« first day (2553 days earlier)      last day (2449 days later) » 

Bob
2:16 PM
@BenN Or the other way around. Though last I heard XML was the big new thing for config in MS-land. They had a brief affair with JSON but I think they're back on XML now.
 
Yep, a handful of Group Policy settings take paths to XML files for various things
I've worked with ODBC driver installation and those Registry entries seem to be authoritative, though
Of course, individual drivers/databases might have their own config somewhere else
For example, SQL Anywhere 11 has a PRM (IIRC) file that holds some switches, including logging options
 
Bob
> This quirk of the ECHO command was originally a bug in the command line parser, but once people discovered it, the bug became elevated to a feature.
#JustProgrammingThings
@BenN Oh, I meant MS in general, not specifically MSSQL or ODBC etc
 
Ah
@Bob Why do people use this shell, again?
 
It's the only game in town if you're using DOS.
 
There is something about this...
 
2:33 PM
lol
 
2:48 PM
I sometimes encounter difficulties with formatting, can someone please help me understand whether this is wanted behaviour or a bug that should be reported (how)?
See this question, and specifically the last two lines of my answer at the bottom: superuser.com/questions/1236585
 
How would you like those lines to display?
 
looks ok to me
 
I see a bit of extra vertical blank space between the two code boxes, but inserting a line saying "Or:" would make it look natural
 
@simlev Your breakdown might benefit from list formatting. Your last two code fragments could be easier split with an appropriate header
 
In edit mode, I could have a single blank line in between, but when saved, there is a larger (double) blank line
 
2:53 PM
I see that too
 
Also, the code fragments are long. You should break them into multiple lines, making it even more readable
 
The preview and final version should be consistent, so I'd say that's a bug
You can report a on any meta site, like ours (Meta Super User) or the main one (Meta Stack Exchange)
 
Without a wider shot of the background, I'm tempted to say that this is an upside-up helicopter whose photo has been flipped =P. — E.P. yesterday
 
Bob
@ToxicFrog And why would you be using DOS in 2017?
 
2:56 PM
@Bob you wouldn't, but my theory is that people used DOS in the 90s, got used to it, and have been using it every since even post-{MKS,Cygwin,MSYS,Powershell,Linux-on-Windows}
 
Bob
@ToxicFrog Except MS-DOS hasn't seen a release since before 1995.
And no update since 2000.
 
@BenN @OliverSalzburg thanks for the suggestions
 
You're welcome :)
 
@Bob win95, win98, and winME were all DOS-based, had a DOS shell as the only command line interface, and often required futzing around in Actual DOS to e.g. get games working.
WinNT and I think Win2k didn't see widespread non-business adoption, so this is the status quo until winXP lands in...2003?
 
@Bob retro gaming or working on an ATM
 
2:58 PM
People in the MS ecosystem definitely had lots of time to get used to COMMAND.COM even after MS-DOS ceased getting releases as an independent product.
 
Bob
Windows cmd, as quirky as it is, is not DOS. So barring the few people still on 98, no one is using DOS.
 
(and this is ignoring embedded systems or legacy UIs that run on DOS, or non-MS DOS platforms)
 
Bob
@ToxicFrog Those would fall under the updates up till 2000.
 
@Bob cmd.exe isn't DOS but mimics it. win95/98/ME used Actual DOS.
 
Bob
They were not standalone releases.
@ToxicFrog It doesn't even come close to mimicking it, considering one is an operating system... it happens to share similar syntax (which has since diverged).
A good deal of modern scripts rely on extensions and even syntax differences.
 
3:01 PM
I no longer have any idea what your point is.
 
well that was interesting...
 
Bob
(I tried installing 98 recently. Even using the command interpreter was ... an experience.)
 
BenN was wondering why people used this shell, I pointed out that variations on it were the only command line shell built into MS operating systems until very recent;ly.
 
FF shot up from 2GB to 5GB RAM and didn't fall over
 
So people have had lots of time to get familiar with it and/or build systems that depend on it.
 
Bob
3:04 PM
@ToxicFrog My point? DOS != cmd, and then just some commentary.
@Burgi All the ATMs I've seen are running either XP or 7 Embedded. Was kinda surprising actually... I was expecting *nix *shrug*
I think the supermarket checkouts use 7
McDonald's ordering was probably 7 too?
 
Girlfriend: Oh, so you can see without specs?
Me: Yeah, but it's like someone JPEGed my world...
 
Bob
I wonder if anyone's rolling out 10 Embedded yet.
 
@Rahul2001 that seems to be the general trend of "government security experts" everywhere, since at least early 90s
 
3:19 PM
The latest version of DOS was released in 2015 :)
> MS-DOS Mobile 1.0 (Windows Phone) – This version was an April Fools' Day joke in 2015 by Microsoft. It is available on the Microsoft Store.
 
hmmm
cisco ios...
dialer0 b/w shows it's 56k o_O
 
@DavidPostill thats a real joke because no-one has a windows phone...
 
bye
 
3:39 PM
@simlev
0
A: Displayed answer not consistent with edit mode

DavidPostillTo display a single blank line between your two code lines you can separate them using: <!-- comment --> Followed by a blank line: awk 'BEGIN {RS="\0"} {match($0,/templateUrl: .*/,m); gsub("templateUrl: .*","templateUrl: templateUrl"); print "var "m[0]$0}' * <!-- comment --> awk -i '/templat...

 
16 mins ago, by Burgi
@DavidPostill thats a real joke because no-one has a windows phone...
 
@DavidPostill You might want to put the stuff after "This displays as:" in a quote to make what is displayed clearer...
 
@DavidPostill Thanks, I'm learning here...
 
@Rahul2001 No no no. Quoting screws up the formatting :)
 
3:54 PM
@DavidPostill lol :P
 
@DavidPostill How does it go about? Can I accept your answer (because it is satisfactory) or would this mean the bug is not a bug?
@DavidPostill Ok, I saw your comment.
 
Bob
hm
 
4:13 PM
Quick question about command line arguments on Windows
exec \\ - Argument passed is \\
 
Use multiple backticks to stop Markdown from eating your backslashes
 
exec \" - Argument passed is "
exec \\" - Argument passed is \
exec \\\" - Argument passed is \"
The last two don't make any sense...
@BenN yep :)
 
I'm pretty sure the backslash isn't actually an escape character in cmd
 
I tested these and it gets all of those verbatim
 
4:17 PM
@BenN It is supposed to be for quotes, apparently...?
 
I suspect the C runtime may be messing with you
Test with powershell -c [environment]::commandline # <insert test stuff here>
 
@BenN :|
 
Is the program still responsible for command line argument processing in powershell, or did they finally move that responsibility to the shell?
 
That PowerShell command prints the command line exactly as the process gets it with no extra processing (unlike $args)
 
@simlev You can accept the answer. It will still be tagged and the devs will eventually look at it :)
 
4:21 PM
@DavidPostill they've already accepted :)
 
@Rahul2001 So I see :)
 
@BenN ow. Well...
 
Remember, the OS just gives the process a command line as one block of text
The section called "The OS parses command line arguments first" is incorrect, at least on Windows
Well, it's almost correct - the C runtime does parse command-line arguments first, so that you can get the arguments as an array instead of one big chunk
 
@BenN Hm, I'm on C++, but I don't think that makes any difference?
 
I'm pretty sure the runtime library is still doing things with the command line
If you're getting the arguments as an array in the first place, some processing has been done for you
 
4:27 PM
@BenN So either the runtime does stuff incorrectly or the page is inaccurate?
 
The runtime just does what it does - the page is inaccurate
 
huh, okay, thanks
 
One could argue that what the runtime does is weird or inconvenient, but one can't really say it's wrong unless there's a standard
 
@BenN There was this document on how command line args are parsed in different OSs which I read a few months ago, but I cannot find it anymore...
 
@Rahul2001 FWIW that statement is correct for UNIX and Linux, but since that page seems to be windows-oriented..
(well, correct-ish; in *nix it's the shell that does the parsing. But one could reasonably argue that the shell counts as part of "the OS".)
 
4:30 PM
@Burgi back in 2015 I used it
honestly it was better than both ios and android before windows 10 mobile. Windows Phone 8.1 is/was the fluidest OS I honestly ever used.
 
There is a Windows API function to digest a command line into arguments, but the OS won't do anything to your command line unless you ask for it
 
@Avery Yep, Windows Phone is pretty cool, it's a real pity that it never caught on...
 
yes yes
I dislike windows but I really liked windows phone
 
@Avery Everyone I've met who has used it always says "It's honestly not as bad as you think..."
 
^ actually a good debugging strategy
 
4:41 PM
151
Q: Sunsetting Documentation

Jon Ericson We will stop accepting contributions to Documentation on August 8 On behalf of everyone who worked on Documentation, I want to thank all 15,451 users who contributed. We particularly want to acknowledge the 294 people who tested the private beta and the 2,361 who pounded on the public beta in ...

 
@BenN hahahahaha
"Hey object, what methods do you have?"
 
$object | Get-Member -Type Method
3
 
$benn | Get-Reason-To { Write-Host -Language PowerShell }
 
In software engineering, rubber duck debugging or rubber ducking is a method of debugging code. The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck. Many other terms exist for this technique, often involving different inanimate objects. Many programmers have had the experience of explaining a programming problem to someone else, possibly even to someone who knows nothing about programming, and then hitting upon the solution in the process...
 
5:05 PM
ps/2
next question
 
USB. Fite me
 
NVIDIA, in a bit of a surprise move, decides to enable increased workstation performance on the TITAN X cards in a driver update.
 
@ToxicFrog well, depends on what you want
 
This is apparently in response to the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition card, which ships with full workstation application support.
 
If you want universality and simplicity, usb
If you want the concurrent click and thingy thingy then ps/2
 
5:18 PM
"click and thingy thingy"?
 
uh, the ability to deliver more input at the same time etc
 
Rollover?
 
I know that they're used by some professional gamers and stuff
 
That's a property of the keyboard's key scanning circuitry, not what interface it uses
 
for my usecase it's unnecessary and likely too clumsy
 
5:21 PM
You can get NKRO keyboards using both PS/2 and USB
 
5:58 PM
@bwDraco is that not just gonna cause issues with cards running out of what was previously 'spec' ?!
 
@Bob Because it has sucky package management ftw
 
6:35 PM
@ToxicFrog rollover on USB is buggy and complicated
Most keyboards require custom software, and will show up as multiple devices, which messes up during BIOS
 
@bwDraco that's reeeeeeally shady
No one releases a high performance computing electronics product on the market and then later on goes "whoops, we found 3x more performance under the rug with a software update"
unless they intentionally were holding it back
what a fiasco - Nvidia should be sued
 
Weird
It really is a shame that NVidia is so shady when they make the best cards.
I want to not buy from them on principle, (principal?) but they're really just hands down the best option.
And I actually just bought a 1070 so...
 
6:51 PM
@DJMcMayhem principle...
 
Wow, apparently the Vega is comparable to the 1080 for a good 300$ cheaper
 
@DJMcMayhem Unfortunately, due to HBM2 and being a new product launch, for the first ~6 months scalpers are going to buy up the cards and sell them higher by about 2 to 3x the MSRP, because they're going to be in extremely short supply, both because of the gaming value appeal, and doubly so because of Ethereum
In practice it's going to end up being about twice as expensive as the 1080, which is comparatively flooding the market, for a reasonable person without impressive shopping skills to get one
I wouldn't be surprised to see them sell for $1000
when demand outstrips supply by this much, expect the parasites, the scum of the earth, to instantly buy them up the nanosecond they go on sale for preorder, and have them sold out at normal-priced sites until 2018, then sell all their stock on ebay and amazon third party sellers for $1000
 
7:08 PM
I am working with 4 screens ATM and I approve of this
 
@allquixotic Yeah... That's pretty much what happened to the 1070s
I had to look for one for almost a month before finding one that was <500$ and in stock
And the MSRP is 400
 
@DJMcMayhem and it isn't helped by the fact that AMD's architecture is far more efficient than Nvidia's for mining Ethereum (altcoin), and Ethereum mining is insanely popular right now
everyone is leaping at the chance to make an extra $30/month mining
 
AMD is more efficient for Etherium mining? I've never heard that before
 
hell, it's hard to find an RX 480 or RX 580 on the market right now, and Vega is going to trounce Polaris in performance
 
I think that more ram = better for mining
 
7:10 PM
@DJMcMayhem oh yeah, by far
my RX 580 gets around 25 MH/s and retails around $300; my GTX 1080 cost more than twice as much and gets around 20 MH/s
 
Forgive the noob question, but what's MH?
I know nothing about cryptocurrencies
 
I think Vega 64 might be able to sniff 50 MH/s in a single card, and when you have to consider both purchase price and ongoing energy costs of motherboard, storage, CPU, RAM and case fans for multi-GPU / multi-system mining setups, you definitely want to get the most MH/s out of each PCIe lane you have
 
The mining craze is still not over :(
 
Hmm. I have a r9 290 (super old, I know). Would that be able to make anything in Etherium?
 
it's all about bitcoin cash now haha
 
7:12 PM
@DJMcMayhem cryptocurrency mining involves brute forcing a cryptographically hard math problem that could only in principle be solved efficiently by a sufficiently complex quantum computer (but this is yet to be done in practice)
 
what's up w/ bch
 
whoever manages to luck into brute forcing it and submitting their "answer" to the pool first, gets a credit of cryptocurrency in their wallet
 
how much is the price of a bch
 
@Rahul2001 AIUI there's two ways to handle it, one is properly implementing the USB HID protocol and the other is implementing the "compatibility HID" protocol and then pretending to be multiple keyboards
 
I knew that. But I'm not sure what MH is
 
7:13 PM
last i checked it was like 180
 
@DJMcMayhem megahashes
 
and first block was still not mined
 
1 hash per second (1 H/s) means you can try one hash per second to try and guess the answer
1 megahash (MH/s) means you can try a million
 
ooh, bch is around $350
it might actually take off
 
7:14 PM
And this is one of the reasons I hate cryptocurrencies.
 
the more mining rigs you have, the more consistently you will "mine a block", which gives you 5 Ethereum, worth between $500 and $2000 lately depending on the market forces
 
Someone should make one where the proof-of-work involves solving folding@home work units or something else productive.
3
 
Huh, apparently r9 290s can get 30 MH/s
 
I know there's real money to be made in cryptocurrency, but I'm buying graphics cards for gaming, not for mining.
 
Rather than just throwing away the energy intake of a small country on waste heat and a high-speed replay of "why we have banking regulations"
 
7:15 PM
@bwDraco except you can't
 
@ToxicFrog it's a huge waste of energy, but not much worse than the huge waste of energy of paying people enormous salaries to play the stock market and do HFT; the cost of their parasitic behavior just so they can profiteer off of others' retirement and pension funds, etc. is not worth it because most of what they spend is going to consume fossil fuels... driving expensive cars, eating expensive food shipped all across the world to them, etc.
 
there's a difficulty of finding GPUs thanks to miners
 
in fact I'd argue the HFT system is far, far worse because it's computers and extremely rich people who live decadent, wasteful lives
 
@allquixotic Since you actually have Ethereum experience, how much money have you made? If I start mining with my Home PC 24/7, should I actually expect to earn anything?
 
@DJMcMayhem I've made about 30 cents
 
7:16 PM
home computer? likely not.
 
@allquixotic right, this is an argument in favour of burning down both, not "lol nothing matters mine btc all day every day"
 
the chances of solo mining a block with anything short of about 50 GPUs (which will have to be Vega 64 to keep up, once they hit the market, otherwise you'll be left in the dust) are extraordinarily low; you might be lucky to mine one block per 1-2 years on a single GPU setup
 
@allquixotic Good to know. It sounds like it's not worth the energy bill it would take, lol
 
ASIC [eth is asic resistant though] or a high end GPU? Likely not enough to pay for the electricity.
 
pool mining gives you consistent, low rewards
 
7:17 PM
Like, thing is bad, but that doesn't mean other thing can't also be bad.
 
@ToxicFrog agreed, just making sure you're aware :)
 
Ethereum PoW is designed so that there's a sharp cutoff between being able to mine profitably and not being able to do so.
 
@allquixotic Oh, that actually makes sense. I've heard that lucking out is possible (which makes sense giving the nature of hashing), but I've also heard that all work is rewarded (which makes sense given pool mining exists). I didn't realize there were 2 different ways of mining, so I was really confused.
 
@DJMcMayhem unless you can afford an up-front purchase around $15000 minimum and build several efficient rigs, and assuming the cost of electricity where you live is low or you live in an extremely cold climate where the heat generated actually will reduce your heating bill, the only way I'd recommend mining is if you can get someone else to pay for the electricity
 
This is a consequence of its design where difficulty affects memory usage.
 
7:19 PM
@DJMcMayhem solo mining is effectively competing against the pools, which means 99.9999...% of the time you will lose because the pools are the vast majority of the mining capacity of the network
 
@allquixotic Curses! Why did I move out of my parents house?!?!
I could be rich now!
 
I've heard of successful solo miners in the early days that had like 3 GPUs and were profitable, quite profitable, but the more people jump on board, the worse it gets
the margins are pretty slim for small scale shops now, and mining pools take a cut of what you contribute in exchange for providing consistent rewards
 
no coin is like that anymore sadly
 
Hmm. I've never chatted in here before...
I like it.
I might stick around :P
 
you might gross around $20 to $30 USD per month with a couple RX 580s right now with Ethereum, but your electricity cost might be $15 or more
unless you live in Alaska or Antarctica, in which case, go outside, dismantle your heating unit for your dwelling, sell it to the highest bidder, and buy mining rigs with the return
 
7:22 PM
@allquixotic Is there a USD/MH rate?
(although it's probably measured in GigaHashes)
 
depends on coin
 
@allquixotic I mean, there's also some sensitizing taking place here, because I interact with people who think cryptocurrencies are awesome way more than I interact with people who run HFT systems.
 
Ethereum
 
@DJMcMayhem there are calculators that estimate it, assuming 24/7 operation, and it's about half for pool mining compared to solo mining at scale, and extremely variable as the cost of Ethereum jumps around like a rabid fish out of water
 
TBF at this point just paying someone else to mine for you is just simpler
you make less profits but initial entry cost is less
 
7:25 PM
below a certain 24/7 MH rate the return is "pretty much nothing" over the sample size of a month or two; above that rate you'll get "something" from pool mining; far far above that rate still, you will get "something" from successfully solo mining a block every X days on average
you also need a very low latency internet connection to be the winner, because sometimes you will mine out the block, submit your result, but somebody else got to it first due to network latency
 
TBH, you'll probably make more money designing your own cryptocurrency and convincing someone else to start using it :P
 
the winners are pool owners that get lots of people on board with them, and people who manipulate the market with FUD fake news about the Ethereum dev dying to drive down prices, etc
 
I think AMD will try to allocate stock towards Radeon Vega Packs in an effort to ensure availability for gamers.
 
True true, though the way cryptos work, I'm not sure you can just reward coins randomly
 
the winners are basically people who either cheat or run the system or have an extremely ideal environmental condition like extremely cold climate
or they have the ability to pull significant KW off of someone else's electricity without being noticed / cared about
people have stolen power from their workplace to cryptomine before; some got fired, some never did
 
7:27 PM
I read some article talking about bitcoin farms in specific parts of china
parts where govt pays for a part of electricity etc
 
How to make gdisk force write
 
also, if you "mine" your own electricity, at some points in the energy supply/demand lifecycle, say, if you own a wind farm or a solar farm, you might make more money cryptomining either BTC or ETH compared to selling that energy to someone else to use via the grid
and then assuming you don't burn out your hardware mining you can flood the market with used GPUs when they're obsolete and make a significant chunk of your initial investment back too
 
@AnArrayOfFunctions man gdisk
 
it's possible but you really have to put a lot of time and energy and effort into it
 
I'm using windows
 
7:29 PM
the common man with 1 x average GPU isn't going to pull in much, if anything
 
plus there is a reason I'm asking here dont you think
@Avery
 
@AnArrayOfFunctions what do you mean by "force write" here?
 
Well here it goes
 
I gtg o/
 
When I type w it says:
Warning! Secondary partition table overlaps the last partition by
33 blocks!
You will need to delete this partition or resize it in another utility.
It's written on the end of the disk
 
7:31 PM
1) slow down with the profanity
 
laughing... completely disincentivized to assist in any way by the vitriolic attitude
 
2) having stuff overlap even when you don't care is going to cause unwanted issues
3) just resize last partition and make it smaller by 33 blocks will ya?
 
Well heck yeah I'm starting IDA PRO and hijacking this stupid program
 
@AnArrayOfFunctions the secondary GPT is mandatory; if you need to use that portion of the disk, use a DOS disklabel instead.
 
Hey everyone
 
7:33 PM
If you store non-GPT data in there expect disk management tools to assume your disk is horribly fucked up and needs to be repaired.
 
@allquixotic Generally, I don't care about profanity. I try to help regardless.
(you might question the morality of doing this; your thoughts?)
 
If you want to ignore that, it's probably easier to build a version of gdisk from source that will let you create broken disklabels than it is to use IDA.
 
if you're on windows just use disk manager and just resize it.
 
isn't 33 blocks like 135 KiB even on a disk with 4kn blocks?
 
@allquixotic: is this attitude wrong?
 
7:36 PM
can't imagine a disk small enough for that to matter at all that also needs GPT for any reason
I have $0.10 contactless credit card chips with more storage than that
 
It is never wrong to help someone. It is also never wrong to keep language professional/ collegiate.
 
IMO your attitude is acceptable and nice, but people swearing randomly gets me annoyed, tbf, and that makes me want to help less.
 
Yep, feel free to disengage if someone makes you uncomfortable
 
@bwDraco oh, I don't care about the profanity, either; I didn't flag anything... just not a fan of someone coming in and posting angry, then disregarding our advice and (lol) raging that they're going to use a professional disassembler to hack an open source program to save a few KiB
 
And if someone does want to help anyway (cc @bwDraco), that's fine too
 
7:38 PM
let that sink in: hack an open source program :P
 
While I generally try to avoid using profanity, when I post answers, I tend to be rather agnostic about the language used as long as I can understand it.
Yeah. That is just not necessary.
 
I mean, anyone who's capable enough with software to be legitimately useful with IDA Pro, I would think, would not need to get help on an issue like this -- they'd probably be able to reason through it rationally and either (1) not care about the wasted space, or (2) if they really do care, edit the source code and recompile since it's about 100 times easier
 
Or use a DOS disklabel.
 
or that
 
...or edit the primary GPT with a hex editor after writing it normally
 
7:40 PM
In any case, that question is probably best suited to a main site
 
Probably going to get the same responses there :P
 
Ben N has a good point about disengaging. Disengaging is generally the most effective way to extinguish unwanted behavior, short of kicking the user. @bwDraco Such as your tactic of ignoring the language and just focusing on the problem -- great strategy.
 
Eh, on the mainsite it'd likely get closed (even if posted with a clear head and with clear "What did I try" steps, etc.) as "Unclear what you're asking" or "Off topic"
 
@allquixotic Sorry to say that but you are dumb
 
Hello, I haven't seen you around before
 
7:46 PM
@sasho648 ???
 
@sasho648 That is borderline abusive. Be nice applies in chat as well as the main site.
 
No offense
 
are you possibly a sock of anarrayoffunctions?
 
Yeah I am
 
Using socks to get around suspensions can get you in big trouble. Just so you know
 
7:48 PM
using socks to evade bans is a bannable offense, I'd recommend you to leave now and return when your suspension expires
 
I have the second account for long time
 
Using socks to get around suspensions is unacceptable, especially when one continues to be un-nice to other users. You may return tomorrow.
 
Well, technically they can return in 14 minutes... :P
 
The sock account can return tomorrow :)
 
@sasho648 Also, I really couldn't care less what you think of me. From your behavior so far across two accounts I have extremely little respect for you and your approach to solving problems and interacting with other people. When I have little respect for someone, what they claim that I am, without knowing me at all, means basically nothing to me. I hope you felt better saying it, though. :)
 
7:55 PM
If array comes back he may also face a longer suspension :)
 
Inspirobot, why
 
@allquixotic I have no idea how to parse that
 
@DJMcMayhem Some of Inspirobot's messages are extremely, uh.... incoherent :)
 

« first day (2553 days earlier)      last day (2449 days later) »