Recent Posts

1551

Living Room / Re: What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away

« Last post by Lashiec on November 21, 2007, 04:43 AM »

But how to explain the behavior of an independent company who (one would assume) benefits most by supporting DX9?

-Ralf Maximus (November 20, 2007, 08:10 PM)

nVidia invested a lot of man hours helping Crytek with the technical side of Crysis, the game runs great on a 8800 GT, the new and impressive graphic card from them... connect the dots

And Crytek now says DirectX 10.1 (supported by the new Radeon 38xx) it's not a big deal. More signs!

It happened before. Halo 2 was exclusive for Vista... until hackers made it run in XP. IIRC Age of Empires II could not run under Windows 2000 (see a trend with Ensemble Studios/Microsoft games?), Doom III was NT-only, until someone learned to use an hex editor, and discovered why it could not run (a simple API that was named differently under NT OSs), etc.

1552

Living Room / Re: DonationCoder.com Yearly Fundraiser for 2007 - Advice Requested Please

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 05:18 PM »

I would to raise a concern of mine, that is that it's December, folks. I presume people will be broken, with Christmas and everything. Then again, if you decide to wait, you'd have to delay it until February, as January is a bad month for spending money as well.

Darwin mentioned the number of members. It will be a good idea to promote even the smallest donation. If 10% of the members donate 1$, you'll get nothing less than 9,500$, which is a huge sum for planning big things for 2008.

1553

Living Room / Re: Help Name Our Cat!

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 04:34 PM »

Totally unrelated, but what's that "DC Immaturity Club" you have in your signature, p3lb0x?

1554

General Software Discussion / Re: Animal Crossing Tragedy: File Under "The Emotional Power of Video Games"

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 04:24 PM »

Very moving. This shows, that despite all advances in technology and changes in the videogame industry, Nintendo still makes some of the best games, just by focusing on small details and exploring new fields, even when they're seen as a company that makes games for kids.

1555

General Software Discussion / Re: AlbumArt Downloader - where?

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 04:15 PM »

Why? Now you have Nina Persson everywhere! I wouldn't complain on such an amazing feat

1556

Living Room / Re: The "Blonde Effect"

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 03:34 PM »

Oh, my IQ went down 20 points

Personally, I think men become dumb when we see a pretty girl, independently of its hair colour. It also helps that in Spain the blonde legend is not so rooted on people, despite cultural invasion (Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, etc.).

Ralf, you are on fire these days. You really took to the heart mouser's plea for collaboration with the site, I don't remember Ken being so prolific. I couldn't hang around the forums too much those times, though.

1557

Official Announcements / Re: Firefox Extension Contest (deadline december 2007) - DC CODING CONTEST TOO

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 03:28 PM »

Hmmm, I recall per site preferences ala Opera were being considered for Firefox 3, but I don't know if they made the cut. Beta 1 is out, but I didn't have time to check it.

D'oh! Forget about it, it doesn't have anything to do with what you envision.

1558

Living Room / Re: Breaking News: Multiple Universes Exist!

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 03:24 PM »

Interesting topic. Personally, I think it's thinking too high to proclaim that you have found we live within an universe that "runs" in parallel with another, considering that practically we don't know anything about our universe. We still don't even know what happens with the matter absorbed by dark holes, we haven't researched how wormholes might work or even if they exist (it's been said a wormhole could grant matter instantaneous teleportation between two parts of the universe very distant one from the other), we don't know how quasars works and if it's possible their light could go faster than normal light (another theory I heard over the years). Heck, even when a couple of weeks ago a group of scientists said they measured light moving faster than 300.000 Km/s, it was featured in the mass media as a breakthrough discovery, it was quickly dismissed by other scientists that the experiment had been seriously flawed, nobody took care of talking to the media again and saying: "Hey, it could exist an error in their argumentation".

The theory of multiple universes makes sense when formulated in the way that multiple different universes could exist, but parallel ones... I think those guys are talking about infinite universes which contain different versions of the same moment in time, but what is the duration of that moment, 1 second? 1 nanosecond? 1 minute? A day?. OK, you have proved the thing with mathematics, now try to explain it in a way that makes sense outside of numbers. We can't almost understand how simple things work, even less something so complex as an universe. Even if we understand it (impossible I'd say), we'll still be asking ourselves: "But, is there something BEYOND?"

Time travelling might be possible to the past, providing you maintain certain kind of link or portal with the exact moment in time from where you took off. To the future it would be a suicide, you would land in a different moment in time everytime, in one you witness the Third World War, in the other, you see people travelling to Mars... and where are only talking about things that people can influence with their work and free will, who knows what could be happening in the universe, we could have been hit by that comet coming beyond the Kuiper Belt, which is currently the biggest object in the Solar System.

Wow, longest post ever, and everything is probably wrong . Those things are truly fascinating.

1559

Living Room / Re: About Rudeness in Forums

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 02:51 PM »

I think I'll go with "Monthly". Once in a while we get some heated discussions, considering how things go around here, but that one that f0dder linked is the only one I saw mouser closed for going too far.

Examples of somewhat rude threads would be the one that Darwin mentions, that other one that was spawned in the Opera 9.5 thread, with zealotry accusations and everything, and the one about the Mac, hehe, that one was quite the show. In every other forum, people would be trolling in those threads, derailing then to the point of making the original topic or question irrelevant.

Like, for example, if someone asked about an antivirus, people started to recommend switching to the Mac or Linux. Or complaining about an app they never tried. But those are the less rude situations.

Then again, like everyone says, this is a very nice place, considering some of the other forums I hang around, one being really mean sometimes. I have to say that is mostly frequented by teenagers, and their "Living Room" is particularly hilarious, because of the naiveness of some people. Anyway, people is always meaner in the Internet than in real life.

1560

General Software Discussion / Re: AlbumArt Downloader - where?

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 02:35 PM »

Found it

1561

Living Room / Re: Pet Peeve: I will never buy a rechargeable mouse again for as long as i live

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 02:31 PM »

Yup, I have one handy if I'm the middle of something important, and the "current" goes off. Like, you know, playing games

1562

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 02:28 PM »

Hmm, FarrTimeZones could be done with an alias, taking advantage of the sites around the net that gives you that information, among other things like the weather and such.

Bonus points if someone can link FarrDaysUntil with Rainlendar

1563

Living Room / Re: Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 09:43 AM »

Well, there's some counterpoint provided by Ars Technica. I don't understand half of it, not the original paper, as short as it may be so...

1564

Living Room / Re: Your Tin Foil Hat Will Not Save You Now

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 09:30 AM »

There's a Dutch grad student - Melanie Rieback - who has worked on an RFID "Firewall" called the RFID Guardian. Crumb, can't remember if I heard about it first here or elsewhere... Apologies if I am stealing someone else's thunder with this!

-Darwin (November 19, 2007, 08:28 PM)

You heard about it here, of course! DonationCoder is the primary source of information for the tinfoil hat lovers around the world!

I wonder if Cody will start to distribute RFID tags with the food in future DC meetings... ya know, just to take care of the visitors to the site.

1565

Living Room / Re: Amazon's Kindle eBook Reader

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 09:10 AM »

God, an iReader... NO! >_<

Unless they don't go the iPhone route, unlikely anyway.

1566

General Software Discussion / Re: ghacks post: "Why I decided to uninstall my Antivirus software"

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 09:07 AM »

Eóin mentioning virtual machines reminded me of something. The use of something like Sandboxie could be a good alternative for when you're browsing the Internet, and you don't want the antivirus scanning (and slowing down) your traffic. Heck, I would even say that it's more secure than an antivirus.

Actually, I encountered one of those fantastic redirections f0dder links to last week, while browsing in Firefox. As it's not my primary browser, I have no extensions installed there. Now I have AdBlock Plus, just to be sure.

1567

General Software Discussion / Re: Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?

« Last post by Lashiec on November 20, 2007, 08:57 AM »

Hehe, the DES story is legendary. Even today, some people are still suspicious of the algorithm. Personally, I think that's being overly paranoid, considering that IIRC the files containing the passwords of Opera and Firefox, and GNUPG all use Triple DES as the encryption algorithm. You can always use stronger algorithms, though, so I don't see any problem in there.

I highly doubt of some backdoor in Rijndael. Wasn't the specification available to the public? Then again it was chosen before the Twofish algorithm... (conspiracy theory... ).

One time pad is extremely secure, that's undeniable, but extremely inconvenient. Is someone using it today? Using media as passphrases, though, it's a nice protection system (jv16 PowerTools has something like this as an option to prevent unauthorized access to the software), but in this age, when everyone loses everything and kids run amok around the house, it's not recommendable.

Don't worry about Carnivore, the latest trend is a traffic shaper per ISP. Besides, Carnivore it's retired, apparently commercial software does its job better (pretty fearful, everyone can go to the P2P and download its copy, and start playing NSA).

And Twofish is unbreakable. Why? It was designed by Bruce Schneier . I'll bookmark that book, thanks. Whoa, it's a novel, that's sweet.

(Now I'm going to write a post ranting about how you guys write too much in too little time, darn!)

1568

General Software Discussion / Re: Fixing an XP Laptop, when to give up?

« Last post by Lashiec on November 19, 2007, 04:36 PM »

Maybe it's a new trojan, or is hidden by using a rootkit (as rookits by definition are not malware). If you somehow come across the offending file, it would be a good idea to sent it to various security software companies. It looks that you won't find it, though

How many security products are enough? Well... a maximum of 4 running and scanning in real time is more than enough, that is, antivirus, firewall, antispyware and a HIPS. Of course, HIPS and firewall are optional, Windows firewall behind a router (or even without it) should be enough.

1569

General Software Discussion / Re: Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?

« Last post by Lashiec on November 19, 2007, 12:53 PM »

Oh, I was thinking in posting this two days ago, but I passed onto it, because I thought that people would catch the news anyway.

It's not exactly clear, like Mr. Schneier says at the end of the article, if the NSA did this deliberately, or was a simple oversight. Of course, we'll never know, once they give some explanations, they would choose the latter option

1570

Living Room / Re: Amazon's Kindle eBook Reader

« Last post by Lashiec on November 19, 2007, 12:50 PM »

Sony also released one recently, Ars Technica have a review of it. The price is the same, what a coincidence

Personally, I think (and I really wish) that this will be the future of books. The vision of carrying tons of books in a small piece of hardware is really appealling to me. Of course, if manufacturers continue to add the damn DRM, non-standard formats, and high prices, both for hardware and for books, I think I'll let someone to continue making paper out of trees, thank you.

1571

General Software Discussion / Re: ghacks post: "Why I decided to uninstall my Antivirus software"

« Last post by Lashiec on November 19, 2007, 12:44 PM »

I suppose that you would have to decide between the convenience of having something guarding you against performance impact and wether your antivirus affects your work on the computer to the point that you'll prefer having it disabled. Of course, you also have to take in account personal preference, hardware, computer literacy and antivirus software.

1572

General Software Discussion / Re: Visual Studio 2008 has gone RTM - free Express downloads, too

« Last post by Lashiec on November 19, 2007, 12:35 PM »

WAIT, WHAT? They offer a free HTML editor as well? OH MY! I wasn't aware of that, does it produce compliant code?

Though I'd have to continue using KompoZer anyway

1573

General Software Discussion / Re: ghacks post: "Why I decided to uninstall my Antivirus software"

« Last post by Lashiec on November 19, 2007, 12:31 PM »

My experience is that people who went "I don't need antivirus software" for a time came running asking for antivirus software. Of course, this changes depending on the usage you're giving to your computer, but even being prudent like Martin suggests and refraining yourself of taking up risks can give problems. Recent attacks to security forums show this, and considering that malware can be sent along normal JavaScript is better to be safe than to be sorry. Being a somewhat paranoid guy with something behind to protect you if disaster strikes it's the better thing to do IMO.

Apart from that, a well written post that does not fall in the anti antivirus zealotry (or trolling)

1574

General Software Discussion / Re: Visual Studio 2008 has gone RTM - free Express downloads, too

« Last post by Lashiec on November 19, 2007, 12:18 PM »

Maybe this would help? It's for the full Visual Studio, but I understand it can be extensible to the Express editions. So far, the only feature everyone was talking about was this multitargeting thing, for building applications with support for the various .NET runtimes versions. Damn, justice beat me to it

Looks pretty good. Should I change to this for C++ development now that I have enough disk space for it? . Oh man, not another .NET version... updating time again <_<

1575

General Software Discussion / Re: Fixing an XP Laptop, when to give up?

« Last post by Lashiec on November 19, 2007, 12:11 PM »

In those cases, it's always better to have a CD with some security solutions stored. Don't know how many can be burned in a CD and executed with the app complaining about it can't write to disk, though. Or resort to online scanners, Kaspersky, TrendMicro's HouseCall or the same NOD32 are pretty good. Unfortunately, except HouseCall, all of the others are ActiveX based, so it may be a bit difficult to run in a pest-infested environment. Anti rookits, like AVG, F-Secure, or Panda (those two are only available in sites like MajorGeeks or Betanews, as they were discontinued). Scanning tools like HijackThis or expert tools like GMER, DarkSpy or IceSword will do a better detective job than Process Explorer.

At least now you know how to protect your friends better. IE7 with common sense is pretty secure, but add browser protection tools like SpywareBlaster or SpyBot to avoid scumware sites. Even adblockers like AdMuncher can suppress those damn redirections and storms of popups. A good antitrojan like AVG Anti-Spyware could come in handy too, and it has a free trial before becoming a simple scanner. NOD32, despite what they say of it, it's not watertight, like any other security tool, despite being the most resistant tool to process termination. So, a multilayered defense is better, at least for peace of mind.