Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 December 14

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December 14

Is this bad? Floaters

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--Tagishsimon (talk) 01:18, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Font

What is a font that looks like medieval typesetting? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.183.165.245 (talk) 02:31, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Blackletter and Fraktur fonts have a distinctly medieval look. Belisarius (talk) 02:40, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

I meant mediaeval, but at the same time, readable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.229.233.53 (talk) 02:51, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

I also don't have either of those fonts. 76.229.233.53 (talk) 02:52, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Try searching for a free font called Essays1743. 81.131.19.93 (talk) 12:59, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Usage Demographics

Where might I find statistics relating to page requests (or some similar metric), broken down by country? More explicitly, I'm trying to figure out what percentage of the site's traffic comes from Ontario, Canada.

Could anyone help point me in the right direction?

72.39.70.195 (talk) 04:36, 14 December 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.39.70.195 (talk) 04:34, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

[1] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.54 (talk) 15:46, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.39.70.195 (talk) 23:21, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Buying and tweaking/customizing a WM smartphone

I have never used a smartphone before. Iam a slightly advanced user of computers and have tweaked the registry , etc to make it run faster. I read in forums that windows mobile is quite slow. I also see many used smartphones for sale and i assume its former users are not technically very proficient. Im thinking of buying one of those with slightly fast processor, say 400 mhz or more. I dont know if it can be done, i intend to switch off all eyecandy to increase speed.The intention is to use it as a largely as a dictionary, internet browser, alarm clock and cellphone. Can aproperly tweaked WM smartphone can do all this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.201.79.116 (talk) 05:28, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

If the 400mhz are at all comparable to a n770's 252mhz it should go without tweaking. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 22:10, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

MS Excel search window position

In MS Excel 2003, hit Ctrl-F to open the Search window, input a term, click Search, and successfully find something. Now X the Search window to close it and hit Crtl-F again. Notice the new position? When done repeatedly, the Search window slowly slides down the page. This only happens if you search and find something, however. If you just open-X-open-X it maintains position. Does anyone know how to get it to quit lowering itself when doing lots of searches? It's stupid and annoying. 218.25.32.210 (talk) 06:28, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Internet protocols and filesharing

I've read several times now (although only in individuals' blogs so far) that technically, it would be possible to adjust the internet protocols such that each request and response could always be tracked down to the individual computer. There also was the proposed Fritz chip thing, but that never took off. My question is, would it be possible in principle to make all file and hypertext transfers traceable?

For those interested, I'm asking because I believe if the answer is yes, and those changes would be implemented, it would "democratise" the distribution of information goods like film and music and thus "level the playing field", as it were, for smaller competitors who do not possess the ressources to tolerate some extent of illegal filesharing of their products. It would obviously also abolish internet privacy with all attached issues, but that's another story (imho). --87.79.84.205 (talk) 07:05, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

They already are traceable. I recommend you read about TCP/IP and file sharing, because every packet that is sent over the Internet has the source IP address and the destination IP address in its headers. (How else could they be delivered?) All of these packets are forwarded to their destination by your ISPs routers. ISPs keep records of these transfers and of your IP address. They later have to delete these logs to make room for new ones. But this is all a vast over-simplification because there are different types of file sharing. There are torrents, which are very, very easy to trace. Open up utorrent and start a transfer, then select "Peers" and you'll see their IP addresses and where they're located. There are peer-to-peer programs, which are also easy to trace. Then there are sites like Rapidshare, which can be traced (and has been by the music industry). Users have to take precautions to hide their tracks. But the vast majority of users don't. They're like you, in that they assume that it's all anonymous because no one is standing behind them and staring at their screen. Honestly I could write a book right here about it, but you really should just read a book or two written by someone else if you want a decent answer.--Drknkn (talk) 07:25, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Though IP addresses don't always go to the same place. And if you read about DNS poisoning you'll see people don't always put their own IP into the source IP address! (Though I see that article doesn't explain how this trick is used, probably be a good thing to add now as most DNS now protect fairly well against it) Dmcq (talk) 11:23, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

And you could also mention TOR, or wardriving, and so on. But, as I said, I have no intention of writing a book because the exception makes the rule. They are traceable unless you perform a trick to make them untraceable.--Drknkn (talk) 15:33, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

For the record, it's not like just anyone can trace an IP-address to a single computer; the ISPs don't share their logs with the public. If you want access, you need a court order (which is not at all easy to get). But the larger point Drknkn is making is absolutely correct, if you try hard enough any regular (i.e. not using anonymizers like TOR) TCP/IP-connection is traceable.

I don't really understand your question though. How would making internet connections traceable make internet "more democritized" and "level the playing-field"? The playing field is just the same, rich people are rich and powerful, poor people substantially less so. Pirating is still unstoppable, regardless of whether it's a small company making the content or a large one. Making all internet connections 100% percent traceable by anyone wouldn't change that, the only thing it would do is make the internet a significant amount crappier and get a lot more Chinese bloggers thrown in jail. Belisarius (talk) 09:17, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, here in Germany, ISPs are now legally required to store the access logs of their respective dynamic IP address pools for the particular purpose of tracking illegal activities. About Tor and other means of masking, that's at the core of my question and I should have been clearer: Could the protocols be changed such that those services (VPN, Tor and whatnot) are universally rendered ineffective? I know about all the things Drknkn mentioned, so that's my real question: Could the protocols be adjusted to render all VPNs and proxy services obsolete?

With "democratized" etc I mean the idea that if all downloads and uploads were centrally traceable (with Tor et.al no longer providing an opportunity to hide one's IP address), it would create the option to automatically charge every individual person for every single download of a copyrighted work. That means, in my vision, the primary means of legal distribution (for most any digital product) would probably be P2P exchange. In that scenario, the infrastructure currently provided by, say, the RIAA oligopoly would become obsolete almost overnight, as artists would no longer depend on record contracts with those companies to distribute their works the way they still do (of course, technically, they already don't -- but tell that to a fledgling musician who needs to eat).

About the Chinese bloggers: Yes, that's unfortunately true. However, if really everything was traceable regardless of proxies, it would also mean child pornography exchange over the internet would be history (an issue which is specifically addressed in the FAQs on tor.org). Moreover, sockpuppeting would be gone as well. --87.79.84.132 (talk) 12:00, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

There's all sorts of schemes for transferring licences around the web. However I don't see any way of stopping people hiding where they come from without cooperative international regulation and policing of all internet providers. That sounds like a very bad idea to me. I know things like paedophilia are always being dragged up to justify tagging everyone sticking in cameras everywhere and doing all sorts of checks on them. It seems like the Stazi have just gone for places like the UK to embrace the idea. I sure your government can trade some of your freedoms for the freedoms the Chinese wish to curtail in theirs so they can both spy on you 24 hours a day, that way you can trace every single transfer. Of course we'll all need implanted RFID chips containing a private key for it all to work well, I can just see them justifying that as stopping credit card fraud and stopping terrorists. Dmcq (talk) 12:26, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I'm not paranoid enough. My question was aimed at illegal filesharing only. Because, you see, the argument works also the other way around: People who really only or mainly want to illegally share copyrighted works are constantly hiding behind the 1984 argument, similar to dopers who really only want to make "trousers out of hemp". --87.79.84.132 (talk) 12:45, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

In either case you have to see it as a tradeoff. The question is whether the benefits of accepting such a scheme outweigh the costs. Making it possible for companies and governments to even more easily trace internet use to individual people would have side-effects that reached far beyond the economic concerns of smaller content producers, and would probably not change the piracy situation notably. There are a lot of very technically adept people out there who enjoy finding ways around copyright restrictiveness, and so far all of the might of the big companies to find technical solutions to copyright piracy have failed miserably. It is not about being "paranoid", it is about trying to come up with a balanced view of things. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:16, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

You're right, of course. It's just, all those people with absolutely zero concern for the property of others irk me a lot. That, and 4chan without teenagers would be great. --87.79.84.132 (talk) 21:17, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) With regards to adjusting the protocols so VPNs etc could be traceable I don't really see how that can happen. If you adjust how a VPN works then it's not a VPN anymore (after all it does stand for "Virtual Private Network"!) and who's going to enforce it? Sure the ISPs can detect a VPN and even if they blocked it, anyone can create their own protocol (online game developers do this all the time). This means that if VPNs were outlawed or additional access/backdoors had to be implemented (and just that's not going to happen) there's nothing to stop someone creating their own replacement protocol with their own encryption which people could use instead. The ISP would have to start filtering for allowed ports only and even then there's nothing to stop you running a SSH tunnel via a TCP port 443 (normal SSL encrypted web traffic). Talking of which, things like SSL on webpages are there to protect the transfer of credit cards and other private details from being intercepted on route, by allowing ISPs access to that then you'd have to remove it completely so anyone else could access it too and in doing so you'd set the whole Internet back 30+ years in the process. ZX81 ^talk 12:33, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for the reply. I figured that it would take an international effort to do this at all, but if I understand you correctly even that couldn't work short of actually "1984-ing" the entire world. I guess that's the answer I was looking for. Thanks to all (RD remains one of the treasure chests of Wikipedia -- too good to recommend)! --87.79.84.132 (talk) 12:51, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

The sort of thing I'd hope those paranoia people would go for is the suggestion that terrorists are passing secret messages to each other via spam. Those alterations of the text may look like random changes to get past your filter but they're really encrypted messages and they send them all over the place so their recipient can't be detected. Rubbish of course but if a fraction of the effort governments put into schemes to collect data on everyone was put into combating spam it would save the world an enormous amount of money and wasted time. I am a bit afraid that the world is headed towards 1984 and the really sad bit is it affects the law abiding far more than the wrongdoers. You can see this with things like the criminal records checks in Britain which have far more errors stopping legitimate people than it ever finds people to ban, and in fact far more people are found out by other means rather than via it. All it has done is cause suspicion and hysteria and closed down or curtailed many activities for children because of lack of volunteers. Men just don't want to have anything to do with junior schools now in case there's some hint of suspicion of them being paedophiles. Overall I'm pretty certain it has caused much more harm than it has ever saved. So forgive me for siding with the filesharers as anyone who really wanted to do criminal acts could get round such checks and the majority public can be helped with less rigorous checking and decent licencing. Dmcq (talk) 13:26, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

I hear you. --87.79.84.132 (talk) 21:14, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Typewriters and free OCR recognition software

I have recently bought an old electric typewriter from a charity store fairly close to me. There is something about using a typewriter (as compared to a computer) that I find very soothing, and would love to start using it to type a fairly long story that I've had in the works for a year now.

My only problem is that once I get past the writing stage and on to the editing stage, I would much prefer to have the story on a computer: A place where editing, spellchecking and such is much easier. My grand plan is to write everything out on the typewriter, then scan and OCR the pages into workable text and move from there.

(Disclaimer: I am what you would describe as "tech savvy"; I know my way around computers and their operating systems quite well, so don't be scared to venture into areas that would leave the average user gasping in horror. I run Ubuntu 9.10, Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows XP with usage preference in that order).

I'm looking for an OCR program that:

1. Is free (OSS preferably)
2. Is very accurate with B&W scans and monospaced fonts
3. Is GUI based
4. Informs you when it had trouble recognising a character, gives you the option to suggest what the character is and learns from your suggestion

Also, would the program having a feature to allow you to train it on a specific character set be any help at all, or would the program already be accurate enough to understand the typewriter's fairly simple font?

Thanks in advanced for your help and program suggestions. ~fl 13:05, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Well you can get an old edition of OCR programs fairly cheaply and they are very good indeed, they'd have no trouble with the typewriting and would hardly ever have an error. I use OmniPage myself and one a year or two old would be fine though earlier ones had problems with some scanners. Alternatively many scanners come with some straightforward OCR program that would probably be suitable. They seem to have learned that people are willing to pay for a machine but want the software 'free' even if bundled in the price. Dmcq (talk) 13:33, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

By the way Optical character recognition lists some free stuff as well but I don't know if I can recommend any. Dmcq (talk) 13:35, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Having done some of this myself, your best (free) bet is probably some GUI-frontend for Tesseract on your Ubuntu machine. The command-line is not very complicated as command lines go, but a GUI may also open up your option 4, I don't know. (If this is not available, some carefully chosen find-replace combinations may help on recurrent mistranscriptions.) - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 17:39, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

I have purchased 2 scanners in the past and both came with "Paper Port" by ScanSoft and have been very pleased. This software does not learn from your suggestions, but it is consistent. In that case, when you find any confusion you can fix them all by doing a find and replace. Word's spell checker help find glitches too.

In general OCR software does it's best with high contrast (as in B&W) and monospaced. I really doubt if you will have any problems at all. The only bad scans I get are scans of small Times Roman fonts in italics, but I scan a lot of scripts and that is quite common. While I am writing this I'll tell you of a funny glitch. One time I scanned a script and one of the lines was "who remembers". It scanned as "whore members." Spell check didn't catch that one. --69.254.66.245 (talk) 23:13, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

WoW II

In World of Warcraft, I am trying to get to 50 quests completed, is there a way to see how many I have done so far? Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.172.59.90 (talk) 14:50, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

If you are trying to do it for an achievement, the achievement itself should have a progress bar on how many quests have done. Livewireo (talk) 18:03, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

The official Armory page will display statistics, though this may not be the exact number used by the achievement calculator if that is what you are going for. For example, my Armory page shows over 3,000 quests completed, yet I do not have "the Seeker" title yet because that number is including daily quests in the total. --Coreycubed (talk) 21:34, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

nice and ionice for a tty

My Kubuntu laptop sometimes goes into near lockup, forcing me to press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and open htop to kill an offending program. I could do this faster if getty and bash on tty1 were always at the highest nice and ionice settings. How can I make this the case? NeonMerlin 16:26, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

It's my understanding that init starts those gettys by running /etc/init/tty1.conf (et al). Mine reads exec /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty1 - I suggest you try nice and ionice in there; I haven't tried this personally, so let us know how you get on with it. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:02, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Editing podcast date formats on iTunes

Hi everyone, I was just wondering whether there is any way of changing the date format in iTunes for podcasts. Currently the default setting is the American way of writing the date (month/day/year) but as I don't use this format it confuses things. Can I change it or am I stuck with whatever date format that was set for the podcast? Many thanks for any help. Chevymontecarlo (talk) 16:42, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Networking Sharing (Ubuntu + Vista)

My Ubuntu 9.10 PC can only access (and be accessed from) my Vista machine when the Firewall is off. How do I set the firewall to accept access from my own Vista machine (and no other machine) while still being able to have both machines communicate freely? The firewall I have is the one that came with it (Ubuntu 9.10) - the one called 'Firewall' with the blue and white shield icon. TIA! --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 17:27, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Unless you tell us how you are accessing your Ubuntu PC, we cannot help. Is is Samba? Is it SSH? Is it FTP? The method being used will require a specific port(s) to be opened in the firewall. Each method uses different ports. So, without the method, the ports are unknown. -- kainaw™ 19:07, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Although it's easy to point out that Samba is port 445 (and 139 for netbios), SSH is 22, and FTP is 21 (and maybe 20).

Anyway, if you only want to open Ubuntu's firewall for the Vista machine, just add an exception for the Vista machine's local IP address. It sounds like you're using gufw, so just click the Advanced tab, select Allow, enter the Vista machine's address, and click Add. It should add an exception rule to the firewall. Indeterminate (talk) 00:56, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Mac screen share

How do you use screen share on a mac?Accdude92 (talk to me!) (sign) 20:11, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Have you tried googling mac screen share? The first hit there seems to explain it. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:24, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

laptop screen issues

The screen on my laptop is doing odd things: flickering, jumping around, little black lines appearing, has a reddish tint especially on startup. I don't have an external monitor, but is it possible to use the screen of a different laptop as an external monitor to check whether it's a screen problem? And if so, how? Exploding Boy (talk) 20:11, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Usually, no, laptops won't let you do that. You'll have to find a legit external monitor, or television with a VGA port. A reddish tint sounds like a screen hardware issue, though, almost unambiguously—it's the kind of thing you get when a wire is loose or frayed. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:26, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Getting an external monitor to hook up will almost certainly verify that it's a loose VGA (one of the RGB wires) cable, either at the port or internally. That redish pinkish tint is very often that. If your external VGA does the samething that speaks more to the internal wiring of that port. I would seriously doubt it's a software/firmware issue, unless you're getting strange artifacts that are video card based. Try taking a screenshot and displaying the screenshot on a working monitor/another computer. If the screenshot has issues then your problem is related to a software/video card problem. Shadowjams (talk) 22:41, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

IOBit Security360 free version

How does IOBit Security360 (free version) rate? It is popular on CNETDownload.

I already have Avast! antivirus, AdvancedSystemCare, SuperAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, SpywareBlaster, Windows Firewall, AdAware, Spybot, and probably one or two other things as well. 78.145.22.247 (talk) 22:43, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

At the same time? In practice more than one virus and spyware scanner tends to lead to problems nearly as severe as having the actual virus (okay, I suppose it won't steal your identity, but you take a nasty performance hit). I know nothing about IOBit Security360, but I can tell you that the success rate of the various scanners is usually within 10-20% of one another, and it's usually best to just pick one that doesn't slow down your machine. If you get hit by a really new virus, none of them will recognize it anyway, and if it's old, they'll all recognize it. —ShadowRanger ^(talk|stalk) 21:24, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

I have only one anti-virus: Avast. That runs all the time. The rest of them only start up and do a scan when told to (I have disabled AdAware from starting up at boot time). You can have as many of the second group as you like as they do not intefere with each other, and are not loaded or running otherwise. My understanding is that having more than one anti-malwares is advisable as they do not cover the same ground, and that has been my experience. I have been running IOBitSecurity360 as well recently, but it has not caused any problems. SpywareBlaster works in a different way. I also use CCleaner a lot. It also speeeds up the anti-malware scans if you use Ccleaner to clean the cr*p out before running them. 78.151.149.182 (talk) 15:57, 17 December 2009 (UTC)