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November 16

Newsgroups & Music

I'm not sure if this should be in the entertainment section, computing or where but here goes... With the large record companies having the clout to shut down music sharing internet sites, busting pirate companies all over the world and even taking individual people to court, is there any reason why the usenet groups have remained relatively untouched and generally out of the debate? For a resource that lets people easily download just about everything it seems low on the 'get rid of it' priority list. Kirk UK 88.144.64.61 07:03, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

It is mostly because the usenet providers don't actually post content, they automatically mirror it. Neither do they flaunt it as a place for illegal files. One usenet provider did recently and have had legal action taken against them by the RIAA (see here) . I also think maybe usenet isn't high profile enough, I'm pretty sure the average internet user knows what limewire is and probably even torrents by now, but most won't know what usenet is, and even if they do wouldn't be willing to pay for it, or go through the hastle of setting it up. Added to the fact that it has a large amount of legitimate uses (moreso than torrents I would say) Finally you can't really get rid of usenet, you may as well try and get rid of http, it is just a method of storing data and accessing it. TheGreatZorko 09:45, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Also, DMCA notices tend to be sent to people who POST the content. I know when I frequented a posting IRC channel, they would discuss this issue and several people either had notices sent or knew people who had noticed sent to them.--152.2.62.27 14:00, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

It would be far easier to get rid of usenet and http than to get rid of bittorrent.. aren't there centralized servers for usenet that resolve the usenet alt.whatever.whatever style names to locations of machines? Same with the internet.. the primary DNS root is critical for basically the entire consumer internet, and it's probably inextricably integrated into billions of dollars of software that depends on it. Just take out the like 8 data centers that serve root DNS requests. Their location is supposedly secret, but the locations of the US ones are known and I doubt it would be too hard for the MAFIAA to track them down. Meanwhile, bittorrent is decentralized and usually encrypted, and a true peer-to-peer network would be completely impossible to stop without drastic changes to networking standards. --ffroth 14:49, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Usenet is a "global, decentralized, distributed" network. --LarryMac | Talk 15:02, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

There are no centralized servers for Usenet. All the recent articles on every group are physically stored in every NNTP server that carries the group. There's no central directory of NNTP servers, either; each server gets its articles from one or more peers, and each of these peering relationships is set up individually (the administrators get together and draw up a contract). It's less centralized than BitTorrent in that there are generally far more servers carrying a particular newsgroup than trackers tracking a particular torrent. I assume you're joking about taking down the root nameservers. This is not something you can do by court order; it would take a major global catastrophe. I'm sure Usenet and the Internet will eventually die, but only of natural causes. Of course, some people would say that Usenet is already dead; in fact, they've been saying that since 1983. -- BenRG (talk) 20:23, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm entirely serious about the root nameservers. Granted it might take a global catastrophe to provoke the action, but really. If someone in power really wanted to take them out all it would take is a special forces team.. they could even take them out one by one at their leisure- who's going to stop them? Rent-a-cops? I don't know if other root nameservers can propogate new root nameserver IPs down to ISPs before their turn is up, but it seems like it would basically break the WWW, at least in the short term --ffroth 05:28, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Let's go over this again. Disabling all thirteen seventy-odd root nameservers, even assuming it was physically something that could be done, would not kill Usenet. This is because Usenet does not require the DNS; rather, each newsserver only needs to be able to contact its peers, which can be done by IP address. (Heck, Usenet doesn't even require the Internet, never mind the DNS). However, it would effectively shut down the entire WWW for the entire world (and email, bittorrent...), which might have one or two other political ramifications for anyone foolish enough to try it, even a group as powerful as the RIAA. Marnanel (talk) 14:06, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Let me echo what TheGreatZorko said. It is a problem of visibility, most internet users have no idea that usenet exists. Usenet as a discussion forum has (sadly) been eclipsed by web-based forums like this one. Usenet as a binaries distribution hub has been eclipsed by highly visible P2P networks. The usenet paradigm is foreign to most people, joining and decoding binaries posted to usenet is well beyond the technical expertise of most users. -- Diletante 15:41, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

You can add to that the fact that many (dare I say most) usenet users never returned to usenet after the September that never ended. -- kainaw™ 15:47, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

A bigger nail in the coffin for usenet is that mailing lists are more convenient - and their sole disadvantage (that they are a horrible waste of bandwidth) is largely irrelevent in a world where bandwidth has become cheap. Setting up a new usenet list was a major political exercise - setting up a mailing list is a job you can do without anyone's say-so and get it ready to roll in about 2 minutes flat. Sure you could put your new usenet list up in 'alt' - but the odds of the usenet servers of all your potential subscribers actually carrying it was almost zero. Between mailing lists and forums - we've got a better solution. Usenet's only remaining benefit (anonymity) means that these days it's mainly a repository for porn. Sad - but it served it's purpose. SteveBaker (talk) 04:29, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Sizes of USB flash drives

Hello, My question is how the size of USB sticks are advertised? Are they in binary gigabytes (as RAM) or in decimal gigabytes (as hard- drives) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.206.56.248 (talk) 14:05, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

According to Binary prefix#Flash drives, these particular drives are measured in "'powers of two' multiples of decimal megabytes; for example, a '256 MB' card would hold 256 million bytes." Ian 14:20, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

A card/stick labeled 256MB almost certainly has a memory chip with an exact power-of-2 of storage locations, but some of it may not be user-accessible. And, how much is really useable will depend upon OS and formatting options. This seems (I work with these every day, so this is "OR") to vary by manufacturer, brand, and even model. The best answer is "You may be able to use up to 256MB of space for storing your stuff, but certainly no more, and probably significantly less". -SandyJax 14:31, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

If you want any kind of filesystem there's going to be enough overhead to make the difference negligible --ffroth 14:45, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

My experience with CF cards suggests that the size changes rather dramatically depending on the individual card -- even those from the same manufacturer. My understanding is that different chips have different defects, and so the internal defect managment may mark large areas as unusable. This makes the card report a smaller size than the actual chip should allow. ---- Mdwyer (talk) 17:30, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

almost every memory chip uses binary, so you would have the size as per RAM. keep in mind that because of the file system you loose some memory. A 256MB card could fit 256MB of ram's data, but not a 256MB file, because the file allocation table etc take up room.--Dacium (talk) 01:58, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Mac Advantage?

Is there any particular reason why Macs have traditionally been favoured by the design industry? I've looked on the entry for Macs and nothing seems to stand out as a massive plus in terms of DTP or Graphics work. Is it that they just look more contemporary? Thanks in advance. 88.144.64.61 14:46, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

IMO: yes. *brace for impact! --ffroth 14:51, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Why would anyone argue with you? You admit that you "hate" the Macintosh operating system[1] so if you're happy in your hatred, carry on; no argument is likely to affect you.

Atlant 16:33, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah but I still have to answer arguments; that was what I was bracing for --ffroth 20:28, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

The software used by the print industry was originally only available on the Mac. Equivalents are now available on Windows (and Linux). However, the Mac-only mindset is well entrenched in the industry. -- kainaw™ 14:59, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I think Kainaw probably has cited the most important reason: Mac's clear early superiority in the "design" environment, but I think it's also worth noting that the user experience on a Mac remains substantially "smoother" than the user experience on a PC. So if your goal is to use a computer as a tool to get some not-directly-computer-oriented work (such as graphic design) done, you may be happier using a Mac. And I say this as someone who, every day, uses Windows/XP, Windows/2K, Sun Solaris, and Mac OS X. If I could, I'd do all my work on the Mac (although a lot of it would be done down in the Unix shell).

Atlant 16:33, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Network effects can cause this kind of entrenchment after the original reasons have gone away. Mac software also has a certain design aesthetic that seems to appeal to people who care a lot about that sort of thing. --Sean 15:49, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I think also Mac has better font systems or font based things, so is often favoured for this too. They certainly feel like they are designed by designers for designers. Whether that is pretentious or true is in the eye of the beholder, but presumably due to this the 'better' versions of photo-editing/design software become available on Macs. It will become a self-fufilling prophecy over time as the more macs are associated with design the more design see mac as their platform. -- ny156uk (talk) 17:04, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I believe it had better color support, too. That is, it supported the ability to handle Pantone colors accurately. ---- Mdwyer (talk) 17:28, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Two words: Aldus PageMaker and LaserWriter. See Desktop publishing for more. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 17:51, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Yup, Apple's early support for postscript printing made it the de facto standard for desktop publishing. Speaking as someone who's done design and commercial printing work on both a Mac and a PC, there isn't a huge diffrence anymore except support of legacy tools (especially font software), and personal preference. -- dcole (talk) 19:53, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Ranked list of Wiki visitor user-agent strings available?

Has anyone compiled a ranked list of User-Agent strings reported by Wikipedia visitors' broswers? ---- 64.236.170.228 (talk) 20:37, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Saving a page in Internet Explorer

Is there a way to change the default format in which Internet Explorer saves pages? Currently, as I go to File→Save As..., the "Save as type" drop-down box shows "Web page (complete)". Is there an easy way (a registry tweak, perhaps) to permanently change the default to "Web page (HTML only)" or to "Web Archive, single file"? I need this for IE6. Please do not suggest switching to different browser or installing third-party apps, as it is not a realistic option for me. Any other help (if only to confirm that it is impossible, so I wouldn't waste any more time on this issue) would be extremely appreciated.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 21:38, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I do not have IE (no Windows here), but I am certain that an alternative is to view the source (I assume you know how to do that) and then save the source. Hopefully there is a more straightforward method. This is just in case nobody has one. -- kainaw™ 23:07, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

There seem to be plenty of people asking about this, but I haven't been able to find an answer that doesn't involve 3rd-party applications. I thought IE6 might remember which type you chose between sessions, but it doesn't appear to remember it between webpages! I think that Kainaw's solution might be the best, although someone else might know differently. -- Kateshortforbob 11:36, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Kainaw! Embarassingly enough, this obvious solution did not occur to me. It is perfect for my needs. Thanks again!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 16:34, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

November 17

Importing DVDs into iTunes

It seems so ironic to me that they make it so easy to illegally download a movie off Limewire and put it on your iPod, but a DVD that you have bought and paid for is so difficult. =o) I've tried googling it, but everything I've found talks about such complicated things like file extensions and converters and stuff. So, in dumbed-down layman's terms, what do I have to do to get a movie from a DVD and onto iTunes? When I go to My Computer, then click on the D drive, then there's a little folder that's labeled VIDEO, but when I click on that, there's a whole bunch of little files instead of one neatly packaged little video file. I'm so confused! 131.162.146.86 (talk) 02:56, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I assume by your mentioning of My Computer that you are using Windows (you need to tell us that kind of stuff!!). I don't know the specifics for Windows but in general you need to:

1. Get a DVD ripper, which will grab the raw VOB video from the DVD for you (it'll be a couple of gigabytes in size)
2. Get a video file converter/compressor that can resize and compress the VOB file so that it will fit onto your iPod

Some DVD rippers can do both of these functions at the same time (that is, they will let you rip the DVD video into a 320x240 MP4 file, which is what iPods use for video). Perhaps someone can recommend an easy one. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 16:03, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I am using Windows. Sorry, didn't realize that was important! And forgive my ignorance and complete stupidity where computers are concerned, but what does VOB mean? 131.162.146.86 (talk) 03:54, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

VOB stands for Video OBject. But mainly, it's the filename extension of the file on DVD that contains the actual movie. We even have an article on it (called VOB of course). SteveBaker (talk) 04:13, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Okay, thank you. 131.162.146.86 (talk) 18:04, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Deezer down?

Why might the music service [www.deezer.com] Deezer be down? When I try to access the website, it says that the server cannot be found. Acceptable (talk) 03:49, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Works for me, maybe it was a temporary server crash? · Dvyjones ^Talk 09:09, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm in Canada and all the Canadian computers I've tried (school, library, friends) will not connect to Deezer. Could it be that they blocked Canadian IP's like Pandora? Thanks. Acceptable (talk) 23:15, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Splitting 1 audio into instrumental music, human voices and something.

As the title says. Well, I don't know how. (Here's software I have; Sony Vegas 7.0 and GoldWave)--JSH-alive ^(talk)_(cntrbtns)^{(mail me)} 12:46, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

We get this question a lot. It's not possible to get high quality tracks, but you can use GoldWave to get a "Karaoke" track that will probably sound bad but might sound all right depending on the song --ffroth 16:28, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, there's software that tries to do the job, but it's inherently impossible to do with a high degree of accuracy. What people do in real life is to retain the source material as separate tracks indefinitely, so they can be mixed as needed whenever you want. Of course, when you're starting with something already mixed, you have to settle for some less good solution. Friday (talk) 16:45, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

The trick for removing vocals for Kareoke is to note that on most music with vocals, the stereo mixing is set up to place the voice in the middle of the stereo image with the instruments off to the sides. If you subtract the left-side image from the right, then anything that's common to both sides will disappear. This works surprisingly well for vocals. We use 'Audacity' (an free/OpenSourced audio processing package) - and it's vocal-removing system is quite amazing. But translating that idea to removing (say) the trumpet from a piece of music when it is in no special place in the stereo image would be much harder. SteveBaker (talk) 17:42, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Steve, so then if you subtract the resulting Kareoke track from the original will you get a vocal only (well, maybe not "only") track? hydnjo talk 20:06, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Sadly (and surprisingly to me), no - I don't think you can. My first reaction to your question was "well, of course you can!"...but when I started to figure out how, I couldn't. To understand why not, you need to do this with a bit of basic algebra: if A is the sound coming from instruments in the left side of the stage and B is the sound coming from the instruments on the right with V being the vocals - then the sound on the left channel of the original stereo recording ('L') is L=A+V, the sound on the right ('R') is R=B+V. L and R are our 'givens'. We have two equations and three unknows (A, B and V) - which first year algebra says is not something you can solve for all three variables. Fortunately we CAN say L-R=(A+V)-(B+V)=A-B - so we can calculate A-B without V. We'd really like a stereo signal with A and B separately - but we can't do that because if we could, we'd have performed the magic of solving three unknowns with only two equations. But A-B is a mono signal - just one value - but with no 'V' in it! In audio terms, a proper mono signal would be A+B - but negating an audio waveform just switches the phase of the signal 180 degrees - and that doesn't sound too bad...certainly good enough for Kareoke! So if (for example) we subtracted our kareoke track from the original L and R signals to try to get the vocals by themselves, we'd get L-(A-B) which is (A+V)-(A-B) which is V+B, similarly R=B+V and subtracting the kareoke track gets us (B+V)-(A-B) which is V-A. In other words, instead of getting rid of the instruments A and B - we just swapped them over. We could try making a mono track first (L+R) and subtracting our mono kareoke track from that - but then we'd have (A+V)+(B+V)-(A-B) = 2B+2V - still we have B mixed up in it. There simply isn't any way to do this...which surprises me! SteveBaker (talk) 04:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I actually came to that realization myself while falling asleep last night. Amazing how clarity arrives when our everyday environmental noise departs! Also, the A-B kareoke track must have some weird stuff going on as the original A+V track probably had varying amounts of B in it an so on. hydnjo talk 14:03, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Ehh maybe you addressed this, but why not mix the 2 channels of song together and 2 channels of karaoke together, invert the karaoke, and superimpose the mono waveforms? It's no stereo signal but as far as I can tell it would work. Also, audacity is the biggest piece of crap software I've ever layed eyes upon- even the geek who occasionally has to work with audio will tell you that GoldWave blows it out of the water. --ffroth 06:46, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Do the algebra:

mix the 2 channels of song together - OK M=L+R=A+B+2V

and 2 channels of karaoke together, - the Kareoke track is already mono - K=A-B A-B

invert the karaoke, - OK: K=-(A+B) K=-(A-B)

and superimpose the mono waveforms - Result = (M+K)/2 = (A+B+2V + -(A-B))/2 = B+V.

Nope - that's the same as the original right channel.

You can't do it because you have two equations and three unknowns. SteveBaker (talk) 16:42, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Well despite your step 3 coming out of nowhere (K should = -(A-B)) that sounds right.. but what about the other K.. K=B-A? There's your third equation. It seems distinct from K=A-B.. it is, right? --ffroth 19:57, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah - sorry - that was a typo. It's fixed (above) now. I got the final line right though. The bottom line is the same - you can't get three unknowns from two equations no matter what. SteveBaker (talk) 21:44, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Geesh Steve, I wuz jist askin', ya know? This is amazing! hydnjo talk 22:28, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Lower screen resolution for speed?

I may have come across this question before. Would lowering the screen resolution on a Windows Vista machine allow the computer to run faster when graphic editing, gaming and everyday surfing? Acceptable (talk) 17:52, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, high resolutions do take more processing power and require more work by your graphics card. So a lower res should run faster, the question is whether it would be appreciably faster or not, and that would probably depend on your processing speed, your graphics card, and what sort of programs you are intending to use. Photoshop is going to be a processor hog no matter what resolution you run at, for example. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 18:58, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

It depends whether the applications you are using are CPU-bound, vertex-processing-bound or fill-rate-bound. Only the fill rate is affected by the screen resolution. Games are most likely to benefit - but even then, only if they run full-screen. I doubt you'll notice much benefit. SteveBaker (talk) 20:52, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Games can be made to run faster anyway by reducing the quality settings (e.g. Anti-Aliasing) in-game. --Dave the Rave (DTR)talk 21:32, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I didn't think about games, but in that case resolution can matter a LOT, depending on the game. My computers are usually a bit slow for games (or are running them through virtualizers) so I usually end up running very low resolutions (640x480 or 800x600) with them (my native resolution is 1400xwhatever, so that's a pretty serious cut!), but it speeds them up a huge amount. My machine generally can't even do them at anything close to a native resolution; it requires way too much out of its puny graphics card. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 22:02, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

If your graphics card can handle it, and it's not trying to do other things like render a 3D scene, then keep your resolution high. It will make no difference to lower it. --ffroth 06:16, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

With 3D applications, there is always a bottleneck that limits the frame rate - but unless you know where it is, you can't know how best to optimise it. The CPU could be overloaded by the AI, the pathfinding, collision detection, etc - if it can't feed triangles to the graphics card fast enough then no amount of messing around with the graphics card or the display resolution will make any difference to your frame rate. Similarly, it might be that the game draws an enormous number of very small triangles - in this case the vertex processing stage of the graphics card will be overwhelmed and speeding up the CPU or messing with the display resolution won't help. Only if the CPU has time to spare and the vertex processor is blocked waiting for pixels to be pushed to the frame buffer memory will reducing the display resolution (or reducing the antialiasing quality which is almost exactly the same thing) help.

The trouble is that different games have different bottlenecks - and unless you are equipped with the source code and a boatload of specialised tools, it's hard to know which games have which bottlenecks. Worse still, this information isn't published anywhere because it depends too much on your precise computer setup - something that's CPU-bound on a 2GHz CPU may be vertex limited on a 3GHz processor. If it is the case that the final stage is the bottleneck then you'll find that reducing the display resolution a bit improves the frame rate a bit. However, dropping the resolution down further may not help because you've already removed the pixel fill rate bottleneck and now the system is blocked somewhere else. So even if reducing the frame rate helps, you might want to try a range of different screen resolutions to see which one gives you the best frame rate - but retains the most pixels on the screen.

If you're still with me at this point - I guess I should complicate the story still more by pointing out that many games are CPU-limited in some areas of the game map, vertex-limited in others and fill-rate limited in yet others. In producing the optimum 'game experience', designers have to trade these various limitations on the grades of hardware they expect their users to have (and, probably, on a couple of console platforms too). Some parts of the game might not need blazingly fast frame rates because you are on some kind of a slow-moving stealth mission - but other areas that involve fast movement through the world (driving a vehicle for example) may demand higher frame rates.

SteveBaker (talk) 16:37, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

I was talking about just for desktop use, but all that is true! When playing F.E.A.R. my Yonah can push out all Maximum settings for the "CPU" graphics options, but my low-end-mobile 3D card can barely handle the Minimum settings for the "GPU" graphics options. (they appear in separate columns in the options menu) --ffroth 19:50, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

I have found it to be true that lowering the screen resolution AND the color depth speed up CPU intensive programs on computers that share video memory with main memory, i.e. use main system memory for video memory (which most of the lower priced ones seem to do these days). Must be because of bandwith to the main memory. Bubba73 (talk), 01:54, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Yep - that's to be expected. In 'unified memory' systems like that texture mapping and even simply writing to the screen all use main memory bandwidth - which will clobber the CPU (and heavier CPU activity will clobber your fill rate). The efficiency of these systems depends heavily on how well their texture caches work - which is a REALLY complicated thing for developers to deal with. If the game gives you the option, make sure you have MIPmapping turned ON and Anisotropic texture filtering turned OFF. You should probably prefer disabling antialiasing to reducing screen resolution - but you may need to do both. SteveBaker (talk) 03:55, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Converting Matlab code to PHP/Actionscript/Javascript/whatever

Somebody helpfully gave me some Matlab code to get X,Y points for a given set of latitude and longitude coordinates with a Robinson projection. But I can't make heads or tails of how it deals with arrays. Could someone convert it into PHP, Actionscript, Javascript, and/or just pseudocode for me? It's totally opaque to me in its current form, but someone who has used Matlab could probably convert it pretty easily. (Note that you can just substitute a fake interpolation function if you want—I have interpolation functions I can use, you don't have to write me one.)

Matlab code snippet

robval = [
00 1.0000 0.0000 
05 0.9986 0.0620 
10 0.9954 0.1240 
15 0.9900 0.1860 
20 0.9822 0.2480 
25 0.9730 0.3100 
30 0.9600 0.3720 
35 0.9427 0.4340 
40 0.9216 0.4958 
45 0.8962 0.5571 
50 0.8679 0.6176 
55 0.8350 0.6769 
60 0.7986 0.7346 
65 0.7597 0.7903 
70 0.7186 0.8435 
75 0.6732 0.8936 
80 0.6213 0.9394 
85 0.5722 0.9761 
90 0.5322 1.0000 
];

robval(:,3) = robval(:,3) * 0.5072;
robval = [robval(end:-1:2,:);robval(1:end,:)];
robval(1:90/5,[1,3]) = -robval(1:90/5,[1,3]);

rvals2 = interp1(robval(:,1),robval(:,2),latitude,'cubic');
rvals3 = interp1(robval(:,1),robval(:,3),latitude,'cubic');
y = -rvals3;
x = rvals2/2.*longitude/180*2;

Thanks a ton! (No, this is not homework at all—I'm well out of my homework phase of life! I'm just working on a Flash project which uses a Robinson projection and it's driving me a bit nuts.) --24.147.86.187 (talk) 20:45, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Uncommented Matlab is largely write-only. But here is an explanation in English/pseudocode:

- Define robval as a three-column, 19-row matrix with given values
- Multiply third column (in all rows) of the matrix by 0.5072
- "Mirror" the matrix.
    The matrix now contains the original matrix backwards (minus first row), followed by
    the original matrix, like so:
        90 0.5322 1.0000 
        85 0.5722 0.9761 
        80 0.6213 0.9394 
        75 0.6732 0.8936 
        ...
        05 0.9986 0.0620 
        00 1.0000 0.0000 
        05 0.9986 0.0620 
        10 0.9954 0.1240 
        ...
        85 0.5722 0.9761 
        90 0.5322 1.0000 
     (Of course the third column would have been multiplied by 0.5072)
- Invert all values in rows 1 to 18 (i.e. the backwards part), in columns 1 and 3.

- rvals2 = interpl(column 1 of robval, column 2 of robval, latitude, 'cubic'); ← for all rows of robval
- rvals3 = interpl(column 1 of robval, column 3 of robval, latitude, 'cubic'); ← for all rows of robval

- y = -rvals3;
- x = rvals2 / 2. * longitude / 180 * 2;

Hope this helps. ›mysid (☎∆) 22:25, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

God, that's totally unobvious from the code as was given! Thank you. (What godawful syntax Matlab uses!) --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:30, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

But oh-so-powerful... :) And by the way, note that rvals2, rvals3, y and x are all matrices (or arrays if you wish) as well, so the operations are actually performed on every element. ›mysid (☎∆) 00:12, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Powerful but totally opaque. Question: if all of them are matrices/arrays, how does it know which values to assign to x and y in the end? Or are x and y matrices themselves? I'm confused. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 06:16, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, y and x will be matrices as well, with same dimensions as rvals3 and rvals2 respectively, but with the said operations applied. I guess they are one-dimensional, assuming that interpl returns one-dimensional matrices when fed with one-dimensional parameters. ›mysid (☎∆) 08:26, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Jetman Cheats

Does anyone know any cheats for the game Jetman on Facebook? Much obliged
мιІапэџѕ (talk) 21:49, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Firefox's Wikipedia search function

I just had to reinstall Windows XP on my computer, and afterward I reinstalled Firefox 2.0. I then added the tool that allows Wikipedia to be searched in the little window in the upper right-hand corner, which I had before the reinstall. Previously, when I entered a term in that search box, it took me straight to the article (much like typing an article name in Wikipedia's own search box and hitting "Go"). Now, it takes me to Wikipedia's search page, where I have to click on the article name to get there (much like hitting "Search" in Wikipedia's search box). Does anyone know how to fix it back to the convenient way? Also, previously I could go to a Wikipedia article simply by typing "wp article" in the URL box at the top of the screen; that doesn't work any more. Any ideas how to fix that? —Angr 22:23, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

There are two "English" Wikipedia tools for that thing. You want the one that is called "Wikipedia (EN)". The other one (forgot what it was called) does go to the search results instead of the page. -- kainaw™ 22:52, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

The one I'm using says "Wikipedia (EN)" grayed out when it's empty. Isn't that the right one? —Angr 22:55, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

To go straight to an article by typing "wp article" in the address bar, go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks > New Bookmark. Type "Wikipedia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s" and "wp" in the first three fields, hit OK and close the Bookmarks Manager. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 10:27, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

That is a really cool trick! Thank you! It seems to be case sensitive, though, which it didn't use to be. —Angr 12:34, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

WOW that's _exactly_ the keyword and bookmark that I use. wp EXPLOAD!!1. --ffroth 19:47, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

November 18

Building gnu coreutils-6.9 on Mac OS X 10.5

I don't have a lot of experience in building programs from source (none, actually). I decided to experiment by building the GNU core utilities. I downloaded 6.9 (newest version) from the gnu website. I ran the 'configure' executable and it determined that my Mac should be be able o build the core utilities. When I actually ran 'make' command it ran for a few minutes without problems. Abrubtly, it stopped and gave me the message:

Making all in lib
make all-am
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all-am'.
Making all in src
make all-am
gcc -std=gnu99 -g -O2 -o date date.o ../lib/libcoreutils.a ../lib/libcoreutils.a
Undefined symbols:
"_rpl_putenv$UNIX2003", referenced from:
_main in date.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [date] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

Can anyone tell me what is going wrong? I though Leopard had full Unix certification, so this should work, right?

Google _rpl_putenv and find this exchange where the same problem has been reported before. There's a patch there, which will be in the next release of coreutils. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 06:02, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you! Worked like a charm. Quick question: How do I build in 64 bit? I have Core 2 Duo.

I don't think you can unless you're running from a 64-bit OS. There's no 64-bit version of Mac OS X, but there are 64-bit versions of Windows and Linux you could obtain. — User:ACupOfCoffee@ 05:13, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Actually, there has been a 64 bit version of MacOSX ever since 10.4 came out, however, it only supported the 64 bit PPC. IN 10.5, there is now support for x86_64 intel systems. I suggest that the OP read Apple's 64 Bit Transition Guide, there are some links there for how to instruct GCC to generate 64 bit objects on intel. -- JSBillings 12:37, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Algorithm for finding cycles on directed graphs

Are there any WP articles on algorithms to find cycles in directed graphs? (I couldn't find any. The graph is currently in an adjancy matrix.) Bubba73 (talk), 07:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

You could just do something like a depth-first search, and when you come across the starting vertex, you have got a cycle. --Spoon! (talk) 08:16, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, but what if the cycle does not involve your starting vertex? I think you are looking for Strongly connected component (Tarjan's strongly connected components algorithm). You can compute this in linear time. If every node is its own component, the graph is acyclic. Otherwise a cycle can be found by doing what spoon said starting at a node within a strongly connected component containing more than one vertex. Finding all cycles is more of a hassle, as there may be a lot of them (a lot = n! and some more).

The application is that there will be graphs with about 50 to 75 vertices (perhaps 100). Each vertex will have at most 20 directed edges connected to it. Quite a few will have 15 or more. For several pairs of vertices I need to see if they are in a directed cycle or not. So it sounds like what I might need to do is first find the strongly connected components and then if they are not in the same component then there is no cycle, otherwise there is, right? Bubba73 (talk), 15:34, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes. A single pass over a graph suffices for all pairs in that graph.

Thanks. One little wrinkle is that cycles of length 2 may not count as cycles. Bubba73 (talk), 16:53, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

One way to do this is extend the idea of a DG to "paintable". The vertices have two states, painted and unpainted. For each root vertex in the DG, do a normal depth-first search, painting vertices as you go along. If you ever come across a vertex that has already been painted, you have a cycle. JIP | Talk 15:44, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Now really, why do you propose a quadratic algorithm after a linear one was linked?

I don't see how my algorithm is quadratic. I've looked at the pseudocode for the Tarjan algorithm, and it seems that it has to be done for each source vertex separately. The way I see it, both algorithms are in linear time for each source vertex: they're just depth-first searches that do extra constant-time work at each vertex. If there are multiple source vertices it gets more complex though. JIP | Talk 17:03, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

A single run of Tarjan's algorithm finds all components. You do not need to rerun it for every source vertex. See the link in the article, it is much better than the article itself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 153.96.188.2 (talk) 10:05, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

If you have control of the data structure used for the nodes of the graph, then just add a boolean "has_been_visited" which you default to 'false' in the constructor function for the class. To perform your depth-first traversal the graph call this recursive function on the root node of the graph:

 bool NodeType::isCyclic ()
 {
   if ( has_been_visited )  // If we already visited this node then it's a cyclic graph
     return true ;
   has_been_visited = true ;
   for ( int i = 0 ; i < num_child_nodes ; i++ )
     if ( child [ i ] -> isCyclic () ) // If the subgraph is cyclic then so is this one
       return true ;
   has_been_visited = false ;
   return false ;
 }

If you don't have control over the data structure then you need to create a hash table containing the addresses of the nodes you've visited and use that table to replace the 'has_been_visited' boolean.

SteveBaker (talk) 17:28, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

The algorithm I gave is a simplified version of this. It does not separately check for subgraphs, otherwise it is the same thing. JIP | Talk 17:34, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

That's not true - your approach doesn't work. Consider this directed graph:

      A
     / \
    B   C
     \ /
      D
      |
      E

(The links all point downwards). This graph doesn't have a 'cycle' because it's 'directed' - but it fails your approach because node 'D' is visited twice during the traversal. If you look at my code, you'll see that I unmark the nodes as it backs up the graph - so this graph is (correctly) returned as non-cyclic. SteveBaker (talk) 21:35, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your help guys - I think I can get it. I'll be working on it tomorrow. Bubba73 (talk), 01:55, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I have a problem?

I have an Acer Aspire laptop. It has a black touch pad to move the pointer or cursor around on the screen. I could click on something by tapping the touch pad twice, and I could draw the scroller up and down by tapping twice and then move my finger up and down. It used to work, but now it doesn't move the pointer around anymore. The pointer still moves when I do it with a wireless mouse. But I want to fix the touch pad. How can I make the touch pad work again?

Hard to say; could even be broken. But for first check (I'll assume you have Windows): go to Start -> Settings -> Mouse. "Hardware" tab should say "this device is working properly". Check that the touchpad is enabled on the "Device Settings" tab. Weregerbil (talk) 11:40, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Also make sure you haven't disabled your touchpad. Should be an option in the taskbar or in the aforementioned folder Heirware (talk) 11:46, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

In many cases the touchpad automatically disables when you plug a mouse into the computer. Try unplugging/disabling the mouse, see if that changes anything. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 16:38, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

search and replace in 1000 .txt files

Say I have 1000 . txt files in different folders, they all have different content but all have a line of text in the middle or at the end that I would like to remove to save HD space on a mp3 player. How would I go about doing this batch-style, without having to open all the folders or files individualy? ~Thank you. Keria (talk) 17:30, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

I would use UltraEdit, but there are probably a number of other editors that could do a batch find and replace. See Category:Windows text editors. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 17:34, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

• You don't say what platform you're on, but if you're on MacOS or something Unixy, running this command will do the trick:

perl -pi -e 's/the line of text you want to remove.*\n?//' *.txt

--Sean 17:54, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

All right! Sorry yes I'm running Windows XP er ... x64. Thank you gadget I'll try that. Keria (talk) 17:59, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Aw shoot, it looked so promissing. Ultredit doesn't work on 64bits machines. Keria (talk) 18:19, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Well duh. Ultraedit is fantastic though --ffroth 19:45, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

The good news is that you can get perl running on XP, but getting 1000 files into the command line is dubious in XP. You may have to runit under a bash shell instead, say with cygwin. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:02, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Not to nitpick the whole project, but is the amount of space to be freed worth the trouble? I can't imagine it adding up to more than 2 MB or so, which is nothing compared to the size of most MP3s. You'd probably spend your time better finding just one song you don't ever listen to and just deleting that, no? --24.147.86.187 (talk) 21:22, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

At the moment it's 5 GB (it's more than 1000 files I just used that as an example, sorry for the misunderstanding). I hope I can save at least 1 GB. If anyone has an idea I'm listening (well, reading). I tried NoteTab (freeware) but it needs to open the files to work with them so it can't handle the job. Graeme you use a lot of words I have never seen before but I'm sure I can figure it out (I don't have to bash shells, right?). Is it as complicated as it sounds? Apparently there is some complicated way to install UltraEdit on x64. Does it need to load the files to replace text in them or can it just go through them as they are sitting on the HD? Keria (talk) 22:49, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

You probably can't shave 1GiB off just by removing 1 line off every file, but if you can't find an editor that can do it, you can always install perl and run the command mentioned by User:TotoBaggins (aka Sean); or, you can install cygwin, and run these commands:

cd /path/where/you/put/the/files
ls | while read line; do sed -i "/^Your text here$/d" "${line}"; done

They basically do the same thing, but it's always better to try it out on a single file first by copying that file to a new directory, change the working directory of your command prompt (aka shell) to the same directory, and run either one of the commands to try it out on first. --antilived^{T | C | G} 23:07, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Right. I tried it with cygwin but it doesn't go into sub-folders, it says: sed: couldn't edit <name of subfolder>: not a regular file. It didn't replace anything in the files that were in the root folder but changed them so the the note pad has trouble reading them. It replaced ^P 's by some unknown character.

The text I have to replace is of this kind of format: ^P^P^P^P^Pyadiyadiyada^P^P^P^PBlablabla for lines and lines of rubish^P^P^P where ^P is a line break. Is it possible to copy-paste it into the command window? It's really long to type and I have to enter a dozen different versions.

I'll try with perl even if it looks even more complicated. BUT: How can I go into subfolders? Does perl do it? Is there a command way of deleting all files smaller than 2KB? Is there a command for deleting empty folders? Is there a command to delete files containg a certain string of characters or by their file extension? Keria (talk) 15:17, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

find or ls -R gets you into subdirectories

find ./ -type f -size -2k -exec rm \{\} \; removes regular files smaller than 2K

find ./ -type d -exec rmdir \{\} \; removes empty directories

ls -R | while read line; do if ( grep -q "string of characters" "$line" ); then rm "$line"; fi; done remove files which contain "string of characters"

find ./ -name \*.ext -exec rm \{\} \; remove files with extenstion .ext

Untested, use at your own risk. -- Diletante (talk) 16:27, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you Diletante. That's in cygwin right?

Then find ./ -name \*old*.* -exec rm \{\} \; would remove all files with "old" in their name? Keria (talk) 16:42, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I tried the first one find ./ -type f -size -2k -exec rm \{\} \; when I press enter a ">" symbol appears on the next line, if I press enter again it says: "find: missing argument to "-exec" Keria (talk) 16:58, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure you typed it correctly? Try copy and paste? ls -r will list subdirectories, but won't get you in there because it doesn't give you the path to it, you have to use find instead. just replace the ls with find ./ so it becomes something like this:

find ./ | while read line; do sed -i "/^Your text here$/d" "${line}"; done

or just use the -exec argument in find

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i "/^Your text here$/d" \{\} \;

Which will remove any line that starts and ends with "Your text here". If you want to do more you need to give us more information: What exactly do you want to delete and do you want to retain empty lines in other places? A sample file would be nice is well. --antilived^{T | C | G} 22:01, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Antilived, you are right about the ls -R, I was mistaken trying to use it like that. Keria, it seems like you aren't including the semicolon at the end. Also when you use wildcards in find you should escape them with a backslash like \* so the shell doesn't try to expand them. Same deal with the semicolon, it is an argument to find, so you don't want the shell to interpret it. -- Diletante (talk) 23:33, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Of course I had checked again and again I had typed it correctly ... without the semicolon! Thank you Diletante you were right and thank you Antilived and everybody who helped. The -2k has been running for 5 hours now and it seems to be working. I'll try all the other commands once that one is done and report back. Cheers! Keria (talk) 16:31, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

All right after 2 days I have processed 1/10th of the files! It's going well though. Thank you very much to everybody who helped! There's only the line to delete directories that doesn't work it just returns this error for every folder: rm: cannot remove './folder/01/02': Is a directory. Keria (talk) 17:01, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

My bad I typed it wrong again. Keria (talk) 17:03, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Standby → Shutdown

Whenever I try to put my computer on standby (or whenever it's idle long enough and automatically goes on standby), it will just shut down instead. I've tried adjusting the power scheme options, but I can't seem to find the right thing to change, because all of my adjustments have been futile. I'm running a Windows XP SP2. How can I fix this and allow my computer to go on standby instead of just shutting down? Thanks for the help. --72.69.146.66 (talk) 18:53, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Check with your motherboard vendor and see if there is a BIOS upgrade. My MB is a five year old Abit, and I think it had the same problem until an upgrade. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 18:55, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Older motherboards seemed to have difficulties with going into standby. You could check the BIOS and see if there is any option in there for Power. GaryReggae (talk) 20:08, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Second that recommendation: That's what fixed by unbelievably annoying MSI systemboard that would crash on standby. 68.39.174.238 (talk) 23:14, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Family Tree software

Hi folks, a software question for you from a frustrated computer user.

About a couple of years ago, I purchased some software via the internet called "Family Tree Maker" ( (FTM)(version unknown), if I remember rightly, I downloaded the trial version, liked what I saw and paid for a registration code to upgrade it to the full version.

A few months ago, my computer had become virtually unusable due to Windows playing silly games and being on a constant go-slow so I backed up all my data files and reformatted and reinstalled Windows and all my software. I had forgotten about the FTM software but wasn't concerned as I had an email with the registration code and had assumed it was like most sofware of the same ilk (GameMaker for example) where if they release a new version, you are entitled to upgrade for free or a nominal fee but when I tried to find the software and reinstall it, all their website www.familytreemaker.com came up with is an entirely different new version with no option for existing users to upgrade or for acquiring previous versions. This seems like a con to me and I am very loathe to give them any more of my money as the same thing will probably happen the next time. I am also quite happy with my 'old' version and don't need any new features. I can understand them not supporting older versions any more but withdrawing something somebody has paid for is not on. If I had known, I would have tried to salvage the program files but that often doesn't work.

Does anyone know where I can download some FREEWARE family tree software? It must be able to load GEDCOM files and preferably Family Tree Maker (.FTW) files as well. I know I could Google it but I have and it comes up with a list of totally irrelevant stuff, some of which is definitely NOT Freeware and others of which include spyware, so much for the powers of Google manipulation. Alternatively, I would consider a reasonably priced (< £20/$40) paid for package if there was an assurance they wouldn't pull the rug out underneath theur loyal existing users and force them to cough up again for a new version every so often. GaryReggae (talk) 20:25, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Try Comparison of genealogy software and Category:Free genealogy software. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 20:45, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Macbook video editing

I am thinking of purchasing a new computer, preferably a macintosh laptop. Due to some lack of funds, it's the cheapest macbook that is highest on my list. I would like to make some rudimentary video editing with it. Can it handle editing with Final Cut (possibly some sort of off-line editing with low resolution)? As I understand it, Apple recently upgraded the graphics capabilities of the macbooks. Will this make any difference to video editing? Do you have any recommendations? --Oskar 22:04, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes it can handle Final Cut just fine, though you'll want to get some sort of monster external firewire drive for it (the scratch disk takes at least 1GB a minute or so, sometimes more). I have a MacBook bought earlier in the year (cheapest model that came with a DVD-R drive; a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of RAM) and it ran Final Cut Pro just wonderfully when I used it a little while back. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:57, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Just as an addendum, my MacBook can even run Half-Life 2 fairly well under the Parallels Desktop virtualizer. They pack quite a wallop even under quite a lot of computational stress. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:38, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

November 19

Cryptography: Which is more secure for authentication: RSA or DSA?

I'm doing some personal research learning about public key infrastructure and asymmetric cryptography. After Googling a bit, I thought I'd submit a question which I've been struggling to find a answer that satisfies me. I think the Computing category would be better suited to post this than the Mathematics category. Which cryptographic algorithm is more secure for authentication, specifically, key exchange and digital signing: RSA or DSA? -- PaperWiki (talk) 02:20, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't know whether one is in theory more secure but AFAIK neither one has been compromised, so they're both 100% right now --ffroth 15:38, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

RSA can be broken by a quantum computer of sufficient bit size. No quantum computers with enough bits to break an RSA cipher of any realistic size could be created so far. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.187.67.90 (talk) 18:40, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I thought quantum computers don't work with bits =_= --ffroth 02:06, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

They are digital devices - so they deal in bits - but they do their calculations using qubits which is a quantum superposition of many possible states. It's true that we don't yet have usable quantum computers - but when we do, RSA will become highly vulnerable to attack by even fairly small quantum computers. With conventional computers, you can double the complexity of cracking a code by adding one bit to the length of the key. With quantum computers, you have to double the number of bits to double the time it takes to crack it. So a 64 bit code takes a regular computer over four billion times longer to crack than a 32 bit code - but a quantum computer will only take twice as long. Sheer brute force makes our present codes unbreakable - but we're going to have to come up with something much cleverer in the future. SteveBaker (talk) 03:33, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, DSA is also vulnerable to quantum attack, but I don't think any attack against ECC is known. There are definitely no known quantum attacks against any symmetric cipher (like DES or AES). Grover's algorithm is far too inefficient to be practical. But all of this is meaningless unless someone finally manages to build a large quantum computer. -- BenRG (talk) 12:46, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

PCI video cards

I have an old Gateway PIII PC I'd like to get working. I pulled the graphics card a while back to clean it and see if it was PCI (to try to diagnose a video card or other failure in a new rig). It turned out to be AGP. The motherboard's AGP alignment is off with the case, so while I can get it to work by fiddling around when the case is open, once I close it it never works correctly. Whoever put it in and got it to boot was apparently blessed with divine powers, and now it just plain won't work. I'd like to get a cheap secondhand PCI card, just to make the box boot and be able to do basic things like word processing and Internet (there is no on-board video). Nonetheless, since PCI graphics cards are so old and slow, I figure I can get a pretty decent one at the same price as a mediocre one. Does anyone have any suggestions for higher-end (of their day) graphics cards that are PCI and not AGP? I was looking at the GeForce 5 cards but our article does not specify if they are exclusively AGP or have PCI versions. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 05:15, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

PCI graphics cards are a pretty rare commodity these days. Even AGP is starting to become outdated. Everything's moving towards PCI-E now. You might be able to find one used, perhaps on eBay or something. — User:ACupOfCoffee@ 05:45, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I understand - I'm just trying to find the highest-end PCI card for its day, specifically a model name, because I figure as they're all old I should be able to get them at roughly the same price. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 05:56, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I remember seeing a PCI Geforce 5200 card, but expect to pay quite a premium for it. They are rare, I paid for my PCI Radeon 7500 roughly 4 years ago for the price of an AGP Geforce 4 Ti. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:09, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I purchased a PCI video card from Wal-Mart just a few months ago to repair an older PC for a relative. [2] --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 15:22, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Personally - since this is a 'junker' PC - I'd take a hacksaw to the case and if necessary use duct-tape to get the AGP card to stay put! Enlarging the place on the back of the case where the video connector comes out should be pretty easy - and then you have $0 solution that'll almost certainly be a lot faster than any PCI card you could buy. Remember - it's not just the speed of the graphics card - it's the rate you can give it work to do that matters. The PCI bus is unbelievably slow compared to even 1x AGP (and you might have 2x, 4x or even 8x AGP). In all likelyhood, it's irrelevent how fast the graphics card is because it'll be spending most of it's time sitting there starved for data. Even a slow AGP card will likely beat out a fast PCI card. (Caveat: This is a gross generalisation - a lot depends on...um...everything really!) SteveBaker (talk) 16:26, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Check the clearance around the video card, it might press on a capacitor or something when the case is closed.Polypipe Wrangler (talk) 05:47, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Windows XP: File | Save As

Windows XP: File | Save As

In the dialog box of any program in Windows XP when you select: File | Save As

There is an option in the "View Menu" to select "Thumbnails"

Is there any registry tweak to make "Thumbnails" the default choice?

If so, what is the tweak?

Also, is there any way to change the "default size" and "default location" of the dialog box?

multimedia

what are the server requirements of distributed multimedia systems

presumably you mean video for your multimedia. It needs a high bandwidth for the network connection, and disk drive connections. If you need to run 24*7 365 days a year, you will need an operating system that does not need to be restarted (for whatever reason). You may need to take an analogue video input and convert it to mpeg2 or something like it. There has to be a way to load up the new content. And perhaps you will need digital rights management for your content. A distributed system will have a lower demand than a single central server, but it will be much more difficult to keep the content loaded. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:58, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Multimedia is far to fuzzy a term. You might mean some still images and some simple JavaScript to animate them - in which case your server-side requirements are minimal. You might mean still images plus audio or flash animations or host-side PHP or other programming - or you might mean full-up streaming video. The amount of traffic you expect to get is also a concern. My ancient home web server is a 600MHz PC with a single, very slow hard drive and nothing but a DSL connection to the net. You can get streaming video off of it if you're the only person using it - or it could manage dozens of simultaneous users for some JavaScripted game or something that only requires a few images to be downloaded. At the other end of the scale, consider something like YouTube that serves 100 million streaming videos per day and pays a million dollars a year in bandwidth costs alone! We can't possibly answer your question without MUCH more information. SteveBaker (talk) 16:14, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Books about Web 2.0

Can someone tell me some books about Web 2.0??? I am from brazil so those books can be in Portuguese or english. Exdeathbr (talk) 14:05, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Here's a list: [3]. --Sean 14:21, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Finding authors of deleted youtube videos

I have a youtube video bookmarked that was deleted by the user, i have tried delutube but to no avail, is there a way of finding user who uploaded the video just by looking at the video id code? thanks Jutwdev99 (talk) 14:57, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

No. Try archive.org? --ffroth 15:37, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Depending on when it was deleted you could check the Google cache of the page. Exxolon (talk) 23:12, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Also you might try searching for the name of the video in YouTube or Google Videos. Often videos are mirrored by other users. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:28, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Unix batch renaming of files to remove illegal Linux characters

I'm using Mac OS X connected to a Linux server. Some Mac file names have characters that Linux won't allow. I'm looking for some clever speedy Unix terminal command to look at a folder of files and batch rename all illegal Linux characters (like : \ " > ’ ? |) into normal hyphens. Any ideas? --24.249.108.133 (talk) 19:23, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

• The only illegal characters in a Linux file name are "/" and "\0". Everything else is legal, if ugly to work with. That said, I've used the following script for years to fix up unpleasant file names. Just save it to a file, and do a:

perl -w this-script.pl *

in your directory of bad files. It tries hard to do the right thing, but you should probably back up your files first anyway. --Sean 19:55, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict; 

for (@ARGV)
{
   unless (-e)
   {
       warn "$0: '$_' doesn't exist, skipping\n";
       next;
   }

   my ($dir, $orig_file) = m#^(.*/)?(.+)$# or die $!;
   $dir = './' unless defined $dir;
   $_ = $orig_file;

   s/%([\dA-Fa-f]{2})/sprintf '%c', hex($1)/ge;
   s/[^\w._-]+/-/g;
   s/[-=_]+/-/g;
   s/^[-=_]+(.)/$1/g;
   s/-*\.-*/./g;

   next if $orig_file eq $_;

   my $i = 0;
   my $fname;
   for ($fname = $_; -e "$dir$fname"; $fname = "$i-$_")
   {
       $i++;
   }
   $orig_file = $dir . $orig_file;
   $fname     = $dir . $fname;
   print "rename '$orig_file' => '$fname'\n";
   rename $orig_file, $fname or die "rename '$orig_file', '$fname': $!";
}

I'm in bash mode and Terminal doesn't seem to like your code. What am I doing wrong? --24.249.108.133 (talk) 22:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Stripping an MP4

Does anyone know a program that can easily stip ALL tags and metadata off an MP4 (specifically audio only i.e. M4A) and leave just the stream in an MP4 container? The reason I ask, is when I convert a particular type of file (best not mention for legal reasons - it probably doesn't matter anyway) the output M4A doesn't work with my Nokia 6300 (normal ones do). When I use VLC to put the stream in a MP4 new container, the phone will then play the file, but if I then add tags (even with Nokia's own software), the phone won't recognise any tags on the file (which it's supposed to). Any help would be appreciated - ^Estoy_Aquí^{(t • c • e)} 21:23, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

If you're on Linux try EasyTag, Windows try tinkering with Foobar2000. --antilived^{T | C | G} 21:29, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

November 20

word virus

I have word 2000 and lately, my documents will not send in email because Gmail has decided that it has a virus. So does every program out there. The only thing that I can figure out is that in other computers, they ask about disabling macros. I did not install a macro, nor do any show up in the macro list. What is going on? --Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:04, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

What's going on? You have a virus!! It is writing itself into your Word files as a macro so that it can try to infect other computers. This is seriously bad stuff! Have you tried running a full virus scan first? Get AVG Free if you don't have one that is up to date. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:36, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Ooh, thanks. Any other suggestions for free Anti-Virus. Last time I tried installing AVG, this computer crashed. So, Id kinda rather not use AVG. I'm running a Trend Micro scan now, is that sufficient?--Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

If it detects it then it's sufficient. Avast is also free if you don't like AVG --ffroth 02:04, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It found it. It actually found two things; 3 instances of W97M_GENERIC in what looked like the word program files, and 16 instances of W97M_MARKER.A in the actual word documents. It says that the second one sends a log to its author via FTP once a month. Seems to me that some computer savvy person with the necessary authority could track that back. Why hasn't this been done? Thanks for all the help. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:23, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It's author is probably using another computer that's also been taken over as its ftp destination...or perhaps the destination account is simply outside of the juristiction of anyone who cares. Many countries have too many other problems to be bothered with arresting people who are perpetrating "Internet crimes" that don't affect them and they may not even understand. SteveBaker (talk) 12:33, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

PostgreSQL: Denormalized input

I recently normalized my PostgreSQL/pgforms database of Magic: The Gathering cards to deal with split cards. The result is that each physical card now requires a row on two separate tables, and it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth between two forms when entering one physical card. But pgforms can't handle more than one table in a form, and I'm told that using a denormalized view with rules at the back-end would be nearly impossible, even with the rules already pseudocoded. Is there a standard solution to database situations where unnormalized storage would cause problems and normalized input would be awkward? NeonMerlin 01:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Anyone reading the pseudocode should know that the PK of cards is "Name","Set", the PK of spells is "Card","Set","Spell", and the FK of spells onto cards and left outer join of the denormalized view is cards."Name" = spells."Card" AND cards."Set" = spells."Set". NeonMerlin 02:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

excel problems

I have excel 97 on another computer. Recently, it has decided that when I double click on a .xls, it tries every group of letters before trying the whole filepath. So, for example, if I was to try opening C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Test Spreadsheet 2007.xls ... First an error message pops up saying that it cant find C:\Documents.xls, then one for and.xls then one for Settings\Owner\Test.xls, then Spreadsheet.xls, then 2007.xls. After clicking OK on all those error messages, it opens the file. Why is it doing this and how can I fix it? --Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:45, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Never use spaces in your filenames- it breaks old programs and command-line syntax. Use underscores instead --ffroth 02:03, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It has never done this before. Besides, the "Documents and Settings" is where "My Documents" is, and those are XP defaults.--Omnipotence407 (talk) 02:11, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Try switching to OpenOffice.org Calc. It's free, more secure against macro viruses and compared against such an old version of Excel should be fully compatible (except for the features OOo will have and Excel 97 won't). Or, you could switch to a Linux distro such as Kubuntu (which doesn't force or default any folder names to include non-alphanumeric characters) and run Excel through Wine. Either Excel 97 or Windows XP probably has to go sooner or later, but it doesn't have to cost any money. NeonMerlin 02:40, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Oy, except that Calc kinda sucks at the moment, like much of OOo. Slow, ugly, unintuitive, not-quite-fully-documented; reproducing all of the worst features of Excel... but even worse! --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

What department of Microsoft are you working for? Even if it's not unqualifiedly better than Excel 2007, Calc should dominate Excel 97 in any fair comparison. NeonMerlin 02:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Believe you me, I hate Excel too. I think Calc's biggest problem, aside from having its interface standards set by computer geeks, is that they are trying to replicate something that is barely usable in the first place. Excel (like all of Microsoft Office) is a shitty program and making a free version of a shitty program is not an improvement, especially if it is a very slow version of said shitty program. But I digress. My hope is that once OOo gets into a more stable phase a bunch of designers will descend upon its code and make a fork for people who actually want to not have to battle with their office tools to get them to work. But if I am going to have to battle with my software, I want to at least battle at a good pace, so the slowness issue (and the fact that everything produced with OOo looks about 200% more ugly than the already ugly things that come out of Office) means a lot to me. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The interface standards are not set by geeks: one of OOo's strengths is that it's good at responding to bug reports and feature requests from non-programmers. As for it looking ugly, the only significant difference in appearance from Excel is the icon theme, and that can be changed (Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > View > Icon size and style). Many other aspects of the GUI can also be customized that can't in Excel. NeonMerlin 03:09, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but the interface is super ugly and super clunky looking. Alas, the ugliness does not end there. Try to make good looking graph with Calc. I dare you. One that doesn't look like it was cobbled together by programmers with no idea of how graphs should look, one that takes Excel's already ugly approach to making graphs and makes it even uglier. It can't be done, as far as I can tell. Everything looks like crap; it would be totally unusable in anything but a setting where apperances did not matter (which is unfortunately the case amongst programmers). Not to mention they seem to have spent more time allowing you to make 3D graphs (which are methodologically problematic, as anyone concerned with visual representation of data knows) than they have on simple things like simple XY plots (you can't plot circles at all unless you are using ugly drop-in bitmapped "custom" plot images). This is the sort of thing that consulting with people who actually care about visual representation of data (or at least had read a book or two by Edward Tufte) would have stopped from the get-go. But the culture of OOo is to create a "replacement" for MS Office; recreating a flawed product will not end up with a good product, and everyone knows how awful MS Office is. (And I won't get into things like OOo Base, which is totally unusable for even basic things as far as I can tell, as a database programmer.) Anyway, I wish the OOo people all the luck but at the moment it's not a great program and I wouldn't wish it on anyone who has to use programs like that on a daily basis (like myself). As far as I'm concerned its a neat tech demo (based on a flawed idea). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 14:59, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Wow, didnt mean to start this argument, but I have to agree with 24. I tried using Impress for a presentation for school, and it just kept crashing, and took about 5 minutes to save any progress. I flipped back to powerpoint, and whipped off the presentation that had been taking days, in a matter of an hour or two. Ive generally found OOo to be pretty slow, and not a viable alternative to Any Version of Microsoft Office, including 97. Only thing that OOo seems to have on Microsoft in my use is the pricetag. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The odds are that somehow the file association had gotten whiggy and it is trying to execute it without the quotes it needs around the filename. If I recall you have to fish around in the registry to fix it. This post sounds like what I am talking about—it's the quotes around the %1 that are probably missing (for some reason). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I'm gonna try the registry fix tomorrow after the computer is scanned for the same virus my other computer had. I'll let you know if it works. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The regedit worked great. Thanks--Omnipotence407 (talk) 02:01, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki, JavaScript and PHP

(This is not a Wikipedia question)

If I have my own MediaWiki system, can I add JavaScript or PHP to specific pages in the Wiki to make them interactive? For example, if I have a JavaScript snippet to create a little interactive widget to convert fahrenheit to centigrade - can I set up the system to allow me to put that into a regular Wiki page? How about PHP code to do stuff on the server-side?

I could obviously do this outside the Wiki on some other web page - but I want the ability to edit it in a browser and to use the Wiki to do version control. Since this is for a private Wiki, I'm not concerned with vandalism or anything.

TIA SteveBaker (talk) 03:18, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Well for Javascript you can edit the skin's js file and do something similar to all the javascript tools on here like WP:POPUPS. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:05, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah - I knew about that - but it's not what I need. Editing your monobook.js allows one user to stick in some JavaScript that affects all pages he visits. I want the opposite - something I can stick into one page that affects all users who visit it. Think specificially about something like having a little type-in box in the article on Temperature that would let you type in a temperature in Fahrenheit, click a 'Convert' button and see the result appear in Centigrade. This is really easy to do in HTML - but MediaWiki kills the usual comment tags for JS. I'm kinda hoping there is a configuration option to change that behavior. SteveBaker (talk) 05:21, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't have an answer to your question since I don't know MediaWiki all that well (although I doubt it'd be hard to implement a <script>-tag in mediawiki that does what you want), but I do want to point out that you should be VERY careful about this, since this would be a major security issue. Your whole wiki would become one big XSS vulnerability. So you'd have to, at the very least, figure out some way to do it so only admins can edit such pages or add such code (which, since it's a private wiki, you may already have done). If you do implement this in some way, keep that in mind. 161.52.15.110 (talk) 11:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

As I explained, this is a private Wiki, it's set up so that only registered users can edit or move pages, WikiSysop is the only account that can create users - there will only be a handful of users and they are all trusted people. The <nowiki><script></nowiki> trick doesn't work - the script tag ends up surrounded by &lt;...&gt; instead of <...> so the browser doesn't see it. This is obviously an essential protection for a regular Wiki - but I need to circumvent it somehow. SteveBaker (talk) 12:25, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, what you want to do is make it so that MediaWiki doesn't automatically escape out Javascript or PHP code, yes? If there isn't a setting for such a thing, I bet you could find the function that does the escaping and disable it? (Sorry, I don't know MediaWiki at all so I can't give any specifics.) If I were going to guess where such a setting would be, it would be around the same place where you can presumably enable or disable HTML tags. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 15:03, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Yep - that's probably what it's going to come down to. I guess I'm just going to have to dive in and start reading PHP code. Urgh! SteveBaker (talk) 01:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

My guess is that if you run a search over all of the PHP code for "strip_tags" you'll find the function(s) that remove the PHP and HTML, etc. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 21:34, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Nope - I just tried that - there is not one occurrence of 'strip_tags' anyplace in the PHP code. SteveBaker (talk) 01:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Which, now that I think of it, makes sense: it isn't stripping it, it's converting it to entities. Which might be done with "htmlentities" but even more likely is being done with a custom regex of some sort and might be hard to find for that reason. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 17:08, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Why not just do the same approach as WP, except it's integrated into the skin? Once you have the JS in then you can simply reference to it using plain HTML code. But, I think this belongs to somewhere like Village Pump/Technical where people are more experienced with MediaWiki. --antilived^{T | C | G} 22:08, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The trouble with asking at the Village Pump and such is that those are about Wikipedia itself - and this is nothing to do with Wikipedia (other than that we're using the same base software). SteveBaker (talk) 01:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

My bet is on doing things the way the user scripts had been doing already, only with it built into the skin instead of optional. You can circumvent the code sanitisation by simply putting a <div> with an id, and use the DOM to create the elements inside it. --antilived^{T | C | G} 03:37, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, I have it kinda/sorta working. I got into the file 'wiki/includes/Sanitizer.php and found tables of allowed HTML tags. Adding things like SCRIPT, FORM and INPUT into those lists allowed me to make a page containing JavaScript that actually loaded and ran - although Wiki keeps trying to format the text inside those tage which resulted in a bunch of <p> tags getting inside my JavaScript code - so I had to put all of my JavaScript code onto one long line! Also, I havn't yet figured out how to let the sttribute fields of those tags go through - but the PHP code appears to be in that same source file. So it looks like I can fix those few problems and make this work - and when I do, it'll be pretty nifty. It's a shame it's such a security risk (which it truly is) - it would be v.cool to have client-side scripting inside Wikipedia. I wonder if we could limit what JavaScript could do by defining our own Wiki-markup scripting language that would be safe and generate real JavaScript from that? SteveBaker (talk) 07:53, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

"Bunu kimse Yapmaz" vanishing email

A friend tells me he received an email through Outlook Express that mysteriously disappeared from his computer. Fortunately he had copied the above text from the subject line to do a Google search before it disappeared. Otherwise he would have had no record. An Outlook Express internal "find" revealed nothing, no record whatsoever.

A week earlier, after purchasing a computer peripheral from Ecoolstore on eBay from China, he also received an email stating that processing of their PayPal payment had been "completed." When the item did not arrive from Hong Kong within the allocated 14 business day limit he requested a refund but the seller responded that his PayPal payment had not been "completed" so when he went to look for the email it had also mysteriously vanished.

What is going on? Can email that has been received and displayed simply self destruct like the mission assignment tapes from Mission Impossible, or did my friend delete them by mistake without knowing what he had done?

Also is it possible for computer peripherals from China to have spyware installed inside then on a read only memory and if so how can this be determined?

Thanks in advance for any response. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.5.134 (talk) 18:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It is probably too soon to tell anything with the little information that we have.

If the user has a desktop search program, I would urge to use it.

If a secondary computer is available, please try taking out the hard disk to that computer and using it as a secondary drive there.

I doubt that the email vanished into thin air because even if the email contained a strange request like that, there is no reason why Windows Outlook Express would conform to it.

Any ideas, Wikipedians?

To the OP: Before doing anything, make sure you understand the disclaimers above. If the issue in the email was critical, I would turn off the computer and have it sent to a reputable data recovery company. It would expensive and the I would probably finish eating my nails (and probably my toenails as well) as they recover the data, but if the situation warranted that, I would do it. --Kushal^t 19:06, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

• Desktop search is faster than Outlook Express or Windows XP searches but does not appear to be configurable to do a search on text or any sequence of characters within a file whereas "Bunu kimse Yapmaz" appeared in the subject text of the email and in the body of the email rather than as the email's name.
• The peripheral device mentioned was not a hard drive.
• The issue with the email is that it contradicts the claim that the PayPal payment was not "completed." There is no need for a data recovery program but only the ability to scan the hard drive at the byte or bit level. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.5.134 (talk) 19:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the correction, 71.100.5.134. I used data recovery in the sense that even if the worst case scenario of the data being deleted from the file allocation table, it might still exist on the hard disk and therefore recoverable. --Kushal^t 20:37, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

To me data recovery implies at worst a hard drive found in the ashes of a house fire and at best a motor or other circuit that has burned out making a cleanroom necessary to disassemble the hard drive and remount the platers in a new case with new electronics to hopefully make the data accessible again. If the data on the hard drive can still be read independent of format then all that is needed should be scanner software that can read sequential bits and bytes looking for keywords. I have data recovery software but it is not keyword friendly. Instead of allowing a bit or byte pattern keyword it merely restores all data it can leaving the user to do his own keyword search by conventional means after all possible data has been restored. I do not expect that such a thing will work in this case.

Also I assume that it is possible for anti-spam or antiviral anti-malware software to allow the text of an email to be displayed but then delete it when it recognizes it contains a pattern it does not like. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.5.134 (talk) 21:20, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The last bit of our post is interesting and very relevant. However, the most sensible anti-spam/anti-malware program will probably keep the message in an archive somewhere so that the software can be trained on whether to treat similar messages as junk in the future.

To the OP: Do you have any anti-spam/anti-malware program that you think will take such actions? --Kushal^t 00:53, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Advertising new store online.

I have a family member who just opened up a new store, of the brick-and-mortar type, and I have offered to help with online sales. A friend set up the basic skeleton of a sales web site, but it needs a lot of work. Mainly it needs some type of sales software (keep track of shopping cart, process transactions, generate receipts, etc). When I look for this type of software I either find what looks like a scam to me, or over-priced options that want to do everything for me. Any suggestions here?

I also need to advertise so the web site can get some traffic, the most important step would be that when someone google searches the name of the store they get the web site. I've looked at the Pagerank page, and I'm a little confused about how to go about this. It seems like the best way to improve the site's visibility in searches is to go to other sites (like blogs and forums) and post links back to my site (especially contextual links). However, this sounds under-handed to me. For instance I could insert a link to the site here in this question, and since google loves Wikipedia this would increase my rank. But the purpose of this question isn't to insert a link back to my site, it is to ask if there is a legitimate way to accomplish the same task? I also plan on eventually using google's ad service to place context-sensitive text-based ads elsewhere, will this increase my search ranking in-and-of itself? Thanks for your help. 128.223.131.21 (talk) 20:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, link farms on Wikipedia no longer give you a boost on Google as Wikipedia has tags to ask Google not to crawl external links and Google accepts the meta tags. --Kushal^t 20:41, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Google doesn't love Wikipedia, in the way you think. All external links from Wikipedia have the nofollow tag set on them, which means Google doesn't follow them and doesn't give them any value. That doesn't stop dumb people from trying it anyway, and we're really pretty good at removing that stuff and blocking the spammer (for that is what people who do stuff like that are). And if they're persistent, and do something stupid like make a whole article about their business, when it gets deleted here it leaves a track (like a deletion discussion) that Google does like. So when you search Google for that business, you find the deletion discussion, and that's something that says "scammer" to your customer. guerrilla marketing is one thing, but dumb stuff like that undoes thousands of dollars of positive press and advertising. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

And similarly a lot of the "cunning" search engine optimization tricks you've heard of, including stuffing blogs with backlinks, turn out to trigger Google's (and Yahoo's, and MSN's) sophisticated "we're being scammed" detectors, which blacklist your site and again prove to be vastly counterproductive. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:55, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Regarding software, our Shopping cart software article doesn't have a comparision (which is disappointing) but does link to some external lists. Google for "open source shopping cart" and you'll find some you can use for free (and can see the source for, making it much less likely to be a scam). But the big pain is accepting credit cards - for a small online retailer that tends to be rather pricey. For that you need to find a trustworthy "merchant services" provider - there are many providers, but I can't say which is trustworthy. Going with an established brand is probably the path of least risk, but will add a cost (PayPal UK's merchant services account charges 3.4% + £0.20 GBP per transaction, which seems like a lot to me). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:50, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Besides PayPal, you will also find that Google and Amazon offer cash-register services for online credit card payments. When you look at the percentage taken, compare it to the percentage that a small merchant would pay for any other credit card transaction. Also consider the cost of website programming, bookkeeping, returns, fraud prevention etc and it might not be the deciding factor on whether to do online sales. EdJohnston (talk) 21:09, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

In terms of advertising your site, it's true that the more people with 'good' websites who link to your site, the better your pagerank will be. Using Wikipedia for this doesn't work (as has previously been explained) because we wish not to become overwhelmed with people posting junk links just to improve their page rank - and the Google 'spider' that searches and indexes Wikipedia knows not to include external links. Spamming other sites may work better though - but it's not a morally good thing to do - and I greatly respect your integrity in that matter. The point of the pagerank algorithm (which has totally transformed the web by the way) is that sites that are actually good, interesting, liked will pretty soon get noticed and the pagerank will accurately reflect their worth. The problem is that until you get noticed, you don't get noticed!

What I think helps is to make sure that there are REASONS for people to link to you. Regrettably, however good your business might be, you'll end up in peoples 'Favorites' lists - but they are hardly likely to link to you from their web sites/forums/whatever. Perhaps people will do it simply because of the uniqueness of the business - but that might be problematic if the business isn't all that unique. In that case, I think you should strive to put things onto the page that (whilst not strictly related to the business) drive traffic your way. This means that you need CONTENT. Content is king. So - do you have employees who are talented in some way? Do you have an amateur cartoonist? Run a weekly comic. Someone with a talent for crazy/funny animal photos? Get in on the lolcats craze. Can you put industry-relevent content on there? Well researched and organised raw data will get linked to. Perhaps if you are a food store then you could publish nutritional data for the foods you sell? Make sure every page on your site links back to the main page.

Anything to make someone trip over your web site while searching for something that's not necessarily related to your business. Make them want to link to your web site. If you have reasonable amounts of disk space and bandwidth, you could offer free web space to a club or other organisation vaguely (possibly very vaguely) related to your business. If you give appropriate credit and pay attention to the GFDL, you can mirror Wikipedia articles that relate to your business. Disk space is cheap (if it isn't, find another web hosting service!) - it costs you little to offer tons of stuff.

Ironically, it's not so important that the people who visit these 'peripheral' locations actually buy stuff from you (although it obviously won't hurt) - what you want is those pagerank-pushing links.

Taking a shot at viral marketting (of the web site - not the business) can't hurt. You may wish your business to have an air of respectability - but you're trying to drive links to your site - not to your business. Can you put on some weird sporting event with staff? Maybe challenge your biggest competitor! A custard pie flinging contest is always good for a laugh - get everyone involved - get everyone messy as all hell - post a short version of it to YouTube with something at the bottom of the video that says "Come to xyzcorp.com to see the full version of this movie". Make sure everyone knows where to go to look for the video - ask everyone to send out links to everyone they know. If you magnanimously agree to host the video on your site, you'll end up with your competitors employees emailing links to your site for you!

But you have to get actually creative - not 'fake' creative, the Internet can spot 'fake creative' a mile off. Be weird - be funny - be unique. The links WILL come if you do it right.

SteveBaker (talk) 01:43, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Republic Commando Soundtrack

Hi all,

the german and english articles state stuff about the soundtrack being available for public at LucasArts, but LA seems to have removed the whole product site :( Does anyone have a DL link for the soundtrack or at least the credit song by Ash?

88.64.74.49 (talk) 21:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Origin of h.264 name?

I know h.264 was "descended" from h.264~h.261. But where did the "h" and "26x" part come from? Do they have any special meaning? --24.249.108.133 (talk) 22:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Assuming you're talking about the video codec. The 'H.xxx' standards come from the ITU-T standards group. They use a letter.number format for all of their standards names - where the letter tells you which kind of standard it is - and the number tells you exactly which standard within the group. They seem to have allocated letters of the alphabet in order - so, for example: 'T.xxx' standards are for faxes, 'G.xxx' are optical networking standards and 'H.xxx' is for multimedia standards. The '264' part basically seems to mean that it's the 264th standard that they've defined in the area of Multimedia. Pretty boring really! SteveBaker (talk) 00:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Windows 95 platform with the 'newest new'

I have a lot of old games that only run well on Win 95 (Railroad Tycoon II among them). This is a weird request, but what is the most modern old stuff you can put on a Win 95 platform, and expect it to run old games like a star? By that I guess I'm thinking about what was brand new in '00 or so. Do the new SM3.0 compatible graphic cards have problems running old games like these, or is it purely the OS? Because heck, I guess I can just dual-boot any new computer with Win95/XP. So I guess there's potential here for the request to be not so weird, but somehow I doubt Win95 would work with some Gfx8800... Still, I'd love to know it from the techies. Thanks a lot in advance. =) 81.93.102.185 (talk) 22:36, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

You could install Win95 or Win98 inside a virtual machine (like QEMU, which is free). This would ignore your actual hardware and will appear to Windows to be old(ish) hardware which it can cope with. This is fairly slow to do, but for Windows 95 on a modern computer, it might work ok. Probably worth a look at, anyway. --h2g2bob (talk) 23:34, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

MS Virtual PC 2007 is also free, and probably a bit easier to use. Speed shouldn't be a problem for the sort of games you're talking about. -- DatRoot 23:46, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Win95 might have some trouble with large hard drives (large being more than 8GB) or Serial ATA drives. Video cards shouldn't be a problems: as long as you don't need 3D acceleration, the standard VESA drivers should let you use the card -- I've had no trouble running Windows 3.1 on a machine with a GeForce 6600GT. You might also run into a problem with too much memory: Win98 (and presumably Win95) have problems on systems with 768MB or more. If the hard drive is supported, it might be slow: without motherboard-specific drivers, you don't get access to the faster transfer modes. Sound cards are an open question: there's no standard, but you might be able to get an AC97 driver and card that work with Win95. You'll need a PS/2 keyboard and mouse: Win95 does not support USB. If you need a modem, look for a Hayes-compatible hardware modem -- those all use the same drivers. Ethernet cards could also be a problem: look for a card that offers Win95 drivers. --Carnildo (talk) 23:02, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Excel

If I have a list as the following in Excel and I want to sort them from A-Z by last name but keeping there phone # and address with their name. How do I do that in Excel?

Last Name, Phone Number, Address

use the mouse to highlight the rectangle containing all the data. Then click data, then sort,

then tell it you want to sort by the column with lastname in it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:33, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Excel Question

In Excel, how do I create a list for one cell? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.193.147.179 (talk) 23:15, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

YOu can type the first item, then alt-enter, then the second item, then alt-enter and so on. is that what you want? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:35, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Did you mean a drop-down list in one cell (otherwise known as a 'Combo Box')? If so, I think you have to show the Control Toolbox (go to View > Toolbars > Control Toolbox then you can click on the drop down list icon and click where you want to put it. You should be able to customise it by right clicking and going to Properties but I've never actually done it in Excel, only Access and Word.GaryReggae (talk) 20:19, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

You'd have to do a lot more work to make it behave properly; don't use controls in Excel files unless you know what you are doing (and even then, they're not usually what you want). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:18, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Unidentified Malicious Software.. "Thumb.exe"?!!

I'm suffering some kind of files on my hdd called "thumb.exe". it copies itself to every drive on the hdd, even to removable drives once i connect them, creating an "autorun.ini" file which makes every drive opens in a separate window, slowing down my pc. it also makes my floppy drive runs every now and then, as if it's looking for a floppy disk inside. anti-viruses are unable to deal with these files because they don't recognize them as viruses inspite of their virus-like activities!!! i used some anti-spyware but it was unfruitful too. when i try to remove them manually, they just come back once i restart my pc, or turn it on after a shutdown. although there is no suspicious programs in the Start-up Menu or in "Windows Services".. my last trick was to remove it manually then format C: drive and reinstall my Windows XP SP2 again. but all in vain, it was in my reception there. what do you think about this, people?. sorry for being gabby!! Thanks in advance Supersonic8 (talk) 23:45, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure it's "thumb.exe" and not "thumbs.db"? thumbs.db is automatically made by windows and contains thumbnails of pictures in the folder --ffroth 08:11, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I'm sure it's "Thumb.exe" not "Thumb.db". I know exactly what "thumb.db" is for. and this is why it took me sometime to discover these files. Thank you Froth. Supersonic8 (talk) 00:14, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Download Free antivirus software like Avast! or AVG and do a complete scan of your system. Alternatively boot into Linux using a LiveCD, and run ClamWin from there on the harddrive. --antilived^{T | C | G} 21:38, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

November 21

information technology in 21st century

can anyone please tell about information technology in 21st century?220.224.121.1 (talk) 05:01, 21 November 2007 (UTC)kaki

Do your own homework. The reference desk will not give you answers for your homework, although we will try to help you out if there is a specific part of your homework you do not understand. Make an effort to show that you have tried solving it first. Asking for an 'essay' as an answer on the Science Desk is a bit of a give away. I will leave the question in case any kind hearted soul wants to point you in the right direction, but seriously, Do your own homework. Lanfear's Bane | t 10:58, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm a kind hearted soul (hmm, blushes) but I'm bu**ered if I'm going to do your homework without a bit of effort on your part. Have you done any searches? you're here posting this question so you have some handle on the technology. Now just take another step forward and use the IT that you're asking about. Richard Avery (talk) 15:55, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

A also am ma**arined if I'm going to help him unless he learns to ask properly. (Is this a british english thing?) --ffroth 01:17, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Here's a big hint: In the 21st century, information technology will rise up and destroy all human societies, replacing them with nothing but more information technology; it will be IT all the way up! Just keep going on that track and I'm sure the teacher will give you an A! --24.147.86.187 (talk) 17:05, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

It is also a very vague (not to mention poorly worded) question. As a starting point, see the Wikipedia link on Information Technology, if you need anything more specific, we can help if you clearly explain what you are looking for but we will not do your homework for you, getting someone else to do it doesn't benefit you as you don't learn anything. GaryReggae (talk) 20:14, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

uninstall

i have 3 os in my pc.how do i uninstall vista.its a disgrace to technology and a waste of precious space.i dont have the cd. 2.am using suse linux dektop enterprise.am having trouble using it.am learning programming and am not sure how linux will asist.are the tutorials in linux? 3.when i boot on xp and open my computer,i see two cd drives yet i only have one.av checked the cables but its not going away.is it a virus.and i always receve a message prompting me that i have files waiting to be burned onto that drive —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.49.92.115 (talk) 11:17, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

• If you're sure you don't want anything on the hard drive partition which Vista is installed on, you can reformat the disk. There's plenty of tools to do this (QtParted/GParted for example).
• There are quite a few tutorials for Linux, but Linux is big and covers many software programs. Most questions can be answered by Google, any others could be answered by posting on a forum (like this reference desk, or this one). Also look around your local area for a Linux users' group who can help you. Linux has many programming tools - which one is best really depends what programing language you want to use.
• With your CD problem - if it's just a cosmetic problem, then leave it be. If you want to change it, the issue will probably be shown by going to control panel > system > click device manager button. Check the cd drives listed don't have yellow exclamation marks next to them - if they do, double click them and follow the advise shown (probably re-installing drivers).

--h2g2bob (talk) 23:08, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

In Linux, you can obliterate Vista by reformatting it's disk partition. The 'fdisk' program (run as root) will allow you view the partitions on that drive - and to change the partition ID from whatever Vista uses to (say) 0x83 - which is a Linux partition - then write that out to the hard drive. Then use 'mkfs' (again, as root) to make a file-system on that partition (this is "formatting" the disk in normal terms). Finally, add your new partition into /etc/fstab so that Linux will mount it (either on commmand or on startup). But PLEASE be very, very careful. Treat 'fdisk' and 'mkfs' with the kind of care you'd take with a loaded gun that's pointed at your foot! Either program can annihilate your entire system quite easily. So be REALLY sure you have the correct partition name/number and all of that stuff before you proceed - make sure that every file you care about is backed up before you start. Trust me - I've seen some pretty spectacular screwups with this pair of programs! SteveBaker (talk) 07:37, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

linux 2

what is the best video player for linux?what site can i use for cool linux softwares —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.49.92.115 (talk) 11:39, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Sourceforge.net and Freshmeat.net are both good for finding Linux programs.--droptone (talk) 13:36, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

VLC? There are licensing issues, so you probably won't find it in a Fedora/Debian/BSD repository --ffroth 21:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

See Comparison of media players and look at the ones that support Linux under operating system support. Usually the repository of your distribution is a good place to look for software. --Spoon! (talk) 05:14, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

sql

sqlبازگشتی —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.71.125.241 (talk) 13:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Does SQL help? or ar:لغة الاستعلامات البنيوية? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:09, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Linux keyboard problems

Hi! After running the following linux command: # dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg configuration and the subsequent configuration process I'm having problems with the keys that have a third character, for example, pressing AltGr+7 will not make the braces appear (Portuguese layout), which is a bit annoying for someone trying to program. What can I do? Also, while trying to install the audio device drivers, the graphic mode isn't running immediately after boot, instead, I must type $ startx. And I still don't have sound. How can I solve these problems? I'm a total linux disaster. Thanks! 217.129.241.186 (talk) 15:18, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Hi, dpkg-reconfigure locales might solve the braces. You will need to specify that you're using a Poruguese layout. To boot into X, the easiest way is to install an X display manager. If you use GNOME, run apt-get install gdm. If you run KDE, run apt-get install kdm. --Kjoonlee 22:58, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I'll try that, thanks! But I already have a X manager, I use ubuntu, it just doesn't start after boot. I have to type startx. 217.129.241.186 (talk) 23:07, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

There should be an option in dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg asking about keyboard layout. You should just be able to type "pt" in the box. (example: here)

Or you could edit /etc/xorg.conf. As root, create a backup copy of xorg.conf. Edit the file, changing the appropriate line to Option "XkbLayout" "pt" There are more variants here you could try.

KDE also does some keyboard stuff in kcontrol, which might be worth looking at. --h2g2bob (talk) 23:27, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

If you don't know how to make X auto start you really should be using one of the distributions instead of trying to build your own (if that's what you're doing). --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:43, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm actually only programming the support for a basic file system. I'm not a computer science student, I study electronics & telecommunications.

217.129.241.186 (talk) 00:03, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Different sizes

What accounts for the difference between the full number of bytes and the amount indicated before the parenthesis in MB or GB and between the "size" and "size on disk" when clicking on properties of a folder in Windows Explorer? For example:

Location: C:\Here\and\there

Size: 2,21 GB (2.235.887.280 bytes)

Size on disk: 2,40 GB (2.581.848.064 bytes)

Contains 3.560 Files, 322 Folders

Thank you. Keria (talk) 16:47, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

It has to do with how files are stored on a disk. The size represents the actual byte size of the files, whereas "size on disk" refers to how many clusters it takes up. Sometimes files take up more clusters than their physical byte size, or, in other words, don't completely fill up the space allotted to them. Defragmenting your drive can help reduce this a bit if it is extreme (it forces files to more efficiently use the clusters) but some degree of this is going to be inherently there in most file systems. It's kind of like saying that every file must be broken into chunks of 8 bytes (this is an arbitrarily and randomly chosen value here), but most files are not going to be perfectly divisible into chunks of 8 bytes, so the last chunk might only contain 1 byte or 2 byte, but is taking up an entire 8 byte chunk of the drive on the disk. At least, I think that's what it is like—someone correct me if I've got it wrong! --24.147.86.187 (talk) 17:02, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

So if I were to copy these files on a hardrive mp3 player which number should I take into account? Keria (talk) 17:48, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

You will need to take into account the first number (size), as well as how free space is distributed on your mp3 player. If your player is originally empty, the files are going to be copied to it pretty much in order, thus minimizing the amount of slack space. If you already have files on your mp3 player, and if you frequently delete some files and replace them with different files, then the free space on your mp3 player is probably fragmented, so the slack space problem is going to be more pronounced.

In practice, however, the effect is not going to be very noticeable, especially for mp3 files, which are fairly large in size. This only becomes a problem when you need to copy a great number of very small files. Hope this helps.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 17:59, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Fragmentation is part of it, but there's also filesystem overhead --ffroth 01:13, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

How can fragmentation have anything to do with cluster usage? Sorry but a file does not extend to another fragment until its first cluster block is fully used. You don't find files that have 3/4 used a cluster and 3/4 another one etc. De-fragmenting won't reduce the amount of info that is in clusters but not being used. The only way to improve that is to turn down the cluster size.--Dacium (talk) 01:50, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

• Why are do the numbers in bytes look different than the numbers in MB and GB?

Normal metric prefixes follow the pattern of 1 km = 1000 m; 1 Mm = 1000² m; 1 Gm = 1000³ m, and so on. When converting to a different prefix, you only have to move the decimal point but the significant digits stay the same or round up. (5678 m = 5.68 km)

Bytes however, don't follow the same rules. 1 KB = 1024 bytes; 1 MB = 1024² bytes; 1 GB = 1024³ bytes, and so on. When converting to a different prefix, the significant digits change. (5678 bytes = 5.54 KB) --Bavi H (talk) 10:07, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

• What's the difference between file size and size on disk?

There's a lot of correct and incorrect information here, so I'd like to try to clarify.

Although files have sizes in bytes, the space on a hard disk is divided into clusters. A cluster is a certain number of bytes in size, and can be different from one hard disk to the next, depending on how it is formatted. The way a hard disk is organized, a cluster is the smallest thing that can be used to store file data. When storing files, the disk always fills up a cluster before using another one. If a file size isn't an exact multiple of the cluster size, then the last cluster will have some left over space that's not part of the file, but still accounts for the "size on disk" number.

To find out the cluster size on your hard disk, just open Notepad, type in exactly one character, then save the file. If you look at the properties of that file in Explorer, you will see that the file size is 1 byte, but the size on disk will be the size of one cluster. On my hard disk, the cluster size is 4.00 KB (4096 bytes). So on my hard disk, any files from 1 to 4096 bytes in size will fit into one cluster and use 4096 bytes on the disk. Any files from 4097 to 8192 bytes in size will fit into two clusters and use 8192 bytes on the disk. And so on.

When you copy files from one disk to another disk with a different cluster size, you'd have to do calculations to figure out what the size on disk would be on the new disk. Generally, it's not worth bothering about becuase it's not much more than the total file size. So you usually can just pay attention to the file size when copying files. You asked about copying files to your MP3 player as an example. I don't have an MP3 player, but the Music folder on my hard disk contains 783 MP3 files (46 hours 20 minutes) and uses 3.08 GB. The difference between the total size on disk and total file size is only 1.47 MB, which is very roughly equivalent to the size of a 1 minute 30 second MP3 file of average quality.

When you are creating files on a disk, you only have to be concerned about wasting space if there are lots of small files that don't fill up very much of their last cluster. The most extreme example is if I had a lot of 1 byte files for some reason. Each file would use one cluster on the disk and so there'd be a lot of space on the disk being used up without storing any useful info. The next most extreme example is if I had a lot of 4097 byte files (the size of one cluster on my hard disk plus one byte). Each one of these files would use up two clusters each, but the second cluster would be mostly empty, so nearly half of the space the files use on disk wouldn't be storing anything useful. In general, most files will use more than 1 byte of their last cluster. And as your files get larger, the amount of space left over in the last cluster is less and less of something to worry about. --Bavi H (talk) 10:07, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

• Although it wasn't in your question, others have brought up fragmentation.

Fragmentation has nothing to do with how much space is used on the disk. A fragmented file just means its clusters aren't in order next to each other on the disk. Defragmenting a file doesn't change how much space is used on the disk, it just puts the clusters in order next to each other on the disk, so it can be read faster. Defragmenting a drive doesn't change the way clusters are used: When writing a file, a disk always fills a cluster before using another one. The distribution of free space doesn't affect how much space is used: The same number of free clusters are used during the writing of a certain size file no matter where the free clusters are located on the disk. --Bavi H (talk) 10:07, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Gtype and Sample Triggering Software

hello, I'm a training sound engineer. I've known about many theatre sound designers triggering sound effects from a Akai Sampler and PC using Gtype software. However, i run a mac platform. Any suggestions for ways to trigger sounds from a Mac using a MIDI or USB interface?

I don't really want to run bootcamp.

86.139.90.55 (talk) 18:58, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't know about sampling software at all, but I will say that it is extremely easy to run a virtualizer on OS X with an Intel processor. I run Parallels Desktop for a few things I do that only run on Windows, and it is a complete snap. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 21:39, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

coldfusion applications -- disable server-side caching per-page

If there is anyone on here who knows about ColdFusion, I need a way to disable server (and client) side caching of specific pages, without turning off caching entirely on the entire server. Is there a way to do this in a cf tag?

Alternatively, if anyone knows a better forum to ask this question please feel free to slap up a link. Gracias. NoClutter (talk) 19:09, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't know CF specifically, but the general way to prevent the client from caching is to set a cache-control "nocache" line - see this -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:07, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

November 22

what does a speed of 54 kb/s means?

If you have a modem 54kb/s you just get 4-5 kb/s. Why do you call it 54kb/s if you only get 10% of it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mr.K. (talk • contribs) 04:45, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

56kbps is the maximum theoretical speed over a conventional phone line- I believe it's capped by legislation in fact. It's by no means a guarantee. Also I think you're probably getting 4 or 5 KB/s, which is maybe 35kbps.. I doubt your ISP could get away with just 4 or 5 --ffroth 04:51, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah, yep it is regulated, by the good old FCC </sarcasm> --ffroth 04:53, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

There is usually a confusion of the units. Modem speeds are usually advertised in kilobits per second. Transfer speeds are usually measured in kibibytes per second. If you have 54kbps (kilobits per second), that is 54 000 bps (bits per second), which is 6750 B/s (bytes per second), which is about 6.59 KiB/s (kibibytes per second). So 4 or 5 KiB/s is not that far off. --Spoon! (talk) 05:10, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

The kilo/kibi probably isn't very significant for a general approximation though- the main issue is that 56k means 56k bits per second, not 56KB/s --ffroth 06:38, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it's neither bits not bytes. The 'b' stands for 'baud'. What's more, 'baud' is a measure of the number of 'signalling events' per second - so you shouldn't be talking about kb/s - just kbaud. Because bytes are sent using a serial protocol, you'll generally need 10 signalling events to send one byte (depending on whether you are using 7 bits per byte or 8, one or two stop bits and with or without parity - the typical 8N1 setting needs 1 start bit, 8 data bits, no parity and 1 stop bit - 10 signalling events to send 8 bits). So at best, a 54kbaud modem sends 5.4 kbytes per second. However, that's only possible on an absolutely perfect quality phone line - which you'll almost never have. In practical terms, the modems at the two ends of the line have to negotiate a rate that allows both of them to get clean data through - and they do this by trying to send data at various set rates until they find one that works well that they can both cope with. This may be 28.8kbaud or 14.4kbaud or 9.8kbaud or worse. But most phone lines can manage 14.4 kbaud - which is 1.44 kbytes per second. So I'd say that if you are getting between 4kbytes and 5kbytes per second, you are doing very well. SteveBaker (talk) 07:21, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I thought with all-digital phone lines these days, you're basically guaranteed a consistent baud-byte --ffroth 07:39, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

ITU-T V-Series Recommendations#Simultaneous transmission of data and other signals says the contrary, it says it's 56kbits/s. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:45, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Contrary to me or steve? --ffroth 07:59, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Steve. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:05, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Ubuntu exim4 TLS problem

Hi, can anyone out there help me - I've got a mail server running Ubuntu and exim4 and I can't get TLS to work. I've tried setting it up as described in several howtos, but I can't get it to advertise STARTTLS :(. My configuration is default for ubuntu except as follows:

A file named 00_localconfig in the "conf.d/main" directory with the following:

   MAIN_TLS_ENABLE = "yes"
   SYSTEM_ALIASES_PIPE_TRANSPORT = address_pipe
   

and the debian/ubuntu config file update-exim4.conf.conf with the following (identifying features obfuscated with generic type info):

  # /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf
  # 
  # Edit this file and /etc/mailname by hand and execute update-exim4.conf
  # yourself or use 'dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config'
  #
  # Please note that this is _not_ a dpkg-conffile and that automatic changes
  # to this file might happen. The code handling this will honor your local
  # changes, so this is usually fine, but will break local schemes that mess
  # around with multiple versions of the file.
  #
  # update-exim4.conf uses this file to determine variable values to replace
  # the DEBCONFsomethingDEBCONF strings in the configuration template files.
  #
  # Most settings found in here do have corresponding questions in the
  # Debconf configuration, but not all of them.
  #
  # This is a Debian specific file
   
  dc_eximconfig_configtype='internet'
  dc_other_hostnames='mail.domain.com : www.domain.com : domain.com '
  dc_local_interfaces=
  dc_readhost=
  dc_relay_domains=
  dc_minimaldns='false'
  dc_relay_nets='192.168.0.0/16'
  dc_smarthost=
  CFILEMODE='644'
  dc_use_split_config='true'
  dc_hide_mailname=
  dc_mailname_in_oh='true'

gnuTLS is also installed, and this:

   sudo swaks -a -tls -q EHLO -s localhost -au example@example.com -ap '<>'" 

gives me this:

   swaks -a -tls -q EHLO -s localhost -au example@example.com -ap '<>'
   === Trying localhost:25...
   === Connected to localhost.
   <-  220 mail.domain.com ESMTP Exim 4.62 Thu, 22 Nov 2007 20:30:05 +1100
    -> EHLO mail.domain.com
   <-  250-mail.domain.com Hello root at localhost [127.0.0.1]
   <-  250-SIZE 52428800
   <-  250-PIPELINING
   <-  250 HELP
   *** STARTTLS not supported
    -> QUIT
   <-  221 mail.domain.com closing connection
   === Connection closed with remote host.

Any suggestions of fixes, diagnostics or ways of acquiring effective divine intervention would be welcome!

--Psud (talk) 09:46, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh, and running this as root:

  exim4 -d

gives me:

   Exim version 4.62 uid=0 gid=0 pid=18767 D=fbb95cfd
   Berkeley DB: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.3.29: (September  6, 2005)
   Support for: crypteq iconv() IPv6 PAM Perl GnuTLS move_frozen_messages Content_Scanning Old_Demime
   Lookups: lsearch wildlsearch nwildlsearch iplsearch cdb dbm dbmnz dnsdb dsearch ldap ldapdn ldapm mysql nis nis0 passwd pgsql
   Authenticators: cram_md5 cyrus_sasl plaintext spa
   Routers: accept dnslookup ipliteral iplookup manualroute queryprogram redirect
   Transports: appendfile/maildir/mailstore/mbx autoreply lmtp pipe smtp
   Fixed never_users: 0
   Size of off_t: 8
   changed uid/gid: forcing real = effective
     uid=0 gid=0 pid=18767
     auxiliary group list: <none>
   configuration file is /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated
   log selectors = 00000ffc 00089001
   cwd=/etc/exim4 2 args: exim4 -d
   trusted user
   admin user
   changed uid/gid: privilege not needed
     uid=106 gid=112 pid=18767
     auxiliary group list: <none>
   user name "root" extracted from gecos field "root"
   originator: uid=0 gid=0 login=root name=root
   sender address = root@domain.com
   Exim is a Mail Transfer Agent. It is normally called by Mail User Agents,
   not directly from a shell command line. Options and/or arguments control
   what it does when called. For a list of options, see the Exim documentation.  

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Psud (talk • contribs) 09:53, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't know specifically about your problem, but perhaps you can read the Exim4 page on the Ubuntu community documentation. --Spoon! (talk) 02:08, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

HOW IS WEIQI RELATED TO CHESS

? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.186.9.2 (talk) 11:02, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

They are both board games of ancient Asian origin. I'm not aware of any closer relationship; the gameplay is completely different. Our article on weiqi (usually known in the west as Go) contains some comparison between the two.

(I'm not sure what this is doing on the computing reference desk.) TSP (talk) 14:50, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

IC's :What does 74(series) temperature range mean ?a

What does 74(series) temperature range mean ,and how is different from 54 series?

11:11, 22 November 2007 (UTC)59.92.139.115 (talk)shashank

The 7400 series article has a little bit on this, although it doesn't include any actual specs. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 19:14, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

5400 is military temp range -40 to +85 operating. Transistor-transistor logic —Preceding unsigned comment added by TreeSmiler (talk • contribs) 03:50, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

software programs

features and functions of benchmark —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.220.4.57 (talk) 12:51, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

`````` —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.220.4.57 (talk) 12:53, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Check out Benchmark (computing) and let us know if there are additional questions. --— Gadget850 (Ed) <sup>talk</sup> - 13:12, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

computer

I want to know the object orientation that are present in microsoft access. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.206.136.70 (talk) 13:10, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

That's sort of a broad question. Access uses VBScript as its core scripting language and is pretty much as object orientated as Visual Basic 6.0 (not VB.NET) would be, though most of the database stuff is automatically instantiated so you don't have to do it manually. Do you have a more specific question? --24.147.86.187 (talk) 18:12, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

When running DOS programs(Clipper program) in windows xp screen shrinked to half why?

I am a Clipper Programmer. When I am running one of my Clipper programs in windows xp the usual full screen menu is shrinked to half screen. What is the reason for this distortion? What is the remedy?. Please help 59.88.73.103 (talk) 16:04, 22 November 2007 (UTC)psnyasas

It's generally a bad idea to run DOS programmes under XP, try using DosBox instead. --antilived<sup>T | C | G</sup> 21:36, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

A full screen command prompt in Windows XP uses a text mode with more lines on the screen than the standard 25 lines from old DOS days. If this is what you are referring to, I found two alternative ways you can change it:

• Enter mode con: lines=25 at the command prompt.
• In the system menu, choose Properties, then click on the Layout tab. In the Screen Buffer Size section, enter the Height as 25. --Bavi H (talk) 03:48, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Text size problem

After a recent reinstall of Vista Home Premium, my IE7 is having trouble with wiki sites such as Wikipedia. All text is displayed at half the size of how it should be with double the amount of space between lines. This is not an issue relating to my text size or page zoom settings, and does not affect other browsers from what I can tell (Firefox works normally). Can anyone suggest a solution?Martin Leng (talk) 19:34, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

That sounds odd. Have you tried emptying your cache, first of all? --140.247.11.24 (talk) 19:57, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Laptop memory upgrade

Current configuration:

• Compaq Presario V5209US
• Hynix HYMP564S64BP6-Y5AB 0622

Memory that I plan to buy:

• Kingston 2GB (2 x 1GB) 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel Kit Notebook Memory
• 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM
• KVR667D2K2SO/2GR
• Capacity: 2GB (2 x 1GB)
• Speed: DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)
• Cas Latency: 5
• Voltage: 1.8V
• ECC: No
• Buffered/Registered: Unbuffered
• Heat Spreader: No

Is the Kingston 2GB (2 x 1GB) 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel Kit Notebook Memory compatible with my laptop? -- Toytoy (talk) 21:48, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't know for sure, but here is the Crucial.com page for your computer which describes the types of memory that are compatible with it. From what I can tell what you are describing seems identical to this RAM, which is compatible with your system, so it should work. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:57, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Microsoft Sam

How come it doesn't say 'soy' right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.66.155.90 (talk) 22:11, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

It's pretty old. Try typing in "soif". Lots of fun to be had with that glitch. NIRVANA2764 (talk) 02:12, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Sony Ericsson K800i owners

Hi all!I wish to buy sony ericsson k800i and want to know a few questions from k800i owners (who has this phone) (1)I often save article from wikipedia into my hard disk and then transfer to my Nokia 6680.I have Netfront web browser install on my phone so problem in reading then.So MY QUESTION IS THAT whether on k800i, can I watch that sort of article or websites (Fire Fox --webpage-complete option during saving). (2)what is the current price of k800i in Saudi Arabia ...........thanks to all —Preceding unsigned comment added by Star33 2009 (talk • contribs) 07:42, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

name a website or database

name a website or database where i can find all the names of softwares from leading publishers all over the world along with information like publisher name,no.of versions released,platforms on which they work , etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.36.255.122 (talk) 07:56, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

That would be quite a huge list. Wikipedia has a whole bunch of lists for different types of software. Maybe THIS will help? TheGreatZorko (talk) 09:13, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Software for editing big text files?

I'm editing a giant text file, where doing certain repetitive things by hand would take hours. I need an app (Windows) that can remove the first X characters of each line, and organise lines by the date that starts each line (formatted "12 Feb 92", "17 Apr 07" etc). Is there anything like that around? Froglars the frog (talk) 09:54, 23 November 2007 (UTC)