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Messages - Ben

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121
Off Topic discussions / Re: Swimarium: The virtual reality swimming pool
« on: August 23, 2014, 12:31:30 am »
The penultimate in loser's entertainment.

Given how societies are steered, what do you foresee as the logical outcome?

For example, fake woods, (press board, aspenite and laminate), laughed at in a simple manner when introduced, are now everywhere in everyone's homes while real woods are being slowly removed and soon be only to be found... permitted... in the homes of the upper crust.

All things nasty are introduced to society as being simply "entertaining". In a few generations the "virtual" will be the sole domain of the masses, (and charged top dollar), while the "real" will be reserved for those at the top.

Of course, that is kind of obvious today, (do you truly believe that computers can only develop in one direction?), as we hemorrhage everything that our parents and grandparents fought and died for, as we come to love our own social and intellectual degradation along with our reduction in standard of living, (it's COOL to accept "crap" for "quality" today, you already have it all around your house).

Today the virtual pool is but a simple man's laugh. Tomorrow it will be all that you can get... and at great cost. (Remember, garbage woods were very cheap when first introduced to the market; now they are ex-pen-sive!)

History is riddled with this... and well known to the very few today who has ever opened a book.

Sobering words for empty ears.


Quickly now, QUICKLY!

Rush on to the next feel-good/empty post! They are... soothing... to the dull mind.

To some, the sharpness of the intellect, can only come from a... prick!

Oops! Did I say a bad word?

You decide.


122
Applications / Re: Surge protectors, was Re: mmioMP3.dll update
« on: August 06, 2014, 04:54:50 pm »
Well...

OS/2 World Forum just ate two attempts at a reply to this.

Ah well, enough time wasted. No more, no more!

123
Applications / Re: Surge protectors, was Re: mmioMP3.dll update
« on: August 04, 2014, 08:06:48 pm »
I have proper surge suppressors (If they blow, they change color) installed in my front power distribution board along with earth leakage current trip relays.

I also use lightning tubes on the phone line, I will know when they have been used and failed, because I wont be typing this ;-)
If I get hit by a direct lighting strike its all toast anyway, just in varying degrees of toasted but that's why we have backups.
You do what you do to minimise the damage, and as with all insurance you trade off between cost, effectiveness and risk.

Inside the house  I only use filtering to remove noise and spikes (fridge, washing machine, vacuum etc).

I have seen surge suppressor power boards that are 'ok' but these have not been the norm. You really have to open them up and know what you are looking for so it's a bit of a lottery. I've also seen ones with a thinner earth lead compared to active and neutral lines... sigh.

I gave up on UPS's, power failures are rare here now, and the UPS normally fry's itself before its really needed.

Wow.

That's a different quintal of fish all together. There is no danger of anything like that going on in Canada and lightning tubes are unheard of.

Sounds to me like what you really need down there is a mechanism to bottle all of that power! 8)

124
Applications / Re: Surge protectors, was Re: mmioMP3.dll update
« on: August 04, 2014, 07:24:33 pm »
Quote
Surge Suppressors are a complete waste of money. 100% of the time the surge is through the system with damage done, before the suppressor even kicks in.

This is not entirely true. Surge suppressors do work, ONCE. The second shot does the damage (and that could be seconds, or months, after the first shot). It is often impossible to tell if a surge has damaged the suppressor, even if somebody does look at the indicator (if there is one).

What does more damage is when the power goes off, then comes back on (two, or three, times), before the system completely turns off. UPS is the answer to that problem. They also give you an opportunity to save work, and, with the proper supporting software, and settings, they will shut down the system properly (not saving work), before they run out of power.

I have heard that one many times... always the last cry of he-who-buys-into-the-marketing.

Like I said, I have spent many hours talking to clients who want to scrimp on their protection. Always they regret it; it is a matter of "when", not a matter of "if".

125
Applications / Re: Surge protectors, was Re: mmioMP3.dll update
« on: August 04, 2014, 07:22:07 pm »

Out of curiosity, where you using a UPS?


I am back up. The hard drive survived. I was not using a UPS. It was on a surge suppressor. Thanls

Surge Suppressors are a complete waste of money. 100% of the time the surge is through the system with damage done, before the suppressor even kicks in. Essentially they are just expensive extension cords that give the illusion of protection. I deter clients from using them whenever the opportunity presents itself.



There are standalone surge protectors. If you are talking about those that are built in power strips, then I agree to you.

Sure, but they cost a great deal of money and are oriented towards mid-sized businesses and up, or a highly successful small business... meaning beyond venue of this discussion other than for technical purposes, but true.

126
Applications / Re: Surge protectors, was Re: mmioMP3.dll update
« on: August 03, 2014, 03:55:03 pm »

Out of curiosity, where you using a UPS?


I am back up. The hard drive survived. I was not using a UPS. It was on a surge suppressor. Thanls

Surge Suppressors are a complete waste of money. 100% of the time the surge is through the system with damage done, before the suppressor even kicks in. Essentially they are just expensive extension cords that give the illusion of protection. I deter clients from using them whenever the opportunity presents itself.


127
Applications / Surge protectors, was Re: mmioMP3.dll update
« on: July 31, 2014, 05:13:57 pm »
My main build machine was fried by an electrical storm this morning.

You have my sympathies. I can only hope that you have good backups.

Out of curiosity, were you using a UPS?


128
Hardware / Re: AMD 8-Core, UEFI and eCS 2.1 a No Go
« on: July 31, 2014, 05:08:57 pm »
I was able to turn off USB 3.0, but to no avail.

My motherboard is an ASUS M5A99X EVO R.20

The eCS 2.1 CD loads fine on all other machines, so while it has been used a bit, it still works OK. 8)

The eCS installation on my hard disk is using the ACPI drivers from the eCS 2.2 beta Demo CD; I can only assume that they are the same as on the eCS 2.2 Beta CD itself, (non Demo), but that might not be the case. I'm reluctant to buy the eCS 2.2 Beta CD because of that and because it may never be completed... hence hard to justify the expenditure.

I'll consider all other possibilities first... and maybe revisit that option then... assuming that it is an option of course.

129
Hardware / Re: AMD 8-Core, UEFI and eCS 2.1 a No Go
« on: July 31, 2014, 03:48:59 pm »
Thanks for replying people.

I'll list Lars' solution to avoid repeats:


Quote
Hallo,

my PC died and it was too old to fix it. I therefore pulled out the SATA harddisk, got a new PC and installed the harddisk. I did not have a close look at the new PC, I was kind of in a hurry. The new PC has an AsRock "Extreme4 blablabla something" MOBO with an 8 core AMD CPU.

1) the new PC has an UEFI BIOS. On the other hand, it also has CSM (compatibility support module -> legacy BIOS "fake") which is enabled.

2) the new PC allows/expects hard disks with the conventional MBR layout (instead of GPT layout). Therefore my existing harddisk is OK to use without any change.

3) the new PC allows to only activate 1 core out of the possible 8 cores. I did so for what follows.

4) the new PC supports AHCI but also IDE compatibility mode. I tried both. If I tried with AHCI I always made sure that I selected OS2AHCI.ADD as the first hard disk driver via the setup menu, see below.

I now have the problem that my OS/2 partition is corrupted and needs a chkdsk. I thought I'd just boot with the install CD, go to maintenance console, open a command line and fix it (plus update the CONFIG.SYS to match the new HW). Just booting the partition was not an option as it would hang after loading IBM1FLPY.ADD (obviously something to remove as I no longer have a floppy drive ...).

a) if I boot with eCS 1.2 install CD and after doing my selections in the setup menu, I get a trap in SCREEN01.SYS (presumably). It does not matter what options I select as I found out that I need ACPI.PSD in order to prevent the trap

b) if I boot with eCS 2.0 install CD and after doing my selections in the setup menu, I'll get a hang with ACPI.PSD selected. Looks like the ACPI.PSD is too old (it's the one predating David's builds). If I do not select ACPI.PSD, I'll get the trap as in a)

c) if I boot with eCS 2.1 install CD, see b)

d) if I boot with eCS 2.2 beta preview CD and after doing my selections in the setup menu, it boots fine. But it does not allow to access any harddisk partitions ...



I have UEFI set to UEFI & Legacy in the BIOS.

With respect to the eCS 2.1 boot CD, I tried the different variants of Dani506 that are available as well as all options available to ACPI and did some config.sys editing as mentioned in Lars' post above.

I know of no way of "disabling" EFI other than mentioned above; I am assuming that is what you meant Eugene.

With regard to switching USB 3 to 2, I did not see that option in my BIOS, but I'm going to give it another look after this post incase I overlooked it.

130
Hardware / AMD 8-Core, UEFI and eCS 2.1 a No Go
« on: July 31, 2014, 01:17:33 pm »
I recently bought an AMD 8-core computer.

I took the hard drives, (one with a working copy of eCS 2.1), from my old machine, (Intel 4-core), and put them into the new machine.

When I try to load eCS 2.1 from the new machine I get a Trapd on start up.

I tried the eCS 2.1 installation CD with similar results.

I tried Lars Erdmann's solution(s) as far as I could take it, but I do not have a copy of eCS 2.2 beta, so some of his options are not open to me.

Enabling ACPI in the eCS 2.1 boot disk prevents the trap, but the system stops right after, (during?), the kernel load(?) providing no additional data. Using Alt-F2 provides nothing new either.

Has anyone been able to get eCS 2.1 working on a similar setup?

Thanks.

131
Multimedia / Re: Converting FLAC to WAV
« on: July 17, 2014, 02:12:48 pm »
Thanks for the replies good people...

The files in question are just mundane music files I got ...


Well, like Dave said maybe it's a non-standard flac format and since all the others converted.

I would just re-download them, especially since it's a small localized problem and not with flac.


Greggory

Well, I would if I could find another source in FLAC format, (lots available in MP3, but only one in FLAC). It's Don Henley's Greatest Hits BTW if anyone is interested.

MP3s sound fine on portable stereos, mainstream stereos and anything with ear buds, (since all expectations are low and electronic reproduction mediocre at best), but all MP3s sound like crap on something high end. FLACs sound fine... assuming the source material was of quality to begin with and the conversion to FLAC, (and back to WAV), was done properly. Of course, most things that come out of the music industry sound poor anyway and only an occassional  few are  done by competant sound engineers... but I have digressed.

At this point I have no choice but to try and find a different FLAC encoding from a source other than that pirate ship... though they do have most everything that is available elsewhere. I guess it now depends on how badly I want it; how much time I am willing to spend searching; it has already taken up too much.

Oh, well.

Thanks to all of those whom have replied.


132
Multimedia / Re: Converting FLAC to WAV
« on: July 16, 2014, 03:32:04 am »
Thanks for the replies good people.

I'm converting for the purposes of making an audio CD; I want to make something that I can play on the large system; regardless of how good computer audio is, it is always a joke in comparison.

These FLAC files will play under PM123.

I didn't know that VLC did conversions. I'll give that a try.

I'll also try the following if VLC does not work;

Quote
ffmpeg -i inputfile.flac - to make sure the identity of format
ffmpeg -i inputfile.flac -f wav output.wav - but AVxCAT probably uses the same string and the best bet would be to email the author this question too.

I'm trying to stay away from using any OS other than OS/2. I'll give other platforms a try only if everything else fails.

The files in question are just mundane music files I got from a pirate ship that passed by not too long ago. 8) I can post a link to the Torrent if anyone wants a look.

133
Multimedia / Converting FLAC to WAV
« on: July 13, 2014, 04:13:03 pm »
In the past I have used the audio converter built-in to eCS with decent success. However, there have always been a few FLAC files that would not convert. AVxCAT took care of those, but now I have some FLAC files that will not convert by any of those means.

I downloaded and installed David Yeo's latest FLAC zip from Hobbes, (1.30), but it has changed nothing.

Has anyone found a solution to converting all types of FLAC files to WAV? Is there another converter program?

Thanks.

134

Hello, Dave


Quote
The real question is how many other vulnerabilities our American friends are keeping secret so they can read our stuff.

You might as well ask yourself the same thing about the entire Internet...

...and after that, ask yourself "what is the real reason why it was created?".

The "light" clicks on in some, (bright!), but not in most, (dull).


135
Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Re: Cruelty in OS2World
« on: February 22, 2014, 03:31:02 pm »
Hello, Boris.

Isn't AJAX Windows only? Can it be utilized by Firefox under OS/2?

I do not know, but maybe you do.

All I know is that this seems to be a persistent problem with the latest versions of SMForum. I have noticed this problem everywhere that uses the latest upgrades to it.

It did not exist in the past incarnation of OS/2 World, nor was the problem there on my own servers where I run several copies of it.

Now, that is just my own observations. It could be that something else we upgraded, (PHP for example), is causing this problem.

I have no doubt that it can be fixed and probably will be, but for now, it's an irritant.

BTW, I haven't had this problem since I installed the addon that Martin recommended, but neither have I made a long post, or had to walk away midstream... so the timeout would not have activated... just in case anyone is wondering.

However, it is only a matter of time. When what happens I'll post the results.

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