Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 April 30

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April 30

How to record high definition programming for watching later without an unwanted TiVo subscription

I have DirecTV with high definition. I am looking for a way to record high definition programs without a subscription so I can watch them later. I have searched and so far it seems impossible for people in the USA to do this without a subscription.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder says "Digital video recorders cannot record from a high definition digital audio/video source such as HDMI or DVI, due to restrictions imposed by High Definition Content protection". I do not want to burn off the shows, just to record them to watch later. Slashdot had a thread recommending building a computer with MythTV software, but I don't know if that will work for stuff that's not over the air. I also don't want to record them to a removable media that has bad quality or a storage capacity that is limited so I'd have to swap disks constantly.

Anyone know? William Ortiz (talk) 09:39, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't realize that digital video recorders had that restriction, making them essentially useless. I was thinking an ATSC tuner card for your computer would not be so restricted. However, I can't find one with an HDMI or DVI input and they don't seem able to record 1080p (1920x1080), the most they can even display is (1600x1200): (http://www.videohelp.com/oldguides/comptvcards). StuRat (talk) 13:56, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Just FYI, as far as I can tell that list seems to be of analog TV tuner cards, and in any case they seem to be European models, and so would presumably use DVB even if they were digital. Googling for atsc tuner card or 1080p tuner card seems to give more relevant results. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:02, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I actually started out with those searches, but when it got down to the details, it looks as though most "1080p tuner cards" only accept 1080p as input, but can't display or record at 1920×1080 resolution, but rather only at some lower res. If you've found one that will really display and record at 1080p, I'd love to know about it so I can buy one. StuRat (talk) 18:52, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

There are cards available that can decode cable HDTV , you will have to do research to find out what cards work with whatever type of signal you are getting. -- 209.30.160.76 (talk) 19:01, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I was looking and it appears that YPbPr cables (the analog high def connections) don't have that copying restriction. William Ortiz (talk) 01:12, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

case analysis of sun microsystem

hi plese tell me about sun microsystem. i need some information for economy of sun microsystem,allso technology,global. so as soon send me ans. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.237.2.226 (talk) 01:35, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

For starters, lets look at Sun Microsystems and Google Finance. I hope that while you are working with these two sources (and pages that are linked in them), someone intelligent and conversant with the topic will be here to guide you. Kushal (talk) 01:59, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

You also need to find news articles ... recent ones like this one. Kushal (talk) 21:46, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Flash + InDesign = nowt

Why can't i copy - paste anything from InDesign to Flash (CS3) ? It would make my life so much easier . Boomshanka (talk) 02:53, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

In the future you probably will be able to, but my guess is that Adobe hasn't had time to make them as seamless (it only acquired Flash a few years ago, previous to that it was developed by a totally different company). There are probably ways, though, to export something from InDesign in a way that it could be imported into Flash—say, as a PDF or an AI file. Give that a shot, maybe? --69.110.41.71 (talk) 04:42, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I've tried everything - nothing works very well at all between the 2 - Flash doesn't recognise InDesign EPS, SVG, not gonna even try XML. Just crazy i can paste text into notepad but not into an app made by the same company. As you say its probably just teething issues between Adobe and the Macromedia formerly known as .Boomshanka (talk) 21:41, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

A surely easy PHP question

I have some filenames stored in arrays that contain the text "\1" (as in "myFolder\1991-blah.pdf"). I didn't realize it until right now but \1 is apparently treated as a special character in the same way that \n is a newline and \t is a tab. Sooo... it's not displaying correctly. Surely there's some way to process it as a literal string? I've tried using htmlentities() but that didn't work at all, nor did addslashes() produce anything useful. For fairly obvious reasons Google isn't telling me anything about it that I can find. What's going on, and how do I fix it? --69.110.41.71 (talk) 08:01, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

In all C-like languages, backslash ("\") within a string is an escape character that introduces an escape sequence. If we're talking about just a few filenames, you can say "\\1..." and that will produce the results you desire because "\\" is a complete escape sequence that resolves down to just "\". If you have many strings, a different approach may be required.

Atlant (talk) 13:04, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

At the risk of asking the obvious, but did you ensure that you addslashes when the element was added to the array, or after? Also, [PHP.net reference] may be handy - it is rare that the comments there aren't illuminating. -- Ironmandius (talk) 13:35, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Note that, as the documentation page indicates, addslashes() is for things like SQL and HTTP/session variables where the backslash character might be re-interpreted by a parser engine other than the compiler/interpreter. If these are string literals in your code, then by the time they are in memory it is already too late to escape the backslashes; that part is done by the compilation step.

So if you have the string hard-coded in your source file, you'll have to escape the backslashes ('a\b\c' to 'a\\b\\c') yourself; if you are reading them from outside your source code (e.g. from a file, database, form data, etc.) they should be fine for general use, but you might have to think about escaping them with addslashes() if you use them for SQL, cookie/session storage (in some rare cases), etc. --Prestidigitator (talk) 16:29, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

check out this page note the difference in behavior between single and double quotes. It is a good rule of thumb to always use single quotes unless you know that you will be doing variable substitution (including \n). -- Diletante (talk) 17:23, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

This doesn't really help in this case (at least if you want to be technically correct) because it is the backslash character itself that is desired in the string. Because of the need to include single-quotes in single-quoted strings, the backslash character still serves as an escape for itself and a single-quote; the single-quoted string representing a backslash character in source code is: '\\'. --Prestidigitator (talk) 22:47, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

RAM

When i was building my computer i did it with upgrading it a couple months later in mind. Hence i only built it with one stick of 1GB DDR2 5300/667 Ram. That was a little after the ram price shot straight up. Im in the market for some PC-6400/800 RAM because apparently it works better with the Core 2 Duo. Anyway Basically i have 32 bit XP, should i just buy a new 2gb stick and throw out the old one (cause it brings down the speed) or will 4gb (Really only 3.5Gb because of XP) make that much of a difference.

One question you need to ask (but I, unfortunately, can't answer for you) is "Can your memory controller operate two banks of memory in parallel?" If it can, you definitely want to populate your machine with pairs of sticks of equal size.

Atlant (talk) 12:55, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Memory speed is only a minor contribution to a computer's performance (as a rule of thumb, doubling memory speed will give you a 5% increase in overall performance). Don't worry about the fact that the computer memory will be running at 667MHz rather than 800MHz. --Carnildo (talk) 20:00, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Clicking on one webiste; leading to another

Hi guys.

So the situation is this: whenever I try and access the BBC News homepage at http://news.bbc.co.uk/ I am instead presented with some Chinese webpage seemingly related to Baidu. No matter how I try to access BBC News, whether by typing in the URL or by clicking on a link, it always takes me to the Chinese webpage. I just now managed to circumvent the problem by instead typing in http://news.bbc.co.uk/default.stm which does take me to the correct website. But what the hell is going on here? I don't think I'm gonna like the answer... Anyway, thanks in advance. Hammer Raccoon (talk) 11:50, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Are you in China? If so "censorship" would spring to mind. -- Q Chris (talk) 12:32, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Hahaha, no. Unless, without me noticing, Gordon Brown has decreed that his own citizens aren't allowed to read BBC News, I don't think that's the answer. :) Hammer Raccoon (talk) 12:39, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Something has hijacked your hosts file and placed a bad mapping within it (so that "news.bbc.co.uk" translates to the evil website's IP address)? Atlant (talk) 12:57, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Sounds likely. Is there a remedy? Hammer Raccoon (talk) 13:46, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Go to your hosts file and restore it to the default. If you give me a moment I shall get the default hosts file and location. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.219.8.231 (talk) 13:50, 30 April 2008 (UTC) File is located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc under Windows XP and Vista 32. Unsure for the x64 versions. Open the file with notepad, and replace whatever text is in it with "127.0.0.1 localhost" without the quotes There was a lot of other text but it was all comented out using #s. If you can't save then save it somewhere else (call it hosts), as a .txt file, then remove the .txt and paste it into the above directory. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.219.8.231 (talk) 13:54, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

If you can get to the site using the full URL, it seems that your host file should be OK. There may be other malware infecting your system though. You should definitely download and run Spybot and a decent virus scanner. If you do want to check out your hosts file, in Windows XP it is located in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc. --LarryMac | Talk 13:57, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Does this link go to the BBC website for you: http://212.58.226.77 (that's the IP for news.bbc.co.uk)? - Akamad (talk) 23:10, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for all your help. I already had Spybot - I gave that a run, and then I tried messing about with the host file as 212.219.8.231 recommended. Anyway, I don't know what exactly did the trick, but the problem seems to be rectified. Thanks again all. Hammer Raccoon (talk) 18:53, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

LMA Manager 2009

Is their any info on Lma manager 2009? is it comeing out etc?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.115.175.247 (talk) 12:01, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Need the 1.1.0. patch for Betrayal in Antara

Some time ago I accidentally deleted the 1.1.0 update patch for this game. The Sierra website is blocked from work so I'm looking for some benevolent helper to please download it for me and email it to betrayal@trashymail.com (throw-away email address). If you do it within the next hour that would be great, else on Monday please (we've got an extra-long weekend, starting tomorrow). Thanks in advance. Zunaid©® 12:26, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

How big was that patch, approximately? Email servers usually don't allow messages bigger than, say, 10 megs (and a binary file encoded to support those old servers increases by ~30%) - mostly for performance reasons. Also I don't think throw-away boxes allow attachments at all. --grawity 16:11, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

A quick the 1.1.0. patch for Betrayal in Antara shows that WINE has a patch of the same name for Ubuntu. It is probably not what you want. Are you running windows? Which version? Where is this patch that you want? Kushal (talk) 11:47, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

It's Monday again, dam the weekend went by too quickly! I was looking for the Windows patch, sorry I should have provided some URLs where it could be obtained from. But never mind, I clocked it yesterday without crashing :) Thanks for all your help though. Zunaid©® 09:23, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Torrent weirdness

I have reason to believe that some files recently downloaded through Bittorrent (official client) are still being accessed after the program has been terminated. I sometimes notice that my hard drive (this is a laptop) is grinding a lot, and I looked into it a little bit further this time (without rebooting) and noticed that in resource monitor I can see that the file I've just completed downloading is being read at an alarming rate... though I must admit it would be impossible for me to upload at that rate so it must be local? It happens to other files too, but I don't always have this problem with Bittorrent. I can't terminate any of these processes either. Anybody know anything about this? 222.158.118.44 (talk) 13:18, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

This may sound like an obvious question, but are you sure you really shut down the BitTorrent client? Many programs like that are designed so that when you close the window, the program still keeps running in the background. Assuming you're using Windows, check if the program's icon is still there icon tray in the taskbar (lower right corner of the screen, at least on XP by default). You may need to right-click the icon and explicitly select "Quit" from the menu to make the program really stop running. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:02, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Another possibility could be that it's an anti-virus program or something like that which is scanning the file. I've never noticed any particular problems like that myself, but I suppose it's possible. That would explain why you'd have a hard time killing the process, at least. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:05, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I'm sure the program and all of its processes were terminated, and I don't have any virus-protection running right now but my hard drive is still chugging about (I've rebooted now). It's always svchost.exe that is listed as the culprit in resource manager, but there are no processes that I can terminate, so I dunno how to stop it, or even where it's coming from : /. 222.158.163.22 (talk) 16:23, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

What happens if you disconnect it from the network? If it still thrashes, then it must be something else. You could do a network trace, but it requires a bit of savvy to interpret. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 19:06, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Since you say it's local, this may be a backup function enabled somewhere. Have a look at the I/O in the task manager and see what is running. I had a Norton version running on my system that was driving me up the wall till I ripped it out and replaced it with something else. XP also copies files from one folder to another occasionally depending on what settings are enabled. --Lisa4edit (talk) 00:01, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I've tried unplugging my computer from the network, virus-cleaned it (something that I rarely do), and emptied some more space on the hard drive. It's quiet for now, but it usually comes back every few days or so so I'll just have to wait. I'm beginning to wonder if it's Vista doing some sort of automatic file defragmentation on the large/new files on my disk or something, like how XP would copy files from folder to folder. I'll look into that when I have time... 222.158.162.42 (talk) 19:20, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

SMART-capable USB enclosures?

I'm looking to put together a storage device to sit in the closet and hold a ton of media. I'm planning on using something like an NSLU2 along with a batch of USB 2.0-enclosed PATA or SATA drives. (And maybe a USB wireless adapter so I don't have to put it in the corner with the cable modem.) Because it'll be using several disks, I'm going to have monitoring set up for it. I'd like to use SMART (presumably through smartmontools) to keep track of the drives' health. I've read that the answer to whether or not SMART will work with a USB-enclosed disk is "maybe", and I don't have the resources to buy one of every brand until I can find one that works. Is there any list of controllers known to work with SMART?

From the smartctl manpage:

The ´sat´ device type is for ATA disks that have a SCSI to  ATA
Translation (SAT) Layer (SATL) between the disk and the operat‐
ing system.  SAT defines two ATA PASS  THROUGH  SCSI  commands,
one  12  bytes  long  and the other 16 bytes long that smartctl
will utilize when this device type is selected. The default  is
the  16  byte  variant  which can be overridden with either ´-d
sat,12´ or ´-d sat,16´.

There was a thread about this on the usb-storage mailing list in 2006, but I haven't seen anything more recent. Has anyone had experience with smartmontools over USB drives, either with PATA or SATA drives in them? grendel|khan 17:04, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know that the NSLU2 supports SMART. I don't recall seeing it on the web page; the specs do show that it can sens an email on a drive error.[1] Even if it did, you would have to have a way to monitor SMART over the web. I've never looked at the NSLU2 via SNMP so I don't know if it has any status in that manner.

I built a NAS box similar to this. I picked up two NSLU2s on a closeout sale and four IDE to USB adapters. Mounted them neatly in an old PC enclosure using the PC power supply to run the drives. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 19:01, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I won't be using their regular firmware. I'll get myself a copy of OpenSlug or the like, which pretty much lets you run full-featured Linux on it. I'll see if I can run nagios on it to provide me with notifications in the event that something goes wrong with the drives. (I suppose I could use SNMP, but I'm used to nagios, and hopefully it'll fit in the resource limit.) If I can get SMART to work on a USB-enclosed disk from my own machine, I can get it to work on the NSLU2. It's that first part that's the rub. grendel|khan 19:54, 30 April 2008 (UTC)