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November 5

Mpeg vs .avi

What is better quality when ripping off a dvd. .mpeg or .avi? Also, does changing format from .avi to .mpeg assuming you always pick the highest quality affect the quality from avi to mpeg?

Reason why I am asking is because I am attempting to take clips from avi high quality rips and converting the clips to .FLV. when i convert the .avi to clipped .flv the audio and video are out of sync. But, if i convert the .avi to mpeg then create the .flv clip the audio and video issue goes away but I want the highest quality clips. Thanks 142.176.13.22 (talk) 01:39, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

You have to understand first that .mpeg or .avi is just a container. They do not determine the video quality. What determines the video quality is the video codec used inside the file.F (talk) 03:02, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

^^That was quite informative and clarified a lot of things. Thanks for the links. I'm still curious on why an .avi container to .flv does not sync audio yet a conversion from .mpeg(from the original .avi converted to mpeg) to .flV works fine. I figure it has to do with how the audio and video streams behind the container or the converter I am using sucks. Thanks for your information! 142.176.13.22 (talk) 04:06, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, converting between video formats is, well, still one of those "feels like we are in the 1990s" kinds of technologies. There are a million formats, a million options, and little easy way to distinguish between them other than trial-and-error. In my experience. What are you using to convert to FLV? That might be the first place to start looking when it comes to figuring out what the problem is, and what the options are. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:33, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Help with javascript please? highlighting links in menus.

Hi, i am trying to make a page on my website a little better with some javascript. I am trying to apply highlighting of links (blue) on mouse hover, and when the user clicks on the link i want it to turn a different (green) color and stay that color. As you will see by my code, i have accomplished this, but if you click a link you will notice the other links are no longer blue on hover. Why is this? is it because i used the script to make the style white, and that over-rides any other styles? Any help in fixing this little bug would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

My code is here: http://pastebin.com/m20258cb7

Thanks again!

137.81.112.220 (talk) 04:08, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't think you need JavaScript for that. You can just use CSS: [1].--Drknkn (talk) 05:37, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Using CSS is so much easier to achieve that than Javascript. --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:02, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

They know how to use :hover, as is clear from the code. That is not the issue at hand, read it more carefully. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:46, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it seems to involve the menu1, menu2, menu3 turning it white code (if you comment it out, it works more like you want it to). I recommend, just creating a class called menulink_clicked, and then change the class of the clicked one to that (this.className='menulink_clicked'), and the other ones to regular menulink again. That way you aren't actually mucking across with the classes' stylesheet directly. I am not really sure why it is eliminating the :hover instructions you have already put in there (you don't modify them), but it seems to be ignoring them after those lines of code. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:46, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

What's happening is that initially the elements are being colored by the background-color CSS property cascading down to them from A.menulink:hover, but when you assign to that property explicitly you give the element its own individual style, which will always override the cascaded value. Your best choice is to do the class manipulation suggested by Mr. 98. If you really don't want to do that, you must re-set the style properties for each link that wasn't clicked on and handle the hovering/onMouseOver yourself, which will obviously be a pain. --Sean 17:35, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay so heres the deal. In honesty a friend helped me code most of what was in that page, although i have had programming and do understand mostly how it works. I attempted to make the modification suggested (menulink_clicked class) however its not exactly working as i had thought. can someone have a look and correct my errors please? :)

http://pastebin.com/m5a4111d4

137.81.112.176 (talk) 20:54, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Nevermind! i fixed it! thanks!!

Resolved

137.81.112.176 (talk) 21:13, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

iPhone v AppleMac Address Book

When I try to sync the Address Book with my iPhone, all the contacts are added in duplicate. Why should this happen please? Can I delete the entire contents (only) on my iPhone Contacts, and re-sync, if so how? Any advice would be appreciated please. Thanks in anticipation.--88.110.20.147 (talk) 08:34, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I had this problem whe I was syncing between my Mac, PC, iPod touch, WinMo smartphone, and Google... somewhere along the line, something in the name or other key information was changed and I was left with duplicate (and at one point triplicate) entries for every contact. The only effective way to fix this is to make a backup of your address book in one location, delete ALL contacts from every other location and disable syncing from the "parent" location you choose. Then get your address book sorted out, enable syncing, and wait a while for your "new" address book to propegate across devices. I also make a backup of my address book fairly frequently so if this happens, I can restore it in a few minutes. 206.131.39.6 (talk) 18:04, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for this idea, will give it a go.--88.110.20.147 (talk) 21:06, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

How to get Wikipedia?

I want to use whole of Wikipedia offline. I thought of downloading Wikipedia (as a whole, not as PocketWikipedia). But is is huge. So, is there a way to get it on a DVD Set or CD Set? (I am ready to pay the price, if required). My Thanks in advance. Anirban16chatterjee (talk) 09:19, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

The closest thing I could find is the Wikipedia for schools initiative, which covers about 5000 articles. Given the size of Wikipedia, downloading anything close to the whole encyclopedia would take a large number of DVDs. — QuantumEleven 12:02, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

You might also want to consider how up-to-date the info will be and how many of the articles will be in a vandalised state when the offline copy is made. Unless there is a really compelling reason to buy many DVDs, stick with the online version. Astronaut (talk) 12:32, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Wasn't there an article in the Wikipedia namespace that talked about the longterm possibilities of a print Wikipedia? I think I remember reading something like that, but I can't seem to find it right now. —Akrabbim^talk 12:46, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps you mean Wikipedia:1.0? -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 13:35, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the one I read a few years ago. Still inching forward I guess —Akrabbim^talk 13:40, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

It's actually not the sort of thing that I think collaborative editing is good for. It's the sort of thing that a centralized editorial staff could get together in few months. But for a bunch of volunteers... it's gonna be tough slogging, even if the content wasn't itself changing on a regular basis. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:54, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

3520 volumes 18 stacks

The problem with a print Wikipedia is that it would consume literally an entire wall full of shelves (see image above - and note the scroll-bar! There is more off to the right there!). Similarly, with 4.4Gbytes of article text plus an even greater number of talk pages, WP: pages and photos, it's not going to fit on any kind of dismountable media - there isn't an optical disk format or a tape that could hold it all. So you're down to needing some big hard drives or a heck of a lot of flash memory. There has been at least one successful effort to boil down the essentials to something that'll fit on a CD or DVD - but the vast majority of articles are missing and the think is practically devoid of cross-links because of that - also, all of the pictures are reduced to thumbnails that you can't expand so that many important diagrams and maps are illegible. The pocket Wikipedia is a great little gadget - but again, it's missing the pictures, the Talk pages (no RefDesk!), etc. If you're willing to pay the price - buy a Kindle from Amazon. It's not an offline device - but (at least in the USA) it uses free cellular bandwidth - so you can use it anywhere where Amazon supports the service without paying any connection fees. SteveBaker (talk) 13:52, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

You can buy 3TB portable hard drives these days. One of those would hold it all I think.

Wikipedia m:data dumps are available in a bunch of formats including static html files (those are currently somewhat out of date, and don't include the pictures). The download is a few gb, which isn't that bad (you can transfer it overnight) if you have broadband. That's a compressed archive file so it needs quite a bit more hard drive space, but hard drives are quite large these days. I've been wanting to set up a mediawiki instance and a copy of wikipedia on my home computer for a while, but haven't had the time to figure out the real requirements and install all the different software needed. 69.228.171.150 (talk) 18:51, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

According to the data dump site, the June 2008 HTML data dump of the entire English Wikipedia, minus stuff intentionally left out (user data and deleted content) is 14 gigabytes. That's only about five DVDs or one-seventieth of the LaCIE USB hard drive sitting on top of my computer right now, and while it's not small enough to put in my jeans pocket (as a USB stick containing every Commodore 64 game ever commercially released would be), it's certainly small enough to fit in a bag to carry on my travels. The only downside is that even with my high-speed 2 MB/s Internet connection, downloading the entire dump will take almost two hours. JIP | Talk 21:17, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

But that 14 gigs of HTML doesn't include the pictures - only links to them. SteveBaker (talk) 21:55, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I wonder why that html dump is so big. The XML dumps, even the current ones, are much smaller than that. And enwiki probably has >50% more text now than it did in mid-2008. Still, it's not a download you'd have to do very often, and once you had it, you could share it with your friends by much faster methods (LAN, wifi, hard drives, dvd's). 14gb might barely fit on three 4.7gb dvd's and should easily fit on two 8.5gb dvd's. 69.228.171.150 (talk) 22:16, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

The OP says they want the entire enclopedia, so they probably won't be interested in this, but an alternate solution would be just to get the FA and GA articles. This would drastically shrink the size of the encyclopia and eliminate a lot of the crap. 12.165.250.13 (talk) 16:13, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Would an AM3 Quad Core AMD computer work OK with Ubuntu?

Would it just be a normal instal, or does it start getting complicated please? 92.29.76.195 (talk) 10:06, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see any reason why would based solely on the CPU but the other hardware could cause issues Nil Einne (talk) 16:22, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Normal install, no big deal. 69.228.171.150 (talk) 18:51, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

vista ram

So I have windows Vista and 2 gb of ram. Why is 1 gb of ram always used up even when absolutely no programs are in use and after a fresh install? Is vista really that ram hungry that it needs a full 1gb just to run, when windows 7 seems to be working good on 512mb of ram —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.201 (talk) 12:34, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

That's absolutely right. Vista, along with all its accessory processes, normally takes up at least 1 GB of RAM. That is one of the intentions of Win7 - that it would be faster and more efficient than its bloated predecessor. —Akrabbim^talk 13:42, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

See criticism of Windows Vista. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 13:46, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

So if I installed Windows 7 on the same computer as my current windows vista, it wouldn't no longer use 1gb of ram it'd only use 512mb? So I'd have more free ram for programs and stuff? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.201 (talk) 15:07, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

All other things being equal, approximately yes. — QuantumEleven 16:25, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Free advertising?

My friend has a forum website that really needs members. So what is the best free or cheap way to advertise it?Accdude92 (talk to me!) (sign) 14:43, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Go to other relevant forums, put a link to it in your "sig", and post some quality things that will make others think you are someone they might want to hear more from? The problem is that there are probably a thousand other forums that do similar things -- you need to think about how you are going to let the small number (relatively speaking) of people out there who might be interested in it know that it exists and is worth their time. It is a non-trivial task for new sites in general, especially forums, which require an existing user base before they become seen as worth participating in. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:14, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I would be careful with something like that. It could easily come across as spamming. At the very least make sure you read the rules first. Better yet get somewhat established in the forum first before you change your sig. Even better, after getting established but before adding it to your sig, ask whether it will be okay in an appropriate place (don't link to the other forum, that will come across as spamming) unless of course it's clear that you shouldn't ask. Nil Einne (talk) 16:21, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

You can probably tell what is acceptable in a sig by looking at other people's sigs. --Tango (talk) 16:29, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

It depends. What's okay for someone who's been with the site for years may not be okay for someone who just joined yesterday or even a week ago. In particular, altho I neglected to mention this earlier my key point was that if you make a bunch of posts which people find unhelpful, offtopic or otherwise unwanted and it appears to them your sole point is to get more posts and you just joined and are advertising a site in your sig they're unlikely to be happy to say the least even if they don't normally care if newbies advertise sites in the signatures. Nil Einne (talk) 17:20, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, I do emphasize that quality is important in such things. A small link with good posts—probably not offensive. Dumb posts, obvious spamming—not going to be effective. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:42, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I second the "reputation-based" distinction between spamming and informing. "Spam" is a tough nut to define - it's "undesirable" advertisement (whatever that means). So, if you have no reputation and you ask people to check out your cool stuff, then it probably is spam. But if Steve Baker links to his cool toys (Sorry to use you as an example), or even his commercial ventures, we might take it seriously because he's a credible, consistent contributor, and most of the time he's not trumping up his own website. When a reliable, consistent contributor does link to some external site, we take it a little more seriously than if a new guy shows up touting his own projects with every post. Then again, most mass-media advertisements are commercial endorsements from random strangers; I don't know why they work (I suspect they don't, and $385 billion worldwide are wasted each year). Nimur (talk) 18:14, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Uncompressed image file formats other than .bmp files

What other file formats are there, apart from BMP files, that are uncompressed and can be processed as a raw bit stream? I require to know the exact file structure of these formats.

The results for searching this includes:
[2], [3] —Preceding unsigned comment added by Csanghamitra (talk • contribs) 15:38, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I believe that, traditionally, uncompressed TIFF is the easiest uncompressed file format for developers to handle. Note that although there is an uncompressed variant of BMP, most BMP files you'll find are compressed (usually, I think, with RLE.) Similarly, some TIFF files are LZW compressed, as noted in the TIFF article. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:23, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

PS: Template:Compression formats has a whole list of image compression formats that you should go through. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:27, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

The Netpbm formats are incredibly simple. -- Coneslayer (talk) 18:25, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Seconded. I love these formats and their associated tools. —Steve Summit (talk) 23:37, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

TIFF files are commonly used by image processing people. They can store uncompressed data. PNG can store with lossless compression (but compressed), depending on whether your software tool supports this feature. Our Comparison of graphics file formats article allows you to sort by compression technique. If you're looking specifically for no compression, your options are narrowed down pretty significantly; lossless compression preserves information but is a bit more work for you as a programmer. "Anything" can be handled as a bitstream, but it sounds like you want to be able to seek to a specific pixel location without decoding any other values - that is a bitmap by definition; and you probably want a .BMP or TIFF container format. Nimur (talk) 18:02, 5 November 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Comet Tuttle (talk • contribs)

I believe that Truevision TGA(Targa) can also be handled in a uncompressed way. But, can also use RLE, so you can't depend on any given TGA being uncompressed. APL (talk) 18:45, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Linux 64 Assembler Error

I keep getting a (Error: suffix or operands invalid for `pop') for the line (pop %ebx) when I try to compile a script for linux. I looked all over the internet and most hints state that this code is incompatible with linux 64 bit assembler. So what exactly do I have to do to compile it correctly in gcc? 70.171.22.194 (talk) 17:00, 5 November 2009 (UTC)asmProgrammer

You could try pop %rbx, but I doubt that will be sufficient. Porting x86 assembly to 64 bits isn't trivial. The calling conventions are different, structure sizes and offsets are different, and you need to understand how a 32-bit quantity is being used to decide whether it should be extended to 64 bits or not. -- BenRG (talk) 17:56, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

If you post example code demonstrating the problem, we'll have some chance of being able to help you. --Sean 21:19, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Mac/Unix: Open a file from a remote server on command line

Hi all,

There is a server on my network that I have access to. If I want to copy a file to/from there, I can use scp otherserver:/path/to/file.txt file.txt. Is there any way to open up that file for editing on the command line? For instance, on my computer with TextMate installed, I can run mate file.txt. However, I cannot run mate otherserver:/path/to/file.txt. For some reason, the command tries to find a file in /Users/username/otherserver:/path/to/file.txt.

How should refer to a file on a remote server?

Thanks! — Sam 63.138.152.155 (talk) 18:53, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

If the other machine has TextMate installed and TextMate works over X11, then this will suffice:

ssh -X otherserver mate /path/to/file.txt

If not, this might do for you:

ssh otherserver vi /path/to/file.txt

If you're committed to TextMate and not doing this too often, this will work:

scp otherserver:/path/to/file.txt file.txt
mate file.txt
scp file.txt otherserver:/path/to/file.txt

If you are doing this a lot, you probably want to NFS-mount the directory containing the file you're editing:

ssh otherserver
   sudo sh -c 'echo "/path/to your-local-ip-address/255.255.255.0(rw)" >> /etc/exports'
   sudo /etc/init.d/nfsserver reload   # this will vary based on what the other machine is
   exit
sudo mkdir -p /mount/otherserver/path
sudo mount otherserver:/path /mount/otherserver/path
mate /mount/otherserver/path/file.txt

There will probably be some file permissions things that need some fiddling with. Some editors have remote-editing features built in, so maybe that's worth looking at. --Sean 20:48, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

You might find MacFUSE a useful tool. It allows you to open an SSH session and mount the remote server as a "local file" via a file-system over SSH. Then, you can use any tool on your local system to read and write the remote files as if they were local (from command line or otherwise). You can download MacFUSE and its associated tools here. Similar sshfs tools exist if your local system is running Windows or Linux or Unix. All that is required on the server is an SSH service. Nimur (talk) 00:51, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

If you're doing the editing from a Mac, check out TextWrangler and/or BBEdit; both can edit files over an sftp connection (essentially like scp). -- Speaker to Lampposts (talk) 19:17, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Help with java script (Part 2) Folding items?

You may remember my post from earlier today where i had issues with a menu highlight system using JS. Ive fixed this now thankfully, but i still need to impliment one more thing. I need to make it so that when you click each of my links, there is a function which shows the appropriate table for that specific link. I have tried to do this once before by simply googling the effect i needed, but i only managed to do strange things like unfold a table by clicking ANYWHERE on the links table, which i obviously dont want! Therefore i removed all of the extra code and decided to ask you, the pros!

What is the best way to impliment folding (hiding!) of tables until the user requests a specific table? I do want to hide all tables except the relevant one. I am including my fixed menu code for reference, with a table for an example. Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

http://pastebin.com/m1266827b

137.81.112.176 (talk) 21:22, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Easy way:

1. First, design the tables with everything maximally expanded. What would it looked like it EVERYTHING were visible?

2. Once you have that, go through and make each of those tables rows that you want to be hidden a class that has the line display: none; on them, which will make them invisible. Make sure each row has a unique id (e.g. <tr id="table_row_1">[etc.]</tr>, and so on).

3. Get a function that will show or hide elements based on their id and put it in the script tags at the top of the page.. Here is a simple one:

function showRow(id) {
	var ctl = document.getElementById(id);
	if(ctl.style.display=='none') {
		ctl.style.display='block';
	} else {
		ctl.style.display='none';
	}
}

4. Lastly, make any link that you want to expand a given row look something like this: <a href="#" onclick="showRow('table_row_5'); return false;">Click to expand table row #5</a>.

That should give you the framework for what you want; you may find you need to modify it a bit depending on the circumstances. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:50, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

If you're planning on getting more into learning Javascript, you should do yourself a favor and get a toolkit like Prototype or jQuery, which makes life enormously easier. It will allow things like, instead of numbering rows manually and mixing your Javascript with your HTML, just giving them a class like "toggleable", then in your setup code doing:

$$('tr.toggleable').each(function(el) { el.observe('click', Element.toggle) })

which says "give every table row with class 'toggleable' an on-click action that toggles its visibility". --Sean 02:09, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

What's a good definition of a .NET assembly?

I'm trying to come up with a good definition of an .NET assembly. I don't particularly care for the definition given in our article. So far, I've come up with the following (which I've gleaned from a variety of sources):

A .NET assembly is a reusable, versionable, and self-describing building block of a .NET application a collection of types and resources that forms a logical unit of functionality. It contains code in the form of Intermediate Language (IL) along with metadata about the assembly. An assembly can also contain resources used by the assembly. There are two types of assemblies: executables (EXEs) and dynamic link libraries (DLLs). An EXE is a program which can be run by the user. A DLL is a library which is dynamically linked to an executable at run-time. When an application is run, the IL code is compiled into machine language by the CLR (Common Language Runtime)'s just-in-time compiler. Although it's technically possible to create assemblies that span multiple files, in most situations an assembly is a single file.

12.165.250.13 (talk) 21:51, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

For what my opinion is worth, so far, I prefer the definition in the article. Your current first sentence is super nondescriptive. May I recommend you take this discussion to the Talk page of that article rather than the Reference Desk, which is more like a place for people to ask factual questions? Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:47, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

The official definition from the MSDN seems to be the best summary of what a .NET assembly is. You should stick to this definition and cite it as a source. Nimur (talk) 00:56, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I wanted to change our article. I'm actually answering a series of (potential) interview questions and "What is an assembly?" is the first question. I didn't like any of the definitions that I stumbled across, so I tried to write my own.

What I don't like about the article's definition is that it says "an assembly is a partially compiled code library". What does "partially compiled" mean? Does that mean that only every other line is compiled? Does it mean that some classes are compiled and others aren't? Or maybe it has something to do with partial classes? Of course, I know what it means but that's only because I already know what an assembly is. Someone who is unfamiliar with JIT compiling could easily be confused by this. The other thing I don't like is that it says an assembly is a "library". Are EXEs really considered libraries?

Anyway, here's my second stab at creating a definition:

A .NET assembly is a computer file generated by compiling source code written in a .NET programming language such as C# or Visual Basic .NET. An assembly contains both code and metadata, and can also contain resources such as text and graphics that are used by the assembly. The compiled code is in the form of Intermediate Language (IL) and cannot be executed directly. Instead, when an application is run, the IL code is compiled into machine language by the Common Language Runtime (CLR)'s just-in-time compiler. The metadata describes the assembly itself including its name, version number, classes, methods, and properties. There are two types of assemblies: executables (EXEs) and dynamic link libraries (DLLs). An EXE is a program which can be run by the user. A DLL is a library which is dynamically linked to an executable at run-time. Although it's technically possible to create assemblies that span multiple files, in most situations an assembly is a single file.

12.165.250.13 (talk) 14:44, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Upgrading to 7

My laptop is about three years old, but it has a fresh install of Vista (reformatted and reinstalled in September I think). If I upgrade to Win7, what are the downsides to doing an OS upgrade-type install, as opposed to another clean reformatting and fresh install? I'm not looking forward to another big file transfer project. —Akrabbim^talk 22:24, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, an on top upgrade install takes a long time. I have about 20GB of files on my laptop and upgrading took 5 hours. The good point is that I don't have to reinstall all the programs. A clean install is faster and may be more stable, however, you have to backup and restore your files plus reinstall everything. F (talk) 00:27, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there any impact on performance? —Akrabbim^talk 00:57, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

7's way better than Vista. Vista would randomly freeze for a few seconds. 7 does not have that problem. It feels smoother. F (talk) 02:08, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I know 7 is supposed to be much more efficient than Vista, I am just wondering if there would be a difference between installing over top without reformatting and a clean reinstall. —Akrabbim^talk 03:17, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't use windows but in general I've found it's preferable to do a clean install than an upgrade. If you've been using a system for a while, you've probably made some customizations, that can break assumptions used by the update procedure. Even if the upgrade doesn't fail outright, it can leave things screwed up in subtle ways. And if one reason you're leaning towards upgrading is to avoid copying your user files off your main drive and restoring them, then your backup practices are deficient and you should work on that too, since that drive will eventually crash. Restoring your files for an OS reinstall is a good opportunity to make sure that your backups actually work, and that is something to be welcomed. 69.228.171.150 (talk) 04:28, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Since the old OS in question is just two months old, it shouldn't matter that much. F (talk) 09:29, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

November 6

what is the difference between router, hub and switch

I am a student studing BE CSE... Please help me with the difference between hub,switch and router... I googled it... But couldnt get the point....

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.165.55.113 (talk) 04:47, 6 November 2009 (UTC) 

To be as simple as possible... A hub connects network connections - it is a very dumb device. A switch connects networks, relaying traffic from one to another - it is a semi-intelligent device. A router directs network traffic to where it needs to go - it is a very intelligent device. In the real world, there is pretty much no difference. Most hubs are switches. Most switches are routers. The definition all depends on what marketing was smoking behind the building that day. -- kainaw™ 04:49, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi Kainaw... What is the exact thing you mentioned about semi intelligent and intelligent device... For what specific purposes we use switch and router... Please make it clear about switch and router... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.165.55.113 (talk) 05:04, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Note that what is now called a hub used to be called a repeater. (To my mind at least, "repeater" is a better term because it more accurately describes what the device does. A "hub" was simply a central point where multiple connnections occurred, and could be a repeater, router or switch.) Mitch Ames (talk) 05:33, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Mitch Ames... But could you please let me know about Switches and Routers in a better way.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Atchays (talk • contribs) 05:36, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

• Hub: Connect two or more computers to each other. They all share the bandwith of the device, so if two computers are transferring a lot of data between themseleves, a third computer on that hub, talking to a fourth one would not have much bandwith.
• Switch: Connects two or more computers to each other. Does it better than the hub, and makes sure that computer 1 talking to computer 2 doesn't interfere with computer 3 talking to computer 4.
• Router: Connects one network to another network. For example a router connects a business network to the internet. It "routes" information from one network back to the same network or to any other network it is attached to depending on where the information is addressed to.

To use a postal anology, the hub is a pile of letters from which each user can grab theirs; the switch is a set of piles of letters with each user's letters separate from each others; the router is a post office. --203.202.43.54 (talk) 08:28, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Although (as most posters here have said) there's now not much difference between what switches and routers do and how they do it, historically it was always considered that a switch was a Layer 2 device, and a router Layer 3. --Phil Holmes (talk) 09:40, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes. Nowadays a "switch" is typically a router optimized for high-throughput LAN connections with a lot of subnets. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:18, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Missing math symbols.

When I look at Mathematical alphanumeric symbols all I see is a table of squares. Running Windows Vista and IE8, how can I display the proper symbols? I'm thinking of downloading a symbol pack or something similar. Thanks --The Dark Side (talk) 04:49, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

You'll need to install a font (or multiple fonts) with glyphs for those characters. See here for a good start. Bendono (talk) 05:11, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I downloaded the Symbola font and installed it, but I still can't see the symbols. --The Dark Side (talk) 04:39, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I've have this problem too, and have tried to download fonts to cure it without success. Why isnt it possible to simply have one font that includes everything?? 89.243.191.11 (talk) 19:58, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Why do we need to use DNS while connectiong to internet

Myself trying to establish a internet connection need to enter the DNS provided by the Internet Service Provider. Why do we need to use DNS while connectiong to internet..... Whats the real purpose in it... Why are we using alternate DNS address... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Atchays (talk • contribs) 05:19, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

See my name, at the end of my post? the numbers? That's an IP address. Every computer connected to the internet is identified by an IP address like that. IP addresses are hard to remember, so there are names (like en.wikipedia.org) attached to some IP addresses. You need a way of matching the name to the address, that's what DNS does. Your computer says to a DNS server "what's the IP address for en.wikipedia.org" the DNS server replies with a number, your computer then finds the site by the number. --203.202.43.54 (talk) 08:31, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

....and if you know the IP address, you can connect to the internet withwithout a DNS server, as in http://131.159.46.188. The problem is that IP addresses keep changing, either because there are actually multiple hosts behind the same name (to spread the load), or because IP addresses are reused when a host goes offline (this happens, in particular, with most users connected via DSL). You often have more than one server, because the function is critical to practical use of the net, so if your primary server is down, you have a fallback. Also see Domain Name System. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:00, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

(I believe you mean "... connect to the internet without a DNS server ...".) Simple analogy - a DNS server is a phonebook. You have a name (Stephan Schulz or en.wikipedia.org), and you look up the number (123-867-5309 or 208.80.152.2) which you can then use to dial the recipient. -- 128.104.112.237 (talk) 21:12, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Very good analogy!Accdude92 (talk to me!) (sign) 21:14, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

W7- Graff Digitiser and sound card

Another W7 question... I upgraded my XP desktop to 7 Ultimate. I was forced to install my Graff Digitizer (tape to digital converter) in XP mode. The problem is, it requires my sound card (M100?) to work, and it can't find the card. The card was installed in 7, and the device manger says it works properly. Is there any way to salvage this in 7, or do I have to return to XP? Specs: Athlon X2 6000, 2X1GB DDR2 800, Asus P5K mb, WD 500GB HDD, ASUS EAH 3450 (512)

(Before you ask, Graff does say it can only work on XP.) Mxvxnyxvxn (talk) 06:49, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I've had a driver issue with my vidcam and have to go back to XP to capture from tape. You can try to download a Graff vista driver if there isn't one for win7 yet. Or, use a downloaded driver for your sound card since Graff might have been looking for something specific in the driver software and win7 uses its own drivers. Dual boot to XP anyway for all those things that don't work; it's a normal step in a migration. Sandman30s (talk) 10:23, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Have you considered a Virtual Machine running XP? --Phil Holmes (talk) 14:43, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Windows 7's XP Mode is a virtual machine. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 17:35, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

(Sigh) It isn't worth the trouble... I think I'll just go back to XP. Thanks anyway. Mxvxnyxvxn (talk) 21:56, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I've seen the thing not work even on XP. Take a look at "DTBuild.cfg" -- it looks like it's rather stupidly searching for sound cards by NAME. For example, it wants "M-Audio Delta AP192 1/2", but the card is really named "Delta AP 1/2". Now, I need to find out what serial port settings it uses, and I can make my own digitizer app.

Vista vs. 7

Resolved

On the exact same hardware, which will have a better performance —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.201 (talk) 10:38, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Windows 7. This very same question has been asked previously. Try Ctrl+F on this page... --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 10:58, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Do you have a source for that? It's not that I don't trust you, I'd just like to see some verification of this, like performance charts or bar graphs of the two operating systems' performance. Thanks

Check out these two articles: [4][5]. It seems that while there is ample anecdotal evidence saying that it is significantly faster/smoother, the people that make bar graphs only get marginal improvements over Vista. —Akrabbim^talk 13:02, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Another example: [6], google is your friend in this case :). 192.234.122.9 (talk) 13:08, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you!

What are the differences between interface and valuetype in CORBA IDL?

I used the idlj compiler to compile two similar idl files ( one with interface X and one with valuetype X) and saw that both created XHolder.java and XHelper.java, only the interface created _XStub.java and XOperations.java and only the valuetype created XVauleFactory.java and its implementation XDefaultFactory.java, which included generated references to XImpl.java, which I had to create myself. I've looked at the generated code but I wonder if someone can crystallize into a simple sentence or two what general use/situation each is really meant for. Thanks! 20.137.18.50 (talk) 14:12, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Where did my CD window go?

I have a Windows Vista XP, Italian laptop, and I am currently unable to view or burn CDs as the window doesn't appear when I insert the CD. What should I do about it? I've got loads of photos I need to download to CDs. Thank you.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 16:17, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

If you have XP, press the Windows key and e at the same time. This will bring up My Computer. You can navigate to your CD drive in the left-hand tree view. 12.165.250.13 (talk) 16:27, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

And once there, you can create a shortcut for your desktop if you so wish. Dbfirs 20:19, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there a name for this bug?

I just found this bug in my code at work. I was using a for loop and an iterator, both over the same range, in conjunction, so the for loop would go over sequential values and check if it had reached the iterator. If it had, it got a value from it, and the iterator advanced. Now what had happened is, the for loop had actually been able to move past the iterator, so when it was checking if it had reached it, it never found it had. Is this a common enough bug to have a name for it? JIP | Talk 19:47, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I doubt it -- it is just a control flow problem. This is why with for/next loops, one usually uses >= rather than == as the way to detect when you have hit a given point, though in theory one should not need to do this if it is programmed carefully. In theory, one should be aware at all times of what the possible ranges for a variable value is, though in practice, or with anything that works in parallel, there can be some sloppy slippage. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:01, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Can you show us the relevant parts of your code ? I'd be interested to see it. StuRat (talk) 15:54, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not at all sure about how much I can show without revealing trade secrets, but here is a very basic sketch (C# pseudocode):

DateTime[] allDates = /* ... */;
IEnumerator iterator = /* ... */;
foreach (DateTime date in allDates) {
  DateTime nextDate = iterator.Current./*get next date*/;
  if (date == nextDate) {
    /* get the value */;
    iterator.MoveNext();
  }
}

Now what happened was that it actually became the case that date > nextDate, so date == nextDate was never going to be true, the way I originally wrote it. JIP | Talk 21:28, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, I guess that means that Mr.98's advice to change the == to >= was right on the mark, then. StuRat (talk) 00:03, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually, it wasn't exactly, but the idea was the same. In my real code, "get the value" depended on the date being exactly equal. So I just added a while loop before the if, checking if date was already past nextDate, and if so, then just discarding values until it matched it. JIP | Talk 18:15, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Shutdown Menu

I've been messing around with my computer a lot (Windows XP), and I don't know what I did but the shutdown menu, in which there were three nice looking square buttons (Standby, Shutdown and Restart) have been replaced by a stupid looking drop-down menu with the same options (and Hibernate as an addition) instead. Also, the computer asks me for a password during log-on, and since I don't have one, all I have to do is press enter. But still, I see all this as an unnecessary waste of time, and would be real glad if someone told me how I could revert to my former settings. Your help would be mcuh appreciated. Thanks in advance! 117.194.225.94 (talk) 19:57, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Try this. --LarryMac | Talk 20:50, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks a bunch. That worked beautifully!! 117.194.224.97 (talk) 17:37, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Installing Windows on another computer

I have an old WinXp computer, computer A, that has a certificate of authenticity and a Windows installation disc. I have another better faster computer, computer B, then has neither of these and currently has Windows 2000 on it. I would like to instal Linux on computer A, and instal WinXp on computer B using the certificate of authenticity and the install disc from computer A. Is this going to create any problems please? 92.26.20.84 (talk) 20:38, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I believe that technically, it will work; but your scheme may violate the license agreement for your copy of Windows XP. I believe some OEM copies of Windows are licensed for use only on the computer that the disc was bundled with. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:47, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

It should work, although as said above some Windows are restricted to certain computers, but this usually only applies to the brand name rather than specific model numbers (ie a compaq disk will work on any compaq computer) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.201 (talk) 22:39, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually I've just bought a Dell reinstalation disk for XP as my non-Dell computer did not have one. And it does not have a certificate of authenticity but just a product key. The product key has been verified by Microsoft. In that scenario, would there be any technical problems doing the above? Or simply using the Dell disk if required for repairs, which is why I bought it? And as a hypothetical case, not something I'm going to do, what's to stop me repeating this over a number of computers? Would Microsoft really be able to detect when two different computers with the same product key do their online software updates? 92.29.76.111 (talk) 13:15, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, they would be able to do that. More recent software from MS seems to require that you go online to register your computer/OS combo, so they would know if you had more than one. You might want to call MS, as I think what you are trying to do is actually entirely legal, and they will help you to unregister the first computer and register the new one. If not, then they won't help you, but you don't have to worry about black helicopters either (too much bad PR, apparently :-) ). StuRat (talk) 15:40, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

unLZ-GBA

I tried to add this image to my Pokémon Ruby rom using unLZ-GBA, yet I get this error message:

Error: Image is not Indexed

How do I fix this and add the image to my rom? --75.50.49.24 (talk) 21:11, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Video Either Too Big Or Too Little

I made a video today of a game I was playing. I used Fraps (free version) and took 10 videos of 30 seconds each. Each of these videos was over 100MB big for some reason - meaning that 5 minutes of video was around 1GB. When I used Muvee AutoProducer to put them together and add music (5MB), the finished version ended up as 148MB. Somehow, these numbers don't add up. Can anyone explain to me what has happened? --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 21:31, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

It has to do with the compression and formatting of the video itself. Different video formats give drastically different results. I don't know about the software programs you mentioned, but it is common for screen capture apps to use formats that are uncompressed or very lightly compressed (like Animation codec), which are huge files. When you convert them into another codec, like MP4, you will get huge savings in file size (albeit with some loss in quality if the codec is lossy). --Mr.98 (talk) 21:37, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Right, but Fraps outputted in .avi, and I chose .avi as the output option in MAP, too. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 23:55, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

AVI is just a container format, it doesn't tell you what the codec is. Different AVI files can have different codecs (like MP4, DivX, etc.). The codec and its settings are going to determine the file size, not the container. To find out what the codec is, you should be able to open it in your video-watching program (like Windows Media Player) and find out what the differences between the files are. (I don't know WMP, but in Quicktime, there is a "Movie Inspector" that tells you the info.) --Mr.98 (talk) 00:29, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Need help overlaying an image

Hello. I'm an admin here on teh Wiki, but when it comes to image manipulation, I am strictly bush-league. Farm league. Possibly tee-ball. Anyway, would anyone be willing to help me out with this? I tried downloading Gimp but I think I'm past the sweet spot age for understanding this stuff. I could email you the photos with a description of what I need. Should be really easy for anyone familiar with gimp or photoshop. Tan | 39 22:57, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I can help. Just post what you'd like and I'll get on it. In the future, you can ask the WP:Graphics lab -- penubag  (talk) 00:33, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Cell phone question

Is it possible on Verizon Wireless to block numbers so that they can't call you? If it helps, I have a Samsung Gleam (SCH-u700). Nick4404 yada yada yada What have I done? 23:11, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes! Verizon Wireless offers the ability to block up to five designated numbers from calling you. For more information, please visit link. There are certain limitations to this service. I recommend that you read the page above in its entirety. If it does not solve your problem, please feel free to comment below. Sincerely,

Kushal (talk) 00:14, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Named nested references

Resolved

I have a problem with nested references/notes to which I would like to assign a name in order to reuse them. Any help appreciated. bamse (talk) 23:59, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

For those who are confused by this Q, like I was, it appears to be about wiki markup. StuRat (talk) 15:32, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Never mind, I found my mistake (forgotten "group=..."). Sorry for the confusion.bamse (talk) 16:14, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

November 7

Collapsing JPGs into a video

Resolved

Hello! I have a lot of JPG files of screenshots that I want to compress into a single video file. The screenshot program saves the screen image about every second to a JPEG (not ideal, I know). I would like to create the video file by specifying about a .2 second delay in-between images to get an animation. Is there any free and open source software out there that will let me do this? And is there a video format that will take up less space by eliminating all the redundant information in the jpegs (since the screen hardly changes every second)? Thank you!--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 05:19, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

If you have Linux, you can do something like [7] (or you can get mplayer on Windows, dunno how easy that is though). --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:48, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, antilived. Actually, after I posted this question, I realized Windows movie maker does this fairly well.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 05:58, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

This often seems like so much 'black-art' - but understanding what's going on 'under the hood' is very instructive in this case:

Most video codecs compress data by comparing two consecutive frames and storing only the differences between the two. For still images - there are no differences. Hence, at first sight, it shouldn't make MUCH difference to the final size of the file whether you record at one frame every two seconds or 60 frames a second because the differences will be zero for almost all of the frames.

However, there is a little 'gotcha' which is what's going to dominate the size of your resulting files. Most formats store things called 'i-frames' at some interval. i-frames are simple, complete video frames with no difference coding. By default, they store them perhaps one per second or so - but with decent software, you can control this interval. They do this to allow you to jump in at the middle of the video without having to start at the first frame and add up all of the differences up to that point. So the video file contains a series of i-frames (maybe one per second) - each followed by a bunch of 'difference' frames (called: p-frames and b-frames for reasons too complicated to explain here).

So what you need to do is to make sure that you aren't generating i-frames at greater than the update rate of your images and ideally, you'd want to make the i-frame timing come at precisely the update rate of your images so all of your p- and b-frames are empty. If you get that right, it won't matter much what frame rate you pick because each frame will just say "no changes from the previous frame" - which is a minimal amount of information. You can read more about this in Video compression picture types. Good video compression software gives you control of the rate of i-frames - check out (for example) mplayer and mencoder.

SteveBaker (talk) 16:16, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much, SteveBaker! That really clears up a lot of the doubts I had about how to compress out all the old frame data. I will have a look at the software you mention.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 19:37, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

A theoretically better way, which may or may not work in practice, is to use variable-length frames. That is, instead of encoding 10 identical frames in a row at 5 fps, just encode one frame and tell the player to display it for 2 seconds. AVI doesn't support variable-length frames, but Matroska does. Matroska isn't supported by nearly as many players as AVI, and I don't know how many Matroska-producing tools will let you produce variable-length frames, but if you can get it to work you will get a smaller file and playback will be easier on the CPU. -- BenRG (talk) 23:31, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

BSOD

Does Microsoft refer to the Blue Screen of Death by that name? jc iindyysgvxc (my contributions) 09:17, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

[8][9]F (talk) 09:26, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Looks like it is only the occasional "tech column" and tech support that mentions it as such. Doesn't look like they officially use it in any of their official literature. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:52, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

The official terms are "blue screen", "bug check screen" and "stop screen" according to this page. I doubt you'll find "BSOD" in official Microsoft documentation. "Blue screen" by itself is somewhat ambiguous because NT uses the same blue screen for startup messages, though as of XP it doesn't look much like the bug-check blue screen any more. -- BenRG (talk) 13:28, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Javascript and windows handles?

This is a very strange question, but can javascript be written to retrieve the "Handle" to a users desktop? (mine is currently "65842" in decimal).

Also can it detect the Operating system and only output the result to the web page if the user has Vista Premium or Vista Ultimate? Thanks!

137.81.112.176 (talk) 10:28, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Javascript can't manipulate anything outside of the browser scope. That would include the desktop.

It can, however, detect the OS — here is some code. However I'm not sure it can detect the difference between Premium or Ultimate specifically if you want that... looking at my own server logs, all Vistas look pretty similar, but there are a lot of numbers involved (e.g. here is one Vista machine: MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618), so maybe one of them indicates Premium v. Ultimate. Hmm. Note that crafting your page to be compatible with only one browser is pretty bad design, and if it is because of incompatibilities, indicates fundamental problems in the coding (reliance on proprietary functions, etc.). Once you've detected Vista (look for that "Windows NT 6.0" string), you could easily have an operator at the top that either redirected the page somewhere else or refused to output the rest of the page. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:49, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay let me fill you in a little. I am doing something that can only be done in Vista premium or MAYBE ultimate, it is simply that what i am getting a user to do CANT be done at all in any other OS, so its not really some mainstream website for all to see. Also, if JS cant detect the desktop handle due to scope, is there anything i can attach to the site to do so besides making the user download something? :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.81.112.176 (talk) 13:12, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

As for Vista, well, OK, I guess, though I do wonder what it is you are trying to do that is apparently dependent on only one or two flavors of a single OS. As for accessing the filesystem, you can't do it with Javascript (with the one exception being that you can have users upload files through form submission, but that's it). There are other options—like Java applets—that can do more than that (with the approval of the user). Javascript is inherently limited to browser scope, though, for security purposes (imagine the mayhem if every page out there could access your hard drive contents). --Mr.98 (talk) 13:37, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I think my anser, then, lies in making an "AutoIt v3" script, which does handles and could be downloaded by a user in exe format. thanks!

137.81.112.176 (talk) 01:12, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Resolved

Game For ZX Spectrum

Does anyone remember the name of a game for the ZX Spectrum where the player takes command of a robot shaped like a ball with three legs, walking around a map of a town and shooting bouncing bombs at flies? I think it begins with 'A'. Cheers! --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 12:56, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

If you don't mind the robot having four legs, there's Amaurote. 88.112.58.122 (talk) 14:20, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Excellent! That's the one! --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 14:45, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Windows 7

Just like to say thanks to all here for the recent help with my Windows 7 questions. I've installed it and it's working great, so much better than Vista (so far anyway... hoping there won't be any big problems >_>) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 14:08, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Glad to hear it. Keep us posted, I'm sure that those of us considering getting Windows 7 would love to hear about any warnings or problems, before we make the plunge. StuRat (talk) 23:58, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Microwave oven that blows my circuit breaker

It works fine most of the time, but every few months it causes the circuit breaker to pop, sometimes only when the door is opened (which turns on the light). I don't want to toss out the microwave oven because of this, but it is rather annoying to go down in the basement with a flashlight searching for the fusebox. Is there any fix for this ? If nothing else, I suppose a surge protector with a low amperage circuit breaker would work here. Then, every time it pops, I could just reset it right there. Do they sell something that looks like an outlet strip, and has a circuit breaker, but lacks surge protection ? If so, maybe that would be cheaper. StuRat (talk) 14:16, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

It certainly sounds like your microwave is faulty. That makes it potentially dangerous. You need to either replace it or get a professional to fix it. --Tango (talk) 20:23, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

What danger is there other than it overloading the house wiring ? That danger can be addressed simply by adding a power strip with a circuit breaker, right ? StuRat (talk) 23:56, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

What exactly is being triggered though? Is it the circuit breaker or the RCD? --antilived^{T | C | G} 00:03, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

It is a circuit breaker, in the fuse box in the basement. StuRat (talk) 00:06, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

This may indicate a fault with the switches that detect if the door is open. These switches are intended to prevent the oven operating with the door open (and thus irradiating the user). One microwave oven that I owned (a National) was wired such that when you pressed the handle to open the door, that handle activated a switch to disconnect the microwave generator, as well as sending a signal to the electronic controller. But the door also had two independent mechanical switches that would close when the door was opened. One of these switches applied a direct short circuit across the microwave generator, so that if the door was open and the handle had failed to stop the microwave generator, the short circuit would prevent the generator from working - and trip the circuit breaker. I have been told that this is not uncommon practice for such applications. The reason being that it is more reliable to short out the "dangerous" item, which will cause any of several fuse or circuit breakers to blow, than to disconnect the circuit. (Personally, I'm not commenting on whether this is a good idea or not, but my oven certainly was wired that way.) Thus if your circuit breaker keeps tripping, it might indicate a fault in the power supply to the microwave generator. Mitch Ames (talk) 00:54, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Here's some links describing this concept, found by a Google search for microwave oven door switch short circuit: Description with circuit diagram, Patent (the first of several found by the search). Mitch Ames (talk) 01:03, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, that's quite informative. StuRat (talk) 15:50, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Microwaves can be dangerous, so you should really replace it. Here's a video of a science program where the presenter "builds a microwave death ray to prove the existence of invisible and untapped energy". --h2g2bob (talk) 01:59, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

But my microwave oven is dangerous how, exactly ? Is it going to generate microwaves with the door open ? Is it going to catch fire ? What's the safety concern ? StuRat (talk) 15:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

The fire part is what you need to be worried about. Tan | 39 15:48, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

But if the circuit breaker pops whenever there's a short circuit, won't that prevent a fire ? StuRat (talk) 15:50, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

You need to be worried about why the breaker is tripping. You have one of three problems: an overloaded circuit, a short circuit, or a ground fault. If I had to guess, you have a short circuit caused by some loose or miswired circuits with the microwave door. So now, in effect, you are trusting your circuit breaker to kill that short - and possibly prevent a fire. If I were you, I wouldn't trust my kitchen and house to a circuit breaker; I'd have it fixed or replace the entire unit. Tan | 39 16:01, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it seems to be a somewhat intentional short circuit, according to the info Mitch Ames provided above. StuRat (talk) 16:36, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

TCP/IP not enabled

Whenever I try to repair the connection labelled as 1394 connection under "LAN or high speed internet" in Network Connections, I get the error message "Windows could not finish repairing becuase TCP/IP is not enabled" But when I got to that connections properties, I can see that it is enabled. Is there any way to fix this problem? (I use Windows XP.)Thanks in advance. 117.194.224.97 (talk) 17:36, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

IEEE 1394 is more commonly associated with connections to video cameras. It is unusual to use it as an interface for TCP/IP networking (though it can be done). Astronaut (talk) 00:29, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Game for Commodore 64?

Relating to the question about a game for the ZX Spectrum above, I have to ask this question here. I played a Commodore 64 game at my cousin's place in the early 1980s. The only recollection I have of it is that it was made in the early 1980s, it came on a cassette tape, it was a platformer-style arcade game, and at some point it had a merry-go-round or something. It was not a game for infants but instead a standard, full-blown game for schoolchildren and teenagers. I think it may have had something to do with Pac-Man but I don't trust this memory, I might have it confused with some other game. This description isn't of much help, but my memory is very vague, because I only ever played it once, and this was over two decades ago. My cousin wouldn't remember it if I asked him, that's for sure. JIP | Talk 21:41, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

There are websites that are about C64 games, including some that have been re-made to run on Windows, so I suggest Googling for something like "commodore 64 games" and see if any of the sites that come up mention your game. 78.147.8.170 (talk) 13:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

How to help a nincompoop?

An acquaintance sent me mail to ask if I could help him with a computer problem, and I said sure, because it was a very simple problem. But it turned into a nightmare; he never does what I tell him, and comes up with the weirdest alternatives instead. He has this half knowledge that is dangerous enough to wreak havoc, but he has problems understanding even what a link is. My dilemma is: I want to get out of this, because even if I help him this time, I'm sure he'll come up with more such requests later. But I do not want to offend him, and I can not just turn my back on him because I see him on other occasions. How to get out of this? I thought of pointing him here, but that probably wouldn't be fair to the rest of you. Compu732 (talk) 22:06, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I have one of these - you may want to get one! --Tango (talk) 22:14, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

That's a good idea - it's certainly a notch more polite than "Go away or I'll replace you with a shell script". But the thing is, I do enjoy helping other people - just not this particular one. Compu732 (talk) 22:22, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

That's a very good idea. Whenever I talk to strangers and mention that I work as a computer programmer, they immediately ask if I can fix their Internet connection or peripherals for them. Internet connections and peripherals aren't even my speciality - my education and work experience is very near to 100% software. I've only ever had to deal with hardware when upgrading my own computer. JIP | Talk 19:10, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Shrug and say "I really don't know, maybe you need to ask someone else". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 22:26, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I hate the idea of him telling everyone else "he didn't even know that". But you may be right, it's usually a good idea to give up one's foolish pride. Compu732 (talk) 22:30, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I second the idea of claiming to be at the end of your own knowledge, or your own abilities, and recommend he take it to, say, BestBuy or whatever. It's not actually any skin off of your back, and it'll save you time. The sooner he decides to start going elsewhere for computer help, the better you'll be. --Mr.98 (talk) 03:39, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Tell him that you have to use VNC to help him in the future for the sake of precision and that diagnosing and fixing problems via a game of Telephone is inefficient and actually dangerous. Tempshill (talk) 07:00, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Why not just politely tell him what you have told us. Do not call him a nincompoop though. 78.147.8.170 (talk) 13:48, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

So what would you call him? Compu732 (talk) 05:58, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

http://www.xkcd.com/627/ SteveBaker (talk) 21:48, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

That's hilarious! Even my gf loved it. Compu732 (talk) 05:58, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

November 8

Show Desktop

On my sister's PC (running Win XP) the "Show Desktop" icon got dragged off the quick start toolbar and onto the desktop. If I try to drag it back onto the quick start menu, I just get a shortcut to something that doesn't work. Is there an easy way to get that icon back on the toolbar so it works as it did at installation? Astronaut (talk) 00:40, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

If you want a quick alternative, pressing Windows+D shows the desktop. If you can open the quick start folder (possibly there's on option if you right-click on quick start menu?) then you should be able to copy-and-paste the actual shown desktop icon back into the folder. Dragging the icon to the quick start menu while holding one of the modifier keys (Shift? Ctrl?) might also copy the actual icon rather than a link. --h2g2bob (talk) 01:50, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

The quick start folder is normally (replace my user name with tour own)

C:\Users\Andreas Rejbrand\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

--Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 02:01, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

• If you still have an icon that you can drag, then hold the Shift key down while dragging it back to the Quick Launch area. Holding the Shift key while dragging forces a move operation.
• If you no longer have a Show Desktop icon, you can recreate it using Notepad: How to re-create the Show desktop icon on the Quick Launch toolbar in Windows XP Note: The steps on that page tell you to simply drag the icon back to the Quick Launch area, but you will probably need to hold the Shift key while dragging. --Bavi H (talk) 02:42, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

About Group Policy Client service...

I can't log on because of an error, and it shows a message: "Group policy client service failed the logon. Access is denied." I'm using Windows Vista. What should I do ??? Thanks for all of your help. 117.4.141.61 (talk) 01:20, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Are you at home or at office?F (talk) 07:30, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm using Windows Vista Ultimate at home.

Algorithm request

Levenshtein distance gives the distance between two strings. Assume you have one string that is a few thousand characters long. Another string is, say, 10 characters long. The Levenshtein distance you calculate between the two strings is rather high, indicating that the short string is, for the most part, contained somewhere in the long string - but not letter-for-letter. What algorithm is the most efficient for getting the smallest substring from the long string with the minimum Levenshtein distance to the short string? Further example: Imagine that this question, up to this point HERE is the long string. Your short string is "maintainer". You, obviously, want to locate "contained" or maybe just "ntaine" or something around that point in the long string that matches up with the short string. -- kainaw™ 02:48, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I would think that you must iterate the Levenshtein algorithm over the original short-string, and then all successive short-er strings. Note that there is a tradeoff between minimum-distance and largest-possible-short-string. So, you must include some kind of weighting in your objective to account for this. Iterating the distance-search would seem to involve a lot of redundand calculation - you're iterating a sequence of nearly-identical Levenshtein applications with "similar" short-strings. (I'm guessing this redundancy exists based on intuitive reasoning - but I'm not any good at proving it). I would focus my literature search on "iterated Levenshtein" or something along that line of thought. Nimur (talk) 04:13, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

No need to check the literature! If we roll up our sleeves and dig in, we can probably find a solution ourselves! There's two approaches that come to my mind instantly: first of all, you can brute force that son-of-a-bitch: test the Levenshtein distance for each 10 character substring in the longer string. If the short string is a characters, the long string is b characters, that would be O(a^2) for each edit distance test, which you perform O(b) times, for a computational complexity of O(a^2*b) (assuming b is quite a bit larger than a). I assume you already thought of this plan and dismissed it, as it is quite obvious. Though, lets face it, modern computers are quite fast, your strings are quite short (1000 characters ain't a whole lot) and it's easy to program, so you might just want to go with it.

The second idea is to do a sort-of binary search divide-and-conquer thing: divide the longer string into two strings 500 characters long and find the Levenshtein distance on each half. By comparing the results, you can now make an educated guess in which half the string is. Now you recurse. Take the correct half of the string, divide it into two 250 character pieces and check those two, and so on. When the string is sufficiently small (<30 or so), brute-force to find the right solution.

This is a tricky algorithm to implement: your code needs to be able to interpret the Levenshtein distance by itself, always picking the right half. It also needs to be able to handle if the string "crosses the gap" between the two halves, i.e. it's located at positions 495-505. This can be solved by cleverly dividing the longer strings up (instead of the first half being characters 0-500 and the second 500-1000, it can be 0-510 and 490-100). But if you use this technique and the string does in fact cross the gap, the string will appear in BOTH substrings, so tailor your algorithm to recognize when this happens.

As I said, this is tricky to implement, but it is very fast. Lets make a quick back-of-the-envelope complexity calculation. First, it makes two O(ab/2) (a is the length of the shorter string, b is the length of the longer string) calculations of the Levenshtein distance of the first two halves. Then it recurses, and makes two O(ab/4) tests, then two O(ab/8) tests, and so on and so forth. That is, it's complexity is:

$O\left({\frac {2ab}{2}}+{\frac {2ab}{4}}+{\frac {2ab}{8}}+{\frac {2ab}{16}}+{\frac {2ab}{32}}+\cdots \right)$

which is equal to

$O\left(2ab\left({\frac {1}{2}}+{\frac {1}{4}}+{\frac {1}{8}}+{\frac {1}{16}}+{\frac {1}{32}}+\cdots \right)\right)=O(2ab)=O(ab)$

(the sum there converges trivially to 1, obviously). So there you go, the same computational complexity as just making a standard Levenshtein distance search! Ain't divide-and-conquer grand :)

(I should say that this was incredibly back of the envelope, it's entirely possible I made some elemental error in underestimating the complexity. Please forgive me if that is the case) Belisarius (talk) 13:13, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes - your error is if the maximal match (minimum distance) occurs in a string which overlaps the subdivision boundaries. The method you described does not appear to handle the case that you split across the best-fit substring - in which case, neither half-string will match very well. I am pretty sure this will trip up your method... I'm no expert though. I'm not certain your redundant-inclusion of the boundary conditions is totally effective. Nimur (talk) 23:37, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Windows 7 standby mode

Resolved

last night something terrible happened, I went to bed and when I came back to my Windows 7 computer it was in some sort of standby mode. It only took a move of the mouse to bring it back, but this MUST NOT happen again. I've looked for the settings but I can't find them. How do I stop it from going into stand by again? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 05:32, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there a reason that Standby mode devastated you so? Go to the Power Options control panel, where you can customize how much time elapses before the computer enters Standby mode or Hibernate mode. You can also turn this feature off. By the way, it's also possible that the computer simply turned the monitor off and was still running at full speed; this, too, is configurable from Power Options. Tempshill (talk) 06:56, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

It was supposed to be downloading from web and I lost 10 hours of data which I can never get back, and it was completely off not even a buzzing sound just dead until I moved the mouse and this MUST NOT happen again. Thank you for the advice, I will try it but I am concerned that the computer will still enter some sort of low power mode if left without user input for a long time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 08:47, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

If you set it to never go to sleep or hibernate in the power management options, it never will. Don't worry, it works fine. See here for guide. Belisarius (talk) 13:50, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I must admit I'm surprised, I'd have though a download program would have kept windows alive. It isn't the sort of thing I do but it sounds like this sort of thing would be a fairly common requirement. Disabling standby is the appropriate approach if one is really desperate but I wouldn't want to have a million people all using up a power station unnecessarily doing it. Dmcq (talk) 14:23, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree. May I enquire as to what web browser (or download manager) you use? --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 23:13, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks everyone, I did the suggestions and it worked

Booting Linux ISO Inside Virtual Box On Ubuntu

Is it possible to get VirtualBox to boot another OS from USB? The only options I can find are 'Boot from CD/DVD' and 'Floppy', but I have a USB-bootable distro of Slax that I wanted to try out without switching the machine off. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 09:22, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Virtualbox does not support booting from usb. There are several workarounds you could try though, for example creating a .vdh image from your usb drive using WinImage and attaching it to virtualbox as a hard drive. Or you could try attaching the usb drive as a physical disk, see here for how. —Preceding unsigned comment added by .isika (talk • contribs) 12:29, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Portable Apps & USB lifespan...

I know that USB flash memory has a limited lifespan based on the number of writes to the hardware. I also know that I have recently completely fallen in love with portable apps. Compared to my previous usage patterns, running XAMPP & Firefox (among other things) off a 4G USB stick is resulting in several orders of magnitude more read/writes per hour. What kind of impact can I reasonably expect this to have on the lifetime of my device? Are there any hard numbers out there? I backup the entire stick daily, so a hardware failure would cost me some cash but no productivity. Just curious about the impacts of such aggressive usage of flash memory on hardware service life... Thanks! 61.189.63.142 (talk) 09:33, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I've had several flash drives fail on me. I use them to move video from one computer to another. The main problem seems to be that there's an "index area" which is written to every time any write is made anywhere on the USB drive. Therefore, this index area fails first and then the drive is hosed. I hope they find a way to fix this poor architecture to make them last longer. Perhaps they could use some other type of memory for this index area, which won't fail so quickly. Another option might be to have a movable index area so that this wear occurs move evenly.

One hint, buy the smallest size that will work for your case, even if you need multiple USB drives. A single 64 Gb Flash drive won't last as long as eight 8 Gb flash drives will. StuRat (talk) 14:02, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm actually a bit surprised there because I was under the understanding that USB flash drives contained Wear levelling hardware to make sure that even if you write to the same "physical" point on the disk (if it was magnetic media) it would be actually be distributed across the entire flash memory. ZX81 ^talk 16:05, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps they do for the data area. In my experience it always seems to be the boot sector that fails, though. StuRat (talk) 00:16, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Wear leveling applies to all sectors equally. (It wouldn't be very useful if it didn't apply to the frequently overwritten metadata sectors.) USB flash drives present a hard-drive-like interface to the computer they're plugged in to, which means it's up to the USB drive to do wear leveling. I don't know what fraction of USB drives actually do it. It's annoyingly hard to find information on this subject. However I think that most/all of them do. When you say the boot sector fails, what do you mean by that? What's the actual failure you're observing? -- BenRG (talk) 02:07, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

The data contained in the boot sector randomly changes. That is, we look at it once, then look at it again, and it's now different. I've also had them just give a read error. StuRat (talk) 13:29, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Buy a pocket external usb hard drive —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 11:10, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there really a portable USB hard disk drive that can fit in a pocket ? StuRat (talk) 15:37, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, loads of them. Here's one

Ultimately I guess that depends how big your pockets are, but I can personally easily fit a 2.5" USB disk in my pockets and I've just tried a 3.5" disk and that fits as well (although it's not exactly comfortable and 3.5" disk would need a power supply as well). ZX81 ^talk 16:05, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

"Is that a hard drive in your pocket or..." :-) StuRat (talk) 00:14, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

How Linux could win in desktop OS war ?

We have to accept that Windows / OSX has very good UI, and more than 90% of people are used to this. Gnome and KDE really sucks when compared to this. So, it is just kernel needs some fix. This fix could be Linux kernel. I have read that windows kernel is closely coupled with it's UI. Still, how difficult it is to replace only windows kernel with linux kernel, or with other kernels like opensolaris, plan9, etc. ? Would this heart / brain transplant operation be worth doing ? Is it legal ? --V4vijayakumar (talk) 12:40, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, for one the Ubuntu Gnome and KDE Desktops, e.g., are certainly good enough - they don't "really suck". They are different from Windows, but most intermediate and inexperienced users have no trouble adapting. Mac OS X already is a slick GUI on top of a UNIX Kernel (well, actually, a FreeBSD personality running on top of a Mach microkernel). It would probably be possible to retrofit Linux, but it also would be somewhat pointless. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:02, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I could well envision that there are people for whom "different from Windows" means "really sucks". JIP | Talk 16:07, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

The reason for Microsoft's dominance is not strictly technical. There is a lot more that goes into why people use Windows and not, say, Linux, than the kernel. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:34, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

The problem I have with Linux has to do with drivers. Windows pretty much automatically works with most printers, speakers, etc., while Linux does not, making me have to search for and install a driver to run those items. StuRat (talk) 13:58, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Have you tried a recent version? Support for older stuff often is better than with Windows. Support for very new hardware may or may not be there, but it is a lot better now than it was a few years ago. Printers, drives, network and WiFi usually work straight out of the box - in fact, most things with published specifications work well. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:12, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

No, I use Skinny Puppy 4.00, and don't want to change to a newer Linux, as it now has all the apps I want on it and I don't want to start over from scratch. StuRat (talk) 14:21, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Dare I suggest, StuRat, that if you never update your OS (cough cough Windows 98), you sort of lose the right to complain about whether it has updated features! --Mr.98 (talk) 14:46, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't consider being able to plug in a new pair of speakers and have them work to be an "upgraded feature". I see no good reason why the interface to speakers needs to change such that old computers can no longer use new speakers. The same is true of printers (although there I could understand that very old computers that were only capable of sending ASCII text to a printer wouldn't be able to send fancy graphics to a new printer, but they should still be able to send text to a new printer). I'm of the opinion that the reason new hardware doesn't work with old versions of Windows isn't because it's technically difficult to do, but because of Microsoft using a strategy of planned obsolescence. So, why do we accept this with computers ? Would you buy a TV that was designed to stop working after a few years ? Of course not (analog TVs can still be used with digital signals via a converter box, like the one I'm watching now). So then, why is it acceptable to do so with computers ? I say that it's not, being bad for the environment to consider computers to be disposable. StuRat (talk) 15:39, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Hardware changes, and expecting all manufacturers to be infinitely compatible with decade-old operating systems is kind of silly. Where does it stop? Should they make everything Windows 3.1 compatible? DOS too? How about making sure things are compatible for C64 users? Obviously there is going to be a tradeoff between what is worth time to upgrade and what isn't. You can take your stance, but really, if you don't upgrade periodically, don't be surprised that things stop working, or that manufacturers don't cater to you. Spending time to make things backwards compatible costs money and time—money and time that is either taken away from improvements, or increases the cost to the consumer. Personally, I'm fine with upgrading every couple of years—I usually get more for my dollar each time. Should your preference for slow and out of date things increase my future costs or impact my desire for improved goods over time? --Mr.98 (talk) 16:09, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps they could sell "disposable" computers that are designed to stop working after a stated period of time, and also sell "non-disposable" computers for people like me. I would expect the disposables to each cost less, but for the total price to be higher using disposables in the long run. My problem with the current practice is that they never state that the computers are designed to only work for a few years and then die, even though they are designed to do just that (and/or the operating system on them is). That's false advertising. For the disposables, they could even lease them, and hopefully pass them on to the poor or third world nations when they are returned at the end of the lease period, where they could still be used for many years with old software and hardware, just not for the latest games. StuRat (talk) 16:44, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

(ec) If you can invent a fan-motor with a MTBF of thirty years; or a hard-disk drive with a statistically insignificant failure-rate; or a thermal-failure-proof CPU, motherboard, and chipset, you can build a computer that lasts forever. Your claim that planned obsolence is a conspiracy to make you buy more things is a bit of a slant - a better way to phrase it is that planned obsolence is the best effort engineering control over the inherent mechanical failures that are known to occur. While it is true that some companies use planned obsolence as a business strategy, it is really making the best of a bad situation (that physical hardware does actually wear out). Nimur (talk) 16:50, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Just because the components of a system are disposable doesn't mean the entire system must be. By use of redundancy and easy to replace parts, the system can continue to be usable even after many of the parts have failed. In the case of a computer, every component can be made to be replaceable except the hard drive, since that contains valuable data. For the hard drive, some redundancy is in order, like a 2nd hard drive with a backup of all your data. StuRat (talk) 17:02, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

As for the discussion of planned obsolescence in general, there are some companies that are quite blatant about it. The worst one I've seen is a toothbrush with bristles designed to slowly dissolve. They claim that this is "to remind you when it's time to toss out that old germy toothbrush", but obviously a toothbrush could be sterilized by boiling or dipping in bleach, so it's quite apparent they just want to force you to buy a new one every few weeks to increase their profits. I'd also be concerned about the effect of ingesting all those dissolved bristles. StuRat (talk) 17:09, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, per usual, your analysis of things is formed by a few incorrectly understood facts and a lot of supposition. Where are these "dissolving toothbrushes" you speak of? Can you find a link to any of them? Even the ones that do have indicators as to wear (which dentists support, not so much because they are "germy", but because the bristles become frayed and ineffective) do not require you replace them "every few weeks", but rather every three-to-four months. The ADA supports this; there are apparently even scientific studies on this front. Anyway, I find it odd that you're find with replacing fans, RAM, hard drives, and all of the other things that can go wrong with a computer, but not the operating system, that thing that actually makes all of the other things work correctly, that thing whose security problems mean a compromised system, that thing which, especially in older versions (cough cough, Windows 98) are known to have major, significant flaws in even their basic operations. Hey, it's your computer—I really don't care if you don't replace it. But don't be surprised when things aren't up-to-date when you don't update them. As for your earlier question about the television—yes, in fact, my old TV did die after about 7 years. I thought that was a pretty good run for it, to be specific, and for even less money that I had spent before, I got a new, much improved television (wide screen, flat screen, etc.). Planned obsolescence, or just about what a complicated device of tubes and heat ends up with after half a dozen years? No clue, but frankly, I'm glad that they work on making new ones better and cheaper, because in the long term, I have a better TV for it. Maybe you've saved a bit more money, but you've still got the old clunker television, too. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:41, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Now find me an environmental group that supports disposable toothbrushes, computers, etc. A disposable society is ultimately unsustainable, and we are starting to see some of the results from that, due to global warming from manufacturing all the unnecessary items, to pollution from both their production and disposal, to higher prices for petroleum and raw materials as the readily accessible raw materials begin to be used up (actually ending up in landfills in forms that aren't easy to reclaim).

As for upgrading the O/S, you seem to have bought the MS line that every O/S is somehow an improvement over the last. They are not. There is often very little new functionality, but quite a bit that is just different for no apparent reason. For example, at one point they renamed the File Manager to Windows Explorer. What new functionality did this rename provide ? It just caused confusion for those familiar with the old name. And when they do provide new functionality, it's frequently unnecessary. For example, older versions of Word required that you press a button to do a spell-check, while newer versions will spell-check and even try to correct errors automatically. Unfortunately, the corrections are frequently wrong, so this isn't really an advantage, is it ? There are also large quantities of functionality that are lost with each new version, but you never see that advertised, do you ?

To look at hardware for a moment; a floppy disk could be inserted, read, written to, write-protected, or removed whenever the user wanted, in any floppy drive, while a CD or DVD requires extra software to get it to behave properly, needs to be compatible with the type of drive, and you still often get a "Can't eject, disk is in use" error, even when it's not in use. Now certainly CDs and DVDs have far more capacity than floppy disks, but that doesn't mean I gladly accept all the limitations the "new technology" imposes. USB flash drives restore some of the lost functionality, but not all. The "write-protect switch", for example, is hard to find on USB flash drives. If I were to upgrade my computer's O/S (which would also mean replacing the computer), I know that half of my stuff would no longer work. Therefore I want to only upgrade when the benefits outweigh the costs, which is rare, IMHO. StuRat (talk) 20:36, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Yep agree with those above. The user interface is not the problem as far as I'm concerned, in fact I prefer some linux interfaces. The problem is that there's some programs I want to run for which there are only windows versions whereas windows versions of the ones on Linux are fairly easy to get. I find development much easier on linux for instance. The problem is reducing now so I may switch to using linux as my main platform soon. Dmcq (talk) 14:14, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

In the meantime, I suggest a dual boot system, which is what I use. StuRat (talk) 16:57, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

It could be that linux/gnome replaces symbian. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 21:44, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Google Chrome OS could be the thing the popularises the Linux desktop, with a large company behind it.F (talk) 01:01, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

How to get a free webpage?

I would like to put some information on a webpage. I do not want to pay for it or have to bother with it. I imagine it would get a fair number of people looking at it, although it could just stay undiscovered for a long time. How can I best get a free webpage that I can put information on, update at intervals of weeks or months, and that otherwise does not require any time from me? 78.147.8.170 (talk) 13:41, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Depending on what you want to use it for, you can possibly just register here and use your free home page for that. Of course, this is not a good idea if you have a huge amount of data or want to use it in ways that are incompatible with Wikipedia. However, if you just want to list your background and maybe a pic of yourself, Wikipedia would be just fine with that. StuRat (talk) 13:54, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

That would be inappropriate as the information would have nothing to do with Wikipedia. I thought there used to be lots of free websites available, but I have an impression that those kinds of websites have been closing down. Unfortunately I cannot remember what any of them were called. Geosomething masy have been one of them. 78.147.8.170 (talk) 14:11, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Geocities, which is now gone. I recommend starting up a free account at Wordpress.com, posting your info there. They host blogs but there's no reason you couldn't just put your data there and leave it there. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

An internal Wikipedia link at the base of the Geocities article links to some more free websites, which still seem to be going. 89.243.191.11 (talk) 20:08, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

This might be of interest. --Rixxin (talk) 14:03, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

"Mouse wiggler"

I have a problem with Flash animations on Firefox, that they sometimes get into a state where they won't update the screen unless I move the mouse. Is there some software that could virtually wiggle the mouse, say by moving it 5 pixels to the right, then 5 pixels back to the left, repeatedly ? StuRat (talk) 14:13, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Such a software would be very easy to write. If you want, I can make one for you. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 14:15, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that would be great. I'm on Windows 98, so I hope that's not an issue. Also, I do still want to be able to use the mouse normally. Perhaps it could start to wiggle if I leave it still for 10 seconds and stop when I move it myself. StuRat (talk) 14:27, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like some old Heath Robinson test hardware which just had a photosensor and a magnet pulling down a prodder, and actually used a complete microcomputer to link the two so whenever the output said 'next page' it thumped the send button. You too could make some hardware to wiggle your mouse around. No input or microcomputer necessary. Dmcq (talk) 14:35, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I had considered that. With a ball mouse that would put extra wear and tear on it, but I have a laser mouse, so it might be OK. Still, software seems like the more elegant solution. StuRat (talk) 15:22, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Back around 2000-2002 or so, there used to be sites out there that would pay you to browse (with their ads). The way they would tell if you were really "browsing" (and not just opening their browser and walking away for a few hours) was to detect mouse movement. I recall there being programs that would simulate mouse movement as a way of scamming these sites. I can't remember the names of the sites, or the programs, but they are out there, somewhere, probably. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:04, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

As always, there is an xkcd cartoon for (almost) this situation. Jørgen (talk) 18:18, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

The comic alt-text is spot-on; we have all been there; and some of us have the sourcecode to prove it... the OP may find these codes helpful for UI scripting if they are using Winamp 2.x or 5.x as their flash video player/plugin (I have found the Adobe version to be the single most buggy software component of any of my computers on any the of various operating systems I use, and so I have replaced it as much as possible with alternatives). Nimur (talk) 20:43, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I have now created an extremely light-weight Windows utility that does this. Please see CursorMotion.exe @ privat.rejbrand.se if you trust me. When you start this application, it checks if Scroll Lock is on 10 times per second. If Scroll Lock is on, the cursor moves ±2 pixels up and to the left 10 times per second. To exit the application, use the Windows Task Manager. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 20:57, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

However, I have to admit that I do not know if it will run on Win 9x... I have not used this platform for many, many years... --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 20:59, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Windows 9x is a rather instable platform, so you try the app at you own risk! --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 21:01, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

No, it says "... expects a newer version of Windows. Upgrade your Windows version." Thanks for trying. Any other ideas ? (Your idea to use the otherwise useless scroll lock key was truly inspired.)StuRat (talk) 21:05, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, that was no major surprise. I just recompiled it with the old Borland Delphi 7 I found that I still had installed. It might work now. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 21:15, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, I downloaded it on my XP computer, where it works well. I also downloaded it on my 98 machine, where I actually need it. It no longer gives that error, but doesn't appear to move the mouse, either. If you can add some debug prints to it, I could tell you what it says. StuRat (talk) 21:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

You might be interested in the AWT robot - a Java tool that will work with your native platform's mouse interface. Nimur (talk) 21:59, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Wiggler.java - example source code

import java.awt.Robot;
public class Wiggler {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
 Robot r = new java.awt.Robot(); 
 while(true) {
  r.mouseMove(10,10) ;  
  r.delay(100);  
  r.mouseMove(12,12);
  r.delay(100);	
  }
}}

You can add other features, like only enabled when "scroll-lock" is on; or relative mouse-motion; as you need. Nimur (talk) 22:06, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Because I was unable to make my app work on the old Win 9x platform, I post the source code here, so that someone more used to this older platform can try to make a working executable. The code is in the Delphi language, but relies entirely on the Win32 API in all essential parts.

program CursorMotion;

uses
  SysUtils,
  Windows;

var
  pnt: TPoint;
  disp: integer;

{$R *.res}

begin
  disp := 2;
  repeat
    if GetKeyState(VK_SCROLL) and 1 = 1 then
    begin
      if GetCursorPos(pnt) then
      begin
        SetCursorPos(pnt.X + disp, pnt.Y + disp);
        disp := -disp;
      end;
    end;
    sleep(100);
  until 1+1=3;
end.

--Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 22:57, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Now I also tried a minor modification to the code. It might work now (it is really too bad that I do not have a running Win 9x computer at home right now...). If it does not work, we have to hope that some other developer will make a try on this problem. Sorry for my inability! I feel that I really should know what the problem is... --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 23:05, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Much better ! Only one small bug: It checks the scroll lock key status when it starts, but never again. Looking at your code, I can't see any obvious reason why. Does the VK_SCROLL variable need to be reinitialized before each call to GetKeyState ? Also, why does it need that "and 1=1" part ? Maybe this line:

       if GetKeyState(VK_SCROLL) and 1 = 1 then

Should be split into two lines:

       GetKeyState(VK_SCROLL)
       if VK_SCROLL and 1=1 then

I'm thinking that the value returned in the first case is actually whether the KeyState was read, as opposed to it's current value. StuRat (talk) 00:35, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

No, VK_SCROLL is a so-called "virtual key constant", identifying the Scroll Lock key. GetKeyState returns a cardinal where the LSB is 1 if the key is "on" and 0 if it is "off", as I understand from [10]. At least this code has always worked for me under Windows NT systems. I think there is a lot more subtle problem. If I get time over "tomorrow", I will plug in my old HP Vectra VE and debug the program. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 00:55, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, cool. Some other thoughts:

1) Does the "if" statement look at the LSB only ?

2) Maybe we need to use the GetAsyncKeyState call instead ? StuRat (talk) 01:39, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, you need to call GetAsyncKeyState. GetKeyState returns the key state as of the most recent window message, and this application never processes any messages. The "if" statement looks at the value of (GetKeyState(VK_SCROLL) and 1) = 1, which is boolean. -- BenRG (talk) 02:13, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

StuRat: 1) Yes. and 1 returns the LSB. 2) Yes, this is probably the subtle problem I am looking for. Strange that it works under Windows XP and Vista, though. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 13:29, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

One problem, though: Although GetAsyncKeyState can check if a key is down or not, it cannot give the status of "lock keys" (Num Lock, Scroll Lock, Caps Lock), I think... But now I have my old HP Vectra plugged in, so I will fix the problem within an hour. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 13:47, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Cool. StuRat (talk) 14:02, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Now it finally works. I gave up the Scroll Lock idea, due to the mentioned problem. Then I tryed to turn the motion on/off when both shift keys are down, but this does not work on Windows 98 (but on XP/Vista). It took a bit longer time than I expected, for I needed to install Windows 98 on the HP Vectra (it had Win95), and also figure out a way to copy files from my Vista computer to the HP Vectra (eventually I found an old USB floppy disk drive). Now the program works perfectly on Windows 98. You enable/disable the motion by simultaneously pressing the "C" and "M" (Cursor Motion) keyboard keys. The disadvantage of this approach is that the current keyboard focus control must, of course, not do something bad when you do this. For instance, it is a bad idea to use the combination when typing a report in Word. Then you simply have to click the desktop, task bar or something else. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 15:15, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

program CursorMotion;

uses
  Windows;

var
  pnt: TPoint;
  disp: integer;
  dorun: boolean;

{$R *.res}

begin
  disp := 2;
  dorun := true;
  repeat
    if dorun then
    begin
      if GetCursorPos(pnt) then
      begin
        SetCursorPos(pnt.X + disp, pnt.Y + disp);
        disp := -disp;
      end;
    end;
    if (GetASyncKeyState(ord('C')) and $8000 > 0) and (GetASyncKeyState(ord('M')) and $8000 > 0) then
    begin
      dorun := not dorun;
      repeat
        sleep(10);
      until (GetASyncKeyState(ord('C')) and $8000 = 0) or (GetASyncKeyState(ord('M')) and $8000 = 0);
    end;
    sleep(100);
  until 1+1=3;
end.

--Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 15:16, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks ! It works great. Now I can't wait until the next time my Flash animations lock up to see if it solves that problem. Thanks again. StuRat (talk) 15:28, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

WHAT ARE DIFFRENT TYPES OF AUDIO,VIEDO STREAMING IN JAVA

PLEASE DONT RESPOND SAYING

"GOOGLE IT DUDE U LL FIND IT"

I HAVE DONE THAT BEFORE

ANSWERS ARE WELCOME. . . . —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aashishkotagiri (talk • contribs) 15:26, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

You might start at the Java Media Framework article. That library encapsulates most of the common audio and video needs. There are numerous other libraries available to help. Your question is very vague - you can technically write any type of streaming audio or video in Java; but some of the more common types are already available through official (like JMF) and third-party libraries. Nimur (talk) 16:44, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Please don't write in ALL CAPS. It is perceive as SHOUTING. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:52, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

...-ed... --Ouro (blah blah) 10:10, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, typo police. What would I do without you? --Mr.98 (talk) 22:33, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

How do I make an NPC for Garry's Mod 10?

I have been playing the game "Spore" for quite a while now, and I have also been playing Garry's Mod 10 for a while. I was just wondering, how would I make a new npc for garry's mod 10, like say, a spore creature npc, or any npc. What would I have to do/download to be able to make one, and Im guessing its pretty complicated, so where can I get help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by DeWandel (talk • contribs) 19:57, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

It seems like you will need to learn LUA scripting, which is the scripting engine used by Garry's Mod and other games. Specifically look at the documentation for server-side NPC LUA scripting. There are numerous introductions and tutorials to LUA scripting on that site. First you need to create an AI script for it, and then you need to load that script and spawn the AI & renderable model in your game script. Here is the list of entities available; you can apparently extend or add to these with your custom scripts. Nimur (talk) 20:29, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Suggestion: find existing NPC LUA code, and use it as a template. Re-inventing the wheel is a good way to end up with a bad wheel—improve on someone else's wheel and you'll get farther. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:05, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

How do I make a custom texture in Source SDK apply like a decal?

I pretty much know the basics to making custom textures for source sdk.....but how do you make it apply so its like graffiti..? Like not somthing you would build with, but, you know, a Decal?? I'm usuing VFT Edit to make my textures. and paint.net, also. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.37.226.31 (talk) 22:34, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

November 9

Visual Dictionary for OS X?

I'm looking for a visual guide to what all the parts of OS X are called. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.253.80.241 (talk) 03:10, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

The Apple HIG will tell you what everything is along with examples of each interface element. 206.131.39.6 (talk) 16:03, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Video problems with Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

A friend of mine recently bought this game for the PC. He installed it, created a character, and it worked perfectly fine until he tried to load his character. After that happened it wouldn't load his character. It would minimize the game and keep saying DirectX 9 failed to start, and that it would fix the problem. Then he would click back into the game and try to load the character again and it would try to minimize the screen and then would freeze, requiring us to open the task manager and end the process directly. It did this every time we tried it. We installed the latest DirectX (I believe it was 10). It still was not working. I think it is his graphics card but we are not sure. Here are the system specs. They are all above the recommended speeds for the game.

HP Laptop (Not sure of the model) Windows Vista Home 64-bit 2.00GHz processor 4GB RAM 512MB dedicated video RAM

What do you guys think, would it be the graphics card or what? Thanks guys.

RandomAccessDawg (talk) 04:38, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Try upgrading the drivers for the video card. If that doesn't work, try loading a different character. If that STILL doesn't work, try reinstalling the game. If that STILL doesn't work, then your video card may be incompatible with the game. Since you are using a laptop, you're out of luck. Check the system requirements for the game and see if a list of supported video cards is available. If yours isn't on there, you cannot play the game. Also, the game might not be supported under Vista or 64-bit. (Wow this is a long answer)  Buffered Input Output 13:49, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I've played that game a few months ago and remember all kinds of gripes about 64-bit issues. I don't think it works very well in Vista either and you'll be lucky to get it stable there. If you can, dual-boot into XP 32-bit; it works very well there. It's not too fussy what video card you have but you will probably lose out on nice effects with the watered-down graphics cards on laptops. Sandman30s (talk) 22:28, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Netbeans or Eclipse

I am learning J2EE....
Which tool will be better for me....
Eclipse or Netbeans....
And why???....
What is the difference between them???? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Atchays (talk • contribs) 06:12, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Both are great tools. Eclipse was originally developed by IBM, while NetBeans was originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Both companies, who were strong proponents of Java, released the projects as a sort of "open consortium". NetBeans has a very nice integrated J2EE environment, complete with the official GlassFish J2EE web application server; it is very convenient for both toy projects and full-scale enterprise development. Eclipse has similar features and a J2EE edition; it also boasts an active user-community (probably more so than NetBeans). Both are very good tools; either will work for learning J2EE; you can learn both, or specialize to learn only one; depending on how much effort you want to put in. In my experience, more corporate J2EE development is done with Eclipse and its proprietary variants. Nimur (talk) 00:27, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Win7

Why wasn't Windows 7 given an official name? jc iindyysgvxc (my contributions) 09:12, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

What do you think "Windows 7" is? If you want to know why it was not given a different official name, I'd guess that Microsoft's Marketing expects more sales this way, probably because they want to try some understatement after the general disappointment with Vista. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:59, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Alright, yes, that's what I meant. Why wasn't it given a name with an abbreveation or word? Why did it go back to the naming convention of the DOS/9x based operating systems? jc iindyysgvxc (my contributions) 11:26, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

hopefully they continue the trend and call the next one windows 8 or something. much less confusing than random names. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 11:09, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Here is a Microsoft blog post on the topic. It says that Windows 7 was the internal development code name (many products will be developed with a simple codename and then named later once marketing people have done their work), and they decided to release it under that name. Mike Nash of Microsoft explains:

The decision to use the name Windows 7 is about simplicity. Over the years, we have taken different approaches to naming Windows. We've used version numbers like Windows 3.11, or dates like Windows 98, or "aspirational" monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista. And since we do not ship new versions of Windows every year, using a date did not make sense. Likewise, coming up with an all-new "aspirational" name does not do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.

Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore "Windows 7" just makes sense.

So they don't have any aspirations, or rather, their aspirations are to make something just like Vista, except a Vista that actually works. --Lesleyhood (talk) 12:32, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

There are 3 things which a version name/number should do:

1) Allow you to distinguish between versions. All three MS naming schemes did that.

2) Allow you to tell which is newer and which is older. Both numbers and dates allow that, although numbers are somewhat better, in that they can have many levels to them.

3) Tell you how old a version is. Only date names did that.

So, the names like XP and Vista were the absolute worst system, while dates or version numbers are both much better. Personally I'd settle for either of those two options, as long as they remain consistent. Changing the naming scheme with each new version is truly idiotic. StuRat (talk) 13:46, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

The trouble is that Windows 7 is actually version 6.1, as you can see by opening a command prompt for example. That's the version number that's reported to applications. So the marketing name and the internal version are still different, but now they're similar enough to potentially cause confusion. -- BenRG (talk) 21:06, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd be interested to know how Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, NT, XP, and Vista map to standard version numbers. Does anyone have a list ? StuRat (talk) 00:10, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Honestly, "does anyone have a list?"? This is Wikipedia, of course we have a list! Windows#Timeline of releases. Keep in mind, they split the development between desktop and servers at one point and then merged them again, which is why none of the numbers make any sense. --Tango (talk) 00:18, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. It's too bad that Windows 7 doesn't match the internal version number. StuRat (talk) 13:05, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

MS PowerPoint - startup macros

Hello,

I am trying to create a way of running a macro (the macro prompts the user for some text and puts it onto the slide master) as soon as the user opens a particular PowerPoint template. This makes sure that the user has to complete the text box. I have got the macro working fine but the problem is running it.

From some research online, it is not simply a case of naming the macro 'autoexec' like you can do in Word/Excel/Access. This does not work. There is a way of doing it that involves using 'Add-Ins'; I don't know anything about Add-Ins but I am pretty sure that they have to be loaded on each user's machine for this approach to work - NOT practical and way too much of a fuss, we are trying to make this as painless as possible to the end-users.

Another approach I considered was setting up an object that, when clicked, runs the macro. This works fine if you run it in slideshow mode but it does not work in editing mode so definitely not ideal. Is there some way I can create a button or something that works in editing mode, runs the macro and then deletes the button itself? Or any other suggestions for this would be appreciated. It is too much to ask of our users to have to go into the slide master every time and manually edit the text box! Thanks! GaryReggae (talk) 10:23, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I can only speak from the recent experience of getting a maacro to be invoked in opening an excel file. The solution there was to create a ThisWorkbook object underneath Microsoft Excel Objects in the Visual Basic editor, and then have that object invoke a form which provided the user interface of (in my case) a data collection system. The code in the ThisWorkbook object was nothing more than:

Private Sub Workbook_Open()

frmLayer1.Show

End Sub

PowerPoint seems to offer exactly the same VB editor as Excel, so I guess the technique will be much the same - you'll call your form which collects the information from the user and which provides a button causing the collected data to be written into the slide master. Obviously it is easier if, like me, you have a minion or two handy who has/have a clue what they're doing...but I hope this helps somewhat. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:35, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Vista

What does the Vista part of Windows Vista's name mean? jc iindyysgvxc (my contributions) 11:26, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

See wikt:Vista. Dismas|^(talk) 11:36, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

That page doesn't exist. Vimescarrot (talk) 12:43, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

This one does, though. Vimescarrot (talk) 12:43, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

That's odd. It worked for me when I posted it. And it worked for me just now. Dismas|^(talk) 11:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

File, exported from evolution calendar

Can I import this file into other calendars? (like I can import txt, doc or jpg into different applications) Quest09 (talk) 12:49, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Not the admin of a network

If I am not the admin of a network, can I scan it and discover what users are connecting to it? I suppose the user names are not encrypted, are they?--Quest09 (talk) 12:51, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Users do not use a network. Computers do. What you will see on pretty much any modern network is a bunch of TCP/IP packets racing about. The only thing you can do is reassemble them into a message that will have source/destination IP addresses (computers, not users). However, you can't do much of that because most modern networks use switches/routers. So, you can't see much traffic other than the traffic to/from your own computer.

In the realm of Windows, you can search the Windows network. You can often see the names of computers that have joined the Windows network. Sometimes, those computer names are based on the primary user for that computer. If that is the case, you can assume that the user may or may not be using his or her computer. -- kainaw™ 13:13, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Most networks consist of a router which is connected (possibly indirectly) to the Internet. The router has a load of wires coming out which connect to computers, including yourself. These are the computers in your local network. The router normally assigns each computer an IP address (using DHCP) when they are connected to the router. An IP address is a number (actually 4 numbers) which identifies the computer. The IP address the computer is given is one of the IP addresses in the Private Network address space (see rfc1918).

You can connect to computers in your local network (or the internet) using their IP address, so you can find all the computers by trying to connect to each IP address in the Private Network address space. There are tools like nmap which will do this. --h2g2bob (talk) 18:06, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Python wont work with glade

My code will not let me use the module gtk.glade

The error code is "The specified module could not be found."

I've looked and cannot find the module either. So where is it?

PS I am running Python 2.6 on Windows with PyGTK and all requirements installed.

Thanks.  Buffered Input Output 13:43, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

You should use gtk.Builder instead. It's an official part of gtk and has replaced libglade. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 14:04, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Word (and VBA) in MS Works and MS Office

Is Word the same in Word as in Office? Can they both do grammar checking? And is VBA included in both Works and Office? I only want to use Word and Excel, and possibly VBA, and I am wondering to what extent my wants will be covered by the cheaper package. (Note - please do not mention OpenOffice etc - I am already familiar with that/those and it is not the subject of this question). Thanks 92.27.152.41 (talk) 14:21, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I assume you mean, is MS Word the same as the word processor in MS Works. My understanding is the Works is scaled down in its features—in both its word processing and its spreadsheets. I used to use it, years ago, and I recall it being fairly limited in both. Works is fairly crippled.

The biggest problem is that Works saves its documents in a different format than Word does. It can read Word documents, but it can't save in them. So if you plan to send documents to anyone else, they will have to get a converter so that their version of Word can read the Works file.

My understanding is the MS Works does not support VBA. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:22, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Download the 60-day free trial version to check. (Sorry to sound like an MS marketing bot for supplying the link here and below, but I think it's the proper answer for both questions.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:23, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Writing stock or pro-forma letters to a few addresses - freeware?

I often have to write the same letter to four or five different addresses. The letter itself is a standard letter with a few details changed. Is there any freeware or no-pay software available that will help me do this quickly, rather than doing a lot of cutting and pasting in a word processor. When I worked in an office long ago, rather than people dictating complete letters they would just tell the typist to put stock paragraphs 2, 7, and 19 (for example) in the letter. I'd like to find something that can do something like that. Thanks 92.27.152.41 (talk) 14:27, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like you need a mail merge function - Microsoft Word will do this but that isn't free! You could try OpenOffice.org, it is a freeware suite of software, including a word processor that has similiar functionality to MS Word but I can't comment on whether it will do a mail merge as I haven't used it for that. Basically, you just compile your standard letter and put in 'fields' that contain the variable sections, such as people's names', address, company name, etc...you then get a spreadsheet or database containing the data that you want to put into those fields and a mailmerge combines the two. Hope this helps GaryReggae (talk) 16:44, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I recently used Microsoft Word to do this (the version in Microsoft Office 2007) for 70 letters I had to make. I was surprised to find it was a little more difficult than I had expected — Word has had this function for over 15 years and I would have thought that by now, it would be easier to move back and forth between using the wizard and manually doing it — but in the end it was a good time saver. As GaryReggae points out, it isn't free — though you could download the 60-day free trial version and see whether that works for you. I think the trial lets you print. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:18, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, although I've tried mail merging in the past, and together with your comments above I suspect that it would be quicker to do it the way I've done it in the past. Isnt there a better way to do this? I may have given the wrong impression above - the addresses I have to write to are new addresses, not routine addresses. 92.27.67.136 (talk) 22:32, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Since it's only five addresses, why don't you just use Word (or the OpenOffice equivalent, or whatever) to write the first copy, then copy and paste it 4 times, and then manually make your minor changes to the other 4? Comet Tuttle (talk) 00:29, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

D'oh! 89.243.191.11 (talk) 17:50, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Virtual LED vu meter

I want a program that displays the sound on my computer like this. I'm using windows 7 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 15:14, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

[11] Works on XP, not tested on 7. F (talk) 00:53, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Doesn't work in 7, it keeps saying it can't detect a sound card. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 10:40, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

executable decompiler

Does anyone know of a decompiler that decompiles executables and shows me the source code and allows me to edit it and export another exe? I've searched the internet but none of the products I've found mention these features. -- penubag  (talk) 16:37, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not an expert by any means but I suspect the answer is no, as EXE files can be created by many different applications, programming languages and formats - Flash animations can be EXEs, Visual Basic and C++ applications use different types of code but can both create EXEs, there are also many propriatery applications that can create EXE files. Hopefully somebody more knowledgable about the subject will be able to shed further light on this for you. GaryReggae (talk) 16:48, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

You can get back to assembly code (or other high-level code) with a disassembler. But it's automatically generated code based on the machine code - it's not the code that was used to create the .exe in the first place. That means it's hard to read. Some .exe files contain symbols, which will help, but most commercial software will not have that. --h2g2bob (talk) 17:43, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

(EC) No such program can work in the general case, since after a program has been stripped parts of the source code (local variable names, for example) are simply not stored. There are many other difficulties that will make it a major project to understand any reasonably large project after decompilation. See decompiler, and the info pages for dcc and Hex Rays. --Sean 17:46, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

To paraphrase what has been said above, many tools will give you a source code, which will be functionally equivalent to the executable program; but it is generally not possible to reconstruct the exact source code which was originally used to build that binary program. The most obvious issue is that the variable-names will probably be machine-generated; but other details like certain flow-control constructs and most data structures and some program flows will be generated via disassembly - functionally equivalent to the original structures, but not at all easily usable or understandable to a human. Nimur (talk) 18:06, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you all for your answers; you've clarified for me how these things actually work. Do any of you recommend any specific decompiler for me to look into. I have a Windows so the linux applications above won't run. -- penubag  (talk) 02:09, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Stupid Server Question

Forgive my ignorance... but suppose I set up a simple server (using Ubuntu Server) on a home LAN, and I use the Samba fileserver program to set up shared folders and whatnot.

What exactly stops random Internet users from discovering and accessing files on my server just as they would on an Internet server?

I'm pretty new to networking, and I'm trying to figure out waaaay too many things at once, so any help would be appreciated. Aylad ['ɑɪlæd] 17:51, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Your question is a smart one. If you have a router with firewall and NAT abilities, as most consumer routers now do, then when a bot on the Internet pings you to find out what ports are open at your IP address, the bot will get silence in return, thanks to the router. It won't be able to send any packets to your Ubuntu server. ShieldsUP, at www.grc.com, is a great tool you can use to ping your location and tell you whether you're visible from the outside or not. You don't have to install anything; just find the ShieldsUP web page, and tell it to probe your ports. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:07, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks. Aylad ['ɑɪlæd] 18:10, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, Samba has an authentication system, and several different levels and types of security. The Samba HOWTO for security explains how to set this up. In this case, even if a random user does penetrate your firewall and discover that you have a Samba service running, they can still be denied access to it. Depending on your needs, multiple levels of security are often advised (e.g. firewall + internal authentication); this redundancy helps mitigate security threats. Nimur (talk) 15:46, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Adding something to XP's right-click contextual menus

Used to be, on my Windows XP machine, when I right-clicked in a folder and moused over the "New >" item, I could create a new .txt (notepad) document. Now that option is missing. How do I add it? Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:09, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately I have forgotten if these items are stored in the registry or in the file system. However, I do remember that the "Send To" items are stored at

C:\Users\Andreas Rejbrand\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows

(replace my user name with your own), at least in Windows Vista. It is possible that the "New" items are stored somewhere near this directory as well. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 19:26, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I am actually quite sure that they are stored in the file system. Indeed, when you select a "Create New" item you get a copy of this template in the current directory. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 19:27, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

It really should be

C:\Users\Andreas Rejbrand\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Templates

I think, but strangely enough, my folder is empty (as is the "All Users" quivalent). --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 19:32, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

See http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1838907,00.asp ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:49, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

That extremetech article was interesting — TXT was not listed as a "registered file type" on my machine — but it doesn't explain how to modify the right-click context menu to add the ability to make a new text file. It just talks about how to add the ability to run an app (Outlook, in the example given) with the selected file as a parameter. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:36, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Provided you have your folders set up to show full filenames, you could right click and make a new anything and then simply rename it to XXXX.txt as a work-around. 218.25.32.210 (talk) 03:03, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

This had actually never occurred to me! You're correct! Thanks! I'll give it a try. Comet Tuttle (talk) 05:19, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Simple Java Counter

I am trying to write a simple program in java that increments or decrements a counter when certain keys are pressed. It is not a graphical program, it is just in the command line. What method can i use to take use the pressing of a key, and how can it be used? Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.132.142.60 (talk) 19:48, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

There are many ways to get keyboard input in Java. Since you have a command line program, with no graphical interface, your usage does not fit into the normal Java pattern of creating a Key Listener and attaching it to your graphic window. You can try to fit that design model on to your needs, but you might also want to consider using the Java System.in (equivalent to stdin in the C language). You can poll this - I am guessing you are a novice programmer, so you may opt for this simple design - but you should know that it is inefficient because it relies on a busy wait. Your main program would thus contain a while-loop and attempt to read from System.in. A better (but much more complicated) method would be to attach the Standard Input (System.in) to an event-listener or an asynchronous stream reader in the java.nio package. What is your ultimate goal - a quick test program, or a deployable, maintainable code? Nimur (talk) 00:37, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It is just going to be a simple test program to try and get a simple program working with Java. Ideally i would want it to increment when a key, such as i, is pressed, without having to press enter aswell. Would the busy wait thing involve pressing enter after every increment or decrement key pressed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.158.11.134 (talk) 13:36, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Technically, that "feature" (requiring an enter after input) is a detail of your console, Windows command prompt, or linux terminal emulator. (It is unfortunately not a feature of Java, so within your code, you can't do much about it). Before your keystrokes get to your Java program, they are "owned" by your terminal or console - and the console gets to decide what to do with the individual keypresses. Apparently, your terminal is set up to buffer its input by lines and waits until it sees a "\n" before actually sending the data to stdin of the program. (See this forum-posting for similar trouble). For this reason, Java's preferred method is to create a Swing GUI and attach it to a KeyListener. This guarantees that your keystrokes are never owned by any other program; and you can process them immediately. If you specifically do not want a GUI, you will need to find a platform-specific way to reconfigure your terminal so that it doesn't buffer its input; or use a different terminal emulator.

At this point, I expect that the C-coders are probably starting to lug out the anti-Java propaganda; "why is it so hard to read one character!? I do that all the time with getc(stdin); but while C programmers may be familiar with a getchar() similar "unbuffered" single-character read from the terminal, they may be unaware that they are actually compiling a macro down to system-code for a platform-specific routine that will interfere with the operating-system's normal I/O handler. So, the "detail" that the terminal is buffering its keystrokes is often overlooked because you are overriding the system I/O handler. This also leads to numerous programming pitfalls. (Ultimately, C is a system-programming language, and you can compile code which does anything with C, circumventing any operating-system conventions which are not protected by special hardware-modes). Java forces you to properly follow the rules laid out by the operating system specification - and not to steal other programs' keystrokes until those programs politely hand them to you. This includes keystrokes in the terminal.

This is probably more than you wanted to know about buffering, terminals, and so forth; but remember that Java is a platform-independent language specification and so it must handle a huge range of different methodologies and conventions. (Not only Windows/Mac/Linux, but also Symbian, AIX, QNX, eCOS, J2ME, VCR RTOSes, ... these systems will break your average C programmers' conception of "terminal" and "stdio" convention). Again, Java's platform independent mechanism is to create a Swing GUI and keep your I/O operations in there. The KeyListener interface is very simple and extremely platform-portable. Nimur (talk) 14:58, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

In C, getc(stdin) and getchar() are buffered, OS-legal operations, just like in Java. If the OS is using buffered input and not sending characters to stdin until Return is pressed, then getc(stdin) and getchar() won't be able to read them until Return is pressed. This is a common question from newly starting C programmers as well. It is true that most OSes provide a C interface to bypass the buffering and actually read the keystrokes directly, but then you're no longer being OS-legal, and your code is intimately tied to a specific version of an OS. Although the interface is written in C, it's actually part of the OS itself, not part of C. (Most new C programmers can't actually understand the difference.) So you have the right idea all along in your reply, it's just that the example functions you mentioned don't illustrate your point. JIP | Talk 18:49, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction... subtle but important point. Even I got tripped up by it... Nimur (talk) 19:17, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Source code for a simple System.in poll

public class Poll {

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
 char c;
 while((c = (char) System.in.read())!='q') {
  System.out.print(c);
 }

}}

Here is a slightly more elaborate scheme, showing a Java command-prompt reader. Nimur (talk) 00:47, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

How can I safely view a phishing scam site?

I just got an e-mail purporting to be from a major bank which I don't have an account with. It claims that errors were discovered on my account and that access to my account will be restricted until I've corrected the errors. It's obviously a phishing scam. Clicking the e-mail's link appears to send you to pop zelda dot com. (I Googled and Binged the site, but didn't find anything relevent.) But I'm curious to see how the phishing site works. How can I safely browse the site? As long I don't enter any personal information, am I safe (i.e. can they access my history, bookmarks, autocomplete info, etc.)? I supposed I can create a Virtual PC with a freshly installed version of Windows, download all the security updates and turn off JavaScript, or is that overkill? 12.165.250.13 (talk) 21:19, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

If you don't enter in anynformation, they probably cannot detect anything. They cannot access your history or bookmarks. They probably cannot access your autocomplete, but it would be an interesting trick to try and get the browser to enter it into a form and then submit it (I'm not sure it can be done, but it's the only thing that seems within the realm of possibility). I am not sure you could get much information from looking at the page itself—it will at the most minimal just be a false front, at most be a complicated man-in-the-middle (e.g. they take your information, "log in" as you on the other site, and then send you the information that you would normally see). If it were me, I would view it with a non-Windows machine, first off, and secondly, I would use the "privacy mode" in Firefox that uses no cookies or autocomplete, and I would probably turn off Javascript too, just to be safe. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:25, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

The safest way to do things is to have two computers, a "secure" one that you never use to browse random sites, much less ones like this, and an "unsecure" computer you use to browse such sites, but never enter any personal information into. No names, no account numbers, nothing. In this case, there is nothing to steal. Obviously, make sure the secure and unsecure computer are not connected in any way. It might be a good idea to put one on DSL and the other on dial-up, so they don't share a network, either. StuRat (talk) 00:04, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

You could just virtualize the OS, though—you don't really need an entirely "clean machine" to do that, I don't think. Even in that case, I think with something like "privacy mode" in Firefox (or Safari, or whatever), there is no chance of them having access to your personal data, esp. if you are not using IE. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:22, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Note that by just visiting the link you will confirm to them that your email address is accurate and someone is reading it. You may get more spam that way.F (talk) 00:50, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

You would want to strip out all of the GET variables that are passed in the url (so if it is http://fakesite.com/?id=2asd8asd8asdas you'd cut everything after the last slash, before the question mark), to avoid this. That's probably a good idea even if you aren't worried about getting more spam. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:22, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

linux's ping -M dont/want options

Google doesn't seem to help much. The man pages neither. I understand that do can help me discover a network's MTU because if I set the packet to be too large I'll receive an error, but I don't get much information with the other two, it just pings normally. Help! --Belchman (talk) 21:43, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Android and Linux

Is it possible to install Android onto a mobile internet device (Archos 5G) that comes with Linux? Android is free, but where does one get it? Thanks if you can enlighten. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.98.238.113 (talk) 23:20, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

You might want to start at Android (operating system) to get an overview of what Android is and isn't and to find links to the official sites. Aside from that, it seems that Archos has released a model called the Archos 5G Internet Media Tablet, which already runs Android. If you have a different 5G (nice of them to confuse us by re-using model names), then you'd probably either have to find where somebody has already compiled a version of Android for that device, or modify and compile it yourself. --LarryMac | Talk 15:07, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

November 10

Where is DOM Storage Located?

Hi. I've been looking all over the Internet but can't find an answer. Where is DOM storage stored on the hard drive (by either Firefox or Internet Explorer)? Thanks.--Drknkn (talk) 02:46, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Firefox's Gecko (layout engine) keeps the DOM in memory, not on the hard drive (unless there is not enough RAM, and memory paging occurs by the operating system). Technical details are described on the Gecko Developer DOM FAQ and the more detailed sourcecode documentation linked from there. This older documentation shows a diagram schematically illustrating the relationship between Gecko's DOM and its painting engine.I was unaware that "DOM Storage" refers to a specific technology - not "storage of the DOM in general". If you feel like getting your hands dirty, here is the C++ source code which implements the Gecko DOMStorage and some elements of the rendering engine for recent versions of Firefox (you'll have to browse through many related files to find exactly whichever feature you are looking for). It looks like a C++ class called a DOMStorageEntry is instantiated and placed in a nsTHashTable (an implementation of a hashtable, which appears to be in-memory - on the stack, no less). Its entries (DOM entries) are on the heap. Internet Explorer probably uses a similar methodology, but because it is not an open-source project, exact answers may be more difficult to come by. Nimur (talk) 07:08, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, now I'm confused, because further reading indicates that DOM storage allows persistent storage of large quantities of data - suggesting that it must be written to disk at some point. The distinction may be between "session" and "local" DOM storage; this persistent storage is a new feature I am not familiar with. It seems that I should read up on DOM Storage before I attempt to answer any further. Nimur (talk) 07:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay, here's the answer: in your profile folder, in a SQLITE file called webappsstore.sqllite - which is a binary, SQLite formatted data file. Nimur (talk) 07:52, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for doing all of that research. I think I found where IE stores it, too. I used Process Explorer while reloading a test page (http://www.advantage-computer.biz/test.htm) and found that it was writing to the following file: C:\Documents and Settings\[my user name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\DOMStore\K706A34J\www.advantage-computer[1].xml. It is inside a hidden folder. When I refresh the page in Firefox, it writes 5 KB to the disk. But, when I browse for cookies inside Firefox's Options dialog, nothing from that site is shown. Likewise, the Cookies folder used by IE does not contain the DOM storage object. This lack of control presents some privacy issues, IMO. Thanks again.--Drknkn (talk) 08:24, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I was surprised to see that the webappsstore.sqlite file that Firefox 3.5 uses for persistent storage is not cleared or deleted when "clear private data" is performed. This may be a feature, but I think it warrants a bug-report to the Mozilla developers. Nimur (talk) 13:57, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Volatile vs Synchronize

Hi...
What is the difference between volatile and synchronization in JAVA....

This link from IBM might help: Java theory and practice - Managing volatility. "Volatile variables share the visibility features of synchronized, but none of the atomicity features." These are Java's standard ways to guarantee that there is no RAW-hazard (volatile) or WAW-hazard (synchronized). If you need some help with this technojargon, you might want to read about parallel computing - specifically, data hazards. We also have articles on atomicity and synchronization. And as always, I really recommend the official Java Tutorial on Concurrency from Sun Microsystems. Nimur (talk) 14:01, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Deleting

When you delete a program or a file on a computer, on the electrical level, how does this occur?Accdude92 (talk to me!) (sign) 14:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

See File deletion. What happens is something like this. The disk consists of a large number of places where data can be writtem. The file is wriiten into some and the name and index to the place where the file starts and its size is written into a special file called a directory which the operating system can find. When the file is deleted the entry in the directory is removed by marking it as not in use. A pointer to the space that was taken up by the file is placed instead in a free space 'directory' which is bit like a normal directory but doesn't give names for the bits of space. The space will be allocated to another file if needed from thew free list. So normally the contents of the file are left on the disk for a while after deletion except if special action is taken to overwrite the space. Dmcq (talk) 14:51, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Since you're asking about the "electrical level", you might want to read about different kinds of persistent storage hardware: Hard disk drive is most common for personal computers and servers, though solid-state drives are also becoming common. Magnetic tape is electrically similar to hard-disk drives but the mechanical layout is different (... it is in tape form, instead of circular-disc form). Other types of nonvolatile storage include NVRAM, optical discs, and you can see many more at Category:Computer storage media. As Dmcq has pointed out, the software will decide what file system changes represent a "file delete" operation; and then it will commit those changes to the hardware (by writing the correct control words to the firmware and the correct data-words to the I/O path). From the purely electrical perspective, there is no difference between a "delete" and a "write" - that distinction is a higher level interpretation of the meaning of many pieces of data that form a file-system. The actual device only knows that it is committing a change to the persistent storage. In most storage forms (specifically HDDs), the control commands will first activate mechanical changes (like a hard-disk motor spinning up and moving its disk head to the correct location; then, they will control the electrical signals that commit the change to the storage medium. (In the case of magnetic disk, this means that symbols will be sent as sequences of electrical currents that are timed to coincide with when the disk head is near the correct location on disk; those currents induce magnetic fields to re-align the magnetic elements on the disc). Each bit can be as simple as a "present" or "not present" (or opposite-direction) electrical current (corresponding to a stored polarity on the magnetic disk); or it may be a symbol-code to reduce the likelihood of incorrect interpretation of the analog data later on. Nimur (talk) 15:42, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It is important to note that simply deleting a file will only remove its directory entry, and mark the space the file occupied as freely usable space. The actual contents of the file will stay there, until another file is written in their place. What is really important is, as I've heard, not even this is enough - the digital bits making up the software-land contents of the file are actually physically manifested as analogical electricity charges, with enough of a charge one way meaning "0" and enough of a charge the other way meaning "1". (So sue me, I'm lousy at electronics. But this is the general idea.) Now, in the real, physical analogical world, electricity charges don't switch 100% completely on or off, but usually switch only part of the way, but enough to make the computer realise they're now supposed to be "0" or "1". What this means is, when a bit is overwritten, a trace of the original bit actually stays there, and with some highly technical equipment, it's possible to figure out what the original bit was. Because of this, heavy-duty industry- or military-scale file wiping operations overwrite the file's contents multiple times, each time with different data, to make sure the charges change randomly enough for these traces of bits to become impossible (or at least impractical) to detect. JIP | Talk 18:39, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It's actually somewhat controversial as to whether it takes more than one wipe to securely wipe a harddrive—so says this article, anyway. It appears that writing over more than once is just paranoid overkill (which, considering how low the "cost" is, isn't necessarily a bad thing if you REALLY want something deleted). Anyway, just an aside! --Mr.98 (talk) 19:43, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

There is a (mostly theoretical, I think) possibility that the hard drives' head positioning mechanism doesn't perfectly follow the same circular path each time you reposition it over one of the data tracks on the hard drive. Sometimes it'll be a little bit off to the left - other times a bit off to the right of the idealised centerline. So if you write magnetic data when the head happens to be a bit over to the left - and erase it by writing over it when the head is a bit over to the right - then while maybe 95% of the width of the track will represent the new data - there would be a thin strip that's just 5% of the width that wouldn't have been overwritten - and which would still contain the old data. Clearly, when you read back the data, even if the head is way over to the left again - the head is mostly picking up the new data - and because it's a digital system, the slight variation in magnetic levels due to that thin strip of old data will get ignired when the signal is force to be a 0 or a 1. The theory is that someone with really special equipment could use a really narrow disk head - positioned really carefully over that 5% of old data and read it back...even after you erased it. However, this seems to be more of a theoretical possibility than something people do on a regular basis. It turns out that when people have investigated this, that a lot of people in the disk recovery business believes it can be done - but none of them can actually DO it. So - can some secretive government spy agency do it? Maybe...just maybe. Can anyone else do it? No. It's probably just an urban legend. Certainly there is no routine mechanism to recover data that's actually been physically deleted - you'd have to dismantle the hard drive in a clean-room environment, use multimillion-dollar custom equipment - take days or weeks fiddling with the adjustments. If it's possible at all, it would be a nightmare of a job. So theoretically - you might need to erase the data many times - probably by writing random numbers all over it - to ensure that the disk head has covered the entire width of the track. SteveBaker (talk) 04:30, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

When you are deciding how to protect your data it is very important to decide who you are protecting it from. If you just want to avoid the next person to use this computer at the public library from stumbling across it, then deleting the pointer is plenty. If you want to avoid opportunistic criminals that buy 2nd hand computers in the hope of finding people's bank details by running off-the-shelf recovery software over the hard-drive, one overwrite is probably wise (personally, I keep computers too long for it to be worth selling them so when I throw them out I just open the hard-drive case and hit the platters a few times with a hammer). If you a criminal trying to avoid the authorities from finding the evidence of your crimes, it is probably worth doing several overwrites just in case they do have clever recovery devices. --Tango (talk) 04:53, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

PS The same principle applies to encryption. In the first case, just password protecting the file is enough. In the second, you might want to encrypt it using a 64-bit key (or whatever is medium security for the type of cipher you are using) or something. In the final case, you can go the whole hog at use 512-bit encryption just in case they decide to throw a military supercomputer at the problem. If the person you think might want to read your files doesn't have access to a military supercomputer, then long keys are completely unnecessary. --Tango (talk) 04:56, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Copying a user's settings

Due to a very stubborn infection of malware which resisted many attempts at removal, I was recently forced to reinstall Windows XP Professional on my sister's family PC. It was a significant hassle (several hours work) to backup all the documents, photos, music, email; then reinstall everything and configure the 6 users required by the large family. One thing that could have save quite a while, would be to configure one user then copy that one to the 5 others. Unfortunately, the user settings are not in one place but are spread over several folders and many places in the registry. Is there a program (preferably free - as in free beer) that will copy one Windows user's complete settings to another? Astronaut (talk) 16:50, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

This isn't what you're asking for, but one tip: Once you've got it set up, use Norton Ghost or Clonezilla or a similar program to make an image file of the hard disk. Next time they download and install malware, it'll be a lot faster for you to hit the reset button, so to speak. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:54, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, but I've already done that - only after I set up all six users. Astronaut (talk) 14:58, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Madriva XP dual boot and compatibility question

On my WinXP Pro machine I would like to install Mandriva additionally. The machine is rather old with SDRAM and IDE HDD. I have downloaded mandriva-linux-one-2009.1-KDE4-europe1-americas-cdrom-i586.iso. I don't know how to go about with the installation. Can I boot from CD ROM (ISO burnt on a CD ROM) and install and then add a bootloader? --Wanttolook (talk) 18:20, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about Mandriva, but in principle, yes, that is the process. Probably a bit easier if you use a Live CD (such as Ubuntu) as a base, in which case you can try out the system (and make sure it works with your particular hardware) before committing. Your Mandriva image might well be a live CD, I don't know. I believe most modern Linux distros are fairly clever at realising that there's Windows co-existing on the system and help with the necessary setup to make it dual-boot. It's been five years since I've done this the last time.195.128.251.41 (talk) 23:24, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Does Microsoft have a record for every Windows computer on earth?

This is implied by each MS operating system instalation having a unique product key. How much memory would this require? 89.243.191.11 (talk) 19:53, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

well, the Microsoft product keys are (at least they were for XP), five clusters of five characters each. Using A-Z, 0-9, that gives you quite a lot of possible keys. But a database that contained keys that had been already registered (that is, did not contain all possible keys), would only have to be as large as the total number of registered computers, not all possible keys. (You enforce the product key by checking if another is already registered with that key.) For a physical card file, this would be a daunting task. For a computer database, it is not very tough. How many copies of Windows are there out in the world? My guess for all versions is between 200-400 million, but that is just a guess. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:29, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually, the number is much larger (at least 1.5112 x 10²⁵). The number of possible keys can be obtained like this using permutations:

26 letters + 10 numbers = 36 characters

25 characters in a serial number

₂₅P₃₆ = 25 x 24 x 23 x 22 ... 1

Which equals 15,511,210,043,331,000,000,000,000. Since each character is a byte, this equates to billions of terabytes.--Drknkn (talk) 20:59, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually, it would be 36²⁵ because each character can be used multiple times, so that would be 80,828,127,746,476,406,064,313,960,045,654,000,000 --omnipotence407 (talk) 22:26, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

That's if the imaginary database contained all possible keys. The number we need to find is how many units of Windows OS that Microsoft has sold, and multiply that by the memory that an individual key uses. Tan | 39 21:09, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

And the total number of acceptable keys is probably much smaller than the total possibility anyway—they are probably generated using some sort of algorithm that can be easily re-run for verification before it ever tries to contact the Microsoft servers about any given key. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:28, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

No. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 20:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Then what's your answer? Are you just trolling? Tan | 39 20:35, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Learn the definition of trolling for starters. As for an answer, "no" is correct. Microsoft does not have a record for every Windows computer on earth. If I have a windows install disk, I could install it on any number of computers without microsoft knowing (espcally older versions or computers without net access). Now add to that piracy (lets say I downloaded my install disk from the net). It is impossible that microsoft would have a record of EVERY windows computer unless they literally scanned every square inch of the earth with some windows detector. Does that satisfy you? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 22:18, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

What's your problem? If you want to give helpful answers, then do that. If you don't, just go somewhere else. Nobody's forcing you to participate. In any case, my understanding is that on OSes from XP onwards at the very least, Microsoft uses all sorts of software "phone homing" whenever you need to update the OS and other things of that nature which require a valid key. There were, last time I checked, ways to circumvent that. But it doesn't negate that Microsoft does have a very substantial key database. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:28, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

What are you talking about? How is my answer not helpful? OP asked "Does Microsoft have a record for every Windows computer on earth?"[12] and I answered "no"[13] to which I was accused of trolling[14], and in response I rebuked the accusation of trolling and expanded upon my answer[15]. In addition to the question, the OP clearly states "every Windows computer on earth", which in my mind includes everything from Windows 1.0 to the present day. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 22:35, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

"No" is not an answer when there are at least two questions, and it is not helpful, especially when you are determined to take the OP's question to mean something rather impractical. Then getting snippy when other people ask you why you are bothering to post it doesn't help much either. Anyway, if you want to contribute, please do. But don't be difficult just for its own sake. It doesn't help and you're wasting your own time as much as anyone else's. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:22, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I took the OPs question at face value, the way it was asked. I'm not going to guess at what the OP might have meant, I simply answered the question which was asked, however impractical the question might have been. How is that time wasting? As for "getting snippy", I think I've got the right to be a bit put out by someone calling my correct answer "trolling". Anyway, none of this meta discussion is actually helpful to the OP, so can we please stop it now?

This is the Reference Desk. You are supposed to supply references. One-word answers with no further information for the OP do not belong on the Reference Desk. Answers that seem logical to you but have no references are only slightly better. Comet Tuttle (talk) 01:25, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

References are only really needed for controversial claims, which mine wasn't.

I think a dose of Wikipedia:Assume good faith would help here... Mitch Ames (talk) 10:08, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

"No." --Mr.98 (talk) 14:29, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm afraid that each Windows installation doesn't necessarily have a unique key though. Businesses with a Volume license key have a single product key for potentially thousands of desktop machines (and that's not including any pirate copies that will have the product key from another machine). ZX81 ^talk 22:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

That's true, and reduces the total database size even more. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:22, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

The previous answer ("No") isn't very useful - but it's obviously correct. It's simply impossible for Microsoft to have caught every single Windows-based computer's serial number - for not one single one to have slipped through the cracks in 25 years! Not least because in the days of Windows 1,2 and 3 - there was no Internet access for the overwhelming proportion of PC's. The amount of memory is rather trivial though. Let's get silly and suppose that every person on Earth has had 10 Windows-based PC's each. That's 60 billion machines. If it took a thousand bytes to store each record - with no compression or anything, that's 60Tbyte. You could store that quite easily on a single computer with a decent RAID array of a dozen 1Tbyte hard drives. That's just nothing to a company like Microsoft. SteveBaker (talk) 04:05, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

How do you store 60TB of data on a dozen 1TB drives? --Tango (talk) 04:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm... are we missing an article Programmer's dozen here? Jørgen (talk) 11:00, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I was last interested in Microsoftware about six years ago. Back then, its CDs came with very elaborate keys that you had to type in to get the software to install. Sometimes I'd remember to take the CD with me but forget the key. I'd then look around on the web and download the same very short PDF file that had a small number of keys for each fairly recent MS product; more often than not, the first of these keys would work. Things could be different now though. -- Hoary (talk) 14:45, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Star Trek TOS, film quality, and HD re-release

I'd like to know if rereleasing the original series in HD would actually be any better quality than the DVD versions already out there. Is the condition of the original film reels good enough to support HD? Or are we essentially getting an HD-sized copy of the DVD image quality? Thank you! 61.189.63.142 (talk) 22:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It is possible digitally to enhance the image quality, and save the result as a HD movie. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 22:36, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

But if the original resolution is low, it won't really be HD, and it wouldn't look nearly as good as actual HD. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:04, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I thought TOS was shot on film, in which case an HD version would look far better, if the film was ever located and cleaned up. And, of course, if they used that as the source material for the Blu-Ray version. Comet Tuttle (talk) 01:22, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

As you can see here - StarTrek TOS was filmed on excellent quality 35mm EASTMAN stock - they were filming on tripods in studio lighting - so we may assume the quality was pretty good. This site says you can expect to get between 12 and 20 megapixels out of a frame of decently shot 35mm film. 1080p HDTV is 1920×1080 pixels - 2 megapixels. So even without processing, the original 35mm film has plenty of resolution to make crisp HDTV images. The film stock from even the earliest shows dates from maybe 1964 - it's only 45 years old - that's not ancient by cine film standards.

None of this guarantees that the quality of the HD version will be better than the regular DVD's because sometimes companies don't do a good job. But there is no fundamental technological barrier to them being vastly better if the company who did the conversion did a diligent job. SteveBaker (talk) 03:41, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I have the first season of TOS on Blu-Ray, and I can tell you it looks far better than any previous release of the series I've seen, including on TV. They did an amazing job cleaning up the series. I highly recommend it if you are considering it (or even if you aren't). ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 05:40, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

MS Excel help

For whatever reason, I need to go through about 4500 cells (all in one column) and click F2 to edit and then it Enter to accept the changes without actually changing anything. I have tried formatting everything as text and numbers but nothing helps. I think a macro would do the trick, but I am not up on my VB. Thanks --omnipotence407 (talk) 22:37, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Can you explain what your goal is? Are you just trying to force a manual update of all the cell values? (Because that is very easy to do with Excel.)

--Mr.98 (talk) 01:05, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I think that's what I'm trying to do. From what I can tell, the cells are not being considered numbers until I edit and accept. The values are copied and pasted (as values only) from the output of Microsoft Query. I'm running 2003 if that helps. It seems like it would be simple, but I haven't found anything that would help. --omnipotence407 (talk) 01:59, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, that sounds like Excel. Have you tried copying and then repasting them using Paste Special > Values? It might keep them from being treated like strings. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:49, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I meant with the "as values only." --omnipotence407 (talk) 03:23, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Have you tried copy-and-pasting first into Notepad and then from there into Excel? That sometimes helps to strip off formatting. Or save the Excel file as a text-only format (CSV for example), open in Notepad or Wordpad and do search-and-replace on any string identifiers (single or double quotes). Re the macros: there's a "record macro" button in Excel that is great for figuring out the language, but you still have to set up the loops manually... Jørgen (talk) 10:56, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Maybe even a recalc command (F9) could solve your problem. -- Codicorumus  « msg 17:48, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

the F9 didn't work. I tried doing the record macro, but the problem was that it doesn't retain the values. It ends up replacing the contents with the one that I recorded with. --omnipotence407 (talk) 19:39, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps, you can do the job via a formula that results in the appropriate number and then –if necessary– copy and paste as value. -- Codicorumus  « msg 20:01, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

November 11

Serious error

When I got home my computer had to be restarted. When it booted up it said it had recovered from a serious error. I copied the details on the "send error report" and they are:

BCCode : 77     BCP1 : C000000E     BCP2 : C000000E     BCP3 : 00000000     
BCP4 : 1727D000     OSVer : 5_1_2600     SP : 3_0     Product : 768_1

I am running Windows XP on a Dell Dimsension 2400 with 528 megs. Can anyone interpret this error report for me? I did install the latest version of Firefox yesterday and it prompted me to install the latest version of Flash Player, which I also did. I am running the latest version of Norton.--162.83.161.25 (talk) 00:46, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I cannot decode the data, but messages saying that the computer has recovered from a serious error are usually not alarming. Most often the problem never occurs again. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 00:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

As Andreas Rejbrand said, these "serious errors" are usually not serious. Bug check code (BCCode) 77 is KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR, and C000000E is STATUS_NO_SUCH_DEVICE. So the kernel tried to read a (stack) page from the page file, but couldn't find the disk where the page file was supposed to be. Why that would happen, I don't know. -- BenRG (talk) 01:39, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

By "serious", it really means, "I had an error with running the OS and had to reboot the whole thing and could not fail gracefully" rather than "this is a permanent problem." That being said, if you get LOTS of said "serious errors", it can be an indication of faulty/failing hardware (e.g. bad RAM will cause lots of weird errors of this sort). But if it is just one every once in awhile—don't panic. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:54, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. Just so you know, I never panic. I have my towel with me at all times.--162.83.161.25 (talk) 04:04, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Resuming downloads

Hi. I use firefox to download files of several megabytes. But my connection often fails, and when it reconnects, I have start the download over again. Is there a way to change the settings to resume the download from where it stopped when the connection terminated? I'm using Firefox 3.5.5. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.124.189.173 (talk) 04:23, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

This add-on] should do the job and has lots of downloads and a 5 star rating, so I would go for that if I were you. --Tango (talk) 05:01, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

note that some sites don't support resuming no matter what addons you install. they simply won't resume. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 11:01, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Downscaling a 1280x720 video? To 854x480 or 720x480?

So utterly confused. I want to resize a 1280x720 video to a smaller size. I though it was suggested to go to 640x360. Which is the more popular resizing. For example, for 640x480, it is frequently resized to 320x240. What is 1028x720 frequently resized to? I've seen 720x480 used a lot, but it's not 16:9 ratio. Thanks. Mahanga^Talk 04:46, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

For what purpose are you resizing the video? That will help to answer what size you should resize it to. — QuantumEleven 10:14, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Don't you mean 1280 and not 1208? 1208 just doesn't make any sense to your question. You can resize the video to any size you like so you really have to tell us what your application is, and what the screen size of your intended display is (both in physical inches and the number of pixels height X width). Zunaid 11:39, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Check out this graphic if you want to know what "standard" resolutions there are, and why "720x480" etc. is used a lot (it is NTSC). If you pick a small resolution in the same color on that graphic, it will be the same ratio. So 1280x720 (HD 720) cannot be smoothly resized down to another common size other than WVGA (854x480) without either cropping a bit or adding blank borders. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

My mistake, I meant 1280. I'm resizing because I would just like a smaller file size (for online video streaming) and simply don't need the large 1280x720 size. I think I'll resize it to 854x480 so that there's no cropping. It's just that I don't see many videos at that resolution (or 640x360), it just seemed a little odd. Thanks, Mahanga^Talk 16:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Pendrive

When i inserted a Kingston pen drive into my laptop (which has Windows Vista), the computer tried to find Data Traveler 2.0 device driver software from Windows update but it couldn't find. So the computer asked me to manually install it from a folder. I didn't have the device driver software so I searched for it in the internet and downloaded it. But when i double-clicked it for installing, i got an error message that it was only for Windows 98. But then, the next time i inserted the pendrive, i accidentally clicked the option named "Do not ask me to install software for this device again". So now if in insert the pendrive, nothing happens; i don't even get the prompt to manually install the software. Does anybody know how to bring back this automatic searching of sofware and prompting of the computer to install the software? I want this propmting to occur because i found a way for the pendrive to work and this way needs the pronpting of the computer. And if you have any other way of bringing the pendrive icon (without the prompting of the computer) in the MyComputer, that is also welcome. Please help me with this as I have some important documents in the pen drive. Thank you very much. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.246.57.2 (talk) 05:33, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

To get the prompt, insert you usb drive into the computer, then go to the Start menu and type "devmgmt.msc" without quotes into the search box (that's assuming you're using the default vista start menu. If you're using classic, go to Start -> Run and enter "devmgmt.msc" into the box). Now find your usb drive in the list, right click it and select properties. Go to the Driver tab and click Update driver. The prompt should then appear. —Preceding unsigned comment added by .isika (talk • contribs) 12:45, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Simple FaceBook application

I have an online community which i would like to spread to my friends via Facebook. I hear you can make your own applications and simply have your app be a window to a certain URL.

I have a java applet which hooks directly to my chatroom, so it would be PERFECT if the application could just bring the Facebook user to a page with my applet on it. Is there anyone who can help me do this? Thanks!

137.81.112.176 (talk) 05:54, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Note: I managed to get the application started, but for some reason people cant add it to their profiles? If anyone is skilled at doing FB apps please let me know, im having a pretty difficult time trying to get the application be able to be added to peoples profiles. Thanks!

137.81.112.176 (talk) 09:27, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Have you gotten an API key from Facebook? You can't just add anything to FB, you have to use their process for adding apps. See here, for example. --LarryMac | Talk 13:29, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah i think i know what you are talking about. It says i have 4 fans but no one "uses" the app. I dont know how to design the app to "hook into facebook" so people can add it to their profile and etc. I know nothing at all about php, and the app is just supposed to be a portal to a web chat, which works. Is there any way i can get a very simple phpish thing that just hooks into FB and does nothing else, so my friends can use the app and it "counts" it on facebook?

137.81.112.176 (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I want to know the turnover, the number of employees of quechup.com or idate corporation

Hi, I'm german and translated the article quechup into german. Now I want to complete the article with informations about the enterprise. I've searched with Google to estimate the turnover, the number of employees of quechup.com or idate corporation, but without success. Perhaps somebody can give me these or other background informations. Thanks in advance Jan —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jan Renzlow (talk • contribs) 09:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC) -- Jan Renzlow (talk) 10:33, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Their "investor relations" link, which you must have already investigated, yields very vague information, which is typical of a small private company. Their whois record shows a registrant in Las Vegas, Nevada, and checking with the Nevada secretary of state's corporation lookup, a search for "idate" yields a "revoked" domestic corporation at this page showing the officers' address in Newbury, Berkshire, which must be where the company is located. These records don't list an employee count, and the fact the corporation's status is 'revoked' doesn't mean much; they could have reincorporated in another state for their US purposes, or have simply decided to not maintain a US corporation. Sorry. Maybe there is a British or EU website where you can look up a company and find out how many employees they have, and possibly even what their turnover is (though that's highly confidential data at every company and I think it's unlikely you'll be able to find it). Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:34, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

'Find' feature in Mac OSX Leopard

What I want to do is search a specific folder for items modified after a specific date. Back in the day this was easy, and possibly still is, but I can't find a way of reliably doing it. The Finder search bar will do this only if I also specify a name of the document so I can get round it by searching for individual types of document (ie searching for '.pdf' then'.indd' then '.qxp' etc. but I would like to get a consolidated result with all the files modified within the time span. Thanks in advance!   pablo_hablo. 09:27, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Go to the folder that you want to search, then hit Command-F. This will start the search feature. Click on "folder name" at the top. Change the search criteria to "last modified date" and fill in your timeframe. Dismas|^(talk) 11:28, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good but I'm not getting a "folder name" option to click on; just 'This Mac', "pablo" (my home folder), 'Shared' and then the options "Contents" and "File Name".   pablo_hablo. 11:35, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

That's odd. I'm running Leopard. So, using my iTunes music folder as an example, I navigate to that folder, hit Command-F, and along the top I have "Search: This Mac "iTunes Music" | Contents File Name Save -" If I click on "iTunes Music" and limit my search by "Last modified date" within the last 10 days, it gives me a list of items. Although, just the stuff in that folder. Not the files within those modified folders... Dismas|^(talk) 11:50, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Mine's 10.5.8 - are you running Snow Leopard?   pablo_hablo. 11:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Same here. 10.5.8. Dismas|^(talk) 11:54, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Weird. I can specify the folder to search if I use the search bar but not if I use the ⌘F option. However - typing modified:>=01/01/2009 in the search bar seems to be doing the job at the moment, but I am now concerned as to why my machine behaves differently to yours ...   pablo_hablo. 12:02, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

If you've got XP, is there much point in upgrading to Vista?

A lot of Vista install disks with COAs are available very cheap now. I've got XP. Is there much point in upgrading to Vista? From what I've read on the internet it seems Vista is poorly thought of by many/some. 78.149.246.109 (talk) 11:13, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

If you want your computer to run slow, lag randomly, make it difficult to find drivers and have a cool interface, then sure, go ahead and upgrade to Vista. F (talk) 12:13, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Unless you are upgrading your hardware to something which XP doesn't have driver support for, there's no reason to install to Vista. It's actually less stable than XP and has many of the problems listed above. If you're thinking of upgrading, Windows 7 is the way to go - it's basically a version of Vista without all of Vistas problems. —Preceding unsigned comment added by .isika (talk • contribs) 12:32, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I think Windows Vista is a much better OS than XP. The user interface is much more appealing, the system is more stable, the start menu is improved, it is much easier to search for files, browse folders, copy/move files etc. But, of course, Windows 7 is even better. Window snap and other features are great. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 13:50, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Sure Vista has lots of cool menus and themes (personally I always use classic) but Vista is very unstable compared to XP and generally runs slower while consuming more resources. See Criticism of Windows Vista

I think the real problem with Vista is that it needs lots of memory - I just booted my Vista system, and with nothing loaded, it was using 1.35 Gigs. If you've got a PC with "only" a Gig, I think you'll find it a poor upgrade. With lots of memory, I'm happy with it as an OS and do like some of the features mentioned above. --Phil Holmes (talk) 14:13, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Windows Vista is awful compared to XP or 7. I'd rather have a fast system than lots of unnecessary "cool" looking features, themes and start menus. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.85 (talk) 14:15, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Windows Vista runs fast on my four-year old (quite high-end, though) Dell Dimension. But, probably, Windows 7 will run even faster. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 15:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

<obligatory>Switch to Mac.</obligatory> Tan | 39 15:25, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

On my computer (hp 530, 2GB ram) Vista was slower than XP, and took much more harddrive and ram. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lukipuk (talk • contribs) 15:31, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Microsoft has put together a comparison of Windows XP, Vista, and 7 for your convenience. It is up to you whether the added features in Vista are "worth it." I think many people were dissatisfied with Vista, but I never had any trouble at all with it in terms of stability or performance (and I spend my day-job benchmarking high-performance computers - so I suspect that most people who claim "poor performance" are either blowing smoke or incompetently repeating blog-o-web hype that is counterfactual). Vista improved hardware support, introduced the Windows Display Driver Model framework - vastly improving throughput and consistency to video cards, the PCIe bus, and other peripherals [16]; dramatically rearchitected multithreading in support of modern CMP and SMP computers [17], DMA, ... the numerous technologies which Vista added make possible vastly higher performance computers. The question of whether it will make your computer any faster can only be answered by benchmarking your hardware. The new features do incur an overhead, and in some cases (especially if your old hardware cannot benefit from the new performance-enhancements) the overhead may be higher than the performance gain (as has been pointed out above). Nimur (talk) 15:53, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Any figures coming from Microsoft are highly suspect, as they of course want to sell you the new stuff, so they will just skip listing any features that were available in XP that have been dropped in both Vista and 7 (although they did list one that was dropped in Vista and restored in 7). They also don't list the much higher system requirements for both Vista and 7, which gives you a real idea of how many more resources they use. The chart is also full of opinions and exaggerations, like "more easily", and my favorite, "Find files and programs instantly". Instantly ? Really ? Absolutely no time is required ? That's a nice trick. A real comparison chart would have objective facts, like times and numbers of clicks and Megabytes, rather than subjective terms like that. StuRat (talk) 16:28, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

To follow up, here are the system requirements for XP [18], Vista [19], and 7 [20]:

            Memory (MB)       Speed (MHz)     Free Disk Space (GB)
          Min/Recommended   Min/Recommended   Min/Recommended
          ===============   ===============   ====================
XP          64-128           233-300           1.5     
Vista      512-1024          800-1000          15   
7         1024-2048              1000          16-20

So, as you can see, there was an absolutely huge leap in system requirements from XP to Vista, with only a modest increase from Vista to 7. I'd pay particular attention to the speed requirement. If you need a computer that's 3-6 times faster to run Vista than XP, that's likely because Vista is 3-6 times slower. Now, to answer the original Q, I'd wait and get Windows 7. There's a reason why Vista is on sale so cheaply now: it's junk. StuRat (talk) 16:57, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

The anti-Vista hyperbole is just that, hyperbole. The new driver model makes Vista much more stable than XP, in my opinion; I have never gotten a BSOD in Vista, whereas my XP machine has suffered 20 over the years. That said, I never upgrade an OS unless there is a need. If your system is stable and your applications work, don't mess with it. What is making you consider an upgrade? Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia has Features new to Windows Vista, Features removed from Windows Vista, Features new to Windows 7, and Features removed from Windows 7.

A lot of the changes that people talk about are really changes in one application, explorer.exe. You don't have to use Explorer to copy and search your files any more than you have to use Internet Explorer to browse the web. Explorer has never been all that good and the changes don't make it all that much better. For the cost of a Windows 7 upgrade you might as well buy Directory Opus, which has a zillion more features than Explorer will ever have. Changes to the Start Menu don't matter to me because I so rarely need it. If I want to open the Run dialog I press Win+R, if I want to open my web browser I press Win+W. The first is a standard key combo, the second I defined myself using AutoHotkey. I've never entirely understood why people care about the 3D compositing user interface. I don't want my operating system to entertain me with animated cutscenes, I just want it to run my applications. Since I don't care about UI themes I'm not very familiar with third-party skinners, but WindowBlinds was/is one such. If you just want cool-looking window borders, it'll do fine.

There are some more meaningful improvements to the OS proper, of course. But keep third-party alternatives in mind, especially if you'd have to pay for the upgrade. -- BenRG (talk) 18:44, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Ubuntu v. Windows: reliability, speed, compactness, error recovery?

Putting aside issues of ease of use, how do the two compare in the technical aspects above? To be more specific about Windows, currently I have WinXP, I suppose I could upgrade to Vista. 78.149.246.109 (talk) 11:16, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Upgrading to 7 would be ideal, and would be faster/more reliable than vista or XP in my opinion. Though I don't use Ubuntu, so I can't give a comparison Chris M. (talk) 14:43, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

In the process of reinsalling Win XP to get rid of a major malware problem, I used a xubuntu live CD to backup all the user's documents, photos, music, email, etc. onto an external disk. I noticed that xubuntu was noticably quicker at copying than XP. Astronaut (talk) 15:16, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I have hp530 laptop (upgraded to 2GB ram) with WinXP and Ubuntu (Xubuntu 8.04). I have tried Windows Vista and Windows 7. WinXP gives best performance, folowed by Ubuntu, next Windows 7, with worse performance achieved by Vista. On th reliability scale, windows XP did best, and Ubuntu worse (there was lot of problems with wifi and laptop special buttons, things that worked stopped working on reboot). I cant say much about 7 and Vista, i didnt use them long enough (because of low performance). I dont know what exactly do you mean by compactness, but Vista and 7 has lot of bloat which i really didnt need (voice recognition and similar stuff), on the other hand there was some neat new things like search and lot of user interface tweaks. Ubuntu have some cool things too, imo the best is package manager, where you can install software literally with one click (no more web searching). This is not meant to be objective comparison, just how the things works for me...hope it helps :) Lukipuk (talk) 15:28, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

When you ask about "speed", your question is extremely vague. "Speed to do what"? Are you referring to responsiveness of the user interface? FLOPS count? Boot time? Disk access? Nimur (talk) 16:11, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Question seems to cause responses to be highly susceptible to personal bias. Kushal (talk) 16:22, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

The question is too vague for us to be able to answer. It all depends on what applications you are going to be using. You don't have to choose just one or the other, by the way; you can set up your computer to dual-boot and choose either Ubuntu or Windows at startup. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:50, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Difference between property files and XML file in java

Hi,
What is the difference in using property files and XML files in Java....
In which cases property files would be helpfull and in which cases XML files would be helpfull.... Thanks,
- Atchays —Preceding unsigned comment added by Atchays (talk • contribs) 11:24, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Properties files are much simpler and are stored in a very direct plaintext representation. XML is a structured markup language, so it adds a lot of complexity - but the benefits are more extensible, better-organized data that can be produced and consumed by many other applications. You can read about .properties files and XML at our respective articles. Nimur (talk) 15:49, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Tuples

I came up with the idea of tuples in imperative, procedural or object-oriented, languages many years ago. A tuple is simply a collection of variables, or values, treated as one single variable, or value, exactly preserving the number, order, and types of every single variable or value. The best idea is to show by example, assuming a hypothetical extension to, for example, Java:

(int, String) myTuple = (1, "Hello world!");
(int, String) copyOfMyTuple = myTuple;
int i;
String s;
(i, s) = copyOfMyTuple; // now i equals 1 and s equals "Hello world!"

Trying to mix tuples with different numbers of members, or with the types of members conflicting, is an error.

The only thing that is undefined is what happens in an assignment such as the last line above when several lvalues refer to the same actual variable. I suppose this could be resolved by defining that assignment happens in strict left-to-right order, so the assignment that happens last is the one that stays in effect.

Now so far tuples might just be syntactic sugar for several variables or values written together, but coupled with generics, we can have:

List<(int, String)> listOfTuples = new ArrayList<(int, String)>();
listOfTuples.add((1, "Hello world!"));

where tuples are a kind of inner classes. I don't think this, coupled with the assignment to individual type lvalues I showed above, can easily be done with existing languages.

My questions, therefore, are:

1. Have I thought about this correctly or have I made a mistake, resulting in a contradiction or open question, in the above?
2. Has anyone else thought about this?
3. Since I can design new features for programming languages pretty easily, but can't actually implement even a simple compiler to save my life, is there an existing language extension that does this? JIP | Talk 19:25, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Outlook email backup

At work I use Outlook and the archiving function is disabled where you can save bunches of emails into .pst files. THere is no chance of enabling the .pst functionality or using different software or installing any kind of additional software.

However, saving individual emails to the hard drive is allowed. I was wondering if there's a way I can create a macro to simply save every email to a folder on my hard drive? I don't have any experience in this but I have heard of using macro's for routine, systematic manual tasks like this. Any chance somebody could get me started?

Thank you -Joe 173.30.18.29 (talk) 19:36, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

When I left my last job, I managed to copy all my mail from Outlook. It was a while ago now, so I'm unsure of the exact details, but I either copied the standard .pst files from my company PC onto a CD (they were always on my PC - I never let the server keep the mails), or I exported the mail to a format suitable for my home email client. I did this a few days before I left, so I could try out several methods to see which one worked. The only problem I had was to get my email contacts backed up. No matter which method I used, I could only get a text file with them in - I ended up re-entering them all. Astronaut (talk) 19:59, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

how to p[lay mission 7

I have a game Immune attack on my computer.I have already copm--True path finder (talk) 20:46, 11 November 2009 (UTC)leted 6 levels (missions) of it.But in mission 7 which is "Eat staphylococcus ",I can elliminate staphylococcus But in next step I can not differentiate between healthy and infected cells .Can any one Guide me .--True path finder (talk) 20:46, 11 November 2009 (UTC)mks