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September 1

How to search for movies that move ?

I type a topic into a search engine, pick movies, and get what looks to be movies about that topic. But they are just slide shows instead. Is there a way to exclude those from the search results ? One complicating factor is that they may have movement, of a sort, if they pan the snapshots or zoom in on them. But that's not what I want, I want a full motion movie. Any ideas ? StuRat (talk) 04:05, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't know, but I hope so, too. Even worse is when you think you're getting a movie, but after the ad stops, it's just a 1:34:23 long screenshot with an ad for a pirate site tacked on. Doesn't pan, doesn't zoom, doesn't do anything. No music. Just anger! YouTube owes me that 1:34:23 of my life back.

Sadly, I think the indexers just look at the file, host and keywords. If it says FLV or whatever, it's a movie to their puny robot brains. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:17, September 1, 2014 (UTC)

Pre-compiled header files?

I noticed that my work computer's (Windows 7) hard drive is 43% full of "pre-compiled header files" (.pch) presumably created by Microsoft Visual Studio. What are these used for? Do I need them after successfully building my code? If not, then is there an easy way in Windows to automatically delete them? JIP | Talk 13:32, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Does the MSDN article Creating Precompiled Header Files help? --Phil Holmes (talk) 14:03, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

In short, they are "cached" compiled files which are unlikely to change, and supposed to speed up large projects. You can delete these files, or just those which haven't been accessed recently, without any ill effects (unless you recompile the code which recreates them; they will reappear if you do ;) )

In my experience, the savings are minimal and sometimes negative; OTOH, compiling across networks does seem to save time, due to the slower data transfer in that case.

43% is a metric shitload of them, given the size of a Windows 7, or generally a post-XP Windows, partition. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 14:29, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

That there is a "metric shitload" of them is mostly because our application is big (I haven't counted, but the source code must run into several hundred thousand lines of code, if not over a million, and the total installed size of the compiled application is in the order of several gigabytes), and I have to maintain several different versions of it, as different customers have different licence agreements, which include different versions of the application. I'm just amazed that these pre-compiled header files take up way more space than the source code or the compiled application. JIP | Talk 19:06, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Several gigabytes of code would explain the PCH bloat quite nicely, indeed.

...and I made an error in the unit conversion; it's only an imperial shitload. ;) - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 06:46, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

PCH files will only help if you have two or more compilation units that start with exactly the same code (and are compiled with the same command-line options). To get the benefit you need to compile one of them with the generate-PCH option (-Yc), then compile the others with the use-PCH option (-Yu). In standard Visual Studio projects you put common headers in stdafx.h and #include that from all of your source files, and there's a dummy stdafx.cpp that also #includes it and gets compiled first. If your project isn't set up that way, and is (mis)configured to pass -Yc when building every file, that might explain the metric firkin of PCH files you're seeing. In that case they're not doing any good and are actually slowing down your build. -- BenRG (talk) 22:23, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

September 2

the text "chapter no # " missing

I m writing a thesis using a thesis template in latex , But I have problem with the title of chapter. In my thesis each chapter starts with only chapter name but before this the text "Chapter No ... " is missing.I want this to appear. thesis style file has the following code at start:

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}[1996/12/01]
\ProvidesClass{Thesis}
              [2007/22/02 v1.0
   LaTeX document class]
\def\baseclass{book}
\DeclareOption*{\PassOptionsToClass{\CurrentOption}{\baseclass}}
\def\@checkoptions#1#2{
  \edef\@curroptions{\@ptionlist{\@currname.\@currext}}
  \@tempswafalse
  \@tfor\@this:=#2\do{
    \@expandtwoargs\in@{,\@this,}{,\@curroptions,}
    \ifin@ \@tempswatrue \@break@tfor \fi}
  \let\@this\@empty
  \if@tempswa \else \PassOptionsToClass{#1}{\baseclass}\fi
}
\@checkoptions{11pt}{{10pt}{11pt}{12pt}}
\PassOptionsToClass{a4paper}{\baseclass}
\ProcessOptions\relax
\LoadClass{\baseclass}
\newcommand\bhrule{\typeout{------------------------------------------------------------------------------}}
\newcommand\Declaration[1]{
\btypeout{Declaration of Authorship}
\addtotoc{Declaration of Authorship}
\thispagestyle{plain}
\null\vfil
%\vskip 60\p@
\begin{center}{\huge\bf Declaration of Authorship\par}\end{center}
%\vskip 60\p@
{\normalsize #1}
\vfil\vfil\null
%\cleardoublepage
}

\newcommand\btypeout[1]{\bhrule\typeout{\space #1}\bhrule}
\def\today{\ifcase\month\or
  January\or February\or March\or April\or May\or June\or
  July\or August\or September\or October\or November\or December\fi
  \space \number\year}
\usepackage{setspace}
\doublespacing

\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\setlength{\parskip}{2.0ex plus0.5ex minus0.2ex}
\usepackage{vmargin}
\setmarginsrb           { 1.0in}  % left margin
                        { 1.0in}  % top margin
                        { 1.0in}  % right margin
                        { 1.0in}  % bottom margin
                        {  20pt}  % head height
                        {0.25in}  % head sep
                        {   9pt}  % foot height
                        { 0.3in}  % foot sep
\raggedbottom
\setlength{\topskip}{1\topskip \@plus 5\p@}
\doublehyphendemerits=10000       % No consecutive line hyphens.
\brokenpenalty=10000              % No broken words across columns/pages.
\widowpenalty=9999                % Almost no widows at bottom of page.
\clubpenalty=9999                 % Almost no orphans at top of page.
\interfootnotelinepenalty=9999    % Almost never break footnotes.
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\lhead[\rm\thepage]{\fancyplain{}{\sl{\rightmark}}}
\rhead[\fancyplain{}{\sl{\leftmark}}]{\rm\thepage}
\chead{}\lfoot{}\rfoot{}\cfoot{}
\pagestyle{fancy}
%\renewcommand{\chaptermark}[1]{\btypeout{\thechapter\space #1}\markboth{\@chapapp\ \thechapter\ #1}{\@chapapp\ \thechapter\ #1}}

please help me to overcome this — Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.187.106.65 (talk • contribs)

Well, I don't know if it's 'missing', it's just not there :) Anyway, you can do this by adding the appropriate commands into an declaration in the preamble. My first guess is to try \atbeginchapter, but a quick google indicates that doesn't exist. This is the kind of stuff that I usually just google and experiment with. Also, consider that making it look just the way you want may not be the best use of your research time... if the template has passed muster at your university, I would urge caution before messing with it. Surely you have heard horror stories of a thesis being rejected because something was slightly off with the fonts or margins? This is why they pass around a LaTeX template, to help eliminate that risk. So it might be the case that doing what you want will cause your document to break the rules.

Anyway, see here [1], for a discussion of how to \renewcommand{\chapter} to change things around a bit. And you can also ask this question at that site, if you don't get enough satisfactory answers here. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:55, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Oh, and I just realized that your last line is commented out. Try removing the % symbol to let the \renewcommand{\chaptermark} take effect, that might solve the problem tight there. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:58, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

What is the best code to use to create a WikiBot?

Currently I am learning HTML and CSS. Based on the list provided, is there a language that would best fit my needs? I plan to have a personal bot for large edits, and possibly another for fixing syntax differences such as:

* [[File:Example_22.png|thumb|Caption text]]

compared to

*[[File: example 22.png |thumb|caption text]]

.

I have been suggested to use PHP or Python, although I would like to have a second opinion with reasons of versatility for the language. DC64 (talk) 01:20, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

There are some who give damning critiques of PHP. However, I have only heard good about Python 3. →Σσς. (Sigma) 01:22, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I would say python is a good option as there is the Manual:Pywikibot framework which will do a lot of the tricky bits for you. PHP only makes sense if you have the code running on a webserver, say if you have an account on WP:LABS. With python it will typically run from the command line or via a GUI. You might find the actual type of edit you want to do is better handled with WP:AWB which can use regular expressions to make changes like turning File:Example_22.png into File:Example 22.png you may even find that sort of change is already done by WikiProject Check Wikipedia.--Salix alba (talk): 06:26, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Pywikibot does not at present support Python3.[2] I understand it is highly functional with Python2.x.-gadfium 03:08, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Google drive permissible file types

Does Google Drive support arbitrary file types, or is there hidden away somewhere in their terms-of-service agreement some requirement that certain well-known file types be used? I've noticed that they've cut prices considerably, and a large mirrored cloud storage space is becoming affordable. I'm considering mirroring a dedicated disk (or two), where I keep encrypted, compressed versions of the stuff on my hard drives. 3TB, perhaps. I roll my own encryption scheme, and like to package the data in .WAV containers, so that I by listening can confirm that the content is truly random (white noise). ENT is nice for that purpose, too. This will of course thwart the deduplication that I suppose is the basis of Google's pricing. Could I risk that Google converts my WAV files to MP3... --NorwegianBlue ^talk 13:01, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Google Drive will let you store binary blobs, at least if you're a paying customer. I think that rolling your own crypto and hoping to hear patterns in WAV files is a really bad idea, though. Use something standard like GnuPG. "Ent" looks like an untrustworthy home-brew utility as well. -- BenRG (talk) 21:26, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, both for the info and the advice! --NorwegianBlue ^talk 08:30, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

September 3

Visual C++ Simple Game Programming

So, from past questions, I'm learning C++ (and finding that I, actually, really love it as I get used to it). For my own interest, I'd like to make a simple game using it - nothing advanced, at the moment, I just want to make a box that moves around in an area, correctly collides with areas borders, and maybe has to avoid other boxes; just something to get a feel for the basics. At any rate, after a little research, it looks like there are all sorts of different packages and directions to start from, so I wanted to know if anyone has any suggestions. I'm not looking for the simplest route, but what would be most useful to work with long term/what would be worth knowing. If anyone has any experience or direction they can offer, I'd greatly appreciate it, thank you in advance:-)Phoenixia1177 (talk) 03:50, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a popular multimedia library that works on most platforms. You can use it to animate simple 2D and 3d graphics. Nimur (talk) 04:06, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

What operating system are you targetting, and what development environment are you using?--Phil Holmes (talk) 11:17, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

For a very simple game, there are indeed an insane number of libraries that'll help you get it done - and for that purpose, it doesn't much matter which one you choose. I think your decision as to which one to invest time into depends on what you ULTIMATELY want to get done rather than what the simple example needs. Most 'real' games rely on a bunch of different libraries - one for graphics, another for physics, another for sound and so forth. SteveBaker (talk) 14:51, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

I checked out SDL, it seems straightforward enough, I'm going to play with it this weekend. I'm using windows 7, visual express 2013 - I also have Code::Blocks, but haven't really used it. As for targeting, at the moment, no one - at most, I'd like to one day make something simple yet entertaining, basic 3d stuff graphically, nothing commercial grade (I'm not delusional); realistically, this will probably be more of a learning experience and way to pass the time, I like game programming related stuff because it challenges various skills and ends up with a fun result (and I like designing, so that's cool). @Steve, I'm not looking to make anything along the lines of what passes for a modern commercial game, however, I would like to learn something that had the ability to make one. In short, I want to learn something that people would actually use, even if I'm never going to use it for that end. Thank you all again for your help - with this question and my previous ones, actual programming is not something I have a lot of background in and while thrilling, I'm finding it to be a different sort of challenge, you all have been very helpful in getting me started with this:-)Phoenixia1177 (talk) 21:00, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Chinese characters and Firefox

Here on Wikipedia everything is fine, but when typing something in Google search bar or looking at Google results, Chinese characters look very odd. I think it's the Firefox default font. I　have done some research and found someone else having the same issue: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1924991. The thread's answers are not very helpful and it is not a general problem as they assumed. It's a Firefox issue and it happens no matter which encoding I select. I'm a native speaker, so it was probably easier for me to find out that these odd forms actually do exist. They are Japanese standardized forms, therefore some strokes look different. It's the 黑体 font, translated as East Asian gothic typeface.
I thought Firefox did it because the characters are too small although I don't see how the Japanese standardized forms make characters smoother or even save space. So I increased the font size and the characters still stayed the same. It wasn't a size issue after all and 黑体 displays perfectly with Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Microsoft Word at any size. Therefore it must be Japanese characters in 黑体. And I was wrong again. The fact is that they are still Chinese characters, but they are displayed as Japanese ones. If you copy those characters and paste them elsewhere, they look Chinese again. Moreover, Google results only show Chinese websites (I didn't set any country preferences).
Now the strangest thing is yet to be mentioned. I had increased the font size and there were actually two different fonts mixed together. 黑体 is a font where all strokes are equally thick, while 宋体 Song is a serif typeface. Again this happens only with Firefox. You can see it yourself even if you don't know the language. Paste a Chinese character for Google results and increase the font size to the maximum. I tried to find a pattern which font is used for which character and came to the conclusion that traditional Chinese characters which had not undergone simplification are in 黑体, while simplified characters are in 宋体. Finally, I still don't understand why Firefox mixes two fonts and I want to know if there's a method to change this. Hope you don't mind the use of paragraphs in favor of the long text's legibility. --2.245.175.56 (talk) 04:05, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

The same copy-pasted character looking Chinese or Japanese in different software is a consequence of Han unification and different font choices. A single row/column of characters appearing in a mixture of fonts is a result of font substitution. It is a practical necessity these days because no font covers all of Unicode. Firefox does its own font substitution internally, I think, but I don't know the rules. Normally the primary font would be used unless it didn't provide the character, but I would expect every Chinese and Japanese font to provide 令 (U+4EE4), the offending character from the forum thread you linked. I'm not sure your problem is the same as theirs; it looks like they are simply using a Japanese font for all characters in Firefox. Does your problem show up with 令 or only with more obscure characters?

Note that this problem is unrelated to Firefox's character encoding menu. The character encoding is what it is; the only time you might want to select an encoding manually is if Firefox's automatic detection gets it wrong, in which case you'd see gibberish, not regional variants of the correct characters. -- BenRG (talk) 20:49, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it occurs with simple characters like 令. As mentioned above, it happens with all characters that haven't undergone simplification. You say that font substitution is used because no font covers all of Unicode, but 黑体 and 宋体 are able to display all characters, even new characters created for new chemical elements. It's likely Firefox used 黑体 Japanese Kanji, so they didn't contain simplified Chinese. Therefore they added them in another font, 宋体, which I don't understand as 黑体 handles simplified Chinese perfectly in Word. I'm convinced the thread covers the same problem. There are two fonts, but you can't tell them apart in that thread's screenshot because of the small font size. --2.245.175.56 (talk) 00:16, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Try going to Tools → Options → Content tab → Advanced, in the "Fonts for:" dropdown select "Japanese", change the MS PMincho and MS (P)Gothic fonts to SimSun, and see if that fixes it. It will break the display of Japanese-language pages, of course.

There should be a way to override Firefox's regional font choice for a page instead of using this hack, but I don't know how to do it, and it's hard to research because searches like "firefox change language" and "firefox change script" get tons of irrelevant hits.

(Incidentally, I only know Japanese, and I was confused earlier because you referred to 黑体 and 宋体 fonts, and I knew those weren't Japanese fonts so I figured they were Chinese. I now realize that they're the styles called gothic and mincho in Japanese, not fonts. As you suggested, you're likely getting MS PGothic with fallback to SimSun.) -- BenRG (talk) 04:13, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Here are a couple more pages that mention the problem: [3][4]. Firefox seems to prefer Japanese fonts to Chinese, and either it's hardcoded or the option to change it is hard to find. I did find another solution: if you set your preferred web page language to Chinese (Tools → Options → Content → Choose) then Google will display its interface in Chinese and Chinese fonts will be used. This will only work on web sites that pay attention to your language preference, though. -- BenRG (talk) 06:48, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

SimSun didn't work, so I changed them all to 宋体 like the Simplified Chinese settings, which solved the problem. When visiting Japanese pages, Kana is still supported. Thank you! --2.245.237.32 (talk) 19:59, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

September 4

What exactly is a "Gaussian blob" chart, and in what situations is it used?

In This page, showing how to use a Java library that does charts, there is "ScatterChart01: Gaussian Blob", which shows an image of small circles with a radius. What is this exactly and where is it used? The example code shows a call to Random.nextGaussian, which i never heard of before.

I acknowledge partly that this may just be a "normal" scatter plot, since the dots seem to be all of the same radius. Googling for "Gaussian Blob" only returns Blob detection as defined in computer science, which is something about graphical areas that look similar or share characteristics. Is this chart called Gaussian Blob only because it resembles one such blob with all its data points? I HAVE also seen charts like this with different sized dots. If my suspicion is right and this is just a scatter plot, what is the use in different radius dots? What does it mean and what are some applications?

216.173.144.188 (talk) 20:01, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

This is a normal scatterplot of points sampled from a two-dimensional Gaussian probability distribution. Blob is an informal term; the points tend to form a mass or blob centered on the origin. --Mark viking (talk) 20:06, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for that clarification. I think the chart I was thinking of in the second part of my original post was Bubble chart. Are there any really good examples for why this type of chart would be used? Is there a situation where the size of the dot shows something intuitive, or is it just used to hold a 3rd dimension of data?

216.173.144.188 (talk) 20:19, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Even in this page which seems to try to explain the reason for bubble charts, and has examples, it seems the third variable is not given special properties above x and y, the data for this radius variable could be whatever you wanted, just like X and Y. Am i correct in assuming Bubble Charts exist because "3D Scatter Plots" would be insane to try to look at and make sense of?

216.173.144.188 (talk) 20:45, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

A regular bubble chart doesn't seem as useful to me as a geographic bubble map. For example, a map of the US could have different sized blobs indicating the populations of cites, or the magnitudes of earthquakes. StuRat (talk) 23:57, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

September 5

Wikipedia

Every time I look at the Wikipedia app, it works just fine. However when I close it and open it, it is a very different style. Can you help me? . — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexander Gellos (talk • contribs) 22:52, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

If you're really referring to a wikipedia app, which one? The official app or something else List of Wikipedia mobile applications Help:Mobile access#Official apps? And what OS? You'll probably be best served contacting whoever made the app since I'm sceptical anyone here can help you, but either way you'll need these sort of details. Similarly, if you're not referring to any wikipedia app but simply wikipedia on your internet browser, you'll probably need to provide OS and browser details (and don't call it a wikipedia app if you're just looking at wikipedia on your browser, it gets confusing when there is an app for many mobile platforms). Nil Einne (talk) 13:49, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

I have had the website inexplicably change from Desktop to Mobile mode on my computer. If that's what you're talking about: There's a Mobile / Desktop link down at the bottom of the site that lets you switch. You might find more information at Help:Mobile_access. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 01:57, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

September 6

Need a lightweight serial I/O library with good flow control.

I'm trying to fix flow control problems in a system with a BeagleBone connected to an Arduino computer via a serial port connection. The Arduino can be very slow (like it might be busy for minutes at a time) - and it has very little RAM memory available for serial buffers (at most 128 bytes). The BeagleBone is running Linux and at times is much faster than the Arduino and at other times, much slower.

So I need a robust flow-control scheme. Sadly, I can't use any out-of-band signalling via control wires or whatever because the Arduino's pins are all in use for other things.

What I need is a lightweight (implementable on Arduino!) serial port protocol with really robust flow control...preferably as an OpenSource library.

Any ideas?

TIA SteveBaker (talk) 04:43, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

By "serial" I'm assuming you mean RS-232. Even if you did have the wires for it, it seems the Arduino UART is set to never support hardware flow control, so you're stuck with XON/XOFF software flow control. From the Linux end, this is already supported in the serial port driver (this code has someone disabling it - you can do the opposite); it seems the rudimentary serial driver examples for the Arduino don't, so you may have to roll your own. One caveat, as it's in-band, is that if you're intending to send binary data, you'll have to byte-stuff your data to remove any XON (0x11) and XOFF (0x13) bytes with as scheme like:

 XON - > ESC 0x00
 XOFF -> ESC 0x01
 ESC  -> ESC ESC

I'm not sure, but I don't think, that the Linux serial driver will do that itself. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 10:24, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Note that this is only as "robust" if one assumes the serial channel is perfect. In practice, if an XON is missed then the system deadlocks forever, and if an XOFF is missed then you get an overflow. But if reliability is necessary, then you end up having to implement framing, checksums, retransmission, and sequence numbers, and you've gone some way to implementing a rather half-baked TCP on SLIP. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 12:55, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah something as simple as XON/XOFF won't work - but I am sending ASCII data, so in-band signalling is OK. I was hoping to find something along the lines of a very lightweight TCP. (Although the tiny buffer size on the Arduino puts rather serious limits on how many messages it can hold for retransmission!) SteveBaker (talk) 18:38, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Type of the S combinator

At Curry–Howard correspondence, the type of the S combinator is listed as "(α → (β → γ)) → ((α → β) → (α → γ))". I'm not seeing how this works. If interpreted as a function type, it describes a function from "(α → (β → γ))" to "((α → β) → (α → γ))", meaning it takes two arguments (a value and a function) and returns a function. But the S combinator takes three arguments. Can someone explain how this works? --Doradus (talk) 12:31, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

I think I may have just read a description that makes sense to me. Let me put it here so the experts can confirm I'm right, or point out errors. From this page I found a type signature for S of "(t3 → t4 → t5) → (t3 → t4) → t3 → t5". This one makes sense to me. From there, I only need to know that "→" associates right-to-left, so I can parenthesize this as "(t3 → (t4 → t5)) → ((t3 → t4) → (t3 → t5))" which is the same as "(α → (β → γ)) → ((α → β) → (α → γ))". --Doradus (talk) 13:29, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

That's correct. T → (U → V) is a function that takes an T and returns a function that takes a U and returns a V, which is the same as a function that takes an T and a U and returns a V. Applying it to its two arguments would look like (fx)y. For this reason → is normally taken to be right-associative and function application left-associative, so you can write T → U → V and fxy. -- BenRG (talk) 18:04, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

CSS Font Restrictions

Hi,
I have a font.
I would like to know how to add or remove CSS restrictions to a font?
Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.228.145.152 (talk) 19:56, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

The only restriction I'm aware of is that the font should be stored in the same 'domain' as the CSS that references it. So the simplest way to remove restrictions is to copy the font into the same web site directory as the files that are referring to it. Alternatively, you can use Cross-origin resource sharing (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS) to safely bypass that restriction.

SteveBaker (talk) 18:38, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

None of the current web typography standards has a digital rights management component (Microsoft's Embedded OpenType does, but isnt' widely supported). Some font foundries use Adobe's Typekit (or their own work-alike solution) which provides some rather rudimentary limits to trivial or accidental infringement of a font's licence. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 12:27, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Time Machine greedy for space

This backup is too large for the backup disk. The backup requires 286.00 GB but only 194.04 GB are available.

Time Machine needs work space on the backup disk, in addition to the space required to store backups. Open Time Machine preferences to select a larger backup disk or make the backup smaller by excluding files.

(I'm still using Snow Leopard.) I never got such an error message before yesterday! Why doesn't TM simply delete old backups to make enough space, like usual? Is this because I recently started using the same disk to back up two computers? —Tamfang (talk) 23:19, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Time Machine can only delete old backups if there are old backups remaining that are eligible for removal. Time Machine cleverly plays with UNIX hardlinks and copies to maintain different versions of the same hard disk quite efficiently (it only stores new copies of a file if it has been changed). But if you backup multiple disks or computers, then you need at least enough space to copy both disks once (for the initial backup), and some extra space for the incremental backups, and some working space. Above, you write that Time Machine wants 286 GB - that is an unusually large amount of space for an incremental backup, unless you work with and backup large video files. Is this the first time you try to backup the second machine? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:32, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

No, I had done it 15 times, before the error happened on the first machine. (The second one has less stuff.) Another oddity: backups before the error are in folder Baby (the first machine's name), and those after the error (after I cleared out a bunch of old stuff "by hand") are in another folder, Baby 895. —Tamfang (talk) 07:52, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

The 'Baby 895' sounds suspicious, unless that is the name of the other computer... I'm not sure that TM intends for you to go into the hard drive and delete stuff 'by hand', that may have caused it to start a whole new backup system for Baby, rather than writing to the previous system (because it could tell it might have been compromised). If 'Baby 895' appears complete, I'd recommend just scrapping the old Baby directory to free up space, unless you have a specific need for a backup from last year, as opposed to last week. If you don't get enough help here, you could try asking this question here [5]. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:07, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

I may just wipe the disk; I have two others. —Tamfang (talk) 23:00, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

September 7

About c++

How c++ codes can work in computer as 01 is basic unit? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amritphuyal (talk • contribs) 08:22, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

A compiler converts the high-level programming language (eg C++) into the computer's lower-level assembly language or machine code instructions that can be used by the CPU. I suggest reading those linked articles. (If you want to get down to the "real" zeros and ones, see Microcode.) Mitch Ames (talk) 09:13, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

If you can program, it may be instructive to write a small C program, and then tell the complier to stop after creating the assembler code, and inspect the generated code. On GCC the -S compiler option will do this, you'll need to check what it is for other compilers. There is a direct mapping between assembler and machine cod;, the former is for humans to read/write, the latter for the CPU to run. CS Miller (talk) 10:33, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

At the level of the circuitry, the computer uses binary - just 1's and 0's. But when we write numbers, we only use 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9 - but that doesn't prevent us from writing pi as 3.1415926535 - and it's the same with the computer. It represents numbers with 1's and 0's - but that can represent any number - so pi in binary is 11.0010010000111111011010101000100000.

OK - so the computer can store numbers. It can also do arithmetic on those numbers, move them from one memory location to another, test their values. The clever part is that the instructions to tell it which of those things to do, and in what order - are also numbers.

So you could imagine a computer where 00000001 tells it to add two numbers together, 00000010 means "subtract", 00000011 means "multiply", 00000100 means "move" and so forth - we call these numbers "machine code instructions". We have instructions for a variety of arithmetic and logic operations - for moving numbers from one memory location to another, for testing whether two numbers are equal, or one is greater than the other and for fetching the next instruction from someplace other than the next location in memory (a "jump" instruction). The list of available instructions can run anywhere from dozens to thousands depending on the sophistication of the computer...but in every case, each instruction has a number to represent it. The electronics within the computer fetches an instruction from memory, throws switches based on the binary pattern in the instruction it's executing which causes that operation to be performed and decides which instruction should be fetched next. The computer does this sequence of operations over and over for as long as it's turned on.

Ultimately then, a computer program is a long list of machine code instructions - represented as a long list of numbers - which in turn are represented as binary numbers inside the memory of the machine...just a very long string of 0's and 1's.

Writing programs using that binary code is incredibly tedious (but when I started out programming an Intel 4004 computer in my first job out of college - that's exactly what I did!) - so we've created ways to write things more comfortably than that. Initially, we'd write "ADD 10,23" and translate that into a string of binary digits that the computer can understand (in our example: 00000001 for 'ADD', 00001010 for '10' and 00010111 for '23'. Doing that translation by hand is painful - so we write computer programs to do it for us. Those more understandable representations are called Assembly Code or 'Assembler' - and the program that converts them into Machine code is called an 'assembler'.

But even then, writing in assembly code is kinda painful (I spend YEARS doing that...but very, very rarely have to do it these days). So by small stages, we've invented easier ways to write programs. The early "FORTRAN" system translated arithmetic formulae like pythagoras' theorem: "h = sqrt(a*a+b*b)" into the necessary ADD and MULT assembly codes needed to evaluate that formula. Converting FORTRAN code into Assembly code requires another piece of software called a "Compiler". So FORTRAN=>Compiler=>AssemblyCode=>Assembler=>MachineCode=>0's & 1's. Our simple description of pythagoras' theorem turns into binary numbers that the computer can understand.

C++ is a couple of generations on from FORTRAN - but the principle is the same. The C++ compiler figures out what low level assembly code instructions are needed to do what you want...and outputs a ".EXE" file (if you're running Windows) that has that ungodly long series of binary numbers in it.

When you're writing C++, it's hard to comprehend the complexity involved in having that turn into binary numbers - but that's exactly what's going on. The beauty of all of this is that 99.999% of the time, you can forget all that stuff and just write C++ or JavaScript or whatever.

SteveBaker (talk) 18:25, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I haven't programmed assembler since time immemorial (for computers, that's 1989 ;-), but I still remember that 201 (hex C9) is the ret(urn) instruction on the Zilog Z80. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:39, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

It could be worse. The PDP 11/20 we used in my final year of college had a particular sequence of instructions that had to be keyed in on the front panel to allow the boot loader to be pulled in from paper tape...I still remember that quite clearly. SteveBaker (talk) 23:02, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Alternatively, you might ask how we humans can communicate here using computers, when "01 is the basic unit". Clearly, we're using a lot more than 0's and 1's here. But it's all translated to 0's and 1's "under the covers", just as with programming languages. "Hello" is actually 10010001100101110110011011001101111 "under the covers". How do I know? I looked it up in this chart. Over the past six or seven decades, we have devised various clever ways to isolate us mere humans from the 0's and 1's. ‑‑Mandruss (talk) 06:39, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

fwupdate.exe

I have a Lenovo U310 laptop running Windows 8.1. Every time I log on, I am asked to let run a program called fwupdate.exe. I understand it is a legitimate LG program, but that it doesn't need to run every time I boot up. How can I stop it from running? --Halcatalyst (talk) 15:23, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

It is either in your startup folder (Start → all programs → Startup) or in the system configuration (Start → Search = msconfig). --  Gadget850 ^talk 17:43, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Can someone make me a neopets user lookup

I need one 65.175.250.157 (talk) 20:13, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

September 8

Computer won't load most sites

I apologise for asking here, but I can't get help anywhere else. Just this evening, my HP Pavilion Windows 8 computer has decided that it won't load any sites except for wikipedia.org, commons.wikimedia.org, and various Google domains. I know it's not a case of "network's dead and computer's simply relying on caching", because it's returning normal results for gibberish searches (I can get https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=bfoubsg, for example), and I can view anything on Wikipedia; I've never seen Järveküla, Saare County before, for example. Can anyone suggest what to do? Here's what else I know:

• Today, like other days, I was able to use my home network to load anything I tried
• This evening, I had a few browser tabs running with a Google application, something from Commons, and a Wikipedia article. At this point, I closed the computer (it's a laptop) and went to a friend's house; my friend has no wireless Internet access
• My friend used a web-enabled cellphone to look up how to set up a local wireless network (see footnote). He then went into the command prompt and changed around things, and the wireless network worked fine. After we were done using it, we closed the computers, and I returned to my house.
• After returning, I discovered the problem in question. Except for the websites with tabs that were running when my friend was working on the computer, I can't load a thing; if I search for something else in Google, for example, it returns results, but it won't load any pages.
• I've tried restarting the computer and turning off-then-on the computer's wi-fi (no differences) and running the built-in HP Network Check software (the software says "HP Network Check is unable to fix your network issues at this time"). When I try to load one of these pages in IE10, I get a message of "This page can't be displayed", and Firefox says "Problem loading page/Server not found/Firefox can't find the server at [pagename]". I've used sites well known to me, such as http://www.iub.edu, and I check them before starting a search, so it's not a matter of me making typos. As well, I can get Google to display results for a search, but I consistently get the error message when I click on any of those results.
• Footnote — my friend and his wife wanted to set up a simple network generated by our computers so that we could play a multiplayer computer game, but their Windows 7 machines and my Windows 8 couldn't recognise each other's networks well enough to permit gameplay. I was playing with their cat while he was looking up the fix-it method and implementing it, so I don't have a clue what he did or how to undo it.

I would ask my friend for help, but he's normally in bed well before now. Thank you for your help! Nyttend (talk) 04:28, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

PS, it feels as if there were some sort of filter on the system, like what one occasionally sees on library computers that are intended for doing nothing except searching the library catalogue — but he did all this in about five minutes, and I know him well enough to be confident that he wouldn't do such a thing. Nyttend (talk) 04:55, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Quick guess: you can't connect to the DNS server you've got set up. This would cause you to be able to browse to http://192.0.43.10 but not http://example.com. You can connect to sites you visited recently because they still reside in Windows' DNS cache. I'd normally link instructions for changing this, but since you can't see them...

• Hit Windows+W, type 'Network and Sharing Center' (or some part thereof), and open the Network and Sharing Center
• Click Change Adapter Settings
• Double-click your connected adapter
• Click properties
• Double-click Internet protocol version 4...
• Set the DNS to "Obtain DNS server address automatically" if it isn't already. Or, try manually setting the DNS servers to, e.g., Google's DNS servers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

-- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 05:05, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

It could be a virus infection. Often these mess with the browser and run the sites you can see through a filter altering web traffic. Try using a different computer through your home network, and using you computer on someone else's network. This is to isolate the problem, to see if it is you computer or your network connection. Try downloading a different browser onto a flash drive and installing that. Grab a bunch of standalone virus scanners from http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ you might need to check for root kits.--Salix alba (talk): 05:49, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

An easy fix to a lot of windows problems is to use system restore to restore the computer to how it was a week ago. If you have corrupted a setting it should fix that.--Salix alba (talk): 05:57, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Consumed Crustacean, you solved it! The IP address had been set to a specific address, rather than obtaining it automatically. Immediately before doing this, I tried to load some pages and got nowhere, and immediately after doing it, I'm able to access other sites easily. And Salix alba, everything changed after I'd been offline and while my networking settings were being changed, so I didn't expect that it was a virus. Were you thinking a delayed-action trojan horse perhaps? Not objecting, just trying to understand — I'm very much a non-expert with most computer issues. PS, Salix, thank you for the system restore idea. I never would have thought of it, and now that I know what happened, I'm confident that it would have worked. Nyttend (talk) 11:37, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Microsoft Excel: Can the number in a cell be circled?

In Excel 2013, is there any way by which I can draw a circle around a value in a cell? For example, let's say that I have a list of sales for each day of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. And, out of all the seven data points, I want to circle the highest number of sales for that week. So, for example, the cell A5 contains the value "100" for the amount of sales for Thursday. Can I circle that "100"? If so, how do I do that? If not, is there some other equivalent function in Excel? Basically, it should look something like the second chart down on this page: Bird Food Preference Guide. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:52, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

There is "conditional formatting" which allow certain cells to be displayed in different formats depending on its value or some other condition. You can change font, foreground and background colour, the border style and color and add coloured icons. I don't think you can circle a number. --Salix alba (talk): 16:28, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, I am aware of all those conditional formatting features. I really need the numbers circled, though. I am hoping someone knows how this can be done, if it's possible at all. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:11, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

In the ribbon bar at the top, click the Insert tab, then click "Shapes". You'll need to adjust the default shape for color and to make it have no fill; when you first insert the circle, a tab named "Format" will appear. -- 17:45, 8 September 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.202.10.134 (talk)

That creates a little picture (of a circle or oval) that gets superimposed over the cell. Correct? It's not really taking the number within the cell and "drawing" a circle around that value. Or am I misunderstanding your post? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:00, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

The person who made the picture that you are referencing (bird food values) is highly likely to have used the method I described. As far as I know, there is no other way to draw a circle over it. -- 140.202.10.134 (talk) 18:04, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

OK, thanks. But, I guess I am confused. When I tried your method, my spreadsheet did not look anything at all like that Bird Seed example. I just got a "picture" of a circle. And that picture just "hovered over" a cell. It was not within the cell. Sort of like when I insert pie charts and graphs. They appear on the page, but they really overlay the cells. They are not inside the cells. Hope I am making sense with my explanation. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:51, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

It may be my ageing eyesight, but the relationship between the red ovals and the contained text does not look particularly consistent to me. The horizontal alignment in the left column (w.r.t the text in the cell) is different to that in the right column, and the vertical alignment of each isn't consistent. It seems to me that the red circles were manually added to a screengrab by someone using a drawing program - that it's not a feature of Excel. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 22:15, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

That's my guess as well. Looking at the options under conditional formatting, there is something called "icon sets" that does draw little pictures in cells, but I don't see red circles as one of the options. This site has some suggestions. I haven't tried it myself, but maybe you can cobble together something? You'd also need to finagle the positioning, which by default I think is always to the left of the cell text. Matt Deres (talk) 16:15, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 01:27, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Microsoft Excel: Can words in adjoining cells be concatenated?

In Excel 2013, is there any way by which I can concatenate (if that's the proper term) the words in two adjoining column cells? For example, say that my Excel spreadsheet has a list of 100 names. Column "A" has the last names and Column "B" has the first names. So, for example, Cell A1 says "Smith" and Cell B1 says "John". Can I somehow "join" the two words together in one column entry, so that the new cell says "Smith, John"? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 16:04, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Type the following into the cell in which you want the combined items to be in:

=CONCATENATE(A1,", ",B1)

And that will get you what you want. -- 140.202.10.134 (talk) 17:00, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Or more simply =A1&B1 --Phil Holmes (talk) 17:05, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

That works as well, but outputs "SmithJohn". You need to add a comma and a space in there for it to look like Mr. Spadaro wants it. You could use "=A1&", "&B1" -- 140.202.10.134 (talk) 17:15, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I will try both methods. Thank you. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:12, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, I tried both methods. Works perfectly. Thank you. (I did have to adjust for the comma and space, as was mentioned above.) That's exactly what I needed. Thanks so much. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:56, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Simpler method yet: copy/paste the contents of the two columns into Notepad; highlight the tab character between the two columns and copy it; hit CTRL+H to bring up find/replace; paste the tab into the "find" portion; put nothing into the "replace" to get SmithJohn, or put your comma and space into "replace" if you want Smith, John; hit replace; copy/paste back into Excel. This will leave an empty column, so just highlight the column and delete it. Nyttend (talk) 22:00, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 01:27, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

September 9

Need to clone Win7 drive

I have a Windows 7 machine a few years old. I got a window from Windows saying my one and only hard drive on which my C drive lives reported a failure and that I'd better back up. The computer still works fine, for now. This drive is 500 GB. I bought a new 1 TB drive which should arrive in a few days. I want to know if there's anything wrong with my following plan of action. 1) Connect the 1 TB drive and format it, clicking Yes bootable, one partition for the whole thing. 2) Restart the computer booting from Clonezilla on CD. Choose device to device. Of course the 500 GB as source, the 1 TB as destination. 3) Disconnect the 500 GB drive and reconnect the 1 TB where the 500 used to be.

Additional question: Will Windows notice it's on a different drive and phone home next Windows update and shut down on me? 75.75.42.89 (talk) 00:58, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I did almost exactly this a while ago when I switched to an SSD (I will never look back). Windows 7 didn't even mention that the drive was different, and my system is as it was (but much, much quicker). 217.158.236.14 (talk) 09:13, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Ditto that. I don't remember which software I used, but as far as problems go, I remember it creating a smaller partition on the larger drive (same size as the source drive). That, however, was easy to fix by extending that partition to cover the remaining unpartitioned space. I never had any problems after that (and it's been a couple years).—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); September 9, 2014; 18:25 (UTC)

Is your Windows OEM? Many OEM versions will have a software lock and detect if the hardware was changed. KonveyorBelt 23:52, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

index.html etc.

Among our perennially popular pages are the index.php and index.html pages, with hit counts presumably fueled by bots instructed to view websites' index.php and index.html pages. A similar page, index.htm, works the same way, but it has far fewer hits, so I'm guessing it's used as a page name by far fewer websites. Why is this true? Or am I incorrect? Nyttend (talk) 02:38, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

When a browser tries to access a web address a request goes to the web site's web server giving the path of the required page. This path may be indicate a directory (folder) rather than a file. In this case the web server software needs to know what to do and it is told this in its configuration file. In the early 1990s on the first web site I set up using NCSA HTTPd the configuration specified a file name to be assumed at the end of the path and the default name happened to be "index.html". When Microsoft came into this game they were still using (requiring?) three-character file name extensions so in IIS they made the default "index.htm". These days web servers are far cleverer (though I am not) and the configuration can be a list of file names to be looked for in order of preference: Apache[6], IIS[7] and Nginx[8] However, the default names of 20 years ago are still lingering on with the name used depending on the original web server software which again depended on the original operating system. Thincat (talk) 11:05, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Couldn't the index.php and index.html articles be very popular among students and learners? Sure, there might be a bot effect, but I also think it's reasonable that those pages are genuinely popular among humans... from the other angle, I think a bot that's looking for index.php files on web servers, and instead loads our article, is a weird situation, and perhaps the mark of a poorly-designed bot. I mean the URL for the article is not actually the file path on the server, right? SemanticMantis (talk) 14:20, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

There is no doubt that "index.htm" comes about from older versions of Windows where the filename extension was limited to three characters. (Hence ".jpg" instead of ".jpeg", etc) That was never a problem for Linux-based servers - but there was a period where some servers could support ".html" filenames. These days, I'd expect very few web sites to need to use ".htm" - but I'm sure there are people who got their brains locked into the shortened form during that period of crappiness who haven't switched over - and perhaps a few old websites that just never got rebuilt - maybe a few old "How to Build a WebSite for Complete Newbs" books that still use ".htm" that are teaching people bad habits.

It's possible that:

1. People are searching for articles about "index.html" because that's the modern form - and far less often searching for "index.htm".
2. Search engines work by following links...they wouldn't know about either of our articles unless there were links to them from someplace else. Probably, the number of other pages (both external websites and internal Wikipedia articles) that link to these pages is heavily skewed, resulting in more bot searches finding one than the other.
3. There are nine WIkipedia pages linking to index.html and only three linking to index.htm...and of course one of those is the link from this very page - so discounting that one, there are four times as may routes to index.html than there are to index.htm. Furthermore, the only other links to index.htm are from the reference desk main page(?!?) and from some dusty old archive of the wikipedia front page talk page. Hardly anyone will click on either of those links. But the eight remaining links to index.html includes one from "Wikipedia:Most read articles in 2008"...which suggests that this was a HUGELY popular page...in fact, it was the fifth most popular page on Wikipedia that year with 4.3 million hits. That's going to ensure that a TON of web pages outside of Wikipedia link to it...which drives traffic, and search engines to that redirect.
4. That is a mistake...that people are somehow arriving at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html - expecting that to be the 'root' of the Wikipedia home page. More interestingly, if you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/index.html, you hit a page with a big 404 warning - which helpfully tells you "Did you mean to type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?"...then redirects you there 5 seconds later. So anyone who tried to get to Wikipedia's main page using "index.html", "index.php" or "index.htm" gets redirected to the article! So if search engines are spidering for the ".html" extension - or if people are incorrectly pointing their web page links at the "index.html" file instead of using just "https://en.wikipedia.org" then they'll arrive at the "index.html" article page...which is pretty weird.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:01, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

But why that would alter the spidering behavior of search engines and such.

Because for a vast number of web sites: http://XXXX/index.html (or .php or .htm) takes you to the same page as http://XXXX - so it's quite possible that EITHER a lot of people are typing links to Wikipedia with "/index.htm" on the end - which would drive spidering software to visit and/or count the index.html article a disproportionately large number of times for such an obscure topic...OR...there are poorly written spidering bots out there that search for the "http://XXXX/index.html" page either instead of or as well as the bare "http://XXXX" URL. My bet is that it's a bit of both.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:34, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I think this is actually an amazingly interesting finding - and quite a worrying one. The fact that the "index.html" page was the second most popular actual article in 2008 (only fractionally less popular than the article about the 2008 Olympics - and significantly more popular than Sarah Palin!) clearly suggests that people were totally confused and got there by mistake. 4.3 MILLION people were confused by this! That's an astounding number. It should be fixed.

To that end, I posted a query at the village pump in an effort to get some eyes on getting this fixed. SteveBaker (talk) 15:37, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Hard maximum for Firefox

Does Firefox (or Chrome or IE) have a maximum resolution, after which it will no longer work (assuming, of course, that the native resolution of the monitor is not an issue)? I've been playing with it, but every time I get to 8k pixels in a single direction, the whole window turns black, meaning that I can't read or do pretty much anything with said window. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 05:31, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I could imagine your graphics card running out of memory, or hitting an internal limit on the size of a texture map (for example). These days, both Firefox and Chrome browsers use the graphics "GPU" to speed up image composition - so the internal limits of your GPU would impact their ability to render large windows (I'd be kinda surprised if IE did that - but it's possible). 8k pixels sounds like the right kind of size for hitting a GPU limit with an older (or crappier) graphics system. I know that it's possible to disable 'hardware compositing' in Firefox...if you do that and find that it fixes the problem - then maybe that's the reason. Since monitors that can reach 8k pixels are exceedingly rare and exotic - I'm curious about how you're actually testing this...it could easily be that your test approach is the real culprit here. SteveBaker (talk) 14:36, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

• I'm playing around with Infinite Screen. After playing around a bit more, I think the "hard limit" isn't quite 8k (I was at 9.5k at another website). GPU might be it, and this is a (relatively) old card (GeForce GT 630M). As for why I'd want even more pixels... there's more where this came from. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:45, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Excellent. Turning off the hardware compositing was enough to stop the window from going all black. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:51, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeeeeaaaaahhhh!! The GPU-limits theory must be the right one!

The max resolution for various nvidia cards seems to be either 8k or 16k - there are a few older cards still in use with a 4k limit - but in theory, anything that supports DX11 and/or OpenGL 4.1 should be capable of 16k. But it's very possible that 8k is the limit on your 630 hardware. The limit probably only applies to each element that the HTML renderer has to composite - so it's perfectly possible that you have a 9.5k window with an 8k image embedded in it that works OK...but in general, it's going to be tough to get arbitrary windows to work beyond 8k. Graphics cards that support 16k are becoming more and more common - so a graphics card upgrade should get you up to 16k, but it's an ungodly amount of memory - so if you expect I'd expect to be doing this a lot, you'll want to get one with 4Gb of GPU memory and not cheap-out on a 1Gb or 2Gb card. If it has to swap such large textures into and out of the GPU, it's going to be slow. SteveBaker (talk) 16:20, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

• An ungodly amount of memory is right... no, probably won't need to upgrade just yet. Getting up to 8/9k is already plenty for most needs. Thanks for the feedback! — Crisco 1492 (talk) 16:24, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Choosing a pocket-sized camera to take good photos

I'd like to learn to take better photos than my phone can manage, and I'm thinking of buying a camera, but I've heard only an SLR would be configurable enough to learn Real Photography. Thing is, the size of even a small SLR puts me off. Compared to my phone, they are some serious luggage. What I really want is something near the size of my phone, but with good build quality, a physical zoom lens even if not a swappable one, and most importantly, no noticeable lag as I turn it on, focus, or take the shot. Do cameras like that exist, and if so how should I choose one? Thank you. 87.1.125.37 (talk) 14:44, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

How are you defining "real photography"? Nimur (talk) 15:18, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

(OP) I was being sarcastic about my own ignorance. At this point I don't know enough about taking pictures to know what is esstential vs what's too esoteric to matter much. 129.67.117.206 (talk) 11:26, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

If I understand the spirit of your question, you might look at Micro_Four_Thirds_system cameras. Many people seem to think they can strike a nice balance between size, price, and "real" photography (swappable,zoomable lenses, playing with aperture and timing, etc.) See also this overview magazine article [9]. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:32, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

(OP) Thanks! That's the sort of thing I was blindly stumbling towards. Actually though, I just typed "pocket camera" into Google, and the third hit was the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. It looks ideal - designed for video as well as stills, part of a system that I can dabble in as and when I dare, but on its own with no extra lenses, it fits into my jacket and is still configurable. Annoyingly though, I've just missed a half price sale that ended on 31st August. Think I might wait for the next one. 129.67.117.206 (talk) 11:22, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

There are a couple of good articles from NASA (sorry - I can't find the URL right now) about cameras they send to Mars and places like that. They point out that the current push towards higher and higher resolutions is largely pointless - and even though money is no limitation for them, they often go for lower resolution cameras. This is somewhat counter-intuitive. The idea is that higher the resolution of the sensor (4Mpixels versus 2Mpixels...or whatever) the smaller each pixel is on the little electronics chip at the heart of the camera. Smaller pixels mean less light is gathered at each pixel - which means that for a given lens size, the shutter has to stay open longer in order for enough light to be gathered...which means blurrier photos! So going for excessive megapixel numbers isn't necessarily a good idea. What you want to take good pictures is a good lens...a LARGE lens with lots of light gathering capability - and an appropriate resolution for your intended final application. So finding cute, small cameras and cellphone cameras with crazy-high megapixel numbers and a lens that's a quarter inch across is generally a bad idea. You want a physically large lens and a more reasonable megapixel number for the kind of use you're going to be using this camera for.

Cellphone cameras have liitle or no optical zoom capability - so they make up for that by pretending to zoom by cropping the photo! This means that they need a ton of resolution so they can zoom into distant objects. It's better to have an optical zoom lens (or switchable lenses) so that the entire resolution of your sensor is being used all the time.

If you're planning to take portraits in bright light and blow them up to poster size - then you'll need all of those megapixels - and you can put lots of light into the scene with big lights and diffusers - and the subject is sitting pretty still, so you can use long shutter times. If you want a really good photo of a race car zipping past and you're going to put it onto a web page, then you need short shutter times to capture the fast motion, you don't have much control over the lighting - and you really don't need much more than 1 Megapixel because more than that takes too long for most people to download. So a lower resolution camera with a big lens is needed. Sadly, there really isn't a "one-size-fits-all" answer. With old-school film cameras, you could fix this problem using different film speeds - but with digital cameras, you don't have that control. SteveBaker (talk) 16:40, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

User:SemanticMantis has a good point. I would suggest the Olympus Pen line. Although they are SLR cameras, they are fairly small, especially as they lack optical viewfinders. (For me, an optical viewfinder is very important, and as Olympus has ceased making cameras that have them makes me want to switch to a different manufacturer when my Olympus E-620 SLR eventually breaks down, but that is beside the point.) The full E-P cameras cost nearly as much as full-sized SLR cameras, but the E-PL cameras are smaller and cheaper, and the E-PM cameras even more so. For an example, you might consider the Olympus PEN E-PM2. JIP | Talk 18:13, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

User:SteveBaker is certainly right about the tiny cameras with a huge number of pixels. Every one of those that I've seen makes pictures that are horrible compared to my 6MP DSLR. But you can adjust the ISO on digital cameras, at least good ones. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 18:50, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

And speaking of viewfinders

When I bought a digital camera a few years ago, two of my requirements were (1) a zoom lens and (2) an optical viewfinder, the latter because I didn't want to have to refocus my eyes on the little screen in order to frame the pictures; in addition I later realized that the screen is hard to use in some lighting conditions. However, I found that the optical viewfinder did a poor job in showing exactly where the edges of the photo would be, so if I cared about exactly what was in-frame, I had to use the screen anyway (or postprocess the picture later). In addition, the camera has a capability to zoom digitally beyond what the zoom lens will do, and of course the optical viewfinder does not reflect this; if I want to use the capability I have to use the screen. Also, the zoom lens is powered and goes in discrete steps, when with my old film camera I was used to being able to zoom exactly to the amount I chose by how far I pushed the mechanical lever. On the other hand, the camera is a great deal smaller than the film camera was.

So I'm wondering: are there any cameras these days with a digital viewfinder that you use like an optical one, by holding the camera to your eye and focusing at infinity? (It would have a miniature screen inside, and would show exactly what is in-frame.) And are there any pocket-sized cameras with a mechanically operated zoom lens?

(No, I didn't think so. Why would anyone want anything like that?) --65.94.51.64 (talk) 18:33, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Many such cameras exist. While Canon and Nikon are still holding on to optical viewfinders, other companies like Olympus and Sony are moving to digital viewfinders only. The Olympus Pen line I mentioned above has no viewfinders by default, but have digital viewfinders as optional extras. The new Olympus OM-D SLR cameras, which are very much the same as the Pen cameras but larger, with better controls and more expandable, have digital viewfinders as standard. And as far as I've understood, the digital viewfinders on all these SLRs work the same way as in conventional SLRs with optical viewfinders, i.e. what you see in the viewfinder is pretty much exactly what you get in the picture. The framing will be the exact same regardless of whether the viewfinder is optical or digital. What I like about optical viewfinders is that there is no delay or lag whatsoever, and the vision I see through them is continuous with no pixelation or other distortions. On the other hand, digital viewfinders do have the advantage that they can show you exactly how the final picture will be, not just what the camera is actually seeing at the moment. And as all these cameras are SLRs with changeable lenses, you can zoom the lens by hand exactly as much as you want, not electronically in discrete steps. JIP | Talk 18:45, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I think there's no such thing as an SLR without an optical viewfinder. The only reason for the reflex mirror is to support an optical viewfinder. -- BenRG (talk) 23:17, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

When I wrote "SLR camera", I was actually meaning system camera. It's just that they're commonly called "system cameras" (järjestelmäkamera) in Finnish and SLR cameras in English, although the terms aren't exactly equivalent. Sorry for the confusion. JIP | Talk 04:21, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

One note: The 'digital zoom' feature operates by cropping the image - and (possibly) resampling it to whatever resolution you asked for. If you care about your photography then you'll be using "RAW" image formats and you might as well just turn off the digital zoom and crop the image yourself using GIMP or Photoshop or whatever. That way, you can continue to use the optical viewfinder.

If you can't tell where the edges of the photo will be in the optical viewfinder then (with digital zoom disabled) I suggest you take some test photos. Line up the edges of the viewfinder with some known object (like a row of windows in the wall of a large office building), count the number of windows in the viewfinder, take the photo, then look at what windows came out in the photograph. You'll be able to get a very clear idea of how much of the image was cropped by the viewfinder (or how much you could see in the viewfinder that didn't end up in the photo). Once you have that mental image of what's going to make it into the shot, it's relatively easy to frame your pictures well using the optical viewfinder. SteveBaker (talk) 18:51, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

In the three film SLRs and two DSLRs I've had, the photo is always a little bigger than what you see in the viewfinder, by a few percent. I think that is true for almost all cameras except for some very expensive ones. But with that, if it is in the viewfinder, it is in the final photograph. Then, as someone said, you can crop it a little, if needed. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 19:00, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Half a year ago, having broken my old camera, I was disappointed at the slim pickings among cameras with real viewfinder, so settled for a Nikon Coolpix P520 with EVF. The Electronic viewfinder has entirely satisfied me. The tiny screen makes easy composition in all lighting conditions and also shows extra information. Where lighting allows, the big screen with swivel is handy for holding the camera over my head to get over a fence, commonplace in my Wikiphotography. Pixels? All my pix are for computer screens, which only show a million or two anyway, so the 18 Mpx is overkill. What disappoints me is the difficult holding and operating with one hand while bicycling, but not all photographers work that way. Shop for a tool that will work well your way. If you work different ways, buy different ones. Cameras, bicycles, wrenches, whatever. If you're new, you don't yet know how you'll work, so you're sure to buy wrong tools. No worry; just don't overspend on your early mistakes. The only camera part that consistently ruins my pictures is the part under my helmet, and that's not so easily replaced. Jim.henderson (talk) 19:44, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks for the responses, folks. Steve: Re digital zoom, yeah I know, I rarely use it. Only for distant objects when I otherwise would have cropped and enlarged the image, but without the magnification in-camera I'm not even sure if the subject is in the picture. Jim: Good point about the part under the helmet! --65.94.51.64 (talk) 04:22, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

More hints, relevant to some kinds of photography: Wikipedia:Photograph your hometown Jim.henderson (talk) 05:58, 10 September 2014 (UTC)