Recent Posts

576

Living Room / Re: SSD Drives - something to consider before taking the plunge

« Last post by phitsc on May 13, 2011, 06:56 AM »

...

While there are applications for a fast storage solution, speed isn't everything and in fact it's mostly nothing.

-Daleus (May 13, 2011, 06:51 AM)

I have to disagree there. While I'm not sure what you're referring to with 'fast storage' I am of the opinion that there are quite a few 'applications' for fast file access. And speed in this respect can mean lots of $$$ (and efficiency and motivation )

577

Living Room / Re: SSD Drives - something to consider before taking the plunge

« Last post by phitsc on May 12, 2011, 02:19 AM »

The general consensus amongst my friends is to use SSDs for OS, applications and reproducible files (compilation etc.) but not for long-time data storage.

I think the important part in the referred article is the table that shows that most of the SSDs mentioned actually broke within the warranty period. I'd hate to have my massively expensive SSD fail shortly after loosing warranty

578

Living Room / Re: Clicking Cool Ads... NOT! (NSFW)

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 03:43 PM »

I use [email protected]. Surprisingly, it usually works.

579

Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 03:34 PM »

I have actually once watched the Lord of the rings trilogy in a row. That must be close to 10 hours. And loooots of snacks too  

580

Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 03:33 PM »

581

Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 03:32 PM »

or to chew standing, to burn even more calories 

582

Living Room / Re: Google Chrome Hacked, Sandbox Escaped

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 03:29 PM »

I don't know. I think I've read somewhere that of the popular browsers, Chrome was indeed found to be the most vulnerable one. But I think that was a report sometime end of last year.

Edit: here's something from Nov. 2010: http://www.favbrowse...-chrome-and-firefox/

583

Developer's Corner / Re: Apples, Walled Gardens, and Screw Deals - Oh My!

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 03:25 PM »

That really sucks

584

Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 03:16 PM »

I sit almost all day every day and I'm not obese. I'm actually underweight.

-Deozaan (May 11, 2011, 02:43 PM)

But at what angle, that's the question

585

Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 08:42 AM »

A vote for the standing desk:

<a href="http://www.medicalbi...ng.org/sitting-kills"><img src="http://images.medica...g-is-killing-you.jpg" alt="Sitting is Killing You" width="500"  border="0" /></a><br />Via: <a href="http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org">Medical Billing And Coding</a>

586

Living Room / Re: Droid Texting - Fail!

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 07:44 AM »

I've never had a problem texting on my Android phone either. Although I have switched to free alternatives (GTalk and WhatsApp) with almost all of my friends, except the few obstinate Windows Mobile friends , and my mother maybe

587

Living Room / Re: Google Chrome Hacked, Sandbox Escaped

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 03:18 AM »

Where I work, IT actually took measures to prevent people from using Chrome. You can install it, but you can't launch the chrome.exe process.

(I had to rename it to something else )

588

Living Room / Re: My own posts showing up in Unread Posts - Am I the only one experiencing this?

« Last post by phitsc on May 11, 2011, 02:43 AM »

The way I use the forums might be a bit odd. I pretty much only use the Unread Posts link (my bookmark is straight to that link!) so I can see what's changed since I last checked. I don't go looking into specific sections. In fact, I hardly pay attention to what section anything is in except for when I'm creating my own posts.

-Deozaan (May 10, 2011, 08:14 PM)

If that's odd then I'm odd too, cause that's exactly how I browse the forum. Sorry for the OT

-Eóin (May 10, 2011, 09:05 PM)

Me too (both the browsing and the being sorry for OT part) 

-TucknDar (May 11, 2011, 12:52 AM)

Me too. I've never experienced the problem mentioned though.

589

Living Room / Re: After PSN. Who's next?

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 05:18 PM »

How am I supposed to log into my e-mail account to get the verification e-mail when my 40 character password to my e-mail account is stored away in my LastPass account that I can't log in to until I verify my e-mail?

-Deozaan (May 06, 2011, 05:03 PM)

That's a 2.8E64 years brute force attack (according to the Excel sheet from here)

590

General Software Discussion / Re: Delicious' new home..

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 04:59 PM »

What I really like about delicious is its excellent Firefox plugin (I never actually use the web site directly). But I guess services like Pinboard or Diigo have that as well. (?)

591

Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 04:56 PM »

It's finally here! I made a small table and used it to turn my digital illustration desk into a standing desk.

They say one should use an ergonomic stepping pad, or something, but I walk barefoot all the time and I this isn't my only working desk (I'll let the other one remain a sitting desk, at least for the time being), so maybe it won't be a problem. We'll see.


<img src="http://www.23hq.com/...fecb528e15_large.jpg">

<img src="http://www.23hq.com/...6707116_standard.jpg">

-paulobrabo (April 29, 2011, 08:59 AM)

Yeah, looks really cool  . Don't know why, but it reminds me of the Bremer Stadtmusikanten. The TFT would be the rooster

592

Developer's Corner / Re: C# : Object Lifetime is Not (entirely) Determined by Scope ?

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 04:37 PM »

But I've been using C# for quite awhile, and have no problem with the GC in .Net. the using(){} pattern is easy to use, and does just fine. I've got a performance-critical app I finished a few months ago that holds a whole database of a hundred million objects in a Dictionary, using it to build other collections of a few hundred thousand objects at a time. This thrashes huge amounts of RAM, but is performant enough that the CPU and RAM usage is barely noticeable, dwarfed by the cost of writing out the results.

-CWuestefeld (May 06, 2011, 11:56 AM)

Yeah, experience does the trick! It's just that I always hear people saying how C# was better suited for less experienced programmers (contrary to C++), because it has garbage collection   (I'm exaggerating obviously)

If you forget to call delete in C++ (or don't know what a smart pointer is), you get a memory leak. If you forget to use using in C# (or don't know how to properly implement Dispose in a class hierarchy) you might get a resource leak. The point I'm trying to make: you need to know your stuff, no matter what language you're using.

593

General Software Discussion / Re: Deduplication, encryption, security and... Dropbox

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 10:38 AM »

And here comes the "workaround":

http://lifehacker.co...eve-got-beta-invites

594

Developer's Corner / Re: C# : Object Lifetime is Not (entirely) Determined by Scope ?

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 09:26 AM »

What bothers me most is that people always praise how GC gets rid of memory related bugs (in that the programmer is not responsible for freeing memory any more), while never talking about the problems that come with it, like the programmer now having to know if an object allocates resources other than memory, the programmer now having to know about using, dispose, finalizers, GC.SuppressFinalize, how to deal with derived classes, when to use sealed, etc.

While GC might be really cool if you only have to deal with memory, everything gets much more complicated (compare to RAII) when dealing with resources other than memory, especially when something like exception safety comes into the picture.

595

Living Room / Re: Anyone here familiar with Synology products?

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 06:39 AM »

I guess you know the SmallNetBuilder web site. Has reviews for many NAS' including performance comparison charts.

596

Developer's Corner / Re: C# : Object Lifetime is Not (entirely) Determined by Scope ?

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 02:24 AM »

There must be some sort of technical reason, but the entire Dispose() thing is a disaster that feels as if they came up with it after the fact: 'oh, crap, some resources actually can't be garbage collected'. I am actually too tired to remember what exactly got me angry about the entire GC&resources thing in the first place; I just remember it gave me tons of shit when devving at some point. It's not exactly the same thing you talk about, obviously.

-worstje (May 05, 2011, 11:50 AM)

I completely agree! The fact that you need to bother with something like the Dispose pattern in a modern programming language is just embarrassing. And error prone as well.

597

Living Room / Re: Anyone here familiar with Synology products?

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 02:12 AM »

I've been using a two bay Synology 207+ with RAID for more than three years now and am very happy with it.

Pros:
- Very reliable
- Feature rich
- New features and fixes about twice a year, also for old products if technically possible. Extensive beta period. Serious bugs that slip beta are usually fixed within days with a hotfix.
- Company support is ok (could be faster). If you have a serious problem, they will even offer you to access your device and fix it for you. If you know how to search a forum, you'll usually solve problems using the forum faster than with the official support.
- The forum is actually quite good. Plenty of information. Lots of users using it. Moderated. The company seems to listen to user complaints in the forums quite well.

Cons:
- I'd rather they spent their development effort on more powerful backup features instead of more web cam features.
- While the 207+ will automatically power on after a power outage, it can't be started by a schedule. I think all the newer models support this though.

I can't comment on the WLAN feature your after, but I'd assume that if Synology advertises it and you can't find any serious complaints in their forum, it will work reliably.

I'd consider QNAP (same price range, feature set as Synology) as well.

598

General Software Discussion / Re: Delicious' new home..

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 01:50 AM »

I'm still happy with delicious, although I'm neither using it extensively nor socially

599

Living Room / Re: After PSN. Who's next?

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 01:45 AM »

assuming Sony's IT guys are not complete idiots

-phitsc (May 05, 2011, 05:50 AM)

That's quite an assumption to make. Consider the following evidence:

In congressional testimony this morning, Dr. Gene Spafford of Purdue University said that Sony was using outdated software on its servers — and knew about it months in advance of the recent security breaches that allowed hackers to get private information from over 100 million user accounts.

-http://consumerist.com/2011/05/security-expert-sony-knew-its-software-was-obsolete-months-before-psn-breach.html

Also, I don't know exactly how it works, but the way the PS3 was finally hacked was the master key could be figured out because Sony used a static/constant number in the encryption scheme where there should have been a completely random number.

-Deozaan (May 05, 2011, 10:02 PM)

I think that would be really embarrassing for them. Nevertheless, I'm tempted to assume that if they don't take the security of their main online system more serious, other's don't to so either.

600

Developer's Corner / Re: AttachMate/Novell Lays Off People - Mono Hit

« Last post by phitsc on May 06, 2011, 01:39 AM »

http://f-spot.org/

-Renegade (May 05, 2011, 06:54 PM)

F-Spot doesn't seem to run on Windows. But wouldn't the whole point of using Mono be to run something easily on both Windows and Linux?