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April 30

How to record high definition programming for watching later without an unwanted TiVo subscription

I have DirecTV with high definition. I am looking for a way to record high definition programs without a subscription so I can watch them later. I have searched and so far it seems impossible for people in the USA to do this without a subscription.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder says "Digital video recorders cannot record from a high definition digital audio/video source such as HDMI or DVI, due to restrictions imposed by High Definition Content protection". I do not want to burn off the shows, just to record them to watch later. Slashdot had a thread recommending building a computer with MythTV software, but I don't know if that will work for stuff that's not over the air. I also don't want to record them to a removable media that has bad quality or a storage capacity that is limited so I'd have to swap disks constantly.

Anyone know? William Ortiz (talk) 09:39, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't realize that digital video recorders had that restriction, making them essentially useless. I was thinking an ATSC tuner card for your computer would not be so restricted. However, I can't find one with an HDMI or DVI input and they don't seem able to record 1080p (1920x1080), the most they can even display is (1600x1200): (http://www.videohelp.com/oldguides/comptvcards). StuRat (talk) 13:56, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Just FYI, as far as I can tell that list seems to be of analog TV tuner cards, and in any case they seem to be European models, and so would presumably use DVB even if they were digital. Googling for atsc tuner card or 1080p tuner card seems to give more relevant results. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:02, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I actually started out with those searches, but when it got down to the details, it looks as though most "1080p tuner cards" only accept 1080p as input, but can't display or record at 1920×1080 resolution, but rather only at some lower res. If you've found one that will really display and record at 1080p, I'd love to know about it so I can buy one. StuRat (talk) 18:52, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

There are cards available that can decode cable HDTV , you will have to do research to find out what cards work with whatever type of signal you are getting. -- 209.30.160.76 (talk) 19:01, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I was looking and it appears that YPbPr cables (the analog high def connections) don't have that copying restriction. William Ortiz (talk) 01:12, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

case analysis of sun microsystem

hi plese tell me about sun microsystem. i need some information for economy of sun microsystem,allso technology,global. so as soon send me ans. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.237.2.226 (talk) 01:35, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

For starters, lets look at Sun Microsystems and Google Finance. I hope that while you are working with these two sources (and pages that are linked in them), someone intelligent and conversant with the topic will be here to guide you. Kushal (talk) 01:59, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

You also need to find news articles ... recent ones like this one. Kushal (talk) 21:46, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Flash + InDesign = nowt

Why can't i copy - paste anything from InDesign to Flash (CS3) ? It would make my life so much easier . Boomshanka (talk) 02:53, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

In the future you probably will be able to, but my guess is that Adobe hasn't had time to make them as seamless (it only acquired Flash a few years ago, previous to that it was developed by a totally different company). There are probably ways, though, to export something from InDesign in a way that it could be imported into Flash—say, as a PDF or an AI file. Give that a shot, maybe? --69.110.41.71 (talk) 04:42, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I've tried everything - nothing works very well at all between the 2 - Flash doesn't recognise InDesign EPS, SVG, not gonna even try XML. Just crazy i can paste text into notepad but not into an app made by the same company. As you say its probably just teething issues between Adobe and the Macromedia formerly known as .Boomshanka (talk) 21:41, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

A surely easy PHP question

I have some filenames stored in arrays that contain the text "\1" (as in "myFolder\1991-blah.pdf"). I didn't realize it until right now but \1 is apparently treated as a special character in the same way that \n is a newline and \t is a tab. Sooo... it's not displaying correctly. Surely there's some way to process it as a literal string? I've tried using htmlentities() but that didn't work at all, nor did addslashes() produce anything useful. For fairly obvious reasons Google isn't telling me anything about it that I can find. What's going on, and how do I fix it? --69.110.41.71 (talk) 08:01, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

In all C-like languages, backslash ("\") within a string is an escape character that introduces an escape sequence. If we're talking about just a few filenames, you can say "\\1..." and that will produce the results you desire because "\\" is a complete escape sequence that resolves down to just "\". If you have many strings, a different approach may be required.

Atlant (talk) 13:04, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

At the risk of asking the obvious, but did you ensure that you addslashes when the element was added to the array, or after? Also, [PHP.net reference] may be handy - it is rare that the comments there aren't illuminating. -- Ironmandius (talk) 13:35, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Note that, as the documentation page indicates, addslashes() is for things like SQL and HTTP/session variables where the backslash character might be re-interpreted by a parser engine other than the compiler/interpreter. If these are string literals in your code, then by the time they are in memory it is already too late to escape the backslashes; that part is done by the compilation step.

So if you have the string hard-coded in your source file, you'll have to escape the backslashes ('a\b\c' to 'a\\b\\c') yourself; if you are reading them from outside your source code (e.g. from a file, database, form data, etc.) they should be fine for general use, but you might have to think about escaping them with addslashes() if you use them for SQL, cookie/session storage (in some rare cases), etc. --Prestidigitator (talk) 16:29, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

check out this page note the difference in behavior between single and double quotes. It is a good rule of thumb to always use single quotes unless you know that you will be doing variable substitution (including \n). -- Diletante (talk) 17:23, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

This doesn't really help in this case (at least if you want to be technically correct) because it is the backslash character itself that is desired in the string. Because of the need to include single-quotes in single-quoted strings, the backslash character still serves as an escape for itself and a single-quote; the single-quoted string representing a backslash character in source code is: '\\'. --Prestidigitator (talk) 22:47, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

RAM

When i was building my computer i did it with upgrading it a couple months later in mind. Hence i only built it with one stick of 1GB DDR2 5300/667 Ram. That was a little after the ram price shot straight up. Im in the market for some PC-6400/800 RAM because apparently it works better with the Core 2 Duo. Anyway Basically i have 32 bit XP, should i just buy a new 2gb stick and throw out the old one (cause it brings down the speed) or will 4gb (Really only 3.5Gb because of XP) make that much of a difference.

One question you need to ask (but I, unfortunately, can't answer for you) is "Can your memory controller operate two banks of memory in parallel?" If it can, you definitely want to populate your machine with pairs of sticks of equal size.

Atlant (talk) 12:55, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Memory speed is only a minor contribution to a computer's performance (as a rule of thumb, doubling memory speed will give you a 5% increase in overall performance). Don't worry about the fact that the computer memory will be running at 667MHz rather than 800MHz. --Carnildo (talk) 20:00, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Clicking on one webiste; leading to another

Hi guys.

So the situation is this: whenever I try and access the BBC News homepage at http://news.bbc.co.uk/ I am instead presented with some Chinese webpage seemingly related to Baidu. No matter how I try to access BBC News, whether by typing in the URL or by clicking on a link, it always takes me to the Chinese webpage. I just now managed to circumvent the problem by instead typing in http://news.bbc.co.uk/default.stm which does take me to the correct website. But what the hell is going on here? I don't think I'm gonna like the answer... Anyway, thanks in advance. Hammer Raccoon (talk) 11:50, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Are you in China? If so "censorship" would spring to mind. -- Q Chris (talk) 12:32, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Hahaha, no. Unless, without me noticing, Gordon Brown has decreed that his own citizens aren't allowed to read BBC News, I don't think that's the answer. :) Hammer Raccoon (talk) 12:39, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Something has hijacked your hosts file and placed a bad mapping within it (so that "news.bbc.co.uk" translates to the evil website's IP address)? Atlant (talk) 12:57, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Sounds likely. Is there a remedy? Hammer Raccoon (talk) 13:46, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Go to your hosts file and restore it to the default. If you give me a moment I shall get the default hosts file and location. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.219.8.231 (talk) 13:50, 30 April 2008 (UTC) File is located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc under Windows XP and Vista 32. Unsure for the x64 versions. Open the file with notepad, and replace whatever text is in it with "127.0.0.1 localhost" without the quotes There was a lot of other text but it was all comented out using #s. If you can't save then save it somewhere else (call it hosts), as a .txt file, then remove the .txt and paste it into the above directory. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.219.8.231 (talk) 13:54, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

If you can get to the site using the full URL, it seems that your host file should be OK. There may be other malware infecting your system though. You should definitely download and run Spybot and a decent virus scanner. If you do want to check out your hosts file, in Windows XP it is located in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc. --LarryMac | Talk 13:57, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Does this link go to the BBC website for you: http://212.58.226.77 (that's the IP for news.bbc.co.uk)? - Akamad (talk) 23:10, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for all your help. I already had Spybot - I gave that a run, and then I tried messing about with the host file as 212.219.8.231 recommended. Anyway, I don't know what exactly did the trick, but the problem seems to be rectified. Thanks again all. Hammer Raccoon (talk) 18:53, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

LMA Manager 2009

Is their any info on Lma manager 2009? is it comeing out etc?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.115.175.247 (talk) 12:01, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Need the 1.1.0. patch for Betrayal in Antara

Some time ago I accidentally deleted the 1.1.0 update patch for this game. The Sierra website is blocked from work so I'm looking for some benevolent helper to please download it for me and email it to betrayal@trashymail.com (throw-away email address). If you do it within the next hour that would be great, else on Monday please (we've got an extra-long weekend, starting tomorrow). Thanks in advance. Zunaid©® 12:26, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

How big was that patch, approximately? Email servers usually don't allow messages bigger than, say, 10 megs (and a binary file encoded to support those old servers increases by ~30%) - mostly for performance reasons. Also I don't think throw-away boxes allow attachments at all. --grawity 16:11, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

A quick the 1.1.0. patch for Betrayal in Antara shows that WINE has a patch of the same name for Ubuntu. It is probably not what you want. Are you running windows? Which version? Where is this patch that you want? Kushal (talk) 11:47, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

It's Monday again, dam the weekend went by too quickly! I was looking for the Windows patch, sorry I should have provided some URLs where it could be obtained from. But never mind, I clocked it yesterday without crashing :) Thanks for all your help though. Zunaid©® 09:23, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Torrent weirdness

I have reason to believe that some files recently downloaded through Bittorrent (official client) are still being accessed after the program has been terminated. I sometimes notice that my hard drive (this is a laptop) is grinding a lot, and I looked into it a little bit further this time (without rebooting) and noticed that in resource monitor I can see that the file I've just completed downloading is being read at an alarming rate... though I must admit it would be impossible for me to upload at that rate so it must be local? It happens to other files too, but I don't always have this problem with Bittorrent. I can't terminate any of these processes either. Anybody know anything about this? 222.158.118.44 (talk) 13:18, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

This may sound like an obvious question, but are you sure you really shut down the BitTorrent client? Many programs like that are designed so that when you close the window, the program still keeps running in the background. Assuming you're using Windows, check if the program's icon is still there icon tray in the taskbar (lower right corner of the screen, at least on XP by default). You may need to right-click the icon and explicitly select "Quit" from the menu to make the program really stop running. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:02, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Another possibility could be that it's an anti-virus program or something like that which is scanning the file. I've never noticed any particular problems like that myself, but I suppose it's possible. That would explain why you'd have a hard time killing the process, at least. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:05, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I'm sure the program and all of its processes were terminated, and I don't have any virus-protection running right now but my hard drive is still chugging about (I've rebooted now). It's always svchost.exe that is listed as the culprit in resource manager, but there are no processes that I can terminate, so I dunno how to stop it, or even where it's coming from : /. 222.158.163.22 (talk) 16:23, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

What happens if you disconnect it from the network? If it still thrashes, then it must be something else. You could do a network trace, but it requires a bit of savvy to interpret. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 19:06, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Since you say it's local, this may be a backup function enabled somewhere. Have a look at the I/O in the task manager and see what is running. I had a Norton version running on my system that was driving me up the wall till I ripped it out and replaced it with something else. XP also copies files from one folder to another occasionally depending on what settings are enabled. --Lisa4edit (talk) 00:01, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I've tried unplugging my computer from the network, virus-cleaned it (something that I rarely do), and emptied some more space on the hard drive. It's quiet for now, but it usually comes back every few days or so so I'll just have to wait. I'm beginning to wonder if it's Vista doing some sort of automatic file defragmentation on the large/new files on my disk or something, like how XP would copy files from folder to folder. I'll look into that when I have time... 222.158.162.42 (talk) 19:20, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

SMART-capable USB enclosures?

I'm looking to put together a storage device to sit in the closet and hold a ton of media. I'm planning on using something like an NSLU2 along with a batch of USB 2.0-enclosed PATA or SATA drives. (And maybe a USB wireless adapter so I don't have to put it in the corner with the cable modem.) Because it'll be using several disks, I'm going to have monitoring set up for it. I'd like to use SMART (presumably through smartmontools) to keep track of the drives' health. I've read that the answer to whether or not SMART will work with a USB-enclosed disk is "maybe", and I don't have the resources to buy one of every brand until I can find one that works. Is there any list of controllers known to work with SMART?

From the smartctl manpage:

The ´sat´ device type is for ATA disks that have a SCSI to  ATA
Translation (SAT) Layer (SATL) between the disk and the operat‐
ing system.  SAT defines two ATA PASS  THROUGH  SCSI  commands,
one  12  bytes  long  and the other 16 bytes long that smartctl
will utilize when this device type is selected. The default  is
the  16  byte  variant  which can be overridden with either ´-d
sat,12´ or ´-d sat,16´.

There was a thread about this on the usb-storage mailing list in 2006, but I haven't seen anything more recent. Has anyone had experience with smartmontools over USB drives, either with PATA or SATA drives in them? grendel|khan 17:04, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know that the NSLU2 supports SMART. I don't recall seeing it on the web page; the specs do show that it can sens an email on a drive error.[1] Even if it did, you would have to have a way to monitor SMART over the web. I've never looked at the NSLU2 via SNMP so I don't know if it has any status in that manner.

I built a NAS box similar to this. I picked up two NSLU2s on a closeout sale and four IDE to USB adapters. Mounted them neatly in an old PC enclosure using the PC power supply to run the drives. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 19:01, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I won't be using their regular firmware. I'll get myself a copy of OpenSlug or the like, which pretty much lets you run full-featured Linux on it. I'll see if I can run nagios on it to provide me with notifications in the event that something goes wrong with the drives. (I suppose I could use SNMP, but I'm used to nagios, and hopefully it'll fit in the resource limit.) If I can get SMART to work on a USB-enclosed disk from my own machine, I can get it to work on the NSLU2. It's that first part that's the rub. grendel|khan 19:54, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

May 1

Emulating Windows Xp on my Windows Vista to make the game work? How?

Hey, I sent in a question earlier, and i ahve included my former question at the bottom here. What i am asking now is that about that "EMULATING the windowns XP" that you mentioned that might make Worms work, what you mean? HOW DO YOU EMULATE WindowsXP when you have Windows Vista? Please explain to me, so i can try that too. Its only the colors and graphics that becomes all wrong after having played the game a few seconds, but other than that it works all fine, and after what i have read lately it shud be possible to address and fix this problem somehow, although i know not at all how...

---

Are "Worms" compatible with Windows VISTA? Hey, I was thinking about bringing some of the good all days back by buying a few of the games in the computer game-series "worms".

However, some of these games are old, meant for WINDOWS 95/98 and shud probably work fine on Windows xp too, but I have windows VISTA...

Anyone have any idea if these games will work on my Windows vista computer?

the games in question, that i'm thinking of buying, are :

- Worms 2 - Worms Armageddon - Worms World party

Other system-requirements shoudlnt be a problem, im only worried about the vista and whether it is compatible with the games.

Thank you :)

Krikkert7 (talk) 13:18, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

---

Last time I tried to run Worms Armageddon on Vista (with the XP patch), it crashed often and had horrible graphical errors. I ended up emulating XP just to be able to play it. I figure you might have to do the same. There was simply no other way I could do it, but maybe you'll get luckyItalic text. 206.252.74.48 (talk) 13:35, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

You can emulate XP with an XP installation CD and either Virtual PC or VMWare. The graphical errors I described are exactly like yours - inverted colours and jagged edges. 206.252.74.48 (talk) 18:06, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

You could also try running the game in compatibility mode: right-click on the icon, and go to Properties > Compatibility. Check the "Run this program in compatibility mode for" box and choose the appropriate operating system. I've had mixed results using this technique. --Kateshortforbob 20:19, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Burning images

Hello! I made an image of a DVD+RW and saved it to my hard drive. Is it possible to burn this image onto a DVD+R that will play on any standard DVD player with +R capabilities, or am I limited to burning it onto another DVD+RW? Thanks in advance!--El aprendelenguas (talk) 02:20, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

You should have a file ending with the extension "iso". That can be burned to any disk that has the required capacity. A DVD+R and DVD+RW both have equivalent capacity, so you can burn the iso to the +R. -- kainaw™ 02:35, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Changing size of a particular font

I have a unicode font for having my folder name in windows explorer in regional script. But the font size is terribly small. Can anyone please suggest me how to increase the size of this particular font under vista? Bobatnet (talk) 04:10, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Error Reading Thumbdrive

Whenever I plug in my thumbdrive, the computer reacts in a way that it appears to be loading something. However, when I go to my computer, the device is not displayed. This problem seems only to happen after I plug in my thumbdrive into a public computer. Does it have a virus? If yes, how do i remove it without damaging my data files? Also, is there any software that can remove the virus? Note that the computer cannot detect the thumbdrive, so anti-virus software do not work. Also, with the thumbdrive plugged in, whenever i tried to open a microsoft word document in it, a message appears saying that the file is corrupted. Format of my thumbdrive:FAT32 Date last plugged in into public computer: 30 April 2008 ~~~~

Is the pendrive even detected on some computers or not? I didn't get that... You can always try to plug the pendrive on a Linux computer, that way, IF the pendrive itself is good, the windows viruses will not infect the system and you can access the pendrive and save your documents, and you can also remove the virus that way, by simply deleting it's files... If you want to do that you have to simply download the Live CD iso of ubuntu (for example) from: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/and boot it... If the pendrive is not detected on any computer, and you didn't erased the filesystem, then there isn't much chance to recover your files... it may be a hardware problem... SF007 (talk) 20:59, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

It sounds like a drive mapping problem. Open Control panel > Administrative tools > Computer management > Disk management. Your thumbdrive may be mapping to a drive that is already in use on that particular PC. You can change it from this menu. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 01:58, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

lost?

i recently had to format my pc and during reinstallation my antivirus detected some viruses and deleted some files. eversince then everytime i start the pc a message box says "windows can't find C:\WINDOWS\....blabla" and on clicking OK "could not load or run C:\WINDOWS\....blabla ...make sure it exists or delete it from registry" 1) how to fix it? don't know nothing about registry so plz elaborate what to click after what. 2) i had problem that none could answer.my pc can't read a particular rar file on a cd though two other rar files on the same cd are ok and all of them are fine on other computers. everytime i click the file pc says "not responding" and then the "windows can't find" reappears after the cd is ejected. may the problems be related? please help, its very imp. sorry about the length.--scoobydoo (talk) 10:40, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I cannot help you here unfortuately, but it should help other voluteers if you name the exact file that Windows cannot find on startup. Adam (Manors) 13:31, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm a little confused by this description. If you formatted your PC (by which I assume you mean the hard drive), then you'd have to re-install Windows. How, then, could you be running any antivirus program? In any event, Manors is correct, without the actual file names there's not enough information to work with. --LarryMac | Talk 13:37, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm taking a guess here, but perhaps the OP meant that they were reinstalling everything and that during the reinstall of the anti-virus program it removed some part of the operating system. If that is the case, I suggest you go through the process again, but this time install the operating system from the original disk then immediately install the anti-virus BEFORE installing anything else or connecting to the internet; then connect to the internet and get the latest OS updates and anti-virus template file - again from the official souces. Hopefully, you will get a clean up-to-date install protected by an up-to-date anti-virus.

I suspect something you installed before was infected, so scan each disk for viruses before installing your other software and backed-up data. Hopefully this will stop the critical file from getting infected in the first place. Astronaut (talk) 22:32, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

One last thing: error messages that appear are usually telling you something useful. Take the time to read them and act sensibly on them, and don't just blindly click OK without considering what's going to happen. Astronaut (talk) 22:37, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

i don't click blindly but don't know how to remove from registry.(i've searched for the file but can't find it, see problem1)and yes some parts of the op was removed so probably have to reinstall again eitherway.thanks --scoobydoo (talk) 11:01, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Windows is provided with a registry editor called regedit. First a BIG WARNING:

Regedit provides no checks against deleting something critical and any changes are instantaneous and permanent (ie. there's no undo and no "Save changes" option). It is possible to break Windows by deleting stuff from the registry and you might have to reinstall Windows again. It is possible to backup parts of the registry using the Export facility in regedit and I would recommend using it if you are unsure what you are doing (registry data is saved to a .reg file which you can double-click later to reintegrate the saved data into the registry).

Anyway, the first places to look are probably HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Failing that, search the registry for the filename of the missing file. Depending on the filename and where you find it in the registry, you will have to make a judgment on whether or not to remove some or all mention of it.

Astronaut (talk) 19:45, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Windows Movie Maker

I'm trying to use the "Take Picture" feature in movie maker, but when I do, the dimensions of the picture are 320x240. Previously when I took a picture with windows movie maker, the dimensions were 640x480, which is what I want them to be. Is there any way to adjust the size of the picture? Digger3000 (talk) 13:57, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Any Mac apps that can read .UIF files?

Are there any Mac programs that can read, burn or mount .UIF files? --70.167.58.6 (talk) 15:34, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Seems to be a proprietary format for MagicISO, which is windows only. My suggestion is to burn the image, using a PC and Magic ISO. You could use this terminal (command line) solution as well [2]. AtaruMoroboshi (talk) 19:44, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I love proprietary formats that have the word "universal" in their name! --71.158.218.130 (talk) 03:53, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Good point, especially software that is not even cross platform... SF007 (talk) 21:23, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

MSN Messenger

Could you put something like this as your display picture, if so, how? I have tried saving it, and changing it normally but then the number does not count up, it just stays on 0. Thanks. Tiddly-Tom 18:52, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

When a program supports gifs but not animated gifs, you usually only see the first frame of the image. So, it looks like MSN Messenger doesn't support animated gif pictures. Astronaut (talk) 21:09, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Windows Live Messenger Plus! supports them (it's just an upgraded version of MSN) try using that, it's free!...... Dendodge.Talk^Help 21:13, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Image snap

PC running XP Home. Word 2003. Whenever I try to reposition an image, it snaps to the top of the page. WTF? --Milkbreath (talk) 19:36, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to the frustrating world of Word - join the club :) Using images in it is notoriously difficult. Have you tried to make sure there is enough "empty space" to work with? If the image can't find space to fit in, it just jumps back to where it came from, or even worse some other place, moving text around. Ctrl-Z is a nice key in word :) Try using tables or paragraphs to better manage images positions. You would be much better off to use something else though; notwithstanding a whole host of DTP programs out there, even Excel would be better. Sandman30s (talk) 23:26, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. What empty space? The text is supposed to wrap. And not only does it snap to the top, it ignores the margins completely wherever it is. Thanks for the hot key. I love them. --Milkbreath (talk) 02:10, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry don't have Word2003 running, so I can't tell you exactly where to find it. If you click on your image you should be able to get to "Format picture" and somewhere in the Layout "Advanced" settings "Picture Position" there is something about "Lock anchor" and "Move object with text" Change those and then move your picture by changing the values for Horizontal and Vertical alignment and also change to "from page" instead of column and paragraph. I agree with Sandman most of the default settings are junk and it takes a while till you find exactly where they've hidden that box that you need to uncheck. Hope this helps. P.S. also check under "Tools" "options" if it's not under "Format" --Lisa4edit (talk) 10:29, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

The snap-to-top-of-page problem can happen when the image is forced onto a different page from its own anchor. If you can't see the image's anchor, choose 'Show hidden characters'. I think it's under the View menu. You then need to make sure that there is at least one paragraph (again, you need to show hidden characters to see the paragraph symbols) on the page where you want the image to appear. Then drag the image around until its anchor snaps to a paragraph on the correct page. Also, make sure that there aren't any other images on the target page that are crowding out your new image. It can help if you set 'Allow overlap' in the image properties, at least temporarily, to allow it to rest on top of other images without jumping out of the way, until you figure out what the problem is. --Heron (talk) 14:12, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Word 2007 switching language with the keyboard

Even though I'm british, live in the UK, and like UK spelling, I prefer to use a US english keyboard with the "@" above "2" and no "£" at all. I use Windows Vista and Office 2007 and the problem is that Word insists on changing the document language to US English if I try to use my US keyboard. If I switch the document language to UK English, I start getting different characters that is printed on the keyboard. How can I type UK English using a US keyboard?

Just to add to the confusion, I have the language bar IME thingy installed so I can easily switch to write Japanese, and there appears to be absolutely no problem with that functionality - I switch the language bar to Hirigana and the US keyboard types out Japanese (like this "日本語") just as I would expect.

Astronaut (talk) 21:28, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I have Windows XP, and don't have Word, but I suspect it's just a setting in the Control Panel that is the source of your problem. There are settings in the Control Panel that control which languages you can switch between, and which keyboard layouts each language can use. In Windows XP, you go to Control Panel, Regional and Language Options. Click on the Languages tab, then the Details button. Click Add. You need to be careful to add the language as "English (United Kingdom)" but the keyboard layout as "US".

Here's an example where I added all four possibilities: example image. In that case, Windows shows both a language icon and a keyboard icon in the taskbar to switch between the possibilities.

While playing around with it, another confusing factor I discovered is that Windows remembers the active language and keyboard separately for every open program. When you use the minimized icons next to the clock, it might not be obvious the keyboard changed on you. If you show the Language Bar, it shows the name of the active language and keyboard, and you can see how they switch between windows: Language Bar image. --Bavi H (talk) 01:35, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your advice, but it's changed a little in Vista. It was far from clear what to do but I've got it working OK now. Here is an image of my language bar settings page as it was and the "Add..." button appeared to only support one keyboard for UK english. However, as you can see here, below the UK keyboard setting is a "Show More..." which let me add a US keyboard to UK english and resulted in this (after I had deleted the unnecessary US language setting). Astronaut (talk) 02:58, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

May 2

I have a problem signing up for AIM?

I sign up correctly for AIM. I enter the right password to sign up and sign in. I enter the code in image correctly. However, it keeps rejecting my registration and sign ins. When I try signing in on http://www.aim.com/, and I enter the right username and password, it rejects it and It thinks I'm enter the wrong password, but my password is right. I'm tired of this site rejecting me and my account. It has a bug. It has nothing do with the caps lock. It just the Web site. I'm using Ubuntu GNU/Linux 7.10 and I don't have AIM installed. My usernames are fastjet123 and fastjet1233. What should I do? Jet (talk) 00:06, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Is there a "forgot password" link? Sorry if this seems obvious but you know how it is ;) ... What about contacting them? I have a similar problem in the client - but I think in my case that I've just forgotten my password, cause I never used the account anyway. Try a different browser. Without looking I will say that i agree that the site might just be really buggy. If that's so, then maybe they tested it in a bad browser. Maybe the site is written with a lot of proprietary code. If you can't do it in Konqueror, try Opera. Perhaps Opera will have or know how to respond to the bugs of the browser they wrote the page in. Konqueror is available through "sudo apt-get install konqueror"; Opera is available through Opera.com 125.236.211.165 (talk) 23:20, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

IBM Kittyhawk vs Storm botnet

The Kittyhawk would make websites it runs invulnerable to Denial-of-service attacks, unless they're powerful enough to take out the whole of Kittyhawk. DoS attacks are used heavily by the Storm botnet. If Kittyhawk gets off the ground, will the Storm botnet DoS attack IBM while it still can? — DanielLC 02:33, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can tell from glancing at the white paper, Kittyhawk is an attempt to get large web service providers like Google to replace their commodity PCs with IBM hardware. It wouldn't do anything new, just (supposedly) do it cheaper. I doubt they're going to find many takers, but even if they do I don't see how the switch would have any effect on vulnerability to DDoS. It's not as though Google is very vulnerable to DDoS right now. Also, it doesn't make sense for Storm's controllers to "attack IBM while they still can". They wouldn't attack IBM unless they stood to gain something from it. -- BenRG (talk) 01:10, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Horizontal scrolling with touchpad

I cant seem to get horizontal scrolling with my touch pad in some programs like Firefox. -USB mouse with scroll wheel works fine so I know its not that the applications don't make use of horizontal scrolling. -MS Word works with the touch pad so its nothing wrong with touchpad itself or its driver some forums mentioned forward/backpaging replacing the horiz. scrolling but im not even getting that

in running vista on a sony sz750 with an apoint touchpad 216.165.243.128 (talk) 06:32, 2 May 2008 (UTC)zyrmpg

html / js / css is holding back the web?!

I have a feeling that html / js / css is holding back the web?! Is it true anyways? --V4vijayakumar (talk) 08:53, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Holding up would be more like it, IMHO. --Kjoonlee 09:16, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

If by "holding back" you mean "limiting the potential of", then you are getting warm. If HTML, JavaScript, and CSS were true standards that every web broswer implemented flawlessly, then there would be no problem. Ever designer and programmer would be sharing code and pushing the web to its true limits. Unfortunately, making things work seamlessly in just the top 3 popular browsers is not easy. Making things work in just the 3 popular versions of Internet Explorer is not easy. The blame falls squarely on the web browser designers. It is not up to them to decide to do things their own way. They should ensure that their browser operates exactly the same as every other web browser. That will never happen. So, you can push a single version of a web browser to its limits, but you can't push the web to the limits of its potential.

On a side note - a huge problem right now is that a web browser is designed to be a "web page renderer", not a "web-based application engine". What we need is a WWA (World-Wide-Application) that sits aside the WWW. Then, we need application browsers that browse the applications. Trying to force a web browser to be an application engine causes a lot of problems that would be easily solved if the program were designed to host applications from the start. Of course, we won't get a WWA. We're just going to get more and more Ajax-rich pages that try to mimic applications. -- kainaw™ 12:09, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

This almost asks for a definition of what exactly "js", "css" and such _are_. I mean I know what I think they are, and I fling the words around sometimes like they're going out of fashion - but are you asking about the things I'm thinking of? For example consider Javascript. When I talk about Javascript I'm normally also talking about JScript, which is arguably something completely different. They're both ECMA262 implementations (or _something_).. So by "js" do we mean that? It's really only a selection of methods and syntax, which I think for the most part are very similar if not identical to those used in "proper" computer programming (apologies)... I think that a lot of high level languages allow programmers to call Date() methods, use regular expressions, and set variables as strings. I don't know if the NASA computer programmers use Brainfuck, C, Commodore 64 Basic or enchanted rune stones, but I strongly suspect that they are using a programming language. if we called javascript a programming language, we wouldn't be far wrong, and therefore if we're using the same sort of thing to build web pages now as what NASA might be using to send men into space, then we're probably not doing too badly in that department. (Javascript: lisp with c-like syntax?) In fact I would say that javascript is a dangerous technology, because once you get your head around working with it, it's so tempting to just put in a lot of fancy effects, and leave the page totally unusable for up to sixty percent of your users (and hope that nobody notices).. XML of course is by its very nature extensible. HTML cannot be holding back the web. Even if HTML is no good, not everyone else makes web pages in HTML any more (technically) so it can't hold back the web as a whole. I don't think that anything IS wrong with it, but even if there was, many now write pages in the much more easily parsed XHTML - a true flavour of XML, which brings us SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) for example. Note that some browsers don't load SVGs at all, and some have limited implementations. The standard is there and it is being adopted. If anything, although the standards seem to evolve painfully slowly, they still advance more rapidly than what browsers can implement. CSS was designed for web pages, but now is being adopted where style needs to be controlled in a variety of applications. Why? Because it's so easy, so powerful, and so effective. The Context Browser in Amarok is one example of css within an application not strictly made for web browsing. Javascript of course plays very nicely with web pages though. That document.something.something.something notation is actually generally used in web pages to point at parts of the Document Object Model, or DOM, which is very easy to create and understand in terms of XML. CSS and javascript are able to directly target DOM nodes (separately or collectively) by their location or attributes. Also note that CSS degrades gracefully - it only affects the rendered style of a page, and not the content or structure (maybe?)... CSS then is inherently and perfectly extensible. All in all, to varying degrees, the technologies you've named are highly extensible and interoperable, easy to use and widely supported. So, like Kainaw, I think that the standards and such are totally adequate. I think that they are _more_ than adequate. What's holding back the web is how slowly the standards are implemented (a very popular browser recently caught up to be only about five or ten years behind the standards..).. The browsers themselves, market forces, the users, and the people who use the technologies - I think that the standards you mentioned are the life-blood of the internet, and that the influences I mention in this sentence are in fact fighting and working against the ones you named - and at enmity with the standards. Sorry for the insanely long sentence and insanely long paragraph. One more time, those technologies make the web, not hold it back. The real problem lies in our attitudes toward those technologies,and our implementations of them, in my opinion.125.236.211.165 (talk) 16:14, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Verily, I think that those three technologies are not. I believe that web applications such as GMail could be as feature-rich and responsive now as "proper" desktop-based applications. The standards give them more than enough power to match their desktop equivalents. What's holding them back, in my humble opinion, is that if you're making a fancy page you have to write at least two versions of it. If you write the page to w3c standards, you then generally find that it needs minor tweaking to get it to work in all the other browsers, and major hacking to get it to work in Internet Explorer. On the other hand, if you write a web page using only deprecated or proprietary code (ie "MSHTML") then you find that it takes major hacking to get it working in Firefox... And then it takes more major work to get it going in Opera... And then it takes even more hacking to get it going in Safari..... The reason why the second method is so much extra work is that ie (and some other browsers no doubt) is very, very, very far behind in implementing the standards, and the "modern" browsers all react differently to ie's shortcomings. I was a big fan of ie until reluctantly I tried a proper browser and got hokoed on its speed. The sad thing is that (although it is a great product and does deserve a lot of attention) ie is tied into the operating system. Most people don't know or care that the internet can be a hundred times better tomorrow, so they continue to use "that browser" - the browser that is holding back the internet in a big way and makes web design difficult (well, it does for me, anyway. I'm sick of writing two copies of every page!! But this is why CSS, for example, is a VERY good thing).

Holding back the web from what? It really depends on what you imagine the web to be. Personally I think the simplicity of those technologies is their real long-term benefit. Consider how much cheaper and easier it is to launch a website than it is to, say, put a single episode of a show together for broadcast media. A single programmer with only moderate experience can put together a pretty functional web page, but putting together something as "rich" as a news feed on CNN takes the work of hundreds of people, thousands of dollars, etc. I also think the web does well as a hybrid between print and video—I think a well-laid-out web page in HTML/CSS is a thousand times better than one in, say, Flash. It's easier to use, more reliable, has a standard interface, etc. But my point here is not to say that I'm right and you're wrong, but rather to say that you've got an unarticulated vision of what you consider the "progress" of the web to be, and it's not necessarily the same one at all that other people have. --Captain Ref Desk (talk) 15:01, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Web is like what web was 10 years back (plus some bug fixes). I ask this way, is the web ready to replace operating system? I just want to have a system that contains nothing but a web-browser. I don't mind how much memory this browser uses, and, what off-line content it stores into my hard disk. --V4vijayakumar (talk) 00:59, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Is my car holding back agriculture? There has been back and forth on your idea, and all that's old is new again. Topics that may be of interest: Centralized computing, Thin client (I recommend reading the latter, then the former - the former's article is a good springboard to other topics). All things, however, are limited by what resources are available (and consequently, their costs). Consider this - Steam (content delivery) still "caches" entire games rather then being thin-client, as I believe you allude. This has little to nothing to do with web standards, and their extensibility (or lack thereof). However, speaking more directly to that topic, XML and related technologies XSLT speak to maneuverable, agile standards. AJAX is also of interest. The topic is really quite large, and what was it the famed historian said? I shall endeavor to present the facts, let the reader draw their own conclusions -- Ironmandius (talk) 03:42, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

virus

If you download an exe file that has a virus in it, will your computer only become infected if you double click on the file? If you never use the file will the virus just remain dormant? xxx User:Hyper Girl 09:15, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

It depends on the application sometimes. I once had such a file that was left untouched, but the virus was automatically activated when I moved the file somewhere else. If you want to be safe, change the file extension. Chenzw (talk · contribs) 09:18, 2 May 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chenzw (talk • contribs)

Wrong, you're fine as long as you don't run it .froth. (talk) 12:40, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Would it be possible for a virus to be created such that the OS (or any other app) runs it without you (explicitly) telling it to do so? Zain Ebrahim (talk) 15:02, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Microsoft OSs are famous for gratuitously running things. See autorun.

Atlant (talk) 17:02, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

It's only a problem if it gets executed - generally, this means if you double-click it but as Atlant says, autorun is a problem. It should be noted that even if you view virus code without executing it, say, in Notepad, it won't infect you (unless a virus is bound to Notepad, which is a different matter altogether). x42bn6 Talk Mess 19:31, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

That's frightening! Zain Ebrahim (talk) 09:05, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

AutoRun isn't exclusively the problem. While avoiding technical details, there was an issue with how Windows handled showing pictures. As a result, one could embed into a picture some code (a virus), send that picture to someone in email, and then when they look at that email (which, if it was your first mail of the day, would be automatic) they are infected. This was also a major problem about ten years ago, when we moved from plain text e-mail to fancy-pants pretty e-mail, some features lept ahead of security concerns, and some e-mail clients would allow embedded script code in emails and execute it trustingly. I think that was Melissa (computer worm) or one of her near predecessors, putting it almost precisely a decade behind us, though. (These particular examples have been fixed, but the principle remains available) -- Ironmandius (talk) 14:22, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

This is more of a question than an answer. Possibly a matter of definition and partly of course of computer science and stuff. Does Windows Explorer perform MIME-Type sniffing? Here are some examples of situations where I think that a virus could be executed without your consent.... First up, a macro in Microsoft Office. Yes, you get a warning about the macro. i do think that most people don't even let them run now. Dose this qualify? Next up, can I rename an .exe to a .jpg and have the thumbnailer attempt to execute it? (I doubt it but hey) because if I could, that would open the doorway for infection. Another might be Internet Explorer. Consider VBScript, ActiveX and so on and so forth.You can create scripts that alter the configuration of the browser from within the web page, installing BHOs (Browser Helper Objects like toolbars) and such without your permission... Alarmingly I used Internet Explorer once last year (as a joke), and there was a toolbar nobody had installed - Norton Antivirus missed it, so did AVG; NOD32 found a lot of interesting downloaders on my system.... NOT a shameless product plug!!! Anyway as soon as we reach this point, someone is sending information about our computer back to their website somewhere. So they could possibly know which sites we visited, and when,and how long for, and maybe our passwords and/or credit card numbers... The joyful thing here is that in IE (last tried this in IE6) you can install BHOs without actually clicking anything! (I blame IE. Maybe I downloaded something bad after all?) You only have to visit a page. I believe that the browser helper objects can modify your registry too, and parts of your filesystem - which all equates to privilege escalation - allowing them to download trojan horses, worms, and any kind of malware they feel like at the time. Suddenly every site you visit has popup ads and interstitial pages (even Wikipedia!) and maybe you even get popups when your browser is closed :-(... I know that Internet Explorer is a fantastic product and has been worked on by a lot of great and skillful people but I strongly recommend that you do not use it for surfing the net. So does the Department of Homeland Security. If nothing else, consider that with so many users it has a nice big attack surface area, and that antivirus and firewall software is not a hundred percent reliable, and that most users are capable of extracting a superior experience from other software _as_well_. Just something to chew on, just speculation and opinion, wondering how many of these would be reasonable ways to try to attack someone's computer security. Never thought this would be such a long comment thing.
After all this... If you download a virus intentionally (please don't do this, I don't advocate doing it ever) then it will probably be fine. If it can't get onto your computer without your consent then it's probably not going to run itself without your consent either. You could argue that it is safe to intentionally download a virus. It doesn't even actually exist as far as the computer's concerned, until you try running it, anyway, right?
There are some very advanced things like crashes and buffer overflows, which hackers might be able to use to run arbitrary code on your system (read: install bad things)... But most users (including me) are largely oblivious to all that sort of thing, and it's best left to programmers and hackers to fix those vulnerabilities IMO. 125.236.211.165 (talk)

The world's first software program?

I want to know what was the world's first computer software program, and what was it all about? Was it something to do with scientific calculations or business calculations...?--deostroll (talk) 10:15, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

The first computer program is generally considered to have been Ada Lovelace's algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers. Of course, the computer in question never actually got finished. Algebraist 10:45, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Using the definition of "computer" to be an electronic device that accepts, stores, computes, and displays numerical values (which is a very limiting definition and takes place long after Lovelace's work), the first computers were used for simple mathematics - such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. When they got big, they were being used as code-cracking machines. I am fairly certain that they got the name "computer" at that time because they were augmenting (and replacing) the original computers, which were people (mostly women) who did the code-cracking by hand. -- kainaw™ 12:02, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Just a note, but "computers" pre-computer were just anybody who was in charge of route mathematical operations. They were usually, but not always, women, and were used in fields as varied as statistics and astronomy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. --Captain Ref Desk (talk) 14:53, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

The predecessors of the modern computers are unit record equipment, which is just a tabulator of information, used for doing census records as well as business records. These same machines were then later used for all sorts of complicated mathematics, often for military purposes (calculating tables of ballistics, calculating fission simulations for the Manhattan Project, code-cracking, etc.). None of these looked a whole lot like a modern computer, and none of these early ones were generalized computers—they usually did one specific sort of task and that's all they did. (And none of them, by modern standards, were very impressive. Your cell phone contains more processing power.) Whirlwind is often cited as the oldest computer that looks like a modern computer, bringing together a number of concepts (real-time operation, video displays, electronic circuits) for the first time. It was developed to be a flight simulator originally but ended up being the basis of quite a number of other machines. --Captain Ref Desk (talk) 14:53, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I think I'd argue that one of Whirlwind's (and earlier, the Manchester Mark I's?) breakthroughs was the use of random-access memory (Williams tubes and later core memory). Previous machines usually used some sort of sequential memory, greatly restricting the programming "style".

Atlant (talk) 17:05, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Using a definition of "software" as a stored program that can be loaded onto a machine and executed, the first piece of software would be a factorization program loaded onto and run on the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine in 1948. --Delirium (talk) 15:08, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

choosing a laptop

Do you know of any site where I can input the features to search for a laptop? (I am not searching for a site that offer reviews, but a tool to compare features). 217.168.3.246 (talk) 14:59, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Most laptop manufacturers provide a means to compare features, but only with their own products. Some stores provide a similar comparison, but only with products they stock and in my experience, their feature coverage is patchy at best. Maghazines sometimes do a "group test" where they compare a selection of different manufacturer's laptops that meet some specification (eg. Core 2 Duo laptops under €700). Astronaut (talk) 19:59, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I found some partial information but I am trying to find something similar to this comparison of digital cameras but for laptops. 217.168.3.246 (talk) 20:29, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

CNet's site does, but it's not great as its selection of laptops is slightly limited. 206.126.163.20 (talk) 00:36, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Downloading link in Flash: Avoid the innumerous scrappers on the web

I'm trying to create a flash movie that will have one buttons that users will click to download material for free from my server

the current solution i'm using is:

on(release){ getURL("http://webaddress.com/music.mp3"); }

i'm basically looking for a solution that would conceal/encrypt that information from the user. so that when they click to download the material- they will not know the address on the server. I have a problem with some scrapper downloading automatically loads of educational mp3 from my site.

So basically a clean way to transfer material by using flash without giving away the location on the server —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.168.3.246 (talk) 15:12, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Well you can't really do that cleanly—at some level the browser has to know what server it is if it going to download from it. The only way I can think of stopping automated dwonloading is to either implement a CAPTCHA for each download (annoying, but not out of league) or to try and filter by the self-reported user-agent of the browser (problematic both because you might end up discriminating against new/uncommon browsers and any programmer worth his salt could make the scraper look like whatever he/she wanted it to). But I have to admit I find the whole thing a little silly anyway—who cares if a scraper gets it? Bandwidth is pretty cheap these days last time I checked (and if it is not for you, you might want to find a different host), and erecting impediments to access is going to hurt your own users more than it will the scrapers. --140.247.240.135 (talk) 17:41, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

If the material you provide is free, why are you concerned about scrapers stealing your material automatically? Frankly, it's annoying as hell to jump through all kinds of hoops to download free material small one piece at a time, when some scraper can do it all automatically for you. Astronaut (talk) 19:53, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

You could use a cgi script that renames the file:

• The Original file is located in an inaccessible folder, but that cgi scripts can read.
• The flash calls the cgi script with a code referencing the file, preferably without using it's name.
• Cgi Script copys the file to a temporary, version in an accessible area, and sends it to the client. It then deletes the temporary version once the download is complete.

@ Astronaut: If someone wanted to keep track of the number of users, where they are, or keep statistics for advertising, etc, they'd have a very valid reason to do as asking. RoadieRich (talk) 19:17, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Excel if function text criteria difficulties

Hi all, I'm trying to nail down some gas expenses out of an excel credit card statement. I'm runnign into what seems like a very simple (and frustrating) problem. When I try to use this formula, it doesn't work (it returns 0):

=SUM(IF(B1:B103="SHELL*",C1:C103))

But when I try subbing in an example of the value in column B as the test value, it does work! (returns the sum of expenses at that gas station)

=SUM(IF(B1:B103="SHELL 3596 WEST 41 AVENUEVANCOUVER",C1:C103))

Obviously, I want know how much I spend at different shell stations all over the place, so what am I doing wrong in the first formula? I am pressing ctrl-shift-enter for both of the above to enter them as an array formula, and once i get this figured out I intend to add an OR statement to include other gas stations. Thanks, -24.82.140.138 (talk) 21:00, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Why don't you just use SUMIF instead? I'm not sure either SUM or IF can be used in the way you want them to. Excel really sucks at the kind of things you are trying to get it to do (multiple conditionals for multiple rows). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 23:50, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

As I mentioned, I want to add an OR statement to get different kind of companies all together. I can't do that with SUMIF, but I guess I may as well try doing a multi-cell operation with SUMIF in the meantime. -24.82.140.138 (talk) 23:55, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Hello. I am quite sure your wildcard won't work in that context. Try something like this:

{=SUM(IF(ISERR(SEARCH("[whatever you're searching for, and you can use wildcards with SEARCH]",B1:B103)),0,C1:C103))}

that is,

{=SUM(IF(ISERR(SEARCH("SHELL",B1:B103)),0,C1:C103))}

SEARCH will return a #VALUE! error if it doesn't find the text, so the formula will return 0 if it doesn't find the text, and the appropriate number from column C if it does find the text. SEARCH supports wildcards, but you don't need a wildcard to evaluate whether "SHELL" is in the text. There may be simpler ways of reaching the goal, but I'm answering your specific formula problem. –Outriggr § 00:52, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

And I don't think you can do SEARCH over a whole array of cells. Again, I don't think the built-in functions can deal with this. I would write a VBA function to do it. It's not worth the hassle—this sort of thing is the sort of thing that Excel just sucks at. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 01:16, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Sure you can. The formula I gave works (in Excel 2007). This is not so complicated as to require VBA. –Outriggr § 01:24, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

=SUM(IF(B1:B103="SHELL*",C1:C103)) This looks to me as though you are missing brackets because to read the range (B1:B103) you have to specify that in brackets or you get an error. Just an idea. --Lisa4edit (talk) 10:05, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Like Outriggr mentioned, I also suspect the problem is that Excel doesn't allow use of a * wildcard to compare text. If the word SHELL is always the first 5 characters, try using the LEFT function: IF(LEFT(B1:B103,5)="SHELL", ... ) --Bavi H (talk) 14:38, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Viruses

What programming language(s) are viruses written in and what executes them (the OS)? Zrs 12 (talk) 21:03, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Viruses can be written in almost any known programming language, but I would speculate that the most common languages are c++ and assembly (perhaps java and VB for the less sophisticated ones). Many viruses are executed by the OS, however lots of viruses are have an ActiveX, javascript, or cgi enabler that executes them allowing them to spread via users web browsers. Some viruses are standalone executables that rely on the user to execute them, while the more common (and sophisticated ones) exploit network holes to spread or attach themselves as riders on other executables. -24.82.140.138 (talk) 21:37, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

So can Windows OS execute C++? Zrs 12 (talk) 21:58, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Only if it is compiled (i.e. is an .EXE or .COM file). If you are asking what kinds of programs (including viruses) can be executed uncompiled, it is mostly scripts that the machine already has the ability to read (e.g. already has an interpreter installed), which confines in primarily to batch scripts (.BAT) and various MS Office files that can embed Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in them (.DOC, .XLS, .PPT, .MBS, .VBS), which many people already have installed, as well as the aforementioned ActiveX and Javascript. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 23:52, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

The infamous Morris worm was partially written in C which was recompiled on the fly on each target machine. This was possible because of the ubiquity of C compilers on Unix machines, and desirable because of the heterogeneity of the hardware. (I originally thought that it was written entirely in C, but according to our article the bulk of it was machine code.) -- BenRG (talk) 16:23, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

To respectfully disagree with 24.82, I would hazard that most viruses (by quantity and volume) are written in VB (ease of exploiting the largest market share targets - IE/OE). To be definitive, one would have to pour over List of computer viruses's links. To sidebar, C++ is a language. Think of programming languages this way - if I hire a carpenter to make me a cabinet, it doesn't matter if we discuss it in meters or feet; the final product is a cabinet. -- Ironmandius (talk) 14:16, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Hot linking

Am I allowed to hotlink images from wikimedia? I'm thinking its not allowed? Sliver Slave (talk) 21:10, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Just about everything EXCEPT the Wikipedia logo (it's copywritten). Just check the rationale on the image's page to make sure it's not being used under fair use. If it is, you might not be able to use it, depending on the circumstances. For future reference, I think questions about Wikipedia go on the Help Desk. Paragon12321 (talk) 21:22, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I think we can answer in the general case, though. IMHO creating a plain link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Example.jpg is fine. However, using http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/Example.jpg in an img tag is definitely not OK, because that would be a GFDL violation unless you provide a link to the GFDL declaration on the Image:Example.jpg page. --Kjoonlee 08:42, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't technically matter if you link to the original GFDL statement; you just need the GFDL statement listed somewhere on the page it is being displayed. Though the way you describe would be most concise (just link back to the original Wikipedia image and its copyright information.) --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:49, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Nonsense. You can put whatever URLs you want in an img tag. That's not redistributing it, that's just telling people where it is! Telling someone where they might go to find an image does not obligate you to pay any attention to the licensing of the image. DMCA lawsuits have reached into the "you can't even tell anybody where to get stuff" area, but GNU (the G in GFDL) is fundamentally opposed to DMCA anyway. It would be beyond shameful for Wikimedia to attempt to enforce such evil RIAA/MPAA-like restrictions. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 08:58, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Huh? That's reuse and redistribution; if you include a GFDL image on a webpage, then the webpage becomes GFDL. According to the GFDL, you must mention all relevant GFDL dedications. --Kjoonlee 10:22, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Notice I said img tag, not a href. --Kjoonlee 10:22, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

And guess what, the obligation to quote the GFDL declaration is meant to promote Free Cultural Works. --Kjoonlee 10:25, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

And look, "Not all restrictions on the use or distribution of works impede essential freedoms. In particular, requirements for attribution, for symmetric collaboration (i.e., "copyleft"), and for the protection of essential freedom are considered permissible restrictions." --Kjoonlee 10:26, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

And we have precedents. The "featured article" star at Wikipedia was mistakenly labeled as GFDL (or was it GPL?) and was used without the link; it was correctly labeled as LGPL to avoid such problems. The logo of WP:SIGNPOST, previously a GFDL image, was being used without the link; it was switched with a PD image. The logos at WP:RD were being used without links; they are mentioned separately at the bottom now. --Kjoonlee 10:31, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Uh, yeah, sorry tcsettattr, but you don't seem to understand copyleft very well. It's not public domain, it's not a lack of copyright. There are restrictions and requirements. They're just not the usual ones. There are ways in which some copyleft licenses are incredibly non-free, in my opinion (personally I think releasing to the public domain is more ideal in many circumstances, if the goal is maximum re-use). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:49, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

The point that tcsetattr is making is that when you "include" an image in a web page the HTML source doesn't literally contain the image data, it only contains a URL where the image can be found. It's the reader's browser, not the author of the document, that fetches the image. You certainly don't want to hold the reader responsible for this, and the author hasn't actually copied anything. It's an interesting gray area of copyright law. It has a name, of course—transclusion—and I'm pretty sure Ted Nelson wrote about its legal ramifications long before the Web existed. To tcsetattr I'd like to point out that if a judge did agree with your interpretation of this practice, the precedent would probably have a disastrous effect on the GPL. If you can claim that your software product isn't a derivative work simply because you've put the GPLed code into a separate executable file and "transcluded" it via some sort of IPC interface, the protections of the GPL become meaningless. It's because of problems like this that people are afraid of testing the GPL in court. -- BenRG (talk) 19:56, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Um, okay...I stopped being able to tell what people meant about 3 comments up. 24.77.21.240 (talk) 20:21, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Dma it wikipedia, keep me logged in. That comment above should be attributed to me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sliver Slave (talk • contribs) 20:25, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I think we stopped answering your question about three comments up... -- BenRG (talk) 22:55, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

BenRG, but inclusion makes the web page a derived work of the image, rendering the web page GFDL. --Kjoonlee 20:41, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

"Inclusion" is just not happening. It's just saying "those guys over there have an image which would look good here. If you ask them for it, they might give it to you." --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:36, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

That's reuse, under the GFDL. --Kjoonlee 01:18, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the combined web page with the image data included is eligible for copyright, and it clearly is a derivative work, but that's not the issue here. Our author doesn't want to assert copyright on the combined web page. All he wants to do (and, let's say, all he does do) is run a web server which distributes his HTML file to whoever asks for it. The HTML file contains an img tag with a URL identifying a copyrighted image. URLs themselves are not copyrightable, and the rest of the HTML file is original work. Has the author created a derivative work? I'm not saying he has, I'm not saying he hasn't, I'm saying that this doesn't seem to be adequately addressed by the current copyright code. Whether it's been addressed in any judicial decisions I have no idea. -- BenRG (talk) 22:55, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Again, that's reuse, under the GFDL. --Kjoonlee 01:18, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Point to which clause in the license contains this "reuse" definition, or any other official statement from FSF to support it. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html doesn't actually contain the word "reuse". It's all about copying and modifying. There doesn't seem to be any part of it which even remotely resembles what you're imagining. It makes no attempt to regulate the dissemination of information on where to find a GFDL'ed document. Such an attempt would look quite out of place. Copyleft is about creative uses of copyright to "promote progress" as it was suppsed to be in the first place, not about using it as a tool of opperssion. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 02:02, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Hotlinking via an img tag is the same as linking via a href tag for copyright purposes, as the image itself is not physically on the linker's server nor being served by the linker's server. That said, any method of linking is vulnerable to DMCA/copyright-circumvention lawsuits (in the U.S.), as people who've linked to "private", but non-encrypted windows media streams have found out. 206.126.163.20 (talk) 00:24, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Just to elaborate slightly with an analogy: You can find the book in the library on main street is by no means the same as Here's the book: (insert contents). 206.126.163.20 (talk) 00:31, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Can't boot computer after attempting to add RAM

Hello, I'm having a problem with booting my computer... I attempted to add a stick of RAM from another computer that I just realized wasn't compatible, but before I figured this out I added the stick then tried to turn on my computer. The first time I got three slow beeps and no response from the monitor (everything was replugged). I've since removed the stick I attempted to add but when I put the computer back to the way it was the monitor still wouldn't display anything. If it helps, it's a Gateway computer and I have Windows XP on it. Should I try to boot the computer with the Windows XP disk or try something else? I should make sure to add that there is absolutely nothing displayed on the monitor even though the computer appears to be running- no Windows error message or anything. Thanks for your help in advance... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.54.42.126 (talk) 22:14, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Might be too obvious but is the old stick you put back in seated correctly? 161.222.160.8 (talk) 22:46, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm almost 100% certain I did, and even if I didn't the first time I have in subsequent tries because I flipped the stick a few ways to make sure there weren't any other ways that fit. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.54.42.126 (talk) 22:58, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Update: I'm definitely certain I have it in the right way now but I still have the problem of 3 consecutive beeps when I try to start up the computer, and the monitor still isn't displaying anything- not even a Windows error message. The best I can say is that it's a Gateway... anything I can do to fix this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.54.42.126 (talk) 23:04, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

3 beeps at POST certainly isn't good. According to this link from the POST article it could be bad RAM or dead motherboard. Are you able to test the old RAM in another computer? If so, and it tests ok, it would seem to be the mobo. If the RAM test fails you need some new RAM. Memtest86 is a quality free RAM tester if you need one. Of course there may be something I am missing so dont so anything too drastic (no hammers, yet). 161.222.160.8 (talk) 23:28, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

There's always the unfortunate chance that you zapped something with static electricity. Did you take any precautions against electrostatic discharge as you did the work?

Atlant (talk) 23:34, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Actually, after hours of panic I just figured out the problem. It was, ironically enough, what the first poster mentioned... I had the RAM plugged in WAY too loosely for it to be read because I was worried about messing it up. A few firm pushes got it locked in and allowed me to type this on the original computer! Thanks for the help you offered, though... I'll definitely make sure to ground myself carefully and place hardware more firmly in the future! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.54.42.126 (talk) 00:49, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

May 3

follow up to wireless broadband security

Hi, I asked the question above on wireless broadband security, and I added a follow-up that I think no one looked at, because it came after the question had been more or less covered already. So I hope no one minds if I add that question again: I'm still not entirely clear: if I have wireless broadband, but I'm not connected to a LAN or anything (just a USB wireless modem stuck in a laptop) and I live in a block of flats, and there's no doubt that the neighbours are in range - can they steal my bandwidth without a password? What do they need to do this? If anyone can give me a website to read more, I would be very grateful. I clicked on the link that someone gave me above, but it was long, and primarily on a different topic. I'm wondering if there's something that just deals with wireless broadband security, or if anyone just knows the exact answer. The poster who mentioned being able to get heaps of other people's signals didn't say if they could actually use those accounts, as opposed to getting the signal. thanks in advance. 203.221.127.183 (talk) 05:57, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

If you're not using the card to connect yourself to any network, just turn it off. The OS or the card vendor should provide a menu option to do that. EdJohnston (talk) 16:34, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm assuming that by wireless broadband, you're talking about one of those USB devices you get from the wireless phone carrier to provide internet access? If so, no there's no way someone close to you could attach to your network using the same methods you can get into a 802.11 wireless network (the Wi-Fi networks mentioned earlier). Wi-Fi networks are made to broadcast to the local area, making it easy for unscrupulous people to break in. Wireless broadband from wireless carriers are not. -- JSBillings 17:04, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Mac

If Macintosh is more respected/liked/whatever than Windows, why isn't it as successful? Interactive Fiction Expert/Talk to me 12:04, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Original research warning: Content may be untrue! IMHO, Macs are more respected, liked, and "whatever" because they are less "successful". Does that make any sense? (Please come back if it does not.) Kushal (talk) 12:26, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, much of the small business and consumer market is driven by price. By letting anyone copy the design, millions of "IBM compatible" PCs in anonymous beige boxes were sold at low prices. Meanwhile Apple didn't release their design so small manufacturers couldn't produce "Apple compatible" computers at all. If you wanted an Apple computer, you had to pay high Apple prices for it. Even today, Apple's prices are considered high compare to Windows PCs.

I consider myself an average consumer and I considered buying a Mac recently. The Mac looked nice but in the end I went for a Windows PC. The reasons for my choice were: I could get a top of the range Windows laptop for the same price as a mid-range Mac, with my limited financial resources there is less cheap (or free) Mac software, I wouldn't easily be able to use the software I already had, and I'm more familiar with the inner workings of Windows.

Astronaut (talk) 13:21, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, there are a lot of factors involved, such that it's hard to answer definitively. They're mainly historical, though: Windows is today more successful than the Mac because it has a larger installed base and therefore incumbency and network effects. So it's sort of circular; most people use Windows because most other people use Windows.

The question is, how did it get there? The answer is a complex intermingling of hardware platforms, operating systems, marketing, etc. that could take a book to sort out, and would still be controversial. In the 1980s IBM PC compatibles dominated the business microcomputer market, whereas the Apple II and Apple Macintosh machines dominated the educational market; the Apple machines also did better than the PC in the home market, though there they had competition from the Commodore 64 and Amiga, among others. Starting in the late 1980s and continuing into the early 1990s, the PC began displacing other machines in the home market as well. One reason was the availability of cheap commodity-hardware PC clones, compared to Apple's relatively expensive proprietary hardware. Another was the confluence of home and business use: people who used business software, for which the PC platform (MS-DOS and later Windows) had long dominated, increasingly wanted a home computer that could run the same software. And yet another was that Apple from circa 1991 to 1997 had a lot of direction and management problems, putting them in a deep hole they're only now recovering from. --Delirium (talk) 13:22, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

To add to the above, more applications are available for the PC platform. People who write programs as third party applications are able to do so and distribute their work easily. It is my understanding that it is not as easy to release products that work on Apple computers. Also, the market for video games rests mainly in the PC's court. Until recently, I hadn't seen any games that were of significant consequence released for Apple computers. Any avid video gamer up until now had to go with PC because it was the only available platform. As for how it got that way, read Delirium's comment above. Leeboyge (talk) 21:27, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

You might be interested in reading In the Beginning...was the Command Line (if you have not done so already). Hope that helps. Kushal (talk) 13:41, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Apple's OS might not be as successful as MS Windows, but Apple hardware is quickly increasing in market share. Plus, Apple has one of the most popular smart phones and leads the market in digital distribution. I think it's unfair to call that unsuccessful. -- JSBillings 14:07, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

If James Joyce is considered one of the most important writers in the English language, how come most people in the United States haven't read him? If Betamax was of higher quality than VHS, how come we used the latter for decades? (Just because something is considered better/important/whatever doesn't mean its actual adoption will be perfect, is all I mean.) --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:45, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

It dates back to the late '70s/early '80s. At that time, the mainframe market was dominated by IBM (to the point that IBM was being investigated by the US goverment for abusing their monopoly position), and desktop computers were just starting to appear. The original IBM PC was one of the worst desktops on the market, but it had the IBM brand on it, so it gained a considerable market share among businesses. Later, IBM clones were able to take advantage of this by advertising them as being "IBM compatible", and IBM-compatible computers became the most common type.

IBM needed an operating system for their desktop computers, and since desktops weren't a core part of their business plan, they outsourced it to a company called "Micro-Soft", who provided MS-DOS, a knockoff of CP/M. Because the IBM PC and most IBM compatibles used MS-DOS, this gave Microsoft an effective monopoly on operating systems on this hardware. When Windows 95 and Windows NT replaced MS-DOS, it meant that Windows became the dominant operating system. --Carnildo (talk) 20:21, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

"The original IBM PC was one of the worst desktops on the market" -- citation needed. --LarryMac | Talk 20:48, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Youtube down?

For the last few minutes, I have been unable to access youtube. Can you access youtube? Do you think it is something serious or just a localized issue? Thanks. Kushal (talk) 13:30, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Works fine for me. Are you on a public computer? Seraphim♥ ^Whipp 13:37, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

No, I am not. So it must be a local issue. Thank you for answering, Seraphim. Kushal (talk) 13:38, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Glad to help :). Seraphim♥ ^Whipp 13:41, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

This exact same thing is happening to me! How can I fix it? Interactive Fiction Expert/Talk to me 13:47, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Ah. See this. Seraphim♥ ^Whipp 13:50, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

What a relief, its working again! Kushal (talk) 14:27, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

A useful site for this sort of question. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 20:10, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

largest tv

whats the largest tv on earth? and how many inches? --119.95.130.172 (talk) 13:54, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Depends on what you define as "tv". Rear projection televisions can be 100 inches¹. I hope that helps. Kushal (talk) 18:13, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

100 inch is quite small. In Beijing there is a screen 250m x 30m which covers the ceiling of s shopping mall. Google it for some impressive picturs of fish on it. Panasonic had a 150 inch TV at trade shows in January this year. I think my 24 inch is too big! --TrogWoolley (talk) 18:51, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

With a video splitter, you can make a television just about any size you like by joining many smaller televisions together. So, again, it depends on what you mean by "tv". -- kainaw™ 18:51, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

You said it, Kainaw! Kushal (talk) 16:05, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Mine is 61 inches and that is satisfactory. But I think the biggest TV unveiled for consumers was the 150 inch one mentioned above. I think it cost around $10,000. Useight (talk) 20:19, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Frank's 2000" TV. -- BenRG (talk) 23:32, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

You'll want to see our Eidophor article; this was a method of projecting very large, very bright TV images.

Atlant (talk) 20:48, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Printing software crashes when it encounters my files?

Okay, here's the problem. I have hundreds of pictures of a soccer league, and my job is to get them ready for print. Now the edits are generally nothing major, such as lightening, cropping, using templates to make sports duos. For the editing I use Photoshop 9 CS2. When I first get the files, I renamed them based on the kid's name and what they ordered (ex. John Smith 2 3x5 1 8x10 1duo.jpg), and move them into a folder named after the team they're on (U2A).

The problem is, when I send them to the printers and they try to print it, the printing software crashes "Client host disconnected from source" or something along those lines. When I say crash, I mean that error pops up, and the program closes. It still prints, however. Now, this happens often with the files i manipulated, but some of the files i make or work with print just fine. The printer is a Fuji Frontier 550, and I think the software is "Pics Pro" (it's the fuji stock printing software). The files are in JPEG format. Now it seems to just be the technique I'm editing them with which is messing with it, but I'm open to any suggestions. I just want to get this done. 71.115.166.102 (talk) 14:37, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

The way you edit the files sould not be a problem, as long as they are valid JPG files (not corrupted).
I assume you are using windows, so I think you should do:
-Go to windows update and install all the latest updates/drivers, sometimes it may be a bug in windows itself, and even if not, windows update sometimes provide the users updated drivers.
-Try to get the latest drivers from the manufacturer
-If all this still doesn't work, you can try to do a fresh windows install and see if the problem continues (this sould solve the problem, if it doesn't, it means there is a bug/problem with windows, the drivers, or the printer itself)
-You can alternatively try a Linux Live CD, ubuntu, for example (you can get the CD here), and see if you can print the files... When I use windows, I have some problems with my HP printer drivers, but when I use ubuntu, it's wonderfull (only talking about the printing part!), I don't even need to install drivers, I just plug in the printer, and it is ready in a couple of seconds... of course this may not be that easy for your printer... SF007 (talk) 21:17, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Here we go again with the reinstall Windows as the option of first resort. Before taking such a drastic step, have you considered perhaps the printer's software doesn't like filenames with spaces or long filenames? Heve you tried opening the problematic files in a differnt image editing program (perhaps on a different PC)? Reinstalling the OS or switching to a different OS should be the option of last resort. Astronaut (talk) 11:30, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I think Linux users will reinstall their operating system with their left hand while feeding the cat, mowing the lawn, and grading the end-of-semester exams with the other hand. It would be awesome if reinstalling the operating system in Windows did not involve formatting *everything* by default. I assume that if reinstalling the OS would mean that all your documents, and applications remained intact after the reinstallation, you would not oppose it so much. Lets wait for Windows 8. Microsoft is trying to show that it wants to adhere to standards (think IE 8). Hopefully, things will change for the better. Kushal (talk) 16:10, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't. You have to hit F or something similar to actually format the drive (in XP, at least). 206.126.163.20 (talk) 00:48, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I have used multiple computers, computers which yield no problems with anybody else's files. I've used about four computers, three of which were running XP, the final running Vista. I was always editing in CS2. Other people use two of the computers for the same purpose, but have no problems with their files. They use the same file-name format as I do (I learned it from them). It has to be something I do.71.115.166.102 (talk) 02:39, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

is it possible to have Internet everywhere in the world?

I would like to know if there is some service that allows any civilian in the world to have an active internet connection anywhere in the world (like a GPS device), with a Satellite connection or something... And I know there is something like an embargo from the USA on some countries, so a product like that purchased in the USA would be illegal to use there, but would it still be functional? I have searched the web, but haven't found any real info... thanks. SF007 (talk) 19:27, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like you want Satellite Internet access#Portable satellite internet. Algebraist 19:59, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

yeah, that's what I meant, from that info I figured it out, seem's it's still not possible **everywhere** in the world... thanks. SF007 (talk) 20:27, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

You won't get it near the poles, or in caves, or in places where the wind exceeds 200 km/h! But with enough money you could install an optical fibre cable to wherever you want it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:00, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

utest.com: scam?

Is uTest.com a scam? 217.168.3.246 (talk) 19:46, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Never heard of it before. Kushal (talk) 20:39, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Probably not. It is mentioned here for example, and it looks nothing like a scam. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 20:49, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, perhaps they are just badly organized or the business is terribly low...217.168.1.251 (talk) 01:04, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

You can never be sure of current events. For example, do you remember when Psystar Corporation seemed to be changing addresses like crazy? Suddenly, many people believed Psystar did not exist at all. Kushal (talk) 01:09, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Google

I dislike Google's new feature: when you enter a phrase with quotes and if there are no results, it just shows the quoteless results. How can I turn this feature off? Interactive Fiction Expert/Talk to me 23:20, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Your observation that "it just shows the quoteless results" is not accurate. It displays a warning icon and a message indicating that the search returned no results. The unquoted results are displayed below the warning message. I do not know of any way to turn it off. -- kainaw™ 00:58, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't think you can turn it off. Google says it did not find the results you wanted and tried its best to come up with the results that seemed most relevant. Kushal (talk) 15:29, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

A possible workaround is to append something like -madeupwordthatgetsnohits1234dfsdsdtgdc to your query; it shouldn't affect the results (assuming the word you pick doesn't get any hits, which this one of course will as soon as Google next indexes this page), but it confuses Google enough that it won't automatically remove the quotes even if there are no hits. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:20, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

madeupwordthatgetsnohits1234dfsdsdtgdc does not give any results ... so far. Kushal (talk) 03:56, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

You could also try adding a trivial word like a or the to get much the same effect, so long as your target pages contain any reasonable English text. A silly but more reliable workaround is to use the OR operator: "foo bar" OR "foo bar". --Tardis (talk) 20:10, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Safe alternative to scanf?

I was wondering whether there is a safe alternative to scanf() for reading words in the C standard library. I am trying to read words from standard input (or any other stream for that matter), like this

char word[BUF_LEN];
while (scanf("%s", word) == 1)
  /* process word here */

But of course this is very dangerous because there is no way to tell it how long the buffer is, so it is liable to overflow. Is there a way to tell it how long the buffer is? I know that fgets() has the ability to stop after a certain length, but it reads lines (up to a newline) instead of words (up to a whitespace) like I want. --131.215.220.165 (talk) 23:32, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I suspect most C programmers would just go ahead and read the whole line, then loop over the words. There's no shortage of functions to help you there: strtok, strspn, strcspn, strchr, etc. Another alternative is scanf with a field width specifier: scanf("%255s", word) is fine if there are at least 256 bytes allocated. (One extra is for the '\0' terminator.)

To make the length adjustable by changing a single macro, you need some preprocessor trickery:

#define WORD_LEN 255
#define Xstr(x) #x
#define Str(x) Xstr(x)
#define WORD_LEN_STR Str(WORD_LEN)
char word[WORD_LEN+1];
... scanf("%" WORD_LEN_STR "s", word)

The result, although it avoids crashes and exploits, is not what you're probably aiming for. A long word gets truncated, and the last part of it is left in the input buffer to be taken as another word by the next scanf. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 00:32, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

May 4

opengl program crash

hey I am a newbie at opengl programming in fact just started.. I got this program to compile under VS2008 but it crashes at glClear():-

i have included gl.h, glut.h and defined GLUT_DISABLE_ATEXIT_HACK

void display(void)
{
    glClear (GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
    glColor3f (1.0, 1.0, 1.0);
    glBegin(GL_POLYGON);
        glVertex3f (0.25, 0.25, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.75, 0.25, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.75, 0.75, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.25, 0.75, 0.0);
    glEnd();
    glFlush ();
}

void init (void) 
{
    glClearColor (0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0);
    glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
    glLoadIdentity();
    glOrtho(0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, -1.0, 1.0);
}

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    glutInit(&argc, argv);
    glutInitDisplayMode (GLUT_DOUBLE | GLUT_RGB);
    glutInitWindowSize (250, 250); 
    glutInitWindowPosition (100, 100);
    glutCreateWindow ("hello");
    init ();
    glutDisplayFunc(display); 
    glutMainLoop();
    return 0;   
}

it crashes at glutMainLoop() while doing a callback to display(). Commenting that line produces a crash at glFlush(). I am using windows vista with ATI drivers. Bobatnet (talk) 12:12, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

It looks like all you need to do is swap the buffers. Opengl works by filling one buffer while the other is displayed and then switching them. So, your display method should look something like this:

void display(void)
{
    glClear (GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
    glColor3f (1.0, 1.0, 1.0);
    glBegin(GL_POLYGON);
        glVertex3f (0.25, 0.25, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.75, 0.25, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.75, 0.75, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.25, 0.75, 0.0);
    glEnd();
    glFlush ();
    glutSwapBuffers ( );
}

If you forget to do this, your window won't display what you want, and it will look like it crashed. Leeboyge (talk) 23:54, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Tried that but it still crashes. Actually, it stays on screen for some seconds and then it crashes. Also, the code is copied from the red book as I am just learning opengl. So, may be the code is right ?!! Bobatnet (talk) 04:47, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

That's really strange. I am assuming that it compiled correctly with no errors. If so, it may just be a Visual Studios thing. I am actually not using VS. I am using Cygwin to compile with gcc, and I am using the GLUT library directly. Here is all of the code I used to test yours:

#include <windows.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <GL/glut.h> 
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

void display(void)
{
    glClear (GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
    glColor3f (1.0, 1.0, 1.0);
    glBegin(GL_POLYGON);
        glVertex3f (0.25, 0.25, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.75, 0.25, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.75, 0.75, 0.0);
        glVertex3f (0.25, 0.75, 0.0);
    glEnd();
    glFlush ();
    glutSwapBuffers ( );
}
 
void init (void) 
{
    glClearColor (0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0);
    glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
    glLoadIdentity();
    glOrtho(0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, -1.0, 1.0);
}
 
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    glutInit(&argc, argv);
    glutInitDisplayMode (GLUT_DOUBLE | GLUT_RGB);
    glutInitWindowSize (250, 250); 
    glutInitWindowPosition (100, 100);
    glutCreateWindow ("hello");
    init ();
    glutDisplayFunc(display); 
    glutMainLoop();
    return 0;   
}

I compiled with this:

g++ -g -Wall test.cpp -l glut32 -l glu32 -l opengl32 -o test

This gives me a white square centered on a dark red background. If yours is crashing, I can only guess that it may be something to do with linking the libraries or with Visual Studio. You should have no problem running on XP or Vista. I am running on Vista right now, and it works just fine. Leeboyge (talk) 06:32, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

May 5

Playing foreign DVDs on a PC

Two questions about importing US DVDs to play on a UK PC. Firstly, I've got two DVD drives in my computer. Is it possible to set one to Region 1 and the other to Region 2 (or, alternatively, would setting them to Australian make them play any Region, since Australia has banned the use of Region coding)? Secondly, will the computer play NTSC format just as easily as it does PAL? Laïka 01:37, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you should be able to set them to different regions. No, setting to Australia wouldn't work; if what you say is so, their DVDs aren't region encoded, so any Aussie DVDs you get will work in any region, but the Australia region will not work with any DVD. (You can get drive firmware hacks that ignore region encoding, though). And yes, PAL and NTSC will be fine with any normal DVD-playing software. 206.126.163.20 (talk) 01:45, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't think Australia has actually banned the use of region encoding of DVD discs, but manufacturers of standalone DVD players were warned by the ACCC that making players which only played Region 4 may violate the Trade Practices Act - pretty far from a ban. If you set your PC drive to Region 4, then it would not play Region 1 DVDs (Region 4 is also used in the Pacific Rim, Mexico and South America and so would be unaffected by Australian law). Bear in mind that a lot of UK Region 2 discs are dual-encoded to work in Region 2 and Region 4 so that the distributors can save money on mastering the DVD and use the same press for the UK and Australia. And yes, in answer to your original question, you can set one to Region 1 and one to Region 2. --Canley (talk) 06:20, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

If you use VLC Media Player, you shouldn't have to worry about region codes at all. --LarryMac | Talk 13:06, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

A small word of caution though. Many modern computer DVD drives have firmware that willspontaneously change the region, but only up to five times - then it's locked into the last region it switched to. There might be some firmware hacks to get round this, but I've no idea where to find them. Astronaut (talk) 14:18, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Name of a sorting algorithm?

I would like to know the name of a sorting algorithm. When I did some work in an office sorting papers, I used a method similar to this (although modified for a desk without space for 20-odd stacks of paper).

First, sort the items by first letter (digit, byte, whatever). Do this by making 26 (or 10 or 256 or however many) piles, one for each distinct first letter (or digit or whatever, I'm just going to say "letter" from here on). Now gather up all these piles so you have one big pile with all the items sorted alphabetically by first letter. Now you use recursion. Take all the A's from the top of the pile and put them into 26 piles according to the 2nd letter of the name. Then you take all the Aa's from the top of the pile and sort them, and then take the Aaa's and sort them, and so forth recursively. Once you're through with the A's, you sort the B's, C's, and so forth, and this also applies recursively: you finish sorting the Aa's before tackling the Ab's, etc. If at any stage the number of items is so small that it would make more sense to use e.g. bubble sort for that stage, do so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.134.229.107 (talk) 03:11, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

It is called a bin sort. -- kainaw™ 03:21, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd call it MSD radix sort. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 04:51, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Computer beeps

Hi, my computer gives long beeps and through that alternating high-low beeps (and ofcourse won't do anything else). According to the beep codes, the first one should be something wrong with my RAM and the second that something is wrong with the CPU. I cleaned the CPU fan (which appeared necessary) so it might well have been overheated. Is there something I could still do myself that could possibly still fix this? Emil76 (talk) 08:46, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Removing and re-inserting the RAM modules very often fixes RAM issues, even if they are inserted correctly (and it doesn't hurt to double-check that they are, indeed, inserted correctly). The same can work for the CPU. Is it a computer that has worked before? Otherwise it could also be that the CPU is incompatible with the motherboard, or that you need to update the BIOS. By the way, it takes time for components to overheat, if it was a fan issue I doubt you would see it at boot. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 09:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. The computer has worked before. It just happened one day, so it's quite unlikely that the RAM got loose or something, but I did check that (a few times). You say "the same can work for the CPU", you mean that I could get the CPU out and try to reinsert it? Emil76 (talk) 09:57, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you should try reinserting the CPU (preferably wearing an antistatic wrist strap, or else taking some other precaution). Try clearing the CMOS memory. I assume you have two RAM modules (perhaps more) - try booting with only one module attached (the one closest to the CPU, in a mainstream contemporary motherboard). If you have compatible RAM and CPU available, try putting them. It might also be a PSU issue. If the problem persists after checking all that, your motherboard is probably dead. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 10:24, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

If it was a siren beep (high-low-high-low...) then you most likely overheated. Once that happens, you run a high risk of damaging the CPU. If all your efforts of cleaning and remounting the hardware fail, look into getting a new CPU. -- kainaw™ 12:11, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Make sure that your cleaning of the fan didn't short circuit or break the solder tracks on the motherboard. Make sure you didn't disturb any of the jumpers on the motherboard. You didn't remove a small piece of foil? Astronaut (talk) 14:30, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

BLAST one sequence against database and return a hit for each sequence in the database

Hi, I'd like to BLAST a small sequence that is in most, but not all of the sequences in my database. I'd like to return, at most, one hit per sequence in the database. Any idea on how to do this? (the -v and -b parameters are set to greater than the size of database. The -K parameter may influence this, but it's not necessarily what I want.) Anybody have any suggestions? THanks. --Rajah (talk) 21:50, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean you wish to return the best match of all the sequences in the database? If all of your sequences have exactly the same subsequence to your query, then BLAST will not be able to distinguish between them. Rockpocket 22:12, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

First, I would compile BLAST as a module for my database (ie: a MySQL module). Then, I could run a query like: "select sequence from mytable where blast('AGAT',sequence) limit 1". That gets one hit from the database for the little sub-sequence if the BLAST function returns true. It would be trivial to expand this to handle multiple sub-sequences or wrap the query in a script that performs it over and over for each sub-sequence. -- kainaw™ 00:54, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

May 6

The Sound of Thinking

What is the cause of the clicking sound that is made when you ask a computer to do something laborious? I'm not referring to the increase in fan speed but rather the apparently non-mechanical tck. Tks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stanstaple (talk • contribs) 00:19, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

It appears that you are referring to the hard drive clicking sound. It makes that when it moves the magnetic heads around to read data from the platters. If you get a lot of it, it is very likely that you don't have enough memory in your computer for what you are trying to do and your computer has opted to use hard drive space as temporary (and extremely slow) memory. -- kainaw™ 00:48, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Also note that this is hard drive specific. My main hard drive barely makes a sound, even under a heavy load. My secondary, on the other hand, makes the clicking noise you mentioned. Leeboyge (talk) 00:56, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

And if it's a louder than usual click or a very high pitched squeak you should back up your data. See click of death and head crash. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:24, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

C File writing

I am starting to use C programming language to write into files but I'm having a little trouble finding out what formats do different files take. Is there a good resource for this type of thing?Bastard Soap (talk) 08:02, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

I mostly use Google. The first hit I get for file formats is www.wotsit.org, followed by Wikipedia's very own file format article (has many links to additional info). If I wanted a specific file format I'd search the web to find the official spec, tutorials, hints, sample implementations, etc. Weregerbil (talk) 08:54, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Why not have Enter, Backspace and Delete options on mouse or on Toolbar

Why must I have to get my right hand off my keyboard onto the mouse to position the cursor in order to highlight text for formatting (such as copy / paste or deletion) and then have to GO BACK to the board to use the Enter and Delete keys to tidy up the text. If these basic options were available on the mouse, then it would mean I could minimise hand movement between mouse and keyboard. If the hardware is too costly, it should be possible to access these through icons on the toolbar. And make them BIG icons. What say you, techies? And I would like a credit for this if my idea is taken up, plus about a million dollars. American. Myles325a (talk) 08:18, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Shift key is your friend, shift+end then delete will remove the whole line from the cursor's position. Or otherwise use your left hand to press backspace/delete. Or you could use cut which you can either use the icon or ctrl+x and not having to move your left hand at all, just don't paste the content. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:24, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Soft spam: a golden business idea?

Why are so many people posting comments for driving a little bit traffic to their websites? Is it so a good business? In almost every forum I see comments like: "Hey, nice idea, but site xyz.com has a better concepts". Normally not following the flow of discussion. 217.168.0.115 (talk) 10:30, 6 May 2008 (UTC)