Recent Posts

6276

General Software Discussion / Re: Maybe Vista doesn't suck?

« Last post by f0dder on December 08, 2007, 05:24 PM »

Hang on isn't there a compatability layer in Windows now anyway - yes but it doesn't work well! (Right click on an EXE file and you can set it to run in Windows 98 mode if you want - but don't expect anything much to happen 'cos it never worked well).

-Carol Haynes (December 08, 2007, 09:03 AM)

Not really MS's fault though, some of the early 32bit windows applications were very ill behaved, using direct port I/O for keyboard access (shows how some of them were really designed as DOS apps but hack-ported to win32 at the last moment), used the privileged CLI instruction because some misguided "Oh I'm so eleet I can program teh assembl0r!" programmer thought it made his apps faster, etc.

Okay, so it was partly MS's fault for letting 9x being wide open and actually putting in the extra code needed to emulate CLI/STI, and iirc Microsoft were the ones who distributed the game POD (OMFG MMX!), which did port I/O... but still...

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Older Newsletters / Re: --> Newsletter for December 6th - Codename "Operation GOE Freeware Release"

« Last post by f0dder on December 08, 2007, 05:20 PM »

Thanks for the feedback, everyone - keep it coming!

I'd like to take credit for the "more sections this time with fewer links in each", but really, mouser's been repeating this like a mantra to me since August 

-Darwin (December 08, 2007, 08:31 AM)

I don't think he meant to get rid of links completely, though

(No, it's not nagging, just a friendly nudge, please don't take it too hard )

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General Software Discussion / Re: ghacks post: "Why I decided to uninstall my Antivirus software"

« Last post by f0dder on December 08, 2007, 05:08 AM »

Essentially just using general common sense, I think can keep you protected most of the time. And don't forget to backup occasionally!

-vegas (December 08, 2007, 04:58 AM)

Until you get hit by a rogue banner ad that admuncher for some reason didn't filter... *boom*. And when that happens, it's going to be nasty.

But no, I don't run antivirus software either

6279

Living Room / Re: 9 Better, Cheaper Ways To Search Amazon

« Last post by f0dder on December 08, 2007, 04:57 AM »

Humm, personally I'm pretty satisfied with Amazon's regular interface, and find their suggestions pretty useful sometimes (yeah, amazingly enough I do have the willpower to not automagically buy everything ).

I'd feel pretty suspicious of using something like the Amazon Light site, where your traffic goes through that site... I feel fine about amazon collecting my browsing/spending habits and credit card info, but a third-party site? Nah.

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SMF Forum Mods / Re: inline attachment mod

« Last post by f0dder on December 08, 2007, 04:53 AM »

Doesn't look like a hacking attempt to me - if it was, the filenames would probably be crafted to include shellcode, and be a lot longer. Look how the numbers are very close and vary just a bit, that looks like letters from an alphabet to me; shellcode would have much more variance.

As to why the filenames are encoded as they are, dunno - it's probably the safest best, as there's so much that can go wrong when you're trying to use unicode/utf-8 filenames; not all system support it, and even if the OS + filesystem supports it, if a piece of software "in the chain" doesn't, you'll get really funny results

6281

General Software Discussion / Re: ghacks post: "Why I decided to uninstall my Antivirus software"

« Last post by f0dder on December 08, 2007, 04:47 AM »

If your machine is never connected to a LAN (and friends never bring over laptops/whatever), and you only selectively forward ports on your router, I guess you're mostly fine. But why turn off windows firewall? Does it impose a significant hit on your machine:

Backup partition won't help you much against nasty viruses if it's on the same machine... but fortunately most threats today is in the trojan/malware category, not viruses.

6282

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: 1 Terrabyte Western Digital Drive for $264 USD

« Last post by f0dder on December 08, 2007, 04:41 AM »

RAID-5! ;p

-vegas (December 08, 2007, 04:19 AM)

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: 1 Terrabyte Western Digital Drive for $264 USD

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 08:47 PM »

I'd probably end up doing 3- or 4-disk mirrors (instead of regular 2-disk) simply because losing 1TB is "ouch". Please, don't anybody say anything about RAID-5 and embarrass yourself.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Maybe Vista doesn't suck?

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 08:44 PM »

Then... the spell starts to break!

But no, it will not happen. It sounds like they want to do it with Windows 7, which sounds pretty hopeful, but Vista sounded like they were going to do something pretty radical, but ended up "Meh. Bother. Whatever".

6285

General Software Discussion / Re: Shut Up About Vista, Already

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 08:42 PM »

Vista was able to make 100% use of all cores where XP only managed to use 70-80% with the same program. In Vista things got done quite a bit faster. Startup of programs when other things are running is also way faster on Vista.

-Okke

Are you sure that it's just not Vista itself taking those last 20-30% CPU time? joking aside, perhaps the Vista scheduler tries to keep thread on the same core, instead of trying to balance load equally across cores... I've seen speedups on XP when I manually lock thread affinity (so threads stay on one core), probably has to do with better core cache memory utilization...

As for faster program startups, the more aggressive prefetching of Vista is certainly something I wouldn't mind having.

But in whole, I'll be sticking with XP until the child diseases of Vista have been rooted out, and I'm sure I can cut off all the fat and useless crap.

6286

Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 09:04 AM »

Ah, sounds smart. I don't use special chars often though, so I guess I'll continue to rely on CharMap

PS: the Danish postal service is usually pretty reliable, but errors do happen. First time I've had a package delivery glitch like that... should've just fetched it manually, I live in the same city as I ordered from, but total roundtrip time with bus is a bit more than an hour...

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Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 07:46 AM »

Yeah, knew about alt+numpad and charmap, just thought there might be a handier way - thanks nonetheless

And more about how important it is to keep your harddrives fanned: I've had a an IBM deskdeathstar survive 4+ years when everybody else's were dropping dead. And when I chose a wrong computer case for a fileserver, causing ambient heat of ~40°C, it took only a few months before a Western-Digital drive dropped dead...

Oh, I got that small amount of money btw, and ordered an additional 73gig raptor... but http://post.dk messed up, and it went on a detour to Copenhagen, so it didn't arrive at Taulov before today, which means it won't hit Aarhus until tonight or tomorrow - meaning I don't get it before monday

6288

Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 05:59 AM »

Good

Intake fan meant 10-15°C drop in temperature when I measured it the first time. Btw, how do you make the '°' sign? I just copy-pasted it from you

6289

Living Room / Re: The State the Art of 3D Printers

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 05:30 AM »

$40k is a lot of money, but not so many years ago the price was in the million range, and doing a print would cost several thousands of dollars... and even a big company as NKT didn't have their own, but shared one with another company.

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Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 05:26 AM »

I actually went with 2x250mm case fans in my system...and a HQ 120mm for the CPU, and the same size for the PSU. No need for another fan dedicated to my HDD's then

-Dirhael (December 06, 2007, 09:56 PM)

Just make sure the intake fan is located in front of the harddrives.

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Older Newsletters / Re: --> Newsletter for December 6th - Codename "Operation GOE Freeware Release"

« Last post by f0dder on December 07, 2007, 05:20 AM »

Oops - the email version doesn't have links for the forum postings

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Living Room / Re: Wiki Spam

« Last post by f0dder on December 06, 2007, 08:38 PM »

I just restored a page recently on a really nice GTD wiki, related to time management/productivity software....and had to do it again just now as I was making this post.

Someone had wiped out the entire page and replaced it with a few spam links. 

Luckily, it was fairly easy for any visitor (like me) to find and restore the previous last spam free version. Unfortunately, it's just as easy for the spammers to wipe it out again & again. 

I am just getting tired of having to do it. It seems like I should bookmark the page with the last good version and write a script that will automate the checking of the page every hour, identifying when it has been wiped out, and automatically restoring that last good version. 

-app103 (December 06, 2007, 08:12 PM)

Sounds like a job for.... SCRIPTO-MAN!

6293

Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 06, 2007, 03:46 AM »

Edit: One of the advantages of having your programs on another drive is that stuff like defrag can be run concurrently on the system and the programs partitions, really cutting down on overall time. 

-nosh (December 05, 2007, 10:37 PM)

As long as it's another physical drive and not just a partition, yeah

What about C:\ on a Flash hard drive, and all the other things on one of these 1Tb 7200rpm... 

-Armando (December 05, 2007, 11:00 PM)

The first-generation flash drives are relatively slow :/, and the hybrid harddrives are very 'meh'.

Throughput of flash drives are a bit slower than traditional harddrives, but with the current new generation, it's "decent enough". It's obviously seek time that rocks++. But there's some write latency. I'm waiting for the new flash memory type (from IBM + friends, iirc) to be developed, supposed to be faster

Currently the neatest thing would be a DDR-RAM based solution with backup to flash, but... that's expensive.

6294

Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 05, 2007, 05:17 PM »

Don't worry about the fans, even the most cheapo case in the market brings along a fan or two with it.

-Lashiec (December 05, 2007, 11:37 AM)

Well, then you do have the fan... but be sure that it's an intake fan, and placed in front of the drive(s), so they're efficiently cooled.

Of course, another story is when we talk about spinning up the drives when the computer starts...

-Lashiec (December 05, 2007, 11:37 AM)

Staggered spinup <3

6295

Living Room / Re: Your Power Suit is (Almost) Ready

« Last post by f0dder on December 05, 2007, 05:14 PM »

Not sure I'm convinced, but it does look cool!

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Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 05, 2007, 08:17 AM »

The advantage of the "safe" RAID levels (ie., not JBOD and STRIPE, but MIRROR and the various PARITY types) is that you can indeed keep on working, you don't lose data, and you can plug in a healthy drive and repair the array (very nice feature if your hardware is hotplug-able).

Problem with RAID-5 rebuilding is that it's more intensive than the simple copy done with RAID-MIRROR. Also, because RAID-5 can still only tolerate one failing disk, the more disks you add to the array, the higher risk of failure you have.

If you buy two identical harddrives from the same batch, statistically the drives will fail within a relatively short timeframe (couple of months or something like that) - and in case you don't have a proper intake fan to cool the drives, you run a much higher risk of more than one drive saying bye-bye.

So if I schedule backup daily of all important files & folders, there really no sense in even running RAID-MIRROR? 

-vegas (December 05, 2007, 02:58 AM)

Yes, because drives always fail one hour before you do your backup

dont really understand the atttraction of fast drives if they need more fans/get very hot but then I've never used one.

-tomos (December 05, 2007, 05:14 AM)

My raptor don't seem to get much hotter than other drives I've used, even though it's 10,000rpm. But I'll never again build a system that doesn't have a 80mm or 120mm intake fan in front of harddrives, it's plain folly. Just buy a quality fan and you won't notice it's there. The advantage of 80mm and 120mm fans are that they're pretty quiet, and the noise they make is "deep", compared to the "whiny" (and highly annoying!) fans on graphics cards, for instance.

(I mean I'd prefer quieter machine to shaving seconds...)
am considering something like a hotswap bay in the future (I only have the option to add one more drive i think..)

-tomos (December 05, 2007, 05:14 AM)

Be careful which one you get - you'll want one that keeps the drive cool. The fans in the (non-enterprise class ) hotswap bays I've seen have been very tiny and high-pitched and annoying.

6297

General Software Discussion / Re: Run apps as non-admin with SetSafer to avoid spyware.

« Last post by f0dder on December 05, 2007, 02:32 AM »

Hmmm, when dealing with security in firewalls or user/program rights, the safe way to go is whitelisting (non-privileged users with possibility of escalating to admin) rather than blacklisting  (by default trusting apps not in the blacklist). I know its goddurn inconvenient, and Vista doesn't really handle it in the most elegant way (and previous versions it was even more horrible), but it really is the way to go.

I still run my primary account as admin though, shame on me . I guess a thing like SetSafer is better than nothing, but I can't help think that it gives a somewhat false sense of security - and that I should get around to installing SandboxIE or Altiris SVS.

Thanks for telling about SetSafer nonetheless

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Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 05, 2007, 02:21 AM »

RAID with Parity would be RAID-5, and I wouldn't touch it... still only guards you against a single failing drive, and rebuilds when a drive dies are expensive (and might generate enough stress that an additional drive dies, *poof*).

RAID-MIRROR might seem wasteful in that you "lose" one full drive's capacity, don't get enhanced write speed etc., but it's really the only way to go. People do tend to weep when their 1.5TB RAID-5 arrays die completely.

And btw... mouser: damn you Amerikans for having such cheap electronics prices! A 74gig raptor drive will set me back ~$195, and the 150gig edition ~$270. Those drives are spendy.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Rumor: Windows Apps Running Native on Your Mac

« Last post by f0dder on December 04, 2007, 06:54 PM »

Does OS X come with ZFS support, or does it just have bits and pieces like the PE support mentioned above?

FLAC support in kernel? heh. That belongs as a codec for iTunes, nothing else. Retards if they don't already have support for that, but my mac-using friend bitched about it.

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Living Room / Re: If you build a new PC, make sure you get 2 HDs: One fast and one big

« Last post by f0dder on December 04, 2007, 06:53 PM »

Be sure to get two large drives and set them up in a RAID mirror... the larger your drives, the more data you lose when it goes down. You'll also want a 80mm or 120mm intake fan located right in front of your drives, and obviously you'll want to do backups as well, because RAID isn't a replacement for backup.

The Raptor drives are pricey, but I sure do like my 73gig model (if I get the (relatively small sum of) money that I'm expecting, I'm buying one more next week). You might argue that other not as spendy drives have reached (and perhaps even beaten, if ever so slightly) Raptors in raw transfer rate, but not seek time... and that does matter.

When I finally get money for a new box, I'll run two raptor drives and use Intel's RAID MATRIX to have both RAID-MIRROR and RAID-STRIPE, without needing four drives...

PS: backing up to another drive in the same computer is not good enough, even if it's two physical drives. You'll want to backup to a fileserver, external usb/firewire/esata disk, etc. And if you really want to be safe, to a remote location as well.

</rant>