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Mathwiz

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Everything posted by Mathwiz

  1. Mathwiz
    Short answer: The drive will almost certainly work. However, NTFS file system performance won't be optimal unless your partition is "aligned" on a 4K boundary. XP's built-in disk management will try to align the partition on an old-style cylinder/track boundary, which almost certainly won't give you the best performance. But third-party software can align your partition on a 4K boundary. The standard these days is to align partitions on not just a 4K (8-sector) boundary, but a 1MiB (2048-sector) boundary! This seems wasteful, but 1 MiB is such a tiny fraction of a 2 TB drive you won't even notice. Linux's GPartEd will do the job, and you can download a boot image that you can burn to a bootable CD or DVD. If GPartEd isn't to your liking, the free version of EaseUS's Partition Master will also do it.
  2. Mathwiz
    I didn't think you were running version 28. Are you using the UOC Patch with it? OK, I see now. Just didn't read far enough. Since you're using "official" PM 28 on an "official" OS, you could report the issue to MCP and see what they say. They may blow it off, but you never know.
  3. Mathwiz
    We all knew this day would come. M$ has really been working overtime this year, killing any old OS features they possibly can. Early in the year they went after XP with a vengeance; now they're doing the same to Win 7. But there's a silver lining: I've read good things about EPG123. The Schedules Direct guide is from Gracenote, which supplies guide data for Zap2It.com and used to supply guide data for WMC before M$ switched to Rovi (which later bought Tivo and took the Tivo name for the merged company). The software is free but (as you noted) the Schedules Direct subscription isn't. The subscription is only $25/year though; a lot less than Tivo (unless you get a Tivo with a "lifetime" subscription), and I've read that you get a 21-day guide for your money; a nice improvement over the 12-day (at best) M$-provided guide.
  4. Mathwiz
    OpenSSL v1.1.1d for XP is now available. Only a few minor fixes since v1.1.1c, so it may not be worth the trouble to rebuild Python's Cryptography module with it, but here it is anyway, just in case.
  5. Mathwiz
    @luweitest: Besides Serpent 55,
  6. Mathwiz
    I think @roytam1's server is owned by Cloudflare, so that's probably OK; just needs a more permanent domain name. (Like many cloud servers, it hosts multiple domains, so you can't just use its IP address and be done with this nonsense.) For now o.rths.ml is fine, but I suspect @siria is correct; it's just a matter of time before it becomes too popular "fraudulent" in FreeNom's eyes.
  7. Mathwiz
    Wayback snapshots of @roytam1's software? Probably, but you don't need them; he only lost a domain name, not his server. Just change the .cf in the link to .ml and it will work (at least, until freeNom decides to yank that domain name too). He's already updated the links at rtfreesoft.blogspot.com, so you could just go there instead. (Don't know if it's possible to similarly mass-update the links on this thread.)
  8. Mathwiz
    Oddly I didn't get the usual yellow shield this time, notifying me of new updates. But I ran M$ Update from IE8 and it found them; installing now....
  9. Mathwiz
    I wonder if someone misreported your sites as fraudulent, as a form of harassment?
  10. Mathwiz
    Is something up with o.rths.cf today? I keep getting either a 503 error or a redirect to a "Girls and their Webcam" page
  11. Mathwiz
    Don't give up so easily; the problem is simply that @roytam1's version numbers have gotten ahead of what the language packs support. At one time @VistaLover posted instructions for fixing a language pack to work with a newer version: Or if that's too much, you could simply download @roytam1's last version 28.7 build of New Moon at https://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/2019/08/weekly-browser-binaries-20190817.html & install the language pack in that version. (You aren't required to always use the very latest NM version!)
  12. Mathwiz
    There are a few about:config prefs that differ between FF 45-48 and FF 49-52: HTH
  13. Mathwiz
    There are language packs for NM/PM 28 as noted in the previous post. Unfortunately there are apparently no official language packs for Serpent/Basilisk.
  14. Mathwiz
    Could you post a link to a video or two that doesn't play, so we could test it and see what's going on?
  15. Mathwiz
    If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
  16. Mathwiz
    Serpent 55 uses Mozilla Sync, so you could use that. Serpent 52 was switched to PaleMoon's Sync some time ago, however.
  17. Mathwiz
    That article offered some insight into why it can be hard for developers to continue to support Windows XP while also supporting newer versions: Long story short: if you target XP, your program might not run on Windows 7 unless you set "XP compatibility" mode; but if you target Win 7, it might not run on XP at all! Of course if you avoid functions deprecated prior to XP, your program will probably run on both OSes, but then you can't target older OSes (Win2k?) where you had to use those deprecated functions. So it's possible to make a program that runs on both XP and 7, but not earlier. And if you want to target Win 10, a similar dynamic probably comes into play: if you don't want Win 10 users to have to set "Win 7 compatibility," you have to avoid XP functions that were deprecated with Win 7, so your program can't run on XP.
  18. Mathwiz
    Surprisingly, MBAE offered to update itself out the blue this morning. I accepted and the version below was installed. Seems to be running OK on Windows XP....
  19. Mathwiz
    I thought that was the case but wasn't sure so I didn't say anything. Does "regular" 52 even run on XP? IIRC, XP users were "diverted" to the ESR channel as of FF 52, but I don't remember trying "regular" 52 (why bother?) so I just sort of assumed it wouldn't work. @VistaLover posted a Javascript fix some time ago that enables SSUAO support in FF 52 ESR. Of course for that method, the "UI" is the about:config page, which isn't the most user-friendly....
  20. Mathwiz
    I didn't even know there were over 60 NPAPI plug-ins!
  21. Mathwiz
    If feasible, adding back FUEL would expand the number of extensions that Serpent could run a bit. I have no clue how easy/hard it would be to revert changes from so long ago (pre-UXP) though. IIRC the Javascript engine was completely redone around the same time, so it may just not be practical. Maybe @roytam1 can take a look and tell us how practical that might be. As for Mozilla removing FUEL, remember that a year or so later, they went on to remove support for all pre-WE extensions, forcing every one of them to be rewritten. It doesn't seem as if they care about keeping unmaintained apps alive.
  22. Mathwiz
    That's odd; none of those files were listed in the File Information section at the link. Perhaps M$ got their updates mixed up, and the info at the link actually applies to a different update than the one we actually got today. Here's what it claims the update does: Oh, joy. Don't know how I've managed to get by without that one. FWIW, Excel does still work after applying it, so the (actual) update doesn't seem to break anything (except possibly Outlook) on XP.
  23. Mathwiz
    One more Office 2010 update today: KB4475604. The support page, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4475604, just gives a 404 error but the update seems safe for XP. Edit: Link started working while I was typing this post. Appears the update is specific to Outlook 2010, which I didn't install, so I can't confirm for sure whether it's safe for XP.
  24. Mathwiz
    With that insight, along with the fact that the number of reserved sectors in a FAT32 volume defaults to 32, it occurred to me that if I could just "round up" the number of FAT sectors to the nearest multiple of 32, then both FATs and the data clusters area would all be 16KiB-aligned! So with that in mind, I downloaded the source code to mkdosfs, made that change (turned out to be a one-line fix), and recompiled it with VS2010. And it works: The key is that the FATs are 27344 sectors long vs. the 27333 sectors calculated by the original version. (BTW, the Linux code in mkdosfs will auto-select FAT32 - you don't have to specify "-F 32" if the volume is 512MiB or larger - but that change was never ported to the Win32 code, so I did that too "while I was at it.") CrystalDiskMark indicates that aligning the FATs in this manner doesn't make a noticeable difference, but it may not tell the full story. It creates test files, then measures sequential and random read/write speeds to them, so the FAT doesn't get updated while the benchmark tests run. I looked online for a program to benchmark file system operations, as opposed to raw read/write speeds, but didn't find much. There is a program called Iozone, but it's a very complex command-line program with very little help or documentation, so I couldn't figure out how to use it.
  25. Mathwiz
    I think that's exactly right. FUEL isn't something new or updated add-ons should ever use, but it's good to leave it in PM (and hence NM) so that extensions that did use it (but that are no longer being maintained) can still run. Speaking of which.... Mozilla announced the details of its plan for the deprecation of TLS 1.0 and 1.1. This will happen in March 2020. Others may disagree, but I don't have a problem with this. TLS 1.2 has been recommended since 2008; by now, every Web server should support it. The concern I have, though, is that this industry-wide move will encourage even more Web sites to disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1. That's not a problem with desktop browsers (even XP supports TLS 1.2 with the appropriate patches), but it's a big problem for users of older mobile devices, since mobile apps rely on the OS to provide TLS support, the OS on these devices cannot always be updated (particularly with Android), and many mobile devices were shipped without TLS 1.2 support through at least 2012. I know that the Powers That Be have decreed that everyone shall throw their old mobile devices in the trash and buy brand-new ones every year or two, but that's always rubbed me the wrong way. Online banking is one thing, but if I'm just downloading a podcast that's available to the public anyhow, I don't mind not using "current and recommended cipher suites."
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