Recent Posts

6876

General Software Discussion / Re: Guess what, you do have certain downgrade rights from Vista to Windows XP

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2007, 03:20 AM »

And you may find that the license key on the back of your machine can't actually be used as a working license key - I got that when I tried installing a *clean* version of Vista Business instead of the preloaded Lenovo version which had so much shit preloaded that it would have taken days to get rid of.

6877

Developer's Corner / Re: Bjarne Stroustrup (creator of C++) talks about the development of C++0x

« Last post by f0dder on August 18, 2007, 12:42 PM »

It's easy to see why the name was chosen - "we're like umm gonna bring a new version of C++ and we dunno when, but presume it will be in 200x". And yeah, it's a crappy name.

6878

Living Room / Re: KenR's health and situation

« Last post by f0dder on August 18, 2007, 12:41 PM »

Hey Ken, nice to hear the surgery has been scheduled!

I'm not religious so I won't pray for you, but I'll keep my fingers crossed!

6879

General Software Discussion / Re: Application that reads header files and reports common usages? Or examples?

« Last post by f0dder on August 17, 2007, 02:44 AM »

I do a fair deal of programming, and while fortunately most libraries have at least adequate documentation (if you know where to look), I've run into poorly documented stuff as well. Most poorly documented stuff, fortunately, isn't worth using, though...

Anyway, there's some useful pieces of code that's poorly documented but still worth using (funnily enough, lots of this seem to come with a GPL license ).

What exactly is it you want to do, anyway? Scanning header files for just function prototypes, for well-formed source, is easy enough with some regular expression magic, but to do much more than that, you basically need to code a C parser. And it's hard to get more data from a function prototype than it already has - what kind of arguments would you turn "..." into? And what do you expect void* to hold?

6880

General Software Discussion / Re: Latest MS updates borks WinXP?

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2007, 05:51 PM »

I'm one of the lucky people as well, updated and no problems (AMD64x2). Pretty weird if it's a microcode patch that causes problems for intel CPUs, since afaik the cpu hardware goes to some lengths to only load intel-supplied microcode patches.

I'm also lucky with DEP, I have it turned on for everything with no exclusions, and no crashes... only ill-behaved software will suffer from it anyway

6881

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: Welcome - READ THIS FIRST!

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2007, 11:15 AM »

Mouser, you should probably split up the "extra posts" in this topic to a separate topic, and manually splice other-language posts to this topic, so things don't get too chaotic.

PS: probably a good idea mentioning explicitly that this forum is not for requesting (help with) keys for other people's software.

6882

Living Room / Re: ARGHHH .... CD/DVD burning woes ... any ideas.

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2007, 06:54 AM »

I need to find some new DVD+R recordables, I've been using verbatim for a long time myself... but even though they're rated for 16x, I hardly ever reach that speed - when about 75% done (after perhaps having peaked 16x), the burn almost always goes down to 12x again for the remainder of the burn.

And no, there's no buffering errors/underruns.

6883

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alternative

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2007, 06:43 AM »

FWIW, xplorer² standard version runs just fine off a thumbdrive - but it does use the registry for settings, so you're going to get the default settings. Not perfect, but better than nothing - I still think he should invest the (very small, if the rest of his code is sane) amount of time it would take to do a registry-or-xml-config scheme.

6884

General Software Discussion / Re: XP or Vista user — take the poll!

« Last post by f0dder on August 15, 2007, 09:52 AM »

There's a few reasons why you might be forced to upgrade to Vista a bit later...

DX10 isn't going to be released for XP, even though it could be done without too much hassle.

Hybrid flash/harddrives aren't going to be supported for XP, although they easily could be.

More and more vendors will start doing Vista-only apps, because Microsoft wants them to... even if it means adding artificial checks and refuse to run on anything but Vista (like with one of the Age Of Empires games, which was "XP-only" but ran fine on 2k after a little cracker magic).

...and that's about it.

6885

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alternative

« Last post by f0dder on August 15, 2007, 09:43 AM »

Well, you can tweak TC to make it prettier, appearantly... but the default is goddamn ugly indeed. It's probably all-powerful etc., but x^2 does all I need and feels a bit more modern.

6886

General Software Discussion / Re: Google now includes StarOffice as a free download!

« Last post by f0dder on August 15, 2007, 09:38 AM »

I prefer MS Office 2000... it's very fast (usable on a pmmx-200/64meg ram), unlike the bloated OpenOffice... and it does all I need.

6887

General Software Discussion / Re: Google now includes StarOffice as a free download!

« Last post by f0dder on August 14, 2007, 07:48 AM »

Thanks for that, sri!

So, same codebase as OpenOffice but with some additional stuff... that I don't need

6888

General Software Discussion / Re: Application that reads header files and reports common usages? Or examples?

« Last post by f0dder on August 14, 2007, 06:25 AM »

fowmow: I don't know of any such program, which is a good reason you read your language/library documentation instead of digging through header files

6889

Living Room / Re: Help with concepts.

« Last post by f0dder on August 14, 2007, 06:23 AM »

Homework?

IBM set standards for all the non-CPU components in PC's... real-time clock, the ISA bus, etc etc etc., as well as BIOS interface and I/O port mappings.

The cpu generation has to do with the speed, internal architecture (ie, a multiplication on a pentium is faster than on a 80386, both because the pentium CPU has a higher MHz rating, but also because the MUL instruction itself takes fewer cycles). New instructions have been added once in a while, like MMX, SSE, conditional mov, et cetera.

6890

General Software Discussion / Re: Google now includes StarOffice as a free download!

« Last post by f0dder on August 14, 2007, 06:17 AM »

So, what's cool in staroffice that openoffice doesn't have?

6891

Living Room / Re: Apple iPhone bills... much bigger than expected...

« Last post by f0dder on August 14, 2007, 06:12 AM »

...not to mention that the items are useless since they don't really tell you anything relevant. Way to go

6892

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alterna

« Last post by f0dder on August 14, 2007, 06:07 AM »

And here's another little teaser, I quite like the elegance of my xplorer² setup

6893

Developer's Corner / Re: Bjarne Stroustrup (creator of C++) talks about the development of C++0x

« Last post by f0dder on August 13, 2007, 06:16 PM »

I wonder when a transcript will be available

6894

Developer's Corner / Re: Best Language for Employability?

« Last post by f0dder on August 13, 2007, 06:12 PM »

I make it a point to learn languages the hard way before the easy way.

-Ehtyar

The language is easily learned, you probably mean "the environment" which also includes IDE and standard libraries. It's usually a good idea to learn what's going on under the hood, but imho it's not necessarily best to start doing this.

Car analogies are ever so popular (and ever so stupid), here's my attempt at one: first you learn how to drive the car well, and the various traffic rules - then you can start tuning it.

If you're going to learn dotNET, you really should familiarize yourself with the RAD GUI tools, otherwise there isn't really any point in using dotNET at all, imho. Not saying that you should reduce yourself to a click-and-play GUI builder, there's obviously a lot of other stuff than that - but do use the ease-of-use GUI stuff so you can concentrate on those other more interesting subjects.

6895

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux or Mac: Which is the better alternative to Windows?

« Last post by f0dder on August 13, 2007, 09:19 AM »

jgpaiva: parallels is still a virtual machine (but like vmware, it tries executing as much code as it can 'directly', although still in a virtualized environment). That it can run apps so that they look like they're running natively doesn't mean that they are

6896

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alterna

« Last post by f0dder on August 13, 2007, 05:16 AM »

I never really understood the fuzz about TC, it seems to have some very die-hard followers, but the program itself? *shrug*.

What I personally love about xplorer² is it's simplicity, yet feature-richness. It's great it supports both dual- and single-pane views, can almost function 100% as an explorer replacement (it has problems with a very few special locations, like "network connections"), and is lightning fast.

It also has pretty configurable color coding:

6897

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alternative

« Last post by f0dder on August 13, 2007, 04:19 AM »

I love xplorerer², ordered it quite a while ago

6898

Developer's Corner / Re: Best Language for Employability?

« Last post by f0dder on August 13, 2007, 04:18 AM »

The reason I'm not worried about the IDE is because i need to learn the language before using it, and i'll have no idea what IDE they're using anyway, so i might as well learn on something that meets my requirements, thus making the learning process easier, then when I'm forced to use someone elses IDE, the experience will be unpleasant, but i will have the language down pat

-Ehtyar (August 12, 2007, 05:21 AM)

You don't have to "learn the language before learning the IDE", there's a lot more to an IDE than silly little code wizards etc. For the dotNET languages, it would seem silly not to use the IDEs btw., since the GUI designers make everything so easy (and that's the frigging point of dotNET, to be easy and fast to use!)

6899

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux or Mac: Which is the better alternative to Windows?

« Last post by f0dder on August 13, 2007, 04:08 AM »

The kernel of the OS is open-source, and currently there is none of the horrible DRM system that Vista is built on. So freedom means what in practical terms?

-nontroppo

Hummm, afaik only part of the Kernel is open, and you ned some non-open key in order to have everything working - and apple have gone to great lengths to make sure you can't just dump that key from a working&running system.

And then there's of course all the rest of OSX that isn't open at all.

IMHO OSX is a better/more realistc alternative to windows than linux is, but I'm not sure I'd like to switch from one proprietary system to another; if I was to switch from windows, it'd have to be to something more open. Especially considering that Apple has always tended to be worse at lock-in than Microsoft.

6900

General Software Discussion / Re: Need some help in recovery data from a damaged external HDD

« Last post by f0dder on August 13, 2007, 03:53 AM »

Recovery tools (the ones worth using, anyway) do a bit more analysis than just "copying the files", so the copying process after recovery should be a good deal faster. And connecting the drives "directly" instead of USB should also be a bit faster, and have less CPU overhead.

The "partition table restore" thing sounds interesting - obviously won't work for non-standard partitioning, and won't work if there's more severe corruption than just the partition table being knocked out... but interesting nonetheless.

large usb drives should only have a small internal, cache max 2mb , to avoid write errors, and wait a few seconds after operation before detachment. Do not activate drive delay on usb drives.

-donzonion

I don't agree here, as it would make the drives too slow. Heck, with a very small cache and syncing too often, you might get enough wear&tear on the drive that it'll die early