Recent Posts

726

Living Room / Re: How to disable Java

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2013, 06:07 PM »

1) Do you need Java?
If not, uninstall it complete. If you're not sure, well, you're probably not a techy user - no fret, and it's not meant as a derogatory term - simply as a matter of fact (and count yourself blessed).

2) Which browser do you use?
If you're on Chrome, be sure to turn on the "click to play" feature. If you're not, you should disable the following plugins entirely in your primary browser, and use a secondary browser (like Chrome) for the few sites that require the aforementioned: Java, Flash, Adobe PDF.

Those two points are un-negotiable.

After that comes a lot of possible ways to harden your online experience, which are optional. But the two above, currently, aren't.

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Living Room / Re: Electric shock from USB cable

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2013, 05:16 PM »

I was always under the impression that you needed relatively high amounts of energy to be toast - that you needed either voltage or amperage to be pretty nasty. Like, getting main-currents (what do you have in the states, 110v? We've got 220/230v in .dk). But still got the idea that the amps was the worst part. Never really grokked what ratio between the two you needed before it was dangerous, so I've always kept cautious and switched off the mains when I needed to do any kind of electric works.

Guess I got a scare early on, though. Sometime before third grade, some of the older boys at the school I attended back then teased a younger kid to jump into a transformer station to fetch a DKK20 (or summat) coin - 20+ years ago, adjust coin currency etc. (though I guess you don't time-adjust a human life in the same way). So the 1 minute mourning and the story of the tiny little exit holes in his toe and his temple kept me somewhat fearful of electrical installations ever since.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Are you going to wait for Windows 9?

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2013, 04:34 PM »

is not selling that well

-J-Mac (January 11, 2013, 03:51 PM)

"Selling" isn't equal to "good", though - neither Linux nor Win8 are selling particularly well, but OS X and iOS are

The thing I personally like about Win8 definitely isn't Metro (well, a few parts of it, like the Start Screen, but *definitely* not the whole package!) - I do like the kernel optimizations, the hybrid shutdown, the optimization focus (less services, tickless kernel, memory deduplication(!)) etc., though.

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Living Room / Re: Electric shock from USB cable

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2013, 01:11 PM »

Watt, you don't need more milliamps than that? O_o

Iirc USB is limited to 100 milliamps before negotiation... that's not at a very comfortable spot in that graph.

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General Software Discussion / Re: MagicRAR Drive Press - worth anything?

« Last post by f0dder on January 11, 2013, 01:57 AM »

I've posted on the other thread too, but I just wanted to add here that I do applaud this as a positive and constructive step.

-mouser (January 10, 2013, 01:33 PM)

I'd rather see some of the points put forth in this thread be answered, instead of met with aggressive hand-waving.

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Living Room / Re: I am now the proud owner of my very own NANY mug :D

« Last post by f0dder on January 10, 2013, 11:57 AM »

lmfao nope dyslexic plus typing too quick lol

-Hally (January 10, 2013, 07:09 AM)

Geez, you can't even spell dsyelxic!

...

732

Developer's Corner / Re: "NTLM 100% Broken Using Hashes Derived From Captures"

« Last post by f0dder on January 09, 2013, 03:57 PM »

How can anything regarding NTLMv1 be considered news?

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Living Room / Re: MS Blocks Ability in Windows 8

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2013, 04:55 PM »

I personally wouldn't use NTFS encryption either, it's "somewhat of a hassle" if you forget to export your encryption keys - also, for encryption matters, I do prefer something opensource. Might use BitLocker on a work machine, though, and I guess NTFS encryption can make sense in some corporate settings (though the few places I've seen that enforce corporate encryption use utter crap (SLOW!) like CheckPoint FDE - probably because it's enterpriiiiiiiisey and remote-managaaaaaaaable).

But again, DPAPI isn't just for NTFS encryption. Not sure how many 3rd-party applications use it (Chrome is/was one?), but it sure is a convenient API for automagic encryption/decryption of blobs of data.

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Living Room / Re: MS Blocks Ability in Windows 8

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2013, 04:46 PM »

Carol: DPAPI^w - including, but not limited to, NTFS file encryption. It might not be something you use, but it does require a password-protected user account to work.

And that would actually provide some security against a burglar

735

General Software Discussion / Re: MagicRAR Drive Press - worth anything?

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2013, 03:22 AM »

The poster f0dder continues to spread technical falsehoods in a desperate effort to protect his or her continuing strawman arguments. Are you seriously surprised that this kind of attitude draws a strong reaction? What were you thinking?

I have privately emailed mauser that it is not a reasonable expectation for any poster here to ask MagicRAR to reveal any of our intellectual property - whether it has been patented or not - as these are our trade secrets. I find it necessary to reiterate that claim here.

-simonking (January 07, 2013, 04:16 PM)

Move along, people, nothing to see here - snake-oil salesman passing through.

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Living Room / Re: MS Blocks Ability in Windows 8

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2013, 03:16 AM »

I seem to be booting straight to the desktop using Start8 but I still have to see the silly (and completely pointless) "Lock Screen" and either log in to an email address or enter a Pin.

Does anyone know a way to by pass the Lock Screen and mandatory login so I switch on and it goes straight to the desktop?

-Carol Haynes (January 08, 2013, 02:49 AM)

Email Address? PIN?

Just create an "offline account" - at least that's still possible. Why on earth would you want to bypass authentication on the lockscreen, though?

737

General Software Discussion / Re: Rumors of Adobe releasing CS2 for free? (true or NOT true)

« Last post by f0dder on January 08, 2013, 03:14 AM »

I personally think Adobe cracked the problem and figured out how to make "cloud" work. Web-based apps are too dicey for production environments. And graphics apps would consume too much bandwidth anyway. So what Adobe has put in the cloud is just the product authorization piece. Everything else stays the same. And by offering subscriptions on a monthly basis, they made it both affordable and good for cash flow.

-40hz (January 07, 2013, 08:04 PM)

"Software as a Service", except it isn't really. Please gut the greedy Adobe bastards, somebody.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Adobe CS2 for free? (NOT SPAM)

« Last post by f0dder on January 07, 2013, 04:02 PM »

Saw it mentioned on Twitter earlier today, contemplated grabbing a copy... then scratched my beard and tried to think of what Photoshop would offer me that Paint.NET doesn't. And then there's the rest of the stuff that I don't even know what is, so... yeah.

(If I was into doing PDFs, Acrobat might have been interesting; other stuff I've looked at has been howwible, not the least XSL-FO + FOP).

739

General Software Discussion / Re: MagicRAR Drive Press - worth anything?

« Last post by f0dder on January 07, 2013, 03:51 PM »

Oh, astroturfing - welcome to the fun

#1 - "I couldn't cash in on the ZIP name, so I decided to cash in on the RAR name" - even though you have no association to RAR. And as Jibz said, ZIP is an open standard (as well as being an ubiquitous term), you can't compare the two. Did it ever occur to you that you could have come up with an original product/brand name?

#2 - I might actually take a look at your product. Rather think it could be funny ripping it apart. Who knows, I might be surprised, but I have my doubts.

#3 - it's hardly rocket science composing a list of files that are unsafe to enable NTFS compression for.

#4 - why would I go through shell code to apply NTFS compression to files? Oh sure, there's some potential load balancing (CPU as well as disk I/O) that can help with speed. But why would I bother with "finishing threads at the same time"? Where does "safely" enter the picture, considering compression is handled at a very low level of NTFS? Fire up a bunch of threads, feed threads producer/consumer style, do DeviceIoControl(FSCTL_SET_COMPRESSION). Possibly apply some balancing. Magic? Hardly. Still using bog-standard NTFS features that have been with us since forever. If you were doing anything but that, you'd be listing patent numbers on your website.

#5 - (Stoic Joker's point, not mine) - date base compression. Yes, the disk clenaup utility, just like he said - it will offer to compress old files, based on... whoa... date. That's the way "normal users" would come in contact with NTFS compression.

#6 - (Vlastimil's point, not mine) "no sense" - I'm pretty sure his point is files that aren't compressible, not files that are dangerous to compress (hibernation and the core loader files read by the NTFS minidriver which doesn't support compression). If you just go gung-ho on the filesystem, you waste a lot of CPU time processing  incompressible or very-little-comrpessible files, along with possibly adding massive fragmentation overhead.

#7 - <flame>I'm pretty sure I briefly used an archiver back in the Win9x days that was implemented through shell namespace, but who cares? Normal users have their zip folders, the rest of use proper standalone apps that Don't Suck(TM).</flame>

#8 - no, the sandforce controllers compress at the block level - this affects read and write speed, as well as reduce the free space available for wear levelling. And even for non-compressing SSD chipsets, the fragmentation (often) caused by NTFS compression will have negative effects on the block erases and writes. I sure as hell wouldn't NTFS compress anything but read-only data on any of my SSDs. As for avoiding sandforce, whatever - even Intel uses them now. And all SSD manufacturers have had their flakes-outs, that's just how it is with that technology at the moment.

#9 - except for the same "ZOMG WE ARE REVOLUTIONARY (but no content)" kind of marketing.

#10 - I have nothing to do with your competition. Or well, I don't think so, I honestly have no idea who they are. (I'm a regular user of 7-zip and the WinRAR, that's as far as 'affiliations' go - and I hate snake-oil and marketing that cashes in on other people's work, but that's a general personal trait of mine.)

(Yeah, I'm grumpy, and neither my caffeine deficiency nor your tone helped.)

740

Living Room / Re: Charging for Links to Your Site?

« Last post by f0dder on January 06, 2013, 07:56 PM »

What a convoluted way for them to commit suicide :-)

741

Living Room / Re: How Much Do You Trust Wikipedia?

« Last post by f0dder on January 06, 2013, 05:56 PM »

Seven years ago at dinner, I mentioned something I had read on wikipedia and my 12-year-old piped up and said, "I edit postings there all the time!" And after dinner he proved to me that he did. He is 19 now and I just asked him if he remembered that incident and he just snickered and walked away. Just sayin'.

-Joe Hone (January 05, 2013, 06:57 PM)

...and unless he edited to something relevant, the defacement is gone in ~5min.

There's automated bots reverting stuff that's clearly spam, and there's people checking "newly edited" all the time.

742

Find And Run Robot / Re: Farr freezes / delays : solved but...

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2013, 11:11 AM »

Had the freezes/delays as well - enough to irritate me slightly, but not enough to actually figure out how to fix it. Had missed this thread, and only saw it because of this other thread. Ignored FARR process in MSE, presto, blazing speed.

Wouldn't go as far as calling MSE ill-mannered - to extract icons from executables, the files need to be opened and read from... one could argue that scanning should only be done when attempting to execute a file, but then I could make a program that simply reads malware from a .jpg and executes it from memory.

743

Living Room / Re: win7 + external HDD

« Last post by f0dder on January 04, 2013, 10:59 AM »

Also, if you launch diskmgmt.msc (the Disk Management thingamajig), does the drive show up? Does it show up under "Device Manager -> Disk drives"? Are there any warnings in device manager?

I've had a few issues with USB storage not getting drive letters assigned, but that was back in the early XP days - haven't seen it since, and I've had a lot of drives attached to my current system (I've got 7 external USB2 disks, one eSata enclosure, one USB3 disk, and a bunch of different pendrives). Can't remember how I resolved it back then, but iirc it was nuking some registry keys or similar.

Windows does seem to handle USB devices somewhat lamely - re-installing/attaching/whatever drivers if you plug a device into a new USB port and whatnot.

744

General Software Discussion / Re: Good coding conventions - Discussion

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2013, 03:37 PM »

I am sorry, I thought it was obvious that this was a single function taken from a file -- there are functions to access the values and close the query as well .

-Jibz (January 03, 2013, 01:11 PM)

I guessed that much - it's just that, coming back to the code after several months & given the other comments in the function, I'd be wondering "why isn't *this* part being commented?". See next comment, though

And (if you'll excuse the tongue-in-cheek) if you think it closes the query right after adding, then I'll take that as an example that even simple code is not easy to read compared to comments .

-Jibz (January 03, 2013, 01:11 PM)

Ah yes (double-tongue-in-cheek), I obviously got distracted by the comments and didn't read the code properly ;-p

745

General Software Discussion / Re: Good coding conventions - Discussion

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2013, 12:05 PM »

I had no idea that Iceland, Denmark and Germany were strict about what you can name your kid. Just seems bizarre to me.

-Renegade (January 03, 2013, 11:56 AM)

The urban legend (which I have done no research of whatsoever) goes that the naming laws were introduced after a girl who was conceived during a bombing in WWII was named "Raketta Bombardina". I personally do find that name laws are sane, considering how mean children are to eachother, and given that some parents are clusterfsck insane - as an adult, you can change your name anyway, and the rules there are somewhat more lax.

But it's all going down the drain anyway, in 2012 "Ninja" (and several other just as silly names) were added to the approved list. "Aloha Ninja" should be approved, for instance... >_<

746

General Software Discussion / Re: Good coding conventions - Discussion

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2013, 11:43 AM »

I must admit, I am a big fan of comments . I believe commenting the "intent" of your code is usually worth it. There is not a lot of code outside of textbooks that is really self-documenting, and what seems obvious to you while you are writing the code may take a little time for the next coder (or yourself in a month or two) to figure out.

-Jibz (January 03, 2013, 07:47 AM)

Sure thing - it's a delicate balance, and what seems "self-commenting" to one person is an unreadable mess to somebody else. I've rarely revisited code that I thought was "self-commenting" while writing it which I then couldn't grok later on... but I've often been confused by code which I neither commented nor thought through properly.

I prefer "too many" comments over "too little", but at the same time I often take a step back when I find myself adding individual comment lines. Am I doing something a bit too complex that can be simplified? Can I think up better variable/function names?

As an example, if you take this simple function

-Jibz (January 03, 2013, 07:47 AM)

Well... your sut_open is actually an example of what I consider to be "noise" comments - IMHO they don't really tell anything that the individual API calls don't already (I'm not familiar with those APIs, though I guess they're related to performance counters). Personally I'd probably rename make_counterpath() -> make_uptime_counter_path(), and get rid of all the comments...

But I might add a comment on how to actually get at the counter value, since that's not evident from the code if you're not familiar with the Pdh API (hm, you add a counter to the query, but there's no "execute" thingy, and you close the query handle right after the add? That looks quirky, but none of the comments say anything about it.) Oh, and I'd replace sizeof(array)/sizeof(elem) with a lengthof macro (for C++, I'd probably use a template function for it, since it's slightly ever more typesafe, but this seems to be über-pure C code, from the single-line block comments ).

But there's definitely other cases where I would do individual comment lines, or at least a comment for a related group of lines... and heck, possibly even comment individual API parameters... the Win32 API is nasty enough to warrant that at times.

Btw, I don't know if it's GeSHI or Chrome, but it looks like most of the identifiers are raised a little above the line (or the operators and keywords lowered) in the code blocks, which is slightly annoying to read:
 (see attachment in previous post)

-Jibz (January 03, 2013, 07:47 AM)

Works fine in the fox of fire, but definitely looks funky in Chrome.
 

747

General Software Discussion / Re: Are you going to wait for Windows 9?

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2013, 03:37 AM »

Each search I tried brought me an error page because of no connection. Same with the "Help" search. I think they all default to online searches anymore.

I would guess that the machine you searches on was already connected?

-J-Mac (January 03, 2013, 01:08 AM)

Didn't do any searches nor did I use help - simply tapped the Winkey and started typing, then looked at the screen. Granted, if you tap the WinKey it's not obvious that you can just start typing (and that's a real issue). But, being used to the Vista/Win7 start menu, I started typing before seeing startscreen :-)

748

Living Room / Re: Ubuntu Linux smarthphone coming this year?

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2013, 01:18 AM »

OK, so I'm pessimistic and it might very well turn out that I'm wrong, but...

"Anything to make it more hacker friendly." - in which way isn't Android hacker-friendly? Sure, individual manufacturer "value" addons might not be open, but core Android is, and there's several custom ROMs. As for being fully open, I kinda doubt that's going to happen, because of patents as well as security issues (radio/baseband code).

"anything to divorce the marriage between phone models and carrier" - I somehow doubt Canonical is going to change that... they're at least partly in it for the money.

"more choices, more software/apps, more options" - more software? Android is already open to write for, for anybody who cares, without any fees to Google. If you think you're going to be able to take any old linux program and run on an Ubuntu smartphone, I think you're going to be surprised... most of the so-called "portable" software is really only "portable to (most) normal linux distros", not something as different as a smartphone, and there's so much crap out there which has a hard time running on anything but x86 (even x64). And even if the code is portable, have fun running something designed for X11 and desktop resolutions on a smartphone screen

Oh, and as if current smartphone OSes weren't bloated enough, I really don't like thinking about how bad a "normal" linux distro would be on such a device. And if it isn't somewhat more "normal" (and clunky) than an Android based device, what's the use then, apart from duplicating Android functionality?

"ability for smaller companies to build their own cellphones, and not just the huge brands like apple, ms, samsung, htc." - we'll see about that, but I somehow doubt it. You need some muscle to be able to withstand litigation from the big'uns. And even ignoring patent trolling, putting a phone together is no easy task.

"how about a ubuntu phone made by kingston, that i take to at&t and activate." - OK, you want phone and carrier to be separated, that's something that calls for regulation.

749

General Software Discussion / Re: Good coding conventions - Discussion

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2013, 01:08 AM »

May be some day this year?

-ewemoa (January 02, 2013, 08:33 PM)

Oh, perhaps. If they don't pull it again (Java7 was one big friggin' letdown). And even if/when it's included in the language, there's the issue of enterprise adoption. Java usually means enterprise, and enterprise tends to mean tardy. I'm glad we're at least on Java6, there's several projects out there still running Java5 or worse.

...the above should also answer "so, why don't you just use Scala on your current Java6?" ;-)

750

Living Room / Re: MS Blocks Ability in Windows 8

« Last post by f0dder on January 03, 2013, 01:03 AM »

Isn't that the same functionality that's built in now?

-wraith808 (January 02, 2013, 09:05 PM)

Pretty much yeah, and the same hotkey - Win+W for searching settings (settings has a bit of stupid in it, though: it won't show anything until you start typing).