Recent Posts

2451

General Software Discussion / Re: A new approach to reduce NTFS fragmentation

« Last post by f0dder on March 26, 2010, 07:55 AM »

Their english seems dubious at best, never a good sign.

-Eóin (March 25, 2010, 10:43 AM)

I will try to be polite and just say that I do not agree with you on this.

-Curt (March 26, 2010, 07:31 AM)

And I will have to say that I agree 100% - when we're talking promoted products.

2452

General Software Discussion / Re: A new approach to reduce NTFS fragmentation

« Last post by f0dder on March 26, 2010, 06:41 AM »

It starts out with uncontrolled entropy... leads to heroin abuse for sure!

-MilesAhead (March 25, 2010, 06:10 PM)

Uncontrolled entropy is worse than heroin abuse, for sure!

2453

Living Room / Re: 50 Places Linux is Running That You Might Not Expect

« Last post by f0dder on March 24, 2010, 09:45 PM »

Despite its mini status on the desktop, Linux is certainly all around us, in phones, cars, planes, embedded devices, toasters, robots, etc. It's a great thing to be able to select which parts of the kernel you need only to run your particular device. No marketing campaign, it just works.

-zridling (March 24, 2010, 09:35 PM)

I wonder how much of linux' success can be attributed to it being "free" and how much is because it's gratis...

2454

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Tool to easily disable/enable hardware device

« Last post by f0dder on March 23, 2010, 07:34 PM »

...anyway, as long as the problem persists it would be great to have a tool that I can use with a hotkey to toggle the soundcard easily. I'm on Win7 x64, btw. I've tried MS' devcon, which is a "command-line utility [that] functions as an alternative to Device Manager" (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272), but apparently it doesn't work on Win7 (not disabling/enabling anyway, it reads the list of devices all right).

-TucknDar (March 23, 2010, 02:58 PM)

Are you remembering to run it from an elevated command prompt?

Also, have you tried disabling any sound-related mixing devices you don't use? Probably not related, but on a number of computers, I've had annoying background noise until I disabled stuff like Mic in and midi.

2455

DC Gamer Club / Re: Sniper Elite for $2 on Steam

« Last post by f0dder on March 19, 2010, 05:56 AM »

Sniper Elite also has some pretty detailed hitboxes, you can detonate grenades on your opponents belts.

-p3lb0x (March 19, 2010, 05:25 AM)

Aaaaaaaaaaawesome

2456

Living Room / Re: Command & Conquer Copies Ubisoft's Awful DRM

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2010, 08:28 PM »

That's cool... cooler if they'd abbreviated plz better

-wraith808 (March 18, 2010, 08:20 PM)

It's teh intarwebs meme abbreviation of "please"

2457

Living Room / Re: How GPU came to be used for general computation

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2010, 07:39 PM »

I bumped upon Igor's blog a few weeks ago, he has a couple of pretty OK things there - time to read the article.

2458

Living Room / Re: Command & Conquer Copies Ubisoft's Awful DRM

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2010, 07:32 PM »

Long live razor1911, reloaded, skidrow and the other heroes - making legitimately purchased games playable by people who'd otherwise be offered nothing but a big cup of GFY from the vendors.

I have one thing to say to those game firms: http://pzldie.kthx.dk/ .

2459

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by f0dder on March 18, 2010, 07:22 PM »

Forget about arctic silver, just use whatever thermal pad comes with the stock heatsink - really, you're not going to be able to measure a difference. The biggest benefit AS had was that it's electrically conductive and thus could fry the AMD CPUs that came without heatspreaders.

2460

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 17, 2010, 06:04 PM »

I had very little problems with XP64, even though I was a relatively early adapter. If you're putting together a new machine and don't need drivers for quirky old hardware, and don't need to run any 16-bit stuff (whether win3.x or dos), you generally won't bump into problems.

2461

JGPaiva's GridMove and Ahk Tools / Re: Kaspersky Reports Gridmove as containing Trojan.Win32.AutoHK.fe

« Last post by f0dder on March 17, 2010, 08:44 AM »

Cool that Kaspersky take the time to answer

2462

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 17, 2010, 08:39 AM »

J-Mac: as carol has mentioned, various devices (not just your graphics card) are "memory-mapped" - this means that in order to program the device, you write to special memory regions. When accessing those memory regions, instead of going to/from main memory, it's redirected to the hardware device. Iirc, PCI devices can only be memory mapped in the low 4GB physical address space (but don't hold me up on this). Most modern BIOSes support a memory remap option that will relocate parts of your system memory above the 4GB physical address, so you can have your memory mapped devices, all your RAM, and eat it too. This is possible in 32bit mode ever since the Pentium Pro, which introduced PAE.

Thing is, 32bit client versions of Windows are limited to 4GB of memory for license reasons. Windows XP RTM supported 4GB of physical memory (you could get your full 4GB of memory using remapping). SP1 changed this to only supporting the low 4GB of the physical address space - there were apparently too many buggy 3rd-party drivers that crashed when handed memory addresses above 4GB. Why?

When doing NT kernel mode programming, one of the data structures you deal with is PHYSICAL_ADDRESS, which is typedeffed as a LARGE_INTEGER.

[Select]

typedef struct _LARGE_INTEGER {
typedef union _LARGE_INTEGER {
    struct {
        ULONG LowPart;
        LONG HighPart;
    };
    struct {
        ULONG LowPart;
        LONG HighPart;
    } u;
    LONGLONG QuadPart;
} LARGE_INTEGER;

The problem is that a bunch of MORONIC, RETARDED, SHOULD-BE-SHOT-ON-SIGHT developers have adopted the idea that "hey, we're on a 32bit OS, we only need to deal with the 32-bit LowPart of that structure". *b00m*, BSODs galore.

2463

General Software Discussion / Re: Trying to remember an old game

« Last post by f0dder on March 17, 2010, 08:23 AM »

Turrican I or II ?

-MerleOne (March 17, 2010, 02:28 AM)

Turrican was made of awesome and WIN! - played it a lot on the Amiga.

2464

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 16, 2010, 03:48 AM »

My point was that going to a larger sector size layout on the physical platter gets you that stuff but doesn't need to change the interface that the OS sees - the HDD firmware would take care of the translation of 512-byte sector request to however things we physically laid out on the platters (and I assumed that this was already happening for a long time).

-mwb1100 (March 15, 2010, 02:18 PM)

It's the way WD is handling things with the just-introduced 4096-bytes-per-sector drive. And it's not a smart solution, imho, because of the performance problems with unaligned writes. Really, there's enough old harddrives around that legacy systems can use, 4k-sector drives should have just been introduced without legacy support.

2465

Living Room / Re: Donationcoder: How did you find it + What has your experience been like so far.

« Last post by f0dder on March 16, 2010, 03:41 AM »

Don't we already have a thread about this somewhere?

I got dragged in here from irc by Jibz - and now they'll have to drag me away, kicking and screaming.

2466

Living Room / Re: Windows doesn't recognize HDD.

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2010, 05:20 AM »

You could try a Low Level Format like I did with my badly behaving WD a few months ago, which seemed to 'repair' it, (or at least fixed the problem I was having).

-4wd (March 15, 2010, 05:10 AM)

Why do people keep calling it a low-level format when all it is, is overwriting the disk with zeroed out sectors? (If it's doing anything else than that, please enlighten me - but giving the scarcity of info on that site, I doubt it).

Zero-filling kicks in sector-reallocation, btw - seemingly "fixing" problems, but in reality just masking them.

2467

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2010, 03:07 AM »

Now there might be advantages to having a better interface or improving the software to be able to deal with larger sector sizes, but I don't think that how much space is taken up by ECC and sector identification are part of them.

-mwb1100 (March 14, 2010, 09:38 PM)

Cramming more data on a platter = good. Might possibly result in better speeds sometime as well, less synchronization overhead?

2468

Living Room / Re: Windows doesn't recognize HDD.

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2010, 03:02 AM »

I wonder what the phantom 75MB is.

-Deozaan (March 15, 2010, 01:57 AM)

Bad cluster map? That'd be a helluvalot of bad clusters tho

2469

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 14, 2010, 06:49 AM »

$10 for a win7 license? Sounds unlikely that this is going to be legit.

2470

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 14, 2010, 06:45 AM »

IainB: the same that goes for 32bit XP goes for Vista as well - PAE (which 32bit XP also uses, it's needed for hardware DEP) is really mostly useful for server-ish stuff. "Cripple" the OS? That's a bit harsh word. Artificially limit? Yes. But the stuff I wrote above about buggy 32bit drivers still holds.

Carol Haynes: you're thinking about filesystem cluster size, not hardware sector size. 4k clusters is the default. And as mentioned above, you simply need to partition manually and make sure your partition is 4kb aligned.

2471

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2010, 10:44 AM »

And following tradition, Microsoft bent over for sucky 3rd-party developers instead of saying "go fix your crap if you want it to run on Windows".

-f0dder (March 13, 2010, 10:23 AM)

True, in a way, but really, what choice did they have? You can rest assured that lots of those 3rd party developers WOULDN'T have fixed their crap/End users wouldn't have updated to the new builds and end users would have continued installing and trying to use the problematic products.

End result? MS gets smeared by the pundits, maligned by Apple's marketing, and their support system gets hammered by irate customers. MS would get 100% of the blame, even if they deserved little/none of it.

OK, so same old same old 

-Darwin (March 13, 2010, 10:42 AM)

Yeah, it sucks. They could have at least made a "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!" option, though.

2472

Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2010, 10:31 AM »

Interesting OpEd article on the UbiSoft debacle -  http://bit.ly/clZtRB

-wraith808 (March 12, 2010, 12:41 PM)

Why do you use bit.ly instead of direct links? please stop it.

-f0dder (March 13, 2010, 07:53 AM)

Why stop it?  What's the big deal?  As scancode said, I got it because I post to here and twitter and my blog... it makes it easier.  So what's your argument against, and I'll consider it.

-wraith808 (March 13, 2010, 10:13 AM)

It makes sense on twitter and in print magazines, but anywhere else?

There's two parts:
1) bit.ly could be down (temporarily or permanently) - perhaps not likely, but could happen.
2) it sucks not being able to see the target URL on mouseover (and no, I don't want browser extensions to do that - and they won't help wrt. #1 anyway).
3) consider the possibility of the service being hacked and introducing drive-by malware.

Obviously I trust your shortened links to be clean and referer-free, but when unknown people post using shorteners, I always wonder what are they trying to hide?

I believe those to be good reasons against URL shorteners - are there any reasons for them, excluding twitter & magazines?

2473

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2010, 10:23 AM »

IainB: hold back your conspiracy theory horses, there!

There's pretty sound technical reasons for going to 4096-byte sectors, but that's covered elsewhere. Western-Digital has actually gone to lengths to make legacy OSes support these drives at all - exposing 512-byte sectors and doing internal handling (which is a fault imho, they should've exposed 4k sectors and dropped legacy support), and even adding a "offset-by-1" jumper so people who can't figure out how to manually create partitions (which solves the performance problem 100%) don't get the performance problems.

As for the 4GB limit in 32bit XP, keep in mind that 4GB is the logical memory limit for a 32bit OS. Yes, since the PPro we've been able to address more than 4GB in 32bit mode, but it's done through "memory windows" - which is mostly useful for running a crapload of apps at once, or pretty specialized big applications. Basically server stuff... so while the limit might suck, it's fair enough they don't want a client OS potentially eating server OS marketshare.

What really sucks about the 4GB limit is that it's on physical memory addresses rather than "available memory", which has given all those "I have 4GB but can only use 3.25GB" problems... and that's something you can thank fscktarded 3rd-party driver developers for. XP RTM supported 4GB-total, but because of people thinking "oh, we're on 32bit, we only have to handle PHYSICALADDRESS.LOWPART", users experienced BSODs. And following tradition, Microsoft bent over for sucky 3rd-party developers instead of saying "go fix your crap if you want it to run on Windows".

2474

Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2010, 07:53 AM »

Interesting OpEd article on the UbiSoft debacle -  http://bit.ly/clZtRB

-wraith808 (March 12, 2010, 12:41 PM)

Why do you use bit.ly instead of direct links? please stop it.

2475

Living Room / Re: First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2010, 07:43 AM »

This is the first really compelling reason I have seen for switching from XP to Windows 7:

http://arstechnica.c...fun-for-xp-users.ars

-xtabber (March 12, 2010, 05:44 PM)

Solution: Buy older HDD's =]

-Stephen66515 (March 12, 2010, 06:02 PM)

Solution: partition your disk manually before installing XP - problem solved.