It’s me, live with it

Everyone that make software agree that publishing their software in a P2P site is a bad thing. It’s practically stealing their hours of building it. And I’m not just talking about the legit software company. Heck, look at this screenshot:

Yeah, that is RELOADED, complaining about P2P users publishing their crack.

Granted, they seems like the lone, hated group from the scene, but still, They worked for their release, and pissed of when someone put them on P2P.

I’m kinda shocked about this. For all these years of seeing (and using) cracks and fixes made by them, I thought they are the one who put it on P2P. I guess I was wrong, then.

Which brings us to today’s topic: What can you do if you can’t pay for your softwares?

Well, you can always use free software (both as in beer and as in speech). There should be almost anything you need in the free world. Need a good OS? Linux, or BSD should do fine. Word Processors? Openoffice, KOffice, Gnome Office, LaTeX will do all of them. Multimedia? A lot of choice you can choose from.

Most of the software I mentioned above can be had for nothing. You can use it as you like, get a free community support, free updates, and you can freely redistribute it, Like selling your own PC brand with free software loaded into them.

But is that it? You use the software, made money with it, and walk away?

Let’s not do that, shall we?

There are a LOT of ways for you to return what free software gave you. For example, you can hang out at the community forum, providing support for others, you can help translate the software, you can help track their bugs, and, of course, you can help them build it.

To give and to receive is a beautiful thing.

Here’s a little program I made for an assignment (it’s in Indonesian). Maybe you are interested in this. It is a monte carlo simulation program.

Here’s the complete project files and the executable:

link

Please tell me if you used it for anything, or want to post it somewhere else.

I’ve been fiddling around Nvidia’s CUDA these last few days. And I am very impressed so far.

For example, I need a few days to get 100 folding@home points when I’m using the CPU. Using my 8600GT boosted my score to 800 overnight, which is entirely impressive.

It proves that a GPU can work much faster in some applications than a CPU. Much, much faster. It is very fast that I think there is a mistake somewhere, but no, it really is that fast.

I am currently thinking to upgrade my video card. I’m eyeing to buy a Radeon HD 4670, but I’m not going to drop the 8600GT. I have a spare PCIex4 slot, and the 8600GT will continue folding there.

It’s great to have a supercomputing power at home, let me tell you.

Earlier today, I had a problem with my media players. Both Media Monkey and WMP refuses to play mp3 files. Since they can play mp4 and AAC files without any problem, I immediately know that there’s something wrong with the mp3 plugin on my sistem.

Fixing Media Monkey was a breeze, I only need to download the MAD plug in and everything returns back to normal. But while googling for the plug in, I came across XMPlay. It is nothing new to me, I used it a few times before as portable music player (I brought it on my UFD). It’s been a while, though, so I wanted to see what new tricks it has. 

And those tricks are good, let me tell you.

Firstly, the way it sounds. I am used to the way Media Monkey plays my music, listening XMPlay doing the same gave me a surprise. I tried listening a song back and forth between Media Monkey and XMPlay, and I like XMPlay more. The bass is a bit more emphasized, and the treble is a little crisper. It’s nothing I can’t do with careful equalization, but still, It’s a nice thing to have without having to fiddle with those sliders.

Next is memory usage. XMPlay is only a 300 kilobytes download, so I won’t be surprised if it uses little memory, too. And it does, it only uses around 3000 kilobytes, compared to around 30.000 kilobytes in Media Monkey and 20.000 kilobytes in Windows Media Player. It doesn’t mean much for me, I have 2 GB of RAM anyway. But for those who are tight on specifications, this kind of saving is really good.

I also didn’t think a player this samll would have any media library, but I was proven wrong. This player even integrates a basic media library which is enough for most people’s needs. 

And lastly, the plug ins. XMPlay comes as a bare package. It can play standard formats with no problem, but if you need FLAC or AAC (like me), you need to download the plug ins. It’s not a hard job, as the file size is only around 200 kilobytes, and all you need to do is placing the files in the same directory as XMPlay. Not only file support, it also have a lot of skins and visualizations to choose from.

 Now, the bad things. This player doesn’t have any portable media player support, especially auto-sync. his only apply for those who need it, though, so if you don’ need it, it’s no problem.

Next, this player needs a beter buffer system. I experienced quite a lot of stuttering if I listen to it while doing hard-drive intensive things, like installing a software. It rarely happens, though.

In my opinion, this is a very good music player for its size, even compared to full player ike Media Monkey, It remains competitive. Therefore, I happily recommend to try this one, especially if you are low on computing power. You might actually like it.