Recent Posts

601

Find And Run Robot / Re: Another FARR similar app - Executor

« Last post by Lashiec on August 21, 2008, 01:46 PM »

Uh, then Launchy won a while ago

602

Find And Run Robot / Re: How to view more search results?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 21, 2008, 12:12 PM »

Wait, don't leave! Which is that font you use in the results list? :)

603

Living Room / Re: What is a mouser? What does it mean to mouser someone?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 15, 2008, 07:03 PM »

I think mouser needs a script to set up a message when he's not at the computer for some time

604

Living Room / Re: The Root of Game Piracy

« Last post by Lashiec on August 14, 2008, 09:08 AM »

Cliff has posted a followup, with a summary of the opinions, what is he going to do to lower piracy of his games, and general conclusions.

605

General Software Discussion / Re: New Linux Distro specifically designed for programmers

« Last post by Lashiec on August 14, 2008, 09:06 AM »

This is pretty interesting. In the past I needed a Linux Live CD to do some quick 'n' dirty programming, but most distros don't even carry the essential tools for it. For now I'll drop it in a VM. Downloading...

606

General Software Discussion / Re: GNU/Linux Desktop Market Share is 4%

« Last post by Lashiec on August 14, 2008, 09:03 AM »

And I now leave people with this url: http://www.allowe.co...umor/SwitchLinux.htm

I believe this to be zaine, in carnate

-Josh (August 13, 2008, 05:25 PM)

Hahahaha, wow, it's Al Lowe!

607

Living Room / Re: Favorite part of the Beijing Olympics so far?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 13, 2008, 11:07 AM »

British cyclists fast? Is there any British cyclist left?

Oh well, except basketball (go Spain!) and tennis (go Rafa!), I did not watch anything else. The rest of the sports are a bit too boring to be seen on TV, or do not interest me. The opening ceremony was certainly impressive, that's true. I wonder which was the cost...

608

Living Room / Re: What printer?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 12, 2008, 01:16 PM »

So what is the reason for not updating a USB printer??

-techidave (August 12, 2008, 05:38 AM)

For all things involving drivers is better to do a clean install (if possible) to avoid random problems. For example, I had a problem with missing DLLs after updating my HP printer drivers quite some time ago. Not that printer makers update their drivers often anyway.

609

Living Room / The Root of Game Piracy

« Last post by Lashiec on August 11, 2008, 11:03 AM »

A game developer takes on a novel idea to "combat" game piracy: instead of resorting to the usual DRM and prosecution of the offenders, he ask them why they're doing it. The answers seem to be the usual, and AFAIK most of them have been mentioned here when discussing software piracy, but still the article makes a nice analysis on the current state of videogaming regarding the piracy matter, and the blog post is an interesting read. Also, I wonder what conclusions Mr. Harris will extract from the comments and the mails.

Note that the discussion is mostly centered about PC gaming, as the current generation of consoles does not suffer from the rampant piracy present in the last two generations, due to various reasons (expensive blank media and duplicators, locked-down systems, etc.). And the blog is getting hammered as well ;D

610

Living Room / Re: Blocking text-ads, no revenue left for web-writers?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 08, 2008, 06:04 PM »

Well, the idea is to always support those sites you regularly visit by whitelisting them in the adblocker you use. Both Opera and Firefox (via Adblock Plus) require a few clicks to achieve this, and global apps should be similar.

In any case, it's not exactly clear you're denying revenue to a site by blocking their ads. While it must be true for those that rely on clicks (and let's be realistic, not many people remember to click through), it seems like for those that use page views as a measure, ad blocking does not affect them... and now I can't find the reference. Besides, the number of users of adblock is not as high as you might think

611

Living Room / Re: which operating system you like most....

« Last post by Lashiec on August 08, 2008, 05:19 PM »

I like Windows the most, which is obvious being the OS that I use on a regular basis. I'm quite fond of XP SP3, which is what I'm running at the moment, stable as a rock, quite lean and fast enough, the apps I use make it better in my opinion, covering most of its shortcomings. I miss *somewhat* the days with Windows 98 SE, inferior OS, even more handicapped by my aging machine, but it really did a great job during all those years using it.

Vista is nice, but I'm lazy to move (and I need more RAM, for future proofing).

I like Linux, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for which distro I prefer (I found that it's not Knoppix, though), and OS X is cool, and its gamut of apps is really interesting (even if most of them are not freeware), but the only way I would use it (legally) is buying that dongle, and I don't need a laptop at the moment.

612

Living Room / Re: Linux convention (funny photo)

« Last post by Lashiec on August 06, 2008, 05:25 PM »

Hehe, I was expecting long-bearded guys

613

Developer's Corner / Re: What is the .NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 market share?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 05, 2008, 04:18 PM »

Basically, I've seen plenty of freeware/donationware programs requiring .NET 2.0, but I can think of none requiring even 3.0.

-alexey_r (August 05, 2008, 03:43 PM)

There are a few, the most prominent of them is Yahoo! Messenger, a specific version for Vista anyway, which is still in beta.

614

Developer's Corner / Re: What is the .NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 market share?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 05, 2008, 01:11 PM »

If it's a nice application, I'm sure people will get .NET 3.x to use it, though I guess its "market share" (I don't think Mono for Windows could qualify as a competitor ) is at least decent with all those .NET apps out there that require the framework, and Vista installations increasing each month.

615

Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 05, 2008, 12:31 PM »

nope, hasnt worked (for me) since a version last year sometime (sorry couldnt tell you which one exactly)

-tomos (August 05, 2008, 03:38 AM)

Strange, maybe something in the profile got corrupted?

Has anyone tried IE 8? Maybe we are past due for a surprise from microsoft.

-urlwolf (August 05, 2008, 11:51 AM)

The first beta was very rough judging from the reports (oh well, you already bite the bullet), so if there's any surprise it should come with Beta 2. Don't expect anything revolutionary though, they improved the foundations of IE7 and moved to better standards-compliancy, which is the bare minimum people should expect from Microsoft these days. But they have a few ideas of their own (web slices, and a few ways to make the browser more robust against unexpected problems), which if properly implemented, could be worth a look by the competition.

What am I missing?

-urlwolf (August 05, 2008, 12:10 PM)

Safari has a market share of around 6%, and it's the most used browser in the Mac. I can't imagine the backlash against the companies refusing to support Safari, and thus the Mac. Not to mention that probably the market share of Mac in most Web 2.0 companies is significantly different from the worldwide numbers, so they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. And WebKit is currently the rendering engine of choice in high-profile projects by a good number of tech companies (Google, Nokia, Adobe, Apple...)

616

Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 03, 2008, 06:05 PM »

eh, you've lost me there Lashiec
dont know if I described it properly
-
say you look at tab#5, then look at tab#12,
then click on tab#12 again & it would go back to tab#5
(are you talking about the same thing? sounds like something that works or doesnt )

-tomos (July 30, 2008, 06:51 AM)

Ah, oki doki. I thought you were talking about the new option in Opera 9.5, which is similar to the default one in Firefox, but from the way it works, it looks like they mixed both options (as sometimes it jumps to the next tab, and others to the last activated tab).

In any case, the method you mention should work with problems. A bug maybe?

617

General Software Discussion / Re: Best software communities?

« Last post by Lashiec on August 03, 2008, 05:54 PM »

The Miranda and foobar2000 communities are excellent, particularly the former, with a very helpful support "staff" (if they can be called like that). It's even more remarkable when you consider no one is making any profit from those projects.

618

General Software Discussion / Re: SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards results!

« Last post by Lashiec on August 03, 2008, 05:35 PM »

Hehe, some innovative categories. Be sure to check the "Finalists" section, there are some other fine programs (ScummVM for example, fits better as the winner in the gaming category).

The best part of the contest is who is the Diamond sponsor

619

General Software Discussion / Re: Your most used SPECIAL programs

« Last post by Lashiec on August 03, 2008, 03:51 PM »

I still not understand what makes a program "special", but I give it a shot nonetheless

Some of my most "pedestrian" tools include things like Universal Extractor, handy for those installers, or obscure compression formats and Universal Viewer, thanks to its range of plugins and what you can achieve with them.

Then a bunch of the typical security-related tools, things like HijackThis, the Sysinternals and NirSoft gamut of utilities, and virtualization apps like VirtualBox, or sandboxes like Sandboxie

In the realm of the truly specialized apps, I use things like Skrommel's WinWarden, or the useful Tooltip Fix, rom tools like ClrMamePro, NSRT, and a few patchers, and some things for the college, like JFLAP, chip emulators and a tool to simulate digital logic circuits which I can't recall right now (as I don't have it installed)

620

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera UserJS contest winners

« Last post by Lashiec on July 29, 2008, 02:56 PM »

Indeed, considering that other programs without major financial backing have a complete repository of plugins / extensions /whatever in place, the situation is really puzzling. And it's not that UserJS is a state secret or something, quite the contrary. Oh well, I hope they get their act together, or I'll have to keep using the essential scripts (otherwise, it turns into a time-consuming chore)

621

Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?

« Last post by Lashiec on July 29, 2008, 02:09 PM »

small things - much less control over how tabs work get's me every time I use Opera - also, not an important thing but it was opera brought in that thing where if you click on the open tab, it will go back to the previous tab - that worked for a very short while & hasnt since -

-tomos (July 29, 2008, 04:08 AM)

Actually, it works all the time, but it's... weird, to say the least. I can't explain how exactly works, but it seems to be a mix between the old behaviour and the default one in Firefox. In any case, it works fine for me, and I prefer it to the old one.

Another thing I cant seem to do is open new typed address in a new page as opposed to in current

You can hold Ctrl + Enter to open an address in another tab (+ Shift to open it in the background), but I don't know if this is what you're talking about

After using it a bit, I've found the "Awesome Bar" to be surprisingly effective... Opera has autocomplete, but FF3 effectively searches all my browsing history when using the address bar.

-allen (July 29, 2008, 09:49 AM)

Opera Software should look at Firefox features, evaluate them, see where they can improve their own ones, clone the non-existent ones... and run with it

But if I want to clip stuff in Evernote, I have to open Firefox or IE (Not Evernote's fault, Opera doesn't support rich text to the clipboard, no two ways about it). . . probably the biggest Opera issue for me right now.

Did you try with the fix reported by tomos?

622

Living Room / Re: Dual operating systems 32- and 64-bit. Need advice on possible XP memory issues

« Last post by Lashiec on July 29, 2008, 01:17 PM »

Well, it's all in the review you linked before. The ThermoIntelligence coolers got good press in the various reviews I saw them being evaluated, not only for the low temps, but also for low noise, even under load. Hardware Canucks is a fairly trustable site (or used to be the last time I checked it out), so I guess both cards are adequate for your needs, unless you are really picky about noise. If that's the situation, I'll suggest you pay a visit to SPCR to find something you like, and have the absolute confidence that the card you'll choose will be silent (mmm, turns out some assemblers are still selling passively cooled GPUs).

If you're not that picky, it's a matter of choosing between cooler operation and lower performance (9600), or higher temperature, and some more oomph (8800). In any case, both are good choices, unless you are in the bleeding edge of gaming, where the 8800 could be a bit more future proof.

623

General Software Discussion / Opera UserJS contest winners

« Last post by Lashiec on July 28, 2008, 07:07 PM »

Errr, I should have posted about this when they *announced* it, but totally forgot about it, and so the contest ended, and winners were chosen.

Anyway, the Opera Software guys held a contest to create new and innovative User JavaScript, em, scripts (the closest thing to Firefox extensions), with quite a nice reward for the winners in the two sole categories. There are a few really interesting scripts, either for its usefulness, or just for being original.

It looks like it won't be the last time they'll do this, which hopefully means the coming of the long-desired extensibility in Opera (or a least a more elegant way to find and handle what's already available).

624

Living Room / Re: Computer problem, maybe you can help

« Last post by Lashiec on July 28, 2008, 06:37 PM »

Uh, not that I'm aware . He just passed by, which is something he (or was it she?) seems to do frequently.

625

Living Room / Re: Can you live with *just* opera?

« Last post by Lashiec on July 28, 2008, 06:37 PM »

For example Gmail works with Opera if I mask it as Firefox, which is silly.

-anne_r (July 27, 2008, 05:28 AM)

Weird, GMail 2 works just fine here without any masking (maybe Opera is doing some black magic behind the scenes?)

The thing is that, considering the issues Opera had as lately with many sites, and the improvements coming with Firefox 3, I was telling myself I would end up coming back to Firefox after some years, yet Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3 came out and I find myself using Opera more than before (I even forgot about the "Open with" submenu). Maybe it's because of my Internet habits that lead me to Opera-compatible sites, which rarely are using AJAX, or if they are, run without issues. It should be said Opera's compatibility has increased as lately (GMail being the prime example), and I'm confident it will get even better with time (yeah, I'm repeating myself over and over :)). Or they sue Google, and set things straight out off the courts ;D

In any case, I was accustomed to use Firefox or Internet Explorer as needed, and well, it seemed natural to me (although I loathe to use IE for anything), and so I cross-browsed (heh, new term) without problems. These days, I fire, errr, Firefox, when I have closed Opera with tons of tabs open, and it's such a annoyance to launch it again, and wait for the sites to load, or just if I need to do something in a incompatible site. IE, only for Windows Update, in the rest of the Internet, I feel dirty using it :D

While it's true that I could replicate Opera in Firefox using extensions, I never saw the point in doing that when I could be using the real thing (and I tell you I thought about doing it a few times already). And yet, some things are impossible to duplicate.