Recent Posts

3726

Living Room / Re: How to get data from dead flash drive?

« Last post by f0dder on March 16, 2009, 09:39 AM »

Flash memory shouldn't be affected by radio emissions from what I know - but I've fried a flash memory device in a bad USB port once.

3727

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: Post your NANY 2009 Mug/Shirt Pics here..

« Last post by f0dder on March 16, 2009, 09:34 AM »

Big bubbles are gooooood for mental health

3728

General Software Discussion / Re: Official players - What is the big deal?

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2009, 08:31 PM »

I don't install the alternatives either - if http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ can't play it, I ignore it.

3729

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicktime only available with iTunes

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2009, 07:51 PM »

Well, official but unsupported codecs == potential malware attack vector - that's a thing I care about.

But sure damn thing, the alt. codecs are so much less hassle than the original crap, both for QT and RP 

3730

General Software Discussion / Re: Official players - What is the big deal?

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2009, 07:26 PM »

Formats should be available through official codecs, that didn't require a shitload of other garbage. A codec really doesn't need to be more than a megabyte in size, and even that is stretching it.

Preferably formats should be DRM-free, but that's a completely other debate.

As for players... fine, make an "official player" if you want, but make it optional and use standard codecs like everybody else ought to.

3731

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicktime only available with iTunes

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2009, 07:21 PM »

Quicktime alternative is just the codecs ripped out from the full QT package, isn't it? And how often is it updated compared to the main package?

3732

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

« Last post by f0dder on March 14, 2009, 07:10 PM »

 

3733

General Software Discussion / Re: cannot play ripped music files

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2009, 07:25 PM »

 

3734

General Software Discussion / Re: "Enable advanced performance" - the optimization that isn't

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2009, 07:24 PM »

There's a limit to how much we should be expected to shield fools from acting foolishly.

-40hz (March 13, 2009, 12:28 PM)

Not really, no - if it hadn't been a GUI item, there would be that much misinformation about it on the net, I bet. (OK ok, eventually some moron would stumble across it with a hexeditor on a .sys file or some obscure technet page... but at least a technet page could have described the bloody thing).

3735

General Software Discussion / Re: "Enable advanced performance" - the optimization that isn't

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2009, 12:11 PM »

Turns out that this feature have been renamed and given a new description in Windows 7, perhaps to avoid confusion?
 (see attachment in previous post)

-Dirhael (March 13, 2009, 09:23 AM)

- about time. Still shouldn't be in the GUI though, and the description is still missleading.

3736

General Software Discussion / Re: cannot play ripped music files

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2009, 12:09 PM »

Audiograbber is a good candidate for cd ripping, even though it's no longer in active development.

-lanux128 (March 13, 2009, 08:52 AM)

Bad candidate - outdated ripping engine, poor MP3 encoder.

3737

Living Room / Re: How to *really* test if your HD has bad sectors or not...

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2009, 03:59 AM »

Yes, writing to a bad section will trigger errors. You'll see messages like "delayed-write failure" and such... but just having your harddrive "fill up" doesn't mean each sector is actually written to, and it doesn't catch errors that could have appeared on areas that are used by "read-only" files.

But you really need a proper testing tool to do detailed and accurate diagnostics

3738

General Software Discussion / Re: Force Firefox?

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2009, 03:25 AM »

Some software is badly written and hardcodes Internet Explorer assumptions - the correct thing to do is to file a bug report against the software vendor. The only solution that'd work (and would still fail to cover a few instances) would be overwriting iexplore.exe with a program that launches your default browser... but that'd be a hack at best.

3739

General Software Discussion / Re: cannot play ripped music files

« Last post by f0dder on March 13, 2009, 03:21 AM »

Curt, how on earth would winamp be able to play DRM-covered tracks that you don't have a license for?

3740

General Software Discussion / Re: "Enable advanced performance" - the optimization that isn't

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 04:27 PM »

Well, imho the writeback delay for EXT4 is a bit on the insane side, but it's still the other software that's broken, not the filesystem. That this huge delay smokes out some of the bad software (especially when it's as high-profile as KDE!), I think it's worth keeping for a while. It's amazing when developers don't read the documentation, that you don't get any sync guarantees without a fsync call is pretty well-documented

Btw, the database approach isn't recommended as a fix for the stability issue, but to avoid the performance penalty of fsync'ing a lot of small config files. But it would definitely be a good idea, the zillion small config of *u*x is retarded

3741

General Software Discussion / Re: A free program that shows live the amount of traffic generated by each process

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 03:32 PM »

Didn't know about Prio - I still prefer Process Explorer, though, has even more options

3742

General Software Discussion / Re: "Enable advanced performance" - the optimization that isn't

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 03:06 PM »

"Enable write caching on disk" is good though

-f0dder (March 12, 2009, 01:51 PM)

I left that one enabled... I probably stumbled across this "tweak" around the time I upgraded my HD in early January. It's the wording that's so familar AND the fact that it was enabled - MS doesn't ship Vista with it enabled out of the box, correct?

-Darwin (March 12, 2009, 03:02 PM)

I would be very surprised if they do - it would've been all over the media (if more people knew what the setting does, anyway ). It definitely wasn't enabled when I installed Vista64 on my laptop.

3743

Living Room / Re: Samsung's 24 x 220MB/s SSD RAID

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 02:58 PM »

I now finally watched the video, and I was of course wrong wrt. ioDrive being faster than the 24 SSDs. Should've realized that 24 SSDs in RAID would mean a really fancy RAID controller . I wonder which controller they used - 2GB/s data transfer rate is pretty impressive. With pci-e 2.0, it would have to be at least a 4x card, according to http://en.wikipedia....PCI_Express#Overview

3744

General Software Discussion / Re: cannot play ripped music files

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 02:09 PM »

techidave: as I understand it, WMP generates a "license" for your user account (or possibly the entire computer) when you set it up. This "license" will be used to lock stuff ripped to WMA format to your account/computer. Long live big brother...

3745

General Software Discussion / Re: "Enable advanced performance" - the optimization that isn't

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 01:51 PM »

I definitely have had it enabled

IMHO it's wrong of MS to offer this as part of the GUI (people that "need" this should be forced to edit the registry!), and the description is very very vague and misleading.

"Enable write caching on disk" is good though

3746

General Software Discussion / Re: cannot play ripped music files

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 01:43 PM »

EAC does require a bit of techy configuration to set up properly, though, and it does rip slowly on some drives. dBpoweramp is more user-friendly and rips fast, but isn't free. Another alternative would be CDex which is hard to beat simplicity-wise, but it's ripping-engine is less thorough than EAC and dBp. It's fine for regular MP3 ripping, though

I really hope I'm wrong about the WMA license-issue wrt. your own ripped CDs though, it's a really mean and nasty thing to do, especially if it doesn't warn about it.

3747

General Software Discussion / Re: cannot play ripped music files

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 01:33 PM »

Well, one thing is that WMP afaik doesn't guarantee bit-perfect copies like EAC and dBpoweramp do - this isn't a problem to most people, as you probably won't be able to hear differences (unless something goes very wrong). I rip my CDs to lossless format for archival, so it matters to me. Next is the choice of format, WMA isn't all that bad but I prefer lossless FLAC or high-quality MP3 (because it's supported on a few more players than WMA).

I didn't know that ripping your own CDs did that copy-protection crap, though. If it always does this, I'll change my stance from "I'd never personally use WMP to rip CDs" to "violently advising people against using it". I'm afraid you're going to have to hunt after one of those DRM-removing applications since you've wiped out your old Vista install >_<

3748

General Software Discussion / "Enable advanced performance" - the optimization that isn't

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 01:23 PM »

I used to think this setting was a decent performance thing, and used to enable it. My impression, based on various faulty wannabe-tech-knowledgy blogs was that "Enable write caching" was only the usual filesystem caching, whereas "Enabled advanced performance" meant the actual disk write cache (ie., the on-disk memory buffer, usually 8, 16 or 32 megabytes).



It's a while since I learned the true meaning, and turned off the setting in shock, and then didn't think much more about it. But after yesterday's slashdot article Apps That Rely On Ext3's Commit Interval May Lose Data In Ext4 (and especially a lot of the moronic comments, sigh) I remembered this setting again, and thought it would be a decent thing warning about it here at DC.

Basically, what it does is making the Windows API function FlushFileBuffers() do nothing. This API is meant to flush the OS's write cache for a file to disk, and is the only way to guarantee that your data goes to disk in a modern OS. Enabling the setting probably won't affect a lot of software positively (since not a lot of software actually uses FlushFileBuffers()), but for things like databases this is crucial to ensure data consistency across crashes.

Read the technet link for a more in-depth description, and go turn that checkmark off if you have it enabled

3749

General Software Discussion / Re: cannot play ripped music files

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 01:01 PM »

You probably have to export the "licenses" from your XP machine and import them on the Vista machine (a bit duh, but...) - I have no idea how to do that, though, since there's no way in hell I'd ever use WMP to rip, or WMA as output format. EAC (or dBpoweramp) for ripping and flac as output

If this isn't an option, you can probably find a "virtual cd writer" and go that route - iirc Carol or app has mentioned something like that in the past.

3750

General Software Discussion / Re: Tool to monitor in background & report on memory needs and other tweaks

« Last post by f0dder on March 12, 2009, 11:54 AM »

Well, I believe it's around 3+ years since I had 1GB in my XP32 machine, and things might have gotten a bit heavier since then. But 3 years ago I gamed (a lot) more than I do now, and I still used Visual Studio - so you're probably running some relatively intensive stuff if 1GB isn't enough - 2GB should be a pretty sweet spot, though (and indeed, with the RAM prices of today, less doesn't make much sense).

My current system runs XP64 - for client versions of windows, there isn't really any way to utilize more than those ~3.5GB (real value depending on BIOS, chipset and installed hardware). Or, well, you could load a pre-SP1 XP since that imposed a limit of 4GB physical memory, rather than the address space limitation that SP1 changed to. Some drivers might have problems with this, though (and, on a related note, some driver developers should be shot or at least moved to userland). If you want >4GB memory on a 32bit Windows OS, you really have to move to server versions, which don't have this artificial limit imposed.

If you're going to jump gun and run a 64bit OS, I'd say go for Vista. It really isn't a bad OS once run through vLite. On the other hand, it probably makes more sense just to run XP32 for now, and going 64bit Win7 once that hits the streets