Recent Posts

4101

Living Room / Re: Do you guys have any experience with routers? because i have some questions

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 11:41 PM »

I'm not sure hiding the SSID is a good idea - it might make your network more interesting to hackers? "Ah, here's somebody who knows how to turn that off, they must have something interesting to hide". Especially if combined with weak protection like WEP or WPA-1. Same goes for MAC filtering.

Btw, what's the timeframe for cracking WPA-2? I thought that even with the latest GPU stuff, we were talking at least months with a decent passphrase?

4102

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 11:25 PM »

If you decide to grab the 32bit ISO from an alternate location, you can verify it against this md5sum:

[Select]

f9dce6ebd0a63930b44d8ae802b63825 *7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso

4103

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 11:13 PM »

Yeah, I wouldn't advise people in general to run the beta - and definitely not replacing their current OS with it. If the vmware experience is any indication of how it runs on real hardware, things will be good. As soon as I pull myself together, I'm replacing the 400gig disk in my fileserver with a 640gig disk (part of moving to a new RAID MIRROR because the other 400gig disk died), and I'll thus have a (fast) 400gig disk that I can do a test install of the Win7 beta on, on real hardware.

I certainly hope MS don't mess up the OS from now and until release - and I hope vlite will support it soon. Too bad MS don't make it more modular from the beginning...

4104

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 11:01 PM »

cmpm: probably works, thing is you don't get a beta key - so you're left with a 30day trial (or 120 days if you use the rearm trick, probably). I got my ISO at 2MB/s, didn't take long

4105

Developer's Corner / Re: help needed to unpack a exe (example creakme)

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 09:48 PM »

As I mentioned in some other thread, DonationCoder isn't really the appropriate site for software deconstruction - even when it's legit stuff like crackmes. There's other more focused forums that'll serve you a lot better...

4106

General Software Discussion / Re: Another 'Lifetime' license bites the dust

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 08:01 PM »

I'm not a fan of companies changing license policies, and I don't find lifetime licenses very realistic... Imho a (reasonable) cost for major versions is the way to do, possibly combined with upgrade discounts. And major versions should be major - not just bumping because of some bugfixes.

Can't say I blame Nikos for sorta giving up on lifetime licenses, since that gives a pretty limited source of income. And xplorer² is reasonably priced, imho. Still doesn't change the fact that changing license type is bad, though.

4107

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 07:39 PM »

Microsoft would have to release some kind of small "ISO checker" program that people could download to verify that the torrent is complete/legitimate after it's finished downloading.

-Hirudin (January 09, 2009, 06:17 PM)

Simple MD5 or SHA1 would be enough.

-fenixproductions (January 09, 2009, 06:48 PM)

And completely unnecessary - you'd get the .torrent file from Microsoft, guaranteeing authenticity, and BitTorrent does it's own hashing.

Anyway, I decided to grab the 32-bit Win7 beta from *cough* alternate sources *cough* (don't really see a problem in doing so), and have tried it under vmware 5.5.9 (64bit host). Gave it a single gigabyte of memory (I have 8, but decided to stress Win7 a bit ), and it seems pretty nice.

Initial impressions:

• Install time still takes a while, and still requires multiple reboots. Not a big issue since you aren't going to do this often, but I still feel MS could do better.
• The video driver from VMWare tools messes up the system - but even without that driver, the GUI (although quite sloppy) still seems snappier than XP without a proper video driver. Might be different on real hardware.
• UAC now has 4 levels - from Vista-style to completely off. Default is level 3, which is like Vista except that control panel and such doesn't have elevation prompts. If this is implemented without being a glaring security hole, it's a really nice thing.
• System seems very responsive, and relatively low memory usage. Around 300meg used after boot without additional apps installed.
• The new taskbar is interesting. I think I could grow to like it... basically, quicklaunch is removed but you can "pin" shorcuts to the taskbar. Those shortcuts will work both for starting apps, but also group running apps. Seems like it might need application support to do the "all in one" thing, though - firefox works perfectly, xplorer² ends up having the "launch icon" and an icon for the running processes.
• Startup seems relatively fast.
• Control panel still has a zillion clicks like Vista, but at least you can directly right-click your desktop and choose "change resolution" now
• Moving a window to the far right or left side of the screen maximizes it to half the screen resolution, this seems very useful for widescreen monitors. Moving to top of screen maximizes fully. Dragging and shaking a window minimizes all background windows.

I feel inclined to finding a spare harddrive and giving the beta a go on real hardware, load it with programs etc... I'd like to see how much advantage Superfetch brings compared to XP's old prefetch.

4108

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: Crush Cryptonizer

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 06:17 PM »

Only one thing to say:

4109

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 05:36 PM »

According to this Lifehacker article, the whole thing has been put on hold while MS gets its server ready to dea with demand...

-Darwin (January 09, 2009, 04:43 PM)

*grin*

Again, the silly-heads should use .torrents for distribution. Of course the sheer amount of hits trying to get the .torrent file would be massive as well, but still...

4110

Developer's Corner / Re: Does anyone know if there is something “very useful” in IE8?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 03:07 PM »

For those very few sites that don't work in FF, I guess... personally I find it pointless, and just fire up an instance of IE instead. If an IE tab in FF crashes, doesn't it bring down the entire FF process?

-f0dder (January 09, 2009, 12:10 PM)

Indeed! Try opening the Win 7 site in Firefox 3 - crashes it each and every time. If I open it in an IETab, all is well...

-Darwin (January 09, 2009, 03:02 PM)

Weird, it loads just fine here with FF3 and a bunch of plugins

4111

Developer's Corner / Re: Is forward declaration of methods necessary in c?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 01:51 PM »

For method #2, there's no reason to write function prototypes (and it's not required for neither C nor C++).

What I meant in my above post was that I wouldn't try rearranging code just to avoid the prototypes, I rather place code "logically" grouped, and write function prototypes if I must.

4112

Living Room / Re: New Ipod/ cleaning mp3s

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 01:49 PM »

The e280 that I have uses a proprietary battery (looks like a typical cellphone one), but the nice thing is that you can replace it yourself. It's also a sturdy little beast, it's survived being dropped multiple times (including from a 40km/h bicycle), lying a couple of hours submerged in water (long story ), et cetera. It plays loud (drives my Sennheiser HD485 loud enough to cause ear damage), it plays well, and is generally lovely.

There's a few issues, though:

• It pops up as a disk drive (which I love), but that does mean it takes a lot of time to update it's database when you've copied new tracks to the device. Probably ~45 seconds when it's internal 8gig flash is full and it's also faced with a rather filled up 8gig SD card
• I've had it lock up a few times, not sure exactly what has triggered it - had to remove the four back screws and unplug the battery to "uncrash" it
• it seems to have a few issues with the 8gig SD card, perhaps either because of it's capacity or speed. Once in a while, it hangs while playing a track off the SD, and I have to eject+reinsert the card (causing database refresh) to unhang it. It probably doesn't do this with other SD brands (mine is a SDHC).

However, these are minor issues to me, the hangs are very infrequent (and as I fill up the SDHC micro card, the card related hangs seem to occur more and more infrequently). Based on functionality, price, ruggedness and design, I would definitely recommend this player over apple iCrap

4113

Developer's Corner / Re: Is forward declaration of methods necessary in c?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 01:33 PM »

Hm, I'm not a big fan of that approach, mouser.

Imho .c/.cpp files should only have an associated header file if they export functionality that can be used by other source code modules - and only the relevant exported functionality should be listed in the header files. Encapsulation and all that...

When writing your code, group logically related functionality together. If that means having to write function prototypes, so be it. Also, mark non-exported functions as "static" (modern C++ dictates that you should put in an anonymous namespace instead, but I still prefer "static" - has to do with what many compilers end up putting in your .obj files, but that's a long story). But either static or anonymous-namespace should indeed be used to enforce encapsulation, and avoid namespace clashes.

4114

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 12:43 PM »

Hirudin: nope, cmpm's link got me to a "Welcome to the Windows 7 Beta Customer Preview Program" page with a bunch of text I didn't read, and two dropdown-list + go-buttons for choosing language for downloading x32 and x64 versions. Clicking the go button got me the server too busy error.

4115

Developer's Corner / Re: Does anyone know if there is something “very useful” in IE8?

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 12:10 PM »

Example: IE Tab

-Darwin (January 08, 2009, 12:45 PM)

Good plug in, but why would anyone use this IEtab plugin on FF (other then web developers)?

-megatron (January 09, 2009, 12:06 PM)

For those very few sites that don't work in FF, I guess... personally I find it pointless, and just fire up an instance of IE instead. If an IE tab in FF crashes, doesn't it bring down the entire FF process?

4116

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 11:41 AM »

The nyud.net link keeps redirecting, whereas the direct link works just fine for me - but there's no download link...

EDIT: thanks for that link, cmpm, unfortunately it gives Server Too Busy when trying to download - geez. They should distribute with bittorrent tech

4117

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2009, 11:39 AM »

Graphics drawing speed isn't everything - have you tried resizing the control panel in Vista? Graphics are smooth enough, but it feels super laggy. if that is because it's a WPF program, then WPF sucks

-f0dder (January 08, 2009, 02:47 PM)

control pannel is laaaaagy because Windows has to collect *.cpl under system32.

-electronixtar (January 09, 2009, 10:40 AM)

That has nothing to do with the lag I'm talking about - I'm talking about resizing the GUI, which feels about as laggy as X11 applications on linux (and that's a frigging disgrace).

4118

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2009, 09:41 PM »

I'm very happy with Vista, but if Win7 is all that people are saying it will be, I will simply have to have it, won't I?!

-Darwin (January 08, 2009, 09:32 PM)

If Win7 is what I hope it is, I'll definitely throw it on my workstation

4119

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2009, 07:48 PM »

Darwin: the DRM is main degradation of certain outputs if "protected content" is playing, so you're probably not going to experience it unless you're playing back HD-DVD or BluRay media. It's frightening that the stuff is there, though. And it has real-life affected some people (certain types of digital outputs don't have copy protection, and are thus disabled when the PMP is active). Then there's the insane-o RSA/AES encrypted driver communication when dealing with the DRM stuff, etc. It might not bite you, but it's there and it bites some people.

Also, several people (including scancode) has experienced latency problems on sound under Vista. This is not something regular users will experience, but low latency is crucial if you're doing sound production.

Then there's the weirdo "shadow folders" that mouser talks about in a thread around here, which is a bad idea.

Personally I've not been bitten by any of these things, and Vista64 runs pretty great on my laptop (I'm tempted to give XP64 a go on it too, and see if there's any difference). But there are issues and they're real... so I'm postponing workstation ugprade until Win7 (which will probably have the same issues, but at least seems to be a bit less fatty

4120

Living Room / Re: DC T-Shirts idea.

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2009, 05:34 PM »

I use a similar one as my avatar. The "square code" is just an encoded url, can you find out which?

-housetier (January 08, 2009, 05:25 PM)

http://nrdd.de/ , perhaps?

4121

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2009, 04:22 PM »

Ehtyar: so, does VirtualBox virtualize the GPU, including 3D capabilites? That sounds like a seriously massive undertaking... and that's (imho) the only way for graphics to be able to run faster than the host.

If you're talking about the rest of the system running faster than the host, that would be doable with normal virtualization, even without hardware support (by doing the clever tricks vmware used to do before the VMX instruction set).

4122

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2009, 03:45 PM »

MrCrispy: which build does MSDN offer, and do you know if it's the same build that's going public-beta tomorrow?

4123

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2009, 02:50 PM »

Bring it on! "We are not afraid."
 (see attachment in previous post)
(Now we'll get to see just how good their Win2k8 server farms and clouds really are. )

-40hz (January 08, 2009, 01:17 PM)

Why do people keep on using Win9x style BSODs? I mean, no wonder people think Windows is unstable if Win9x is all they've tried.

4124

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2009, 02:47 PM »

Graphics drawing speed isn't everything - have you tried resizing the control panel in Vista? Graphics are smooth enough, but it feels super laggy. if that is because it's a WPF program, then WPF sucks

4125

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

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2009, 02:31 PM »

Ugh, Cairo is built using WPF? I might be mistaken, but isn't WPF the reason that stuff like the control panel runs so sluggishly in Vista? (Aero and the hw accel is good, btw, but there's those extremely laggy system components that suck, and my impression (which could very well be wrong) is that they're WPF).