Yay, another victory

I got VLC to play blu-rays

I was using PowerDVD 10 up to this point, but now that I don't need that anymore, I should be able to just do a clean Windows 10 install

but I'll save that for after my holiday in December

Don't want to risk messing this laptop up before then

I have to admit that since doing a clean install a lot of the quirks are gone from my system

Same here on my Mother's laptop

I still have the bugged onboard network (no MAC address) but driver issues seem to have gone away...

Did a clean install of Windows 10 after an upgrade from 7 and gone are all the issues with windows update being slow, my antivirus not working properly and the entire device just feeling sluggish in general

I think the thing might have had some kind of malware, but that seems to be gone now

@NateKerkhofs I think my malware was called McAfee

I had Norton. My mother doesn't care if it's norton or Defender, but I found that Norton is more reliable than Defender when it comes to protecting me from my own stupidity

I mean, every malware is designed to get past Defender, otherwise your malware just sucks

At least Norton has heuristics and certain extra methods that Defender doesn't have

Malware that doesn't get past Defender or Essentials is broken, because you can guarantee that anyone who doesn't have custom antivirus has that running

I'm not quite sure which is worse, the malware or the antivirus... at least the malware isn't trying to cripple our computers.

Really? Malware these days steals credentials, breaks security and turns your PC into a bot, BTC miner or both.

not only that; it encrypts all your data and ransoms it back to you

I don't know about you, but I think a BTC or Botnet infection will slow your machine down far more than anything but the worst designed antivirus will

@allquixotic That as well. All my important files are backed up through Dropbox so I can just wipe and rollback if need be, but for most people with no backups, ransomware will ruin their day

I'd prefer neither to be honest

I'm not going back to a computer that feels like a reject from the 90's by having a malware or "anti-malware" infection.

fuck, wanted to edit, not delete

hehe

And apparently it also triggered "flag for moderator attention", but fortunately that didn't complete

But seriously, antivirus is like a condom: it might numb your tool a bit, but it helps protect you against losing your tool altogether

It's not perfect, but then again, neither is a condom

I'm happy to stick with a lightweight AV, but McAfee or Norton are performance murdering beasts.

Now that I think about it, browsing the internet is a lot like dating around: one wrong visit can really ruin you

@Mokubai How long is it since you last used Norton?

Maybe a year and a half?

And until all the advertisers pull their thumbs out of where the sun doesn't shine all the machines I use have Adblock as a minimum

I don't hate advertising, I hate that there is little to no accountability when they let themselves get used as an attack vector.

"But it was the guy who bought the ad space that made the malware"

"Yeah, and it was you that served it up to millions of people on the internet like a good little drone."

@Mokubai I've actually had this idea running around in my mind of starting a software/gaming related ethical ad network that only allows still of slightly moving images, with no sound, video, expansion or code, like advertisement used to be

@NateKerkhofs Sounds good. jpgs, gifs or plaintext allowed. scripts, flash and the like can go die in a fire.

I'd unblock that ad network

I think advertisement networks are not vetting the ads they receive enough. I think all the networks should be forced to hire a few people to check each ad for malicious actions on the company network. networks would quickly change their attitude.

Imagine something like Kontera getting their entire network cryptolockered by their own ad netowrk

karmic retribution, that's called

I checked it. The most recent version of Norton has an impact of about 10% on your performance

That would be hilarious. Writing a malware that only targets and encrypts machines that are serving up advertising junk.

and that's during an active full system scan

Performance loss from a quick scan and just being active is around 1%

@NateKerkhofs 10% performance or 10% CPU time?

PCmark7 score

tomsguide.com/us/norton-security,review-2550.html

I also found this test from May of this year, but it doesn't include Norton: av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/…

which claims there is about half a dozen AV solutions that actually slightly increases your performance compared to Defender

They might only take 10% while doing their own thing, but I've always seen a marked decline in load times and general responsiveness when I'm trying to load my games or programs.

Is that during the first launch or also during subsequent launches?

What you should do is install all your games in a subfolder of c:/games, and then exclude that folder from heuristic scans

it's not that likely for malware to hide in that folder since not everyone has that

Probably worst on the first time, but generally there is a sluggishness to everything that accesses the HDD

but it does mean that your game executables and files aren't monitored, which speeds it up

I believe Norton at one point actually had a specific gaming-brand antivirus that excluded known gaming processes from being scanned

But it was bugged and wouldn't work well with Windows 7, and it was abandoned

You still got a few malware sites that try to trick people into thinking that there is a 2015 version

ah that was a good lunch

How can I tell if a DIMM is single- or double-sided? According to Wikipedia, it is not just a question of whether it has chips on both sides.

Also, how do I get rid of clippy? I thought it had been disabled, I haven't seen it pop up here in ages.

Clippy is love. Clippy is life.

You cannot simply dismiss Clippy.

smore.com/clippy-js

@Dave We have our own Clippy.

Ask "How do I..."

@Mokubai I hated the little bugger even when I was using Word and Windows 15 years ago. I hate him more today. Seriously, how can I get rid of it?

How can I tell if my computer is dying.

Have I lost Clippy?

Nooooooooooo

How can I stop clippy from appearing in the Root Access chat room?

Son of a...

I knew this had happened to me before...

I would like Clippy to magically appear now.

Dagnabit!

Hmmm. Chat script blocking it?

How can I make Clippy appear in the Root Access chat room?

Ahhhh

:)

@terdon I think stackapps.com/questions/2105/… blocks Clippy

How can I make Clippy appear in the Root Access chat room?

Ah, I may well have had that at some point.

Thanks.

So, does anyone know what single and double sided RAM chips are?

"Help"... right. I know what you're up to clippy.

@terdon I assumed chips on both sides, but is it something to dow with how many "banks" each memory chip has?

Well, according to wikipedia:

> DIMMs are often referred to as "single-sided" or "double-sided" to describe whether the DRAM chips are located on one or both sides of the module's printed circuit board (PCB). However, these terms may cause confusion, as the physical layout of the chips does not necessarily relate to how they are logically organized or accessed.

Aye, so you could have multiple chips acting together on a module and a "chip select" line going to different banks of chips. Or you can have those chips located on the same physical chip and just route the chip select to them. Good way to reduce the number of address lines going to each module.

I'm basically asking because I have a motherboard whose manual tells me to only use single-sided chips if I install more than 2 of them. I have 4 chips to play with and have no idea how to tell whether they are single or double sided. All I know is that putting any combination of >2 DIMMs make the machine beep at me.

Have you got a full part number for the modules?

or one of the chips itself?

How can I make Clippy Appear in the Root Access chat room?

Oh awesome!

@terdon Hilariously you can have single-rank double-sided RAM and quad-ranked single-sided RAM. Methinks your mobo manufacturer needs a slap for not being clear about what they want.

Basically you probably have four chip select lines coming from your processor. With two modules fitted you have two lines to each module so it can select the first and second rank on each, with four modules fitted it uses one select line per module and you are limited to single rank memory.

@Mokubai Tell me about it...

@Mokubai I see. And there is no way of knowing whether a given DIMM is 1 or 2 sided by looking at it right? Ramhound seems to be able to tell from the model number:

@Ramhound thanks for the help. If the bottleneck is the processor itself, the question is very unlikely to help anyone else so I just deleted it.

Damn.

@terdon From the part number I wouldn't be able to tell. I'd look at the chips on the stick themselves. As an example this QVL has two part numbers that are identical but the stick has different chips resulting in one being double sided and the other not....

So basically memory manufacturers will sell you any old crap in the hopes you won't send it back because they couldn't be bothered to actually tell you what the hell it was

it used to be a primary spec listing to list these things, and also the chip layout 256x8 (etc) as some motherboards were not only compatable with SS or DS but also would only work with a specific chip layout.

i see even newegg specs do not list everything.

@qasdfdsaq Nope. Stays at 2000 MHz. Max burst spec is 2600 MHz for that chip (5Y70). Though it looks like the OEM might have set a lower limit -- so, again, you've got a situation where that device can sustain its max burst but not what the chip is capable of. And that's what I've been saying this whole time!

@allquixotic status.ovh.com/?do=details&id=11304

Also, it should be noted that that temps were still gradually rising there and it hit 85 already. I'm not entirely sure it could have kept that up for another 5 mins.

@Bob Someone cut a cable? :o

@MichaelFrank Apparently.

> 6x10G

Someone must REALLY like Gentoo

That was the whole joke yesterday, was the battle over arch linux vs gentoo where people were fighting to keep gentoo on sda and others were trying to remove it in chat.

We had just got through like stage 2 of arch install then someone thought it was brilliant to bring in 300 bots to take control of the commands and download a gentoo iso and proceed to dd it to the block device that we were installing the os on..

and even better someone then later on during the night attempted to dd a windows 98 iso

@Bob o.o my server is working fine

@allquixotic came back up ~10 mins ago

was down for almost 4 hours, and partial connectivity for another hour

so you're saying my server was inaccessible to the public inet for 4 hours? because I wasn't aware of this

I'm debating asking for a partial refund under their SLA... hm :P

bet my "customers" (teamspeak users) will complain

@allquixotic pretty much

(it only really affected my IRC bouncer. I don't have anything else that needs to be always up)

@Dave yea, was that too... :\

fortunately my VPN I use at work is through LeaseWeb now instead of AWS or OVH, so it wasn't impacted

@allquixotic hm? latency?

@bob: Oh really you irc?? Ever irc on the undernet network?

wonder if they had a fiber cutter doing that

@allquixotic Looks like they're not fully back yet. They were still setting up the redundant link, which they rushed to finish -- and that's done now but the actual cut is not fixed yet.

@Bob leaseweb in virginia - right on my doorstep - low overhead

@Dave nope

It's a fairly recent thing :P

@bob: Ah

I'm currently on... moznet, quakenet, ruxcon... got one open on freenode but no channels

@allquixotic Ah, nice

I've still wondering if I should bother with an AU VPS :P

But probably not worth the trouble.

OVH manager still down

well, my box is up, so their backup routes must already be configured and working

@allquixotic That's what they said.

> Sorry! We're busy running around with our hair on fire because Imgur is over capacity! This can happen when the site is under a very heavy load, or while we're doing maintenance.

Heh. I wonder if imgur is hosted on OVH.

Probably not.

@Bob It's hosted on the Fastly CDN.

with the aggressive caching possible on an image hosting service, most requests probably never even hit the imgur origin servers.

Is it as easy to make a 32bit OS with 16bit OS knowledge

@RACING121 "32bit OS" and "16bit OS knowledge" are far too vague.

x86-32 is completely different from, say, ARMv7-A.

Whether it's "easy"... No. Again, depends on the OS.

Depends what languages it's written in. Depends how it's structured.

C

If you take Linux as an example, it's fairly portable - a large portion of it is in C and fairly hardware-agnostic.

You might get away with just modifying the VM code, but depending on the platform you're running on you might also need to replace everything that interacts with hardware.

Are you running on x86? Are you talking about 16-bit (virtual 8086 mode? real mode?) or 32-bit (protected mode?) on x86?

Are you running on ARMv7-A? Some other ARM architecture?

Are you running on something else entirely?

When you deal with OSes, it's very sensitive to the underlying hardware.

Does your x86 running in protected mode support extended page tables? Do you need to use them? Do you want to use the NXbit?

How does your processor handle virtual memory? Does it support virtual memory at all? Perhaps it uses segmented addressing?

That is the level of detail you need to worry about.

How do you access hardware peripherals? Perhaps it's via DMA? Perhaps you're using I/O ports on the CPU itself, if it has any?

You need to worry about the specifics of the hardware you run on.

Heck, is it a harvard or von-neumann architecture? Perhaps some mix of the two? Can you execute data memory? Does the CPU have a concept of a "data memory" vs "program memory"?

Wow

If you're talking primarily about x86, and if you're just talking about running in virtual 8086 mode vs protected mode on identical modern hardware, then most of these are easier to answer.

But even then on modern hardware you need to worry about the bootloader and whether the UEFI firmware starts in protected mode or long mode or whatever else.

@allquixotic Yea, expected it to be a CDN. Was just an amusing coincidence.

@RACING121 Im hoping that was the answer you were looking for because If I have to read anything else about the subject from @BOB TONIGHT IM GOING TO LIKELY HAVE BAD DREAMS TONIGHT. ;)

@Dave :(

@Bob, I love you man. :-)

@allquixotic ^

@Bob considering a fiber cut 9km from their datacenter is completely out of their control, I wonder how many customers will think "OVH sucks" and leave because of this.

@allquixotic Is OVH popular?

@MichaelFrank OVH is popular with spammers :/

spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/ovh.net

"Found 38 SBL listings for IPs under the responsibility of ovh.net"

One of those is "Yambo Financials" #6 in the top 10 spammers list @ spamhaus.org/statistics/spammers

So a fibre cut means less spam, at least for a while ;)

lol

o0

That's interesting

my hosting transaction went through

@DavidPostill Okay, so we've got a plan, how do we get to all of their fibres?

(My bank typically rejects those due to a lack of cvv number)

@MichaelFrank It's all relative. I'm sure they're more popular than some hosting companies and less popular than others.

There are advantages and disadvantages to OVH that, if they converge to meet your needs, makes them a good deal. Just like every other hosting provider.

@Mokubai With a backhoe ;)

Factors like: location, price, service level (some people need [i]less[/i] service level because service always costs more, and some people don't want to pay for 24x7x365 with 1 hour hardware repair), recentness of hardware, "included" stuff (does it come with KVM over IP? do you pay monthly for extra IPs? how much bandwidth do you get?), customizability (can you add storage/RAM/CPUs?), etc.

blog.level3.com/level-3-network/…

The 10 Most Bizarre and Annoying Causes of Fiber Cuts

> [i]less[/i]

you can tell I've been typing on BBcode-enabled forums a lot lately

I need to use less [i]BBcode tags[/i] and more Ghetto Chat Markdown

Sharks are my favourite

Although four different versions of Windows have been released in the years since (Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10), Windows XP continues to command an impressive share of the market. According to Net Applications, around 12% of all computers worldwide still ran the antiquated operating system in September 2015, representing around 180 million users. Windows XP remains second only to Windows 7.

I have just been restarted! This happens daily automatically, or when my owner restarts me. Ready for commands.

lol

One of those is my dad ;p

Windows 7 is going to be the next XP tho

close enough ;P