Recent Posts

3326

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP & sata drive

« Last post by f0dder on July 16, 2009, 11:20 PM »

EDIT: Actually I do now vaguely remember loading my SATA drivers from flash drive for SP2 for my old AsRock 939 motherboard - maybe it depends on the motherboard?

Dang it!  I'll just have to try it on the spare computer for each SP, enquiring minds want to know......grrrrr.......curse you f0dder!        

-4wd (July 16, 2009, 07:41 PM)

If it has an USB floppy emulation mode, then perhaps that would work? I think the "press f6 to insert drivers" thing happens before booting fully into the NT kernel, so it has an opportunity to use BIOS calls and copy drivers to the install partition?

3327

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« Last post by f0dder on July 16, 2009, 11:10 AM »

Windows finally being a real full-fledged OS instead of sitting on top of DOS, etc.

-Innuendo (July 16, 2009, 10:59 AM)

Just to nitpick: win9x still sits ontop of DOS (even though it "sucks out the brains" pretty well, and only calls down to DOS very rarely), and while it does implement pre-emptive multitasking, there's still a few "biglocks" in the kernel code that can get the system locked up totally. Oh, and there's a lot of thunks to old 16bit windows code as well. Win9x is... a mess

As for Win7, I agree fully - the small usability enhancements and polish might not seem like a lot when looked at individually, but it all adds up to a better experience than XP. And there's some pretty cute kernel enhancements as well; those aren't directly visible to the end-users, but it does make for a smoother ride, and scalability that's going to be important as the number of CPU cores go up.

3328

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP & sata drive

« Last post by f0dder on July 15, 2009, 05:47 PM »

I think it depends on the drives too. I have installed XP on my system using SATA II drives without any issue and there doesn't seem to be a BIOS compatibility setting to select.

-Carol Haynes (July 15, 2009, 11:33 AM)

Sounds like an old BIOS that only supports compatibility mode?

3329

Living Room / Re: What's the best registry cleaner? Ask Leo says: none

« Last post by f0dder on July 15, 2009, 10:00 AM »

There is no real reason to clean your registry unless you are OCD about it or there is something in there that is seriously screwing up your system. Since the registry is in a database format doing thinks like cleaning, optimizing, shrinking, compressing or whatever fancy names these programs put on their functions will not gain you any speed-up at all when your OS accesses it.

-Innuendo (July 06, 2009, 12:06 PM)

Hear ye, hear ye!

The registry is pretty darn efficient, binary searches and all. You do want to keep the hive files defragmented, but that's of course something those silly registry cleaners don't tend to do.

3330

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP & sata drive

« Last post by f0dder on July 15, 2009, 09:46 AM »

4wd: XP only supports loading drivers from floppy, flash drive support wasn't introduced until Vista (unless it's an addition in SP3).

mrHappy: you can indeed run your SATA drives in "compatibility mode" in your BIOS, and then you won't need drivers... but then you won't get the full benefit from the drives (NCQ and such). It's pretty easy slipstreaming drivers to your install disc though, so I'd definitely run in AHCI mode

3331

LaunchBar Commander / Re: McAfee again. Don't ask.

« Last post by f0dder on July 15, 2009, 09:42 AM »

Nobody should have to use McAfee. Ever.

-Innuendo (July 11, 2009, 03:50 PM)

3332

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« Last post by f0dder on July 15, 2009, 09:41 AM »

Haha, using thread count as a benchmark stat? That's plain old lame. Most of those threads are going to be in idle state, and thus using up no CPU time whatsoever. The amount of memory used per thread is generally so little that it's irrelevant.

You also can't compared used RAM directly, unless you are very++ specific on how you do it. Both Vista and Win7 have the wonderful SuperFetch service which preloads applications before you use them - this gobbles up memory like mad, but it's done using "discardable" memory... so in fact that memory is available to applications, although it shows up as "used" in task manager.

I don't know how Win7 fares on older hardware, and I don't care much about that either - I can always stick XP, win2k or NT4 on old stuff. But on my current machine, Win7 definitely outperforms XP64. Stuff loads faster (thanks to superfetch), graphics are smoother (thanks to Aero and the win7-specific GDI optimizations), and everything is snappy and responsive. The various small GUI enhancements might not seem like that big of a deal, but it makes it overall more enjoyable to use the computer.

Oh, and the video driver architecture introduced with Vista is pretty darn nice - no more BSODs when there's a bug in your video driver, it simply reloads.

If you need to run DOS stuff, grab dosbox.

3333

Living Room / Re: Torrent Giant, The Pirate Bay sold, will go legal

« Last post by f0dder on July 15, 2009, 09:21 AM »

If we end up in such a hefty DRM'ed world, I'll simply stop buying anything and go see more concerts instead. Besides, I'm sure the pirates will find a way around the protection, and then I'll have no moral qualms whatsoever pirating everything - if I'm going to be treated like a thief, I might as well act like one.

Hopefully we'll see more small independent DRM-free publishing, though I'm not betting on it.

3334

Living Room / Re: CD archive and copying

« Last post by f0dder on July 15, 2009, 09:12 AM »

NigelH: yes, it's obviously going to be a binary image of the disc, the problem is that because of the way data is stored physically on CDs (error correction and positioning information), data can be read accurately while audio cannot - so you need special audio ripping code to get proper results.

3335

Living Room / Re: Truely amazing piece of animation art

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2009, 12:42 AM »

I guess converting the .mov with a wrapper program would work, since it does seem to loop - it'd still be cooler to have the "real" program though (higher video quality, also iirc the site mentions that the installation can change pace depending on how the elevator moves?)

3336

Living Room / Re: CD archive and copying

« Last post by f0dder on July 02, 2009, 12:33 AM »

For a few $$, this may do the trick.
http://www.farstone....are/virtualdrive.htm

-NigelH (July 01, 2009, 09:59 PM)

Fine for data CDs, but do they have decent audio-ripping code?

3337

Living Room / Re: Truely amazing piece of animation art

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2009, 07:21 PM »

40hz: thanks for the link, and the tips - a bit embarassing that I have DownloadThemAll installed but didn't think of using it

Video looks pretty awesome, would be great having the executable version so you could run it as a screensaver or whatever

3338

Living Room / Re: Truely amazing piece of animation art

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2009, 07:19 AM »

Somebody post a direct-download URL for the lazy of us? pretty please?

3339

Living Room / Re: Torrent Giant, The Pirate Bay sold, will go legal

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2009, 06:47 AM »

Back then the saying was: "I didn't sell out - I got smart and bought in."

-40hz (July 01, 2009, 06:02 AM)

Can't say I blame them, though. It was all fun and games (and damn, they had fun!), but things ended up a bit personal (and that was entirely their own faults for being so goddamn cocky). A bit of a shame seeing TPB go this way, since there was a lot of interesting stuff there (and yes, a lot of it is actually legit, even if it is some marginally small percentages).

Is this going to stop filesharing? Nah. There's several gigabytes/sec going on that has nothign to do with TPB.

3340

Living Room / Re: CD archive and copying

« Last post by f0dder on July 01, 2009, 02:24 AM »

Edvard: fred wants something that just can't be done for cd media - perfect copies. For *data* there's synchronization information burnt into the physical media, but the data doesn't exist for audio. It's really messy stuff. REALLY messy stuff, so many people violating both audio and data cd standards. For dog-standard audio CDs, cdparanoia on linux will get you what you're after... but for the pesky copy-protected-CDs's, who knows what you get :/

3341

Living Room / Re: CD archive and copying

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2009, 11:12 AM »

Edvard: dd is a bad choice, since it simply reads from the beginning of the "stream" to the end (and it doesn't read bits, btw, it reads blocks - you can't address anything smaller than sector size). It does a dumb copy, which is no good for audio data.

Really, you need a program written with audio ripping in mind, and something that supports AccurateRip so you have confidence your rips are good.

3342

Living Room / Re: CD archive and copying

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2009, 10:28 AM »

Fred, using EAC with FLAC+CUE output, you will get 1:1 copies of your audio CDs as long as they don't contain data - gaps and cd-text should be copied just fine. There's cd-writing routines in EAC as well to help you get proper burns.

I find it weird that you're willing to sacrifice general audio quality in order to satisfy a few special cases

3343

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2009, 10:21 AM »

I highlight things all the time when reading stuff on the web - and not just when the contrast is bad, I use it as a visual indicator of how far I've read. I'd absolutely hate if selecting text automatically copied it to the clipboard

3344

Developer's Corner / Re: ServerFault.com

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2009, 10:19 AM »

The reason they chose Markdown over BBCode is most likely because BBCode requires you to type like a coder, while Markdown requires you to type like a writer. There's a lot more people that can write than that can code.

-justice (June 30, 2009, 04:28 AM)

Pretty bad reason, imho.

StackOverflow and ServerFault both address pretty techy people. And besides, regular people don't seem to have much trouble learning bbcode (or using the "easy editors", like the smart little buttons SMF has).

3345

General Software Discussion / Re: some basic questions about IT science

« Last post by f0dder on June 30, 2009, 10:17 AM »

homework?

-justice (June 30, 2009, 07:11 AM)

And here I was thinking I'm the only one who was thinking that!

-40hz (June 30, 2009, 09:51 AM)

Nah

Btw, a machine's bitsize isn't determined from how many bits goes in it's bytes (which is 8 on most architectures). We have the machine's natural word size (or register width), along with it's address space width.

3346

General Software Discussion / Re: Is There Anyway????

« Last post by f0dder on June 29, 2009, 10:26 PM »

That still makes no sense to me.

-moranacus (June 29, 2009, 10:24 PM)

No, DRM doesn't really make much sense, considering it only hurts the legitimate users (you) but doesn't stop the pirates for long

3347

Living Room / Re: Where did your DC user I.D come from?

« Last post by f0dder on June 29, 2009, 09:51 PM »

turns out he was a shape shifting, gender changing god.

-Loki15 (June 29, 2009, 09:46 PM)

Not to mention a backstabbing coward - not really the most flattering god from Norse mythology

3348

General Software Discussion / Re: some basic questions about IT science

« Last post by f0dder on June 29, 2009, 09:50 AM »

2) the 1024-bit "computer kilo" is only really unambiguous when combined with bytes. When applied to bits, some people mean SI-kilo and other 1024-kilo, which is a bit messy. At least it doesn't look as ugly as the KiBiBytes etc. that the lunix zealots want to impose on the world.

3) depends. An ASCII character is defined as one byte, where a byte is usually (but not always!) 8 bits. For a lot of languages, this is not enough, though, and then you have to use a MBCS encoding (which can be unicode or "something else"). Unicode covers several different encodings, btw, and isn't just "two bytes per char".

5) sectors are imposed by the storage device, clusters by the filesystem. Since the storage device addresses in sectors, that's why sectors go bad, and not clusters. A filesystem based on clusters will probably choose to mark the whole cluster bad, though. Not all FSes are cluster-based.

6) again, cluster size is defined by filesystems, not anything else.

7) when dealing with computers - and they aren't metric units (you probably mean Système Internationale, btw?)

depends on the CPU, really. x86 CPUs have a number of general-purpose registers (amount and size depending on whether you have a 32- or 64-bit x86 CPU, and the operating mode it's in), a number of floating point registers (or rather, a stack), and a number of multimedia/SIMD registers (also depending on how new the CPU is). Operations available also depends on the type of registers (GP, float, SIMD).

3349

Living Room / Re: CD archive and copying

« Last post by f0dder on June 29, 2009, 09:31 AM »

As for ripping. NO, I want everything to be the identical, exact same.

You either get identical audio, or you get a cd-image where audio might or might not be identical, bu the rest of the structure is. This is one of the unfortunate consequences of the audio cd standard: it doesn't have the same repositioning and checksum information that data CDs have, and thus you need audio ripping routines that are more complex than simply making data CD images.

FLAC is meant to be lossless, so it shouldn't matter which program rips it, since it does, I wouldn't touch it for a permanent archive.

FLAC is lossless, the problem is the process of getting the audio from the CD. Using a proper audio ripping tool guarantees that this is done correctly - EAC is good, and also supports AccurateRip.

Hidden sub-track information and cd-text can be stored just fine in .cue sheets accompanying the FLAC files (or single-file-for-a-whole-album, but that really isn't necessary with FLAC), leaving you only to manually copy cd-data, if you want it. If you care about the audio, this really is the best archival form you can get.

3350

Living Room / Re: CD archive and copying

« Last post by f0dder on June 28, 2009, 05:44 PM »

Since you're doing this for archiving purposes, imho you'll be best off using a decent audio ripping tool like EAC, to ensure you get perfect rips. If you encode to FLAC format (which is lossless), then you can preserve gaps and everything, and even when ripping to individual files, combined with a .cue sheet you can burn perfect copies.

The only minus is that it doesn't rip multipart/data portions, but that's not too big a loss for me - that data can be copied directly over, so the most important is getting the audio right.