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December 2

Android map apps that work near the poles?

What Android apps, if any, can display maps when the user is closer to the WGS84 North or South poles than the 85.051129° N/S latitudes where Google Maps cuts off? Do any of them use a map projection that can show the poles on screen (as e.g. a gnomonic projection centered on the screen would do)? Neon Merlin 02:28, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@NeonMerlin: Google Earth might be able to do it. I haven't used the Android version, though. Jc86035 (talk) 14:18, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Influence of MINIX on Linux?

Authoring Linux was a monumental accomplishment by Linus Torvalds. However, it seems that the history surrounding the development of the Linux kernel version 0.01 is mostly legend.

Did Linus have much formal training? Did he study earlier kernels (MINIX)? Who were the influences that led to Torvalds' Linux kernel (or was it all Linus)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.221.67.126 (talk) 03:11, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Have you seen our Linus Torvalds article? The "Youth" paragraph says

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki between 1988 and 1996,[11] graduating with a master's degree in computer science from the NODES research group.[12] His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Army Uusimaa brigade, in the summer of 1989, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland. In the army he held the rank of Second Lieutenant, with the role of a ballistic calculation officer.[13] Torvalds bought computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum's book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, in which Tanenbaum describes MINIX, an educational stripped-down version of Unix. In 1990, he resumed his university studies, and was exposed to UNIX for the first time, in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX.[14] His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.[15]

Rojomoke (talk) 07:44, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate. Linux and Minix are structurally very different Linux. Calling Minix a "stripped-down version of Unix" entirely misses the point (and it's wrong); Linux, like original Unix (and its descendents, including ULTRIX, SunOS, Solaris, and the BSDs), is (effectively) a monolithic kernel; Minux (like Mach) is a microkernel. Tanenbaum's book was clearly influential; Tanenbaum's OS clearly wasn't. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 14:49, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, OS-X/macOS, probably the most widely used certified UNIX, and the spiritual UNIX most widely used on desk- and laptops, uses a microkernel architecture under a BSD "personality" layer. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:12, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What To Do If i Want To Play Homescapes Android Game On My Mac PC?

hey guys i am lover of mobile games. Problem is that i want to play homescapes game on my office PC? because they doesn't allow mobile phone on office i tried so many sites but nothing works for me. in last i tried GamingRun site i don't know who is the author of this site. but this site provide solution of Homescapes Hack on Windows. Please help guys :( — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2405:205:3090:9D68:E18A:E587:F444:56E6 (talk) 08:26, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Try BlueStacks. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 14:36, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Blockchain

People talk about blockchain and specifically distributed ledgers as being beneficial in so far as that they keep a record of every transaction conducted. It strikes me that wikis do this already, in so far as they keep a record of every edit made at least. I know that wikis are not perfectly comparable to blockchain given that in some cases I believe edit histories may be retrospectively purged, and I am not sure of the extent to which wikis operate on a decentralised basis, but it strikes me that there may be some similarities or overlaps within the technologies. Am I totally wrong in thinking this? Freeknowledger (talk) 21:52, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You miss one important part: A blockchain is a public record that ensures a permanent unalterable record between untrusted parties. A wiki uses a central database (possibly replicated and distributed) under control of only one entity. Whoever controls that database can change the history. We all (well, maybe most ;-) implicitly trust the Wikimedia Foundation to not do malicious changes - but would you trust a random anonymous public/private key pair with your life savings? In Proof-of-work system (like Bitcoin), you need over 50% of the computing power in the network to reliably change the history. In a Proof-of-stake system, you need 50% of the "stake", which is a less well defined concept, but also will be unlikely to be controlled by one party in a large-scale system. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:54, 2 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

December 3

RGBA hex interpretation

Why is the RGB colour #00000080 interpreted as black at exactly 0.5 opacity (at least by Firefox)? #…7f is treated as 0.498 ≈ 127⁄255 and #…81 as 0.506 ≈ 129⁄255, for what it's worth. Jc86035 (talk) (notify me) 14:01, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The answer is "it shouldn't be" - 0x80 should be 0.502 (128⁄255). This is the official W3C specification, linked from this page on the Mozilla site, and neither say anything about a special case for 0x80. See also RGBA color space. Perhaps a bug report to the Firefox developers is in order? Tevildo (talk) 20:18, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It's very likely that the implementation of Alpha compositing uses hardware-accelerated, low-bit-depth (e.g. 8 or 16 bits) math for intermediate results, which could yield all types of varieties of rounding or loss of precision. Here's some more on layer compositing in Gecko, the engine used by Mozilla Firefox. Casually glancing at that system schematic diagram, I see about six zillion places where a minor math or rounding error might cause a small but non-zero error in the final pixel value.

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a professional image-software programmer make a single-bit- numerical error in a compositing- or color space conversion- operation that resulted in a user-visible effect, ...I'd have a lot of dollars. Attention, all programmers: today's a good day to review the mathematics in error analysis and error propagation!

As Tevildo suggests, a bug-report is in order: it won't be the first - accelerating the graphical operations in Gecko creates havoc ranging from minor glitches to catastrophic layout problems to total machine-failures - and those are just my cursory samplings of the bugs reported this week!

Nimur (talk) 02:50, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Another level of 3D experience

(I posted this question at the Entertainment RD, but I'll continue it here.)

Looking for a digital 3D CGI animation video format where I can hover the animating object over (similar to ZygoteBody, but I can freely move to any angle including top and bottom). It will be great if it does not rely on Adobe Flash. JSH-alive/^{talk/cont/mail} 16:31, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Preview / Mac OS provides this function with some file formats (eg .dae / Collada). The WP article lists a few more. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 16:47, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Can anyone recommend me a Windows equivalent or web browser-based ones? And it should have a time bar, so I'm able to skip forward or go back. JSH-alive/^{talk/cont/mail} 17:10, 6 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

December 4

Word Labels Question - Specifying Vendor

I am running Word 2016 on a Window 10 desktop machine. Word has the feature to create labels and to specify the vendor and style of labels. The default vendor is Microsoft. Can I set the default vendor to be Avery US and the default labels to be 5162 (or 8162, which are the same size)? Is there an option that I can set in Word so that I don't have to set it every time I build and print labels? Robert McClenon (talk) 00:23, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Are you referring to the Labels option under the Mailings tab? Or the Labels option under Mail Merge under the Mailings tab? If so, Peter Jamieson's suggestion in this discussion [1] seems to work for me. BTW that discussion is linked in the top answer in this discussion [2] and the second discussion is the first Google search result for 'default label vendor word'. Nil Einne (talk) 11:58, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the question that I am asking is the question that is being asked on the other web sites. No, I don't see that it provides me with a "sticky" option, maybe because I don't see a Tools tab in the first place. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:23, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Am I missing something? Can someone help me? Robert McClenon (talk) 22:23, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

nVidia Quadro 2000 graphics card

I have an nVidia Quadro 2000 graphics card I took out of an HP desktop computer whose motherboard died. I think the card itself is still working, though.

When I googled for "nVidia Quadro 2000" I found two different designs:

My card is of design 2. What is the difference between these?

I intend to sell the card because I bought a new computer with a better nVidia Quadro graphics card (a Quadro K4000). Does anyone have any idea of a current market price for a used nVidia Quadro 2000 graphics card? JIP | Talk 17:22, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

eBay and similar sites tend to be the best place to get an idea of the value of a lot of common second hand components. Particularly computer components. A quick look suggests the Quadro 2000 appears to be worth about US$40-50 in the US. You may be able to get a little more if you're lucky. I suspect it may be worth a little more in Finland, but I don't know how big the market is there. Nil Einne (talk) 16:09, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

They are useless, since they are so old, they only have 1 GB of Ram. Even the lowest common entry level consumer graphic cards come with 2, more common even 4 GB of Ram today. The on-chip graphic cores on Intel or AMD CPU's are more capable in 3D-Rendering. Besides that such old hardware often cause strange issues that can not be tracked but can make systems unstable and can drive users nuts when they try to find the "bugs" in their system. --Kharon (talk) 23:18, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cant see the chip under the heat sink. I see different designed buck converters on the cards. See if a direct connection to the power supply is required. See first if Your computers GPU, today inside the CPU chip performs better or equal to those cards. The Quadro chip is very similar to another NVIDIA chip. One of it has some deactivated features. This can be seen as the former Celeron compared to its same generation Pentium or even Duron to Athlon. If those Quadro cards are recapped hardware, know if the electrolytic capacitors are useful and new to prevent performance issues and an unstable performing computer. If these are polymer caps the are made for 10 to 15 Years when used inside the manufacturers designed operation range. Worry on incomplete placed electrolytic capacitors. Maybe better components are used or the lifetime is reduced, means on used parts, the lifetime may be short from expiring. This is up on the card manufacturer, not on the chip manufacturer. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 15:24, 7 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

December 5

GoogleBot and such.

I had a domain name submitted to Google.

Then, I created an add-on domain. It does not link to any page, nor does any page link to it. Within days GoogleBot comes and finds it and such. How did GoogleBot and such find it?

Is it possible to look up a domain, and find out all the add-on domains? And vice versa? (By add-on domain, I do not mean subdomain, as in subdomain.domain.com). And if I want Google to stop logging it, I can just upload a blank robots.txt, or do I have to put something in it? Thanks. 12.239.13.143 (talk) 20:16, 5 December 2017 (UTC).[reply]

I think "Add-on domain" is just marketing jargon. It usually refers to a special deal where you can host more than one domain without buying a separate hosting package.

You're really asking if google is aware of newly registered domains.

Answer : Yes. Registering domains is public. You can actually get up-to-date lists of all registered domains.

Here is a site that tracks recently registered domains.

Here is a site that will sell you a giant list of all domains.

ApLundell (talk) 23:12, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, thanks. This must not have been the case 10 years ago? I wanna say 10 years ago, I manually submitted my domain site to Google to log it, Google even asked you to add in a tag on the page to prove it was yours. All this is changed now huh? 12.130.157.65 (talk) 14:08, 6 December 2017 (UTC).[reply]

Nope, they require you to prove the site is yours if you want to add it to webmaster tools or analytics. You do not have to do it in order to submit it, and that hasn't changed in the past decade. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 16:32, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Vector field visualization apps: free, configurable, pretty?

Hi, I'm looking for apps that do vector field visualization, ideally like this:

Must have animations, more options the better
Available as multi-platform and runs in browser
Alternately available as free and open source download for Mac or Linux
Should enable basic manipulations of what functions determine the field (ideally free entry, not a list)
Should enable at basic visualization manupulations (e.g. number of particles/lines, speed, color mapping, type of information shown, etc.)

Something like this [3] or this [4] are along the lines of what I'm looking for, but I'm hoping to get suggestions that are better, or perhaps one piece of software that has all this. Thanks, SemanticMantis (talk) 23:16, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Some more items to look at: vPython, commonly used for physics education, can plot fields (example and other tools); GNU Octave can plot 2D fields with almost no effort. Both are free software. Historically, I've hooked those up to web servers (using very old-fashioned, extremely reliable and high-performance cgi interfaces); but I bet you can find new stuff nowadays that sits inside of some slow and crufty web content management package manager...

You can also directly draw lines using WebGL, but as this tutorial points out - drawing lines is hard! Nonetheless, if you can learn to draw lines, you can plot arbitrary mathematical functions using a fairly modern, fairly-high-performance, cross-platform, web-enabled technology...

Nimur (talk) 19:56, 7 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

December 6

PowerPoint animation on click

I want a PowerPoint animation that is

triggered on a click,
appears inline (like a bullet point),
randomly displays a name from a list.

I am aware that this likely requires VBA. But I have no experience of VBA, and have found nothing on the web for a macro that will work. It seems like such a simple task, so how would I achieve it?--Leon (talk) 13:02, 6 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

December 7

Streaming video display ratio

On many streaming websites, many videos with wrong aspect or display ratios exist (e. g., video is 16:9 but displayed as 4:3). Is there such a thing as a Firefox (57.0.1, 64-Bit on Windows 10 Home) plug-in or add-on where I can change any streaming video's display ratio on any page with one click, a lot like I can in VLC? The only such exact plug-in I could find could only do it for YouTube, and the other two I found only could tell my OS that my *MONITOR* would be 21:9 rather than 16:9. --2003:71:4E07:BB77:903C:110A:4DF3:BC7A (talk) 23:34, 7 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe one of the first three results on this page can help? (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 16:28, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, thanks...I considered that my last resort because loading it into VLC will leave a permanent copy hogging my C: drive space that I'd have to clean regularly to keep my system running, hence I was hoping for a one-click in-browser solution. --2003:71:4E07:BB40:5DB9:6E6A:B4D1:170 (talk) 03:27, 9 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

December 8

how to delete files on my phone

It's a Samsung Galaxy S6. Today I received a message that I'm running out of space and that some apps might not run as a result. The message said 19 GB of my space was occupied by Pictures, and I decided to delete them all.

In the Samsung folder I found My Files, which showed six categories, including images. When I clicked that, I saw all the images but no way to delete them. There were options to edit, share, sort by, and settings.) When I clicked on one of the pictures, I got the message, "Unable to open Gallery. There is not enough storage space to open Gallery. Go to My Files, then delete some files."

I would love to. Can you help? Thanks, --Halcatalyst (talk) 00:07, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A Web search for "samsung galaxy delete file" looks promising. You can also delete (as well as copy to or from the device) files on the phone from a PC if you connect the phone to a PC with a USB cable. --47.157.122.192 (talk) 03:43, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I found an excellent reference" [5] --Halcatalyst (talk) 15:37, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

VHDL is Sequential or Concurrent/Parallel?

If VHDL is a concurrent language, then how it handles conditional statements (like if, elsif, case) which proceeds sequentially? The confusion is that how can a concurrent language deal with sequential conditional statements? Sunnynitb (talk) 13:51, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

VHDL captures both concepts. A process is a sequential operation, but a VHDL design can have multiple (often many) processes, which can operate concurrently. The language has various mechanisms, including process sensitivity and wait statements, which allow the designer to specify how otherwise concurrent operations can interact. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 15:10, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If there is any material or link regarding this question, please give me. Thank You. Sunnynitb (talk) 18:19, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.tkt.cs.tut.fi/kurssit/1426/S11/Lectures/TKT-1426_lect_7.pdf -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 21:07, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Security question

I just attempted to visit http://www.allmusic.com/artist/reverend-jim-howie-mn0001168557 but was presented with a huge warning about a worm, and it autoplayed an audio file telling me to call so-and-so about the situation. (1) If you have a really solid antivirus/firewall/whatever, could you visit the page and help me understand what's going on? I'm guessing that it's somewhat of a hoax (warning! virus! call this Microsoft number which actually is our number, and we'll take over your computer, thank you very much), but I'm not clear. (2) AllMusic appears to be a major commercial site; unless someone hacks their databases, how is this possible? If it were user-generated, I'd guess that it's comparable to the GNAA attacks that we've sustained (e.g. Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive960#Spam_/_"hack"_(loosest_sense)_edit_needs_followup), but our article doesn't make it sound like a usergenerated site. Nyttend backup (talk) 20:47, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, I see an entirely normal site with no scary warnings. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 20:58, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Huh. I wonder if I've got something on my computer...I think I'll talk with our IT department about this computer. Nyttend backup (talk) 21:24, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You probably have malware on your computer. Allmusic isn't the problem. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 21:49, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?url=allmusic.com It is the reference desk after all. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 22:41, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

December 9

USB Hub

I have a new, powered, USB Hub, and though I know that it is plugged into a power outlet and is plugged into the back of my Apple Desk-Top, none of the "keys" (or whatever they are called) show-up on the 'Desktop', does anyone have any ideas as to why please?194.126.80.63 (talk) 00:45, 9 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I know very little about Macs and I am not sure what you mean when you say "keys", but I think that if you (for example) connect an external hard drive to that USB hub the drive will show up on the desktop, but the USB hub itself does not. Its just a bunch of empty extra USB ports, and they are only displayed on the desktop if you connect something to them. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 00:54, 9 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I know a bit more about Macs, and your understanding is correct. Also, not all hard drives can be powered via USB, not even via a powered hub - for most 3.5" drives, you still need an external power supply, or they won't turn on (and won't show up). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 00:59, 9 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this, but each of the connections on the Hub have a portable programme 'key' plugged in and it is those that I should expect to show up on the "Desktop". Sorry not to remember what these portable "keys" are properly called! (Memory Stick is it?)