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January 25

if i upload a pdf/docx online, will any of my info be in the metadata?

e.g. say its an assignment for school, and i have not written anything in the pdf. could it still be traced back to me somehow? e.g. will i be lised in the file's author? Haddaya9 (talk) 00:08, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Docx can definitely store author information and I think PDF can. (Well, it certainly can, I'm just not sure there's a standard way of doing it.) You can see this information by viewing the document properties in an appropriate viewer. Even if you don't see your name there, there might be some forensic means of tracing the file to your computer, but probably only if the investigator had access to your computer and could produce other documents for comparison. -- BenRG (talk) 04:28, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the above, there are ways to try and remove at least some of the information though - see for example [1] ---- _nonsense ferret 16:34, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Facebook telling me way too much about any email address

I forgot my password so I clicked the "forgot password" option on Facebook. Like any other site, FB asks me: what is you email address. After entering that, instead of saying: "we may or we may have not sent you an email with a link to reset your password, you might want to check your spam folder" (which is still the "industry standard" as far as I know) it says: "Ah, welcome back John! You must be John Einstein, living in New York, and this is your picture. Right?". Actually FB also tells me "We don't even think you are John", probably based on cookies or browser signature. I can't see any reason how that information might help a user who lost his password. I do see a lot of opportunities for spammers to check if an email address belongs to a real person, to personalize the spam or even blackmail a john@bla.com who appears to be Mary on FB. FB doesn't even show a captcha before telling the personal details it knows related to the address just entered. FB must have tens of programmers, lawyers, and otherwise smart people thinking about the problem that users sometimes forget their password, and they come up with this. So my question is: why? Joepnl (talk) 02:18, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

The point of the lost password link is that not everyone remembers the email address they have associated with their account so they provide other options to identify your account. Since some of these will identify accounts that may not belong to you particularly if you make a mistake or forget details, they want to make sure you have the right account. Arguably this isn't necessary if you enter an email address but since they also want to provide a method for you to recover your account if you no longer have access to the email address, there's no real harm in using the same thing since ultimately they are going to tell you who the account associated with the email address belongs to. Also does Facebook even require email addressess anymore? I was under the impression they were trying to get people to use Facebook for their email so potentially if you have a mobile phone number associated with the account, or some other suitable method of ID you don't need an email address. It's worth remembering that for some people their Facebook account is far more important to them then their email address and people will compromise far more by compromising their Facebook account then their email address and so they will protect their Facebook account far better then their email address. And some people will use throw away email addresses. Nil Einne (talk) 03:38, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree if it works in this way it is a nasty bit of information leakage - however, it has always been possible to do this with a facebook search - if you search for an email address it will show you an account associated with the email. In fact i suspect that searching for it will then register a 'connection' between you and the person searched for and probably start recommending you as a friend to them. ---- _nonsense ferret 05:02, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I think I'll just stop using FB. I am still a bit surprised, though. Joepnl (talk) 13:51, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

You can check Facebook's privacy settings to see if they still allow you to minimumize your 'public info' -- that is, what anyone can see who is not a friend, or friend of friend, or in your networks, or.. etc. I haven't checked recently, as over the past couple of years they've really stretched any decent sense of privacy standards, especially using a general default of opt-in, when it should be opt-out. I recall a story from 2011 (or earlier?) where they actually imported contact info from users' smartphones. After I heard that I cut down on whatever little personal info I was sharing. If the photo revelation bothers you, just switch the main profile pic to something non-descriptive. And write them a letter of complaint, though it probably won't matter much to them ya never know. El duderino ^(abides) 14:39, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

On second thought, don't bother with the letter. Just google-search "Facebook privacy lawsuit" and check out how much they care about your privacy. E.g. [2] I imagine their rationale is something like, "well, our service is free and you agreed to all this stuff upfront... Oh, you didn't read the fine print?" El duderino ^(abides) 14:58, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Well I've used a picture from Where the Wild Things Are for instance in the past when I needed an image to represent me ;-) It's called an avatar (computing). Dmcq (talk) 14:50, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

• On the back end of the issue, so to speak, you may want to regularly empty your browser's cache before and after using Facebook. They've been known to data mine your websurfing history. And I'm sure they're not the only ones. El duderino ^(abides) 15:31, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

They would be using Like buttons for that (for which your browser tells FB which page the button was on), I'd be even more suprised if they somehow had access to your browser history otherwise. Anyway, I don't think it will still be cool to use Facebook when people find out it knows more about you than your parents did when you were 4 years old. BTW, even the Reuters article El duderino refers to has a like button, which hopefully at some time will be considered offensive. I wonder how big the profile is that FB has on people that are not even logged on. Joepnl (talk) 20:56, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

You can somewhat limit the damage by turning off "third-party cookies". In Firefox, go to Edit->Preferences->Privacy. In the "history" section, choose "Use custom settings for history", and then un-check "Accept third-party cookies". --Trovatore (talk) 21:02, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! I just did that. Meanwhile I've looked who else apparantly needed to know I just read an article on Reuters.com. I stopped typing after this: ensighten.com, outbrain.com, industrybrains.com, google.com, betrad.com, bkrtx.com, bizographics.com, npartio-inc.net, gscontxt.net, moatads.com, crowdscience.com, teads.tv, linksmart.com, cloudfrond.net, webtrends.com, adnxs.com, adsrvr.org, truste.com, twitter.com, licdn.com, invitemedia.com, revsci.com, webtrendslive.com, imrworldwide.com, bluekai.com, yieldmanager.com, krxd.com, wallst.com, globaltravelerusa.com, zendesk.com, thomsomreuters.com, domainnamewitercom, yourjewishnews.com, celebrations.com. Joepnl (talk) 21:15, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Actually yes I was referring to them accessing your browser history, as well as other means. I don't have a link handy to what I've read about the former, but for the latter you could check the Beacon (Facebook) story for more detail. And given their current and recent legal battles, I'm guessing that they're still doing that kind of crap & just got better at hiding it. El duderino ^(abides) 10:33, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

understanding processor power

When I was younger, it was my understanding, correct or not, that the clock speed of a processor directly inversely with the time needed to complete a task. At some point it became apparent that clock speed is only one factor. It is no longer trivial to compare processors, assuming it ever was. What are the relevant factors in determining how quickly a processor will complete a task? Is there conceivably a simple system that could be employed when naming or describing a processor which would give a user the ability to compare processors without having to up benchmarks? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.150.17.65 (talk) 06:30, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

really depends on the task. Some tasks are more inherently paralizable (parallelizable if you prefer) and therefore advantage processors with a larger number of cores, other tasks may be memory intensive and advantage processors with large amounts of on-board cache - there are many differences like this which means that you can't really say one processor is faster than another, only that is performs a particular task faster. ---- _nonsense'ser talk:nonsenseferret|ferret 06:34, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Okay,so then what would you say are all the important metrics to know when comparing processors?

Clock speed (assuming adequate memory) was probably the main factor up to about 2004 (in fact I was expecting a "Moore's Law" speed of way over 20 GHz long before now), but the technical problems with ever-increasing speed, combined with the cheaper option of multi-core and multi-threading processor design meant that the manufacturers stopped pursuing the speed option. As explained above, there is no one benchmark. This table compares processors by giving the total time to perform a wide range of tasks, but it might not be appropriate for your purposes. Intel's "i3/5/7" is really just a marketing device and provides only a very crude comparison of the processors used. If you are running Windows, then Windows Experience Index gives another comparison and shows the weak points of your configuration. As explained above, it really depends on what you are using the processor for. Dbfirs 12:49, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Tom's Hardware charts are what I would normally look to as a starting point to see how different tasks and benchmarks produce different results for a given processor comparison - it is pretty comprehensive - [3] ---- _nonsense ferret 16:29, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Surprisingly no one has mentioned it yet, but see Megahertz myth. Clock speed is only part of the performance of a processor in a given task even ignoring the importance of the rest of the system. This gets most extreme when talking about quite distinct architectures (and note that to some extent Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge can be said to be distinct architectures). Intel was basically the last major hold out strongly marketing megahertz, but after they ended the disastrous NetBurst and also with the rise of multi core processors, even they abandoned it. To give an example of the problem about referring to 'important metrics', consider a specialised functionality like AES acceleration present on a number of modern CPUs include some recent Intel ones and most recent AMD ones. If AES is important to whatever task you're doing and a major chokepoint, the presence and usage of AES acceleration will probably make a very big difference to the performance in that task. If you're not doing AES, it's of course irrelevant. Nil Einne (talk) 18:32, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

It will help if you review (and fully understand) our article instructions per cycle. In "trivially simple" computer architectures, one digital clock tick corresponds to one instruction execution. In any real computer, that is not accurate - and hasn't been for at least half a century! (Read IBM System/360 architecture, for example). More to the point: very few useful software programs are designed or tuned at the machine-instruction layer - so "hardware instruction" is becoming a less and less useful term for describing software performance. Almost all modern software is compiled code that resides above an operating system. Specialized software libraries are translated to hardware instructions, often in very complex ways that interact with other software and other hardware. So, to fully describe a processor's performance and execution time, we now depend more than ever on a full description of the complete system - all its hardware peripherals, and all its software components, and how they all interplay. Only a few very specialized programs are so simple that we can meaningfully talk about execution time in terms of total-number-of-instructions, instructions-per-clock-cycle, and clock-cycles-per-second. Nimur (talk) 19:50, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't know anything about the System/360, but I'll point out that the 65816, which has completely predictable (though variable) instruction cycle counts, is still in production. It was notably used in the Super Nintendo, which only ceased production in 2003. It was also used in the Apple IIGS, where I know people wrote cycle-precise code—for example the FTA's Split Demo altered the screen border color at precise moments to draw images in the border. The MIPS architecture originally executed every instruction in one cycle, and MIPS chips are still being made, but I don't know if they still use one cycle per instruction. Some newer processors have also moved back to in-order execution because of the enormous complexity of the bookkeeping in superscalar processors. Examples are the Intel Atom and the CPUs of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (no relation to the System/360, though I was hoping they'd call its successor the Xbox 370). I think it's still pretty hard to count cycles on these CPUs, though, because of the complexity of the memory hierarchy if nothing else. -- BenRG (talk) 01:25, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Good points, BenRG. To some extent, the points you bring up indicate that the long-standing debate between CISC and RISC style designs has not yet been definitively decided. At the very least, we can say that in certain domains - especially embedded computers, simple pipelines and memory systems are still considered more efficient. And, you bring up "variable but deterministic" execution times; I think this is also true for even the most pathologically complex out-of-order-execution processor, but is a prohibitively difficult task. Nimur (talk) 16:05, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Downloaded Japanese files display random symbols instead of japanese characters

Is there any possible ways to get around this problem? I am using Windows 7, I never had this problem with Windows XP..

This is an exerpt from a .txt file, entitled ‚è[‚Ç‚Ý[ ; its folder name is y”wŒiz‹_“¹ê‚Á‚Û‚¢”wŒiPART1‚Æ•›ŽY•¨@

ˆÈã

‰ü•ÏA‰ü—Ç“™‚ÉŠÖ‚µ‚Ü‚µ‚Ä‚ÍAŽ©—R‚É‚µ‚Ä‚­‚¾‚³‚¢B

‚Æ‚¢‚¤‚©Žv‚¢‚‚«‚ƨ‚¢‚Åì‚Á‚½‚©‚ç‚©A

Žg‚¢“¹‚ª‚‚Ü‚è–³‚³‚»‚¤‚ÈŠ´‚¶‚È‚Ì‚Å‘¢Œ`‚ª‚¢‚ë‚¢‚ë‚Æ‚¢‚¢‰ÁŒ¸‚È‚Ì‚Å

A‰ü—Ç“™‚µ‚Ä‚¢‚½‚¾‚¯‚é‚Ə•‚©‚è‚Ü‚·B

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ÅŒã‚ÉŽg—p‚³‚¹‚Ä’¸‚¢‚½Œ³MOD»ìŽÒ—lAŠeŽíMOD‚Ì»ìŽÒ—lAŠeŽíƒc[ƒ‹‚ÌŠJ”­ŽÒ—lA

ƒeƒbƒNƒA[ƒc—lA‚RDƒJƒXƒ^ƒ€—‚ÉŠÖ‚í‚é‚·‚ׂĂ̕û‚ÉŠ´ŽÓ‚¢‚½‚µ‚Ü‚·B

These are all supposed to be Japanese characters, but for some reason the computer is unable to decipher them as such, and spits out these random symbols instead. The same happens for any Japanese executibles. I am assuming that Windows 7 already comes with Japanese locale, so I don't know what is causing the problem. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.235.221.120 (talk) 09:06, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Mojibake may help here. Nil Einne (talk) 12:15, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

moving blogs

I used to post a lot on wordpress, but I had a habit of getting bored or distracted after a few months and letting my blog fade away, only to start again some months later. The last time I did this, I thought it best to start again on a new account rather than try to catch up on all that had happened in that time, and to get a chance to reorganise everything a bit different. However, some months after I stopped posting to that blog, I feel the need to try again, except now I regret that earlier decision and want to get all my old posts back, merging the two blogs into one and continuing from there, preferably without having to repost each of them one by one. However, now wordpress is messing me around in awkward ways and I have lost interest in the new redesigned site, and wish to migrate over to somewhere better. (I was looking at this 'blogger' site, but if anyone knows somewhere more suitable to what I want, I can check them out too) Of course, this would mean taking everything I have posted onto wordpress and copying and pasting it to the new site piece by piece, and having it all turn up on one day, rather than spread out over a couple of years as things are now. Is there any way of avoiding this? Some way of moving both wordpress blogs over to another site as quickly and easily as possible, and keeping all the dates they were posted the same, rather than setting them all to today?

many thanks,

86.15.83.223 (talk) 16:57, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Wordpress as an import/export mechanism. Go to one blog, export it (to an XML file on your computer). Same for the second. Then on the final one, import both (one at a time). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:04, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

ok, so if I stick with wordpress, any way of fixing this bug where when I try to reset my password it says there is no such account, but when I try to create a new account under that name, it says it's already in use? Or if not, can I import to another site from there? 86.15.83.223 (talk) 17:19, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Other sites like MoveableType, Squarespace, and TypePad, support import with the Wordpress XML format. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:40, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

If you think Wordpress has a bug, or has messed up your accounts somehow, that's something you should take up on their support forum. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:43, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

website privacy

So, I am in the process of setting up a website within which I can organise various personal projects, each hosted on a different part of the site, and for my university course, I need to upload my work to a website for some reason, so I thought why not put it on my own website rather than using something simple and easy like google. However, some of the items on my site are... well things I'd rather not have my tutors see if at all possible, and thinking of it, the same goes for people there for each of the different projects, they don't need to know what is going on elsewhere on the site, unless it also involves them directly. so, would it be possible to set up the site such that people linked to one section cannot access the others without a separate link, or at least knowing the address of those other sections? something like

[project1].[mysite].co.uk, [project2].[mysite].co.uk and so on, or 
mysite.co.uk/project1, mysite.co.uk/project2...

or something along those lines? Where unless people know the name 'project2' they would not be able to access those pages, or even know they existed?

86.15.83.223 (talk) 18:24, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Sure if you set up your site properly they won't be able to access another section from hyperlinks within your site. Make sure you don't have any sort of site tree. But of course people could still easily access other parts of your site via other ways. If you're using the subdomain method, make sure that you've set up your DNS properly (e.g. don't allow zone transfers). Then you'd need to make sure you don't allow search engines to index the pages, most will respect your properly set up request but not all will. More importantly, how do you know someone else isn't going to link to the pages? Also while it's just an example, remember if your name is as easy to guess as project2 no one needs to go to that level of complexity. And depending on how well your site or hoster security is, someone could try to bruteforce and find hidden pages or subdomains. Nil Einne (talk) 18:56, 25 will be inaccessibleJanuary 2013 (UTC)

If you buy some webspace one of the facilities normally supported is the ability to password protect subdirectories so the content is inaccessible on the web without the password. That helps with for instance family photos which you only want your own family to be able to see.. You still need subdomains though if you want other people to have full control of their own stuff and yet not be able to look into each others directories. Dmcq (talk) 00:19, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

January 26

Smartphones

Did companies other than Apple envision anything like a smartphone before the iphone? And did Apple take a big risk by releasing iphone? Clover345 (talk) 01:18, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Smartphone#Early years -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 01:21, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Google DMCA notices

There are times that, whenever I search on Google, when I get at the bottom, I see a "In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed X result(s) from this page." This can get somewhat annoying, especially if I search deeper and the notices pile up (for example, there can be 5 notices like that on top of each other). Is there a way to disable this message? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 04:01, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Not that I know of but I'm sure places like China will eventually be able to supply you with a plug in for your browser to eliminate all traces of censorship. In fact I'm sure it would be such a nice app that all browsers there would be supplied with things like that by default and eliminate any annoying or disturbing information. Anyone up to writing such an app? Dmcq (talk) 12:51, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

On a quick try with two entries from chilling effects I got nine of those notices on the google page and I wonder why they couldn't merge them, but they were all at the bottom of the page. Bing just had one line saying entries were removed an not saying why, and on another try still had the entry for which removal was being explicitly requested so perhaps the copyright owner only bothered with the notice to Google. Dmcq (talk) 14:04, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

I wonder if anyone views/uses these notices as helpful search results. The URLs being mentioned in such a DMCA complaint (first one I tried contained 134 URLs covering 10 copyright claims) likely contain exactly what the complaint alleges. A bit like marking a download/link as "Verified". （￣ー￣）. Ssscienccce (talk) 15:12, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Oh dear, this is straying off-topic. The question is, is it possible to disable or at least hide these notices? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 15:15, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

And an answer was use Bing instead and it won't be so noticeable. What's the big problem anyway? Dmcq (talk) 15:34, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

As I mentioned earlier, it can get somewhat annoying to see, especially when they start piling up. It's repetitive. But I don't like Bing. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 15:44, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

I have no experience writing scripts for greasemonkey, but managed to get the wanted result by altering this script. First saved it locally, edited in two places: (edits in bold): document.getElementsByTagName("p") instead of "a", and one of the lines removeNodeByID("mfr"); saving the changes , then opening it in Firefox (with greasemonkey enabled) and installing it as script. Of course most of the other lines in the script are rendered useless by the first change, so you can trim it further, but with those two changes it worked for me. (I'm assuming that "mfr" is always the id for these lines). If you use other scripts as well, you probably want to change the name of the script to a more descriptive title. Ssscienccce (talk) 18:07, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

That script should already have remove it by removing 'botstuff' I think. Personally I feel unhappy about doing things like that as I believe site owners are entitled to live or die by what they want to show rather than have people automatically removing ads for instance. Dmcq (talk) 13:20, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Oops, you are right, the "botstuff" should have worked, no need to change the script it seems (although with the original script you lose more than just the DMCA stuff). Hadn't noticed it, I had already made the changes before realizing I was testing on a saved copy of the page, so the url didn't contain "google".

I may agree with you when it comes to individual sites, one can always choose not to visit them. But for me google doesn't fit that category. They have a quasi monopoly, leaving most people little choice than to accept them and their policies. And that includes for example America's prudish attitudes toward nudity. In europe, nudity in commercials, on tv or magazines is pretty normal, but it isn't on european forums anymore, because it takes just one person submitting complaints to google ads about every bare nipple they find to enforce censorship on all the users. This happened for example on the dutch Fok! forum. Ssscienccce (talk) 22:12, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I just tried 'nude' in image search an it warns about a facility called safesearch, if you just continue on you get all the pictures of nudes you could ever want, well at least far more than I wanted for certain. There's lots of other search engines. Dmcq (talk) 01:29, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

? Im not talking about google image search, I'm saying because of google ads, forums change their policy and people can't post pictures or use avatars that nobody objected to a few years ago. Just because prudish americans control the ads. If you read dutch: http://forum.fok.nl/topic/1668191/3/25#98328626 Ssscienccce (talk) 04:12, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

PC not displaying content

Hello all, I could really use help please. My pc is a Dell inspiron 530, although the motherboard and hard drive are the only remaining original components. Today I installed two new sticks of 1gb ram to replace two 512mb sticks and bring it up to the max of 4. I had some trouble with 1 of them, and I think I pushed up against the graphics card, an ATI radeon 4850 which is directly against it (a bit like this, not my pc but my graphics card is a similar size). When I plugged everything back in I could hear it start up fine, but the monitor remained in standby mode. I checked and the cards fan is working but there is no display. I tried plugging the vga cable into the default vga port, but from what I have been able to gather it was likely disabled in the bios which I can't see to get to. I've tried removing the graphics card but can't it out, when I pull to remove it from the port it stays in at one side, from this picture you can see a sort of hook on the bottom right, there is some kind of lever/tab/thing in this holding the card in place, but I can't get to it well enough to push/pull it back and remove the card. So in summary, no display, can't use onboard vga port, can't remove graphics card. Hoping somebody has some similar experience or other insights before I resort it to taking it in to a shop, having trouble finding similar questions around the web. Thanks--90.208.112.248 (talk) 21:41, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

I've had similar problems, the most likely explanation is that either the graphics card or the memory isn't properly seated in the motherboard, really my first port of call would be to remove and reinsert them. Yes there is a clip holding one side of the graphics card, but you generally only have to push it to one side, which is fiddly, but not much force is required usually. However, sometimes to push the graphics card in you need a bit of a push even when it is properly lined up. Bear in mind while handling memory etc, that its best to be earthed! ---- _nonsense ferret 21:58, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

I think I'd put everything back the way it was originally, including the original RAM. If you still can't get it to work, then a stray spark might have damaged something. StuRat (talk) 04:11, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Had another go at it today, managed to get the graphics card out and put it back, reconnected and the display came up fine. Thanks for your advice folks--90.208.112.248 (talk) 12:40, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

OK, great. I'll mark this Q resolved. Please remove the resolved tag if any more issues come up. StuRat (talk) 14:49, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Resolved

January 27

Where can I obtain the source code of Android 4.2?

It does not appear to be available on http://source.android.com/ . The latest new is about Android 4.1. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Czech is Cyrillized (talk • contribs) 03:40, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I think they just haven't updated that page yet. I haven't tried it, but according to this [4] it should be available under the branch name "android-4.2_r1". RudolfRed (talk) 04:15, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

You can get it using the SDK manager. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 12:14, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

The binaries are non-free, I need the source code instead. Czech is Cyrillized (talk) 11:15, 27 January 2013 (UTC) Moved to keep thread together - Cucumber Mike (talk) 16:32, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

You need to download them from GitHub. The instructions for doing so are at [5] - as mentioned earlier you can specify which version to download and you will want "android-4.2_r1". - Cucumber Mike (talk) 16:32, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I want the Android SDK. Is the source of the SDK included in the Android source code you link to? Czech is Cyrillized (talk) 12:23, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Interchangeable AC chargers

If anyone here could pop over to the science desk for help on this, that'd be great! DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 03:43, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Console/shell in Windows?

I know fairly well that in the Unix/Linux world, the command prompt console (terminal emulator) is just a graphical front-end for text-based applications, and it runs a separate program, called a shell, which handles all the text-based interfacing to the system. Both the graphical console front-end and the shell are interchangeable without depending on each other. How is this on Windows? Are the Windows Command Prompt and the actual command-line interface (cmd.exe) as interchangeable or are they deeply married to each other? JIP | Talk 18:30, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, cmd.exe is just another program, which uses the same APIs as other programs do. An altogether more modern (and rather more bash-like) shell is Windows PowerShell, which is built on the same common language runtime as C#, and so gives scripts written in it access to the Windows API. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 18:37, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, I think I misunderstood your question. You're asking whether the terminal and cmd.exe are separate programs. That I don't know. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 18:48, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Some things are evident:

• One can get the black-text-window without cmd.exe: any Windows API console mode program gets that
• One can run a windows shell inside another program (such as python's subprocess calls with shell=true) and interact with the cmd.exe process programatically, without it popping up a window of its own
• One can run a cmd.exe interactively as a slave of another process, with the other process doing GUI and graphics for the enslaved cmd.exe (this is just a fancy extension of the above point); emacs's m-x shell mode does this on windows.

But I can't find, and I'm not sure actually exists, an API for the cmd.exe window itself. If I really wanted a program to pop one of these up, and a Winforms RichTextBox wasn't enough for me, I think I'd probably end up writing a console mode winapi program and having it talk to my master program on a socket. The only gap that leaves, I think, is where the ANSI terminal emulation exists; if you really needed that I think you may have to write it. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:16, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

The API to 'create' a console is AllocConsole. Some simple coloring and positioning of text appears to be possible with the APIs mentioned there too. Unilynx (talk) 21:29, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Windows Command Prompt is cmd.exe 92.233.64.26 (talk) 19:13, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Does that mean that the graphical front-end and the command-line interpreter are the same program and inseparable, different from Unix/Linux? JIP | Talk 19:57, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Even if they were separate, I doubt you could legally exploit that fact in any way—it is all bundled together with Microsoft Windows. ¦ Reisio (talk) 20:23, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Finlay knows a lot more than I do about this sort of thing, and I don't think I fully understand what you're asking, but once upon a time, the Windows GUI really was a program that ran on top of DOS. So when you exited out you could "get back" to the black screen and blinking cursor. Most linux distros still have that abstraction because Xwindows (and all the popular GUIs, gnome, kde, synaptics... etc.) run on top of it. But the xterm you're running is also just a program running within the gui. Fundamentally, whether windows or linux (or osx/bsd for that matter), the programs (whether it's xterm that then makes calls to bash, or whether it's bash itself, or whether it's a file manager) are just making API calls to the kernel. So I think you're working with a mental model of an operating system that works, but your question is demonstrating where that model breaks down. But again, I'm not exactly sure what you're asking so maybe I'm off base here. I hope this helps a bit though. Shadowjams (talk) 22:38, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

On reading up various things, here's how cmd.exe seems to work. It seems that, depending on context, it can be the command interpreter and the owner of the terminal emulator, or just the command interpreter alone. The actual black texty window thing is, as Unilynx linked to, created with the Windows Console API; lots of other programs use that, including rxvt and Windows PowerShell, and there's a wrapper library that wraps "console mode" applications so they use the console. cmd.exe is just another of these. cmd.exe also works analogously to bash. In addition it detects if its been run under _popen (or an IO redirect in which case it doesn't make its own consoleAPI calls, and just shoves characters down the file descriptors to its owner (just like bash does). cmd.exe also implements some basic ANSI functionality, which isn't in the ConsoleAPI. It's very instructive to read the source of an alternate command-terminal program like ANSIcon. One thing of note is where the command-terminal has to host a console mode program which is linked with that library (the one that makes its stdin/stdout work using the Console API) - the "terminal" has to use dll hooking to intercept these calls so that they instead go to its own calls instead (which ANSIcon does in injdll32.c). So, tldr, there isn't quite a comparable mapping between the unix and windows way of working, but mostly the display stuff that xterm does is done by the Console API and mostly the stuff that bash does is done my cmd.exe. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 01:13, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

I should say that this is all utterly different to how COMMAND.COM worked when you ran "command prompt" on say Windows 3.1/95. If anyone cares about that, let me know, and I'll write it up tomorrow - it's weird, clever jumble. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 01:30, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

---

The console window is a terminal emulator running as a separate process much as in Unix, but unlike Unix, where there's a documented interface (ptys) for writing your own terminal emulator, the communication between Win32 console applications and the terminal emulator happens through an undocumented interface (using LPC) and there's no provision for putting another emulator in its place. In Windows 7, the console windows are displayed by conhost.exe, and you'll see one conhost.exe process in Task Manager for each open console window. In XP and earlier all console windows were put up by the single privileged process csrss.exe, but after one or two instances of bugs in the terminal emulation leading to a compromise of csrss.exe and hence the whole system, they switched to the current model.

In Windows 3.1, each DOS program (such as command.com) ran in its own preemptively multitasked VM (while Windows apps were cooperatively multitasking in a single shared VM). They could write to the screen by calling DOS/BIOS functions or by directly writing to the screen memory, which usually started at B800:0000. When they were running in a window, the text memory was (I assume) scraped by Windows which then displayed it in a window. You could switch into a graphics mode and that would be rendered in the window as well—a nice feature that I wish existed in modern terminals on Unix and Windows. Modern Windows still limits you to 16 colors in console windows, which is a relic of the IBM PC text mode, and it still (in many locales) uses a special code page for console windows which contains box-drawing characters and other weird IBM PC stuff. In Windows 9x I think it was the same, except that Win32 apps could also run in console mode, and I don't know how that was implemented. -- BenRG (talk) 03:25, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

To expand a bit on the first paragraph, in contrast to Unix, all of this is implemented in user mode; the kernel doesn't know anything about console windows. "Console handles" are not real kernel handles but magical values with meaning only to kernel32.dll (and kernelbase.dll these days, I guess). There are special checks for these handles in some general APIs—e.g., WriteFile calls WriteConsoleA instead of its usual NtWriteFile syscall. It's in the bowels of those DLLs that the private interface with the console process is handled. In principle it would be possible to reverse-engineer the protocol and make a replacement terminal, but it would be a systemwide change and seems kind of dangerous. If you look in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems\Windows, there's a part of the command line that says "ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2". That's the handler for console-related messages. You could replace winsrv (which is a DLL) with a work-alike. Probably not worth it, though... -- BenRG (talk) 03:52, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

---

In Windows NT, cmd.exe is THE command prompt. It shows the command prompt window, interprets the commands, and carries out their executions. If you typed, say, "DEL *.TMP" in a command prompt window, it is the code inside cmd.exe that interprets it as a command to delete files and calls the appropriate APIs. 180.245.210.151 (talk) 04:50, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

As I said above, it doesn't draw the window. Also, modern Windows ships with a second shell, Windows PowerShell, and there's no barrier to installing third-party alternatives because that side of the interface is documented. Other than that you're right. -- BenRG (talk) 17:54, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

January 28

How to update from WinXP to Win7 via Apple BootCamp?

Help! I'm a total newb regarding installation and updates of MacOS systems, but I kinda hesitate asking on any dedicated Apple forums because I'm afraid of getting flamed for using Windows on a Mac, or that they'll try selling me a wholly new machine.

Here's my problem: My machine here is a first generation (c. 2005-'06) Mac Pro with 2.6GHz, that years back upon purchase I installed WindowsXP Home on, using BootCamp. Back then, the brand-new Mac Pro seemed the most bang for the buck with a rather standard machine rather than having one customized utterly from scratch, especially because I got potentially two operating systems for pretty much the price of one. Just my luck, it was exactly that one year that Adobe had discontinued their entire support for MacOS (citing the reason that "hardly anybody's using Macs anymore, so we can't afford bi-platform releases any longer"), which was why in order to be able to use the Adobe Production studio, I had to go with Windows one way or the other.

Back then, I'd originally tried to install a copy of WindowsXP Professional 64bit freshly bought for just that occassion, but BootCamp refused to acklowledge it as a genuine Windows copy (maybe 64bit Windows was too recent to be included in that version of BootCamp?), so I could only install Windows XP Home 32bit.

I've only ever seen the MacOS screen for maybe 30 minutes back then, until BootCamp had completed the Windows partition, and that's the last time I've ever seen the MacOS screen on this machine.

Now that we're past faulty Windows Vista, with Windows7 around and obviously working quite pleasantly and reliably for me on other machines with required backwards-compatibility (after all, I certainly don't have the moolah at the moment to update my entire product line that back in 2005/'06 was bundled in Adobe Production Studio), and the latest BootCamp version obviously supporting Win7, I'd like to somehow update from WinXP Home to Win7 Professional 64bit, also to for the first time use all the CPU power my machine can give me.

So, how the Heck do I do that? I don't even know how to get back to the MacOS screen!

Also, I guess with all the mess this rather limited WinXP Home has been through throughout the years, I guess I'd like to make a clean sweep by backing up all my important data, then formating the C: drive, and only then I'd like to go back to MacOS somehow, as that's what I obviously gotta do to make the new version of BootCamp work.

And when I'm back on MacOS, how do I update the OS itself? Is it free, or as costly as most other Apple products? --85.182.140.98 (talk) 14:03, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Hold option key during bootup. ¦ Reisio (talk) 16:22, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Okay, been googling for a few hours now. I'd like to document my findings below for others in the same situation, and to submit it for review in case any experts are here to kindly inform me whether this roadmap below ain't quite functional or perfect yet.

Looks like what I need is OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion as the first MacOS's to support BootCamp 4.0 required to install Win7 64-bit. It also looks like either requires the 64-bit system support update[6] and the ATI Radeon X1900 graphics card 64-bit support update[7] prior to the new OS install. More updates required are the Graphics Firmware Update 1.1[8] required to install Windows7, plus the SMC Firmware Update 1.1[9] (seems there's no version 1.0, at least not as an update) and the SMC Firmware Update 1.2[10] to fix some fan issues.

I've also found out that obviously what I need to do during booting is keep the C button pressed until MacOS is gonna come up (but you say it's the option/alt key?).

Then, I'll have to update entire MacOS in order even just to install those updates on top of it. In consecutive order, I'll have to:

• buy the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade, run it, and install those 64-bit updates,
• get an Apple ID for AppleStore and download Mountain Lion for $19.99 which requires the above 64-bit updates to be pre-installed in order to install Mountain Lion, as it's required to run BootCamp 4.0 that I need in order to finally install Win7.

Anyhow, once I'm at Mountain Lion, it seems I'm supposed to go to Finder, choose Help > Help Center and search for "upgrade Boot Camp" and "upgrade Windows" in order to get a free copy of BootCamp 4.0 and instructions on what to do for a Windows "clean install". Probably it'll include using DiskUtility to erase the faulty Windows partition (normal boot process still has me choose between a forever borked WinXP Professional setup and the working WinXP Home system).

On the other hand...some updates for BootCamp 3.x are telling me I only need WinXP and some version of BootCamp 3.x in order to install Win7 64-bit. Hmmm...guess I'll just try updating BootCamp to 3.x with 64-bit Win7 drivers in my Tiger first before coughing up 50 bucks just to install Win7 64-bit on this machine via two other MacOS systems that maybe I don't even need.

Anyway, even way before all that, I'll make sure if I'll still get my c. 2006 Adobe Production Studio to install and properly register (or else I won't be able to use it) by trying to install Photoshop. The last time I tried that I had no internet connection to register, the given hotline for phone registration only had a tape running, telling me that this number had been discontinued years ago and I should call regular support, which had another tape running saying they only operate on weekdays from noon to 4pm or something. --85.182.140.98 (talk) 18:53, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Oh joy! Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor now tells me there's nothing I really gotta do other than buy a new HDD to fit both Win7 64-bit and my software on it together! Still, I'll first try updating my BootCamp in Tiger and see if I can get the additional updates installed there, just to be on the safe side. --85.182.140.98 (talk) 19:05, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

You know you can run Windows 7 in a VM within Mac OS, for no additional cost over that of Windows itself. ¦ Reisio (talk) 19:23, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

And did you know that you can get free technical support for your Apple computer at any Apple retail store? If you're having trouble with this process, the in-store assistants can walk you through the entire process and answer your questions in-person. Nimur (talk) 16:19, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

The IP of the question locates to Hamburg; here is Jurnfergstieg and Alstertal; both look very scenic and have a Genius Bar in-store. Nimur (talk) 16:27, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Well...thanks for the links, but I remember talking to an Apple customer support person in a dedicated store a few years ago when I was in need of a VGA adapter, and they had no idea what a Mac Pro even was. They kept trying to tell me that there's no need for a VGA adapter on a laptop such as the MacBook Pro, while I was trying to explain to them that I was just plainly talking about my Mac Pro, successor to I think the old G5. When they understood at last that I was really talking about "something with a tower", they just handed me the right thing.

By now, I think I'll just buy a new 126GB internal HDD, boot into my MacOS Tiger for the first time in more than 5 years, update BootCamp to the latest 3.x version with 64-bit support via internet and check what else of the above update drivers listed above will properly install, and then I'll use BootCamp to install Win7 on the new HDD. --85.182.140.98 (talk) 11:12, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Calendar appointments

In MS Outlook, when an appointment is on a recurring schedule, it is possible to drag its instances to other dates without affecting the recurring schedule. However, whenever the schedule itself needs to be changed (even if it's only adding an end date to it), all previous exceptions are lost and moved to their default dates. This has been driving me mad for years, and I'm curious if anyone knows a workaround or can suggest better software that handles this kind of thing properly. Years ago, on a Palm Pilot, it was possible to change a recurring schedule without affecting all previous instances (i.e., a user had a choice between changing the whole schedule or only a part of it from some point onward). I refuse to believe that there is currently no software which can do what Palm Pilot could do in the last century :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 28, 2013; 16:14 (UTC)

I can't answer the question itself, but would like to say that new is not necessarily better, in software as in other technology. For a simple example, VHS video tapes allowed you to play, copy, and record from any device and used a pretty much universal format. DVDs/Blu-Rays, on the other hand, make it quite difficult to copy some content and use multiple formats, including Digital Rights Management software which can block you from viewing your movie. Yes, they had reasons for doing what they did, and the new formats are superior in other ways. Still, something was definitely lost. StuRat (talk) 14:46, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

how can i transfer data from a clipper application to SAP

I HAVE A Clipper application. how can i transfer the database(dbf format) to SAP — Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.199.0.68 (talk) 17:10, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Clipper, wow, that's a blast from the past! :) The easiest way to do this is probably by opening the .dbf file in Excel, saving it in a delimited format (.csv), and then importing that to SAP (or it may even be possible to import it in the Excel format; I don't remember). Of course, if you also have memo fields attached or some other bells and whistles, you might need to look for other ways. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 28, 2013; 17:30 (UTC)

Burning to and ripping from a CD and changes in audio quality

Some time ago, I ripped some songs from a CD at 320 kbps and burned one of the songs into another CD. Later, I ripped that song also at 320 kbps from that CD and burned it into yet another CD. Then I ripped the song from that CD into my computer again at 320 kbps. I noticed that the song that was ripped from the original CD in the beginning sounded like it had a higher audio quality than the song that was ripped from the last CD and that the song had less audio quality than that song that was ripped for the second time and the song that was ripped the second time had slightly less quality than that song that was ripped the first time. I then tested this observation on a music editing software called Sony Acid Pro to see if it was true and saw that it was true based on the wavelength details. Why is it that if I repeat burning a song from a CD and then ripping that song to the computer, the song loses more quality each time even if it is burned at ripped at 320 kbps every time? 71.98.163.183 (talk) 17:58, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

When you ripped a song "at 320 kbsp", you actually used lossy mp3 compression, which always leads to a loss in quality. To avoid any loss in quality you should use either no compression at all or some lossless compression (Monkey's Audio for instance). Ruslik_Zero 18:55, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Time to get a digital audio player. ¦ Reisio (talk) 19:00, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

I use Windows Media Player whenever I rip songs from a CD. So, how would I use no compression in Windows Media Player to rip songs from a CD in order not to loose any audio quality? 71.98.163.183 (talk) 20:29, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Windows Media Player could rip to WAV, last time I checked; you’ll have to look around in its preferences. As Ben says below, it won’t necessarily be a perfect copy regardless of the format you rip to, but it’s incredibly unlikely your ears will notice at all unless the disc is actually physically good and well scratched. Once you have it in WAV, if you’d like to store it digitally, convert it to something like FLAC to reduce its size without losing any quality. You could also just take care to always burn new CDs from the original MP3s, instead of MP3s transcoded from MP3s, etc.. ¦ Reisio (talk) 00:03, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

I have a few different comments. 1. It's really easy to fool yourself when it comes to audio quality; many people think they can hear differences between certain setups (e.g. CDs with green marker and without) but completely fail blinded tests. 2. You will always see differences in the wave form after lossy compression and decompression, but that change is probably not audible. Lossy compression is designed to discard parts of the signal that humans can't hear anyway. At low bitrates it will discard audible information but at 320k it shouldn't. Repeated compression discards the same information, which was already gone, so it won't make the quality much worse. 3. Repeatedly encoding and decoding in any lossy audio format will gradually degrade the signal because of roundoff error ("generational loss"), but I'm not sure how many iterations it would take to be noticeable. This is an interesting experiment which would be easy to do (and which someone has no doubt done). There is a paradoxical effect wherein the generational loss can be worse at higher bitrates, so it's possible you may really be hearing something. 4. Ripping a CD even without compression is far from trivial because CDs have weak error correction and not much synchronization information. Writing a CD also won't perfectly write every bit. Exact Audio Copy has a reputation for doing a good job of reading (I don't know if the reputation is deserved) and it will let you rip to lossless formats like WAV or FLAC. It can also burn CDs, but no more accurately than any other program since there's no way to improve that in software. -- BenRG (talk) 20:47, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

I also noticed that some of the songs that are up on the Internet or on file sharing software at 320 kbps seems to have higher quality in terms of wavelengths and audio quality than if I rip such songs from a CD. Why is that the case? Are some of those high quality songs up on the Internet ripped in a certain way or come from the original source? 71.98.163.183 (talk) 03:01, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Remove Proxy Server without Password

I have a used laptop that has a proxy server installed and I do not know the password. Can I just purchase a new copy of windows and reinstall? Yes Window 7 is installed with a proxy address and I do not have the permission to change.

Bit confused about the quetion, do you mean that internet explorer settings has a proxy address set up and you do not have the permissions to change it? What version of windows is installed? ---- _nonsense ferret 20:59, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

MP3 Format Error

I bought some 4G IRULU MP3 players before Christmas to make my nephews a best-of selection of my music. I was able to use Windows Media Player to download a few dozen MP3's as a test, they worked fine. When I finalized my playlist it was well under 4G in size, so I downloaded it. A good third of the songs were left off as too much data when I synched the list.

I cut this down and erased the original synchs be deleting them from the drive to through windows (Computer from the F drive at the Start Button in Windows 7) to make space for them. Once I got the new playlists synched in full I played the drives. Both played about 2-3 dozen songs in order alphabetically from W through A and the showed "Format Error" on the MP3 window once they got to the B songs.

I tried repeating the process, erasing the existent playlist from the drive through windows, removing even more songs from the playlist, resynching. I still get the same "Format Error" warning on the MP3 player screen once it gets into the B songs.

What might possibly going wrong, and should I look for or try as a fix? Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 21:35, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Well seems a bit obvious to say, but I guess either:

i. is there any possibility that some of the file name or file meta properties (like album/artist) in those problem files might include characters from a non-latin character set which might be tripping up the player? I've certainly seen this sort of problem

ii. the files have been mistakenly converted to a different file format or using incompatible settings for the B songs that are different from the A songs - you can check this by looking at the file properties in windows explorer.

iii.there was some sort of file corruption in the copying process, so delete and recopy.

iv. there is a fault with the player, kind of unlikely given it was the same for both drives (although I have heard of some scams that involve the sale of wrongly labelled flash memory so can't absolutely exclude this). ---- _nonsense ferret 22:35, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

All the songs are in the same format, MP3, and some of the songs that begin with a B played before when I made the test recording but don't know. My gut feeling was that the original memory wasn't erased--in which case I would need to fully erase the MP3 players. Or that for some reason the playlist was too big or not well formatted. I don't thing cover art is the issue, but I will check. So, in the meantime, how do I make sure the players are really truly blanked? μηδείς (talk) 22:44, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

AFAIK if windows says they are all deleted, then they are all deleted and barring hardware faults should be successfully overwritten - I would have done exactly what you did. Are you able to play songs individually without using a playlist (I amn't familiar with that brand of player). ---- _nonsense ferret 22:56, 28 January 2013 (UTC) Oh and not all MP3s are equal - there are a few possible parameters that could be different such as different static bit rates, or variable bit rates etc ---- _nonsense ferret 22:58, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

I haven't found a way to play individual songs of the MP3 drive through the computer, if that is what you mean. The playlist itself on the PC is fully playable from the PC. As for the player, just the entire library is available as one long list. μηδείς (talk) 23:12, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

I understand, I wrongly thought when you said playlist on the device you meant that you were using a separate 'playlist' file on the device along with the mp3s, rather than just allowing the device to find and play all the mp3 files itself ---- _nonsense ferret 23:16, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

The red flag for me in your question is that you say you're using Windows Media Player, which is capable of doing some weird things with Digital Rights Management, and has been known to screw up mp3s so they can't be played on some devices. There may be a better way of doing this, but here's how I would go about eliminating WMP as the source of the problem:

1. Transfer all the mp3s to a removable device like a USB stick or an SD card. Verify they're safely copied, then remove the device.
2. Remove the files from your PC.
3. Using another media player (WinAmp, MediaMonkey or Songbird (software) are all free and should work fine), open the mp3s from the removable device. Check they all play as expected. Note any error messages that occur.
4. Assuming no errors, if possible transfer the files directly to the MP3 player. You may need to copy them to the PC first, but you might be able to get away without it.
5. Play the files on the MP3 player.

I will warn you that, if my hunch about DRM is correct, it might be possible that by deleting the files from your PC you may break the link between the files and your rights to play them - I believe some files have some sort of 'copy count' built in to prevent you sharing them widely. So, if you follow my instructions, you do so at your own risk. Sorry. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 23:50, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

But should digital rights management be relevant here? All but some five or ten of the songs were uploaded to my computer from compact disks, not itunes or amazon. μηδείς (talk) 20:38, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah, my apologies; I took 'downloaded' to mean 'from the web' - I see what you meant now. You're probably right - it is unlikely to be a DRM issue (although I think CDs do have the possibility of inbuilt DRM that could be being transferred). Nonetheless, I have experience of WMP sucking with regard to transferring files to MP3 players, so if these were my files, I'd still be tempted to try a different method of transfer. YMMV. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 21:58, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

I just tried clearing one of the MP3 players then resynching with WMPlayer, and now it gives a format error after even fewer songs. It seems to start playing from the beginning of the unproblematic files, as if it knows where in the synch list to start. I am curious what other program I should try ysing to synch it besider Windows Media Player and iTunes? Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 01:35, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Let me clarify. Is there some other program I might already have like media player I can use to synch, one that would have come with the laptop? I am loath to download anything at this point. μηδείς (talk) 03:27, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

If it was me, I would just be manually copying the mp3 files into the drive through windows explorer. The only way to work out what is going wrong is the scientific method: to clear the mp3 player drive and then copy one unproblematic file and check it plays, then clear the drive and copy one problematic file and check it doesn't. Then look for differences and try other files one at a time to see what they have in common - still my best guess if there isn't a hardware fault (which seems unlikely as both players give identical results?), is either some unusual character contained in the name (accented letters, foreign character set, hyphens, percentages or meta-properties of the mp3 file), or the format of the file itself is somehow different. ---- _nonsense ferret 14:56, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

I'll try copying them manually from windows explorer to the drive. Just to clarify, there is no "problematic file". The files are all fine when played from the PC in any manner. When they are synched to the MP3 player, they are in alphabetical order. Once I get to the bees, I get a format error when trying to play that song and all those following back to the beginning of they play list. I'll try the manual copying after dinner. μηδείς (talk) 19:32, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

January 29

Running mobile apps on a Windows PC

To make discussion easier, I am dividing this question into four separate questions. Please answer in the sections below, and thanks for all answers. 180.245.210.151 (talk) 04:30, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

With great difficulty.

There are emulators that come with the developer kits of those platforms. (However, The iOS dev-kit is Mac-Only.) In theory you could use the emulators to run the apps on your desktop. In reality, emulators often don't work well and have many limitations. (For instance, as far as I know, the Android emulator has only the most rudimentary OpenGL support. It won't run games, or almost any other app that uses OpenGL for display.) Another stumbling block is actually getting the apps. You can't connect to app stores with an emulated device, only real ones. So you'd need to get a copy of the app from the developer (or pirate it, I suppose.)

In most cases it would be more trouble than it's worth. APL (talk) 09:14, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

How do I run Android apps on a Windows PC?

Use BlueStacks.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 29, 2013; 15:42 (UTC)

How do I run iOS apps on a Windows PC?

Run Mac OS in a VM. ¦ Reisio (talk) 16:00, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

How do I run Windows Phone apps on a Windows PC?

You can download the development tools for Visual Studio and this will allow you to run and debug 'your' applications either through an emulator or with an attached windows phone (you need to developer unlock it first). [11] Surely however, if you are serious about development, the small bit of googling needed to find this wasn't beyond you? ---- _nonsense ferret 16:58, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

could a kinect read depth information from something as small as the travel of a computer keyboard?

hi,

could a microsoft kinect read depth information from smething as small as the travel of the keys on a computer keyboard? 178.48.114.143 (talk) 13:21, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

I seriously doubt it. The resolution seems much lower than that. StuRat (talk) 14:37, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Could you tell me your reasoning? I just google "kinect accuracy mm", https://www.google.com/search?q=kinect+resolution+mm Now, the first result (for me) is the stackoverflow question, where somebody says "Horizontal Resolution: 640 x 480 and 45 degrees vertical FOV and 58 degrees horizontal FOV. Simple geometry shows is about ~ 0.75 mm per pixel x by y at 50 cm, and ~ 3 mm per pixel x by y at 2 m." and then it says "Depth resolution: ~ 1.5 mm at 50 cm. About 5 cm at 5 m." 1.5 mm per pixel seems EXTREMELY precise, especially given that a SINGLE pixel's color would give away which key was pressed out of 104... and we probably have a lot more than one pixel. what I mean is, if the kinect were looking directly down, even if all the keys were "basically" the same color, wouldn't the ones that wasn't in the plane with the rest "obviously" be of a slightly different color? (I'm talking 'colors' as in the depth map that you can see, for example, in the pdf result on the google search, which is the second link). Thanks Stu for any reasoning or insight you have here. 178.48.114.143 (talk) 15:00, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Having recently purchased a digital camera, I can tell you that the useful resolution is far lower than the nominal resolution. That is, reflections, dust on the lens, bad pixels, etc., make the result a lot worse than you might think (incidentally, the same is true of our own eyes, with our brains hiding all the defects in our vision, like the blind spot). To account for this, they generally don't have the software react to a change in a single pixel, but rather a large group of pixels. See computer vision for some of the issues encountered.

As for your idea of detecting the color change when a key is pressed, do you mean because there is a finger on it ? In this case, having a finger on a key doesn't necessarily mean it was pressed. Or do you mean that it will be in shadow ? This would only apply with little ambient light and most light coming from the side. Still, how could you see this with a finger in the way ? I imagine if you had a keyboard which would hold down the keys after you press them, and you remove your hand after pressing a key, and you set up the light conditions very carefully, and made the keyboard take up the entire image, then you could get it to work. Mapping the keyboard would be another issue, if you want to be able to use any keyboard, and they can have keys in slightly different places, with slightly different mappings. And, of course, there are far easier ways to determine which keys were hit on a keyboard. StuRat (talk) 15:18, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Actually by "color" i meant the depth map that is colored that you can see. I've given one example (in the top pdf result of my google search). so, in that sense do you think there would be a discernible difference in keys, if the kinect was as near as its range allows? A key seems like it's more like 1.5 cm across, giving you 10x pixels in each direction. That is, nominally, 100 pixels that would consistently a the same dropped plane versus all the other pixels. Wouldn't such a consistent change show up in the depth imaget? Look at our Wikipedia Kinect article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kinect2-deepmap.png this picture is taken from quite far away, and not on the plane. If instead the kinect were looking more straight down and at the near end of its range, wouldn't it be able to pick up keys based on depth change? (By "color" I just meant the "colorized" visualization of the depth map, as you can see in the linked picture). Thanks. 178.48.114.143 (talk) 15:34, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

(Saying "the top Google result" is ambiguous, since different people get different Google returns from the same search.) That last image is rather poor quality. What are all the black areas ? Areas where the depth couldn't be determined at all ? StuRat (talk) 15:41, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

replied below, incl. exact title of pdf. 178.48.114.143 (talk) 02:17, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Now for a practical suggestion. You haven't said quite what you are trying to do, but I imagine you want to get a Kinect to allow input of text information. In this case, a large printed grid with a subset of the keys would be easier for Kinect to read. You could make each key the size of a hand, and consider a key to be pressed when a hand covers it (although even this would be tricky, as your hand will also cover other keys on the way to and from the desired key). Perhaps you could have a box you place on a key to indicate that the key is pressed. A delay could be applied, and it would only register as pressed if the box remains there for a second. Once you get this to work, you could try smaller and smaller "keyboards" and boxes, until you find the practical lower limits. StuRat (talk) 15:50, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Stu, the pdf is the one entitled "Accuracy and Resolution of Kinect Depth Data for Indoor Mapping Applications" ( https://www.google.com/search?q=kinect+resolution+mm ). see third page, color image on the right. Yes, black means that no depth information was available. See this faq: http://openkinect.org/wiki/FAQ . As for application, there is none: I would just like to know whether a kinect close to it can tell which key(s) are pressed on a keyboard and which are in the normal plane, using only the depth information. What do you think? 178.48.114.143 (talk) 16:20, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

The answer is probably "about as well as computers can do voice recognition". (While computers can recognize a small set of easily distinguishable words, getting them to recognize any word is another matter.) So, if the keyboard fills the entire field of view, and is aimed directly at the lens, and you find a way to keep the keys pressed after the hand is removed, then, some of the time, it could probably work, yes. However, as those large areas of black indicate, the depth perception is rather iffy in the Kinect. StuRat (talk) 02:29, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Avoiding spam filters

For a new internet business we would like to send newsletters to a large number or recipients. How can we avoid being blacklisted for spam? Is it enough to use proper (html) style and to avoid certain words/phrases? Does the number of emails sent matter, e.g. if we send 1 million emails to gmail accounts, would we be considered spam? How important is sign-in/opt-out. Is it possible to send non-spam email without "opt-out" text or to send unsolicited email at all? bamse (talk) 14:01, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

What makes you think your newsletter isn't spam? 86.167.125.59 (talk) 14:23, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

If you're going to send a million unsolicited HTML emails with no opt-out, then lots of people will think it's spam. In general, it's very hard for commercial emails, even when sent with restraint and the best of intentions, not to be treated as spam. At one company I worked with, we sent 650 emails to current or past customers. Each email was customised with the person's real name and a snippet about how we'd already done business together (e.g. "since we worked together on the new business park at Fooville"). The emails were HTML with ASCII fallback, with only embedded images (no webside images). They were from the email address of a real person, who signed the message, and featured his full name, his direct phone number, and an opt-out link. We used none of the spammy tricks like misspelled words, foreign characters, or invisible text designed to skew statistical results. The email itself wasn't directly selling anything (just a company newsletter) and contained articles of genuine interest to the kind of person who'd be receiving it (it was a consulting company, so the articles were there to show how clever the consultants were). It got a very low SpamAssassin score. I checked with our ISP beforehand, and sent the emails over two days with a script that sent them one at a time (no CC, no BCC) with minutes between each send. I think we did everything we reasonably could to avoid tripping automatic spam filters or, much more importantly, pissing off people with whom we really wanted to do business. Still, out of that 650, 6 complained that it was spam (one, rather vociferously, by phone). When the aforementioned marketing guy (the emails' nominal sender) phoned around all 644 others to follow up (that was a fun week for him) about 10% denied they'd ever seen it, and only about 10% had paid more than glancing attention to its contents. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:48, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for this reply and interesting story. This will give us an idea of things to avoid and things to do. What do you think about services like mailchimp? Can this help to address some of the issues? bamse (talk) 15:57, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

So, 10% of the people who read the email complained about it? APL (talk) 23:34, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

One thing which there seems to be a lot of lack of understanding of in various companies is the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - if you are sending email from a particular IP address, purporting to be from sendingaddress@mycompany.com - then you should make certain that you have the appropriate SPF record on the domain, as if this is wrong, it is pretty sure to get your email caught in people's spam filters. A lot of companies go for years blaming spam filters for losing emails, when in fact they have it in their own power to resolve the situation quite easily. Otherwise it can be quite difficult to predict the sort of heuristic algorithms employed by the larger email providers, but if you are effectively sending people email unsolicited and they don't like it they will flag those individual messages in their inbox as spam, and after this happens a few times, I think that provider is potentially going to start to flag ALL emails from that address. ---- _nonsense ferret 16:53, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

If you send out unsolicited emails without an "opt-out" option, and preferably an honest and reasonable explanation of why the user is on the list, then many of the recipients will report you for spam. Even if your email has the best of intentions. You probably won't get a chance to send out a second set of emails. APL (talk) 23:25, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Website generating "screenshot"

The "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of the google.co.uk search results screen goes through a process whereby it generates a "screenshot" of the Google webpage and previews it prior to submission to Google. How does this work? I assume (certainly hope) that websites cannot truly take screenshots since that would seem to be a serious security hole. 86.167.125.59 (talk) 14:22, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

They just duplicate the process that renders a web page in your browser. They load the page's html content from the remote server and put it through a layout engine, except instead of showing the results on screen, they're stored in an image. That image is what you see. i kan reed (talk) 14:42, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

However, it seems to replicate local browser settings such as colours and fonts, as well as zoom level, exact scroll position and clipping, and so on. How would it know all that? 81.159.111.140 (talk) 18:07, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Oh, that is odd. Are you using chrome? Maybe they had some hidden features they whitelisted google.com for? i kan reed (talk) 18:27, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

No, I'm using IE 9. 81.159.111.140 (talk) 18:35, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Here's a presentation by a Googler about it. -- BenRG (talk) 18:53, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Most of that is a bit over my head, but is it saying that the page is completely re-rendered using JavaScript? So the Google web page has access somehow to all those local broswer settings like font, colour, zoom and stuff? Another thing that I don't understand is that both in that presentation and in the actual web page widget there is some stuff about "privacy" and blacking out parts of the page you don't want Google to see. But surely Google already has access to everything that it's allowing you to black out, so what is the point? I suppose unless it just means it doesn't "save" blacked out parts to its comment log, or make them available to the Google employees who deal with that aspect? 81.159.111.140 (talk) 20:38, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

It's presumably the case that they expect you to give more personally identifiable information (name, contact details) when submitting feedback than you give anyway when you do a search. Thus, it is important that you don't link the two. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 00:05, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't understand how that explains why you are prompted to black out parts of something that must already be available to Google so that it won't be available to Google. 81.159.111.140 (talk) 01:39, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Assuming good faith, which is not something I commonly do about Google, we could speculate that not everyone inside Google has access to all information. So, if you file a feedback submission, the person who reviews that submission might not have internal permission to browse everything that the company-as-an-ensemble knows about you. In fact, this is their public version of their employee-code-of-conduct, which discusses internal disclosure of user-data on a need-to-know basis. Nimur (talk) 05:52, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Hello I Need Your Help (Google search result special pages)

Hello.i need Your help about article of Leo Jee i want to now: when i search leo jee on Google.com i find there leo jee wikipedia but not like this(u can see photo for example) i mean discussion on right side of page Google.com.

plz help me what i must to do that Leo Jee search like this ... thank U so much!!!--AlexSpancer (talk) 14:24, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Google seems to be setting up special pages for certain topics, like the Eric Saade one you show here. While they use some content from Wikipedia, we can't control which topics get these special pages and which don't. I'm not sure if they've published their criteria for setting up a special page, but I imagine the number of searches for that topic must figure in. StuRat (talk) 14:34, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank U so much !!!--AlexSpancer (talk) 14:37, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. Also, I added to your title to include some indication of the actual question. Please try to do this in the future, so we know what it's about without reading through the entire Q. StuRat (talk) 14:55, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Win32s

Win32s allowed some 32-bit programs to work on a 16-bit OS, but not all because it was only a "partial implementation of the Win32 Windows API". Technically, could the whole Win32 API have been implemented, allowing it to run all 32-bit programs? Hypothetically, could a 64-bit environment be created on the 16-bit OS using the same thunks technique? 92.233.64.26 (talk) 15:51, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Hypothetically, one could emulate all of the necessary hardware and software, and if we take the mental exercise to its natural limit, one could implement a Universal Turing machine. In practice, this might require writing a lot of software that doesn't yet exist for the 16-bit platform in question: things like a truly infinitely-scalable file-system (or at least, a really really large scalable file system). And, whenever software emulation must use many layers of indirection to perform the same task that other hardware does very quickly, the execution times become prohibitively long, often requiring orders of magnitude longer to complete. Nimur (talk) 16:11, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Windows 95 was basically Windows 3.1 with a more complete version of Win32s built in, so yes. Of course, 64-bit x86-compatible processors didn't exist then, but I see no reason you couldn't write a 64-bit DOS extender. Multitasking DOS programs, as Windows 3.1/9x did, would be more of a hassle because there's no support for V86 mode in 64-bit long mode. However, the 64-bit versions of VirtualBox and friends do it, so it is possible. -- BenRG (talk) 17:39, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

*Manually* factory-restoring Windows 7 from recovery discs

Hello! I'm restoring my HP laptop from Windows 8 Preview to its original Windows 7 OS. I put in the first of the recovery discs I had made when I first bought the laptop, booted into it, and selected the factory-default option, while opting to do the recovery from the media, not the hard drive partition (not thinking it would make any difference).

Now the problem: the HP recovery software successfully started off reformating my drive, and then as soon as it started writing the old image, it immediately failed with 0xe0ef000e error, which is a generic error that it couldn't read properly from the dvd, or write properly to the drive. So I booted into the latest distro of Ubuntu with toram so I could use the cd drive, put in the recovery disc, and can read the entire disc, no problem. gparted can play around with the hard drive fine, but of course all the partition data has been lost from the recovery utility. Looks like windows includes md5 checksums with images parts on the dvd, and I verified a few arbitrary ones without any problems. It really seems to me it's a problem with the recovery software.

And now the proposed solution, with the full arsenal of Linux and GNU software utilities, how can I manually restore the image of the original windows split across the recovery dvds? There has to be a way with gparted and dd. Perhaps the recovery images are encrypted, though; then again, since Windows is so obsessive with checking that the hardware it's running on is all OEM, maybe not. Thank you for any help or useful links; everything I've been able to find via search engines assumes competent system-recovery software from the factory.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 23:44, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

January 30

Multiple Choice Question building software/website

Hi There,

I am interested in the Open Education Resources. I want to develop the multiple choice questions for student evaluation for Biology module of The Saylor Foundation Biology Textbook. Can you please suggest a software/website to create them?

Thank you very much. Nirajrm Δ | [sign plz] 00:57, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

.MOV or .MP4 to .OGV file conversion

The free Miro Video Converter software that I am using does not do so well with creating .ogv files from 640x480 .mov video files (or .mp4 crops of those files). See File:20130126 Simeon-Whitney Young pregame shootaround layup lines.ogv. Although my original is not so great, I was hoping not to lose so much quality in the conversion. Also, is there a way to remove the sound of the people sitting nearby. Here is an example of the original quality: File:20130126 Simeon-Whitney Young game at start of 4th quarter at Emil and Patricia Jones Convocation Center.jpg.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 00:31, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

On Windows, you might try WinFF or HandBrake. Personally I’d use FFmpeg (used as a backend by both of the aforementioned apps), but it can be kind of a pain to get working on its own on Windows (http://sourceware.org/cygwinports/ is probably the “simplest” way). Complex random sounds can be hard to remove; if they have some regularity to them, you could try Audacity’s noise removal. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:32, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

What do you mean by the term backend? Also, I am not talking about removing the guys next to me but keeping the PA announcer. How do I remove all sound?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:13, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

By backend he means a command line tool. Some of the GUI based software will be using FFmpeg behind the scenes to do the job. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:11, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Remove all sound with FFmpeg: ffmpeg -i input.mov -an -vcodec copy output.mov ¦ Reisio (talk) 00:05, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

What is spooled to the printer driver?

Say you have two word processing programs, like Microsoft Word and Apache OpenOffice Writer, and you have two printers with their own specific drivers, like an HP printer and an Epson printer. Say I put "Heading" in h1 heading at the top with 1" top margins and 1.5" left and right margins and "Hello world" spaced 1.5 line spaces down in Times New Roman, and save as .doc and .odf files. There are four different printing possibilities. Do the word processing programs output some standard page description language? I hardly suspect word processing applications could be expected to know the specific page description languages different printer drivers require, and I could hardly expect printer drivers to know every word processor application's output to printers (I suspect that to-printer format has nothing to do with saved document format) if they were different. So is the interface point a common page description language applications promise output to conform to and printer drivers to read? I'm mainly wondering about non PostScript printer systems. 67.163.109.173 (talk) 01:04, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

OK, I found Printer Command Lanugage which says it's a de facto industry standard. But in that article it says "At a consumer level, PCL data streams are generated by a print driver. PCL output can also be easily generated by custom applications." Which makes the PCL in standard printing from a word processor? The application or the driver? I want to better understand what comes out of the word processing applications of the world and goes into the print drivers of the world. 67.163.109.173 (talk) 01:23, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

At the word-processor level (or any application level), print commands are generic "draw this here"-type commands that are made via the operating system. The printer driver then turns these into something that the printer understands. The interface to the driver is specific to a particular OS, but within that OS all applications that want to print use the same set of "draw this here" commands. 81.159.111.140 (talk) 02:55, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Under Windows and MacOS X, printing works more or less like this:

• The application asks the OS for a drawing surface suitable for printing.
• The application draws to that surface as if it were drawing to the screen (telling the OS things like "put text here using this font, style, and color", "draw a line from point a to point b using this pen style", "render this bitmap at this location using these scaling parameters", and so on).
• The print driver takes these drawing commands and turns them into instructions to the printer (the details vary from printer to printer).

I'm not sure how Linux or other Unix-like operating systems handle printing. --Carnildo (talk) 03:36, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Typically, Linux and Unix systems use CUPS. As described above, a high-level drawing API is exposed to the system, abstracting details about the type of printer or its actual mechanical control. The word processor or other user software generates an input, and CUPS schedules the job, converts to a lower-level back-end printer representation, and sends the commands to a printer. Nimur (talk) 16:51, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

ISBN "splitting"

Hello,

I am searching for a software that "splits" ISBNs into a well-formatted system with hyphens. It is sometimes difficult to do it by myself, especially checking publisher code and item number is sometimes time-wasting. Regards.--Tomcat (7) 12:18, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

I doubt this is possible, as the block lengths are unpredictably variable. See ISBN#Publisher code. The hyphens are not really necessary and do not strictly-speaking form part of the ISBN, which is just a number.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:16, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Actually, there's some Linux software that appears to do just that called Tellico. I've never used it, but it is one of the features. Since it's presumably Open Source, I dare say that if you're technically minded enough you could find out how it does it. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 17:24, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

User:Helpful Pixie Bot did just that recently in an article on my watchlist. Even if you don't need it for wikipedia work, perhaps there is some useful information if you dig in that direction. bamse (talk) 19:51, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Playing DVDs

I downloaded and installed WinAmp, assuming I could use it instead of Windows Media Center to watch DVD's from my laptop's internal DVD drive. However, I can't see any controls that would allow me to do so. Is that possible? If so, how do I do it? If not, what other free software is available? (Windows7) Thanks, Rojomoke (talk) 13:18, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Best free video/dvd playing software I've used is VLC ---- _nonsense ferret 14:47, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, for Windows, definitely VLC. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:28, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Why can't I use Shadowman with a Blaze Xplorer FX Cheat Cartridge ?

I've bought a Blaze Xplorer Cheat Cartridge for the Playstation but when I try to play Shadow Man (UK/ PAL) version) with it all I get is a black screen & the intro music starts going funny (as in not playing properly). And when I try it with the cartridge just turned on without any codes activated the same thing happens.
I can get past all the 'Loading' screens but when I get to the 'Press Start' screen I get that black screen with the intro music that doesn’t play right. Any help ? 80.254.146.140 (talk) 14:19, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

That question is better suited to a Google search or forum about the topic than an encyclopedia. Try Googling keywords from your problem, or search for Playstation forums or Blaze Xplorer forums. --Kierkkadon ^{talk/contribs} 17:28, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Maybe he tried that already, it's an old game (1999), an old console and an old cartridge. With a search for the exact terms you get a few eBay pages, long lists of games and some hungarian websites. I didn't see anything helpful. Ssscienccce (talk) 20:00, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Begone SATA! Get ye behind me.

Can I now, or will I soon be able to buy a PC that casts out SATA in favor of memory addressable Flash chips? It's not like I'll be able to fill up a 64 bit address space anytime soon, so I might as well setup filesystems (flash aware ones) in flash based memory. Hcobb (talk) 15:21, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

All-flash storage is a major advantage of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Here's a promotional video outlining the performance benefits. Nimur (talk) 16:54, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

That's Flash with SATA. When are we going to cut that cord and just plug into the memory bus? Hcobb (talk) 17:27, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Also a major disadvantage. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:27, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Flash memory is about an order of magnitude slower than DRAM, so it'd be daft to put it on the RAM bus off the northbridge. What's sensible is to put it on a PCI-X card off the southbridge, and map the flash pages into the host CPU's address space using PCI page mapping. Workstation vendors have sold these for a few years (often on their own bus standards); they're now available as generic add-in PCI-X cards (here's a Sandisk one). 176.250.31.78 (talk) 17:41, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

hi, do 3d camera rigs ever use convergence info for depth?

pretty simple question, it seems our eyes actually converge toward near objects, extent of convergence helps with 3d reconstruction. do two camera systems have cameras that converge the same way (I mean with servos, moving angle moment by moment)? why/why not? is it theor. possible? interested int he near field... --91.120.48.242 (talk) 16:45, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Rechargeable power sources for electronic devices

I hear lots of 'wisdom' get tossed around about how you should charge your devices (like a mobile phone). Never leave it plugged into the charger past full charge, try to make sure it charges slowly, only charge when it's almost empty, and so on. The reason given is that charging it 'wrong' will decrease the effectiveness of the battery.

Is there a source in Wikipedia that might prove/refute this, or explain the science behind it? --Kierkkadon ^{talk/contribs} 17:36, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

I've checked Rechargeable battery, and it gives a mention to quick charging damaging the battery, but has no source for this information (the article as a whole could use a lot more sources, or at least more in-line citations). I've taken the liberty of adding {{refimprove}} to the article. --Kierkkadon ^{talk/contribs} 17:36, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

I've actually read a lot of our Wiki articles on this subject, and they're moderate in quality I'd say. There's a lot of FUD surrounding rechargeable batteries. In almost all cases with a phone we're going to be talking about lithium ion batteries. The question about memory is dealt with in our various articles, including lithium battery, lithium polymer battery, lithium ion battery, thin film rechargeable lithium battery, and rechargeable battery. The general overview I've gained reading those is that 1) rechargeable lithium batteries need sophisticated circuitry to keep them from overcharging (and lighting on fire), and to maintain their useful term (undercharging), and that circuitry does a lot of the hard work, 2) all rechargeables have a lifespan and the more you use it the quicker that goes, 3) there is some debate on the internet (not sure what someone who worked on these as a job would say) about how much if any memory effect there is in lithium rechargeable batteries. The corollary question is, is it a bad idea to recharge my phone when it's at say 75%, or to let it get down to 10%? I don't know the answer to that definitively. Shadowjams (talk) 17:58, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Hurm. Alright, thanks. --Kierkkadon ^{talk/contribs} 18:50, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Let me be a bit more specific to your particular question. The "never leave it plugged in" is probably irrelevant on the vast majority of modern lithium ion devices. That's because they'll shut off the charging when they get full. If they didn't, they'd risk overheating. The exception to that is old devices, and counterfeit chargers (which can be a real problem). Older battery types might actually have this issue. I know I have some batteries that say not to charge over 24 hours. So read the labels on those. It's probably not irrelevant advice on a lot of other-rechargeables. Like NiCad.

I don't know how you'd make sure it charged slowly. That seems beyond regular control. The only charge when it's almost empty advice is an attempt to either eliminate memory effects (see the articles above for details on that), or to maximize battery life by not recharging it too many times. As I said above, a question I'd really like answered, is the answer to your third question. That is to say, say you have 200 "duty cycles" in a battery, does that mean that going from 80 to 100 is = 1, and going to 10 to 100 is = 1? or is 80 to 100 = 0.2 and 10 to 100 = 0.9. Like I said, that I don't know, but I'd love to hear about. Shadowjams (talk) 19:24, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

On a li-ion battery, charging from 90% and charging from 10% are not the same amount of cycles. There's a table somewhere, where you can charge from near-empty about 200 times (typical Li-ion rating). At 90%, you can charge something around 2000 times. Here's where it gets tricky though. At somewhere lower, like 50% or 70%, it almost seems like not charging is a slightly better option. I don't remember the figures off the top of my head, but you're supposed to get just under 400 cycles at 50% (something like 380). Then they go on to recommend charging as often as you can. But if you do the math, the total energy recharged for a 50% capacity battery at 380 cycles is less than 100% capacity at 200 cycles.

As for longevity, common consumer Li-ion batteries lose about 40% capacity a year from use. If you keep it cool and dry (warmer than a fridge, but not by much), you can store them for a year and have it lose a couple percent of its capacity. Unused, in normal circumstances, I think it loses in the neighborhood of 20% capacity a year. So yes, buying a new battery for future use isn't really a great idea. I don't have a lot of time right now to find the sources, but I will if I can remember later. --Wirbelwind(ヴィルヴェルヴィント) 00:06, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Actually, have a look at Battery University. My example of 100% and 50% was incorrect, but does seem to look like charging at 50% is better than charging at 75%. --Wirbelwind(ヴィルヴェルヴィント) 00:12, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Lithium batteries can be damaged by deep discharge. That's why these devices switch themselves off when the battery goes low. With older type batteries, you could use them until the voltage was too low to power whatever you were using, but with Li-ion the circuitry decides to turn off. If this happens, it's not a good idea to leave it like that for a long time. Batteries self-discharge even when not in use, deep discharges shorten the lifespan and damage may occur when it discharges too much. With the old Ni batteries that was merely inconvenient, but damaged lithium batteries can be dangerous. That's why if the voltage drops too much, the internal circuit will shut it down permanently i.e. you won't be able to charge it or use it again. Ssscienccce (talk) 20:35, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Also, lithium rechargeable batteries age even when not cycled. Don't buy a spare battery thinking you'll have a brand new battery when the first one expires. In contrast, disposable lithium batteries have a very long shelf-life. Ssscienccce (talk) 21:09, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Division of labour in computer game development

What are the different tasks that needed to be completed in making a major computer game? What fraction of the game's development team will work on each task, and how long does each task take? I heard that once an engine is created/acquired, importing and coding entities that go in the game is only a small task compared to everything else that has to be done. Is this true?

Wargaming.net for example has over 800 employees. How many of its employees are making new vehicles for its games, compared to doing other tasks? What are the other tasks that need to be done?--89.101.237.2 (talk) 18:56, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

here is one link you might find helpful which discusses the different sort of roles are recruited for a major games development company [12] ---- _nonsense ferret 19:16, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Sound quality difference of songs ripped from CDs vs. downloaded from the Internet

A few days ago I asked a question about why the continuous burning and ripping of a song from one CD to the next lowers the audio quality. I have another observation and that is that some of the songs of the songs that are up on the Internet or on file sharing software at 320 kbps have a little bit higher quality than if I rip the same from a CD at 320 kbps. Why is that the case? Are some of those high quality songs up on the Internet and file sharing softwares ripped in a certain way or come from the original source? 71.98.163.183 (talk) 00:10, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

The answer to why they sound different both at 320kbs is maybe they use a different encoder or different settings for the ripping? If sound quality is an issue for you, then use software like (exact audio copy) EAC and rip them to .FLAC files rather than mp3. ---- _nonsense ferret 00:50, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Remote desktop

Does anyone know of any software (Win XP) that could allow me to run a game on my desktop, but be able to (stream and) control it via a different computer? I have tried a few remote programs but the lag makes it impossible to play the game. Both computers are behind the same router (I have a very good ISP, too!), so I'm wondering where this lag is coming from if it's not the software (I have tried StreamMyGame - not so good). Can anyone suggest any software or anything else that might work? Thank you in advance! 86.11.247.18 (talk) 00:36, 31 January 2013 (UTC)