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What Free IDE Do You Use? 1055

Posted by kdawson from the ides-of-may dept.
postermmxvicom writes "I program only occasionally and mostly for personal interest. I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005! I went looking for other free IDEs and came across Code::Blocks and Visual Studio Express. I work from a Windows machine, use C++, and make mostly console apps; but have written a few Windows apps and D3D or OpenGL apps. I wanted to know what free IDEs you use and recommend. What do you like about them? What features do they lack? What about them irritate you (and what do you do to work around these annoyances)? For instance, when I used Visual C++ 6.0 in college, there was an error in getline that had to be fixed, and the code indenting in DevC++ needed to be tweaked to suit my liking."
Networking

Handmade vs. Commercially Produced Ethernet Cables 837

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-wait-a-minute dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We have a T1 line coming into our satellite office and we rely fairly heavily on it to transfer large amounts of data over a VPN to the head office across the country. Recently, we decided to upgrade to a 20 Mbit line. Being the lone IT guy here, it fell on me to run cable from the ISP's box to our server room so I went out and bought a spool of Cat6. I mentioned the purchase and the plan to run the cable myself to my boss in head office and in an emailed response he stated that it's next to impossible to create quality cable (ie: cable that will pass a Time Domain Reflectometer test) by hand without expensive dies, special Ethernet jacks and special cable. He even went so far as to say that handmade cable couldn't compare to even the cheapest Belkin cables. I've never once ran into a problem with handmade patch cables. Do you create your own cable or do you bite the bullet and buy it from some place?"

Comment No, that won't work. (Score 1) 18

by loucura! (#26864835) Attached to: Against Proleatarianism- against Monopoly

Chesterton's system solves this problem rather neatly- only information is traded between communities, and the principle of subsidarity requires the factory be as close to the end consumer as possible, eliminating the need for shipping.

That would only work if natural resources were evenly distributed amongst communities.
Medicine

California Classes LED Component Gallium Arsenide a Carcinogen 495

Posted by timothy from the tooth-fairy-is-a-cat-burglar dept.
Reader LM741N, pointing to a report released this month by California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, writes "Gallium Arsenide has now been listed as a carcinogen. Given the increasing usage of gallium arsenide, the main constituent in LEDs, and their recent championing as more efficient light sources in recent news stories and Slashdot, there may be significant environmental concerns as related to their disposal. Morover, workers in industries using the substance may be at risk of cancer as well."
Media

Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back 751

Posted by kdawson from the what-goes-around-comes-ariynd dept.
theodp writes "Time reports that vinyl records are suddenly cool again. Vinyl has a warmer, more nuanced sound than CDs or MP3s; records feature large album covers with imaginative graphics, pullout photos, and liner notes. 'Bad sound on an iPod has had an impact on a lot of people going back to vinyl,' says 15-year-old David MacRunnel, who owns more than 1,000 records."
Government

National ID Cards Mandated in the US, If You're Under 50 869

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the 1984-is-about-the-good-old-days dept.
charleste writes "CNN is reporting that the US Homeland Security Department has mandated Real ID for drivers licenses. According to the article, this will not include a 'chip', but a list of options by state. Despite legislation passed in various states and objections by groups such as ACLU, this appears to be a done deal. Without one of the new IDs you will be unable to board a plane after 2014 if you are under 50."
Education

Linux To Be Installed In Every Russian School 293

Posted by Zonk from the lots-and-lots-of-penguins dept.
J_Omega writes "According to an article from last week at the Russian IT site CNews, Linux is slated to be installed in every Russian school by 2009. The article makes it appear that it will be going by the (unimaginative) name 'Russian OS.' As stated in the article: 'The main aim of the given work is to reduce dependence on foreign commercial software and provide education institutions with the possibility to choose whether to pay for commercial items or to use the software, provided by the government.' Initial testing installations are supposed to begin next year in select districts. Is 2008/09 the year of Linux on the (Russian) desktop?"
Handhelds

Aids For Communicating With Hospitalized People? 160

Posted by kdawson from the hawking's-computer dept.
charliezcc writes "My grandmother recently fell and broke two vertebrae (among other things) and is in the hospital while she recovers. Thankfully, she was not paralyzed and retains the use of her limbs. However, they have placed her on a respirator and she is virtually unable to communicate with us, so while we try to keep her company during her recovery, our company is reduced to mainly one-sided conversations. Asking her questions, even yes/no questions, is hard because of the neck brace — it turns into a guessing game and very quickly becomes frustrating for both parties. I'm a firm believer in the power of positive mental attitudes and to make her recovery a little better and I'd like to be able to facilitate two-sided conversations with her so she can keep positive. Keeping in mind that she does not have much technology experience, what would you suggest I utilize to ease the communication barrier? I remember seeing devices with a number of buttons that say whatever you program it to say, but I can't find these anymore. What other kind of devices are available?"
Censorship

Submission + - Delete 'em all and let god sort it out (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Exetel, an Australian ISP, has a novel approach to the possibility that copyright material might be hosted on its servers.

It just runs a cron job every night to silently delete all media files.

Yes, you read that right, all .avi, .mp3, .wmv, and .mov files, plus files on another sekrit list of extensions which you're not allowed to know about. "All formats are fair game", warn their admins.

And users don't even get notified it's happened. You wake up in the morning, the files are gone. Then I guess you have to find your way to "Why do my media files keep getting deleted from my free web space?" in their FAQ and take it from there.

Talk about a chilling effect. You can be exempted from their Kafaesque cron job if you sign a kind of Loyalty Oath swearing you own the copyright or have the permission of the owner. So, no fair use then?

They say they're doing it to avoid legal problems, quoting universal v cooper where an Aussie ISP was found liable for encouraging piracy. Only thing is, that case involved a commercial website called mp3s4free which did nothing but offer copyrighted material, and the hosting indisputably company knew all about it, choosing to fight the case on the basis that they didn't host the files, just linked to them.

Copyright law and the internet is a complex subject, but hell, this is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Spam

Fight Spam With Nolisting 410

Posted by kdawson from the noncompliant-spambots dept.
An anonymous reader writes with the technique of Nolisting, which fights spam by specifying a primary MX that is always unavailable. The page is an extensive FAQ and how-to guide that addressed the objections I immediately came up with. From the article: "It has been observed that when a domain has both a primary (high priority, low number) and a secondary (low priority, high number) MX record configured in DNS, overall SMTP connections will decrease when the primary MX is unavailable. This decrease is unexpected because RFC 2821 (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) specifies that a client MUST try and retry each MX address in order, and SHOULD try at least two addresses. It turns out that nearly all violators of this specification exist for the purpose of sending spam or viruses. Nolisting takes advantage of this behavior by configuring a domain's primary MX record to use an IP address that does not have an active service listening on SMTP port 25. RFC-compliant clients will retry delivery to the secondary MX, which is configured to serve the role normally performed by the primary MX)."
The Internet

The Need For A Tagging Standard 200

Posted by Hemos from the tagging-joy dept.
John Carmichael writes "Tags are everywhere now. Not just blogs, but famous news sites, corporate press bulletins, forums, and even Slashdot. That's why it's such a shame that they're rendered almost entirely useless by the lack of a tagging standard with which tags from various sites and tag aggregators like Technorati and Del.icio.us can compare and relate tags to one another. Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the blogosphere — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it. I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.""

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