Recent Posts

8026

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« Last post by f0dder on October 24, 2006, 01:29 AM »

Thanks for the link, but xPlorer^2 has the power I need - and I don't have to do a whole lot of tweaking to get it to look okay . Especially since it seems TC doesn't have a single-pane mode, it's not very useful to me.

I know it has some very loyal followers, it just isn't for me

8027

General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2006, 06:11 PM »

dk70: since I tend to close and re-open my browser, "a few seconds" means a whole lot to me - and my computer isn't exactly sluggish . And it's a bit silly when people say "omfg n00b just cut down on the extensions then", since FF sucks without extensions. (And even without any extensions, it's still noticably slower to load than both IE and Opera).

About FireFox use... it does seem to use suboptimal data structures. Try loading a complex website (or a "malformed" one, like what the picture->html converters produce). That should of course be fixed. But on the other hand, I don't think it's wrong to use a bunch of ram for aggressive caching and history - I personally like snapback tab and it's speed a lot. But don't kid yourselves, a big part of the memory bloat of FF is because, well, suboptimal code.

8028

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2006, 06:06 PM »

The default look of TotalCommander has always put me off - it's so darn ugly >_<. It has this "early win95 app" look-and-feel, including the installer. And it doesn't seem like there's a single-pane mode?

Oh well, I'm just glad xPlorer^2 does everything I need (including single-pane mode ), and I don't like integrated archive and ftp support et cetera, since I have specific applications for that...

8029

Living Room / Re: MIT Smartboard video — MUST-SEE

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2006, 08:55 AM »

Yeah, that's the one NeilS. For some reason I thought it was Apple.

8030

General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2006, 08:54 AM »

HtmlHelp is loaded on-demand - so just starting an app that uses HH for help doesn't get the HtmlHelp code loaded automatically, before you actually use the help functionality.

I think I'm gonna make a little program that enumerates which DLL files are loaded in memory, would be a fun little project and might show some interesting results as well...

8031

General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by f0dder on October 23, 2006, 08:30 AM »

Nope, haven't removed the IE and Explorer components - it would be pretty hard to do in the first place, and a lot of other apps would break. I still doubt that the IE-specific controls (like the html rendering) are loaded automatically, but I'd have to do a little more research.

Of course there are controls, the so-called "common controls" ("un"common in the way you program them, by the way ) that were originally introduced with IE - I'm not taking them into consideration though, since just about every software these days use them.

If you use a plugin to minimise FF to the system tray (effectively what IE does invisibly) then FF would load pretty quickly.

Actually no - the FF plugin just keeps FF minimized, whereas with IE the process terminates. If you load the browser again right away, it's executables and DLLs will be in the filesystem cache and thus won't have to get loaded from disk... but FF is still a lot heavier to load. This is not because of IE "cheating", but because FF is pretty amazingly bloated.

At any rate, Opera loads almost as fast as IE, where FF is ridiculously slow.

8032

Living Room / Re: Self-Contained Helmet Videocam Gadget For You Extreme Sports Freaks

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2006, 03:55 PM »

640x480@30fps... hope they have some decent compression, otherwise 2GB doesn't last long

8033

General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2006, 03:45 PM »

Carol: I use xPlorer^2 and BlackBox, so I shouldn't have much of the IE-specific stuff preloaded... yet IExplorer is a LOT faster than FireFox in terms of startup time. If you count second-time launches, when stuff is in the filesystem cache, IE is still noticably faster to start then FF. Opera is a bit slower than IE, but a bunch faster than FF.

Yeah, I do have some extensions loaded in FF, to make it usable - but even a vanilla FF is sluggish (1.5.0.7, not going to install a RC on my main box).

Yet I still use FF... it still has fewer exploits than IE, and because it's not in as much use as IE is, fewer sites also target FF. And even though things like Avant and Maxthon make IE more ustable, I still find FF + extensions are better. YMMV. I'd use Opera if there weren't those few annoying things I can't entirely put my finger on...

8034

Living Room / Re: Roller Coaster of Death -- Machinima Video

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2006, 02:09 PM »

Haha, fantastic

8035

Living Room / Re: MIT Smartboard video — MUST-SEE

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2006, 10:58 AM »

Damn, that's cool!

Combine that with the multi-input display stuff from apple(?)...

8036

Living Room / Re: Shit....just come on in to learn about a new "trick"

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2006, 10:48 AM »

Summary: OpenDNS? No frigging way.

-f0dder (October 22, 2006, 08:20 AM)

Unless you ISP's DNS is down right now and you desperatelly need to do something online

-jgpaiva (October 22, 2006, 10:43 AM)

True, then you can use it as an emergency backup. But as primary DNS? no way.

8037

Living Room / Re: Shit....just come on in to learn about a new "trick"

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2006, 08:20 AM »

Instead of duplicating info, I'll just post links to two other threads:

https://www.donation...59.msg37253#msg37253
https://www.donation...17.msg31192#msg31192

Summary: OpenDNS? No frigging way.

8038

General Software Discussion / Re: Multi-Document AND Multi-View Text Editor?

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2006, 09:28 PM »

...and it's a pretty damn useful feature. Especially having two views of the same file can be a life-saver when programming. Visual Studio supports this, too.

8039

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there any tool to see pdfs full screen in two pages?

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2006, 03:15 PM »

Hmm, I think you need the full version of Acrobat for OCR'ing, not just the reader?

8040

Living Room / Re: do you think this will run vista?

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2006, 02:11 PM »

Hah, insane

8041

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there any tool to see pdfs full screen in two pages?

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2006, 08:39 AM »

JavaJones: sounds interesting, I'll have to download a more recent version and see for myself.

8042

General Software Discussion / Re: The Vista "kernel access" controversy - what does DC think?

« Last post by f0dder on October 20, 2006, 06:51 PM »

mwb1100: thanks for the info (could you provide some MS link for this info?) - sounds like less of a pain than I thought it would be. But $200-400 is still a fair amount of money if you want to create freeware tools... and there might still be some requirements for the people who want to get a cert?

8043

General Software Discussion / Re: The Vista "kernel access" controversy - what does DC think?

« Last post by f0dder on October 20, 2006, 04:55 PM »

The current way of requiring kernel hooks might be a kludge, but it works well. The Vista kernel is probably a bit different etc., but you'll need some way of hooking specific functions, or inserting "filters" for them. If I know Microsoft and how they usually do stuff, they might make some half-reasonable API, but will forget a bunch of important ones.

Carol, other A/V companies have specifically come out and said they do *not* need such access. It's not just that they're keeping quiet.

-JavaJones

Any protection not doing on-demand (or whatever the "real-time" stuff is called) won't need hooking. Others will - or at the very least need to insert filter drivers.

8044

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Vista EULA to users: Go to hell!

« Last post by f0dder on October 20, 2006, 04:44 PM »

Josh: I've had a couple of the PCs at the museum bitch about being invalid - and that's after I got valid licenses for them (yes, it was a pirate-copy mess before I started adminning there). And on the other hand, there's still a lot of people using pirated XP licenses (without crack patch) that aren't affected. WGA is not reliable - period.

I don't want a GPL license for Windows, and I fully support Microsoft's right to make money. But I think they at least ought to be fair against their users. The licensing is bollocks, and all the DRM will - as always - only hurt the end users. DRM'ed music CDs will just be put through a professional studio loopback (or chinese hardware that doesn't respect the copyright bit). Similar story for protected video.

So what effects does Vista leave on lawful users?

1) You need Vista for DirectX 10 - booh.
2) You need Vista for the hybrid harddrives - booh.
3) You'll probably need Vista for playing back HD content.
4) If you change hardware often, you're screwed. From reading the license PDF, I got the impression this doesn't just apply to the OEM Vista version.
5) You aren't allowed to run the "cheap" versions in vmware. Why?
6) "Garage" programmers will have a hard time doing driver development. It will be much harder for a new startup to become the next sysinternals.

...and that's just a bit of it.

8045

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there any tool to see pdfs full screen in two pages?

« Last post by f0dder on October 20, 2006, 08:07 AM »

I use foxit myself, but it's slow for complex PDFs

8046

Living Room / Re: Ms Dewey: the search engine with a face & personality

« Last post by f0dder on October 20, 2006, 08:05 AM »

I hate that kind of stuff. I hate the fluffy search dog in XP. I just want 2k classic style searches, dammit.  locate32 

EDIT: she refuses to load here, IE as well as FF. Stops loading at ~60%.

8047

General Software Discussion / Re: Physics Games Website

« Last post by f0dder on October 20, 2006, 06:35 AM »

 

8048

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Vista EULA to users: Go to hell!

« Last post by f0dder on October 20, 2006, 06:34 AM »

Nasty.

Aagain, I hope Vista fails massively. But again-again, users are sheep.

8049

General Software Discussion / Re: New Winzip will open rar archives

« Last post by f0dder on October 19, 2006, 05:48 PM »

Never liked WinZip... annoying interface, and zip is limited compared to the other archivers. Go WinRAR, nice and fast and clean and quality russian code ^_^

8050

General Software Discussion / Re: The Vista "kernel access" controversy - what does DC think?

« Last post by f0dder on October 19, 2006, 05:35 PM »

JavaJones: perhaps only a couple of the lame companies have bitched about the kernel hooking stuff, but check your product of choice with http://www.resplendence.com/hookanalyzer . Kaspersky 6.x has 37 hooks... you need to hook stuff if you want a transparent scanner.

And as for driver signing, money is one issue, the time it takes to verify is another... and the third: Microsoft will decide which drivers they like and which they don't. I wonder if they like daemon-tools and similar...