Recent Posts

6801

General Software Discussion / Re: Top 3 programs you use

« Last post by f0dder on September 10, 2007, 07:31 AM »

You might want to provide a link to Meskalin - it's a bit hard to google for

6802

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« Last post by f0dder on September 10, 2007, 04:00 AM »

Innuendo: sounds like your connection is using too small packets then, or the interrupt moderation is being done at a different rate than the various documents say. Or that there's some additional problem.

I stand by my claim that it should be a very easy fix (unless implemented retardedly) - probably as simple as changing a constant (apart for fixing the multi-adapter bug), and that it's a generally good idea for HD video content.

6803

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2007, 05:23 PM »

the slow-copy bug or the network-performance slows to a crawl if you play MP3s" bug?

-Innuendo

In all fairness, the thing that causes this slowdown actually makes sense - it should just have been fine-tuned better (like, only kick in when HD content is being played). And it's also not going to affect many people; you're not going to be playing media files on a file server, and I do wonder how many people are doing full-speed file transfers on a gigabit network (as far as I can tell, 100mbit LANs shouldn't be affected by the interrupt moderation imposed).

But yes, that feature should have been tested better, should only kick in when necessary (shouldn't be that hard to detect programmatically; or at least only activate on HD content), etc. I do think it's funny how everybody are overreacting about an issue that's only going to affect a small number of people, and is a pretty easy fix.

Mark's Blog has some sense about all this.

6804

General Software Discussion / Re: ReNamer: The best freeware file renamer? (yes says cybernetnews.com)

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2007, 01:53 PM »

The Bulk Rename Utility interface looks a bit messy and overcrowded though :/

6805

Post New Requests Here / Re: [REQ] Keyboard locale auto-switcher?

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2007, 11:28 AM »

Does seem to work, thank you!

Wonder how 'clean' the solution is... it would be nice if people would generally post AHK scripts in script rather than compiled format, makes it easier to tinker with

6806

Developer's Corner / Re: License to Pick :)

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2007, 11:22 AM »

Haven't heard of a specific license that does what you want, but it certainly isn't the GPL . You might have to roll your own license, and you'll be attacked by the GPL zealots who'll claim that the license isn't open, free, whatever.

6807

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« Last post by f0dder on September 09, 2007, 11:20 AM »

BTW, You can turn off Virtualisation via the Local Security Policy control panel. Local Policies -> Security Options, then the last item in the list: "User Account Control: Virtualize file and registry write failures to per-user locations".

-Nudel (September 09, 2007, 09:56 AM)

Nice!  - something to keep in mind once I'll have to move to Vista.

6808

General Software Discussion / Re: Advantages and disadvantages of NNTP Newsreaders

« Last post by f0dder on September 07, 2007, 06:35 PM »

Fan of steve? poor soul. More appropriate to link to gravity itself imho.

I personally like the Outlook Express interface quite a bit, and it's a very lightweight application as well... but I don't use it because of the security implications. Thunderbird comes pretty close (even if noticeably more sluggish) so that's what I use for NNTP now - mail still handled by TheBat, though.

6809

Living Room / Re: Barbie Doll Electric Chair Science Fair Project!

« Last post by f0dder on September 07, 2007, 06:25 PM »

Heh, how cute.

political incorrectness

6810

Living Room / Re: riding the hype train - emergency stop at reality station (or dx10 so what)

« Last post by f0dder on September 07, 2007, 06:23 PM »

Yeah, do remember the difference between a DX10 engine and a DX9 engine with some DX10 candy bolted on. Driver immaturity as already mentioned is another thing, although that's really a performance/stability issue. I also wonder if the current DX10-capable hardware is fast enough once the DX10 titles start rolling - no telling yet

Annoying thing is of course that DX10 is Vista-only although there's no reason for this, and we will see basically DX9 games that require DX10, all just to get us pushed on the the Vista bandcrapwagon.

6811

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« Last post by f0dder on September 06, 2007, 09:39 AM »

It could be called "Legacy Applications Group", or LAG - might seem a bit messy to do it this way, but certainly less messy to use a feature present since the initial NT/NTFS days, instead of the shoddy way it's done in Vista.

6812

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« Last post by f0dder on September 06, 2007, 08:13 AM »

The proper solution would have been simpler, clearer, safer, and better for everyone.  When a program is attempting to access files it's not allowed to in one of these privileged directories -- prompt the user, explain the problem, and let them switch the program to run in "compatibility mode" where it IS allowed to access these directories like it could in WinXP, etc.  If they want to run it in compatibility mode, fine.  If not, don't run it.  If you then wanted to let them switch into some insane virtual store more, with a huge warning, you could even do that (though if you ask me i wouldn't provide such an option).

-mouser (September 06, 2007, 08:07 AM)

Simply fix the NTFS filesystem permissions of that _one_ application folder to allow non-admin access.

6813

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« Last post by f0dder on September 06, 2007, 08:05 AM »

I too think that sometimes you have to cut the past loose. I myself always write my programs for unicode which limits me to Win 2k and better. But I think the advantages of unicode and support for multiple languages far out weighs the negatives.

-Eóin (September 06, 2007, 07:59 AM)

What about MSLU/Unicows?

6814

General Software Discussion / Re: ati/nvidia and portrait monitor setup:nvidia does not let you assign shortcuts

« Last post by f0dder on September 06, 2007, 07:21 AM »

Hm, dunno if it's possible to assign to hotkeys, but you can enable the nvidia tray icon which should take less clicks.

Screen rotation is the single thing where I like ATI better than nvidia - with nv, operations on a rotated monitor seems to be, if not completely unaccelerated, at least take a massive speed hit... wasn't like that on my radeon9600.

6815

General Software Discussion / Re: Adblock Plus: the nuclear plug-in (nice blog post)

« Last post by f0dder on September 06, 2007, 07:12 AM »

Am I the only one that isn't annoyed at all by most forms of online advertising (except the most obstrusive ones, that open windows above what you are reading, obviously)?

-Mark0 (September 06, 2007, 05:53 AM)

Really depends on the kind of advertisements and how many there are. On some sites, advertisements aren't the pop-over/under kind but simply make the page layout distracting and stressful; other sites have porn ads, which I'd rather not have show up.

6816

Living Room / Re: encrypting an already encrypted file

« Last post by f0dder on September 05, 2007, 04:34 AM »

Shouldn't be any problems in doing this, but there shouldn't be much reason to do so anyway - use strong encryption in the first place. Some encryption apps support "chaining" of different ciphers, I guess the rationale is that if a specific attack is found against a cipher, it's hoped that this attack can't be used for other ciphers.

6817

General Software Discussion / Re: NTFS Compression hack under XP - is it safe and is it worth implementing?

« Last post by f0dder on September 05, 2007, 03:58 AM »

"clear" from cacheset didn't seem to do much about read cache. Memory usage goes down, but then starts going up again - timings from md5sum'ing a ~500meg file clearly shows that the file is still cached, though.

Dunno if the sysinternals forum thread helps anything either, even if I did a FlushFileBuffers() on all file handles in the system, I'm pretty sure that only takes care of flushing the write buffers (at least according to MSDN/PlatformSDK).

6818

General Software Discussion / Re: Adblock Plus: the nuclear plug-in (nice blog post)

« Last post by f0dder on September 04, 2007, 06:05 PM »

There's already tricks to detect if a user is using an ad blocker... I've seen it here and there.

<3 AdBlock pluy anyway.

6819

General Software Discussion / Re: NTFS Compression hack under XP - is it safe and is it worth implementing?

« Last post by f0dder on September 04, 2007, 06:03 PM »

Will have a look at that carol, thanks.

Flushing write cache is easy, but I didn't/don't know of a way to empty the read cache...

6820

General Software Discussion / Re: NTFS Compression hack under XP - is it safe and is it worth implementing?

« Last post by f0dder on September 04, 2007, 10:14 AM »

Well, a word of caution: these datasets were very small, so do keep in mind that there's going to be some fluctuation. You'd need to test on larger datasets before measuring CPU time taken - also note that I didn't do any affinity limiting either, further introducing risk of inaccuracy.

Obviously decompression isn't going to be free, but I doubt it's going to be more than a few percent actually (compression is certainly going to be more expensive than decompression though).

Dunno about the bytes read - that _is_ interesting... ought to do some more intensive testing and more than just a single test run for each case. I wonder if there's some way to ask Windows to discard it's filesystem cache, instead of resorting to the "allocate all physical memory" trick. Rebooting the system between each test run _IS_ too tedious

6821

General Software Discussion / Re: NTFS Compression hack under XP - is it safe and is it worth implementing?

« Last post by f0dder on September 04, 2007, 08:34 AM »

Okay, results for the Lib folder: 23.654.752 bytes, taking up 9.768.564 bytes on disk with compression.

Version Number:   Windows NT 5.1 (Build 2600)
Exit Time:        3:32 pm, Tuesday, September 4 2007
Elapsed Time:     0:00:00.750
Process Time:     0:00:00.156
System Calls:     29265
Context Switches: 26811
Page Faults:      3980
Bytes Read:       29256002
Bytes Written:    0
Bytes Other:      27048

-compressed

Version Number:   Windows NT 5.1 (Build 2600)
Exit Time:        3:32 pm, Tuesday, September 4 2007
Elapsed Time:     0:00:01.359
Process Time:     0:00:00.109
System Calls:     29211
Context Switches: 27563
Page Faults:      3973
Bytes Read:       29240194
Bytes Written:    15928
Bytes Other:      30128

-uncompressed

6822

General Software Discussion / Re: NTFS Compression hack under XP - is it safe and is it worth implementing?

« Last post by f0dder on September 04, 2007, 08:29 AM »

First: the other topic, discussing the scamsters at DiskTrix claiming that NTFS compression is oh-so-über-fantastic (and not even revealing that their "OMFG SPEED UP WINDOZE!!!11! one one" trick is NTFS compression until you pay them ca$h).

With that said, NTFS compression isn't a hack, and it can have some good uses; but just like Josh, I'd never enable it systemwide. For some things it's decent enough though, like compressing the contents of the PlatformSDK include folder. I made a copy of this folder, enabled NTFS compression for it, made sure that both the compressed and uncompressed files were defragmented (sysinternals' contig tool), and then rebooted so I was sure the filesystem cache was empty.

Here's the results of "md5sum -b *" in the folders, timed with "timeit.exe" from the Windows Resource Kit:

Version Number:   Windows NT 5.1 (Build 2600)
Exit Time:        3:19 pm, Tuesday, September 4 2007
Elapsed Time:     0:00:02.703
Process Time:     0:00:00.484
System Calls:     136548
Context Switches: 130067
Page Faults:      13608
Bytes Read:       102010609
Bytes Written:    0
Bytes Other:      128204

-compressed

Version Number:   Windows NT 5.1 (Build 2600)
Exit Time:        3:20 pm, Tuesday, September 4 2007
Elapsed Time:     0:00:04.437
Process Time:     0:00:00.375
System Calls:     135903
Context Switches: 132015
Page Faults:      13701
Bytes Read:       102214521
Bytes Written:    0
Bytes Other:      133980

-uncompressed

So about twice the speed to read in the files... 10,000rpm raptor drive and AMD64x2 4400+ CPU. Disk usage: 49.299.474 bytes, taking up 18.926.984 bytes on disk, volume cluster size: 4kb (gains/savings likely to be different with different cluster size because of how NTFS compression works).

Thing is, the PlatformSDK include folder is "pretty huge" considering it's plain text, but even that kind of "plain huge" is <50 megabytes, and under normal use (ie., compiling apps) it's probably going to be cached most of the time, so it's not that big a deal imho. And you'd be hard pressed to find real-life situations where you can get better results than this and actually feel the effect.

Gonna reboot and post stats for the PlatformSDK "lib" folder too...

6823

Living Room / Re: $7.5 to optimize XP NTFS Drive access : rip-off or not ?

« Last post by f0dder on September 04, 2007, 05:22 AM »

so how should we best use NTFS compression?

-justice (September 03, 2007, 04:51 PM)

Things like the PlatformSDK header files could be a candidate for compression - it's text, lots of repetitions, and basically read-only...

PS: do they make sure to empty the filesystem cache after compressing files and doing re-test?

6824

Living Room / Re: Étonné - logic, math, crypto and programming problems

« Last post by f0dder on September 03, 2007, 09:58 AM »

Oooh, which link to donationcoder?

6825

Living Room / Re: $7.5 to optimize XP NTFS Drive access : rip-off or not ?

« Last post by f0dder on September 03, 2007, 09:58 AM »

Actually you would probably expect decreased performance for music and video files!

-Carol Haynes (September 03, 2007, 09:47 AM)

Depends - NTFS should be smart enough not to write blocks as compressed when it can't reduce size... so it'd take a bit longer copying to NTFS-compressed .mp3, but (hopefully ) reading should be normal speed. Worth keeping in mind, though.

Would somebody please shoot the marketing division from DiskTrix, please?