Messages

51

General Software Discussion / Re: how to run programs without altering the host pc

« on: December 08, 2011, 06:05 AM »

Well sandboxie will do it if it's already installed on the host PC. Portable apps should work too, that is the basic idea of them, but they don't necessarily provide guarantees to that effect.

52

Living Room / Re: Minecraft Pocket Edition (Android): 10 Cents (US) on Google today

« on: December 07, 2011, 01:55 PM »

The place to go to find out is xda-developers, I see they even have a forum section dedicated to the Kindle Fire. If it's possible, then the guys there will know about it. In facts it's likely they'll be the ones who made it possible.

But note, while playing with such mods is generally very safe, it usually voids any warranty.

53

Living Room / Re: Minecraft Pocket Edition (Android): 10 Cents (US) on Google today

« on: December 07, 2011, 12:34 PM »

The discount is over, the each day a new 10 apps are available and we're now on day 2.

Also Deozaan - the Market and it's compatibility checks are really annoying. If you do any tinkering with your phone then it'll often get confused and say an app is incompatible when in fact it runs perfectly. That said there are modded versions of the market app out there that disable the compatibility check, and the geographic checks so an app is always available.

54

General Software Discussion / Re: Mike Halsey article on firmware upgrades/updates ...

« on: November 27, 2011, 12:02 PM »

You do hear about things like firmware updates for harddisks which can improve performance. But I must admit I've never looked into getting any myself. The only time I've flashed new firmware for my PC was to update a BIOS to support a 64bit chip.

I do flash my phone quite often, but I see that more as software upgrading rather than firmware?

55

Living Room / Re: Google scares me, I think.

« on: November 24, 2011, 07:13 PM »

I'm not so sure that Google intelligently rerouted the message, rather it probably reroutes every message and the ones classed as read don't get highlighted.

Either way, Google is VERY scary, Facebook is even more terrifying!

56

Living Room / Re: FUNNY~! Drinking Water DOES NOT Hydrate!

« on: November 20, 2011, 09:49 PM »

I would think it took 3 years because of how borderline the claim is. In the end they decided you can't claim drinking water reduced the risk of dehydration because the "risk-factors" were so badly defined.

Simple really, if you want to claim your product reduces the risk-factors of something, you'd really want to know what those risk factors are. These guys clearly didn't.

If someone else can come along and show otherwise the regulations will undoubtedly be changed. The media won't report that of course, because that would be boring.

57

Living Room / Re: FUNNY~! Drinking Water DOES NOT Hydrate!

« on: November 20, 2011, 09:00 PM »

Carrots were never reclassified as a fruit, it never happened! Stop saying it did when it didn't???

Frankly what future would be be more afraid of

1) Companies are allowed do what they want, selling grapes while calling them apples and claiming their recycled, feces covered, toiletroll cures cancer.

or

2) Regulations are drawn up under the eyes of 100s (1000s even) of civil servants being briefed by umpteen experts in the appropriate fields all in public view, to define want an apple actually is or what medical claims can actually be made about a product.


The only thing which will stop the world going upside is sufficient bureaucracy and regulation. It's the unregulated systems which collapse, and individuals with too much power who pass crazy laws.

There is a good reason so many stories are made up about this nonsense law, or that ridiculous legislation coming from Brussels - there just aren't anywhere near enough legitimate cock-ups to keep the newspapers with something to say.

58

Living Room / Re: FUNNY~! Drinking Water DOES NOT Hydrate!

« on: November 20, 2011, 07:18 PM »

Sometimes things are complicated, it's when the papers/bloggers bastardise the truth that suddenly something very reasonable seems ridiculous.

But in this case there is nothing complicated, the pdf you linked is very clear and unambiguous. The only ramifications/confusion come from the lies.

59

Living Room / Re: FUNNY~! Drinking Water DOES NOT Hydrate!

« on: November 20, 2011, 06:44 PM »

Lies are never surprising 

Carrot is fruit?

For the purposes of this Directive, tomatoes, the edible parts of rhubarb stalks, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and water-melons are considered to be fruit

-http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32001L0113:En:HTML

So wasn't a reclassification of carrots, just just a lumping of various ingredients for jam under the heading fruit to cut down on words in that directive. As usual though the lie is funnier.

Snail is fish? Don't know, can't find a single credible citation to that. But feel free to supply one.

Banana must be sized properly? Bananas must be above a certain minimum size, and free for excessive malformations. What about that exactly offends you?

Generally speaking it wouldn't hurt to do a wee bit a googleing before you repost someones else's lies and embarrass yourself.

60

Living Room / Re: FUNNY~! Drinking Water DOES NOT Hydrate!

« on: November 20, 2011, 05:45 PM »

Yeah I was a bit surprised to see mention of the bendy bananas in the article when that was a lie in the first place.

61

Living Room / Re: FUNNY~! Drinking Water DOES NOT Hydrate!

« on: November 20, 2011, 05:28 PM »

Yeah seriously! Dehydration as a medical/biological state was obviously defined in such a way that the claim the water will cure it is not medically proven enough that companies can go around claiming their products are a cure.

The issue seems to be the dehydration is a symptom which can have causes other than simply not drinking enough. In such cases drinking water is not a cure. If you even just read to the end of the article you linked you'd have realised this. Companies shouldn't be allowed to make medical claims willy-nilly and the only way to stop them is through regulations.

But as usual people don't care about the actual case or the facts behind it, it's more fun to assume everyone else is stupid and if that means misrepresenting facts and outright lying most people are happy.

62

Living Room / Re: FUNNY~! Drinking Water DOES NOT Hydrate!

« on: November 20, 2011, 12:30 PM »

Medical claims require scientific backing? My god what is the world coming to? The ignorance expressed in this thread is hilarious, yet expected.

63

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint: Freemake

« on: November 18, 2011, 09:25 PM »

Or you could just not use this software which they worked very hard on and give away for free.

64

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: [Android OS] - DC Forum App (FREE)

« on: November 14, 2011, 07:32 PM »

If you're a C++ fan and feel most comfortable with Visual Studio then check out the NDK and vs-android.

65

General Software Discussion / Re: Smartphones, Tablets, E-Readers Become Physically Heavier With More Data

« on: November 07, 2011, 02:56 PM »

Is flash memory different though? It could be?

Either way this all sounds like just an excuse for tedious people to show off when they overhear someone else suggesting that digital songs or e-books don't weight anything. Unfortunately I'm probably one of those tedious folks

66

General Software Discussion / Re: Smartphones, Tablets, E-Readers Become Physically Heavier With More Data

« on: November 07, 2011, 12:02 PM »

Sounds suspicious to me, but if flash memory does have more energy when used then I suppose it makes sense.

Of course "used" doesn't really make much sense, memory has just as much information when empty as when full, it's just usually the empty memory isn't really of much interest to us. Rather I guess it a question of whether storing a 1 in memory requires more energy then a 0, or vis-versa.

If one of those is more energetic, does the memory usually start off predominantly filled with the other, then I guess adding the more energetic type through structured data, which on average probably tends to a 50:50 spread, would increase the mass.

67

General Software Discussion / Re: Why I stand up for Stallman

« on: November 06, 2011, 04:28 PM »

Plus you don't actually have to pay Redhat to use their software, you can recompile the sources yourself, or use CentOS.

68

Living Room / Re: Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs, is the real hero

« on: November 05, 2011, 04:12 PM »

Also didn't Mother Theresa's stance on artificial contraception have a big role to play on the spread of AIDs in Africa? In terms of ultimately having a good/bad impact on the world she is way way into the bad side of the scales.

69

Developer's Corner / Re: Herb Sutter's brief look at C++11

« on: November 01, 2011, 07:22 PM »

Yep, most of it it header only, so all gets compiled in. The other stuff is built as static and dynamic libraries. If you link against the static ones then there are no extra DLLs that need to be shipped with EXE. Build boost takes a lot of time and needs a lot of hard disk space. v 1./47 uses 10GBs for me, 3.5 GBs when NTFS compression is turned on. That's for 8 versions; debug/release * static/dynamic * x86/x64.

The EXE size will grow though, generic coding generates loads of code, the idea being that the compiler optimizes each version it generates for the specific types that are used by your program.

70

Developer's Corner / Re: Herb Sutter's brief look at C++11

« on: November 01, 2011, 06:08 PM »

You should start using Boost libraries, they get you thinking in the STL way. And once you do you won't go back!
Or at least I didn't.

71

Developer's Corner / Re: Herb Sutter's brief look at C++11

« on: November 01, 2011, 01:50 PM »

Sounds like a great way to make code disposable, because coming back at a snippet months later it wont be real clear what the hell it does if it isn't commented thoroughly.

-Stoic Joker (November 01, 2011, 11:22 AM)

If misused sure, but I don't believe features should be left out because they could be misused. Also when you consider polymorphism and generic coding, both present in C++ for years now, this auto isn't exactly a whole new paradigm anyway.

72

Developer's Corner / Re: Herb Sutter's brief look at C++11

« on: November 01, 2011, 09:16 AM »

With the likes of iterators I think it's a great thing, after all you don't want to care what the actual type of an iterator is, just that it behaves like you expect it to. It's duck typing but with the compiler verifying everything at compile time rather than forcing you to deal with runtime errors.

For the example you give, well I agree with you. But then foo is a local variable, likely it's lifetime is pretty short and it's type isn't as important as that it behaves as a vector-ish of strings. If your code specifically requires it to be a std::vector you can be more specific.

auto isn't necessarily meant to be used everywhere.

[edit] mouser beat me to saying much the same thing

73

Developer's Corner / Re: Herb Sutter's brief look at C++11

« on: October 31, 2011, 07:15 PM »

I must say I'm loving the few C++11 features that appeared in Visual Studio 2010. Can't wait to get developing with the fuller new standard library.

74

Developer's Corner / Herb Sutter's brief look at C++11

« on: October 31, 2011, 02:51 PM »

Herb Sutter, Microsoft's head C++/CLI guy and author of the famous Guru of the Week columns, has nice little overview of some of C++11 new features over on this blog. It's really worth checking out.

The C++11 standard offers many useful new features. This page focuses specifically and only on those features that make C++11 really feel like a new language compared to C++98, because:

• They change the styles and idioms you’ll use when writing C++ code, often including the way you’ll design C++ libraries. For example, you’ll see more smart pointer parameters and return values, and functions that return big objects by value.
• They will be used so pervasively that you’ll probably see them in most code examples. For example, virtually every five-line modern C++ code example will say “auto” somewhere.

-http://herbsutter.com/elements-of-modern-c-style/

75

Living Room / Re: Steve Jobs is dead.

« on: October 26, 2011, 02:07 PM »

True, he also robbed a lot of other people ideas and claimed they were his.

He was famous for taking all the credit.

Apple's famous designer, Jonathan Ive, was frustrated because Steve was constantly taking credit for his ideas.  It was a recurring problem, with incredibly talented executives complaining that Jobs took all the credit for Apple's game-changing innovations.  "I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas," Ive said.  "So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs."

-http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/032411jobsa