User talk:Dsimic

My stress level, induced by editing Wikipedia? So far, so good. :)

Bit rot

Don't you hate it when that happens? ;) --168.215.131.150 (talk) 21:21, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I really don't get it... There's something wrong with the crash / tabs recovery within Firefox – hm, it would be nice to trace it down and at least submit a reproducible bug report to Firefox developers. -- Dsimic (talk) 21:26, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Replaceable fair use File:SATA Express host plug.png

Thanks for uploading File:SATA Express host plug.png. I noticed that this file is being used under a claim of fair use. However, I think that the way it is being used fails the first non-free content criterion. This criterion states that files used under claims of fair use may have no free equivalent; in other words, if the file could be adequately covered by a freely-licensed file or by text alone, then it may not be used on Wikipedia. If you believe this file is not replaceable, please:

1. Go to the file description page and add the text {{di-replaceable fair use disputed|<your reason>}} below the original replaceable fair use template, replacing <your reason> with a short explanation of why the file is not replaceable.
2. On the file discussion page, write a full explanation of why you believe the file is not replaceable.

Alternatively, you can also choose to replace this non-free media item by finding freely licensed media of the same subject, requesting that the copyright holder release this (or similar) media under a free license, or by creating new media yourself (for example, by taking your own photograph of the subject).

If you have uploaded other non-free media, consider checking that you have specified how these media fully satisfy our non-free content criteria. You can find a list of description pages you have edited by clicking on this link. Note that even if you follow steps 1 and 2 above, non-free media which could be replaced by freely licensed alternatives will be deleted 2 days after this notification (7 days if uploaded before 13 July 2006), per the non-free content policy. If you have any questions, please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:59, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

SATA images

I have removed them from the article due to non-compliance with WP:NFC. Do not re-add them. Our policies on non-free media is very restrictive, and those are replaceable, and thus not acceptable. Werieth (talk) 20:04, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Ok, will re-tag the pictures as orphaned. -- Dsimic (talk) 20:07, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Uop Cache

See also: User talk:Oranjelo100 § Please get yourself a blog

Dude whats your problem with my aricle that was revelant information. You yourself make blog if you want to.Oranjelo100 (talk) 10:11, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Please excuse me, but can't you see how did you write your sentence above? It has a few misspelled words, and it's such a simple sentence. Also, for those two sentences above you needed four commits, what makes little to no sense – if you agree.

All I wanted to say is that you need to practice more before contributing to Wikipedia.

Also, do you think I was born with the knowledge of English? No, and English isn't my native language. But, I've spent many years working hard on it, and I still don't consider it to be as good as I'd really want it to be – so I still keep learning it. Learning and practicing is the key – but only when performed in appropriate places. When people learn and practice for their drivers licenses, do they go straight to highways doing 100 mph? Please consider Wikipedia to be some kind of a highway.

How about placing your edits into sandboxes, so other people can have a look at them first? -- Dsimic (talk) 12:12, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Just noticed that you also selected a wrong section title level for your addition to my talk page, so I fixed it. :) Can't you really see your own mistakes, and learn from them? Is there anything more I can do in order to make noticing your own mistakes easier for you?

Please note that the contributions are good, but not in case fixing them requires more effort than the actual contribution would require by itself. Also, each system has its own rules, and that applies to Wikipedia too. -- Dsimic (talk) 12:25, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Maybe stop arrogantly patronizing me, and you still didn't respond why you deleted relevant information from uop cache.

You're probably right, as I'm obviously wasting my time trying to provide some suggestions to you on how you should improve yourself. That actually makes me a bigger fool.

Back to your question, I've deleted some of the stuff you added there because it was (a) written in very bad English; and (b) contained hardly verifiable platform-specific information that actually doesn't help explaining the micro-op cache to the people who will be reading the article.

Hope that answers your question. -- Dsimic (talk) 15:38, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Btw, please sign your posts on talk pages. That's one of the rules here. -- Dsimic (talk) 15:42, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

You are full of yourself instead of acting high and mighty explain what you mean by very bad english and hardly verifiable platform-specific information .L1 cache is commonly used term and you deleted relevant technical information about uop cache inner workings.

I'm really sorry about your true inability to see your own mistakes. Every single article you touched, ended up looking like a real mess. You are unable even to properly space words, or to use periods and commas properly. It's all the same to you, those little dots on the screen seem to be irrelevant. Are you using some kind of an automated translation engine to produce such "Me Tarzan, you Jane" English? -- Dsimic (talk) 19:41, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Texting: The choice of a new, illiterate, generation... Thanks for the laugh, Dsimic! Props to you for trying. PaulMEdwards (talk) 10:52, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

@PaulMEdwards: Hello there! You're welcome, and I'm glad that someone actually reads the stuff I'm putting into Wikipedia. :) Though, I'm asking myself quite often whether all that makes sense? Wikipedia is a great thing, no doubt about that, but who cares about all the effort so many people are putting into it? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:54, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

@Dsimic: Well, you and I, and certainly a few others, do care... Isn't that enough? Hopefully future generations will look back upon us as akin to the scholars who founded the Library of Alexandria. We stewards of information must remain vigilant and diligently curate this valuable resource. — PaulMEdwards (talk | contribs) 20:25, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

When looked from that side, it makes sense. Though, do you really think that new generations and "modern people" care about the Library of Alexandria, or about the older (or more complicated) stuff available on Wikipedia and elsewhere?

A few days ago I watched a motherboard unboxing video on YouTube, and the presenter (a young guy) wasn't sure what's actually provided by the expansion slot bracket that came bundled with the motherboard – and it was a serial port. He was like "is it a VGA port? not sure, but don't need it anyway", what really struck me. Also, he just tossed away the manual, which is for that particular motherboard full of extremely valuable information and simply a must-read. Though, all that guy cares about is to stick two graphics cards into it, click ten times to get a running installation of Windows, and spend countless hours with W, A, S and D keys.

Library of Alexandria? C'mon. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:58, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

SATA Express wiki page

Hi Dsimic,

Thanks for the explanation after you reverted some of our edits back to their original form. All makes sense.

However, with that said, we would like to request a few edits to the Serial ATA Express (SATA Express) wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA_Express

1. Would you change the title of this page to SATA Express (as opposed to Serial ATA Express)? This is how the specification is usually referenced in papers and publications.
2. SFF-8639 connector is referenced as the device connector. Although it can be used that way, this connector is not part of the SATA Express spec. Is there anyway you could edit this to make it clearer to readers?

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns to the requests above.

Many thanks,

Jbalich (talk) 19:30, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Hello there!

I'm glad you're Ok with the edits I performed. Thank you very much for your suggestions, especially regarding usage of the SFF-8639 connector — that's something I haven't described well enough within the article. Already went ahead and edited the SATA Express article so it properly describes used connectors, please check it out.

Also, I agree about the renaming, it's going to be shorter and better that way — and that's how all the papers are referring to the interface itself. I'll ask the admins tomorrow to perform the article renaming, can't do that myself as the SATA Express article already exists in form of a redirect (and copy&paste is not an option as commits history gets trashed that way).

-- Dsimic (talk) 05:46, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

Renaming of the article is done. :) -- Dsimic (talk) 02:25, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Looks great, thanks for your edits to the connector section! Also, I appreciate your help in renaming the page! On another note, are you able to add an image to the SATA Express page? I found a simple yet informative image of hosts and drives from the SATA Express page on sata-io.org, found here: https://www.sata-io.org/sata-express — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jbalich (talk • contribs) 15:54, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. :) I'm glad you like it, and I'm really hoping that the whole article will help anyone in understanding better what's SATA Express about, as it can be quite confusing at the beginning.

Regarding adding images, Wikipedia is very, very strict about disallowing non-free images. I've already uploaded images of all five types of connectors used for SATA Express, in form of plain black-and-white sketches borrowed from a SATA-IO paper, and they were quickly deleted as disallowed. Well, it took me at least 45 minutes to crop, export and upload those wasted pictures. :) It's all about preventing any copyright issues down the road... Basically, unless it's a picture of a building that's been taken down, or a picture of no longer alive person — only the pictures you've taken yourself (or graphs created from an empty canvas) are allowed here.

-- Dsimic (talk) 16:09, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

I see, thanks for the clarification. If I had permission from SATA-IO (the owner of the above mentioned image) to post this image, how would I go about getting it up on the page? Once again, thanks for your help! Jbalich (talk) 16:43, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

You'd have to obtain a "free to use" license from SATA-IO for the particular image, in form of a page on their site explicitly stating such a license. With that available, you should provide URL of that page while uploading the image using the Wikipedia's File Upload Wizard (Toolbox --> Upload file on the left side of Wikipedia's standard layout). That would be basically it, together with adding image to the article itself.

Quite frankly, I'd say you'd be much better re-creating the illustration yourself, than chasing the SATA-IO for a license. You'd save yourself from a lot of pain. :) -- Dsimic (talk) 17:16, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Got it, thanks again! Jbalich (talk) 17:29, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. -- Dsimic (talk) 17:35, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

M.2 (NGFF) page

Can we change the title of the "Next Generation Form Factor" wiki page to "M.2"? NGFF is its former name and I feel that the page should reflect that change as it is listed on many other pages by its proper name "M.2". Thanks! Jbalich (talk) 18:54, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Hello there! That's a good proposal, things changed in the meantime and it should improve the clarity. I've placed a request for admins to perform the rename, as the M.2 article already exists as a redirect page. -- Dsimic (talk) 19:51, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks much! Jbalich (talk) 20:29, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. -- Dsimic (talk) 20:32, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Regarding move request on Talk:Linux Gaming

Just a note, I went ahead and merged the two move requests on Talk:Linux Gaming. Having two separate move requests happening at once on the same talk page can be a bit confusing to readers, and it makes it so that consensus has to be form only once. Steel1943 (talk) 04:13, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Hello there! Looking great to me, less cluttered and a lot easier to discuss. Thank you for merging the move requests. -- Dsimic (talk) 13:02, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Form factor

I'm more than happy to discuss anything - however; just because something's 'accepted' does NOT mean or make or correct. Wikipædia IS an encyclopedic work. If we follow your logic, then it's almost certain the (so-called) 'bastions' of American journalism would sink - dramatically in quality. However, they ALL have guides to proper language use. All of them. Regardless if their writers' personal idiosyncrasies, they write in a UNIFORM style.

Additionally, I was speaking to the head editor of PCWorld the other day (sheer coincidence) and HE brought up his displeasure with it's use by 'readers.' Another point; on ourpise, I forgot the gentleman's name, but, he 'writes' for an inline 'journal,' & he used INCORRECT grammar. When I pontes it out, he responded: 'rules are meant to b broken.' He must think he's Shakespeare - he's not.

Just 'because' is NOT an answer. We ALL need to uphold things. No - it's not 'the end if the world,' but it's WRONG to encourage continued MISuse. Finally. As I'm NOT changing the arrocle's structure, I fail to see HOW it has to be removed - by ... you. Of ALL people, it's people LIKE you who should ENCOURAGE PROPER use of words & speech. Why not just LEAVE it - if - IF - theirs an 'outcry,' THEN 'correct' it (lol).

But, in fact, all I did was WRITE it CORECTLY. — Preceding unsigned comment added by UNOwenNYC (talk • contribs) 23:46, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Hello there! I apologize for the confusion, please allow me to explain.

Basically, "form factor" is something I've seen used in many places so far. There are even some definitions around, like this one, or this one. It's also used in other areas, for example while describing electric motors. That's why I was against editing it out, and also "configuration" isn't such a great general replacement word. It would be better to use "footprint" instead, though saying "hard disk footprint" would be quite awkward, if you agree. :)

Please don't get me wrong, I'm all in for improving things whenever and wherever possible, and for not allowing "everybody does it that way" approaches to creep in. Many people are doing wrong things, and that isn't making wrong things right.

Any chances, please, for describing in more detail why the "form factor" is actually wrong? Any examples, definitions etc.?

-- Dsimic (talk) 00:14, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Reviewer

Hello, following a review of your contributions, I have enabled reviewer rights on your account. This gives you the ability to:

• Accept changes on pages undergoing pending changes,
• Have your changes automatically accepted on pending changes level 2 protected pages, and
• Administrate article feedback.

Please remember that this user right:

• Can be removed at any time for misuse, and
• Does not grant you any special status above other editors.

You should probably also read WP:PROTECT, since this user privilege deals largely with page protection. As the requirements for this privilege are still in a state of flux, I would encourage you to keep up to date on the WP:REVIEWER page. Feel free to ask me if you have any questions! Happy editing! Reaper Eternal (talk) 12:22, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much! I'll make sure to use this privilege only with the best intentions, and according to the Wikipedia rules. -- Dsimic (talk) 13:45, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Re: Android 4.4 screenshot

The Android 4.4 "launcher" is exclusive to the Nexus 5, and is technically part of the Google Search app, it is not a stock component of Android, and requires the non-free Google apps in order to function (thus, I cannot consider it to be a stock screenshot of Android). All other builds of 4.4 (even from Google itself, ironically) use the stock launcher from 4.3. ViperSnake151  Talk  17:33, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

You're totally correct there, and it might be some kind of a new product launch strategy for Google (so they somehow differentiate the Nexus 5 from other devices running 4.4), who knows. I've just edited the Android version history article so it states that pictured launcher is currently exclusive to the Nexus 5, please check it out. Hope you'll find that acceptable. -- Dsimic (talk) 18:14, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

I still object because, despite how Google has promoted it, it is not a new feature of Android 4.4, and we are giving false expectations to readers. ViperSnake151  Talk  18:11, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree there, it's a launcher feature. Is it better after this edit to the article? -- Dsimic (talk) 18:23, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

The launcher is part of the Google Search app. Updates to Google apps are not considered to be part of Android for the purposes of the version history article, because they are distributed through Play Store and not technically part of the stock Android system. And as you can see there, this launcher is "not" exclusive to 4.4, so its not a feature of 4.4 either (my Galaxy Nexus proudly uses it just fine, thank you very much) ViperSnake151  Talk  18:27, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Ok, makes sense. I can live with that. :) -- Dsimic (talk) 18:33, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of File:RouterBoard R52n-M.jpg

A tag has been placed on File:RouterBoard R52n-M.jpg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section F1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the image is an unused redundant copy (all pixels the same or scaled down) of an image in the same file format, which is on Wikipedia (not on Commons), and all inward links have been updated.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Eeekster (talk) 20:50, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Number of edits (Oranjelo100)

Discussion started on Oranjelo100's talk page and continued here.

It's none of your business how many edits J made.--Oranjelo100 (talk) 14:34, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

It is my business to make Wikipedia better, and unfortunately your edits aren't helping in that. So, I need to point out what's wrong, so we can make it better together. Also, there are rules on Wikipedia we all need to obey, as we've already discussed. -- Dsimic (talk) 14:41, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

J will use whatever references J will like J am not your servant. Do it yourself without deleting without deleting relevant information if you have problem and my edits help make Wikipedia better like them or not. You feel you are important when you talk about rules. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oranjelo100 (talk • contribs)

I don't want to sound important or whatever, and I don't want anyone to serve me. We're all here to play by the rules established by Wikipedia. All those rules are reasonable, and targeted at improving quality of the content provided through articles.

On the other hand, you sound like a totally ignorant and unreasonable person, unable to see your own mistakes. For example, can't you see that you're using letter "J" instead of "I" when referring to yourself – and four times in a row above? Can't you see that? Also, why are you writing "gb" instead of "GB", for example? That's not a rule imposed by Wikipedia, that's something from the elementary school.

Please, understand that you need to follow the rules, and to apply some common sense while editing. Otherwise, please get yourself a blog, and do whatever you want there. -- Dsimic (talk) 15:27, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

My bad with J, English is not my native language but will make edits in whatever way I like and I will not make blog just to appease you don't you have anything better to do then stalking my edits and nitpicking everything. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oranjelo100 (talk • contribs)

English isn't my native language either, but I've spent many years learning it. Sorry, but I see no point in spending more time and words towards trying to educate you. You just don't want to accept anything, or at least take it into consideration. -- Dsimic (talk) 15:51, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

And stop trying to discourage others from editing Wikipedia for example me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oranjelo100 (talk • contribs)

Please excuse me, but I'm feeling sorry for your obvious lack of intelligence. -- Dsimic (talk) 16:23, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

I feel sorry for you because you have to try make yourself feel superior by trying to put down others. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oranjelo100 (talk • contribs)

I'm trying to make you better, but you don't seem to understand that. Btw, please sign your posts. -- Dsimic (talk) 17:27, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

you will make me feel better when you will stop stalking and harrasing me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oranjelo100 (talk • contribs)

You're taking all suggestions as if they were against you, but they're not. I'm telling all that so you can improve yourself, but that seems to be pointless as you simply don't understand.

Once again, please sign your posts. -- Dsimic (talk) 18:29, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't need your help in improving myself like I said stop stalking my edits and making mocking messages on my talk page or any other messages for that matter I dont want to talk with you. Another issue is that you broke Wikipedia rules by making personal attacks against me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oranjelo100 (talk • contribs)

Dude, you're ridiculous. I'll stop talking to you, as it's a totally pointless waste of my time. -- Dsimic (talk) 21:58, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

About your Third Opinion request: I am a regular volunteer at the Third Opinion project. Your request for an opinion has been removed because this is primarily a conduct dispute. 3O does not handle disputes which are primarily conduct disputes, which are handled through RFC/U, ANI, or ARBCOM. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 22:46, 20 November 2013 (UTC) PS: @Oranjelo100: While I express no opinion about any of the rest, you do need to sign your posts with four tildes. Failing to sign them makes following a conversation very difficult. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 22:49, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Your request for rollback

Hi Dsimic. After reviewing your request for rollback, I have enabled rollback on your account. Keep in mind these things when going to use rollback:

• Getting rollback is no more momentous than installing Twinkle.
• Rollback should be used to revert clear cases of vandalism only, and not good faith edits.
• Rollback should never be used to edit war.
• If abused, rollback rights can be revoked.
• Use common sense.

If you no longer want rollback, contact me and I'll remove it. Also, for some more information on how to use rollback, see Wikipedia:New admin school/Rollback (even though you're not an admin). I'm sure you'll do great with rollback, but feel free to leave me a message on my talk page if you run into troubles or have any questions about appropriate/inappropriate use of rollback. Thank you for helping to reduce vandalism. Happy editing! – Juliancolton | ^Talk 04:38, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much! I'll make sure to use this privilege only with the best intentions, and according to the Wikipedia rules. — Dsimic (talk) 14:18, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Sandy Bridge and FinFET

Discussion started on InternetMeme's talk page and continued here.

Hi there,

The idea was to link to the page and section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device#FinFET

So a user who clicks the "FinFET" link will be directed to a section specifically about FinFETs, rather than a more general article about various multigate devices. Is that not the correct thing to do? Or is there another issue I'm not seeing?

InternetMeme (talk) 15:17, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Hello there! It's just a small confusion, please allow me to explain...

FinFET is a redirect page, and that redirect was basically broken until a few hours ago, when I got it fixed. Previously, FinFET was redirecting to a section title anchor (and that section was renamed at some point in time) within the Multigate device article, and I edited both pages so an explicit anchor is now placed and used. That corrected the FinFET redirect, and it's also preventing such issues with renamed section in the future. Please check out the FinFET redirect, and these two edits: edit #1, edit #2.

Hope it makes sense, please let me know if further explanation is required. — Dsimic (talk) 15:37, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Desktop Enviroment

Whack! You've been whacked with a wet trout. Don't take this too seriously. Someone just wants to let you know that you did something silly.

You have been trouted for: Under Microsoft windows Do not used "Windows" Xp" / "Windows 7" Used Lana and Areo okay?

Thank you for pointing that out! I knew about Aero, but had no idea about Luna... What do I know, my migration to Linux took place back in 1998 or so. :) — Dsimic (talk) 04:09, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Under Microsoft windows Do not used "Windows" Xp" / "Windows 7" Used Lana and Areo okay? Mathsquare (talk) 03:43, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! It's somewhat funny I got a barnstar for something related to MS Windows, but that at least shows I'm not biased. :) — Dsimic (talk) 04:11, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

BLAST protocol edits

Dear Dsimic, please see the "talk" section of the BLAST (protocol) article for my response to your much appreciated attention to said article.Synchronist (talk) 01:54, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Hello there! I'm glad you're fine with my edits to the BLAST (protocol) article. :) Right now I'm reading you comments and further edits, and will be replying shortly. — Dsimic (talk) 13:33, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Android 4.4.1 revision

I saw that you reverted my update. Thanks for catching the layout issue. It didn't seem to show up for me under preview or even after I saved the changes until I collapsed and then expanded the Android 4.4 subsection. It should be good now. I have also added some sources. --Jimv1983 (talk) 02:51, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Hello there, and you're welcome. :) It's looking good now, with the inline references backing new 4.4.1 content. I've touched it up a bit, please check it out. — Dsimic (talk) 03:12, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Google Experience Launcher

Take a look at this. Cheers. --uKER (talk) 14:33, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for a heads-up! I'm already looking at it. :) — Dsimic (talk) 14:35, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for this; I hadn't noticed so thanks for updating it. In addition, while I'm sure it was implied via my use of the "thanks" feature, thanks for all your work on the Nexus 5 article. :) Best. Acalamari 23:52, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. :) Exactly, I went to see who thanked me for my edits on the Nexus 5 article, and spotted an outdated external link. :)

While we're there, would it be possible to provide better integration of various external tools into Wikipedia? Or is it all up to the actual Wikimedia software? Some of the tools (for example, page views stats) are confusing and burried so deeply, that I doubt many people are actually using them — while their value and actual usability is undoubtful. Any insights, please? — Dsimic (talk) 00:03, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Hmm...I actually have no idea what processes are used to integrate the external tools! I'd recommend asking Cyberpower678 about this; from my experience, he's fairly knowledgable about technical matters such as this one. Acalamari 09:36, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

In order to integrate them, the devs of this site need to get off of their butts and start doing something. :D. Actually, these tools are used a lot. I recorded that Page History Statistics tool was used over 88,000 times last month. That's quite a lot.—cyberpower _Online^{Merry Christmas} 12:37, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you both for the insights! Ah, as always, elbow grease is required for new features and improvements. :) — Dsimic (talk) 15:10, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Improved quotation style in article on BLAST protocool

Yes, Dsimic, it does look better! Synchronist (talk) 02:34, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad you like it. :) — Dsimic (talk) 02:38, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Laravel (Framework)

If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.

You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

A tag has been placed on Laravel (Framework) requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G12 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article or image appears to be a clear copyright infringement. This article or image appears to be a direct copy from https://teamtreehouse.com/forum/php-frameworks-2. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material, and as a consequence, your addition will most likely be deleted. You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. This part is crucial: say it in your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing.

If the external website or image belongs to you, and you want to allow Wikipedia to use the text or image — which means allowing other people to modify it — then you must verify that externally by one of the processes explained at Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials. If you are not the owner of the external website or image but have permission from that owner, see Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission. You might want to look at Wikipedia's policies and guidelines for more details, or ask a question here.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. - MrX 20:35, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

@MrX: Hm, what's going on? It wasn't me writing this article, I've just renamed it so the second word in its title isn't capitalized. — Dsimic (talk) 20:41, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Just as a note, quoted from the article's talk page:

You created the redirect at the (almost) same time as I nominated the article for speedy deletion. You can ignore the notification. - MrX 20:48, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

— Dsimic (talk) 20:56, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Laravel (framework)

History nicely fixed :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Laravel_%28framework%29&action=history  Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 20:31, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Looking good, thank you very much! — Dsimic (talk) 20:48, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

FYI: FlexRAID at AfD

Didn't seem notable to me. Someone should look the promo contribs of Special:Contributions/Wikidevb (and other SPAs which wrote that FlexRAID piece) in other articles. Someone not using his real name (talk) 18:05, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for a heads-up! — Dsimic (talk) 18:29, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

@Dsimic: That section isn't about FlexRAID. An article on FlexRAID is being prepared separately. The section was about RAID over File System as a general RAID approach. Refer to prior discussion on the entry here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spectwiki (talk • contribs) 17:41, July 30, 2014‎ (UTC)

Hello there! Well, Ok, it doesn't hurt to keep it if you insist. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:19, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Nexus 4 Modification Rejected - no reason given?

Dsimic hi, I don't normally edit articles so perhaps I've got the wrong end of the stick. The material in the Nexus 4 page was waffle at the very best and that is what I removed. Is it that I have not correctly followed a procedure (there seem to be a lot) or just that you don't agree, and as a prominent editor/contributor you therefor felt justified in removing my edit with no reasoning? Just so I know what I should do in future. I contribute financially to Wikipedia and hate to see it dumbed-down with junk text. Nick (ozy1ozy) Ozy1ozy (talk) 21:42, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Hello there, and sorry for my delayed response! I apologize for not providing an edit summary while reverting your edit, so please allow me to explain now... In a few words, your edit deleted majority of the article's content, without a clear link with the deleted content being "bloat-text or advertising adding no useful information", especially as that content already went through multiple rounds of reviewing, debating and consenting. Of course, Wikipedia has clear rules against advertising, WP:Spam etc,. and the whole content has been already verified against them numerous times. Basically, your edit was bordering with blanking as a form of WP:Vandalism, and in such cases it's acceptable to perform the reverting while providing no edit summaries.

Hope it makes sense. If required, I'm more than happy to discuss it further! — Dsimic (talk) 22:37, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Editing OpenStack page

Hi Dsimic,

I'm very interested in your decision to pull the list of notable people in the cloud computing industry that drive the globally significant OpenStack project? Wikipedia has no problems with low rate movies having lists of actors and such, so why should the cloud computing industry and it's currently most significant project OpenStack not be able to list the leaders of the project? it's a larger than usual "key people" list, but that's the way the governance model is structured, so it's justified to declare that. I will be putting more information up about the unique and innovative OpenStack governance model in the coming days.

Thanks DHOTOU — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drhopontopofus (talk • contribs) 11:51, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Hello there, and sorry for my delayed response! On second thought, and especially with your intention of adding more details about the OpenStack's governance model, that list makes more sense. Having such a long list isn't that useful per se, as there are hundreds (and probably even thousands) of other people also playing important roles in OpenStack's development, but if we add more details about the structure, inner workings etc., that list will become more useful... Looking forward to your edits!

Also, just as a note, seeing the word "committee" is always bringing me a bitter taste. :) — Dsimic (talk) 22:14, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

@Drhopontopofus: Any updates, please? :) — Dsimic (talk) 15:11, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi Dsimic, I have been a bit snowed this month. I'll get onto this as soon as I can. I'm going to enlist one of the docs guys to help me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drhopontopofus (talk • contribs) 04:30, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Just take your time, there's absolutely no hurry. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:35, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

It has been a pleasure

Hey Dsimic, I've really enjoyed collaborating with you on Replicant (operating system). I think we have made some significant improvements. If you ever need help on a project in the future, I'll be glad to assist. --WikiTryHardDieHard (talk) 00:00, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you very much – I'm glad you enjoyed it, and I'd say that the pleasure was all mine. :) Sure thing, we've made clearly visible improvements, and that's probably going to make Replicant more understandable to a broader audience, while preserving the knowledge and facts for the future. In the end, that's the goal, if you agree. :)

Speaking about bigger projects, there's one I've been putting aside for a long time. :) It's the Logical Volume Manager (Linux) article, which is currently a totally outdated mess. It's such an important part of Linux, and a quite confusing part to many people at the same time; thus, having a good article would have multiple benefits.

Would you like us to go into that as a kind of joint venture? :) — Dsimic (talk) 00:38, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

I'd be happy to help with the LVM article. --WikiTryHardDieHard (talk) 01:27, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Sounds great, thank you! I'll try to provide some kind of a "new layout proposal" for the LVM article in the next few days, and we can start from there, if you agree? — Dsimic (talk) 01:31, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

That sounds like a plan. --WikiTryHardDieHard (talk) 02:01, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay, I've been sidetracked... Hopefully I'll be able to present the "new layout proposal" in the next few days. — Dsimic (talk) 18:02, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Talk before you revert

I believe you are in violation of Wiki consensus in your constant reversion without explanation. I carefully explained my reasons in the Talk section for reverting your original edit. You ignored the talk and went ahead and reverted or reinserted without responding, twice. Please see Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle. While this is not a policy, your continued reversion without discussion is close to an edit war. Tom94022 (talk) 00:46, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Please, let's take it easy, there's no need for running too fast. I do agree that I should've provided feedback first, but I was at the end of writing my quite long reply on the Talk:Data corruption, when you reverted my two edits. While I totally agree (and stand corrected) that it wasn't the best behavior from my side, you should've also waited for my response before deleting my edits (and you just reverted it once again before talking first).

However, let's move forward; I'll stop doing anything before we reach a consenus. Looking forward to discussing it further! — Dsimic (talk) 01:33, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

C algorithm for Damerau–Levenshtein distance

See also: User talk:Alinoli § Damerau–Levenshtein distance

I've read your discussion and I understand your reason, on one hand you're right when you say that wikipedia is not a source code repository on the other when I googled Damerau–Levenshtein distance, I was interested into knowing what that was, its applications an so on but, on the other hand, I also needed to implement it in one of my programs, so it would have been very useful to have a runnable (and possibly well written) source code on hand rather than googling again and reinventing the wheel taking pieces of sources here and there (I built the algoritmh i published from various questions on Stack Overflow). So this is my proposal: I publish the source on one website like rosettacode.org or github and then I publish the link into the "External Link", section. I've just noticed that there is already a link to a C implementation on github that I skipped yesterday, but I've looked at it now and it seems way too complicated yto be useful (for example I don't understand why a function returning a distance between 2 char vectors never uses the char or char* datatype, I'm sure that a deeper reading will unveil all the mechanism that probably threats char vector as vector of unsigned integers and that in the end it will definitely work, but my implementation, taking simply the two char vector as an input seems to me much easier and clear)Alinoli (talk) 12:24, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Totally agreed on your "External links" proposal, please go for it, and there should be no rules against such inclusions here on Wikipedia. It might be bordering with the WP:HOWTO rules forbidding HOWTO's as external links, but an algorithm implementation could hardly be treated as a HOWTO, and there's already a bunch of such external links in the Damerau–Levenshtein distance article.

Regarding the already linked C implementation and no usage of char, they do use unsigned int instead (possibly for an extended alphabet), there's even a comment on top of the source file stating that: Note we use character ints, not chars. At the same, that implementation looks a bit inefficient, as they use a linked list for deduping and storing stuff, what involves linear searches every time. — Dsimic (talk) 16:25, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

I also agree -- posting source code to some source code repository, and then editing the relevant Wikipedia article to add a link to that source code, is a great idea.

I am unaware of any "rules forbidding HOWTO's as external links", although I often discover new rules I was previously unaware of.

Please give me a link to any Wikipedia policy, guideline, or essay that includes any such rule. Thank you. --DavidCary (talk) 16:50, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Hm, unfortunately I seem to be unable to find that policy again; the best I can come up with at the moment are WP:LINKSTOAVOID (which doesn't explicitly forbid HOWTOs as external links), and WP:NOTHOWTO (which says that content of articles isn't to be in form of a HOWTO). Maybe I just got it wrong back at the time?

Ah, I know how confusing all those rules, guidelines and policies can be sometimes... There are even a few studies stating that Wikipedia is pretty much no longer growing in terms of getting a lot of quality new content, as not everyone wants to learn all those dozens of rules scattered all around. — Dsimic (talk) 17:21, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Android 4.4 image revert

Hi, I thought from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Android_version_history#AOSP_vs_Android talk that one should not make any distictions between Android/AOSP, thus not distinguish between open and closed sourced software. Threrefore, Android as the end used know it is what is provided by Google, thus making screenshots of the GEL appropriate to represent the Android home screen. Looking at Android.com, images of the GEL is displayed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pandabear123 (talk • contribs) 21:47, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! This thread on the Talk:Android version history talk page hasn't received any feedback yet, though I partially agree with the proposal itself. Though, there was another discussion before (scattered around), concluding that we shouldn't be including screenshots of the Google Home (also known as Google Experience Launcher), as that's basically a closed-source application which can be running on any version of Android, not only on the "AOSP-like" variants. On the other hand, not providing those Google Home screenshots probably brings in a lot of confusion, as the readers are actually expecting to see them.

In a few words, that's still an open question, and I'd suggest we try first to gain some more attention on the talk page; I'll post a comment there shortly. In my opinion, the solution might also be to include two screenshots ("AOSP" and Google Home), but I'm unsure whether that would actually be a good solution. — Dsimic (talk) 22:07, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Delay in responding about Data Corruption

Hi Dsimic: I've been down with a bad cold since Jan 2 so haven't responded, but will in the next day or so. Thanks for being patient. You can delete this after u read it. Tom94022 (talk) 21:56, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! No worries, thank you for the notice, and there's no hurry... I hope you're feeling better now? Looking forward to making Data corruption article better! :) — Dsimic (talk) 22:18, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Concerning your revision on the Android kernel

Android can technically be built upon any Linux kernel and was never limited to 3.4.10. In fact that version with the citation in the article is wrong. It's the kernel version for the HTC One ONLY. The Nexus 5 for instance uses 3.4.0. The Snap 800 note 3 also uses 3.4.0 with a slightly different revision. Older kernel versions are also used on KitKat, the second Nexus 7 has 3.1.10.

Some devices are able to use kernel 3.12 with proper sources. Even my i9001 runs 3.4.77. There is simply no standard/generic kernel version for Android, it all depends on the SoC, device and sources.

Sources:

• http://cdn.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nexusae0_one_kot49h.png
• http://mobilesyrup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/android442nexus5.jpg
• http://www.sammobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Screenshot_2014-01-12-20-03-13.png
• http://www.droid-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Screenshot_2013-12-09-13-35-43.png
• http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1617219

Yowanvista (talk) 11:45, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

• Hello there! Sorry if my edits sounded like me being lazy or something similar, it was only about the need for providing references while changing articles in such ways. I knew things were the way you edited the Android article, but Wikipedia is an encyclopedia where everything is about verifiability of the provided content.

Sure thing that Linux kernel versions are depending on the actual device, and pretty much any (recent) kernel version could be made to fit – it's all about what each manufacturer sticks with, and whether it wants to invest more time (and money) into porting whatever in-house kernel changes they've made, onto a newer version. Remember those infamous (from the security standpoint) changes Samsung had done to the Linux kernel, in order to support cameras on some of its cellphones? Not to mention the main differences introduced by Android's "fork" of the Linux kernel. As we know, once manufacturers do the required "hacks" just to make a device work with a specific Linux kernel version, they're reluctant to invest more resources into further upgrades, as all those different versions seem to be the same ish to their upper-level management. :)

— Dsimic (talk) 02:15, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Replicant

What does the non-breaking space do? --WikiTryHardDieHard (talk) 02:08, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

In this case, improves the way content of table cells is wrapped, by keeping together compounds that include a space. In case you'd like to see more details about the inner workings, {{nbsp}} is a good starting point. — Dsimic (talk) 02:15, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Interesting --WikiTryHardDieHard (talk) 02:39, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Right, and it all comes from the standard   HTML element. — Dsimic (talk) 02:43, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Android hardware requirements

See also: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 121 § JavaScript and redirects issues?

Ooops sorry I don't know what happened, your link work, but when I did the change my browser (firefox) was jumping to the bottom of the page. --Dadu (talk) 09:44, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! No worries; you're right about the redirects to anchors not working properly sometimes, regarding the vertical scrolling of pages upon such redirects. I've seen that myself too on various redirects to the Android version history article, as well as on some other articles.

As far as I can tell, that's up to the anchors positioning being performed by using JavaScript code, not through plain anchors in URLs – and probably something becomes messed up with the vertical positioning because of those collapsed sections in the Android version history article. I'm not a JavaScript expert, but that could be debugged quite quickly using Firebug by placing a few breakpoints into the JavaScript code and tracing what's happening there. Maybe it would be good to post a MediaWiki bug report?

Also, please have a look at the discussion provided within the section which is now linked as see also above – in its second half, that discussion provides a further insight into the inner workings of MediaWiki redirects. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:42, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

About sue from Nikon

Nikon sue only for the style, but IMO Nikon worry about Android OS, Nikon worry if something happen as mobile phone and mainly smartphone made compact camera sold only 40 percent than 2 years before, while 2013 DSLR sold is also declining. Thank you.Gsarwa (talk) 04:29, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! That sounds as a good possible further addition to the Android (operating system) article; are there any references providing such a description of the lawsuit? If there are such sources, Android (operating system) § Cameras section could be expanded further. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:40, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Help request

If you are looking for a new article to edit, I just created Ark OS. It's pretty minimal right now, and could seriously benefit from that magic Dsimic touch. --WikiTryHardDieHard (talk) 00:38, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing, I'll have a look. By the way, I'm not a magician (wished I was one), but just a guy spending too much time at his computer screens. :) Also, regarding the previously mentioned Logical Volume Manager (Linux) article, that's somewhat on ice for now, but we'll get to its rewrite eventually. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:45, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Column formatting

I've noticed you're setting up column formatting for References and See also in numerous articles. This is all well and good. Would you mind marking these edits as minor to keep our watchlists reasonable? Thanks. ~KvnG 14:21, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thanks for noticing on that, I've been thinking more than a few times whether such edits should be marked as minor or not; guess my dilemma is now resolved. :) Though, on my watchlist (currently 1,100 articles) I'm reviewing minor edits as well. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:27, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Matrix at feature hashing

Re: your edit, what was shown instead of the matrix? I have MathJax turned on because it's more reliable and produces better-looking output, so I hadn't seen the problem. Sometimes, saving without changes can force the LaTeX output to be regenerated. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 20:50, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Instead of the expected matrix, this message was displayed in red (of course, you can log off Wikipedia and look at the revision in order to verify it):

Failed to parse(PNG conversion failed; check for correct installation of latex and dvipng (or dvips + gs + convert)): \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 2 & 1 & 1 & 2 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 0 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 \end{bmatrix}

Tried a few things, including reducing the number of columns, and for some reason everything over 8–9 columns (or so) seems to result in this error. I really have no idea why – that's not a huge number of columns? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:07, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Your revert of Ethernet

It's not a matter of better language but of verifiability. "A frame begins with preamble and start frame delimiter, ..." implies that preamble and SFD are part of the frame which they are not.

Your source, clause 35.2.3.2 "The preamble <preamble> begins a frame transmission. [...] The SFD (Start Frame Delimiter) <sfd> indicates the start of a frame ..." is ambiguous – it doesn't really tell where these sequences belong to. Please take a look at the more basic clauses 3.1.1 and 3.2 which very clearly show and state that preamble and SFD are not part of the frame but the (largely neglected) packet: "A MAC frame starts immediately after the SFD." (3.2.2).

With respect to your preferences I'll change the phrase to "a frame begins after the preamble and SFD". Zac67 (talk) 18:45, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you very much for pointing out sections 3.1.1 and 3.2 (from the 802.3-2012_SECTION1.pdf file), where the relation between Etherner frames and packets is clearly stated. Also, current language is looking good to me; went ahead and added a reference, followed by a small language cleanup. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:28, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Great – I keep finding the same problem here and there, but we can surely weed that out. Zac67 (talk) 10:33, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Sure thing; I've seen your further edits correcting that in the Ethernet frame article, and I've improved and corrected the Start frame delimiter article so it clearly states the difference between Ethernet frames and Ethernet packets. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:50, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Debian timeline

Sorry to bother you. I've spent over an hour trying to find the origin of {{Timeline Debian GNU/Linux}} as used in the main Debian Wikipedia article. It's out of date (and I think about to become more so), but I can't find the "source" with which to fix it. I see you take an interest in that Debian article, and are probably more skilled than I am on Wiki-matters, so I hope you can point me to the relevant editing page. Larry Doolittle (talk) 20:35, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! You're not bothering, we're all here to help each other. :)

That chart is a template, and it can be edited just as any other Wikipedia template or page. Just click on the above template link (which I've created in this edit), and you'll go to the template page where it can be edited as usual. I know it's quite confusing to get to those templates (and not documented AFAIK) – that's where the {{t|Template_name}} tag comes handy. Also, you can manually create and open a direct URL in form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:template_name.

Hope it helps. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:07, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

That helps tremendously! I've already edited that template to include the 7.3 update. Thanks so much! Larry Doolittle (talk) 21:36, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:39, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Template:Android tablets

It doesn't look like ThinkPad Tablet 2 is Android? Frietjes (talk) 23:47, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

You're totally right, it was simply my brainfart to get it included there, sorry. Thank you for catching it so quickly!

The same applies to ThinkPad 8, and I've already corrected that, while adding it into the {{Windows tablets}} template. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:13, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Redirect template formatting

Regarding your "cleanup" of my edit on Intel HD Graphics, I was following the format mentioned to me by Paine Ellsworth (talk · contribs), who told me that {{redr}} should be used even if only one category is desired and that a line break should be put between the template and the redirect itself. Is there evidence that this is no longer the consensus? (I see now that WP:REDCAT mentions the line break but not {{redr}}; I'm not sure how regularly that guideline is being updated though.) --SoledadKabocha (talk) 05:45, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Regarding my edit, the main intention was to have this redirect page using the {{R ...}} categorization syntax; basically, {{redr}} template is (still) just a proposal for a redirects unification and not officially suggested to be used, as visible from its documentation and WP:REDCAT. If {{redr}} template had become the offical way for tagging redirects, there would be bots automatically editing redirect pages thus making it used all around.

Regarding putting everything into the same line, it's somewhat common to do that if there's only one {{R ...}} tag – I've seen hundreds of such redirects (and zero redirects using {{redr}} template, by the way). I'm not saying that merging it into the same line is by the book, but it makes such "one-R" redirects a bit more readable, I'd guess, so editors tend not to put single "R-tags" into separate lines. IIRC, I've even seen a few bots placing these tags into the same line, while fixing double redirects etc. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:08, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Since my name was mentioned, I suppose my "2 cents" is welcome here? Since there is no set rule on whether to use the {{This is a redirect}} (Redr) template or place Rcats on redirects individually, and since both ways accomplish the same thing in terms of categorization, then there is no reason why either method cannot be used. Most of the redirects I come across, whether or not they already have an Rcat or two, usually need at least one more Rcat, so I use the Redr template to tag redirects with up to six Rcats in one template. I suppose I may be a little biased since I've put so many hours in improving the Redr, but I favor the way it presents text over just to add the Rcats individually. I recently enabled the Redr template to take Rcat parameters as I explained in the documentation and am still looking for ways to improve it. I also made a comparison page so editors can see the difference. This has become more important now that the two bugs were fixed and text appears on redirects. I wish I could judge you and say its wrong to convert from the Redr template to individual usage, but I convert in the other direction whenever I get the chance, so I cannot be one to judge. At this point it is a matter of contributor preference, and even though I consider the Redr usage as a major advancement over individual usage, others' opinions may differ. Joys! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 14:49, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Of course you're welcome – the whole Wikipedia was built by many two-cent contributions. :) As always, it's good to have multiple ways and different options for doing the same thing; the only bit unclear to me is that the official redirects categorization manual nowhere mentions usage of the {{redr}} template? Why is it so? Did it go through an extensive voting procedure to go out of the proposal state? Also, while looking at the usage and results differences, {{redr}} template produces somewhat "too blingy" messages on the redirect pages, when compared to the messages produced by {{R ...}} tags – though, that's only my opinion. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:07, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

If "blingy" means "gaudy", "flashy", etc., then perhaps it can be toned down, although it would be nice for you to explain exactly what you mean. For nearly all of the Rcats, the messages are the same whether the Rcat is deployed individually or within the Redr template. So if the messages are too blingy, then they are so no matter which method is used. The reason I have not added Redr to REDCAT is because up until very recently Redr had some limitations that needed to be improved, plus the fact that only last month the bugs were fixed and text was then allowed on redirects. If you'll check the oldest bug, Template:Bug, you'll see how long it's been in the fixing, and little "warning" was given that it was about to be fixed, so until now there hasn't been any big hurry to improve Redr. As we speak I have almost completed the addition of another parameter that will fully enable {{R from alternative language}}'s parameters in Redr. A few more tests to make sure the expected performance is up to snuff, and I will deploy the new parameter. Then Redr's limitations will be few and far between. Keep in mind that I and others have been using Redr to tag and sort redirects for nearly six years, so even without its recent improvements, its utility has been excellent for all but a few applications. If it's blinginess from your perspective turns out to be in its usage of color, then if you like, we could try a different type of Mbox to get a less blingy color scheme? The "type" parameter choices can be found at Template:Mbox#Parameters if you would like to experiment with how the different types appear. Joys! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 02:02, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much for a detailed insight! That longstanding bug #14323 is quite a good example of how much persistence is often required to make something happen. With all that effort going into the {{redr}} template, I'd say you should go ahead and include it into the WP:REDCAT once you feel it's ready.

Regarding the "bling factor", I'm not sure how important are my own aesthetics assessments, :) however I went and compared again two variants of the Intel HD Graphics redirect page – "R-tag" and "redr template"... On second thought, and after spending some time erasing the mental imprint of the {{R ...}} tags, I'd say that adding a 1em top padding to the message box would make a world of difference, as right now it sits too close to the redirect description. It's somewhat "blingy" when compared to the R-tag's output, but it's quite nice once that old imprint is gone – but still, that padding would put a cherry on top. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:00, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Is there any conclusion I should draw from this discussion yet? (Paine Ellsworth, sorry for relying on WP:Notifications rather than notifying you manually.)

Is it worth formally proposing that {{redr}} is to be used iff multiple categories are desired? What syntax will be used for "{{R from alternative language}}'s parameters in Redr"? --SoledadKabocha (talk) 18:25, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Hehe, iff, thumbs up! In my opinion, it is worth proposing the {{redr}} template for official inclusion into the WP:REDCAT manual, once the last bits are ironed out; to me, its use shouldn't be limited to multiple categories only. Of course, all that only if Paine Ellsworth agrees. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:01, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

It's all good, SoledadKabocha. It's probably "high time" to add Redr to REDCAT, and I agree with Dsimic that Redr should not be limited to multiple Rcats. While I haven't yet come across a redirect that couldn't be sorted into at least one category, Redr is designed to tag redirects that don't need an Rcat into Category:Miscellaneous redirects. That cat now has 22 inhabitants, and while I haven't scrutinized them yet, I would bet I could put at least one Rcat on all or most of them. The sandbox version is ready to be deployed with the "to" parameter for {{Ralterlang}}, and I wonder if both of you would mind having a look? Not too sure yet about the minor addition of the small text at the bottom, which notifies that it is the This is a redirect template. Too blingy, maybe? Also, I have placed a non-breaking space at the top of the sandbox code that may accomplish what you, Dsimic, have suggested? It's elegance is a bit wanting; however, this may be better than spacing the top of the Mbox that probably has applications for which a top space would not be appropriate. Please do not pull any punches, as my main concern is to improve Redr. Joys! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 07:27, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

PS. There is a ready comparison of live vs. sandbox at Template:This is a redirect/testcases. PS added by – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX!

I had a look at the sandbox version, and—quite frankly—the addition of "This is the {{This is a redirect}} template." at the bottom doesn't look good to me. I've never seen something like that on any of the Wikipedia's templates, and such kind of an "advertisement" (or a usage hint) shouldn't be there, as it's perfectly normal to have a look at the source code; if someone cares about it, the source code is already there, otherwise no ads would do any good. :)

Regarding the top spacing, it might be better to use a surrounding table or <div> element with the required CSS definition, as those might play better with the rest of the page elements, when compared to placing a more simple <br />. Also, including a simple <br /> actually creates a surrounding <p> element containing that <br /> in the rendered HTML code, what results in a vertical spacing much larger than the desired 1em spacing. Of course, no modifications should go to the already existing templates, everything goes into the {{Redr}}'s composition of them.

Just my $0.02. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:38, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Just as an example, here's a table bringing the desired 1em top spacing, as described above:

{| style="width: 100%; padding-top: 1em;"

|-

| {{Redr}}

|}

Sorry if I'm overexplaining. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:48, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Didn't mean to

Undo you here. I just thought I accidentally inserted two blank lines. Beware that there has been some unholy MOS war about this issue, i.e. how many lines are allowed in the footer. (General pointer [1]) Someone not using his real name (talk) 20:25, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

No worries, it's just a newline character, nothing more. :) Interestingly, WP:STUB states that "it is usually desirable to leave two blank lines between the first stub template and whatever precedes it." Based on that manual entry, there actually should be two blank lines, leaving more vertical space before the stub template? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:28, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Red links

Please do not remove red links, as you did at Metadata - they're a deliberate feature of Wikipedia; see WP:REDLINK. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:57, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Yeah, I've read about the redlinks a long time ago, and they used to be much more recommended back at the time when the Wikipedia's coverage was much more narrow. Also, according to the manual, it actually isn't recommended to create redlinks for people's names – "red links to personal names should be avoided". Anyway, I'm fine with leaving the Metadata's redlink as-is. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:06, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

App Ops

On reflection I think this comment was unnecessarily harsh and I'm sorry for it. – Steel 22:50, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

No worries! I'm always open to other people pointing out my deficiencies, bugs in code, areas for improvement etc. In my opinion, that's the only way to learn and improve yourself; taking a primrose path is much more convenient, but isn't good at all. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:02, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	For your distinction between Android RAM requirements and recommendations. read (talk) 23:03, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much, read! Though, I'm not sure that I deserve the credit – I've just cleaned up and propagated further the edit on Android version history article, which was originally submitted by XSpidey01x. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:00, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Nokia X

I removed categories because the article already was part of subcategories of them, for example, all Capacitive touchscreen mobile phones are automatically "also" Touchscreen mobile phones, and as a consequence automatically "also" Mobile phones. At least at Commons, where I'm more familiar with categorising, this would be a clear case of overcategorisation. |FDMS 17:18, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! You're right, I stand corrected; Category:Capacitive touchscreen mobile phones is covering all deleted categories. Went ahead and re-introduced your changes to the categories in Nokia X article, and cleaned them up even further – please check it out. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 17:33, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

I overhauled the PCI express pinout chart

I'm curious what you think. If you want to revert it all, or make massive edits, that's okay. I just figured it wasn't so dubious I had to do it in a talk page; I figured I'd WP:BB and do the edit process live. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 23:40, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! You did a good job with layout compaction, but to me it seems like something that might be confusing to the readers, especially as we have different types of cards ending at various pin positions. Also, it looks even more confusing when viewed on small screens... Trust me, I love compact layouts, so reverting it was really difficult to me – it hurts me to see so much work going down the drain. :( Anyway, I'm still thinking about how to make the layout more compact; any suggestions, please? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:06, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

I was thinking about how to make it more compact while not introducing any potential confusion, and came to nothing that would be an acceptable solution. Having all that in mind, I've just reverted my revert, restoring your initial compacted version. If anyone becomes confused by it, well, that's not our fault. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:45, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Well, thanks for the fedback. Actually, it could easily be compacted further, as the comments describing the differential pairs have very little information content and can be easily compressed. What window size are you using? Using a 640x480 pixel window, the main problem I see is that the line-wrapping of the legend thickens some rows at the bottom of the table.

I think a bit of prose explaining that the power and low-speed signals all come before the key notch, while high-speed signals all come after in a variable-width section could be combined with long explanations for the before-the-notch pins and terse ones for after.

Can you explain the issues you'd like addressed? 71.41.210.146 (talk) 07:08, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome, and thank you for your feedback! Actually, I see no big issues with various browser window sizes (to me, rows thickening you've described isn't a big deal), while the only "itchy" thing is to somehow "connect" two "columns", making it clear that a ×16 card is what takes up pins listed in the second column. That's, in my opinion, the only thing possibly causing confusion – otherwise, the new layout is as good as it gets for so many pins to be listed. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:25, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Emulator

Hi, cool guy

I could come up with several reasons to perform this deletion but I chose one that covers them all. In case I wasn't clear enough, here is my concerns: You see, the text is unreferenced, has no context and is very technical, so much so that only interests a minority. So, I supplied manual as the reason because manual is the place where you read unreferenced technical stuff like this. (If you'd have to add a source for them, your source would be most likely a manual.)

When I removed them, I thought chances are that they are listed in one of the sources in close proximity, so no one misses anything. But if nothing else, let's at least solve the invalid HTML problem. It's ordered list item -> definition list -> definition item, which is not good. The same list can be written in prose form.

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 01:32, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Hey, how are you? :) Please, let me check first whether those instructions are contained in one of the already existing references, and I'll come back with an update. My main reason for reverting your edit was that such information might be helpful and usable to some readers, so preserving it might be better than deleting. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:40, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay. I've checked the surrounding references, and now I agree that the note is pretty much an overkill, representing a marginal information already contained in the reference #22 (starting on page 65) for those who need such specific stuff. Went ahead and reverted my earlier revert. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:40, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Always a pleasure working with you. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 04:39, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Please undo yourself...

Well, I thought my edit summary was quite clear that I was about to do another undo (which I can't do now due to the edit conflict and overlapping edit region). Can you revert yourself so I may show you without me having to undo again? Widefox; talk 22:37, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Ok, there you go, though that doesn't make much sense, honestly. While here, you could've also explained what are you actually intending to achieve, if you agree – maybe we could discuss the whole thing in order to find the best option, for example. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:45, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

You had to revert something in order to perform this edit? Please tell me you're kidding. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:01, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! Eventually  Done If my edit summaries weren't clear please say. If they were clear to you, best not to undo when someone else is mid-undo! All yours now. Widefox; talk 23:30, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome! I see what you wanted to achieve and that was just fine, but the revert was somewhat confusing. Anyway, it's all good now. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:36, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

A beer for you!

Thanks for the kind words. Someone not using his real name (talk) 23:41, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, and you're welcome! Hopefully, this advice (if I may call it so) might be helpful. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:12, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Dear Dragan

Dear Dragan: I am injecting myself into the dialogue regarding artificial intelligence (see the newly created User:Synchronist), and I am counting on you to be my Virgil! User:Qwertyus also alerted! Synchronist (talk) 05:21, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Wow, your life and work sounds quite amazing! As someone born in one of not so shiny parts of the world (but striving toward the escape), I'm always amazed seeing anyone doing things out of ordinary, and making for a living the same way – heck, even by working as a kinetic sculptor. :) Please feel free to call me crazy, but to me, that's quite amazing.

At the same time, I guess Wikipedia isn't that much of Hell and Purgatory? :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:51, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Don't kid yourself -- like 99% of all other artists, I have a day job, and not a very glamorous one at that, since I am trying to preserve my mental energy for my art -- and for my participation in this here noosphere. P.S. Thanks for the indents -- I didn't know how! Synchronist (talk) 15:49, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome. Thank you for the clarification – it's quite interesting that the majority of people has day jobs which have little to do with their true desires and passions. I'd say that only truly successful companies are managing to somehow connect people's passions and commercial viability; in my opinion, that's what creates progress through creation of brand new products, ideas etc. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:27, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Inversion of control

Thanks for the thanks. I’m confused by your latest edits here. "Assembly object" is a fairly important concept. I’m not sure what your objection to it is, but I found the new edits harder to understand. I think we should put more work into this.Strebe (talk) 08:35, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! I totally agree that the Inversion of control article could be improved further – no article can ever be too good. :)

Regarding the above linked edit, I really see no point in keeping the "assembler object" which is actually quite confusing – to me, it sounds like some special piece of object code doing the work while involving usage of an assembler (what's, quite frankly, next to a nonsense), or it also could be understood as some special object hidden somewhere while doing the magic. In fact, there's no such special object or code doing the inversion of control (or dependency injection), which is in fact an extremely broad concept based on what programming languages are offering through their basic language constructs. There's no mystery behind the whole thing, so defluffing the lead section by stripping out the "assembler object" can be only a good thing.

Having the "assembler object" is pretty much similar to as if we had some kind of a "recursion manager" for the plain recursion, or a "template selector" for template metaprogramming. :) Hope you agree, and of course I'm more than open to further discussion. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:22, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Yun OS

As far as I'm noticed, the last part of the article was about whether that thing is android or not, but the last statement which i removed and you added back suggest there are android applications available......The system's android compatibility is announced officially and as far as I concerned, neither side of the argument used the ability to install many android apps as a main argument...C933103 (talk) 20:17, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Hello there, and sorry for my delayed response. I see you've already changed that part of the article, while leaving the part describing Aliyun's app store distributing pirated Android applications. It's pretty much important to keep the note on pirated applications, as it also confirms the fact Yun OS is capable of running ordinary Android applications what's related to the clash between Google and Aliyun regarding the true nature of Yun OS. I've improved that section further, please check it out. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:28, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

The tech barnstar for you!

		The Technology Barnstar
		For your extensive contributions in the field of computing. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 13:17, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Knowing your expertise in the field of artificial intelligence, I'm even more proud of this barnstar. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:02, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Congratulations! (And thank you for improving my talk page by adding the two templates. I am still not very knowledgeable of the many templates that are available.) — Anita5192 (talk) 21:42, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, and you're welcome! The vast variety of templates (which is good, of course) is what makes knowing and using them quite time-consuming. Even worse, there seems to be no single point of entry into that maze of templates. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:01, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Minor wiki code cleanup on RAID

See also: User talk:Σ/Archive/2014/March § Line breaks following placed tags

I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by Lowercase sigmabot's failure to add a line break! Thanks for fixing it. Note that I complained about the issue earlier this month, but the issue stalled after the fix caused an error. If you would like, you are welcome to and reference my thread in the archives. – voidxor ^{(talk | contrib)} 05:05, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Guess what, now I'm also extremely happy knowing I'm not the only person bothered by such things. :) Thank you very much for commenting!

There's another related issue with this bot (or maybe another bot, will explain) – when the {{pp-protected}} tag is removed later by a bot, an empty line is left at the beginning of the article source code, producing in most cases additional empty vertical space when rendered into HTML and displayed. I've already fixed one or two of such removals, but unfortunately can't recall on which articles and whether it was the Lowercase sigmabot or some other bot removing the tag.

Thank you for pointers to the bugfix request, I'll try to post again a bug report about these issues. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:28, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Ah, yes, those empty lines were the error caused by the introduced bugfix; sorry, didn't go immediately through provided links. Why people don't test changes they make against such anticipated regressions? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:10, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Operating system–level virtualization

Hey, with this edit: Special:Permalink/596825429 you moved the article because of its punctuation. How do you know the correct punctuation? Help:Punctuation does not help me. User:ScotXW^t@lk 15:47, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Please have a look at MOS:ENDASH and a detailed discussion which addresses suffixed compound adjectives much further while slightly confronting with that MOS section; while you're there, it might be worth to also have a look at a related discussion. By the way, in case you haven't looked at the Manual of Style discussions before, you'll be discovering a whole new world of its own. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:29, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Just in case anyone reads this later, here's another related MoS discussion – a lengthy one, of course. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:34, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

And/or considered harmful

See also: User talk:Sofia Koutsouveli § Edits taking out "and/or"

Thank you. :) Sloppy writing has no place in the compendium of the human knowledge, we should extinguish this uclear construct used by those too lazy to decide whether to use and or or. Sofia Koutsouveli (talk) 23:07, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome. :) I agree, and that's inline with "if you're gonna do it, do it right". — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:13, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Blank lines in talk page discussions

Please don't insert blank lines between indented talk page posts, as you have been doing at User talk:Σ. This goes against both WP:LISTGAP (Do not separate list items, including items in a definition list (a list made with leading semicolons and colons)) and WP:INDENTGAP (Blank lines should not be used between indented lines as they are currently rendered as the end of a list and the start of a new one.). Thank you. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:59, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I know about those list rules, but I have that bad habit only because it makes editing long lists easier – and I do that only on lengthy talk pages, never in articles. However, I'll do my best to get rid of that habit. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 16:16, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

That guy

Oranjelo100 is at it again. Now he's moved on to game emulation. I'm not asking you to do anything. I just thought I'd let you know, in case he's continued abusing your scope of involvement with Wikipedia, because I saw your history of trying so valiantly and thoroughly to deal with this person. You handled it perfectly, and incredibly thoroughly, and positively but realistically, and I completely agree with you. You were given ridiculous advice such as "perhaps you could have been slightly" blah blah. No, you pretty much couldn't. :( — Smuckola (Email) (Talk) 10:57, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you for a heads-up and for kind words!

Yeah, I've seen that Oranjelo100 is back, now in different parts of Wikipedia. The main trouble with him/her is complete absence of self-criticism and obviously not-so-good English. Well, English isn't my native language either, but at least I've been hard at work learning it for the past 20 years or so – and I still keep learning it. :) On the other hand, I'd say that Oranjelo100 is quite good in adding raw facts, but the troubles arise when raw facts are to be converted into good and usable content.

At the same time, I'm sure we'll agree that nobody is perfect, but humans are supposed to become better with time and work – at least in theory. Making mistakes is a way to learn. Though, the trouble is I haven't seen any of those improvements from Oranjelo100, and I've seen tons of mistakes.

Regarding those advices on the RFC, ah, you know how it is – those advices are generally good, but they're like proposing world peace and such stuff... It's all great, but how do we deal with the stuff currently on our hands? :) Should I have walked away from repairing damaged articles while proposing world peace? :) That's a standard issue with disconnected management, as things are always looking good from a greater distance.

Hope it makes sense. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I really have no idea how to help, as talking to Oranjelo100 simply doesn't yield much. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 17:27, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Backporting

Hello Dsimic. I noticed you reverted my change to the backporting page. I used to think that backporting meant applying bug fixes from new versions to old versions just like the article used to explain, but https://backports.wiki.kernel.org and the http://backports.debian.org/ do not fit that mold, hence my expansion. As it is, the article is back to not defining the term in a comprehensive enough manner. Do you have a better definition? If not, all unrevert and let somebody else improve it. ARosa (talk) 04:23, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Please allow me to explain why I've reverted your edit, and I'm sure we'll end up in further expansion of the Backporting article. Edit summary I've provided didn't describe it well, and I apologize for that.

Basically, you've introduced a pretty much new (article-wise, of course) meaning of the term "backporting" only into the article's lead section, which is there to provide a summary of the article. In other words, that meaning of the term is nowhere available in the article, so introducing a new meaning only in lead section unfortunately isn't the way to go. The article requires a slight layout rework and a new section which is going to describe a somewhat different meaning behind the "backporting" term. Part of all that would be an update to the lead section, of course, but only together with expansion of the article.

Currently, the article describes backporting as taking smaller pieces (like security fixes) from newer versions of software and incorporating them into older versions. New meaning for backporting is about incorporating much larger chunks of code, like complete device drivers or complete software packages. At the same time, current Backporting § Examples section pretty much isn't inline with the rest of the article, and article expansion would nicely tie it all together.

Just as a note, the following sources could also be used as references for the new section:

• A New Collaboration Aimed at Automatically Backporting the Linux Kernel
• Automatically backporting the Linux kernel
• Linux kernel driver backports documentation
• Driver Backport Workgroup
• Ubuntu: Backporting software updates

Hope you agree. Thoughts? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:55, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Another example for the new section (and for Backporting § Examples section, of course), could be Red Hat's backport of GCC 4.4 from RHEL 6 to RHEL 5; please see Red Hat's documentation which is describing this further. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:21, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

You've gathered lots of good material. I edited the lead section to be more general. It'd be great if you expanded the article as you described.ARosa (talk) 03:17, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Ok, thanks, I'll have a look and expand the article further. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:25, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

BSD

Hi Dsimic, good to see you added the bitstream entry. I'd refrained (I guess we both came to BSD dab from Phoronix?!) as there wasn't a vendor neutral target, so I quickly created something and changed the target and entry. Widefox; talk 09:35, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Actually, I came to creating the BSD disambiguation link while reviewing edits – and one of them added link to a Phoronix article as a reference. A quick search on Wikipedia came back with no vendor-neutral destinations for bit stream decoder so I went by redirecting it to anything useful. That was the first step, and it's awesome you took it from there and improved further! — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:20, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I wanted to add it to the dab when I was cleaning it up, was surprised it wasn't defined anywhere so had left it lacking. Stream processing is a better target, but it'll do for now, and at least we're not making out it's only one vendor. I personally don't use anchors. Widefox; talk 09:17, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Explicit anchors do add some more complexity, but in my opinion they're very usable as many times section titles are changed, breaking the links. At the same time, it's much more neat to have an {{Anchor}} inside section titles rather than attaching those <!-- warning: something links here --> comments. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:36, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Cache Intersystems

Why did you remove Cache Intersystems from well known DBMS? This is the premier DBMS for healthcare systems and many financial institutions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.183.47.54 (talk) 01:59, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Well, I've been dealing with databases quite a lot, and I've never heard of Cache Intersystems; I'm far away from being an absolute expert in databases, but at least should be able to judge what's a well-know DBMS and what isn't. :) If we go into covering a broad variety of various databases, we could also include now pretty much defunct Informix, for example – I know at least a dozen of big companies which are still using it. Even already listed FileMaker Pro should probably be also deleted. However, it's about providing a not too long list of well-known databases in the article's lead section.

Hope you agree. Of course, I'm more than open for discussing this further. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:40, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Cache Intersystems is a very well known DBMS that provides solutions outside of the relational DB model. This DBMS should at least be credited for its different style of database management. The article is currently skewed to provide bias towards relational models, the site should be more unbiased. Have you looked into the link I posted? Cache Intersystems in a non-relational database that is the fastest non-relational database system on the planet. I think that because it is the most efficient, and most used by healthcare (and some financial) institutions that it should be included. Please let me know why it is not included, if that's the decision that you reach. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.183.47.54 (talk) 04:06, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Well, as you insist I'm fine with the inclusion of a link to the InterSystems Cache article – go ahead, and I won't touch it. :) However, there are other non-relational and/or multi-dimensional databases claiming to be the fastest, like Palo OLAP database. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:18, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

<tt> or <code> tags

You recently changed existing <code> tags to <tt> on the Crypto API (Linux) article. Why? As far as I can tell, there is no visual difference between them. "Code" seems like a more descriptive version and I've seen people convert them the other way around. -- intgr [talk] 09:32, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Regarding my edit you've described above – <code> tag produces pale bluish (#F9F9F9) background for the rendered text, while <tt> tag doesn't do that. Here's an example, try adjusting your monitor to see the actual difference:

Here's some text with inside the <code> tag,

and some more text inside the <tt> tag.

In my opinion, having no explicit background defined looks much better and it's mandatory in tables having background colors other than #F9F9F9 (what's the default for background-color), see Master boot record § Sector layout section for a few examples. The main reason why people tend to replace these tags the other way around is, I'd say, because the <tt> tag is deprecated in HTML5, but that isn't going to become an issue that soon. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:20, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Ah I see now. I really didn't notice that background before you pointed it out. -- intgr [talk] 09:06, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, it's not that easily visible, especially on short <code> sections. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:23, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Hm, since when OpenSSH is a fork, and of what?

FYI OpenSSH is a fork of OSSH, which is a fork of ssh by Tatu Ylönen. See Project History and Credits page of OpenSSH site. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk•track) 21:16, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing that out – there's always something new to learn. I've reverted my edit. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:22, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

At the same, I've expanded the OpenSSH § History section a bit, so it's also described there for future reference. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:33, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Microsoft Cortana Easter Eggs

Hey. Look at this: Microsoft Cortana Easter Eggs. Looks like someone makes an article every time Microsoft so much as sneezes or burps. 188.245.55.0 (talk) 15:20, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Hm, that's a somewhat funny list of predetermined answers (just look at "You're awesome" which leads to "Thanks. My programming prevents false modesty, so I can't disagree."), but definitely not good for having a separate article, so my vote goes for it to be deleted. Thank you for a heads-up. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:32, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Discussion about unrestricted bootloader

You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Infobox mobile phone#Unrestricted bootloader. You were selected because of recent edits to the article Android rooting. ViperSnake151  Talk  16:03, 2 May 2014 (UTC)Template:Z48

Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I'll have a look at this discussion while trying to provide a NPOV opinion. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:39, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay, I've added my opinion a few hours ago. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 12:56, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Graphics Lab Request

See also: Talk:M.2 § Keying diagram is incorrect (reversed), and Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Illustration workshop § Changes to the M.2 edge connector keying drawing

Check the Graphics Lab. I've had a crack at the M.2 keying request.  :) NikNaks _{talk - gallery} 20:13, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! The SVG drawing you've created looks great, thank you very much for resolving the Graphics Lab request! I've added this picture into the M.2 article, and it helps a lot in explaining keying of the M.2's edge connector, as well as providing a depiction of the edge connector and socket with their pins/contacts overlapping on different sides. May I ask whether you'd be willing to have a look at another Graphics Lab request? :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:14, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

I'm very much a 2D artist rather than 3D, but if no-one else takes the request I'll probably have a go at it at some point. If it gets archived before it's finished, you're more than welcome to simply repost it. NikNaks _{talk - gallery} 13:04, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Check the lab. :) Also, if your original request further up the page (where you link to PDF files) is no longer required, please let me know, or mark it resolved yourself, so that it can be archived. Thanks! NikNaks _{talk - gallery} 18:37, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Another SVG drawing you've created also looks great, and it looks even better with larger labels, thank you very much! I've added this picture into the SATA Express article – it helps a lot in describing what the SATA Express motherboard (host-side) connector looks like, and how the backward compatibility with legacy SATA devices is ensured. Awesome! :)

Regarding the Graphics Lab request for SATA Express connectors, unfortunately the content of PDF file is copyrighted so creating SVG drawings based on it doesn't seem to be acceptable. I'll mark it as resolved, as File:SATA Express motherboard connection.svg provides enough details until we can find a non-copyrighted source for all available variants of SATA Express connectors. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:46, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Okay, then. If you do ever find something suitable, of course, you're more than welcome to make another request. Glad I could help. :D NikNaks _{talk - gallery} 22:40, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for creating the SVG files! I'll feel free to submit new Graphics Lab request(s). :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:36, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Red Hat Linux article

Hello, I'm Masssly. I wanted to let you know that I undid one or more of your recent contributions to Red Hat Linux because it did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. —Sadat (Masssly)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:03, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, that edit probably requires some discussion so we find the best possible solution. I'll leave a message on your talk page. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:42, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Ok, it's probably better to keep the discussion in one place, and you've also stated on your talk page that's how you prefer it.

Regarding your revert on the Red Hat Linux article, here's why I've deleted the content in the first place. If you have a detailed look at the info it provided, it's pretty much about the history of Red Hat as a company, not about Red Hat Linux as a Linux distribution – deleted content could be classified as WP:TRIVIA simply because it goes too far away from what the article is about. Just as a few examples, what do "1986: ARPANET founded", "February 1999: IBM and Red Hat announce Linux Alliance" or "January 2007: Red Hat launches Certified Service Provider Program" have to do with Red Hat Linux as a Linux distribution?

In other words, the deleted section could fit well into the Red Hat article which describes the company, but not within the Red Hat Linux article which describes the company's primary product that's a Linux distribution.

Hope it makes sense. Of course, I'm more than open to discussing this further. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:07, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Taking time to go through the article I understand what yo mean, that stuff doesn't really fit well in Red Hat Linux. Meanwhile some of that sundry information is pretty useful I wish someone could pick that up and include it in Red Hat "company" article. Thank you for corresponding. kind regards —Sadat (Masssly)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:03, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

I'm glad we're on the same page. It really hurts me whenever I delete anything that someone had invested a lot of time into, so I went ahead and added a to-do for the Red Hat article that refers to the deleted timeline content. Hopefully somebody will pick that up at some point in the future. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:33, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Discussion at Template talk:KDE

You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:KDE. Thanks. Codename Lisa (talk) 10:40, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Template:Z48

Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I'll have a look at this discussion while trying to provide a NPOV opinion. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:43, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. It is always good to ask for the opinion of someone who knows more about Linux and its landscape. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 13:01, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome! Nobody knows everything, but many people know a lot together – your edit on my talk page is a good example, thank you for pointing out that additional feature of the {{See also}} template! If I recall correctly, that feature might be a recent addition to this template, as I've seen it at least a few times where rendered output was "Article#Section" instead of "Article § Section"? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:14, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes. It is rather new. Although § sign was part of Wikipedia and people loved {{section link}}, the number of people who knew about it was small. I asked an admin to implement a parsing function in {{Main}}, {{See also}}, {{Further}} and {{Details}} that converts # to § and people seem to love it.

Now I don't go around removing |l1= from people's talk pages; but you are open-minded and friendly. So, I abused your hospitality and did that edit.

Best regards,

Codename Lisa (talk) 02:30, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

That's awesome, thank you very much for initiating such an improvement! I totally agree that the "Article § Section" format is much, much more readable and better in general. At the same time, please feel free to abuse my hospitality whenever it leads to improvements or learning of any kind. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:11, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

About UEFI

See also: User talk:Zambi007 § UEFI article

I looked at the UEFI articles on 12 computers. Each one carried the n which was almost unreadable by people inquisitive of knowing what boot lingo mean. I thought I could help by making the n bold n.

Anyway, no issues. thanx for the edit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zambi007 (talk • contribs) 05:09, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! I totally understand your intentions, but that's not how Wikipedia's Manual of Style defines the intended formatting in its MOS:BOLD and MOS:WORDSASWORDS sections. It's all about keeping the layouts unified across various articles – hope you agree. However, if a reader is unable to distinguish the notion of pronouncing UEFI as "unify" without the n (as formatted in Wikipedia's style), he or she is also most probably unable to comprehend what the UEFI is all about, thus I'd say that additional formatting tweaks wouldn't be of much help in such cases. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:06, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Notice on "deletion heros"

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is ScottXW and his "deletion heros". Thank you. Yunshui ^雲_水 08:29, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I'll keep an eye on it. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 09:07, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Note that Editor Review has been retired

Hi, Dsimic: this is a notice that after a MfD and two RfCs, the Editor Review process has been officially retired. You should not expect further comments on your open Editor Review, which will be archived soon. In the coming weeks there may be information available on alternative processes that you can pursue if you so desire. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 21:05, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you for letting me know, I've removed the {{Editor review}} template from my user page. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:16, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

SATA Express

Why does lowercase make more sense to you? If you are going to revert somebody's edit, you should provide a more elaborate reason than what arbitrarily makes more sense to you. – voidxor ^{(talk | contrib)} 05:09, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Edit summaries don't allow for longer descriptions, that's why I wasn't elaborate enough. :)

In a few words, MOS:BULLETLIST allows both sentence case and lower case for list items, and the lower case style made more sense to me because those weren't real sentences, and they were quite short at the same time. However, with latest edits that section grew up a bit, so I've edited the article by extending the section further and turning the list items into true sentences. Hope you find that acceptable. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:32, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Requested moves of "Android rooting" and "iOS jailbreaking" articles

Hi there, Dsimic! Now that the move of "Android rooting" to "Rooting (Android OS)" has been completed, I know you'll be interested in this parallel proposal:

• Talk:iOS jailbreaking#Requested move: iOS jailbreaking → Jailbreaking (iOS)

I'll see you there, I'm sure! =) — Jaydiem (talk) 19:36, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I'll keep an eye on it. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:09, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

ZFS - use in commercial products

Thanks for letting me know that I had missed items for my ZFS edit. I've updated it, and it should meet the requirements, year & references. Let me know if additional information is required. A'kwell (talk) 20:30, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! You're welcome, and thank you for providing references and years, it looks good now! Went ahead and improved it further by touching it up, and by filling in a few references so they're now protected from link rot – please check it out. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:26, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Great. Thanks for the extras. I'm still learning Wikipedia editing, so some of my updates will be a bit primitive. But, I have the technical details, (with proof), to contribute. A'kwell (talk) 02:32, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome. Just take your time, we've all gone through the learning phase here just as everywhere else. As a small suggestion‍—‌and I'm sure you're already well aware of it‍—‌there's the Wikipedia's Manual of Style as a great resource, which is also very usable outside of its primary role to be a general guide to editing Wikipedia. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:46, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

En dash

I do not understand how the article can be full of e.g. "flash-based" with a hyphen, and that is fine, but as soon as it becomes "flash memory-based" the hyphen is supposed to change to an en-dash.

Why??? What is the justification here? What is the benefit? I think it just clutters up the wikitext, makes editing more difficult, and will require more redirects when these things get into article titles (since nobody will be typing in the keycodes for endashes in the search box). Jeh (talk) 06:50, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

And from what I can tell, WP:ENDASH does not support you. "Instead of a hyphen, when applying a prefix (but not a suffix) to a compound that includes a space".

• ex–prime minister Thatcher;   pre–World War II aircraft;   but not credit card–sized

"flash memory-based" is parallel to "credit card-sized", and therefore, per this point, should NOT get an endash. Jeh (talk) 06:56, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! I totally understand your confusion (BTDT), so please allow me to explain – I'm sure you'll see where are the benefits from the whole thing.

As I've already pointed out in my revert on the Solid-state drive article, more details are provided in MOS:ENDASH and in a detailed discussion which addresses suffixed compound adjectives much further while slightly confronting with that MOS section; while you're there, it might be worth to also have a look at a related discussion. You're right that MOS:ENDASH currently doesn't state that en dashes should be used for suffixed compounds, but the above linked discussion(s) provide numerous arguments why the en dash rule should be extended to suffixes as well. That's something I simply don't agree with the MoS, and there are more editors sharing that disagreement – as you can see in these linked MoS discussions.

What are the benefits of en dashes at all? Well, that's a good question. From one side, I've also thought a lot of ditching every form of hyphenation except plain hyphens; on the other hand, that would simply reduce value of the English language what can't be good. Sure thing, it's much more simple to use plain hyphens everywhere, but then we'll slowly end up with a text messages–style language, which is simply disgusting and in a long run makes people less smart without any true reasons of real-life benefits.

Speaking of "flash-based" vs. "flash memory–based", it's all about "flash memory" being a compound. Having a hyphen in place indicates the relation between only two words ("flash" and "based", and "memory" and "based"), while having an en dash idicates that "based" relates to "flash memory" as a whole. Sure thing, human brain is advanced enough to figure out these examples even with no hyphenation, but if we'd extend that a bit further we could easily go even without capitalizing first words in sentences, right? :)

Another examples of the en dashes usage (for a different purpose, of course) are Diode–transistor logic, Eye–hand coordination, Request–response, etc. These are all article titles, and they would have a completely different meaning if en dashes were replaced with plain hyphens; in those cases, using en dashes implies that the "linked" words remain independent what's important for the resulting meaning.

Regarding cluttering of the Wiki code, en dash character (–) could be used in the source code instead of the &ndash; HTML entity. This should make Wiki code more clear; however, I find typing in HTML entites much faster than going into "Special characters" picker, scrolling a bit and clicking onto the en dash character provided there. Could've used the toolbar available under the source code edit box instead, but I'm somehow used to the "Special characters" picker for that purpose. :)

Hope it all makes sense. Thoughts? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:37, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

I think you are vastly overestimating the percentage of readers who will even notice whether a "short horizontal line" is an en dash as opposed to a hyphen... let alone ascribe to that distinction the meaning you think they well. It's not as if we're talking about em dashes, which are obviously different. I am something of a "type person" and the only way I can tell if something on WP is an en dash vs a hyphen with perfect reliability (provided there are no examples of both next to each other) is to use character search on the page to highlight the latter. And your invocation of "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy.

Anyway, as it stands, your edit and your reversion are contradicted by the MOS page. The discussions are interesting, but if there was consensus to agree to that change then the actual MOS page should have been changed. It is unreasonable to post MOS and then say "oh, well, you can't rely on that! See, this discussion says otherwise." Since when? Jeh (talk) 08:35, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Well, I can always tell the difference in legth between a hyphen and an en dash just by looking at them while reading. You're right that most people don't even know (or care about) the difference between hyphens and en dashes, what's somewhat sad. A flawed "slippery slope" or not, the very fact people don't know about that, or about the distinction in meaning, indicates something... Right?

Linked MoS discussions could've resulted in actual changes to MOS:ENDASH, but there were a few editors completely reluctant to accept anything outside of their "by the Chicago Manual of Style" bubbles, so the proponents of changes lost their energy and interest.

In a few words, please feel free to revert my changes, I won't stand in your way. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:52, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I may return to this. Jeh (talk) 09:56, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 10:15, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Changing ref syntax on Android Runtime (ART)

Please do not use that style of citation syntax on articles. The |publisher field is designed to list the publishing company of the work, not the domain name it came from. The title of the website must be in either a |work or |website field. Also please do not use Android Police as a source; it is a blog, and blogs are typically not considered reliable sources. ViperSnake151  Talk  16:36, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you for pointing this out, moving forward I'll use the |website= parameter. However, to me web sites are publishers and specifying their domains instead is more usable in many cases, but of course that's debatable. For example, if a LWN.net article is used as a reference, I'd say that 99% of people wouldn't recognize "Eklektix" when it's specified as a publisher, while "LWN.net" is pretty much widely recognizable. Should we end up using something like "|website=LWN.net |publisher=Eklektix" for this example?

Oh, and by the way, please consider including edit summaries in your edits, they're quite usable. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:58, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Kmscon

Thank you for your recent improvements to kmscon article. Posting here only because I didn't want to spam your echo notification log with multiple "thanks" (for each edit). Good work! — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk•track) 08:19, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there, and thank you very much! I'm glad you like those improvements I've made to the article. Oh, and of course thank you for your contributions to the kmscon article – that started everything. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:59, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

OpenSSH reverse forwarding

Hi Dsimic,

I was just commenting on a feature SSH has. Yes, it allows to "punch" through a firewall, but I don't how that affects the text. Should I revert and append a reference to the manpage of openssh where that feature is described?

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ssh&sektion=1 option "ssh -R [bind_address:]port:host:hostport"

Cruzzer (talk) 10:04, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! In your addition to the OpenSSH article, you've described that it "can also be done in reverse direction where the server receives access to the environment of the client." However, that's a bit confusing, as in that case it is still about tunneling connections (or port forwarding requests) that are initiated from the client, what's also clearly described in the man page you've linked above:

-R [bind_address:]port:host:hostport

Specifies that the given port on the remote (server) host is to be forwarded to the given host and port on the local side. This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the remote side, and whenever a connection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over the secure channel, and a connection is made to host port hostport from the local machine.

[...]

In other words, -R [bind_address:]port:host:hostport can be used to connect arbitrary TCP ports both on the server side and and on the client side through an SSH tunnel, but that's still the same thing no matter from which side we're looking at it. Thus, it might be a bit misleading to describe it as being "done in reverse direction", if you agree.

Hope it makes sense. Went ahead and edited the article to include this info in a form that allows no misinterpretation by the readers. Please, check it out – hopefully you'll find this edit good enough. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 11:54, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Avoiding confusion is surely the way to go. My intention was more to highlight the feature, as it's pretty unexpected from a network stance. It's also a security issue, as the client can open connections back into his own network, sidestepping firewall rules disallowing access to the client network. But I guess the the red "flag" is set with the --and to circumvent firewalls-- part. Cruzzer (talk) 12:44, 14 July 2014 (UTC) 

Right, there's already a note that SSH port forwarding can be used "to circumvent firewalls". Thus, if a reader is unable to grasp that, I'd freely conclude that no additional explanations about possible security issues would be helpful. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 13:01, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Additionally, OpenSSH § Features section now contains a link to the SSH tunnel article, which describes potential security issues in detail. That should make it all covered, if you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 13:13, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

However, went ahead and clarified it additionally. Please, check it out. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 13:20, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I like that. Thanks for your help. Cruzzer (talk) 13:43, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome, and thank you for your contribution to the article – it started the whole thing. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 13:59, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Power supply unit

Re: Power supply unit (computer): the calculation is explained in the next sentence. Otherwise, the other result is not explained either. Glrx (talk) 17:42, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Sorry, my bad, everything is fine with your addition to the article. Totally a brainfart from my side. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:15, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Re: List of M.2 SSDs as a section in the M.2 article

See also: User talk:DracoDan82 § List of M.2 SSDs as a section in the M.2 article

By this logic, the following pages should also be removed, correct?

• List of android devices
• Comparison of Linux distributions
• Comparison of smartphones
• Comparison of file archivers
• Comparison of tablet computers
• Comparison of wiki software
• Comparison of netbooks
• Comparison of firewalls
• Comparison of digital SLRs
• List of displays by pixel density
• Comparison of platform virtualization software
• Comparison of disk encryption software
• Comparison of handheld game consoles
• Cryptocurrency
• Comparison of portable media players
• Comparison of stackable switches
• Comparison of single-board computers

The list goes on ad nauseam, and that's only the computer related things! The fact is these drives are extremely hard to find information on, instead of removing a list that's a challenge to maintain, we should allow everyone to help grow the list like all these others... Isn't that the spirit of Wikipedia anyway? I created this list out of frustration over not being able to find a good list that shows all available, or even most of the available M.2 SSDs, which I'm currently in the market for. My original plan was to put the list on one of the forums I frequent, but then I thought 'this list would best serve everyone if it was available on an unbiased site where anyone can contribute to it'... There is only one place I know of like that — Preceding unsigned comment added by DracoDan82 (talk • contribs) 15:17, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Personally I agree with the removal and I think most of the above articles should go as well. Wikipedia should not be a product catalog. WP:ITSUSEFUL is not a valid argument for retention. Jeh (talk) 18:02, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

So what about lists like the following?

• List of Intel Xeon microprocessors
• List of AMD Opteron microprocessors
• List of Dell PowerEdge Servers
• NetApp filer
• etc...

Where do you draw the line? There are literally thousands of articles that are either lists or contain lists of products.

I guess it also depends on which definition of "encyclopedic" you use, I grabbed the following from google:

en·cy·clo·pe·dic

adjective:

1. comprehensive in terms of information.
2. relating to or containing names of famous people and places and information about words that is not simply linguistic.

If you use the first definition then a list is absolutely encyclopedic, assuming the effort has been put forward to make the list as complete as possible.

If you use the second (vague) definition then it could be argued that the list I created isn't encyclopedic, but then neither would half the other articles on Wikipedia that millions of people benefit from on a daily basis. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DracoDan82 (talk • contribs) 19:38, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, those lists should go too. The one of "Dell PowerEdge servers" is particularly egregious. Google's first definition is belied by every encyclopedia on the planet. Tell me with a straight face that any encyclopedia includes "comprehensive" information about any subject it covers. If it did, then no other books or reference material would be necessary for any of those subjects! Can you learn all there is to know about, say, radio design or quantum mechanics or Egyptology from an encyclopedia? Of course not. You learn the history of the field, the key discoverers, the key theories and maybe a few of their implications. We don't need to have a list of m.2 products to provide similar information about the product category. Where do YOU draw the line? Should there be a List of machine screw-threaded fasteners, to include every combination of diameter, thread pitch, head drive type, core material, finish, etc., etc., from every manufacturer who's ever made them? If not, why not? Again, "WP:ITSUSEFUL to you" is not an accepted argument. Jeh (talk) 19:54, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Hey everyone! DracoDan82, trust me, I understand your intentions and associated confusion, so please allow me to explain a bit further. Oh, and by the way, please sign your posts on talk pages. :)

Let's start with the definition of "encyclopedic"... As we know, Wikipedia has grown into a medium-sized :) monster when it comes to its Manual of Style and the set of rules articles need to follow, thus it's important what those rules say, not what a dictionary definition of "encyclopedic" might be. :) That's how every system works, and one must play by the rules of a system; luckily, Wikipedia's rules are truly awesome when you compare them to the rules of many other systems. Also, Wikipedia's rules can always be discussed, improved and potentially changed by the principle of establishing a consensus.

Regarding the first batch of "List of XYZ" articles, I totally agree with Jeh that almost all of them are clear candidates to be nominated for deletion. Let's just have a look at the Comparison of stackable switches article, for example – that article looks almost like a bad joke, as not even 25% of the available stackable switches are covered there. At the same time, that article should be called Comparison of stackable Ethernet switches instead, as there are also things like FibreChannel switches, for example – not all switches are Ethernet switches. It's always better not to have a list-of-XYZ at all, rather than having an incomplete and outdated list. On the other hand, lists are almost always badly updated, so they eventually become outdated.

At the same time, when a certain manufacturer (or even a model) is left out from the List of microwave owens, for example, such a list clearly becomes a favoring of other manufacturers (or models), what slowly creeps into the field of adertising. And, we're not here to advertise anything. :)

Let's have a look at more examples from the above. Comparison of Linux distributions is also a true mess, filled with pretty much outdated information; I've tried to clean it up once, and gave up quickly as I by no means have internal knowledge of 50+ Linux distributions, while becoming familiar enough (and staying familiar, for later updates) with each of them would be a very time-consuming (and pretty much pointless) thing to do. Of course, there are people on Wikipedia who have deep knowledge of all those Linux distributions‍—‌such people wrote the associated articles‍—‌but they either don't care about updating the Comparison of Linux distributions article or don't even know that it exists. Thus, sooner or later, all those lists turn into a mess.

Now, let's have a look at the second batch of "List of XYZ" articles, and compare it to the batch #1. The second batch has a much better reason for its existence, as each of the articles lists products coming from a single manufacturer, or a single line of products made by a specific manufacturer. Thus, even if a product or two are missing from such lists, that doesn't turn into advertising, what's a good thing. However, I'd never rely solely on the data available from the List of Dell PowerEdge Servers, for example, and instead I'd always go to the manufacturer's website; however, sometimes even the manufacturer introduces various changes to available server models that aren't even available on its website (and you become aware of them only after you've purchased a server – BTDT). With all that in mind, it's quite hard to expect "List of XYZ" articles to be always up-to-date. However, I'd say that the batch #2 doesn't deserve to be nominated for deletion, as it serves the purpose of an initial look-up for a particular product line.

Then, how does all that apply to the List of M.2 SSDs? Of course, that would be a good question. :) Well, if we had List of Crucial M.2 SSDs (or even List of Crucial SSDs) instead, I might vote for having such an article; though, it would be a quite short article. :) With the List of M.2 SSDs, there's simply too much room for turning it into advertising, especially as M.2 SSDs are currently a somewhat "hot topic" and a few manufacturers (as always) are trying to dominate the market.

Thoughts? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:32, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

OK, you have some points. Let's start by proposing one of those articles for deletion and see what'd happen. I proposed "Comparison of stackable switches" for WP:AFD, the discussion is open here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of stackable switches. All of you are welcome to join that discussion and say again your arguments for or against deletion. Vanjagenije (talk) 10:25, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, we'll see how the deletion nomination develops and what the other editors think about the whole thing. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:01, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

The first discussion is over and the consensus was reached to delete "Comparison of stackable switches". I've continued by nominating "List of displays by pixel density" for deletion. Vanjagenije (talk) 20:50, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Great, thank you very much! List of displays by pixel density is a really bad article, and Comparison of smartphones might be later a good candidate for the next nomination round. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:33, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

My feeling is that the base articles for these things (like Network switch in this case) could well mention the most significant products in the field, the ones that represent significant advances, all put into historical context. But a list that includes all of the "me too" products doesn't serve the purposes of an encyclopedia. Jeh (talk) 06:08, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Totally agreed. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:14, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

As an example of what product coverage should be, look at History of IBM magnetic disk drives. Although many models there represent only incremental development, each is put into historical context, the fundamental enabling technologies are described, etc. IBM was long a leader in disk storage; many many advances in the field came from their labs, so this article is entirely appropriate for WP. That doesn't mean we should have exhaustive coverage of the myriad "plug-compatible", "work-alike" drives that were made by other companies. Jeh (talk) 01:27, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Exactly, History of IBM magnetic disk drives is a very good product line coverage article. At the same time, it reflects what I was referring to above while comparing the nature of List of M.2 SSDs and List of Crucial M.2 SSDs (or even List of Crucial SSDs) articles – even if some of the IBM's magnetic disk drives aren't included, that provides no room for turning it into anything similar to advertising. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:35, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

@Vanjagenije: Just checking, do you intend to continue with nominating these articles for deletion? Both nominations you've performed so far ended up in deletion, so it must be that we were right there. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 09:57, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Actually, Comparison of smartphones ended with "no consensus" (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of smartphones), and newly created Comparison of Music Education Software is also going towards keeping (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of Music Education Software). I'm little bit tired of this. Would you continue with nominating? Vanjagenije (talk) 11:13, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing out those already existing nominations for deletion. However, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of smartphones is a nomination back from 2010, and it's quite possible that points of view have been changed since then, especially when it comes to smartphones and such related articles. I'll see to nominate Comparison of smartphones for deletion a bit later. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:47, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, just saw the actual nomination you've referred to, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of smartphones (3rd nomination). As that was article's third nomination for deletion, which also was closed just three days ago, there's simply no point in nominating it again. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:59, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm sorry to say that this effort is pretty unappreciated by me, especially since it makes some of my IT research much more difficult. Glad that the comparison of smartphones deletion seems to have (hopefully) taken some of the steam out. Categorical removal of most of our (admittedly prolific) Wikipedia technology lists, which are a widely-used resource across the internet, based on let's just say a vigorously interpreted approach to rules, is a bad trend (in my opinion). Actionslike this are why so many people roll their eyes or express frustration at the idea of contributing to Wikipedia. – ImperfectlyInformed (talk) 03:23, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Sorry but WP:ITSUSEFUL is not considered a valid reason to keep an article that should otherwise be deleted. In my opinion, "sorry to say" but Wikipedia articles should not be parts or product catalogs. Such "articles" contribute nothing to understanding of the product category, of the progression of technologies, etc. An encyclopedia article should be more than just a table of unexplained, context-less facts, however useful the table might be to some. I think that one of the things that makes many people roll their eyes at the idea of contributing to Wikipedia is the presence of such low-grade articles, and the accompanying notion that anybody with a distributor's product list or product specs handy can "contribute to the encyclopedia" by copying product names, model numbers, and basic specs into yet another table-heavy article. Such articles also attract linkspam, new product announcements, etc., which further degrade WP's reputation. See my comments above about the History of IBM magnetic disk drives article, which I hold up as an example of a product-centric article that does belong here. If the "Comparison of smartphones" had that kind of contextual information, that would be a different matter. Jeh (talk) 05:01, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

For a longer, more thorough explanation of what's wrong with this sort of stuff in WP, please see this unpublished draft. Jeh (talk) 05:09, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello there, ImperfectlyInformed! As Jeh already explained it, plain product lists usually end up as not-so-good articles. Beside going pretty much below from what the encyclopedic content should be, they almost always end up unmaintained and outdated; such articles usually don't attract many editors, what makes them prone to spam, advertisements, bias, and false or unreviewed information. In other words, creating a good article of that kind (History of IBM magnetic disk drives is a good example, while it's an article whose growth has ended) requires significant and continuous efforts; IMHO, the majority of "product list" articles simply don't attract the editors willing to put in required amounts of elbow grease.

Another example of a similar type of article might be Android version history, which had engulfed significant amounts of work put in by multiple editors. At some points in time, working on it was so tedious and time-consuming that I've almost removed it from my watchlist and stopped contributing to it – and I'm a quite dedicated and determined type of person. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:54, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

What we are creating with Wikipedia is not set in stone. It is an evolving standard defined by what its editors determine to be acceptable, and personally I don't agree with the view that the priority is to write lengthy prose in the style of Encyclopedia Britannica. I've been around since 2007, Jeh has been around since 2005, and Dsimic has been editing a lot since 2013 (in other words, enough to get a very good idea of how Wikipedia's anarchist system works). I'm glad that Jeh prefaced his statement with "in my opinion" because that's what Wikipedia is about, and no personal statement (or even an essay such as commonly-cited arguments to avoid essay) is law. We debate a lot. I know just how much sucks but it's the way it is. Now, whether or not product lists are not-so-good articles is (debatably, if you you're axiologically inclined) an empirical and subjective question which could be most reliably answered by surveying our users, or our editors if they're not your priority. In my experience, lists are great for their purpose, and as a power Wikipedia user and editor, I've derived enormous benefit from them - and our users probably derive much more benefit from an article like Comparison of smartphones than the benefit which is derived from, say, the dozens of references I've added to articles like Tort, Trust law, or Economics and hundreds of much lower traffic niche topics. Lists in general are not easy candidates for "good articles"; as I recall, back around 2008 or so there was a campaign by a couple people to to delete a lot of list articles on that basis and on the duplication with categories, but when I pointed to WP:CSL, the steam was taken out even though that didn't change the sensibility of the decisions. In any case, you are welcome to boldly make and advocate for changes, and I reserve the right to express my own opposition within the limits of my available free time. :)

As an aside, I mention the views of users seriously - it has been pretty well empirically shown that oldtimers like myself are actively hostile to newcomers (as documented by Aaron Halfaker, User:EpochFail). I'm pretty sure most prospective editors are more bothered by the detailed and voluminous rules than maintaining the style of an old-school encyclopedia. I realize I'm channeling this a bit myself in my approach here, but oh well! II | (t - c) 10:34, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Sure thing, Wikipedia is by no means set in stone and it's never going to be perfect, just as WP:IMPERFECT says – what's actually one of its strong points. At the same time, I don't think that the way Wikipedia works sucks; the debate is the key, and I always find open environments to be much better. The whole thing is very similar to how and why enterprises and startups differ, and why enterprises always need fresh blood in form of acquired startups: form eats function and kills innovation very quickly. Then again, having no rules at all also isn't good, and balancing the whole thing is a quite delicate act. And, of course, all that I've said (and what I'm saying right now) is just my opinion, nothing more. :)

Please don't get me wrong, but I totally understand why the oldtimers may be hostile to the newcomers: newcomers usually don't show enough respect and take things too easy. That's why I didn't simply start to poke around randomly back in 2013; instead, I've invested a lot of time into reading many of the guidelines and policies first. Sure thing, it took me a few months to get a solid grasp of everything (we all know how long the MOS is, for example), but I've always listened to corrections from more experienced editors and continued to expand my knowledge. I'm sure you'll agree that not so many people are ready to invest a few months into the flat portion of a learning curve, no matter how beneficial the whole thing might be; learning LaTeX vs. using Microsoft Word is a good example outside Wikipedia. In a few words, newcomers usually bring in new ideas and that's excellent, but they tend to behave too cocky or lazy, even to the extent of not wanting to learn how to properly use the Wiki markup language; I've always been humble, and I don't intend to become cocky. :) To sum up my thoughts, breaking the rules is good, but one must know a lot to break them in a widely beneficial way.

Speaking about the list-style articles, you've probably noticed that I'm putting emphasis on the long-term quality of such articles. From what I've seen so far, slapping them together quickly usually doesn't produce a good and reliable article a few months or years later. Please, let's have a look at another example, List of PHP accelerators article; it covers a quite popular topic, but it's so outdated and badly written that it might be better if we didn't have it at all. I've tried more than once to collect enough energy to do a complete rewrite of that article, but after looking at it for more than ten minutes all the interest simply faded away each time. That pretty much complies with the "first broken window" syndrome: usually, people like to improve already good things, but not so much to polish turds :) or to rebuild things from the ground up. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 13:48, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Hey folks. Got the ping. It doesn't look like there's much for me to comment on here. I just wanted to hop in to agree with II. The media coverage of the Rise and Decline work is kind of crappy (as often happens with coverage of scientific work). I don't believe that we have any evidence that Wikipedia editors are jerks -- to the contrary actually. However, we have plenty of evidence that rule enforcement tends to scare newcomers away and the situation of rule enforcement tends to be old-timer vs. newcomer. We report on this carefully in the paper in question and much of our follow-up work has not been to seek and destroy mean old Wikipedians (or take away their tools), but to explore ways to improve old-timers/newcomer interactions (e.g. WP:Teahouse and WP:Snuggle). --EpochFail (talk) 16:39, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! I also have no reasons to think that people here are bad; my own experience shows that (if I exclude only a few unconstructive or incompetent editors encountered so far) people are here with very good intentions. Regarding the rules, every system has its own set of those, and it's the duty of newcomers to learn them – as simple as that. If you want to drive a car, you have to learn how, learn the traffic signs, make a few (hopefully smaller) mistakes and learn from them, etc.; pretty much the same drill applies to Wikipedia. In other words, a common misconception is that teachers are evil jerks, but they simply aren't. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 16:55, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed response, although I'm sorry to consume your time. Sorry, meant to include a link to Halfaker's Rise and Decline article, and I should clarify that I'm not picking on you guys in particular as being harsh to newbies but Jeh's offhand comment that "that one of the things that makes many people roll their eyes at the idea of contributing to Wikipedia is the presence of such low-grade articles" struck me as the opposite of my personal experience and the conclusion I would draw from that research. In terms of the low-quality and outdated articles, most articles on Wikipedia are hardly even in decent shape, but that by itself is clearly not a good reason to delete them. It makes me feel better to avoid looking at articles in terms of wholesale rewrites and through a lens of perfection, as that can make the messiness less frustrating. It's not realistic to expect Wikipedia to be without broken windows. You say that these articles are deserted and outdated, but that's an empirical question and a glance at, say, the edit history of the Comparison of smartphones shows dozens of different editors incrementally adding their improvements. The four AfDs to that article give an indication of the community's view towards deleting such articles (see, e.g., Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of smartphones (2nd nomination)). And in some ways it is problematic to keep pushing for deletion as the prior commenters may not notice the re-raised issue. In that case User:DGG and User:Cyclopia are still highly-active, made strong arguments, and may be willing to reaffirm those arguments if they noticed the issue come up again. As far as I know, our system doesn't make it convenient to set an alert to be reminded when, in particular, an AfD proposal hits an article but I may set up an RSS feed on a few of these articles as a workaround. II | (t - c) 20:15, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

No worries, this isn't wasting anyone's time; sweeping any issues or concerns under the carpet is never a substitute for discussing them openly. Sure thing, no system or environment is without broken windows; instead, it's more about how much time passes between the repairs. :) While looking at various articles, at least at over one thousand articles I've contributed to and watched over so far, it all depends on the editors interested in particular articles. IMHO, another big issue is how changes to the articles are reviewed; raw spam patrol is only one part of the whole thing and it works very well, but sometimes there are over three or four days before more subtle errors are fixed or improved.

Based on comparing Wikipedia with my own experience in commercial environments, it's‍—‌as always‍—‌all about the people. As a system becomes more complex, it becomes tougher to introduce changes or new features into it without breaking already existing functionality. That's why systems tend to become more and more inert as they grow, as people simply can't track everyhing that accumulates over time. Of course, that affects the newcomers even harder, and hurts the oldtimers as they need to clean up the mess while repeating the same things over and over. But, that's probably the way the cookie crumbles. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:02, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Pinging User:Vanjagenije as an fyi since he was also heavily involved; no to pressure to comment. I've said all I have to say; thanks for the hard work and I hope to get active here again when my life has settled down. II | (t - c) 06:04, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

Just take your time, there's no hurry – we'll take good care of Wikipedia without deleting too many articles. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:39, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

SATAe

Ironically your revert comment came at a point I was fixing the same issue. See reworked version which should be simpler and more direct, and better tone (you probably saw it just now).

See what you think, fix what you need to, but try to avoid wholesale "plain reverting" :)

I look forward to discussing anything you want to, on the t/p later. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 14:38, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Please don't get me wrong, as I've already noted on Talk:SATA Express § Stimulus for SATAe your latest additions to the article aren't bad per se, but they're simply way too wordy and make the article look a bit like a forum post.

The only reason why I went with the "revert everything" approach (which I really don't like) is because at the moment I don't have enough time to dedicate for going through everything in detail. In the meantime (until later today, or early tomorrow latest), to me it's better to leave the old version. Of course, that's only my humble opinion. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:50, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

kpatch listed at Redirects for discussion

See also: User talk:Intgr § kpatch article

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Kpatch. Since you had some involvement with the kpatch redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. -- intgr [talk] 10:52, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I'll provide some feedback in the above linked redirect discussion. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:34, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

TSX article

HI, this is my first reponse on a talk page, please forgive me if I mangle this submission. I found your TSX page quite good. I was wondering if you have an affiliation with Intel or have a contact with someone responsible for TSX at Intel? Regards, AndrewX – 12.15.146.127 (talk) 13:07, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! No worries, it's Ok and I've just cleaned up your post a bit. :) Actually, I haven't created the Transactional Synchronization Extensions article, I've just contributed some improvements to it. Unfortunately, I have no connections with Intel, at least not beside using their products. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:58, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Which vs. That

See also: User talk:Tom94022 § A third opinion might be useful, and Talk:Hard disk drive § Highlights In History Section

There you go violating BRD again. Your reversion to your text (after your change was reverted) is considered edit warring. The next stage is supposed to be "Discuss". It is not BRRD. Jeh (talk) 07:26, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

And your analysis is incorrect. The clause that follows which/that is not necessary to the sentence's meaning; it merely adds description. Therefore, according to your reference, "which" is correct. Jeh (talk) 07:30, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Please, let's not split hairs on the WP:BRD rule – as you probably know, I'm more than open for discussion and this is one of the places where we can exchange our views. Anyway, here's an excerpt from the style reference I've included in my edit summary:

Use “which” plus commas to set off nonrestrictive (unnecessary) clauses; use “that” to introduce a restrictive (necessary) clause.

... and here's the edited sentence from the article (emphasis added):

Price decreasing from about US$15,000 per megabyte to less than $0.05 per gigabyte by 2013, a greater than 300-million-to-1 decrease that corresponds to a 41% per-year increase in bytes per dollar (or a 29% per-year decrease in price per byte).

According to the referenced rule, "which" is to be used for unnecessary clauses, and you've also confirmed that what follows which/that in the edited sentence simply adds a better description. That's simply true, there's no doubt. When looked from that side, "which" is the way to go; let's see how the sentence looks when that unnecessary clause is trimmed away:

Price decreasing from about US$15,000 per megabyte to less than $0.05 per gigabyte by 2013, a greater than 300-million-to-1 decrease.

To me, that doesn't sound great and it should be edited like this, what also complies with the referenced rule as the sentence still contains another unnecessary clause:

Price decreasing from about US$15,000 per megabyte to less than $0.05 per gigabyte by 2013, which is a greater than 300-million-to-1 decrease.

Now the sentence sounds good, at least to me. But, in this case returning back the initial unnecessary clause simply by using "which" (as the style refrence suggests) would look even worse:

Price decreasing from about US$15,000 per megabyte to less than $0.05 per gigabyte by 2013, which is a greater than 300-million-to-1 decrease, which corresponds to a 41% per-year increase in bytes per dollar (or a 29% per-year decrease in price per byte).

Now, that would be a true mess. :) Based on all that, using "that" is a much better choice. However, it could be me splitting hairs here, but please let me know where am I wrong and I'll be totally fine with using "which" in the first place. :) Also, maybe this could be some kind of a compromise:

Price decreasing from about US$15,000 per megabyte to less than $0.05 per gigabyte by 2013, which is a greater than 300-million-to-1 decrease that corresponds to a 41% per-year increase in bytes per dollar (or a 29% per-year decrease in price per byte).

Thoughts? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:04, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

I do not at all see how you arrived at "'that' is a much better choice". I cannot, in fact, imagine how you can at once accept the notion that "that" is used to introduce necessary clauses and then argue for its use on an unnecessary clause, just because it "sounds better". (A lot of correct things "sound wrong" to many because the correct grammar has been misused for so long.)

In your compromise, "that" is still introducing an unnecessary (descriptive) clause, so "that" is still incorrect.

The sentence was fine as it was, except that it needed the comma before "which"... and I was in the process of adding that when you re-reverted.

The "true mess" is simply avoided by not using the "which" you're trying to introduce before "a greater than..."; not every descriptive clause needs "which" in front of it.

As a side note, there are many other ways to handle multiple descriptive clauses: em dashes, parentheses, break the second one off into a second sentence ("This corresponds to..."). But I see no need to inject a compromise here when the dispute is not between two shades of right, but rather between right and wrong. You want to use "that" to introduce an unnecessary clause, and that's wrong. Please restore the previous wording. Jeh (talk) 08:45, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Ok, to simplify the things I've edited the sentence as you've suggested, tweaking it a bit further so we don't have a mishmash of parentheses, which'es and other constructs. Looking good? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:59, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

No. None of the other items get two sentences, this shouldn't. Jeh (talk) 12:18, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Why would something like that be important? That's really a hairsplitting; please feel free to edit the sentence as it suits your taste, I won't stand in your way. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:20, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

"I won't stand in your way." Well, that didn't last long, did it? I took you at your word and... Yet another revert notice in my inbox. I strongly feel that when you have a series of bullet items like this they should present information like this in as parallel a form as possible; one point should not have embellishments that the others lack. And no, the answer is not to add similar embellishments to the others. Jeh (talk) 17:48, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Please pardon me, but this is slowly becoming an inconvenience to me, and I'll try to explain why. Firstly, I didn't revert your edit, I've just restored the deleted sentence by converting it into a note by using "undo" feature to quickly fetch the deleted content and convert it. Just to emphasize it, I didn't simply revert your edit. At the same time, I've changed the edit summary so it doesn't trigger the "your edit was reverted" notification, as I've read somewhere in Wikipedia's guidelines (or in MediaWiki documentation, can't remember) that those notifications are based solely on edit summaries. Though, as we see that isn't the case, and I apologize for not using a different way to fetch the deleted content.

Then, why is your opinion in this case so much more important than mine, and why is it so important to you that some additional information is deleted? Ok, I'm not a native English speaker, and I'm always more than open to receiving any criticism language-wise as that's the only way to improve myself, but this is no longer about the language and style. Sure thing, that sentence by far isn't the Holy Grail of HDD-related information, but why should we delete it, as it simply provides an additional perspective? Someone invested his/her precious free time to do the required calculation and provide some more content, which does no harm whatsoever; hitting "delete" on something like that makes little sense to me. Also, now as a note, it doesn't disturb the overall form of the surrounding bulleted list.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not here to argue, but I'm sensing some kind of pressure directed toward me, and (what's quite reasonable) that makes me uncomfortable. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:04, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

As discussed in Talk:Hard disk drive § Highlights In History Section, bulleted list from the Hard disk drive § History section is now converted and compacted into a table, please check it out. At the same time, the troublesome footnote has been deleted. Looking good? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:48, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

And, here we go again – 71.128.35.13 went a step back and restored that footnote. Hm. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:01, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

See my comments at the talk page there. Jeh (talk) 00:59, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

National varieties of English

See also: Referenced edit to the article

In a recent edit to the page Transactional Synchronization Extensions, you changed one or more words or styles from one national variety of English to another. Because Wikipedia has readers from all over the world, our policy is to respect national varieties of English in Wikipedia articles.

For a subject exclusively related to the United Kingdom (for example, a famous British person), use British English. For something related to the United States in the same way, use American English. For something related to another English-speaking country, such as Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, use the variety of English used there. For an international topic, use the form of English that the original author used.

In view of that, please don't change articles from one version of English to another, even if you don't normally use the version in which the article is written. Respect other people's versions of English. They, in turn, should respect yours. Other general guidelines on how Wikipedia articles are written can be found in the Manual of Style. If you have any questions about this, you can ask me on my talk page or visit the help desk. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1338/are-collective-nouns-always-plural-or-are-certain-ones-singular Little Professor (talk) 18:33, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Additionally, per WP:ARTCON articles should be written in a consistent manner, following one of the English varieties throughout the article. Which one prevails in this article? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:28, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Actually, Little Professor, it is you who would have been templated - except that Dsimic is too polite to template a regular. Intel is an American company and therefore articles about them and their developments should be phrased in American English. Nor is this a question of respecting the existing usage in the article. It contains numerous examples of treating "Intel" as singular, so your use of the British treatment of a collective noun goes against prevailing usage. Furthermore, you took what had been a completely dialect-neutral phrase ("Intel announced... which resulted in disabling...") and changed it to English dialect ("Intel announced... which lead to them disabling..."). In short it is you who are going against MOS:ENGVAR here, and you should withdraw and apologize for your complaint against Dsimic forthwith.

Just by the way, we don't care much what stackexchange.com says about anything (even though, in this case, it supports the notion that American dialect treats companies as singular); it consists of user-contributed content and therefore is not what WP considers a reliable source. Jeh (talk) 05:25, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Jeh. Getting a templated notification did look a bit strange to me, but I'm always more than eager to receive criticism related to my usage of the English language, as that's the only way I can improve myself. Anyway, I always assume that all editors are here to make both Wikipedia and themselves better. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 09:00, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

WP:AN/I discussion on disruptive edits in Nvidia-related articles

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding to discuss a disruptive IP-hopping editor that edits Nvidia-related articles. The thread is Disruptive edits by IP-hopper on Nvidia-related articles. Thank you. —Jesse Viviano (talk) 17:40, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I'll see to provide some comments in the above linked discussion. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:02, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@Jesse Viviano: Well, the WP:AN/I discussion got archived with zero responses from other editors. That makes me wonder why should you, Lonaowna or I care for those Nvidia-related articles? Who else cares? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:47, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I just tried to resolve the situation. I used to automatically hate Nvidia products because a G86 GPU that was soldered to my laptop's motherboard failed due to the bad bumps issue and took the motherboard down with it. I had to spend a large amount of money to recover from that. Nvidia then hit another reliability low point with its GeForce 400 series which endured high RMA rates probably due to overheating. Later on, AMD's drivers for my Radeon HD 6970 started to crash on me when I am trying to read my email or use a web browser on my desktop machine I built after the failed laptop motherboard incident. AMD's driver quality apparently tanked after Carrell Killebrew, the then head of the AMD Graphics Product Group, was laid off from AMD. I had to replace my Radeon with an Nvidia card in my desktop build to solve the frequent crashes. Nvidia's poor sales figures and high RMA rates for its GeForce 400 series spanked some sense into Nvidia that we care about card heat and noise. Since the GeForce 500 series was not as hot, it was much more reliable. These incidents have left me with a bitter hatred for idiotic fanboyism for both sides. I still wish there was a way to force Nvidia to recall all of the G84 and G86 GPUs that were made with the defective stepping. (A later stepping fixed the bad bumps issue that destroyed my laptop's motherboard.) I also don't like someone spreading debunked statements on Wikipedia without explaining that they were debunked. Such half-truths and lies in Wikipedia without disclosing that they are debunked hurts Wikipedia. Jesse Viviano (talk) 22:52, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not a fanboy either. Back in 2002–2006, I had two desktop PCs with Nvidia GPUs, and they both worked just fine under Linux with open-source drivers, what made me quite happy about Nvidia. Then, in 2007, I got a newer desktop PC with a more modern Nvidia GPU, which simply refused to work properly with even the latest available open-source drivers of the time. Speaking about garbled screens in X sessions (for example, all buttons in Firefox turn into black rectangles, and almost on a regular basis), manual upgrading to latest X and its associated libraries, and other extremely time-consuming endeavours aimed toward fixing the issues, I was forced to use Nvidia's closed-source Linux drivers. Aaargh, a binary blob as a module in my kernel?! Never thought of having those before, but that became an unavoidable everyday reality; at least the GPU worked fine with that huge (4–5 MB, IIRC) binary blob.

Back in 2008 (or so) I got a laptop that came with a discrete Radeon GPU; I was already used to having binary blobs around. Linux support for Radeon GPUs can't be bad, right? If open-source drivers don't work, official binary blobs will do the trick. Not so fast! It turned out that open-source drivers existed only as a then-beta RadeonHD open-source project, while the official closed-source Linux drivers were a story of their own. For example, when a running X session is switched to virtual consoles (Ctrl+Alt+Fn), laptop's screen turns into something that extremely resembles a broken LCD, making it look as if moisture got into LCD from the bottom and destroyed it. You can imagine my feelings while looking at that for the first time. :) Luckily, those were only visual effects; of course, all that also locked up the laptop requiring hard reboots. After a few days of experimenting, I've ended up with hand-crafted RadeonHD open-source drivers, which worked but caused very reduced battery runtimes and made it impossible to use an external monitor. Sigh.

Thus, I've been tortured with products from both manufacturers, but at least was lucky enough not to experience physically damaged hardware – I can feel your pain when your laptop's motherboard failed. :( — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:28, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

USB article

See also: User talk:71.41.210.146 § USB cable plugs table

You're very welcome. Now I wonder what you think of my edits to your edits. One is basically a revert. :-)

As mentioned in the edit comment, other than forgetting the final "s" on "suspects", I really was quite fond of that description of the reason for PING packets "This avoids the need to send a large DATA packet if the host suspects the device will just respond with NAK." If that's actually unclear, I'm curious how you interpreted it. Anyway, I tried a different phrasing. (Good reference finding, BTW.)

One change I wanted to make, but haven't found the right words for, is to split up the two uses of "non-standard" in the cable plugs table. Mini-A to micro-B is weird, but perfectly reasonable. A to A may exist, but you can't talk USB over it.

Another thing I'm tempted to do is mark the mini plugs as deprecated, tinting the column & row headers, and switch the compatibility matrix entries to green. To me, that reflects reality a bit better. What do you think? – 71.41.210.146 (talk) 20:52, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Regarding "ID pin" vs. "ID line", on second thought using "ID pin" should be actually better as it's used where connector pinouts are described. In other words, your revert is just fine with me. :) Your other edits are also fine with me, FWIW, especially simplification of the note in USB § Host and Device interface receptacles section – while it was acceptable before, I wasn't too happy with it as the provided description of differences in pin assignments between connectors wasn't precise enough. Thanks for improving the note so it's down to the exact differences; I've just cleaned it up a bit for improved readability.

The description of PING packets was somewhat confusing, as it was unclear how can a host suspect that. That's much more clear with your additions, and (after thinking about it for some time) I've restored your initial wording, sligthly tweaked and now in addition to the already present additional description. Hope you're fine with that. In addition, I've just cleaned up and clarified that and another earlier section, together with adding two more references.

Speaking about changes to the tables, I wouldn't change the colors or wording – both for "non-standard" combinations of cable plugs, and for Mini connectors. Why? Well, there's WP:COLOR that disallows color to be used as a sole carrier of the meaning, as there are blind people who use screen readers to access articles. Beside that guideline, introducing additional shades of color would probably be simply confusing. Thus, for the uses of "non-standard" I'd suggest a few notes to be added into respective table cells using the {{Efn}} template. For the Mini plugs and receptacles, I'd suggest we add nothing as they are deprecated but still used; please see WP:COMPNOW for something that might be used as a preservation analogy. Hope you find that acceptable. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:23, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Good points, especially about color & accessibility. Sigh, that may mean I have to go back and fix my beautiful Conventional PCI § Connector pinout chart. Anyway, it appears we're basically on the same page and don't have any significant disagreements. Feel free to go nuts with a red pen on my edits, and I'll try to communicate in edit comments. I just like to start discussion when I get as close to an edit war as re-doing a change that you reverted. (TIL about Template:Diff.) 71.41.210.146 (talk) 09:27, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm glad that you find our discussion productive. :) Sure thing, there are no significant disagreements, it's all about improving the article by providing as clear and correct descriptions as possible. By the way, having small disagreements along the way is actually a good thing, as that way things (usually :) become better. And, of course, please feel free to change the content brought in with my edits.

Regarding the chart you've mentioned above, redoing it might not be required as a color-coding legend is also provided. Though, I'm not sure about that; if there isn't anything similar described in WP:COLOR, it might be better to ask on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility before changing anything. Oh, and {{Diff}} template is quite useful. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 09:49, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

MOS:DAB

Hi. I linked the entries as I did on the dab page IML because WP:DABPIPE encourages linking the article itself, rather than redirects. ENeville (talk) 22:53, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you for pointing out this disambiguation linking guideline, I'll use it for my future edits related to disambiguation pages. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:33, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

F5 Networks Corporate page

Hello - I notice you've undertaken a lot of work to build out the F5 page...nice work. Could you help me? I am wondering where the content for "history of software development" originates. I cannot find the sources and I am wondering if you are the brother of Bojan Simic and getting content from him. Any help you can provide is appreciated. – Jaim Harlow 17:39, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thanks, I've contributed a little bit to the F5 Networks article. Regarding the F5 Networks § BIG-IP software development history section, back at the time I was interested in the design of Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM), and I've contributed a few related references to that section. Unfortunately, I have no brother named Bojan, and those references I've contributed were simply Googled out. I'm sorry I can't provide a better assistance, but that's how it is. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:17, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Graphics Lab Request (Android Runtime...)

Just a heads up to let you know I responded to your request with a question. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 13:48, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you very much, I'll respond there in a few minutes. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:47, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Duff's device as outdated and harmful method of loop optimization

Hi. Thanks you for your comment in revert in Duff's device with link to WP:COMPNOW. I think we should somehow mention in introduction that this method was used in 1980-s and in early 1990-s, but can be harmful for modern optimizing compilers (it creates very complex CFG - control flow graph - which should be deoptimized back into simple unrolled loop before compiler can optimize it in correct way)... a5b (talk) 17:50, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! You're welcome; by the way, WP:COMPNOW is a recently added guideline and I've seen it as a result of watching the page it belongs to. As we know, relation between the Duff's device and modern compilers is already covered in Duff's device § Performance section, here's a quotation for completeness:

This automatic handling of the remainder may not be the best solution on all systems and compilers – in some cases two loops may actually be faster (one loop, unrolled, to do the main copy, and a second loop to handle the remainder). The problem appears to come down to the ability of the compiler to correctly optimize the device; it may also interfere with pipelining and branch prediction on some architectures. When numerous instances of Duff's device were removed from the XFree86 Server in version 4.0, there was an improvement in performance. Therefore, when considering using this code, it may be worth running a few benchmarks to verify that it actually is the fastest code on the target architecture, at the target optimization level, with the target compiler.

You're right that the article's lead section should also sum this briefly – went ahead and slightly expanded the lead section, improving one reference at the same time. Please check it out, hopefully you'll find it good enough. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:42, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. PS: what do you think about Reliable Sources for Ribbon cable (flat IDE cable)? I added two at bottom after improving ru: article ru:Ленточный кабель. `a5b (talk) 00:48, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome, I'm glad you like changes to the Duff's device article. Regarding those two references, I presume you refer to these two edits to the Ribbon cable article? They look good and WP:RELIABLE; however, they should be converted into WP:FOOTNOTES, as in current form they're more suitable to be moved into new "Further reading" section. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:37, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Edit warring on Heartbleed article

Chealer continues to edit-war[2][3] on the Heartbleed article, even though I've asked them numerous times to discuss their changes on the article talk page, yet they still refuse. I'm not sure what to do next. Do you have any ideas? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:44, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Situations like this one are always a bit tacky; if an editor repeatedly refuses to discuss his/her edits, requesting a Wikipedia:Third opinion or reporting that on the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard or Wikipedia:Requests for mediation are the only remaining options. Of course, reporting other editors isn't the nicest thing to do, but that's pretty much what remains if there's no possibility for a discussion. However, as this content dispute is currently about the section title ("Source code patch" / "Code patch" vs. "Resolution") and associated differences in the meaning, and as the whole thing has been somewhat discussed already, it would probably be much better to try discussing that with Chealer once again before reaching out to other mechanisms.

At the same time, please have a look at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution and Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Collaborating with Other Editors/Resolving Content Disputes for more information. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:13, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

DIMM

I think 'class="hintergrundfarbe6"' is a color code for the cells. I borrowed the tables from a German Wikipedia page haha, the class may not apply here. Thanks, again, for the help! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jchap1590 (talk • contribs) 23:00, 24 August 2014‎ (UTC)

Hello there! You're right, 'class="hintergrundfarbe6"' changes the color of table headers, I've confirmed that by temporarily changing Wiki code on the German Wikipedia page linked above. And, yes, that CSS class doesn't apply on the English Wikipedia. :) You're welcome, and thank you for your contributions to the DIMM atricle, I've just touched them up while reviewing the changes. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Hey, I like the new table layout! It may be my browser version or some other factor, but it looks like there is a broken empty row from the DDR2 table on the second column of tables. I didn't see anything in particular that needed correcting, however. see here: http://i1304.photobucket.com/albums/s526/jason_chapman1/DIMMSpeeds_zps1d66ed8b.png Jchap1590 (talk) 22:09, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, and that's a very good remark – you're right, there are some issues when {{Div col}} template is used for a compacted layout and columns contain tables; additionally, the template documentation states that it "handles wiki table code", but it's up to browsers to split the content into columns. I've just tried it in Internet Explorer 11, and I can only confirm that it doesn't render columns properly; though, I see it as an empty row inserted before the end of the DDR2 table in the first column, while its last row "overflows" into the second column – how much sense in the world does that make? :) Anyway, Firefox 31.0 renders it just fine.

Went ahead and changed the way layout compaction is performed; that's still not an ideal way to do it, but unfortunately I'm unaware of a better way. It renders fine in Internet Explorer, but the issues are now on narrow screens – please try resizing your browser window and you'll see what I'm talking about. I'd really love to know if there's a better way to do it? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:34, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Just tried another approach that uses {{Col-float}} template and it slightly simplifies the Wiki code. Though, it's still not ideal as column breaks must be specified manually instead of having a dynamically adjusted number of columns that's produced by the {{Div col}} template. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:08, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

What was the RAMAC price and capacity?

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Hard disk drive § An End To The RAMAC Price Duologue. Please help end the duologue on capacity and price of the IBM RAMAC Model 350 disk file. Thanks. Tom94022 (talk) 21:49, 4 September 2014 (UTC)Template:Z48

Sure thing, I'll have a look into that in the next few hours. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:57, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Done, added a comment. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:06, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Re: Explicit anchors

See also: User talk:Tomchen1989 § Explicit anchors

{{anchor|2-clause}}

=== {{anchor|2-CLAUSE}} 2-clause license ("Simplified BSD License" or "FreeBSD License") ===
Content ... ...

Hello. I assumed that {{anchor|2-clause}} and {{anchor|2-CLAUSE}} are hidden anchors and "#2-clause license ("Simplified BSD License" or "FreeBSD License")" is an explicit anchor, which is the opposite to a "hidden anchor". Maybe I got wrong, maybe you meant "anchor with an all capitalized name" by saying "explicit anchor"? --Tomchen1989 (talk) 23:09, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

If so, I don't know why we should use an "anchor with an all capitalized name" instead of a normal anchor. Is there a guideline about this? Thx. --Tomchen1989 (talk) 23:12, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Please allow me to explain. In a few words, no anchors (as HTML elements) are visible in resulting web pages; let's have a look at what the HTML code looks like for a section title:

<span id="Section title" class="mw-headline">Section title</span>

Creating a section also implicitly creates an anchor (the <span> HTML element above) with the same name as the section title, and that's what an implicit anchor is. On the other hand, placing {{Anchor}} templates explicitly creates additional anchors (hence the name of such anchors). The main benefit of explicit anchors is that they remain unaffected if a section becomes renamed later – that's why using explicit anchors is always a good idea when linking to sections.

Regarding the all-uppercase names for explicit anchors, there are no guidelines regarding that (AFAIK) but I've seen a few other editors doing that for explicit anchors so I've followed them. As of why, that way it's much easier to distinguish implicit and explicit anchors wherever they're referenced – if it's an all-uppercase anchor, that's an explicit one. Hope you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:53, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Ah you mean {{anchor|2-clause}} and {{anchor|2-CLAUSE}} are explicit anchors, and "#2-clause license ("Simplified BSD License" or "FreeBSD License")" is an implicit anchor, just the opposite to what I thought LOL. Whatever.. Thank you for clarifying this. I'm aware of these concepts and techniques, I just didn't know what you meant by saying "explicit anchor". <a name="link_here"></a> (btw no whitespace is allowed in name or id attribute in the specification) was used, but now it is not supported by HTML5. Although the template's name is {{Anchor}}, it renders as a <span id="link_here"></span> rather than an anchor element <a></a> in HTML actually.

Well I still have a little doubt about that word "explicit" after doing a little lookup. It seems that WP:ANCHOR uses the word "explicit" to describe section title links.

Anyway, it is not the definition of "explicit" that matters here. Under your definition, I've replaced an explicit anchor "#2-CLAUSE" with another explicit anchor "#2-clause". You can see in the article BSD licenses we have {{anchor|2-clause}} {{anchor|3-clause}} {{anchor|4-clause}} with lowercased names, but we only have {{anchor|2-CLAUSE}} with a uppercased one. There should not be too much {{anchor}}. As a shortcut, one {{anchor}} for every section title is usually enough. It is reasonable to remove that "isolated" (no other anchor with uppercased name) {{anchor|2-CLAUSE}} I guess. I don't see using all-uppercase name for anchors is conventional at all. Unless if it's an unwritten but relatively conventional approach used or advocated by even a small majority of editors, I don't think it's good to use uppercase names.--Tomchen1989 (talk) 00:52, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, this means that I was unnecessarily explaining concepts you're already familiar with. I apologize for doing that. Of course, thank you for further clarifications and corrections. By the way, I really don't know else how should the results of placing {{Anchor}} templates be called? You're right that WP:ANCHOR seems to be using word "explicit" for exactly the opposite anchor variant, but FWIW that makes little sense to me.

Regarding {{Anchor|2-clause}} in the BSD licenses article, I've contributed to the whole confusion by looking at the Wiki code by clicking on "edit" links right to the section titles; this explicit (or however it should be called :) anchor is placed in a separate line before the section title, what makes it invisible when a section is edited. I totally agree that {{Anchor|2-CLAUSE}} is then redundant, but according to documentation of the {{Anchor}} template additional anchors should be part of the lines that contain section titles (== {{Anchor|EXAMPLE}}Section title ==, for example).

All-uppercase explicit (additional or whatever) anchors or not? Of course, that's debatable as there are no guidelines that would either encourage or disallow such a scheme. To me, all-uppercase anchors are quite usable – again, FWIW. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:25, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, technically and very strictly, I guess it can be called "a subordinate resource that can be pointed to by URI with a hash mark ('#') fragment identifier".

But it can also be called:

1. fragment identifier (strictly speaking, it's the "#ABC" "?ABC" stuff in the URI, not the resource it points to)
2. link (but "link" usually refers to the <a href=""></a> anchor, or the URL "http://...", rather than the thing we are talking about)
3. link within a page / link within the same page (understandable)
4. internal link (very ambiguous. it has two meanings: 1. (primary) an anchor link to a page outside the same domain name; 2. the thing we are currently discussing here. The lead section of the article Internal link defines it using the first meaning, but the "Examples" section uses the second, this article definitely needs to be rewritten)
5. section link (for Wikipedia pages)
6. anchor / anchor name (as I mentioned before, "anchor" is an old school name and technically not that right since it's not necessarily an anchor element <a href=""></a>. However the word is largely used and may considered OK)

For the part where {{Anchor|2-clause}} is outside the section and invisible when the section is edited, I put all those anchor templates inside their related section titles. --Tomchen1989 (talk) 10:19, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

We should also take into account that it's the MediaWiki who diverts from the ordinary definition of HTML anchors, what was required for MediaWiki redirects and such stuff; a brief explanation is available here: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 121 § JavaScript and redirects issues?. As we know, including #ABC in a URI works only with <a href=""></a> if there is no additional JavaScript code that would handle the page positioning. With all that, MediaWiki's "anchor" is pretty much unrelated to true HTML anchor elements – it's more of an abstraction of that concept, if you agree.

And, of course, thanks for folding the {{Anchor|...}} templates into section titles! — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:56, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Edit summary on Dalvik (software)

Hey, I just wanted to offer my apology since my edit summary wasn't as polite as it could have. Sorry about that and glad that you took it so well. Cheers! --uKER (talk) 02:39, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! No worries, just as I've stated in my consecutive edit summary that was a clear mistake from my side, and your disagreement was perfectly fine. The tone in which the disagreement was expressed might be debatable, but it was fine with me – I'm always more than open to having anyone point out my mistakes, as that's the best way for both personal and project improvements. In other words, I'd say that there was pretty much no need for the apology, however I'm happy that you've thought about it afterwards and I'm more than gladly accepting it. Thank you! :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:28, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

While we're here, it might be good if I describe further the reason why I've reverted your edit on the Dalvik (software) article a few minutes ago. I totally agree with you that we shouldn't limit ART to the previews of Android L, but that's all what we have currently available from Android L. In my opinion, your edit is just fine but we should probably wait with it until Android L becomes released and available in its production form. Hope you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:36, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, I understand that theoretically there's the remote possibility that L could go back to Dalvik and to avoid going WP:CRYSTAL we should leave it, so well, while it's now what I'd do, I respect your concern. --uKER (talk) 20:34, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Docker

Nice job on the Docker, it looks much better now! Best, --Nabak (talk) 16:16, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Thank you very much, I'm glad that you like those layout improvements. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:38, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

768×1280 is totally uncommon?

What about the Sony Xperia Z3 and the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact? --Jobu0101 (talk) 20:14, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! Regarding my edit on the Nexus 4 article, I probably wasn't clear enough in the provided edit summary. It was about "768×1280" being uncommon as the way to specify a screen resolution, not about how often screens with that resolution are found in cellphones. In other words, "1280×768" is the common way to specify this screen resolution; if you look around, it's almost always that the bigger number goes first. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:41, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

However, UKER just reverted my edit; if that's the standard format for cellphone screens, I'm fine with it, although "1280×768" is more logical to me. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:47, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Screen resolutions have been historically expressed as Width*Height, and that's the way most technically correct sources mention it (see GSMArena, PhoneArena). Some sources use it the other way around (biggest length first) I guess for the sense of familiarity, as for example 1080x1920 doesn't ring the same bells in the public as 1920x1080. I, for one, am for keeping it as WxH, since it reflects the true orientation of the display, but feel free to put it up for discussion if you see fit. --uKER (talk) 23:13, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

It all makes sense, and I don't see the need for starting another discussion. However, maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned, but I'm somehow "classifying" the screen resolutions mentally by their first numbers; thus, seeing "768" as the first number brings me a much worse sense of direction than seeing "1280" first. Of course, that's just me. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:07, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

HHVM redirect, and capitalization of templates

Yes, I know HHVM is defined as HipHop Virtual Machine in that article; I meant exactly what I said, which was that no pronunciation is given. My point was that, as a native English speaker, I can see no way to pronounce "HHVM" other than as an initialism.

I admit all that was a bit unnecessary, so, sorry for such a wordy edit summary in the first place; but I digress. To get to the point:

• Does that capitalization convention also apply to {{Redr}} or only the single-rcat templates?
• Is this a serious enough issue that I should be editing redirects I previously categorized just to capitalize that "R"? My understanding is that such trivial edits are normally discouraged. Is there some previous discussion I should be looking at?

--SoledadKabocha (talk) 00:41, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Hello there, and thank you for the clarification! I can't pronounce "HHVM" in any other way either, not even in my native language if that matters. :) No worries about your edit summary, maybe it was just a bit confusing but adding {{R from initialism}} was totally fine.

Regarding the capitalization of template names, that's debatable and I'm unaware of any associated official guidelines. However, I tend to capitalize them, and {{R from initialism}} also refers to itself with a capital R. At the same time, I'd usually leave such edits to Wiki code unchanged, but I've used that more to quickly comment back. Not a great way to do that, I know; hopefully you find that acceptable. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:09, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you. I've been trying for a few years in the Turkish language. I know Wikipedia, but I do not have much English :( --Fsandlinux (talk) 19:28, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome, and thank you for your contributions. Just keep working and learning – almost everything can be accomplished by investing some time, together with applying just the right amounts of elbow grease. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:16, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Lollipop on Nexus 4

I think the guy you just reverted was referring to the fact that Google officially announced Lollipop for the N4 a couple of days ago. --uKER (talk) 12:54, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Well, I've reverted Harshal.dhumal's edit that pretty much changed the Nexus 4 article so Lollipop is stated as an offical and over-the-air upgradable release. As we know, Lollipop is still only a developer preview, which requires a phone to be flashed using one of the official preview images. Thus, to me it's better to wait a bit longer until Lollipop becomes released as a regular Android update. Hope you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:46, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

RAID-Z (non-standard RAID levels)

Hello again, there, sir! I was wondering if you would be able to provide assistance with improving the RAID-Z section (which was) in the non-standard RAID levels article. the information was unsourced and has been deleted by another user. I feel this is an important topic on the subject of non-standard RAID and would like to ask for your help in recreating the section. Thanks, in advance, for any consideration. Jchap1590 (talk) 07:33, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Thank you for bringing it to my attention; of course, I agree that RAID-Z deserves to be part of the Non-standard RAID levels article. Though, as everything else in Wikipedia, it needs to be backed by a few references – I'll have a look into finding better references, as the ones used for RAID-Z descriptions in the ZFS article are somewhat bordering with what's acceptable. To keep the discussion in one place, I'll post my findings and further opinions in Talk:Non-standard RAID levels § RAID-Z section you've already created. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:54, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Picture asking for republication in FUNKAMATEUR Magazine

Hello Dragan,

I found your Picture of a small Voltage and Current Meter for USB-Connections on Wikipedia: File:USB voltage and current meter.jpg.

As I am preparing an article about Charging of portable devices from different sources and especially the Problems the User should be aware, I am asking you two questions:

1. May I use this picture in the publication in the German Radio Amateur Magazin FUNKAMATEUR? Of course, I will mention it in a literature annex, where I've found it.
2. Could you please give an Idea, were I will have a chance to buy such a useful tool? This question is primarily because I expect users to ask me or the publisher after publication where they may buy it and/or looking for more detailed specs, such as voltage drop on the GND or the V_BUS line(s).

I am awaiting your kind reply. kind regards, or as Radio Amateurs around the world would say: vy 73.

Hartwig Harm, DH2MIC http://dh2mic.darc.de [in German :-( ] mailto: dh2mic@darc.de — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.148.215.15 (talk) 16:05, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello there!

Sure thing, please feel free to use this picture in the article you're preparing. The picture has been made available and licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0, which allows pretty much all kinds of usage, though a brief attribution would be required.

I've bought this gadget on eBay; since that time, other variants became available as well – some of them provide simultaneous voltage and current readouts, others even provide power measurements and estimated battery capacity readouts (in mAh, of course). More fancy versions even have OLED displays, :) and just saw that some versions additionally allow calibration to be performed by end users. Simply search for "USB meter" on eBay, and you'll see a whole bunch of such devices, which are also quite cheap at the same time (under $10). Unfortunately, detailed specifications for these measurement devices, such as their temperature dependencies and incurred voltage drops, do not seem to be available. However, accuracy levels are usually available, and they're typically specified to be within 0.1 V and 0.01 A error margins.

As a side note, you might also find Wikipedia's USB article usable, sections USB § Power, USB § Charging ports, and USB § USB Power Delivery in particular. Those sections provide an overview of the power delivery over USB ports and involved negotiation between devices, as well as links to detailed documentation that describes it further and provides official specifications.

Is your article, once it's published, going to be available online? I'd like to read its published version, if possible. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:05, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

RfC appearance

See also: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Software

The request about Wikipedia style and naming looks confusing. 84.127.115.190 (talk) 23:52, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Thank you very much for bringing it to my attention, I'll make sure to make it less confusing; that's the result of a bot listing it on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia style and naming. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:25, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Done, it should be better now. Improved RfC description should be picked up soon by Legobot. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:13, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Red Planet Mars

My friend Dragan! First of all, I see that you have been recognized by one of my few other Wikipedia buddies QWERTYVS [or is it QWERTYUS ?]; and so I draw your joint attention to the anomalous Wikipedia entry on the movie "Red Planet Mars", which movie (which I have just viewed on Youtube) was a quite heartfelt and anomalous comment on the possibility that compassion is a universal reality! But the Wikipedia entry itself is way, way out there! Synchronist (talk) 05:25, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Unfortunately, I haven't watched Red Planet Mars yet, but I'll make sure to do that. Based on what's available in Red Planet Mars § Plot, I'd say that it describes what might be seen as "search for the higher goal". In other words, human society seems to be flooded with "you must have latest and greatest <something>, which is of course much more shiny, bigger and better", while things like alternative, less polluting energy sources are receiving much less (public?) attention. Knowing that we aren't alone in space might be a wake-up call for the search for the higher goal, bringing back more compassion into people's hearts at the same time. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:36, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

1BASE5

Sorry for reverting your changes to Ethernet. I mistook 1BASE5 for 10BASE5. I don't think I would have made this error if you had linked to StarLAN instead of 1BASE5. I'm tempted to change that. Do you have any objection? ~KvnG 15:50, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! No worries about reverting those changes, we're all here to work together. I totally agree that it's very easy to see "10BASE5" while looking at "1BASE5", as 10BASE5 was actually used and seen around in commercial networks. While 1BASE5 is actually a redirect to StarLAN, I went ahead and clarified it a bit further; please check it out. Looking good? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 17:21, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Talkback (Bufferbloat)

Hello, Dsimic. You have new messages at Talk:Bufferbloat.
Message added 18:21, 11 November 2014 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Widefox; talk 18:21, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I've just replied on the article's talk page. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:46, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

File:Linux kernel live patching kpatch

Category Linux kernel on Commons is empty, actually in use category Linux-Kernel. --Victor•talk 18:50, 11 November 2014 (UTC).

Hello! That's a good point, thank you for pointing it out. However, having "Linux-Kernel" as a category name is simply awkward... I'll see how to get that cleaned up. Once again, thank you for the SVG drawing, it looks great! — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:57, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

 Done: After a lot of clicking around and editing, Linux kernel category replaced Linux-Kernel on Commons. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:05, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Lowercase username

I saw your desire for a lowercase username on your user page. While not technically possible for the reasons you state, you can somewhat fake it by adding {{Lowercase title}} to your user page and user talk page, then changing the capitalization in your signature. This is just merely a tip from your friend who also prefers a lowercase username. – voidxor ^{(talk | contrib)} 20:57, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Thank you for the tip, but that might create some kind of a discrepancy between different places where the same username is displayed, like in article histories, diffs, talk page posts, etc. Sure thing, changing the case of one letter doesn't introduce a huge discrepancy, :) but I've also seen some editors that use completely different names in their signatures, what makes quite difficult to track and correlate their edits in various places. With all that in mind, back at the time I've decided to ignore my desire and keep capitalized username all around. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:05, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

English spelling reform

Don't feel bad about making this error; even native English speakers make it all of the time (myself included). The problem is English spelling—not you! May I suggest the following userbox? – voidxor ^{(talk | contrib)} 21:09, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Code	Result
{{User:Asarlaí/Userbox spelling reform}}	tough, though, through, thoughtThis user supports English spelling reform.	Usage

Hehe, well, that mistake was a true brainfart from my side, and I wouldn't attribute it to English spelling. :) Speaking about the English-language spelling reform, that's a highly debatable topic... Inevitably, every language becomes changed slightly over time, but it also isn't good to lose the existing variety and fine language details. I always tend to compare such simplifications to the so-called Web 3.0 when it's displayed on large screens – it becomes a big question why large screens are actually needed. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:43, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Date format in Linux articles

Months ago, I wrote a review about Dsimic. I have defended this user when he made a good decision. Now, I would like Dsimic to reflect on his contributions; I am aware of what has happened in Linux distribution. 84.127.115.190 (talk) 06:02, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! I understand your concerns, so please allow me to explain.

It's all about bringing in opinions from more editors, as the whole thing in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Software § Date format in release history sections of Linux articles pretty much turned into a not-so-well discussed imposing of additional rules to a WikiProject. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to influence the outcome of the discussion; doing something like that would also be against WP:CANVASS. Instead, what I'm trying is to turn that into a much better discussion that would lead to a much broader consensus, which may be whatever we end up with.

In other words, a few editors simply can't create new guidelines – a much broader consensus is required for something like that (please see WP:CONLEVEL). Furthermore, that proposed new guideline even went into effect in a few places, what simply isn't the way to go. Thus, the whole thing spins out of control and doesn't have much sense if we don't bring in more editors, and that's what I've tried to do by posting invitations to talk pages of a few editors with substantial edits in the field; doing something like that complies with WP:CANVASS.

Hope you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:35, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

PAD Runtime

See also: Talk:Android Runtime § Puzzles And Dragons non-op with ART

I'm not looking for support. I'm trying to warn people (and give accurate info) about the FACT that PAD, a game enjoyed by millions of people several times a day on Android, will not be playable for them once they allow the upgrade to 5.0. Since you're well-established here, perhaps you can add that info in the appropriate ways and places? To those who play the game (and those seeking facts about ART vs. D.) it is significant. Thanks! JT (talk) 02:13, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Thanks for the clarification. As with any major software release, or major architectural change in a mature software product, there will always be bugs, unforeseen troubles, and eventually broken stuff. Your report on this Android game no longer working with ART is valid, but unfortunately Wikipedia shouldn't list individual problems with particular software products; that would turn Wikipedia into a bug tracker, what it isn't. On the other hand, adding such info would be doable in case such problems are widespread (affecting numerous Android applications, in this case), together with having them backed by reliable sources. Hope you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:33, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

HDDs less than 100 MB

The HDD article concerns HDDs, not SSDs. HDDs less than 100 MB aren't common, because they're largely obsolete. Cluttering the article with SSD-specific provisos and eventualities is not justified. It just adds clutter. SSD formatting should be addressed elsewhere, not here.71.128.35.13 (talk) 22:55, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I'll reply in Talk:Hard disk drive § Partitions? File systems? RAID? section so we keep the discussion in one place and better visible to more editors. Just for later reference, it's about this revert on the Hard disk drive article. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:19, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

DDR5 SDRAM

Could you weight in on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/DDR5 SDRAM, since it seems that nobody feels qualified to "vote"? Thanks! Thue (talk) 18:45, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I'll have a look and possibly cast my vote. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:41, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Done, unfortunately the article should be deleted as highly misleading; it seems to be created by a confused editor that jumped the gun over some quick searches for "DDR5". — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:27, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Ksplice

Hi, there is broken link in article in Ref. #3.  --Victor•talk 19:24, 23 November 2014 (UTC).

Hello! Nice catch, thank you! I've just fixed the reference by pointing it to another web page that also provides man page for the ksplice-create utility, which covers the content in article's lead section. While we're here, may I ask you to have a look at the Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Illustration workshop § A high-level overview of Ceph's inner workings section, just in case you might be willing to take that request as well? :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 21:59, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

OK, I will.  --Victor•talk 23:45, 23 November 2014 (UTC).

Thanks! — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:46, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Fixing a hole where the rain gets in

Dragan, I have for the first time found it necessary to stick a fork in something -- see my recent edit to the "Semantic Search" article. The guys at IDMARCH are giving semantic search a bad name, and so I have tried to follow the BOLD directive -- but perhaps there was a better way? Synchronist (talk) 04:41, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! I had a look at your edit on the Semantic search article, and unfortunately there are a few issues. The biggest issue comes from the fact that, in general, editors should try to refrain from writing about something they're directly involved with; please see WP:COI for more details on possibly associated issues. Also, articles should never include links to Wikipedia user pages; even using self-written published articles as references requires additional attention, please see WP:SELFCITE for more details. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:02, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

OK, it's been undone, and thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow! But if you find out anything about those guys at IDMARCH -- their motto is "Designed and built with all the love in the world in Europe", although the site is basically anonymous -- I would love to be clued in. Synchronist (talk) 15:30, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome, and I'm glad that you took it so well, so to speak. I know, it's quite difficult to go by all the guidelines, rules, essays and unwritten rules Wikipedia has in place – it's no surprise that nowadays not many editors contribute new content to Wikipedia articles. Speaking about that IDMARCH thing, right off the bat it looks a bit strange to me; with no description of who they actually are and why do they do that, it looks as just another AdWords revenue generator. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:00, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Dragan, there has been a happy ending -- or perhaps beginning! -- to the story. I used the "whois" facility to get the email address of IDMARCH's founder, and we had a pleasant correspondence today (available here: http://www.space-machines.com/Nov_29_correspondence_with_IDMARCH_founder.pdf ), with the salient feature that he has added a facility to the web site enabling one to determine the number of hits for a particular article. Unfortunately, I have had no hits except my own, and so my consternation with Dragomir -- for that is his name -- has now now turned to solicitude. He really has pulled off a neat trick in indexing 7 million PDF documents -- the only one of the many semantic search engines out there, for example, to have found my two articles, if Google Advanced Search can be trusted in my hands, and the semantic indexing is really not bad. Furthermore, he has asked for ideas, and so I will be thinking about ways to help him in both practical and strategic terms. And given that I have alluded in the correspondence to a Wikipedia buddy who is perhaps his near countryman -- and the guy, in fact, who got the critical edit reverted! -- it would be quite appropriate for you to jump into the fray. All for now, but there is much, much more I could say about all of this. Synchronist (talk) 02:28, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Hey, that's great you've actually reached someone at the other end of the wire! I'd be extremely happy to see a semantic search website like that grow into something many people use to find better-matched content. I'll think about what could be added in terms of features, options, etc. For the beginning, it might be good for the website to include a description of what they do and why do they it, so it looks less like a puzzle. By the way, it's quite interesting to compare websites with US background and those having Eastern Europe or (in particular) Russian background – it might be only up to legal stuff, but the US ones tend to provide better descriptions of actual intentions that drive them. Oh, and based solely on Dragomir's last name, he and I could be considered countrymen only if we abstract out hundreds of miles and a few country borders. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 05:52, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Drives and other storage

Since you made the solid-state storage redirect, just notifying that because I have been informed there are some other kinds of non-drive storage (cards) I turned the SSS page into a disambig. Was wondering if you know any other types, or if I am wrong and other forms of solid-state storage like the SD Card might be considered drives in some way. --64.228.88.135 (talk) 01:29, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! That looks like a good move to me, thank you! I've just improved it a bit, so the major meanings are listed, and so it conforms to the basic guidelines for disambiguation pages. There's also the Flash-based storage page, and I've turned it into a redirect to Solid-state storage – that should fit better with the now available disambiguation page. Just as a note, article links in general shouldn't point to disambiguation pages (linked example might not be very good as it was more of a prose addition, which might have introduced potential confusion that early in the article's lead section); please see WP:DABNAME for more details. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:05, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Illustrations in Unix-like article

Hello, both illustrations in this article are out of date: as if OpenBSD "quit" :) in mid-2013, as if Mac OS X is not OS X now and v.10.10, etc., etc... You may answer in Gr. Lab. --Victor•talk 08:54, 4 December 2014 (UTC).

Hey Victor! Yes, both File:Unix history-simple.svg and File:Unix timeline.en.svg could use some maintenance. :) I'll see to compile a list of required changes to these two drawings, thank you for pointing it out! — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 10:33, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

About Skylake

We don't know its cache system until we see the actual product in fall 2015. Before that we'd stick with current info. Please do not edit this unless you're an employee that works for Intel. Thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.57.33.215 (talk) 08:05, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Well, if you insist, leaving the article's infobox as-is is fine with me; also, cache-related information is already tagged with {{Citation needed}}. However, it's quite unlikely that the L1 cache in Skylake is going to be bumped to 128 KB, but the time will tell whether that will be the case. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:14, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

All the back-and-forth (also known as edit warring) over essentially unsourced L1/L2/L3 cache sizes information is pretty much pointless, so it is better not to have that as part of the article's infobox at all. At the same time, content marked with {{Citation needed}} may be removed if the sources haven't been provided for extended periods of time, and in this case no sources have been provided since October 2014. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:31, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

PDF page links

Hi. I saw that you deleted the addition about PDF pages on WP:Citing sources, on the grounds of avoiding browser-dependent stuff and/or needing more explanation of where it works. As far as I know it works in all popular browsers, including the built-in PDF viewers and Adobe plug-ins for Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari. And according to SourceOhWatch (SrotahaUvacha), who originally added it, if a browser doesn't support it, then it degrades gracefully with the browser displaying the first page.

I added a comment to Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#PDF page links, with a link to a PDF explaining these hash URIs. If you know of any browser-dependent issues, could you leave a comment there? Otherwise I'd like to put it back. Thanks. – Margin1522 (talk) 15:03, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Well, the content I've deleted would require additional explanation; basically, it should be explained that it depends on built-in web browser functionality (or a browser plugin), and that it works only when a linked PDF file is viewed/opened inside a web browser. Despite the introduction of somewhat technical mumbo-jumbo, :) having that additional explanation would be beneficial. Hope you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 15:19, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

OK, I think that since the only way to view a Wikipedia link is in a browser (right?), we don't need to explain that. But I guess it wouldn't hurt to add a caveat that the browser has to support it. There are dozens of viewers and OS variants for smartphones, and some of them might not. Would the following be OK?

Note that this functionality depends on support from the browser's PDF viewer. In some cases, the browser may ignore the PDF page specification and display the first page instead.

I don't think we have to worry about downloaded files. Users will expect the browser to download the whole file, which is what happens, and then once you have the file, the link where you got it is irrelevant. – Margin1522 (talk) 17:05, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Actually, links to PDF files do not always end up viewed inside web browsers – some people prefer to use "open with" or even to save PDFs before opening them using a separate application. Furthermore, if we go into corner cases, someone could even use wget or curl to bypass the browser entirely. :) Anyway, your additional explanation is just fine, I totally agree on including it. By the way, as another editor pointed out, I was wrong and WP:YOU doesn't apply to guidelines, which already address readers directly in numerous places. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 06:55, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

That's a point. In the meantime, Mxn has restored it in the guideline with a better version of the caveat. He's also started a thread at Module talk:Citation/CS1#PDF page links, where Gadget850 pointed out that this has been discussed before and rejected for reliability reasons. – Margin1522 (talk) 07:47, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Went ahead and improved the guideline addition (clarified and added the note you've proposed above), hope you find it good. Yeah, I saw the module talk discussion, and it surely isn't "dependent on the server", as web servers generally have nothing to do with the URLs they're requested to serve. Of course, if a PDF file isn't served statically that's another story, but the majority of PDF files are served that way. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:58, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Piped links

Don't do this again. It is pointlessly antagonistic. There is nothing which makes an editor look less suitable for collaborative development than this sort of idiotic revert war. The rationale behind keeping the case is that if the link is somehow transformed such that the piping is no longer necessary (such as in "Interface" in your example, where the pipe trick means the piped text can be omitted entirely in the edit) it doesn't accidentally enter wrongly-cased text. If you've some control issues with your life that you need to work out, do it somewhere else. Argh, and this was going so well. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:32, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! If I may notice, your commanding tone isn't that friendly, and it simply doesn't help in making Wikipedia a good and collaborative environment. If there's a disagreement, we're here to discuss it and find a solution whatever the subject is. Anyway, is there a guideline about that, or are those just your own preferences for piped links? As far as I can see, Wikipedia:Piped link says nothing about the case; by the way, the tone you used in an edit summary while adjusting that guideline today also doesn't seem to reflect a great amount of tolerance and openness to discussion.

At the same time, please stay away from involving any personal issues as you see them – no editor, myself included, simply doesn't deserve to be addressed that way. We're here to make articles better; as WP:TPYES says, "comment on content, not on the contributor". Also, as an administrator, you should be the one who promotes friendliness and tolerance, and helps in reaching compromises and solutions for various issues that are inevitable along the way. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 11:40, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

The precise tone I use is dependent on context. You've demonstrated that you're a mature editor with a solid understanding both of the technical matters of what you edit and of the editing process itself. Accordingly, I'm not going to beat around the bush when confronted with passive-aggressive nonsense like this (not by any means the first summary revert I can remember). I've provided an actual rationale, whereas you simply pointed at an example without any elaboration on why you think that example said what it did. The onus is on you to explain your edit, not on me to find some stone tablet marked with instructions that back up the rationale I've provided. But I'd far rather you simply stopped doing it, and reconsidered whether using the undo button on good faith edits is improving the project. That article has a long way to go (though it's getting better incrementally) and it needs its editors to be cooperating rather than competing with one another. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 12:58, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

No matter how something is or isn't to be approached softly, friendliness and non-commanding tone only demonstrate one's maturity and improve the overall desire toward collaboration and team work. Also, technically speaking, I didn't revert your edit, as that wasn't performed by clicking on the "undo" link. However, the way my edit was performed is less important, and here's why I find capitalized piped links to be suited better.

As we know, Wikipedia internally capitalizes article titles by default and nothing can be done to prevent that; using {{Lowercase title}} only displays lowercase titles while reading articles. Thus, following the Wikipedia's approach down to piped article links makes things more consistent; the text to right of the pipe is what's to be displayed, while the text on the left is pretty much Wikipedia's "key" for the linked article. In regular non-piped links, using a lowercase title (where appropriate, of course) actually determines what's displayed, with automatic conversion into article "keys" (capitalized titles) when a page is rendered and actual URLs are generated. In other words, using "keys" in piped links stays to Wikipedia's (externally visible) internal way of referencing articles.

Of course, a perfectly logical question for my train of thoughts is "why shouldn't then [[Article|article]] also be used?" Because only the first letters in article links become automatically capitalized, no matter what, and that can be relied upon to produce valid "keys". At the same time, repeating pretty much the same string twice would be overly redundant.

Considering your rationale toward keeping piped links case in accordance to their positions in sentences, so someone later isn't going to put a capitalized word in the middle of a sentence, I'd say that "foolproofing" it that way simply isn't worth it. Unfortunately, if an editor isn't careful enough to click on "show preview" and review his/her changes before hitting "save page", nothing helps, and we'll probably have much bigger errors to handle than needlessly capitalized words.

Hope it makes sense. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:12, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia's use of initial uppercase in article titles is a hack for articlespace; it's not the preferred form for MediaWiki itself (nor the other namespaces on en-WP), and in any case the very last thing we should be optimising for is the backend codebase. It is far better to optimise for editors, who should see as few implementation details as we can get away with. As far as editors should be concerned, Example and example are exactly equivalent, and thus "optimisation" of pages by piping the latter to the former shouldn't even be considered. What that boils down to is that we should not be including capital letters in links unless except in the specific case that we want them in the output. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:50, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

While understanding your reasoning, I still respectfully disagree. It's perfectly fine to have different opinions on things not covered by any explicit rules or guidelines, and probably the solution in this case is not to modify case of piped links once they're placed into an article's Wiki code. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 13:25, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

Nope. Your version is demonstrably broken IMO, leading to unnecessary piping for pointless optimisation. I fixed this during routine copyediting and will continue to do so in future. I don't expect that such changes will be reverted in future. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:59, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

How can that be clearly demonstrated, and how does that cause "unnecessary piping"? What I've questioned above about [[Article|article]] was not a suggestion for something like that to be used, but exactly the opposite; that was just a self-asked question for my reasoning.

Also, I expect you not to do such copyediting, as there are no related guidelines; moving forward, I won't do such changes either. Changes in case would be similar to switching articles between different styles, what's‍—‌as we know‍—‌explicitly forbidden in the lead section of WP:MOS and further explained in this ArbCom ruling. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:22, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

It's not "switching articles between different styles"; it was only present in a couple of sentences. I don't really expect to find many articles where this idiosyncrasy has been prevalent since article creation, but if I do then you're free to invoke ArbCom rulings regarding style changes on said pages if you wish (though I dare say most people would consider invisible changes like this to be a different matter from the language and date formatting disputes that led to ENGVAR). Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 14:29, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

It does involve some kind of switching an article or its part between different styles, or better said, between different personal preferences. If something isn't explicitly regulated by a guideline, and if there are multiple ways to do it with the same or similar final results, then that is some kind of a style and the only good solution is to leave it as-is while copyediting articles. Thus, there's simply no ground for saying that you "will continue to do so in future" – in that case I also have the same right to implement my preferred style; though, as we probably agree, there's no point in doing something like that. Of course, there's also the article-level consistency argument that may justify such changes in style, but that clearly wasn't the case in BIOS article.

Would you feel comfortable if I ask for a WP:3O on this? We're clearly in a slight disagreement here, and a third opinion might help. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:49, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

IMO it's far too much work to have to decide whether any particular area of syntax oddness is due simply to sloppy editing or some editor's particular writing idiosyncrasies across the entire encyclopedia, and therefore editors shouldn't be expected to do so, particularly in cases where the style in question is obviously not in common use. You can ask for a 3O if you like, though I'm sure you're aware that as a non-binding process it's unlikely to resolve an issue which is basically a difference in personal aesthetics. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:18, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

That's exactly why I've said that the case of already existing piped links should simply be left unchanged while editing articles – that way no personal preferences would be involved into something that isn't regulated by Wikipedia's guidelines. Also, based on my experience, [[Article|something]] form is much more commonly used than [[article|something]]. Thus, capitalized form is far away from being "not in common use". — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 13:56, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Article on restrict

Just saw your edit on restrict with the pithy description "Hm, doesn't look like an improvement". How is marking an example as flawed (is not actually an example due to other issues) even if one cannot (maybe just then) add a correct one, *not an improvement*? I reverted your edit. 94.220.161.15 (talk) 22:57, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! I apologize for my terse edit summary, please allow me to explain it here. First, the changes I've undone introduced additional spacing that's too Java-like and doesn't improve the code readability. Second, but not too important, since when "UB" is an abbreviation for "undefined behavior"? Sorry, but I've never heard of it. Third, what's the point of saying that those pointers might overlap? Surely they all might overlap or point to exactly the same location, as pretty much nothing of that is checked against by the C language, compiler or runtime; even with restrict in place, the pointers can still overlap or be the same as restrict is merely a hint to the C compiler. Additionally, could you please elaborate a bit on how and why the example in Restrict § Optimization section is broken?

Usually I wouldn't immediately revert an edit performed this way (with an ongoing discussion), as doing something like that pretty much isn't by the WP:BRD, but your edit is somewhat misleading; thus, I've dared to revert it. Hope you understand, and I'm more than open to discussing this further. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:57, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Mousing

Hi, re this edit, mousing is a word, see wikt:mouse#Verb. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:15, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello, and thank you for pointing that out! Got my associated neural paths updated. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 20:16, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

CPU and SMP configurations

See also: Talk:Central processing unit § CPU in SMP setups

In early computer the CPU it was the only unit that handed all the system. The only "clever" unit. All passed through the CPU (memory accesses, interrupts, etc.). So that the name "central". To day the function of old CPUs is to execute only the "instructions" of a program and no other. It is equivalent to another processor, for instance Disk processor, Graphic processor etc., just only with a different task. The correct name would have to be "instruction processor" but it is called shortly only "processor". We have Intel processor, PowerPC processor etc. but no one recall the term CPU, why ?. Because it is obsolete. Please does not to confuse the term "central" with the "main" meaning, that is the most important processor just only because execute the instructions that are the main function of a computer. I am a super expert in the computer field, mainly in multiprocessor e NUMA system with several patents (more than twenty: find: Ferruccio Zulian patent). I have collaborated with Olivetti, IBM, General Electric, Honeywell, Bull, AT&T, NCR during more than 30 years as computer architect with more a tens design systems. In wiki there are many not correct information written by no not expert people. Ferry24.Milan (talk) 19:37, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! While your reasoning makes sense to a certain degree, changes you've introduced into the Central processing unit article would require at least one good reference. As you probably already know, Wikipedia doesn't allow original research, and content of the articles should be based on reliable sources. Please don't get me wrong, that isn't personal and means absolutely no disrespect – that's simply the way Wikipedia works.

At the same time, I do remember "CPU" as a term and use it regularly; the actual meaning, which might be somewhat historical, should be clear to a wide audience. Also, if we stretch your rationale far enough, even the PC XT's 8088 chip shouldn't be called a CPU as it, for example, relies on the 8259A PIC for interrupt handling; XT's selection of graphics cards just takes that further. As another example, with that reasoning even the Commodore 64's 6510 can't be called a CPU, as it offloads majority of graphics and sound processing to VIC-II and SID chips. All that wouldn't make much sense, if you agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 11:00, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

ECC memory

Hi!

I just read in Wikipedia about ECC memory. Under solutions it lists ECC memory and RAM parity memory. But I find the wording misleading, because the memory itself is not performing the ECC nor the parity algorithm. The memory only offers an extra-wide memory bus (typically 72 instead of 64 bits). The error detection and correction is in all cases a feature of the CPU / the memory controller which creates the parity bits and writes them to the extra-wide memory bus. Upon a READ, the controller receives the data including parity bits, verifies and corrects the data then continues it's processing of that data.

I think it is not clear enough on Wikipedia that ECC/parity are mainly microcontroller-features, just because of the wording "ECC memory", "Parity memory"

But in fact there is now new DRAM-memory on the market with 'on-chip integrated ECC error correction'. See http://www.intelligentmemory.com/ECC-DRAM/ . These ECC DRAMs really perform the complete algorithm inside the memory components on their own. They do not require any special microcontrollers with parity or ECC functionalities, nor an extra wide memory bus is required. Upon a WRITE to the ECC DRAMs, they generate parity-bits and store them separate from the data into an additional memory-area. On a READ, they logic on the ECC DRAMs performs the hamming algorithm and outputs verified&corrected data.

The interesting thing about these ECC DRAMs is that they are 100% compatible to JEDEC standard DRAM components. They can be used in any existing application on the market, no matter if the memory controller is having a 8, 16, 32 or 64 bit bus, and no matter if the controller has own features to handle ECC or parity.

I did not feel comfortable trying to change the Wikipedia entry as my mother-language is not English. Additionally, I work for a company that is distributing the products of Intelligent Memory and I really do not want the Wikipedia page to look like 'advertising'. Still, I am fascinated by the technology and find it worth mentioning. If you would like to work on some changes, I am ready to help and provide lots of input (how about a block diagram explaining the way 'on chip integrated ECC' works?). I am in the memory business since 23 years and can surely support to make some things a bit clearer / more correct.

Regards, Thorsten Wronski t.wronski@memphis.ag 80.156.59.106 (talk) 15:23, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Actually, various implementations and their differences are described in more detail in article's ECC memory § Implementations section, which mentions that some implementations depend on the memory controller to do the work, while some other implementations include the ECC logic as part of the ECC memory itself. Of course, the majority of contemporary ECC-enabled systems involve pretty much passive memory devices, at least when looking at the way ECC functionality is handled (buffering usually has nothing to do directly with ECC); an interesting exception is POWER8's Centaur, which puts a lot of logic onto memory modules.

The link you've provided describes a really interesting technology, thank you for pointing it out – I've already included it into the article as a reference. The main benefit and a great thing, as far as I can see, is that it acts as a drop-in replacement for systems not supporting ECC memory in the first place. I'd like to expand its coverage a bit; for example, it would be especially interesting to know how does it interface with the rest of a system that doesn't support ECC memory natively, so the rate/count of detected and corrected memory errors is eventually available to the firmware and operating system? How does it handle uncorrectable errors?

Looking forward to your reply. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:23, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Hi! The ECC DRAM chip does not have a communication-pin for reporting errors, otherwise it wouldn't be a JEDEC-standard-compatible drop-in-replacement to conventional DRAM components any more. But it offers a 'passive' way to read out an error-flag through a special mode register. Unfortunately an error-flag can not tell you when, how often and at which address(es) the error(s) occured. All you get is a flag 0 or 1.

We need to be careful with the definition of 'Uncorrectable errors'. A two or more bit error is uncorrectable by the normal 64/72 hamming code. But a two bit error is at least detectable with ECC algorithms. Now it depends on the exact usage of the hamming code. Most hamming codes can not see a difference between a corrected single bit error and a detected but uncorrected double bit error, same on the ECC DRAM.

Thus, the error-flag could have various meanings:

• Error-Flag = 0 -> Either No Error happened or maybe there was a multi-bit error (2+ bits) which was not detectable
• Error-Flag = 1 -> Either a Corrected Error occurred or there was an uncorrected, but detected double-bit error

Well, what does this help? In my opionion this does not provide any usuable feedback. We really need to think about the importantce of the ability of detecting - but not correcting - a double-bit error. Some statistics: Let us look at the statistical frequence of double-bit errors compared to a 'complete memory fail' (functional) or 'multi-bit-fail' and you will see what I mean...

Assuming we talk about 1 Gigabit of data which is the typical memory-chip-capacity. That is 1 billion bits. The hamming code is able to correct 1 incorrect bit per every 64 bits. In 1 billion bits there are 16 million blocks of 64 bits. So in theory, a 1 Gigabit ECC DRAM could have 16 million correctable errors at a time without failing, as long as each bit-error is in a different 64 bit word. Or you could say that every 16 millionth bit-error might hit a 64 Bit word where another bit flipped before.

DRAM bit-flips are rare cases. There are several statistics about their frequence, but finally it depends on many hard-to-evaluate factors. But even if we had a bit-flip in 1 Gigabit every day which the ECC DRAM corrects 'on the fly', the probability for an uncorrectable double-bit error in the same 64-bit-word would be 16 Million days = 43800 years. That is 384 Million hours or 3 FIT (failures-in-time).

When you look into a reliability-report of any DRAMs (these documents are available from all DRAM-makers upon request), you will typically see a FIT-value of 11 or higher. Important to know: This FIT-value refers only to total functional fails/defects, and not about the sporadic/random single bit errors. If a DRAM is shown with a FIT of 11, it means it is expected to have 11 defective parts after a billion device hours.

Now what I am trying to say: A 'total fail / defective chip' is about 4 times more likely than having an uncorrectable double-bit-error in an ECC DRAM. I do not dare to specify a FIT-value for single-bit-errors (which an ECC DRAM will correct, but let a conventional DRAM have a real error). The field-study of the University of Toronto named 'DRAM Error in the wild' is talking about 25000 to 70000 FIT of ECC-correctable single-bit errors PER MEGABIT. This would convert to 25 Million to 70 Million FIT per Gigabit. A shocking high number!

Thus I think the importance of ECC focuses on correcting single-bit errors. Everything beyond this requires different methods to secure the continuous operation or safe shut-down of the application.

Additionally, for high-reliability applications it is a good idea to do a 'memory scrubbing' on ECC memory periodically. Scrubbing means that the CPU uses it's idle-time to read from the DRAM and then writes back to the DRAM. This way single bit errors get corrected during the read and that corrected data is then written back to the DRAM. Since the majority of DRAM bit-errors are typically not permanent, scrubbing reduces the probability of 'a second bit-flip in the same 64 Bit word' extremely.

I hope it was correct to 'Edit' the post to add my reply. I could not find a reply button anywhere. Regards, Thorsten 80.156.59.106 (talk) 14:33, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for a detailed overview! Though, as far as I can see from it, memory chips with integrated ECC functionality provide a very limited way for reporting their statuses back to the firmware or operating system. As we know, some organizations have policies that mandate replacement of ECC-enabled memory modules once their corrected error counts go over a defined limit, what makes the reporting a necessity. Also, some vendors, such as Apple if I'm not mistaken, even have warranty policies that allow ECC DIMMs to be replaced under warranty if they encounter more than a defined number of correctable errors over a defined period of time.

However, I'd say that the memory chips with integrated ECC functionality aren't even made with the above mentioned applications in mind; instead, they're probably a good fit for embedded systems that have no hardware support for ECC memory – nobody is going to monitor such systems anyway. Though, I wonder how many manufacturers care about not having silent data corruption in CPEs they sell in high volumes?

By the way, clicking "edit" to reply is exactly how Wikipedia works – unlike regular forums, talk pages provide absolutely no functionality specific to posting replies. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 03:38, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

The idea of these products has never been to replace a normal ECC method (through CPU and extra wide memory modules) by using ECC DRAMs. Instead, the idea was to make it possible to have ECC in applications where it was not supported at all before. Look at all the access controls, smart meters, routers, industrial PCs, automotive&avionics electronics, medical instruments, cash-registries and data-entry terminals, ticket machines, any kind of control boards, etc. These are often too small for memory modules with ECC and using ECC-capacble CPUs would also make them much too expensive. With ECC DRAMs they can be upgraded to an extreme stability.

In automotive markets the manufacturers use conventional DRAM, just pretested according to the AEC-Q100 regulations. But this does not protect from single bit errors. You might have seen electronics in your car randomly malfunctioning, but working fine again when you restart the car. No testing can protect from memory errors, only ECC can. And how could anybody use 9 DRAM-chips or a memory module on a little camera module that is integrated into the cars mirror? There is just no space. Automotive manufacturers use multiple methods to at least make sure the applications get safely shut down upon an error, but it is very difficult to control. With ECC DRAM those effects would not even happen (for a 16 million times longer period).

But let me repeat again what I wrote before: A totally defective DRAM is 4 times more likely to happen than an uncorrectable, but detectable double-bit error. And multi-bit (more than 2 bit) errors are not even detectable. Due to this, I see no need for detecting double bit errors.

'Not having any more visible single-bit errors' by using ECC improves the reliability of DRAMs by a factor of 16 Million. Even in the very extreme case of 1 bit-error per day, the DRAM will continue to work flawlessly for many thousands of years (by far longer than it's expected lifetime).

Based on those factors, I do not see a reason why someone would want to get a feedback about corrected single bit errors as long as the system still works. And if the system fails, it was most-likely a total memory-fail, which is 4 times more likely to occur than a double-bit error. Both, the chip fail and double bit errors, will lead to a system-fail as they are uncorrectable and fatal, but fortunately EXTREMELY rare.

I think you are right when you say a memory-module vendor will replace the module when the customer complains about seeing too many correctable errors. And yes, there is this difference from CPU-controlled ECC to DRAM with integrated ECC. The ECC DRAM can not pro-actively inform the CPU about a detected/corrected error. However, it is possible by reading out a flag.

But please do not forget: It is a big milestone to add ECC functionalities at very low cost (no redesign necessary, no expensive CPU needed, no extra memory chips required) to ANY application, no matter what CPU is used, no matter how much space is on the board. Even a $50 WiFi-Router could be made as stable as a server at just a dollar or two more. Any HDD/SSD drive uses 1 DRAM Chip for Cache/Write Buffering and a bit-flip can cause data-corruption (in fact it does happen, I see it on our companies RAID), which would not happen with ECC DRAM.

Technically it would not have been a big issue to add an Error-Pin to the ECC DRAM, but then the big complaint from all customers would be 'it is not compatible, we need to do a re-design to use it'.

The FIT for correctable single-bit errors (according to the field study) might be as high 25 Million to 70 Million FIT (failures in time), while total fails count only 11 FIT and double-bit-errors count only 3 FIT. These numbers show that the key-factor is to eliminate single-bit errors. When these get corrected, the stability is 99.9% secured. 80.156.59.106 (talk) 08:26, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

You're totally right, adding ECC memory functionality to otherwise incapable systems, without the need to modify their designs in any way, is a really, really great thing. However, as I've already noted above, the big question is how many manufacturers are willing to spend those extra few dollars? Please don't get me wrong, I love to see ECC memory in any equipment, but the fact is that profit margins for high-volume products are quite thin.

Asking why would anyone want to have such feedback available is perfectly fine, and one of the reasons is that some companies tend to replace ECC DIMMs once they produce one or more uncorrectable errors. Here's a quote from the Google's DRAM study:

In many production environments, including ours, a single uncorrectable error is considered serious enough to replace the dual in-line memory module (DIMM) that caused it.

Perhaps the feedback for correctable errors might be freely ignored (though, personally, I love to have as much feedback available as possible), but uncorrectable errors should be clearly reported in some way. That's where your error flag comes into action, and it might be even better to see its transition to logical one only if an uncorrectable error is detected. In other words, if its "1" indicates that there are some errors, that isn't too usable, if you agree.

Though, it all depends on where the memory with integrated ECC functionality is used; for example, even if it had full reporting capability, I doubt that car manufacturers would be quickly replacing ECUs with such memory due to a single uncorrectable error. Or maybe they would be replacing them – I can only theorize. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 09:17, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

The field-study is right, an uncorrectable error is serious enough to replace the DIMM. Any yes, it would be nice to see any uncorrectable errors to be reported. Since total DRAM fails are also 'uncorrectable' (as well as 3+ bit error), but are more likely than double bit errors, it would require completely different methods than ECC which can detect ANY error, no matter if the DRAM has a functional fail or multi bit error. ECC can impossibly do that. It would detect only double-bit errors, but before detecting those, 4 chips already had total functional fails or multi-bit errors that were not detectable by ECC! (because of the theory that the FIT-value for total functional fails is 4 times higher than for double-bit-flips)

The capabilities of a standard 64/72 ECC hamming code are limited. If a total fail or multi-bit fail is more likely than a double-bit fail, I do not see a sense in being able to detect only the double bit fails. Either you find a way to catch ALL uncorrectable errors or you accept that there is a very very little risk of failing due to such rare uncorrectable errors. The double bit detection alone is not very helpful. In case of a double bit error, the system will malfunction or crash or perform an automatic reset anyway. And what if it just malfunctions or crashes due to multi-bit or functional fail errors without detection? The information 'system malfunctioned or crashed' is the same.

Until now, all manufacturers use standard DRAMs which do have a bit-flip from time to time. Either they use 9 or 18 Chips per rank in a 72 bit wide memory bus to do ECC by the CPU like on servers, or they have no protection at all.

Automotive applications can not use ECC, they are typically too small to fit so many DRAM chips into them. Any automotive electronics I know is using just one or two DRAMs with a 16 or 32 bit memory-bus to the CPU. There is no ECC. They calculate some of the important data multiple times to compare them and detect an error. This is good, but slow. Additionally the CPU will jump to an interrupt routine when an illegal command is found to be executed. Such illegal commands can happen when there is a bit flip in the program code. You might have seen that when your navigation or multimedia system suddenly resetted itself. Unfortunately not every bit-flip in the program code results in an illegal command, it can also become another legal command causing system malfunction. The possibilities to secure the stable operation of the electronics without ECC are limited. The automotive industry welcomes any improvement, and ECC DRAM will clearly relax and optimize the activity of other functional-safety methods used in the car-electronics. This does not mean they do not need them any more, but the frequence of their activity is getting reduced a lot and they become a lot safer (taking the example of a legal command changing into another legal command that results in malfunction...this won't happen with ECC!).

For consumer electronics and price-sensitivity, I agree with you partially. There are thousands of customers having to reset their electronics periodically. For example just Google for 'Router hang' or 'Router crash' and you know what I mean. It is also a question of marketing and bringing the awareness to the people that they can have something more stable at a few dollars more.

Any manufacturer of practically anything is trying to announce something 'new and better' to the market to present their products being superior. Look at how many new hair-shampoos are fighting each other claiming to have the best results by new ingredients with funny names. ECC in a router or in a HDD/SSD can be promoted a lot better, because ECC is well-known, the people really know the issues and many will happily pay a few dollars more to have a stable product. If each chip costs $1.50 more (for example) and most router just use ONE piece, then the manufacturers cost will increase by $1.50, but he can sell the product to end customers at maybe $5 more. This is not much compared to the massive price difference between electronics without or with ECC. Example: A desktop-PC costs $299, but a server with ECC at least 10 times more. Still the people buy a real server and do not use a standard PC. And if you look at the difference, there is not that much. The main reason for the 'better stability of the server' is in fact the ECC. So in the PC vs Server market the people even realized they have to pay thousands of dollars more to get reliability. Paying $5 more for a router with ECC is peanuts. BUT it requires marketing of these products and then the manufacturer will surely be able to make extra money and gain market share from their competitors.80.156.59.106 (talk) 12:24, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, uncorrectable double-bit errors are rare, and undetectable triple-bit errors are even more rare, but IMHO that doesn't justify a blanket statement that detectable double-bit errors shouldn't be reported at all just because it's more likely that a memory chip is going to fail completely. A total failure of a hardware component in most cases isn't a cause for silent data corruption, and the primary goal of ECC memory is to prevent silent data corruption. Sure thing, it would be great to also cover silent corruption involving more than two bits, but that kind of corruption is predictably very rare.

Regarding the automotive applications and space constraints, I'd say that it also depends on a particular control unit. For example, engine and transmission control units, as well as instrument clusters and GPS navigation units, are usually large enough to house more than a few memory chips, and they're anyway much more important than some random in-car gadgetry. Heck, some GPS navigation units even have built-in 2.5-inch hard disk drives, and those mechanical devices are huge in comparison to a full-size SO-CDIMM, for example. :)

I agree that some marketing around more stable products that contain ECC memory could be a huge selling point, but please let's remember that many of the "reset your router" scenarios are due to software bugs and sloppy firmware and not because of cosmic rays messing up memory cells. :) For example, I used to have ordinary PCs with no ECC memory serving as busy Linux servers, and some of them had 1+ year uptimes with absolutely zero issues (others needed to be rebooted for kernel-related security updates to be applied). — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:32, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi! First of all I would like to say: I like this discussion. Thanks for your time for it!

A detected double-bit error still has not been corrected. Very immediate action has to be taken like a Reboot. This is similar to Rebooting on an illegal command, which most CPUs can do. If it is in the data, the data gets lost due to the reboot. But yes, the more reporting you get, the better, I totally agree. I am just trying to show up that having double bit detection is not a major improvement.

I know the memory-demands of Conti, Delphi, Harman, etc. In none of their applications they use ECC and in most they have only one or two DRAMs. There is ONE navigation system using 8 pcs 2Gb DRAMs, so also this is without ECC. I can't say why they did not just put 9 Chips into it. Maybe the CPU does not support it. I talked a lot to people designing driver-assistance systems which are able to keep you on the right lane, detect obstacles on the road, read traffic signs, etc. They told me a lot about the functional-safety methods they currently use and that they only use one or two DRAMs, but they all said they are interested in DRAM with integrated ECC. Some of them had similar questions and concerns as you have, but all agree that having ECC with single-bit correction is MUCH better than using todays conventional DRAMs which have no protection at all.

You could also understand the ECC DRAM as a super-reliable-DRAM, million times better than the hardest tested conventional DRAM, but 100% compatible to a conventional DRAM.

On the router-fails, I do not agree it is software bugs, as a router executes the same (fairly small) software-routines again and again over hours, days and weeks. A PC has much more complex software and a full operating system with many processes running. It depends how you drive the PC. If you run different programs, surf the web, download and install, open/close programs&files, etc, then at some point it becomes slower, eats up your memory or might hang. There sure are some bugs in complex software like Windows, maybe some less on Linux.

If you read the field-study of the University of Toronto, you will find that not every memory module failed! Only 8% of the DIMMs needed to be replaced. Thus some memories seems to work well for a very long time without troubles, while others show more or less bit-flips.

Also, Conclusion 7 of the field study says that the majority of errors are not soft-errors (caused by external disturbance like cosmic rays), but hard errors. Hard Errors are for example 'weak-cells'. They are not permanent in most cases. When a DRAM is intensively used, it will degradate over time and sporadically show a bit-flip. You can see this from the charts in the field study, where the error-rate increases further and further over time. This speaks against cosmic rays, but clearly for a degratation-process. Degradation is a well-known problem of DRAMs. After some time of operation, after soldering processes or even after a longer flight in an airplane, the isolations of the cells get reduced, cell-leakage increases and the data retention-time drops. The cell loses its content before the next refresh cycle sets it back. This appears to be as random as a soft-error, but when watching it carefully, it can be found that always the same cells have this problem, which is a clear sign that it is not caused by an external influence. In many cases the problem only appear with specific data-patterns written to the DRAM, showing that the cells are linked to each other (bit-lines/word-lines, etc) and if one cell gets charged, the neighbor one suddenly also gets part of that charge (due to leakage) changing its binary content resulting in a single-bit-error.

When talking to DRAM test engineers who write the test-programs for wafer-level testing, and for package-level core-, speed- and burn-in-testing, you will always hear that their biggest challenge is to find data-patterns and routines to stress the DRAMs in a way that they show these weaknesses and interferences. During the tests, they always find a handful of single-bit errors which they can repair by e-fusing, but everybody is aware that it is impossible to test in 'every possible way', thus a certain risk for single-bit errors is unavoidable. And unfortunately, those often appear only after some time of operation. The more stress, the faster they appear.

I have a nice report here for a test which was performed on conventional DRAMs. They have been heated up to 85°C, then 95°C, 105°C, 115°C up to 125°C and at the same time the refresh rate was reduced to simulate the degradation. Note: The tested DRAMs were brandnew, never soldered or used, so not degradated. The test was not meant to accelerate degradation (which is difficult anyway), but to show what errors are to be expected IF they degradate.

At the worst case scenario of 125°C and 128ms Refresh-Rate, about 1000 to 8000 bit-flips were observerd in every single test-run on all tested DRAMs. Not even one double-bit error has ever appeared. But at a bit better conditions, some RAMs showed no errors at all, while others had hundreds. This shows that even after the manufacturers testing, there are still DRAMs that are more likely to have issues than others. And it explains that not every DRAM will have errors after some time, but some do, and the percentage is too high to ignore the need for ECC. 80.156.59.106 (talk) 08:16, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much, I also really enjoy our discussion! :)

I agree that having double-bit error detections isn't an improvement by itself, but it allows some kind of damage control, so to speak. In general, such corruptions happen very rarely, but at least someone can know that something went wrong and see what to do about it. Of course, halting or rebooting in case of a detected uncorrectable error might even cause bigger troubles than simply ignoring the corruption – let's just think of complex file systems interrupted in the middle of their busy operation.

Regarding the routers and Wi-Fi access points, many of them actually run Linux, so reduced complexity of their software simply isn't to be counted on. In other words, those boxes are small but quite complex on the inside. :) The main trouble with the stability of embedded systems running Linux comes from the fact that manufacturers usually opt for their own hardware designs with no existing community ports of the Linux kernel; they do the porting themselves, or contract it to someone else, and that results in a much lower quality of the port than what a community-developed port could provide. Why? Because manufacturers have deadlines, tight schedules, not so much enthusiasm, ;) and they end up with a limited amount of testing before releasing a product (when compared to having tens of thousands of people doing the testing in vastly different environments).

Of course, no matter how software/firmware is well-written or not, DRAM bit flips contribute a lot to the overall stability. That's even more important and evident as the amounts of installed RAM increase: not so many years ago, PCs with 128 MB of RAM were common, and nowadays many consumer-level embedded devices have that much RAM. Contemporary PCs went to 8 GB of RAM as standard, the amount of RAM that leads to about one bit flip per week, per field studies. To me, that's a serious thing that turns ECC memory into a necessity.

When looking at a big picture, having no ECC functionality is like gambling – things might work just fine, but not necessarily. Speaking of cosmic rays, I'd say that they serve as a "fallback" description for something we actually don't understand. :) Just as you've described it, many of the bit flips come from undetected manufacturing defects, manufacturing stresses, or simply aging of a device. With ever increasing amounts of RAM per device, and ever increasing complexity of the devices, the issues just grow in size.

What's also really interesting is why consumer-grade PCs still remain without the ECC memory? It's true that profit margins are also quite thin in the PC business, but still, 12–15% more expensive RAM (effectively, if we disregard price inflation due to low volumes) simply doesn't look like a viable explanation for the situation. And, even more interestingly, why there are no laptops with ECC memory? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 09:20, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

I am still of the opinion that the 'damage control' is not the job of ECC as it's damage-control possibilities are too limited (only double bit error detection). But ECC is fantastic to improve overall reliability, as it is a fact that 99.9% of all DRAM errors are just single-bit-fails.

Really reliable damage control can only be safely achieved by triple-redundant systems. Three CPUs with three separate memories execute the same code and do separate calculations. If one is different from the other two or if one of them hangs, this one must be 'bad'. The method of rebooting upon an illegal program-code only has a small chance to become active, as for example a JUMP-instruction could just be jumping to a wrong address due to a bit error, or the JUMP becomes an ADD command or other legal command. Only if the command-code does not exist, the illegal-command interrupt-routine would help.

On the routers: Maybe they run Linux, but how much of the program-code RAM is being used? Take a PC and only work with one and the same program in the same way for a long time, for example with WORD. The program takes up maybe 2GB of your memory, but if you just type some text, you use by far less than 1% of the total WORD program code. You would not even notice if bit-errors hit into the other 99% of the code. Same thing when using a PC as a server...you only run maybe a few MB of program code again and again, although you have loaded Gigabytes of program-code into the RAM. You also use very very little parts of the total OS. But if you use your PC for lots of things like Excel, Word, Internet, other programs and try all the functions, etc, then your percentage of code-usage becomes a lot larger and the visibility of running into a bit-flip that causes malfunction or crash increases heavily.

Most routers (you can Google for pictures of the PCBs and see it) have just 16MB to 64MB of RAM. I'd say the the code in the RAM is loaded much more effectively than in a PC. Unnecessary routines and OS-parts have been elimiated to make the code fit into the small memory. However, routers also have lots of menus, features and settings. During normal operation of the router the effectively used code for just transferring data in and out to/from the web is again just a small portion of something between 1% and 5%.

With 1% effective RAM usage, only every 100th bit-flip causes visible trouble. I have three (different) routers at home, two used as repeaters. Two of the routers need a Reset about every 3 months, although I do regular software updates. And interesting enough the errors on both are different every time. Sometimes it does not accept my WiFi password and asks me to re-enter (which does not help=, sometimes it just does not connect although every entry in the menus looks fine, next time one of the submenus does not appear, another time I can not connect to it through it's IP at all, although it still lets me into the internet, etc etc. It is really weird! When I googled if other people have similar experiences, I noticed that the web is full with millions of entries about router hangs and random functional fails for all brands of routers. So it is not limited to one router with one specific software.

One day I opened the routers and noticed the antenna cables are lose-wired going right over the DRAM....I assume here we really can talk about soft-errors!

The same problem happens on HDD/SSD drives. There is just a 512Mbit (64MB) DRAM on it which is mainly used for Cache&Write Buffering as well as for running the (very small) firmware. The SMART features of the firmware add a cyclic CRC checksum to the data (only the data, not the firmware) passing through the RAM and in the SMART-value IOEDC End-To-End Error you can then retrieve the count of errors. An error hitting the data in the cache will increase the number of those End-To-End errors without repairing them (file on drive damaged), but a hit into the firmware can cause worse malfunctions. And in fact, I sometimes experience that I save a file to the drive and when trying to load it again it says the file is corrupted. This even happens on our big company raid-system. If it was a bit-error on the magnetic media, the drive normally tries to read multiple times before it reports an error. And re-trying then sometimes helps. But what I experience when I have a bad file is an immediate 'file corrupted' error that can not be corrected by re-trying. Thus I think the write-buffer (DRAM) had a bit-flip when writing the file to the drive and the data got incorrectly written to the media. Well, I don't really know, I just guess. But I am still very sure that many business customers would pay $5 more for Enterprise-HDD drives having ECC on the DRAM. And the HDD manufacturer could also 'proudly present his new innovation' and take away market-shares from their competitors, publish press-releases, get magazines to review it, etc. If the manufacturers like, they can also offer their drives with and without ECC DRAM at two different prices. In this case the customers will question the difference, read into it and then decide 'do I want the increased safety or not?'. Many will!

Do you know the "Intel Inside" sticker on many computers? There is an "I'M ECC PROTECTED" sticker/badge/logo which Intelligent Memory offers to customers using their DRAMs. I think it is a good marketing tool to put onto the end-products, product websites, brochures, advertisings, etc to show the end-customers what they get for the extra-money! If I could have your e-mail address, I can e-mail you some things. I do not want to type mine here, but if you e-mail to sales@memphis.ag and put into the subject 'Att. Thorsten', I will get it and reply to you. 80.156.59.106 (talk) 10:31, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, perhaps I haven't expressed myself clearly enough when referring to "damage control"; what I also wanted to say is that ECC's protection against silent DRAM corruption (that is, one-bit errors) is the best kind of damage control it provides. Handling of uncorrectable double-bit errors is just a continuation of that.

As you've described it, usage of RAM contributes largely to how a computer is going to react to a silent DRAM corruption. Speaking of Linux running on embedded systems, it's true that Wi-Fi APs or routers don't use a lot of RAM, but NAS appliances, as another example, use everything that's available for caching and various file system-related operations. Having a flipped bit in NAS appliances is even more dangerous, as that has the potential to cause file system corruption and loss of user data. Sure thing, the amount of RAM in embedded devices depends on what they're used for, so a Wi-Fi AP might run Linux just fine with as low as 16 MB of RAM, while a NAS appliance needs more RAM (they usually have around 256 MB).

As far as I know, end-to-end data protection doesn't exist in consumer-grade SATA HDDs; that's reserved for the enterprise segment and SAS HDDs. That's the reason why there are advanced file systems, such as Btrfs and ZFS, which implement end-to-end data protection on their own, by calculating and storing checkums of data and metadata. However, file corruption issues you've experienced sound quite uncommon to me – are you sure that the hardware you're using isn't flaky? I've seen such random corruption only on some flaky hardware. For other issues related to HDDs, you might want to have a look at unrecoverable read errors; back at the time I've compiled a good summary there. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 11:16, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, a single bit flip here and there is not a sign of a damaged DRAM for me. It just happens, either due to external disturbance or a cell weakness which only shows up with certain patterns of data. To a normal DRAM without ECC it is an 'effect', not a 'defect', but still the effect can cause a damage. However, such effect can typically not be repaired by replacing the RAM, as the next RAM will most-likely also see such effect every now and then.

As my point of view is 'single bit errors happen, they are not a sign of defect, we can't avoid them', I see ECC being mandatory for system stability, but it is nothing I need to count to evaluate if the DRAM is bad. DRAMs just tend to have those hiccups, we just need ECC to cover them, but - depending on the safety level required - we can hardly evaluate the system-stability by getting informed when they happen. If someone puts his cellphone on the electronic device, there might suddenly be an increased number of bit-flips in the device. As soon as he takes it away, the issues are gone. Is this already a sign for a DRAM of the device being bad? I think the DRAM has just gotten into a temporary critical environment. Same in a car... park the car in the sun, the inside mirror gets over 100 degrees hot, the DRAM in the camera or distance-sensor gets some bit errors. But when it cools down, it is fine again. The DRAM is not damaged, but it was under temporary stress and ECC can save it! And again the same under radiation, high data-traffic between DRAM&CPU, etc.

The risk of 'errors adding up to result in an uncorrectable double bit error' is extremely little and can be avoided by scrubbing during CPU Idle-Time.

Yes, especially Enterprise drives have the SMART features. Here in the company we use only Enterprise class SCSI drives, where the price is 5 times higher than for a consumer drive. Our employees save and open hundreds to thousands of files every day. It does not happen very often, but it does happen that files become unreadable for unknown reason. We can read out the SMART parameters of the drives and can see some IOEDC (Input-Ouput Error DETECTION Code) end to end errors occured, but have no information on when they happened nor which file is affected, so I can only guess there is a relation to those files which we found becoming corrupted. Per the WikiPedia documentation of the SMART parameter for IOEDC : 'This attribute is a part of Hewlett-Packard's SMART IV technology, as well as part of other vendors' IO Error Detection and Correction schemas, and it contains a count of parity errors which occur in the data path to the media via the drive's cache RAM. 80.156.59.106 (talk) 11:50, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Totally agreed, as the purpose of ECC memory is to recover from singe-bit errors. If having single-bit errors from time to time would be seen as a sign of bad DRAM, that would mean it is possible to manufacture perfect DRAM that would never ever encounter bit flips – and as we know, that's pretty much impossible.

Everything shows that ECC DRAM is they way to go, either through native hardware support or by using DRAM chips with integrated ECC functionality. Hopefully more equipment manufacturers will share the same point of view. :) Do you, maybe, have any insights why there aren't any laptops with ECC memory? That's very strange, and I'd be extremely happy to pay even a significant price premium for such a laptop.

The silent (or not so silent) corruption you're experiencing in data storage is really interesting. Does the manufacturer of storage system you're using have anything to say? I wonder how would Btrfs or ZFS perform in such an environment... Is the overall storage capacity and number of HDDs something you'd be comfortable with sharing here? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:44, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

The right people at the manufaturers of storage systems are difficult to find. They have an endless number of employees. I was hoping that a bit more detail could appear on Wikipedia about the ECC DRAM technology, so more potential customers find it and more 'awareness' is being created. If you have any further ideas on that, I would really appreciate any kind of activity that helps making the world aware of this technology. I think it really fits to each and every industrial, automotive, medical, military product, no matter if the application is computing, networking, telecommunication, storage, control, measurement, etc, because all of these applications require to be 'better than a normal PC' and should run perfectly smoothly without ever requiring to be rebooted/resetted.

Laptops with ECC are really rare. Only some rugged military laptops might have it. BUT: With 16 Chips 1Gbit ECC DRAMs we can build 2GB SO-DIMM modules, where each chip has ECC. Since 8 chips are per memory-bank, you get eight times ECC in parallel! This is a lot stronger than having a 72 bit bus with just one time ECC over all bits. If 2GB modules are big enough for you, then we can do that. 80.156.59.106 (talk) 11:47, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

You're right, reaching engineering people is almost an impossible mission in larger companies. Could you, please, send me a few links to data sheets for the DRAM chips with integrated ECC functionality, their specifications, related promotional materials, etc.? Of course, all that needs to be publicly accessible so it can serve as references. After reviewing all that, I'll see how to add more content into already existing articles – you're right that such a technology deserves better coverage.

As you've pointed it out, such SO-DIMMs would be even better than regular SO-CDIMMs by offering "finer grained" ECC protection. Does your company already sell such DDR3 SO-DIMM modules in small quantities? If so, what are the prices compared to same-capacity standard non-ECC SO-DIMMs? Also, I was wondering whether your company sells small/sample quantities of DRAM chips? I have a few embedded Linux devices (Wi-Fi access points, small NAS appliances, etc.) that would benefit from replacing their factory-soldered "plain" DRAM chips. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:06, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi Dragan! FYI, a lot of the info and datasheets you ask for is visible and downloadable at www.intelligentmemory.com and on the FAQ pages, etc, but I have even more documents I can send. But how can I send you that? I can hardly include it here onto the talk-page.

And yes, we do build such modules and can also make them based on ECC DRAMs. I can tell you pricing by email, but I do not have your email address! 80.156.59.106 (talk) 07:56, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Please let me dig through the documentation available on intelligentmemory.com in the next few days, and I'll let you know if more would be required. Basically, all that would be used as references needs to be publicly accessible on some web server; I could host some files for you, but it would be much better if you could host them somehow on your company's website (perhaps you have some means to make more files downloadable through the CMS you're using, or maybe by uploading them manually).

The availability of such SO-DIMM modules is a great thing, thank you! What about individual DRAM chips in small/sample quantities, for replacing DRAM chips soldered in embedded devices such as Wi-Fi access points? Sure thing, I'd provide specs of the currently soldered DRAM chips. I'll shoot you an email to t.wronski@memphis.ag in the next few days, or you could open an account here on Wikipedia and use the "Email this user" functionality that's available on this page for registered users. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 22:25, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Individual DRAM chips in small/sample quantities are also readily available in stock. Just let me know what you need. I hope you have a BGA soldering station to replace the parts. After replacing the RAM, try and heat up the ECC DRAM or disturb it with an antenna or in any other way. You will see that you can't get it to fail unless you use brute force.

I don't think I need a Wikipedia account. If required, I can put any additional documents into Dropbox or something like that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.156.59.106 (talk) 12:50, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

That's awesome, and I was hoping to be able to outsource BGA soldering to some local shops; of course, I need to verify first whether that kind of work is actually doable locally. By the way, I already went through one part of the documentation available on intelligentmemory.com and will come back soon with an update. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 01:28, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Some new links:

http://embedded-computing.com/guest-blogs/why-ecc-matters-in-embedded-design/

http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/en/dram-chips-integrate-error-correcting-code.html?cmp_id=7&news_id=222922892#

And did you read the product-brief? Here is the link:

http://www.intelligentmemory.com/fileadmin/download/PB_IM_ECC_DRAM.pdf

80.156.59.106 (talk) 08:37, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, those are good links, and I haven't read this product brief before. I've also considered whether Intelligent Memory would be notable enough for a separate article; please see WP:NOTE for Wikipedia's notability requirements. Unfortunately, running a Google search doesn't yield a large coverage in form of potential reliable sources, some of which are these:

• http://embedded-computing.com/news/intelligent-code-ecc-functionality/ (pretty much the same as one of the links you've provided, but not presented as a blog entry)
• http://www.anandtech.com/show/7742/im-intelligent-memory-to-release-16gb-unregistered-ddr3-modules
• http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6817/i-m-intelligent-memory-16gb-ddr3-udimm-memory-review/index.html
• http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/im-intelligent-memory-8-gigabit-ddr3-and-16-gb-modules.html

Are there any other secondary sources, third-party reviews, etc. available, which a Google search was unable to find? Having only a few more would be just fine. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 09:09, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

It seems you found several older press-releases about the world's first 8 Gigabit DDR3 chips which were designed by Intelligent Memory. These chips make it possible to build unbuffered DIMMs and SO-DIMMs up to 16 Gigabyte, while ALL other manufacturers only have such modules up to 8 Gigabyte, because they only have maximum 4 Gigabit DDR3 components. Intelligent Memory uses their own (patent pending) method to make 8 Gigabit chips without having to wait for new manufacturing-technologies like 25nm. A 25nm DRAM manufacturing process would allow to put 8 Gigabit of memory onto a single die, but such processes cost billions of dollars and are about to go into mass production only by this year. Intelligent Memory thought "why wait? why spend so much money?" and invented a very unique method to use two conventional and readilty available 4Gb dies made in 30m process, interconnect them in a really tricky&specific way and put them into one chip-package. The fnal product looks/acts/works as if it was a monolithic 8 Gigabit chip. The very first samples were made in 2013, which is 2 years earlier than the big memory-manufacturers are able to release their 8 Gigabit memories in 25nm.

And even more interesting: As soon as the big manufacturers have 25nm monolithic 8 Gigabit DRAM components (for example in DDR4), Intelligent Memory can take their technology to make 16 Gigabit chips from these! It would take at least another 5 years before other manufacturers can do the same by another process shrink as they would require processes smaller than 20nm to put 16 Gigabit onto a monolithic chip.

While this technology of IM is also very interesting, it it not related to the topic of "ECC logic integrated into the DRAM" which we are dicussing here.

The ECC DRAMs have been officially published and released on the Memphis booth at the Electronica show in November this year. News release: http://www.memphis.ag/fileadmin/newsroom/newsletter/Archiv/2014/Memphis_1410.html

Also please take a look into this folder please: http://www.intelligentmemory.com/download/

And I would like to refer to the FAQs where you find many questions/answers about ECC DRAMs: http://www.intelligentmemory.com/faq/

I posted a comment about ECC DRAM on this page: http://thememoryguy.com/memory-issues-in-space-medical-applications/

Another forum posting:http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-2472284/hdds-ssds-issues.html

But I know, there is a LOT more activity to be done to create an awareness for the ECC DRAM product series, for the simplicity of upgrading 'anything' to have ECC, but also for the 'need to have ECC' especially on all the industrial applications or anything that should run 24/7 like routers, HDDs, SSDs, access controls, Smart-Meters, POS systems, industrial controls, surveillance cameras, ATM machines, robot-controls, traffic-systems, networking devices, automation-systems, medical, military, automotive, etc.

When you look at any electronics device, even those of which the manufacturers say they would be industrial, rugged, robust, high quality, reliable, stable, etc, you will rarely find ECC being used. The only exception is Servers, where people pay 10-20 times the price of a PC.

Talking to the manufacturers of such products on the one hand creates a certain interest, but they do not even want to pay $1 more as they think they can't get that money back when selling and they would not be competetive any more.

I am not expecting that a manufacturer of a settop box or tablet-PC wants ECC, but I am convinced that all those above mentioned electronics should at least match the quality of a server. The customers buy those products and pay a high price because they trust in their reliability, which can impossibly be guaranteed without ECC.

If a manufacturer of such devices tells me 'we have no problems reported by customers and get no returns', I say 'Do you return your PC or Smartphone when it crashes and works again after a Reset?'. The big misunderstanding is that bit-flips are not permanent defects leading to an RMA, but they are randomly appearing and non-repeatable effects which customers do not want to have when buying a professional industrial electronics device.

I am 100% convinced that the end-customers select the product they buy not only by price, but by reputation of the manufacturers brand/products for reliability, features, functions.

If the manufactures add the ECC functionality for their products and promote it to the world, do press releases, point out the reliability features on the website and brochures, maybe let magazines review the product, then this manufacturer will become a market&technology leader. Customers buying such products will have to decide if they buy from company A) at lower price without ECC or from company B) with the 'server grade reliability by ECC' at a very little higher price. I am also sure that the expression 'ECC' is familiar to everybody buying electronics, but electronic-magazines can also be pushed to write more articles about its importance.

Well, there is a lot to do to change the thinking. 80.156.59.106 (talk) 10:56, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Sure thing, I didn't mean to imply that integrated ECC and higher-density DRAM chips are directly related, but if Intelligent Memory would be created as a separate article, all aspects and products would have to be described there.

Speaking of references for the separate article, this one would be good as it isn't a primary source; roughly speaking, all content residing on a manufacturer's website is considered as primary sources. In a few words, articles need secondary sources as that's how Wikipedia works; please see WP:USEPRIMARY for more information. Also, forum posts unfortunately can't be used as references.

Please don't get me wrong, but I've been convinced that ECC memory is the way to go long, long time ago. :) That's why I'm now considering the creation of a separate Intelligent Memory article, which might help in increasing the overall awareness of the necessity for ECC memory. And for that article, we'd need a few more secondary sources that describe integrated-ECC DRAM as one of the IM's products. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 11:41, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, we need more people to talk about it, then there will be more secondary sources talking about it. All I can do is post into forums. To make others talk about the product and to write articles, it requires awareness of the product. Hen and egg problem. A really good article is this one that I just commented on http://www.zdnet.com/article/flipping-dram-bits-maliciously/#comments. 80.156.59.106 (talk) 12:28, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

You're right, that one is a very good article. Speaking of secondary sources for IM's integrated-ECC products, may I suggest that you donate a few sets of integrated-ECC DIMMs and SO-DIMMs to the guys over there at phoronix.com? I'm sure they'll be more than happy to write a good article on their website, which is highly respected. Moreover, I'm sure they would use and mention those memory modules while creating more than a few articles later, for example when they test new models of motherboards or laptops so compatibility and performance can be assured. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 12:39, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Password Saeba Ryo (talk) 12:59, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much, best wishes to you too! :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 15:23, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't get it? Now you want to take back your good wishes? Changing your mood so quickly makes absolutely no sense, unless you've tried to use such stuff for campaigning related to the discussion taking place in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/IA-32 (see also WP:CANVAS). — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 00:14, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

This is not personal, but Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Password Saeba Ryo (talk) 11:49, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

Hehe, well, this is now really confusing and a bit weird. :)

Please keep in mind that everything I wrote regarding IA-32 vs. x86 vs. x86-64 isn't judging you as a person but your statements, and all that has only improvements to the articles as the final goal. While working together on improving an article, the editors should judge only each other's contributions to the article and statements expressed on the talk page, and nothing more; that's what "it isn't personal" means.

On the other hand, when we express good wishes related to holidays, there has to be at least some amount of personal involvement if the wishes are true. Such wishes show good will and positive feelings about an editor, while they aren't directly related to the articles we're working on or we have worked on.

Hope it makes sense. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 12:31, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

Hi. User:Password Saeba Ryo has been blocked indefinitely as a sock puppet of User:Janagewen. --Claw of Slime (talk) 12:13, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Thank you very much, Claw of Slime, for clarifying this somewhat awkward situation with Password Saeba Ryo. And, of course, Merry Christmas and best wishes for the around-the-corner 2015! :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 12:53, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

I invite you to this page to discuss that should the consistency of talk pages of IA-32, x86 and x86-64 should be kept! Because I've seen you as one of most active editors there. So thank you! Remover remover (talk) 15:14, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing it to my attention, I've casted my vote there. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 15:29, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Nitpicking

Was this really necessary? To boost your edit count? I added the tag and reason; do we need to start nitpicking over a period? WP:OWN --82.136.210.153 (talk) 08:02, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, that probably came across too harsh. Didn't mean it like that. --82.136.210.153 (talk) 08:10, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! No worries, I'm not an overly thin-skinned person. :) Of course, removing that period wasn't absolutely necessary, but it should be better not to have it for two reasons: that isn't a complete sentence, and placing a period there effectively creates a "link" to a non-existing "GPL." section on the article's talk page. However, if you really prefer to have that period, please feel free to put it back. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:32, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Your revert of my changes in ZFS

Thanks for pointing me to WP:NOTBROKEN. I remember when people insisted to avoid all redirects but it was years ago and I see that things have changed since then. I'll keep that in mind. Thanks and best regards. —Rafał Pocztarski, Rfl (talk | contribs) 19:20, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Hello there! You're welcome, and I'm glad you're back to editing Wikipedia. :) Of course, it wasn't absolutely necessary to revert your changes, but that's simply how the guidelines mandate the usage of redirects. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:28, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Talk:Linux distribution—Third opinion request declined

Sorry I couldn't be of any help. @Chealer didn't seem to be interested in providing a concise viewpoint or participating in the process. With this being the case, I doubt a third opinion would have been any help.
I hope this can be resolved as you both continue to have a discussion. If not perhaps another route of dispute resolution would be more helpful.
Anyhow, I've enjoyed the correspondence I've had with you, and hope it all works out.
—Lightgodsy^(TALK_CONT) 09:54, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Lightgodsy, thank you very much for your good will and time invested into this, and I also really hope that Chealer and I will be able to reach some kind of a compromise soon, which I've already offered, avoiding that way the need to reach out for an official dispute resolution. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:45, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Edit warring

See also: Talk:Linux distribution § Information on GNU/Linux, and User talk:Chealer § Edit warring

Your recent editing history at Linux distribution shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you get reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the article's talk page. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in your being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you don't violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly.

Suggesting that the behavior of other editors constitutes "trolling" may be interpreted as a personal attack. Working towards a resolution usually yields better results. Thank you for your contribution to Wikipedia. --Chealer (talk) 02:43, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for nothing, and there you go. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:51, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

PC/104

Hi Dsimic (whoever you are...)

The PC/104 Consortium's Specifications are FREE...- not like PICMG and others, but currently (and getting this changed is effort by the Board of Directors, as a change to the byelaws!) they require a REGISTRATION.

You have actually uploaded a document that you are not really allowed to share, but I can't be bothered to change this - AGAIN!

I also do not really agree that HyperLink to a HISTORIAL - for PC/104 - important person, like Rick is "SPAM", but then I am a newbie to Wiki edits.

I only landed on the PC/104 Wiki page by mistake. However, it would make sense to spend some more time on this. You seems to be interested in PC/104, so would you possible be interested in adding more information to this??

All the best

Flemming@Sundance (talk) 09:46, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Flemming Christensen Flemming.C@Sundance.com Managing Director Tel: +44 7 850 911 417 Skype: Flemming_Sundance Web: www.sundance.com

Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 2440991. Registered office: Chiltern House, Waterside, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS, England

Hello there! Well, please allow me to explain...

Regarding this edit I've performed on the PC/104 article, I haven't uploaded anything anywhere; instead, I've used Google search to find that document. In general, references that require registration are dicouraged unless it's impossible to provide a directly accessible copy. Speaking of the particular PDF file, which is available as http://www.pc104.org/specifications/PCI104-Express%20v2_10.pdf, it resides on the same domain (pc104.org) as the registration page, http://www.pc104.org/pci104e_specs.php. Thus, it's clearly visible that I haven't uploaded anything. :) As you can see, the PDF file is actually directly accessible without a registration, and the registration lockdown isn't functioning properly for some reason. However, if you insist, reverting back to using registration page as a reference is perfectly doable.

The other edit, as described in the edit summary, removed an external link to a LinkedIn profile and deleted an external link to a specification that didn't mention 2.10 as the latest PCI/104-Express version, and which also wasn't described as leading to further documentation that requires registration. In general, external links in article bodies are discouraged, and there's even a specific guideline against including links to LinkedIn profiles; please see WP:LINKSTOAVOID for more information.

At the same time, just as a side note, people associated with an organization that an article describes should be (quoted from a guideline) "careful to make sure that their external relationships in that field do not interfere with their primary role on Wikipedia"; please see WP:EXTERNALREL for more information.

Hope this clears the situation a bit. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 10:58, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

I got all busy down a twisty road, in the cold, cold world of raw encyclopedic maintenance, and I forgot all about what a wonderful person you are. You deserve some kindness, and to never question whether your overall efforts are admired and appreciated.

— Smuckola (Email) (Talk) 11:53, 15 January 2015 (UTC)