Recent Posts

8776

Living Room / Re: BitTorrent - why bother?

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 08:22 PM »

cFosSpeed is an external app that will work on your machine in general, it isn't a plugin for Azureus. I do have mixed experiences with the app, though :/. Once when I tried it, it really did help greatly. After a windows re-install, it was as if it had no effect.

I suggest you give the trial version a spin: http://www.cfos.de

8777

Site/Forum Features / Re: Ads On The Website - Everyone Read In Please - UPDATED!

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:29 PM »

Google Ads is fine, I just wish you could make it not show up suggestions when it doesn't actually have any...

8778

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Maya for Free

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:27 PM »

Watermark isn't bad, you can get experience with the free version... and then decide whether investing in the full version is something for you.

Btw, it still does object/scene save, right? Without watermarks, right? Not a bad choice for content, creation for 3d engines, then

8779

Living Room / Re: BitTorrent - why bother?

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:25 PM »

Deozaan, the whole torrent protocol and client software is structured to "penalize" users who don't upload much. But at the same time, you will *always* have to throttle your upload rate a bit if you have ADSL, since maxing out your upload will *kill* your download. Finding the sweet spot between up and down can be a bit difficult.

And yeah, HTTP will usually give you better speeds than torrents, unless you use some of those nasty illegal semi-private torrent sites, or some of the better linux/bsd torrents. That's just life in an egoistic world where people want to download but not upload.

Btw, for the up/downstream issue, it's worth looking into cFosSpeed (http://fileforum.bet...osSpeed/1103571841/1). Rather than just "choking" applications to throttle your upstream (and thus maintain downstream), it can also do some packet reordering ("deep stuff") that will make everything flow smoother. The result is download speeds somewhat below your theoretical maximum, but still with a good upload speed at the same time.

8780

Living Room / Re: hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:19 PM »

Well. I've never been much of a fan of Gibson, there's too much hype and buzzwords and too little factual information (one thing I'll have to credit him for, though, he's VERY good at selling himself.)

I don't doubt spinrite can do some tricks, but it's not the end-all-be-all. And I'm afraid that in some situations it could be outright dangerous to use; it puts a lot of stress on your drive, so if you have a read/write head whose arm is about to collapse, spinrite could be very unsafe.

But hey, it's ascii graphics does look cute

8781

Living Room / Re: Memory probs ... any ideas?

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:15 PM »

I've got bad experiences combining different-sized sticks, even when the sticks were individually okay... depends on your motherboard and chipset. Even same-sized but different-{vendor,model} can be problematic, but that's not often a problem today, unless you're one of those tweaker guys.

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Living Room / Re: Memory probs ... any ideas?

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 05:40 AM »

Good luck

8783

Living Room / Re: BitTorrent - why bother?

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 05:39 AM »

What I really like about µTorrent is that the developer, ludde, is a nice guy who's very open to suggestions. You can usually find him on IRC/EFnet in #winprog. Torrents (and the .torrent file) can be moved from your "in-progress folder" to "download done" automatically, very suitable for automatic extraction tools or remote checking (if you can't do remote desktop but have ftp access, it's still easy to see if a download is done).

I don't think it has "auto-launch .torrent files from <this folder>" yet, but ludde would probably not mind adding it (it's a feature I use a lot in rTorrent on my linux box - fire and forget like). Oh yeah, and there's a web-based control interface coming.

All this while *still* keeping it LEAN_AND_MEAN

8784

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: HDDlife Pro (and other disk-health reporters)

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 05:06 AM »

I hope so - a "reallocated sector" happens when your drive determines there's a bad sector. It notes this in an internal map, and chooses a spare sector that all references to this sector will be mapped to (all modern drives have a smallish pool of spare sectors). In other words, a non-zero amount of reallocated sectors means your drive has some problem. And once you have one bad sector, others tend to follow...

8785

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: HDDlife Pro (and other disk-health reporters)

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:48 AM »

m_s, you have a non-zero reallocated sector count... if the application is showing this value correctly, it's time to replace that drive ASAP.

8786

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Buzzsaw - free background HD defragmenter

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:42 AM »

DiskKeeper isn't that great - check out PerfectDisk instead.

8787

Living Room / Re: hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:40 AM »

SpinRite... fancy ascii graphics and a lot of buzzwords. And that's about it.

8788

Living Room / Re: Unprotected Wireless Lans?

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:39 AM »

[...] I can't use wpa because my router doesn't support it, but i have wep, and i feel quite secure since there's only one more wireless network on my area.

-jgpaiva (April 05, 2006, 04:32 AM)

WEP passwords can be bruteforced in a reasonable amount of time... but you don't even have to do that to gain access, afaik... Something about packet injection that I haven't bothered to look into.

8789

Living Room / Re: Unprotected Wireless Lans?

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:37 AM »

The windows kernel is superior to the linux kernel, period. What drags windows down is the usermode software, the win32 API, and third-party driver developers that produce unstable crap. But even with all windows' flaws, it's still superior to the majority of people, simply because you don't need to mess around just to get everyday jobs done. </anti-gpl fascist rant>

As long as you get a decent access point, setting up wireless shouldn't really be much of a hassle (unless there's other very strong-signal AP's in the neighbourhood). Most stuff that's worth anything today comes with at least WPA-PSK, which seems pretty decent. Just stay away from WEP and friends.

8790

Living Room / Re: Keeping track of software license/serial keys

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:24 AM »

Lynn, be sure to check out the beta/test version of fSekrit that's in the bottom of this thread - it has text searching (Ctrl+F) making it altogether more useful than the previous version

8791

Living Room / Re: BitTorrent - why bother?

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2006, 04:22 AM »

Well, if the difference is that Azureus needs a shitload of tweaking to work decently and µTorrent works out of the box... *tongue-in-cheek*

8792

Living Room / Re: It won't happen for 100 years

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 09:18 AM »

yyyy/mm/dd here, so... :p

8793

General Software Discussion / Re: Foxit Reader (fast pdf reader alternative)

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 08:56 AM »

Given the fact that AR 7 installs its own launcher speed up service (can't remember the name of it), I'm not sure how much of a difference these utilities will make (NOTE: I've never used either of them with AR 7 for the reasons outlined above). I do note, though, that the authors of each claim that their solutions do speedup AR 7 launches nonetheless...

Afaik AR's own speedup service is just the usual "precache" business. The other utilities remove/disable plugins that then won't be loaded at all... I did this manually with AR6, and it had some tremendous positive effects. I've always been against the "precache" things btw...

8794

Living Room / Re: It won't happen for 100 years

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 06:53 AM »

cool

8795

Living Room / Re: Hacking Network Printers - nice loong article

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 06:52 AM »

Hm, not going to read the article (lack of time etc.), but it sounds like something you really want to consider if you're running a LAN where malicious users might connect (school, office, ...)

8796

Developer's Corner / Re: Language for professional, sellable software?

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 06:48 AM »

If you hire java/.net/... programmers, you risk getting "click-and-play module monkeys" that aren't very skilled in writing "real" code. Not to disrespect those language nor all coders using those languages, it's just an unfortunate trend. After all, it *IS* goddamn easy to whip up a gui in .net, delphi, vb, ...

I haven't played much around with the various toolkits, they all seem a bit heavy for my taste. I've heard a lot of good about wxWidgets and especially QT from trolltech, though. If I needed a "heavy" framework, I'd probably go with either of those; MFC might be a bit lighter, but very windows bound. WTL is like a light version of MFC without any documentation, I guess I'd rather write my own wrappers than using WTL

If you're looking to resell the system, I think you should go with something portable. Not really to have it run on different platforms, but because windows-centric code has this habit of being pretty ugly, if the API isn't abstracted. The win32 API is powerful, yes, but pretty incoherent.

8797

Developer's Corner / Re: Language for professional, sellable software?

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 06:27 AM »

I'd stay away from JAVA except for places where it's required - performance is simply abysmal, thanks to sun's crappy JVM and silly lawsuit.

C++ is where my heart lies, but it's impractical to do GUI stuff unless you use third-party libraries.

Delphi, BCB and VB all seem like good tools if your program is mostly GUI-centered. I have a background in assembly language, though, so I'm not too pleased with their large filesizes and VB's runtime. I also dislike Delphi's code generation, it's crudd.

.NET seems like an interesting platform... it's still a huge virtual machine, but in my experience it runs better than java, is better integrated, has a lot of important attention, etc. It's not yet as portable as JAVA, but that'll probably come

8798

Developer's Corner / Re: Thoughts about OOP programming

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 06:22 AM »

Any good piece of software will be written using many of the principles of OOP, whether you use classes (C++), objects (Pascal), or whatever they're called in other languages. Namely, isolation, modularization, black-box functionality, et cetera.

Some of the popular C libraries (as in not-using-classes-and-not-C++) are even object-oriented by nature - most library calls include a "context" of one form or another as one of their parameters. Guess what? That's the same way classes work, syntactic sugar aside.

People that I've seen fight fiercely against OOP have almost never had a formal programming education, often don't realize they're using using OOP concepts themselves, and have this totally flawed view that OOP code means "bloated and slow", based on observations of really bad code and really old and bad compilers... or compilers in debug/non-optimization mode.

Crappy textbooks and "teach yourself language <lang> in <quantity> <timeunits>" pieces of crap are to blame too, talking about cars, fruits, and animals. For good OOP (C++ biased), you'll need Meyers, Dewhurst, Sutter, Alexandrescu books, as well as the Design Patterns (GoF) book. That's the Real Deal.

8799

Older Newsletters / Re: Newsletter for April 3, 2006 - Codename 'Happy Birthday to Us'

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 06:02 AM »

Glad that I'm aboard and that DC is rolling - I love this place

8800

General Software Discussion / Re: Foxit Reader (fast pdf reader alternative)

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2006, 01:42 AM »

So, what's the better? filehippo, betanews, (...insert other services here). I think somebody should start a mini-review thread where people can chip in with their experiences.