Recent Posts

926

Living Room / Re: Amazon closes woman's account and wipes her Kindle

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2012, 03:50 PM »

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but... don't buy anything that has DRM, and do what you can to prevent others from doing so as well. If you must have the content and can't find a non-DRM source, pirate it - and do what you can to convince others that this is an acceptable thing to do. There's only one way to get rid of DRM: vote with your wallet.

As for ebooks on ipad: Calibre + Stanza. Fsck the horrid itunes crap.

It's a shame Amazon are being so stupid, as the kindle is a nifty little device, and e-ink is much better on your eyes than a TFT screen. But so be it.

927

General Software Discussion / Re: Ramdisk

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2012, 03:43 PM »

Curt, SoftPerfect has been updated, with 20-900% speed improvements - check last post in
In search of ... RAMdisk opinions.

928

General Software Discussion / Re: In search of ... RAMdisk opinions

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2012, 03:42 PM »

Curt (and the rest of you), Raymond's benchmark has been updated with the most recent version of SoftPerfect (which sports 20-900% speed improvements) - and also, I've added my own quick benchmark.

Verdict: go for SoftPerfect RAMdisk

929

General Software Discussion / Smallish RAMDisk benchmark

« Last post by f0dder on October 22, 2012, 03:36 PM »

After Curt linked to a RAMdisk Benchmark, I decided to do my own testing, just for good measures, completeness' sake, and because I'm curious :-)

Note that the benchmarks were run on my workstation, with the load of normal apps I usually have open (firefox, thunderbird, pidgin, skype, and a zillion others) - while they were all pretty much idle, this obviously makes the benchmark slightly less "pure" than a "real" benchmark, but IMHO the numbers shouldn't be measurably skewed. Also, I have Intel's speedstep power management enabled, and didn't bother to "pre-burn" to ensure the CPU was running at max frequency; I'd wager say this shouldn't effect the benchmarks much either, since they're long-running, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Benchmark software & configuration:
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64
5 passes, 2000MB test file
Test data: random (default)
...I'm not a super big fan of CDM, since it's weird and uses the silly SI units for MB - but it's easy to use, and what Raymond's benchmark uses.

ATTO disk benchmark: 2.47 bench32
Direct I/O, Overlapped mode
transfer size: 0.5 to 8192kb, tested with queue depth of 2 and 8
total length: 2GB

OS: Win7 x64 SP1, Build 7601
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770 (Ivy Bridge)
RAM: 4x4GB Corsair DDR3-1600MHz
Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V PRO

General RAMdisk configuration:
4gig, formatted as NTFS with 4kb clusters

Note that I did not test the speed winner of the Raymond's benchmark, Bond Disc, since it simply seems too weird - and it has a max size of 640MB, which makes it a no-go anyway. I tested: Superspeed - because it's a big professional commercial product, and I had access to some older version of it
ImDisk - because it's more or less the "reference opensource ramdisk"
SoftPerfect - because it's a commercial product but free for non-commercial use

It might also have been worth looking at CPU usage while doing the benchmarks - I kept half an unscientific eye open on Process Monitor, and it seems like all three more or less maxxed out a single core while benchmarking, but nothing more accurate than that

Without further ado, results for each product - the textual results are from CrystalDiskMark:

SuperSpeed RamDiskPlus 10.0 x64
  Test : 2000 MB [Z: 1.2% (48.3/4094.7 MB)] (x5)
  Date : 2012/10/22 21:12:55
           Sequential Read :  6251.861 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  8910.925 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  6268.756 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  8409.925 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :  1171.595 MB/s [286034.0 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :   882.728 MB/s [215509.7 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :  1152.307 MB/s [281324.9 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :   754.141 MB/s [184116.5 IOPS]



SoftPerfect RAMDisk 3.3.2 (2012-Oct-11) x64 - note that v3.3.1 from Oct06 changelog says "Major optimisation with performance gains 20% to 900% in various tests."

  Test : 2000 MB [Z: 1.2% (48.3/4096.0 MB)] (x5)
  Date : 2012/10/22 21:33:50
           Sequential Read :  8575.204 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  9629.429 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  7506.314 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  7784.935 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :  1538.529 MB/s [375617.4 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :  1067.687 MB/s [260665.8 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :  1490.878 MB/s [363983.8 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :   901.656 MB/s [220131.0 IOPS]



ImDisk 1.5.7 (2012-Jul-30)
  Test : 2000 MB [Z: 1.2% (48.3/4096.0 MB)] (x5)
  Date : 2012/10/22 21:56:39
           Sequential Read :  5955.938 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  8793.090 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  5747.944 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  8380.221 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :   670.431 MB/s [163679.4 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :   563.793 MB/s [137644.7 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :  1519.625 MB/s [371002.2 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :  1135.113 MB/s [277127.1 IOPS]


I think my recommendation henceforth is going to be SoftPerfect. It's fast, it's free and it's got an uncluttered interface (ImDisk is somewhat raw and messy), and it can do differential image saves instead of dumping the entire memory contents (saves quite some time if saving a large ramdisk). Also worth noting is that adding a new drive is instantaneous in ImDisk and SoftPerfect, whereas it takes quite a while (up to a minute or so) in RamDiskPlus.

EDIT 2012-11-07: added links for softperfect and imdisk.

930

General Software Discussion / Re: Ramdisk

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2012, 04:54 PM »

If you don't have a very special need for a ram-disk, then stay away from it. Current harddisk are quite fast, and SSD's are even faster. You shouldn't need it.

-Ath (October 21, 2012, 02:33 PM)

I mostly agree - although it's nice having a ramdisk for %TEMP% - less strain on the flash memory if you've got an SSD, and generally faster. With 16 gigabytes of RAM, it's not a bad idea dedicating one gig to %TEMP%

By the way. There is a soft for calculating and logs the boot time of a program ?

-Contro (October 21, 2012, 04:18 PM)

Probably not, and it wouldn't be reliable anyway - there's no foolproof way to determine when a program is "booted" or "fully ready".

My only problem is with Autocad 2012 , 64 bits. First boot take 27 seconds with 16 GB ram and last generation pc (i7, DDR3, etc.) .

-Contro (October 21, 2012, 04:16 PM)

Does a second startup (after fully loading once, then closing the program fully) load noticeably faster? Disk access is a very small part of what happens during program/game load, and if it's taking 27 seconds... then you either have an insanely fragmented harddrive, or the program is not spending most of it's time reading from the HDD (a normal HDD these days can easily do 100MB/s linearly, so with an unfragmented disk, 27 seconds of mostly I/O would be 2.7 gigs loaded from disk... which I kinda doubt ).

Some years back, I did a test with Far Cry 2 - putting the game entirely on a ramdisk didn't really have any noticable effect on load speed. Hard to tell without benchmarking, though, so... go benchmark! (You'll want a persistent ramdisk if you're going to install software to it - SoftPerfect might be worth checking out).

There's also another RAMdisk thread here, a bit more recent than the one Curt mentioned: https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=32319.0 .

931

General Software Discussion / Re: Getting rid of the home screen and ads in Skype

« Last post by f0dder on October 21, 2012, 10:49 AM »

So, umm, while on the topic of skype: is there any opensource replacements around that are as easy to use and work as well as skype? (voice+video chat, don't need phone connections).

The backdoors(?) that Skype previous had were bad enough, but after MS bought it, official law-enforcements backdoors have been added (no, this is not paranoia, and no - don't ask.) - while I don't do anything shady on Skype, I still don't like those changes, so... alternatives?

932

Living Room / Re: Outing the Internet's worst troll.

« Last post by f0dder on October 19, 2012, 02:28 AM »

That's all I'm saying.  Outing isn't solving the problem.  Mob rule isn't the key.  Going to the police with the information is.  And is actually more constructive, as they can build up a case without him knowing.  And thereby have a better chance of being able to do something with it.  So it seems like a win win to me.

-wraith808 (October 18, 2012, 09:55 PM)

I haven't looked into what violentacrez has been doing, and I'm not going to - I've got the feeling gist that some of what he's posted is relatively nasty stuff, and I frankly don't feel like seeing more nasty things than I already have. But has he posted anything that's illegal? And, if that, anything that's bad enough to get anything more than a "Well, we've got murderers and rapists to investigate, so whatever" response from the police? You can make other people's lives pretty darn miserable without breaking the law.

The rational part of me believes that outing is a bad thing. There's the risk of framing innocents, but even if the information is 100% correct, it's a pretty darn slippery slope. On the other hand, I'm glad to see a bully stopped...

933

General Software Discussion / Re: Readability - Get rid of the clutter so you can read!

« Last post by f0dder on October 18, 2012, 07:55 PM »

Without Javascript, there is no changing the page/DOM and all that smart logic stuff.

-worstje (October 18, 2012, 07:36 PM)

Not if you're thinking in the terms of AJAX, no... but addons already have a lot of trust. I mean, c'mon, you can do stuff like AdBlockPlus, Ghostery and NoScript that heavily manipulate the contents of a webpage - why would readability need special privileges beyond that? (OK, transformation happens after page load, but still...)

934

General Software Discussion / Re: OCR - comparisons of different software/capability

« Last post by f0dder on October 18, 2012, 06:25 PM »

You'd need a lot more samples to construct a corpus valid for comparing OCR products

FWIW, I've had very good results with ABBYY in the (now semi-distant!) past - IIRC, we chose the product mainly because the Danish National Museum was using it, and had decent results. Now, that was back in ~2002, and a lot could have happened since then, but it was relatively fast, had an intuitive UI, and dealt with relatively bad text quite fine (I was doing (civil) conscription at a smaller .dk museum, and some of the stuff I scanned was pretty bad) - oh, and it had decent support for furren languages, like Danish

I would expect Google to have some really wicked stuff internally these days, not the least because of reCAPTCHA, but I do wonder how much of that power they open to the wider public.

935

General Software Discussion / Re: Readability - Get rid of the clutter so you can read!

« Last post by f0dder on October 18, 2012, 04:58 PM »

Thread necromancy alert!

So, are there any decent alternatives to Readability? I'm still miffed that I have to allow JavaScript execution for the domain the article is hosted on - but beyond that, nowadays using Readability forwards you to a https://www.readabil....com/articles/xxxxxx site... which means the page you were reading gets uploaded to readability and processed there? I kinda don't like that.

And all the processing that happens ought to be doable clientside anyway - and I'm not sure I can see why JS needs to be enabled at all.

936

Living Room / Re: Do Not Track

« Last post by f0dder on October 18, 2012, 02:32 PM »

How can users prevent Flash cookie tracking?

-Tinman57 (October 16, 2012, 08:00 PM)

For some time now, I've been using the Firefox add-on Better Privacy to deal with Flash cookies, and it seems to work well.  It allows you to select which Flash cookies you'd like NOT to block, or just to have it block them all.  It can inform you about the Flash cookies it blocks each time you close Firefox, or just do its business and not bother you.  Your choice.

-cyberdiva (October 18, 2012, 08:28 AM)

BetterPrivacy only deals with flash-cookies, right? They might be persistent nasties, but they're only a (small) part of the whole problem - IMHO it's much better to block any of the tracking scripts from executing (Ghostery or whatever, preferably combined with at least AdBlockPlus and NoScript if you can handle the whitelisting nuisance).

937

General Software Discussion / Re: Is Readyboost for me ?

« Last post by f0dder on October 17, 2012, 04:14 PM »

Readyboost is a marketing gimmick Microsoft came up with to soften the blow of complaints about hardware requirements of Vista. It won't do much good, and it won't do any good at all if your swap file is on an SSD drive.

-eleman (October 17, 2012, 01:44 PM)

Wrong on several levels.

First, the obvious one: if you've got enough cash to put a SSD in your system, you've got enough cash to put enough RAM in your system that you can disable the pagefile entirely.

Second, readyboost isn't just for your pagefile, it's a generic 2nd-level filesystem cache (where RAM is your 1st level).

While it won't do you any good at all if you've got plenty of RAM, it can be a decent thing when you don't. It makes life a little less painful on my 4GB work laptop when dealing with Adobes shitty software... hoping for an 8GB+SSD upgrade soon, though, since that'd be a lot more pleasant.

938

Living Room / Re: Do Not Track

« Last post by f0dder on October 15, 2012, 08:25 PM »

DNT+ don't use "Opt-Out" cookies, they actually "Block" tracking of all kinds.  I think opt-out cookies are worthless.  It's the fox guarding the henhouse.  I want to block all the tracking crap, not flag them with a useless cookie...

-Tinman57 (October 15, 2012, 07:31 PM)

http://www.abine.com/dntp/faq.php#q17 - "There are good cookies and bad cookies, and we add the good kind to your browser. They’re called “opt-out cookies,” and they signal to advertisers that you want to opt out of receiving target advertising (it's like the "Do Not Call" list for targeted advertising)."

One thing that does seem good about Abine/DNT+ is their team page, with names & faces. Assuming those people are real, that's a good sign - Ghostery/Evidon has that too. Couldn't find that for PrivacyChoice/TrackerBlock, which for some reason seems slightly fishy to me.

As for the fox guarding the henhouse, it's worth noting that Evidon used to be named Better Advertising - and I definitely wouldn't turn on the GhostRank stuff. But so far, Ghostery seems to do it's job well. I haven't been spying on it to check if it's sending back spying data (but even if I'm not that paranoid, I'm pretty sure other people are - and it'd hurt Evidons business if they were outright lying bastards?) - and I've seen it break sites that depend on tracking, which is good thing IMHO

939

Living Room / Re: Remember to make full drive image backups

« Last post by f0dder on October 15, 2012, 12:15 PM »

http://support.kaspe...m/viruses/rescuedisk

Free effective external scan, does wonders for cleanup of all sorts of evilware.

-Stoic Joker (October 15, 2012, 06:42 AM)

Thanks for the link - trying to diagnose a friend's royally messed-up laptop... I'm wagering hardware fault, it's either that or some really nasty malware.

Kaspersky's tool to write the ISO to USB flashdrive is severely retarded, though, it can't handle neither 16- or 8gig drives. 32bit arithmetic bug?

940

Living Room / Re: Do Not Track

« Last post by f0dder on October 15, 2012, 11:19 AM »

Re Ghostery & Trackerblock (from another thread):

I ... switched out Ghostery for TrackerBlock, on the theory that even if "less evil", Ghostery is run by an ad company, and hopefully PrivacyChoice.org ... isnt?

-TaoPhoenix (October 06, 2012, 07:46 PM)

-tomos (October 15, 2012, 07:31 AM)

PrivacyChoice is also a commercial entity - I dunno if I'd choose one of the two over the other... and something about PrivacyChoice seems fishy (not the least running a commercial site on a .org address), but opt-out cookies? I am to trust that anybody respects those? LOL! In general the addon seems to be focused more on cookies, than to keep from executing javascript or loading tracking beacon images, which is what Ghostery does.

941

Living Room / Re: Remember to make full drive image backups

« Last post by f0dder on October 15, 2012, 05:56 AM »

Experience so far with Paragon has been good - plus it has the option of backing up offline (using the Windows based recovery disk) if you do come across online issues (which I haven't).

-Carol Haynes (October 15, 2012, 03:03 AM)

Do they still have the offline feature? I received a mail a while ago wrt. Paragon Virtualization Manager, that due to Micrsoft sumfinsumfin they would no longer be able to offer the WinPE based rescue disks :/

The biggest issue with image files AFAICS is, assuming they are produced without error, the problem of a single bad block appearing on the hard disk rendering the whole image unusable. I have seen no mention from any of the major software houses on mitigation for this issue and when you are talking about images potentially in the 100s of Gb soor or later there is going to be a block error.

-Carol Haynes (October 15, 2012, 03:03 AM)

You shouldn't have an entire image ruined because of a single sector error, as image compression is normally done in blocks rather than image-wide... but it will still affect a larger block than a single sector, which can obviously be disastrous (registry hivefiles, executable files, or some of your important damage). Plus, I dunno how restoration deals with these errors - ideally you should be able to let the restoration continue, but get a list of smashed-up files, but I wouldn't be surprised if most software goes "sorry, failed, bummer mate."

PS: never back up (solely) to usb flashdrives, they're way too unreliable.

942

Living Room / Re: Remember to make full drive image backups

« Last post by f0dder on October 14, 2012, 07:05 PM »

By the way if you rely on Windows 7 backup for imaging I discovered it no longer works on 3Tb drives (or any drive that has a 4mb block size). Seems Windows backup is optimise for 512kb block size.

-Carol Haynes (October 14, 2012, 02:30 PM)

Wouldn't that be 4kb and 512byte sectors? Interesting if that's preventing a backup utility from working.

Also, mouser, why specifically recommend image-based backups? Sure, it's faster to restore an image than doing a clean reinstall, but other than that? Isn't the most important thing to have backups, and to have several revisions of each file so that you don't overwrite a valid file backup with a corrupt or ransomwared copy? (And yes, it's a good idea to only have the backup drive connected when backing up - even if you don't get hit by a nasty, there's oversurge from lightning or cable cutting fsckups).

943

Living Room / Re: Do Not Track

« Last post by f0dder on October 13, 2012, 04:50 AM »

And set a custom X-DONT-TRACK-SCREW-YOU HTTP header

-f0dder (October 12, 2012, 01:06 PM)

Hm... ...Can we tweak the header hard enough to make the ad server spit burnt cookies for a few cycles after we say hi?

-Stoic Joker (October 12, 2012, 02:51 PM)

Good idea, but I doubt we'd be able to come up with something that could actually DoS their servers - the best we could do is probably to generate bogus tracking events.

Which could actually be interesting enough... Omniture, for instance, has a pay-per-event model. We could make tracking an expensive affair for a select handful of companies :-)

944

General Software Discussion / Re: Path too long utilities supere barrier

« Last post by f0dder on October 13, 2012, 04:46 AM »

What's wrong with just setting up a mapped network drive that points deep enough down into the folder structure?

-katykaty (October 12, 2012, 03:07 PM)

Probably not possible, at least with the standard commandline tools (since they don't use the \\?\ prefix, and are limited to MAX_PATH).

But if the APIs that subst uses support the \\?\ prefixing, one could make a tool for it. Interesting idea!

945

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: NANY 2013 Pledge: Track My Stuff!

« Last post by f0dder on October 13, 2012, 04:41 AM »

i know we're off topic (in my own topic to boot!), but have you played with Clojure at all?  That's what I'd planned to learn functional programming in, but knowing a bit of Java already was what made me sit up and take notice of your link, and I wondered if you had any opinions on the merits of the two.

-wraith808 (October 12, 2012, 02:37 PM)

Nope, and I'm not going to touch it. Using a language that's not statically typed? Plain and simple: no.

If I were to pick up a language that's "noticeably" different from the ones I already know (Scala is still "within the comfort zone", and can be viewed as a Super-Java with some of the nice parts from C#), it would probably be F#.

946

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: NANY 2013 Pledge: Track My Stuff!

« Last post by f0dder on October 12, 2012, 02:24 PM »

Also, it would be a chance to do something simple in Play2 and Scala to get familiar with the stuff

-f0dder (October 12, 2012, 02:11 PM)

Ooh... thanks for that!  I'm going to have to figure out something *else* to build to try those out!

-wraith808 (October 12, 2012, 02:19 PM)

Scala looks very promising so far, even though it definitely isn't perfect. But it has a lot of the stuff I like from C#, and on a JVM... alternatives are good (though currently it's MS and whOracle, where are the alternatives to *those* abominations? ). Without doing measurements, I do think Scala will be performing worse than C#, but for a lot of applications the difference won't matter - but the mindset from it, both (pragmatic!) functional programming and immutable data matter so much more.

I'm currently doing this course, and it's pretty good - both content and the whole course platform

947

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: NANY 2013 Pledge: Track My Stuff!

« Last post by f0dder on October 12, 2012, 02:11 PM »

I personally think TaoPhoenix has a pretty useful insight, and it is one I've subnconsciously followed for all of my apps as well. Many apps that are created are something that is easily done in Excel or Access, and as a consequence, they also tend to be apps that have been created a hundred times before in slightly different formats.

-worstje (October 12, 2012, 02:27 AM)

...but then you're limiting yourself to the UX of Excel (or OOo calc or whatever), and you need a 200meg-or-more install.

I'm personally considering doing a couple of dedicated webapps to replace some OOo spreadsheets. One for my weekly power consumption measurements, another for keeping track of purchases (I enter receipts from everything, from groceries to large hardware purchases, to a spreadsheet). Both work kinda fine in spreadsheets, but I'm often in situations where it'd be nice to use a webapp from my smartphone rather than remembering to do it later on my desktop... also, before anybody says GoogleDocs or whatever, no. I can do a better UX with a dedicated app.

Also, it would be a chance to do something simple in Play2 and Scala to get familiar with the stuff

948

General Software Discussion / Re: Path too long utilities supere barrier

« Last post by f0dder on October 12, 2012, 02:07 PM »

Heh, spammer #2 removed from the thread before I could quote it - but still, to keep an account of the pattern:

Actually, People who manage large files and download mostly through the web may find the redacted very useful and very convenient in simplifying file management and file error messages resolution. redacted  is a fast, efficient yet simple software that anyone can use at any time at all. Nice Day..

Interesting that a simple utility like this not only has such an insane price point, but also pay spammers to turf forums. MilesAhead, you really ought to polish up your TPLD mod and get mouser to set up a dedicated page to it and fight those spambags

949

General Software Discussion / Re: Does the browser Opera suck?

« Last post by f0dder on October 12, 2012, 01:34 PM »

Agreed, there are still vulnerabilities, but many browsers are seeing these same hits. Heck, Mozilla just had to pull Firefox 16 from the web due to a security vulnerability. My whole point is that IE is nowhere near the monster it once was and is actually quite reliable and safe.

-Josh (October 12, 2012, 01:17 PM)

Sure, 16.0 had a bug, which was fixed how many hours after release? MS is quite a bit slower wrt release cycles, though thankfully they have out-of-band releases for really critical stuff (and to give them credit, they have to go through a lot more rigorous QA/QC to avoid fscktards moaning). But at any rate, the FF bug was:

The vulnerability could allow a malicious site to potentially determine which websites users have visited and have access to the URL or URL parameters.  At this time we have no indication that this vulnerability is currently being exploited in the wild.

The IE bug was remote code execution, which is a metric sh!ttonne more serious.

Anyway, the main reason I don't use IE isn't security, but simply that it sucks. With IE6, at least the browser loaded lightning fast - they lost that advantage with IE7, and haven't regained it. The developer tools suck, the HTML compliance sucks compared to chrome and FF (even though it's a lot better in IE9+ than it used to be), and the addons sucks.

I really don't see any reason to use IE if you've got half a mind, but of course people doing webdev have to support it, *sigh*.

950

General Software Discussion / Re: Does the browser Opera suck?

« Last post by f0dder on October 12, 2012, 01:10 PM »

Is Internet Explorer really that dangerous nowadays? I think this mentality is something leftover from the IE6 Pre-SP2 days....and yes, Opera does suck as you will see more and more as you continue to use it. But, in the end, use whatever works for you.

-Josh (October 10, 2012, 05:31 PM)

It's not nearly as bad as it was in the olden days, and most exploits these days are from Flash or Java browser plugins - apart from XSS stuff, the *real* nasty browser bugs (those that don't trigger plugins but can lead to remote code execution or the likes) are few and far between.

But there was an exploit lately (iirc mid/late september) that targeted IE{7,8,9} on {XP,Vista,Win7} that was pretty bad.