Recent Posts

5651

Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by f0dder on February 23, 2008, 12:31 PM »

5. people who treat ADHD as an excuse for their/someones behavior, and state they/someone has the condition based on their ill-educated perspective.

-jammo (February 22, 2008, 10:54 AM)

Please tell me you are not one of those people who thinks this is not a real disorder?

-Josh (February 22, 2008, 02:07 PM)

There's a difference between suffering from a disorder, and hiding behind a disorder and excusing everything and yourself because of it.. and behaving like a total jerk. Using an illness/disorder as a bad excuse for being ill-mannered is pretty unfair to the people that really suffer and try to cope with it.

5652

Living Room / Re: about to switch to a Widescreen LCD.

« Last post by f0dder on February 23, 2008, 12:27 PM »

st bought a new 22" HP W2207h after using a 17" CRT for years.  At first the images were stretched and blurry, but after adjusting the screen resolution to the recommended setting (1680 x 1050) everything scaled perfectly.  I couldn't be happier.  While researching for this LCD I narrowed my search down and then visited Circuit City and did a

-RipVW (February 23, 2008, 06:37 AM)

Emphasis is mine - because it's a pretty important point. CRT monitors can "change resolution", whereas TFT monitors always run the same resolution, but stretches the source image to it's native resolution. This obviously doesn't work well for modes that aren't exact multiples of the TFT screen, because there's no such thing as fractional pixels

5653

Living Room / Re: a 3D game that is only 97kb!

« Last post by f0dder on February 23, 2008, 12:24 PM »

psionics: umm, you're linking to kkrieger, which is exactly what this thread was about? And where do you get the 104KB figure from, kkrieger is 94KB?

Looks like a good hard work Assembly Language game thats worth the experiencing

-psionics

Not really, farb-rausch do most of their stuff in C++... the small size is achieved by generating textures and geometry procedurally, and of course the usual trick of EXE compression.

5654

General Software Discussion / Re: teracopy: copy your files faster

« Last post by f0dder on February 23, 2008, 12:21 PM »

ut... it doesn't do the primary thing teracopy does... copy things faster!

-wraith808 (February 22, 2008, 11:27 PM)

Benchmarked, or throwing a tongue-in-cheek statement?

Does the teracopy folks explain how they achieve better speed, or is it all black box magic? There's a lot of parameters to tweak in a file copy routine... like, whether you scan all source files for size so you can check if there's enough room on destination, whether to use buffered or unbuffered file I/O, how large blocks you operate on, etc.

5655

Living Room / Re: Disk encryption makes you safe? - think again!

« Last post by f0dder on February 22, 2008, 05:19 AM »

Actually come to think of it pagefil is probably what I am thinking of (mea culpa).

if the feds come knocking down your door, you might very well not have time to pull your power plugs, let alone shutting down properly

If the feds come knocking at my door (in the UK) I will be more than a little surprised - though in this day and age I suppose nothing is impossible! 

-Carol Haynes (February 22, 2008, 04:00 AM)

Hehe, same here, I used "feds" as a catch-all.

But considering how much pressure the US of A can lay on other countries... DVD-Jon had Norwegian police all over his place because of pressure from the media interest groups in USA, even though he had done nothing illegal according to Norwegian law.

5656

Living Room / Re: Disk encryption makes you safe? - think again!

« Last post by f0dder on February 21, 2008, 07:49 PM »

There is a registry setting that wipes RAM when you power off as part of the power off sequence. Whether anything can then read between the lines (like wiped hard discs) is another matter though.

-Carol Haynes (February 21, 2008, 07:41 PM)

Oh? I only know about the one that clears out your paging file. Would be a nice enough thing to enable, but...

#1 - won't save you if you use sleep/standby (laptops as well as desktops)
#2 - if the feds come knocking down your door, you might very well not have time to pull your power plugs, let alone shutting down properly

5657

Living Room / Disk encryption makes you safe? - think again!

« Last post by f0dder on February 21, 2008, 07:35 PM »

I've always wondered how long RAM keeps it contents after you shut down your machine, ever since a bug in my code (back in the DOS days) had me write a pointer to a memory location, rather than the memory contents. I was amazed how I had "compressed" a textmode screen of 80*25*2 bytes of data into just 4 bytes, and that I could restore the data after a reboot...

So, how does this apply to disk encryption? Check this out.

Today eight colleagues and I are releasing a significant new research result. We show that disk encryption, the standard approach to protecting sensitive data on laptops, can be defeated by relatively simple methods. We demonstrate our methods by using them to defeat three popular disk encryption products: BitLocker, which comes with Windows Vista; FileVault, which comes with MacOS X; and dm-crypt, which is used with Linux.

I got this link from slashdot, and one of the comments led to another pretty scary thing: the hotplug. Your desktop machine can be easily be moved from your home in power-on state, if they really need it that way - for instance, to extract crypto keys from your ram.

5658

General Software Discussion / Re: Vista 64-bit - Service Pack 1 Arrived!

« Last post by f0dder on February 21, 2008, 09:34 AM »

SP1 is supposed to change explorer's copying algorithm quite a bit - and give much better SMB/CIFS performance when talking to other SP1 (and server2008?) computers... but SMB is still going to suck speedwise for older OSes, Microsoft probably won't make SMBv2 upgrades for those OSes.

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Living Room / Re: What annoys you to no end?

« Last post by f0dder on February 21, 2008, 09:32 AM »

People, copy protection, DRM.

5660

Living Room / Re: NOT Satanic... Quite The Opposite Really!

« Last post by f0dder on February 21, 2008, 09:28 AM »

So, Renegade, what do you feel Editplus has that Notepad++ doesn't?

Editplus used to be my main editor, but that's quite some years ago - iirc it either got replaced with Textpad or replaced Textpad, but then I moved on to Notepad++ some years ago, and haven't looked back since.

5661

General Software Discussion / Re: Free Microsoft Commercial Developer Tools

« Last post by f0dder on February 21, 2008, 09:27 AM »

Some other companies supply software to students with expiring licenses so that the software actually becomes unusable without revalidation and a new license code.

-Carol Haynes (February 21, 2008, 04:12 AM)

That wasn't what I meant - just that your (legal) license to use the products are terminated when you're no longer a student. I recall having talking about this issue with Jibz (for older Office and Visual Studio), and I'm pretty sure he pointed out part of the license that said your license was terminated when you're no longer a student.

5662

Developer's Corner / Re: Waiting for program completion in Visual Basic 2008

« Last post by f0dder on February 21, 2008, 09:23 AM »

Just a note, but I think that you should make sure that you spin that code off into another thread and poll it for completion.

Otherwise you may end up with some nastiness.

-Renegade (February 20, 2008, 03:21 PM)

DON'T POLL!

If he's doing a GUI and doesn't want to lock that up, sure, put program launch in a work thread. But don't frigging poll, have the worker-thread post a "I'm done" message to the GUI thread. Polling is evil and lame, except for a very small set of problems.

5663

Living Room / Re: Making a dream PC for cheap (as possible) - help anyone?

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2008, 01:33 PM »

As long as the processor is "retail" or "boxed" (most of them are), you'll get a cooler with it. Intel's boxed coolers are generally pretty decent, except for their celeron coolers: those are pretty sucky.

If you don't play games, get a motherboard with onboard graphics, that saves you some cash - and they come with PCI-e x16 anyway, so you can install a GPU later on. Also integrated graphics = less power drain, so you can go with a cheaper PSU.

If you really need to skimp, DDR2-667 memory is extremely cheap - but I'd still rather go for two sticks (for dual-channel operation) DDR2-800 memory, either 2x1 or 2x2 gigabytes - no less.

5664

ProcessTamer / Re: Set foreground to "above normal" rather than "high"

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2008, 01:29 PM »

hmmm, not even worthy of a "no way you loser" ?

-stinky1 (February 20, 2008, 12:51 PM)

Mouser probably missed this thread, poor busy soul - he'll probably pick it up soon

5665

General Software Discussion / Re: Free Microsoft Commercial Developer Tools

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2008, 01:27 PM »

Seems to be personal/non-commercial but I couldn't see anything in the T&Cs that says the license dies with your student status.

MS have never done that in the past with academic discounted software (eg. Windows XP or Office XP/2003).

-Carol Haynes (February 20, 2008, 11:22 AM)

I'm pretty sure they have done with with both Visual Studio and Office2000, at least in .dk.

5666

Living Room / Phun - 2D physics sandbox

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2008, 10:17 AM »

Don't have time to check Phun out myself right now (NEED SLEEP!), but the youtube video definitely looks fun. I really love physics sandbox stuff

5667

Living Room / Re: Making a dream PC for cheap (as possible) - help anyone?

« Last post by f0dder on February 20, 2008, 09:57 AM »

It's not ready to divide calculations between 8 threads running in real concurrency.

-Lashiec

Just to clarify your statement, you mean that the software is not ready, right? Because the hardware certainly is (assuming you're not too memory bandwidth limited, at least).

And sure thing, normal people won't be able to even nearly utilize a octa-core system, not even a quadcore. But for 3D rendering, servers (especially those running multiple VMs) et cetera, those CPUs can be utilized, and are welcome.

I'm interested in a 4-500 budget dual core-intel.

-cmpm

I assume you're talking US$? And would that be for just the CPU, or total system? $450 can get you a core2quad Q9450, which is a damn fine CPU, and the one I wanted - but not on stock yet, so went for the ~$345 Q6600, which is also OK. The best bang for the buck is probably the dualcore E8400 at $250. Not much point in going lower than that, since the price differences in that segment are so small.

5668

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: fake timer to activate screensaving

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 09:58 PM »

You can also find the .scr file responsible for the screensaver, and double-click it. Those files are actually regular .exe files, except that they take some special command-line arguments.

5669

General Software Discussion / Re: Free Microsoft Commercial Developer Tools

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 05:34 PM »

Is that with the usual clause they tend to use? Ie, no commercial projects, your license is revoked when you're no longer a student, etc.?

The Express Editions aren't super-handicapped, by the way, and iirc their licenses are pretty liberal. (And are for anybody, not just students).

5670

Living Room / Re: Cooking my PC: what NOT to do

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 05:33 PM »

Wow - but do you need a house sized case for that? And does the weight bend your mobo?

-Carol Haynes (February 19, 2008, 05:29 PM)

Good point to make, many of the heavier HSFs come with warnings against moving your case when the heatsink is attached... and some require (either recommended by manufacturer, or just by common sense) some support straps . Aluminum fins for heatpipe designs tend to be pretty thin and light, though.

5671

Living Room / Re: Cooking my PC: what NOT to do

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 05:21 PM »

Holy moley, that's a lot of airflow! But ugh, still 80-90C? Those CPUs are insanely hot... or perhaps you should get a better heatsink for it, something *big*, with decently applied thermal paste.

5672

Living Room / Hardware AES-encrypted harddrive, cool - but...!

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 07:33 AM »

The specifications of the 2.5in. Easy Nova Data Box PRO-25UE RFID[1] hard drive case by German vendor Drecom sound promising: hardware data encryption with 128-bit AES, access control via an RFID chip compact enough to carry around on your key ring and optional 160GB or 250GB hard disk capacity. Swiping the RFID chip along the case causes the integrated Innmax IM7206 crypto controller to reveal the drive as a USB 2.0 mass storage compatible device to the attached computer. This works under Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows. There's no need for special drivers.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Too bad it's the marketing people who've been pushing their snake oil once again.

5673

Living Room / Re: tip: check your mouse before going to red alert.

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 06:47 AM »

I dunno how bad cellphones are, really... I mean, there's constantly radio signals all over, so how much worse does it get by holding a cellphone to your ear? Does it somehow "focus" the radio signals for maximal brain-frying power?

5674

Living Room / Re: Cooking my PC: what NOT to do

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 06:45 AM »

Btw, the Pentium4's have thermal diodes, to make them shut down on overheating instead of frying. Funny thing is that they get so hot so fast that if you turn on a late-model "fast" P4 without a heatsink... you risk that they actually blow up. I saw a video of it, but iirc that CPU was overclocked as well

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Locate 3.0 - great *FAST* HD search tool!

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 03:57 AM »

For me, a very nice feature of locate32 is that it can run completely from it's index-database, without accessing files on disk (thus possibly spinning up harddrives, and definitely slowing down a bit compared to not accessing files).

-f0dder (February 19, 2008, 03:33 AM)

Doesn't it already do this? As in, when you search, doesn't it access just the database? 

-nosh (February 19, 2008, 03:45 AM)

Depends on your settings - if you want to track whether files have been deleted since database creation (the default, iirc) it needs to access files on disk. Same goes for icon extraction...