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Recent Posts

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351
General Software Discussion / Re: Official players - What is the big deal?
« Last post by Lashiec on March 15, 2009, 04:33 PM »
QuickTime still isn't a competing player IMO, due to its long load time, and some glaring omissions (by heaven's sake, it's the 21st century, and STILL does not have a playlist). But it's a well-behaved citizen, unlike previous versions, and asks you during the installation phase if you want the various integration thingies it'll bring with it, unlike iTunes.

It also works nicely with 3rd party players (MPC-HC in my case), so I rarely have to use it, save for the rare video that mess with its native resolution.

RealPlayer, in the other hand, it's a player I'm not touching with even a 10-foot pole, not to mention I don't have any need for it, as I don't recall encountering Real streams or files in a while.
352
General Software Discussion / Re: Quicktime only available with iTunes
« Last post by Lashiec on March 15, 2009, 03:56 PM »
The page is back to normal, so everyone can "enjoy" QuickTime without the burden of iTunes :P
353
General Software Discussion / Re: Quicktime only available with iTunes
« Last post by Lashiec on March 12, 2009, 09:53 AM »
Apple could just go f*** themselves, really. This is the second time in a row they have removed the download links for the standalone QuickTime. Oh well, I'm sure it'll come back after there's enough public backlash, just like last time.
354
Developer's Corner / Re: Microsoft releases SmallBasic for Newbie Programmers
« Last post by Lashiec on March 11, 2009, 07:17 PM »
.NET 3.5 also installs 2.0 :)

I very seriously doubt that.  The .NET Framework 3.5 is incredibly extensive.  I don't envision a slew of further versions beyond 3.5; but we'll see.

.NET 4.0 was announced in the last PDC so...
355
General Software Discussion / Re: Why Windows must go open source
« Last post by Lashiec on March 11, 2009, 07:12 PM »
Windows 7 will fit comfortably into any netbook, even taking into account disk space. Now if only they could get a decent chipset for Atom into netbooks, they could offer Aero as well without problems...
356
Developer's Corner / Firefox Addons Developer Guide published
« Last post by Lashiec on March 11, 2009, 04:07 PM »
The guys at the Mozilla Corporation published today a still unfinished guide for all those who wish to develop a extension for Firefox, but don't know where to start. I ignore if a 3rd party did have something similar, but as far as I know, Mozilla just had a rough number of guidelines that seemed not that helpful to a beginner.

Screenshot - 11_03_2009 , 21_57_38.png

This guide changes all of that, and while many things require fixing, it seems quite comprehensive, even including an appendix to help you choose an appropriate license for the resulting extension. Pretty neat.

via Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more
357
Living Room / Re: The Greatest Graphic Novel of All Time: Watchmen
« Last post by Lashiec on March 08, 2009, 04:09 PM »
Anyone seen the movie yet? Everyone I know who might go with me is 15 or younger (my kids are 4 and 6), so I haven't had a chance to get out to see it  ;D

I went yesterday night with a friend and I kinda enjoyed it. I never read Watchmen before, so I didn't have any expectations on it. Well, I expected it to be acceptable at least, I pay some money for it ya know ;D, but I didn't care if it was true to the novel or not.

Anyway, the movie was worth the ticket. I liked how the main plot was slowly developed mostly by the investigations of Rorschach, while it showed the post-superhero life of the rest of the main characters, and their struggle with normal life. I think such internal conflicts were already present in past superhero movies or comics, but it seems to me that the Watchmen heroes don't have anything in life than being that, and as a result they felt to me like empty characters, and I did not feel empathy with any of them. I ignore if this is a fault of the movie, lacking character development or if in the comic were already like that. I also missed in the movie a lot of the backstory of the different masked heroes, including the ones that fought in the World War II, as my friend said to me such backstories were present in the novel.

The actors did their job, but I did not find anything remotely memorable, frankly. Perhaps the characters were not exactly appropriate for a good actor to develop a fine role, so who knows. The action parts were nice, well choreographed, and making good use of special effects, although some of them were quite violent with blood splatter and limbs being cut. The soundtrack is really cool.

Still, I was kinda disappointed in the end. The "Luke, I am your father" part didn't strike me at all, and it's not that I saw it coming, perhaps I was expecting a more complex twist, even more considering that the unveiled truth is disgusting, but after 5 minutes you promptly accept it (IRL it would not be remotely possible, in any case). Also, the movie lacks cohesion between the different parts, and the rhythm of the narrative is irregular </pedantic critic>

Most of the disappointment comes from the fact that I fail to see what makes Watchmen so great. While as I said it's a fine movie, if it's a faithful adaption of the Moore novel, I wonder why it's so loved, because I did not see anything to make me think otherwise in that respect. I guess I will end up getting the comics one way or another, but if someone cares to explain where's the big fuss in the meantime...

But most times it doesn't - LOTR The Two Towers & Return of the King being two of the most obvious screenwriting screw-ups.

I think the Lord of the Rings movies did a good job of adapting the book to a different medium. It doesn't beat the original text by any strech of the imagination as movies can't match the feelings you get reading a nice book, but they were really enjoyable, and worth watching a few times more. A better example would be Dune, a major disaster, as a movie and as a book adaptation.

It's not even clear if Watchmen is a good adaptation or not. Some claim it's a heresy, others said it's damn good... I guess that must be it's OK.
358
General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Last post by Lashiec on March 05, 2009, 09:25 AM »
Just to note: DonL is busy working on XYPlorer 8, which will feature, amongst other things dual pane  :-*

It's getting chilly here in Hell... ;D
359
General Software Discussion / UAC: The big mess
« Last post by Lashiec on March 05, 2009, 09:02 AM »
Around a month ago, blogger Long Zheng and developer Rafael Rivera demonstrated how to exploit two security flaws in Windows 7 UAC: one to disable the same UAC sending mere keystrokes, and the second one to autoelevate (giving administrator rights to a program without UAC prompts) any given program using rundll32 (part of Windows, which allows DLLs to run). After some confusing statements by Microsoft, the flaws were acknowledged, and somewhat fixed (I understand the second flaw can still be exploited).

Turns out that at the same time those flaws were made public and discussed in the Internet, another developer, Leo Davidson, found another flaw in UAC which essentially makes the whole system useless. Using ordinary methods built into Windows, Leo was able to inject arbitrary code into a 'trusted' process and break all kind of havoc in the system.

Peter Bright published a concise summary of the research just hours ago at Ars Technica, for those who wish to avoid the most complex technical details. The discovery does not only affect UAC but also Microsoft credibility as it seems Microsoft apps can happily bypass UAC prompts while 3rd parties had to either make users deal with the prompts or redesign their apps so they require the prompts as less as possible.

The outcome of this for now is that all the usability improvements Microsoft made for UAC in Windows 7 were for nothing, and the only way to stay secure is to raise that lever in the configuration and go back to Vista's behaviour.
360
Living Room / Re: Ms Office 14 will be ad supported WTF ???
« Last post by Lashiec on March 04, 2009, 10:49 AM »
Em, it's mentioned in Mary Jo's post, as well as confirmed in Ars Technica: only web-based offerings will be ad-based. Which is understandable, desktop versions alone can't fund the entire Office ecosystem.
361
Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: A virus according to Kaspersky
« Last post by Lashiec on March 04, 2009, 10:34 AM »
Probably another false positive, even more considering that Bagle is a worm that uses e-mail to propagate itself.
362
Offtopic, but since you were talking about Josh Whedon... :D
363
i'd be very interested to hear from people who went from obsessive email checking to this kind of once every 3 hours approach, since i am very tempted to try to adopt such a plan, but im just not sure i could.

If you receive many e-mails through the day, perhaps it would better for you to install an e-mail notifier (unless you're receiving a new e-mail every minute).
364
Coding Snacks / Re: Quick Simple MP3 Player
« Last post by Lashiec on March 01, 2009, 04:40 PM »
Are there more freeware players with such a feature?

XMPlay and foobar2000. Winamp can do it with a plugin as well.
365
DC Gamer Club / Re: Quake Live
« Last post by Lashiec on March 01, 2009, 04:29 PM »
Also, playing 3D games in the browser isn't that new of a thing. Instant Action has been doing that for over a year now, and most of their games have much higher quality graphics than Quake Live.

Quake Live is mostly the in-browser version of the original Quake III: Arena (it uses the same engine), so no wonder the graphics look a bit dated. They probably did that to ensure the game would run in as many computers as possible, and if they're planning to release Linux and (specially) Mac OS X versions, they need to set the bar a bit low to ensure it runs fairly well everywhere. The fact that it runs inside the browser will involve some additional work for the system, but probably not that much.
366
General Software Discussion / Re: Anal Program Monitor/Firewall
« Last post by Lashiec on March 01, 2009, 04:16 PM »
Ya know, app's PesterMe is much more light on resources than any other recommendation I can come up with, and it does the same job (annoying you 'til no end) :P

ThreatFire in its maximum reporting level is as comprehensive as it can be, though the dialogs were usually cryptic for the most obscure warnings (in version 3 at least), and I find myself wondering what the hell was the program reporting about. System Safety Monitor was also quite vocal in its number of warnings, and less anoying (systray popups instead of in-your-face ones), but it seems the program is abandoned and the company developing it went they way of the dodo.
367
General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)
« Last post by Lashiec on February 26, 2009, 01:40 PM »
During the brief FUD debacle, development of Windows 7 towards the first Release Candidate has continued, including some minor tweaks to the OS behaviour and features. Nothing groundbreaking, but some of them are more than welcome, like #2
368
Find And Run Robot / Re: Google launches possible FARR competitor for windows
« Last post by Lashiec on February 25, 2009, 08:49 AM »
Woo, "QuickSilver" for Windows, might give it a spin. Shame that it requires the Google Toolbar, that's a big con in my book.
369
Living Room / Re: Crazy brits crossing railroads
« Last post by Lashiec on February 17, 2009, 03:01 PM »
but he obviously didnt look and you dont actually hear the train until it quite close - especially if it's going fast - and if there's a breeze going in the opposite direction you've even less chance of hearing it.
With peripheral vision you see mostly movement and because the train is coming directly towards there's actually very little actual visible movement

Sure, but my point was how can anyone cross a railway with the barriers down, without even bothering to look around just because he assumed he would have enough time. Perhaps he thought looking left and right only applies to crossing the road? ;D

I know all this cause I went out in front of a train once :-[ but nothing as bad as that guy, it was maybe 20-30m away as I actually crossed the tracks (an official crossing with no barriers) BUT I didnt notice it until I was actually stepping onto the tracks at which point I can tell you I speeded up a bit!

Exactly! There's a railroad near my home, which I sometimes cross even if the barriers are down (the cars have to wait behind them, but people can cross anytime as there's a separate section for them without barriers), and I look left and right and left and right again... a train is a train, and I do that even if the barriers are up.
370
General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)
« Last post by Lashiec on February 17, 2009, 01:52 PM »
Em, after reading the comments in Slashdot, I think it would be wise to wait until there's a real analysis, and not just a random guy commenting its findings without providing real evidence. For example, the "Win7 allows programs like Photoshop to stealthily insert themselves in your firewall exception list" is OLD, µTorrent has been doing this for years in XP.
371
Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 06-09
« Last post by Lashiec on February 15, 2009, 01:02 PM »
On point 9, I have a question for the European Commission. If Windows will come without Internet Explorer, how will the people download another browser from the web?

Easy. Including a simple app which lists the available browsers for Windows, and fetches the selected one from the developer's site. Or providing them via Windows Update. Or developing a replacement for Windows Update mimicking the functionality of Linux package managers, that is, providing and updating all the software available for the OS, including libraries and the like.

Another thing is how convenient that would be, or even if it is desirable.
372
Same here. Where is my beautiful (?) siggie?

Weird, I'm just staring at it. On the other hand, cranio's sig is not showing.
373
Living Room / Re: Crazy brits crossing railroads
« Last post by Lashiec on February 15, 2009, 12:22 PM »
Wow, my assumption was right. Still, I don't understand his explanation:

I didn't really look because normally when you wait for the trains to come past, they wouldn't come for two or three minutes, so I thought I had my chance to get across.

For the looks of it, the railways goes straight, and unless there was a serious curve a bit before the barriers, you can clearly see the train coming if you look at the right.
374
General Software Discussion / Re: Postbox - a new Mozilla-based email client
« Last post by Lashiec on February 13, 2009, 09:21 AM »
These people are not part of the GPL FOSS world. They're just leveraging FOSS for their own advantage. Otherwise, why come right out of the gate (not as an LLC, mind you) but a full C corporation?

They used to be, though.
375
Living Room / Re: Crazy brits crossing railroads
« Last post by Lashiec on February 13, 2009, 09:15 AM »
Hahaha, I saw the first one yesterday, but for unknown reasons it was at a low resolution, and cropped to only show the rails. Anyway, while I shake my head looking at so much retardness abound in the video, I can't help but laugh out loud at the narrow escapes, I mean, this is stuff worth of experienced stunts at action movies.

BTW, is people really so late for work to risk their lives in front of a train? ;D
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