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March 17

Important

How do u get your friends back on page when it has been wiped out for some reason and what is a number to call for assistance? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.242.119.194 (talk) 00:41, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Gonna need more details than that, what exactly are you talking about?--Jac16888^Talk 00:45, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

You might know what you're on about, but we have no idea unless you provide more details....Chevymontecarlo. 15:43, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

home network - slow speed for 1Gb

My new 1Gb home network is performing at only about 20%.

In my home network I replaced a 10/100 wired router with a 1Gb wired/802.11n wireless router. Before I made the change I timed the transfer of a 338MB file. It took about 37 seconds. One computer already had a 1Gb Ethernet card, with a cheap cat-6 cable. I put a 1Gb Ethernet card in another computer. (It still had a cat-5 cable.) I tested the transfer several times and it took 17 to 22 seconds - about twice as before but about 5 times slower than I thought it should be. I replaced the cat 5 cable with a cat 5e cable - no noticeable difference in speed.

I replaced the cat 5e with a high-quality cat-6 cable and restarted the router. (The other computer has the cheap cat-6 cable.) Now the transfer took less than 5 seconds - the speed I was expecting. (Note: I did this test only one time so it is possible I copied the wrong file.)

Now, about 12 hours later I tested again and it is back to 17-22 seconds. I restarted the router - same speed.

The router shows that both computers are connected at 1Gb. The Netgear utility shows both connected at 1Gb. The Netgear utility also shows the transfer performance at 18-19%, which agrees with what I measured.

Why am I getting only about 20% performance? Could the problem be the cheap cat-6 cable? Bubba73 ^{(You talkin' to me?)}, 05:13, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

It's possible that the network isn't your bottleneck; a nearly-full, highly-fragmented, or just poorly-performing hard drive could easily only be able to manage 20MB/second sustained write speeds. —Korath (Talk) 07:29, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Though, having reread what you wrote, it's more likely that it's on the sending end—338MB will probably fit into ram cache, so the slow first send indicates a slow read from the hard drive, and the repeated test is sending it from your source machine's read cache. If this is the problem, then you can expect the first test to be slow, and a subsequent repeat test to be limited only by your network, even if you don't reboot your router in between. You probably want to be benchmarking with larger files, certainly ones larger than the amount of ram you have in either machine. —Korath (Talk) 07:42, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Repeated tests are not significantly faster. Bubba73 ^{(You talkin' to me?)}, 15:18, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

My first suggestion is to make sure jumbo frames are enabled on both computers, assuming that the Netgear router supports jumbo frames. There is often a jumbo frames setting in the device driver settings for the ethernet interface, which you can get to through Device Manager. But it's unrealistic to expect to get anything close to 1 Gbps of actual throughput on most gigabit hardware, especially if hard drives are involved; see this Coding Horror blog entry for example, or this more recent Tom's Hardware article. -- Coneslayer (talk) 11:28, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't think it is entirely the hard drives. One computer has two SATA drives and the other has two ATA drives. On the one with two SATA, I can copy the file to the same drive or to the other in a couple of seconds. On the one with two ATA drives it takes under 10 seconds to copy to the same drive or to the other drive. But it is somewhat faster copying from the ATA to the SATA than the other way around. The SATA to ATA gives about 18-19% network performance and ATA to SATA gives about 25% network performance. But still the network performance is about half of the HD to HD performance on the old ATA drive-to-drive. Bubba73 ^{(You talkin' to me?)}, 15:16, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Both cards had jumbo cache disabled so I enabled it. No improvement. I rebooted both computers and the modem. I also disabled Firewire (because I don't use it), and now it is up to about 24% from 18-19%. Bubba73 ^{(You talkin' to me?)}, 15:47, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Tom's Hardware article was extremely informative. The HD must be the bottleck. He said to expect 20-65MB/sec, and I'm getting approximately the low end of that range. One of the machines is old with the old ATA drives, so that seems to be what I can expect. My thanks to everyone.

Resolved

Bubba73 ^{(You talkin' to me?)}, 16:04, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

"Ticking" HDD

I recently bought an external drive (1.5TB, Seagate) and it sporadically makes loud ticking noises when turned on. Usually when first turned on it will do it for about 30 seconds, during use it will start ticking maybe once every 15 minutes, giving it a large read/write job seems to stop it temporarily.

It's the same sound I've heard from drives with "crashed heads" (not sure if thats the correct term) so it's giving me some angst ... is it defective? I assume it's the heads banging into the case or something thats making the noise, that can't be good for it. Will it die completely soon? I'm loath to send it back since it has more than 1TB of data on it so I'd need to buy a new drive to put all the stuff on while I sent this one away to get replaced/fixed but obviously I have to, just hoping for a second opinion or an alternative. Thanks Benjamint 07:58, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Ticking is indeed very often a sign of drive failure. It would be a good idea to run a badblocks test and some S.M.A.R.T. self-tests. If either of those return any errors, it's best to replace the drive ASAP, as any further use will likely aggravate the problem. If all the tests come up clean, the drive might still be good - but if you keep it, be sure to periodically repeat those tests. --Link ^(t•c•m) 11:22, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Sounds suspiciously like the Click of death. You should immediately back up all important information--I wouldn't trust a hard drive that is making that sound. --Zerozal (talk) 17:20, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Ticking is bad. Backup now. Shadowjams (talk) 21:11, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Is it only damaging itself or at risk of dying when it is actually ticking? With about 1.2TB of data to copy over it would need to be running for several hours... should I do it incrementally in order to not tax it too much? Or since it doesn't seem to tick when it's reading/writing is it actually functioning normally during the backup processs? Benjamint 21:18, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

It's hard to know what exactly the "ticking" sounds like. It's conceivable that it's just a loud platter, but most rhythmic sounds from a HD, especially a modern one (which are usually quiet), is cause for concern. I think it would be prudent to backup in that instance. It's possible that reading sections could damage them, but that data's in jeopardy anyway. You have to use your own judgment, but in my experience, new drive sounds always precede a crash; I would prioritize the most important data first for backup and hope for the best. Shadowjams (talk) 03:27, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

My drive has been "ticking" (1 tick every few minutes when it is idle) for 3 years, and it's fine. --169.232.246.115 (talk) 08:52, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

This type of ticking could be the disk powering down after a certain time. Maybe a background process wakes it every minute or so. If you listen very carefully you might be able to hear if there is less motor noise before or after the click, though drives are usually much quieter than cooling fans so you might not be able to tell. -- Q Chris (talk) 10:00, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I had exactly the same experience and concerns. Seagate's forums have a lot of posts about it and a general web search produces a lot of results as well. Seagate recommends you maintain an up–to–date backup, (regardless of whether the drive itself is intended to be a backup). I purchased a backup Western Digital product that runs much more quietly.—Machine Elf 1735 (talk) 17:28, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Keys suddenly not working

a e h l m r and w. What should I do please? - Kittybrewster ☎ 10:43, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Turn off. Unplug the keyboard. Turn it upside down and shake out the gook. Replug the keyboard. Try again. If that fails, get a new keyboard. (Did anything else happen? No accidents with liquid, for instance?) --Tagishsimon (talk) 12:46, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Step 1 and 2 are optional. Step 4 is fairly cheap nowadays.--Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:57, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

You could try prying off the key tops with a flat-head screwdriver (or similar tool) and clean under there. You can also get cannisters of compressed gas for cleaning a keyboard, but it's probably as cheap to buy a new keyboard. Note that this advice and the previous applies to a desktop PC with a separate keyboard; you don't say what sort of keyboard it is.--Normansmithy (talk) 17:01, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

(Laptop). Success! Oh joy. Thank you. - Kittybrewster ☎ 17:30, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Just curious...which action fixed it ? StuRat (talk) 23:10, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Handed it to girlfriend who cleaned it. - Kittybrewster ☎ 09:16, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

That method is more likely to result in her breaking it over you head, which is one way to fix a problem keyboard. :-) StuRat (talk) 03:36, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Using the "turn it upside down and shake vigorously" method ? StuRat (talk) 15:33, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Regarding buying new keyboards - I actually clean my keyboards even if a new (used but still) unit will cost me less than a kebab, because this just generates less electronic waste. Take apart. Wash all non-electronic components with dishwashing liquid. Put back together. --Ouro (blah blah) 07:46, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Greasemonkey Question

Is it possible for a greasemonkey script to make the browser load a url? How would you do this? Thanks --Fire2010 (talk) 15:35, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

That is an example of cross-site scripting, and because it represents an inherent security risk, GreaseMonkey has limitations about what you can do with it. See this forum post and this documentation for GM_xmlhttpRequest. (Compare with the standard JavaScript XMLHttpRequest. For more information about this issue, see the Same Origin Policy from Mozilla's developer website. Nimur (talk) 15:56, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

I gave this query a suitable title. --Sean 18:00, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Windows networking / Samba and subnets

I'm trying to understand the interaction between windows/samba file-sharing/workgroups and the local subnet. Specifically my question is, can I share files on a LAN, with a basic windows setup (no master domain controllers or anything advanced) between machines on different subnets? Is it that they don't see each other because they simply don't receive the broadcast messages?

Obviously these packets don't get routed by most ISPs, but is that because ISPs block them or because a NATed network will have a different subnet (and in which case, if a client wasn't NATed, would they be able to share with that non-private subnet?). I'm not so much looking for a specific answer so much as I'm trying to understand how these two interact, so any push in the right direction would help. Shadowjams (talk) 19:01, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

To the first part of your question: yes, that's right. In that scenario, if you type \\192.168.2.10 (or whatever; the ip address of the other machine) in your Explorer location bar, you should still be able to reach it directly. It's just that Windows discovers nearby hosts by using NetBIOS name resolution, which broadcasts on the local subnet. If your DHCP server also incorporates a DNS server, or if you manually add the hostname/ip pairs to your Hosts file, you should be able to access it by name, although I don't think Windows will be able to discover them automatically.

To the second part, there's a couple issues. As I mentioned, netbios name broadcasts are local subnet broadcasts, so they won't make it onto the internet. And yeah, a lot of ISPs might block SMB traffic. The main reason there isn't to block file sharing, but because there are a lot of viruses and worms that target the SMB and netbios ports, since they're open on a lot of Windows machines by default. But if you weren't NATed, and your ISP didn't block it, then you should be able to do \\208.80.152.2 or whatever, and be able to reach it. Indeterminate (talk) 03:36, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Very helpful. Thanks. Shadowjams (talk) 03:57, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

One DVD won't play in laptop

Hi. I'm running a Windows 7 Dell laptop. I recently bought a new DVD boxset, and it won't work in the laptop: I put any of them in, the noises cycle round and round and round, but it won't show up or function. Other DVDs work perfectly, and the "defective" DVD is perfect in a desktop PC and in a DVD-player. Any ideas on what's up? ╟─TreasuryTag►assemblyman─╢ 19:18, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Pardon me, have just clarified: of the six DVDs, numbers 1, 4 and 6 are subject to the problem listed above; the others work perfectly... :O ╟─TreasuryTag►Counsellor of State─╢ 19:27, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

You didn't state the title. A web search might reveal others with the same issues— bad batches have occured. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:55, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

No, tried that – no such luck. Since it works on seemingly every other device, however, I'm not sure it's going to be the DVD's "fault"... ╟─TreasuryTag►belonger─╢ 20:09, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

If you're using some horrible DVD playing software that Dell preinstalled, or Windows Media Player, all bets are off. Try with VLC or SMPlayer, or try making an image first with dd or ddrescue. ¦ Reisio (talk) 22:22, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

If the disk doesn't even show up in My Computer, you won't be able to make an image, and other media players won't help either. If the disk really doesn't show up in My Computer at all, it sounds like you might have a defective DVD drive, which you should talk to Dell Support about. Indeterminate (talk) 00:12, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Google Earth

It may be my own ignorance - probably the case as usual - but whenever I use the latest version of Google Earth and narrow down to the desired location - and then click on the chosen "bubble", everything works fine. The bubble rotates and points me up or down the desired street or whatever, and then offers me a chain of cameras. I soon discovered that if I try to leapfrog to a distant camera further away than the closest in view, the system will crash and I will get an error message and have to start over. So I now don't do that; instead, I religiously move from the closest camera to the next furthest and so on - but I still invariably crash the system and get a message that says, "Google has discovered a system error" or suchlike. Is it me or is it something else I am unaware of? I really would like to know as I really enjoy using Google Earth but the interruptions are spoiling it for me. Thanks folks. 92.2.71.61 (talk) 20:00, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, it sounds like you've found a bug. It could be due to:

• a bad install of the program - you could try to fix this by uninstalling and reinstall Google Earth,
• some configuration problem on your computer, maybe a driver or a library or something. If this is the issue, you might have to reinstall your OS to fix it.
• a bug in Google Earth - if you try this same thing on another computer, and it does the same thing, this is probably the issue.

If it turns out to be the last one, you can report a bug and hopefully Google will fix it in a future release. Indeterminate (talk) 00:09, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

.exe to .dmg

How can I convert a .exe file for windows to being accesible on an Apple Macintosh? Do I need to convert to .dmg? What program can I use to do so? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.31.145.125 (talk) 20:14, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Could you explain what exactly you want to do with the .exe file when you say "accessible"? If you want to run a Windows executable file (like HalfLife.exe, for example), it won't work, because the .exe file format is specifically designed to run under a DOS or Windows operating system. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:18, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

That's too strong. There are various emulators for running Windows executables on things other than Windows. See VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop for some MacOS ones. --Sean 20:41, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Also, if you tell us what program you are interested in someone may know of a Mac port.131.111.185.69 (talk) 21:06, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

.EXE files are generally compiled to work only on Windows machines. There is no one-step solution to running them on a Mac—they are compiled for a different operating system. They cannot be just easily converted into one another. The two major ways for running Windows programs on Macs are either

1. through a virtual machine (e.g. VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop, VirtualBox), in which you basically run Windows itself as a program in the Macintosh, and the EXE in that virtual instance of Windows (advantage: pretty easy to set up, if you have an extra copy of Windows; disadvantage: you're running two operating systems at once and that is much slower than just running one of them),
2. through a dual-boot system (BootCamp), whereby you run Windows itself on your Mac hardware (advantage: quicker than virtualization because you're running Windows and only Windows; disadvantage: a bit harder to set up, opens your main computer up to all of the "dangers" of Windows, computer needs to be rebooted every time you want to switch between operating systems).
3. there is also Wine, which manages to somehow run Windows applications more natively in a Mac OS, but the few times I tried to get it to work, it seemed rather impossible even if you were pretty well experienced with the Unix aspects of Mac OS X. (Maybe it has gotten easier. But if you're asking whether EXEs can be converted to DMGs, you are probably not better in this respect than I was.)

And of course the other option altogether is to try and find a version of the program that has been compiled specifically to run on a Mac, which may or may not be possible depending on the program. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:31, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

All correct except part of your first point. Modern virtualization solutions like e.g. the free VirtualBox are running the virtualized OS at very nearly native speed. You will only lose significant performance if you are short on memory, if the host OS is running additional resource-intensive tasks, or if you rely on some hardware that is not supported by the virtualization. I'm e.g. running Ubuntu with VirtualBox on MacOS-X, and its indistinguishable from a native install. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:34, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Put simply - there is literally no way to turn a Windows EXE into a Mac DMG - that's really impossible for all sorts of technical reasons. What you have to do is to find a way to persuade the Mac to behave sufficiently like a Windows machine that it'll run the EXE "as is" - and previous posters have explained that very well. SteveBaker (talk) 09:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, if we want to be finicky, its quite trivial to turn a Windows EXE into a DMG. DMG is just a disk image and does not care whats inside. Of course, turning an EXE into a DMG that contains an installer that will install the EXE as a runnable program is something very different and, if not impossible, not possible with plausible effort. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Win 7 - opensource and/or free video editing software?

First, thank you to everyone who posted answers to my question a week back about bulletproofing my mother-in-law's new Win7 PC. That went very well! As a follow-up, I'd like to know if anyone has a particular opensource and/or free video editing software they can recommend for Windows 7? My dear M-i-L has dreadfully boring charming digital videos of her 2 cats that she'd like to edit... 61.189.63.170 (talk) 22:14, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

The best place to start are our articles on video editing software, List of video editing software, Comparison of video editing software. Nimur (talk) 22:23, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Windows Movie Maker? ¦ Reisio (talk) 22:24, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

These days, most video cameras come with some basic video software on a CD. Depending on the model, that will simply let you copy the video off the camera, or also provide some editing capability. Alternativly, the camera manufacturer might have something you can download from their official site. As mentioned above, Windows has a basic tool installed by default and there are others available. In my experience, using the software provided with the camera and Windows Movie Maker has proved acceptable for my purposes. Astronaut (talk) 23:06, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

As the Windows Movie Maker says, Windows Movie Maker has been replaced by Windows Live Movie Maker in Windows 7. --169.232.246.115 (talk) 08:51, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

avidemux --F08VUHOnP9hbuBu9EfJz8Q (talk) 23:12, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

March 18

Game development - relative profit now vs then?

Reading about Zork, which was developed by ~4 dudes, made me wonder about the relative profitability of pc/videogames over time. Clearly development costs & team headcounts have skyrocketed in the past 30 years, but gaming is now a 6(8?) billion dollar industry in the US. On relative terms (revenue/cost as a %) is it getting more or less lucrative on average to make PC/videogames? 218.25.32.210 (talk) 05:29, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

It must be more. Normal people who surely scoffed at gamers only 5-10 years ago are now playing World of Warcraft, and paying a monthly fee to do so. ¦ Reisio (talk) 06:02, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Yeah but how many dozens of MMOs have been outright failures? For a reasonable analysis you've got to include all ventures, not just the phenomenally successful ones. 218.25.32.210 (talk) 06:46, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Paging SteveBaker --Tagishsimon (talk) 06:03, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

This topic is summarized at video game industry under Economics. The stuff about the current market is unreferenced and most likely based on anecdotal evidence instead of real data. Basically, the video game industry is like any other entertainment industry now. To make a blockbuster hit, it takes tons of people. There are cases where a small indie group get lucky with a big hit - which is nowhere near the size of the big-budget blockbusters, but still profitable. There are many failures and a lot of fear - causing tons and tons of repetition of past hits. -- kainaw™ 15:46, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

That's right. There is no data out there on individual projects' failures or profitability levels, because only the publishers know this data, and they don't release the data. But one visible indication that it's a lot more profitable today is the simple fact that you have publicly traded third-party publishers like ERTS, ATVI, TTWO, and THQI; and salaries for the top people have, I think, outpaced inflation when compared to a programmer's salary from 25 years ago. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:29, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

It's worth noting that, while small groups (either indies, or small groups within big games companies) rarely get big hits, they do get lots of little hits. Browser flash games, mobile phone app games, etc.. A recent episode of BBC Click discussed the topic and apparently lots of games companies are starting to favour the smaller games. They are lower risk, since you can easily make 100 games and know that at least a few will be successful. If you concentrate on big games then you can only make 2 or 3, and it's entirely possible that they'll all be complete flops. --Tango (talk) 17:02, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Although that's a great theory that I would love to see them adopt, no major game publishers are doing this currently. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:22, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

The story said they were starting to, rather than actually doing it. I think it is happening on a small scale at the moment, and not with the biggest companies. --Tango (talk) 17:52, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I was trying to draw a relation between the rest of the entertainment industry and video game production above. The idea of a small house putting out 100 games and hoping for a few minor hits is not abnormal. There are many straight-to-video movie companies that operate that way. Large companies can do the same. Think of Disney. Yes, they always have 2 or 3 major blockbusters in production, but they also have 20-30 straight-to-video movies like Cinderella VI, Bambi IV, or Ariel's Next Big Adventure... I'm see Square Enix growing to that level. They are already recycling old games into cheaply made (and lower priced) games. If they are successful, others will likely follow suit. -- kainaw™ 00:41, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

(I work in the games business - I'm a graphics programmer). The problem with the videogame business is twofold:

1. Customers' expectations about 'depth' of content has grown. Zork has a few hundred pages of text description of it's world - and a few thousand lines of software to run it - and that was enough back then. Something like GTA IV has every building in a large city, hundreds of music tracks, hundreds of characters, voice acting, hundreds of cars and trucks, etc. The software for a modern game engine could easily reach a half million lines of code. That's why ZORK could be written by four guys - but GTA IV required several hundred. There is a slight reversal in that trend with cellphone games and for things like Guitar Hero and Rock Band - but it's going to be short-lived.
2. Only about one in every 35 games made ever turns a profit. That makes it an incredibly risky business. The reason games like Halo-3 and GTA IV made such an ungodly amount of money was because they were a virtually guaranteed hit. Sequels of games that are popular are generally popular - so you can invest a big chunk of change into them and have high confidence that you'll make money. But a new, novel game is insanely risky.

A typical PC/Xbox-360/PS-3 game requires around 100 people for perhaps three years (although it's wildly variable both in time and staffing). That's mostly split between programmers (earning $80k to $130k maybe), artists & designers (earning probably $40k to $70k) and game testers (who often earn little more than minimum wage). There are also licensing costs for music and outsourcing costs for bulk content creation - and more licensing fees if you are making the game of a movie or TV show or something. It's quite easy to burn through a million dollars a month in the last half of the development of a big ticket game. If it fails - that's a truly massive loss.

The game I was working on for Midway when they folded had 80 artists and maybe 20 programmers with a dozen or so testers - plus managers, designers, audio guys, IT, HR, etc. We'd worked for more than 2 years on our title (a 3rd person game about high-class criminals that set in up-market locations in real-world, present-day, Chicago) - and I have to say that it looked good graphically, it had good audio, we had a famous Hollywood movie director put his personal "feel" into the thing, advising us on everything from dialog to pacing to camera angles. It worked reliably, it ran well on PC, Xbox-360 and PS-3, we had several test missions fully playable in our open-city world. Technically and artistically, it did everything we set out for it to do. But somehow, indefinably - it just wasn't much fun to play and so it was axed. Making something "fun" is tough - nobody really knows how to do that - and nobody really knows how to "fix" an un-fun game because we really don't understand why the game wasn't fun. So you can spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and end up with something that doesn't even end up on the store shelves - let alone turns a profit!

This means that small companies can't spend enough to get that game 'depth' without having someone with deep pockets (a "publisher") funding them and taking the risks and most of the profits. A large game company or a major publisher can make enough money off of the 1-in-35 that turn a profit to pay for the 34-in-35 that are either cancelled and never get onto the store shelves, or fail miserably once they get there. But what this means is that when you read about the ungodly amount of money something like GTA IV made, you have to understand that those profits had to pay for a ton of game development that went horribly wrong for whatever reason.

MMO's are even worse because the startup cost for setting one up is quite outrageous - vastly more than a normal game - and the risks are just as high. However, once you have them up and running, the profits are good - even when weighted against the cost of maintaining the servers, keeping the game working and continually adding content. But so many of them fail after just a few months, it's a complete crap-shoot.

Phone games (on iPhone and Android) are popular right now - and we're in that little niche in time when the public will splurge a couple of bucks on a game without it needing to be advertised to death - and the depth of content of the game can be fairly small. That allows small games companies to make them with small groups of developers and relatively little risk. Of course at $1.99 per game, they have to sell an awful lot to make money - but that's OK. Also, you can make a lot of them. A handful of guys can make an iPhone game in a year easily - so even a small company can churn out a hundred games in the time it takes to make one PC/Xbox/PS3 game - and the law of averages says that a few of them will be phenomenally successful and pay for all the rest. But this is a brief window. As these gadgets get more sophisticated - and the prospect of using cloud-computing for cellphone games takes off - the push for deeper content will once again make these games cost a lot more and we'll get all of the risk back.

Games are unlike almost any other product in that close to 100% of the cost is in the development and advertising - both of which cost the same whether you sell 1 copy or a 100 million copies. It costs less than $1 to copy a DVD-ROM and a manual and put it into a box. Most of the copies you sell will go for $20 to $40 which looks like a pretty amazingly good markup. Now WalMart and Microsoft/SONY/Nintendo take their cut (remember - game consoles sell at a loss and the hardware manufacturers take a cut of games sold for them in order to make a profit). If you're a game company who went via a publisher - they'll take a huge slice. But if you spent $1,000,000 a month for several years making it, you're going to look pretty bad if you don't sell a hundred million copies.

SteveBaker (talk) 09:06, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

A year to develop an iPhone game? At the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the turnaround time for an iPhone-style mobile "casual game" was reputed to be more on the order of three to four weeks. On the one hand, the development of content is fairly shallow, but the market forces (specifically, the tendency to be a brief fad, go viral, and then disappear into obscurity), in conjunction with a very saturated market, forces a constant race to produce content of dubious quality. Three or four indie developers need to churn out new content at a frantic pace in order to hope to sell enough copy to make rent. This GDC 2010 Announces iPhone Games Summit Line-Up overview from Gamasutra links to several in-depth interviews from GDC2010 on the art and business of iPhone game design Nimur (talk) 10:10, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

In response to your last paragraph - doesn't that apply to all software, rather than just games? The other industry that is very similar is pharmacology. Most of their research either goes nowhere at all, makes an ineffective drug or one with too many or too severe side effects, and the few that work have to pay for the rest (which is why drugs are so expensive) and, also, the cost of making a pill is negligible compared to the development costs. Computer processor design and manufacture is quite similar. --Tango (talk) 14:13, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Dell Optiplex to upgrade

Can anyone recommend a good Optiplex model for upgrading/building my own PC, that wouldn't cost much to buy secondhand? Basically just one with a large form factor case and a power supply that will run a decent processor and graphics card. I'm open to suggestions on other manufacturers, but was thinking of another Optiplex because I know how robust they are. This will be a kids' pc once it's finished! 89.195.206.83 (talk) 09:04, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Intel Core

what is intel core —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kdcee (talk • contribs) 10:31, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

See Intel Core. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 11:11, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Also, this archived question from July, "Difference between core 2 duo and dual core". Note the important distinction between "core" (a generic term for a particular part loosely defined subset of the innards of a computer processor), and "Core™", a brand name for a specific product technology released by Intel. Nimur (talk) 15:57, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Specific keyboard key will not function

Resolved

When i turned my computer on thiS morning, i found that the 'S' key would not function (i'm uSing the character map to copypaSta the letter). It'S not that it doeSn't function, it'S whenever i preSS it the window'S focuS iS Stolen by Something elSe. The weird part iS that every keyboard i plug in doeS thiS. The laptop built-in keyboard and even the On-Screen Keyboard do thiS. Before i Start a painfully long viruS Scan, haS anyone elSe had thiS problem? (PS: ShortcutS don't do thiS, CTRL-S workS fine)

 Buffered Input Output 12:24, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I take it you're cutting and pasting the "S" now ? If you have a recent system checkpoint, now would be the time to do a restore. StuRat (talk) 15:30, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

It was a virus. Thanks anyway.  Buffered Input Output 15:40, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

fortran 90

I want to download fortran 90 software (free). please give me some link.Supriyochowdhury (talk) 12:29, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

GCC supports Fortran 95. —Korath (Talk) 13:15, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

GCC also supports Fortran 90. Here's the official gfortran manual, including downloadable installers for most major platforms. If you are using Linux, gfortran may already be installed. Nimur (talk) 14:23, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

[1][2] --Normansmithy (talk) 15:03, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

FrontPage site user registration

I decided to add user registration to my web site. My IP had set it up with a domain name and a prefix and a subsite with frontpage extensions installed. I now realize that the prefix site is considered the top level site where I place things like the user registration which is intended to protect access to the subsite. It also appears that I can only access the top level site using FTP and the subsite using HTTP. However, once I create the user registration I also have to protect the subsite so that only registered users can access it. Currently without a user registration on the top level site anyone can access the subsite if they know what it is named and it appears that only the IP can change the site prefix or the subsite name. Is this a correct understanding and if so how do I protect the subsite from access by non-registered users and how do registered users sign in? 71.100.11.118 (talk) 16:07, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Ubuntu 9.10 Hibernating without consent

Every time I get the larger update which involves a restart of the computer, I have noticed that my computer tends to go to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity. I did something last time to sort this out, but recently we've had this update again, and it's started again. I have checked Power Manager, and have set everything to basically be on forever (except that 'when battery level is critically low' I have no choice but to put it on 'hibernate'). I have set the screensaver to never come on, but can only set the computer to be regarded as idle after two hours. Still, after a few minutes of inactivity, the screen goes black, and I have to press a button to get the screen back again. Particularly annoying is when I don't do that, the computer switches off. Now, when I leave a computer on, I leave it on for a reason, and don't want it to switch off when it feels like it. Can anyone tell me what the problem is and how to solve it? On a side note, I would ask this on the Ubuntu forums, but it can sometimes take days to get an answer there, and when I do, usually the writer assumes I know everything about Ubuntu, and so, although well-meaning, the answers are too technical and therefore useless to me. Any help would be appreciated. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 17:51, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

It's possible this is due to the monitor (which might have a separate low-power mode). Check your graphics configuration to see if a low-power / idle state signal is set up for the monitor (this is often separate from the software-level screensaver). The configuration might also be accessible through your monitor's firmware (using the buttons on the screen, rather than a software interface). Nimur (talk) 09:46, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Cheers, I will check that. How do I do this? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:13, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

What happened to Hotmail?

I am on a computer with Windows 7. I have had lots of problems since this software was installed, but never anything like today. I signed in to Hotmail and was doing fine until I did a search for all emails I had sent to myself with the appropriate subject line that I won't bother to explain. I clicked on one of those and then, when it was ready to delete, I did so and clicked on "Back", only to be told the web page had expired. I clicked on "Back" again and ended up in the inbox, which had nothing of value. For some odd reason I clicked on "Back" again and found myself in the other email service I had used earlier. I clicked on forward and the URL turned green (it also had a lock) and the page was completely blank. I typed "Hotmail" and even tried going there from Bing. Same result. I tried other ways of getting into Hotmail (actually, I was looking for Hotmail help) and finally succeeded in getting back to the inbox. But nothing I clicked on would take me anywhere.

It gets worse. I went back to that other email service and found I couldn't get into the inbox. I could see a list of folders but clicking on any of them just got me a bunch of white space where the list of emails should go. Fortunately, Lycos behaved normally. It has similar problems to the other email services I mentioned, but these are the result of the foolish way each one was designed. What's happening to me today is not intended by anyone.

And in one newspaper web site, I was unable to go to pages other than one in the articles with multiple pages. I'm contacting that site now.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:03, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and the items at the bottom of this page that I can normally click on require copy and paste.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:07, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't believe this has to do with Windows 7, but with your web browser. Which program are you using? —Akrabbim^talk 18:15, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Internet Explorer, probably 8.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:45, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

At last. I noticed something helpful. The yellow line that usually is saying a pop-up was blocked has been showing up all day, with a different message. I ignored it because supposedly there's nothing I can do. But I read the message and clicked like it said to and got this result when I matched up the message:

Okay, it won't let me copy and paste. Essentially it says ActiveX needs to be removed from the restricted sites list. There's something about changing security settings. I am at a library and furthermore, they tell me they can't do anything except call IT and that requires a work order. This takes time. They may not do anything today.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:53, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

More here.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 21:11, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

do I need to use a switch to segment, or if I have enough LAN plugs I dont need them?

I got a p.o.s. (point of sale) equipment for a small store, it came with a switch, on the back of the switch it says: typical network setup:

internet - Wireless Modem - This switch - stuff (laptop, computer, the pos equipment, etc)

But the wireless modem here already has 5 big yellow lan connectors. Do I need to use one of them for the switch for some (security) reason? Does it "segment" or do anything else with the network? Thanks. --84.153.225.240 (talk) 18:10, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Network switches exist to give you more ports, so, no, the switch itself isn't necessary if you want to plug stuff directly into the wireless modem's ports. Do you know the model number and manufacturer of the wireless modem? That would let us give more specific advice. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:22, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

TP-Link brand Model no. TL-SF1005D. By the way the p.o.s. is ingenico brand. So, if there are 5 free LAN connectors on the back of the wireless connection, it does NOTHING to plug one of them into this router switch and then the p.o.s. into the router switch, versus just plugging it into the wireless lan? thanks. So what's this bit about "network segments" in the routet switch article? --84.153.225.240 (talk) 18:44, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

You're getting your terminology a bit mixed up, though you had it right in the original post; you have a DSL modem (which in your case is also a router), a switch, and your other devices which need connectivity (laptop, POS, etc.) There are switches which have special features for network security (often found in managed switches) but the switch you mentioned is not managed. Adding it to the network will do nothing more than give you more ports to connect network cables.

Technical comments: The model TL-SF1005D is your switch that was provided - Comet Tuttle was asking for the wireless modem's information, but it's not really a big deal. Adding the switch would just make the network segment larger, but it's still one segment. Besides, I rarely hear the term "network segment" used outside of large / enterprise networks. Coreycubed (talk) 19:41, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I made a mistake, being in a rush. I've corrected "router" to "switch" as appropriate. It is the switch article whose lead includes the line "A network switch is a computer networking device that connects network segments." and then just sentence later, "The term network switch does not generally encompass unintelligent or passive network devices such as hubs and repeaters." So what does connects segments mean in a technical sense? Also, the part I've just quoted says that a switch has to do something more than a passive "hub", so what would this something be? What is the difference between the switch I've mentioned and the hub? Nothing?

The wireless modem model number is written on it as "Speedport W 503V Typ A". (It is a German modem, in line with my typing from a German IP). This wireless modem is connected to the DSL box thing. So, given that you really know everything now, what, in practical terms, is the difference between connecting the pos into the wireless modem; into the switch I mentioned and connecting that into the wireless modem; or (this is hypothetical, I don't have one), connecting it to a hub and connecting the hub to the wireless modem. What's the difference between any of these three? Thanks. 84.153.225.240 (talk) 20:13, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Practically, there is no difference. In a technical sense, data needs to be able to travel around the segment, which in this case is your home network. (The wireless network would also be considered part of the network segment.) Let's say you had two computers. If they were connected to two different switches, those switches would in turn need to be connected to each other, or data could not pass between the two computers. Don't get caught up in the terminology and overcomplicate things! :) In lay terms, we'd just say that they needed to be networked. This is probably common sense - there are two devices that need to "talk" to each other. They have to have some way of passing information back and forth. Whether it is through the LAN ports of your Speedport or through the TP-Link switch (or both) does not matter. Your Speedport modem is actually quite the multitasker - it's acting as a modem, translating the DSL signal into a usable Internet connection, and as a router, providing NAT and DHCP addressing, and ALSO as a switch, providing four LAN ports, AND as a wireless access point (think of a wireless AP signal as a giant invisible switch, and connecting to a wireless network as walking up to that invisible switch and plugging your computer into it).

Since you're asking some hypothetical questions, here are a couple of examples of situations where it would matter how you connected it:

One switch is faster. Let's say that the TP-Link switch was capable of gigabit speeds (usually marked 10/100/1000). You'd want to connect all gigabit capable devices to that, and let the modem and switch talk at 100 megabits since that is still likely far more than your DSL connection is providing. That way, your computers can talk to each other faster, allowing them to transfer files among each other at greater speeds.

You have hubs. These are inferior to switches. You'd want to leave the hub out if possible since it is less efficient at exchanging network data than a switch is. The LAN ports in your Speedport modem are undoubtedly better than any hub would be. A hub just broadcasts packets it receives on all the others ports, so if lots of packets are being sent through the hub, you will get collisions. A switch, even an unmanaged one, can direct the flow of packets much better. The article on hubs which you linked goes into more detail, but basically a switch can handle simultaneous packet exchange while a hub cannot.

Since you also mentioned a repeater - wireless repeaters just listen for a wireless signal and rebroadcast it, effectively extending the range of wireless access points. This is why they, along with hubs, are not called switches - becuase they do not actively take a role in getting packets to their destination. Coreycubed (talk) 21:24, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Copy/paste one partition's contents to the other partition in GParted

Because Windows was having major issues not being the first partition in the drive, I need to move the Windows partition to the front of the drive (trust me, I have explored all other avenues around this), so if I right-click in one partition and say "Copy", then click in the new NTFS partition at the front of the drive, why doesn't it allow me to paste? (The right-click and toolbar buttons are greyed out). Do I need to complete all other operations (resize, format, etc.) before I can do this?

Thanks!

110.175.208.144 (talk) 21:02, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about using gparted for this; I've always just used dd - e.g. sudo dd if=/dev/sdc2 of=/dev/sdc1. Obviously you need to be super sure about the if and of - get them wrong and you'll overwrite the wrong partition and ruin your day. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:14, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, failing that, if I manually move the entire partition's content across using a file browser, will it work? Thanks! 110.175.208.144 (talk) 05:18, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I'd use gparted to blank the NTFS partition at the front of the drive that you were attempting to copy to and then just shift the whole partition to the left. If you want to, you can create the other NTFS partition in the blank area where the Windows partition used to be, or just expand partition #1 to fill the space. Hope that helps. Coreycubed (talk) 21:31, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Did that, worked like a charm :) Thanks! 110.175.208.144 (talk) 00:58, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Does an electronic paper word processor exist?

There are ebook readers using electronic paper (e-paper) like the Kindle. Does there exist a device like that where you can edit text? I would really love to have that and be able to easily read outdoors in the sunlight. Too many laptops are hard to read in bright conditions. Is there a technical reason for this, maybe that blinking cursors or altering small portions of the screen are not conducive to e-paper displays? Thank you for your help. --Rajah (talk) 21:43, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

The ebook readers I've seen (a Sony and a Kindle) have displays with a pretty high latency. If memory serves, the Sony screen goes blank, then inverts, then a new screen appears (I don't remember precisely how the Kindle worked in that regard). Electronic paper#Disadvantages suggests that this is the case for the current e-ink technologies in general, and I agree with that article that the one's I've seen would be unworkable (or at least unpleasant) for a normal GUI. I'm not sure there's enough market for general high-ambient-light computing to justify making one with the current, suboptimal technology. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:56, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

The iLiad allows annotation and highlighting of existing documents out of the box using an included Wacom stylus. It's Linux based, and according to the article abiword has been ported to it. The port is not really meant for editing - more for viewing rich text files, but a USB keyboard module has also been ported which allows you to plug in a USB keyboard [3]. So, yes it can be done if you are willing to do some hacking, but the end result probably won't be that smooth or easy to use.131.111.185.69 (talk) 23:09, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Reading the site I linked to I discover they have even ported an instant messenger app and a spreadsheet program. I love Linux hackers - they are all quite mad (in a "this shouldn't be possible and certainly isn't advisable but we are going to do it anyway" sort of way). 131.111.185.69 (talk) 23:16, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

You can definitely edit text on the Kindle - I do it on mine all the time. The Kindle software offers a way to add notes to your eBooks - and that involves typing in text on the little keyboard and viewing it on the electronic paper display. You can also surf the web and enter text that way. That certainly works - so it must be possible (in principle) to do what you want. The usual problem is that machines like the Kindle are designed for ultra-low battery life - which they achieve buy using the ability of the ePaper to retain the image with the power turned completely off. The Kindle only uses power when you push a button. So you can read a dozen books over a period of weeks on one battery charge because it only takes maybe a thousand button pushes per book. However, if you were doing extensive word processing, the CPU would need to be on all the time and the display would be doing a lot of refreshing - and the battery life would probably be alarmingly short. The Kindle also has a couple of 'easter eggs' - you can play "MineSweeper" and "Gomoku" on it - which, again, requires the display to refresh 'interactively'. However, I don't know of any custom word-processors built around ePaper. SteveBaker (talk) 08:09, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Why not just upload any documents you want to read to GoogleDocs or similar online wordprocessor? You'd be able to read and/or edit them on a Kindle easily then. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:50, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Including gpus, new and used, printers, Playstations, etc, and mainframes and services too what is the best teraflops for the money?

Say I want to do a whole lot of flops in a highly parallel way. Out of all the choices I listed in the subject line, what would give me the most FLOPS for the money. Put another way, if I had $20,000 to spend, what is the most flops I could get out of it, including on the used hardware market, and how. Just about the only thing I wouldnt consider is buying a botnet, or paying some Russian the $20000 to build me a viral botnet, for the calculations, though I suspect this would be the cheapest :) Thanks for your creative answers, and of course please feel free to include anything I didnt think of if it's better flops for the money. :) 80.187.97.187 (talk) 22:33, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Can you clarify whether this is just fun speculation or whether you're serious about doing this? For example, there is a massive difference in the ease of implementation between a room full of blade servers and 250 Playstation 2s... if you really want to build your own parallel setup, knowing your personal software competency (or the competency of those available to you) will go a long way towards accurately shaping the answer. In short, the real question should be "what's the best speed per dollar parallel computing setup I can build if I know (insert programming language here)?" 218.25.32.210 (talk) 01:05, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

An awful lot depends on your use patterns. If you only need this thing periodically for one or two large calculations - you might be better off buying computer time from one of the large compute farm providers out there than owning your own system. There are all sorts of innovative ways to buy CPU time without owning the hardware (eg [4] or [5]). You can also sell your unused CPU time the same way. So by sticking with PC's and not buying weird hardware like Playstations, you could sell your unused CPU cycles and earn money back from your compute farm when you aren't using it. Many of the service providers sell Linux CPU hours at about half the cost of Windows CPU hours - and Linux computers are always cheaper then Windows ones because you aren't paying for the cost of the operating system - so if you are serious about this, you'll want to be running your application under Linux. If you work in a large organization, you might consider building a Stone soupercomputer - where you set yourself up to take old PC's that have been upgraded in other departments of the company and re-purpose them into a gigantic cluster. These machines are old and clunky - but the hardware is essentially free and your application is (hopefully) highly distributed - so having 100 1GHz machines that cost you nothing is better than having (say) 20 3GHz machines that cost you a thousand dollars a pop. A lot also depends on the nature of your calculations. If you can parallelize the code in such a way that it could run on the GPU instead of the CPU, you can often get a 100-fold speedup on a single PC! SteveBaker (talk) 07:59, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

This is a scientific economical question, such as the question "what is the most human-consumable calories you can buy for $20,000", even on the international commodities market. The answer could be "5000 gallons of vegetable oil". I would be happy with that answer.

Now, in my actual question, I am purely concerned, in a pure "calories" sense, what the MOST number of floating point operations I could get out of $20,000 is. Would the MOST number of floating point operations I could get out of it be by paying the $20,000 to a service, like SteveBaker suggests? Or would it be by buying 150 almost but not top of the line, used NVidia cards and middle of the line cases and power supplies for them, and powering it in Arizona, which (this is just hypothetical) has the cheapest power in the United States that you can start accessing for $20,000, then writing your code to run on those GPU's as a cluster. You see, guys, this is a purely scientific economical question, such as the analogous question about about what the most human-consumable calories you can buy for $20,000 would be.

Does anyone have an answer? 84.153.225.240 (talk) 13:37, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

But that's not a meaningful question. If you buy a $100 programmable pocket calculator and keep it for a million years - you have "bought a teraflop" - but sadly, it's so appallingly slow and can hold so little code that it's virtually useless. But if you're doing something like weather forcasting and you absolutely need to do a teraflop calculation to predict the path of a hurricane and you need the answer within an hour - then you have to buy a roomful of computers at monumental cost. Between those two extremes, there lies solutions like the stone soupercomputer and buying time from Amazon. It's not like buying apples. It's not a matter of how many teraflops - it's tiny details like how often you do this and how soon you need the answer - and how much memory you need - and whether the algorithm is parallelizable or not and whether you need lots of disk space and how much intercommunication between processors is required. You can't treat it like the commodities market. Sorry! SteveBaker (talk) 14:31, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I recently gave a presentation at University of Nevada on how to develop a "personal supercomputer" for under $1,000 (I'll try to dig out my presentation for release). I basically loaded up a "middle-of-the-road" desktop computer from HP and loaded it with a "middle of the road" GPGPU-capable NVIDIA card. I spec'ed it out around 25 giga-calculations-per-second on the 2D or 3D wave equation, which is something like 300 GFLOPs. In my opinion, this is about the peak of the price-to-performance curve; I have some more metrics, (but many of them are not ready for release yet). But remember that if you are really doing high performance computing, you need to seriously analyze your algorithm to determine where your bottlenecks are. The FLOPS article explains very important caveats when measuring compute performance in "operations per second". For example, can your algorithm be represented in CUDA in the first place? And, if it can, will the data dependency overwhelm the parallel compute capabilities of a graphics processor's cache layout? Also - if you're going to cluster these systems, you will need a parallelizable code, either node-independent algorithms with some type of grid engine or some type of cluster programming API like MPI. (Or you can write pthreads and socket programs manually!) Do you know how to program in those sorts of systems?

Speaking of almost-publication-ready data, I have a friend who is soon to publish an ACM report on bit-error-rates in high-end vs. low-end GPUs from NVIDIA using data from the Folding at Home project. He corroborated my intuition with stastistical evidence; middle-of-the-road GPU systems (like the GTS250) have similar bit error rates to the high-end Tesla marketed cards; so unless your algorithm has a need for the huge GPU memory space, your system is better off buying 4 GTS250 cards rather than one C1060. As always, it depends on your algorithm needs - the C1060 can compute some problems that a smaller memory footprint doesn't allow. In that case, it's not about a price tradeoff - it's about meeting your algorithm needs.

Finally, one last insight regarding pricing - note that Amazon EC2 will rent "FLOPs" by the hour. Interestingly, their price point (~8 cents per hour) is lower than the cost of electricity needed to operate a server in most parts of Europe or the United States. So, keep in mind the power of outsourcing and economy of scale if you really want price-performance.

One last point: an actual published version summarizing some of the above, written by my colleague: Selecting the right hardware for reverse time migration. Note that this paper mentions a specific algorithm, because the computational needs vary so widely depending on application. Nimur (talk) 14:20, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

The low cost is because they have all of these bajillions of computers that are needed for peak-hours operations that sit idle for much of the rest of the time. They can't easily power them down - and they still take up airconditioned space - so the logical thing to do is to sell the (otherwise-wasted) CPU cycles and recoup some of that expenditure. SteveBaker (talk) 14:24, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Some good points have already been made but the other problem is your question ignores the complexity of the market. SB already pointed out you how you can buy old computers for next to nothing and use these. But in addition, while $20,000 isn't a great amount relatively speaking, it's still enough that you'll be dumb to pay retail. (Even the retail price varies from vendor to vendor anyway.) In other words, the price will depend on what you negotiate with your supplier. This gets complicated too since at a guess you can probably (particularly if you had a larger amount to play with) negotiate a better deal (cf retail) for the PCs then you can with PS3s for example (given that modern consoles tend to be somewhat sold on the idea they'll make the money back with the games) unless perhaps you can convince Sony it'll be got advertising. Of course you could even go the home built route, but the CPUs, GPUs and assembled PCs yourself. This will generally be cheaper compared to the prebuilt solution but you're going to need someone to assemble them so it'll end up costing more unless you have slaves or are willing to do it yourself without for some reason counting the time it takes you to do it as a cost. Also, as others have stated, in the real world, what you can actually do with the assembled network will vary depending on what you've chosen and this matters. People have already given examples but something which occurs to me, you'll probably save some cost if you only give each computer the lowest amount of RAM possible. Say 256mb RAM (and get the cheapest one you can find at that, obviously no ECC and don't care if it's basically brandless because no manufacturer dared but their names on it). However a quad core with 256mb of RAM is gonna be fairly limiting. You can also probably skimp out on the PSU and motherboard, get the crappiest ones you can. Cheaper but when it may die 5 months down the road and maybe even cause numerous problems from the outset. Also you mentioned middle of the line cases. Why bother with a case? Just leave it out in the open. Saves on cost even if it complicates cooling, requires much more room, increases dust etc problems and it's at far greater risk from someone spilling something on it. These won't really gain much, and few people in the real world will consider them but if you want the best price/FLOP option, why not? Another example, the above examples reference Nvidia cards. While I don't pay that much attention to the GPGPU world, it's my understanding with the launch of the new ATI 5x00 series, these may be a better bet in price/performance terms (at least until Nvidia launches their new series). However they obviously lack CUDA support, AMD/ATI stream never really took off and OpenCL is still in its infancy and AMD/ATI are somewhat behind in supporting it anyway so it doesn't receive so much attention in the GPGPU world. A final example which occured to me, if you know the right people, perhaps you can buy stolen computers and stuff. Probably cheapish particularly if you really know the right people. Of course once you get arrested for receiving stolen goods your network will be dismantled. The precise cost is not something I expect anyone here can estimate and likely as I've already emphasised likely depends a lot on who you know and how well you know them. Even more so then your botnet idea. Heck if you aren't counting your own time as money, why not just set up a botnet yourself? P.S. While I believe you intend the US, geographical location will make a difference to a number of things as well. Nil Einne (talk) 16:00, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to address the other replies more thoroughly, but first a quick retort to your "if you aren't counting your own time as money..." Well, if I'm not counting my own time as money, then obviously the most FLOPS per dollar (infinite, in fact) is doing the calculations in my head, though admittedly it would take a while :) 82.113.106.89 (talk) 18:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

In the same way that many sysadmin and budget people forget to count the cost of electricity, you're conveniently neglecting the cost of feeding and housing yourself while you do floating point math in your head. For perspective, you will die if you don't eat - so you need to pay for food, unless you are a hunter-gatherer or something. (In that case, how will you find time for floating point calculation? Your effective compute rate will be significantly diminished!) This isn't a minor detail. In the same way as you conveniently "forgot" to account for food and essentials in your human-computer concept, your budget estimate for a supercomputer is proportionately incorrect if you only measure part of the computer system cost.

Our great total cost of ownership article has a whole section on the equivalent costs for a computer. Interestingly, in today's marketplace, you will spend more money on electricity for your server, than the initial cost to purchase that server. If you want to ignore the cost of electric bills in your considerations, then you should anticipate a fun budget overrun - by a factor of 2 or more! Electric bills are the single greatest expense for a computer cluster. And don't forget air conditioners - that's another 30% of your total expense - or, again, equal to the cost of your server hardware! [6] Nimur (talk) 09:55, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

In addition, even if you argue zero cost for you, you may get a division by zero for the FLOPS per dollar which you may argue is infinite FLOPS per dollar, you're clearly not going to get infinite FLOPS since we hopefully all agree you're not likely to have an infinite lifespan anymore then the rest of us even if you automagically sort out the costs of housing, medical expenses food etc. In fact even SB's hypothetical calculator doesn't really work when we consider such real world facts since it's not going to last 1 million years. But hey at least if we talk a solar powered calculator we shouldn't (well baring catastrophic events, the sun should still be shining on earth a million years from now, strong enough to power your calculator) have to worry about the energy side of things albeit it limits the time you can use the calculator :-P Nil Einne (talk) 20:54, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Connection reset by peer.. meaning?

What does 'connection reset by peer' even mean? If random people on the internet can just reset my connection any time they want, there's a security concern right there. Hopefully it actually has a deeper meaning than that. Preferably I shouldn't have to ask this question, but the fact of the matter is that the rest of the error codes actually make a lick of sense without a lengthy explanation. ArchabacteriaNematoda (talk) 22:46, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

"peer" doesn't mean "any random node on the Internet", it means "the host at the other end of this connection". 98.226.122.10 (talk) 23:44, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I - a different poster - never suspected this answer. You'd think if it meant "connection reset by host" it would say "connection reset by host". I guess I have high expectations. 80.187.107.143 (talk) 23:47, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

It means exactly what it says. As 98 pointed out, not just any host on the Internet can reset your connection—it has to be your peer, the particular host you're connected to. -- Coneslayer (talk) 11:21, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Anyone who read "connection reset by host" would understand it's the server you're connecting with. 84.153.225.240 (talk) 13:31, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

But if your computer is the server, the peer would be the client, and you'd still get the same message if the other end dropped the connection. "Peer" can refer to either end. In fact, communication that doesn't fit the client-server model is sometimes called "peer to peer". 66.127.52.47 (talk) 23:06, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

A TCP connection (which is the kind that gets the "Connection reset by peer" message) is an association between 2 hosts (a host on the Internet is basically anything that has an IP address assigned to it). From the point of view of one of those hosts, the other one is "the peer". 98.226.122.10 (talk) 23:54, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

And to expand on that a little more, the "reset" refers to the RST bit in the TCP header. "Connection reset by peer" means that a packet was received in which the RST bit was 1, indicating that the peer (i.e. the other host that you were connected to) believes the connection is no longer valid. For some random third party to cause this to happen, they would have to be able to forge the IP address and TCP sequence number, which used to be surprisingly easy to do, but defenses against that are fairly good now. Your ISP, however, can still do it to you, and don't think they won't. (I believe Comcast has used forged resets to slow down bittorrent users...) 98.226.122.10 (talk) 00:00, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

"used to"? Did Comcast stop attacking torrent use with fake resets? -- kainaw™ 00:35, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes. The FCC ordered them in August 2008 to stop before the end of the year, and they did.--Chmod 777 (talk) 01:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

See Comcast#Network_neutrality. -- Coneslayer (talk) 16:29, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

The term can be traced back to the OSI Model (although our article doesn't use the term - instead see here). Each layer in the model must (and can only) communicate with its peer on the other side of a connection. --LarryMac | Talk 00:02, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Our article should (sorry, SHOULD) use the term, because it is included in the official X.200 recommendation specification. An enthusiastic editor MAY edit the appropriate sections in our article, which SHOULD comply with the X.200 draft, to reflect that an OSI network model element MUST communicate with an N-PEER element and MAY NOT communicate with a node or element from a separate N-level. Nimur (talk) 10:01, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

March 19

Formatting

Does frequently formatting our system to install the OS in the same drive slows down our system???? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.235.54.67 (talk) 13:25, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

No. If anything, it speeds it up because you frequently get rid of all the garbage that gets needlessly installed on the system. -- kainaw™ 13:32, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

But if you have a modern OS (such as Windows 7) and do not install a lot of unnecessary software on it (or misuse it in any other way), you should actually "never" need to do this. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 16:27, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Google Chrome

A couple of weeks ago I decided to download Google Chrome to try it, and I generally like it a lot (fast, etc.). However, on occasion, when I click on a link on a webpage, the new page will refuse to load. It seems to happen quite a bit when I'm on Wikipedia, but maybe that's just because I click on a lot of links here. Anyway, usually it's not too bad, because I just exit out of the tab, open a new one, and return to the page I was at. Sometimes, however, it will refuse to load for a couple seconds, and then my entire computor will slow to a crawl; can't switch tabs, can't exit out, nothing. It takes about 20 minutes or so to try to close the window. Why might this be happening, and what can I do about it? I'm running Windows 7 on an ASUS laptop. I also have internet explorer (which is what I used before I got chrome); could that be interfering somehow? I like Chrome's speed a lot, so I don't really want to go back to Internet Explorer (or get firefox, as I'm sure you guys will recomment), but if I can't trust my browser to load consistantly, I might have to. Buddy431 (talk) 16:12, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I've not experienced this myself, but your "refuse ... for a couple of seconds" might suggest that you're running out of RAM (and having to swap). Chrome uses a process per tab (for some very good reasons) which results in generally rather higher memory usage (see for example this analysis). If your laptop doesn't have a lot of memory, or if you've also got a bunch of other stuff running too, then Chrome's rather aggressive memory usage might result in it having to swap some of those processes in and out of swap. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:29, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

It's unlikely Internet Explorer is responsible.—Machine Elf 1735 (talk) 17:43, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't know how Chrome renders pages, but sometimes with browsers, any one web page requires a browser to load up lots of other pages as well (Javascript, stylesheets, ads, etc.), and in some cases, if one of those pages won't load (or loads slowly), it can slow the total rendering of the page down considerably. One way to see if that's the case it to install something like NoScript that bans all Javascript and see if the problem is replicated; if not, it is probably due to so sort of background Javascript that isn't loading right. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:23, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Stop Excel Horizontal-scrolling in a document

Excel is being very very annoying in one document. Any other document i own will scroll up/down the page as I roll the scroll-wheel, but this one particularly document refuses to - it always scrolls 'left-right' whenever I roll the scroll-wheel. It's very odd, if i open a new doc it'll do up/down. Any ideas on how to 'reset' it back to up/down for the doc i'm having the trouble with? 194.221.133.226 (talk) 16:31, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

In case nobody else responds to this query: I did a little googling and found some requests from people who want this behavior in their spreadsheets, and the only responses I saw were very convoluted responses involving triggering a macro upon moving the scroll wheel. There may not be a simple "on/off" switch to cause this behavior. To the original poster: I would first try contacting the author of this document; if I couldn't reach that person, I would try disabling macros on this document. What platform and version of Excel are you using? Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:39, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

ISO Files

I have an ISO file. I burned it to a DVD and all that happened was that the ISO was copied across to the DVD. The DVD didn't carry the image that the ISO file has: I just had the ISO file on the DVD. Any ideas? •• Fly by Night (talk) 18:33, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

You used your burning software's "create a data disc" option with the contents being the .iso file. What burning software did you use? It probably has a menu or button option that says something like "Burn image to disc". The burning software may also "know what you want to do" if you simply double-click the .iso file to launch the burning software. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:38, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

(ec)You just copied your file to the DVD; you need to use your DVD burner software's "burn an ISO" or "burn an image" option. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:39, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks chaps! You guys are right. I found an option "Copy a CD/DVD". That seems to have worked... •• Fly by Night (talk) 19:43, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

.mdf and .mds files

I'm trying to download an expansion patch for a game. But the download only contains two files: a .mdf file and a .mds file. What the heck are these? I did a search for .mdf and .mds files on my computer and only found one shortcut to a .mdf file sat in a roaming folder. I am really confused. The worst thing is that the original game was published in 2000 so no support exists and all of the forums dried up long ago. •• Fly by Night (talk) 19:52, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

.mdf → Alcohol 120% ¦ Reisio (talk) 20:01, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Could you please give more details? •• Fly by Night (talk) 20:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

What game is it? Each developer makes their patches differently. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:08, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

The original game is Zeus: Master of Olympus and the patch is Poseidon: Master of Atlantis. •• Fly by Night (talk) 20:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

These files, as a pair, form a disk image, similar to a .iso file. Programs like Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools (both are available in free versions) can be used to create a virtual disk drive and mount either the .mdf or .mds (I can't remember which). Since they operate as a pair, you have to keep them in the same directory. You can also burn the image to a physical disk if you wish. —Akrabbim^talk 21:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

March 20

Editing Wikipedia from iPhone OS

Resolved

Whenever I edit Wikipedia from Safari, it doesn't seem to let me respond if a thread has more than x replies. What happens is the text entry box only displays so much text. There are two ways to get around this: I can create a new thread, indent my reply, and post without a subject. Another way to do it is to respond to the subsequent thread, right above the section heading. The problem is this doesn't work if I want to respond in the middle of the thread, only at the bottom. So, how do I increase the amount of text showing in the text entry box, such that I can view the entire thread and respond to it? Viriditas (talk) 03:45, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

you can't, but while editing the text (of which you only see the top, you don't see enough) you can hold down your finger over any location until you see the "select all" bubble, tap it, tap "cut", then tap "paste". This leaves the same text (but the bottom portion of it rather than the top portion) in the edit window as before, since your blinking cursor is now at the bottom. Maybe you can now see the location you would like to edit, so just tap there so the cursor moves there... 82.113.121.93 (talk) 12:51, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Ah, I'll try that. Good advice. Viriditas (talk) 21:50, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Works great! Viriditas (talk) 04:58, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Also note that some people always respond at the bottom (maybe they're on iPhones, too ?) with something like "@StuRat: No, Pope John-Paul II didn't die of auto-erotic asphyxiation in Bangkok, you must be thinking of David Carradine." :-) StuRat (talk) 18:08, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Heh. Viriditas (talk) 21:50, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

syscall # 3

Hi folks. Real simple question, but I need the help for my class!

I'm writing assembly for NASM on Linux intel. The assignment says, 'write a program that repeatedly takes in a line of input, puts out the number of words (separated by blank space) and halts if the input line is blank.

mov eax 3 ; this will mean that I want to use the system call to read.
mov ebx 0 ; I want to read in from the keyboard
mov ecx address ; the address where I want to store the input string

What I am unclear about is what do the registers contain after int 0x80 occurs? Does edx contain the length of the string that was input? What do the other registers contain?

thanks

Duomillia (talk) 03:47, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Per this (old but should still hold) and this, for all syscalls, eax contains the return value of the syscall. In the case of read(2), eax contains a ssize_t that is either the +ve number of bytes read, 0 if no bytes read, or -ve for the appropriate error per its man page. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 10:21, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Error message in main screen every time my computer turned on

Immediately after I turn on a computer, an error message pops up in the main screen. The message says something weird, like "..couldn't find 0023XAS02" (I just made this up since I don't remember the actual thing), and the bar name ends with the .exe and has two buttons "OK" and "Cancel". How can I stop it from keep appearing at the start of turning on a computer? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.68.120.162 (talk) 08:28, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

We can't really help you unless you tell us the exact error message. You might check the Windows startup configuration - there are a lot of places programs can register in Windows to start at bootup - to see if a broken program is trying to start at launch. Here is a list of common places to check for startup programs, and how to remove them: How to Remove Startup Programs, by O'Reilly Media. Nimur (talk) 09:33, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

No need to bother with that, just use Autoruns. F (talk) 05:30, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

That seems like a fantastic tool for sysadmins and power users! Thanks for the link, F. Nimur (talk) 18:39, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Login page

If I turn on my 2002 XP computer, I'm led to a blue login screen, even though there is only one user ID with no password for the computer. Is there a way for the computer to skip this login screen and just proceed to the window main screen? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.68.120.162 (talk) 08:39, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes. [7] [8] Nil Einne (talk) 08:57, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

control breaks

How can I best understand control breaks and their logic? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.77.248.239 (talk) 20:44, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Try Control breaks as a starting point. Cander0000 (talk) 05:01, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Delphi/AVG Issue

I have encountered a strange Delphi 2009/AVG Free Antivirus issue. If I create an empty VCL Forms Application, i.e. an application with an empty form, and run it, AVG blocks the execution of the program, and reports that Project1.exe (the executable's filename) is (infected by) Trojan horse Downloader.Agent.AONT. This - of course - makes me think of the W32/Induc-A virus. But this virus should only affect Delphi 7 and below, and I cannot find any changes to my library folder. What is even more strange, is that if I add any code whatsoever to the application, AVG will not report any issue at all. If there really was some infection of my DCUs, it should not go away by adding code to the project... Moreover, AVG has no information whatsoever regarding this virus in their online virus database, and Google has never heard of it. I therefore suspect that it is a false alarm, or a bug in AVG. But can I be sure? --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 22:18, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

It may very well simply be a checksum match, and thus a false alarm. Try uploading one of these "infected" .exes to virustotal.com. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:56, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

I am not a computer security expert. But it does not look good, or does it [9]? But I have run a complete scan with AVG, and it reports no infections. So how can a compiler running on a uninfected system produce infected executables? --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 23:13, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

If I add a beep; statement in the FormCreate procedure, it appears to be clean: [10]. Is it possible that so many (mostly unknown, though) virus scanners report a false alarm? --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 23:34, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

March 21

Local Javascript pop-up with pop-up blocking on

This is a somewhat odd request, and what I want to do might not work.

I am using Safari in OS X as my default browser. I've written a little Javascript page that will display some scheduling data to me quite quickly. That part of it is nice and works fine.

The way I have it set up, there is an icon on my dock which, when clicked, opens the file LAUNCHER.HTML in Safari. LAUNCHER then runs some Javascript that opens the schedule file as a pop-up (let's call it SCHEDULE.HTML), and then closes itself (just a window.open and window.close).

This works well when I have pop-ups enabled in Safari. But ideally I would have my "Block Pop-Up Windows" setting turned on. When I do have it turned on, LAUNCHER can't launch the pop-up. (Duh.)

The advantage of using a LAUNCHER popup rather than just linking to SCHEDULE.HTML is that I can strip away the address bar, status bar, and so forth of the pop-up. I don't think I can do that without doing a window.open(), right? And I suppose there's no way to enable pop-ups just for local HTML files.

The obvious easy "fix" is to scrap LAUNCHER and make SCHEDULE.HTML position itself accordingly and just put up with the extra address bar and status bar even though it is ugly (because really, the purpose of this application is just to be functional—it is just a home-made thing I use for my own stuff), but I'm curious if there is some other thing I have not thought of. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:42, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

No, the "obvious" easy fix is to run a script from the dock. Any modern scripting language has a built in GUI library and any built-in GUI library has an HTML window rendering class. So you just open a window using it and se it to render whatever you need. If you're on modern hardware then the fastest workaround is using a vm with safari in it, maybe under windows if its easier for you to get the cd. That should take you lile 12 minutes of yourtime plus download time/ waiting forthe guest os to install. The 12 minutes includes you figuring out how to use your vm software to make a checkpoint that your shortcut will open. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.187.97.181 (talk) 01:14, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what you are suggesting. Could you elaborate with fewer acronyms and more practical explanation? --Mr.98 (talk) 01:41, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Agreed with above, I'm not sure how the use of a Virtual Machine applies to your question. It appears the basic stuck point is Safari's lack of security zones, which in browsers such as Internet Explorer or FireFox, would allow you to apply different browser settings to different categories of sites. So with Safari as your browser, your "obvious" fix is indeed the choice between a) unblocking popups for all sites, or b)rewriting your "launcher" to not rely on popups. Alternatives would include rewriting (assuming its local only) schedule.html as an HTA. This supports rendering HTML through client-side script but doesn't require launching the full browser. Cander0000 (talk) 04:59, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

It's too bad that Safari's popup blocker can't be configured. You might try looking at Mozilla Prism or another light little SSB that you could use for this one little HTML file. I tried using it once before, and it worked pretty well. Mozilla Prism website Indeterminate (talk) 04:24, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Installing MSYS on 64bit vista

I am trying to make msys work on 64bit vista by following these instructions: http://old.nabble.com/Installing-MSYS-on-Windows-Vista-x64-td16904988.html. However I cannot seem to find the "MSYS-1.0.11-20071204.tar.bz2" file anywhere. Is there an easier fix for this issue? Is there an available substitute file that can be used in place of the required file. 72.188.46.69 (talk) 01:47, 21 March 2010 (UTC)CompuGuy

Yeah, that's a daily build which has probably disappeared off the internet. Did you try following the installation instructions on the project's website? Indeterminate (talk) 04:11, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

US federal government software

Works of the US federal government are in the public domain, and I think the government writes a lot of software. Is there a centralized Website repository somewhere containing all of this software? (I realize that (a) it must just license a lot of the software it uses, so I'm not going to expect every government payroll system and accounting system to be available; (b) I'm probably not going to be able to get their nuclear explosion simulators; and (c) I probably have little use for Medicare compliance certification audit software written in Ada.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 06:45, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't think there's a central database. (There's not a central database for US federal government publications, much less software.) I also think they likely contract a lot of that work out, and contractors are not covered by the "works of the federal government" copyright clause. Nuclear weapons codes, even if they were declassified (and some old ones are), are technically works of a contractor (Los Alamos or Livermore labs, which are Government Owned Contractor Operated facilities). I did some software work for a US federal agency once, and they definitely weren't that interested in having it distributed (the question of whether it should be distributed actually did come up, but not because it was public domain—it's because the software was part of a database that theoretically a small-but-greater-than-zero number of the academic community might find useful). It was not sensitive or classified in any way, but they considered it solely useful to the internal functioning of their department. (Which actually exempts it even from FOIA if I recall.) The truth is, my particular bit of code was really quite boring and isolated and specific to the task. While one could imagine a well-organized code database in which I entered in component bits of my software, explained how they worked, made sure everything was commented well, and indexed it in such a way that others might find it useful... well, let's just say they weren't paying me to do that! And I suspect they aren't paying anyone to maintain such a central database, which in the end, with the federal government, is how anything exists at all (if it ain't funded, it ain't happening). Now, you probably could get certain types of software via FOIA requests, if you wanted them. But I don't think the government automatically distributes or collects them. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:16, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

As just an aside. The question of ownership of government v. contractor code comes up with some frequency in discussions of electronic voting. By contracting electronic voting out to private companies (e.g. Diebold), the government gives them the ability to make their code copyrighted and proprietary, and thus outside of public scrutiny. This has met with criticism by security people, unsurprisingly, who believe that security through obscurity on something as important as elections is a dangerous idea. Thus some have argued (I think Bruce Schneier is one in this camp?) that the government should code these things in-house, and thus the code should be public domain, and open to outside analysis. Just putting that out there, as it came to mind. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:29, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

My experience is that a lot of people don't care whether it's in the public domain, provided it's FLOSS. [11] Some don't even go that far, and simply argue the source code should be open to public scrunity. [12] Of course even if you do demand the source code be in the public domain, it doesn't automatically follow that they have to be produced by the US government since I believe it's possible for private companies to release things into the public domain in the US and there's no reason why that can't be a legal requirement for voting machines, just as FLOSS or open to public scrutiny could be. Nil Einne (talk) 17:55, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, that's true. The issue of ownership matters largely because contractor produced code (and everything else) is not necessarily subject to information openness laws (like FOIA), and there is not a lot of precedent for contractor openness. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:04, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

For comparison, consider software written by a National Laboratory (which really are the premiere science and technology centers that are operated by the civilian side of federal government). Take a look at Argonne National Laboratory Mathematics and Computer Science Division. For example, here's the copyright statement for Message Passing Interface, which is authored by government employees, but may incorporate work from private contractors. This work is not exactly in the public domain, although "Permission is hereby granted to use, reproduce, prepare derivative works, and to redistribute to others," and "the Government is granted for itself and others acting on its behalf a paid-up, nonexclusive, irrevocable worldwide license in this computer software to reproduce, prepare derivative works, and perform publicly and display publicly." Similar sorts of license statements accompany any work released by the federal government. Nimur (talk) 18:54, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

GPU-assisted video transcoding on ATI?

Is there another GPU-assisted video transcoding program available for ATI? The Avivo program provided by ATI is too limited in its options. thanks F (talk) 09:14, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes Cyberlink PowerDirector [13] and CyberLink MediaShow Espresso [14]. If I had to guess, these use the same internal encoder although the feature set may vary. These were evaluted here which doesn't come out very favourable for ATI although that was in August 2009 which can probably be said to be a long time ago given that GPGPU is still a fairly rapidly developing field. In particular they used PowerDirector 7 but 8 is now out and while they don't seem to say what MediaShow Espresso they used (I'm not surprised, I've never been particularly impressed with the quality of Pc Perspective's reviews) I believe 5.5 was only released in 2010 [15]. In any case this found the results tended to vary depending on the source material and this didn't find any substanial quality differences. Windows 7 also uses ATI Stream for the drag and drop transcoding (for portable devices) [16] [17] but I doubt you get much control. It may be part of SHED [18]. There's also an AMD plugin for Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 [19] [20] [21] and Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 [22]. How much control you have with these, I don't know. Personally though, while I don't know if things are better on the Nvidia side (with other apps) from what I've just read GPU assisted transcoding still doesn't sound particularly interesting to me, except perhaps for cases when I absolute need extreme speed, any case where I care about quality I'd stick with x264 (presuming your talking about h.264). And I do have a Nvidia card altho I do rarely transcode. Nil Einne (talk) 17:44, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Fortran

I write a fortran program but I can't run it and I can not get output please tell how it compile and run I use windos xp.Supriyochowdhury (talk) 09:57, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Which coding environment did you use? Presumably one supplied by one of the tools you downloaded and installed after your previous question was answered. Astronaut (talk) 11:30, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Do you get an error when you compile it ? If so, what is the error ? Note that a file may have been produced in the directory where you did the compile, which contains the error messages. StuRat (talk) 17:17, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Also, if you will provide the Fortran source code, I could debug it for you. StuRat (talk) 17:18, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Did you compile the code? It's not clear from your question, but I wonder if you have merely written the source code but have not yet tried to compile it (since you did not mention any compiler error message). FORTRAN is a compiled language, so you need to process the text file containing your program source to generate the executable program. Nimur (talk) 22:22, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Updating to Norton 360 v.4 from v.3 for free --- is that possible?

I have just installed Norton 360 v.3 in my laptop. Is there anyway I can update it to v.4 for free? Please give me outright instructions. I'd be so glad to read from you. Thanks, everybody! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.202.208.174 (talk) 11:48, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

If you have a current (i.e., unexpired) subscription, go here. Symantec does a pretty good job of hiding this page, because they want you to think you have to upgrade when you renew your subscription. The only place I could find a link to it was right on the Norton front page, but it is very well-hidden. It is named "Norton Product Updates" and is located right above "Upgrade to latest version". To a novice user it would sound like "Norton Product Updates" is where you go to get, say, the latest definitions, not a new version. Quite misleading. Xenon54 / talk / 12:53, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

fortran

which mistake frequently doing a student first time during run a fortran program that is why showing error.Supriyochowdhury (talk) 14:59, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Before you get any more answers about Fortran, you must answer the questions you are being asked in return. What program are you using to write Fortran? What program are you using to compile Fortran? Without answers to those questions, it is not possible to help you. -- kainaw™ 15:45, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Maybe a variable which is declared incorrectly ? Often a problem for me. For example, I make a single variable when I start writing the program, then, in the middle of writing it decide I need it to be an array, but don't rememebr to go back and change the declaration. StuRat (talk) 17:22, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Most programmers would say "Your first mistake is using Fortran in the first place." - it's a horribly obsolete and completely nasty programming language. But there is no way we could hope to help you without at least seeing the source code and the error message(s) that the compiler is giving you. SteveBaker (talk) 00:11, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

And many of us Fortran programmers consider C to be non-intuitive and unnecessarily complex, such as when dealing with string handling. StuRat (talk) 02:00, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Obligatory non-quote from McCarthy: "You're doing it completely wrong." -- kainaw™ 03:28, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Top ten websites

What are the top ten websites, most used on the internet?? --Extra999 (Contact ^me + _contribs) 16:44, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Search engines and porn sites (not in that order). ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:13, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Those are categories of sites, not individual sites. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:01, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Alexa Internet ranks websites here: [23]. There are questions as to how accurate they are, but they're something to start with. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:01, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

In terms of the Alexa rankings, I know for http://www.wikipedia.org after a poll we decided to choose and order the top 10 by the most visited which many would feel makes sense. But bizzarely even though these are entirely wikimedia run projects and so producing stats on most visited was never going to be that difficult (and in fact I think they were always available) we originally used Alexa Meta:Talk:Www.wikipedia.org template#Do not use Alexa as main source! Meta:Talk:Www.wikipedia.org template#most visited wikipedias and when we changed we changed to using our local stats it made quite a big chance to the order of some and even what we listed. I also noticed [24] which while probably not suitable for the above article may be of interest. However I agree in the absence of anything else, Alexa is an okay starting point Nil Einne (talk) 19:58, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks everybody. --Extra999 (Contact ^me + _contribs) 04:04, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Putting text into a database

I have a large number of text files. In each text file one or more entities are described in a standardised way i.e. a short descriptor such as "Name" "Location" "Type" is followed by the appropriate detail. The order of those descriptors is the same for every entity. Sometimes the content such as an address will continue on further lines after the descriptor.

Is there any easy (which means quick for a non-programmer to do) and free way of making a simple database out of this? I have something in mind like a card file. Thanks 92.29.149.119 (talk) 21:13, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Free, yes. Easy as in non-programming... I doubt it. It is not a hard job, as far as they go, to get that data out and into some kind of database file (it is a pretty standard and straightforward scripting job, assuming things as as regular as you describe them), and going from the database file to a simple database application is pretty straightforward (could be done with PHP/MySQl or something like OpenOffice Base)... but you still need that initial step of extracting the data from the files into the database format. While not difficult for someone with a small amount of scripting, it would probably require some scripting (that is, you probably won't find a solution that does it without a little scripting). The reason for this is that you need to tell the script how to interpret the text files (what is a field name, what is a field value), and since it is non-standard you would need to write a custom little script to do this for you.

It's the kind of thing where if you posted maybe five of the text files here that were representative of the variety, we could probably write the conversion script for you pretty easily. It's probably about 10-20 lines of code total depending on the language, nothing complicated. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:39, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

This sounds like something you could do with a spreadsheet. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 07:15, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Clever AI

We havnt got anywhere near having intelligent robots yet. What is the cleverest AI system that currently exists? I'n not expecting it to talk. Thanks 92.29.149.119 (talk) 21:18, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

It might help to define (what you mean by) "clever". At one point in time, one might have guessed that a computer would have to be "clever" to beat the world chess champion, but Deep Blue accomplished that. However, I don't think anyone would class Deep Blue itself as "clever" as it basically brute-forced the problem, although some of the algorithms which went into pruning the search space might have been (but the cleverness there was on the part of the programmers). On the other side of the spectrum, you have things like genetic algorithms, which routinely come up with solutions a human might not have ever considered, so may be classed as "clever" in that sense. Genetic algorithms, though, proceed through a pretty stupid guess-and-check system, so some may argue that the algorithms themselves are not "clever", merely diligent. - As a final note, saying a horse is "clever" merely means that it is well behaved, which may be a much easier standard for an AI to reach. -- 174.21.243.94 (talk) 22:00, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I consider the disorganized set of distributed computing resources available via the Internet, through search engines and wikis, to be a "clever" system. A natural language query can be submitted; a series of computers translates that query into machine-readable form, transmits it over a network, processes the query, locates resources, and delivers a meaningful answer - entirely transparently. For example, I can ask "the internet" a question, like "what do pandas eat", and get an answer - without ever knowing anything about how computers process data. The ensemble of technologies, including computer networking and routing, HTTP, web services, natural language processing, wikis, and distributed computing, all result in an answer to virtually any kind of question I can pose. Nimur (talk) 22:27, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I sat through a painful lecture a long time ago title "AI is Dead". The point is that the ideas of AI in the 60s and 70s were abandoned during the 80s (to be overly general). The main reason is that we don't have a need for another human, so why make an artificial human? We need machines that are better at certain tasks than humans are. So, we end up with "clever" machines for specific uses. For example, it is well known that computers can trade stocks better than humans. It used to be assumed you had to be real clever to profit in the stock market. Now, you just have to be a computer running a clever program. -- kainaw™ 23:59, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't buy the "We gave up doing AI because we don't need it" argument. It was flat out too hard. So we're doing all of the bits around the edges - speech, language comprehension, vision, robotics, knowledge representation, etc. All of those fields are producing great results - and what was being attempted before wasn't - an nobody likes failing. SteveBaker (talk) 00:08, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Play with http://www.20q.net for a while and tell me it's not clever? ;) But it's not really AI.. Vespine (talk) 00:14, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

And presumably any true A.I. would need to combine all of these things. Our own brains have separate centers for language, visual processing, speech, etc., and even within those centers separate places for spatial thinking, abstract thinking, mathematical thinking, etc. I think cog sci has shown pretty clearly that the idea that brain intelligence is just emergent from throwing a bunch of neurons together has been pretty dead for a long time (just like throwing a bunch of transistors together does not make a CPU—there's a lot of complicated engineering involved to get everything to work together correctly). Today we would probably say that A.I. is not just one problem but a bunch of interconnected problems. Artificial intelligence has more details on this. As for "cleverest A.I." system, I think I'd have to agree with those who say that by itself that is not quite a well-formed question (or at least no better formed than asking who the cleverest person is). We have machines that can do very clever things with communication, data, visuals, language, etc. None of them can do anything more than an illusion of "general intelligence," and not a great one at that, but in specific intelligences, there are probably sure winners. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:56, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Complete System restore for Medion Akoya

Hi everybody we have a problem with our Medion Akoya, model number: WIM 2180. We have a password on it which my dad has forgotten. We need to perform a complete system restore on the laptop. Is there anybody who knows how to do this? Any help appreciated. Thanks, Hadseys 21:23, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Is the password just the windows administrator password? If so, google for "reset vista password", or "reset XP password" as appropriate, and you'll find methods to do this without zapping the whole system. Or do you mean the BIOS password? -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:31, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

TCP/IP weirdness.

Network programming is not my strong point. I'm trying to get a very basic TCP/IP communication going between a Linux box and a Windows-7 machine for a little project I'm doing in my spare time at home.

To keep the explanation simple, I'm using the code from [25] to send a TCP/IP packet from a client to a server - which simply sends the packet content back again. I'm compiling the identical code under g++ under Linux and Cygwin under Windows. I have the pair of programs (client and server) use port 5010.

1. The program works fine when I run the server on Windows-7 - the client works on both the Linux box and the Windows box.
2. The program works fine when I run the server under Linux - but ONLY if the client is also running under Linux.
3. Nothing works if I run the server under Linux and the client under Windows.

The Windows machine is running "Symantec Endpoint Protection" and the firewall is turned on. I tried creating a custom firewall rule in case port 5010 was disabled - but I've never played with that stuff before - and it's perfectly possible that I messed up. However, because everything works in case (1) above, I don't see how it could be a problem of port blocking.

This is all running on my home LAN via a LinkSys router.

Help!

SteveBaker (talk) 22:44, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

So the server, if running on Linux, is only reachable from the machine itself. Sounds like the Linux machine has a firewall enabled too ? Unilynx (talk) 22:51, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Also check to ensure SELinux is not blocking network traffic. -- kainaw™ 23:54, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

<smacks forehead> that was it - disabling the Linux firewall fixes it. Many thanks! SteveBaker (talk) 00:05, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

As in all such matters, Wireshark is your friend - in this case you have the luxury of running it on both parties, so you can see if the packet was sent ok, received ok, and delivered (os->app) ok, and you get a better insight into failure that ECONNREFUSED will give you. It might be instructive to temporarily turn one or t'other firewalls back on to see what they really do - some barf your SYN immediately with a RST/ACK, others drop the SYN and vexingly play possum. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:30, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Yeah - I should probably do that - however, I was hoping for a quick fix and I got one! Putting in a custom "Additional Service" for my new software even allowed me to turn the Linux firewall back on. SteveBaker (talk) 00:58, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

March 22

Microsoft Groove

What is the use of Microsoft Grove? --Extra999 (Contact ^me + _contribs) 04:14, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

See Microsoft Groove. I feel the opening paragraph sums it up very well. -- kainaw™ 04:17, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

What are the future prospects for inserting highlights, annotations, and html anchors into other people's websites?

I did a google search for "annotate a website", and I was really excited by this service.

1. Unfortunately, this particular service ("Jump Knowledge") has been discontinued. Do you know of any good alternatives that offer the same services?
2. I think that services like this would revolutionize the work of quoting, paraphrasing, or commenting on other people's work (including in academia, law, of course Wikipedia, and probably everything else). Is it generally understood that services like this will grow in availability and popularity? (Is this something that everyone knew about but me?) If not, what are the obstacles to making services like this succeed?

Cheers, Andrew Gradman ^talk/_WP:Hornbook 07:10, 22 March 2010 (UTC) (editing from an IP address, for complicated reasons, as 207.237.228.236)

• Following up on my own question, I found Web_annotation. This is still a novel idea for me. Please refer me to other resources if you can. Andrew Gradman ^talk/_WP:Hornbook —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.237.228.236 (talk) 07:25, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

It's inevitable. ¦ Reisio (talk) 08:41, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

lib to java class/.net il ?!

Is it (at least theoritically) possible to convert .lib/.o/.so/.dll files to java (JVM/.class) or .NET (CLR/il) ?! --V4vijayakumar (talk) 09:50, 22 March 2010 (UTC)