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[Iduno]

Also I shouted "snaketits" in a bar a couple days ago, so I clearly shouldn't be allowed to have contact with the rest of the human race.

You're posting that on a website for nerds, dedicated to a weirdly over-detailed game about controlling insane dwarves. "I clearly shouldn't be allowed to have contact with the rest of the human race" is the starting point around here.

[Yoink]

That said, I've realized that I mainly just build off of or manipulate things that other people say, inserting comments and observations of stuff wherever I can fit them in. Basically, wisecrack tetris.

Gosh, same.

[Egan_BW]

It's fairly simple to watch the flow of conversation and insert punchlines where you can. Actually creating comedy from the ground up when people are expecting it seems like the hard part. What makes comedy funny is partially the element of the unexpected. If someone already knows you're telling a joke by the time you set it up, you have to work that much harder to defy expectations.
Which I guess is what leads to classic antijokes such as the chicken that crosses the road. The simplest way to defy expectations when telling a joke is to not tell a joke at all.

[Gentlefish]

I am the man who arranges the jokes

That fall down from upper boards

[NullForceOmega]

More of a mildly annoyed than mildly sad, but we don't really have a place for that.

We need exactly ONE thing to happen so we can finalize our home purchase, that one thing being that the windows on the second floor balcony need to be replaced with tempered glass to meet code.  On Monday the contractors were here to replace those panes, and today the inspector came.  Of the four panes only the three that are below the sixty inch mark (as measured from walking surface) need to be tempered, and in fact three were replaced with tempered glass.  But the one that didn't need to be replaced was, and one that did wasn't.  So We have to contact the contractors again, and have them get out here to do the work, then we need to call the inspector back.

I'd really just like to be able to close the purchase now, but apparently the universe has other plans.

[Teneb]

IT IS CURRENTLY 40 CELSIUS.

THIS IS FINE

EVERYTHING IS FINE



_{send help}

[Loud Whispers]

IT IS CURRENTLY 40 CELSIUS.
THIS IS FINE
EVERYTHING IS FINE

_{send help}

When life gives you mangoes, make dried mangoes

[Rolan7]

IT IS CURRENTLY 40 CELSIUS.

THIS IS FINE

EVERYTHING IS FINE



_{send help}

It is currently about 40F
Yeah I don't envy you, this is relatively fine.

[Jopax]

My internet has been shitting itself for the past couple of days, from outright dropping the connection to the near constant and crippling packet loss making any and all attempts at multiplayer exercises in rubberbanding and frustration.

[wierd]

Again, have you tried resetting your router to factory defaults?

I am very much serious about this-- there is a major outbreak of routers getting hacked by automated intrusions, and being converted into swarm zombies for DDoS attacks, bitcoin mining, and the like.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/mass-router-hack-exposes-millions-of-devices-to-potent-nsa-exploit/

Internet routers (consumer grade) are not exactly big iron; They ARE general purpose computers, and can be made to do a lot of additional work, but they are really designed for the exclusive purpose of making packet delivery decisions, and that's it.  If your router is busy mining bitcoin, it is not going to be able to service your network requests very well. 

Resetting it to factory defaults with the little button on the back will undo most forms of compromise, but wont remove the vulnerability.   I would not second-guess this as a possible reason for your internet acting like ass.  These are strange and troubled times we live in.

[Jopax]

The issue with that idea is that my ISP is kinda shit at their job and as such have provided zero info on the router in question, I could reset it to factory settings, sure, but I have no way knowing its current settings since their user help page is outdated by several years and has no info on the current model. Hell, I can't even access the settings since the password isn't the factory default one and I have no idea what they set it to since, once again, no supporting documentation exists :V

Edit: Ok I found their user manual, but it was on a docbox for whatever reason and not on their website, proceeding with messing about now.

[wierd]

I am a bit torqued at the moment.


Ok, I have this antediluvian laptop from when the dinosaurs ruled the earth, that I have been trying desperately to get set up with either winXP or win2k.

It's a really old Fujitsu Lifebook e2010, featuring an amazing 2ghz pentium 4 processor, a whole gigabyte of ram, and a 320gb hard drive.  It has the "cutting edge!" Ati IGP 340m integrated GPU, and an AC'97 codec based audio device. Truly, this unit is the transformative technology of the century! /s

Now--  Here's what's making me sad.

The bios in this thing is trash. The IDE controller in it is trash Ali based garbage, and winxp refuses, **REFUSES** to turn on DMA mode on the drive. 

Just to be sure it was not just my imagination, I tested a win98se install on the thing, and sure enough, DMA mode turns on and works fine.  XP? Go fuck yourself. Win2k? Go fuck yourself. Win7? Go fuck yourself.  PIO only!

I strongly suspect that the issue relates to 48bit LBA functionality, since the bios does not appear to support it natively. (DMA mode worked fine in XP on an older, cruddier drive that had a dismally small capacity.)  I have hunted down a suitable dynamic drive overlay that should address that problem and should work with 2k and XP, but the stupid cd for the tool wont boot.

I think this thing is a local nexus for Murphy's Law, that has congealed into a physical object.

[TD1]

My dear wierd, speaking in tongues is counterproductive on a text-based forum.

[wierd]

Allow me to provide a Rosetta stone.

1) IDE == Integrated Drive Electronics. This standard came out in the early 1990s, and replaced the previous generation of ESDI (Enhanced Small digital Interface) and MFM (modified Frequency Modulation)/RLL (run length limited) controllers , which had a separate controller board that controlled a dumb disk drive. These older technologies are named after how they encode data to be read from or written to the dumb drive they are attached to.  IDE was an important milestone, as the disk controller (the part that interprets what a sector is, does all the low-level signal processing from the spinning disk platter, and all that jazz) was now built into the disk drive, and not a part of the expansion card, meaning you could take the disk from one system and put it into another, without also having to transplant the disk controller adapter as well, like you used to have to do.

2) DMA == Direct Memory Access.  In context, this refers to the use of DMA as a memory transfer technology that allows two or more PCI devices to send data directly to each other, and with RAM, without involving the CPU in the transfer.  It is also frequently called "Bus Mastering", as the PCI devices themselves take control of the Bus they live in, and use it to transfer data with the system memory without the involvement of the CPU. This process is facilitated by the south bridge of the PCI chipset.

3) PIO == Programed Input/Output.  This was the predecessor to DMA mode for IDE drive communication. There are 5 PIO modes: PIO0 through PIO4.  Each is progressively faster at transferring data to and from a disk drive controller, but relies on interrupt signalling and handling code, which the CPU has to be directly involved in processing.  As such, CPU useage spikes tremendously when a disk IO operation occurs when using these access modes.

4) Interrupt signalling/handling:  In the days before DMA/Bus mastering, any device that wanted to communicate with another device needed two things-- an IO address space mapped into the system's memory space, and a hardware IRQ line.  IRQ stands for Interrupt Request. You can think of it as a signal that goes high when a device needs to stop the CPU from doing whatever it is doing, so that the CPU can service its needs.  It is used to communicate status with the host computer for such things as "I am done now! Let's do the next thing!" and the like.  An IRQ handler is a special piece of software that the CPU executes when an IRQ line gets raised.  In terms of old fashioned disk IO, the disk controller would raise its IRQ when it had completed a write or read operation, signalling that it was ready to be issued another command. Historically, IDE controllers live on IRQs 14 and 15.

5) LBA == Logical Block Addressing.  Historically, before the existence of IDE disks, drive "geometry" was used to determine how much data a disk could hold, and how to address a sector on a disk.  You literally told the controller to fetch a sector on a specificed platter (cylinder), on a specified track.  LBA is a modern alternative.  Each sector is linearly addressed sequentially as just a large number. The size of the integer to store this number determines how large a drive the system is able to handle.  Previous versions of LBA were limited to 32bits for the size of this integer, and top out at around 128GB worth of sectors. The current implementation has an integer size of 48 bits, and can handle many exabytes of sectors. Both are tremendous improvements over CHS (Cylinders, Heads, Sectors) addressing, which tops out at 8GB.

6) DDO == Dynamic Drive Overlay.  This is a special bit of software that loads before the OS boot loader, which replaces the disk controller's Interrupt handler with a more advanced piece of software that is capable of handling more features than the one provided by the disk controller's bios.   Since this software has to reside on a sector of the drive, and MUST be the first sector (because it has to load before the OS, and thus has to be loaded from the bootstrap routine of the BIOS, which loads sector 0 off the drive), it has to shift all sectors it reports by 1 sector, to prevent loaded OSes from overwriting its data.  This dynamic translation is where the 'dynamic' portion of the name comes in. It is also why this technology was frequently despised when it was a necessary thing in the computer ecosystem; If you moved a drive from a system that needed it, to a system that did not, the OS would not boot, and the partition table could not be found-- because those structures are located on sectors 0 and 1, which would have been pushed to physical sectors 1 and 2 respectively.  For systems that need it though, there is no way to see a drive larger than 128GB without installing such a bit of software.



NOW..

Basic reason I am unhappy.

I have an old laptop that I want to use for retro gaming, that has a 320 GB drive. This is larger than 128 GB, and thus needs 48bit LBA.  The computer's BIOS does not support 48bit LBA.  Windows XP SP3 supposedly knows how to handle 48bit LBA natively, but the disk controller acts like it is on drugs, and refuses to enter DMA mode for disk transfers.  The laptop is a single core system, with a slow processor. *I DO NOT WANT THE CPU TO BE 100% UTILIZED, JUST BECAUSE I AM READING OR SAVING A FILE.*  Without DMA mode on, PIO4 is used instead, which-- as per above, uses the CPU to facilitate the transfers.

Fine-- I need a DDO.  Ok, I found one that works with windows XP.  But the CD wont boot. It hangs during the boot process, so I cannot install it on sector 0, and so cannot band-aid the problem.

The system is hell bent on staying in PIO4 mode FOREVER.

[dragdeler]

-snip-