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May 22

Templates on another wiki running media wiki

On another wiki, I have the following template - which works fine.

{| class="wiki-table" align="right"
! class="hl2" | {{{Name|Name}}}
|-
| [[Image:{{{Image|Picture.PNG}}}|180px|Level Screenshot.]]
|-
| style="text-align: center"|Previous level: [[{{{Prev|Previous}}}]]
|-
| style="text-align: center"|Next level: [[{{{Next|Next}}}]]
|}

Two questions: (1) are the parameter names case sensitive (ie will prev=123 work just as well as Prev=123?; (2) How do I detect the absense of the Prev parameter and omit that row of the table? -- SGBailey (talk) 12:57, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

1) I don't think so, but someone else should know for sure. 2) I think that that needs the ParserFunctions Extension, which can be found at [1]. If it's already installed, or not your wiki, try using this. I would use the if function to determine if that parameter is non-empty, and then enter text to display if it is, and if it isn't. Thanks, gENIUS101 13:53, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Empirical tests show that {{#switch:Ba|{{{2}}}|{{{3}}}|{{{4}}} = [[Image:Badgeless.png}} repsonds to Ba ut not to ba.

Also in the template above I see that Prev=U-Turn produces U-Turn and prev=U-Turn produces Previous. So that answers (1) - the are case sensitive.

I tried making User:Meconopsis/Sandbox2 = Parameter p is {{#if:{{{p}}}|first|second}} and called it with {{User:Meconopsis/Sandbox2|p=hello}} and it always evaluates as

Parameter p is first

. Does this mean I don't have the extension or that I have the syntax for #if wrong? -- SGBailey (talk) 16:36, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Changing Sandbox2 to Parameter p is {{#if:{{{p|}}}|first|second}} appears to make it work. I'll experiment from here. Thanks. -- SGBailey (talk) 16:49, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

I can't make it work. To simplify things with all the | and || floating around, I've changed to html table/tr/td/th. Is there any chance someone could have a look at the calling page and the template for me? I'd be most grateful. -- SGBailey (talk) 19:44, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

I think I've fixed it, one of my { { # if was ( ( # if -- SGBailey (talk) 20:32, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Simple to do list with reminders for overdue replies

I use a simple text list of tasks to do. Often these tasks are writing business letters to people. When I have written and posted the letter, the task then goes into "pending" status until I get a reply.

That is the important thing - I want to be able to see which replies are overdue. If I have not recieved a reply say 14 days after sending a letter, then I want that to be easy to see.

What would be the easiest way to create something that could do this please? Something like Notepad where dates would flash red if they were older than the current date would be ideal. Another feature would be that finished tasks are removed from the main list, to a list of finished tasks.

I have Googled and looked at several To Do programmes, did not like any of them as they were too fussy and complex. I may be willing to programme something if it would take less than an hour. Thanks 92.28.248.33 (talk) 13:44, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

You could move your list to / import your list into Excel and use its conditional formatting on cells to highlight things based on dates. Alternatively you could run a program which filters your list based on dates. For that to work easily you would have to impose some structure on your list - for example all dates might be written in ISO format as yyyy-mm-dd - and on yourself - entering a due date into the file. Then you could print any line in the file out that contains a date older than today. A straightforward task such as this could be written in many languages - which do you have available to you? Is your list 'moveable' or is it always at the same location (eg C:\Data\Docs\Lists\Todo.txt or something?). -- SGBailey (talk) 16:44, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Excel is probably easiest, Emacs org-mode is more fancy (in the "less is more" sense), it's basically text file editing with some more functions. (I'm not sure it can do what you wish for but I'd be surprised if it didn't). Jørgen (talk) 19:19, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, although I don't use Excel, and I'm thinking of deleting MS Office from my HD completely.

Is there anything like a notepad or editor where the contents can be scanned by conditional expressions, and where I could get a notepad-like editor to always load the same text file? Rebol, perhaps. Thanks 92.28.255.202 (talk) 21:22, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

which really big dotcom was cofounded....

...by a chinese american and an indian american? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.189.218.251 (talk) 14:12, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm still surprised to see no answers here; there are probably dozens that can fit the description. Try reading about Vinod Khosla, he's founded dozens of companies and ventures (directly and indirectly), some have been huge. Undoubtedly, you can find one of his startups that fits your description; if nothing else, you'll get to read about an interesting guy. Nimur (talk) 15:36, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Line cutting through infobox

Can anyone help me out with understanding and fixing the section line that cuts through the infobox on this page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Trouver/Terrain

I would also like to know if there is a way of controlling the size of the thumbnail pictures. I would like to make the bottom 2 pictures a little larger. I'm assuming the thumbnail size is based on the original size? Thank you. LoreMariano (talk) 16:00, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Thumbnail sizes:

..thumb|300px|..

..thumb|400px|..

etc

px is pixels I think - default is 150 (or is it 180?) (ie the thumbnails are a default width)

There are various instructions for images eg Wikipedia:Picture tutorial or Wikipedia:Extended image syntax

In general the Wikipedia:Manual of style recommends using standard settings for image size (or used to) - the small images look ok to me .. see Wikipedia:Image_Use_Policy#Size for the obscure reasons why. 87.102.18.191 (talk) 17:04, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

87.102.18.191 (talk) 16:41, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Does this edit fix the problem http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Trouver/Terrain&action=historysubmit&diff=363575929&oldid=363551999 ?

The {{-}} makes the text after it display below any images/infoboxs etc.

The {{TOC left}} inserts the "Table of contents" at that point.

If the line actually went all the way through the infobox that may be a browser display problem. ? 87.102.18.191 (talk) 17:33, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Cross posted at Wikipedia:Help desk#Line cutting through infobox. --

Connected to home network but no internet

Hey guys. I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to home networks and internet issues and am completely perplexed by this problem. We recently switched to AT&T from Comcast and got a new modem/router all-in-one in the process, one that comes with a firewall. At first, the internet was working completely fine for my sister's laptop, but one day it stopped working even though the connection icon is blue (Windows Vista) and says connected to Local and Internet. When I try to go online, it says "page can not be found" on both Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Any ideas? I'm completely lost. I checked the proxy settings to make sure those weren't changed somehow but those seem to be at the defaults. I also don't think it's malware of any kind, though it could be a possibility.

Thanks a ton. 184.36.108.188 (talk) 22:26, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

This is almost certainly a wireless problem, but the first thing I would do to verify this is to run an Ethernet cable from the laptop to the router to see if the wired connection works. If so, that will rule out various problems the router itself may be having. Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:39, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Interesting. When I plug in the ethernet cable, it still shows a blue bubble in the connection window and has a 'connected' status, but I have no access to the internet. Extra info: I already tried a system restore, and a full scan with AVG and Malwarebytes. 184.36.108.188 (talk) 00:05, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

It sounds as if some communication settings have been changed. Have you tried the "diagnose and repair" option from Vista's "Network & Sharing Center"? Dbfirs 06:27, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Is it a problem with your router or your ISP? If the modem/router is at fault, no matter what you do with your computer, the connection won't restore. I once had a problem with a netgear router. Although it show it is connected, I couldn't access to the internet. Finally, I exchanged the router, and viola!, internet restoration! --Tyw7  (☎ Contact me! • Contributions)   Changing the world one edit at a time! 07:06, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Have you tried restarting the modem/router box? Turn off the power, wait a few secs and restart it. I often find this procedure clears many internet connectivity problems. Astronaut (talk) 10:57, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, the router works for both the other computers in my house. Yes, I tried Diagnose and Repair and it said it could find nothing wrong with the connection. I'll try resetting the router. What I'm afraid of is that some malware changed the internet settings to cause the current problem because my sister says when it happened, some pop ups came up and she lost control of the computer. But she's not really the most tech savvy person in the world. 184.36.108.188 (talk) 15:59, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

To rule out router problems, either use another computer to connect to your network or bring the problematic computer and try connecting it to another network. --Tyw7  (☎ Contact me! • Contributions)   Changing the world one edit at a time! 21:12, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it's definitely worth trying out your sister's laptop on a friend's network or at an internet cafe. The "Network & Sharing Center" actually contacts a Microsoft site before reporting that the connection is working correctly, but it doesn't transfer much data. The page not found message sometimes appears when only a small amount of data is received. I assume that you have tried different sites. Could malware be redirecting your browser to a non-existent site? (Though the fact that you have tried two different browsers probably rules out this.) I sometimes get an intermittent fault on my (microwave delivered) internet connection and this results in lots of "page not found"s even when "Diagnose" says that I have a connection, but when I repeatedly try "Diagnose and repair" is eventually notices the problem and shows a local only connection. Dbfirs 23:46, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

I think sometimes a malware can knock out the internet through multiple applications. Therefore, I would recommend running MBAM full scan --Tyw7  (☎ Contact me! • Contributions)   Changing the world one edit at a time! 23:59, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

I'll try another full computer scan with Malwarebytes and AVG to see if some malware is redirecting e through a proxy. Argh, this problem is so frustrating, especially since I don't even know where to begin to fix it. 184.36.108.188 (talk) 19:35, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Do you not have access to any other internet connection, just to test? Have you tried pinging your router, the DNS server and various websites (e.g.Wikipedia: ping 208.80.152.2)? I agree that these problems are frustrating because there are so many possible causes. Dbfirs 00:27, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Windows Questions - Technical

Hi,

In some notes for the Windows 16 bit New Executable format, I found reference to some fixups performed in respect of 'floating' point emulation.

i) So my first question is , in the absence of a h/w co-processor what techniques exist for trapping and implementing floating point (8087 type) in software? ii) Are the specifcs of the floating point fixes (OSFIXUP in relocation data) type in relation to NE type image formats documented?, (WINE doesn't seem to use these directly, instaed using the Linux Kernel's floating point emulation...)

Next questions

iii) What really happens when an NE file is loaded on Windows ? (Apparently there is some kind of startup code which sets up a stack, local heap , task entry and a message queue... and that's BEFORE you even see a Window)

I'm assuming that somewhere Windows is reserving a set of page-table to store data on the usage of memory? In this table, a set of byte values indicate if memory is in use or not? (And presumably what the memory's being used for?)

For example , Assuming 'real' mode... one possible tactic is to reserve an entire segment for a page table covering every possible 'paragraph', When memory is allocated or removed this page table is updated?

iv) How does Windows (or WINE) resolve where modules are loaded (lif loaded?) (On a related note my understanding is that it keeps some kind of table containing loaded modules along with a refernce/instance count?) Thusly you would have something like

char * p_Z_module_name
WORD reference count
WORD instance
WORD offset_first_instance_selector

For each module, followed by a list of selectors for each instance data?

Of course this is all complicated by the fact that Windows can run in real or protected mode...

Sfan00 IMG (talk) 21:10, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

For iii), windows maintains a Local Descriptor Table for each process; the task switcher is responsible for managing the appropriate CPUMMU registers to make sure the current one is active when a process switch occurs. Naturally this uses memory allocated by the global memory manager, which keeps track of which process has which memory. For iv), by "modules" I guess you mean DLLs? DLLs (and their unix counterpart .SOs) have a default load address. Ideally the loader assigns an LDT mapping that matches this and loads the DLL into that space. If there is a clash the loader must perform a relocation, by altering the loaded binary by performing the relevant fixups. If two different applications try to load the same DLL (and lets say that fixups aren't required) then Windows (just like Linux) will load a single copy into physical RAM and each process will have an image of that in their LDT. I'm pretty sure these are copy-on-write, which means if one process decides to write into that space (e.g. to place debug breakpoints) then the OS has to make a dedicated copy for it (I don't know whether it's copy-on-write per page or per DLL, probably the former). For i), executing an FPU instruction on a machine without an FPU will cause an illegal instruction exception. THis causes the CPU to transition to ring0 for the exception to be handled; so in the worst case the software FP library can run in that context. But ring transitions are expensive (and blocking) so rewriting the binary means you can do the whole thing in userspace. But ii) I honestly don't know what older Windows versions did when they encountered this scenario - it would be quite reasonable to just barf the application, as apps written when FPUs weren't ubiquitious either insisted that they only be run on a FPUed machine or shipped with a software-math-instead version, and I'm not sure Microsoft ever felt it was necessary to handhold those few programs that just assumed an FPU was there. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:36, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Note that this holds for a version of Windows with a full protected-mode kernel (which I guess is Win95 onward), where the power of the processors address virtualisation makes things straightforward. For genuinely old versions like Windows 2, I really don't understand how they work (fixups and little bits of string, I gues). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:46, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

This site contains the FP source code for Borland's CRTL, including some stuff for FP fixups. FPINIT.ASM explains pretty well - it says that if an FPU isn't detected it resolves the special Borland FP fixups to library calls in the emulator. If an FPU is detected then E087ENTR.ASM patches those fixups out and replaces them with actual FPU instructions. Unfortunately E087ENTR.ASM isn't present on that site (and Google doesn't show it elsewhere) so I don't know the correspondence between the fixups and the actual FPU instructions. From this, it seems this scheme works only with a binary that's compiled to use these fixups rather than to explicitly emit the FPU instructions (so a hand-written program that just called FMUL or whatever wouldn't be patched). None of this relies on there being a standard - MS' CRTL will surely do something similar, but as the CRTL startup is part of the compiled .EXE (and not part of the OS loader) there's no need for MS' and Borland's to interoperate. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:48, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Although judging by this Microsoft KB article it seems the Borland and MS crtls share the same names for FP fixups. This article talks about how link (which I think is microsoft's language-agnostic linker) leaves fixup info in the NE file, and confirms that those FIARQQ (etc.) fixups are resolved as either FWAIT or NOP. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:29, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

The Old New Thing has some posts about 16-bit Windows: [2] [3] [4] [5]. Even in protected mode, all 16-bit Windows apps ran in a common memory space and all (far) pointers were valid system-wide. The only difference between real and 286 protected mode was how the segment numbers were translated into segment base addresses: in real mode they were multiplied by 16, while in protected mode they were looked up in a table. (Also, in protected mode, every segment had a size which could be less than 64K, so an out-of-bounds array access couldn't accidentally trample on someone else's memory.) 386 enhanced mode added a 32-bit kernel and was introduced in Windows 3.0 (not 95). -- BenRG (talk) 23:47, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

May 23

how can I get Google's pac-man home page after it's gone??

 Done

we love the google pac-man home page so much... will it be online somewhere else once it's gone off of google's homepage? thanks. 82.113.119.242 (talk) 01:12, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Usually they are posted at http://www.google.com/logos/ after being removed from the homepage.  7  01:56, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

If there have been any other Google logos that you have liked in the past, you can get them there too. There was also a Doodle for Google competition that they ran in the high schools here in the UK, and the entries and winners are on there too, which are also great. Chevymontecarlo 19:23, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Plus - if you go to http://www.google.com/pacman/ you can actually PLAY the pacman game. Click on "insert coin" below the search bar.  7  01:49, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Benefits of iWork

Should I get iWork instead of Office? It's cheaper and it seems to save in the same formats as Office. I am sick of Office and I would like other people's opinions on iWork. Does anybody here use this program suite? Chevymontecarlo 08:34, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

I've not used the Mac version, but the Windows and Linux versions of OpenOffice.org are very good. It reads the same files, it does much the same job, and it's free. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 08:56, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

I use OpenOffice on a regular basis, especially oocalc, but you do need to be aware that it is not perfectly compatible with Office. Excel spreadsheets are usually OK in oocalc if they're not too complicated and don't use obscure stuff. But Word docs often paginate differently when opened in oowrite. As for the OpenOffice version of PowerPoint (I forget what it's called; "impress" or something like that?), it tends to do a rather poor job of rendering PowerPoint presentations. As for the other direction (create a document in OpenOffice, open it in Office), I haven't done that much, so I'm not sure — usually I prefer to create documents in LaTeX. --Trovatore (talk) 08:20, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

They both have trial versions from the respective manufacturers' websites, these might help. Also, Office comes with more 'stuff' in the form of Entourage and Messenger, but it seems to be an old version of Messenger that you can get for free anyway, plus you probably already an e-Mail setup. OpenOffice.org is very good also, and has more 'stuff' than both of them due to database and drawing capabilities (but no mail). But give the trials a shot! 110.175.208.144 (talk) 13:37, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

If you use PivotTables, get Office. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:47, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

To the IP - I currently use Mail for my email, so Entourage would be kinda pointless to use. I am also a bit of an Apple fanboy...! Anyway, I have used OpenOffice before and several people have recommended it to me, so I think I might try that. Office is so expensive though... £100 although you do get Messenger and Entourage too I don't think I'll be getting Office. I just use it for the basic stuff and I know Word has a ton of features and options which I probably won't use. I will try the trial versions! Thank you everyone :) Chevymontecarlo 19:22, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

I only used Pages and Keynote. Those are excellent in what they do. When I opened up Pages and started working in it, my first thought was "wow, a WYSIWYG word processor that does not cause pain". I've not used it much (I'm an hardcore Emacs and LaTeX person), but for what I used it, it is very good. Keynote is, I think, the best presentation program out in the wild. I have a somewhat older version (2008), where I sometimes miss some functions from Powerpoint. But on the other hand the Interface is so much slicker, it's well worth it. I also assume the latest version will have added some of those missing functionality. One caveat: Yes, in theory iWork supports MS office formats. But usually, you need to do some post-processing, as the import is not perfect. If work with MS office documents is important, I recommend NeoOffice, which is OpenOffice with a native Mac GUI. Again, I've only used Writer and Presenter, and found them at least as good as their MS counterparts, and very much more compatible with MS formats than iWork. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 19:53, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi Chevy, I'm a science student who has iWork. Firstly it might be worth popping by a Mac-specific forum, like those on the Macrumors or Macworld sites, since the number of people using iWork will be much greater than here. However, I've got to say that, on the whole, Pages is solid and a rival to Word: its layout capabilities are good, and in a sense it's a hybrid of Word and Publisher (not available on Macs). I haven't used Keynote, but have heard good things about it, but Numbers is a real turn-off. For example, you can only sort by column, not by row, so you find you have to end up transposing entire tables manually if you've started them off the wrong way. Cell reference detection in formulae doesn't always work/change correctly with cloning. It makes pretty pictures, but for technical purposes I would advise against its use. Brammers (talk) 11:09, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I think I will ask on the [Forums] for more opinions if no one else here has had any experiences with these programs. Chevymontecarlo 15:17, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

If you plan for your files to be used for anything outside of your own computer, you might want to avoid the inexpensive programs like Pages or, on the PC, MS Publisher. They do not export with much elegance. I work in translation and we have to extract text from whichever program the customer has used. I can't count the number of times I have had to deal with files from customer who saved a penny by buying a bargain basement program only to spend a pound trying to get it to work together with something else. MS Word is so prevalent that third party developers have many tools for interacting with it. InDesign, in fact most of the Creative Suite, has a huge capacity for exports and imports. Meanwhile I have never received any documents, in ten years at this job, from any open source programs. If I did, I would probably have to convert it to Word format before attempting to process it for use in translation programs. So, you see, it depends on whether your files will ever have to work with other programs. If they do need to interact with other programs, the money spent on something widely-used could save money lost on quirky workarounds.snakespeare (talk) 16:02, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

For translation? Really? What's wrong with plain ASCII text? I would think any formatting beyond that would just get in the way. --Trovatore (talk) 22:59, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Song recognition

So everyone has that iPhone app that can recognize songs just by listening to them, but is there anything that can do that on a computer? Something that probably happens a billion times a day on Youtube in the comments: "What song was that at x:xx?" could be solved pretty easily with an "app". Nobody in the open source community has come up with something? 210.254.117.185 (talk) 11:00, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

There are many applications that can do it. Try Tunatic. See Category:Acoustic_fingerprinting for more. There are lots of open source programs that can use acoustic fingerprinting (check the article), but I'm not sure if there are any open source services (e.g. that hook the technology up to a huge database of fingerprints) at the moment. It seems like MusicBrainz might fit the bill, though. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:37, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that not everyone has "that iPhone app". I don't have a iPhone at all. 82.44.55.254 (talk) 12:42, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Be careful using generalizations around computer people. They think in 1s and 0s. Dismas|^(talk) 12:54, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Oh come on is it that hard to imagine that I'm joking? My phone can't even access Wikipedia, never mind recognize music! : P 210.254.117.185 (talk) 13:45, 23 May 2010 (UTC) Thanks for the links though! 210.254.117.185 (talk) 13:45, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

"iPad-like" real computer

Hi:

I am wondering if there is a real computer out there that takes the form-factor of an "iPad", falls within iPad's price range, but is a genuine computer in the sense that I could format its hard drive, install Windows/Linux, and do whatever I want with it. I know the tablet computer is close to what I seek, but it's too expensive and cluncky compared to the iPad.

Thanks,

--174.88.242.83 (talk) 14:52, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, you couldn't install Windows on it (as it uses ARM architecture) - but in all other respects the (hopefully) soon to arrive Adam tablet fits the bill - most sources I've been able to find (including Wikipedia) indicate you should be able to install Ubuntu or Chrome OS on it, and it will ship with a modified version of Android. The best thing about it - the dual mode Pixel Qi screen, which should last 160 hrs per charge in black and white ebook mode. They say they're aiming for 16 hrs of HD video playback in the full colour mode, but I'm not sure I believe them on that one (sounds too good to be true). Apparently there will be two versions - a basic one for ~$350 and one for ~$800. 17:45, 23 May 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.185.68 (talk)

They're out of date now, but I've been using a Viewsonic V1100 for years. It's quite nice, if rather underpowered. It uses a stylus instead of your fingers, but I prefer that anyway. APL (talk) 19:27, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

There's also some ipad-like devices here and [6]. APL (talk) 16:00, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks so much!!! --174.88.241.71 (talk) 01:51, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Resolved

Free web hosting

Excluding Google Pages, what are the option for serious looking reliable free hosting? Something which allows an address of the form www.mypage.freehosting.com?--Quest09 (talk) 17:10, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

host-ed.net, based in Germany, is one I know of off the top of my head. Even with a free webpage you get a domain.host-ed.net. A warning, though: a website I frequent that is freely hosted there has gone down several times in the past. Xenon54 (talk) 17:13, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

x10 hosting, sixserve (warning, this site has been marked as dangerous by Norton, but in fact it is one of the sites that have been hosted. ). --Tyw7  (☎ Contact me! • Contributions)   Changing the world one edit at a time! 06:47, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

qwerty keyboard in portable device

What has a qwerty keyboard, is portable, has WLAN and is not a BlackBerry, nor a Nokia, nor a netbook, nor costs several hundred dollars?--Quest09 (talk) 17:16, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Do you have any reason to suspect such a thing exists? Most everything costs several hundred dollars these days that has a QWERTY keyboard attached. I'm not sure why you ruled out netbooks—they're probably the cheapest option that has what you are looking for in it. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:54, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

iPad? It's not really a real keyboard, just one on a screen, but it's a QWERTY one at that. You gotta love Apple... I guess I am a fanboy... Chevymontecarlo 19:17, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

It costs well more than several hundred dollars... --Mr.98 (talk) 20:44, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Sorry! I need to read people's questions more thoroughly... Chevymontecarlo 15:13, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Open Pandora finally shipped their first units this week, but there's a waiting list for those. APL (talk) 19:25, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

A quick check of one of those sites lits the price at $330 which may fail the several hundred dollars criterion. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say you could find several Chinese phones which may pass the above, particularly if you're willing to accept virtual keyboards. If you were actually planning to buy one of these, I don't know if I'd recommend it however. Nil Einne (talk) 21:02, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

There is an $86 Netbook for sale here. Terrible hardware specs, of course, and its ARM cpu runs WinCE not standard windows, but probably usable for web-browsing and email. APL (talk) 22:48, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Second hand Palm Treo devices. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:13, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

That's a netbook which of course is against one of the OPs criteria. However I think we've highlighted the fact the criteria are unclear. What's a netbook? Does a laptop count as 'portable' and 'not a netbook' and if so how do you differentiate between a netbook and laptop? Is a tablet a 'netbook'? What is 'several hundred dollars', everyone is presuming the OP means US dollars but precisely what a rough cut off point should be is unclear. What's a 'QWERTY keyboard', for example is a virtual keyboard okay, is a typical smartphone keyboard okay or do you want a more complete QWERTY keyboard? Does the OP actually want to buy one, in which case where they live and other things are probably relevant whereas if we're talking about in the abstract, things like stuff on DealExtreme or even only really available in China (e.g. stuff you can find on TaoBao) would be relevant. Nil Einne (talk) 13:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Many smartphones offer what you want and can sometimes be had for "free" if you take a 18 or 24 month contract with the phone service provider. In particular, take a look at Comparison of smartphones and sort the table according to your preferred criteria. Astronaut (talk) 11:16, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Of course if you calculate how much you spend on that contract, it'll be several hundreds dollars, potentially even in to a thousand Nil Einne (talk) 13:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

how to get source code of comiled games

if we have files after compilation of source code in any language ,and name of language or software used is known ,then there is any way to get the sourse code from these compiled files ,although it may not be unique ,but how to get only one —Preceding unsigned comment added by True path finder (talk • contribs) 23:43, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

You can try to use a Decompiler suitable to the build environment. The result will often not be very good, in particular for games. Or you can ask the company who made the game to give you access to the original code. Some older games and game engines have been published freely, and there are also some open source games. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:53, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

(disclaimer: I've never used a decompiler before, so this is all theoretical) Decompilation can preserve the semantics (i.e., it'll do the same thing) of the machine code (after all, machine code is just another programming language). You should be able to decompile into any common language you want, regardless of what the program was originally written in. But it can't undo the information-destroying step of going from a high-level language to a low-level language. Not only will control flow (and data structures, etc.) be reconstructed into more awkward, less clear constructs, but all of the variable names and comments (and external documentation) which was vital for making sense of the code was no use to the machine and leaves no trace in the machine code.

Sometimes, even the original source code isn't enough to understand what's going on. Without really good documentation, or someone who knows the source code really well, a large project can be well-nigh incomprehensible. Paul (Stansifer) 01:42, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Keep in mind that the software license agreement under which a program is sold often contains a clause prohibiting disassembling/decompiling. Even when it is not prohibited, the results are frequently of poor quality, especially if you don't pick the correct source language (e.g. using a C decomplier on a program originally written in Visual Basic). Asking the person/company who originally wrote the software is almost always the best option. -- 174.24.200.38 (talk) 01:47, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

A good optimizer will remove most of the evidence of what language a program was written in, so I thought that your C/Visual Basic example was incorrect, but looking at [7], it turns out that VB is not compiled to machine code at all, but to a bytecode that leaves a lot of information. It won't even be possible to use a machine-language decompiler on a program compiled to VB bytecode (you could do it to the VB bytecode interpreter, though...). So I should qualify my previous response: if the program was compiled to an expressive bytecode, it's possible for decompilation to produce something more coherent.

That link has some other interesting information. It looks like decompilation of even medium-sized projects from machine code is really hard, even ls can't be done automatically. Paul (Stansifer) 16:39, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

It depends on which version of VB you are talking about. VB5 and VB6 can compile to both p-code and native code. For bytecode, a good decompiler like the JAva Decompiler may produce something that resembles the original source code. decltype (talk) 01:45, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

May 24

Broadcast Message from root@Macintosh.local

Broadcast Message from root@Macintosh.local
       (no tty) at 18:09 PDT...

May 22 18:08:47 Macintosh kernel[0]: Wake event 0020

This appeared in a Terminal (shell) window. What the heck is it? I had used MacOS X for almost five years without seeing such a thing before. —Tamfang (talk) 06:29, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what triggered it, but a Wake event is something that would cause the Mac to wake from sleep mode—there are a number of these, I believe, like plugging or unplugging USB devices, or various power settings related to "wake on ethernet" status.

That, of course, is not the really confusing part. I don't know what the Broadcast Message bit is about at all or why it displayed that to you in Terminal. As you've no doubt seen, Googling it doesn't turn up much, so it can't be all that common? --Mr.98 (talk) 12:42, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

The "Broadcast Message" bit indicates that the message was issued using wall (Unix). Can't help with the "Wake event" part. -- Coneslayer (talk) 12:57, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Jumping audio

Whenever I play audio on my laptop it sometimes judders andqu at other times is perfectly clear. Its been doing this for quite a bit now. What is wrong with my speakers and is it a sound card problem as it still does it when plugged ino external sources such as my TV. Paul2387 11:31, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Only at times, you say? Well, is it a stutter or is it more like static? A stutter could be caused by a system inundated with other tasks such that it is unable to designate enough processing time to play the sound fluidly. In other words, you may want to kill some processes. Anti-virus software in the middle of a scan can definitely tie up your system and make things sluggish. Staticky sound is more likely to be caused by a weak connection in the sound module (or anywhere else along the line), but could potentially make the sound "jump" too.

Sounds more like the former case from what you're describing, though, in which case you'll just need to clean your system up a bit to keep things running smoothly. A nice disk cleanup and going through processes you don't need to have running all the time followed by a defrag could fix the problem and be sure no major processes are running when you need to use the sound.

And if none of those work, you might consider trying a 3.5mm stereo-to-USB adapter. I hear they work pretty well and they're under $10.

Or maybe someone else here will have a better solution. -Amordea (talk) 12:29, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Or, if you're using a crummy decoder (some out-of-date MP3 player with a lousy internal codec, for example), you can get all kinds of digital noise, espcially on variable bitrate and high-bitrate MP3 files. Similarly, if you have a crummy OGG or FLAC decoder, and try to play those through your media player, you might get bad quality sound. Try changing your media player software to see if that was the source of the problem; Comparison of audio player software can help you find some alternatives for your computer.

I also have seen audio quality trouble due to crummy sound drivers for lousy cards (or, crummy "high-quality" sound drivers for premium cards that happen to be in the wrong mode). I used to have a Philips PSC card that could switch to 48kHz or 96kHz for "professional audio" purposes (which is a silly anyway, no human can hear the difference); but if it was still in 48kHz mode when I played a 44.1kHz (standard) MP3, the inline hardware resampler would work only "most of the time." Every now and then, there would be audio stuttering, followed by sporadic horrifying squeals and digital noise bursts. Other times, (presumably, the card was improperly initializing its resampler), there would be a persistent 4.1 kHz buzz. Needless to say, I was thoroughly disappointed with the "professional grade" soundcard features. If your audio troubles are related to this, see if you can update your audio card/chip driver from your computer manufacturer's support website; or see if you can manually set the audio sample rate mode in a configuration utility. Nimur (talk) 15:52, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Birman Schiper Stephenson protocol

I dont understand the Birman Schiper Stephenson protocol and its explanation as given in Advanced Operating Systems text by Mukesh Singhal and Niranjan Shivaratri.The explanation is totally confusing.Can anyone give a clear and succinct explanation.Ichgab (talk) 11:41, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Does this page help at all? -- BenRG (talk) 22:59, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Download WP to cellphone

Hi,

I asked this same question a few months ago, but I was hoping for new info. Is it possible to download WP (minus images, history, etc to cut down the size) to a cellphone. This is to avoid data charges by just accessing the online version. What kind of phone would I need for this?

Cheers,

Aaadddaaammm (talk) 11:46, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I think we established last time the answer is yes, so what 'new info' are you hoping for (if the answer was yes last time, it's not likely to be no this time)? As for what sort of phone, a look at the wikipock website should tell you.

If you want alternatives well a quick look into the foundation related efforts, in particular Meta:Offline readers and Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team which were linked last time, and perhaps Strategy:Proposal:Offline Wikipedia which is linked to from the meta offline readers page suggest progress on the mobile phone front is not great.

If those pages don't provide enough info, I would suggesting asking there since there's a good chance someone there is more likely to be able to provide the info then here particularly given the minimal response last time. However if you look it seems those pages have a lot of good info. For example, it doesn't appear kiwix is currently working on any mobile phones.

Also someone in the talk page of the Strategy Proposal page did mention WPMP [8] which releases wikipedia as Mobipocket files so any phone which can support a Mobipocket reader should in theory support those although you'd need enough storage space and it's possible some phones making it difficult or impossible to use the files generated but again, looking at the details provided by WPMP is probably your best bet.

Nil Einne (talk) 14:04, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

iPad Compatability With Yahoo

I bought an iPad a couple of weeks ago. It's my first Apple device. One of my favorite uses of my PC is playing cards with other people at Yahoo games. When I try to do so on my iPad, I get an error message relating to Java. I have been unable to resolve the issue. Is there a resolution?Chief41074 (talk) 14:12, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Some of the fancier Yahoo! games are implemented using Java applets (rather than regular web content such as HTML+javascript). iPad (and its iPhoneOS buddies iPodTouch and iPhone) don't support Java and, it seems, never will. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 14:37, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

In your situation the best solution would be to try and find similar card game apps through the app store. 131.111.185.68 (talk) 14:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Eventually though many major sites should have a non-Java option. Chevymontecarlo 15:10, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Or, major hardware vendors like Apple will strategically choose to implement Java for their device (or simply permit users to install and run OpenJDK on their platform). Why should people stop using a widespread, free, and open technology to cater to the whim of a proprietary device vendor? Nimur (talk) 17:00, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Because Steve Jobs is so cool and we all want to be just like him. Buddy431 (talk) 20:48, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

The trouble is that Apple is extremely concerned about look-and-feel, and they want to prevent their users from ever gazing upon Swing widgets. Apple has the luxury of people willing to jump through hoops to make custom applications look Apple-y. Paul (Stansifer) 00:02, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I was kind of afraid of that. Thanks for the swift response.Chief41074 (talk) 16:23, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Mac Mini analog audio output

I'm planning on buying a new Mac Mini, and I wanted to confirm my understanding of the audio connections. I'm going to hook it up to an LCD TV using a mini-DVI to VGA connector. That leaves audio: I know the Mini has an internal mono speaker, but I'd prefer its sound came out of the TV's stereo speakers. Happily the TV has both a single stereo 3.5mm TRS connector receptacle (labelled "PC audio") and the normal red/white RCA connector audio sockets you'd get on most hifi equipment and larger TVs. And I have the cables to make either connection. Were this a PC (the hardware for which I'm comfortable) I'd just hook either up to the regular green line-out connector on the PC and be done. My hands-on Mac experience ends at a Macintosh LC, so I'm asking y'all to confirm that the Mac's analog output is the same. Mac Mini#External connectivity 2 says (of the two TRS receptacles the Mini has) "support both analog audio input and output" but Apple's spec page on the Mini (here) calls the analog output a "headphone" jack. Is calling it a "headphone" jack just mean it's a regular line-out jack, or is it putting out a higher voltage (and thus more power) than a PC's line-out (and thus risk damaging the preamp in my TV)? TL;DR: is it safe to hook a Mac Mini's audio output jack to a TV's stereo RCA inputs? Thanks. 87.114.110.237 (talk) 14:28, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

VHDL, ModelSim and Clocks

I'm using the free web version of Altera's quartus and attached ModelSim. The following code works passably

clock_gen : PROCESS IS
BEGIN
	clock <= '0' AFTER (0 ns), '1' AFTER (ClockPeriod / 2);
	WAIT FOR ClockPeriod;
END PROCESS clock_gen;

How can I adjust the phase of the clock by some arbitrary amount simply. This seems to work, but its a bit clunky and leaves the first part of the first period undefined. Is there a better way?

clock_gen : PROCESS IS
BEGIN
	clock <= '0' AFTER (10 ns), '1' AFTER ((ClockPeriod / 2) + 10 ns;
	WAIT FOR ClockPeriod;
END PROCESS clock_gen;

-- SGBailey (talk) 16:21, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Are you aware of Altera's hardware phase locked loop devices built in to all their chips? You can access them with the ALTPLL Megafunction, described in Phase-Locked Loop (ALTPLL) Megafunction User Guide, as well as this section of the NIOS on-chip CPU hardware guide, Clock Control Peripherals, or these examples for raw VHDL/Verilog. If you need precise, fine control over clock parameters, including phase, you should use these hardware PLLs instead of general purpose logic. However, be aware of vendor lock-in - if you use Altera megafunctions, you can't port your design to other chip manufacturers. Nimur (talk) 17:04, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, but they aren't relevant here. I'm not generating a clock within a pld, but rather simulating external sensors in a testbench. -- SGBailey (talk) 18:32, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Even still, you can use an ALTPLL in ModelSim, because you are already using Quartus's version of Modelsim-Altera. The User Guide has a section with examples that show how to do this. You will have complete control of the clock and phase; and if they are, as you say, simulating external devices, then the "black-box" model that the megafunctions use will be fine. Nimur (talk) 15:22, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Ahh. Ta. -- SGBailey (talk) 21:51, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Microsoft Office 2000 Premium refuses to uninstall

Because during uninstall it asks me to insert some installation disk, which I have not got. How can I uninstall it? Would just deleting the Micriosoft Office folder in the Programs directory work, followed by running Ccleaner to remove redundant registry enteries? Its a nasty program if it will not uninstal. Thanks 92.15.29.164 (talk) 21:24, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Revo Uninstaller would be a better option. But try the "remove office components" thingy first (rather than a full uninstall) and whittle away the bits of the whole Office package. In doing that you might break the dependency on whatever it thinks it needs the disk for, leaving the full uninstaller able to work. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:27, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I downloaded and installed Rwevo Uninstaller freeware version. But as it only offers the option of using the MS Office 2000 Premium built-in uninstaller, which as explained above will not work, then it is of no use. I did not see any "remove office components" option, perhaps you have mixed this up with erasing the Office history. 92.15.29.164 (talk) 21:55, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Install or remove individual office components is in the Add or Remove programs section of Control Panel - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP052741691033.aspx -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:49, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I tried clicking "change" instead of remove and got the same problem. I have deleted the Office 2000 Premium manually and ran registry cleaners. So far, no problems. I also used Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, and the Office Removal Wizard, which removed another 45MB of unwanted stuff. Perhaps the Office Removal Wizard could have done the whole deletion job itself. Its nice to be clean, and the computer seems to be running faster than previously. Next stop, Ubuntu. 92.24.188.82 (talk) 23:48, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

OpenSUSE key/mouse repeat problems.

My computer has recently developed a problem where when I tap the mouse or (occasionally) when I'm typing, the mouse button will cause two mouse-clicks instead of one - or my keyboard will produce two letters instead of one.

I'm kinda suspecting that maybe I have a bad motherboard battery - in fact, I'm almost sure I do - and I could maybe understand why that might cause clock problems that might make this happen.

Can anyone confirm whether this is likely to be true? Is there some other explanation? Is there a work-around I can apply (like maybe telling the system to use the software clock rather than the hardware one) until I can find the time to replace it?

SteveBaker (talk) 21:55, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I can't see why the motherboard battery would make any difference. You can, in general, remove it entirely and (albeit with faffing around in the BIOS at each startup) everything should work fine; the clock will advance as normal, just it'll go back to 1970 on reboot. The system (jiffy) clock is seeded from the NV clock only at bootup, and I've never seen keyboard code that cared about the keyboard events' timestamps anyway (hmm, maybe entropy seeding...). I'd hazard that the USB host controller is misbehaving (try simply moving mouse and kb to different usb ports, or even just swapping them, and maybe experimentally remove other (new?) usb devices on the same controller). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

[Additional straw clutching] - the BIOS generally has a USB KB/mouse compatibility mode, which takes USB keyboard and mouse events and generates fake PS/2 keystrokes/mickeys, for old OSes that don't know USB, or installers that haven't started a USB HC driver yet. This mode should never /also/ generate the genuine USB event, but who knows what it's doing if the battery is, as you say, failing. See if disabling that option in the BIOS helps. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:46, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't know how to solve this proble, but I do know what it's called: keybounce. Hopefully with that keyword you'll be able to search for solutions more effectively. 98.226.122.10 (talk) 23:02, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I believe mice send a signal both when the button is pressed and again when it's released, and the mouse driver controls which of these is actually used. Therefore, perhaps there is a problem with the mouse driver, which is causing it to use both. StuRat (talk) 23:24, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't see how it could be the drivers because mouse and keyboard both do it - and they must surely have different drivers. They do share a USB hub though...I'm going to try another one of those tonight. SteveBaker (talk) 19:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Eek, you didn't mention a hub. That (and not the HC) is the common point shared between the failures, so it's your first point of call. In addition to the hub being bad, worry about it being power-exhausted. I confess I don't know what a recent Linux dist does when a device reports being underpowered (Windows pops up a little message); I'm off to try plugging all my usb devices into a self-powered hub, just to see. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:45, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

At least on my Ubuntu/Lucid (Gnome) there seems to be no indication; indeed I can so overtax a hub that devices starve altogether and there's no indication, and nothing worthwhile shows in lsusb -v So definitely disconnect any bus-powered usb arcwelding equipment you have on that same hub. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:04, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Did you try booting from a Windows hard disk to see whether the problem is reproducible then? Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:38, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

What is this "Win-doze" of which you speak?  :-) I don't actually own a Windows disk/license. Aside from my wife's bletcherous laptop - we are a Microsoft-free zone! SteveBaker (talk) 19:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Amazing! Naturally, because this is the Reference Desk, I have to challenge that, and ask whether you really lack both an Xbox and a Dreamcast. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:32, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

windows system resource manager

Is there anything similar to Windows System Resource Manager for Windows 7? 82.44.55.254 (talk) 22:17, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

May 25

No audio on some songs

All of my music was working fine yesterday, but now some songs have no audio. Was there some update to Windows Media Player recently that could've done something to them? What should I do? 174.52.133.133 (talk) 00:38, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Setting up a file server with a RAID

My plan is to put a couple of 2TB drives into a Dell (I think it's a Dimension 5150 or some such) and use this as a media server. I want to RAID the drives together for safety's sake. I have a copy of Windows (I'm 99% sure it's XP) to put on the system. Will Windows be able to set up the RAID? Or will I have to get some third party software for this? I've only set up one RAID before and it was in a Mac (which is where most of my computer experience lies). Dismas|^(talk) 01:34, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Windows XP Pro appears to support RAID 0 only, out of the box, which is not what you want; see this link; and our Software RAID article section. Comet Tuttle (talk) 02:58, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

From that, it looks like I'll want to set up a hardware RAID then, using a RAID PCI card. Do you agree? Dismas|^(talk) 03:50, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

If you are indeed running a 5150, it appears that the computer may already support RAID 1 in the BIOS, so you don't need to go to software RAID. See pages 27 through 30 in the manual, which I found here. By the way, Nil Einne and some others here on the Reference Desk have been saying "RAID is not a backup strategy" for a while; see this link, this RD post, and the bottom of this RD post, if you're interested in such advice. Personally I have never set up a RAID; for desktops, I use 2nd or 3rd hard disks and set up nightly or every-other-nightly backups. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:32, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I used to run a RAID system a while ago and concluded that it was infinitely better to have a decent backup strategy than run RAID. I't not impossible that the RAID hardware will fail and you'll be unable to get another of the same spec - thus making both drives unreadable. The PC could overheat and burn, thus losing both disks. Someone could break in an steal it. Depending how valuable your data is, portable hard drives and a remote fire safe (mine's in a shed in the garden) will give much better security. --Phil Holmes (talk) 16:16, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

PCI IDE controler for main HDD?

I have an older, single HDD Dell with failing IDE controllers on the mobo. Would it be possible to just get a PCI IDE controller and plug it into that? Would I be able to boot XP off of it in the same way that a PCI video card works at POST, or would drivers from the OS have to be loaded before it started working?128.151.32.169 (talk) 03:26, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

The model of card I have seen (this was several years ago and had a Silicon Image chipset that supposedly supported RAID) could be used for the boot hard drive. To get XP installed, you might need to copy some files from the driver CD (including one called "txtsetup.oem") onto a floppy disk (yes, it has to be a floppy disk, not a flash drive or CD). I am not sure about what you would have to do if XP is already installed on your hard drive. PleaseStand ^(talk) 04:10, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Sweeeeet. Thank you.128.151.32.169 (talk) 18:11, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Do I need several versions of NET installed on my computer?

I appear to have MS Net Framework 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 all installed on my XP computer. Do I need all of them? 92.28.244.102 (talk) 11:30, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately I can't give you an exact answer as it it depends what applications you're using and if those applications require a version of the framework. Unless you're really short of disk space I would just leave them then if anything tries to use them it'll load without a problem, but otherwise you can always uninstall them and reinstall later if you find you need one. ZX81 ^talk 11:56, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

To make explicit a point that ZX81 is implying: Each one of those is not a superset of all previous versions; so 2.0 does not include 1.1. If you have .NET 2.0 only then you can't run an app requiring 1.1 until you download and install .NET 1.1 as well. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:55, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Help with codes..

Hey! I'm a beginner in signals and systems.I'm trying to write some simple matlab codes on uniform and non-uniform quantization.I've serached but most of the codes are quite complicated using the Guassian method that dont give me any clue to work with my codes. Can anyone provide link to some simple codes for sampling and quantization.Any help will be well appreciated.Thanks --221.120.250.76 (talk) 11:45, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

One way for example a-law coding is to quantitize uniformly first, then apply a function to the number to get a new value that is non uniformly quantitized. This could use a look up array if it needs to be fast, or else a slower a more complex calculation. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:17, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

reviews of day-to-day mobile and semi-mobile living with an 13, 15, and 17-inch MacBook Pro???

Hi, I wonder if there are any real-life reviews of what it is like to work and play with a 13, 15, and 17-inch MacBook Pro in terms of the weight and size. I am considering all three, for me it seems like bigger is better, but then who knows what it is like to actually use a big size like 17 inches in all kinds of situations, like working outdoors, in cafes, lugging the thing around, and so on. Are there any reviews from what the usage of the three are, respectively? Thanks. 84.153.238.49 (talk) 12:19, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Nearly all the laptop reviews I have ever seen make some comment about its usability on the road and its weight. Here is my personal experience: I don't know about MacBook's in particular, but my previous employer issued me a laptop with a 15 inch screen. I took it with me on many business trips and took it home most nights in case I need to provide out of hours support. Even though it came in at at a relatively light 2.6 kg (5.7 lb), the bag and light-ish power block pushed the weight of the whole package closer to 4 kg (8.8 lb). Quite frankly I got tired of lugging it round, to and from the car or to and from the airport. So, when it came time to buy my own laptop, I deliberately selected a light weight laptop with a high-res 13 inch screen. I just couldn't imagine lugging round some 17 inch monster weighing in excess of 6.5 kg (14 lb) once in its bag. Unless heavily into gaming or video editing, I would choose weight over performance almost every time. Astronaut (talk) 17:45, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Agree 100%. The extra space isn't worth it 99% of the time, and you pay for it dearly in terms of size and weight. If you do need large screen space, you are better off buying an external monitor that you keep at your primary work station. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:27, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Here's a review that talks briefly about the size differences. Going from the 15 to 17 inch, you don't get any better performance, but rather a larger screen and more ports. I certainly wouldn't recommend that if you'll be hauling it around frequently. The reviewer appears to prefer the 15 inch, but he also doesn't have to lug it around a lot. Obviously, it depends on how much you travel with your laptop, and also what you use it for. I chose a lighter 13 inch laptop for school, and then it turns out that it just sits on my desk in the dorm room all day (I don't find it useful in class), so I could have gone for a bigger one. The screen does feel a bit small at times, though overall it works well. On the other hand, when I do travel with it, I am glad that I don't have a bigger one. If you go smaller than 13 inches, you can start to run into usability problems (cramped keyboard, small screen, etc.). I largely agree with Astronaut though: if there's not a reason to get a bigger one, don't. Buddy431 (talk) 18:04, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm on my third 15 inch Mac laptop, so my preference is clear. 15 inch is ok for most forms of travel, but barely usable in coach when flying. The only other situation where I would prefer a smaller one is when on a longer cycling trip - even with the very compact Tom Bihn bag, it fills nearly half a panier bag. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:13, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict with above) Here's an overview comparison from Apple (doesn't talk about usability and travel, though). For me, the prices are striking. It costs $500 more for the 15 inch over the 13 inch, and another $500 from the 15 inch to the 17 inch. Depending on your budget, that could be something to consider (I'd never pay that much for a laptop with those specs anyway, but that's your business). Buddy431 (talk) 18:16, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Buddy431 - It's what Microsoft calls the 'Apple Tax'.... :) Chevymontecarlo 18:50, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

is it true that CPU performance isn't improving anymore?

Is it true that the reason that discounting more and more cores, the raw performance of CPU's just isn't increasing by the amount it had been, say between 1995 and 2005? Is there some kind of performance graph someone could show me with the very fastest/highest-performance general-purpose PC cpu core (like Intel or AMD) and how this "fastest" performance has changed over the past fifteen years? That way it would be easy to see, at a glance, if performance increases (the curve upward) really is tapering off... THanks. 84.153.238.49 (talk) 14:27, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I like this question! (disclaimer: my knowledge of the this side of computing is a little weak, so the low-level stuff is kinda vague, and maybe even wrong) Process improvements in chip manufacturing have led to smaller and smaller transistors. This makes it possible to put more and more transistors on a chip, but doesn't have too significant an effect on how many times each transistor can accurately switch per second. So, in order to make processors faster, it becomes necessary to trade the extra space gained for time somehow.

If it's not possible to get an instruction done in fewer microseconds, it becomes necessary to increase the number of instructions executed at a time, by breaking instructions into small chunks, and executing chunks from multiple instructions at a time. This is called instruction pipelining and it has been in use since the 1970s. As you might imagine, it's a complex process, since one instruction might depend on the result of another instruction, and both might be in the pipeline at the same time. With more space, you can be doing more things at once, but eventually you reach a limit. You can only break down instructions so much before the tiny chunks stop making sense to execute independently, and you can only have so many instructions in-flight at a given time before the inter-instruction data dependency slows everything down by introducing pipeline bubbles all the time.

So the makers of CPUs have moved the problem up to the programmer's level by using the extra space to provide more cores. On a four-core machine, you can have four totally independent things happening at once. The catch is that they have to be independent. Now it's the programmer's (or programming language designer's or compiler writer's) responsibility to break up tasks so that four (or eight or sixty-four) tasks are available that don't depend on each other's output.

See Moore's Law for more information on the blistering pace of increase in transistor density. Paul (Stansifer) 15:32, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I found this old news item about a multigate device: [9]. Ten years later, are we using these vertical transistors or anything like them? The wiki article says "the industry predicts that planar transistors will reach feasible limits of miniaturization by 2010". Did that happen yet? 213.122.2.195 (talk) 17:02, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

It's instructive to look at the spectacular rate of improvement in Graphical Processing Units (GPU's) compared to Central Processing Units (CPU's). Because graphics are very parallelizeable, it's easy to use increased silicon densities to add more processors and get an almost linear improvement in performance. You can do the same thing with CPU's - and just increase the number of cores - but because the work of most software isn't parallelizable, you can't easily split it over multiple cores. While many important CPU-software tasks can be rearranged to run on two, three or four cores - there aren't many pieces of software that could take advantage of (say) 100 cores. So simply pushing the number of cores up doesn't really help. The alternative is to use that silicon area to build ever cleverer ways of executing code so that it runs faster - but those things are notoriously error-prone and horribly expensive to engineer. So yes, CPU's are hitting something of a bottleneck. The smart money (IMHO) is going into pushing more of the heavy workload onto the GPU - leaving the CPU to do things that are strictly impossible to parallelize. Things like nVidia's CUDA library are helping that process along immensely. SteveBaker (talk) 18:51, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, steve, but my question (I'm the OP) is about whether the rate of performance increase has been tapering off in a single Intel or AMD core (the fastest available at any given time). Has it been? 82.113.121.113 (talk) 21:53, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

There's basically no performance left to gain in the single-core world (because parallelizing work at the instruction level is yielding greatly diminishing returns, as I described above). This is why it's barely possible to get single-core machines, despite the fact that, for most applications, the extra cores are useless. They're hoping that the software people start writing parallelizable code. Paul (Stansifer) 02:14, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Addendum about the device physics side - smaller transistors inherently can switch faster (this is just a fact of device physics that governs their behavior). So the goal of miniaturization was not only density, but also towards improving the clock-speed for the digital circuitry. The big problem is that we are reaching two analog-circuit/device-physics roadblocks that make it hard to keep decreasing the size any further: first, we have devices so small (we're talking tens of silicon atoms across) that they barely function as transistors. Manufacturing these devices is an immense challenge - photolithography can't work for features smaller than the wavelength of light - and we're pushing way into the ultraviolet spectrum and beyond, with 32 nanometer VLSI nowadays. So, making devices any smaller will be a technology challenge. A secondary problem is power density. If we make devices smaller, and do the same amount of work, the concentration of heat-per-unit-volume increases dramatically - you can find charts that predict energy densities inside of transistor junctions that would approach nuclear-fusion energy densities if Moore's Law continues indefinitely. So, the devices can not be packed in any more densely. Compounding this problem is that smaller devices are worse devices - they have poorer characteristics, worse thermal losses, and so on. Thus the problems with cooling the CPU interior emerge even sooner than we might predict by straightforward extrapolation of heat/thermal trends. See, for example, End of Moore's law: thermal (noise) death of integration in micro and nano electronics from Physics Letters; there are dozens of similar high-profile "End of Moore's Law" analyses published in major journals over the last decade or so. Nimur (talk) 15:35, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Slight correction to a generally interesting contribution. The minimum size of features created by photolith are related to the wavelength of the light used in the exposure, but can be considerably smaller. The article you linked to says "Current state-of-the-art photolithography tools use deep ultraviolet (DUV) light with wavelengths of 248 and 193 nm, which allow minimum feature sizes down to 50 nm." --Phil Holmes (talk) 08:45, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

MonoDevelop vs. SharpDevelop

Hello. I want to start programming in C# and wants a opensource IDE and my chose is either MonoDevelop or SharpDevelop. I looked at both of them and I can't tell the difference. Some say SharpDevelop is better, others say MonoDevelop.

Which one should I choose and what IDE would you recommend and why?

Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.243.235.218 (talk) 15:07, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Android and Java

The Android (operating system) article says it "allows developers to write managed code in the Java language". The managed code article says that managed code "will only execute under the 'management' of a Common Language Runtime". Does Android therefore compile from Java into Common Intermediate Language and then into native code, or did the second article mislead me? Also: does the Android OS require (or virtually require by reason of available libraries) that any program it runs be written in Java, or can you write in C? What's the point of its ties to Java - why have a platform independent language integrated with the OS, seems like a contradiction? 213.122.2.195 (talk) 16:43, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

The managed code article has been significantly changed since that sentence was written. Here is an earlier version which does not specifically tie it to Microsoft .NET. --Spoon! (talk) 17:57, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

In this case a link to Sandbox (computer security) would have been more appropriate (although in practice apps have a more sophisticated security model, something akin to signed java applets). Android's security model (described here) prevents defective or malicious apps from messing with each other or the system. Desktop/server OSes do this with a full memory-protected, user/supervisor mode architecture, but that requires CPU features that the limited processors in handhelds frequently lack. In addition, writing in a platform-neutral language (and delivering bytecode to the platform) gives independence of the architecture - initially Android platforms are ARM, but there's no reason (from an app perspective) that it couldn't run on a PPC, MIPS, or even Intel Atom core. It used also to be the case that bytecode was a preferred distribution format for mobile apps, as bytecode tends to be more compact (an issue for very memory limited mobile platforms) - but these days mobiles have enough ram that this isn't a big deal any more. Android itself, and the platform's drivers and other ancillary code, is still written in C and/or C++. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:16, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

So... is the bytecode CIL? 213.122.2.195 (talk) 18:35, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

No. Android machines run the register based Dalvik VM, not the stack based Java Virtual Machine, nor the CLR CIL bytecode. In this post Mono Project leader Miguel de Icaza speculates about the possibility of someone implementing a CIL to Dalvik translator, but I'm not aware that anyone has actually done so. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:44, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Incidentally, Dalvik's .dex file format is discussed here, and the bytecodes discussed here. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:49, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Cool. Register based sounds good. I like the idea of Android a little bit more now. 213.122.2.195 (talk) 19:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

It hardly matters whether an abstract machine is register-based or stack-based. Bytecode stack operations don't compile to hardware stack operations. The bytecode stack is just a (potentially) more compact way of referring to recently written registers. -- BenRG (talk) 22:08, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Ah I might as well post a few thoughts in this thread. I just upgraded to an Xperia X10, foolishly not knowing that it wouldn't support .jar files. Anyone have any idea if it ever will, or will there be (better) support in Android 2.1 or 2.2 or later or never or we will have to rely on Dalvik ports? Anyone with battery issues with the X10? Bah sorry for so many questions but I'm a little peeved at 'spending' so much and having so many doubts about a mostly great phone. Why can't someone just create a perfect phone? I miss my P1i already! Sandman30s (talk) 23:07, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

When you say ".jar files", I'm guessing you mean J2ME MIDlets (which is the "normal" mobile java environment). It would seem not. Android (operating system) discusses some conversion tool called J2Android; I've no idea how, or whether, it works. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes that link mentions 'It allows developers to write managed code in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries' which was what I kind of researched before buying the phone. Knowing that, who would have guessed it wouldn't support J2ME (some silly copyright struggle between Google and Sun/Oracle)? I have a library that I've built up over the years and I know it's going to be a struggle to either port some of that or replace that with Android equivalents. The variety of phones and phone OSes on the market nowadays reminds me of the boom in home computers back in the early 80's... it will take a while but there will be a few winners and many losers. Sandman30s (talk) 09:17, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Sadly, from mobiputing, 'Myriad isn’t targeting end users. Instead, J2Android is described as a utility that will let phone makers, wireless carriers, and mobile app stores expand the number of apps available for Android'. At least there's hope that someone else can do it. Sandman30s (talk) 09:37, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Improved Formula Editor in Word 2010

The new formula editor in Word 2007 is great, although very buggy:

• Sometimes Word crashes when you edit large formulae.
• If you insert a formula in a numberbed or unnumbered list containing soft line-breaks (Shift+Return), you will no longer be able to save the document ("file format error").
• In large formulae, on-screen rendering bugs are common.
• Editing large formulae is very slow.

In addition, it is not possible to number equations. Prior to Microsoft Office Word 2007, one used the Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 OLE object, and then it was easy to number equations: simply insert a centered tab stop at the center of the page, and a right-aligned tab stop at the right margin of the page. Then you insert the formula at the first tab stop, and the number at the second tab stop. However, this is not possible in Word 2007 (using the built-in formula editor), for unless the formula is entirely alone on its line, it will shrink, as if the formula was "inlined" on a line (if you know what I mean). Furthermore, using formulae in headings does not work very well.

Are these problems solved in Word 2010? --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 17:08, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Word 2010 is still in Beta mode at the moment, and only the 2007 version is currently available as a demo/trial version. You can find out more about Office 2010 here. The best way to see if the bugs have been fixed in Office 2010 is to wait until it comes out and try out the demo. Chevymontecarlo 18:48, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Very late "beta mode" if so. It will be released in shops within a month. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 21:34, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

It RTMed over a month ago [10]. Those with MSDN access to such things and other Microsoft connections can I presume already get it. If you don't have those, the beta version is probably the only legally available option although if you haven't already got a key I presume you can't get one. And Microsoft is unlikely to be interested in bug reports for stuff they may have already fixed. In other words, I wouldn't consider it beta mode. You may be able to find someone using the RTM version of Word 2010 to test this but it seems so far no one has turned up. Nil Einne (talk) 23:22, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Windows Server 2008

Resolved

Can Windows Server 2008 be used as a normal operating system, for browing the web, watching video and playing games etc, or is it for server tasks only? 82.44.55.254 (talk) 18:50, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Of course. Perhaps gaming support is limited, but in principle, yes: see here: [11]. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 19:55, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I used Windows Server 2003 for a while once. Generally it worked fine, however some poorly designed game installers just refused to install (some did it on XP x64 too which was based on the 2003 code base). I can't remember but I think compatibility mode didn't help for some reason. But once I did install (by modifying the installer IIRC), the game itself worked fine. Some may warn you about an unsupported operating system. Probably due to Microsoft's push to security, stability etc and the resulting removing unneeded components you're more likely to have problems with 2008 vs Vista or 2008 R2 vs 7 then 2003 vs XP. But a quick search shows a bunch of discussions e.g. [12] [13], it seems crappy installers are still a problem but similar to my experience many will work. However some dlls may be missing since they're unlikely to be used by servers which you'll need to manually add. Obviously any game which doesn't work on Vista is unlikely to work on Windows Server 2008. Nil Einne (talk) 17:45, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! 82.44.55.254 (talk) 18:22, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Setting a Variable in a Shell Script to The Contents of a File

Hello,

I'm trying to figure out how to in a linux shell script set a variable to be equal to the contents of a file. Here is my example: I have a file called foo.txt and I want to send an email using the mail command:

# mail -s "$mail_subject" someone@someone.com

How to I set the variable $mail_subject to be the contents of file foo.txt?

Thank you for any help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by CGP (talk • contribs) 21:37, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Using backticks. mail -s "`cat foo.txt`" someone@someone.com Unilynx (talk) 21:42, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Getting a 'permission denied' error. CHMOD says everyone can read the file... --CGP (talk) 22:34, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

no cat

read mail_subject<foo.txt

mail_subject=`<afile`

for options with no cat Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:53, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

May 26

pictures in text

Using Microsoft Works, how would I go about adding pictures into a block of text, usually it then leaves a large gap next to the picture, which isn't what I want, is there any way to avoid this? Or would I be better off copying it all into another program, Paint perhaps, and arranging it there.

148.197.114.158 (talk) 07:41, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Also, does anyone know why I had to type in a password to ask this question? Apparently I am creating external links somewhere, but I can't see how. 148.197.114.158 (talk) 07:44, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Did you edit the entire page rather than using the "new section" link? That would cause the wiki software to see any external links on the page, as prompt you to enter a captcha 82.44.55.254 (talk) 10:09, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure I did add a new section, I do usually. I figure it's just the computer broken again, they do that a lot. 148.197.114.158 (talk) 11:16, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Indeed looking at your contribs strongly suggests you did use the new section Nil Einne (talk) 17:37, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

So, any ideas? Anyone? I really do need to know this quite soon. 148.197.114.158 (talk) 11:34, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Already found it. I just had to select each image and reformat it. 148.197.114.158 (talk) 12:18, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Separate appendices in latex, and referencing labels in other documents

Okay, I want to do this in latex: I want to have a main.pdf, and then an appendix.pdf as two separate files. However, in appendix.pdf, I want to be able to refer to equations (e.g. with \ref) etc in the main.pdf document, and have the numberings update automatically if I change main.tex. Is there a way to do this? Alternatively, is there a way to get latex to parse some tex, with respect to its effect on labels and numberings, and yet not display it in the final compiled document? Thanks.--163.1.210.162 (talk) 15:31, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

First question: One way would be to compile the document, then split it by "printing" it twice with PDFCreator or some other tool. Second question: I think you can write \kill at the end of a line to get latex to parse the line (ie include references, tags etc) but not actually show it. Jørgen (talk) 18:26, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

You could also use Pdftk to split the PDF output (I assume you are comfortable with command line tools, given that you are using latex).131.111.185.68 (talk) 20:49, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Is there an alphabetical list?

For the letter A, such a list would include the meanings of CTRL+A, ALT+A, etc. for Microsoft Windows.

For the letter B, CTRL+B, ALT+B, and so on through the alphabet.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 21:04, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Here is one list from Microsoft, though it is not alphabetical as you requested. It's also unfortunately divided up the way the Microsoft engineers would divide it up: by what part of Windows is affected by the keys. Here is another Microsoft list that's a little longer, specific to XP — though almost all these will still work in Vista and Windows 7. Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:14, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

When I get time, perhaps I can convert the lists into alphabetical ones and put them on Wikipedia with those as the sources. Thanks.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:21, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Hm, looks like someone started: Table of keyboard shortcuts. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:42, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Alphabetical sorting is nonsensical in this context, given that more than half of them are things like shift, space, function keys, and delete. 81.131.4.58 (talk) 05:55, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Still, there may be uses I don't know about which I'd like to see. But if that article has been done, then there's no point in my adding anything to Wikipedia.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 15:17, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Hosting your site with Wordpress

I'm new in the computer bussiness and i would like to know if i can host my website using wordpress? is wordpress a hosting website as well? is there a cost to it? thank you very much, i cant wait to host my website in wordpress! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.5.1.137 (talk) 23:12, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Why don't you go to http://wordpress.com and check it out yourself? 203.167.190.79 (talk) 23:21, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

From my experience, wordpress is only for hosting very simple sites or blogs, where you use a pre-made template. If you want to host a full website with dynamic content or custom layout and menus etc wordpress is not ideal. 82.44.55.254 (talk) 23:25, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

I usually recommend experimenting with Google Sites, which lets you hosts a simple website for free and lets you see what you're getting into. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:54, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

There is a distinction to be made here. Wordpress is the software which manages site content and display. By hosting, however, you are referring to buying server power/space/bandwidth as a service. Google sites and wordpress.com offer software packaged together with hosting as a single service (and free). The question is ultimately if Wordpress can accommodate your website's needs, which is a fair question. Hosting --- making your site available --- is more or less a commodity and can be assumed to ubiquitous. Different sites have different needs, and I've seen many complex powerful sites done in Wordpress. Can you tell us a bit more about your requirements?--rocketrye12 ^{talk/contribs} 20:02, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

May 27

windows mobile os backwards compatible with ce.net?

Can I run an application written in CE.net on a device running Windows Mobile? Is WM backward compatible with CE.net? Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.28.42.225 (talk) 00:07, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Port 22

Is there any legitimate or accidental reason why an IP address belonging to either a DSL modem or a county government for a county in another state (not sure which it is, WHOIS says "Org-Name: Butler County") to try to access port 22 on my network, or is this a sure sign of malicious activity ir a virus infection? The IP is 66.117.197.99 PCHS-NJROTC ^(Messages) 02:23, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Port 22 is assigned to SSH so it's most likely what you describe (something looking for people running unsecured or poorly secured SSH server), but it's obviously easily possible it could be accidential. E.g. if someone typed in an IP address wrong, if someone has the correct IP address but it's been re-assigned... In terms of legitimate, well there are some possibilities like your ISP is testing you from some remote location perhaps to see if you are violating their TOS and they're using something you won't recognise to avoid tipping you off. Perhaps you're on some CIA watchlist, they're obviously not going to use a CIA identified IP if they're testing your defenses (I believe you live in the US, so it's possible this could be considered legitimate if authorised by law). In fact, if the question is 'Is there any legitimate or accidental reason why' the answer would usually be yes since it's unlikely you can't compare up with some possibility even if it's ridicilously unlikely Nil Einne (talk) 04:44, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

According to my /var/log/auth.log file, I've gotten over 500 failed attempts to log in via SSH in the past few days. They're almost all malicious, and I seem to recall that this is about normal. As long as your passwords are good, you should be safe. (And it doesn't hurt to make sure that root is an invalid user to SSH into.) Paul (Stansifer) 12:37, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

There's no need for conspiracies by the CIA. This is very common. If it's more than just a few incidental logins, it's almost certainly a brute force attempt against SSH servers. The IP its coming from may be an infected machine too. If you aren't running an SSH server, or have it firewalled off, you shouldn't need to worry about those attempts. Even if you are running it, the key is to make sure you have complex long passwords. There are other security options available as well. This is very common and anyone running an SSH server will frequently see these failed login attempts in /var/log/secure. Shadowjams (talk) 20:29, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

About PC RAM

I m having 4 gb ram, but in system properties it shows only 2.75 gb. the RAM is 2-2 gb two pieces. And my motherboard is AMD-GA-MA785GM-US2H,It has 512 mb graphic card built in. The shopkeeper said that RAM is using by Graphic Card but i m not sured. So resolve my doubt n tell me whats the problem with RAM. Reply me at <e-mail removed> —Preceding unsigned comment added by Abhi29jain (talk • contribs) 02:23, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

I removed your e-mail address since we answer questions on the RD, and you're risking spam by leaving it in a public place; as mentioned in the header. Anyway as for your problem, at a random guess, you're using a 32 bit operating system, probably Windows which limits the amount of RAM that is addressable. If you upgrade to a 64 bit operating system like Windows 7 x64 or Windows Vista x64 or Windows XP x64 you should see all your RAM. I'm lazy to explain more particularly since I have no idea if you're going to read this since you want me to e-mail you, perhaps someone else will Nil Einne (talk) 04:38, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

The maximum memory available in 32-bit Windows is 3.25GB. Minus 512MB used by the integrated graphics and you are left with 2.75GB. F (talk) 09:09, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Reference: KB929605. 124.214.131.55 (talk) 11:25, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Problems

I have a hp pavilion dv5-1170ei and it had problems with the audio and the quick launch buttons after upgrading to Win 7. I decided to update the bios because that was the only thing that i had not updated. Now the computer is frozen with the BIOS update still running. I once had the same problem with a dv5-1199ei and it worked fine after upgrading the BIOS. By the way i upgraded from Vista Home premium to Win 7 Ultimate.

I don't know what to do.-129.78.64.100 (talk) 03:16, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Restart your computer first to verify BIOS is not loading and the update operation is hung. If your BIOS fails to load, you may need to reset your BIOS to default and try to flash it again. I'd re-download the BIOS flashing program to be sure it isn't a corrupt download as well and be doubly sure you got the right BIOS update.

If you do not know how to reset your BIOS, here is a simple article detailing a couple of methods. It does not mention, however, that you must disconnect ALL power sources from the laptop (including batteries), so please do this. Before touching any of the internal electronics, be sure as well to discharge any static electricity from yourself by touching a metal surface.

Resetting the BIOS will also reset your time/date settings and any other changes you have made to BIOS, and so you will need to change those back.

Given that this procedure involves working inside the laptop (and while not an especially challenging operation) it is a great way to ruin your several-hundred dollar investment if you are not careful. If you don't feel confident doing this, please take this to your local PC repair shop. -Amordea (talk) 05:35, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

keyboard commands history

Did the assignment of Z/X/C/V to Undo/Cut/Copy/Paste originate at PARC or what? —Tamfang (talk) 06:40, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes. It is commonly assumed that they chose those because they are in a row in the lower left of a standard qwerty keyboard. However, like much of Xerox PARC's innovations, they didn't do much to popularize it. Microsoft adopted the same control keys in Windows and from there they became standard. -- kainaw™ 18:57, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

What DSL cable do I have?

My broadband router is connected to the DSL jack on my phone line with a thin cable that has small 6-pin connectors, the same at each end. I'm not sure if all the pins are used, can only see two wires attached. I'd like to get a longer cable, but can anyone tell me what jack it is? Seems too small for an RJ45, and I don't want to just guess.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.170.214.177 (talk) 11:52, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I've searched some more and think it's an RJ-11. Does that sound right? Another question - in the US, is this used as a phone jack? I'm in the UK and our phone jacks are different, flatter and wider with a clip at one end. 86.170.214.177 (talk) 12:06, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it's (essentially) an RJ11; that's typically what's on both ends of the cable runs from the DSL splitter to your broadband router. Registered jack goes into horrible detail (strictly what you call RJ45 isn't, and what we're calling RJ11 here is really probably RJ14, but RJ11 will do you fine). FYI, the BT plug (properly called a BS6312 plug) is described at British telephone sockets. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:30, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Being a US native, I couldn't help but giggle at this question. RJ-11's are so ubiquitous here that it's even hard for me to imagine someone not being familiar with one (which I don't mean as a slight, it just amuses me). But yes, the RJ-11 (and its cousins, but they tend to get lumped in with the others and labeled as RJ-11 as well since they all use the same size/shape plug but have different connectors, with the RJ-11 being the most common type) is our landline standard here in the US. But hey, we're also still using imperial units, so we might just be backwards in this department as well. -Amordea (talk) 21:21, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Customizing Win7 taskbar/tray

I could swear that I read a tip the other day about how to force an app to display in your system tray (AKA notification area) instead of the taskbar, but I don't remember where. I should have bookmarked or wrote it down. Anyway, does anyone know how to do this off the top of their head? I just want an app to display in the tray to conserve desktop space. I'm using Windows 7. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 12:26, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

I believe what you are referring to requires individual program support. Some programs are built to run in the notification area, some are not. What you read could have been referring to the ability to show/hide notifications. But in Win7, you can easily pin programs to the taskbar anyway, so I am not sure why you would want to put them in the notification area (which is not what it was designed for anyway). To pin an item to the taskbar, you can simply click-and-drag the executable link to the taskbar and drop it onto it. If taskbar real estate is an issue, consider using small icons (right-click the taskbar, click properties, click the "use small icons" checkbox). -Amordea (talk) 19:17, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Er, did you try a web search? RBTray, Trayconizer, PowerMenu, lots of others. -- BenRG (talk) 20:16, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Huh, I had no idea there was so much support for this sort of thing, even if third-party. My (admittedly very brief) web search did not turn any of these programs up. Well, learn something new every day. -Amordea (talk) 20:50, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Outlook mail accounts

Is it possible to use yahoo or gmail accounts with Microsoft Outlook? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.255.2.187 (talk) 14:39, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, at least for Gmail. You need to enable IMAP in Gmail's settings and then configure it according to these instructions. It works perfectly well. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:04, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

I've never done it with Yahoo! Mail; it seems the free version now supports POP3 (a simpler, less powerful counterpart of IMAP) - some instructions are here. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:14, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Megaupload

If I upload a common file to megaupload, say for example the vlc-media player installer file, the upload progress bar goes straight to 100% without any uploaded data coming from my connection (I monitored it upload and download speeds and amounts). When I download the file, it is in perfect working order. Obvious I didn't upload this file, so does megaupload detected if the someone else has already uploaded the same file, and simply link my upload to it? 82.44.55.254 (talk) 15:22, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Probably. It would be a pretty easy thing to do, by just exchanging md5 hashes of file contents, and it would save time for you and space for them. It's how I would do it, anyway, if I were running a site like that! --Mr.98 (talk) 15:58, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Windows and Linux virus

Can a virus pass from one OS to the other? It could be a kind of "write once, run everywhere" virus. I often use the same USB in a Windows and Linux machine, could that be a source of infection?--Mr.K. (talk) 17:30, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

There are, in essence, no Linux virusses. While some proofs of concept have been made, and one can surely speculate about how one might exist, there is no evidence at all that any Linux viruses exist "in the wild". In theory Wine runs many Windows programs, so a Windows virus might (again, in theory) run in Wine, but in practice Wine doesn't do many of the lower level things that virusses reply on, so again there's no evidence that a Wine-compatible virus really exists in the wild. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:36, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

The Linux malware article talks about viruses and trojans written for linux, and how they're "on the increase in recent years and more than doubled during 2005 from 422 to 863". Also, to address the OPs question, could there possibly be viruses or malicious programs written in crossplatform languages like Java which could affect different operating systems? That seems like a possible threat, although I personally don't know if such things exist. 82.44.55.254 (talk) 18:11, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Unlike programs written in machine code, or in a language such as C that compiles into machine code, programs written in Java compile into Java byte code, which needs the Java Runtime Environment to run. At least in my experience, this prevents them from (1) starting on their own without the user's intervention, and (2) interfacing with the system directly. Of course, there are exceptions to both, but I hardly think they matter. A malicious native program could very well start a Java program on its own, but for that, you would need a native program in the first place, and it could very well do the malicious stuff itself in that case. Java programs can do damage to the system in a system-legal manner, for example by deleting files, but they cannot actually call low-level system calls. JIP | Talk 19:03, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Making sense of syntax

I am having problem understanding the last line of the Python code below.

If it were object.method(), it would make sense for me, you would be calling the method of an object. But, this way, it seems like two methods concatenated... :(

>>> from urllib import urlopen
>>> url = "http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2554/2554.txt"
>>> raw = urlopen(url).read()

--Quest09 (talk) 17:50, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

In Python, pretty much any value is an object. urlopen(url) returns an object which has a read method. It's as if you did

temp = urlopen(url)
raw = temp.read()

but in one line. --Spoon! (talk) 18:13, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand Python, but from a quick look at the above, it looks pretty similar to the situation with languages like Java or C#. If a method returns a reference to an object, you can call other methods on that object simply by concatenating the method calls. The only difference is that return values from methods aren't lvalues, so you can't do things like:

PlaceToStoreObject(location) = new Object(); (not legal)

but you can "cheat" with special array syntax, like so:

GetObjectArray(location)[0] = new Object(); (legal, I think)

C and C++ have the * operator, which transforms rvalues into lvalues by dereferencing them, but Java and C# do not. JIP | Talk 18:57, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Python syntax is mostly about expressions and statements. Expressions have values, and statements do things. (Confusing the issue somewhat is that expressions can also do things when they are encountered.) So 1, 1+1, "google.com", urlopen(url) urlopen("google.com").read() are all expressions. On the other hand, x=4, import foo, and return 1+1 are all statements (but they contain expressions, which I've underlined).

Every value (and thus, the result of any expression) in Python is an object, and all objects have methods (to see what methods an object o has, look at the value of dir(o)). Try the following expressions out (interactively, Python treats an expression e as the statement print e):

dir(1234.5678)
(1234.5678).as_integer_ratio() #the parentheses are only needed because "." has two different meanings.
(2).__add__(2).__mul__(3)  # "2+2*3" is actually short for this
"hello".upper()

Expressions can contain other expressions, arbitrarily deep. Statements can contain expressions, but expressions can't contain statements. See also Python syntax and semantics. Paul (Stansifer) 19:08, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Blender question

This looks so good I just want to eat it up.

I am a Blender noob. I am playing around with the interface and learning how to make some simple objects.

One thing I notice is that all of my renders, no matter how much I play with their materials, look very shiny and flat and very 1980s computer graphics (kind of like this. What I'd really like to know how to do is to make them look more "organic" in the sense that even though they are of, say, metal things, they have a nice texture to them. A good example of the effect I'd like to achieve is in this image here: File:Engine_movingparts.jpg.

What exactly gives it that organic feel, like it was made out of a rough plastic? I'd be eager for any explanations even if they are not Blender specific. I assume it is some kind of settings relating to how the objects reflect light, and maybe some kind of very subtle texture bitmap applied to it, but I'm kind of clueless in my essential noobiness. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:16, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

This is of interest to me too. I've played with Blender but never gotten very far. One thought is that the more organic pictures might have a subtle depth of field. The other issue is that the raytracing / reflections are much more subtle on the better images. Shadowjams (talk) 20:24, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

That image looks like it benefits from radiosity, which simulates light diffusely bouncing between parts of the object. Also, turning down specular highlights tends to make things look more plasticy and less metal. Paul (Stansifer) 20:30, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

This Blender page discusses the various parameters - "gloss" seems to best describe what you're talking about, in the Blender sense. Diffuse reflection covers the physics, and points us to Radiosity (3D computer graphics) and Photon mapping. Both of these are rather expensive, so it'd be tempting for some applications to apply a global local illumination like Phong shading with some anisotropic noise, and that'll look reasonable. If you really needed a brushed metal appearance, you'd probably look to implement one or several shaders that did a noise-guided texture and possibly bump map, but that's probably overkill for most applications. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:34, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks much for the comments. I've been popping around these links and others and I think what I need to do is really grok how ambient occlusion works, because I think that's the effect that I'm really going for, in the end. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:38, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Did you realise that the image you linked appears in Blender_(software)#Features where it is described as " with ray tracing and ambient occlusion using Blender and YafaRay" - looking at the blown up image I notice a lot of noise - indeed YaFaRay uses montecarlo based approximations for illumination - in fact the image seems to gain a pleasurable graininess from the approximate nature of the sampling - more accuracy might result in a 'flatter' looking surface - and in fact look less good (subjectively).77.86.125.207 (talk) 20:51, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

I think you want to turn down the shinyness of the surface - ie reduce specular reflections - they do look '80s'. In phong shading either just it turn off or reduce the value of n in the equation given in Specular_highlight#Phong_distribution (1 or 2 maximum). Possibly this hasn't been done in the example image - it's difficult to tell since the angle of illumination wouldn't show any specular highlights anyway - I think rough montecarlo sampling is the thing that is causing the effect you like in the image.77.86.125.207 (talk) 21:19, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

The User:Wapcaplet created the file and says will send you the scene file if asked - quickest way to learn is to copy modify.77.86.125.207 (talk) 21:23, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Sibelius files

Why can't Sibelius files be uploaded into any Wikimedia project? --84.62.209.203 (talk) 20:44, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

We only allow uploads of files in "free" formats, that is formats that can be read and written by open source and free software, and that aren't encumbered by patents. As far as I know, only Sibelius itself adequately reads and writes its file format. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:48, 27 May 2010 (UTC)