Recent Posts

3276

Living Room / Re: top secret: tech support cheat sheet (xkcd)

« Last post by f0dder on August 24, 2009, 06:10 AM »

 

3277

Living Room / Re: Show us a photo of your mutt or other creatures..

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2009, 05:52 AM »

Molly... and a very young p3lb0x

3278

Living Room / Re: Print and fold your own camera?

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2009, 05:34 AM »

Insane

3279

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Word: Live by the patent, die by the patent? (rant)

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2009, 05:30 AM »

So... any software that allows users to create their own XML tags could be targeted by this? How lame.

3280

General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Fix all the wrapping issues...now!

« Last post by f0dder on August 21, 2009, 05:29 AM »

I still don't see the issue, really.

Apart from lack of hyphenation, MicroEd mode wraps perfectly for me. What exactly is your problem? Time to add those screenshots, perhaps?

3281

General Software Discussion / Re: MS Word: Live by the patent, die by the patent? (rant)

« Last post by f0dder on August 20, 2009, 05:08 AM »

zridling: I've not read the patent (I'm not so good with legalese), but how would going with ODF have saved MS? ODF also uses XML. But perhaps the patent was made specifically to target the way MS uses XML in OOXML?

Both formats are retarded anyway, compared to the efficiency of dealing with efficient binary formats (like .DOC). Ever tried saving a several-hundred page document in either of the XML based formats? yuck!

3282

General Software Discussion / Re: What kind of this Virus and how to clean the USB

« Last post by f0dder on August 20, 2009, 04:58 AM »

Perhaps it didn't contain a virus, but maybe the USB drive was flawed and fried one of your USB ports?

3283

General Software Discussion / Re: Recommend file shredder?

« Last post by f0dder on August 19, 2009, 09:43 AM »

File shredding is relatively useless, imho. It's bothersome to individually erase each file, and because of fragmentation you could miss some data. A disk wipe/shred, if allowed, is better. Or start by deleting all your files, defragment the drive, and use SysInternals' SDelete to wipe free space - the combination of defrag data-shuffling and free-space wiping should be a decent enough mix. Also, don't bother with anything but a standard single-pass wipe, anything more is just voodoo today.

Sorry to hear that you've been laid off, btw

3284

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« Last post by f0dder on August 18, 2009, 05:45 PM »

I prefer having the flexibility of a file browser that does both dual- and single-panel views... having to "drag away" a pane is what put me off from 2xExplorer. Fortunately, the successor supports both single- and dual-panel modes, tabs and whatnot.

The optimal mode depends on the task I'm performing, and that very often includes having only a single pane of information.

3285

DC Gamer Club / Re: Batman Arkham Aslyum (coming in Sept.2009)

« Last post by f0dder on August 18, 2009, 12:35 PM »

Is the game really as detailed as the screenshots from their main site? Seems to be pretty high-poly and with pretty decent textures - not bad

3286

Post New Requests Here / Re: idea - a simple prog to protect files/folder from deletion

« Last post by f0dder on August 18, 2009, 11:30 AM »

Ah!  You mean actually revoke delete permissions to the folder- I didn't think of that.  I did indeed think you were referring to the read-only file attribute.

-wraith808 (August 18, 2009, 11:23 AM)

Of course the delete permission can be re-applied if you have the rights to do so... but that's not something normal applications attempt to do when they want to delete a file, hence "I suspect this solution is good enough".

3287

General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Fix all the wrapping issues...now!

« Last post by f0dder on August 18, 2009, 11:09 AM »

*shrug*

I'm afraid I don't really see the issue - when I write in TB, my stuff gets auto-wrapped (and not in the way that normal editors (and outlooke/OE?) do, since that would produce a single long line of text). I only really need alt+l when doing copy/paste, or dealing with other people's badly formatted mails.

One wrapping issue I can think of is that very long words don't get split up decently - but I can live without hyphenation support in my mail client... I kinda like that it doesn't try to be a full-blown word processor

PS: if the receiving end doesn't use a monospace font, things will never look "right".

3288

General Software Discussion / Re: The Bat: Fix all the wrapping issues...now!

« Last post by f0dder on August 18, 2009, 09:36 AM »

Personally I just use Alt+L to wrap-format the paragraph I'm in, and that seems to work just fine?

3289

Post New Requests Here / Re: idea - a simple prog to protect files/folder from deletion

« Last post by f0dder on August 18, 2009, 09:32 AM »

wraith808: the delete permission is different from the read-only file attribute; there aren't a lot of programs that mess with NTFS ACLs, so for casual purposes this should be fine.

3290

Mouser's Zone / Re: My main hard drived just died so i'll be offline today (8/16/09)

« Last post by f0dder on August 17, 2009, 09:04 AM »

*cough* RAID-1 *cough*

-f0dder (August 16, 2009, 02:34 PM)

or use MirrorFolder if nothing else - which offers more choice (being able to select specific folders).

-nudone (August 17, 2009, 04:55 AM)

Yeah, that'd work as well. The point is you need your most important stuff automatically synchronized to a second physical disk, at all times, and of course in addition to a backup scheme.

I personally prefer RAID-1 since you can keep running your system while waiting for new disk / rebuilding the array. My main disk is now a SSD, though, so I'm out of the RAID-1 game for my workstation

3291

Mouser's Zone / Re: My main hard drived just died so i'll be offline today (8/16/09)

« Last post by f0dder on August 16, 2009, 02:34 PM »

*cough* RAID-1 *cough*

3292

General Software Discussion / Re: Open dos window from here

« Last post by f0dder on August 14, 2009, 07:17 AM »

"command prompt", not "dos window" - that way, the description works for both 9x and NT. For 9x, instead of pointing directly to command.com, make a shortcut to command.com that specific non-fulscreen mode, and point to the shortcut.

3293

Living Room / Re: PLEASE, Host Your Own DNS Server

« Last post by f0dder on August 11, 2009, 06:20 PM »

Suggestion for regular users: OpenDNS w/account creation so you don't get their redirection - plain and simple.

3294

Living Room / Re: PLEASE, Host Your Own DNS Server

« Last post by f0dder on August 11, 2009, 09:24 AM »

If you create an account at OpenDNS you get the option to not get their stupid redirection crap - making it a decent enough choice. Latency is sucky compared to using my ISP DNS servers, but I fix that by running dnsmasq on my linux server; that takes care of caching lookups from OpenDNS.

Using those other "public DNS servers" works, but it feels a bit wrong to me, since I've never seen official pages documenting them. And can you be guaranteed that they won't suddenly start redirecting queries?

Also, I believe I saw a story about an ISP moving from simply redirecting queries on their own DNS servers to actually modifying your DNS request UDP datagrams. In case that method is employed, you can do whatever you want, and you're still screwed.

PS: BIND sucks

3295

General Software Discussion / Re: VirtualProtect

« Last post by f0dder on August 09, 2009, 06:07 PM »

To be honest, with driver signing + UAC it's a lot more work than "shorting two wires" - getting a *serious* malware infection (ie, rootkit and not just something you can easily kill and remove) really shouldn't happen on vista/win7 unless you're stupid and run with UAC turned off.

3296

General Software Discussion / Re: VirtualProtect

« Last post by f0dder on August 09, 2009, 05:11 PM »

I wouldn't pay for the promise of 64bit support in something that sounds like it's hard/impossible to implement because of PatchGuard. There have been ways around patchguard, but since it's not exactly something MS supports (in other words, requires exploit kinda code) I wouldn't want to depend on a piece of software that has to use such tricks.

At the same time, I feel it's a shame that MS hasn't provided official & clean hooks for some of the stuff that PatchGuard makes impossible. 64bit drivers already have to be signed, so it's not like anybody could just write a driver and subvert the system protection.

3297

Find And Run Robot / Re: Ad-Aware identifies frr as threat

« Last post by f0dder on August 06, 2009, 10:44 AM »

I can't believe people are still using ad-aware - it's junk. Yes, the linked article is old, but point 1.5 is enough by itself that I've avoided aaw ever since.

3298

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 For Free - Powerful but controversial

« Last post by f0dder on August 06, 2009, 10:41 AM »

moor: defragmentation also induces wear and tear - but one could argue that while defragmenting, you get that tear once, whereas you get it "all the time" when accessing fragmented files.

As for free space requirements, all defrag apps I've seen take longer time (and shuffle data around more) when there's not "enough" free space. "Enough" is a bit hard to define, since it's a combination of defrag method, file size, amount of fragmentation, etc.

3299

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« Last post by f0dder on August 06, 2009, 09:39 AM »

I hereby declare that effective Windows 7 release if you get any computer advice that starts out with "Well, the first thing I do is turn off UAC..." that will be a surefire way of knowing you are talking to a whackjob.

-Innuendo (August 06, 2009, 09:29 AM)

I really don't see the fuzz about UAC these days - the prompts are few and sane. One of the few things I'm not so happy about is that "shadow file storage" thingamajig, which mouser has also rambled about... but UAC is a good thing.

3300

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« Last post by f0dder on August 06, 2009, 08:02 AM »

Gizmodo reviews the 'master CD'...

They like it.

-urlwolf (August 06, 2009, 02:26 AM)

From that link...

The more chaste User Account Control goes to that—the frequency with which it interrupts you was grating in Vista, like standing under a dripping faucet. But it actually works as Microsoft intended now, with more security, since you're less likely to repeatedly hammer "OK" to anything that pops up, just so it leaves you the hell alone.

-that link

WrongWrongWrongWrong. As mentioned several times already by other people, Win7 UAC isn't safe unless you crank it to the max. Sure, a lower level is still better than nothing, but since it allows for privilege escalation, it only guards against old threats - new ones are sure to use the design flaw.

f0dder

What do you think of  - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1235

BTW I thought chkdsk was used all the time by windows before format for a clean install ?
(maybe not chkdsk /r which seems to be at issue here)

-SKA (August 05, 2009, 11:32 PM)

I read that (linked from the OSNews article), dunno if I have anything to add to it. Since the problem only seems to happen with /R I don't find that it's a "showstopper bug", but the insanely high memory usage is definitely a problem. I don't think windows does chkdsk before install, since a format makes that unnecessary (why check filesystem integrity if you're going to wipe the filesystem anyway?).