Entries for DigitalDud

Castles in Windows 7 [Castles in Windows 7]

DigitalDud — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:31:09 GMT

It looks like Long is on to something here: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080215/windows-7-homegroup-rebirth-longhorn-castle/

I was pretty sad to see Castles had been cut back in the Longhorn days, it's nice to see it possibly making a return in the next release. A replacement for the old Workgroups has been a long time coming.

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Re: Free!! Download and use Daniusoft Video to Mobile Phone Converter For Free! [Re: Free!! Download and use Daniusoft Video to Mobile Phone Converter For Free!]

DigitalDud — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 05:39:31 GMT

My phone already plays all those formats.

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DVDs on Vista (more DRM crap) [DVDs on Vista (more DRM crap)]

DigitalDud — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:12:03 GMT

Is there anyway to get Vista to play DVDs when you have unsigned video drivers? The fact that you can't, is well, extremely annoying.

I'm stuck between using official signed video drivers that haven't been updated since March (thanks Dell!) and recent, bug-fixing ATI drivers that may or may not contain a "slight hack" to allow them to be installed on my laptop.

Why OEMs don't let ATI/NVIDIA distribute laptop drivers I'll never quite understand. But anyway, this has to be the first time DRM-related technology has actually pissed me off. I'm stuck between being able to play DVDs and having video drivers that can run recent games.

Microsoft, go fix the industry please, thanks.

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Re: Convert DVD to all sorts of format(zune,iPod,iPhone,PSP....) on mac and windows [Re: Convert DVD to all sorts of format(zune,iPod,iPhone,PSP....) on mac and windows]

DigitalDud — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 19:51:04 GMT

Let's see it convert to an FLI file.

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Re: Top 10 Things Windows is Better At Than Linux [Re: Top 10 Things Windows is Better At Than Linux]

DigitalDud — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 03:23:31 GMT

cyber_rigger wrote:

Excuse me, but MS Windows multitasking has lagged behind Linux for more than a decade. Linux was concurrent-multiuser since the early 1990s, MS Windows was not.

Bullcrap.

Windows NT was DESIGNED to be multi-user, preemptively scheduled with SMP on multiple CPU architectures long before Linux even existed. Linux was not designed to be any of those things. It took them 6, no wait, 8 years to add support for preemptive multitasking in the Linux kernel. The kernel was not reentrant for nearly a decade. It still requires huge locks. Linux didn't even get proper thread support until about 4 years ago.

Linux is usable today, but for most of its lifespan it was a piece of crap and totally outdated, only gaining popularity because of its support for x86 and the fact it was free. It was designed to do none of things it does today, support for everything was progressively hacked in over a very long period of time.

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Microsoft WSV Hypervisor Functional Specification [Microsoft WSV Hypervisor Functional Specification]

DigitalDud — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:02:56 GMT

The functional specifications for the Win2008 hypervisor are finally out: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=91E2E518-C62C-4FF2-8E50-3A37EA4100F5&displaylang=en

Good for some light reading.

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Cool video on virtualization [Cool video on virtualization]

DigitalDud — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 07:28:06 GMT

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2007/video/UIUC-ACM-RP07-Traut.wmv

Here's a pretty neat video of Microsoft's Eric Traut talking about virtualization, and a demo of a super stripped down version of Windows 7 (such that it is right now). Apparently a goal is for Windows 7 to scale to 256 core machines.

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Google's ASP.NET Presentation Editor [Google's ASP.NET Presentation Editor]

DigitalDud — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:06:58 GMT

Everyone knew this was coming but its out now: http://docs.google.com/default.aspx?action=new_presentation&hl=en

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.NET Rant [.NET Rant]

DigitalDud — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 08:30:39 GMT

So there's a number of well-known performance issues with .NET. Reflection is slow. Throwing exceptions takes half a second. Cold starts take forever, the memory footprint is high. Half these performance bugs people just take for granted, "Oh yeah don't use reflection a lot, its pretty slow". But WHY is reflection slow? Why doesn't someone at MS open a bug against .NET, "Priority 1, fix NOW, millions of customers experiencing millions of dollars lost in operating costs cause of a slow reflection code, blah blah"

Environments like .NET are supposedly awesome because if you make performance improvements to the runtime, the JIT compiler, etc., every single program that targets .NET receives a performance benefit. And today that is A LOT of programs. But the thing is, they DON'T update the runtime. They haven't touched it in years, and 2.0 didn't do much for performance anyway. And it's not like you can't make runtime changes without breaking compatibility. You don't have to touch the libraries, just make the compiler faster.

And now MS is investing big in Silverlight and its "thinner" runtime, so .NET will probably never see any improvements beyond new really fat libraries like WPF.

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GDI Limits in Windows [GDI Limits in Windows]

DigitalDud — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 02:17:55 GMT

Anyone know the reasoning behind why Windows has such strict limits on GDI resources? For example, I can only create about 300 or so windows because I run out of handles and things start crashing and bugging out. This is under Vista, in this day and age. Given that controls (buttons, etc) also get window handles, you can easily hit the limit running a few complex applications like Photoshop, VS, Maya, etc.

Edit: Nevermind, it's because of the desktop heap: http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/2007/01/04/desktop-heap-overview.aspx Still it's pretty crappy that these limits apply to Vista today.

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Interview with Alex John (DirectX creator) [Interview with Alex John (DirectX creator)]

DigitalDud — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 05:57:54 GMT

http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2007/032907_alexstjohn1_1.x

This is a really good inteview with the guy who got DirectX going at MS. Mostly about the frustration, and getting nearly fired trying to push gaming at MS, etc.

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BBC is biased [BBC is biased]

DigitalDud — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 03:19:05 GMT

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=411846&in_page_id=1770

What's funny is I have friends who claim to read the BBC news for their "impartiality."

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Richard Stallman just spoke to me [Richard Stallman just spoke to me]

DigitalDud — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:47:02 GMT

I just came out of a Q&A session with Richard Stallman that my University hosted. The general consensus I heard from people coming out of it was he's definetly an extremist and a whacko. I have to agree and I have to say I'm pretty disappointed since he really didn't have much to say besides that "anyone who works on proprietary software is unethical and evil" (over and over).

The only thing I kind of agree with him with is with regards to I.P. law, but for totally different reasons.

What do you guys think of the (in)famous R.M.S?

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Unsafe C# [Unsafe C#]

DigitalDud — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 04:45:35 GMT

It scares me that the C# compiler allows this:

public byte* GetPointer()
{
   fixed (byte* ptr = byteArray)
   {
      return ptr;
   }
}

This effectively returns the pointer to byteArray but leaves it unfixed by the runtime so it can still relocate byteArray whenever it wants. This will eventually leave your pointer pointing to some random memory area.

I think it shouldn't be so easy to take a pointer out of the protection of a fixed block.

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To WPF or not to WPF? [To WPF or not to WPF?]

DigitalDud — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:39:03 GMT

I'm working on an app for my school that displays the status of computer labs in the building (lab map showing workstations that are available/in-use and a graph showing how full the labs are). This will be put up on a few nice big plasma screens.

So...I'd like to do something that has a real hi-fi graphics experience with some nice animations to prevent screen burn-in. WPF would seem to be ideal for this considering that I already wrote a .NET app without the super-splashy graphics.

I have very little knowledge of WPF except of what it does. I'd like to use it but I'm concerned about stablity since it's still in beta. This isn't exactly a mission-critical application but it should be able to run continuously with few restarts.

Can anyone else with more experience with WPF recommend it for an application like this? Should I try doing this in Flash or maybe the low bar and hack together something with managed D3D or GDI+?

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Why bother with CSS support? [Why bother with CSS support?]

DigitalDud — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 10:31:46 GMT

I know the IE team is simply responding to user feedback in adding additional CSS support but I don't think it's wise to support CSS just to say you support standards. Fix bugs, but don't bother with new features. The CSS recommendations aren't very well designed and are full of errata. They had to create CSS 2.1 just to fix all the problems with 2.0, it's been something like 8 years in the making, and last time I checked, it still hasn't been finalized. Maybe we'll see CSS 3 sometime this century if we're lucky (or unlucky). Honestly, I think the W3C is a miserable failure at creating recommendations for the web. XML is great, CSS and XHTML suck. They're not the least bit extensible, are still very restrictive in their ability to layout elements, and are still not that well-defined.

We need a web standard that gives you near unlimited control over what your pages look like without resorting to hacks, scales to high-DPI monitors, logically separates content, logic, and layout, and is an actual standard (ISO/ECMA).

I think Microsoft has the right idea with WPF but it's kind of overkill for web pages. What would be cool is if they released a subset of WPF intended for web site development and sent it to ECMA/ISO much like .NET CLR and C# for standardization. It would be giving web developers a great technologly with huge improvements over HTML/CSS and being made an ISO standard other browsers could implement it (like Mono does the .NET framework) and not fear patent violations, etc. Also it makes good business sense. :D

Sorry for the long rant, just my ten cents.

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