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June 9

I must be a complete moron

Can someone explains to me why Gmail Labs have fixed width fonts for reading email but on Google Groups I can't even get fixed width fonts for reading the news group comp.lang.python

Or is there a feature which I cannot find because I'm a complete moron? 122.107.165.222 (talk) 00:02, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Looks like you have to do it for each page, but still... [1]. Indeterminate (talk) 00:45, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Programming simple macros with open source program

Can someone recommend a simple program for programming macros? I just need a macro that pushes down arrow, "alt+e" and kind of stuff. Can a programming language like Perl or Python easily do it too? GoingOnTracks (talk) 00:07, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

You didn't mention an OS, but AutoHotkey is a good open-source macro program for Windows. -- BenRG (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

yes, it was Windows. Thanks. How did you guess it? GoingOnTracks (talk) 00:41, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

You can also use Autoit, which can be run from within Perl and Python via the ActiveX component "AutoitX". dr.ef.tymac (talk) 06:58, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

convert command-line program into GUI program

How can it be done? Is there a open source tool to do it? I have Python and a grasp of it and would like to learn more. I just have to perform easy task with a command-line program in Windows. Like pro.exe -s sourcefile.abc targetfile.abc GoingOnTracks (talk) 00:14, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Do you just want to run the program from the Windows gui? Because that's not hard... you can just right-click->new->shortcut, and enter the command line as the target. If you want to associate your command-line program with a file type (like .abc), you can do that too.

Alternately, if you really do want to learn GUI programming, you'll need to learn one of the toolkits available for python [2] (or your language of choice). Indeterminate (talk) 00:43, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt answer! I'll try both. GoingOnTracks (talk) 00:45, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

If you know HTML you can create a GUI pretty quickly using HTML Application. dr.ef.tymac (talk) 06:57, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

64-bit

What does 64-bit mean? I know what a bit is and what a byte is and so on, but what is 64-bit referring to? Also, if I have an Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 processor, does that mean my computer is 64-bit? --96.227.103.6 (talk) 02:29, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

May want to read 64-bit and x86-64. That CPU is an x64 (aka x86-64) one, so it is '64-bit'. Others may come in with slightly more detailed descriptions. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 03:09, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Look, there's an article: 64-bit. Several things can have a size of 64 bits, but when no particular attribute is specified, it usually refers to the size of the processor registers which can be used to reference bytes in memory. That means a process running on a 64-bit CPU can address 2^64 bytes of memory (way more memory than any computer will ever likely have). With a 32-bit address space, the limit is 2^32 bytes (4 gigs). And look, here's another article: Core 2 Duo, which confirms that it is a 64-bit CPU.

Intel processors have for a long time had the ability to do 64-bit arithmetic (add, subtract, multiply, divide) by using a pair of 32-bit registers as input and/or output. And floating-point math has been at least 64-bit for even longer. But without the ability to use a 64-bit number as a pointer to a memory location, those processors would never have been called "64-bit". --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 03:20, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

According to Intel Core 2 Duo, it is indeed a 64-bit processor. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 02:32, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

So is 64-bit better than its 32-bit counterpart?

Dial up connection for CDMA Telephones

I created the dial up for CDMA in FEDORA CORE,when actvating the modem, the phone dials HSPD call,but disconnects in a moment, Why?, Please help.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.248.92.4 (talk) 03:53, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Does the modem work with POTS wired telephone lines? Kushal (talk) 09:31, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I have never seen a cellphone (cellphone modem), which could be connected to POTS wired telephone line. -Yyy (talk) 08:34, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Does it works in other operating systems? (if available). Does your cellphone contract (or whatever terms of service) includes HSPD? (or any other data services). Does the call connects and then disconnects, or it fails to connect in first place? Does your dialer (program that dials the modem and maintains ppp connection) produces any error messages (or writes any error messages in log)? -Yyy (talk) 08:34, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Buying an email address

There is an email address I would like to have (say, johnsmith@gmail.com) which is already taken. I would like to buy it from its current owner. However, I can't find any guides online on how to go about this in an effective manner. Does anybody have any suggestions? Thanks in advance. -Anonymous —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.187.115.163 (talk) 05:09, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Just send an email to the email address saying you want to buy it off the owner and hope for a reply? --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:46, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I believe that selling email addresses is against gmail's terms and conditions, not that they are likely to find out. -- Q Chris (talk) 07:58, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

One small thing to iron out is to know what the secondary email address was and change it if possible. Just in case the previous 'owner' wants to change your password, just for fun. Kushal (talk) 09:30, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

What about the price? Should I ask the current owner for a price, or should I offer one? And if the latter, how much? Thanks -Anonymous —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.187.125.154 (talk) 17:43, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Depends on how much you are willing to pay for it and how you anticipate the bargaining to go. Kushal (talk) 21:00, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

You could just use a modified version, such as johnsmith123@gmail.com and save yourself the trouble. --Alx xlA (talk) 03:57, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Squid

Hello,

I'm trying to get a squid proxy working for https, like this:

[ me ] ---- http or https (don't care) ----> [ proxy ] ---- https ----> [ website ]

Squid's compiled with --enable-openssl and works fine for http requests, but gives "protocol error" for https requests. I've got self-signed keys set up like this

https_port 3129 cert=/.../squid_proxy.crt key=/.../squid_proxy.key

though I think this is only from me to the proxy? I'm trying my requests like GET https://some_website.example over HTTPS (using python's httplib class). This is just on localhost at the moment.

Are there any good tutorials for this sort of thing, or are there some useful pointers as to what to do? --h2g2bob (talk) 14:29, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

SSL/TLS is supposed to provide end-to-end encryption. The endpoints ("me" and "website") are not supposed to trust anything in the middle, including a squid. When done correctly, the proxy will not even know what URL you are requesting, and will only have minimal knowledge (IP address and port) of the server you connected to. How it's done: HTTP CONNECT. You tell the server "CONNECT 208.80.152.2:443" and it makes the connection for you. Then you start doing your SSL/TLS negotiation with the server, and the proxy just passes the data through without attempting to parse it (which it can't do anyway because it doesn't know the secret keys). After the SSL/TLS setup is complete, you send your HTTP request and read the HTTP response. That's the operational summary; as for how to do it quick and easy in python, hopefully someone else will answer. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 20:17, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Are multiple backup of encrypted data easier to decipher?

If I am encrypting (with TrueCrypt, for example) my data (a spread-sheet, for example) every week and doing a backup of it with the same password, is this set of files that are almost the same easier to crack than a single file? GoingOnTracks (talk) 17:31, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think so—the length of the file should have nothing to do with it. In either case the file is going to be broken up into smaller cipherblocks, it's just a question of how many there are per file, I believe. And if you could break one of them, you'd know everything. But you can't do that (assuming you've chosen a passphrase not susceptible to simple dictionary brute force attacks). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 17:48, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I think it is always going to be the case that the more sample data you get the easier a cypher is going to be to crack, and especially if something is known about the plaintext. The worst might be if an attacker can actually inject plaintext for you to encrypt, but it doesn't sound like that is the case. If the samples are relatively sparse, an attacker can't purposefully inject their own plaintext, and the plaintext (and the differences in plaintext between the samples) is unknown, I can't imagine it would reduce your security very significantly.

If you are really worried about it you could probably use a one-time pad on the data itself and include the pad as a prefix/postfix to the "plaintext" stream going into your cypher. That way the input data would look pretty random each time and it would be difficult looking for similarities between encrypted versions. With a stream cypher a random prefix might even do the trick by itself, without the need to use it as an initial pad. --Prestidigitator (talk) 20:11, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

There's no reason to bother. TrueCrypt is completely secure against known-plaintext attacks and adaptive chosen plaintext attacks and all other attacks on the encryption. It's possible there's a flaw in the design but I don't think so. A previous version was vulnerable to a chosen plaintext distinguishing attack (i.e. the attacker could tell that the volume was a TrueCrypt volume, not actually read the data), but that's been fixed. That doesn't mean TrueCrypt will keep your data secure, but you shouldn't worry about the encryption side of things. The dangers are things like a weak passphrase (which can be brute-forced) or malware running secretly on your computer or files left over in an unencrypted temporary directory. Whether those risks are relevant in your case depends on who you're trying to hide your data from. -- BenRG (talk) 00:05, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

As far as I know, in theory, the more encrypted data you have, the "easier" to crack it gets, this is one of the "basic rules" in cryptography, off course this does not mean your data will be easy to crack... In fact, it should be very hard to crack if you use something like TrueCrypt, here we are just talking about minimal differences, if you are careful, your data should be extremely difficult to crack, even if you have lots of files SF007 (talk) 13:40, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Wiki-ness of a wiki

When does a wiki stop being a wiki? Does anything that runs on MediaWiki automatically qualify as a wiki? What if editing is blocked to everyon but one or maybe two people? Our article states, "A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language." But if no one can edit the pages, or act collaboratively, is it still a wiki? Mahalo nui loa. --Ali'i 18:51, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean all pages have full protection, cascading protection or something like that? Kushal (talk) 20:57, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I think the question is about personal wikis and similar closed "wikis" who can only be edited by one or a small group of people. In these cases, the distinguishing feature seems to be the ease of editing and linking between pages. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 21:12, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, or say I just decide to start a wiki, but then disable account creation and turn off all non-logged in edits. That way no one but myself can edit it. Is it still a wiki? Wouldn't that just kind of make it a regular non-wiki website? --Ali'i 21:13, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

No. The distinguishing feature of a wiki is that it makes web pages read/write for authorized users, rather than the standard regular non-wiki website's read-only. How you choose to define "authorized users" doesn't change that. --Sean 22:24, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Any web site can be edited by its owner(s). Does that mean that all web sites are wikis? Perhaps more specifically, plenty of blogging software allows editing of existing posts - does that make them wikis? If you include the "ease of linking" criteria, these cases largely go away. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 01:19, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Plain old web pages are not "designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify". See paradox of the heap for borderline definitions. --Sean 12:59, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Password protecting web directory

I need to password protect files in a given web directory (say, ~/www/files), but I don't have any way to put files into anything but my main www directory (say, ~/www). From what I can tell, this rules out using .htaccess, yes?

Is there another solution to accomplish something like .htaccess protection? It doesn't have to be totally rigorous, just something that will keep people from downloading files in the directory unless they are a select group of folks with a password. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 20:07, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I believe you can use .htaccess to protect subtrees (pretty sure Apache does this), but it is going to depend on the web server you are using, and may have to be explicitly allowed in the web server's configuration files. (EDIT: Oh. Oops. Missed the part about where you can put the files. Don't know about that one, but it should be pretty clear from the web server's help documentation.) --Prestidigitator (talk) 20:14, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

For Apache, see the Apache authentication and authorization how-to for a good starting point. --Prestidigitator (talk) 20:23, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I should also have noted that I don't have shell access at all. Just FTP. And I can't modify any of the server settings. (Sigh.) It does have some PHP capabilities, but a lot of things are disabled (and, believe it or not, the entire filesystem is read-only, so no PHP script can do anything but read files. WTF academic IT departments, why you gotta be such a pain in the ass.) --98.217.8.46 (talk) 20:30, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Um if the filesystem is read only then how do you upload with FTP? .froth. (talk) 22:29, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I can upload from FTP, but that's it. As for how they implement the read only aspect, no clue. It's clear that PHP in any case does not have the permissions to modify files; I inquired and they told me it was a read only filesystem or something like that. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 03:55, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I think PHP and Apache runs as nobody, so the files must be set to "writable by all". --grawity 11:28, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Right. But I can't change the file permissions. That's not the current problem, though. There's no way around this read-only business (other than doing weird things by automating FTP connections). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 16:52, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Flickr: What's the catch?

Flickr^PRO seems to give unlimited uploads and storage, unlimited sets and so on. What is the catch? Is there a reason to not get Flickr^PRO? They even say they will retain all the pictures in case someone drops the subscription and joins again later. Kushal (talk) 21:07, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

There is no catch except the cost. You pay for the service yearly. JoshHolloway 21:20, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Unless you consider a 20 MB picture filesize limit and a 90-second video length limit catches. Xenon54 21:27, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Hard drive space is cheap, bandwidth is relatively slow. Most people who sign up for the service will probably not use anything close to the maximum amount of data that their ISPs would let them upload anyway. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 21:35, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, thanks. I don't think I will own a camera that has an output of 20 MB image in lossy jpeg [in the forseeable future] and there is Google Video for uploading videos. However, I agree that I need to see how much of the "unlimited"space and bandwidth I will use. Afterall, I cannot just spend all my time taking pictures and uploading them to flickr, can I? Kushal (talk) 21:52, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

windows Xp on Vista laptop?

My brother bought a dell PC with windows XP a few years back, and it came with microsoft office XP. He's in the process of buying a laptop, and heard horror stories about vista. Can he use the old win XP install disk on his laptop, or will there be some sort of driver incompatibility problems?

Also, he's aiming for cheap. If the above fails, can he install office XP on a vista laptop?

thanks --Shaggorama (talk) 21:33, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

WHen buying a new PC with the operating system included it is only licensed for that box. So he won't be able to activate the license on a completely different machine, although it may be physically possible to install. One thing to watch out for is all the drivers for the laptop that may have different vista and XP versions. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:56, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Ah- but Vista now has downgrade rights. [3] --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 22:07, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

But does OfficeXP work on Windows Vista? I am not sure. By the way, you can always use OpenOffice.org so this should not be a major problem. Kushal (talk) 22:47, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

According to Microsoft Office, Office XP works on Vista. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 23:18, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I have Vista on my laptop, and Office 2003 works just fine. Leeboyge (talk) 06:10, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Automatically mount data CDs in Kubuntu

How do I set Kubuntu to automatically umount /media/cdrom when the drive tray is opened, and mount it when the tray is closed? NeonMerlin 22:03, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

.RAR Help

I was trying to download a video clip off of RapidShare that's in .rar format, but try as I might I can't :( . I tried to use WinRAR but after about two hours of going nowhere, I was wondering if anyone could give me directions? (Error text @ http://pastebin.com/m23b220bb). To me the errors make a loop by directing me to extract volume two to extract volume one when volume two needs volume three to extract volume two and volume three needs volume one for extraction. Anyone else ever had this happen/know how to solve it?

I know it's because rapidshare has a 100MB limit so it had to be broken into three sections, I just can't get the sections to work. MANY thanks! Yamakiri ^T_C § 06-9-2008 • 22:34:15

Do you have all the volumes together? To me it sounds like it is trying to extract all at once, but it can't find the component pieces. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 16:50, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Yup, I've got all three. Yamakiri ^T_C § 06-10-2008 • 19:34:58

Hmm... the names of the sections match what the error message says WinRAR is looking for? JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 02:37, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

DDR2 vs. GDDR3

For the exact same card with the same amount of memory that comes in both a DDR2 and a GDDR3 version (such as the 8600GT and HD 3650), is there a big gap between performance? There seems to be a $10-20 price difference for the two versions. Will GDDR3 offer better performance at higher resolutions or something?

And if there's any benchmarks between a DDR2 and a GDDR3 card, could you post them here? Thanks 24.6.46.92 (talk) 22:55, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

For what it's worth, my guess is that there will be no significant difference. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 00:31, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

But aren't most stock GDDR3 clocked higher though? 24.6.46.92 (talk) 00:39, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

If GDDR3 is anything like DDR3, then the higher clocks will generally be accompanied by higher latencies. Depending on whom you ask, this can either partially or fully offset their advantage. It is also not very clear how much of a bottleneck is memory in a card like 8600GT. Again, I'm just guessing here.

In any case, I wouldn't really recommend the 8600GT. There are some much more powerful options available for similar prices (9600GSO comes to mind, but the specifics depend on your requirements). -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 14:28, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

linux

i have a new laptop with windows vista. can i dual boot vista with linux or is it too late? if i can then how would i do it? and what is a good version of linux for somebody who never used it before?--96.227.104.157 (talk) 23:04, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

It's not too late, by any stretch. I'd suggest trying out Ubuntu as a starter, as it's a very simple and easy to install. You may want to consider using a virtual machine in order to try it out from within Vista before going the whole hog and installing a dualboot system. Hope this helps, Gazimoff ^Write_Read 23:16, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

A virtual machine? Wouldn't it be simpler to use Wubi? -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 00:29, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

It depends. A VM will let you try out an operating system with little risk, as you're unlikely to repartition your hard drive or break anything. They're also usually easier to get working as they imitate very standard hardware profiles. I find it very handy when trying out a new OS for the first time, as you can have the VM in one window and the help files, manpages or support website open in another. Once your confidence is built up, you can then go for partitioning.Gazimoff ^Write_Read 15:26, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Wubi doesn't partition anything either. It installs an OS on a file on the existing Windows partition, then puts an entry in the Windows boot configuration so that it shows up in the boot menu. Uninstalling is done easily through Windows. No mess, no risk. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 22:20, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Check what partitions you have...If you have an unused partition, install Linux in that. And Ubuntu is the best distribution for beginners. --User:Masatran —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.199.213.66 (talk) 15:22, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

PayPal Account

Can I receive money, send money, and make purchases via PayPal if my account is unverified and doesn't have a bank account or credit card attached to it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.117.44.78 (talk) 23:14, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

No you can't, because that'd be a huge security risk! Yamakiri ^T_C § 06-9-2008 • 23:24:21

I figured...so what's the minimum amount of info I can have on an account before it will allow me to make purchases with money that has been sent to me from someone else? (can I receive the money sent by someone else?) Thanks for your response. --71.117.44.78 (talk) 23:29, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

This seems like a question you need to ask of PayPal. Call them at 888-221-1161 in the US. --70.167.58.6 (talk) 14:32, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

June 10

linux

what are the pros and cons of linux. focus more on the pros, because im already aware of the major cons.--96.227.104.157 (talk) 02:13, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Have you read our articles about Linux and the various distributions?

Atlant (talk) 11:49, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

ubuntu cd

sorry for so many questions. if i order the ubuntu cd now, i think it will be the hardy heron version. but i saw that the next version comes out soon. by the time the cd ships(6-10 weeks i think it says) will it be out-of-date and useless? or will it update perfectly fine?--96.227.104.157 (talk) 03:00, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

It will be perfectly fine. Just make sure you do the required and recommended updates in time. Hardy is a LTS release which means it will be supported for three years. Cheers, Kushal (talk) 03:33, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

If you prefer, you can download the ISO image from the Ubuntu site and copy it to CD. It'll save you having to wait for it to arrive.Gazimoff ^Write_Read 15:28, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, downloading is not for everyone. When I was on dial-up, I would not even think about downloading such a massive file. Kushal (talk) 16:01, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

It only took me a month to download a 700MB iso on 33.6kbps dial-up connection... --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:43, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

But my pg_hba.conf DOES have "local all all trust"!

I can't log into my PostgreSQL database (hosted locally on a firewalled single-user machine running Kubuntu) and get the error "Ident authentication failed for user chris". What makes this different from anything I've seen an answer to online is that I opened my pg_hba.conf and it already says

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local	 all	 all	 trust
# IPv4 local connections:
host    all         all         127.0.0.1/32          trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all         all         ::1/128               trust

What else could be preventing me from logging in? NeonMerlin 03:32, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Has postgres been restarted since that pg_hba.conf was written? Are you sure that the postgres server is reading that particular pg_hba.conf file, and not one somewhere else? Have you tried running psql both with and without "-h localhost"? --Sean 13:06, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

utm forum names

what are the names of the ideal discussion forums available for unifies threat management names? 203.88.128.94 (talk) 11:39, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

An example of good C code?

I'm teaching myself C, and I think it'd be helpful for me to have a good piece of C code to look at and mess around with. Something well structured, not too long and relatively self-contained. Does anyone have any suggestions?--Fangz (talk) 13:45, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

The source for the BusyBox utilities is short and easy to understand. Here's cat: [4].

Can corrupt photos offloaded from an xD card be recovered?

I have about 60 pics that got corrupted during the transfer from my digital camera to my computer. My fault, since I started rotating the ones that needed to during the transfer, however only the last 60 got screwed up. The icons for them show up but can't display a pic. Is there any way to recover them? --BrokenSphere^{Msg me} 14:52, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

You could try PhotoRec to get them from the card. --LarryMac | Talk 14:55, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Can anything be done with the files that were offloaded or I have to go with the memory card? --BrokenSphere^{Msg me} 15:15, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

That's hard to say without knowing exactly what happened. PhotoRec itself might be able to help. Alternately, I searched for "fix corrupt jpg" (on the assumption that we are, indeed, talking about JPEG files) and found this; I have not used or even downloaded this tool, no endorsement is implied.

Bluetooth application for Symbian mobile phone

Is there any Java or Symbian application, that will display a constantly up-to-date list of visible Bluetooth devices, on my Symbian+UIQ mobile phone? --User:Masatran 14:54, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

GPS on iPhone II?

Can someone please explain to me, in simple, non-marketingspeak language, what the situation is with regard to GPS on the new Apple iPhone II? Apple claims "assisted GPS" but what the #@!! does that mean? Does the phone have GPS or does it fake it with cell site info, WiFi hot-spot info, inertial navigation {;-)}, etc? And if you have an authoritative reference to cite, more the better!

(Partially answering my own question)

From our article:

"A software update allowed the iPhone to use cell towers and Wi-Fi networks to locate itself despite lacking a hardware GPS. The iPhone 3G includes GPS but also uses cell towers and Wi-Fi for location finding."

So what's the advantage of the "assist"? Faster GPS cold-start location-finding times? Or just better marketing?

Atlant (talk) 16:54, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Better coverage; see Assisted GPS. --Sean 17:13, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! WHAAOE!

Atlant (talk) 21:52, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

So does A-GPS work only in the US or also in other countries? -- SGBailey (talk) 17:12, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Is osdisc.com legit?

I got there from a link from distrowatch.com. I want to try out ubuntu, but downloading is not a feasible option. Before I give osdisc.com my personal information, I want to be confident that they're legit.--71.175.117.228 (talk) 17:56, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

And by the way I'm the same guy that asked about linux before, just on a different ip.--71.175.117.228 (talk) 17:58, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

A quick Google search didn't turn up any complaints about osdisc.com. Is there anybody in your local area that might have some discs to give you or let you copy? I know that when I ordered Ubuntu "Dapper Drake" I was sent five discs, so Canonical makes it easy to share. --LarryMac | Talk 19:47, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Ubuntu has https://shipit.ubuntu.com as well... -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 22:33, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I know, I already did shipit, but the wait is about 6 weeks.--71.175.117.228 (talk) 23:27, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I've never used it, but it should be legit. It's featured on Distrowatch. --Russoc4 (talk) 23:40, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Completely legit - Bought the Mandriva 10.0 discs there back when I had 33k dialup. They were very reasonable and even sent me the 10.1 update disc the next week when it came out. Freedomlinux (talk) 19:27, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Internet problem

It seems that all websites are down except Wikipedia. Is there a sever problem? Eklipse (talk) 20:58, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Something with your computer or your ISP (going to guess a DNS lookup problem), or the individual servers you're connecting to all happen to be down. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 02:32, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I unplugged the internet accidentally while vacuuming. sorry. Gzuckier (talk) 21:04, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Free open-source CAD program

Is there one? Something serious, for professional projects? GoingOnTracks (talk) 22:52, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Maybe these two links will help: one and two. --Russoc4 (talk) 23:36, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, they do. GoingOnTracks (talk) 23:43, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

My UMTS provider is shortcharging me: how can I prove that it is doing it?

Currently I have a flatrate UMTS. In the ads they promised speed up to 358 kbps, but from exactly 15h00 until 01h00 I get only 1KB/s (ridiculous speed). Between 01h00 and 15h00 the speed is rather normal (50KB/s). They only reduce the speed in days that I use it constantly (perhaps downloading 300 MB).

I know exactly my speed, since I am using NetMeter, but how can I technically prove that they are doing me?

GoingOnTracks (talk) 23:22, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, before going legal, have you read the fine print? Just because the ads appeared to guarantee something doesn't mean it's guaranteed—the ads certainly had tons of fine print, the contract you signed had even finer print. Look at that stuff first, figure out exactly what they are supposed to be providing. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 00:48, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

It is certainly not a legal matter. The contract was quite simple. I even have a right to a compensation is the service cannot be provided. I guess the company offered a flat-rate service and was overwhelmed by the internet addiction of the clients. Now they are trying to contain the damage. GoingOnTracks (talk) 01:05, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

You said up to. IANAL, but unless you can prove malicious intent, I don't know how you can do anything to them, other than threaten them that you will switch carriers. Kushal (talk) 01:20, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, speed from 64 KB/s (GPRS) and up to 384 kbps (UMTS). But the problem is not the contract. It is proving that they are doing it. GoingOnTracks (talk) 02:33, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Keep in mind that if you are downloading from a particular source (or kind of source), the other end's bandwidth is an issue too. (For example, if you are using some kind of peer-to-peer system, often there is a lot of demand on users who have pretty limited upload rates already). Think about what your activity is like and maybe try downloading something big from a site you know to have good bandwidth as a control sample. --Prestidigitator (talk) 16:10, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I kept that in mind. The point is that my conexion provides a normal speed of about 50KB/s until I reach a threshold (that shouldn't been there). After that it is only 1KB/s. :( GoingOnTracks (talk) 23:12, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

June 11

Ubuntu programming

What programming tools does Ubuntu have?--71.185.140.19 (talk) 01:46, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

There's tons... See here. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 03:02, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, then click on "Development". If you want any more details, you'll have to be a little more specific. Are you interested in a particular language? Do you want an integrated development environment, or are you just interested in finding out what gui toolkits or libraries are available? Maybe just a rich text editor? Indeterminate (talk) 04:49, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Opera Master Password

I have set a Opera Master Password and have forgotten it. How can I get rid of it? It doesn't matter if I also get rid of all my other passwords. GoingOnTracks (talk) 03:50, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Delete your wand.dat and opcert6.dat files from your profile directory. You should probably do it with opera closed, then re-open it afterwards. See here: [5] Indeterminate (talk) 05:01, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Program

I remember seeing an old computer program called "Goldie". It has an animation of a naked lady dancing. But I can't find any mention of it anywhere on the internet. Anyone have a link? Interactive Fiction Expert/Talk to me 06:33, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Internet porn... :p HardDisk (talk) 17:58, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Keyboard protector

Yesterday I purchased a new Toshiba laptop and I was flipping through a catalog of accessories and noticed that they offered a "keyboard protector" which resembles a plastic transparent sheet. While I am interested in it, do you recommend I buy it? Is it worth the money doing so? I don't know anyone with a laptop having one. Also, do I remove the plastic strip over the integrated camera? I think I should. --Blue387 (talk) 07:44, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

It depends on whether you plan on spilling your tea on the laptop's keyboard ;-). Seriously, if your environment is dirty or dusty or you do have a proclivity for spilling your drink, the protector may help. But it does impede keyboard action somewhat. And after several years accumulation of crumbs (which really do accumulate, even for the most fastidious user), most keyboards can be vacuumed clean with good results.

Meanwhile, regarding the plastic strip: If it is simply a piece of almost-clear vinyl or the like, surrounds the lens and the surrounding plastic/metal bezel, and it has an obvious pull-off feature, then yes, remove it. Such strips are used to prevent scratches/crate burn during shipment and in the case of your camera, will definitely impede the functioning of the camera if left on.

Atlant (talk) 11:36, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Ipod Touch/WinSCP

When I delete applications off my ipod touch through WinSCP it doesn't seem to actually delete the application because I can still see it on the spring board. Is there something I need to do to delete the application in another way? Possibly delete it from another location? And if you guys are wondering why I am using WinSCP to delete applications it is because my installer keeps crashing on me. Yer so I'm wondering can you fix that through WinSCP also? Thanks. 220.233.83.26 (talk) 07:54, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Dynamic IP for WebSite

Hi, I am thinking about making my own website, and I have the option to choose a static IP, my question is: Would it be less safe to use a static IP than a dynamic IP? Thanks in advance. SF007 (talk) 13:27, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

• You would want to use a static IP. A dynamic IP changes periodically. Which means that every so often the URL will change. A static IP is fixed, so it doesn't change. As far as security goes, it isn't going to make a big difference, except in the sense of Security through obscurity - if people can't find your website (because the IP keeps changing) they won't be able to attack it - but if people can't find your website, you might want to wonder why you have one anyway. :) Plus the value of security through obscurity is debatable, (it certainly shouldn't be seen as sufficient on its own, even under the best circumstances). - Bilby (talk) 14:39, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

• • URLs can use domain names, and domain names can change IP (e.g. DynDNS), so URLs can be constant with dynamic IP. MTM (talk) 18:53, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

• Technically that is possible. However, domain names need to be registered through a DNS, and it takes time for changes propagate - I normally quote about 24 hours for a change in the IP address to start working for all users. So while you could do it, there would be a period during each changeover during which you would get inconsistency, with some people going to the correct IP, and some going to the old one. This would also loose most of the advantages gained via security through obscurity, as the domain name would be consistent for attacks, and could be used to resolve the IP if needed. - Bilby (talk) 22:42, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

• The only reason why I use a dynamic IP is that it is cheaper in Poland. Since my IP changes once per several weeks or months, I did not think about security implications of this. MTM (talk) 21:19, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

yeah, I think a static IP will do fine, better to focus on trying to keep the software up to date and stuff like that. Thanks. SF007 (talk) 23:44, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Most advanced file compression?

What's the most advanced file compression method available to an end user? My preliminary searches point to 7z, but I just wanted to check in with you experts. --70.167.58.6 (talk) 14:27, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Define "advanced". Fastest? Most compression? Both? --LarryMac | Talk 15:16, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

maximumcompression.com has benchmarks of a lot of different lossless compression programs. PAQ8O10 and WinRK win most if not all of the compression ratio tests. PAQ is free (GPL), but it's a research compressor with no GUI or fancy features or support, and it's very very slow. WinRK is commercial and has a GUI etc., and I think it's faster, but I've never used it. Unless you have unusual needs you should go with 7-Zip (or WinRar). -- BenRG (talk) 17:38, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Yeah, I should have specified I need cross-platform and no CLI! :) --70.167.58.6 (talk) 22:24, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Maybe one of the PAQ derivatives or front-ends such as PeaZip might fit your needs, then? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 11:55, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

By cross-platform, I mean Mac and Windows. Thanks for your suggestion, though! --70.167.58.6 (talk) 13:54, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Most advanced video codec?

It seems that h.264 seems to be the most advanced, most widely available codec (that also isn't under the control of one company). What is next? Is there a more efficient h.264 successor in the works? --70.167.58.6 (talk) 14:30, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

• VC-1 - better known as WMV3/WMV9
• H.265 - not really started yet

--tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 18:23, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

And eventually maybe Dirac. -- Q Chris (talk) 10:13, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think VC-1 is intended to be a successor to H.264. It's more of a contempory (and in fact performance worse in most visual comparison tests) with the advantage of being easier to decode. Dirac may be a next generation codec. Or it may simply compete with H.264 (i.e. MPEG-4 AVC). One of the key advantages is it's (believed to be) patent free. Theora the current primary patent free codec is not particularly good. It doesn't even compete with MPEG-4 ASP currently. One of the key problems I've heard is that the developers have been severely restricted in what they can do given how heavily patented the field is. It's obviously going to get better, but I personally have my doubts it will achieve quality/bitrate comparable to H.264 for a long while. Dirac may have an advantage there as wavelet video compression is still relatively new. Nil Einne (talk) 18:31, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

language support for internet explorer of windows mobile

Can anybody please tell me how to enable indian language support for internet explorer of windows mobile ?59.93.196.42 (talk) 17:00, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

iphone unlocking

Now that iphone comes with a 2 year contract, will iphone unlocking continue? I think such two year contract was there last year also. Then how did many American citizens unlock and sell phones in other countries when there was a contract? was there a contract last year?

On the previous version of the iphone you could buy it without a contract, and purchase a contract later. The new pricing and availability strategy will reduce the motivation, as the initial cost for the phone will be lower, but you will be locked into paying, and also the phone will be available in many countries. Nevertheless you may want to change the SIM when traveling to avoid roaming charges. For example in Hong Kong local mobile phone charges are only 1% of the cost when using a foreign SIM. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:35, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I read in some blog that previously it had a no commitment price and now it does not. Any idea what is that?59.92.107.231 (talk) 03:46, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

fragmentation

Can fragmentation of a hard drive be good in that it ensures not the same part of the drive is always used and its use is spread out randomly across the drive? JessHalie (talk) 19:14, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I doubt it. If anything, the increased need for seeks will accelerate degradation. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 20:15, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Fragmentation really has no benefits. It uses more disk space than a nonfragmented disk. It takes longer to read/write files. Both of those put the drive to more use than it would in a nonfragmented system. As for using the same spot of the disk over and over - there is no harm there. It doesn't degrade the disk (unless the drive is broken). It merely alters the magnetization of the block. I know of no risk for disk damage through magnetization. However, I should point out that the popular flash-media USB sticks are not the same. They do degrade and have a limited number of read/write operations before the fail. At that point, they truly fail and are unusable. Therefore, they have a sort of built-in fragmentation to spread the work around the internals of the disk in an attempt to get the maximum amount of use out of the whole drive. -- kainaw™ 00:01, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Fragmented files do not use more disk space. A defragmented file has all of its parts next to each other in order on the disk. A fragmented file has one or more parts spread out on the disk. Either way, the file will use the same amount of space on the disk. See file system fragmentation. --Bavi H (talk) 02:04, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

So, how does the OS know it hit the end of the file or the end of a fragment and the rest of the file is elsewhere? It has to store the information about the fragment on the disk. That takes space that wouldn't be used if the file was not fragmented. -- kainaw™ 12:41, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure to what degree it varies across filesystems, but in the old FAT filesystem, the actual FAT was a table of cluster numbers, with as many entries as there were clusters. If j were stored in slot i, that meant that i was followed by j in a (hopefully the) file that contained both. There was a special cluster number that meant EOF — perhaps the cluster number for the FAT itself, since nothing could be continued there. (The OS knew where within the cluster to stop because it knew the total length of the file.) So the space really was constant; an unfragmented file just had entries that looked like (@4b00d) 4b00e, 4b00f, 4b010, …. In general, I suspect that this pattern is common; if you can either store a fragment pointer or something else in a given space (thus saving space when you don't need the pointer), you have to have some way of "escaping" real disk data that happens to look like your pointers (however you store them). The added complexity and wasted space (for, say, a bit that indicates whether a pointer or data follows) may not be justified. --Tardis (talk) 14:37, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I vaguely recall from days gone by it being a linked list or such. back then you could use norton edit or similar to just go and look at the FAT. boy i'm oldGzuckier (talk) 20:57, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Kainaw: The operating system knows how to find all the clusters of a file by using the directory entry to find the first cluster, and the file allocation table to find all the rest. The file allocation table of a particular disk is always a fixed size (it has an entry for every cluster whether it's used or available), and is really a special reserved part of the file system, not a part of any particular file. I explain a little more here, because I couldn't find any brief explainations online. --Bavi H (talk) 03:00, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

A related discussion on file sizes, clusters, sizes on disk, and fragmentation was here. I got so frustrated with the incorrect explainations I wrote quite a bit to try to clarify. --Bavi H (talk) 04:38, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Isn't it rather misleading to use a defunct filesystem that isn't the default filesystem on any modern operating systems as an example? How about using NTFS instead? I may very well be wrong, but my understanding is that it stores everything in metafiles, which are files in the root directory beginning with $. As fragmentation grows, information about the fragmentation is added to the metafiles - making them larger. -- kainaw™ 11:19, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

but as for the original question, for quite a few versions of windows now the OS has been smart enough to keep moving forward through the unused disk space while writing rather than just rewriting the beginning of the disk over and over as you suggest. although i don't know if it's specifically to reduce wear, it was presented to me as a way to reduce fragmentation, since obviously when it finally comes around to writing at the beginning of the disk again, there will be more continuous open space after more time has passed and more files have been deleted, and less need to cram little pieces of file into little holes. Gzuckier (talk) 21:01, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Making a symmetric matrix

I have a matrix A and a symmetric matrix B, and I'd like to calculate $A^{\top }BA$, which is obviously symmetric. Using such tools as GSL and/or BLAS, how can I go about doing this efficiently? Neither of the intermediate products $A^{\top }B$ and $BA$ will in general be symmetric, so the normal routines that read or write (slightly more than) half of a symmetric matrix won't work. The general routines will, of course, wastefully calculate every entry in the final result. If it matters, A is typically not square. --Tardis (talk) 19:42, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Go through unique pairs of columns of A (e.g. do a loop to find i<j), and do the inner product defined by B? In the end, though, I'm not sure whether this much optimisation is worth it.--Fangz (talk) 00:05, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

You can check the matrix chain multiplication first to see if you should do (A^TB)A or A^T(BA). However, it seems to me that many of the operations you perform will be highly repetitious. So, memoization may be use to shortcut the operations and return the answer. -- kainaw™ 00:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

The (direct) multiplication has the same expense in either order because of the symmetry. Perhaps the best thing is to simply do the first multiplication normally; then do the final multiplication "by hand" (without calling into a library), skipping the terms above/below the diagonal (as Fangz suggested). I think the "correct" answer for large matrices (when it's worthwhile to recognize the symmetries) is to factor $B=Q^{\top }DQ$ (D will have all positive entries if B is positive-definite, which it is for me) and write $A^{\top }BA=A^{\top }Q^{\top }DQA=C^{\top }C,\;C={\sqrt {D}}QA$. The standard packages know how to deal with $C^{\top }C$, so efficiency is had; the required Schur decomposition is $O(n^{3})$, so it's not necessarily more expensive than the matrix multiplications. --Tardis (talk) 15:34, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

In case anyone's implementing this, the general Schur decomposition is really overkill; the precise function I'll use (if I need it) is gsl_eigen_symmv. Thanks for the input. --Tardis (talk) 15:44, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Posting a file without exposing myself to spambots

I need to temporarily files for other message board users -- what are some good sites? By good, I mean easy to use, no porn advertising, clean interface. --70.167.58.6 (talk) 22:16, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Temporarily what? I am ahving difficulty understanding your question. Astronaut (talk) 23:04, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Temporarily file? You mean upload a file for temporary use? Try Microsoft SkyDrive. Just create an account, upload the files and set them to public or semi-public. GoingOnTracks (talk) 23:15, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

You want a website to place a file? you can use MediaFire, I think it is a good site because:

• No registration required
• upload files up to 100 MB
• Files are not deleted
• you can registrate and organize files in folders
• the person that download the file don't have to wait time, or enter any CAPTCHAs, (unlike rapidshare and it's kittens....)

link: www.mediafire.com SF007 (talk) 23:50, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

June 12

Lightweight desktop Linux

Can anyone recommend a Debian based (preferably) Linux distro for an old(ish) laptop (Dell Gateway 2000, Solo 9100). Its for a friend who isn't exactly a computer expert, so it should be easy to use and configure. He'll be mostly using it for homework and the like.

System requirements are pretty tight. It's from the Windows 98 days. 233mhz Pentium II and 64mb's of RAM, 4gb hard drive (in two 2gb partitions).

Has some maybe strange hardware, like a combination DVD-ROM/floppy drive, but I'm mostly sure It's just two ATA devices in one box. Floppy boot capable, but haven't tried. Supposedly CD boot capable, but not booting of my Ubuntu CD-RW (hardware not powerful enough for it anyway) though Win98 can read it.

I can provide any additional information. Thanks in advance -WikiY ^Talk 00:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Have you tried Xubuntu? I've had luck using that on old laptops. -- kainaw™ 00:19, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

If you really want to dig into it, you could go Linux From Scratch and install the X-Window packages afterward, then the packages for any desktop you put on it. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 06:49, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I've recently used Puppy Linux on a 400MHz PII, with 128MB RAM and 8GB hard drive. I then upgraded it to 640MB RAM and 40GB hard drive and tried Vector Linux. Both Linuxes worked well. However, neither would work on my really old 200MHz Pentium MMX with 64MB RAM (I think the 1st gen Pentium architecture didn't suit them). Anyway, I'll probably give Damn Small Linux or Xubuntu a go next. Astronaut (talk) 10:23, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

DLLs

Someone told me that even after uninstalling programs, there are a lot of left over DLLs that may take up space that could otherwise go towards something else. Is this true, and if so, how much space would these files typically take up? Would it be a noticeable difference if I was able to get rid of them if there were enough of them? And is there a program that could accomplish this?--十八 00:37, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

If these were shared DLL files, you would get into some inconveniences. Kushal (talk) 00:55, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

It depends on the program. Some uninstallers only pretend to uninstall a program. They just remove the entry for the program from the Add/Remove Programs list. Others will remove all traces of the program. As for space, the most a DLL will take up is a few megabytes, and they are usually smaller than that. The thing I'd worry about would be old DLLs loading themselves into memory, which would slow down your computer. I tried a program once called DLL Toys but it didn't catch most of them. I also hear that Registry Mechanic will delete useless DLLs. But I've gotten the best results by going into the C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder and switching to the Details view. Most DLLs are stored in that folder. Then, I sort the files by company. So if you uninstalled Zone Alarm, for example, you would look for any files made by Zone Labs. You can see what DLLs are being used at any time by opening up a command prompt and typing tasklist /m. That's only scratching the surface, though. If you want to do a more thorough job, you'd have to run a registry cleaner and look through your C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers and C:\Documents and Settings\ and C:\Program Files\Common Files folders for other pieces of the program.--Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 01:05, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. When I opened up the command prompt and typed in tasklist /m, it says that "'tasklist' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file"; what did I do wrong? Nevermind, I figured it out by downloading the required application.--十八 02:45, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Are you using Vista? It may be that tasklist isn't included in it. I'm using XP.--Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 04:01, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

No, I have XP. Tasklist wasn't included for some reason, so I downloaded it, and it works fine. Thanks for the tips.--十八 09:31, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome. :)--Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 09:51, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

GoLive Woes

Hi guys,

I was silly enough to lay out a page in GoLive. Unfortunately, that program used pixel co-ordinates to position text on the page. It looks OK in Internet Explorer, but Firefox and Opera mess up the formatting. I'm not sure how to move the "your computer" line away from the "I can help" one without doing a massive rewrite of the code. The bullets are in Wingdings, but I can't get those to display outside of IE, either: http://home.comcast.net/~richmaxw/ad/ad.htm.

Thanks,

Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 01:13, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Your link doesn't work. Preemptively, though, I can think of one thing to check. Look at the css pertaining to the DIV or SPAN tag corresponding to the misaligned text. If it's positioning says position: fixed, change it to position: absolute. Fixed doesn't work in every browser, and I've had that cause problems like what you're describing. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 02:48, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about that. The link is fixed. I tried messing with that, but it doesn't seem to work.--Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 03:38, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm looking at it, and I'll post if I find anything, but that's the most jumbled, mangled mess of HTML I've ever seen.

I notice the picture isn't working in Firefox, either. I think I know the problem there. The line that begins with DIV name="22F", at the end of the line is z-index:-1" there needs to be a semicolon between the one and the quotation mark.

Check the line starting with div name="155"; it's also missing a semicolon at the end. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 06:27, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Tell me about it. It was even worse before I tried to clean it up! I haven't been able to get the placement right, though, so I'm trying to code it in Notepad. Thanks for looking, Jeremy and Antilived. I never was a fan of CSS, anyway. I just use tables.--Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 09:39, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I suggest you just start over and code it the hard and elegant way. It will take more effort to make it standard than to rewrite it. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:25, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

WebSite with WWW or without?

I am considering making a website, but I don't know if I should choose www.mysite.com or just mysite.com, what is better? if I choose with WWW, will it redirect to the other one (www.mysite.com redirect to mysite.com)? and vice-versa? Is the WWW really necessary? should I go for it? thanks in advance. SF007 (talk) 03:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

The version without really is still www.mysite.com. It just has to be setup on the server to have an alias of some sort to make mysite.com go to www.mysite.com (which is why some sites don't work if you don't put the www). When you register a domain, you're usually registering a second-level domain, where the "www" part is part of that second-level domain's subdomain. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 03:30, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I'd add that the www doesn't serve any real purpose from the technical side of things, and most of the time I just make sure that www.mysite.com and mysite.com point to the same place, as Wirbelwind suggests. The main reason for keeping the www (other than the chance that some people will type it in anyway) is that it indicates to a reader that we're talking about a website - when you see www.mysite.com on a billboard, you know that it is a url, while mysite.com isn't as blatantly clear. :) - Bilby (talk) 11:48, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I'd go as far as to say anything with a ".com" is ubiquitous of a website, so the www is not needed as long as the ".com" is there; or .edu/.gov/.org/.etc. :P--十八 10:37, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

.. and the www version actually involves less typing as (in Internet Explorer and Firefox at least) you can type "mysite" in the address bar followed by Ctrl-Enter to get http://www.mysite.com. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 14:19, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Or in Opera, where it automatically adds it. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 16:27, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

yeah, with WWW people know immediately that is a website. Thanks for the answers. SF007 (talk) 02:49, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

The "www" prefix came about in the years before the Web was as ubiquitous as it is today. Back then, an organization might have their online presence spread around, say, www.example.com, ftp.example.com, gopher.example.com, telnet.example.com, irc.example.com, etc., and those might well be different hosts with different IP addresses. Meanwhile, the unprefixed domain name example.com might be only configured for mail delivery, with only a MX record and no A record at all. (In hindsight, it might've been more convenient to have separate DNS record types for all these protocols, not just for e-mail. Of course, this wouldn't have been very practical unless the DNS architecture was made much more flexible than it actually is, to the extent that people could effectively invent their own non-standard record names.)

In fact, you're still likely to find such setups around: for example, universities, free software vendors and others who still distribute large files over FTP are likely to have a dedicated FTP host which is not the same as their main webhost. On the other hand, it has gotten to the point where, these days, one can pretty much expect every second-level domain name to have an A record and respond to HTTP request, even if only to redirect the browser to the actual webhost. Meanwhile, even as older protocols like Gopher have been outcompeted by the Web, the naming convention continues to be used for newer protocols: for example, the Wikimedia Foundation, who run Wikipedia, have svn.wikimedia.org, which, though it does respond to plain HTTP requests, is really meant to be accessed via the SVN version control client. They also have irc.wikimedia.org, which, while it responds to HTTP requests too, only redirects the browser to a page on Metawiki.

Meanwhile, for "vanity domains" that only serve web pages and maybe receive e-mail, there's little point in using the "www" prefix. It's still worth supporting it, though, if only as an alias, since many people (and some software) will assume that the prefix should be there. For example, www.vyznev.net redirects you to the corresponding URL without the "www". Mind you, I had to set up the redirect feature myself using mod_rewrite in an .htaccess file; with the default configuration provided by my webhost, the two hostnames would've just served up identical copies of the site. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:44, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

KDE 4 in Kubuntu 8.04

Hello I have install Kubuntu 8.04 but it is in KDE 3.5 and I need KDE 4 how can make kde4 default .thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.125.143.74 (talk) 04:15, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Heading added — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 09:15, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

KDE 4 is a work in progress, and doesn't yet have all the features the average user expects -- I'd recommend waiting until KDE 4.1 or 4.2 is available. --Carnildo (talk) 23:05, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Help me debug this program please!

I’ve written the following program in C++ which is supposed to convert a given string of ASCII values into coherent text. Whenever I run the program in Borland C++ environment, I get the message “Conversion may lose significant digits” and the code that is emboldened in the following program gets highlighted. Please help me debug it!P.S—The output is supposed to be James Bond if I give the input as 10665771011153266797868.

Code

#include <iostream.h>

#include <conio.h>

#include <stdio.h>

#include <string.h>

#include <ctype.h>

  

void main()

{

  char a[50];

  char b[50];

  int l, k, i, n, j, c, s=0, f1=0, f2=0;

  int N[50];

  

  cout << "Enter code \n";

  gets(a);

  cout << endl;

  

  l = strlen(a);

  for (i=0; i<l; i++)

  {

    n = a[i] - 48;

    N[i] = n;

  }

  

  j = 0;

  while (j<l)

  {

    k = j + 1;

    c = (N[j] * 10) + N[k];

    if ((c>=65 && c<=90) || (c>=97 && c<=132) || c==32)

    {

      f1 = 1;

      b[s] = (char)c;

      s++;

    }

    else

    {

      c = (N[j] * 100) + (N[k] * 10) + N[k+1];

      if (c>=100 && c<=132)

      {

        b[s] = (char)c;

        s++;

        f2 = 1;

      }

    }

  

    if (f1==1)

    {

      j = j + 2;

      f1 = 0;

    }

    else if (f2==1)

    {

      j = j + 3;

      f2 = 0;

    }

    else

      j++;

  }

  

  l = strlen(b);

  for (i=0; i<l; i++)

  {

    if (i!=0 || b[i]!=' ' || b[i-1]!=' ')

      b[i] = tolower(b[i]);

    else

      b[i] = toupper(b[i]);

  }

  

  cout << b;

  getch();

}

Thanks. 117.194.226.179 (talk) 05:13, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I see it- the "else" above the bolded line should be braced out. As it is, it's executing both the upper and lower commands on the inputs. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 06:44, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry to say that doesn't help much. I just ran the corrected coding in my system, and the same error message appeared on the screen. By the way, I thought that if there are no braces after an "if" or "else" statement, it only executes the immediate next line?? 117.194.225.130 (talk) 07:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I think the if-else is okay as written, but the code is hard to read because of the lack of spaces. The message “Conversion may lose significant digits” sounds like a compile-time warning meaning that you've implicitly converted from a wider integral type (the int returned from toupper) to a narrower one (char). It's a spurious warning in this case; the code is fine (at least that line is). It shouldn't prevent the program from running unless you've configured the compiler to treat warnings as errors. -- BenRG (talk) 09:19, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I took the liberty of spacing it out a bit to improve the readability. Yes, toupper (and tolower as well) will return int sized values. There is an implied cast to fit the result into a char and you are being warned about the potential to lose accuracy with the cast. Astronaut (talk) 11:08, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Your program flow is rather tangled and unclear. You should have five separate steps:

1. Read in input string
2. Convert input string to array of single digit integers
3. Convert array to list of valid 2 or 3 digit ASCII codes (simplify your logic here - for your purposes, a 3 digit ASCII code always starts with 1; a 2 digit code never starts with 1)
4. Convert list of ASCII codes to character string
5. Apply capitalisation rules to decide whether each character in final output string should be upper or lower case and convert as required

Prorgram each step separately and insert debug statements to print out the result of each step before it is passed to the next step. After step 3 your array of ASCII codes should hold (106,65,77,101,115,32,66,79,78,68) and after step 4 your string before you apply capitalisation rules should be "jAMes BOND'. And adding comments will help you to clarify your own thinking as well as being a big help to anyone else who is expecetd to read your code. Gandalf61 (talk) 11:42, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

And while on the subject of improving your program, you could use more descriptive names for the variables. Astronaut (talk) 13:05, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Google Maps error

I'm using Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu and when visiting Google Maps there are always specific tiles that it cannot display and instead says the "we don't have maps at this zoom level" error message, no matter what my zoom level is. The tiles changes from use but there seems to be a pattern for it, whether it be diagonal or skip one or things like that. What could be causing this? --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:44, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Ad blocker? As far as I can tell, the "we don't have maps at this zoom level" can mean either "we don't have maps" or "there was an error downloading the image". --Carnildo (talk) 23:07, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I get that sometimes (Firefox 2 on Windows XP); I just thought it was Google Maps screwing up. I'd noticed that G-maps and Wikimapia would lose map background at the same time (Wikimapia uses G-maps for its backgrounds). JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 01:05, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

mountmgr.sys

what dose it mean when your lap top says " the file mountmgr.sys is corrupted —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.35.45.66 (talk) 14:26, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

mountmgr.sys has a link to [[6]] where one of the posters point to http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=297185 (I get Network timeout on the microsoft page). AFAIR, I have never seen this error myself. file mountmgr.sys is corrupted may have more information as well. Please give us more information on your case. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. Thank you. Kushal (talk) 00:39, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

SATA HDD for this board?

Hi, Does this motherboard support SATA HDD? [7] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.91.254.43 (talk) 14:27, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I think not. It would have appeared under "Internal I/O Connectors". -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 14:49, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Looking at the image, I don't see any SATA connectors either. Useight (talk) 15:43, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Ditto those above, I don't see any SATA connectors in the picture. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 18:10, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Quantum computer hardware for videogames?

Quantum computer technology can one day be used for videogames right? ScienceApe (talk) 16:36, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Maybe. What makes you think they would have any advantages over traditional computers for this purpose? -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 16:40, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea. Do they have advantages for videogames? ScienceApe (talk) 18:39, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

None that I can think of. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 19:21, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Graphics won't be processed faster? ScienceApe (talk) 20:51, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think there is any evidence that they will. Quantum computers don't really do anything "faster", they just have a wider range of basic operations available. They are famous for being able to factor integers effectively, but I see no application of this for gaming. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 21:00, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Maybe, Ray tracing (graphics) could benefit from the wider range of basic operations if games (or their underlying packages) were modified to take benefit of the options quantum computing gives. Kushal (talk) 22:04, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Everything is possible. But last I've heard, the largest computation performed by a real quantum computer was factoring the number 15. This means that by the time these mature, classical computers will probably have developed to a degree that any further improvement will not be distinguishable by our feeble eyes. The bottom line: Don't hold your breath until quantum computers come along and turn your gaming world around, it's not going to happen for a long while, if at all. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 22:20, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

A lot of newspaper and magazine articles have created the misimpression that quantum computers would run classical algorithms faster than classical computers do. As Meni Rosenfeld said, they don't; what they do is run a larger class of algorithms called quantum algorithms. For certain specific problems, the best known quantum algorithm is significantly more efficient than the best known classical algorithm. But for the vast majority of problems the best known quantum algorithm is the classical algorithm, and in those cases you're better off running it on a classical computer. I think there are fast quantum algorithms for some path-finding problems which might be relevant to computer game programming, but it's hard to believe that you'd get any practical increase in frame rate from offloading such stuff to a quantum coprocessor. I don't think any known quantum algorithms would help with 3D rendering. Even if we all had quantum coprocessors in our machines right now, they probably would see very little use. -- BenRG (talk) 23:40, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

It seems a fair bet that, if quantum computing ever works in practice at all, it will, somehow, be used for games. Or porn. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:49, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

open-source free maintenance tools

I need two of them:

-first a program that monitors my connection to the internet and tells me what program is connecting to what port, what speed, etc.

-the second is to find duplicated files on my HD.

GoingOnTracks (talk) 16:39, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

If you are on Tiger or Leopard, you can use iStat for the first one. Kushal (talk) 00:30, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

No, I am on Windows :(. GoingOnTracks (talk) 01:11, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I know there are core utils for Linux that can be used to test for duplicate files. I'd use something like:

find . -exec cksum {} \; 2>/dev/null | sort >~/fileCksums.txt

Then look for duplicate checksums on consecutive lines in ~/fileCksums.txt. Maybe try doing that with Cygwin or something. --Prestidigitator (talk) 07:14, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I'd recommend md5sum (or sha1sum) over cksum, just to minimize the (admittedly small) chance of false positives. Also, xargs would probably be more efficient than -exec. Oh, and you don't want to checksum directories. And the non-duplicates can be filtered out with uniq. So:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum -b | sort | uniq -D -w32 >~/dups.txt

Note that some of the options I've used are GNU-specific (but if you use Linux or Cygwin that's what you'll have). For sha1sum, replace -w32 with -w40. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 13:07, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Escaping stuff in bash

I have a path like:
$ MYPATH="/some/path with spaces in it/somefile.dat"

I'd like to create the directory in another spot and copy the file there (I'm aware there are easier ways to do this but this is for illustrative purposes only). How do I properly escape everything in the following:
$ mkdir -p /home/me/$(dirname $MYPATH)

As-is, dirname gives an error ("extra operand 'with'"). So I double-quote $MYPATH:
$ mkdir -p /home/me/$(dirname "$MYPATH")

Great, so now I have /home/me/some/path, ./in, ./it, ./spaces and ./with. If I play stupid and pretend like bash will know what I'm talking about (and stick double-quotes in, even though they then become nested):
$ mkdir -p "/home/me/$(dirname "$MYPATH")"

It actually works, but it doesn't seem like this is the correct way. I would have thought "/home/me/$(dirname \"$MYPATH\")" was the correct way, but the inner, escaped quotes end up becoming part of the directory name.

--Silvaran (talk) 17:46, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Looks like bash is smart enough to use the parentheses that are part of the $(...) notation to nest the double quotes also. (Perhaps this is one of the reasons people like -- and invented in the first place -- this newfangled $(...) mechanism.)

Me, I've always used the universal (if perhaps a bit dated-looking) backtic mechanism for command expansion. I just tried this, and it worked:

mkdir -p "/home/me/`dirname \"$MYPATH\"`"

Here, I did have to escape the inner quotes, for exactly the reason you suggested. —Steve Summit (talk) 20:44, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I've always wondered why good shells don't extend the nestable $() syntax to quoting as well. I agree that letting bash figure out what you meant with the double quotes is icky. In a script I'd do it in two steps:

mydirname() { dirname "$MYPATH"; }
mkdir -p "/home/me/$(mydirname)"

--Sean 00:20, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with "/home/me/$(dirname "$MYPATH")" at all. It may be surprising that you can include a pair of quotes within a command substitution that's within a pair of quotes, but the recursive parsing necessary to correctly match them up is required by the unix standard[8] so it's a pleasant and portable surprise, not a bashism. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 00:32, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, there is nothing wrong with mkdir -p "/home/me/$(dirname "$MYPATH")". It is actually the preferred syntax. Although the bash documentation doesn't specifically deprecates the backtick syntax, many expert shell programmers discourage its use. --Juliano (T) 15:00, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Search keys

In search engines, "" helps you to define your phrase and search for that exact one. I think ~ or maybe three of them or something has a similar function. I am wondering if there are any keys\symbols\etc that can be used to exclude things you are searching for to make the search more refined. Simply south (talk) 18:30, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think you can generalize search engine behavior. Google allows you to use to '-' character to exclude items. For example, I live in the state of Virginia, and when I search for state government information, I used to get a lot of results for West Virginia as well, so I use something like Virginia Lemon Law -"West Virginia", which will filter out the WV results. --LarryMac | Talk 18:57, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Also, the ~ is used (by Google) to search for synonyms, this is described here. That Google Guide site is packed with great tips for getting the most out of Google searches, and I'll repeat, you can't necessarily apply those tips to other search engines. --LarryMac | Talk 19:14, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much for these. Simply south (talk) 19:42, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

You can preface a search term with a minus sign. Some engines, which includes google I think, use boolean words (AND, OR, and NOT), which you can also use. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 21:25, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

There's also inurl:, intitle: and site:. There's a list of advanced operators here. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 12:46, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

USB-to-serial converters, and drivers

Does anyone know why, when you plug a USB-to-serial (RS232) converter into a Windows (or Mac) machine, it's useless until you obtain and install the proper driver, but when you plug the same converter into a Linux machine, it tends to work automatically? (Me, I'm zero-for-three with several different Mac and Windows machines and several different converters, and I think three-for-three with Linux.) —Steve Summit (talk) 20:33, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

My understanding has always been that since the Linux community can't trust hardware manufacturers to supply Linux drivers for their products, they write their own drivers for all common devices and include them with the kernel. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 20:46, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Windows enjoys a large enough market share to force hardware manufacturers to write their own drivers. I don't know whether Microsoft does or should include every single device driver written for its operating system with its default installation. Some say that the modern operating systems are already bloated as they are. Kushal (talk) 00:26, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I suspect Linux is able to support these devices out-of-the-box not because it has 2,574 handcrafted individual drivers bloating the kernel, but because it has one generic driver which supports not only the 2,574 USB-to-serial converters already out there, but also all the ones that haven't even been built yet. See also Juliano's answer just below. —Steve Summit (talk) 15:56, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

If you haven't thrown out your old RS-232 devices by now, you must be a unix geek anyway. You refuse to get on the upgrade treadmill? You will be punished... --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 00:59, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

That is a mystery. The USB standard defines a set of "device classes" that have well-defined behavior. One of them, class 02h, is USB communications device class. The specification clearly defines how a "serial port" is implemented. This is an open specification, see http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/usbcdc11.pdf, sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2, and the rest of the document (a USB-to-serial converter is trivially implemented, it is just a very small subset of this specification).

USB intends to provide an extensive protocol that supports many kinds of devices without requiring specific vendor drivers. Check the first paragraph of Universal Serial Bus: "[...] and allowing many devices to be used without requiring manufacturer specific, individual device drivers to be installed."

This has nothing to do with the Linux community not trusting hardware manufactures to supply drivers (although this may be true for other situations, it is not the case for USB CDC). It is part of the USB standard, just like mass storage is (this allows you to plug a USB flash drive into your computer and it just works). Windows doesn't provide a USB CDC driver because whatever reason Microsoft doesn't want to. --Juliano (T) 16:21, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I was pretty certain there was a generic (device- and vendor-independent) specification; thanks much for the confirmation and the references.

(It's interesting you mention mass storage, because every time you plug a different USB thumbdrive into a Windows machine for the first time, it tends to do its little "searching for new hardware" dance, and it may even warn you that it "couldn't locate an appropriate driver and that your device may not work properly", although in that case, at least, it almost always does.)

One more reason to loathe Microsoft, I guess. (But it's not like I needed any more!) And it's certainly not a merely theoretical concern: it cost me and four other people a very expensive wasted hour of time last week, which is what got me thinking about it. —Steve Summit (talk) 15:56, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

sound cards; bipolar?

i know i should just go try it, but does anyone know beforehand any reason why a sound card shouldn't be able to feed the output from the audio out into the input to record it? Sort of a D to A to D thing? Gzuckier (talk) 20:53, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Make sure you check your recording levels- if you have the "stereo mix" option, mute it or things could get ugly. Other than that, I'd think it would be okay. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 21:27, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Depends on if your sound card supports full duplex operation or not. If it doesn't, it can't record and play at the same time. --Carnildo (talk) 23:11, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Sharepoint 3.0, Internal and External Sites

We just set up WSS 3.0 on a system running MS Small Business Server 2003 in a small office.

We would like to use sharepoint to host both internal project-management type workspaces, and an external site for clients and/or other professionals.

We are concerned about security, and ensuring that hosting a sharepoint site from here doesn't open up our network in any way.

How do you recommend we go about doing this? Are there any tips that can be offered? NByz (talk) 22:55, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Just a word or two of warning without getting into the sharepoint technicalities. If your users are used to using MS file systems and networking (such as workgroups) to share files, get used to a major paradigm shift when implementing sharepoint. Be prepared for a lot of resistance. We implemented sharepoint at the corporate where I work and I can tell you although there are disk saving and file sharing advantages, sharepoint is quirky at best. It requires some intense setup and at least one full time person to support MS SQL server that it uses and often loses connection to, etc. I would seriously reconsider before using it. Sandman30s (talk) 23:14, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

June 13

Javascript and Opera

Although I have Javascript turned on in Opera some sites do not recognize it. Firefox has sometimes the same problem. Should I stick to IExplorer? What can I do? GoingOnTracks (talk) 00:09, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Opera never gets any love. However, what problem do you have with Javascript in Firefox? We are very eager to help but it helps if you could provide more information. Is it a specific website that you are having problem with? Kushal (talk) 00:28, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I suppose that means that the problem with Opera is not solvable.

www.alternate.de didn't show properly in Opera or Firefox some weeks ago. GoingOnTracks (talk) 00:57, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Please don't get me wrong. Opera is a fine, polished, and rock-solid application. Its just that most people have a bias for a certain application (and change is hard). When I think of Opera, I remember that silly old "banner ad". With Firefox 3 release candidate 2 out, I don't think anyone needs to work with any proprietary web browser. I did not want to sound absolutely dumb by asking which OS you are on (I assumed you are on a version of Windows, since you mentioned Internet Explorer --by the way, there is a lot of hype about IE8, but I am getting off-track). It could well be you are on one of Mac OS, Mac OS X etc. I have a small problem with kantipuronline.com on my mac with nightly builds of Firefox 3. This problem does not exist on my Windows machine with the release candidate. Therefore, it could be a platform specific problem. Please tell us which OS you are on. Kushal (talk) 22:20, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I prefer to work with Opera or Firefox (for the plug-ins). I am on Windows. And I know of a further site where Iexplorer works fine but Opera or Firefox not. In this one, when you want to place a bid, you have a rule of tools to format the text. In the IE it works, and in the other two it will not load. GoingOnTracks (talk) 13:03, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Increasing my paging file

I have Windows XP SP 3 installed, with 1GB of RAM and 1.5GB for my paging file now. If I increased my paging file by 500MB, what adverse effects can I expect? Also, I have about 60 processes running in the background after my computer starts up from shut down (plus my browser, and other programs I use a lot like mIRC or iTunes). Is 60 too high, and if so, how can I be sure I don't turn off something at start up I really need? My task bar on the lower right only has 9 icons at startup, and most of that is essential like mousepad, McAfee, and volume control. My goal is to make my computer run faster without buying new RAM.--十八 01:35, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

To see exactly what your processes are and what they are doing - have a look at the excellent Microsoft utilities at sysinternals. With 1G of RAM it depends what you're doing on your computer - you should not be paging all that much if you're using it for lightweight tasks; if you're into modern games or high-res digital editing for example, then yes you're going to need a larger swap file, or more RAM which is cheap nowadays! Sandman30s (talk) 04:48, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Ram Cleaner

What exactly does a ram cleaner? Which data does it clean? Could it delete what you have saved? --Omidinist (talk) 06:03, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I'd never heard of a RAM cleaner before, so I googled the term. Those programs look pretty dodgy to me. There was a big scandal a decade ago when people noticed that the best-selling "RAM compression" program SoftRAM95 actually did nothing at all. That product at least claimed to do something that made technical sense (make a compressed swap file in RAM), though it didn't actually do it. The CyberLat RAM Cleaner page seems to make no technical claims at all about the product they're charging $5 for. I doubt it's worth the money. -- BenRG (talk) 14:34, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

A typical "RAM cleaner" works by allocating a huge amount of memory. This forces the operating system to discard things like the disk cache and other caches (pre-rendered fonts, and possibly some other things), and move inactive programs and memory areas to the swap file. Occasionally this will speed up programs you start after running the cleaner, but it's far more common for it to slow everything down. Unless it crashes your computer, it won't delete anything important. --Carnildo (talk) 21:33, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Windows Media Player 11 codec missing

I try to play .avi files using my version of Windows Media Player 11 on my new laptop but everytime I try, there appear to be missing codecs. I've just installed Media Player Classic but it does not work. Not sure where I can download the codec, what can I do? --Blue387 (talk) 06:37, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Try this? http://www.cccp-project.net/ It's built to play .avi(s) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.156.83.85 (talk) 06:57, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

You might also try the K-lite codec pack with Media Player Classic, if you haven't already. It can usually fix this problem. Leeboyge (talk) 21:39, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I also recommend K-lite codec pack, it may be hard to believe, but with that codec pack and the program The KMPlayer, to this date, I played 100% of the "regular" media files I encountered (and I do a lot of internet browsing, exotic formats, etc...), you can also try MPlayer and VLC (with the codecs installed), if none of them work, it is very, very likely that that media file is currupted or it is not valid... (or requires an exotic codec...) SF007 (talk) 03:44, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Windows XP Service Pack 3

Ever since I downloaded this a while ago...I, for some strange reason, can no longer see some special characters. Why is this & how can I get them all back?

Well, what are these "special characters"? If for example they're Hangul (and thus special to non-Koreans), then I'd start by checking if you have a Korean font installed. Morenoodles (talk) 09:42, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Compare java performance between Unix and Windows

I know that java programs perform faster in Windows than Unix. And tuning can narrow the gap. But is there any document comparing java performance between these two OSs? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Isaiah5818 (talk • contribs) 08:14, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

ePSXe

Now that I have gotten ePSXe to work, I need to know where I can download games for it. Interactive Fiction Expert/Talk to me 09:34, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, those games are more or less illegal, and we can't point you to anywhere. However, there are very good search engines out there on this interweb thing I hear about. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 17:44, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

It works just fine at reading Playstation CDs in your CD-ROM drive. You can usually get games at extremely low prices from garage sales and used-game stores. You could also try eBay, but the prices usually aren't as good. --Carnildo (talk) 21:35, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Hacking an .exe file

Hi. I have an .exe file (the executable of the game Deadlock: Planetary Conquest). All the text of the game is stored in it as plain text. I suspect that it also contains all the data in plain binary. I would like to make changes in this data. I have a hex editor, but I have no idea where are the relevant pieces of data located. Is there any effective way to find out? For example, is there a way to monitor which locations of the file are accessed at given points in time when I run it? Thanks. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 09:45, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Try ResHacker or newer XN Resource Editor. --grawity 12:22, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Unfortunately, the numeric data I'm after doesn't seem to be among the resources these programs deal with. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 12:54, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I've hacked .exe files using a Hex editor (beav, in my case). The only changes I was able to make was changing text strings to others of identical length (possibly including blanks). Any additions or deletions presumably threw off address offsets used in the program and would cause a crash. Still, I managed to have some fun. For example, I changed the standard Windows Free Cell game into Nazi Free Cell: "Nein, Das Move ist Verbotten !" StuRat (talk) 23:55, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Looks to me like you need the Cheat Engine. — Shinhan < talk > 05:02, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. This certainly looks interesting, but I haven't been successful in trying to use it for my purposes. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 19:46, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

editing with Mac OS X Preview

Preview (software) tells us that Preview is Mac OS X's application for displaying images and Portable Document Format (PDF) documents (my emphasis), but clearly it does more: you can use it to resize, to fiddle with color balance, etc. (I'm talking about Preview version "4.1 (469.1)", as supplied with OS X 10.5.2.) So can you also copy and paste selections? There is a copy option (rectangle, ellipse, lasso), and I use it to copy. I then move elsewhere in the same image and either (a) click the cursor and choose the "paste" option or (b) define a rectangle with the cursor and choose the "paste" option and -- either way, nothing seems to happen. Or anyway what was red before is not overwritten with yellow. There's no error message, and I am offered the option of undoing my paste, but the whole operation seems to achieve nothing.

Can Preview do this? I can hardly complain if it can't; but if it can't, then just out of interest what is "paste" for?

If Preview can't do this, do I have any freebie options other than Gimp? (Gimp had a rather disorientating interface the last time I tried to give it a go.) Morenoodles (talk) 09:57, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

You might have a look at Seashore. I don't recall exactly what Preview can do, but it's pretty lightweight. Fletcher (talk) 13:17, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! I've just spent about two hours battling with it to get it to do something I could do in five minutes with Windows-95-era Lview (as installed from one diskette), but that's progress in software, isn't it, heh heh. Anyway, it did work in the end. -- Morenoodles (talk) 08:07, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

web languages

Hello, Can anyone please tell me the difference between ASP, .NET and ASP.NET? Thank you in advance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.255.171.250 (talk) 11:44, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

ASP is Microsoft's old web scripting thing. .NET is Microsoft's name for a framework of program libraries, inter-program communications, and such. ASP.NET is ASP with the .NET framework. You can see ASP, .NET, and ASP.NET if you are actually interested in learning about these topics. -- kainaw™ 12:09, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Which filesystem I can choose

My requirement is that, data write / read to disk should be as fast as memory write / read. This filesystem can also take the advantage of a fact that at any point of time memory will not be filled up by writes too quickly, before it is getting written into disk. If at all this fails, graceful degradation is expected in this case.

I would like to use this filesystem as a RDBMS datastore.

Or, simply caching would solve most of these problems? :) --V4vijayakumar (talk) 13:41, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Because of the structure of the motherboard itself, a disk will be slower than memory. You may find a motherboard with some weird configuration where memory is as slow as disk access - but that would make memory pointless. Everything could be done on disk. The best answer I can give is to use a hardware RAID0 (striped) with a lot of fast drives that have a good on-drive cache. I do this for my database servers. I use the maximum number of drives, all striped. Each drive has a large cache. So, disk read/write is very fast. Of course, it isn't as fast as memory. So, I avoid disk access by maxing out the memory. I specifically asked all the server dealers "What server do you sell that has hardware raid and the most memory possible?" Now, I can do rather large table joins without ever swapping to a disk. -- kainaw™ 13:59, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, RAM caching is normally handled independently of the file system. Some file system drivers may do a better job than others of laying out data on the disk for faster reading later, but even in the best case this will be far slower than reading from the RAM. If all your frequently accessed data fits in RAM, the choice of filesystem shouldn't matter much. This should be doubly true of a database store, which will probably maintain its own virtual filesystem inside a single huge file, making the container filesystem basically irrelevant. (But I know next to nothing about databases.) -- BenRG (talk) 14:07, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Seems to me the OP is talking about a high-end file system. Proper RDBMS's don't use one large file; rather their datafiles are split not only physically but logically at the table and index level at least, for a very simplistic summary. If you're talking about data getting written as fast as memory, it doesn't quite do this; database writes are flushed to datafiles and "redo" logs asynchronously. So if you use a high-end disk subsystem such as EMC, which uses fast disks and ridiculous amounts of disk cache, these writes are performed from cache to disk asynchronously therefore allowing other operations to happen in memory while disk writes are going on in the background. EMC works well with the Veritas File System (vxfs) but this is all high-end stuff really. Sandman30s (talk) 22:58, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

lan networks

Hi...we hav a lan in our hostel with which about a hundred comps are connected...I'm planning to create a sort of bulletin board thru which anyone can be able to post any news or event list also it must be able to work like a website...is there any way to do so?? if yes how??? plz explain in detail...any link which can help will be gr8...thanking u all in advance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Piyushbehera25 (talk • contribs) 15:50, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Note: If you need very high performance, use a separate computer for this.

1. Install a web server, such as Apache with PHP and MySQL (or simply XAMPP)
2. Install bulletin board software, such as phpBB, punBB or [UNB].
3. RTFM.

--grawity 18:56, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

stereo sub

this might not fit in the computer section but its the closest thing to technology matters. I blew the sub on my stereo and am wondering how specifically to fix it. yes i know i can take to a proffessional at some store or whatever but we happen to not be going into the city for quite awhile. i can't go one day without listening to it. what should i do about it?Jwking (talk) 19:56, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

HOW did you break it? They aren't something that's easily broken, mechanically... --antilived^{T | C | G} 23:06, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

If this is a traditional speaker with a paper cone attached to an electromagnet, the paper cone is probably torn. You could patch the cone, I suppose, but it will never sound as good as new. It might sound good enough, especially with the volume low, until you can manage to get a replacement, though. StuRat (talk) 23:49, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Game resolution suddenly decides it doesn't like me.

I have a 1280x800 laptop and I'm trying to play Age of Empires II. I've had the game for ages and it's always played fine, filling the whole screen no matter what resolution I set it on. Today it screwed up, filling a small rectangle in the middle of the screen, and even if I play it on the highest resolution it can go (which is the 1000xsomething; it won't let me click the 1280 one) there's still big black lines to both sides.

I noticed it when I booted the computer up - randomly one of the 'Windows resuming' screens was small like that. It's annoying me, I haven't added, changed or taken anything away, it's just 'happened'. What's going on and how do I slap the game back to working properly?

Lady BlahDeBlah (talk) 21:50, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Under Accessories | System Tools use the System Restore to restore your system to a point in time when the game last worked. Sandman30s (talk) 23:02, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Nope, that's not fixing it. I don't think there was a point for that time Lady BlahDeBlah (talk) 23:08, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

You said "Today it screwed up" so restore your system to yesterday, or last week! If that doesn't fix it then you have a hardware problem I'm afraid. Sandman30s (talk) 23:17, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Yea, I'd guess the graphics card needs to be replaced. But, just to make sure it's not the monitor, try hooking up an external monitor. StuRat (talk) 23:43, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Before you rush out to buy a replacement laptop, have a close look at all of the display settings before you start the game.

Also, in both XP and Vista I have seen it where the screen resoluton is set to something like 800x600 by default when it cannot read your personal settings because you are logged out of your user account (it was annoying as hell because it moved my icons around to fit the new resolution). All these different modes are stored somewhere in the registry and are built up each time the computer encounters a new setup like being in "Windows resuming" mode for the first time. Looking in the registry on my Vista PC, I stringly suspect it is something to do with the data stored in HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\VIDEO, but I'm not sure what you should do here. You could try the searching the Microsoft knowledge base, or maybe someone who know more about the different screen resolution will add further answers here.

Edit: BIG REGISTRY WARNING... deleting the wrong thing in the registry can seriously mess up your PC - so much that you will have to reinstall Windows. The registry editor has no "are you sure?" questions and has no undo feature. Use it with great caution. Astronaut (talk) 18:30, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Photo story 3 temporary files

Hello I am using Photo Story 3 on Windows XP SP2 on a Toshiba Satellite M55-S135. I am working on a project right now but for some time, the application is not responding to Windows. I was wondering if I could salvage any work out of it. Does it save its files in a special format (like Audacity does)? If yes, where can I find the temporary files? The project contains voice-over which I will have difficulty in persuading the people to do the re-recording. (I was dumb enough to do the recording on Photo Story, so I have no back up of the audio.) Please help. Kushal (talk) 22:09, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Kushal (talk) 02:38, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Ubuntu/Debian?

From a desktop user's perspective, what are the main differences between the two distributions? (I know Ubuntu has a faster release schedule). Fletcher (talk) 22:17, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Debian and Ubuntu are very, very similar because Ubuntu is a fork from Debian. Aside from the release cycle, the ideology is different. Ubuntu seems to be focused on helping non-technical users and achieving mass market appeal [9], while Debian focuses on developers (for its "unstable" releases) and servers (for its "stable" releases). Debian is very focused on making sure most software is free software (developing the DFSG); while Ubuntu it is prepared to make some compromises with nonfree software vendors if this helps the end user. This may be because of their different revenue streams: I think Debian's main funding is through SPI, a trust for funding free software projects; while Ubuntu is funded by Canonical, a company selling software support. --h2g2bob (talk) 18:03, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

In my opinion, ubuntu is probably more suited for most users, more easy to use, more easy to install some software, more hardware support, more easy to get support (since is probably the most used distro), and all that stuff... unless the question of "Free Software" really matters to you, you sould be better with ubuntu... (just my personal opinion!) SF007 (talk) 03:36, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Mac OS X - Raw data to /dev/audio using 'cat'

On UNIX computers, I sometimes like to mess around and cat data files to the audio device to see what kind of industrial music I can produce. How can I do the same thing on Mac OS X? I have tried using /dev/audio, /dev/dsp, and /dev/mixer, but they all produce the error "Operation not supported". I have heard that OS X has a higher-level audio system than /dev/audio, so is there another device I should try to cat or pipe to, or should I just pipe to a program like mpg321 and save the hassle? Freedomlinux (talk) 22:34, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

This program looks usable. ~~ N (t/c) 07:37, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Don't think that's what the OP wants, as he/she wants to pipe any random file to /dev/audio to listen to their funky sound (mostly static for compressed files, but the .ko file I had lying around had a few tones in it), not play music files through the command line. To the OP, have you tried sudo cat instead of cat, in case it's a permission thing? --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:53, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

If it's anything like the common UNIX play command, it can accept raw audio files, for the same effect. ~~ N (t/c) 20:46, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Nickptar, while that is not my preferred solution, I may be able to do some creative piping to achieve the same result using your program. I suppose the problem lies in the abstraction of the sound system normally used by /dev/audio. Antilived, I do believe I was root when I tried to do this, due to the inherent administrative nature of accessing the hard drive and outputting to the system audio device. Thank you both for your tips, I will try and see what I can do. Freedomlinux (talk) 00:14, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

June 14

Problems with torrents and other P2Ps

I have been having a lot of problems with torrents and other p2ps forming a comection with peers. I think it has something to do with my port(s). How do I solve this problem. When I download a torrent I open it with utorrent and the availability is 0 even if there are a few thousand seeds. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dalakoi (talk • contribs) 01:47, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Networking is a complex field, particularly diagnosis & trouble-shooting of problems. Details of your environment, network configuration, applications used & their configuration (with regard to port(s) used), exact symptoms (including error messages etc.) would be of great help in order to offer some kind of assistance towards a solution. Unfortunetly, a vague description is not enough in order to provide anything more specific.

Pre-emptive suggestions: check the configuration of your applications, firewalls, routers etc. There should be a forwarding path from your external connection all the way to your application. Try testing with Wireshark. However, doing so may require reading/learning about networking concepts. Like I said; it's complex.

Don't be put-off by the title, there is a vast amount of useful information within: I kindly/gently point you to Eric Raymond's How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, which may help you in the art of asking questions which elicit useful answers. — Lee Carré (talk) 18:14, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps your ISP has blocked your p2p ports. GoingOnTracks (talk) 18:00, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

2 questions, front panel connections pins, UPS

I had a hard time finding the correct front panel wires inside the chassis of my PC. I had to look behind the front panel to determine which is which. Now, although I have been able to recognise the right pairs of wires, I am not able to determine the correct polarity for each pair. Are they interchangeable? The manual of my motherboard specifies each pin of a pair for two LEDs. Like this: HD (IDE Hard Disk Active LED) Pin 1: LED anode(+) Pin 2: LED cathode(-) But I have no idea how I am to find which is anode and which is cathode. Can somebody help me? —Genuee (talk) 05:19, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

The White/Black one is the cathode, and the brightly coloured one is the anode. You can always do it the trial and error way though. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:49, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

---

Second question is related to UPS. My UPS's manufacturer says that their product would support the computer only if there is a certain level of load. At least 100 Watts is the required load. In my case, when there is a power failure when the monitor is off/in sleep mode, the UPS will fail. Is this the case with all manufacturers? —Genuee (talk) 05:19, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

In response to your second question regarding your UPS: I have an APC Smart-UPS 1500 which does not exhibit this behavour. Personally I would consider the symptom you describe as a significant fault; there should be no minimum load needed for it to operate correctly. My UPS supplies power from battery no matter the load attached, even if there is nothing attached.

The only reason I can think of for this sort of behavour is to preserve the battery when there appears to be no load (in which case the UPS should look for any load, rather than something greater than 100W). Batteries used in UPSes only have a limited life, governed mainly by the number of discharges, particularly if they are deep discharges. — Lee Carré (talk) 17:56, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

At my school, we have a rack to TV equipment and computers backed up by a 30amp TrippLite lead-acid UPS. About 1.5years ago, I determined that it did not require any particular load to discharge, as it sat there giving off a warning beep and powering a small test lamp while we went to lunch. While it may preserve battery life, I can't think of why 100w would be chosen as the load limit, especially when many small, but delicate devices would draw less than 100w. Freedomlinux (talk) 00:18, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Non linear curve fitting in Matlab

I have been using Matlab for fitting a non-linear curve(the model is known for sure) which depends on three parameters and one variable: I have been getting results which look somewhat like this :

c =

    General model:
      c(z) = newtransmittance(wav,ipow,opow,w,b,g,z)
    Coefficients (with 95% confidence bounds):
      b =        5.17  (-5.018, 15.36)
      g =          10  (-74.81, 94.81)
      w =       12.52  (5.814, 19.22)
    Problem parameters:
      wav =        1064
      ipow =          90
      opow =          80

gof =

          sse: 0.007544015427389
      rsquare: 0.824078213449844
          dfe: 37
   adjrsquare: 0.814568927690377
         rmse: 0.014279086415046

As can be seen I am getting a large uncertainty in fit results. What shall be my approach to minimize the uncertainty in the coefficient values?The plot shape that I am getting seems to be descent enough.I have been trying to change the lower and upper bounds on hit-and trial basis which sometimes helps and sometimes not.

What should be my general approach while solving such ?I mean, how do I know which bounds will be giving me the best fits apriory? I am finding it very difficult to try hid and trial method (I have a lots of data )for finding the best bounds that suit my fit. Is there a better way?If, yes could you please help me out with the same?

I tried reading the Matlab documentation help, but couldn't find a good way to deal with such problem. Thanks in advance...

I've never used Matlab but have done curve fitting before, using polynomial parameterized arcs and splines. The higher the number of constraints you supply, whether point constraints, tangency contraints, or curvature constraints, the higher the degree of the arc needs to be for an exact match using a single polynomial parameterized arc (the degree has to be at least the number of constraints minus one to fit all exactly). However, an arc with a high degree will also be "lumpy" and may bow out unexpectedly. Therefore, you might want to lower the degree and accept more deviation from your constraints to ensure a smoother curve. A similar effect also occurs when using multi-arc splines. Alternatively, you might just want to remove many of the constraints, and only leave a few "representative" data points. StuRat (talk) 00:59, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

computer gives out continuous beeps and won't boot

I unmounted a Combo drive (DVD R + CD RW) from a computer. The drive was connected to an IDE cable along with a hard disk. After removing the Combo I connected the HDD at the end of the IDE Cable (It was connected to the middle connector earlier). When I switched on the system again, it gave out continuous beeps. The motherboard is Gigabyte. The continuous beep indicates power error according to the manufacturer's manual. I did everything I could do but the system wouldn't boot or enter setup, it just gives out continuous beeps. It did enter setup just once though, which gives the impression that the motherboard has no serious defect. I removed the SMPS and installed another one. Changed memory, removed and reset all connections,took out the CMOS battery to clear CMOS etc. but nothing helps. Any suggestion? --Genuee (talk) 11:51, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Check out the jumpers on the back of your hard drive - there should be a guide to the jumpers on a label somewhere on the drive casing. If "CS" (cable select) is selected, you can't just move the drive to a different connector on the cable. If this is the case and you still want to use the end connector, you have to move the jumper to "MA" (master).

A little background info: There's usually 3 sets of jumper pins, "MA", "SL" and "CS" (master, slave and cable-select). Master is set to ID the first/primary device, Slave is set to ID the secondary device, Cable-select sets the drive ID (master or slave) based on which connector is used. Occasionally, there's a fourth pair of jumper pins (sometimes labelled "SP") used to indicate to a master, that there is a slave present elsewhere - if the drive is the only device on the IDE cable, then the "SP" should be unselected.

Astronaut (talk) 13:19, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

It would help if you specify which motherboard you are using ("Gigabyte" doesn't quite cut it). Try disconnecting the power and data cables of everything that isn't required for the BIOS to run (that includes all hard drives) and making sure that what's left is connected properly. If it works, reconnect parts until the problem recurs. If the hard drive is the culprit, you need to mind the master\slave issues raised by Astronaut. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 20:44, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

• After a lot of fumbling the long howl has stopped. When I switch on the machine floppy drive is continuously lit and the DVD drive is checked. I can’t still enter the setup. The monitor shows nothing. Seems that no signal goes to the monitor. The keyboard is not recognized. No beep at all now. My board is GA-8I845GV of Gigabyte. The manual describes about auto recovery of corrupted BIOS from a special partition of the hard disk. I don’t have the hard disk this system used to have. I purchased a 160 gb and wanted to install OS. The board has two pins to short to clear the CMOS and go back to defaults. But there is no BIOS recovery as such. What can I do now? --Genuee (talk) 09:58, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

What type of connector is this?

Does anyone know what the connector shown in this picture: http://www.xanthos.se/~joachim/pmagb-b.jpg is? Thanks Rilak (talk) 12:10, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I suspect it's some variety of RGB component video. —Steve Summit (talk) 15:41, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

A google search for "PMAGB-B" suggests that board is a DEC framebuffer video card, perhaps for a DECstation or AXP3000. —Steve Summit (talk) 16:32, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

disk image emulator

Is there a disk image emulator software for windows, which could mount simple hard disk images? There are programs, which can mount optical disk images and there are programs, which can mount encrypted hard disk images, but none of them mounts simple, unencrypted hard disk images. (Something analogous to linux loop device). -Yyy (talk) 14:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

See Daemon Tools. --Russoc4 (talk) 15:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

It was the first program i tried. (i also tried truecrypt) It cannot mount hard disk images. -Yyy (talk) 16:16, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Try WinImage. It can't mount HD images, but it can edit them. --grawity 16:29, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Acronis True Image supports mounting of hard disk images made by itself... There is also VMware Workstation, that can open some formats of hard disk images (it also supports real partitions) to run them inside a Virtual Machine... And there is also WinMount, that can mount lots of archives types (.zip, .rar, .iso, etc...), ... What do you mean by "simple hard disk images"? What program created those hard disk images? What are the types of files you want to mount? maybe then we can help a you little more SF007 (talk) 03:30, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

This image was created by ubuntu wubi installer (ext3 filesystem of ubuntu installation). Vmware workstation has image mounting tool for virtual machine disk images, but it works only on virtual machine disk images (i already tried)(i have not tried to attach this image to existing virtual machine). I will check out winimage and winmount. -Yyy (talk) 04:32, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

It was not possible to attach this image to VMware workstation virtual machine (vmware version 5.5.4)(it complained as it was an unrecognized format). Winmount (version 8.1) did not recognize the file (cannot open the file). Winimage (v6.1) could not open the image, but version 8.1 could and it was possible to extract files from image. Thank you for answers. -Yyy (talk) 06:31, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Ah, it was created with Wubi, now it makes sense, yeah, that is one of the prolems with wubi: it is difficult to open the hard disk images created by it, since there seems to be no official tool for that... didin't knew WinImage would open that... Cool, have to try it some day... SF007 (talk) 13:58, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Firefox text-search mystery

I've got one tab where command-G has stopped working. Command-F still searches for a string, but command-G won't search for the next occurrence of it. I wonder how that happened? (Command-G still works in other tabs in the same window, and other windows in the same session.)

(Firefox 2.0.0.14 under MacOS 10.4.9. When I say "command-G" I mean "apple-flower-key-G"; the rest of you can think "control-G".) —Steve Summit (talk) 16:11, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I've had that happen a couple times before, but it is rare. I believe the only way I could get it to work again was to open the location in a new window, though I might have had to restart the whole browser (can't remember specifically, but it was one of those). Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); ; Alexa; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13 --Prestidigitator (talk) 17:24, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

X11

I have a black MacBook and when I downloaded the OS X 10.5.3 update, X11 and all the programs that used it stopped working. I tried downloading an older version but that didn't work either. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix it? Jkasd 17:44, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Ubuntu help

I'm the same guy as before. I managed to download the .iso Ubuntu file rather than buying a cd. I have a cd burner but no blank cds. Is it possible to install Ubuntu without burning the .iso file to a cd?

I've also been using Windows Vista for a few days now, and I don't know how to mess with partitions or anything. Regardless of the answer to my first question, how do I install Ubuntu without screwing up Vista or my files or anything? I also want to be able to access my files from both OS's if I can.--71.175.125.178 (talk) 18:32, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I strongly suggest NOT doing this because it appears you are in a bit over your head at the moment... What you want is a dual-boot system with a shared file partition. So, you will need four partitions. One will have Vista and likely be NTFS formatted. Two will have Ubuntu and likely be ext3 and swap formatted. One will be your shared file partition and will need to be FAT32 formatted. That part of the process is difficult itself. You need a program like Partition Magic to resize your current Vista partition and allow three more partitions. The largest should be your shared file area. Then, install Ubuntu using the ext3/swap partitions. Once installed, both Vista and Ubuntu will be able to mount and work with the FAT32 partition. As for installing from an iso, the difficulty is that you have to install from boot. So, you don't have an operating system running. Only BIOS is running. I don't know of any BIOS capabilities that allow you to mount an iso off a hard drive. You must put the iso on a bootable media (ie: a CDROM). -- kainaw™ 19:36, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I would avoid PartitionMagic like the plague. Ubuntu's install has GParted built-in for partition purposes. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 19:40, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Vista doesn't seem to respond well to partitioning. I have tried it using Ubuntu's partitioner (gparted) and Vista wouldn't boot. I also advise against using Partition Magic! It hasn't been updated since 2004 and it ruined an XP partition of mine. The best partitioning program out there is from Acronis and some have even reported problems partitioning Vista with that.

As for the ISO, it depends on your BIOS. My BIOS supports booting from a USB flash drive, so if you have one of those, that might be an option. Ubuntu will mount your Windows drive automatically and will allow you to modify files on it. To access your files on a Linux drive from Windows you will need to install a program like ext2ifs.--Hello. I'm new here, but I'm sure I can help out. (talk) 19:50, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

FYI, Kainaw, Linux has native NTFS read and write (ntfs-3g) support now. --antilived^{T | C | G} 03:19, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Try Wubi. No CD, no partitioning. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 19:40, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Does your BIOS/motherboard use PXE? If so, you may be able to set up a server to host the ISO image for you over the network and boot it via PXE. Freedomlinux (talk) 00:23, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Per User:Consumed Crustacean, just mount the iso using something like Daemon Tools and install Ubuntu through Wubi, nice and easy. -antilived^{T | C | G} 01:25, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

I think Wubi is a separate .exe file which is unrelated to the iso. I tried running it just to see how it works. The installer itself is tiny, and it downloads everything it needs when you run it (making the effort the OP invested in downloading the ISO go to waste). Unless, of course, it crashes, like it did for me. Somehow I don't feel comfortable having an unstable program mess with my boot loader. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 12:39, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Zelda DX

[This question moved from Wikipedia talk:Reference desk by Steve Summit (talk) 20:13, 14 June 2008 (UTC)]

Okay, so here's the story: I own Zelda: Link's Awakening DX, but I don't own a Game Boy Color or Advance. So I ripped the rom to the computer. I discovered a cool glitch that was enabled when I pushed 2 or more directional keys at once other than diagonal movement. I had a file where I was at level 8, but I couldn't find the fire rod, so I gave up and deleted the file. However, I'm now interested in that glitch again; one cool function was that it could launch the Hookshot in a half-parabola. I'm trying to find a SGM (save state) file compatible with VisualBoy, the emulator I'm using, preferably at the end of the game. The problem? I can't find one anywhere! Please help. 71.220.217.201 (talk) 19:44, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Addressing your comments in order

1) I'm interested in knowing how you ripped the cartridge without the gameboy. It can be done, but the only inexpensive ways I know to rip a gameboy cart involve a gameboy and a link cable. And even then, nowadays the special link cable probably costs more than the GBC itself!

2) Yea, a lot of old games have weird glitches if you hold down opposing d-pad buttons. (Which can't easily be done on authentic hardware.) I don't recall which one, but one of the Zelda games allows you to fight Gannon in the first five minutes by this method.

3) There are a couple of saves here. I haven't played the game, so I don't know how close these saves are to what you want. Hope it helps, though.

APL (talk) 18:03, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Valve Sprays

I need help importing sprays to use on Team Fortress 2. I know that you need a .vtf file, but i don't know how to get it to work or how the game to regonize it. Also, I want to know how to convert JPEG's into .vtf. Any suggestions? --69.127.64.22 (talk) 20:50, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I found this on the Steam tech support pages. Any good? CaptainVindaloo ^{t c e} 21:29, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't know. I tried exactly that, and it doesn't work. Maybe the picture has to be in a specific folder? I don't know if the desktop counts. --69.127.64.22 (talk) 13:48, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

The desktop should be fine, just navigate to your desktop and open the file. If you are unable to work out how to navigate to the desktop from TF2, I suggest you try a different directory (folder). The easiest may be to create a new directory in C:\ called Temp and put the file there. Nil Einne (talk) 16:05, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

computer security ?

Is it possible for someone to "tap" a landline phone remotely. A friend of claims some guy on a AIM chat said he was tapping them . Or is that bs. --Rio de oro (talk) 23:45, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Since all phone calls are routed through a great deal of equipment before they arrive at their destination, it's possible to tap the phone at any of those locations, or anywhere (cable or air transmission) in between. The US National Security Agency did such phone taps all the time, apparently illegally, since they didn't get a warrant first. However, "some guy on AIM" isn't likely to have such access, or to brag about it if he does. Therefore, it's the people who don't claim to be tapping your phone you need to worry about. :-) StuRat (talk) 00:26, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

That said, if you're using a wireless phone on your landline, you can be heard on a shortwave radio by your neighbors. If the frequencies are too close together, it may even be picked up by their baby monitor. With that in mind, you should always have sensitive discussions (such as credit card transactions) on a physical, corded phone. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 17:40, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Video file Conversion

I'd like to know how to convert video files (i.e. Windows Media or Quicktime) into a format readable by run-of-the-mill DVD players (not HD or Bluray). Please help. BeefJeaunt (talk) 23:56, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

You may want to try DVD Flick [10] . It will take many types of media files and produce an ISO image and/or burn directly to a DVD using ImgBurn. DVD Flick is only available for Windows, but the source is GPL and also available for download. I would highly recommend DVD Flick due to my personal satisfaction and its reliance on the stable ffmpeg and ImgBurn programs. Freedomlinux (talk) 00:28, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

June 15

Balancing a network

If I have a DSL, UMTS or whatever network conection, I experience different speeds. I suppose that these speeds are determined by the server and by the use of the network at the moment. But, is there some sort of administration (from the side of the provider) to balance the network or it "just happen"? Is there some sort of traffic central that provides more bandwidth for user that have downloaded less or are requesting less? Do some ports (like http or VoIp ports) get preference? GoingOnTracks (talk) 01:10, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, see traffic shaping. --antilived^{T | C | G} 01:22, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

AT&T telephone compatibility

can I use a at&t post paid cell phone set on the at&t go phone network? Kushal (talk) 03:10, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

They use the same cellular network. All you have to do is put a GoPhone SIM card in your phone, and activate it on their website or in a store. Unfortunately, I don't think they sell the SIMs by themselves, so you may have to buy a cheap GoPhone and use the SIM that comes with it. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 17:44, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Online TV guide

Is there a website where I can see all the upcoming over-the-air digital broadcasts scheduled for the week for Detroit, Michigan, USA ? StuRat (talk) 03:30, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

There are quite a number of them, in fact. Try entering terms like "television", and "program schedule" into Google. Some of them seem to handle local listings (channel selection) better than others, but I can't remember enough offhand to be able to make a specific recommendation. --Prestidigitator (talk) 03:31, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

I use titantv.com. I don't see why it wouldn't have broadcasts for Detroit. -- kainaw™ 13:04, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Audio file

I have an MP3 file on my computer that I downloaded. However, the audio only comes from 1 side (speaker or headphone) when I play it. I'd like to be able to listen to it on my ipod. What is the easiest way to equalize the audio so that sound comes from both sides? I am on Windows XP. Thanks. Nadando (talk) 05:34, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Go to Control Panel --> Sounds and Audio Devices --> Audio tab --> Volume button under Sound playback, and a window pops up. Move the icons in the Balance fields to be in the middle. This also may be due to your speaker (or headphone) chord being partly unplugged; this has happened to me a few times.--十八 07:55, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

No, he's trying to re-equalise the file so that both channels have sound. Download Audacity and play around with it. If you still need help post them here. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:41, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Audacity seems a bit of a waste to me. Presuming you are willing to completely discard one channel and it is not joint stereo, there may very well be a way to losslessly convert one channel to a mono MP3 Nil Einne (talk) 16:07, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Music Programs

It seems Reason is like a more inclusive program, let's say, compared to a Digital audio workstation like Pro Tools. Are there any other programs like Reason, and if so, could you provide a list? My other question is if there are "higher-level" programs", than Reason, as it seems like Reason can do everything Pro Tools can do, and I'm wondering if there are any programs that are "higher-in-level" than Reason, and if so, could you provide a list. Thank you!

Pro Tools only mixes and records, but Reason mixes, records, reverberates, etc. etc.. That's what I mean by inclusitivity.

Yes, I'm after the software which does the most things. Hmmm, what's the difference between Pro Tools and Reason? And what exactly is a rack?68.148.164.166 (talk) 08:06, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Save video file from MMS source with Linux?

With Linux, I can use Xine to stream a video file directly from an Microsoft Media Server (MMS) source. But how can I instead save it to disk so I can view it later at my leisure? JIP | Talk 10:45, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

mmsrip --Juliano (T) 12:23, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

MiMMS --h2g2bob (talk) 13:01, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

algorithum key?

Is there such a thing is a algorithum key on the pc that can mess up the fan or something. A certain "person" on a MSN chat made a threat saying he knew my encribiton algorithum key , which is bs. Btw, I did report it to MSN. Is that bs or what . That guy is probly just some punk that has no life.--Rio de oro (talk) 14:49, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

The Canadian Encyclopedia Search Toolbar

Hello. How can I get The Canadian Encyclopedia search toolbar if possible on Internet Explorer 7? Thanks in advance. --Mayfare (talk) 17:32, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

What is the world record for the fastest speed data has traveled?