Recent Posts

5301

Image Manager Shootout / Re: Xnview vs. IrfanView - integrity issue examined

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2008, 08:54 AM »

Humm,

I don't personally see a problem with lifting some inspiration from how other programs design their GUIs and dialogs - this has been done all the time, and it's generally for the greater good of end-users. Of course there's a fine line between inspiration and blatant rip-off, but you have to factor in whether it's a pretty standard-looking dialog or something completely unique.

Personally, I don't use either irfanview or xn (instead I stick with the last good version of acdsee, the blindingly fast 2.4), so I dunno how the situation really is - but Irfan's statements do seem a bit unprofessional and very bitter.

5302

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista Aero vs. Linux Compiz

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2008, 08:40 AM »

File systems on Linux are its core attraction for stability, no need for defragging, and since everything is a text file, they last forever,

-zridling (April 25, 2008, 01:09 AM)

That linux filesystems should not need defragging is a goddamn lie. It's true that they generally don't fragment as badly as, say, FAT filesystems, but they sure as hell do fragment. (Oh, if you follow the "never use more than 80% of a drive" the fragmentation issues aren't as bad, but that's damn lame advice).

But they do fragment. How badly depends on filesystem type and usage. And what's your option then, to defragment? General advice is to "make a new filesystem, copy all files there, erase old filesyste, copy back". I don't know of any decent defrag applications for linux - there's some experimental thing for ext2, and for XFS you can hack up a command pipeline but it essentially uses single-file defragmenting, and isn't as comprehensive as tools available for windows.

Yet linux users keep propagating the misconception (or even outright lie) that linux is fragmentation-resilient. I dunno if it's simply because there aren't defragmentation apps available that this ignorance hasn't been debunked, or if it's because linux users have simply gotten used to sub-par performance...

5303

Living Room / Google master plan

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2008, 08:42 AM »

Hadn't seen this little video before - pretty well done. Don't have much to add to the topic though, and "do no evil" has been discussed here before

5304

Living Room / Re: Gorgeous Homebuilt PC Mod with instructions: Victorian Steampunk All-in One

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2008, 03:29 AM »

 

5305

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista Aero vs. Linux Compiz

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2008, 03:17 AM »

Well, flipping windows was not exactly the smoothest with the GMA X3100... But if you say that it should be smooth, I'll have to check that out. Maybe a driver problem...? 

-Armando (April 23, 2008, 10:31 PM)

Very likely a driver problem - intel has a track record of writing retarded graphics drivers, and crippling their otherwise OK/nice chips.

5306

Living Room / Re: Windows XP SP3 due for release .... (don't hold your breath)

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2008, 09:53 AM »

I wonder if there'll be a new service pack for XP64/Win2k3-server as well... those run at a different schedule from XP32.

5307

General Software Discussion / Re: Turning Windows 2003 Server into a workstation?

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2008, 09:50 AM »

I wonder what the point is of running such a stripped-down version? How much physical RAM do you save by turning off that many services? Is the system measurably (not just placebo) faster? Or is it done because it's omfg-leet?

5308

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista Aero vs. Linux Compiz

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2008, 01:46 AM »

MrCrispy: remember that nvidia not only makes video drivers, but also chipset and network... those crash statistics were interesting, but afaik did not tell which nvidia drivers caused the crash. Also, it would have been interesting to see per-user frequency of the crashes - obviously nvidia has a higher percentage of crashes simply because they (afaik) has larger market share than AMD/ATi.

Afaik (hear-say, not verified!) Aero is implemented using shaders, and requiring SM2.0 - this has some requirements of the GPU and it's drivers. The newer intel integrated graphics is actually relatively capable, but still with insanely retarded drivers.

I dunno if Compiz is done with shaders or whether it uses fixed-feature OpenGL calls with a whole bunch of CPU massaging...

5309

General Software Discussion / Re: False Positive on Software (Generic.Dx) by McAfee Today: McAfee Response and Fix

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2008, 05:27 AM »

...I wonder how much that's going to cost you?

5310

fSekrit / Re: Fonts?

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2008, 07:51 PM »

Doh, didn't see this before now - thought I had enabled email notifications of all posts in the fSekrit subforum.

Well, as it is now it's already possible to change the used font - but it requires manually editing the registry, and isn't saved per-note. I've considered the font selection dialog for a while, but there's been more pressing issues to fix first. But I can probably take a look at font selection dialog soon - not sure if I want to save the font per-note though, I'd rather prefer to keep it as a system/per-user setting.

I do, eventually, plan on making the container format a bit more flexible though, then it'd at least be possible to save things like font information per-note... right now, that would be another hacked-in thing

5311

General Software Discussion / Re: BeyondCompare 3 Beta released

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2008, 05:57 PM »

btw: version 3 will be released for linux, so this is big news for the linux crowd.

-mouser (April 21, 2008, 04:25 PM)

I hope that doesn't mean they're using one of those horribly bloated and non-native-skinning crossplatform toolkits :/

5312

Living Room / Re: How to make a wawed-off USB Key

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2008, 08:39 AM »

That's pretty cute!

5313

Living Room / Re: How Do You Use Your USB Flash Drive(s)?

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2008, 08:26 AM »

I have a 2gig voyager that I occasionally use for data moving when I visit my brothers etc., it also contains my passwords.exe fSekrit container, and some various tools (subversion, the putty suite of SSH tools, notepad++ and such). Don't use it that often, but when I do it's a very nice little thing, and obviously it's ultra portable.

I also have an older 128meg drive, with a DOS boot sector - useful for running harddrive diagnostic tools, BIOS flash updates, and playing around with the occasional low-level code that won't work under windows.

5314

General Software Discussion / Re: BeyondCompare 3 Beta released

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2008, 08:21 AM »

Whoa, they're finally releasing a v3 beta?

5315

Developer's Corner / Re: Pet Python

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2008, 08:13 AM »

Haha, lovely

5316

General Software Discussion / Re: Maxthon or Avant?

« Last post by f0dder on April 20, 2008, 05:04 AM »

I used Avant back in the IE days, gave Maxthon a try a bit later but preferred Avant - can't give any qualified reasons why, though.

5317

Living Room / Re: Earthquake

« Last post by f0dder on April 19, 2008, 04:57 AM »

There are worse places to burn than your hands. 

-Cpilot (April 18, 2008, 07:50 PM)

Oh yeah... and I'll never make that mistake again >_<

5318

Living Room / Re: Earthquake

« Last post by f0dder on April 18, 2008, 09:06 AM »

wtfcats!

5319

General Software Discussion / Re: Should I get my new laptop with hard drive partitioned?

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2008, 06:11 PM »

Btw, pagefile on a second partition (but same physical drive) doesn't necessarily make things slower - the read/write heads have to move anyway. Keeping in unfragmented is what matters (and better yet, get 4+ gigs of ram and 64bit windows and disable it altogether).

5320

General Software Discussion / Re: Who used up the bandwidth/allocated traffic for the month ?

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2008, 08:18 AM »

Btw, if it's wireless, make sure the network is encrypted so it's not abused by anybody else.

And 50 gigs of traffic, hmm... somebody's gotta be p2p'ing (ok, perhaps ~420 megs per person per day doesn't require p2p'ing, but still.)

5321

Developer's Corner / Re: Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror Starts a New Website for Coders

« Last post by f0dder on April 17, 2008, 03:10 AM »

Hmm, I don't feel comfortable about him teaming up with Spolsky.

And "stackoverflow.com"? Cool domain name, but it should've been used for something primarily focusing on security, really.

5322

Living Room / Re: If you get angry about frivolous lawsuits by big company bullies you'll love..

« Last post by f0dder on April 16, 2008, 06:06 PM »

That guy is an hero! 

-Mark0 (April 16, 2008, 05:41 PM)

Hehe

A hero - an hero is one of the evil internet memes.

5323

General Software Discussion / Re: HowTo EASILY create image backup?

« Last post by f0dder on April 16, 2008, 09:44 AM »

patthecat: linux has offered read-only NTFS for many, many years... and there's stable write access as well, albeit pretty slow.

5324

General Software Discussion / Re: HowTo EASILY create image backup?

« Last post by f0dder on April 16, 2008, 08:04 AM »

[almost off topic] What is in general the benefit of FAT32, since some people swear to it? [/almost off topic]

-Curt (April 16, 2008, 07:48 AM)

Some people believe that it's "omfg faster!!!", but those people should really be ignored. The only tangible advantage is that more operating systems can handle FAT, whereas NTFS support in non-NT systems is either slow (ntfs3g) or non-existent.

NTFS is more stable than FAT (it has journaled filesystem metadata <3), has faster file searching, support individual files larger than 4 gigabytes, has better access control (not needed for home users, but wonderful in the corporate world), and has a number of other more technical advantages.

5325

General Software Discussion / Re: HowTo EASILY create image backup?

« Last post by f0dder on April 16, 2008, 06:24 AM »

With a brand new disk without data on, I'd rather use format than convert... also, a full format, even though it takes a lot of time, since that serves as a rather comprehensive disk check as well

And I agree totally about doing NTFS instead of FAT, it's more robust... and also supports individual files larger than 4GB.