Recent Posts

7651

Living Room / Re: cost of running a pc (in the UK)?

« Last post by f0dder on January 29, 2007, 12:29 AM »

I wonder how much PSU efficiency matters... and idle vs. fully loaded should also have quite a bit to say, depending on the PC. So I don't think there's really any way around the power meter (can it really be that hard to get such a thing to output the current wattage? O_o)

7652

Living Room / Re: Hard Drive File System Questions

« Last post by f0dder on January 28, 2007, 05:18 PM »

Weird... perhaps it's just disabled in the GUI because "christ, doesn't make sense, stupid user" etc. If you haven't filled with data yet, try dropping to a shell and do a manual "format /fs:fat32 x:" and see if it bitches?

7653

Living Room / Re: Hard Drive File System Questions

« Last post by f0dder on January 28, 2007, 05:05 PM »

Why use PartitionMagic in the first place, when you can use compmgmt.msc + format?

7654

Find And Run Robot / Re: ndff - could it be of use for FARR?

« Last post by f0dder on January 28, 2007, 05:49 AM »

Sounds like an interesting tool - too bad the author doesn't release source. It could be pretty useful adding this feature as an additional way of indexing files, it's pretty blazing fast

Wouldn't use it as the only way of searching though, since it's limited to NTFS, and might break if NTFS version is updated.

EDIT: mouser, the app shows folders as well, so while the description makes it sound "flat", it really isn't

7655

Living Room / Re: cost of running a pc (in the UK)?

« Last post by f0dder on January 27, 2007, 08:00 PM »

I wish I knew

I found some rough power usage estimates, and for running a low-power server (using one of the low-power chips from AMD or Intel), I think it ended up at roughly £10/month here in .dk - but our power prices are probably different, and the power usage ratings might not be precise.

Should probably borrow a power rate meter thingy and check how much my own box uses.

7656

General Software Discussion / Re: 1.3 GB deleted, but not deleted, so where are they?

« Last post by f0dder on January 27, 2007, 06:30 PM »

jgpaiva: do you use FAT32 partitions, by any chance?

7657

Living Room / Re: Hard Drive File System Questions

« Last post by f0dder on January 27, 2007, 02:13 PM »

That sounds preeeeety fucked up. Run compmgmt.msc and see what it thinks the partition layout is like. I do not trust partition magic; it usually seems to work flawlessly, but when it fucks up, it fucks up bigtime.

7658

Best Archive Tool / Re: 7Zip - best archiver tool

« Last post by f0dder on January 27, 2007, 09:45 AM »

Compression ratio might be a bit better, but 7-zip still comes nowhere near WinRAR in terms of flexibility (command-line options, etc). Also, has NTFS streams & security been added to 7zip yet?

7659

Living Room / Re: Hard Drive File System Questions

« Last post by f0dder on January 27, 2007, 09:14 AM »

Hrm, if the partitions are "RAW", you shouldn't be able to access them as drives - otherwise something is horribly messed up. Wouldn't be surprised if partitionmagic has messed something up, to be honest.

7660

N.A.N.Y. Challenge 2007 / Re: Cody Mug for NANY Participants

« Last post by f0dder on January 27, 2007, 04:01 AM »

Haha, great

7661

General Software Discussion / Re: WIndows Vista Ultimate ... worth upgrading ... CNET say no!

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2007, 09:56 AM »

Let's look at Carol's top 10 list....

#1: which gets so much in your way that you turn it off, and basically end at XP-or-worse security.
#2 & #3: hahaha, as if. The base OS is going to use more CPU, RAM and GPU power for doing basically the same. Friend of mine that does graphics programming said stuff ran noticably slower on Vista than on XP (~360fps vs ~430fps or rougly 20% - but okay, immature drivers etc).
#4: we'll have to see about that. MS did a lot of code rewriting - fresh new bugs.
#5: *shrug*
#6: even more useless eye-candy, and a shell that I'm going to replace with BlackBox anyway. Yay.
#7: Aero, which I'll turn off immediately for performance reasons. And that transparancy crap doesn't reduce clutter as they claim.
#8: *shrug* - thankfully they dropped WinFS. One size doesn't fit all, anyway, some people will like an app like Google Desktop, while I prefer locate32. This is yet a point that doesn't matter.
#9: which will affect end users exactly how much? The improvements I heard of basically sounded useful for high-load fileservers with gigabit-or-faster NICs... and didn't sound like something that isn't doable under XP.
#10: oh. What a big deal. Yawn.

BUT!!! VISTA WILL HAVE DX10 AND SUPPORT FOR HYBRID HARDDRIVES OMG!!11! one one one. Yeah. And while MS will claim that this is for "brand-spanking new architectural reasons", the real reason is of course they need some selling point for Vista, and that's the reason they won't be ading support for those useful features in XP.

And then there's all the DRM crap that, until properly circumvented, will put a limit on what you can do with your own stuff - as well as take up resources because of the extremely aggressive way it's implemented.

cranioscopical: there's a difference between squeezing the last drop of performance from something and handcoding everything in assembly, which is pretty useless today... and then writing extremely shitty, bloated and buggy code with exponentially inflated resource requirements. Vista is, of course, the latter of the two. The frigging core OS shouldn't eat resources at that rate, resources that are much better spent in your apps/games/etc.

7662

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by f0dder on January 26, 2007, 09:34 AM »

Boot sector virus sounds extremely unlikely - that was a DOS phenomenon, really. At least I haven't heard of any boot sector virus in the NT era.

7663

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2007, 04:37 PM »

I just remembered a thing!

Back on my P4 system, the onboard RAID stuff was slightly unstable - sometimes when processing lots of non-fragmented data (like doing a md5sum of an ISO image), I would have ~5 corrupted bytes out of ~700MB.

I only experienced the problem in stripe mode, and only on reads; although, if I copied a file from the stripe to another drive, the read could still be fast enough that I got corruption, which would of course be present in the copy. I never experienced corruption just from writes, though.

Never found a solution for it either, I thought perhaps the chipset was overheating, but having a table fan blow into the computer didn't help (although it lowered temperatures decently).

Dunno if this is any help, just popped into my mind while at work.

7664

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Ligare

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2007, 09:43 AM »

Nice, I'll check the PDF when I get home from work

What about doing a "secure version" using Rijndael?

7665

Developer's Corner / Re: Clash of the languages

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2007, 04:09 AM »

Interesting - but do keep in mind that this is availability of engineers. Doesn't say anything about their abilities, though. So you get a zillion not-so-talented fresh-out-of-uni Java coders, what's that really worth?

7666

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Ligare

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2007, 04:05 AM »

Hmm, "RC4 derivative encryption algorithm." - isn't RC4 relatively weak? And why "derivative"? IMHO it's better to use strong standard algorithm than trying to fix up a weak one

The app looks nice though, and is something that I had considered writing myself.

7667

General Software Discussion / Re: Sudo for Windows?

« Last post by f0dder on January 25, 2007, 03:56 AM »

Keep in mind that some security holes exist in the OS for years before they're (publicly!) found, and some exist for quite a long time before they're fixed. An exploit in an AV program is going to be fixed ASAP.

Iirc it doesn't take anything more than the "at" service being enabled to elevate user privileges.

7668

General Software Discussion / Re: Sudo for Windows?

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2007, 05:14 PM »

Many people believe that if you run as non-admin then having a real-time AV check isn't needed and simply running an explicit AV check periodically is sufficient - I've heard good things about ClamAV/ClamWin for this.

-mwb1100

That's wrong, though - unfortunately there's been a few ways to elevate from user->admin from time to time, and I'd be surprised if there aren't a few holes left on XP... and holes to be found on Vista.

7669

Developer's Corner / Re: Best Programming Beer

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2007, 05:12 PM »

I usually find that beer makes me dull when coding... But a single Guinness or two-three "whatever standard Danish pilsner" on a hot summer day is good. A small amount of whiskey can be fine too.

But generally, I don't find that alcohol is a good thing while coding.

7670

General Software Discussion / Re: From the makers of CCleaner... Recuva Beta 1

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

Hm, scan and recover in one go sounds like a bad idea - specifically when recovering, you'll always want to recover to ANOTHER partition, so the act of recovering a file doesn't reduce the chance of recovering another.

This is tricky stuff to get right

7671

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2007, 02:18 PM »

If it didn't bitch about not being able to dismount the volume, it should be fine - otherwise it usually says "couldn't dismount, check at next boot?".

7672

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2007, 01:07 PM »

There aren't actually much that's "unmovable" - and those can still be defragged when doing an "offline" defrag (ie., a filesystem that can be "unmounted", or at boot-time before launching the full windows system).

Basically the $files (special NTFS files, like $MFT) require offline defrag afaik, and the paging file as well. But registry and such should be normally defraggable. I think

I wonder how NTFS/FAT bad sector marking works these days... internal drive logic handles bad sectors by remapping to a "scratch sector" - I wonder if it reports error when doing this, or if it's just noted down in the S.M.A.R.T log.

Doing a /r does sector-based checking after it's done examining the logical (ie. filesystem) structure, so it should indeed find problems. But again, the question of how this mixes in with the internal drive badsector remapping remains.

I wish computers were really deterministic

7673

Living Room / Re: Amazing tabletop parts fabrication machine

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2007, 12:04 PM »

Cool - those machines (albeit industrial use ones) used to cost millions

7674

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2007, 11:19 AM »

Dune fan, eh?

If Windows (or applications) were installed to the bad disk, that would be a very likely cause for serious trouble; when a sector goes bad and it has to be reallocated, it's not always possible to save all the bytes in the sector - pretty bad if the sector was used for program code

7675

Developer's Corner / Re: Microsoft Visual Studio Codename "Orcas" - Jan 2007 CTP Pre-release

« Last post by f0dder on January 24, 2007, 10:15 AM »

Before I install, does this version still have that stupid friggin debugger that embeds itself into everything? You know, the one that makes just about every application crash, until you format, reinstall, then don't install VS.

-chedabob (January 24, 2007, 06:45 AM)

Must be a new feature, vs2005 doesn't have that