Recent Posts

5426

Official Announcements / Re: March 2011 DonationCoder.com Fundraiser Celebration -- Ideas for Special Events?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 11, 2011, 04:08 PM »

I'd be willing to split the proceeds from people buying my autographed pics at $10 a pop:

Me


Seriously though, most sites I'm on don't even let you put a url in the sig. Makes it tough to promote stuff(which is generally the idea.)

5427

General Software Discussion / Re: Video player: What's the quickest (fastest/lightest)?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 11, 2011, 03:56 PM »

Apparently Light Alloy is now freeware.  I used the Google translator and scrolled to the bottom.

http://www.light-alloy.ru/

-mrainey (February 11, 2011, 10:30 AM)

Cool. You can also download the standard version from Softpedia instead of waiting for the download server count down:

http://www.softpedia...rs/Light-Alloy.shtml

5428

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 11, 2011, 03:46 PM »

They got me on an impulse buy.  A-Data isn't a speed demon but I like them because they don't have the "sliding guts" design.  So far I haven't had one break.  I got this model:

http://www.newegg.co...20-211-522-_-Product

The one user review claims he got 27 MB/s write speed using USB 2.0 port. If I get 15 MB/s in a 2.0 port I'll be very happy.  USB 3.0s are in the back of the machines so it's not likely I'll use those except to benchmark it.

My next PC I'd expect to be USB 3.0 all around.

5429

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Chrome: Time for a Second Chance?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 11, 2011, 03:43 PM »

Hmmmmmmmm, I guess MS is locked into "Internet Explorer" otherwise with the "cloud push" in all the ads I don't know why they don't come out with a browser named "Cloud."  It seems inevitable.

-MilesAhead (February 11, 2011, 02:14 PM)

Didn't that happen today? IE 9.0 RC (Release: Cloud)

-Ath (February 11, 2011, 03:02 PM)

That may be the "code name" but they should dump the IE moniker and just be Cloud period.  Plus it's a pain every time you search for stuff about Explorer file manager you get all kinds of IE hits that don't apply.

5430

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 11, 2011, 02:47 PM »

I'd like to see a video of the benchmark. Don't know if they're blowin' smoke, but Sharkoon is claiming 130 MB/s transfer speeds:

http://www.tweaktown...rite_rate/index.html

They also have an "economy" model that only writes at 83 MB/s

http://www.overclock...club.com/news/27739/

5431

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Chrome: Time for a Second Chance?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 11, 2011, 02:14 PM »

Hmmmmmmmm, I guess MS is locked into "Internet Explorer" otherwise with the "cloud push" in all the ads I don't know why they don't come out with a browser named "Cloud."  It seems inevitable.

5432

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 11, 2011, 02:07 PM »

You might be right, but that would only be because of marketing weasels, and not have anything to do with the technology.

OTOH, if USB3 parts are expensive enough compared to USB2 parts, we might see flashdrive vendors sticking with USB2. There really isn't any good reason to use USB3 parts for them.

-f0dder (February 11, 2011, 05:23 AM)

btw where are you seeing these USB 2.0 60+ MB/s reads? Do you have USB on an addon card? I'm wondering if it's like what I'm seeing with USB 3.0 where people are saying it's "slow" because they're not even getting ESata speeds out of them and have the USB 3.0 on the motherboard. I have off the shelf HP machines and the fastest USB 2.0 read I ever got was 24 MB/s(I'm talking external HD not a USB stick.)  With WD 6 Gb/s fast drives in USB 3.0 docks and SIIG USB 3.0 ports on PCI Express card, on my Quad the sequential reads are like 5 times faster for me than USB 2.0. Pulling a large video from a WD in a USB 3.0 dock often shows 130 MB/s read. It's as fast or faster on both machines than the system disk.

5433

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Chrome: Time for a Second Chance?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 11, 2011, 12:49 AM »

I'm trying the Chromium nightly that was just put on Softpedia.
11.0.668.0 build 74561

Just to be fair I thought I'd note that I had changed my settings Under The Hood under Privacy to disable all features.  The new portable picked up those settings.  Did not enable by default. One less thing to have to remember. I'm just trying it now. I don't see any obvious bugs at this point.

5434

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 SP1 to release on 22FEB

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 10, 2011, 08:47 PM »

If you haven't hit your thumb twiddling quota, join us on this forum hanging around until W8 arrives:

http://www.eightforums.com/




edit: btw I frequently suggest people on Vista, Windows7 and W8 forums check out donationcoder, esp. Coding Snacks.  So it's a cross pollination thingy.

5435

Living Room / Re: Too much free time apparently :)

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 10, 2011, 08:45 PM »

...time to hack up a script doing nefarious things in the personal testing forum.

-f0dder (February 10, 2011, 01:38 AM)

I thought that's what it was for but I wasn't sure. Thanks for the confirmation.

5436

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 10, 2011, 08:42 PM »

The price point for USB 2.0 stuff is going to hit the cellar. So who is going to cram expensive chips into USB 2.0 when they can put them in USB 3.0 that's backward compatible?  People don't care about theoretical. They care about capacity and speed per buck.

USB 2.0 is going the way of the 5 1/4" floppy drive.

5437

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 09, 2011, 05:49 PM »

USB 3.0 as it gets common will write way faster.

-MilesAhead (February 09, 2011, 03:59 PM)

No, it won't - it comes down to the speed of the flash memory on the pendrive. Again: I haven't seen a single usb2 pendrive that even comes near saturating the usb2 bandwidth.

-f0dder (February 09, 2011, 04:26 PM)

I doubt you will.  Why try to max out obsolete technology? It's like waiting for the 100 MB fast floppy drive to arrive.

5438

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 09, 2011, 03:59 PM »

18MB/s is perfectly attainable with a 2.0 plug - I think one of my corsairs reach ~20MB/s for reads.

-f0dder (February 09, 2011, 06:40 AM)

None of the USB 2.0 thumbs in my price range have claimed anywhere near that for write speeds.  That Verbatim one is the fastest I have and I think it's really about 7 MB/s write. USB 3.0 as it gets common will write way faster. I'd like to have one to see how they handle the connector.  The one in the link, the connector sure looks like USB 2.0.

But until I have USB 3.0 ports instead of 2.0 it's on the back burner.  The USB 3.0 I have are mostly occupied with docking stations.

I run across "USB 3.0 slow" on boards.  I think 100% of the time the guy complaining about it being slow does not have USB 3.0 on a PCI express card, but built into the motherboard.

In any event, if I thought it would be convenient to copy a video onto a key drive for a quick watch it's way too slow to tolerate the copy.  It's easier just to swap drives in the docking stations.  Eliminates most use I'd have for a key since I don't jump around to dozens of PCs carrying a portable toolkit of utilities.

Plus the thing still feels like a novelty to me. I have a hard time believing the things won't break with moderate use. Just too flimsy.

5439

Living Room / Re: Too much free time apparently :)

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 09, 2011, 01:46 AM »

You'll could always take up fencing…

Nah, I prefer your rapier wit. I don't recall anyone in all this time saying "touche." I'm grateful for that at least.

5440

Living Room / Too much free time apparently :)

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 08, 2011, 09:10 PM »

I just noticed I have over 2000 posts on this board. I have too much free time apparently.

5441

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 08, 2011, 09:05 PM »

I haven't spent a lot for them.  But looking around at the ads and reviews the write speeds seem to be rated rather low with the USB 2.0 models.  The USB 3.0 model I linked to claims 18 MB/s write speed which seems fairly quick for a cheapie thumb. If I use it with my WD set top box, it's only going to read via USB 2.0 anyway, but it's a drag writing the video file on at < 8 MB/s using the cheap 2.0 models(assuming they really are backward compatible and I can plug into a USB 2.0 port in the WD player.)

5442

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 08, 2011, 08:02 PM »

I'm a big advocate & user of portable apps and task oriented USB collections.

But I'm still waiting untill it hits a $2/Gb "everyday price" point.

Once it does, however, I'm all over it!  

-40hz (February 08, 2011, 06:49 PM)

Thanks for the reply. Please update if you find a deal with price/performance/design sweet spot.

The last thumb I bought was similar to this model 'cept it was 16 GB:

http://www.newegg.co...20-235-053-_-Product

The write speed wasn't too bad. About 8 to 11 MB/s I think. But I hate the "sliding guts" design. I have to jam my thumb against the stop to plug it in and unplugging is pulling on mere plastic. I know it's not gonna' last long.

edit: the only one I saw at newegg that meets your $2 per Gig price point is an A-Data. I have a few A-Data USB 2.0 but they are not known as high performace.  Although none has broken apart on me yet.

Here's a link to the A-Data USB 3.0 model:

http://www.newegg.co...Item=N82E16820211521

5443

Living Room / USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 08, 2011, 06:03 PM »

Some USB sticks are showing up as USB 3.0. I'm just curious if anyone has sprung for one. If/how you liked it etc..

The prices seem to be dropping into the somewhat reasonable range. If over $50 can ever be reasonable for a key chain gadget.

5444

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Faster boots combining hibernate and restart (Boot Snooze)

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 07, 2011, 07:42 PM »

Boot Snooze features in CybernetNews today:

Succinct article.  Always nice when they get it right in a write-up.

5445

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of a partition identifier ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 06, 2011, 04:42 PM »

Thanks for the link.  Added it to my code snippets.

I also found a port of the Linux "file" command:

http://www.vowles-ho...windows_file_exe.htm

One of the infos output is console or gui when run against an exe file.
C Source is included.  Assuming it works it's some good info on PE fields.
I'm not sure if the exes "compiled" by AutoIt3 conform to the standard.

5446

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of a partition identifier ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 06, 2011, 03:47 AM »

I found this console detection code. I have no idea if it really works though.

http://www.autoitscr...earch__1#entry787423

(scroll up to the post by GodlessSinner for the script)

Not exactly great for doing it inside the file you're checking but you can probably work around it somehow.

Also there's a new UDF WinApiEx.au3 that has tons of stuff. It's by the guy who figured out how to get the translucent blue glass dialogs on Windows Seven Aero.

5447

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: New MakeMKV beta 1.6.4

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 05, 2011, 07:05 PM »

version 1.6.4 has been released.

5448

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of a partition identifier ...

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 05, 2011, 05:17 PM »

There are some WinAPI calls to get volume information but I haven't used them myself to know if the info can be easily meaningfully interpreted. Just about everything at BootLand is boot related so there must be some programmers there willing to share some of their secrets.

5449

General Software Discussion / Re: Traying windowing tool?

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 05, 2011, 04:32 PM »

I've been using WinTray for quite awhile in Vista 64 bit:

http://www.autoitscr...c/85841-wintray-v16/

You hold down Shift while clicking the minimize button and it minimizes to tray.

The apps I use in Vista64 I've found replacements for in W7 so I only use it on the Vista machine.  But it doesn't seem to interfere with anything as far as I can tell.

5450

General Software Discussion / Re: New (Feb 1 2011) "Starter" Editions of Delphi and C++ Builder

« Last post by MilesAhead on February 05, 2011, 04:19 PM »

The component sharing was what made the old Delphi(pre .NET) fun. You could produce stand-alone exe programs for Windows without the messy message handler switch statement.  Install in your IDE and drag & drop onto a form.

Searching through the copy for this offering I don't even see the phrase "64 bit" anywhere.  PCs < $500 are coming with 6 GB ram and 64 bit Windows. Time to get with the 21st Century here!

What I'd like to see is a nice sophisticated free resource editor. I don't mind filling in the message handling statements later.  This way you could have RAD prototyping without that spaghetti vc++ code.  Just do Win32 native for nice small apps.  The VC++ 2010 even tells you how to add the 64 bit support for free.  Fairly painless.

If I'm going to do 32 bit exes then I might as well just reinstall Delphi 5 Pro. Back then you could back into the Pro version for reasonable money. I remember I bought the 1.0 standard version of C# for $60 and that qualified me for a competitive upgrade to get Delphi 5 Pro for $200 or $239.. something like that.

Now they want you to make less than a grand a year... how you supposed to buy anything from them? Indentured servitude?  Sheesh!!

Is MS still propping them up? I don't see how they're making a profit with this mess.