The Computer Thread

Not really had much to comment on in this thread, it was mostly news stories.

>.<

Which the only one I really care about is they finaly did it, the next generation of USB will go in on the FIRST TRY.

USB C was aproved, and it is REVERSABLE. :D

edited 24th Aug '14 10:09:09 PM by Imca

With my luck, it will still take 3-5 tries to go in, somehow.

RAM either fit (but rarely there's some resistance) or don't, because there are notches on the RAM PCB itself, besides the fact that the contacts are grouped unevenly. Same case with video cards (and other PCI-E parts for that matter). CP Us may be tricky but usually the CPU latch doesn't lock for a reason.

CPUs have a corner beveled, with a mark on the socket to line up that trimmed corner with. Dunno about Intel processors as I haven't used one since the P2 was a thing, but AMD uses ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) sockets, so if it doesn't just drop in when you release the chip over the socket, like they say on the internet UR DOIN IT RONG.

One of the most frustrating UI features for me is so-called "natural scrolling". It takes a conscious effort to remember and to me it feels more natural to glide my fingers down as I'm reading and then "throwing" it to scroll back up.

To deter cyberattacks, build a public-private partnership

I've finally bought a new computer so I can run Visual Studio 2013 on it. My first experience with Windows 8.1 was rather... Unsurprising. Window 8.1 lived up to the memetic hate. I had to look it up on the Internet to find out where they had hid the "show keyboard cues" checkbox (answer: It's only on the desktop version of the accessibility/keyboard options).

Oh, and the Internet Explorer options? Hidden on the desktop version too. Welcome to Window 8.1, and its sucky Window Store shovelware.

At least Internet Explorer doesn't suck any more.

It does. The Window Store version doesn't even allow to "save as" a downloaded file at all.

Atleast Cortana is looking good, but thats windows 9/

Amazon could be ESPN of video games in Twitch deal

Google Chrome 64-bit arrives for Windows 7 and Windows 8

... Somehow, I just received an e-mail from myself (Hotmail account, FYI). Even stranger is that the content is supposedly an official notice from PayPal about suspicious activity involving my account. Big Problem: I don't even remember visiting PayPal's site, let alone having a PayPal account!

Has my e-mail been hacked?

edited 27th Aug '14 7:09:53 AM by MarqFJA

It's very likely. I had a similar situation with one of my early e-mails (which I deleted later).

It's not necessarily a hack. Phishers can scrape email addresses from all sorts of places, like social media, public forums, and the like. They will try to send you emails using addresses that you recognize in order to more effectively trick you into clicking/opening.

It can't hurt to scan your computer but it's not necessarily the culprit.

edited 27th Aug '14 7:34:17 AM by Fighteer

... But how could the sender address be the same as the receiving address? Is there a way to mask sender addresses like this? Heck, why would they even do this? The identicality of the addresses is an immediate tip-off that something is horrendously wrong with the message; if it were a mass-spam operation and I were the culprit, I'd set up the mass-spam so that it skips over the sender address in its list of targets. That shouldn't be too hard, right?

edited 27th Aug '14 7:37:14 AM by MarqFJA

From addresses are ridiculously easy to spoof. It's child's play. Spammers are fishing in a vast ocean; they know that they'll get bites no matter how blindingly obvious their tactics are.

edited 27th Aug '14 8:35:11 AM by Fighteer

Email header spoofing.

If you don't want to read that article, the tl;dr is that email is a very insecure protocol when it comes to authenticating who sent what.

Just now I saw a weird thing. I exited an old game (one that runs at 640X480 only, my GPU scales this up to fit my 1280X1024 monitor), and upon returning to the desktop, the colors were displaying as if the RGB color channels were shifted with respect to each other. Like, the red channel was shifted several pixels to the right of the other two, or something like that. After I turned my monitor off and on with its power button, the problem was gone.

Does this sound like a monitor or GPU issue? If it's a monitor issue, does it indicate that my monitor is wearing out in some way and will need to be replaced?

was it CRT? CRT monitors have a beam that actually sweeps across the screen, so it's easy to imagine colors shifting to the left or right if the timing gets a little out of sync.

Nope, LCD flatscreen.

How old exactly is the game?

1996. And I had things set up so that explorer.exe is turned off before the game starts, and back on when the game closes. This seems to help with color palette issues on a lot of old games, I use the same technique for Star Craft and Total Annihilation as well.

So I've set up another possible budget build for when I get the money to build a PC, and I just want some suggestions/possible improvements, if any. Since this thing's likely to run some kind of Linux (probably Arch, knowing myself), I'm still leaning towards AMD processor-wise for the extra cores (they'd really come in handy when compiling stuff from the Arch User Repository), and since the Athlon X4's a rather good bang-for-your-buck processor. I know Intel would be a bit better for gaming, but I'm trying to keep the cost relatively low (right around the $500-600 range). Thoughts?

Why don't you just try running the game in compatibility mode?