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April 3

Repair Of a Laptop Screen

I have an old laptop (working) with a screen that was disassembled. The silvering on the last layer of the LCD unit was washed off and now the screen is impossibly dark. Can this be replaced with aluminum foil or something similar? 76.117.247.55 (talk) 03:30, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

I doubt it. You can probably hook it up to an external monitor, though. StuRat (talk) 04:17, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

RGB color ranges for human skin, nails, hair, and eyes

RGB color range for human skin

In the RGB color model, what is the range of numeric representations for normal human skin? For the purpose of this question, I am counting congenital albinism, natural sun tanning, and aging as normal. Artificial treatments are not counted. -- Wavelength (talk) 05:57, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

The best you can probably get is something like the SVG in Von Luschan's chromatic scale. It's going to be inexact no matter what you do, but if you're looking for just some baseline values, it's probably fine. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:08, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

All humans trend toward the red channel. This fact is common knowledge among Photoshop users as it aids them in isolating (masking) humans from a background.--Chmod 777 (talk) 17:19, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

[From List of Biblical names, I quote: "Adam, earthy; red". -- Wavelength (talk) 19:32, 4 April 2010 (UTC)]

RGB color range for human nails

In the RGB color model, what is the range of numeric representations for normal human nails? For the purpose of this question, I am counting congenital albinism, natural sun tanning, and aging as normal. Artificial treatments are not counted. -- Wavelength (talk) 05:58, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

RGB color range for human hair

In the RGB color model, what is the range of numeric representations for normal human hair? For the purpose of this question, I am counting congenital albinism, natural sun tanning, and aging as normal. Artificial treatments are not counted. -- Wavelength (talk) 05:58, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

RGB color range for human eyes

In the RGB color model, what is the range of numeric representations for normal human eyes? For the purpose of this question, I am counting congenital albinism, natural sun tanning, and aging as normal. Artificial treatments are not counted. -- Wavelength (talk) 05:59, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

In reply to all the above

Unfortunately, RGB is inherently uncalibrated, and human perception of computer RGB colors can be strongly affected by monitor characteristics, ambient lighting, etc. so your questions are not really all that meaningful as they stand. There's sRGB, a standardized version of RGB, but there's no guarantee that your system is sRGB-compliant unless you've carefully calibrated your monitor in one particular set of ambient lighting conditions, etc... AnonMoos (talk) 06:28, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

But surely human skin is not bright blue or bright green, so it must be possible to reduce the range of possible colours by a lot. Perhaps the OP could find twenty photos of people on the internet, measure the colour of their skin etc, and get a better idea that way. 78.149.194.146 (talk) 13:04, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

It would give an idea of the colors that have been used in previous images, but it wouldn't give much precision or additional exactness beyond just eyeballing it... AnonMoos (talk) 13:33, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

If it was just one-dimensional data then you could calculate the mean and standard deviation, which would give you more information than just looking at them. But as its three dimensional data then I'm not sure what you do. Regarding shadows, perhaps it would be possible to adjust the greyness of each colour to a standard grey, so that shadow was not important. But perhaps skins differ in the amount of greyness in them anyway. 78.149.241.120 (talk) 10:56, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, the lighting conditions change all the RGB values from 0,0,0 all the way up to 255,255,255. StuRat (talk) 13:16, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

True, but I'm sure the original poster knows this. Let's imagine he wants the base colors for use as textures for a 3-D modeling scene, whereby lighting conditions would be calculated against the base. It isn't a totally horrible question. I just don't know if the numbers are easily accessible in the way the OP wants them, other than skin color. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:37, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

For standardization of lighting, let us assume that all the subjects have been photographed outdoors on under a cloudless day sky, at the equator at sea level (see Macapá), at exactly midday (12:00 noon) on the spring or autumn equinox. -- Wavelength (talk) 14:30, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

[I am revising my comment. -- Wavelength (talk) 14:39, 3 April 2010 (UTC)]

What, no humidity spec ? :-) StuRat (talk) 15:58, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

OK. now the next problem in specifying ranges is that the R, G, and B components aren't independent. That is, we can't just give a range of each. (If we did, you'd find that many combos within those ranges would look very wrong.) For a given value of R and G we could give a range of B, though. So, we end up with a 3D graph. How could we pass on that info here ? StuRat (talk) 15:58, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

For a 3D graph, maybe there is helpful information in the article on 3D computer graphics. -- Wavelength (talk) 16:22, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

My Google search for "3D data" reported about 198,000,000 results. -- Wavelength (talk) 16:33, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

There could be a list of all the integral values from {0,0,0} to {255,255,255}, or simply a reporting of the number of such values out of a maximum of 2²⁴ = 16,777,216. -- Wavelength (talk) 16:48, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

If you are contemplating using these RGB numbers for computer graphics - I've gotta warn you that they won't do you much good. Drawing things in "skin color" doesn't produce reasonable results because the things that make for realistic skin have little to do with color. With good lighting algorithms, you can make green skin look "real" but without good lighting, even getting the RGB values perfect for your own skin won't produce good results. When drawing skin, you need to pay a lot of attention to surface texture (tiny pores, etc), to the shininess (which varies over the skin with oily deposits) and especially to an effect called "subsurface-scattering". If you get those things right, then the range of believable colors are truly vast. SteveBaker (talk) 16:42, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

[Wikipedia has an article about subsurface scattering. -- Wavelength (talk) 20:44, 3 April 2010 (UTC)]

My reason for asking these questions is that humans perceive each other as having skin with a hue of black, brown, red, yellow, or white, and I am looking for an objective measure of the actual differences, which may be relatively slight; and I added hair and eyes, because they vary in color also; and I added nails for a total of four features. -- Wavelength (talk) 16:58, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Why don't you open a picture of a naked human in Photoshop, remove the background, and then look at the histogram to see how much of R, G, and B there is? You could then repeat the procedure for their nails and eyes. Here are some tutorials on how to do that: [1], [2]. Also, if you'd like to see how much cyan, magenta, yellow, and black there is, you can switch to the CMYK mode (Image --> Mode --> CMYK).--Chmod 777 (talk) 17:30, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

There is also DigitalColor Meter, but I am hoping that someone has already done the research.—Wavelength (talk) 18:37, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Again, see Von Luschan's chromatic scale for human skin color. Anthropologists standardized this a long time ago. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:04, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

I tried to find the questions at Ask a Color Scientist!, by looking on the FAQ page and by searching on the FAQ Search page, but I did not find the questions, so I submitted the questions on the page for that purpose. -- Wavelength (talk) 03:41, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

My guess is that Mark Fairchild (the “color scientist” who answers those questions) is unlikely to tell you anything that you haven’t been told here. His research is not about human skin color, but rather about how color perception operates and can be modeled. Anyway, if you clarify your motivation for asking about skin/eye/etc. color, someone can probably better figure out how to answer your question. RGB is not a good system for quantifying or comparing color (of skin or anything else); instead, it is a system for telling televisions or computer displays what to show. Much of the recent academic literature about skin color is about face detection, etc. But if that’s not what you’re specifically interested, it might not be useful to you. Try searching google scholar for “skin color” or similar terms; Many papers have pdfs available. –jacobolus (t) 04:55, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you all for your answers. -- Wavelength (talk) 14:47, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

What's the term for a code file?

What do you call a single .c file within a multiple file C program (and its header file)? Is it a "module"? (Never mind whether it's truly a module - is that the term generally used?) 213.122.26.30 (talk) 07:38, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

I'd just call it a source code file. StuRat (talk) 12:53, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Yep. It's a source file in common parlance. It also closely corresponds to (but is not the same) what the C standard calls a "translation unit". C does not really use the term "module", and only supports the concept with some discipline on the side of the programmer. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 16:47, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, so that's what a "unit" is. What if you have two or three closely related .c files (which you probably keep in the same subdirectory)? Would C programmers tend to call that a module, or just "a bunch of source files"? Or perhaps a unit (which, judging by your link, would be as technically incorrect as "module")? 81.131.48.116 (talk) 23:13, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

C does not have the concept of programmatically defined object namespaces or hierarchies. (This is largely because it is not an object oriented language). When compiled and linked, every file is equal, no matter which subdirectory it came from. Any terminology to refer to logical groupings of C program source code is used loosely by the programmer - it doesn't have an exact meaning in the context of the language. A programmer may choose to compile and link several source files into a single library; in that sense, those files are the set of sourcecode for a particular library. Languages like C++ or java precisely define the concept of namespaces, packages, and object hierarchies; the compiler and linker understand the meaning of such terminology. Therefore, these languages have more precise terminology for referring to groups of source code files. The C language does not. Nimur (talk) 05:41, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

As an aside, a "module" can mean something totally different than you probably expect; it is the Fortran equivalent of an object file - a compiled element from a single source file - but only if that source file defines a Fortran module. Here's a good overview: What is a Module?. Note that this is probably not what you were thinking when you described a group of related source files. Nimur (talk) 05:45, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Modules have nothing to do with OOP. The fanciest module system in widespread(?) use is ML's. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 09:32, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Sure, but is there no common name, however imprecise? 81.131.23.57 (talk) 12:02, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

There is no official name for a group of related .c files, but I've heard "package" being used (which, unlike in e.g. Flash Actionscript, has no formal meaning for C). People working under a standard like Automotive SPICE would tend to use the term "unit", but again this is unofficial, since ASPICE does not stipulate the use of C. 83.81.42.44 (talk) 14:26, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Translation unit was the word that first came to mind, but like Stephan says, source file is more accurate. A translation unit is the result of running a source file and the files #included by it through the preprocessor. decltype (talk) 13:07, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Network issues

I'm having serious problems. I'm on Wichita State University's guest network, and I'm having trouble (despite a full wireless signal) getting the internet to function. I ran a few diagnostic tests, and they told me

“ The wireless router/AP for your network is either unavailable, not working, or is disconnected. You will not be able to connect to the Internet, although you might be able to connect to your local network. ”

I'm lucky to have gotten to here to ask how to fix it, as it took me 45 minutes to get the connection to function long enough. Web pages will load partly, then not finish loading or will not even start loading and return the "Connection timed out" error. All of this is happening with a full and strong signal. I may, if I'm lucky, get a small burst of .5% network utilization. What's going on with this connection, and how do I fix it? --Ks1stm (talk) ^{[alternate account of Ks0stm]} 14:04, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

You certainly do seem to be having a problem of some sort. I deleted about 6 duplicates of this post. --Phil Holmes (talk) 14:29, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

First, we need to establish if the problem is on your computer or with the network. The easiest way to check that out is probably to talk with other computer users nearby, to see if they are also having problems with the network. Note that just because it says you have a strong signal, that doesn't necessarily mean the network is running (or running well). If you have any other way to access the Internet from your computer, try it. This could be dial-up, or, if it's a laptop, by taking it to a location with a different network.

So, if it's the network that's at fault, just contact the system administrator and tell them about the problem, there's nothing more you can do at your end. If it does seem to be a problem with your computer, then come back, tell us the steps you took, and we may be able to make further recommendations. StuRat (talk) 15:45, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to hope and pray that this doesn't duplicate post...sorry about that...it didn't even load the page with my changes on it, it just quit loading before it moved away from the editing page, so I thought it hadn't gone through. Once I finally got through to the page, it logged me out (which I notice it has done again) and I couldn't rollback my changes. I checked with the only other computer user in the area, and they said the internet is working for them, but excruciatingly slowly. On my computer, it just quits loading the page and times out. In the task manager it registers a tiny little blip of network utilization, then nothing until I refresh the page or try again. I can't access the internet any other way, so I can't check via that method. Is there anything I can do to fix this, or is it a network problem? Also, if it is a network problem, how do I tell the system administrators without the same problems affecting my attempts to communicate the problem to them? 156.26.255.7 (talk) 16:51, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

It does sound as if the problem is at the University connection to the internet. Do they have any internal servers that you are allowed to view, or an internal e-mail system? I suspect that your connection is low in priority when allocating a limited internet bandwidth. I get similar problems with my internet connection (delivered via a series of microwave links). Dbfirs 17:10, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

I found a temporary solution (except for when saving edits) where I just copy the url I want to go to into the address bar, hold down enter while watching the Task manager networking graph thingy, and when it spikes, I let up the enter key and it will load my page. It's as if I have to ping the network over and over again with the same request until it finally responds. Ks0stm ^(T•C•G) 17:21, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

That sounds a useful trick! I'll try it when my connection is playing hide-and-seek with me. Does anyone know exactly how DNS servers behave when there is insufficient bandwidth or connections available? Dbfirs 18:25, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

It sounds like there is a slow network, which causes your computer to time out on the connection. Perhaps someone else knows how you can make your computer wait longer before timing out. As for letting the network administrator know, I looked up their phone number, but it seems you will have to wait until Monday morning to get any help:

User Services Helpdesk

The User Services Helpdesk is one source of 
contact for information, to report technical 
problems, and to dispatch assistance.

Contact Information

The Hours of Operation are Monday-Friday, 
8:00am to 5:00pm.
3 WAYS to summon HELP
  1.      Call WSU-HELP (978-4357)
  2.      Fill out an Information Request Form
  3.      email helpdesk@wichita.edu
Always provide the following:
   * Name
   * Phone number where you can be reached (Land line preferred)
   * Brief description of the problem
We will respond as quickly as possible. 
Every call and on-line request is important. 
These requests are logged and prioritized 
based on the problem. While every effort 
is made for a quick response, demands of 
time and resources may result in delays 
of service.

So, you may be out of luck until Monday. StuRat (talk) 23:43, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Scan specific folder

So in Windows 7 you can scan a drive for errors. But I have a folder where I know there's an error (because every time I try to open it, I get an error) so can I just scan that one folder instead of scanning the entire drive which is take hours? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.207 (talk) 15:13, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

The issue is that the error(s) may not be limited to the folder, especially if the folder is spread over many small areas of the disk, due to disk fragmentation. So, you'd better bite the bullet and scan the whole disk, or you may be in for future problems. StuRat (talk) 15:38, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Alternatives to "solid compression"

I often use the "solid compression" option in rar and 7zip because I'm compressing many thousands of similar files, many of which are over half the same exact data in each of them with only a few tiny changes here and there. Because the files are so similar, the solid compression gives great space saving results. I was wondering, does something similar to solid compression exist but without the actual compression part? For example a way to store many similar files by scanning them and only writing a set of data once instead of saving the same data over and over for every file that has it? I hope that makes sense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.207 (talk) 15:53, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

You could store a reference file and then diffs between it and each subsequent file. A smart utility to do this would search for favourable reference files (that's fairly expensive to do, but has no cost at decompression time), would reject diffs that were uneconomic, and would LZcompress the reference file(s) and all the diffs. But, as this seems to be a fairly specialist circumstance, I don't know of (and rather doubt that there exists) a general archiver that does this for you (there are binary delta compression programs, but they're really setup for patches). If you know a bit of coding, this wouldn't be rocket science to do yourself. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:05, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Old algorithms for storing (Asian) fonts worked in a similar way. The common elements are defined once and the actual characters are created by overlaying the common elements. --91.145.72.188 (talk) 16:34, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Storing repeated data once and referring to it multiple times *is* compression. In fact, one of the most frequently used compression scheme, Lempel–Ziv–Welch, is nothing but that (well, that and a clever trick so that it doesn't have to store the lookup dictionary separately). The algorithm scans through the files and makes a dictionary representing chunks of the file. When a chunk is repeated, it can then add a flag telling the decompression utility to look up the chunk in the dictionary. As I understand it, solid compression refers to nothing more than treating multiple files as a single unit to be compressed, so that the already created dictionary for one file can be reused for another. This is opposed to "traditional" compression utilities like gzip which work only on single files, and require other programs (like tar) to package the files together first. If I'm understanding your question correctly, you would like to have the space-saving properties of a solid compressed file, but be able to refer to each component individually and natively, like it wasn't in a compressed archive. For that I would suggest a disk compression utility - these are special device drivers which sit between your operating system and your disk, allowing the OS to access files like they were separate, uncompressed files, but having the on-disk space saving effects of compression. However there is an inevitable disk slow-down as it takes time for the files to be put back together. -- 174.31.194.126 (talk) 19:22, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Is the reason for your question that you want to be able to extract individual files quickly, without decompressing the whole archive? If so, you can use 7-Zip's option that limits the size of each solid block. From the command line, -ms=16m will make 16-megabyte solid blocks (for example). I don't know whether RAR has a similar option. This won't eliminate any mutual redundancy from files that end up in different solid blocks. You could also look at rzip. It doesn't support what you want at present, but it might be a useful starting point. There seems to have been surprisingly little academic research on the problem of random-access compression, or maybe I'm just not aware of the work that has been done. -- BenRG (talk) 23:51, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Office with frontpage

What is the difference between "Microsoft Office XP Professional with FrontPage" and "Microsoft Office XP Professional with FrontPage-stuff9"?Efort919 (talk) 19:36, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Where are you seeing this "stuff9" addendum. The only places I can find with Google are all to do with illegal pirate versions available from torrent sites. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:20, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

It could just be a tag for credit. Many pirating entities like to specify who made it happen. ¦ Reisio (talk) 01:42, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Password-only Joomla resources

Hi. There's a website using Joomla, with a http://resources.example.org subsite (also using Joomla), but in order to access any of the documents, you need a password. Their office won't be open until Tuesday; is there anything I can do in the meantime to intiuitively work out the download URL? Thanks! ╟─TreasuryTag►duumvirate─╢ 19:50, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

I've just found out that it uses the 'Docman' extension if this helps? ╟─TreasuryTag►Lord Speaker─╢ 21:48, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Firefox will not print all of webpage

When I tell Firefox to print the webpage I'm looking at, it only sends the beginning of the webpage, the part that is visible in the browser window without scrolling, to the printer. It does not send the remainder of the webpage, that you would have to scroll down to see, to the printer. All three versions of Firefox that I've used have done this. How can I fix this problem please? Internet Explorer, when looking at the same webpage, prints the whole page and does not have this problem. Thanks 84.13.45.122 (talk) 20:12, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

I've just tried the latest version of Firefox (3.6.3) and it happily printed a 3-page "page". Dbfirs 20:47, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

It's been doing that for all versions I know. Are you (84.X) sure that you use the print function of the browser (File->print) and not a Windows "Print window" function (which maybe IE intercepts and reinterprets)? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:13, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I am sure. 89.243.37.199 (talk) 22:18, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

It does print OK for some pages. It does not like printing all the search results obtained from this page http://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/ after entering a postcode. I get one page with two blank pages. I found this: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problems_printing_web_pages but nothing jumps out at me as being a solution - perhaps an expert would understand more. 89.243.37.199 (talk) 23:18, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. That particular website seems to interact with Firefox to allow only one data page in the printout. There is a very similar problem in Opera. Internet Explorer also prints blank pages but it does include all the data (with 20 pages, some blank, on my test). I suspect the problem lies in the way that the pages are generated, probably hidden overflow from the long table, but I can't give a solution (other than change your browser), so we await an expert? Apparently, this bug has been unsolved for the past eight years! Dbfirs 06:42, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Not so much a solution as a workaround, but you can always print one page at a time using the print screen button (and maybe pasting into MS Paint). Then scroll down and print the next page. This isn't a bad option if you only have a few pages. StuRat (talk) 13:09, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

(EC, wrote this before the below, somewhat redundant now but perhaps will have some use) You can saving the page and then try editing it (I tried and removed most of the stuff between the title and the first text but while it killed the background and stuff it didn't help so I guess it's more complicated then that). Or copy the text to WordPad or Office or something although you'll lose some of the formatting. You can also shrink the page (scale under 100%) so you get a lot so you get more text.

You can also print the page as a very, very long page by making a custom paper size for example to XPS, PS or PDF. If this isn't an option for your 'printer', on Windows XP and perhaps Vista right clicking on the printer and choosing print server properties should allow you to create a new form (i.e. paper size) (see [3] for example). On Windows 7 the option should be along the controls at the top under the file, edit etc menu (of course things may vary if you use a classic control panel). Alternatively use the print server snap-in [4]. Anyway 214748.3647cm appears to be the maximum length but I don't recommend you use this (I tried it with XPS, it failed completely to print). 2970cm (100 times length of A4) worked but the XPS doesn't seem to work in the builtin viewer (looking at the file, the content is there I guess the viewer just can't handle such a long page length). 742.5cm worked fine. Anyway once you have XPS, PS or PDF there may be some way you can print it in seperate pages. I haven't worked out that part. Probably easier with PDF or PS (I didn't get very far at all with XPS actually). If your printer has a banner function you could use that. Of course in any case the tables may be split into half, may be even a line of text depending on how you do it. (While searching it occured to me importing it into something like InDesign would probably work but that's a bit overkill and I you probably don't have it.)

Of course if you're using Windows I'd just recommend IE for this page. And it seems Chrome and Safari haven't been tried yet if you're not. Baring that, since it doesn't seem the kind of thing you want to keep around for long or care if it looks a bit ugly, copying the content and then printing from WordPad or Office or whatever is probably sufficient.

As Dbfirs said, some of these issues have been around for 8 years to so, so I wouldn't hope for a fix anytime soon unless you're planning to code them :-P In this case, I'm not even sure if there's any point adding further info to the bug report, there are already test cases and the like.

P.S. A sample search for people to test [5]

Nil Einne (talk) 06:11, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I played around with it a little bit, and I suspect the site's style sheet for print media is working differently in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Here's a kludgy work around:

1. Once you have your desired page of search results, go to File, Save Page As. Choose a filename and location and be sure to choose type "Web Page, complete". This will create a file like findbusiness.aspx.htm and a folder like findbusiness.aspx_files that contains all the elements needed to display the file.
2. Go in to the findbusiness.aspx_files folder and delete the print.css file.
3. Open the findbusiness.aspx.htm file. Because you deleted the print.css file, the previous print styles won't be applied. Go to File, Print Preview to verify what the printout will look like and see which pages are blank. From there you can click Print, and enter the starting page number you want. --Bavi H (talk) 05:36, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

can't burn file to CD-R

Hi all - having problems burning some files (I believe they are CDG files) from my computer onto a CD-R. The files all play fine on windows media player on my computer. When I burn them on to CD-R the files all burn fine but when I try to play them in my karaoke machine the song counter starts counting as if it were playing a song but there's no sound - and yes the volume on the player is turned up! The files are compressed - does that make a difference? Cheers. RichYPE (talk) 20:52, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Could it be copyright protected ? StuRat (talk) 23:22, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Are you burning the audio files directly to the disk or creating a standard audio cd? The karaoke machine might not be able to play audio files as they are on your computer, so you need to select the audio disk mode in your burning software so that they are converted to a format the karaoke machine understands. Another possibility is that the karaoke machine is having trouble reading the CD-R, but this should only happen in very old drives and shouldn't be a problem if the karaoke machine is less than 10 years old. There are a number of other helpful answers here that may help you. .tkqj (talk) 10:38, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Don't think the files are copyrighted, I paid to download them from a karaoke site so should be able to burn them to a disc. Thanks for the link to the website - I have identified the problem - my compact disc has folders on it. I take it I need to change the way my computer burns, so it burns to audio CDs. How do I do this for windows XP? Thanks RichYPE (talk) 17:57, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

You will need to use special software to burn the CD+G data onto the disc. Specifically, you will need to create an audio CD with the correct CD+G information embedded in the subcode area of the disc.

The subcode is a special area of the disc that is used to store track starts and timing information, and has left over space that can be used for CD+G graphics or CD-Text data. Typical burning software doesn't let you put CD+G graphics in the subcode area. You'll need to find software that has specific CD+G burning capability.

The last time I played around with burning CD+G discs was when I had Windows 95. I don't remember the name of the software I used. But I remember I had to use the slowest burn speed, and the CD+G graphics still ended up with some minor glitches. Maybe CD+G burning has become easier since then. --Bavi H (talk) 05:00, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks to Bavi for the response - does anyone know the name of the software I need? Thanks RichYPE (talk) 20:13, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

April 4

Semi-unresponsive key

Resolved

I have a Macbook from c. 2007. And the r key is not as responsive as I would like. When I hit it directly, it types; but if I press down on the lower right corner of the key, it doesn't type. All other keys work fine when I press them that way. (As a result, I find that r often gets accidentally omitted while I'm typing.) What to do? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 01:43, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Some options:

1) Try cleaning the old keyboard. First hold it upside down and shake it. If that doesn't do any good, pry off the key and clean the contacts with a cotton swab and alcohol.

2) Learn to live with it. (That's probably what I'd do.)

3) Buy a new keyboard. StuRat (talk) 01:47, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

As I said, this is a Macbook, not a desktop. As for removing the key, honestly I've never figured out how to do it on this computer. Any tips on how to do it safely? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 05:03, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Can't be sure about a Macbook, but on a standard keyboard you can just pry a key off with a screwdriver or a nailfile, clean out any annoying gunk or crumbs, and push it back on. There won't be any contacts to clean at that level, though - to find those you have to take the back off the keyboard, and you're usually looking at two mazes of metal tracks on flexible plastic sheets which are pressed together at certain points by the keyboard action. These can get corroded, which might be cured by cleaning, but I expect (since it depends where you press) you've just got something stuck under the key. There might also be something mechanical displaced at an intermediate stage - often the key presses on a little rubber cup inside the keyboard, which acts as a spring and in turn presses the contacts together: this might have got shifted to one side a bit. 213.122.48.17 (talk) 05:37, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

I successfully removed the key and cleaned under it, and it appears to be better now. I was a little apprehensive about the Macbook keys because of their plastic scissor mechanism, but I figured it out. --Lazar Taxon (talk) 05:54, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Glad it worked out for you. Had it been necessary to buy a new keyboard, this would mean an additional, external keyboard, in the case of a laptop computer. StuRat (talk) 13:04, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

You can replace MacBook keyboards without too much difficulty depending on the model. Some are rather simple things that are separate from the casing; some require you to replace the casing. Just FYI. Apple replacement parts are easily available through ifixit.com. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:17, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Ugly DOS charset

One thing I've noticed on a laptop I have is that the extended ASCII characters display in a very ugly way. Is there any way to change the way the characters display? I'm in MS DOS 6.22 running on a Toshiba Satellite T2130CT. 76.117.247.55 (talk) 01:59, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Can you describe these ugly characters ? On the usual ASCII code page, characters 128-255 give you lots of special characters for creating single line and double lined rectangles. There are also the card suit symbols (♠ ♣ ♥ ♦) and some other characters. Here it is: Code page 437. StuRat (talk) 02:07, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

They're all the normal ASCII characters, but the lines of the box drawing characters are offset and thicker (than usual) and letters that have descenders (p, g, q, y) seem to stretch like this:

. . . . . . .
. | . . . | .
. | . . . | .
. | . . . | .
. | . . . | .
. .=======. .
. . . . . | .
. = . . . | .
. .=======. .
. .=======. .
. .=======. .
. .=======. .

76.117.247.55 (talk) 02:26, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Your example shows a 7×12 pixel character, which is pretty small. If you are using an MS-DOS command prompt window, you can set the size up to 13×22, which should look much better. (I don't think the small size is causing the problem you describe, but changing the font size will cause a new font to be loaded, and hopefully it will be OK.) StuRat (talk) 03:01, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

One possibility is that the BIOS (or whatever is controlling the screen display) is expecting a screen resolution of, say, 640×480, but the native resolution of the display is 1024×768 (or something else—I couldn't easily find the resolution of a Toshiba Satellite T2130CT with a Google search). So the image is being "stretched" to fit the screen, and it's being stretched poorly, by simply doubling some of the rows and columns of pixels. You might try to see if there's a BIOS setting that can be changed to fix it. I once had an IBM ThinkPad laptop that behaved similarly, and I discovered that there was a BIOS setting (if I remember correctly) to display 640×480 output, like MS-DOS, in a 640×480 rectangle in the middle of the screen rather than stretching it to fill the whole screen. —Bkell (talk) 02:47, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm using straight up DOS and no option to change the size of the "window". I will try and find out how to get into the BIOS/CMOS setup if at all possible (I know it is somehow). 76.117.247.55 (talk) 00:52, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Making a laptop a wi-fi hotspot

I need to make my laptop into a wi-fi hotspot so that my DS can connect to Nintendo WFC. Googling turned up several sites which said to create an ad-hoc wireless network, which I did. However, after locating the network, when I tried to test the connection on my DS, I got error code 51300. I confirmed that I'd entered the right WEP key, but it still wouldn't work. How do I set up a wi-fi hotspot using my laptop, without having to buy a wi-fi router, to which I can connect my DS? --70.129.184.122 (talk) 02:21, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

• i did try the same it did not work :(. —Preceding unsigned comment added by R.srinivaas (talk • contribs) 12:54, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

You don't write what operating system you use. If it is Mac OS X, I may be able to help you. I use my DS with my Mac Mini (with the built-in AirPort, i.e. without a separate, external router) and I should still have the link to the guide I used somewhere. Actually, now that I think about it, I remember having a similar problem so I just use no WEP key at all. Clearly, this is risky from a security point of view, so, I'm not sure I can recommend this. 83.81.42.44 (talk) 14:14, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Finding accurate phone numbers online

How can I find accurate phone numbers for people online that are located in the USA? I tried anywho.com, whitepages.com, spokeo.com, and beenverified.com, but most the numbers are old and disconnected. Does anyone know of any other free or cheap unlimited web sites or services? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.94.253.121 (talk) 03:51, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

VirtualDubMod (abandonware)

Resolved

 – Thanks to Reisio. I needed to download a complete program package from SourceForge and now it runs.

I have installed this video program under Vista. It refuses to start and complains that it cannot find CORONA.DLL. I have tried reinstalling the program and also obtained a CORONA.DLL file which I placed in the same directory as VirtualDubMod. But still it says "The application has failed to start because corona.dll was not found". How do I get this program to run? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:45, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

http://www.sevenforums.com/software/72943-corona-dll-missing.html#post640586 ¦ Reisio (talk) 11:14, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

While I know this doesn't answer your question, why do you want to use VDM? If you just want to be able to load MPEG2 or ASF files, try the most recent version of VirtualDub with one of these plugins [6]. Nil Einne (talk) 13:09, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

AFAIK VirtualDubMod has features of VirtualDub plus some more. I have not yet found what I am looking for which is a free program to edit or convert .flv videos. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 17:11, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Long time later (looking for something else) but VDM was very outdated then and more so now. It still has some featured VirtualDub does not but probably also lacks many features and bugfixes VirtualDub has. There is also a .flv plugin for VirtualDub which I think I've used before although I don't think that allows output to .flv (although not something I've ever cared about, I have used it to open flvs with some success IIRC) Nil Einne (talk) 04:31, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Changing colours to a standard grey

Colours in digital photos are affected in appearance by how shaded they are. When measuring and comparing the RGB numbers for individual pixels, would it be possible to standardise the amount of greyness in the colour, so that you could remove the effects of shade and just see the colour without being distracted by the differences in shading or illumination? What would be the maths to do this? Thanks. 78.149.241.120 (talk) 11:03, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

How about changing it over to the HSV model, setting saturation and value to some standard amount, then going back to RGB ? StuRat (talk) 12:59, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

If you have PhotoShop, you can convert to CIELab and set the "L" channel to some constant value, which is theoretically mathematically better than HSV (though I don't know whether there's any actual practical advantage). AnonMoos (talk) 13:25, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

If you don't have Photoshop, a free and open-source alternative exists: GIMP, and the CIELab plugin for it. Nimur (talk) 15:12, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm asking because in the future I'd like to be able to process images with software that I write myself. Would the procedure, to change a pixel to a standard grey, be getting the illumination (I) by (R+G+B)/3, then changing this to the required standard illumination (S) by multiplying each of the old R, G, and B by S/I ? Thanks 84.13.53.211 (talk) 10:58, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

(R+G+B)/3 is a very crude approximation to color-neutral brightness. One traditional formula (used in the JPEG format, and elsewhere apparently) calculates it as 0.299*R+0.587*G+0.114*B (see YCbCr). Once you go beyond a very few simple things, this is actually a somewhat complex area, which requires a fair amount of care and technical knowledge to really get things right, so you would probably be better off finding an appropriate library or API, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel... AnonMoos (talk) 13:45, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

P.S. I guess if you want a semi-quick-and-dirty method which doesn't completely ignore all accumulated past color science wisdom, then you could convert RGB to Cb and Cr using the equations in article YCbCr and/or the JFIF standard specifications document, assume an arbitrary value of Y, then use the inverse equations to convert these Y,Cr,Cb values to new R,G,B values. AnonMoos (talk) 21:06, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, I don't think that method would work for all values of "S". Let's say a pixel is 0,0,255 (all blue). You would get an "I" value of 85. Let's say you want an "S" value of 100. This means you would need to raise the blue color above it's current level of 255, which is the maximum. So, you'd need to choose a level for "S" equal or below 85. StuRat (talk) 14:19, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Bluetooth and WiFi

Is it possible to get a Bluetooth 1.1 compliant PalmOne Tungsten E2 to be able to talk to a Linksys WRT54G broadband router which, according to the side of the box, follows the following standards: IEEE 802.3, IEEE 802.3u, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11b? I've tried everything on the Palm side and no networks show up. Are these two things unchangeably apples and oranges? Thanks 71.161.45.84 (talk) 14:17, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

A direct connection will not work. Bluetooth is not the same as 802.11 (or any of its sub-types). (Briefly, Bluetooth uses a different kind of radio signal - at a different frequency, through a different analog layer, and with different digital encoding, and uses a different software network stack - in short, totally different technology implementation). 802.3 is simply wired ethernet. It might be possible to get a separate device, such as a personal computer which has both Bluetooth and 802.11 radios to act as a network bridge of some sort, but I'm not familiar with this procedure. I would guess it falls under Internet Connection Sharing if you are using Windows. Then, your Palm could conceivably connect to the PC using Bluetooth; and the PC could share its network connection. Nimur (talk) 15:06, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

IIRC, the Palm Tungsten E2 has a slot for a SD card, and I think Palm make (or used to make?) a 802.11a/b/g device that fitted in that slot and provided a wi-fi network link. Now I check the Palm Tungsten article where it says: "The Tungsten C has Wi-Fi and it is optional on the E2, T3, and T5 via the Palm Wi-Fi Card placed in their SD card slot". Unfortunately, the provided references are not much help, so maybe the WiFi card is no longer available; though you might be able to get one used - perhaps on eBay. However, I did come across this page which discusses who to use bluetooth to get wireless networking via the cell phone network (something have done on my T5). Astronaut (talk) 16:23, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

(or any of its sub-types). ..... at a different frequency - what? Both use (802.11 in some cases only) the ISM 2.4ghz band. If you don't believe me, Bluetooth "uses the microwave radio frequency spectrum in the 2.402 GHz to 2.480 GHz range". And you can see from List of WLAN channels that anything from 2.401 GHz to 2.483 GHz is possible depending on what's legal where you live (for b, g and n which is also capable of using 5 GHz). The possibility of mutual interference is an often discussed issue (CiteSeer^x: 10.1.1.21.8450 [7] [8]) with anedotal reports [9] [10] [11] although as illustrated in several of the earlier links, the frequency hopping characteristics of Bluetooth, it's low transmission power and a bunch of other factors means it doesn't tend to be a big issue. Electromagnetic interference at 2.4 GHz discusses the more general problem. They do of course use different channels so the frequency overlap isn't consistent but I think it's a little confusing to suggest they use different frequencies. None of this means they are in any way compatible or otherwise similar in design. Nil Einne (talk) 17:04, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Nil Einne is probably correct; it's loosely used terminology anyway, though; because "the frequency" of a complicated digitally modulated waveform is poorly-defined. Both occupy the same frequency channel - a spread spectrum of frequencies near 2.4 GHz; but they use different carriers (with frequency-hopping, the concept of "carrier frequency" again gets stretched pretty far); overall, a different communication scheme, from the wireless link level all the way up to the software stack. Not compatible. Sorry for my loose terminology. Nimur (talk) 22:30, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

My CRT monitor has gone green.

The on-screen menu is colored normally, though. I can move the menu around the screen and the blue and red stay blue and red.

Is there still no hope? 67.243.7.245 (talk) 19:59, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Check that the cables are firmly plugged in, for one. If so, well, it sounds like something has seriously conked out or gotten too loose on the inside. Don't try to service it yourself—there are nasty chemicals inside and there are electrical and vacuum dangers. Note that there are probably about 10 million CRT monitors on offer for cheap or free on Craigslist at any given time, since almost everybody seems to be converting to LCDs. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:11, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Especially if it's a VGA cable, the most probable explanation is a loose cable connection on one end or the other. VGA transmits colors on separate wires, so if the cable is only plugged in "half-way," a full image can form, but some color channels may be missing or distorted. Other possibilities include a fizzled graphics card, a wonky video driver, or somebody mucking with software color settings at the operating system level. After checking your cable connection, check your control-panel or see this Windows color settings FAQ (if you're using a Windows system). Nimur (talk) 22:35, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Try plugging into another monitor. That will tell you if it was a problem with the original monitor. Somehow I doubt it, though, I suspect it's the cable, the cable's connectors, or the graphics card in the computer. StuRat (talk) 01:58, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you all--you were correct. It was a connector that probably got loosened. I unplugged the VGA cable from the netbook and reconnected it, and all is fine now. FWIW, I had bought the monitor from Craigslist--not perfect, but it's only five years old. I had hoped that it wouldn't go out so quickly. Thanks again. 67.243.7.245 (talk) 15:15, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

My experience with CRT monitors is that they last almost forever. I've had some get a bit blurry, dark, or have colors off a bit, but never had one completely die on me yet. (I kind of wish they would, so I could justify a new flat-screen monitor. :-) ) StuRat (talk) 18:04, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I wish I had your kind of luck. For some reason my CRT TVs die on me every few years. Everyone else I know have theirs for over a decade, it seems. And I've had one CRT monitor sent back to manufacturer, its replacement experiencing burnout several years later, and another hand-me-down going up in toxic smoke recently. Imagine Reason (talk) 15:18, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Domino toppling in Blender

How long does it take to render a virtual domino chain reaction with 4.5 million domino stones in Blender? --84.61.146.104 (talk) 20:15, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Are these two questions related? Which machine are you asking about? As far as rendering in Blender, the speed will depend on many factors - how did you design the scene? Are you computing physics, or simply running an animation script, for the dominos? How many dominos are on screen at any given time? What resolution are you going to render? How many textures, shadows, lights, and visual effects are you using? These are the sorts of things a 3D renderer is strongly affected by. The type of computer will also make a big difference; Blender can support hardware-accelerated rendering, so if you have a GPU, you may be able to process image data on that. The Blender Manual has a chapter on performance called "Rendering Big Hairy Scenes or Speeding Up Rendering" which you might like to read. Nimur (talk) 22:41, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

How large is the largest virtual domino chain reaction rendered with Blender? --84.61.146.104 (talk) 16:55, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Mechanicaal engg

sir iam akshay i am studing mechanicaal engg.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Akshay85 (talk • contribs) 21:24, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

my name is akshay.....i study mechanical engg...so my question is

i want to learn abt the machine ?wht i have to do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Akshay85 (talk • contribs) 21:28, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

I have separated the above duplicated question from the Blender question above it. Comet Tuttle (talk) 02:14, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I guess the best place to start would be machine and mechanical engineering. Can you refine your question? We're having a hard time understanding what you want to know. Nimur (talk) 03:35, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Lost Picture

I accidentally erased a picture from my computer and emptied the trash can, not realizing the picture was among those erased. I would really like to get this picture back since it is irreplaceable. Is there a way to bring the picture back up-or is it gone forever? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.147.7.50 (talk) 22:05, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

If the picture was deleted recently and you have not done any disk-intensive tasks since then (such as downloading a large file), you may be able to recover the picture using a program such as Recuva (article). Good luck. Xenon54 / talk / 22:07, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I use Handy Recovery for that. Ensure that you do backups in future! Sandman30s (talk) 22:33, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

April 5

Converting formula into Javascript... help.

I have a formula I'm trying to use in After Effects, an animation program. It uses JavaScript as its language called "expressions". I know a little about JavaScript, but even less about formulas. Is this trig? calculus??

So I'm trying to convert this: $f(t)=a_{0}+\sum _{k=1}^{n}(a_{k}\cos(k\omega t)+b_{k}\sin(k\omega t))$ (The parameters $\omega ,a_{k},b_{k}\;\!$ can be computed from data.)

...into something Javascripty like this that plots X/Y points onto a window (called this.Comp in AE speak)

veloc = 40; //horizontal velocity (pixels per second)


amp = 12; //sine wave amplitude (pixels)

freq = 2.4; //oscillations per second

x = time*veloc;

y = amp*time*Math.sin(freq*time*2*Math.PI) + thisComp.height/2;

[x,y]

--70.167.58.6 (talk) 00:32, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure what your question is. That kind of formula is a truncated Fourier series. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 01:04, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

The summation will probably be best implemented as a for loop, for k=1 to n. Do you know how to set this loop up, or do you want some help with that? Depending on whether your language handles vector syntax, you might need to loop over t as well, computing a value for every time sample, by summing over k.

JavaScript-like pseudo-code

// Initialize all your other variables as needed.  x[] and y[] should be vectors of length T_MAX...
amp = 12; //sine wave amplitude (pixels)
freq = 2.4; //oscillations per second
N_MAX = 10; // Constant, which you need to define - the upper-bound of the summation.

for (t = 0; 0 < T_MAX; t++) { 
 x[t] = t*veloc;  
 y[t] = 0;
 for (k = 0; k < N_MAX; k++) }
    y[t] += amp*time*Math.sin(freq*time*2*Math.PI) + thisComp.height/2;
    }
  }

Nimur (talk) 03:37, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

That looks great. But is seems After Effects Expressions are JavaScript *based*, not plain JS. I get this error, "Class 'global' has no property or method named 'T_MAX'". --70.167.58.6 (talk) 21:56, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

My code wasn't intended to be totally complete, only to demonstrate the formation of the loop to calculate the sum. T_MAX is intended to be a constant which defines the length of the vectors. This is the integer number of data-points you want to compute for f(t). The error message is telling you that T_MAX hasn't been defined; it is not a "default" (global) variable, and you have not defined it yourself. Nimur (talk) 17:09, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Windows XP activation

I have recently acquired a couple of used laptops (for free) and I thought I could clean them up a bit and perhaps give one to a relative in need of a working laptop. Both came with Windows XP Professional (presumably preinstalled since both have a XP professional Certificate of Authenticity attached to their undersides) but neither have any installation/restore disks. They also have Microsoft Office and various pre-installed software, again without any disks. I found I can easily download the manuals and some of the pre-installed software from the manufacturers' websites, but I would really like to keep the operating systems and the Office installations since they are expensive things to replace if I keep them as Windows machines - my relative would be very confused by Linux, is one reason for keeping XP and MS Office.

As part of the clean up, I have been removing the accumulated junk of partially installed/uninstalled programs, the foistware that comes with things like printers, scanners and cameras, old documents from the previous owners, and so on. In doing this I have noticed some problems with the operating systems. One such problem prevents me from doing any user management tasks, another prevents me from doing searches in Windows Explorer. I thought a repair installation was possibly the best bet so dug out an XP Professional OEM installation disk (which actually belongs to a third PC and that installation is in daily use), reasoning that it wasn't a complete reinstall but just a repair of a few broken files. After a surprisingly long time it claimed the repair was complete. However, when I now go to log in it says Windows needs to be activated, giving me a phone number and a long "Installation ID". If I understand it correctly, even though I have not changed any of the hardware, the reason I'm being asked to activate is because I used the OEM installation disk rather than the original installation disk (which I don't have). I took up the opportunity to ensure the "Installation ID" was based on the correct Product Key, entering the Product Key from the Certificate of Authenticity attached to the underside of the laptop, and the activation wizard generated a new and different "Installation ID".

So, after that rather long explanation, the question is: will activating XP Professional on the repaired laptop, using this new "Installation ID", suddenly make the XP Professional installation on the above mentioned third PC no longer properly licensed (and consequently cut it off from future updates and/or introduce annoying nag screens and/or eventually stop it working altogether - remember it is is daily use)? I really don't want to break a working and properly licensed PC that is in daily use, in an attempt to fix a used PC I got for free. Many thanks. Astronaut (talk) 01:36, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Go ahead and activate. It doesn't matter what disc you use, because all of them are identical. As long as each computer has a sticker you would be fine. (Think about it: if Microsoft had to produce an unique disc for each Windows they sell, how much trouble would it cause them?)F (talk) 05:50, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

If you can find the Office disc, you should do a format+reinstall. Use Keyfinder to extract the key first. F (talk) 10:58, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

A format & reinstall would be my preferred method, but not having any installation disks is a problem. While I can download the the pre-installed software and drivers from the manufacturers' websites (or simply choose not to reinstall something of dubious usefulness, and accept default drivers if necessary), the lack of MS Office disks is still a problem. To fix this would it be possible to use another computer's Microsoft Office OEM installation disk, with the product key I can extract using the Keyfinder software? ie. In the same way all Windows XP disks are the same, are all Office 2003 disks are the same? Astronaut (talk) 20:43, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Building a new box

I'm currently planning out my next computer it's primarily for use with photoshop - large >30MP images with many layers etc. - running 64x winddows 7 with the possibility of occasional gaming. I'm thinking if I wanted to cut down on cost is it better to go with:

A) Far Cheaper DDR3-1333 with a more expencive CPU (e.g., the i7-960 (I haven't chosen yet, definitely an i7 though. advice appreciated)), or

B) Go with DDR3-1600 and cut costs on the CPU instead e.g., getting only the ~i7-920 or ~860 (they have similar prices but the 9 series is better on paper?)

Which option gives better performance?

A second question about CPUs, how much difference does the three memory channels of the 9 series make compared to only two in the 8 series? (If I get a cpu with 3 channels I need a motherboard with 3 channels aswell? think thats right, just want to make sure)

A third question, if, for example, you had 8 GB of RAM divided between 3 channels, a single stick of 2GB in the second and third channels but 2 * 2GB sticks in the first channel, would the first channel bottleneck? i.e., would all 4GB RAM in that channel be used to it's full potential? I think this might be a stupid question, i assume it depends on the speed of the cpu and of the ram but I'm hoping for a "general case" answer.

I haven't built a box from scratch before so more questions will probably follow ;) Thanks in advance, Benjamint 02:52, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I've been very pleased with the performance of my i920 - especially with how it falls on the price-performance curve. I really recommend the i9xx series; if I recall, the i8xx do not use QuickPath Interconnect, which will degrade your performance to memory and peripherals. This may counteract any gain you would have gotten from higher performance RAM.

Also, I think your question on the memory channels also depends on the presence or absence of QPI; I've got 3 2GB sticks, and things run pretty smoothly. I believe QPI allows for asymmetric memory channels (different amounts of RAM in each channel) - it provides a more generalized bus arbitration between each core and each memory channel, and so it handles more corner-cases than DMI over a front-side bus; but I can't find this exact use-case, loading 8GB as you specified, to be certain it's a valid (let alone high-performance) option. Off hand, is there any reason 6 GB isn't enough? Will photoshopping 300 6-megapixel images at a time be better than only 250 simultaneously? Sorry, per your information: "65 30-megapixel images simultaneously in memory, instead of 50". If you're doing parallel programming, 3 memory channels makes a huge performance boost - because each core can essentially hog an entire memory channel when it needs a bulk transfer. During normal use, you might not have enough parallelism to take advantage of this 50% memory bandwidth boost: keep in mind that a single core can only use a single channel at a time - so unless you're routing the memory transfer to a different process, you can't take advantage of the performance. Nimur (talk) 03:48, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Ok, RAM first: so photoshop can only access the RAM in one channel anyway (I never realised that, it explains a lot though), i.e., 2GB in your case ... Thats changed my outlook. My laptop already has 2GB per channel and I'd like to at least double the performance I'm currently getting in PS. Loading 4GB into all 3 channels would be very wastefull though, most of it in the other two channels would never be used.

Second, CPU implications: well I don't think I'd be utilising all 3 memory channels, photoshop would hog all of one easily but apart from that I generally don't have anything else open thats particularly resource hungry. But would you still say it's worth getting an i9xx for the QuickPath Interconnect? Sounds like in my case the third channel would just be wasting RAM. Better to have only two channels?

n number of photos is a bit meaningless, they're 16bit images for a start and, for example, just a few days ago I was stitching a 32MP panorama of 3 photos, because of the overlap between the individual images it's not really 32, it's closer to 63MP that the computer needs to handle during the stitching process which is pretty resource hungry. Thats before even getting started on editing the image. As soon as I stamp the visible pixels of 3 images to one new layer thats already increased the file by another 38MP. But thats not important :) Benjamint 09:44, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I also just rechecked RAM prices and there isn't that much of a hike from 1333 to 1600 anyway... Benjamint 09:46, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Multi-channeling does not work like that. It's completely transparent to the application; it's the memory controller that splits the data between channels to get a higher throughput (think of it as RAID0 for RAM). To say "a single core can only use a single channel at a time" is completely false as dual channeling has existed long before the advent of multicore CPU's. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:57, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

And the implications of that for me are that Photoshop *would* in fact be able to utilise more RAM that what was in one channel? Benjamint 12:39, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

You can use multiple channels in a single procses. And you can definitely use more than 2GB of memory. But you can't use two channels simultaneously from one core to boost bandwidth to memory. Nimur (talk) 12:42, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Here is a joint IBM/Intel report, Optimizing performance..., which discusses the effect of unbalanced memory channels on a Nehalem QPI system. There are benchmarks, too. Adding extra RAM, but creating an unbalanced memory channel actually created worse performance than not having the RAM in the first place. So: less RAM = better total system performance. Counterintuitive, but backed up by experimental benchmarks. See the QPI overview for details). Nimur (talk) 12:54, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Clarification, since Antilived has got me second-guessing my QPI / memory channel statements above. A single core CAN use multiple memory channels to improve bandwidth from main RAM up to the L3 cache, but no further. Beyond that, your memory-bandwidth is irrelevant, and all that matters is bandwidth to the L3 cache, which will depend on which cores are accessing which memory. Here's a simplified diagram from Ars Technica illustrating this, and here's the Nehalem schematic diagram from our article. Nimur (talk) 15:18, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

No asymmetric RAM. Done.

The diagram and article went a bit over my head unfortunately. So firstly, in my case where I'm just running PS and nothing else except an OS and maybe firefox at the same time, is there any benifit for me in having 3 memory channels?

Secondly, just for peace of mind, can somebody who has PS installed go to Edit>Preferences>Performance and tell me what the figure is that PS gives for "Available RAM" compared to the total amount of RAM and the amount of RAM in each memory channel? I ask because I have 4GB in my current box and PS only recognises 1665MB.... This has always struck me as odd and I've never understood why it is, I definitely want to avoid any similar occurance in the new computer. Benjamint 22:57, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm presuming you're already running Windows x64 of some kind right? If Photoshop isn't large address aware, then you'll be limited to 2GB in the x32 version. CS4 comes with an x64 version so you'll need to upgrade to that if you have an older version. If you're going to get 6GB you'll want to anyway regardless of whether it's large address aware. Nil Einne (talk) 05:04, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

That explains it. I thought the limit per application in x32 was 4GB. Thanks. Benjamint 09:34, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

For further clarification a x32 application can use 4GB if it's large address aware and on an x64 operating system. (If it isn't it'll be limited to 2GB.) If it's large address aware and on a x32 operating system, it may be able to access more then 2GB if you change some system settings but this will limit the amount the kernel has access to and is generally not recommended unless you really need it because it can create problems. Note that on a x32 OS you will generally not even have access to the entire 4GB because some of the address space is used to reference other things like GPU RAM. (Look in taskmgr to see this.) Also this only refers to Windows and workstation/consumer versions at that, server versions may have Physical Address Extension although I'm not that familiar how that interacts with the application (I presume large address aware applications will have access to 4GB but I'm only guessing). Nil Einne (talk) 16:25, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Ok, so large address aware applications on a x64 OS are able to access up to 8GB, is this regardless of what channels that RAM is in? i.e., in multiple channels Benjamint 03:59, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Sorry x32 large address aware applications can only use 4GB on a x64 OS. A x64 application (which aren't called large address aware AFAIK) should be able to use up to the limit of the x64 OS, probably much more (maybe up to 64 bit/2?) in any case not a limit you have to worry about. The channels may make a difference to the performance with some CPUs, but is basically transparent to the application (i.e. the application only sees the amount of total RAM you have regardless of whether it's single channel, dual channel or triple channel) Nil Einne (talk) 12:40, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

KDE sftp

KDE makes it very easy to set up remote file systems with sftp, just use something like sftp://username@somehost.com as the file directory. However, it appears that KDE will always make 2 or 3 attempts to use passwordless login when doing this. Is there a way to tell KDE to always use a password with an sftp attempt? -- kainaw™ 03:56, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Few things come to mind; you could set up a saved SSH key, per these instructions. (I don't like this idea). Second, you could use KWallet, (I don't really like this idea either - I'm not a fan of password saving). Finally, I think there's a way to set Nautilus to "remember the password forever", "forget the password after this login session", or "forget the password immediately" when you set the sftp session up. Is this popup box showing up? (Maybe this is actually a Gnome GUI, given that it's part of Gnome...). Nimur (talk) 04:00, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Nautilus is Gnome. KDE uses KIO. I do have passwordless SSH login. However, when I check my logs on the remote server, I see 2-3 passwordless attempts to login before using the public key. I don't understand why it does this. The only annoyance is that if I try to open a bunch of things on the remote server quickly, I get a flood of failed passwordless login attempts and the remote server assumes that I am a security risk and refuses to respond for two minutes. -- kainaw™ 04:06, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I see - are you actually typing in the sftp:// URI each time? I had been under the impression that you were saving this as a remote file system mount (this is how I do it in Nautilus - no password-less login attempts). Can you elaborate on what you're doing to mount the remote directory? Nimur (talk) 04:12, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, would an acceptable workaround be to substitute the sftp connection by using KIO's fish implementation or sshfs? These should never attempt to login without a password. All that is required is that the SFTP server is running sshd. Or, if you're in Konqueror, you can put the password in plaintext in the URI [12], sftp://username:password@name_of_server/directory/; I'm sure you're fully aware of the associated issues with that. Nimur (talk) 04:21, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I have never used fish. I haven't looked into it, but I notice that it is mentioned a lot. Perhaps I will read up on it some more. As for what I'm doing - I have bookmarked a few sftp URIs and I select them from the bookmark - so I am sort of typing it out every time. -- kainaw™ 04:27, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

From what I gather, fish is just a front-end to ssh that appears to the end-user as a file protocol. SSHFS is the same, except that it uses a virtual file system, typically in user space, so that other programs appear to access the files as if they were local; but preserving user-level authentication and file protection. Nimur (talk) 05:17, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't see this (Konqueror 4.3.2/KDE 4.3.2). If I enter sftp://localhost:22/home/fin directly into KDE's address bar, the login window appears (I have no passwords stored or prior sessions hanging around) and there is no traffic reported on /var/log/auth.log. When I enter the correct password only then does it try to login, and it immediately tries the password (successfully). It immediately opens a second session (again successfully); I guess that (like ftp) it likes to use one socket for directory ops and another for transfers. I haven't set up stored passwords, but I can confirm that for password-given logins it behaves as one might expect, and not in the daft way you're experiencing. Perhaps your problem is the password-storer thing; that it has stored even unsuccessful passwords, and is trying them in order - if that's the case, a thorough cleansing of the password manager (which I think is called KWallet) may help. You may be able to diagnose this problem by visiting the server you're interested in by another name (e.g. by IP rather than a DNS name), which should circumvent the previous store that KWallet has made. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 10:39, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Print screen

On a Windows XP, how do you utilize the print screen key if it is attached to the SysRq key? Will it work while a full-screen computer game is up? And could one use that screenshot in an article? 2D Backfire Master ^{¿Por que,señor?} 13:57, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

You would have to abide by the various copyright laws if you uploaded the screenshot of a game to wikipedia. It might fall under fair use if you're using it in the games article and the image is fairly small and low res —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.207 (talk) 14:04, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Of course it would be relevant to the game. But that didn't answer my question of how to take the picture. And where are these copyright laws? 2D Backfire Master ^{¿Por que,señor?} 14:08, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

As far as I know, although "SysRq" is still written on the button, it doesn't function that way any more. It's just a Print Screen button, AFAIK. So, hit the button, go to an application like MS Paint, do an Edit + Paste, and see what you get. Movies often just give you a black box, and that may be the same for the game. I don't know about copyright policy with screen grabs. StuRat (talk) 14:11, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

There are some things that PrintScrn is not good at getting (e.g. graphics rendered directly by the video card with DirectX Video Acceleration), and it might be the case also that some applications can re-assign what PrintScrn does. Many games, though, have their own screenshot system built into them, which might be even more reliable. There is also software one can run that will guarantee your ability to make screenshots. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:16, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Software screenshots is our page on using game screenshots in Wikipedia articles. It is a stub and has a "historical" tag on it, for some reason; but has links to some useful pages. See the Half-Life 2 article for an example of a featured article that uses game screenshots (2, to be exact), under the fair use policies. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:25, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

In the original design, the Print Screen/SysRq key is used by itself to get the Print Screen function, and with the Alt key to get the SysRq function. On the Model M keyboard, the Print Screen/SysRq key has "Print Screen" written on the top of the key in black and "SysRq" written on the front of the key in green (see this picture). On that same keyboard, the Alt keys are also labeled with green letters (see here). This helped show you have to press the Alt key and the Print Screen/SysRq key at the same time to get the SysRq function. (In the same way, the Pause/Break key has "Break" written on the front of the key to indicate you have to press Ctrl and Pause/Break at the same time to get the Break function.) Modern keyboards have moved the SysRq label to the top of the key, and don't put it in a different color, so its meaning is less clear. --Bavi H (talk) 02:40, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Limiting SSL/TLS chain-of-trust length

In SSL and TLS, is it possible for a certificate authority to certify an intermediate CA without allowing the intermediate to certify other intermediates (meaning that the intermediate is trusted to properly control its own issuance of non-CA certificates, but not to police other organizations in doing so)? NeonMerlin 15:32, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the x509v3 Basic Constraints extension (OID 2.5.29.19) has a path length parameter for that. Be careful because some older implementations don't bother checking it. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 03:21, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Video Encoding issue

I have many files which i have recorded from TV using a tuner card and windows media center. These files are set to highest quality, and are in ".dvr-ms" format. I've been looking for a free program that converts these to popular standards like .avi, .mpg, or divx formats (partly so that i can also reduce the file size (quality) a bit!) I tried using something called "Format Factory" but they have an issue where any video converted from dvr-ms format has a small top section scrambled.

Does anyone know of a free video converter which reads my format, and doesnt have goofy issues when changing formats? Like i said ive been looking for a long time!

Thanks! 137.81.112.81 (talk) 21:05, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

According to DVR-MS, the files are basically .asf files with an unusual extension. I'd suggest reading the article on DVS-MS. It also notes the VLC should be capable of extracting the streams into a new container format; from there you should be able to do what you like with them. I should note that protected broadcasts will be recorded with DRM attached; you won't be able to work with them. At least, not legally, and I'm not going to look for or provide info on how to do that here. —ShadowRanger ^(talk|stalk) 21:14, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

VLC does play DVR-MS for me, but is a bit skippy; I've not tried its inbuilt conversion function. In addition to that, Windows Live Movie Maker will recode (and downscale) a DVR-MS to WMV (which more programs will read, but which isn't as portable as the formats you specify). Windows Media Center will also write DVR-MS files to unprotected video DVD (providing they fit) which means it recodes them to MPEG2, whence you could recode then to just about anything. The DVR-MS article says ffmpeg will also do it, but I didn't have luck trying (but I didn't try very hard). As with ShadowRangerRIT's reply, if the DVR-MS is encrypted then all bets are still off. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:34, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I just tried the VLC-recode method (with whatever default settings VLC chose to apply) and the resulting MPEG was also unacceptably skippy. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:44, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I have yet to find any format that ffmpeg cannot decode. However, I think it is only supported well on linux, but you may be able to find some windows binaries. 86.157.54.58 (talk) 22:06, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I just tried a trial version of AVS Video Converter 6.4.... same deal, a little strip at the top which is scrambled. Its not a HUGE deal? but fairly annoying! Why do i get the same effect using two entirely different conversion programs?!

137.81.112.81 (talk) 03:39, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Are you sure this strip isn't in the video file? If you're recording with an analog tuner, you'll often get things like that. Certain playback programs may extend the playback area past the visible screen so you won't see it under normal playback. Are you sure for example you don't see the strip in WMP or MPC when it isn't full screen? Nil Einne (talk) 05:21, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I should point out that the scrambled strip, at least in the old broadcast format, corresponded to the Closed Captions feed (the info that produces text for the deaf and hard of hearing). It was hiding the signal in an area that CRT televisions wouldn't show, but could read. Not sure if a similar sideband exists in the digital broadcast specs. —ShadowRanger ^(talk|stalk) 13:54, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I got to thinking and if DVR-MS is indeed a variant of ASF then perhaps VirtualDub with the ASF plugin [13] will work. If you can open the file in VirtualDub, you should be able to see the input video so you can easily see if this scrambled line is really there. You can also convert it to other formats if you have the appropriate encoding codec, resize it, deinterlace it & whatever with the appropriate filters including some rather fancy ones. This would be better then with some silly program which doesn't show you the input video Nil Einne (talk) 16:13, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

USA customs rates

I am importing 6 cell phones from the States to Australia and the company i am buying them from is telling me that i have to pay $5000USD to us customs before they can ship the phones which does not appear to be right because of the free trade agreement between USA and Australia. Can some one give me a contact email address at us customs so that i can check this out but i think i am getting ripped of. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Perrin7271 (talk • contribs) 23:44, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Sure sounds like you're getting ripped off — but you want the Australian customs agency, don't you? Customs duties are paid on import, not on export. This link is a US Customs website that has a link to a search engine for its big customs book, which is "the size of an unabridged dictionary", it says. But, again, duties are payable to the country into which the items are being imported. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:50, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Oh, you should save yourself some time and tell the seller to show you where exactly it is written that you have to pay this. If they can't show you then you're certain it's a scam. Certainly something is amiss here. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:56, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

An export tax will be payable to the country of export obviously. But these are very rare nowadays so that we seemingly don't even have an article, and are unconstitional in the US [14] and even elsewhere tend to only be used for raw materials and the like either for revenue generation [15] [16] [17] or to encourage local processing [18]. Definitely an export tax on electronic products is extremely unlikely anywhere (and obviously impossible in the US), in fact some countries may even have export subsidies. So yeah, there's definitely something amiss, you can ask the seller but personally I wouldn't bother, look for a more trustworthy vendor. Note that even with the free trade agreement you'll almost definitely have to pay GST to Australian customs (you'll either deal directly with them or thorough the shipment company, definitely not the supplier). Also although I doubt there's an import duties on mobile phones in Australia anyway are you sure they're covered by the agreement? Nil Einne (talk) 04:54, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

So you are in Australia and a seller in the USA is asking for US$5000 before shipping. Definitely sounds like a rip off to me. The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service article provides a link to http://www.customs.gov.au/ which should be able to help you further. In particular, this page gives examples of the duty payable in various scenarios - for example: "Import of goods (other than tobacco products or alcoholic beverages) valued above [AUS]$1000" (a possible value for six cell phones?) suggests you need to pay an extra AUS$325. Astronaut (talk) 07:51, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

If you import them one at a time, they will hopefully each be under the $1000 mark and avoid customs duties. I agree with everyone else that a company telling you that you owe $5000 to import 6 cell phones is not trustworthy and you should have nothing more to do with them. If they don't rip you off now, they will try again and again until they succeed. You should report them to the authorities wherever they are located. (And besides, I prefer import/export companies that make money the old-fashioned way, by smuggling drugs with the cell phones. :-) ) StuRat (talk) 12:39, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Customs will generally be on the look out for that sort of thing, the website explicitly says:

Note: However, where there are multiple packages to the same addressee in Australia from a single consignor overseas that arrive at about the same time, then the value of all packages will be combined for duty and tax assessment purposes.

While you may be able to do it in certain circumstances I wouldn't recommend it, it will also increase shipping and could cause other problems and if customs thinks you're doing something fishy they may even give you a warning or something of that sort.

Incidentally am I the only one to notice someone forgot to update an internal IP in the website and it's pointing you to http://192.168.6.10 ? The actual page it links doesn't seem to exist on the customs website anymore? nor does the page linked to before that.

Nil Einne (talk) 16:33, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm surprised that they can assess items shipped separately as if they were a single item. When I bought a suit in a US state, I was advised to buy the jacket and pants separately, as that would put them under the minimum for a "luxury tax". In Australia, there must be some period after which they are legally considered separate items; a day, a week, or perhaps a month ? StuRat (talk) 16:44, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

May not be relevant, see my edit at the end

I doubt it's that simple. The thing is I'm pretty sure we aren't talking about some sort luxury tax here. Rather the Australian customs has decided it isn't worth their effort to tax people who irregularly importing a small number of low value goods for personal use. If you either import goods for commercial purposes or regularly import high value items they don't give you that leeway. As it is simply a policy of theirs and they are legally entitled under law to tax you for any item if they desire, you may be able to ask them to reconsider by giving them additional details but can't fight them if you disagree with their decision. Definitely it's the case in NZ, although the threshold is lower. Specifically they don't bother if the amount of tax due is under NZ$50 which if only GST is due means items worth less then NZ$400, well until the rate goes up to 15%; and they've also made it clear this isn't a hard and fast limit, if you receive several items or regularly receive items even if each one is under the limit they may still tax you.

This is not disimilar to the way for example the police often have either an unofficial or official policy of not stopping people who are only a small amount over the speed limit. In NZ they have an official (i.e. public) policy of allowing people to speed up to 10km/h above the speed limit. But they decided a while back to vigiriously pursue the speed limit near schools during school hours [19] and this obviously required no legislative changes nor is it likely you fight. For example the official policy is with 250 metres, if you carefully take measurements and prove you were only 275 metres of a school and could have safely slowed down in time to meet their official policy you may be able to convince them to change their minds if you write a polite letter but it's unlikely the court will have any bar of it if they don't since the police are entilted to fine anyone over the speed limit. At worse all they have to say is they thought it was unsafe (and indeed they could do this in any circumstance) and there's no much you can say in reply unless perhaps you feel they were discriminating against you because of your race or something. Obviously the Australian customs would have some sort of policy but they're not going to tell you in detail what it is and very likely there's a great amount of leeway given to the invidual officer.

And if you are doing something fishy, e.g. putting a false name or sending it to multiple addresses with the intention to try and avoid tax they could likely pursue this. (If you just send the items individually it's not likely they can pursue you but it doesn't mean they won't tax you and given the extra cost for shipping and other potential problems that could result probably isn't worth the extra effort.)

Edit: Re-reading the Australian customs website, I'm not so sure now since it does seem to suggest the limit is fairly fixed. From a bit of searching some people e.g. [20] are discussing importing stuff for businesses under the $1000 limit (including say that it can still be cheaper because of the reduces rates for high volume combined with shipping which suggests importing multiple times is no problem), and others also discuss it like it's a hard limit [21] [22], this one [23] discusses what about the same time may mean (although I haven't looked at the whole act so I'm not sure if the law actually says under $1000 is fine unless a total combibined over $1000 is arrriving at about the same time. However others talk about the limit like it's less clear cut [24] [25] [26] [27]. You probably should try asking the customs yourself, if you are unable to get a clear cut answer, it may mean that it's really not clear cut.

Nil Einne (talk) 11:10, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

I would expect them to have a definite policy on this, not just leave it up to the discretion of the customs officer to charge taxes whenever they feel like it. The reason is that businesses absolutely hate that kind of uncertainty/risk. In many cases they would rather pay the tax than not know if a tax will be required, since that messes with their bookkeeping. In some ways a tax that may or may not be owed is like bribes required in 3rd world nations, adding an uncertainty that makes the profitability of a business impossible to predict, scaring off investors. StuRat (talk) 14:58, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

The free trade agreement kicks in if the article is made in the USA, not just sold from there. Also there is special paper work to fill in by the seller to indicate this fact. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:06, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

April 6

Does information posted on the Internet remain forever?

Is it true that anything that is posted on the Internet stays there forever? What about posts on messageboards deleted by site moderators, or pictures taken down on Facebook? ExitRight (talk) 05:26, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

No, not always. On some sites like forums things are deleted after a certain amount of time, or they are archived. Facebook and sites that are moderated are cleaned out sometimes by users. On Wikipedia stuff stays here, for example on the reference desks old questions are archived after a certain amount of time. Chevymontecarlo. 07:23, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

If you're thinking of running for office, you should think of the internet as an electronic Mount Rushmore. Anything you put on it will be around forever. For places like facebook, if you take something down, it stops being publicly viewable, but you should assume that facebook itself can still retrieve it (like wikipedia admins can restore deleted articles), and that any random people who browsed the page and thought it was interesting, may have saved copies to their hard drives, that could come out of the woodwork at any time.

"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
(—Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

66.127.52.47 (talk) 07:39, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Obligatory XKCD link with a nice take on this issue (warning NSFW text) [28] 131.111.185.69 (talk) 10:09, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

The Wayback Machine stores many web pages after they have been deleted or altered. Google Groups stores old Usenet posts. Ordinary Internet users may create an online copy of something (often violating copyright) or have an offline copy that can later be republished. Some things will disappear forever but it's safest to work on the assumption hat anything you publish on the Internet may come back to haunt you. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:25, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

The easiest way to make something vanish from the internet forever is to desperately need it once it has already been taken down. All of which is just to say: there's no guarantee that anything will be around forever—it depends on the architecture of the original site and whether it gets archived by others. Some things have a tendency to stick around longer than others. Some things can vanish without anybody caring. As with many things in life, the more people who care about something, the more likely it will persist. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:46, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Are there any websites that explain how google indexes wikipedia?

In particular, I'm curious how Google indexes redirects.

Hypothetical 1: For whatever reason, Euler's formula ranks #1 in a google search. e to the i pi exists as a redirect and gives Euler's formula a high search result, whereas e raised to pi i does not exist as a redirect and Euler's theorem is nowhere to be found. What happens when we create the redirect?

Hypothetical 2: suppose someone creates a redirect to George W. Bush based on an insulting epithet that has no appearance on the web; fuddlefucktard is an example. Would George W. Bush show up for that search?

Hypothetical 3: suppose someone edits Shmuck (which is a redirect to Schmuck) so that it points to George W. Bush. When someone does a search for "Shmuck", how will Schmuck compare in the rankings to George W. Bush?

Hypothetical 4: Someone moves motherfucker (where all the wikilinks currently point) to MotherFucker, and then changes the redirect at motherfucker to point to George W. Bush. Assuming nobody notices the apparent typo in the title, What result?

JD Caselaw (talk) 06:48, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Try googling "predicativity" and its redirect target, "impredicativity". If of any relevance, I notice recently that google usually indexes wikipedia edits within a minute or so (it used to take up to a day). So a vandal who got something indexed that way wouldn't keep the placement for long, if the vandalism was reverted quickly as usual. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 07:10, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm very impressed with google's increase in speed of indexing WP edits. It's been amazing to create redirects and then see my google results change. JD Caselaw (talk) 08:15, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

It actually scares me. They gave a lot of money to Wikipedia around the time this speedup happened. My theory is they now have a toolserver-like database feed that they are indexing on the fly and doing who knows what else with. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 10:13, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't believe they do, but you could always ask (try the IRC channel #wikimedia-tech on freenode for the quickest response). If they do, it won't be a secret. I don't see why that would be scary, though, it's just a more efficient use of bandwidth and server time. --Tango (talk) 14:42, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Doing this is easy, and no special arrangements or secret plots are necessary. Recent changes is available as an RSS and ATOM feed. Article bodies and deltas are available via the MediaWiki API. As a practical matter they'd be wise to debounce the changes on a given article (that is, if an article is changing very rapidly, you still only fetch a version every few minutes or hours). From a business perspective they'd be wise to avoid introducing vandalism into their own presentation of the content, so if they're smart (and they generally are) they'll have a rudimentary reputation system (e.g. with rules that say "don't show changes made by IPs, or by users with fewer than 100 edits; don't show changes made by users whose recent edits have been reverted; if an admin changes a page, show that change even if the cached version isn't due for update). The volume of changes done at any time is high by human standards, but it's pretty trivial bandwidth both for Wikimedia's API server and Google's system. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:21, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Macbook rapid ticking noise

I have a 2007 Macbook, and there's a somewhat rapid scratchy ticking noise (maybe 2-4 beats per second) coming from underneath the upper left part of the keyboard. It becomes faster and louder during periods of activity. Anyone know of the cause or remedy? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 08:09, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like the hard drive. I don't think it's the disc drive because it's located in the upper right part of the MacBook, at least for the 2009 model. You might want to try the [Apple Discussions forums] if no one here can give you a good answer. It's a user to user forum and there's plenty of knowledgeable people on there. Hope this helps. Chevymontecarlo. 08:19, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

There are only a couple moving parts to a MacBook (or really most laptops). The fan, the optical drive, and the hard drive. The optical drive is on the upper right. The fan is in the center. Which just leaves the hard drive. That's in the lower right, under the keyboard. Dismas|^(talk) 08:24, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Try your local Apple store if it's bothering you. Even if you're out of warranty they might be able to give you a clue as to what is causing it and help you, without you having to pay. Chevymontecarlo. 09:33, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Sounds more likely to be the fan than the hard drive. See if there's an air inlet or outlet near where the noise seems to be coming from. Fans get full of dust and make noise and you can often quiet them by cleaning them with compressed air. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 10:12, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

If it is the hard drive, then that's likely a death rattle, so be sure to back-up your critical data and applications to somewhere other than the hard drive, immediately. StuRat (talk) 11:51, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree - you may not have much time left - I've seen drives go from "clicking" to "dead" in a matter of hour. You should immediately back up your valuable data - don't delay! If it's the fan, then the machine will probably shut itself down when it overheats - but it's possible for some component to be damaged - or to have its' life dramatically shortened before that shutdown occurs. If it's the optical drive - then you might as well keep using it until it fails. The easy way to find that out is to eject the drive tray and see if the clicking stops. If it does, then it's optical drive. But if it's not that - then: STEP 1: Back up valuable data. STEP 2: Get it fixed. SteveBaker (talk) 02:29, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Google UK

How many times a day on average is the Google UK site accessed? Are there any sites which document this? Thanks for any help. Chevymontecarlo. 08:16, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Alexa does this. --Ouro (blah blah) 10:12, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Subversion wanting access

I recently installed Subversion and the Windows client TortoiseSVN on my Windows Vista PC., and both work pretty well. However, there is one thing which I have found really irritating. Whenever I want to upload an image to Imageshack, I keep getting a pop-up box from "Internet Explorer Security" saying "A website wants to open web content using this program on your computer" (as seen in this screenshot). The folder with the image to upload is not an SVN repository or a working copy known to SVN. Is this due to the nature of TortoiseSVN as a Windows Explorer shell extension, and is there a simple fix? Astronaut (talk) 08:48, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Have you tried clicking the "Do not show this warning again" box? --Phil Holmes (talk) 08:58, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

If I simply dismiss the message with "don't allow", it comes back within about 4 seconds. If I first click the "Do not show this warning again" box, it still comes back within about 4 seconds. I barely have time to scroll the file dialog before the message comes back. What would be the security impact of clicking "Allow" instead? Astronaut (talk) 09:54, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

The message box is telling you that TortoiseSVN (which you installed and therefore presumably have no problems with) is trying to run outside IE's protected mode. If it was my computer, I would reason that this must be the way it works, and click the "Do not show me this message again" box and the Allow button. The only alternative I could think of would be to uninstall TortoiseSVN. --Phil Holmes (talk) 11:14, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Here is the workaround (or fix), as documented on the TortoiseSVN message board. For what it's worth, I use TortoiseSVN on multiple Vista machines and do not see this error. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:28, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

From normal laptop into touchscreen

I have seen some kits to transform a common laptop screen into a touchscreen, but no one really make me think that is what I want. It looks strange and clumsy, but do they work correctly? Have anyone had good experiences with this kind of kits? --Quest09 (talk) 18:36, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

GoogleMaps - scale overlaps copyright notice and is therefore unreadable

At GoogleMaps, on my computer at least (Win 7; Firefox 3.6 but also in IE8), the map scale is overlapped by some copyright crap, making the metric portion of the scale unusable. I would like to report this to Google but, in their minuscule wisdom, they decided to only allow 'report a problem' to US residents. Thus, I ask any willing US residents to please go to GoogleMaps and right click on the map, select 'report a problem', and file the report. Don't hold back on the profanity. If one or two people from Google actually used their own software, this feedback wouldn't even be necessary. Maybe the metric portion of the scale doesn't appear on US maps. ALTAVISTA!! I mean it! --84.13.110.251 (talk) 21:50, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

The "Report a Problem" process seems to be for reporting problems with the data in the map (for example, incorrect streets). Instead, I went to Help, Known Issues, clicked where it says "If you've found a new problem that's not listed on our Known Issues page, let us know" and got this contact form that looks like a more relevant way to report this problem. Is that contact form available where you are? --Bavi H (talk) 02:01, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I can certainly confirm what 84.13 is saying. As I shrink the width of the browser window, the long line of copyright notice, eventually overlaps the map scale. It is unfortunate the copyright notice is nicely aligned with the metric portion of the scale, but I very much doubt that it is done intentionally. Yes, please do report it to Google using the contact form Bavi mentions above. Astronaut (talk) 09:10, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

April 7

HandyRecovery Help

I just downloaded the trial version of handy recovery and I was hoping someone here could help explain how I could retreive pictures emptied from the recycle bin, how do I recover those with Handy Recovery? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.147.7.50 (talk) 00:56, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

This program has saved me a few times - one can't always back everything up in time! Choose your C: drive then click Analyze. Then click on the Recycle Bin in the tree list - if there's anything it's able to recover, the files will appear in a list on the right. Choose what you want to recover then click Recover. Recovered files will default to C:\Recovered Files. Good luck and make sure you do this before doing anything else on your computer. The longer you delay, the more the chances are of your files being overwritten. Sandman30s (talk) 21:15, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Wrongful Article Content Change.

In the following Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo

This change was made
Conrad Abbott: President of NOC
Yuji Bando: Managing Director of Nintendo Australia

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nintendo&diff=prev&oldid=354265541

Being a Journalist with Nintendo for 19 years and hundreds of international pages of information being written for Nintendo. I can say that these two Owners of the Nintendo Franchise, Yuji San being recently retired as well as Mr. Abbott being the newest Owner. These two wonderful people who I have interviewed in the past are truly a name to be mentioned and recorded in history.

I have vast amount of information I can contribute to these outstanding people and if I may, I shall write there Wiki if not done so already by the Wikipedia Community.

Known that these edits are being made because of lack of knowledge and references, it is still disappointing to see these fine people and others being removed from there place in Wiki history.

Thank You Gratefully, Kuju Yoshiamo (Senior Editor, Asia Media)Kuju Yoshiamo (talk) 04:16, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Answered on this user's talk page. Comet Tuttle (talk) 04:41, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Placing captions beside figures in LaTeX (beamer)

I'm trying to achieve something like the picture of the giraffe with side caption under the heading "Side Captions" here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions

however the line in their code

\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}

results in the error message "Option clash for package graphicx..."

If I try to compile without the usepackage command, the LaTeX compiler seems to hang forever.

I am using documentclass "beamer". Without that I don't get the option clash error message, but this is for presentation, so I don't want to abandon beamer for this reason.

I have searched the internet and found some hacks to accomplish something similar involving minipages, but they don't adjust well to my particular situation.

Anyone figured out how to place captions beside figures in beamer documents? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Heatkernel (talk • contribs) 05:48, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Beamer gives you a lot of manual control. I don't think you should rely on a figure environment and hacked side-captions, but rather determine which boxes should go where manually. Yes, this sucks, but then so do slides in general ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:28, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Stephan Schulz: if I knew how to "determine which boxes go where manually" I wouldn't be asking this question. Would you care to post a link explaining how to do that or explain what you mean? Thanks! Heatkernel (talk) 16:35, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I've only ever made 2/3rds of a lecture series with Beamer so far, and was so pressed for time that I was glad to get the contents right, never mind the formatting. But a simple (if inelegant) fix is to use a tabular environment with the image in one and the caption in the other column, or to use minipages. Take a look at http://www.eprover.org/TEACHING/TGSE2009/TFSE06.pdf, page 07. Ignore the German language ;-). The source for that (image and text next to each other) is as follows:

 \includegraphics[height=0.9\textheight]{IMAGES/300px-Burj_Dubai_20090916.jpg}
 \hfill{}
 \begin{minipage}[b]{0.6\textwidth}    
 \begin{itemize}
 \item Höhe 818m 
 \item 162 Stockwerke
 \item 57 Aufzüge
 \item Aufzughöhe bis 504m
 \item Geschwindigkeit bis 10m/s (36 km/h)
 \item Doppelstöckige Aufzüge
 \end{itemize}
 \end{minipage}

Does that help? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:07, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

That helps a lot. Thanks! Heatkernel (talk) 03:25, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Internet

Where is the Internet's control centre? jc iindyysgvxc (my contributions) 13:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

There isn't one. The whole point of the internet was initially to be a decentralized network that could survive having major sections removed. That being said, it is not a totally decentralized network (or, more specifically, it is decentralized but not distributed), owing to the way that undersea cables work (they cluster at points), so some countries have relatively centralized connections (that is, most of their connections eventually lead through a few distinct points). But there is no control center—no control, and no center! A better way to think about it is a network in which you, the user, connect to large hubs, which can then connect to other large hubs, which can then connect to other individual sites. There are lots of hubs. Using a traceroute command you can actually see the connections being made. From my computer (near Boston) to Wikipedia, I first go through a manner of local (Massachusetts) hubs, then end up being routed through New York, then through Washington, then Atlanta, then Dallas, then to Florida, then finally to the computers that Wikipedia lives on (19 hops total, in this particular example). The network is set up so that if one of these hubs went down, the connection would find a way around it... all in a blink of an eye! --Mr.98 (talk) 13:28, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Think of it like airports. There isn't one central airport which all planes fly through, right ? And, if an airport unrelated to your flight is shut down, it shouldn't affect your flight (except that some traffic through that airport may be rerouted through yours, slowing things down a bit). And, even if an airport on your flight route shuts down, they may be able to reroute your flight through another. So, no one airport is critical, but if enough shut down, as after 911 in the US, then that does stop traffic. StuRat (talk) 13:42, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

That said, there is ICANN, a centralized authority in charge of, essentially, assigning domain names. Without some centralized authority, it'd be essentially impossible for everyone's computers to agree on what, say, wikipedia.org means. All the infrastructure (except the root nameservers that ICANN controls) is decentralized. In fact, even the root nameservers are numerous, and spread all over the globe. Paul (Stansifer) 14:20, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Click the links to enjoy this story. Once upon a time there were many LANs. Some were just a few computers connected together and some grew to lots of computers using one or more Network switches to move data efficiently. Then came the idea of connecting the LAN's together into a WAN which is made possible by Routers. Before you could say Internet everyone could connect to everyone. For that to work every computer has to be given an IP address, just like every telephone is given a number. That's where the similarity ends because while you might be able to remember the telephone number of, say, the Wikipedia office (?), people like the way the system recognizes an easy to remember name like www.wikipedia.org so you never need think of the numerical IP address. It was once rumoured that the whole Internet is controlled from the bedroom of a 13-year old named Jason. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 19:51, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, that would explain all the porn, wouldn't it ? :-) StuRat (talk) 00:57, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

These answers all have too much love for ICANN, not enough for ARIN and the other RIRs. Without DNS you'd have to memorize a lot more numbers, but what would you do without the numbers? 98.226.122.10 (talk) 07:56, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

KDE on Windows--Plasma Desktop won't launch apps

When I use Plasma Desktop and the Application Menu widget, the applications won't launch. They launch if I use the Start Menu shortcuts, though. I have Windows 7; could this be a permissions problem or is it just a glitch?  Buffered Input Output 14:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Copying from a pdf file

I'm sure there's a way to do this, but I don't know how. I have to copy large chunks of text from a .pdf file and I don't want to copy it by hand if I don't have to. How can I do a cut and paste to a Word document? I've tried highlighting, but the copy function isn't available. Thanks. InspectorSands (talk) 15:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

If the copy function is unavailable, it's probably because the PDF has that feature specifically disabled. iText may be able to get it anyway. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:41, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I'll give it a try. Thanks for the help.InspectorSands (talk) 16:10, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Is the PDF of a scanned page image? If you zoom in on the text, does it render cleanly or does it become chunky/blurry pixels? If it is the latter, it might not have had OCR run on it, and might not be copyable in that way. (Even with OCR on it, the copied text will probably have some errors, but that's a different problem.) If it is the former, it might be permissions, yeah. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:17, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

If there is a lock icon in the lower-left corner of the screen in Adobe Reader (or Acrobat), then the creator of the PDF has restricted what you can do with the file. If you double-click on the lock, it should tell you what the restrictions are. You can use a PDF password removal program to clear the restriction. The following program works well for doing that. I use it all the time: [29].--Chmod 777 (talk) 19:18, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

You can always copy your PC screen display as a picture. Press Alt-PrtSc. Then open Paint. Then ctrl-V (means "Paste"). It's only a picture and not editable text but you can Save it in a file or insert the picture in a Word document. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 19:19, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

also, not every pdf has a text image imbedded; some scanned items are stored in the pdf as images only, so that there is no way at all to extract the text from the pdf since the text doesn't actually exist. you realize, naturally, that it requires an additional step of OCR to produce the text after the image is scanned, so it's relatively easy to NOT produce it. of course, any pdf found by google search must have a text imbedded in it. i don't know if such pdfs can be set up to no allow text extraction, or conversely if locked pdfs are indexable by google. anybody know? Gzuckier (talk) 06:11, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Why must ads cause so much misery?

Most of what I do on the Internet, other than a few select sites, I do at libraries.

I doubt they would block ads, though some have, briefly.

Yesterday the computer just froze and at the bottom of the screen it said the computer was waiting for some site that I know was ad-related. It certainly wasn't the newspaper article I was trying to look at.

If I have the article I want, why can't it just give up if it can't find the ad? Or if I don't have the article but the thing gets hung up on an ad that's not essential?Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:57, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Install Adblockplus 82.44.54.207 (talk) 19:08, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

(ec)Some browsers can be configured to do incremental rendering as well, so the page can (mostly) load without the ad. It leads to some screwed up formatting at times (particularly if some of the layout is controlled by CSS or JavaScript served from another slower server), but it would partially solve your problem in many cases (excluding those cases where the page layout is completely dependent on the ad). That said, I haven't needed a feature like that in years, since I'm running Firefox with Adblock Plus and NoScript, which, as the IP above notes, circumvents the problem. As such, I have no memory of how to enable incremental rendering on the browsers which (may) still support it. —ShadowRanger ^(talk|stalk) 19:19, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, disabling Java Script (Tools + Options in Firefox) stops the worst ads, with crap flying across the screen. You may need to occasionally enable it for something to work, but then disable it again to kill the annoying ads. StuRat (talk) 19:16, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

In my experience, at least four websites out of ten require JavaScript to render intelligibly nowadays. Another four in ten don't need it, but look funny without it. If you're going to go to the trouble of managing JavaScript execution, you may as well use NoScript (so you can control which domains are allowed to execute) rather than using the all-or-nothing hammer of global JavaScript disabling. —ShadowRanger ^(talk|stalk) 19:22, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Expanding Vchimpanzee's question: When a browser loads an HTML page that has, say, 20 images on the page, doesn't the typical browser parse the page and send out 20 fetch requests for the images in a big batch, and then update the page as the images come in? It sounds to me like Vchimpanzee is having a problem where a commercial site waits until the images load before it displays the content that Vchimpanzee is interested in, which I remember having problems with back in the dial-up days. (Like ShadowRanger, I haven't had problems like this in years, because I use Firefox with Adblock Plus.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:10, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

The sites normally load the way they're supposed to. I don't know what was happening yesterday or even what version of Internet Explorer was being used. But it's a library, and they're unlikely to block ads.

A related problem would happen with Firefox at another library, but it hasn't happened lately. It would just freeze completely for certain ads.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:17, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

There's another question I asked which got answered when messages started showing up saying Javascript was disabled and I couldn't do certain things. THIS the library can fix, and I'm going there tomorrow hoping they have.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:21, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

@Comet Tuttle: "doesn't the typical browser parse the page and send out 20 fetch requests for the images in a big batch" - the answer is "it depends". Originally, in http1.0, this wasn't true: if you had 20 images, the browser would open 20 fully independent sockets to the server, issue a single GET request on each, read the resulting image, and close that socket. That was obviously very inefficient, and (because browsers initially only used a few sockets) very slow. http1.1 added HTTP persistent connections which allows clients to keep alive a socket, so each request didn't necessitate establishing a fresh tcp connection. But that still means 20 http request-response pairs. So, with modern browsers, one would ideally use CSS sprites, where many images are encoded into a larger image, and one uses CSS to display only the parts you want. That way there's only one get/response cycle to service many images, but this relies on the browser supporting the relevant CSS properly - and (as usual) IE6 (which is still around too much to ignore) needs special treatment and also lacks proper PNG transparency support, which makes CSS sprites more flexible. Add to that the bother of organising graphics serverside into such groups, you mostly find that CSS sprites are used for logical groups (like the little graphics which comprise a skin) but not all the graphics on a page. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:16, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

if a page has a link to a printable copy, that page will be free of most of the ads, since they're not printable. if you get in the habit of hitting the "print" link as soon as it comes up on the page, you can find a more enjoyable browsing experience. occasionally a print page may feature a javascript that causes the print option box to popup automatically, as if you hit the file/print menu item, but it's no sweat to hit the cancel button on that. sometimes the "print" link doesn't take you to a differently formatted page but just pops up the print option box on the current page. fie on that. Gzuckier (talk) 06:15, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

April 8

USB 3.0

Is USB 3.0 essentally a parallel version of the USB 2.0 with three sets of data cables to allow two way communcation between devices plus backwards compatiblity with 2.0 devices? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.67.89.61 (talk) 02:45, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Does USB 3.0 answer any of this ? StuRat (talk) 02:49, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Signal a program when Internet connection made

In Kubuntu, is there a way to send a signal to a program whenever an Internet connection is made? I'd like to be able to mirror a local folder onto a remote folder (one-way) via SSH, with updates taking effect as fast as possible; I figure the way to do this is to write a daemon that uses inotify to monitor the folder, waits for a connection if I don't already have one (or if the one I'm on didn't work the last time the daemon tried it), and then invokes rsync. I have both wired and wireless interfaces (eth0 and wlan0) and am usually using only one of them at a time. NeonMerlin 03:23, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

As a Debian-derived system, I'll guess that it has an /etc/network/if-up.d directory. Put a script in there and it'll run every time an interface is brought up. man 5 interfaces for details 98.226.122.10 (talk) 07:45, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

do Huawei wireless broadband dongles support voice?

The wireless broadband dongles work on the 3G mobile phone/data network, so I was wondering. If they do support voice do you know if they support voice on common linux distributions? --Polysylabic Pseudonym (talk) 08:37, 8 April 2010 (UTC)