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October 12

Cryptographic hash in less than O(n)

Do any known cryptographic hash functions run in less than linear time? NeonMerlin 01:14, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Bad ones can run in far less than O(n) time. Consider the worse one of all: Just use the first X bits as the hash. That is O(1). But, you can use whatever integer you want for X and get arbitrary length hashes! I do see that the list of popular hash functions on cryptographic hash function doesn't have runtime costs. Checking the articles, I don't even see anything in there. Looks like we need some research. -- kainaw™ 02:31, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Even worse and faster hash function: always return 42. Not so "cryptographic" though. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 04:14, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I doubt that any good cryptographic hash functions run in less than linear time. You might be able to fudge "good" for a particular application, and get away with less, but not in general. Consider the property "second preimage resistant" as described in the article Cryptographic hash function: It should be very hard, given one input x, to generate a second input y, such that hash(x)=hash(y). To get that, you need every byte of the input to have an effect on the output. But doing anything to every byte of input is necessarily going to take at least O(n) time.

It's also a minor point from a practical perspective. Most of the times that you're interested in the cryptographic hash of some data, you're also doing something else with the data -- storing it on disk, or transmitting it across a network -- that takes O(n) time, and a fairly substantial amount of time at that. So any gains you'd make from having a sub-O(n) hash function would be swamped to insignificance by the cost of your other operations.

The only application that comes to mind where it's not moot would be something like Open Source Tripwire (checking to see if files have been modified, in part by checking their hashes) since you're potentially hashing the file a lot more often than you read it, or write it, or transfer it. But I think that's one application where you couldn't "fudge" things -- if you don't use each and every byte in your hash, an attacker could conceivably slip something into the bytes you ignore.

On a parting note: I think (but I'm no expert) that currently used cryptographic hashes are all O(n) in time and O(1) in space (excluding any space used to hold the input). -- Why Not A Duck 04:37, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Think about it. For a hash to be at all cryptographic, it needs to exhibit the avalanche effect, meaning that if one bit flips, about 50% of the bits in the has should flip. Even a truly terrible hash needs to give at least a different value if you flip one bit. So say, you're hashing two 100 gigabyte files that are identical except for the last bit. You want those two files to hash to different values (otherwise, what's the point of a hash?). But to do that, the hash needs to read all of the file, it has to check all of the bits. This makes it O(n).

The general rule is that if you have a problem where in order to solve it, an algorithm has to check every part item that's part of the problem, it can't possibly be any less than O(n). Think of sorting algorithms for instance. It is easy to see why those have to be at least O(n), because in order to place all items in a list in the correct order, it has to look at every item at least once. Otherwise, it will have no idea where to put it! It's the same with hashing.

You could, if you wanted to, instead just hash the first X bits of a file, then it would be O(1) (assuming X is a constant, otherwise it would be O(X)). But then you're not hashing the file, you're hashing the first X bits of the file. And there's no point in doing that. 90.235.19.68 (talk) 22:28, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Google 2001 and phrases

A google 2001 search for "Sarah Palin" with quotes gives no hits, but doing a search for Sarah Palin Alaska (without quotes) reveals that pages featuring the phrase "Sarah Palin" existed back then. Does anything like this happen for any other search terms in google 2001? Andjam (talk) 04:09, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

It looks like the quoted phrase feature didn't work back then. --Sean 21:56, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Doing a google 2001 search for "Steven Bradbury" with and without quotes gives different results, so I don't think that's it. Andjam (talk) 08:04, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I remember being asked how to search for phrases, by a coworker at a firm that dissolved at the end of 2001, so the capability must indeed have existed then; though I think it was not then true that hand-rail, say, would find both "handrail" and "hand rail". —Tamfang (talk) 04:00, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Firefox: Predict my URL please, but not a whole bunch of nonsense

Hi all,

I set Firefox to auto-fill my url bar as I type some time ago (using about:config, I don't exactly remember where), so that typing in 'news.g' would fill in 'news.google.com' and I could just hit enter. After the latest update, though, it's started filling in much more than I typed, and instead filling in addresses it's been to, e.g. news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct=:ePkh8BM9E2IF2mHAArFFW[.....], forcing me to finish typing and hit delete, or using my mouse to delete the rest.

How can I tell Firefox to only auto-fill addresses that I've actually typed, instead of addresses that I've been to?

Thanks! — Sam 07:58, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Found it at last! It's another about:config change. Set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to True. Incidentally, there's a couple of lists of about:config settings - at http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries and http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Preferences . AJHW (talk) 10:46, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Great! Thanks for tracking that down. — Sam 03:05, 14 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.115.120.108 (talk)

ASP.NET: <%# %>

Can someone remind me what that is called? In between it would be an expression. I would search for it, but those characters aren't coming up in google or msdn. Thanks Louis Waweru  Talk  15:40, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

is that like a preprocessor directive? 68.146.178.33 (talk) 18:51, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that you are right...it's strange but I can't find anything about them to confirm this. Someone else described them the way you do, and give this list of them #if #else #elif #endif #define #undef #warning #error #line #region #endregion. That one in this section title is the only one I've been using, it's always been with binding data...I'm trying to figure out how many there are and how to use them to see what I can and can't do with them. But they're not turning up anything for me. Louis Waweru  Talk  22:31, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

gnome 2.24

Is there a .deb package of GNOME 2.24 available for downlaod for either Debian or Ubuntu (latest stable versions of both)? Thanks in advance :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.138.187.117 (talk) 16:06, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Linux: inline text editing

What is "inline text editing" in Linux? Thanks. Smaug 16:45, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Currently, "inline text editing" almost exclusively pertains to editing web page content through a web browser directly on the web page's server. For example, when you click "edit" on Wikipedia, you are using an inline text editor. Linux doesn't really have anything to do with it. The web server could be Linux, Windows, Mac, Commodore... -- kainaw™ 16:57, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

There is something, when you are editing a text document in Linux. There is graphical, there is stuff like nano, and there is "inline text editing". What is inline text editing? Or does it refer to graphical or nano/w/e? Smaug 17:09, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Tell us where you saw this term? SteveBaker (talk) 18:58, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Maybe ed, the "line-oriented editor"? - IMSoP (talk) 19:26, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Re SteveBaker: "1. What are two advantages of graphical and inline text editing?" Smaug 21:45, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh-oh. Now your confessing to having asked us a homework question...which we're not allowed to answer. But if this is indeed homework - then the answer must be somewhere in the books you're working from. Personally (and I've been using Linux since almost the first version - and I've used other UNIX versions since the mid-1970's)...I have never heard this term. It's possible they are talking about "line editors" versus "visual editors" - you can see a 'line' editor in Linux by opening up a text console and running 'ex filename' versus a 'visual' editor by running 'vi filename'. (These are actually different modes of the same underlying program). SteveBaker (talk) 00:27, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

On yet another hand, if vi (which I use heavily!) were invented today it's unlikely that anyone would describe it as "visual", because it doesn't follow the usual WIMP conventions. —Tamfang (talk) 03:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Versatile Flash Animation Software

Howdy folks, I've been looking a whole lot lately into animation and the like, and I was wondering what exactly the "Standard" software is for Flash animation. I've been looking at Flash MX, but I've heard there's some stuff out there that's better purely for animation, however I still want a decent amount of versatility. Thanks!

Kenjibeast (talk) 17:10, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

There are different types of web animation, one of them is Flash. Flash animation is any animation made using Flash. Flash MX is an old (though still very good) version of Flash. It has since been followed by Flash 8 and Flash CS3.

I have not used any animation software other than Flash MX and Flash 8, but I find both to be great for animation and great for other stuff. I even use it to make static diagrams, or in place of powerpoint presentations. Smaug 17:46, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Vista track number help

I have a folder with more than 200 songs and I'm giving them track numbers. However, when I try to give a song a track number over 99, I get an error. Can Vista not handle track numbers over 99 or something? How do I fix this; use WMP?--Oldman55 (talk) 17:59, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

You're going to have to edit the id3 tag in a different program. You can do it manually in WMP, but some programs will let you automate something like that...I can recommend Tag&Rename.Louis Waweru  Talk  18:54, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know of any albums with more than 99 tracks! Your problem is almost certainly that you're trying to put a bunch of songs that are not part of the same album into a single album. You need to put them into the albums they came from originally. SteveBaker (talk) 18:55, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Well they're all ripped from a game that doesn't have an OST, and I want them all in one folder and with track numbers following each other so they stay in one spot on my ipod.--Oldman55 (talk) 18:57, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Weird browser glitch?

Hi. This has happened four times already, including three times today. The first time happened a while back, when I was uploading an image of a Northern Cardinal to Commons from my computer. I think I had one Wikipedia window and two Commons windows open in my browser. I use IE. As I closed either one or two windows, I don't remember, new windows started randomly popping up, each an exact duplicate of a window I closed. If I pressed "Esc", the new windows would just come up like 'there is nothing to display'. Today, when I was opening new windows from my watchlist, once while editing persimmon, another time while editing The Weather Network, and another time with Cyclone Nargis, I closed the window I was editing to come back to my watchlist, and the exact same thing happened again! As I closed the window, more windows would pop up of the window I closed. The only way to stop this is by closing all the windows, in which I have to log back in again if I closed my watchlist window. Since my computer is a bit slow, it took a while for the windows to load, so today by the time I closed all the windows only about six or seven managed to stay up at the same time. If left unattended, perhaps it could open indefinitely. I remember with the TWN and Nargis articles, the page hadn't completely finished loading before I closed it. Is this a general browser glitch, or could it be some sort or virus? I'm not asking for professional advice. The problem is, this has never happened without me closing a window and also not without closing a wiki website, or at least I saved something, closed it before finished loading, and this happens. Any ideas? Thanks. ~AH1^(TCU) 19:43, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia has melted down. See my question below. Powerzilla (talk) 20:43, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Keyboard Problem

Hello, my 'e' key is at the point where it's barely responding. I have to press down on it fairly hard for the letter to appear on screen and it's significantly lowering my typing speed. Is there any quick fixes for this? Thank you —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.236.176.39 (talk) 20:34, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Buy a new keyboard? They only cost about £10-15. Algebraist 20:44, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

It's a laptop... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.236.176.39 (talk) 20:52, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Other option, get a vacuum cleaner and completely vacuum the contents of your keyboard. You would be surprised how much crap collects between the keys and the pad or membrane underneath! :) Thor Malmjursson (talk) 20:54, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Most laptops let you unscrew the faceplate of the keyboard, giving you better access to clean the inside of the keyboard with blowers, wipes or whatever. If you need online intructions, there's a good site for MAcs, ifixit.com, and I'll bet there are guides out there for some PC laptops. — Sam 21:09, 12 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.38.252.83 (talk)

You can buy some "switch cleaner" spray - (you'd get it in any decent computer store...or RadioShack) gently lever off the keycap with a flat screwdriver and spray a good squirt down into the center of the hole - put the keycap back on and tap the key repeatedly. If you've lead a good and virtuous life - your key will gradually come back to life. If it gets a bit better, do it again...but if not...give up and buy a USB keyboard - it should work just fine - even with a laptop. (Although it's going to be kinda inconvenient if you actually use your laptop for mobile computing). SteveBaker (talk) 00:20, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

When this has happened to me, it's been because something solid is stuck underneath the key (on my laptop). I usually just pop the key off and pull whatever it is out with tweezers... but be warned, you can damage the key doing this. I recently had to replace my keyboard, so I had a dummy to test on. Should you decide to do this (at your risk) you usually just lift on the side or bottom of the key and the cap will just pop off... depending on the manufacturer. On my new gateway, you lift from the bottom, on a slightly older gateway, it's the side. Anyway, make sure you don't lose the little squishy plastic piece underneath. To put it back on, just line up half of the key (generally under some hook things), and then push down on the other half to put it back on. (Again, at your own risk! I've broken keys doing this occasionally). DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:29, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia Having a MELT-DOWN?!

Is Wikipedia having a melt-down? It is repeatedly malfunctioning. Getting really weird shit on it, disconnects from wikipedia. I guess it finally blew up. Powerzilla (talk) 20:42, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I've had no problems. Can we have a bit more info? What operating system are you on? What browser are you using? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 21:32, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia sometimes has a little hiccup but it's usually fixed within hours. Just be patient. Seems fine now. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 02:07, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

no, wikipedia and the whole wiki network is absolutely fine. what you have experienced is most probable some maintenance interruption.

anubhav.g october 17, 2008

Ignoring Users on YouTube

Is there a way to find out which users are ignoring you on YouTube or how to find out if a certain user is ignoring you?Serpentipes (talk) 21:35, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

You mean users who have blocked you? You can try individually by trying to subscribe to their channel. It won't let you subscribe if they blocked you. ScienceApe (talk) 00:08, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

October 13

Is Windows 7 being released so soon because of the criticisms about Windows Vista?

I actually didn't realize that a successor to Vista was being released so soon. ScienceApe (talk) 00:07, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

No. You can make that claim if you like, but you'll have no evidence to back it any more than you can claim that Windows 7 will be released soon because Tony Gonzalez is looking for a quick trade. There is no cause and effect there. -- kainaw™ 01:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Last I checked, he was asking, not making that claim. 98.221.85.188 (talk) 01:31, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The first, second and eighth times I checked, he wasn't accusing ScienceApe of making the claim... only granting him the leverage to make it, if he should so wish. However on the Seventh viewing I saw nothing but blasphemy, and images of Ninjas lauging at the sight of the Wolfpocalypse. Raise arms, don't let the super wolf get us all. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 01:40, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Why would he want to make that claim? I don't understand that logic. Oh, and please re-review the rules, and act civil on the reference desk. 98.221.85.188 (talk) 13:44, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Ugh... If I wasn't civil with my identical style of response... then you definetly weren't being civil. Especially as I added surreal and friendly humour so you could cop out of responding and not feel like you were being attacked for posting unnecesary messages in an attempt to have ago at Kainaw. So, I was being Civil, you on the other hand are being somewhat rude and childish. As for making the claim... If he wasn't considering, reviewing or analyzing the possiblity and/or action of making such a claim then he wouldn't have posted the question, so on some level there is achance he might want to, or at least feel he could come to make or not make that claim. Kainaws response was Valid, complete and his claim note was entirely on point. You on the other hand are just a twat... now that's not civil :). - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 16:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I think something about my sig tells anon users "Read the preceding statement with as much ill intent as possible." I'm not really certain why, but I'd like to know. -- kainaw™ 01:56, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Don't be rude, and act civil on the reference desk. 98.221.85.188 (talk) 13:44, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Can you point to anything remotely uncivil in my response? I did not respond, "You are an idiot for making that claim." I responded, "You can make that claim." The first response, which you appear to be reading, is uncivil. The second response, which appears to be escaping your reading, is an allowance, permission, and acceptance of the questioner's view. Misreading responses and arguing that others are uncivil is, by nature, a very uncivil act. Perhaps you want to open another RFC on me and try to coerce others into joining in. -- kainaw™ 16:50, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Isn't it supposed to be 2010? That's like... 4 years. Windows 95-98 was 3, 98-2000 was 2. that to XP was also around 2. How is 4 years "soon" in this context? Even if it comes out this year its still the same gap XP was to 2000 and Windows 7 will be what XP is to 2000 (ie a small update with a few extra features)Gunrun (talk) 07:58, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Erm... we *are* in 2008 here. 2008 to 2010 is 2 years, which is about average, according to your figures. Or did you mean since Vista's overall release, which the person above doesn't seem to be referring to? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 18:03, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I was meaning to imply that the gap between releases isn't small at all. Just the gap between XP and Vista was so big. Gunrun (talk) 10:23, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Vista came out in late 2006, Windows 7 could arrive in Q3 of 2009. So it's going to be closer to 3 years. That is fewer compared to the gap between XP to Vista, which was 5 years. I think the interval between Vista and 7 seems so short (at least to me as well) because there probably won't be as many changes in computing from late 2006–2009 as there were from 2001–late 2006. Louis Waweru  Talk  18:20, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft has frequently said that Windows 7 would ship around 3 years after the availability of Vista. Vista was released twice: October 2006 for businesses, and January 2007 for consumers. Therefore, a release anywhere from late 2009 to early 2010 is possible. There are rumors of a June 2009 release date, which would allow Microsoft to get Win7 on many back-to-school computers. Any feelings that Win7 is being released very quickly is only because of the long time between XP and Vista. Most likely future releases of Windows will be released around 3 year after the previous version. -- Imperator3733 (talk) 18:38, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

• New versions of Mac OS X are released every couple of years, too. (Updates are stopped shortly thereafter.) Linux is the worst, though. Ubuntu, for example, has a new release every six months. There's a "long-term support" release that lasts three years. The bottom line is that us Windows users have been spoiled.--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 02:10, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Hm, an interesting perspective; most people I know tend to think the opposite: Windows users have been badly served by the lack of incremental improvements between Windows XP and Vista, leading to a drawn-out death for one, and a steep learning curve for the other.

MacOS X was able to add major new features and core improvements as soon as they were ready, while everything in Windows had to wait for Vista. And as for Ubuntu, one of its key advantages is precisely that it is does keep track of improvements in the software world.

The length of time offered for support is another issue, admittedly, but one form of support is to offer a smooth and cost-effective upgrade to an improved OS, rather than trying to patch all the holes in an ageing version. - IMSoP (talk) 16:59, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

What file types benefit most from defragmentation?

Although we have several articles on fragmentation and defragmentation, I don't see my issue addressed. Discussion follows based on 8.3 naming conventions, but answers should easily generalize (shouldn't they?)

• Initially, I thought compacting .exe (and .dll) files would have the most benefit, but now I'm fairly sure that defragging such files only helps once, at program launch.
• There wouldn't seem to be much benefit to compacting document files (.doc, .xls, etc), as they do a WriteToTemp-Delete-Rename sequence whenever they're resaved.
• Savefiles and the like from games wouldn't seem to offer much benefit, as they're really only written once and read a small number of times. I suppose each game designer decides whether to write to a new file or rewrite-in-place.
• Two of my email systems manage their own databases themselves, periodically compacting folders, so there's probably not much to be gained there?

So, although I dutifully cleanup and defrag once every two or three months, I'm hard pressed to know where I would most see a difference for my efforts. Experts? --DaHorsesMouth (talk) 01:45, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, what you are saying is that every operation gets faster - but none individually matters to you. But each one DOES make your machine run faster - programs start up only a little bit faster, they read their initial data only a little bit faster, they write results only a little bit faster...but every disk-related operation is faster - so there is a net win.

• You are right that once the program is loaded, it doesn't read the .exe file again - but lots of programs are starting and stopping in response to who-knows-what going on in the background. Your browser is loading plugins and helpers as you work, for example. DLL's may be loaded, unloaded and reloaded during the operation of some kinds of program.
• Documents and images will indeed tend to defrag themselves 'automatically' as they are written out - but lots of documents are read over and over without ever being re-written. Also, if your disk is horribly fragmented, the system may have to move the disk heads a long way to get to a sufficiently large contiguous free area to write new files out to - which slows things down.
• Game 'savefiles' are typically small - so yeah - not much benefit here. But the massive level files get a huge win from being contiguous...especially if the game 'streams' from disk continually as you move through the virtual world.
• Email systems aren't "defragging" (in the usual sense of the word) when they "compact" a mail archive. They are de-fragmenting within the blocks occupied by the file - but the file itself might still be scattered all over the drive if it's badly fragmented. Even the act of compacting will go a lot slower if the mail file is fragmented badly.
• In general, having gaps scattered all over your file system means that disk heads have to move further on the average...so EVERYTHING goes slower when the drive is fragmented...even operations like using swap-space that use contiguous blocks will run more slowly if the heads start off further away (on average) than they would with a defragged drive.

I don't think there is any one specific place where you'll see a speedup - but every operation gets a small benefit from having a nicely defragged drive, so there is a net win.

As a Linux user, I look in puzzled amazement that Windows STILL needs to have it's drive manually defragged after half a dozen major OS revisions. Linux systems NEVER needed to be defragged.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:13, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about never... every time you save something on your hard drive, it will put it in the first available block of adequate size (according to my understanding). So over time, as you delete files, there come to be gaps. Defragging may not be necessary (as it's not necessary with Windows) but it will stillincrease system performance on badly fragged drives, especially on slower HDD's. Heck, even my iPod could use some defragging from time to time. DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Note that if you have Steam installed on your computer, it will be difficult to defrag it (although you can easily defragment Steam games by right-clicking on the game, going to "Properties", clicking on the "Local Files" tab, and clicking the "Defrag cache files" button). -Jéské ^{(v^_^v Kacheek!)} 18:54, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Windows systems don't need to be defragged either. People just think they do, for some reason unknown to me. You can certainly get major performance benefits (on any OS) by reducing the number of head seek operations, but the kind of defragmentation that typical defragmenters do doesn't work very well to reduce head seek operations. By making each individual file contiguous, you're optimizing for the case of files being read from beginning to end in a certain order. This doesn't help at all for small files unless by an amazing coincidence some program reads a bunch of them in that semi-arbitrary order. It would help a lot for large files if they were commonly read from beginning to end, but that's actually rather rare; large files tend to consist of smaller parts which are read and written somewhat at random. Audio and video files are often read sequentially, but the bottleneck there is the presentation to the user, not the disk reads. If fragments of a large file are scattered all over the disk, moving them together might have some benefit since seek time does depend on the physical separation of the cylinders.

Executables are not read from beginning to end at program startup. On all major operating systems, they are demand paged. If the executable uses dynamic libraries (DLLs) then the typical startup sequence will involve reading a few pages from the executable, a few pages from a DLL, etc., so defragmenting each file individually is not going to help that much. Windows XP/2003/Vista record which pages are loaded the first time an application starts and preload those pages the next time, so you might see a bigger improvement in startup time on those OSes if you defragment. XP and later also record which files are used during boot and application startup and move them all together to a contiguous region of the disk (when the system is idle). If you use a third-party defragmenter that undoes that ordering you might actually hurt performance. -- BenRG (talk) 19:18, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Qwerty vs Dvorak: why no scientific evaluation?

I taught myself to touch type when I was about 16, and on a portable manual typewriter. It was about the handiest thing I have ever done, because I have always done my own typing, and average about 60 wpm on a computer keyboard. I have often wondered why the outmoded QWERTY is STILL standard, even when everything else about typing has changed so much.

I read many years ago that Dvorak minimised the distance the fingers had to travel by putting the most used keys on the home row, as well as on the keys used by the strongest fingers. Figures I read earlier were that Dvorak cut finger distance travel by about 30% over Qwerty which means you could either type a lot faster, or type at the normal speed but go easier on your fingers, with less chance of Repetitive Strain Injury.

I find it astonishing to read—here and elsewhere—that tests on the merits of the two systems “are inconclusive”. We are talking about entirely measurable quantifiable operations here, which can be researched for next to nothing in monetary outlay, by just about anyone. What, we have a Large Hadron Collider looking at the early universe, but tests on keyboard layout efficiency “are inconclusive’? Bollocks!

My idea would be that someone could write a simple program that begins by randomly allocating a virtual keyboard position to every letter and adds up the distance that has to be covered by moving from one letter to the next in a piece of input text. So the program would generate a particular keyboard layout, and the operator would then input a sizeable piece of text, say about 100 pages, and the program would measure how far fingers resting on home keys would have to travel to type the entire piece of text. If the program also included an average finger movement speed, it could also tell you long a competent typist would take to type that text.

The first thing you would measure would be the performance of Qwerty and Dvorak and the other candidate arrangements. At least such a system would give you measurements on the notional efficiency and speed of one system over another which had scientific and mathematical credibility.

By getting the program to test ALL the possible keyboard layouts, we could well come up with one which is better than any of the other candidates, and would be notionally the most efficient layout of all. Of course, there are other criteria to be considered apart from pure finger movement distance. The stronger fingers should have more work to do than the weaker ones, the work should be roughly equal for both hands, and awkward movements when fingers have to move down a row should be minimised, speed and dexterity measures would have to be adjusted for the different fingers, digraphs should not be adjacent and so on. But the initial program could be rejigged to give weight to all these other variables. Why has nothing like this been done? A program like that could be written by any amateur coder.

Of course the usual anal retentive will now post in and tell me that “this is not the place to canvass new ideas, no matter how brilliant”, so I am going to post this on the Wikipedia Computer Research Desk. As well as here. Myles325a (talk) 02:31, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Short answer: Because it's not "evaluation" that we need.

The problem is that we know that Dvorak (and other) 'new' keyboard layouts are faster...we don't need experiments to tell us that. The problem is that people won't switch - even though we know that we're using an inefficient layout and we know that better layouts are out there. If you made Dvorak keyboards and sold them for $10 each at "Best Buy" - you'd hardly sell a single one. So doing further research doesn't really get us anywhere...what's the point in knowing (even in mind-numbing detail) that QWERTY/AZERTY is a pile of crap if nobody will switch as a result of that knowledge?

Worse still - we're inadvertently training an entire generation into thinking that using a twelve-key telephone number pad is the best way to enter text!! (My grumbling tendonitis twitches in sympathy when I even consider that prospect!) So far from adopting better designs, we're actually heading backwards at amazing speed. I guarantee that by the time present-generation teenagers reach 40 to 50 years old - they're going to have terrible repetitive strain problems due to appalling user interface designs on cell phones. The replacement of the PDA by the up-market cellphone means that our brief foray into handwriting recognition has fallen by the wayside.

FWIW - there is an even better way than Dvorak. We should really toss out the gigantic, bloaded 101 key keyboard altogether and switch to using chording keyboards. In those setups, you mostly don't move your fingers at all - you type by entering 'chords' (like on a music keyboard) with the gentlest of fingertip pressure only.

• You don't move your fingers - so RSI issues disappear.
• You only need one hand to type - the other is free to write with a pencil or turn pages in a book or whatever.
• The "keyboard" is small enough that you could mount it onto a mouse - and move the entire keyboard around instead of having to move your hand off of the keyboard and onto the mouse a bazillion times a day.
• You need almost no desk space for the device. You can sit it comfortably in your lap if you want.
• You could easily adapt the design to work in the confines of a cellphone format.
• With fewer keys - it's cheaper than a 101 key contraption.
• It's SO different from QWERTY that it's actually easier to learn than Dvorak because there is no temptation to slip back into your old ways.

I have a hand-held wordprocessor called "The Microwriter" that dates back to the early 1980's - it has just six 'keys' (there are two 'thumb' keys - one acts as a kind of 'shift' key) and with about a day's practice, you can use it as well as your QWERTY keyboard - and most users get proficient enough to take realtime dictation on the things. (The photo of the Microwriter in the article is actually my machine). It's horrifying that this vastly more efficient technology is not standard - but getting all of the two billion keyboard users around the world to switch is impossible - and doing a 'gradual' change over would be utterly disasterous.

Just about the only problem with chording pads is that you need separate left- and right-handed versions. However, I'm left handed and I learned (by necessity) to chord with my right hand - and the ability to use a pencil in my left hand and do all of my keyboarding with my right is an enormous win. Sadly, the drivers for the Microwriter to allow it to drive a regular PC have long ago ceased to be supported...so I'm back with QWERTY.

But sadly, despite all of the huge gains to be had...it really doesn't matter how amazing the alternatives are - we're effectively stuck with QWERTY into the indefinite future.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:43, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

When I imagine using a chording keyboard, my hands ache at the thought of constantly holding them in one position and moving my fingers in unaccustomed combinations. I wonder how many people stick to it as a fraction of those who try it. —Tamfang (talk) 03:33, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I got tendinitis in my right index finger from mousing. My index finger didn't move at all relative to the button, it just clicked. That was the repetitive strain that caused the injury. I've never tried a chord keyboard (I've known about them for years), but like Tamfang I feel pain at the mere thought of it—especially the idea of putting it on a mouse. It's also hard for me to believe that chord keyboards improve typing speed, since you have to release each chord before pressing the next, and I can press sequences of keys with different fingers faster than I can repeatedly press the same key.

As for Dvorak, I've never known what to think. Simple-minded metrics like distance between keypresses are useless because human physiology is complicated. The way to get useful data on this question is for some corporation that employs a lot of typists to convert a fraction of them to Dvorak and look at the effect on typing speed (which can be monitored with software) and RSI-related complaints. I'm surprised that this seems to happen so infrequently. Hasn't it ever been a management fad?

Claude Shannon estimated the entropy of written English at about 1–1.5 bits per character, so with a really efficient layout it should be possible to type around 3–5 letters per keystroke on a 32-key keyboard, or per chord on a 5-key chord keyboard. It'd be a bear to learn, though. -- BenRG (talk) 10:15, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Just a thought, regarding your suggested program... perhaps you could add a feature to give more weight to common usage? For example, the word "the" is very common, so since this word is very common, perhaps the letters contained in these common words would be on the home row and towards the middle more?

Seriously though, I don't think it would make any difference in the long run, because naturally almost every keyboard on the planet is of the qwerty variety and it will be impossible to change... like America's continual clinging to the imperial system? (On an interesting side note I remember reading that the qwerty keyboard was originally set up in a way so that it would be more difficult to type on... since typing too quickly on a typewriter will jam the lever thingys...) DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:44, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

For most uses it doesn't make much difference. It's the human being trying to think best what to say that's the bottleneck. It's like the Heisenberg principle Time x Nonsense >= some constant. Is it a good idea to cut down time when so many people already dash off things they regret? Dmcq (talk) 05:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

In fact a far better way of selling things like chording pads than saying they save time would be if they could give extra convenience or a saving in space for portables or as SteveBaker says because it gives a free hand. For instance having one hand chording and the other drawing with a stylus could be very productive. BTW I change sense to nonsense in my little formula above - shows that even a QWERTY keyboard doesn't slow me down enough. Dmcq (talk) 10:18, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I think this is very similar to x86. Just about everyone (who can understand computer hardware) will agree that x86 is a terrible design, but it is used throughout the world, people understand how it works, and there is a lot of software that runs on it. There have been many alternatives to x86, but they have all lost because x86 is so widespread and is so cheap. For the same reason, no alternative keyboard layout will replace QWERTY because everyone knows QWERTY. The benefits of switching simply do not outweigh the cost and difficulty of doing so. -- Imperator3733 (talk) 18:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The niche might grow in the future, though (with the advent of touch screen which makes a new keyboard layout purely to the software designers. Kushal (talk) 02:23, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

there is pretty much no doubt that dvorak is faster. in the caveman days, when computers didn't have screens and were called typewriters, the winners of the typing speed competitions always used dvorak keyboarded typewriters, (which had to be specially built, obviously)

and regarding the chorded alphabet: if you put a microswitch under each finger, that's eight bits, and you can teach yourself to type in ASCII. very handy if you're trying to type while riding a bike or some such.

and re the bad effect of mousing on your index finger: yes indeed. screwed my right hand up good. i've switched over to old IBM keyboards with the trackpoint gadget that sticks up in between the g and h and b keys, but they're getting scarce. at least a few notebooks have them now, though.Gzuckier (talk) 16:41, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

This past week I've been reading up on alternative keyboard designs, and found someone who claims 80wpm on a keyboard that he designed himself, with 18 keys. QMK and ZMK (I don't know how they are related) are keyboard firmware systems that allow, among other features, "layers" of encodings; this chap evidently puts the 14 or so most frequent letters on the top layer, and shifts to get the others. That's a sort of chording, I suppose. —Tamfang (talk) 04:20, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Free web hosting request

Can anybody with room to spare on their website/web server give me something to play around with? I want (need) at least a few hundred megabytes of space, some bandwidth, local .htaccess control, Ruby on Rails, PHP (safe mode off by default), and MySQL. All the free webhosts that have the above features that I've seen (believe it or not) have really crappy signup systems. I might use the site as a pilot for a project or simply as a sandbox for educational purposes. --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 05:33, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Would... nearly free do you? I use this host called NearlyFreeSpeech.net which seems to have everything you offer (except the php safe mode off by default thing but I'm sure this is changable) and they're pennys to set up and use especially if your site is low bandwidth. Gunrun (talk) 07:43, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

If you want a totally free and full-service sandbox, just run it off your localhost? You can always migrate to a full server if you want later. Much easier than trying to finagle free hosting. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:18, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, setting up a webserver on your local host would not be to hard at all.

XAMPP. x42bn6 Talk Mess 23:26, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I already have a localhost server...I just want some basic hosting. --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 23:57, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Is there a place to request features for Windows?

I have thought of a dozen or so features I think should be added to Windows 7. For one, I'd like MS to give us back the old defragmenter. I don't know why they castrated it in Vista. Is there a place where I can request stuff like that?--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 18:24, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft Connect is the place. I don't think they castrated the defragmenter, I think the idea was that people shouldn't have to worry about things like this. But if you want to see what's going on try using it with the command prompt defrag/?. Louis Waweru  Talk  18:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The defragmenter in Vista runs in the background, which makes sure that everyone is defragging. With the old defragmenter, people who don't know much about computers most likely wouldn't know to defrag. -- Imperator3733 (talk) 18:43, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. I've used the command-line version, but it doesn't give the graph. I understand the graph doesn't mean much, but it lets me see the progress and how much time is left. Maybe they should add an "Advanced" button to see the old screen? I've always liked Windows for the feedback it gives users. It seemed like, as Waweru said, MS was making a half-hearted attempt to hide things from us like they were Apple. At the same time, they added things like Windows Defender and the Compatibility Assistant that pop up extra messages. They need a clearer mission, it seems.--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 18:47, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Not having used Vista, I'm not sure if the following is entirely correct, but the defrag tool in Windows 2000, 2003 and XP was a cut down version of Diskeeper. As this was proprietary software used under licence, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft finally created their own bespoke defrag software for Vista. A lot of people use a full version of Diskkeeper instead. Nanonic (talk) 22:30, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The bundled defrag tool was never very good. There are much better defragmenters for Windows 2000/XP/Vista, like the free open-source JkDefrag. Better yet, don't bother defragmenting at all. It's mostly a rain dance. -- BenRG (talk) 23:36, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

There are many better defrag tools than Diskeeper. There are also other reasons to avoid the software. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 02:45, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Good Proxy?

I'm looking for a good proxy to hide my IP address- this means no pop-ups. I've tried a few, but they all have pop-ups and massive, annoying ads, so I figured I'd ask my knowledgeable fellow Wikipedians. Any help? A plus would be if it showed me as in Canada. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 19:28, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

tor? --98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:48, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Anything I don't have to download? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 19:53, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Hide My Ass! I tried the first one it gave me, worked well from Japan to NY. Forgot to undo the settings and Wikipedia showed me a screen I'd never seen before about being behind a proxy (hahah). Here's the idea in Firefox. So, you'd want to chose one located in Canada. Louis Waweru  Talk  20:23, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

If you have the knowledge and a second computer you can always set up your own proxy, if your goal was to simply avoid getting pop ups. —Preceding unsigned comment added by E smith2000 (talk • contribs) 22:34, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Who are you trying to hide your IP address from, and for what reason? I'm not saying you shouldn't, but it makes a difference as far as choosing proxies goes. -- BenRG (talk) 23:39, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Bit of a long story, but essentially, I'm a spambaiter on occasion. I've used other proxies, but the pop-ups get REALLY annoying when you're actually trying to do something other than get on Youtube while you're at work. Just a bit of a precaution so it looks like my emails are coming from somewhere else other than Michigan, USA (particularly when I'm claiming they're coming from Toronto, Ontario). --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 02:18, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The good ones aren't free. The free ones are either slow or covered in ads. You can find many pay-services out there that charge per KB of bandwidth. The low-end options are relativity cheep and should be good'nuff for spambaiting. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 02:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Make Live USB image with Mondo Rescue

Resolved

I am trying to make an image/clone of a Live USB I have with Mondo Rescue, but it never works, it always end up backing up my PC, even if I choose /media/USB as my root directoy (in mondo rescue)... Does anyone knows if this is suppose to let me create images of USB flash drives (a Live USB in particular)? or it is just to backup my runnnig system? I am going crazy with this... SF007 (talk) 22:50, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

dd (Unix) works for volumes under 2GiB. --antilived^{T | C | G} 03:40, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Partimage. --wj32 ^t/c 06:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

dd (Unix) is not an option (only does raw copies, not to mention it is a command line program), and partimage does not backup the MBR properly due to a bug in the software... I tried many programs, none of them worked like I wanted... SF007 (talk) 12:26, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I think what I am trying to do is not possible... (backup a Live USB + bootloader in it and restore to another Flash drive of different size). R-Drive Image and Acronis True Image almost made it... Thanks anyway. SF007 (talk) 16:43, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I thought raw copy is EXACTLY what you need, for you need MBR, bootloader, and the content itself. I have done dd transfers between different sized hard drives and they end up exactly the same (as long as the backup drive is bigger than the original), and then you can resize the partition with gparted if needed. And what's wrong with a command line programme? --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:16, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

October 14

Making a different email client the default in IE

Hello all. I want to have my computer's default email be myname@verizon.net. When I click on "contat us" on amny sites that attempts to openb up an email screen but it openbs up to a default ermail client. I know where to access this to change it: I go to properties in Internet Explorer, and in there, it has a place to change the default. But, unfortunately, in the drop down menu, it gives a host of different services , such as AOl and hotmail. I do not see any way to fill in a new default (like I said, I want it to be my verizon email). Can you please advise how to manually change the field to fill in and remedy this problem. Thank you very much in advance.--68.237.217.229 (talk) 04:28, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

You need to change how Internet Explorer handles mailto: links. I do not have Internet Explorer handy for me. Under Mozilla Firefox, all you need to do is Options > Applications >> mailto and change the setting to desired one. Is there any way for me to convince you to test drive Mozilla Firefox as a replacement for Internet Explorer? Thanks. Kushal (talk) 08:44, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I use firefox pretty much exclusively, and when I'm not, I'm on Safari. This is for a person who is computer illiterate who I would have to train in all new ways if I changed the browser she uses. This "problem" is only a problem if you don't know, for example that you can simply highlight the address copy and go to your own email client. I would be much easier for me to change the default, trust me on this. Can someone help me actual change the email default?--71.249.111.130 (talk) 21:12, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Windows XP SP2 should allow you to set program access and defaults. 69.150.163.1 (talk) 02:19, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The original poster is confused why AOL and Hotmail appear in the list of e-mail clients, but the verizon.net e-mail provider can't be easily added. You can't just add arbitrary websites or e-mail providers to the list. A program must be installed for it to appear in this list. For example, to add Yahoo Mail to that list, you have to install the Yahoo Toolbar for Internet Explorer. To add Gmail to that list, you have to install the Gmail Notifier.

For a verizon.net address, I couldn't find an answer for certain, but here are some possibilities to try:

• You might try installing the Verizon Broadband Toolbar, but I'm not sure if it adds verizon.net mail to the list of default e-mail programs.
• You can go to activate.verizon.net, select "Configure additional PC or reinstall software", and select to customize the install. There might be a mailto plugin available as one of the things you can install.
• Another alternative is to set up Outlook Express to use the verizon.net address, then select Outlook Express in the list as the default e-mail program. This will allow you to use the verizon.net e-mail address, but will look and feel different from using the verizon.net website.

--Bavi H (talk) 05:26, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Excel VBA query

value in cell "B15": "D" & rwcnt & ":" & "J" & rwcnt

when we read the text in cell 'B15' through VBA code, the code should consider rwcnt as a variable and substitute its value so that the whole text in cell 'B15' becomes a range, like: D6:J6 (if rwcnt=6)

How to do this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 157.191.2.16 (talk) 07:26, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

You want cell B15 to contain the text "B6:J6"? If so,

Range("B15").Value = "D" & rwcnt & ":J" & rwcnt

works for me. I declared rwcnt as an integer. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 08:00, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

rwcnt is not constant and keeps on changing its value, so we put the text "D" & rwcnt & ":J" & rwcnt

and as the value of rwcnt changes, on accessing the value of cell B15 ie. "D" & rwcnt & ":J" & rwcnt, we can refer to the range contained in B15

eg:

rwcnt=10, then set rng=range("B15").value so this must set rng to (D10:J10) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 157.191.2.16 (talk) 08:21, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure what you're doing but storing a range as text in a cell seems inefficient. You should just reference the range directly for whatever you need it for. Maybe if you told us what you're trying to achieve we might be able to help. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 09:47, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Secure Password

If I choose a sequence of letters like "asdfghj" -following a path on the keyboard - for my password, is that secure? What about choosing the first letter of every word in a sentence like 'wtfe' for "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Besides being too short, is there any problem in the second approach? Mr.K. (talk) 11:01, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Short passwords are vulnerable to dictionary and brute force attacks. They should be avoided at all costs. Something as short as four letters is also vulnerable to rainbow table hash cracking in a crazy way. Avoid it! "Besides being too short"—that's the be-all and end-all of this particular limitation.

Long passwords are as secure as any other password. They aren't vulnerable to brute force attacks but there are a million other ways they can be compromised with poor user habits or poor technical setups. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 11:27, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The best passwords involve alphanumeric characters and numbers along with capital and lower-case letters. Here are some randomly generated suggestions from my school's "Change your password" webpage: =HogTwIT2, 4LaB*smuG, %Dug2sPEc, 8*JErkteA, CATbanG5#, jumP}9Yea, moAN&6LiP.--droptone (talk) 11:41, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

• I'd wary of the first approach, as most "dictionary" techniques should include obvious combinations. The second is certainly better, as it is effectively using the sentence/phrase as a mnemonic, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that, so long as the combination itself can't be easily guessed. However, for better strength (as Droptone mentioned) you should probably be combining case and numerals as well, with other characters being cool, too - thus the sentence approach may be limiting in this regard. Perhaps "Wikipedia is the 01 Encyclopedia" giving Wit01E, or something similar, will be more effective. - Bilby (talk) 11:46, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

@98.217: I was not suggesting my password could be so short. I was only exemplifying a concept.

@droptone: "alphanumeric characters and numbers"? Are you sure that you didn't mean "alphanumeric characters and letters and numbers"? I see that there are real words in your suggested passwords: lab smug, dug, jerk tea, cat ban, jump. Would it compromise the security of an encrypted file?

@bilby: couldn't a robot scan for sentences, pick the first letter and build a dictionary of passwords?

Perhaps the best approach is to open 20 pages, takes a random letter and mix it up with random special characters...Not easy to remember... :(Mr.K. (talk) 12:04, 14 October 2008 (UTC)]

Yes, except that the range of possibilities for sentences is much greater than the range of possibilities for words. A seemingly random string of letters that happens to be part of a mnemonic is going to be just as good (to all practical intents) as a random string of letters that isn't part of a mnemonic.

It is part of why there is a push towards passphrases for security, instead of passwords - it makes dictionary attacks much harder, while still making it easier to remember - although the mechanism for brute force attacks changes, rather than is broken. At the same time, obvious pass phrases (such as "This is my password") as still going to be a bad idea. :) So I guess obvious mnemonics are bad, too. - Bilby (talk) 12:16, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Because long passwords are difficult to remember and they should contain letters (both upper case and lower case), numbers, and symbols, most security systems fail miserably once users get in the habit of writing their password on a post-it note and putting under their keyboard, in their drawer, or even on their monitor. Many of the people I work with are not native English speakers, I've found a nice trick. I taught them l33t. It is easy to remember for most people. Then, I tell them to use a slang word in their native language and type in sort of in a l33t way. So, something like "huozipichu" is easily remembered as "Hu0z1P1c#u". I don't know much more than English, so I decided to use slang words I learn from others. My problem is that if I don't use a password for a while, I forget the slang word and then can't remember the password. -- kainaw™ 12:59, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Another approach for passwords you don't enter often is to take a random sentence from a book that you have near the computer. Just remember what page it is on. A passphrase is much more secure than a password, as long as nobody knows what book you used. If you type it often enough it becomes quite easy to remember, incidentally, because it is not just random letters and characters. --140.247.11.9 (talk) 23:13, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Extracting *.rar files in Mac OSX

I have an archive that I need to extract. It has lots of files ending in ".rar", and before the file extension, they are all numbered - like archive1.rar, archive2.rar, and so on. I've tried using The Unarchiver and Stuffit Expander, but neither of them work. Stuffit says "An error occurred attempting to extract... The structure of the archive is damaged (Error #17540)." I hit OK, and it starts on the next file. It continues on to the next file, and keeps on giving me the same error. I'm pretty sure it's not corrupted, because I extracted it once before.

Any suggestions?My name is anetta (talk) 12:20, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Use Puppy Linux for Mac. You can start it from a pen drive. Mr.K. (talk) 12:37, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I'll (try to) run it in VMWare Fusion, and presume it can extract *.rar. From your answer, I'm not sure if you noticed, so I'll make it explicit: this question is about extracting an apparently corrupt archive. If using Linux will help, I'm willing to try. But running Linux isn't the aim, unlike my question further up the page about using Ubuntu in VMware Fusion.My name is anetta (talk) 13:00, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I've never tried it, but assuming that the problem is that the unarchivers you've tried simply failed to handle multi-part rar archives, (rather than a corrupted file), you might want to give UnRarX a shot. - Bilby (talk) 13:05, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I am aware that your files are probably not corrupted. Having extracted them once, however, doesn't mean that they are not corrupted now. Perhaps the easier way would be to use a computer with Windows or Linux on it. 80.58.205.37 (talk) 15:09, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

You can always try the official UnRAR command-line program; scroll down to "UnRAR for Mac OS X - Command line freeware Mac OS X universal binary UnRAR" --71.106.183.17 (talk) 17:48, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thankyou, 80.58, I presume you're Mr.K logged out. The file is extracted anyway, thanks again.My name is anetta (talk) 17:49, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm a Windows XP user, but Zipeg is some awesome freeware that is also compatible with Mac OSX. It can open pretty much any archive file: ZIP, RAR, ARJ, LHA/LZH, 7z, TAR, GZ, TGZ, BZIP2, CPIO, RPM, ISO, CHM, Z, CBR, CBZ, WAR, and EAR, to name some. I've used it for quite some time as my default extractor, and it works fine with RARs, from my experience. bibliomaniac15 03:16, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

directional ethernet cable?

after a couple of unsatisfactory days trying to get IT at work to determine why i couldn't log in to the network, i finally got some guy who explained to me that the ethernet cable we use has a little H at one end for the hub end and a little S at the other end for the system and mine might be reversed; and in fact, it was and hooking the H end up to the little connector on the wall and the S end up to the computer fixed everything. ?? The ends look quite symmetrical; it's a crossover cable, but that's still symmetrical. the cable says 568-A Cat 5. i screwed around with serial cabling and breakout boxes and null modems and all that crap for a long time,but i've never heard of ethernet cable being directional. how's it work? how common is that? my home router manual doesn't say anything about it, although it does address the crossover/no crossover issue. what's the deal? thanks. Gzuckier (talk) 16:33, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

These guys say if you're connecting a PC to a hub "you MUST use a Straight cable." Looking at their page for a straight cable, I can't see any way that swapping ends would make a difference. I'm puzzled too. --LarryMac | Talk 19:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

My first assumption on reading the original question is that it's a little gentle trolling. But I'll assume good faith...

Ethernet cables are not directional. No ifs, no buts, the concept makes no sense. Whoever told you that was either messing with you, or had a valid motive but a questionable way of implementing it. The rationale is that if I as Helldesk person ask one of my users to please physically check that a given cable is plugged in, and in the correct socket, there's a fair chance that he'll just say "OK", sit there for a few seconds, and then tell me he's checked and all is fine. In his mind this is not the problem, he's sure it's plugged in, and he's not going to go crawling around under the desk to check what he already knows to be true. In a bid to make sure he actually does go look at the connections, I can ask him (on whatever pretext - reversing cable, blow into plug, etc) to remove and replace the cable. If he tells me he's done that (and he didn't see through my request for the sham that it is) I can be much more confident that he actually went and looked at some cables.

It's a well-known ploy. 81.187.153.189 (talk) 19:59, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I'd considered that the IT guy was fooling around, but what about the alleged H and S labels? --LarryMac | Talk 20:07, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The 569-A refers to the standard now known as TIA/EIA-568-B. The ends are interchangeable. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 20:20, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

me again. serious, not trolling. if i can, i'll upload photos of the labels at the ends, but that doesn't really prove anything... anyway, being careful about what end of the cab le goes where seems to make the absolute difference, just as the guy said. all the references from all the related articles here don't mention anything, every one says direction doesn't matter, and the other thought i had, i.e. only one end is grounded, is also defined as untrue.

idea, however: termination? wouldn't it be bad for the network to have unterminated cables sticking out of the hub? i can imagine that the connector in the box on the wall may have a little switch inside that puts a termination across it when the cable is removed, and the same for a laptop docking station, but a lot of the cubicles here have just the cable hanging out of the wall box without anything on the computer end when somebody takes the computer away... so is it possible that the cable could contain a termination on one end that was sufficient when there wasn't a computer plugged in, but wouldn't "short out" the signal to a computer that was plugged in? of course, that wouldn't exactly explain why it would "short out" the signal if the wrong end was plugged into the wall..... just grasping at straws..... Gzuckier (talk) 15:39, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The termination theory doesn't really make electrical sense. By not being plugged in to a device on both ends, the cable in essence is terminated. No data can flow through an unplugged cable (on either end), as there is no complete circuit. Is it possible that your company doesn't use standard Ethernet cables and network equipment for some reason? Because if a cable was made by your company and not wired (in the little plug housing thing) in the standard order, then direction would make a difference. Say the 8 conductors are numbered 1-8, if end A was arranged 12345678 and B was 87654321 or if B was also 12345678 (pass-through and cross over, although I am just making up arrangements) then it wouldn't matter which end was where. But if either end was scrambled, say A was 12345678 and B was 3657814 (again, just making up gibberish to demonstrate my point), then the correct plug on the correct end would make a difference. But I can't think of any reason to do that, so that's probably no more than a theory... (see Ethernet crossover cable#Crossover cable pinouts if you want the actual arrangements, there's a nice diagram) DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 03:11, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, there's a quick test to determine if your cable is directional. Unplug both ends (again) and re-reverse it to its original state, making sure both ends are plugged in snuggly. Matt Deres (talk) 16:25, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I just wanted to add how you can SEE how the cable is reversable.

A Picture is worth a thousand words. $--~~~~$

SMS services that support Primus Canada?

Are there any free services that provide weather updates, or alerts from arbitrary RSS feeds, via SMS and support Primus Canada? (Alerts via e-mail won't help, because Primus doesn't provide an e-mail address for my phone.) NeonMerlin 20:45, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

What would be the best WiFi technology for a very busy and large house/office?

We live in a big Penthouse and use it as an office too. The house is very big and it has 2 levels. Also, we're located at the 8th floor, with 7 floors of offices bellow, which have their own WiFi network. We use wireless phones, which operate on the 2.4 Ghz freq.

I've been reading a lot about 802.11n and a bit about 802.11y. I would like to know if any of these, or any other, technologies would be better for our penthouse.

I must say that it has all kinds of halls, doorways and windows. All made of drywall and some real concrete walls too. Mainly it's a square. Renich (talk) 22:59, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

THIS is a tricky question, but MY suggestion is get a router and a wired network. if you use it for any type of office work just the security alone would be a large benefit. Assuming though you don't want that then that leaves other options. 802.11n is not officially out yet, so any router that claims it is, means it is "pre-n" and for all we know n could change drastically from the state its in now, leaving proprietary issues. Not my suggestion. Likewise, 802.11y isn't out yet, it's just a theoretical band with no actual routers supporting it. So unless this is in the future you need this set up, I can't suggest that. That leaves you down with 802.11a/b/g, and G is a combination of a and b more or less. I would suggest g if you HAVE to use wi-fi. Now for the channel. Basically use whatever you can that's not near other channels. use whatever the floors below you arn't using, and separate yourself from the 2.4Ghz freq. That's the most I can suggest offhand. The problem is the network won't penetrate the concrete walls very well, but the drywall it shouldn't have significant problems with.

In short, Wire your network, If you can't then get a 802.11g router, but if you can, wire it please. cat5e-cat6 doesn't cost THAT much. Forai (talk) 23:07, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply. The problem is that most of the computers here are laptops and that leaves me with setting up 4 routers and putting them around the house, bridged. And, isn't the unfinished standard correctable by a firmware update in the future? Renich (talk) 23:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The unfinished standard MAY be correctible, what pre-n does is it takes the basic premise of what 802.11n is going to be about (dual antenna, bouncing as I understand) and it creates a router that uses that. For all they know they could say "802.11n is HORRIBLE" and turn the standard into an advanced way of creating a unicorn. OBVIOUSLY a stretch of an example but they could say "research has found three antenna are SIGNIFICANTLY better at reducing noise, and increases distance threefold" or something like that, and impliment 3 antenna. BASICALLY I just don't trust a company coming out with a product before the standards say it should. I get what you mean about the laptops being drastically far apart though. My suggestion in that case is 802.11g for wifi, but the point is still wired IF PLAUSIBLE or possible.

in short, 802.11g. Wired is still the PLEASE DO suggestion but wiring does require alot of work. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Forai (talk • contribs) 23:34, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Assuming your laptops have support for 802.11n(draft), I'd suggest going with that. I frequently connect to wireless N networks, to great success. While the standard may not be completely finalized, it's close enough that I don't think it will change much. If they do change it, any router you buy now will continue to work in the future. (Honestly, I thought N had been finalized by now.) Anyway, I love the speed and range of N, and I always get really strong signals, even through multiple walls. Of course, make sure to secure your network immediately (not only to protect your files, but to keep WiFi moochers like myself from using Limewire on your connection), using something like WPA (of course, don't use "password" as your password... how many free internet sessions that one has gotten me). Anyway, yeah, I think 802.11n is definitely the way to go... I don't understand why it's not more widespread already. DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 02:41, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

After setting up hundreds of networks over the years, and currently using WiFi. The best answer is NONE. ( well, mabye the presidents office, and the largest confrence room ), but other than that, just run eveything along baseboards. I wired one design firm that *hated* blue wires. The DETESTED them, so we encased all the blue wires in 1/2 PVC that they painted with a gold stripe. Looked great, and every workstation had 100base speeds. ( They did their confrence room in wireless, a linksys, that had multiple problems, WEP got cracked, it had multiple firmware issues... replaced it with a NetGear, and they were happy as clams. Location was SOM in San Francisco ). ( Oh, did I tell you I am hijacking someone else's network? ) Secret (talk • contribs)

Is there a relative to Flash in GNU & Linux?

I've been looking for a while and I can't find a tool or language that does the same things as Flash does. Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in Flash at all, but, maybe, in the functionality it offers, if it's available for GNU & Linux. I'm looking for some kind of SVG framework or something that enables me to make interactive presentations fast and easy, as Flash or Director would. Renich (talk) 23:26, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

So, let me get this straight: you're looking for both a different language and an easy tool and you want it to run inside Linux? No, of course not. Even the open-source community is embracing Flash with the Gnash player. There are programs to make animated SVGs easily in Windows and there are programs to make Flash easily in Linux, but they apparently wouldn't suffice for your needs. I guess you'll have to code an animated SVG in vi. O'Reilly has a book about SVGs that will tell you how.--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 02:21, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure "embraced" is the word you're looking for. I'd go with "is forced to support". APL (talk) 04:01, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, I know that you can view content made in flash, on GNU & Linux, but, what I'm talking about is generating the animated/interactive content. Yeah, I'm sure you can do cool stuff using SVG, but I would like to know if there is some framework or something... or an IDE so I can, or any user, can make, with proper knowledge, a fine and interactive presentation. Renich (talk) 23:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

What capabilities are you looking for specifically? I haven't used it, but depending on what you're looking for this might do the trick : [1] APL (talk) 04:01, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, I would say: a) audio/video capable, b) scriptable, c) capable of conections (smtp, ftp, http, etc), d) animanimable, e) easy to run in any environment (with the proper engine/run environment. I want to make cool and interactive presentations on GNU & Linux, if it's with some advanced capability of Open Office, it's ok, just want to know what's in the menu for this. Renich (talk) 23:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

October 15

Power Supply

I'm looking into buying a new graphics card (and while I'm at it I'll buy a new mansion and a new private island.) Anyway, the one I'm looking at says its Minimum System Power Requirement is 400 Watts. Now, does that mean I can get a power supply that is only 400 watts, or do I need to consider other things when determining that power supply I need? Digger3000 (talk) 06:26, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It's a rough recommendation for an average computer with that type of graphics card, with an average PSU. So yeah, you need to factor the entire computer's requirements in. You might need more, or less than what they recommend. There are several calculators out there, such as [2] or [3], that will give you a general idea of your overall wattage and 12V current needs. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Ok, well let me ask you this. According to those calculators, the power supply I have now isn't powerful enough for my computer as it is. (It says I need 430W, I have 268W) And yet my computer seems to be running fine. Am I currently at risk of my computer, like, blowing up or something? And if not, would I even need to increase my power supply for this new card? Digger3000 (talk) 06:54, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Interesting. I just tried the first link, and I got a recommended 371 W PSU, whereas the Newegg one recommended me a 445W PSU. Which gave you that rating? If your computer is working fine right now it's not going to blow up any time soon, but without knowing exactly how much it's drawing and exactly how much more a new graphics card would add, it's hard to say if you'll need to upgrade. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 07:07, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The second link gave me the 430W figure. The first link only wants 208W for what I have now, but I don't know if I chose all the right options on the first link. Digger3000 (talk) 07:12, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Make sure you're looking at the bottom under Recommended PSU (they have a Generic and a Decent Brand section down there too), not the estimated draw. Few PSUs actually give you exactly what they're advertising, at least not for sustained periods of time. That's also a reason that people tend to overdo the wattage when they buy cheap PSUs, and probably why the Newegg one is giving such high estimates. And make sure you're feeding it the right number of USB devices, case fans, PCI cards, etc. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 07:14, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The recommended PSU wattage is 325W on the first link, still higher than what I actually have now. So, worst case scenario, what would happen if I tried putting a graphics card in my computer that needed more power than my computer could supply? Would it, actually, blow up? Digger3000 (talk) 07:24, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It wouldn't work. Your computer might fail to POST, the graphics card or some other component might stop while gaming or doing any other stressful task, and it'll generally be unstable. It's generally not going to cause damage; it might cause data loss if it crashes while you're doing something. The only case of damage being caused is if it spikes for some reason. I guess that might potentially happen if you're pushing a low-quality PSU to or past its limit, but it's less likely than the computer simply not booting or crashing while in use. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 07:35, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

So, in your opinion, if my computer is running on a 268W power supply when (according to those calculators) it should be running on at least 325W, could I get away with just using a 400W power supply with this graphics card that claims 400W as its minimum? Digger3000 (talk) 07:40, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, as long as it's a decent quality PSU. Despite what I said in the last one I wouldn't recommend underdoing it, but that sounds like a safe bet. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 07:43, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Ok, gracias for your help. Digger3000 (talk) 07:47, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I have a system with a graphics card that needs a bunch of power. A GeForce 7600GT. I looked at getting a 500W PSU, and ended up getting a 750W for $21 more. My roommate got the same card, got a 500W PSU, added a DVD Burner, and another HD, as well as 2 more gigs of ram. Now he cannot burn DVDs any more, and even lost the ability to burn altogher. His +12V rail is down to 11.5v. Mine is still at 12.2v. Another friend of mine asked me ( about USED power supplies.) He was looking for a PSU for a core duo 2 with 4GB of ram. Again, 2 HDs. Looked between a 550 and a 650W. He got the 650W, and hasn't had any problems. ( yea, the power went to his head, he over clocked his system, and ... ... ... still works fine! ).

Lesson: get more for expandable systems. Less, and you cut the board too short. 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:01, 18 October 2008 (UTC)--

OS X Finder: just one window at a time

A beloved coworker of mine (i) has somehow reconfigured the sole Mac in the office (OS X 10.5.5) so that when you have a window of Finder open and click to open another folder the newly opened window pushes its predecessor off the screen, and (ii) won't be back for a couple of days. This setting is irritating (and as far as I can see utterly pointless). I looked among relevant-looking menu options but saw nothing helpful. (In particular, "Window|Bring All to Front" merely left the one window on the screen. What obvious option have I overlooked? Tama1988 (talk) 10:02, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

If you go into 'folder options' (when on finder should be on the menu-bar in one of the menus) you should be able to select an option setting it "open in new window" - that should return it so that opening a new folder results in a new window (and an old window with the original click). Personally I find folder navigation in OS X to be infinitely worse than in MS Windows (though spotlight is very good) but perhaps that is because i've used MS systems for a lot longer than have had my apple laptops (15 years compared to 5). 194.221.133.226 (talk) 12:32, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Excellent, thank you! Tama1988 (talk) 08:17, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Anti-Aliasing in XP Service Pack 3

I just installed Service Pack 3, and everything seems to have worked fine, except that it's now added a rather annoying anti aliasing effect to everything. It's not just a text smoothing effect like Cleartype - everything, including pictures, is blurred. Is there anyway to turn this off? If it helps, I've got a Radeon 9550 card. Thanks, Laïka 13:13, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

That doesn't sound right at all. If you take a screenshot, does the effect show up (obviously you'd need to check with another machine); if so, I'd be curious if you could post one here. Otherwise, have you recently updated your video card's drivers? -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 13:32, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

No it doesn't - if I zoom in the picture, it just appears to be made up of regular pixels. I've not updated my video card drivers in a couple of months - might that help? Laïka 13:55, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, I've fixed it. For some reason, the Service Pack had shifted everything about half a pixel the left, which was what was triggering the effect - readjusting my monitor did the trick. Thanks anyway. Laïka 14:08, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Cpython and Jython?

I'm new to programming and a looked at the Python programming language.

What exactly is Cpython and Jython??? I downloaded the Jython file and installed it, but I don't know what is does. Can I downlaod Cpython too??? How do I used Cpython and Jython??? And again what is JPython?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.243.235.218 (talk) 15:24, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Cpython is a python runtime written in the C programming language; jPython is one written in (and running on the runtime system for) the Java programming language. If you don't particularly want to interact with existing Java language libraries, then Cpython is probably the best place to start. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 15:38, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. CPython is the "default, most-widely used implementation of the Python programming language"; it is the implementation that most texts assume your are using by default. Jython seems to be a few releases behind CPython. You may not notice many differences at first, but as you start doing more complex things with Python (and especially once you get into some of the more obscure Python modules) the differences will become more apparent.

If you are new to programming as well as new to Python, start by browsing around the official Python language website. There is a very useful list of Python guides for non-programmers; this links to guides such as One Day of IDLE Toying - an introduction to the IDLE development environment that comes bundled with CPython. Gandalf61 (talk) 15:54, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

October 16

Youtube

Are there any Youtube users who have died? February 15, 2009 (talk) 02:04, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

This seems like a silly question, so let me clarify. Do you mean "have any of the regular users (whether just viewers or also those who have uploaded) of youtube died of causes not related to using youtube?" because naturally the answer is yes. Can you be more specific if that's not what you meant? DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 02:32, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

YouTube has hundreds of thousands if not millions of users on it at the moment. Statistically speaking it is rather impossible that some YouTube users have not died. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 04:28, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

In a somewhat related point there was an article (I can't find right now but worth searching for) that covered the rather interesting point around death on the internet. When someone dies in the real world there internet accounts/etc. don't instantly disappear, they continue and will sit there pretty much indefinitely. Infact it's pretty difficult to get rid of the accounts of dead people, as the process isn't really embedded into the organisation of user accounts. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 10:11, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

This is probably the article you are referring to. - Akamad (talk) 02:11, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Wireless Network w/o Modem

How do I setup a home network for my PC without a modem? I have a cat5 outlet in the wall of my apartment, and I'm not sure if it's DSL or Cable. I just got a router that came with this computer I bought, but the only instructions are for a modem-fed connection. The router is a WBR 1310, and though it seems cheap, it ought to work [but doesn't]. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Osuryan (talk • contribs) 04:52, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

You don't need a modem to setup a home-network, but if you want that home-network to be able to connect to the internet you will need a modem. The Modem serves the function of connecting you to the net, whilst the router allows you to share files/resources/services (such as printers/internet) across mulitple PCs within the network. Do you want a home-network in the share-files across multiple PCs sense, or do you want a home-network in the 1 internet connection shared by all the pcs in the house sense? 194.221.133.226 (talk) 10:08, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

If your computer can get to the Internet when you plug its Ethernet port directly into the wall - then you should be able to plug the router into the wall and your computer into the router - and it should all "just work" regardless of whether the hole in the wall is DSL or cable. If it doesn't - then there are a few possibilities:

1. One of the cables you are using is faulty. Try plugging the computer directly into the wall with each cable in turn - can you still reach the Internet? If one of the cables doesn't work - then it's faulty. Toss it out and get a replacement.
2. What you think is just a dumb router is actually something intelligent like a WiFi router. If so, then it ought to come with a manual that describes how to set it up. Typically, you plug the computer into the router, then fire up IE or Firefox and visit a website that is hosted on the router itself(!) - mine is at "http:192.168.1.1". However, even in these cases, the default setup is typically exactly what you need.
3. Perhaps you have a faulty router.

When you arrive at a situation where your computer is plugged into the router and the router into the wall - and the computer can still get out to the Internet - then you can plug more computers into the router and they should "just work" too. It's remotely possible that the company that is providing you with Internet service may not allow you to connect multiple computers - in which case you have a problem...but that too can be fixed - albeit with some issues. Another matter is that communication BETWEEN your computers isn't protected when you go this route. They can't tell when a message is coming from a computer in your apartment - or from the big-wide-world - which makes good security a little tricky.

The fix for both of those problems is to set up a 'firewall' computer. I use a really ancient machine that's no good for anything modern - it runs Linux and has two Ethernet cards. One of the ethernet cards talks to the Internet - the other talks to the router and all of my other computers, printers, cameras, game consoles and other ethernet 'stuff'. Since only one computer is connected to the outside world, my ISP can't tell how many machines I'm really hooking up to the net - and since all of the machines in my house can talk to each other without the firewall passing data out to the outside world, I can use insecure (but very convenient) protocols inside the house (stuff like sharing all the files on every computer with every other computer without passwords being needed) - in the sure and certain knowledge that my firewall won't let people outside the house do anything nasty to me. Setting that up is beyond the scope of what we can explain here. But I'm sure there are online resources that could help you out. If that's the level of sophistication you need. SteveBaker (talk) 14:19, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually both of those things should be already solved by a router. A router acts as one device to the Internet. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 18:35, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Executable Jar File

What is it and how can I open it? --Omidinist (talk) 07:39, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

To run it, use java -jar foo.jar. To see what is inside, unzip it (most popular archivers will recognise it as what it really is, a ZIP file). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 08:04, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. --Omidinist (talk) 16:05, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually I should add to that: although JAR was originated by Sun as a Java programming language archive, it has come into use by various Mozilla projects (chiefly the Mozilla Firefox web browser) to store executable Javascript code and related files. These are now used to implement Mozilla project stuff like user interfaces, dictionaries, browser plugins, and other stuff. I'm not clear, from your question, whether you're sure about the origin of the particular JAR file. In both its Java and Javascript guises, a JAR file can contain code as powerful and potentially harmful as any other executable, so it's wise to exercise care in deciding what to open. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 16:22, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

using vista

my operating system is vista basic. i can't type C program in full screen mode. After pressing alt+enter there is message given by OS is " full screen mode not supported in your system" this is was the message. could you give a solution and a reason for this problem? —Preceding unsigned comment added by NaveenSRM (talk • contribs) 10:59, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Have you tried installing the drivers for your graphics card? If you don't know what card it is go to your search bar (on the start menu) and type dxdiag, and hit enter. Then click the Display tab at the top of the new window (it may be called Display 1), and the details are there. If you need help finding drivers for your card please reply with the manufacturer, name, and chip type. 88.211.96.3 (talk) 11:58, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

It might be this issue. -- BenRG (talk) 14:31, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

website

can you tell me if there is away to host a website without paying money?tell me the entire procedure if u please. thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.199.213.67 (talk) 11:09, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

free web host —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.240.66 (talk) 11:56, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

It's also possible (notice I didn't say "recommended") to run a server from your own computer at home. For example, run Apache HTTP Server and forward port 80 if you're behind a router. You'll need a fixed IP address and your ISP's terms and conditions should be checked to see if this is permitted. I would recommend studying the security implications before trying this. -=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 14:47, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Though it depends on what you mean by "without paying money". Running a server from your computer still assumes that you have an internet connection that allows incoming connections (which costs money), have your own computer (which also costs money), and have the power to keep it running constantly (which costs money). If these are things you already have with your regular computer usage, then it may not cost any additional money. But I wouldn't say that it doesn't cost money. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 18:32, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

You can also look into free web hosting services. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 18:32, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Canon scanner functionality with Windows XP embedded

Hi, I'm trying to install Canon PIXMA MX850 drivers on my machine which is running Windows XP embedded, and it's not recognizing the scanner. The strange part is, Canon MX850 is All-In-One device, a Printer, Scanner, Copier and Fax, and it has recognized them all but the scanner files. Does anyone have a clue why i am not getting that? Many Thanks--80.88.251.210 (talk) 11:30, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

device driver —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.240.66 (talk) 11:57, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

USB

wot is the mximun amounts of data you cans put through the usb cable before it fails? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.240.66 (talk) 11:56, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Have you looked at our article on USB? You may have up to 127 devices running from one controller, and depending on what version of USB it is you have either 1.5 megabytes or 60 megabytes. 88.211.96.3 (talk) 12:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

no. how many magabites can pass throught the cable before it fails? Wot is life expectancy of cable at higest biterates? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.240.66 (talk) 12:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I suspect it is dependant on the quality of the cable, but I'm almost certain it is way more than the lifetime of the computer the cable would be attatched to. Since all that is traveling through the cable is electricity, and not much of it. Just look at house wiring, which carries much more electricity, at higher voltage and current. I live in a house with copper wires about 70 years old, and they work just as well as they did when we bought them. Are you confused with flash storage? This does have a finite life expectancy, something like one hundred thousand writes 88.211.96.3 (talk) 12:09, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

ok thank you. for your reply. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.240.66 (talk) 12:36, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

The amount of data you send down the wire will have no effect whatever on it's life expectancy. The reasons USB (and most other) cables fail is because they have been twisted too tightly - or repeatedly bent and unbent. The connectors on either end of the cable are undoubtedly weak spots - especially with USB where people plug and unplug the cables very frequently. The number of times you plug and unplug the cable are the thing most likely to affect it's lifespan. But for 100% sure - the amount of data you transmit through it doesn't make even the slightest bit of difference. SteveBaker (talk) 14:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

EXCEL MACROS

How do I create Excel macros and use them to link worksheets on each of my Excel files? I have been struggling with this problem and it is beginning to affect jobWilly osakwe (talk) 14:05, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Best place to start is with Excel Help or MS Office Online - this MS Office Online page is an introduction to macros in Excel 2003; there will be a similar page for Excel 2007. Gandalf61 (talk) 14:17, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

If you had a more specific description of what you were trying to do, it would be easier to give more specific advice. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:24, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Build my own laptop/desktop

Why is it much common to build a desktop than to build a laptop? Is it a must to buy your laptop from the shelf or is possible at all? Mr.K. (talk) 16:26, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

It's a lot harder to put the parts into a laptop case (due to its size) than it is to put parts into a desktop case. You can build your own laptop, but it is going to be much harder. Useight (talk) 18:25, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Buying/building the casing can be quite a hassle in itself. Kushal (talk) 19:14, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

True PC gamers (and there are lots of them) would always build a desktop due to the miniaturized components of laptops not being fast enough for modern games especially power hungry graphics cards, and the fact you can't put your monster cooling fans into a laptop, and "desktop art" has become a bit of a fad nowadays too with all the fancy cases, neon tubing and the like... Sandman30s (talk) 19:19, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Laptop casings are quite small and restrictive. A great deal of planning goes into the location of components and how they will fit. You have a lot less flexibility unless you are the one actually manufacturing the laptop (and its motherboard, etc.) and know exactly how it is all going to fit together. If you've ever taken apart laptops made by different companies (or even the same company but different models) you'll know exactly how convoluted the space engineering is. --140.247.40.216 (talk) 20:06, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

alternatives to COLSPAN

I really dislike COLSPAN for HTML tables. Let's say I have some mechanically generated data like this:

Row 1:	Value
Row 2:	Value
Row 3:	Value

There are occasionally times when it would be nice to, on the fly, add another cell to, say, only row 2. Currently the only way I know how to do this is like so:

Row 1:	Value
Row 2:	Value	SPECIAL NOTE!
Row 3:	Value

Now my issue is that in this case, if I'm going to do that, I have to go through all the OTHER cells and figure out whether they need the extra cell or not. It'd be much easier if there was some way to tell the table "subdivide this one cell into two columns" rather than explaining which cells are NOT two columns.

Is there any way to do this? I'm assuming the answer is "no" but I thought I'd ask. --65.112.13.194 (talk) 19:20, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

You are correct. The answer is "no" for HTML. You can do it in one of those WYSIWYG editors, but not in HTML. -- kainaw™ 20:31, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps you can put a table with two columns inside the box, alternatively a vertical bar or graphic may be equivalent in appearance. What you need is colspan=0.5! But this is imaginary. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:35, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Is it absolutely necessary to specifically use <table>? If it's just a layout-issue, you could solve this with some clever <div>s and some CSS 90.235.19.68 (talk) 00:50, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Scatterplots in Excel

I have a data set with the following structure:

X_axis_var  Y_axis_var  Dot_color
30.6	     20.2	 Red
82.5	     65.3	 Red
63.2	     79.4	 Blue
39.1	     97.3	 Blue
12.9	     23.0	 Red
41.4	     79.6	 Green
53.7	     13.5	 Green
68.8	     59.8	 Blue

where I would like to create a scatterplot, in which the third variable (here Dot_color) selects the symbol or symbol color used to display the data points in the first two columns. Normally, I would have used R (programming language) to make such a graph, but for a particular task, it needs to be done in Excel 2000. Is there an easy way to do this? I suppose it would be possible to achieve what I want by sorting the data set on Dot_color, and then adding the data corresponding to each Dot_color one set at a time. Is there an easier way, using Excel 2000? --NorwegianBlue ^talk 19:42, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

True Transperency - Linux

I have two questions:

1. What is Composite extension in Xorg?
2. Do I have to install proprietary ATI driver to get true transparency eyecandy in Fluxbox?

Thank You --The Firewall 20:04, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Tunneling usb traffic on Linux

How is it possible to control an usb device from windows with a Linux computer (capturing data) transparently in between? --194.197.235.221 (talk) 20:38, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

With regular hardware, it isn't. USB has two broad categories of thingies on the USB network - hosts and devices. A PC only has a host controller, so it can only be a host. In order to be a man-in-the-middle it would have to be able to set one port to pretend to be a device rather than a host, and it would then record and then relay that data out to a second port, to the real device. I'm not aware of any xHCI chip that supports pretending to be a device in this manner. The old ethernet sniffing trick of using a promiscuous hub doesn't work for USB either. To be truly in the middle you either need a logic analyzer (with the appropriate USB decode software) or a hardware USB bus analyzer like this one. Now if you're asking just for the purposes of reverse-engineering a Windows USB device driver, you can do it entirely a different way. You run windows inside a virtual machine (VM ware or whatever) on Linux, and use usbmon to sniff the usb communications. But you don't really need linux at all for that - there are several USB software sniffers for Windows, which sniff its USB traffic well enough for this purpose. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:11, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

October 17

Error

Sometimes, when I log into my computer, I get a message saying something like "This application failed to initialise properly (0c00000142). Click OK to terminate the application.". I do so, then the computer stops loading. How can I fix this problem? 58.165.17.100 (talk) 02:02, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Excellent question. I have seen the same problem.

Best answer is that the application failing to start is Explorer.

I used to fix it by hitting control-alt-delete then using the FileRun command and typeing explorer.

Then I found out in a routine virus scan, a trojan horse. I had to back up all the data, and reinstall everything from scratch. I backed up the entire system, just after I installed the OS with the 134 updates. Then after I installed all the applications, I backed up the system again. Lo and behold, the trojan came back. Backed up the current data, reloaded the System backup with Applications, and The trojan is gone.

I would first check the integrity of the OS with a command. ( Ill post it here later)

Then make sure you have all the updates for your computer installed.

It may be time to reload your operating system. Like me, if you do you should

Backup the drive after you get all of the OS loaded and

Backup the drive after you get all of your applications loaded.

You now have a temporary fix, and the path for a more permanent fix. Best of luck. 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:15, 18 October 2008 (UTC)--

OK. Big secret here: I use firefox almost excusesivly, and my IE homepage is set for

[4]

It turned up this article about re-installing Internet Explorer, which I think you might be able to save yourself some time.

[5]

Please follow up. 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:23, 18 October 2008 (UTC)--

HTML question

The code <h1>ABC</h1><h4>ABC</h4> puts the first ABC on a different line than the second ABC.

Is there code that will create the font size difference without creating a line break? Thanks. Wanderer57 (talk) 03:29, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Don't use h# codes to create font differences. They are for headers. There are ways to make them stop making a line break but if all you want is font size changes there are better ways to do that, like this: <font size=+2>ABC</font><font size=-1>ABC</font>. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 03:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Specifically, H tags are Header tags - they're kind of like in books, where the text splits and some bold text provides like a mini-chapter title/break? So of course they'd be on their own lines. HTML tags *shouldn't* describe how things look - it should describe how things flow ("these are paragraphs, this is a headline, this is separate from that..."). Of course, since we tend to make all things of a category look the same (for example, chapter titles all tend to be larger then chapter *text*) the association works there. To get to the point, try using CSS (although previous responder's text also works). Something like <SPAN style="font-weight: bold;">ABC</SPAN> would be along the lines of what you're looking for. I highly recommend w3.org and browse to the HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 standards (as starting points). 98.169.163.20 (talk) 03:47, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

<span style="font-size: 20pt">20pt text</span><span style="font-size: 14pt">14pt text</span> --wj32 ^t/c 22:52, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

<h1 style="display: inline;">ABC</h1><h4 style="display: inline;">ABC</h4> --70.254.87.166 (talk) 03:26, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Mediawiki template problem

I'm trying to make a template on some other wiki that provides a convenient way to add a link to Wikipedia. My current code is this:

<includeonly>
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{{{1}}} {{{2|{{{1}}} }}}]
</includeonly>
<noinclude>
Includes a link to Wikipedia.

Usage: <nowiki>{{wp|page title|optional:link-text}}</nowiki&rt;

Appearance: {{Wp|Hello}}
</noinclude>

But it returns an extra trailing space and newline that cause formatting problems such as this:

This is some random content. This is

more random content.

This is a new paragraph.

What am I doing wrong here? And what's this thing on Wikipedia like in Template:imdb title? --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:22, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain that interwiki-links to wikipedia are installed by default in mediawiki. Try making a link like this: [[wikipedia:Some wikipedia article]]. You can set these up according to this guide Belisarius (talk) 05:18, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

As for the trailing space, I don't know a lot about mediawiki templates, but have you tried putting the <noincludes> on the same line as the relevant portion of the template? That might be causing it to insert a space (I have no idea, really, but it's my best guess Belisarius (talk) 05:21, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm never knew Mediawiki has that by default, guess that renders my template a bit useless. But still I'm curious on why it does the trailing space thing. You mean having <noinclude>Includes a link to Wikipedia. instead of my current code? Nope, still gives me the trailing space. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:42, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I believe the line breaks are being included as part of the content. A common technique in template definitions is to wrap the newlines into comments like:

<includeonly><!--
-->[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{{{1}}} {{{2|{{{1}}} }}}]<!--
--></includeonly><!--
--><noinclude>
...

This is equivalent to:

<includeonly>[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{{{1}}} {{{2|{{{1}}} }}}]</includeonly><noinclude>
...

Hope this helps. -- Tcncv (talk) 05:52, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Ahh ok adding the comments solved the problem. Thanks a lot. --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:19, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

assigning variables in class declaration (outside methods)

I found out it's possible in JAVA and C# (I don't think in C++). But has the class to be static? If not, are the assignments performed by the constructor? T.I.A. --Ulisse0 (talk) 08:42, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

In C#, you can assign values to class variables outside of the constructor. The end result is that it is assigned in the class constructor. If the class variable is static, then it is assigned when the class gets loaded into memory (at least that's my guess). If the whole class is static there is no class constructor. --wj32 ^t/c 08:58, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Initializers for instance fields in Java are executed and assigned to the fields before the body of the constructor is run. So it is kind of as if the assignments are performed at the beginning of every constructor. Initializers for static fields are executed and assigned when the class is loaded. I don't understand what you mean by a "class" being "static". C++ also has a mechanism for initializing members, but it is syntactically and semantically different; the initializers for bases and members in C++ are placed after the arguments and before the body; I will not go into the full details of that here. --Spoon! (talk) 09:05, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you both! In C# a class can be declared static, indicating that it contains only static members. I don't think this syntax exists in Java. --Ulisse0 (talk) 09:13, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

HTML form: unchecked value

How do I set a default unchecked value for a checkbox so if I left it unchecked, it returns something such as '0'?

value = "1" only sets the checked value.

If there's no way to do it in HTML, I can work out a clumsy PHP solution. -- Toytoy (talk) 09:39, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

This link [6] has a solution to your exact problem. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.188.33.26 (talk) 16:37, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

moving websites

More and more websites have moving parts on them such as GIF animations. They irritate me and hinder my visual concentration. Is there some way to "freeze" a website when I just want to read the text? --Lova Falk (talk) 10:30, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

If you use firefox there is an extension you can get that disables many adverts which should significantly cut down on the gifs and flash files you see. It is called Adblock plus, and I'd link you to it but my college firewall blocks the google search, but googling it will give you a link. 88.211.96.3 (talk) 11:01, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

For your convenience, here is a link. -=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 12:10, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

In firefox hiting the Escape key will freeze all gif animations. I don't know about flash-based animations.APL (talk) 13:56, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

You could use a Firefox plug-in like Flashblock to kill any flash animations you don't explicitly click on. APL (talk) 13:58, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you all so much!!! I downloaded adblockplus and it works like a dream. Calm sites for sore eyes. Thank you! Lova Falk (talk) 09:19, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Skype

How can one edit/delete interlocutor's message in Skype? 89.236.214.174 (talk) 11:39, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Thunderbird Junk

How do I set Thunderbird to automatically send all my junk mail to my junk folder? I have set my junk filters, but I still get the mail, only with a green basket next to them. Do I always have to do it manually?--ChokinBako (talk) 14:04, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

In the "properties" sheet for the specific account, in the "junk settings" section, check "move new junk messages to" box and pick the destination. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 14:13, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but I've done that. It is not automatic, though, i.e. when mail arrives it doesn't just go in there anyway. I have to 'run junk mail controls', each time I get some. I'm asking how to get it done automatically.--ChokinBako (talk) 14:34, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Whoops, OK, my bad. Thanks!--ChokinBako (talk) 14:37, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Is the open source Java spelling API "Jazzy" dead? What about the alternatives?

Resolved

Is the open source Java spelling package Jazzy [7] project dead, it seems to have had no activity since 2005?

What are the alternatives like? Has anyone used JOrtho [8]?

Update: I have found a web page[9] detailing the statuses and options and giving another alternative. -- Q Chris (talk) 15:28, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Sync phone with Google Calendar

How do I synchronize my Nokia 3220 with Google Calendar? I've tried Gcalsync and Icalsync, but both tell me my phone isn't supported. (I can't do it through a PC, because I don't have a Pop-Port cable and the phone doesn't have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.) NeonMerlin 14:46, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

If you have unlimited texting, a low-tech, stop gap solution would be to have Google send you text notifications. Not even close to perfect an answer, though. :( Kushal (talk) 17:40, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Youtube Insight demographic and gender identification

How does Youtube's Insight determine the age and gender of a viewer? I am amazed how the data in this [10] was collected ... Any ideas? Kushal (talk) 15:27, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I THINK you can choose a gender when you create an account. Dendodge|Talk^Contribs 15:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

How would that be representative of the vast number of viewers who Google can identify only by IP address? Kushal (talk) 17:41, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Same way that any polling service works. Polls aren't taken of an entire group; a small sample is taken that's large enough to represent a good cross-section of the group, but small enough to actually work with. Polls for determining public opinion about the government, for example, only take the opinions of a few hundred (or thousand) people, not all how many ever million there are in a country. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 17:57, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

You specify your gender and age (or you don't, or you lie) when you create an account. The Insight program would be more accurate if it had a "unknown" possibility. --140.247.240.69 (talk) 18:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

But if anyone lies, I'm sure they always get caught. Dar-Ape 05:06, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

scjp1.5 certification

i got certified two months bac but havnt received the certicate yet.where do they mail it from?.Is it from America or any other country? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.93.5.47 (talk) 17:16, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Java problem

I'm trying to draw a grid of images but for some odd reason I can't even draw two images properly...

Here's my code:

Grid.java

 package test;
 
 import java.awt.event.WindowAdapter;
 import java.awt.event.WindowEvent;
 
 import javax.swing.JFrame;
 
 public class Grid {
 	public static void main(String[] args) {
 		JFrame f = new JFrame("Grid");
 		
 		f.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter(){
 			public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
 				System.exit(0);
 			}
 		});
 		
 		f.add(new Cell("/path/to/test.png", 0, 0));
 		f.add(new Cell("/path/to/test.png", 64, 0));
 		f.pack();
 		f.setVisible(true);
 		f.setSize(320, 240);
 	}
 }

Cell.java

 package test;
 
 import java.awt.*;
 import java.awt.event.*;
 import java.awt.image.*;
 import java.io.*;
 import javax.imageio.*;
 import javax.swing.*;
 
 public class Cell extends Component {
 	private BufferedImage img;
 	private int x;
 	private int y;
 	private Dimension size=new Dimension();
 	
 	public void paint(Graphics g) {
 		g.drawImage(this.img, this.x, this.y, this);
 	}
 	
 	public Cell(String url, int x, int y) {
 		try {
 			this.img = ImageIO.read(new File(url));
 		}
 		catch (IOException e) {
 			//?
 		}
 		
 		this.x=x;
 		this.y=y;
 		this.size.setSize(this.img.getWidth(), this.img.getHeight());
 	}
 	
 	public Dimension getPreferredSize() {
 		return this.size;
 	}
 }

However, when I run the program, it only displays the image at (64,0) - it doesn't display the image at (0,0): http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/5954/pandora004jx6.png

Does anyone know why?

Thanks in advance. x42bn6 Talk Mess 16:13, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

You're not using the LayoutManager properly. You don't set one, so the JFrame defaults to having a java.awt.BorderLayout(). If you .add() something to a BorderLayout without an additional constraint, it gets put in the centre position. You're adding two things, so the second one gets put in the centre too, hiding the first one. So, before your two f.add() calls, call f.setLayout(new GridLayout(3,3)); -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:51, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Generally speaking, you may find java specific forums ([11], [12]) to be more helpful than this RD with program analysis questions. Dar-Ape 05:01, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

I know, but I knew it was something really stupid and I didn't want to bother registering. Thanks, anyway. x42bn6 Talk Mess 10:00, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Home Network - Extension from question above

A question above got me thinking. Is it possible to have a home network without access to internet? I have a router (and I do have internet), but let's just say I didn't have internet (or the phone line that came with it), but just the hole in the wall where the telephone goes, a router, and two PCs. Would this be possible, like a sort of intranet?--ChokinBako (talk) 18:02, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Sure, the internet connection just allows systems connected to your router to talk to other machines. Pull out your phone cable and you have an isolated intranet. Note that if you only have two PCs you can connect them together directly (if they're reasonably modern) without the router altogether (although you need to manually take care of setting their IP addressing info, something that is often done automatically by the internet router). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:11, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

previewing pages in Internet Explorer

Is there any easy way to see how a page will render in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 without actually running IE6 or IE7? I'm on a Mac so it's really a pain to have to boot up a virtualizer or another computer to see how my pages will (poorly) render in IE. (Firefox is pretty consistent across platforms.) I'd love it if there was some sort of clever program or webpage that could duplicate IE's many flaws in a way that I could just say "show me how this looks in IE6/7" without all the hassle of actually having IE on a computer. (The other difficulty is that I have IE7 on my virtualizer so I have to actively seek out machines with IE6 on them to see what it looks like too, as it doesn't look like I can install IE6 and IE7 at the same time?). Any ideas? --140.247.240.69 (talk) 18:25, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Upload it to a temporary online location (one hidden from normal view) and use http://browsershots.org/ -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:29, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Re running IE6 and 7 on the same machine/virtual machine - I use IETester for this — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 22:02, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

You can also use the Firefox extension IEtab, but only if you're already on windows :/ Dar-Ape 04:56, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Location of Mac system updates when downloading/Privilege problems in System Update

I'm trying to update to Mac OSX 10.5.5, listed in Software Update as "Mac OS X Update Combined." Before it has had any time to download (never mind install), I get the error:

"The update “Mac OS X Update Combined” can’t be saved. You do not have appropriate access privileges. The Installer package has been moved to the Trash. To try again, open the package from the Finder."

Thing is, it's not in the trash, and I am an admin. What can I do about this? It has downloaded part of the update earlier today, can I go and delete the remains?

My name is anetta (talk) 18:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know how to fix this problem, but try downloading it from Apple's website [13]. This is also useful if the install crashes half-way (as it did for me). --wj32 ^t/c 22:50, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Nice problem. You are admin, and you have admin priveldges, but the updater doesn't think so? Time to boot your computer from its install disk, and run a full check permissions.

Remember the GOAL is to have the updater run all the way through with out errors. ( i.e. download the file, and run the updater until it says 'Updater sucessfull' 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:19, 18 October 2008 (UTC)--

Onyx will check and fix permissions for you.--ChokinBako (talk) 10:40, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

You cannot install Mac OS X Update on this volume. This volume does not meet the requirements for this update. ...is what I get after downloading it manually. Even though it's a brand new installation, and the "About this Mac" lists it is 10.5.5. It would be nice to know the requirements for the update, but this [14] doesn't say what it needs.My name is anetta (talk) 16:06, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

October 18

protocol

Which protocol is used to connect the web server on the internet? tcp/ip or http? i have to choose only one option from the choice. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dahalrk (talk • contribs) 03:54, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

We do not do your homework, and either that question is malformed or you've interpreted it incorrectly. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 04:09, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Both, honestly. If I had a question phrased exactly like that, I'd choose HTTP, although both are correct.--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 04:16, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

I am humbled at the breadth and simplicity of this explaination. I could not have done better:

[15] 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:28, 18 October 2008 (UTC)--

Computer language difficulty

Hi. This is, frankly, a very trivial question. But I was wondering how one might rank computer languages by difficulty? There are too many to learn, but I'd rank the languages I'm familiar with like so:

1. Assembly
2. C++
3. Java
4. Visual Basic.NET
5. ActionScript
6. JavaScript
7. HTML

So, I don't know much about PHP, COBOL, PostScript, SQL, or Perl. How would they fit in the list and also, do I have the list ordered correctly? I heard, by the way, that PostScript was harder than C, but only know a smattering of both languages, so I can't say.--75.71.127.230 (talk) 04:27, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

My 2 cents: of the languages I'm familiar with, starting with the easiest to learn/use: 6, 3, 2, 1. (Of course, if you're looking for something easier than any of these, check out Python, and I would only use javascript if you're writing a webpage.) HTML is not a "language" in the sense of a programming language, rather it's just a markup language-- that is, a series of formatting tags, so it doesn't really fit in with the rest of your list. Also, SQL is for database management and isn't really a general purpose language. Finally, just don't use COBOL, or you'll be sorry. Dar-Ape 04:54, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

What you've really done here is rank them in order of how close they are to human language on the bottom side and machine language on the top side. PHP is basically the same as Actionscript for your purposes. SQL is sort of its own beast—a query language and not a programming language—but again closer to natural human languages than machine languages (e.g. Assembly, bytecode, etc.). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 08:38, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Difficulty is something I find hard to rate. I tried teaching three languages concurrently - VB.Net, C# and Java - and expected VB.Net to be the easiest to learn. But the students who tried learning all three tended to argue for Java. I think 98.217.8.46 makes a good point, but I would add a second requirement for ease of learning: consistency. If the language has a high degree of internal consistency in the syntax (for example, if you look at Java's history you see gradual improvement, in that many early methods were renamed to be more consistent across the language as a whole). A third axis would be applicability: while I could write a text parser in both Perl and Java, I'd find Perl much easier. But if I wanted to create a graphical app, I could do it in Perl, but I'd choose Java. - Bilby (talk) 08:56, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Heat sink

Under my laptop's heat sink, there is a square of metal foil sandwiched between copper heat pipe and the processor die. It was originally coated with a black, carbon-like substance (although not powdery), and was lightly adhered to the surface of the heat pipe. So, what is this piece of metal used for, if it is useful at all, and is it safe to not use it and just have the die touching the heat sink (with thermal paste, of course)? I can't really put it back on as it does not stick any more, and isn't it better to have one less barrier to heat anyways? Here's a picture for reference: CPU, foil, and heatsink - WikiY ^Talk 05:04, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

I would suggest that you get some thermal compound, and put a drop the size of a grain of rice on the copper part, and a drop about 1/2 that size on the CPU, and run the edge of a plastic card over the peice of foil over, and over until its as flat as you can get it. STICKING has little to do with it. You are attaching a peice of metal to a peice of glass. The glass is both extrodinarly expensive, and extrodinarly delicate. The foil was added during macfacturing to avoid breaking or chipping CPUs ( Glass ). The pressure of the screws on the heat pipe/heat sink would be engineered to have that peice of foil inside the gap. ( as much as 15 to 30 mills can radically change the pressure exerted on the glass, and if it makes the gap larger, it will lessen the extent to which the thermal compound can transfer heat ).

Note: I have done this HUNDREDS of times. Be very carefull. ( Or not, if you might like to try and upgraded CPU ). 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:35, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

And great picture! $--~~~~$

Power Supply, Part 2

Good evening. This is the sequel to my previous question, "Power Supply." I recently updated my graphics card, and to make the graphics card work, I also upgraded to a 450W power supply. And it worked great...for about 30 minutes. Then, out of nowhere, my computer simply turned off. I was in the middle of something and boom, it was off. And I couldn't turn it back on. I had to put the old power supply and the old graphics card BACK in, just so I could get my computer to turn on. And if you think that's easy or fun, it's not. So my question is, uh, what the hell happened? Why did my computer spontaneously turn off like that? If it helps, the power supply I'm using now (the good one) has a green light on the back of it. The other power supply (the bad one) has a light on it that, when I first installed it, was orange, and after my computer shut off, it was red. Digger3000 (talk) 07:18, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Probably just a bad power supply. Does it work fine if you just use it with the original video card? If not, then that's more than likely it. See if you can return it or RMA it. On an older computer purchase I had two of the things blow up (one with much smoke) before deciding to buy a slightly nicer brand; it does happen occasionally even with the good brands though.

The manual might tell you what the red light means, but it sounds like it's just there to indicate failure. Some sites also suggest shorting the ATX connector to start the power supply to see if it starts at all apart from the computer, if you're adventurous [16] -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 07:39, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

RMA. Immediatly return the new powersupply for a Return Materials Authorization (RMA). We still need to know a few more things about the system, i.e. how much ram, how many drives, what kind of video card. $--~~~~$ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.185.0.29 (talk) 12:34, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

In any case, please do not open the Power Supply Unit without expert advice. Kushal (talk) 12:36, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Mirror my Routers

Hey guys, i have two routers at home(both different makes) and i would like to set them up to be exact morror of each other so that as far as my computers are concerned they are they same thing, thus i wouldnt have any sort of drop out when i moved between them etc. Is this even possible? and if it is do you guys know of any resources that may help me get it set up?Vagery (talk) 07:22, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

security expert

how to become a network securtiy expert? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Atulchamola (talk • contribs) 08:57, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Neo Office Help (Question Change)

How do I get rid of an unwanted page? A blank page has appeared in the middle of my document after I made a page break and I don't want it there. Regards!--ChokinBako (talk) 13:14, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

In "Options" switch on "Show all formatting marks" to make the page break visible. Then just highlight it and delete it. As for the cause of the blank page, I would guess either the paragraph immedialtely after the page break is formatted with "Page break before" or you hit "Blank Page" instead of "Page Break" on the Insert menu - "Blank Page" actually inserts two page breaks ! Gandalf61 (talk) 13:24, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, but I don't want to get rid of the page break - it took me over an hour to write the page - just the blank page.--ChokinBako (talk) 13:45, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

The page break is simply a marker that tells the word processor to start a new page at this point. You shouldn't lose any of your text if you delete it. To find out how page breaks work, open Help and look for a section called "Add or a delete a page" or similar. Save your document before trying anything, and that way you have a copy to go back to if you make a mistake. Gandalf61 (talk) 14:12, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Actually, all I did in the end was type a word on the blank page, then delete all the (empty) lines behind it. That worked.--ChokinBako (talk) 15:14, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Semantic web

Hi! I'm learning about the semantic web and have a few doubts:

1. Is XML used in conjunction with RDF or are they alternatives of the same thing??
2. And, is there any difference between XML and XHTML?
3. Also, are all the above, 'microformats'?
4. Lastly, does 'metadata' refer to any semantic component used to describe data in general, or is it something specific?

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.68.77.73 (talk) 11:43, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

2) Yes there's a difference. XML is a specification that describes a good way to store and communicate data whose structure can be represented by a tree. In itself it says nothing about what the data means. XHTML is an application of XML to represent web documents - i.e. it defines a language conforming to XML and assigns meaning to the bits of the language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.164.115 (talk) 13:45, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

1) My understanding is that RDF is a "data model" for describing certain types of information such that you can make use of them in logical ways. One of the ways of writing it is using XML. Roughly, RDF describes what you are writing, XML how.

2) As stated above, XML is a general-purpose notation for machine-readable data. XHTML, on the other hand, is a format for web-pages; specifically, it's a version of HTML that conforms to XML syntax, and is therefore easier to parse and define than older HTML. It can also be more easily combined with other formats which also use XML syntax.

3) No, microformats are a specific way of using existing markup (from HTML / XHTML) to encode additional information - generally, to add semantic information to existing content. So whereas <b>IMSoP</b> just means 'display the text "IMSoP" in bold', and a special XML format might use <user name="IMSoP" />, a microformat might combine the 2 as <span class="user"><b class="name">IMSoP</b></span>. This can be read both by a tool for displaying HTML, and one for spotting usernames in the document.

4) Yes, metadata is a very broad term, which basically means "data about data"; so it's very much dependent on context, but your definition seems as good as any.

Hope that helps! - IMSoP (talk) 16:00, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Font is different on wikipedia only

I posted this question in the help desk, but received no replies - I assume this means I'm having a computer issue and not a wikipedia issue.

So I must have hit some key combination on my machine while viewing wikipedia (I am using windows xp, and browsing using firefox 3.0.1), and now the font on wikipedia is screwy. I don't know if it is just bigger (ctrl- doesn't make it look right), or if it is a different font altogether, but I find it really distracting. I took a screenshot, and posted it here: http://img201.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wikifontkn1.jpg

I find this font on wikipedia to be really ugly and distracting. I didn't realize how much the font mattered before now. Any help would be appreciated. Man It's So Loud In Here (talk) 15:13, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Looking at that screenshot, I think you have just "zoomed in" - Firefox now does full page zooming, not just text, and remembers it per website, so this would make sense. Try hitting Ctrl-0, which should reset the zoom (or View -> Zoom -> Reset in the menu bar). - IMSoP (talk) 15:33, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Wireless Connection Troubleshooting

Hi...I have two laptops(both compaq model) and both are wireless enabled...one supports a,b,g networks and the other supports only b and g networks. When I connect them both in the ad-hoc mode I get a very weak signal(it shows low signal even when they both are in the same room 5m apart) and when I shift one of the laptops to another room it disconnects. Also I get a very slow transfer speed(even though it shows 54Mbps).Both the computers have the latest drivers.One's OS is XP and the other has Vista. They both used to work fine with other computers. What can be the problem?? Please help... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Piyushbehera25 (talk • contribs) 15:27, 18 October 2008 (UTC)