Recent Posts

2176

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Bejeweled 2 free today

« Last post by f0dder on October 11, 2010, 04:36 AM »

Seems like I were too late, no anniversary mention on the site you linked to, Lashiec

2177

Living Room / Re: Email Security

« Last post by f0dder on October 09, 2010, 04:55 PM »

Another thing you have to be careful about: The extremely stupid concept most financial institutions have of requiring you to have "security questions and answers". I don’t know who dreamed this up but it is very dangerous IMO.

-J-Mac (October 09, 2010, 01:58 PM)

Yeah, and extremely silly - especially if they require you to fill this info. I always choose "mother's maiden name" and fill in "byggemand bob" - which is obviously not her maiden name.

2178

Living Room / Re: Why do support people never answer questions?

« Last post by f0dder on October 08, 2010, 05:37 PM »

Jibz: for the specific question you asked, let's keep in mind that... (unless things have changed in the last X months)

1) TheBat internal mailbox format is undocumented.
2) The plugin API for TheBat sucks, and cannot be used for mailbox exporting.

Thus, you'd be left with either reverse-engineering of the binary format TheBat uses, or sending windows messages to simulate user input to get the job done. And for TheBat, you have to mark each and every fscking individual sub-mailbox and export it, since there's no recursive export.

So yeah, the answer you got kinda sucks, but it's no wonder it's not supported out of the box.

2179

General Software Discussion / Re: Format NTFS from DOS!

« Last post by f0dder on October 08, 2010, 02:46 PM »

yeah my backup is image based: but i just want to format for my satisfaction.

-hulkbuster (October 08, 2010, 02:32 PM)

Why?

It's an entirely superfluous step that buys you nothing, and only wastes time.

2180

DC Gamer Club / Re: Minecraft - An Incredible Indie Game

« Last post by f0dder on October 08, 2010, 08:21 AM »

Purchased the game a couple of weeks ago, because frankly it's worth it. Great fun. I sometimes feel a bit like the dwarves that made the Moria mine... I dug too deep!

As far as i know, there is even someone who build the 1701-D (Star Trek fanatics know what I am talking about) in it...on true scale! 

-Shades (October 05, 2010, 04:25 PM)

Didn't actually build it, but exported a pre-made schematic to minecraft level format... it would've been insane to hand-build that ship

Plus then you can maximize it for near full-screen gameplay.

-Deozaan (October 07, 2010, 09:25 AM)

Protip: F11 is your friend

-Dirhael (October 07, 2010, 07:10 PM)

Ooooooh, didn't know that!

As for machine specs, yeah, it is a bit on the heavy end. On my (lower-end) dualcore laptop with intel graphics, I have to set lighting model to simple and turn down visibility some notches. It's a very different engine than what all other 3D games use, so it's not fair to compare; HL2 and the likes might be a lot prettier, but their levels are 99% static, whereas minecraft is 100% dynamic. There's a lot of data being pushed around.

2181

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Locate 3.0 - great *FAST* HD search tool!

« Last post by f0dder on October 07, 2010, 02:06 PM »

Windows come with this built in?  Windows built in Indexing Service is a laughable useless farce compared to Everything!

-TurboJosh (October 06, 2010, 02:53 PM)

You can't really compare the two, since Everything only searches based on filenames. It's good for what it does, though. I personally don't like it has to run with admin privs, but without separating to a LUA GUI app and a admin service, that's just how it has to be.

Afaik it reads the MFT and not the USN Journal, btw - but the two are closely related.

2182

General Software Discussion / Re: Format NTFS from DOS!

« Last post by f0dder on October 07, 2010, 02:04 PM »

hulkbuster, what kind of backups are we talking about?

Again, if it's image-based, doing the format is 100% superfluous. If it's file-based, you can just restore from within Windows.

2183

General Software Discussion / Re: Which archive software are we using in 2010 (and why)?

« Last post by f0dder on October 07, 2010, 01:59 PM »

What do you think about ARJ?

-Giampy (October 06, 2010, 08:51 AM)

Haven't used it for the past 10+ years, and can't see any reason to.

2184

General Software Discussion / Re: Format NTFS from DOS!

« Last post by f0dder on October 03, 2010, 02:56 PM »

If you use image-based restore, the format step is absolutely superfluous.

2185

General Software Discussion / Re: Format NTFS from DOS!

« Last post by f0dder on October 02, 2010, 08:57 AM »

NTFS on DOS? Why on earth would you want that? And why would any sane person use DOS today in the first place?

2186

General Software Discussion / Re: what's wrong with my PC? (it's often soooo slow)

« Last post by f0dder on September 30, 2010, 03:35 PM »

Better yet, DON’T check Windows Update for any of your hardware drivers! I recommend searching the manufacturers' websites for the latest correct drivers. Windows Update, while a little better than in the past, still lags pretty far behind on 3rd party drivers.

-J-Mac (September 30, 2010, 03:33 PM)

Personally, I use WU for everything but graphics drivers - don't usually need the latest-and-greatest for other stuff, and WU is convenient

2187

General Software Discussion / Re: Another reason to drop Kaspersky?

« Last post by f0dder on September 29, 2010, 01:17 AM »

If less people were using Windows, malware / trojans problems could be more manageable.  Hence the (not happening) shift to Mac, Linux, BSD etc

-SKA (September 28, 2010, 10:01 PM)

There, ftfy.

2188

General Software Discussion / Re: MD5Hash 1.8

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2010, 04:07 PM »

The 1.25 core was worst case when I just let the consumer thread churn waiting for file data.

Sounds like you did a spinning instead of blocking wait for file data - this is bad

The file serving is the determining factor. The app is not waiting
on the calculation.

Yes, as long as you're not CPU bound. Overlapping reads and computation will give you the biggest advantage when processing also takes some time. Problem with today's CPUs: we programmers get lazy :p

But both are much faster than my old FileCRC32.

I guess the algorithm used there wasn't table-based?

edit: concurrent_queue looks like a good means of emptying  the drop loop quickly though.

As a building block - you definitely don't want to be doing "try_pop" in a loop with nothing else, since you'll burn a lot of CPU doing that. Needs to be combined with an event you can block-wait on in case the queue is empty.

2189

General Software Discussion / Re: how to create algorithm graphs

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2010, 05:17 PM »

oh i see
they resemble so much

-kalos (September 26, 2010, 02:25 PM)

Well, both were computer images consisting of pixels, but beyond that? 

2190

General Software Discussion / Re: how to create algorithm graphs

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2010, 01:59 PM »

ttbut i would like something neat as the one in the first post

-kalos (September 26, 2010, 01:57 PM)

Ummm, the suggestions were pretty good wrt. the first image you posted - instead of editing your first post and upload a completely different kind of image, you should've added that image to a new post.

2191

General Software Discussion / Re: MD5Hash 1.4

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2010, 04:20 PM »

Hm, 60%->125% by threading (without any performance advantage) sounds like there's something being done wrong - like busy-waiting instead of block-waiting. How did you design the threading stuff, what is the "work item"? I assume the language is C++ native?

2192

General Software Discussion / Re: Another reason to drop Kaspersky?

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2010, 10:32 AM »

Stoic Joker: true - and I don't know whether MSE is purely signature-based or has heuristics... if it's purely signature-based, you're definitey SOL. With a degree of heuristics, you have a chance of fending off a new rootkit (malware writers will definitely be focusing a LOT on slipping past MSE, though).

As for LUAs, they're great, and I love how Vista has made it bearable to have your main account as a LUA. But we can't rule out 0-day privilege escalation, so IMHO running LUA is only part of the security solution.

MSE is great and relatively lightweigtht - I do feel a bit of a hit in application loadtime, but not nearly as much as I've had with other solutions. MsMpEng.exe weighs in ~180meg of private bytes, though - not a problem for me, but it's somewhat of a hit for lower-end machines.

2193

General Software Discussion / Re: Another reason to drop Kaspersky?

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2010, 08:11 AM »

Thanks, tranglos.  Let us know how that goes.  I'm still toying with the idea of turning everything off and just running daily scans while I'm sleeping or at work.

-superboyac (September 24, 2010, 05:42 PM)

Bad idea - if you get hit with a rootkit, the daily scan isn't going to catch it.

Microsoft Security Essentials seems to do a pretty good job, and doesn't get in my way.

2194

General Software Discussion / Re: Another reason to drop Kaspersky?

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2010, 11:56 AM »

FYI regarding Microsoft Security Essentials.  Starting in October, in addition to being free for home use, it will also be free to small businesses with up to 10 computers.

http://www.eweek.com...l-Businesses-148952/

-patthecat (September 24, 2010, 11:49 AM)

Indeed

2195

General Software Discussion / Re: MD5Hash 1.3

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2010, 05:37 PM »

Processing multiple files in parallel will only slow down the operation since you'll introduce a fair amount of read/write head movements - unless of course you have the files to sum on different physical drives, but how often does that usecase happen?

The argument for async I/O isn't to try and get full core utilization; it isn't something you can achieve with a nonparallizable algorithm, and I agree it's not something you want for this application anyway. But if you can get a bit closer to full utilization of one one by overlapping reads and computation, the system is still usable but the summing task will finish faster.

I've actually been meaning to do some performance benchmarking for various reading methods with hashing in mind for a short while, but unfortunately haven't found the time to do so yet

2196

General Software Discussion / Re: MD5Hash 1.3

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2010, 03:18 PM »

You say it's not the I/O, but that you're only running at about half a core - that indicates that you are I/O bound, or are block-waiting on something else. Async I/O lets you do you disk reads and hash computation in parallel, and I believe MMF should allow the same (you have less control and take a slight (as in should-be-almost-unmeasurable on modern CPUs) CPU hit from it, though). You'll still ultimately be I/O bound, but since you can overlap CPU and I/O you can possibly shave off a bit of execution time.

I don't think MD5 itself can be parallelized across threads, that would kind of defeat the "every input bit should affect every output bit" goal of cryptographic hashes.

2197

General Software Discussion / Re: MD5Hash 1.3

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2010, 01:58 PM »

Why MD5?
Why x64-only?

As for "not the fastest checksummer", how do you do your file I/O? in case you aren't using either, I'd suggest testing with both memory-mapped files (which are both over- and under-appreciated) as well as overlapped (async) I/O.

2198

General Software Discussion / Re: what's wrong with my PC? (it's often soooo slow)

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2010, 01:55 PM »

Is there harddisk access when the freezes happen?

When monitoring CPU usage, be sure to show kernel timings. If the lockups have high CPU usage and lots of time spent in kernel-mode and there's disk activity, your disk might be failing. You might want to check if your controllers have reverted from DMA->PIO mode.

2199

Living Room / Re: Was Stuxnet Worm Built to Attack Iran's Nuclear Program?

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2010, 01:53 PM »

True, Deo - but that's also pretty bad - (critical) SCADA systems really shouldn't be accessible from the outside by any means... they should have "air firewalling"

Btw, this is a worm, so either the systems *are* directly accessible from the 'net, or it uses other exploits to get into LANs and then start looking.

2200

General Software Discussion / Re: what's wrong with my PC? (it's often soooo slow)

« Last post by f0dder on September 22, 2010, 05:20 PM »

it could also be that some memory 'block' has died, leaving you with maybe half as much memory as you used to have.

-Curt (September 22, 2010, 04:45 PM)

That would have different symptoms, and most likely result in crashes rather than hangs.