Recent Posts

1026

Living Room / Re: SpammerScammer

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 02:11 PM »

The problem with baiting is that is assumes that everyone is hip to the scammers. Some people are plain old dumb to email scams and fall for them..ask my aunt she ALMOST fell for one...which is why I believe it is better for the scammer to abandon the email address and have to start from scratch, this way if there is a potential victim's email in the mailbox it will most likely get lost in tr shuffle.

-Webpirate (September 23, 2012, 01:37 PM)

Tossing an email address and grabbing a new one takes a couple of minutes. The stuff scambaiters do can keep scammers occupied for a lot longer.

You've got your heart in the right place, but you're approaching the problem in a wrong way - and I'm still afraid it'll do more harm than good.

1027

Living Room / Re: SpammerScammer

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 12:56 PM »

I think this service is a bad idea.

Even with the manual target check, it's open for abuse... and it will likely get the IPs you're sending from blacklisted. And I kinda doubt it will do much to combat spammers. Scambaiting (419eater.com style) is a much better idea - to seriously waste the scammers' time doing silly stuff.

1028

Living Room / Re: $10 for a Facebook Post? Huh?

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 12:28 PM »

If it's going to reach people already my friends or already subscribing I will just re-post 5 times a day.

-rgdot (September 23, 2012, 10:52 AM)

If a company started doing that, I kinda expect that followers would get pissed.

Ah well, we're seeing the beginning of investors wanting to monetize facebook. This will only get worse with time <3

1029

Developer's Corner / Re: WiX Installer - not really a review

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 12:08 PM »

Shouldn't be too hard writing a WiX-config-generating tool that takes out the mind-numbingness? :-) - I think one of the developers at the company where I did my internship did something along those lines.

I've always found that .msi installers are slow and sucky... are the installers generated by WiX any better?

1030

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... RAMdisk opinions

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 11:45 AM »

I don't remember the exact names of the apps. They were both mid-tier multi-user accounting/CRM applications used in the magazine and publishing industry. I tried moving certain data files into RAMdisk to speed up user searches and queries.

-40hz (September 23, 2012, 11:09 AM)

Sounds like badly programmed software.

Since the thread that Shades mentioned, I've upgraded my main system to 16 gigabytes of RAM, and my permanent %TEMP% ramdisk is now 1gig... plus I have the option of creating "plenty big" temporary ramdisks. I used an 8gig ramdisk while rebuilding my rt7-stripped-down windows ISO, and it cut down on the time spent on rebuilding quite a bit.

1031

General Software Discussion / Re: Google says goobye to Internet Explorer 8

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 11:26 AM »

It just smacks of the same thing we saw with the whole go dark for ie thing.  Elitism.

-wraith808 (September 22, 2012, 10:48 PM)

...or making the world a better place :-)

1032

Living Room / Re: Ubuntu will now have Amazon ads pre-installed

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2012, 11:19 AM »

I should clarify my response also- if someone is forthcoming that the link has affiliate info, then if it's useful and I buy something as a direct result of the link, then I won't remove.  If someone is less than forthcoming, or I buy something that is not a direct result of the link... bye bye affiliate link!

-wraith808 (September 22, 2012, 10:45 PM)

Yeah, the same here - I don't mind the affiliate links when people plainly state they're included.

1033

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 01:36 PM »

ouch -that was very funny- but not for the Quebecois

-tomos (September 22, 2012, 12:45 PM)

...but pretty fitting for anybody who believes anybody should speak French. Really

1034

Living Room / Re: Is my pen-drive performing okay?

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 11:42 AM »

my bad eyes f0dder, sorry -its MiB indeed, zooming in with IE9 helped(Ctrl+)
 
Ska (nibbling humble pie)

-SKA (September 22, 2012, 11:40 AM)

No need for that

(I'm probably going to need glasses soon - if not 5 years ago )

1035

Living Room / Re: Is my pen-drive performing okay?

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 11:36 AM »

Ska> I think the MB circled in your pic means megabytes.

-SKA (September 22, 2012, 11:25 AM)

It says "MiB", not "MB" - although both would be megabytes.

Using a super-insane high-res monitor, SKA?

1036

Living Room / Re: 1080p playback: hardware discussion

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 11:35 AM »

I wish people would stop calling it 'super computers'.

-f0dder (September 22, 2012, 07:50 AM)

Uh-oh! Next thing you know, f0dder's gonna be telling us how to abbreviate Firefox too...

-40hz (September 22, 2012, 10:49 AM)

*grin*. I know that you're being tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless... Well...

Isn't "supercomputers" about "lots and lots of processing power"? Would clustering a bunch of 486s on a coaxial network make a "supercomputer"? The RasPis are 700MHz, but a relatively ineffecient (in terms of cycles/MHz) CPU - probably (guesstimate) about 4x as inefficient as a modern core2 based CPU. A modern mid/high-end core2 quadcore is 3.4GHz, which would be equivalent to roughly 3400*4/700=20 RasPis (rounding up, but at the same time ignoring the benefits of hyperthreading and very fast inter-core communications compared to networked connections between the RasPis). Even without factoring in the guesstimate of 4x architectural benefit (and ignoring that the core2 probably also has a "somewhat" faster memory bus), it should take no more than four modern core2 quadcores to beat the processing power of the 64-node RasPi cluster.

Does four Quadcore PCs on a network constitute a "supercomputer"?

Of course the calculations above are tongue-in-cheek, and real-world performance depends quiiiiite on the work you're going to perform - possible GPU offloading and crunching-power-per-watt are not included (a lot of people who do the crunch-per-watt for RasPis forget that the architcture is less cycle-per-MHz efficient than core2, and "forget" including power consumption and latency for the network gear, etc). But it should put things into perspective.

I still maintain that it's a valuable project, since it's a cheap way to build a cluster, and if you're going to teach supercomputer programming, you do need to focus on "massively parallel" and how to distribute jobs between a lot of nodes - that's more important than the actual processing power.

The articles calling it "supercomputers" sound slightly silly and totally miss the point.

1037

Living Room / Re: Is my pen-drive performing okay?

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 11:22 AM »

Whoops, forgot the "byte" part

1038

General Software Discussion / Re: Google says goobye to Internet Explorer 8

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 11:21 AM »

There are other examples, but I think that gets the point across.

-wraith808 (September 22, 2012, 09:50 AM)

You've listed one specific issue where there's - supposedly - some IE requirements going on (I haven't had the misfortune of dealing with SharePoint, I pity you ). Lots of stuff doesn't require IE because of crappy ActiveX controls, but because of jscript vs. javascript or DOM differences (or, in the old days, MS-Java specifics) - the kind of stuff there's really no excuse for.

-f0dder (September 22, 2012, 10:04 AM)

Not supposedly - Sharepoint just won't work under anything but IE.

-wraith808 (September 22, 2012, 10:45 AM)

I guess that depends on the level of sharepoint support you want - the (horrible!) office integration crap might require IE, but basic site functionality works fine (as "fine" as you can manage to get with sharepoint  ) with other browsers - at least the school intranet system some years back did. Of course the site as a whole was a catastrophe of sharepoint dimensions, so was eventually scrapped again in favor of something simpler, that actually worked.

Or the need to have an embedded browser- it's easier to just embed IE- and they're using IE specific stuff.

-wraith808 (September 22, 2012, 10:45 AM)

And I'm kinda glad when that bites people in the behind, since embedded browsers is almost always a horrible end-user experience. There's a (very!) few pieces of software where this makes sense, but mostly it's just a very very bad idea. (I remember a certain antivirus package that decided using embedded IE for it's user interface was a good idea... yeah.)

1039

Living Room / Re: Is my pen-drive performing okay?

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 11:15 AM »

MiB == 2^20.

1040

General Software Discussion / Re: Google says goobye to Internet Explorer 8

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 10:04 AM »

There are other examples, but I think that gets the point across.

-wraith808 (September 22, 2012, 09:50 AM)

You've listed one specific issue where there's - supposedly - some IE requirements going on (I haven't had the misfortune of dealing with SharePoint, I pity you ). Lots of stuff doesn't require IE because of crappy ActiveX controls, but because of jscript vs. javascript or DOM differences (or, in the old days, MS-Java specifics) - the kind of stuff there's really no excuse for.

1041

Living Room / Re: Cascading grammar trolls

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 09:52 AM »

... I think that should be we native speakers... - but that sounds very posh somehow

-tomos (September 18, 2012, 07:24 AM)

.Us, teh pplz!

1042

Living Room / Re: Ubuntu will now have Amazon ads pre-installed

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 09:50 AM »

On a somewhat related topic: am I the only one that purposefully removes affiliate links from URLs before purchasing things, unless I deliberately want to support a particular person?

1043

General Software Discussion / Re: Google says goobye to Internet Explorer 8

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 09:32 AM »

because of retarded internal apps coded by slopmonkeys

-f0dder (September 22, 2012, 06:36 AM)

Why blame the coders for the requirements of management?  That seems somewhat ... wrong.

-wraith808 (September 22, 2012, 09:29 AM)

Because the coders wrote stuff that breaks in all other browsers, instead of Doing Things Right, with some abstraction layer for IE support?

1044

Living Room / Re: Is my pen-drive performing okay?

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 09:23 AM »

it would look like they're misleading us then? Which I suspect is common...

-tomos (September 22, 2012, 09:13 AM)

It's been like that with storage vendors for many++ years. I've heard rumors that once upon a time, they used the 2^(10n) terms, but that's from a time I definitely can't remember (way before the mibibytes-style madness). And they can definitely use the SI excuse, where capital-G means 10^9.

Also, notice the "Go" in that picture? That's the wacky french - octets rather than bytes. BAGUETTE! CROISSANT! Lé hahaha!

1045

Living Room / Re: Is my pen-drive performing okay?

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 08:14 AM »

Depends on context - and I'm a bit surprised that you have Mb but GB in that table. If you're in a context where one could confuse bits and bytes, spell out bits in full.

Other than that, yes, you've got the 1024-scale right. And keep in mind that storage vendors use the 10^(3n) rather than the 2^(10n) scale.

1046

Living Room / Re: Self-Portrait Camera - Casio EX-TR150

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 08:09 AM »

Man, I need one of those cameras.

Any idea how hard it was to snap this picture with a conventional IXUS? Also, I was all out of self-tan and eyeliner. #yolo #fml :-(

1047

Living Room / Re: Is my pen-drive performing okay?

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 08:04 AM »

But I don't understand the mbits, MiB, MB differences.

-kyrathaba (September 22, 2012, 07:40 AM)

Well, it didn't get easier after the opensores world decided to go all SI-nazi... back in the olden days, in the context of computing, our 'k' meant 1024 (2^10), 'm' was 2^20, et cetera. People generally weren't confused - and we all knew the harddrive manufacturers used the normal-world convention when stating drive sizes, those weazely scumbags

Today, pretty much all you can say for certain is that... if you see somebody using the terms KiB, MiB, kibibyte, mebibyte... then you're dealing with the old 1024-based numbers (and a basement-dwelling pedantic idealist that you shouldn't ever try having a rational discussion with). Anywhere else, you'll have to study context and guesstimate. So much for standardization.

mbit/s or mbps ought to mean the same - megabits per second - but whether they're talking about 2^20 or 10^3 depends on context. Also, you'll see the basement-dwellers claiming that zomg-it-should-be-capital-M, totally ignoring that outside extremely specific and rare situations, talking about millibits just doesn't make sense.

(I'm generally in favor of SI, because the units tend to simply make sense, compared to legacy crap like pounds and yards and inches and whatnot, I'm just not convinced in the context of computing. Especially since their 2^n unit names are so ridiculous).

1048

Living Room / Re: 1080p playback: hardware discussion

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 07:50 AM »

I'd be surprised if a Raspberry Pi would do it. It's fun to play with but I don't think it would handle the throughput of 1080p playback.

-Carol Haynes (September 22, 2012, 07:00 AM)

Do keep in mind that, while it has a really wimpy CPU, there's GPU hardware acceleration. Dunno if it can do 1080p, but it wouldn't surprise me - but it does mean that only very specific video formats (and possible very specific encoding options) are going to be supported.

Now there is a project for linking Pis together to form multicore 'super computers' - that might be a nice route to try ;-)

-Carol Haynes (September 22, 2012, 07:00 AM)

I wish people would stop calling it 'super computers'. The Southampton Uni RasPi cluster project is cute (because of the lego) and it's a worthwhile project for teaching how to program clusters... but it's definitely not a "supercomputer" :-)

1049

Living Room / Re: Is my pen-drive performing okay?

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 07:05 AM »

Doesn't seem too bad to me, for a pendrive. The theoretical speed limit of USB2 is 480mbit/s, which would translate to 60MB/s (and that's excluding stuff like ATA protocol overhead - dunno if the USB protocol overhead is included?). Even for harddrive enclosures, I've never had better than close to 30MB/s, leading me to think that the 480mbit/s is marketing snake-oil, and they should be saying 240mbit/s full-duplex?

Also: never use those drives for primary storage of anything. They go flaky without warning.

1050

General Software Discussion / Re: sublime text: some innovative text editor!

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2012, 07:00 AM »

I've been using ST2 for about a week now, and I'm seriously considering a purchase - even if the pricetag is somewhat steep for a text editor.

It's probably not going to replace Notepad++ as my system default text-editor (simply because NP++ starts at <500ms cold, whereas ST2 is ~2000ms, and I'm über-sensitive to these things) - but when starting some heavy-duty editing tasks? Yeah. It rocks. Package Control, multi-selections, fuzzy search, nice color themes and decent multi-language syntax highlighting, .... . . . . .

And while the pricetag is somewhat steep, I have a lot of respect for the no-noncense license terms. None of that bullshit "free lifetime upgrade" crap.