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November 17

Standard deviation error bars in Microsoft Excel

Stale

– I had to turn it in this afternoon (without the error bars), but would still be interested to know what I was doing wrong. Ks0stm ^{(T•C•G•E)} 22:09, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm trying to add standard deviation error bars to a graph for a chemistry lab, but when I add standard deviation bars the bars it adds don't even include some of my data points (see here). How do I get it to add standard deviation error bars actually relevant to my data (which is found in the left two columns in the spreadsheet)? Ks0stm ^{(T•C•G•E)} 21:57, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sound not working on this machine

I'm on a machine which has no sound. I am trying to work out why. The soundcard appears in the windows device manager, and isn't disabled. The Configure button in windows 7's configuration panel doesn't work, and the Levels tab under properties is empty. I even tried plugging a USB sound card in and making that the default device, and no sound comes from that either, with the same problems. The diagnostic tool when I double click the audio device icon in the system tray says The Audio Device is disabled but offers no help beyond that. What am I missing? System is Windows 7 Enterprise x86 192.84.79.2 (talk) 09:36, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Forgive me for starting with the obvious, but does the computer have integral speakers? If not are your speakers plugged in and switched on? And what is the setting on the volume controls (both on-screen and on the speakers)?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 12:58, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm using headpones, and the onscreen thing has no volume control. The volume icon shows that the audio is disabled, like I said in my op. 192.84.79.2 (talk) 13:39, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Kindle

It is not possible to make folders on Kindle, i.e. you can make on PC but on Kindle itself they won't show, all files will appear as though in a single list. However, there is a "Make New Collection" option in Kindle settings, but it is greyed out (disabled) by default. How can I activate this mode, using PC or Kindle itself. There is no way I can use Kindle's wireless network. Please help... Jon Ascton (talk) 10:53, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You use the collections like folders. Try selecting a book (in the Kindle interface), then pressing the "right" button, and then "Add to Collection" or something like that. Once you figure out how to put them into collections, you can change the default view to list by collections. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:03, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, 98. Just tried that. Didn't work - when I press "right", after selecting a book, the menu appears with "Add to Collection" disabled...

You must register your Kindle to enable the collections feature. -- kainaw ™ 14:16, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can I do it using PC (thru Internet), because wireless thing is only in USA, Europe etc ?

You can register it through Amazon's website (log in, go to "Manage my Kindle", add the serial number), but I don't think it will "unlock" that aspect of the actual device until you connect it to the Internet somehow. Does it have WiFi or just the Whispernet service? If you have WiFi it should use any internet WiFi connection. If you're in one of the countries without Whispernet then I'm not sure what you can do. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:07, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Open-source software

Hi, I don't understand Open-source software at all. How are the developers of such software selected and vetted, and what is their motivation? Where are the quality control and checking mechanisms located? Clearly you cannot have a free-for-all where any random person can be editing source code, else the program would be just be overwhelmed with rubbish and malicious edits (just like leaving Wikipedia to its own devices without the army of people constantly reverting vandalism). So, some team of people must check every sumbitted edit if a viable product is ever to emerge, right? Our article seems weak on explaining how all this works. 86.179.7.93 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:59, 17 November 2011 (UTC).[reply]

The best write-up on this topic that I've found is "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". I've heard many people use this essay to talk about open vs closed source code. But it is actually about open-source code in which the code is heavily controlled vs open-source code in which it is fully open and available to everyone. They are two very different models. So, consider Wikipedia (actually Media-Wiki, the open-source software it runs on). The answers to your questions:

How are developers selected? They aren't. They decide to contribute code. When the contribute, the code may be accepted by the software maintainers. It may be rejected. It may be sent to others to be cleaned up and improved. I submit code to open-source projects often. I see a problem. I look at the code. I fix the problem. I submit my fix. Sometimes it is accepted. Sometimes it is not.

What is the motivation? Fixing the problem. I'd be fixing the problem on my computer if I submitted the fix or not. So, why not submit it to others? Not everyone is selfish. Programming is not a zero-sum game. Just because I submit a fix I wrote does not mean that I am losing something. There is also a touch of animosity. I have supported Okular simply because I hate Adobe. I have supported Gimp because I hate Photoshop. I want the alternatives to be as good as possible.

Where is the quality control? It depends on the project. Sometimes it is a single person at the top (ie: Linus Torvalds). Sometimes it is a company (ie: The Wikimedia Foundation). Sometimes it is just a group (ie: The KDE project).

How does the junk and malicious code get stopped? You use Wikipedia as an example. How do we have articles that aren't packed full of junk and vandalism? People volunteer to police projects they like. Similarly, people volunteer to police open-source projects they like. I've seen malicious code submitted to both Gimp and the libPurple library used for many chat projects. I made note of it immediately and the code never made it into the released project. Can some get through? Sure. Can malicious code get through closed models like Apple and Microsoft? Yes - it happens a lot more often than they want to admit.

Is every edit checked? Yes. Every edit is checked by many eyeballs. The entire theory is that with many eyeballs the errors are easy to spot.

I hope that helps a bit. -- kainaw ™ 14:28, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you so much for your full answer. The key concept that seems to be under-emphasised (or perhaps not even mentioned at all) in our article is that edits are submitted to some authority -- "the software maintainers" you call them -- who, if I'm understanding correctly, have ultimate control over what goes into a release. 86.179.7.93 (talk) 14:59, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That is true for all major projects. For minor projects which have very few people working on them, there is no authority. Perhaps you could say that the programmers are themselves the authority. -- kainaw ™ 15:16, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone can be a software maintainer; just declare yourself to be one! The tricky thing is convincing people to use the software you maintain. Usually, for that to happen, the software has to be good, so you have to be a good coder, and someone who is good at convincing good coders to work with you. You also have the right to fork existing open-source code, although convincing people that your fork is better is extremely difficult, because it's usually not. Paul (Stansifer) 16:17, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, there are plenty of important software projects today that were forked for no other reason than that the original or previous maintainers had become difficult in some fashion. This is part of what's great about free software. It's hard to manage a project with absolutely no official/s, equal or not. ¦ Reisio (talk) 16:45, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note that altruism is not the only motivation. If you write a fix or add some new functionality, it is much easier to send it upstream. This way it will be integrated in subsequent versions, so you can forget about it. Plus, it will be maintained by others, for free. If you keep the code to yourself, you have to maintain your own, non-standard version, indefinitely. Given that the standard code base might diverge, you'll have to spend some effort to adjust the code each time, possibly even introducing bugs in the process. Unless keeping the code to yourself gives you a strong competitive advantage, it is much more cost-effective to make the initial effort to please the maintainer so that it will accept your code. Everyone wins. Bomazi (talk) 20:54, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

command prompt beep

In Windows 7 on the command prompt if I echo this character

�

the computer makes two beep sounds via speakers. I am thinking of including it into some batch files, but I would like to know more about it first. What is this character? Are the beeps an intended feature of the command prompt or is it the result of an unintended error of some kind? Are there any negative effects using this beep method many times, eg corrupting files, slowing down the computer, damaging the processor, etc. I know those are very unlikely but I want to be sure. Thanks. 82.43.90.142 (talk) 18:22, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The character to posted is not standard. You'd be better using the code instead of the character to demonstrate which one it is. I assume it is the bell character, which you can use anywhere you can print to a console. -- kainaw ™ 18:24, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The code? I don't understand. In the batch script I have

@echo off
echo �

I tried "echo ^G" from the bell character article but this did not make any sound. 82.43.90.142 (talk) 18:53, 17 November 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.90.142 (talk) 18:53, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That "^G" is asking you to type control+G, rather than type the ^ character. Card Zero (talk) 19:00, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

^G means Control-G and you can't actually type ^G, you need to physically press Ctrl-G to create the beep/special character :) ZX81 ^talk 18:59, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm still trying to work out what character the OP actually pasted. I copied it to notepad and saved it as UTF-8 and looked at it in a hex editor, and got the sequence EF BF BD; and then I got lost in the UTF-8 article, so I tried again with notepad's plain "unicode" option (a bit vague, that?) and got 00 FD FF. Don't know what to do with these numbers next. Unicode doesn't like me. (I gather EF BF BD breaks down as 1110/1111 10/111111 10/111101, so without the special UTF-8 parts that's 11111111 11111101, or FF FD, which is the same two bytes the other way round.) Card Zero (talk) 19:04, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, U+FFFD is the "replacement character", so it probably pasted to the page as that. Here's what prints: � if I surround the character the OP pasted with a <span class="Unicode"></span> tag. I wish I knew how to do a proper job of decoding unicode manually though, without guessing.

Further confusion: why is my Firefox printing the OP's original character as a little box, instead of the diamond with a question mark in it? My browser's set to UTF-8, and there are the right three bytes there on the page (EF BF BD, as I can verify if I change encoding so it appears as ï¿½), yet it's taking those three bytes and arriving at a box and not a diamond. Strange. What, in fact, does that "unicode" tag do? Card Zero (talk) 19:16, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There's no standard appearance for U+FFFD (which is EF BF BD in UTF-8). It's not "black diamond with question mark", it's just "replacement character". -- BenRG (talk) 22:24, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

But why (and how) is the class=unicode span changing the look of the replacement character? (Inside that span I see the diamond, outside it see the box.) It doesn't seem to change the font - text inside that span appears in Arial for me, same as the rest of the page. Maybe it forces a switch (from ordinary Arial for the rest of the page) to Arial Unicode MS - but that ought to happen anyway when there's a missing glyph, because of font substitution - unless maybe ordinary Arial does have a U+FFFD character, which looks like a box, and then U+FFFD looks like the diamond in unicode Arial? Font substitution should make forcing a change of font pointless, though, so maybe class=unicode does something else, but what? No, I can't understand. Card Zero (talk) 09:01, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

According to Template:Unicode, the Unicode class just specifies a bunch of fonts which between them include practically everything. I don't know exactly what's going on, but it doesn't seem all that strange that you'd see different glyphs with different font lists. -- BenRG (talk) 04:35, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Here's one way of getting a beep in a batch file: At a command prompt type copy con beep.txt (enter) control-G (enter) control-Z (enter). Then type notepad beep.txt and copy and paste the beep code (which should be visible) into your batch file. -- BenRG (talk) 22:24, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I guess you already managed to do that—never mind. :-) -- BenRG (talk) 22:52, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Factors affecting .svg rendering speed

What factors affect the speed at which browsers can render .svg files? I imagine that possibilities are the browser, RAM, processor and graphics card, but I don't have a clue of the relative importance of each. I'm asking because I want to animate things like this, but at the moment everything gets very jerky once a few hundred objects are animated. If anyone knows of a better way to animate things like this then I am open to suggestions - I've already tried openFrameworks but that doesn't work well either. SmartSE (talk) 18:51, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I've partly answered this part myself - chrome is way way better than firefox. SmartSE (talk) 23:57, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Amid the current fondness for <canvas> and WebGL, animated SVG (and really SVG in general) seems like a neglected stepchild. You might get better performance if you coded it procedurally (javascript_webgl). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:50, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, hadn't come across those so thanks! Being a coding novice, the big advantage of svg to me is that I can draw something in illustrator / inkscape and then adjust the code, but I might end up trying those some day. (Plus it's more like wiki markup than javascript). SmartSE (talk) 22:23, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The SVG that Inkscape emits isn't very clear (in the long term, if you're generating stuff, you'll retain more hair if you generate SVG content from scratch). As to the state of WebGL, try this in Firefox or Chrom(e|ium). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:34, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Executable over bittorrent = safe?

Background - I have four disks for running Sims 2, but they look a little beat up, my CD drive isn't functional without me tinkering with the computer, and Iost the registration key for the CD's.
Situation - Instead, I downloaded Sims 2 as a torrent from [REMOVED LINK]. It includes 4 disks and a zip with an executable, 14MB large. The instructions say to replace the normal executable installed with the executable provided by the torrent.
Question 1 - is there any way to know if it's safe to run that executable on my computer? I already rarely use Windows because I hate its security problems, and I don't like the idea of running a 14MB executable from the internet. Even if it runs the game, there might be an imbedded virus (right?)
Question 2 - is all of this even legal (I do own a legitimate copy of the game)? Is it a gray area?

Thanks. Magog the Ogre (talk) 20:02, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

1) No, there's no way to know it's safe other than relying on security through obscurity - distributing your malware in the form of copies of the Sims 2 (when the Sims 3 is the hot new thing) would be a strange choice of viral vector. Oh, but various virus checkers will scan a file to see whether it contains a virus, so you could offer the file to one or more of those and see if it gets rejected. 2) Yes, it's a grey area. Unless this counts as legal advice, in which case I can't give any. (It's certainly legal in nature, but I don't think I gave you any advice.) By the way, I did the same thing with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (which I own three worn-out copies of), replacing terran.exe with the cracked version, with only happy results, but it would be unscientific of you to be encouraged by anecdotal evidence. Card Zero (talk) 20:15, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you have a decent antivirus app (Avira, for example), it should catch any naughty software. You could try running it in a sandbox or VM first, too, but that's pretty paranoid. You can get into trouble for this. AIUI technically (so technically ISP's won't necessarily protect you over it), what's illegal is uploading. ¦ Reisio (talk) 20:23, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ugh; well is there a decent way to emulate a CD drive, so the game thinks it's talking to the CD drive, when actually it's talking to a CD image on the hard disk? It can be done with VirtualBox, but the game won't run in VirtualBox due to graphics issues. Magog the Ogre (talk) 20:44, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I found this but again, I'm reticent to run the executable, even if it's off cnet.com. Magog the Ogre (talk) 20:46, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Alcohol is legit and will work. So will Roxio and any other really dedicated disk mounter software. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:21, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk open source, works wonderfully. There are some less popular/more proprietary formats it doesn't manage, you'd possibly have to use daemon tools for that. ¦ Reisio (talk) 21:12, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

DAEMON Tools and Alcohol 120% are legit and highly recommended. I've been using DAEMON tools for years now really. My antivirus and firewall have yet to complain. All it does is create virtual CD/DVD Drives so that the computer thinks you have additional drives. Using images instead of the actual disks helps prevent degradation over time. It also reads faster than physical disks and is really quite easy to use.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 02:51, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I just realized I sounded like an advertisement, LOL. But virtual disk drives really do make your life a hell of a lot easier.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 02:58, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

November 18

google redirect virus

Hi all, I believe I have something called the google redirect virus, because when I click on a google link, about a quarter to a half of the time it takes me to a junk website. Only problem is, although there's plenty of stuff on it on the internet, I can't find it on Wikipedia. This is normally a bad sign, as Wikipedia is usually very up to date, especially on IT matters. Is it for real, or is it some kind of hoax (in which case what is wrong with my computer, Windows Vista by the way)? How do I get rid of it, since it is supposed to be hard for antiviruses to detect (unless that's part of the scam)? And how could I have caught it? I don't download stuff - do you get it from just visiting a website without clicking on anything? Many thanks, IBE (talk) 00:56, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mostly harmless malware, IIRC. I'm sorry I don't actually remember what I did to remove it on the box I encountered it on, just that it was simple. Something in the registry, I want to say. [1] ¦ Reisio (talk) 01:38, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks :) any other info from anyone most welcome (I've visited the site but haven't done anything yet, so please add more if you think there's anything else I need to know, although the first link looks to be a good one). IBE (talk) 03:07, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I removed something similar a while ago. It was malware that modified my browser's proxy settings to somewhere in Ukraine. About one in three clicks on Google search results led to porn, scareware sites, an unexpected page that was vaguely related to the search terms. The hardest part was to remove the rootkit which hid the component of the malware responsible for resisting my efforts to remove it all. Astronaut (talk) 13:28, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't expect to find anything more in-depth than this on Wiki. Just because this is the obvious symptom of whatever's on your computer doesn't mean the same program, or something else you haven't noticed, isn't harvesting your credit card information or login passwords (less likely). I'd suggest running Spybot – Search & Destroy at the very least- do a scan from safe mode if possible. I don't find the Spybot resident scanning function to be very useful myself- you probably want to run whatever Microsoft is calling their anti-spyware program for that. After that, you've got a good incentive to make the regular change of your passwords that everyone is supposed to do regularly but which doesn't actually happen. Nevard (talk) 22:36, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Variation

I have a similar issue, but in my case it works a bit differently. I do a Google image search, find the pic I want, click on it, and it displays, for a half second, then the web site apparently redirects me elsewhere. The odd thing is that I wasn't at the website yet, I was still in Google's picture viewer looking at the preview. Somehow the website must have imbedded an instruction in the image preview that redirects me elsewhere. StuRat (talk) 22:49, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Google loads the web page it found the image on, behind the image, presumably in an inline frame. If that page has Javascript on it that detects if the page is loaded within a frame, it can perform an appropriate action - like redirecting you to the page, without the frames. The principle is similar to those 'get me out of someone elses frameset' links that you used to see around. Obviously this is a little inconvenient when you're browsing for images. Nevard (talk) 02:38, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Any way to disable that function ? StuRat (talk) 04:00, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Microsoft Works Suite 2006

On my first visit , my thanks to the technical information provided in my previous question. Have Windows 7, and would like to download my Microsoft Works Suite 2006 which I think will be much easier for me to manoeuvre. Could there be any impediments or undesirable consequences to this action?

Jim. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hamish84 (talk • contribs) 01:11, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In general, there should be no consequences to installing software from 2006 on a Windows 7 machine. TheGrimme (talk) 16:15, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

where to buy the cheapest laptop online ?

I really to know where to buy the cheapest laptop online ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Linda901212 (talk • contribs) 02:00, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You really need to tell us where you are. You really need to tell us what you want the laptop for. You really need to tell us whether you want a new one, or second-hand. And you really need to think about whether this is the best place to ask vague questions... AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:44, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Probably eBay. You might get lucky, but don't be surprised if you end up with a piece of junk.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:44, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It is possible to get free laptops. Some relatives gave me four supposedly dead laptops. After a bit of refurbishment, I now have three working laptops having cannibalised one for parts. Maybe someone you know has something to give away. Obviously, it won't be the latest model, but it'll probably be good enough to run Windows XP and do a bit of internet surfing; and if refurbishment is needed then that will depend on the skills you have access to. Astronaut (talk) 13:25, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Also try CraigsList.org. That way you can inspect the laptop in person before purchasing it.TheGrimme (talk) 16:16, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Remote access to an iMac over Verizon FiOS

My internet service provider is Verizon and I own a 2009 iMac running Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard. I would like to set up a remote connection to my Mac from anywhere. My router is an Actiontec. What software do I need (I would like to setup a graphical connection, instead of SSH or whatever) and how can I maintain the ability to keep connected with my Mac? --Melab±1 ☎ 04:26, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone. --Melab±1 ☎ 16:29, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You can set up Screen Sharing. Here's "Mac 101" for 10.5"; and here's more recent documentation, Screen Sharing (for 10.7). Leopard supported a variety of built-in remote access tools - ssh, screen sharing, file sharing, remote access and management, and more; you can use your Mac's built-in help tool to guide you through the setup in System Preferences. If you update your system software to Lion, you can also use a variety of iCloud-related remote sync features between your Mac(s) and iOS software: How to Set Up iCloud (Mac). If you install a Mac OS X Server edition of the system software, even more remote-access features are available, including a web-server, wiki server, mail server, storage area network system, remote management tools, remote monitoring tools, and other features.

As a last note - SSH with X11 forwarding is also an option; if you are a proficient unix user, you are probably already familiar with this capability. Here's the official page from Apple's Open Source Tools: X11. Nimur (talk) 17:59, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am not very literate with command line stuff other than changing directories. Are there any problems posed by a dynamic IP and by FiOS? --Melab±1 ☎ 20:10, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Another thing: I probably have a dynamic IP address, so how can I maintain access to my Mac? --Melab±1 ☎ 20:53, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Dynamic DNS lets you dodge issues with the dynamic IP if you're using a fairly low-level way to access your computer like SSH, VNC, or Screen Sharing. I'd suggest using LogMeIn- lets you dodge a lot of the fiddling involved in setting up these things, and you won't have to configure your router. Nevard (talk) 22:29, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I just found LogMeIn. I am using the free version. Will I be able to log in and out remotely? Also, if I eject a USB drive using Finder how can I reconnect with it in the case I am away from my Mac? --Melab±1 ☎ 00:26, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If the drive is still physically attached you could probably map it to a folder using the 'mount' command in the Terminal. 'mount --help' should give you the goss. Nevard (talk) 08:42, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can I connect iTunes to my iPod touch remotely using LogMeIn.com, or will I have to use Apple Remote Desktop? --Melab±1 ☎ 01:00, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

LogMeIn Pro will apparently (according to posts on their forum) do USB redirection for thumb drives and so on- which is probably not good enough for the iPod to work. There is a pro trial available- might be worth trying. Even if it is possible, I'd really recommend you find another solution- I've used USB redirection with VMWare and VirtualBox with a car computer interface that needed Windows, and without even getting the internet between the device and the program using it it was flakey. From my reading, Apple Remote Desktop doesn't seem to do it either. Nevard (talk) 08:42, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Window 7 ISO File Installation with Daemon Tool Lite !

Hi Guys !

I need to ask you a question.

Suppose i have windows 7 ISO Image File on my system and want a clean installation of it with Daemon Tool Lite. Will it install smoothly without any problem and without DVD-Rom.Please help me.

Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.151.155.196 (talk) 12:19, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

AFAIK, you can't do a clean install from within Windows. If you don't know how this answers your question, think about it carefully and eventually you should get it. (I'm not saying you need to burn a DVD, I know there are ways to install without doing so which I've used myself. I'm simply saying your proposed solution is flawed.) Nil Einne (talk) 13:36, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Nil Einne is mostly correct in that you can't use a Windows app to install Windows on top of itself. If you don't want to use a DVD disc, you can put the image on a USB drive and boot off it. See this guide. TheGrimme (talk) 16:19, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's wrong. You can't reformat your hard drive before reinstalling if the install files are on the hard drive, but a "clean install" is simply an install that doesn't copy over previous settings, drivers, etc., and you can do that from within Windows, according to this page. I see no reason why it wouldn't work from a DVD image mounted with Daemon Tools; it copies everything it needs to the hard drive before rebooting in any case. However, if you did have problems, you could manually copy all files from the DVD to a folder on the hard drive and run setup from there. -- BenRG (talk) 05:41, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

PNG geotag

Is there a geotag in PNG? Exx8 (talk) 13:13, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No not in any consistand and supported way This site says:

The PNG specification allows labeled text (ASCII or UTF-8) elements to be embedded in text chunks and predefines a few standard keywords (element labels): Title, Author, Description, Copyright, Creation Time, Software, Disclaimer, Warning, Source, Comment. The compilers of this resource are not able to assess the degree to which such metadata is found in practice or whether other keywords are in common use. An attempt in 2000 to develop open source tools to convert EXIF images (including EXIF metadata) to PNG seems to have been abandoned. See http://pmt.sourceforge.net/exif/drafts/d020.html. Without such tools and agreed practices, PNG can not rank highly for self-documentation.

It is possible to embed XMP metadata in PNG files, according to the XMP specification. However, the documentation for ExifTool for PNG tags suggests that practices for storing XMP or EXIF metadata in PNG images have not been consistent.

its possible that there will be some standard in future. -- Q Chris (talk) 13:33, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The only (decent) use I can think of for this would be imagery rendered (that is, not photographed) by a mobile device that knows where it is. ¦ Reisio (talk) 14:12, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why not photographed? I thought you were a believer of PNGs in all circumstances. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:09, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

PNG compresses photographs quite poorly, while JPEG works well for them. The standard way of losslessly storing image data is to use a raw image format. They're actually "more lossless" than PNG, since they store more color information than just 8 bits each of R, G, and B. Paul (Stansifer) 12:32, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

gzip wget

I am downloading pages with wget on Windows 7 from a site which supports gzip HTTP compression. Wget however does not support this, so pages are transferred without compression and therefore use much more bandwidth than they should. I figured the best solution might be to put some program that supports gzip HTTP compression between wget and the site, like a proxy, so pages are downloaded with compression, uncompressed, and then fed to wget as normal. What program might be able to do this? I looked at polipo but it doesn't appear to support gzip. I don't have much RAM so a full squid setup is not an option. 82.43.90.142 (talk) 15:29, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Are you sure wget doesn't support gzip compression? As far as I know you can say wget --header='Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' http://example.com If you can't persuade wget to do it, try cURL instead, which works in much the same way. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:38, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That fools the site into thinking wget supports gzip, but wget cannot process the downloaded file for other links. wget just sees binary data instead of html. This breaks recursive retrieval and page-requisites. 82.43.90.142 (talk) 17:00, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's why raptor jesus invented pipes, stdin, & stdout, but maybe you should just use HTTrack. ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:34, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How does one use pipes and stdout to make wget understand gzip during recursive retrieval? 82.43.90.142 (talk) 18:41, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

With more effort than using HTTrack. ¦ Reisio (talk) 02:04, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Still, I'd be interested in learning how 82.43.90.142 (talk) 10:09, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Privoxy might work. I know it decompresses gzipped/deflated pages internally (to filter them), and I think it passes them uncompressed to the client. I don't know whether it will request compression from the server if the client didn't request it. You could try passing the "--header=Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate" to wget or configuring Privoxy itself to add the header, and see what happens. You might also have to add a dummy filter that never matches to persuade Privoxy to decompress everything. -- BenRG (talk) 05:53, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't seem to work, but I've never used privoxy before and it's complicated so I'm probably doing something wrong. Thanks anyway, it's a very interesting idea 82.43.90.142 (talk) 10:09, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Potential Security Risk

I know that some websites display data on where the last 10 or so visitors came from (e.g. Google.com). On one of my translator websites, for example, it tells me where visitors to my page came from (e.g. from specific pages within the site, or from external websites, search engines, etc.). I would like to know if any website collecting this data would also be able to collect login details of the visitor on the previous site. For example, if I went from here to another site, one which collects visitor data, would they be able to collect my Wikipedia login details or any other information? What about when I visit one of these sites, would it be able to collect data from other tabs I have open in Firefox? I am not asking about Chrome, as Chrome tabs are all separate and individual processes. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 18:21, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What you're seeing is just the HTTP referrer data. It doesn't convey login data unless a site was ridiculously stupidly coded so that its URL did contain login data (which no website may by anyone other than someone coding for the very first time would have). Generally speaking no site should be able to get information about other tabs in browsers, but there are security loopholes with regards to cookies, applets, plugins, etc., which have at times compromised this. But on the whole, no, it should not be possible. In practice, there are sometimes bugs, bad security choices, etc... --Mr.98 (talk) 18:36, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The security problem is not the HTTP referrer field. It is flash cookies and social linking. Flash cookies have been around for a long time. They are cross-site cookies that store a lot of personal information that any website can gather. The purpose of them is to have fancy applications that work on more than one site. The use of them is to track a user's behavior across websites. Because many people have been smart enough to disable flash cookies, the next step is social sites (mainly Facebook). Ever notice that when you visit a website that has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook, you will still see a Facebook logo and your login name (and sometimes your list of friends). Facebook distributes code to other sites to gather information on your behavior across the Internet. What do they do with it? They own your identity and sell it to others. Did you give them permission to do so? You read the EULA, right? -- kainaw ™ 18:43, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

According to the New York Times, Facebook will even try to blackmail you into giving your passport and other private documents. Some users have been foolish enough to voluntarily provide Facebook with access to their government-issued IDs, financial information, and so on. This helps Facebook identify individual users when selling identity information to advertiser websites. Nimur (talk) 19:53, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

While I agree the 'instant personalisation' (if that's what you'rereferring to) is a privacy concern (albeit not one available to me), it's currently limited to 8 websites and Bing, Pandora, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Clicker, Scribd, Docs. And theoretically the websites are supposed to delete the info if you ask them (per their contracts with Facebook).

A bigger concern is the Facebook Connect/social plugin type things that you see on website. But from what I've seen a lot of people misunderstand this. While you see info such as which one of your friends has liked the website or page and have the option to like or or occasionally updates from your friend or have the option sometimes to login to the webiste, as I understand it and supported by the privacy policy the info actually comes from Facebook itself (if you look at the page it's coming from the Facebook server) and it's not shared with the other website unless you choose to engage with it. In otherwords, unless you choose to 'like' something or authorise a connection or otherwise engage in the Facebook stuff, the website isn't supposed to gain any info on who you are.

While Facebook has a history of privacy failures [2] [3] [4] [5] it's also worth remembering they are a business not some evil company out to end all privacy. While they may not care much about privacy per se, they do care about making money and it's not in their interest to provide potential tracking info to third parties without getting something important in return which they currently at least (and I would say not surprisingly), don't see without some sort of agreement as in the pre-approved websites or a user using Facebook on the website. Which leads to me my main point, the big privacy concern with Facebook Connect etc comes not so much from the website learning who you are, but from Facebook being able to track what you do online, which can happen even when you're logged out [6]. In other words, to get back to my earlier point, it's far more in Facebooks interest for them to gather all the info then for them to hand out info to others willy-nilly so they can do their own tracking.

Nil Einne (talk) 00:35, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. Re-reading your comment perhaps you were talking about Facebook tracking not third party tracking after all? I'm not sure, the comment about Flash cookies made me think you were referring to other websites being able to use info Facebook provided for tracking purposes. Nil Einne (talk) 01:04, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you don't want website B to know that you visited from website A, you can install a Firefox extension like RefControl. Configure it to send the real referrer within a domain and a forged referrer when crossing domains. (You can set it to block the referrer header entirely, but that breaks a lot of sites.)

The referrer header is only sent when there's an explicit link between pages—either a link that you click or an inline image/video/whatever that's loaded automatically. It's not sent when you navigate to a page by any other means (such as clicking the home button or pasting a URL)~~, and it doesn't operate across tabs in any browser~~. (edit to add: In any browser, including Chrome, the referrer header is sent whether the link opens in the same tab or a different one. I should probably add that referrers are normally not sent on cross-site links when one or both sites uses HTTPS.) -- BenRG (talk) 06:10, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the replies. You have allayed my fears and replaced them with a set of new ones :) And thanks for the suggestion of the addon, BenRG. I am using that now, and it works perfectly. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:57, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Same password on different accounts

These two questions are supplementary questions to my original question in the discussion now archived at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Computing/2011 November 14#E-mail account protection.

If a person has a particular password for a Hotmail account, should that person avoid using the same password for a Gmail account?
If a Gmail employee could use the password to hack the Hotmail account, could the same employee not use the same password to hack the Gmail account?

—Wavelength (talk) 21:01, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You should avoid using the same password for two different things.

In any decently implemented system (which surely Google and HoTMaiL are) the passwords themselves will not be stored, but a cryptographic hash instead. So even if an employee of Google could retrieve the hash, he couldn't generate the password to type it into HoTMaiL. Better yet, sensible practice has the hash itself be cryptographically salted too, which means two different people with the same passwords have their passwords stored as two different values. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 21:07, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The big problem with using the same password isn't respectable companies like GMail or Hotmail. It is those "who the heck runs this site" places like blogs. They ask you for an account name and password to post a response. Then, they try that username/password on all the popular websites to see if you were dumb enough to use the same user/pass for their blog as you did on GMail or Facebook or, worse, Bank of America. -- kainaw ™ 21:26, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

... and, even worse, some sites store and display your unencrypted password, and some regularly e-mail the password to you unencrypted with a reminder that you haven't logged on for a while! I'm amazed at the lack of awareness of security issues on some smaller (but respectable) websites that I've used. Dbfirs 00:18, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

And as the recent anonymous attacks have revealed, even quite a few of those that encrypted it don't seem to use a salt meaning it's very vunerable to rainbow tables Nil Einne (talk) 00:50, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The big problem isn't so much malicious service providers (although there is that danger), it's stupid service providers who store passwords in the clear, and then expose their database via a security hole. Paul (Stansifer) 12:29, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

November 19

Could a PC be used as a radio receiver/transmitter?

Resolved

Software such as NI Multisim can be used to emulate electronic components. Could a standard laptop with its built-in Wi-Fi antenna be programmed to function as a radio receiver or transmitter? --Codell (talk) 02:06, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You might be interested in Software-defined radio. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 02:21, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I managed to find GNU Radio through that article which seems to be what I was looking for, although I wonder if software for Windows exists that can receive radio without needing external hardware. --Codell (talk) 02:51, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This page references a number of projects, some free and some commercial, one or two for Windows but mostly Linux or BSD, which unlock the capability of wireless cards to some degree. If manufacturers distributed more broadly-capable drivers, they would have to endure greater FCC scrutiny, and any added sales just wouldn't pay for the resulting costs. I think Cisco has a Wifi interference detector with a near-standard chipset and some funky drivers that does something like this, but it is expensive, even by comparison to the more capable hardware GNU Radio works with. Besides, there's not that much interesting stuff going on in the bands WIifi cards operate on anyway- you might be able to snoop on your neighbour's cordless phones, but without extra hardware, you're not going to have access to much. Nevard (talk) 08:54, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Where can I get affordable Maytag Gas Wall Oven Parts?

Does anybody know of a place where I can get affordable parts for my wall oven? My less than 6 year old oven had several "faulty codes" on. I replaced the ignitor and the temperature sensor that cost me over $100.00. Now there is another faulty code on and the technician said is the hardware and watchdog circuits and that I need to replace the clock assembly (also called the ERC) (Honestly, I don't have a clue and nothing about this makes any sense to me)

I already went online and the cheapest cost almost $250.00. Spending so much money on a not so new appliance sounds absurd and it would probably make more sense to just buy a new one. So, I am asking if anybody has some advise or know of a place when this part can be found used or new before my oven ends up in a landfield. Thanks! 66.108.223.179 (talk) 02:50, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Iphone's bluetooth

Hi, I would like to know why an Android cannot transfar files to Iphone, and which devices can. Exx8 (talk) 10:51, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

They can. Some apps might make it easier. [7] ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:18, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

iPhones cannot send or receive files over Bluetooth, except to other iOS devices, AFAIK. Apple, like everything else, crippled Bluetooth. Until iOS4, iPhones and iPod touches didn't even have AVRCP, when older devices had it out of the box. User:Bodman456 | Come talk to me or ask me a question! (I don't bite ;D) 23:10, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Overclocking and stability

Computers are physical systems subject to wear, thermal degradation, and intervening factors like cosmic rays and electromagnetic interference. Nonetheless they perform remarkably well. Systems remain stable for very long periods of time. We can check system stability by running computational exercises where the expected answer is known already. Presumably if one runs any computationally intensive task for long enough, eventually an error must occur due ultimately to the physical limitations of the machine. Existing systems are often so reliable that the mean time to such an error may be months or years. I'm curious if there is any hard information of the typical reliability of recent CPUs in this way? For example, something like if you have 1000 CPUs computing MD5 hashes continually for 2 months you would expect 1% of them to make at least one error in one hash over that time.

Assuming such quantifiable data does exist, I'd also like to know how CPU reliability is impacted by overclocking. Obviously overclocking too much can lead to scenarios where a CPU fails almost immediately and no useful work can be done, but I'm wondering about the rare events where everything appears fine for hours or days before a small glitch. Can we measurably demonstrate that overclocking increases the chance of small glitches on systems that initially appear stable? Dragons flight (talk) 11:21, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Soft error appears to have some very good external links measuring actual reliability vs. cosmic rays and radiation effects and such. Nothing about overclocking, though. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:17, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Most people who know what they are doing when overclocking the CPU will test for 'instability'. For those not experienced, they may think instability refers solely to the computer crashing or freezing but realisticly you should only get that when you are beginning to overclock and trying to work out the limits, at least if you aren't some sort of 'extreme edge' overclocker. (There are those who try to get records and only hope is the computer lasts long enough to get a verified screenshot of it running at the speed.) It's of course far easy to push the CPU until it's clearly unstable then ramp down then it is to test everytime for long term stability and slowly ramp up even if the later is technically safer.

Once you've gotten past that point, it gets down to the nitty gritty of stress testing#hardware. For the CPU, this will often mean running something like Prime95 or OCCT or IntelBurnTest or something of that sort for hours to see if any errors (either by comparing the results against known, pre-computed results or doing the same thing a few times and seeing if the results are the same) are detected. (Nowadays memtest86 should probably also be part of the mix since even if you aren't overclocking the RAM, the memory controller is built in to all modern x86 CPUs.)

While it depends on the user, on a personal note I've generally used 24-48 hours error free (often multiple sessions with at least all 3 types of Prime95 test) as a minimum before I'm willing to say the computer is stable. Although I admit, past 24 hours often means I use the computer during testing for general stuff like browsing, which isn't as bad as it sounds, at least for Prime95 if you don't chose 'Blend' or some other test that uses all the RAM the fact the test is usually on very low priority by default means it's not that noticeable for such low level usage, however it must reduce the chance of an error being detected.

Anyway to your point, most people reduce overclocking or bump up the voltage after any error but I believe in the past I've repeated testing more then once after getting an error in a few hours and got another error at some stage every time (the precious time tends to vary quite considerably of course) but received no errors after having reduced the overclocking. This is even easy to show further past the borderline, sometimes you get an error within 10 mins - 1 hour or so and you will find this happens fairly consistently, but if you reduce the overclock or the CPU is not overclocked this doesn't happen.

I'm sure you must be able to find some more systematic analysis of this in some overclocking forum. Although as said it depends on the invidual, I have heard of some people who ignore a single error after a long time and I think quite a lot test less then I do. Of course if you only ever got an error once and can't get it to happen again, it's difficult to be sure it had anything to do with overclocking, one of the reasons I generally hope if I do get an error, I can have it happen again but not happen when I've either reduced overclocking or stopped overclocking (statistically I doubt I test enough that it's really that meaningful and there's also the risk of confirmation bias but on a human level it provides at least some reassurance).

Of course this doesn't mean such tests detect all errors, a good case in point, I believe when IntelBurnTest (which I've never really used as it came out after my last major overclocking mission and also I haven't had an Intel CPU In a while although I believe by now it's supposed to be quite good for AMD CPUs as well) came out, some people found their previously seemingly 'stable' CPUs after hours of Prime95 would start to fail in some way after a short time with IntelBurnTest.

Nil Einne (talk) 03:20, 24 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Windows colour editing

What I used to really like about Windows98 was the way you could bring up the customise window and change the colour or size of anything to make the computer look just the way you wanted. Having proven unable to get 98 on my new laptop, I am wondering if there is any way of getting a similar function on Windows 7. I have managed to find the option to return it to the original blue and grey, but not any other colour options.

148.197.81.179 (talk) 11:58, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Right click on the desktop, select "Personalize" from the menu that comes up, click on the icon that says "Window color," and you get a screen which is more or less the same set of options as was in Windows 98. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:47, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I've found it now, I have to set it to the classic version first, then after that go to the window colour options. Thanks. 148.197.80.214 (talk) 20:35, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Word 2007 - Two problems

Resolved

I have two problems with Word 2007, which I would like to sort out.

When I start a document, the default spacing of lines is set to 'Normal', which leaves a blank line between lines. I want it to be set to 'No spacing' as default. How can I do this?

Whenever I enter a date, I am prompted to press Enter to change it to today's date (in a different format). I don't want today's date, and I want to press Enter anyway so I can start a new line, so this is troublesome. How can I turn this feature off?

Cheers KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:39, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

1. Whenever you start a new normal document, it's based on a template called "Normal.dotm". Choose File -> Open, click "Templates" on the left, and choose "Normal.dotm". Select All, change the paragraph attributes and line spacing attributes and default font however you want, and save over Normal.dotm. And let me know if this works! I'm too chicken to do it on my machine. You should save a copy of Normal.dotm before you begin, of course, in case something gets messed up.

2. Haven't found an answer yet, but Office button -> Word Options has an Autocorrect Options button in the "Proofing" screen ... which to my surprise doesn't let you turn off this date feature. For what it's worth, my Word doesn't seem to do this. What exactly are you typing (in what date format)? Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:57, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that. Please bear in mind, I am using Word 2007, and your first solution is not possible. There is no 'File' and when I click open (from the Office button), I just get a list of files in my Documents folder and no option to open Templates. Clicking 'New', however, gives me the 'Templates' section on the left, but Normal.dotm is not there (I know where it is in my AppData folder, as I have had to locate it in the past). As for the date format, I type 1st November 2011, for example, and it will offer to change to 2011-11-19 (today), which, bizarrely, is Japanese date format. The language is currently set to English (United Kingdom). KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 18:15, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm using Word 2007, too — sorry for saying "File"; what I actually did when testing it was to hit alt-F, which in my mind will always mean "File". So what I did is: Alt-F, Alt-O (for Open), click Templates. This brings me to username->AppData->Roaming->Microsoft->Templates and it does contain Normal.dotm. Did this work for you?

I just verified the same behavior you described on the date! I normally never type dates like that, because I am an American, so never saw this. By the time I get to "November 1," then that comma cuts off the annoying date autocorrect. Anyway, you could have found the fix by doing what I did, which is to google "Word 2007 turn off date autocorrect" where the second entry was this not-super-intuitive solution which did work for me:

To turn off date autocorrection in Word 2007, do the following: Press Alt+F11 to display the Visual Basic Editor. Press Ctrl+G to activate the Immediate window. Type

Application.DisplayAutoCompleteTips = False

and press Enter. Close the Visual Basic Editor.

Cheers — Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:24, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Brilliant! Both work perfectly! Excellent, thanks! KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 22:08, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Kompozer

Kompozer doen't work and blames xpcom.dll saying entry point not found. Recently had to replace myy hard disk (C:) due to warnings and crashes. Both Kompozer & xpcom.dll are new. Kittybrewster ☎ 17:31, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have added a section header for this question. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:50, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know anything about Kompozer, but when you wrote that you replaced your hard disk, what exactly did you do? I am betting you did not (a) cloned the hard disk with software like Norton Ghost or Clonezilla, and that you did not (b) format the new hard disk, install Windows, and then use the Kompozer installer to install the software afresh on the new hard disk. I'm betting you (c) formatted the new hard disk, installed Windows, and dragged your files from the old hard disk to the new hard disk? If so, that is the problem; almost any software you install on a Windows system sets some values in the Windows registry, which do not get copied over if you just drag the files from the old hard disk to the new hard disk. Do a reinstall of Kompozer and that should fix it. If the installer allows it, run it and choose a "Repair" install. Back up everything first of course in case a badly designed installer chooses to overwrite some of your work files. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:19, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have a world book backup, backing up my stuff pretty often. It was installed at a distance using logmein. I installed the c drive by handing it to a local shop. Kittybrewster ☎ 21:31, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Did you pay the local shop to install Kompozer? If so, take it back to them. Backups work for data files, but program files need to be installed, as explained above. Dbfirs 09:21, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not specifically. ~~But thanks to the ref desk, Kompozer now works.~~Kittybrewster ☎ 10:37, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

ICT4D

ICT4D- Who proposed it and why and when — Preceding unsigned comment added by 120.151.181.98 (talk) 22:30, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why don't computers have money inserters, so we order online with physical cash?

Look at this- these are conduits leading from the house, to many parts unknown.

The idea here would be to insert coins through coin slots, and dollar bills through bill inserters, and into a waiting capsule, in order to send the capsule through a conduit to the payment recipient. (If the online store doesn't take e-checks, I suppose the checks can be inserted into the capsules as well.)

If we can have many conduits/pipes/tubes/et al. originating from every home to parts unknown thousands of miles away, what's wrong with doing the same for the sake of home-shopping with physical cash?

Besides, a child can't use plastic until their teens, but even kindergartners can buy with physical cash, so online toy, novelty and game stores will see a spike in sales if these conduits come along.--70.179.174.101 (talk) 22:54, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The tubes at the bank just connect to the inside of the bank. The distance is short, and no switching mechanisms are needed.

Building infrastructure to connect to every single house is really expensive. A typical building will hook into networks for water (and also sewage), power (electricity/maybe gas), and information (phone/cable TV/Internet service). Each one of those is something that people are happy to pay dozens of dollars per month for (possibly indirectly, though taxes). Importantly, pretty much everyone is willing to pay for this, so it's practical to dig up every single street in order to put the infrastructure in. A pneumatic tube network would be cool (I'd think more for delivering groceries than dealing with money, since electronic mechanisms for money are pretty good already), but it's probably not worth the immense cost of construction and maintenance, especially since moving macroscopic objects through tubes is going to be more failure-prone than, say, applying current to a wire. Paul (Stansifer) 23:14, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Parents could give their children an account with a PayPal-like service (not one hooked up directly to their bank account), and allow them to deposit money into it and spend money from it. But online businesses in the US are likely to refuse service to anyone under 13 due to COPPA, so the whole thing may be moot. Paul (Stansifer) 23:14, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That would be an enormously expensive undertaking to supply every house with a pipe like that. And you'd most likely have people digging up the ground where the pipes are trying to intercept the money. It's simply not economical enough to warrant doing 82.43.90.142 (talk) 23:18, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Operated two ways it would eliminate the need to step away from the computer at mealtime, as here.

Yet, we do NOT have an article on the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel??? It's such a marvel of engineering, we need to put one up! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.179.174.101 (talk) 23:49, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Let's imagine how this would work.

1. I put in my money.

2. The money thus travels to... somewhere? A bank? A central repository? The business in question? Somewhere. Not where I am.

3. This takes.... awhile. Because paper in tubes doesn't move as fast as electrons do. Ho hum. I wait, oh, I don't know, awhile. Now let's pretend, just for fun, that this money tube is set up so that it can't get clogged (not easy for such distances) and somehow we've managed to get over the fact that we're not likely the only one using the system so unless we have dedicated tubes from each house to the place (a lot of tubes), we're talking about a scheme where multiple dollars have to somehow share the tube at once, not get caught, and not get confused.

4. Eventually the bank or whatever gets the money, scans it in, determines it is not counterfeit, credits the account. Let's imagine this can happen very fast unlike in real life, where banks have actual humans verifying cash deposits before they are credited to your account.

All of this is... well, just very silly. What problem does it solve, again? Oh, children being able to buy stuff on the internet. Parents are going to be clamoring for that — they'd love for their children to just be able to send money out of the house at rapid speed. That's definitely worth the cost of this silly money-in-tubes scheme. --Mr.98 (talk) 23:35, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Also, let's say I (in the UK) wanted to buy something from Japan. Even if my money travelled down this ridiculously long tube from my house to the store at the speed of an average Boeing 757, it would still take around 14 hours for it to get there - and then another 14 hours for me to receive any sort of acknowledgement of payment. Besides, kindergarteners don't tend to buy toys or games. They are bought for them, by their parents, whether online or physically at the store. Why? Because kindergarteners don't earn. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 01:04, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would have to assume that the allowance is a foreign concept in your culture. Parents, to varying degrees, pay their kids to do chores and their best on their academics. Children do earn after all. It's the parents' decision on whether they earn money or something else. --70.179.174.101 (talk) 01:34, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We call it pocket money, but when I was a kindergartener (which the OP specifies), it was just enough money to keep me going over the week with sweets, etc., and certainly not enough to buy myself a game or toy from a specialist game/toy store. Without supervision. At the age of 5. :) KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 02:14, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My son wants me to get paid in Legos to cut down the time between me giving him allowance and then waiting to go to the store to buy Legos. -- kainaw ™ 01:36, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In one of many possible post-apocayptic futures, Legos will be the only viable worldwide currency. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:27, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why would someone put his money in this thing? It's true that cities, or at least boroughs could have some sort of pneumatic tubes, but the idea somehow didn't pan out...At least not at a a level higher than a building. I also ask me why, since we invest in many other large expensive infrastructure ... Quest09 (talk) 22:14, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The router logistics are just not physically workable on the scale of a city or country with each house connected, though with modern robots and postcodes/zipcodes, I suppose it would be technically possible using sorting offices similar to the mail system. I wonder if the system was considered when designing a new city such as Dubai Meydan City Dbfirs 23:22, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

November 20

How do I get Google's account services to keep track of my tabs & bookmarks online?

I hope and pray that K-State's ITAC department will recover all the data in my failed hard drive. Their turnaround time is 5 business days (as opposed to the rip-off Geek Squad's 3 weeks) so if they don't get to it before Thanksgiving, I'll have it back Monday.

In the meantime, so that I don't lose the hundreds of bookmarks stored, and the 60 tabs I had open, how do I get Google to save, through my Gmail account, the whole package of them both? (Hope it's free.) Thanks. --70.179.174.101 (talk) 01:30, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Once again... --70.179.174.101 (talk) 19:32, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you use Google Chrome, there is Chrome Sync. However, this will not save your browser tabs. Xmarks is cross-browser, and will sync bookmarks and tabs. --Kateshortforbob _talk 15:22, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Chrome can save the tabs as well. Go into the preferences\basic, making sure that the tabs you want to save are open. Then where it says "on startup" click on "use current pages". Now if you have to reinstall Chrome just run the sync without setting anything up and the tabs will come back. I only had three tabs but it opened them on the laptop after I saved/sync them from the desktop. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 13:56, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, that's handy! Thanks, CambridgeBayWeather - I didn't know that --Kateshortforbob _talk 14:04, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

And I forgot. After you check the "use current pages" you need to make sure that it has synced. Also wouldn't Firefox sync work as well? I've got it running but never had a major crash. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 12:59, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

RGB color values—linear or not?

If I open an image in an image editor, I can sample the RGB value of any given pixel. Are RGB values you see in image editors linear RGB values, or are they non-linearly coded? If the latter, applying a linear function to remap pixel values (e.g. making each RGB coordinate values 10% larger) will result in non-uniform scaling of luminance—something that seems like the wrong result to have. Does anyone know whether the commonly used RGB values in computer graphics and digital photography are linear or not? --173.49.18.110 (talk) 05:21, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The RGB values you see in most image editors are nominally sRGB, which is roughly linear in perceived brightness. There are other, more esoteric color spaces that are linear in absolute brightness measures like watts per square meter. Both kinds of linearity are useful in different circumstances. -- BenRG (talk) 06:27, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ancient Egyptian game on the Amiga found

Way back in March 2011 I asked about ancient Egyptian game on the Amiga. I have now found this game by running E-UAE and looking around my Amiga's hard drive. It turns out that it really is called "Pharaoh's Curse", but it's a different game than the one Wikipedia has an article about. It was written by an Egyptian person called Mahed Farag in AMOS BASIC and released as ShareWare. I'm not sure if Mahed Farag handles registrations for the game any more. JIP | Talk 06:47, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Lego NXT and i2c/rs485 camera

) I want to interface a camera to Lego_Mindstorms_NXTbrick (possibly colour). It has i2c interface only. But searching for i2c cameras in Google and electronics part stores turns up cameras that can be controlled via i2c but acutal o/p is in some other format/protocol/pins. Can some one direct me to a camera that takes commands and gives data in pure i2c. It doesn't have to be fast or high resolution. I'm intending to take picture once in 10s or so only.
) Is there a nxt compatible camera sensor available?. My only other choice seems to be to mount a Bluetooth camera to the nxt.There is mindsnsors site [8]. But it doesn't seem to give raw pixel output. (From their site : No, the image taken by NXTCam can not be transferred over to NXT. You can however transfer them to PC using USB)
) Alternately can someone point me to some hobby tutorial site where they have interfaced a camera. (I'm hoping that this tutorial will allow me to interface an i2c camera once i obtain it. [9])

117.230.120.102 (talk) 07:13, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

why do jvm/clr need bytecode?

why do jvm/clr need bytecode? couldn't they compile from human readable language to assembler? thx — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.9.125.64 (talk) 11:52, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In essence, bytecode (and CLR) are designed to be more efficient that the original human-readable source code when they are compiled or interpreted into machine code. Thus you get a performance boost. It is also worth noting that multiple languages can be converted into bytecode or CRL: with CRL you have the .NET family, and with bytecode you have options such as JRuby, if you are thus inclined. So the JVM and .NET can, in a sense, work with multiple human-readable languages so long as they have been compiled into the intermediate language they understand. - Bilby (talk) 12:09, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think the question goes the other way: Not "why don't they interpret the high-level language directly", but rather "why do they compile to bytecode, not directly to a machine-specific assembly (and, implicitly, machine code)?". There are a number of advantages to bytecode, including portability and security. A bytecode program is portable between different architectures as long as the corresponding virtual machine has been implemented on the host architecture. Secondly, bytecode more easily allows the run-time system to limit what any program can do (thus allowing for better sandboxing). No bytecode program can access or change a resource that the virtual machine does not offer an interface to (of course this includes unintended interfaces (i.e. bugs in the VM)).--Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:21, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The original Java bytecode was designed only to run compiled Java Programming Language code; while it's possible to compile a few other languages for it (and later changes have added a bit more flexibility) it's not intended as a general purpose intermediate code, and there are plenty of languages (e.g. C) that cannot generally be compiled to Java bytecode. The Oak/Java system was initially intended for network mobile code (which, curiously, it rarely does any more) - that means it needed a) architecture neutrality b) managed operation (for security) and c) verifiability. That last thing is a big issue - most valid-looking (operationally perfectly sound) JVM programs will be rejected by the verifier, and its role in preventing non-compliant casts and access to private members is important for Java's security (but it what thwarts the JVM's use as a general purpose VM). In contrast the CLR was designed from the outset to support multiple languages (the whole Microsoft Visual Foo suite of things), but doesn't care so much about security partitioning inside a virtual machine, and in practice binary portability isn't its big selling point. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 12:38, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Where "most" means "the set of bytecode sequences the verifier will permit is very much smaller than the general set of bytecode sequences"; the Java Language compiler is obviously constructed to only emit sequences in the smaller, verifiable set. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 12:42, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Search engine log file download

I have been working on a search engine algorithm. To test it well, I need real search engine usage. So, I need log files (deidentified) of real search engines. I have the AOL dump released a while back. Have any other similar log files been released? -- kainaw ™ 15:39, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Try using a search engine to find content on the internet. 88.152.82.235 (talk) 16:03, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The AOL data release is the most obvious example; hopefully, there are no others. It was a huge mistake. Although the users were only identified with random numbers, a great deal of personal information can be recovered. There were even cases in which a single search provides too much personal information, so it wouldn't even be safe if the information about which searches came from the same user was thrown out. If you're looking for common searches, the annual Google Zeitgeist will give you some information. Paul (Stansifer) 18:25, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I know that the AOL dump had issues. I was hoping that someone released some info along the lines of "At timestamp 1321831529 user 65842 selected search item 965482." I've been researching convergence of search engine usage over time, which could be due to many reasons, but I'm just looking at finding good measures for the convergence and need real data to test the measures with. Fake data can only get you a little way to understanding the topic. -- kainaw ™ 23:27, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How do I tab outlines on the Mobile Google Docs?

I cannot seem to use the tab key to make outline indentions with the smartphone. There is no tab key on the default android keyboard. I downloaded the "hacker's keyboard" app. Their tab key didn't work. What is another way to make this happen from a mobile device? Thanks, --70.179.174.101 (talk) 19:12, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Historically, the tab character code has been treated in a platform- and application-dependent way. It is possible that your software keyboard is sending a non-ASCII code when you press the tab key. It is possible that the application does receive an ASCII tab character but is programmed to use this to alter keyboard focus rather than to insert a whitespace tab character. You may be able to use the device's copy-and-paste facility to copy a tab character from another place, and paste it into your document, circumventing any application or system keyboard interpretation logic. Nimur (talk) 15:52, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

November 21

I think I have a trojan

I am using AVG 2012, but it won't remove it completely, what can I do? What program can I get to remove it? I don't have any money, so it would have to be free.Luciferwildcat (talk) 00:22, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is a screenshot of one of the pages that shows up

Use Spybot first. If you don't pick anything up at first, you may need to run it in safe mode. You may want to install Microsoft Security Essentials as well and do a scan. Probably also want to make sure your browser's up to date, or chuck on [Google Chrome]]. Nevard (talk) 00:35, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Lucifer, that is just a website trying to get you to click a button. ¦ Reisio (talk) 07:26, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If I have firefox, how can I check for updates? And is spybot and microsoft security essentials free? And where can I download them? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Luciferwildcat (talk • contribs) 09:12, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Mozilla Firefox article has relevant links. As for the other two programs, which are indeed free. Nevard (talk) 10:50, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

They are not completely free though, the spy one only removes 100 items, but detected 1480, and if I wanted the rest removed I had to pay up. If I uninstall and reinstall 15 more times will it work 100 at a time? Essentials didn't remove anything, but its from Microsoft so obviously a piece of shit. In any case they did remove some bugs so thanks for the advice.Luciferwildcat (talk) 07:33, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to make sure you actually downloaded Spybot, using the official site linked from the article would be a good idea. As are the two suggestions from Smartse. Nevard (talk) 08:02, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Malwarebytes and SUPERAntiSpyware are also worth using if the previous tools don't get rid of it. Alternatively, you could install ubuntu and probably not need any AV software SmartSE (talk) 12:28, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Purge everything related to the wifi connection in Ubuntu

My Wifi connection gets lost every 1 minute (and reconnects within seconds). I don't know exactly where the problem is. How can I reinstall everything related to the wifi? (in Ubuntu). Quest09 (talk) 15:15, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Have you asked at Ubuntuforums yet? They're pretty knowledgeable about problems like this. If you ask them, you'll need to provide more information, such as when it stopped working (was there a major installation at the time?) Magog the Ogre (talk) 16:47, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CompTIA certification

Where should I start to get A+ certified? I have a degree in computer science so many of the topics will be easy for me. Magog the Ogre (talk) 16:55, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you haven't seen it already, knowledgebuster.com lets you take practice tests for the CompTIA. You might be surprised, though, as the questions are not necessarily stuff you would learn on a traditional Comp Sci course (I failed a couple of practices). You will need to take the test through one of the registered test centres, run by Pearson or Prometric. These may be based in FHE colleges (community college in the US?) or in private companies. College-run tests may be subsidised, but you might have to do the whole course. Private companies will either just let you turn up and do the exam, or will run a short course aimed at getting you to pass the test (rather than learning more generally). Private companies may cost more. You will need to book your test through one of the above sites - check both as they list different testing centres. If you've done any of the Microsoft certifications, the process is quite similar. --Kateshortforbob _talk 14:17, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So.... there's no way for me to download something and study it on my own? I do have an old computer or two laying around IIRC that I could take apart if necessary. Magog the Ogre (talk) 01:47, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I happen to have a CompTIA A+ Certification. I also studied computer science in college and found it was of little help in earning my certification, as computer science emphasizes programming with a light overview of hardware. The A+ exam emphasizes hardware and software configuration. The first thing I'd do is download the exam objectives here and here and then print them out. Then, I'd Google all the terms listed and check them off once you have a good understanding of what they mean, what their speed is, their voltages, their pin layouts, etc. I also watched some video tutorials from CBT Nuggets and VTC, although those cost money. I've also heard good things about TestOut tutorials. I also read this book: [10]. It's a great book.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 03:36, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can SQL SELECT combine items from several rows?

I have a database with a structure like this:

 Table1UID  Identity  Date           Value
   00001    ABC       01.01.2011     43
   00002    DEF       02.01.2011     28
   00003    GHI       05.01.2011     37
   00004    ABC       05.01.2011     49
   00005    JKL       08.01.2011     28
   00006    GHI       09.01.2011     40
   00007    ABC       12.01.2011     42
   00008    MNO       23.01.2011     31

The Table1UID is unique, while the "Identity" field is non-unique. I want to make a selection that collects all (or at least several, see below) occurrences of the same "Identity" in the same row of the selection.

Identity  Table1UID1   Date1       Value1  Table1UID2   Date2        Value2   Table1UID3  Date3        Value3
   ABC    00001        01.01.2011     43   00004        05.01.2011     49     00007       12.01.2011     42
   DEF    00002        02.01.2011     28   NA           NA             NA     NA          NA             NA
   GHI    00003        05.01.2011     37   00006        09.01.2011     40     NA          NA             NA
   JKL    00005        08.01.2011     28   NA           NA             NA     NA          NA             NA
   MNO    00008        23.01.2011     31   NA           NA             NA     NA          NA             NA

I suppose I may have to put a limit to how many items I want to combine; say I want to collect the values corresponding to the first, the last, and the "middle" Table1UID (whichever way "middle" is easiest implemented). Is it possible to do this with SQL SELECT, and if so, how? I'm using Microsoft Access (ancient version), but could switch to MySQL if that makes it easier. Thanks, -NorwegianBlue^talk 19:41, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I can imagine very cludgey ways to do this involving lots of embedded SELECT queries that abuse the FIRST and LIMIT parameters to try and get successive iterations of the same values and poke them into a row, but it strikes me that this would be a very clunky way to do this (and likely to fail with regards to when there is only a first and not a second), which indicates that there's probably a smarter approach than this. But I'm not an SQL guru so I'll defer to others on that point. If you're using Access, though, my inclination would be to go about things differently, using VBA to construct this sort of thing, just because it'll be less apt to go belly-up when you hit all of those NAs... ---Mr.98 (talk) 21:27, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You can almost do it with group_concat (MySQL - similar functions in other engines). You'd use: select Itendity, group_concat(Table1UID, Date, Value) from YourTable group by Identity. The catch is that the group_concat comes out as one column with comma-separated values. Of course it is rather each to explode a comma-separated value in a wrapper query to turn them back into independent columns. -- kainaw ™ 21:34, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If I were to do it as SQL, I imagine creating 3 temporary tables would be the way to go, where:

1) The first table has columns Identity, Table1UID1, Date1, and Value1 and contains the first occurrence of each Identity when sorted by Table1UID.

2) The second table has columns Identity, Table1UID2, Date2, and Value2 and contains the first occurrence of each Identity when sorted by Table1UID1, which is not in the first table.

3) The third table has columns Identity, Table1UID3, Date3, and Value3, and contains the first occurrence of each Identity when sorted by Table1UID1, in the reverse order, which is not in the first or second table.

Then the only ugly thing remaining to deal with would be Identities in the first table which aren't in the second or third tables. You might want to update the second and third tables to add the "NA" for any Identity present in the first table, but absent in those tables. After this prep, the final SELECT statement should be straightforward. StuRat (talk) 22:19, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For a solution specific to MS SQL Server 2008 & later, you can use the ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY ... ORDER BY ...) to group and sequence the rows. Those partial results can then be wrapped up as a Common Table Expression (CTE) using a WITH clause that precedes a final select which selects and joins the contents of each column. The number of column groups would be fixed though. Generating a result with a dynamic number of column groups would likely require some dynamic SQL. For the three column case, you would have something like:

       DECLARE @Table1 TABLE(Table1UID INT, [Identity] VARCHAR(100), [Date] DATE, Value INT);
       INSERT @Table1
       VALUES 
           (1, 'ABC', '2011/01/01', 43),
           (2, 'DEF', '2011/01/02', 28),
           (3, 'GHI', '2011/01/05', 37),
           (4, 'ABC', '2011/01/05', 49),
           (5, 'JKL', '2011/01/08', 28),
           (6, 'GHI', '2011/01/09', 40),
           (7, 'ABC', '2011/01/12', 42),
           (8, 'MNO', '2011/01/23', 31);

       WITH CTE1 AS (
           SELECT col = ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY [Identity] ORDER BY Table1UID), *
           FROM @Table1
       )
       SELECT
           C1.[Identity],
           Table1UID1 = C1.Table1UID, Date1 = C1.[Date] , Value1 = C1.Value,
           Table1UID2 = C2.Table1UID, Date2 = C2.[Date] , Value2 = C2.Value,
           Table1UID3 = C3.Table1UID, Date3 = C3.[Date] , Value3 = C3.Value
       FROM CTE1 C1
       LEFT JOIN CTE1 C2 ON C2.[Identity] = C1.[Identity] AND C2.col = 2
       LEFT JOIN CTE1 C3 ON C3.[Identity] = C1.[Identity] AND C3.col = 3
       WHERE C1.col = 1
       ORDER BY C1.[Identity];

-- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 01:24, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Did you give it a run ? If so, I'd like to see your results. StuRat (talk) 03:58, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Here are the results I get from the above. Except for a few formatting details and the limitation of being a fixed layout, this appears to match the OP's request.

Identity	Table1UID1	Date1	Value1	Table1UID2	Date2	!Value2	Table1UID3	Date3	Value3
ABC	1	2011-01-01	43	4	2011-01-05	49	7	2011-01-12	42
DEF	2	2011-01-02	28	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL
GHI	3	2011-01-05	37	6	2011-01-09	40	NULL	NULL	NULL
JKL	5	2011-01-08	28	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL
MNO	8	2011-01-23	31	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL	NULL

Although I'm using Microsoft SQL Server, the common table expression and window functions like ROW_NUMBER() appear to be more widely implemented than I originally realized. -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 06:29, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot! Unsurprisingly, the code failed miserably with my ancient (2000) Access version. I installed Microsoft Express 2008 server and management studio, and managed to run the SQL statement after having created a new empty database, by right clicking on its icon, and selecting "new query". I pasted the SQL statement into the edit window, and pushed the execute button (exclamation mark). The table that you showed appeared below the SQL code. However, the table "Table1" did not appear to have been created, as I thought it would have been (does the code only create a temporary Table1?). I found the output of the query in the tree control, but not where I expected (it was under "Databases/System databases/master/tables/dbo.Query", not under the database that I had created). I'll need to experiment a bit more, but that will have to wait till tomorrow evening! Thanks again for getting me started! --NorwegianBlue^talk 22:02, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The DECLARE @table1 TABLE(...) statement is used to define a "table variable" in SQL Server, and such tables are automatically dropped when execution of the current script completes. It can be thought of as a more convenient, but less powerful alternative to a temporary table (see [11]). What you are looking for is a persistent table which you can create using CREATE TABLE Table1 ( ... ). Changing the first statement to create a persistant table and replacing all remaining references to "@Table1" with "Table1" will give you a running script. Note that you need only create and populate the table once. -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 00:46, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a million! Works perfectly now! --NorwegianBlue^talk 19:41, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

convert GIF to FLV

I need to do a one-time conversion of a 7-second animated gif to flv. I have Photoshop and Roxio, but they don't seem to do it. I downloaded two free programs, but neither would do it without paying. (Well one wouldn't do anything and the other put words over it and the image was slanted 45 degrees.)

Is there an easy, no-cost way to do this for one time for a small GIF? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:30, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The first reply in this question tells you how to do it, using ImageMagick and then ffmpeg. I tried it and it worked fine. Use the -r option to ffmpeg to set the framerate of the resulting FLV. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:53, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What about native Windows software? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:19, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Those are native Windows software. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 01:16, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

With difficulty, I got ImageMagick, but it doesn't do anything except load the file, allow you to save it or print it, and a couple of things - no conversion. With even greater difficulty I got ffmpeg. I did the command line just as the "answer" says, but it gives the error message: "unknown input format: 'gif' ". Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 02:59, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The file is for a student art contest. The student made a 7-second GIF animaton that won at the county level. Now it is to go to the state level, but the state requires flv. The student doesn't know how to make it an flv. My wife is coordinating it at the local level and sending the local winners on to the state competition. She asked me to convert it from GIF to FLV. I've spent about an hour and a half, I can't do it, so I have to give up. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:11, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you can put the GIF online, I'm sure someone would be willing to do the conversion for you. Email to gifconversion@reisio.com if you like. ¦ Reisio (talk) 05:22, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

FLV sent. ¦ Reisio (talk) 06:33, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, but when I unzipped it, all it played was 7 seconds of black, which is what I got with two of the other conversions. Could there be a problem with the GIF file? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 15:47, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Whoops, when I was playing it back in the default Windows Movie Player, it was showing 7 seconds of black. My wife tried it with Real Player and it worked! Thanks!! Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 16:01, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

You guys should check out VLC sometime. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:29, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

November 22

wireless mouse

Apologies for what feels like a really dumb question, but is it necessary to switch off a wireless mouse after every use? The switches are small and fiddly as though they are not intended for regular use. Both of mine came with no instructions and I can't find an answer by Googling or reading the relevant articles. One is an HP RM809A which has a red light underneath that goes out after a few seconds. The other is a Logitech M235 with no visible light underneath.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:45, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Many wireless mice have a "power save" mode, wherein (when they haven't detected a movement for a while) they reduce the level of their light to save power. But they don't switch it, or their circuitry, off entirely, and so continue to use some power. Switching it off will make it last longer before you need a new battery, but I don't know how efficient that "power saver" feature is. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 12:29, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mine (a Microsoft mouse) runs out of battery pretty quickly and it doesn't have a switch, so I try to remember to unclip the battery compartment lid when I leave the machine unused. - David Biddulph (talk) 12:36, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The mouse which doesn't ever show visible light uses infra-red light instead of visible; this light is visible if you view it through a digital camera, so you can see when it's on or off. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 12:33, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Eventually the switch will break. If it breaks in "always on" mode, no problem, but if it breaks in "always off" mode, you need a new mouse. So, the question is whether replacing the batteries more often is more annoying and expensive that the risk of that. I suspect it's a wash, depending on the relative cost of the mice and batteries. StuRat (talk) 14:52, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I've gone back to using a mouse with a cable. Not only did my IR mouse use batteries at a ridiculous rate (and inevitably run out of power at an awkward time), but the extra weight of the batteries made it less precise. Being attached by a cable has the added advantage that I can't lose it amongst all the other clutter on my desk... AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:00, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. The one wireless mouse I tried also had an absurdly short range of about 3 feet. My mouse cord is longer than that. StuRat (talk) 20:24, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Back to the battery life and the off switch - it depends on the mouse, as the technology is constantly improving. I use a Logitech Wireless Trackball M570 for several hours a day and rarely switch it off. I have been on the same single ordinary AA battery now for 11 months. The range is at least 35 feet (the limit to my line-of-sight environment). This is anecdotal of course, but I figured it was worth pointing out that not all wireless devices are battery hogs. -- 24.254.222.77 (talk) 01:10, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Columns in Word 2007

I am pretty sure I have never experienced this problem before, but I may be mistaken. I am starting a new document at the moment, and the top of the document requires two columns. The first column needs to be oriented to the left, while the second needs to be oriented to the right. After clicking Breaks>Column, to get the cursor at the top of the new column, I try to orient it to the right, but, this is affecting the left-hand column, too - which also becomes oriented to the right. What am I doing wrong here? KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 10:22, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I just had a play with this. It helps if you have all your text done first (in one normal continuous column down the page). Select the bit you want in 2 columns and click on the columns option on the page layout ribbon-tab. This will take the selected text and split it over two columns like a newspaper. You can then select parts of each column and align them left/right/center/justified. You can also apply other paragraph formatting such as language, indents, etc. Unfortunately that is applied to each paragraph within the columns, so you might get odd things happen if a paragraph breaks at the foot of the first columns and continues at the top of the other column.. That way, I can get 2 columns with the text close together in the centre of the page or wide apart towards the page margins. Astronaut (talk) 13:48, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

When you say "the top of the document requires two columns", exactly what does that mean? To me that sounds like you want maybe the top line or two of the document with some text left-aligned and some text right-aligned, rather than say a page full of text in left and right-aligned columns. If that's the case you don't really want to use columns at all. That would be better solved using either left and right tab stops, or by inserting a borderless two column table and formatting each cell to left or right as needed. FWIW these solutions could also be used for full columns of text; if so the table would probably be the better option. --jjron (talk) 14:21, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Astronaut's solution works, until I press Enter in the second column, when I get sent back to the first column again. I haven't tried Jjron's answer yet. I will do so later, and report back. Cheers. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 17:12, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The columns in Word are designed to work a bit like a newspaper. A continuous single column of text is broken in half at a convenient point so as to keep both columns roughly the same length; exactly which point is often a paragraph boundary, but that depends on the widow/orphan control in the paragraph settings. You can get some seemingly odd things going on if you add text to your columns after you have created them, with text in the right column suddenly moving to the left column. If you want to add normall formatted text after the columns, you need to be aware of the section breaks that separate the columns from the rest of the document. You can see these if you turn on the hidden-paragraph-marker view (the ¶ button) so you can be sure you are adding text after the section break. On the other hand, if you have a clear idea of exactly which text needs to be on the left and which on the right, rather then simply needing a newspaper-like layout, then Jjron's solution might be a better way. Astronaut (talk) 04:55, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Connecting an external HDD to a computer

Where can you connect an external HDD to? If a computer only has USB 2.0 ports (not 3.0, which should be standard!), but also E-SATA and HDMI. Would it be possible not to connect through the rather slow USB 2.0 port? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.8.74.46 (talk) 13:51, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well given that external HDDs tend to come with USB connections only, that would generally limit your options, unless you're into rewiring these things to suit a different connection, or using an adapter to another port, which would probably be more likely to slow you down even more anyway. Alternatively you could get a second internal HDD (assuming you have the space in your computer) and connect it via a faster internal connection. But maybe your cheapest and easiest option would be to buy a USB 3.0 expansion card for your computer, and plug your new USB 3.0 external drive into that. --jjron (talk) 14:28, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's a laptop, so no internal space available for it or for the USB 3.0 expansion card... 88.8.74.46 (talk) 14:50, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Everybody was fine with using USB2.0 until a year or two ago, I think you will be able to get away with using it. On the other hand, many external USB HDDs are really standard HDDs with a SATA to USB converter. You could potentially open it up and use the original SATA cable. But really, just use USB - it's not that slow. TheGrimme (talk) 14:55, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For exchanging several 5 GB files, USB 2.0 is slow enough to be irritating. It's simply not the standard anymore. At the time when files were <1 GB, it was OK, but I want something more. 88.8.74.46 (talk) 15:04, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I use USB2.0 on my laptop for my external HDD, and run some fairly CPU-intensive games from it with no problem whatsoever - no lag, nothing. Also, transferring 5GB takes just less than as many minutes. This has never been a problem for me (Intel Core i5 processor, in case that matters). Sorry, this answer may not be of any help. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:07, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, USB 2.0 was enough for us a short time ago. A HDD of 1 TB also sounded as a lot. However, times change. 88.8.74.46 (talk) 19:36, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

... so won't you be changing your laptop soon for one with USB 3.0 and several TB of storage? Meanwhile, I would just put up with 2.0 (in fact I do!) Dbfirs 22:36, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently you can get USB 3.0 adapters for your laptop - see here. Or you may be able to upgrade the laptop motherboard, but that may be unlikely or uneconomical. Look, not to be flippant, but if none of the suggestions suit you and USB 3.0 is that important to you on your laptop, maybe you just need to lash out and buy yourself a new laptop with USB 3.0 already built in. --jjron (talk) 23:05, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Vista toolbar icon doesn't match internet connection?

I've noticed that the internet connection icon on the bottom toolbar of Vista sometimes doesn't match the status of the internet connection. On mouseover it says "Network 4: Access local and internet", and I'm able to submit this question. But the toolbar icon is the two monitors with a red X representing no connection. I'd think a program that's been out so long on so many computers with bugfixes every couple of weeks would be past stuff like this... but then again, it's a Microsoft product. Wnt (talk) 16:41, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This happens to me, too, on my other laptop, which is Vista. Also, lots of icons don't show what they are supposed to show (for example, currently, my REVO Uninstaller Pro icon is showing as Windows' own generic .exe file icon, and World In Conflict is showing with Dawn of War II's icon. I don't think it's anything to worry about, however unprofessional it may look. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 17:10, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

On the Mac (the old classic Mac systems) this problem of icons being wrongly associated would happen every so often and would be cured by a mysterious process called "rebuilding the desktop", which meant restarting with certain keys held down (option and apple, I think). So, I went and searched for a windows equivalent of rebuilding the desktop, and found this page [12] which says Tweak UI does it, but Tweak UI is very old, so I searched for a Tweak UI equivalent and found this Tom's Hardware article [13] about something called "Ultimate Windows Tweaker". I don't know whether it has the necessary function to repair icons or not. I've never understood why they go wrong in the first place, either Card Zero (talk) 00:41, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My Vista laptop also does this, but I'm sure it is quite a recent thing. Either a recent update broke something, or it is time to reinstall Vista. Astronaut (talk) 04:33, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I've noticed something similar recently, but the icons eventually rearrange themselves correctly. Dbfirs 07:06, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Too technical: What readers NEED/want here

Message originally appended to Talk:Secure Digital

No offense intended. Experience of reading article was comparable to old comment, "If I already knew how to spell the word, I wouldn't need to look it up in a dictionary." Or, despite the charts, the technical language still leaves reader with feeling of "too much data, not enough information."

Hope my comments help you improve article - soon. ;-) Arrived here through search and links. Seeking info re WHAT micro SD card to buy for Android smartphone, Samsung SPH-M920 (marketed as the Samsung Transform). This article is as close as index-search got me.

I provide background, so that those who DO understand the article can see how the article does not meet information needs of intelligent, but less-tech-savvy users who NEED the info.

Article too technical: I STILL do not know what card to buy. Before reading, these are the things I "thought I knew" this:

- Standard 2GB card that comes with phone = too small for needs. (Minimal photos, but many applications. Some applications (used daily) make intensive use of SD card.
- 16 GB = too much $, even on internet. That leaves 4 GB or 8 GB.
- Speed matters. Class 4 makes seems better choice. (Possibility of watching full-length movie?)
- Prefer SanDisk (Known compatibility with phone, at least at 2 MB) (Still have adapter from original SanDisk card.)
- 4 GB likely to meet needs for near term, but likely to have phone at least 1.5 more yrs (end of contract).
- Do NOT like the phone (mostly software issues), but likely "stuck with it" for financial reasons. Like plan I have.
- Seriously considering 8 GB, partly due to possible re-use.
- Do NOT know if 8 GB (especially class4) would be compatible with phone.
- Although need card ASAP & budget tight, prices vary so widely, I should consider online purchase and/or another brand.
- If get San-Disk, Reader and/or holder to use in USB (packaged together), seems logical.
- Need back-up & transfer/read capabilities. Specs: Near-term computer access is Linux in PC. Future computer access (by summer) will be Macintosh (while still using this phone).
- Local prices for 4 or 8 GB = several times internet prices. Rarely find SanDisk.
- Know of a few online sources I would trust for purchase (if they had what I want).
- Know how to search, but not evaluate "bargains"/vendors I find.
- Know of a few, relatively-local sources, none of which seem to have SanDisk, except in 2 gig or at almost maximum prices.
- Even though I need phone "yesterday" - it could well be after Thanksgiving before I get SD card - no matter how I get it.
- Do not know what is and is not compatible with phone.
- Do not know what brands are reliable.
- Do not know what brands will fit in existing adapter. (Do I need package of adapter and micro SD?)
- Question: Do I buy cheapest 4 or 8 Gb I can find locally? Or SanDisk locally?
- Question: Do I buy cheapest 4 or 8 Gb I can find on internet (at seemingly-reliable dealer) - even though not SanDisk?
- Question: If I buy 1 card,identified as from bulk-package, am I risking it has been handled, not warranty?, may be another failure?
- Question: Do I focus only on card? or seek package with card, adapter, and reader and/or pen-drive holder for card?
- Bottom-line Question: Cut losses & save time by getting 2-4 gig of anything, locally, no accessories? OR Optimize expenditure by getting 8 gig + accessories on-line for relatively similar price-point? OR spend least, on-line, delays, "mystery label" for 2-4 GB?

So, that is where I started. I read entire page. I am smart. Reasonably tech-savvy, but less than 1 year experience with smart-phones. Most mobile-phone experience has been abysmal. Yet, I am nowhere closer to being informed about making decision than I was before I read this article or wrote this response.

FWIW: Main advantages of remaining with this phone:

- Like the plan (includes unlimited data and enough minutes & minute-saving conditions for free-calls).
- Much of learning-curve accomplished.
- Cut my losses by staying with this phone. (Tight budget.)
- Phone meets *current* needs. Most "future needs" are "wants" - not needs. Needs are:

phone with "enough" minutes (rationed carefully).
Substantial access to data-intense application. (Plan has unlimited data package.) Have used iPhone 'estimator' to calculate usage. With anticipated data usage & close minute-management: My costs approximate my anticipated costs if used newest iPhone 3 (non-Verison). Newer iPhone out-of-reach at least till summer (same time I would qualify for upgrade on current phone, but iPhone not option on that contract). Note that getting iPhone would increase costs, due to unanticipated,too-tempting purchases.

WANTS ARE: Media (radio and free downlaodable songs. Occasional free, down loadable movies and/or TV ability to use internet access while on phone ability to listen to anything (radio, voicemail) or use other applications - while on-hold for long-time on call I placed.

Suggestions? TIA....

--KnowLimits (talk) 17:01, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

On ebay I found a 8 gb memory card for $3 more then a 4 gb, so go with an 8 CTJF83 18:26, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There is a limit to what one can reasonably expect to find in an encyclopaedia, no matter how comprehensive. While Wikipedia might illustrate the basic differences between a range of phones, for detailed shopping decisions you'll surely be better off looking at review websites and using their forums. 87.115.189.156 (talk) 18:46, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I reformatted your post to remove the double numbering. Note that an encyclopedia can't have current pricing info, as that changes on a daily basis. StuRat (talk) 20:15, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest buying online from a reputable dealer, which does not include third party sellers on reputable sites. I personally recommend Newegg, just because they're reputable and relatively cheap. Your phone can accept up to a 32GB microsd card, and all microsd cards should be compatible, because it's a standard they have to follow. Class speeds are mostly pointless, because a Class 4 can outperform a Class 10 in the real world, depending on the card. Typically, read speeds on solid-state devices will be vastly superior when reading. So unless you're recording a lot of HD video, you can mostly ignore the class speeds. You shouldn't need a card reader, as long as you have a USB cable to connect your phone to the PC (or if you have bluetooth on your PC as well). You also should get a decent brand. Sandisk is up there, but Kingston is typically the cheapest of the good brands. Other brands to look at include PNY and Transcend. As for size, it depends. I always run out of room, so I usually opt for the largest. It depends on how much media you plan to put on it, and what you can afford. I recently bought a 32GB Sandisk one for under $36, so they're not as expensive as even six months ago. You shouldn't be paying much more than about $1 a GB. With Black Friday around the corner, you can probably expect to find a 16GB card for about $10.

In short, I put reliability first, followed by size and price. Adaptors are rarely needed. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 21:58, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with your thesis that the technical nature of the Secure Digital article kept you from getting answers to your question, namely: which product is best for your personal situation. Not only are current costs outside the scope of the article, as StuRat notes above; so are decisions such as whether you should trade in your phone for a different model. Spike-from-NH (talk) 23:05, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, reflecting the above responses, perhaps you've misinterpreted - Wikipedia articles are for encyclopaedic information, they're not buyer's guides or advice. Other websites specialise in that sort of information. The Whirlpool forums are a popular Australian example. --jjron (talk) 23:10, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

To summarise your question: You want to store movies on a micro-SD card and watch them on your Samsung SPH-M920 phone. What size should you get that fits your budget?

I think you are over-thinking this way too much. Go buy the largest capacity card that is within your budget. I can easily find Class 4 8GB cards online for less than $10, while class 10 cards are a couple of bucks dearer. I think the brand is pretty much irrelevant. If the card turns out to be of too poor quality, they are usually cheap enough to simply buy another. Page 111 of the phone's user manual says that cards of up to 32 GB are compatible with the phone and the next page says to "be sure to use only recommended microSD cards" without saying which cards they recommend. Astronaut (talk) 04:07, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Old equipment

I live in the American midwest. Instead of trashing or taking to a recycling center, does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with old computer stuff, such as parallel and serial cables? I would think someone, somewhere, might still be able to use such stuff. Thank you! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:22, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Put it up on some kind of freecycling site? Card Zero (talk) 00:58, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

November 23

Remote desktop

Resolved

I have a computer running Windows 7 which I want to connect to via remote desktop. I've set it up and everything works well, except for when I restart the computer. After restarting, I cannot connect to it or even see it in network discovery until I log into it with the account password. It is like the computer doesn't activate the network card until it has logged in. But this means I have to keep a physical screen and keyboard attached to it all the time, which I do not want. I want to be able to turn it on and log in via remote desktop, with no physical screen or keyboard needed. I know it is possible to change a setting to enable the network to start before logging in, because I've done it before on a different computer. But after an hour of searching google and the ref desk archives for my old questions on this, I cannot find the answer. 82.43.90.142 (talk) 00:39, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I know that this isn't answering your question per se, but why do you need to keep a physical screen and keyboard attached? Can't you just make it auto-login with whatever username/password you would login in with? Not the best security practice but if the computer has no screen or keyboard it may not be a big risk to casual passers by and without full disk encryption the computer is always going to be vunerable to anyone dedicated enough. Presuming the problem is really as you suggest this will ensure the network works after a restart and you can later login in remotely if you desire. In fact, unless you really don't want it to login except when you choose, this sounds even better since after a restart you don't have to fluff around with logging in remotely but any background apps etc will start (even if there are no background apps of importance it does mean the restart/login will be more likely to be mostly completed by the time you login remotely). Nil Einne (talk) 02:40, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That works! Thank you 82.43.90.142 (talk) 10:40, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Telling Windows what part of my screen to use

Hello! I recently dropped my laptop. I caught it before it hit the ground with full force, and it works fine. The only part that received damage was the screen. There is a near perfect rectangle all the way to the left of the screen that does work; it is solid white. It spans the entire vertical length of the screen and about 150 pixels horizontally. Is there a way I can tell the Windows 7 OS to only paint to the quadrant of the screen that is functional? I've basically just been resizing my open windows to the dimensions of the functioning part of the screen, but it would be nice if I could trick the OS into thinking the screen is only as large as the part that still works. Thank you.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 03:43, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure about that, but another suggestion is to use an external monitor, assuming your laptop has a connection for one. I use one on my laptop, now that the screen is damaged. StuRat (talk) 03:50, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know a really good way, but you could use something like MaxTo to make it easier. The last completely free version that was released that I know of is up at http://reisio.com/temp/MaxToSetup-2009-3-1.exe. You can also get a few versions from http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.maxto.net/download. ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:13, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe, just maybe, the internal cable between the motherboard and the screen might have come loose. If you don't find a software solution and can't use an external monitor, it might be worth trying a repair before disposing of it, though it would involve downloading the service manual and following the instructions to the letter to take the laptop apart. Astronaut (talk) 04:19, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A screen repair is well worth checking the prices on- though looking through the service manual is key, it's just too easy to break the stupid clips they put on the things instead of real metal fasteners.

Server won't stay shutdown

I have a Dell Poweredge server with CentOS installed. When I want to shut it down, usually because I got fed up with the noisy fans, I can choose shutdown from the menu or type shutdown -h now in a terminal window. It goes through the shutdown process, but this server seems very reluctant to stay shutdown and after a brief (one second?) power off it starts right back up again. Even if I press and hold the power button, I get the same thing unless I let go of the power button at just the right time; and I shouldn't really have to fiddle with the power button anyway. This is probably a useful feature in a large company server room, but is damn annoying in my spare bedroom. I'm sure it didn't used to do this, so something must have changed. What can I do to make my server stay shutdown? Astronaut (talk) 04:27, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like getting into the BIOS to see if there's anything relevant there could be the first order of business. If it will only turn off when the power switch is used in a certain manner, could it be a problem with the switch itself? If you've got a spare case around, you could try hooking up the switch from that to the pins on the server mobo. Failing that, there's always the various software suspend and sleep modes. Nevard (talk) 12:08, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Try shutdown -P now instead of -h

-P explicitly requests a powerdown; -h requests a "halt", the meaning of which is system dependent (I think it's often a function of an ACPI BIOS setting). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 12:27, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CAD help

I need some help in finding a specific length in the attached image. I need the distance of the center of the circle (point near center and radius marked in red) from the corner or edge closest to the observer in the image. It is 0.88 from the center line which is in the y-axis. I need the dimension in the x-axis. The image is from the book Technical Graphics Communication by Gary R. Bertoline. Image: http://i44.tinypic.com/rwosas.jpg

Thanks. --175.110.237.118 (talk) 17:51, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Java: Password storage and retrieval

I am learning to program in java. And my first project is to make a program that is capable of scheduling a YouTube upload. As far as i can tell this hasnt been done before so i figured it would be a good project to jump start my java learning. This project introduces me to 3 new fields: GUIs, Java, and password storage.

My question here today relates to proper/accepted handling of passwords in java.

At first i stored the passwords in clear text in the AppData folder of my windows 7 machine. But i quickly learned how to encrypt the data and i have been using that since.

What i am asking is... Does my program handle password storage in a secure & accepted manor?

November 17

Standard deviation error bars in Microsoft Excel

Sound not working on this machine

Kindle

Open-source software

command prompt beep

Factors affecting .svg rendering speed

Related question

Executable over bittorrent = safe?

November 18

google redirect virus

Variation

Microsoft Works Suite 2006

where to buy the cheapest laptop online ?

Remote access to an iMac over Verizon FiOS

Window 7 ISO File Installation with Daemon Tool Lite !

PNG geotag

gzip wget

Potential Security Risk

Same password on different accounts

November 19

Could a PC be used as a radio receiver/transmitter?

Where can I get affordable Maytag Gas Wall Oven Parts?

Iphone's bluetooth

Overclocking and stability

Windows colour editing

Word 2007 - Two problems

Kompozer

ICT4D

Why don't computers have money inserters, so we order online with physical cash?

November 20

How do I get Google's account services to keep track of my tabs & bookmarks online?

RGB color values—linear or not?

Ancient Egyptian game on the Amiga found

Lego NXT and i2c/rs485 camera

why do jvm/clr need bytecode?

Search engine log file download

How do I tab outlines on the Mobile Google Docs?

November 21

I think I have a trojan

Purge everything related to the wifi connection in Ubuntu

CompTIA certification

Can SQL SELECT combine items from several rows?

convert GIF to FLV

November 22

wireless mouse

Columns in Word 2007

Connecting an external HDD to a computer

Vista toolbar icon doesn't match internet connection?

Too technical: What readers NEED/want here

Old equipment

November 23

Remote desktop

Telling Windows what part of my screen to use

Server won't stay shutdown

CAD help

Java: Password storage and retrieval