Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing

October 4

RAM thumbdrive?

Don't ask why, but I can't change the virtual memory on a computer to anything higher than 20 MB. Explorer keeps crashing it's so low... But it did give me the option of using a separate memory space - in this case, a thumbdrive. Is it even possible to use my thumbdrive as a sort of pseudo RAM? If so, what would I need to format it as? --69.144.233.96 02:03, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Even if you can use your thumb drive, I suspect you will still use it as a virtual memory. By the way, some details on the operating system and error messages would be nice. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 02:36, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I forgot. I believe it's Windows NT... 200 some odd megs of RAM normally; bumped down to 20 because I was screwing with some stuff. I have a limited account coughschoolcomputercough, but it appears that I can change the virtual memory - just not on the C drive, if that makes any sense. --_{King of the Wontons} | _{lol wut?} | _{Oh noes! Vandals!} 02:37, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

It makes total sense if C: is nearly full. Remember RAM is physical memory and virtual memory uses your hard drive as sort of "virtual" RAM. Having too little of one can't be offset more than a little by having insane amounts of the other. As far as format goes, since it's NT, use NTFS. Just don't forget to set the size in even multiples of 8. — User:ACupOfCoffee@ 02:46, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Cool, thankees. --69.144.233.96 02:53, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

CAD thing

Does anyone know of a program that can allow you to build computer chipsets (like a mobo, graphics card, etc.)? I mean, one that allows you to add things like stock parts (PCI ports, CPU sockets, graphics chipsets, and so forth). Thanks. --68.89.95.20 02:39, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

In priciple, any VLSI design package can accomplish this. In practice, you can't drag-and-drop components to create a viable PC chipset. — Lomn 15:02, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I recommend KICAD - it's free, OpenSourced and you can do schematics and circuit board layout with it. I've only used it for one very simple project - but I know of people who have used it for fairly serious stuff. SteveBaker 17:59, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Does this work for anyone?

Just wondering if the streaming video works for anyone here. If so, what is the direct url so I can put it directly into WMP. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.169.145.28 (talk) 02:45, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I tried but I could not see the video. Sorry :'(--Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 03:11, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Worked for me. [1] — User:ACupOfCoffee@ 03:14, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Here is a direct link to the .flv file, if that helps: [2] —Akrabbim^talk 16:23, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Resizing NTFS partitions....

I'm thinking of making a dual-boot system (with Ubuntu) on a computer that already has XP on it, but to do that I would obviously need to resize the NTFS partition. Can today's finest Partition editors do that? 83.249.113.29 10:53, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Actually if you just put in the LiveCD and actually went ahead with the installation you would find out that it can resize partitions (including NTFS) during installation, and then you can spend half an hour surfing or playing sudoku or whatever and have your new Ubuntu system with dual boot already configured. So much easier than a Windows installation. --antilived^{T | C | G} 11:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

This is what I thought, thank you :) 83.249.113.29 11:58, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Minidisc player down

Hello I have an electronics question about my sony MZ-R55 MD player that uses NH14WM batteries. Although I have several batteries for it, even fully charged by an independent charger, none of them last for more than 20 seconds. The Minidisc works fine when plugged into the mains via an adaptor. What could be the problem and can I do anything to fis this? Thank you Keria 13:00, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Is your minidisc player from the age when Sony was using lead-acid batteries in their rechargeable players? If so, the batteries are probably "sulfated" and past their useful life. Even if they're not lead-acid, is there any reason to suspect that these batteries aren't simply failed at end-of-life?

Atlant 13:14, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Well after I noticed the problem with the one battery I had I bought 4 'new' (packaged anyway) ones from ebay from 2 different sources with the exact same result: about 15 to 30 seconds of battery life and they've been charged until the green light goes on in an independant charger. Keria 13:25, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

All of the rechargeable battery technologies have problems of one sort or another. NiCd's get 'the memory effect' where if you don't discharge them completely, they gradually only accept less charge. Most of the other kinds are only good for a certain number of charge/recharge cycles before they die. Lead/Acid batteries don't like being completely discharged - and leaving them discharged for any amount of time is bad for them.

But the fact that your "new" batteries aren't working either is interesting. Look at it this way: either the batteries aren't getting charged - or they are being discharged very fast. If they were being discharged very fast, where did the electricity go? It wasn't powering anything useful - and a full battery charge would generate a lot of heat if it were shorted out or something. So did anything get hot during those 15 to 30 seconds? If it did then something is shorting the batteries out - and you'd better be careful because that kind of thing can make batteries EXPLODE! But if the batteries went dead over 30 seconds and didn't get amazingly hot - then they couldn't have had much electricity in them in the first place...so either the battery itself is faulty or your charger(s) are faulty. You claim to have new batteries - and from two different sources - it's unlikely that all three sets are bad (although who knows what you get from eBay). So I think the problem may be in the charger. Can you charge them some other way - at least as a test? How long does it take before the green light goes on on the charger? Are you sure the light means "Finished charging"? SteveBaker 17:50, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Sulfated lead-acid batteries go to their "fully charged" voltage very quickly, but there's very little electrochemical activity that took place to get there so there's very little available charge stored in the battery. So they then go from "full charge" voltage to "no charge" voltage just as quickly. My first guess we'd be that all the batteries are of a similar age and all are dead.

Atlant 23:57, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

How safe is it to put banking details on a website?

I have a client who wants to sell things on the internet, and for those customers that don't have a credit card, he wants to provide them with his business's bank account details. I'm having great trouble researching online if this is "safe" or not - because every google search brings up results about providing your credit card details and bank account login information over the internet - which is not what I'm asking. If I gave you may bank account details like this:
ACCOUNT NAME: John Doe
BANK: Commonwealth Bank
BSB (Branch Code): 123-456
ACCOUNT NUMBER: 123-456-789-111-213
, what could a person possibly do with this information other than pay me?
Rfwoolf 13:32, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Sure sounds dangerous to me. Someone with that info could pretend to be you and empty your account. Perhaps banks require signatures and are supposed to check them against a signature card for withdrawals, but one lazy teller and you're account can be pillaged. StuRat 14:21, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Precisely right, this info can easily be used by a smart dude for identity theft. For those customers that he has that don't have credit cards (which can't be that many), how about just asking them to snail-mail him a check or something (not as fast, obviously). --Oskar 15:37, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

As a sidenote, lets see how wikimedia foundation does things. Please turn to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising which provides the following information:

Direct deposit Deposit money directly into our bank account.

The Wikimedia Foundation has a bank account that accepts money transfers.

Account holder: Wikimedia Foundation

Bank:

Dexia bank/Banque Dexia Pachecolaan 44/ 44, bvd Pacheco 1000 Brussels/1000 Bruxelles Belgium

Account number:

IBAN BE43 0689 9999 9501 BIC GKCCBEBB

National Belgian account number: 068-9999995-01 For transfers inside Belgium or from countries not supporting the IBAN-system

Does it pertain to this question at all? --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 17:24, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I think you have to give HIM your bank account details so he can deposit to it.. why would you be able to withdraw from someone's account with just the account number? You can only deposit --froth^t 17:36, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

That does seem AWFULLY dangerous. But then the information you are giving out is only what is printed on one of the cheques in your chequebook - and you give those out to complete strangers all the time! But still - with the prevelance of identity theft - tell the bad guys as little as possible. Have people mail you the money - it's worth a couple of days of delay just for peace of mind. If you do decide to do this, I REALLY think you should talk to the bank. They are the true authority on what's safe and what isn't. SteveBaker 17:39, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Amen --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 18:27, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

You can just put account number/sort-code up and have people use that to send money. I've no idea if it is a joke or actually true but in Private Eye (the magazine) they often have little comical 'begging' ads in the classifieds...Things like "trying to restore classic Mg but too lazy to earn the money myself, A/c: XXX XXXX and Sort Code: ZZ ZZ ZZ", or things like "just graduated, looking for rich individual to gift student loan A/C xxx xxx ..." (you get the idea). As noted it is perhaps not advisable but surely this individual can speak with the bank to have an account setup that will allow this (lots of firms seem to have odd accounts that look like normal accounts but are businessy instead). ny156uk 22:44, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

(http://www.eyeadvertise.co.uk/?section=classified&catid=13) there's the link...One says "just for fun, i'd like £200. Thanks! 12-60-60. 02423083. :)" ny156uk 22:45, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Hello, my name is George Agdgdgwngo, I'm from your billing society, and could I just have your bank account number and sort code? -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 01:49, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

!!!Actually this is a common practice in europe, but the accounts are generally configured for deposits only and not withdrawals. You should talk to the bank and see what they are willing to support. I did know one company that wasn't set up properly and people were withdrawing money from the company instead of depositting it. A quick call to the bank sealed the leak but the company had to contact a bunch of customers and get the money back. Again please talk to your bank if this is advisable in whatever country you are doing business in!!!

Wich AMD?

1.Whats the suitable AMD CPU for 3D computer graphics, CGI, Animation , 3D displays and softwares?and because of what particular characteristic, that device is suitable?

2.and what about ATI graphic cards(when work with that CPU)?(I want a specific model and answer in both)Flakture 19:10, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Why AMD ? --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 20:02, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Athlon_64_X2 seems to be a good start. (I am biased against AMD for no reason.) --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 20:06, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Internet Explorer versus Firefox

It was taking well over a minute and a half for Google to load so I suspected the problem might be Google since other sites seemed to load okay. The problem appeared to be resolved when I decompressed my partially compressed C drive so I thought I was back to normal. However, IE will not allow Google maps to be viewed and all I get is a blank screen This happens with other HTML pages using IE so I loaded Firefox which I had unloaded at one point thinking it was part of the Google load problem. Sure enough after viewing several Google maps with FF I tried to use IE to open Google and again it took well over a minute and a half before Google would load with the hard drive light remaining on the whole time. Now I think its a war between IE and FF because my IE cookies had been disabled and I was no longer able to log on under several different accounts. So is that a possibility that IE and FF are fighting it out by messing with each other's settings and using my computer as the battleground? If so what can be done about it? Clem 22:18, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Opera (browser) ? StuRat 04:05, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

You probably need to reinstall your OS. You're attributing way too much personality to software. IE and Firefox don't "fight" over each other's settings. You simply have an OS problem. Keep in mind that IE has been integrated into the windows operating system, so anything you've done to mess that up might show up in IE performance. On the other hand, software such as Firefox or Opera, once freshly installed, use far less of the OS's libraries. Since you have mentioned in this question and earlier that you partially compressed and decompressed your C:\ drive, I suspect you've somehow managed to damage or corrupt your OS install, which is affecting IE. I recommend reinstalling the OS from scratch, and NOT turning on compression. -- JSBillings 10:31, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

dead pixels

There a lot of dead pixels on my Ti-83 plus. Is there anyway to get rid of them? (Pressing on them made it worse)71.218.38.193 22:32, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Replace the screen? Having a look at dead pixel it seems some 'broken' pixels can be fixed/will fix themselves but other pixel problems are unfixable. ny156uk 22:37, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Never press on a LCD-screen. Never!!! It damages the screen.

195.35.160.133 14:28, 9 October 2007 (UTC) Martin

Bypassing DRM

I'm not asking how one does this, but rather I am doing a a short project on the Digital Rights Management technology associated with downloaded songs. Can the DRM technology, which for example allows a song to be played only a certain amount of times, be bypassed so that the song can be played an infinite amount of times on a computer? If so, how hard would this be? Thanks. Acceptable 23:17, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

The analog hole is one way. If you haven't seen it already, Digital rights management#Digital Millennium Copyright Act might be of interest - in the US, it's illegal to produce or disseminate technology that allows users to circumvent DRM. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 23:26, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Another fairly obvious way is purchasing a non-DRM version of the media. If just one form of it is non-DRM (say, on a non-DRM CD) then it is exceptionally easy to create non-DRM digital versions. (So instead of buying a DRM-ed mp3, you buy/borrow a non-DRMed CD and turn it into mp3s). --24.147.86.187 12:45, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Also, every major DRM system has been broken, allowing people to strip the DRM protection off the protected media. The specific technique varies from system to system. --Carnildo 20:18, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Here's the problem (from the content-owner's perspective) in a nutshell: he wants to ship data (lets say audio, but it's the same for video) and not have it copied. To prevent usable copies from being made in transit (over a wire or on a medium like a disk) he encrypts it. But your eyes and ears don't understand encrypted data (it's just gobbledigook) so, before the audio gets delivered to you it as to be decrypted. So there are three places where the whole DRM scheme can be attacked:

• Before encryption: (this is the favourite of the serious, scary-dude Triad pirates) they just get a copy of the music/movie before it goes off to be made into a final, encrypted product. Using bribes (and maybe a bit of common theft) they get studio tapes, screener DVDs, insider copies, rushes, and other materials.
• Reading the encrypted data: as noted by others, above, the encrypted data can be read by unauthorised parties (and thus copied, generally to unencrypted data that anyone can read and copy) using a variety of methods (which vary by the encryption scheme). People can reverse-engineer existing players (that's how DVD-HD and DVD-BR were broken), or they can exploit defects and backdoors in existing players. DVD-VIDEO (that's regular DVD videos as used by most people now) was broken because the CSS cryptosystem used was very weak (and was badly implemented to boot) making a brute-force attack on it quite easy.
• After decryption:Some attacks against DRM capture the data after it's been decrypted (even before the analog hole, most OSes (including Windows before XP) allow you to capture the digital audio before it goes to the soundcard, and it's trivial to save that off); a partial solution to this is making the entire computer system part of the DRM framework, with trusted hardware and trusted signed device drivers (which is how TPM and Vista work) - but the downside of that is that it's very error-prone and inflexible, and relies on everything in the computer working perfectly (which no computer ever has done). Some people ascribe a lot of Vista's current reported slowness (in copying files, playing media, or doing graphics operations) to the omnipresent DRM infrastructure that permeates the whole system.

-- 217.42.190.82 00:00, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

IMO that permeating security so there's no "analog hole" in your hardware is desirable from a holy crap that's ultra cool hardcore security standpoint.. as long as it's not used against you. Anyway yeah, to restate your points perhaps more clearly, the goal of DRM is to distribute the work, but not actually let you have it. It's the classic paradox of DRM. They want to get it in your hands, they want you to buy it so it becomes your property, but they want to control it --froth^t 02:20, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

• As a linux user, I have to say that busting DRM is easy. I run Audacity with a duplex ALSA sound card - I play the drm media out in one direction, and switch Audacity into record at the same time. So I play out and take in what I am playing out. Then Whatever I have recorded, I export as MP3 and it takes about 5 minutes per track. We already have a codec base (libfaac & libfaad) for working on iTunes stuff which is coded in AAC or m4a. It's nothing to do stuff like this! Thor Malmjursson 11:49, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

October 5

Stepmania

I was looking through Stepmania, and I was wondering, which one is the version that has the same steps as DDR? --JDitto 01:40, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

how do you install a copy of msn/wlm on a thumb drive?

so you can keep your emoticons and settings wherever you go? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.121.36.10 (talk) 02:19, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

U3? --froth^t 03:33, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

i have a u3 thumb drive but how do i install a copy of msn/wlm on it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.121.36.10 (talk) 06:28, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Or you can dump the bloatware and do this. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 09:32, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

but i cant save my own emoticons in pidgin. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.121.36.10 (talk) 05:27, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

registry

What are HKCU, HKLM, HKCR, etc called? I think I recall them having a specific name like registry domains or something but not that --froth^t 03:32, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

The Registry Editor help file calls them registry subtrees and predefined keys. --jh51681 10:07, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Our article calls them hives (Windows_Registry#Hives). 11:02, 5 October 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeltz (talk • contribs)

Must have "www."

Hello, I have a website but for some reason it can only be accessed with the www. at the front of the address (eg. www.example.com). If I try to access it without the www. (like just example.com), I get a "Could not locate remote server" error. Is there any way to fix this so the website can be accessed even if the www. isn't typed (say, through the .htaccess file or something), like any other normal site? thankyou —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.208.110.207 (talk) 07:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

If you do an nslookup on the name "whatever.com" (without the www.), does it look up to anything? If not, you need to add an entry for it to the domain name server (DNS). Usually this is not handled by you; and you need to tell whoever is running your DNS to fix it. --Spoon! 08:43, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

You have to modify your host file, instead of looking for www.example.com, remove the www. part and just leave it to example.com. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:34, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Like Spoon! said, you need a DNS entry for example.com, otherwise there will be no way for anyone's web browser to contact your web server. Once you have that, there are a couple methods you could try that redirect browsers to www.example.com, if that is your preferred domain. I use Apache's mod_rewrite for this. -- JSBillings 10:40, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

After doing a nslookup I can see that something is wrong with the DNS - I'll have to contact the company who manage my domain. Thanks for your help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.208.110.207 (talk) 11:45, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Your web server itself will also have the know the list of names it can be called by. Friday (talk) 15:35, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't get this. I thought that the site was, say, example.org and www.example.org is just one of the local servers (just like there could also be an ftp server and what have you). So shouldn't this be a local problem? Unless someone told the dns folk to be more specific than they normally are, or something. DirkvdM 06:13, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

example.com is just another DNS name, like www.example.com and really.long.name.example.com. If you don't configure an A record or CNAME record for that name, it won't resolve as the hostname in a URL. In this case, no one created an A record for example.com (you don't want example.com to be a cname, for a variety of reasons not worth mentioning here.) Some people and hosting sites don't automatically create them, either by preference or policy. -- JSBillings 14:56, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Image upload site

What is a very user friendly site to upload images and create a gallery? Thanks 81.241.103.75 08:56, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[3]--Mostargue 11:10, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

http://flickr.com. Lanfear's Bane 12:38, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

imageshack.us 68.231.151.161 17:33, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Java vs. C++

I read about Java and C++ programming languages and I can't really find any big differences.

What ia the different between Java and C++? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.54.33.250 (talk) 12:50, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Generalized pointers, present in C++ but absent in Java are an obvious difference.

Atlant 13:19, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh come on, that's what you come up with? How about the obvious difference that Java is interpreted and C++ is compiled? --froth^t 15:15, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Java is not interpreted. Java is usually compiled into Java bytecode (which is usually JIT-compiled into native machine code at runtime), but can also be compiled directly into native machine code. --Spoon! 18:03, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

But it is interpreted. Human-readable Java source code is compiled into Java byte code, which the processor can't make heads or tails of. The JVM interprets the Java byte code. In a sense, Java is both compiled and interpreted. The .NET CLR does the same in MicrosoftWorld. In a sense, every language is interpreted. In machine code, the interpreter is the processor itself. I have myself written two interpreters, and have found them to be much easier to write than compilers, which I have very little expertise on. JIP | Talk 20:14, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

One of the most important differences is that in C++, you have to memory manage each and every object yourself, while in Java and C#, the runtime environment does it for you. JIP | Talk 20:16, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

As interpreter says, "Any language can be implemented via an interpreter or compiler; there is no such thing as an "interpreted language" or "compiled language", only interpreted and compiled implementations of a language.". --Sean 20:25, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

It's a very broad question, and you haven't told us what perspective you're viewing it from. Do you want differences that matter to someone who studies the intricacies of programming languages? Do you want differences a CIO should care about? These are vastly different questions. Taking a fairly "big picture" view, Java is almost certainly the language where more active improvement is being made. Java has made vast inroads in enterprise application development in a way that C++ almost certainly never will. Java is more than a programming language- it's a platform. Friday (talk) 15:23, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

@ [87.54] And just to round out this thread of replies ... if you are asking from the perspective of someone who doesn't know anything about programming languages, and simply wonder why someone bothered to "invent" Java when C++ already existed and seemed to be doing a decent job on its own ... there are thousands of programming languages and programming language designers love "improving" things. There's more than one way to invent the wheel.

For some good background on programming language design in general, read a few essays by Paul Graham (Here are two good ones [4] [5] that talk about lisp, but have general application). dr.ef.tymac 20:27, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Follow-up: oh, by the way, in case you aren't enthralled by techie-types debating the nuances of "compiled vs interpreted" and the other kinds of perennial squabbles that are likely to show up in in response to your question, you might want to take a look at Comparison of Java and C++, on Wikipedia. dr.ef.tymac 20:44, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

As others have said, a huge difference is that in Java, all objects live on the heap and are garbage collected. The programmer controls when objects are allocated, but the run-time system deallocates them behind the scenes when it can prove that they will never again be used. In C++, the programmer controls the full life cycle of every object (creation and destruction). This has major consequences for certain styles of programming; the idea that "resource allocation is initialization" is ubiquitous in C++ and nonexistent in Java. In C++ it's generally considered good programming style to use automatic (stack) allocation for most objects and avoid new and delete, whereas in Java new is everywhere. Explicit memory management also means that objects can disappear while references to them remain, which is a famous source of bugs.

In C++ when you write Foo x, it means that x is a Foo (automatic). In Java, Foo x means that x is a reference to a Foo; the actual object lives elsewhere (on the heap). In C++, if you assign to x, you're asking the object x to overwrite itself with whatever's to right of the = sign. In Java, you're changing the reference; no objects are involved. The closest thing to Java references in C++ is pointers; they're syntactically different but semantically very similar. C++ also has something called references, which are syntactically more similar but semantically rather different. Pointers in C++ are more general than Java references, because you can have a pointer to anything that can be assigned to, not just objects. In particular, you can have pointers to a particular element of an array, and pointers to pointers, both of which are useful in practice.

Another big difference is that Java comes with a huge standard library, while C++'s standard library is minuscule (at least by comparison). You can find C++ libraries for practically anything, but they have to be installed and configured separately.

C++ is normally compiled to native code while Java is normally compiled to the JVM, but that has essentially nothing to do with the languages themselves. I really don't understand why there aren't more C++ interpreters or native-code Java compilers. (They do exist.) Also, there's no reason there couldn't be a bounds-checked implementation of C++ (those exist) or an unchecked implementation of Java (well, the Java spec forbids this, but there's nothing deep in the design that precludes it).

I don't recommend Paul Graham's writings in general since he's painfully biased toward the Lisp way of doing things. I haven't followed these links, but everything he writes is like that; even when he's not talking about Lisp, he's talking about Lisp. You'll get a very twisted view of the world from reading his stuff. I love Lisp, but I don't exclusively love Lisp. Learn lots of languages -- most of them have at least a few neat ideas you won't have seen before. (Though Java's pretty boring, actually. C# is more interesting.) -- BenRG 21:38, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah - language wars. Gotta love it. Empassioned user of the two languages at each others throats. The deal is that both languages have their place. You certainly don't write high performance video games in Java - it's vastly too slow (not just because it's typically interpreted - some language features are just inherently slow). You don't write web applications in C++ - with pointers and programmed memory cleanup, it's not secure enough - and being designed to be compiled and having no standards for what a 'char' or an 'int' is, it's not portable enough. C++ definitely isn't for beginners because it allows you to create insanely hard to track down bugs. Experienced programmers hate that Java places you in a straight-jacket and cuts you off from the most efficient programming techniques (the very things you need to avoid teaching to newbies because they are error-prone). You can't program "to the bare metal" in Java. C++ lacks some of the nicely thought out libraries and middleware that Java has. Both languages will be around for a long time to come - each dominating in their own fields of expertise. There are areas of overlap where either language is perfectly adequate - and in those cases the preferences and experience of those doing the programming typically ends up being the deciding factor. There are other situations where neither Java nor C++ can cut it. Shader programming in graphics hardware for example - we use HLSL, Cg or GLSL for that. For generating host-side web pages we use PHP (that's what Wikipedia is written in). There are all sorts of programming languages out there - and they are generally not interchangeable for extremely good reasons! SteveBaker 14:08, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Microsoft Publisher and Word Processing Sofware

Can anyone tell me if Microsoft Publisher can be considered as a Word Processing software? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shelaghmccormick (talk • contribs) 17:31, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Device Presenter

Somewhere that present me the suitable devices of my given requirements and characteristics for PC?Flakture 18:06, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

How do I create a scraper?

I want to retrieve some data from a variety of websites for a personal project, and it looks like I need to create a scraper.

This is just a one-off requirement and it's simply to save me several weeks of manually inputting data into the websites and getting the results.

I don't have any web scripting skills (HTML is the most I have), but I do have programming skills in other environments (Oracle PL/SQL and VBA) so could probably learn if I have some good, clear examples to follow. I don't want to spend more than 25 quid on this (it's all coming out of my own pocket), so will probably have to do it myself.

How might I make a start?

(I won't say what the websites are or what the project is - it's a secret!) 81.151.177.230 18:25, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Perl? Perl + Lynx?

Atlant 19:05, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks but...

I need to understand the missing links. Really, I need to know how to knit the bits of technology together. Do I have to get some web space that can host and execute Perl? Or can I embed the script in an HTML page? Thanks.--81.151.177.230 19:30, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

You can always get ActivePerl on your windows system, and use the native Perl modules for scraping web sites. There are also Python (programming language) packages too, if you'd prefer Python, as well as other packages. You could probably also write it in Visual Basic, but I'm unfamiliar with that language. -- JSBillings 20:04, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

If you have Microsoft excel, go to Data --> Import external data --> New web query --> then enter the URL you wish to scrape and it will load the data. --Open2universe 20:16, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

To answer your questions: 1) no, you don't have to; and 2) sure, you could, if you are familiar with the relevant HTML scripting language, but that would be an unconventional way to do it.

There is a multitude of ways you can go about it. The best way is to check the terms of use of the "target" web site(s) and ask the person in charge if they make the information available "pre-scraped" for you to download, or whether they have a Web API, or whether there is a third-party site somewhere that aggregates the content in XML or some other format. I remember seeing a website that did that XML idea with Wikipedia.

You could just directly save the text of the HTML pages to whatever machine you are browsing the internet from and then extract the information you want with a custom-made beanshell or perl or ruby or javascript, provided your machine has the relevant language interpreter or compiler installed on it. You could use a pre-made module such as some of the ones linked below.

You could probably pay someone 25 quid to teach you how to do this on your own, or write some scripts for you, although I'm not sure how ethical that would be if you didn't expressly state what you are planning to do first, and how you plan to use it.

Random ideas in no particular order: WWW::Mechanize Hpricot Mashup (web application hybrid) Web spider Aggregator Scroogle ... here is a site on a specific software package with a nice tutorial and pretty diagrams. If you need someone to spell things out for you step-by-step, you might have a better chance if you can show you've researched the above links (or related) and you've investigated the various options ... or you could just get a computer whiz to fall in love with you or something. dr.ef.tymac 20:15, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

MANY THANKS...to everyone who replied with suggestions. It looks a lot less daunting now, and I've just done a proof of concept with Open2universe's Excel solution. Not pretty (yet), but I've done some VBA that can grab pages and then pick out the data I'm after. (It's actually simply one number buried in each page that results from running searching with various parameters, but there are just over 1000 combinations.) And thanks to dr.ef.tymac for his interesting, thought-provoking suggestions. scRUBYt sounds especially interesting, and is making me think about extending the scope of my project (which isn't illegal or improper, I assure you). Thanks again, --81.151.177.230 17:51, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Finding a font

Where can I get a font for my Mac (OS X) so that I can see this diff correctly? Right now the ml link is just a series of identical and strange boxes. Dismas|^(talk) 19:53, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

• My method was to look at the language code (ml), go to its article ([[ml]]), see that it's for the Malayalam language, search for "font" on that page, follow this link, and end up with this font. --Sean 20:39, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Hey, cool! Thanks, I learned something from that! In the future I'll try to be less of a n00b about finding things. Dismas|^(talk) 23:13, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Easy alternatives to DOS window?

I'm a mac user and very amateur C programmer... I've written a simple program that interacts with the user via the standard streams, which works great in the unix terminal. I'd like it to run on Windows machines, too, but the DOS window only has 80 columns and can't scroll. Do I have any other options besides learning what the Windows API is all about? Can this Win32 console thing help me? (In case it matters, I'm using Windows 98 and Open Watcom.) Thanks! --Allen 20:40, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Have you tried Cygwin? dr.ef.tymac 20:48, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

No... I'll read up on it. Thank you! --Allen 21:16, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can remember, you can click on the system menu and select "Properties" and set the number of rows and columns to whatever you want. If you set the row count to something large like 2000, you effectively have a scrollback buffer. You can also do this programmatically with the Win32 console API. -- BenRG 21:53, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Hm? Vista (and I thought XP too..) has an actual option for how many lines you want it to buffer. --froth^t 22:21, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

One sucky feature of the command prompt window is that the "screen buffer size" is fixed (you can change it in the window's properties, but it doesn't change dynamically when you resize the window - Windows just puts up scrollbars if you make the window smaller than the SBS, and prevents you from dragging the window bigger than the SBS). I guess the reason is that Windows really doesn't have a proper mechanism whereby the terminal can tell a program running inside it that the window has changed. Unix, by contrast, can sent client programs a SIGWINCH message - which lets smart terminal-aware programs like vi and less and emacs know that someone has resized the terminal - so they can cleverly resize their own displays to match. If you do use cygwin you can start a whole x-windows session and use a full x terminal (like xterm) and you get the SIGWINCH mechanism thrown in. Also (last time I checked) there is a cygwin port of rxvt that doesn't use X (it just uses windows calls, and this looks very like a regular command window) - but it does support SIGWINCH. It's a nice thing to have if you want real resizability but don't want the whole X system running on windows just to get that. -- 217.42.190.82 00:11, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Froth, I think you're talking about the same thing that I am. IP address, Windows does have a mechanism to tell applications when the window size changes: ReadConsoleInput(). The big problem with the Windows console system is that the metadata (cursor movement and window size change and so on) doesn't have an encoding as byte sequences, and hence can't be sent through a pipe. Console handles are not real NT handles, they're special values which are intercepted by the user-mode Win32 subsystem and routed via a private side channel (LPC) to the Win32 process that manages the console window. This is why the Unix world has lots of terminal emulators but the Windows world has only Microsoft's. I think they've now specified a way for third parties to hook into this system, or at least I seem to remember hearing that they were planning to do so. -- BenRG 22:03, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Cygwin is the right answer - it gives you a UNIX-like environment under Windows - once you've opened a Cygwin shell window, you'll be right at home with all of the tools you know and love. It comes with gcc, make and all of the other things you need. (And it's free!) SteveBaker 20:48, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, everyone; I appreciate the help. --Allen 23:55, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

SUPER

I was lazing around the computing reference desk when I saw a solution to my problem: SUPER! I was trying to actually use the VideoDownloader add-on for Firefox...anyways, I downloaded the SUPER installation files (I think), but all I got was a box saying "Invalid Database. The installation will be cancelled." What exactly am I doing wrong?--The Ninth Bright Shiner 21:50, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Using SUPER in the first place for one. It's just a frontend to mencoder and ffmpeg- use those instead --froth^t 22:19, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh, okay. I'm still in the dark here, so could you tell me a little about mencoder and ffmpeg? Thanks.--The Ninth Bright Shiner 15:17, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

There's an MEncoder and FFmpeg article. -- JSBillings 16:04, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Alright! I downloaded it, downloaded a video, and viewed it successfully! What I don't know how to do, though, is to convert videos from one format to another...--The Ninth Bright Shiner 20:52, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

installing xp on laptop with no cd or floppy

i have a laptop with xp pro sp2 already installed, as i just got it from a friend i want to do a clean install of windows to get rid of the junk, but the floppy drive/cd drives are external (floppy usb, cd rom uses some sort of smart card drive?) i've tried installing it but i realised that the computer cant recongise the cd drive as it would need a driver but the driver wouldn't be loaded at the point where windows installs itself. anyway round this?--Colsmeghead 21:51, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Most fairly new (certainly the last few years) BIOSes will allow you to boot of a USB disk (which should include a USB optical drive). So look in your BIOS - I think the BIOS will be able to make the optical drive appear as if it was IDE (as far as the bootloady bits of XP are concerned), so no driver would be required. -- 217.42.190.82 23:38, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

so just copy win cd to the usb drive?--Colsmeghead 09:51, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

theres no boot from usb option possibly because it doesnt have any usbv drives, you have to put it in a dock thing for it to have any kind of ports--Colsmeghead 11:09, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

HOW much does it cost?!

Due to processes I really rather wouldn't go into detail about, I can no longer install my Office Professional 2007 disc, because it's an upgrade. So, my only alternative seems to buy the cheapest available regular Office disc. What disc would that be? Standard is a frightening $400, which I certainly wasn't expecting. Doesn't Home & Student cost less? Is it even able to be upgraded? Thanks.--The Ninth Bright Shiner 21:55, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Look for the OEM install of Office Basic at online retailers. Office basic only comes with Excel and Word, which is most that almost everyone really needs (I run a couple of dozen machines at the office, and all but a few only have basic - occasionally people complain that they don't have powerpoint, but not enough to actually get up and walk over to one of the machines that do have it). The OEM disk (which is intended for system installers, but can quite legally be used by anyone) just comes in a little sleeve with the disk and the licence - no blurb, no docs, no box, no handholding. But really, before you spend money, do try OpenOffice.org - it opens every Word document I've ever had to throw at it, does everything I know how to get Word to do just as well. For 99% of people I'm convinced it's just fine; only people who do some pretty scary macro stuff find significant differences between Office and OO. And with OO you get all the suite for free. -- 217.42.190.82 23:36, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Hm...I found it at $180. Is that too high, or is that what it normally costs? Thanks again for the help.--The Ninth Bright Shiner 15:15, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Are you a college student? Microsoft likes to feel philanthropist and sell it at fair prices to college students. Check through your school's website- "Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 Suite (Student Option)" costs just $14.40 + S&H for me. Vista Ultimate Upgrade (never buy the full, just upgrade twice for a clean installation) is $18.45. If your school doesn't have a fair deal with microsoft, you can still get software if you can prove your student status. This january when Vista came out, I ordered home premium upgrade from journey for $90, and all I had to do was get the registrar's office at my school to send proof of enrollment to the provided address. This is considerably more expensive than buying from the school however- That $14.40 office 2007 ultimate becomes $249.75 at gradware.com --froth^t 17:29, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Whoa. Now that's something. I'm in 10th grade right now, so would I be eligible for these discounts to end all discounts?--The Ninth Bright Shiner 20:55, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

You might also concider Open Office. For most things, it is a suitable replacement for Microsoft Office, and the price is certainly right. --Mdwyer 01:04, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Those versions that are priced that cheaply are (usually) feature incomplete. Regular retail "Student and Teacher" editions of Office are (again, usually) the "Standard" edition with something like a 25% cheaper MSRP and a VLK (Volume License Key) good for 3 installations. — User:ACupOfCoffee@ 02:44, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

October 6

Running IE

How would one run IE from a limited user account to a administrator account, if you know the password to both that is...ie. what does one need to type in "run" by windows to get it run IE as admin? Thank 209.202.45.185 00:42, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I am not sure but if you know which version of Windows you are using that could help.

If you are able to right-click from the limited account, try right-clicking and then clicking on "run as" ... the rest should be a piece of cake. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 15:04, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Firefox 2 Spell check

When typing a comment in a text field (such as this), I accidentally added the word "unverifyable" to its dictionary (The correct spelling of the word is "unverifiable"). I was about to clicked on the right word in the right-click menu, but not being as mouse savvy as I though I was, I click on the option JUST BELOW IT, which was "Add to dictionary." My question is how do I remove it from the dictionary? And why did they not at least put a separator between the suggestions and the add option, like what Microsoft® Word does? — Kjammer  ⌂ 01:34, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi, if you look in your profile folder, you'll find a text file called: persdict.dat which you can edit. You might need to edit it when Firefox is not running. You should probably use a text-editor which can handle Unix line-endings. Wordpad will work if you're in a pinch. --Kjoonlee 16:20, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

How to find your profile folder: Profile folder at MozillaZine Knowledge Base --Kjoonlee 17:46, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, fixed the problem. I was looking in the Program Files section for something like this and could only find DLL files related to spell check, which do not store any data. Although you'd think there would be a viewable list in the options menu. — Kjammer  ⌂ 22:40, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Richard Stallman and Wikipedia

Hi all - thanks for any help with this query....

Has Richard Stallman ever written something or said something quotable specifically about Wikipedia that reflects his opinion of it? (perhaps particularly related to this article: http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html ) Thanks for any references, links and tips! 207.151.227.116 02:38, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Image Scanner Upkeep

Hello. What are the unobvious tasks in maintaining an image scanner? I know that I must regularly clean the glass cover but what else? What if my light tube that moves up and down when scanning burns out? Thanks in advance. --Mayfare 03:08, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I've never heard of a light tube burning out; I'm sure it is possible but I've never seen it, and don't think it is very likely to happen unless you are seriously mishandling the scanner. As for other maintenance, there really isn't any, though if you transport the scanner you have to re-calibrate it occasionally as it can get a bit off of alignment when moved around (this is done via the scanner software). --24.147.86.187 04:11, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

As the fluorescent tube or LED illumination thing ages, the color of it may go off. If it does burn out, they generally are not replaceable. The color changes, though, can be handled by the calibration that the previous editor mentioned. --Mdwyer 01:02, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Energy consumption of the Internet

How much energy does the Internet use up? Worldwide and/or in a densely internetted country like the Netherlands. Not counting the endcomputers, because they may have been on anyway, even if there was no-one on the Internet. DirkvdM 06:02, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Everyone should read slashdot :] Not exactly what you're looking for, but go to the article and read through the documentation; there are dozens of sauces that you can use to figure it out for yourself --froth^t 06:56, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Wow, 5.3 % worldwide and 9.4 % in the US. Since I assume that energy waste in other fields will be higher in the US, that might be even higher in other western countries, especially in the Netherlands. But two thirds of that is due to the computers and monitors at people's homes, sort of like I expected, and it's not entirely fair to count that. But still, for the Netherlands it will probably be something like 5% of energy consumption, which is more than I thought. DirkvdM 17:56, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

IMO it's not really all that surpising. For every watt they're using, they waste 2 or 3 watts trying to cool the thing.. and my laptop uses a LOT of power for cooling- to keep it from overheating I use a USB-powered fan rig to pipe heat away from the bottom (my thinkpad tries to put out as much heat as possible through air cooling, and any extra it pumps directly through the solid metal bottom, so it's perfect for this kind of setup) as well as the built in internal air cooling system that runs air super fast through a little corner of the laptop and uses powered radiators to dump heat into that little fast-airflow space. I get about twice the battery life when I turn off internal cooling and unplug the fan rig --froth^t 18:50, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I really don't think they use more energy in cooling than actually for calculation. All my fans are just rated for a few watts, and I have 6 of them, which is way more than the average; that's just around how much power my 250gig hard drive uses. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:50, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

E-Mail ID

I want the E-Mail ID OF Tiffany Taylor.Now dont dismiss it as a borderline trollish question I am really crazy about her.218.248.2.51 07:57, 6 October 2007 (UTC)Hedonister

Her website says it's dgi.business AT aol.com. Good luck! --Sean 13:49, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I would be really surprised if she actually ever sees any of the mail that goes to that address. If you get a reply - it'll be picked from a menu of pre-written replies. Forget it. SteveBaker 17:59, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I would not be surprised. If I got nearly as much attention, I would probably do that too. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 15:01, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Streaming music with wiki

Is there a way to stream music with wiki? For example using windows media player to play music in a wiki article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.75.79.220 (talk) 08:08, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, in fact we've already got it integrated into many articles, like Eruption_(song). [Mac Δαvιs] ❖ 02:13, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Hardisk Failure

Hi friends, My PC's been suffering from Hardnisk failure.My configuration is (Pentium D 3GHZ,1GB RAM(transcend),Mercury TV tuner card on PCI slot,160 GB SATA Segate HDD,965 INtel Mainboard,Windows XP SP2) In C Drive I have installed Windows 2000 and in D drive I have installed Windows XP SP2.The thing happened was., that last week I found one partition was not formatted and it was about 12 GB space.I have already divided HDD into 8 partitions.Using disk management in XP,I assigned a new drive letter "Z" and clicked format,and next to that second, my system displayed Blue screen or stop screen error telling that Plug and play device is in faulty cond,could be due to bad\faulty driver.Before this incident,my HDD was just doing superb.I never got such problems...I disconnected all other devices and again booted using that faulty HDD, but to my surprise, it showed the operating system choice menu such as windows XP and windows 2000.Also I was able to detect my drive in BIOS.Once I boot xp, the HDD is loading which I confirmed by its sound and vibration but when the "windows XP loading screen" appears,my system again displayed stop or blue screen error stating the same problem.This was the permanent case.Later,I plugged in the HDD as plug and play into another PC after booting and login to windows XP desktop in my friends PC.The device manager detects the drive, but within seconds it displayed stop screen error with same quote.This is my critical case.I changed HDD cables,power cord,I reset the BIOS and set for default values,but nothing helped out...Booting sectors in my HDD seem to OK,but I thing some clusters might have been damaged...I have huge amount of precious data with many not backed up.I cant give to data recovery centre since that will void guarantee or if I send it to segate,they will return new product and I will lose all data..Please help me solve this problem by any means...Thanks a thousand in advance... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balan rajan (talk • contribs) 08:26, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I suggest using a LiveCD for data recovery, such as Linux System Rescue CD or Rescubuntu, to recover it to another hard drive. Do it fast, since your hard disk seems to be near failure. Splintercellguy 20:27, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks But my hardisk is not at all loading.Only boot sectors seem to be fine...When my disk is being read by windows, the system automatically restarts.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.164.57.137 (talk) 08:34, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

You can try burning a copy of a LiveCD version of GNU/Linux (I see a fellow Wikipedian recommended Rescubuntu) in another computer (I bet you could figure that out yourself) and then using that computer to transfer the data from your near to failing disk to the on in the computer. Your computer should not restart just because you have a failing (or even failed) hard disk connected to it unless you are booting from the failing hard disk. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 14:59, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

RAIDed external USB harddrive...

My dad wants to buy an external USB harddrive to back up all his important things. He's really, really worried about it crashing and only having one copy, so I suggested that maybe he should get one that had a built in RAID system (RAID 1, that is), because I imagined some USB drives came with that built in. There are, right? Can someone recommend one? --Oskar 09:38, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

They're pricey. This one looks perfect but it's way too expensive for only 400GB in RAID 1. Maybe this one, but there's a bad review. I don't know, just buy a nice low-end enclosure that comes with all the RAID parts, and then buy hard drives separately --froth^t 17:44, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think RAID is a good idea. It's too easy to imagine scenarios where both drives are lost at once -- power surge, controller electronics failure, earthquake depending on where you live. RAID mirroring is good for servers that need to be online all the time; when a drive fails, the server can keep running while you swap in a new drive. I don't think it's a good fit for an external backup drive that's only occasionally going to be switched on. I'd buy two drives from different manufacturers and alternate between them for backups, never having both plugged in at the same time. How much important data does your dad have? USB pen drives are dirt cheap these days. You could buy a dozen 4GB pen drives for the price of that Buffalo RAID array. -- BenRG 22:05, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

For critical data, I certainly wouldn't store it on the same computer - or even in the same building. RAID will save you from hardware problems such as a head-crash on one of your drives - but it won't solve the problem of you accidentally deleting a file you intended to keep - or of a virus or other malware taking over your PC and corrupting all of the drives in the RAID. That's why you need to mirror the data on another computer. But if your house burns down - it's not even enough to keep the data on two machines in the same building - so off-site backup is vital. My important stuff from home is mirrored onto the computer that does my web hosting once a week - as well as being copied onto my file server computer down in my garage every day. SteveBaker 13:47, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

If you are paranoid, maybe you can burn the data every few days on DVDs and mail copies to two reliable people living in abother county (or still better, another state or country). But I don't know how it would help for extended periods of time. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 14:52, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I am not a computer scientist, but from what I have read, USB hard disk drives are painfully slow and are suitable only as a back-up drive. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 14:53, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

They are slow - but not painfully (well - depends what you are doing) - I have a beat-up old laptop whose hard drive died. I use one of those teeny-tiny 20Gb "FIREFLY" USB drive to boot the machine into Linux - and it's perfectly usable for stuff like web surfing and email that doesn't demand a lot of disk I/O. It's fast enough to play movies using mplayer too. So whilst I wouldn't recommend using USB for high-demand tasks, for basic stuff it works plenty fast enough. SteveBaker 18:54, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

problem of faint photos on internet viewing.

Hi, I am Tejraj Singh from Palghar, India, the problem I am facing with my computer is that when I connect internet, pictures/photos are seen faint not clear or say broken (like trying to hide fact in photos ) .this problem is with all internet sites that I had visited. Please help me how to overcome this problem on my computer, is their any short of software or else. Thanking you, Tejraj Singh.220.224.101.32 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.224.101.32 (talk) 11:38, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Hello Mr. Singh. Do photos/pictures that you have on your computer also appear faint? If so, it may be either a problem with your monitor, or your graphics card.--Mostargue 11:57, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

It might be something as simple as turning up the contrast on your monitor. This can easily be tested with something like the shades of grey on the right in greyscale, but for your purpose that would have to extend to pure white (where you would then have to see all shades). Don't we have that somewhere? DirkvdM 18:02, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

This is a stretch, but it is possible that your browser is going through a proxy that compresses pictures to minimize bandwidth charges. On thing to check would be to see if the images are still damaged when you use the SSL version of a web page. --Mdwyer 00:59, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

microcontroller neuron

Are there microcontrollers designed specifically to simulate or duplicate the learning function of a neuron or does such functionality have to be programmed into a standard microcontroller, and if so, is there an algorithm for such programming? Clem 18:05, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

No - microcontrollers are not designed to act as artificial neurons. You could possibly run a Neural Network simulator on one of them. The algorithms for this are widely published in books on the subject - but without understanding the workings of them, you'd find it very hard to use them - so you're going to need to get hold of a book on the subject anyway. What application did you have in mind? SteveBaker 20:45, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

The Artificial neuron article does not show how an artificial neuron learns but only how an artificial neuron functions after it has learned. Clem 05:21, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

You need more than an encyclopedia article to cover this broad topic in enough detail to actually go off and implement a neural network. (You keep talking about a single neuron - I hope you realise that we need to talk about a network of many artificial neurons - typically all simulated in a single computer.) As I said previously, you need to get a book on the subject and be prepared for a significant amount of study. Training a neural network is by far the most complex part of the problem and there are a lot of techniques and gotcha's that have to be worked through. Very roughly, you start with a randomised set of weights for the neurons in your network. Then you present a typical input to the network and observe the output it generates. Then you reinforce the weights of the neurons that produced the output you wanted and you reduce the weights on the ones that messed up - and back-propagate those weights up the network towards the inputs. (Back-propagation alone is the subject of three chapters in the book I have.) Do this a bazillion times with different training samples, gradually reducing the amount of change you apply to the weights and eventually the network learns. However, there is a lot more to it than that - it's a huge field that's not easily summarized in the few pages that is appropriate to an encyclopedia article. The book I originally learned this stuff from ("C++ Neural networks and Fuzzy Logic") is wildly outdated and I couldn't recommend it - but there are plenty of more modern works which include sample code and worked examples. SteveBaker 13:37, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Your description of how an artificial neuron (and artificial neural network) learns provides the general answer I was seeking in an encyclopedia article. Can you add your description to the artificial neuron article with perhaps some Pseudocode that illustrates the algorithm as well? Since the artificial neuron is the basic component, structural element or computing unit of the network I need an explanation that is comprehensive enough to be able to progress to an understanding of how an artificial neural network learns regarding further complexities such as the technique you mentioned of back propagation. Thanks. Clem 14:32, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Generally, the implementation of an artificial neural network is a big array full of the weightings of the inputs to each neuron plus another array which contains the current state of each one and a third array that lists the connection pattern. Generally the connection pattern consists of an input layer - and output layer and some number of 'hidden layers' of neurons between input and output - with the connection pattern generally connecting all of the neurons on one layer to each of the neurons on the next (although MANY other variations are possible - and even commonplace). The main loop of your application shoves the input data into the input neuron's state array - then iterates over all of the neurons taking each of their inputs current state, multiplying by the weight for that input and then summing them to make the new current state for this neuron. Hence the whole system is (typically) just a simple 1D floating point array for the current-state of each neuron, a 2D floating point array for the weighting of each input of each neuron and a 2D integer array containing the array index of the neurons that connects to this input of this neuron (of course this could instead be a 1D array of structures or classes or something - but performance is the driving factor here - neural networks can take a long time to execute and cache coherency can be a big problem with the largest ones). Since there tend to be a LOT of interconnections (just as in a real brain, the number of interconnections is vastly more than the number of neurons) - the inner loop of the code is mostly fetching state, multiplying by weightings and summing. This being just a few lines of code, and given that it occupies almost 100% of processing time in running the network, it can be really carefully hand-optimised. This is a useful property of neural networks. SteveBaker 23:46, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

In terms of a practical application then suppose each input were a pixel of 32 bit color of a 600 by 800 array. Do there exist such neural network arrays for instance that might be built into the electronics of a CCD array which can be trained to recognize a set of similar pictures and then ring an alarm when anything like its training comes into view of the camera? Clem 00:17, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes - that kind of thing is certainly possible. You'd need 600x800x3 = 1,440,000 input neurons (for red, green and blue for each pixel), some number of intermediate layer neurons and just one output neuron (you just want some kind of 'confidence' number on the output 1==It's one of the special images, 0==No, it's not a special image, intermediate values indicating degrees of confidence). You'd train the network by alternating between showing it one of your special images and tweaking gains to get a '1.0' output - and showing it a set of non-special images and training to get a '0.0' output. Then you'd be able to stuff a 'live' picture from the camera into the input neurons and observe the value of the output neuron. However, 1.4 million input neurons (and probably a few million intermediate neurons) will require an immense amount of training and a TON of computer resources to do that. The camera itself would need a pretty hefty computer to actually run that network in realtime. Remember, you'll want to connect every one of the input neurons to every one of the intermediate layer neurons - if there are 1.44 million of each, then that's 1.44² interconnections - which is 2 trillion multiply/add cycles. On even a 3GHz PC, that's going to take a L-O-N-G time to execute! Consequently, you probably can't have the algorithm looking at ALL of the pixels - I'd probably split the image up into (say) 30x40 grid cells and feed each neuron with the average of the pixel colours in its grid cell - so you only need 3600 input neurons - and you'd only have maybe 10 million multiply-add cycles. The resulting neural net wouldn't be able to recognise tiny features in the images - but it would at least run at a reasonable speed. But this is a tricky subject - you need to learn the technology (I'm far from being an expert) and spend serious time on trying different possibilities - neural networks are as much art as science. I used a neural network to recognise buildings in satellite photos - which meant that I fed a 128x128 pixel area to a neural net - and took a 128x128 output that indicated the probability of each pixel being a building. It worked well eventually - but it took me months of tweaking the resolution and number of hidden layers in the network. SteveBaker 13:37, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

As SteveBaker points out, the dimensionality of 800x600 images is really high. Each example picture is defined by by 1.4 million numbers, making most machine learners (such as neural networks) useless. The key is dimensionality reduction, such as the proposed method of reducing to a grid of 30 x 40. Another way to go about this is to use feature extraction. You define a bunch of ways to turn the image into a single number like "how many pixels are green", "how strong is the contrast", "how strong are the edges" and so on. If you use, say, 50 of these feature extraction methods, you get 50 numbers, instead of 1.4 million. You can then use these as inputs for you neural network (or other machine learners, support vector machines work well with this method). Another method of dimensionality reduction principal components analysis. Here, you look at a single picture as a vector of 1.4 million numbers. The algorithm then calculates (looking at the whole set of examples) another vector of 1.4 numbers where the first number is the most important, and so on. you reduce the dimensionality of the vector by just using the first n numbers and ignoring the rest. If you're going to do machine learning, you should also beware of overfitting. A good book on the principles of machine learning is 'Machine Learning' by Tom Mitchel.

risk 23:33, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Bluetooth Webcam

Where can you get a bluetooth webcam?martianlostinspace ^{email me} 19:19, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there are any. --froth^t 19:22, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Really?martianlostinspace ^{email me} 19:26, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Bluetooth isn't really made for high speed, high bandwidth transfers, 2.0 transfers only about 3 Mbit/s which isn't all that much. It's designed to transfer sounds and and calendar entries and stuff. I think that it would be pushing it to use it for a webcam. --Oskar 20:06, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

You might be able to just get a USB webcam and bridge it over a pair of Wireless USB adapters. Belkin apparently makes them but I can't find them. --froth^t 21:06, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

But even if you could - 3Mbit/s isn't enough for video. You can't magically get bandwidth from nowhere - so it couldn't possible work. SteveBaker 13:19, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

3Mbit/sec is more than enough for video. Sure, not full screen 30fps video, but mobile phones record video in 3gpp which have data rates belows 3Mbit/sec. I would guess the real reason is power supply and range. You most likely need to plug it in to AC power. And if you have a wire to power it, you might as well use power over Ethernet which would provide tons of bandwidth *and* power. And even if it was Bluetooth, it would have to be located somewhat close to your computer and paired to a specific. A WiFi webcam would seem more practical as it could be available to any computer on your network. --24.249.108.133 16:56, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

OK then, are there any wifi ones? What I mean is, is there a straightforward camera that sits on top of your computer, like a wired cam, but without the wires. That is, wireless. Not the type that some companies are doing, security type ones. Plain old webcam, like you might use on MSN, for example.martianlostinspace ^{email me} 18:41, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

python class method: does a function/method have a way to know it's own name?

Suppose you have the following python code:

   class person(object):
       def __init__(self):
           self.fn = 'homer';
           self.ln = 'simpson';
       def say_anything(self):
           try:
               this_func   = '__what_do_i_put_here__??';
               name        = this_func.__name__;
           except:
               print       "there was an error!";
               name        = 'say_anything';
           print self.fn +" "+ self.ln +" didn't "+ name;
   test    = person();
   test.say_anything();

The code produces:

   there was an error!
   homer simpson didn't say_anything

The goal is to produce the same output, but without the "error" ... which means I have to figure out a way to get a function/method to know its own name ... which means I have to figure out what to put in place of '__what_do_i_put_here__??'. Any suggestions? NoClutter 22:32, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

• See here. --Sean 14:46, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Removing lyrics from songs

Using existing technology and software, is it possible to remove the lyrics from an MP3 song, leaving behind only the melody, so that one can sing the song themselves with only the melody playing? Thanks. Acceptable 22:59, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. You can easily look up this topic yourself. Please see Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Computing/2007_September_26#Karioke_Track. For future questions, try using the search box at the top left of the screen. It's much quicker, and you will probably find a clearer answer. If you still don't understand, add a further question below by clicking the "edit" button to the right of your question title. . dr.ef.tymac 00:41, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

As for a more nonautomated and quicker answer: No. [Mac Δαvιs] ❖ 02:07, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Quicker? Perhaps. Correct? Doesn't seem so -- especially since the previous answer to this question includes side-by-side demonstration audio files that you can hear with your own ears ... if you follow the "automated" link already provided. dr.ef.tymac 05:41, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Do I need to do this again? I used GoldWave again, on Rock Lobster (song) by The B-52's.. chosen because since the instrumental track is so distinct, goldwave separates it perfectly.

Convinced yet? It doesn't work with many songs, but if you have a good high-quality version (preferably lossless, though this is rarely available -_-) it turns out OK. Most of the time you have a ghost of the vocals left, but it's much quieter than before and it's perfectly easy to sing over. --froth^t 06:39, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

My son has been using the OpenSourced 'Audacity' audio processing program which has a pre-programmed filter for removing vocals. (He removes them from rock music so he can hear the guitar part better when he's learning to play a song). I presume it's using a similar technique to the 'invert-left-channel-and-subtract-from-right' - but it's got a bunch of adjustable widgets that let you play around to get the best possible vocal elimination. It's obviously not 100% perfect (nothing could be) - but it's amazingly good - you can cut the vocals down to such a low level that you can only just barely hear them during the quieter parts of the music and you can't hear them at all when the music is louder. SteveBaker 23:33, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

The leftover vocals are almost always the results of an echo effect applied after recording. In songs without the echo applied, the elimination will be perfect. Of course, songs without echoed main vocals seem to have lots of annoying backup singers. :P HYENASTE 22:03, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Wow! That's really interesting. It makes perfect sense though. Thanks! SteveBaker 13:22, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

PSP Wifi

I have established a wifi connection on my PSP using my home computer's wireless access. I have noticed that the two devices use the same IP address. So...

QUESTION 1- If I were to, let's say, get banned from a site using my PSP (this has not happened, just an example), would I be banned from that site on my computer as well?

QUESTION 2- Let's pretend I have the Internet Service Provider SBC Global. Both of my internet connections, then, are provided by SBC Global. So, let's say that, on my home computer, I establish an SBC Global email account. Of course, I wouldn't have a pre-established SBC Global e-mail account on my PSP since I am simply using the connection. So, let's pretend that I set up a Gmail e-mail account for myself, that I will use when using my PSP. So, if I subscriped to something or ordered something using my gmail account, would anybody using the computer or SBC Global account ever be informed thru the SBC account of this? So pretty much, would the computer user be able to track the IP address and find not only the history of the computer, but also what has happened on the PSP?

QUESTION 3- Are there any extra fees thrown onto a wireless internet connection if there is a 2nd party using it via a PSP? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.23.84.129 (talk) 23:27, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll assume you're in a residential setting, and your PSP was connected to a home broadband router with wireless capabilities. For the first, The IP address associated with your connection would have been banned, so any machines that use the router will be blocked too. For the second, no. For the third, no, it's your wireless router, isn't it? How can the ISP track how many machines are connected to the router anyway? Splintercellguy 01:19, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

is the psp or iphone a better media player (widescreen movies).

it seems the iphone in widescreen mode playing a movie is similar to a psp doing the same thing. which is better? (the actual experience though maybe its because of brightness, physical size, resolution, dpi etc) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.0.127.58 (talk) 23:37, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I have no idea about PSPs. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 02:41, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

The PSP appears to have a wider screen, but I have never even saw an iPhone in real life, so I would say the PSP. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jonathan (talk • contribs) 03:45, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I know the iPhone sucks but it might be the best thing for amatuers like me. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 14:45, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Keep in mind that you must prepare almost all media you want to view on your PSP (outside of UMD movies and DRM-free MPEG-4 -- like video podcasts and movie trailers). You must compress any video yourself. The iPhone has the iTunes store, which carries lots of movies, TV shows and video podcasts. So the iPhone is far more convenient if you don't mind paying a couple bucks for content. And personally, the ability to have the internet available no matter where you go (even if it is slow AT&T Edge service) is something that will change your life. --24.249.108.133 22:49, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Surfing web without web browsers

Is it possible on a Windows XP/Vista to surf the internet without a web browser on your computer and instead using, for example, CMD? Thanks. Acceptable 23:43, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Not sure about windows versions for these tools, but can you explain a bit more about what you need. There are some text-based web browsers, like the Lynx web browser. There are simpler tools for downloading, like wget, which are also text-based. For more complex stuff, there are scripts like python which could be used. --h2g2bob (talk) 00:07, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

See also cURL and links. --71.175.68.224 01:57, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I think if a software allows you to browse the web, it is a web browser. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 02:40, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

You could hand-write raw ethernet frames in a hex editor.. that's about the only way you're going to be able to do it without using a networking program --froth^t 05:57, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

He didn't ask how to do it without a networking program, he asked how to do it without a web browser. It's very easy, as said below, just telnet into port 80 and write the HTTP request by hand. You don't even have to know what ethernet frames are, or that there even is any layer below TCP. JIP | Talk 05:41, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

OTOH, it has been agreed that you can surf the internet without web trousers (or even naked) 8-)[[6]] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.109.198.32 (talk) 08:27, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

LOL --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 14:44, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

yes, you can telnet to port 80 and parse the site yourself. (imagine what it looks like). for simple sites you're familiar with, this isn't even insane. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.0.158.245 (talk) 20:58, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Been there. Done that. Try this:

• telnet www.google.com
• when it connects (it won't say anything) type the next line
• get / http/0.9
• press enter twice
• You'll get the HTTP header (200 OK + headers), a blank line, and then the raw HTML.

Fun for the whole family! --Mdwyer 00:56, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

October 7

On the verge of breaking...

On my Socket 754 motherboard 2 hooks on the side of the CPU that were holding the fan down broke off and the remaining one looks like to be on the verge of breaking is well, and my CPU is getting hot since the contact is not optimum. Is there any way I can remedy this situation, because this motherboard is really good for a file server (built in IDE/SATA RAID etc.) and I want to keep it in service even after I get a new computer. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:55, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

You can use a thermally conductive adhesive to permanently attach the heat sink to the CPU. Clem 05:26, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

...like the standard Arctic Silver. --froth^t 05:55, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I always thought Arctic Silver is simply a thermal compound which has barely any adhesive power at all... Will it not put too much stress on my CPU since the heatsink is quite heavy (~600g). --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:18, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

What? Why would it put stress on the CPU? If that beast of a heatsink is already sitting on the processor, the arctic silver won't make it any worse. You could try buying artic silver thermal paste and putting that in the middle, then dabbing a little of this insane stuff around the edges.. warning, it will NEVER EVER come off. Don't use globs. -froth^t 06:48, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes it's now pushing it in but if I had to use the epoxy once the remaining hook breaks off the CPU will experience a pull instead, due to the weight of the heatsink, and I'm not sure if it can withstand that. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:40, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

You are correct - Arctic Silver (and other things like it) are NOT adhesives - they are thermally conductive pastes that fill in the microscopic gaps between the CPU and the heatsink to allow heat to flow from one to the other without there being an air-gap (air is a pretty good thermal insulator). When the clamp breaks, there won't be stress on the CPU - but then the heatsink will simply fall off - or a gap will open between heatsink and CPU which will probably allow the CPU to destroy itself. That clamp is there for a reason - you need it. If it breaks - buy an new heatsink and put fresh thermal paste onto the cpu before you clamp it back together again. SteveBaker 14:18, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I think the OP is referring to the tabs on the CPU socket. If so then again use a thermal adhesive versus a thermal compound to permanently bond the heatsink and CPU so as to permanently eliminate the air gap between the CPU and the heatsink. Do not mix the adhesive with compound. Doing so is unnecessary if the adhesive is a thermal adhesive. Using compound with the adhesive may prevent the heatsink and CPU from bounding allowing the heatsink and CPU to separate and an air gap to form. Clem 17:37, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

So does anyone know if the CPU can withstand the pull from the weight of the heatsink or would I have to lay it down horizontally? --antilived^{T | C | G} 03:08, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

What other choice do you have? --froth^t 04:34, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, there are many other choices... He could get a lighter heat sink. He could switch to a liquid-cooled system. He could use a bunch of zip-ties to hold the heat sink to the motherboard. He could underclock the system to keep heat down. That's just a start. There are certainly many more. -- kainaw™ 04:57, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

What's the plastic structure with the hooks near the CPU called? Is there any documented case of replacing that since I've found a faulty, near-identical board and it would seem a better idea to simply replace the hooks instead of gluing my CPU to the heatsink. --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:50, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm getting confused about what's broken. We have the circuit board - then into that is soldered the zero-insertion-force (ZIF) socket (a plastic thing with a lever for releasing the CPU) - into that plugs the CPU chip itself - then onto that sits the heatsink with a set of metal spring clips that clamp the heatsink/fan assembly over the CPU and onto the ZIF socket. So which is broken - the metal spring clamps or the ZIF socket?

• If it's the metal spring clamps then you can just buy a new heatsink (and clamp).
• If it's the ZIF socket's attachment points then you're in deep trouble because those things have a bazillion pins and your chances of successfully de-soldering it and replacing it are ZERO.

So I guess we're talking about the fallback position when the ZIF socket is busted (or you are too cheap to buy a new heatsink+clamp!). In that case, you have two problems:

1. Firstly, how do you keep the heatsink in firm thermal contact with the CPU? Glue is the only way I could imagine would work - and you'd have to get glue with really good thermal conductivity or else the CPU is still gonna overheat. We've established that the usual stuff you squirt between CPU and heat-sink is a good thermal conductor - but it's not an adhesive. I'm not aware of any adhesives with the thermal properties of Arctic Ice - but maybe there is something out there that'll be good enough.
2. Secondly, with the heatsink fixed to the CPU - but not clamped onto the ZIF socket, if you have the motherboard mounted on it's side, will the weight & leverage of the heatsink+CPU be enough to wrench the CPU out of the socket? If so, you're in deep trouble - if not...not!

So if you can mount the motherboard horizontally (put the computer on it's side maybe) - then you shouldn't have too many problems - but if you absolutely have to mount it vertically - I'd predict that sooner or later you'll have trouble...but it's hard to say for sure. It's all down to how well the ZIF socket grabs onto all of those pins. It used to be that they were designed to grip pretty well - but that was in the era before the heatsink clip would hold everything firmly together - so these days...who knows? — Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveBaker (talk • contribs) 16:02, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

See this photo about my motherboard (and most Socket 754 motherboards out there. The hooks are not on the socket itself, but on the black plastic housing around the CPU, and it looks like it's replaceable. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:16, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah! That helps! So the ZIF socket is that white thing in the middle of the black frame - but the frame is what's broken. I guess the question now is how the black frame is attached to the motherboard and whether you can buy a replacement. The problem with getting a replacement is that these things are not common 'user replaceable' parts - you might have to find an electronics component vendor - and they may not be happy about selling them in one-off quantities to an individual. Urgh! SteveBaker 13:15, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I found a faulty, near-identical motherboard selling at a low price and I was just wondering if there's any previous examples of replacing that. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:09, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

customising pie chart in MS Visio

Help please! I want to create pie charts in MS Visio without showing the percentage text. Whatever I do, the result is like the one seen in the pic at the link. http://www.data.no/FilesUploaded/Publications/612/Images/tut1_fig4_chart.jpg What I want is a pie chart with custom text, like the following. http://tommcmahon.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/03/27/piechartalternative2.gif I suppose there must be a way. Can somebody please help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Weird connector (talk • contribs) 09:51, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately I don't know Visio at all. Is it possible for you to do it in another program (like Excel) and import it? --24.147.86.187 20:39, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Visio seems to use the same chart engine as Excel anyway. To make a chart like the example you gave, insert a chart on to your Visio worksheet, then change the Chart Type to "Bar of Pie". Then go to the Chart Options, turn Show Legend off, and in the Data Labels tab, turn on whichever options you want to show on the pie chart. -Canley 02:55, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Reverting all Windows XP Display settings to default

I recently installed Battlefield 2, but somehow it changed all my GFX settings including the Display settings. The tahoma font setting is massive and ugly and makes me want to puke, the taskbar is massive. I need to know how to revert all the settings (icon, message box etc). My video card is Radeon 9200. - Vicer 13:21, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Try Right-clicking on the desktop to go to "Properties", then under theme tab, there is (or should be) a drop down menu, select Windows XP in the menu. Hit apply and then OK. This should work. Let me know if it does not work.

BTW, a small game is not supposed to interfere with you GUI. I hate it when games don't just mind their own business. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 14:41, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi, it didn't really work but I soon found out it was the DPI settings that caused it to look huge. Thanks for the help though. - Vicer 14:58, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

You are always welcome ... and congratulations! --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 15:05, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

October 8

Python

I have a question about python. I'm trying to write a program to do matrix operations. If I give the program inputs of n rows by m columns, how would I tell it to ask for (m x n) inputs? 68.231.151.161 01:36, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

• Your question is unclear to me, but here's the general idea:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys

def read_array(rows, columns):
    print "Enter a %d row x %d column array of integers," % (rows, columns)
    print "separated by spaces, one row per line:"
    print
    got_rows = 0
    array = []
    while got_rows < rows:
        try:
            print "Row %d: " % got_rows,
            line = sys.stdin.readline()
            row = [int(x) for x in line.split()]
            if len(row) != columns:
                raise Exception, "I need %d columns per row" % columns
            array.append(row)
            got_rows += 1
        except Exception, e:
            print e
    return array

def array_add(a1, a2):
    if len(a1) != len(a2):
        raise Exception, "mismatched array sizes"
    out_array = []
    for row in range(len(a1)):
        if len(a1[row]) != len(a2[row]):
            raise Exception, "mismatched array sizes"
        out_row = []
        for col in range(len(a1[row])):
            out_row.append(a1[row][col] + a2[row][col])
        out_array.append(out_row)
    return out_array

def pretty_print_array(a):
    for row in a:
        for col in row:
            print '%6d' % col,
        print

array1 = read_array(2, 3)
array2 = read_array(2, 3)

asum = array_add(array1, array2)

pretty_print_array(array1)
print
pretty_print_array(array2)
print
pretty_print_array(asum)

--Sean 21:13, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

midi files

I have collection of midi files from the late '80's. Some will not play using Windows Media Player with the problem being timing or rhythm. At first I thought it might be due to an outdated copy of WMP or the motherboard being configured for use spread spectrum, but no, it happens with all WMPlayers not what else is changed. Most of the midi files that WMP cannot play Quicktime can play so I'm able to listen to almost every file I have. What is the reason for this problem? Is there a difference in midi file format or what? Clem 06:24, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

If you'd like to email me one (you can do that from my user page) - I'll try to play it with some other MIDIfile players I have...including one I wrote myself(!). Maybe I can figure out what's wrong with these files (or, conversely, what's wrong with WMP). The MIDIfile standard has hardly changed at all - but most players out there are incomplete in one way or another - and the tempo stuff is the hardest to get right. SteveBaker 15:36, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Timing and rhythm are no problem for Quicktime with these files. It may also be how WMP runs under Windows XP x64, what thing either uses for the clock. The question I am really trying to answer is whether it may have something to do with the copyright protection mania that WMP has, if midi files have any provision for copyright enforcement. Clem 20:32, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I really like winamp.--Sonjaaa 02:20, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

To answer your questions, User:kadiddlehopper, yes, there are different MIDI file formats (or alternatively, different "variants" of the MIDI spec). There are various reasons why your MIDI files may not read properly in any given player, none of which necessarily have to do with copyright protection schemes. For example, certain MIDI controller messages or track information may be corrupt. You can find out more by opening your files in a MIDI sequencer, which are designed to handle multiple file formats and fully support view/edit/delete of all controller and track events. If there's corrupt data, you can usually remove it by editing in a sequencer. You can find more information here. dr.ef.tymac 13:51, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

EMail ID

Earlier Iasked for the email id of Tiffany Taylor and someone gave it to me as dgi.business@aol.com.As planned I sent her a mail but I got a mail from MAILER-DAEMON@n2.bullet.mud.yahoo.com that the mail could not be delivered to that address.The remote host said that 550 MAILBOX NOT FOUND [RCPT_TO].What does this mean?218.248.2.51 08:45, 8 October 2007 (UTC)Hedonister

Exactly what it says, you were given an invalid email address. JIP | Talk 08:58, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

See bounce message and RFC 3463. --Kjoonlee 17:20, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Ripping DVDs

With libdvdcss installed, MPlayer on Linux will rip the actual movies on DVDs just fine and store them on my hard disk, where I can play them without the DVD. But is it possible to also rip the menus where I choose the movie to play, and have them work in the DVD player?

(Legal disclaimer: libdvdcss is perfectly legal in Finland. These DVDs are commercial, copyrighted content. I have bought them legally and paid for them full price. It is not against any law for me to copy them for my own personal use. I will not redistribute the content in any way.) JIP | Talk 11:32, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Here is a common misconception. You only need deCSS to play the movie - you can copy the entire content of your DVD onto another DVD without decrypting it. So deCSS has essentially nothing to do with copy protection. What it mostly does is try to ensure that only licensed players can play DVD's - and that's an entirely different matter. The thing that makes it (maybe) illegal in the USA is the DMCA which makes it illegal to break the DVD encryption mechanism. However, it's a dumb law because you can break the copyright laws without decrypting the disk - and you need to decrypt the data in order to do something (like playing your legally purchased DVD on a Linux machine) that isn't illegal otherwise. I suspect that the main reason for encrypting the content in the first place was to prohibit un-licensed DVD players - because those can let you do things like skipping all of the intro-crap and circumventing the region-encoding (for example to play legally purchased Japanese or European DVD's in the USA). The law in the US is a total mess right now. SteveBaker 15:31, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, but it did not address my actual question at all. I do know that CSS does not prevent copying, and is only intended to prevent playback by unlicensed players. I merely added the disclaimer to prevent people from freaking out when they saw I am ripping DVDs. My question is, how can I rip the menus as well as the actual movies? JIP | Talk 15:34, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

You need to use something other than mplayer, I imagine. There are DVD rippers that can rip menus—MacTheRipper, for example, does this readily. My bet is that the easiest way to do this would be to get something that would just create a disk image of the DVD, which would reproduce the menus just the same way. --24.147.86.187 20:00, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Neither MacTheRipper or DVD Shrink are available for Linux. I tried making a raw disk image with dd if=/dev/dvd of=dvd.img but it stopped at a read error after only a few megabytes. JIP | Talk 20:04, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

The deal is that if you rip the DVD into an unencrypted MPEG or AVI or something - then you've lost all hope of having the menus work. It's got to remain as a copy of the original DVD for that to work. I wonder though - do you actually need a bit-for-bit rip of the DVD? Can't you just copy the files off of it? I believe that DVD's have a proper directory structure - you can mount them and look around the files that are there. SteveBaker 20:29, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I can mount the DVD and look at the files. But Xine (the only player I have found to play CSS-encrypted content) can't play the files directly, it has to go through a DVD driver. Xine can either play the DVD directly from the drive, or the VOB files MPlayer creates from individual titles. I have found k9copy, which claims to copy DVDs with menus. So far I have been successful in creating a copy of an encrypted DVD but I haven't yet tried to play it. JIP | Talk 21:09, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it works. Reading the DVD takes only about ten minutes but writing it to the ISO image takes well over an hour. Xine can't play the resulting ISO file directly, but if I tell it that the DVD device is in fact in that ISO file and not in /dev/dvd, then it will play the DVD just nicely from dvd://. Now I just need to find a way to tell Xine the driver location from the command line. JIP | Talk 22:25, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I've found dvdbackup to do a great job of copying DVDs. It produces a simple decrypted copy of the files on the DVD which can be played by xine or burnt with standard dvd+rw-tools. Both should be available as packages on Debian-based distros at least (apt-get install dvdbackup dvd+rw-tools). I've never experienced the kind of slowdown you describe either; the only explanation for it that I can think of is that k9copy is actually recompressing the video streams rather than just copying them verbatim. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 01:46, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Solitaire

This is something I've wondered for years, but when playing Solitaire, are all of the cards given a deck and a value from the beginning of each game, or is the identity of each card only decided once it has been turned over. In other words, is a whole virtual set of cards dealt everytime you click "Deal", or does the computer only assign to each card a value (from the remaining possible values, i.e. those not already face-forward) once it has been turned over? I.e. will two players playing an identical game of Solitaire encounter the same cards at the bottom of each of the piles?

This is something I've wondered since the first time I played Solitaire... which is a long time indeed, and I figured that this would be the best place to ask as I figure one must know what the Solitaire codes and what-have-you contain before being able to correctly answer.

Thanks in advance, Ninebucks 13:10, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't know, but I do know that Minesweeper "deals" out a whole field of mines but if you end up clicking on a mine for the first click, it will quickly re-deal things so that you don't just end the game. (You can test this by using the XYZZY code to detect where mines are without having them revealed.) That being said, I find it unlikely that Solitaire doesn't deal the entire deck into an array and just use that as a reference to the cards—it would be easier to just do that all at once than do re-calculate it for each card. --24.147.86.187 13:33, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

It probably depends on the game's implementation, I can't be sure since I don't have access to the source code. But I would assume it'd be like a shuffled and dealt deck of real cards, which, obviously, are pre-defined. For snappier gameplay and the ability to pre-cache images, I bet it'd make sense to define the order of dealt cards. -- JSBillings 14:24, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

It's hard to know how someone else's program works without seeing the source code - but it wouldn't be a lot more difficult to maintain a list of cards that are 'in play' and a list that are available to be played and to just pick a random card from the 'available' list each time you turned over a card rather than shuffling the deck at the outset. On balance, I suspect they shuffle the deck just once - but it's really impossible to know without reverse-engineering the code or obtaining a copy of the sources. SteveBaker 15:23, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

To the player, there is no difference. The probabilities are the same. --131.215.166.100 18:17, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes - certainly. Although quite a few people would be nervous that the computer was somehow 'cheating' by not shuffling the cards first! SteveBaker 20:25, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

• In 2004, parts of the Windows source code were leaked. I'm sure you could find a copy kicking around and see for yourself how they do it. --Sean 21:25, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

hot swap able hard disk

can we load operating system from hot swap able hard disk? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.209.115.137 (talk) 15:05, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

It really depends on the hardware. All the disks in my servers are hot-swappable, in a RAID1 configuration. -- JSBillings 15:40, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Windows Aero Problems

I purchased a new computer around 2 months ago and it has Windows Vista Home Premium. At the same time, my brother purchased an identical computer. For the first few weeks all the features of Windows Aero worked perfectly. However, now the window translucency and the "window select" thing still work, but the "live thumbnails" on the taskbar steadfastly refuse to work no matter what I do. My brother's computer works fine. What is going on? 69.205.180.123 16:00, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Maybe you turned them off in the taskbar properties. Leave them off, they're a drain on performance --froth^t 17:03, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

My comp can easily handle it, (it has a 2.0GHz AMD dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM) That was the problem i.e. I had it turned off in the taskbar menu. Stupid me. (bangs head on desk)69.205.180.123 00:01, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Posting not showing up???

I posted a new article and it doesn't come up in the search function??? It is listed and accessable in "my contributions", so I'm confused!

The title is: Human Capital Integrated

Thank you,

--Mwoodward 16:41, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Works for me. Someoneinmyheadbutit'snotme 17:00, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

The article is there - but I'm going to nominate it for a speedy deletion. Mr. Woodward - it is *NOT* OK to write articles about yourself or promote your own business on Wikipedia. SteveBaker 17:04, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Kinda irrelevant, but for future reference, this question would have been more suited for the Help desk. Algebraist 19:15, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

It takes some time after a change for it to be reflected in the search. Graeme Bartlett 22:03, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Plasma TV break in period?

I just bought a snazzy new Plasma TV from one of the big electronics stores in the US. The salesperson recommended that I run the set for two months (!) at reduced brightness in order to 'break in' the plasma elements. (In fact, this particular set has a 'low power' mode that reduces the screen brightness dramatically) I've never heard of anything like this. Does this break-in period really prolong the life of the TV screen and reduce burn-in later on? Or he feeding me some crazy pro-LCD propaganda? Do I really need to watch a dim screen for 8 weeks? --24.249.108.133 21:29, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

When we bought our plasma, the guy said to play it at low brightness for 16-24 working hours, which we took to mean that when we had watched tv for a total of 24 hours since making the purchase, it was safe to turn it up to maximum brightness.69.205.180.123 00:04, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Go to www.google.com and type in plasma break in. There are discussions and manufacturers' recommendations[7] out there. I hadn't heard of this either... Weregerbil 11:11, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Read about this a while ago (I think it was on these very pages..). Essentially, plasma TVs often have the problem of some phosphors becoming less bright before others - with the ones that usually do not fade being the ones corresponding to black bars on movies, as they are lit up much less often. So essentially they have you dim the entire set so that there's an even burnout pattern - otherwise, the areas usually black will appear brighter than the duller phosphors in the middle when watching TV or properly sized movies. This might be incorrect, but it's what I remember. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 05:57, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

ancestor to photocopier

when i was a kid in grades 1 to 3, the school had a machine that you'd turn a hand crank and it would apply special blue paper onto many many copies, each copy would be sligthly fainter than the previous one. They used that for making many copies of tests, etc. (i was born in 1978, so i was ages 5 to 8 at that time). what exactly is this called?--Sonjaaa 00:21, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

A mimeograph, or it could be a Spirit duplicator. DuncanHill 00:23, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Reading through the articles, if the prints were purpley/blueish, and had an interesting smell, then it was a spirit duplicator. I think that when I was a lad, the name "mimeograph" was used rather generically for both types of machine. DuncanHill 00:26, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

It was definitely purply blue, but i don't remember if there was a smell or not.--Sonjaaa 02:21, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Duncan. The process that Wikipedia calls a spirit duplicator was commonly used in the schools I attended in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only do I remember the alcohol smell on freshly made copies -- I would definitely describe the ink color as purple, not blue -- but I prepared some masters myself to be reproduced that way. (As I recall, you had to write fairly heavily, either using a typewriter or pressing hard with a ballpoint pen.) But what we always called them was ditto or mimeograph copies, even though Wikipedia says a mimeograph is something else.

It is not really correct to describe the process as an "ancestor to the photocopier", since the point of a photocopier is that it can copy any original image. Since the process uses a specially prepared master, it's more like a cheap alternative to printing. But of course it was used in some situations where people would use a photocopier today.

Incidentally, this seems more like a Science or Miscellaneous question than a Computing question. --Anonymous, edited 04:00 UTC, October 9, 2007.

I use Computing section for Computing and Technology.--Sonjaaa 08:48, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

You might also want to check Cyanotype - that's another ancient duplicating process, and the origin of the term "Blueprint". SteveBaker —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 13:07, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

CAS programming on PC

Hi,
Does anyone know a program I can use to create/edit Ti-89 files (.89p) on my computer? Massive thanks for anyone that can tell me!!! --Fir0002 07:58, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• See TI-89#Programming and TIGCC. --Sean 16:12, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Who pays for Internet backbone? How much websites pay?

We all know consumers pay for bandwidth. But do companies like Google pay for any bandwidth? I assume that the $20 which a Internet subscriber/ user pays to an ISP is for both getting connection in to my house and at the same time, it also pays for my usage for the ISP to laying cables across oceans and deserts. I think that the whole Internet consisting of cables across the world is paid by subscribers of ISPs. How about Google? Do they pay only for uploading data to Internet backbones or do they also share cost of laying backbones across the earth? What is the situation? The Internet consists of both websites and web surfers. Do they contribute equally to the underlying capacity or do consumers pay more? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.96.23.251 (talk) 09:00, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Generally, you pay your ISP and the ISP pays the telecom companies that own the backbone. Google is too big to use an ISP - so they'll be paying for their bandwidth to the telecom companies directly. Not all companies work like that - the smaller ones typically use an ISP just like you and I do - but everyone pays according to the bandwidth of their connection to the backbone. Indirectly, both you and Google are paying for the bandwidth for the up and downstream data that you exchange with them. Whether that is a 'fair' split is tricky and gets you into the issues of network neutrality. Google (specifically) are starting to buy networking resources - so gradually, they are becoming another telecom company and they'll (presumably) get revenue from selling that bandwidth to ISP's and other companies who need it and cut their own connection costs in the process. Also, many, many websites out there (like mine for example) are paid for by individuals who use a web hosting service (mine costs ~$100 per year[8]). Web hosting services also pay the telecom companies for access. So it costs me $100 per year to give you access to the stuff on my website, my son's website and my car club's website. SteveBaker 13:00, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

This certainly counts as original research, but I do not believe Google is intending to sell its networking resources to outside parties. In my estimate, they are solely seeking to mitigate their internal networking needs (with such a massive infrastructure and web-crawling, they are using a lot of long-haul bandwidth!) From the rate at which they purchase longhauls, and their marketing strategy, it seems highly unlikely that they will provide network service to end-users (and almost certainly not to residential networks). However, you may get a good laugh from their last April Fool's Joke, [9]. Nimur 22:46, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

For the love of God, I don't think that original research is an issue on the reference desk. Donald Hosek 00:16, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

It's more tongue-in-cheek I think --froth^t 02:49, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Hah, steve's web host looks like the april fool's joke- a fat kid sleeping is their company image :) Nice offer though. (isn't 5TB overkill for a static personal website?) --froth^t 02:57, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Unix question: Getting file name if one exists

In Unix, how can I get the name of the first file to match a given pattern, or an empty string (0 bytes) if there is no such file? The following sort of works:

ls *.iso | awk "{print \$1}" >filename

The file filename ends up containing the name of the first .iso file found or as empty if no such files were found. But if there are no such files, I also get the error message:

*.iso: no such file or directory

How to do this more cleanly? JIP | Talk 09:31, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

How about

ls -d *.iso 2>/dev/null | head -1

or if you want it in a variable

X=`ls -d *.iso 2>/dev/null | head -1`

The "2>" makes stderr go somewhere (in Bourne shell; C shell has different syntax). "ls -d" in case there is a directory that matches. Weregerbil 09:45, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• In a program I would do:

find  -maxdepth 1 -name '*.iso' -type f | head -1 > filename

--Sean 16:25, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies. I managed to make this shell script:

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" != "" ]
    then filename=$1
    else ls 2>/dev/null *.iso | awk "{print \$1}" >/tmp/iso_file_name
    filename=`cat /tmp/iso_file_name`
fi
if [ "$filename" != "" ]
    then xine dvd://`readlink -f $filename`
    else xine dvd://
fi

This will make Xine play an ISO image of a DVD if one is in the current directory or is given as a commandline parameter, otherwise it will make Xine play a real DVD. JIP | Talk 18:13, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Careful with the awk bit there. In all versions of ls that I'm familiar with, if the output is directed to a pipe then you get one filename per line, so if there are multiple *.iso files, /tmp/iso_file_name will contain all of them. With the ls behavior I'm familiar with, I'd use this for the key bit:

ls *.iso 2>/dev/null | sed q

(sed q is a way to select just the first line; use head -1 if you prefer.)

This also avoids the problem that if any of the filenames could contain spaces, $1 in the awk code would print only the first word of the name. The final $filename will still go wrong if there are spaces; you should put double quotes around it. --Anon, 22:46 UTC, October 10, 2007.

rename

Resolved

Can someone logged in rename Viking: Battle of Asgard to Viking: Battle for Asgard. Thanks87.102.87.171 13:57, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks87.102.18.10 14:06, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

It's done, but in future, note that this is not what the refdesk is for: the help desk might be more appropriate. Algebraist 14:08, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Using a VPN for only SOME applications

I have a direct tcp/ip connection, and then VPN which also has TCP/IP. The VPN is required for work-related stuff, but it's (of course) slower than my home connection. The downside of this is that when I use the VPN, ALL my tcp/ip traffic is slower-- not just the few connections to the work intranet. If I connect to the work server over the vpn, it works. But if I try to watch Youtube in a different window, for example, it doesn't work, because it's trying to send the traffic THROUGH the VPN, instead of just sending it to me directly.

Is there a way I could specify only SOME applications access the internet through VPN? Like maybe have Opera be for the VPN, but Firefox be for the direct connection?

There must be some way-- it's a mega pain having to completely close my VPN connection every time I want to do anything that requires high bandwidth. --Wouldbewebmaster 15:12, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Would split tunneling work? That would enable you to access your intranet via the VPN and the internet through your home connection. Instructions for Windows are here. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 15:24, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Skimming the articles, it looks like those solutions decide whether to pass through VPN or not based on destination IP. Unfortunately that won't work, because I will need to connect to SOME websites through the VPN. So, for example, let's say we have site license that allows everyone at work to connect to a database like JSTOR. That traffic needs to go through the VPN, but traffic to Google does not. Since it's impossible to predict ahead of time which IPs are going to need to go through which connection, routing by ip won't work.

However, I could do some port translation, so if there was a way to "Route by port" or "Route by application"-- those would work if possible. --Wouldbewebmaster 16:36, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• How about just setting up a web proxy that always uses the VPN for connectivity? Then you could point one browser session at the proxy, and just use that browser for your VPN sites. --Sean 20:22, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

That's be awesome if it's possible. Is there a way to set up a windows proxy so that it will send all it's traffic to the VPN? --Wouldbewebmaster 22:13, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

UK Television Graphics - Produced How?

I'm not sure if this should be in the computing or entertainments section but here goes! Does anyone know what software / computer systems are used for producing television graphics in the UK (Channel four / BBC etc, I know ITV stuff is farmed out)? The sort that you find on the news / documetaries and daytime television shows where the graphics have to be produced quickly but still at a very high quality. Somehow, I can't see someone fiddling around in Adobe After Effects for hours! Any information would be very gratefully received. I think Zaxwerks Invigorator is used extensively in the US but UK stuff has a much less sparkly and low key appearance. Weather reports change from hour to hour, again it has to be a pretty fast and easy to use system. Custom software maybe? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.152.176.45 (talk) 18:40, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Chyron is a generic trademark for broadcast CG systems in general. Apparently, in the UK, they're called an Aston. --Mdwyer 19:50, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I haven't got a clue about titles for news reports and stuff, but the BBC use Weatherscape XT for their weather reports. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 19:57, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Back in the 90's, Quantel products had a huge presence in UK televisions. Today, I'm not so sure. Desktop computing speed has increased dramatically. I worked in TV news graphics in a major top 10 market for almost a decade. We did everything in Photoshop, After Effects, and ElectricImage. Many of the daily promos were edited with Avids and Final Cut Pro. Most on-air station graphics are reusable background elements with only the text being changed daily. The design company who made the original backgrounds, TVdb, used Lightwave for 3D elements, but everything was run through After Effects after that. --24.249.108.133 16:56, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

October 9

Nvidia GeForce 8300GS

Hi,

I've just ordered my parents a new pc with a video card "256mb NVIDIA GeForce 8300GS Turbocache graphics card". Question...Does this card have its own memory or is that 256mb coming from my RAM/PC somwhere else? Also is it a decent card? Basically i'd be happy if it can play new games like Half Life 2 Episode 2 at a reasonable level, but have no idea if it will (though i'll probably just buy it and find out what kinda level I can play it at). Also do video-cards get used when using programs like Adobe Lightroom? ny156uk 21:05, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

It has it's own memory. And it's a pretty good card. :) --76.213.142.41 21:09, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Your card is probably the lowest in the GeForce 8 Series. Get an GeForce 8500GT, for me it was around $110 AUD. Overclocking it to a 600MHz core, Half-Life 2 runs with no lag at 1680x1050, all effects high, 16xAF and 4xAA. Of course, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 demands more than Half-Life 2. According to some simple (and possibly incorrect) calculations, your card should be 4 to 8 times slower than mine. I would guess that Episode 2 would play alright at 1024x768, all effects high, 4xAF and possibly 4xAA. That's only my guess though. BTW, TurboCache means the card (mostly) uses system RAM. So, I'm guessing your card only has maybe 64MB of onboard RAM. --wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 23:26, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I would imagine this card is equivalent to a 128mb 6600GT or so. Don't be expecting to play on anything other than low. I am amazed at how many people buy budget graphics cards around $70 when they could pay $20-$30 more for a vastly superior one like the 8600 or even a 7 series. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 02:58, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Hey, don't insult the 6600GT; my 3 year old system (Sempron 3100+, Nforce3 MB, 1.5GiB ram, 6600GT AGP 128MiB) can play Team Fortress with everything on high, can't try episode 2 right now though since it's still decrypting... --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:35, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not insulting the 6600GT, it was one of the most underrated cards for quite a few years, easily the best buy for a while. However, I had a 6600GT 256MB with a P4 @ 2.4ghz and 2GB of the best damn DDR RAM you could buy and barely squeaked by (20-30fps) on "Medium" in Battlefield II. I also dislike when people automatically assume the 8xxx series is going to be faster than previous generations, as was assumed by the OP, because often a 7xxx card at a similar or lower price, while lacking DX10 functionality, is vastly superior in benchmarks and everyday usage than anything the budget 8xxx cards throw down. Since the G92's going to feature in a new 8xxx series card at or slightly below the 8800GTS 320MB's performance (which I own, and am very happy with!), somewhere in the middle of November, prices may fall drastically in a few months on 8800GTS and 8600GTS/GT cards as well. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 07:46, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

On this topic, how long do you think a 7900 GS (AGP) will last in terms of playing games at around 1024 or 1280 resolution? I've currently got it overclocked to 600 mhz gpu core and 700 mhz memory and it works fine (most settings turned on) in 1280 resolution for almost all games (currently playing Test Drive Unlimited and Bioshock) Sandman30s 14:06, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

The 7900's a good card. I'd say you'll have DX10 games becoming the norm (and therefore the card just won't work period) before the 7900 has trouble playing most games. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 01:25, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Might as well ask another question - are these 8-series cards being touted for DX10 compatibility? Even though they are not superior in benchmarking, they can at least run DX10 games. When will DX9 be fully de-supported in games? Sandman30s 14:06, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I'd give it about a year. Most of the mid-range 8xxx cards probably won't be able to run DX10 games at anything other than "low", sadly. I didn't buy my 8800GTS for DX10, I bought it for performance. Until the 89xx or 9xxx series, you won't be seeing "run everything at max settings" in a DX10 game. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 01:25, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Well the card above (in my original question) is the 'standard' one with a Dell they're getting. Unfortunately they're not into games but obviously I would be pleased if it is capable of playing new ones, even if it is just at an average standard. I've totally got no idea about what's good/bad so thanks for the input everyone. Also does anybody know whether it does or doesn't help improve running of programs like the affore mentioned Lightroom? I know RAM/Processor come into it, but does a better card boost performance on programs such as this or is it purely 3d work? ny156uk 16:22, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't see any reason why you'd buy from an OEM, even if it's your non-gamer parents, you can get a much better deal just by putting it together yourself. I recently put together a "wish list" on newegg for a budget computer with a 8600GT, Pentium D (these are overclockable to around 3.2ghz, allowing it to actually be superior to the Core 2 Duo), and two gigs of ram for under $600. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 01:25, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

PS- Flattening a vector

In Adobe Photoshop CS, is there anyway I can flatten a series of vector shapes on different layers so that they still retain their vector properties, but does not allow anyone to edit each individual component? For example: If I constructed a vector silhouette of a person, I have the head on one layer, left arm on another, etc..., is there anyway I can combine all of them into one? At the moment, If i click "Flatten image", PS flattens all the layers, but turns it into a raster. Is there anyway I can flatten, but keep the infinitely scalable properties of a vector? Thanks. Acceptable 21:08, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately I can't find a simple way to do it. The easiest way I've found is:

• Copy and paste each of the individual shapes onto one layer. They should retain their position on the canvas
• Select the combined shape with the Move Tool
• Go to Edit > Define Custom Shape... and name the shape
• Select the Custom Shape Tool and select your shape in the shape picker
• Draw the shape on the canvas

This was in CS2; apologies if it doesn't work in CS — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 22:36, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Why not put their layers into a folder and then link all objects in the folder? That way changing one of them changes them all, and you can just select the folder itself if you want to select all of them at once. --24.147.86.187 12:44, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I plan to send it to someone so that they can resize it to however large they want it for printing. But I don't want them to be able to change any of the parts easily. Acceptable 01:39, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

October 10

NTLDR and Vista

Alright, so I built a giant professional computer rig and ordered Vista OEM 32-bit. The problem... when I first booted up vista after installing it I got the message "NTLDR is missing, press any key to restart". I pressed a key and it loaded vista fine. The thing is that, I can't access the boot menu (like being able to boot with safe mode, which I REALLY need) and I can't add more than one OS. I plugged in my older HDD to transfer the data from it to the new computer and I got a message about an error loading the OS (when I removed the extra disk it went back to normal). How do I fix this? It happened from the get go although I have not seen "NTLDR is missing, press any key to restart" since.

Stats: Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo, Intel D975XBX2 mobo, Nvidia 8800 Ultra, 4GB memory (2 sticks), ASUS Xonar D2 7.1. 2 Seagate Barracuda 500GB drives (one is being used, although the other is completely empty) I have a USB floppy drive but no floppy disks to use (except for RAID floppies, but I will not overwrite them). --76.213.142.41 19:42, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like your other hard drive or your DVD drive are in front of the main HDD in the boot order. Move your main hard drive to the first position in the BIOS setup utility and use the boot device menu (mine's F12) if you ever need to boot from a CD. I have no idea why NTLDR would be having problems.. you can try restoring it with this utility (use the /vista flag) or even the XP recovery console (boot an XP disk and hit R)- I'm pretty sure that fixboot and fixmbr work fine if you run them over a vista installation --froth^t 22:09, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

They don't. MBR in XP and Vista are completely different animals, but that doesn't matter in this case since it's obviously okay or else Vista wouldn't boot. NTLDR is Windows's bootloader. To get to safe mode, press F8 just before the point where the error message came up earlier to bring up the menu. — User:ACupOfCoffee@ 02:52, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I went into the BIOS and put the HDDs in first in the boot order. After the intel splash screen it still just jumps straight to loading vista, however. I still wish for a boot screen to be present. I also need it because I need other options than just standard safe mode, and I need to recover this data of the other hard disk in question! --76.213.142.41 20:37, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh is that your problem? Vista never displays a menu unless you have multiple NT operating systems set up in the Boot Configuration Data --froth^t 23:01, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

No, when I tried to load more than 1 operating system on it said "Error loading operating system" or something like that! Maybe it's boot managers conflicting? The vista harddisk probably has the Vista bootloader process on it. The other disk I'm trying to recover data from is XP and has the older NTLDR loader. Is that the problem...? --69.152.207.86 03:17, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Recovering older versions of photos?

I had a family photo, and i may have accidently saved it down in photoshop as a compressed file, like, the original photo i took 5mp and was 2.5mb, and i still have a copy of the photo, but its only 1024x768 now, its still quite printable but i wouldnt mind the original back, but i may have either saved that over the top of the original or just deleted it. This happened about 3 years ago and since then i have formatted and reinstalled windows many times, i have no idea what the original was called ect. Should i just give up hope, or is it possible to get it back? i mean the photo wasnt priceless or anything, i took about 5 photos of that same shot so i wouldnt bother paying heaps for a pro to get it back but this one was the best i took. Thanks... USRM000107 04:57, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

No there's almost no chance that you can recover that photo. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:32, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Intel Turbo Memory

I've been a little bit out of the computer-scene for a while, and I was suprised to see 1 gig of Intel Turbo Memory listed on the specs for a laptop that I'm planning on buying this week. I've just read up the article on it, and I just want to clarify something.

Am I correct in assuming that there must be a dedicated chip to the memory, i.e. that it can't be combined with any other cache memory/memory chip, and that the "1 gig" of turbo memory won't be subtracted from any other memory source on the system? The system itself has 2gb DD2 memory, and I'm wondering if the second gig isn't just "pretending" to be turbo memory, or something like that. I just don't want to be tricked into thinking that I'm going to get more for my money than I really am! Hah. Thanks always. 210.138.109.72 06:41, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Turbo Memory is a pseudo-cache blob of NAND memory. It's completely separate from RAM, and simply offloads some data from the hard disk so that it can be accessed quicker and without spinning up the HD. However, it's been shown to be completely useless in testing. The 2GB DDR2 RAM is completely separate, in both form and function, and you're not going to get cheated out of a gig. You should be more concerned about the graphics chipset and whether it's stealing memory. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 07:38, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Nested RAID

What is the difference between RAID 5+1 and RAID 5 plus one more desk ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.241.128.189 (talk) 12:19, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

According to the RAID article, "RAID 5+1: mirror striped set with distributed parity (some manufacturers label this as RAID 53)". If I recall correctly, that means that you have two separate RAID5 arrays mirrored in a RAID1 configuration. That means you have to have at least 6 disks in a RAID5+1 array. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jsbillings (talk • contribs) 22:10, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Faking a unix tape drive

I'm tweaking my linux tape backup script, and I'd like to test changes (stuff about handing "tape is full" issues) out on a small tape device (rather than the gargantual actual DLT tape, where filling the tape takes several hours). I'd hoped I could make a fake tape device (much like one can make a loopback filesystem with /dev/loop/..), but I can't figure out how. The /dev/loop mechanism provides a block special device, not a character one. Is it possible to make a similar loopback character special device, such that one can tar stuff in and out of it, and that mt is happy to treat it as if it were a really tape? -- 84.45.132.96 14:07, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I *really* wish I had an answer for you. You should be able to use a file as a tape device, but it won't give you the end-of-tape messages, which is what you really want. You might check with the 'ftape' developers to see if they ever came up with a fake-tape device. --Mdwyer 21:08, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

How to increase the time of timeouts?

I am using Mozilla Firefox and I cannot seem to access the number of my edits on Wannabe Kate tool. After 2 minutes exactly, this message appears: The connection was reset. The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments. If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection. If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web. The values on my Mozilla Firefox is this: accessibility.typeaheadfind.enabletimeout -Value false. accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout - Value 5000 network.ftp.idleConnectionTimeout - Value 600 network.http.keep-alive.timeout - Value 1800 network.proxy.failover_timeout - Value 1800. Moreover, remarkably, I can access the edit counts of this user as well whose maximum contributions for the month of May was around 9 000 edits (more than the 7000 edits made by me in the month of July). There is also a statement on top of the page which states Too many pages fetched. Terminating. Does anyone have any idea how can I change the length of my timeout? --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 14:30, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

• TCP's "Connection reset" means that there was an unrecoverable error in the network connection, not that your browser got bored and timed out. There's probably not a lot you can do to improve this situation, as it's likely to be a problem on the server side related to load. --Sean 22:39, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

WikiMedia private pages

Is it possible using the Wikimedia software to have a group of privileged users in some fashion and then flag a page so that only that group of privileged users can see it?  — Timotab ^{Timothy (not Tim dagnabbit!)} 18:36, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

That would be against the spirit of Wiki. Still, check the mediawiki developer sites to see what options you have. --Mdwyer 21:06, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Fixing the boot sector in WinXP.

I did a bad thing.

My home is generally a Windows-free area - we run Linux everywhere...except on my Wife's laptop which has to run some god-awful business software or other.

Last week, I borrowed my wife's WinXP laptop - and, needing to run Linux, I plugged a 300Gb USB drive into the beast and installed SuSE Linux on the USB drive. Changing the BIOS to try to boot from USB before the internal hard drive should have allowed me to run Linux with the USB drive plugged in - and to leave the laptop COMPLETELY working.

This would have worked out just fine...except the I didn't notice that the stoopid SuSE Linux installer wrote the GRUB boot loader onto the internal hard drive instead of the USB hard drive. So now the machine won't boot into Windows anymore...which means I'm in deep trouble with my wife (NOT GOOD).

OK - so I grab the WinXP (Home edition) CD's and presume that I can just re-install the boot loader somehow...but (just my luck) the CD is scratched to hell - and (of course) my wife never made a backup. I went to Microsoft's web site and they want $35 to replace the CD set. (Ack!)

So - is there anything I can download or create from Linux (or at a pinch) another WinXP machine that will enable me to restore the boot stuff? Remember I can run Linux, download from the web and write CD's, I can even mount the WinXP drive under Linux and look at the contents - and I have access to a WinXP machine at work (but not the original CD's for it). I also have the product ID thingy to install Windows with if I can get an ISO of the CD or something.

Help!! SteveBaker 18:47, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

This could be illegal and highly unsafe, but have you considered bittorrenting the windows iso? --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 20:33, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Go to [[10]], grab a boot disk with fdisk on it, and once you have it, run the command "fdisk /mbr". That should fix you right up! You might also consider uninstalling grub. I might be on crack, but I seem to recall that some boot loaders will backup your original boot sector when they install. Good luck, Steve! You help out a lot on the ref desks, and I hope it can return the favor. --Mdwyer 21:04, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

The site I linked wants money. You can probably steal a boot sector from another machine. All you need is "dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/bootsector bs=512 count=1" to steal it, then reverse the steps to write the boot sector back to another hard drive. --Mdwyer 21:21, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

• How about you make a Windows boot disk on another Windows machine, boot into that, and do an "fdisk /mbr"? If that doesn't work, you could resort to this. --Sean 22:44, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

How about the Super GRUB CD? Has a very easy option to repair the MBR for Windows. Splintercellguy 00:06, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

1. Acquire an XP disk. Burn from ISO or get it from a friend or from work.. XP disks are everywhere nowadays, just reach under your butt and chances are there's one right there!
2. Boot from it
3. Hit R to enter recovery mode
4. run fixmbr and fixboot

By the way IIRC there's something weird you have to do to instal grub to a USB drive.. I don't know, possibly not --froth^t 04:39, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Is there a design pattern for taking a joined query result and getting it into a hierarchical data structure?

The simplest version table A and table B with a 1-to-many relationship between the two. I want to do a query SELECT a.c1, a.c2, b.d1, b.d2 FROM a INNER JOIN b ON a.id=b.aid and store the result in a data structure along the lines of

<code>
[
 {c1=>val, c2=>val, [d1=>val, d2=>val]}
]
</code>

where the square brackets indicate arrays and the curly braces structures. Worse still is the case where b is joined to yet another table so that we get nested arrays. I'm doing too much cut and paste coding on this. (As an aside, the language is PHP using MDB2 to talk to the database.) Donald Hosek 18:55, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

how virgin mobile sugarmama works

I heard that there are three types of advertising sugarmama has. 1) text messaging ads, 2) video ads, 3) filling forms. Can you explain a bit of the procedure of these three types of ads. If you know only one or two types, please explain. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.123.57 (talk) 19:24, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Visual Basic 6

Hi, i was wondering if anybody here had knowledge about the audio aspects of VB6, I have the following code that lets me play one song

   Private Sub Form_Load
   mmcMP3.DeviceType = "MPEGVideo" '\\Change MCI device type to MPEG 
   mmcMP3.Filename = "C:\Myaudio.Mp3" '\\designate file to be played
   mmcMP3.Command = "Open" '\\Open file for playing
   mmcMP3.Command = "Play" '\\Play file
   End Sub

But the song only plays once, I was just wondering if you know how to get some other songs playing after the song that is playing has finished or/and how to get the song to loop so that it plays again and again

That would be much appricated, many thanks, POKEMON RULES 21:23, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I haven't used MCI devices, and I don't use VB6 anymore (VB.NET appears to be the VB way of the future), but I believe you can create a Sub like this:

Private Sub mmcMP3_Done(NotifyCode As Integer)

End Sub

that will be called when the Play command has completed, or something like that. You would then use that sub to again tell it to play, if you wanted it to loop or play something else. --24.147.86.187 22:47, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

ls -l shows asterisks in filetype bit on Solaris 5.10

Does anyone know what these asterisks mean, how they came about, and how to remove them?

Also, when I try to print out a file with an asterisk in the filetype bit, it says file not found. Moreover, notice the asterisk at the end of the first 5 filenames.

e@n[350]cs_a> ls -l
total 12575
-rwxr-x---   1 iwtt   iwtt   1290529 Oct 10 17:33 og.3.1.fa.a.top*
-rwxr-x---   1 iwtt   iwtt    199609 Oct 10 17:33 og.3.2.fa.a.top*
-rwxr-x---   1 iwtt   iwtt    224228 Oct 10 17:33 og.3.3.fa.a.top*
-rwxr-x---   1 iwtt   iwtt    670732 Oct 10 17:33 oo.3.1.fa.a.top*
-rwxr-x---   1 iwtt   iwtt    332509 Oct 10 17:33 oo.3.3.fa.a.top*
*rwxr-x---   1 iwtt   iwtt   1276521 Oct 10 17:33 op.3.1.fa.a.top
*rwxr-x---   1 iwtt   iwtt    717249 Oct 10 17:33 op.3.2.fa.a.top
*rwxr-x---   1 iwtt   iwtt   1182111 Oct 10 17:33 op.3.3.fa.a.top

e@n[358]cs_a> head op.3.1.fa.a.top
op.3.1.fa.a.top: No such file or directory

Has anyone experienced this before?

Thanks, --Iwouldntthinkthat 22:32, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

• The stars on the right just mean that the file is a regular file (not a directory or link), and executable. They're displayed because your "ls" command is aliased to something that passes in "-F" or "--classify" (do a "type ls" to see). I don't know about the stars on the left, but I'm guessing they're some nonstandard Unix feature like deleted files that can be undeleted or something like that. They don't get stars at the right because ls only puts stars on executable files, not undeleteable entities, or something like that. Post back here if you find out. --Sean 22:57, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

• • I was able to reproduce your stars by touch "op.3.3.fa.a.top^v^M*" (that is control-V control-M in the file name). Your oo and og files may have a star on the end of the names too without an embedded carriage return. To delete, try typing rm -i op* and answer y to appropriate prompts. Graeme Bartlett 23:15, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
    • Wow, good call! I didn't think of that. I should have known I was on the wrong track, though, as I went to opensolaris.org and looked at the source for ls, and didn't see a * type. --Sean 04:13, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

C Code: Sorting list of pointers

Hello, I am trying to use qsort to sort a list of pointers. My trouble is in the compare function. The compare function is passed pointers to items in the list, which are pointers to the structure. But when I run this data pb1 in the compare function seems to point to rubbish and causes the program to crash. Thanks for any help!

typedef struct
{
	int val;
} MyS;

int compare( const void *arg1, const void *arg2 );

void main2(void)
{
	int i;
	MyS **List;
	List = malloc(sizeof(MyS *) * 10);
	for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
	{
		List[i] = malloc(sizeof(MyS));
		List[i]->val = i;
	}
	
	qsort(List,10,sizeof(MyS *),compare);
}
		
int compare( const void *arg1, const void *arg2 )
{
	MyS **b1;
	MyS **b2;
	MyS *pb1;
	MyS *pb2;
	b1 = (MyS **) arg1;
	b2 = (MyS **) arg2;

	pb1 = *b1;
	pb2 = *b2;

	return ((pb2->val) - (pb1->val));
}

Never mind, I found the mistake, the compare function should be:

int compare( const void *arg1, const void *arg2 )
{
	MyS **b1;
	MyS **b2;

        b1 = (MyS **) arg1;
	b2 = (MyS **) arg2;

	return ((**b1).val - (**b2).val);
}

----Dacium 00:21, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

But that's the same. --Spoon! 02:23, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Which is why I still dont see where the mistake is!--Dacium 05:28, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

What mistake? The version you have now is correct. Add a <stdlib.h> include, change void main2 to int main, and it's a complete program that actually works. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 05:51, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Why does Firefox take so bloody long to start downloading things?

I'll open up a few tabs with images, for example, right click, and hit save image as. Then I'll have to wait 7-10 seconds for the download window to pop up, because it's so slow. I don't have any spyware/adware on my machine, and I have 2GB RAM. Is this just more of the same "let's eat tons of memory!" from Firefox, or can this be fixed with some nifty gadget? -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 01:27, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Works perfectly for me. And firefox eats so much memory because it's caching things- not to mention the massively memory-expensive "instant back" feature that lets you hit back/forward and see the site already downloaded and rendered. This can be fully tweaked in about:config--froth^t 04:36, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

I have seen bad save times when 1 - a network drive is broken, or 2 there are thousands of files in the directory to save to. Graeme Bartlett 05:44, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

phd topic

I am searching for a research topic for a phd program. and I prefer it to be in the domain of database and networking —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.78.64.100 (talk) 01:36, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

MP3 to WMA

Could someone do me a favour and encode this, a short mp3 to wma. I don't want to get a program for a 2 second clip. TYVM!

Bitrates when ripping from CD

If I have a track that is encoded at 128kbps, but my programme is instructed to rip at 320 - where does the extra information come from? I appreciate that the track isn't going to magically get any better, but is the extra space simply empty? Is there any difference in quality (bad or good)? Thanks. 195.60.20.81 08:17, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

EMail ID

Please give me theEMial Id OF Tiffany Taylor.Dont make me more mad.Try to understand me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.248.2.51 (talk) 09:41, 11 October 2007 (UTC)