The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Took me half an hour to add the .NET 3.5 SP1 feature to a machine running Server 2012 today - perhaps there's some issue with the update service?

 

There are a couple of updates that cause issues with some PC's for Windows 7. One is:

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
INSTALLS ALONE BUT GIVES A REG ERROR DURING INSTALL

Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2515325)

Download size: 1.5 MB

You may need to restart your computer for this update to take effect.

Update type: Recommended

This is a reliability update. This update resolves some performance and reliability issues in Windows. By applying this update, you can achieve better performance and responsiveness in various scenarios. For more information please see the Knowledge Base article. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

More information:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2515325
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=

This update will cause others to bomb. There is another one but I haven't had the time to figure out which one it is exactly. With these problematic updates it really depends on what configuration/software you have.

 

all these DDP

 

Oh, man, I missed all the fun. I was looking around - where's that guy with Jeff's quote from a few years ago - hahaha. Sure enough, DDP was on-the-job!

Hey that dumpster-diving song was good - well made and lively.... "wearing your grandpa's clothes"

One of the guys making comments just below it said "Hey come to my you-tube page I'm trying to break into rap and I don't suck" and he didn't, but his videos were poorly lit and shot from the side. I started to comment but they wanted me to set up my own channel just to write one lousy comment, lol. It was Salience - some name like that. If you guys have a channel tell him his videos need better lighting, more him looking at the camera instead of into a giant-ass microphone that takes 20% of the picture space, with an ugly drape right behind his head, lol. But his raps are pretty good.

Good for you that you quit that job, Jeff. The guy was obviously desperate to make money and had turned into a con man. Maybe you can expand your own business somehow - sounds like you have real talent for fixing things. Maybe a web site would help you do that - see if Christa has any ideas. You might have to start paying referral fees to get your customers to actively put out the word for you. Pay them 10% of the gross on the first year's worth of work that you get through any customer who says they were referred by them. We do that in real estate, but it's illegal, but we do it anyway - calling it finder's fees. It helps cut down on advertising, and it's more powerful. You could try just asking customers to refer - my old coach taught me the standard line to use "Hey Jim, I'm expanding my business and I need your help, who do you know with entertainment systems or computer electronics that might need my help sometime in repairing or doing a tuneup on their stuff?" You can then just call the person, and tell them their friend Jim referred them, and do they mind if you get them your card?

Adding a monetary incentive on top of that might help with some people - others will do it just because you ask.

FredBun - that sony 4k article was very interesting. I realize that at 4 million pixels and 30", I have a display that is twice as sharp as a display with 8 million and 60" but still - you can't sit back and watch it like a TV. I like the 47" Toshiba so much at 1080p, to see it with 4x the pixels would be very cool indeed.

And I'm just as goofy as you - my brother can't really tell regular channel 2 from high def channel 1002, which drives me nuts. I HATE regular programming once I start watching high def - and I hate low def commercials, like "Sell us your gold at Kevin's Jewelers" on a high def channel - they need to spend the money on a high def commercial to be effective in my opinion.

Here's just a short gaming update for you guys:

Besides getting halfway through the King George Washington Tyrant DLC with Assassins Creed 3 where you learn to fly like an eagle (unbelievably fun!) I have begun playing Company of Heroes 2, but the game is upsetting me a bit with the excessive emphasis on Soviet brutality toward their own soldiers.

Great - they're focusing on a front that has been neglected where 14 million people lost their lives - and yes there was a policy of shooting soldiers who retreated - but I am beginning not to like the game for it.

Remember COD2, in Russia? Yes you had the commissars - in one story when you followed a sniper, he actually had to shoot the commissar so they could retreat to a minor degree to get better positioning. But it wasn't overly emphasized. Last night's portrayal got me worked up, and it wasn't a commissar - it was a Major who was angry that a group of low-level unit soldiers had gone off on their own to rescue their Captain. I'll leave out the spoilers, but his brutality in expressing his anger caused the rescued Captain to be beside himself with rage - he ended up being shipped off to a hospital in Moscow to recuperate from his injuries and cool down.

Yes, I know that the World War II Russian front was brutal and desperate. Desperate times call for desperate measures. But where is the almost indiscriminate slaughtering of Russian civilians done by the German troops early in the Russian invasion? The German Field Marshal Paulus who ultimately surrendered in Stalingrad immediately after being promoted (Hitler expected him to commit suicide) was sick about what was being perpetrated by his Nazi commander on their push into Russia.

Maybe Relic was counting on the marketing - selling tons of games in Germany - so they decided to back off the reality of massive German war crimes and pick on the now out-of-power Commies. I already posted about the training for the game which had me playing the part of a German paratrooper - I hated that training!

Anyway, the game has had some interesting moments - freezing temperatures - soldiers huddling around fires - women snipers, and last night even women light tank commanders. But when I go back to it after a planned break of a month of so, if they don't let up on the heavy-handed anti-communism, I'll just stop playing it and start bad-mouthing it some more - da comrade! Hahaha.

Rich

 

Rich, the brutality of the Eastern Front was a very real thing.

Stalin himself killed as many of his own people as Hitler. Right before the war, he administered a major purge of the Soviet Armed Forces, executing nearly every commissioned officer and high ranking official, save those few he saw as sympathetic to the cause of Communism. Any person who had spoken out against the government simply disappeared. So you can see, weeding out "weakness" for the good of the greater group was not a new concept under Ioseph Stalin's regime.

The Soviets lost most of their skilled soldiers in the early months of the war. Blitzkrieg wiped out entire army branches. Ordinary citizens were conscripted by the hundreds of thousands to fill the gap that well trained, experienced and disciplined soldiers had once filled. The men being sent to fight often did not have rifles, only shovels, axes and whatever else was lying around. Often, the only way to win a battle was to charge wave after wave of infantry at the German lines and overwhelm them with numbers. When Russia was in the direst of trouble, especially around the time of Stalingrad, Stalin issued his famous "Not One Step Back" order. That's when Russian commissars started gunning down any who would retreat or hesitate to charge. There was sometimes no other choice, as the conscripts had no other tactical experience. Most of them were simply plucked from their homes, had a rifle shoved into their hands, and charged into battle. The German soldiers they were charging against were well equipped, well trained, and very battle-hardened.

They also lost a huge amount of their higher quality weapons and tanks as those had been issued to front line units that were decimated. In particular, they had recently come up with some very fine quality semi-automatic(one pull of the trigger = one shot) rifles called the SVT-40(shown below) that were nearly entirely lost.



They lost several hundred thousand of these rifles. They were expensive and complicated to produce, so they basically dropped production of them in favor of the cheaper and simpler Mosin-Nagant bolt-action(shown below).

I am the proud owner of one of these very rifles.

Many of their better tanks were also destroyed or captured. Check out this KV tank(shown below) in a Finnish museum with German capture markings.


These tanks had nearly the armor of a Tiger, but so many had been lost, and they were so expensive to produce, that they were never able to make a large impact on the war. Smaller, cheaper tanks using more modern design concepts, like the T-34(shown below), were what made the impact in some of the largest tank battles in history like Kursk and Prokhorovka.


During the siege of Stalingrad, they were producing these tanks in a re-purposed tractor factory, then sending them into battle with little else than the gun installed. They didn't even have time to put a sighting system on the tanks, so Soviet gunners often had to look down the barrel for aiming. They were rolling right out the front doors of the tractor factory and into a firefight. The factory itself changed hands several times during the battle.

Yoou can see very clearly on early model T-34 shown here that the quality of the casting and components was very rough. Time of manufacture was a much larger concern than final quality.

The design was just simple enough, just like the good ole' AK-47, that it didn't matter. They would simply work.

What that illustrates is that the Soviets were under-equipped, under-trained, and usually under-manned. Their situation was very desperate indeed.

The Germans did indeed basically slaughter their way indiscriminately into Russia. They executed Russian prisoners of war en masse while they treated other Allied soldiers comparatively well by the standards of the Geneva Convention. So for Russian soldiers, surrender meant almost certain death. Likewise, when the Russian soldiers would liberate camps holding other Allied men, they were often sent to work camps in Siberia, using their "MIA" status as a cover up.

When the Russians finally took Berlin, they had quite a history with the Germans to take revenge for. Most of the women in Berlin were raped hundreds of times each, people were executed indiscriminately in the streets, buildings were looted and burned, everything of value was ripped from peoples' homes and hands. If you don't believe the rapes, check out the number of Russo-German mixed heritage people living in Germany and the surrounding nations, born to German mothers roughly 9 months after the fall of Berlin.

Both sides committed horrible atrocities. The Germans' horrific deeds are well known by history. Nearly everyone knows about Auschwitz and Birkenau. What most people don't know is the very similar things being carried out by the Russians. Neither side was merciful in the war, Rich.

 

Five-dimensional glass memory can store 360TB per disc, rugged enough to outlive the human race

Scientists at the University of Southampton in the UK have succeeded in creating five-dimensional (5D), ultra-high-density storage on standard silica glass discs that, unlike DVDs or Blu-rays, seem to be capable of storing data for an unlimited period of time without a reduction in data integrity. The scientists say that 5D optical storage could allow for densities as high as 360 terabytes per disc, and unless you crush it in a vice, these discs are so non-volatile that data stored on them should “survive the human race.”

At first glance, five-dimensional storage might sound a bit like pseudoscience — but, in this case, the data really is stored on five different dimensions (surfaces, planes). There are the usual two dimensions (width, height) provided by a piece of silica glass, and depth is provided by writing at three different depths (layers) within the glass. The fourth and fifth dimensions are provided by nanostructuring the surface of the glass, so that it refracts and polarizes light in interesting ways.

To record data, spots are imprinted on the glass (pictured below) using a femtosecond laser. A femtosecond laser, in this case, produces bursts of laser light that last for just 280 femtoseconds (280 quadrillionths of a second). These spots, thanks to the nanostructuring of the surface, and some hologram cleverness, are capable of recording up to three bits of data in two “dimensions.” By varying the focus of the laser, the team are able to create layers of dots that are separated by five micrometers (0.005mm) in the z-axis (the third dimension). Then, by simply moving the laser horizontally and vertically, these tri-bits can be stored in two more dimensions, bringing the total to 5D. The image at the top of the story helps illustrate this concept.

To read these spots, an optical microscope that’s capable of untangling the polarized light reflected by the three-bit spots is used. There’s no word on whether these silica glass discs can be rewritten, but the research paper [PDF] makes it sound like this is a write-once-read-many (WORM) storage method.

As you can imagine, storing a tri-bit in a single dot, and then storing these dots in a three-dimensional medium, allows for utterly insane storage densities. The researchers say that 360 terabytes could be stored on a single 5D disc — by comparison, quad-layer Blu-ray discs that store just a single bit per pit have a total capacity of 128 gigabytes, or almost 3,000 times less. The best hard drive technology, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which will soon make its way into commercial drives, will max out at around 20 terabytes per disc.

Furthermore, the scientists report that their glass discs are thermally stable at temperatures up to 1000 degrees Celsius, and the imprinted spots don’t seem to degrade over time. This led Peter Kazansky, the group’s supervisor, to pipe up with this particularly memorable/questionable soundbite: “It is thrilling to think that we have created the first document which will likely survive the human race. This technology can secure the last evidence of civilisation: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.”

Moving forward, the University of Southampton is now looking for industry partners to commercialize this technology. Obvious applications include archival storage, where the management of huge repositories of tapes and hard drives is expensive, complex, and time-consuming business. Eventually, assuming the complex laser/microscope setup can be miniaturized, these discs might offer an upgrade path from DVDs and Blu-rays.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...ign=Feed:+ziffdavis/extremetech+(Extremetech)

 

Ha so you have me there ddp. I looked up "Swastika KV" and got that tank. Just using it as an example of the vehicle itself really. It does illustrate that they changed hands during the war. As far as I know, most of them were destroyed by the time of Kursk. They continued to produce them in small numbers but their size and expense meant they had limited use. Only about 5,000 of them were built vs the some 80,000+ of the T-34 both during and after the war.

 

Jeff, really good and interesting post about the war.

And very interesting what you said about the tanks - and thanks for all the pictures. A really nice post.

Yes I knew they were still producing tanks in that tractor factory in Stalingrad, and I even read that the factory workers jumped into the tanks because there weren't enough soldiers around, and drove them out and started using them.

What saved the Russians, from what I read, was the result of the 5 Year Plans, the huge munitions and arms factories built in the far East Urals area of Russia, because Stalin insisted that this was the only way Russia could be safe from Western invaders, and he was right.

If it sounds like I am a Stalin sympathizer, not exactly true, but I have to respect the fact that from the time of the revolution, 1918, to the time Hitler invaded, 1941, they only had 23 years to put together a massive industrialization program to defeat the Hitler war machine - and defeat it they did with superior numbers of tanks of all categories, and eventually, superior numbers of fighters, as you say, throwing fresh conscripts into battle with abandon. The nationalism and patriotism was as feverish as the Japanese suicide fighters, and indeed, as feverish as the tenacity of our own airmen in attacking large Japanese destroyers and battleships - we surprised the Japanese by fighting every bit as fiercely as they did.

My main point, is not the brutality on both sides. One could argue that Hitler started things, and started massacring civilians first. I have no doubt that by the time the Russians got to Germany, they were insanely bent on revenge. I read that a Russian would rape a woman, then come back the next day and bring her presents and defend her from other would-be rapists. You never knew what to expect from those Russian soldiers. And why not - they had a lot to be angry about. The Germans feared the psychological trauma on their own troops from indiscriminate killing of civilians, and sought the answer in organized killing inside concentration camps - which pre-dated and led to the secret methods used in the Holocaust.

Yes, Stalin purged and killed 20 million fellow Russians - wow - a revolution that was indeed one of the bloodiest in history - to push the class-struggle communist philosophy of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and later emulated by the mad man Pol Pot in Cambodia, who killed anybody who wore glasses - the concept being that all the intelligentsia had to die to allow the workers to rise - his murderous reign ended by another Communist country, Vietnam (against the wishes of communist China) who thought his methods excessive, plus he was also targeting Vietnamese Cambodians living close to the border.

But, while not being a pinkie communist sympathizer, I am also not a McCarthy red-baiter. It was a social experiment - similar to the kibbutz system in Israel - in fact the kibbutz pioneers took a lot of commune, communal ideas, from the communists. And one could argue about the secret police, state terror, fear of speaking out, lack of freedom of political discourse, etc. Of course. But when I play Metro, I like and enjoy the Russian romantic sense of nationalism and pride - and the entire Slavic culture.

Whereas I can't point to the Germans and say the same thing - and that may be largely in part to the fact that English and German were all one people 1000 years ago, as I was taught in Germany when I took German language classes at my Army base. The Germans and the English share a common cultural identity from 1000 years ago, when they were the Anglo-Germanic tribes. So I look at Germany and I see the English, in a sense, although the English never committed the excesses of the Germans, and never embraced the absolute disregard for human life of anybody not a member of the "supreme Aryan race."

The English may have been accused of patronizing their Indian and Arab "subjects" in their colonies - but they did end slavery way before we did here in the States, and they certainly never entertained the idea of mass extermination of "inferior races."

No, the Germans came up with that idea.

My complaint is that the game is omitting German war crimes, and pushing in my face the brutish acts of some Russian officers.

But I am glad to report that it has eased off a bit. I played a few more times, and the Captain who was rescued was shipped off to Moscow, and is now a journalist, covering some of the battles. The only reference to what bothered me, is an occasional bit of random soldier dialog, in between "Why are you so angry, I told you I did not take your biscuit" along the lines of "They killed my best friend in front of the Battalion, because he rescued an officer."

So I am back to liking the game, which now that we are out of the snow, has some of the same beautiful graphics of the first game, Company of Heroes 1. The game so far - and I am probably at least halfway through - is very beautiful, and all in all a very good, very fun and very challenging game.

Zosolv - that bit about glass storage - is more than fascinating. In the search for long-term reliable data storage, I did some research when I first was shocked to discover that storing hard drives long term without running them, can ruin them.

That is fascinating, because one would think that optical media lasts forever, and yet I read that "no" it doesn't. Why is that? One article talked about disks with vegetable dies where the laser discolors the die, but the die image degrades over time. That makes sense to me, but what about a non vegetable disk, where the laser actually burns a pit in the plastic - what could possibly cause that pit to not be able to be discerned later on. However, I have read that sometimes the readers will not read one disk, but can read a different one, because of changes in the ability of the reader - so it isn't the media that decays, it's the changing ability of the reader. Again, I would ask why?

By the way, at the end of the interesting article that ZosolV linked us to, is this link: The 10-million-year sapphire hard disk. And here Sam was questioning sapphire reliability. Come on Sam, does gigabyte have anything that will last 10 million years?

Rich

 

They used Sweden & Norway too! But for subs and nuclear power as well.

 

Germany did, not Russia.

 

Sweden was neutral but the Germans had a large hydro plant there and other testing was performed.

 

Hello Everyone,
My name is Bryan i am new to this Fourm, there seems to be alot of Knowledgable people here that will help the people in trouble.

With that, I need some help..I'm somewhat Tech. With saying that i wanna build a good computer (have had laptops and i have an ipad 2) but i have never owned a desktop. I am going to use this desktop for backing up my Blu-ray disc to a hard drive cause the disk are really taking up to much space.. I have been looking at some of the "ibuypower" computers. if someone would like to look at those and give me some suggestions or if someone can tell me what type of hardware i need to buy since im really only using this computer for that certain reason.
Thanks,
Bryan

 

Welcome Bryan, I've been on this thread a long time but am no techie,so personally I can't help you, on the other hand you came to the right place because you have great people on this thread that are heavy weights when it comes to tech advise, threw the years with their help I was able to put together 2 PC's that I would never be able to do on my own, and if I can do it I know you'll be able to.

One of the people here will be getting back to you trust me, all are top notch not just in tech advise their good all around folks in every way, good luck.

 

Thanks Fred, I plan on being pretty active on here.