Recent Posts

4601

Living Room / Re: Why Does Microsoft Make File Type Names So Long?

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2008, 01:25 PM »

No way! Currently I, like many Windows users, have different directories configured to show different details and view styles. My Pictures, My Music, Program Files, etc. And then all subdirectories within those. If you use "apply to all folders" ALL folders will show only the exact details that are shown in the specific folder you save it from.

Hadn't thought of that - I've always been annoyed with individual folder view settings, and set EVERYTHING to details mode

I wouldn't be surprised if somebody has made a tool for backing up those settings.

Then that is the developer's problem IMO. If developers are required to stick with a standard extension length that wouldn’t be a problem. asit is, any developer can make an extension as long or short as he/she desires. Which can be a problem, at least for me!!

Or - with so many software applications now that apparently need to create their own special, unique, important (Read: proprietary - to make them more $$$), then set a standard for a 4 character length for file extensions.

4 chars wouldn't be enough either... and proprietary formats doesn't have much to do with this, actually. There's several programs storing data or configuration in XML format, but with a generic ".xml" extension, you aren't able to double-click a file and launch the correct application.

4602

General Software Discussion / Re: Iobit smart defrag vs o&o defrag pro

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2008, 12:19 PM »

The one that's given me the best results has been Raxco PerfectDisc.

I hate the direction the GUI has been taking the last few revisions, it's gotten heavier and sloppier for no good reason. But it still defragments well

4603

General Software Discussion / Re: The Vista Immersion Experiment

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2008, 11:33 AM »

Why can't I turn off the bar that has "Organize", "Views" (etc), and the big bar in the bottom that has selection details?

-f0dder (October 07, 2008, 10:14 AM)

Organize Menu->Layout->Deselect anything you don't want.   With the new address bar's handy ability to move laterally in the file system I never use the tree view any more.

-Stoic Joker (October 11, 2008, 11:26 AM)

That won't let me turn off the organize/views/etc. menu itself, though - the "big bar in the bottom" turned out to go away when I selected "use windows classic folders". Better than nothing.

4604

General Software Discussion / Re: RegBench - Registry Benchmarker Utility

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2008, 10:16 AM »

Afaik windows doesn't load the entire registry (nor even the entire hive files), but does on-demand loading. I could be wrong, though. But even with full hivefile loading, you would need some serious compacting before you'd be able to see much improvement - it'd take a pretty old harddrive to go below 40MB/s sustained read, probably even on laptops (mine does 65MB/s -> 30MB/s, averaging at ~50MB/s. But that is a 7200rpm drive (rpm should have more to do with seek time than transfer speed, though)).

I would expect that keeping the hive files defragmented is more important than keeping them compacted - having to seek back and forth kills read performance rather quickly.

Anyway, even if the hive files have on-demand access rather than full loading, at the point you're at your desktop and ready to run the benchmark, big parts are pretty much guaranteed to be already loaded and cached. I guess that to actually say anything about performance, you'd need to boot from a different windows install and load "cold" hivefiles instead. Just a thought

4605

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Mini Review: Espresso

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2008, 09:32 AM »

Ugh, that's nasty behavior!

4606

General Software Discussion / Re: The Vista Immersion Experiment

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2008, 09:25 AM »

Did anyone try if ClickOff can handle the UAC notifications? 

-Curt (October 11, 2008, 04:43 AM)

That would totally defeat the point of UAC, and if it was possible, would be regarded as a security vulnerability and fixed. UAC isn't all that bad, really, and it's a great thing security-wise.

IMHO NortonUAC is a bad idea, but I already wrote about it in the other thread.

4607

Drag&Drop Robot / Re: Major CPU flaw?

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2008, 09:22 AM »

Mouser, what kind of "monitoring" of the launched app are you doing?

If it's simply to wait for termination, I hope you're doing WaitForSingleObject and not polling GetExitCodeProcess...

4608

Living Room / Re: Why Does Microsoft Make File Type Names So Long?

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2008, 09:19 AM »

I realize, though, that doing this throughout all my thousands of folders will never be done. Maybe just a few key folders, I guess.

-J-Mac (October 11, 2008, 12:00 AM)

Doing what throughout all your folders?

You should only need to configure the columns once, then go to tools -> folder options -> "View" tab and "apply to all folders"... unless I'm super dense and it's something else you're talking about

4609

Living Room / Re: Why Does Microsoft Make File Type Names So Long?

« Last post by f0dder on October 10, 2008, 08:18 PM »

While that program will add the Extension column to Explorer itself, will that also propagate to other applications? I'd hate to download, install and try it just to find out I'm still screwed in Excel et al!

-J-Mac (October 10, 2008, 08:13 PM)

It should

4610

General Software Discussion / Re: Use this modified version of Chrome for more privacy

« Last post by f0dder on October 10, 2008, 07:49 PM »

As a end-user, I don't see the point of Chrome, and would've preferred if they spent the time and money helping the firefox developers instead.

But there's probably a lot of reasons for google doing this. gPhone might be one of them?

4611

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 41 [NEW]

« Last post by f0dder on October 10, 2008, 06:47 PM »

A TOC would be, to put it simply, just too much extra work.

-Ehtyar (October 10, 2008, 06:41 PM)

Script it?

4612

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: 41 [NEW]

« Last post by f0dder on October 10, 2008, 06:35 PM »

Looks pretty decent

Might be nice to have an index with links to the article summaries? You've already made the anchors, so you might as well put them to use

4613

Living Room / Re: Why Does Microsoft Make File Type Names So Long?

« Last post by f0dder on October 10, 2008, 06:24 PM »

I don't think there's a way make explorer show file extension rather than file type - if you right-click the column header you can select which columns to show, but there's only "type". Somebody might have made an explorer extension to handle this, though.

Personally I use xplorer² and show extension rather than type, so I'm a happy little camper

I disagree with "Three letter extensions are more than adequate.", btw. There's a lot of extensions that don't make any sense and there's too big risk of name collision for the ones that do make sense. This might not have been too bad if we still lived in the DOS days, but since we're using GUIs and like being able to double-click a file to open/edit/whatever, this is important.

4614

General Software Discussion / Re: NortonUAC

« Last post by f0dder on October 10, 2008, 06:10 PM »

This is an incredibly bad idea.

The point of UAC isn't just to keep malicious programs from doing bad things - it's just as important to keep trusted programs from doing bad things. Imagine the havoc that could happen if you add explorer.exe to the whitelist...

And even the idea of whitelisting something like UAC is, by itself, bad. I wonder how long it'll take before somebody manages to exploit NortonUAC and add itself to the whitelist.

What should instead have been done would be to keep the user elevated for a configurable time period after saying yes to an UAC prompt, that would make life easier when messing around with the control panel etc. For other stuff, imho UAC isn't really a big bother.

4615

General Software Discussion / Re: fastest method/language to create my own software

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 01:32 PM »

Fastest? Money.

4616

Living Room / Re: Asus ships Eee Box PCs with malware

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 01:32 PM »

*giggle*

When do manufacturers learn to run their disk images through quality control before mass-producing and shipping? And when are employees of big companies going to learn that public warez sites suck, and they should join private torrent communities? And stop browsing pr0n at w0rk?

4617

Living Room / Re: I can haz LOLMouser plz?

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 01:19 PM »

HAH, loving yours f0dder

Ehtyar.

-Ehtyar (October 09, 2008, 05:46 AM)

You fell for the self-irony of the IRC pic? 

4618

Post New Requests Here / Re: Vista style filename editing in XP

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 04:52 AM »

I sincerely hope there's no DonationCoder members who hide file extensions for known types

-f0dder (October 09, 2008, 01:47 AM)

i actually leave the 'Hide extensions' on because i hardly use Explorer, using Altap Salamander and Total Commander instead whose behaviours are just like xplorer2.

-lanux128 (October 09, 2008, 04:50 AM)

Well, that qualifies as "showing extensions" to me

4619

Living Room / Re: I can haz LOLMouser plz?

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 03:46 AM »

3 X TOFU

-tomos (October 09, 2008, 03:42 AM)

That's because we love the mouse-man

Here's a slightly more original attempt:

4620

Living Room / Re: I can haz LOLMouser plz?

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 03:32 AM »

Here's my first shot

4621

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Testing tool that fills up memory

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 03:17 AM »

Perhaps we have different definitions of physical memory. The task manager screenshot does show that I'm consuming physical memory by the task manager's definition.

-VideoInPicture (October 09, 2008, 03:04 AM)

Slightly, yes

The thing is that when you're dealing with memory in usermode Windows, you're dealing with virtual memory. What this means is, basically, that you don't have any control of how this is mapped to physical memory - including whether it's paged out to disk. So you can't really make a tool to "consume physical memory", because windows might very well decided not to give you the memory you're asking for.

Sure, you can stress a system by doing usermode virtual memory allocations, but it's not going to be a reliable test of anything.

4622

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Testing tool that fills up memory

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 02:58 AM »

VideoInPicture: you can't "consume physical memory" - for usermode windows applications, you're always¹ dealing with virtual memory. Virtual memory isn't the same as "stuff that goes in the paging file"...

Really, if you need to check how your application deals with low-memory situations, either use the boot.ini flag, or (if I'm not confusing the tool with another), gflags.exe, which lets you specify evil things like making memory allocations fail etc.

1: there's stuff like the address-windowing extensions which let you (indirectly) deal with physical memory, but that's outside the scope of this rant

4623

Post New Requests Here / Re: Vista style filename editing in XP

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 01:47 AM »

I sincerely hope there's no DonationCoder members who hide file extensions for known types

Personally I use xplorer² which does this by default - if I wasn't, I'd buy you a cup of beer, skrommel

4624

General Software Discussion / Re: Monster Cables- The World should know!

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2008, 01:42 AM »

But I was talking about looks over functionality Overpriced designer stuff is exactly what I meant.

-MrCrispy (October 08, 2008, 07:24 PM)

Yeah, I know

Personally, I like simple, functional looks :]

4625

Living Room / Re: Help with vista business remote desktop

« Last post by f0dder on October 08, 2008, 05:52 PM »

nite_monkey, wild shot here, but... have you enabled the "allow remote connections thing" that's located "somewhere in system properties"? It's not enabled by default... ought to give a different error code if this was the problem, but you never know...