Recent Posts

5276

Screenshot Captor / Re: Slowed Down My PC

« Last post by f0dder on May 07, 2008, 08:33 AM »

I think it unlikely that your optical drive would cause your hard disk to change mode.

-Carol Haynes (May 07, 2008, 08:29 AM)

It can happen, but should only happen if they're on the same channel...

5277

Living Room / Re: Elite Forces Defense, another hero TD

« Last post by f0dder on May 07, 2008, 08:24 AM »

I couldn't figure out how to play the game, so the evil guys just marched right in and killed me. I do NOT want to read a zillion pages of info in order to be able to play a simple TD game >_<

5278

Screenshot Captor / Re: Slowed Down My PC

« Last post by f0dder on May 07, 2008, 08:11 AM »

Very nice that your problems went away, and you didn't seem to have harddrive problems after all!

And yep, "screenshot captor shouldn't cause DMA problems" - that might even be a candid 'customer review' tagline for it

5279

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: Forum has a new red background? A css blip? Or is it just me?

« Last post by f0dder on May 06, 2008, 07:48 AM »

Not here - try emptying your firefox cache and restarting?

5280

Living Room / Re: Suck An Egg RIAA

« Last post by f0dder on May 06, 2008, 07:46 AM »

I reached around 2MB/s on the .flac torrents, that's pretty much my theoretical max. Guess I either hit the swarm at a good time, or that Carol's torrent client isn't properly set up?

5281

Developer's Corner / Re: Procedural Game Coding Contest (May 5 to June 2)

« Last post by f0dder on May 05, 2008, 06:11 PM »

That's a pretty neat idea for a competition... and especially with today's fast CPUs, I'm sure you can generate some pretty hefty content on the fly. Or do even heftier precomputations, like 64kb intros have done for a while (farb-rausch have some good samples of what you can do if you're smart about doing it).

5282

Living Room / Re: Suck An Egg RIAA

« Last post by f0dder on May 05, 2008, 06:03 PM »

I'm wondering if I should listen to the new album now, or get a good night's sleep first. The two single tracks released before the whole deal seemed pretty poppy, but not bad. Anyway, it's nice to see Reznor release stuff this way, and it'll be interesting to see what it means for him financially

5283

Living Room / Re: Knock, Knock, It's the FBI

« Last post by f0dder on May 04, 2008, 01:26 PM »

This is a very sensitive topic.

I have found myself falling between a couple thousand chairs on the matter.



Freedom - I love it. It's a pretty neat thing. We could have a load of discussions for and against it but let us try and agree the it's generally a good thing. But... freedom vs. regulation. Camreas, DNA banks, big brother... that's where the issue is.

My younger brother was recently by a stone, some madman thought it was fun to drop crap from a highway bridge. And that has made me think, think, think think, and think a bit more. I was never too fond of 1984 and the implications it has brought on us. And while my political views are probably anti-liberalist , I have never been a fan of total freedom (because it limits the freedom of other people).


OK, sorry, that was a bit too close to our fine grey line here.

Trying to re-focus, I have been having thougts about automated surveillance and and DNA banks. And the argument that they who have nothing to hide are safe, has been wheieing very heavily. If we had a global DNA bank, the idiot(s?) that nearly killed half of my family might very easily have been found.

But, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

5284

Screenshot Captor / Re: Slowed Down My PC

« Last post by f0dder on May 02, 2008, 05:44 PM »

Seems like I was right wrt. "xp reverts PIO".

Definitely time to get a S.M.A.R.T monitor and check the "reallocated sectors" count, and if nonzero - BACKUP and replace the drive. You will definitely want to hack the drive back into DMA mode before backing up, though, otherwise it'll take an eternity (it will most likely revert to PIO sometime during the backup because of bad sectors, but hopefully not until midway or later).

Now, reverting can happen for other reasons than bad sectors, but since you only have a single drive on your primary channel, bad sectors sound likely

5285

Living Room / Re: Shutdown Day!

« Last post by f0dder on May 02, 2008, 07:22 AM »

Shouldn't they have announced a cut-off point for shutting down? As in, if I realise it's shutdown day at 11:40 PM and restart 20 minutes later, am I perhaps using up more power restarting everything? Some people have NO concern for the planet!

-nosh (May 02, 2008, 05:40 AM)

Not really necessary to define explicit period with timezones and all that... just spend _your_ entire may3 without turning on your computer. Like, 24 hours straight.

5286

Living Room / Re: Shutdown Day!

« Last post by f0dder on May 01, 2008, 01:33 PM »

What a perverted thought.

But since I, at the moment, generally sleep until two hours before I have to leave for work, and don't get home after until midnight... I guess it's doable.

5287

Screenshot Captor / Re: Slowed Down My PC

« Last post by f0dder on May 01, 2008, 07:21 AM »

Hm... so you're saying that CPU usage is continuously at 50%, but you don't see any single process item in Process Explorer hogging the CPU? O_o .

OK, this is a very wild guess - but try looking here. Sorry for giving a google link, but it's a lot faster than me trying to explain the issue. That could give you similar symptoms (but so could a lot of other things).

5288

Screenshot Captor / Re: Slowed Down My PC

« Last post by f0dder on April 30, 2008, 06:02 PM »

On a normal system, CPU usage of 50% is a lot - especially if it's a dualcore, since that means an entire core is maxed out. Normal idle CPU usage, even on a machine with a lot of background apps running, generally shouldn't hit more than 5% or so.

Is there any single process using up all those CPU cycles?

5289

Living Room / Re: Comic Strip Generator (and March Caption Contest Announcement!)

« Last post by f0dder on April 30, 2008, 08:01 AM »

Wow, nice!

I'll definitely post a mugshot (hehe) when it arrives.

5290

General Software Discussion / Re: WTF SourceForge

« Last post by f0dder on April 30, 2008, 07:58 AM »

SourceForge seems to work just fine here and now?

5291

General Software Discussion / Re: Excel as a database

« Last post by f0dder on April 30, 2008, 07:57 AM »

Worst thing is, I wouldn't be that surprised if it's been done somewhat similar, somewhere.

5292

General Software Discussion / Re: How do I delete big folders with ease?

« Last post by f0dder on April 29, 2008, 06:52 PM »

If you have a huge file tree to delete, going to cmd.exe can definitely be a lot faster than deleting from explorer.

You say you copied the entire C drive? Then you might also have some permission problems, depending on the way you did the copying.

5293

Developer's Corner / Re: What XML editor do you use?

« Last post by f0dder on April 29, 2008, 06:02 PM »

Personally I use Notepad++ - might not be so hot for heavy-duty editing, but whenever I do anything even remotely heavy-duty with XML, it's either import or export and thus machine-generated...

5294

General Software Discussion / Re: XPPro SP3

« Last post by f0dder on April 28, 2008, 06:21 PM »

I've installed it on two PCs now and am not having any issues with startup time on either, the first reboot doesn't really count. No noticeable difference in performance either - what was that figure people were throwing around? 40%? Bwaha!

-nosh (April 28, 2008, 06:17 PM)

Wasn't that based almost exclusively on some very specific benchmark of MSXML?

5295

General Software Discussion / Re: Monster Cables- The World should know!

« Last post by f0dder on April 27, 2008, 06:34 PM »

Oooh!

Liquid filled! Nice! Must have! Must sound good! etc... $3000? Oooh.

5296

General Software Discussion / Re: fSekrit as open source ?

« Last post by f0dder on April 27, 2008, 06:22 AM »

fSekrit source will be opened eventually - I'm a bit too embarassed by the source right now , but once I've cleaned it up enough, we'll get there.

5297

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista Aero vs. Linux Compiz

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2008, 11:54 AM »

Edvard: just because it's on wikipedia doesn't make it correct...

5298

Living Room / Re: Google master plan

« Last post by f0dder on April 26, 2008, 11:53 AM »

Well, Carnivore... nothing more than that needs to be said.

5299

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista Aero vs. Linux Compiz

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2008, 11:59 AM »

Edvard: try maintaining an Arch linux setup for a while - eventually, the speed of "pacman" (lovely name for a package manager ) slows to a crawl... because of fragmentation.

-f0dder (April 25, 2008, 11:25 AM)

pacman -Sc; pacman-optimize; sync

-Dirhael (April 25, 2008, 11:44 AM)

...which wouldn't be necessary if the claims about "fragmentation isn't an issue" were true.

5300

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista Aero vs. Linux Compiz

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2008, 11:25 AM »

Edvard: try maintaining an Arch linux setup for a while - eventually, the speed of "pacman" (lovely name for a package manager ) slows to a crawl... because of fragmentation. Fragmentation is inevitable, you can do a lot of heuristic to try and avoid it, but it eventually ends up happening.

And it does impact performance, no matter what people say. Claiming it doesn't is pure and simple ignorance. NTFS fragments as well, by the way, so I'm not claiming it's a linux issue - it's an issue with all filesystems.

Obviously, how bad fragmentation affects performance depends on a lot of different figures - but it all boils down to fragment size and the nature of the storage system (transfer speed, seek speed, ...) - Microsoft's Vista defragmenter guesstimates that with current storage systems, you're generally OK and don't lose too much performance as long as each individual fragment is at least 64 megabytes in size.

But blanket-statement claiming that fragmentation is a non-issue and that it doesn't happen on linux - well, sorry, that's either ignorance or outright lies.