How do I stop my Mac from deleting my internet history on Firefox whenever I shut it down? It does it automatically, and I can't figure out how to stop it doing that. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 06:24, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Preferences → Privacy → Clear history when Firefox closes. Good luck; I have it set to clear cookies on closing, but it no longer consistently does that. —Tamfang (talk) 09:07, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I use the LastPass password manager. Since a few days ago, I've been unable to access the site; it times out. Then I read about their security breach from last June. Is there anything I can do to gain access to the site now? Halcatalyst (talk) 07:05, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have been using it without interruption for a long time, including the last few days. The site and service are not down. 209.149.114.132 (talk) 13:58, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the remark.It may be because I'm currently in Europe? It's hard to imagine why that would matter? Halcatalyst (talk) 14:08, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Chrome tells me this page is not available. Halcatalyst (talk) 14:13, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Under such circumstances, I strongly recommend: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com - if a site is not responding, go there and type in the URL you're trying to reach. It'll let you know if the server it's running on can access the site - which will give you some confidence as to whether the site you're trying to reach is having problems (so nobody can reach it) - or whether the problem is at your end and other people are not having problems. SteveBaker (talk) 14:26, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It IS just me.

Though I get the error message "An error occurred while logging into LastPass. Please check your Internet connection," I can get other sites. Just out of curiosity, I wonder, how does this sort of thing happen? Halcatalyst (talk) 18:23, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

My PC is broken. It's a few years old, and I'm trying to work out the very cheapest way of getting it working. I am on a VERY limited budget at the moment.

The CPU is an Intel core i5 2500k 'Sandy Bridge'. Motherboard is Asus P8P67LE.

Memory 4 x 2b (total 8Gb) DDR3 PC3-10666.

Graphics Radeon HD 6850 1024Mb.

It has a couple of 1Tb SATA drives, a Blu-ray thing, a 500W PSU.

The motherboard is definitely broken. The CPU may be faulty. I think the graphics card, RAM, and everything else is fine. Reason: The PC had started shutting down unexpectedly; in removing the CPU to clean the fans out, the socket was damaged. Bent pins on the motherboard.

I'm trying to work out a cheapo-fix, but am confused about all the sockets and compatibilities etc.

My own research/googling indicates the CPU is 'socket 1155' (right?), and I see there are quite cheap motherboards avaiable with that (about 40 UK pounds) , although some of the cheaper ones only support 2 DDR memory instead of 4. But then I guess DDR memory is pretty cheap now, so maybe the RAM doesn't matter (if I just use 2 of them, or just buy 2x8 or something later)

I think those boards would support that graphics card?

If one of those pretty cheap motherboards can take the CPU and RAM (or half the RAM, and more is also cheap), and - importantly - that graphics card, then that might be my best option.

Or is it so unlikely to be a successful 'fix' that I'd be better putting that money toward a more modern motherboard+processor+RAM combo? I can't afford much more - maybe I can manage £200.

Is that Radeon Graphics card kinda OK-ish?

I do realise that the entire system is now about 5 years old, so obsolete/a dinosaur, but I can't afford a complete new system right now.

I've done my best to research this myself, but there's so many permutations that it's confusing - so I'd really appreciate experts saying e.g. 'yeah, get a new mb for 40 quid and try it...if the CPU is broken you can get those too for not too much more' or 'don't even bother, just get a new xxx', or that type of thing.

It's suprising to me that I could get a brand new laptop for not much more than the cost of a board+processor, but it seems that's the way things are now. But I'd still rather have a desktop system. And I feel like I want to make use of the hard drives, case, power supply and probably the graphics card for a bit longer. If this is a silly idea, please tell me!

Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.152.145.136 (talk) 15:46, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The problem you described (shutting down randomly) can be the fault of several things in your computer. Anything from unseated RAM, to bad RAM, to a faulty PSU, to overheating. Unfortunately, the motherboard is actually broken, so it's difficult to diagnose the health of the other parts. Old computers sometimes suffer from replace-everything syndrome, where replacing one or two parts precipitates poor performance or failure of the other parts in an avalanche of replacements until you suddenly end up with a basically brand new computer and less $700 in your wallet.

I'd say your best bet is to grab a new motherboard with enough of a feature set to support your things. It's likely that if you're running windows that you'll have to strip out your old drivers & replace them, but that's (hopefully) easy enough.

If you have the extra cash, I would think about upgrading the processor up to the Haswell series (4xxx) and grab an LGA 1150 motherboard. It'll at least keep part of your hardware up with the times, and then you'd have a little more breathing room for the future.

As for the graphics card, this might help with your decision. I know that 1GB of VRAM is barely adequate anymore, so you might consider upgrading that if you're planning on playing the newest stuff at the highest detail levels. Though, if this machine isn't primarily for gaming, then it's fine. FrameDrag (talk) 16:25, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Minimum cost , find a used machine, preferably in the dumpster/ashbin. Lots of people upgrade. Check classified ads. Swap parts between machines till you get working system. GangofOne (talk) 01:48, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Your machine is not as absolete as your think. A SandyBridge CPU from 2011, 8 Gb of RAM and 1 TB hard drive – it is actually pretty good and can run the vast majority of applications! Did you attempt to straighten the pins? Ruslik_Zero 20:12, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever I open videos app or music app, the start screen is seen automatically. I am using Windows 8.1 . It used to work but suddenly it stopped and started displaying start screen. When I drag the left side, it show Videos/Music working. But it doesn't load. How to solve this issue? Thanks in advance. AmRit GhiMire "Ranjit" 16:06, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Moreover none of fullscreen app are not running. AmRit GhiMire "Ranjit" 11:41, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've noticed that more and more mail services are sending every email over the wire in Base64 encoding, whether it needs it or not. Anybody know why? It seems to me that good old quoted-printable encoding is still perfectly fine for most plain-text and HTML parts, and it leaves the on-the-wire representation human-readable (and it's more efficient, to boot). --Steve Summit (talk) 22:04, 12 November 2015 (UTC) [edited 23:56, 12 November 2015 (UTC)][reply]

Well for one, in this day and age, leaving email as 'human readable' on the wire is actually a feature that is generally not desired. Vespine (talk) 23:01, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Baseless speculation: rather than scanning the document to figure out which encoding is more compact it's easier to just pick one, and quoted-printable is 125% bigger than base64 in the worst case while base64 is only 33% bigger than quoted-printable in the worst case, and quoted-printable is only smaller if >5/6 of the bytes don't need quoting, which probably isn't true of Chinese emails even with lots of HTML tags. -- BenRG (talk) 23:41, 12 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Steve said "whether it needs it or not", but I think the main change is that simply that one or another form of encoding is being needed more often, because fewer messages (even in English) are limited to the ASCII characters. In particular, some widely used software, seeing UTF-8 as preferable to ASCII, is rendering apostrophes as ’ instead of ', and similarly with quotation marks. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 03:46, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The efficiency argument is weakened when one considers how much is really saved or cost by the text encoding scheme. The text portion of almost all emails is pretty small; if you have a large email, it's overwhelmingly likely that it's large because it has large binary attachments. So even halving or doubling the size used to represent the text portion won't really make most people's email traffic, or email storage, significantly larger or smaller. We can considered the inverse case: if emails had always been specified to only be encoded in chunks of base64, and someone proposed (today) to add additional support so that text chunks could be encoded as quoted-printable - I think such a proposed would be dismissed pretty promptly as adding complexity without enough gain. In any case, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP all support a TLS-1 layer, and TLS-1 can (and hopefully does) negotiate a pre-encryption DEFLATE step, which mitigates the base64 bloat some. Everyone's using encrypted email transmission, right? right? right... -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 21:32, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

TLS compression is a security liability because the compression ratio can leak information. See e.g. the CRIME attack. Because of this, Google's SSL library doesn't support compression, and neither does draft TLS 1.3. But I think it's true that textual email is a drop in the bucket regardless. -- BenRG (talk) 22:40, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wow. I remember hearing about CRIME when it came out, but had never read of the details. That is... an awesome exploit (if I can be forgiven for describing an exploit as "awesome"). But it's even sneakier than the old page-fault password attacks, which were themselves pretty darn awesome in their day.

(Note, by the way, that I confined the mention of efficiency in my original question to a parenthetical, because it is indeed a marginal concern at best.) --Steve Summit (talk) 23:01, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I am currently loking at this datasheet from Atmel. There are a couple of tables describing the contents of the device's EEPROM (tables E-1 and F-1) whose column headers' contents look like 0_h / 8_h. The byte address for each row is a range of eight bytes. I can understand using 0h through 7h to divide the row, but why is each number paired with a second hexadecimal digit that is 8 greater than itself? — Melab±1 ☎ 03:10, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

My guess is the / means "or", meaning, for example, the byte values at addresses F000h and F008h are always the same. However, this doesn't seem to be explained in the document, so I'm not sure. I notice there are other tables in Appendix E (tables E-6, E-8, and E-10) that only label the columns as 0h to 7h. Maybe this suggests you only need to use addresses ending in 0h to 7h to access the data values in table E-1 (and table F-1?). --Bavi H (talk) 04:52, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oops. I originally thought the row headers were ranges of 16 bytes (F000h - F00Fh). Now I see the row headers are only ranges of 8 bytes each (F000h - F007h). I'm more confident the / means "or": For the first row labeled F000h - F007h, the columns represent addresses ending 0h to 7h. For the second row labeled F008h - F00Fh, the columns represent addresses ending in 8h to Fh, and so on. --Bavi H (talk) 05:20, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A spam bot has cropped up at GlyphWiki with bizarre edit summaries and weirder edit contents (this is a wiki that hosts designs of Chinese characters). Searching "Way to use the internet to help people solve prblsemo!" (one of the "messages" left behind) in Google shows that GlyphWiki is not alone. What purpose does such a bizarre attack have? What's the single misspelling in the message for? Do the cryptic edit summaries mean anything? —suzukaze (t・c) 05:27, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

About the misspelling, it could randomly swap some letters in a sentence it sends out to millions, in an attempt to evade automatic blocking software looking for a particular sentence. StuRat (talk) 06:43, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The thing to remember is that computers are stupid. Most spambots aren't very complex. They just look for any HTML form and submit spam. They're going for quantity over quality. Especially looking at this page, I think this particular bot is more oriented towards comment sections. These kinds of bots often stick spam links in the name or title fields of comments. Since Mediawiki isn't a blog platform with comments, it might be sticking spam links in the submit data for these nonexistent fields, so the links never get posted. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 08:33, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I looked at a site once by a guy who hated Wikipedia. He developed tools to bypass the CAPTCHA so you could create and use multiple accounts automatically. I also saw an auto-editor on his site that copies previous edit summaries and slightly misspells them so they won't look, to the computer, like duplicates. When I looked at it, he had a few other tools, but was mainly working on one where you give it some copyrighted text and a Wikipedia article. It would then alter one sentence at a time, each time with a different account, over a long period of time. It would turn the Wikipedia article into the copyrighted article. That appeared to be his purpose - making articles on Wikipedia copyright infringement. I assume that someone else could develop similar tools to put spam in pages or, perhaps, use his editor tool but instead of making article copyrighted, they add spam. I've been Googling, but I keep coming back to a user here on Wikipedia who doesn't have a user page anymore. I haven't found his website. 209.149.114.132 (talk) 13:39, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Diff 563404424 is still in the Wikipedia history, even if Google can't find it. One may hope that our old friend has since recanted - at least the parts pertaining to intentional, automated vandalism. Nimur (talk) 16:33, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't call that an "old friend." 162.211.46.242 (talk) 20:32, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I believe you're looking at XRumer with its distinctive edit summaries. These are designed to provide any value for input fields. The misspellings usually come from a highly developed list of alternatives, designed to avoid filters and spam detectors. The general conversation it adds is used to supply some SEO context. You can expect these edits to be followed up with some real spam. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 14:08, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Lately I have been sending pictures of people I have taken photographs of to their own respective e-mail addresses. Pretty much everyone has had a GMail address. So far, I have extremely seldom received a reply. All this makes me worried whether the mails are getting there in the first place, especially as e-mail is a connectionless protocol. The mails have been in the order of 20 to 30 MB each. I have received mailer-daemon replies from GMail if I send too large mails, or mails to addresses which don't exist, but I extremely seldom get a reply from anyone I send a mail to. Is there some sort of problem with GMail, or do people simply have too little time or energy to reply to my mails? JIP | Talk 21:02, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why not email them and ask if they got the photo? Or ask if they have too little time or energy to reply to your mails? GangofOne (talk) 21:45, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I've been thinking about too, but in case they have received my mails and just haven't replied, I fear I might come across as pushy or nosy. JIP | Talk 23:47, 14 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How about - "I've accidentally deleted the photo I sent you - could you send me a copy?" If they didn't get it, you can tell them it's not important - and if they don't reply, your question is answered. Tevildo (talk) 01:04, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Check out Sidekick, I use it and it tracks when an email is opened and by whom if sent to multiple people, and lets you know. Integrates with Chrome and Gmail seamlessly. RegistryKey^(RegEdit) 22:00, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's also possible you send so much stuff to everyone they just tuned you out. I have a relative who sends me a dozen forwarded emails a day, and I no longer bother opening them. I haven't actually blocked them, and do look at the titles, but others might choose to block them. StuRat (talk) 17:48, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I am having troubles with my ≈4.5 year old Toshiba Windows 7 laptop, almost randomly, running 'slow' and even 'locking up'.
This is possibly due to my bad habit of running several browser windows with multiple tabs in each.
• I also usually hibernate the laptop after use and only reboot it after days of use. (or when it won't respond!)
• Right now Task Manager says I'm running about

-120 processes. (Is that excessive?)

- 81% physical memory,

- CPU 10%

• Laptop config is:

• Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit (service pack 1)
• Intel i3-2310m Processor (quad core)
• 4Gb RAM
• 750 Gb HDD (55% free)
• Geforce 315M video

I sometimes seem to be using a lot of memory like 95% for not doing much. Irregularly the usage seems to go right up ↑ for no obvious reason. Sometimes when I kill a few browsers tbas it will drop ↓ abruptly and the laptop become responsive again, but sometimes I can't even close a browser, without a significant wait!
• Any suggestions? 220 of ^Borg 17:45, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The number of processes and memory use are not remarkably high. Which browser do you user? When the laptop freezes is it actively using the hard drive? Ruslik_Zero 20:04, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

When was the last time you cleaned the dust out of it? Over the years I've seen a number of people complaining about issues with laptops where it turned out the entire thing was crammed full of dust, causing overheating, which causes the system to run slowly and/or crash. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 21:27, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The browser I was using at the time was Chrome. I sometimes switch to Firefox (usually after a 'crash'). The laptop was repaired about 15 months ago, HDD replaced after dying after about 2.5(?) years usage.

• They did include a note about dust, but IIRC that was standard practice. I have been watching the temperature gauge (cpu temp?), and it seems to indicate correct temperature. Doesn't seem to happen while playing games, makes me suspect a browser issue. I have checked the inlets & exhaust are clear, but haven't opened it up to check. Now it is well out of warranty, so likely a good idea

• I have previously received a warning about the HDD thrashing, perhaps I got ripped off with the replacement HDD? My window experience index dropped from 5.6 to 5.1 after repair, and last night I ran the test again and it dropped to 4.9!

• I have an SD card that I think is configured to be used as cache memory, maybe that's a problem. No, that's been disabled .
I'm on my tablet now so no quick access to more PC info. -220 of ^Borg 23:45, 15 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I would reboot more often (at least daily). That clears out old processes wasting CPU time. (See if you notice it being faster right after a reboot.) StuRat (talk) 17:45, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not generally necessary. My 6 GB RAM Vista box currently has uptime of 380 hours and runs perfectly well. I probably reboot less than once evert 6 months. My 1 GB Windows 7 netbook regularly runs slowly and is automatically rebooted twice a week to free up memory. So - if you have enough, a reboot is not really necessary.--Phil Holmes (talk) 18:28, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The RAM is only part of the story. If one of your processes has a memory leak (which seems quite common in Windows from my experience), it will soon fill your RAM, no matter how much you have. You may just be lucky enough not to have any memory leaks. StuRat (talk) 06:11, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

StuRat interestingly, I actually had a forced reboot via a BSOD about 12 hours ago. Makes me concerned about the HDD as that's the sort of thing that happened last time it 'died'. It does reduce the memory usage, but there still seems to be peculiar spikes in that. I may have to post a screenshot so you can see what I mean. 220 of ^Borg 02:44, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm hesitant to say that 4GB of RAM isn't really enough in this age of software bloat, but that's the only real problem I see with the setup. Have you considered purchasing more RAM? FrameDrag (talk) 20:23, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Money is very tight right now. I have lots of RAM, just not laptop type! What would another 4GB cost? 220 of ^Borg 02:44, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Any ideas about the magically dropping Windows experience figure? 220 of ^Borg 02:44, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Recently on my laptop I found a windows update hanging and causing a memory leak, leading to all the symptoms you describe. It wasn't easy to find but the utility I found at processhacker.sourceforge.net helped. Sandman1142 (talk) 08:39, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Updates? That's something I haven't done recently. 220 of ^Borg 11:39, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why use the cosine similarity to know how similar two documents are? That is, (A * B) / (||A|| * ||B||). A and B are sequences of word frequencies.

Couldn't you just make a table of words + frequencies for each document and subtract the value of doc A from the value of doc B? More differences in these would imply more general difference. That is A - B, A and B are sequences of word frequencies. --3dcaddy (talk) 19:01, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You need some historical background for a complete answer... The Jaccard index (also known as a coefficient) was popular for measuring similarity and diversity among two different sets. Flowers are used often as an example of Jaccard index. My set might contain color and length of stem. Yours might have color and number of pedals. We compare based on what we both have and get a measure of similarity. It is also important to note that Jaccard index handles sparsity very well. If I forgot to write down color for half the flowers in my set, it still works for those that actually have data. Next... what if we are working strictly with binary data. Every field is a yes/no answer. It is still two sets containing different columns and there is still a lot of sparsity. The Tanimoto coefficient is an algebraic form of the set theory Jaccard index for binary sets. It is popular and common. But, it has some overhead that can be simplified. If you know the algebraic form of cosine, you will see that it is very similar to the Tanimoto formula. So, why not throw out the complexity and use cosine instead? You nearly get the Tanimoto coefficient, which is the same as the Jaccard index for binary sets. Jaccard index is already accepted, so using cosine is nearly accepted. That is the history. Why do we not just count the differences? If I say the differences count up to 132, what does that mean? Nothing really. You need to confine the answer to a range so I know the minimum and maximum values. We know that cosine is -1 to 1. If you tell me the different is 1, that is the max value. I only have to ask if the 1 means absolutely different or absolutely the same. By convention, 1 means absolutely the same and 0 means completely different (-1 means the exact opposite, but that makes no sense in most examples). If that doesn't answer the question, please ask for what I missed. I don't want to flood you with even more details that you don't think are pertinent. 162.211.46.242 (talk) 20:31, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The short version: Each document is modeled as a vector in a high-dimensional vector space. When you have two vectors that point in nearly the same direction, they are more "similar" than vectors that are orthogonal or antiparallel, or just point in rather different directions. See also document modelling. (or maybe not, that's a rather pitiful stub) SemanticMantis (talk) 21:33, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the answers, now I get it. It didn't realize that counting the number of differences, instead of finding a range of values, was quite off the track. Is there any literature about such issues, that intuitively make sense, but are mathematically no-good? --3dcaddy (talk) 21:42, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

SemanticMantis is correct. Cosine similarity is strictly the cosine of the angle between the two vectors. The relative vector lengths are ignored. If you analyze the Tanimoto formula, you will recognize that it takes into account the distance between the end-points of the vectors. So, if the angle is 10 degrees, cosine is always the cosine of 10 degrees. With Tanimoto, if the vector lengths are nearly the same, the distance between the end points will be near minimal and give me a higher similarity value. If one vector is much longer than the other, the angle remains the same, but the distance between the end points is much longer and the similarity is reduced. If the cosine similarity is good enough for you, then use it. If it turns out that some vectors are extremely long and others are extremely short, you will want to use Tanimoto difference to account for that aspect of measuring similarity. Then, if you are still refining your algorithms, you can look into SVD (which I personally don't like) or convert your data into ordered strings and make a big jump into string-based similarity. 209.149.115.177 (talk) 14:50, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

After watching YouTube videos of Super Mario Maker, I've become interested in actually buying a Wii U just to play it. It would be the first video game made in the last two decades that I would actually consider buying.

However, I'm afraid I've fallen hopelessly out of touch of modern video games. The last time I bought new video games, they were on real, physical, honest-to-gosh floppy disks put inside a nice, beautiful cardboard box I could take home, open up, and put into my computer.

I figure that these days, actual physical storage media is like Soooo last millennium! What are you, Methusalem?. So, how would I actually go about buying and installing the game? JIP | Talk 19:25, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You can either buy a physical Wii U Optical Disc retail, or you can download from the Nintendo eShop. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 19:34, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In case a physical disc isn't available, how would I go about downloading it? Can I do it solely using the Wii U? I already have a wired (i.e. non-wireless) broadband Internet connection, which I'm using right now to write this message. Can I use that on the Wii U? Does it have an Ethernet cable connection? How do I pay for it? Can I just use my credit card or do I have to set up some sort of new-fangled subscription account? JIP | Talk 19:40, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The Wii U doesn't have an ethernet port, and most people use its Wifi capability; if you can't do that, you can buy a USB Wii LAN adapter which plugs into the Wii U's ethernet port. You can use a credit card with the eShop (and maybe a debit card); you can also buy physical gift cards (they're just plastic cards with numbers on them) in supermarkets which give eShop credit. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 20:05, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You said both "the Wii U doesn't have an ethernet port and "plugs into the Wii U's ethernet port". Which is it? Or did you mean "the Wii U's USB port"? In any case, I might be better off finally buying and installing a WiFi device in my apartment. So far I've had no use for one as the only Internet-capable device I ever use is my computer, which uses the wired Internet connection, which I presume is both faster and more secure than a WiFi connection. JIP | Talk 20:23, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, yes, I meant USB port. It's just a usb<->ethernet dongle. I see them for about £10 on Amazon. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 20:29, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Furthermore, once I get it, I'd like to play other people's levels. Can these be downloaded free of charge or are there additional charges for them? JIP | Talk 19:42, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, when someone is finished designing a level they tell others the level's ID code (where the ID is a 16-hex-digit number). Here's an example of people posting their IDs in the SuperMarioMaker reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MarioMaker/comments/3t164h/level_of_the_week_8_factory_submissions_last/ -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 20:09, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) There's also the 10 Mario/100 Mario Challenge which chooses several levels at random from the ones users have uploaded, and you have either 10 or 100 lives to get through them all (or skip ones that might be very difficult). I believe that after playing each level it saves snapshots of those levels in your game so that you can look at them in the level designer afterward. FrameDrag (talk) 20:19, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You might appreciate SuperBunnyHop's review of a bunch of SMM levels submitted to him here. I think it gives a reasonable idea about what is, and crucially what isn't, possible in SMM. As constructing-stuff-in-the-game type games go, it looks to be considerably inferior to Little Big Planet and especially Minecraft. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 20:13, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wii U is intended to be easy and idiot proof, and it succeeds admirably at those goals. You will have no problems buying (officially licensed) games as physical media or online. For inspiration on SMM, see Bananasaurus Rex's playthrough of this insane level [1] :) SemanticMantis (talk) 21:30, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever I close my laptop, the computer will do the same thing that happens when hitting the "print screen" button, namely copy an image of the screen to the clipboard. Does this also happen on your laptop? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 02:28, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

no. Vespine (talk) 02:33, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Could be something physically hitting the Print Screen button. StuRat (talk) 06:14, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Laptops usually have a setting for what to do when the laptop is closed, such as "turn off the screen" or "log off". It is possible someone changed that to "print screen" just to be annoying. 209.149.115.177 (talk) 14:52, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Windows has a limit of 255 characters imits for path names according to [2]. It's fairly easy when copying or renaming folders, to get in a situation where some of your data is unreachable by ordinary means because this limit has been exceeded. The previously quoted source says robocopy can bypass this limitation. Another trick is to use the subst command from a windows shell to create an alias for a reachable folder with unreachable sub-folders, and access the nested material using the alias.

My question: Is it possible to test beforehand whether a folder contains sub-folders or files with names that exceed the name length? I ask because I would like to avoid starting time-consuming tasks that are bound to fail and possibly mess things up (zip + move). --NorwegianBlue ^talk 13:08, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Best bet would be writing a Python or PowerShell (or whatever language you're comfortable with) script to recurse through all the folders in a tree and keep track of the max path length as you go. This thread has a Visual Basic (ugh) script for doing this.

The other option is to move the files elsewhere before you begin said task, to shorten the length of the paths; depending on what you're doing this for, though, that may not be possible. FrameDrag (talk) 14:42, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The claim that Windows limits path names to 255 characters is not correct or authoritative. Microsoft's documentation, Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces, explains that maximum path length is file-system-dependent. Certain programmatic functions in the Windows API are limited to use strings of length MAX_PATH, which is 260 characters; but most built-in utilities (including Explorer and the command prompt) are able to use extended path names, with lengths of about 32,000 characters. This has been true of all Windows operating systems for about 20 years - including Windows NT, Windows 95, and Windows CE - so unless you're using a very old system like Windows 3.1, or Windows for Workgroups, or some other ancient software, you do not need to limit path names based on the MAX_PATH limitation. When you write C or C++ code to the Windows API, if you choose to use legacy path functions, you need to be aware of these limits; but you can always use newer APIs to access the file system. If you aren't writing C or C++, (or otherwise directly linking the Windows API), you should probably ignore the "260 character" limit completely, because it doesn't apply. The shell and the individual file system may have different limitations, but this MAX_PATH is not one of them.

Nimur (talk) 16:23, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You've misunderstood the documentation. Almost all Windows programs are limited to 260-character paths (259 + trailing NUL), including .NET programs, and there's no sign of that changing in the future. -- BenRG (talk) 18:27, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

My Epson scanner won't open when I click the icon on my computer. I can turn it on but that's it. What could be the problem?--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 13:24, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've just purchased a 500GB SSD and I'd like to copy the data from my 240GB SSD (drive letter D currently) to it. Normally I'd just add the drive in but I've actually run out of SATA ports on my motherboard so an upgrade will have to do. Will anything bad happen if I just plug both drives in (unplugging another one temoprarily) and just copy all the data across, then unplug the original and give the new drive the drive letter D? I have installed programs but no OS installed to the drive. 81.138.15.171 (talk) 17:03, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing bad should happen (standard disclaimers apply), but if you want to be certain a kit like this (many different ones available, search around for the one that suits you best) makes cloning a disk almost painless. WegianWarrior (talk) 18:45, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Because of circumstances beyond my control, I no longer have the right to use the Windows drive that was in the computer my company gave me. I can keep the actual computer though, so I have physically removed the drive. Fedora 20 Linux boots up happily without it, but I still see "Windows Boot Manager" in the boot menu even though the computer is now 100% Bill-free. How do I get rid of it?

This has also given me an empty drive bay. Assuming I buy another hard drive, can I somehow have one partition, or one mount point, span both drives, part of one and the total of another, or part of one and part of another? I think I must have asked this question earlier but I have forgot the answers. JIP | Talk 18:08, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The issue will be what boot manager you are running. If it is grub2 (F20 default), you can see the grub.conf file usually in /boot/grub2/grun.conf. It looks like a mess, but it is rather easy to find each kernel that it will load. You can delete the one you don't want. I know that there are tools to edit the grub.conf file, but I don't use them, so I cannot explain how to use them. As for spanning multiple disks, that is what LVM is used for. Again, this is default for F20. Both disks become a volume that you, the user, sees as a single drive. My suggestion is to backup all the files you really want to keep. Then, put in a second drive. Then, install the latest Fedora from disk and tell it to completely format and reuse all drive space. You'll quickly end up with a single logical volume over two disks and the boot manager will be cleaned up. 209.149.115.177 (talk) 18:37, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think that when I fill up my current drive, I can buy another two drives and keep the old one as a backup. I can then install the latest Fedora release on the new drives and use LVM on them. Is it possible to have LVM only use part of one drive and the whole of another? How is it controlled which files end up on which drive if they're the same logical partition? Or will the files themselves be spread out across the drives, with part of a file lying on one drive and part on another? What happens if I remove one drive? Can I still access the remaining drive's files or will the whole LVM system fail? If I migrate the drives themselves to another computer, is it enough to plug them both in somewhere? Do I have to boot the computer from the LVM drives for LVM to work or will it somehow automatically work even if I boot from a normal singular drive? JIP | Talk 19:13, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

LVM merges partitions into single logical volume. You don't really have much control over where files go (there are advanced LVM settings, but I don't play with them). So, you can partition a single drive into two partitions and only use one of those partitions in a logical volume. The cool thing about LVM is that you can remove and add partitions whenever you like. I had a disk that was reporting too many bad sectors. I removed it from the LVM (which took time, but automatically removed all data from the failing drive). Then, I added a new drive to the LVM. My file system was, from my point of view, the same (technically bigger). I also solved a problem we had using LVM. We had a JBOD with 24TB of disk space in it. We kept getting file corruption. After a hell of a lot of research, I highly suspected the size of the disks. It reported as a single 24TB partition. So, I broke it into 6 4TB partitions on the JBOD side. I didn't lose much data storage - just a very minor amount for the partition overhead. Then, on the server side, I merged the 6 partitions into a single logical volume. After a year of monthly (or more often) file corruption, we ran for the next two years without a single corrupt file. The users still saw the 24TB "disk", which was actually a volume of 6 partitions. 209.149.115.177 (talk) 19:45, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fairly sure I use grub2, because it's the F20 default. I don't remember choosing any alternative boot manager. I have a /boot/grub2 directory but there is no grub.conf file there. locate grub.conf didn't find it either. JIP | Talk 19:16, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Mine is in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg - I think I typo'd with grub.conf earlier. 209.149.115.177 (talk) 19:45, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Mine is in /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg; it depends on whether your machine uses UEFI or not. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 19:50, 17 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]