October 1

From a programmer's point of view, what may be Windows XP used for, in 2012? And in 2017? I think, Win32 API programming and web page compatibility testing (older versions of Internet Explorer). What else?
Microsoft will stop XP support in the near future, and I've got an old installation disk, so I think, I might install it on a virtual machine and download the updates while they're still available. But I want to know whether it's worth the effort. I'm at university and have no idea of what OS/field I will work on when I finish (2017). --151.75.35.148 (talk) 01:53, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'd certainly keep a VM of it. I've kept a VM of mine (which Microsoft consider a re-install, of which you have only a small number). Firstly, as you say, keeping the OS around for API compatibility is useful. Secondly, as it won't get newer versions of Internet Explorer, keeping XP around lets you test new websites with old (but still very common) browser. As you've already paid for XP, this is a nice-to-have; serious commercial Windows developers usually have one of the MSDN subscriptions which gets them a (non-production, no support) install for every Microsoft OS, so they don't care so much. Another reason is historical preservation (if you're willing and able to sit on that VM for a lengthy time) - some software and hardware will never run on Vista/7/8 etc., so having XP around will keep that software alive. Anyway, disk space is fantastically cheap, so keeping a VM, even if you never use it, will cost you very little. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 02:01, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I, for one, cannot run my Sims game on my 7 installation (unless I run it ridiculously vanilla: no expansions, no custom content), and XP has been the only one I've tried thus far that has reliably run the full game long-term. So, as a Sims programmer (albeit not a fantastic or prolific one), testing objects in an XP install would allow me to more accurately gauge if an object or a problem with the installation is causing crashing. So if you're programming for something that is more stable on an older operating system like XP, it can be of help. I had a 7 partition and an XP partition (and a Mac OSX Lion partition) until my XP partition went kaput because the 7 patition did something it wasn't supposed to do. - Purplewowies (talk) 02:23, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok. What set of snapshots would you recommend? What software do you recommend that I preserve? There are a lot of combinations useful for testing: if I save each service pack in couple with each IE version, that's 9 combinations, and more if I consider the OS updates and the applications. Also, I don't know what programs (that I may want for testing/programming purposes) are likely not to be downloadable in XP version in the long future. --151.75.35.148 (talk) 02:39, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That would completely depend on your support policy as a developer. If you want to stick to whatever OS/browser Microsoft itself supports (lifecycle policy) then just supporting SP3 with at least IE7 would do. If your users would rather live without security updates than be forced to upgrade, there's no way to tell how much service pack/browser/office combinations you would have to support... Unilynx (talk) 21:08, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I own a 3TB external hard drive from Seagate, and my OS is Windows XP on a laptop from 2006. I was in an IRC chat, and I noticed, while the chat was ongoing, the phrase "does support 2.2TB+ drives". In Googling to find what that means, I saw many results mentioning a 2.2TB limit, but I have no idea if the combination of the 3TB I own and the fact that I still run XP will cause problems? If I was going to have problems, would I have had them immediately upon first trying to use it (I haven't), or will my problem come some time in the future, perhaps when I reach 2.2TB of used space (i.e. 0.8TB free)? Thanks for your help! -- Tohler (talk) 03:29, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, you may not notice anything wrong until you hit the limit. I suggest a test, where you fill the disk drive by copying files repeatedly. StuRat (talk) 03:47, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You could also take this opportunity to part ways with Windows XP and 32-bit operating systems, both antiquated. ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:43, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• According to this document, XP won't naturally support a drive that large. The basic problem is that the variables used by the OS to represent partition sizes and address are not large enough to represent the numbers that you get from such a disk. However according to this page, it is possible to install a Seagate utility called DiscWizard that makes the full capacity of the drive available even under XP. Looie496 (talk) 05:56, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

From what I've read about this, the limit is caused by using sector sizes of 512 bytes. However, it is possible to format the drive to something higher like 4096 bytes, and considering this is a 3TB drive it may already be formatted for 4096 bytes sectors. This should increase the limit to 16TB 92.233.64.26 (talk) 20:09, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Another quick question while I'm using the ref desk: I prefer XP over 7. However, I know I'm going to have to upgrade to a modern computer (e.g. 2012+) eventually. Is it possible to keep on using XP on a modern computer that would have 7 installed "from the factory" (Dell)? How would I go about doing this, and would I run into any problems or limits? (I think one of them is the limit on RAM 32-bit systems can use) -- Tohler (talk) 03:35, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I split this off as a separate Q. StuRat (talk) 03:40, 1 October 2012 (UTC) [reply]

Yes, it's possible. You would need to have the install disks for XP, as you probably won't be able to download it from Microsoft at that point. You will also need a mechanism for controlling which version of Windows boots. Here are a couple approaches:

A) A boot manager can be installed which comes up and asks you which one you want, each time you boot. This might be good if you will be constantly switching back and forth.

B) If you install each version of a different hard disk, you can go to setup when you boot up, and switch the boot drive, to pick the hard drive with the desired O/S. This option would be best if you will use one O/S most of the time. StuRat (talk) 03:44, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In addition to the RAM (really address-space) issue you describe, you will find it increasingly difficult to find XP drivers for modern hardware. They changed the driver model between XP and Vista, so Vista/7/8 drivers won't work in XP. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 03:45, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify, this means that, at some point, new devices (like printers) will no longer work when you boot in XP. However, they will work when you boot in Windows 7 mode. StuRat (talk) 03:49, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

At this point the documentation and tools are available to allow you to make Windows 7 behave exactly like XP basically every way that matters, if that is your concern. http://classicshell.sf.net/ being easily the biggest piece of the puzzle. ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:59, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Windows 7 has it own boot manager—Windows Boot Manager, which can handle dual booting with Windows XP including booting from different physical drives. Ruslik_Zero 18:51, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

My solution is to run a windows XP virtual computer on my win 7 machine. I use vmware player which is free, just btw. I've actually grown to like windows 7 quite a lot so my xp computer only gets turned on when I'm doing things like programming microcontrollers which only have xp drivers. You could do most things, even play games on sufficiently powerful hardware, but you do take a processor hit from running the virtual machine on top of win 7. But if you are not doing very processor intensive tasks a VM is a great solution, and you can do your processor intensive tasks on win7, which is a better idea anyway since win 7 will have newer drivers and software version and updates. Vespine (talk) 01:53, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Does that approach suffer a performance hit over running XP directly ? StuRat (talk) 02:25, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it does StuRat, have another quick look at my reply above ;) Vespine (talk) 03:48, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Having said that and mentioning the limitations, there are actually several decent BENEFITS to running a virtual machine. For one, you get one (or just a few) files that represent the whole machine, this makes backups a piece of cake. You can also transfer or copy the entire computer VERY easily, literally like copying a few files. you can keep it on a USB key if you like (obviously the performance won't be great) but you can do it. You can also "snapshot" the configuration once you have it built 'just the way you like it' and revert back to the snapshot if/when you have problems, instead of having to do a full reinstall.. Vespine (talk) 03:53, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If you're happy running in a Virtual PC, Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate have something called "XP Mode" that runs an XP virutal machine. The intended use is to run certain apps that require XP inside of the machine, and it uses remote desktop-based magic to make it look like it is running on your Windows 7 desktop. However, you can also launch and control the virtual machine directly. XP Mode doesn't require you to have a licensed copy of XP - it is included with Windows 7. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 17:18, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have a Word document that I need to export as a PDF, with its text preserved as text in said PDF. But whenever I go through the appropriate steps, the resulting PDF converts the text to raster images. How can I prevent this? I believe this is something to do with the font I am using, as this does not happen to all the fonts on my computer. Pokajanje|Talk 16:24, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some fonts are set with font embedding disabled; if Word honours this, then it won't put the font file into the PDF, and would have to either substitute it for another font or rasterise it. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:44, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here's some info about embedding fonts in Word. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:05, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've got a UTP cable from a room to the router downstairs. The connection sometimes gets slow, an internet speed test gives 1.62 Mbps download, 2.63 Mbps upload to the closest server (same town). That download speed is one fifth of what I normally get and what I still get on the pc downstairs, so I'm guessing it's the cable. Both pc's are plugged into an old hub before the router btw, so there's an inherent limit regardless of my ADSL speed. Unplugging the one downstairs does not improve the situation. What I really don't understand, is why downloading pdf files is slowed to about 30 kilobyte per second, and why wikipedia pages load slow, mostly waiting for bits.wikimedia.org, after which they often appear with much of the layout missing, I guess because the style sheet(s) didn't load. I presume that doesn't happen to everyone with a connection speed under 1Mbps or maybe 300kbps, so why would a noisy cable cause this? ifconfig didn't show any errors or dropped packets. Ssscienccce (talk) 19:50, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's going to depend on how the application handles bad bits. For some applications, like streaming video, an occasional bad bit may not even be noticeable, so can just be ignored. For other applications, one bad bit can be a disaster, so error detection and correction methods must be used. This could result in sending the same data many times, then giving up after a certain number of tries. This could produce slow response time and missing elements. StuRat (talk) 21:21, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Bad bits will almost never make it to an application using TCP. There are checksums in TCP and the Ethernet level, and the data will get resent if it is bad. As for the unusual connection issues it would be great if you could confirm it is the cable and not the PC by seeing if the downstairs PC has the same issues when taken upstairs. It may also be a failing port on the hub - try just switching which port you are plugged into, or even bypassing the hub altogether for a quick test. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 13:44, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's unfortunate, as fault-tolerant applications don't always need data to be resent. StuRat (talk) 18:13, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Problem went away right after posting (with a little pulling and pushing of the cable). Maybe it's time to finally configure WiFi on laptop and removed the hub. And I really need to review network protocols; guess I can't complain about cisco certificates having an expiry date anymore... Ssscienccce (talk) 00:23, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

StuRat, that's what UDP is for. It doesn't promise to get the data there correctly and in the right order like TCP does, so there is no resending. It's often used for sending video. I'm pretty sure AT&T U-Verse uses something based on UDP multicasting to send live TV out to their devices. I assumed TCP because downloading PDFs or viewing Wikipedia are almost certainly happening over TCP. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 16:31, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Found out it was the hub, not the cable. Finally got rid of it, took some rewiring; 23Mb/s now. Ssscienccce (talk) 11:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

October 2

I realize there are smoothing methods to try to disguise jaggies, but that's not what I'm asking about here. Suppose you have the worst-case scenario, of a horizontal line one pixel wide, with a one pixel offset in the middle:

@@@@@@@@@@@
           @@@@@@@@@@@@@

Would there be any resolution where this would appear smooth, or would it become invisible before it appeared smooth ? How about if we make the line thicker ? We could have 2 pixel thickness and 2 pixel offset:

@@@@@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@@@@
           @@@@@@@@@@@@@
           @@@@@@@@@@@@@

But, presumably, this would be the same case as before. So, how about a 2 pixel thickness and a one pixel offset:

@@@@@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
           @@@@@@@@@@@@@

Or 3 pixel thickness and one pixel offset, etc. I imagine technologies which produce "fuzzier" pixels (like CRTs) actually result in the first case looking more like the third. Has anyone studied this ? StuRat (talk) 00:42, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a nice website, Resolution of the Human Eye, quantitatively comparing an eye to several common metrics used to describe cameras. The Air Force Eye Chart, and many similar charts, use parallel lines of various widths and spacings to quantitatively measure human and instrument resolving power. In fact, eye resolution depends on more than just distance: light conditions, subject color and contrast, and physiological state, all affect the resolution; not to mention immense variation from person to person, especially in light of known optical aberrations like myopia, astigmatism, and hundreds of other special names for different-types-of-blurry-vision. So there's no specific singular answer to your question; you can easily estimate your own eye resolution, or use statistical aggregates such as the ones provided in the references and articles I linked. Finally, I'll comment that antialiasing is not merely a method to disguise sampling artifacts. It's a rigorous, mathematically-robust way to more correctly present or reproduce sampled data. Nimur (talk) 01:11, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think making everything so blurry you can't see the jaggies is really correcting it, just disguising it. Wearing glasses at the wrong prescription can produce the same result. StuRat (talk) 02:21, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Properly designed antialiasing involves application of a low-pass filter to band-limit the (reconstructed) sampled data. A low-pass filter can be described as a "blurring" filter. Incorrect parameters will result in a low-pass filter with an overly-aggressive cutoff frequency, which is not optimal and the image will appear blurry. Correct parameters will reproduce a signal that is provably, optimally most-similar to the intended input - even closer to the desired signal than the un-antialiased signal. This is studied in great detail; we have many articles on sampling theory and antialiasing. It is unfortunate, but true, that many crude attempts at antialiasing simply result in blurred images; but any algorithm constructed crudely can mangle data; that's not unique to antialiasing. Antialiasing, implemented incorrectly, blurs the image. Quicksort, implemented incorrectly, can produce unsorted lists; but neither error is the fault of the algorithm. Nimur (talk) 02:34, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly some attempts are better than others. Still, if I want the maximum contrast between "line" and "not line", and still want the above cases to appear smooth, I can really only get that with a high resolution. With a lower resolution, I have to choose one or the other. StuRat (talk) 03:01, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You may be interested in Subpixel rendering, which achieves a higher effective resolution around edges in order to smooth them. The animated image on the left of the article is a great demonstration. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 13:35, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i figure i should put this all in one section, but feel free to split it up.

1: how do i tell if my pc hardware is ipv6 compatible, or does it matter? 2: how do i know/make if my router is ipv6 compatible? 3: what all should i do to get ready for the ipv6 switch?

4: i need i list of commands i can use in the command prompt in windows7? (ones that don't have access restrictions that make them unusable.) 5: how do i use the windows7 ftp client (c:/system32/ftp.exe)? (basic)

6: how do i get a list of functions in a given module in python? 7: how do i use the "ftplib" module in python? (basic)

8: i have windows7, a 7.5gB micro-sd with usb adapter, and a 4.5gB mkv file. when i try to copy the mkv file to the micro-sd card, windows gives an error message saying it's to big. any advice? 9: anyone have an alternative method to copy the mkv file to my friends laptop or pc? (i have no cd/dvd/bd burners, and no extra sd cards or usb drives.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.114.254.43 (talk) 03:22, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1, 2 & 3)I'm sure there will be people who will disagree, but this is precisely the same question as "what do I need to do to be W2k ready?" back in the day and the answer is the same: Don't worry about it. The people who need to worry about it are taking care of it. Some people are really making a mountain out of a mole hill. Sure there's some fairly complex stuff going on in the back end, but most internet users don't need to worry about it. For the vast majority of people, if you pay for an ISP service, it's up to them to continue the service, whatever that takes. I'll let others address the rest. Vespine (talk) 03:43, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll give 8 a crack since it's a pretty easy one. Your card is probably formatted in FAT32, which means no single file can exceed about 4GB. I think you should just be able to format the SD card in NTFS which will enable it to hold larger files. Vespine (talk) 04:58, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To answer 6, you can use dir(module) to get a list of all objects in its namespace. vars(module) will return a dictionary of everything in the namespace (including builtins), which can be unnecessarily verbose if the creator didn't define __all__. →Σσς. 06:36, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The most useful command is probably help(module), which will give you a list of functions with descriptions. Re #8, yes you can format the drive as NTFS, or make a multi-volume archive using something like 7-Zip. Re #4, Template:Windows commands is one list. -- BenRG (talk) 15:45, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

thanks Vespine , (8) i formated the drive to ntsf, and it worked. 70.114.254.43 (talk) 22:53, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1 2 & 3 The PC hardware, including the network card, is by definition IPv6 ready. The operating system is the component that determines if your PC is capable of operating in an IPv6 environment without using one or more of the transitional technologies that are available. If you are using any more or less up to date version of Windows, OS X, or Linux then your PC is ready to deal with IPv6. Your router may not be IPv6 ready and this will determine how you will be able to use IPv6 but it will not prevent you from using Internet services that are only available at an IPv6 address. For most IPv6 capable home or small office routers, the configuration screens will have some obvious IPv6 entries. The simple thing to look for is an IPv6 address in the form of hex characters separated by ':'. Even if your router is strictly an IPv4 device, you may be able to update the firmware. After saying all that, it really doesn't matter to most users. Your ISP is not going to suddenly stop providing service to you. Most ISPs will provide something called CGN (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation) that will allow IPv6 and IPv4 to inter-operate. CGN isn't elegant, the protocol purists hate the mention of the term but it does work.Docdave (talk) 03:10, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

is there any such thing as a tunneling proxy? one to tunnel ip thru icmp, for example. so if i wanted to send data to a port my firewall blocks, i could trick it. cause i can't use yacy, cause i don't control my firewall. (also, i don't get the capchas when i save edits anymore. i don't know if that's a malfunction or not.) thank you, 70.114.254.43 (talk) 04:09, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's very uncommon to use ICMP for anything other than ICMP, because it lacks some pretty important pieces of a reliable internet transport protocol: error-checking and correction, automatic retransmission of lost data; sequencing, and so on. Not to mention, sending malformed or otherwise "irregular" ICMP packets is sure to draw the ire of commonplace automated security software on internet routers, potentially causing these routers to drop your packets. But, theoretically, one could append tiny amounts of arbitrary data to an ICMP packet. (This is how traceroute works). It's far more common to use an SSL-over-TCP tunnel for proxying: for example, SOCKS, or any of the numerous secure VPN protocols, are much more robust ways to securely tunnel traffic to a trusted proxy server. As far as "tricking" your router: ports are an abstraction supported by the TCP or UDP protocol; you cannot "fool" a router by sending non-TCP or non-UDP packets. Those are simply "invalid" TCP or UDP packets, and as I mentioned, are liable to be dropped, potentially with the consequence of convincing the router to drop future valid data you may wish to transmit. Nimur (talk) 04:57, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

ICMP tunnel AvrillirvA (talk) 10:39, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's been done, even through DNS, but hopefully you can set up a conventional proxy someplace you can actually reach through your firewall. 67.117.130.72 (talk) 05:02, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

One bit of advice, if this is a corporate environment and you are looking to bypass corporate controls, it is not likely to have a very happy ending. In addition to using firewalls, many large organizations also use tools designed to identify things like tunneling which is usually a violation of acceptable use policy. Dan Kaminsky did, in fact, use DNS to tunnel data past a firewall, that was a proof of concept and not a very useful tunneling mechanism. Using an encrypted HTTPS session to any one of the available tunneling sites will work, but more and more organizations are using devices that decrypt and inspect outgoing traffic, so you might well be caught. Docdave (talk) 03:20, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Not to mention a lot of places (well, schools and hospitals at least) randomly pull up users' screens in remote desktop to see what they're doing, and when they do that, they see everything you see. So unless you want to end up like this person, I would advise against doing anything like this at work or school. PCHS-NJROTC ^(Messages) 00:52, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i write software as a hobby, and i wanna know if there's any way to keep malware from reading my apps's data from the ram. or if the os may do this for me. more specifically, can my software directly prevent other software from reading the ram it's allocated, or other ram with it's data (like the frame buffer, storing a bitmap of data to be output to the screen)? or can it even detect that other software is doing this? and can the os prevent or detect it? also, can malware open files it doesn't have permissions to (overriding them the permissions)? thanks, 04:24, 2 October 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.114.254.43 (talk)

If malware is running while your program has things stored in RAM, I can't see any way to stop it from reading it under the current architecture. Still, there are things you can do:

A) Obviously, make sure that no malware is running.

B) Use a computer with no connection to the outside world. This means no Internet, but also no swapping CD's, DVD's, and flash drives with your friends. This would both help to keep malware off your computer, and, if it does get on there, it would also prevent it from sending your data to the bad guys.

C) An architecture with a single process running would prevent this. Embedded systems may do this.

D) An architecture which strictly limits access to RAM by process could be developed. This could work with separate processors, where each processor has it's own RAM, and only runs a single process. The performance hit might not be as bad as you think, as a processor with only a single process could avoid having to "take turns" and swap things in and out of paging space. Of course, you'd need lots of processors and RAM chips to do this for every process (like 256 ?). However, if you only need a few standalone processes, then you could let most of the processes run together on the same processor and RAM, as they do today. StuRat (talk) 04:42, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We have an article on memory protection that answers most of your question. Provided that the operating system is functioning normally, and that you are not running esoteric computer hardware, it is the job of your operating system to guarantee memory protection. Nimur (talk) 05:06, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In Windows there is no way from preventing one program from inspecting another's address space if they are both launched by the same user with the same privileges. If the malware is running as a normal user, it cannot inspect programs that are running as administrator. If the malware is running as administrator there is no way to stop it from doing whatever it wants to. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 15:12, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There is no really reliable way to do this. If you have ultra-private data, put it on a separate computer with no internet connection, don't use usb keys (Stuxnet), etc. 67.117.130.72 (talk) 05:05, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

what do "socket.setsockopt", and "socket.options", and "socket.ip_ttl" do? and is there any way to change the fields in the ipv4 header? and does the socket module support ipv6? and does python have a way to do arp or rarp? and lastly, does python have a way to build a packet from the ground up (below the transport layer) and send it? thank you in advance, 70.114.254.43 (talk) 04:43, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Such specific questions about the APIs are best answered by consulting Python's excellent online documentation. For your latter questions: no, Python is a high-level, platform-independent language, and does not have a mechanism to access low-level hardware interfaces such as the direct control of a network interface. Python programs can call external system libraries to execute system-specific functionality. Nimur (talk) 05:12, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

the online docs don't have info on "socket.options" or "socket.ip_ttl". and were would i get software to work below the transport layer (direct control of a network interface)? 70.114.254.43 (talk) 07:33, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

On Linux, socket.setsockopt is a thin wrapper over the setsockopt syscall, and works just like it. As that man page suggests, the options themselves depend on what kind of socket it is. So, for TCP for an example, see the "Socket Options" section of the TCP manpage. Yes, the socket module supports IPv6 - create a AF_INET6 socket. Python doesn't contain built in libraries for ARP and RARP, but you can find several libraries that do ARP at least, or you can build your own in Python (see next question). As to building your own packets - yes, you create a AF_PACKET, SOCK_RAW socket, and you can hand make ethernet frames (see this example); I think you need to be root to open a SOCK_RAW socket. If you make AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM sockets you can write IP packets (and thus manufacture things like ICMP and IGMP packets), for which I don't think you need to be root. All the above is roughly the same on Windows, but you'd need to look up the MSDN documentation for sockets and their options. Reading and generating packets can be a chore, so packages like scapy make it easier. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 11:25, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

On Windows, a raw socket is created with socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_RAW) instead. I've checked, and to create a raw socket you definitely need to be root on Linux, or Administrator on Windows. I don't know where you're finding socket.options and socket.ip_ttl I don't see these (either as members of the socket package, or of a created socket), either on Windows or Linux. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 12:29, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

SOCK_DGRAM is for UDP packets. It won't let you send ICMP and IGMP packets (which, for obvious reasons, really require you to be root/administrator) Unilynx (talk) 20:57, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What would be the easiest way to archive an entire existing web site, one to which I only have regular HTTP access to? Horselover Frost (talk · edits) 14:15, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Httrack AvrillirvA (talk) 14:16, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

After giving it a quick try, it looks like it'll suit my purposes, though I do have two questions. Is there a way to restrict it from accessing certain subdirectories, and is there a way to make it archive all linked images, but keep itself restricted to the one site for other file types? Horselover Frost (talk · edits) 15:18, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, you can specify what you want to allow/disallow with the filter system. These pages explain it in detail [1] [2] [3] AvrillirvA (talk) 18:38, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You could also use wget, look at the manual page's information on the -m and -R switches in particular. Cdwn (talk) 14:40, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This seems like it should be such a simple thing but I can't get it figured out and searching brings up too many results for the desktop version of Firefox. How can I delete a folder (empty or not) from the bookmarks menu on the mobile version of Firefox? Dismas|^(talk) 20:48, 2 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

press "ctrl+shift+b", this shows all bookmarks. then find you'r folder, should be in either: "bookmarks toolbar", "bookmarks menu", or "unsorted bookmarks". then right click and hit delete. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.114.254.43 (talk) 02:59, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Read my question again. The title too. I think you might have missed something. Dismas|^(talk) 05:42, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have a mobile phone and have never used Firefox Mobile, so this is based purely on google search and I have no idea if it works or not. The only thing I could find which seemed relevant was to "press and hold [the folder] for a few seconds" and then apparently a popup menu will appear with options to remove the bookmark. I assume this is referring to a touch screen system. The other way to remove them would be to find and edit and bookmarks database file in the profile directory directly. 92.233.64.26 (talk) 10:50, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks but that was the first thing that I tried. You can delete individual bookmarks by "long-pressing" on them and then selecting "delete" from the pop-up menu that appears. For folders though, no menu appears and therefore no delete option. Dismas|^(talk) 10:56, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

sorry, i somehow missed the word "mobile". 70.114.254.43 (talk) 22:50, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

October 3

I have heard four conflicting claims regarding the effect of horizontal/vertical orientation on how long external hard disk drives last (that is, the device lifetime):

• External hard disk drives last longest if placed in a horizontal orientation because the platter then spins evenly underneath the head under the influence of gravity (that is, force exerted by gravity is always the same at every point in each spin cycle).
• External hard disk drives last longest if placed in a vertical orientation because the platter then spins with least friction/resistance, since gravity is not pushing the head against the platter, nor the platter against any surface below it.
• External hard disk drives last longest if placed in the orientation, whether horizontal or vertical, indicated by the manufacturer's logo/label or the physical stand, since the manufacturer would have designed the hard drive to be placed in the orientation implied by that logo/label or stand.
• Hard disk drives do not last any longer or shorter based on whether they are placed in a horizontal or vertical orientation.

Which of these four claims is true? How should I orient my external hard drives to maximize their lifetimes? —SeekingAnswers (reply) 07:06, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Google's servers use horizontally orientated drives. I think that Google would have thought about this, as they go through many, many drives. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.158.236.14 (talk) 11:19, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Also there is no friction or noticeable gravitational push pressing the heads onto the platters. They "fly" on the air drawn around by the platter which they are accessing.--Phil Holmes (talk) 11:26, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Every modern hard drive technical spec I've ever looked at says that they can be mounted at any angle, and recommend not moving them around once they are running. That implies that if there is a slight advantadge to a particular orientation then it isn't something the manufacturer considers noteworthy. You could always look up the spec for your particular drive to be sure. It sounds like you're using an external drive, so the only thing I would worry about is making sure that any ventilation holes are unobstructed. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 11:50, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I can attest to the not moving them around when connected. Mine still works perfectly fine, but I've pulled it around so much that it will often disconnect and reconnect to the computer if it even moves around a little now. - Purplewowies (talk) 13:02, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Various storage arrays from Oracle, IBM, Netapp, HDS, HP, and Dell use drives in flat (label side up) and on edge (label side left or right) configuration. Oracle's Thumper and Thor arrays, which have pull-out trays, have the drives in connector-down orientation. Dell's Precision desktop machines have the drives in a connector-up orientation. So they're all orienting the disks in a way that suits their chassis, cable routing, and cooling strategy. There's no consensus orientation, because there's no advice from any HDD maker that orientation matters. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:15, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Can't seem to find the details regarding this particular db2 sql query optimization; i got told, so long ago, that the query optimizer was smart enough not to deal with unneeded columns; i.e., if i wrote

select a.foo, b.foo2 
from a left join 
(select * from b 
where foo2 > 0)
on a.foo = b.foo

it would be smart enough to just handle columns foo and foo2 from table b. Anyway, we got upgraded to version 10, and this doesn't seem to be the case; I need to specify

...
(select foo, foo2 from b 
where foo2 > 0)
...

instead to get it to run. Was it the case that this was an optimization? Is it no longer the case? Thanks. Gzuckier (talk) 07:46, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure, but you are explicitly asking it to return all columns from b, so I can see why they might not want to override that. It would be different if you wrote:

SELECT a.foo, b.foo2
  FROM akbar a,
       berny b
 WHERE a.foo = b.foo
   AND b.foo2 > 0;

In this case you don't explicitly specify to retrieve all columns from b, so it's reasonable to expect it to only fetch the ones it needs. StuRat (talk) 08:18, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

yeah, you'd think it would be easy enough to write db2 optimizer code which could see which columns are used in the query and use that instead of the *..... oh well. Gzuckier (talk) 16:43, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It is, but it's one thing when you say "retrieve whatever you need to" and quite another when you say "retrieve all this stuff you don't need". In the one case optimization is doing what you asked, while, in the other, it's going counter to what you asked. Since there might be some reason why the user prefers the non-optimized version, overriding what they asked for is a questionable practice. Think of it like an auto-correct spellchecker in a word processor. Sure, most of the time it may make good corrections, but, on occasion, it will make a "correction" you don't want (let's say you are writing dialog and are trying to show a dialect by including words like "aint").

A possible improvement they could make in the DB2 case is to have a setting which controls whether it optimizes queries where you've intentionally asked for it to do things in an inefficient manner. Perhaps a future DB2 version could also offer an alternative to "*", meaning "all". How about "?", meaning "just what is needed" ? StuRat (talk) 18:35, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Would DB2 really find itself to be forced to execute the obviously inefficient query, given that there's no way a user could tell the difference by the end result (the final selected columns are the same...) - either DB2 would truly suck, or there is something much more subtle going on. Unilynx (talk) 21:01, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No, that does make sense; there is nothing more infuriating than something that won't let you overrule the defaults, optimizations, etc. because the designer didn't see any reason why you would ever want to. Gzuckier (talk) 06:17, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I can't see why you would ever want to. Can you give an example? -- BenRG (talk) 04:04, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, say you want your own code to be optimized, so that, if you transfer it to a different platform which does the optimization differently, you don't have to worry about it slowing down. In this case, you wouldn't want it optimizing it for you, as this would obscure the optimization level of your own code. Another (admittedly poor) practice might be to make it intentionally inefficient so that the data scrolls by at a slower pace which you can read. StuRat (talk) 16:54, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

October 4

(Continued from Sept. 27 thread)

I received the new power supply today, and took a close inventory of what happened on startup after I installed it. To wit:

• Motherboard lights do not turn on.
• The POST is ~30 beeps in very rapid succession.
• There's no visible blackening, nor is there any burning component smell.

Any ideas? —Jeremy v^_^v ^Bori! 01:22, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a link to the first part of the discussion, for anyone trying to catch up: Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Computing/2012_September_27#Computer_will_not_start. StuRat (talk) 01:54, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

NM, this is moot. my rig is starting up as normal now. —Jeremy v^_^v ^Bori! 01:56, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Good, let us know if it dies again. StuRat (talk) 01:59, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

1: in Transport Layer Security, is the hole transport layer header encrypted? 2: if so, and your router uses port forwarding, how does it know your trying to establish a connection? (when you send a tcp-syn packet in tls.) 3: if i write my own transport layer protocol, and send a packet with it, is there any chance that a router somewhere along the way to the destination host would drop the packet? thank you, 70.114.254.43 (talk) 06:00, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1) no, as the article explains, TLS runs on top of the transport layer. The TCP and IP headers are not encrypted. 2) The source and destination of traffic are not encrypted. If you need those to be kept confidential, you might want to investigate systems such as Tor (anonymity network). 3) theoretically yes, any router can drop a packet for any reason. If you're trying to create your own alternative for TCP, it's more likely that a firewall near the destination will drop it (not recognizing the protocol) than some router halfway the path. Unilynx (talk) 21:12, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. the IP header and TCP header are not encrypted.
2. a router or firewall will not be inspecting or making decisions on the encrypted content.
3. Yes, if the queue for the next hop is full the packet can be discarded. If the IP time to live is exhausted it will be chucked out, and if the route disappears or a network node cannot be reached with an arp the packet will also be dropped. Hopefully in these last circumstances you would get an ICMP message to tell the sender about it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:08, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

3) Writing a transport layer protocol is not exactly trivial and a firewall is very likely to drop packets for any protocol that it is not configured to permit. If you "hijack" an existing permitted protocol identifier, the firewall is likely to figure out that the header is not what is expected and drop the packet anyway. TOR may give you some amount of privacy but it does not withstand techniques available to significant opponents. Docdave (talk) 03:40, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am using Oracle. I am storing data where about 99% of it has an ID and a value. The other 1% has an ID with two, three, or four values. I could make a table with ID, Value1, Value2, Value3, Value4. But, that means that every query to find an ID will require checking all four value columns. I know there is an array column type that is often used instead of separate joined tables. Can someone show me an example of the syntax to make a table like ID, Value[4]. Then, I want to be able to insert (ID, [value1, value2]) and then query select ID from my_table where value='something'. 128.23.113.249 (talk) 13:11, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The normal way of doing this is simply to have multiple rows with the same ID, so you would insert [ID,value1], [ID,value2], [ID,value3] etc.--Phil Holmes (talk) 15:10, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. You can also add a column with a name like INSTANCE:

ID   INSTANCE   VALUE
--   --------   -----
 A          1     TOM
 B          1    DICK
 B          2   HARRY
 B          3   LLOYD
 B          4    JOHN
 C          1   JERRY

The advantage to this method is that you can add as many instances as wanted, and identify each by the unique ID/INSTANCE key.

However, if you have other columns which only vary with the ID, not the INSTANCE, then you really do need to break it down to two tables, to avoid duplicating data:

ID_TABLE
========
ID   ID_ATTRIBUTE_1   ID_ATTRIBUTE_2
--   --------------   --------------   ...
 A          
 B          
 C         

INSTANCE_TABLE
==============
ID   INSTANCE   VALUE   INSTANCE_ATTRIBUTE_2   INSTANCE_ATTRIBUTE_3   
--   --------   -----   --------------------   --------------------   ...
 A          1     TOM
 B          1    DICK
 B          2   HARRY
 B          3   LLOYD
 B          4    JOHN
 C          1   JERRY

StuRat (talk) 15:50, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi,

I have a software a (unfortunately its closed source) which generates a lot of output (Terabytes per hour to STDOUT, for several weeks). I don't have the disk space to store all of it, so I wrote a small C++ program to analyze it and capture what I need. Under linux I can call it like this

./a inputfile | ./myprogram

and it works nicely. I still need to wait for a few weeks to get my results and have to hope that our admin doesn't decide that the compute needs to be rebooted in that time.

To solve this problem I just found a way to parallelize myprogram. So I start some threads using OpenMP, in each thread I call a on a subset of the inputfile and try to reads its STDOUT using popen. On small datasets, the new program works correctly. On large datasets popen returns NULL with errno==ENOMEM (Out of memory) after a while but before myprogram reads the first line of input. To me it seems like popen tries to read all input into a buffer before myprogram can start processing it. Is there a way around this problem? Can I tell popen (or a similar command) to give each line (or each 100MB) to myprogam and then forget it?

Many thanks, 46.223.66.196 (talk) 19:44, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have to run out so I can't check the source, but it's my understanding that popen calls pipe(2), which stores everything written to it in RAM (its man page says "Data written to the write end of the pipe is buffered by the kernel until it is read from the read end of the pipe."). pipe's behaviour is described in the pipe(7) manpage. It says "the pipe capacity is 65536 bytes"; assuming it's not been opened as non-blocking (I don't think popen would use that option) then if it gets full the writer should block until it gets read. So the most a pipe, and thus popen, should consume is 64kbytes. popen doesn't store huge chunks of data itself - that would be madness. So I don't think popen is to blame; it may be that someone else has wasted all the memory and popen just happens to be the call that fails. I confess I don't understand quite what you're passing to popen; if you don't want the writers to block, you should probably be writing generated data to real files and be reading from those. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:18, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Writing the STDOUT of program a to a file would consume hundreds of Terabytes. I do not have that much space available. What I have verified: Program a gets started (by popen("./a part_of_inputfile", "r");) and is running, I can see its STDERR. Before any popen returns, my 512G Ram get filled in about a minute. When the Ram is full, popen returns NULL. --46.223.66.196 (talk) 20:45, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I read your problem definition a few times, but I'm still not entirely certain that I've understood it. On the assumption that I've understood correctly, it's difficult to know if it is applicable without seeing the relevant code, but it sounds like you need some form of IPC between the two programs. — cdwn 20:55, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Try running a memory profiler like valgrind which will report where the memory is going. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 21:21, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

One thing of note: popen spawns a /bin/sh, which runs as long as your command does. You could try not using popen (and thus that shell, whose complicated behaviour may be to blame). Instead you'd create a pipe yourself with pipe(2), fork a subprocess, twiddle the child process' file descriptors (as the pipe(2) man page shows) and then have it exec (thus doing a fork-exec). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 21:29, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm blanking on any reason why this might be happening. It's worth rolling your own popen as Finlay McWalter suggested to see if anything changes. Here's some sample code (error handling omitted):

      int fd[2];
      pipe(fd);
      pid_t pid = fork();
      if (pid) {
          close(fd[0]);
          dup2(fd[1], 1);  // stdout -> write end of pipe
          close(fd[1]);
          execl("./a", "./a", "inputfile", 0);
      } else {
          close(fd[1]);
          // ... read from fd[0] ...
      }

-- BenRG (talk) 04:10, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think we are missing some important information here. This is a very special computer, if it can generate 10 gigabytes of output per second. What kind of computer is it? What OS is it running? Looie496 (talk) 04:39, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Another possibility is that the program is not running out of memory, but out of file descriptors. How many threats are running at the same time? popen() does not reliably set errno, according to the BSD man pages on MacOS-X. Linux is a bit more circumspect ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 06:52, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I tried that, and when the process' limit of file descriptors (1024) is reached, popen returns NULL and sets errno to EMFILE ("too any files open"), as one would expect. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 09:58, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Terabytes per hour is probably less than one gigabyte per second. It's not an unreasonable amount. If 512GB RAM fills in 60 seconds, that's evidence that the RAM isn't just being consumed by output from the program (at least not very efficiently). -- BenRG (talk) 15:02, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

OP here. It does work now. Creating my own pipe as shown above was the solution. Thanks a lot 46.223.66.196 (talk) 21:29, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Great, I'll mark this Q resolved. StuRat (talk) 21:34, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

It seems that I can no longer load any Java applets; after initially displaying the Java "loading" screen, the applet 'times out' with "Error. Click for details" and "ClassNameNotFoundException". This happens on all my browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome), as well as any site that uses applets (including Java's test applet). I have the latest version of JRE and have already tried reinstalling it, to no avail. Any have any ideas how I can fix this? 142.157.42.181 (talk) 21:06, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a firewall? Ruslik_Zero 19:14, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. Is there a way to display a time in an Excel table as local time, yet sort the data by a common time zone? Let me give an example: Four events happening on the same day in New York, London, Tokyo and Los Angeles. If I list them all by UTC, they happen, in proper order, as TOK 06:00, LON 17:30, NYC 18:00, LAX 18:30. However, I want to display each as local time, so that people will know whether the event is a morning, afternoon or evening event. That listing would show LAX 11:30 (PDT), NYC 14:00 (EDT), TOK 15:00 (JST), LON 18:30 (BST), which is obviously out of sequence. So how do I get the listing to sort by UTC but display local time? I know I could put a UTC column in, but what do I put in the local time column to convert the UTC to local time? Thank you.    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 22:17, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The only way I could think Excel could handle that natively is if it knew which time zone existed for each value you had in each row. I doubt that's built in. You could, however, put in two columns, one with UTC, and the one with UTC + appropriate offset. If the location didn't change, you could hardcode in the offset. If, however, you wanted the location to be adaptable too, you could create a table of locations and then offsets. Then use the HLOOKUP function to pull in the appropriate offset.

For example, you'd have an index that looked like this

G	H	I
London	Tokyo	Los Angeles
0	+9	-7

A	B	C
Tokyo	Los Angeles	Los Angeles
3:00	4:45	18:30

Then you'd use HLOOKUP (or VLOOKUP if you transpose it) to do something like HLOOKUP(A1,G1:I2,2). I'm not 100% sure the HLOOKUP syntax, I think that's close. Does that help any? Shadowjams (talk) 22:58, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I see what you are saying, yes it helps very much. I could add a column for each city for its offset from UTC, then use that number multiplied by 3,600 as a factor on the UTC time (since Excel tracks stores times as seconds, even when they are displayed otherwise). Thanks so much!    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 02:22, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

Actually, Excel stores dates and times internally as amounts of days. If a is a time and b is a number of hours, use a+b/24 to add them. --Bavi H (talk) 18:44, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

if i split a file into 100 parts and send each to another computer in a udp packet, do i need to limit the speed and witch the packets are sent to avoid overloading my router? and, if so, how do i limit the speed, and how do i know how much to limit the speed? (p.s.: i have some programing experience, including network programing (some). and sturat, are you a programer?) thanks, 70.114.254.43 (talk) 22:28, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Your router shouldn't "overload" even when it is being completely saturated if it has been manufactured right. As a side note, you really don't want to be using UDP for file transfers. Use a protocol with reliability mechanisms in place, namely TCP. — cdwn 23:51, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, many will start to slow down if fully saturated. Lower-end (i.e., home) routers will often have a single ASIC for all their switch ports, whereas higher-end Cisco switches have one ASIC per two ports. Juniper switches come with powerful Intel CPUs running in excess of 2 GHz, which can handle full gigabit speeds on all their ports.—Best Dog Ever (talk) 01:11, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

by "overload" i mean sending sending more then 100 melon bits per second at it (being a 100 mbps router), exceeding the bandwidth, causing it to drop some of the packets. and i know i should use tcp, but it's just an example. 70.114.254.43 (talk) 00:40, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If it's a 100 mbps router, the port will only send at 100 mbps and you'll have to upgrade to a gigabit model. But whether it slows down actually depends on the model of the router. Still, the only time I've seen routers become overloaded (i.e., slow down) is when you utilize multiple ports on them simultaneously to send over 50% of their rated speed. As a rule of thumb, if multiple people are using the router at the same time for large transfers, limit the speed to 50% of the maximum port rating (e.g., 50 mbps if it's a 100 mbps port). If it's just you who's using it, though, I wouldn't worry about it. But I would still ensure the room you're doing this in isn't really hot and that the vents in the router aren't obstructed by dust. Some higher-end switches have temperature sensors in them that can be read via DD-WRT or Cisco IOS. Many also come with dual-fans which ensure the device remains cool. If your router starts to choke on the data, consider upgrading to an enterprise class switch from Juniper, HP, or Cisco to handle LAN data transfers. This is assuming, of course, that your hard drive can actually handle transferring above 100 mbps. Lower-end mechanical drives can only do about 400 mbps: [4] if your drive isn't fragmented.

Also, I should mention that splitting up the file will slow down the transfer. Try copying a bunch of small files and then a large file and you'll see what I'm talking about.—Best Dog Ever (talk) 01:11, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You have to do roughly what TCP does: have the recipient report received packets to the sender and dynamically adapt. There's some information at Transmission Control Protocol#Congestion control. It's not easy. -- BenRG (talk) 02:03, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's why he chose UDP, which does not require acknowledgement of receipt of the packets. But it's largely irrelevant because you simply cannot transfer at a speed greater than 100 mbps on a 100 mbps link. It is impossible because the coding scheme for converting the electrical signals to bits is different for each speed and because 100 mbps connections use 2 pairs and 1 gbps links use all 4 pairs. Gigabit ethernet uses all pairs for sending and receiving whereas 100 mbps connections use dedicated wires for each purpose. Both the computer and the router will automatically negotiate the speed to 100 mbps, even if you tell them it's a 1 gbps link. If, for some reason, they do not negotiate that speed, the link will not work at all. The sending computer will have to drop packets in order to continue sending data once its buffers are full. So, the only thing getting overloaded in this case is the sending computer.—Best Dog Ever (talk) 05:36, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So he'll end up with missing bits of the file instead of slowing down! -- Q Chris (talk) 12:12, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"That's why he chose UDP, which does not require acknowledgement of receipt of the packets" — what are you talking about? You're clearly answering a different question than I am. Even if you "merely" saturate the link from your computer to the router, the router may still drop a lot of packets, depending on the bandwidth and activity of its other links. Some other router beyond that one, about which you know nothing, may drop packets. Dealing with that without massive inefficiency is what TCP does, and it's hard. UDP is only suited for low-bandwidth communication unless you implement congestion control that's approximately as sophisticated as TCP's. To implement congestion control you need information about the rate of packet loss, which you can only get from the recipient. -- BenRG (talk) 15:41, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Or of course situations where dropped packets don't matter! If I am sending a stream of GPS position coordinates to a server then UDP would be a good choice. -- Q Chris (talk) 16:43, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I mentioned that he chose UDP because that's what he said in his initial question: "if i split a file into 100 parts and send each to another computer in a udp packet." UDP is actually perfect for video streaming (especially high-bandwidth streaming), and it's used quite often for that purpose. If your video is 30 frames per second and you drop a couple of frames a second, it's hard to notice, and even if you retransmitted the data, the retransmitted frames would be for action that has already been shown on the screen.—Best Dog Ever (talk) 19:30, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I am a computer programmer, so I'll answer the part about how to delay a task, not the part about whether this is a good idea, in your case. Here are some approaches:

1) A big old loop that does nothing but count. Not very good, since the delay isn't constant, but rather depends on the CPU speed and your current share of that CPU time. I've noticed that the Microsoft Hearts card game uses this method, and, as a result, has become so fast that you can't even see the cards fly by on the slowest setting, because computers got much quicker since they originally set the timing.

2) Specify a delay in real time. In Fortran, for example, the SLEEP command lets you specify how long to wait. This is the easiest solution.

3) Wait until a specific time. This requires a bit more coding, as you need to calculate the time you want and compare the current time with that, keeping in mind that that you might have a change in minute, hour, AM/PM, or even date. It's also less efficient, as you're constantly doing the check.

4) Wait until a specific condition is met. In your case, you would check for the router load level dropping back down to a low level. Probably not easy.

5) Wait for user input, like "Hit any key to continue". Not a good choice for 100 parts. This is more useful if it needs to wait for something that only the user can identify. For example, I just added some code to a CG movie rendering program I wrote that says "Warning, this program will take up considerable resources on your computer, so you may want to use the Task Manager to lower the process priority, if you intend to use the computer for other tasks while this runs. Please do so now, then hit any key to continue." StuRat (talk) 16:33, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1) I am going to avoid the TCP/UDP discussion because it is not relevant to the question of exceeding the available bandwidth. Your UDP packets eventually end up at the network interface card of your computer for transmission to the local router or switch. Each network card is a little different, but all of them have a finite number of buffers to hold outgoing and incoming packets. The operating system drivers interact with the card and can only provide a packet to the interface when there is an available buffer. This effectively slows down the rate of transmission so that it can't exceed the available bandwidth. Docdave (talk) 04:00, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all ! 

I got a problem on my Sony viao laptop when boot up my laptop , every thing goes fine but the Desktop loads , there appear a white screen

just like when there is a internet problem on Internet Explorer and it says "The page cant be displayed , check your internet connection and things like that " and i cant access my desktop.

Could you guys please help me it is very urgent .

Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.7.132.221 (talk) 23:29, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any text on the white screen? Do you receive any error messages at any point? You say the desktop loads, so at what point does the white screen occur? — cdwn 23:44, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Cdwn ! The white screen occurs just before the desktop loads and it is a very typical error like the webpage cant be access , check out your internet connection . It is the same error message you know we get when there is a problem in internet and Microsoft Internet Explorer displays .

Thanks for your help i am waiting for your reply. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.7.132.221 (talk) 23:52, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Does this white screen say anything about "Active Desktop"? What happens if you press the Windows key, does the start menu appear? — cdwn 23:55, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

When i start Task Manager , it disappear at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.7.132.221 (talk) 00:16, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Cdwn , None of the key works but when i press ALT+CTCL+Delete then the Task Mgr start other wise no thing works . — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.7.132.221 (talk) 00:08, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What happens if you open the task manager, select "File", "New task", and then enter "explorer"? — cdwn 00:11, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

When i start the Task Manager , it disappears. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.7.132.221 (talk) 00:17, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What disappears? - the task manager, the white screen, something else? Astronaut (talk) 12:26, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i have emule (p2p app) running on a high numbered port. i closed it and ran a simple http server in python on the same port (the one in the python docs for "simplehttpserver"). when i try to connect with Firefox, Firefox says it can't find a server at "my private address". and the error text in the python console indicates that the other hosts emule was connected to are still sending me traffic. anyone know how to fix this? (i have windows 7, i,m behind a router with nat, the port emule uses is forwarded, and i type in Firefox: "my_private_address:port_python_is_serving_on".) thank you for your time, 70.114.254.43 (talk) 23:36, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This is probably because SimpleHTTPServer is single threaded and is unable to serve you whilst it is still receiving connections. As your port is forwarded and you have a server running, anyone can connect to the server (even if they are sending totally wrong data, emule data to a HTTP server, for example). Either you need to wait for the other emule clients to realize that your client is not there any more (try not running anything on the port for a few minutes), or you need to disable the port forward. — cdwn 23:46, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i waited half an hour for the other emule clients to realize that my client isn't there anymore, but they were still sending me data. also, i'm trying to serve on that port so the outside world can access the server, as it's the only forwarded port i have. (i don't have admin access to my home router.) 70.114.254.43 (talk) 00:49, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

October 5

i port scanned my pc, and port 554 is open. the port scanner says it's real time stream control protocol. netstat says the port is used by wmpnetwk.exe. i was wondering what it's for and how to close it. (i have windows7.) thanks, 70.114.254.43 (talk) 01:03, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No offence but this is the kind of question that can really easily be answered by google. It took me about 30 seconds to google it and check it out, one of the results is even a youtube video called "How to Remove/Disable wmpnetwk.exe from your Windows 7 PC" . Vespine (talk) 03:51, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

sorry, i just get used to asking here, cause i can't normally find the info anywhere else. thanks for the tip. 70.114.254.43 (talk) 08:13, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This link [[5]] explains media sharing through WMP, which is what the process is for. These instructions show how to disable it: [[6]] 209.131.76.183 (talk) 11:34, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am trying to understand how an SSL session corresponds to HTTP requests. I understand fro the Transport Layer Security article that there is an initial negotiation and a "Resumed TLS" negotiation. If I perform an http request to a server, then obviously this must start with a full negotiation. The rest I am not clear on

• If the response sends html and several images in one TCP session via HTTP keep-alive would these be sent without any negotiation?
• If the response sends the images as separate http sessions would there be any renegotiation? If so full or resumed?
• If later I click a link on the https page which requests another page and images on the server, will this use a renegotiation? If so is it a full handshake or a renegotiation?

I think that there probably is a renegotiation between the separate page requests to prevent "message repeat" attacks, but a definitive answer would be good. -- Q Chris (talk) 10:52, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

SSL/TLS doesn't understand HTTP at all. It just provides a byte stream like TCP's that can be used by HTTP or any other protocol. After the first connection to a particular IP address, if both ends have cached the shared secret that they negotiated the first time, a later connection can reuse that secret. That's "resumed TLS". Renegotiation is something else: it means agreeing on a new shared secret for an already-open connection. This can happen at any time and HTTP isn't aware of it at all. The answers to your questions are 1. yes; 2. yes, a new connection (not renegotiation), probably resumed; 3. yes (new connection) or no, and resumed or not, depending on whether the keep-alive connection has timed out and whether the cached TLS session information has been discarded by the client or server. -- BenRG (talk) 15:23, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I understand that SSL doesn't understand http, but I was wondering whether the browsers and/or servers would understand SSL and issue a "resume handshake" between each element downloaded in a persistent connection using keep-alive. Thinking about it there is no need because replay data could not be inserted during a session anyway. -- Q Chris (talk) 16:41, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have several hundred PDF files each of which have some Javascript in them. It's not a malware issue; it's the result of using Google Doc's "print" function to cache PDFs whose original files have ben deleted (clicking "Print" causes the original PDF to open again, off of Google's servers, but with a little "please print on opening" Javascript). It's annoying to me and the prospect of going over each one manually in Acrobat to delete the Javascript is, well, boring-sounding.

Is there any tool out there (either Mac or PC would be fine) that can go over the PDFs, just delete the Javascript automatically, and re-save the PDF? pdftk doesn't seem to do this. I have Adobe Acrobat but there doesn't seem to be a way to remove Javascript in a batch way (you can execute Javascript in batches, but not remove or edit it). I could probably use ImageMagick and/or pdftk to extract every page from the PDF and then re-compile them into a new PDF, but that seems like a really clumsy way to remove a single line of code, and one prone to producing huge files.

Any thoughts? --Mr.98 (talk) 16:03, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ah! I found a way to do it with pdftk. It's not as hard or clumsy as I thought:

pdftk myPDF.pdf burst output myPDF--%02d.pdf

pdftk myPDF--*.pdf cat output myPDF.pdf

del myPDF--??.pdf

Basically this just strips the PDF to individual pages, then recombines them again in order. Works reasonably fast even for big PDFs, doesn't add anything to the file size overhead (in fact, produces slightly smaller files, probably because of the removal of the JS and other meta junk). Easy to batch. The last line produces an annoyingly cryptic DOS error ("the parameter is incorrect") but works nonetheless. (The latter error may be related to the fact that I'm doing it on a shared folder in VirtualBox.) Thanks for being my rubber duck... --Mr.98 (talk) 16:19, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

When the movie is released in the form of DVD or when it's still in the theaters (they get digital copies nowadays, I suppose). OsmanRF34 (talk) 20:04, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes before they're even in cinemas, having been extracted from screeners. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:06, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

pirated movie release types ¦ Reisio (talk) 02:14, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

http://i.imgur.com/19uRe.jpg

I lost the original, however I'm unsure what I need to get. Hopefully it's something cheap that's available from Monoprice? It's a Seagate GoFlex FreeAgent 500GB. Eisenikov (talk) 22:12, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I can't see the image (on a ridiculously slow 3G connection), so please ignore this if it is not relevant, but if I recall correctly the GoFlex range has a SATA connector that had various different output types. Assuming that the image linked does show a SATA header, Seagate sold their own one-piece connectors with a chip inbuilt for this model (although it should work with any SATA drive). Otherwise there are lots of boards out there with mini or standard-B type connectors. — cdwn 23:43, 5 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The picture seems to show a Micro-B USB 3.0 connector to me. If I'm right you could just likely use a standard micro-B cord but be limited by the USB2.0 speed (which despite the theoretical limits is generally quite slow with mass storage devices, something like 20-30MB/s) or get a USB 3.0 and go at close to the raw HD transfer speed. Of course if you don't have a USB 3 port on the computer you plan to connect it do you might as well just use a standard microtype B USB cord if you have one (e.g. from a phone, digital camera, GPS), if you do need to buy one it may still be worth investing in a 3.0 since the price is unlikely to be much different and you may use it in the future (unless you want to the microB for something else although to be honest given the price and the increasingly common use it's probably worth having at least one spare of each handy). However I could be wrong, it seems a bit strange to have USB 3.0 on an old HDD. I do believe cdwn is correct that the GoFlex does have changable output types so it's possible someone put a USB 3.0 adapter on it for some reason. Note however my impression is the interface adapter connection is proprietary and not a standard SATA connection (or eSATA) although it's possible this is just with the 3.5" line. (The physical HDD likely has a standard 2.5" SATA connection but this isn't what is exposed to the changable adapters.) Nil Einne (talk) 07:02, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If this page is correct, you won't be able to use anything except an actual GoFlex cable, because those cables have special circuitry built into them. They are not simply USB connectors. Looie496 (talk) 00:29, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Actually if you read the comments, I believe you're mistaken. While the GoFlex does put the circuitry in the interface adapter the OP appears to have an interface adapter connected. The interface adapter is sometimes called a 'cable' because for whatever bizzare reason, Seagate chose to hardwire the cables for a number of adapters but as per the comments, they (thankfully IMO) did not do so for USB. Per the OP's picture, it looks a lot like they do have an interface adapter connected, in particular a USB 3.0 one which as I mentioned above is exposing a microUSB B socket (like [7] from [8]).

However per that source and others like [9], [10], it seems that I was partially mistaken above, the GoFlex (as does the GoFlex Desk [11]) does in fact simply expose a normal (internal) SATA and power socket which is what the interface adapter connects to so in a cinch you could simply connect it to an internal connection (on a desktop, it's unlikely to be worth it on a laptop) as suggested by cdwn (of course you will still need an internal SATA cable and a free or freeable SATA port and power), or for that matter any vendors SATA to whatever adapter (provided they aren't physically blocked).

This does further suggest they have some sort of adapter connected as what's showing in the photo is not SATA+power sockets.

Nil Einne (talk) 03:37, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there's indeed an adapter connected to the thing that leads to a long rectangle slot. However, I only want a simple cable to recover the files. I ordered this from eBay: it was free with eBay bucks so no big deal if it doesn't work (which I doubt). Eisenikov (talk) 14:42, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/USB-3-0-male-Micro-USB-Super-Slim-Flat-Cable-external-Hard-Disk-50cm-/130739907107?pt=US_USB_Cables_Hubs_Adapters&hash=item1e70b4aa23#ht_1977wt_1163

Yes that should work. Nil Einne (talk) 04:36, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

October 6

Hi all--I'm an American living in China who is in the market for a new cell phone. I have my eye on the Samsung Galaxy S3, but I wanted to post here to see if I'll run into any unforeseen issues. I'd like to buy an unlocked version when I visit Hong Kong in a few weeks. It's my understanding that my mainland China SIM card won't work in Hong Kong, but I'm not really worried about that. My main question is this: When I move back to the US in a year or so, will I be able to get this phone to work? I understand that I'll have to buy a new SIM card and get a carrier plan (which carrier isn't really important to me, since I'm off contract). Is there anything in the hardware of the phone that would prevent the phone from working in the US? Some Googling suggested that all of the S3's were quad-band (which apparently I need), but I didn't find a definitive answer. Thanks in advance! — Preceding unsigned comment added by GreatManTheory (talk • contribs) 00:47, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The basic 2G functionality will available in USA with this phone. I am less sure about 3G. It would probably work in some networks but not in others. You should carefully select a carrier that provides 3G services in 850/1900 bands (AT&T) with 1900 as the best option. Ruslik_Zero 08:01, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Halfway in the Samsung Galaxy S III article there is a table of ten different versions of the phone. There are differences in 3G and 4G support and frequencies. Looks complicated... Maybe first find out what version is available in Hong Kong, perhaps you can find an electronics store that lists the model numbers on their web site. 88.112.36.91 (talk) 13:47, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all. I am trying to learn Java at the moment and feel that I have progressed sufficiently far that I need to see small but, nonetheless, useful programs that are actually used for something. Unfortunately the only resources I can find tend to demonstrate one aspect of Java rather than unifying several aspects in a program with a genuine point to it. Could someone please direct me to a website (or book, even) that has the type of programs that I'm looking for? Thanks. 78.146.66.48 (talk) 11:12, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Deitel Java How to Program book basically walks you through components of what becomes a single, integrated program illustrating lots of aspects of Java together at once. It might be worth checking out, as it is a real program with a genuine point (an elevator control simulator, in the edition I used), but is also written to be clear to beginners (as opposed to many real-world programs). --Mr.98 (talk) 12:21, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your reply but, as it happens, that's the book that I'm learning from and I've already been through the program (which has now been updated to simulating an ATM machine). Any other suggestions? 78.146.66.48 (talk) 13:46, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have an excellent book, O'Reilly's Java Examples in a Nutshell; but the examples in that book tend to be "reminders" for programmers who already know how to use Java APIs and programming techniques. The Official Java Tutorials are now maintained by Oracle, but they were originally written by the creators of Java, and still are some of the best resources for new programmers seeking to learn Java. They are categorized by Java package, and each top-level tutorial contains one or more sample programs that increase in complexity in an elaborate progression. Nimur (talk) 17:39, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have a product key and installation disc for Windows 7 Professional. On my computer, I have an unactivated copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. But because the key for Professional I got from a student website which gives me Professional for free, I can't simply upgrade Home Premium. It won't let me...I have to reinstall. Is there a way around this? Reinstalling Windows would mean many hours reinstalling other software, as far as I can tell, and I'd really rather not have to do that. I don't care which version of Windows I get, I just don't want to reinstall... 90.195.196.8 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:03, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't quite understand the issue. How can you have an unactivated version of Windows 7 Home Premium which also has all your other software on it ? How did that get installed on a computer without a functional O/S, or did it previously have another O/S ? StuRat (talk) 16:06, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

With an installation disc. The computer didn't work when it was first built a few months ago and when I took it back to the shop they installed Home Premium on it to test it. Had I realised that my Professional key wouldn't work, I'd have reinstalled as soon as I got it home. It has all of my other software because I've downloaded all of the other software. 90.195.196.8 (talk) 16:43, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, when they return it to you, you definitely want to verify that everything is back the way it was. StuRat (talk) 16:49, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It didn't have any operating system installed on it immediately before that, for uninteresting reasons. 90.195.196.8 (talk) 16:56, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In that case, ensure that it's returned to you in a usable form (with an O/S), as, otherwise, you have no idea if the PC is usable. StuRat (talk) 00:27, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You can just do an upgrade to professional using the cd and It will keep your files and programs. I am running windows 8 and did it that way.--RandomLittleHelpertalk 16:46, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Not when the CD key is a free copy of Windows given to students, you can't. 90.195.196.8 (talk) 16:56, 6 October 2012 (UTC) Sorry, misread[reply]

Okay, thanks, I'll give that a go. I do hope I did actually have a functional CD for that... 90.195.196.8 (talk) 16:58, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't work. " To upgrade from one edition of Windows 7 to another edition of Windows 7, use Windows Anytime Upgrade. Cancel the upgrade, open the Start menu, and search for Windows Anytime Upgrade. " Anytime upgrade refuses to upgrade me because it's a free student key for Professional. 90.195.196.8 (talk) 14:00, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

And relatedly, why in the world won't it just let me use my Professional key? 90.195.196.8 (talk) 12:08, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure why you can't use the key with Anytime Upgrade. It may require an upgrade key, not a full version, but that is pure speculation on my part. If you can't figure out how to upgrade using that disc and key, then there is a tool called "Windows Easy Transfer" that will at least migrate all of your documents and settings to a new install easily. You'll still have to reinstall all of your applications, but the easy transfer wizard should make the rest of the transition go smoothly. I used it when moving from Vista to 7, and it should work from 7 to 7. Also, Windows 8 should be available for you now if you're interested in giving that a try. The disc and key I received through my MSDN subscription should be the same as what they give you through MSDNAA (or whatever it is called now), and I was able to use the disc to upgrade from 7 to 8 and keep all my documents, settings and programs. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 19:08, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

it took the reversed, so i tried to rotate (flip) it, with Windows movie maker, i managed, but the problem is that now the vid is very very narrow and there are now 2 huge&ugly black bars, on the vid's sides. (it's also strange because this narrowness seem to acute not to think there is a bug in the Windows movie maker).

whether i try to reinstall the vid's aspect-ratio as 16:9 or 4:3 (also with WMM), the film is still very much narrow). i humbly request for help, i am a total ignorant in video editing. thanks ! 79.176.161.47 (talk) 12:35, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm unclear whether you want help editing the existing video or figuring out why your iPhone is shooting it that way. In the first case, there are 3 approaches to fixing the aspect ratio:

1) The black bars, which you currently have.

2) Stretching the video. This makes it look short and fat, of course. For some subjects that's more acceptable than others. A stretched tree might look OK, for instance. Short, fat people, not so much.

3) You can also enlarge the video, and clip off the top and/or bottom. Here, in addition to losing the top and bottom, you will have lower resolution, as a result of the enlargement.

Some combination of those approaches is also possible. StuRat (talk) 16:01, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i try only to fix the vid. is there another program other than movie maker that can give me choose other aspect ratios or that will generate a flip with much smaller bars? 79.176.161.47 (talk) 17:48, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Via which of those methods ? StuRat (talk) 18:46, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i don't know about the technicality of this procedure, i don't understand it. i don't mind pay only to get the video flipped but not that starched... 79.176.161.47 (talk) 11:56, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's not a technical question, but rather what you want to do. Is stretching it what you want, knowing it will then look distorted ? Or do you want to enlarge it and trim off the top and/or bottom, knowing it will then look grainy and truncated ? If neither is acceptable, then that means just leaving it as is. StuRat (talk) 19:48, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i don't mind try to stretch it a bit.. just for the try. though, i don't know if stretching is the right word we need to agree on, because, when i don't flip the video, and play it naturally, i looked much more stretched then it looks after i flip it. this is why it's so weird. the natural enlargement of the vid (when not flip) is fine and i just want it to be that way after flipping, even if smaller black-bars will stay. i don't care from small black bars. it's just that the current are way too big, and the video does not "stretched" as it would have been if i wasn't flipping it. 79.176.161.47 (talk) 07:21, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is it possible for you to upload the (original, unmodified) video somewhere so we can be certain what the problem is and how to address it? ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:50, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

the vids are more than 200 mb, please try to understand me (it's tough for me to explain myself in this issue but i did my best). it seems that i do need to "strech" this video... how can i do it?, i didn't find any reliable software to do so. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.176.161.47 (talk) 20:17, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, next question, have you tried out all the size and ratio options in Windows Movie Maker ? This is a discussion of the basics: [12]. If that doesn't help, here's some software one person recommended: [13]. (I never used Aneesoft Video Converter myself, but this is where you can buy it: [14].) Unfortunately, our Comparison of video editing software article doesn't go into that detail, but following the links to various products might give you the info you need. StuRat (talk) 20:28, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

VLC should at least be able to display it in all commonly used aspect ratios, regardless of how it was recorded. That should give you some ideas of what needs doing. It also supports transcoding, though I'm not sure that is what you need. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:54, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i will now check the links. Movie maker gives me only 2 options - 16:9 and 4:3, there is almost no difference between them regarding my vid. note that i need to change the vid's aspect ratio for all time (after the flip), i am, constantly, and not only of the playing time. another absoud is that also when i try to change it in the player - nothing happens. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.176.161.47 (talk) 21:04, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

addition: after looking on the links the last one was useful for me. i understand from it that convertors can help me. i have a video convertor - of Applian technologies. but it can change the file type (is that good for me?). blessings! 79.176.161.47 (talk) 21:07, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Something else that might help is just changing the display resolution on your monitor. Most offer different aspect ratios, but they often are only listed as H×V pixels, without the aspect ratio. In Windows XP, that's under Start + Control Panel + Display + Settings tab. Some monitors also have hardware dials that will allow you to stretch or shrink the vertical and horizontal directions (although having part of the display pushed off the edge of the screen permanently is obviously not a good idea, so reset it after viewing the video). StuRat (talk) 21:24, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

okey man, last try, what about video convertors? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.176.161.47 (talk) 06:54, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What are you asking about video converters ? StuRat (talk) 23:26, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

can the aspect ratio have something to do with the video file-type? (file-output). thanks. 79.176.161.47 (talk) 08:19, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Probably not directly, but a video converter might also have options to change the aspect ratio during conversion. StuRat (talk) 20:33, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps you might consider iMovie for iPhone. It can edit, modify, convert, and help you prepare your movie for sharing. Nimur (talk) 01:10, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. Does anyone know how to switch out the internal memory (which only had 380 possible MBs?)

2. I can't transfer everything to an SD card. What will help me override the restrictions and let me transfer everything anyhow?

3. When I deleted an app that was already on an SD card, why did I see some memory get freed up from the internal memory section?

4. I got my Xperia Play in May 2011. Has there been an "Xperia Play 2.0" or somesuch released since, that has a bigger internal memory?

5. If there's another, newer gaming phone than the Xperia Play, what is that model?

5a. (It matters that I'm in the United States, particularly Kansas. Current provider is Verizon, though I'm not sure whether to switch to a different network.)

Please answer all the numbered questions. Thanks. --70.179.167.78 (talk) 14:49, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

3) It might put an index for everything on the internal memory, to make searches faster. StuRat (talk) 15:53, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. This is probably not possible without a large amount of work, it's likely soldered to the board.
2. "Everything" is not very meaningful. What is it that you are wishing to transfer which you cannot?
3. There is probably some form of caching on the internal memory, likely in the form of (as StuRat suggested) indexing.
4. Not as far as I am aware, and I don't see anything about it elsewhere. — cdwn 18:17, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It was already suggested to you that you can likely move most of the phone's internal storage to the SD card (by partitioning and then either mounting the entire internal app directory or symbolicly linking stuff perhaps with the help of Link2SD). From a follow up response you even seemed to be heading in this direction. Asking the question all over again without acknowledging previous responses from others and efforts on your part isn't going to help in any way. Of course you do have to root your phone. You've also asked about this more then once and a quick search suggests as with many Android phones, it isn't that hard with the Xperia Play (depending somewhat on which firmware you're running but downgrading also sounds like it isn't hard). So the fact you still haven't worked out how to do it suggests perhaps it's never going to happen, since while as I said it isn't that hard, doing it by yourself does require some ability to search, read and comprehend and use more appropriate forums (and when asking for help asking from where you reached rather then starting all over again).

As for the answer to 3, even when an app is transferred to SD there are still some parts which have be stored on the internal memory as required by the Android framework, the size of these depend on the app. At least on the stock Android firmware and until version 2.3 (never used other versions much_, you can tell how much space is used on the internal memory by each app under the applications menu. The amount of storage used refers to internal storage only, this becomes obvious when you notice that moving apps to SD reduces the amount of storage used (and the amount of storage freed up when you uninstall the app equals about the amount that was used).

P.S. As mentioned by others above, changing the internal storage is going to be very difficult; and to be blunt, impossible if you can't work out how to root your phone and make it use the SD for most of the normal internal storage.

Nil Einne (talk) 22:49, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

how do you make one for windows? does windows have a simple api for it? and does Linux as well? also, how would you go about writing an app to apply real-time filters to the output to the monitor (such as color or brightness filters)? lastly, how do you guys find non copyrighted pictures for this site? thank you, 70.114.254.43 (talk) 22:47, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(1) You can find instructions for writing a Windows screensaver in C at http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/17214-write-your-own-windows-screen-saver/. (2) Applying real-time filters to the monitor output is extremely nontrivial, in the general case. As far as I can see, the only way to do it in general is to create a new driver for your graphics card. There may be some existing drivers that allow user-created filters to be interposed; if so, I don't know about them. (3) Non-copyrighted pictures are contributed by people who have them or manage to find them. There is no universal method here. Looie496 (talk) 00:09, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

On both Windows and Linux, screensavers are basically just regular programs. On Windows there is an expectation that they will take certain arguments (see here), but this is also not actually required as such. As such, there is no "API for screensavers", as a screensaver is just a meaningless abstraction. — cdwn 00:11, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the big categories of non-copyrighted pics are ones we make or take ourselves, ones old enough to be in the public domain, and those released to the public, such as from government organizations. StuRat (talk) 00:24, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Nitpick: just being "released to the public" does not mean anything about a photograph's copyright status. US copyright law says that nothing created by the US federal government can be copyrightable (under the argument that the taxpayer has already paid for its creation). That's a very specific case (it doesn't apply to state governments, it doesn't even apply to contractors, much less other countries). Just because a government has "released something to the public" doesn't mean it has relinquished its copyright claims on something. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:17, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's perhaps worth clarifying a resonable percentage of our media are not 'non copyrighted'. Instead they are copyrighted but released by the copyright hold under a Free content licence sufficiently free for our goals. For that media which is truly 'non copyrighted', I think a large percentage of it comes from one of two sources. Content which is old enough that it is now in the public domain, or content created by the US federal government. Contributors do sometimes release their content in to the public domain or otherwise try to give up on the copyright, I don't think this is common enough to represent a big chunk of our non copyrighted works. Note that this is not simply nitpicking, there are a number of key differences. For example the copyright holder of a free content is still fully entitled to licence the media seperately to someone else if this third party does not want to follow the terms of the free content licence. And speaking of which, as the copyright holder it's generally accepted (with the support of some court cases) that they retain the right to protect their copyright, for example by enforcing compliance with the terms of the free licence, we do allow share alike or copyleft free content licences as well as some which require attribution, and these explicitly require reusers to follow certain terms. Also as our article mentions, public domain work arising from where the copyright has expired has the potential to become copyrighted again (and therefore unless released under a free content licence no longer suitable for us), which has happened in the past; whereas it's generally accepted a free content licence is largely irrevocable (although technically law changes could nullify a free content licence). Nil Einne (talk) 03:23, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

thanks. 70.114.254.43 (talk) 01:24, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

October 7

I'm suddenly seeing ads on Wikipedia. One right under the article title, and another right above an article's table of contents. I am NOT happy. I thought Wikipedia would never run ads? Was referred here from the Help Desk. On the last page with ads, the first was for weight loss tips, and the second was for an online game. Right now, there's an anti-drunk driving ad below the title. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.193.228.251 (talk) 01:35, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Would you take a screenshot of the relevant portion of the page and upload it to an image-sharing site like Imgur? That would enable us to see exactly what's going on. Goodvac (talk) 01:38, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. Here you go: http://i1271.photobucket.com/albums/jj637/backagain2012/Ads.png. It's zoomed out to 80%. Also, accessing Wikipedia through an https:// connection removes the ads, and a full scan of my computer came up clean. 98.193.228.251 (talk) 01:46, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, that certainly is odd. What happens if you click "about this ad"? And can you right click on the image of one of the ads and paste the url of it here?
I also see some text-link advertising on that screenshot (the underlined orange links). Where do those go? Goodvac (talk) 01:50, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. Clicking "about this ad" brought me to a page for some browser toolbar, which was not malicious(even told me how to uninstall it), but didn't benefit me at all, and was installed without my knowledge or consent. Uninstalled the toolbar, and the ads are gone. 98.193.228.251 (talk) 02:00, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent. Glad it's gone. Goodvac (talk) 02:03, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, we recently had a similar case here. I'll mark this resolved. StuRat (talk) 04:42, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

How can you know that the toolbar was not malicious? Maybe you have now a worm installed in the background.

Every now and then someone appears here with the problem of wikipedia showing ads. OsmanRF34 (talk) 10:24, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, Wikipedia sometimes does show "fundraising banners" at the top of pages that look like ads. –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 23:15, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i make an http get request for a jpg allowing gzip compression. the response is a code 200, and the "transfer-encoding" header says: "chunked". the same packet has gzip data (apparently random data), being the start of the image. how do i pick out witch future packets have the rest of the image? thank you, 70.114.254.43 (talk) 02:28, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A level enquiry before we go any further: when you say "packets", do you mean TCP/IP packets, or do you mean HTTP chunks? Marnanel (talk) 02:34, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

tcp/ip, sorry. 70.114.254.43 (talk) 04:26, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The combination of protocol(TCP), source address (the web server), source port (probably 80), destination address (your machine), and destination port will all be the same for each packet of the response. Docdave (talk) 04:15, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note than, on any system derived from, or influenced by, Berkeley Sockets, then the Operating System takes care of directing the data to the network socket handle. Your program just need use one of (C-like code given)

 amountRead=read(socketId, buffer, bufferSize);
 amountWritten=write(socketId, buffer, amountToWrite);

with appropriate error checking and retrying for partial reads or writes.

However, if you mean how to find then next packet in a network packet sniffer, then check its documentation, or ask here, with the name of the tool. CS Miller (talk) 05:34, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i have a software for my chemist shop named cross of swil ltd. it can not take its daily back up . when i want to take back up it shows pkzip <E15> can't open:d:/backup/c0212/bk071012.zip for write access! backup processing has completed now,testing the backup

pkunzip: <E09> can't find:d:/backup/c0212/bk07101.zip testing completed.Rikisupriyo (talk) 11:21, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You should make sure there is enough space on whatever device is your d:. Beyond that, because Cross is a proprietary application aimed at a very narrow market segment, it's pretty unlikely that anyone here will have any experience with it. You'd be much better advised to contact the dealer who installed it for you. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:01, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Another possibility is that the software isn't authorized to open that file in that folder. If so, you would either need to change the folder to grant broader permissions, or have the backups run as "root" or "Administrator", depending on the O/S.

As far as root cause analysis, what happened between when the backups worked and when they stopped working ? StuRat (talk) 19:44, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry if it's presumptious, but have you even tried navigating to d:/backup/c0212/ and seeing what's there? Maybe your d: drive somehow unmapped it self of failed, or filled up (as suggested above), that would be the 1st thing to check. Vespine (talk) 02:43, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

how can i fix PKZIP:<E15> Rikisupriyo (talk) 11:27, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

October 8

Apparently there are some issues with these two videos. Please see: Talk:Phodopus#Please place, where it says "...What you've done is to upload a hi-res video (4x the recommended area) and told it to display as a thumb. That doesn't compress, so it still tries to come in at 7.12Mbps...". I really haven't a clue what to do. Please, please enlighten me. "Obi-reference-desk-onobi, you are my only hope." Anna Frodesiak (talk) 02:51, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry if the above question is about Wikipedia. Are questions here only to be about computers? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 03:46, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, questions on Wikipedia policies belong over at the Help Desk, yes, but if your question is how to create a lower resolution version of your movie, we could possibly help with that. What movie editing software do you have  ? Also, what's the diff between the two videos you posted on the right ? The most obvious way to reduce the size of that movie is to trim off the edges. There's nothing of interest going on outside the disc, is there ? StuRat (talk) 14:08, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

They both play instantly for me, and while I'm in a comparatively affluent western country, my broadband connection is nothing special. My guess is that Stfg was or is having software or local network issues himself. That said, you can of course get help reducing the size of the video. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:45, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I just drag-n-dropped the video into Miro Video Converter 2.5 and selected Theora format and let it do its thing. It doesn't seem to have options. Thanks for the replies. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 23:29, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

@Reisio, thanks for looking into this. I think my software issues are solved, as I can play the lower-res videos, and my broadband checked at 9.4Mbps at a time when I couldn't view Anna's which requires 7.12 Mbps. What I don't quite grok is how Wikipedia:Creation and usage of media files#Limitations and Implementation Issues is counselling to stay below 1Mbps to keep within the "ability of Wikipedia or the Commons to deliver ...", when the obviously approved videos at Commons:Media of the day are going so much higher -- those fine magpies are asking for 33.05Mbps, no less. What throughput does the server end typically achieve? --Stfg (talk) 00:18, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Questions for those better informed than I, but I will say it's fairly apparent that in-browser video support is less than perfect at this point, particularly in regard to prebuffering. ¦ Reisio (talk) 15:50, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am mildy curious how http://dl.dropbox.com/u/98754825/dhrod_q06.ogv.tar would compare, however. It was generated with the following command:
ffmpeg -i Dwarf_hamsters_running_on_disc.ogv -vcodec libtheora -q:v 6 -an -vf crop=544:480:88:0 dhrod_q06.ogv
¦ Reisio (talk) 16:23, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing#My_iphone_4.27s_camera_shot_the_video_in_disarray.2C_now_i_need_help_editing_the_vid. They've now clarified what they want, so does anyone have any recommendations ? StuRat (talk) 14:15, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

How large is a typical 1080p movie file on a purchased Blu-Ray Disc? Suppose if one illegally torrents a 1080p Blu-Ray rip of the same movie, is that the exact same quality as one would receive if one purchased it instead? I suppose the file format has something to do with it right? Frequently, one can find .avi's and .mp4's and .mkv's. Which one is best? Why is there such a size discrepancy between the file types (s22 gb vs 2gb)? Thanks. Acceptable (talk) 20:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Are you suggesting we give you advice on the merits of doing something illegally? AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:13, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

He didn't say anything about advice. The question itself is descriptive and neutral. --Trovatore (talk) 20:15, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The 22 GB sounds like the full movie, at the compression level it has on a Blu-Ray disk. 2 GB would require heavy, lossy compression, and would look bad on a 1080p screen, as a result. They might also drop frames, making it look jumpy on any sized screen. StuRat (talk) 20:19, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it would not look _as good_ on a 1080p screen as a result. The question as to whether it would look _20 gigs worse_ is one most pirates have already answered: no. ¦ Reisio (talk) 20:42, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Most 'rips' are recompressed. It's possible simply special feature or certain audio tracks were removed but this is rarer, generally speaking if it's description as a 'rip' (or particularly 'brrip') by someone who knows what they're talking about, that often means it's recompressed. If it's the original BluRay which hasn't been recompressed etc, it will often be called something like 'untouched' (or possibly BD25/BD50 although these terms may not guarantee it was untouched as they simply refer to what it's suitable to burn to) or 'remux' (although this term could also be used in other cases) depending on what was done to it. You may be able to tell by the size too but you have to be careful. Generally the nfo should make it clear what was done if it's a scene release or a decent releaser. Nil Einne (talk) 03:02, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Depending on the quality of the encoding, disk content and the number of sound channels, original blu-rays can be anywhere from 5 gigs to 50 gigs (dual layer) large. The merits of mkv can be found at www.matroska.org but afaik it's a far more efficient format than avi and less lossy. Therefore mkv files are large... I've seen them ranging from 4 gigs to 20 gigs. The format is gaining in popularity and is supported by more hardware media players nowadays. Sandman30s (talk) 07:18, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

MKV is simply a container format. It has a minor efficiency advantage with certain codecs and configs over AVI (particularly when it comes to VBR and B frames) and better support for certain things like the aforementioned, as well as multiple video streams and embedded (not hardcoded) subtitles; also for related reasons may have other advantages like when it comes to avoiding audio sync issues, seeking and support (meaning since there's a better defined way of doing that stuff, you don't get a bunch of different implementations which don't always work with different players). However the efficiency of MKV is largely dependent on the codec used since as stated it's simply a container format. MKV could contain lossless video, or as I hinted above the original unreencoded BluRay streams, or something encoded with a high efficiency codec at crappier quality then the lowest Youtube quality (and therefore of comparable low size). Generally speaking, any AVI could be remuxed as an MKV so it doesn't make any sense to talk about quality or size difference when it comes to MKV vs AVI, discounting the minor efficiency advantage except perhaps in regard to scene rules and common practices. Notably the WebM container is basically a subset of the Matroska one, albeit with only one possible video and audio codec, and that of course is one of the options Youtube uses for their HTML5 video support which gives a limited idea of the bitrate/quality variation possible. Nil Einne (talk) 12:31, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

They generally can turn things on or off every few minutes, but I'm looking for one that can turn things on or off every second, to attach to my microwave oven. Currently, even on the lowest setting, the outside of food burns while the center stays cold. So, I'd like to cook things longer, on a lower average power setting. My current workaround is to turn the microwave on and off manually, waiting in between for the heat to evenly distribute, which isn't very satisfactory. One of those microwave absorbing disks under the center also helps a bit, but not enough. And, yes, I have a manual microwave which is "always on" so long as it has power, time on the manual dial timer, and the door shut. StuRat (talk) 22:59, 8 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I can hardly imagine a more effective way of destroying electrical equipment than cycling the power every second. Well, bashing it with a hammer, I suppose. Looie496 (talk) 00:59, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Actually may not be a bad idea. After StuRat spends $50-100 on the 'second' cycling timer and kills their microwave, they can spend $200-300 on a new microwave oven with an inverter/PWM and hopefully not have to complain here again. Nil Einne (talk) 03:08, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

When you turn a microwave to low, that's exactly what it does, it cycles on and off. Unfortunately, 1 second on and 7 off seems to be about the longest cycle, which isn't enough for the heat to redistribute fully. StuRat (talk) 04:42, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The difference is that when you use the controls, you can be sure that the device has capacitors and stuff to protect itself against any power surges that might result. When you are cycling the external power rapidly, you're putting the device into a situation that it was not designed to handle. Any modern electrical device is designed to handle power fluctuations, but not an extended series of large fast fluctuations like that. It's possible that nothing bad would happen, but it's also possible that you would fry the circuitry. Looie496 (talk) 05:19, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm assuming you have a pretty simple Microwave with mechanical controls, since you can cut the power and reconnect it and have it keep cooking. If you feel like cycling the power won't hurt it, then go ahead. The best cheap solution I can think of is to build something yourself, if you have the skills. For an analog setup you could set up some sort of simple RC delay turn a relay on and off. You could even work in a potentiometer for control. I can't help you much, because I would go the digital way - use a cheap hobbyist microcontroller kit like the Arduino and use it to drive a relay. If you want to look more into prebuilt solutions, "pulse-width modified" is a way to describe an output that acheives an average voltage by turning a constant higher voltage on and off. Usually it applies to things cycling several times a second, but the industrial controllers I have worked with still use the term to describe things that can cycle on the order of several seconds. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 11:29, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Probably quicker, easier and safer to buy a new microwave oven that works properly. Astronaut (talk) 15:04, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, but that solution was already given. I figured I could at least point him towards what he wanted. Sturat, I am curious what you're cooking that burns on a 13% duty cycle. I normally only need that low of power for defrosting, and I haven't had anything burn while using it. Maybe there is simple solution to cooking the food that doesn't involve buying a new microwave or modifying your existing one. Also, out of curiosity, how does the power setting work on your microwave? I'm picturing something like several sets of traces on the back of your timer dial, each for a different duty-cycle. If that is the case, you may be able to trim off some of the conductor for the lowest power setting, if you don't mind permanently modifying your microwave. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 16:16, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Microwaves seem to prefer liquid water over ice, so they can seriously overheat one thawed pocket while leaving the rest frozen. Unless, of course, enough time is allowed for the heat to distribute itself and for everything to thaw. At that point, heating by microwave becomes more even. For boil-in-bag items, I sometimes thaw them first in hot water, but this doesn't work for other items which would get soggy while thawing. StuRat (talk) 23:11, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

An alternative to decreasing the energy output would be to add a container of water to absorb some of that energy, thus decreasing the amount absorbed by the food item. Be sure to include a wooden spoon or popsicle stick to encourage boiling and avoid superheating should the water get that hot. -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 22:57, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good idea, and nice use of a previous Ref Desk Q regarding the wooden spoon. StuRat (talk) 23:08, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

October 9

Hi in Word 2007, when I use quotes it insists on putting in the characters ‘ and ’ instead of '. Is there any way of turning that off or forcing the '? I can do the most advanced things in computers but Word drives me nuts! Sandman30s (talk) 10:13, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Those are called "smart quotes". Info about how to disable that feature is here. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 10:19, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that... would never have found that in Word's menu black hole. It seems to work and looks correct in Word; however there is one rogue line which, no matter what I do, when I copy and paste that line into notepad it still pastes the 'smart' quotes. The best part is that line looks correct in Word! Sandman30s (talk) 07:45, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

And I agree, that's quite annoying. I've been copying Python code from lecture notes, in order to run it, and have to manually fix every case where the word processor did that to them. StuRat (talk) 10:22, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Why are you using Word for lecture notes? (Or, why is the instructor doing such a silly thing, as the case may be?) --Trovatore (talk) 06:40, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's the instructor, and you'd have to ask him. StuRat (talk) 06:49, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In many modern code editors, there is a function somewhere called something like "Straighten Quotes" which converts all smart quotes to straight quotes. --Mr.98 (talk) 11:36, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I know, strong short passwords sound kind of like tasty, fat-free chocolate. Nevertheless one of the online services I use (and am required to use for my job, so don't say that I shouldn't use a service with such ridiculous requirements) has an 8 character limit (case sensitive, letters, numbers and symbols allowed). The consequences of this password being compromised are fairly high so I am interested in getting the best security possible. So, firstly, is even a randomly generated password of this length secure in this day and age? Secondly are there any tricks I can use to increase security e.g. will passwords generally recognise non-keyboard letters such as Greek or Chinese characters that probably won't be in brute-force character lists? Equisetum (talk | contributions) 15:34, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

An online attacker (e.g. a botnet) will surely try passwords in order of likelihood, meaning they'll try the random-junk passwords (henceforth RJPs) last. For an online attack they probably won't bother with RJPs, as their bots or the account will likely get blocked or rate-limited before they get that far. Online attackers are looking for low-hanging fruit, mostly. For offline attacks (where an attacker has obtained a copy of the password database), with a rainbow table, they'll still try real words first, but 8 characters of rainbow table is quite tractable (particularly if the database isn't salted). There's no way of knowing, without trying, whether they'll accept non-ascii (or non-latin) characters - a sensibly written service will, but a sensibly written service doesn't impose such a low limit on passwords. If they do accept say Chinese characters then they're at least doubling the effective password length (depending on how they're encoding stuff). This is, as you say, an unsatisfactory situation, and there's not much you can do to ameliorate their decisions. A random password, unique to this service, is probably the best you can do. I'd write a memo detailing "what will happen when our account at XYZ online service is taken over", so you can scope the damage should that happen. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 15:51, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You might find this article interesting regarding offline hash cracking — apparently rainbow tables are more or less no longer needed, what with the speed of GPU hash crackers ("You can literally test all lowercase, alphabetic passwords which are ≤7 characters in less than 2 seconds. And you can now rent the hardware which makes this possible to the tune of less than $3/hour. For about $300/hour, you could crack around 500,000,000,000 candidate passwords a second."). --Mr.98 (talk) 02:16, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

But what web sites allow you to try 500,000,000,000 candidate passwords a second ? If they require each to be sent separately, accepted or rejected, then this notification sent back to the user, this is going to introduce a much longer delay. StuRat (talk) 02:41, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The point is that, ideally, you want to assume that an opponent has somehow managed to capture the website's hash table, and you still don't want that opponent to be able to masquerade as you. --Trovatore (talk) 02:54, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I looked in to that blog post before and my understanding is it's somewhat mistaken about the use of rainbow tables. They are still widely used even with GPUs (in fact many rainbow tables require GPUs) because they can still speed up searches fairly significantly, I believe the blogger simply misunderstood how rainbiw tables are used. Nil Einne (talk) 03:54, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Great advice, thanks. I think I should be reasonably okay with an RJP as this is a large system and there will be a lot of low hanging fruit around. Now... I just need a random password generator that I trust and to work out a way of remembering the output (don't worry about answering this - easy to google)! I don't think I'll even try non-ascii characters as I've just remembered a story from a while back of a piece of software (I think it was some turnkey forum software for websites) that would allow non-ascii characters but convert them all to spaces or something similar, turning the most secure passwords into the least secure at a stroke! Equisetum (talk | contributions) 17:02, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

KeePass will both generate and store passwords. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:29, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Worst case scenario: they only allow letters and numbers, and the letters aren't case sensitive. This would give you 36 possible characters in each position, so 36⁸, or over 2.8 trillion, possible passwords. If they can try one password a second, it should take almost 90 thousand years to try every possibility. As long as you use random characters, you should be fine. StuRat (talk) 23:20, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You may be in trouble and if the data is sensitive, you may want to get your manager concerned. From the Linux journal - you probably have the hardware in your computer already and the cracking software is free. Zoonoses (talk) 06:34, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Have looked around for something that is just audio and is simple to use, one command and its recording to download, also one that can keep recording unlike the "Sound Recorder" on microsoft OS which keeps stopping every 60 seconds. Any program with "Sound Recorders" simplicity and low memory usage but that keeps going? Thanks. Marketdiamond (talk) 16:32, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Audacity is nice, but has a more sophisticated interface than you're looking for. GoldWave is reportedly simpler. SoX (particularly its rec command) is about as basic as one can get. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:42, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Finlay McWalter! Marketdiamond (talk) 21:57, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, How does the page of facebook is so dynamic? Is there a script behind it? I thought about it, but it can take a lot of resources from the server. Exx8 (talk) 17:46, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A good starting read for this sort of stuff is Ajax (programming). Not sure exactly what technique Facebook are using, but it'll not be 1,000,000 miles away. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:49, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Facebook Platform describes the overall setup at Facebook. For desktop clients, they used to use an AJAX framework called FBJS, but they've replaced that with something called iFrames for Pages. For mobile sites they use a framework called Javelin, on which they build BoltJS. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 19:39, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I might be wrong, but Facebook Platform seems only to describe the app API, not the overall Facebook site itself. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:41, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The short, non-technical answer is a form of AJAX. In layman's terms, this means that your browser is constantly running a bit of Javascript that says, "Hey, Facebook's server, should I change anything?" If you hover your mouse over someone's name, for example, your browser says, "hey, what should I show this guy?" The server will give the script data ("Hey, put this guy's name and photo in here, and this list of shared friends"), and the script then tells the browser to display this. The "dynamism" is common to AJAX-like applications — it's all that Javascript working behind the scenes so that the browser doesn't ever have to refresh. As for the resources on the server, each individual call requires very little attention from the server — it's just text. (Even the photos are just text, because they are links to images, not the images themselves.) Now, if you multiply all of those little server requests times the millions of users — yeah, that adds up. It's non-trivial to code a site with the popularity of Facebook, as well as with all of those bells and whistles. You can make a very basic version of that sort of site with very little training at all, but getting one that won't crash or be sluggish when 100 million people do it at once requires clever programming, clever server architecture, and lots of processing and bandwidth capability. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:40, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if that explains the NASDAQ's feed of Facebook stock crashing the day of its IPO? Ok not funny for about 10 million ways.Marketdiamond (talk) 04:52, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Over the last week or so I've noticed the format of articles has changed when I open up Wiki on my Blackberry Curve-when I click on the individual segments to open them up they do not respond. Have any other user's reported a similar problem?

October 10

I have Ubuntu 12.04. I want to change to Fedora. The problem is my DVD writer is not working properly. Can I do direct installation (as I have done several upgrades in Ubuntu)? --Tito Dutta ✉ 09:20, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

First, the simple solutions: Turn the ISO file into a bootable flash drive if you have one large enough. Also, the last time I bought a DVD burner it cost $30, and that was years ago.

In order to install without a flash drive or a new DVD drive, the simplest solution is probably to shrink the last partition on your drive. Create a new partition and set it up with the Live installer image. Reconfigure GRUB to let you boot to that. When you boot to and install from that partition, be careful during the repartitioning step of the install so you don't accidentally destroy your install media. After installing, delete the installer partition and grow your last partition to fill the disk.

You could also try installing to a VM, then imaging the OS partition from the VM onto a new partition on your disk, and setting grub to point to that. It would save the step of figuring out how to get a bootable live image onto a partition. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 12:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'd advice strongly against messing with the grub or partition setup if you have no way of booting your computer if it goes wrong, i.e. if you have no functional DVD-reader. If it is only the DVD-writing that is defective, I'd suggest the really simple solution of asking a buddy to burn the Fedora DVD for you. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 14:47, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Or spending less than $5 probably on a USB stick, yeah. ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:10, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Being deaf I wonder if there is an app. that will increase the volume of my iPhone. Any ideas will be much appreciated.--85.211.192.197 (talk) 09:57, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You can get louder results if you hook it up to headphones with batteries and an amplifier, like this one: [15]. StuRat (talk) 10:17, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks but I'm sorry and I should have made it clear that I was referring to the telephone element of the phone.--85.211.192.197 (talk) 13:50, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You won't find an app as the volume is built in. I suggest you get yourself this device.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 16:35, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I want make firefox ignore https hostname mismatches on some exceptions, is there anyway to do this? 190.60.93.218 (talk) 12:34, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

My Asus Eee Netbook came with a 3-cell 11.1 V battery. I purchased a battery from a reputable eBay seller that is supposedly an official first-party Asus battery compatible with my netbook. The battery arrived in perfect condition and has the proper Asus markings, but beyond that, I am unable to determine if it is indeed an official Asus battery. Anyways, this new battery says it is 10.8 V, 0.3 Volts lower than the original battery.

My netbook runs fine with it and I've been using it on the new battery for a few weeks now. However, I have noticed that it is performing a little slower than before I got the new battery under the same operating environments and workloads. Could the drop in battery voltage be responsible for the drop in computing performance?

Thanks. Acceptable (talk) 20:24, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think so. This could be the case with analog devices, like dimmer lights and slower fans, but digital devices like a laptop should work at full speed until the voltage drops too low, then they shut down completely. An exception might be if the slower fan speeds cause it to run hot, and it has internal software to choke the processing speed when this happens, to prevent a total shutdown from overheating and/or damage. StuRat (talk) 20:27, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Did you "notice" a performance change, or did you measure a performance change? We have a list of common computing-performance benchmarks, including a variety of free software implementations. Without direct measurement, it's moot to discuss "apparent" performance. Nimur (talk) 23:17, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Just use it while it's plugged in, that will show you if the battery makes any difference. And yes, I agree with the above, actually use a benchmark, not just how it "feels".. I personally doubt battery would make a difference, but I don't think it's as inconceivable as StuRat's reply might suggest. Mobile processors use pretty fancy power management these days, I wouldn't be totally surprised if the processor was slowed down as the battery voltage decreased.. Vespine (talk) 04:51, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I wanted to make a chart showing the history of far-left organisations in my area. Anyone remotely familiar with the subject will know that such groups quite frequently undergo repeated splits and mergers (for those not familiar, think the People's Front of Judea and its associated splinter groups in Monty Python's Life of Brian) .Is there any kind of software that would be particularly suited to creating this sort of visualisation? I wanted to end up with something looking like this. Obviously it would be possible to do in any basic image editing program, but I was wondering if there was specialised software for this sort of thing. --149.135.146.88 (talk) 09:33, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The formula for computing double declining depreciation in Excel is relatively straightforward:

DDB(Cost, Salvage Value, Useful Life, Current Period)

So, for example, DDB(80000,8000,5,3) gives you 11520, the depreciation in year 3.

However, I cannot find a function that will give me accumulated depreciation (ie, the total amount of depreciation in previous periods, and the current one). In the above example, the answer would be 62720, which is basically DDB(80000,8000,5,1)+DDB(80000,8000,5,2)+DDB(80000,8000,5,3). Is there any way I can easily and automatically compute total accumulated double declining depreciation to date? ΣΑΠΦ (Sapph)^Talk 12:11, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You can use VDB to calculate over an arbitrary period, so you can set the start period to 1 and the end period to the period you want total depreciation on. VDB Documentation209.131.76.183 (talk) 12:27, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm trying to create a backup copy of a software CD and I keep getting the error message "Could not complete the On-The-Fly disc copy process.". Here's the log data:

User Name  : Windows User Company Name : CyberLink CDKey  : MS485795235X3544 OS Version  : Windows 7 Home PremiumService Pack 1 C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\Power2Go\Power2Go.exe : Version 6.1.0.3802 CBS.dll : Version 7.7.4810

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Total physical memory : 3563MB (3649400KB) Free physical memory  : 2181MB (2233952KB) Memory load  : 38 percent

Number of CPU : 4 CPU Name  : AMD A6-3420M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics CPU Speed  : 1497 MHz

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11.10.2012 Task Type : Copy Disc

09:31:50, File(cl_DiscCopyCD.cpp), Line(90) -> Begin burning process Current drive: <F: ARTEC WRR-52X 2.25> Current writing speed(x): 32.0 ====== Disc Info ======= Disc Type: CD-R Disc Status: Blank, Appendable Num. of Sessions: 1 Num. of Tracks: 1 Disc Capacity: 336223LBs Free Size: 336223LBs Used Size: 0LBs ======================== ->Burn on the fly Current reading speed(x): 16.0 Burn option: w/ buffer underrun protection Burn option: w/o simulation Burn option: w/o overburn Burn option: w/ verify disc Burn option: w/o extra long disc

09:31:55, File(cl_Cdwrite.cpp), Line(2697) -> Setup drive Sessn: 1, Sessn type: Disc At Once Disc physical format: CDROM_MODE1 Trk: 1, Trk mode: MODE1

09:31:55, File(cl_Cdwrite.cpp), Line(1966) -> Start session Sessn: 1, Start trk: 1, Last trk: 1

09:31:55, File(cl_Cdwrite.cpp), Line(1992) -> Start track Trk: 1, Track start addr(LBA): 0, Trk size(sectors): 303348, Sector size(bytes): 2048

09:32:27, File(cl_Cdwrite.cpp), Line(2430) -> Write end/Close disc Burn option: w/ close disc Burn mode: DAO

09:32:27, File(cl_DiscCopyCD.cpp), Line(935) -> Burning Fail, ErrCode: 0xeb020b88

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Error Code : 0xeb020baf

Any clue why it's doing this? 199.241.185.195 (talk) 13:48, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]