Recent Posts

4251

Living Room / Re: Childhood Memory

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 06:13 PM »

I believe all numbers in Denmark are 8 digits long, except for 112 (our variant of 911... back in the old days, it was 000, I wonder why they changed it to 112). For cellphone text messages, there's some 4-digit numbers for special services, though.

4252

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 06:10 PM »

Rammstein kicks some serious hiney live - they put on some massive shows, with enough fireworks and flamethrowers to make 4th of July seem like a walk in the park. Quite recommended

4253

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 06:10 PM »

Every harddisk producer has had some bad batches - some have had more than others, though (IBM DeathStar series, a lot of maxtors that overheated, ...). The brand I've personally had the least problems with is WD. I've only had single of them fail on me, and that was in a cramped case that had an ambient temperature of 50+ Celsius . Oh, and their raptor drives supposedly have pretty low defect rate.

As for CPU, it sounds like just about anything on the market right now will fit your needs, so there's not much use in waiting for the i7 to go down in price. On the other hand, there's not that big a price difference between a 2.66GHz core2quad and a 2.66GHz i7 (which is also quad... but has HyperThreading, 8meg cache instead of 6meg, and integrated memory controller. Hmm.)

EDIT: forgot to say, I've learned that you should always have an intake fan (80mm or 120mm) directly in front of your harddrives. Keeps them colder (dropped a maxtor drive by ~20 Celsius), and I'm pretty certain that keeps them alive longer. At least I haven't had a drive crash since I started cooling them down.

4254

DC Gamer Club / Re: The Best Gaming Moments of 2008

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 07:19 AM »

Hmmm, pretty puzzling those BioShock crashes, it runs like a champ here

-Lashiec (December 16, 2008, 07:12 AM)

Perhaps it doesn't like XP64? Could be the copy protection that messes stuff up. Or it could be the video drivers... or... etc. I've heard a lot of people complain about instability though, so it's not just me.

4255

Living Room / Re: Childhood Memory

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 07:04 AM »

Both my mum and my dad have kept their old numbers even though they've moved a couple of times since then - so I remember both numbers

4256

DC Gamer Club / Re: The Best Gaming Moments of 2008

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 07:02 AM »

I tried Assassins Creed, but it didn't really catch my fancy, and was pretty unstable. I wanted to play BioShock since it seemed like an OK way to kill time, but that was pretty unstable too - I'd usually only get around 30min playtime before a crash, so I gave up.

Crysis was a nice game - gameplay was pretty trivial and the storyline was pretty standard, but it sure it darn pretty. It only crashed on me once, and that was when my graphics card overheated after 6 hours of continuous playing

HL2 EP2 was a really nice play, and I'm looking much forward to EP3. The game continues to look great even if the engine is no longer state-of-the-art, and I like the gameplay mechanics and storyline. Portal was a great play as well, had a great time completing that. The bonus levels are a bit too insane, though.

From what I've seen of GTA4 screenshots for PC, I don't think I'm going to bother. It doesn't look all that great (imho only minor improvements from GTA3), but from what people say it requires an insane machine configuration in order to run smoothly even at medium detail quality.

Far Cry 2 has been pretty fun, and looks great even though it's not quite up to Crysis' standard. I like that it's somewhat more realistic than Crysis, though. But it's somewhat unstable, and when it crashes the last couple of savegames are usually corrupted. It's one of the few games that seems to utilize all four cores of my quadcore pretty well, but I can't help but think how well it utilizes them - after all, the game seems simpler than Crysis, but sucks up more CPU power. The gameplay is very repetitive too, but it's fun for a couple of hours now and then, driving around and sniping people

I revisited DOOM a couple of months ago, completing all four episodes (what, you thought there were only three? Didn't know that ID software released "Thy Flesh Consumed"?) on Ultra Violence.  Ah, the nostalgia... and still a great game.

The best game I've played this year has to be Left 4 Dead. It uses the source engine, so it runs really great, and it looks very nice as well. And I love zombie movies. The gameplay is very nice, both in cooperative and versus modes... this was the game that finally made me buy a head-set in order to coordinate stuff properly with my buddies.

4257

Living Room / Re: Funny, Strange, and Confusing Error Messages

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 06:36 AM »

Screenshots are more fun anyway, and some dialogs can't be Ctrl+C'ed anyway (some developers love custom dialogs and don't just use a MessageBox() call).

I prefer genuine error messages btw, the fake ones are often not that funny. I should have a search for the various BSODs and other oddities I've snapped around town

4258

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft updates - annoying folder proliferation

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 06:33 AM »

Hm, interesting - so you get them after any random update, not just a service pack?

I wouldn't feel scared about removing them, although I'd probably do a reboot first, just to make sure any install/cleanup actions have (at least attempted to) run.

4259

Site/Forum Features / Re: Forum feature suggestion: Necromancer alert (very old threads resurrected)

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 06:31 AM »

If that is too large, it could always be a "user" with a similar avatar "posting" a necromancy spell, followed by the newer posts.

-app103 (December 16, 2008, 12:56 AM)

Haha, that's a nice idea - I love it!

4260

Living Room / Re: Windows software RAID

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 06:29 AM »

OK, I managed to find the time to mess around with all this the other night, and this is what I ended up with:


It was "pretty interesting" moving things around, since I had a lot of stuff referencing the "D:\" source partition - once I had emptied disk#1, I made a new source partition there and copied all the old stuff over. Getting the drive letter changed involved killing most running processes, and then doing a superfast "pskill explorer.exe" and removing the drive letter before the explorer shell reloaded... and again, "pskill explorer.exe" and adding the drive letter to the new partition before explorer (again) reloaded. This gave an error message which scared me a bit, but fortunately a reboot solved the problem.

As you can see, the picture looks a bit weird - I wasn't able to match up the sizes of the C: and D: partitions exactly. I presume this is because disk#0 had a primary partition (for C:) and an extended (for D: and E:) before it was converted to a dynamic disk. This annoys me a bit since I'm a perfectionist, but I don't really feel like reinstalling Windows from scratch just to have a prettier picture - and stuff seems to work fine.

Unfortunately, HD Tach doesn't want to benchmark the RAID partition, and only wants to deal with the physical drives. Running md5sum.exe on a 4GB ISO file seems to do about 130MB/s though, but the md5sum I have is pretty inefficient disk-wise, and I measured using Process Explorer... will have to find some more accurate benchmarking tool. The main reason for striping was getting continuous storage though, and it does seem like I got some performance improvement as well (duh ) - I'd still like to know just how much, though.

4261

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on December 16, 2008, 06:18 AM »

remember that TFTs don't look good at their native resolution

-f0dder (December 15, 2008, 05:11 PM)

I presume you meant that the other way round!?!

-tomos (December 16, 2008, 04:14 AM)

D'oh!

Personally, I'd go for a single 150gig velociraptor main drive (in my current box I have 2x74gig raptors, now partially running RAID stripe) - I don't see much reason to pick two of them, unless you want a RAID mirror. If you need local data beyond that, a single terabyte drive (if you need that much :O) should be sufficient - and they're pretty fast, too.

Most NAS boxes are unfortunately pretty slow. Partially because windows file sharing (SMB/CIFS) is pretty inefficient - even on gigabit, you're probably going to hit a wall at 30MB/s or so. SMBv2 fixes this, but is only available in Vista and 2008 server - and samba only has experimental support for it, so it probably isn't going to be present in any NAS boxes right now. Even if you use FTP, consumer-grade NAS boxes tend to not be able to hit full harddrive speed. So either get an eSATA enclosure or build your own fileserver for backups. (I like having my backup/filestorage raid-mirrored and available all the time, instead of having to muck around with enclosures etc.)

As for RAM, if you go for core i7 (*drool*), keep in mind that the CPU supports triple-channel memory. So you'll probably want to go for 3xsomething modules for max performance. Perhaps you aren't going to utilize even 3GB right now, but you say you only upgrade your computer every 5 years... definitely go for 3x2GB, then.

Shades: sounds weird that maxtor is king where you live, since they've been notorious for having drives that run very hot

4262

Living Room / Re: Creative, awesome uses for Google

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2008, 05:13 PM »

Google calc (3 of the tips) rock

It supports some pretty esoteric quantities

4263

Living Room / Re: Please help me build my new computer, DC!

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2008, 05:11 PM »

Intel core i7
8gig DDR-3 ram
IODrive


To be realistic... two monitors indeed. I do fine with 2x17"@1280x1024, but with today's prices going below 21" is probably silly. Just remember that TFTs don't only look good at their native resolution, and that you need a high-end graphics card to run games at 21" resolution.

If you can wait until core i7 drops a bit in price, go for it. And 4 gigs of ram.

4264

General Software Discussion / Re: Bear Bottoms Freeware: A very nice high-quality software site

« Last post by f0dder on December 15, 2008, 10:24 AM »

Ummm, your link to the Iran Contra page has no mention of mr. Bottoms. And where are the URLs to articles where he "admits to being a cocaine smuggler"? Where are the links (to reliable media) that shows he has anything to do with the death of anyone?

You are the one making the accusations, so you should be providing links (to reliable media). "Use google" or "read usenet" doesn't apply. Before you do that, I see your posts as particularly nasty slander.

And even if those accusations are correct, it really doesn't have much to do with his site. As others have mentioned, if you were only criticizing the quality of his reviews (and actually giving some examples of sloppy work), it would be a different thing. But DC isn't really the forum for personal attacks like this.

Besides, how long ago did those crimes of his allegedly happen?

4265

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Peggle Extreme now free on Steam

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2008, 07:05 PM »

Why do you call casual games stupid?

Sometimes it's nice being able to spend half an hour on something not too brain-boggling, without having to get immersed in storylines and whatnot. Casual games work pretty well for that. Peggle is quite nice imho, and I kinda like bejeweled as well

4266

General Software Discussion / Re: Bear Bottoms Freeware: A very nice high-quality software site

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2008, 06:48 PM »

When making accusations like this, you really ought to link to relevant posts. And people here generally aren't too fond of tinyurls, btw.

4267

Living Room / Re: Anonymous I-net surfing ?

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2008, 10:06 AM »

I would never do anything involving credit card numbers or site logins using TOR, https or not.

4268

Living Room / Re: ThreatFire or Prevx Edge ? And do I really need it?

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2008, 09:57 AM »

I wouldn't really bother. If you want security, go for Kaspersky antivirus - it has the antivirus part as well as some behavioral blocking that should be adequate, and it's been running pretty stable on the XP machines I've been setting it up on. Don't run any anti-whatever software myself, though (*knock on wood*).

I wouldn't bother with registry cleaners either, they usually don't do much good, but can do harm if you're unlucky.

Use FireFox with adblock plus and (if you can live with whitelisting) noscript. That'll keep you rather safe

4269

General Review Discussion / Re: Zaine's review of Compression Tools is cited in an excellent book on Compression

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2008, 09:51 AM »

I would like this book - could be interesting. But some people wrote in reviews its not diving deep enough into the algorithms. A long time ago there were some revolutionary big new inventions about fractal compression - why aren´t there any till now?

-Crush (December 14, 2008, 07:35 AM)

Because nobody ever mad it run fast enough that it would be a feasible method to use? If only compression had been that slow, perhaps it would be viable, but iirc decompression is as slow as compression?

4270

Living Room / Re: Repeated drive corruption

« Last post by f0dder on December 14, 2008, 09:49 AM »

Yeah, SATA connectors are really stupidly designed - they wiggle loose too easily, and it's also too easy to break the connector (both the cable-end as well as the connector on your disk drive). A pity really, since it's otherwise pretty nice, slim cables and all.

4271

Living Room / Re: Windows software RAID

« Last post by f0dder on December 13, 2008, 11:56 AM »

True. But Microsoft has become quite adept at limiting (i.e. crippling) features between the various versions of Windows; so I'm not sure it would work the same on all versions despite the fact that the underlying code may be identical. "Vee haf vays..." as the saying goes.

-40hz (December 12, 2008, 01:25 PM)

Well, playing around in vmware, I just found out how the Pro version is crippled compared to the Server version: XP Pro only supports striped volumes, you need a server edition to set up mirror or raid5- bollocks! After seeing this limitation, I do recall reading about it previously - and yeah, you can gain ability to create mirrors and parity volumes if you hack some system files, but I don't really feel like doing that.

The thing is, I have 2x74gig raptor drives in my system. On drive#1 I have a 16gig system partition for XP64 + apps, a 4gig partition for source code, data files, etc (all the "important stuff"), and a 50gig "dump" partition (for games). On drive#2, I have a single big 70gig "dump" partition for downloads, messing around with ISO files, etc.

Considering that the two "dump" partitions are expendable, I'd like to stripe them. Both for the additional speed, as well as consolidating the drive space to one volume (I've often had situations where I had something like three gigabytes left on both volumes, but needed a single volume with ~4.3gig free space for manipulating an ISO file). Since I was planning this stripe business, I though I might as well set up a mirror for OS and data partitions, to avoid having a ~20gig partition on drive#2 (stripes take two identical-sized partitions).

I guess a workaround would be resizing the system partition to 6 gigabytes, thus ended up with the following layout:

[Select]

disk#1: system (6GB) | data (4GB) | stripe-part1 (60GB)
disk#2: system2 (10GB)            | stripe-part2 (60GB)

Then I could mount "system2" as a junction - problem is, apart from the windows folder, system consumption is split up between "c:\dev" (visual studio, eclipse, MSDN, DDK, SDK, ...), "c:\usr" (portable apps, minor tools, various libraries and header files, etc), and program files. I don't really feel like consolidation everything under "program files" :/

Then again, I've been considering giving Vista a spin on my workstation, and that would allow me to use symlinks instead of simply junctions... I wonder how easy it is to move "program files" to another volume on a running instance of windows, though

4272

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Fix Vista so I can drop a file from Windows Explorer to cmd yet again

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2008, 04:40 PM »

Don't worry about your first post being a request, you posted it in a nice tone rather than "GIMME I DESERVE THIS!" :-)

I think the problem might have something to do with console applications running under ClientServer Runtime System (CSRSS)... an CSRSS runs as a system service (ie., higher privilege than even user accounts with admin privileges), and iirc Vista disables communication between lower- and higher-privilege applications.

I'm not 100% about this though, but it would explain why the functionality was dropped.

4273

Living Room / Re: Windows software RAID

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2008, 12:30 PM »

Shades: is it the RAID rebuild or the filesystem fsck that takes the time, though? And what RAID level are you running? (RAID-5 would take a long time to rebuild, but I'm only considering a mirror and a stripe). I run a mirror on my linux fileserver, btw.

40hz: server and desktop windows versions should have the same RAID implementation, really - there's a lot of code shared between the two, so really the difference mostly comes down to different registry defaults and some add-on stuff for the server editions. I'm not seeing mirror as alternative to backups, but as a supplement. I was thinking of mirror for OS install + documents/source partition, and a stripe for messing with ISOs, game installs, etc - ie, the data that I wouldn't weep if I lost.

I don't want to lose data to anything but a disk crash, though.

So, how does the windows raid work? Does it create a "virtual disk" that you can then partition, or do you set up "per-partition" kind of raid?

4274

Living Room / Windows software RAID

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2008, 07:33 AM »

Before anybody says "software RAID sucks, go hardware", let me start by saying that you need expensive 3ware or adaptec adapters with on-board battery-backed RAM in order to have any big advantage over software raid (and most "hardware" RAID solutions are partially software anyway, usually just with an XOR accelerator engine).

So, the question is: does anybody here have experience with Windows' built-in software RAID? AFAIK it requires that you do 'dynamic' disk partitioning, has support for 0,1,5 levels, and is only supported on the pro/business versions... but that's as far as my knowledge of it goes.

So I'm wondering... can windows boot from a mirror RAID partition? And what is performance like? (I have a quadcore CPU, I don't suppose there's going to be much CPU strain unless you go RAID-5 which I'm not interested in). Does it offer the "striped read" optimization for mirrors (like intel raid matrix), or does it read from both disks and do compare?

4275

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA:Embed mouse-over hot spots in/on .jpg image

« Last post by f0dder on December 12, 2008, 05:31 AM »

You can't embed this information into a standard image file and have it work with image viewers. But it's quite possible to do for websites,through use of image-maps, for example.