Recent Posts

5676

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 19, 2008, 03:33 AM »

"Realtime indexing" would require locate32 (or a service for it) to be always running... it would be an okay optional feature, but I'd hate it if the program became dependent on it.

Thumbnails ho humm, as long as it can be turned off. 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).

5677

Living Room / Re: GPLv3 explained

« Last post by f0dder on February 18, 2008, 10:07 AM »

...explanation from an objective person

There is such a thing as an objective person on software licenses? 

-Gothi[c] (February 18, 2008, 10:04 AM)

There's probably more objective people than Mr Zealot himself?

5678

Living Room / Re: The Longest Joke in the World

« Last post by f0dder on February 18, 2008, 06:30 AM »

Oh, from the thread topic I thought this was going to be about George Bush, but then it's just pages and pages of letters forming those-there words and sentecus. Ugh.

5679

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 06:16 PM »

Well, if it floats your boat - I'd still say it's not the most effective way to really stress out your PC.

5680

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 06:08 PM »

If you have an optical mouse, you should clean the lens every now and then, to avoid strange incidents like the nude one's - I usually use a q-tip with household ethanol on it.

Oh, another weird thing: if I leave my cellphone close to the mouse cord, I can tell a few seconds in advance if I'm going to get a SMS or phone call... the mouse cursor freaks out

5681

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 06:04 PM »

That's not a very good stress test, wreckedcarzz! You risk wasting a lot of CPU use by disk swapping (unless you have an insane amount of RAM), you risk games fighting for GPU resources and thus not maxxing out the GPU, and if you're disk swapping, CPU usage won't be maxxed either, since you'll be wasting time waiting for disk I/O.

It's better to stress the CPU by running something like prime95 (both small FFTs and in-place large FFTs, they stress in different ways), and afterwards try something really GPU intensive - I dunno which, but 3DMark has usually been pretty heavy on the GPUs I've had.

5682

Living Room / Re: can't access donationcoder.com sometimes unless i use a proxy

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 03:46 PM »

Gothi[c]: but is that a/the problem? We had some weird DNS problems at another site, which I solved by fixing up nameserver addresses... but those are still {ns1,ns2}.otherdomain.net - so not "recursive", but still subdomains of another domain... hm.

I think I should read up on DNS records and how the TLD stuff works

5683

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 03:41 PM »

Oh, 30C ambient temperature - that certainly doesn't help

Most decent cases will have room for an intake fan or two in the front, usually 120mm these days, although 90mm or 80mm also exist. It's a good idea having an intake fan right in front of your harddrives. I usually wouldn't bother with a side-panel fan, but with 30C ambient temperature, perhaps it's a good idea to get one of those really big ones

A different CPU cooler with a humongous heatsink (and at least a 80mm fan) would probably also be a good idea. As far as I can tell you have an old (not socket 775) motherboard, so you can't do The Good Thing^TM and find a cheap core2 CPU that'll outperform the Pentium4 (running cooler as well)

5684

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 02:38 PM »

Yes, around 2.3-2.4 GHz, some reviewers got engineering samples from the 2.6 GHz model, which I think is the future 9900, that one can compete with the Q6600 up to some extent, but not with the Penryn. Oh well, at least AMD users can get a nice upgrade (if I had the money...)

-Lashiec (February 17, 2008, 02:24 PM)

...and if they're lucky that their AM2 board support AM2+ - not all of them do, at least not without BIOS upgrades, and apparently that might not even be enough?

5685

Living Room / Re: can't access donationcoder.com sometimes unless i use a proxy

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 02:26 PM »

My problem was DNS related - sometimes, anything related to donationcoder.com simply wouldn't resolve to an IP. If I added entries to my hosts file or used another DNS server (like OpenDNS), the site worked just perfect.

I don't know wtf the problem is, if it could be a misconfiguration at DC's end, or just my ISP (www.cybercity.dk), or whatever - haven't experienced the problem with any other sites though.

EDIT: running a WHOIS on donationcoder.com:

Name Server: NS1.DONATIONCODER.COM
Name Server: NS2.DONATIONCODER.COM

Now, I'm a bit rusty at the more advanced DNS topics, but assuming that your (ISP or whatever) nameserver doesn't know about DONATIONCODER.COM, how will it resolve NS1 and NS2? Doesn't resolving NS1 and NS2 mean your DNS server has to contact ns{1,2}.donationcoder.com, which it doesn't have the IPs for?

5686

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 02:20 PM »

Phenom is slower per MHz than the 45nm (aka "Penryn") core2 CPUs, and iirc also draw a bit more power... plus the first stepping has the nasty L3 cache bug; afaik performance goes down ~10-30% to "fix" the bug in the affected stepping.

Oh, and while slower per MHz, they're also quite far behind in how high the MHz go. Phenom max 2.3GHz?, core2quad at 2.66GHz (3.2GHz for the wildly overpriced Extreme Editions). Notice that the "sanely priced" core2s overclock very well. Running my (65nm, ooold generation ) Q6600 at stock voltage, I can get it from 2.4GHz to 3.0GHz without breaking a sweat...

5687

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 02:07 PM »

80-90C? That's insane... that must be a really cramped minitower case :-s

Please nosh, get yourself a couple of 80mm or 120mm fans to get some airflow before your harddrives die. They wear out a lot faster with such high temperatures.

I wouldn't say that the NetBurst architecture is the worst ever, but it doesn't work that well for x86 code - if there was a different frontend and some work was done on compiler design, the backend is cute enough.

But core2 is certainly nicer for x86 code, I wonder if AMD will ever be able to make a comeback...

5688

General Software Discussion / Re: The definition of "bloat" - RE: Software

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 01:02 PM »

Windows

Look at size increase from NT4 -> Win2000 (NT5.0) -> XP (NT5.1) -> Vista (6.0?).

5689

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 12:43 PM »

Get paint dotNET (heh, URL speaks for itself) for your resizing + simple editing needs.

CPU overclocking is generally done by increasing your FSB speed, not by playing with the multiplier, since most CPUs have that locked. Increasing FSB stresses your system, though - and your RAM, if that isn't run by a seperate clock. And yes, you can damage your system by turning FSB up too much.

As I said, I undervolt my system and keep it at stock speed. At stock voltage, I can go from 2.4GHz to 3.0GHz... 600MHz is a respectable enough gain imho, and since it's a quadcore system that adds up to ~2.4GHz total gain. But the system does draw noticably more power and gets quite hotter if I do this, and I don't need that much juice all the time, so... undervolt it is

5690

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 12:30 PM »

Pentium D, but same difference. And 30C?? Wow.

-wreckedcarzz (February 17, 2008, 12:01 PM)

PentiumD == Pentium4, just a different name. Probably because 64-bit support and dualcore were added. But it's the same architecture as P4, which means relatively low performance, compared to the power it drains and the heat it generates.

Well, between 30-40C idle. I should install an app that names the sensors, I don't know which figure is my motherboard/chipset and which is the CPU :p. Under full load, I push the system above 50C, but I don't think I've reached 60C yet. I do undervolt the CPU by the way, to make it drain less power and thus generate less heat - no stability issues so far.

As for your setup, you really need a bigger table, to provide arm rest. Otherwise you're ruining your body... takes a while before you notice it, but when you do, you'll regret it.

And you really should resize those pictures, pretty insane resolution to use on forums . 800x600 or 1024x768 would be a lot better...

5691

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 06:48 AM »

Christ, you're damn lucky you didn't fry your computer, especially since it's a Pentium4 you have - those things get darn hot. For comparison, my Core2Quad Q6600 idles at thirty-something centigrade.

And do stress-test the machine, if you're very unlucky there's a risk you have partially damaged the CPU, like blown part of the cache. If you get any MACHINE CHECK BSODs, time to cry.

Btw, a decent computer case with good airflow means a lot, too, and a couple of 120mm casefans (those are pretty silent) are really great as well, especially having an intake fan cooling your harddrives is a good idea. If you have a sucky cramped case, installing a good CPU cooler is pretty much a waste.

Oh, and your computer isn't running any faster because of the new cooler, that's just placebo. It should be running cooler, though

5692

General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!

« Last post by f0dder on February 17, 2008, 06:39 AM »

The 20% spikes were partly because of the network transfer, Comodo seems to like uTorrent much better so it'll be substituting Sygate for good shortly.

-nosh (February 16, 2008, 02:11 PM)

Well, if you're leeching with µtorrent, your system isn't setting idle - especially not if you're downloading at high rates . 20% CPU usage still does sound like a lot, but torrent downloading means a lot TCP connections...

5693

General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2008, 11:35 AM »

Well, I do have a quadcore CPU now, but back on my dualcore it was max ~3.5% CPU or so.

5694

General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2008, 11:23 AM »

80% idle when not doing anything? That's 20% CPU usage

With Process Explorer running (spends a little cpu time on every update), firefox idling in the background, PuTTY connected to my server and showing rTorrent (which updates a couple of times per second?), and some other apps (sitting idle), I generally sit between 0 and 1.15% CPU usage. 20% CPU usage on idle sounds very very wrong.

5695

General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2008, 11:14 AM »

Btw iirc it's not necessary to reboot, I'm pretty sure I found a workaround where you can just disable+reenable the controller, and new DMA settings would be applied... but reboot is the safe way

5696

General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2008, 10:33 AM »

Check device manager and see if any of you IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers are set to PIO mode rather than DMA - my guess is that they are, and this query will help you

5697

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2008, 08:26 AM »

Dunno if the DVI cables matter - I can't tell much difference on 1280x1024 with analog D-SUB/VGA vs. DVI... but it probably matters for higher resolutions?

Dunno about CRTs being superior to flatscreens (whether that the LCD, TFT, whatever), sure their color spectrum might still be a bit better and have better viewing angles, but even 85Hz refresh rate on a CRT seems flickery to me nowadays.

5698

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: chat blocked

« Last post by f0dder on February 16, 2008, 08:22 AM »

I know my isp is a small company run by monkeys, and very likely has been abused by people more competent than them (There are so many haaxors here in northern maine...) but why must I suffer? There any way to convince openrbl I'm not a spammer?

-allen (February 16, 2008, 07:51 AM)

Hm, that sounds pretty nasty :/

Tried using a different server?

5699

Living Room / Re: More Dangerous Products for Children from China!

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2008, 07:37 PM »

Unfortunately not urban legends, no. Back when my mum&dad lived in Copenhagen, there was a sicko in the local supermarket that would put razor blades in apples :/

Oh, and the maniac that would put pipebombs in sandboxes, disguised as toys... and in phone booths. So, all phone booth doors were removed in the whole of Copenhagen, and stored at some central place. When the bomb manic was finally caught, it turned out that there were different kinds of phone boxes (with incompatible doors...) and that nobody had kept track of which doors were taken from which booths...

5700

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Scanahand RC1 Released

« Last post by f0dder on February 15, 2008, 06:47 PM »

Pretty cute idea.

Does it generate bitmap fonts, or does it go all the way and convert your handwriting to vector fonts?

-f0dder (February 14, 2008, 07:42 PM)

Scanahand creates vector based fonts that you can use in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Notepad, and any Windows application. The fonts are technically speaking OpenType fonts (although they don't contain OpenType Layout Features like Ligatures). Windows "identifies" them as TrueType fonts.

-erwind (February 15, 2008, 01:05 AM)

So it actually converts the scanned-in pixel data to the mathy vector stuff? If so, that's pretty impressive