Recent Posts

8551

General Software Discussion / Re: programmes that use little system resources.

« Last post by f0dder on June 09, 2006, 05:14 AM »

I use Foxit Reader myself, but interestingly enough it's rendering engine is a LOT slower than Adobe Reader. You only notice this on complex PDFs, but for those PDFs rendering in Adobe Reader might take a second for a page, while I can see the page being composited over ~2-4 seconds in Foxit... on my dualcore amd64 4400. Something to keep in mind for slow systems - you might be better off finding an old (v5 or so) adobe reader.

For browser on such an ancient system, I would suggest something IE based, since nothing really beats it for speed/memory use, unless you find some small obscure browser with incompatibilities. Maxthon or Avant browser are probably the best options.

OpenOffice... eek. I tried it on my pentium-mmx@200/64ram system, and it was awful. Funny enough, Office 2000 was a *lot* faster, even with all the accusations of bloat. AbiWord might be worth a look though, I think it's "real machine code" whereas OpenOffice is java.

8552

General Software Discussion / Re: How to monitor and fix corrupted files on the computer?

« Last post by f0dder on June 09, 2006, 05:09 AM »

Hm, sounds a bit weird. On NT systems, use "chkdsk /f X:" to repair minor filesystem problems. If the problems are bad enough that you have unreadable folders, lost important files, etc. do NOT run chkdsk, but a nondestructive recovery program (like GetDataBack).

8553

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Want to play a game without putting the CD in place

« Last post by f0dder on June 09, 2006, 05:06 AM »

If GameJackal doesn't work, GameCopyWorld.com should.

-Deozaan (June 08, 2006, 11:39 PM)

Too bad you're then doing an illegal action in order to be able to play your games >_<
(I do that myself for the games I purchase, though - no way I'll allow starforce or securom drivers on my system).

8554

General Software Discussion / Re: Flashget is now freeware

« Last post by f0dder on June 08, 2006, 04:10 PM »

No ads either? What's the catch? 

8555

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by f0dder on June 08, 2006, 02:32 PM »

I think some of the recent maxtor enclosings use the figure-8 connector - I can try asking my friend what drive he recently bought; I know for sure he got the 8-con, but can't remember if it was maxtor.

That's good that you've had good experiences with Maxtor, I've heard that they've been very reliable in recent years.  I'll admit, my problem with maxtor was way back in 1999, but I've held a grudge since.

That's quite understandable, losing a drive is never fun. Especially not since you tend to lose irreplacable data the first time it happens. The only drives I've, personally, had really bad experiences with are the IBMs. I thought I had a maxtor dying on me, but that was an ATI driver problem that caused symptoms that were exactly equal to a dying drive - clicking noises and everything :-| (and no, no reallocated sectors after I re-formatted it with Maxtor's tool).

Addonics seems to be the only company that makes enclosures that can be used both internally and externally.  It's a great idea, I just wish I had more options to compare features.

You must ask yourself what you really want and need. These days I'd probably go for external sata - it's as fast as if you connected it internally, it has hotplug, and it's movable. Plus you don't get the vendor lock-in that drive trays give.

8556

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by f0dder on June 08, 2006, 01:23 PM »

ive never had trouble with my usb2 drives dissapearing or hiccuping (i have ide externals in lian-li racks).

-mouser (June 08, 2006, 12:44 PM)

Might just be the "icy box" enclosure, then... or perhaps some really weird conditions. I haven't been able to isolate the things that makes it reproducable, but it happens every now and then

8557

Living Room / Re: Recommendations for good external hard drive solutions?

« Last post by f0dder on June 08, 2006, 12:35 PM »

If the enclosure isn't using something standard like SATA, be sure to buy as many bays as you think you'll need, because different vendors tend to be incompatible. Also be sure to research if your combination of bay, drive, OS and possibly motherboard will support hotplug, before you attempt hotplugging.

As for drives, I have almost exclusively maxtors here, and haven't had a problem... but maxtors tend to run hotter than other drives, and you *need* cooling for them. A single 80mm or 120mm fan sucking air in across the drive lowers temperatur by about 20C on my drives... increases lifetime.

I dunno if any brand is worse/better than the others, though. IDE disks suck. I won't touch IBM/hitachi for a long time though, their "deathstar" series has left quite an impression. Also, the Quantum (makers of the Fireball drives) had a revision where the name "fireball" fit quite well - one of the controller chips would get so hot it exploded.

If you're shopping an external USB/firewire/external-sata enclosure that needs extra power, BE SURE that the power connector isn't a s-vhs style connector, but one of the "8 laying down", or similar sturdy design. The s-vhs type power connectors break easily.

I'm personally not too fond of USB2 external drives, sometimes (different boxes, different enclosures) there seem to be "hiccups" if running for a longer period of time and/or transferring a lot of data, where the drive disappears for a second and reconnects. I've not lost data because of this, but it's not too encouraging. Sure beats the firewire/filesystem-corruption issue, though. If you need mobility (as in being able to connect to other people's computers), USB2 is the way to go. If you just need something external for your own box, I'd look into external sata or even a gigabit-lan connected SAN solution.

Never do RAID/Stripe, unless you don't care about the data on that drive. It's okay for temp video editing where you need a lot of speed, but never for data storage. I'd even go as far as to advice always using RAID/Mirror for anything important, in addition to regular backups.

RAID/Parity is tempting, but once two drives die simultaneously in a terabyte-sized array with an expensive controller and decent disks, you kinda don't trust that anymore either (fortunately happened to a friend and not me).

XMinus1: I'm pretty sure those iMation drives aren't flash memory but rather micro-harddrives...

8558

Backup Guide / Re: Acronis now does backup of individual files/folders

« Last post by f0dder on June 08, 2006, 12:20 PM »

Also, file syncronization tends to be slower, especially if you have lots of small files, because of the overhead of managing filesystem information. With Acronis, you get image files that you can mount as if it was a (read-only) drive. I still don't recommend acronis for file-level backup, though.

mouser: a disk-image program supporting exclusions? That wouldn't be imaging then (imaging tends to read sector-by-sector).

8559

Living Room / Re: 10 minute video of Japanese Rube Goldberg Machines

« Last post by f0dder on June 07, 2006, 12:22 PM »

Okay, so I must admit that I'm not a wizard at Quantum Mechanics , but I seriously doubt that we'll ever see perpetual motion. Even if it was possible (which I doubt; that would mean infinite and ever-growing energy in the universe), you can be sure as hell big corporations would be willing to get rid of anybody making serious breakthroughs.

8560

General Software Discussion / Re: A Warning about Thinkall.com

« Last post by f0dder on June 07, 2006, 03:19 AM »

Sounds like a very sketchy company. As if most people read those TOS'es. Bastards!

8561

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Beta new version of TrID file identifier - now with batch scanning & renaming

« Last post by f0dder on June 07, 2006, 03:15 AM »

Cute - linux version wouldn't have happened with PowerBASIC

8562

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by f0dder on June 06, 2006, 12:23 PM »

Hmm, direct DMA'able? This sounds weird. Afaik only devices attached directly to a bus (be it pci, agp, pci-x, pci expresss, et cetera) can do direct DMA?

But I also do remember some security concerns over firewire, though. It was extremely far-fetched stuff, though.

8563

Living Room / Re: Animator vs Animation - one of the best flash animations i've seen in years.

« Last post by f0dder on June 06, 2006, 08:19 AM »

nice!

8564

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by f0dder on June 06, 2006, 02:33 AM »

Rover, sync just flushes the usual filesystem cache - it's a great tool (especially if you're a driver developer), but won't save you from the firewire problems.

8565

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by f0dder on June 06, 2006, 02:16 AM »

This page seems to be a pretty good information resource on the delay-write firewire issues: http://www.bustrace.com/delayedwrite/ .

Integrity of copied files? There's a lot of ways to go about this. You can either use file comparison or file hashes - I prefer file hashes myself. md5sum is pretty decent, but you might prefer something that has a GUI

Just yesterday, I transferred some large files to a portable hard drive using USB.  I moved them instead of copying them...before I disconnected it, I checked to see if the files had appeared in the portable drive and they did.  Then I took the drive to my laptop and the files were gone!  I took it back to my desktop and plugged it back in and it was gone, also!  And since I had moved the files instead of copying, I couldn't undo it.  So goes my story with USB.  I've never been a big fan.

Sounds weird! You did remember to "safely remove device"?

8566

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by f0dder on June 05, 2006, 12:07 PM »

The filesystem corruption manifests in "delay-write failures" right away

8567

Living Room / Re: Is firewire better than USB?

« Last post by f0dder on June 04, 2006, 12:28 PM »

The speed difference between firewire and usb2 is quite noticable, by the way! My hdd enclosure does both, and firewire is quite noticeably faster when copying a couple of gigabytes or more.

800mbps isn't bad indeed, and since firewire400 can already beat usb2@480, well...

By the way, be careful if you use firewire for external hdds. I've ended up with sevaral cases of filesystem corruption. Appearantly has to do with some DMA buffer size limitation not being reported correctly or whatever, and there's some filter driver to fix it.

8568

Living Room / Re: Jack PC

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2006, 03:27 PM »

It sounds perfect.

Could also be useful for running linux - keep httpd, subversion, misc other services on it, and farm out storage to a SAN

8569

Living Room / Re: Jack PC

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2006, 12:52 PM »

That looks damn nifty!

8570

Living Room / Re: Be careful with your personal data...

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2006, 11:04 AM »

If it's true that he did sell the laptop online, i think it's fair he got that "public display".

I don't really think so. First, you have to consider the option that it got broken in transport. But even if he did sell a broken laptop etc. as the buyer claims, I think the buyer should have tried a bit harder with legal means. We don't live in the wild, wild west...

Even wiping it is no guarantee that the data can't be recovered.

If you do a proper full-disk wipe, ths disk won't be recoverable. Sure, the NSA "might be able to read magnetic residue data", but if that stops you from selling a drive, I'd recommend some anti-paranoia treatment ^_^.

It's true that file-based wiping shouldn't be trusted for that kind of stuff, though - especially of linux systems with file-data journalling filesystems (as opposed to NTFS and other systems which only journals file metadata).

8571

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is so much software cracked?

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2006, 10:57 AM »

I've always found those notes rather hypocritic, zridling - but they're right, of course

8572

Living Room / Be careful with your personal data...

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2006, 06:25 AM »

...or this could happen to you: http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/

In some way, I think the blog is fun. But it'll be more fun when the blogger faces legal action. People just don't have any decency these days.

8573

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Beta new version of TrID file identifier - now with batch scanning & renaming

« Last post by f0dder on June 01, 2006, 05:53 AM »

I think you need to fix the link, rjbull

8574

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is so much software cracked?

« Last post by f0dder on May 31, 2006, 01:41 PM »

You STILL haven't gotten it, have you?

No I get it, basically the gist is if you decide it costs too much it's ok to steal it.
Your the one not "getting" it.

-Cpilot (May 31, 2006, 01:06 PM)

That shows you really haven't gotten it.

I don't say it's okay to steal it. I say that a pricing model that allow different social groups to pay different amounts of money would eliminate some (much? little?) piracy, create bigger income for the companies, and allow users to be happy little campers because they don't need to resort to illegal means to get a piece of software.

Try actually reading what people post.

8575

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is so much software cracked?

« Last post by f0dder on May 31, 2006, 12:54 PM »

One of the things I particularly hate about software companies is product activation - and it is becoming a growing issue even with small shareware companies.

-Carol Haynes

Amen to that!

First off, product activation should be limited to applications that simply cannot function without being connected to the internet, or at least whose primary operation involves internet use. This could be HTTPDs or FTPDs. Online activation for anything else is plain wrong... I couldn't play HalfLife2 *single player* after moving to a new flat, because I had forgotten to set it to "offline mode", and it took a while before I could afford ADSL.

Then there's the issue of companies going bust - bye bye ability to use software / read ebooks. And it can be an issue even for large companies like Microsoft or Amazon, who says they'll keep their activation servers running for Product X in five years? Carol was obviously already bitten by that wrt. Amazon ebooks.

Yeah, we can afford all that and yet begrudge someone a fair profit for their product.

-Cpilot

You STILL haven't gotten it, have you?