Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computing/Archive 7

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:WikiProject Computing. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

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Archive 5

CSS related propose move

Propose move Internet Explorer box model bug to CSS box model problem (Discuss here: Talk:Internet Explorer box model bug#Requested move 2) --Voidvector (talk) 22:03, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Discussions of a merger between CISTF and Malware WikiProjects

There is currently discussion about merging the Computer and Information Security task force and WikiProject Malware to form a new WikiProject Computer Security. Please add your views! --h2g2bob (talk) 23:21, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Notability guidelines for Firefox extensions?

What are the accepted notability guidelines for which Firefox extensions deserve articles? There appear to be quite a few that lack any external citation or independent claim of notability. Thoughts? --ZimZalaBim ^talk 18:44, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Any input welcome at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/FireGPG.--Jmundo (talk) 19:23, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

List of Process Simulators

There are two articles on process simulators, Chemical Process Simulators and Dynamic Process Simulators, that are similar and have considerable overlap. I have been updating the latter on an irregular basis and just found the former which has also been undergoing revisions. Process simulators can be broken down in to many different camps from their methodology, use in industry and capabilities. What I suggest is merging these two articles into a "List of Process Simulators" and creating a table. Simulators down the left, and functions across the top, with comments or check marks in the boxes as needed. Comments or thoughts?

Scottinthebox (talk) 14:20, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Proprietary protocol

It looks like there's a nasty edit war going on at Proprietary protocol. One editor has reached out to WT:V, but I think that some subject matter expertise might be helpful. Can anyone here take a look? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:21, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

RJ41

Could someone make an article about RJ41 so I can know what it is? Thanks...66.224.186.130 (talk) 23:09, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

The article about those connectors is Registered jack. RJ_Jack_Glossary.htm should give you some info about the differences between RJ41 and RJ45. --Kgfleischmann (talk) 21:14, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

I should've checked there. Thanks! ~ JohnnyMrNinja 21:17, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

VUNDO removal with Online Solutions Autorun Manager (OSAM)

The Wikipedia information concerning the Vundo virus includes and external link to the Online Solutions Autorun Manager (OSAM)software and also instructions by Online Solutions in how to remove Vundo. After installing OSAM and running through the removal process several times, I have concluded that the software does not remove Vundo. Online Solutions is a Russian-based company. 206.255.100.101 (talk) 04:29, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Backslash paper

Backslash paper has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Backslash paper. The deletion is proposed due to lack of notability. Thank you. Cybercobra (talk) 07:05, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Emile Tobenfeld not author of scorewriter "The Copyist"

I'm Cris Sion, author of The Copyist, or Copyist as it is now known. I'm commenting on some information on obsolete scorewriters in the following page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scorewriters

Copyist was originally published by Dr. T's Music Software, of whom Emile Tobenfeld (Dr. T) was one of the principals (although not the author of Copyist). Copyist is still available. In fact, in the list of scorewriters, Copyist is correctly listed in Current paid-for software for Windows. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.81.23.79 (talk) 00:51, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

--24.81.23.79 (talk) 01:01, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

What does the acronym RSS mean?

I'm a total non-tech person. I looked up RSS and found two meanings on separate Wiki pages. Any input on which (both?) meaning is correct would be appreciated.

RSS = Really Simple Syndication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)#Confusion_between_Web_feed_and_RSS

RSS = Rich Site Summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_technology

75.21.194.184 (talk) 20:13, 7 January 2009 (UTC)jayguitar@yahoo.com

Cryptol (programming language)

Cryptol was created and deleted via AfD. A deletion review failed to reinstate it; however the conclusion allowed for reinstatement if it was better sourced. (I had nothing to do with the article, its deletion, or the appeal; indeed, I first heard of it only minutes ago.) Those who, unlike me, are knowledgable may edit, source and improve it here. -- Hoary (talk) 23:35, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

BIOS needs your help

Looks like BIOS could use some serious attention, if anyone's interested. (I will not be working on this myself.) -- 201.37.230.43 (talk) 14:00, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Route poisoning

Route poisoning desperately needs attention. This article has had 19 edits since it was created in 2005. It has been itentified as being wildly inaccurate, but hasn't had any serious corrections or edits in over a year. It's an orphan as well. I'm going to put it up for AFD if no edits come in the next month. I'm not even sure if it's a legitimate subject. Help by a computer networking guru to clean it up, un-orphan it and make it a decent stub at least would be deeply appreciated. --Lendorien (talk) 17:17, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Article Importance scale

I'm repeating this question from the sub-page Assessment‎, in the assumption that it is never checked.

How are the importance levels of articles decided? For example, would it be fair to say that complimentary terms would be of equal importance, or does the topic of each and people's opinion take precedence? - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 22:03, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

I find it amusing that this talkpage is rated high-importance. --Mika1h (talk) 19:42, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Unix Commands

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_commands

Is the "batch" command linked to a page discussing the "at" command? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.18.67.164 (talk) 19:42, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Organization of the Word Processor Article

Hi, my name is Amy Wohl and I believe it would be correct to say I am an expert on Word Processing.

I think in organizing this article historically you have fallen into the trap of getting some things wrong because they didn't happen along a neat, smooth timeline. For example, electronic typewriters appeared in 1980, fairly early on, cost quite a bit (more than some PC's) and had a whole range of features from no screens and very little memory to larger screens and much more memory, storage, and functionality. The very cheap ET's referred to at the end of your article (like the Brother) didn't occur until the very end of the period, after PC's were well entrenched.

More to the point, starting in about 1980, minicomputer vendors and some word processing vendors began to offer something called "office automation" in which word processing was the main part of the offering, but only one part. A much longer list of vendors, including vendors like DEC, Prime, DataPoint, Data General, Four Phase, Basic Four, and others were involved, and, of course, IBM, who had multiple offerings. To fully understand word processing, you have to understand that as part of it was disappearing into the PC market, part of it was disappearing into the office automation market, where it paired up with email, calendaring, and a range of DP functions (on fully programmable machines).

I own quite a lot of historic literature on the subject, besides what's in my head, but unfortunately quite a bit of it's in storage. I do have a copy of the set of books we published on Word Processing, Office Automation, and Personal Computers in the early nineties which do contain quite a lot of information and were used as the basis of some of the research for the ACM article last year. All of the word processing vendors and nearly all of the office automation vendors were clients of mine during the period between 1976 and their demise in the late 80's. The few survivors and I are still working together from time to time. I would like to get this article into a more accurate narrative.

Amy Wohl

P.S. Who ever wrote the article knew quite a lot about Wang Laboratories so I'm puzzled that they didn't know anything about Digital, who was a lively Wang competitor or any of the high-end IBM systems that eventually competed with the Wang OIS. BUt we can fix that by adding in some more. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.58.86.207 (talk) 16:34, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Lunch table version, anyone?

I appreciate the value of a technical discussion on a topic like this. However, as an everyday webmaster trying to get a grip on issues relevant to my efforts, I can't get anything from this. Can someone give us a lunch table version? By that I mean if someone in the cafeteria said "Hey, what's UTF-8 about, anyway?", what would you tell them? A couple of paragraphs in a box at the top of the article would be a big help to those of us who don't understand the more technical aspects of it.

Someone described it to me as 'Unicode with the ASCII character set compressed at the front of it', which I would take to mean the huge Unicode character set that is designed to be highly efficient at processing the basic ASCII character set which would comprise the greater part of most data (i.e. web pages or XML data) written in latin character derived languages like English. Reading the Wikipedia article on UTF-8, I can't tell if what I was told is useful or not.

Any thoughts, folks?

Gulliverian (talk) 22:39, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I'm just short of sleep or something but . . . a "lunch table version" of which topic? Of UTF-8? Of many or all articles on computing?

Anyway, no, boxes aren't the answer to any such problem. A simple and concise lead paragraph is. And of course a particular article may be rephrased less technically below.

I'll suppose you're asking about UTF-8. (The reference desk is really the place, still.....) I happen to be a manyday webmaster myself, though no expert. Off the top of my head, the advantages of UTF-8 over the likely alternatives (and I don't mean theoretical alternatives such as UTF-16) are that you can put in any Unicode character without resorting to entities (handy if you need to mix, say, Korean and Japanese scripts) and that you don't need to specify the character encoding system in the http header, in a meta tag, or at the top of a CSS files. The disadvantages are that plenty of older text editors -- which are all that might be available on an old computer that you might suddenly have to use for an emergency fix -- can't handle it, and that many browsing devices can't handle it either. (My own and admittedly ageing cellphone won't display pages in UTF-8, not even for characters that it can display when presented in a different encoding system.) However, these advantages and disadvantages to web authors do not strike me as particularly basic/essential encyclopedic information about UTF-8; if they belong in the article, I don't think they belong either at the very top or in any other particularly prominent place. -- Hoary (talk) 04:58, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

On the subject of "Orders of Magnitude"

Within the Programming Languages article is a mention that programs executed directly on the hardware runs several orders of magnitude faster than the same program interpreted by software. There really needs to be a discussion here on what orders of magnitude means in terms of time complexity. For instance, say I have a O(n^2) sorting algorithm which runs directly on the hardware, the same implementation in an interpreted language should not in any way turn out to be something like O(n^4) or even O(n^3). Therefore, the assertion that interpretation instantly adds "several orders of magnitude" is not in line with computational complexity theory whatsoever.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Russell Joseph McCann (talk • contribs)

That's called Reductio ad absurdum. It's fairly easy to come up with cases where (computer instruction set simulation comes to mind) interpretation can be orders of magnitude slower than "directly on the hardware" Tedickey (talk) 14:09, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

The issue you raise is quite easily resolved by noting that the asymptotic behavior referred to by Big O notation is not the same thing as an order of magnitude. Both allow approximate comparisons to be made, by grouping concrete values into classes of more abstract values. However, they differ in the kind of concrete values to which they are typically applied (numerical measures of size or amount vs. functions of input size), in the nature of the abstract classes (powers of ten vs. functions of input size), and in the method of classification (truncation or rounding to nearest power of ten vs. asymptotically dominant term in an expression for the number of execution steps). In other words, they are used to compare different things, and do so in different ways.

Let's say you have an O(n²) sorting algorithm (bubble sort maybe). You create an implementation (in whatever language you choose) that takes 1 millisecond to sort 10 integer values. You sit down with a deck of cards, pick 10 at random, and sort them by hand using the same algorithm. Sorting the cards by hand takes you 10 seconds. You then run your sorting implementation on 20 integer values, which takes around 4 milliseconds to complete. Your manual sort of 20 cards would see its execution time scale in the same way, and likely take around 40 seconds. In both cases the algorithm has a time complexity that is O(n²) (i.e. the execution time scales approximately as the square of the size of the input, so the running time for the larger number of inputs will be approximately (20/10)²×<execution time for 10 inputs>), but the measured execution time for the manual sort is 4 orders of magnitude greater than that for the computer implementation. If you were to instead use an O(n log n) sorting algorithm, you'd observe a different kind of scaling over input sizes (e.g. if sorting 10 values took 1 millisecond on the computer and 10 seconds manually, sorting 20 values might take about 2.5 milliseconds on the computer and 25 seconds manually).

--Allan McInnes (talk) 00:30, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Management features new to Windows Vista

Management features new to Windows Vista has been tagged for a {{povcheck}} as it seems promotional in nature to a person outside of Microsoft and computing - and it clearly needs a new title per WP:NAME. Would anybody who has not contributed to the article please take a look? (please read my note on the article's talk page) Thanks. B.Wind (talk) 17:56, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

The first two paragraphs do seem to leave the impression of a marketing message and not an encyclopedic article. But the rest of the article looks fine to me. I can't point to anything specific in the first two paragraphs, it's just the impression I get. I would expect to read it at microsoft.com not wikipedia.org. Lwoodyiii (talk) 19:20, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Part of it may be the name of the article itself. I have renamed it (from the promotional/transitory "new to") to Management features originating in Windows Vista. I don't know how much of an improvement this is, but it would be less promotional in tone, anyway. More "toning down" seems to be needed with that first section, though, I think. B.Wind (talk) 05:25, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Fast Flux information wrong

The information on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_flux is saying that "Fast flux is a DNS technique used by botnets to hide phishing and malware delivery sites behind an ever-changing network of compromised hosts acting as proxies. It can also refer to the combination of peer-to-peer networking, distributed command and control, web-based load balancing and proxy redirection used to make malware networks more resistant to discovery and counter-measures. The Storm Worm is one of the recent malware variants to make use of this technique."

This is not completely right, yes, it is used by botnets, but also by services like Akamai for their distributed DNS. I suggest removing this article from the Malware page (it's a stub anyway).

Rvdblink (talk) 12:13, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Juniper Networks

"This article contains too much jargon". C'mon. Article is fine. Has anyone compared this one to Cisco Router page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Baravelli (talk • contribs) 06:36, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Internode Systems under WikiProject Computing ?

Could you tell me if ISP's come under this Project? I'd like put your project banner on Internode Systems. Kathleen.wright5 02:28, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/RecentChangesCamp

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/RecentChangesCamp

This AfD discussion could use some fresh eyes. Comments are appreciated. Thank you, Cirt (talk) 23:57, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

IRC navigation templates

A user had recently made a bot request proposing merging and moving around the various IRC navigational templates: Template:IRC networks, Template:IRC footer, Template:IRC bots, Template:IRC clients. It seems to me that both the navigational templates and the bot request could use some input from the relevant WikiProject, which as far as I can determine is this project. Thanks. Anomie ⚔ 17:16, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't aware anyone else was working on this. I happened across this discussion while checking to see what all linked to the various templates. (also Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive_24#IRC) I've been working on a couple of ideas but I decided to first focus on cleaning up the Internet Relay Chat category and subcategories. Have you already done work on the various templates? I certainly don't want to end up duplicating work. I'd planned to do some sort of multi-template with collapsible elements that all the IRC related articles could use. The IRC related articles/templates/categories seem to have unfortunately been heavily neglected. Tothwolf (talk) 20:54, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

No, nothing has been done regarding that bot request, because no one bothered to reply. Anomie ⚔ 00:45, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Doesn't surprise me, unfortunately. Which article(s) point to Wikipedia:WikiProject Computing? I came across Wikipedia:WikiProject IRC when I was initially trying to figure out who maintained the IRC related articles but it looked largely abandoned. Overall, the number of articles really isn't all that excessive so I'm not sure a bot would be required to make the final template change edits. It might make things a little faster though. Do you have any suggestions on a replacement navigation template? I was thinking about having it accept parameters that would uncollapse specific sections on an article by article basis. For example, client articles could uncollapse the 'clients' section (and other sections as required) and the other sections would default to a collapsed state. I was planning to move the red links to the template's talk page until those articles can be written, restored, or just dropped from the list. Tothwolf (talk) 05:03, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Done While there are a few things I'd still like to add to the new templates, they are now mostly complete and a huge improvement over what the IRC articles previously used. Tothwolf (talk) 05:30, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

GA Sweeps Review of Apple TV

Good article reassessment for Apple TV

Apple TV has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. --Malleus Fatuorum 16:16, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Moving computer security articles to Computer Security project

There are several 'Computing' articles tagged as

   {{WikiProject Computing|class=Start|importance=|security=yes|security-importance=High}}

where there is an additional parameter "security=yes". See for example Talk:Access control. I am going to convert these articles to the new 'Computer Security' tag to be assessed and managed by the Computer Security project. Using 'Computer Security' tag this will simplify management of the lists of articles for our project.

Does anyone has any objection ?

Does anyone know an automated way of doing this ?

-- Equilibrioception (talk) 04:36, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd object to splitting off another WikiProject when there's no issue of crowding in the main project. Computing and its existing descendants are all fairly inactive. There's no real need for another project and it only serves to fragment the community, and when the projects die off they leave a bunch of orphaned pages and somebody else then has to make the effort to re-tag them into the main project. From what I've seen, these 1-2 person projects put more time into editing their project page rather than editing the articles in its scope. If you really want an explicit subdivision of articles to work on, consider making a Task Force instead and first prove that you can achieve a critical mass for this subject (if you can't sustain an active TF, there's certainly no need for an entire project). At least that way you're not creating organizational changes that somebody will have to undo after you get bored. Ham Pastrami (talk) 19:38, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Coordinators' working group

Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.

All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot (Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 05:11, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

who is responsible for assigning ip address in pakistan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.52.144.35 (talk) 17:21, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

GA Reassessment of Forth (programming language)

Forth (programming language) has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Articles are typically reviewed for one week. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here. --Malleus Fatuorum 16:21, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

FAR notification for Phishing

I have nominated Phishing for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. D.M.N. (talk) 19:11, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

GA Reassessment of Programming language

Programming language has been nominated for a good article reassessment. Articles are typically reviewed for one week. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to good article quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. Reviewers' concerns are here. --Malleus Fatuorum 14:40, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

List of acquisitions by Juniper Networks

List of acquisitions by Juniper Networks is up for Featured list review. Do share you comments -- Tinu Cherian - 07:29, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

FAR notification for HTTP cookie

I have nominated HTTP cookie for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. D.M.N. (talk) 16:32, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Standards for Software Deletion

What is the purpose limiting software topics to topics reported by non-developer sites. Some critically important tools appear, just for example, at the MS server but receive no 'notability' reporting elsewhere. If WP is limited to reporting only the sufficiently 'popular' and 'news worthy' knowledge about software, being a limited knowledge base, does not seem to have much merit. "Come to Wikipedia to learn about programs you can learn about elsewhere. If you can't learn about the programs elsewhere, don't come here." While that is a great idea about individuals and historical events, does not seem so impressive of a concept for software. Software 'knowledge' changes daily/hourly. Limiting software to abstracting what major media has already reported seems to condemn WP to irrelevancy in this area. So long as the information is verifiable, (for example, credibility of the distributor can be established by external reference, etc.) seems mighty helpful to bring relevant knowledge regarding software development to the world.YSWT (talk) 21:03, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

You appear to be mistaking Wikipedia, an encyclopedia with a core value of being a tertiary source, for your favourite monthly computer periodical. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:00, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

In a world where knowledge changes/advances slowly, a 'monthly computer periodical' might be real cutting edge. My own view is that era is behind us. We live in an age of information explosion.

A "tertiary source" is, as I learned it, a summary or compilation of primary (or secondary) sources. If MS or DEL or Intel publishes information, *that* publication is a primary source. If the MS or DEL or Intel website is a credible source, what is gained by excluding that information from wikipedia ?

If you wait to copy *another* tertiary source, you've turned wikipedia into an abstract of other reference materials. For some subjects seems wise to require proof of notability via reporting by some other tertiary source. Does not seem so wise to use that same requirement for software.

Wikipedia should not be a primary source, like a review in a computer periodical. Nor should articles reveal what authors discovered for themselves while testing the software. But, crucial knowledge and information is *in today's world* so often reported in primary sources connected first hand with the information, eg. developer websites & product guides. In very real terms requiring other tertiary sources to report on the subject, means that wikipedia cannot, ie. will not ever be because by rule it cannot be, relevant in the world of software knowledge.YSWT (talk) 20:34, 9 March 2009 (UTC)