Recent Posts

5726

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2008, 03:14 AM »

I have had 2 nVidia cards and both have badly disappointed me (low FPS, low resolutions, uses system RAM for graphic purposes...)

-wreckedcarzz

That's your own fault for not doing proper research before buying, imho. The system-ram using cards were designed for the budget market, for which they're fine, but they're no good for games. And iirc ATI has those cards as well.

I'm staying clear of ATI because of crappy drivers and loud fans. As for driver crappyness, one thing is that it was only in the most recent catalyst they (re?)-fixed OpenGL on dualhead systems (try looking at the blender3d forum to see the kind of frustrations people have had, and the hacks they've resorted to), another thing is the dreaded BSOD and filesystem corruption that has left me scarred.

Unless you're suggesting to wait because these new lines of GPUs and CPUs will lower the price of the ones I'm looking at now, what's the real advantage of waiting for the new stuff, taking into consideration what I just wrote about my opinion on value?

-Deozaan

If you can wait, do so. The 45nm core2 CPUs enter the market priced about the same as the current breed, but with better performance and lower power consumption. Unfortunately, the available-in-shop dates for the Q9450 CPU keeps getting pushed here in .dk (start of April now >_<), so I'm off today (actually, right after posting this message) to buy a Q6600

5727

General Software Discussion / Re: Thoosje Quick XP Optimizer

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2008, 03:06 AM »

@f0dder

Any experience with "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" tweak? Does it really improve perfomance?

-PhilB66 (February 08, 2008, 09:48 PM)

On Win9x, yes, I believe it did - made the kernel less likely to page things out to disk. Win9x was designed to run on pretty low-memory systems, when you moved to "enough" memory (64megs or above), it was often paging out stuff when not necessary.

On NT, ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 has no effect at all.

5728

Living Room / Re: OpenDNS - safer, faster and smarter DNS

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 06:10 PM »

Well, have to say I'm not too big a fan of OpenDNS because of the "typo-correction" stuff (I prefer non-resolving), and I'm not sure what to think about certain other parts of it... but it's very nice having an easy-to-setup alternative when ISPs fsck up (I have the OpenDNS IPs entered in my cellphone), and it's also very nice seeing software/service/whatever authors stepping by donationcoder

5729

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 09:17 AM »

Where did you get 768meg from? *cough*

5730

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 09:09 AM »

Well, 8800GTS/640 is a G80 chip, 8800GT/512 is G92.

Note that you should go specifically for the 512meg versions, as those are the ones that brought along the newer chip revisions.

5731

Developer's Corner / Re: 18 Monospace fonts comparison screenshot

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 08:28 AM »

Humm, playing a bit with Inconsolatas. It gets way too smudgy when any kind of font smoothing is on (cleartype or not). At 12pt, the l (lowercase L) is too big/fat/wide compared to the rest of the characters, and 10pt it's a bit too small. Other sizes don't work very well (it scales like crap, although font smoothing makes that less appearant). And for some reason, Incosolatas doesn't show up in Notepad++, so I was forced to test it in notepad :-s

Droid Sans Mono seems to be okay, but at 10pt and a 768px-height Notepad++ window, I lose 6 lines of text compared to 10pt Dina. Also, Italic text with Droid is a bit smudgy compared to Dina's �ber-crispness.

Same with Envy Code R, it doesn't work very well at 10pt, some characters are a bit too thin and some a bit too heavy, and I again lose around 6 lines of text.

It should be noted that I use "standard" font smoothing and not cleartype, cleartype is so smudgy and I simply can't stand it, means more strain on my wacko eyes, which is kinda the opposite as to what cleartype is supposed to do? . And I work at 10pt not 8pt, I guess my eyesight is going bad...

Simply haven't found any font that works as well as Dina for coding and other monospace use.

Thanks for the links, though

5732

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 08:20 AM »

Nope - both Power2Go & CD Lock create standalone media - no need for decryption software at the user end, they popup a password prompt once you insert the media. I'm not sure about them being openly documented though, my guess is no. The advantage with CD lock is once you enter the password the media is mounted and can be accessed normally by all apps, Power2Go opens up its own window with a protected files list that you can copy or (I think) run from within the window.

-nosh (February 08, 2008, 08:07 AM)

Hm, I wonder how that works, then - and how well it works (including encryption strength). I wouldn't trust such a solution for archival types of backup... especially not without any documentation.

5733

Living Room / Re: is someone stealing my bandwidth?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 06:41 AM »

Yes, if you plan to do something which might get you in trouble it is best to have an open network and then use tor or a chain of proxies and other methods to hide your tracks. Also do it from an old laptop which is not one of your main machines...

-iphigenie (February 08, 2008, 06:34 AM)

You don't need an old laptop, you simply fake the MAC address. Most adapters support that just fine. TOR + open network is just fine, you don't need a chain of proxies... just go down to your local McDonald's (or whatever other Evil Empire Company^TM with free WiFi), fake your MAC, hit up TOR, and off you go.

5734

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 06:34 AM »

Humm, I doubt DDR3 is that much faster, and you really do want a lot of video ram for your GPU, considering how huge textures are nowadays, and that there's also geometry processing etc done there.

Notice that more isn't always better - for instance, the best bang for the buck is currently the 8800GT-512meg cards, that actually perform better than the 640-meg

5735

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 06:32 AM »

Disenchanted Nero fans should look at (the unofficial) Nero Lite & Micro, weighing in at 35 & 13 MB respectively (these figures may be for slightly older versions.) I personally prefer a burner that lets me directly create standalone encrypted media - something like Power2Go, though the CD Lock end result is a lot more transparent/user-friendly.

-nosh (February 07, 2008, 11:21 PM)

Hm, that requires software on the user end, doesn't it? And is it 100% openly documented how the stuff is encrypted, so you can restore the data in the future, without that app?

5736

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Character Table

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 06:23 AM »

sssshhhhhttt!  Don't say that
Aren't there ways around it ?
A complete rewrite "just" for unicode ???

-Armando (February 08, 2008, 12:02 AM)

FARR internally uses "narrow" or "ANSI" strings, all over the place. Theoreticaly, parts of FARR could store UTF-8 encoded strings in those, and use that for it's scoring rules etc. But then there would need to be vairous "conversion points" where the strings get converted between UTF-8 and UTF-16 (the windows "wide" or UNICODE format).

One example would be the file-browsing capabilities of FARR, another would be actually displaying the returned strings. And that's another problem, mouser uses a custom control for the dropdown list, which uses the Delphi/BCB NarrowString data type - and iirc, it didn't look like the control had WideString support.

So lots of changes would be necessary indeed.

I guess this character table script uses a RichEdit control for displaying the characters? Then there shouldn't be much trouble with that

5737

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Locate32 Plugin for FARR by Okke

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 06:11 AM »

I've had that problem too - I think it's caused by a buggy version of locate.exe? Have you tried upgrading to the bleeding-edge?

5738

General Software Discussion / Re: Best password manager?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2008, 06:09 AM »

IIRC, the password manager in both of these are akin to unix account password management, the setting of the master password basically means you've lost your stored passwords if you forget it - it's also extremely secure.

-4wd (February 08, 2008, 03:34 AM)

How is that akin to unix account password management? Those don't work with a "master password", each user password is stored separately, usually as the md5sum of {salt,password} where salt is a 12-bit (iirc) random number.

5739

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2008, 08:33 PM »

Granted ImgBurn only writes images, but there are plenty of alternatives

-Target (February 07, 2008, 08:28 PM)

It can also create images (and can write directly to CD, without first creating a .iso then using that). It's also capable of burning/fxing-up VIDEO_TS folder so it works on standalone DVD players... and a few more things. It's not quite as fully featured as "regular" burning apps, but it works for almost all my burning needs - I don't even have DeepBurner or anything else installed at the moment

5740

General Software Discussion / Re: fifty, nifty, freefty

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2008, 08:29 PM »

I just wish OpenOffice wasn't so unstable, and FileZilla had a better user interface...

5741

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

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2008, 08:24 PM »

Call it professional pride. Probably the most important reason. I just don't believe in needlessly wasting disk space, memory, et cetera. And download size matters too, not everybody is on blazingly fast broadband. Then there's also the issue of stuffing things on USB pendrives (yes, those are growing too, but even a 1- or 2-gig stick can only hold so much).

Then there's also the issue that even if harddrives are very large and cheap, not everybody wants a super big system partition. My drives are punily small, 2x74 gigabytes - but 10k rpm disks. People running solid-state disks would have even smaller.

Oh, and I like how fast imgburn boots up. Even with my fast raptor drives, I'm still sensitive to application boot time

5742

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

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

So, is Nero itself a bloated application or is the nero SUITE bloated? I would like to see a burner only option too, but I dont consider nero ON ITS OWN to be bloated. Quite the contrary. Yes, I have to download ~200mb of data, but I only install about 20-30.

-Josh (February 07, 2008, 07:15 PM)

The suite definitely is, when you're only interested in the burner. Downloading 200 megabytes isn't a problem on a 20mbit ADSL line, but it certainly a different experience on 512kbit. Haven't used Nero for a while, so I dunno if it really is 20 megs for just the burner, but that's also too much... imgburn is less than 1.5meg

But okay, there's a few things imgburn lacks that could be useful (but that I haven't used myself for ages) - one that springs to mind is being able to add .mp3/whatever files and burning an audio CD from that. But iirc DeepBurner free supports that, at less than 3meg download.

5743

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

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

Nero is the prime bloatware example for me, too. 5.5 was ~12 megabytes, 6.3 was ~28 megabytes but still in the realm of usable (I think that's when they added the cover designer? Never used that, though). I used to love Nero because it was good at burning CDs.

Then I bumped into a mysterious error, it looked like Nero (on purpose?) burned bad copies. Not coaster level bad, mind you, it just meant that read speed would suck with those media. Upgraded to latest nero version as well. I might've been using a pirate keygen (even though I had valid OEM licenses for my drives), so it could be an anti-piracy thing.

Shortly after that, teh über-bloated 100+ megabyte versions of Nero hit the scene, and I completely ditched the app. It had gone from a nice "does it's stuff well" app to a bloated "want to do everything". Fortunately, imgburn exists, and is now my "does it's stuff (very) well" app.

Sometimes bloat is about disk size and/or resource consumption, sometimes it's about packing too many things into product, So ein Ding müssen wir auch haben style. I dunno if I would classify Opera as bloat, but I do prefer my browser not to come with e-mail and torrent support in one package.

PowerBASIC - #BLOAT metastatement
DOH! 

-Mark0 (February 07, 2008, 12:43 PM)

PowerBASIC is just plain lame allround

5744

General Software Discussion / Re: Spam filtering

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2008, 07:04 PM »

I use AntiSpamSniper too, the free version - works well enough for me.

Win9x? Ugh, I pity you

5745

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Character Table

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2008, 06:56 PM »

FARR doesn't support unicode at all, and it'll take more or less a complete rewrite to support it

5746

ProcessTamer / Re: Taming disk accesses

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2008, 09:20 AM »

Vista added I/O priorities, yes... dunno how well it works, but at least the facility is there.

5747

General Software Discussion / Re: Save the Cookies!

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2008, 05:10 AM »

It's scary how often that file is read... sure, it'll be filesystem cached, but it still has to be parsed on every read.

-f0dder (February 06, 2008, 07:06 PM)

Yep, I agree with you on that... and it can drastically slow your machine down.

The fix is (XP and 2000) you must disable the DNS Cache service before using a hostfile. If you don't disable the dns cache, XP will try and resolve/parse every bleeping site in your hostfile.

The slowest machine I have used a hostfile on is a P3 900mhz laptop. Seemed to work wonders so I was happy. I supoose ymmv depending on what antivirus/antispyware you use, since I know some of them seem to think hostfiles are evil and sit there scanning them forever.

-Cloq (February 06, 2008, 07:53 PM)

Disable the DNS cache? Sounds like a pretty bad idea to me. And is the hosts-file even used at all, then?

5748

General Software Discussion / Re: Save the Cookies!

« Last post by f0dder on February 06, 2008, 07:06 PM »

Simply put, a hostfile cuts the request before it even goes out to the net. Proactive. 

-Cloq (February 06, 2008, 05:41 PM)

If your ad blocker + rules are decent, you get the same - no reason to make a big hosts file. It's scary how often that file is read... sure, it'll be filesystem cached, but it still has to be parsed on every read.

5749

General Software Discussion / Re: How many of you use encryption?

« Last post by f0dder on February 06, 2008, 06:42 PM »

Ho humm, BitLocker... dunno enough about it to say anything. Does it work on the system partition? I don't feel too comfortable trusting my data to full-disk encryption unless I have sourcecode, or at least complete documentation of the on-disk format + algorithms used.

TPM chip support ho humm, if you have boot-time authentication it's going to be secure even without TPM.

Disk images will obviously have to be sector-by-sector (the smallest granularity you can read a harddisk at) with an encrypted partition, which is fine, imaging != backup anyway.

The strong point of TC's plausible deniability is that a given container can have two separate keys, each of which reveals different content. You can have an outer shell that contains slightly embarrassing data, and give up that key when under duress. The bad guy, looking at the outer shell, has no way to know that there is another inner shell with the really juicy stuff, still buried in the container. But to be really plausible you need to mfill the outer shell with something that they'll believe that you were really trying to hide.

-CWuestefeld (February 06, 2008, 03:59 PM)

"They" will know that they didn't find what they were looking for. But they can't prove it , although they can muse about only 1 megabyte of a 100gigabyte container was used.

5750

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by f0dder on February 06, 2008, 06:35 PM »

darklight_tr: I'm not sure Scorch3D is actually "one better" - it's a pretty different thing than the 2D version I spent so many hours with