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February 27

SQL UPDATE statement to multiply each value by 10

I am trying to figure out how to run a SQL command that will multiply a given field by 10 and update that row. Basically I have a table where rows have weights, and I want to change a weight of 1 to 10, 2 to 20, 3 to 30 and so on so I can have room (BASIC line numbering style) to put weights in between. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.237.229.90 (talk) 03:08, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

ok this is much easier than I thought. update table set weight=weight*10 works. --76.237.229.90 (talk) 03:29, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Resolved

StuRat (talk) 21:13, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

How can a distributed p2p database work at all?

How can a distributed p2p database work at all?

take something simple. I have half the phone book (m-z), you have half the phonebook. (a-m). I ask you if Abigail Atkinson is listed, and you say "yes, there are seven Abigail Atkinsons, here are the records"

but there aren't seven. There are eight.

You are one of the 10k imposter nodes the eighth Abigail hired to keep people from finding her number.

how can a p2p database defend against that? 109.128.182.182 (talk) 04:51, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

I think that peer-to-peer databases in the real world are either of a type where there are no malicious nodes (because you own all the nodes, and the benefit is the lack of a single point of failure), or they are key-value databases where the key contains enough information to authenticate the value (and the key is much shorter than the value, so you only need a low-bandwidth connection to a trusted source). It might be possible to have a network with a priori untrusted nodes and a priori unverifiable replies, using some kind of automatic trust-building process (you send identical queries to a node you trust and a node you don't trust, and if you get the same reply then you trust the second node—except a bit more sophisticated than that). I'm sure somebody is researching it. The Wikipedia articles web of trust, trust metric and reputation system might be relevant. -- BenRG (talk) 08:31, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

One other option that comes to mind, though this is not something I know anything specifically about, are situations where comprehensiveness is not a goal. Let us say that our p2p database is a list of computers you could connect to (as in actual p2p file sharing software). I find some way to get an initial list of participating computers, and then each of those nodes can expand the list to more. It's true that there could be bad data in there (RIAA computers that gave junk info), but the amount of good data should exponentially overwhelm the bad data by the nature of the p2p system (every good node connects you to X more good nodes, whereas every bad node is probably just a failure). This sort of arrangement would be very practical for a p2p system, because it doesn't all assume the need to have one giant, coherent dataset at any one time. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:11, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Searching Amazon.co.uk

I'm trying to track down a paperback copy of Samuel Butler's Hudibras, but I'm having difficulty filtering the results on Amazon.co.uk so that POD books are not included. There are hundreds of results when I search [1], but it seems impossible to refine the results by – for example – publisher, or to exclude the POD titles. Any suggestions? 87.114.87.69 (talk) 12:38, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Amazon publishes some book search tips and there is an advanced search which can search by publisher. (Of course, this requires you to know the publisher in advance). I managed to narrow the results to 234 using this, but haven't been able to experiment with it further yet. --Kateshortforbob _talk 17:26, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Something else you could try is to sort by "bestselling" rather than by "relevance" (there's a list-box near the top-right of the results); this may be better with advanced search. Do you know if thre is any non-POD edition currently published?

Abe Books allows you to omit print-on-demand titles from their advanced search (although annoyingly not to search by condition or for only new books), but none of the other big booksellers do. Although Abe is mainly for secondhand, you can get some brand new books there.--Colapeninsula (talk) 17:37, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm trying to find out whether there is a non-POD edition currently available, which is why I'd like to exclude the POD titles from my search. As the Magic 8 Ball says, "all signs point to no"... 87.115.50.126 (talk) 19:39, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

You could try searching on other book search engines such as AddAll http://used.addall.com/ WorldCat http://www.worldcat.org/ or the British Library http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/catblhold/all/allcat.html to get the ISBN number, and then go back to Amaszon and search for the ISBN number there. There was an Oxford University Press Edition paperback published in 1973. (talk) 01:14, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

java programming

a program to find out that the two are twin prime nos or not.Create a function which will return a boolean value —Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.97.28.57 (talk) 16:13, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Please do your own homework. JIP | Talk 18:52, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

LinkedIn spam

Does anyone know how to stop repeated LinkedIn invitations? The person they purport to come from claims not to be able to stop them, and there is no "unsubscribe" link in the emails.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:35, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

It's probably an email with fake header. Gmail, at least, allows you to set rules to automatically delete specific email. Check your email provider for something similar. Quest09 (talk) 19:19, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Tell your friend to do a virus scan. APL (talk) 05:48, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

The spambots now use fake LinkedIn invitations that direct you to a phishing website to try to steal your password. There is nothing that any of us can do to unsubscribe from phishing spam. The fastest solution is to delete LinkedIn e-mails that come into your inbox. (Apologies if LinkedIn phishing spam isn't the problem you're referring to. If the problem is that a single known user is sending you lots of invitations, I would write a rule in your e-mail program to detect known text strings in the e-mail and delete anything with those known text strings.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:45, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Locating (and re-allocating?) Lost Disk Space on Vista

A few days ago, my HDD on my laptop started to get smaller and smaller, at a rate of around 100MB/minute. I never worked out what was causing this, but I did happen to do a malware check with Malwarebytes, and it found two infections, which were promptly removed. The problem of shrinking disk space has since gone away. Now, I was right down to 64KB on my disk at one point. After uninstalling a load of stuff, I am up to 20+GB, but I am sure there is space missing, as I had 20+GB and all those programs installed before this problem happened. I have run Disk Cleanup (inc. deleting restore points) and have use Auslogics Disk Defrag to defrag the disk, both to no avail. Is there anything I can do to see if there is indeed any disk space that is not registering? I am on Vista Home Premium SP2 (32-bit). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 18:33, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Well the space swallowing malware seems to have downloaded lots of stuff and put it somewhere. After eliminating the usual suspects (folders called tmp or temp, the temporary internet files, and such like), I would search the entire disk, including system and hidden files, for anything created since the malware infection took hold, particularly strange named folders. You then need to make a judgement call on what to actually delete. Note it might take Vista some time, especially if your disk is several hundred giga-bytes so this is not something to do when you are about to go out. Astronaut (talk) 20:37, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

If you right-click on a folder and select "Properties", you will get a report of the total disk space occupied by that folder. You could do some exploring to see whether the total size of your folders adds up to the size of the disk, and whether any of the folders is a lot larger than you expect it to be. I can't think of a more efficient approach. Note that it doesn't take malware to cause a problem like this -- all it takes is a buggy program that goes into a loop and keeps endlessly appending material to a file somewhere. Looie496 (talk) 22:46, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Google disk space visualizer or file space explorer or visual disk space for several pieces of software that show you a visual map of what folders are consuming space on your hard disk. Unfortunately you have to download something, and it's not something that's built into Windows. Personally I have used SpaceMonger (here's the download.cnet.com link) but I'm unsure whether it's totally Windows 7 compatible. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:41, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

PS: Your mileage may vary, but I just ran SpaceMonger on my Windows 7 machine and it worked fine. Who knew that I had 12GB in my Recycle Bin.... Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:48, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Cheers, well, I got something called 'Disktective' earlier today and tried that out. It gave me some results. I was in a hurry and just wanted to check to see what it does, so I will have to run it again and check it out again - I got a reading that said 9GB was 'unknown', but maybe I need to look again. After that, it will be a case of finding out how to reclaim the missing space (if that is it). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 21:37, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

mht

I need to convert 100,000 .mht files into html. I've tried Mozilla Archive Formats convert wizard, but it fails on 60% of the files. I've also tried several other free programs which claim to do this, but they mess up the links to images and css, resulting in broken pages. I'm on Windows but can try linux programs if there is one which does exactly this. Thank you 82.43.92.41 (talk) 18:59, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Our MHTML article mentions a linux program called kmhtConvert, which looks like it might do what you want. Looie496 (talk) 19:44, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

From the screenshots and documentation it seems designed to convert one file at a time manually. I have 100,000 :/ Is there a way to make it do them all in one go? I have zero experience with linux and would like to be sure it will work before I install linux over Windows 7 82.43.92.41 (talk) 23:52, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

If you have a file containing a list of the files you want to convert, it is easy (for somebody used to working in Linux, anyway) to write a script that automates the whole process. But when you said "can try linux programs", I didn't realize you meant installing Linux specifically for this purpose -- I have doubts that it would be worth doing just for this. Looie496 (talk) 01:16, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Installing Linux to do one task would be crazy, but maybe some sort of live-disk would be reasonable. APL (talk) 05:45, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Why don't you install Cygwin? This would provide you with a Unix-compatible interface to your existing Windows operating system. The benefits are that (1) you don't have to install a whole new operating system, as Cygwin runs as an application on Windows, (2) Cygwin's own interface is completely Unix-compatible, and (3) it has direct access to the Windows operating system's files without an abstraction layer. The only downside is that pre-built Unix/Linux binaries are incompatible with it, as Cygwin can only run native Windows binaries. You have to download the source codes and compile them from inside Cygwin. JIP | Talk 18:48, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

It looks like there is a non-interactive option, "--NoGui". If you post a few input files I'm sure someone will run it on their Linux system to see if the output's OK for you. --Sean 14:39, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Problem with signature

I am trying to work out why my signature isn't functioning properly. Jay _{Σεβαστός}^discuss 19:13, 27 February 2011 (UTC) Here it seems to work fine, but sometimes the "discuss" link does not work (e.g. here) or it goes all funny like this: [2]. What is going on here? Thanks so much for the help in advance.

Gah, it took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure this out! The link does not work because it would link to the same page that you are already on -- it is an item on your talk page linking to your talk page. The sandbox appearance looks strange because you have spaces at the front of the line -- any text that starts with spaces will be placed in a border and printed using a special font. Looie496 (talk) 20:06, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you so much - sorry it took a lot of your time to figure this one out! It was driving me crazy as well. Jay _{Σεβαστός}^discuss 15:31, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

February 28

RAID 1+1 Array

  I now want a RAID 1+1 array; is there any Windows-compatible hardware or software which implements RAID 1+1? I prefer hardware-based RAID to software-based functionality. Rocketshiporion♫ 00:50, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

How is a RAID 1+1 array different from a RAID 1 array? Just set up a all your disks in a single RAID 1 array and you get exactly the same functionality. Also, I can't point you to any hardware solutions although I would be surprised if none exists. Taemyr (talk) 15:12, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Therein lies the difficulty - all the hardware implementations of RAID 1 of which I'm aware only support two-mirror sets, and I want a four-mirror array. Rocketshiporion♫ 08:16, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Copy and run a file into C:\ drive and all folders, sub folders, subsub folders.etc

I urgently need to find a way to mass attempt to copy a file from a USB into every folder, subfolder and subsubfolder in C:\ and if it works attempt to run the .exe file. It will be even better if a log can be produced showing where it was sucessful or not in copying and/or running a .exe. Can anyone figure out how to put such an instruction into command prompt or powershell? General Rommel (talk) 01:21, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Do you mean that you want to copy tha same executable into the root of every directory and all sub-level directories on C: (which I'm presuming is your Boot Drive), and then execute all the copies of the executable? Rocketshiporion♫ 04:27, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

And if that is what you mean, I'm curious to know why anyone would want to do such a thing? Other than as a rather arbitrary test of disk drive reliability, it wouldn't do anything that you couldn't achieve in other ways. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:50, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Rocketshiporion, that is exactly what I'd like to do, and to AndyTheGrump, I just want to test something about my computer. General Rommel (talk) 08:11, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

(Assumption 1: you're on windows). Assuming access to suitable tools (e.g. excel, openoffice), it's fairly easy to take a recursive listing of a folder structure from a command prompt (e.g. dir /s /a:d > filename.txt), load into excel and parse out distinct folders using (in column B) a formula such as =IF(MID(A1,2,1)="D",RIGHT(A1,(LEN(A1)-17)),""). You can then use these as the basis of a batchfile, by putting together a repeated list of copy xyz.exe c:\dir\dir\ strings by formula, notably using syntax such as +A1&A2&A3, where A1-A3 contain the sub-elements of the command. It's a job of a couple of minutes. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:32, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I have a not so high understanding of Excel and unfortunatley I don't know what you are talking about. When I looked up command dir, it dos not seem to help me do the job. AS well as that I can't run scripts or batch files either. So des anyone have an idea? General Rommel (talk) 23:16, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I can't believe that you really want to copy an executable file into every folder of your hard disk. That's nuts. Perhaps just you want to run it once per hard disk folder with that folder as the current directory? If so, you can try this:

       cd /d c:\
       for /d /r %i in (.) do ((cd /d "%i" && u:\foo.exe) || (echo %i >> u:\failed.txt))

where u:\foo.exe is the program, and u:\failed.txt is a log of directories where the execution failed. This could be adapted to actually copy the executable into each directory, but I'm not going to tell you how unless you tell me why you need to do it (to satisfy my curiosity, if nothing else—I expect some reward for the time I volunteer here). If you just want to know which folders you have write/execute permissions in, you can use AccessEnum. -- BenRG (talk) 05:00, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Well I'll tell you. I want to put a executable on a locked down DET laptop given to students in year 9. All I want to do is run Google Chrome (they only let you use IE for a web browser, which I find insulting), so that is why. So now will you please help? I'll attempt to ask someone to make an virtual medal for you (now where am I'm going to get that?) if you want recognition. General Rommel (talk) 08:53, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

So basically you found that you couldn't run your .exe in a particular folder so you want to see if it can run from some other folder on the C drive? Odds are if they locked down the laptop sufficiently to block the .exe from running on C:\ and a random selection of other folders, then it probably won't run anywhere. That being said there are possibly other means of accomplishing what you want (run a .exe file not approved by whoever set up security on your laptop). For example, have you tried just running the .exe off the USB drive? That often works for me. Also, it would be helpful if you tried to not give the impression of taking offense at the responses here, you may not realize it but your request is extremely bizare and many people here (computer professionals or otherwise) would never have a need to do what you're doing. Also, you were given a solution above (using batch files and excel would do what you want to do) and turning it down without providing more information about what your goal is, isn't very helpful. The reality is that your method of getting chrome to work probably will be a lot of effort for little gain. Good luck! Chris M. (talk) 20:17, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I should have mentioned, that you cannot run .exes from a USB drive as well, and there are loopholes because there was one (until group policy took care of that). I'm sorry if I sound that I just shrugged away from the first response, but as I said already, unfortunatley I don't know what it means, and I can't run batch files. That is why I would like a better answer please. Thank you for noticing that though. Perhaps I sould say thanks for a good response Ben! General Rommel (talk) 22:47, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

@General Rommel - If you'd like to give anyone a virtual medal, refer to Wikipedia's barnstars. Rocketshiporion♫ 07:45, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I will if BenRG wants a reward for helping people at the reference desk. Once I figured how to make oneGeneral Rommel (talk) 09:17, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

A quick search suggests these laptops tend to be locked down fairly well and many people have tried different ways to get round the restrictions [3] (see comments) [4] but when uncovered these tend to be locked down too [5] [6] and also tampering is grounds for confiscation as well as what sounds like an unpleasent visit from various people in your school and involved in the program and in some cases possibly including punishments like detention or even suspension. In other words, it may be prudent to consider the wisdom of breaking the security restrictions of something it sounds like you don't own particularly if (as it sounds like from here) you don't really know what you're doing and you're posting publicly about it. Nil Einne (talk) 15:41, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I know the risks of asking here, but I'm am quite sure that a officer will not mind. I am aware of the risks. As I hae said above, all I want to do is ise Google Chrome. General Rommel (talk) 01:12, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Try putting the executable in a .zip archive. Use Windows Explorer to browse the zip file and run the .exe. decltype (talk) 08:33, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I was AFK for a few days, but I'll follow up for what it's worth. I don't want a barnstar or any other reward; I was just in a silly mood because the question was silly (or seemed silly, at any rate). Having heard the explanation I understand what led you to ask the question, but it is really unlikely that this global-copy attack will do anything useful (as other people have always said). I promised to give you this:

       cd /d c:\
       for /d /r %i in (.) do (copy /y u:\foo.exe "%i" && "%i\foo.exe" && (echo %i >> u:\succeeded.txt))

but I recommend strongly against actually trying it. -- BenRG (talk) 02:29, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

I tried it, and unless it was typed wrongly (I didn't understand anything when I typed 'help for') it failed. Thanks anyway Ben!!!!!! General Rommel (talk) 03:17, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Garage Band: recording with real instrument, converting to software instrument

I've been trying to figure out how to do this. I'll record myself playing guitar with Garage Band '08. What I want to do is take the notes I have just played and convert them into notes for a software instrument. Is this possible? I can copy and paste the guitar information in the top track section, but when I look in the bottom track editor section, the information doesn't paste into the software instrument track. When I try playing the software instrument track, it doesn't do anything. Is there any way to do what I'm trying to do or does it just not work like that? Thanks 129.3.151.117 (talk) 03:15, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Detection of the notes you play, and conversion to a software instrument format (e.g., MIDI), is an incredibly difficult challenge. Converting recorded-audio to MIDI has been discussed many times on the desk (see this archive-search), and the answer is generally summarized as "currently impossible" or at least "extremely difficult," due to inherent theoretical challenges in the detection of the notes. In this discussion from November 2010, I described some research-grade software technology that can convert MP3 to MIDI, and some of the reasons why this research is still far from being a "one-click conversion" software tool. What you could do is obtain an electronic guitar with a MIDI interface: Guitar synthesizer or "MIDI guitar" and play through that. And, with professional-grade software (and a high-end, hybrid synthesizer/guitar), you can record both the waveform of the music as well as the MIDI note meta-data. As far as I know, this is not something GarageBand can do - but it can probably take in the MIDI track only, which may be suitable for your needs. Nimur (talk) 18:37, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

MacBook battery bar problem

I have a first-generation MacBook running Snow Leopard, and I've recently started having trouble with the battery indicator. If I unplug the computer, it still shows the charging icon, right through the whole cycle, at which point it will die with no low battery warning. Sometimes I can prod it into showing an unplugged icon by repeatedly unplugging and replugging, but it's inconsistent and laggy - sometimes showing an unplugged icon while the machine is plugged in. How do I fix this? --140.232.184.35 (talk) 06:49, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Odds are it is a problem with the battery — see if you can't find another battery and see it does the same behavior. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:17, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I just replaced the battery a few months ago (because the original one was bulging), and the new battery has been working fine. So no, I'm not going to waste money replacing a perfectly functional battery. How do I fix the indicator bar? --140.232.177.147 (talk) 18:54, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

First, reset the System Management Controller.[7] If that doesn't work, then calibrate the battery.[8] ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:00, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I'd reverse that - I had this problem when I first installed a new apple battery in the same kind of machine, and calibration fixed the problem. I think Apple introduced this weirdness in the last update (somehow it's recalling information from the last battery and getting confused about the new battery?) --Ludwigs2 19:12, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Free PDF reader - not Adobe

I do not like bloatware, so I want to replace the Adobe reader with some other. The Adobe reader is about 45MB, and I think I recall reading that it is several times that when loaded into the computer. What would people recommend from personal experience please? I use Windows XP. I have already looked at various Wikipedia articles, but nothing evaluates them rather than just describing them. 92.15.3.182 (talk) 11:58, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I've used Sumatra PDF and it's very small, under 2MB. It handles most .pdfs fine but can occasionally have trouble with complex .pdfs 82.43.92.41 (talk) 12:35, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

If you haven't used Adobe Reader for a while, you might want to give it another try. It sure has been bloated, slow, and difficult to use in the past (version 7 is the worst in my opinion). However, the more recent releases of Adobe Reader (including the current version, Adobe Reader X) is actually faster and easier to use than its predecessors. And I tried it on the very same hardware I once used to run Adobe Reader 7. There is an Adobe Reader alternative called Foxit Reader, but I like Adobe Reader better. 118.96.165.14 (talk) 12:47, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I use Okular. I hear that it has a Windows version. -- kainaw™ 13:21, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

everyone uses Foxit. You won't be disappointed. Ignore the respondents above. 109.128.222.233 (talk) 14:39, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I see three problems in as many sentences here:

• 1) Not everybody uses Foxit - because I (and evidently some of the above respondents) do not.
• 2) "You won't be disappointed" is an absolute.
• 3) This is a reference desk. We do not advise people to ignore other people's answers, especially when they offer relevent advice. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:31, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Okay, but he should still just install foxit. 109.128.222.233 (talk) 16:47, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

For me, Foxit Reader does not support form filling. In both Windows and Linux, it does not support catalog indexing and has a tendency to mangle copied text. So, why install it? I will certainly be disappointed. Please make some attempt to comprehend that this is a reference desk. If you want to state absolute facts, they need to be true. If they are questionable, you need to provide references to back them. -- kainaw™ 17:09, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I seem to remember IrfanView as being able to view .pdf documents. The only disagreeable (to me) feature of this (free) software was its ugly icon. It uses Ghostscript to render .pdfs, but as for its accuracy I cannot say as I have not used it recently. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 17:28, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Evince is available for Windows as well. For the technically-inclined, it does not use ghostscript (so certain subtle PDF-rendering artifacts are avoided). Here's a comparison of Evince vs. Adobe Reader features. Nimur (talk) 18:30, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I just use preview - does everything adobe reader does, and more, and is generally snappier to use. or if you want something more sophisticated, get Skim. --Ludwigs2 19:15, 28 February 2011 (UTC) wrong platform, sorry --Ludwigs2 19:16, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

The icon is a red cartoon cat which is squashed because it has been run over. Since I like Irfanview, I am going to claim that this is a lovely icon, and is also a very funny joke, unfortunately accessible only to Bosnians. 213.122.11.147 (talk) 23:08, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

It's icon is roadkill? I knew it was a contorted red cat, but I did not know that........ --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 00:56, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Google Chrome has its own PDF reader. Downloading Chrome just for this is probably overkill, but if you have it already, or are otherwise looking to use a different browser to the troubled IE, this might be an option for you. I've found Chrome's PDF viewer to be fast and reliable. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 19:46, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

This advice is orthogonal to everything above, but my advice is to permanently abandon your dislike of bloatware, since your objection to it is based on either RAM or disk space. Here in 2011, RAM is cheaper than it has ever been in history, hard disk space even more so, and who cares if software takes up more RAM than "it ought to", since today's operating systems use a page file and will immediately take care of the "problem" if you somehow fill up your computer's RAM with such software. I had the same attitude fifteen years ago, but these days I see this posture as being analogous to complaining that 1.44MB floppy disk drives are needlessly slow. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:31, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

If someone was just running Adobe Reader and nothing else then it shouldn't be a problem on a modern computer. But considering most programs try to take ~300MB each, even running just a few programs at the same time can cause a 2GB system to be used up quickly. Upgrading RAM isn't always an option especially on netbooks or laptops, and why upgrade more RAM so that badly written / bloated programs can run when the same task can be done by a small / well written program? 82.43.92.41 (talk) 21:29, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I think you missed my comment about the page file. That's a key component of why oversized software isn't a real problem anymore. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:47, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

No. From page file: "The backing store for a virtual memory operating system is typically many orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Additionally, using mechanical storage devices introduces delay, several milliseconds for a harddisk. Therefore it is desirable to reduce or eliminate swapping, where practical." Anyone who has exhausted RAM and then needs to thrash around by repeatedly querying the swap space can attest that it is a frustrating experience, since the computer's performance becomes obscenely slower. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 22:08, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

No offense, but when was the last time you sat there, arms crossed, and waited for your PC to stop thrashing the hard disk? Swapping out the 45MB that the original poster is complaining about takes about 0.5 of one second these days. Of course I remember the bad old days when thrashing made it horrifying to run into low-RAM situations — I owned a Macintosh with no hard disk, you see — and those days are just a bad memory now, unless you're unfortunate enough to have to use old hardware with not much RAM and with a nearly full hard disk. As stated below, the original poster has taken a principled position, rather than a practical one. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:39, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

It's happening right now on my computer, even just maximizing windows of already running programs takes 5 - 10 seconds, opening a new tab in Firefox takes ages, basically doing anything takes a long time. I would not want to lump another ~60mb of Adobe Reader on top. Process explorer reports 1.3GB of RAM in use, with 2.5GB of pagefile. Windows 7, 2GB of installed RAM. I really appreciate programs which don't use loads of RAM for no reason. 82.43.92.41 (talk) 23:56, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Happens to me all the time. On pretty high end machines too.

I've noticed that there are two schools of computer use. Some people are single-taskers : they do one thing at a time, they rarely use tabbed browsing, and when they are done with a task they close all related programs and start 'fresh' on their next task. If they need to reference a web page for their work, more often than not they'll print it out.

I am not one of those people. At any given time I've probably got a two dozen firefox tabs open in at least a couple of windows. At least one development IDE, Thunderbird, a word processor, a calculator, and a bunch of file browsers.

If you're from the first group, I'd agree that "software bloat" isn't much of an issue, but if you're in the second group your choices are to change your mindset (Which is an admission of tool failure) or to seak out programs that start quickly and then can sit idle using a minimum of CPU power and RAM.APL (talk) 15:33, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Paging is much slower than that in practice because the reads/writes are generally not sequential. If, say, you're reading non-sequential 64K blocks and it takes 8ms per block, that's about 8 MB per second. Physical RAM is always in use, even when the OS reports it as free; if nothing else, it's caching file data that isn't currently mapped into the address space of any user process. Any time an application needs more RAM, something is discarded to make room for it, at the cost of extra disk accesses later if that data is ever needed again.

The best argument for speed optimization is that there are far more users than programmers. If it takes a man-week to implement an optimization that saves the average user one second per day, and there are 1,000 users and the optimization remains in the code base for one year, then it was worth it. Actually, though, the most efficient way to save users' time is probably to improve the UI or documentation. And a botched attempt at optimization may cost users time instead, if it introduces a new bug. -- BenRG (talk) 04:24, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes - this is a principled position rather than a practical one. If everybody writes programs which are ten times bigger than they need to be, well, however cheap hard drives and memory are, an order of magnitude difference is still likely to cost people a bit of money on hardware, and the same difference in the opposite direction means paupers can use old and cheap machines, and makes interesting design variations possible. So taking a moderate, reasonable amount of care to reduce bloat is just what software designers ought to do. It's not vital, but it's pleasant, and so using needlessly huge programs feels slightly unpleasant - not because they won't work, but because pandering to the ethos of bloat is very slightly immoral. Having said that, in many cases the impression of bloat may be an illusion, and the hugeness of a program may in fact be because it's very useful and does all kinds of things you'll eventually discover you need. Besides, excessive optimization is a bad thing. 213.122.11.147 (talk) 22:40, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Though I do think there are probably real performance problems when you start talking about a bloated OS running many bloated programs at once. I'm somewhat dismayed to find that 3 GhZ of processing power and 4 GB of RAM doesn't add up to much anymore, when you are layering that over Windows 7 with MS Office and a bunch of bloaty other things on there. I'm not convinced that I'm really getting a lot more of import done with that processing power than I would have been getting done with my old Pentium III running at 550 MhZ and with 256 GB of RAM. Yes, things are "prettier" and I know that takes up a LOT of processing power, and websites have gotten very complicated and all that jazz, but there's part of me that sort of expected that I'd really be seeing a truly better overall experience by now, above and beyond the specialized benchmarks. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:58, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I have installed Sumatra PDF which is now about 3MB, and it seems to work very well. The other free PDF readers suggested were several times larger. I had replaced OpenOffice by Abiword, which is about 20MB compared to the formers 400MB. I am now looking for a suitible spreadsheet. The old Visicalc, a version of which still works in a DOS window, is only a 19 kilobyte (repeat kilobyte) zip file. 92.24.191.30 (talk) 12:58, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

If you are looking for a simple office suite with very small footprint, have you ever considered "cloud office suites" that are pretty popular nowadays? They are accessible anywhere (from any Internet-enabled computer with a modern web browser), require no installation and updating, use very little disk space and memory (that can be easily reclaimed after they have been "exited"), load pretty quickly (as fast as your Internet connection), more secure (primarily because they are web pages running in a web browser —most of the processing is done in their vendors' servers— and they are regularly updated by their vendors as new security problems are discovered), and … they are free. 118.96.158.165 (talk) 02:42, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

If you are interested in cloud office suites, here are some links to the most popular ones: Google Docs (article), Docs.com (article). 118.96.158.165 (talk) 02:51, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I am not, but thanks. I have since found a 490KB spreadsheet that appears to do a good job http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page14.html#Spread32 (last freeware version S32118.zip) and a less than 2MB wordprocessor http://members.multimania.nl/textshield/ Other small applications are available at http://tinyapps.org/ http://www.portablefreeware.com or even http://www.softpedia.com 92.15.15.174 (talk) 20:23, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons

About 12-14 hours ago I wanted to upload a few pictures to Commons using Internet Explorer. The first one or two went as usual. Then after entering all of the correct information and clicking on the upload button it started returning a IE unable to (do not remember exact) page. I would use the back up button and I would get returned to an unfilled picture upload information page. I would then re-enter the information exactly the same and then click on the upload button and it would work correctly uploading the picture. This happened about 2-3 times and then I started getting a pop up small window saying Internet explorer stopped working. The program tried to recover the tab and after a few tries I got a page saying it was unrecoverable. I went to a couple of other non Wiki websites and they worked fine, I then tried Commons again with the same results. I restarted my computer with the same situation (all other sites working including Wikipedia just not Commons), gave up thinking I would retry latter. It is now latter after my computer has been shut down for the night and again the same situation. I cannot get onto the Commons main page or any of the Commons pages I have bookmarked, I also tried to get there by going through Google with no success. Always the same small pop up window and the attempt to recover the tab. Anybody else with this problem? any thoughts?
--RifeIdeas Talk 14:16, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

The Commons site now seems to be working, I just uploaded one picture. We will see if it continues.
--RifeIdeas Talk 14:59, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I uploaded several (7+) pictures and took a break. Just came back and am having the same problem of not being able to get onto any page within WikiMedia Commons. Again any thoughts? ? ? ? ?
--RifeIdeas Talk 23:23, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

There was a problem for users trying to open Commons pages in Internet Explorer, reported here at WP:VPT and at Commons:Village_pump#Commons_not_working_with_IE.2C_again. It was caused by Javascript and is apparently resolved now. If you're still having problems, the old versions of Commons files may be stored on your computer - try clearing your cache to see if this fixes it. --Kateshortforbob _talk 10:50, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

like a live powerpoint, but a video

is there any way I can make a video on my computer of me speaking into the mic while flipping through powerpoint slides, this is called a screencast I just realized, so I have my answer: yes, as well as the search term to use. Thank you. 109.128.222.233 (talk) 21:36, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Camtasia will do the job for you. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 21:38, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Or CamStudio for something free. ¦ Reisio (talk) 22:17, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Motorola Droid Series Bootloaders

Can someone please explain to me what people mean by locked bootloaders? I know what a bootloader is, but can't one just flash a new bootloader onto a Droid 2 or Atrix or whatever that doesn't check the digital signature of the kernel? As I understand, a bootloader is not hardwired. --Melab±1 ☎ 22:24, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Not necessarily. I'm not sure what method they employed, but they could have protected the memory (which could potentially be reflashed if you removed the chip and had the tools, depending on if the pins required are accessible or not), or it could have been manufactured with a ROM bootloader, which is unchangeable. Basically, yes, it can be hardwired. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 23:10, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Almost all consumer electronics devices these days boot from a flash memory part. Many such devices (nicknamed "bootsectored flash") feature write-protectable sectors. These were designed to give devices a basic loader that couldn't be corrupted even if software running the flash-write algorithm on the same part went crazy and tried to wipe the whole part. Typically such a basic loader executes in place (after the most minimal hardware setup); it checksums the next phase of the loader and only executes it if it's valid. This initial loader is written onto the flash part in one of two ways:

• In the factory of the flash manufacturer themselves, en-masse. Flash manufacturers will (for an additional cost) perform this for large orders, before the flash devices are put on the tape (the plastic roll that holds them until they're fitted onto the final PCB)
• In the phone (etc.) manufacturer's factory, where a production-line appliance connects down over the chip (e.g. with pogo-pins or a zebra connector) and performs the programming operation with the flash device mounted in the PCB.

Either way it requires either grounding a given physical pin or applying an external voltage to it. The whole idea is that this physical connection isn't normally available in the field, and the protected sectors can't be erased by software.

This process was invented purely for reliability; you don't want a bad update wrecking a whole field population of units. But it can be adapted to enforce the manufacturer's desire to lock-out third-party or altered firmware. Replace that checksum with a robust public-key cryptographic check and the system can refuse to run any firmware not signed by the manufacturer.

The obvious hack would be for someone to open up the device (e.g. phone) and (with skill and dexterity, as the pins are very small) apply the same external voltage as the manufacturing appliance did - that would unprotect the bootsector segments, allowing an unsigned loader to be written. To prevent that, a manufacturer may choose to glob epoxy over the part (making access to the pin very difficult), or to snip off the relevant pin (which logically will be held in the no-op position by an internal pull-up or pull-down resistor).

When manufacturers really want to keep out custom firmware, they have to do more. The bootsector validation code in modern game consoles is written into the chipset (so you can't just swap in a fresh boot flash); that's more difficult still to circumvent. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 01:25, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Good grief. That was a really detailed expansion of what I was saying. One point I would like to add that you didn't expand on, is that the chip likely will still need to be removed in able to access the pins required for reflashing. For example, the all so common TI OMAP's pins are not accessible without removing, as the pins are not exposed at all on the circuit board. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 17:27, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Mac OS X Interface Builder

I have a mac running Mac OS 10.5, and I use interface builder a lot for developing software. There's a problem I have though. Whenever I put things in tab views, there are no resize handles and no visible alignment guides. It's like the tab view is obscuring those or something. Is there any way to fix this? Hope someone can help, and thanks in advance. --Thekmc (talk) 22:35, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

This is a followup to the above question

So, I can make an Avi file while I'm talking and advance the slides as I'm doing my presentation. Great. Is this the right way to do what I'm doing, or am I repeating built-in Powerpoint functionality??

How shoudl I get the video OR powerpoint-with-built-in-voice-over-and-slide-advances (if that exists) to my cliwent??? In the former case, shoudl I just e-mail him the whole AVI? Or, is there some site I can put it up on, like Youtube, only it is private for just one person? 109.128.222.233 (talk) 22:56, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

In PowerPoint 2007, I see that under the "Slide Show" tab, there's a button that says "Record Narration".

Otherwise, an AVI or other movie file is going to be too large to e-mail, and YouTube videos are not private; so you could use a file transfer service like DropSend, or, if you have your own website, create a private, password-protected directory for your client on it, upload your AVI to that directory, and e-mail (or tell them via phone, or whatever) your client the directory URL and password. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:23, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Though I've never tried, I think you can do this in Google docs. Google of course own youtube, and googling "google docs video" (this is all a bit incestuous, isn't it?) turned up a result titled "Play your video files in Google Docs". These uploaded documents can be made private to a limited audience (which is the default setting). 213.122.11.147 (talk) 23:27, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Javascript - what does constructor prototype equality signify?

I'm in the process of analysing a piece of javascript malware I found when idly browsing. I've successfully deobfuscated it, bar a few lines at the top that I don't understand. They're below (don't worry, these lines themselves are harmless):

String.constructor.prototype.mama='BAR';
rNEW=Object.constructor.prototype.mama;

if('FOO'+rNEW=='FOO'+'BAR'){ 
    doc=document
};
// otherwise doc is uninitialised and subsequent calls to it will fail

At the end, if things are working well (for the malware author) doc will be the DOM document object, which he later manipulates to his wicked advantage. But I don't understand the purpose of the check he makes. What he's essentially doing, to my mind, is checking whether String.constructor.prototype == Object.constructor.prototype. In my testing, this evaluates to true in Rhino, node.js, and Firebug; and indeed in all three String.constructor == Object.constructor is true too. So I guess he's checking to see if the environment is conducive to his manipulations.

If that assumption is correct, presumably there is some javascript environment in which this isn't true, in which case he doesn't set doc and the subsequent code (his attack) will fail.

Does this check make any sense to anyone? In what environment would it fail? If he's just checking to see if he's in a DOM environment, wouldn't typeof(document)!='undefined' work just as well? Or is he checking to see if some framework or tool has hooked one of those constructors (but if so, why)?

I don't, incidentally, think this is an artefact of his automated obfuscator: it does dumber string-substitution and string-splitting things. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 23:48, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm no JavaScript expert, but it seems like he's creating a new variable in the Object Constructor Prototype. To do this, a security-manager must not be preventing write-access to the object constructor prototype. Your "equivalence-check" (String.constructor.prototype == Object.constructor.prototype) only checks for equality - his checks for equality and write-access (to add a new variable "mama"). This tutorial shows how you can override the String constructor-prototype. The malware author probably wants to append a function to the String object constructor, so that any new string in your javascript environment will be over-rided and will contain his variables and functions as a payload. I don't know if that method actually circumvents any type of security-policy or access controls on any reasonable JavaScript engine; but if it did, it could open the door for XSS or other attacks. It seems like it's his intention to append functions - not variables - to each string instance - probably for the purposes of snooping; and his check is determining whether he can modify the String constructor. Nimur (talk) 21:19, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

March 1

Iomega external hard drive

My external hard drive has no power button. How can I turn it off? Should I just unplug it? 74.14.108.10 (talk) 01:24, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

n short, Yes General Rommel (talk) 01:33, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Longer and more accurately, yes, but only after you've either powered down the computer, or told the computer that you're done using it. (Usually the operating system has an "eject" or "disconnect" option for removable media.) Turning off the drive while the computer is still using it could lead to data loss. (Aside from the dangers of stopping the drive while the computer is in the middle of writing, operating systems may cache (delay) writing to disk, sometimes for quite a while, meaning that what you think has been written to disk hasn't been yet.) Modern computers should be somewhat sophisticated about caching writes to removable media, but it's safest to inform the computer that the drive is going away soon, and allow it to do whatever finalization it needs. -- 140.142.20.229 (talk) 02:51, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Specifically in Windows the small "Safely remove hardware" icon is in the system tray of the task bar. 130.188.8.12 (talk) 18:10, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I have such a hard drive. I plug it into a power strip and turn that off, rather than pulling the plug, to prevent wear and tear on the cord (and on my back, from bending down to the insanely low electrical outlet). I also wait until the platter stops spinning from the last operation (does Control Panel + Power Options control when external hard drives do this, too ?). StuRat (talk) 02:16, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

If you're running Windows 7, just go to the Computer folder, right-click the removable HDD and press J, before you unplug the HDD. Rocketshiporion♫ 07:33, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Migrating MS Outlook

I'm currently using Windows XP, and for e-mail I use Outlook from MS Office 2003. My e-mail is actually web-based, but I have Outlook set up to call up my e-mails from the web server and let me open them, reply to them, and store them locally. But now I'm buying a new computer with Windows 7, and I'm going to get MS Office 2010. But I can't figure out what file(s) I have to save from my old computer and take over to the new one in order to keep all my old e-mails, contact list, calendar dates, etc., in my new Outlook. Any suggestions? Thanks! —Angr (talk) 07:14, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Update: actually before I spend €100 €350 on Office 2010, I'm going to see how well I survive using Open Office instead of Word and Excel and Windows Live Mail instead of Outlook. (I never use the other Office programs anyway.) So the question is modified to: How do I make all my e-mails, contact list, calendar dates, etc., from Outlook 2003 and currently stored somewhere (I'm not sure where) on one computer available to Windows Live Mail on a different computer? —Angr (talk) 10:46, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

IDK much about Office 2003, but AFAIK I think you've save all the PST files, and register them on the new computer. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will come along soon and answer your question. Rocketshiporion♫ 11:25, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Try Windows Easy Transfer. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:37, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, but I don't have an Easy Transfer Cable, so I was going to copy all the files needed on my new computer to my external hard drive. Is Rocketshiporion right that the only files I'll need to copy to the external drive are the .pst files? —Angr (talk) 15:05, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Why not just use the external drive with Windows Easy Transfer? Nil Einne (talk) 17:40, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Exactly. I have used a USB drive to do this. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 20:19, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

But to do that, I still have to get the files from my old C:\ onto the external drive, and I don't know which files to move. I suppose I could move the entire contents of C:\, if there's room on the external drive. —Angr (talk) 06:38, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm confused. Isn't the idea of Windows Easy Transfer that it's supposed to automatically know what to transfer and so copies the files itself without you needing to know what's supposed to be copied, all you need to do is provide a way for it to copy and as the article explains, that includes external HDs. I don't know how well it works, I've never used it but going by the article this is how it's supposed to work. Personally I'm reluctant to trust such things so can understand if you don't want to but it's not clear that this is your objection to Easy Transfer (actually it sounds to me like it's not). Although if you're only worried about Outlook given it is MS I would hope it works with Easy Transfer properly anyway. Also, I presume it's supposed to be run from the computer with the old settings so if you've already deleted your OS there or otherwise don't wish to boot it I guess it won't work but from the sound of your message you're still running the old OS. Nil Einne (talk) 15:18, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't object to Easy Transfer. But it can't automatically know what to transfer from computer A to computer B if computer A and computer B have no way to talk to each other (since I don't own an Easy Transfer Cable and have no intention of buying one for this single occasion). That's why I want to move the files from computer A to the external drive, and then let Easy Transfer get them from the external drive. But first I need to know which files to move to the external drive. And I think the answer I'm gradually getting from this thread is "as many as will fit, to be on the safe side" - as in the entire Documents and Settings folder, the entire Programs folder, maybe the entire WINDOWS folder. Or even (if there's room on my external drive) everything on C:\. —Angr (talk) 15:51, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Sorry but I have no idea what your fascination with the cable is, it's completely irrelevant. All it apppears to be is some sort of USB ethernet cable thing for direct connecting 2 computers via USB. Nothing in our article suggests it's essential, not even close. I suspect the vast majority of people who've used Windows Easy Transfer either use ethernet or external media and have never even touched or seen one of those cables. Also I don't get why you believe the computers need to talk to each other. AFAIK that's not how Easy Transfer is designed to work, it's definitely not what the article suggests. When run on computer A Easy Transfer copies data and settings files to the external hard disk from computer A and then when run on the computer B it copies these to B from the external HDD. There's no need for the computers to talk to each other, there's no reason why there has to be a need either. All computer A needs to do is copy the data and settings files somewhere. All computer B needs to do is to copy these files from computer A into the relevent locations. It's not like the computers are trying to set up a life long partnership.

If you have to know where the files are then it's defective and our article also needs major work. But given this is Microsoft I highly doubt that. As I said I'm not saying it always works, but I'm pretty sure it's a case of it either works or it doesn't. You knowing where the files you want to copy are is completely irrelevant since I strongly suspect Easy Transfer doesn't even give you the option to manually select extra files that you want unless they are in locations it's designed to copy in which case it obviously doesn't need you to specify the locations since it already knows them hence why it gives you the option to copy them. (It may give you the option of what you want to copy at best.)

In other words, all you need to decide is whether you trust Easy Transfer to copy all that you want. If you do then I don't see why you won't use it. As I said, all this talk of cables and needing to know where the files you want to copy are is completely irrelevant since that's not what you want to do. All you want to do is to use Windows Easy Transfer to do what it's designed to do.

Nil Einne (talk) 19:25, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

A quick search found [9] and also [10] which is continued in [11]. While I skipped thru them they clearly shows what me and others have been talking about. You will note they used the external optical media in one and external HDD option in the other. In the second they actually copied the files to a network drive in the end but there was clearly no direct communication between the computers. (The second one also appears to show something to do with mail perhaps that will help.)

This is what me and others have suggested multiple times, so if you still don't accept that, I guess this question has reached a dead end since I'm not sure what more we can say or do to convince you a cable and communication between the computers unneeded and irrelevant.

I will note that [12], the place you download the software also says "You can transfer data using an Easy Transfer Cable, removable media, or across a network" (emphasis added) which clearly implies you do not need a cable. One of the refs used in the article suggests something similar.

Nil Einne (talk) 20:00, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

The part that I didn't realize before was that I would have to download WET from Microsoft's homepage and install it on my old computer, and that it would then do the copying of files from the old computer to the external drive. I tried that, and after working for about 2 hours (of the 20 or so it predicted it would need) it "detected an error and had to close" without further explanation. So I have to everything manually after all. But at least now I understand how WET is supposed to work in theory. —Angr (talk) 12:59, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Personally in Outlook migrations I always migrate the .pst file but I specifically export the Contacts and Calendar to their own .pst files and import those. This is probably because of superstition and not because you have to. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:16, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Would Mozilla Thunderbird be able to help? BTW, after using OpenOffice for some time I have started to use the much slimmer MSWord-clone Abiword and probably Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice, with Sumatra PDF in place of Adobe. 92.15.29.32 (talk) 22:10, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

If this helps at all, I had a similar problem migrating Outlook Express XP to Outlook 2007 in Windows 7. After a lot of dead ends I found the best method was to import the outlook files into Windows Live Mail and from there export into Outlook (or import Live Mail from Outlook; can't remember). An added benefit of this is that you have a backup in Live Mail. Sandman30s (talk) 09:42, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

As I said in the second paragraph, I'm not going to use Outlook 2010 after all, but only Windows Live Mail. But I still don't know how to import Outlook files from one (internal) hard drive to another when I can't have both computers up and running at the same time. That's why I want to move the files to the external drive (as a glorified USB stick), but I'm not sure which files to move. If there's room on the external drive, I suppose it's easiest to just copy everything from the old C:\ onto the external drive and then let Windows Easy Transfer move them from there. —Angr (talk) 12:00, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

You can check Tools, Account Settings, Data files. My outlook files are in C:\Documents and Settings\<name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. It should work if you backup the entire Documents and Settings folder (good idea anyway) and ask Live Mail to import from there. Sandman30s (talk) 13:07, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, thanks! I was looking under C:\Programs\Microsoft Office and not finding anything useful-looking. —Angr (talk) 13:23, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Note that storing settings or data files or anything of the sort in in the program files directory has been strongly discouraged by MS for a long time. With Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft has gone even further so that when poorly designed programs try to write to files there it virtualises this to a location in the user directory. This has meant many programs have finally got the message and stopped with that behaviour. Microsoft programs have never written settings there for a very long time AFAIK if they ever did. In other words, there's often no need to look in the program files directory for settings and other such data files. Nil Einne (talk) 15:18, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, I didn't know that. —Angr (talk) 15:22, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Map creation

I want/need to create a simple schematic map for wikipedia. (I need fairly accurate street data) - the obvious choice appears to be to base my efforts on data from open street map. Here are my problems:

• I get a map on open street map which is far too detailed - I was expecting some method of only showing certain layers (eg "A" roads), no buildings etc.. but can't find anything like that - is there an easy way to turn it into a simple map excluding using a map as a background in a paint program and digitally tracing...
• Can anyone suggest a good way to go about creating 'simple' maps with limited data presentation eg Main bus routes in a city, high speed train lines in a country. Starting from zero - ie programs, data source, general advice etc.. ? 213.249.225.149 (talk) 13:10, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

You can have OpenStreetMap export to an SVG, then open that in an SVG editor like Inkscape, and delete the excess detail with that. But you're right that there's a lot of detail and even with this method, cleaning up is a lot of work. You might be better off asking on the openStreetMap forums if there's a way to limit what's exported in the first place. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 13:15, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Tiger would do that, but it has been discontinued. Maybe someone will know if another service took over Tiger's service. I checked and I found nothing useful. -- kainaw™ 13:36, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Google maps certainly adds more detail as you zoom in further, and I'd expect most mapping programs to do the same. So, by zooming out far enough, hopefully you can get the right level of detail without losing too much resolution. If you intend to do a screen grab, then using a large monitor set at the max resolution will enable you to grab the largest pic at highest resolution. StuRat (talk) 23:16, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Well I need a specific area - and at that level there's too much stuff - including stuff I definately don't need (I'm making a historical schematic map - so I don't need the 1960s motorway it shows... :)

Anyway I found that CityEngine appears to do it simply eg but isn't free (or cheap enough), JOSM can turn items with 'tags' on and off but I don't actually know what the tags are... - probably this program does more but I haven't found it yet. Loading a SVG in Inkscape of my local city is a little too much for my little computer - too much stuff for it.. I considered just editing the raw XML which is probably quite a good solution if I knew the tags.. Also http://maperitive.net/ looks promising .. For now I've just decided to "trace" over the maps using a simple paint program as I only need a very simple schematic .. though I probably should try to learn one of the proper programs. Hopefully maperitive will have evolved in terms of user interface by the time I actually need it.. If anyone knows of something user friendly for making custom maps from the data( and substantially less than $1000) I'd be interested. (signed in)Sf5xeplus (talk) 00:26, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

CSS box model

I heard a while back that CSS was planning to introduce a width attribute that was the total width: margin+border+padding+content. I can't find anything about it now. Was it just a rumor? Was it replaced with some other word than "width"? Does it exist now? -- kainaw™ 14:29, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

http://w3.org/tr/css3-ui/#box-sizing ¦ Reisio (talk) 22:49, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Vandal's comeuppance

Just curious: Do we know whether any vandals have been disciplined/sacked by their employer/college etc for vandalizing Wikipedia from their employer's computers?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:54, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I figure that this is the most popular case. The employee was first suspended and then found guilty of more than just vandalizing Wikipedia. -- kainaw™ 18:14, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

If the Seigenthaler incident qualifies to you as vandalism rather than a libellous hoax, the guy "quit", but was rehired later. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:13, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Google Maps

How does google maps get my location on my pc? I dont think my laptop has a gps chip.Accdude92 (talk) 21:49, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

How accurate is it? If it's your town, it's probably just through your IP address. If it's a university or a company, that's also often easy from an IP address. If it is more specific than that, then it must be something else (e.g. you may have told Google it at some point in the past and forgot about it). --Mr.98 (talk) 22:08, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Nope, its really accurate, like just a few feet off and it isnt any of the reasons you listedAccdude92 (talk) 22:11, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Here's a link to different ways it can be done that it can be done (http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/basics.html) - they don't need a GPS chip in your phone as they can use phone-networks/etc. to determine location pretty accurately. ny156uk (talk) 22:14, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

The networks thing is really cute and deserves explicit mentioning. As long as someone with a GPS and WiFi in the same device wandered through your vicinity (and shared the data with whatever system does this), it can be identified by the names of the wireless networks in range. Paul (Stansifer) 04:33, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

That's a neat trick! So if anyone has ever looked at a map on their android based phone in range of your wifi hotspot, Google will be able to guess where you are? Clever. APL (talk) 06:02, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

There is an option on my Android phone to enable or disable Wi-Fi location services, so yes. It's only accurate to 300 yards or so though. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 21:37, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

So, despite being a Brit with a British ISP, Google maps defaults to the USA for me. Perhaps it's because I use a US keyboard, or because I always use google.com rather then google.co.uk. On another point, I've generally noticed the who-is page for many European IP users geolocates only to the ISP's location which may be hundreds of km from the subscriber's home. Like Google says, the IP address can only provide a very rough location. Astronaut (talk) 12:53, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

For countries where a local Google Maps service has been launched, maps.google.tld defaults to the country of the TLD. maps.google.com always defaults to the US, because .com has unfortunately become the new .us. It has nothing to do with geolocation. Xenon54 (talk) 21:45, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

March 2

Trusted in the sense of Mozilla

If one site's certificate is classified as trusted by Mozilla, that means: (a) their identity is right or (b) Mozilla knows that the identity is right, and that they keep some other policies, which make them trustworthy. (a) implies that a mobster could still apply for a certificate and be declared trustworthy. Quest09 (talk) 02:04, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

See Certificate authority, from which I think you can get (or derive) your answer. Comet Tuttle (talk) 02:08, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

A cryptographically secure certificate should be considered a technological version of a "notarized statement verifying identity" - not a statement vouching for their good intentions. Nimur (talk) 16:56, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

See here for Mozilla policy. Basically the CA files some paperwork and there is a Wikipedia RFA-like online discussion (usually not contentious, but sometimes...) where users can raise any objections they might have, and if everything is in order, the CA gets added. (Added: One of the paperwork requirements is documenting an external audit of the CA's certification processes, which is rather expensive, so you can't really become a CA out of your apartment any more.) The public CA system is not very secure, so if you're building an extranet or something like that, disable all the public roots and use a private CA. 71.141.88.54 (talk) 10:42, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I think OP asked for what it would take to get a certificate. Not what it would take to be allowed to issue certificates. So in short, trustworthy means that you can trust that the page you are viewing belongs to the URL you typed in. It does not imply anything about the trustworthiness of the organization or person holding the certificate. Taemyr (talk) 12:28, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, I see. Basically there are several levels of authentication that CA's use before issuing certificates, but it only takes the lowest level recognized by Mozilla to get the browser to accept a given cert. The lowest level is email confirmation to some administrative address (like root@whatever.org) at the domain you're buying the certificate for. Those types of certificates cost around $15/year, or even zero if you're willing to accept some annoying conditions like telling the CA your home address. They just show you have some administrative access to the domain. If you look at some sites like paypal.com, you see the domain name in green along with the country code, which is intended to give you a heightened sense of security (whether or not that is justified). Getting that green bar requires an "extended validation" (EV) certificate which is more expensive and requires somewhat more paperwork and headache than a normal certificate. They check out the paperwork and that shows to some extent that the cert holder has a traceable real-world existence. Unless you're running a large retail or a financial site, don't worry about EV. 71.141.88.54 (talk) 04:01, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Using the datastore outside of CGI in Google App Engine

I'm trying to use the App Engine datastore in my application outside of the bounds of one of the request handler pages (like main.py or the other files you can specify in app.yaml). Is this possible? When I try to run it, it says my database model does not have a method "put" associated with it, but it has no problems when I run it from a script connected to CGI and request handling. Do you know what I can do to add CGI to those pages without adding request handling? Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Legolas52 (talk • contribs) 09:20, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

URIs and URLs (terminology)

I fear that this may be a FAQ. If so, sorry.

As I understand it, URIs were envisaged as including, but not as being exhausted by, URLs and URNs. However, they are in practice no more (or little more) than the union of URLs and URNs. A URL needn't start with "http://", but if it does (and if this works?), then it's either a URL or a URI: Most people would call it a URL, but those sticklers at W3C would call it a URI.

I could be wrong here. But as it is, I don't know why http://en.wikipedia.org/ (for example) shouldn't be called either a URL or a URI. Or to put it more bluntly: Why does W3C bother to kick against the pricks by calling such things URIs?

Yes, the question is merely academic, but it somehow intrigued me all the same. So I went to the article "Universal Resource Identifier" "Uniform Resource Identifier" to take a look. This starts: In computing, a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a string of characters used to identify a name or a resource on the Internet.

There's no "typically" or "usually" anywhere in that. But a short way down in the same article I read A typical URL for [a digital version of a particular book] on a Unix-like operating system would be a file path such as file:///home/username/RomeoAndJuliet.pdf, identifying the electronic book saved in a file on a local hard disk. I know little about webservers, but /home/username doesn't look at all to me like a directory available to the internet or even to an intranet. And if it were available, surely that address would be insufficient for universal access: we'd have to know the name of the network, the name of the computer, etc.

Suppose I build a toy website on my own hard drive, maybe just for my own amusement, maybe in preparation for or as a backup of a real website on the real web. As far as I am concerned, the top page is at file:///Users/morenoodles/website/index.html ; by contrast, you've no idea where it is as you don't know what or where my computer is. Can I call this address a URI or a URL? If not, what can I call it? Now, if I use Safari to open this web-page-not-on-the-web and click on <a href="pix/zebra.jpg">this</a>, I'll see file:///Users/morenoodles/website/pix/zebra.jpg -- thanks to "pix/zebra.jpg", which is what: a "relative URL", a "relative URI", either, something else? Morenoodles (talk) 09:22, 2 March 2011 (UTC) fixed embarrassing typo Morenoodles (talk) 06:13, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

A URN is the name of a resource, such as en.wikipedia.org, and a URL is the path to the resource, eg. http://'en.wikipedia.org. If you have a file on your computer named testbase.odb at the location C:\testdocs\testbase.odb, testbase is the file's URN, and file://C:\testdocs\testbase.odb is the file's relative URL. A relative URL only works within the resource in which it is contained. An absolute URL works across the entire Internet. Rocketshiporion♫ 11:56, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

That makes sense! Hmm, but if file://C:/testdocs/testbase.html is a "relative URL" then a link like <a href="testbase.html">this</a> to it from another file in the same directory would employ, uh, a "relative relative URL", perhaps? Certainly it seems intuitively (to me, at least) to have an additional layer of relativeness to it. Morenoodles (talk) 12:05, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure about whether that can be classified as an additional layer of relativeness, but the URL file://C:\testdocs\testbase.odb is relative in that it only works on your computer. If you typed in file://C:\testdocs\testbase.odb on another computer, it would not lead to the file testbase.odb on your computer. Rocketshiporion♫ 12:12, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Well . . . that much I know! Of course the meaning of "absolute" is, well, absolute, and anything less is of course merely relative. Somebody could create a proto-website on his hard drive that was interlinked in terms of the root or C:\ directory and when copied to a web server the result would not work. Somebody else could create a similar site that was interlinked via "../" and so forth and that would work when copied to a web server. Speaking carelessly, I'd tell the former that her problem was that she'd used absolute URLs. But I'd be wrong. I wonder then how best to phrase it. Imagining (for the sake of brevity here) that all one's readers are using Windows: Make sure never to reference any drive letter (e.g. 'C:'), do switch backslashes to slashes, and do rely on '../' to go up one directory, '../..' to go up two, etc." Perhaps. Morenoodles (talk) 12:37, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

The two confusing senses of "relative" in play here are:

• Relative to the location of the file the link is in (pix/zebra.jpg).
• Relative to the local computer the file is in (file:///C:/.../website/pix/zebra.jpg).

I don't think there's any escaping the need to use a full phrase to specify which you mean (unless it's clear from context).

I have my own theory about why the W3C insist on saying "URI" when they mean URL, but it's not very encyclopedic in tone, so I'll keep it to myself. 81.131.58.108 (talk) 14:57, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

You wouldn't be wrong; see below. The whole point of relative references (properly defined) is the portability (between machines, copies, and protocols) they provide. --Tardis (talk) 17:11, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

First, technical points:

1. en.wikipedia.org and testbase are not URNs (nor URIs at all) because they have no scheme components.
2. The backslash \ can never appear literally in a URI, although some user agents will render its percent encoding %5C as a backslash for the user.

It is true that a URN is a name (as its name suggests) and a URL specifies a means of getting to the resource in question; see another section of the RFC, where the confusion over the name "URN" is described.

Since we're talking about terminology, let's now go to fully-pedantic mode. There's a great possibility for confusion here because the standards themselves have changed (note the list of RFCs at the bottom of URI). The last standard (RFC 2396, from 1998) used the terms "absolute URI" and "relative URI", though it also used the phrases "relative reference" and "relative-path reference" (emphasis mine) which corresponds to Morenoodles' "relative relative" idea. (That RFC is hard to read with an eye to precision because it so often switches between "URI" and "[URI] reference"; see the grammar (terminology) translation table in the new standard.) The "file:" scheme still seems to be governed by the officially-obsolete RFC 1738 from 1994; there is an expired draft to update it, but it's mostly just a warning that no one knows how many slashes go at the beginning (despite the fact that 1738 is very clear on this point).

Using the modern terminology from RFC 3986 (2005), <a href="foo/bar">link</a> does not contain a URI at all, but rather a URI reference (in particular the "relative reference" that is the alternative to a URI in that context). The term "absolute URI" in this standard merely means a URI that lacks a fragment (the #foo at the end of some URIs), but since what is sometimes called a "relative URL" isn't a URI at all, they're still not "absolute URIs". (It's fortunate that "relative URLs" are not "absolute URIs"!) But in either standard, anything like file:///c:/foo/bar is absolute, because "absolute" means "does not require a base URI for interpretation" and a base URI would have nothing to add there. (In particular, the empty authority already means "localhost"; it can't be filled in by another URI.)

The fact that a file: URI (with the very common blank authority) is resolved in a fashion that depends on the computer in use is a detail of the resolution policy of that scheme and has nothing to do with the absoluteness of the URI. We can't adopt the definition that "absolute URLs work across the entire Internet", because they mightn't work for a wide variety of reasons: the use of a private network or link-local address (or even loopback address), the use of an alternate DNS root or multicast DNS where the specific identity of the machine is meant to be important, or simple routing restrictions. --Tardis (talk) 17:11, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Here's an attempt to actually answer your various questions:

1. Because the W3C thought that using URL and URI semi-interchangeably was confusing. (This is also RFC 3305.) (You say "it's either a URL or URI", which of course just means "it's a URI" since everyone agrees every URL is a URI. And no one would argue that typical HTTP URIs are URLs; it's just a question of whether it's useful to refer to the set of all URLs in preference to the set of all URIs.)
2. Your example is a URL (and thus a URI); the fact that it can't be used by us is why it's a "uniform" and not a "universal" resource identifier (as you wrote). As for whether it's "on the Internet" or not, note that RFC 3986 specifically says that resources need not be Internet-accessible; perhaps our lede should be adjusted to say "often on the Internet" or to say that URIs themselves are often used on the Internet whether or not the resources are found there. (Not to mention the subtle question of whether your computer is part of the Internet (just with heavily-restricted access).)
3. "pix/zebra.jpg" is a relative reference or (more generally) URI reference, as I wrote in my other reply. --Tardis (talk) 17:11, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Tardis, thank you for your excellent, thoughtful response. It did come with the prefatory warning let's now go to fully-pedantic mode but this didn't alarm me much: I'd realized that my question would probably call for a pedantic answer. It had also seemed to me that anything starting "http://" (and also working?) could be described as either a URL or a URI, but I wondered if there were after all some meaningful distinction for some cases; that some could be URIs but not URLs. Come to think of it, yes, I'd noticed that in practice addresses (whether correctly called URIs, URLs, both, or neither) starting "file:" didn't seem to be standardized: one can copy a local address from one browser that successfully displays the file to another (running at the same time, and of course by the same user, on the same computer) for that second browser not to be able to find the file. Odd business. Morenoodles (talk) 06:40, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Updating Adobe Flash Player

I got the message "You should update Adobe Flash Player right now." It appears to be a Firefox message.

How can I tell if the message is legitimate? More importantly, how to know whether I would be updating from a safe place or a malware site?

I am tempted to remove adobe flash player rather than risk getting more malware. Is there a safe way through this mess?

Thank you, Wanderer57 (talk) 18:14, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

The safe way to do this is to visit www.adobe.com by typing that address into your address bar and not clicking on some link to visit. Then go to the download section and download the latest Flash player. For the record, that message is probably legitimate; I have seen it a number of times when updating my PCs' Firefox clients. Firefox is doing the public a service by blaring that message at them, because old versions of Flash have known large gaping security holes. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:37, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks very much. Wanderer57 (talk) 02:04, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

DVD driver

Hi, I know have Windows Vista 32-bit running as a virtual machine, with Ubuntu as the host. I was looking at this page for a DVD driver I could download. 1) how do I know which optical drive I have (it makes you pick I think) and 2) how do I know which one of these is a DVD driver? Thanks, --T H F S W (T · C · E) 23:00, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

What makes you think you need to download a driver? Doesn't the one that ships in Vista work? -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 23:51, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Apparently not. It gives me this notice: "Windows Media Player cannot play the DVD because a compatible DVD decoder is not installed on your computer." How do I get one of these? --T H F S W (T · C · E) 00:07, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

A DVD decoder is not the same as a DVD driver; a decoder it takes care of the job of decrypting and playing video DVDs. Typically you'd have a DVD decoder (a plugin into the Windows Media framework) which is usually installed by an add-on player like WinDVD, which usually comes with a PC such as yours. But it seems you've wiped that (when you installed Ubuntu natively) and I guess you installed a retail Vista install inside the VM - retail Vista doesn't ship with a DVD decoder. Instead, install VLC media player and use it (and not Windows Media Player) to play DVDs in Vista. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 00:25, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Windows Vista Ultimate and if I'm interpreting this properly Vista Home Premium do come with a DVD decoder. However 'Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, or Windows Vista Enterprise' do not. Nil Einne (talk) 10:21, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

In addition to the above, it's worth my explaining how hardware virtualisation works. Ubuntu is running on your real, physical, unvirtualised hardware. On that you're running a virtualisation program (I'm guessing either VirtualBox or VMWare). That virtualisation program manufacturers an entirely fictious computer; an OS running in the VM will see imaginary hardware that isn't there (different hard disks, different optical disks, different adapter cards, different USB controllers, etc.). So even though the VM is on a Dell machine, Dell drivers aren't appropriate, as Vista (in your case) is running on the virtual PC instead. Usually this fake PC reports some very standard hardware, so the standard drivers that come by default with an OS like Vista will work out of the box. Both VMWare and VirtualBox supply "Guest Additions", software to run in the virtual machine, which helps integration with the fake PC; in some cases this includes Vista (e.g.) drivers. In summary: don't install Dell drivers on Vista, because Vista isn't really running on a Dell. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 00:40, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

So what can I put on here to make it play DVDs? Should AVS Video Converter do it? --T H F S W (T · C · E) 04:51, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

If you want to use WMP ,I believe with Vista all you may need are codecs for MPEG2 and probably AC-3. In that case something like ffdshow try-outs [13] or the Media Player Classic Home Cinema edition standalone codecs/filters [14] should do the trick. Nil Einne (talk) 10:26, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

New Core i5's vs Core 2's

In terms of performance, how much better are new middle of the line Core i5's compared to middle-end or high-end Core 2 processors for gaming and heavy multitasking? Acceptable (talk) 23:27, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

March 3

Mostly downloaded video file

I am downloading a television program using utorrent. I am stuck at 97%. If I burn this to dvd as is, does this mean that the last 3% of the episode will be missing, or that I will see some flickers on the screen and some cracks in the audio because the download distributes the 3% error over the whole thing evenly, or will it just be no good at all or unplayable or what? I don't have DVD+RW so I don't wamt to waste a dvd to test it out if it has no chance of being decent to watch.--141.155.143.65 (talk) 01:06, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Bittorrent clients don't (necessarily) download a file in order, from beginning to end. Instead they download it in chunks (often with different chunks coming from different peers, and sometimes downloading chunks from peers which themselves don't have a complete copy of the whole file). So a Bittorrent client like uTorrent has to piece these chunks together, and this often means that an incomplete download has a few missing chunks in all kinds of random places. I don't have uTorrent specifically to hand, but this screenshot shows a partially downloaded file, with the downloaded sections in blue and the missing sections in gray. So at best you'll get some bumps and clunks etc. when the player encounters the missing sections, but you may get nothing at all. Some media container formats are more tolerant of damage than others, and depending on where the missing chunks are you might get something that stops part way through, or doesn't play at all. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 01:19, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. So I guess there's no real way to be sure short of just doing it.--141.155.143.65 (talk) 13:50, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Sure there is. Try to play it in VLC, which can play DVD files that aren't burnt. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:49, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

or you could use a disk emulator like Daemon Tools. VLC is designed to be able to play rather damaged files, so you might be disappointed if you test in VLC and then burn the disk to play with a different player. With 97% of the file done you should probably be able to view the file, but this depends on format and exactly which part of the file is missing. Taemyr (talk) 20:37, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if you couldn't try to stream it through VLC, convert it into some other video format, and then burn that to do the disk? If VLC would read it, it would probably output something with blank spots rather than empty sectors, which would make it more burn-able. But this is just a guess. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:45, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

how many gb is 5nb

how many gb is 5nb —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.88.229.22 (talk) 04:26, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

The prefix giga (normally abbreviated "G", not "g") means a billion, while nano (normally abbreviated "n") means a billionth, so that would be a billion times a billion or a quintillion (10¹⁸), making 5nb = 5 quintillionths of a Gb. However, the "b" part confuses me. Do you means bits ? If so, a billionth of a bit (or any fraction of a bit), is meaningless, as bits only exist in integer quantities. StuRat (talk) 05:04, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

In some contexts you can have non-integer numbers of bits. See Shannon entropy.

Suppose for example that you enter a lottery that you have one chance in a billion of winning. The next day, someone informs you reliably that you did not win. How much information is that? Not very much; you were pretty sure you wouldn't win. But it's some information. By Shannon's measure, about 1.4 nanobits. --Trovatore (talk) 05:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Another thought, perhaps you had a typo and meant to ask "How many Gb in 5 Mb ?". In that case, we compare the giga prefix, meaning a billion, with the mega prefix, meaning a million, and thus there are 1000 Mb in a Gb, so 5/1000 of a Gb (or 1/200 of a Gb) in 5 Mb. This is complicated by the fact that computers often use multiples powers of 2, so that 1000 really is 1024. In that case, there are 5/1024 Gb in 5 Mb.

One last comment, "b" is used to mean a bit, while "B" is used to mean a byte, which is usually 8 bits. Case is very important when dealing with "GB", "Gb", "MB", "Mb", etc. The same is true of metric prefixes, where "M" = mega- and "m" = milli-. StuRat (talk) 05:16, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Assuming that you made a typographical error, and actually intended to ask how many Gb is 5Mb; for decimal units the answer is 0.5%, and for binary units the answer is about 0.488%. Rocketshiporion♫ 08:38, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

... and remember that disk manufacturers use decimal units, not Gibibytes. Dbfirs 09:17, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

... and that no one actually uses the word "gibibyte", because it's goofy. APL (talk) 15:20, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Hear, hear, brother. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:52, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Powers of two, you mean. 213.122.68.101 (talk) 11:01, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, correct (and corrected). StuRat (talk) 05:29, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Difference between Fab site and Assembly site

I was looking at the list of Intel manufacturing sites, which is divided into two sections: Fab sites and Assembly/test sites. What's the difference in layman's terms between Fab and assembly? I was thinking in my head that maybe the Fab sites are where the engineers actually design new and more advanced chips and manufacture, on a smaller scale, chips on a scale intended to try out the designs, and that chips manufactured in the Fabs actually end up inside non-prototype, sold end products little or none of the time, while the assembly sites are where the bulk manufacturing of products designed at the Fabs takes place. Is this about correct? Thanks. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 14:45, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

For Intel, "fab" refers to semiconductor device fabrication. Assembly will refer to assembly of Intel products, such as Intel graphics boards. -- kainaw™ 15:31, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Assembly also refers to assembly or packaging of the processor or other chip. The processor dies are fabricated in a relatively high tech site (traditionally for complex things like CPUs in places like the US, Germany, Japan although there's increasing interest in Singapore, Taiwan as well as UAE and China in gettingg fabs there), they're then sent on to be packaged into a procesor chip and tested in another relatively low tech site. If you look at the processor it will often have the packaging site [15] altho AMD has been putting both sites [16] for a while. If you're still confused, look at a processor without the heatspreader like [17]. The shiny bit is the actual die i.e. the actual processor that's fabricated in the fab site. Nil Einne (talk) 15:46, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Nil Einne. I see the "Diffused in Germany, Made in Malaysia" at [18]. It sure seems to be precarious though to be shipping naked dies halfway around the world. Those must be some special shipping containers and they must have to specially clean them before opening them in the packaging plant. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 17:12, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

While this is just a guess more then anything, I'm pretty sure they are shipped as entire wafers, i.e. the wafers are not cut into individual chips/dies until they reach the packaging plant. So this sort of thing is what's being shipped around the world (although they're not actually using that size yet). You may also be interested in [19] particularly page 4 although it doesn't say where the steps take place Nil Einne (talk) 18:36, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I realise that many people posting here are not native English speakers, but you may be interested to know that, even with semiconductors, the plural of "die" is "dice".--Phil Holmes (talk) 18:41, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

"die - (plural dies)a device for cutting or moulding metal into a particular shape", Oxford Dictionary. 91.125.112.146 (talk) 18:54, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

"Dice" is only the plural for small usually cubic gaming items with markings on the sides. "Dies" is the plural for all other uses of the noun "die". -- kainaw™ 20:19, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Taking the middle ground Die (integrated circuit) suggests we're all correct to some extent (well perhaps not the parts that imply one is exclusively correct) as both are accepted. Well what I presume is the ref to dice doesn't directly link to the supporting page but a search on Google Books does come up with other refs. Although perhaps you could also say we're all wrong since the article also says die is accepted and [20] suggests usage in the industry has evolved to that. Nil Einne (talk) 22:17, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I used to work in the industry - I worked in a wafer fab clean room and was in charge of a packaging clean room - and we, and all the others I talked to in the industry, called them dice. I presume they were regarded as analogous to small gaming cubes - certainly not cutters. I agree that the plural of the cutting devices is dies. Just my 2p. --Phil Holmes (talk) 09:22, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

I worked in a similar area when I was on a contract a long time ago. We called them "dies". Some people thought we were saying "dice". When speaking, the sound difference between "dies" and "dice" is almost impossible to detect. Nobody knew anyone thought it was "dice" until one guy left a note in which he wrote "dice", resulting in a good two weeks of jokes at his expense. -- kainaw™ 13:58, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Youtube video view milestones

Hi, is there anywhere which has a list of YouTube video view milestones e.g. "first video to reach 100k?" And does anyone know the answer to my example? Thanks in advance. —Half Price 22:57, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Why do I hear a door closing?

I am at a library with Mozilla Firefox, one of only three libraries where I have sound.

Every once in a while I hear a door closing. It must be an ad, but I don't ever see the ad that is causing this.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 23:41, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I associate that sound with a friend having left the Instant Messaging area, so they are no longer available for chat. Do you have an IM running ? StuRat (talk) 04:07, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Some program that is running has an alert set up to use the door closing sound (a standard system sound with most installs of Windows). Without knowing what is installed on the computer, it is absolutely impossible to know which program is triggering the sound and what event in that program is being used to trigger the sound. As usual - the library's IT staff is who you need to ask. -- kainaw™ 13:54, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

This is a little of a longshot, but it may be that someone has set up the computer to play this sound when certain "program events" occur. In Windows XP, try Start -> Control Panel -> Sounds and Audio Devices, click the Sounds tab, and you'll see a list of "program events" like "Default Beep" and "Device Failed to Connect" - if you select each one in turn, you'll notice the popup menu below says the name of the ".wav" sound file that will be played when that event happens. Clicking the triangle next to that will play the sound for you. By looking through all the program events you may find that someone has set up the door-closing sound to play when something common occurs. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:42, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

StuRat has the right answer. I was signed into AOL to read emails. For some strange reason, that apparently means I'm signed into AIM as well, even though I don't participate. I've received instant messages without knowing why, but I can only conclude that being signed into certain sites makes me "available".Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:25, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Resolved

StuRat (talk) 22:56, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

March 4

OPTICAL FIBRE

WHAT ARE THE STANDARDS OF OPTICAL FIBERS? ELABORATE IT COMPLETELY —Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.196.118.81 (talk) 06:31, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Is this for your homework? JIP | Talk 06:42, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

See optical fiber and the links therefrom.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 11:55, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia! Please do not type in ALL CAPS, as it is considered the online equivalent of shouting. Thank you. Rocketshiporion♫ 06:16, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

a freeware tool to zip files in batch one by one

does it exist? t.i.a. --Il signore degli dèi (talk) 15:35, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Please explain in more detail. You have a batch of files and you want to turn each file into a zipfile containing only that file? What platform are you using? Marnanel (talk) 15:37, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. I use Win XP. --Il signore degli dèi (talk) 15:39, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

May or may not be quite what you're looking for, but have you tried 7zip: [21] ? Darigan (talk) 15:40, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Does 7zip allow to zip the file one by one with a unique command? --Il signore degli dèi (talk) 16:17, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with 7zip, but I assume it can be controlled from the command line, so you could write a batch file quite easily to do this. (Easily, that is, if all the files are in one directory.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:35, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

If you have a command-line program that has, for example, the syntax

pkzip textfile.txt textfile.zip

you could use the following command in the Windows shell (start button -> "run" -> type "cmd", then type "cd \programs\files" if that is the name of the directory where the files are):

for %f in (*.txt) do pkzip %f %f.zip

to get all .txt files zipped (though the filenames will be textfile.txt.zip and not textfile.zip). If you want all files use *.* instead of *.txt. For this type of task it is often hard to avoid command-line programs. Jørgen (talk) 19:17, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

(Jørgen, you have the arguments backwards. The zip file comes first, followed by the file(s) to add.) -- BenRG (talk) 05:28, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

The following will zip all files in c:\srcdir into individual zip files in c:\dstdir with ".zip" appended to the name:

   for %i in (c:\srcdir\*) do zip -j -X "c:\dstdir\%~nxi.zip" "%i"

This uses the Windows version of Info-ZIP's zip utility. The -j option makes it not record the path "c:\srcdir" in the zip file, and the -X option makes it not record Windows security information (which just wastes space, in most cases). You could also add the -9 option to use maximum compression. If you want the source file extension to be stripped, so that textfile.txt ends up in textfile.zip, then replace %~nxi with %~ni. But note that if the source directory has multiple files with the same extension, they will end up in the same zip file.

You can also use 7-Zip's command-line version, 7z.exe or 7za.exe. Unfortunately this seems to lack an equivalent to Info-ZIP's -j option, but you can do this:

   cd /d c:\srcdir
   for %i in (*) do 7z a -mx=9 "c:\dstdir\%~nxi.zip" "%i"

If you care about file size, 7-Zip's maximum compression (-mx=9) is better than Info-ZIP's maximum compression (-9). They are both compatible with every unzipping program. -- BenRG (talk) 05:26, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

DNS not responding

My laptop keeps loosing connectivity to the internet and when I run diagnostics I get DNS not responding, did a Google search on it and one of the solutions I found was to change my DNS to Primary DNS 208.67.222.222 and Secondary DNS 208.67.220.220 which I did but I am still getting the same problem. I am running Windows 7 on my laptop. Any Ideas? Mo ainm~Talk 17:10, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

That IP address resolves to opends.com, but the first thing I would do is to change your DNS servers back to the DNS servers that you were told to set them to by your ISP. (Or to the setting named something like "Get Automatically from ISP", if that's what your ISP told you to do.) DNS servers are usually run by ISPs for the benefit of their customers; your ISP's DNS servers are unlikely to be the real problem, and your performance will suffer if you use some open DNS server that is shared among hundreds of thousands of users from around the world.

It is more likely that this is a signal problem. Is this a wireless connection or a wired connection? Have you tried connecting from multiple places to verify whether the problem is with (a) your laptop, or (b) something about the router or ISP? Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:49, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

It is wireless and was previously set to get it automatically, I have checked the connection with the wifi on my phone and it connects no problem so looking as if maybe it is a problem with my laptop. Mo ainm~Talk 17:56, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Are you able to connect at another wireless site, perhaps at a coffee shop or the like? Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:17, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Not sure if this matters but have noticed any time I start Bit Torrent, it seems to lose connection if I then restart the laptop the connection is established again, is it possible that Bit Torrent is doing something? Mo ainm~Talk 23:14, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Printing or splitting a very large web page into parts

I do not want to sit for hours and hours in an uncomfortable chair in front of my desktop computer to read this webpage http://www.re-bol.com/rebol.html which would be over 500 pages if printed out. Rather, I want to print it onto paper a chapter at a time and read that.

Can anyone suggest a way of splitting it into chapters or converting it into a PDF file please? Thanks 92.24.182.238 (talk) 20:44, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Download PDFCreator. That will install a "printer" that makes PDF files. Then "print" the web page to this printer - this will create a PDF file of the webpage. Then, you can print some pages of the PDF file at a time to a real printer as you read. Jørgen (talk) 20:50, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Most Web browsers have an option in the print dialog to "Print selection only"—if yours has this option, you can highlight a portion of the page and print just that. —Bkell (talk) 23:08, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

My first thought was, "there is no way that a document like this would be available only in HTML; it must be published in other formats, including PDF." My second thought was, "I'll try replacing the HTML extension with PDF." And it worked. The PDF is at http://www.re-bol.com/rebol.pdf. -- BenRG (talk) 04:36, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Brilliant! Thank you. 92.15.24.116 (talk) 13:44, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Installing IE9 RC

Does anyone happen to know whether if I install IE9 RC, what happens when the RTM comes? Will I be able to install the RTM over the RC? Or will I have to re-install Windows? I'm using Win7 64-bit. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:29, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

This source indicates that you can install IE9 over the beta version, so I would imagine it would be the same for the RTM. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:48, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Even if it turns out that the IE9 RTM cannot be installed over the Release Candidate, you will not have to reinstall your Windows 7 operating-system. At worst, you'll have to uninstall the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate application, and then install the Internet Explorer 9 RTM application. Rocketshiporion♫ 13:06, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

March 5

Computer start-up problem

Vista Software. When starting up, get, "HTLDR", with instructions to press any key. When pressing any key, get repeat instructions. Usually have to do hard shut down and restart.Easyed7wp (talk) 08:03, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure it isn't NTLDR? Mo ainm~Talk 11:07, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

It must say something about NTLDR as well. I doubt it just says "NTLDR. Press any key." The message may not mean anything to you, but it would mean something to me. In any case, whether the message is "NTLDR not found" or "NTLDR is compressed" or something else, you probably will need to start up a Vista recovery environment and select the "repair" option. The details of how to do this depend very much on what type of computer you have. You may want to contact the computer manufacturer for help. -- BenRG (talk) 11:24, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Endless Ocean:Blue World

Any sources that players have ten minutes to escape, not less? Us441(talk)(contribs) 12:04, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Website help

I'm trying to make a registration page where the user types in their name etc and if all is good he is registered however I am not sure how to do the following: if something is not right (e.g. he types in the password twice and they do not match) I want the form to reload the registration page but with certain data which would indicate what was wrong so that when it is reloaded I can for example put an * beside the fields where errors were detected. I think I can write the code to indicate and later determine what fields are wrong. I just dont know how to get the page to reload itself with this data. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.88.197.134 (talk) 12:41, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

What platform and languages are you using? This is pretty standard stuff for form-handling in web applications, and there's probably plenty of sample code around in books and online. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 13:53, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

PHP and MySQL —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.88.197.134 (talk) 13:56, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

In PHP, a very simple way is to have one login form that sends the POST password data to itself. At the top of the page you have code that says, "Have I been sent a password?" and if the answer is true, and the password is valid, it redirects you to the actual content pages (and sets a cookie, or whatever means you are using to determine that a user is really logged in). If a password has not been sent, it loads the "enter your password" screen. If a password has been sent, but it is invalid, it loads the "enter your password" screen again but says, "hey, your password was wrong" at the top of it. Does that make sense? A more advanced way is that each page that has a "login" link sends a variable to the "login" page which then tells that login page where to redirect back again when it is done. --Mr.98 (talk) 23:32, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

One more note. If this is just for fun, for learning, go ahead and re-invent the wheel. If this is at all something you'd be unhappy if someone broke your security, consider using a pre-existing script. User authentication is one of those areas where do-it-yourself approach, as a novice programmer, will leave huge security holes, without realizing it, just because you don't have enough experience with practical computer security. That's no reason not to play with it. But if this is for something of great importance, try to find a pre-existing script that has things like encryption of sent passwords, clever authentication schemes, hashed and salted user passwords, protection against SQL injection attacks, etc. --Mr.98 (talk) 23:38, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Free Random Number Generator

Resolved

Are there any free (downloadable) random number generators that will emulate the rolls of the types of dice that are typically associated with roleplaying games or tabletop wargaming, such as D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and D20? I am looking for something exactly like this but downloadable and usable offline. Cheers. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:23, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Whoops! ;) --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:28, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

REBOL

A question yesterday drew my attention to a page about REBOL.

http://www.re-bol.com/rebol.html

Quoting from the introduction: "REBOL is a uniquely small and productive development tool that can be used to create powerful desktop software, dynamic CGI web site and server applications, rich distributed browser plugin applications, mobile apps,.....(It can) replace many common tools such as Java, Python, Visual Basic, C, C++, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Javascript, toolkits such as wxWidgets, graphic/multimedia platforms such as Flash, DBMSs such as Access, MySQL, and SQLite, (etc).......REBOL is ultra compact. Its uncompressed file size is about 1/2 Meg on most platforms."

This seems to me to be an extraordinary claim. Please will an editor familiar with REBOL comment on the claim?

Thanks, Wanderer57 (talk) 17:49, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Technically, Assembly language can replace all of those things too and have a micro-sized compiler; it's a question of how much work you want to do. REBOL seems like a language that is meant to be extremely extensible. So yes, if you have lots of libraries that handle all of those specific things, it can probably do fine. But the same can be said of C and C++, as well. There are, for example, libraries for REBOL which allow you to programmatically construct Flash SWFs. It's not the same thing as using Adobe Flash at all in terms of development environment, but it can create similar output (e.g. a SWF file that your Flash plugin can display). My understanding is that this is all the above is supposed to mean. There are similar libraries for PHP, for example. I don't think it's an extraordinary claim, unless you interpret it as saying that REBOL is, out of the box, a replacement for all of the different development environments that are often associated with those things above, which it is not. REBOL can do databases, if you are willing to reprogram your database program in REBOL; that's not the same thing as saying, "now you can toss Microsoft Access out the window, if that's what you use." --Mr.98 (talk) 18:35, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Here is another quote from the same source: "REBOL is easy enough for absolute beginners and average computer users to operate immediately, but powerful and rich enough for a wide variety of complex professional work"

My sense is that a product with all the capability described above, and contained in a 1/2 Meg file cannot possibly be easy enough to be used by absolute beginners, or even average computer users. Comment please. Wanderer57 (talk) 00:25, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

OpenOffice Calc autocorrection madness

I'm going nuts with OpenOffice trying to DWIM and not letting me override it to do what I really mean. There might be one or two things going on, which may be combining to do a third thing. (And these behaviors seem to be something OpenOffice copies from Microsoft Excel.)

1. If I type a word into a cell and hit ENTER (or the green check icon), it gets automatically capitalized. If I notice this in time, I can sometimes override it.
2. If I type a few letters into a cell that are a prefix of an entry I've made into any other cell in that column, it assumes I'm typing that word again, and autoexpands it. Again, if I notice this in time, I can usually override it. (And this behavior can be quite convenient -- except when it's not.)
3. However, there's some variant or combination of these two effects that is proving impossible to override. I've got three cells currently containing:

Minor 1

minor 2

Minor 3

No matter what I do, I can't seem to decapitalize the first and third ones; it always recapitalizes them for me.

There are a few configurable preferences under Tools/Options which look like they might have something to do with this, but turning them off doesn't seem to help.

This is with OpenOffice 2.4 on a Mac, if it matters. —Steve Summit (talk) 18:01, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Aha. I've partially figured this out. It's looking at the whole column, and if there's an extant value anywhere that's "close enough" to what I'm trying to type, it insists on making them match exactly. My actual scenario was more like this:

	A
1	Minor 1
2	minor 2
3	Minor 3
4
5	Minor 1
6	minor 2
7	Minor 3

I can't edit cell A1 to make it "minor 1", because OpenOffice notices that A5 contains "Minor 1", so it insists on making A1 match. But if I temporarily change A5 to "xMinor 1", then I can change A1 to "minor 1", and then I can change A5 to "minor 1", too.

(Alternatively, I could have temporarily changed A1 to something else, and properly fixed A5 first. But as long as there's a "Minor 1" anywhere in the column, it seems to be impossible to change any of them to "minor 1". I'm reminded of the saga of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck.)

Although I've got a workaround, I'd still like to know how to turn this behavior off. —Steve Summit (talk) 18:21, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Does this help? --Mr.98 (talk) 23:27, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Random pool for encryption

When you create a new volume with True Crypt, it has you move your mouse around in its window in order to seed a random number pool. The window says that the longer you move your mouse around, the more you significantly improve the quality of the encryption.

Now I buy that having good random numbers is useful, and that the idiosyncratic moving of the mouse can act as that. But surely there is a cap on how much it can help the encryption? What's the low-end on that? I mean, if I move it for 10 seconds, is that really much worse than 20 seconds, or that much better than 5 seconds? Obviously not moving the mouse at all would introduce no new randomness and so a potentially attacker could, I guess, try to crack it based on guessing my computer's clock conditions or whatever. But how much "randomness" needs to be added to make it secure? What is overkill? --Mr.98 (talk) 19:11, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

You need to harvest enough entropy for the full key size of your cryptosystem; how long that is depends on which cipher you're asking TrueCrypt to use; Advanced Encryption Standard supports a key up to 256 bits. Windows and Linux harvest entropy from a variety of sources, but user input does seem to be particularly fecund (it's a wobbly fleshy person rather than a beautifully engineered chunk of spinning metal). If you're on Linux, try this command dd if=/dev/random bs=16 | hexdump -C and wobble the mouse around to see entropy being harvested. Beyond the key size, it shouldn't be necessary to have any more entropy, but these entropy generators kinda guess how entropic their input is, so a bit extra isn't a bad idea. As with all cryptography, you have to worry that some future analysis will uncover that the entropy measure wasn't sufficiently conservative. So you have to weigh your own paranoia, and consider the relative costs of a few seconds more mousewaggling vs. the (possible, maybe) future diminution of the level of security you thought you had. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 20:33, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't think you need that much. 128 bits of entropy is plenty, unless you're paranoid about quantum computation, in which case 256 bits is plenty. TrueCrypt keys are 512–1536 bits long (XTS requires two block cipher keys). But that key protects the entire volume. If you're not worried about deriving (size of the volume in bits) bits from 512 bits then there's no reason to worry about deriving 512 bits from 128. -- BenRG (talk) 21:33, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Beautifully engineered chunks of spinning metal (i.e. hard disk drives) are good sources of entropy because of chaotic air motion inside the drive enclosure affecting data timing. See: Don Davis, Ross Ihaka, and Philip Fenstermacher, "Cryptographic Randomness from Air Turbulence in Disk Drives", Crypto 1994.[22] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.141.88.54 (talk) 22:08, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

March 6

Question about Dell's early days

I read somewhere that Michael Dell at one point was making $80 grand a month while he was still a pre med student making computers in his dorm room. I have serious difficulty seeing how that's physically possible, but that's not why I'm posting here. I read that he got his materials to start with from an IBM supply house that was obligated to order in large quantities and he got them to unload their looming inventory to him at cost. Getting them to do that for him must have been a result of his persuasion skills. But what I want to know is a little more about whatever extremely fortuitous circumstances he found to get so many buyers. Thanks.76.27.175.80 (talk) 01:50, 6 March 2011 (UTC)