Recent Posts

4026

Living Room / Re: Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2009, 11:48 PM »

Crush: many journalling filesystems (including NTFS and some operation modes of EXT3, EXT4 etc.) only journal filesystem metadata, not file contents itself - thus you are able to overwrite data. But still, file wiping is a bit useless because....

• Some filesystems do journal file data itself.
• Changing filesize can cause other clusters to be used while leaving residue (if using NTFS compression, at least I think so).
• You can no longer defragment a partition without copying critical files somewhere else, wiping them from the partition, defragmenting, copying back, wiping from temporary location.
• Many document types are saved using temporary copies (like they should!), those temporary copies are almost never wiped.

4027

Living Room / Re: Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing at alrming rate?

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2009, 04:22 PM »

Hm, either I never had that option, or it's only enabled... floppy discs. Can't remember when I last had a floppy drive in my box, might have been with win2k, and removed once I moved to XP? That was years ago anyway

At any rate, the option wasn't available for my USB pendrive, so I had to "do trickery" ^TM.

4028

Living Room / Re: Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing at alrming rate?

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2009, 02:15 PM »

If you have WinXP you can format a DOS disk in the same way as Win98.

-Carol Haynes (January 19, 2009, 02:12 PM)

Hmmm? I don't think I ever had that option? Is this only available if you did an upgrade from 9x to XP?

4029

Developer's Corner / Re: extra Visual Basic Unicode support

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2009, 10:37 AM »

Hmmm... iirc the Danish characters worked just fine all those years ago when we did VB6 in school. And these days, I'd be very++ surprised if VB.NET doesn't have full & proper unicode support.

Besides, VB in 2009?

4030

Living Room / Re: Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing at alrming rate?

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2009, 10:35 AM »

If you want to get to a DOS prompt format a system floppy and copy the flash stuff to the floppy and then restart your system with the floppy.

-Carol Haynes (January 19, 2009, 05:21 AM)

How do you format a DOS boot floppy from NT and beyond? When I created my bootable USB pendrive, I had to do a lot of trickere involving installing Win98 in vmware and doing the format from there...

4031

Developer's Corner / Re: Qt now also licensed under the LGPL

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2009, 10:33 AM »

Yes, provided you dynamically link the the LGPL'd code. If you want to use static linking, you must at least provide the object files of your application so that they may be linked against a newer version of the LGPL'd library. Sillyness.

-Ehtyar (January 19, 2009, 12:49 AM)

Yeah, that's lame - some people fortunately add a "static-linking-is-OK" clause, though

4032

General Software Discussion / Re: Another Linux Thread :-P

« Last post by f0dder on January 19, 2009, 10:30 AM »

I've run XAMPP on my other Dell P3 laptop and performance was acceptable. I'm hoping on Linux it will be noticeably better since one of Linux's chief benefits is supposed to be better performance than Windows on a given CPU/memory setup.

-Jimdoria (January 19, 2009, 12:33 AM)

That's a bit of a myth, imho - the main advantage linux has is that it can boot to console-only without running a GUI, which obviously takes up less system resources... the "friendly" distros run in GUI mode by default, though. Oh, linux distros are also a lot smaller than Vista (and even XP), of course

4033

General Software Discussion / Re: Another Linux Thread :-P

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2009, 10:52 PM »

How CPU-intensive stuff do you plan on running on the server? And will it be running 24/7?

Both machines are going to be a bit on the slow end for running a compile-from-source distribution like gentoo, so you probably want to go for a binary distribution. If you're going to run the box 24/7 and don't need much CPU grunt, I'd do power measuring on the two machines and select the one that sucks the least power (probably going to be the laptop).

4034

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2009, 10:48 PM »

Well, there a few significant kernel changes in Windows 7 -

- its now scalable to upto 256 cores
- it has the new 'Min-Win' kernel, which is refactored and componentized.

http://channel9.msdn...ch-Inside-Windows-7/

-MrCrispy (January 18, 2009, 03:37 PM)

That was a pretty cool video - there's gone a lot more work into Win7 than I thought. Definitely worth giving i the "Windows 7" name and not just a service pack (most users won't realize those things, though, so no wonder people say "it should just have been a SP").

4035

Living Room / Re: DonationCoder.com - Complaints, Problems, and Rooms for Improvement

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2009, 06:50 PM »

For most browsers, you can also use middle-mouse-button (scrollwheel, whatever) clicking to open a new tab, so you don't need to use a keyboard modifier.

4036

Developer's Corner / Re: secure automated backup on *nix.

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2009, 06:27 AM »

DisturbedCompute: this is a backup tool for *u*x (unix, linux...), not Windows

4037

General Software Discussion / myrekrig.dk site isnt working

« Last post by f0dder on January 18, 2009, 06:21 AM »

Do somebody have myrekrig on their computer curs the myrekrig.dk site isnt working, and i would relly like to try out that game

-thedbbp (January 18, 2009, 03:48 AM)

That's a pretty weird request to make in an almost 3 year old thread that has nothing whatsoever to do with MyreKrig

I do have a version of myrekrig from 2005 lying around though, and I'm attaching it here since Aske's MyreKrig.dk site indeed seems to be down at the moment. Just know that it isn't a usual game as such, you have to program your ant races...

4038

Living Room / Re: Can a Linux man survive in Windows Land?

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 03:19 PM »

PM?

Doh! I always overlook those >_<

4039

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows editors - do they have to be so bad?

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 02:00 PM »

Hehe, I do remember him complaining about the date functions at some point in time. C/C++ you can develop on any platform, Java as well, .NET only on Windows (Mono is a 'band aid' in its current incarnations).

-Shades (January 17, 2009, 12:17 PM)

There's some truth to that - but from the project page, it seems like Mono has gotten quite far. And while Java is available for a lot of platforms, it isn't write-once-run-everywhere portable, unfortunately. Especially not in the field of cellular phone apps/games

He can really go on (in a funny way) about which student is getting a chance to work/learn for his outfit. From those stories I understand that he poses little problems to them and asks for (programmatic) solutions and that he can (too) easily dig holes through solutions made by ('fresh') .NET programmers.

-Shades (January 17, 2009, 12:17 PM)

Sounds pretty elitist. As if any fresh-outta-school programmer doesn't have a lot of holes in their knowledge/experience... your friend probably tries extra hard against dotNET programmers?

4040

General Software Discussion / Re: windows 7 beta available for free Jan 9 (!)

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 01:41 PM »

Umm, it's the beta that's free...

4041

Living Room / Re: Can a Linux man survive in Windows Land?

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 10:00 AM »

Stoic Joker: it's nice to see that he's giving it a fair shot, yes. And I don't feel that I'm "picking apart the details", I just find it's relevant noting that buggy drivers can bring down an OS whereas a usermode application won't... and I've been bitten by ACPI bugs (I assume ) on linux.

4042

Living Room / Re: Can a Linux man survive in Windows Land?

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 05:50 AM »

Day 0: Virtualization and bitness - he says he gets BSODs with "LIRQ_GREATER_OR_LESS_THAN" [sic], and connects it with OS "bitness" - but also mentions that it's happened with VirtualBox. He should've stated which driver causes the crash, as afaik VirtualBox uses a driver for emulation acceleration. If it's that driver crashing, it isn't really "The OS crapping itself", but a buggy piece of 3rd party software that needs fixing

Day 1: Shutdown - again, the troubles he's having seem related to VirtualBox. There's probably a service or driver component keeping the ISO file open.

4043

Post New Requests Here / Re: Maintaining Windows explorer Detail view

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 05:27 AM »

many of us use a 3rd party explorer replacement that solves this issue.

-mouser (January 17, 2009, 05:19 AM)

Yeah, xplorer² for great justice

4044

General Software Discussion / Re: The Monkeys Have Hit The Button

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 04:00 AM »

CWuestefeld: to be fair, when dealing with x86 applications, you very rarely need a lot of speed (hurts saying this, being an old assembly coder and all) - so native vs. managed often isn't going to matter a lot speed-wise. Memory overhead of managed apps is usually somewhat higher, which also isn't much of a problem on x86. Embedded is a different story, though

Also, JITted platforms has the possibility of outperforming native code (because of dynamic runtime analysis) - I just haven't seen this happen yet, seems like there still is a lot of research to be done in the JIT field.

How can you say that the 2nd benchmark outperforms C code, btw? He clearly shows that the C# compiler is somewhat retarded compared to the C compiler he uses, and ends up having to unroll the C# code to even get near to the performance of the C code (which he hasn't unrolled, btw...) - loop unrolling makes things a lot less readable. You can btw pretty much dismiss the non-optimized native results entirely. Why would you not turn on optimization for native code? (except for some cases of debugging).

And lastly, the benchmark is sorta flawed - he doesn't mention which C compiler he uses, doesn't mention the optimization settings, and the samples are very simplistic (I would have expected dotNET to do a lot better with such simple code).

4045

Living Room / Re: Can a Linux man survive in Windows Land?

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 03:43 AM »

Why would you pick Windows Server 2008 for your personal computer? Nobody uses that on their personal computer.

-Deozaan (January 17, 2009, 12:44 AM)

Because of misinformed people stating "OMFG VISTA IS TEH SUX BUT WIN2008 IS SO OMG LEAN!!11! one one".

Just run Vista through vLite and remove stuff you don't need (tablet support etc.), don't run the services you don't need, and presto - you get a decent setup (and won't have to bother with free antivirus programs refusing to run, some applications requiring more expensive server licenses, etc.)

4046

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows editors - do they have to be so bad?

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 03:41 AM »

According to him most (if not all) IDE's may not even kiss the feet from Eclipse so to speak.

-Shades (January 16, 2009, 09:39 PM)

Eclipse is a very decent IDE, especially considering that it's free. Saying that other IDEs can't "kiss it's feet" is a bit of a stretch though, Visual Studio is very powerful. However, it does by default lack the refactorings that Eclipse offer, for which you'll have to purchase Visual Assist (next version of VS is apparently going to have refactorings, though). Also, things seem to be a bit less integrated and a bit more clumsy when using Eclipse for C++ development compared to the ease of Java.

Not even the 2007 version of Borlands product. He also concluded that .Net = .Not

-Shades (January 16, 2009, 09:39 PM)

Seems interesting that he uses Java but says ".Net = .Not"... what does he base that on? Java definitely has it's problems (like, parts of it's class libraries having horrible design - date/calendar functions being a really obvious WTF).

4047

Post New Requests Here / Re: Maintaining Windows explorer Detail view

« Last post by f0dder on January 17, 2009, 03:26 AM »

It has worked reliably for me when I've also turned off "Remember each folder's view setting" - but with that setting on, it definitely hasn't

4048

Living Room / Re: Can a Linux man survive in Windows Land?

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2009, 07:11 PM »

Heh... "Day 0: BIOS".

The biggest thing that strikes me about the Windows/Linux split is that Linux doesn't ever assume anything about hardware. Sure, it does assume that you're on the right architecture and that you have some way to give the PC information. It doesn't, however, expect you to have a certain BIOS version, a certain graphics card, a special TPM module or the like.

Linux developers learn to deal with the quirks of each system. The odds are that my system really WAS not compliant with ACPI but Linux never complained. It didn't deny me permission to install until it was.

Linux might not "assume" anything about your graphics card, but you still do have to be careful when picking one if you want proper hardware acceleration. And it might not keep you from installing on a system with b0rked ACPI implementation, instead you'll risk random crashes or motherboard devices not working (been there, done that).

Anyway, sleep time - I'll read the rest tomorrow

4049

General Software Discussion / Re: The Monkeys Have Hit The Button

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2009, 07:03 PM »

Certainly isn't going to be lighter on resources than the explorer shell, considering it's written in dotNET.

-f0dder (January 16, 2009, 06:41 PM)

Whats wrong with .NET? >_<

-wreckedcarzz (January 16, 2009, 06:57 PM)

Nothing per se, but even though JIT technology has become better, it's still more heavyweight than native code.

4050

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows editors - do they have to be so bad?

« Last post by f0dder on January 16, 2009, 06:50 PM »

I wonder why some people are so obsessed with SlickEdit... it basically falls flat between a text editor and an IDE, not really knowing what it wants to be. It's too bloated for a text editor, and lacks the functionality you'd expect of a decent IDE. The pricetag certainly can't be justified when there's freeware editors like Notepad++, IDEs like Eclipse, and the free Microsoft Visual Studio Express...