Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing

February 21

Ethernet Plug Cable?

Hi there,

I was researching, and adding a "Broadband Telephone" onto my computer. I was required to find the boardband ethernet cable from the computer? Where is it? What is the colour of the plug? How many plugs down from the top of the CPU?

 Smcafirst | Chit-Chat  posted at 03:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Ethernet cable (click image for bigger) --h2g2bob 23:18, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

It really depends on your computer, there isn't really anything that's specifically a "broadband ethernet", just a mis match of terms, what you are looking for is your ethernet or simply network port. Technically, it's called an Rj45 socket, kinda looks like a phone plug, the little type not the big type, and it should have 2 tiny lights above the hole, but when they are not illuminated they might not obviously look like little lights. Vespine 03:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Also, the color does not matter at all. Freebytes

Virus Search Problem

So in doing an AVG virus search on my Windows XP computer, I was presented, after a few minutes of searching, with a menu that said "Unwanted Program While opening file: C:\\WINDOWS\Downloaded Program Files\pinstall.dll Adware.LookMe" (The "Adware.LookMe" was on the next line of the message; whether this is because it was separated by a space or because it wouldn't have fit on the line above - which was the case - I don't know.) At any rate. It asks me if I want to Ignore the "Unwanted Program", Move to Vault, or Add to Exceptions (meaning they wont bother me about it in searches to come.) I have no idea what I should do. I know dll files can be important, and I generally keep out of the WINDOWS folder, but otherwise I'm pretty clueless here. What should I do? Thanks, 70.108.199.130 05:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

It's an Adware, which doesn't qualify for virus but you still don't want it on your computer. I would move it to vault (or delete it manually). --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:25, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot.

Encyclopedia software

Would anyone know of any sort of encyclopedia software (Preferably freeware, naturally) that is similar to and can be used in a similar fashion to Wikipedia and other wikis (For example; articles, internal-linking, search functionality and the like) but is chiefly offline and only for personal use? Thanks, --Knyght27 10:28, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

If you're comfortable with web servers, databases and the like (or are willing to learn), you could always install MediaWiki (the software that Wikipedia runs on) on your own computer. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 10:55, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Some people also like JSPWiki. (I don't; at least in the version that I'm saddled with using, it's not nearly as feature-rich as MediaWiki and its markup differs just enough to always leave me typing the wrong stuff.)

Atlant 12:34, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Personal_wiki and Comparison_of_wiki_software may be useful. -- Diletante 23:14, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Tracing IPs

I asked a question on the Wikipedia-help desk regarding tracking down the location of an IP address and was told:

If you go to an IP's talk page with messages on (it doesn't work if the talk page is a redlink) and click on WHOIS at the bottom of the page, it will tell you information about the IP. Sometimes it can be traced down to an individual school, city, or organisation, sometimes you don't get any more information than which contintent the IP's located on.

My next question is, what causes the variability in the available information? --Seans Potato Business 10:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

When an IP address is allocated, it may be allocated to a school, an organization, a company, a city, a country... anything. All you can see is who the IP address is allocated to. It is like trying to see who is living in a specific apartment in New York. If you go by the official records, you might get the management company that owns the apartment, you might get the landlord, you might get the guy who pays the rent but sublets it out... --Kainaw ^(talk) 13:18, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

It's not as dire as that, as you will get the ISP's location and not your location. Schools and educational institutes are a bit different, as I think a lot of them get special deals for their internet, and I think they sometimes do some peering too. You can't really trust the information to be accurate, except perhaps for the country - for example my DNS says I'm at Bath, but I'm really at Exeter. --h2g2bob 23:04, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Representing | in BNF

Since the | is used to separate statements in BNF, how do you represent a | in BNF for something like the standard boolean "or" in most programming languages? --Kainaw ^(talk) 13:15, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Usually literals in the grammar are set off in some fashion — with quotes, or italics, etc. — so that you can write any character in them without confusion. This can be used for whitespace, |, or whatever. (Consider Python's grammar with its indent tokens, and the example BNF grammar for BNF.) --Tardis 17:12, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I hadn't used quotes for any other literals because I use angle brackets for all non-literals. I just put quotes around the | and added a note a the bottom. --Kainaw ^(talk) 18:29, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

IF you are using the | in more than one place, it's better to add a new production

 <or>::= "|"

and then use <or> everywhere. If your formal BNF allows comments (e.g., if you are using yacc) put the comment in this one place.-Arch dude 01:03, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Windows Operating System

In what programming language is Windows OS written 219.65.190.120 14:34, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Most of it is C++, I'd say. yandman 14:42, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

C++ and C#, I believe. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 15:28, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Generally speaking, the kernel is in assembly language, DLLs are in C, and higher-level functionality is in C++. —LestatdeLioncourt 16:32, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Not quite so. [1] [2]. The NT kernel (NT, 2k, XP, Vista; sources talk about earlier NTs, but it likely hasn't changed much) is mostly C, some C++, and a little assembly where it's needed. Most drivers and other important bits are probably in C, with the other stuff being mostly C++, but I can't be certain (i.e. can't find a source). Vista might use a little C#; they were originally playing up the idea that large swathes of the OS would be redone with C# code, but didn't go through with it. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 18:36, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I thought that a lot of efficiency-important drivers in Windows were done in pure asm --froth^T 19:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Since most device drivers are limited by the I/O bandwidth, I doubt it; the cost of maintaining assembly code is too great for the small speed increase. --cesarb 22:01, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Assembly language is not intrinsically faster nor smaller than C, etc. Poorly performing code and bloatware can be written in any language. Mostly, assembly language attracts programmers who obsess about the size and speed dimensions of engineering, and the choice of programmer has much more to do with the effectiveness of any solution than the language.

The overriding concern for most development is portability: That's why Windows NT, Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and C compilers are all written in C, which provides an effective programmer the means to write portable, efficient (speed + size), and comprehensible code. Development time is also a significant concern, but portably-written code addresses that nicely—the first time the code is retargeted.

Only a few bits of NT are likely to be assembly: the handlers for dealing with specifics of the CPU, like page faults, CPU type detection (80386 vs. 80686), maybe select portions of interrupt handlers, and a few odds and ends dealing with the FPU and quirks of the CPU, like the page-edge-fault bug of the 80386. —EncMstr 22:52, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The only area of intense assembly language program that I've seen anytime in the last few years is in 3D engines for video games. I remember a quote from John Carmack that went something like: Anyone can learn some ray tracing and opengl and pump out a 3D engine. When you wonder why yours gets 40FPS and the Quake engine is getting 80FPS, you'll have to learn assembly. --Kainaw ^(talk) 22:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The Demoscene still makes use of it for purposes of size optimization, though that's pretty fringe programming. Check out some of the demos at [3] if you're bored enough. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 23:23, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

One nit: while I wish I could agree with you, the overriding concern in most projects (commercial ones, at least) is, sadly, not portability; it's not even in the top three. The overriding concern (driven by management) is time-to-market; #2 (driven by programmers) is doing as little work as possible; #3 is actually getting the code to work right; #4 might be maintainability. Maybe down at around #5 do a few dedicated programmers start worrying about portability...

(I'm not arguing with you to suggest that portability shouldn't be important; it certainly is important to me. But unfortunately large swaths of the rest of the industry do not agree with us.) —Steve Summit (talk) 04:46, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Time to market is indeed a major incentive. And some, usually poorly organized (to put it politely) operations, do the 100 yard dash without considering what comes after getting there. That's where portability increasesdecreases time to market substantially. And I respectfully disagree with your #2: programmers don't get much consideration over how much trouble it is, not unless they're paid by the hour. #2 is usually functionality. Larger companies consider support costs as #3 (though I've worked at some where that's #2), smaller companies. Granted, most of my experience is for mass-market software, so that greatly skews the weighting of these factors. For custom software developed for a Ma & Pa operation: cost is almost always the overriding concern. —EncMstr 23:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Also, nowadays CPUs are built with compiler optimization in mind, and it makes writing assembly code by hand much harder. ColourBurst 16:09, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Well screw portability and the end user; ASM is tiny and fast and I like it >:{ --froth^T 05:08, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes. Fast.

waste_time:
push ecx
mov ecx, 1234567
do_the_wasting:
loop do_the_wasting
pop ecx
ret

global _start
_start:
call waste_time
mov edx, msglen
call waste_time
mov ecx, msg
call waste_time
mov ebx, 1
call waste_time
mov eax, 4
call waste_time
int 0x80
call waste_time

mov ebx, 0
call waste_time
mov eax, 1
int 0x80

jmp $
call waste_time
int 3
int 3
call waste_time
xor eax, eax
not eax
int eax

section .data
msg db "hello", 0xa
msglen equ $- msg

--wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 08:48, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Doesn't look lik eit actually does anything.. --froth^T 19:36, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

It's his counter-example. Splintercellguy 22:05, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

OK... well here's some C that's slow:

void do_nothing(int iterate) {
if(iterate<100) return do_nothing(iterate+1);
else return void;
}
iterate(0);

What does writing bad code have to do with the speed and efficiency of the language? Wj32 you can't possibly argue that ASM isn't fast; it's basically identical to the object code that every other programming language sends through the processor, but without the overhead --froth^T 20:51, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the point is that someone who isn't skilled can easily make very poor programs in assembly. Optimizing assembly requires a pretty good functioning knowledge of the microarchitecture in question, something about its internals, and a lot about its quirks. Someone familiar merely with the ISA and what it's intended to do (as opposed to what it actually does) may well fare worse than someone writing C, especially for big and complex ISAs like x86. Bugs in instructions, unexpected side-effects, potential data hazards, even microcoded instructions that end up being less efficient than a combination of other instructions are all things you have to recognize and deal with. Most C compilers contain fairly extensive optimization tables and periphery that do a lot to navigate all this, and frankly only a fairly skilled programmer will be able to glean a little bit of extra performance by writing some of their code in assembly.

More importantly, the extra development cost of writing and maintaining that may outweigh any performance advantage. I find it ironic that you use the adjectives speed and efficiency here, since from a coding, debugging, and maintenence standpoint, assembly is anything but. Even though it is possible to, say, implement an office suite entirely in assembly, the development and maintenence cost of doing so would be ridiculous, nevermind the fact that in such a sheer mass of code one would naturally expect to find a proliferation of bugs. Even if you had skilled assembly programmers, you'd end up with an unportable, unmaintainable monstrosity that costed many times what it would have if using other tools. There's little advantage in that. Now, for some low level portions of operating systems, it does sometimes make sense to write certain subroutines in assembly (and this is frequently done). However, you'll rarely see large modern OSes written entirely in assembly for roughly the same reasons you won't see Microsoft Office written in assembly. C has sometimes been called "the portable assembly", which I think gives a clue as to why it's a popular language for OSes. -- mattb @ 2007-02-23T21:08Z

Yes, you stated it quite well. —EncMstr 23:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I believe almost all the open-source OS are written (mainly) in C. There are a couple of assembly OS like V2 and MenuetOS. My guess is most proprietary OS use C too.172.144.97.71 22:46, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

IPOD

Is it possible to bypass the feature on my Nano IPod and download or upload songs without having to delete everything first?

There are certain programmes, such as copypod, which allow you to copy the current files to your computer.... This would mean not losing files if you move to a new computer... However, I do not know of any other such programmes. Asics talk ^{Editor review!} 21:46, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Yamipod (google it) is a good free one, if I understand what you are asking. Which I'm not sure I do, because I don't really get what you mean by itunes deleting everything. Perhaps the answer has something to do with your itunes settings. I don't know about the nano specifically, but my experience with other ipods is that your itunes comes with all sorts of funny settings that make it automatically upload and delete etc. If you go into Itunes preferences, you should be able to cancel automatic upload, which might solve the problem. You need another program, however, (Yamipod's the one I use) to download from the ipod to the computer. Itunes doesn't let you do this because they don't want to deal with all the copyright crap that might result from lots of people easily moving music or whatever from their ipod to someone else's computer. 70.108.199.130 06:33, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Windows installer

The Windows installer on my computer is giving me a lot of trouble. Whenever I try to run Microsoft software, the installer launches and tells me it cannot locate the pro11.msi file. I know that this is because I manually deleted my Office 2003 folder from my Program Files folder after installing Office 2007 (for some reason, the Office 2003 uninstaller refused to run). How do I make this stop? —LestatdeLioncourt 16:20, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Look around for the file on google (unlikely if its part of an office install or something) or check your office/widows CDs to see if any of them have the file, and if you find it, use browse and point the prompt at it. It's probably not going to shut up about it until you give it the file, or get tired of the prompt and format. Cyraan 18:01, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

A suggestion: Instead of deleting the program folder, use the Windows Add/Remove programs. Click Start, then Settings, then Control Panel. You will find an icon labled "Add/Remove Programs" and you should be able to find the program that you want. Deleting the program file folder will cause errors and difficulty installing if the program puts itself into the Windows registry. user:zylstra555

The Add/Remove programs panel invokes the uninstaller for Office 2003, which as I mentioned, refused ro run. I tried pointing the installer at the file it was asking for (I have it on the installation CD), but it still wouldn't shut up. Maybe I'll try cleaning up the registry... though I've had highly unpleasant experiences with that before. I think somehow the Office 2007 installer screwed up my machine, because I tried to install Office 2007 on my laptop, but then I found out that it needed at least XP SP2 (I have SP1), and now I can't run Office at all on my laptop (I also get the same prompt when launching any Microsoft product). Windows can be such a headache at times... —LestatdeLioncourt 20:09, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Windows XP suxxorz

I accidentally clicked on my bottom menu (the one with the start menu, etc) and mistakenly dragged it to the right (dorsal) side of my screen. I can't get it back on the bottom. I once knew how to fix it... crap. Help meem! 69.81.50.3 18:21, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Right-click it (make sure it's an "empty" part - ie not on one of the buttons or icons) and make sure 'Lock the Taskbar' is unchecked. Then click and drag it back to the bottom. Again, make sure you click on an empty bit before you drag. It's called the taskbar, by the way. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 18:27, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

.rep

I've probably posted the question some time ago, but forgot how to watch the downloaded replays in StarCraft. Namely after throwing the .rep files to the maps folder I select Multiplayer, then Direct Cable Connection, then Create game, but see no such files. Suggestions? --Brand спойт 21:16, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

You have to find the file; for downloaded replays (from other players) they're in "Download" (oddly enough); ones you save from your own games should go in "Replays". Note that these are subdirectories of the "maps" directory; you may need to go "Up One Level" first if it starts you in, say, "BroodWar". --Tardis 00:29, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Default font in Notepad

What is the default font in Notepad? 68.193.147.179 22:35, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Fixedsys. Anchoress 22:44, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Update: Not for every version though. Lucida Console is used for some versions of Windows; read the Fixedsys or Notepad article for more info. Anchoress 22:47, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

It's "System" on my Windows 98 SE. Check (or change) yours with Edit, Set Font. --h2g2bob 22:45, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Was going to say it is Lucida Console on my XP machine but I clicked the wrong button on an edit conflict. I'm wondering it is clear to the op about ascii and notepad and how it does not save any formatting information? So default font is pretty irrelevant. Vespine 22:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Well I'm running NT4.0 and my print test had Fixedsys printing as Courier New, and when I changed the font to Arial it printed as WYSIWYG. Anchoress 23:08, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Vista uses Consolas ;)! JoshHolloway 22:32, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

February 22

WiFi for Linux

I hope I placed this question right, feel free to move it around.
I just started using Ubuntu linux, and have come across a bit of a problem: WiFi. I tried using LinuxAnt DriverLoader, it didnt work, I tried NDIS Wrapper, it didnt work. I tried just using what linux had to configure, it didnt work either. I am either doing something wrong, or need to find another way to add this. How can I get WiFi to work Linux? I have the latest kernal, and I have a USB WiFi Adapter. Zylstra555 05:03, 22 February 2007 (UTC) --user:Zylstra555 9:02PM Feb 2007

The best place to ask your question for this would be at http://www.ubuntuforums.com/ or alteratively #ubuntu on irc.freenode.net. 61.25.248.86 00:26, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Stability of Firefox + Add-ons

If all the add-ons for Firefox are coded by third-party amatures, aren't they likely to conflict with each other and other components of any given computer system and likely cause more problems compared to Opera where the entire thing is coded by a single development team and subject to more rigerous testing? --Seans Potato Business 00:37, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

What type of add-ons are you talking about? Firefox without extension is a fully functional web browser. Few extensions have major issues, and the popular ones are generally rock solid. I typically use Unplug, Adblock Plus, and Greasemonkey, and I have had no stability issues. I'm not sure that you can say that Firefox extensions receive less testing either, or that the creators are necessarily amateurs. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 00:46, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Add-ons generally do not conflict with each other - although that is a possibility. Keep to the addons.mozilla.org extensions which are checked by volunteers before being made available to the public. I've looked at the code for some of the popular ones and they've all looked well-coded to me. I've only had problems with plug-ins (Java and Flash) which are coded by professionals! --h2g2bob 02:54, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

There are a number of addons that are famous for screwing up the browser. See Mozilla's Problematic Extensions. Oskar 16:30, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Sharing Single Copy of Program by Two Linux OSs?

In a situtation where Ubuntu and OpenSUSE are installed on the same computer, is it advisable or even necessary that application are installed separately for each or can they be installed once, perhaps on a third partition and used by both operating systems (that way, additions to an OpenOffice dictionary under one OS wont leave the other dictionary without those additons plus loads of other divergent settings that would occur. --Seans Potato Business 02:44, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

SUSE uses rpm, Ubuntu uses deb. They have different package systems and even if you really really really want to do it by sharing some of the key directories between them, what would be the point then for having two systems?--antilived^{T | C | G} 04:20, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

This seems unnecessary (applications aren't that big, OpenOffice is still only about 100 MiBs), but what you could do is a third partition for all of the stuff that does take up room, ie data. You can put your music and movies and what-have-you there. And, as already stated, it would be a bad idea to share software since they use different package managers (I thought openSUSE used YaST, btw?) Oskar 16:26, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

You're looking at a more or less irreconcilable linking/depedency mess. What you could potentially do is share the /home filesystem so that settings are kept, but sharing the actual binaries (especially if they're dynamically linked) isn't really feasible. While it may be possible in certain (mostly statically linked) cases, it will be a big headache and waste of time on the whole. -- mattb @ 2007-02-22T18:53Z

iTunes

Hi. I think I've managed to burn an MP3 Disc in iTunes before but in folders for each individual album. Does anyone know how to do this? I'm sure it's easier with Nero but I can't get it to work.

If you are running Windows XP, you may want to just drag and copy the music onto the burning drive. When asked, select "Make Audio CD" to make a 80 Minute CD that can be played in all Compaq Disk Audio CD Players. If you are not using Windows XP, I would suggest searching through the iTunes help files.

If I'm understanding your question right, the folders you are referring to are playlists. So to make a cd out of them using itunes directly, select your music (all the songs at once) and in the file menu at the top left select to "Create Playlist from Selection" (I think that's the wording). Then the playlist will be created as a folder in that left tab thingy. So you just click on the playlist, insert your blank cd, and click the burn cd icon in the upper right. Hope that answers the question. The above mentioned suggestion should work perfectly fine too, but it requires you to locate the songs on your hard drive. 70.108.199.130 06:27, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Vista issue

Just got a upgrade version of Vista home basic but because i just got a new hardrive i had to bypass entering the product key because my XP system was not detected. Therefore when i try to activate windows using the upgrade product key it says it can not use the key because of it being an upgrade key. i have basic on my drive right now but i need to figure out if there are any sites where i can purchase a new product key to activate my copy or to find out when new product keys will be avalible. Any help would be good.--Biggie 08:31, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

From what I've read, Vista has tons of 'trip wires' to stop anything they don't like. The upgrade must have a perfectly happy copy of XP existing prior, even though it eventually wipes everything out anyway. There is apparently a way to install Vista twice to fool it, but I don't know the details. --Zeizmic 12:31, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

You can Get a New Product Key by Calling (800) MICROSOFT (642-7676) or you can go out to the store and buy a copy off the shelf but since you already have the disk then you might as well call for a new key. ( to get human Press 0 at each prompt, ignoring messages. ) --Nerdd 15:54, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice i'll try the number

Just install Vista again over the already installed copy of Vista as an upgrade, and enter your product key at that time. kmccoy (talk) 20:21, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

IntrAnet naming customs?

Are there any naming conventions for intranets? for example, if it's the intranet for company XYZ, would "Intra XYZ" or "XYZ Intranet" or "Inside XYZ" or "XYZnet" or whatever be appropriate? I realize you can name a site whatever you want, but maybe there is a popular convention that is especially clear or considered good usability.--Sonjaaa 18:43, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I havent come across any popular conventions. Where I work its the company name and Intranet - I wouldnt have thought it would matter because the only people whoa re going to look at your Intranet is your company staff - no one else would/should have access to it outside the company --PrincessBrat 12:03, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

About 90% of places I have contracted to (~150 clients) use the default windows network name WORKGROUP. The others use something related to the company, like NIKE. It's usually redundant to use "XYZ NET". That's like ATM Machine or, my favorite redundancy, hot water heater. —EncMstr 23:28, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Dosbox or Wine

Is this hypothetical situation possible? I am browsing files on my Linux computer as usual, and I find a .exe file. When I click it, or type it's name in terminal, either Dosbox or Wine is automatically launched (without me needing to specify which one). Is this a realistic dream? Duomillia 20:13, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

It should be possible. --Carnildo 21:17, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

It's certainly possible when you are browsing around in your favorite file manager. In Nautilus, right click on the .exe file, choose properties, then Open with and you can choose Wine Windows Emulator (which is kinda strange, since Wine Is Not an Emulator). That will open the file in wine any time you double click on it. From the command line it is harder, you can simply just change the permissions of the file and run it, that won't work. There might be a way, I'm not skilled enough in linux to be able to tell you for certain (well, there is certainly some way), but by far the easiest thing will be just to simply type in "wine " ahead of the file. It's five characters, fer chrissakes, deal with the pain! :) Oskar 22:40, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Email Viruses

How do they work? Do they only work if an attachment is downloaded? If the download is executed? If the email is opened? I don't get how a virus sent by email would work if you didn't download something specific. Thanks, 70.108.199.130 21:34, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

E-mail viruses typically either entice the user to open the payload, or exploit a bug in mail programs like Outlook Splintercellguy 22:03, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

The classic example is an outlook bug which allowed emails to contain unrestricted scripting which activated as soon as you opened the email. That is, when you opened it, a program would run that would infect your computer and send itself copies to every one in your address book. This system was created before people (well, Microsoft) had realized just how important Internet Security really is Oskar 22:57, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

This is a very good question. According to one school of thought, an email virus should be practically impossible. No one, so the theory goes, would ever think of designing an email program that would run arbitrary, unchecked, untrustworthy code received in unsolicited mail from an unknown, untrustworthy recipient. Doing so is the "safe computing" equivalent of rolling around naked having sex with perfect strangers in a garbage- and needle-strewn alley behind a crack house with bad plumbing.

However, the previously-described school of thought had not reckoned on one thing: Microsoft. For the longest time, Microsoft thought that running arbitrary, unchecked, untrustworthy code received from any unknown, untrustworthy recipient was just dandy. After all, if an attachment is a .JPG, you hand it to an image-viewing program to display it, and if an attachment is an .MPG, you hand it to a movie-playing program to play it, so if an attachment is a .EXE, why not just hand it to the CPU to run it? And the computing landscape was changed forever. Not all unchecked, untrustworthy code is malicious; in fact an environment in which unchecked, untrustworthy code is routinely executed makes certain nondestructive actions very convenient. And by now the computing industry (at least, that part of it dominated by Microsoft) has become so dependent on that convenience that the "obvious" solution to the email virus problem, namely utterly disallowing the easy execution of untrustworthy externally-received code, is widely held to be impossible. So instead we all (er, well, most of you all) have to put up with (imperfect) third-party virus protection, and UAC, and stuff.

As Oskar mentioned, the executable-attachment problem isn't even the only problem. At various times, Outlook and certain other email clients have suffered various egregious bugs under which they were willing to run the untrustworthy, unchecked code all by themselves. So while the classic email virus depends on your clicking on or otherwise opening an attachment in order for it to be executed, at times there have been viruses which infected your machine when all you did was view the message, or even when all you did was have the message's header display in your inbox. In particular, Outlook Express was for years a virus-writer's best friend, although I gather it's been mostly fixed by now.

Another sad aspect of the email virus problem is that, too often, we end up blaming the victim. How often have you heard someone say, "The problem wouldn't be so bad if only there weren't so many stupid users clicking on obviously bogus attachments"? But to me, rigging up email clients so they execute an executable attachment with one click, and then attempting to prevent a worldwide computer virus epidemic by asking users to remember not to click on the wrong kind of attachments, is sort of like equipping all cars with ejection seats, with the "eject" button right in the middle of the steering wheel next to the horn, and trying to solve the resulting accidental-ejection epidemic by putting up conspicuous billboards along busy highways reminding people to be careful in finding the horn button if they need to honk. But what do I know. —Steve Summit (talk) 01:47, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Your argument doesn't take the user into account. The scenario is more accurately described as:

Microsoft: Here's an email program. You can only view text. If you want to see the attachments, you have to save them to your disk and open them with another program.

User: I'm too stupid to save a file to a disk. Let me just open it with a program.

Microsoft: OK. You don't have to save it to a disk now. You can open it directly from the email.

User: I'm too stupid to select a program. Just open it for me.

Microsoft; OK. You don't have to select a program now. Just say you want to open it and it will open with the most common program for the file type.

User: I'm too stupid to ask it to open a file. Open it for me.

Microsoft: OK. It opens all the attachments without asking you now.

User: I got a virus! Why did Microsoft do this to me!?!?

So, now Microsoft is the bad guy because users have spend the last 10 years complaining that they simply too stupid to use computers. In my opinion, they should have kept it the way it started and told the users to use their brain just a little. It wouldn't kill them. --Kainaw ^(talk) 03:27, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

But there's a middle ground, which for some reason is never pursued. I'm with you -- really with you -- on those attachments and the lazy users, and on the appropriateness of near-automatically opening the data attachments in the associated viewing apps. But where is it written that the thing to do with an executable attachment is to give it raw, unfettered access to the entire CPU, i.e. to just run it, i.e. to treat it not as data to be handed to a program, but as a program itself? That's the wickedly unsafe thing, and I don't think those lazy/naive/stupid users you're speaking of would have clamored for this easy executability of code. —Steve Summit (talk) 03:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Change Date/Time Field in GMail

Is there a way to change the date/time field in emails sent from GMail, so that email appears to have been sent from whatever date you specify? If not, is this possible in any email client? Thanks. Daniel (‽) 22:19, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

This is currently not possible in GMail, nor any client I know of. However, if you were to custom-code an email script in, say, PHP, this *may* be possible by changing the headers. This is complicated stuff and unless you're really determined you won't get very far! JoshHolloway 22:31, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

The orig-date is a required header (or so RFC822 tells me), so in theory you could absolutely change it. If it will have any effect, I don't know, the date displayed might very well be the date that your email-server received it or when your client downloads it (although that would not be very smart). You'd have to run some experiments with various email-servers and clients to find out if you really could send your friends emails from the future ("The future, Conan?", cue "In the year 2000" music). Oskar 22:50, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit conflict]

In my experience, custom-coding email is neither complicated nor particularly difficult, though I suppose it's not for the faint of heart. On most Unix and Linux systems, at least, you can construct a raw email message (typically with at least To: and Subject: headers, a blank line, and the body of the message), and pipe it into /usr/lib/sendmail -t, and off it goes. Now, the man page for sendmail says that it "is not intended as a user interface routine; other programs provide user-friendly front ends; sendmail is used only to deliver pre-formatted messages". Maybe I'm crazy, but I find manually preformatting messages so easy that I do it that way all the time. (Telnetting to port 25 and doing SMTP by hand, as TotoBaggins demonstrates below, that's a little trickier! :-) )

Besides the To:, Subject:, and Cc: headers you supply, certain other headers, such as From, Date:, and Message-ID, will be automatically added, although if you supply your own, they're accepted. So as long as you get your own Date: line in one of the formats stipulated by RFC822, you can set any date you want, and in my experience the date you so set is the date that's presented to the recipient. (If anybody wants me to, send me your email address and I'll be happy to demonstrate.)

Beware, though, that a Date: line more than a few hours in the past or future is for some reason a hallmark of spam, and many spam filters will give such messages a very high spam score, so they're pretty unlikely to get through to an arbitrary recipient after all.

Also, before someone scolds me, I suppose I should say that just because you technically can forge just about any part of an email header you want to, doesn't mean that you should. Forgery with intent to deceive is Wrong. —Steve Summit (talk) 00:57, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

You can easily tell the mail server the wrong date, and most receiving clients will happily display it, probably on the grounds that the sending mail client knows better what time the message was sent than any MTA along the way. The following SMTP session produced a mail that did indeed display as coming from the future. --TotoBaggins 00:38, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

$ telnet bag-end 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to bag-end.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 bag-end ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
HELO sean-desktop
250 sean-desktop
MAIL FROM:<gollum@oz>
250 2.1.0 Ok
RCPT TO:<toto@bag-end>
250 2.1.5 Ok
DATA
354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>
Subject: Bad Date Test
Date: Thu Feb 22 19:22:22 EST 2017
To: toto@bag-end

Hello from 2017!
.
250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as A760B1C564
QUIT

Thanks all. To summarise you learned opinions, it can be done, but not without more knowledge of computing than I have(. Never mind. Daniel (‽) 21:41, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Turning off Norton Pop up Blocker

I have a new computer and when I open up a certain window in this site for my work it will only allow me to do so the first time. After I save and exit I try to go to the next link it won't allow me to open any links again instead it gives me a sound and says "a pop-up window was blocked." Sometimes if I try long enough and I exit that site and re-enter it will let me or open a pop up window but then it won't let me again. I also tried going through the other way turning down the security level and clicking off the check mark it still won't allow me to open up pop-up windows from that site. Also a side note is that my computer allows pop up windows on other sites. I believe it is Norton Virus program, so how can I turn it off temporarily, or at least the pop up blocker for that program?

Some googling turns up this site (clearly in danger of exceeding URL length specifications) which gives you a short little instruction on how to do it. Does that work? Oskar 22:54, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

February 23

Appleworks

Here are the troubles: When I try to open an appleworks file i recieve a message saying "An unexpected error ocurred (error code -600)." Appleworks is permanently open for unknown reason(s). It resists my Force Quit attempts. Clicking on Appleworks on the dock does nothing. Any solutions? Thank you in advance 63.231.243.111 02:10, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Have you tried rebooting? --24.147.86.187 02:56, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Try deleting any Appleworks Preference files...(Do not worry, Appleworks will create a new one). There should be a "Library" folder in both your home directory, (the one that has the home icon for it), and the directory thats under the name of your internal hard drive. After your in either Library folder, go to a folder called "prefernces", and delete any Preferences that have the word Appleworks in its name. (Do NOT tuch any of the other files in the Libray folder, since part of the OS X operating system is in those folders also.)Zeno333 19:52, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Typecasting char array to floating point in C

I'm writing data acquisition software in C on a PIC 18F2680 microcontroller. I have a serial stream in, which is double precision floating point, in IEEE 754. The stream is read by the chip one byte at a time (the buffer is only one byte wide). Thus, I have an array of 8 bytes, which I want to manipulate as it's value instead of as an array of bytes. Eventually, I want to typecast it to floating point, to cut the data size. How do I make the micro recognize the data as a double instead of as an array of characters? anonymous6494 03:24, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

*IF* your microcontroller also uses IEEE 754, that is, if its internal floating-point format is exactly the same as (bit-for-bit compatible with) the external data you're trying to read, you can sidestep all sorts of messy bit-twiddling conversions and "pun" the types, with a typecast as you've already suggested. The recipe might look like

char chardata[8];

double realdata;

...read in the chardata array...

realdata = *(double *)chardata;

You might also have to worry about alignment. If so, we can explain that, too. —Steve Summit (talk) 03:34, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Be careful of endianness; you might have to swap the byte order if the endianness is different. Also, it might save some precious bytes if you, instead of using pointer tricks, use a union:

union data {
	char chardata[8];
	double realdata;
};

Doing so can also avoid flipping the bytes if you have an endianness mismatch; just fill the array from the opposite direction. You might have to align the whole union, if your microcontroller needs the alignment; I didn't check the datasheet (if it's the compiler which is doing software floating point emulation, the information about alignment would be on its manual instead). --cesarb 13:32, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

If proper alignment is an issue, using the union is a good way to achieve it. —Steve Summit (talk) 13:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Choosing a type of linux

Which would you guys say is the most semi-competent-windows-user-friendly Linux-based OS? I'm feeling like giving one a try. Is there one that can still run most windows-friendly programs, like Adobe stuff, realplayer, word, rosettastone, firefox, itunes, daemontools and many others? Thanks, 70.108.199.130 04:21, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Ubuntu or Kubuntu. And you won't be able to run the Windows-specific programs you mentioned without WINE (daemontools won't run at all, though you can generally mount ISOs without any extra tool [4]). There is a Linux version of Firefox as well as free alternatives to most of those. Do you know what you're getting into? You most likely can't use your existing partitions in Linux; you'll have to resize or reformat them, the latter of which kills all of the data contained within. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 04:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

What do you mean by partitions?

Sections of the hard drive; see the article on Disk partitioning. The file systems won't be compatible with Linux, and you'll likely want an extra partition or two for the bootloader and swap partition. If you install Linux and go through with the default settings, you'll completely reformat your existing partition, meaning any data in Windows goes down the drain. Ubuntu does allow you to simply resize your Windows partition(s) to free up room, but you have to be certain that you don't select the wrong option. If all of your data is backed up somewhere else, then there's naught to fear. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 04:47, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Damn. I think I'll wait till I get a new computer

Why does the bootloader need another partiition? I thought that special areas of the HD were set aside for such things? I personally, am planning on five partitions; one each for WinXP, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and one for the swap and one for data. I wasn't expecting to have to create one for the bootloader as well. If its necessary to make a partition for it, how big should it be? --Seans Potato Business 08:08, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Some bootloaders are small and don't require space on a regular partition, e.g. GAG. Others are multistage, e.g. BING. I have GRUB4DOS and BING sitting on a FAT32 partition (with Win 98); and GRUB sitting on a JFS partition (with OpenSUSE). I think a neat option is putting DOS on a FAT32 partition, adding imaging software (e.g. Image), antivirus (e.g. F-prot), GRUB4DOS, and some images. I used to dig around my shelves to find a good boot disc / floppy, but it's easier to use GRUB; map --mem and map --ramdrive.172.146.58.73 08:33, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't have to be set up that way, no. That's just a way that some people do it; right now, I just have the files within my main partition. I'm not talking about the MBR, but GRUB/LILO/etc.. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:15, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Ubuntu and Kubuntu and many other distributions of Linux come in the form of a LiveCD. This means you can use the operating system without having to install anything. So you just boot up the computer with the LiveCD in the drive, and you'll get the option to run Ubuntu/Kubuntu or whatever from the CD. This way, you can play around with it, make sure your drivers work and stuff before installing anything. It's a little slow, but it's good enough to play around with to see if you like it. - Akamad 11:16, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

In general, it's best to use the Linux equivalents of whatever Windows software you want to use, just as if you had a Mac, you would use the Mac equivalents, rather than expecting to keep using Windows-only software. Free programs like Open Office, The Gimp, Inkscape, and XMMS cover most people's needs for desktop software on Linux. If only the Windows versions of those kinds of software will do, you should ask yourself why you want to switch to Linux? --TotoBaggins 15:26, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

You could fit another harddrive and install Linux on that? You could then choose between starting Linux or Windows when you switched on your computer. What are the specifications of your current computer? --Seans Potato Business 06:50, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Alternatively, you could resize their current partition using the free [gparted LiveCD] --Seans Potato Business 08:08, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Ubuntu and a few other distros have that built in to the installer CD/DVD. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:15, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

If you can afford it, Transgaming's version of WINE is designed for games. And Crossover is good for office software. For instance, Crossover used to run AOL 7.0, while the installation would fail on stock WINE. And the fonts are decent. There are other ways to run Windows applications like qemu, Bochs, and VMware.172.146.58.73 08:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Does Kazaa give a lot of problems?

Does anybody here use kazaa? does it give any problems with your computer?04:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)shindo9hikaru

According to Wikipedia's Kazaa article, there's a lot of problems with malware and the like. So it's probably best to stay away from it. - Akamad 11:13, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Have to defend Kazaa - I have used it for about 2 years (maybe longer now) and providing you folow some basic rules you should be fine. I always found avoiding downloading strange file names was he easiest way to avoid malware or viruses. Also its dependant on what your downlaoding - if it is music then its normally quite safe though some files will not play as they require codecs or licences. If its videos you might find more of a problem as there are a lot of files that look like video files but when you open them there is nothing there or they require a licence. (Be careful with videos as you can downlaod large files with nothign there or require a pay licence).

Just to go back to your question I find it gives my computer no problems what so ever. Its a tad slow opening up but once thats over with I never have problems. It used to drop a lot of annoying files onto your hard-drive like adware and like but nothign harmful, but the free version I recently downlaoded didnt do that this time. --PrincessBrat 11:55, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Kazaa is notorious for its malware, don't use it --froth^T 20:44, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

If you absolutely must use Kazaa, and not some other file sharing platform, use one of the modified clients that has the malware stripped out, such as Kazaa Lite. SubSeven 21:02, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Does my dream laptop exist?

I've been searching with no success. I figured if anybody could help me, it'd be you guys. I'm looking for (and I may be getting the techincal names here slightly off, but hopefully it's somewhat clear) a ~15inch non-Apple laptop with a Core Duo ~2Ghz processor, a hard drive of 150+ gigs at a high clock speed (hopefully 7200ish), good resolution, great internal speakers, 2 gb of memory, a DVD burner, a battery that can last ~3-4 or more hours, and nice, sleek (as in simple, like Macbooks or the Voodoo Envy, not fancy gamer-looking like Alienware or the Dell XPS.) I couldn't care less about graphics cards or gaming potential. I just want a computer that can deal very well and quickly with lots of non-game stuff and multimedia and is very portable. Not a Mac. Hopefully for $3000 or less. Impossible, right? Is there anything that comes to any of your minds, or anything that comes close? If I wait half a year, are my odds of finding something this good going to increase? 70.108.199.130 04:40, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Checking the standard places like Newegg.com will probably get you a better answer than asking here. This system looks similar to your specs. It is true that you'll be able to get more bang for your buck if you just wait 6 months, but that will be true in 6 months, too. :) --TotoBaggins 15:32, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Well there's my computer, which fits those specs exactly and only cost about $2000. Try the ThinkPad T series. You can probably find identical specs for a lower price from another manufacturer though; thinkpad is a notoriously-expensive famously-good line of products. --froth^T 20:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but "great internal speakers" is an oxymoron. Other than that try an assisted search such as Pricewatch. look for a machine that can run Linux. -Arch dude 02:20, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Dell Inspirons (at least my 9300) comes with two tweaters and a built in mini subwoofer. I think it sounds pretty good.--Russoc4 22:11, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Copyrighting a programming language

Is this legally kosher? For example, if I wanted to create my own free implementation of a programming language which was claimed to be copyrighted, would I be violating copyright?

• On an ethical level, Id have said so - the person who created the language was given copyright for a reason, to defend against unauthorised copying, regardless of you not making profit from it, all your doing is taking revenue away from the copyright holder.

I would refer you to the wikipedia article on copyright which should help as it depends which country you live in as to the laws and how they are enforced by a Court. --PrincessBrat 12:00, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

You can't really copyright a language, since you have to copyright a specific work, while a language is an infinite set of acceptable works. You can't, for example, write a BNF grammar, and then declare that you have copyrighted all strings accepted by that grammar. That said, the law is not logical, so you should consult a lawyer. I personally would not touch a "copyrighted" language with a ten-foot clown pole, as any company that makes that claim is likely to be populated by dicks. --TotoBaggins 15:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit conflict] You can't copyright a programming language. You can copyright its specification (but that only prevents people from duplicating the specification), and you can copyright an implementation (typically a compiler or interpreter: then people can't duplicate or modify-and-distribute those), and you can copyright any support structures, like standard libraries, so that people can't link them into their programs and distribute the result. (Obviously, any of these could be done partially by granting a license to copy this part of the specification and not that one, or link to the libraries for non-commercial use, or whatever.) But you can't copyright the language itself, and the mere fact that my compiler can compile the same things that your compiler can does not in any way infringe on your copyrights on the compiler itself. You can (in some jurisdictions) patent the algorithms used by the compiler or by built-in functions in the language, but if I can find a different way to implement them (or there exists prior art for them) I'm in the clear there as well. Finally, you can trademark whatever names you want in regards to their use with the language, but I can still write the compiler: I just can't market it as "The Official FooLanguage Compiler". (I can market it as "Tardis' compiler for the FooLanguage language", since that is use of the trademark as a name not as a brand.) However, you can't, for instance, trademark the names of the built-in functions in the language and so prevent me from implementing them by claiming that it would infringe the trademarks: see Sega v. Accolade. This very limited control over a standard of information is a good thing: without it the competition between compiler vendors would be totally based on locking customers into their language rather than implementing a common, useful language in the most effective way possible. --Tardis 16:20, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Depending on the claims granted in a given patent, finding additional implementations may not get you outside the patent. If I patent the idea of "sending backwards text across the internet" then I've patented that thing in any implementation (you'd be infringing if you had anything which did that, no matter how it did it). This is but one of the many reasons that software patents are evil. --24.147.86.187 02:07, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Patent law is crazy. I ran across one that patents the automatic control of master / slave PATA on 2 drives to give different combinations of boot OS. That idea is common sense to any engineer (or even Geek Squad employee).172.146.58.73 08:42, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, if you came up with some new programming-language feature deemed novel, then you can patent it in jurisdictions that allow software patents. For example, if you had been American and the first person to invent object-oriented programming, then you could probably have patented it. However, with regards to the question at hand, the claim of copyright is most likely over the compiler, interpreter, or IDE. A free reimplementation in that case ought to be fine. --Delirium 10:34, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Google Adwords, but for adult sites

Suppose you want to run an Adult site. Text and images, but no movies. Profit isn't your main motive-- so, a "pay-for-access" site is off the table. That said-- it would be nice if you could at least be break-even-- i.e. having unobtrusive banner ads that could at least page for the domain name, hosting costs, and bandwidth. And in the unlikely event that that your site became super-popular, you would like _you_ to be the one to maintain ownership of the site-- rather than putting it up on some some adult-oriented version of Geocities.

I'm a computer geek by nature, and I've been setting up websites for as long as there have been webrowsers. But I've never had to try to set up adult-site banner ads or the like. Normally I'd just do Google AdSense in a situation like this, but they explicitly forbid sites that contain pornographic content. Is there anyone like AdSense, but open to adult sites?

(While I'm asking, I'd be open to host recommendations). Wouldbewebmaster 12:49, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I would just go to any other adult site, and see where they get their sleazy ads from. You are not going to get corporate ads, like salmonella peanut butter; they have a reputation to uphold! --Zeizmic 12:59, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

programming langauges

i was thinking of starting my own little home project to a help my programming skills and b help me learn all these dam confusing maths equations. basicly i want to create a program where i can put in various initial conditions and viola i can create my own solar system. so does any1 one know a good language to try this in. i want to start it from the beginning so i'm really just looking for a good mathematical language that has some end user graphic capability's--Colsmeghead 14:31, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Any general programming language will be able to express the sorts of equations that you're talking about. If you're a new programmer, I'd suggest using something that will let you focus on the math at hand, rather than external complexities. I'd suggest Haskell (programming language), Python (programming language), Perl, or Java (programming language), as they're all nice and understandable languages, in active development, with good libraries, documentation and communities to help you along. Those latter items tend to be more important than the intrinsics of the language itself. --TotoBaggins 15:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd suggest Java. --h2g2bob 18:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Many people will go, "Oh no! Not Java!". It is good to start because you can learn all the C/C++ syntax without learning about memory management. Once you have Java down, it is much easier to make the jump to C/C++. --Kainaw ^(talk) 18:17, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

If you go for C (or C++) then the Allegro library is a good way to do graphics. --h2g2bob 21:01, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

It was probably meant seriously and I can see some advantages to the suggestion, but I'm still chuckling that TotoBaggins recommended Haskell as a good place to start for a programming newbie. --Delirium 10:32, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Unless you want to learn a programming language for the sake of learning a programming language, I would suggest something like Matlab or Maple instead. Those are programming languages, but they're equation-oriented. Because with a language like Java, you'd have to implement all the functions and graphics capability yourself, or find a library that does it all. ColourBurst 16:39, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

at

I understand that the Unix command at mails the output of the job to the user who scheduled it. What does it do if the system has no email system? Thanks. --87.194.21.177 15:51, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Two possibilities:

1. The system has a rudimentary email system (typically installed by default), but it is not configured to actually be able to send mail. The email notifications which at attempts to send therefore bounce. root's local mailbox, probably /var/spool/mail/root, fills up with these bounce messages.
2. The system has no mail software installed at all. When at attempts to email a notification, it gets the equivalent of "no such command: mail". That error message probably gets logged to a log file, but the scheuled job probably runs successfully.

When I just can't get email notification for at and cron jobs to come through correctly, I often redirect the job's output to /tmp/my_at_job_output, or something, for debugging. --Steve Summit (talk) 16:12, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Another choice is to send it to syslog, as below. --TotoBaggins 16:28, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

$ at now
at> echo "this is my job" | logger -t atjob 2>&1
at> ^D
job 3 at 2007-02-23 11:20
$
$ tail -1 /var/log/messages
Feb 23 11:20:40 mymachine atjob: this is my job

xbox 360

The bandwidth of the 'northbridge' is quoted at about 20GB/s xbox 360, yet each processor runs at 3.2GHz and the length of a PowerPC instruction is 4 bytes? 3.2x4x3=38.4GB/s - almost twice as much - can someone explain the discrepancy to me.87.102.43.239 16:57, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm no expert but nothing ever runs at full operating power so maybe 20 gb/s was on average or perhaps there some extra error check codes sent as well that take up some bandwidth?--Colsmeghead 17:30, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The northbridge, and everything else outside of the CPU, will often run slower than the processor itself, which is why there are various levels of cache memory closer to (or integrated with) the processor. Locality of reference allows the caching to be effective in keeping the CPU from being too I/O bound. --TotoBaggins 17:48, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The processor will not fetch instructions all the time. Looping is extremly common, so it will not need to fetch nearly as many instructions. The ones it fetch will be in the instruction cache, so they will not need to be fetched again within the loop. --cesarb 18:37, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, the instructions are fetched, they just (hopefully) exist in convenient cache. It's not just loops, either. Branch prediction, OOOE, and similar concepts are absolutely crucial for making deeply pipelined superscalar architectures perform well. This is why you typically see cache hit rates in the 99.9% range; main memory access is such a slow and costly operation. -- mattb @ 2007-02-24T17:32Z

Thanks for your replies - which I found useful.87.102.3.88 17:54, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression algorithm example on Wikipedia (moved from Math ref desk)

in the example shown on page 3 of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZW could you explain why during encoding the first 5 sysmbols of the string TOBEORNOTTOBEORTOBEORNOT# a 5 bit output code is used and then 6 bits are used to encode the reamining symbols. Why aren't 6 bits used at all times. How does the decoder know that it is only the first 5 symbols that are using 5 bits? --anonymous

The answer is on the page, if you know what to look for:

In order to keep things clear, let us assume that we're dealing with a simple alphabet - capital letters only, and no punctuation or spaces. [...] The # is a marker used to show that the end of the message has been reached. : Clearly, then, we have 27 symbols in our alphabet (the 26 capital letters A through Z, plus the # character). A computer will render these as strings of bits; 5-bit strings are needed to give sufficient combinations to encompass the entire dictionary. As the dictionary grows, the strings will need to grow in length to accommodate the additional entries. A 5-bit string gives 25 = 32 possible combinations of bits, and so when the 33rd dictionary word is created, the algorithm will have to start using 6-bit strings. [5]

Basically, we set 27 basic symbols to the first 27 five-bit strings, which leaves 5 more five-bit strings open for the start of our dictionary. After that, we need to go to 6 bits, because five bits won't hold any more strings. As the decoder also knows the alphabet being used, it can calculate this.

Conceptually, the decoder "know[s] that it is only the first 5 symbols that are using 5 bits" in the same way you know that 10 is the first number that uses two digits. After 9, the only way to write the next number (in the decimal system) is 10, so you move to two digits. You could have written the previous numbers with two digits, but there was no point. Why write "09" when "9" will do? --FunnyMan 20:08, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Vista user icon

Does anyone know how to turn off that user icon in vista? In XP you could use TweakUI to take it out of your start menu and you could disable the welcome screen to get a more professional looking login, but I don't see any option in Vista to turn it off. The icon sticks randomly out of the otherwise-greatlooking start menu and it would look a lot better without it. Also my "This computer is locked" screen is dominated by this ridiculous icon- but it would look great without it.

Does anyone at least know what registry key that TweakUI for XP changes to turn off the icon in the start menu? (Regmon could find this.) The same key might still work in Vista --froth^T 21:13, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

XSLT Gurus?

Given...

<element>special fruit name</element>

... is there a way to get

<element type="apple">
  <apple>.....</apple>
</element>

or

<element type="orange">
  <orange>.....</orange>
</element>

That is to say, I can determine the type, but I need to grab the child element's name from the result XML. Is that possible? One thought I had was to run the output XML through a second XSLT to handle this, but I'd really rather do it in one transformation. Thanks! --207.216.243.201 21:32, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah, found my own answer.

<xsl:variable name="fruitType">apple or orange</xsl:variable>
<element type="{$fruitType}">
  <xsl:element name="{$fruitType}">.....</xsl:element>
</element>

Thanks anyway! --207.216.243.201 21:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

February 24

Tracing School Vandals

Supposing you traced and IP vandal-edit to a particular school and the school IT people were willing; would it be possible for them to trace it to the individual logged-in user and give them detention? --Seans Potato Business 00:04, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Potentially yes, if:

• they have cameras in their computer labs
• computers are assigned IP addresses statically.

On that last point, they wouldn't have to- they could keep DHCP logs --froth^T 00:44, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

On the first point, if the computer system requires individuals to log in or whatever, then they could check those login logs. --Spoon! 00:48, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Quite true, but most schools IT departments aren't that intellectually adept, nor do they require students to have individual logons. Of course, that all depends on the school. Some are better than others in that respect.

Worse, if you share my POV --froth^T 07:19, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Formatting Flash Cards

I take a bunch of pictures in a short period of time with my digital camera, so usually if I need to free space and get ride of them I just reformat the card. Are there any repercussions to reformatting a flash card often and/or is it "safer" to delete them one-by-one? --Cody.Pope 03:49, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

It takes longer to format the card. It is much quicker to select all files and press shift-delete. Instead of updating all the bits on the card to be a zero, you just blank out the inodes. It appears that you haven't tried selecting all the files at once (crtl-a usually works fine) and then immediately deleting (shift-delete is the normal key-combo for that). --Kainaw ^(talk) 04:26, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah no, I'm formating with the card in the camera. It takes about 3 secs. --Cody.Pope 04:45, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

That is completely different. In a camera you can rarely select multiple pictures. You have to select one at a time. Then, you have to jump through hoops to delete an image. I assumed that if you are deleting the pics, you must have saved them somewhere - meaning that you must have connected the camera to a computer. --Kainaw ^(talk) 04:49, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Sort of (sometimes I'm blanking a whole card on the fly when I need more space and/or the pics I took were uninteresting blah blah blah), really I'm specifically wondering if formatting-often effects card life-span. Thanks! --Cody.Pope 05:41, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Not much effect on lifespam, so go ahead! Splintercellguy 05:43, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Normal formatting does NOT change every bit to 0, it just changes the allocation table in the file system to mark all area as empty space (that's why you can recover things after formatting or deleting if you haven't done anything else afterwards). Formatting does this in one go while deleting individally does this each time you press delete. Since flash memories have finite write cycle, formatting is actually better for your flash card than deleting individually, but not that much that it is noticeable. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:04, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

According to the page Flash memory many cards come with a 1,000,000 programming cycles guarantee. You would have to be using your camera/making read writes a lot to use that up. If you took 50 shots a day (and delete them individually) that would be 100 cycles (50 writes, 50 deletes). You could do that for 10,000 days before you hit 1m cycles. 10,000 days is about 27 years. I'm guessing that it isn't quite as simple as this but I suspect that most flash-cards will outlast the product they are in so I personally think you can delete as a group, or individually and not worry at all about the impact. It is also fair to note that just because the lifetime is 1m cycles doesn't mean that under normal cicrumstances that can't be hugely higher. ny156uk 14:35, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, that was my intuition but I wasn't sure. --Cody.Pope 01:18, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Old Game, New Machine

Why would a game designed for an inferior machine play more slowly (while using 100% CPU) on a newer machine? --Seans Potato Business 06:41, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

A machine is only as good as its weakest link. Also check drivers, patches, updates etc. Or give us more detail (specs of your computers, what game etc.). --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:05, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

It may be using some automatic-slowdown system to gear the execution speed to the machine. On very fsat machines these systems don't work very well; they may trigger divide-by-zero errors or produce inaccurate speed estimates. User:Ben Standeven : 209.210.225.6 23:08, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Data

I like to get information from websites such as www.abbreviations.com for my website.

I wonder how I get all data available from those sites and need script or software for that so that I could start similar websites. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.69.103 (talk • contribs)

This is possibly copyright infringement, and definitely plagiarism unless you clearly state your sources. You could use an automated web downloader like wget to download an entire site, then process the resulting HTML. Droud 15:36, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Comment below moved from inside question above: --h2g2bob 16:48, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

I like to display search results from websites like wikipeia.com, answers.com on my web pages and I like to get the script to do that. Could you please tell me how to write such script or where to download it?

thanks--80.7.69.103 10:35, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

You may use material from Wikipedia, if you keep to the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. An example of this is answers.com. If you plan to use more than a handful of pages, you should use the database dumps. --h2g2bob 16:52, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

WindowsExplorer, need help

Hello there. Sorry to use you guys as some help-center though I just can't fix this. First of all; I'm running windows vista (can't be that diffrent from XP).

Secondly; In Folder options > View i reset the folder views. Resulting in that Start>Computer now wont group the objects anymore (harddrives, portable media etc, etc, like XP does too), do anyone know how to fix it back?

Thirdly; The explorer got this sidebar, as it should. Though from the begining it also had a few buttons at the bottom. I somehow removed them, and now I can't get them back again. Any ideas?

All help will be, and are, appriciated! Big thanks! 213.64.150.116 16:50, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Well for your second point, presuming it is indeed the same in XP, just open My Computer, go to the View menu and select 'Details'. Go back to the View menu and select 'Arrange icons by' then select 'Show in Groups'. Then finally go back to the View menu then 'Arrange Icons By' and then select type. That should be it. Johnnykimble 17:35, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

How do I train myself not to open so many terminal windows?

At the end of the day I might have 20 or moer console windows open on my desktop. (on linux with kde right now) I'll open a new shell to do just about anything, my command history gets all messed up and i often end up having to look through all the minimized terminals to find something. I know the desktop paradigm is that I am supposed to do most tasks through the file manager/browser but then you have to get everthing configured right first :P the command line is always quick and easy. How do I wean myself off of starting so many terminal windows and cluttering up my desktop? WHat is your strategy for having the CLI and desktop coexist peacefully? ---- Diletante 18:15, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Don't use X at all! --froth^T 21:56, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

In every default install of KDE/Gnome that I've seen, at least 4 desktops are set. I normally put a full-screen konsole on destop 4 and jump there whenever I want to do something at the command prompt. If I need more than one konsole, I double-click by the tab at the bottom to open another screen in the single-instance of konsole. --Kainaw ^(talk) 21:58, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Virtual desktops are your friend, I'll echo that.

Er... Make good use of GNU screen and perhaps find a terminal emulator that supports tabs? Also, virtual desktops and edge flipping are your friends. -- mattb @ 2007-02-24T23:10Z

For most file-management tasks, a GUI desktop will basically never be faster than a skilled CLI user, so I think your goal of moving away from that as an end unto itself is questionable. As people said, just keep a few open, and use whichever one's handy to do your task. --TotoBaggins 23:49, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

This is entirely dependant on the software used to manage files. Some shells are very powerful, like bash, while others are very limited, like MS-DOS. The same applies for GUI software. 68.15.208.73 18:12, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips. I guess the solution is the same as for web browsers, tabs. -- Diletante 16:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I usually keep three or four "terminal" (shell) windows open. I'll emphatically echo what TotoBaggins said about the power of a good CLI -- the reason the "desktop paradigm" is so popular is not that it's more powerful (in fact, quite the opposite).

It is often the case that a particular terminal window has a fair amount of state in it: what directory you're in, what task you're working on, what your recent (and easily-recallable) command history is, etc. I'm usually working on two things at once, so my top two windows will be for those two tasks. The third window is for miscellaneous stuff, in case the first two windows are both "frozen" -- for example if they're both in the middle of more-ing something, or if there's stuff visible in the window that I want to look at for reference, and not scroll away with the output of a new command. If I end up with three windows frozen like this, I'll open a fourth. But the majority of the time I'm not working on so much that I need five or more windows. (I start losing track of things, myself, at that point.)

Having 20 or more open terminal windows to close when you log out does not strike me as a problem in and of itself. But if you find yourself rummaging through them all to find things, then yes, that's a nuisance (or worse). What you need to do is imagine that each new terminal window is expensive -- which it is, if not in computer resources, then in screen real estate and in your brain's own capacity to keep track of it. Whenever you find yourself having the urge to "open a new shell to do just about anything", try to catch yourself, and re-use one of your already-open windows instead.

History management is an interesting issue. I've often through that It Might Be Nice If a shell could somehow retain multiple history files, one for each window, and keep track of them somehow and re-use them in the analogous windows each time you log in. In fact, at times I've gotten the impression that bash was somehow doing that for me already, in that my history (across multiple windows) wasn't getting as messed up as I would have expected. But trying to actually do this could easily turn into an unmanageable can of worms that would cause more problems and nuisances than it would solve, so I haven't pursued it (yet). —Steve Summit (talk) 23:19, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I used to need to have many UNIX windows opened at once, so came up with some strategies to find the right one. I color-coded the foreground and background, using one color scheme for writing code, another for compiling and linking, another for running, etc. I also split them up by desktop, with one for coding, one for research on existing code, one for applications, one for general reference, etc. I also gave each window a descriptive title. A typical startup command was something like 'xterm -fg yellow -bg saddlebrown -T "Compile and link" -sb -sl 3000 &', as I also like lots of scroll lines. I added the typical startups to my root menu using the appropriate resource files. StuRat 05:56, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

tunebite alternative

I am trying to find a free alternative to tunebite. The trial version only lets you do 30-second previews, but I don't want to pay for the premium. Is there a free-source or shareware alternative to this program? —Akrabbim^talk 18:25, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Use Winamp, and if necessary, downgrade your WMA input plugin. Get a Lame output plugin and play. --wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 00:54, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Beware tunebite, it is not lossless like the website claims. You can use free software like Audacity and Virtual Audio Cable (edit: Virtual Audio Cable is NOT free, but you can use your sound card instead) to accomplish the same thing. Video is a bit trickier. Droud 18:20, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

XML Parsing with Perl

Hi, I'm having trouble parsing an XML document using Perl. I'm trying to get the information inside the <title> element inside all the <page> elements. Here is my code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use WWW::Mechanize;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;


my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new;
$mech->agent_alias('Windows IE 6');
$mech->get('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php?format=xml&what=allpages&aplimit=20&apnamespace=10&apfilterredir=nonredirects&');
my $list=$mech->content;
my $xml = new XML::Simple (KeyAttr=>[]);
my $data = $xml->XMLin($list);
open (LOG, ">>a.txt");
foreach $e (@{$data->{page}})
{
	print LOG $e->{title}, "\n";
	print LOG "\n";
}

Comments:

1. The Perl Monks website's Seekers of Perl Wisdom area will probably get you better/faster help than you'll get here.
2. You should look over How do I post a question effectively?. In particular, you never told us what your code was doing wrong.
3. You should always use strict;
4. If you insert a print Dumper $data after the call to XMLin(), you'll see that you missed a level in the structure (see below). You need to change your list to @{$data->{pages}->{page}}. It's pretty weak that Perl let you treat the non-existent $data->{page} as a listref, but that's dynamic languages for you. --TotoBaggins 00:19, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

$VAR1 = {
            ...
          'pages' => {
                     'page' => [
                               ...

Thanks

Dual monitors at different heights auto-aligning.

Something weird has happened! I have two monitors, one which is my laptop screen and another an old CRT - they're in dual monitor configuration. Thing is, the CRT monitor is about 5cm higher than the TFT one, this used to mean a noticeable jump in cursor height when moving between monitors and when having windows spanning both you'd see they didn't match.

Something seriously weird has happened recently: Without any intervention, they've auto aligned, so now there is now jumping, and i can't physically move the cursor from top of my CRT to the TFT one as there is no adjacent "Monitor Space":

-I ASCII'd a diagram but wikicode screws it up :P-

Question is, how the hell does it know!? I haven't done anything to show the monitors positioning, it just seems to have worked it out - but how?

Thanks!

-Benbread 22:12, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

In Display Properties -> Settings you'll have both the monitors, 1 and 2, shown there. You can drag them up and down and about, whatever you want. If one's smaller and has a lower resolution than the other then it'll be noticably shorter in the Settings page. By moving monitor two up slightly or down slightly you can choose whether you want it to be physically impossible to move your mouse from the top of your CRT to the TFT one, or from the bottom of the CRT to the TFT.

I'm not sure why it would have auto-aligned without you doing anything, but if you installed some new software this may have aligned it for you. JoshHolloway 22:28, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure that this is an adequate answer.. regardless of the resolutoin, there's no reason for Windows to know the physical size of your screen --froth^T 23:38, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

February 25

md5

Is it possible to reconstruct the original file from an md5 hash? I don't really completely understand how md5 works, only that it gives a unique id to every file and can be used to verify files. Is it a two way process? Thanks!--Ryan 00:00, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

No, it is not a 2 way process. It is mainly for that very reason that it is used for hashing (generating unique values for a file or sequence of bytes). It's extremely difficult (to the point of being worthless to attempt) to go backwards. The situation is slightly different for passwords. A lot of websites and security systems in general use md5 as a way of storing passwords so that even if the hashed or encrypted password is found out, it is difficult to establish the real password from it. However, due to the fact that many people don't use strong, secure passwords, databases of md5 hash versions of common passwords exist, so by 'brute force' it is possible to find the unencrypted form of a hash fairly rapidly. Johnnykimble 00:28, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

What you describe is a rainbow table attack, but yeah brute forcing md5 is pretty easy. Use SHA for your secure hashing --froth^T 02:09, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I think rainbow tables are used to reduce compute time when cracking hashes like NTLM. You can make memory / time tradeoffs. *nix often uses salts, so that two *identical* passwords don't map to the same hash. With linux, you often have a choice of different algorithms to use. I use the default, since my firewall blocks most everything anyway. If someone got onto my machine, they probably have a priv escalation exploit, and don't need to crack passes. The passes are in /etc/shadow not /etc/ passwd, and that file requires admin to look at.172.146.58.73 09:55, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Definitively not! The very definition of a one-way hash is that it's, well, one-way. To prove this to yourself, consider that while the 128-bit MD5 hash can only take on 2¹²⁸ different values, you can compute the MD5 hash for at least 2¹²⁸ + 1 different input files, so at least one of those hashes must be the same for 2 different inputs. So there's no way of knowing which input file to reconstruct. See pigeonhole principle. It's worse than I've stated here, since you can of course compute the hash for an infinite number of input files, while the number of hashed outputs holds steady at 2¹²⁸. --TotoBaggins 00:32, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

If a hash is truly one way, then brute force is the only way to attack it. With block and PK ciphers (and likely hashes), there are sometimes alternative routes to brute force. For instance, 3DES2 (2 key triple DES) and 3DES3 (3 key triple DES) both have effective key lengths of 112 bits. This is because one of the variants has an MITM attack. With ciphers like RSA / ECC / knapsack, there are mathematical routes (e.g. factorization) that should be faster than brute force, since 90 bits and up takes a lot of compute power. Some attacks are mostly theoretically, you hear about ones that requires 2^40 chosen plaintext, which seems unlikely to happen in the real world.172.146.58.73 09:55, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

If you need something that can reconstruct files, try parchive, which is seen on Usenet all the time for multi-file archives. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 05:38, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

The original file can almost never be reconstructed from a shorter file like a hash. The hash length is a few hundred bits, while the file length is potentially gigabytes. This is Information Theory 101, and it's the same reason there are fundamental limits on compression. For instance, you could map the input value 01 to the output value 1. But you run into trouble if you try to map 00, 01, 10, and 11 to *unique* one bit values. A cryptographic hash is used for security, although a side benefit is general file integrity. Checksums work fine for integrity (e.g. parity bits), but MD5 style hashes are one way, meaning it's hard for an attacker to generate a trojanized executable (e.g. Windows PE format) that has the same hash as the legitimate executable. You can think of MD5 as being loosely related to ciphers like DES, because both use trapdoor functions which are easy to compute in one direction, and intractable in the other direction. So people make a big deal out of hash collisions, but i've yet to see someone construct a trojan utility that has the same hash as its legit counterpart.

Google Answers?

What are some other websites like Google Answers? Also, do any researchers have their own service?

There's yahoo! answers, though you have to take a lot of the answers with a grain of salt. Corvus cornix 03:15, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

You might also want to look through howstuffworks. Corvus cornix 03:17, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I read in the news recently that the Charleston County Public Library reference department takes questions through IM. I'm sure that it will be temporary because they will quickly be overrun by too many stupid questions. --Kainaw ^(talk) 03:23, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Reference Desk, or Experts Exchange. Splintercellguy 04:14, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Google Answers#Alternatives to Google Answers. --Teratornis 06:30, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I saw quite a few bad answers on Google answers. Yahoo has some misinformation too, but at least you aren't paying $5 a question. If you are willing to pay (say $20 an hour), you might try a site that hooks you up with a consultant / freelancer. Sometimes a specialized site is best. If you want to mod a Commodore 128, the vintage computer forums / newsgroups are much better than a general computing site.172.146.58.73 10:13, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

USB Flash Drive - Cannot Access Files

I use a flash drive to store files from Quick Books. The last time I updated my files I was able to save to the flash drive without any problems. When I try to access my files today, I am getting this error "Quickbooks was unable to create the image file. The disk could be full or you may not have sufficient rights to the data directory.".

I am able to use a different flash drive that has other QuickBooks files on the same computer without any problems. I also tried using the corrupted flash drive on a different computer and I receive the same error. So, I have to think it is a problem with the flash drive itself, and not the computer.

Is my flash drive corrupt? Is there something I can do to fix it without losing the data stored on the drive?

Thanks!

Try opening the flash drive from the "My Computer" option from the "start" button (usually on the lower left). If it won't open, it is a corrupt flash drive. If it does open, then it is more likely that the drive is full. Quickbooks makes a temp file when you open a Quickbooks file. If the flash drive is full, there's no room for the temp file. --Kainaw ^(talk) 03:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Not sure if this is the problem in your case, but the weight of a pen drive can cause it to "sag" and lose connection. This usually shows up as no flash drive listed as attached. You can test for this by supporting it's weight with your hand (holding it completely horizontal). If this fixes the problem, then the permanent solution is to get a short USB connection cable which will allow the flash drive to rest on the table without putting strain on the connection. StuRat 05:42, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

How do I deal with halftone artifacts?

I scanned a painting (reproduced at a pretty small scale) from a book at 400 DPI, and it's come out with this repeating halftone pattern on it. Is there any way to deal with that? Using a "despeckle" filter gets rid of the detail and makes it look mushy. I have a lot of paintings to scan from this book, so any sort of specialty tool would be much appreciated. grendel|khan 03:30, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Do you mean moiré pattern? I think Photoshop can correct it. Splintercellguy 04:14, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I was looking for a descreening filter, but I think scanning any printed matter at 400 DPI is a fool's errand. I reduced it by half, which still gave me 200 DPI, and it looks quite acceptable now. (See Image:Opitz-Dedication of a Synagogue in Alsace-1820.jpg.) grendel|khan 05:06, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Google

I heard the Google will professionally search for a keyword that you choose, but, it costs money. Does anyone know the name of the service? 68.193.147.179 03:49, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It was called Google Answers, and it's inactive now. There are some alternatives that might prove useful to you. grendel|khan 04:28, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Does ChaCha fit in that list? Pomte 12:05, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

PDF problem

I'm trying to compile a TeX file to PDF. Every time I open the PDF, at some point in the file it give me an error message "Too few operands in path", and shows a blank page. How could I solve this problem? deeptrivia (talk) 04:55, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

When asking technical questions it's important to include details like what software you're using. A minimal example exhibiting the problem would be helpful, too. In your case, a small TeX input that causes the problem, and the names of the TeX -> PDF converter and the PDF viewer you're using would give someone a chance to help you. --TotoBaggins 05:13, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

This is a general pdf problem and happens with Adobe acrobat reader. I doubt it has anything to do with the TeX compiler. Hopefully someone has experience on how to deal with this. deeptrivia (talk) 06:33, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Have you tried it in a different PDF viewer, like Xpdf or KPDF? --h2g2bob 19:06, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Updating a JTable with new information (Java)

I am rather stuck on a part of my program; I am trying to add another row within a JTable, however I can't get the component to update. I have already traced through the debugger (I am using Eclipse), and I am positive that the book is successfully added to the ArrayList, and I am positive the method that adds the data to the two dimensional array used for the data works (it displays initially). I have tried everything that comes to mind, but nothing works. The code that I am trying to use to update the JTable is as follows:

public static void redrawDataTable() {
		//jtblData = null;
		jtblData = new JTable(setJTableData(),colNames);
		JScrollPane jscrpane = new JScrollPane(jtblData);
		disp.add(jscrpane);
		//jtblData.updateUI();
		jtblData.repaint();
		jtblData.setVisible(true);
		disp.setVisible(true);
	}

Since I don't think I (or anyone, for that matter) could debug code without seeing everything in context, I went ahead and put the classes from the Java program on the web here. Any assistance on this confusing conundrum would be greatly appreciated. Kyra_~(talk) 05:14, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It seems a bit odd that you'd be creating a new JTable every time you redraw the object. The usual way to add a row is to perform some action on the backing TableModel. I'll have a look at your code. grendel|khan 05:58, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I see that you're filling the JTable with a new String[][] every time you want to update it. If you want some other method in the HoldingDisplay class (or elsewhere) to be able to add new rows to the JTable, you're going to have to create a backing TableModel. For what you're doing, you may want to use a simple DefaultTableModel, which supports adding and deleting rows via the addRow and removeRow methods. And lucky for you, DefaultTableModel has a constructor that takes an Object[][] for the data and an Object[] for the column names, which is pretty much what you're starting with. So then, to update the table, you're just going to update its model, instead of recreating the whole table. The Java Tutorial touches on that here. Does that make sense? grendel|khan 06:07, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

The irony is that given this explanation I can explain the problem without seeing the other code after all. When you add a new component to a Container, it is by default added at the bottom of the Z-order. So all your later additions are behind the first one you put in! Of course, the real solution (as grendelkhan provided) is unrelated to this point, but I think the diagnosis is also interesting. --Tardis 03:46, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

.wmv and .mpg files play with no sound

Recently, I downloaded some AVI files from the site www.thisisthusfl.com. Windows Media Player said I didn't have the codec for the files, so I downloaded some codec package from some website (forgot which). With the codecs installed, the AVI players would play, but some of my WMV and MPG started playing without sound. I uninstalled the codec package, but the files still played without sound. I tried upgrading to Media Player 11, but that did not help. Strangely, one of the files plays with sound in RealPlayer but not with Windows Media Player, while some files play with sound in neither and some with sound in both. Any idea what is going on? -- Mwalcoff 08:04, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Get VLC Player. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:05, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Which codec pack? Most of them are counter-productive in the sense that it messes up what used to work, at least from experience. Combined Community Codec Pack doesn't though, if you want to give that a try and let that decode everything. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 08:56, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I checked this clip (cached link so you won't overload the server). VLC says the codecs are "cvid" (Cinepack video) and "araw", which is WAVE audio. WAVE is the most basic audio ever made, and should be supported by everything. It plays fine in VLC (but then everything always does :-). By the way, don't download codecs from random websites - codecs can contain viruses and other malware. In fact, there is a trick where videos say they need a special codec and point you to a website where you download the codec with malware in it. This doesn't apply here, but just to warn y'all. --h2g2bob 19:01, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I realize I made a very stupid mistake by downloading a codec from a random website. Unfortunately, I didn't write down the site or name of the codec. I will try the VLC player. Thanks -- Mwalcoff 21:32, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

The Combined Community Codec Pack is pretty good. It uses ffdshow show for most things, which is what VLC uses, though it apparently has somewhat better compatibility in some cases. Other codec packs tend to be iffy, unchecked, closed-source, and with many illegally distributed components. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 17:42, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

VLC uses libavcodec, which is also used by ffdshow. ffdshow is just a directshow splitter, it doesn't actually do any processing --froth^T 21:12, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Agh, d'oh. I keep messing up ffdshow, FFmpeg, and all that. ffdshow is good on its own as well, though the CCCP includes extra codecs where it/libavcodec fail. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 23:14, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

ATI Radeon X1600

How powerful is this graphics card? Specifically, I would like to know technical specifications like core clock speed, support or Pixel Shader 3, and so on. Thanks a lot!--Ryan 20:03, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Did you try the ATI site? --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 20:44, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes. They give good info, but i'm looking for an unbiased review (not marketing!).

Try our own article: ATI Radeon X1600. --cesarb 01:57, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Computer System

I am looking to buy a really good computer system, any suggestions? 68.193.147.179 23:19, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm kind of a Mac fanboy, but the iMac is a great computer. Fast, and runs Mac os X. Great for anyone from a beginner (easy to use) to a power user(Unix Core).

It all depends what you want it for. See my comparison of OSs. --h2g2bob 00:40, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

"Good" is subjective. Do you want to use it for gaming? Build it yourself or find someone who can't rip you off like a major OEM will. Do you want to use it for word processing? Buy a $100 computer from a second hand store and use it for that. Using it for multimedia but not gaming? You may want to buy from Dell or another OEM. There is no "good computer system", just as asking "I want to buy a good car" is a meaningless question without any context. -Wooty Woot? contribs 01:29, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

There are no computers today which anyone will likely think are "really good" ten years from now, thanks to Moore's Law. Not even three years from now. Since I tend to look ahead to the future computers that will make all present computers a joke, it's hard for me to think of any present computers as "really good." --Teratornis 05:58, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

As Wooty states, a computer is a tool. A really good tool is one which gets the job done. So, what's the job? For my job, Windows and Macs are both terrible. For my job, I need Unix/Linux machines with tons and tons and tons of RAM and more processing power than is possible to cram into a desktop box. But, I have absolutely no use for 3D graphics, surround sound, DVD players, CD burners, tons of USB ports, special blue lighting around the case... --Kainaw ^(talk) 06:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I looked on wikiHow for maybe some actually useful advice, but How to Buy a New Computer is too short, and kind of unimpressive. At least it's free. --Teratornis 06:25, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

This Article lists some really good computers. -Arch dude 21:33, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

If it is cost no object, I'd get a custom built machine or maxed out Voodoo/Alienware/whatever. I'd have several external drives, a hard drive selector for SATA and PATA, an external patchbay, and about 100 operating systems. I guess my point is that you need to decide what you want to do with the machine, then purchase hardware made for that. If you are cracking ciphers, you need a fast CPU. If you are collecting porn movies, you need a big hard drive.172.146.58.73 09:21, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

A maxed out "high-end PC" like that often has a big premium over simply building it yourself, among problems. I'd never suggest purchasing a high end computer from a manufacturer. Low or lower-mid, fine, but nothing else. The obvious exceptions are laptops, businesses and other bulk purchases, etc. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 17:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Build an uber pc similar to what 172 is suggesting, but don't get any kind of botique product like alienware. Get a couple of nVidia SLI cards, of of them fancy PhysX cards, a few terabytes of RAID01 mirrored 3 or 4 times. Get yourself an array of 5 or 6 monitors. Ooh and grab a couple of Montecitos and a ton of memory --froth^T 18:41, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

You can usually customize a high-end PC for a lot cheaper through smaller companies; my favorite has been CyberPower PC; my last 2 computers were through them, I'll be getting another one later this year from them, and a couple friends have also bought repeatedly from them. They offer more choices for customization than any other site I've seen. I'm trying to customize a high-end video editing system (Q6600 quad-core processor, 2GB PC6400 DDR2/800 RAM, ATI X1950, WD740ADFD boot drive plus a large storage drive), and it comes out to about $2600 through them, while it's nearly $4000 through Dell and almost $5000 through Alienware. — BRIAN0918 • 2007-02-26 18:54Z

A lot of computer stores will do this. Try to locate one if your own city; it makes it far easier to return things should they go screwy. I'd still suggest buying components and installing them individually; it gets you the things immediately, and can save you ~$100-200 labour as well as the savings you get from being able to shop around for the individual parts. I've seen how some of computer technicians in the shops around here work (lazily, too quickly), and it doesn't give me great confidence. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 19:05, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

How to make a template?

I was wondering how to make a verticle template that appears on the righthand side of the article like {{Disneyparkinfo}}. I know how to make a horizontal template that appears across the bottom like {{Epcot attractions}}. Can you help me? WDWbuff 23:24, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Just take a look at a few and copy the code. Go to the Template:Disneyparkinfo and Template:Epcot attractions for example. See Help:Template for full details. --h2g2bob 00:37, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

February 26

End user suport

What's the meaning of the End User Suport which is using in computer networking?

I'm sorry, but we are no longer offering End User Support on this question.172.146.58.73 10:19, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Support here means technical support. A networking company (e.g. a router manufacturer) will often receive questions from both end-users, for example someone setting up a home network or having trouble with a network card they purchased, and from network administrators or network engineers, for example an engineer setting up an industrial-strength router. Their end-user support division will be the one providing technical support to the end users' questions. --Delirium 10:24, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

help me buying un upgraded (assembled)PC with only $600

I recently visited HP homepage and find the price too high for the pc i want with audio and video composite input output capability, now i am wondering to minimize cost by building an assembled fast pc but with a brand name case, Like an HP case and Capable Motherboard above all which is capable to run AMD athlon dual core starting from x2 5000 and with a total of 4GB memory capacity ( for which i am going to need for now 2GB), DVD writer and TV tuner. I am mainly going to use it for Video and audio editing with the addition of DVD authoring. the total price i can afford is 600 U.S dollars. So please help me where to locate some one who is able to assemble like this pc for me, or if there isn't such like that any information where i can get the components in USA cheaply so that i build the pc myself.

thanks. ese Esete 08:48, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

You don't really get detailed, hand-holding support here, just so you can save money. I assemble all my computers from parts, but that involves many hours of study, some hundreds of hours of experience, and at lot of time with those twiddly little connectors that aren't meant for humans! --Zeizmic 13:03, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

You can usually customize a high-end PC for a lot cheaper through smaller companies; my favorite has been CyberPower PC; my last 2 computers were through them, I'll be getting another one later this year from them, and a couple friends have also bought repeatedly from them. They offer more choices for customization than any other site I've seen. I'm trying to customize a high-end video editing system (Q6600 quad-core processor, 2GB PC6400 DDR2/800 RAM, ATI X1950, WD740ADFD boot drive plus a large storage drive), and it comes out to about $2600 through them, while it's nearly $4000 through Dell and almost $5000 through Alienware. — BRIAN0918 • 2007-02-26 18:54Z

Also, if you wait until April, the Q6600 should drop in price by about $300 making it a lot more affordable, and definitely better than anything AMD can offer for video editing. — BRIAN0918 • 2007-02-26 19:03Z

4GB of memory on 600 dollars is going to be a tight squeeze for other components --froth^T 20:37, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Unless he means 4 gigs of HDD to store the files he needs for image editing, but I somehow doubt it, considering image/video editing systems usually have loads of RAM. But it's true, 4 gigs of RAM alone will cost about half your budget, then add on to that a good video card, you're pretty much already over. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 22:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Half? More like almost all --froth^T 00:54, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

It's about $360 for 4 gigs of corsair RAM, so definately not all. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 03:04, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

---Well, sorry for the misleading i wrote about the RAM, what i mean was to say the capacity of the motherboard to the maximum it can hold, and i have corrected that and i only need 1 or 2 GBs this is related with the price.

I will have a look to Cyberpower and also
i will be glad if some one can point me
if there are other sites that offer like 

cyber for cheap and customizable pcs. thanks Esete 10:33, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Help with javascript

Hi, is there a client-side function in javascript that can imitate the clicking of a button?

For example something like: "clickbutton(document.form_name.button_name);"

My experience with javascript is very limited!

Thanks for any replies!

If you just want to submit the form, you can use document.FormName.submit() — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 11:45, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Use document.getElementById("FormName").submit() where FormName is the ID on the <form> tag. There are one or two cases where this doesn't work, for example, if the form is submitted using a <button> rather than an <input type="submit">, then there may be problems. If so, use document.getElementById("ButtonID").click() (it may be onclick rather than click, I forget for now). But this may not work on all browsers anyway. --h2g2bob 12:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

element.click() should simulate the click. onclick refers to the event. Where element is the element in question - in this case, document.form_name.button_name. x42bn6 Talk 14:00, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Slipstreaming software in WinXP

On the web you find many (illegal?) distributions of Windows XP that come pre-compiled with Office, Firefox, Adobe Reader, hotfixes etc, so that once the OS is installed (unattended of course) these programs are already loaded. There are also nifty distros like TinyXP which rip out all but the most basic functionality to give a much leaner and meaner OS, useful for older PC's or special applications. How do they do it, and how easy/hard is it to do yourself? How would you go about it? And is it legal if you've got a legal Windows license? I tend to FFR my PC every six months and it would be handy to create a slipstreamed copy of XP. Zunaid©® 15:23, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

nLite is your friend. Splintercellguy 15:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

The legality depends on where you live, and I'm cautious to provide any legal advice here (see the header on the top). It's certainly not wrong morally. Our nLite article could also be useful for a quick summary of it, and the http://www.winaddons.com/ site has several addons (as does the nLite site itself, and a few others). [6] has post-SP2 hotfixes and such. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 17:39, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

ADSL & Cable

Is it possible to have an ADSL wireless router connected to a Cable Modem, and have my laptop running internet from the wireless, AT THE SAME TIME as my desktop running internet from the cable? If so, how should I connect them up? I have found I can only get either one or the other to work at one time (PLUS, after the laptop has been on the internet, the desktop cannot be connected without hours of trial and error reconnecting.

I have a Buffalo AG54 AirStation Wireless Router (plus card for the laptop) and a Motorola SB5100 Surfboard Cable Modem. Both PCs are Win XP.

Any help would be appreciated! CCLemon-ここは寒いぜ！ 18:26, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I presume your wireless network is connected via a wireless-router with built-in modem? If this is the case you will just need to connect the desktop to the wireless-router with an ethernet cable and configure the internet settings. Alternatively you can buy wireless-cards for desktop computers for around £10 ($20?) and solve the problem that way. I suspect it is not possible to have 2 modems connected to the net on one line (even with a line splitter) but i'm sure someone will correct me if i'm wrong. ny156uk 19:12, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Debranded or fake?

I just got home, from an independent but fairly established electronics store, a replacement USB cable for my iPod that resembles the original but does not bear the Apple logo anywhere. Also, its UPC (EAN?) of 8-276245-658623 apparently does not belong to Apple. The only text on it aside from the barcode is "Dock Connector", "USB 2.0 Cable" and "White." Is this a counterfeit cable, or has it simply been debranded? If it is counterfeit, are there safety concerns and/or should I expect it to fail sooner? NeonMerlin 20:02, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Sounds to me like it's just a cable. Did it purport to be from Apple? Did the packaging try to give the impression it was from Apple? I don't see why you should need to use an Apple-branded USB cable - it's just a cable! --Seans Potato Business 20:04, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It's probably just a generic USB cable. Cable is cable :). Splintercellguy 03:52, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Reinstate disk image to different drive

Is it possible to take a drive image from my RAID 0, switch to RAID 1 and reinstate the image, so long as the data on the RAID 0 does not exceed 50% of the RAID 0 (i.e. 100% of the RAID 1) capacity? Or will the image include "deleted" data that is not in the file system or will the drive image expect to be able to use the exact same sector/block locations for all of the data?

Also what free liveCD/DVD solutions are available to take this image and place it in the spare space that I have on an ext3-formatted partition. It's important that it can store the image like just another file, 'cause I don't have any spare drives, just spare space on a drive already containing other data. --Seans Potato Business 20:02, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I am not familiar with RAID but I think you want to dump an image of the filesystem, not images of the drives. The filesystem is agnostic about any RAID stuff you have going on underneat it. Any live cd with RAID support should let you use dd to copy the filesystem into a file in another filesystem quite easily. Or you should just copy the files over if you don't want to waste any space. -- Diletante 20:45, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, the thing is you don't want any of the RAID metadata. Just take an image of the filesystem, which will be processed through the RAID controller so you end up with a copy of all of your files. like diletante suggested, use dd to stream the image over to your spare drive so you don't run out of space while building the image. Then reconfigure the controller or whatever and re-image your drives based off of the image you built. The data will be processed through the raid controller for writing, and the raid controller will now mirror it. Since the image you made doesn't contain the same sector/block information as the original hard drives (images aren't of the same format as a physical disk) it's completely transparent to the new RAID array --froth^T 21:10, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

No, the image would have the full size of the RAID 0 (it includes not only deleted data, but also the free disk space!), unless you shrink the filesystem to the target size before dumping (and image only the space used by the filesystem). It's much simpler to dump the filesystem contents (for instance, using tar), create a new filesystem, and restore to it; as a bonus, doing that will also remove any leftover filesystem fragmentation. --cesarb 15:31, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

E-mail obfuscation

I've seen a gaggle of sites which use variations of "name(at)domain.com" or "name at domain dot com" and so forth to deter spam.

Does this actually work? I know that one could easily write an address harvester that picks those up as well (it would take a single line of perl to filter them out pretty easily), but do spambot creators bother? It seems like it would be an easy thing to test using some honeypot addresses -- has this been done? What's the best way to do e-mail address obfuscation? I know that one could post them as an image, but that seems clunky and would not allow the blind to access the page. I've seen some schemes that use javascript to encode the addresses in some way though these too would not be too difficult to defeat depending on how the bot was getting the page information.

Any thoughts as to whether these work and what one ought to do? I'm interested in particular in low-skill, low-hassle approaches -- things that would not take much time per address to implement. --24.147.86.187 20:08, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It may or may not work; it's a lazy webmaster's way of trying to avoid spam bots. You're right that one could easily write bots to look for obfusicated email addresses, so it's best to be safe than sorry. I would suggest creating an image in paint with the email address written in it and then just "My email address is <img src="./email1.jpg" />" or whatever. Alternatively if you want a quicker way, write in MS Paint a "@" sign in the font you're using on the site. Then just write "my email address is bill<img src="./atsign.jpg" />microsoft.com". JoshHolloway 20:51, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Images won't work for anything which requires 1. the ability of the visual impaired to view the page, 2. the ability of those who don't load images to view the page, or 3. the mass-production of said addresses, unless you automate it which is a big additional pain in the neck on top of #1 and #2. --24.147.86.187 03:19, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Well if you make your javascript obfuscation engine complex enough (like not just escape()) that the harvester can't easily rewrite it in perl or something, then if he's too stupid to use rhino he won't be able to use your actual javascript code and stay efficient --froth^T 21:03, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Ethical Hacker Network uses some crazy javascript obfuscation, if you need an example. Another answer I've seen is to do "name@doBUSHmain.com without the fool," or some other more humerous version. --h2g2bob 00:00, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Slashdot does this too, my email is currently shown as oskarsigvardssonNO@SPAMgmail.com (I'm confident in providing my email since it is obfuscated ;) It's pretty fun to come back each week to see what crazyness CmdrTaco is up to know ;) Oskar 17:14, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

See this old report; I don't know if any followups have been done, but the kind of people who spam are quite deliberately looking for the very easiest pickings. --Tardis 18:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

That's a great report, thanks. I wonder if there is anything more recent? --24.147.86.187 03:19, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Downloading file in IE > garbled letters to look at

I uploaded a file to my own webspace and when I tried to download it by suppling IE with the address (in the address bar), IE (stupidly) tried to open it and display its garbled contents). Is there any way to download this file with IE. It's a .rar file and I do not have administrative privileges on the computer I'm downloading to. --Seans Potato Business 20:37, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like the content-type is not being sent. If it's an actual rar file then it's not that you haven't programmed it to print the program type, which is weird. I suggest you ensure that the upload mode is in ASCII mode rather than binary mode. Other than that, I wouldn't be able to help (but will give that advice as my two cents!). JoshHolloway 20:46, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Wouldn't you want to ensure binary, not ascii? Anyway, just make a hyperlink to the file (or use an existing link) and right-click it then Save target as --froth^T 21:04, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Maybe the wrong Content-type is sent by the web server. Maybe you need to reconfigure it to send the right one. --Spoon! 23:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

The remote server is sending the wrong MIME type. If the address is a hyperlink somewhere, right click the link and select Save As. Or just wait for the page to load do File, Save As. --h2g2bob 23:50, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

If the file isn't linked from a web page, make your own link. --wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 09:56, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

February 27

MS WORD

In Word '03, when I highlight text and type it doesn't delete the highlighted text, how do I fix that?

Go to the Tools-->Options, and then on the "Edit" tab, the first checkbox is "Typing replaces selection". - Akamad 06:13, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Refreshing Problem

When I visit a website like Wikipedia, then refresh the page I do not get the latest version of the page. I have to right click on the article a click open in new window to receive a new version. Does anybody know how to fix this? 68.193.147.179 01:10, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

You can either disable cache or use ctrl+refresh to reload from scratch. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 01:14, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

The details depend on the browser. You should check out Wikipedia:Bypass your cache. Spiral Wave 01:15, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

AOL 9.0 SE E-Mail Problem

When I write a message from the program AOL, AOL adds on AOL.com AD on the bottom of the message 10 spaces after the messaged ended. But, it is only supposed to be there if I email from www.AOL.com. Does anyboby know why this is happening? 68.193.147.179 01:12, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

They seem to be adding ads everywhere to pay for their new "free" e-mail. That apparently means free of cost, not free of annoyances. StuRat 05:35, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

That's the free as in "free beer" but the waitress spit into it :D Aetherfukz 15:53, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

PSP

I have a Sony PSP which I purchased last December. It was dropped the other week and since then it has kept freezing when I turn it on and sometimes won't even boot up. Does anyone know how I could fix it? I've heard of people putting theirs through way worse so I'm hoping it can be fixable. I bought it interstate and I don't know where the receipt is. Mix Lord 01:17, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

You've probably knocked something ajar inside it. I've dropped mine and had no problems, but who knows. Unless you're just saying that to cover up the fact you screwed installation of a homebrew loader, simply send it back to Sony, they'll fix it. -Wooty Woot? contribs 01:37, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

No, I find that honesty seems to be the best policy here on the reference desk. At least when asking questions anyway. Do you think anything in it would be user serviceable? And would I still need a receipt to claim it under warranty?

Mix Lord 22:39, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Firmware in low-end GPS units

Hi,

I am interested in who makes/provides the firmware (or perhaps it's a basic operating system) that runs the common, low-end GPS units commonly available. Not the higher-end models that run run Windows CE, but the monochrome, basic system seen on basic GPS systems.

Is there a single company that on-sells this OS to Garmin, Magellan and others?

Thanks. 130.101.152.94 01:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)MJH

Desktop publishing programs

What are the relative merits of Scribus, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign when it comes to typesetting books? The Adobe InDesign article says that books are usually typeset in QuarkXPress, but what makes this software preferable?

Also, does Scribus have support for ligatures, swash characters, and all the wonderful things that come with OpenType fonts? --Siva 02:35, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Selective proxy use in Firefox?

Today I needed to access a site that's theoretically available only in the U.S. To circumvent this restriction, I used an open proxy. But the proxy is probably slower than my direct connection. What I'd like to do is enable the proxy only for that one site (and possibly others I'll specify later) and disable it for all others. I know you can set Firefox to use the proxy by default and turn it off for specific sites, but is it possible to do the opposite? NeonMerlin 06:12, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I know only of Torbutton. Though it's intended for Tor, you can set the proxy settings for whatever you wish. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:14, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I think Coral Cache would appear to be in the US. This can be accessed by changing site.com/page to site.com.nyud.net:8090/page. --h2g2bob 04:03, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

iPod memory

I have a 60GB iPod which is almost full. Both iTunes and the settings screen on the iPod tell me that I have 515 MB available. But when I try and copy a single short song to the iPod, iTunes tells me that there is no space. So why isn't that 515 MB available to me? I've tried resetting the iPod but it doesn't help. Many thanks. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 06:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

My guess is that you have half a gig allocated to firewire disk usage (as in data storage). --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 06:58, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks very much for this. So does that mean the iPod needs that half a gig to operate? Or can I free it up somehow? --Richardrj ^{talk email} 08:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I think you're misunderstanding what User:Wirbelwind is saying. An iPod has a setting where you can allocate a certain amount of space to be used for data storage (e.g. text documents, presentations, etc.). That 515 MB might be set aside for that. If so, you can change the settings of the iPod to not use any of the harddrive for data storage. Dismas|^(talk) 09:33, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

No misunderstanding, I can assure you. My second question was just for clarification, i.e. I was asking if the amount of memory allocated to data storage can be changed by the user. From your response, it sounds like it can, so I'll need to look into how I can do that. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 11:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, so I've now looked through the settings both on my iPod and on iTunes, and I can see no way to tell it that I don't want to use the hard drive for data storage. I don't currently have anything stored on it except songs. Am I missing something obvious? Many thanks once again. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 16:47, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

You haven't said whether you're on a Mac or a PC but I would think this would be the same on both systems... Connect your iPod, open iTunes, on the left you will see your playlists, library, and devices listed. Click on the iPod. This should display info about the iPod in the main window. In the "Options" section of that screen, there should be a checkbox that says "Enable disk use" next to it. Make sure this is unchecked. Dismas|^(talk) 22:13, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks very much, I'd seen that and thought it might be the answer. The checkbox is indeed ticked, but it's greyed out (I'm on a Mac) because I've also checked the option to manage my iPod songs and playlists manually rather than have them automatically sync with my iTunes library. I have to keep that option checked because I don't keep copies of my music on my hard drive (I have it all on CD). I don't see why the two checkboxes should be related, but they obviously are. Which kind of stumps me. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 22:20, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

A certain amount of your hard-drive is taken up with system-files that the iPod requires to operate. This shouldn't show in the available-space however. The only other thing I can think of other than space being dedicated to 'data storage' is that a portion of the hard-drive may have corrupted, leaving it unusable.

depending on your version of iTunes this (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61131) link may help. If you still cannot recover the file-space for songs I would consider resetting your iPod as I understand it this will remove all your songs from your iPod , as that may resolve the issue. ny156uk 18:26, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

The iPod generally has two partitions by defualt: the firmware partition and the data partition. The firmware partition will range from 10MB to even 100MB, I don't know, but certainly not 500MB. The data partition is used for everything else; iTunes prefs, iPod settings, your music, calendars, notes. So, you should be able to copy your music. Also, if there were bad blocks, iTunes would most likely say "I/O error", not "Disk full". --wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 09:54, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

"System Restore" on MAC OS X

How is it possible to get my MAC iBook to restore itself to a previous date, like the System Restore option in Windows? In fact, is it possible? MAC Help was no use to me, as either I don't know what the keyword is (i.e. the name of the process), or it just doesn't exist. Thanks in advance! CCLemon-ここは寒いぜ！ 10:00, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain there isn't one, at least not one as smooth in Mac OS X. They're going to introduce such a feature (in fact, a much more advanced one since it keeps track of versions of individual files) in Leopard called Time Machine Oskar 18:16, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

No, but a past article on either MacWorld or MacAddict tells you how you can build your own System Restore disks from the System Restore disks that came with your iBook, which is close enough. kelvSYC 22:06, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Before Leopard, Mac OS X accomplishes this through 3rd party apps. I have something in my prefpanes called "Deja Vu" which came with a suite of Roxio software. [Mαc Δαvιs] X (How's my driving?) ❖ 03:51, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Google Earth

Does anybody know how long it takes the free version of Google Earth to pick up on Wikipedia articles. I noticed and changed the coordinates for Ottawa/Rockcliffe Water Aerodrome on the 16 February because it was showing up at Cambridge Bay. It is still shown on Google Earth at the same place as Cambridge Bay Water Aerodrome. The main thing is that because the coordinates for most of the airports in the Yukon were entered in the format DD|MM|SS|00|W they all appear in Russia. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 10:02, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Google Earth is not hitting Wikipedia live. (Which is probably a good thing.) I presume they're working from our database dump files, and as you may know, those don't exatly come out with clockwork regularity -- the last one completed on 2007-02-11. At best they come out once a month or so, and I don't know how avid Google is being about picking up the new ones. --Steve Summit (talk) 20:04, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 00:27, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Another MAC question

I have a Japanese iBook, but unfortunately the keyboard is set to UK settings for some bizarre reason (I bought it in Japan - it's just a coincidence that I'm from the UK). Anyway, I want to set the keyboard back to Japanese settings (e.g. so that single quotation marks are SHIFT+7, etc.) so I can reduce my typos. Anyone have any idea? CCLemon-ここは寒いぜ！ 10:04, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

There should be a language preference in the preferences. I'm not in front of my Mac right now otherwise I'd be able to point you exactly to it. One of the options for that setting is to have a flag representing the current language setting. The flag would be up in the upper right corner next to the clock. If the flag is there, you can pull down the menu for it and change the settings there. Dismas|^(talk) 11:51, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

What Dismas said. I'm not in front of my Mac either, but if you can't find the flag, I'm pretty sure there's a Language box in System Preferences where you should be able to change the settings. --Richardrj ^{talk email} 12:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I have tried both of those, but I can't get the keyboard to write Roman letters as printed on the actual keys on the keyboard when in Roman letters mode (i.e. with an 'A' in a box). It's just a minor embuggerance, as I'm using both Japanese and UK computers simultaneously, and I've got to keep reminding myself which type of keyboard I'm using. It just slows my typing speed down. I'll work it out. Cheers! CCLemon-ここは寒いぜ！ 13:07, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I assume that you have enabled both a Roman layout and the Kotoeri layout for Japanese. If not, enable them via the International Preference pane (in System Preferences). Then use Command-Space to switch to the layout you need. You may have pressed Command-Space (or either Command-Shift-Space or Command-Option-Space, depending on your prefs) accidentally, which forces the keyboard layout to change. The procedure is similar to classic Mac OS, but I do not recall what it is off the top of my head. kelvSYC 22:09, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Loopback

why can't a pc from the same building on a different floor can not connect to the network on a different floor. in the same building.

Rephrase your queston since at this point it makes no sense. Splintercellguy 15:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

It can, and much further than that, considering that I'm writing this to you from a building far away from yours. As for doing so on a single cable, as your node title seems to indicate, Ethernet physical layer has material about distance limits for that medium. In the future, it would be good to sign your posts with ~~~~, and also to include key details like what kind of network you're talking about. --TotoBaggins 16:34, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Just going out on whim here. I'm heavily assuming that you mean there's a wireless LAN network in a building, where a computer can connect fine, but another computer on a different floor cannot. Wireless LAN networks have a limited range, and it can deteriorate through walls, and the second computer is out of range in that case and needs something like an wireless access point in between to connect the second computer. If this doesn't help, then please rephrase your question and supply us with more details. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 19:03, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

There are lots of reasons for a network not to work properly. Your PC could have an improper netmask or default gateway address set. The building's network could be misconfigured. The computers in your building might all be using NAT in such a way that they can reach machines in the outside world just fine, but not each other. If you can give us more information about your machine, and the machine you're trying to reach, and how, and how it fails, we might be able to give you some more specifically-applicable information. —Steve Summit (talk) 01:40, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

How does this whole "bootstrapping" thing work, anyway?

When I start my computer, a nice little 1980s style menu shows up on my screen asking me if I want to boot Ubuntu or Windows XP. If I don't pick anything, GRUB (for that is what I am using) will boot Ubuntu 7 seconds later. This menu and and configuration is stored on my linux partition at /boot/grub/menu.lst, and I can easily edit it in Ubuntu (or windows). My question is this: how does this whole thing work? I mean, the MBR is 512 bytes long, 446 of which is machine-code dedicated to launching the OS. Since 446 bytes ain't a whole lot of room to put code in (certainly not if you want a cool 1980s style menu!), I'm assuming it executes some code stored in my linux partition. That code then loads the menu.lst file and displays my options. But to do this, doesn't the computer have to mount a file system? I mean, how would the MBR-code find the GRUB-code stored in linux or the menu file, if it couldn't use a file system? And to mount a file system, don't you need the linux-kernel running? I mean, finding and opening is a system-call which the kernel sends to the correct driver, right? Does GRUB actually boot a tiny operating system, only to shut it down when I choose to start my "real" operating system? Or does it boot linux proper? I mean, it has to be able to read any number of types of file-systems, from Ext2 to ReiserFS to VFS, right? What's going on when I start my computer? Oskar 17:27, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

You're right about the stages of booting- the MBR only contains the code to load up GRUB stage 2. The "code" to read off the hard drive is in the hard drive firmware as part of the LBA abstraction. I guess that 512 bytes must be enough to get some kind of rumedial filesystem running to walk the ext3 tree to find and stream the grub code into memory. If you look at the grub binary files, there are a ton of different tiny files that each are optimized to find the grub stage 2 code for each filesystem. So if your /boot is in reiserfs, then when you install grub to the MBR, the grub setup copies this reiser-optimized boot code into the MBR. It must be extremely optimized, and almost certainly programmed by hand in machine code --froth^T 19:33, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, no, the filesystem driver is written in C. See my answer below. --cesarb 19:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

On my fedora system, /boot is an ext3 filesystem! This surprises me. I figured it would be FAT. No matter. What happens at boot time is:

1. The level 0 bootstrap code (in ROM) loads the MBR into memory and jumps to it.
2. The MBR code (level 1 bootstrap) identifies the selected partition and loads the first sector of that and jumps to it.
3. For MSDOS and NT, this sector is called the boot sector and it contains the BIOS parameter block (BPB). Its job is to find the "boot file" to load and jump to it. In NT/W2K/XP, the rest of the file is contiguous right after boot sector. In MSDOS/FAT, it begins in cluster number 2. The basic code is like 2K or 4K long, and contains logic to parse the filesystem. In the case of grub, I looked at the /boot/grub directory to see what I could learn. There are two interesting entries:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    512 Mar 30  2006 stage1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 102332 Mar 30  2006 stage2

I bet the boot sector loads stage1 and stage1 loads stage2. With a little careful programming, the boot sector code can be used by the stage1 code to leverage 1024 bytes of honoring basic filesystem structures like simple inodes, scan directories looking for pathnames, etc. This all assumes the files are simple and don't require all the features of the filesystem, like security access checking, 4 GB long files, symbolic links, etc., etc. It does not need to understand any kind of filesystem—just the one that it is installed on. Stage2 with 100K is more than enough to show text mode menus, play music, parse complicated filesystems, etc. —EncMstr 19:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

The stage1 can load the stage2 directly (bypassing the filesystem; the sectors with the stage2 are recorded when GRUB is installed), but it's not usually done. Usually it loads the stage 1.5 from the remaining sectors on the first track (see my answer below), which then loads the stage2 from the filesystem. --cesarb 19:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Usually, when GRUB is installed on the MBR (the stage 1), it also installs the "stage 1.5" on the following sectors of the first track (for historical reasons, the first partition starts on the second logical track, leaving a full track of wasted sectors, which are used by several bootloaders and some copy protection systems). The MBR is enough to load the stage 1.5, which has a full read-only filesystem driver for the filesystem of the partition where /boot is (this is why there are several versions of the stage 1.5). It then loads the stage 2, which has all the filesystem drivers, the menu code, and everything else. As an aside, when it's not possible to use the stage 1.5 (for instance, when GRUB is installed on a floppy or a partition boot sector), it directly loads the stage 2, bypassing the filesystem (which can cause problems if the data blocks with the stage2 file are ever moved; the same problem also happens with LILO, which does not have a filesystem driver). --cesarb 19:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

So you are saying that stage 1.5 has enough room for code in it to contain a primitive file system driver that can read the /boot part of the file system? It's big enough, like a couple of KiBs? That's pretty darn cool. If I understand you correctly, if there isn't such a track GRUB simply hard-codes what part of the hard drive that contains stage2 and simply jumps there, right? Can I just say: this kinda stuff is awesome :)

But what if /boot isn't in a "simple" file system like ext2, but in something fairly exotic like VFS or JFS? Do you still use those kinds of drivers in stage 1.5? Do you have to custom make them, since there isn't a kernel? Or do you use the other method and simply jumps to the pre-recorded position of stage2? Oskar 23:41, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, read-only filesystem drivers (which is what grub uses) are much simpler than read-write filesystem drivers, even in more exotic filesystems. You don't have to custom make them; the default installation of grub already has all possible drivers (each on its own stage 1.5 file, the installer choses which one to use depending on the filesystem it will have to read; the stage2 has them all compiled together). And usually /boot is a simple filesystem (often ext3, which grub treats as ext2), since there is no real benefit of a complex filesystem for something that's so rarely used (read on boot by grub, written when installing a new kernel/initrd or changing the boot configuration, and the rest of the time doing nothing). On my system, grub has stage 1.5 files for ext2, FAT, JFS, MINIX, ReiserFS, and XFS. --cesarb 00:27, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Very cool. Thank you for clarifying this! Oskar 02:24, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Distributed chess program...?

Is there yet a distributed chess program designed to utilize the power of thousands of personal computers over the Internet to play a game of chess like the SETI program that uses distributed programming to search for life in outer space? 71.100.171.80 19:25, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Something like this: Chess960@home? Someoneinmyheadbutit'snotme 20:14, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes! Thanks. 71.100.171.80 21:31, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Unless you are a true genius at chess, I would expect a single computer chess program can provide all the challenge you need. StuRat 05:26, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually my own personal ability to concentrate and win at chess against a personal computer program long ago proved to be inadequate even at beginner and intermediate levels. All of my losses revealed the problem to be insignificant moves I had overlooked which proved to me anyway that the ability to consider every possibility is a strength which a computer has and which I lack. Therefore my interest evolved into one of wondering what other strengths might be exploited which computers have such as distributed programming. My interest is not in playing a game of chess against a distributed computer program but in seeing how the personal computer programs I have rate such a program as an opposing player, which takes me to my next question... 71.100.171.80 11:29, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't believe any computer comes anywhere close to being able to consider every possible move until the game's conclusion. If you figure an average of 20 possible moves per turn, and 60 moves turns for each player per game, that would be 20^120 total "games" possible or 1.33 x10^156. Computers can, however, consider far more moves than a person can. In both cases, though, the critical skill is an accurate "pruning algorithm" to chop off the silly branches of possibilities without wasting much time on them. For example, there's no point at looking into pawn development moves when you are in danger of checkmate, whether you're human or a computer. StuRat 18:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

What does "20 moves per turn, and 60 moves for each player" mean? Black Carrot 06:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Moves per turn are how many possible moves there are available for a player to make each turn. Moves for each player is approximate how many turns ae in an average game. Nocternal 15:00, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

That's right, I've now clarified my comments above. StuRat 19:08, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Downloading sun java packages

Hi all,

I downloaded a piece of source code that requires Java files from sun.plugin.javascript. Naturally I've searched the web and sun.com, but I can't find where I'd get such packages. Anyone have any idea?

Thanks! -Mary — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.96.110.73 (talk • contribs) 20:51, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

After a quick look on Google Code Search, it looks like it's part of Sun's browser plugin implementation. The jar file for it seems to be htmlconverter.jar, which however does not seem to exist on Sun's 64-bit JVM. I would recommend avoiding it; it does not seem to be portable and is probably for internal use only. --cesarb 22:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

spam help

hi, I have a spam problem on outlook express running windows xp. i get about 15 per day "giberish stock quotes" and "returned mail" . my isp is orange and my email is "fsnet.co.uk" the old freeserve one.

can you help?

I tried to set up a spam folder but it failed!

thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.105.76.80 (talk • contribs) 21:55, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

• Usually when one gets the "returned mail" spam, it means that someone that you know has a virus, and you are on their email mailing list somewhere. One good way of stopping it is to simply change your email address, and let your freinds know that they may have a virus, and for them to be extra careful with Virus protection. Zeno333 01:35, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

February 28

Does this type of user interface have a name?

IDE-style_interface is what the article calls it, but not much can be found by way of links. So is this a made-up concept? What say the GUI experts out there, anyone? dr.ef.tymac 01:41, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Forgetful computer

Two questions about memory. I have a 2 x 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon ("quad-core") Mac Pro which uses 667MHz DDR2 Fully Buffered DIMM memory units/connectors. I purchased the computer with bare bones memory, two 512MB units. My questions are thus: Other than taking up more DIMMs per unit memory is there any difference between using two 512MB units; and using a single 1MB unit? Also, if I were to purchase heterogeneous memory units (different capacities and manufacturers), is there any importance to the order in which the units are installed in the machine? That is, if there are eight DIMMs all in a line, is there a difference between alternating 512MB and 1GB; or putting all 1GB units together, then all 512MB units. Thank you for any help, these Buffered DDR2 units are not cheap! ^tucker/_rekcut 03:30, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

It's Come to my attention that the memory must be installed in risers in groups of two, so to modify the second question, is there any difference between putting four units on one riser, or splitting it up into two risers? And does having homogenous memory units change the answer to this? Sorry if I'm confusing, there are just a lot of permutations... ^tucker/_rekcut 03:41, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I can answer your question because I don't use Macs and I don't know what risers you're talking about. But here's what I do know. Intel CPUs use different modules for odd and even memory addresses, since the beginning. This is why on modern Intel-based motherboards, it's best to put matched RAM, one for the odd and the other for the even. They recommend not only the same brand when you're matching two chips (they have to be identical sizes when you match them), you get chips from the same batch. The same batch means that the CMOS devices are doped (they're made) under the same conditions, leading to a greater compatibility between the two. This is why you find companies selling matched sticks of RAM, and that's what that means.

When you matched the RAM, you match them by size. A 1GB with a 1GB, a 512MB with a 512MB, etc. There isn't really any difference in putting the 1GBs first then the the 512MBs, or vice versa, except for when it seeps over to the next chip. For example, say you're using 1GBs in the first slot, then the 512s, it won't use the second chip till you fill up the 1GB chip. If you use the 512s then the 1GBs, it seeps to the 1GBs faster. But as for benefits, there really isn't any that I know of.

As for putting them on different risers, if I'm thinking of the right things (where you connect two RAM chips to an adaptor that then connects to the motherboard), it's generally slower because there's more address decoders the system has to go through (the extra one to choose which chip on the riser), thus it's better to spread it out over as many risers as you can. Hope something in here helped. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 05:48, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

A MacWorld report says that performance significantly rises (+25% or +50%) when there are 4 DIMMs installed compared to two, with no significant performance increases between four and more. So as long as four or more chips are installed, you should be able to milk the most from your Mac Pro. kelvSYC 22:13, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Distributed medical research programming via the Internet...?

Are there any distributed medical programs which can use the power of thousands of personal computers over the Internet to do medial research like the SETI program that uses distributed programming to search for life in outer space? 71.100.171.80 11:30, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Take a look at Folding@home. Cheers, Davidprior 11:44, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Also see List of distributed computing projects. Davidprior 13:08, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Add page with new significance to existing page

How do we have to behave in the following situation, in order to operate in line with the wikipedia behaviour guidlines. E.g. the page which explains Tendency exists already, now a company named Tendency would like to add their company description in an objective way to this page. What should they do? tx 62.101.100.5 12:06, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

If (and only if) the company meets the requirements of Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies), you could create a page called Tendency (company) and create a link to it on Tendency. Cheers, Davidprior 13:02, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

If you're involved with this company in some way, please also read Wikipedia:Autobiography and Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 14:45, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

In general, the Wikipedia:Disambiguation for guidelines covers this issue. - Akamad 16:56, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

media player

why does windows media player suck so much at being on random? - i.e. always wanting to play a song that has just already been played. (i have the new version - 11 i think it is)

is there any way to get it working better? this is really starting to annoy me, it have thousands upon thousand of songs to pick from why must it pick the one that was on a minute ago, to me that doesnt seem all that random Rickystrapp 16:59, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

• Have you tried turning on shuffle?--VectorPotential^Talk 16:59, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

yeah its on shuffle Rickystrapp 17:08, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

• And it's repeating the same songs? I guess whatever algorithm they use isn't very effective--VectorPotential^Talk 17:13, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

The problem with 'random' is that we humans find patterns/sequences in anything. For instance you might want to 'note' the random-order for say 100 songs and see what occurs. You probably won't find 100 unique songs even if your library has 10,000 songs. I know in iTunes they now have a 'songs by same artist to appear less/more often' slider because users complained. The random-generator is correctly random, you just remember the 'hits'. This selective-memory is one reason why psychics etc. are believed in by so many. ny156uk 17:17, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Rather than being truly random, it should randomly select songs, then randomly pick again if the selection was played recently (say it's in the last 50% of songs in the library). So, if you had 10,000 songs in the library, it should keep randomly selecting until it finds one that isn't one of the last 5,000 songs played. Or, better still, they could only randomly pick from the 5,000 songs which haven't been played recently. StuRat 17:30, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

At the moment i would say at at least one in 8 songs is one that has been played in the very recent past(a lot of the time though it may be that a song is played then it will move to a random song then back to the one it just played i.e song A -> song Q -> back to song A). This definately occurs more frequently if i skip the song because i didnt want to hear that one, and of course that winds me up even more becasue it one i don't want to hear. Over a period of time it becomes increasbly noticable and rather annoying. There has to be some sort of solution to this, bar dragging and dropping the songs into a playlist (as this somewhat defeats the object of 'random'). Maybe it serves me right for using a microsoft product. Rickystrapp 17:50, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

In the playlist pane, you can tell it to randomize the order of the items. I'm not on a Windows computer right now so I can't detail exactly where you click to do that, but it shouldn't be hard to find. If you do that, you certainly won't hear the same song twice until everything has played (unless you have duplicates, of course). -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 18:06, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

python import: avoiding naming collisions

Having a little trouble finding documentation or help on a particular naming collision problem. I am dealing with the following situation:

   c:/foo/alpha/mymodule.py
   c:/foo/bravo/mymodule.py
   c:/foo/charlie/mymodule.py

   c:/baz/caller.py

Someone horribly saw fit to name all the modules "mymodule.py" and now I cannot figure out how to get the import statements to work unambiguously. Assume renaming the files is unfortunately not an option.

   sys.path.insert(0,'c:/foo/alpha')
   import mymodule as ModAlpha

   sys.path.insert(0,'c:/foo/bravo')
   import mymodule as ModBravo

This-a no-worky! In the "other" language perl, you could do

   require"c:/foo/bravo/mymodule.pl"; ### python have an equivalent?

I know this is bad "programming form" but just assume for this case I am stuck with this layout and situation beyond my willing. Anyone care to shed some light? NoClutter 17:36, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Insert a blank file named __init__.py into C:/foo/(alpha|bravo|charlie) (if there isn't one already), and add C:/foo to sys.path. Then, your code looks like this:

 from alpha import mymodule as alphamodule
 from bravo import mymodule as bravomodule
 from charlie import mymodule as charliemodule

By the way, comp.lang.python (linky to it in mailing list form) is a good place to ask Python questions, and you'll likely get a real veteran or two responding, instead of rather mediocre anonymous users. 88.111.161.53 19:03, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Java static keyword

Could anyone tell me the difference between a static variable and a non-static variable, in dumbed-down language? Does static allow a variable to be referenced through all instances of a class (so say variable is a static variable in a class TestClass, to reference the "global" variable will be TestClass.variable, but for an instance, test.variable?). x42bn6 Talk 17:51, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

TestClass.variable and test.variable point to the same thing; if one is changed, the other is changed. 'static' means that the variable is attached to the class, rather than instance variables which are attached to the particular object. [7] is a nice, brief overview. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 18:04, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah, so static variables are like a variable that points to the same reference for each instantiated class, while non-static gives each class its own reference to its own variable? x42bn6 Talk 01:46, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and with classes which are static, you don't have to create instances of them to use them. --wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 09:39, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

computer to stereo

Is it possible for me to listen to music from my computer, on a stereo, which is located in a seperate room?

Assuming you have a long enough speaker cable and a headphone jack on your computer, I don't see why not. Of course you'd probably have to run the thing through an amp--VectorPotential^Talk 18:31, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

If it's a stereo, it would probably do that itself, wouldn't it? (And the computer needs to do some sort of amplification before feeding its speakers...) You may need to get an adapter to go from the 3.5mm ("1/8 inch") jack on your computer to the two 1/4" (or "RCA") plugs that your stereo probably accepts. That is, unless your sound card and stereo support some form of digital audio cable thingie. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 18:41, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Airport Express does this, I have one - it works very well. I guess there is a pc-specific product somewhere. ny156uk 19:12, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

A Mac is a PC :/. If you mean Windows or Linux, the article has links to Airtunes implementations for both. There are other devices that do the same thing but with more features, better controls, a display, etc. Squeezebox (network music player) is a good example of that. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 19:19, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Most computers have 3 audio jacks in the back. One is a microphone/line-in jack (rather poor since line-in and microphone signals are very different). One is line-out. The other is a headphone jack. The line-out is intended to be run into the line-in of a receiver. Once it is on the receiver, you run it to an amp and speakers as you do with any other line-in source. --Kainaw ^(talk) 19:46, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Flight Sim X

I have a new copy of the flight simulator. I installed it. All the computer requirements are good, however when i attempt to play it says i do not have enough disk space. I have a 250GB Hard drive so i have no idea why it won't work. Any Tips would be nice.--logger 19:32, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

How much of your 250GB hard drive is not being used? --Kainaw ^(talk) 19:43, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

206GB are free--logger 20:26, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Is the drive partitioned. How much is free on C. Lots of programs assume they are being installed to C only.

Drive is not partitioned.--logger 08:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Of course the drive is partitioned! You must use partition to use a modern file system!!!! ggrrr --wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 09:40, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Pardon me, I don't see why? It is possible with modern operating systems to address above 130G. Namely XP with SP2 which can see my whole secondary 250G drive. Of course it is impractical as you would want to partition C to something between 10G and 50G, but technically there is nothing wrong with a 250G C drive. Logger what OS/patch are you using? Sandman30s 10:56, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Because, even if you have only one partition covering the whole drive, the drive is partitioned. I don't think anybody uses a raw unpartitioned drive on a PC, as the loss of disk space is minimal, and it avoids confused operating systems accidentally overwriting your data. --cesarb 15:48, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I am Using Windows Vista Home Premium.--logger 19:16, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

WinXP system font name?

I know Vista uses a new font called Segoe. But what did XP use? --Navstar 20:02, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Tahoma — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 21:45, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Any moderns flight sims have A-10 Warhogs?

I'm looking for a flight sim that has a realistic cockpit and HUD of an A-10 Warthog. Are any available for Microsoft Flight Sim X? --Navstar 20:05, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Lock On: Modern Air Combat maybe?--antilived^{T | C | G} 03:27, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I can confirm LO:MAC does have A-10s as a flyable vehicle (and it is quite fun). I really wish rigid sims weren't such a niche market, I would kill for a new AH-64 Apache sim. Cyraan 05:19, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

2 IP address

My Internet connection tab shows My IP is 10.0.7.101. BUT Wikipedia shows different IP 202.79.18.2. Why this is happening?? Will it creat any problem?? Which IP should I mention in Infobox?--NAHID 22:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Hello. 10.0.7.101 is your internal IP address, whereas 202.79.18.2 is your external one. 202.79.18.2 should be used in your infobox. 10.0.7.101 is used for your home network, and no one on the internet will ever know this. See Private network and IP Address for more information. JoshHolloway 22:28, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

The article which best explaing what you are seeing is Network Address Translation. --cesarb 22:34, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

InDesign

Where can one find a free InDesign tutorial online that gives instructions on how to create a book (with TOC, index, etc.), rather than how to create a flyer or a magazine? Do any such exist? --Siva 23:35, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

March 1

Way to "trace" an IP number?

Is there a way to get an street address from an IP number? I was thinking about one of those movie hacker scenarios that doesn't have to be completely real, but just has to be based in reality. So my hacker has an IP number from an email. He hacks into the phone company to match it against their DSL modems. He finds a match and the phone company has the billing address on file. Does that sound plausible? I guess the only hole would be trying to find which ISP owns the TCP number. Thoughts? --Navstar 02:18, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Is there a way to get an street address from an IP number?

Not unless you're the ISP, a very bad person at the ISP, or the police with a subpoena for the ISP. Using some extrapolation and known databases, you can often figure out a general geographic location for an IP, but usually nothing more.

So my hacker has an IP number from an email. He hacks into the phone company to match it against their DSL modems.

The whole "getting into the ISP's logs and billing records" is the tricky part. It's very easy to figure out which ISP owns which IP address. Those are usually very protected systems that aren't designed to be accessible from outside networks. That being said, sensitive data slipups have certainly happened in the past, so you couldn't rule out the possibility. The only real fallacy in this thinking is that "anything can be hacked through purely technological means given a clever enough person", which really isn't true. In fact, some of the most clever hacks have involved a lot of social manipulation and diving through dumpsters. It's usually negligence that causes data to fall into the wrong peoples' hands, not a flaw in the system (though security flaws certainly turn up regularly and are sometimes exploited). -- mattb @ 2007-03-01T02:26Z

Word Retrieval

Is it true that MicroSoft Word files keep track of everything you've typed, including what's been deleted? (Deleted as in backspace, not deleted as in erasing the file.) If so, how do you retrieve that? I'd be interested in going back over things I've written and seeing how I came up with them. Black Carrot 04:33, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I think MS Word can keep revisions, I just don't know how... search the Tools menu. --wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 09:42, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

It's called "reviewing"; if you go View->Toolbars->Reviewing, you can activate the reviewing menu. However, you'll need to have "track changes" activated on the Reviewing menu. Incidently, you should deactivate track changes if you happen to be a Government employee; all sorts of sensitive information has been found by clicking on the "show all changes" option[8]. Laïka 12:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Nifty. I'm not sure that's what I'm looking for, though. I went through the tutorial on it, and it's for red-penning something that's otherwise finished, and the markup is deleted as the changes are accepted. I was thinking more along the lines of keystroke tracking or previous save points or something. Black Carrot 05:59, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Lockpicking/Cryptography quotation?

There was a quotation by a nineteenth-century (or thereabouts) locksmith, which could be applied surprisingly well to modern cryptography and full-disclosure security debates. Does anyone know what it was? grendel|khan 05:38, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I could guess it would be along the lines of saying they could make any lock secure, but it would require a huge key. StuRat 17:52, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Left and right handed Dvorak on OS X

Does anyone know if there is a way to install left and right handed dvorak keyboard layouts on OS X?

Thank you,

Does this help? Mabris 23:39, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Excel number formats

Is it possible to create an Excel number format so that instead of displaying a number as 1.473E-03, it displays it as 1.473x10^-3, or better yet as 1.473x10^-3? Laïka 12:26, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

This Excel number formatting article should help. Droud 13:25, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

pc freezes before xp loads

i can't figure why my pc won't start; please helpIpeariso 14:02, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

By "freezes", what do you mean exactly? Is it not starting at all, does it start partially and then stop, does it display any error message? Does it beep? -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 15:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

And also, what stage does i freeze. For example, does it stop before any windows logos appear on the screen? - Akamad 20:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Data Retrieval - Expensive?

I run a 160Gb Lacie external firewire drive in conjunction with my Macbook Pro. However, it has now stopped working. The error seems mechanical ( ie, disk not spinning ), but Lacie will not offer to save my data. All the data retrieval quotes I've had seem VERY expensive. Why is this so? Can I recover the data myself? I believe the drive isnt corrupted, and ultimatley, the drive is out of warranty.

Why can they charge so much? And is there any other hope to recover my files on a student budget? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.13.35.175 (talk • contribs) 14:54, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

They can charge so much because people are willing to pay that much to recover their precious un-backed-up data. A hard disk drive is a black box; when it stops working, there's not much you can do. If the error is really mechanical, it might be stiction; you might try to put the drive on a fridge (carefully wrapped in plastic, to prevent condensation) for some time and see if it spins (if it does, quickly copy all the data; it won't last long). If it's not, it can be several things; the spindle motor might have burned, the motor electronics might have failed, the whole circuit board might not be working anymore, or a defect somewhere else is being detected by the drive's firmware (which then stops before starting up to prevent damage). Since it's an external enclosure, it's also possible that the power supply is out of specification; the drive will not spin up without enough power (and out-of-spec power can even burn the drive's electronics). If the drive can be removed from the enclosure, you might try using the drive outside the enclosure, as the defect might be in the enclosure (but be careful when doing that, as a defective drive might burn the computer's IDE interface). As an aside, an interesting article on that subject appeared on Slashdot some days ago; it's called RAID Recovery: The Data Knight Kroll Ontrack To The Rescue!, from Tom's Hardware. --cesarb 15:42, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Follow cesarb's advice (i.e., check the power supply, etc.) Remember that the drive mechanism can be moved from one external mounting box to another, or even into your computer; there's nothing magic about the LaCie mounting box. If the drive works in its new environment, you're all set, but take this as a lesson and begin backing-up your data on a regular basis.

But additionally, if the problem really is stiction in the drive mechanism, there are several more things you can try:

1. Hold the drive mechanism in your hand. Imagine the platters inside it and sharply rotate the drive in the axis in which those platters would turn. (You're trying to use the inertia of the platters to break the stiction.) Do this several times and then try operating the drive again.
2. If you're truly at the end of your rope, take your Torx screwdriver and carefully open up the drive, working in as clean a space as you can manage. With the platters exposed, turn them slightly. (They turn in the direction the heads are pointing and you should only touch the very edges of the platters or the raised hub assembly and not the disk surfaces.) If you don't hear any truly evil scraping sounds, try operating the drive again. It will actually work for a while exposed to the environment but eventually, the heads will probably crash due to dirt contaminating the drive. (I'm not kidding about this; I have several drives opened up for demo purposes and they still mostly-operate.)

If the drive works after following either of my steps, again follow cesarb's advice and immediately back up all the data you can snarf off of the drive. Don't get entranced by the sight of the head comb flipping back-and-forth and don't give into temptation and Photoshop that "one more file" before beginning the recovery process because you're living on borrowed time and the drive will fail again.

Atlant 17:56, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

It's at times like this that you need to make friends with someone who has access to a class 100 clean room. :) -- mattb @ 2007-03-01T18:10Z

I wonder if you could buy a used version of your drive on Ebay, swap your disk into that drive, and get it to work like that. That would mean working with some tiny electronic components, do you have much experience with that ? StuRat 17:50, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

The electronics boards of disk drives contain data that is unique to each set of platters (mapping bad sectors and the like; you can't just take the electronics from drive A and the disks from drive B and put them together and have the data from drive B be accessible. This is one of the reasons why the data recovery places can charge the big bucks that they do; they know how to utilize the drive-specific data.

Atlant 17:58, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Though swapping out the spindle motor is feasible (and non-trivial). Of course, if the problem is solely the motor, the above methods should be tried before attempting to replace it (I wouldn't even attempt it without a clean room and a very steady hand). -- mattb @ 2007-03-01T18:16Z

Actually, I have heard of people who did exactly that (replaced the electronics board) and it worked. It's quite possible that the data about the bad blocks can also be found on the plates (and even if not, you would still be able to access most of the data). Of course, to do that you need a board from the exact same model (sometimes down to the hardware revision, which is not announced in the model number). And there's no need to say it would work only if the problem is on the board — if the problem is on the inside of the drive (burnt motor, head crash) replacing the board would not make any difference. --cesarb 19:16, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I'd say the first thing you'll need to decide is how much you value your files. If you had to pay $x or risk losing them, how much would x be? If it's anywhere near the cost of professional data recovery, go for that. Anything you might do to recover the data yourself could also make things worse, especially if you don't know what's causing the problem in the first place.

If you do decide to try recovery yourself, the second question is whether you can still get the drive to spin up and give you some data. If not, there's not much you can do. Some of the suggestions above might help if it's a small, purely mechanical problem, but if there's more significant damage or if the controller circuits are fried you pretty much need to call in the pros.

In any case, get everything ready before attempting recovery. If the drive is right now powered down and sitting in a safe place, leaving it that way for a while isn't likely to make things worse, but spinning it up needlessly might. I'd recommend getting a new disk that is at least as large as the original — preferably two or three times larger — and some software for making disk images. A live Linux recovery CD will do nicely if you know how to use one; all Linux distributions generally come with the dd program which can image disks nicely.

If you use dd, remember to use the conv=sync,noerror option to make sure a single read error won't break everything. Also save stderr to a file; that way you'll know where any failed blocks are. If you got errors, you may want to try taking a second image; with some types of damage, the errors may come and go, so that a second read may get blocks that the first read missed, allowing you to combine the images. I've done this before myself — unfortunately, following these particular instructions won't be very easy unless you're rather good with computers already. Still, it might give you some ideas. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:15, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Cat 5 wiring problem

I want to run a Cat 5 cable to a part of my house that gets low WiFi signal. I have a big spool of Cat 5 cable. I have some outlets that can be wired.

In my first attempt, I stretched bulk Cat 5 cable under the house. The run is about 50 feet. I tested each wire for continuity and found no problems. I then went to connect the cables to the outlets. I connected like colors in the Cat 5 cable to like colors in the outlets. This gives me a female connection at both ends of the house. At one end of the house, I used a regular store bought cable to go from this new outlet to my internet hub. At the other end of the house, I used another store bought cable to go from the outlet to the computer. The computer does not recognize a network signal.

I have tested both of the short store-bought cables by themselves and found they work fine. I have also tested the port on the hub and it works fine. In trouubleshooting this problem, I replaced the computer with a second hub. I notice that the WAN light on the hub blinks. Usually it is steady when it has a valid signal.

Where did I go wrong? Should I not connect like colors to like colors?

Thank you, Johntex\^talk 15:49, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

You have too many unknown variables. I wired my house, but I just put a normal connector at the end (no outlet) so I could test it with a laptop. I still screwed up a few times. --Zeizmic 16:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I first tried to do this with plastic connectors and a crimper. I found that even with a very expensive crimper it is hard to get a good connection. That is when I switched to the outlets. Johntex\^talk 16:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Just testing for continuity is not enough. Testing for continuity only shows the cable can transmit a DC signal, but not that it can transmit a higher-frequency signal well (it needs to be able to transmit up to 100MHz). There are also several other parameters which need to be within specific limits; for instance, NEXT and FEXT. The only way to correctly test a Cat5 cable run is with a special tester. It's hard to know exactly what went wrong, but check this:

• Did you untwist too much at the ends of the cable (you must untwist as little as possible)?
• Did you use the punch tool to install the cable in the outlets (doing it by hand will not give you a good enough connection)?
• Are the outlets of the correct type (wrong outlets might cause problems, and even have the wrong colours)?
• Is the cable run near an AC power cable (which might induce too much interference)?

--cesarb 16:29, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

• I have a Cat5 tester that consists of two blue boxes with lights. Unfortunately, I can't find the instruction manual so I am not sure what the lights mean or what to do about them. I may need to buy/borrow a new tester or see if I can find an instruction manual online.
• I tried not to untwist too much but at one end I probably have untwisted 1.5 inches and maybe 2 inches on the other end.
• My outlets are not the punch tool type. They are like a phone wall outlet (but with more wires). You twist the wire under a screw to make the connection. Are the punch type better?
• The cable is under the house so of course there is electrical under the house. I made sure not to come near the breaker box and I made sure not to run directly alongside an electrical line. How close is too close?

Thanks to both of you for your help. Johntex\^talk 16:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

AFAIK, there are no Cat5 outlets which are not of the punch tool type (all I've seen are of the punch tool type). Twisting the connection under a screw would not make a good enough connection at the frequencies involved. That's probably your problem. As for how close is too close, I don't know; your guess is as good as mine (but remember to cross them at 90 degrees if they have to cross). --cesarb 17:00, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm.... OK. These were billed as Cat 5 outlets. I bought them at Fry's Electronics. I will replace them with the punch-type because this is easier than getting back under the house to run new cable. Johntex\^talk 17:17, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Have you tried running Cat 5e or Cat 6 cabling? It's better shielded against interference. --24.249.108.133 17:14, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

No, I have not tried that. Are they just higher quality versions of Cat 5? In other words, same connector type and all that - nothing different as far as my computer would be concerned? `Johntex\^talk 17:17, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

The 2-box tester you mention works as so: 1) Plug the boxes into each end of a cable run. 2) Turn on the box with the switch. 3) The lights (there should be 4 of them) will light up in order from left to right, 1..2..3..4..pause..1..2..3..4. A common problem is to hook up the loops backwards. Then, you either get 1..3..2..4..pause..1..3..2..4.. or you get 1..2..pause..3..4..1..2..pause.. --Kainaw ^(talk) 17:18, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

iPod problem

I have had iTunes installed on my (Windows XP) computer for some while and have just bought a iPod video (30gb) to accompany it. However, I have some video files that iTunes and the iPod seem to treat as music files. The video does play in iTunes and it objects to putting a video file in the same playlist as audio files. However, a playlist of videos alone has a music symbol next to it and I can't make the video play in the movies screen. When the iPod plays it, it plays it as if it's an audio track with a frame (not the first frame) as the album picture.

I'd like this to work properly. Can anyone tell me how I might do this?

Many thanks,

Sam (85.210.161.98) 16:43, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

music scheduling software

Does anyone know of a program for Windows XP (preferably freeware or relatively inexpensive) that can be used to play music at 6 specific times of the day and is easy to use? I've been using Raduga, but it is too expensive and has too many features for what I need. Any help would be appreciated. And do you know of any software to normalize volume across mulitple tracks? I'd very much like to keep the volume about equal between the songs. Thanks -Mysekurity 17:30, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Audiograbber is freeware and can normalize wav files, but I'm unsure about the multi-file and mp3 format ones. As for making music play at 6 specific times, you can just use windows scheduler. I remember making my computer into an alarm clock briefly with it by opening a music file with scheduler. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 05:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Free RAW images?

I am considering a purchase of a new digital camera that can do RAW image captures. Are there any free RAW sample images I can download to process with Photoshop's RAW importer? --24.249.108.133 17:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

This sample Olympus RAW file (15MB) is linked from the bottom of RAW image format. RAWpository has a bunch of RAW samples. There are some more scattered around if you Google for raw sample images. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 18:12, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I had tried Googling "raw images" and didn't get anything useful. --24.249.108.133 19:13, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Cleaning Dust From PC

I've read many sources that say a PC should never be cleaned with a vacuum cleaner due to static, however, I've also read that many people do it anyway. At two shops that I was in recently (looking for a can of compressed air), it was suggested that I use a vacuum cleaner, including a guy who repairs computers and says that's what they use in his shop. Some people use paintbrushes to sweep across components which I imagine would also be risky. I want to know once and for all, how safe is it to use a vacuum to clean PC components? Exactly how is static electricity generated by using a vacuum? What is losing electrons and what is gaining them? --Seans Potato Business 17:23, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

A lot of vacuum cleaners have plastic hoses that do indeed build up a significant static charge (lots of little particles bumping around inside the hose). I personally wouldn't use a vacuum cleaner around any electrostatically sensitive components. -- mattb @ 2007-03-01T17:29Z

I question the need to clean dust out of your PC at all, unless it's in a saw mill or otherwise excessively dusty environment. My experience has been that they become obsolete before the dust builds up to a level that causes a problem. StuRat 17:44, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't agree with that. Significant dust buildup can easily impede air flow through heat sinks and the like, and that will cause cooling problems. I mean, cleaning out the dust isn't something you'd likely need to do on a monthly basis, but once a year might not be a terrible idea. I usually use compressed air or just take the thing outside, open it up, and use a power blower (you should disconnect any fans and still be careful about electrostatic discharge, though). -- mattb @ 2007-03-01T18:08Z

Pros do it with specialised vacuum cleaners that are designed with anti-static (mildly conductive) hoses and brushes. You might find that "toner vacuums" (used for servicing photocopiers and laser printers) meet these needs. Me, not having such a vac, I'd tend to blow the dust out with compressed air and then apologise afterwards to my wife for all the dust bunnies that were now on the loose.

Atlant 18:09, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

The recommended method is to buy canned air. --h2g2bob 19:39, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I take it outside and use canned air myself, maybe twice a year. Cleaning it does matter, if you monitor the temperature with your motherboard or whatever. As for static, I've never messed a chip up from static, and I work with them in my field. However, theoretically, it doesn't take that many volts to mess up a CMOS device, so you should be cautious. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 05:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Theoretically nothing, it's not difficult at all to build up sufficient charge in something like a vacuum cleaner hose to create electric fields beyond the dielectric breakdown point of materials used in modern microprocessors/DRAM. One good zap may be all it takes to cause permanent lattice damage. I wouldn't risk it if the idea of damaging important parts of your computer isn't attractive. -- mattb @ 2007-03-02T06:31Z

The suggestion to use an anti-static vacuum nozzle is a good one. Not having one of those, I just take the standard plastic nozzle off the metal pipe between it and the vacuum hose, and ground the bare pipe to the computer chassis with alligator clips. In fact, just holding on to the metal pipe with one hand and the chassis with the other should be enough to prevent a significant static buildup. Try to be careful not to touch any exposed wiring with metal objects, though — even with the power off, the power supply delivers standby current to the motherboard, and even if you disconnect the computer from the mains entirely, many capacitors will still retain charge. Grounding the nozzle should reduce the likelihood that you'll fry anything even if you do manage to create a short circuit, but the risk is still there. Besides, you don't really want to bring the nozzle of a powerful vacuum cleaner too close anyway; accidentally sucking a chip off your motherboard is never a good thing. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:31, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

MAC OS X 10.5

Is there a way on Mac OS (w/ Boot Camp Software) to get Windows XP and Windows Vista as well as Mac OS? 68.193.147.179 21:06, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Sure, you'd need to make a parition for each of your OSs. It involves a little work in Terminal.

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 60G "MS-DOS FAT32" <name of Windows volume> 17G "MS-DOS FAT32" <name of windows volume> 15G

Also look up "Triple Boot Camp" in a search engine. --24.249.108.133 21:42, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Make sure you understand what you are doing in Terminal, since you want to partition it different ways depending on who you are and what you are using each OS for. Check MacWorld magazine for a great guide from this month on how to partition without losing any data (normally partitioning causes a full erase of the disk). [Mαc Δαvιs] X (How's my driving?) ❖ 03:38, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

What are 2EDS_~!3 files?

I'm running a Linux server connected to Macs and Windows. I notice each directory contains a small file called "2EDS_~!3". Is this important? Can I trash them? --24.249.108.133 21:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I believe they are temporary files created by Samba, which allows you to connect to your Mac and Windows boxes.... I'd leave them there. Mabris 23:33, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Could this be a problem with the Exchange?

I often received the following message when I attempted to send email to certain individual: “This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY. YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE. Delivery to the following recipients has been delayed.” What should I do? Could this be something to do with the server and Exchange? Chailai 21:25, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

The message basically says your e-mail message could not be sent immediately and was queued, so something is going on with the e-mail server. Splintercellguy 22:05, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Office 2007 and Windows Vista

What is the best version of Office 2007 and Windows Vista? And, can I buy them directly from Microsoft ([9])? 68.193.147.179 22:03, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

The best option is the one that meets your needs at the lowest cost. Try these pages at Microsoft: Vista, Office. They are not generally purchased direct from Microsoft for home use. — Lomn 22:45, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I am just looking for which one has the most features. 68.193.147.179 23:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

The ones with the most features are the Ultimate editions of each one. Unless you're running IT for a business I doubt you'd need them though. --Kiltman67 00:17, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

For most needs, OpenOffice.org is a good replacement for MS Office, and it's free so worth a go --h2g2bob 04:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

WinXP

I heard that there a couple of WinXP editions, which one should I get? 68.193.147.179 22:20, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

It depends on what you want/need. Please explain further. Splintercellguy 23:08, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I am just looking for which one has the most features. 68.193.147.179 23:12, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

That would be Windows XP Professional, but the advantages over Home edition are minimal. Unless you need to connect to a domain, or need to use terminal services to access your PC remotely, chances are XP Home should be adequate. Cyraan 00:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Cyrann, does the same go for Vista? --24.249.108.133 19:36, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Vista has far too many editions. Home Premium is ideal for most people. Home Basic lacks the media center and fancy user interface. Business and Enterprise add some features that are very useful for businesses and probably not so much for end-users, and Ultimate is like those two but with extra fluffy things (i.e. a video wallpaper). See Windows_Vista_editions_and_pricing. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 21:26, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Have you looked at our article on Windows XP? There's a section on the differences between the editions. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 00:48, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

There is also a WinXP Pro x64 bit and some others like it; is it better? 68.193.147.179 22:08, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

March 2

Learning languages

Do people usually learn computer languages and programming languages by themselves or in a class? --The Dark Side 01:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Depends on the person, but it's probably best to learn the principles of computer programming and at least one language in a class, allowing you to more easily teach yourself other languages from books or the internet. --Canley 10:12, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Mass un-capitilization

Hi is there any way to turn all the filename of a large group (100) of files into all lowercase characters on a Windows machine? For example: "Something.jpg" into "something.jpg". I am asking because I'm hosting a website on a Linux sever, and apparently the capilization is important when establishing links.

As well, when I'm backing up files from a hard drive to a USB drive, I have the same files on both drives, but the filenames of the files on my harddrive is all lowercase and when i replace the files on my USB with my lowercased files on my harddrive, the USB files still remain capitalized. Any way to fix this? Thanks. Jamesino 02:05, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

For the first issue, a Google search: file + renamer + capitalization. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 04:26, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm well-aware that this is a very heavy-handed solution, but if you do a lot of "advanced" manipulation of files of any sort you might find it useful: Emacs. I just threw together a tiny bit of Emacs Lisp that does precisely what you want:

 (mapcar (lambda (f) (rename-file f (downcase f))) (directory-files "." nil "[^.]"))

...obviously "downcase" can become "upcase" or, with a bit more work, "abbreviate to 12 characters", or whatever else; you could also make it only affect ".jpg" files, or make it recursive (an entire directory tree at a time). Anyway, enough evangelizing; it's just an answer to many questions so I thought it worthwhile. As for the second thing, delete the files on the USB drive and then copy the HDD's files again. --Tardis 06:06, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

OCR Software

Is it possible to get OCR software that reads hand-writing?

Yes, though as I understand it, they're not as good as OCRs that do printed text. As for specific, I don't have. Splintercellguy 04:18, (UTC)

Windows XP has a built in ocr for text User:Nerdd 07:45,2 March 2007 (Utc)

Windows XP - is it possible to make your 'C: drive' spin down?

Is it possible to configure Windows XP so that it leaves the main hard drive alone for more than 3 minutes in a row? I would like to use the 'turn off hard disks' feature in Power Management to - yup - turn of the hard disk, but even on the shortest timeout (3 minutes), the main hard drive (where Windows, the pagefile and hibernate file live) never gets to stop, however little the machine is doing. Any details of exactly what services/processes might be bothering my drive would be welcome, but I'd also like to know has it ever been done?. Thanks. -84.69.45.120 04:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Someplace I thought I read somewhere that the NTFS file $LogFile has a header which is updated every few seconds with a new sequence number or timestamp. I thought it was described here, but I don't see it. Anyway, just because "the system" isn't doing much, doesn't mean that the internals aren't busy! Various programs check the windows registry every so often, program execute code or access data sporadically, which might cause a hard page fault. Also, windows prefetchs data it predicts is about to be accessed as part of a caching scheme under certain conditions. Turning off all of this seems akin to asking someone not to exhale for a couple hours. —EncMstr 05:35, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Even if you could, you don't want to do that. Spinning up and down often will harm the hard disk. – b_jonas 08:34, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Inverted screen

One of the computers in our college digital library is having an inverted screen(I dont know how it got into that condition).How can I revert it back to it's original position of straight screen.

Check video card/display settings for Windows? Splintercellguy 06:07, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

If it's the same as the ones we used to have, hit Ctrl+Alt+(up arrow). — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 09:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Running as arbitrary ring

Is there any built-in way to get Windows or Linux to assign a particular running program Ring 0 priviliges? I realize that this is very bad form but I like having control over my computer and this seems like something that's important to know. --froth^T 07:01, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

You can setuid 'nix programs to run with root privileges, but you can't do this once the program has already started running. If I understand correctly, ring 0 is essentially kernel space, and no operating system worth its salt will let you run a program in kernel space.

Yeah I don't mean root, I mean actual kernel space. If I wanted to test a program from within Linux.. a program that needs the direct hardware control that Ring 0 provides, how would I make this happen? Since linux is open-source it shouldn't be too much of an issue to add this functionality to your own kernel revision or something. --froth^T 15:00, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Write a loadable [virtual] device driver. See here. —EncMstr 17:30, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Firefox search thing

I have two computers. Both have firefox. One of them's firefox 1.5, and the other's firefox 2.0. On the 1.5 one, when i type seperate words, not adresses, into the address bar (not the search bar), it would automatically load a page related to it. I think it may have basically been using google's feeling lucky thing that opens the search found to be the most popular. it was really nice, because i could type, say, "amazon no sun in venice" and be taken to the amazon.com site specific to that modern jazz quartet cd. this doesn't happen on the computer with 2.0. I don't know if this has always been the case. I just started using the computer again after a while of only using my laptop (with 1.5). But I was hoping one of you knew how I might be able to make my firefox 2.0 do that. i really liked it. thanks, sasha

Here you go --froth^T 07:07, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Statistical distribution of bits

Has anyone ever done a study of the statistical distribution of 1s and 0s in registers as various programs run? What would you think would be seen more often, 1s or 0s? --froth^T 07:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

That's going to vary widely depending on the particular register(s), their function, the program, and the alignment of Venus with Mars. Without any further information, I'd guess that the pmf converges upon a uniform distribution as time goes on. -- mattb @ 2007-03-02T07:19Z

It will vary widely, but you have to consider that most of the numbers stored in registers will be (much) smaller than the register's maximum value, especially on 64b platforms. This is a direct result of architecture (nobody has fully populated RAM, so pointers won't get the most significant bits set, ever), and would lead to more 0's than 1's, I believe. Droud 13:27, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

0 will be seen more often. Not only is zero a commonly used number, but also small positive numbers (which have a lot of zero bits) are very common. --cesarb 14:32, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, ASCII (commonly used for text) is mostly 7-bit (extended ASCII is rare compared to normal ASCII). The 8th bit is normally a 0. --Kainaw ^(talk) 17:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Photoshop JPEG color downsampling.

At what quality settings does Photoshop CS2 apply 4:4:4, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 color sampling? --24.249.108.133 19:33, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Graphics card - what does this mean?

I'm looking at the specs for the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT. The specs say this "NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM (1 x single-link DVI / 1 x dual-link DVI)". So does that mean that it will support two monitors from the one card, i.e. one monitor on the single link connector and one on the dual link connector? Or does it mean that it will support one monitor with either a single or dual link connector? Dismas|^(talk) 20:29, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Nevermind, I found out. One place said "(single-link DVI /dual-link DVI)" which led me to believe it was one connector which would work with both. Another place said "(1 x single-link DVI / 1 x dual-link DVI)" which made me think it was one of each on the same card. Rooting around more I found "making it capable of simultaneously supporting one 23-inch and one 30-inch Apple Cinema Display." So, I have my answer. Dismas|^(talk) 20:35, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Reset a Dell Dimension 4600

How do you reset a Dell Dimension 4600 to its original settings? 68.193.147.179 21:36, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Assuming you mean you want to reset the BIOS settings so you can get to the menu where you can configure boot devices, etc.? Disconnect power and pull out the little battery on the motherboard for a few minutes. It's not sufficient to use the unit's power switch as some power is still applied and might maintain the CMOS memory. If that doesn't do it, it might be necessary identify and operate a reset jumper on the motherboard. —EncMstr 21:55, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I mean is there an easy way to restore the factory defaults (like reseting the "C:" drive)? 68.193.147.179 22:05, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Did your Dell Dimension come with a recovery CD? That's what you would use to restore to out-of-box install. Splintercellguy 22:07, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I think I only have a WinXP Home reintall CD-ROM. 68.193.147.179 22:11, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Trouble converting LaTeX PDF to SVG via pstoedit and skconvert.

I'm using beton.sty and euler.sty in a LaTeX file. I intend to replace AMS_Euler_sample.png with an SVG. I get this when trying to convert the file.

$ pstoedit -dt -psarg "-r9600x9600"  euler.pdf -f sk euler.sk
pstoedit: version 3.42 / DLL interface 108 (build Jan 19 2006 - release build) : Copyright (C) 1993 - 2005 Wolfgang Glunz
Warning: image operation ignored due to restriction of target format or driver (repeated 12 times)
$ skconvert euler.sk euler.svg
$

In the resultant SVG, the "sin" and "cos" operators don't print (they were in Concrete Roman to match the math symbols). I'm thinking there's something wrong with the beton package (if I remove beton, the operators appear, albeit in Computer Modern), in that the fonts it inserts won't convert with pstoedit... but what? And how can I fix it?

 $ pdflatex euler.tex
 This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4)
 entering extended mode
 (./euler.tex
 LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
 Babel <v3.8d> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, b
 ahasa, basque, bulgarian, catalan, croatian, czech, danish, dutch, esperanto, e
 stonian, finnish, greek, icelandic, irish, italian, latin, magyar, norsk, polis
 h, portuges, romanian, russian, serbian, slovak, slovene, spanish, swedish, tur
 kish, ukrainian, nohyphenation, loaded.
 (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/base/article.cls
 Document Class: article 2004/02/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
 (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/base/size12.clo))
 (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/beton/beton.sty
 Package: `beton' v1.3 <1995/03/05> (FJ)
 ) (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/euler/euler.sty
 Package: `euler' v2.5 <1995/03/05> (FJ and FMi)
 
 LaTeX Font Warning: Encoding `OML' has changed to `U' for symbol font
 (Font)              `letters' in the math version `normal' on input line 35.
 
 
 LaTeX Font Warning: Encoding `OML' has changed to `U' for symbol font
 (Font)              `letters' in the math version `bold' on input line 35.
 
 ) (./euler.aux) (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/concmath/ot1ccr.fd)
 (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/amsfonts/ueur.fd)
 (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/amsfonts/ueuf.fd)
 (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/amsfonts/ueus.fd)
 (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/amsfonts/ueuex.fd) [1{/var/lib/texmf/fonts/ma
 p/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}] (./euler.aux) )</usr/share/texmf-tetex/fonts/type1
 /bluesky/cm/cmsy10.pfb> </var/cache/fonts/pk/ljfour/public/concrete/ccr10.720pk
 ></usr/share/texmf-tetex/fonts/type1/bluesky/euler/eufm7.pfb></usr/share/texmf-
 tetex/fonts/type1/bluesky/cm/cmex10.pfb></usr/share/texmf-tetex/fonts/type1/blu
 esky/euler/eufm10.pfb></usr/share/texmf-tetex/fonts/type1/bluesky/euler/eurm7.p
 fb></usr/share/texmf-tetex/fonts/type1/bluesky/euler/euex10.pfb></usr/share/tex
 mf-tetex/fonts/type1/bluesky/euler/eurm10.pfb>
 Output written on euler.pdf (1 page, 26806 bytes).
 Transcript written on euler.log.

Here's hoping someone has experienced similar troubles and found a way around them. grendel|khan 21:52, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, mentioning this, you informed me of a copyright violation (thanks!). When I originally uploaded the image, I added the source as well -- but it's written in plain TeX. Perhaps plain TeX that source, ps2pdf it, then try whatever juju you're doing to get it to a PDF. While you're at it, you might want to change the 3 in that integral to a t, remove the C, and change every x on the right hand side to a t (my bad): so it reads

$\int _{0}^{t}9x^{2}+2x+4\,dx=3t^{3}+t^{2}+4t$

Dysprosia 23:36, 2 March 2007 (UTC)