Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing

Welcome to the computing section
of the Wikipedia reference desk.

skip to bottom

Select a section:

• Computing
• Entertainment
• Humanities
• Language
• Mathematics
• Science
• Miscellaneous
• Archives

Want a faster answer?

Main page: Help searching Wikipedia

   

How can I get my question answered?

• Select the section of the desk that best fits the general topic of your question (see the navigation column to the right).
• Post your question to only one section, providing a short header that gives the topic of your question.
• Type '~~~~' (that is, four tilde characters) at the end – this signs and dates your contribution so we know who wrote what and when.
• Don't post personal contact information – it will be removed. Any answers will be provided here.
• Please be as specific as possible, and include all relevant context – the usefulness of answers may depend on the context.
• Note:
  • We don't answer (and may remove) questions that require medical diagnosis or legal advice.
  • We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate.
  • We don't do your homework for you, though we'll help you past the stuck point.
  • We don't conduct original research or provide a free source of ideas, but we'll help you find information you need.

Ready? Ask a new question!

How do I answer a question?

Main page: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines

• The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.

See also:

• Teahouse
• Help desk
• Village pump
• Help manual

September 20

Visual basic express edition coundown program

My friend is making a countdown for me in visual basic, so how would he make the countdown work when the computer is off?Accdude92 (talk) (sign) 01:43, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

And btw, I would like the countdown to NOT use the internet in any way.Accdude92 (talk) (sign) 01:48, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

You'll have to check the system time, save the end time to a file, and have the program check the file against the system time on startup. NeonMerlin[1] 02:18, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

But he dosn't don't know how to compare that to the text and update it.Accdude92 (talk) (sign) 02:25, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

It sounds like you friend needs a VB crash course! He'll have to read KB304427, which deals with read and write operations (plus some others). Xenon54 / talk / 02:33, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Problem with external hard drive

I have a Hitachi Easy Drive that I've been using with my MacBook. Now I want to use it with a PC (running Windows XP) to transfer some files, but when I plug it in and turn it on, it doesn't appear anywhere. There's a little icon on the task bar to safely remove the external hardware, but it doesn't show up as an available drive. I've tried using the "add hardware" button in the Control Panel, but when I try to add the external hard drive, it says, "Windows cannot use this hardware device because it has been prepared for "safe removal", but it has not been removed from the computer. (Code 47) To fix this problem, unplug this device from your computer and then plug it in again." I do so, and no luck. What do I need to do? --68.239.11.74 (talk) 02:16, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

It's plausible that the hard drive is formatted as HFS Plus, which cannot be natively read by Windows. The linked article contains links to software that enables Windows to read those hard drives. Xenon54 / talk / 02:40, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Interet keeps crashing...

Why does my wireless internet keep crashing?Accdude92 (talk) (sign) 03:26, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

If you want a serious answer, you must provide a lot more information. What kind of wireless? What kind of computer? What operating system? What do you mean by "crashing"? If you just want people to poke fun at your inability to provide even the slightest hint of information required to answer your question, then leave it be for a few hours and the jokesters will be here shortly. -- kainaw™ 03:39, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

What kind of wireless?

WiFi, I have a router, and a usb stick to get the signal

What kind of computer?

Compaq Presairo SR1150NX

What operating system?

Windows XP home edition

What do you mean by "crashing"?

It just randomly disconnects. Like I am typing on here and it randomly stops sending me data. Oddly, the icon says its still connected...

Accdude92 (talk) (sign) 03:46, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a problem I had with one of my computers...but that was under Ubuntu. I fixed it by taking out the stick and then plugging it back in, and then restarting the computer if that didn't work. (That was 2 years ago. It's much more stable now.) But, as Kainaw said, you really need to work on providing more information - we're not mindreaders. If you want this problem to really be fixed, you still need to tell us the manufacturer and model number of your stick. Also, go into Device Manager (Start -> Run -> devmgmt.msc) and check and see if the device is listed, and then see if it lists any errors. Errors are indicated by a small ! in a yellow circle on top of the device's icon. Posting at least the OS and specifics about the problem is a must for any question (and with the amount of similarly-worded questions you post on here, I'm surprised you haven't learned that yet). Xenon54 / talk / 12:03, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

I have a similar problem. Sometimes it is caused by the attenuation of WiFi signal passing through thick stone walls, sometimes it is the wireless transmitter of my router that is having a hiccup, and (just occasionally) the problem is at my laptop. You can try pinging your router to see if it is still responding. (I have the additional problem of an internet connection delivered by microwave, and often the problem is there). Dbfirs 03:33, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps your PC's power management keep turning off the USB when the network goes quiet for a while? Astronaut (talk) 10:55, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Java hacking book?

Anyone got a favorite book about how to hack Java code? I.e. not a book about the Java language itself (I've programmed enough other languages that Java is pretty straightforward), but about how to use the surrounding infrastructure, libraries, tools, etc. My immediate task is to add some features to a big existing Java program, and in order to do that I want to run it under a debugger (Netbeans or Eclipse) to see what it's doing. And in order to do that (per the Netbeans docs) I have to modify the Ant build.xml to include a debugging flag for javac, so I'm off to look at the Ant docs for how to do that, and then I have to get all the code (currently spread across dozens of directories and several library jars that I also want to debug through) loaded into Netbeans, etc. You get the idea, there's just this ton of stuff to get on top of before reaching the equivalent of "hello world".

Is there a short cut through all this? Is there a particular book or url that I should look at? Thanks. 70.90.174.101 (talk) 07:19, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Java class files can usually be easily decompiled. Decompilers include JAD, JODE, JReversePro, Java Decompiler, Mocha, Jdec, just to name a few. --Spoon! (talk) 07:41, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm not trying to reverse engineer the program. I have all the source code or can download it. I'm just trying to run it under a debugger so I can step through it and understand better what it does so I can modify it. It's a fairly standard problem of getting a bunch of unfamiliar tools to work together causing a lot of farting around even though the high-level task is straightforward. 70.90.174.101 (talk) 07:53, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Not sure what the problem is? If you can load the source code into the IDE you should be able to debug - step in/over etc.

Was there a particular bit that was a problem. Isn't the source provided as a single package, or in a single directory?83.100.251.196 (talk) 10:23, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

The source is a bunch of different packages including some downloaded libraries. There are maybe 1000 or so classes. I haven't been able so far to load the source into either Netbeans or Eclipse (requires adjusting the build scripts to compile with debugging info, figuring out how to tell the debugger where to find the dozens of directories of sources, getting versions of the debuggers that don't hang or crash with specific JVM's, etc.) It's one of those situations like when you want to click something to print a document, and you end up spending days screwing around with printer drivers, installing fonts, etc. There seems to just be a lot of java infrastructure that java developers have to get used to, in addition to learning the actual language. That's what I'm asking for advice about 70.90.174.101 (talk) 17:37, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

I assume you are new to both IDEs then? There are introductory tutorials for them eg http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/tools/netbeans_part1/ , and probably something similar for eclipse if you look. I'm not sure if there is an quick way to get started - I think you would at least need to read some of the tutorial first. As a first guess to get started quickly - have you tried creating a new project, downloading all the files, and dumping them into the project folder? (and finding the 'refresh project button')

Also, do you need previous build version info? or just the current build? If the second you just need the source code text files I think (might be missing something) - once inside a project you should be able to select the project, press build, and then be able to debug. Apologies if I'm oversimplifying the process - I don't know just how complex this project is.83.100.251.196 (talk) 18:26, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Thanks, yes, I'm pretty new to both IDE's, and also to the general culture of Java development. In C development I'd get debugging info from the compiler by putting "CFLAGS=-g" into the makefile, and I'd have a few directories where all the source code was and I'd point gdb at those directories. So I'm trying to figure out how to do the equivalent in Java, which uses build.xml (for Apache Ant) instead of a makefile. The source files are scattered across several dozen directories that are separated from the jar files where the class files are. It would be great if I could just tell Netbeans to recursively crawl a directory structure and find all the java files but that doesn't seem possible. There doesn't seem to be a way to build the whole program completely from source with one command, rather than building a bunch of jar's with separate scripts. I don't care about previous build version info, at least for now. I just want to run the program under debugging, so I can see how a few specific inputs get treated as they make their way through the program. I see the netbeans tutorial mentions a compilation classpath so I guess I should figure out how to set that up. Maybe I'm just being lazy and the classpath really does have to have dozens (maybe even 100's) of nested directories. Is that reasonably normal when using Netbeans? This program is nowhere near as big as, say, the Linux kernel, but its source tree seems almost as complicated. 70.90.174.101 (talk) 21:15, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Add a new application

How can i add a new application in orkuts application dictionary?

The Bank of England has got MUMPS

What exactly does the BoE use Mumps for? And similarly, why do other financial organisations use MUMPS in preferance to more modern languages? 84.13.198.33 (talk) 10:47, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't know the former, but as for the latter: here is an article about COBOL, and why aging infrastructures use it. (Looks to be similar as the MUMPS example.) The short answer is that to revise their systems at this point would be a massive investment—these systems are decades old and have millions of lines of code and if they seem to be working, nobody wants to dare touch them, for risk of screwing up massively important businesses, health facilities, governments, etc. Working on projects of that size and magnitude is difficult and expensive—it's easier and cheaper for them to just keep patching it up as time goes by than to risk screwing it up majorly in an overhaul. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 14:14, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

MUMPS combined the database with the programming language. It isn't like writing a program in C++ and using an Oracle database. The variables in the program are the data in the database. Therefore, it was seen as a huge leap forward in data-driven computer programming. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a huge mistake in most areas. Where it has worked, it works well. If you want to be cynical, you can claim that it also has built-in programmer retention. Once you become a MUMPS programmer, you have no ability to go elsewhere. So, you are stuck in your job. -- kainaw™ 01:00, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Doesn't it go in the reverse too though. Their can't be that many MUMPS programmers so they must be hard to replace Nil Einne (talk) 15:15, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Most Mumps programmers that I know were hired out of high school and trained on the job. So, they have a double-hit on job transferrability. They have no college education and they only know Mumps. -- kainaw™ 03:15, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Does that mean they're easy to replace (since they only need to be high school educated)? Their training and experience must be worth something though (to the small number who need MUMPS programmers) I can't imagine any bank would be willing to have say 3/4 of their programmers be people fresh out of high school. Nil Einne (talk) 17:06, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Very easy to learn english-like and other computer languages

I'm thinking of things like COBOL, MUMPS, SQL, and so on. I can program in BASIC, and years ago I used Logo as well. I'm interested in doing things like writing a simulation of a growing property (UK-eng) or real-estate (US-eng) rental portfolio, and downloading information from databases off the internet, and so on. What very easy to learn languages would people recommend learning? Because I do not do much programming, it is not worth spending the time learning a more difficult language. Thanks 84.13.198.33 (talk) 10:56, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

If you go to read COBOL or SQL you'll find they really aren't easier. So if english-likeness is not an requirement I would recommend python or perl. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 11:18, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, COBOL and SQL are actually NOT easy. You'd be better off just taking the plunge and learning a more flexible language. 90% of a language is just understanding the syntax—the grammar, as it is. Once you do that, many are quite straightforward. A scripting language (like python, perl, PHP, etc.) is going to be probably what you want. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 13:59, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

With long function and variable names, an object-oriented language like Java or C++ can sound almost like a pidgin English. Most of the control-flow is direct use of the English equivalent, e.g. "if", "else", "try", "catch", "finally", "do", "while", ... etc. Nimur (talk) 15:36, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

For a project like the one you describe some variant of SQL is unavoidable. You will work on a large enough data set that some database manager is needed, and those "talk" in SQL. Most of the difficulty in learning to program is the proper mindset, not really the language you use. I speak Norwegian natively, but find that trying to use the norwegian translation of Excel is a pain. Whenever I need a function I must first figure out what it should be called in English, then have to guess how the translator have translated this into Norwegian. So having a programing language with an easy to understand structure is more important than having one that mimics english closely. Taemyr (talk) 07:41, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I love COBOL! I've used Visual Basic.NET, ActionScript, JavaScript, C++, Assembly, HTML, CSS, COBOL, and PostScript. COBOL is my favorite of them all. COBOL is the most proper language grammatically. I'm an English-grammar Nazi, so I appreciate being able to hyphenate my variable names (e.g., TOTAL-COST vs. totalCost). Programming in other languages teaches you bad grammar. Larry Wall, a supposed linguist, should have known better when he invented Perl. Here's another example: Statements end in a period in COBOL -- not a semi-colon. AppleScript and Lingo are other languages that closely-resemble English, but they have very few applications. I also like that you can put line numbers into your code. I write programs in Notepad, so that helps. It's also self documenting. You need very few comments in COBOL, as the code speaks for itself. Further, the programs are well organized, with clearly-labeled sections for your variables (which go at the top of the program -- which is good form), your name, etc. You can use Eclipse for writing COBOL, if you like. You can also use OpenCobol, which works nicely with Visual Studio to compile COBOL into machine code. NetCOBOL is probably the easiest COBOL development tool, as it allows you to create forms inside Visual Studio in COBOL. But it isn't free.

I also like Visual Basic.NET (or VB.NET for short). It's a little more similar to English than languages like Perl, C++, and Java, but not as similar to English as COBOL. VB.NET is also easier to learn and it works very well with databases (using ASP.NET). Visual Studio also makes developing with VB.NET very easy. There's also Pascal, which is beginner friendly. The most popular version of Pascal is called Delphi and has a nice development environment made by Borland.--Drknkn (talk) 08:12, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Which version of Lingo (programming language) do you mean please? Is it possible to get AppleScript or something like it to run in Windows Xp or Linux please?

I thought in the past that very high level languages were being developed that would make programming fast and easy - do any of these languages actually exist?

Can the R (programming language) do anything useful apart from statistics, as I've decided to put the effort in and learn that?

I see that the usual "Hallo World!" code is missing from the Python (programming language) pages as far as I can see - out of curiosity, how would you write it? 78.144.198.168 (talk) 15:10, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

It is, quite literally, print "hello world" -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:40, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

R can be used for other tasks, but would be a poor choice. It's designed for doing statistics, processing large data sets, and plotting pretty graphs. It comes with a Tcl/Tk library, but then, to do anything gui-like and useful/interactive, you'll have to learn yet another language. I've read that it's possible to use R as a dll directly from C/C++, and have thought about trying it out (for incorporating some graphics output in an application), have but never gotten around to it. It both cases, you'd have to learn a second language. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 21:27, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Lingo is used by Adobe Director, which can export executables (or "projectors" as Director calls them). Many people don't realize how many programs they use are actually Director projectors. I don't know much about the different versions of Lingo or about AppleScript, though.

The first generation of computer language is binary. The second is assembly. The third are procedural languages such as C, Pascal, and so on. The fourth includes SQL. A fifth generation was never necessary. GUIs came into being that are now used to create programs for us. For example, if you type an RTF document in Word Pad, you don't need to know RTF. The RTF is generated automatically by Word Pad. But I think that computers will soon understand human language with little difficulty. You might call a language like English a "fifth-generation" language. The biggest obstacle -- surprisingly -- is computing power. Our brains are far more powerful than the most advanced computers today. Microsoft is working on an interpreter for human language, but right now it only runs on a super-computer with two quad-core CPUs. But, given Moore's law, I suppose it will be only a few more years before it will be available to the public.--Drknkn (talk) 22:22, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Once a program that understands human languages is made and it's put the parse the internet, interesting stuff will happen. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 00:26, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Programming Lanuage Selection

Resolved

I know php/html and do simple CLI programming with it, but lately need something that will allow me to do GUI exe's. I have considered php compilers (such as bamcompile) but they either don't do GUI (php-gtk) or support php5. I think C will be too low-level for me. Microsoft Visual Studio Express seems promising, but I'm not sure what to choose. Thank you for your suggestions. Waqqasd (talk) 14:39, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Visual Studio Express is a great programming environment, IMHO. You will obviously need to learn C# or Visual Basic .Net, and the ins and outs of programming .Net, but there's a lot of books and material on the web that will help. --Phil Holmes (talk) 17:32, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

A friend of mine found Qt] a good way to jump from CLI to GUI programming as a Perl programmer; there are apparently PHP bindings for that as well. If it were me, I'd probably look into that first. VB.NET is a whole other kettle of fish, and not very fun or intuitive for the most part. (VB itself was more straightforward, for all of its problems.) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 19:06, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm going with C#. [2] gave me a good syntax comparison, C# is much more like php, and has a compact syntax. Thank you, Phil and 98.217... .

Using the speed of USB 2.0 to record several audio tracks separately

I was inspired by the alesis multimix 16, as it can record 16 audio tracks separately. A few problems though - I already have a decent mixer, and the alesis one is super-expensive. I would like to build a device which takes 16 mono inputs and records them separately through a USB port. I have never used USB or computer interfaces in my electronics and need some help. Problems i foresee are:

figuring out how to make the computer know that the device has 16 audio ins

making a timing device to send samples from each of the 16 ins one at a time i.e. send the first sample of all 16 ins in order, then the seconds, then the thirds and so on... so that the computer can determine which of the 16 ins it is reading by what time it was sent at

Are there any other problems that I will encounter? Anything i've missed?

Any help is appreciated! 89.241.28.24 (talk) 18:23, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Computers can have multiple sound adapters right now - be they soundcards inside the case (connected to the PCI bus) or outside (on USB cables). So what you'd typically do is just add a bunch of these to a given machine; if the driver software is half decent then all these will appear in the OS as audio input devices, and you need only configure your audio recording software to match track1 to adapterA, track2 to adapterB, etc. If you didn't need studio quality audio (just half decent) you could do that today with off the shelf soundcards/usb-boxes. Now I guess you do want studio quality. I don't know if genuine studio-quality soundcards/usb-boxes are available; if they aren't, or if you really want to build them yourself, you'd typically take the reference design supplied by the audio-chip manufacturer and use higher-quality analog-side components. Actually building high-quality USB audio components like this is a serious project (a business, really), as you'd need a good analog/signal electronics person, a half-decent digital-design person, and (if you can't rely on the audio drivers supplied by the chip company) a windows (mac, linux, whatever) device-driver software person. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:54, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

If you're designing and building the hardware yourself - I would add in a "USB engineer" to the mix of required skills, which is an elite specialist who understands the USB protocol details very well. For stability and performance, you may need a full-time engineering or programming professional just for that aspect of the system. The Specification is hardly a user-friendly document. Nimur (talk) 20:36, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Okay, thanks, it does seem like building a multi-input USB interface might be out of my depth - but you mentioned adding several USB interfaces and "linking" them together somehow. I have 4 USB inputs, could I (in theory) attach 4 2-input USB devices and in my computer (somehow) treat them as one device? I know macs can do this, but I am running Vista. The recording software i'm using is audacity, which will only accept one input device, but upto 16 tracks from that input. As audacity is open-source, would it be easier to write some code for audacity to read from several sources? Or would that be even harder than my USB idea?

Thanks in advance

There really isn't a meaningful way to "unify" several disparate USB audio devices and make them appear as channels on one device (hmm, maybe you could wire things with Pulseaudio, I don't know). It's disappointing that Audacity won't allow you to simultaneously record from multiple audio devices, and some Google searching shows others want to do the same as you (even to record from two USB microphones simultaneously). I'd certainly be possible to rearchitect Audacity to this, but I think it'd be quite a piece of work. Still, if it was done then that would benefit lots of other people too. See this forum discussion. If you're up for this, I'd approach the Audacity team on that forum. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 12:29, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Is my University using a NAT network

My reasons for believing that is IS are:

1. The University is a large organization.
2. I cannot access (or even ping) university machines from outside of the network (unless I'm using VPN).

and my reasons for believing that it ISN'T are:

1. Tools such as this give different IP addresses on different university computers - these addresses correspond to those registered by tools like ifconfig.
2. To my knowledge, local networks using NAT have certain conventions for IP addresses - the campus network, if it's functioning as a NAT, breaks these.

So, from this, is it possible to tell? Thanks.--Leon (talk) 20:16, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

It may be using a firewall without network address translation. In many home routers, the firewall and the NAT are provided by the same piece of hardware/software ("the router"); but in a large network, they are usually separate - both conceptually, in the service that they provide; and in implementation - in that they are managed by separate hardware. It is very common to block certain ports and firewall certain network traffic patterns, without performing NAT. Nimur (talk) 20:33, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Neither of your "for" reasons is really valid (the latter one just shows that a firewall is blocking ICMP, which is common). Both of your "against" reasons are valid; if public addresses==actual addresses, then (by definition) they're not being translated (which is the essence of what a NAT is). So they're not using NAT, they've just got a firewall (probably a pretty smart stateful firewall). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:38, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

The true test is to find out whether the IP address shown to the world is the same as the one on the PC. There are lots of sites that will tell you your public address, but Steve Gibson's site is one http://www.grc.com/default.htm and follow the link for Shield's Up. You can find your own IP address if on a PC by running a command window and typing IPConfig. If they're the same - no NAT. Otherwise - NAT. --Phil Holmes (talk) 13:11, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Leon already did that in "reason for believing it isn't" number 1 above: He noted that an address from www.myipaddress.com is the same as one given by ifconfig, the Linux / Unix equivalent to ipconfig in Windows. So Phil's answer agrees with Nimur's and Finlay's: no NAT. --70.253.157.59 (talk) 00:43, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Additionally, a good NAT implementation will use only private network IP address space for internal addresses. If your computer reports an IP address outside those ranges, it's probably not NAT. — Lomn 16:56, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

September 21

Vista sidebar and a blue tint

I use Windows Vista. The Windows Sidebar on my system runs 4 gadgets, all from Microsoft: Clock, CPU Meter, Slide Show, and Weather. A few days ago, everything in the sidebar acquired a blue tint. The CPU Meter gauges go from white to light blue to deep blue, rather than going to red; my photos in "Slide Show" have people with blue faces in them. Right-clicking in the Sidebar area and choosing "Properties" doesn't display anything valuable. The rest of my monitor is unaffected; only the Sidebar has become tinted. How do I chase away this odd coloring? Tempshill (talk) 04:23, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately because i'm on my school computer i can't go to many message boards. I did find this though. I hope this helps. Also could you provide information about your video driver, video card, and whether the OS is 64-bit or 32-bit? Thanks!

--JD's Web Service 13:42, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

The problem seems to have fixed itself, possibly via a reboot. I doubt that the video card data would help diagnose the problem unless I had been complaining about a full-screen tint change, yes? Tempshill (talk) 05:45, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Trouble with Java

I bought a book to teach myself Java and have this weird error that doesn't seem should be. The code goes like this:

System.out.print("Enter the assessed value of the property: ");
property = keyboard.nextDouble();
System.out.print("Enter the property owner's name: ");
holder = keyboard.nextLine();

Basically it is a simple tax program to see if I could do it. The print lines asks for input and the other lines place them into variables. This works fine for the variable property, but as soon as I hit ENTER to submit the number it skips the line where Im supposed to enter the name and goes right down to the output of the tax, correctly. It prints the line to ask for input but doesn't stop there.

The output comes out like this:

Enter the assessed value of the property: 150000
Enter the property owner's name:   (It should stop here but doesn't)
Taxes on $150,000.00 are $885.00.

All the variables are initialized, but I can't see the problem. Any help? 134.126.192.188 (talk) 13:44, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I'd guess that keyboard object is a java.util.Scanner, which you've got reading from System.in? If so, you can hack it by putting keyboard.nextLine(); after the property = keyboard.nextDouble(); line (to eat the linefeed that's causing you problems). There's probably a paradigmatically sanitary way of doing this. however. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 15:36, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Try this to understand the behaviour:

        String surname;
        String holder;
        double property;

        System.out.print("Enter the assessed value of the property followed by the property owner's name,");
        Sytem.out.print(" followed by newline: ");

        Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in);
        property = keyboard.nextDouble();
        holder = keyboard.nextLine();
    
        System.out.print("Enter fred's surname ");
        
        keyboard = new Scanner(System.in);
        surname = keyboard.nextLine();

        System.out.println(property);
        System.out.println(holder);
        System.out.println(surname);

Note that - for your example you need to enter "1000 Brown" not "1000" //newline// then "Brown" ie the scanner class is a file input type of thing - so it stops after a newline (thinks it's finished - meaning in your example the name is null..)

You could start a new Scanner to get past any newlines -Also try printing out holder string in your example to see what has happened.

Experiment and you should get what is going on.. Hopefully. (are you familiar with file reading commands ala C or Pascal?).Sorry if that explanation was a mess -83.100.251.196 (talk) 15:59, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Also scanner.hasnextline might be a good idea here as part of a program http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Scanner.html#hasNextLine() there are so many ways to do it it's difficult to give a definative answer.83.100.251.196 (talk) 16:40, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Anyway, it gets fiddly anyway - if you accidentally don't enter a number for the float problems arise, (unless you catch errors) for this reason many will resort to reading input character by character. Luckily David Eck has created a javaIO class that behaves better - as part of his java tutorial (which has been recommended by others before) - http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/ his input stuff is here http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/c2/s4.html it might be just what you want, unfortunately it's not a lesson in using the scanner class which should be found at sun.83.100.251.196 (talk) 17:59, 21 September 2009 (UTC) And don't forget to close the scanner object.

The OP might be interested in an EasyReader class. I used it back when I was learning Java and didn't yet understand I/O and how to get user input from the command line. Read the annotations for one of the .java files from that search and find one you like. Usually it's just as easy as instantiating the class and calling its methods for user input. Really streamlines the process for you.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 22:12, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Many windows opening very fast, screen flickering very fast

Earlier today I started my desktop tower computer as normal, running XP SP3. But when I clicked on a folder icon on my desktop, the computer went nuts. It seemed to be opening many windows very rapidly. The screen was also flickering very fast. The one window I noticed seemed to be the window for the desktop. I did a forced shut-down by pressing and holding the power button. It re-started normally. I ran an Avast! anti-virus boot-time scan - nothing found. Did another anti-virus scan - nothing found. I have clicked on the same folder icon again and it behaves normall. What could have been the problem please? All Microsoft security patches are up to date. 78.144.198.168 (talk) 13:49, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't have an answer as to why this bizarre behavior took place, but I do have a couple of tips for what to do if it occurs again. It is always best to do a "Shut Down" or "Restart" operation rather than turning off your computer with the Power button. The latter may damage your files, especially if the computer happens to be writing to a file right when the power goes off. In a chaotic situation like the one you describe, I would possibly first try to sleep or hibernate the computer by pressing the Sleep button on your keyboard, if there's one there. (The hope is that whatever crazy stuff is occurring will magically stop when you wake up the computer.) If not, try pressing Control-Alt-Delete, which should display the Windows Task Manager. In Windows XP, the Task Manager has a "Shut Down" menu. The Task Manager is displayed on top of all other windows, so you may be able to (carefully) navigate the Task Manager's menus normally, even though all that crazy activity is occurring in the background. Click the "Shut Down" menu, then click "Restart" to restart the computer safely. Of course, this will get old if you have to restart your computer every hour or whatever; hopefully it doesn't occur again. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:31, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

It was impossible to do the above due to the computer being busy with the flickering screen etc - I did try. Its like criticising someone who's just survived a motorway/freeway crash and telling them that they should have parked the car and left it in neutral rather than coming to a sudden stop. 78.147.85.67 (talk) 18:55, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

No, it's more like telling an anonymous person on the Internet, about whom no information is known, and who has provided insufficient context for a perfect answer, about shutting down their computer properly. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:07, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

You might have had a stuck Enter key, or something sitting on it. Other than that, I would run a Spyware scan, as that could have been an Ad-Bot trying to fire off popup ads. If you have a popup blocker enabled, that would explain the flickering as your blocker fought with the bot... Arakunem^Talk 17:50, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it could be a stuck key on the keyboard or maybe one on the mouse. Inspect both devices and make sure the keys and buttons all move freely. StuRat (talk) 22:11, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps you managed to select every file in the folder and executed/opened it, eg "select-all" or control-A this causes computers to go crazy! ^{why is there no article on control-A?} Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:22, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Here Control key does CTRL-C really need an article83.100.251.196 (talk) 12:25, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Change the page title in firefox, with greasemonkey

Would it be possible with a greasemonkey script to change the Page Title to something custom based on the url? For example, a web page at "http://example.com/pages/123456.html" has the page title of "example.com" only. I would like it to display "example.com Page 123456" instead. Would this be possible? I would be a great benefit as it would mean saving pages would be much easier than having to copy and paste into the save box. Thanks!

Sure. The following will do just that:

if (location.href.match(/([^/]+)\.html$/))
    document.title = location.hostname + ' Page ' + RegExp.lastParen;

--Sean 17:14, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

YES! This is perfect, It's Sean to the rescue yet again, you're awesome you are so awesome THANK YOU!

But that seems to have a dependency on the URL ending in .HTML, no? Not sure if that's a problem, but. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:00, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Sure, of course, but that's what was given in the example, and I didn't want to cloud the solution by handling guesses at other requirements. --Sean 18:48, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Extract WAV sound from AVI video

Hullo clever people! I've been trying to put together a bunch of scripts to rotate a video from a digital camera. It works great, using mainly very specific MJPEG and JPEG utilities, but there's one problem: the yuv2wav command from the MJPEG tools can't see the sound in my videos, and the only thing I've found that can is ffmpeg - which is ten times as big as the rest of the scripts put together!

So, is there a small Windows command-line utility out there that can extract the sound from an AVI file? The only ones I found were pretty ancient; in fact the only one I could actually download and run was AVI2WAV 3.5, which didn't work on my files. There's also the weird avi2wav-mpg, which unzips to a file called avi2wav-mpg.mbd, which I have no idea what to do with! - IMSoP (talk) 18:36, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Are you sure your camera encodes the audio in the AVI as WAV format? Does it use some kind of non-standard encoding? You can use ffmpeg to identify the type of audio encoding it's using, by just doing "ffmpeg -i filename". Indeterminate (talk) 02:11, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, good question... ffmpeg says it's "adpcm_ima_wav", which doesn't mean a lot to me beyond having PCM and WAV in the name; does it to anyone else?

Full ffmpeg output

Y:\Projects\VidRotate\trunk\bin>ffmpeg -i "c:\Temp\V\CIMG1637.AVI" FFmpeg version SVN-r19926, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al. configuration: --enable-memalign-hack --prefix=/mingw --cross-prefix=i686-ming w32- --cc=ccache-i686-mingw32-gcc --target-os=mingw32 --arch=i686 --cpu=i686 --e nable-avisynth --enable-gpl --enable-zlib --enable-bzlib --enable-libgsm --enabl e-libfaad --enable-pthreads --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libsp eex --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libxvid --enable-libschroe dinger --enable-libx264 libavutil 50. 3. 0 / 50. 3. 0 libavcodec 52.35. 0 / 52.35. 0 libavformat 52.38. 0 / 52.38. 0 libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0 libswscale 0. 7. 1 / 0. 7. 1 built on Sep 20 2009 04:03:00, gcc: 4.2.4 [avi @ 0x3ecdb0]non-interleaved AVI Input #0, avi, from 'c:\Temp\V\CIMG1637.AVI': Duration: 00:00:01.29, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 9917 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 640x480, 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 25 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: adpcm_ima_wav, 44100 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 177 kb/s At least one output file must be specified

Incidentally, does anyone know how to stop ffmpeg outputting its entire version and configuration details every time I run it? - IMSoP (talk) 19:53, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

You could put it in a .bat file and use the @echo off command ... Nimur (talk) 20:13, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Setting "echo off" stops CMD.EXE (or COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) "echoing" each line of the batch file before it runs it; it doesn't make any difference to what the commands themselves display. What I need to do is redirect the output of the command, but >NUL didn't seem to work.

To answer my own question, it turns out CMD.EXE does actually use standard streams in the same way a Unix shell would, and the same redirection rules apply, as explained admirably here. So what I need to do is redirect "standard error" using ffmpeg ... 2>NUL, or redirect stderr and stdout using ffmpeg ... >NUL 2>&1.

I still want a smaller program to extract my WAV streams though... ;) - IMSoP (talk) 18:38, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Windows Vista hijacks my programs

Hi, I recently started using Vista. I now experience that the system sometimes declares that a program has crashed, and that the program will now be shut down. I can see that this is probably helpful in some situations. However, this mostly happens with programs ported from Linux or older programs, which I support do not tell Vista in the "proper" way that they are just spending some time doing their task (long filesystem operations, Internet searches or downloads), they have not actually crashed. Is there any way to disable this unhelpful "feature" in Vista? I've tried using "compatibility mode" for Windows XP (where I never had this problem). Thanks! Jørgen (talk) 18:48, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

You might try right-clicking and running the program "as administrator". Indeterminate (talk) 05:28, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try that when I get home, but the whole point of running as non-administrator is that I do not want my programs to have admin access, plus it will be a bit cumbersome to enter admin password every time I start the program. This "feature" was not there in XP, so I am hoping there is some way to disable it? Jørgen (talk) 06:23, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

I've never encountered a program being forced to crash in Vista. When I do encounter a program has crashed Windows, I'm usually pretty sure it has crashed. You do however get Vista saying the program is not responding and may have crashed and giving you the option to wait (well this was in XP too but I encounter it more in Vista). If Vista says the program has crashed, are you sure the program hasn't really crashed, e.g. did something invalid? Just because the program worked in XP doesn't mean it will work in Vista. Also with Vista's UAC, you don't have to run with a non admin account to give programs no admin access. They don't have admin access by default. If you are running in an admin account, you need to give permission if a program requests adminstrative access (or you tell Vista to run the program in admin mode). You don't need to enter a password. This behaviour is somewhat changed in Windows 7 so running in a non admin mode may be necessary again Nil Einne (talk) 13:19, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

File times changes when copying between hard drives

Hi, I've copied a lot of pictures from my external hard drive (SD4000, shows as "USB device", FAT32) to the local hard drive ("SCSI Disk Device", NTFS) using drag-and-drop in Windows Vista. However, I now see that the timestamps are two hours apart on the two drives (which corresponds to the time difference between me and UTC, not sure if that is a coincidence or not). The digital camera that took the pictures was at some points set to a third time zone, so I suspect the time zone on the camera does not matter here. This is annoying as it confuses file synchronization software. My questions are:

• Why do the timestamps behave this way?
• Any easy way in Windows Vista to adjust the timestamps in bulk?

Thanks! Jørgen (talk) 18:52, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Update: It seems to be a problem specific to Microsoft SyncToy 4.0 - the "dir" command reports similar file times. My question stands, in addition to one more: any suggestions for good synchronization software? (gwsync only crashes, synctoy has this problem). Jørgen (talk) 19:02, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't know the tool you're using, but I know a lot of *nix OSes use UTC as the system clock and then modify in userspace for display and otherwise, though windows OSes will set the system clock to the local time. This causes file-time issues. I don't know if windows 7 continues this windows practice. Shadowjams (talk) 06:58, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

S3 as file backup

Hi, I am looking for an easy way to backup my pictures online. I do not want to use image sharing services such as Flickr (I want my files to be mine only, and potentially to be able to save any type of file) and I need more than 5GB (which I think is the current limit for some free services). Paying some dollars a month is not a problem. Would Amazon S3 be a feasible choice for such a thing? Would it be easy for someone who is not a programmer to set up? (I'm decent with computers if I do not have to program anything myself). Any other recommendation for good such services? Ideally, I would like something that does not tie me into a particular piece of software as my experience with proprietary "uploaders" is that they are buggy - and I might want to move from Win32 (which I use now) to Linux one day. Thanks! Jørgen (talk) 18:56, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I like dropbox personally (2GB on the free service). It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is $100/year if you want 50GB. I have not spent that much time exploring the other options since earlier this year, so I do not know how it compares to other services currently. Caltsar (talk) 19:46, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I just noticed that you don't want proprietary uploaders. Dropbox does have one, and I do not know of any major services that do not as most website based ones are a bit slow to use for large numbers of files, and the sync features of these services tend to rely on the ability to track changes over multiple computers. That said, many of these services offer a free version that you can try to see which has the best software. Caltsar (talk) 19:52, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Here is a list of s3 based backup services - http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007641.html (the list is quite old, but a bunch of the programs mentioned are still in development, and people have added info in comments). Personally I wouldn't use an online backup service without client-side encryption (as otherwise you're trusting Amazon or whoever to never goof and allow access to your s3 buckets to someone else). Given the bandwidth limitations (and the charges amazon adds for data transfer), I'd backup genuinely important stuff (documents, local emails, probably photos), but not ripped audio and probably not home videos. It is nice to have an offsite backup solution, as no amount of local redundant storage and thorough backups will survive a serious fire. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:54, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I use s3sync (a functional copy of rsync for s3). It works well. I have a lot of files stored there and it costs me about $3/month. -- kainaw™ 21:08, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

I know you said no photo-sharing websites, but you might consider SmugMug. It's less of a community sharing site than Flickr and more of an archiving site; they explicitly advertise it as a backup service. Galleries can be public or private. The price is a flat $40/year for any number of photos. There are a bunch of third-party batch uploading tools for it. -- BenRG (talk) 00:49, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks all, the answer to the question "is S3 as backup feasible" seems to be "yes". I'll look into your suggestions. Jørgen (talk) 06:21, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

PS2 to USB adapter for keyboard

My old keyboard is not working with a PS2-USB adapter that I got. It is not one of those connector cords, it is just a short adapter plug. When I plug it into the USB port, the lights on the keyboard flash once, and then nothing. My PC never detects the hardware, and the keyboard just doesn't work at all. Where is the problem? Is it the keyboard (it worked last time I plugged it into a PS2 port on my old comp), the adapter, or Vista (I tried it on two vista laptops, same result)? Thanks —Akrabbim^talk 21:04, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

It's hard to really tell as you'd need to try it with another PS2 keyboard and another USB adapter to narrow down the problem, but from personal experience I know that not all PS2 devices will work via a USB adapter, I don't know whether this is because they're picky about the power requirements or just that there's something missing in the adapter that they need, but I'm thinking this is your problem, but like I mentioned above, you'd really need another keyboard at least to try it with. ZX81 ^talk 21:36, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Direct communication between PCs

Just wondering: is there any way to stream bytes from one personal computer to another over the Internet without some server or middleman in-between? Thank you!--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 22:16, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

If we discount the plethora of routers & switches that packets of data traverse, then in short, yes. Your client PC or Mac is getting this page full of bytes directly from a wikipedia server, without any middleman activity (bar the aforementioned routers & switches). I suspect you have something more specific in mind - it would help to elaborate your question, perhaps by way of an example of the sort of streaming you have in mind, so that we can provide a slightly better answer. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:40, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, specifically I was thinking about running the Java Virtual Machine on two different computers and having them send objects from one JVM to the other in real time without having to sign up for some kind of P2P service or whatever. Is this possible?--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 01:03, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, this is the basic idea behind Peer-to-peer networks. At least one of the computers will have to act like a server, so it needs to have a routable ip address (or at least Port forwarding from its home router) so the "client" computer can connect to it. The "server" also needs to have an available open port on its firewall. You can check if your computers are accessible from the internet by searching for an online port scanner and entering the computer's ip address and the port number you want to use. Indeterminate (talk) 01:55, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

If you own both machines, neither one must be the server (meaning both can be the server - waiting to see if anyone connects). This is not something new. Remote objects have been around in Java for at least 10 years. There are two levels of remote objects. In one level, the object is instantiated on a remote machine and communication with the object goes over the network. The other level uses the class definition on the remote machine to instantiate the object locally. At one time, there was a believe that by now nearly all programming would be done with remote objects. I don't see it happening any time soon. -- kainaw™ 04:13, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

El Aprel may simply be seeking the Java Sockets tutorial, from Sun. If both machines have routable IP addresses, this is the simplest way to send bytes from one to the other; although technically it is not a "Stream" - that would be an InputStream attached to a socket object (which is also common). As the above users have hinted, these connections need not be a direct "client-server" design; but in Java, you need one server to host the socket ("listen") while another connects. Nimur (talk) 17:52, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Resolved

Thanks, everybody! All your responses were very helpful.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 22:06, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

September 22

twilight/ vampire tales in byron bay refuge?

just wondering if "anyone" has heard of it? someone named alice rings bells?

This is a computing question? --68.103.141.28 (talk) 04:48, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Mozilla Firefox

After we hooked up with Comcast we couldn't use Mozilla anymore, just Internet Explorer. Is this an accidental-on-purpose technical glitch that Comcast provides Microsoft as a courtesy??Rich (talk) 08:31, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

It is more than unlikely. A quick web search reveals little concern about Comcast & Mozilla, but I'd expect plenty if Comcast was not playing with Moz. Comcast is alleged to throttle P2P traffic such as BitTorrent, but should honour any other TCP/IP packets. The problem is almost certainly in another area. Exactly what are the symtoms? And what firewall / anti-spyware software do you have running? --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:04, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

I have Comcast and can use FireFox, Safari, Opera and IE. -— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:54, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

I had a similar problem with the initial setup, which had to be done in Windows/IE. Once the initial setup was complete, I could use my choice of OS and browser. Are you still at the setup phase? If so, finish setup in IE and then try Firefox. anonymous6494 13:44, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps your proxy server settings have changed. Check which settings IE is using by going Tools -> Internet Options, look under the Connections tab, and click "LAN Settings" at the bottom. Then in Firefox go Tools -> Options -> Advanced, look under the Network tab, and click "Settings". Make sure Firefox is using the same settings as IE.

• thanks everyone.71.198.176.141 (talk) 01:27, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Lockerz.com, what's the deal?

In my net peregrinations I'm coming across more and more postings advertising invitation giveaways for Lockerz.com, however I can find absolutely zero independent third party explanations of what that site IS.

My spam/scam sense is tingling. Does anyone have some insight? Wikipedia, to my amazement, hasn't even a stub about it... 218.25.32.210 (talk) 09:10, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

[3] also see their own advert http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y4hi6cNKlM

You earn points be getting others to join or buy stuff of something - a bit like a pyramid selling scheme but without the cash. Clever. Also trash. Probably legit though. Aimed at youth. Aimed a people who think ipods are god, but not apple geeks. Kidz.

They also sell stuff - so that might be a source of income - you get "Pointz" for participating in "Lockerz" , so it might be aimed at "Bratz" (or Niggerz)? Who knows?

fatlad's first law of the internet - "Any sufficiently advanced marketing scheme is indistinguishable from spam".83.100.251.196 (talk) 11:36, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Here's an independent evaluation [LINK REMOVED] 83.100.251.196 (talk) 11:47, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

For extremely small values of "independent". I've removed the link as inflammatory, inappropriate, and any other "in-" words that come to mind. ;) Grab it out the history if you really want to go there. - IMSoP (talk) 13:44, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

The "independent evaluation" is well worth a read; the evaluation is certainly independent, albeit grotesquely partisan. I'm doubt I'm alone in feeling that the insidious marketing approach being taken by the company in question richly deserves (some of) the response it has engendered. It is also very humorous, albeit in schoolboy fashion. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:00, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Eh, since when do we not link to things? Wikipedia isn't censored. The site is stupid and unhelpful, and will tell you nothing about their business model or anything else. Still, I don't quite see it as dangerous. The site is a bunch of script kiddies planning to launch some sort of hacking attack against Lockerz. It doesn't tell you much about Lockerz itself, except that they don't like it very much (mostly because it tries a bit too hard to be cool, and because it apparently spams). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 16:25, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

What's the deal? The site basically is trying to grow a huge user-base by trying to entice people to get "points" for watching ads, using it, etc. They will then reward these hours of interactions with what are no doubt carefully determined trinkets that are not really worth the time spent on them. Better yet: once they get enough users, they can just sell the site and its user-base to someone else. It's how a great deal of online business works these days, where the number of people using the site is more valuable than anything else. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 16:28, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

After some quick Google searches on "Lockerz" it was easy to determine they were using scam-like techniques for advertising and attracting interest. I'd stay away from them, whatever they are. Mac Davis (talk) 03:14, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

The chief problem with getting a sensible entry for Lockerz in Wikipedia, is that the Wikipedia editors are irrationally biased against it. My original entry on Lockerz was taken down by a hoard of whining Wikipedites who seemed to think they had the right to censor information about something they don't like and hadn't taken the trouble to understand. Lockerz is not a scam, but is genuine commercial venture that is using a clever twist on affiliate marketing to build site membership. Yes, it's annoying, but so is the lack of rational analysis of it here. Lockerz.com is one of the fastest growing internet sites around. Wikipedia should be ashamed of its inability to even record Lockerz existence.

I agree to the paragraph above. There is almost no chance that lockerz is a scam as it is funded by liberty media ,http://www.libertymedia.com/interactive-lockerz.aspx .The CEO of Lockerz is Kathy Savitt the dormer VP of amazon.com, any involvement with a scam would be "social sucide", sorry i am new to wiki so i don't know the rules, delete this if needed. More hereWyldman (talk) 21:46, 4 December 2009 (UTC)


ENGLISH
Maybe in the beginning, lockerz could be considered a scam, but after several months it can be sure that lockerz not a scam. There are many videos on youtube showing that lockerz is true, just enough for "unboxing lockerz" to realize the enormous amounts of "prizes" that has sent lockerz. Now his goals are not clear and I do not think the awards are forever but they already have a database with millions of people visiting the web constantly and they did it in a few months :-) Is not it better that could happen to a website? A couple of ads out there, a few thousand dollars for each trailer ... In a few months could recover everything they invested in Redeems. Finally: I do believe in lockerz, seize the opportunities this giving.

Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft2z1CFfzdQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSPbunR8RbI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg3QLxqRsOw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChUM4ARtRko&feature=related
... and more


ESPAÑOL
Quiza en sus inicios, lockerz pudo ser considerado una estafa, pero despues de varios meses ya se puede comprobar que lockerz no es una estafa. Existen muchos videos en youtube que demuestran que lockerz es verdad, solo basta buscar "lockerz unboxing" para darse cuenta de las enormes cantidades de "premios" que lockerz ha enviado. Ahora, sus finalidades no estan muy claras y yo no creo que los premios sean por siempre pero ellos ya tienen una base de datos con millones de personas que visitan la web constantemente y ellos lo lograron en pocos meses :-) ¿No es lo mejor que le podria pasar a una pagina web? Un par de anuncios por ahi, unos cuantos miles de dolares por cada trailer... En unos cuantos meses podrian recuperar todo lo que invirtieron en las redeems. Finalmente: Yo si creo en lockerz, aprovecho las oportunidades que esta dando.

Fuentes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft2z1CFfzdQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSPbunR8RbI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg3QLxqRsOw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChUM4ARtRko&feature=related
...y mas

GPGPU and integer performance

So I asked this on the GPGPU talk page, but haven't gotten a response. The article doesn't address the question of whether GPGPU is suitable to improve the performance of integer workloads or not. Can anyone shed some light on that? Google searching essentially led to garbage results at least I wasn't able to make sense of them. Thanks - Taxman ^Talk 20:10, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

This guy wrote an MD5 implementation in CUDA (MD5 is all integer and bit ops) and reports very good results. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:14, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

September 23

How do you quickly familiarize yourself with code written by someone else?

Say you have the source files for a software application but there are no design documents, and you want to modify the software. What steps do you take to help yourself understand the organization of the code? Are there tools that you'd recommend for facilitating the analysis? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.49.10.73 (talk)

Maybe a look at Michael Feathers' book Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Template:ISBN-13) might help. —Tobias Bergemann (talk) 10:14, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I find adding print statements is quite valuable: "Oh, so this chunk of code is hit whenever the value of variable X is in the Y-Z range, I see...". StuRat (talk) 13:27, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I go through and change the indentation and use of { and } to my own preference, one line at a time. It forces me to scan all of the code. By the time I'm done, I have a pretty good idea what the code does. -- kainaw™ 17:12, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Charging Li-on batteries

Will the quality or lifespan of lithium ion batteries degrade if left charging for long periods of time? Assuming the battery has the battery protection circuit. -- penubag  (talk) 06:19, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

If the "battery protection circuit" prevents it from charging when already fully charged, then I don't see how being plugged in all the time would have any effect at all. This Q is very similar to the "Charging my laptop" Q a few down from this one, so also look for replies there. StuRat (talk) 12:52, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up -- penubag  (talk) 01:58, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

HELP with my rogers phone to a new one im supposed to get!!

hello,

I currently have the KRZR from ROGERS. and it has a spot for my SIM CARD. i was looking to buy an HTC TOUCH DIAMOND.. unlocked.. and i thought i would be able to pu tmy rogers Sim card in and it would work? whats am i supposed to do!?

HELP PLEASE! (:

MathML support in Mozilla Firefox

What versions of Mozilla Firefox support MathML? I used to use MathML with some older version, but my current version (3) does not render MathML. Does 3.5 support MathML? Thanks! --Masatran (talk) 11:17, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Firefox 3.0.14 (linux x86 ubuntu) passes the MathML test at https://www.eyeasme.com/Joe/MathML/MathML_browser_test pretty well (with a few missing-font issues). Maybe you're missing fonts too? -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 11:25, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

EasyCap 2.0 USB problem

Hi everyone I wondered if somebody could help me with a problem with a friend's capture card. My friend's computer OS is Windows XP and the capture card is called EasyCap 2.0. The default setting to record is NTSC_M but the one my friend wants is PAL_M. Every time he goes to change it, it just goes back to the default NTSC_M setting. This means because his TV and Wii is PAL the capture card can only record in black and white...Is there any way to change the setting permenately to PAL_M rather than NTSC_M so he can record in colour? Will continue to monitor this section for any other answers...Thanks Chevymontecarlo (talk) 11:36, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Charging my laptop

Is it best to keep my laptop plugged in 24/7 or to periodically charge it and allow it to discharge ? I am a college student, so mostly my laptop is on all the time. I am asking this question from the point of view of the battery... I have heard that its not good for cell phones to be kept on charge always, but I'm not sure if the same applies to the laptop battery,....Rkr1991 ^{(Wanna chat?)} 12:20, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I think the most serious problem is devices that continue to try to charge the battery even when it's already fully charged. This results in it getting hot, which in turn shortens it's life. I'd expect an expensive device like a laptop, which already has the ability to monitor the charge level of the battery, to stop charging when the battery is fully charged. You can test this for yourself by feeling if the battery is still hot after it's been fully charged for hours, but not turned on. StuRat (talk) 12:46, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I have a thermal monotor built in. It is around 50 (in degrees centigrade) when idle and around 70 during use... So I think that means it's pretty safe to keep my laptop plugged in, doesn't it...? Rkr1991 ^{(Wanna chat?)} 12:50, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

That's within the normal range for a processor. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 13:03, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but we need to know the temp of the battery specifically, not the processor. What's the battery temp when charging and hours after fully charged but still plugged in ? StuRat (talk) 13:20, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter much. The battery will, at some point, start losing its effectiveness and, if you have it long enough, may need to be replaced. But this happens no matter what you do, as far as I can tell. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 13:03, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I use a laptop as my weather station and I leave it permanently on and plugged in - 24x7. My current one has been doing this for about a year. The battery still works fine (when there's a power cut). --Phil Holmes (talk) 13:33, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, but there's a lot of range for "works fine," though. There are usually utilities you can get that tell you the health of your battery. Mine is 85% at the moment (that is, it can now only hold 85% of its original charge) -- not great, but not worth replacing at this point. I've had them dip pretty low after some years. If you don't use it on battery very much, you probably won't notice it, but if you do use it a lot, you start to notice it holding less of a charge after awhile. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:26, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I remember reading an Apple document not too long ago that advises use of the battery at least once a month and to leave the battery at half charge if it is going to sit for multiple months. I assume this is the case for all Li-ion/Li-poly powered laptops. If you take your laptop off your desk and off the power adapter every few weeks, your battery should be good (mine is plugged in the majority of the time and it's stil at 95% health after a year and a half) Caltsar (talk) 16:05, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware any worry about 'leaving the battery charging' is unfounded - laptops use a lithium type battery (which are not far off fireworks as far as energy density goes) - thus they have built in electronics which prevents things such as overcharging etc. A full battery can be easily detected since the resistance (at a given charging voltage) rises rapidly once it is full. However I have read that it's a good idea to 'power cycle' these batterys (some instructions mention it) - however this is a different topic. The article Lithium ion battery also mentions built in thermal shutoff in case of overcharging.83.100.251.196 (talk) 17:34, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Also note that if the device is permanently plugged in it's not using the battery, but drawing power from the power supply.83.100.251.196 (talk) 17:37, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Are you positive that this is the case for every laptop? There may be laptops out there which always take current from the battery, even when it's plugged in, yes? Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:49, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I doubt it - think electrical safety requirements, also see [4] - manufacturers of cells require buyers to use safety electronics, otherwise no-sell - (they don't need arseholes making unsafe batteries from cells - causing accidents - and thus making the cells unpopular etc) - Li batteries require special charge control to limit the charging current (so to prevent overheating and BOOM!).

Also see [5] section 'safety circuits' 83.100.251.196 (talk) 21:33, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh you meant it draws power from the battery even when plugged into the mains - ok -why would it do that?83.100.251.196 (talk) 21:36, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Because it's cheaper, since no switch is required to go from one power source to another. I have a portable DVD player and rechargeable walky-talkies like that, they won't run without the battery in place. And even with the battery in place, you still have to charge it up a bit before it will run. It's a sucky design, but since the consumer has no way of knowing if it works this way, prior to purchase, they don't know to avoid such devices. And, after purchase, unless they try to run it without the battery in place, they may not notice that it works that way until after the return period has ended. StuRat (talk) 14:29, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but you can't draw power from a battery and charge it at the same time.83.100.251.196 (talk) 18:02, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

This link contains some relevent info about Li batteries [6].83.100.251.196 (talk) 17:40, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Having left my laptop plugged in almost permanently for over two years, I note that its usable time has reduced from three hours to one hour. I discharge and recharge it occasionally (once or twice a month). Is this reduction in usable time just normal deterioration, or would it have lasted longer if I had not left it on permanent charge? The advice of the manufacturers is not to leave it permanenly plugged in, but I usually ignore such advice. Has anyone done any research on what difference it makes? Dbfirs 12:51, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Is this code unbreakable?

Hi all,

In order to encrypt various bank details and passwords on my computer, I created a program that uses a simple Polyalphabetic cipher. I then generated a key that was longer than my message (using all existing ascii characters) and encrypted the message once.

Am I right in thinking that, if the key were truly random, this would be unbreakable? In the section here it says that it's "difficult to break" if the key is less than 27 times the length of the plain text, but it doesn't say whether having the key being longer than the plain text makes it unbreakable.

In practice, my key was not random, but produced using Java's Random algorithm, which takes the time as a seed (I believe). How much less secure does this make the code?

Thanks! — Sam 63.138.152.155 (talk) 16:06, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

If your key is as large (or larger) than your plaintext, and you never reuse the key material, then you have a one time pad. A OTP is, formally, provably secure; but in practice using a OTP properly is very difficult (as there's so much key material to store and manipulate) that it's only used for very rare things like diplomatic wires. java.util.Random is not a cryptographically secure random number generator. Your scheme founders on the practicalities alone - rather than keeping safe an N-character block of blank info, you now have to keep safe an N-character block of key material, which is essentially the same problem. If you're genuinely intending to use this to store real secret data, use GNU Privacy Guard, Password Safe, or KeePass rather than brewing something yourself. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:14, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

As to the specifics of the random number generator, see Cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. A regular pseudorandom number generator is insecure because its period (how long before it repeats itself) is too short; and in practice because it may have unpleasant algebraic properties that allow an attacker a shortcut. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:21, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Answering the last question... If I know the algorithm you used to make your key, and I know that it was created using Java's random function, and I know it used the time as a seed, and I know approximately when you created the key... I can create keys using every time from before I know you made the key until after I know you made the key. One of those keys will be your key. I try each key on the encoded text until one works. This gets into automated brute force techniques. I obviously won't actually read the output of each key. I will send that into a pattern-matching filter. If it matches the pattern of what I expect the plain text to be, then it is saved off for me to read. -- kainaw™ 17:09, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Pedantry: Generally speaking, the answer to your title question is "no". If the core technique is sound, an attacker is likely to simply go around it. What if your program swapped the plaintext out to disk? What if there's a bug in your program? What if the NSA is using TEMPEST techniques on you? What if your spouse is a mole? What if Dick Cheney tortures your loved ones until you give up the key? "Unbreakable" is a very high bar. --Sean 20:03, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

This is kind of an interesting question. Lets put aside rubber hose techniques (that's not what he's asking). Just because your cipher's polyalphabetic doesn't mean it's analogous to a OTP. I'm going to assume you actually have access to true random numbers. The better question is why, if you have a key longer than your plaintext, do you need an encryption method other than OTP. OTP is provably secure. If you can keep the key secret/remembered why can't instead keep the information secret? If you somehow can remember the key better than the original data then I suspect the original key isn't random (or you got "lucky" and your key is probably susceptible to some other attacks) . Shadowjams (talk) 09:23, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Commodore 64 to a modern TV?

My team mate at work saw me wearing a Commodore 64 themed T-shirt and said he had a fully working Commodore 64 for sale. Now this made me intrigued about whether it's possible to connect a Commodore 64 to a modern flatscreen TV. The Commodore 64 uses an RF modulator for video output. Back in the 1980s, it was standard for all TVs to accept a signal from an RF modulator (it was often the only input available), but is it used on modern TVs any more? JIP | Talk 16:20, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Sure, my year-old Sony flatscreen has an RF-input, which can be used to watch analog TV (so there's no reason a C=64 or whatever wouldn't work). Once digital switchover is complete, there's much less reason for TVs to continue to feature that, so it'll die out over the coming years. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:23, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Great! Now I'll just have to buy my team mate's Commodore 64 (which I think will cost a negligible sum) and a flatscreen TV (which will probably cost about 200-300 €). Or then bring it around to my father's place and use his really fancy wall-mounted flatscreen TV. JIP | Talk 16:24, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

The Commodore 64 has both an RF port and an AV port. The AV port carries mono audio, composite video, and luma/chroma video. If you can find or make an appropriate cable, it's possible to connect the Commodore 64 to your TV's composite video or S-video input.

According to Commodore 64 - IO ports some early Commodore 64s have 5-pin port with only composite video. To make sure, just check your Commodore 64's AV port (next to the RF port). If it has 8 holes it's the newer type. If it has 5 holes it's the older type.

Be careful when shopping though. Original Commodore 64 AV cables designed for Commodore monitors use a yellow cable for luma (a grayscale picture), a red cable for chroma (color information), and a white for mono audio. If you plug these cables into a stereo TV with yellow, white, and red ports, you'll get a grayscale picture, correct audio from the left speaker, and buzzing audio from the right speaker.

Also, an AV cable for a Sega Genesis uses the same connector, but different cable assignments. We had one and when we connected it to the Commodore 64, I remember we could only get a grayscale picture with it, but I forget if we got sound or not. --Bavi H (talk) 03:31, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

You can get perfect C=64 emulators online for free right now (such as VICE); they do everything the physical one will do, and (because disk and tape files load nearly instantaneously) you don't have to put up with those twenty-minute "fastload" flickery-border loading times. The real thing probably isn't going to be as fun as you remember ;( -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:29, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I already have VICE installed on my Fedora Linux system, and it works perfectly. But I would like to be able to transfer the about 500 original Commodore 64 disks I have to the system. I went out and bought a 1541-to-serial adapter cable online, but only after I had completed my order did I realise my system doesn't have old-style serial ports. Direct 1541-to-USB adapter cables are still in hobbyist prototype stages, but are there serial-to-USB adapter cables available for sale? JIP | Talk 17:21, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Sure, just search for "usb serial port adapter" at your favourite retailer; they're cheap and plentiful. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:24, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about that. All hits for "USB serial port adapter" I could find are for 9-pin RS-232 serial ports. The cable I ordered is for an even older variety of serial ports, with something around twenty pins. Also I'm worried about cable gender issues, I might end up trying to smash two connectors with the same gender together. JIP | Talk 18:23, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

That larger format is a DB-25; the mapping of pins on the DB-25 and DE-9 is given at RS-232#Pinouts. You either need a 9-25 adapter or you can build one - in practice you almost always only need the GND, TxD, and RxD lines - the rest are meaningful only for modems. If you're doing that yourself you may have to wire things as a Null modem (which essentially means one side's TxD is the other side's RxD and vice versa). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:31, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I would very much like to avoid having to build a single cable myself. The last time I soldered something was back in primary school, and I did a pretty bad job at that too. JIP | Talk 19:31, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Are you sure your 1541 transfer cable is for a PC serial port? The 1541 transfer cables I'm familiar with are for a PC parallel port (printer port). For example, see sta.c64.org/cables.html. If I'm interpreting it correctly, all of the disk transfer cables listed there connect to the PC parallel port (printer port). For the connection on the other end, most of the cables listed there connect to the Commodore 64 or Commodore disk drive serial port (the standard Commodore disk and printer bus), and so they're called serial cables. However, if you modify your Commodore disk drive, you can install a special parallel port on it and transfer files faster. The cables that use this special parallel port are called parallel cables on that page.

Also, I made some comments about AV cables above. --Bavi H (talk) 03:31, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

It's an XM1541 cable, and yes, it actually seems to be for a parallel port. There also seem to be parallel-to-USB adapter cables available. I'm still worried about cable gender issues though. JIP | Talk 04:34, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

After some Googling, it turns out that the real problem is in the parallel-to-USB adapter, but of a completely different sort. Modern parallel-to-USB adapter cables are stripped-down versions that only use those pins needed by printers. The XM1541, on the other hand, makes full use of the parallel cable, and thus expects to find a complete parallel port on the other end. This means I need a USB-compatible parallel port replicator, which seems to be extremely hard to find, and even I do find one, it will cost me over 60 €. Damn, it feels like the whole world is trying to stop me from accessing my old Commodore 64 software. JIP | Talk 17:31, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

VPN, certificates, and CAs

I'm setting up a Netgear VPN router for the first time and the Netgear manual talks about getting a certificate from a CA, and uploading it to the router. Do I really need to do all of this? If I do need to do it, who's the cheapest of the reliable CAs? What company do most people use? Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:56, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

The cheapest CA would be the one you would set up yourself. In the netgear website i were able to find only one VPN router and it seemed to be rather high end device (8 gbit ethernet ports, etc), and it uses IPsec. I have never dealt with IPsec VPN's, but SSL VPN usually can either be set to use preshared key or no encryption at all (both are considered less safe than use of CA and certificates). Maybe there is available something similar. -Yyy (talk) 10:45, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

open modem

i have a Huawei 3g Broadband Dongle Modem..it's locked onto using one 1 service subcriber but on googling i found out you can open it to use whichever network available..There's a place that you send your imei number and they send you the unlock code..i thot i could save and donate the amount ..i downloaded the software from http://wareseeker.com/download/huawei-modem-unlock-code-tool-v1.1.rar/7cddfaaf4..but it's not installing..Anyway i need help if anybody knows how i can unlock my modem..the imei is XXXXXXXXXXXXX...so help.

I've removed your IMEI from your post just as a precaution. Last thing you want is someone cloning your sim card and running up a huge bill at your expense. I am using a Huawei E220 USB modem (in fact I'm connected from it now). It came with proprietary dialer software, however I can't confirm if it was network locked. Soon after I got it I simply downloaded the latest software and firmware update (two separate entities as I discovered) from Huawei's website, and now instead of the proprietary dialer popping up, the standard Huawei dialer comes up instead, and instead of connecting at 3.6Mbps the connection reports that it is connected at 7.2Mbps. I'm not sure if flashing your firmware with standard Huawei firmware will get rid of a network lock, but it's worth a try. Zunaid 22:25, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

SIM card specific data is IMSI, IMEI is specific to device (this case - modem), so it is not possible to clone SIM card by knowing that. (knowning IMSI also would not be enough to clone SIM). -Yyy (talk) 09:56, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

On the economics of free software

How do Free Software activists like Richard Stallman (as opposed to Open Source adherents) who would that there were no such thing as proprietary software expect full time software developers to make money to support themselves? You always hear "free speech, not free beer," but if beer were distributed with the GPL and could be replicated as easily as software is, beer would realistically have zero price almost instantaneously too.71.161.40.225 (talk) 21:43, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

From the Free software article "Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as applications, support, training, customization, integration, or certification." To extend your analogy, beer is not distributed for free, but the instructions for making beer are. Assuming you have minimal equipment and relatively low cost ingredients, you can make beer. In much the same way, you can make software, but even when the instructions (source code) come for free, there are many reasons why you might choose to buy software & service rather than brew it yourself.

The model appears to work very well for GNU/Linux; per Linux#Community, there are a great many contributors to the Linux kernel and the remainder of the operating system ... I'd hazard a guess that at least as many if not more are engaged in this pursuit as are engaged in developing Windows operating systems. So there is empirical evidence that the free software market does, remarkably, financially support a great many developers.

I grant you it is all seemingly counter-intuitive, but that is merely because we are so wedded to and familiar with proprietary models as to have become conditioned to think only within that paradigm. And that's where hairy monsters like Stallman come in; presumably one of the reasons that he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Finally, and even more counter-intuitive, is that one can create software and make it available under a free software license and sell it - check out this Q&A with Stallman, who says "So I see nothing wrong with charging money for a copy of a program. However, I do see something wrong with denying the user of a program the essential freedoms, after he’s gotten his copy, whether he’s gotten it by paying for it, gratis, or however he got it." --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:08, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure if they do make any money. I read that 98% of MySQL customers are DIY.^[7] The MySQL division only earns about $50 million a year from support services. SUN paid about $800 million for MySQL in 2008, even though it's a free product. I'd like to see some data relating to other open-source products, but I think it's damning that so few companies open source their software today.--Drknkn (talk) 23:46, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Damning? What sort of talk is that in the context of a discussion of the economics of FOSS? I really do fail to grasp your point, and just do not even begin to comprehend your tone. I recognise we are on ground that for many appears to be ideological, but the ability of the FOSS market to fund itself is surely the relevant empirical evidence here. That much software is proprietary demonstrates that that model has legs, too. But the one having legs does not delimb the other. Meanwhile, if you want to bandy figures, let's consider Redhat's $652.57 million revenue in 2009 (according to our article). They're but one of a number of suppliers in the Linux field, and it seems to work for them. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:03, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

As a manager (not an open-source advocate), your first obligation is to your shareholders. (They're the owners of the company.) You're not running a charity. You're playing with other people's money. That's what I meant by "damning." Also, what about SUN and Novell, which are both losing money even amid R&D cuts? SUN has been losing money since 2002. Around the same time, they gave away much of their intellectual property. Novell got out of the Netware and WordPerfect business and into the Linux business, which hasn't worked out very well for them, either. Compare their performance to that of Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple. All of those companies have been doing great with closed-sourced code. RedHat charges for RHEL, and they get away with it because Fedora releases are clearly beta-quality. SUN, on the other hand, charges for StarOffice, even though OpenOffice is just as good. The business model for a while now has been to give away crippleware and charge for software. You guard your source code, because if it's open sourced, then there's no way out. Once it's on the Internet, it stays there. That's why many Oracle shareholders are a bit upset about the acquisition of SUN. I don't blame them.--Drknkn (talk) 01:16, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

I personally am not convinced that the economics works out, but comparing them to Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple—maybe the top three most profitable companies in the business, all of which go WAAY beyond "proprietary" to the level of "lock-in", does not make much sense. Looking at the fortunes of one company does not tell you about an entire business model. There are a lot of reasons that people lose money or gain it; extrapolating from the numbers alone doesn't tell you anything at all. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 14:28, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Apple is an interesting case since their kernel is mostly open source and partially based on open source components (MS also uses open source components in Windows but not to such an extent AFAIK) but their products are generally heavily restricted Nil Einne (talk) 15:13, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

I think it makes some sense to compare the leading companies in a sector to the leading companies in another sector. It doesn't tell you a lot, but it tells you something. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:41, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Skipping out on volunteerism as your primary source of labor (which can be significant, as Wikipedia can attest), it comes down to selling subsidiary products and services. It's certainly not the most profitable model, and would not appeal to big software combines unless there were other advantages to being "free" (like market dominance). Stallman does not frame his argument in economic terms primarily—it is an ideological, rights-based argument first. Any attempts to find ways to make it profitable are secondary. (As compared to Open Source, which is usually presented as a quality-based argument first, rights-based second.) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 23:51, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. It comes down to if your primary goal is to make money, with providing quality software to as many people as possible only a secondary consideration, or vice-versa. Although in the case of a company which only provides software as a ancillary service to their real product, both goals can match up nicely. For example, Netflix' primary business is distributing DVDs through the mail, but they also have a rather extensive web site and database system set up to support this. As it happens, some of their software seems to be rather poor. Now, they could hire lots of highly competent programmers to fix it, or they could release all their software to the public and let them fix it. They seem to be trending more to the latter, which could save them money and provide better software in the long run. Now for an example of a business that doesn't do this (AFAIK). When you buy a car it has software to control how the radio, heat and A/C, and other settings work. From my experience there's no easy way to reprogram this software. Thus we get window defrost settings that automatically turn themselves off every 5 minutes, at great annoyance to the customer, who has no way to fix it. If we could just go online and grab a fix for that, put it on a USB flash drive and plug it into our car, then the customers would be much happier and more likely to buy that car again. However, I wouldn't allow user access to any safety related programming, like the brakes or air-bag deployment, that should be left to the "experts".

Now let's talk about companies that are primarily software companies. There I think a compromise is in order. I like the model where the core software is proprietary, but they also give away lots of APIs, GUIs, etc., so that end users can thoroughly customize their software. This hopefully allows the company to make a profit and also allows a large base of application programmers to make the software fit their business and personal needs. StuRat (talk) 19:46, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Removing "Personal Antivirus" trojan

A friend has gotten themselves infected with the "Personal Antivirus" trojan. I've looked online at the various fixes and noted with alarm that they're often quite different from one another. For example, this site has a list of DLLs that need to be unregistered while this one does not. Even the lists of processes to end don't match up. If I've read things correctly, it looks like there are no free AV fixes for this infection out there, so I'm going to do it manually, but don't know which site has the straight dope on fixing the problem. Is there a site that the pros use to get their removal tips from? Matt Deres (talk) 22:10, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I've dealt with PAV on several occasions. I simply boot into safe mode by pressing F8 during start-up. Then, I delete the Personal Anti-virus folder inside the Program Files folder. Then, I go into the C:\WINDOWS and C:\WINDOWS\system32 folders, arrange the files by creation time, and delete the newest files. Viruses can mutate, so the file names may change. That's why I simply remove files created since the infection. Then, I search the registry by running regedit and pressing CTRL + F, then typing in the names of the files I deleted. I delete any keys with those names in them. Then, I disable the PAV add-ons inside Internet Explorer. Finally, I delete all temporary files on the computer -- including the folder used by System Restore (C:\System Volume Information, C:\WINDOWS\temp, etc.). As for those instructions, services.exe and winlogon.exe are critical system processes, and I don't know if Windows will function without them or even if you will be able to stop them. In any case, viruses are programs, and programs can crash if they're missing any of their modules. So, if you just get rid of some of the files created by PAV, then I think their computer will work much better.--Drknkn (talk) 22:24, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Also, another thing to keep in mind is that once a system is compromised, if you really care about privacy, you may want to just do a clean install of the operating system. It takes way too much work to be fully certain that you have gotten rid of some bug. Brusegadi (talk) 06:59, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, guys. Matt Deres (talk) 21:40, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

September 24

Does Microsoft Office 2007 product activation keep track of uninstallations?

Hello,

I'm considering the purchase of Microsoft Office 2007, but I've noticed that the retail version available in stores says that the program can only be installed on 3 computers. Does this mean 3 computers at one time can be running MS Office using the same product key, or does it mean that 3 installations on a given key are permitted (which would be more restrictive)?

To clarify: if the user installs MS Office on one computer, I assume the product activation system notes that one copy of Office has been installed using the user's specific activation key. However, if the user uninstalls MS Office from this computer at a later date (e.g. he or she is getting rid of the computer, it has a virus and needs to be formatted, or one of several other potential scenarios), does the product activation system record this and decrease the number of installed copies of MS Office associated with the user's activation key by one?

On a related note, if the user's computer is destroyed before MS Office can be uninstalled (e.g. by a house fire), has the user irrevocably lost one of their permitted installations, or is there a way to contact Microsoft and deal with this?

I've tried to find the specifics of Office 2007's product activation online, but there seems to be no concrete answer to this question one way or the other (Microsoft's website for Office 2007 was decidedly unhelpful). As such, any information regarding this would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

- 67.70.122.28 (talk) 00:30, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

3 computers does mean 3 computers at the same time, and from my experience uninstallations are not tracked, so if you install the program on 3 computers, remove it from 1 and try to install it on another, it will deny activation. If this happens, a phone number should be shown on screen which you can call, tell the Microsoft staff member that you have uninstalled 1 copy, that only 2 installations are now active, and they will give you a code to bypass activation. This answer comes from Canada, but I would imagine that the process is similar or the same everywhere. Vancouver Outlaw (Speak) 01:46, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

No, CD's such as Norton 360, or games such as Team Fortress 2 have always kept track of un-installations so I would assume Microsoft Office does as well. warrior4321 04:03, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

I prefer preventing the program from keeping track in the first place. You own the program now, forget about the originator's terms. Mac Davis (talk) 03:02, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but that's not true. You own a licence to USE the program (subject to the agreements of the licence), not the program itself. There's a big difference. ZX81 ^talk 13:16, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

UNIX dd command

Hello, I was wondering what dd does with the output when "of" is not specified. I ran:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1000
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1000 count=400

Did I create anything? I know that this writes to stdout when of is not specified, what does that mean? Also, does anyone know of an easy way to create a large file (not a sparse file, I want to actually reserve disk space) without actually writing anything? Thanks, Brusegadi (talk) 06:55, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Stdout means standard output, that's the console if you haven't piped it to somewhere else. You didn't see anything because you used /dev/zero, try some text file and what happens should be more visible. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 08:59, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict)If you don't specify an of, dd sends its output to stdout, which will mean to your terminal. If you do dd if=/dev/urandom then you'll see screens full of garbage. Because you were reading from /dev/zero, those zeros are sent to the terminal, which ignores them. I don't know of a way (and I don't think there is a way) of reserving disk space without actually writing, and in the past I've used dd for the job myself. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 09:07, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

To actually take up disk space, just use dd as you did. Sparse files require the use of the sparse or seek option. 82.75.185.247 (talk) 19:58, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

You didn't create anything. If you want to see whatyour output is then try using "hexdump -C" or maybe "xxd". Either of those will show you the actual bitstream you're creating. Shadowjams (talk) 09:15, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I formatted the part of your question containing the two dd calls, by adding a leading space, which is useful if you want the output to appear exactly as it does in the edit window where you enter the text. As it was renedered, it was confusing, becuase both dd calls were printed on the same line. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 14:54, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Password vault for OS X

I run OS X 10.4.11. I would like to use a password vault like Password Safe. Does anyone have any recommendations as to which to use? --98.217.14.211 (talk) 14:20, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

I like 1Password myself. I got it at a deep discount ages ago so I have not compared recent password managers lately. OS X's keychain also acts in a similar way as Password safe if you don't want to pay money for it (you just have to make sure to lock the keychain when you're done to keep it completely secure!) Caltsar (talk) 14:30, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

I use KeePassX on Linux, which also runs on OS X. It's been fine for me. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:33, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

1Password and Wallet are good. I got 'em from MacHeist :) Mac Davis (talk) 03:00, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Apple filing system; changing search sort parameters from last opened to date modified

I cannot tell you how much time I lose and things I can't find because when I perform searches on my mac it sorts by "Last Opened" rather than by "Date Modified". I'm on an IMac G5 (Powermac12,1, PowerPC G5 (3.1)) running Mac OS X. version 10.5.7. When I go to my normal filing system screen menu, where I have documents such as word/excel/pdfs etc., the default sorts are: Name, Date Modified, Size & Kind. However when I go to the search window at the top of the screen and type in a search term, the sort categories on the results of the search are limited to: Name, Kind and Last Opened. Is there any way to change Last Opened to Date Modified (or add Date Modified as a fourth category to sort by? Thanks in advance.--173.68.34.143 (talk) 14:35, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

How To Find Out When A User Last Logged In To A PC On Win XP?

How is it possible, if at all, from another user account (or from the login page) to find out the last time a particular user logged into a PC running Win XP? --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 15:06, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

You can read the System Event Log. Microsoft's knowledge base has an article: How to view and manage event logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP. You might have to set group-policy to log user-login events (depending on your version of Windows XP). Even if the actual logins are not logged, you might see "footprints" in other system events (such as program launches and starting of system services) that indicate a user began running the system at that time. To enable logging of the actual login sessions, you need to enable login auditing, as described in this Microsoft document. Nimur (talk) 15:18, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

The date/time stamp on the file used to store the user registry hive is usually a good indicator of that user's last session. The relevant files are "C:\Documents and Settings\username\NTUSER.DAT" and "C:\Documents and Settings\username\ntuser.dat.LOG". You'll normally require Administrator privileges to see another user's files. Mitch Ames (talk) 01:28, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Choise of motherboard (ASUS P5Q-EM Motherboard)

Hello there, I am looking for better motherboard for my gaming rig. Here's my specs (except motherboard) :

• Intel core 2 quad 9400

• DDR2 RAM 4 GB ( 800 MHz)

• PSU 750W

• XFX ATI Radeon 4890 1 GB or XFX 9800 GT 512 MB

• HDD 320 gb

• Chasis - thermaltake chaser VI

I was planning to get this mobo but confused with the review in newegg (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131336&cm_re=ASUS_P5Q-EM_Motherboard-_-13-131-336-_-Product and cons) as it runs too hot during gaming and some other issue. I did not find any hitpipe on this board. I noticed two blue colored box on this board and one of them contain "Asus" name on top. What are those boxes? A user from newegg mentioned that Vista 64 bit sp1 takes to much time to install on this board and even it hangs the system.

I have XFX 750i SLI mobo which is causing freezing problem from the very first day when I built up my system and tested system on other mobo and found problem with 750i SLI Mobo. I don't need cross fire or SLI enabled platform, just need a stable system which will run both ATI and Nvidia High end cards smoothly. Any advice for getting this new mobo would be appreciated. Thank you--119.30.36.60 (talk) 15:34, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

I have a similar setup and I've been happy with a rather inexpensive MSI Micro-ATX motherboard I bought. Look for something with the correct number of expansion slots for your needs and make sure the FSB and memory standards match up. A higher price doesn't always mean the motherboard is better, and heatpipes are not always necissary on the board. You could improve performance by finding a board with higher cockerate memory, but then you'd need to invest in new memory. Newegg is very good for finding the correct motherboard based on components you already own (you may need advanced search). Caltsar (talk) 19:09, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Is there any reason why you need integrated graphics or m-ATX form factor? I have a P5Q-E and I've never had much problem with it. Just looking at Newegg even the P5Q-Deluxe (open-box?) is cheaper than the board you chose, so unless you really need the G45 or the m-ATX form factor I don't see why you'd choose that. PS: 4890 is in a completely different class to a 9800GT. --antilived^{T | C | G} 20:00, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

The specific board I chose was on sale at the time from another retailer, and I wasn't recommending it specifically, but I was mentioning that it is not necissary to buy an expensive board such as those targeted toward gamers. A board that is cheap and gets good reviews will generally last just as long and perform just as well as the "top of the line" equivilant board of compatible specs. Everything the op has listed will fit onto a mATX board, but if he can find a full sized ATX board for less, that would be great! Also, having integrated graphics on a board often adds little to no cost, and it is found on almost all of the cheaper motherboards I've come across. Boards built to use a PCI Express graphics card and no integrated graphics are often targeted at a higher end market and come with a similar markup. Obviously this is not the case 100% of the time, but I've always found it easier to look for boards regardless of the inclusion or lack of inclusion of a built in graphics card. (Minor Edit) Indentation made me believe you were replying to me. My points still stand regardless of who they're aimed at. Caltsar (talk) 20:30, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks for the reply. I don't need integrated graphics or m-ATX form factor. Well, I have just found this board in new egg (Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L). Shall my system match with this mobo? Any thoughts ? thank you--202.56.7.137 (talk) 21:20, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Download some pages, links and content from Wikipedia

We are a group of researchers and would like to build a mathematical model for change in the Wikipedia network. To begin this, we intend to focus on a small subset of the Wikipedia site (pages under the "Statistics" subcategory). The analysis requires three kinds of information:

1. a list of all pages under the Statistics subcategory, with information on which pages are linked to which other pages within that subcategory;

2. a list of the dates on which each of these pages and links was first established (history or date stamp);

3. a file for each page that contains the text in the current entry (which we shall use to create a "bag of words" model).

Are there any tools that Wikipedia currently has that would help us in download this specific information?

Thanks 152.3.22.21 (talk) 16:09, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

You can get the raw data two ways:

a)You can download database dump - as you care about the history, you'd need to download the entire history, which is a pretty huge file. Then you'd read that into MySQL, and run queries on the result.

b)Alternatively you can use the MediaWiki API and query just the stuff you want. As you want a small subset, this is probably the better approach.

But I'd caution that the creation date of an individual article isn't nearly as informative as you'd think (and may very well confound what you want, or at least render it a partially-manual process). Many articles are forked out of existing articles (so maybe once there was just a "statistics" article, then someone took the "Descriptive statistics" section and made the Descriptive statistics article, and so on. There isn't a good machine-readable way of tracking that (people really should credit the originating article when they're forking, but they sometimes don't, and there is no standard rubric for you to parse to detect that). In general this is a major obstacle to analyses of Wikipedia such as you propose: mediawiki is very good at tracking changes within a given article, but motion of stuff between articles (which is very very common indeed) is entirely an untracked, manual process. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:49, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Are you guys at Duke? I recognize the 152.* IP ... - You might find Category:Wikipedia_resources_for_researchers useful. Often, when research has been done with Wikipedia, it is best to do it out in the open, with active communication among the research team and the Wikipedia contributors; but some research needs a "double-blind" methodology. The MediaWiki API linked above is a bit heavy-handed, since you just want the Page History data (this is easy to get, either by screen-scraping or manual checking). Nimur (talk) 19:11, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Espon P-4000 and Linux?

Is the Epson P-4000 compatible with Linux? My Creative Zen Vision W doesn't appear as a mounted device under Linux, but Gnomad2 recognises it. I've been thinking of getting an Epson P-4000, as it has a 80 GB hard drive compared to the Zen Vision W's 30 GB one, but I'm not sure if it will actually work under Linux. JIP | Talk 18:16, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Processor failure or something more benign?

Lately I have been having bizarre crashes on Windows Vista (although it happened once when I had XP last month), the entire system just stops with the sound quickly stuttering then cutting out, no hard drive activity, and the screen is frozen in place - no blue screen of death or anything. The system responds to nothing, so I am forced to reboot. Initially it only did it within minutes of me starting to play The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, so I figured it was a problem with the game. But now it does it when I'm screen-sharing over Skype while running NESten (an NES emulator). Just now it did it after only 5 minutes of screen-sharing.

Now I'm worried that something is wrong with my processor or something, but I hope there is some kind of simple solution.

My system specs: Pentium 4 HT, 2 GB of RAM, ATI Radeon X1650 (AGP), running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Nothing on the system is overclocked or anything.

Chris16447 (talk) 21:38, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

This sort of crash / lockup is almost always due to a software bug and not due to hardware malfunction, in my experience. If you want to do a thorough memory test anyway, download memtest86, make a boot disc, boot from it, and let it run through a cycle's worth of testing. Crashes under XP were more frequent than under Vista because of Vista's improved driver model. I bet the problem is with crappy video card drivers. ATI and NVidia suck at writing drivers that never crash, seemingly. (Granted, it is a difficult task.) Download the latest video driver available for your video card and see if that fixes it. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:08, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Very likely a video driver problem; Skype's video capture system relies on hardware video acceleration, which may fail if you are running other software (including the NES emulator) which may also have some form of video acceleration. Consider checking this first - find the latest version of your video driver, and see if the failures persist. Nimur (talk) 18:23, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

September 25

Dual Quad Core i7 possible?

Is it possible to build a computer with two quad core Intel i7 chips (8 cores total)? Or is a Xeon better suited for multiple chips on a motherboard? --68.103.141.28 (talk) 00:23, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't know of any technical reason why you can't. However, you'd need a motherboard that supports two i7 processors and as far as I know there aren't any commercially available (yet?). I'm happy to be proved wrong though! ZX81 ^talk 00:52, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

True Crime nyc ps2 - editing

I own it on ps2 , is there a way to mod it by using some kind of software or an application? I really want to choose another player model to play as.

IS THERE ANY F***ing way to EDIT PS2 GAMES!? 85.220.102.101 (talk) 17:53, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Macbook broken screen, please help

The screen on Justin's macbook is messed up. Here's a picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hadakushal/3939622349/

Any ideas what happened here? Will just replacing the LCD screen fix the problem? Maybe? Need more information to answer?

I was wondering if buying a non-Apple part would be worth it. This one http://cgi.ebay.com/screen-13-3-lens-for-Apple-Mac-macbook-13-3-inch_W0QQitemZ280399759286QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item414920c7b6&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14 is $24. The cheapest ones that claim to be original part run $75 dollars. I also found this guide http://www.ifixit.com/pdf/guide_536_en.pdf and while not easy, it looks straightforward.

Looking forward to your reply ... Kushal (talk) 11:47, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Jeez, that looks not so good. What happened to it? You usually don't just wake up one day and have it look like that. I'm not really sure what the issue is—I would take it first to an Apple store, show it to them, have them diagnose it. Then you can figure out whether you want to try and do the labor at home. It's a real chore to replace the screen, as you can imagine, but if you can do it yourself, it's obviously cheaper than having them do it. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:26, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I think you are right, Mr.98. I never asked the complete details in this case. I am not entirely sure how it started. However, once it did, it just kept growing until it became what it is today. :( We don't have Apple Care anymore. Is it worth it to drive to an Apple Store? The closest one here is just shy of a quarter to three hour drive. :( Kushal (talk) 09:56, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

That looks like a hardware problem with the screen itself. If replacing the screen isn't doable, you could also hook the laptop up to an external monitor, although obviously at the cost of reducing portability. StuRat (talk) 12:59, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

That is a possibility, StuRat. I guess I would be needing a mini DV port adapter for whichever monitor I choose. ... maybe something that doubles as a television even! I will probably query Justin about it. He likes taking the computer to class and such though (he is in college). I would probably want to go with the least expensive solution, though. and nothing seems to beat a 25 dollar screen. ... any ideas? Kushal (talk) 18:06, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm not speaking from experience on this, but it seems highly unlikely to me that the $25 screen is going to be an adequate replacement. Sounds too good to be true. I would seriously look for some reviews. It's only the cheapest option if a) you don't count your own time as valuable, and b) it doesn't immediately break again or cause other difficulties. If I were going to replace the screen, I would probably opt for original parts, esp. with Apple (where everything is about original, proprietary parts).

Taking it to the Apple store won't cost anything—they ought to be able to tell you if it's a screen problem or something else. (Even just hooking it to an external monitor would tell you something, as well.) A cheap LCD monitor will cost about $120. The Mini-DVI->DVI or VGA plug costs $19, usually. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:27, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

recovery shutdown

i have aprblem that is when i start my laptop the windows vista is loaded smoothly but sometimes i heard asound like fast ticking the ablue screen pops up showing shut down recovery and stuff like dumping physicsl memry.what do you think the problem is?

First, back up everything on your hard disk, probably most easily done by copying it all to an external USB hard disk during one of those times you are able to successfully boot Vista. The problem is probably a corrupted OS, though before you try to address the problem, you might as well download memtest86, create a boot CD, and boot up your computer with it, letting it run a complete memory test for a cycle. This will highlight problems with your computer's RAM, which could be the cause of the blue screen problem you're seeing. Then I would start from scratch: Reformat your hard disk, deleting everything on it, and reinstall everything from scratch. I would normally first suspect corruption of the OS for some reason. (When you reinstall Vista, be sure to make an "admin" account that has administrator rights, and a "user" account with no administrator rights; and use the "user" account whenever you use the computer. This helps prevent viruses, trojan horses, and other malware from infecting your OS in the future.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:06, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I would guess that the "fast ticking" is a hard disk trying to seek and failing. It seems likely that it would be better to grab what's possible of the hard disk and if the OP can do this, to replace it. Otherwise they might be looking at a new machine. --Phil Holmes (talk) 11:06, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Recovering Last Session After a Crash on Firefox and a Dumb Mistake

I'm running firefox 3.5.3 and had a crash. Unfortunately, when it restarted I accidentally clicked the 'start new session' button rather than the 'restore my previous tabs' button. Now I'm staring at google instead of the 10s of research pages I had open in mid project. Is there any way I can get that last session back?

Your history may still contain those pages even if the session crashed, (depending on how the crash happened). You might consider bookmarking those pages as well; you can use the new "bookmark all" feature to save an entire browsing session with a single "bookmark". Nimur (talk) 21:05, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't have a solution to restore your lost tabs, but I would highly recommend the Session Manager addon to prevent something like this happening again

replace only new and updated files

I have all of my files in a folder, with a nice and organized directory structure. I want to keep a copy of this folder on a couple of computers, and use an external hard drive to sync it up. What I'd like to do is at the end of the day, just drag the top level folder onto the external drive and have the system only copy the new files and only overwrite the files which have been updated. The computers in question are using vista, and xp.

When I try this in XP, the message I get is "If the files in the existing folder have the same name as the files in the folder you are moving or copying, they will be replaced. Do you still want to move or copy the folder?". So I don't have the option of only replacing files that are new or updated, and don't want to waste my time overwriting files I don't need to. In Vista the exact message is different, but the result is the same: no conditional copying command.

Is there any way to do this? Do I need to use another (preferably free) program besides windows explorer? Thanks for the help mislih 15:36, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, Windows Vista is actually a lot better than XP in this regard. Explorer asks you if you want to merge the folders. But still there is no "copy only newer versions" option. However, writing such a program is almost trivial, so surely there are quite a few available on the Internet. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 16:24, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I use xcopy to do this. If you use the following syntax: "xcopy /s /d /y /c sourcefiles destination" you should get what you want. If you save this as a .bat (Batch file) then all you need do is double click the batch file to synch up. As an explanation, /s does all subdirectories, /d does what you want - copies new/newer files, /y suppresses confirmations and /c supresses errors. HTH. --Phil Holmes (talk) 16:44, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Nobody has yet mentioned Windows Live Sync, which is the official tool from Microsoft and is included on newer versions of Windows. If you wish to use the Microsoft servers as the provider, you are limited in total storage space; but if you choose to run your own server using the Windows Server, you can operate an arbitrarily large data synchronization. You can also read about the Microsoft Sync Framework for more industrial-strength synchronization. Nimur (talk) 18:16, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

If using xcopy, /h (copy hidden and system files) may also be useful. Run xcopy/? to see all the switches, and what they do. Also you might want to try robocopy, which includes all sorts of extra capabilities. It comes with Vista, but I believe it will also work on XP. Again, /? should show you all the switches (and there are a lot of them!). Mitch Ames (talk) 01:27, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Or Teracopy. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 18:27, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Inkspace

How can I use Inkspace? --ArgGeo (talk) 5:30 pm, Today (UTC+2) User talk:ArgGeo

Moved from WP:VP. Svick (talk) 16:18, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

First, you need to download it, instructions and links here. Here are the official tutorials. Do you have a specific problem? Nimur (talk) 16:40, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

For your future searching and such, you should note it's called Inkscape, not Inkspace. --Sean 20:54, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

How did they disable the back button?

Go to the Asheville Citizen-Times web site[8]. Look at any article that has more than one page. Read each article one page at a time. When you get to the last page, click on "Back". You only have to do it once.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:53, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

The hyperlinks are not to a URI, but instead serve to actuate a javascript tool to load new content. Such use is common on rich content websites (often using AJAX, DHTML, etc.), although it is discouraged by standards organizations like W3C because it results in stateful URIs. See the section in our HTTP article and also computational idempotence for more technical details about why such design is discouraged (these articles are fairly technical and theoretical - but they are conceptual ideas that are part of the HTTP and web architectural standard). This section, Protocol Parameters for the official HTTP specification, explains in technical detail why the news site Vchimpanzee linked is technically "broken" according to strict interpretation of standards - it uses the same URL to refer to multiple documents based on the user's Javascript state. Nimur (talk)

On a related note, to make printing out the articles cheaper, I copy and paste the text and put it in an email to myself with all the white space removed. The entire article appears even if I never go to the other pages.

On another site [9], there are links to other articles on the page with each article but when I copy and paste those articles the first few words of the actual article appear--not just the names of the articles! It's very annoying if I'm trying to save money, not to mention it makes the result harder to read.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:39, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Again, like many complex websites, they use JavaScript to override default behavior, including copy/paste. Nimur (talk) 20:57, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Note that in this case, "complex" is synonymous with "poorly designed, from a user's point of view." One should never use Javascript to override things like basic copy and paste behavior. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:48, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. What is to stop a user from disabling javascript just on that website? Kushal (talk) 10:01, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

That will make many such sites unusable, since they're usually not good at making their masterpieces "unobtrusive". Greasemonkey is a better solution in my experience. --Sean 11:02, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

UDP and throttling

Suppose I am playing a hypothetical first-person shooter that broadcasts my character's position by blasting out UDP packets over a Gigabit Ethernet LAN at maximum speed, saturating the network. This is awesome! All my friends' machines know precisely where I am, many times per second! Now suppose I connect my Gigabit Ethernet router to my DSL modem which has an uplink speed, typical as I understand it in the USA, of only 768Kbps. That's under 1/10th of 1% of the bandwidth I'm using for LAN play. How does the throttling occur? Does the router itself discard 99.9% of the UDP packets? Or does it perhaps discard a mere 90% of the packets and fire the other 10% of the packets to the DSL modem via its link at 100Mbps Fast Ethernet speed, and then the DSL modem in turn discards another ~93% of the resulting packets as it uploads them to my ISP's connection? And in all cases, how do the router and modem determine which UDP packets to discard? Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:17, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

What is the destination_ip_address set in these UDP packets? -- 87.115.106.169 (talk) 22:23, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

This is all hypothetical, so I guess it would be the IP address of some other guy playing against me, a few cities' distance away. Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:52, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Games don't flood networks with an infinity of packets (at least not since Doom); indeed games are generally very economical, sending as few packets (and as small) as they can get away with (without causing jumpiness or obvious interpolation/extrapolation artifacts). Packet loss will occur only when the network is saturated for some other reason. -- 87.115.106.169 (talk) 23:04, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

In other words, the software of the game does the throttling, by sending an intelligent number of packets. Even if your connection is fast, the software will not blast out packets at megabytes-per-second data rates. It has been designed not to use (and not to need) this data rate.Nimur (talk) 23:25, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I am asking specifically about how exactly the router/DSL modem setup above would throttle a large amount of UDP data, not about how a well-designed (or even adequately-designed) game will handle the situation. I only mentioned my hypothetical game as an example, but it might as well be a video broadcast application. I am indeed asking about a situation where the network is totally flooded with UDP packets. Comet Tuttle (talk) 03:32, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

The throttling device (the DSL router in your case) will initially delay the packets and will then drop them once its queue is full. If you were usin TCP your sending process would not receive the ACKs to say they had been received and so would slow down. With UDP the network does not provide that feature, and so by default your process would continue sending them and they would be dropped by the router. A well designed process (the game) would communicate with the far end machine to check arrival and would slow down, like the TCP does - but the game writer would have to do this. --Phil Holmes (talk) 10:12, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

More about accessing a 1541 from a modern PC

So I've ordered an XM1541 adapter cable, but it hasn't arrived yet. I originally thought I could attach it to a modern PC with a parallel-to-USB adapter, but apparently those won't work. I do have another option - I just found out my father's company has at least one many years old laptop, which still has an old-style parallel port. I could, in theory, copy the files to that laptop if I borrowed it from my father's company. But how do I get them from there to my own system then? I'm not sure if the laptop has any USB ports, so memory sticks might not be an option. It has a CD-ROM drive, but I'm not sure if it's a recording drive. I couldn't get the laptop to connect to the Internet when I tried to help my father set it up at his home. A last resort would be to physically remove the laptop's hard drive and put it in my own computer, but I don't think you can do that with laptops, only with desktops. Do I have any other options? JIP | Talk 23:52, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't install hardware often, so I'm not always up to date with modern computer hardware. But if your computer has an available PCI slot, I think you could purchase and install a PCI parallel port card? Then you could use the XM1541 cable with your computer's new parallel port and avoid having to use a second computer at all. --Bavi H (talk) 01:41, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes it has available PCI slots. I'll just have to see where I can get a PCI parallel port card then. JIP | Talk 07:42, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Hey, wow! These are even available at Verkkokauppa.com so I don't even to have to order one from abroad! I found that trying to find a USB parallel port replicator is next to impossible, but apparently PCI parallel port replicators can be found like mushrooms in the rain, like we say here in Finland. Installing PCI devices is a bit trickier than simply plugging in the plug, but I've done it before many times, back in the days where EtherNet devices didn't come integrated into motherboards, but you had to buy and install them separately. JIP | Talk 07:49, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

If you did want to go down the "transferring by using the hard disk" route, you could get a USB->2.5" disk adapter. --Phil Holmes (talk) 10:18, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I ordered a PCI parallel port replicator from Verkkokauppa.com. Now I need to wait for both items to arrive, then load a 1541 driver for Linux from the... Internets, and then I should be in business! I just had a look at the box of Commodore 64 disks I have and went all nostalgic just from looking at them. There's about 100 of them, and with 330 kB each, it comes to 33 MB. That's one-thirtieth of the smallest-capacity USB memory stick on sale nowadays, and that would fit in my back pocket. JIP | Talk 17:48, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

September 26

Strange things happening to Windows XP clock.

For the last few days, maybe a week, strange things started to happen to the clock of my Windows XP. Sometimes it jumps forward or backward one hour, and sometimes it even jumps back and forth one full day. As I observed, I think it happens mostly when waking up from standby mode. Has anyone an idea what can cause this? I have firawall and antivirus, and just in case they let soemthing through, I googled a lot for malware which behaves like this, without any success. I use this system since around a year ago, and these strange things started happening only recently. --217.91.40.206 (talk) 10:44, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Time and date weirdness can be a result of the CMOS battery going dead, but that shouldn't happen on a year-old system... Xenon54 / talk / 13:39, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

It seems too organized for that. It's not resetting to 00:00, it changes from AM to PM, increases or decreases the day or the hour by one, but the month, year, and minutes are still correct. That's why I'm still suspecting some funny malware, a bug, or other software-related issue. However, I couldn't find anyone with similar symptoms by googling. --217.91.40.206 (talk) 15:19, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Could be changing to different time zones if the minutes and seconds stay the same. --h2g2bob (talk) 21:10, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Two fold laptop question - struggling m9750 Alienware laptop

Hello all. My long suffering Alienware m9750 laptop ius on the fritz again. When turned on, it begins to boot up for perhaps 1.5-2.5 seconds, and the fans give a hint of whirring, and then it turns off. Long term problem that sounds most like the fans failing to initialise but, it has happened before and when I left the laptop for a couple of days then came back to it, it switched on fine. The last time it did this, I left if for about a month in my laptop case while shopping for a new one - and I randomly returned to it one day and it worked perfectly. That was July 9th, and it has worked flawlessly until the other day. I'm not sure if a fan failure can manifest like that. I have a laptop cooling pad also which produces nice cooling air for it. Blasted thing, any thoughts?

Second thought. Failure of the Power-on self-test? I don't know what system it may use to understand what error code it may be reporting to me. SGGH ^ping! 14:11, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Secondly, in the opinions of the informed users here, what are some good, reputable laptop producing companies that still contruct their laptops from components they manufacture themselves, rather than 3rd party imports like Alienware does? Preferably good to high-end performance laptops of the visual kind. If I need to replace el Alienwareo, I am hoping to get something whrre third party component conflict and shoddy construction principles in the mould of the new Dell-Alienware merge aren't going to crop up (also want to get away from their dodgy customer services!). Thanks guys, SGGH ^ping! 13:21, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

You have a more serious problem than the fans. If a fan fails, the most that will usually happen, with a fairly recent system, is that the BIOS screen will pause at bootup and tell you there was a fan error. As with the post from yesterday about a failing laptop, your first priority is to back up all the data when you do get a good boot and a stable system. Then it's probably time for a new laptop, unfortunately. As for components, no laptop manufacturer manufactures their own components. Tempshill (talk) 16:34, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

It's already all backed up - as it worked yesterday morning for a while. It is also backed up, as this is a common occurence. What are some reliable laptop makes? 90.206.202.29 (talk) 20:35, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry that was me above. New development: While it was going through its 2-second boot-and-fail-malarky, I managed to pop the CD drive open and took out a CD that was left in there... and it carried on booting happily and is now working... is a CD being trapped in the drive giving it too much to do on boot up? SGGH ^ping! 21:36, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

How to stop OpenOffice writer from splitting words at the ends of lines?

I have OpenOffice 3.1.0 and WinXP. I've copied some text that I typed into a Notepad file and pasted it into an existing document. OpenOffice for some unknown reason is often splitting words into two with a hyphen at the ends of lines. The words are ordinary short words. How can I stop it doing this? I want justified text with whole words only. I've tried chaging the font size - does not make any difference. Thanks 89.242.92.200 (talk) 13:36, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

It is doing it I suspect because the text is running outside the print margins on the sides of the page, and when your resize the text it is retaining the hyphens because by then they were already there. Perhaps expand your print margins before typing the sentence, rather than after? SGGH ^ping! 14:07, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I cannot imagine that altering the margins would make any difference. It is supposed to be able to justify the text within the margins. It has done on all previous occasions. 89.242.92.200 (talk) 14:19, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

In that case you have auto-hyphenation switched on. Hitting F11 should open your Stylesd and Formatting box. Right click on default and select modify, then click on the text flow tab. Then deselect automatically from the top and save the new preferences. That should stop it? SGGH ^ping! 14:38, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. Before reading your second responce, I copied the text from the open office document into Notepad, un-wordwrapped it (no hyphens found) then opened another OO document and copied the un-wrapped text into it. This time there has been no hyphening. I deleted the previous document and emptied the recycle bin, so sorry I do not know if what you suggested would work. Seems to have been a problem with the formatting of the original document. Thanks. 89.242.92.200 (talk) 15:57, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Best way to create small simple single-user no-frills database by non-programmer?

Long long ago when I used CP/M, it was easy to find database software that would allow you to design a simple on-screen form and create a simple database. But now there seems to be nothing available that can do this - at least no free software. (Some former freeware that could do this is no longer freeware). The database I have in mind involves entering information onto an on-screen form, and then choosing the form(s) to display based on searches on the various fields on the forms.

What would be the easiest no-pay way to create a database like this please?

Side-question - I can understand the simpler commands of SQL easily enough. But I understand that SQL is normally accessed through some other language. Are there any available front ends or "GUI"s that can make use of SQL without requiring that you learn another language as well? 89.242.92.200 (talk) 13:55, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

You might try OpenOffice.org Base. I have found it a bit too slow and clunky for personal use (and I already have and know Access so there's no real motivation to learn it), but its goal is to be something like Microsoft Access or FileMaker Pro, which are the pay versions of what you are looking for. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:04, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Is there any such thing as a self-contained database language now, as there used to be in the good old days? One that does not require you to learn another language as well, and that is not part of some huge multi-purpose package either? Edit: The xBase article lists two or three free database languages at the end. I'd be interested to hear of any SQL-like languages that are self-contained and can be used without another language. 89.242.92.200 (talk) 16:00, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Answer to side-question: There should be plenty of sql guis out there, eg pgadmin. --91.145.72.227 (talk) 18:45, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Are there any simpler ones please - PgAdmin looks fiendishly complicated. 78.151.116.146 (talk) 19:09, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

It isn't that complicated, but I admit it is not exactly zero-setup as you must install postgresql first. Perhaps sqliteman which uses sqlite, so you only need to press ctrl-n to get going. Btw I'm no expert, I'm just copy-pasting debian repository contents here. --91.145.72.227 (talk) 19:28, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

It looks pretty complicated, compared to what the OP wants. Frankly, I think what the OP really could use is FileMaker—sounds about the level of complexity. Unfortunately, it's not cheap ($300). The more lightweight Bento might actually be a good compromise if the OP has a Mac—not as feature-rich, but if it's just for a personal database, it might be worth the $50. Unfortunately all of the free programs are generally made for DB people, not general computer users. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:09, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Looking for imageSorter2004V1.3.zip

I'm looking for a copy of this freeware program http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Others/Image-Sorter-2004.shtml Unfortunately every download link I can find simply redirects to the programmer's home page, which no longer exists. Does anyone know where I could find a copy of this file on the internet, not just a dead link please? Unfortunately Google does not allow (AFAIK) you to search for a file rather than just a link - perhaps there is some way of searching for files only? Thanks 89.242.92.200 (talk) 15:51, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

September 27

Emulator for running Windows Mobile apps on PC

Is there some kind of (preferably free software) emulator that will allow me to run a Windows Mobile app binary (i.e. not recompiling the source code) on a desktop PC (Windows, Linux, doesn't matter)? --164.67.235.98 (talk) 00:45, 27 September 2009 (UTC)