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3176

Living Room / Re: Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account

« Last post by f0dder on September 21, 2009, 11:43 AM »

Yes, but the difference is, I consider sites like facebook and myspace to be pure evil. Even more so than our beloved admin's cat, Saffron.

-Josh (September 21, 2009, 11:30 AM)

I agree that myspace is evil, but that's a combination of no more than three things:
1) most pages there look like throwup from a early-nineties HTML editor.
2) there's too many XxXcoreXxX cluetards.
3) it sucks

On the other hand, I find facebook to be pretty useful. Be conscious of who you add as a friend, stay away from the applications, and apply some sane privacy settings - presto. My family and real-life friends are scattered across Denmark, so it's a pretty convenient way of keeping in touch with people. I've gotten back in touch with people that I haven't seen for a while... and finally, it's so much easier being up-to-date with what happens (concerts, events, ...) in my city through "hive mind" of status updates and event invitations than having to check several other sites.

If I was the kind of person that called in sick to go drinking, I'd probably stay away from FaceBook... but I'm not and I don't

3177

Living Room / Re: Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account

« Last post by f0dder on September 21, 2009, 11:29 AM »

and can only be viewed by people I have allowed to view it. Hooray for privacy!

-Josh (September 21, 2009, 11:18 AM)

You might not be aware that it's perfectly possible to set your facebook privacy settings just like this?

3178

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint: Softwrap (nasty eula)

« Last post by f0dder on September 21, 2009, 11:28 AM »

I obviously can't speak for everybody, but...

• I've avoided software and music purchases because of DRM
• Where "necessary" I apply cracks to legally purchased apps/games
• A few of the pieces of apps/games I've registered was done mostly because thy weren't DRM-encumbered
• I paid for a copy of NIN's even though it's available as a gratis download (even in 24bit/96KHz WAVE, which is higher than CD quality!)

I know several people who act the same way as myself. We might not be the majority of users, but I'm in the same camp as app103:

I am a firm believer in just enough protection to keep honest people honest. Anyone else is going to be dishonest no matter what you do, and never buy, no matter how well you protect it.

-app103 (September 21, 2009, 08:36 AM)

Unfortunately, I was also stupid enough to think "gee, this electronic download offer for Battlefield 2142 is pretty cheap" - but was it worth the insane amount of time I spent getting the thing working, because of it's vile DRM crap? I don't see myself as a computer illiterate, but it took me around two hours to figure everything out. And it's ludicruous to go to those lenghts, especially with a game whose main focus is online play; simply checking a game serial with key servers would be perfectly fine.

3179

Coding Snacks / Re: IDEA: Double-click makes a new folder

« Last post by f0dder on September 21, 2009, 07:52 AM »

it contains torjan binded be aware

-javafreak (September 21, 2009, 06:36 AM)

Perhaps you want to upgrade your antivirus solution to one that Doesn't Suck^TM? False positives is a pretty well-known problem with AutoHotKey generated executables.

3180

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint: Softwrap (nasty eula)

« Last post by f0dder on September 21, 2009, 07:48 AM »

Yeah well, good thing there's 0-day groups who are constantly targeting crap like this. Too bad that you have to go that route to get proper fair use of products you've paid for, but rather that than getting screwed over.

If you really feel you need a draconian DRM scheme, at least allow users for no-questions-asked de+reactivation (as long as within reasonable limits). Of course software developers deserve getting paid for their work, but punishing honest users is not the way to go about it.

3181

Living Room / Re: Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account

« Last post by f0dder on September 21, 2009, 01:51 AM »

Why all the facebook hate?

-wraith808 (September 21, 2009, 01:50 AM)

Because it's hip.

3182

General Software Discussion / Re: Complaint: Softwrap (nasty eula)

« Last post by f0dder on September 20, 2009, 05:29 AM »

Piracy - because being honest only gets you screwed over (and over and over and...)

3183

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2009 / Re: Warning: Time is the single biggest cause of stress in our western culture

« Last post by f0dder on September 18, 2009, 09:50 AM »

There's got to be something wrong with translation or the movie's script writer has never had a warm, glazed Krispy Kreme donut. Never once has one given me a headache. 

-Innuendo (September 18, 2009, 09:44 AM)

You've clearly not had enough, then - it's with sugar as with caffeine, you haven't had enough until you go into a jittery frenzy (which tends to be followed by headache and/or nausea).

I thought the quote was pretty funny, btw.

3184

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you touch-type or hunt-and-peck?

« Last post by f0dder on September 17, 2009, 05:22 AM »

JoTo: how did you get CPM results from the site? For me, it shows WPM instead. I got 83 WPM for the 3min astronauts test, 98% accuracy (5 errors) - at first, I didn't think punctuation was necessary . I can usually "feel" when I've made an error and auto-correct without looking.

I also find it's a lot easier to type fast+correct when you're getting things out of your head, rather than copying a text where you also have to concentrate on reading as well as typing.

3185

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you touch-type or hunt-and-peck?

« Last post by f0dder on September 17, 2009, 03:35 AM »

Autodidact touch typist here. I started writing on my dad's electrical typewriter many many moons ago, and fortunately computer keyboards turned out to have the same QWERTY layout (well, you could say unfortunately because the layout sucks, but...)

I honestly don't know how useful touch typing is to the majority of people, though. Both when programming and writing reports for school, I spend much more time thinking&planning than on actual typing. Sure, hunt-and-peck would be a serious slowdown, but it's not super often I go full-speed WPM bonanza.

3186

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2009 / Re: Warning: Time is the single biggest cause of stress in our western culture

« Last post by f0dder on September 16, 2009, 12:55 AM »

I thought this thread was going to be about Tower Defense

3187

General Software Discussion / Re: Cyclic Redundancy Error on CD/DVD

« Last post by f0dder on September 16, 2009, 12:52 AM »

Thank u for that,,,,,but none of the Warez worked on retreiving Media files ie.,Video .

-hulkbuster (September 15, 2009, 11:12 PM)

>_<

It failed to make an ISO of a DVD Movie Beowulf having Cyclic Redundancy Error,,,its not like i m asking too much or extending this Thread.

-hulkbuster (September 15, 2009, 11:12 PM)

Ah, so in fact you're not dealing with damaged CD/DVD media, but copy-protected DVD movies, probably using ARccOS protection.

3188

Living Room / Re: What's the best registry cleaner? Ask Leo says: none

« Last post by f0dder on September 15, 2009, 03:42 AM »

An alternative is to use VMWare which can build a virtual machine based on a physical installation.

-Carol Haynes (September 15, 2009, 03:38 AM)

It's a damn shame it's so hard (aka almost impossible) to go the other way, though - would be an extremely useful feature.

3189

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 14, 2009, 02:18 PM »

How about we fork firewall/av requirements off to a separate thread?

-Josh (September 14, 2009, 01:46 PM)

Sounds like a good idea to me, it's cluttering the thread a bit but is still a useful discussion.

3190

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 14, 2009, 11:21 AM »

Innuendo: well, I block flash and java. Of course there is the risk of a whitelisted sited being hacked... but to be really dangerous, it would need to combine 0-day exploits in {firefox, flash, java} (pick one) and UAC, and it would be on a whitelisted site and something that passes through AdBlock. Could happen, but for now (and I might one day regret this) I personally prefer not bogging my system down with AV software. Even the relatively light NOD32 causes a noticeable speed hit for me.

3191

General Software Discussion / Re: Cyclic Redundancy Error on CD/DVD

« Last post by f0dder on September 14, 2009, 11:07 AM »

The only thing that's worked for me, and worked surprisingly well at that, is polishing the disks with brasso. I've had a success rate of around 75%. Software can only do so much if your disk is truly effed up.

-nosh (September 14, 2009, 08:24 AM)

This should be the last resort, though, as you risk damaging the discs more than you fix them

3192

General Software Discussion / Re: Cyclic Redundancy Error on CD/DVD

« Last post by f0dder on September 14, 2009, 12:48 AM »

Also, favor DVD+R to DVD-R media - it's better. And even when keeping the discs from humidity, sunlight, temperature fluctuations etc they aren't going to last forever. For important stuff, I wouldn't bet on more than 5 years before doing a refresh... and heck, I'd much rather store important stuff on external harddrives.

3193

General Software Discussion / Re: What the hell is OpenCandy?

« Last post by f0dder on September 13, 2009, 08:36 PM »

As kartal said, that is exactly what I was referring to as well. What if a malware is designed to look for OC's dll files and exploit a known or , up until now, unknown vulnerability in said dll?

-Josh (May 30, 2009, 04:22 PM)

That sounds a bit silly - if a piece of malware is able to scan for OC dlls, it's already on your system - what would it gain, then, by exploiting those DLLs?

I don't really like the concept - for me, no value is added, and having to skip yet another blablabla page during install is annoying. And 300kb (or however big the DLL is now) might not be a lot on my 20mbit ADSL connection, but there's plenty of people who aren't even of 256kbit.

Guess I could live with the scheme, though; it's definitely a lot less bullshit than what other applications are up to. And it's good to know that you're no longer leaving OCSetupHlp.dll behind and doing uninstall tracking... the next step is to make it very clear that data is being sent to your servers, and exactly what kind of data and why.

Anyway, I'm in the suspicious camp with Kartal and app103 on this one. You do seem like a nice guy, and the concept isn't all that bad. However, there really isn't any guarantee that the company won't go rogue... heck, if I managed to win the hearts and minds of users and got a large enough install base that I could make some hundred million bucks by snatching a little bit of usage data and sell people out... wouldn't I be tempted? As app says, there's a lot of power in being able to xref the "pretty harmless" data you're sending with other stuff. (I don't like the obfuscated registry keys, by the way).

Not saying that OpenCandy is evil or that it's going to end up being evil, but I'm not a big fan of advertisements, referrals, or capitalizing on user/usage information. Nothing wrong with making a buck, but I really don't see OC as a value-adder.

3194

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 13, 2009, 07:02 PM »

Carol: well, I wouldn't advise normal people to not use antivirus software - but it works well for me. If there were other people than me using my workstation, I would use protection

And good point about leaky software firewalls; imho it's better to not run one (and be careful) than having a false sense of security.

3195

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 13, 2009, 05:27 PM »

cyberdiva: I'm not a big fan of 3rd party software firewalls, since I find blocking outgoing connections pretty much useless; if you've got malware on the system you're already game over (I know the proponents have some opinions as to why it can be useful, but imho it's too much hassle and regular users will just end up saying "yes yes, allow olsentwins.nude.sexy.exe to connect to the intarweb" anyway). The focus should be on preventing badstuff from entering your computer - and XP SP2 built-in firewall takes care of not getting service ports exposed to the internet.

As for antivirus on Vista, I'd still advise normal users to grab an antivirus product - I just don't find it necessary myself. Being a bit careful about the sites I visit, not running random .exe files, and checking could-be suspicious stuff in a virtual machine does the trick for me. Sure, I can't be 100% certain that somebody doesn't find a 0-day flaw to bypass UAC and exploit FireFox, and hack a bunch of legitimate websites to serve the malware... but I'd rather reinstall Windows and restore my backups if that happens, rather than wasting system resources daily

3196

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 13, 2009, 04:39 PM »

I only know what I've read about other people's experiences, and from the interminable confirmation messages I've had to translate. But as a philosophy, I think it's flawed. First of all, users don't read stuff. If you put up a dialog box, you have a lot of people who will hit Enter (rarely Esc) without reading.

Well, some people can't be helped (boy, does the gene pool need some chlorine!), but I'm fairly certain that there's a large gorup of people (perhaps not in America, but the world is bigger than .us ) that actually do read confirmation messages and can think a bit for themselves.

And UAC isn't as intrusive and happening-all-the-time as a lot of other security software.

And often for a good reason too, since the system is asking them a question they don't know how to answer. The other group of users, those who do read messages and do know the good answer - I don't think they need UAC in the first place. These are the same people who install their AVs and their firewalls and basically know what they are doing.

3rd party software firewalls are superfluous since XP SP2, and UAC means that I don't have to bother with running antivirus software - and it's a lot less of a hassle than running a Limited User Account on pre-Vista NT systems.

Thanks for the correction. I've found though that I can't use the "snapshot" task switchers of any kind. I've tried TaskSwitchXP, for example, and there's a Firefox extension that does a similar thing with tabs. It's weird, but I just can't use those, because I'm lost. I can't instantly recognize a window by its downsized graphical snapshot - they look all the same to me. When I switch, I recognize apps by their icons, and tabs by their titles. Every time I tried a snapshot-based UI like that, I end up randomly switching to things in panic, can't tell which window is which. Don't know whay that is, but it just doesn't work for me at all.

It does take a bit getting used to, but the cute thing about Switcher is that in addition to showing the window content, it also shows the application icon. It's very keyboard-friendly, and I feel more productive than Alt+Tabbing

Oh, apart from UAC, Vista also included some under-the-hood improvements to make exploit writing more difficult. And Win7 has had numerous performance enhancements; some of them won't be noticable until you scale to a pretttty high number of CPUs, but it does show that MS takes this OS seriously, and expects it to be used not just for the desktop.

3197

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 13, 2009, 12:57 PM »

UAC? We'll just have to agree to disagree, then!

It's the best thing that has happened for Windows security for a long while, and it really isn't that annoying when you're done with the initial program installs and setup after a fresh Windows install.

Aero looks good on screenshots, but I'm not convinced it wouldn't be too much lucre and visual distraction for me. And I would probably disable it anyway, since I want my CPU to be there when I need it

The cute thing about Aero is that it runs on the GPU, not CPU - and that it allows for live previews on alt+tab (without being hacky and resorting to the cpu-sucking "take constant screenshots" approach that some fancy switchers use). This allows for a very smooth Exposé clone, which I've quickly grown fond of.

. If "code is law", as said by Larry Lessig (the lawyer who instituted Creative Commons), then Vista is a prison.

Dunno; I'm not fond of the DRM (which hasn't bitten me yet, but I haven't attempted to hook up a TV via HDMI), but other than that I don't see big issues with Vista. Given beefy enough hardware, I'd even choose Vista over XP these days (yes, it's more demanding than XP, but it's also better at utilizing a powerful PC than XP is - SuperFetch rocks.)

3198

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 13, 2009, 12:05 PM »

Who knows. I'm happy to see Vista didn't last long. It's a pimple on the face of computing. But how is 7 any better?

-tranglos (September 13, 2009, 11:28 AM)

I wouldn't exactly call SuperFetch, UAC and usermode graphics drivers pimples on the face of computing... Aero is also pretty sweet, especially in Win7 with WDDM 1.1

3199

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 13, 2009, 10:01 AM »

Vista has worked pretty well since SP1 arrived - after all, I kept it on my laptop. Win7 seems a bit faster & lighter, and I definitely like the various enhancements (user interface, optimizations, etc) that it brings over Vista - but it isn't that different. It's definitely more than a service pack, though

3200

General Software Discussion / Re: Will Win7 last as long as XP?

« Last post by f0dder on September 13, 2009, 08:28 AM »

and I don't want Vista.

-cyberdiva (September 13, 2009, 08:12 AM)

Keep in mind that Win7 isn't that different from Vista.