Ski By Fire

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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

Post by yogi »

Intel makes cpu chips specifically designed for overclocking. They have separate model numbers so that you know what you have. Be that as it may, they state in no uncertain terms that overclocking will immediately void any warranty. My motherboard has a BIOS that I've never seen the likes of elsewhere. I dug through the overclocking settings and you need have an advanced degree in nerdology to even get a vague idea what all those settings do. Basically, the voltage to the cpu is lowered to a point just above the silicon barrier voltage; less than one volt typically. from there you can adjust the frequency and about six other things I don't recall. If you are serious about this, you have an outboard monitoring panel that shows you the state of each core so that when the temperature reaches a certain threshold you can turn on the water flow or whatever else you use for cooling. The problem here, and this is what you experienced no doubt, is that the temperature inside the core could be hotter than the temperature at the sensor interface. You are supposed to know where that threshold is so that you don't melt the silicon inside the core.

So, you overclock the processor, but does that do you any good? You say it made your game run faster, but there is a lot of interference between your computer, the game server, and the opponent you are facing. That lag time between all those points cannot be overcome by a fast processor. Plus, your graphics generator has to be able to use that faster processing speed, which most don't because they have internal clocks of their own. Thus, your central processor may be able to send the video signal over the bus at overclocked speed, but can your graphics card put it out that fast? Usually there is a mismatch.

Anyway, overclocking is a whole new world of computing. I may try it some day when I want to upgrade my computer system again. LOL
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Kellemora
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Re: Ski By Fire

Post by Kellemora »

I was using the on-board video and what overclocking setting I had available to me apparently covered more than the CPU alone. This was also back before we really had many sensors to use too.

Ever since then, I figured the mfgrs. had everything running at peak performance without the possibility of damage, so never messed with internal settings after I fried one computer, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

Post by yogi »

The idea behind overclocking is to exceed the design parameters of the CPU. They all have more capacity than what is specified but there is a degree of stress and uncertainty beyond the specs so that the warranty doesn't go into that territory. People who do it are taking a calculated risk. You better make sure you calculated it right before you venture into the unknown. LOL

As I said earlier, I'm more than pleased with this ASUS desktop I build. It can be overclocked but I doubt I'll try it until I feel I can replace it should something go wrong.
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Kellemora
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Re: Ski By Fire

Post by Kellemora »

Almost all of the motherboards in my machines have been Asus, and I've been pleased with them.
Don't think I would get into overclocking them for how I use my computers though.
After all, I can only type 120 wpm on a good roll, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

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One of the things about overclocking is that it supposedly improves the graphics rendering. That's an important attribute to certain gamers. The only game I have that actually takes advantage of what this nVidia card can do looks to be close to photo realistic. It's all in the minute detailing of tones and shadow effects. The overclocking allows for more details than my old eyes can see, or my old brain can care about. LOL

One of the benefits of the nVidia card has to do with graphics that are not part of a game. Some of the backgrounds for my desktop are brilliantly outstanding. I just installed Linux Mint on a memory stick and put it in the laptop. That laptop has the identical nVidia card which is in this desktop, only reduced in size to fit the smaller footprint. That old familiar Mint background is breathtaking in detail and there are details on the desktop folders I never knew were there. You can't imagine how the toolbars are improved in appearance in Libre Office. LOL This is the same GPU that is giving the world problems during OS boot, but once you get past that it's simply amazing.
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Re: Ski By Fire

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Unless I'm working on a book cover, or restoring photographic images, I usually keep my video set to Speed.
I have three settings on this computer for graphics, Speed, Normal, HiRes. Might not be those words. The default is Normal. Also some of the games I play let you set their graphics to Poor, Better, Best, or LowRes, Normal, Detail.
If you have the computer set to Speed, and their setting to Lowest, the graphics look like Commodore 8, hi hi.
If I set the computer graphics to HiRes, and the game to Detail, you can actually see the nuts and bolts on the train engine.
But boy does the game move SLOW, hi hi, well compared to keeping the computer set to Speed that is.

Back when I was doing some Cad/Cam work, it seemed there was no end to how far you could zoom in on something.
Of course you could only see what you drew of course. But for shits and grins on a plumbing schematic, I zoomed in and lettered a few of the pipes and fittings NIBCO in that tell tale purplish red they use. Zoomed out a few steps and you no longer saw it. But I did learn pulling little stunts like that slows down the opening of the drawings, as well as really bogs down the printing if there is too much detail added that is not needed.

We place our Initials on a drawing in the box provided. I thought I would be cute once and had a set of my initials done in an intricate lacework pattern like really expensive wrought iron. You had to blow each letter up about the size of your monitor screen to see all the detail. In any case, I decided to make a copy of this and size it down to fit in the little initial box on the drawing. I didn't really thing about the file size when I did it. But to give an example: If the entire drawing without my initials embedded was around 250k, adding my initials brought it up to around 50 megs or more.
Luckily I caught this before the boss did and removed it, else my head may have rolled, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

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I've got so much overkill built into this Windows 7 desktop that I run everything full throttle. As you point out my high power graphics will often be wasted on a game or image that is no match for my capability. It's really bad on the eyes to see those Comodor graphics in 4k hi res. LOL Well, they don't render that way if they weren't designed to handle it in the first place, but I can handle just about anything that comes along. It won't stay that way, of course, but I had the future in mind when I built this machine. 3 years is about the time it takes for a computer to be behind the times. I am hoping for 10 years or more with this baby.

I can imagine what a 50MB signature block must look like. LOL It's not a big deal these days but it would be inconvenient to any people you are corroborating with on the drawings. The IT guys might not like you consuming all that disk storage either.
Last edited by yogi on 24 May 2019, 16:18, edited 1 time in total.
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Kellemora
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Re: Ski By Fire

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When I scanned all of our old family photo's, I did so at the highest resolution my top-end flat-bed scanners would allow.
I did this so I could restore some of them, or pick a single face out of a group picture without image loss.

The only problem with scanning them at such a high resolution is, I had to save copies of them in lo-res in order to pass a few on to someone who asked for some. This is where that one program I used to have came in handy, as I could convert from tiff to jpg and set the jpg for 50% or lower. Another program I had would let me convert a pcx image to a pcx image with a given file size. Then I could convert the pcx images to jpg for distribution.
I sure miss all those handy little programs I used to use on my Windows 3.11 computer, hi hi.
Some of them worked on XP also. But unfortunately, most of them came with Printers, and they checked to see if I had that printer installed in order for the program to work.
Once I was wise to this, I used to install the printers on a new computer, but as they died, there went the programs.

Speaking of which. I bought four 32 gig USB sticks and copied a bunch of images to them for my son. I did not reformat the sticks. After I loaded the sticks up, I checked them on the Silver Yogi, checked them on a Dell with WinXPHome, and checked them on the frau's Windows 8 computer. They all could be viewed just fine, so I mailed them to by son.
He only has a laptop computer, a new one too. It could not read any of the four USB sticks.
They show up when he plugs them in, but does not show any folders. He checks the properties and it shows them as full.
I did not use a filename for the images or folders that is not compatible with Windows. But they were readable on both of our Windows computers here. I probably should have also checked on the frau's new computer sitting up here collecting dust first, hi hi.
In any case, I told him to send them back to me and I'll see if something happened to them in the mail.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

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There are a ton of programs out there that will convert one graphics format to another. They can do it for .gifs and movies as well. I found a few online but there is "free" software as well. I don't know if they are as good as what you had back in the Win 3.1 days, but I also have a photo editor that will change formats, PSP Pro. This is comparable to Gimp and I would be surprised if Gimp cannot do the conversions you are talking about. I don't know if I can batch process these conversions in my software; seems unlikely. But, I'm guessing all those small programs of old are now bundled into larger programs that do the same things, or more.

Those empty memory sticks remind me of similar problems I've seen recently with my BIOS/GPT escapades. I've been making and copying a lot of .iso disks lately and I noticed that they are not always visible when I try to view the directory on the target machine. They work fine, but I can't do a directory listing because the computer thinks it's empty. I attribute that to the formats on the sticks being different. The MBR formatted sticks are the ones that I sometimes cannot see on the GPT laptop format. While I'm not positive, I have a feeling that this problem is due to the file system formatting and not the disk formatting. The experiment I did a couple days ago and posted here about worked fine, but the file format was strictly NTFS. The invisible .iso sticks were FAT32. So, check out what your son is using for a file system format. Match whatever it is when you send the next batch.
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Re: Ski By Fire

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CTRL-H will usually let you see hidden files.

My son called back, he tried them in his frau's computer and they worked fine.
So he set about to figure out why they wouldn't work on his computer.
The way he described it, although the USB stick showed up and he could check properties to see it was full, for some reason they were not assigned a drive letter.
After a little searching on the Internet, he found he could open Discovery, right click on the USB stick which did show up by name, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
All he had to do was Assign a Drive Letter.
He used "G" for the drive letter.
Now all four USB sticks appear when he plugs them in, no problem.
Odd thing though, both is computer and his wife's computer are both Win 10 Home, but her's is about 4 months older than his which is brand new. Both laptops came with Win 10 pre-installed.
He also noted a couple of other things he had to change to get things to work right for him.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

Post by yogi »

Directories can be made hidden. In fact GPT and UEFI depend on that to keep you from altering the bootloader partition. I don't know how long it would have taken me to figure out a drive letter was missing, but it is easy enough to fix once you recognize the problem. The Windows system of attributes for viewing file folder content is horrendous. Linux doesn't give you as many choices as Windows and sometimes that's as much of a problem as having too many choices.

The ctrl+H keys only work for dot files in Linux.
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Re: Ski By Fire

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Windows 10 does have a selector button you can check to allow you to see hidden files.
I've used it a couple of times.
What Windows won't let you see are folders or files which use characters they don't allow.
Which was one of my nightmares. I had thousand of photo's that used a character allowed in Linux but not in Windows.
So had to go and change my whole method of naming image files.
All of my files now use something like this: SmithJamesQuincy(+AHUnknown)-1876 Which was OK on Linux and Windows.
But my original files used this: SmithJamesQuincy(+AH//)-1876, since // is used in genealogy to designate a missing given or surname. Then the corresponding file: //AnnaHildegard(+JQSmith)-1878 was not recognized by Windows either.
So now the corresponding files read: UnknownAnnaHildegard(+JQSmith)-1878
Also, in order to see some of the image files, you have to make sure Windows has certain file extensions turned on, such as tiff.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

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The ban on forward slashes in file names has to do with the way Windows parses directory paths. Normally the slash means a new directory but I'm pretty sure there is a way to escape the banned characters so that they appear to be what you want. When using the command line, directory names, for example, cannot have spaces but if you put a double quote around it the parser will accept it. The directory name itself may have a space, but Bash needs to be tricked into recognizing it.

There is indeed a way to see hidden files in Windows. It's buried deep within the bowels of the Folder Options settings.
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Re: Ski By Fire

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The thing is, a forward slash is NOT in the list of characters you cannot use. They only list a backslash.
Nevermind, I found that a forward slash cannot be used in Unix, Linux, Mac, or Windows.
So now I'm wondering how on earth it used to work on Linux. Perhaps because it was always a double forward slash?
We also could not use a period at the end of a filename. Of course, at the front of a file name it made the file hidden, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

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Keep in mind that the underlying code for Windows and Linux is basically the same as for Unix. The compilers aren't that different either. As far as the slashes and dots go they are fundamental markers that I've never seen take on a meaning other than what we know them to be today. When working with languages such as C++ the rules are the same but there are ways to tell the interpreter to ignore a slash or a dot. It might not be an inherited function when you get to the Bash level and it certainly isn't allowed in the user interface. The double slash (double plus and double minus signs) has meaning in the logic operations of some programming languages. Again, I'm not sure that translate up the language ladder, and I don't have enough experience with Linux to recall seeing that kind of thing. Too many rules when using program languages. Glad I'm not doing it anymore. :mrgreen:
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Re: Ski By Fire

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Yes, escape codes can let you use things you normally can't, if the language allows it that is.

One would think that folder and file names would be able to use all the characters on the keyboard, and other Unicode characters not available on the keyboard be reserved for non-use in directory names. But I guess it is how they are stored on the drives that would mess things up.

Take this window I'm typing in as an example.
The programmers who wrote html made a mistake of not recognizing two spaces in a row.
So, if I used two spaces, such as right here " " it will remove one of the spaces.
However, in html you can use "&nbsp" to force a second space where needed.
But I doubt it will work here, but let's see here comes two spaces &nbsp to the left.
You'll probably see the "&nbsp" instead of two spaces.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

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The programmers who wrote html made a mistake of not recognizing two spaces in a row.
You're blaming the wrong programmers here. LOL It's the browser you are using that strips out the extra spaces. There are tags in HTML that will preserve it:
for example, <pre> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... lement/pre
and the use of hard code: &nbsp; or &#160;
I did a little searching and found a lot of work-arounds, but nothing that answers the question of WHY they did it. It's been the rule since IE6 and Netscape days is all I can tell you.

Our forum does not allow HTML tags to be embedded in the posts. This would be asking for trouble from some very creative minds. We do allow what is called BBcodes. Those are the codes you see in the line of editing aids. BBcodes are in fact modified HTML and written into the site software. There is a way to add new BBcodes for any special purpose we might have, but I've not been able to figure out the tech-speak used to describe how to do it.

And, as a side note, if you click on the quote icon instead of the Reply Button a copy of the posters text will appear in a new text editing window. The cool thing about it is that the double spaces you put between those asterisks are retained. That's akin to the <blockquote> tag in HTML.
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Re: Ski By Fire

Post by Kellemora »

Interesting Yogi!

I was told by at least 20 different people over the years that it was the programmers who developed HTML that caused the double-space to be stripped out.

Also, the pre element tag was depreciated around HTML version 4. Use CSS.
Also, didn't he pre tag convert the text to monospace? Been so long since I used it, I don't remember.

Here is something interesting I picked up not to long ago.
A study released by Skidmore College. The study is titled: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods.”

It also appears in the issue of the journal "Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics." The Rochester Institute of Technology defines it as the “study of the relationship between stimuli (specified in physical terms) and the sensations and perceptions evoked by these stimuli.”

Rebecca Johnson's expertise is in the cognitive processes underlying reading.
“Our data suggest that all readers benefit from having two spaces after periods.”

“Increased spacing has been shown to help facilitate processing in a number of other reading studies,” Johnson explained about using two spaces after each period.

In the Skidmore study, among people who write with two spaces after periods—“two-spacers”—there was an increase in reading speed of 3 percent when reading text with two spaces following periods, as compared to one. This is, Johnson points out, an average of nine additional words per minute above their performance “under the one-space conditions.”

This is a small difference, though if a change like this saved even a tiny amount of time, or prevented a tiny amount of miscommunication, the net benefit across billions of people could be enormous.

I use two spaces after a full-stop in all of my writing work.
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yogi
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Re: Ski By Fire

Post by yogi »

It was in my freshman year of high school that I learned how to type on those old Royal uprights. That is the first time I was instructed to put two spaces after a period. I do not recall the reasoning behind that, although I am certain the teacher did have an explanation. I can't say it was more readable than a single space, but it certainly did look better.

I believe I was still in school, college, when we were told to use some popular style book for reference when writing papers. That style book said one space is the way to go. By then I was already used to the double space and nobody ever criticized me for using them. Then again, I never completed college for a degree. LOL

My guess would be that double spaces after a period is a conditioned reflex kind of thing. People have seen it for such a long time that it is comfortable. Anything less makes them think about where a sentence ends. Unless you are a speed reader in which case punctuation is superfluous.


I've not been keeping up with HTML and webpage creation so that I don't know if the <pre> tag has been deprecated. It's still used and recognized by browsers so that it doesn't matter what the W3C folks say. The PREformatted text markup is supposed to exactly reproduce whatever is between the tags. That's its purpose, preserving the format. It probably was created due to the fact that browsers chopped off a few things in the text they rendered, and adds support to the notion that it wasn't HTML's doing to cut out white space. Apparently text is just a long string of characters and browsers don't recognize such things as carriage returns and line feeds (a lot like not being allowed to use forward slashes in file names: It confuses the system). Thus it becomes the task of the markup to instruct the browser how to do things it wasn't designed to do. Seems like an unnecessary complication but that's the way it's always been.
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Re: Ski By Fire

Post by Kellemora »

I used to do manual typesetting from California Case many eons ago.
Unless we were typesetting an actual book we had to use an Emquad after every full-stop.
For books we used a 3/4Em which was 1/3 smaller than an Emquad, but not as small as an Enquad.

Here's the problem with using a single space after a full-stop.
Each font is different.
If you look at the text here on this page, you will see every space is the width of an Enquad.
Also. The. Space. After. A Period. Is also the space of an Enquad.
And a Period should be the width of an "i" plus 1/3En.
But now watch this, I'm typing 20 each of the characters shown below.
....................
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Well, well, well, if it posts as it appears above, here on the BB program, by gosh it is correct.
The periods in the screen I'm typing in do have a 1/3En attached to them.
Unfortunately many fonts do not, the period is the same width as an "i", so when you only put one space after a period, it is too tight.

Now let's see what it looks like after I hit the Submit button.
Just in case it does post differently. The Periods end 1/2 way from the end of the i to the end of the n.
In other words, the font on this entry screen is correct.
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