Recent Posts

7201

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Quality Comparison: PDF Readers / Viewers (Update +1 and Conclusion)

« Last post by f0dder on April 28, 2007, 09:20 AM »

It's a think to keep in mind, though - thanks for adding, Eóin.

7202

General Software Discussion / Re: Whats the best program to learn typing?

« Last post by f0dder on April 28, 2007, 09:17 AM »

Just "finished" typer shark... 2.485.194 points, "amateur diver" rank, 84 WPM with an accuracy of 93% - level 15. That's on "X-Treme" skill, adventure mode, two bonus levels (and +33% difficulty or so?). Darn it gets hard

I originally taught myself touch typing on my dads old mechanical typewriter, luckily with a QWERTY keyboard, so I could transfer that skill directly to PCs 

7203

General Software Discussion / Re: Whats the best program to learn typing?

« Last post by f0dder on April 28, 2007, 08:38 AM »

Typing Of The Dead looks fun

Typing Shark is cute, but when it gets harder, it sucks a bit with non-us keyboards.

7204

Living Room / Re: How AMD plans to take over the market by adding DRM directly to CPU

« Last post by f0dder on April 28, 2007, 07:50 AM »

there is also an 64bit version of xp that will only run on intel
for some crappy reason you have to have different serial numbers for amd64 and intel64
talk about inconvenience

-gjehle (April 28, 2007, 07:47 AM)

Umm, aren't you confusing x86-64 with Itanium? Those are quuuuuuite different beasts.

7205

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Quality Comparison: PDF Readers / Viewers (Update +1 and Conclusion)

« Last post by f0dder on April 28, 2007, 07:11 AM »

I've used TFT screens for quite a while, and I plain hate cleartype - makes text have a sort of fuzzy/smudgy feel to it. Quite subtle, but bad enough to make it less easy on my eyes than the higher-contrast regular antialiasing. And yes, I've run the cleartype calibration wizard.

Adding gdiplus.dll to the foxit folder doesn't seem to change anything - but that's because it's already present elsewhere on my system, with Process Explorer in "module mode", I can see the GdiPlus.dll is loaded by Foxit even though not present in it's own install folder.

Foxit has much smoother scrolling (when zoomed in) than sumatra has (and a difference of ~20% vs ~60% CPU usage when using the "grabbing hand" to scroll quickly up and down... and that's on my dualcore 4400+ cpu). There seems to be a slight difference in rendering between the two, but can't really say which one has the better quality.

7206

Living Room / Re: How AMD plans to take over the market by adding DRM directly to CPU

« Last post by f0dder on April 28, 2007, 06:57 AM »

There has already been a Windows version that will only run on AMD64 processors. How hard would it be for Microsoft to make it so their OS will only run on approved DRM enabled CPU's?

-app103

This is, fortunately, wrong. The reason the folder on XP-x64 DVDs is called AMD64 is that AMD was the company that came up with x68-64, which was then licensed to intel (quite the opposite world of how it usuall goes ). 64-bit XP works just fine on 64-bit intel CPUs.

Intel has always had bigger market share than AMD, even when P4s sucked and AMD introduced the great AMD64 CPUs. But after intel introduced the core2 and AMD has failed to come up with something new and decent, and are in financial troubles, I think we'll see intel's market share becoming even better.

The reason AMD is able to do this framebuffer locking is because they've bought up ATI, and now want to combined CPU and GPU in one chip. Pretty bad idea if you ask me, AMD already has a pretty bad yield on their CPU wafers, and making the chip immensely more complex is not going to help that situation. It's going to make the CPUs even more expensive too, unless AMD is going to take the traditional route and undersell the CPU/GPU combos.

Framebuffer locking is probably a feature that has to be enabled once som DRM-crap-app is run. Tada, out comes the reverse engineers to out rescue, just like they've done with HD-DVD and bluray.

Anyway, the thing we need to say... no, shout... NO!!! to isn't really as much the AMD CPUs, as it's Windows Vista and the companies that are obsessing with DRM. Vista is already taking steps to lock down stuff even without hardware DRM being available.

So you say...ok...I won't run Windows...I'll install Linux. This won't bypass CPU level DRM. Your hands will still be tied.

-app103

Actually that should work, the problem being of course that the software you'll want to use isn't available for linux, and never will be because the only way it'd ever get remotely considered was if the DRM features were present.

7207

General Software Discussion / Re: More offensive — Resource bloat or Feature bloat?

« Last post by f0dder on April 27, 2007, 05:53 PM »

Why the heck should I have wait forever for Word to load, just to sort a list in a simple .txt file alphabetically?

-app103

In my experience, word (at least the office2000 version and previous) is a blazingly fast loader - also when the "office loader" application is set not to run at system startup. I was forced back on a pmmx-200/64ram, 5400rpm IDE drive that didn't support UDMA, for a while - and that's after I had been used to a P4/2.53/512meg/7200rpm-fast-drive. Yet, word was still fast loading (although the as-you-type spell checking was a bit heavy on the CPU ).

I do agree that integrating a lot of functionality isn't always the best way to go... but some tools can also almost be too single-purpose-minded. Ah, achieving the golden balance...

7208

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use 7-Zip files?

« Last post by f0dder on April 27, 2007, 09:49 AM »

512meg ram is already standard for normal machines, anything used for gaming or developing tends to come with a gig or more. If you buy a machine today with only 256 megs, you're being ripped off.

Also, even the dirt-cheap Pentium D processors are dualcore... amd64x2 CPUs are also pretty cheap now... too bad that some people write crap code that doesn't work properly on dualcore machines without various tricks - like, all unreal engine based games, ufo afterlight, ...

7209

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« Last post by f0dder on April 27, 2007, 08:49 AM »

Humm, it does look like there's only OEM versions of 64-bit XP available, but you can get an OEM copy by buying it with a harddrive, mouse, whatever... at least in .dk. And the 64-bit version of XP is for x64, x86-64, amd64, EM64t, or whatever you want to call it - that is, 64-bit x86 processors.

For Vista, don't you have to buy a separate license if you want the 64-bit version? I don't think one license would cover both 32- and 64-bit versions, considering it's two separate products in the stores I've seen (same cost though).

7210

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« Last post by f0dder on April 27, 2007, 07:19 AM »

Finally, a 64-bit version - umm, there's been 64-bit XP and Win2003 for quite a while? (and previous windows as well, although not x86 64bit )

7211

Official Announcements / Re: Power Supply on my PC just exploded: i'll be mostly offline this week crying

« Last post by f0dder on April 27, 2007, 06:25 AM »

Hrm, converters?

I'd rather get a PCI sata card, seems like the proper way to do it. Or an external sata enclosure that connects via firewire or usb.

7212

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use 7-Zip files?

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2007, 06:10 PM »

I took at it as "no=I don't generally use it" and "never=I NEVER USE IT EVAR!"

7213

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2007, 05:48 PM »

Process Explorer

IMHO the most important figure is "Private Bytes" - this is the amount of memory the process has actually allocated that cannot be shared with other processes. So if memory is trimmed, this is how much that'll end up paged out to disk.

Working set is still important though, as it's the memory that "is recently been touched", and thus should be kept in memory. If you look closely at memory stats after running, say, trimws , you will often see working set size jumping way down, only to rise by 100+ kb after a split second.

7214

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2007, 05:33 PM »

vm size, "working set" - the amount of memory the process uses that windows will try to keep in memory. This includes private as well as shared memory the program uses, so it's not a good indication of how much memory the program really occupies. This is the figure that task manager shows by default.

7215

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use 7-Zip files?

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2007, 03:58 PM »

Tekzel: when compressing files of roughly 4.7GB of size (*cough*), speed is certainly an issue. Also, WinRAR can practically be used as a backup tool because of all it's commandline options, as well as unicode filename support, NTFS security & alternate streams support, etc...

Now, if 7zip was actually cleanly written and was extended to have the same support as winrar...

7216

Living Room / Re: Are Optical Computers as PCs on the horizon?

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2007, 10:17 AM »

Iirc intel is down to 40nm now - that's pretty frigging small.

I wonder what the smallest scale we can reach are... I recall something about the laws of quantum mechanics setting some limits

7217

General Software Discussion / Re: Don't call it "the tray"!

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2007, 09:07 AM »

Ah yeah, that's his name! - dunno if it's he who did the sketch I remember, but the voice reminded me of him.

7218

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use 7-Zip files?

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2007, 08:02 AM »

RAR is by no means closed and undocumented. Yes, there isn't any compressor source available and you're not allowed to write one, but the format is documented and has portable decompression source available - that's good enough that you won't end up with archives you can't decompress.

You found an easy-to-use SDK? http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html - that one certainly isn't, at least not if you just want to, say, use the LZMA code for generic de/compression. Tangled mess. Too bad, really, sinze .7z is a decent enough format.

The LZMA SDK has a pretty nice license, btw - basically "LGPL made sane by adding exceptions."

7219

Living Room / Re: Are Optical Computers as PCs on the horizon?

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2007, 05:20 AM »

Using DNA is not without problems - it doesn't have infinite lifetime, but will decay. Also it's a lot slower than our current silicon based computers, but has the advantage of being massively parallel. At least that was my understanding of it when I head about it a couple years ago... so the idea was that you could use a "DNA computing device" for some specialized tasks, rather than having a "DNA computer"... same goes for "quantum computer", really.

The idea of optical computers is interesting, but I have this hunch that there'll need to be some conversion to/from electricity in various parts, and that might end up being the bottlenecks.

7220

General Software Discussion / Re: Don't call it "the tray"!

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 05:40 PM »

60 minutes as in http://www.cbsnews.c...nutes/main3415.shtml - there's always this old guy at the end who's doing a funny monologue

7221

Developer's Corner / Re: The OMGWTF Programming Contest - Design Purposefully Buggy Code and Win

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 05:34 PM »

I'm going to enter if I get a positive reply on the comment I just sent them

7222

General Software Discussion / Re: Don't call it "the tray"!

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 05:20 PM »

That's the guy who made that 60-minutes-ish monologue on "the meaning of the word f***"? I've been trying to track it down on and off

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General Software Discussion / Re: Don't call it "the tray"!

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 05:13 PM »

As yet another example, the origin of the word "f**k" comes from a word meaning "to thrust", as in to thrust with a sword. (Old Anglo-Saxon)

-Renegade

You've heard that mp3 too?

7224

General Software Discussion / Re: Cheeky

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 05:10 PM »

You need a transcoder capable of outputting to mpeg2 format... and preferably one that also happens to set up the various DVD structure files needed. There's several out there, dunno if there's any free ones, but try googling for something like "divx dvd transcoder".

7225

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use 7-Zip files?

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 05:08 PM »

I'm a WinRAR not-quite-but-close zealot myself, and I've been using RAR since the early DOS days. It's fairly fast, has a very good compression ratio, has portable source available for decompression (so while it's not quite opensource, at least it's not 100% lock-in and dependency), the UI is nice and unbloated, and there's very good commandline support as well. RAR also offers AES encryption, recovery data, authentication verification, and support for NTFS streams and security info. Licenses are pretty darn cheap. Quality software!

7-zip isn't half bad, and it's speed has improved a lot during the years. But while it's opensource, I dare you to actually do something with it - the LZMA SDK is one big pile of ugly spaghetti code, as I'm sure most people who's worked with it can attest. Dunno how portable it even is, without a lot of glue code...

Zip is a pretty sucky format today, especially because of it's lack of solid compression. The format has been amended a bit with later versions of winzip and whatnot, but once you start using those extensions, you risk that other people can't decompress, and you lose it's "available everywhere" status.

For source code distribution, especially if it's portable, I prefer .tar.bz2 (or if you want to support even really old quirky architectures, .tar.gz) - not because it's necessarily the best format, but because it's available pretty much everywhere, and still has a decent compression ratio.