough to carry the maximum current the laptop will require. Putting a short across the terminals is likely to make an internal conductor behave like a fuse, and vaporize. Not a good idea.