Recent Posts

5101

General Software Discussion / Re: Proprietary media formats — time to get rid of them!

« Last post by f0dder on June 23, 2008, 08:27 AM »

It wouldn't be a problem to migrate to one open container file format (like Matroska), and this would be a good idea (not going to happen, obviously). But even if the world settled on one container format, there would still be a need for different codecs for different purposes.

DivX is basically just MPEG, btw - it started out as a hacked-up MPEG codec that had been modified to accept lower resolution and bitrates than it was originally meant for.

And DRM needs to go. "Less restrictive licenses" just isn't good enough, it punishes legitimate users but doesn't stop the pirates at all. The same with those copy-protected CDs that I can't rip for use on my MP3 player, sigh.

5102

Assembly / Re: What version of assembly? Any

« Last post by f0dder on June 23, 2008, 08:17 AM »

Here's a bunch of free assemblers for the x86 platform: FASM, NASM, YASM. GNU AS for the masochists

5103

Living Room / Re: U.K. growing more peculiar by the day. What's happening in your area?

« Last post by f0dder on June 20, 2008, 11:06 PM »

OK, so who haven't licked 9V batteries when they were a kid?

Seriously, all the disclaimers and treating people as stupid cattle is getting out of hand.

5104

General Software Discussion / Re: The Fifth Element: back to basic?

« Last post by f0dder on June 20, 2008, 09:57 PM »

I use OpenOffice at the moment, but I'm constantly considering going back to MS Office 2000... it's so lightweight in comparison, and just seems to work. OOo hangs on the simplest of things :/

5105

General Software Discussion / Re: The Fifth Element: back to basic?

« Last post by f0dder on June 20, 2008, 05:41 PM »

cmpm: nah, haven't tried it, I pretty much have the needs that it could cover already covered. But I do believe that it seems like a pretty disjoint collection - it might all be integrated, but it seems like an odd bunch. CD Ripping, VoIP, lan scanning and IM, some office-like stuff, etc.? Hm.

5106

Find And Run Robot / Re: Won't Start Programs - Vista

« Last post by f0dder on June 20, 2008, 09:50 AM »

bobblehead: nice that you didn't just give up, but stepped by here - might even end up benefiting other users as well

5107

General Software Discussion / Re: The Fifth Element: back to basic?

« Last post by f0dder on June 20, 2008, 07:50 AM »

So basically a whole bunch of unrelated programs thrown together into one big package? Ugh

5108

Living Room / Re: Spore Creature Creator Released - Make Cody Creature Contest!

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 06:37 PM »

YouTube + Spore, that reminds of something. If you don't make a creature, at least have a good laugh

-Lashiec (June 19, 2008, 06:13 PM)

Heh, that was pretty nice

5109

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 Released

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 06:01 PM »

FF3/win32, running on XP64 Pro, with the following addons:

- Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4
- Dansk ordbog 1.6.13
- Download Statusbar 0.9.6.3
- Extension List Dumper 1.14.1
- Firebug 1.05 (Disabled, Incompatible)
- FlashGot 1.0.3
- It's All Text! 0.8.5
- Mouseless Browsing 0.4.3 (Disabled, Incompatible)
- NoScript 1.6.9.3
- ScrapBook 1.3.3.6
- Screen grab! 0.95
- Tab Control 0.4.1
- Tamper Data 10.0.4
- Text Link 2.0.2008052801

Seems to start slightly faster, leaks a LOT less memory, opening "a zillion tabs" (ie., 10+ forum notify emails when I get home from work) doesn't cause new-tab-open-slowdown anymore, and even facebook doesn't lag like a slug when it's been open for 6+ hours. The AwesomeBar is nice, although I'd wish it had ALT+n shortcuts like FARR.

Sites load as fast as ever, no change there really - after re-enabling pipelining, anyway.

So far, I'm pretty satisfied with FF3, it seems to have fixed the problems that annoyed me most with FF2 (even though startup time could be reduced even a bit more ).

5110

Living Room / Re: How can I get hard drive space... without deleting (my) stuff?

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 05:48 PM »

You should only use NTFS Compression on "mostly read-only files" - ie., files that don't get written to very often. Why? CPU usage is a small factor, fragmentation is the big factor.

Doesn't work all to well on WAV/BMP (use MP3 and JPEG/PNG compression for those), but does a good job on text files (including source code), executables, et cetera. NTFS Compression is a LZW variant, so you can basically expect it to work for the same types of files that ZIP works for.

Windows folder is OK, never compress boot.ini, ntdetect.com or ntldr, though.

5111

Living Room / Re: Accessing the contents of another computer's hard drive

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 05:45 PM »

Sharing whole hard drives may be a bad idea, but it's the default in many versions of windows.

Browse to \\machinename\c$ on any machine where you have an admin account. Enter your admin username and password if prompted. Helllooo C drive!

Basically, any machine on which you are an admin is an open book, either at the keyboard or across the network. I don't recall having to disable simple file sharing to do this, either.

-Jimdoria (June 19, 2008, 02:59 PM)

Yup (I already linked to info on admin shares), and I do believe this is a very bad default - but iirc you can only connect to the shares with administrator+password (or is it "member of administrator group"?) - that makes it slightly less severe than manually sharing the root of a drive.

I always disable administrative shares as part of my unattended setup

5112

Best E-mail Client / Re: Seriously, what is MicroEd good for?

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 05:43 PM »

Ummm... who in their right mind would use the mouse while composing an email message?

5113

Best E-mail Client / Re: Seriously, what is MicroEd good for?

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 08:33 AM »

I just wish TB! would let you define your own text editor    I was a "point" on Fidonet for ten years, using the mighty GoldED, and while GoldED had a rudimentary text editor built in, for normal messages I preferred to use my favourite text editor VDE under it.  I fail to see why Windows programs can't do the same  

-rjbull (June 19, 2008, 03:32 AM)

Some do (like the "It's All Text!" extension for FireFox), but it usually involves temporary files and is somewhat messy. Instead, most applications simply adopt the existing windows editor interface & shortcut keys, and it works well enough for most people - learn one, rule all.

5114

General Software Discussion / Re: "The browser is the new OS" ...(really?)

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 08:31 AM »

For those here who say Games in a browser suck, check out the Fallen Empire Legions video.

-Deozaan (June 18, 2008, 09:07 PM)

And what kind of plugins does it require? I doubt flash is enough

5115

General Software Discussion / Re: NewEgg

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 08:27 AM »

Well, there isn't much you can do to prevent DOA - especially considering how the various postal services work (I should know ). So it all comes down to how RMAs are handled, really. Sucks that you have to go through a support call (and to India, ugh) before you can just fill out a bloody RMA slip. Having to pay for postage is pretty normal, though :/

5116

Living Room / Re: Accessing the contents of another computer's hard drive

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 08:20 AM »

wreckedcarzz:
#1 - WEP can be bruteforced within minutes, especially if you sniff some traffic first. Might not be a concern where you live, but keep it in mind.

#2 - if a piece of malware enters your computer, not having passworded accounts mean the malware can spread automatically to the other computers in your LAN (yes, some malwares do this automatically). No need to "guess names", it's easy enough to scan a LAN subnet for active computers.

#3 - adding same-name accounts with with same passwords is (more) secure, and really isn't that much bother.

First of all, you need to disable "simple file sharing" - and then you need to grant some access rights. Make sure you have identically named (and passworded) users on both machines, that makes things easier. On some windows versions, you can access the "administrative shares", on some you can't.

-f0dder (June 17, 2008, 06:13 PM)

Where do you go to disable Simple File Sharing? I don't understand why it's so hard to get XP to let me access my files, but usually I have to resort to an external drive to accomplish anything. :-(

I have XP Pro SP3, FYI.

-Deozaan (June 18, 2008, 09:30 PM)

Explorer, tools->folder options, "view" tab, scroll to bottom: "Use simple file sharing (Recommended)", untick. And then you need to manually configure shares, add user accounts and permissions etc., but it's the proper way to do things.

(Sharing whole drives is bad, mmkay?)

5117

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 Released

« Last post by f0dder on June 19, 2008, 08:15 AM »

Both of these are bad design practices. Extensions should never have to keep updating, especially between minor revs, like on each beta and rc. This is where the open source mentality hurts FF - there's little effort on the part of Mozilla to make sure extensions work, since anyone can go fix them if they want to. At least that's what I feel.

-MrCrispy (June 18, 2008, 10:16 PM)

I think it's fine to make breaking API changes in major revisions. Otherwise, you either need to keep old cruddy compatibility code around indefinitely, or lock yourself to a possibly ill-designed API.

5118

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3 Released

« Last post by f0dder on June 18, 2008, 03:33 PM »

type "about:config" in the location bar, then enter "network.http" in the search bar, and find pipelining - dunno if a restart is necessary.

5119

Living Room / Re: Spore Creature Creator Released - Make Cody Creature Contest!

« Last post by f0dder on June 18, 2008, 02:27 PM »

i couldnt hear any sounds

-mouser (June 18, 2008, 02:24 PM)

codec problem? Worked fine here, playing in MediaPlayerClassic, with no codecs (iirc) except for xvid and possibly AC3.

5120

Living Room / Re: Spore Creature Creator Released - Make Cody Creature Contest!

« Last post by f0dder on June 18, 2008, 01:59 PM »

Haha, only saw the video now - great stuff. But pretty scary sounds Cody is making!

5121

Coding Snacks / Re: [Idea] Lossless MP3 Silence Trimmer

« Last post by f0dder on June 18, 2008, 12:26 PM »

lanux beat me to it, by several hours - so I'm just going to chip in and say I've used mp3DirectCut successfully several times in the past, and it's a nice little application. Of course it doesn't beat keeping your own collection in lossless FLAC format , but it's certainly nifty when all you have are the MP3s.

5122

Living Room / Re: Looking for help identifying hidden domain owner...

« Last post by f0dder on June 18, 2008, 06:54 AM »

DMCA takedown notices can be very effective - and since DMCA is such a blanket law, it can be used for all kinds of stuff.

5123

General Software Discussion / Re: Is anyone having random slowdowns on Vista SP1?

« Last post by f0dder on June 18, 2008, 06:52 AM »

Vista works in mysterious ways

Is there any disk activity while this happens? when I hear about massive CPU usage for no reason, my first suspect is usually either malware, or a disk that has reverted to running in PIO mode (that can kill the performance of even a 3GHz quadcore).

5124

Developer's Corner / Re: source control systems: what's the best?

« Last post by f0dder on June 18, 2008, 06:47 AM »

tinjaw: hmm, mixing BZR+SVN? How?

5125

Living Room / Re: Accessing the contents of another computer's hard drive

« Last post by f0dder on June 18, 2008, 06:46 AM »

I have XP Home so I don't have the Admin Shares, but all I needed was file read/write access. Now to just disable the requirement for password authentication, and it is one-click access!

-wreckedcarzz (June 17, 2008, 08:50 PM)

Umm. Disable password authentication? You do realize this is an insanely bad thing to do, right? And that all you need are identical usernames with identical passwords on both boxes, in order to do things safely?