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September 4

Alpha on Mac OS X keyboard

I'm trying to find a way to put the alpha symbol (lower case, I think. It's the one that looks like infinity but with the right side chopped off) into NeoOffice on a Mac. I found ∆ just fine but can't find alpha. Any help? I'd rather not copy and paste from somewhere. For one, I just want to know how to do it. And for two, I'd rather not have any unexpected formatting show up. Dismas|^(talk) 00:23, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

You might not be able to—the hotkeys for Greek characters are pretty limited (and appear to be somewhat arbitrary). You can always get them in Finder, though: Go to Edit > Special Characters. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 02:11, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! That got it. I still hate that they took away the Key Caps application... Dismas|^(talk) 02:32, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Apparently, this works in the same way as KeyCaps. --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 12:08, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

You can enable the Keyboard Viewer (very similar to Key Caps) in System Preferences > International > Input Menu. Unfortunately, you have to have the input menu shown in your menu bar, even if you don't want any of its other features. -- Speaker to Lampposts (talk) 19:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

RTMP streams and VLC

I'm trying to open a RTMP stream with VLC, and it's not going too well. There is an RTMP option in the "Open Network Stream" box. Given a URL, everything seems to go smoothly. I go into the Messages window, and again everything seems okay - no warnings or errors. But it doesn't play - it just sits there. No buffering, no video, no audio. I have to kill VLC with the system monitor of the OS I'm using at the time. Does anyone know of a way to open such streams with VLC or if there is another (preferably Linux- or wine-friendly) media player that will open them? I really don't want to install XBMC (and even then RTMP support there seems to be rather new and not fully implemented), but if that's what I have to do, so be it. Xenon54 / talk / 01:58, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

RTMP is a proprietary format and can support encryption. Attempting to open it with a 3rd-party client is unfortunately not possible unless the server allows it. Nimur (talk) 02:05, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Debian Kernel Help

Hi. The installer is asking me which kernel I want to install:

linux-image-2.6-486
linux-image-2.6-686
linux-image-2.6.26-2-486
linux-image-2.6.26-2-686

Obviously, I should get a 686 one, but I don't know how the ...26-2 one is different. Is the 2.6-686 the first 2.6 kernel release? Thanks.--S1kjreng (talk) 10:03, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

The "2.6" package is "the latest 2.6". If you install it, it will actually get the 2.6.26-2 for you, so there's no difference right now. The difference is in the future. If you have the generic "2.6" package installed, future upgrades might automatically select something newer than 2.6.26. If you just install the 2.6.26-2 then future upgrades will only update the 2.6.26-2 with bug fixes if necessary, no newer versions. Not a big difference since you can easily change your mind later. 69.245.227.37 (talk) 09:36, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

ok. Thanks.--S1kjreng (talk) 22:51, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

how to make the best of out of USB stick?

I browsed about this topic a little bit and found that there are ceratin OSs that can be booted from an USB stick but its not of big use to me since public computers don't allow that. Portable apps seem to be good idea. Do you have other suggestions pls?. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.220.46.25 (talk) 10:09, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Most public terminals (in the true sense) will actively block foreign executables. — neuro^(talk) 10:24, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

For portable apps I suggest Portable Firefox as a must have, it's awesome. Also Portable Tor to allow you to view restricted sites at the public computer. I also suggest Process Explorer which can be used to override some restrictions on public computers, like timed forced shutdown if a program running on the public computer is responsible for it (select the program, right click and choose "kill process") . For OSs that run from USB, take a look at the Live USB article. SLAX is a nice, easy to use LiveOS with lots of features. Remember, flash drives only have a certain number of write cycles, so read/write intensive use of them will greatly shorten their lifespan. It might be better to use a portable external hard drive rather than a flash drive —Preceding unsigned comment added by Avrillyria (talk • contribs) 11:33, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

With the ever decreasing cost for flash drives though, that may not be much of a problem for even heavy users. --antilived^{T | C | G} 14:02, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

True, but it's still an issue if the drive fails when it's got important stuff on it. Regular backups are a good idea —Preceding unsigned comment added by Avrillyria (talk • contribs) 14:19, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

• That's such a huge topic, it's tough to narrow it down. It depends on what you want to do. Perhaps List of portable software would give you an idea of the scope of what can be done; Full office programs (openoffice.org), to compilers, to video viewers and burning software. Just about anything you'd like to do. ;) — Ched :  ?  10:12, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Graphics card choice

I am looking for a card which has better performance but produce Less temperature. Which one I should choose? I am not worried about price. Actually my room is quite hot and worried about system overheating.

XFX Geforce 9800 GT 600M 512 MB

or

XFX Geforce 9600 GT 650MHz 512 MB

--119.30.36.54 (talk) 13:46, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

(added title) The 9800GT is a much better card than the 9600, so if all you want is performance then get that. In terms of heat the 9800 will definitely output more heat but as long as your case is adequately ventilated and you don't mind a bit of noise you should be fine. If you can though, try get a 9800GTX+ (which all comes with dual-slot coolers AFAIK) or a 9800GT with a dual-slot cooler so that the hot air from the graphics card gets vented out instead of recirculated inside your case, which will help your temps. --14:00, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for reply. I had previously overheating issue with ATI Card (4890 1 GB) which caused system to freeze in 61 to 63 Celsius (GPU Temp) and even in low temp 47 to 49 Celsius (GPU Temp. If I attached XFX Geforce 9800 GT or XFX Geforce 9800 GTX+ will it improve heat issue then the ATI ? My pc case is Full Tower Thermaltake Xaser VI. Thank you--119.30.36.53 (talk) 18:10, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

That does not sound like an overheating issue. 6x degrees load temp is fine for GPUs. --antilived^{T | C | G} 12:38, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Post-fuse insertion?

What does post-fuse mean in the term "post-fuse insertion"? What kind of fuse is it talking about? It's something related to printers. Thanks to whomever can help. Leptictidium (mt) 13:54, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

IIRC, it means that it is inserted after the toner. — neuro^(talk) 14:06, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

The fuser melts the toner to the paper. In a cheap color laser printer, you will place all your color toner on the paper at the same time, then fuse them all. This causes a problem with bleeding and ghost images. For most people, it is not visible and no problem at all. On the high end, each color is placed on the paper and fused, one at a time. This eliminates the bleeding and ghost images. If you see the two side-by-side, you will recognize the one with separated toner insertion to be of superior quality. -- kainaw™ 16:03, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

The fuser uses heat and pressure to "fix" the toner to the media. "Post-fuse insertion" or "post-process insertion" inserts a non-printed page such as a separator or cover into the job. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:25, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Static discharge and electronic devices

As you probably know if you wear synthetic fabrics and remove one layer over the other it generates a lot of staic electricity.. Does this present a danger to electronic devices (eg phones ipod etc) - under any conditions - what if the device in the pocket of one of the clothes items, and what if the first act after removing one of the items is to pick up an electronic device? More specifically has anyone ever bust their stuff doing this? Does anyone know what sort of quantities of static electricity is produced (charge).?83.100.250.79 (talk) 17:16, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

You would have to encounter incredible extremes of static electricity to damage phones and .mp3 players. For the most part, the metal parts in the casing for these devices would shield the electronics from any static damage. This is a normal concern that I'm sure most designs address. I have never heard of someone's stuff getting damaged by normal static buildup. If you took apart the phone to expose the electronics, it would be a good idea to ground yourself, as a person with their clothes can build up thousands of volts of static electricity. It is not dangerous to humans, as there is little energy to create current, but you can burn out diodes with it. —Akrabbim^talk 17:32, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

(Aren't most things plastic?) I was wondering about a worst case scenario - say for instance I picked up an usb stick, or memory card - touching the metal contacts?83.100.250.79 (talk) 17:39, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Electronics can get zapped by static charges - but only when one part of the device is at one voltage and another is at some other voltage. Transferring charge to something like a phone is fairly risk-free because the entire phone gets charged up and discharged together. Touching the pins of a memory stick and then plugging it into something could zap it though - I'd recommend trying not to touch the exposed pins of such devices. The worst thing about static discharge damage is that it sometimes doesn't show up for days or weeks after the device is zapped - so it can be tough to know what actually caused the problem. SteveBaker (talk) 16:50, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Minesweeper

Hello. Why is there speculation that Minesweeper in Windows Vista generates its board before the first click as mentioned in Minesweeper (Windows)? Would generating the board after the first click make more sense since, if Minesweeper randomly lays a mine at the first-clicked square, it can randomly assign the mine another location, knowing where the first click was and where not to place the mine again? I programmed the algorithm in Java as shown below.

for (byte b = 0 ; b < 99 ; b++)
{
    boolean bool = true;
    while (bool)
    {
        bool = false;
        mine [b] = (int) (Math.random () * 480);
        for (byte j = 0 ; j < b ; j++)
            if (mine [b] == mine [j] || mine [b] == i) //i = location of first click
            {
                bool = true;
                break;
            }
    }
}

Thanks in advance. --Mayfare (talk) 18:11, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Either approach you mention is reasonable. I think the better approach is to make sure the first click is not a mine, but there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the debate. The sentence in the article is not cited, so I don't know whether it is speculation or fact, or a sort of abstraction to help teach the concept of the game rather than analyze the (unimportant to the article) exact sequence of events in the code. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:16, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

I fact-tagged that line in the article, FWIW. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:19, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Minesweeper's first-click behaviour is dissected at the following: [1], [2], and [3]. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:27, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

This only applies to pre-Vista versions, the original Microsoft-written ones. The Vista version may have been rewritten from scratch so the these dissections maybe no longer apply. --FvdP (talk) 19:40, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

On the original version you could use the XYZZY code to see where all the mines were before you clicked. If you didn't click on a mine, they would be in the position as you saw. If you deliberately picked a mine for your first click, it suddenly wouldn't be a mine. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 20:45, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Why would there be a reasonable argument for generating the board before the first click? --Mayfare (talk) 16:27, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, if you need a lot of CPU time to generate the board (eg to make a setup that doesn't have an impossible-to-solve situation within it - or in order to establish some kind of 'difficulty level') then you might want to do it before the first mouse click in order to produce a faster response once the player starts playing. However, the need to move the mine that the player first clicks on without that move causing an impossible-to-win board might be just as tricky. Simply quietly erasing that first mine seems like an easier solution - but it results in fewer-than-expected mines in the setup - which might be a problem if the user is counting on some exact number in his solution. Overall, it just seems easier to do it after that first click...but I could see how some players might regard that as 'cheating'...although it's really not. SteveBaker (talk) 16:42, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

AT&T ad

There is a library where I go and get on a computer where this [4] comes up every time someone goes to the Internet. The page says Firefox needs updating, so I don't know if that's the problem.

A number of web sites I go to there but not at home (where I limit the sites I go to so as not to cause problems) have an AT&T ad for high-speed Internet. My guess is they put something in it to slow the Internet down so you would think yours was slow and get theirs.

Actually, it doesn't happen every time, but when the computer does freeze, there is an AT&T ad on the screen. If I try to do anything, I just get the word "Stopped" in the lower left corner. I don't know how long it takes to go to the next page. It seems to work better when I put something where the URL goes and press "Enter". At least a blank screen is progress.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:22, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

So what's the question? --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 12:03, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

How do I fix it rather than just sitting there and sitting there with only the word "Stopped" or some useless message about some ad I didn't even want at the bottom of the screen? Here is a page where it did just that a minute ago.[5]Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 17:15, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, that page loaded completely for me in about 3 seconds. For what it's worth, you didn't miss out on anything in this instance, because the cartoon was unfunny. Unfortunately it's difficult to diagnose problems like this without actually sitting at the computer that is having the problems. The partial loading of pages that I have experienced has been because of bandwidth restrictions, connection problems, or a slammed server that is hosting the page in question. It is unlikely that banner ads have much or anything to do with the problem. Tempshill (talk) 03:04, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

That was just one sample. There are lots of newspaper web sites that have the problem. It doesn't matter what I'm looking at; if it's an unfunny cartoon, then I'm looking at it for a very long time and I can't get into anything else. And the AT&T ad is always there, though the situation doesn't happen every time there is one. There are many sites that have this same ad. So far, the delays have been minor today.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:44, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Three times today I just sat there and sat there. If you don't have dial-up, you're not supposed to be able to see "Read (url)", "Waiting for (url)", "Transferring data from (url)". I remember when we had to do that, but that was in the days we were happy to have anything. The AT&T ad was there every time.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:09, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Converting Win98 program to Windows Vista 64-bit compatibility

Hello, I have a few old Win98-compatible programs that are incompatible with Windows Vista 64-bit. Vista's "compatibility" function does not work in these cases (I've tried). Is there a decompiler/recompiler that makes programs compatible with Windows Vista? I suspect the programs are made in Visual Basic, Visual C or Visual C++. Thanks, -- Guroadrunner (talk) 21:35, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Nice idea, but I have never heard of any such miracle product. One workaround might be to run your old programs in a VirtualBox that has an appropriate OS in it, of course. Tempshill (talk) 02:57, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

True - the program worked in VMWare's virtual box program, but VMWare's virtual box created a separate "ghost" hard disk drive that the programs operate, but not interact with what's on the Vista hard drive (no copy/paste function to the non-virtualized HDD). In one case, I need my program to interact with a program on the Vista hard drive to work, although thinking about it your idea works if I operate both programs in the virtual box world. This duo of programs I am talking about are the Windows-based GP2Edit-32, which modifies elements of the DOS-based Grand Prix II (which I can run under DOSBox). GP2Edit, which is legal, is no longer supported by its author. Of course I could just format the disk and load WinXP... -- Guroadrunner (talk) 00:03, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Graphics card on motherboard

Hello there, I want to add new Graphics card (PCI 2.0) on my mobo. This is my first time. So if I attach the card in mobo with cable do I need to change anything in BIOS?--119.30.36.38 (talk) 22:43, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

It depends on the BIOS. Some bioses are smart and will automatically disable the onboard graphics adapter if they detect an external graphics cards. With other BIOSes you'll have to go into the BIOS "onboard peripherals" screen and disable the video. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:47, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

September 5

E-mail

Why do students with a school e-mail address often create another address for the purpose of joining sites like Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, Gamefaqs, etc? Jc iindyysgvxc (talk) 00:37, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

There are lots of possible reasons, if the above is actually true.

1. School addresses necessarily expire. Unless you are a graduate student, of course, in which case you can have the same one for a decade. Yay!
2. School addresses are seen as rather "official," being explicitly joined to a real, physical identity. Not everybody wants these places like Youtube, Facebook, etc., to have access to their real-world identity. They might want a little more anonymity.
3. School addresses may have specific terms of service that make them undesirable for wider use.
4. School addresses may require POP3/IMAP enabled mail readers to access them, where webmail is sometimes more convenient. Similarly, one might want to diversify one's incoming e-mail—to keep the school things on the school address, and everything else on the webmail address. This is advantageous also in terms of spam.
5. Lastly, there is no worse place in the world for reliable IT services than a school. Academics always underfund their IT departments drastically, and this leads to all sorts of mayhem on a regular basis. Every university I've attended has had major IT problems—stolen data, overheated servers, ridiculously small inbox quotas, you name it. If you want reliable e-mail, your local university is probably the last place you'd want to go.

The above is just speculation. I'm not sure there is a definite trend, nor am I sure the causality is right here. (In my experience, students often already have gmail addresses when they arrive at school, and then have the school mail just forward to that, for what they are used to.) It also probably differs depending what level of "school" you are talking about (high school? undergraduate at college? graduate school?). Again, this might not even be true—is there any evidence that this is a major trend? --98.217.14.211 (talk) 00:50, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

The above statements are generally true, although some schools offer lifetime email addresses to alumni. One other reason may be that the student used their yahoo/hotmail/gmail before entering college and that is their primary email. -- Guroadrunner (talk) 16:58, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Though the "lifetime" e-mail addresses are often different anyway (e.g. @alumni.uni.edu vs. @uni.edu) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 18:46, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

• Another issue is the naming conventions. While someplaces are relaxed and let you choose your address, others have rigid naming rules and will *force* you to have the email address of WILBERFORCE_TIBERUS_VIJAYARAGHAVENSATYANARYANAMURTHY (at) schoolname.edu, when everyone knows you as "Billy V". Get a Gmail/Hotmail address, and you're the much more user-friendly billyv_23 (at) gmail.com

But the reason I use a separate address is the spam issue. The address I give out to websites, mailing lists, etc. gets hundreeds of spam messages a day, whereas the address I only give out to friends, family and "official" contacts gets a couple dozen per week at most. -- 128.104.112.179 (talk) 17:48, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Actually, worse than the long names are that most require you to have short names. There is nothing so emasculating as having your proud, long last name (John Q. Izzardly, III) truncated into some sort of horrible Unix username (jizzard@uni.edu). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 18:45, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Probably the most simple reason is the fact that sites such as myspace and Facebook arent accessable through school, we were blocked from all these sites which resulted in the emails being of no use inside college and school email was very slow to access outside of college.195.49.180.146 (talk) 12:57, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Increasingly, you ARE your email address. Ideally, you'd want to keep the same address your entire life. I've used steve at sjbaker dot org for close to 15 years now. The mail server it's directed towards has been linked, redirected, forwarded and moved around more times than you can count - but it's the "one true place" where people can always get hold of me. People who I have not talked to in 10 years can (and do) still find me there. Knowing my email address also lets them guess my web-site URL - which is another huge win. Changing your email address frequently is a really terrible idea from a communications standpoint...although the brief spam-holiday you get is often welcome! So if (for some reason) you're required to use a school address (for example, because teachers are ignoring mail from other addresses) - then it makes sense to redirect it to your 'permanent' address for the duration of your time in school - knowing full well that when you graduate, you'll have a new address - but your 'permanent' one can always redirect to it. SteveBaker (talk) 16:33, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Importing bookmarks from Firefox into Opera

Can somebody tell me where to find my Firefox bookmarks? I am trying to import them to Opera and, unlike Chrome, it makes me look for them rather than just doing it automatically (actually, I never managed it with Chrome - it just went on for ages before I gave up - both times). --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 02:26, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

I think Transmute will fit your needs nicely. It transferred my Chrome bookmarks to Firefox almost by itself.--The Ninth Bright Shiner 03:12, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I downloaded that, but it's not quite what I wanted. Anyway, for reference, I found out how to do it here on the Mozilla website. --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 12:00, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Excel 2007 being absolutely dense

Sometimes it baffles me how freeware can outdo a bazillion-dollar office suite.

Let's take this hypothetical situation here:

      Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3
Row A   106    |          |    99
Row B          |    90    |

Very simple, no? I want to start a line graph and add on to it as new values arise. However, the fact that there's a gap between the 106 and 99 is just far too troublesome for Excel, so it doesn't connect the values. I'm left with three standalone points when I really should have one standalone and two connected.

OpenOffice.org Calc, hilariously, does not do this. Meaning you can have oodles of columns between one value and the next, and two values will still connect. Now while I love Calc, I'm trying to transition back to Office ever since I re-obtained it. I'd rather have the correct graph on Excel if possible. Is there any way to make Excel connect those points?

And yes, I realize I could put "102.5" in Row A, Column 2, but I feel like I would be winning the battle only to lose the war, know what I mean?

The problem is that you have introduced 3 'y' co-ordinates and provided only 2 values. The problem is with using a Line Chart. If Excel draws a line directly from 106-99 then anybody reading that chart will think that the value for Column 2 must be something between 106-99. Because Excel does not have a value in the field it assumes it is a missing data point so does not connect the data to it. It could assume the null-value is equal to 0 (in which case yourl line-chart would go from 106-0-99 and look like a 'v') but that wouldn't be a very good assumption as it's rare that someone has a 3 point chart, but pieces of missing data in 100-data-point Y axis is easily handled and looks sensible (the data shows a line, it breaks, then resumes - showing a data-point missing an entry.

I would suggest that OpenOffice is incorrect because it fails to note that there is no entry in column 2 for Row A and by connecting the dots leaves the reader (anybody other than the creator) to assume that Column 2's row A value must be something between 106 and 99. ny156uk (talk) 09:32, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Well I won't say which is right or wrong - surely there should be an option to turn this on or off - perhaps there is - if so, what/where is it?83.100.250.79 (talk) 11:42, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

If there is an option in Excel, I've never found it, despite LOTS of looking. It is incredibly irritating. I've resorted numerous times to making two data sets -- one where the missing points are averaged, and one which they are not, and then making the one where they are not have data markers so you can see where the actual data is. The truth is Excel is an awful, idiotic program, and is not capable of making good-looking, useful graphs at all (it is, however, great at making misleading, 3-D, colorful graphs, which are apparently what people use in the business world today, despite their inability to convey information). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 14:35, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

I often wondered what it is like to have a job where I can just create a few pi and bar charts and talk about "market trends" - ah, to live in bullshit castle, what a dream!83.100.250.79 (talk) 19:49, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

My biggest complaint is that Excel (and other visual data analysis tools) readily apply trendlines and spline fits to data which should not have either. Unfortunately, it has trained a generation of "data analysts" that you can just "put" a curvey line through any data points, whenever you want, without thinking (and assume the result is meaningful). Interpolation will soon be a lost art... Nimur (talk) 18:26, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

The problem with Excel, at its heart, is that it does not give serious people the ability to really manipulate how the data is displayed, and encourages people to take a rather non-serious attitude towards visualization of data (hey, maybe this is an X,Y chart? or maybe it is a bar chart? how about a web! let's make it in 3-D, while we're at it!). It is, like the rest of Microsoft Office, geared towards middle-management. Alas, the rest of us have to use it too (or open-source programs that faithfully replicate all of its flaws). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 01:51, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Importing sound files to Scratch

What kind of file types does scratch (MIT) accept when I import sound files?--Mikespedia (talk) 05:09, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Windows Problems

On every Windows XP or Vista computer I've ever used - my own, public computers, etc - after leaving the computer on for more than a day or so it starts to act up, goes extremely slow and makes hard drive rumbling sounds even when all programs are closed and the computer is supposedly idol. More mysterious, in task manager there are no processes making read / writes, yet the hard drive rumbles away like it's been formatted or something. Why is this? Why does restarting the computer fix this problem for the next 24 hours, then it comes back? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 10:04, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

This sounds like the proverbial "When did you stop beating your wife?" question. I'm sure there will be a few Mac and Linux folks that will have a ball answering this, but - I'll give it a meager shot. (Although I've run both XP and Vista for over a month without a need to reboot). Anyway ... think of your memory (RAM) like a chalkboard. You keep writing, then using a dry eraser to to remove things when your done. Eventually, all the "dust" still on the chalkboard needs to be completely "washed off". (reboot). There are memory managers that can help with this, but essentially the computer is looking for a clean spot to write stuff. Hope that helps a little. — Ched :  ?  10:17, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand what you're trying to imply with that loaded question. Anyway, thank you for the answer. I'm not really sure what ram has to do with hard drive rumbling though, could this be the swab file?

There is no "dust" that needs to be "washed off". Some things that might cause disk activity during idle time are background defragmentation, shrinking the page file, and background indexing. The first two of those probably wouldn't show up as reads/writes in Task Manager. They can all be disabled and they shouldn't slow down your work because they stop when the machine stops being idle. NT does have an annoying habit of discarding perfectly good pages from RAM when the machine has been idle for long enough, which causes a temporary slowdown and disk activity when you start using it again. Other than that I don't know what your problem could be. -- BenRG (talk) 11:14, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

It sounds vaguely like an antivirus program constantly scanning the hard disk - which locks up the hard disk - but doesn't use that much resources - since the hard disk is the bottleneck - could this be it.83.100.250.79 (talk) 11:37, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about your systems, but I have had Windows XP computers with persistent uptimes longer than 500 days. (The only need for a reboot, if I recall, was after upgrading to XP SP2). My current Windows XP system is reporting an uptime of over 7 days at the moment. I think Windows, like any operating system, can be stable or unstable, depending on the installed software; good luck with hardware and drivers; and generally, making sure the system setup is well-thought-out. The operator's or administrator's capabilities are a major contributing factor, but sometimes you just get some bad luck with a wacky audio-card or disk controller that occasionally freezes up the machine. As far as the "gradual decay" towards sluggishness, I have not seen this behavior on Windows XP, though I remember it was always a problem on older systems (Windows 95 in particular). As I mentioned, one of my WinXP systems ran for most of two years without a reboot, and I never saw a performance slowdown. I suspect you have some buggy software running on your machine; it's probably not the operating system's fault. Nimur (talk) 18:07, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Just to correct Ched, RAM is constantly being written to and read from, it is not like a chalkboard -- if you look at it like that, it is being wiped off constantly. I find that after about 20 days of uptime my computer slows down noticeably. I don't understand how you are reading HDD read/writes from taskmgr, because it doesn't show them (as far as I know, but I don't run Vista, and it would surprise me if Microsoft implemented that in such a core feature). — neuro^(talk) 18:47, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

You can add I/O information to the XP Task Manager's process view in View → Select Columns. -- BenRG (talk) 19:02, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

I only see that option on the view menu on the networking tab. — neuro^(talk) 19:09, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

On Windows 98, RAM was often not freed up by programs after using it. In Windows XP this was noticeably improved to the point of not being a problem. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 03:55, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

In the past, (pre-WinXP) it was undoubtedly true that you needed to reboot your Windows machines at least daily. Microsoft even told you to do that! Linux and Mac users could rightly point to up-times measured in years without slowdowns or crashes. But I have to grudginly accept that Windows has gradually gotten better - the WinXP machine I use at work goes for weeks to maybe a month before needing a reboot. The reason for needing to do so at all is usually a slow leakage of resources due to almost insignificant bugs that slowly, but inexorably, cripple the system. A lot also depends on the kinds of use you put your computer to - and on how sensitive you are to performance. I'm a game programmer - I measure where every millisecond goes - and every millisecond is precious - so I'm spectacularly sensitive to problems like this!. Some programs and usage-patterns impose more of a stress than others - some may 'tickle' particular bugs - it's really tough to say why (in detail) this happens on a general basis. When it gets bad - reboot - and while it's rebooting, think about how much nicer it would be to be using Linux. SteveBaker (talk) 16:17, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Windows didn't gradually improve, it improved suddenly with the switch from Win9x to NT. Any slow leakage of resources on your machine is not NT's fault. If your 3D graphics programming is bluescreening your computer, that's ATI or Nvidia's fault. -- BenRG (talk) 20:08, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Linux cp of home directories

1. What are the correct options to give to cp to recursively copy a directory, maintaining file ownerships+groups, file permissions, including .hidden files, and let softlinks remain softlinks? I'm copying the /home subtree to a different disk. I have read the manpage, but the number of options is quite large, and the explanations terse. In case there are distro-variations, I'm using Ubuntu and Debian, and the file systems are ext3.
2. Is there any reason not to replace the /home subtree with a softlink to a subdirectory on a different disk?

Thanks, --NorwegianBlue ^talk 13:04, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

"cp -a /home /new/home" as root should do it. As for the second question, theoretically some program might get confused by /home being a softlink, but that would certainly be a bug. 84.239.160.214 (talk) 13:26, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! --NorwegianBlue ^talk 13:52, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

I've always used 'tar' for this:

  cd fromdir ; tar cf - . | ( cd todir ; tar xf - )

It preserves links, sym-links, ownerships and privilages, etc - so long as the person doing the copying has the relevant permissions. There are a bunch more command line arguments to fine-tune what gets duplicated and what doesn't. SteveBaker (talk) 16:05, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Presumably the -a option achieves the same thing (the 'a' is short for archive), but as you say there are a bunch of command line arguments. The directories in question are small enough for me to use both approaches and compare. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 19:06, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

three way merge sort

i have done 2 way merge sort ..

but now i want 2 do it by three way ...

please give sort function and merge function in detail in c-programme language..

hope i will get it earlier as there is mine exam soon.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Yogeshlahane (talk • contribs) 19:04, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not do your homework for you. Please read the header. — neuro^(talk) 19:06, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

We have a mergesort article, which shows the 2-fold way of doing it. I've never heard of someone doing it 3-fold (and I doubt it'd be more efficient), but the 3-fold implementation is an obvious extension of 2-fold - where you split into two, split instead into three. When merging, your merge function needs to be able to compare values from the three sublists. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:52, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

If you are going to try a 3-way merge sort, you would just be baby-stepping into parallel sorting algorithms. Performing it on one processor doesn't provide a benefit. Doing an n-way merge sort on n processors will have a benefit (limited heavily by Amdahl's law. Of course, there are many other parallel sorting algorithms that are far superior to parallel merge sort. -- kainaw™ 20:50, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Was I wrong to read this as a homework question? I still read it that way, just curious if I am misreading. — neuro^(talk) 22:35, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

It may very well be a homework question. Good. There is no proscription against answering homework questions; we just don't do the homework for the guy. If, as it seems, the OP needs a C implementation of 3-way mergesort, and doesn't want to do the work himself, he was SOL before he asked, and he's SOL now. If he wants to do the work himself, but was just somewhat confused, then we've helped in an appropriate and educational way. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:53, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

If the algorithm is done by hand an n-way merge is more effective. Imagine sorting a big stack of paper. I often do this myself when sorting books, splitting into 5 or 6 stacks is good. This is where the effort of moving is much bigger then the effort of identifying the next one to pick. Just keep picking the smallest off each stack that is bigger than than the last one you picked, until you can't do it any more, then pick the smallest again to start a new run. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:35, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

In the olden days of computing where there were no disk drives, but card sorters and tape drives, the most effective would be to read as many tapes at the same time for a merge, as you could. The idea is to reduce the number of operator tape mounts. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:57, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Tracing travel route on map

I am trying to create graphics of our travel route (for a family photo album). Can anyone suggest a program / website I could use for this? I would like to trace our route as lines across a map. I tried Google Maps, but it puts massive markers at every stop which I would like to avoid if possible... — QuantumEleven 21:26, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Bing Maps. Hit "Collections" -> "Open your collections". At the bottom of the collections box is a row of six or seven icons. Next to the pushpin tool is a path tool. It will measure distance as well and you can hit "print" to print the path and the surrounding map. Xenon54 / talk / 21:34, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

I believe Google Earth will do that as well, but it has 3D buildings and some other cool stuff. Thanks, gENIUS101 01:15, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

You can draw lines on Google Maps instead of dropping pointers (and have those lines follow roads automatically). -- kainaw™ 21:04, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

home networking, what equipment do i need?

the situation is that i'm moving into a large house with lots of other people, there is an existing ethernet network, ie internet comes into the house and each person gets an ethernet port in there room. Now i have several bits of equipment that use the internet and would like to make a "mini-home network" ie i have one device to plug everything into (as i only have one port in the room). Now i would like to be able to set up a network so i can share files between my computers easily and securely and preferably it would need wireless, though i could live without it

the problem i have is what do i actually look for? routers seem to need to be connected to the internet access (ADSL or cable), bridges just seem like a way to expanding the range of stuff, i think i need a switch but none of them ever seem to have wireless, is a switch what i should be looking for? and if so does anyone where i can get one with wireless ability?--90.221.74.56 (talk) 21:49, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

You need a router. The name router has been misused to commonly refer to router/modem combos which is what you've described. If you want to have a network that's pretty much inaccessible from the main LAN then you need a router, one with a WAN port and a/some LAN ports and wireless capability. If you just want to extend the main network and make all your equipment to be part of the main network then you need an ethernet switch, and a wireless access point for wireless. --antilived^{T | C | G} 01:59, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Writing Guidelines

I've moved this question to Wikipedia:New contributors' help page#Writing Guidelines, as that seems like the appropriate venue for this subject. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:39, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Searching in Google - what is "clients1.google.co.uk"?

After every key is pressed in a search, it will have a message in the firefox toolbar "waiting for clients1.google.co.uk". Is this keystroke logging?--Nothingwrongwithit (talk) 23:45, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

It's Google Suggest sending what you've typed so far to Google to provide you with that dropdown list of suggestions. You can turn it off here (bottom of the page) if you don't want the suggestions. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 23:59, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

(ec) This notes that it's a server associated with Google Suggest. That latter link tells you how to turn it off. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:01, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

September 6

SQL server problem

When I try to go to http://www.hscl.cr.nps.gov/insidenps/report.asp?STATE=&PARK=&STRUCTURE=&SORT=&RECORDNO=6534, a National Park Service webpage, I get an error message as follows:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][TCP/IP Sockets]Specified SQL server not found.
/insidenps/global.asa, line 13

Is my computer missing something, or is this a problem with the NPS website? I've accessed pages like this before, including this page just two days ago, and never had this problem before. Nyttend (talk) 01:27, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Your computer isn't missing anything, theirs is having a problem. My guess is that they keep their database on a specialized server that has somehow crashed or been turned off. (I would wait until Tuesday to expect anyone to look at it again, given the three day weekend and all.) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 01:38, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

As its name implies, SQL Server is a server side product. Nothing is required on the client to run. If you can find the webmaster's or tech support e-mail address, I would inform them of the error. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 01:48, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanations; as all had worked a few days ago, I was guessing that it was on their end, but I wasn't sure. I saw "Microsoft" as a possible indicator that my use of IE was the problem; for all I knew, they had changed settings to something that IE didn't like. If you'd said that was a browser problem, I would have perhaps tried to find a Firefox-equipped computer. Unfortunately, there's no way to find an address for a webmaster; most of the National Park Service website has been down today. Nyttend (talk) 03:49, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

For example — I found that their report-an-error page was visible, but when I tried to submit a report, I received a "page-not-found" message. Nyttend (talk) 03:53, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

You shouldn't see any sort of explanation of the error at all. The web master should have disabled custom error messages in the web.config file. Imagine what a hacker could do by changing the URL and seeing the output from the server. Everything you see is just plain incompetence, and it's more common than you think.--S1kjreng (talk) 05:41, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Honestly, just wait until Tuesday. I bet it will work again. Nobody is there right now and nobody is going to get to it before then. It's a government website, not a for-profit dot-com that cares about its uptime. They'll get to it. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 14:05, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Intel E4300 vs. Intel T3400

I am about to buy a low-cost laptop. I have a choice between Intel E4300 and Intel T3400. Which is better? Intel has a comparison at its website. The E4300 has a faster FSB and larger L2 cache, but the T3400 is newer and has a lower "Max TDP". Which is better? Thanks! --Masatran —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.36.231 (talk) 10:39, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Are you sure you saw E4300 on a laptop? I thought the E-series is for desktop? --antilived^{T | C | G} 11:18, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

What redirects here?

How do I find out what articles redirect to another article? In this case I'm interested in Female ejaculation ?Rfwoolf (talk) 12:49, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Use the "what links here" option - [6] -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 13:59, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Not not the What links here, cos how do I distinguish between which terms links there, and which redirect there?Rfwoolf (talk) 16:27, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Ahh okay I see you can then filter out the links... Got it. Thanks Rfwoolf (talk) 16:28, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Copying text from an Acrobat Reader PDF document

Acrobat Reader has something called their Text Select Tool. When I use it to select and then copy text, and then paste that text into, for instance, TextEdit, the results are strange. The results require a lot of cleaning up. Here is an example of how something comes out:

Consult the ser onsult servic vice and suppor e support inf t information that came with y ormation your i our iMac f ac for or

inf information about ho ormation how t w to contac tact A t Apple f pple for ser or servic vice.

I have an Apple computer.

What is causing this? Is there a way to overcome this? Bus stop (talk) 14:57, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

What's causing it is how PDFs store text sometimes. Instead of storing it as a sentence, it stores it as a bunch of glyphs (letters) with specific positioning information (letter "C" goes here, letter "o" goes there), and doesn't necessarily know how they fit together. So in your case you have things like "inf" on one line and "ormation" on another, because the PDF doesn't actually realize that those are part of the same word and are sitting on the same line. My understanding of it is that it varies depending on what tool was used to make the PDF. Some programs do better than others. There's no way to overcome it that I know of. It's a problem with the PDF, not the reader. (This is assuming, based on the content, that it is not an OCR problem.) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:00, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

The problem seems to be much less pronounced with PDFs produced in 2009. I should have mentioned, that the PDF that I was trying to copy and paste from, was made in 2006. Maybe the problem has been to an extent addressed since then. Thank you for your help. Bus stop (talk) 15:51, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm told another issue is that in a PDF file, the program that created the file may write out the text "information about ho" and then stop what it's doing, skip lower on the page to write unrelated text, then skip back to where it was and resume with "w to contact...". If this is so, it sounds difficult for programmers to write a PDF reader to reliably copy and paste text that happens to be contiguous visually. Tempshill (talk) 01:44, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

The easiest way, in that case, would be to dump the page to an image file (PNG, for example), and then run OCR on that. It might work or it might not (or, most likely and even worse than not working, it will work with an accuracy of 98% or so...). Jørgen (talk) 08:58, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Believe it or not it is now working. I went to Adobe's website and downloaded an updated version of their Adobe Reader. I guess I should have tried that in the first place. Thank you all for your input. Bus stop (talk) 16:21, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Microsoft Excel Mode function

Is anyone familiar with the Microsoft Excel 2007 function called "Mode"? It is supposed to return the mode in a set of data. Sometimes, however, a set of data has more than one mode. Nonetheless, Excel returns simply one (and only one) result. That is, Excel returns only one of the modes, but not all of the modes. Does anyone know which of the several modes it reports? Is it the highest numerical mode? The lowest? I can't seem to find any rhyme or reason in how Excel computes the mode in a situation where the data set has several modes. One of my thoughts is that it goes through each data point, one by one. As soon as it finds one mode (any mode), it simply reports that. And any subsequent additional modes that it finds, it simply ignores. But, that is just a guess on my part. Does anyone know? Thanks. (Joseph A. Spadaro, 6 September 2009)

Here is the official documentation for the function, but it does not explicitly answer your question. Maybe the best solution is to test on a few known data-sets to see if the behavior is consistent? In this case, the best programming practice would be to assume that the value is "undefined" on such a data-set (or at least, that the selection of which mode is undefined), unless you can guarantee that it is always (e.g.) the lowest of the possible valid choices. Nimur (talk) 21:20, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Fiddling about in Excel 2003, I see there is the same problem. If there is more than one mode, it looks like Excel reports the first mode in order of the position of the first element of that mode in the array - not necessarily the first mode. For example:

• mode(2,5,3,5,1,2,1) = 2

The "first mode" would be 5 but it reports the 2. Do you get the same result in Excel 2007? Zain Ebrahim (talk) 10:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for the input. To Zain Ebrahim ... I think that your theory is correct. Yes, I do have the same problem and the same results in Excel 2007 as you do in Excel 2003. To test your theory ... I tried the following functions and got the following results (among several other trials):

• mode(700,333,8,8,8,700,111,555,700) ... Result = 700 (as your theory predicted).

Using the same exact data set, in different order, yields:

• mode(8,700,700,700,333,111,555,8,8) ... Result = 8 (also, as your theory predicted).

Now, this leads to my follow-up question (below). Thanks. (Joseph A. Spadaro, 7 September 2009)

Follow up question:

I thought that the Mode function also works on text data (that is, words) ... in addition to numerical data. In fact, in the Remarks section of the official documentation, it states: "Arguments can either be numbers or names." Therefore, as a test, I tried the following data set:

• egg, star, star, star, tree, orange, frog, egg, egg.

And I expected to get a mode of "egg" ... but I got an error message instead (specifically, #N/A). I tried formatting the above list of words as "general format" and also as "text format" ... both formats returned an error message for the mode function. What am I doing wrong? Thanks. (Joseph A. Spadaro, 7 September 2009)

I'll think you'll find that Names in this context refers to Named Ranges. 86.165.115.70 (talk) 15:50, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

MPEG-2 and AVCHD Video Files

Dear All,

Can anyone tell me a way to convert to either of these two file formats if you have a camcorder that doesn't use them? Mine will only record in a strange format for which the file extension is .mt2s

If someone could recommend a program that would convert (especially for free) I'd be very grateful.

90.218.48.56 (talk) 20:22, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Avidemux and Handbrake both support .mt2s files —Preceding unsigned comment added by Avrillyria (talk • contribs) 20:42, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Sites - copyright

What's the best way to tell if a site is legit? Specifically [7] (popups!) Is it a no brainer that this site is circumventing copyright (I don't want an angry letter from my ISP...)83.100.250.79 (talk) 21:20, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

When you say "legit", I think you mean whether accessing a particular website violates any laws. Since we don't know where you are or what you're doing, it's impossible to know; and we can't give you any legal advice (see our legal disclaimer at the top of the page). If you're interested in learning about digital copyright law in general, we have numerous articles you can read. In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the applicable legal standard; typically, Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act explains the liability of one party for the infringing acts of a second party. Again, we can't interpret whether these apply to your particular scenario; or make any guarantee about the accuracy of the articles at any given time. Nimur (talk) 21:37, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

obviously my intended activity would include downloading stuff via this site, what I'm asking is suppose I want to download a Rhianna (or Shakira song) (as examples), and I don't entirely trust that everyone using the site has read and digested the DMCA etc - so there might be some non 'legit' stuff on there.. How can I find out if a music label has released a song for free (as does happen - for publicity reasons etc I suppose) - is there a simple way I can find out the copyright status of a song.?

83.100.250.79 (talk) 22:14, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

No, there is no simple way. Everything must be assumed to be copyrighted unless you know otherwise fairly explicitly. Anyway, that site is almost certainly violating copyrights. Whether they are breaking laws depends on their jurisdiction. (You can tell this pretty easily by reading its disclaimer, which is a standard "we're not violating copyright, our users are! nothin' we can do about that!" that all sites who habitually violate copyright have posted. In this case I'm not sure it is even true; it sure looks like the content is hosted on their server, which makes them liable.)

Now the upside for you, as a user, is that the only people who know, at the moment, that you've downloaded anything is the skeezy site. It's not the same thing as the P2P software where one of your "peers" might actually be a copyright watchdog. So the odds of getting a letter from your ISP are pretty low. But I am not a lawyer, yo. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 23:53, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

There is an easy way - if the site says something like "this song is provided copyright-free" then it is - if not, not. Everything that anyone writes, draws, paints, composes, sings, publishes, sculpts, etc is automatically copyrighted. There is no need to put a little 'c' in a circle or register it someplace. So unless there is a specific statement (such as at the bottom of every Wikipedia page) that says that there are some special terms and conditions, then it's safe to assume that the work is indeed copyrighted and that you need permission - or some kind of license - in order to be able to copy it. Even if you ARE allowed to copy it - you may be required to accept some additional terms and conditions (as is indeed the case with the Wikipedia GFDL and CC-BY-SA 3.0 license terms) - which may prevent you from giving copies to your friends or putting the thing on your website or whatever - even though you were allowed to download it for free. SteveBaker (talk) 15:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

September 7

Fonts

I have multiple computers in my home, and I have recently used one (not the one from which I am typing now) to view a user's signature. I thought it nice, and decided to copy some of the code for my own. Unfortunately, it seems the computer I am on now does not have the font I want installed, so all I see when I look at that user's signature on this computer is regular text. Could someone tell me how I can install, download, or otherwise acquire the font "Monotype Corsiva"? Intelligentsium 00:03, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

P.S. - I have a feeling my new signature looks a lot better to those of you whose computers can show Monotype Corsiva - to me it only looks like italicized text. Intelligentsium 00:03, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

You mean that it looks like this? I have the font of which you speak, and it looks quite similar to that font. Sorry, but I can't help you get it; the only time that I tried to download a font, it failed without my understanding why. Nyttend (talk) 00:53, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Going off topic but it's a really bad idea to rely on fonts for your signature. If you want a proper signature, include an image; if you want to have your name printed clearly - use a normal font. Script-font-signatures are generic, unreliable, and very 90's :p --antilived^{T | C | G} 01:23, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

To install a font, download the font file(s) (typically *.ttf files), and then copy them to the C:\WINDOWS\Fonts. You have to copy them to the Fonts folder from another, uncompressed, folder, on the computer. If I remember correctly, it is, for some reason, not possible to copy them to the Fonts folder directly from a compressed foler (*.zip) in (at least) Windows Vista. You can download loads of highly interesting fonts for free (see "free fonts"), but I believe that Monotype Corsiva is not free, but included in either Microsoft Windows (Vista) or Microsoft Office (2007). --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 09:21, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I've got Monotype Corsiva and the signature doesn't display in it... when I paste the signature into Word it says it's in "Decorative". If you delete the <font face="Decorative"> and the matching </font> you end up with Intelligentsium (the code is <font style="font-family:Monotype Corsiva; font-size:15px;"><i>[[User:Intelligentsium|<span style="color:DarkGreen">Intelligent</span>]]<b>[[User_talk:Intelligentsium|<span style="color:Black">sium</span>]]</b></i></font> ) , which I'm seeing in something that looks like Monotype Corsiva. Re downloading the font, http://www.newfonts.net/index.php?pa=show_font&id=130 claims to be a free-to-download Monotype Corsiva and the filename looks plausible - I can't get at my fonts folder to check at the moment. AJHW (talk) 11:23, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Mac on PC

How do I do it? I heard it's called Hackintosh, what exactly do I do —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 11:28, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

That article links you to resources, such as they are. Apple claims that doing so violates their EULA and that it's illegal, and they make strenuous legal and technical efforts to keep breaking Hackintoshes. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 11:57, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

And it depends on your hardware; hacked distros such as iDeneb are a bit easier to install, but still your mileage may vary, as it may not work as well as it should. And obtaining an ISO image of it may be illegal in most jurisdictions, too. Blake Gripling (talk) 12:02, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

int in C++

What are the benefits of having a type "int" in C++ that can be a short, a long, or even a long long? Should a programmer always use definite types, such as short and long instead? -- kainaw™ 11:39, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I guess it made sense to Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie and those guys back in the day, to have a type that was the size of the machine word, although in practice it's pretty hard to think of a programming case that having that adaptive int makes for easier programming of a given task than using a fixed-size. My only guess is that, while modern compilers can treat values from 8 to 64 bits with facility, things were harder and less efficient with DMR's first C compiler (and they couldn't afford the space or time to have the compiler invisibly insert a bunch of instructions to complement arithmetic ops on a size the architecture didn't natively support). Without exception, every single serious systems programming job I've ever worked on has used uint32_t (et al) or something very similar. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 11:55, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

What I mean by that is that, particularly with a rather basic compiler and a very slow and instruction poor CPU,

       int x;
       for (x=0; x<10000; x++) {
         *p=x + x/2 + x%5;
       }

would be much faster than if the type of x was short or long, because all those ops on a non-native-wordsize x would require lots of masking and shifting to get them to work. More modern CPUs have a rich enough instruction set that this isn't a major issue right now (except for long long). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 12:07, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

In addition, C99's stdint.h has some nice types that encode the idea of minimum-width and fastest-minimum-width integers, so you'd probably code the above example with the type of x being uint_fast16_t, so you get the advantage of using the CPU's native int if that's appropriate, but without prescribing a possibly suboptimal type. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 12:36, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I understood the question, and so did Finlay, who answered it well, but make no mistake: an int can never "be" a short or a long. Even if int has the same representation as another integer type, the types remain distinct. It is also impossible for "int" to provide as much storage as "long long", unless "long" and "long long" are the same size, because an int can't be larger than a long. My advice is to not worry too much about short and long, and just stick with int, unless there's specific reasons to worry about those things. decltype (talk) 13:05, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Correct. I was referring to bit-size, not type. I do not see why a compiler couldn't use 8 bytes (long long) for an int and still be ANSI C/C++ compliant. I know that "long long" hasn't been completely adopted, but 64-bit machines are common enough that an optimized system could opt for 8-byte ints. -- kainaw™ 14:13, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

When working with hardware acceleration, using a generic name for the "standard" floating point or integer representation allows for easy portability. In reference to your original question, this means that I can compile the same code for two different machines, (e.g. a 32-bit and a 64-bit system), and get all the benefits/hassles of immediate conversion to the new bit size. For complex applications, this would be undesirable; but for numerical algorithm kernel code, this is extremely helpful in improving portability. Nimur (talk) 15:06, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

True. My point was that on such a system, sizeof(long) would also have to be exactly 8. decltype (talk) 06:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

The original specification for C said that 'int' was the most efficient word-length for the hardware and only guaranteed that it was no smaller than a 'short' and no longer than a 'long'. Small microcontrollers and ancient C compilers for things like the 6502, 6800, Z80 and 8080 families often used 16 bit 'int' but so many programmers of larger-scale computers assumed that an 'int' was 32 bits that there were severe portability problems with these systems. Nowadays, some microcontrollers still use 16 bit int's because it's rare to be able to port anything from (say) a PC with a couple of gigabytes of main memory to a microcontroller with 512 bytes! However, even the compilers for those systems often have a compile option to always compile 'int' as 32 bit. Hence we now have a 'de-facto' standard that char is 8 bits, short is 16, int is 32, long is either 32 or 64 depending on whether the underlying hardware is 32 bit or 64 and long-long is 64 (if it's implemented). I would be rather surprised if any compilers ever broke that 'standard' in the future because it's so widely assumed to be true - even when the language specification doesn't guarantee it.

The reason not to always use the maximum word length is performance. Even though a 64 bit machine may be able to add two 64 bit numbers just as fast as a 32 bit one - it's really quite rare to actually need 64 bits in most of the situations where integers occur - and the additional memory storage requirements and RAM bandwidth demands of using 64 bits tend to completely outweigh their usefulness. When I worked at L3 Simulation, we had over a million lines of code in the application I was in charge of - and there were only (I think) two places where we used 'long' - and that was for date-fetching functions as mandated by the Linux kernel API. We were careful to do that precisely because of 32/64 bit portability issues.

The major benefit of transitioning to 64 bit processors is nothing to do with integer calculations - but rather that of improved double precision floating point performance and the ability to address more the 2Gbytes of RAM without kernel slowdowns and other ikky problems.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:43, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Improved floating point performance? Are you talking about the extra XMM registers? But there are extra GPRs too and that improves integer performance... -- BenRG (talk) 19:45, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

The ability to perform fast bitwise operations on 64-bit integers has a tremendous impact on the performance of chess engines and other board game implementations that make heavy use of bitboards, such as Othello. decltype (talk) 06:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Use the stdint.h ones instead, or for big projects set up your own include file which defines you own names for the types you want. That'll make it easier to port. By the way you do sometimes get funny sizes like 18, 24 or 36 bits in embedded work. The other thing I'd warn against is assuming that int is the same size as a pointer, use intptr_t instead, same with things like file sizes. Dmcq (talk) 16:36, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

If you're not using C99, here's some portable C89 code to generate fixed size types. "Portable" meaning that it does not make any assumptions about the size of char, short, int or long. Similar definitions can be made for signed types. (Although personally I believe that if you want portable code, you should just use int, or long if the value might exceed 16 bits.) Mitch Ames (talk) 11:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

/*  Portable definitions of fixed size integer types */
#include <limits.h>

/* 8 bit */

#if UCHAR_MAX == 0xff
    typedef unsigned char u8;
#elif USHRT_MAX == 0xff
    typedef unsigned short u8;
#else
    #error No 8 bit type available.
#endif

/* 16 bit */

#if UINT_MAX == 0xffff
    typedef unsigned int u16;
#elif USHRT_MAX == 0xffff
    typedef unsigned short u16;
#elif UCHAR_MAX == 0xffff
    typedef unsigned char u16;
#elif ULONG_MAX == 0xffff
    typedef unsigned long u16;
#else
    #error No 16 bit type available.
#endif

/* 32 bit */

#if UINT_MAX == 0xffffffff
    typedef unsigned int u32;
#elif ULONG_MAX == 0xffffffff
    typedef unsigned long u32;
#elif USHRT_MAX == 0xffffffff
    typedef unsigned short u32;
#else
    #error No 32 bit type available.
#endif

DV handycam

If it possible to capture video in .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files using DV Handycam? --AquaticMonkey (talk) 13:38, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

When I import video to my Windows machine from my MiniDV camcorder, the video is in an AVI file. Not sure what codec. Tempshill (talk) 15:30, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

No, you can't capture in those formats, but you can convert DV files to them pretty easily with something like ffmpeg. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 20:04, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Can Wikipedia please add a 'share' facility for Facebook and myspace users etc?

Hello,

I am not sure where to send my request for the idea of Facebook and myspace share buttons to be added to Wiki? Sorry if I have wasted your time, please can you forward on to the right place, or instruct me where I need to send this idea to?

Thank you

Why can't you simply use the hyperlink? It's the most general way to "share" a web document. Wikipedia's architecture has been conveniently designed so that its URLs are human-readable. I think the best place to ask about this sort of feature would be the WP:Village pump, where technical issues and policy suggestions are discussed. Nimur (talk) 15:09, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Binding application window to a particular monitor

I recently added a second monitor to my Windows Vista computer and am looking for a Windows equivalent to devilspie (UNIX). My primary concern is iTunes - the Library window is maximized on the 2nd monitor, but the Get Info insists on opening on the 1st monitor. I am thinking of something like devilspie so I can pattern match by windows name / parent application name / etc to convince iTunes to keep on its own monitor. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Freedomlinux (talk) 16:02, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

GIMP/PSD text layer problem

Greetings. Am gonna be terse today, because I'm getting sick and am tired, so here's the problem.

User is using GIMP 2.4.3 running on Zenwalk Linux. User does the following:

1. Open old PDF as single-layer graphics and edit out certain portions (text). What remains is one layer of graphics.
2. Save so created document as .psd (user's customer wants .psd).
3. Open so created .psd on following day; introduce text as layers into document. Save (as .psd still).

Now, when user tries to edit the text in the .psd, he can't. Is this:

a) impossible b) easy, but user doesn't know how to do it c) complicated, but user also doesn't know how to do it.

I thought .psd was a useful and editable format. Is it the GIMP that doesn't fully support it? What gives?

I can share the incriminated .psd file to show what I mean. Thanks in advance. Gonna get some tea now. Cheers, Ouro (blah blah) 16:35, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

When you import into Gimp, you are converting the PDF into an image of the PDF. When you save as PSD, you are saving an image, not text. Gimp (even through the latest version, as far as I know) does not save a PSD text layer. It saves it as an image. -- kainaw™ 16:43, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

One down. Thanks, Kainaw. Have to look for another tool, then... Ouro (blah blah) 16:53, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Try importing the PDF in Inkscape, remove the things you want, and then export. Inkscape won't write to PSD, but will write to SVG, PS, EPS, and AI (adobe illustrator) formats. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:17, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

If you're ever going to open .svg files created with Inkscape in AI, be sure to save it in plain .svg or AI will have problems. 142.20.146.226 (talk) 20:09, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm probably forgetting something obvious here... but can't the user save the interim versions as .xcf (which should keep the layers intact) then save the document as .psd when it's finished? AJHW (talk) 11:04, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

powerpoint

Which type of the following screen elements is displayed below the slide pane and allows you to type additional slide information. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.166.18.43 (talk) 16:57, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

There's a 'slide notes' that you can add lots of notes -these don't appear on-screen but you can print them off so that you have the notes that relate to the appropriate page (you can also send the doc to people so they can see it with the slide-notes for further reference). Is that what you mean? ny156uk (talk) 17:21, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

System freezes with nvidia geforce 9800

Hello there, I am having trouble with system freezing issue. I have bought a new card nvidia geforce 9800. Whenever I try to play crysis or other game it freezes within 10 minutes. I recorded temperature.

• In idle 49 Celsius and 3d load it is 83 Celsius (Graphics card)
• Processor 27 Celsius
• Mainboard 36 Celsius

What is the problem and how can I rectify it? I am planning to buy a processor cooler. Will that solve that issue? I have full tower chasis with four fan inside.

My specs:

• Core 2 Quade 9400
• nvidia geforce 9800
• mobo: 750 SLI nvidia geforce
• 4 gb ram (800 MHz)
• Full tower chasis

Any advice would be appreciated.--119.30.36.53 (talk) 17:25, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

The processor temperature sounds good to me. The nvidia temperature running the game is higher than I'd like though still below when they'd slow it down. The fan should speed up a great deal at that temperature - do you hear it doing so? Freezing though sounds to me more like a possible power supply problem. Dmcq (talk) 17:52, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree - if it's not overheating then you're almost certainly overloading the power supply. You need a more powerful one. SteveBaker (talk) 03:41, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

• My PSU is Thermaltake 750W. I have increased the fan speed from 35% to 40% by using Riva Tuner. Still I don't hear fan noise. What should be the ideal fan speed at 83 Celsius? Will it reduce fan life span (If I increase)? Thank you —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.30.36.53 (talk) 12:05, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Is it a GT or GTX or GTX+? My friend has a GT with a single slot cooler and it gets really hot, whereas the GTX+ with dual slot cooler is considerably cooler. If you have the former, you should improve the ventilation in your case or your card will just keep recycling hot air around. --antilived^{T | C | G} 12:14, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

It's funny about you not hearing a change in the nvidia fan, I'd have though it was probably the loudest part of what you've got. If the system lasts much longer or doesn't crash with the side off then it's probably overheating. You have to be careful about airflow, it's usually best to keep everything clear but sometimes a baffle to ensure the air goes the way one wants can help if there is a particular problem. Dmcq (talk) 18:20, 8 September 2009 (UTC).

Are you sure the GeForce's fan is actually working/spinning at all? I know it sounds a bit obvious, but as you've said that you don't hear it I think it's worth verifying and it certainly would explain the overheating. I used to have a 7950GT which suffered similiar issues and that was because my fan had seized up and stopped and like Dmcq above said, I would also expect it to be quite noisy. Try loading a game and "playing" it so the card is working hard and then placing your ear next to it should be enough to hear if it's on. ZX81 ^talk 19:17, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

• After increasing the fan speed to 50%, I am hearing a little noise from card. I also tested with "furomark" software. When temperature goes to 85% the fan speed increases with huge noise in it. I have tested my system with another card but same thing is happening. Can it be motherboard or processor? bit worried :(--119.30.36.55 (talk) 19:31, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Symptoms of processor overheating

Hello there what are the symptoms of processor overheating? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.30.36.53 (talk) 17:40, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Other than the computer's CPU temp alarm going off, the most common symptom is apparently random system restarts. That is not always a CPU overheat. Just about any part of the computer can overheat and produce enough heat to cause the computer to reboot. What makes it complicated is that a faulty fan can cause a perfectly cool system to reboot. -- kainaw™ 18:49, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Many CPU's use clock-throttling (aka Dynamic frequency scaling) to try to keep cool - so if your PC seems to run slowly when doing CPU-intensive tasks, it's worth checking the temperature. Some GPU's can do that too. If this happens a lot - if it's happeneing then it's a sure sign that your machine is inadequately cooled and may crash under more extreme loads. SteveBaker (talk) 03:40, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

• Can system freezes because of processor overheating? --119.30.36.55 (talk) 19:17, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Probably, yes, and definitely crashes followed by restarts. I've been having problems with my 2005 AMD Athlon64 PC recently, which turned out to be caused by processor overheating. The symptoms were: during CPU-intensive tasks, during file copying, and during any activity which involved USB traffic, the fan sped up, becoming much more noisy. It was instantaneous and highly reproducible, move the mouse, and the fan speed increased. I tried to hear whether it was the fan of the PSU or the fan attached to the CPU, and first thought it was the PSU. Since I had installed two extra hard disks, I found that reasonable, and replaced the PSU. Same symptoms. Then I read about the Cool'n'Quiet feature of the Athlon 64 CPUs. So I removed the fan that cools the CPU, and saw that the cooling paste had gone dry, and that there were patches where it was simply gone - there was air between the metal block to which the fan was attached, and the CPU. So I bought cleaning liquid (two components) to remove the cooling paste, new cooling paste, and fastened the fan again. That fixed the problem completely. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 19:46, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

• I have freezing issue with my system. I thought it was my graphics card but when I tested system with another graphics card, same freezing problem is happening. Is it processor or motherboard or what else? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.30.36.47 (talk) 09:57, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Ubuntu

I've been a Windoze guy for a long, long time. However, when my box recently died, I thought I'd give Ubuntu Linux a try. With my old 'puter now pushing up daisies, I got an old junker off a friend and tried to install Ubuntu 9.04 on it. As installation begins, Ubuntu craps out, saying that the BIOS on the computer is too old (1999, and it needs 2000) and proceeds to give error number 16, which I assume is related to the BIOS date issue. So, what's my best option? I've never updated a BIOS before; I don't know if such a thing is practical/possible. Should I instead look for an older version of Ubuntu? What release would I need? Or should I just try a different distro? I'm willing to do some learning, but Linux is brand new to me. Matt Deres (talk) 17:50, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Try Damn Small Linux. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:43, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

You could try an older version of Ubuntu, but that would expose you to bugs/security holes which have since been patched. Your best bet is to talk to Ubuntu experts to see if there isn't some simple setting that you can change to get it to work (the unofficial forums (ubuntuforums.org) is probably the best place to do that - they are remarkably beginner friendly). Failing that, you can look for another linux distribution which may work better with older equipment. (Again, the Ubuntu forums may help to point you in the right direction.) -- 128.104.112.179 (talk) 18:51, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Ubuntu is more forgiving of an older machine than, say, Vista, but asking a decade old machine to run it is unlikely to be fun. It may very well be possible to get it to run, but the stuff it installs by default is (comparatively) memory hungry. DSL is a better fit, as is Puppy Linux. Knoppix might work okay, depending on the machine's specifics. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:04, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Errors during installation might be caused by errors in the burning of the CD; make sure to verify it first. Xubuntu is a version of Ubuntu that is intended for lower end computers. --Spoon! (talk) 20:13, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Puppy linux will boot off a cd without needing to be installed - try that for a start. There are probably other variants of Linux as well that will boot off the cd. 78.149.167.102 (talk) 23:48, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I assume it's a GRUB error 16, which is usually a file-system issue. Updating your BIOS is a trivial task, and I haven't had any problems doing so. That's assuming that the BIOS is actually the problem. I've learned to avoid the bi-yearly Ubuntu releases. They're very buggy. It's ridiculous that Ubuntu releases a new version every six months. That's not enough time to fix the bugs. Windows Vista was in beta for 1 ½ years! And even then, it wasn't ready. I use Ubuntu 8.04 -- the long-term support release. They've patched that one too many times to count, so it's very stable. The latest version is 8.04.3, meaning it's on it's third "service pack" (that's what I call it) after only 1 ½ years. There's also Debian, which is what Ubuntu is based on. That is very stable. If you mess around with any of the new Ubuntu releases, you're frankly asking for trouble.--S1kjreng (talk) 03:52, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you all for the replies. I burned a CD of Puppy Linux and that also is failing to install. In the case of Puppy, it appears to be starting correctly, and even allows me to access the boot options with <F2>, but will go no further - it just freezes. Both Ubuntu and Puppy fail to either install or run from disc, so I'm beginning to suspect the problem is more... complicated than an out of date BIOS. Discs are cheap, so I'll give one of the other options above a crack at it and then perhaps haul the box out to the curb for the weekly pick up. Computers are not my friends this week it seems. Matt Deres (talk) 18:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I had a lot of trouble a while back installing Ubuntu on a relatively old secondhand computer: the problem turned out to be the CD drive - out of my four second-hand drives, the Ubuntu CD was only happy to install using one (counter-intuitively, the oldest). 213.122.39.88 (talk) 22:20, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

External drives that appear to be internal

Dear Wikipedians:

This has been a problem that bugged me for a long time:

At times I find opening up the computer, put in new hard drive, etc, to be a major hassle. Unfortunately, so far all the "canonical buses" are internal -- by which I mean the PATA and SATA interfaces. I know that Linux can be installed and booted off of external devices such as USB stick. However, I googled and found that it takes a lot of hacking to isntall Windows XP on a USB stick.

I'm wondering if there is a solution that would allow me to install Windows XP (and all operating systems for that matter) transparently (i.e. no hacking) onto an external storage device that lies OUTSIDE the system chassis and is powered independently.

What I mean is that as far as I'm aware, there are three external buses used for storage devices:

• USB
• Firewire
• eSATA

I'm wondering if :

1. Are eSATA drives recognized and treated in the same way as internal SATA drives? (That is, can WinXP be installed onto eSATA devices with no hacking necessary).

2. Are there any other alternative bus architecture that I'm unaware of that would allow me to accomplish the effect of being able to install and boot OS off of external devices?

3. Is there a way of plugging in an expansion slot device (like extra USB port hookup) that translates internal IDE cable signals into an external USB/Firewire signal so that all my USB sticks transparently become USB devices (because the system has no way to tell what's at the other end of the IDE cable, as far as it's concerned it's a perfectly legal IDE hard drive).

4. Or, better yet, is there someway of FOOLING the system/OS into thinking that a USB/Firewire device is a proper internal PATA/SATA device?

Thanks.

174.88.240.61 (talk) 22:17, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

There are probably some hacks, but you probably need to check if your motherboard will boot from these devices. Many new BIOS will boot from USB. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 23:42, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I also did some digging aruond myself and found out that eSATA does exactly what I want to: internal and eSATA appear EXACTLY the same (i.e. as internal) to the system, and therefore to WinXP and all other OS. As a perk, eSATA also has beat all other external buses (USB, 1394) in speed by roughly one order of magnitude ;) I'm going eSATA! 70.52.150.227 (talk) 01:56, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Resolved

September 8

Algorithmns to measure how closely two short sections of text match

I want to write a program that parses downloaded bank statements. This would include comparing text strings of up to about 50 characters long with another similar text string, or perhaps a whole group of similar text strings. What algorithmn could I use to measure how similar the two compared text strings are? The result would be a number scale that at one extreme means an exact match, at the other no match at all. Perhaps such an algoithmn may be similar to those which match mispelt words - how do they work? 78.149.167.102 (talk) 00:04, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Levenshtein distance is a good article to start with; there are several articles in the same area linked to at the bottom of that article. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:26, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Hamming distance is another - but a lot depends on what your desired kind of similarity is...if you look for precise binary differences - then a single letter missing from one string towards the start will make the strings totally different from that point onwards - when from a "human" perspective, they are almost identical. Two interchanged letters is another common typo that you might want to consider to be a 'minimal' change. Two strings might be identical but one is in uppercase and the other lower - not one character matches! You might also want to consider using a Soundex approach - which makes two strings that SOUND similar come out similar in comparisons...handy when a message has been relayed by phone and typed by someone who doesn't spell so well! But it depends on what you want and why. SteveBaker (talk) 03:29, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

For things like bank statements it may also be useful to compare similarity of numerical values, for example saying $100 is closer to $99.99 than to $1000 or $900. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:18, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia

I'm not sure where to ask this question so I picked this section. How much data is stored in Wikipedia? I'm curious to know. Thanks for any information. NeoJustin (talk) 07:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Text only, or including media (e.g. pictures)? Only en.wikipedia.org, or *.wikipedia.org? Do you want to include wiktionary.org, and other projects as well? If you only count the pure textual content (with formatting) in en.wikipedia.org, you might use the last dump of the database as a measure. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 07:53, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I was thinking en.wikipedia.org and everything including pictures. Any breakdown would be nice. I was thinking it must be like trillions and trillions of bytes of data. I'll look at the link. NeoJustin (talk) 08:08, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

The dump doesn’t seem to provide a total byte count, only 17,449,963 pages of which 2,404,861 pages are in English. If a “page” is, on average, about 10KB (this is just a guess – someone might have done some research on article length?) then the total in the English Wikipedia would be around 2.5 GB, but the last dump on September 4th was 9.7GB compressed, which could expand to nearly 200GB including talk pages and user pages. Can anyone narrow down the discrepancy?

By way of comparison, The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that "As of May 2009, the Library has collected almost 100 terabytes of data", and, according to Kevin Kelly of the New York Times, "the entire written works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages" would amount to 50 petabytes of data. Google processes about 20 petabytes of data per day. The big advantages of Wikipedia are its ready accessibility and its relevance (usually) Dbfirs 08:55, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

So all the articles on the English Wikipedia would be less than 200 GB. Interesting... I could download it all onto my computer (if I had a reason). NeoJustin (talk) 17:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether that dump included pictures (probably not if they reside in commons). Are there any Wikipedia experts reading this who can check on my guesses? Dbfirs 22:54, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

From Wikipedia database dump, the dump of all current articles is 5 GB, and all current pages (including talk pages etc) is 10 GB. However, this doesn't include page histories or images. Just the full article histories are 2.8 TB, not counting images. — QuantumEleven 09:36, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Turn the Windows search index off

how

Load Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services - Scroll down to "Windows Search" and double-click to open. Click stop and then change the startup state to "Disabled" to stop it from restarting. This will obviously have a knock on effect on the performance of anything trying to use Windows Search. ZX81 ^talk 19:11, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Vision client

Is there any way to turn it off without my teacher knowing?Accdude92 (talk) (sign) 13:21, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Probably not, if they've set it up reasonably intelligently. (I'm assuming they don't give you access to the Program Files, Control Panel, or an unencumbered Task Manager). And even if you could, if you got caught, there would probably be severe penalties regarding computer "hacking" and other such things. You'll have a whole, long life to goof around on the computer — surely you can make it through a few months of school. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 13:52, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

As 98.217 mentioned, unless there is a serious flaw in the software and setup, you will not be able to circumvent it while it is running. But there are other ways to work around such software locks. As mentioned above, try not to get yourself in trouble; schools sometimes overreact to any minor digital deviance with legal threats and a variety of other hassles.

The following advice applies in general to a machine you wish to unlock, which you have physical access to. A common adage is that "physical access to the machine" trumps every software security methodology, but this is not strictly true. A skilled systems engineer can set up so many levels of protection.

You could conceivably reboot the machine with a Live CD. This will circumvent almost every software protection on the local machine. But, a few technical caveats come to mind. But, if the machine is running a Trusted Platform Module, or some other pre-boot hardware lock, (including certain setups with encrypted hard disk drives), the machine may refuse to boot any unauthorized software. In fact, there may be a pre-boot BIOS password at power-up, which will deny you the ability to boot from disk or CD. Even if you successfully circumvent these and boot a Live CD, you're not in the clear yet. The network may be configured to deny access to any machine which isn't running exactly as it was configured.

If such draconian technological protections were actually in place, attempting to circumvent them would be technically challenging and would certainly not win you any points with your teacher.

As always, though, the best way to circumvent a computer security system is social engineering. See if you can volunteer to work with the computer or IT department as an extra-curricular activity. It will be a good learning experience, and you will probably gain fuller access to the computers and the network. The "best way" to "break in" to a system is to politely ask permission and earn the privilege to use it. Nimur (talk) 15:04, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Short answer to your question is "No" As a Computer teacher, I use vision, and I've had students try to disconnect... if they are sucessful I see an indication on the classroom overview so I can check on that student personally. 206.131.39.6 (talk) 16:25, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

My college teacher uses Vision as well (in fact he's probably watching me type this right now...), and it isn't possible to turn it off without them knowing. If you did, they would most likely see that your computer isn't connected. This could easily be justifiable if the computer was actually turned off, but if the lights are off in the classroom, the glow from the monitor onto your face would be a dead giveaway as to what you're up to... Do you go to high school or college? I personally don't highly recommend it, but if it's college, and it has wireless internet access, you could probably bring a laptop to do... whatever it is you want to do. Until It Sleeps ^alternate 15:41, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

php html

I have a php script that generates a page from it's flat file database when I visit a url such as "example.php?page=2". I would like it to also create a .html page on the server so that the php is not being queried constantly to view the page from the php. What would be the best way to do this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 14:15, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Why? If you save an html page, it's no longer dynamic, which is the point of that setup. And you could have it automatically generate one, but it would be easier to load it and copy the HTML source code from the browser, then just upload that. Ale_Jrb^talk 15:13, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I think the OP wants to cache the generated pages for a time, perhaps for performance reasons. This is precisely what Wikipedia does. Wikipedia's caching is done using the squid proxy. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:18, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I am aware that caches exist, and indeed that Wikipedia uses one ;). However, while you could technically call saving a static page in your web directory is a form of caching, it really isn't. It would be completely useless to simply save the page - you would have to direct users there. To do that, you would need a dynamic script (or a separate caching server/program) to direct requests there - in most cases, this is no more efficient than simply retrieving a page from the database in the first place, and databases are often (usually?) more efficient than file writes.

It might just be worthwhile if the page in question is performing lots of complicated calculations, but it would still then be better just to cache results in a database and display them directly. And the question says that the original script is just displaying a page - as in '?page=2'. PHP is efficient enough that doing this dynamically is superior in most standard situations to periodically performing a file write to save the HTML, and then redirecting users there.

And for the example of Wikipedia, it generates everything dynamically - it is the separate server software, squid, that performs the caching. Imagine if the Wiki web directory (SVN) had a static HTML page for every article... Ale_Jrb^talk 15:46, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I do this for sites similar to Wikipedia. Users edit content. When they edit the content, I don't just update the database. I generate the entire HTML and replace the html file on the main website. The public hits static HTML pages. However, the site is dynamic in the sense that it is easily updated online by the users. Of course, these pages do not have truly dynamic content that changes based on time of day or browsing history of the user. -- kainaw™ 15:40, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Honestly, that sounds like pretty bad practise to me - you're merging several jobs into one. If you feel the need to have a cache, which only really improves performance on extremely busy sites, you should have a proper cache server - or failing that a cache script that stores requests and responses, and redirects users. Dynamically re-saving HTML pages when someone changes your content isn't the way I'd do things, though I suppose if it works for you, that's fine :). Ale_Jrb^talk 15:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Caching is very good practice for sites that don't update constantly. It can save a huge amount of processing on the back end. It's not very hard to develop good caching procedures. I'm not sure where you got the idea that caches are bad, but they aren't, and nearly everybody uses them. Dynamically generating a complex page for each user is not a good idea if you can avoid it. (Does taking up processing power matter? Yes, if you have a lot of users, and yes, if you are co-located, where processes that go over 1-2% of the total CPU can get you disabled temporarily. Running multiple MySQL queries, for example, can easily do that if you are not careful about optimizing them.) Complicated scripts like WordPress can be sped up dramatically with caching, for example.--98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:56, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, caching is effective. That's why large sites invest significant resources in cache servers. But if you update your site so infrequently, and it has so few pages, that you consider a script that dynamically saves static HTML pages directly into your web directory for people to view a good thing, then your site would be fine being solely static. A proper cache acts as a proxy between the content server and the user - for most sites, it's on a different machine. Wikipedia is an excellent example - the squid (cache) servers are most definitely not PHP scripts that recreate static HTML whenever you perform an edit. Is that how you would cache wordpress? If so, yikes.

Caching properly is a good thing. That method of caching is (usually) not. See the difference? In a situation where the potential bottleneck is lots of database queries, a far better method would be a system like memcached. Ale_Jrb^talk 17:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

It depends on the usage. Many of the projects that I work on have one or two changes per month. The entire point behind the PHP-based online admin is to keep them from calling me to change a phone number or add a new employee name to a list. Of course, they still call and ask how to make the change. -- kainaw™ 15:53, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Heh - the danger of the layman. :) Ale_Jrb^talk 17:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

You could easily write a function that, before being called, would check if there was an existing HTML file in the directory, and if so, output its contents, and if not, generate it, and then output its contents. Whenever you updated the flat file, you'd just delete (either manually or algorithmically) the existing HTML file to clear the cache. Depending on the complexity of generating the page, this could easily deliver higher performance. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:56, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

woah! lots of answers :) But how exactly do I do this? What is the code I have to enter into my php file to make it do this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 18:56, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

It is not a line of code. It is an entire program (possibly hundreds of lines of code). I seriously doubt anyone is going to flood this page with tons of code. As for caching - that is separate from PHP. You install a caching mod in your webserver. As for writing web pages, you just use fopen and fputs. -- kainaw™ 19:36, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

ok, sorry. I am absolutely clueless with php, I thought it would just be a simple matter of telling the script to make a actual .html file out of the html code it sends to the browser when a page is viewed. my bad —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 19:43, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Screenshots From Games

I'm thinking of making a blog/diary based on some of the wargames I play regularly. It's more of a private account of certain scenarios I've played and how certain little dramas within those scenarios played out (e.g. defense of a certain building by a certain unit; assault on an enemy position using a particular combination of forces; etc). and I was wondering if it would be possible to get multiple screen shots without leaving the game. I would take a bunch of screen shots, then organize them after the battle and post them on the blog. Is there any software that does this (i.e. run side-by-side with a game, with hotkeys to take screen shots, and said screen shots will be saved to a clipboard or auto-saved)? TIA!! --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 18:21, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Fraps. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:29, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Excellent! Just what I needed, thanks! --KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 18:55, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Processor comparison

As per my previous posts detailing my recent bad luck with computers, I've decided to throw in the towel and simply buy a new system. The place I normally buy from (www.neutron.ca) allows me to customize my system piece by piece and I'm out of step with how processors are compared. On the system I'm looking at, the cost will be about the same for either of these two setups: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.00 GHz, 6 MB, 1333 MHz and Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66 GHz, 4 MB 1333 MHz. My computer gets intermittent heavy use (graphically intensive games, multitasking between videos, web, other progs), but is not a work machine. That is, when it gets used, it tends to get used pretty roughly, but it also lies fallow most of the day. Which setup can handle that kind of work better? Or is the difference between them more subtle than that? Matt Deres (talk) 19:17, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

If you do more multitasking, the Quad core processor will allow your system to feel more responsive while the Core 2 Duo has more raw "horsepower." Either way, you can't go wrong, and both will be plenty fast. (Personally I'd go for the quad core). When dealing with games, your graphics card is going to pull all the weight, so go for something reasonably new (GTX 200 line for nVidia) and you'll be relatively futureproofed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.131.39.6 (talk) 19:34, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

They only offer ATI cards, so mine will be a Radeon HD 4670 (1 GB), which should also have lots of horsepower. Given that it's a higher end graphics card, would that make the quad core the smarter choice? Let the quad core work the multi-tasking and let the Radeon handle the games? Matt Deres (talk) 19:44, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Modern games are surprisingly well multithreaded; I think you will see a strong performance boost from the quad-core, even if it is mildly weaker in "raw horsepower" per core. Nimur (talk) 20:22, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

The ATI card you picked is plenty good, I'm just more familiar with the nVidia line (hence my example before I signed in). Nimur also makes a good point in that many games are multithreaded, though any modern dual or quad core CPU won't have any problems as the CPU isn't used as extensively as the graphics card in gaming. You will mainly see a difference in the fact that you can run relatively CPU intensive tasks behind the game while seeing a negligible performance hit to the game. I've encoded video while playing games on my similarly configured computer, and it's done just fine. No matter what processor you ultimately choose, you will not be disappointed. Caltsar (talk) 20:34, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

September 9

help me make my keyboard quiet please?

I live in a dorm and sometimes stay up late. I worry that my typing might bother my room mate. Is there a way to make my keyboard quieter without buying a new keyboard? (eg: would sticking paper between the keys soften the impact of the key on the back of the keyboard?)

I googled this and all i got were keyboards to buy and one ps3 forum that told the person asking my question to just buy a keyboard!

Any thoughts would be great! Thanks!

137.81.113.21 (talk) 06:03, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about modifying your keyboard (I guess it depends on how the keyboard works), but there are a couple of free alternative ways to type. Windows has an On-Screen Keyboard included, which you can set up so that leaving the mouse over a button for a specified time will "press the key", and I'd be surprised if OSX and Linux didn't have something similar. There's also a free program called Dasher with which you can "type" by moving the mouse through a set of letters - it takes a bit of getting used to, but with a little practice you can get good speeds. Either of these would be almost silent. AJHW (talk) 10:56, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I would also suggest to just buy a keyboard. If you have a thrift store in the area, you can probably get one for less than $5. The noise of a keyboard is caused by the mechanical switches under each key, and there's not much you can do about those. Maybe you could take off all the keys and put a layer of foam down, with holes cut for the keys. Sounds like a lot of trouble when you could buy a cheap quieter keyboard. ;) Indeterminate (talk) 04:49, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Installing Minitab

I needed to learn this statistical software in order to ace an interview so i rosorted to install the demo version which had expired (30 days) no as i still have the exe file but when i initate the install process aftrer i have uninstalled the previous one it pops a message, a version of minitab was alredy installed ,please call the customer service to buy the real version, i can't afford it, what do i do now? anyone please help....

Im afraid theres not alot you can do. Im not an expert but companies are pretty good at making sure you cant use their stuff after the trial period. Im sure you can do it anyway, but its usually complicated and illegal! sorry! :)

Try finding a free/open source program thats similar? thats all i can think of.

137.81.113.21 (talk) 07:32, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Disconnect from the Internet, set your system time back to when you still could install, then use a debugger or equivalent, eg strace, to see what files/other stuff the installer accesses and delete them (not blindly everything of course). It's nowhere near 100% guaranteed it will work even then. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 08:57, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Software to make image of contours from grid of data

What software, preferably freeware, can do this please? The data would be for regular x.y coordinates. Thanks 78.146.183.185 (talk) 09:29, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Gnuplot can do that. --Sean 16:17, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

So can GNU Octave: with the ContourScript extension (usually installed by default, I think). The image is graphically displayed with GnuPlot, but this method also gives you access to the contours data. Nimur (talk) 17:41, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

You may also want to look into the GNU Data Language (GDL) at [[8]], and in particular the CONTOUR routine. This is an open source clone of the popular IDL software developed and commercialized by ITT Visual Information Solutions [[9]] Michel M Verstraete (talk) 21:11, 9 September 2009 (UTC).

Overlaying semi-transparantly on another image to make final image

I anticipate having an image of contour lines that I want to use with a map image to create a map-with-contours image. The contour line image would need to become semi-transparant so that the map image shows through. Also the images would have to be moved around and enlarged and reduced so that they register correctly. What software could I use for this please - preferably freeware? Thanks. 78.146.183.185 (talk) 09:35, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Inkscape. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 10:43, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Or GIMP. --Sean 16:19, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Archive request script

Would it be possible to write a script in php that could take the url of a webpage and download the complete page (.hmtl, images, css etc) onto the server where the script is hosted? The url would be entered via a submission form by the end user, they'd click submit and the page would be saved. Something like that. I'm absolutely clueless with php, so if anyone's feeling really kind I certainly wouldn't say no to someone writing the script for me ^_^ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 16:16, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Live Player

What is "Live Player"? An ad for it says "Watch over 1,000 TV channels for free on your PC". The FAQ on its website says it is "ad supported" and uses something called "Favorit Advertising Component". Is there a catch to this? The name reminds me of some common video player software, cannot quite remember the name - quickplayer perhaps? - that is too intrusive when used. I have been using something called Freez online tv - I laugh at the shameless hard selling of very overpriced rubbish on the shopping channels. 84.13.49.79 (talk) 16:58, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Realplayer was notoriously intrusive. My anti-viral software will not let me see the Live Player home page. Not sure what that tells us :) --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:33, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Are there any free programs which would do the same thing please? YouTuibe does not do "live" streaming video as far as I know. 89.242.155.121 (talk) 11:57, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Make a touch screen using a webcam.

I've seen some software that can use a projector and a webcam to make a makeshift touch screen... but that isn't feasible for me, since I don't have a projector. Is it possible to use a webcam to turn an ordinary LCD monitor into a makeshift touch screen? Until It Sleeps ^alternate 17:05, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it'd work very well - crappy VGA webcams like mine are low resolution, have slow refresh rate and quite a noticeable lag. If it's feasible I don't think it'd be a very pleasant experience. --antilived^{T | C | G} 02:15, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Delete file - access denied windows XP

See title - probably familiar to those skilled in the craft..

Specifics - downloaded video file .mp4 , using a downloading program - downloading terminated (using program - usually not a problem) - additional - file type not supported, attempted to play partial file using separate program - successful - probably this sequence of events cause the issue. Fixed using cmd.exe + task manager , terminated processes until cmd.exe allowed deletion - probably not a good way to do it.

My question is: is there a way to find out exactly what program still thinks it is using a file, and then to persuade it that it is not?83.100.250.79 (talk) 18:08, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, the answer to that is 'no', but it's possible I'm wrong. Ale_Jrb^talk 18:36, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I find this link useful Unlocker by Cedrick Coulomb. Jan1nad (talk) 19:18, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll bear that in mind in the future.83.100.250.79 (talk) 21:06, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Torrent problem

I am using uTorrent on Vista-64 Home Premium, over my home's wireless network. On my old laptop (Vista-32) I had no problems with torrents, especially after I set a static IP and had uTorrent port forwarded. Since I got my new laptop, I got through most of a torrent, but then after ten minutes or so (sometimes less), my whole internet connection goes down, and my network is set to local only. I have to disconnect and reconnect to connect to the internet again. Since that first torrent that worked, I have had to connect to the router with an ethernet cable if I want to download any torrent. When I am connected with the cable, I never get kicked like that. What is going on, and what can I do to fix it? Thanks —Akrabbim^talk 18:33, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

If you can connect your computer to the router directly, I'd have to ask why you are using wireless in the first place. Strong electromagnetic signals are damaging to health and should be avoided if possible. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 22:02, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Tin foil hats are great as far as reducing damage to health is concerned. To the OP, I doubt that the router is the problem for you. Also, you do NOT need to have your port forwarded in order for uTorrent to work. I would assume it is a configuration issue somewhere. I have never tried uTorrent on wireless myself, (or on Windows Vista)so I cannot say anything for a fact ... Kushal (talk) 22:55, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

You imply that there is zero health risks from electromagnetic radiation. I suggest you read this and this —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 23:33, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you 82 for sidetracking my question (how can artificial EM radiation be any more harmful than light?). Kushal, what kind of configurations would it be? I have the exact same wireless settings as I did on my old computer, for all I can tell. And the uTorrent website advises users to forward the port for best performance, and I have observed better connections with it forwarded (but the router etc. doesn't seem to be the problem). I guess it rests with my wireless. —Akrabbim^talk 00:26, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I had one issue a couple years ago where my wireless would drop out whenever I tried to transfer a lot of data over an encrypted connection. I eventually figured out it was the drivers - I updated them and the problem went away. It's possible that the 64 bit drivers for your wifi card are just less stable than the 32 bit drivers you were using previously. You could try getting the most recent drivers, but aside from that, I dunno. hrm. Indeterminate (talk) 04:35, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I know Akrabbim might be angry at me for this but I will start with the obvious... Does resetting the power supply in the wireless router when your computer drops dead out of the network help? I know that my uncle has a Linksys that just dies every once in a while. All we needed to do was to press the yellow wi-fi soft button and it would flicker white for a couple of seconds and restart. (I know I am backtracking from my previous position but I want to make sure that we cover all our bases before going into 64-bit driver zone. There is little we can do if the 64-bit drivers are finicky and the lazy programmers have not bothered to write updates so far but let us stay optimistic for now.) Kushal (talk) 07:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

If I reset the router, I get reconnected when it comes back up, but then the connection drops out again if the torrent is still running. I am pretty sure that it is not the router though, because all the time that I am losing and gaining the connection, the rest of my family is happily connected without a problem. I'll check the drivers, see what's up, Indeterminate. 11:46, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Blue area moving

I copy and paste a lot. When I move my mouse while holding down the button, with Explorer, sometimes the area that is blue changes in a way that I don't want it to. The text has turned blue, but that's misleading.

On one computer with Firefox, sometimes the text is gray whn I've selected the text to copy, but when I do copy, that gray text didn't get copied. It sould, of course, have been blue.

If it's doing that and I enter Ctrl-C, I get nothing when I enter Ctrl-V.

I'm trying to duplicate what happened so I can explain it, and I'm not having any luck.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:30, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

In Firefox, selected text is highlighted in blue when Firefox is the active window, but highlighted in gray when another window is active. Try clicking on the Firefox button in the taskbar to activate Firefox, then see if the selected text highlight turns blue and the copy works correctly. --Bavi H (talk) 23:34, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

These color descriptions only apply to default color settings for certain operating systems. In general, though, most modern window-managers use a modal selection-mechanism (for all selection behavior, including copy/paste). This means that "highlight" and "select" behavior depends on which window is active. Nimur (talk) 00:21, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Boolean addition/subtraction in C++

As some have guessed in emails sent to me... I have been posting questions here from my class. My intention is to allow the class to get answers from many intelligent people rather just my answer. If this offends anyone, I will stop doing it.

In C++, there is a bool type that can only hold the value 0 or 1. By rule, any integer besides 0 becomes 1 when represented as a bool. Therefore, bool x=1+1; will result in x=1. Does this mean that if I have three boolean variables (x=1, y=1, and z=1) and add them together, it will do special boolean arithmetic? For example, (1+1)-1 in boolean will be 1-1 which becomes 0. However, when I put that in a C++ program I get 1, not 0. It seems like it is casting the bool to an int during all math and back to a bool when I grab the result. -- kainaw™ 21:05, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

(clarifying) If x, y, and z are all bool types and set to 1, (x+y)-z comes out as 1, not 0. -- kainaw™ 21:25, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

small-ify since question clarified It's almost certainly what the compiler decides to do. It will evaluate the right hand side first (which is 1), and then apply that to the assignment (in your case to a boolean), this is all almost certainly because despite being binary logic machines, processors are set up to handle strings of binary..

In fact it makes sense not to treat (1+1) as a boolean , because "true+true" is meaningless, or undefined (does + mean or or and or concantentate ?)

If you try

boolean keith = 1+1
boolean george = keith-1

It will probably do what you want. It's certainly a very good idea to test this stuff out (avoids being caught out later on with mysterious bugs") Similar things to try is to see if the compiler allows int chris="a" , or char mike=89 . Many do.

I've no idea if the compiler has infered an integer type because of the "+" sign, but would guess that's the case.

Also note that 1 (or 0) isn't a boolean value, "true" and "false" are, of course many compilers make no distinction, some will even swap the representations round.

Far better to write somrthing, like "bool susan = (true AND true) AND false", or whatever the logical meaning you had in mind was.83.100.250.79 (talk) 21:17, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but this and your followup below are incorrect. It is not undefined behavior to do math on bools: section [expr.9] of the 2003 standard ("usual arithmetic conversions") says, "operands of type bool, wchar_t, or an enumerated type are converted to some integral type". That promotion makes bools into ints. What's happening with "bool w = (x + y) - z; assert(w);" is that x and y get promoted to ints with value 1, added up to 2, then z gets promoted to an int with value 1, and subtracted from 2, leaving an int with value 1, which then gets converted back to bool and stored as true in w. --Sean 21:37, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I meant undefined in a mathemtical sense - hence the necessity for the compiler specifications to decide how to treat with them.83.100.250.79 (talk) 21:47, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

respond to clarification If a,b,c are boolean (eg bool d=(a+b)-c ) then the basic error here is to try to add them, this will have to be typecase to an integer, or it will result in an error, since, as mentioned above "true plus true" has no defined meaning, since 'plus' is a numerical operator, not a boolean one.

As an aside I recommend the birch for your class, they learn much quicker and tend not to make as many simple mistakes, in my experience..83.100.250.79 (talk) 21:34, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

d=(a XOR b) XOR (a XOR c) might be an answer here, depending on what was originally intended, it might even be faster.83.100.250.79 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 22:00, 9 September 2009 (UTC).

or (a OR b) XOR c for the intended but unobtained result.83.100.250.79 (talk) 22:10, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

You'd probably want an AND 1 , after these results to truncate.83.100.250.79 (talk) 22:13, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Replacing a macbook hard drive

Is it possible to remove the T screw that is on the hard disk sleeve without a T screwdriver? If not, where would I find a screwdriver of that particular dimension? I think the 2006 Intel Macbook takes a T-2 but I am not entirely sure. Could you help me find the cheapest way to replace the drive? Thank you... Kushal (talk) 22:47, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Did you mean Torx ? (you can file down a flat head screwdriver if you want) - but torx screw sets, including the security type are soo cheap - somewhere like http://www.conrad.com/ will have them, try your local hardware store - the bits are cheapest - they are literally £2 for 50 different types. eg [[10]]search term = "screwdriver bit sets" 83.100.250.79 (talk) 22:57, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I have been able to work them off in the past using a pair of needle-nose pliers (to get past their initial tightness) and then just my fingers. It's probably a better idea to get a torx one... though I was never patient enough to do that. It can be done, but it takes some work. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 23:53, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the help guys. I guess I could check at Walmart. The problem is that I read on some website that it is a T2 and I don't see T2 in those lists. T6 seems to be the smallest that these sets contain... I am tempted to try the pliers ... Kushal (talk) 07:23, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Mac v. PC

So, I have a HP G60t-200, and I like it pretty well. However, I have the opportunity to get a new laptop soon, so I thought I would ask for some input. I've heard several things about macs, some of which are probably myth, so please dispel any misconceptions, and help me out. I checked out the Apple site and I think I'm leaning toward the MacBook Pro 15" if I go Mac. Some things I've heard:

• Macs are more physically durable
• Macs have better built-in protection from viruses
• Macs generally outperform PC in computing
• Macs are NOT as easily compatible when it comes to presentations and word documents

Also, what's the situation with the "unmoving" hard drives or whatever. Pros? Cons? Have at it. Hubydane (talk) 23:42, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I have recently been through this road too and I'll write up some of my thoughts at the time. The MacBook Pros are made of out a single block of aluminium so yes they are quite durable - the reason that didn't sway me too much though is that what good is a durable case when the insides will be outdated in 3-4 years? My laptop is almost 1000 NZD cheaper than the equivalent MacBook - and all the difference I'll get is the a working piece of junk instead of a broken piece of junk after say 5 years, so the Apple tax wasn't worth it for me. Mac OS X is more secure than Windows, but as long as you don't be stupid and have antivirus it's quite rare to catch a virus (this point was irrelevant to me since I'm going to put Ubuntu on it either way). Outperform PC? No. Just No. Compatibility? Microsoft makes Office for Mac so it should work quite well, but there probably will be some tiny incompatibilities that will only affect 1% of the users. The unmoving hard drive you referred to is SSD, which is faster, less sensitive from shock, but still outrageously expensive even if you buy a small one (especially if you get it from Apple). Unless money's no object for you you're probably better off saving the difference. --antilived^{T | C | G} 02:11, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Antilived seems to have covered most stuff but i'd just add

• I have 2 Macs (a maybe 7 year old iBook and a Macbook that's a couple of years old). Both boot up and run pretty much exactly the same as they always have. They have not slowly ground to halt like many PCs my family and friends own. I know (because I have a PC too) that a lot of the grinding-to-a-haltness is not the PCs fault, but the fault of the end-user, but it does seem to be a general thing that PCs grind to a halt more quickly than Apples do (I suspect due to the sheer volume of malware/software that gets installed and never fully gets removed). 194.221.133.226 (talk) 08:26, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

1. Macs are LESS secure than PCs. I don't know about Leopard, but Tiger Macs came with their firewalls turned off. They all have web servers pre-installed (Apache). They come with the least-secure web browser on the Internet (Safari). There's an annual "hacking" competition called PWN 2 OWN. Macs have been the first to be taken over the last few years because of Safari. I find it strange that people see Windows as insecure. One of the biggest complaints about Windows Vista is that it is too secure! You need to read up on Windows Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2, and the large number of security innovations they have brought. Windows Vista was a complete rewrite of Windows XP to improve security. Microsoft releases security patches every week for Windows. And most of the "vulnerabilities" they find were discovered by employees at Microsoft--not criminals. By contrast, Apple took many months to patch the vulnerabilities discovered at PWN 2 OWN. Microsoft does a much better job than Apple at securing their operating systems.
2. I don't know what you mean by "Macs generally outperform PC in computing" but Macs have a lot of eye-candy and services that run automatically. I've seen speed comparisons between Mac OS X and Windows XP, where Windows XP greatly outperformed Mac OS X in terms of speed.
3. In response to your first point, Apple is both a computer manufacturer and a software maker. Microsoft just makes the software. So, Apples are durable, but so are Sonys, and so are Toshibas. If you buy a counterfeit Chinese netbook with Windows installed, you're technically also buying a PC, so it's hard to generalize. I could probably write a book comparing Macs and "PCs," but suffice to say that I think they're over-priced and OS X is not nearly as sophisticated as Windows 7.--24.9.113.111 (talk) 09:12, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Adding to the comments above, whether Macs or PCs are more secure depends greatly on the behaviour of the user, it's hard to make a blanket statement "Macs are more/less secure than PCs". The same goes for robustness, there are very solid PCs and there are PCs that will fall apart when you look at them wrong, it's hard to generalise, although you mostly get what you pay for. As, for Macs, the software and hardware is built by a single company, they tend to be more tightly integrated, but at the cost of less choice in software. I should also note that, most software (games are particularly bad at this) tends to get written for PCs, but thanks to Boot Camp and Parallels, Macs can (mostly) run it as well. — QuantumEleven 09:57, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Web emails

How come on most web emails, there's no way to preview your mail besides saving it as a draft then sending it? I find it quite annoying, and I would've thought that a preview function would be pretty basic.

Also, is there anyway to embed (not attach) images on Yahoo mail? Thanks. 24.6.46.106 (talk) 23:32, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Because e-mails are usually WYSIWYG. There's not need for a preview when it's just a body of text. Darrenhusted (talk) 23:37, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Back up my computer

My keyboard messed up, so I need to send my computer back. I need to -completely- back up -everything- from my computer--files, applications, bookmarks, pictures, etc.-- before sending it off. So 2 questions. 1) How do I find out how much space (and therefore how big a flash drive) I need to perform this total backup? 2) How do I perform this total backup? (I'm using Vista x64 on an HP G60t-200)

Thanks Hubydane (talk) 23:41, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Why don't you just replace your keyboard? Intelligentsium 00:46, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm assuming it's a portable which does not invite casual tinkering. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:54, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Right click on your hard drive icon and select properties, and that will tell you how much space is being used by all your files. Check out this website for information on free hard drive imaging software, which would be the easiest way to back up your entire hard drive, files, applications, settings, and all. —Akrabbim^talk 01:12, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

If this is a warranty repair, you should send them as little hardware as possible. If the hard drive isn't part of the problem, remove it. You can remove the hard drive from any laptop without voiding the warranty. On my laptop the keyboard is also easy to remove, but I don't know whether that voids the warranty. Call them and ask; you might save a lot of money on shipping. -- BenRG (talk) 11:11, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

September 10

Youtube

On Youtube, why do some users post replies saying "Oh" or "Thanks" or any other word that shows they understand? It's pointless to do that. Jc iindyysgvxc (talk) 05:42, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh. Zunaid 09:15, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't think this is unique to youtube. On the internet, it's not easy to tell whether the person you're talking to understands what you're saying. So it's a courtesy to let you know that they do. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 09:27, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

realistic images

I have seen a 40 minute section of the last film made by Marilyn Monroe that stops halfway because she died. Isnt technology able to finish the rest of the film off realisticlly? that would be great —Preceding unsigned comment added by Payneham (talk • contribs) 06:29, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Mobile dictionary

I have Nokia 6630. I want a free English dictionary for it. Also, it doesn't have reminders, stop watch, and countdown timer. Where can I get these? Thanks. --Siddhant (talk) 07:05, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Website Hosting Provider

Hi, How can I find out who the Hosting Provider for www.rvis.edu.bh is? Thank you. 80.88.241.94 (talk) 09:13, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Looking for a paper forms designer

I'm looking for some freeware that can design paper forms that can be printed out. I have found one or two programs to do on-screen computer forms, but that is not what I want. Does anyone know what software can be used to easily design paper forms please? 89.242.155.121 (talk) 11:54, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Which side of printer paper best to print on - shiny side or matt side?

Thanks 89.242.155.121 (talk) 11:55, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

BASIC-like languages to use on a PDA and a PC

I anticipate buying a PDA. Which BASIC-like languages will run on a PDA and a PC also please? (BASIC = Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Which PDA I buy depends upon which languages and software will run on it - I know nothing about PDA operating systems. Thanks. 89.242.155.121 (talk) 12:02, 10 September 2009 (UTC)