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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 July 4

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July 4

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Neurotypical computer scientists/programmers

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What famous computer scientists or programmers, if any, have been conclusively determined not to have ADHD, autism-spectrum disorders or Pervasive Developmental Disorder? NeonMerlin 00:07, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Normal people don't need tests to determine normality - your question is kind of weird in that respect - however as far as I know Niklaus Wirth, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup have never been suggested to be neuro-socialially challenged.83.100.250.79 (talk) 00:41, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Which means to say, they've never eaten pieces of skin off their foot during a class lecture. --156.34.71.129 (talk) 01:55, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Dijkstra was a little 'out there'...he definitely seemed like an Aspie of some variety. I met him a couple of times (we both worked for Philips Research) - and I was on his 'mailing list' for a while (by which, I mean, he mailed me stuff that he wrote...about twice a week!) Only very rarely did he type his technical documents - he liked to invent his own symbols - so pretty much everything was hand-written, photocopied and posted out to whoever happened to be on his list. He had the most perfect handwriting you ever saw - then one day, you'd get a letter in different - but equally beautiful handwriting that starts "My left hand could use some practice". A fascinating guy.) SteveBaker (talk) 03:41, 7 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Being famous implies that the person will be assumed to have a disorder. When a normal person does something such as state a preference for banana and peanut butter sandwiches, it is just considered a taste preference. When a famous person does the same thing, it is considered a weird eccentric result of some deeper psychological disorder. Therefore, all famous people are believed to have a disorder of some kind. -- kainaw 14:34, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Kainaw....you have to be kidding. Some famous people have their eccentricities blown out of proportion, but by no means are "all famous people...believed to have a disorder of some kind." You're just plain wrong. And more to the point, a "famous" computer scientist or programmer probably isn't famous enough to have the kind of media-visibility required for the type of (non-existent) phenomenon you described to occur. Your distinction between "famous people" and "normal people" is a bit strange in itself. Famous people ARE normal people (for the most part), they're just really well known. --Shaggorama (talk) 17:16, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think there's a distinction between 'famous in the field' and 'famous in the public eye' to be made here.
We're here My boyfriend has Asperger's Syndrome, and now I think I might have it as well. How do I talk with him about this? are we not? 83.100.250.79 (talk) 18:04, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unable to Login Into Wireless Router Configuration Page (Using Firefox)

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Hello everyone! I hoping you could help me with a problem I'm having. This computer (connected via Ethernet) cannot login to configure the network but any of the computers in my house connected wirelessly can login. (Yes, I am using the right user name and password) Could anyone offer an explanation for this and some solution(s)? Thanks. [I just discovered this today but I haven't attempted to login for several days so the problem may have appeared anytime within the last week]--Xp54321 (Hello!Contribs) 03:06, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

For some reason I can't login using Firefox [3.5] but I can login through other browsers like Google Chrome or Internet Explorer. Strange... Does anybody have any possible explanations for this? And hopefully some solution(s)?--Xp54321 (Hello!Contribs) 03:15, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know. You didn't say the brand of the router or what it says when you can't log in.--WinRAR anodeeven (talk) 03:43, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Apologies; it's a Westell router and the message it states is "Login failed, please try again: " Though I just tried it and another error message appeared mentioned cookies being disabled. (I have third-party cookies blocked but cookies from sites are still allowed; I tried to login again but with third-party cookies enabled and the login still failed)--Xp54321 (Hello!Contribs) 05:13, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm - if you know when you were last able to login you could use system restore to roll back your pc to that point. Maybe you installed/changed something that borked your connection - this might be faster than trying to dig out the exact problem? Exxolon (talk) 12:31, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved

--Xp54321 (Hello!Contribs) 17:24, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

geforce gt220

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I recently bought a new PC with a GeForce GT220 graphics card. Do it have a 40nm chip?
This is the PC: [1]. As far as I had known, the GT220 was not supposed to come out until after this summer ends, so you can imagine my suprise when I saw a retail computer with it! --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 05:51, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Probably (yes) see http://en.inpai.com.cn/doc/enshowcont.asp?id=6229 , sounds like you got number 1 .83.100.250.79 (talk) 15:07, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

YTMND audio loop problem

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OK, so I was browsing some YTMND sites, but one thing that bugs me is the broken looping sound. Sites that are supposed to loop properly, i.e. LOL, Internet and many others, pause at the end and cut a bit of the beginning part. I'm using Firefox 3.5 and Quicktime 7.6.2; there had been at leat one thread in the forums describing the problem, but I couldn't seem to track it down and resolve it. Even other browsers don't loop wave and MP3 files properly. Any thoughts on this? Blake Gripling (talk) 06:13, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

VPN w/o tweaking router

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Can I set up a VPN on a home compuer without making any edits to the router? I share itnernet use with a few others in the hosue and I don't own the router, so if I could set up a VPN on my terminal with just a software package or something like that without making any edits to the router, that would be ideal. Right now I'm looking at Gbridge. --Shaggorama (talk) 17:03, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

All traffic into your local network goes through the firewall. So, assume you set up VPN on your computer on port 5252. If I try to use it, I will hit your router on port 5252. It won't know what I want and I won't get anywhere. You have to configure the router to forward all traffic on port 5252 to your computer. Then, when I hit your router on port 5252, it will forward me to your computer and all will be great. This goes for ANY service you want to run on your computer, not just VPN. If you want someone outside of your local network to access your computer, you must have the router forward the traffic to your computer. -- kainaw 00:47, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Actually there are a bunch of ways of doing this (see NAT traversal#See also for a list) and probably most VPN software supports some of those ways. The Gbridge web site seems pretty dumbed down and I couldn't find anything about NAT traversal, but chances are good that it will just work. -- BenRG (talk) 09:52, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, Gbridge includes a couple of things I wouldn't have thought to bundle (VNC, mainly). What about Hamachi? It shows up as Just Another Network Adapter, so you can Remote Desktop and file share over encrypted links. Unfortunately, Hamachi is owned by LogMeIn now, but the free version is still as functional as before it was bought.
All sessions are Point-to-Point, and don't require forwarding (sessions are initiated by the central server, then become Point-to-Point), so no encrypted streams pass through their servers, but both ends do need Hamachi running (it easily installs as a service and is fairly non-obtrusive). Washii (talk) 18:08, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Steve Ballmer - lifestyles of the rich and famous

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Without wanting to get in to the realms of invasion of privacy - I was wondering if Steve Ballmer has used any of his wealth on the usual stuff millionaires do - like a 4gigagallon swimming pool in the shape of the windows logo or something? The biography says nothing - not even a football team.83.100.250.79 (talk) 18:30, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That would indeed be a freaky pool --Ouro (blah blah) 09:29, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
... and probably be leaking and generally unsafe to use ... 95.112.189.234 (talk) 14:36, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Baller really loves Microsoft so he probably just puts all his money back into Microsoft :-P Oligomous (talk) 19:19, 13 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Edits

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I got nothing for the title, but this is my question, is there a page that can tell me how many edits were made to Wikipedia on a certain day and then on that day what was the most edited article? Ever since MJ crashed Wikipedia I've been wondering what other days had a similar problem. Rgoodermote  21:25, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Check out all the links at Wikipedia:Statistics. Tempshill (talk) 15:26, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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Let x be a Unicode character (or, a codepoint). Is there any simple way of obtaining a list of all characters similar to (or related to) x? Of course, often similar and/or related characters have codepoints close to each other, but this is only the case in a very restricted way. For instance, among the mathematical operators, you have "∫", "∬", "∭", ..., but the characters "⌠", "⌡" are found in Miscellaneous technical. An even more striking example is "-" (Minus-hyphen) in Basic latin, where you can also find "‐", "‑", "‒", "—", and "―", but we have "−" (Minus sign) in Mathematical Operators, "─", "━", "┄", "┅", "┈", "┉" in (Swedish:) Ramelement, and "-" in Fullwidth forms, and "﹘" in Small forms. It would be great with a website, where you can enter a character (or a codepoint), and a list of related characters is returned. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 21:41, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Like this ? http://www.unicode.org/unibook/ it's a program not a webiste - but it definately seems to return all the different dashes, if you supply it with "-" , and has delete issues if you try to get rid of it.. :(
This works better and much easier:
or this http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/index.htm - select search, enter "-" and get the similar characters?83.100.250.79 (talk) 01:16, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Here's the result for "∫" : [2] Seems to work..83.100.250.79 (talk) 17:24, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
A bit restricted for hyphen-minus [3], though. But thanks for both suggestions! --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 20:29, 5 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]