Messages

1

Living Room / Re: Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing at alrming rate?

« on: January 21, 2009, 02:03 AM »

Seems there was something wrong with the firmware fix. Seagate have removed it and are working on a new one according to this theinquirer article

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/530/1050530/seagate-bungles-firmware-update

Adding insult to already injured customers, there are reports streaming in to our inboxes of users who have attempted the firmware flash and have ended up with bricked drives.

Seagate has hastily removed the doubly-offending firmware before any more customers get their drives killed and is advising that a new firmware will be ready in 24-48 hours time.

2

General Software Discussion / Re: IDEA: CD-RW/DVD-RW emulated drive?

« on: June 12, 2008, 11:47 AM »

Carol, it looks like a virtual cd/dvd writer actually has emerged. I noticed this app as I was reading the cdfreaks.com news and kinda remembered this old thread

H+H software has announced what it claims to be the world's first virtual recorder that handles every optical media format....

http://www.cdfreaks....s-Phantom-Drive.html

3

Living Room / Interesting new article series by Darek Mihocka

« on: November 26, 2007, 01:22 PM »

Darek Mihocka over at emulators.com has written a series of articles recently, covering, his view of some things that have happened in the computer industry since he began working back in the 80's, flaws in CPUs/operating systems, compilers, ways corporations cheat consumers and what he thinks is the next killer app, to name a few things.

In coming weeks I'll also take the "hype" out of "hypervisors", explain why Microsoft should dump the entire Windows programming model, and pose the question "with Gateway gone, should Dell worry?".

http://www.emulators.../docs/nx01_intro.htm


I believe a total of 11 articles are available at the time of writing this. Most of them are highly technical, describing low level virtual machines details, or in-depth explanations on how some part of a CPU works, but some are easy to understand. I can recommend the part about standards and why we should not accept proprietary or DRM'ed things:

http://www.emulators...s/nx02_standards.htm

In the chapter called "One night in Paris" he explains what he thinks is the next killer app:
http://www.emulators.../docs/nx07_vm101.htm

I believe it would be the next killer application for some company like Google to provide virtual machine hosting services on the web, for hotels and airports to rent laptop computers, and for yours truly to develop the virtual machine client technology to host virtual machines on any PC, Mac, even my Playstation 3. This would allow one not only to "remote desktop" into a virtual machine, but to actually migrate it (either move it or clone it) to the local computer.

He also gives detailed explanations to this view of his...

I am firmly convinced that much of the past 20 years worth of progress in personal computers - from the extra complexity added to microprocessors to the entire "software stack" upon which the Windows operating system, its device drivers, its runtimes, and its applications are built upon - should be re-evaluated and redesigned from the ground up.

4

General Software Discussion / The great defrag shootout

« on: June 11, 2007, 12:36 PM »

Donn Edwards has written a comprehensive review, called "The great defrag shootout", covering just about every defrag app out there for the Windows platform. It is an interesting read and Donn clearly has spent a lot of time on this defrag investigation of his.

http://donnedwards.o...shootout-part-1.html

[modified to attach image]

5

Living Room / Free Acronis TrueImage for Seagate/Maxtor HDD owners

« on: May 23, 2007, 11:26 AM »

According to The Inquirer Seagate and Maxtor (acquired by Seagate some years ago) ship a free version of one of the tools recommended by donationcoder.com with their HDDs: Acronis TrueImage

http://www.theinquir...t.aspx?article=39779

I am not sure if you need any special HDD, such as an external one, to get this software for free, but it might be worth checking this out if you either own one of those drives, plan to buy one...or even plan to buy Acronis TrueImage. Buy a HDD instead and get the software with the drive...

6

Living Room / McAfee reports where the dangers of the www lurk

« on: April 12, 2007, 02:56 PM »

A study called "Mapping the Mal Web" has been written by McAfee SiteAdvisor. It is based on analysis data from massive tests of website exploits, downloads, the "spamminess" of the sites et cetera ( I reckon they use automatic tests of some kind for this ).

http://www.siteadvis..._malweb_mar2007.html

It is an interesting read, but most of it was expected, e.g. the most risky sites are the ones in eastern Europe, Russia and China. What surprised me a bit was the result of the .info sites.

A stunning 73.2% of the more than 6,000 .info sites that we have tested for e-mail practices are rated risky, meaning that SiteAdvisor registrations at these sites resulted in the receipt of high volume e-mail, spammy e-mail or both.

[edited to attach image]

7

Found Deals and Discounts / Christmas discount for various popular applications

« on: December 24, 2006, 03:17 PM »

I decided to have a look around the web and see if any software that had been recommeded by DC in the past now was available at a christmas discount. This is what I found...I happened to stumble upon some other software as well that had a christmas discount.

Acronis offers discount if you buy several of their products:
http://eu.acronis.com/homecomputing/holidays/2006/

Buy one license and get a second one free says Kaspersky about Internet Security...
http://www.kaspersky.com/christmaspromo06

25% off on Xara products
http://www.xara.com/

Agnitum offer one extra year of updates and support. Personally I have been an Agnitum Outpost user for a couple of years, but I am thinking of installing another firewall due to stability problems.
http://www.agnitum.com/purchase/outpost/index_christmas.php

$5 to $20 discount from Slysoft
http://www.slysoft.com/en/

Genie soft gives you File Access Manager for free if you buy Genie Backup Manager Home or Pro:
http://www.genie-soft.com/

..and finally. My favourite e-mail client: The Bat!
Ritlabs has a generous 30% discount for single user licenses and a 50% discount on upgrade licenses to v3 of The Bat. By the way, if you install 3.95 you get a nice looking santa bat in the splash screen 
http://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/news_detail.php?ID=1740

8

Living Room / Re: Agnitum Outpost 4 .... dumped

« on: December 02, 2006, 04:03 PM »

Here is a fresh Leak-test analysis from some people that seem to know their stuff. It is interesting to see that Comodo comes out at top while some more widespread ones, like Norton and F-Secure perform so poorly (not that much a surprise though...).

http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/leak-tests-results.php


They accuse Agnitum of cheating a bit:

Another important result of our tests is firewall scoring against FPR. FPR stands for Fake Protection Revealer. This leak-test was implemented to reveal cheating on leak-tests. Outpost Firewall PRO 4.0 (971.584.079) was convicted of such cheating.

Here is a review of Agnitum Outpost 4
http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/Outpost-Firewall-PRO-4.0-(964.582.059)/

Some interesting quotes regarding security/stability:

Not only the design but also its implementation is imperfect in Outpost. We have found components of Outpost that are more buggy than working. All these results in a very unstable application that is likely to have compatibility problems with common security software. Because of this, we can not recommend using Outpost.

However, 42% performance reduction while working with files, registry and processes can be very painful. This is probably caused by the extensive number of hooks that Outpost implements to fulfil its security design. Hardware requirements of Outpost Firewall PRO are bigger than requirements of competitive products.

In the end Agnitum Outpost ended up at 2nd place after ZoneAlarm in their test of the five top personal firewalls.

Being an Outpost user for years I have had my share of problems with this application ( BSODs and random reboots for example ) and I am still using v3.5 due to all the bad things I have read about 4.0. I am actually considering to migrate to Comodo in the near future.

9

Living Room / Leonids meteor shower visible tonight

« on: November 18, 2006, 07:11 PM »

The Leonids meteor shower should be visible tonight, given that the sky is clear and the amount of light pollution is low.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonids

You might wonder what meteor showers has to do with software...well there is a great open source app called Stellarium that can be used to locate stars, planets, constellations. It really is a great piece of software and worth checking out:

http://www.stellarium.org/

So, if you have the opportunity and the sky is clear. Check out where the "Leo" constellation is using Stellarium and have a walk looking at the stars...and hopefully some falling ones too.

10

Living Room / Using GPUs to accelerate computations

« on: November 10, 2006, 01:09 PM »

An interesting feature of the current, and future, generation of graphics processing units, GPU, is their ability to be programmed to process a massive amount of data in parallel...and the application using the GPU to accelerate data processing does not even have to be graphics related.

Stanford University recently upgraded their Folding@Home software ( works pretty much like SETI@Home, but is used to gain greater knowledge about diseases like cancer, Alzheimers disease etc) to make use of the power in the ATI GPUs, resulting in a massive performance increase.


http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html

By writing highly optimized, hand tuned code to run on ATI X1900 class GPU’s, the science of Folding@home will see another 20x to 30x speed increase over its previous software (Gromacs) for certain applications. This great speed increase is achieved by running essentially the complete molecular dynamics calculation on the GPU

Recently NVidia released their latest generation of graphics cards, the 8800 series, using the G80 GPU, supporting "General purpose processing". What is especially cool with the latest gadget from NVidia is that they have developed a C compiler to make it easier for a programmer to use the GPU for general purpose processing. Check out this page on Anandtech.


http://www.anandtech....aspx?i=2870&p=8


It sure will be interesting to see when ordinary CPU intense apps start to use GPU:s to speed up the data processing. Apps that benefit the most are of course those that gain the most from running multiple threads, i.e. dual core friendly apps, and the algorithm must also process data in ways that the GPU is especially good at.

Media encoders would benefit a lot. I sure wouldn't mind a 10 times faster mpeg4 or mpeg2 encoder. ATI actually made a Video converter that used the GPU in their X1xxx series of grahpics cards, but according to people that know about video quality it was fast but the quality was poor compared to the good free ones available...

11

General Software Discussion / Eight security sandboxes reviewed by Gizmo

« on: October 28, 2006, 11:03 AM »

Gizmo over at Tech Support Alert has reviewed a number of security sandboxes.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/security_virtualization.htm

It is an interesting read...

Has anyone here tried any of them and had a bad experience of any kind? Like incompatibility with antivirus software, firewall, defragmentation apps etc..

12

Living Room / D-Link routers vulnerable to remote attack

« on: August 15, 2006, 07:11 AM »

Reports of new vulnerabilities pop up every now and then. An unchecked buffer in a piece of software could easily slip through code reviews and testing. If found and exploited, it could lead to total control over a computer or even network.

According to the following eEye report several D-Link routers can be attacked remotely, leading to total control of the router, and possibility to get into the network it protects.

http://www.eeye.com/...ries/AD20060714.html

Like I said, bugs like these are found every now and then in software and hardware devices (e.g. HP printers), but what is interesting here is that apparently D-Link has not bothered to fix it even though it was reported to them back in February! It tells you a bit how interested they seem to be to fix problems with their products.

Here is some more detailed information:
http://www.blackhat....06/bh-eu-06-Jack.pdf

Funny cat & dog pic on page 25 btw..

13

Living Room / Re: First Blu-ray Drive Won’t Play Blu-ray Movies !!!

« on: August 12, 2006, 09:41 AM »

Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible.

Weird. I googled a bit and found this:

http://www.asus.com/...1313&modelmenu=1

..and Asus is not the only company. Sapphire has some HDCP/HDMI cards as well it seems

http://www.boxgods.c...n=Article&ID=215

The second reason, according to Bautista, is that BD playback software that can decrypt HDCP isn't "released as a saleable item yet".

Not that I have tried to play anything Blu-Ray -ish on my PC (well.. Sony, claims it is not possible anyway at this point), but I googled a bit further and found this. Cyberlink and NVidia believes it might work:
http://www.cyberlink...s_room/view_842.html
http://phx.corporate...70130&highlight=

That Cyberlink press release is well over a year old.

14

Living Room / Re: New WEP attack found - cracks in seconds

« on: August 11, 2006, 05:21 AM »

regarding MAC addresses. From security point of view MAC addresses shall not be relied upon since they are available in the ip packets, thus an attacker is able to see the MAC addresses of the computers communicating in a wireless network and may change the MAC address of his NIC (possible using software) to match one of them.
One thing that MAC addresses are really useful for is to create a static DHCP list.

15

Living Room / New WEP attack found - cracks in seconds

« on: August 11, 2006, 05:05 AM »

It is not really news that WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) has been severely broken for a long time (major design flaws), but recently a paper revealed new ways of attacking the security protocol that effectively renders it totally useless.

Check out this page:
http://blogs.msdn.co...06/08/07/690912.aspx

To be secure, migrate to WPA/WPA2.

Still, WEP is better than nothing at all since it still protects from neighbors accidently using your router as a gateway to the Internet...but that's about it.

16

General Software Discussion / Re: Photo panorama creation

« on: August 05, 2006, 10:53 AM »

HDR is something I have yet to explore, though the tests I have made indicate that Autopano registers and aligns the images automatically. Check out the Autopano online wiki documentation, it has a HDR tutorial.

17

General Software Discussion / Re: Photo panorama creation

« on: August 03, 2006, 06:24 AM »

Just to clarify things. I did not shoot that image, a photographer named Dave Melges did. He wrote in a post over at dpreview.com that he used Autopano Pro to make it. Someone posted a link to it on the Autopano forum as well.

I have been playing a bit with Autopano Pro myself lately, processing lots of photos from a vacation to Iceland. Really neat app.

18

General Software Discussion / Re: Photo panorama creation

« on: August 02, 2006, 02:59 PM »

Here is a cool panorama that has been made with Autopano Pro

http://davemelges.co...ilverleafdemoone.htm

19

Best E-mail Client / Re: The Bat! - annoying word wrap

« on: August 01, 2006, 01:28 PM »

thx Ampa!

That sure makes The Bat a bit easier to live with. I actually considered using another e-mail client because of this , but this solution will work for me. I do still think it would be better if the words could flow automatically to the next line though.

20

Best E-mail Client / The Bat! - annoying word wrap

« on: August 01, 2006, 12:36 PM »

The Bat is a great e-mail client in lots of ways, but there is one thing that has annoyed me like hell for a long time, the word wrap feature.
Let me give you an example. Lets say I write a couple of sentences (due to extreme lack of imagination I have copied some parts of mousers latest newsletter).

We've just added a big new feature to the website that we
are really excited about and proud of, called Best Of Blog. 
It's designed for the casual reader; a daily blog highlighting
the best and most interesting threads on the forum every day.

Word wrap will kick in after 70 chars or so by default. The annoying thing is that if I want to change something in a sentence word wrapping does not make the words "flow" onto the next line like one would expect, instead the line gets longer until I press space somewhere somewhere at the end of it.

Below I have added some words to show the problem.

We've just added a big super cool new feature to the already magnificent website that we
are really excited about and proud of, called Best Of Blog. 
It's designed for the casual reader; a daily blog highlighting
the best and most interesting threads on the forum every day.

..and when I enter a space after "magificent" it becomes

We've just added a big super cool new feature to the already
magnificent website that we
are really excited about and proud of, called Best Of Blog. 
It's designed for the casual reader; a daily blog highlighting
the best and most interesting threads on the forum every day.

This annoys me a lot and causes some manual editing to get the text neatly aligned.

Does anyone have a solution for this problem? I have been searching the net and changed setting but failed to come up with any solution to the problem so far.

21

Backup Guide / Good new Acronis TrueImage vs. Norton Ghost review

« on: March 20, 2006, 11:13 AM »

I believe there has been some threads in this forum in the past regarding imaging apps such as Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage..and a donationcoder review of course. Here is a brand new review that compares the two.

http://www.techsuppo...-imaging-reviews.htm

Check out the part where the author is in contact with both Acronis support and Symantec..it is quite interesting.

To summarize the review: TrueImage beats Ghost. It is cheaper and better. Acronis support is better. Ghost still seems to suffer from corrupt images.

22

What's the Best? / Re: Anti-Virus Package

« on: March 02, 2006, 11:32 AM »

Been using NOD32 for a couple of years now and at the moment I would not replace it with anything else out there. I actually have a license for Norton Antivirus as well that I got from work but that thing is not coming anywhere near my computer because of the bloatness.

Not only does NOD32 excel when it comes to heuristic detection, it actually rocks as well...well, according to ESET that is 

Check this out:

http://www.eset.com/...bout/nod32-rocks.htm

23

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: Välkommen!

« on: November 17, 2005, 07:15 AM »

Den här sektionen är till för att hjälpa dig med frågor eller svårigheter du kanske har rörande vårt licensnyckelsystem; men även andra problem du kanske har om ditt modersmål inte är engelska och du inte förstår delar av text i något av våra program eller websidor.

Om du inte behärskar engelska så bra, skriv gärna frågan på ditt modersmål så hjälper någon på forumet till att översätta det för oss.

24

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: Translators Wanted

« on: November 17, 2005, 06:29 AM »

I can help you out if you need a swedish translator