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September 10

Using optical drive ports for hard drives?

Many consumer level desktops are currently laid out with the expectation of 1 or 2 hard drives (possibly using RAID 0 or 1) and 1 or 2 optical drives. Is it feasible in general to use one of the optical drive connections for an additional hard drive? If so, what limitations are there in such an approach? For example, does the optical drive connection have a lower bandwidth than the normal hard drive connection? Dragons flight (talk) 03:54, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

They're identical. New desktop computers use SATA cables for both hard drives and optical drives. Older computers used PATA cables for both.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 04:17, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of motherboards in the last few years still had a single PATA connector which we use a lot to connect older CD/DVD drives, whilst using the SATA connector for the harddisks. (No sense in replacing all those (rarely used anyway) optical drives with SATA ones) Unilynx (talk) 06:56, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

But in his case, if the cables look the same, then they are the same. If one is a ribbon cable and the other is a thin cable, then they aren't the same.

I prefer SATA over PATA optical drives because ribbon cables restrict airflow inside the case. It's also been my experience that PATA optical drives cause the computer to lock up while the drive reads a disk.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 07:12, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Using another type of wiki

During the introduction to my first grad school class (last week), my professor told us that we'd be making some presentations on a class-only wiki. I was excited, of course, but my excitement dropped after I found that it didn't run MediaWiki — the engine is something called "Radeox", and it appears that it's written in Java. I've googled the term, but the most that I can find is this blog that appears somehow to be associated with it. List of wiki software doesn't say anything about it.

Is anyone familiar with using this type of engine? I've discovered that it doesn't have many MediaWiki features — there are no templates, equals signs don't produce headers, links are made [like this] rather than [[like this]], and typing ~~~~ and saving produces a text of ~~~~. I believe that I can get around these missing bits, but I can't find the watchlist — if you know how to use this software, how do I find the watchlist? I know that there is one, because the software tells me that I can watch pages, although it doesn't tell me how to view the watchlist. Nyttend (talk) 05:13, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think you'll find that the markup renderer is a component of the actual wiki software, which will be in charge of watchlists and such. Similar to how the WebKit HTML renderer is used in multiple browsers. My advice would be to focus on the content of the class and/or wiki and not on the (lame-sounding) infrastructure that's there. --Sean 13:43, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Internet speed, difference between 1 mb/s and 6 mb/s?

Currently my internet speed is 6 mb/s, but I am rarely able to use it to it's potential. I usually download files from megaupload, and the speed is 0.7 mb/s. I am thinking about switching to cheaper internet. Since I'm only downloading at 0.7 mb/s, a 1 mb/s internet connection would be just as good, right? Or is it more complicated? Thanks.--69.135.164.206 (talk) 05:35, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What do you use to download files? Internet Explorer displays downloading speed in megabytes per second (MBps) and ISPs advertise in megabits per second (mbps). There are 8 bits in a byte:

0.7 MBps x 8 bits/byte = 5.6 Mbps

And if you were rounding down to 0.7, this is what you have:

0.75 MBps x 8 bits/byte = 6 Mbps

Does that make sense?--Best Dog Ever (talk) 06:31, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To summarise what Best Dog Ever said, you're actually getting very very close to what you should be getting. 6 Mbps = 0.75 MBps. This bit/byte problem is a very common misconception which ISPs seem averse to dispelling. For example, if you were to switch to a 1 Mbps service, you would end up with a maximum speed of around 0.125 MBps, so this wouldn't be in your best interests. Regards, Brammers (talk/c) 07:26, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are 8 bits in a byte, and 1,000,000 bits in a megabit. But as displayed by Internet Explorer, there are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte. This means 1 megabyte = 8.388608 megabits and 0.7 megabytes per second is about 5.87 megabits per second. So you are getting close to what you're paying for. --Bavi H (talk) 01:43, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC megabit per second is abbreviated as mbps, while megabyte per second is abbreviated as mBps. This is also true with kilobit/kilobyte (kbps/kBps). The difference is the capitalized letter B. You should check it carefully. But it seems that these 2 abbreviations are often used synonymously. -- Livy the pixie (talk) 14:47, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense! I've always wondered why I download so slow. Thanks for clarifying.--69.135.164.206 (talk) 19:29, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Other than IP Address, how else do forums/Q&A sites, etc. know that you're the same person?

Years ago, on an IGN forum, after I logged off and got a new IP address, I posted under a new account (with a different registration email of course) and asked one of the mods if they knew who I used to be.

The reply was, "You're (old username), right? IPs don't matter..."

So what other methods do they use to know that you're the same person? Please be as comprehensive as you can. Thanks. --70.179.165.170 (talk) 10:58, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Chatted about this in IRC, a bit; I mentioned cookies, User agent, Anon proxies and suchlike - and emphasized that Wikipedia does not permit the latter, of course. Chzz ► 11:14, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification: Wikipedia doesn't permit editing from open proxies. You can read Wikipedia from an open proxy as much as you'd like. Comet Tuttle (talk) 15:16, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Further clarification: Users are allowed to edit from open proxies, but the proxies may be blocked at any time. "legitimate users ... are not the intended targets and may freely use proxies until those are blocked". Wikipedia:Open proxies 82.44.55.25 (talk) 15:30, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If your method of getting a new IP address involved something like rebooting your router, you would have been allocated another address in the same block. It's not rocket science, given a new user who is suggesting they used to be someone else, to look up other users from similar IP addresses. Marnanel (talk) 12:08, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Your new ip was probably similar to the old one. They geolocate it and it goes to the same country / city etc, it's probably you. Also maybe they recognized your style Quadrupedaldiprotodont (talk) 14:37, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

sub-question

Has anyone heard of internet servers that attempt to identify by MAC address? I realize there are all kinds of inherent issues with that, but it would not surprise me if a last-ditch effort was made by an advertising server, for example, to tie a MAC address (or just the IP, for that matter) to a previously established cookie-based profile. I hope this makes sense. In practical terms, I delete cookies with every browser close: I would think ad servers would be motivated enough to come up with other ways to tie my browsing session to an existing profile by my IP or even MAC address. Riggr Mortis (talk) 22:12, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The MAC address is a link-local address. It's only transmitted in ethernet packets for a single hop (depending on your network configuration, either to your gateway or to your ISP's router). From there IP packets are reencapsulated in different ethernet frames (or other kinds of low-level frames, such as SS7 or ATM frames). So no, at most only your ISP sees your MAC; it's not sent over The Internet proper, and thus isn't available to websites etc. for tracking you. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 22:22, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

With normal DSL broadband links, the MAC address gets no further than your DSL modem/router. --Phil Holmes (talk) 10:37, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't that device have its own MAC address, though? Excuse my ignorance, just wondering. I'm sure some device I used to own had a little sticker on it which said something like "MAC 01:23:45:67:89:ab", and I think it was a cable modem. 81.131.17.37 (talk) 11:38, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's good to know, I figured my question was probably ill-informed and I was right! Riggr Mortis (talk) 22:28, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

However, IPv6 does, in its standard configuration, use the mac address to create an IPv6 address, which would allow such tracking. Fortunately, Ipv6 also has a privacy option which allows it to use temporary addresses for outbound connections. Unilynx (talk) 00:30, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note that some programs do use your MAC address for tracking (along with a host of other things) particularly free non browser online games more particularly the anti-cheat programs that come with them. America's Army is one that I know that does but I'm pretty sure it's not the only one. This shouldn't be that surprising, any program that runs on your computer is able to send whatever info it can gather from your computer to whatever server you allow it to communicate with, the good ones will mention in their EULA or whatever Nil Einne (talk) 09:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hard drives

Are hard drives becoming more reliable over time, or are drives from 1987 just as reliable as modern drives? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Overdowner (talk • contribs) 13:57, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I would think more modern hard drives are more energy efficient and reliable, at least certainly more energy efficient. There's a bit more information here. Chevy monte carlo - alt 15:59, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are you asking how a new hard drive from 1987 would compare to a new modern drive, or are you asking if you should replace the 23 year old relic that you're storing your tax documents on? Because if it's the latter, I think anyone would say "yes, of course, after 23 years of use that thing is long past due to fail" (even modern hard drives last what, 5 years?). If it's the former question, than I don't know. Buddy431 (talk) 01:20, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The unrecoverable error rate of modern harddrives are atleast two (possibly three?) orders of magnitude better than 1987 harddrives. So atleast in terms of data integrity, modern harddrives are much more reliable. Plus, AFAIK, the annualized failure rate of modern harddrives is much lower than 1987 harddrives. Rocketshiporion♫ 02:22, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Almost certainly phishing email, but top-level domain is paypal.com

Resolved

–

\sim

Lenoxus " * "

Received a message consisting the following very suspicious text:

Dear customer, Your account has been temporarily limited. Download and fill out the form to resolve the problem. Thank You.

Message is from 'PayPal Inc. <notice@personal.paypal.com>'. Message's 1 attachment is the "form" in question, which looks to be some sort of HTML file, or URL file (whatever those are called).

Simple Googling of the phrase "Your account has been temporarily limited" indicates that it's almost certainly not a phrase PayPal uses, so I'm looking at a scam. (On top of that, they don't use the name of the account holder (just "Dear customer"), and if the real PayPal needed information, there would be a link to their site.)

So what I'm wondering is, how are the scammers able to use the top-level domain paypal.com? As far as I can tell, it's not an IDN homograph attack. Using Wikipedia, each of the letters seems to check out. Is it possible that when I copy the address in mail.app, the application actually "substitutes" the Latin characters and sends those to the clipboard? Or is there some scary way that phishers can disguise their address to look exactly like that of anyone in the world, without having to take over that person's computer (which I doubt has happened to PayPal)? $\sim$ Lenoxus " * " 14:51, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like an HTML email (that is, an email where the content is in essence coded like a web page) where links are constructed to appear to go to paypal.com, but if you actually were to click on them (which I don't recommend at all) you'd really go to something fake. Hover over the links in Wikipedia:Phishing e-mails to see an example of how this appears. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 15:01, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) Sorry, I'm not clear on one part of your question. Is the "paypal.com" you're referring to in the "From" field of the e-mail, or are you referring to an apparent "paypal.com" URL within the HTML file somewhere? If the former, I would assume the "paypal.com" in the e-mail's "From" field is simply forged — it is trivial to do this — and the actual attack is to get you to open a malformed HTML file that targets old browsers. Comet Tuttle (talk) 15:02, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To echo Comet Tuttle, where does the HTML attachment point to (you can download it and open it in Notepad for example)? I think the trick is to get you to click on the attachment, which would naturally open your browser and take you to the linked shortcut. It is trivial to forge the "from" address (or any other field) to reflect the actual, real paypal.com TLD. Email is an unsecure, plain-text standard. Zunaid 15:09, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Remember that the "From" address on an email can be easily forged. Very easily. APL (talk) 15:24, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all the answers! Yes, I was curious about whether the "From" part, which does say "paypal.com" in Latin letters, could be forged. That's scary! $\sim$ Lenoxus " * " 16:10, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See our article section E-mail#Header fields for more detail on the e-mail headers. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:09, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

E-mail "from" headers are easily forged; don't trust those at all. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:11, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Data compression built into TCP/IP

In the latter days of dial-up modems, the V.42bis spec had the modems actually perform Lempel-Ziv compression upon data before sending it over the wire. Nowadays, when I'm looking at web sites or using FTP with my nice Ethernet rig over a cable modem or DSL, is there any data compression going on between my computer and the servers it contacts? I mean to ask this question broadly; I don't want to restrict the question literally to TCP/IP, but want to learn about data compression taking place at any stage of the communication between the computers. Whether there is or not, I'd love pointers to any articles or books discussing the compromises involved and why the decisions were reached. Comet Tuttle (talk) 15:12, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There is optional compression (e.g. CCP, MPPC) in the PPP layer; I don't know whether, in practice, the PPPoE and PPPoA systems used for delivering broadband internet to home users actually bother with this. There is optional gzip compression in the HTTP layer (details). PPTP can, I think, use the same compression schemes as PPP. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 15:23, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I do not believe that, as a general rule, the servers and routers in the internet do any compression at all. Of course, the exception to this would be to state the obvious that JPEG, MPEG, MP3, etc., are all heavily compressed formats. Given the compression that's already applied to most large datasets, such as these, it would probably be a waste of processing power and intellectual effort to try compressing internet data. --Phil Holmes (talk) 16:54, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

@Phil...no there is compression with HTTP ussually using gzip. See HTTP compression. SSL can also use Lempel-Ziv-Stac (LZS) compression. Hope this helps.Smallman12q (talk) 20:42, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

All major web servers (e.g. Apache) and many web publishing platforms (e.g. Mediawiki) have built-in support to exploit the optional gzip compression over HTTP when web browsers acknowledge support for that compression (which is true for all major browsers). The web site operator may have to turn on these features, but the burden for doing so is generally small, which allows gzip over HTTP to be widely used. Dragons flight (talk) 21:16, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It is often the job of a network engineer to decide whether CPU-time (or dedicated DSP calculation time) is cheaper or more expensive than network bandwidth. When the tradeoff is good (i.e., computing the compression is cheaper than sending the data uncompressed), the engineer will opt to use a compression system. I think this is often the case in large "internet backbone" scale data transfers; but in most point-to-point (read: last mile) connections, CPU is proportionately more expensive than bandwidth, so data is not compressed. Nimur (talk) 15:19, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

September 11

Storage Area Networking: Difference between SAN Group & SAN Pool

Hi.

In regard of Storage Area Networking, what is the exact difference between a group and a pool? Is either one a subdivision of the other, and what are the purpose and properties of each? These two terms in SAN literature do always confound me.

Thanks to everyone. Rocketshiporion♫ 02:00, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

operating system

what is mean by semaphores? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Govindaraj.s.2012 (talk • contribs) 04:50, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

see Semaphore (programming). basically, they are signals that allow different processes to use shared resources in a multi-tasked environment (flags that indicate whether a resource is currently in use, so that two processes don't try to modify/access it at the same time). --Ludwigs2 06:12, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Microsoft Publisher 2003

Okay, I have a problem that I need to be fixed as soon as possible. I'm trying to send a Newsletter using Microsoft Publisher 2003, is there a way using my Gmail account that I can send to be a read-only file? It seems like it won't let me do anything without an Outlook account (not a big fan of outlook). Thanks. Moptopstyle1 (talk) 05:51, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you're trying to distribute the newsletter for other people to read (and not edit), the issue is not with your e-mail program but with Publisher. Generally speaking you should not send Publisher files out if you want them to be just read and not edited (I'm not sure there is a reliable way to do that, and most people don't have Publisher anyway, and so wouldn't be able to read it). What you generally would do in this situation is convert the Publisher file into a PDF, and then distribute the PDF file. There are lots of free PDF "printers" available that can convert it for you (CutePDF and PDFCreator are commonly-used ones), if you need one of those. Basically you install one of those, and it shows up as a new "printer" that makes PDF files. You then open Publisher and "print" the document to the new "printer" and it then saves the information as the PDF file (it doesn't actually print it, which is why I've put all of that in scare quotes). --Mr.98 (talk) 13:46, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So, you're saying I have to get a new printer? oh joy. Moptopstyle1 (talk) 20:31, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, not a new printer, just a programme that will convert the files to pdf. Most people won't have MS Publisher, and won't be able to read your newsletter if you send it as a .pub file. Sending it as .pdf means that they will be able to read it. DuncanHill (talk) 20:48, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, you don't have to get a new printer. The "PDF printer" is not really a printer. It's a program that you print to as if it were a printer, and instead of sending it to an actual, physical printer, the software outputs a PDF file. It's a piece of software that allows you to take any program and output its files into PDF format. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:55, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Put very simply: Download and install CutePDF from this link. After you have installed it, go into Publisher. Click "Print" as normal, but instead of selecting your regular printer, you should have something like "CutePDF Printer" under your printer options. Select this, click Print, and it should ask you where you want to save your new PDF file. After you save the PDF file, take a look at it, see if it is what you wanted to distribute. If so, send it on to your friends, and you are done. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:59, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OH! I'm such a dork, I read through the first response and realized that I was wrong saying that "I needed a new printer", okay, I'll try downloading the file. THANK YOU SO MUCH! you do not know how much this helps, this takes SO much stress away! THANK YOU THANK YOU! I will reply if the converter works. Moptopstyle1 (talk) 03:43, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Do not look for any application to run. Just print your document using CutePDF Writer (the printer) to get PDF output. 1. Open your original document and select Print command in File menu of your application to bring up Print dialog box. 2. Then select CutePDF Writer as the Printer to print (DO NOT select "Print to file" option). 3. You will get a Save As dialog box prompted for saving created PDF file. 4. Select a folder to Save in and enter a File name, then click on Save. Go to that folder to find your PDF file."

Option "3" did not happen. is there anything else I can try? Thanks. Moptopstyle1 (talk) 04:25, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It works OK in Publisher 2000, though there is a pause before the "save as" box appears. Dbfirs 06:48, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Try PDFCreator or PDF995. Otherwise Google for "export to PDF" or "print to PDF" freeware, but be careful of malware. Zunaid 06:34, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Running commands on another (Windows) computer

Hello,

I'm wondering about the best way to run commands on one Windows computer from another Windows computer connected to it (and also how the two computers should actually be connected and configured). To be more specific, I have two computers running Windows XP and I'd like one of them ("computer A") to be able to run commands on the other ("computer B") as if the commands were entered in the command prompt on computer B. Currently, the computers aren't connected (physically or otherwise).

What's (typically) the best way of setting this up? Apparently there's a program called PsExec available to download from Microsoft that allows this, but it looks like it might require the computer issuing the commands to be running Windows Server. If so, what other (preferably free) options are available? Additionally, can I just connect the two computers directly with an Ethernet cable (assuming they're not already on the same network) and adjust their IP protocol settings appropriately or are there additional settings in Windows or specialized versions of Windows (e.g. Windows Server) that are required for this to work?

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

-- Hiram J. Hackenbacker (talk) 13:30, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Remote desktop Quadrupedaldiprotodont (talk) 14:25, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the suggestion, but remote desktop wouldn't be suitable for my needs. To be more specific about what I wish to accomplish, I need computer A to trigger commands on computer B while still performing tasks itself (e.g. computer A starts process 1 on itself, runs a command on computer B to start process 2 on computer B, then runs process 3 on itself while computer B is running process 2). This will be part of an automated procedure (potentially stored in a batch file or something similar), which I should have specified initially, as that seems to rule out remote desktop (unless there's a command that can be run on computer A to instruct it to indirectly execute a command on computer B through a remote desktop connection). Hiram J. Hackenbacker (talk) 19:16, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

While it is possible to pass a command name to Remote Desktop, I'm not sure if this will work for connections to a client machine (say, Windows XP, Vista or 7) - I've only seen it in connection with Windows Terminal Services on W2K and W2K3. For the scenario you describe, the psexec tool you already found out about yourself is the way to go, and last time I saw it, it did work from a client, no Windows Server required. There's even a Linux tool to remotely execute commands on Windows machines, it's called winexe and Debian and Ubuntu distributions carry it in the wmi-client package. Depending on your usage scenario, you might be able to recycle an old computer by running linux on it and have it control not one, but two Windows boxes. -- 78.43.71.155 (talk) 01:37, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EMAIL

I WISH EMAIL TO FAMILY IN INDIA

HOW EMAIL, EXPLAIN PLEASE.? WHAT SITE —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shantie.jevla (talk • contribs) 13:36, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See Email client. This is a program - which you may need to download, although it's likely you already have a suitable program which came with your operating system, typically Outlook Express - into which you put details of your email address, which should be provided by your internet service provider. See also the section Email client#Webmail, which may be an easier way. 213.122.17.213 (talk) 13:47, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The location of the recipient of an email doesn't matter. Email addresses are globally unique, and (generally speaking) the Internet is unaffected by national boundaries. Paul (Stansifer) 16:56, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The easiest is to go to google and click on the gmail link. Sandman30s (talk) 19:39, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, webmail (such as Gmail) is a free option that doesn't require downloading anything (especially useful if you use many different computers). Your family in India also need to set up a free e-mail account and let you know the address. Dbfirs 08:33, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Teletext and the BBC Micro

What exactly was the connection between these two things? The BBC micro had a "teletext mode" (mode 7), and teletext pages always looked as if they had been designed using it. I know of no other computer with this particular screen mode. So:

Was there a BBC B at the other end, being used to compose the teletext pages?
If so, was it also in some sense transmitting the pages - were they coming live from an Acorn computer, so to speak?
Are the chips in TVs which decode teletext Acorn-derived?

213.122.17.213 (talk) 13:40, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I highly doubt they used an actual acorn computer for broadcasting Teletext. Most likely they used an emulator or modern program that simulated the old one. Quadrupedaldiprotodont (talk) 14:24, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Teletext existed when these computers were new, you know. The BBC micro wasn't created old. 213.122.17.213 (talk) 15:10, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Teletext (in production by 1974) pre-dated the BBC Micro (1981). In short, I don't think any of teletext has much to do with Acorn, beyond Acorn providing emulation facilities within the BBC B. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:18, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Teletext in your TV (until quite recently) and in your BBC Micro do indeed look essentially identical. That's because they both contain(ed) a Mullard SAA5050 character generator chip. That contained the character ROM (which defined how the characters appeared) and equipment to encode a TV signal to represent them (which affects the "feel" of the characters - their subtle analog character). -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 15:22, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That explains it! And the chip was used in at least one other home computer. Thank you Finlay. (I still wonder if there was somebody in the TV station tapping away on an 8-bit machine to make the pages, though, and how they were stored.) 213.122.17.213 (talk) 15:32, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Probably not (at least not initially). Our Videotex article mostly talks about client-side equipment (which is 8-bit equipment based on the SAA5050 and similar technology). The Prestel article (Teletext's dialup interactive cousin) talks about the Minicomputers used to run it; it's likely that the transmission elements of Ceefax, Oracle etc. used much the same technology. That leaves design of the pages, and their entry, about which I can't find much. A lot of Ceefax pages are formatted essentially, so it's likely they had a simple content management system which allowed users on a serial terminal to enter news stories. I'll bet some of the design was simply done on paper by someone with a big table of the character set. At some point (before highly integrated ICs like the 5050 were available) they'll have had to build some adapter cards for whatever minicomputer they were using (which did the same job as the 5050, at a much greater cost) so they could have some basic WYSIWYG editing and previewing. I'd imagine that once the 5050 was available it was integrated into terminals so they could do that easier and cheaper (it would be tempting to do it with a BBC micro, but I don't know that they did). -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 15:57, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As to how they were stored, they'd be stored as blocks of character data in the Ceefax (etc.) broadcast minicomputer, encoded in the 7 bit ASCII-based alphabet listed in TABLE 1 in the Mullard document linked from its article. For teletext they'd have a special program that cycled through the available pages, emitted that (and the other lines of data, like the bookies info that they had on their own lines), encoded that in the Videotex analog format, and sent that off to be time-multiplexed into the master PAL signal that the BBC were sending for BBC1 (etc.). Given the pioneering nature of much of this, and the BBC's technical strengths and willingness to build its own technology, you can bet much of this stuff was BBC built for BBC use. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 16:10, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I found some references to support this: this article talks about the initial Ceefax backend. Firstly a single "VDU" (which mostly means "terminal", but doesn't say terminal of what, and may really mean a paper-punch machine) generating paper tape (with the above data encoded) feeding into something (presumably some home-cooked broadcast thingy) which stored its mighty 30 pages in core memory. You can bet at this early time all the pages were hand-designed on paper. A year later they've got themselves a minicomputer (it doesn't say what kind) called Esmeralda, with six terminals (again it doesn't say what kind). I guess at some point they built an electrical interface between Esmeralda and the core-memory-broadcast thingy. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 16:37, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I can add a couple of items, the minicomputer in question was a pdp11, it's on the page source of: bbcmu0583.shtml , note you need to look at the page source. The terminals were Aston Intelligent Terminals, but I can't find references to what exactly such machines were, except perhaps it was an Aston University project? The BBC Micro of course had Teletext graphics, because it was part of the BBC's specification for the BBC Micro (Personal Computer World December 1981, I believe).--TheOriginalSnial (talk) 08:21, 24 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I seem to recall that programs for the BBC Micro could be "downloaded" from some Ceefax pages. DuncanHill (talk) 07:40, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I was right, see BBC Cheese Wedge#Teletext Adapter. DuncanHill (talk) 07:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Configuring Toshiba Satellite 3000-X11 to use LAN and Wi-Fi (urgent, please answer if you can, cause it's not my laptop)

I'm trying to configure this laptop to connect to the Internet via conventional methods, but it connects only with a WAN miniport (it won't seem to connect to anything other than dial-up). Is there any way I can set it to connect with a LAN or wirelessly? I'm not too sure if it can do the latter, since it seems to show no signs of wifi capability. 24.189.87.160 (talk) 19:48, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Searching for this particular model is proving particularly difficult. This page suggests the 3000 series has a built-in ethernet port (which will accept a RJ-45 jack), a PC card slot and some USB ports. You can connect to the internet via a standard ethernet cable, you can buy a Wirelss LAN PC card, or you can get a USB wireless adapter. Astronaut (talk) 03:23, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Display

In greasemonkey, how can I make some text display on any page. Similar to the php echo function. I tried

document.writeln("Hello");

but nothing is displayed. 82.44.55.25 (talk) 20:12, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Date handling with XML in Expression Web

I use Microsoft Expression Web to maintain a couple of websites. I've just come across the Data View feature which allows you to access XML databases (it generates XSLT). There seems to be a feature allowing you to format numeric values eg as currency, but what I need is the ability to format dates, as one of the potential applications is to present a list of future events. Can anyone suggest a way to do this (without constructing XSLT by hand)? Thanks --rossb (talk) 22:28, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Your question isn't clear. Do you mean with a particular programming language?Smallman12q (talk) 23:52, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Freeware old fashioned database

I recall simple databases from many years ago, in the days of CP/M. You would be able to define the fields on a virtual "index card", fill them with data with each virtual card being one entity, and then search through the fields. Is there anything available like that now please? I have tried to find one and been unable. I do not have the time or patience to learn anything complicated or non-intuitive or anything that involves programming. Thanks 92.15.7.75 (talk) 22:35, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like what you want is something like Filemaker or Bento but freeware. OpenOffice.org Base can do what you want, so can Kexi. How easily, I'm not sure, but what you are asking for is really pretty simple and I'm sure that it would not take much effort to set up either of those in the fashion you're describing, and without doing any scripting. --Mr.98 (talk) 23:44, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Microsoft Office Access 2010 does everything you describe, plus it also provides user-friendly wizards for the construction of tables, forms and queries. As the OP did not ask that it be freeware, I assume that commercial software is acceptable to them. IMHO, Microsoft Office Access 2010 is the gold standard for databases. Vickreman.Chettiar 00:41, 12 September 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vickreman.Chettiar (talk • contribs) [reply]

Actually, the subject line explicitly says "freeware"... --Mr.98 (talk) 01:33, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think Microsoft Works is often available at no cost these days (though it is still priced at $39.95 on Microsoft's website). It has a basic database without the sophistication of Access. Dbfirs 06:23, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

September 12

Maximum LUN Size

Hello Everyone!

Does anyone here know what is the maximum possible size of a LUN for each of the following protocols?

SCSI/iSCSI
Fiber Channel
InfiniBand

Many thanks. Vickreman.Chettiar 00:45, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Shell Script

Other than my one year in computer programming class in high school, I am ignorant about programming, so, please, excuse my misuse of jargon.
Can I write a script to visit every verse from this website? One which copies the information and pastes it into a text document, inserts a horizontal line, goes on to the next, and repeats? How would I do this? Thank you. schyler (talk) 02:36, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes you can unfortunately wikipedia is atheist so wikipedia is unable to assist you with your homework or bible studies.130.56.88.248 (talk) 03:48, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think Wikipedia takes an official position on the existence or otherwise of supreme beings. Dbfirs 06:19, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Technically, it's not a difficult feat -- if you're a programmer. You could use a loop in a *nix shell script: lynx | awk >> some_file, but I find that approach clumsy compared to a scripting language like Perl or Python (programming_language) both of which have http modules which can be used to retrieve Web content and regular expression modules which can be used to scrape the contents. Python also has an HTML parsing module which can perform the task especially elegantly.

All that said, it looks to me like you would violate the NASB copyright. Even if it were not legally murky, I would still have to question the wisdom of this project. It would take me a few hours to cobble something like this together and ensure that it worked properly -- and I've been doing this kind of thing for 20 years. If you're a novice, it will cost you weeks. Why not simply purchase a Bible in the format you need? Mike Duskis (talk) 06:03, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

wget is very useful for this sort of thing.

wget -l 1 -np -p -k http://biblelexicon.org/matthew/

should work. However, as Mike said, you're probably in breach of their copyright. CS Miller (talk) 09:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for introducing wget into the discussion. I find it an excellent tool for downloading HTML content over HTTP, especially if I'm interested in recursing the hyperlinks. In this case, I suggested lynx (web browser) instead because it also parses the HTML, converting it to plain text. This would make the task of scraping the content simpler and less error-prone. As is the case with wget and CURL, a non-interactive mode makes lynx fully scriptable. As graphical Web browsers rose to dominance, lynx fell into obscurity. I think this is a shame because it is still useful for many tasks. Mike Duskis (talk) 15:54, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A late note on this: at least with the version of lynx I use, you can't simply redirect the output using ">" or "|". You first have to make lynx non-interactive by using the rather oddly named options -dump -crawl. Then you can. For example,

    lynx -dump -crawl http://en.wikipedia.org >wikipedia-home-page

--Anonymous, 20:31 UTC, September 14, 2010.

Thanks to most of you for your insight. Over at the language desk I am trying to find what I am looking for. schyler (talk) 13:23, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What is this Place

I can't figure out what this place is it needs a wikipedia article explaining itself.130.56.88.248 (talk) 03:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See reference desk. -- kainaw ™ 03:50, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And, Wikipedia has an official policy against writing articles about itself. This reference desk is within the Wikipedia:Namespace, so the best place to find information about this desk is the information-banner at the top of this page (i.e., there is no article in Wikipedia:Main namespace about this desk). However, the Reference Desk has been the subject of at least a few academic studies about Wikipedia; for example, The paradox of expertise: Is the Wikipedia reference desk as good as your library?. Nimur (talk) 15:15, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know about policies aganst having articles about ourselves...I was under the impression that, despite this coverage, the Ref Desk still didn't pass Wikipedia:Notability. Vimescarrot (talk) 20:02, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If there is such a policy, how come the article Wikipedia exists? --Anon, 20:33 UTC, September 14, 2010.

There is no such policy that I am aware of. There is a Wikipedia article because WP itself (as a whole) is notable - many reliable sources have written extensively about it. The Refdesk pages have simply not (yet) qualified under the the General Notability Guidelines. Roger (talk) 21:07, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure what to look for when Choosing a Web Hosting service for a plain Website.

I have some experience with Databases, HTML and coding.

I am looking to create a website which has a database however it will not have logins or anything like that. The database will have an image and description.

Please advise what kind of database service should be offered, what computer language I should study and how to get the database to interact with the HTML code, or to generate it.130.56.88.248 (talk) 04:07, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The best language for you depends on the database you want to use. So, what kind of database did you work with? ASP.NET works really well with Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access. PHP works really well with MySQL.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 05:28, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Internet browser slow and freezing

Over the last few months I've been travelling all over SE Asia, China and Mongolia, and have probably used hundreds of different wifi connections on my netbook. In the last few weeks my Internet browser has become extremely slow - not just loading pages, but even opening my bookmarks menu, typing stuff etc. It freezes up for at least 15 seconds out of every minute. My friend thinks it's because the Internet here is just slow, but I don't see how that would affect anything other than the loading of pages, and I think it has something to do with the fact that my netbook has done the electronic equivalent of sleeping with hookers all over Asia. What exactly could be causing this and how do I fix it? 124.158.90.27 (talk) 05:07, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How in the world could I possibly answer your question? I don't know what browser you're using and I don't know what your operating system is. Is your browser Internet Explorer? Are you using Windows XP? Are you using a Mac? I started to write some detailed advice, and then realized that it was for nothing because you gave almost no background information.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 05:43, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the immediate question is, could a slow internet connection cause a browser to have a slow user interface? I think without needing to know the details of the software, we can say almost certainly not. It should be simple enough to test, though - is the interface still slow if you put the browser into offline mode and use its menus, or look at some cached pages? If so, it definitely isn't your connection. (I bet it isn't your connection. If it turns out to only have a slow interface when you're online, I suspect malware, or some internet-related software you've installed that runs in the background. If it has a slow interface all the time, I suspect it's something like your browser being unable to cope with its cache or history or download history being too full, or barfing on some extension you've added - or malware.) 213.122.16.225 (talk) 09:14, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict × 3) Possibly a Computer Virus or Malware as a result of "electronic equivalent of sleeping with hookers all over Asia" (Good analogy!) Scan and clean your hard disc drive (HDD). Your HDD might need Defragmenting, or may be getting too full. Try to keep at least 200 Mega-bytes free. Another commonly suggested cure all for a 'slow' PC is to reload your operating system. - 220.101 talk^\Contribs 05:34, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You should have much more than 200MB free. Having a hard time finding proper references, but I think the usual recommendation is to have 10%-20% free space to reduce fragmentation. And apparently Windows XP requires 15% free space to properly run its internal defrag tool. Unilynx (talk) 09:59, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have assumed you are using a Windows machine. If so I suggest using Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and AVG Anti-Virus. I use both and they seem to work very well. 220.101 talk^\Contribs 08:31, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Without system specs, I'd suggest also that long freezes like that are a common symptom of running out of RAM. Have you installed any software that consumes more RAM? Comet Tuttle (talk) 12:37, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Clear your cache. That solves a lot of problems Quadrupedaldiprotodont (talk) 13:43, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you are using Windows, then the easdiest way to do that may be installing and running Ccleaner. 92.15.30.158 (talk) 20:36, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Free database software

Google brings up far too many hits so I turn to the collective knowledge of RefDeskers for help. I'm secretary of a non-profit organisation and maintain the (small - about 100) membership list in Excel. Typical fields are Name, Surname, Address, phone numbers etc. The treasurer uses a copy of this list to track annual membership fees, sales of tickets for fund-raising events etc. by appending the necessary columns to his copy of the Excel sheet. I'm responsible for adding new members to the list, updating contact details etc. He issues receipts and invoices (paper or electronic) and tracks payments on his own. As you can imagine there is always a danger of things getting out of sync between us. I'm looking at database options to replace the Excel method we're currently using, either online or offline. It needs to satisfy the following:

Gratis
A record for each member containing the usual "core" fields as per our current Excel sheet
Ability to add "supplementary" fields globally to all members for membership fees each year or for fund-raising events, in order to track payments
Ability to embed (not just link) attachments into the members' record e.g. scanned copies of ID documents, correspondence, receipts and invoices for payments etc.
Ability to add/remove members and to mark "dormant" accounts for those whose membership has expired
Export to the standard database and spreadsheet formats
Bonus: ability to self-generate invoices or statements from within the database program
Bonus: multi-user with permissions and access controls for certain fields e.g. secretary only has write access to certain fields, treasurer only has write access to certain fields.

Basically I'm looking for a combination database and rudimentary book-keeping system. Before downloading and trying all the different options Google brought up I thought I'd throw it to RDers for input. Thanks. (p.s. I'm extremely computer literate but have never used a database before, not even MS Access. Don't be scared to throw technical questions at me if needed.) Zunaid 12:17, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The only problem you cite is getting out of sync with your co-worker, so if your current Excel solution is good-enough, except for synching, you might consider just continuing to use Excel, but set up a Subversion server, and modify your workflow so each of you gets in the habit of using the Subversion client (usually TortoiseSVN) to do an Update before doing any work, then a Commit after doing some work. Comet Tuttle (talk) 12:35, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

well, first, you're not using excel to its fullest capacity. Excel has several features for online collaboration and synchronization.

That being said, if you just want something free and centralized, you might look at MySQL. bit of a learning curve if you've never used an SQL before, but it will do everything on your list out of the box (except for your first bonus point - you'd have to write a script in PHP or some such to extract data and output an invoice, or export info into Excel and use a Word merge). --Ludwigs2 14:02, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The reason I'd like to go the database route is because it seems to be the "right" solution. Creating a record for each member and keeping their record updated seems more in line with what we want to do than appending columns and rows to Excel in perpetuity. Also the embedding of documents right into the members' record would make things very convenient. There is still some manual intervention of course but I'd like to explore the options. Ludwigs, I know SQL is a database query language but I have no idea what to do with your answer "you might look at mySQL". I'm basically hoping for an off-the-shelf product, hopefully an answer like "install OpenOffice Base, it does everything you need (and more)™!" Like I said, I've never even seen a database program before so I'll have to teach myself how they work from scratch (which I don't mind). Zunaid 15:12, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

look at the MySQL homepage and for their main competitor, the PostgerSQL homepage. You'll find download and installation instructions on both pages. I know MySQL, so that's what I recommended, but the differences between them are minimal. They are both intended a internet database servers (meaning that they sit an a machine somewhere storing data, and accept and process requests from local and remote clients). They can be run from the command line, from PHP or ASP, or from standalone applications designed for the task that you can also find through a google search.

for a broader set of choices, you might look at Comparison of relational database management systems

'Off the shelf' is a tricky concept. it will take you 15 minutes to install MySQL on your machine, and you can start using it immediately from the command line, but learning the fundamentals of using an SQL server (from using the SQL language to allocating privileges to different users to making sure the security is set correctly) takes a while. If you want to use a GUI application for access that that will have a little extra overhead; if you want to develop software specifically for your company you'll need to learn webdesign.

Translation into non-geek: MySQL is a program that will require you to basically learn a programming language to use effectively. Probably not what you want unless you are interested in learning both a tricky database language AND another language by which to build a real interface out of it, not to mention the web markup you'll need to output it. It's an elegant solution if you already know all the languages involved, but otherwise will take you a huge amount of time to learn, with a large learning curve. The people (like myself) who know all of the relevant languages involved are apt to underestimate how many years it took for us to get at the stage when it all became natural. I find the idea of a MySQL backend with a PHP/HTML front-end quite straightforward, and could whip one up in a matter of hours, but that's because I've got a solid decade of programming experience behind me. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:39, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like what you really want is Microsoft Access, to be honest. I know — not free, at all. And not the easiest thing to use in any event. But it can do all of what you are asking for, and is "off the shelf," and most of what you are requesting is not very complicated. Some of it is trickier, like embedding documents in the database itself (which is generally not done, because it increases the overhead of the database considerably — usually you keep the information within a file structure and link to it). But all of this is pretty basic DB stuff. With any DB though you'll need to spend some time learning how to set it up and keep it working. Since you are a non-profit, might I recommend trying to get a college or high school student intern to do this? An experienced DBA could do what you wanted in a day or two, plus whatever time it would take to iron out the inevitable bugs. It's the kind of project a beginning database programmer might find interesting as they are learning their way around things. When I was in high school I set up something very similar for a non-profit group, used it as my "community service" when applying to college. The downside of such a scheme is that the quality will probably not be as good as you'd get from an expert, and getting any kind of "black boxed" system is a bit dangerous, if you don't know how to fix things when they go wrong.

The tough truth of it is that what you're asking for is not so hard as to be out of the range, but is hard enough that doing it with commercial off the shelf is unlikely to be a straightforward thing. Somebody's going to have to learn a little database programming, a little Access or something else. On the other hand, maybe this is that opportunity you've always been looking for to expand your own skill set a bit? --Mr.98 (talk) 21:39, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks guys. Seems like databases are a lot more complicated than I expected. I had visions of something like Excel where you can just start with a blank database, quickly define some fields and start typing in things immediately. Seems like a lot of back-end work is required. Having (briefly) read through OOo Base's documentation I might just give this a go as a part time project to expand my skill set. I think for our organisation we'll need to stick to Excel (perhaps augmented by some VBA voodoo). A database might also not be sustainable long-term, we shouldn't expect any future secretaries and treasurers to be as PC literate as the current incumbents.

Side question: Still on the topic of off-the-shelf solutions, besides OOo Base are there any other products I should try? How easy is Zoho? Any others? Zunaid 09:49, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can do some things like you are describing, e.g. with OOo Base or Access. But some of what you are describing is more complicated than that. The issue is that in Excel, you have all sorts of easy tricks for sorting and editing the data in a pretty straightforward fashion. In a DB program like Access, this is also done with macros and scripting and more complicated queries and things like that. It's all very do-able, but it's not just a simple matter of switching from one to the other; without knowing how to use queries, macros, scripting, etc., what you'd end up would be functionally much poorer than what you already have with Excel. (Imagine if all you could do with Excel was edit things manually, search, and sort by alphabetization or value. That's pretty much the situation of trying to use a DB without knowing the other things.) --Mr.98 (talk) 22:37, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Have you considered making do with Excel? You can set up a shared workbook on a central server, which should help you prevent editing conflicts, and if you play around with Forms feature (under the Data menu in Office 2004) you can set up something which looks more like a database and less like entering rows on a spreadsheet. That wouldn't handle anything high-volume, of course, but if there's only a handful of people trying to use it it should work just fine.

I mean, since you already have Excel, and your needs are not heavy, maybe it's best to stick with what you know. --Ludwigs2 22:54, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are free database languages such as Harbour (software). But programming something in them is going to take up a huge amount of time. 92.15.13.186 (talk) 20:55, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

TablePro http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page33.html may serve your needs. 92.29.118.215 (talk) 19:31, 17 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Spam from a friend's email

I just got a spam message from a friend's email account. (The friend is definitely not the author of the message.) Does this likely mean that his account has been compromised, and I should alert him to change his password? Or is there a way for spammers to make you get a message from [your friend, whoever "you" may be] without the friend's email account being involved? (It's different from scams that come from "PayPal.com", because my friend's email doesn't have anywhere near a high enough profile that it would be worth a spammer's time to type it in.) $\sim$ Lenoxus " * " 13:18, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Your friend probably has malware on their computer that sent it. And yes, you can technically send an email from any address. I could send you an email from "theprimeminister@number10.gov.uk" or "123@fbi.gov" etc. However you'd verify whether it was a real email or not by looking at the server address which sent in. In this case, it would not be coming from the official server so you'd know it was a fake. Quadrupedaldiprotodont (talk) 13:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Now I'm curious: Is there a simple way to check that server address thingy?

\sim

Lenoxus " * " 14:40, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually I don't quite agree with Quadrupedaldiprontodont's first sentence. I think it's quite possible that your friend has malware on his or her computer; and it's very probable that one of your friends has malware on his computer. What I mean is: If Alice, Bob, and Charles are all listed in each other's address books, and Alice's system gets compromised and becomes a zombie spambot, then her computer may either (a) send spam to Bob and Charles; (b) send spam to Bob and Charles, with the "From" header forged to look like Bob's address; (c) send spam to Bob and Charles, with the "From" header forged to look like Charles's address; (d) send Alice's entire address book to the Zombie Master computer, which sends the addresses out to all the zombies in the botnet, and, eventually, the botnet will send literally millions of e-mails to millions of people, appearing to come from Alice and from Bob and from Charles and from everyone else who has had their address book uploaded to the Zombie Master. Anyway, yes you should definitely tell the friend about this and advise them to scan for malware; but it's not proof of an infection. The infectee might just be a friend. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:52, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A good answer, but don't reply to the spam email to tell your friend of their possible malware infection. Start with a new email or a phone call. Astronaut (talk) 06:54, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Prejudice against Macs

I told my friend I was thinking of buying a Mac. They laughed at me and said "Macs are overpriced shit". Why is there prejudice against Macs and Apple products in general? Sugarrush345 (talk) 13:22, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's a matter of perspective. In your case, probably the result of confirmation bias due to advertising and a negative media campaign?Smallman12q (talk) 14:13, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

religion is passé, so people need some other topic to be jerks about?

Everyone has preferences about things like this, and some people allow their preferences to transform into a kind of group identity. group identities produce conflict. The general Mac/Windows divide is a quality vs. expediency issue: macs are better quality machines and better quality software at a higher price; Windows PCs are more cheaply designed but more widespread. If you have a profession/avocation that requires a computer you're better off with a Mac - you'll find it a better working environment, you'll find the machine is more powerful for complex tasks and more stable as a rule, and has a longer half-life before it obsoletes. If you have a profession/avocation that just uses computers (e.g. office work) you'll get more bang for your buck from a PC. --Ludwigs2 14:17, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, there is an example of the type of incorrect overgeneralization that has always characterized this divide. "If you have a profession/avocation that requires a computer you're better off with a Mac" - citation needed!!! Comet Tuttle (talk) 15:01, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I do have a profession/avocation that requires a computer. In fact, I have three of them. I am a health-informatics programmer. I maintain multiple web servers. I am also a computer science PhD student/instructor. If I used a Mac, it would be like trying to run a marathon with concrete boots. If I used a Windows box, it would be like trying to run a marathon with my legs cut off. I use Linux because it natively allows me to do the work that I need to do without being chained down by the whims of what others declare to be "user friendly." So, in response to the claim... If you are really a computer person, you won't use either a Mac or Windows machine. If you have a job that happens to include a computer, like an accountant or computer artist, then you choose something user friendly. -- kainaw ™ 15:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

With all due respect, this is the exact type of non-encyclopedic (reference desk is about facts, right??) generalization that shouldn't warrant further discussion. Without getting into an argument about which is the better ("Oh you must be a luminary if you use linux") but the computer and operating system you use is like the beer you like to drink... because there is no right or wrong answer, it's about personal choice and you shouldn't advocate your personal bias against another computer; in the same way you shouldn't criticize another man's choice of beer. Oh, and I use windows for work and home, solaris unix at work and I've used linux for both purposes but chose not use it any more. Sandman30s (talk) 19:32, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

People have strong feelings about computer choices, the same as they do football teams and religions and everything else. Macs tend to be more expensive (and you are probably paying a large premium for "good aesthetics" and "large advertising budget" as part of your price) and have more limited hardware options than PCs. On the other hand, you have far less trouble with things like viruses and malware than PC users do, and the machines as a whole are usually better "integrated" than a PC would be, and the simplicity in your choice-making can be seen as a virtue for some. Linux people love the fact that their OS is free and that if they want to they can reprogram that whole thing at a whim. There are legitimate reasons for preferring one set over another, but they depend on your values as a computer user and consumer. These days all of the different operating systems are trying so hard to look more or less like one another that many of the superficial differences are quite small. Personally I find MacBooks to be generally more impressive than their PC counterparts, but would never buy an iPhone as they seem to be overly restrictive and too high priced. To each their own! --Mr.98 (talk) 14:27, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Macs have a famously loyal fanbase. See Apple evangelist, then Backlash (sociology).

\sim

Lenoxus " * " 14:50, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Apple is not merely marketing their products on technical specification alone. Apple computer and electronics products represent a particular style and approach to computing; and more than other computer systems, Apple products also represent a cultural and fashion statement. They are very "user-friendly" in the sense that their designs gloss over many technical details; they also make certain user customizations impossible. This design approach also makes a lot of commonplace tasks very smooth and simple. For example, if you want to purchase and play mp3 files, Apple iTunes is very convenient and integrates to their entire product lineup (from iPod to iPad to iMac). But if you want to change the login-screen wallpaper (hardly an unusual/technical request!), the process is actually quite arduous - because this "breaks" the Apple branding and style, it is not an "Apple-supported" feature, and the process is actually not user-friendly at all. There are lots of similar examples - if your use-case requires, for example, specialized hardware modifications, Apple computers may entirely unsuitable. There are a lot of good reasons to use an Apple system; and a lot of good reasons not to; and there are a lot of silly and unfounded opinions on both sides of the pro- and anti-Apple fence. Make a decision based on your needs and budget: see Comparison of operating systems. You might be surprised to realize that there are hundreds, or thousands, of free and commercially available computer operating systems for thousands of variations on hardware and form factor; the game has many players besides just Mac, Windows, (and Linux). Most of these systems are not the right computer for you - but you can only make an informed choice after you've investigated several options. Nimur (talk) 14:59, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Change your friends and buy whichever computer you want. Don't change them because of their ignorance or sectarianism over computers, change them because they're stupid.

Think of a Mac as a possibly (it's for you to decide) pretty package in which Mac OS X runs. Mac OS X has certain arguable advantages over Windows; presumably you know about these. One extraordinary (in my view) disadvantage is that it's extraordinarily difficult to avoid using the rat (mouse, trackball, whatever). In Windows (and most Linux distros), Alt-F will take you to the file menu of a GUI program. Yes, you can use the rat if you wish, or you can go faster with Ctrl-S or similar if you know what you want, but you also have the Alt + letter options. Meanwhile, with a Mac ... well, since a Mac has a "Command" and an "Option" key, it wouldn't be surprising if the key for this were different. So what is the key? Uh, there isn't one.

Apple also has the bizarre notion that people don't want or are confused by a second button on their rat. But luckily they're not dogmatic about that. You donate the Apple rat supplied in the box to a charity shop and buy an alternative from Logitech or wherever, and find that Apple has thoughtfully provided for the right button after all.

If you like Mac OS X but prefer Wintel hardware, then investigate the Hackintosh. -- Hoary (talk) 15:27, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When I changed from Macs to Windows (which, due to a badly-timed attack of poverty, was exactly when OS X came out), I had to unlearn all the Mac keyboard shortcuts; and, as you say, they don't have shortcuts to open menus - but they do have a bunch of standard shortcuts to do simple things immediately in one keystroke. So I found myself pressing alt-Q (that is, apple-Q) a lot, in particular, to no avail, rather than alt-F and then X. By now I've learned all the single-press shortcuts, like alt-tab and alt-F4, but I still haven't acquired the habit of opening menus from the keyboard, and this is coming from a long-term Angband player. 81.131.5.26 (talk) 17:43, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

[edit conflict] I'd disagree with this, actually. I have a MacBook Pro, and I've never once used a mouse with it. I (and many other people I know) actually enjoy using the trackpad more. By default it's decent, but combined with some freely available third party software it can be customized far, far more than any other trackpad I've seen, to the point where I don't even want to have a mouse. As for the original question, there's a lot of different reasons. Unfortunately I do think a large part of it is due to the aura of smugness Apple often projects and the intractable ravings of some of the most vocal fans. I personally am a very happy Mac user (and a computer person—you can have computer people use Apple products too!), yet find those two things quite irritating as well. I think a major contributing factor is people just not knowing much about Macs and OS X in general and just repeating things they hear other people say. In my opinion, it ultimately depends on your needs and budget. I'm more than happy to recommend Windows, OS X, or Linux (having used all three) to different people based on what their own personal requirements are. 173.66.149.81 (talk) 17:45, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To answer the original question about why there's "prejudice", the strongly opinionated divide between the two camps has existed since the Mac was introduced, and it has gone both ways, with Mac users snorting at the inferiority of Windows. But this sort of divide has also existed with previous PCs, where the Apple II users snorted with contempt at the Atari 400 and Commodore 64, and vice versa; and in video game consoles, where you can easily find the raging wars on the message boards about why Xbox is totally superior to PlayStation, and vice versa. I have always attributed this to two things: (1) the psychological principle in which people become irremediably attached to their previous investments of time and money. If you've spent two years with Windows, the very idea that a Mac would have been a better choice is an insult to your intelligence and your two years of investment. (Same idea going the other way.) (2) Basic human tribalism, especially among the young. I belong to the Windows tribe or to the Apple tribe, and because I'm tribal, rather than this just being human beings having chosen to use either a hammer-and-nails or a screwdriver-and-screws, the choice assigns you to either "us" or "them", and the two groups are fundamentally opposed. As an aside, the divide ought to be less now than it was in the 1990s, because Macs can dual-boot, so the fight now really is (or ought to be) Windows OS versus Mac OS, rather than a fight about all the hardware architecture as well. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:47, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think a lot of the Mac pride is residual from the fact that the Macintosh 128K was really amazing and unique - for roughly 18 months, starting in 1984. 81.131.5.26 (talk) 18:16, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it has to do with Evangelism marketing?Smallman12q (talk) 22:15, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Psychology of small differences"

The "us" vs. "them" goofiness described above reminds me of a concept I once read about on Wikipedia. It was about how when two groups of people are very similar they will tend to magnify the importance of whatever small differences might exist between them. Example (second joke). Can anyone point me to it? Thanks. --Sean 16:04, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sectarianism? Bloody splitters! 213.122.69.236 (talk) 19:44, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if there's a particular name for this (I can't think of one, and I am fairly familiar with cognitive biases), but it would probably get lumped under cognitive dissonance. Basically, a small difference in the middle of otherwise large coherence will produce more cognitive dissonance than a large differences overall, because the greater the similarity between the two, the more likely that differences will produce value judgements. --Ludwigs2 23:17, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I actually trailed through a dozen or so articles (starting with tribalism) before I hit on sectarianism, and one other that seemed as if it might fit was group polarization. This article might be about the phenomenon you just described, or it might make contradictory assertions, or be about something else entirely, I have difficulty telling. Anyway, there it is. 213.122.59.149 (talk) 09:25, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't compared prices for the last couple of years, but through most of their history Macs have had higher prices compared to other machines with similar benchmarks. (Last time I checked this difference was almost double for their cheapest machines, but negligible for their most expensive high-performance machines. But I want to stress this was at least three years ago when I last personally researched this.)

Their supporters often claim that the price difference is explained by Apple devices being "Luxury" devices and that you pay more for a nicer machine. (A Luxury car might not have a more powerful engine than a Honda civic, but it might still be worth more to you.) Their detractors claim that the 'luxury' factor is an illusion caused by very aggressive, and very clever, marketing.

Personally, Every time I've looked into buying a new machine, I've always agreed with the mac-haters that Macs are too expensive for what you get, but then again, I drive a Hyundai, so maybe I just don't value luxury. APL (talk) 14:49, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Getting the static URL for a Flash video

It is a sad and sobering experience when you realize that you're dumber than Fred Phelps. I was trying to create a static link to a video he recently posted of a flag and Koran burning, which is prominently displayed at http://www.godhatesfags.com/. I did a view source and easily got the URL for the flash:

This is passed via his site's function openVideo:

options: {flashVars: {media:vid, autoplay:"Yes-on first video"}}

to Shadowbox.open

Now flashVars go directly to the flash player

But where in hell is the base? Because guess what, http://www.godhatesfags.com/video/20100911koranburn.flv is a 404.

I also tried downloading and using FireBug according to [1], but all it ever got me, despite cache clearing, was a useless link to singleflashplayer.swf .

This is actually somewhat important for video referencing in articles, since otherwise, all you can say is, duh, look at his site, maybe you'll find it. Wnt (talk) 17:55, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You're getting a 404 because you're trying to use HTTP to download it. It's not served over HTTP: it's served over RTMP. You can't easily cook up that reference into a plain rtmp:// url, because a) free-standing player support for rtmp is patchy at best and b) rtmp has a bunch of other parameters that may need to be specified (read about that here). While you may be able to figure out all the parameters you'd need to specify (that's what flash video downloaders like DownloadHelper for Firefox do) you wouldn't end up with something that's easily clickable. So I doubt anyone will consider this to be an acceptable way of verifying something. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 19:20, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't get it. Firefox obviously can play the video. I just want it to know which flash file I want to watch and act as if I've just hit the play button. For this purpose it's not important to save the stream to disk or bypass the ordinary Flash player. Wnt (talk) 19:42, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Firefox isn't playing the video. A flash application embedded in an HTML page is playing it. That player, and not Firefox, is engaging in the RTMP session to download and play the video. Without that flash application Firefox can't play the video (even though Firefox has a flash plugin, that's not enough). So to make a playable url for that video, you need to have an http url to an html page containing that flash player. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 19:52, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose that the "singleflashplayer.swf" file is the flash application you're describing. But what's so special about it? It sounds generic. According to Flash Video there are many standalone players. I ran one of these, VLC media player, and it has a drop-down menu to choose rtmp:, and I entered www.godhatesfags.com/video/20100911koranburn.flv as the target ... still no action. Software aborted connection, no handshake received. I don't get it - these programs seem like they must do something, if properly used.

Put it this way: suppose I wanted to aspire to be as clever as Fred Phelps and put up a flash application on my own site to play this .flv file. How would I do it? Wnt (talk) 20:51, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There's frequently nothing special about the particular flash player; lots of sites use the same one. A few (like the one for the BBC's iPlayer service) do all kinds of clever stuff, but most don't. I doubt Phelps' one is anything special. When you say there are lots of players for "flash video", that's true, for FLV files. But you're not playing a file, you're playing a stream, so the "player" needs to talk the streaming protocol as well as understand the file format of that which is streamed. Indeed, lots of players can play FLV files. But most won't do a worthwhile job of playing even the simplest rtmp streams. VLC has support, but it only works for a fraction of streams. That stream-recorder.com post I linked to above tells you how to use a special program to figure out the options for a given (standard) RTMP session. If you do that for this stream, you might get an rtmp:// url that VLC will play (it's rather more complex than what you have - you seem to have to specify the server-side "app" and a "client" field as well), but (as that post notes) there are some additional parameters to an RTMP session that can't be represented in a URL - if those are relevant to this particular case, you're out of luck (and frankly that rtmpsrv process is rather more involved than I can be bothered doing; your commitment may be greater than mine). And at the end of it you'll get a URL that will open on only a few computers, assuming they're configured just right. All of this is because FLV, RTMP, and the RTMP url scheme are entirely non-standard. Things should be much more straightforward with HTML5 video (although codec support will be an issue even then). Lastly, if you wanted to play this video on your own site, you'd copy his HTML code and embed it in an HTML page on yours (unless he checks the http referrer, you can have almost everything still hosted on his site, and only have your own html). The problem with using his video on Wikipedia is of course that you can't embed custom javascript and a flash player in a normal Wikipedia article. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 21:09, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Now if you're thinking "why don't these bozos just download the file over http", which would of course let you have an http:// url to the file, which is just what you want. And that's technically perfectly possible; HTTP has had a "range-request" header (which is what you'd use to seek around a non-live stream) since http1.1. Indeed, that's how the open-source OS-FLV player works (do your same analysis of their demo page and you see they do have an http:// url to the downloadable flv, which you can indeed link to or download directly). But it's not in Adobe's interest to do that, as all this RTMP pain is one of the main things keeping people using their stuff. And its not in the interests of big video download sites doing it, because then people would post download links to their vids, and they'd lose ad traffic (although in fairness YouTube does do some HTML5 video, I believe). -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 21:34, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Here's how you do it without ever having any flash player installed: get the swf. flasm -x (decompress) it. strings it. rtmp://98.190.12.131/ appears. Look at that, 98.190.12.131 is wsip-98-190-12-131.ks.ks.cox.net, "KS" is the Home of the Idiot (state motto, I think). Try rtmp://98.190.121.131/video/20100911koranburn.flv with mplayer. Bingo. --69.245.226.104 (talk) 00:01, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm... I downloaded the mplayer version from mulder.dummwiedeutsch.org, typed in URL rtmp://98.190.121.131/video/20100911koranburn.flv ... and nothing. 0x0 resolution, according to the info. I assume that nothing in the the first steps don't affect what happens when I do this, given that I'm using this URL. I see that there are many options for video and audio codec in the playback, and perhaps I merely need to figure out what they are somehow (I know someone posted instructions above, but I became skeptical somewhere around the part about "remember to change back your hosts file..."). I think that the gist of the above has been that .flv is not really one format, but a multitude of incompatible formats, which are not labelled to indicate which is which.

It's worth noting, however, that if I can figure out how to set each of the four columns, and can tell users to set download mplayer and set those four options and enter the rtmp: URL, then this approaches a usable reference link. Not exactly click and go, but it would be at least an option. Wnt (talk) 04:22, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Never heard of mulder.dummwiedeutsch.org, and it doesn't exist now as far as I can tell, so I have no idea what you've found. But if it's actually mplayer, then mplayer -dumpfile foo.flv -dumpstream rtmp://... should save it. 69.245.226.104 (talk) 04:56, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm... When you linked mplayer above, I went to [2] from the article. Which says "The recommended way to install MPlayer is to compile from current SVN source. Look at the unofficial packages section of our projects page if you do not wish to compile from source and/or are looking for packages that may be more tightly integrated with your platform..." Now to me, this last part sounds like opensourcese for "packages that might actually work on your platform", though perhaps I am terribly wrong and out of date and nowadays you can just compile up a program on another computer system besides the one the author used without battly baddering your head 'gainst the wall. This SMPlayer was the one of the unofficial packages that looked viable and finished. But I don't see a command line option -dumpfile (though I'm not sure the options they list in the GUI are smplayer options or mplayer options...). But do I need dumpfile for my goal of getting a Simple Out Of The Box Link to third-party flash videos? I thought that was just to save the .flv, which this claims to maybe-possibly do with "other drivers", unspecified. I feel as if all these people are afraid that if they come out and explain themselves in a usable manual that they'll get sued for it, but maybe I'm wrong. Wnt (talk) 05:39, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On further inspection, I see there is a mulder.dummwiedeutsch.de, not .org as you said. And I'm sorry that your OS puts up so many obstacles between you and getting mplayer installed properly. Let me restate what I've said already, without extra details: rtmp://98.190.121.131/video/20100911koranburn.flv is the address of the video. mplayer, at least as installed on my system (from SVN, not from any "unofficial package"), is perfectly happy to play it, with no extra configuration necessary. I suggested downloading because that would provide a way around the problem that your mplayer was unable to play it. The implied suggestion (not implied strongly enough, apparently) was that you download it with mplayer since mplayer understands the RTMP mumbo-jumbo, and then play it with the movie player of your choice. But now you're back asking for the "link" again, which is a question that had already been answered. rtmp://98.190.121.131/video/20100911koranburn.flv is it. All clear now? 69.245.226.104 (talk) 08:05, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Firefox Plugin called "Unplug" does a good job of sniffing out Flash URLs. --Sean 16:10, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

texting

whats a program i can text my gf with on the computer but it looks like its coming from my number. i hate texting on my phone. i will pay —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomjohnson357 (talk • contribs) 18:34, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The best way to approach this would be work out if you can, and if you can how to connect your phone to your computer. (Does it have Bluetooth? Infrared? If not it will hopefully support some sort of cable connection.) Once you have, find a program which can access your phone. The phone manufacturer will usually provide one, although for popular brands like Nokia and Sony-Ericsson you'll likely find other user developed software which may be better. In any case, most software will be able to use your phone to send SMSes (and sometimes MMSes). Alternatively your mobile network provider may have an online service. Nil Einne (talk) 19:33, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

are there any on line programs i can use? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomjohnson357 (talk • contribs) 23:44, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just google "send text message using computer". I used to send text this way when I didn't have text messaging on my phone. Lots of advertisements though.--70.222.49.57 (talk) 06:10, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The OP apparently wants the sender's number to be the same as their mobile number which isn't something commonly (AFAIK) offered by free services. Even pay services don't always offer this service. According to SMS spoofing, Skype does but it's not clear how the reply path will work, in other words even though the message may look like it's coming from your phone if someone replies to the message it may end up somewhere you don't want, presuming it doesn't get lost completely. [3] suggests SMS spoofing often doesn't even work in the US where the OP lives. As I've said above, some mobile network providers do offer the option to send SMS via their website or similar means, it's not clear to me the OP has looked into their mobile network provider which is surely the best option first up Nil Einne (talk) 06:36, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Our provider (though not free) allows us to set any sender on SMS messages as we like, up to 10 alphanumeric characters or 16 numeric characters if I'm correct. In practice, it's no problem for us to set. eg the European emergency number 1-1-2 as the sender of an SMS message. Unilynx (talk) 16:30, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are plenty of websites which will send text messages to a mobile number. Whether they will send using your own mobile number, I don't know.

On the other hand, why do you dislike using your phone to send text messages? Have you considered turning on T9 text prediction? It works very well on my phone, though I know some people find it more confusing (in which case you can turn it off). Astronaut (talk) 06:44, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We use these guys at work, but I'm not sure whether they are international. We send the SMS via a web interface or unix script. They have contracts with the cell providers in order to be able to do this. Sandman30s (talk) 11:39, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Word's Editing Tools

I recently found out about the strikethrough tool in Words and I'm finding it useful to do editings. Now I'm interested in knowing all the other such useful tools in Words that serve the editing purpose. Please tell me what they are. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.68.120.162 (talk) 21:54, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like you're describing the "track changes" feature - there's info about using it here. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 21:56, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What it really sounds like you want is a tutorial on all of Word's "useful" features. There are manuals and books and help files galore on "Microsoft Weird"; it's been my impression that this reference desk is for answers to specific questions which someone is having trouble finding otherwise. If you can handle a Google (or other search engine) search, there are many, many places to find this information. If not, try your local bookstore; a Borders or Barnes & Noble will have a section on this program.

rc (talk) 22:08, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, our job is to point out useful references - this OP's question is extremely broad, but it still probably qualifies as a valid request for "reference material." Nimur (talk) 07:04, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For editing, "Track Changes" is pretty essential. You can also "Compare Documents" which is pretty useful if someone has edited one and you have edited another. --Mr.98 (talk) 23:27, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've found the official Microsoft help and online resources to be excellent quality: Getting started with Word 2010 will help you locate additional resources. Here is the main Word Help and How-To guide. Here is the tutorial for how to use Reviewing features in Word. Nimur (talk) 07:04, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

September 13

old computer doesn't play HD video

My decade old P4 computer having an Intel D845 chipset board and SDRAM cannot play high definition video clips. The monitor would go black and then after a minute or two it comes back with a crash report of some driver but the display would be crude and grainy. Is there a way to make the system play HD with some additional contraption like video card?--117.204.84.46 (talk) 00:08, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

First try VLC media player. Not likely to help but worth trying for free. Second, check out cards with video accelerations: AMD HD 5570 or Nvidia GT 220 should have no problem with Full HD video playback, not to mention 720p, plus they would let you play a lot of 3D games. But be careful, most variants of HD 5570/GT 220 use PCI Express. Your motherboard could support only AGP, in a latter case you would be limited to AGP video cards. 70.52.185.227 (talk) 01:36, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is my mobo. It has two versions with DDR and SDRAM of which mine is the older SDRAM compatible. Can my PC show HD avi files (absolutely no gaming requirement) with an entry level AGP card?--117.204.94.35 (talk) 05:06, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Probably not. We need to know your video card model to be sure. In Windows (correct?) click Start > Run > and type "dxdiag" (without quotes) and hit enter. Then when the DirectX Tool comes up, select the (probably) 3rd tab marked "Display" and tell us the name and model of your graphics card. THEN we can tell you with certainty whether HD is a possibility (though the likely answer is no). Masked Booby (talk) 08:11, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you have an Nvidia card, it's recommended that you get PureVideo installed for HD playback. You would also need the latest DirectX 9 drivers, not because your player needs them, but just to see if your system can handle it. You would need the latest compatible video card drivers. Even then, your CPU and GPU (not to mention probable lack of RAM for buffering) are going to struggle displaying HD smoothly in 30 frames per second (I assume you don't want stuttery playback). Sometimes you just have to upgrade to move with the times. Sandman30s (talk) 11:29, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

---------------
Display Devices
---------------
       Card name: Intel(R) 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV Graphics Controller
    Manufacturer: Intel Corporation
       Chip type: Intel(R) 82845G Graphics Controller
        DAC type: Internal
      Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2562&SUBSYS_4C598086&REV_01
  Display Memory: 64.0 MB

Any chance of getting more juice out of this old gadget? --117.204.81.140 (talk) 15:38, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Meta date

How can I get rid of metadata? I want it all gone, and I don't want it to come back —Preceding unsigned comment added by Carrymine (talk • contribs) 15:04, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Where is the metadata you want to get rid of? --Phil Holmes (talk) 15:08, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As our metadata article says, metadata is "data about data", so we don't know what sorts of files you're referring to. Technically, all of the files on your hard disk have some metadata about them (like the file creation date and the file modification date), but I'm sure that's not what you're referring to. Do you mean the EXIF metadata that's associated with each of your photos, by any chance? Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:14, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Computers double

Why do computer things always double? 16 -> 32 -> 64 -> 128 etc. Also, when will 128 bit computers be here? Painiscalling (talk) 15:34, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Because [0, 2ⁿ - 1] (2ⁿ different numbers) is the unsigned integer range that can be represented in n bits. 128 address bits is enough for a huge amount of memory (10²⁶ terabytes) so probably never. --85.76.188.101 (talk) 15:51, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"128 address bits is enough for a huge amount of memory" - somewhat irrelevant IMHO. 64 address bits is enough for 16 exbibytes of memory which is also a huge amount of memory by many definitions. The reason we have 64 address bits is not because we want 16 exbibytes of memory but because 32 address bits was no longer enough (amongst other things). Similarly we will move to 128 address bits if and when 64 is no longer enough (which is also likely to be a very, very, very long time away, if it ever arises), we aren't going to stick with 64 address bits if we need more because 128 seems like too many. It's possible we might do 96 bits or something but I doubt it. (Although it wouldn't be surprising if initial or even all 128 bit CPUs only support 96 bits or less, similar to the way all? current x86-64 CPUs only support 48 bit addressing. However even if you argue that means they're not really 128 bit, the relevant issue remains how big 96 bits or whatever is i.e. when or if it will no longer be enough, not how big 128 bits is per se. ) Nil Einne (talk) 16:38, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also, doubling is an easy way to design. Take something that works, and just double it. 128bit processors, as in addressing 128bits of memory, are probably unlikely for the time to come. However, how do you define the 'bits' of a processor? If you consider the data size of the CPU instructions, SSE4 already operates on 128-bits of data. 16:25, 13 September 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Unilynx (talk • contribs)

The real reason is data structure alignment. The problem with large memory addresses is that they waste memory. But anything more than 32 bits and less than 64 would almost always end up padded to 64 bits anyway, wasting the same amount of memory. So it makes sense to jump from 32 bits to 64 bits in one go. That's also why your video card supports "32-bit color" that consists of 8 bits each of red, green, and blue, and 8 wasted bits per pixel. Intel CPUs have actually had 128-bit registers for SSE instructions since the Pentium III in 1999, and they are introducing 256-bit registers in 2011 (AVX), and they will no doubt go to 512 bits in the future. But the CPUs are called 64-bit because of the internal address size—although the external address bus is smaller than that. The naming has always been pretty arbitrary. The "16 bit" Super Nintendo had 16-bit CPU registers, an 8-bit data bus, and a 24-bit address space. The "16 bit" Sega Genesis/Mega Drive had 32-bit CPU registers, a 16-bit data bus, and a 24-bit address space, if I'm remembering correctly. -- BenRG (talk) 17:21, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, the real answer to question 1 is the way computers do addressing in the first place. Remember that everything is in 1s and 0s, and consider the case of specifying a particular byte of memory. The memory system somehow needs to provide the contents of that memory based on a set of 1s and 0s -- the "address" of that part of memory, usually a byte. So you build hardware (memory chips, used to be memory boards) that accepts a set number of 1s and 0s, and allow every byte in that memory space its own combination of 1s and 0s as its address.

However many 1s and 0s you provide, the maximum number of combinations of them is a power of 2 -- 4, 8, 16, etc. So you get powers of 2 as the most efficient way to use the hardware, and hardware used to be the expensive part (not so very long ago, in elapsed time as measured by humans). This is the same reason so many other things that need addressing one way or another -- ports on a hub or router, for instance -- also come in powers of 2 (4, 16, etc.). Each time you add another 1 or 0 to a given number of 1s and 0s, you double the number of addresses they can specify. 4 bits can address 16 things, 5 can address 32, etc.

The size of computer instruction sets, registers, I/O systems, etc., is driven by this basic characteristic of binary addressing.

I don't know the answer to question 2 -- I presume they'll show up when they can be sold for more than it takes to make them.

rc (talk) 22:23, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Resize

What would be the best program (free preferably) that could resize 30,000 images of my favorite singer I have downloaded? Windows computer, so I don't want weird linux stuff Canadian sk8er girl (talk) 16:13, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

ImageMagick is available for Windows and does what you want. Insulting Linux was rather gratuitous. Marnanel (talk) 16:25, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

IrfanView can also do batch resizes, and doesn't involve using a command-line interface. I think that ImageMagick might be considered by many people too much like a "weird linux thing" even if it's running on a Windows machine. Buddy431 (talk) 17:03, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

ImageMagick on a Mac is a "weird linux thing" (it requires all sorts of compiling and porting and etc., which is what I associate with "weird linux things"), but on a Windows machine it acts like any command line program. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:10, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that most computer users today (including myself) are fairly inexperienced with and adverse to command-line interface programs. When someone says "Linux" I immediately think of a command line interface (even realizing that there exist command-line interface programs in Windows, and that some linux setups do a good job with Graphical user interface). To me, someone saying "I don't want weird linux stuff" is saying "I want an intuitive, well built, easily used program with a nice GUI that I can understand without memorizing a bunch of commands". That's what I like out of my programs, anyway. Buddy431 (talk) 18:20, 13 September 2010 (UTC) [reply]

I think there are people who call Linux "weird" by default, just because it's different from Windows. JIP | Talk 09:39, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'd agree if one is talking about something one might use every day, but this sounds like a one-time job. You don't need to memorize any commands; you just look up what the magic settings are and plug them in. For a one-time batch operation, it's a pretty convenient way to do things, even if you don't use command line interfaces very often (I don't). No memorization needed, just a one-time consultation of online examples. In any case, I'm not pushing this method over another, I'm just pointing out that as far as "weird things" go, on a Windows machine it's not terribly hard to pull off, compared to a lot of things. To execute the command does not take any deep understanding of the command line or the program, which is where I would draw a line between what is "hard" and not. (If using a program requires five years of previous experience with similar programs, that's "hard" if you don't have that experience.) --Mr.98 (talk) 19:39, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I would add that for doing the same thing to a bunch of different inputs, the command line has it all over the GUI. It's well worth getting used to, even if you're not interested in switching to Linux. --Trovatore (talk) 22:02, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have never had to compile or port ImageMagick on Linux in all the years I've been using it. We have package managers. Do you? Marnanel (talk) 22:51, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, whatever the terminology, it took me (who is pretty computer savvy, but not very experienced with Linux) literally days to figure out how to get it to the point where I could type "convert" into the shell and have it do something correctly. First I had to make the package manager work correctly, which wasn't straightforward, then there was some kind of compiling, some kind of errors, and so on, endlessly. I got it working but only after a lot of difficulty, and after going through a lot of instructions that seemed to already assume I had been using Linux for the past 5 years. Compare that to the PC version, where you can just download the convert.exe executable and you're done. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:14, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a little confused — was this on a Linux machine, or on a Mac? Or were you running Linux on a Mac? --Trovatore (talk) 00:53, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know about Mac, but On Windows I'm pretty sure you'd just install Cygwin and click on the ImageMagick check box during install. Easy enough. APL (talk) 14:56, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To address the question: assuming the user is willing to install ImageMagick and use the command line, it seems the following will work. Say you have a directory with many jpg files. If "convert.exe" is in your path (I believe ImageMagick adds its directory to the PATH automatically), execute the following on the command line in the directory with the files:

for %i in (*.jpg) do convert -resize 50% %i resized_%i

Hopefully you can see that you can change the percentage resize factor (there should also be options for specifying an absolute width or height for all images), and that the new file name will be written to whatever you want ("resized_" can be changed to any term, though it needs to precede the %i portion. The files could later be batch renamed to get rid of the prefix. If you are willing to overwrite the originals, remove "resized_" altogether, but maybe copy the originals to a backup directory first). The OP may have a more complicated scenario, which we could look at if they are willing to head this direction. (I thank Fin. M. for introducing me to ImageMagick (I think it was him) and am "paying it forward".) Riggr Mortis (talk) 21:56, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose ImageMagick also has a GUI version that performs this function (I haven't used it). If so, my answer was probably a waste of time? Riggr Mortis (talk)

ImageMagick has a GUI (it's called "display") but as far as I know there is no way to perform the same operation on multiple files from the GUI, except by laboriously opening them one at a time. For what the original poster wants to do, the command-line version is clearly best.

My quibble would be though that you should specify what shell you're using. It doesn't look to me like the two I know best (csh and bash), although I don't know either one well enough to be sure it wouldn't work. --Trovatore (talk) 08:29, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am lost can you please tracert me so I can find out where I am

I have been dumped in the woods. Fortunately I have a laptop with about 40 minutes battery and an available wireless network with free access. Can you please help me find where I am by using tracert and locating the results on a map for me? I will now turn off the laptop to conserve battery power, I will check back here in about one hour. Thanks so much.130.56.95.117 (talk) 21:46, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No. I don't think that search-and-rescue-on-request is a service which Wikipedia can provide. Sorry. ╟─Treasury Tag►sheriff─╢ 21:49, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm still trying to figure out (a) where one would find a woods big enough to get lost in that has available free wireless, (b) why the user can't fire up google maps to find a way out, and (c) why he wouldn't send an email to the local police or ranger station.

I'm most curious about (a), though. if I could find a campsite that wouldn't threaten my internet addiction I'd be in heaven. --Ludwigs2 21:56, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps when you had 46 minutes of battery left you should have been doing something other than vandalizing? --Tardis (talk) 21:57, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In any case, tracert wouldn't give us that precise information. We can see you're somewhere in Canberra... which you'd assuredly know. The ISP might be able to triangulate, or at least figure out what base station you'd be coming from, but we don't have access to that information. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:30, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Appears to be a Scibaby sockpuppet playing games. Viriditas (talk) 00:22, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

well, duh! but as games go, it's not a terribly disturbing one. --Ludwigs2 00:47, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Compatibility of MGS2

Is the PC version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance compatible with Windows Vista or Windows 7? If not, can it be easily played on an average-quality computer with Windows XP?--99.251.211.17 (talk) 22:26, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

September 14

Lost pictures on SD card

I have recently loaded pictures on my PC from my SD card . Now my SD card says no image when in the camera how do I return the pictures to my SD card from the PC? Alan Wright —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.7.151.47 (talk) 05:57, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Did you perhaps move rather than copy? Sometimes you can just copy back again, but sometimes this doesn't work in the camera. There is software available that will recover lost images. I recently used Convar's "PC Inspector smart recovery" and was surprised to find images from more than a year ago still on the (large) SD card. Dbfirs 07:14, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Question header added. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 07:44, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are you asking how to move photos from your computer to your camera? Many cameras will insist on having the exact files created by the camera with the exact file names, in the exact folders. If you've so much as rotated them by 90 degrees the camera may refuse to recognize them. (They're not really general-purpose image viewers.) So you'll need to take those exact files and copy them back into the exact same folder they were in. APL (talk) 15:16, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In the event you didn't move them, but instead they were erased, there are ways to recover things from the SD card. But to do so, don't use the SD card until you've recovered the files you're interested in. If that's the case, ask it as a new question here. Shadowjams (talk) 01:21, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you need to recover files, what operating system are you using. Second, how do you access the files on your camera (do you remove the card and put it into the computer/another device, or do you plug a cord into your camera). Shadowjams (talk) 06:46, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Shadowjams gives solid advice about not attempting to use the SD card till you've retrieved any content from it. Whether your OS is Windows (95 or above), Mac OS X or Linux, an excellent tool for retrieving content from the card is PhotoRec. (You'll find its price appealing too.) Tama1988 (talk) 07:43, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Java generics, what use is "extends"?

Resolved

Java generics there are wild cards. I understand these as

"?" - any type
"? extends T" - any subtype of T
"? super T" - any superype of T

I can see that "extends" could be useful, if you want a list of types extending a class or interfaces, but I can't grasp what use "super" is. Presumably "super T" means that objects or any other supertype can be assigned, so you really can't say much about the contents! -- Q Chris (talk) 08:08, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Read about the "Get and Put Principle" here, and follow up in this thread if you still don't get it (this stuff is tricky!). Page 7 of this presentation has a shorter treatment. --Sean 14:50, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Covariance and contravariance (computer science) is the Wikipedia article about this, though it could stand improvement. The idea is simply that you can convert from a subtype to a supertype, but not the other way around. So if you're storing a value into an array of T, for example, you can use any subtype of T, while if you're loading a value from an array of T, you can treat it as any supertype of T. If you're both loading and storing then it needs to be both a subtype and a supertype of T, and the only type with that property is T itself. This ought to apply to Java's built-in arrays too; the fact that it doesn't is a famous hole in Java's type system, mentioned in the article. -- BenRG (talk) 18:57, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks both of you, I see it now! -- Q Chris (talk) 10:28, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

can we make an arrangement?

Is it probable I can make an arrangement with someone with much greater programming skills than myself, as well as money from their programming career, but with a dearth of ideas, such that I - for whom the implementation of any of my ideas would take a month of solid programming investment - could supply them the idea and direct their programming activity but we could jointly share from the profit? (Even if at a rate of 10% for myself). Or is that arrangement less than probable? If it is probable that I could make it, where should I start? 92.230.233.251 (talk) 12:49, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Bluntly:

Everyone has ideas. I get so afflicted by ideas that I write them down so I can get peace to get on with what I was doing; so I have a pile of ideas twice as thick as the phone book. There's all kinds of junk: spine-crushingly wonky space elevators, video games of immense complexity and unutterable dullness, parallel computation using brittlestars, weird tensegrity structures, and the plot for an adult movie so filthy it would set the sky on fire. I don't claim to be imaginative; I'm probably rather below average. When everyone has ideas, ideas alone are worthless.
People who don't program vastly underestimate how much programming effort anything worthwhile takes. This is exacerbated when they see how relatively quickly a decent programmer can knock out something that looks finished (a half-decent web programmer could put out a Twitter clone in a few days; that doesn't remotely mean that there's a few days, or even a few years, of programming in Twitter)

So, frankly, if all you bring to the table is an idea, you bring nothing.

Unfortunately, I look like I'm a nice approachable decent human being (when I'm nothing of the sort) and remarkably frequently people make me just the proposition you're suggesting. Their "idea" is mostly along the lines of "Facebook but better", "Twitter but better", "Google but better", and so forth. These people have neither an idea nor a clue.

That said, there are plenty of circumstances where a non-technical person is key in building a business based on a technical system like a website. But that person has to bring a great deal to the table: a fully explored design of what needs to be built (literally hundreds of pages of detailed design), graphic design, marketing strategy, business plans, customer lists, financial models, in-depth lists of prospective customers, and well developed relationships with customers, suppliers, partners, and investors. With all that in place, when the software is just a component, when you've got the business kinda running with a paper-based system or some Excel macros cobbled together, then you're certainly in a position to build a business. I'm sorry if I sound blunt or discouraging: there are huge opportunities for people to build interesting businesses and exciting systems, and millions of people struggling with mostly-manual business processes, but the road to Damascus is a long one, and the idea is just the first of very many steps. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 13:41, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is how it is stated in the entertainment industry: Ideas are worthless. Money is in execution. -- kainaw ™ 13:42, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Post one of your ideas here and perhaps one of the many programmers on this forum will comment on it to give you an idea of how realistic your plan is. --Sean 14:56, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's just the problem (beyond what Finlay already said). There's no legal protection for ideas, so a person wanting to make money from it won't be willing to post it to find out its value. Moreover, they can't trust a random programmer they've just met not to say "wow that's crap" and then go home and write/sell it. You'd have to have a contract (almost an NDA) before starting such an endeavor, and most programmers aren't going to want to sign a contract just to hear some idea of completely unknown value to them. You'd probably have to pay them to sign the contract and listen! --Tardis (talk) 14:58, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, because of everything outlined by Finlay, even if your idea is one-of-a-kind brilliant and actually possible, programmers are going to be very, very wary of working under the terms you outlined.

Though 90% of the profits is very reasonable, but who is going to market it and make it a big success? (For example : Run-away hit Farmville is a clone of an earlier web game that no one had heard of.) It seems like you're expecting a lot of profits, who will be handling the business side of things? Who will be managing everything? Is your idea web-based? If so, who will handle the maintenance costs that will sky-rocket once your idea becomes popular? (And who will actually perform the maintenance? If the answer to this question starts "Well, you're our technical guy..." the programmer will head for the hills.)

I'm not saying that a two-man team couldn't take the world by storm, but your half of the team is going to have to have a lot more on the ball than "idea man". APL (talk) 15:13, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OP here. You can't have it both ways, guys. If I were to understand and agree with your reasons for not going into the arrangement I outlined, I would immediately cease to have an ounce of sympathy for someone working for a mere $40-$60 per hour while their boss makes millions off of them. In fact, if a decent programmer can implement my ideas in a couple of hours, by everything I've just read above, I should just pay them for their time on an hourly rate, without sharing a cent of my profits. Well, enjoy your $600, mates. 82.113.121.135 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 15:27, 14 September 2010 (UTC).[reply]

In 99% of all cases would much rather work for hourly money upfront than for some vague promise of riches later. It's not worth it for me to buy into the delusions of grandeur of the world's approximately one zillion self-appointed "idea people".

Perhaps if you were a close friend and we had worked on the idea together, But otherwise if I'm going to spend "a month" working on some crazy idea, I'll just work on one of my crazy ideas and keep 100% of the money instead of giving 10% to you. Why wouldn't I do that? APL (talk) 16:04, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify : I place zero value on your idea (I can use my own for free), so what else do you have to offer?

If I'm going to take the plunge and spend "one month" (heh) working on a crazy, but potentially profitable, idea, I've got at least a dozen of my own I want to try before I pay out 10% to an "idea man".

If all you've got is an "idea" you're bringing coals to Newcastle. APL (talk) 16:16, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Nonono, it would only take me (OP) a month. It would take you a couple of hours, since you already have enough background. Look, why don't you give me your phone number and I'll tell you ten specific implementations any single one of which would take a couple of minutes (in Perl) or a couple of hours (properly done) then you can quote me an hourly figure or a percentage, and I can decide if I want to go into it, and if so which one. For you it's win-win. 82.113.121.135 (talk) 16:41, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Why not use a freelance programmer site like Elance? Then you can pay them in rupees or rubles and really come out ahead. --Sean 16:49, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also: I'm an expert-level Perl programmer with 15+ years experience in the language. I accept your proposed rate of $60 per hour. Make a confirmed $60 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation, and I'll spend an hour working on your proposal. After that, we can go from there, with all payment going to WF, if we both choose to proceed. Mail me at this spam-proof address: M8R-7y2sr11@mailinator.com . I promise not to steal your idea. --Sean 17:00, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) If the general public is going to interact with it, it will take a while to implement well. I worked on a project with a friend once that had two main components: a complicated machine learning system and simple web frontend (like a web forum but without discussion threads because we didn't know how we wanted them to work). Both pieces took a while to build, but the web frontend took significantly longer. The difference between a proof-of-concept and something that you can actually put online without embarrassment (or terrible security flaws) is a huge amount of plumbing. (I was quite proud how few lines of code the result wound up being. I had to write and then delete a whole lot to get there, though.) Paul (Stansifer) 17:10, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, not to mention the enormous amount of bikeshedding that occurs when you're doing non-technical things like choosing whether to round your corners. --Sean 17:36, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The bikeshedding might not be so huge in a two-person start-up. APL (talk) 18:33, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I misunderstood slightly, if we're really only talking about a day or so of work, your prospects look a lot better.

You're far more likely either find someone who will work cheap or who will say "what the heck" and go with it.

I notice that sometimes people advertise odd jobs for programmers on Craigslist. I have no idea if that actually works, but if you don't find someone it might be worth a shot. APL (talk) 18:33, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OP, can we make an arrangement? I have this fantastic software that I have written 10 years ago. Once I go public with it it will revolutionise the software market. Microsoft will be toast – unless they learn about it too early. Which is why I have to be a bit secretive. Unfortunately, keeping my software up to date until I find a suitable distribution partner is getting a bit tiresome. I am looking for someone who has a reasonable amount of funds of their own and is also good at marketing and capital-raising. There is big money in this, but you will have to trust me, and obviously you can't expect immediate returns.

This is your chance! Are you game? Just write me an email with details of your financial and marketing background. If you appear like a suitable partner, I will tell you the approximate category into which my software falls and will give you further instructions for the first year or so of our partnership. If all goes well, we will be on the market in two to three years, and I promise you that at that point you will be extremely excited when you find out what my software really does! Hans Adler 17:55, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

if you really think Microsoft would be toast just because another solution is better, you do need help! :) 82.113.121.135 (talk) 18:07, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"If the deal goes ahead there will be some good money in it for you." (link has bad words in it, so possibly NSFW.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:33, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Attn: Original Poster

I notice that while you are seeking to create a business arrangement with someone on the RefDesk, you have not provided even your name, which causes me IMHO to suspect that you may be a Scibaby sockpuppet. In addition, you have failed to state what kind of work you need done; website design, website programming, web application development, etc. I am a Website Designer, and I can design just about anything in HTML, CSS and ECMA-262. If you are for real and this is the kind of work which you need, I propose that you make a confirmed US$50 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation, and for that I will work on your project for an hour. Thereafter, if you wish to retain me (with all proceeds going to the Wikimedia Foundation), we can discuss rates and proceed from there. Click here to contact me via email, or leave a message on my talk page.Vickreman.Chettiar 21:08, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Which torrent client allows establishing without too much effort exlusive connection to one peer only

I have a .torrent file with thousands of seeds. I also happen to know the exact IP and port of a certain seed with an unusually high upload ability (it was set up unofficially by my Internet provider to reduce the load on their side for popular torrents). I am actually able to establish an exlusive connection to this peer, but it requires a lot of effort in my uTorrent client (I do it by restarting the torrent download a number of times and then quickly reducing the number of allowed peer slots to one, and it's very frustrating). Does somebody know of an easier way? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.172.63.16 (talk) 14:04, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

uTorrent lets you block IP address ranges; you should be able to tell it to block 0.0.0.0-1.2.3.3 and 1.2.3.5-255.255.255.255, after which it will only connect to 1.2.3.4. I've never tried it, though. -- BenRG (talk) 19:01, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, it works! Added 2 lines to ipfilter.dat then "Reload IPFilter" and bingo. Nice trick 93.172.63.16 (talk) 22:52, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is it just me or should OP be very sceptical to an ISP that does this? While this sort of service is nice, it seems to me that to pull this of they need to analyse throughput of their routers to an extent that are a serious privacy concern. Taemyr (talk) 23:18, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If the torrents in question are at all illegal, I would assume it was a honeypot and avoid it like the plague. APL (talk) 02:03, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Map Building

I need a program that lets me label certain locations on a given map. Is there a program or online resource that I can give the postcodes (zip codes) and names of some places and it will superimpose them onto a map? Even just a point and click selection would be fine! — Fly by Night (talk) 16:31, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Google maps does that. Go to http://maps.google.com and click on My Maps. Then, you can place icons, labels, and anything else you like on the map. You can save the map and others can open it through the URL provided. -- kainaw ™ 16:55, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Google Earth has this capability as well. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:38, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Fios

what is Fios internet —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kj650 (talk • contribs) 22:21, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Check out Verizon FiOS. Basically it's a high speed internet connection delivered over fiber-optic cables.

APL (talk) 22:23, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)Judging by Verizon FiOS it's the use of fibre-optic cables to the home ... or somewhere near the home. See Fiber to the x and the first paragraph in the Verizon article. Fibre has more carrying capacity - greater bandwidth - than cable or DSL. I presume there are implicit or explicit promises of high speed services with such things as Verizon FiOS. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:25, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

do they have to run new line INSIDE my house? how complicated is it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kj650 (talk • contribs) 23:31, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

yes. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 23:35, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

that link tells me nothing —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kj650 (talk • contribs) 00:09, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are you using a recent browser? If you give it a second or two to load, and then scroll down, there's information about the tech coming out to install an optical network terminal in your garage, etc. Comet Tuttle (talk) 00:20, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

i said INSIDE my house —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kj650 (talk • contribs) 00:46, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Calm down and please read the link Finlay supplied. It clearly states "At your home, we’ll install a small box called an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) in your garage, basement or other inconspicuous place, or near your telephone box outside. Inside, we’ll setup a router and any necessary wiring and wall jacks" (emphasis added). If you need more info, hatever you need to know; or there are plenty of other contact options here. Astronaut (talk) 01:48, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

that dosent help. i want your experiences with installation for fios

"FiOS" by itself refers to all three of Verizon's fiber-optic services: FiOS phone, FiOS internet, and FiOS TV. The page mentioned above estimates the install will take 4 hours or more, the complexity of the installation probably depends on which one or more of the three services you order, and if your home has existing phone and coax wiring that is suitable.

The fiber goes to the ONT, which may be installed outside or inside, but usually on a perimeter wall. (In apartments, some areas will have one ONT per building, some areas will have one ONT per household.) The ONT connects to the phone, coax, or in some cases Ethernet wiring in your home, and converts the incoming light signals on the fiber cable into electrical signals on the wiring in your home. If your home has existing phone and coax wiring, the installation technician will likely use it. If needed, the technician will install appropriate wiring and jacks. But the wiring in your home will be phone or coax wiring. The fiber only goes as far as the ONT, which will be outside or close to outside, so the fiber actually in your home will be none or minimal, but it will go right up to your home.

The ONT connects to electrical power and a battery backup unit, which is always inside. If that electrical outlet goes out or gets unplugged, the battery will provide power to the ONT, but after about 5 minutes, the ONT will shut off internet and TV signals and only power the phone signal to conserve battery power. (If the electricity is out in the entire house, you won't be able to use cordless phones, but regular corded phones will work.)

More links: --- a ZDNet photo gallery of a FiOS installation --- Broadband Reports' Verizon Online FiOS FAQ: Installation --- FiOS users discuss installation questions. --70.253.38.181 (talk) 05:08, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

pine

When I'm in pine and try to save an attachment, it saves it to the home directory rather than to the current working directory. That strikes me as disrespectful to the user.

Can I alter the .pinerc file to change this? And why was it set up that way in the first place? Unix has such a thing as a current working directory. Michael Hardy (talk) 01:56, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

September 15

blogspot/blogger visual verification (captcha) unreadable

I wonder how I can possibly post a comment on a blogspot blog when I cannot see the visual verification image. I can see the text "Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author. Visual verification Word Verification" followed by a box to enter the word, plus a little image of a person in a wheelchair followed by the text "Type the characters you see in the picture above." There never is an image with words. The words "visual verification" I can right click and select "view image"; but that loads a new page with "Not Found Error 404". The little wheelchair image is clickable too but nothing, no sound. I normally use Firefox, but the exact same problems in Chrome and IE when I tried them. I have Windosw Vista. Anything else I can try? I know this must be possible because other people are posting comments all the time. 70.31.56.23 (talk) 08:51, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Translation request

Hi guys! Can you please convert the code in this page [4] to visual basic? It's only about 7 or 8 lines. I'm using VBA in Excel 2003. Thanks very much! --Mudupie (talk) 11:13, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]