Messages

26

Living Room / Re: As a counter-point to the SOPA/PIPA demonstration

« on: January 22, 2012, 05:10 PM »

I'm never quite sure where I stand on the idea of Johnny Joe sharing a copy of an album he bought with Jimmy Bob down the road. Frankly I find it difficult say they are doing anything wrong.

On the other hand MegaUpload and similar sites are profiting by distributing other peoples works. Once you make money, you're no longer sharing, and you deserve to be stopped.

27

General Software Discussion / Re: "Of course you know, this means WAR Gentlemen!" Microsoft makes its move.

« on: January 21, 2012, 08:04 AM »

Lets face it, ARM for the time being means portable. So what MS are suggesting locking down are Windows 8 tablets. I don't agree with it, but Apple already do it, so do most Android tablet makers. It's the regulators who need to step in and stop this practice.

28

General Software Discussion / Re: Math-O-Mir: Equation Editing (and a new approach to GUI input)

« on: January 20, 2012, 03:56 PM »

Fantastic find, seems to work really well.

A similar program I've been using is Equation Author it's free and still out there for download but sadly the original author website is gone.

29

Developer's Corner / Re: Lost My Faith - Need New Religion - Need LAMP Help...

« on: January 10, 2012, 06:14 PM »

Spoiler

+1 for wraiths question.

Also since when is wishing to not see the already chronic overpopulation problem in many 3rd world countries from getting worse a sin?

30

Developer's Corner / Re: Lost My Faith - Need New Religion - Need LAMP Help...

« on: January 09, 2012, 06:31 AM »

Hmmmm

“The world today has 6.8 billion people… that’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
Spoken like a true eugenicist!  He wants to kill 15% of the global population through vaccines.  His Foundation has already been responsible for forced vaccinations at gunpoint, so I suppose this isn’t any new surprise.

-http://www.truthistreason.net/bill-gates-foundation-buys-500000-shares-of-biotech-terrorist-monsanto

Well that source clearly has zero credibility or reason. Not a good start for the anti-bill side

[edit]Also oops didn't realise this thread was more for the technical advice so I'll stop dragging it OT? Sorry

31

Developer's Corner / Re: Lost My Faith - Need New Religion - Need LAMP Help...

« on: January 09, 2012, 06:28 AM »

Disappointing, I'd want to hear more details before jumping to conclusions. The purchase of shares seems to be a fact rather than rumor so there's no spin on that.

32

Living Room / Re: Kopimism - a newly-formalised religion

« on: January 08, 2012, 06:27 PM »

The only good thing about nonsense religions like this is that it highlights the nonsense it all religions

33

General Software Discussion / Re: Rapid Environment Editor

« on: January 08, 2012, 06:25 PM »

I use this alot, it's a godsend when programming apps rely on environment variables for locating each other, and for managing the path variable which a number of programs can be careless with.

34

Living Room / Re: Google Breaking its Rules?

« on: January 04, 2012, 12:38 PM »

Interesting response, they even opted to punish themselves. How masochistic of them

35

Developer's Corner / Re: Silly question about localizing C/C++ applications

« on: January 03, 2012, 03:26 PM »

The the native MS approach is indeed resource DLLs as vlastimil suggests though the recommended way to use them is through Microsoft Multilingual User (MUI). I personally found this example, Hello MUI, great for getting up to speed with the API.

The FSF guys have long used gettext as mouser mentioned. Recently Boost added a localisation library, Boost.Locale, to their ever expanding collection. I haven't yet had a chance to use it, but looks neat. It seems to build on both gettext and ICU.

Some C++ apps come with language files that look like this:

[Select]

HELLOWORLD "Hello, World!"

I'm curious: how is this loaded and interpreted? Is HELLOWORLD a string literal, and you have a long list of conditionals such as  "if id equals "HELLOWORLD" then sHelloWorld = id, else if..."? (That would be quite slow and it's one of the things I'm trying to avoid in Delphi.) Or do these strings map to numeric values somehow? Or something else yet?

Silly question!

-tranglos (January 03, 2012, 12:38 PM)

Nope not silly, my guess is that the file is loaded into an associative array of some kind. In C++ that could be as simple as an STL std::map<std::string, std::string> container.

36

Developer's Corner / Re: How do I Start a Ribbon Project?

« on: January 01, 2012, 07:24 PM »

Going WPF means going C# or C++ CLI I believe. However you don't need to go managed .NET for the ribbon, it is exposed as a native Win 32 API.

I would suspect the easiest way to start a ribbon project is through C++ WTL and this tutorial - Relook your Old and New Native Applications with a Ribbon UI under Vista or Windows 7 (WTL)

I admit my soft spot for WTL does bias me in that suggestion. But being a header only library which wraps the WIN32 APIs, it means you acquire zero external dependencies.

37

Living Room / Re: Hosters are impossible. (A.k.a. get me what I want, not what I don't want!)

« on: December 29, 2011, 10:21 AM »

I'd be pretty sure it does support using your own domain name, but do email just in case, they are very quick to reply.

38

Living Room / Re: Hosters are impossible. (A.k.a. get me what I want, not what I don't want!)

« on: December 29, 2011, 09:13 AM »

I use GeekISP, they provide everything on your "want" list, and some things on the "do not want" list. Been with them for years without a hitch. It's very much lowlevel shell access, not control panel stuff, though the FAQ tells you everything you need.

39

Living Room / Re: Adware is not freeware, right?

« on: December 27, 2011, 12:39 PM »

The meanings of geek and nerd differ from place to place. In Ireland geek is a serious insult as it describes an individual with zero social skills. Being a nerd mostly describes someone as having non-mainstream interests. If you seek for society at large to accept you then it's a bad thing, if not, well, meh.

As for adware, if you pay then I'm opposed to it, if you didn't pay then stop complaining, even if you were not warned beforehand. People don't complain when they drive down the road and see a billboard, or if they go to a website and it has ads, so stop holding developers to some separate standard.

40

General Software Discussion / Re: Question about extra-large JPG

« on: December 22, 2011, 02:57 PM »

Some quick multiplication says that a 1536x1024 image at 32bit colours (4bytes) would be 6mbs in size. So those smaller images are likely just in an uncompressed, or lossless compressed, format. Maybe it's to do with the recovery, or maybe the camera was just set not not compress the pictures to preserve the full original quality.

41

Developer's Corner / Re: Can CSS apply custom user style to a certain range of Unicode characters?

« on: December 18, 2011, 05:26 PM »

Sounds like something that could be done with a simple enough custom Javascript bookmarklet. I don't do much JS myself, but could be worth asking in coding snacks section.

42

Living Room / Re: LHC Finds HBP? Or at least...they think they did...Awesome if confirmed!

« on: December 16, 2011, 10:23 AM »

Here's an awesome explanation of why the scientists cannot claim to have proof yet, but are nonetheless super excited and confident - Starts with a Bang - The Large Hadron Collider, the Higgs, and Hope.

43

Living Room / Re: Intel vs AMD processors

« on: December 15, 2011, 02:37 PM »

Intel's OpenCL implementation can't utilise the on-chip GPU. I believe I've read that their future integrated GPUs will be supported, but the current ones won't be.

44

Living Room / Re: Intel vs AMD processors

« on: December 15, 2011, 01:54 PM »

I'm personally interested in their new range of APUs, the Fusion range. I've been reading a lot about OpenCL recently and they seem like a fascinating architecture to target. In particular because small form PCs built around them are relatively cheap.

I haven't heard much feedback about them though,

45

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7 -- to x64 or not to x64, that is the question

« on: December 14, 2011, 06:22 PM »

x64, and never look back.

-f0dder (December 14, 2011, 05:48 PM)

Not since XP 64 bit

46

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Clojure the next C ?

« on: December 13, 2011, 05:53 PM »

It's worth noting that the new highly parallel future doesn't automatically need a new language. Indeed the current approach to utilizing the extra power offered by GPUs and the like is to stick with the old bare metal languages, e.g. CUDA and OpenCL are basically C programming.

47

Developer's Corner / Re: Is Clojure the next C ?

« on: December 13, 2011, 03:12 PM »

Let's see

• He applies a human linguistic issue to computer languages without ever justifying that it is applicable.
• He keeps going on about us being "trapped" without every really justifying that we are or what the trap is.
• He then proposes a "solution" without any really explanation of why it will solve things other saying "it's different".

I suppose it's an interesting diary entry, but it's not much of a supported argument.

48

General Software Discussion / Re: AdBlock Plus To Not Block All Ads

« on: December 13, 2011, 11:58 AM »

Personally I don't mind, static ads are all but invisible to my brain. In the past I've happily browsed the web without ads blocked, rather I just use flash block so I can enable only the flash boxes I want.

So I guess I'm with CWuestefeld and Josh on this.

Also, here's some food for thought - If you block ads, then aren't you being immensely selfish? After-all it means you are leeching a service while happily off loading the cost of your usage onto your fellow netizens who don't block the ads. You are using them to subsidise your own gains.

49

Living Room / Re: Kicked Off the Plane for Games

« on: December 13, 2011, 08:24 AM »

Their plane, their rules. Seems very simple to me.

50

General Software Discussion / Re: Java Interfaces - huh?

« on: December 11, 2011, 03:48 PM »

A Java interface in what sense? As in an interface class?

If that's what you mean well they are like a purely abstract C++ class.

Multiple inheritance from non-abstract base classes seems to generally be considered "a bad thing" among many developers. So Java went the decision of only allowing single inheritance from a concrete class and multiple inheritance from interface classes.