Recent Posts

8601

General Software Discussion / Re: The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time - PCWorld.com

« Last post by f0dder on May 27, 2006, 12:04 PM »

Think BTX is currently just attractive for the OEM market. For private consumer ATX is still state of the Art. And you can also build up a really quiete ATX system 

-masu (May 27, 2006, 11:58 AM)

Sure, there's not many BTX casings and motherboards out yet - that will change, though. And yes, you can build quiet ATX systems, BTX just makes it easier (and, when it's an established platform, cheaper).

8602

General Software Discussion / Re: The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time - PCWorld.com

« Last post by f0dder on May 27, 2006, 11:53 AM »

They forgot the new BTW Standard, which still is behind ATX format.

-masu (May 27, 2006, 11:42 AM)

The BTX standard seems pretty nice, though. It really does allow for much better airflow in your PC casing, ultimately leading to quieter computers. As if Dell machines weren't already quiet, you should hear (or not ) a BTX based Dell machine.

8603

General Software Discussion / Re: The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time - PCWorld.com

« Last post by f0dder on May 26, 2006, 03:19 PM »

I've always been hateful towards realplayer - it's too intrusive, the player always felt bloated to me, and I hate having to install "yet another player". Not to mention that, unless you use shady software, real media is only playable in their player.

And WinMe surely does belong on the list, too. I know it's worked fine for some people, and those will never understand the animosity other have for WinMe. But well, having to roll back some 30 school computers to win98se does say something about the stability for the masses...

The list does seem like it's been thrown together in a lunch break though, and it's order isn't very realistic either

8604

General Software Discussion / Re: Some users locked out of Google Mail - Some Wiped (Yikes)

« Last post by f0dder on May 26, 2006, 03:08 PM »

Never trust big brother - and google does seem to go that way. Just because it's not (currently) Microsoft doesn't mean it's not a monopoly...

8605

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista, Up Close and Personal

« Last post by f0dder on May 26, 2006, 12:43 PM »

Spot on the sugar, baby!

Does that make you my sugar daddy?

-Carol Haynes (May 26, 2006, 12:31 PM)

I would hope not

8606

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista, Up Close and Personal

« Last post by f0dder on May 26, 2006, 12:15 PM »

[...]but I really feel like MS should have been focusing on deeper core stuff.

-JavaJones

Well, afaik they did rewrite a lot of the stuff to .NET, supposedly more safe against buffer overflows etc. Whether that holds true only time can tell.

Trouble I see is that MS seem to be doing the usual stuff - add in a lot of eye candy, miss out all the killer stuff they originally planned and promoted, encroach on other people's markets by adding 'free' software to compete with other people's commercial interestes (like adding blog uploading to Word to mention just one instance) and tie users further into their corporate identity by collecting evermore personal info just to run an OS etc.

-Carol Haynes

Spot on the sugar, baby!

8607

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista, Up Close and Personal

« Last post by f0dder on May 25, 2006, 03:11 PM »

Well, but remember, this is charting two beta versions

Ok, I'll give... betas deserve a little slack.

And what are the realistic alternatives to windows? Mac OS X and... uh... >_<

hehe... C'mon f0dder, say it... SAY IT!!
 

-Edvard (May 25, 2006, 03:03 PM)

Not a realistic alternative for me, though. Distros like Ubuntu are getting a lot better etc., but just not there yet.

8608

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista, Up Close and Personal

« Last post by f0dder on May 25, 2006, 01:42 PM »

Eek, even more fisher-price than XP...

And what are the realistic alternatives to windows? Mac OS X and... uh... >_<

8609

Living Room / Re: Blog Post: The death of Wikipedia

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

Restriction on who can add/modify/remove topics is a good thing, having special interest groups moderate various topics is a bad thing. *shrug*.

WikiPedia is a nice resource, just take it's contents with a grain (or gramme, or couple of tons) of salt

8610

Delphi and C++ Builder / Re: Something you should know about C++ Builder

« Last post by f0dder on May 25, 2006, 10:48 AM »

>_<

It's a lot better to link dynamically and the redistribute the runtimes. BCB and Delphi code generation is bad enough on it's own, but with statically linked runtimes the exe file size is plain enormous. This is bad for people on slow ADSL connections, or even worse, those still on ISDN or regular modems.

Also, with dynamically linked runtimes, the runtime code is shared between multiple delphi/bcb apps running... not to mention that with delphi/bcb apps protected with asprotect or whatever (*sigh*), at least the runtime won't be included in the memory overhead.

8611

General Review Discussion / Re: VPN/SSH Tunneling software

« Last post by f0dder on May 23, 2006, 12:49 PM »

I'm not too fond of hamachi - central point of failure, and some of their claims sound a bit weird...

8612

Living Room / he-man: the sensitive side

« Last post by f0dder on May 23, 2006, 11:43 AM »

http://www.slackcirc...am/video/fsp_101.mov 

8613

General Review Discussion / Re: VPN/SSH Tunneling software

« Last post by f0dder on May 23, 2006, 10:59 AM »

What type of server would I need to setup on my pc to allow me to use tunneling like that in windows xp? I understand how ssh operates, but at the moment I do not have access to a linux box with an ssh server.

-Josh (May 23, 2006, 10:15 AM)

You will need, ta-da, a SSH server
I think there's a win32 port of the OpenSSH project, but I don't know how well it works. There's probably some commercial offerings too, though.

I'm afraid I can't say "it doesn't matter much for a home setting", with the recent exploits for VNC... one of my friends got hacked because of it, but fortunately the hackers were kind enough to shut the VNC ports down in his firewall. He still needs to reinstall a couple of machines though, just in case they have been rootkitted >_<

8614

Living Room / Re: Humour - how about a giggle column ...

« Last post by f0dder on May 23, 2006, 07:00 AM »

To throw in a few nice strips: http://www.sinfest.net/ and http://www.little-gamers.com/

8615

General Review Discussion / Re: VPN/SSH Tunneling software

« Last post by f0dder on May 23, 2006, 06:39 AM »

Ah great, didn't know that! Then it should be quite possible to access multiple internal RDP machines through a single server/IP. I'd have to do some research to figure out how to do it, though - hardware assisted VPN is so easy

8616

General Review Discussion / Re: VPN/SSH Tunneling software

« Last post by f0dder on May 23, 2006, 06:30 AM »

VPN sorta requires custom hardware - or perhaps a BSD (or linux) box. Or perhaps some (commercial?) windows (server?) software. We got a CISCO PIX 501 at work, which works pretty well. Not exactly cheap, but the VPN on it is easy to set up and works very well (can't say I'm too happy about the cisco vpn client though, it causes some hiccups with vmware networking every now and then - still researching into that one).

As for SSH tunnelling, I haven't gotten around to playing with it yet . I think the nice PuTTY software can handle it on the client side, and at the serverside I'd recommend some bsd/linux/unix box running OpenSSH. Something that seems a bit problematic to me in the case of RDP is that the default client won't let you specify a port number to connect to... so you'll only be able to access one machine behind the SSH wall, unless you manually remap the tunnel...

8617

General Review Discussion / Re: Opinions on remote PC control software

« Last post by f0dder on May 23, 2006, 05:47 AM »

The thing that seems to give the best speed is Microsoft's own Remote Desktop. Even UltraVNC with the GDI mirror driver isn't as fast, lags a bit even on a LAN. Most VNCs have been pretty slow for me - bearable on a LAN, but not elsewhere. The official RealVNC client is somewhat better than most of the others, but pretty duh; it's commercial software.

It's been a while since I tried any of the dedicated "remote control" applications, but back then most suffered the same problem as the VNC clients: they poll and grab screenshots.

By the way, Remote Desktop and VNC should *always* be used through VPN or a SSH tunnel. *always*.

The problem with Remote Desktop is that, unless you're on a terminal server, it will log off the active user (well, switch-user on XP).

8618

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Symantec anti-virus auto-updater

« Last post by f0dder on May 22, 2006, 12:05 PM »

I wonder if the "spoiler button" feature wouldn't be a nice thing to use for long error logs like this?

just my 2 cents:
if you have a lot of content in a very general thread that tons of people will be reading, then encosing it in a spoiler box or putting thumbnails of big images may be warranted.
but if its a very specialized thread like this one, i don't think it's important.

-mouser (May 22, 2006, 11:58 AM)

You're probably right - it would still make it easier to separate the error log from the "this happens when" part... but I'm just thinking out loud

8619

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Symantec anti-virus auto-updater

« Last post by f0dder on May 22, 2006, 11:52 AM »

I wonder if the "spoiler button" feature wouldn't be a nice thing to use for long error logs like this?

8620

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Encryption software

« Last post by f0dder on May 22, 2006, 10:51 AM »

The problem is that even after you delete a file, it's still present on your harddisk - it's only a directory entry that has been wiped. If you use a wipe tool to erase the file, you're better off, but a lot of people forget to do that. Also note that with fully journalling filesystems (those that journal the file data and not just meta-data/filesystem accounting overhead), it's more or less impossible to do file wipe... but that's not an issue with NTFS.

So, the encryption is fine enough, it's the temporary files that's the security problem.

Shameless self promotion: fSekrit doesn't create any temporary files

8621

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Symantec anti-virus auto-updater

« Last post by f0dder on May 22, 2006, 05:58 AM »

This shouldn't be too hard to do, especially not in a decent scripting language or .NET... basically, grab the page, do a regexp search, and grab the file if the date has changed.

What's the full URL to a download file? A quick-and-dirty regexp might look something like

[Select]

http://www\.symantec\.com/path/(\d{8})-(\d+)-x86\.exe

...

8622

Living Room / Re: PREY trailer - looks funky

« Last post by f0dder on May 22, 2006, 05:44 AM »

Yeah, portals have been around a long time. But Serious Sam was the first game that I saw which used it in the way Prey was promisiting to do, that's all.

- Oshyan

-JavaJones (May 21, 2006, 06:47 PM)

Hm, I can't seem to remember any "funky" use of portals in Serious Sam... but it's been a while since I played it

8623

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Encryption software

« Last post by f0dder on May 22, 2006, 05:44 AM »

Just remember that anything that need a decrypt->edit->encrypt cycle is a big security problem...

8624

Official Announcements / Re: Contest - Make a new Banner for Website

« Last post by f0dder on May 21, 2006, 03:24 PM »

We need somebody to make a little www.DonationCoder.com 64kb intro thing. Music! Sync! 3D! Go!

8625

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there an AV App that Doesn't Eventually Become Bloatware?

« Last post by f0dder on May 21, 2006, 02:54 PM »

Anyways, You are right, it is quite easy to overlook the processes being used by a program as complex as an a/v.

Indeed. And the kernel-mode components aren't even visible in taskmgr or process explorer... then there's all the various services that some of the products include (scheduler, on-demand engine, bla bla bla).

Bloated would the inclusion of unnecessary features, and none of the features I see in norton's home line are to the point that I would deem unnecessary or "useless".

Remember that there's both feature- and code-bloat. The home editions certainly suffer from code bloat... sluggish memory/cpu hogs. And aren't they using the MSHTML control for configuration? I remember there was one AV soft doing this, and I think it's Symantec/Norton home edition.