The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.
OOUI\Exception: OOUI\Theme::singleton was called with no singleton theme set
I pulled mediawiki:latest in docker desktop.
I received the notification: "You've just made your tenth edit; thank you, and please keep going!".
When I click on it I see the following error:
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
This query, posted at 01:34, 7 March has been erroneously archived under 29 February. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.0.5.230 (talk) 18:25, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing If there is a website at an IP address, does that mean there has to be a domain name with letters and an extension like .com or .uk? Kk.urban (talk) 05:00, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, that's not actually a requirement (just good sense, because it's easier to remember a name than a string of numbers). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:27, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are a number of services which you can use to do a "Reverse DNS lookup"; that is, to find any domain names that map to a given IP address. Google that phrase to find some of them. The particular IP address in the OP does not appear to have any domain name associated with it as far as I can tell. CodeTalker (talk) 07:05, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Back in my day, all website addresses were numbers. 05:11, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
When was your day? The ARPA internet used host names in 1971.[1] The earliest version of the IP protocol, using internet addresses with a fixed length of four octets (32 bits), is from 1980.[2] --Lambiam 11:51, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is based on my memory of first using the Internet in 1994 or '95 was that every URL you went to was a four-octet number, not an alphanumeric name. Bubba73You talkin' to me? 22:10, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This was before the summer of 1994. At a terminal or dial-in connection you would Telnet to an IP address. There you would see something like a Unix file structure. Bubba73You talkin' to me? 00:04, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"The URI syntax and URL forms have been in widespread use by World-Wide Web software since 1990."[3] --Lambiam 09:09, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The URI syntax includes URIs using an IP address (not just those with a domain name).
I remember File Transfer Protocol (FTP) being the most popular way to exchange files around 1990 (and that may be what @Bubba73 is remembering), and it could always, and often did, use the IP address. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:11, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I used what was available to me. I had to use a dial-in connection to a remote computer and then used telnet to get to the host, all in text mode. I didn't have a browser until I got Netscape, which was after Window 95 came out. Bubba73You talkin' to me? 00:45, 10 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So you used only numbers as website addresses, which is not the same as "all website addresses were numbers". Mosaic was released for Windows in June 1993, so if only you had heard of it (and were using Windows then) you could have enjoyed the wonders of the World Wide Web two years earlier. --Lambiam 16:29, 10 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't say that all website addresses were numbers. I said that is all I knew of and used, at the time.That is what I remember, but my memory could be wrong. I didn't have Windows (to run Mosaic) until some weeks or months after Windows 95 came out about June 1995. Bubba73You talkin' to me? 01:55, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry for the confusion. I used the "back in my day" like an old person talking about their youth. In the first half of 1994 a woman (she is now my wife) taught me about the Internet. She used a Unix workstation at work, so maybe numerical IP addresses were all she knew about. That is all I knew for some time. I had to dial in to a remote computer and use Telnet to get to the Internet. There was no local number, so I had to call long distance, at a cost of about $0.10 per minute. So I wasn't on very long each time and didn't explore it. Bubba73You talkin' to me? 00:33, 14 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Telnet is different from WWW because it doesn't use URLs, but the telnet target can be either a domain name or an IP address. Often telnet is used to reach another machine in the same organization, and organizations often don't bother to set up a DNS server for internal machines, so that may be the origin of the perception that only IP addresses were used with telnet. DNS was certainly well established before 1994. Now if you want to reach back into history, when I started using email around 1979, we used bang paths. There was no Internet; each machine connected directly (usually via dialup) to a small list of other machines, and to reach a given destination you had to specify the exact sequence of machines that needed to be traversed to reach it. That was a real pain. CodeTalker (talk) 19:33, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see it mentioned, but there are many IP addresses that host services, such as web pages, without a host name. That is on purpose because the desire is to only make the services available to people who know about them. Further, they don't host the services on standard ports. Web pages are served on port 80. So, http://24.75.48.45 will go to that computer using port 80 (http = 80). But, to hide a web page, you would put it on something like port 514 and people would have to use http://24.75.48.45:514 to get to it. Further, DNS usually implies "Public" DNS. That isn't the only DNS. A group of people can set up a private DNS that only they use. Then, they can make up their own host names that nobody else has. For example, I could make bozo.xxx go to any IP address I like on my private DNS. I don't have to register it with a public registrar and pay for it (and hope it is available). Another example, wikipedia.org on public DNS goes to 200.80.154.224. But, I could setup a private DNS and send it to 24.75.48.45. Then, if you happened on one of my web pages and clicked a link to Wikipedia, you would use public DNS and go to the normal web page. I would click the same link and go to a different computer that may or may not have anything to do with Wikipedia. Why would anyone do this? It is commonly referred to by the blanket term "dark web." It is simply the Internet services that are not mapped to public DNS host names because they don't want it all to be public. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 12:05, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's a little bit of confusion creeping in here. the earliest naming system for ARPANET was the hosts file (originally hosts.txt). A unified hosts.txt was distributed from the Stamford Research Institute and contained all known names and addresses. By the early 1980s the file had become unwieldy and a team at Berkley developed the Berkley Internet Name domain (BIND) and the first Domain Name Service (DNS). the original hosts.txt exists on most machines to this day, but usually only contains the definition of the loopback and possibly the hosts own name. Having said which, for small networks it is still an easy way to define local fixed addresses. There are alternative DNSs to BIND which are designed for specific use cases. All DNSs should interoperate such that the local DNS will pass on requests it can't satisfy to an external DNS. This multilayered approach becomes essential when NAT or proxy servers are used such that the intranet address is not globally unique. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Martin of Sheffield (talk • contribs)
March 8
Internet being jammed
I believe I've been hacked somehow, even though when I run Malwarebytes on my laptop it doesn't show any malware. Whenever I go to work or shop online, my Internet keeps going out. Wifi signal is fine, everything shows up fine on the router. Weather is not a problem. This only happens when I go online. I think the problem originated with my cell phone some time ago (I think someone was listening to me through the phone, I would get calls at very specific times whenever I made a sound), but I factory reset my phone and it's persisting with my Internet. Of course I don't know who is doing this or why, but when I hard reset my phone the problem goes away for a few minutes, then boom, it happens again. I am leaving my phone (for now) factory reset. Any idea what's going on and how I can fix it? I know how to work a computer but I'm not advanced or anything (ie no coding skills or network skills). Thanks. Therapyisgood (talk) 14:50, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It could be due to some bad add-on/extension for your browser. If you look at your browser's menu you should find an entry for tem. Try switching off any you don't need. NadVolum (talk) 15:20, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's happening to multiple computers in the same house. Therapyisgood (talk) 15:45, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say it's very unlikely to be a result of a hack. Sounds like there is a problem with your router or modem. First step would be to power cycle both of them. I'm unclear however about why you mention your phone. Your phone has nothing to do with your computers' Internet connections, unless your computers are connecting via a hotspot on your phone. CodeTalker (talk) 19:36, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Concentrate on only one device, let's start with your laptop, since I even Windows. Turn everything other device in the house right off. If possible, disable your laptop's Wifi (or enable flight mode) and connect the laptop directly to the router with an ethernet network cable. Power cycle the router and laptop (ie complete reboot). When the laptop restarts, without opening your browser, open a command prompt with Win and enter cmd.exe . Type ping www.ibm.com, press Enter. You should get three Reply from www.ibm.com in 0.37 secs (or so). Don't close the command prompt window. In your browser, can you access any site? Does the internet connection fail on any particular site? If it fails, switch back to the command prompt, press the Up arrow and press Enter to repeat the ping command. Does it still work, or do you get three Request timed out? MinorProphet (talk) 19:52, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I went to the source code of the page and searched "09-14" to see if there was any metadata for the date, and sure enough, I found: "datePublished": "2017-09-14T15:25:36-04:00"Anon126 (notify me of responses! / talk / contribs) 04:27, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The years 1995, 2000, 2006, 2017 and 2023 are the years, since the World Wide Web was opened to the public, in which 14 September was on a Thursday. Gennady Golovkin moved to the US after 2010, around 2012,[4] and the web page was archived in 2022, so also without metadata this leaves only 2017. --Lambiam 14:06, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
ZIP file central directory in another central directory's comment
The ZIP format allows the central directory to end with up to 65535 bytes of arbitrary data as a "comment". If the comment contains another central directory, is there any consensus about which central directory is the "real" one? Is the class of valid central directories for a given set of zipped files equal, as I suspect, to the intersection of strings of up to 65535 bytes with a class that's closed under concatenation (or concatenation plus overwriting O(1) bytes) and includes all possible central directories that don't already have comments? This will affect the zip_next Rust crate, which uses a fuzzing library that's done a great job so far of surfacing corner cases that a denial-of-service attack might exploit.
(I know that the class of entire valid ZIP files is closed under concatenation because of the prefix feature; but this is worse since the multiple central directories can point to overlapping files.) NeonMerlin 21:16, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
After that on the mystery URL are a bunch of numbers, an underscore, the letter n, a dot, and jpg. After that is a question mark followed by stp=dst-jpg_p526x296&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=c42490&_nc_ohc=IkTXZYZRFfQAX8RLql3&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.xx&oh=00_AfDtojZCc8iZapB-2hG3BZI1_MGfC2CNxVOal30R8PBuxA&oe=65D6F479
Because of the first parts of the URL being identical, it is possible I found the same photo twice, but I don't know.
I don't want to post the entire URL in either case because it came from someone's Facebook.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:38, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In a URL, everything after ? is a query string. The format is service://host.server/path/to/resource?query&string. So, https is your service. scontent-atl3-x.xx is the host. fbcdn.net is the server. v/t39.30008-6 is the path to the resource, which is a jpg file according to your description. That is the image file. It is a jpg image file. It doesn't matter what the query string has. You've found the file. The query string is a set of variables you can use to customize some resources. Not all resources care about it. For example, an image file server might accept an image size setting in a query string. So, you can send the image as small or large. It doesn't change the resource itself. It just changes the size of the image sent. Therefore, if everything before the ? is the same, it is the same resource. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 10:44, 14 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The URL is a hash created by Facebook, which reports it is a "Bad URL hash". Probably, the original URL pointed to content that was later deleted. --Lambiam 11:31, 14 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
March 15
Aspect Ratio Problem (ShotCut)
I have an mp4 file of something that was originally widescreen but has been reformatted to fit an old-fashioned TV. That is to say, it has gone from (I think) 16:9 to 4:3. The effect is that all the characters in the clip appear taller and thinner than they really were in the original.
Does anyone know if there is a filter (in ShotCut, ideally) which could correct that problem and return the file to its original aspect ratio? Or another way to address the problem? AndyJones (talk) 12:31, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
VLC-player for example offers under its tab "Video" options to format-per-view. --46.114.5.149 (talk) 15:06, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. ShotCut doesn't have a option called that, or indeed called anything that sounds to me like it would be the place to look! However FWIW I have found a workaround, which is that if you open the clip in isolation in ShotCut (as distinct from adding it to the playlist), then you go into its properties and amend the aspect ratio there to 1600 x 900, then you export the result, you get what I was hoping for. AndyJones (talk) 17:22, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When I am typing the words stop appearing
This happens on several sites when I am typing in a box like this. It doesn't happen on Wikipedia because there are no ads. I don't know if there is a fix even if I can get through to the people who can fix the software.
I'm not sure how I figured it out but it seems to happen when an ad appears on the screen. Not all ads, though. And I don't notice right away that what I typed stopped appearing because I look at the keyboard, something my typing teacher told me not to do, then I don't realize the words didn't show up.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:18, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A totally non-expert reply from someone who experiences the same phenomenon – it may be that your device is either quite old or quite small in memory terms by current ever-advancing standards, and is unable to allocate sufficient resources to running everything in complete parallel. In the long term, applications get more numerous and more resource hungry (which in part drives the need to update hardware). I also seem to notice more frequent updates of OS and security systems these days, which in combination slow my ageing PC for a significant proportion of my usage. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.186.221 (talk) 00:12, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do get high memory usage warnings but the computer is quite new. Well, two years old. Wow, times passes quickly. Anyway, I made a note of that on my user page.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 15:10, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When did electronic computers first allow input in base 8+ instead of just manual binary?
With a button to load your machine instruction or tell it you want it in this address, after you've entered it by physical binary toggle switches. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:51, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wasn't there a time when you could only input raw machine code but had a keyboard with all the octal or maybe hexadecimal or decimal numerals? And before that you had to flick switches one way or the other (one switch per bit) then press something? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:23, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"KEYBOARD: A device for translating manual key strokes into "computer language". There are eight keys, representing the octal numbers zero thru seven, each of which when depressed, produces a unique set of binary pulse codes (3 pulse combination). Keyboard is used to introduce either the "program" or quantitative data into the computer and memory."
By "8+", do you mean binary-coded decimal? Typically, numerical input was by means of peripheral input devices reading prepared punch cards or punched tape in which numbers were represented in the form of a sequence of codes for the decimal digits and possibly the sign and the decimal point (or comma). Even if the internal arithmetic was binary, as for the Z3, the input and output used decimal representation. Assuming you mean a form of inputting data, one word at a time, through a row of toggle switches on the computer's console that are manually set by the operator, another question is, when were electronic computers first equipped with such switches? --Lambiam 16:01, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Looks good. But I think that BINAC's approach of interfacing with the hardware directly in this way was already being superseded. See Manchester Mark 1#Programming: "In 1948 Alan Turing devised an encoding scheme based on the standard ITA2 5-bit teleprinter code, which allowed programs and data to be written to and read from punched tape." This included a keyboard which controlled the punching mechanism. The concept of using a keyboard goes back at least to Émile Baudot's printing telegraph of 1874, on which ITA2 was based. MinorProphet (talk) 16:40, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The 1943 Colossus computer used punched tape for data input, though it was 'programmed' through hardware settings rather than any sort of input device. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:27, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Z4 (computer) was like a sophisticated programmable calculator. It had a special program construction unit for programming it and used decimal floating point for the external world though it worked in binary. No need to work in binary or even octal or to toggle switches. But then again it was mechanical not electonic. NadVolum (talk) 18:43, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The PDP-11 I worked on around 1979 had toggle switches that could be used to enter machine code in binary. You toggle in a value, then press a LOAD button and it would store that value in memory. Then toggle in the next value, press LOAD again and it stores it in the next memory location, etc. But this was usually only used for entering the bootstrap program; there was no non-volatile memory so you had to key in the bootstrap program every time the computer was powered on. After it was booted, it ran Unix and you could write programs in a high-level language, run a compiler, etc. So this machine did allow only binary input for the bootstrap program, but acted more like a modern computer after it was booted. CodeTalker (talk) 22:13, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Lambiam asked, "...when were electronic computers first equipped with such switches? You mean, after this type of thing? (ENIAC) According to Z3 (computer)#Relation to other work "The ENIAC computer, completed after the war, used vacuum tubes to implement switches and used decimal representation for numbers. Until 1948 programming was, as with Colossus [1943], by patch leads and switches."..."The Manchester Baby of 1948 along with the Manchester Mark 1 and EDSAC (both of 1949) were the world's earliest working computers that stored program instructions and data in the same space. In this they implemented the stored-program concept which is frequently (but erroneously) attributed to a 1945 paper by John von Neumann and colleagues." MinorProphet (talk) 22:39, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I assume the expression "physical binary toggle switches" in the OP refers to manually set switches, as seen in the fourth image here for the console of an EL-X8, and here for an IBM System/360 Model 40. --Lambiam 00:25, 18 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Teletypes pre-dated computers, so the concept of a single key that transmitted a whole letter (or any value more complex than 0 or 1) already existed. -- Verbarson talkedits 22:59, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
March 16
REVISIONTIMESTAMP
Hi. In Magic words on "MediaWiki" about the Variable REVISIONTIMESTAMP you can read "Viewed revision of current page (latest revision or selected older revision)". Does anybody know how can you select with this variable an older revision, for example the first revision of any article? 46.114.107.163 (talk) 06:00, 16 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wrong forum, this belongs to mw:Help talk:Magic words. Thanks to user "Lambiam" for the useful hint. Indeed you cannot select by means of magic words to gather the details about any other revision than the one that is being viewed at the moment. Taylor 49 (talk) 15:17, 17 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
March 18
Limits of silicon-based computation
I remember there being some sort of theory or law about the limit of the performance of silicon-based computing hardware, but I can't remember what it was called for the life of me. Anyone know what this is called? I hope I explained it well. vghfr (✉ Talk) (✏ Contribs) 02:03, 18 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
to be able to use it as a link. However, when I click on these two links, the information I need opens, but the URL doesn't change. What trick can be used to find the direct URL of these two links? Thank you very much. 46.114.181.185 (talk) 19:56, 19 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There seems to be a typo in your ifosta.de URL. It gives a 404 error. CodeTalker (talk) 22:23, 19 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There may not be a direct link. The content display may be controlled by Javascript or other tricks. RudolfRed (talk) 00:16, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks @RudolfRed:, ok, but can you tell me what are those tricks that can be used to display directly the content? 46.114.181.185 (talk) 00:28, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
