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June 18

Microsoft-based Virtualization

Virtualization with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition

   I have a question in regard of creating and hosting Virtual Machines on the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition operating-system. The Microsoft website states that Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition only supports a maximum of four virtual machines. Is this limit of four virtual machines an overall limit, or is it the limit of the number of Windows-based virtual machines which can be hosted by a server with the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition operating-system? In other words; can more than four non-Windows based virtual machines run in a single physical Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition operating-system environment?

It doesn't say that. What it says is "Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise licenses include the use right to run up to four additional virtual instances of Windows Server with one server that is licensed with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise." That means, I gather, that the purchase price of this product includes four Windows OS licenses intended for use in VMs. It has nothing to do with the number of VMs the product can support. -- BenRG (talk) 00:26, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Management of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

   Is there any software other than Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 which can be used to manage Virtual Machines running on a server operating on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2? In addition, does anyone know what precisely is the licensing model for Microsoft System Center? The Microsoft System Center homepage can be found here, but I have not been able to figure out the licensing system up to now. It's not anything like the regular model of a server operating-system and Client Access Licenses.

Objective & Comparison

   My objective is to create and host dozens of Linux-based virtual machines on a single physical machine. Which of the two hypervisor operating-systems; Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2; would be more appropriate for this objective? My key considerations are as follows.

1. Compatibility with both Ubuntu Linux and Debian Linux
2. Ease of Management of Virtual Machines
3. Simplicity of Acquisition - Licensing Model
4. Economy - which one is cheaper and/or more cost-effective? Although Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is free to download, it requires Microsoft System Center to manage the virtual machines hosted on it. And I have to date been unable to decipher the licensing model of Microsoft System Center.

   Thanks in advance, Rocketshiporion (talk) 00:12, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't think anyone here has any experience with these products. However, I don't think System Center Virtual Machine Manager is required to use Hyper-V Server; is there a reason you think it is? Also, is there a reason you're considering only Microsoft products? Xen and VMware's products are other options. -- BenRG (talk) 07:48, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I believe that Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager is required to manage Microsoft Hyper-V Server as it is stated on this page under the question "Will System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) support Microsoft Hyper-V Server? When will it be available?" that "System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is required to manage Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. It is available today. An eval version of SCVMM is currently available or download from http://www.microsoft.com/scvmm". I have not yet considered VMware, as I am mostly familiar with Windows and a bit familiar with Linux. Is there any open-source Linux hypervisor which can be used instead of Microsoft Hyper-V Server; i.e. something with similar features? Rocketshiporion (talk) 08:07, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I think the quoted text means that 2008 R2 is the earliest version of SCVMM that will work with Hyper-V Server, not that SCVMM as such is required to use Hyper-V Server. Xen is an open source (GPL) hypervisor with corporate backing from Citrix Systems. I've never used it (or any of these products) but I think it's mature and well regarded. I think its support for Windows guests is rather poor compared to MS and VMware's products, but it supports Linux rather well. -- BenRG (talk) 19:33, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

If you're looking for more information, consider posting your questions here or here. Right now, you seem to be talking to an OSS guy.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 01:43, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. The Microsoft Technet Forum turns out to be quite useful. Rocketshiporion (talk) 06:48, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Can a whole disk be copied?

I have been struggling to repair a laptop with a totally screwed Windows XP operating system, probably caused by a head crash some time ago. I am particularly keen to keep the other programs which are installed on the same disk, programs for which I do not have replacement installation disks. After successfully recovering (most of) the registry, and using chkdsk to try to patch up the hard disk, the machine no longer boots (stopping with a black screen with just the mouse pointer on it). I have tried using a XP installation disk to repair the existing Windows installation, hoping to repair the broken files that chkdsk identified. However, about halfway through the process it suddenly stopped, saying the hard drive is corrupt and it cannot continue. I was wondering if it is possible to copy the whole disk to folder on another machine (obviously taking the disk out and using an external USB housing to do this), reformat the faulty disk so it correctly marks the damaged sectors as unusable, then copy the original contents back again? I know that will still leave me with broken files, but the idea is to fix the disk corruption that prevented the repair installation from completing. Are there any things likely to trip me up later (for example: what happens if 'C:\System Volume Information' ends up with different attributes from the original)? Astronaut (talk) 03:09, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

It's worth trying. Norton Ghost can do a sector copy of your drive to (a) another drive, or (b) a file. You could then reformat the bad drive and copy the stuff from (a) or (b) back to it, preferably sector-by-sector. (List of disk cloning software lists other software that can do some or all of this.) However, I strongly caution you not to use that drive anymore. If it actually has bad/damaged sectors and this isn't just a software problem, then more bad sectors will appear. I'd advise you to replace the drive. Comet Tuttle (talk) 03:27, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

If you know *nix (linux/unix) at all, it's very easy. You could get a Knoppix live disk and then run dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -9 -c >> DRIVEIMAGE.img.gz. This will direct copy the disk (in this case SDA, adjust for your purposes), compress it with gzip, and then pipe it out to a file. Adjust the output appropriately so it doesn't overwrite something. This creates a byte-for-byte copy of the original image. If you have to write it back, it's easy to reverse that command. Shadowjams (talk) 08:17, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Just in my own experience, GParted is exceptionally reliable and easy to use for this sort of thing. It does not require you to type in any obscure Linux commands to work. I've used it many times (as a non-Unix user) to make clones from one drive to another. Whether it will work exactly right depends on more than that, but that's a pretty easy thing to do. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:17, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

If the disk is physically damaged, ddrescue may be of interest. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 20:27, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Is is possible to navigate the Rolling Stone website at all?

When I go to read music reviews or articles and then I read the comment section, sometimes the comments are a little long to display in its entirety, so I have to click on the comment to finish reading it, and instead I get redirected to Rolling Stone's main page. What the hell? 24.189.90.68 (talk) 05:58, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Please provide an explicit example for us to contemplate. -- SGBailey (talk) 12:50, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

This is common when reading archived pages on a web site, including our own Ref Desk archives. What happens is that the pages to which the link pointed have moved and it can't find the new location of the (now archived) page, so instead of giving you a general "page not found" error, they redirect you to their home page. Yes, it is annoying and there are ways to archive without breaking links. One way is to put everything in it's final archive position right away, initially providing links from the main page, then sever those links from the main page once it has been "archived", but leave all the internal links in place. Another option is to have a bot go through and search for any broken links created when a page is moved, and modify those links to point to the new location. Finally, anyone moving a page could be forced to leave a redirect behind, so any links to the old page can still find the new page. StuRat (talk) 15:23, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Video_game_console vs. laptops

Why do video game consoles exist at all? At the beginning, a couple of decades ago, when computers were expensive, they certainly had a purpose. But, nowadays, why would someone not buy a laptop instead of a video game console? Laptops can do everything and more, can't they?--Mr.K. (talk) 09:29, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

You're entering into a long debate my friend. Short version of the argument is that consoles can force developers to write programs a certain way and can also optimize graphical functions. Hence why lots of parallel ps3s can do good distributed projects. That said, most major studios also like to have cross-platform compatibility, including PC. The second piece is the economics. Many consoles are priced below cost on the expectation of selling games for them. Like buying a printer and then buying ink. Or a cellphone, and buying service. Shadowjams (talk) 09:40, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Also, because consoles are entirely built-for-purpose, and their purpose is not as broad as that of a PC, it is generally considered that they have less problems due to conflicts or system inadequacies. That doesn't however make it less likely that an issue is present with the hardware itself, although you would expect it to be put under a lot of scrutiny. Findstr (talk) 11:41, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

There have been cases where I've bought a game and then was later disappointed that it wouldn't run on my computer. Hardware and software differences mean that games will not run the same on every system, and sometimes won't run at all. Except for a few rare exceptions, games designed for a particular game console will always run on that console. The hardware and software is all standardized. If I buy a game for my console, I don't have to worry about the requirements. I know it will run because I have the console. I don't have to compare the game's requirements to my machine's specs, or mess with settings to find the ideal configuration. I just stick the disc in and start playing. And the PC is freed up to do something useful while I'm wasting my time playing games. Reach Out to the Truth 20:35, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

A large part of it is simply marketing. A lot of promotion is put into game consoles (Both to consumers and to developers), but there doesn't exist any single company who could do the same for PC gaming. (Microsoft would be the best bet, but they've already got a console.) APL (talk) 21:59, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Citing PDFs

Not sure if this is entirely the best place to put it, but USAir Flight 405, an article I'm working on, was just turned down for WP:GA because the number of inline sources was too low. I have based a good deal of the article on the NTSB report on the accident, and most of the quotes in the article come from this PDF. However, I don't want to have the article littered with [1]s, because it would look messy and improper. Is there a way to have inline citations link directly to a certain page in the PDF? I know the URL doesn't change depending on what page you are on, so I was wondering if there was any other way. Thanks in advance, WackyWace ^{talk to me, people} 11:52, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

You can add #page=pagenumber to the end of the URL, though this doesn't always work in every browser. Recent Internet Explorer and Firefox releases should support it, though. NTSB report, page 12. Note that this will use the actual PDF page numbers, which aren't always the same as the numbers printed on the page you're displaying. so the previous link will show pages 3 and 4 of the document, as they are displayed on the 12th page of the PDF file. -- 109.193.27.65 (talk) 12:14, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Or you could just cite the page in the citation ("Report on XYZ, page 6."), without the hotlink. That's an easy way to do it that doesn't depend on PDF readers behaving correctly. Perhaps a better way, on the whole. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:02, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

If this led to the article being quick-failed, I would ask the reviewer how he or she would prefer the article to be referenced - and if there was any chance of him or her reconsidering their decision. decltype (talk) 15:56, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

What they want, I gather, is not just a million "general" citations, but citations that say, "this statement comes from page 6." It's not an unreasonable thing to ask for, though it does create a lot of work for someone else, of course. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:02, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

True that. A recent discussion on WT:GAN seemed to conclude that page numbers should normally be given. However, there's many ways of doing that. For example the "shortened" style as seen in WP:CITESHORT. I encouraged the author to contact the reviewer to ensure that he or she didn't do it in a manner that would result in another failed review. decltype (talk) 17:47, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

HTML web page creation using ASP

I can create an HTML formatted web page using ASP code and save it to the server logical path. I can also create an HTML formatted web page manually using a text editor on the client and save it to the server using the URL path. However, what I want to do is to save the HTML formatted web page I can create using ASP not to the logical path on the server but to the URL path. How do I do this? 71.100.0.224 (talk) 14:02, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

When you save it to the URL path, would I be right in thinking that you're doing this with FTP? --Phil Holmes (talk) 17:02, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

When I save it from the client I can use DOS FTP or FrontPage FTP of FrontPage HTTP since the server is FrontPage and ASP enabled. The problem is in saving a file generated by an ASP program on the server to the URL path I manually access client side by saving using FTP or HTTP post. 71.100.0.224 (talk) 21:21, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

File Location	Accessed from	Access Type	Path
Server	Server (via ASP)	Logical	d:\\logical folder name\\my file name
		Physical	d:\\hard drive folder name\\physical folder name\\file name
	Server (via IP)	IIS	d:\\inetpub\\physical folder name\\file name
	Client (via FTP/HTTP)	URL	http:/logical folder name.the domain name.the extention/physical folder name/file name

---

If you can post your page to your website, you could send it via the HTTP POST method. The basic syntax is shown here [1]. Alternatively you could try using the inbuilt FTP exe as shown here: [2]. If you can't do that, there are a number of other suggestions that you could try by googling "asp ftp". --Phil Holmes (talk) 10:30, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Firefox RAM

With 10 tabs open (normal wikipedia pages, not games or fancy javascript processes or anything else) Firefox 3.6.3 is using 300mb of RAM after 5 mins of use. Is this normal? How could I reduce this without using just one tab as that basically defeats the point tabs. Are older versions of Firefox (versions 1 or 2) less resource hungry? 82.43.90.93 (talk) 16:00, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

On my Mac, I opened up 10 Firefox tabs of CNN.com (a pretty resource-heavy page), and got about 200MB of RAM. I did the same in Safari and got the same result. When it is 10 pages of Google.com, it's only 80MB or so (50MB on Safari). So a lot of that is likely dependent on the page content, how many extra "helpers" the browser has to load to display it. (In terms of "raw size," CNN and Google are pretty similar: 200KB of content for CNN, 103KB for Google. But in terms of page complexity—amount of elements to render, calls made to other scripts, Flash ads and etc.—the CNN page is much more complex.) I suspect this is probably pretty standard but I'd be interested to hear how other browsers perform. I think it is probably unavoidable though that modern browsers rendering modern webpages are very resource-intensive. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:05, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Most resource usage complaints for Firefox can be traced down to its addons - try disabling all the addons and do the same test again, see if there's a significant difference. If there is you can re-enable them one by one until the problem come back. But if you aren't really running out of RAM, reducing Firefox's RAM usage probably won't do much at all. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:11, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Greasemonkey scripts

Resolved

Is it possible for a single greasemonkey script to take different actions depending on different url you're viewing? For example, I have the following two separate scripts;

// ==UserScript==
// @include       http://en.wikipedia.org/*
// ==/UserScript==
document.title = 'YOU ARE ON EN [DOT] WIKIEDPIA [DOT] ORG';

// ==UserScript==
// @include       http://google.com*
// ==/UserScript==
document.title = 'YOU ARE ON GOOGLE [DOT] COM';

Is there a way I can combine the function of these two separate scripts into one script? Installing potentially thousands of separate scripts for every website I might want to alter the title of seems like a waste of time if one single easily updateable script can do it. Thanks for your help 82.43.90.93 (talk) 16:15, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Something like this? (My Regex is bit rusty, apologies for any inadvertent error)

// ==UserScript==
// @include       * //enabled on all websites
// ==/UserScript==
if(location.href.match(/http:\/\/wikipedia\.org/))
       document.title = 'YOU ARE ON EN [DOT] WIKIEDPIA [DOT] ORG';
else if(location.href.match(/http:\/\/google\.com/))
       document.title = 'YOU ARE ON GOOGLE [DOT] COM';
else if(....)
  ...

--59.95.103.172 (talk) 16:32, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

The script doesn't seem to be working :( Thank you anyway for trying 82.43.90.93 (talk) 19:55, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• Works for me after a slight modification to the Regex :)

//==UserScript==
// @name           asdf
// @namespace      qwerty
// @include        *
// ==/UserScript==

if(location.href.match(/http:\/\/en\.wikipedia\.org/))
       document.title = 'YOU ARE ON EN [DOT] WIKIEDPIA [DOT] ORG';
else if(location.href.match(/http:\/\/.*google\.com/))
       document.title = 'YOU ARE ON GOOGLE [DOT] COM';

It is also possible to "extract" the name of the website from the URL; that way it will work on all websites and without an if...else if ladder. --59.95.99.64 (talk) 20:17, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

AWESOME! Thank you so much! 82.43.90.93 (talk) 20:44, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Plustek OpticFilm Scanner 7500i and 7600i

Can anyone find me some real concrete differences between these two models, apart from the price tag?

The plustek website and review site do not indicate this and I have found it pretty frustrating after quite some research.

Anyone have anything concrete?

86.140.210.188 (talk) 18:14, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

The Plustek does have a feature "comparison" page. Primary differences seem to be the lamp (7600i has a white LED, 7500i uses a cold cathode), different preview speeds (7500i is faster), and scanning speeds (7500i is faster except at 7200 dpi, for some reason). --Mr.98 (talk) 20:12, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I wasn't signed in but I had no history

If I look at my history with CTRL-H I can only see today and yesterday. Earlier this week, there was no yesterday since I had not been on the computer in several days, yet the first two Wikipedia pages I went to showed I was signed in. The third said I wasn't. Perhaps it had been 30 days, but there shouldn't have still been pages in my history if I can't see my history beyond the previous day--right?Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 21:20, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I often see "unusual" Wikipedia claims that I am logged in after days away from the computer. I believe it's just because I've read the page before and it's been stored locally in the browser cache, and the copy of the page that is in the cache says at the top "Comet Tuttle - my talk - my preferences"...etc. I think the third page you visited in your example above was a new page you didn't have in your browser cache. If this bothers you, you can clear your browser cache. Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:30, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, like I said, when I do CTRL-H there is no history beyond "yesterday". So how could it still be in my browser cache? That's what I'm trying to answer. I used to clear my history daily but then I found out there wasn't any left after I had been gone several days. Or so I thought.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 15:31, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

The history and the browser cache are separate things. You can see this in Internet Explorer 8 by going to Tools -> Internet Options, and on the General tab, in the "Browsing history" section, click "Settings". You'll notice that there's a "Temporary Internet Files" section, where you can tell it how much disk space to use to store copies of web pages you visit; and, separately, the "History" section lets you tell it how many days to keep a history of the pages you visited. If the history is set to, say, 3 days, and you come back 5 days later, the history will show as empty; but everything in the Temporary Internet Files cache will still be there. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:25, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

So I should still be deleting every day or at least frequently to keep it from getting cluttered.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:35, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

When is a gigabyte not a gigabyte?

When a company advertises certain storage devices, they count the bytes in a base of 10 to yield a greater number of gigabytes than if they were counted in a base of two and this leads to confusion when ignorant end-users install these devices and discover that they appear to offer lower capacity than advertised. Does this apply to all data storage devices, or just HDDs? What about SSDs? Just because it appears to be standard in the industry, does that mean it must remain an acceptable practise? Could it not be deemed misleading by the UK Office of Fair Trading, requiring all sellers to describe their goods in binary quantities of bytes? --78.150.225.204 (talk) 22:25, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

This "issue" has occurred in the US and there have been class action lawsuits about the allegedly "missing" storage, and the issue is behind the recent use of the odious term gibibytes and its symbol "GiB". Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:32, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Some space from the advertised size is always lost by system files and file tables etc 82.43.90.93 (talk) 22:34, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I think that ram is usually still advertised in the traditional base two units, (Partially because it needs to be packaged that way, for technical reasons.) But most storage cards are sold advertised in the SI base ten units.

I would assume that the reason it's not considered fraudulent is because of the IEEE 1541-2002 standard which attempts to define the SI base ten units as correct, and give the traditional base two units silly names.

Adaptation of this standard has been haphazard outside of storage manufacturers. Many claim that using base ten units for computer storage is unintuitive, while others claim that it was politically motivated by hardware manufacturers. APL (talk) 22:41, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

"Giga" almost always means 10⁹. The only widespread exceptions are (a) RAM sizes and (b) sizes reported by commonly used file management software like Windows Explorer. The software could easily be changed to use decimal units instead; in my opinion, this should have happened long ago. -- BenRG (talk) 03:09, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

This issue gets worse as memory, disk space, etc. get bigger. Here's a chart of the difference between the base 10 and base 2 units at different scales:

KB  2.4%
MB  4.9%
GB  7.4%
TB 10.0%

So, while 2.4% is small enough to ignore, a 10% difference begins to become significant. 68.248.75.49 (talk) 04:53, 19 June 2010 (UTC)II

They do it with things as small as pen drives. I know my "2 GB" pen drive is actually about 1.9 gigs, because of this rounding. I think everything should be rounded down to decimal units, instead of up to binary. As software becomes more accessible, so should its workings and terminology. {{Sonia|ping|enlist}} 05:11, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

It's not roundng. It's different units. And the lower number is when it's reported in binary. So if you have 2 GB/1.9GB then the 2GB is decimal while the 1.9 is binary. Taemyr (talk) 15:59, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

June 19

SATA-to-USB bridge

Hello! I bought a SATA-to-USB bridge to connect my old laptop's SATA master drive (don't worry; I know the drive still works even though the laptop broke) to my desktop computer with the USB. When I connect the drive, Windows recognizes a "USB Mass Storage Device" has been connected, and states that the corresponding drivers have been successfully installed, but the drive doesn't show up in My Computer. I accessed the disk management utility, and it recognizes the drive but says it's uninitialized, but when I try to initialize it, I get an error: "Device is not ready." I tried this on two different computers (Vista and Win7) and two different SATA drives, and it didn't work. Am I missing a step? Does it have to do with the drive's configuration as a master drive? I wanted to use this bridge for emergencies when a computer breaks down and I need to access its hard drive. Would that be impossible anyway? Does Windows need to format a drive before it can mount it? The bridge was cheap, so I can't rule out the possibility that it's just crap, but the OS's ability to recognize it as a USB storage device gives me some hope. Thank you in advance for any comments or suggestions!--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 02:06, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Why not just connect it to your desktop directly via SATA? The SATA interface is exactly the same on laptops as on desktops, it'd be faster and almost guaranteed to work. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:07, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Does that drive shows up in disk management ? -Yyy (talk) 10:48, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, I can't connect it to one of my desktops because they only support the PATA interface. I have a PATA-to-SATA adapter, but I'm already using it in a permanent setup, so I bought this to try to save myself a lot of the hassle of opening desktops and disconnecting and reconnecting the adapter. Yes, disk management recognizes athe drive is connected, but it doesn't know what to do with it. I should also mention that the SATA drive is adequately powered from a wall AC converter that came with the bridge.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 20:52, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

It did not assign drive letter automatically? Does windows recognizes that drive as foematted? If do, then it should be possible to assign drive letter manually. (change drive letter and paths in right click menu on partition) -Yyy (talk) 07:27, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

visual land vl-875

I bought a Visual Land VL-875 media player in March. Now, it is having trouble connecting with my Windows OSs (xP and Vista). When i plug it into the USB port, it thinks the media player is charging. But when I used a friend's USB cord meant for a printer, it works! Any way to correct the computer connection problem? thanks for ur help :-)--LastLived 02:30, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

The VL-875's USB cable is probably out-of-order. Try replacing the USB Cable. If that still doesn't work, then try uninstalling then reinstalling the VL-875's drivers. Rocketshiporion (talk) 05:14, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Free natural voice text reader

Do you know where I can get a free natural voice text reader? I've already downloaded several text readers, but the only voice available is computer Sam which sounds very robotic. I'd appreciate it if someone could point me to a place where I can download for free (most important) a text reader which has natural-sounding voices that can be played (most important). Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.109.119.6 (talk) 04:02, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure I've ever heard a speech-synth program that I really thought was "natural". But a good place to start would be Wikipedia's rather incomplete Comparison of speech synthesizers APL (talk) 06:21, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Microsoft Sam is the default voice of Microsoft Windows XP. Microsoft Anna, the default voice of Windows Vista and Windows 7, is far improved. However, finding a free voice better than these is probably impossible. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 06:24, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Also, 99.9 % of all freeware text-to-speech applications available on the Internet for Microsoft Windows do not implement their own text-to-speech engine and voice, but rely on the Microsoft Speech API (SAPI), included in Windows. Hence, the only thing these programs actually do, is to call the Windows function SpVoice.Speak("This is a text"). You know, it is like all these freeware (and even shareware) web browsers that actually are nothing but alternative front-end GUIs of the Internet Explorer web browser. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 06:34, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

url

Resolved

I want to generate a list of the same url, each time appending a higher number onto the end. For example http://www.example.com/page/1 to http://www.example.com/page/100 and everything in between (http://www.example.com/page/2, http://www.example.com/page/3, etc). How can I do this automatically? 82.43.90.93 (talk) 10:08, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Save the following function as a bookmark:

Code

javascript:(function(){%20function%20selectColor(i)%20{%20return%20["#fdc",%20"#cdf",%20"#bfd",%20"#dbf",%20"#fbd"]%20[i%5];%20}%20var%20u=location.href,%20ul=u.length;%20var%20tparts=[""],%20zparts=[],%20nz=0;%20function%20isDigit(c)%20{%20return%20("0"%20<=%20c%20&&%20c%20<=%20"9");%20}%20for%20(i=0;%20i<ul;%20)%20{%20for%20(;%20i<ul%20&&%20!isDigit(u.charAt(i));%20++i)%20tparts[nz]%20+=%20u.charAt(i);%20if(i<ul)%20{%20zparts[nz]="";%20for%20(;%20i<ul%20&&%20isDigit(u.charAt(i));%20++i)%20zparts[nz]%20+=%20u.charAt(i);%20tparts[nz+1]="";%20++nz;%20}%20}%20if(!nz)%20{%20alert("No%20numbers%20in%20URL.");%20return;%20}%20D=window.open().document;%20D.write();%20D.close();%20function%20a(n)%20{%20A(D.body,n);%20}%20function%20A(p,n)%20{%20p.appendChild(n);%20}%20function%20E(q)%20{%20return%20D.createElement(q);%20}%20function%20cT(t)%20{%20return%20D.createTextNode(t)%20}%20function%20cBR()%20{%20return%20E("br");%20}%20function%20cS(t,ci)%20{%20var%20s=E("span");%20s.style.background=selectColor(ci);%20s.style.fontWeight="bold";%20A(s,%20cT(t));%20return%20s;%20}%20function%20cTB(v,oc)%20{%20var%20b=E("input");%20b.size=6;%20b.value=v;%20b.addEventListener("input",%20oc,%20false);%20return%20b;%20}%20function%20cCB(t,oc)%20{%20var%20L=E("label"),%20b=E("input");%20b.type="checkbox";%20b.checked=true;%20b.onchange=oc;%20A(L,b);%20A(L,cT(t));%20return%20L;%20}%20function%20cL(nz,tparts,zparts)%20{%20var%20L=E("a");%20var%20u="";%20for%20(var%20i=0;%20i<nz;%20++i)%20{%20A(L,cT(tparts[i]));%20A(L,cS(zparts[i],%20i));%20u%20+=%20tparts[i]+zparts[i];%20}%20A(L,cT(tparts[nz]));%20u%20+=%20tparts[nz];%20L.href=u;%20L.target="_blank";%20return%20L;%20}%20a(cT("Original%20URL:%20"));%20a(cBR());%20a(cL(nz,%20tparts,%20zparts));%20a(cBR());%20a(cBR());%20var%20fromBoxes=[],%20toBoxes=[],%20padChecks=[];%20for%20(i=0;%20i<nz;%20++i)%20{%20a(cT("Run%20"));%20a(cS(zparts[i],%20i));%20a(cT("%20from%20"));%20a(fromBoxes[i]=cTB(zparts[i],%20listURLs));%20a(cT("%20to%20"));%20a(toBoxes[i]=cTB(zparts[i],%20listURLs));%20a(cT("%20("));%20a(j=cCB("%20Pad%20with%20zeroes%20to%20maintain%20length",%20listURLs));%20padChecks[i]=j.childNodes[0];%20a(cT(")"));%20a(cBR());%20}%20a(cBR());%20resultDiv=E("div");%20a(resultDiv);%20listURLs();%20function%20listURLs()%20{%20while%20(resultDiv.childNodes.length)%20resultDiv.removeChild(resultDiv.childNodes[0]);%20var%20lows=[],%20highs=[];%20for%20(i=0;%20i<nz;%20++i)%20{%20lows[i]=parseInt(fromBoxes[i].value,%2010);%20highs[i]=parseInt(toBoxes[i].value,%2010);%20if(highs[i]-lows[i]%20>%20999)%20{%20A(resultDiv,%20cT("Too%20many"));%20return;%20}%20}%20urls=[];%20function%20cb(sta)%20{%20var%20newzparts=[];%20for%20(var%20i=0;%20i<nz;%20++i)%20{%20var%20z=""+sta[i];%20if(padChecks[i].checked)%20while%20(z.length%20<%20zparts[i].length)%20z="0"+z;%20newzparts[i]=z;%20}%20A(resultDiv,%20cL(nz,%20tparts,%20newzparts));%20A(resultDiv,%20cBR());%20}%20fors(nz,%20cb,%20lows,%20highs);%20}%20function%20fors%20(n,%20callback,%20lows,%20highs)%20{%20function%20fors_inner%20(states,%20v)%20{%20if(v%20>=%20n)%20callback(states);%20else%20for%20(states[v]=lows[v];%20states[v]%20<=%20highs[v];%20++(states[v]))%20fors_inner(states,%20v+1);%20}%20fors_inner%20([],%200);%20}%20})()

Navigate to the first page you want, click on the bookmark and it will allow you set the initial and final value of your page range. I use this all the time when downloading a list of sequentially numbered pictures for example. If you JUST want to generate the list though, doing it in Excel is easy. Put the standard part of the URL in one column and copy-paste it all the way down; put the numbers sequentially in the next column, then use the CONCATENATE command to combine the 2 into a third column. Or wait for someone to post a Perl script to do this in one line in the next few minutes :) Zunaid 10:17, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

That's great, it generates a nice list which is just what I needed. Thanks! 82.43.90.93 (talk) 10:53, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

How to translate a Word Document into forum code

Hi. I have an extremely long document that I want to post onto a forum. The document uses bold, italics, strikethrough, and underline however, which normally don't show up when copy-pasted into a forum text box.

I've been attempting to find a way to use Word's find/replace feature to add [b][/b], [i][/i], [s][/s], or [u][/u] around the necessary parts, but I haven't had much luck. Is there an easy way to do this, with or without the Find/replace feature? --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 10:57, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

You could paste it into a forum with a WYSIWYG editor, then turn off javascript and preview it. It should then show the code. Findstr (talk) 13:13, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Save as html, open in a decent text editor like Notepad+ or Emacs, trim off the opening verbiage, and replace the html bold, underline, italic tags with their (very similar) forumcode equivalents. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 13:55, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Server Requirements

   Now I am looking for a server which meets all of the following requirements; I have considered major brands such as HP, IBM and Dell; but I have not been able to find anything similar. Maybe someone here has come across such a machine...

1. Has eight processor sockets, and is able to accomodate eight-core Intel 6500 or 7500 series processors.
2. Accomodates one terabyte of DDR3 ECC RAM running at atleast 800MHz, and preferably 1066MHz or 1333MHz.
3. Has two internal 2.5" drive bays, and is able to boot from a RAID 1 SATA SSD array.
4. Has atleast three, and preferably four, PCIe 2.0 x8 Slots.
5. Consumes no more than two to three units of rackspace.
6. Has a depth not exceeding 100 centimeters (39.37 inches).
7. Has a motherboard which supports Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.
8. Is entirely compatible with the Dell PERC H800 External RAID Controller and Dell MD1200 DAS.

   In my (perhaps hasty) enthusiasm, I have already placed an order ten days ago for a Dell MD1200 DAS to be configured with twelve 2TB 3.5" 7200rpm NL-SAS 6Gb/s HHDs in a RAID 6 array; before actually finding a compatible and suitable server, or deciding confirmedly what hypervisor I'm going to run on the server. So here I am again... Thanks in advance. Rocketshiporion (talk) 11:15, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

You should really be talking your your account reps at those companies. Unless they're totally worthless, like ours. --mboverload@ 07:46, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Create a Wikipedia Bot with no experience

Hello, I'm looking for someone that is willing to teach me( or tell me) how to create a Wikipedia bot. Is this possible? Sir Stupidity (talk) 11:21, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

User:Chzz might be able to help you. They use bots a lot. Of course there are other people too but that's the person I thought of first. You might want to ask at the WP:HD instead, someone might be able to point you to a help page or something. Chevymontecarlo 11:28, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Hi there, Sir Stupidity.

See also: Wikipedia:Creating a bot

Thanks for you interest and enthusiasm.

A lot of new users get interested in Wikipedia bot, and I'm not really sure why. Bots mostly perform very boring repetitive tasks. They require considerable programming expertise, and they need approval - it's not easy. We already have bots to do most things, so if you have something that needs doing, it is much easier to ask an existing bot to do it, than to write a new one.

Before you start to create one, you need two things;

1. Computer programming skills. This part is not within the scope of "Wikipedia help" - if you do not know how to write computer programs, then look around for tutorials either online, or in books, or college/university courses.
   
2. A fairly high level of experience with Wikipedia; as you only appear to have made 60 edits, and created this account a week ago, I suggest waiting a while.

Then, you could try out auto-wiki browser, which a semi-automatic editor - you need around 500 mainspace edits, and a good editing history, to use it. Use of AWB helps to learn about some of the many complications in automated editing.

Beyond that, you should carefully study the Wikipedia:Bot policy, and get involved in the Bot Approvals Group - watch what happens there, with other requests for approval. And, study the code of existing bots to see how they work.

Feel free to ask me any further questions on User talk:Chzz, or even better, talk to helpers live, with this. Chzz  ►  14:22, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

assign JSON response to variable

The twitter API (the JSON version) returns the response in the form of an array. Just like it's supposed to. If I just say,

<script lang="javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.json"/>

then it just executes the object, and I've got an object floating around without any way to access it. How would I assign the response to a variable so I can manipulate it? Thanks, 74.177.0.70 (talk) 14:31, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

I will mention that I have already tried the callback parameter (http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.json?callback=onCallback, where onCallback is a function that is called when the response comes back), and it appears to not work. 74.177.0.70 (talk) 14:48, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Call eval on the JSON text to assign it to a variable. Ale_Jrb^talk 14:50, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

i.e. if you're using onCallback as your handler, Twitter will call onCallback ( 'JSON text' ); - as your callback function, have function onCallback ( text ) { var data = eval ( text ); } and so on. Don't forget that you should make sure you sanitise anything you request from an external server before calling eval on it. Ale_Jrb^talk 14:53, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Or, if you're only targetting modern browsers, you can use the native JSON.parse - I think most JavaScript libraries will automatically use the native function if available. Firefox example is here. Ale_Jrb^talk 14:58, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

(same person, different ip) Thank you. I forgot to turn it into an object. I was just trying to manipulate the raw text. This should fix it. 75.66.64.192 (talk) 16:51, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, screw it, I'll just log in. I am the same person as the two IPs. It still isn't working (using eval or JSON.parse), so I placed an alert in the callback function to see if it was even being called, and it isn't. It appears that twitter isn't calling the callback function when it returns the text.

Here's the full code of the page that I'm referring to, html and all. For simplicity's sake, I've only decided to use the "source" attribute of each tweet, and I've limited it to 20 tweets. I've placed several alerts in there just to check if it's working (which it isn't). The jsr_class.js is a pretty straightforward application of a dynamic script tag, explained here. Any help on what's going wrong? [flaminglawyer] 17:30, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Why won't back button work?

Actually, there was no reason I needed to use it, as I didn't need to go back to anywhere in particular. But I've edited Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which is 158,000 bytes, several times. Once, when I tried to go back, the back button was no longer blue and I couldn't.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 17:31, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Is your browser configured to not save internet history? Arloz (talk) 18:42, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

No, that's not it. Ordinarily, it will go back. I've asked this question before. It used to happen with very large emails I sent myself. Before I had a computer that was the only way to store information from web sites I thought wouldn't be accessible after a period of time.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:23, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Photoshop Tutorials

Could anyone recommend an excellent site for teaching oneself photoshop, mostly filling in gaps with the basics then perhaps building up to more complicated things. But rather than just googling or youtubing CS4 tutorials and coming up with a list of stuff that simply shows you how to make a certain type of photo (e.g. change this ordinary photo into a dreamy portrait, or turn this face in to a character from avatar, both of which were proposed fairly highly on the results lists I found, but which just show you the settings you need to change, as opposed to showing you how the different settings can be used more generally to create specific effects) I would like a good site that teaches you the elements of photoshop and the different ways to use them, e.g. mastering layers, certain filters, layer modes, smart objects, etc.

If there is one also that will allow you access to the images in the tutorials so you can guide yourself step by step that may be helpful.

Any suggestions?

86.140.210.188 (talk) 18:58, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

http://tv.adobe.com/show/learn-photoshop-cs4/. There are other tutorials on Photoshop (and all Adobe products) scattered around tv.adobe.com.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 21:22, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

eBay weird

I've been trying to bid on things on eBay, and literally every time I've bid, someone else bids within the 10 seconds or so that it takes to confirm a bid. I get that this would happen if the auctions were nearing the end, and I know that would happen if there was a bidding war, but literally, there's like 8 days left on some items, no bids, and then suddenly someone's "happened" to bid right before me. What gives? It's literally mechanical, this. It cannot be just coincidence that every item I go to, this happens. -- 99.228.45.121 (talk) 21:19, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Are you sure you understand the basics of eBay's bidding system? Each person bids an amount that is the maximum they are willing to bid at that time. Another person comes along and bids their maximum. But the amount shown as the "current bid" is the minimum amount up to anyone's maximum that is greater than the previous maximum bid.

If I come on to a piece which current bid is $1, and I bid $5, and there are no other bids at that time, the current bid is liable to show up as $1.50 or $2. Then you come along and bid $4; the current bid is going to jump to $4.50 or $5; more than your bid, and do it automatically because of what I put as my maximum when I bid in the first place.

rc (talk) 22:38, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes. But that's only a partial solution. For many items (ie:items that don't have a firmly established, precise market price) there is no magical price where I would happily pay that price, but refuse to pay fifty cents more.

In fact, some people would argue that it is the very essence of an auction: A bidding war. It's not really a bidding war if there's no back-and-forth. Your options are to either bid reasonably, secure in the knowledge that someone will bid a nickle more three seconds before the auction ends, or to bid too much, and hope that no one calls your bluff. APL (talk) 03:05, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Yep, what rc says is right - it's explained at this page - http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/automatic-bidding.html 83.100.252.174 (talk) 22:46, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

There are two possibilities. One is automatic bidding—but in that case, it'll tell you immediately that you're not the highest bidder, yet. The other is using a piece of software, known as auction sniping. --Mr.98 (talk) 07:16, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

At the risk of giving away a secret, my preferred strategy is to avoid round numbers at all costs. Many times I have won auctions by bidding $50.55 that I would lost in the final seconds if I had bid an even $50.00 APL (talk) 03:05, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

June 20

Window Media Player

Is there some way I can adjust the contrast, brightness etc. of the movie on WMP ?  Jon Ascton  (talk) 05:45, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

The latest Windows Media Player allows you to right-click the playing video, choose "Enhancements", then "Video settings" to change these settings. Alternatively, you can change the settings on your monitor. PleaseStand ^(talk) 09:39, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Of course I know that ! Tried it, did'nt work  Jon Ascton  (talk) 01:54, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Laplace transform C++ libraries

I am trying to make a circuit simulator using C++. Can anybody tell me if there are any libraries available that can do laplace transforms, using C++? 59.93.207.169 (talk) 06:39, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

There are symbolic algebra systems for C++, and there are numerical integration packages for C++. Which do you need? Here is some code in C# for a numerical Laplace transform, Numerical Laplace Transforms and Inverse Transforms in C#. (After a cursory scan, I think most of that code would work in C++, with minor symbolic/syntactic tweaks). It's worth noting that I think you are on the "wrong track" if you're trying to make a circuit simulator and need to compute a Laplace transform explicitly. Few numerical algorithms, especially circuit simulators, use the Laplace transform, because the more computationally-efficient FFT can do the job "most of the time." More commonly, instead of actually performing or computing the Laplace transform, you really just want to perform pole-zero analysis (like if you are making a Bode plot - so you don't actually ever need to compute the Laplace transform for the circuit in question. You need to structure your circuit simulator so that it is "operating" in the Laplace domain - i.e., understands the meaning of a pole and a zero - and uses that to generate the output (typically, a time-domain "transient response" or a frequency spectrum plot). Nimur (talk) 16:44, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

And I forgot to mention - if you want inverse Laplace transforms, be sure to do partial fraction decomposition first, so that you always end up with a sum of second-order Laplace-domain terms. This will simplify your life greatly - every inverse-transform will be a simple sum of decaying cosines and will be "free" (computationally) to compute. Partial fraction decomposition will probably be some horrible linear operation on your coefficient matrix (i.e., An Efficient Parallel Algorithm for the Solution of a Tridiagonal Linear System of Equations ("This particular computation is of general interest because it is an efficient method for evaluating partial fraction expansions and linear difference equations in parallel)". Nimur (talk) 16:57, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

I just wanted to second Nimur's comment -- you might want to consider going about this another way. Symbolic math libraries exist, and some can do Laplace transforms of specific forms of equations (like polynomials), it's not really practical to build a large circuit simulator this way. But as a kind of broader comment on this approach, the utility of both the Laplace transform and Fourier transform methods depend on your circuit being more or less linear. As soon as you want to add things like diodes, transistors, or realistic circuit elements, everything falls apart. I would recommend instead considering learning about the numerical solution of systems of ODEs (Numerical ordinary differential equations), which let you directly transform a set of differential equations into a system you can solve numerically. Specifically, SPICE (the transient part of it) solves a system of differential equations with constraints (Differential algebraic equation), some of which may be nonlinear. This involves a nonlinear root finding algorithm (like Newton's method) and an implicit numerical ODE solver using something like backward Euler. A good general introduction to the numerical solution of ODEs can be found here: An Introduction to Numerical Analysis for Computational Fluid Mechanics. A collection of more advanced papers and a thesis specifically devoted to simulation of nonlinear circuits is here: [3]. And of course, you can always refer to the SPICE source code, which already does all of this. 128.12.174.253 (talk) 18:07, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Windows XP Firewall - no exceptions ever

I was surprised to find that even with the "no exceptions" option ticked, I could still see webpages. The help information says "When you select Don’t allow exceptions, you can still send and receive e-mail, use an instant messaging program, or view most Web pages"!

What would happen if I kept "no exceptions" ticked all the time? The only thing I do is surf the internet with Firefox, nothing else. Thanks 92.28.240.72 (talk) 15:43, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes you can see webpages = because you (I the home computer) requested it. Generally the firewall blocks external computers from requesting info on your computer.

If you leave 'no exceptions' on then you won't be able to do things like file sharing on a network etc. To see what the effect will be look at the exceptions listed in the exeptions tab eg control panel>>security>>firewall>>exceptions tab. If you're not on a network of computers (or don't use the network), and you're not using things like remote desktop or printer sharing then selecting no exceptions might not make any difference to you. (I'm not sure if firefox needs an exception to get data or not). If firefox isn't listed on the exceptions there will be no effect - since XP firewall only blocks incomming stuff (and asking for a webpage is outgoing) I don't see why the XP firewall would affect basic browsing at all.77.86.115.161 (talk) 16:24, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

The Windows XP Firewall was designed to only block unsolicited incoming traffic. It doesn't block outbound traffic or incoming traffic that is a response to a previous outbound request, so almost all your applications should connect to the internet just fine. Only programs that would ever need an "exception" to work correctly are the ones that create a listening socket for incoming connections - such as a web server.(ref) You can install a third-party firewall (e.g. Zone Alarm) if you want tighter control over applications connecting to the internet. Arloz (talk) 16:42, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

It is important to emphasize the way that Internet sockets are designed. One socket allows communication between two endpoints (your computer and a server). Communication may flow in both directions. Windows Firewall (and most other default firewalls) block attempts to open sockets that are initiated outside your computer - but the firewall is not configured to block "communication". If your computer initiates the socket by connecting to a server, then data may flow in both directions. This is a common misconception about firewalls - by default, they do not prevent connections to the outside network. All they do is prevent connections that are initiated by the outside network. This is also why a firewall is useless if your machine is already compromised by malicious software. If you want more elaborate control over all communication (irrespective of who opened the socket), then you need a more sophisticated firewall (e.g. a firewall with a packet analyzer to apply some control to the type of communications). That might be called a "Protocol-based intrusion detection system or a "Network intrusion detection system", (or it might just be called part of the "firewall"). Such software could be part of a commercial or open-source security suite. In my opinion, such protection is unnecessary for a home computer, so long as you know what software is running on your machine. Nimur (talk) 17:09, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, in summary does the above mean I can keep "no exceptions" ticked all the time without any problems, if I only do web browsing? 92.24.178.183 (talk) 20:05, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Firewall with no exceptions should not interfere with most stuff you access on the web through a browser. It is possible that certain web-based or browser-based stuff (I'm thinking Flash games, for example) might occasionally break. Windows Firewall can inform you when a program requests access and has been blocked - so if you want, you can configure this setting. Nimur (talk) 20:19, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Arin.net's WHOIS isn't being helpful. Please help me find the origin of my dad's IP Addresses.

For Father's Day, I decided to email Dad, who is contracting overseas. He didn't tell me where he was located, so I went to the "Show Original" section of his message sent to me and tried to copy/paste these IP addresses onto the ARIN WHOIS search. It keeps returning IANA, from Marina Del Rey, CA. (I see something about a "BLACKHOLE" in that listing, as well.)

Not being satisfied by IANA, because MDR is obviously not where Dad is, I need extra help here.

Now, as the entire "SHOW ORIGINAL" view would be too overbearingly full of raw text to show you, I'll just paste all the unknown IPs I was able to sift out of the message:

(IP info starts)

Mail Header

Received: by '''10.216.160.8''' with SMTP id t8cs47884wek;
        Sun, 20 Jun 2010 03:41:32 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by '''10.224.44.102''' with SMTP id z38mr2274034qae.32.1277030491302;
        Sun, 20 Jun 2010 03:41:31 -0700 (PDT)

Received: from web63405.mail.re1.yahoo.com (web63405.mail.re1.yahoo.com {'''69.147.97.45'''})
        by mx.google.com with SMTP id g42si8721156qca.50.2010.06.20.03.41.29;
        Sun, 20 Jun 2010 03:41:30 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of ''(redacted email address)'' designates 69.147.97.45 as permitted sender) client-ip='''69.147.97.45''';
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of ''(redacted email address)'' designates '''69.147.97.45''' as permitted sender) smtp.mail=''(redacted email address)''; dkim=pass (test mode) header.i=@yahoo.com

This mail header merely indicates that your dad used Yahoo Mail's webmail interface. There is not locatable information about where the computer was located that accessed that webmail interface. (In fact, Yahoo Mail specifically works to ensure that you cannot retrieve such information from the email headers). This mail header will not help you locate the place where the human who sent this mail was sitting - it contains no useful information about that. Nimur (talk) 19:02, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

(IP info ends; my message continues)

Now, I just did a search on that 69.147.xx.xx IP and it was of the server that processed Dad's email. What's left is that 10.216.xxx.x IP and the 10.224.xx.xxx IP. What other ways can you think of that'll help me find where Dad is just from those two IPs, and that will not turn up IANA/MDR again? Also, when you search for those two IPs in a different way, how did you, and what results did they turn up this time?

Thanks, --Let Us Update Wikipedia: Dusty Articles 18:51, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

10.x.x.x is a private IP address - it is part of the "internal LAN" at Yahoo Mail that processed this message. Nimur (talk) 19:04, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Are you sure you've included all the IP info, in particular all the "received:" headers? Many webmail providers like Yahoo and Hotmail used to include the sender's IP, I think they did it for accountability reasons to try and discourage spam etc. I thought from Nimur's message maybe they stopped and no longer included it (like Google who never did) but I just tried with a Yahoo account and it did include my IP address so while it's possible it varies depending on server you use or something, and perhaps there's some way to turn it off or if you father has Yahoo Mail Pro it may not include it; I would look again carefully first. Be aware that these may be below other headers like domainkeys: which were added after the first received: header (there may also be some headers above other headers but newer headers tend to go to the top I think). You could always include the full headers on your talk page or user page or a subpage thereof.

Incidentally your father may not have told you, but have you asked? Nil Einne (talk) 20:23, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Outputting known waveform

I decided to put off the previous project I mentioned here and try something else. What is the simplest possible way of:

(1) outputting a custom waveform (i.e. one whose amplitude vs. time relationship I define)? (2) reading raw values from the microphone at a pre-defined rate and putting the results into an array?

I'm using Windows XP, with Microsoft Visual C++. I'm reading Microsoft's documentation on waveform generation, and I'll understand it eventually, but I don't need anything that elaborate. --Bowlhover (talk) 19:45, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

"Simplest way" depends heavily on your expertise, experience, and technical requirements. Most likely, it sounds like you plan to use a soundcard for the hardware step. In that case, Simple DirectMedia Layer, an opensource library and API that works on Windows, will be a pretty simple, direct access to the media layer. You will be able to fill an audio buffer with your waveform data and push it out to the sound output port (to a speaker or any other device). If you have more critical requirements for the latency, accuracy, and sampling time, you may find that Microsoft Windows' audio driver layers are unsuitable. In that case, you can consider switching to a different hardware option, like a dedicated DAC: this one from National Instruments costs over a thousand dollars. There are others with fewer features, depending on your needs. Nimur (talk) 20:08, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

If you Google "DirectSoundRecording.SoundRec" there are a number of how-tos for this. --Phil Holmes (talk) 15:12, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

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How can I go from something like the title to a string in Python? I don't know what the representation is called, so I'm having trouble finding resources. 70.162.12.102 (talk) 22:05, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

I think it's called Hexadecimal. 82.43.90.93 (talk) 22:10, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

It is probable that those hexadecimal values are unicode codes, or some other character encoding. Here is some information for python: Unicode. You can parse the integers from that string and then place the values into a string buffer using your preferred encoding; and then you simply need to give that string buffer to a program that knows how to interpret said encoding. (Most modern text-editors know about lots of encodings, but unicode (UTF-8) is probably your best option. Nimur (talk) 23:19, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

It looks like decimal representation of UTF encoding of Phoenician alphabet characters. The first two values that you mentioned would form the letter Aleph, and in Python that would be u"\uD802\uDD00". The next two form Bet, and so on.

55298 decimal is D802 in hex.

56576 is DD00.

UTF-16: 0xD802 0xDD00 is "Aleph"

I hope that helps.  Chzz  ►  23:57, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

It's called Numeric character reference. --Spoon! (talk) 02:25, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

June 21

How can I get Unicode range of a Language.

Dear Experts,

I want to know the unicode range of following languages.

For example Japaneese scripts are Hiragana and Katakana starts from 0x400 and ends at 0x4ff. Like Japaneese what are the starting and ending of the below languages.

Russian,German, Italian, French, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish.

Thanks in Advance,

Santhosh4g (talk) 05:36, 21 June 2010 (UTC)\

Try here first. If that doesn't solve it let us know. The range is in the first page of the language's PDF. http://www.unicode.org/charts/index.html --mboverload@ 07:39, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I already checked this page. But I dont know the exact script name of all languages. For example Japaneese scripts are Hiragana and Katakana, also Russian characters are identified in Cyrillic pdfs.

How can I map Russian to Cyrillic ? Also what are the script names of other languages ?

Hope my problem is clear. Santhosh4g (talk) 10:53, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, Unicode does not try to encode for specific languages. It encodes for character sets - that is, ways of graphically representing text. These writing schemes are independent of language - that's an idea higher up on the "conceptual ladder" than character-encoding. Because Unicode codes for all possible kinds of writing systems, you need to keep in mind that this requires a sort of complicated architecture. Every single unicode code point has a unique numeric value (usually, this "code point" maps to "one single character", but there are exceptions). Read about terminology for Unicode. Groups of code points are arranged into Unicode planes, and the Basic Multilingual Plane can be subcategorized into separate language families - see this table and the others below it in our article. However, there can be significant overlap between languages, (e.g. English, French, and Czech all share many characters, but each also use characters not found in the other two). Similarly, Unicode understands and categorizes CJK characters - glyphs that are common to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Because of the unique way that these written languages represent their ideas, Unicode attempts to share these character encodings to the maximum extent possible. So, for basic Japanese writing, you probably will find that your codepoints will span these categories on the basic multilingual plane:

• Supplemental Punctuation (2E00–2E7F)
• CJK Radicals Supplement (2E80–2EFF)
• Kangxi Radicals (2F00–2FDF)
• Ideographic Description Characters (2FF0–2FFF)
• CJK Symbols and Punctuation (3000–303F)
• Hiragana (3040–309F)
• Katakana (30A0–30FF)
• Bopomofo (3100–312F)
• CJK Strokes (31C0–31EF)
• Katakana Phonetic Extensions (31F0–31FF)
• Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (3200–32FF)
• CJK Compatibility (3300–33FF)
• CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A (3400–4DBF)

You may find that Russian can be written entirely in Cyrillic and its supplements:

• Cyrillic (0400–04FF)
• Cyrillic Supplement (0500–052F)

However, it depends on exactly what you are writing. Unicode allows you to mix and match elements from these different character sets because they are all encoded in a uniform way - so that your text file is represented and rendered universally, independent of the language used to interpret it. That is the purpose of Unicode - to separate character representation from linguistic interpretation. In a former era, if you were to open a perfectly formatted Cyrillic text file that you mistakenly thought was English, your computer would decode it in the wrong way and spew gibberish to the screen. You wouldn't know what the source language was, except that "it wasn't ASCII". Now, if your computer opens a Unicode file with Russian language text in it, you might not understand the language, but at least it prints properly. Nimur (talk) 14:20, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Still my problem is not solved. Im trying to display different language texts with opengl. Inorder to support whole unicode character set, I should create 65536 bitmaps. It will consume huge memory and not practical at all. Now my idea is to create required bitmaps for current system language.

For example, if current system language is Russian I'll create bitmaps from 0x400 to 0x4ff.

I dont know maximum unicode range to support following languages. German Italian French Spanish Danish Swedish Norwegian Finnish

Inorder to support a single language at a time, I have to know the unicode character range of these languages.

Thanks in advance, —Preceding unsigned comment added by Santhosh4g (talk • contribs) 13:48, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Binary - Difference Between Displaying Text And Numbers

how do computers tell the difference between text and numbers in binary? i know very little about binary. from what i understand "97" is the same as "a". is an extra piece of binary added or what? 68.7.192.98 (talk) 06:42, 21 June 2010 (UTC)legoman

You mean like ASCII or Unicode? Don't fully understand the question. --mboverload@ 07:43, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

To a computer everything is numbers. Say you have a byte in binary "11001011" - it might mean 203 in decimal, or it might mean -53 in two's complement, or it might mean the letter "Í" in ISO/IEC 8859-1 encoding. You tell the computer what you want to do with it - whether you want it as an unsigned number, a signed number, or a character, but to the computer it's all the same number. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:24, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Antilived is correct; allow me to expand on the explanation a bit for those who may not follow that explanation.

Modern computers store everything as collections of 1s and 0s. A specific collection of 1s and 0s may represent just about anything: numbers, text, pictures, videos, etc. In order to interpret a given collection, the computer must assume how it is to be interpreted.

Your "97", for instance, is represented as 01100001 in an eight-bit 'byte', a common organization on modern computers, and does represent the number 'a' in ASCII, a commonly used set of codes for letters. If the 'a' were to be represented in EBCDIC, it would have a different 8-bit code, and in Unicode it actually has 16 bits. My point is that, as said above, everything stored by the computer is done in 1s and 0s, and representing letters is a matter of deciding what arrangement of 1s and 0s will represent what letters. Usually this is, in turn, a matter of using a standard set of such arrangements, mostly so that other programs and other computers will also be able to interpret your output.

As to how the computer tells, it is normally told how to interpret any given set of data. For instance, on a Windows system, computer programs rely heavily on file extensions for information on how to interpret data: .TXT is thought of as a file of letter codes in ASCII, .MPG as a file of codes for video, .XLS as an Excel file, etc.

If a computer were just given the binary equivalent of 97, then it could be a number of things, and there is no way for the computer (or any engine or person) to say for sure what was meant by it. rc (talk) 11:04, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) ... or "01100001" could represent part of a floating-point number or the colour of a pixel in an image or the address of some other bit of data or a processor instruction - the possibilities are endless. Basically, the computer does not know or care what "01100001" represents - it leaves that up to the program that it is running. To do this, the program has to have some way of remembering what type of data is stored in each memory address that it is using - so it uses more memory addresses to store that information too. Different programming languages handle this in different ways. Some langauges insist that the programmer identifies the data type of each program variable before they use it in the program. Other languages work out the data type of a program variable from the way that the programmer uses it. Some languages only allow the programmer to use data types from a fixed set of built-in types; other languages allow the programmer to define their own data types. Some simple languages even side-step the whole issue by not bothering to remember the data type of each variable at all - the danger then is that the programmer can easily produce nonsense by, say, multiplying the letter "a" by the colour blue. Gandalf61 (talk) 11:20, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Most modern "normal" computers have specialized circuitry (digital function units inside the CPU) to deal with the following types of data: whole numbers ("int), including negative numbers; numbers that represent fractions ("float"); numbers that represent locations inside the computer (pointers); and (sometimes) special circuitry for "characters" - numbers that directly map to the most common representation of letters and printable characters. (There are variations, especially with regard to the accuracy and range of these values, depending on the kind of computer you have). These special interpretations of binary are called "primitive data types" and have special meaning in most programming languages. They are the most efficient kinds of data to work with, because the concept represented in the programming language directly maps to a single, specific operation with one particular electronic circuit inside the CPU. Every other type of data, like a picture, video, or music sample, must be represented as some combination of instructions and streams of primitive data. For example, a character string is often constructed using several characters and a special numeric code, NULL (but this depends on your programming language and how you choose to represent a string). Similarly, you can construct a PCM audio buffer out of a stream of integers, with a few special numeric tags to describe certain formatting details. Other kinds of data, like variable-sized compressed data, can be carefully treated "as if" it were a regular numeric value, as long as the programmer is careful with the operations applied to that data. Some computers have specialized hardware to deal with such "compound" data types - vector computers, digital signal processors, and to some extent, even a standard modern PC will have extensions to its circuitry that know about extremely specific combinations of numbers that represent intermediate steps in common algorithms like video processing. (You can say the same about hardware representations of triangles, lines, and image textures on a GPU). In each of these specialized cases, the circuitry needs to be carefully controlled - programmed - so that the correct data is loaded into the correct location. Otherwise, unusual and unspecified behavior can occur. In modern computers, the program is also represented as a set of numbers - you can think of these as a bunch of "settings" for switches that direct "the next number" to the correct circuit inside the CPU. Because modern computers are sort of complicated, there are literally thousands of possible combinations of those switch settings - billions of possibilities, actually (though only around a thousand are used). For this reason, programming languages were designed to simplify the task of converting conceptual operations into specific machine instructions. Nimur (talk) 15:28, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I am now convinced that all the answers above (including mine!) tried to do more than answer the OP's question. I'm going to try to answer that succinctly here.

Modern computers store and process binary; whether a given piece of binary data is a number, letter, or something else cannot necessarily be determined by looking at that piece of data. Your "97", for instance, could be 'a', or 97, or something else. In order for the computer (or computer program) to tell the difference, it must have some other information.

A computer program can sometimes look at a whole bunch of data and make a reasonable guess as to its use; a long string of bytes encoded as letters in a specific encoding, for instance, tend to have strings of binary data in specific ranges and not in other ranges. But, in fact, most programs that determine a datum's type automatically are using something else -- a file extension, a code embedded near the front of a data file, etc.

I hope this answers your original question, and I *know* it doesn't branch out into other areas nearly as much.

204.152.3.37 (talk) 20:59, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Subnet calculator

I am looking for an online netmask calculator that translates a generic IP-range to a minimal list of subnets. For example:

Input

Min to Max address: 10.112.0.0 - 10.123.255.255

Output

Subnet_1: 10.112.0.0/13

Subnet_2: 10.120.0.0/14

Proof

Subnet_1 = 10.112.0.1 - 10.119.255.255

Subnet_2 = 10.120.0.1 - 10.123.255.255

There are tons of online calculators (see example in proof) that do the opposite. Any idea anyone? DVdm (talk) 09:56, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

[4] -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 10:47, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Bingo. A thousand and twenty-four thanks! - DVdm (talk) 11:10, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Files to Images

Is it possible to encode a non-image file into an image? Say for example a small mp3 converted to png. Obviously the image would look like gibberish machine code or randomness. Is this possible? What programs can do this? 82.43.90.93 (talk) 11:29, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

You can rename the file from test.mp3 to test.png. When you open it with a viewer, it might produce a black screen, or gibberish, or a program or system crash, all depending on your viewer software and operating system. DVdm (talk) 11:46, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Assume you take the mp3 file byte by byte. Each byte has a value from 0 to 256. If you take those three at a time, you have red, green, and blue values for a pixel. You can write a program to color in the pixels of an image using those values. Now, the problem is getting the mp3 back. You cannot use a lossy format for the image because you will lose important data for the mp3. That is why encoded secret messages inside of images isn't such a trivial task. You cannot have the lossy format messing with the message. -- kainaw™ 12:20, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Container format might help. Both PNG and MP3 use a file format that contains a fixed-format header followed by data. It sounds like you want to take the data payload out of an MP3 and put it in place of the data-payload of the PNG. (If you just try to use an MP3 as a PNG, you will be missing the necessary metadata, so whatever program you use to interpret or display your PNG will probably simply refuse to do anything). You might benefit from using a library that already knows about these file formats so that you end up with a "properly formed" PNG (even it its data payload is gibberish). Also note that because the PNG and MP3 formats are both compressed, it is not safe to say that "any combination of bytes" will represent a valid PNG (i.e. it might not even be possible to display gibberish - certain combinations of bytes will be "improperly formed" and can not be mapped back into an image of any kind). Compare this to uncompressed formats, like WAV files or BMP files. Any combination of bytes you stuff into the data payload of these uncompressed formats will display as something (though depending on your BMP reader, it may hiccup of die if your payload size doesn't match the metadata expected size). Nimur (talk) 15:41, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

As an aside - if you're just doing this for the sake of hobbyist exploration, you might find GNU Octave a helpful tool. In exactly three lines of code, you will be able to read an arbitrary file of any type; reshape it to dimensions of your preference ("height x width"), and display it as an image buffer. Consider the Wikipedia logo: (you can put a URL in the fopen() command, or save it to disk)

x = fread(fopen('wikipedia-logo.png'));
imagesc(reshape (x, 119, 131));

In the first line, I open, read, and store the Wikipedia logo to an array, "x". In the second line, I reshape that file into a 119 x 131 matrix (by luck, the file happens to be 15589 bytes, which can be factored into a square-ish matrix). Then, I display it to screen with the "image scale" command. If you find an MP3 or OGG file, you can open it in a similar way, and display its raw data as an image buffer. I just tested this technique on this audio of a red panda - hint, the file can be displayed as a 767 x 409 element buffer. It looks like noise (as we would expect). (Note that by using this method, we're treating the raw file, including its header, as part of a continuous uncompressed bitmap). Nimur (talk) 15:53, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

What's a good tool for Knowledge Engineering?

I'm looking for a readily available tool that can be used for modeling an expert system. Perhaps something like PCPACK, but something I can get quickly instead of without having to wait for some time. Any ideas? 122.255.2.108 (talk) 12:22, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Key code of win-key on azerty keyboard

I am installing Ubuntu and want to have the normal functionality of the win-key. Here I found a solution, with the following code:

#!/bin/bash

xmodmap -e 'keycode 115=Menu'

But it turns out that 115 and 116 are the codes for the right- and end-keys. Does anyone know the code for the win-key on an azerty keyboard or how I can find that out? Also, the script changes those keys into the functionality of the context menu key (next to the win-key). So should I change 'menu' into something else? DirkvdM (talk) 12:56, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Switch to a virtual console that doesn't have an X server on it (e.g. ctrl-alt-f6), login, and run showkey. That displays the raw keycodes for each key you press. On my uk-qwerty keyboard, the left and right windows keys are 125 and 126 respectively. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 13:37, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

But (at least for Ubuntu's normal GNOME desktop environment) this works (the thing you linked to seemed like only half the solution). Note that he's using xev instead of showkey, which for me is returning different results (I think other X keyboard remappings are changing things); for your use the result reported by xev will be the one to use. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 13:43, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Also note that you can put the 'keycode blah=bar' straight to ~/.xmodmap and X will load it at login. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 15:43, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Ah, ok, I have to run xev, keep the little 'event tester' window active and then press the win-key to see info about that in the console. Took me some time to figure that out. :) Turns out it's 133 for Super_L and 134 for Super_R (the left and right win-keys).

For the rest, gconf is for Gnome (I use KDE) and I don't have a file ~/.xmodmap. So I just put the number 134 in the script I already wrote, logged out and back in and now the win-key behaves like the context menu key, as I feared. So I changed 'menu' to 'panel_main_menu', but that didn't work. Nor did 'panel_menu'. Or Panel_Main_Menu' (upper cases). DirkvdM (talk) 17:50, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Ubuntu/Vista Dual-Boot Broken - Reason

Recently I had a problem, in which Vista wouldn't start up on my dual-boot system here. After going through a (fairly) lengthy process of trying to fix it, I ended up reinstalling Windows. The problem I was encountering was that after the Microsoft loading bar had been on for a short while, I would get the blue screen of death and an auto-reboot. Stopping the auto-reboot managed to get me to the error messages on the blue screen, but they were not very informative. Anyway, that's all in the past now. However, I've been wondering how I could avoid such a problem occurring again and going over my actions prior to the problem. The only thing that I remember doing was seeing if I could run a program from my Windows partition whilst in Ubuntu using Wine. This, of course, failed (because the program was a game and not one supported by Wine). It was shortly after this that I had the problem. Could anyone confirm that this might have been the actual cause of the problem, or am I still in danger of this just happening again? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:42, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Running programs already installed on a Windows partition is usually a bad idea since there will probably be .dll files and registry entries missing and things like that since you didn't install it in Wine. Depending on how you mounted the Windows partition it could inadvertently modify files needed by Windows, but unless you know what broke Windows there isn't much more to say than don't use wine to run Windows installs of programs unless you have to and know it works. --antilived^{T | C | G} 02:34, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Why do the XHTML specifications "forbid" serving XML syntax as text/html?

I prefer writing markup for the XHTML serialization (i.e. all lower case, expanded attributes, open/closing tags, self closing tags etc) but the HTML specifications actually say it is incorrect to serve this format as text/html. Now, obviously browsers don't actually care if you do but why is this "restriction" in place anyway? 193.122.22.247 (talk) 16:21, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Oh, browsers do care. Serve XHTML as application/xhtml+xml, and watch IE getting confused, and Mozilla/Safari switching to a much stricter DOM model (createElement isn't good enough anymore, and (at least older versions of) Safari would even forget about 'document.title'. On the plus side, serving as xhtml will put browsers in a much stricter parsing mode and they will refuse to process non-wellformed XML documents.

As http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/ explains, you should use the XHTML mimteype unless you structure your document to be usable by both HTML and XHTML parsers (ie, use the short syntax for tags like <img />, but the long syntax for tags like <script></script>). Whether XHTML actually servers any practical use, is probably still a matter of debate. Unilynx (talk) 21:13, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I guess my real point is why is XML syntax for HTML considered "invalid" HTML unless it's served as XML? Why can't both forms be valid (i.e. <br> vs <br />, or <option selected> vs <option selected="selected">). Obviously since IE won't render XHTML correctly with the XML mimetype it's basically pointless for the majority of pages to be written in XHTML syntax, but there are benefits to writing in this way (especially when dealing with things like the <p> element which have optional closing tags. Since the browsers seem not to care anyway I guess it doesn't matter that much...yet. 193.122.22.247 (talk) 12:51, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

XML syntax in HTML is invalid. The standards are not compatible. For example, <br/> is a line break in XHTML but it's a line break followed by a greater-than sign in HTML. No major browser will print that greater-than sign, but that's because they deliberately violate the HTML standard for compatibility reasons. See this crazy document, and the explanation. -- BenRG (talk) 03:45, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Editing an MPG file

I took a video with my Sony digital camera lasting about 1 minute. When I was finished I forgot to stop recording and slipped the camera into my pocket. As a result, the recording continued for another 10 minutes, stopping only when the memory stick was full. I would like to keep just the first minute of the video and discard the rest. Is there any software that lets me do this? Hemoroid Agastordoff (talk) 16:38, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Try virtualdub -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:05, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

TMPGEnc has a nice set of tools for cutting and joining MPEGs without recompression. -- BenRG (talk) 03:46, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

June 22

Multiplication by a fraction avoiding temporary overflow

Suppose, in 5-bit unsigned integer arithmetic, I wish to compute 13*17/19 (that is, 11). Is there a standard trick for performing such calculations efficiently (in terms both of execution time and code complexity) when no higher primitive word size is available? In particular, I mean a*b/c where the numerator is not representable but the overall result is. (Obviously changing it to a/c*b or a*(b/c) doesn't work for integer arithmetic and yields 0 here.) --Tardis (talk) 00:05, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The "standard trick" is to use a larger word for the results of multiply instructions. Unfortunately, it is a fact of life that an n-bit number times an m-bit number will yield a result that requires an (n+m)-bit representation. This is a fact of binary representation: log₂(NN*MM) = log₂(NN) + log₂(MM). You may choose to always discard the least significant bits; or you may choose to conditionally overflow and throw an error iff the inputs are too large. Your problem is actually a special case of the general problem - that your intermediate representation requires higher precision than your inputs or your outputs - but there is no way around this problem for the general case. (If you knew, for example, that your inputs were only going to be in a certain range, you could use any fixed point math representation to input only the significant bits). For example, if you always divide by 19, you could approximate that as a "left-shift by 4 bits" (divide by 16), thus always discard the lowest four bits. Alternately, you can implement a simplified floating-point (i.e. use one or more bits to specify dynamic range). With a five-bit word, this isn't much of a gain. Nimur (talk) 02:23, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Use multiple locations to store a double (or treble or quad) sized number. Your basic 5-bits will handle 0..31. A double length will handle 0..1023. You would need to write some subroutines to do (single * single -> double) and (double / single -> double quotient & single remainder) You can do both by mimicing standard hand calculated long multiplication and long division. If your computer instructions can't manage localised overflows well, you may need to divide the 5-bit numbers into (say) 2.5 lots of 2-bit numbers so that even a local multiplication doesn't overflow 5bits. Exactly which is a good choice depends on the limitations of your system. -- SGBailey (talk) 09:46, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

It's quite possible that those mixed-type subroutines are exactly the answer, but I don't know immediately any efficient way to write them. (The assembly I've seen for doing multiplication into two words is not trivial, and I imagine that division would be worse.) The number 5 is of course irrelevant; I just wanted to give a concrete example and one that was all primes so that no reductions were possible. --Tardis (talk) 15:16, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

If you're really desperate and two of those numbers are constant you can work out what you are multiplying the other one with as a binary fraction and then do shifts adds and subtracts on the number to get that fraction. Seems over the top with even the simplest microprocessor nowadays. Dmcq (talk) 10:38, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I would consider writing my own double precision functions. So multiply5(a, b, result, overflow) would take in two 5-bit values, a and b and return a double precision result in the 5-bit result and a 5-bit overflow. Similarly, divide5(a1, a2, b1, b2, result) would take in 2 double precision values, a and b (each made from 2 5-bit components) and return a single 5-bit result. Alternatively, you could write a class 5bit, define single and double precision values, and overload the multiply and divide operators. Astronaut (talk) 11:19, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

(As in my other simultaneous reply,) That sounds great! How does one write such functions, given no access to operators that can use larger types for you? (I know that, for example, the x86 MUL* instructions are $n\times n\rightarrow 2n$ even for the largest machine integers, but not many higher-level languages give you access to that.) If it's easier, we can use an even number of bits since that's the standard and then you can divide the numbers into two subwords that are small enough that even all their squares can be represented. But of course signed numbers matter too in practice. --Tardis (talk) 15:16, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Vista Q

I have Windows Vista Home Basic and I'd like to place my computer on a setting that provides an audible/visible warning alarm that the battery is low. Please advise. DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 02:12, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Don't have a Vista laptop handy, but click the Start Button and just type "Power". The power options menu should come up in the results. All those settings are in there. Let us know if you can't find it; I'm sure we can scare up someone who uses Vista. --mboverload@ 08:56, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The Power Option in the Control Panel has a whole bunch of settings for what to do when the battery is low. However, for an audible alert to accompany the System Tray popup, you need to go to the Sound Control panel and assign a sound to the Low Battery Alarm and Critical Battery Alarm. Astronaut (talk) 10:59, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Internet Protocol Addresses of Network Interface Controller Ports

In a Network Interface Card with multiple ports, does each of the ports have its own IP address, or do all of the ports share the same IP address? In addition, do Network Interface Controllers have permanent IP addresses, or are IP addresses assigned (whether statically or dynamically) to Network Interface Controller? Rocketshiporion (talk) 02:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Hello Rocketshiporion. I'm in IT and trust me - if you're taking a class on networking you're going to want to read the books cover to cover. You can start your research on Network interface controller and DHCP. If you're covering multiport cards you're probably covering servers. Networking is not something you want to skimp on in this case. If you need help deconstructing this problem and finding the answer please reply back. --mboverload@ 08:34, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Make your own Anime

Can you make your own Kirby: Right back at Ya episodes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Prgreeneyes (talk • contribs) 03:30, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Please expand on your question. --mboverload@ 08:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Can you make your own character in Kirby anime like your own story your own monster? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Prgreeneyes (talk • contribs) 14:54, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

As a commercial venture to make a profit by selling it to a TV company... almost certainly not. However, as a piece of fan fiction or fan art, maybe you can depending on the legal situation in your country and the copyright holders' attitude to fan made work. Astronaut (talk) 06:57, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Which Linux distro is right for me?

I have used Suse Linux for many years now and want to look around a bit more. I just tried Ubuntu, but that had too many issues. But the amount of distros is just staggering. So can anyone suggest one for me that is to my liking? So what is my liking? Here's a list:

• not mouse- but keyboard-oriented (loads of keyboard shortcuts)
• very configurable (I want to define those keyboard shortcuts myself)
• not terminal- but gui-based (see below)
• functionality over looks
• no fancy stuff that is supposed to make life easier, because that tends to confuse me. For example no msWindows-like 'interpretations' of what I want. If I don't know what I want I want to learn that the hard way (not too hard, though, please. :) ) .
• slim, hard-edged look-and-feel. This is hard to define, but for example I hate smooth scrolling and I prefer German cars over French cars, if you know what I mean.

I say I want it to be both keyboard- and gui-oriented. That is a bit of a contradiction, so let me explain. I want it to be gui-based so I get a complete overview of all options without having to know them by heart. And if I have an overview, it makes most sense that I can activate those options in that overview, without having to switch elsewhere (the command line) and then type that in. Alas this is hard to do with a keyboard, so I'll have to compromise there and use the mouse.
Note I said a complete overview. So not loads of sub-sections that show just a few options, where you have to click 'advanced' to get just a few more. I have a big screen and want to use it to the full. And big tables don't scare me, I love them (if they are logically ordered). If I don't understand something that doesn't matter. I'll leave it alone but will have learned that that option exists and in which context. I don't want to be shielded from details I am supposed not to understand (says who?). I may be ignorant but I'm not stupid. :)
Some examples to illustrate what I like:

• Photoshop: very keyboard-oriented and loads of (well ordered) possibilities. May take some time to learn how to use it, but once you know that you get a lot of power.
• KDE rather than Gnome, and not KDE4.4 but 3.5, although I realise that is going to be difficult.
• I don't like the Kickoff menu style, where I have to scroll. Also, no recently used programs at the top of the start menu. I want to completely arrange the menus myself and have them stay that way, so I can start an application with my keyboard with my eyes closed, so to say.
  

Does anyone understand what I want and know of such a distro? DirkvdM (talk) 10:14, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Only you can: [5]. Appreciate the irony of the above answers. You also might like Ubuntu... which translated means "can't install debian"... but those re mostly rumors. Shadowjams (talk) 10:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Which above answers? Bloody deletionistst at work again? If so, they've been very thorough and even removed those answers from the history.

Anyway, like I said, I already tried Ubuntu, but I encountered too many problems with that - it even crashed on me just now, the first time that has happened to me with Linux (even Ctrl-Alt-Del didn't work). Also, it feels too much like msWindows for my liking.

You link to building my own system, but I'm not enough of an expert for that. That's what distros are for, right? But then I'd have to know beforehand what they are like and I can't find any good info on that. And downloading them all would be madness. So can you give a hint as to which ones I might try that are a bit like what I described above? DirkvdM (talk) 12:45, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Btw, the way linuxfromscratch is organised is a good example of what I don't want: see this help page, that links to loads of tiny bits of text. I want the whole text in one go, so I can quickly browse through it. DirkvdM (talk) 12:51, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

gnome do could be your friend. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 21:48, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Automatic backup of files?

I'm looking for a freeware program that can automatically do either one of the following things:

1. Sync files from a specific folder on a network drive to a local drive.
2. Backup/upload files from a specific folder on network drive to cloud storage.

Background: I am constantly updating the files on the network drive, but the program I'm using bugs out on occasion and may delete the file I'm working on. I can't work off the local drive because the files need to be available to my coworkers. I would like a automatic backup option that takes the files from a specific folder (the network drive is huge) and puts them somewhere else.

I'm hoping there's a freeware program out there that can do this, or fairly cheap program.

I've already tried SyncToy (not automatic) and DropBox (doesn't work off network drives).

My System: Windows 7 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Xvkarbear (talk • contribs) 13:52, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Synctoy can be run from the Windows Task Scheduler, with instructions about what to synchronise given on the command line - see here -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:09, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Help me understand the whole megabit/mebibit confusion

Here's how I understand it. Please correct me where needed. So, the metric kilo, mega, giga prefixes are multiples of 10. But for the longest time, those prefixes were used to describe base2 memory sizes -- even though they were not the same. A "true" megabyte is really 1,024KB, not 1,000KB. As the numbers got larger, there was more of a discrepancy between base10 and base2 numbers (A "true" computer gigabyte is 1,073,742KB, not 1,000,000KB... a difference of over 73MB.)

Computer storage manufacturers measure drive space in kibibytes, but marketing them as kilobytes.. So when a user plugged in a "1 Terabyte" drive, their computer actually reported 976 GB. So the term kibi, mebi, gibi are used to correctly and precisely describe the actual memory a computer sees. So while the metric prefixes are wrong, it's common usage. Man, that's confusing. --70.167.58.6 (talk) 15:41, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Additional info in Binary prefix and Kibibyte. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:58, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The last paragraph isn't quite right; it's more confusing than that. "Kibibyte" is a newer term, and it is definitely 1024 bytes. Traditionally, "kilobyte" has meant 1024 bytes, but if the bending of the metric units bothers you, or you make hard drives for a living, you'll say that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.

This whole mess only applies to fixed storage. If you're talking about RAM, "kilobyte" almost always refers to 1024 bytes because, for technical reasons, it's important for memory to be evenly divisible into largish powers of two, so 1000-byte units are kind of silly. Paul (Stansifer) 16:09, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

You've more or less got it. Traditionally power of two units were used for computer storage. Some people thought this was a misappriation of the SI prefixes.

This was 'fixed' by redefining the words to match the base 10 numbers, and creating new, sillier, prefixes for people who still want to use the traditional power of two units.

Nowadays some people still use the old units because they need base-2 units, but can't bring themselves to use the silly names.

Personally, I think it's too bad that Knuth's idea of calling them "Standard Kilobytes" and "Large Kilobytes" didn't catch on. It'd be a lot less silly. APL (talk) 16:28, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

For archived discussions about whether to use the precise words in Wikipedia articles, you can visit Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) (shortcut: WT:MOSNUM), find the archive box at the right-hand side of the page, and follow the links under "Binary prefixes".

—Wavelength (talk) 16:57, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

There is no sane reason to report hard disk sizes in gibibytes. It is a completely stupid thing to do. Somehow people have gotten it into their heads that the hard drive manufacturers are in the wrong here. I imagine it's because gigabytes are smaller and people are sensitive to the idea that they're being cheated. Whatever the reason, it's irrational. The problem is Explorer. People blame Microsoft for everything else, whether or not it's Microsoft's fault; why can't they blame Microsoft for this when it really is their fault?

I believe it's true that hard drive sizes are always a multiple of 512×63×16 bytes = 504 KiB exactly, for a mixture of historical reasons. My laptop drive is exactly 310101 = 7×11×9397 times that size, for a total of 160,041,885,696 bytes. What this has to do with human-readable sizes displayed in GUI windows I can't imagine. Why not report the numeric part of the size in binary, if you're going to use the binary metric units? After all, computers work in binary. Wouldn't it be logical and natural? -- BenRG (talk) 03:21, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm surprised no one mentioned Timeline of binary prefixes Nil Einne (talk) 11:41, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I cannot read the Wiki website

Can anyone please help? I've always read Wiki at work and on my home computer the print is all illegible, small and I cannot read it w/o really squinting hard. It's nealry impossible...totally unclear.

I've reset my display for larger type (I prefer small, crystal clean fonts) but that makes little difference.Is it my system and is there any way I can make your program legible? I've read Wiki for a long time and miss it.

This does seem new. I can't recall it being this way here at home before recently.

Thank you for any help here. I've tried resetting my type sizes/fonts and it makes little difference. Wiki is the only site where this occurs.

Sorry to send it here but I can't read the site well enough to find another place on the Wiki site.

Thanks,

Jeremy Gubbins I'm at this email....(e-mail redacted) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.161.187.1 (talk) 17:47, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

1. I've removed your e-mail; answers will be posted here. 2. Normally WP:HELP is a better place to post questions about help with Wikipedia; this is a reference desk. 3. We may be able to help you here on the Computing desk anyway, if you could take a screenshot of your screen and upload it to a site like Flickr so we can see what you're seeing. To take a screenshot, if you're using Windows, press the "Print Scr" key (or "Prnt Scrn" ... keyboards vary); then run a graphics program like MS Paint, then hit CTRL-V to paste the screenshot into Paint; then save the picture as a PNG or JPG file; then upload to Flickr and point us to the file. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:00, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Have you tried hitting ctrl++ - this often makes the text size larger in browsers? Also, Internet Explorer 8 (and maybe other browsers too) have a little zoom control in the bottom right of the status bar - 50% make the text so tiny it is unreadable.

One other thing, when I played around with the DPI for the default font on Windows Vista, it created all kinds of havoc when I went to change it back to what it was before I started (IIRC, the font size of every screen element remained tiny, until I reset each one in the Advanced Appearance settings). It was such a major hassle that I have never changed the font size since and instead rely on the methods I mentioned above to zoom in and out. Astronaut (talk) 06:30, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

operation behind deleting a file

hay, i wand to know the operation behind deletion. usually i delete unwanted files in my system and always keep recycle bin empty.once i noted that a particular software in my system (installed by my brother) help me to retain the deleted files.how it is possible.then Wat is actually happening during deletion. is the same operation take place during cut-past,copy-past? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.204.85.120 (talk) 18:08, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

It depends on your computer's file system, but in general file deletion leaves data remanence which can sometimes be recovered by means of undeletion, which in turn can be prevented using data erasure. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:23, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

can i prevent coping a file

i wand to prevent a file to be copied from my disc by others (but it should work from disc), is it possible then how?is it possible to copy it later by me,how? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.204.85.120 (talk) 18:13, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Not really. There are various digital rights management schemes which try to limit this kind of thing, but they don't work very well and really aren't available to a normal user. Perhaps (depending on your circumstance) the best idea is either file encryption (in which case someone can copy the file, but can't make any sense of it) or disk encryption. Both require a degree of skill and judgement on your part, and add some complexity to your normal doings of things. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:20, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I second that. I would recommend installing TrueCrypt on each PC that you work with, and use TrueCrypt to create an "encrypted file container" on the disc. You can use TrueCrypt to "mount" the file container as though it were a hard disk, so Windows treats it as your S: drive, or whatever; and you can put whatever files you want into the S: drive. When your enemies get hold of your disc, they will be able to copy the encrypted file container to their hard disk, but it will just appear to be a random string of 1's and 0's to them, because TrueCrypt uses strong encryption. As Finlay McWalter says, this adds some complexity to your day — for example, in order to use the disc at all on another computer, you'll need to first install TrueCrypt on it, which won't be possible in many school or Internet-cafe situations. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Quick note: As you can see the only solution is an encryption product. File system permissions and such are worthless if someone has physical access to the machine. Just wanted to make that super clear. Also, don't think you're outsmarting the government or a technical user unless you've read and understood all of TrueCrypts limitations outside of its control. --mboverload@ 02:01, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Rank amateur wants to install Windows and Linux OS’s on two +15 year old computers, and later install OpenOffice and Ogg Vorbis, for 50 bucks or less

I have two old computers sitting in my basement locker—they have been for a few years. One’s on a pre-Windows XP, whereas another doesn’t seem to have an OS at all. I want to give them to someone who knows even less about computers than I, and both of us are poor (though I have my own computer (Windows XP with Office 2003)); and I feel free to experiment with these two computers.

First, can I and how do I create “partitions” for MS OS’s and Linux?

Second. Presuming that older is generally cheaper, how much would it cost to get, say a Windows XP, 2000, 98, 97, even 95?

Third, as I’ve never done this, are these discs re-usable? Could I take, say a Windows XP and upload it on +10 computers? If so, could I do the same with, say Office 2003 Professional?

Fourth, let’s say even a used Windows XP and/or Office 2003 Pro was too rich for my blood, and I decided on, say, Windows 95, what are the latest versions of WORD, EXCEL, and POWERPOINT, and PAINT could I use?

Fifth, how do I get such computers to take an OpenOffice? Could I get them on the earlier Windows, and/or I would be better to have them on the latest Linux versions?

Sixth, what good free painting/pics and player software would you recommend? Could Ogg Vorbis be installed in earlier Windows, or should I have it on Linux?

Seventh, as I’m too poor for even internet connections (I’m using an employment centre computer to post this) how would I download this on another computer (say internet café one) onto a USB, CD-ROM, or DVD-Rom, and then install it on these computers.

Thanks for the help and time.
:-)
70.54.181.70 (talk) 19:19, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

You cannot buy new Windows XP or any older consumer version of windows (I don't know about arrangements for Vista or server-Windows). You can find XP on sites like ebay, but these tend not to be cheap, and I would be highly suspicious that these were either downright illegal or that they had been activated on other machines making it illegal, or difficult, to use on your machine. You are at best going to be scrabbling together odd bits and bobs, second hand. Depending on the windows version, the disks may be reusable, but doing so will generally not be legal, unless you can get multiple licences too. For XP there is also product activation, which enforces the licences, preventing multiple use of a single-use licence. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:42, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Frankly the only reasons I would recommend anyone try what you're doing (getting XP or 98se or whatever) to run on an old machine like that is either for nostalgic purposes or if they have some piece of software that absolutely will not run on anything else. If you're looking to just resurrect these computers and get some basic use out of them (some internet, some basic word processing) then I'd very strongly recommend you download one of the many Mini Linux distributions and install that. You don't have the issues about licences and ancient install media, you don't have nearly the trouble of getting device drivers for ancient hardware (and once we're talking pre-XP, installing device drivers is a pretty darn technical activity), and you can still get software that will run on them. All those mini linux distributions will give you an ISO image which you can burn onto a DVD and install from there. Modern full linux installs like Ubuntu are probably going to be much too heavyweight for your antique machines (frankly you should check the computers' features against those supported even by the mini linuxes, as you're really going back a long way). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:49, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

To answer your specific questions:

1. You'd install windows, then linux (but really, please don't do this) and the linux installer will take care of partitioning.

2. Whatever someone on ebay can get away with charging you. XP will be surprisingly expensive. Linux is, for your purposes, free.

3. As with 2, you're back to whatever junk you can scrape up from jumble sales and ebay

4. You can't get any of those programs from their creators. There are some (perhaps questionable) sites on the internet that will let you download old versions of things, and again you might be able to find old disks around. Linux will come with a compatible, lightweight office and graphics program (or will have an easy option to install one)

5. I don't think Openoffice will run on anything older than XP, and may be too heavyweight for your computers. Retro sites, ebay, jumble sales again. Linux will have a (more basic) office suite.

6. Much the same as 5.

7. Linux: yes, CDs (not DVDs like I said above, your computer is surely too old for that). Windows: probably not legally.

-- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:06, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice and explainations. Mind you, I'm pretty confident that the ghost of Gary Kildall wouldn't mind me ripping off the company that ripped him off (CP/M, 86-DOS, and all that). As for this Product activation, a cursory check on the article sez it's applies to post-2000 MS software, and when I bought my Dell computer--the one with the XP and Office 2003, not once did I have it connected to the internet. The other two were internet capable and active on it. I'll at the very least check out the Mini Linux article and links, and print this for later perusal (the centre will soon close for the day); and again, thanks.
:-)
70.54.181.70 (talk) 20:11, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The OEM version of XP on your Dell was (essentially) pre-activated at the factory. The retail install you'd have to get would not be so forgiving. If I were you, I'd spend a fraction of that $50 putting up little cards in a newsagent's window (or whereever classifieds are posted in Canada) saying "poor but virtuous person needs a half-decent computer for self betterment, can't pay but will collect" and you'll find people will give you old computers (but much nicer than the ones you're talking about fixing up). I have frequently had to take perfectly functional, and much newer than 15 year old, computers to the recycling centre, as no one will buy them, no child wants them, and no charity will take them. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:24, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Another good idea. Thanks.
:-)
(same person--different IP (library))205.189.194.208 (talk) 20:48, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

In my experience, stuff older than about 10 years is usually too old to be recoverable, largely due to a lack of Windows drivers for older hardware and OS combinations. Even with small Linux distributions there is a lower limit to what will still work with a GUI. It can work though - I sometimes run Puppy Linux and Windows Me (and Microsoft Office 97) in a dual-boot setup on a Pentium-III dating from about 2000, though the original 128MB memory was not enough and I had to buy some more. I could install Windows XP, but then I would have to buy a license or find a way to avoid the attention of Windows Genuine Advantage telling me it needs to be activated.

An alternative might be to get slightly newer stuff and refurbish it. Very cheap or even free stuff is easily available, often with an Operating System and other softwere still installed. Ask your friends and relatives, search the small ads in the paper, supermarket or perhaps online in places like eBay and Craigslist, and ask friends who work with computers if their company is throwing out some old PCs. Only a couple of months ago I was given 3 old laptops, all with Windows XP and Office 2003 - two I have successfully refurbished, but the other is probably beyond repair with its trashed disk and broken keyboard. Astronaut (talk) 06:05, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Astronaut for your input.
Hmmmm. As I remember, one of the computers had WORDPAD, and I wanted WORD--or even WRITE. A few years earlier I created a few WRITE files on yet another computer, stored them on a floppy disk, and when they changed the programming of that computer, found that their newly installed WORD program would open it. I figured that if the one of these two computers had even that, my friend could use it, for writing resumes and the like, and WORD programs on other computers would open it. However, again, it only had WORDPAD--which according to the WP article indicates that it's more advanced than Write. Hmmmmmm (I'm not so sure). The weird thing is that the computer opened jpeg files and had a media player--yes it played CR-ROMs, so I figure it can handle a latter OS and OFFICE prorams--cost being the main factor here. As for the OpenOffice, again, I figure that if I can't get a latter WORD program in, or any WORD program, due to cost, then have both an old MS writing program (early WORD, WRITE, or even the WORDPAD) and a new OpenOffice program. That way, I figure, the former, while primative, might be supported by a latter MS program--if he wanted to alter it on a latter better computer; while the other, though not supported by WORD (I think), would nonetheless enable more features that an earlier MS program wouldn't (he could type, tailor, print, and save on his computer).

As I think of it (I haven't got to them yet--the locker is jam pack with stuff) when the second computer was given to me, I was given a disk, and while I can't say I remember it requesting anything about activation (in the prompts--DOS prompt, command prompt, whatever you call it--it's white print in a black background that you might see when a computer boots up) but it might have been rejecting the disk for that reason--I don't know. I'm certain it was originally capable of Internet, media players, and yes, even WORD.

The reason why I initially posted this is when I was talking to someone at the soup kitchen who had a bit more knowledge about computers than I, he sounded like I could get all these things for free--from the MS site even. When I checked MS--I admit, I'll have to peruse the site more--it seemed to say that upgrades were free. As for Googling "free Office 2003", well, I might as well asked for "free Beatles MP3's".

The idea is to got to an internet cafe, burn whatever OS's and programs, go to the locker, pull out the computers (and a bunch of other stuff), see if I can fix them in the laundry room, if and when, then wrap them in some heavy torn up blankets (i.e. disposeable but useful for this purpose), put them in a shopping cart (there are a few in my housing project), wheel them to my friends (he lives about 1 km), drop them off, and my promise-of-sorts will be fulfilled.

As for the idea of getting free computers, such has merit and I'll likely try that, but again, I'm also thinking of practicing with fixing them, as as Astronaut indicated with the laptops, they needed fixing, so again, I might profit from some practicing. Mind you, again, thanks for the above.70.54.181.70 (talk) 18:37, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

For what it's worth, Wordpad is indeed an improvement on Microsoft Write, enough such that I set WordPad up as the word processor of choice for my parents 10 years ago. The price is unbeatable. OpenOffice.org Writer is far more full-featured, if you can get it to run on an old computer. As Finlay McWalter wrote above, this seems unlikely. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:49, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Hmmmm, maybe it's my memory. It could be other things. For instance, the WRITE program I used had a spell-check, whereas a computer with a WORDPAD program a neighbour of mine had, didn't. Have you ever seen a 10 page document, copies of which were plastered all over the buildings' bulletin boards, where the writer couldn't spell and there was no spell check? Fortunately for her, some of the content was conciliatory.   :-D  . Very well, if OpenOffice is likely too big and modern-like, what other free or (very) low cost word processing programs are there that would fit in such ye olde computers? Thanks.70.54.181.70 (talk) 19:38, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

twitter

i wanna create a new twitter but i dont want to manually have to re-follow all those people. is there a program i can use or can i save the people im following? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexsmith44 (talk • contribs) 19:42, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Babylon's dictionary of Wikipedia

In the Babylon translation-software, the user can add Wikipedia as one of the online dictionaries. It is possible to download Wikipedia for offline use, through this link: http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20100130/enwiki-20100130-pages-articles.xml.bz2 But is it possible to do one of the following: (1) Get an offline version of Wikipedia for Babylon? (2) Convert the above XML-file to a BGL file?

Thanks in advance. 77.127.184.216 (talk) 20:04, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Wget

I'm trying to mirror a specific part of a website, not the whole website. Through searching, trial and error and hours of wasted time I've come up with the following:

wget -mk -X */images/ -np http://example.com/pages

However, this only downloads the html files in the directory "/pages/", and not any of the other resources that are displayed on the pages. I want it to download the css files (located at http://example.com/css/) and the thumbnails (located at http://example.com/thumbs/). What do I need to do to make wget do that? Thanks for your help 82.43.90.93 (talk) 20:18, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Take a look at the the -p (--page-requisites) option. --Bavi H (talk) 01:55, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I tried that and is don't seem to work. Only the index page gets thumbnails and css downloaded, all the other pages are still missing thumbnails and other embedded images. 82.43.90.93 (talk) 10:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

June 23

Just built a computer but it wont turn on

After pressing the power button it doesn't do anything. The fans don't spin. No lights light up. It is absolutely quiet. I am unsure what the problem is. (power supply maybe?) Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.118.202.92 (talk) 08:04, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Assuming you are sure mains power is actually getting to the PC (go check the fuses/circuit breakers in your house and the power cable leading to the PC), the first place I would look is the power supply. Many PC power supplies have their own internal fan as shown in this image, and if that isn't running the power supply unit itself is likely to be faulty. Check your power supply has the correct input voltage settings: 100-127V AC, 60Hz in the USA, which is usually selectable with the small red switch on the backplate. The small plugs that supply the power to the components inside your PC, carry voltages typically 3.3, 5 or 12V DC. Check each one with a multimeter to see if the correct voltage is being supplied. Make sure each plug is properly seated, the correct way round in its socket on the motherboard, disk drives, etc. and note that some can be a very tight fit. Astronaut (talk) 09:43, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

(edit) Due to the much better advice provided below, and me forgetting quite how a PC gets switched on, I've struck out my rather simplistic view of how a power supply can be checked. Astronaut (talk) 17:13, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

If you just built a computer and it isn't turning on I would be careful about assuming the PSU is faulty. The PSU will only turn on if the motherboard tells it to turn on so there could be plenty of reasons like the motherboard is faulty, you didn't plug the power switch in properly, the power switch is faulty (presuming the motherboard doesn't have a built in switch which you are using). Okay technically the PSU us always on by the fan doesn't usually run when it's in standby mode (a few keep it running for a few minutes after you turn it back to standby mode but I don't think I've ever seen any that turn it on when you first turn it on in standby mode although probably something does exist), there may be some lights visible on the motherboard, there may not be so without knowing more details about the particular set up, it's difficult to say whether the OP would be aware of the difference between PSU completely not working and motherboard never turns on the PSU. Depending on the PSU if something is shorting you may also get something like this (although usually the PSU will turn on briefly and then go off quickly albeit depending on how much attention you paid and where the computer is you may not notice). Of course if it's the standby that's shorting then I would guess this would usually fuse it fast enough that wouldn't notice.

In terms of testing, you don't really have to worry about disk drives. I would connect only the motherboard and perhaps video card if it has a power connection first (disconnecting anything else plugged into the power supply). In fact, often you'd disconnect everything but the video card (unless it has built in video in which case even that is unnecessary if you have one), RAM and CPU from the motherboard plus the power switch if needed and of course the power. There's also little use trying to measure voltages if the PSU isn't even on (other then the standby lines).

If all else fails, you can disconnect the PSU from the motherboard and video card, connect it to a few disk drives, or fans or something and then short the power on (usually green) and ground (usually black) lines and see if the PSU comes on properly as discussed in our ATX PSU article. If it does, try measuring the voltages if you can. (If it doesn't then yes your PSU may be faulty presuming you've made sure that the PSU is actually getting power and any switch on the PSU is on.)

If you have a good PSU, you shouldn't really need to connect anything, it should come on even without them although the voltage regulation may be poor. (And as Astronaut mentioned the PSU should have a fan which would normally come on when it comes on properly so you should be able to tell if it's at least working somewhat without connecting anything.) For some cheap & crappy PSU however, I wouldn't discount the possibility of them either refusing to turn on, or even dying if you start them without any load so I'd be careful. If the PSU seems fine, I would look more carefully at the motherboard. You could try shorting the pins for the power manually if you're careful.

Nil Einne (talk) 11:15, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Make sure the PC Speaker header (SPK or PCSPK or something like that) is connected up - the motherboard uses that to signal (by means of several beeps) if there's a problem (and if you can't hear the beeps you can't know what it's trying to tell you). Next make sure the power supply connector to the motherboard is properly connected, including the additional +12V2DC connector that most motherboards have (it's separate from the main connector, and is often located nearer to the CPU). Then make sure that the CPU fan is correctly connected to the appropriate header on the motherboard - most motherboard microcontrollers will refuse to let the system boot if they don't detect the fan (as a missing or bad fan would result in the CPU being very quickly cooked alive). In my experience these two mistakes are the most common causes of newly-built machines not starting at all - if they're okay, the PSU should power up, even if the RAM and CPU are entirely missing. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 13:40, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Another simple thing: I assume you're using the front-panel power button to try to turn it on, but first make sure that if there's a hard power switch on the PSU, that it's turned on. -- Coneslayer (talk) 13:51, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

And, of course, that the front-panel power button (PWR) is properly connected to the appropriate header on the motherboard (apologies for stating the obvious, but sometimes one can get caught up in byzantine hypotheses for a failure that's cause by something so trivial one has overlooked it). Ditto for the case reset (RST) switch (if it's accidentally shorted the motherboard may refuse to boot, thinking the machine is being deliberately held in reset). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:00, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Finding and deleting disused DLLs

I've just done a scan of my HD using the freeware program DLL Archive by AnalogX http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/System/dllarch/Freeware.htm which searches for unreferenced DLLs.

I thought it would find either none or just a few. In fact it found over six thousand of them, the biggest of which were over 13MB in size. They must be using up gigabytes of space on my nearly full HD.

a) Are there any paths/folders where it would be particularly unwise to delete them?

b) Would deleting those not in the Windows folder be safe?

c) Is there any other practical means of finding disused DLLs? Thanks 92.15.17.9 (talk) 11:24, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Here are some more similar programs, except the first one: http://www.softpedia.com/downloadTag/delete+dll 92.15.17.9 (talk) 12:32, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't think such programs are terribly safe, and I wouldn't recommend relying on one. That's because of how DLL dependencies work. There are two mechanisms whereby Windows loads a dll. Firstly is by means of static dependency, where the information in an application's Portable Executable file lists all the dlls it depends upon (and they, being PEs themselves, list those that they in turn are dependent upon). That's how programs like the ones you're talking about work - they find all the executables, and then traverse the tree of dlls indicated (directly or indirectly) by these headers. It's tempting to assume that any DLL file on the disk that isn't reachable by this traversal is therefore "unreferenced", and so can be safely deleted. This isn't the case, because of the second mechanism Windows employs. DLLs can also be explicitly loaded by a program calling the LoadLibrary function; LoadLibrary takes the name of a dll and loads it when it's told to; that name isn't in the PE header of the executable, and so isn't found by the traversal discussed above. This might sound like an obscure way of doing things, but it's actually a very common pattern. Lots of programs will have a "plugins" folder (or several), and when they start they'll look in that folder, read the names of all the dlls they find, and then LoadLibrary each one (and so installing a plugin is as simple as copying its dll into that folder). The traversal misses all of these, classifies them as unreferenced, and so you'd be deleting things that are in fact used (but not statically referenced) and so break stuff. To answer your specific questions: a) clearly the windows directory and its children, but really no-where is safe b) no c) as described above, not really. Instead I'd recommend running a smart uninstaller like Revo Uninstaller Free and aggressively uninstall programs you don't use (smart uninstallers are better than dumb traversal, because they have some knowledge a-priori about the files used by many popular programs). But really I'd question that dlls are really taking up a significant part of your disk; it's almost always media files or the data files associated with applications that's really to blame. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 13:18, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

There's probably other stuff on your disk that can be deleted first. You can start by clearing your browser cache, emptying your trash/recycle bin, clearing various folders called temp or tmp - c:\temp, c:\windows\temp (80+MB in mine!), and other places too. Astronaut (talk) 17:01, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I use Ccleaner and CleanUp! all the time, so already doing that. I found three copies of hwxjpn.dll, 13MB each, 20 copies of ieframe.dll about 11MB (although some vary slightly in size), and many more repeated seemingly identical DLLs. I have 6719 unreferenced DLLs, dating back to 1994. BTW, I do frequent virus scans with four or five different scanners so they are unlikely to be malware. Its a pity that XP isnt designed to use just one DLL file rather than having many identical copies of them. I don't suppose there is any software that can do the second thing that FinlayMcWalter described? Thanks 92.15.3.0 (talk) 20:09, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Task Scheduler

Resolved

I want to run a .bat script every 10 mins with Windows Task Scheduler. However, it doesn't work, the .bat script just flashes up for half a second and then ends. If I run the .bat script normally it works fine. What am I doing wrong? 82.43.90.93 (talk) 14:34, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Try adding a "pause" statement to the end of your batch file so you can see the result and hit a key at your leisure, so Windows doesn't just immediately close the cmd.exe window once the .bat file is done. Comet Tuttle (talk) 14:43, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

And you'll probably see a "file not found" error of some nature. That's typically because you're expecting the batch file to run with its working directory set somewhere, and with the PATH set with something in it, and it's providing a different environment where that's not the case. It's generally best to specify the full paths for everything (for the batch file, for all the executables it calls, and for any data files it references). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 14:55, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks everyone, that solved it! 82.43.90.93 (talk) 15:15, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Language Display in Games

I've got a mod for one of my games (Men of War) which adds certain scenarios to it. Unfortunately, the English version of this mod is not available yet (i.e. the localization files for this mod have not been released), and I only have the Russian version. The problem is, the cyrillic is not showing up in the game (I get random symbols), meaning I can't read what the objectives are (the objectives are spoken, too, but it's way too fast for me!). Does anyone know what I should/could do to fix this so that cyrillic is displayed in-game? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 17:12, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Assuming a windowsish OS, try setting your system locale to Russian (Control Panel->Regional and Language Options->Administrative->Change system locale... in the Vista box I'm currently on). You may need the Russian version of Men of War, though. —Korath (Talk) 17:19, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Did you use Windows Update and make sure the Cyrillic language pack is installed? Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:18, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I believe the cyrillic language pack is installed, because in 'Regional settings' I can install Russian input (which I have done) and therefore write in Russian. I can view Russian in any other software (Office, browsers, etc.). If this is not what you mean, then how would I go about checking for this (and then installing it if it's not installed)? I don't want to change the system locale just for one single mod, though. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 18:45, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

What is the operation done for data or file is created ,deletion ,selection ,cut,copy,past

What is the operation done for data or file is created ,deletion ,selection ,cut,copy,past,drag drop etc —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.204.80.63 (talk) 17:29, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't understand the question, and I don't think other editors are likely to, either. Are you asking how to write a program to do these things, or are you perhaps asking what Windows or Linux do when the user does these things? Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:20, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I think it's the second one, "what is the OS is doing to the data when those actions are taken". 82.43.90.93 (talk) 20:14, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Making a page live.

I have edited pages that have already been live in the past, but this is the first time I have created my own page. The page name is "Newman Grace Inc.", and I have finished editing it, I have saved it, however, I cannot find it on wikipedia when searching for it. How can I make sure that my page is indeed live, or is there another step that I must take in order to make the wikipedia page live. Thank you for your help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by OBillyHill (talk • contribs) 19:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Letter case in filenames when transferring photos from digital camera to Linux

I've been transferring photos from my Olympus E-520 DSLR to my Fedora 12 Linux computer by connecting the camera to a USB port, mounting it under the Linux filesystem tree (using automatic filesystem detection) and then just copying the files across, because I haven't been able to make any better or easier way work. Previously this has worked all OK, but now I've run into a small issue here.

Previously, Linux saw the files on the camera in all lowercase, such as dcim/100olymp/p1010001.jpg. Now, with no apparent reason, it has suddenly started seeing them in all uppercase, such as DCIM/100OLYMP/P1010001.JPG. This creates a problem, because like all Unix-compatible systems, Linux uses case-sensitive file names, and so the two are actually different files. If I just blindly copy the files across, mixing both conventions, I end up with duplicated photos. I have been able to change the filename case with a simple command: for i in *; do mv ${i} `echo ${i} | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`; done, but it's awkward having to do it every time.

I don't know whether the fault is in the camera (thinking all the world is Windows, where letter case in filenames doesn't matter) or in Linux (thinking that since Windows is case-insensitive, the default rendition of the filenames doesn't matter and it can blindly force its own version instead), but I want to know how to fix this. I want to force Linux to use a consistent letter case, no matter what letter case the camera uses internally. How can I do this? Is there some option to mount or some filesystem driver parameter I can use for this? JIP | Talk 19:30, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

There are several File Allocation Table filesystem drivers for Linux, as described in FAT filesystem and Linux. It sounds like, for whatever reason, your camera is mounting as msdos rather than vfat. See what it's mounting as now, and try manually mounting it with vfat. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:40, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Logo of Diba inc.

Can anyone find me a copy of the logo of Diba Inc., a Menlo Park, California internet-appliance startup that was bought by Sun Microsystems in 1997? I only have it on an ancient t-shirt, which I've scanned here. Tineye and my usually proficient Google-fu haven't come up with anything at all. Note that it's not the insurance company, the Iranian bootmaker, or a defunct East-European social-networking site. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:58, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

How to watch the new Torrent TV Pilot "Pioneer One"

"Pioneer One" is said to be the first TV program pilot specifically for viewing by Torrent. I have never tried this video form before, and when I go via Firefox to the website [6] and click on "Download Torrent" nothing happens. I use Windows XP. I get a box which says "Opening Pioneer.One.S01E01.720p.x264-VODO.torrent Open or save? "Open" leads to "Browse" and a choice of Firefox and other unlikely programs for viewing. I assume "Save" is the right answer. This leads to a list of downloads, with a 90.1kb file, clearly not the 1119 MB file for the show. If I double click that 90.1 kb file, I get a Windows message that "Windows cannot open this file" without knowing what program created it. If I click "Use the web to find the program" I get a Windows page which offers some downloads from sources of unknown trustworthyness. Basically, what computer program should I install to be able to watch a Torrent program, and what are the basic steps to download and watch this particular program? It really should not be this roundabout. Will some widely known media viewer such as Real, Itunes, or Windows Media player play the thing? And how do I avoid cluttering my hard drive with giant files for programs looked at once? If they were in the playlist for a particular viewer, I might be able to download, watch, and delete. Thanks. Edison (talk) 20:50, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Smaller alternatives to OpenOffice with British-English spell checking?

OpenOffice is nearly 400MB with a British English add-on; despite "Never look a gift horse in the mouth" dare I mention the word bloatware? And it has some irritating features I don't like. I've already looked at List_of_word_processors#Freeware and similar articles.

What smaller free alternatives with British English spell checking are there please (that people can recommend from personal experience or knowledge rather than just providing a link to Google)? All I really want is a word-processor, never use the other things in OpenOffice except sometime the spreadsheet which may be available independently. I have Windows XP. Thanks 92.15.3.0 (talk) 20:54, 23 June 2010 (UTC)