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June 2

Wikipedia article file names

Let's take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator as an example. In my rudimentary knowledge of the URL, there would be a wiki directory and in that would be another directory named Uniform_resource_locator. Would there then be an index.html file or index.php file in that directory? If so, which one, html or php? I realize that the actual content of the article is pulled from a database. I'm just interested in the hierarchy and the file name though. Thanks, Dismas|^(talk) 05:50, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note that the part in the URL after the first slash (in this case, "wiki/Uniform_resource_locator") can be interpreted in any way the web server chooses, it doesn't have to be a physical file path. I am not a WikiMedia developer, but I would guess there's simply a PHP script that receives the name of the article and fetches it from the database. There probably aren't separate directories and files for every single article. JIP | Talk 06:11, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

JIP is correct. In fact, most installations of MediaWiki do not map each page to a unique file or directory. Instead, individual wiki pages map to database entries in a relational database (like MySQL or PostgreSQL). That relational database may commit data to the filesystem by any method, but it is uncommon for each data entry to have a one-to-one mapping with the filesystem. Super-large installations - like Wikia or Wikipedia - have a little extra complexity, because there are multiple layers of cache services, proxy services, load balancers, database federation, and so on. (Just to be very clear about terminology: Wikipedia is the world's largest and probably the most heavily customized running instance of MediaWiki, which is software you can run on your own server. Wikipedia has a team of engineers who customize the MediaWiki server software, and they keep it hooked up to the world's largest MediaWiki content database, and it's been running for years as a scaled service across many machine-instances and through many versions of software-updates... so it has a few "quirks" that are not as well-documented as a clean, fresh installation).

Commonly, MediaWiki servers use Apache httpd's mod_rewrite feature to map URLs to unique queries - and to hide the ".php" extension. This is documented as Short URLs in the MediaWiki manual. The result is that a query is sent to the webserver, with the page title as an argument, requesting the main MediaWiki PHP index script. (For recent versions of MediaWiki, that index is a real file in your web server directory at location w/index.php but if you're picky about your webserver folder structure, it can be moved to other sub-directories, or reconfigured: even Wikipedia moves that directory to wiki/index.php). The PHP script then dynamically generates hypertext content based on a database query. Nimur (talk) 06:47, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Specifically, it is mapped to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uniform_resource_locator , which is a PHP script, and it is given one parameter "title", with the value "Uniform_resource_locator", it does accept other parameter/value pairs. CS Miller (talk) 08:56, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Microsoft

When Microsoft was still small but growing big, how did Bill Gates manage to buy out all the other shareholders? Surely they could see like he could that the company was rocketing to success. Did he employ underhand tactics to make them sell? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Modeltrainsets (talk • contribs) 10:59, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There were no shareholders when Microsoft was still small. It didn't go public until 1986. See History of Microsoft. Mitch Ames (talk) 11:50, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A recurring theme in technology entrepreneurship is the difficult choice an inventor must make between raising money to run the business and keeping creative and financial control. If you can not afford to pay your employees, they may leave, and you might not be able to stay in business. If you let a super-billionaire "donate" to your creative enterprise, he might send the goons after you as soon as he thinks it's more profitable. One of Silicon Valley's smartest and most vindictive solutions - according to the 2011 documentary Something Ventured - was to pay the employee salaries using cash advances on your girlfriend's credit card and then fire her. Despite their canonization by the mass media, technology entrepreneurs are pretty horrible people. Arguably, Bill Gates is a lot more ethical than the executive team at Cisco; (and Bill Gates is also still happily married).

In the case of Microsoft, Bill Gates retained financial control from a very early stage by becoming profitable before leveraging his company assets to raise more capital. Nimur (talk) 15:41, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Think the OP may be best answered by reading The Microsoft File : The Secret Case Against Bill Gates. The author outlines (often times in detail) all the dirty dealing MS did in order to become a monopoly.--Aspro (talk) 17:09, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Simulink

Hellow! I need a box in Simulink, that at first accepts a constant as input, and later accepts the output of a computation of another box. Something like this:

   a = 1;
   b = a*2;
   a = b+1;
   b = a*2;

How can I do this in Simulink? 77.125.164.49 (talk) 15:03, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This tutorial [1] might be helpful. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:21, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There are switching blocks that can be used to select between two signals if you need to switch from a constant to another source. They will be in the signal routing category. A manual switch is the simplest if you don't mind clicking to switch. Otherwise you'll need something to trigger it, such as a step source configured to rise at the right time. Katie R (talk) 18:02, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I also suggest contacting their support or having your account rep put you in touch with someone there - in my experience the staff is very knowledgeable and can help explain things and point you towards free tutorials and webinars that they think will help you out. Katie R (talk) 13:50, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

JPEG metadata in MS Visual Studio with 'System.Windows.Media.Imaging'

I'm using VS express 2013, and want to access\edit jpeg metadata. From what I can find, it looks like the best way is by using the classes 'JpegBitmapDecoder', 'BitmapImage', etc from the 'System.Windows.Media.Imaging' namespace.

If this is right, what 'reference' do I need to include to access the 'System.Windows.Media.Imaging' namespace?

MSDN says this is in the PresentationCore (in PresentationCore.dll) assembly, but I cant find this!

Any idea what namespace or assembly I should reference, or dll to use?

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this, I've tried searching Wikipedia, msdn, google etc. with no luck. Any advice would be really appreciated - this is driving me crazy!

Many Thanks, Andy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.122.115.65 (talk) 18:30, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You may want the "metadata" property of Imaging's BitmapSource class. 87.115.60.38 (talk) 18:42, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I think you're right - but when I try 'BitmapSource' or 'System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapSource' in my code I get a not defined error! Any idea how to get past this? Andy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.122.115.65 (talk) 19:02, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You may simply not have the requisite assemblies loaded into your project (in addition to PresentationCore you need WindowsBase and System.Xaml). I wrote this simple app that prints some properties:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Media.Imaging; // need PresentationCore, WindowsBase, System.Xaml assemblies

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
	// a good sample image:
	//   http://metadatadeluxe.pbworks.com/f/1242531528/GettyVillaExifToolImport.JPG
        Stream fileStream = new FileStream("test.jpg", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);

        JpegBitmapDecoder decoder = new JpegBitmapDecoder(fileStream, BitmapCreateOptions.PreservePixelFormat, BitmapCacheOption.Default);
        
        BitmapSource source = decoder.Frames[0];
        Console.WriteLine("width:" + source.Width);
        Console.WriteLine("height:" + source.Height);

        BitmapMetadata metadata = (BitmapMetadata)source.Metadata;
        Console.WriteLine("Format:" + metadata.Format);
        Console.WriteLine("ApplicationName:" + metadata.ApplicationName);
        Console.WriteLine("Comment:" + metadata.Comment);

        Console.Read(); // wait 
    }
}

-- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 21:37, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As to how to add the necessary assemblies to your project: in VS2013: PROJECT->ADD_REFERENCE, and in the assemblies/framework section check the three assemblies I list above. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 21:54, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Finlay, this works great! Huge thx for ur help - much appreciated! Andy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.205.240.249 (talk) 11:33, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Computer mice

Are computer mice in other languages still named after rodents or is being named after cheese-eaters an English thing only? 88.167.253.167 (talk) 22:08, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's definitely souris in French and raton in Spanish. It's Maus in German, too, complete with an expression 'kaufen per Mausclick' to mean online shopping. AlexTiefling (talk) 22:12, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See wikidata:Q7987#sitelinks-wikipedia for our articles in different languages. There are clearly a lot of mouse spellings in languages using Latin script. Probably also in other scripts but I cannot tell. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:42, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I tried to infer, for each language of that list, whether it uses a calque or a direct borrowing. I count 49 calques, 16 borrowings (including Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Urdu, Italian(!)), two that use a more literal expression like 'computer pointer', and 22 that I cannot assign – because I can't transliterate and didn't find a path from the term to the rodent. —Tamfang (talk) 09:50, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Compare to our mouse (animal) articles at wikidata:Q39275#sitelinks-wikipedia to see that many languages use the same word, including scripts I cannot read. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:51, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Tangent: When the pointing devices first came out, people called them mouses. I still like that better; makes a clean separation from the small mammal, and it's a normal linguistic process for words to regularize when they take on a completely new meaning like that. But unfortunately mice seems to have caught on. --Trovatore (talk) 23:02, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

June 3

Follow-up about SSD not having a drive letter

File:Screenshot - TEMP.jpg

screenshot

This is a follow-up from my question of about a week ago. To recap, my wife got a new computer at work. It has a 500GB SSD and a 2TB HD. The SSD shows up in Speccy, but not under Computer, etc. A few months ago one of her coworkers got one speced out the same and she got me to go down there and look at it. On it, Speccy doesn't show the SSD, but it shows a 2TB drive, RAIDed. I opened the case, and the two drives go to a RAID controller card. So on that computer, they RAIDED a 500GB SSD and a 2TB HD. Does that make any sense (it doesn't to me)?

My wife said that the other employee told them that he wanted RAID. My wife told them that she didn't want RAID - she wanted Windows and installed programs on the SSD. So what I believe is that although the SSD is in her computer and hooked up, it isn't doing anything. That also doesn't make sense to me.

Do both of these approaches seem to be absurd? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:45, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm still confused about one thing from both of your threads. What does disk manager actually say? Surely that's the first thing to look at not 'Speccy' (whatever that is), where the hard disk is connected or even what shows up in Explorer/My Computer? Nil Einne (talk) 01:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't looked at Disk Manager on that computer. I'll have my wife do it tomorrow (or I'll go by). Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 01:43, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes a RAID (0) of two disks that different is absurd. It could be somewhat useful if it was a RAID 1, where one HDD is a fallback for the other, but even then, you'd prefer two similar drives, at least in capacity. If it is indeed a symmetical RAID 0, you'd end up with slow accesses of the HDD and an overall capacity of only ~1TB. The SDD would be vastly superior for access time, and the HDD for capacity.

~~If we didn't have WP:AGF~~ oh wait, AGF doesn't include 3rd parties... I'd call malicious compliance – a case that's aimed at the customer. Maybe someone at Dell thinks the average customer isn't going to see the difference anyway? "Users are Morons"?

"Customer asked for a box with SSD/HDD mix and RAID? Sure, let's RAID the two together, rather than calling them back and ask if they want two SSDs."

OTOH, poor training could explain this one, too. Whatever it is, that's one of the reasons why most companies have a dedicated IT guy: to avoid that kind of mess. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 06:49, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Screenshot of disk manager added. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 14:22, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely a non-standard install, with the system on the drive without letter. AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong), this is only possible if the "system" partition on the SSD is actually mounted, but via path rather than drive letter. These configs are disasters waiting to happen.

The latter may or may not be true with the most recent OSes, but most late "development" at MS was of the "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Another GUI" kind (google Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades if you don't know the meme), rather than useful features. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 15:08, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I looked it up - it was very finny. After two-blade ones came out, Saturday Night Live had a parody one with three blades. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 19:51, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I accidentally flagged the other edit as "minor" :( - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 15:10, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"System" doesn't mean Windows is installed on that drive. It means the Boot folder is on that drive. See here. The fact that it's not mounted after bootup is normal, but obviously this is a really stupid use of the expensive SSD. -- BenRG (talk) 17:24, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oopsie. I ASSumed the 90-something gigabytes were the OS and ASSorted CRAPware... SCNR. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 13:40, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dell really should set up this system from scratch, but if you can't wait for that to happen, you could probably boot from a live CD, shrink the HD partition to 465.76 GB, move the SSD partition to the HD (and shrink it too while you're at it), move the HD partition to the SSD, make a new data partition using up the rest of the HD space, and reboot. And hope that it still boots. I'm not completely sure it will. -- BenRG (talk) 17:24, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Does your wife's laptop come with Dell's standard business-class 3-year on-site support? She should be able to get a technician on-site to reinstall that system in a way that makes sense for her needs. It certainly wasn't configured in any reasonable way from Dell, so this should be covered under the support contract. Katie R (talk) 17:59, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To answer some questions: (1) She doesn't have a laptop - it is a desktop. (2) They had an IT person on site until a couple of years ago. They thought it would be cheaper to contract it out to Dell. But it is more expensive and they have to go through a lot of bureaucracy to get anything done. She ordered the computer last August and got it about a week ago. (3) The Dell guy is coming Monday to fix it. He says that he will have to research it first. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 19:10, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note however it is still possible it's mounted. From what I know and seems to be confirmed by a few tests, ¡Ouch! is correct that the partition could be mounted under an empty NTFS directory and it wouldn't show in disk manager. You'd either need to check mount points for the specific volume ('Change Drive Letters or Paths') or look at 'Drive Paths' under 'View'. IIRC, Microsoft doesn't even try to stop you mounting the system partition like they do with recovery partition. That said, considering the inanity of the set-up, I agree it's unlikely it's mounted. And in any case, even if it is mounted it's unlikely it's doing anything useful. Nil Einne (talk) 04:32, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

asside: My wife and her coworker ordered these computers last August. They were speced out the same - one four-core Xeon, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD, 2TB HD. Her coworker got his some months ago - his was like that. My wife got hers a week or so ago. In the meantime, Dell discontinued that model, which made it available cheaper. But the Dell people they contracted with wanted to get the price up to the original agreed-upon price. So they replaced the single four-core Zeon with two six-core Xeons! (for the same original price.) Since they are hyperthreaded, she can run 24 threads! Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:13, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nuke and pave for the win! I'd do it if it were my box, but since you/your wife have the all-inclusive package, you can let Dell handle it. That's the way that gets you into less warranty issues, too.

p.s. You should aim a bit lower if you want to shuffle the partitions around. I'd shrink the big C: partition to 465.75GB (wasting some megabytes is better than resizing to a size that's a few MBs larger than the SSD due to rounding). - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 13:40, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

p.p.s. asside?

Chrome's notification bell in the quicklaunch bar of Windows XP

I can't remove it. When tried disabling the notifications in chrome:flags, it went away then came back. When I click the little bell, and then settings, it no longer has the chrome tickbox. Now only the gmail tickbox. Advice? Thank you very much. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 07:00, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, as a workaround, if you don't normally use the audio on your computer, you can turn the volume down until you do need the audio. StuRat (talk) 13:22, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm so sorry. I wasn't clear. There is no bell noise. It is a grey bell icon that appears in the quicklaunch bar at the bottom right. An example is in the graphic in this link right at the top next to the birdy. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 13:35, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

transliteration service?

Sometimes Google Translate isn't what you want. On a tangent from yesterday's question about translations of Mouse (computer): Is there a service that will transliterate a foreign script rather than translating the words? I want to know whether or not these words

Մկնիկ (Armenian)
마우스 (Korean)
ເມົາສ໌ (Laotian)
മൗസ് (Malayalam)
ମାଉସ (Orissa)
சுட்டி (Tamil)
మౌస్ (Telugu)
เมาส์ (Thai)
ჭუკია (Georgian)

are pronounced something like /maus/. (I'm not sure of all the language labels.) —Tamfang (talk) 09:55, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you click on the speaker icon at the ~~bottom-left~~ bottom-right of the input (or output) text boxes, it will play a speech synthesis approximation of the pronunciation. CS Miller (talk) 10:39, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Google did once offer this service (Google Script Converter) but they retired it with the closure of Google Labs. There's a list of websites that might help at Transliteration#Online transliteration. —Noiratsi (talk) 15:27, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Google Translate does have a transliteration feature. Go to translate.google.com, select the source language, and input some text. If the transliteration option is available, then in the bottom right of the text entry box there will be a Ä icon with a hover label of "read phonetically". If you click on this icon, a transliteration will be shown below the input box. For the languages Google Translate supports:

Մկնիկ = Mknik
마우스 = mauseu
ເມົາສ໌ = mao s
சுட்டி = Cuṭṭi
మౌస్ = Maus
เมาส์ = Meās̄̒
ჭუკია = chukia

--Bavi H (talk) 01:00, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Google Translate messed up for Thai here. To answer your query, เมาส์ is a direct borrowing from "mouse" and is pronounced somewhat like the original. (It isn't phonemically possible to represent an ending "s" sound in Thai script.) --Paul_012 (talk) 18:12, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

gameover zeus

please urgent

how can i detected if i have "gameover zeus" virus on my windows?

antiviral program says no detection but gameover zeus hides from it maybe? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.116.25.10 (talk) 12:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know specifically about that virus, but generally a virus can't hide once the anti-virus software knows what to look for. That's why you need to update your anti-virus software often. StuRat (talk) 13:20, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Earning money from Internet

I am a Computer Science Post Graduate student. How can i earn money from Internet? What are thesse different sources or way where i can apply my skill and earn money. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.212.49.25 (talk) 16:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your question is too broad to have a useful answer as-is. Your school may provide free career counseling for its students. -- BenRG (talk) 17:56, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The key point to understand is that "the Internet" doesn't have any money. It's the people using it that have that. So the trick is to find ways to provide something that people will pay for. The Internet can make that easier (and sometimes it makes it harder!) - but in the end, you're basically doing traditional marketing of some product or service.

If you have a great product in mind - then crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo can help you fund making it and get you an initial customer base - but you still have to do a certain amount of promotion and it doesn't get you out of all of the other parts of a classical business model.

SteveBaker (talk) 20:50, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Making money on Internet Content is possible. You could create a popular game or software tool. You could draw a webcomic. You could write a popular blog. You could sell music or become a video blogger on YouTube.

All of these things could theoretically make money, all without ever having a "boss" or a traditional contractor arrangement. ... but don't bet your house on it. A lot of people are trying this, and you'll need a lot of luck, talent, and marketing know-how to make it work for you. And in any case, it'll probably take years of hard work before it yields anything other than "beer and pizza money" (if it ever does!).

Finally, if you want to make a very small amount of money right away, you could try the Amazon Mechanical Turk. I understand that typically pays out much less than (USA) minimum wage, though. APL (talk) 23:50, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to make money then I think you be better off heeding SteveBaker's advice. You need to provide a unique service or product that people are willing to pay for rather than climbing on band-wagon that everyone else is climbing on and hope that your wagon is popular enough to earn you a living. Modern capitalist America seem to be foundered up the philosophy of Napoleon Hill, [2] and Dale Carnegie [3]. The Chinese have taken note and moved it to the next level. Any answer you get to your question will be so obvious that you'll will all ready will have competition (unless you're very, very talented). Look towards people that had very mediocre technical skills like henry ford, edison, bill gates, donald trump etc., and look at how they made their money. --Aspro (talk) 15:23, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Saving Usenet

Are there any present efforts underway to expand access, participation, and technical quality of Usenet? For example, are there other free interfaces, or interfaces with web interface, besides Google Groups? Wnt (talk) 19:21, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See List_of_Usenet_newsreaders and Category:Usenet_clients (I guess categories can't be wikilinked with normal double brackets?). There are lots of other ways to access it outside of Google Groups. Last I checked anything there though, it was mostly a wasteland of spambots, even on relatively obscure threads. Not sure if anyone has the collective will and power to clean it up. Someone the other day suggested to me that Reddit has many similarities to old Usenet, with the main difference that Reddit was immediately born into a Long September. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:23, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To link a category with normal double brackets, put a colon inside the brackets, like this: Category:Usenet clients ([[:Category:Usenet clients]]). JIP | Talk 16:32, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@SemanticMantis: I understand there is free client software - the main issue is that, although provided free by sites like universities with other services, Usenet is not provided free by many NNTP sites. Wnt (talk) 08:29, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

On the whole, the internet has trended towards technologies and use-cases that rely on centralized distribution, as opposed to a peer-to-peer traffic pattern. Most internet traffic flows from just a tiny handful of major websites to n different users, with large n, and growing. In the early days of internet technology, this scalability was not practical or cost-effective. Peer-based data transfer made sense: in 1988, your dial-up connection to the BBS at the local college was usually faster than an internet connection to a major server at NASA or IBM or Stanford. If you wanted news from NASA, you'd get it faster by pulling from a local server who had already cloned the latest content. But today, chances are high that you'll get a 50 megabit-per-second sustained downlink data transfer from NASA - or more likely, Netflix or Youtube or iCloud or your favorite mega-website - from any computer in the world. Even weirder - you probably can't/won't get that kind of high-bandwidth, fast and reliable datalink to an anonymous peer at a nearby university - even if it's geographically closer, your "local server" may be farther away on the network topology, or may simply be connected by lower-performing hardware. Commercial internet providers have built networks that encourage this centralized model, concentrating traffic to a few major providers, because it is more profitable.

The economics of this trend have been incredibly thoroughly studied. For example, Braess's paradox expresses why a Pareto optimum is never met for the network, because it doesn't coincide with the Nash equilibrium. Using less techno-jargon, it means that the networks that get built trend towards sub-optimal traffic patterns. A similar paradox was written up by the oft-cantankerous ex-AT&T engineer, David Isenberg, in his paper "The Rise of the Stupid Network [4] and the related paper, "The Paradox of the Best Network." Historically, economists described Jevon's paradox for the general case of resource-consumption and efficiency.

The moral of this story: peer-to-peer network infrastructure and hardware - and peer-to-peer software protocols like bittorrent, or even NNTP and UseNet - are mathematically provably more efficient at flowing traffic between n different nodes. If the goal is to copy the same data to n users, Usenet-style many-to-many data transfer will require dramatically less network-resources than a centralized HTTP-style server that must single-handedly serve all users individually. Now that we use computers to stream large binary files - like videos and music - it's even more true that a many-to-many distribution network would be more efficient at sharing the data. At the same time, economic forces tend to discourage building these sorts of provably more efficient networks. Compound this with concerns about intellectual-property ownership - yet another reason that providers opt for centralization - and throw in the enforcement of digital restrictions management, and it is evident why our internet infrastructure takes its present form.

Nimur (talk) 09:51, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Surely you know that high-traffic web sites use content delivery networks to serve users from data centers that are geographically close to them. As far as I can tell, Bittorrent is much less efficient in practice since it ignores geographical proximity when choosing peers, meaning that popular data travels many times over transatlantic cables instead of being cached once on each side. Bittorrent has an advantage only when the uploader doesn't want to pay the bandwidth costs (e.g. Linux distributions) or when content delivery networks would refuse to host the data for legal reasons.

NNTP is inefficient because it's push-based: instead of requesting articles from peers on demand and caching them, you have to take the entire contents of every group you subscribe to and store it locally for as long as possible because once you delete it there's no way to get it back from a peer. I think that most of those article copies expire without ever being read by anyone, so the total Internet traffic might actually be lower if there were a single Usenet server for the whole world. It would certainly be lower if the articles were served from a CDN that could be designed for efficient caching instead of being forced to use NNTP.

I don't think any of the technical articles you linked are relevant to any of this. -- BenRG (talk) 17:44, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear though, this isn't a choice between two identical products. I remember people back in the early 90s laughing at someone (I can't remember who) who said that the Internet would be a few hundred channels of cable television. No one respects a prophet when they don't like what he has to say, eh? People never stop coming up with reasons to take things off a centralized server, each flimsier than the last - Wikipedians certainly have reasons to know this. All the things you say are reasons why we shouldn't just accept Usenet going away as some bland technocratic change, but recognize that it is something to be actively opposed. Wnt (talk) 17:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes, I seem to have misunderstood your question. But Nimur's explanation makes a lot of sense why there aren't as many free/public NNTP News servers as there used to be. FWIW, we don't have a list of news servers, but the previous article has a link to this site, which has some other info [5]. I'm a little surprised I can't easily find a list of public news servers. I mean, I can easily find active Gopher_(protocol) pages [6]! Actually, since Nimur brought up BBS, I'm reminded a bit of the trouble I had finding my first BBS phone #. Once I had one, I could get many. But since the main repository of BBS numbers was on BBSs, there was a decent bootstrapping problem! SemanticMantis (talk) 14:24, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The trouble with open NNTP servers is that they're easily abusable, like open SMTP servers. -- BenRG (talk) 17:44, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not necessarily saying open at the protocol level - I mean, does anyone other than Google not charge people for viewing or posting to Usenet? (And don't tell me colleges unless you know one that doesn't charge tuition and let's anyone sign up online) Wnt (talk) 17:48, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe one of these services fits your needs [7] [8], [9]? SemanticMantis (talk) 19:19, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The last link provides useful leads. It is definitely reassuring to see some public projects like http://aioe.org and http://www.eternal-september.org - the more proprietary the access becomes, the greater the risk that an attempt to innovate would fall victim to rent-seeking. News-Portal is a decent effort to present news in a sensible web format, though for some reason I don't understand, eternal-september doesn't make the output available directly for the bulk of the groups it contains.

My feeling is that the way to save Usenet and the way to save Wikipedia may be one and the same: to work out a way to fuse NNTP and MediaWiki into a single hybrid organism, with some added torrenting DNA to work out the optimal way to spread the load. Whether that can be done directly I have no idea, but for example, I can easily picture adding a line to assign a Usenet post to a Wiki page, where it could be treated as a revision (with the added wrinkle that many different people should be able to specify their idea of which revision is "top"); to enable transclusion of one post into another rather than tracking threads, to enable display of images in other posts, and complex CSS, to very nearly the degree we do here on Wikipedia. To be deprecated and lost: the newsgroup as it was, with its ponderous and mostly empty hierarchy filled with overloaded crossposts. Usenet needs to develop mechanisms of central planning; Wikipedia needs to lose its central authority; at the middle, a method of decentralized centralization, authority without authority, should arise. Wnt (talk) 22:25, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Wnt: have you looked at freenet? Maybe a bit of a sketchy place, but it is an interesting idea on how to do decentralized hosting and retrieval. As I understand it, it's like an entire substitute for www, and uses some torrent-like concepts as well as integrated encryption. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:18, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It may be that that aspect would provide useful ideas. In general, freenet isn't really useful for what I'd like to see - it requires installation, a FAQ is why is it so slow?, it has to stay running to improve performance. Above all, as I understand its model, if lots of people ever started using it, it would collapse in a mass of spam once some company arranged to run enough computers requesting their ads 24/7. The main requirements for a hybrid wiki usenet would be accessibility and participation, with the key mystery being how to fund it without the central donation revenue stream of WMF and without resorting to the subscription model of the Usenet providers. It might need an advertising model that reliably protects user reading privacy, but allows for sites to subsidize public access to blocks of content that interest them by serving semi-targeted ads. (I think that as a society we desperately need a whole new theory of advertising, something that can supplant the diminishing returns of the 'Guantanamo Bay' approach) So we'd want a design that mirrors content around in a way that works in accordance with monetary incentives. So for example, a sci-fi site might host copies of all known sci-fi newsgroups - or in my dreaming above, sci-fi Wiki article or discussion titles - and post ads to recently published book titles to fund it. The amount of revenue brought in from doing that ought to be more if there are few sites hosting the sci-fi posts and less if there are many, so that sensible business decisions tend to drive the hosts to try to cover every niche. But there would need to be extensive curation of resources by users and ultimately good default choices of curations from the access sites in order to avoid being swamped by spam and biased content, and it would be key to define the hybrid in such a way that the advertising holds within strict limits, including privacy and rewarding the site that actually hosts the content copy rather than only the one you happen to request it from... I don't claim to have a complete idea at this time, just a desire for one. Wnt (talk) 20:19, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

June 4

Excel help

	A	B	C
1	30	apples	oranges
2	30	bananas	apples
3	40	peaches	lemons
4	50	apples	grapefruits
5	60	mangos	pears
6	70	plums	apples
7	70	apricots	apples

I'm looking for a way to count the unique values in column A corresponding to a given value in either column B or column C, using formulas. In the above example, if the value in question is apples (bolded for clarity), the result should be 3, because wherever apples occurs in either column B or column C, it corresponds to three unique column A values, namely "30", "50" and "70" (but not "40" or "60"). Could you help? --Theurgist (talk) 16:33, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What you want to do is more like a database command, and I'm not sure if Excel can do those. In SQL, it would be something like:

SELECT UNIQUE MY_TABLE.A
  FROM MY_TABLE
  INTO TEMP_TABLE
 WHERE MY_TABLE.B = "apples"
    OR MY_TABLE.C = "apples";

SELECT COUNT(*)
  FROM TEMP_TABLE;

DROP TABLE TEMP_TABLE;

One option is to export a CSV file then import it into an SQL server. If you can write computer programs, you could also extract the info you need from the CSV file, using a program you write. StuRat (talk) 17:12, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you don't mind adding a few extra "working" columns (which you could hide if necessary), you could do it like this: in D1 enter the formula =IF(OR(B1="apples",C1="apples"),A1,""); in E1 =COUNTIF($D$1:$D$7,D1); in F1 =IF(D1="",0,1/E1); copy all these formulas down, and then the sum of the values in column F is the number you want. In reality you would presumably have more than 7 rows, so extend the range of the formulas accordingly. Also you would probably want to put "apples" in a special cell and refer to that in the formula rather than the literal value. This is probably a little more long-winded than it needs to be and could be compressed, but it does the job. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 21:51, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that works. --Theurgist (talk) 15:27, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OEM Windows question

As you probably already know, my boss got permission from the company's management to give me a new PC for use for working from home, pre-installed with Windows 8, and I installed Fedora 20 on a second hard disk. The Windows 8 installation is an OEM one, and my boss was worried that adding a second hard drive would break the licence, because it would think it was no longer the same computer. Nothing of the sort happened, and both Windows and Linux work fine. But what will break the licence? Would upgrading its graphics adapter card do such a thing? And if it would, would it start working again if I reverted the change? JIP | Talk 16:39, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The exact hardware changes that would trigger an activation or license problem are intentionally not made clear. See Microsoft's FAQ on activation and hardware changes. But, if you have trouble after a hardware change, a call to the Microsoft technical support hotline linked on that page will often be able to re-activate the license. Nimur (talk) 16:49, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your company owns the computer that it has bought for you – not microsoft. --Aspro (talk) 22:32, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Win8 Problem.

Why is it that my Win8 PC will not connect to my wifi, when I change the wifi password on the phone I use - I have an android phone with tethering enabled. I had an older password, which I changed on the phone, but now my PC will not connect to it. My android tablet will, however, connect. The problem seems to be with the changed password, as my android tablet asks me for a new password, whereas the PC will not. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 16:58, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Trying having your PC "forget" the wi-fi network, then reconnect. Mingmingla (talk) 18:31, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Cheers. Genii don't come very often, but you are veritably one. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 19:02, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bitter pit

I have carried out a major revision to this topic. The edited version is OK but when I press the read button there is a problem with some of the references. There is a rectangle around some of them and I can't remove them as they are not on the edit page. Tibby 261--- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tibby261 (talk • contribs) 23:24, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings and welcome to Wikipedia. We are always looking for new contributors, but getting started sometimes requires a bit of a learning curve, but once you learn the basics of editing, it's not that hard. You have a message on your talk page that contains several useful links to articles on the Wikipedia ways. I suggest that you start by looking at the How to edit a page and Wiki markup articles.

It appears that you performed your editing outside of the Wikipedia page editor and then pasted the results back into the page source. Because Wikipedia uses a variety of special syntax constructs to achieve the desired formatting, pasting the text as you have done has resulted in several formatting problems. A few quick pointers that may help you fix these problems:

Don't use leading spaces to indent text. Leading spaces have a special meaning. Let Wikipedia handle the formatting.
Use a blank line to separate paragraphs.
To create a section header, precede and follow the header text with two "="s, like: "== Control of Bitter Pit ==" (without the quotes).
Do not try to manually number your references. Anywhere you need a reference, insert the reference information inline preceded by "<ref>" and followed by by "</ref>" - something like "...known as "Stippen".<ref>Jaeger, G (1869)...</ref>".
You will also need to add a single line containing "{{Reflist}}" at the end of the article, preferably preceded by "== References ==" to give the section a header. Wikipedia will automatically number the references, insert superscripts, and replace "{{Reflist}}" with all of the numbered references.

Please give it a try. In my opinion, it's best to learn by doing, but if you need more assistance, a good place to ask is at Wikipedia:Teahouse. Good luck, and again, welcome. -- Tom N talk/contrib 00:56, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to have a go at editing the article, without fear of damaging it, then you can create any article starting with "user:Tibby261"; these are called user-space articles. As long as they vaguely in accordance with Wikipedia articles, you can put what ever you want in them. Here's user:Tibby261/bitter_pit, a blank page for you to get started on, copy the wikisource into the new article's page, edit it there, and when you're happy with it, copy the source back. However, you should check the history for the original since you copied it; see the "view history" to the top-right, or click [[10]]. Wishing you a productive wiki-career, CS Miller (talk) 08:37, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

June 5

Memtest but for graphics cards?

Memtest86+ applies a test to RAM, checking the result. I want to do the same thing with my graphics card. FurMark was the first hit on Google but if I'm not mistaken, it's approach seems to be to stress the card in an attempt to cause a BSOD. Surely it will miss many miscalculations made by the card. Is there no more rigorous method to test graphics cards are performing properly? 78.148.110.113 (talk) 18:13, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would recommend using free benchmark tools and comparing the results to the results obtained by others. Guru3d.com has some links to a few.8.17.117.40 (talk) 19:41, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know of tools for verifying proper rendering, but I'm pretty sure there are LINPACK benchmarks for video cards. This will have them do a complicated linear algebra computation and verify the result. It's at least somewhere to start. A well-written one should make use of most of the memory and a good portion of the card's computing resources. Katie R (talk) 13:47, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm somewhat confused what you're looking for. The various reasons of Memtest only test RAM. They're good at it (although from my experience overclocking the memory subsystem with with modern APU, do have their limitations). But they don't really test any result, at least not in a simple way (they primarily write stuff to the RAM with various patterns and read it back and make sure it's what is expected, you could call this 'the result' but it confusing and makes me understand if you really understand what memtest is doing and what it's good for).

Something like Prime95, or OCCT or Linpack or whatever does test the results of calculations made by the CPU. They are essential for any stress test of a computer, unless for some reason you have some reason to think only the RAM is problematic. (And note as I mentioned, from my experience memtest may fail to pick up problems which are likely with the memory subsystem which the CPU stress tests will pick up.)

OCCT has a GPU stress test with error checking function [11]. It's also supposed to have a memtest for GPU which doesn't seem to show up in my version. But definitely the normal GPU test and probably even the memtest is much more like the CPU OCCT and Linpack tests and other such atress tests rather than memtest86/+. The EVGA OC scanner also has an error check function I believe, but it only support eVGA cards [12]. IIRC there are also a bunch of other tools with GPU error checking functions, which I can't recall the name of.

CUDA GPU memtest [13] which despite the name also supports OpenCL but is apparently Linux only and memtestcl/memtestG80 [14] seem to be trying to replicate memtest86 for the GPU. These will probably be useful if you can get them to work but bear in mind what I said earlier, the are likely only part of stress testing the GPU. That said, I'm not totally sure whether they only test the memory either or do some general purpose stress testing. (Even if they do, I would still recommend another general purpose GPU stress testing tool like OCCT unless you are totally sure you only want to test the GPU memory).

Nil Einne (talk) 15:51, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

June 6

For IT books, how old is too old?

When do publishers stop selling a book, if at all? (given a case where there is no new edition) Some books at oreilly.com are pretty old. For example, [| XPath and XPointer ]is 12 years old. [| sed & awk, 2nd Edition ] is 17 years. Both can still be purchased through Amazon. OsmanRF34 (talk) 16:51, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And the Mach Server Guide is 21 years old, but I still reference it. The C Programming Language is even older, and I still reference that. Speaking of technology documentation, the legally-approved operating handbook for my Citabria is a 1975 Bellanca Aircraft Company document. No newer manual is "legal" for the purposes of keeping the aircraft airworthy, and although my E6B computer is not called out in the installed-equipment listing, it too has documentation that is pretty old. When technology documentation is done well, it doesn't necessarily need to be updated. On the other hand, if you try to write Python 3 using Python 2 documentation, you'll find a lot of incompatibilities; and if you are a Swift programmer, you'll have a hard time finding public documentation older than five days (as of this post). Nimur (talk) 17:08, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I see stuff from 2011 in Swift (parallel scripting language). I imagine if you look a bit more you'll find stuff from 2007. Nil Einne (talk) 06:31, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For clarity, I ought to have linked directly to Swift (Apple programming language), which was announced to the world only on Monday. Nimur (talk) 15:31, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Many computer programming languages try to stay backward compatible, so you can continue to use "deprecated" functions, etc., even in newer versions. Therefore, you could use very old documentation, although then you won't take advantage of any new additions to the language. In Fortran, for example, I don't need to use much that was added after Fortran 77, on a regular basis. So, a 35 year old book would still be of use to me. StuRat (talk) 16:21, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How Windows Updates on a computer finds the Windows Updates servers

How does Windows Updates find home to phone? Say I had an XP box that hadn't been connected to the internet since late 2001 and I connected it shortly before support for XP had recently ceased. I know the source code isn't available, but maybe there's a source from someone who knows explaining it. Given that the IP of the Windows Updates server(s) quite possibly has changed over time, it's probably not a hard-coded constant in their source. Is it a URL to a domain name that Microsoft maintains that DNS servers can route to and instead of replying as a webserver to http requests from browsers, only listens for and responds to Windows Updates-format requests? 20.137.2.50 (talk) 17:01, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It looks up update.microsoft.com, and most of the files it needs are hosted at update.microsoft.com/redist. If you're a developer, [[15]] explains how to use the Windows Update Agent API, and a lot of the details of how the whole process works can be worked out from that documentation. A lot of the files can be directly downloaded if you know the URL because there isn't really a need to restrict access to specific clients. Katie R (talk) 18:32, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What's the smallest format an MP4 could be converted to using Format Factory that would still be readab;e as a music video by a Samsung Smartphone

The question is in the headline,the desire is to send a 6.9MB video (less than 3 minutes) in a reasonably clear format. The target phone has a very low download speed network that charges ridiculous per-minute prices for downloads. If FormatFactory has a more compressed video format than MP4 it will be of great help, but I am an old person who owns a flip phone in case of medical emergencies only. Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 23:32, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't use Form Factory so I can't help answer your exact question, but if you don't have any means to compress the file to less than 1MB then is there no way you could send it by e-mail to be downloaded over a cheaper link and moved onto the phone? Dbfirs 16:27, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

June 7

New windows in Windows

When one launches a program in Windows, it will typically open in a window. Windows has settings, presumably, for where this window will be created, and how large it will be. Is there some way I can find these settings and change them?

This has been a mild annoyance since Windows 95, but now that Windows has decided that Firefox should launch on my second monitor - which is almost always off - it's actually becoming a problem. Vimescarrot (talk) 01:20, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Problems downloading from Mediafire

Any file I try to download from Mediafire immediatly crashes my internet. How can a web page switch off my internet connection? So i go to the mediafile file i want, the page never fully loads, the space for the adverts is constantly trying to load. Ive waited for 10 minutes for it to load and still nothing. Some of the ads that are trying to load appear to be from facebook, firefox says "waiting for facebook.com...." in the bottom left. I do not have a facebook account, would this be relevent? Ive tried this with many different mediafire files.

I give up waiting for the page to fully load and click on the green panel to download my file. And immediatly my internet drops out! everytime.

Ive created a free account with mediafire, this didnt help.

So Ive tried this with chrome and firefox. Ive disabled all add-ons for both browsers. Ive cleared the cache in both browsers. I think this has only started about two weeks ago, before then things were fine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iiidonkeyiii (talk • contribs) 01:39, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Difference between Unix and Unix-like

My understanding is that Unix developed from the 1950s onwards and many parts of it today are relatively unchanged from when they were first coded over half a century ago. Whereas "Unix-like" simply emulates Unix programs but are written recently. Is that correct? Lastwine123 (talk) 23:28, 7 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Webpage map with river route

How do I create a map that has an exploration route along some rivers highlighted on it, that I can embed on a webpage? I have looked at Google maps API and the Google maps JavaScript API version, but it seems like I will need to have a huge amount of geocodes to create a polyline. Is there a less arduous free option? The aforementioned Google API, a little JavaScript, HTML, and CSS are the limits of my coding expertise. Thanks for the help.--Dreamahighway (talk) 00:58, 8 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]