CoffeeFiend

Actually, you DON'T need all your devices to be gigabit. You just won't get extra speed from the devices that have slower connections. Any old switch will happily work with devices operating at various speeds. Cat 5e will work just fine too, no need for 6 with fancy shielding... As for the low speeds, there's a lot of possibilities. I would try to benchmark the network itself first, using something like iperf as it's not affected by disk speed, RDC and various other possible issues and bottlenecks (there's just so many differences on both ends... SMB 1/2, TCP/IP 4/6, etc). I wouldn't really consider buying another NIC as most onboard (the PCI-e ones at least) get very good performance, a PCI (non-express) NIC would most likely be a bit slower. As for jumbo frames, that will only give you a boost if all your devices support it, including the gigabit switch (and most cheapos still don't -- no idea what switch you got). Oh, and if you want speed, then definitely don't buy a NAS. They're not exactly known for performance (nor value) Last thing, a 4400+ would be a dual core, not a quad.

Check out the adword tools. There is no way to know that. If it's overpriced, buggy and doesn't look polished or usable, probably zero or very close to it. If it's the best thing ever and is just about free, a good amount. Price alone has a HUGE impact. Your profit vs price would typically look like a bell curve: you have the 2 extremes (a large volume of sales with a really low price, or a high price but almost no sales) and the sweet spot that you just have to find (max of units sold * unit price). Either ways, that should be mostly to get them to download the trial which is what should convince them to buy it.

ModifyPE is poorly coded and doesn't work with anything newer than XP. This has been discussed dozens of times on these forums. Just try a similar utility instead (a forum search should yield relevant results e.g. search just for modifype)

It's mostly that. 10.0.0.0/8 allows for a LOT of hosts and fancy subnetting. There's really no point if it's a home network or small business. There are other ranges as well e.g. 172.16.0.0/12, but to stick with the basics 192.168.0.0/16 works fine. Personally, I don't use 192.168.0.x nor 192.168.1.x as they are too often used by other networks which makes it a pain when it comes to VPNs and such, but you can easily pick 192.168.2.x or 192.168.3.0 or whichever you like instead.

It *totally* depends on what it is. Again, it comes down to the actual requirements list. It could be way too much, or way too little. If it's a ghetto VB6 front end to a open source command line encoder, without support, without bugfixes, without documentation, without a fancy interface, without (...) and writen by a out-of-school n00b that also happens to be in a country with dirt cheap labor... Then it's WAY too much. If they have to write their own codecs in assembly for just about every possible format from scratch, pay the licensing fees for every technology used, have to deliver full documentation, free bugfixes within 24h for the next decade included, including the subcontracting for usability studies and graphics artists, professionally localized in different languages (including the help and installer), and the code written by a team of guys with a PhD's from a top-ranking uni in the USA and all that, then you're at the very least missing 2 or 3 zeros. Then for the website (including payment processing, the back end for the updates, bug tracking, keeping track of issued licenses, etc) you can very easily blow another 10K. And another 10K would disappear VERY quickly with adwords or such e.g. just for "audio converter" you're looking at $0.42/click (fraudulent or not), and out of the estimated 1M searches for those exact terms alone, even if only 1% click it that's $4200/month (still only for a single keyword combo)... And that's assuming everything goes perfectly, but if you were more familiar with the software development world, you'd know that projects are hardly ever on time and on budget (and with every feature you wanted) -- it happens like 20% of the time perhaps. And most likely, there was a difference between whatever you wanted and what you asked for (99% likely) and you will have to revise your requirements (which will increase price, or they can spend the time on that instead of some other feature you wanted). Scenarios were people spent two or three times as much as originally planned before canning the whole project aren't exactly unheard of (sometimes costing hundreds of millions!) I've seen it first hand more than once. Project management is hard. Also, the next update/version won't be free either. This is only the very beginning. And even if everything goes right development-wise which is quite unlikely, it doesn't exactly mean it'll be a commercial success either.

There is no hacking necessary or anything like that. The page passes a playlist to the player which contains: [Reference] Ref1=http://ms.radio-canada.ca/archives_new/2006/en/wmv/cdn_comics19700520et2.wmv?MSWMExt=.asf Ref2=http://24.200.239.61:80/archives_new/2006/en/wmv/cdn_comics19700520et2.wmv?MSWMExt=.asf and this redirects to a MMS stream from Windows Media Services located here: mms://ms.radio-canada.ca/archives_new/2006/en/wmv/cdn_comics19700520et2.wmv?MSWMExt=.asf That's all there is to it. As for how to record MMS streams, I'm sure there's dozens of app that can do this. I know even VLC can do it. It's not a great player but it's fairly solid for streaming stuff.

I could quickly write something in VC++ but it would require the VC++ redist to be installed. Your call.

Sure, you can hire several programmers (those to write the initial version, those to do maintenance and write bugfixes, those for new versions, etc), a copyright lawyer, an accountant, a web designer, a web developer, content creators and translators (help file and website), an usability expert, testers, a payment processor, a consultant that will figure out for you what the program should do and what it should look like and how it should be written (and translate that into a "requirements" list for the hired programmers), someone to moderate your forums, someone to answer emails, perhaps a manager to make these guys work together and on schedule (and resolve all the problems that will arise), etc. There's no problem at all with this picture, unless you plan on making any money. It doesn't matter if you have billions to give away to all kinds of consultants and experts. You still need to make money as well. The more work you get done by someone else, the more expenses you'll have to cover. Startups and micro ISVs normally try to minimize these by doing most of the work themselves. And since you're gonna get basically everything done by someone else, you'll have to make loads of money (from a crowded market, filled with freeware and cheap apps and all kinds of mature/established/well-known products), either by a high volume of sales (unlikely) or by high prices (good luck). And when I see a fairly large percentage of ISVs that can handle most of that in-house (without any expense besides their time) with good products don't ever make a penny... Not that I see any money to make with this particular kind of app in the first place (I'm fairly happy with BeSweet and Audacity which are both freeware). Right now, what I see is a nice way to sink a 5 figure amount. Either ways, good luck to you. Hopefully having money will prove a valid substitute for knowledge.

A bit overkill? A plain old P4 could handle most of that just fine. The boxes I threw together for the kids last year for $300/ea should handle all of that perfectly for several years (dual core AMD with 4GB of RAM). This is way, WAY beyond overkill. It's like swatting a fruit fly with a 50 megaton atomic bomb. Also, the price isn't exactly hard to beat, especially if we don't pick a 1:1 equivalent of what Dell sells (which I wouldn't really want to buy) but what seems like a better choice. For the same price as the top machine: Intel Core i5 750 Quad Core Processor Lynnfield LGA1156 2.66GHZ 8MB Cache Retail Box $218.99 Gigabyte P55A-UD3 ATX LGA1156 P55 DDR3 2PCI-E 2PCI RAID GBLAN CrossFireX USB3.0 SATA3 Motherboard $145.99 2x Corsair XMS3 TW3X4G1333C9 4GB DDR3 2X2GB DDR3-1333 CL 9-9-9-24 Dual Channel Memory Kit @ $109.99/ea Western Digital WD1001FALS Caviar Black 1TB SATA2 7200RPM 4.2MS 32MB 3.5IN Dual Proc Hard Drive OEM $97.99 Powercolor Radeon HD 5750 PCs 700MHZ 512MB 4.6GHZ GDDR5 2XDVI HDMI DP DIRECTX11 PCI-E Video Card $134.99 (a 4850 is also a good pick, as fast, cheaper, but not DirectX 11) Samsung SH-S243D/BEBE 24X Black DVD Writer SATA OEM $24.99 Antec Three Hundred Mini Tower Gaming Case 300 ATX 3X5.25 6X3.5INT No PS Front USB & Audio $49.99 Antec Earthwatts 650W Power Supply ATX12V V2.2 EPS12V Active PFC 80PLUS 120MM Fan $69.99 Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64BIT DVD OEM $99.99 PC Assembly and Testing with 1 Year Limited NCIX System Warranty (PRE-CONFIG WIN. OS If Purchased) $50.00, skip this if you don't mind doing it yourself to save $50 Total: $1112.90 CAD The CPU is still well beyond overkill, the motherboard is above and beyond anything Dell will sell you at any price, and you do get cutting edge features like SATA3 and USB3 which the Dell doesn't have, the hard drive is MUCH faster than the Dell's (4.2ms seek time, dual processor, twice the cache), the case is better than any Dell (but for $30 extra or so you could get something extra nice), the power supply is a LOT better quality than what you'll find in any Dell, has LOADS of power to spare should you ever decide to add a fancy video card & more drives and so on, and it's significantly more power efficient too (save on your power bill), great quality RAM, you get a "next generation" DirectX 11 video card (the other is a 10.1) that's about twice as fast, and 7.1 sound like the more expensive rig. You also get a faster DVD writer -- add about $75 if you want a Blu-Ray combo drive instead (not that I would really bother yet). Even though the CPU is slightly slower, it's still ridiculously overkill for those needs, and the faster hard drive and video card will make it faster than the Dell at most tasks anyways. And should you want to change any part, you can actually do it at cost, and not the ridiculous prices Dell charges (you also have a LOT more choice). If you have $ to spare and want extra speed then I'd also consider a good SSD. Edit: although personally I would build a cheaper system (it's still beyond ridiculously overkill), just like puntoMX said. Edit2, to reply to puntoMX's edit2: nothing, that's what's in my kids' boxes

Good luck with that. That system is already 6 years old, so that would bring it to about 20 years old by then, the exact same as still using a 386 as your primary computer today... I wouldn't want to be still using a Core i7 by then, so an old and already slow-ish P4 chip that's not so power efficient? I don't see that kind of hardware lasting anywhere near that long either (low quality PSUs, very common problems with bad cap usage in P4-era computers, etc) As for upgrading to x64 on that box, I don't see much of a point. You're not going to see any real improvements. The few CPUs that will likely work with it (Prescott 2M) will hardly be faster than what you already have (and probably cost about as much as the whole computer is worth by now), and won't run a x64 OS particularly fast, and you're limited as for max RAM and so forth. Honestly, for little more than the price of a replacement P4 chip, you could pick up something a LOT faster that's also more power efficient, and with a longer life ahead. For example, my usual shopping place has a Athlon X2 7550 with basic motherboard under $100 which would be about 3x faster than a P4 3.6GHz 660, which pretty much costs the same (actually, for the same ~$100 CPU wise, you could get that P4 or a fancy quad core like Athlon II X4 630 which is just about 10x faster than the P4). I've seen similar kits with E3300's which are also a lot faster than a P4 (about the same price too). Those dual cores would run Win7 x64 great, without breaking the bank. Anyhow. A P4 6xx would most likely work if you still prefer to do that, and you could install a x64 OS on it, assuming there are x64 drivers for all your hardware.

True enough, CCleaner doesn't get rid of these. For the record, they are stored inside subfolders under the "C:\Users\YourUserNameHere\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player" path in Win7.

modifype has long been known to be problematic (it's an issue parsing its command line arguments) and as such there's plenty of posts about it. Just use any other similar tool instead.

You can hire plenty of programmers, locally or online (even from countries with cheaper labor). There's definitely no shortage of that. There's just no straight answer to that. And I believe this is where you REALLY have a LOT of work to do first! -You don't seem to have much expertize in-house, seeing how you need to hire devs and don't do web sites either so mostly everything will cost you $$$ -Do you have any experience or knowledge in how to run *any* business, online or not? -Do you know anything about running a Micro-ISV in particular? -What about accounting and such things? (all kinds of stuff! Invoices, purchase orders, taxes, you name it!) -Do you think you have anywhere near as much knowledge as you need software-wise? Do you even know what you should ask your programmer(s) to do? (What language do you want this written in and why? What set of "widgets"? What about cross-platform compatibility? How do you want them to manage versionning? How about unit tests? What installer type? Are you just expecting them to hand over a perfectly polished app with a good looking and usable GUI? ...) -You need to register a domain, create a site (design and also writing all the content and FAQs and everything), setup email for that domain, possibly create a support forum (and then spend time to moderate it), setup payment methods (and deal with the fees, chargebacks and all that fun stuff), ... -How do you expect to keep track of who paid, for which version, when, how much, their license name/serial and all that are? Scatterred across hundreds of email? By hand? Besides, most people want their registration # pretty much as soon as they've typed their credit card #, not "when you get around to email it, eventually"... You likely want a trial version as well. -How about updates for your program? You'll have to have something in place on your website for that as well -How about someone writing a proper help file for your product (and possibly translations, for your app *and* the help *and* your site)? -And loads of very important questions like for bugfixes: how much it will cost you (agreement/contract with programmers) and same for features you want added -Are you good at marketing? If you want any sales at all, people have to actually know about your product first! (and not just blindly paying for ads, you kind of have to know what is somewhat effective and what isn't!) -What about pricing? Picking the perfect price point isn't as easy as it may seem (and think about upgrade pricing and such too). Just picking the wrong price may kill a perfectly viable product by itself -Keep in mind you've just became their technical support should anything go wrong with your program... -How do you plan on keeping track of bugs (submitted by customers and otherwise)? And what about collecting customer feedback (through surveys or otherwise)? -What about legal stuff? (EULA? should you incorporate? ...). This may be be even more of a requirement as lots of such programs make use of various open-source libraries (FFmpeg and what not), without paying royalties for various media formats (mp3 and others) which is not exactly legal and it could eventually be a problem (I definitely wouldn't want MPEG LA suing me personally!) ... And I'm not even sure you've actually thought through the very basic, most important questions either: -what problem does it solve, or how do it solve an the problem better than existing solutions? -is there money to make there at all? Especially when that market seems pretty crowded with hundreds of inexpensive and freeware converter apps (why would anyone want to buy yours over all the others?) -have you studied your competitors' products to know what they have, and at what price? It sounds like you have a LOT of homework to do still. Getting an app developed by a 3rd party is truly the trivial part here.

... unless it's a USB device, in which case there's another list. Firewire and P-Card/PCMCIA devices also have other lists. Microsoft doesn't maintain such lists (at least, not publicly) as they're not the authority for those things (very much like OUI's for ethernet devices), the lists pretty much change daily, and having a complete list of every vendor & productid ever made is just about impossible unless you somehow manage to get every single manufacturer to send you the infos on every single device they've ever built.

It won't affect your other drives whatsoever. Your data will still be there and ready to use, no reformatting necessary. Just make sure you pick the right drive when you're installing Win 7 though (you can always unplug them first if you're worried).

or perhaps: Dim Fso :Set Fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") (no double S) edit: looks like you fixed it already... Either ways, I'm still not completely sure how it should work in the first place, like how it should react if extra lines were inserted in one file (report the extra line, or keep reporting mismatches from that point on), or if it should be a "dumb" line by line comparison against the other file, or even just seeing if the line merely exists in the other file (line/order unimportant). We need more details.

There's nothing forcing you to use any "tools" for this (included or 3rd party). You could move from 1980's best (batch files) to 1990's technology: VBScript (using InStr for example, which is meant precisely for this -- comparing text strings). You can even use regular expressions if you want... And that has worked out of the box on any Windows box for a little over a decade.

If it's the motherboard listed above, there is no FW port on it, and it's unsurprising he has no use for it either. If he ever does, generic FW cards are dirt cheap now (under $10 shipped, I even gave several away a while ago). The uses for it are pretty niche these days, USB 2 (and now 3) being good enough for just about everything (external storage and such), cheap Gigabit switches and onboard Gbit NICs making it mostly pointless for networking, using it for debugging is not that common... There's almost only DV cameras using it now, but even then lots of those are moving to USB too (even iPods and other Apple stuff moved away from it). I always wonder why onboard Firewire is so popular these days when there's less and less use for it anymore (I'd gladly take a 2nd GBit NIC, USB/eSATA/serial/parallel port or whatever else instead as I might actually use those) As far as coolers go, I haven't really looked much as far as Socket LGA1156 goes so I'll let someone else chime in.

I'm not aware of any Canadian ISP (telco or cableco) that actually has anything like this. There's very few companies offering anything similar to FIOS to begin with. The only one I can think of is Bell, and I wouldn't say it's anything like FIOS still: -FIOS is actually available somewhere, whereas Bell Fibre is only available in small parts of a couple cities or so. Just forget about it, it's just not available, and it won't be anytime soon. In fact, the fastest Bell can deliver to us at work (right in the middle of a city of a half million ppl) is a whooping 1.3mbit (sometimes it's more like half that due to network congestion... oh, and static IPs are $30/month each, what a ripoff!) -The price is similar, but FIOS doesn't cripple the upload speed e.g. (FIOS: 25/25mbit, Bell: 25/7mbit) and doesn't have the low bandwidth caps that Bell has (75GB -- on a 25mbit line, so that's 5h worth of usage *per month*!)... -The FIOS bundles (and channel lineup for TV) are a LOT better (e.g. getting free netbooks vs having to pay $500 for a unreliable PVR *and* also a LOT cheaper) Besides, I don't see any telco or cableco (anybody offering TV content) letting your stream it over wifi to a TV w/o heavy DRM anytime soon (nevermind TVs aren't actually equipped to play back contents from wifi, much less with DRM on top of it) I'd say Internet and TV providers are actually worse in Canada than in the USA (low bandwidth caps, higher prices and basically zero competition for starters). For 7.5/0.82 mbit with a 30GB cap around here, it's $62/month (plus taxes n stuff), and then after that it's $8/GB (yes! you read that right!), not counting the $120 upfront for the modem... It's either that, or going back to dialup pretty much (well, I could get 512kbps with Bell at $42/mo...) Lucky to live in Canada perhaps, but definitely not for the ISPs!

Just start notepad (or whichever text editor you're using) elevated (right click on notepad and pick "run as administrator") and open your file. It should be able to save it then.

It actually isn't (mine at least). It's far simpler than that... More like notepad'ed

MKV lets you have multiple audio streams including formats that aren't valid or possible in avi files. You can also mux several subtitles too. MKV is supported by pretty much any codec pack out there, and basically every decent H.264 "hardware" player too (e.g. popcorn hour). Loads of other advanced and useful features (like alternate movie endings using seamless branching, supporting ANY video/audio codec, being able to sync streams, great settings for aspect ratio, proper support for VBR audio and B frames, etc) There are great tools for working with it too. Avi files are a relic from the early vfw days (think Win 3.1 era). You don't want to even try H.264-in-avi...

MPEG 1 or 2 are older formats which aren't not so great -MPEG1 support is pretty much universal though which is why some people use that despite the low quality and low resolutions (e.g. 352x240) -MPEG2 is used by DVDs and looks decent at higher bitrates (but that's a waste of space/bandwidth) AVI is merely a container (a bit like a zip file), it doesn't mean much beyond that. You use that along with a video codec (divx, xvid, 3ivx, etc) and a audio codec (mp3, ac3, etc). The quality will vary depending on which you use (and bitrate obviously). Almost all avi files out there are encoded using xvid or divx (video wise) which are both MPEG4 ASP codecs which give similar results as MPEG2 but at much smaller file sizes (but require a bit more CPU power to decode) and most of the time with mp3 audio which sounds just fine (AC3 is normally used for multichannel audio i.e. Dolby Digital). The same codecs can be used inside other containers such as the fairly popular mkv format. WMV is Microsoft's format (container and codecs). It's pretty good (good enough that it's used for Blu-Ray titles under the name VC-1), but it's mostly Windows-centric (which is perfectly fine by me). There are also other formats, namely H.264 (one of the most popular and best encoders/codecs being x264; modern Quicktime versions and DivX since version 7 also use H.264) which is usually stored inside mkv or mp4 containers (with different types of audio). It's what most Blu-Ray titltes seem to use. Amazing quality but LONG encoding times. Good support by modern hardware (some newer generation "hardware" players support it directly, and PC-wise recent video cards do the decoding as well) Even satellites and cablecos are moving to that. IMO: H.264 in MKV is where it's at. MPEG1 & 2 are obsolete. WMV has always been average. MPEG4 ASP (DivX pre-v7 and XviD) was good, but it's time to move on. And indeed everything is: Quicktime ditched Sorenson for H.264 (also means iTunes content and Apple Movie Trailers in H.264), DivX ditched ASP for H.264 in version 7, Flash is moving to H.264 as well so sites like Youtube are adopting it, many HD channels on satellite are already in H.264, loads of Blu-Ray discs are encoded in H.264, Silverlight 3 is getting H.264 support, etc. It's the obvious choice.

Alright. In the sense of unscientific mindless fun, cheating allowed, here goes (PNG format, but I can submit in JPG or BMP or TIFF or whatever else if you really prefer, it just makes a larger file), on an external host:

These tests are mostly a waste of time. Especially, in this case where they have a strong monetary incentive to make you believe you're a genius (so you can enjoy the privilege of sending them money). I tried it twice just for fun. One time, without reading the questions *at all* (mostly answering in a sequential or random order -- as good as the average monkey would answer) and I got 96 (pretty high for a monkey IMO). Next time, I only picked answers for the painfully obvious (you know, those that made my 10yo daughter say "DUH" as she was watching) which I don't think deserves much of a high score and I got 124 (I wouldn't expect a typical 10yo to score that) which is just enough so I can send them money... If you actually try to answer all questions properly and/or Google for some answers, I don't think getting 140 is hard at all (you can even attempt it as many times as you wish). Not that I have much faith in the testing method itself, and many parts are pretty much well known to be poor choices e.g. why use english literature questions (who wrote whatever book)? That will give a unfair advantage to native speakers (just imagine if it was questions about french or italian books and authors, that would tip the scale rather differently)