Recent Posts

6676

Living Room / Re: Spacetec spaceorb

« Last post by f0dder on October 12, 2007, 03:34 AM »

I have very likely disabled the COM ports in the BIOS... might want to take a look at that, p3lb0x

6677

Developer's Corner / Re: The day before the day we've all been waiting for...OLLYDBG 2.0 ALPHA IS OUT!!!

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2007, 06:13 AM »

Nice++

6678

Developer's Corner / Re: Writing a simple driving game (help!!)

« Last post by f0dder on October 10, 2007, 08:18 AM »

I guess it depends on what kind of precision you need - just a few taylor iterations should give you a decent cos/sin approximation, dunno how big a LUT that would correspond to, but "more than a few cache lines". Friend of mine says that a 4096-entry LUT was too small for his 3D engine, it was too jerky (and when dealing with 3D operation, the sin/cos calls aren't too costly compared to the matrix operations anyway).

4k LUT table of single-precision floats = 16kb, or 256 x 64-byte cache lines (and still not good enough accuracy). Cache misses are pretty expensive. And especially if you're dealing with "hundreds of vectors simultaneously", my guess is that SSE code with a few taylor iterations would be faster than using LUTs.

As for GPU offloading, you obviously design the code for the GPU generation you're targetting; texture lookups for older generations, calculations for newer. But I have no experience with GPU programming, so the above is basically all I know about it

6679

General Software Discussion / Re: kmplayer, whoa!!!

« Last post by f0dder on October 10, 2007, 07:31 AM »

Afaik "quicktime alternative" had the official quicktime codec stuff ripped out of the official package - so you would still be using "real quicktime", just without the bollocks player, intrusive auto-updater, etc.

Wouldn't be surprised if it's the same story with QT Lite, so it'll probably be taken down by apple as well. I wonder why they don't just smell the coffee and realize people hate their player, and just offer unobtrusive codecs instead.

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Developer's Corner / Re: Writing a simple driving game (help!!)

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2007, 05:05 PM »

Ralf Maximus: lookup tables were indeed faster back in the old days, but have you timed it on a modern processor?

6681

Developer's Corner / Re: Writing a simple driving game (help!!)

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2007, 10:37 AM »

Sounds a bit like the trigonometry math involved in good old turtle graphics

You should add the cos/sin(angle)*dist to the curx/cury variables, btw.

6682

Developer's Corner / Re: Strange customer...

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2007, 10:32 AM »

Also, never-ever go for a "payment on success" payment strategy, I've burned my fingers with that crap.

6683

Developer's Corner / Re: Strange customer...

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2007, 09:21 AM »

Hmm, that sounds a bit fishy to me.

On the other hand, I had to fax a copy of my student license + visa card to datarescue when I purchased IDA, since they've had a lot of stolen credit-card purchases... but that's a somewhat different situation than yours.

I'd definitely blank (and I do mean blank, not blurring or pixelizing etc. as those can be reversible) out any control codes etc. on the passport, so the image can't be used for forging a new passport. One can never be too careful.

6684

General Software Discussion / Re: kmplayer, whoa!!!

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2007, 05:06 AM »

The CoreAVC codec is indeed a lot faster+smoother than anything else I've seen. I heard they do some tricks that degrade image quality a bit, but it's nothing I've been able to notice on normal playback (but feel free to do framegrabs of coreavc and whatever free H.264 codecs, it might show ).

6685

General Software Discussion / Re: alternatives to partition magic/paragon?

« Last post by f0dder on October 07, 2007, 06:56 PM »

Never use partitioning programs for anything else but delete/create - never resize partitions, it's a recipe for disaster... PartitionMagic always worked fine for me in the past, but there's just too much room for disaster.

But yeah, it sucks having to backup all that data just to do a minor resize.

6686

General Software Discussion / Re: program to block internet access of a certain file/program

« Last post by f0dder on October 07, 2007, 09:04 AM »

I don't know of any such apps, although running in a virtual machine (vmware, virtualpc, whatever - perhaps some of the sandbox apps as well) could do the trick. But that would be heavier on your system, and more bother, than just getting yourself a firewall.

6687

Developer's Corner / Re: Microsoft providing .NET Framework source code!

« Last post by f0dder on October 07, 2007, 04:55 AM »

This is happening a lot more in the .NET and component industry now. A lot of commercial .NET components offer source code now. You can't resell it, but you can modify it. That's good enough for me.

-Renegade (October 06, 2007, 06:41 PM)

And that's imho the most important part of open source - being able to modify stuff, perhaps to fix bugs, perhaps to add features. I like commercial developers offering that kind of license, especially if they're willing to incorporate user's bugfixes and features.

Of course it's a bit dangerous for developers to release (commercial) source, as it does end up in pirated 0-day...

6688

Developer's Corner / Re: Automate Your "Cut It In Half" Debugging Sessions

« Last post by f0dder on October 05, 2007, 05:20 AM »

So, an automated binary search for bugs, kinda? Cool

6689

Developer's Corner / Re: Jeff Atwood revisits the issue of best programming fonts..

« Last post by f0dder on October 05, 2007, 05:19 AM »

I still personally prefer Dina, it's the best coding font I've seen yet. I've never liked cleartype antialiasing (yes, even on LCD/TFT displays), it looks smudgy to me and strains my eyes.

6690

Living Room / Re: BioShock Demo Shock!

« Last post by f0dder on October 05, 2007, 05:17 AM »

lanux128: grab a crack and avoid the securom shit... will probably work just fine with the demo. I do that for all the games I purchase, except those from STEAM since they don't tend to have as obnoxious and obtrusive protections schemes.

6691

Living Room / Re: Psychic Whois Service :)

« Last post by f0dder on October 05, 2007, 05:13 AM »

Seems to be a friendly domain-squatter tool >_<

6692

General Software Discussion / Re: Diagnostic for portable harddisk

« Last post by f0dder on October 05, 2007, 05:12 AM »

You can always take the disk out of the enclosure and mount it directly on your pata/sata, but of course that does take some work...

In my experience, S.M.A.R.T has never really said anything about reliability before it was obvious in other ways - ie., disk making clicking noises. But okay, you can miss those clicking noises in a noisy environment, and checking the "reallocated sectors count" with SMART would tell you.

6693

Living Room / Re: Versioning of files

« Last post by f0dder on October 05, 2007, 05:08 AM »

When working on media files, and if you have the money to burn, perhaps take a look at http://www.softimage...products/alienbrain/ . Don't have any experience with it myself, but it sounds cool enough. And id software uses it

6694

General Software Discussion / Re: registration benefits

« Last post by f0dder on October 05, 2007, 05:07 AM »

I don't think I've ever seen something where registering made sense... for the couple of shareware applications I've purchased where I've need support in one way or another, registration (in the typical nag-screen sense) wasn't necessary.

6695

General Software Discussion / Re: Question: Does the GPL allow program redistribution?

« Last post by f0dder on October 05, 2007, 04:55 AM »

mwb1100: I'm all for keeping open source code open - the problem with the GPL is that it's viral and extends beyond just the piece of code that's released under GPL. You use something GPL? Then your entire project become GPL.

Renegade: just keep in mind that, unless exceptions are added, LGPL still requires you to distribute the .obj files so users can re-link with a newer version of the LGPL code you use... (okay, you could put all the LGPL code you use in dll files to avoid this).

6696

General Software Discussion / Re: Back up files with a printer and scanner

« Last post by f0dder on October 04, 2007, 04:17 AM »

It's a cute thing, although the only real use for it I can think of would have been back in the days of crypto export restrictions - all the PGP code was printed, mailed to norway (I think?) where it was re-scanned and OCR'ed. Why? Because the export restrictions apparently didn't cover prints.

I wish Olly would have spent more time working on OllyDbg 2.0 instead

6697

Developer's Corner / Re: Software Copy Protection Questions

« Last post by f0dder on October 04, 2007, 04:08 AM »

Ah, StarForce and the other big and evil game protection schemes... I've always grabbed no-cd cracks for the games I've purchased, it sucks having to insert the CD/DVD to play the game, when all the data files are installed to your harddrive anyway. And the protections tend to slow down things, in-game or startup or both (with one CD drive I had, starting up unreal tournament took a couple of minutes... and was down to less than a half after de-protecting. Yay for cd-checks).

6698

General Software Discussion / Re: Question: Does the GPL allow program redistribution?

« Last post by f0dder on October 04, 2007, 04:04 AM »

Lashiec: you're from spain? (writing "SO" instead of "OS" ).

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General Software Discussion / Re: Question: Does the GPL allow program redistribution?

« Last post by f0dder on October 03, 2007, 10:05 AM »

Now, if you're a developer who sees some GPL software you'd like to use in your software, then  you have some hard choices.  But one option that's always open to you is to not use it - which is no worse than most commercial software, which never even gives you the option to derive your own software from it.

-mwb1100

The problem is, of course, with platforms where you can't really do anything but the really basic POSIX & libc stuff without having to use a GPL library, or reinvent the wheel. This gives non-GPL developers a great disadvantage. And that's one of the places where Windows has quite an advantage - the API is extremely rich, and doesn't really come with any limitations or silly clauses, only windows lock-in.

GPL itself isn't necessarily evil btw, I think it makes okay sense for the OS kernel... but for usermode applications? Naw. It's too arrogant... it's fine that any modifications to the piece of opensource code you use/modify should remain opensource, but imho it's wrong placing restrictions on the *rest* of the application.

Oh, and thanks for the clarification, Jibbo - although it wouldn't have surprised me if they wanted their first answer to your question to be the correct one

6700

General Software Discussion / Re: Question: Does the GPL allow program redistribution?

« Last post by f0dder on October 03, 2007, 08:18 AM »

Imho GPL software isn't free, by any means. It's enforced open (I certainly don't dislike openness!), and is usually gratis as well, but free?