Recent Posts

8151

Living Room / Re: Buying New PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 06:25 PM »

The thing with AGP is that it *is* being phased out, and greedy corporate bastards have realized this, so "new" AGP cards are often more expensive than their PCI-e counterparts - at least here. And pci-e has been around for long enough now that it shouldn't be an extra expense to get a board with it.

17" TFT is great, I've got two of them. Do mind the refresh rate if you're going to watch movies or play games... well, shouldn't be a much of a problem with today's TFTs, unless you're picky. But not higher than 25ms or you might get bad ghosting.

8152

Living Room / Re: Buying New PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 06:04 PM »

If you can get a core2duo CPU for a reasonable price, go for it - kickass performance and low power usage (and thus heat generation). Speficially core2duo, not just "core" - stupid intel for having confusing naming schemes. If that's too expensive, probably go for an amd64 (should be cheap, and lower power usage than pentium4).

If you want affordable graphics but still okay performance, a GeForce 6600 should be okay - and cheap by now, since it's "last year's model".

512meg ram, or a gigabyte if you can get it cheap. Less than 512 is going to be a pain.

Humm... there's probably more. Do you need a monitor, dvd burner, etc?

8153

Developer's Corner / Re: Tiny 'Touch' 32 bits program in C (3 kb)

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 02:21 PM »

Just for fun, here's a 1kb C (well, C++) version, that has proper system return code

8154

Living Room / Nifty wooden computer cases

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 11:57 AM »

Got this from slashdot, so the site will probably soon be unavailable for a bit

I usually hate fancy computer cases, but some of these look pretty good IMHO: http://suissacomputers.com/

8155

Developer's Corner / Re: [FBSL] LZO compressor (GPL is viral and evil, kthx)

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 11:46 AM »

Section 0 of the GPL, with my emphasis:

The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another
language.

Section 2b of the GPL, again with my emphasis:

b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

And the viral nature of the GPL is cemented with this clause:

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole.  If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

You might also want to check out the GPL faq, I'll quote a pretty relevant part of it right here:

Q: If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any program which uses it has to be under the GPL?
A: Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library.

8156

Developer's Corner / Re: [FBSL] LZO compressor

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 11:26 AM »

So, you've got a special non-GPL license for LZO?

8157

Developer's Corner / Re: [FBSL] LZO compressor

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 09:29 AM »

I'd like a copy of the FBSL source code, please.

8158

Developer's Corner / Re: Tiny 'Touch' 32 bits program in C (3 kb)

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 09:10 AM »

Yay for people who don't care about standards. Professional? *cough*

8159

Living Room / Re: Buying New PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on October 01, 2006, 09:08 AM »

Make sure the computer has pci-e and not AGP! It's getting harder by the day to find AGP video cards.

8160

Living Room / Re: HD noise distracting

« Last post by f0dder on September 30, 2006, 05:35 AM »

http://en.wikipedia....rg/wiki/Flash_memory says that the write cycle is probably around 1million for normal flash, and I would think/hope these drives are a bit better than that.
 

8161

Living Room / Re: Game: Funny Farm

« Last post by f0dder on September 30, 2006, 02:05 AM »

Spoiler

http://shygypsy.com/...cmd=guess&guess=+

I wonder if sting + desert has something to do with DUNE?

8162

Living Room / Re: HD noise distracting

« Last post by f0dder on September 30, 2006, 01:59 AM »

Much less noise, much faster speed (fragmentation basically becomes irrelevant), less heat, less power consumption, no chance of mechanical failures. I wouldn't mind one of those for my primary drive (windows + apps + source/documents + a few games), then move everything else to a NAS or DAS(?).

8163

Living Room / Re: HD noise distracting

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 07:56 PM »

Which newer solid-state disks are those and what are the access times and transfer rates?

-JavaJones (September 29, 2006, 07:32 PM)

Haven't seen any benchmarks, but this is the one I was thinking about. I also think somebody mentioned it here at DC not too long ago. Well, there's an italian article that I butchered up with babelfish, as far as I can tell we're speaking 50MB/s xfer rates, and insanely low access/seek time. And a pricetag of $950 >_<

8164

Developer's Corner / Re: Tiny 'Touch' 32 bits program in C (3 kb)

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 07:50 PM »

Now you got the sources, you can do it
Personally I prefer telling 1 that is equal to True when successfull and 0 that is equal to 'False' when failed... It's just another point of view!

-Gerome (September 29, 2006, 06:57 PM)

Not if you ever have to deal with makefiles or the like.
(emphasis is mine).

8165

Developer's Corner / Re: Tiny 'Touch' 32 bits program in C (3 kb)

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 04:50 PM »

You really should return '0' since that's the standard returncode for success...

8166

Living Room / Re: The $39 Experiment

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 04:48 AM »

Heh, nice

EDIT: he certainly did put a bit of effort into it - I couldn't be arsed writing that many silly praises just to get a few free treats of that kind. But funny nonetheless.

Oh, and if people start doing this on a larger scale, it won't continue working for long.

8167

Living Room / Re: Lectures from Professor Who is Out of It - HA!

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 04:34 AM »

Haha, great

Too bad that's only part of it, I assume? I WANT MORE!

8168

Living Room / Re: Spank the Monkey: today's flash game

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 02:44 AM »

"Hi!"
"Uh, hi boss..."
"So, watcha doing?"
"Spankin' the monkey".

8169

Living Room / Re: HD noise distracting

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 02:13 AM »

Christ, 2x4GB iRAM in stripe. Bastards. I'd prefer one of the newer solid-state disks, though.

8170

General Software Discussion / Re: How to add/delete files of an installer?

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 02:00 AM »

Thanks for the replies. I posted the same Q on InstallShield's forums and here's the reply I got:

http://community.ins...wthread.php?t=163002.

-sri (September 28, 2006, 08:45 PM)

Christ, what a roundabout way of doing things

8171

Living Room / Re: Surveillance equipment has never looked so ..... scary!

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 01:59 AM »

The problem with DarkCreek, as was noted when slashdot posted about it a while ago, is that it's just an image and some text. No URLs to shops or more thorough descriptions. Might as well be a mock-up.

8172

Living Room / Re: Buying New PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 01:56 AM »

Yup, we need some usage specs.

If it's just for a bit of word processing and internet usage, just about anything will do. Personally I'd go for a core2 duo and at least 512 megs of ram, graphics card depending on needs (but definitely PCI-E, although onboard with possibility of PCI-E expansion is an okay option too if you don't know if you'll be doing games).

8173

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Why do unzip apps have to be so complicated?

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2006, 01:51 AM »

jsmallberry: WinRAR is popular because it's been around for a while, it has a good compression/speed ratio, it isn't very expensive (not everybody's a freeloader ), and it has very good commandline support ans OS features (saves NTFS alternate streams and security info) - plus unrar is free & has source code available.

You should be able to use the free unrar for your purposes.

8174

Living Room / Re: Lectures from Professor Who is Out of It - HA!

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2006, 05:20 PM »

Keep us posted

8175

General Software Discussion / Re: FairUse4WM : Strippingng DRM (digital rights management) from windows media

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2006, 04:54 PM »

The program is pretty interesting - instead of trying to work on the files, break the encryption, etc... it hooks the player. FairUse hooks it right after the decryption of a chunk of audio date, which can then be written out to file instead of just playing it.

This is probably a lot easier than doing reverse engineering of (I guess) heavily obfuscated code dealing with the file, and it should be easy enough for the Reverse Engineer to use a tool like bindiff to "catch the patch" when the protection is updated.

Only downside is, of course, that decryption is a bit slow. Just say no to DRM'ed media in the first place, and say no to CDs that violate the standard - even if you have a nice drive capable of ripping it.