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November 22

Google Hummingbird page

I gave a blog link in the External links section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird and it was deleted. But many other blog links can be found in your references. Is it Wikipedia paid that the moderator can put their friends links only or paid links only.

The link was - http://technologiesinternetz.blogspot.in/2013/11/how-hummingbird-has-changed-definition.html

First I put this link under - References - the link was deleted

Later on I put this link under - External Link - Again it was deleted.

Is it biased that only moderator or checker can do anything. Other blog links are visible but when I put my favorite blog they delete it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.74.24.62 (talk) 04:56, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

This same question has been asked, and answered, at the Help desk. Maproom (talk) 07:39, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

video capture

i need to know if it's possible to take a high quality video of my screen the same restitution as my screen at 30fps in real time (with software.) if so, i need a free program to do so if anyone knows of one. thank you. 70.114.242.17 (talk) 14:06, 22 November 2013 (UTC) p.s., i have a 4-core 2.8ghz amd cpu, 4gb ddr3 ram, 1280*1024 moniter with 24bit rgb color and 60hz refresh rate. 70.114.242.17 (talk) 14:18, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

If you want to capture DirectX/OpenGL stuff (games), which your framerate requirement would suggest you do, you need something like Fraps or DXTory. Fraps has a free limited version. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:39, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Otherwise take a look at Comparison of screencasting software, which lists both opensource and freeware screen recording programs. But most are aimed at recording the ordinary screen (where things like browser windows are drawn) - to capture video game footage it's usually necessary to reach into the graphics buffers themselves, which is a lot more challenging to write. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:50, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Useless cookies

I grudgingly see the need for (some) cookies - like remembering my user id or personalised settings for various things, but I find the targeting of adverts quite annoying. What is really bugging me though is that I might look around the internet to buy some product or service and then make my purchase, only to be stalked with adverts for the very same product or service for the next week or two. Why do targeted adverts not take notice of the fact that you actually bought something and are obviously no longer interested in that particular thing? Astronaut (talk) 20:15, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree, but the cookies don't know whether you went through with those purchases. It would be even more spooky if they did. It is good practice to delete all your cookies at regular intervals. Having to then re-enter your passwords is a minor inconvenience.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 20:49, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

[1]--Aspro (talk) 20:51, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

AJAX website page ID in URL

Hello, My website hosting company gives really horrible addresses to pages of websites they host, eg. example.com/#!PageName/xxxxx. It's that last bit that looks really unprofessional, but they claim (http://www.wix.com/support/forum/html5/other/other/scrappy-web-nameaddress-bar) that this 'page ID' is necessary for AJAX websites. I may be mistaken but I think Facebook uses AJAX and I don't see such horrible page IDs at the end of their page URLs, so I think it's poor/lazy coding on the part of the service provider. Is there a way to hide the page ID? Thanks 81.101.120.9 (talk) 21:14, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

These are sometimes called "hash-bang urls" - their purpose, and problems with them, is discussed pretty well in this post. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 21:21, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh, awesome,thanks! 81.101.120.9 (talk) 21:50, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

"Document Expired"

Does anyone remember the good old days of the 1990s, where you had to open every single page in a browser in a new window because if it went out of sight, the information and all your changes went away? Well, I just had a blast from the past getting hit with an edit conflict on Wikipedia - I did what I've always done, namely back-arrowed out of their useless "upper/lower text box" thingy so that I could grab my content and hit the Editing Section tab in the history browser. And guess what! "Document Expired". On Wikipedia I actually could go to the accursed lower box to retrieve my text, but if it had been another page, another time, I could have lost an hour or more of work, so it's important for me to stake this vampire, salt and burn the bones, bury it in its native earth, etc.

Now I've seen this plague rear its head more than once, and changed browsers more than once to get rid of it, and I'm amazed that something so universally derided by readers is still making appearances. The browser I was using for this was the latest update of Firefox on a Windows system. I went hunting and I found various threads claiming that you may or may not be able to fix it with a specific about:config setting - they're about evenly divided. [2] [3] and elsewhere. Oddly, some of those are from a period when I didn't notice that problem. Anyway, some general questions:

• Why anyone think this good idea, ever? It stands to reason, back arrow, forward arrow, flip, flip, flip. What's so complicated about saving a page the way a person expects it saved?

• Specifically, is all this rooted in some capitalo-utopian's freakish ideology of how the site owner owns your eyeballs and has the right to keep you from re-viewing a page, all sense be damned, even if he has to blow up the building, or is this truly apolitical?

• Is there a name for a browser model/philosophy that sticks with the notion that what you had is what you get? Are there browsers that strictly adhere to never giving you "document expired" except as a warning for your voluntary decision making purposes? (I see the Firefox thread mentions Opera, for example)

• And by the way, does that fix (setting browser.sessionstore.postdata = -1 in about:config) work, why do some people say it doesn't, and is there some dread exploit/virus/Knock At The Door From the Copyright Police that will happen if you make it?

Pardon my rhetoric, but this one... it's just so absurd... Wnt (talk) 21:45, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

There are at least two legitimate technical obstacles here:

• Browsers can't realistically treat every page in the history like a separate tab because there could be hundreds or thousands of pages in the combined histories of all tabs, and if you think browsers are bloated now imagine if they always acted like there were hundreds of additional open tabs.
• If a page was returned in response to an HTTP POST request, and the browser has discarded it (probably for legitimate reasons—see previous point), then it can't retrieve it again without resending the POST data, which can have side effects that shouldn't be repeated (such as charging a purchase to a credit card).

I do think it's silly that if a remote site has instructed the browser to immediately discard a page (as shown in the thread you linked), browsers will keep it around indefinitely as long as it's the latest page in a tab, but then forget about it instantly when you navigate away.

If I understand the browser.sessionstore.postdata documentation correctly, setting it to anything other than 0 instructs Firefox to automatically resend POST data in some circumstances, which could easily come back to bite you some day, so I advise against it. Also, it apparently only matters when quitting and restarting Firefox, not when hitting the back button. But if you're getting that "document expired" page with the "try again" button as shown in the thread you linked, and you don't mind resending the POST data in this particular case, clicking the "try again" button is safe and should solve your problem. -- BenRG (talk) 06:20, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I didn't try it in this particular case, but my previous experience was that "try again" means that you lose all of the information you typed into the form, which is the whole reason why this is a problem. I'm not sure if hitting it would also mean that I'd lose the information in the next window (the one with the two edit boxes) also. I don't want the browser to hold all the data on every page I visit - only the ones with post data. I mean, before now I was counting on it to do that 100% of the time, so not only doing it 99% of the time doesn't seem like a huge burden. Wnt (talk) 14:48, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I see that the copy of Firefox that did this is also doing something related: my list of contributions on Wikipedia is being changed while it is off-screen to reflect the more recent ones. While this isn't as obviously annoying, it also varies from the desired behavior of being able to count on the backarrowed and forwardarrowed pages to remain undisturbed. Wnt (talk) 18:48, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I sent myself an email; why is it white space unless I reply?

Rather than carry around a flash drive I email myself stuff if I don't have time to read it at a library.

I forwarded the email to User:Nil Einne to see if he saw just white space too and if anyone can figure out why.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:49, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi, the email doesn't show up as whitespace (I take it you mean it's totally blank for me). That said, I didn't expect it to. You'll probably find if you forward the email to yourself, the forwarded copy will likewise show up with text. I had a brief look at the source for the email, but didn't see anything interesting however I didn't see much point as forwarding the email as almost definitely meant a lot of the formatting could have been modified etc.

If you really want someone to look in this for you, you'd need to use 'show original' or whatever in your email client, and copy the original version and paste that somewhere like [4] or the millions of other paste bins out there. But you might want to be careful, while the email itself doesn't appear to be particularly private, I'm not sure if you want your email address etc permanently in a paste bin. The headers will contain your email address, you can exclude most of them since I doubt they are relevant (but do include anything MIME related including content type etc) but it's also possible your email address is somewhere else. The email itself is very long, probably only the first few lines are needed but I can't be sure of that.

You could send it to someone, the reason I'm not suggesting that to actually reliably send it so it isn't modified, you'll either need good control over your email client (which you obviously don't have), or you'll need to do something like compress it.

Anyway it's easy to guess what your problem is. The email is likely malformed. Perhaps it's a HTML email with such poor formatting it results in nothing being displayed. Alternatively, it's also possible both a HTML version and plain text version were sent using MIME multipart/alternative but the HTML version was actually blank (I'm pretty sure I've seen this before) and your email client, as with many, displays the HTML copy by default (of course the alternative in all ways is possible but I doubt it here). When you reply, your email client has to do some reformating. If the HTML formatting is borked, most likely it will fix the main problems resulting in the text displaying. If the HTML version is blank, probably replying will result in the client realising there's something wrong and using the text version.

To be honest, I've had a few of these myself before, but I've never really looked in to the precise cause of most of them. Unless you're composing the emails yourself and need to work out what's going wrong, it's unlikely to be worth your bother particularly if you lack the experience to figure it out yourself. The only case would be if you're strongly suspect the emails are fine, and your client itself is the problem but that's generally unlikely.

Nil Einne (talk) 20:53, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I forwarded it to another email address of mine and got the same result. I don't even remember how, but I finally got made a copy that showed up without my having to click on reply. I don't know what an email client is. I save a link to a web site in an email to myself, in the email service which comes up when I first turn on my computer. I rarely use that one. But I use the email service I sent the one to you from at home, and once the web site comes up, I click on "email". It is otherwise the closest to ideal. I created the email where I am now, Windows 8 and whatever version of IE is here. At home, I have Vista and IE9.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:26, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

November 23

cookies

i need a way to delete all but one cookie on Firefox 23.0.0.1, thanks, 70.114.242.17 (talk) 06:33, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Instruction are here courtesy Aspro. Just select all cookies then unselect the one you want to keep. You could also keep a backup of the one you want to keep.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:33, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Functional programming in Python

I like to do functional programming in Python.

Recursively-written functions

• are the functional way of doing things

however,

• always causes the exception RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded in comparison

Loop-using functions

• run without the recursion error

however,

• are imperative (having mutable state).

Is there a way to write functions that neither causes errors nor is imperative? Actually, using the function product in the definition of the function factorial for example appears to be one way, however the product function must be written in either of the two ways above.

--Czech is Cyrillized (talk) 06:44, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Python isn't properly tail-recursive in the functional programming sense, and that seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, because a fundamental feature of Python's design is that function calls show up in tracebacks, and tail call elimination would break that. You can get around this with a trampoline, but it's not very pretty. There may be a way around it in Stackless Python, which I've never used. -- BenRG (talk) 07:04, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Using map() or list comprehensions instead of iterations is quite functional. Also, loops are not the problem - using mutable variables is. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:42, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

software

Hi! I'm a new user of this wikipedia reference desk. I'm searching for a software in which I can put beard and mustache on a person's photo. Would you help me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 106.218.47.240 (talk) 10:20, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Gimp ! It is a 'free' Image Manipulation Program. [5]---Aspro (talk) 15:59, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Would you like to give address to a good site to download it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 106.218.120.48 (talk) 00:15, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Good general advice is to only ever download stuff from the official site. Aspro provided a link for Gimp, above. Astronaut (talk) 13:00, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

We have an article about GIMP and the official site for downloads, tutorials, etc is the easy-to-remember http://gimp.org SteveBaker (talk) 20:47, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Opening an arrangement of windows with one click (or keyboard shortcut)

Resolved

When I am coding I always use the same arrangements of windows - chrome on the left (for looking things up), my text editor top right, and powershell bottom right. This is annoying to set up manually each time. I have to open three programs, snap chrome to the left, then manually arrange my text editor and powershell. That's a total of three clicks, a drag and some futzing around to manually resize windows - is there a way of saving this arrangement of windows so that the whole thing would appear with a single click? I'm using Windows 7. Equisetum (talk | contributions) 11:08, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

We are making progress! I can (obviously) open the programs with a batch file, it was the moving and resizing that was giving me trouble. I found this utility called NirCmd that claims to be able to move and resize windows from the command line (and hence, I imagine, from a batch file). I now have a followup question - is there any way I can find the size and position of a currently open window - to save me lots of tedious trial and error with parameters to "nircmd win move" and "nircmd win setsize"? Alternatively, if anyone has a less ugly and hackish solution to this I would still be interested (with my idea if I changed monitors I'd probably have to recode my script - urgh). Equisetum (talk | contributions) 11:37, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

NirSoft WinExplorer will tell you various information about open windows, including the position and size.

I found a PCWorld review of various window managers: Crisp up your desktop with a window manager utility. I've never used any of them, but you might explore if they're useful to you. Mosaico looks promising but it costs money. (The review says $10, but the site's buy page says $19.95 or $15.96 with a limited-time 20% off code.) According to the review, Mosaico can

create different desktop snapshots for various situations. Once you're happy with the way your windows are laid out, click the snapshot button to save the arrangement. You can save eight different desktop snapshots and restore them easily from the program's snapshot browser. When restoring a snapshot, Mosaico will open relevant programs if they're closed, and will minimize others that aren't part of the snapshot. It can't, however, open specific documents.

You might search for window manager to look for similar programs. --Bavi H (talk) 20:12, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

WinExplorer sounds like exactly what I need, I'll check it out. Thanks for the window manager search term as well - I suspect the difficulty with these is that I would need them to work seamlessly with Dexpot (a virtual desktop tool - which makes up for the inexplicable lack of this feature in Windows compared to every other major desktop environment), but I'll try them out if I can't hack somehting together with NirCmd and WinExplorer. Equisetum (talk | contributions) 18:59, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

KitKat differences

Dear Wikipedians:

I have attached a screenshot of two KitKat installations, one on Nexus 5 (left) and the other one on Nexus 4 (right). I have noticed that the transparency of background does not extend to the bottom three buttons on Nexus 4 whereas it does on Nexus 5, what gives?

Thanks,

L33th4x0r (talk) 20:04, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't think the one on the right is KitKat. Aside from the white icons in the status bar it looks like Jelly Bean or ICS. I'm not convinced it's a Nexus 4 either, since it looks like it was rendered at a lower resolution, not downsampled, but I may be wrong about that. -- BenRG (talk) 06:54, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

As has been widely discussed in various places outside wikipedia (and I would suspect is mentioned somewhere in a variety of wikipedia articles, Google Experience Launcher is exclusive to the Nexus 5. It seems a bit unclear whether the translucency is part of this or not since for some reason the Moto X, did get it but either way it didn't make it to any of the other Nexus devices. [6] I presume Cyanogenmod and other customs firmwares will make up for this shortcoming if it matters to you. Nil Einne (talk) 13:40, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you all for your helpful information, I think it most likely is the Google Experience Launcher. Thanks, 216.58.91.254 (talk) 14:18, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

A private server

I'm wondering if it is possible to set up a server that cannot be traced back to the owner?

What ownership do you want over it? And please don't rely on "several encrypted hops", because that only makes the NSA curious. Hcobb (talk) 20:20, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Maybe you would like to look and read threw Tor (anonymity network)--Aspro (talk) 22:26, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

What are "several encrypted hops?" And what do you mean by "what kind of ownership?" You use strange terminology I don't understand. Let me try to be more specific I guess. I want to have a domain and set up a website in such a way that nobody will be able to figure out that I did it. Is it clear or further explanations are needed?

What is Thor? It seems to be a video game. I don't do them. Never played any. Is it here as a joke or what?

Are you a wind up monkey? Its TOR T-O-R --Aspro (talk) 01:05, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, I've got it. I am dumb! Much appreciate the pointer. Many thanks. Is it the only way? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.52.14.15 (talk) 03:17, 24 November 2013

Please remember to sign your posts by adding "~~~~" at the end. Thanks ツ Jenova20 ^(email) 13:58, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

It depends on what you mean by "cannot be traced". Clearly, for someone to send a command to your server to get data - and for the data to get back again, there has to be a means to trace it...otherwise how did the data get to your server in the first place?!

So what you are dependant on is either (a) making it too difficult and tedious to do the tracing (which might stop your mom from finding it - but not the NSA) - or (b) find someone to route the data through who promises not to tell anyone about the part of the journey from their computers to yours. (b) will work - but only so long as you trust the intermediary not to give up that information - which might be difficult for them to guarantee if the guys in the black suits who talk to their sleeves come knocking.

SteveBaker (talk) 17:06, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Actually, re-reading your question, you're really not asking how to prevent the server itself from being located - you're asking that the OWNERSHIP of that server can't be traced back to you. That's actually a lot easier! Suppose, for example, you bought a cheap computer like a Raspberry Pi, added a WiFi dongle to it, loaded its memory card with server stack and your website. Powered it from a small box of batteries and leave it hidden in a waterproof box and bolted to a light pole near a local fast-food place, hotel of coffee-shop that offers free Internet access. You could disguise it as some kind of electrical box that people routinely ignore. Now you have a server that is (essentially) impossible to trace back to you. So long as nobody sees you planting it and you take care to avoid leaving fingerprints or DNA on the thing, you're probably never going to be connected back as the "owner". If you don't care too much about being strictly legal - you could probably even wire it up to steal electricity from the light pole. Of course, once it's set up, you'd want to be careful never to access it yourself - or else there is the potential for your packets to and from the thing to be logged...but that's a different problem. The box itself would be relatively easy to trace back to its location - but if the bad guys get to it, putting up a replacement would be fairly easy. SteveBaker (talk) 17:15, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

SteveBaker is, as always, the most brilliant! Sorry I don't mean to put others down. The second discourse (humoristic I believe) is of course somewhat off the scale, it is not something I will ever do. Actually I think, my design (if ever implemented) will be entirely legal but it might rattle some feathers. So, the public backlash is what on my mind. I don't care about the NSA. I am on their side. 174.52.14.15 (talk) 17:49, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Although Steve is probably right in a theoretical sense, the usual approach is to hack into a machine owned by some innocent victim and set it up as a server. If done cleverly on a machine that the owner doesn't pay much attention to, the result can stay up for a substantial period of time and the process can be extremely difficult to trace -- especially if the hacker works through multiple links involving several different countries. Looie496 (talk) 18:02, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Without physical access to a machine, it would be hard to hack into someone's machine, set up a server there and not leave any footprints along the way - it's also illegal, and we're not going to advocate that! My approach is more or less legal - it might be illegal to attach a device to a light pole - but I'm sure you could get creative and find a legal solution...you'd also want to be careful to read the terms and conditions of the free WiFi provider - but, again, I'm sure that's surmountable. The result would be perfect anonymity. SteveBaker (talk) 23:39, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Looie is definitely another bright character around here. Now I will have to post a question: How to become a hacker? Oh' my! You guys are dragging me into a dark (Thor) world!!! :-)

The problem with being a black-hat hacker is that unless you're the best of the best (and perhaps, even if you are), you're quite vulnerable to people figuring out who you are. Lots of hackers have gotten caught over the year...even fairly accomplished ones. So taking that route is a bad idea if anonymity is your goal.

If your goal is just to prevent the ire of ordinary people from reaching you, it's probably enough to protect your WHOIS record and choose a web service provider who'll respect your privacy. Situating your server in a hard-to-reach country with a sketchy law enforcement record against internet "criminals" might also help...Nigeria comes to mind. But it's hard to generalize. SteveBaker (talk) 23:39, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, I keep thinking of what Looie said. It sounds like an attractive idea in principle but is it applicable to my goal? Can it work as a server? I am under the impression it is mostly for people who want to broadcast let's say advertisements or whatnot, in other words to send out junk mail. Am I correct in that? Thanks, 174.52.14.15 (talk) 23:31, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

It can definitely work as a server. All that you need to do is cause a program to run in the background on the target computer, which will receive requests from people trying to access the server, and send the right data, without anything obvious happening on the infected computer. In principle, this is similar to the operation of a node in a botnet. O the other hand, while Steve's idea is questionably legal but mostly untracable, Looie's is illegal and may result in people with the expertise to trace it back to you (i.e. law enforcement) getting involved. MChesterMC (talk) 10:23, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks very much who contributed their expertise. It's been an eye opener for me. Sure I want to stay on the right side of the law, thus the TOR idea seems to be the only way to go. Thanks again.174.52.14.15 (talk) 01:44, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

November 24

Issue with digital photographs all coming out white

Hi there, folks:

Today, I went on a day out, where, unfortunately, my camera - which had been working perfectly fine outside before - decided to stop working. The issue is that, whilst taking photographs outside, the picture appears to be almost entirely white, with few of the details that I intended to capture appearing. I imagined that this was an issue with white balance, but even in the mode wherein the white balance is manually set, the same thing happened - almost entirely white pictures such as this here. Inside, the picture quality was not as good as usual, but at least did not produce entirely white pictures - however, something unusual happened in the preview mode: dark bars would appear, then disappear, on the photograph. I resorted to taking videos and capturing images from the videos, and while taking videos, there were no issues with whiteness. Does anyone know what the cause of this is and what the resolution could be? It made for a frustrating experience.

All the best,

--188.78.106.5 (talk) 01:27, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

This is not an issue with white balance. It is an issue with the image exposure. More specifically, it looks like your camera is over-exposing the image. The first thing to check is whether you accidentally set a manual exposure mode with improper settings.

Tomorrow I might take a longer look at the image, but at a first glance, I am inclined to attribute this specific exposure problem to a defective or malfunctioning CCD sensor. I conclude this because the image artifacts are interlaced (characteristic of recent era CCD sensors), and there appears to be over-exposure only on certain rows. That would imply that the sensor is either ignoring commands to correctly set integration time, or is receiving incorrect exposure commands (due to a software error in the camera's controller). It is also possible that the corruption is occurring during a post-processing phase; there might be no hardware defect at all. If any of these are the root-cause, there is unfortunately very little that you can do, except to complain to the retailer or manufacturer and ask for a refund. Nimur (talk) 08:27, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I booted up my computer to stare at the image and scrutinize a few more technical details... yes, this is a photograph from the Samsung ST45 (known by many other names in some countries). And, regrettably, the EXIF indicates that the camera software provided reasonable settings to the sensor (not incorrect manual-exposure settings). This means that either: the camera software has a major bug, and does not send the sensor the commands it thinks it sends; or, the camera sensor hardware is defective, and does not set up its circuitry correctly when it receives a command; or, the camera post-processing software is defective. You might be able to "work around" some of these problems by switching the camera into a different mode, but ultimately, these are technical problems that an end-user cannot really resolve. Nimur (talk) 08:43, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, Nimur - thanks for taking a look at the photo and its data for me, I appreciate it. I had a feeling that it was something more severe, as I tried resetting the exposure and other settings that were available to be changed manually in vain. I've had some rotten luck with cameras lately - the first was robbed from my house by a burlgar, the second fell prey to a "zoom error" that I couldn't get fixed, and now this. I bought it in a second-hand shop, so hopefully I can return it! All the best and thanks for your time, --188.78.106.5 (talk) 10:46, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

The image metadata appears to say the picture is exposed at f/3.0, 1/160 seconds, ISO 80. Those seem rather a lot for daylight. Could be the camera is set to over-expose. Try resetting the camera's settings - a quick googling suggests remove the memory card, then press and hold shutter and power button for several seconds. Or if that's not the reset see the camera's manual or google. 88.112.41.6 (talk) 16:45, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Immunicity ?

Someone recommended Immunicity to redirect my traffic and avoid webpage blocks the other day. Should i be concernced about my traffic going throught their servers or do they have a good reputation? Thanks ツ Jenova20 ^(email) 12:46, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Immunicity provides a "free-to-use" public open proxy. There is always a risk when you use a proxy server; the proxy operator can see your traffic. If most of your traffic uses SSL or TLS security, you significantly reduce the risk that the proxy operator can eavesdrop on your data. But the server operator will still know several pieces of information, such as which websites you are accessing (even if the website data is encrypted). A proxy server provides a more straightforward entry point for a man in the middle attack, which (if executed) can even compromise securely encrypted data.

I do not recommend any third-party open proxy servers. If you don't control the hardware, and you don't have a business-relationship with the operator, there is almost no accountability, if they turn out to be malicious eavesdroppers. But not everybody is as paranoid and cynical as I am; not everybody's network data requires strong protection against eavesdroppers. You can decide for yourself whether you have enough technical understanding, and if you care about your data integrity, to trust them. Nimur (talk) 16:42, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, that's pretty stark...I think i'll reconsider my options. Thanks Nimur ツ Jenova20 ^(email) 10:43, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Unwanted pop-ups.

Hello there,

My OS is Windows 7 on both of my machines. On one machine (mine) I run Microsoft Security Essentials(MSE) as well as SpyBot Search and Destroy (SB S&D) free application. As a matter of fact the last time I ran MSE was yesterday. It said it found no malware. Every time I run SB S&D it finds some kind of advertising leach which I destroy but next time I run SB S&D again it is there. And I don't go any dark places. No sex sites, no nothing, not even amazon.com on this machine. It is mostly for email. I also browse msn.com and read their articles.

My second machine is my wife's computer. I also use it frequently mostly to check the news at msn.com, that's it, and also I use her email account with her consent of course. I run SB S&D on it and every time I run it it comes out totally clean. The hardware is identical, it is both Dell T7400, relatively old but still rather powerful because when I ordered them I packed them both with top of the line blocks.

My wife's machine operates OK. On my machine I have unexpected pop-ups. They are aggressive and provocative. It is mostly about "warnings." Like: "You are running out of disk space. Click here and we will fix it." I have enough disk space for my needs: 104 GB free. On another occasion it is about my computer's speed. They offer to increase it dramatically. Those popups cover some of the web page I am reading and frequently they appear in pairs. They flash menacingly. I hate them. I am also afraid to click "OK" button accidentally. The popups never bother me when I read something in Wikipedia. It is only when I click on a link on the home page of msn.com.

I just checked my "Internet Properties. Privacy Tab" "Turn on Pop-up Blocker" is ON. That checkbox is checked. Disable toolbars and extensions when InPrivate browsing starts HAS BEEN checked. I don't know what it means though.

"Never allow websites to request your physical location" was OFF. I decided to leave it OFF. Is it about the IP address?

On my wife's machine I've never had any pesky pop-ups. I just checked the Privacy Tab on Internet Properties. Unlike on my machine, "Never allow websites to request your physical location" is ON. Also other two checkboxes are checked. Is it the cause of the problem?

Now's the question: Why do I have this pestilence? How to get rid of them? Why do I have it on only one machine? What is wrong with this one?

Thanks, 174.52.14.15 (talk) 19:56, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

You need some more heavy duty virus detection and elimination programs. I'd recommend TDSKiller, SuperAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes. I'd also recommend going to [www.bleepingcomputer.com/‎ bleepingcomputer.com] or some other specialist virus removal site people there will walk you through a thorough virus removal process. Also check any extensions in your browser and remove them.--User:Salix alba (talk): 00:55, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I've read your message. Thank you but I need to contemplate it all tomorrow. May come up with additional questions. You think it is a virus. Wow! Thanks, 174.52.14.15 (talk) 03:15, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

It may not be a virus, but either way you should have a competent Antivirus, and MSE is not. There are plenty of free options, which include AVG and Avast also. Thanks ツ Jenova20 ^(email) 10:39, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for information. Very helpful. Now I have to follow.174.52.14.15 (talk) 02:28, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

November 25

Why does setResizable for Java FX Stage class not work on Linux?

I've found that the Java FX Stage class's setResizable method when given a false parameter results in a non-resizable window when run on a Windows machine, but have found the same source code, when compiled on two different Linux platforms (the latest Ubuntu and the latest CentOS) to result in a window that is still resizable. Another person with the same problem. What is/are the technical reason(s) that setting resizable to false doesn't result in a non-resizable window when running on either Ubuntu or CentOS (if not more Linux platforms)? I know the method spec says it's a hint, so why don't these two (if not more) take the hint?20.137.2.50 (talk) 14:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Have you considered filing a bug report? If you are using OpenJFX (OpenJDK), send a bug report to openjfx-dev. Be sure to specify your OS, JVM/JDK, and your window manager or desktop environment, (e.g. GNOME). Nimur (talk) 15:17, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't have javafx installed on my Ubuntu machine to test this, but for me setResizable works for an ordinary Swing toplevel (with the default unity/compiz window manager). I'd be interested to know if that code works on the machine(s) where you're seeing the problem in JavaFX:

import javax.swing.JFrame;

public class top {
    public static void main(String[] args){
        JFrame f = new JFrame("frame");
        f.setBounds(100,100,200,200);
        f.setResizable(false);
        f.setVisible(true);
    }
}

If that doesn't work either, that would suggest that your window manager is ignoring the hint, rather than it being a JavaFX problem. If it does work, you've narrowed the responsible party down some. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:17, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, If I use Swing and a JFrame, setting resizable to false works correctly for me too. It's just the FX Stage that doesn't not-resize correctly. 20.137.2.50 (talk) 16:45, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Then it sounds like something isn't passing the resizable property to the underlying AWT X11 toolkit peer. If you do decide to submit a bug report, the person responding will want to be sure that the relevant hints aren't being passed to the window manager. The way "non resizable" is implemented in X11 is to set ICCCM hints which set the maximum and minimum sizes of the window to the same value. For a running window, you can externally check by running xwininfo -size which will display the hints. So my example Swing program, with setResizable(false) will report:

 Normal window size hints:
     User supplied location: 100, 100
     Program supplied location: 100, 100
     Program supplied size: 198 by 171
     Program supplied minimum size: 198 by 171
     Program supplied maximum size: 198 by 171
     Program supplied window gravity: NorthWestGravity

Those two bold lines (minimum size and maximum size) don't show if the window is setResizable(true). If you check your JavaFX program with that, you can confirm that Java isn't sending the appropriate ICCCM hints, rather than the WM ignoring them. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 18:15, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for telling me about xwininfo, Finlay McWalter. It helped me analyze the problem. I think I found out more about what's going on, and even found a working solution. I neglected to mention that I was using SceneBuilder to design my window's size and appearance. This application automatically updates the application's .fxml file, which is where information about the window's appearance, such as minimum and maximum size go. But the checkbox "resizable" for the AnchorPane properties is grayed out in the checked status, which is why I went to hard code it with primaryStage.setResizable(false). But I did set min and max dimensions in SceneBuilder and my .fxml file had that information. But when I ran xwininfo -size, that min and max information was not hinted to the window manager. So it looks like the problem is that (on the Linux platforms I've used), Java FX does not read the min and max sizes from the .fxml file and interpret that as hints to the window manager. When I added the lines primaryStage.setMinWidth(200); primaryStage.setMaxWidth(200); primaryStage.setMinHeight(200); primaryStage.setMaxHeight(200); primaryStage.setResizable(false);, it worked. So the problem is with the fxml file getting its size info parsed out. 20.137.2.50 (talk) 19:32, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the cause. I've since installed sun-java8ea in an ubuntuVM and manually compiled the Oracle HellowWorld JavaFX app. It honours primaryStage.setResizable(false); as one would expect. So that confirms your settings-file theory. For things like this, especially where there's a difference between Unix and Windows platforms, there's the usual list of file-related things to be suspicious of:

• Paths: it's not picking up your .fxml file at all (the test for that is to put some outrageous values, which should elicit outrageous behaviour in the app)
• Permissions: does the process reading the file have permission to do so (shouldn't be an issue for your dev environment, but it never hurts to check)
• File parsing error: unix/dos line terminations (rolls eyes at this still being an issue), character encoding and related stuff like invisible unicode byte-order-marks (the eye roller of the 21st century)

-- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:44, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Blacking out subtitles

My fiancé is learning British Sign Language. She regularly watches See Hear which is signed, but also subtitled. She wants to watch it without the subtitles being on-screen and is currently doing this by covering up some of our TV with a row of books — does anyone know of any free video-editing software which has filters to detect subtitles on-screen and automatically cover them up? Thanks, davidprior ^t/_c 19:00, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm not clear about whether you're watching See Hear on broadcast TV, or through a media player (or both). Subtitles on digital video are often provided as separate files - see Category:Subtitle file formats. I assume that's not the case with See Hear (if it is, all you need to do is turn subtitles off in the media player), but it might serve your purpose to create your own subtitles file which just displays a single blank subtitle for the entire length of the video, obscuring what's underneath.  Card Zero  (talk) 21:44, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Either from broadcast TV (I use the PlayTV as my PVR which can save recordings as M2TS to transfer to the computer) or from iPlayer (using get_iplayer). But as far as I can see, the subtitles are within the actual video itself whichever of these I use. I guess that creating a dummy subtitle file mean the black box on-screen wouldn't follow the area the real subtitles fill? Thanks, davidprior ^t/_c 21:51, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

You're right, it would be a terrible kludge. It would make more sense to overlay something else - VLC media player for instance has options to overlay text or an image (a "logo", but I assume it could be a large black rectangle) at a specified position. (You could alternatively just crop the bottom of the video off completely.) I guess the subtitles you're trying to cover up move around a lot, so the overlay would have to take up a lot of the screen; but I haven't found any subtitle-detecting software yet except the kind that reads the subtitles and saves them as text.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:09, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

But wait! This VirtualDub MSU Subtitle Remover looks good.

However, the person asking here [7] about how to remove subtitles specifies "don't say MSU Subtitle Remover", and I'm not sure why. Possibly they didn't like the resulting quality - and you have the advantage there, because you only want to achieve illegibility, not clean removal.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:24, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Unix utilities in windows, filesystem may be corrupt

I was messing with tar unix utility with arguments "-czvf" on windows 7, something very weird happened, the output file didn't appear in windows file explorer, I made sure I was on the same path as the console, I also used dir /a to see if it was a hidden or something, it wasn't, however when I used 7z to browse on that directory, the files were there, I tried to type the path but windows insisted they didn't exist, what is weird, is that when I used "ls" unix utilty on windows, ls knew they existed.
Using dir /a

(With and without administrator privileges)
C:\Program Files\Java>dir /a
 Datenträger in Laufwerk C: ist EXTERNO
 Volumeseriennummer: 605B-21A7

 Verzeichnis von C:\Program Files\Java

10/30/2012  09:39 PM    <DIR>          .
10/30/2012  09:39 PM    <DIR>          ..
09/22/2012  02:05 AM    <DIR>          jdk1.7.0_07
10/30/2012  09:39 PM    <DIR>          jre7
               0 Datei(en),              0 Bytes
               4 Verzeichnis(se), 28,093,161,472 Bytes frei

Using ls -l

(No administrator privileges)
C:\Program Files\Java>ls -l
total 152362
-rw-r--r-- 1 User Administrators 78005148 Nov 25 12:30 jdk.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 User Administrators 78005148 Nov 25 12:33 jdk.tgz
drwxr-xr-x 7 User Administrators     4096 Sep 22  2012 jdk1.7.0_07
drwxr-xr-x 4 User Administrators     4096 Oct 30  2012 jre7

Using ls -l with administrator privileges

(With administrator privileges)
C:\Program Files\Java>ls -l
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 7 User Administrators 4096 Sep 22  2012 jdk1.7.0_07
drwxr-xr-x 4 User Administrators 4096 Oct 30  2012 jre7

I can't remove them either, so, I'm not sure what's going on. 190.60.93.218 (talk) 19:03, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

OOOhhh, after a long file search it seems windows 7 redirects read/write operations of applications with something called "VirtualStore", I've found the files, interesting.. seems it's all right now. 190.60.93.218 (talk) 19:13, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

This isn't exactly related to your question, but this caught my eye. Does the ls Unix command really work in Windows? I know that modern Windows versions (from Windows NT and beyond, as I recall) support POSIX-compatible file system access at the core level, but the command line still only works with the old MS-DOS way. Is this utility natively supported on Windows 7, or does it need some additional software? JIP | Talk 20:13, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Probably the best answer is to install "Cygwin" - which is a complete unix-like environment with all of the usual command line tools. Everything works cleanly. Windows sees the "unix" system as the c:\Cygwin directory. The unix environment sees the windows system as /cygdrive/c, /cygdrive/d, etc. This is vastly easier than trying to run unix tools directly under Windows. SteveBaker (talk) 20:45, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I used MinGW shell, and just appended to PATH the binaries location. 190.60.93.218 (talk) 12:29, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Reading Amiga disks on a modern PC

So the Uridium 2 game I bought from eBay finally arrived, after one month of waiting. When I powered up my old Amiga 4000, it turned out that its circuitry has long since broken. It can't even find its own CPU any more. So I decided to scrap the physical Amiga altogether and instead just use E-UAE on Fedora Linux from now on. But how can I transfer the game disks to a modern PC? PCs can't read Amiga floppy disks without special hardware (unlike the other way around). Vesalia.de appears to sell the Catweasel controller, but is this, and a real Amiga floppy drive, all I need to read Amiga floppy disks on a modern Linux PC? JIP | Talk 20:09, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

That is the ISA Slot version of the card, which won't fit any vaguely modern PC. They seem to be sold out of the PCI version of the card[8].

Is the game readable by in a format that any of the Amiga disk imagers whose formats UAE can use [9]? If so, that's probably going to be the cheapest option even if it means buying an actual Amiga. davidprior ^t/_c 20:38, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

The PCI version of the Catweasel card seems not to be for sale anywhere, even though it's the newest version. I have contacted Vesalia about it, let's see if they reply. Google gets very many hits about it, but not a single one about one actually being for sale. You would except such a popular product to be actually available. The copy of the game I have only exists on Amiga floppy disks, which PCs (legacy or modern) cannot read without special hardware. If I had bought the game on PC floppy disks (which it was never available on in the first place) or on a CD-ROM, I wouldn't have needed to ask this question. JIP | Talk 21:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Here in the UK, working A500/A600s start about £50 on eBay. This, along with a null-modem cable (and USB-Serial adaptor if your PC doesn't have one) may be the cheapest option. An A600 has the benefit of being able to use cheap IDE-SD adaptors so you can image to SD card then transfer over the serial link. davidprior ^t/_c 21:56, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Given that you now own a copy of the game, would you consider it morally permissible to just download Uridium 2? Searching for the game brings up download links on the first page. I admit it would be neat to be able to read Amiga disks in general, but that's not necessary to reach this particular goal of playing the game.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:51, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I was able to easily find a WHDLoad version of Uridium 2 on-line, free for download. Because I bought the registered version of WHDLoad fully legally way back when my Amiga still worked, I was able to play the downloaded Uridium 2 installation straight after I had copied the files to a directory accessible from within E-UAE. Yes, I think that because I own a fully legal, paid-for copy of the game, I am entitled to download the game from the Internet, provided I don't redistribute it. But still, I would want to be able to read my old Amiga floppy disks. I found this site: http://www.kryoflux.com/, which claims to sell a USB floppy disk controller capable of reading Amiga disks. I only need a real Amiga floppy drive, because Kryoflux doesn't sell them, but then I only have to extract one from my old Amiga 4000 before I send the machine itself to be recycled, because there's no way I can be bothered to get it working again. It's been about two decades since the computer was introduced, after all. In the meantime, I have started the Uridium 2 Wikipedia article. It's still a very short stub, so it needs attention and expansion. JIP | Talk 19:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I placed an order for this KryoFlux controller. It's fairly expensive (over 100 €), but it looks like all I need to read Amiga disks with it is a normal PC floppy drive, which I actually happen to already own. The controller even has a USB interface instead of an ISA or PCI one, which makes it even easier to plug into my PC. I'll have to see how it works when I receive it. JIP | Talk 19:20, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Camera not working since upgrading Ubuntu.

Grrr...my Canon Powershot S3 has been working great for years with my Ubuntu (strictly "Kubuntu") PC - you just plug it in, open the File Manager from the popup that shows up - then grab the files and drag them where you need them.

Last week, I upgraded to the lastest Kubuntu - and while memory sticks and external USB hard drives still work just fine, my camera is detected - but seems to have no files, no folders, nothing on it!

I plug it in, the device notifier shows it's there, I can open a File Manager (Dolphin) from that dialog, the window opens OK with "camera:/" as the location...but no folders, no files, nothing?!? I also tried opening it with Gwenview - same deal.

The camera works fine on our Windows 7 laptop - and the Kubuntu machine works OK with other USB mass-storage systems after the upgrade.

WTF?

SteveBaker (talk) 20:40, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

How much pain is it worth, just to be able to download directly from the cam? You could go read manuals about the Picture Transfer Protocol and fiddle with it for, I would guess, hours, which might or might not work, or you could get a USB SD card reader for less than $20, and pop out the memory card every time you want to download your pics. Personally, I prefer the second option, also because PTP doesn't show you all the files on the card as far as I can tell (I've never been able to download DNG files that way). --Trovatore (talk) 22:02, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, it used to work - easy - just plug the camera in and grab the pictures. I know I can fritz around with SD cards - that's not the question. It just stopped working when I upgraded and I need to know why. SteveBaker (talk) 23:29, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I am confused... is dolphin using PTP or USB Mass Storage Class to grab images? (Sounds like PTP, based on the phony file path "camera://"). What does F-Spot do? (or, what does kamera do, if you're really really using just KDE and don't have any GNOME pieces). Nimur (talk) 03:10, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

That's a good question - I assumed it was USB mass storage - but they might have changed that at some point. Maybe I should try some other file managers - there are several to choose from. But the fact that Gwenview (which is specifically designed to be an image browser) also can't see them suggests a deeper problem. SteveBaker (talk) 14:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

And what about your system log, anything in there related to kio or kamera? Nimur (talk) 03:26, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

This doesn’t answer the OP's question but what I do is install upgrades 'first' to a virtual machine (with Ubuntu a use VirtualBox). Only when I have had time to make sure everything continues as I want it to, do I move over. I still have some old versions running on VirtualBox because I can't be bothered to sort out the right dependancies for the apps I'm running. Makes a nice change though, from Microsoft were regedit problems and drivers takes all weekend to sort out.--Aspro (talk) 02:28, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, I do something like that too - I use a spare hard-drive, install to one while retaining the other as a backup. I could go back to the older install if I needed to - but I upgraded for a reason (other bugs that were getting in my way) and the camera problem isn't sufficiently serious to warrant a downgrade. SteveBaker (talk) 14:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

My theory: Ubuntu recognized the Windows format files your camera creates, while Kubuntu does not. StuRat (talk) 04:13, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

My previous setup was also Kubuntu - just an older version. I don't know about "windows format files" - the files on the camera are just regular JPEG's...and when I grab them from the camera from my wife's laptop and copy them onto our file server - my Kubuntu machine sees them without problems. Plus, it's not just the files that aren't showing up - it's the entire directory structure of the camera that's not there. SteveBaker (talk) 14:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I mean the file system is a Windows one, which some Linux implementations can also read, but not all. StuRat (talk) 22:23, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Steve, we need to know a little more to debug this. When you connect the camera: What do you see in the system log? What do you see in dmesg? What do you see if you run lsusb? This could be an automount problem, or a PTP problem, or a USB driver problem, or something else, but we can't narrow it down from what you've given so far. Nimur (talk) 15:20, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

• Given that it used to work, it would be reasonable to report this at Ubuntu's bug handling facility, https://bugs.launchpad.net/. Looie496 (talk) 16:31, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

With VirtualBox you don't need to do a down grade. I can, and often have had, have several versions of Ubuntu running all at once. I find it quicker in the long run than debugging every time a new version is released. Just keep an old image of Ubuntu or what ever 'worked' on VirtualBox. Then upload and copy the images from there, over onto your current hosting and latest OS. I do it all the time when using GIMP & Hugin (software). --Aspro (talk) 00:54, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorting NEWID() in SQL

SELECT Name, NEWID() AS ID
FROM MyTable
ORDER BY ID

The sorting doesn't seem to work. It sorts randomly, but not in the order of the ID shown. Why? Ypnypn (talk) 22:37, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Try this:

 SELECT Name, NEWID() AS ID
 FROM MyTable
 ORDER BY NEWID

(I'm not sure if that should be "NEWID()" on the last line.) As for why your version didn't work, probably it does the sort before it has assigned the name ID to anything. StuRat (talk) 04:16, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorting of a uniqueidentifier type (a.k.a., GUID) is well defined in MS SQL, but is just not what you might expect, and not necessarily as might be used on other platforms. See this article, which shows which bytes and byte groups are considered first. Our GUID article also has some discussion on encoding and ordering. To get the order that you might be expecting, try:

    SELECT Name, NEWID() AS ID
    FROM MyTable
    ORDER BY CONVERT(VARCHAR(50),ID)

--- Tom N talk/contrib 05:28, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

That's just what I was looking for. Thanks! Ypnypn (talk) 13:49, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

November 26

Power Supply Efficiency confusion

If a PSU is rated at 500 watts and has 80% efficiency, does that mean that (a) the PSU will actually pull 500 watts from the mains, and output 400 watts to the computer, or does it mean (b) that the PSU actually outputs 500 watts to the computer, and pulls 625 watts from the wall? 08:20, 26 November 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.56.118.12 (talk)

It's usually the second case, but you can confirm it by looking at the more detailed numbers on the label. It should tell how much current you can draw from each of the different lines. From there a little math (that they often do for you on the label) tells you how many Watts total are making it out to those lines. There should also be a number (probably a bit high to be safe) for how much it draws from the wall. Katie R (talk) 13:12, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Note that most decent PSUs should not have a single efficiency rating as the efficiency will depend on the output power which in any modern computer will vary a lot depending on load. See for example the 80 Plus certification standard which specifies different minimum efficiencies at different output levels. And as Katie Ryan A said, a 500W PSU would normally imply that's the maximum power that can be supplied (although as has also been said each line will also have a limit), but you should check out the label, and for a crappy PSU which only specifies 80% efficiency I wouldn't trust the limits on the label anyway. (Actually I probably wouldn't trust such a PSU point blank.) Nil Einne (talk) 19:29, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Screen resolution alternates when I reboot

When I reboot my Windows 7 64-bit PC, it alternates between starting up at two different resolutions. I think it's every other time. And when I go to change the resolution from the smaller one, I find that is the max res for that session. So, I reboot, and it fires up at the large res, and everything is fine, until the next time I reboot. This behavior started when my LCD monitor died and I hooked up an old, smaller, CRT monitor. So, I'd guess it sometimes loads the driver it thinks is good for the CRT, which gives me the small res, and sometimes loads the driver for the LCD monitor that died, which actually works great on the CRT, and gives me the higher res.

So, short of always rebooting twice or getting used to the small res, what can I do ? StuRat (talk) 04:29, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Monitors communicate their available modes to the graphics card via a protocol called Display Data Channel, and consequently don't have drivers. I'm inclined to think that the graphics card must be malfunctioning (did the card kill the LCD by failing to respect its capabilities?), or possibly it is the aged monitor that is to blame and you in fact have two dead monitors. You have the correct drivers for the card installed, right?  Card Zero  (talk) 10:05, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I assume so, since it worked fine for over a year on the old monitor. I've also tested the broken monitor on another PC, and it doesn't work there, either. StuRat (talk) 09:17, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

YouTube + flash game problems.

I sometimes get this when trying to play a YouTube video in Firefox 26.0a1:

Error Message

An ActionScript error has occurred: Error #2044: Unhandled securityError:. text=Error #2048: Security sandbox violation: http://s.ytimg.com/yts/swfbin/player-vfle5oFqK/watch_as3.swf cannot load data from http://r4---sn-xoxgbphpqu-3g2e.c.youtube.com/videoplayback?algorithm=throttle-factor&burst=40&clen=912697&cp=U0hXR1ZRUl9FT0NON19OS1ZIOlJEX2Fzc0VmQ1da&cpn=uSzBJrlGFyY0_Spe&dur=57.399&expire=1382664705&factor=1.25&fexp=916912%2C930103%2C932250%2C921087%2C916625%2C924616%2C924610%2C907231&gir=yes&id=9fb598b9f7d0a38a&ip=78.156.109.166&ipbits=8&itag=140&key=yt5&lmt=1382561812255366&ms=au&mt=1382641665&mv=m&signature=B481E13C2A9C3002D00882E823572CC4254149B5.F295E8E7DE6C07FF9E2075836C98365E99B7BCE7&source=youtube&sparams=algorithm%2Cburst%2Cclen%2Ccp%2Cdur%2Cfactor%2Cgir%2Cid%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Clmt%2Csource%2Cupn%2Cexpire&sver=3&upn=aZS1EOw7Ov4&range=0-6950.
Error #2044: Unhandled securityError:. text=Error #2048: Security sandbox violation: http://s.ytimg.com/yts/swfbin/player-vfle5oFqK/watch_as3.swf cannot load data from http://r4---sn-xoxgbphpqu-3g2e.c.youtube.com/videoplayback?algorithm=throttle-factor&burst=40&clen=1544046&cp=U0hXR1ZRUl9FT0NON19OS1ZIOlJEX2Fzc0VmQ1da&cpn=uSzBJrlGFyY0_Spe&dur=57.291&expire=1382664705&factor=1.25&fexp=916912%2C930103%2C932250%2C921087%2C916625%2C924616%2C924610%2C907231&gir=yes&id=9fb598b9f7d0a38a&ip=78.156.109.166&ipbits=8&itag=133&key=yt5&lmt=1382561820960995&ms=au&mt=1382641665&mv=m&signature=D96EA73DA90ECDFACE8592DEB735FC867D251C44.9C4ECFAF3E8C8ED56809EE80F80D421553367C6D&source=youtube&sparams=algorithm%2Cburst%2Cclen%2Ccp%2Cdur%2Cfactor%2Cgir%2Cid%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Clmt%2Csource%2Cupn%2Cexpire&sver=3&upn=aZS1EOw7Ov4&range=0-8470.
	at com.google.youtube.players::TagStreamPlayer/createAppendBytesNetStream()
	at com.google.youtube.players::TagStreamPlayer/getNewNetStream()
	at com.google.youtube.players::HTTPVideoPlayer/connectStream()
	at com.google.youtube.players::HTTPVideoPlayer/onNetStatus()
	at com.google.youtube.players::TagStreamPlayer/onNetStatus()
	at flash.net::NetConnection/connect()
	at com.google.youtube.players::HTTPVideoPlayer/resetStream()
	at com.google.youtube.players::HTTPVideoPlayer/initiatePlayback()
	at com.google.youtube.players::TagStreamPlayer/initiatePlayback()
	at com.google.youtube.players::BasePlayerState/play()
	at com.google.youtube.players::BaseVideoPlayer/play()
	at com.google.youtube.application::VideoApplication/playVideo()
	at com.google.youtube.application::VideoApplication/startApplication()
	at com.google.youtube.application::WatchPageVideoApplication/startApplication()
	at com.google.youtube.application::VideoApplication/onInited()
	at com.google.youtube.application::Application/initData()
	at com.google.youtube.application::VideoApplication/initData()
	at com.google.youtube.application::WatchPageVideoApplication/initData()
	at Function/http://adobe.com/AS3/2006/builtin::apply()
	at com.google.youtube.application::VideoApplication/guardedCall()
	at com.google.youtube.application::Application/init()
	at com.google.youtube.application::VideoApplication/init()
	at com.google.youtube.application::WatchPageVideoApplication/init()
	at com.google.youtube.application::VideoApplication/onLoaderInfoInit()

And sometimes I get this: Warning: Unresponsive script. The flash player plugin has stopped responding. You can see if it completes or stop the script now. Also why do YouTube videos work for me in Internet Explorer 11 but not in Firefox 26.0a1? In Firefox, it says "An error has occurred. Please try again later. Learn more" in the place where the video is supposed to be. And get this when loading Cursed Treasure 2: An ActionScript error has occurred: Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2124: Loaded file is an unknown type. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.156.109.166 (talk) 09:44, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I have reformatted the error message so it doesn't disrupt the rest of the page layout. Nimur (talk) 15:23, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Your first error occurs because of a poorly-thought-out web design on YouTube: a server that delivers your video needs to load a file from a different server. One file is hosted on youtube.com, and one is hosted on the YouTube content delivery network aliased as "ytimg.com" - which sets off your flash plugin's security alarm, because it looks like a cross site scripting attack (attempting to load resources from a separate top level domain). There is nothing to suggest it's a real malware attack; it's just poorly architected server aliasing, and has a symptom that looks fishy to Firefox's sandbox.

Your second error can occur because the Flash plug-in is loading or running too slowly. Firefox assumes the plug-in has crashed, and asks if you want to force-quit it. Sometimes, Flash plugin actually has crashed; and sometimes the game or video you're loading is just poorly implemented and runs very slowly; so Firefox lets you decide whether to wait or force-terminate. Nimur (talk) 15:53, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I'd like solutions. 78.156.109.166 (talk) 10:06, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Maybe the solution got lost in technobabble, but to summarize, there is almost nothing you can do as an end-user to fix these issues. These bugs need to be fixed by the server administrators and programmers who created the software. You can send bug-reports to the authors of those softwares, in the hopes that it will expedite a fix.

You can work around the plug-in sandboxing issue on YouTube by disabling your Flash plug-in, and streaming video directly to your browser. On YouTube, this is branded as switching to "html5 video."

The other issue you described in the game is a totally unrelated problem. You can send a bug report to the software author, but it looks like his game was created as "work for hire," so it might be complicated to get a fix pushed to the game's publisher. Nimur (talk) 10:28, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

not understanding b trees

hello, can someone help me out with this? i have to create a b tree with order 3 with the following values: 12, 24, 7, 4, 30, 13, 19, 27, 8, 10, 2, 18, 21, 14. when creating it, i run into trouble adding 13. this is what i sketch

          12 | 13
         /      \
      4 | 7      24 | 30

however, this is incorrect. the correct method is:

          12 | 24
         /   \    \
      4 | 7   13   30

why is my method wrong? and what exactly does order 3 mean? because at the end of the b tree, only the second row actually has 3 things in it. this is the final result:

               12
           /         \
          7           18 | 24
        /  \        /      /     \
    2 | 4  8 | 10 13 | 14 19 | 21   27 | 30

205.211.50.163 (talk) 20:38, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

What is making you decide to move the 24 when you insert 13? In an order N tree, you can have anywhere between N/2 and N children per node. In your final example, all non-leaf nodes have 2 or 3 children, so they are following the N/2 to N rule. Our B-Tree article has a good example work-through of the insertion algorithm if you haven't already read it. Katie R (talk) 20:43, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

are you talking about what i did or the solution? because in my mind i see nothing wrong with having 12 and 13 as the root, but the solution provided by my professor has 24 and 12 as the root with 13 put below. anyway ill read the article more thoroughly, i was given basically three powerpoint slides on the formula used for b trees and thats all. thanks 205.211.50.163 (talk) 20:48, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I was asking about your workthrough of the first few elements. If you follow the algorithm described in the page, you should see 24 at the root at that stage, just like in the correct solution you posted. Let us know if you're still having trouble after reading through the article, in particular the part with the insertion algorithm. I probably won't be back online until Monday, so this post will likely be archived by then, but someone else may be able to help. Katie R (talk) 16:19, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I would like to add that your example is a valid b-tree, that is it follows all of the rules for how many elements are in the nodes and how they are arranged. The problem is that the standard b-tree algorithm would not have created that particular layout given the elements in the order you listed. Katie R (talk) 16:26, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Bandwidth shaping

A few weeks ago I asked a question here about the possibility that my ISP is throttling my file transfer. I use a program called CrashPlan to back files on my PC to a hard drive I put into my mother's PC. When I reported the problem previously, I said that the usual upload rate was ~800 KBps when I actually meant 800 Kbps and this was determined to be normal because it is eight times the speed I actually achieve. I've seen it exceed 4 Mbps but it normally doesn't reach that for very long. So is my ISP reducing my bandwidth, perhaps because they think I'm illegally file-sharing? If I leave my computer and my mother's computer on, it will take 50 days to complete at the current transfer rate (430 GB to transfer)! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.148.107.181 (talk) 21:05, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

What is your ISP and your mother's ISP? Some ISPs simply throttle every TCP connection after the first few megabytes (my Google-fu is failing me, so this is from memory). You might annoy the ISP in any case if you transfer 430 GB of data, even if it takes 50 days. Theoretically the information about throttling and monthly maximums should be published in the ISP's terms of service.

If your computer and your mother's computer are in the same house, the transfer should happen over the local network at a much higher speed without the ISP being involved at all. Otherwise, it would make sense to temporarily attach the drive to your computer for the initial backup. If CrashPlan doesn't support either of those things, you might want to consider different backup software. -- BenRG (talk) 22:07, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

If you visit her frequently, borrow an external hard drive and take that over. --Aspro (talk) 01:15, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

November 27

To hire a programmer for a job

Hi there,

I am wondering if it is the right place to ask such a question or if such questions are allowed here. So I will try. A month ago I got a patent from USPTO office. It concerns a special mode of visual processing. It is a device, however I have never implemented it in practice. What I need is to prove (or disprove) that it can work in real time. The device should employ either a laptop (better) or a desktop with sufficient computer power. The modeling should involve some graphics, rather simple, and considerable amount of numerical integration. The first step will be computation of special functions. No high math will be needed since the computations will be based on well known recurrence formulas. They are elementary. Quite many iteration will be required and this is one of the major problems.

I do have considerable experience with programming in C# and about two years ago I tried to crack the problem. What I ran into was that the functions, I calculated, were missing some roots predicted by the theory. Also many years ago I tried to do similar calculation in Fortran IV with double precision on an ancient mainframe and I got good harmonics after many iterations. Unfortunately I had to abandon the project (of calculating everything myself) and now I want to hire a programmer to do the job.

I will have to try to estimate the time needed for the project more carefully but it seems to me 20 hours might be sufficient. I do not want to use MathLab for that. I want the functions calculated from scratch. The graphics I mentioned are for visualization and displaying intermediate results.

I live on Mountain Time. My first question is: what would be an hourly rate a competent person, perhaps a graduate student will charge me to do the job or, alternatively, how much should I offer? The second question is: how difficult is it to find such a person? One acquaintance scared me with his assertion that it would be extremely difficult. Sure my first thrust will be to find such individual locally.

Any suggestions will be welcome.

Thanks, 174.52.14.15 (talk) 00:43, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Some thoughts:

1) Fortran is still available, and not a bad choice for the math engine. I've used it myself recently for this purpose. You might want to separate the graphics from the math engine, using different languages and maybe programmers for each. Although Fortran can do graphics, too. See the bottom of my home page for some examples of animations I created using Fortran.

2) 20 hours seems absurdly low, to me, as it will probably take that long just to nail down the specs.

3) You will probably have to offer a high rate for such a short project. StuRat (talk) 01:01, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the suggestions. It is already something. Could you give me your estimate in terms of the hours and the rate? Just rough ideas. Wow, I just checked your web page. It is very impressive.174.52.14.15 (talk) 01:08, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Given the obscurity of the description, anybody sensible will estimate a 90% probability that your task is hopeless, and require $1000 up front to invest any time in it at all. You might be able to interest a grad student with good numerical analysis skills for $50/hr, but without any specific knowledge of the math you want it's completely impossible to say how many hours would be needed. Looie496 (talk) 01:11, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. Full specs are needed to develop an estimate. Also, you might offer a portion of any future profits instead of cash, if money is tight right now. StuRat (talk) 01:19, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I can pay for the job, it is not a problem. $50.00 an hour is what I expected. I am learning as we go. Now is the question: how to write a spec. Well, it is numerical integration. One of the problems will be that the computations themselves might take an eternity, or at least hours and hours. I hope I won't be charged for that. What I would need is the time spent on specific tasks. Then somehow I will have to figure out if there exist faster computers that might accelerate the integration.

I can describe the whole project broken down in specific tasks. But first I would like to try to make a spec. Any references for me to see a few samples?

As I said I tried to crack the problem myself. What I did: I created a form (it is elementary in C#). It took me, I don't remember exactly how long but definitely not more than 8 hours, perhaps much less. Sure there were a bunch of buttons with some small windows for initial parameters, like indices L & M. Then a window for the argument. The program was rather short. Tomorrow I will open my source and will be able to tell exactly the number of lines. My goal was to calculate the special functions used in integration. I got weird function values. Apparently computational errors accumulated. I was tired at that time and just dropped it. I was discouraged. Lately I recalled my Fortran experience and thought that it was the way to go. The thing is, it is not what I do for a living. It is all rather complicated to explain. Also I want some independent mind with much broader computer experience to take a look at the problem. Even now with the hints you are dropping I am learning a lot. Thanks174.52.14.15 (talk) 02:24, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

The specs don't have to be very formal, just list what the program is supposed to do, as detailed as you can, and include any formulas you have developed. Does your patent application include any of that, or is it just for the hardware ? As far as not paying for the programmer's time while a long batch job runs, yes, that could be a term of your contract. However, you said you hope to get it to run real time, and this confuses me. Do you mean it will initially take hours, but you hope to get it down to seconds ? In that case, you need to do lots of benchmarking and code optimization, which is a different type of coding. I've done some of that, too, and it takes many iterations, tweaking one thing at a time, then running your test cases again, to see if that tweak improves the speed. StuRat (talk) 03:34, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

A patent is supposed to provide enough information to make a working example. You should have got your idea working in C# or Basic or anything first even if very slowly using an inefficient method. If you can't get it working slowly there is no point talking about doing it fast. A programmer might be able to get it going fast using a better algorithm once you get it working satisfactorily but they're not going to do your work in devising a method in the first place. Dmcq (talk) 08:51, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

If I understand the OP correctly, the problem seems to be error stackup, which is caused by using too low of a precision in the calculations. If so, there are solutions to that. Some languages support arbitrary-precision arithmetic calculations, for example. Or, perhaps 32-bit or 64-bit precision would be enough.

However, you do have a point that the algorithm may not work. With this in mind, the contract should not specify that the programmer must provide working code, but only that they must implement the algorithm defined in the specs correctly. Whether the formulae work or not is beyond their responsibility.

I once had a robotics professor derive the formulae for linear movement of robotics arms, without consulting any notes, in class, over several weeks. He then asked us to implement those formulae in code, and, no surprise, they didn't work. So, it happens. Even very smart people sometimes make mistakes. Let's hope this is not one of those cases. StuRat (talk) 09:15, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

The problem is more likely to be caused by discretization, which especially comes into play in numerical integration. But when the OP starts talking about numerical integration and then suddenly is talking about roots, it's really impossible to figure out what sort of mathematics is involved here. Looie496 (talk) 16:36, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much for all contributions. I have to go to work now and will be back in about 12 hours. It is a very interesting discussion for me. Thanks, -Alex

Well, this is the scoop (partial though). Let's assume I have it under control. I will use masculine for simplicity. I've found a man who would agree to follow the script, we have a contract, etc. So, he writes software, he then runs the "program" and determines that the execution took let's say N minutes. What will follow is not a clear vision because I have so little experience in it, it is sort of granular. I will look into multiprocessor hardware. The task itself is highly linear and it is amenable to breaking up in much smaller and manageable parts. I will describe it later in the spec. Multiprocessing is mentioned in the patent. Dell manufactures a server with 96 processors. Perhaps that will be the answer. I can afford to buy it if needed. The further vision is to get a computer with perhaps 4096 processors. I've read somewhere that there is an experimental machine available with that many. But I need to run the task one single time to calculate roughly how many processors will be needed. Then another option still down the road is: provided everything points to it and financing is available I may approach Dell and ask them to make a computer with so many processors, perhaps 256 or whatnot, unencumbered with any I/O junk, pure calculator that will run the integrations I need. Sure some I/O will be needed but stripped down. And how about creating specialized hardware for at least part of the task, sort of special processors like video cards. Perhaps some of the subtasks could be hard wired solid, who knows.

Someone mentioned a possible optimization which I've also had in mind. One thing I expect to find out from the execution is to learn which part requires the largest effort and consumes most of the time. If it is calculations of the special functions (harmonics) then perhaps it would make sense to create a table (library) of needed values and take what you need every time. That will require a three-dimensional matrix though because you change two indices and an argument (angle). Hopefully it will cut down on execution time. Perhaps it can be kept in RAM. Then it will be super fast, or in case of ordering a new machine from Dell, a cash memory might be construed for that.

Another idea is to try to calculate those special functions only at key points and then use linear or quadratic interpolation to fill the gaps. In some areas they look like sine/cosine and perhaps those could be used instead. The only thing that will be needed is the table of all roots. The ideas here are plentiful. Thanks2601:7:7680:626:86D:846D:AD0B:96BD (talk) 01:44, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Some more thoughts:

A) You mean cache memory, not cash.

B) "Highly linear" to me means sequential processing, where each step depends on the previous step. In this case, parallel processors won't help.

C) Having a custom computer architecture designed for you will cost a huge amount of money. If there's any way to use an off-the-shelf model instead, I recommend that.

D) A lookup table in memory will require more time up-front to load it into memory. Just reading the entries off the hard disk, as needed, will take longer per look-up. Assuming they are properly indexed, though, that might still be quicker, if the number of items you need to look up per run is only a small portion of the total. You might also consider a relational database for storing a large look-up table, as they offer several indexing options, which you can optimize for your situation. (In your case a hierarchical database would also work, but relational databases have had a lot more work done on them to optimize efficiency, in recent years.) StuRat (talk) 06:08, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Set Mac OS X Leopard to wake up every two hours

Is there a way for me to make it such that my iMac running Mac OS X 10.5.8 wakes up every X hours? The system that is found in the "Energy Saver" panel is insufficient for this task. — Melab±1 ☎ 06:27, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I haven't used it, but this program says it can do scheduled wakeup calls [10]. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:58, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Is your iMac a PowerPC-based system? That could change subtle details about how power events get triggered.

Either way, you can use pmset to set and modify advanced schedules for power management events. For example:

     pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 12:00:00  wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 14:00:00 wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 16:00:00

... will wake (or power on) the system every day, at 12:00, 2 PM, 4 PM, and so on, repeating forever.

Nimur (talk) 04:48, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

How Do I edit wikipedia using javascript on monobook.js

I want to make a javascript (user script) that automatically edits a page (without needing to press any buttons). This will be very helpful for tagging. I one day wish to make something similar to twinkle. But I need to start somewhere...Finally An Account (talk) 17:31, 27 November 2013 (UTC) How do I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_scripts/Guide to work.Finally An Account (talk) 18:24, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Disabling resizable text areas on Firefox

There are certain pages that I use that Firefox will automatically shrink the text areas and then put a resizing button in the corner. Is there any way to suppress or disable that? All my searches just turn up help for website developers to suppress it on their site only, instead of a solution for the user. —Akrabbim^talk 19:12, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Well if you can change it, it's probably in about:config (see this list of about:config entries). You're sure it's not caused by javascript on the page itself? Can you try visiting the page with javascript turned off, or give us a link to an example page?  Card Zero  (talk) 20:11, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Have you tested the page in another browser for comparison? I believe Firefox adds the resizing handle to all textareas (unless the page code says not to), but the textarea's starting size is specified by the page itself. So if you're annoyed that the textarea starts out too small, I believe that's caused by the way the page was coded and not caused by Firefox. The resizing handle lets you override the size if the page's default size is too small.

Firefox has a user style sheet that lets you modify every page you visit. This can be used to remove the resize handle, or change other aspects of webpages to your liking. Here's how to find it:

1. Go to the Help menu and choose Troubleshooting Information.
2. Find the line Profile Folder and click Show Folder.
3. Open the chrome folder.
4. Using a text editor, edit userContent.css or create it if it doesn't exist.

You can add the following line to disable the textarea resize handle:

textarea { resize: none !important; }

Restart Firefox to see the change.

• If you want to use styles that other people have made, you may be able to find add-ons that make the process easier. For example, I found userstyles.org recommends an add-on called Stylish, but I don't have any experience with that site or add-on.
• If you want to make your own style rules, you can read up about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the language used.

--Bavi H (talk) 06:32, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

How do I mount my SD card's 2nd partition on my Samsung Galaxy Victory?

I can't use Link2SD to transfer my movable apps to the SD card unless I "mount" the 2nd partition.

TWRP won't let me select the option "Mount SD Card," so I figure TWRP isn't the right app to mount the 2nd partition from. What will let me?

And once I successfully mount the 2nd partition, I'd get 4 choices: ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT32 / FAT16. I'm trending toward ext4, so I take it that's the right choice?

I've been wanting to transfer many movable apps to the SD card because I have very anemic space on my internal storage (less than 5 GB.) That's why I partitioned my 32 GB SD card, but I still have yet to figure out how to "mount" said partition and what file system to choose, before I move the apps. Thanks. --Let Us Update Wikipedia: Dusty Articles 21:53, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

DVD drive keeps on spinning

It just does it for no reason. I'm running Windows XP. Is there a command to stop it? Thanks for any help you can offer. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 22:05, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm assuming there's no disk in it, which is just weird. Even so, there are some good suggestions here: if "power options" in the control panel is set to put hard drives to sleep, try turning that off; if you can locate a firmware update from the DVD drive's manufacturer's site, install that; do a thorough malware scan; then try turning off any anti-virus program to establish whether that's trying to access optical disks.  Card Zero  (talk) 00:31, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm so sorry. I neglected to say that it spins when a disk is in but not in use. The superuser site seems to be blocked here in China. I'll try the things you recommend. Many thanks. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:47, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

November 28

Size of electronics

These days, all our electronics are getting thinner and lighter but at what cost are manufacturers doing this? Is it performance? I dont think its cost as the high end professional electronic items still tend to be larger and chunkier, as well as more expensive. 82.40.46.182 (talk) 00:24, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Actually performance tends to go up as size goes down, since the electrons don't have as far to travel, so get there sooner. Reliability can be a problem, though. NASA tends to use older, bulkier electronics, so a stray particle won't destroy them. Here on Earth, we have the atmosphere to protect us from that, but still subtle things like temperature and humidity changes could cause problems. StuRat (talk) 00:38, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Connect a laptop to a HDTV

Thinking of getting a flatscreen HDTV to hook up to my laptop, mostly so I can watch streaming Netflix movies on a bigger screen. I have a Toshiba Tecra A-7 (bought 2006 or 2007). I checked the archives but couldn't find anything that would apply to my case. My laptop doesn't has a HDMI port as far as I can tell but an S-video outlet. Do I need some extra hardware, is there a cable that would do the trick or is the solution, if there is one, completely different? Appreciated for any helpful input. thank you.71.101.136.168 (talk) 02:17, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

You will need a converter : http://www.ebay.com/bhp/s-video-to-hdmi-adapter

S video? Do your laptop even have VGA output? 140.0.229.39 (talk) 02:56, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Mmh, yes, of course it has a VGA output too. Is there a way to connect it to a TV through that or do I still need the converter mentioned above?71.101.136.168 (talk) 03:07, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Also as a side note: With that converter i won't get HD I guess, unlike on my laptop? Unless Netflix (silver light) tricks me into thinking I have HD. Hard to see a difference on such a small screen thus I don't know for sure what I get.71.101.136.168 (talk) 04:46, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Dual Monitor Setup with Different Size Monitors

I have a dual monitor setup with two different size monitors. The issue I am having is when I use remote desktop to connect to my server, on the left monitor (the larger one), when I maximize, I don't have to scroll right/left and up/down. Then when I move it over to the right monitor, I have to scroll right/left and up/down to display everything on the screen. Is this because I am using two different monitors of different resolutions? Are there are software fixes for the issue? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:E000:5FC0:1E:15CB:3E18:656C:8F1E (talk) 03:23, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Nice question. I too am wondering about that setup. Using several PC's on one screen,keyboard and mouse is easy done but what the other way around?71.101.136.168 (talk) 03:42, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it is because you are using two different resolutions. The only fix I can imagine is to use the same res on both. StuRat (talk) 05:50, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Shuffle a deck of cards in Java

If I'm working with a deck of cards that is held in an array, can I use Collections.shuffle to shuffle the deck? It says that it's used on lists but I have an array. Dismas|^(talk) 06:29, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

I think you might just implement shuffling routine yourself as a method for the array. Algorithm is described in the doc you linked:

This implementation traverses the list backwards, from the last element up to the second, repeatedly swapping a randomly selected element into the "current position". Elements are randomly selected from the portion of the list that runs from the first element to the current position, inclusive.

that is, going with pos from N–1 downto 0 make random number r such that 0 ≤ r ≤ pos and swap array elements at pos and r. Done.

You might also use Arrays.AsList which gives a List-like interface to an array. :) --CiaPan (talk) 06:51, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Dismas, you can convert your array into an ArrayList, using Arrays.asList. Now you have a Collection object that you can safely pass to the Collections shuffle function. Nimur (talk) 10:32, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

TrueCrypt Pre-Boot Authentication - can it be temporarily disabled?

Hi, I'm looking for a way to temporarily disable the built-in Pre-Boot Authentication feature of TrueCrypt, so that security updates / software installations that require a reboot don't require physical presence of somebody to type in the password. Does anybody know how that could be accomplished, preferably purely in software or with the use of a regular USB storage medium (no special "Token generator")? I'm looking for a way that would either have it bypass the authentication "just once" or a pre-defined, selectable number of reboot cycles, or as long as the USB storage medium is plugged in.

Kind Regards, 149.172.200.27 (talk) 12:44, 28 November 2013 (UTC)