Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 November 4

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 4

Adobe Media Player

How come after viewing my saved favorites only once they automatically disappear, even though I download them in order to watch them? It even tells me that I'm not online when I try to re-download them, even though I clearly am. Is that normal of the program? --Crackthewhip775 (talk) 04:26, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Status of Apache log for downlaod of a file

When user downloads a file from web server, apache access_logs show 200 OK followed by size of the file downloaded. Does this 200 OK mean that the complete file was downloaded by the user successfully? I suspect that Apache sends file and closes connection and puts log entry. (Client browser will receive FD_CLOSE socket event, but client should continue reading remaining data on the socket). But at users end, there may be network error just before receiving the last few bytes, and user may not receive complete file. Or does Apache waits for client to close the socket connection and only then it puts the log entry? manya (talk) 06:59, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

I just started to download a large file and cut off the transmission halfway through. At that point Apache logged with 200/OK, and showed the file size I actually downloaded. 200/OK just means which HTTP error code got sent to the client, which happens before file transfer even starts. Note also that Apache won't wait until the socket is closed since modern browsers will do more than one request on a connection (constant opening and closing of connections was one of the major slowdowns of standard HTTP 1.0). --Sean 14:54, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

REPOST: Stopping Excel from Minimizing sheets

Didn't get an answer, and it is driving me crazy. DOR (HK) (talk) 07:29, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

---

I’ve Googled and run around the tech blogs, but no one seems to come close to a sensible answer to this one. When I copy-and-paste a column of numbers from a website spreadsheet (e.g., http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIAUCNS/downloaddata?cid=9), and paste it into my own Excel spreadsheet, two things happen. First, I am instantly jerked back to the source web page (not such a big deal). Second, and this drives me crazy, the Excel page (e.g., “Sheet 1”) pops out of maximized size (the sheet, not the program, shrinks). This makes the scroll bars disappear and causes a host of other problems.

Stats: XP Professional SP2; Office 2003

Is there a simple way to tell Excel to knock it off? DOR (HK) (talk) 05:39, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

(Yes, I used "Special Paste," but it didn't help.)

---

I copied and pasted that data into excel using all three file formats and it worked just fine. My stats are the same as yours. Which file format are you using? Zain Ebrahim (talk) 10:17, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to look at this. I’m on MS Office Excel 2003 in XP Professional. The file format is straight default, nothing unusual at all.

With some website .xls data, the “special paste” option leads to choices such as Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet Object, Picture (Enhanced Metafile), Bitmap, etc. I choose “text” and that’s usually fine. But at the Fed, and many other sites, copying a column or line of numbers to paste into my own spreadsheet results in the worksheet reducing itself to less than maximum. I also frequently get a new (blank) worksheet inserted on top of my own, and that worksheet is labeled “Object”.

The Fed example is here http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TB1YA/downloaddata?cid=116 (scroll down for “Download Data”).DOR (HK) (talk) 07:34, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

0x80004005 error when I try to register vbscript.dll

I'm getting this one whenever I try to register the library, since I can't use VBScript; however, when I try to log on another account, I can register the said DLL. I need some help on this! Blake Gripling (talk) 07:43, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft big through illegal copies

Did Microsoft become big thanks to illegal copies? And did they plan that? (Yes, pov, I know.) The first question is almost rhetorical. msWindows became the OS standard because so many illegal copies were going around. (Although there are probably many other factors too.) But this makes me wonder if Microsoft planned this. Is it true that msWindows was (and is?) very easy to hack? If I'm not mistaken, one could retry the installation code an infinite number of times. So it's just a matter of letting a computer try all the possibilities and it'll give you the code within a week or so (yes?). Then spread that copy along with the code and the world uses msWindows. This is not just easy. This is a no-brainer. Below a hacker almost because there is no challenge. But is it true? Amrad (talk) 09:09, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft would certainly have a smaller market share if it wasn't for "illegal" copies, but their profits would be higher. Maybe. --wj32 ^t/c 09:56, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

I doubt it. Bill Gates was strongly opposed to piracy from the beginning (the 1970s) and became a leading critic of it. Piracy doesn't make business sense because you have to make up the lost sales revenue by either raising prices, cutting prices (to increase sales), or by cutting costs. You can't really stop piracy, anyway. Microsoft's copy protection isn't as evil as Adobe's, but it is still stricter than many. You have to enter in a serial number and then activate the software. The usage share of Windows would drop slightly if it were impossible to pirate it, but it would still dominate the industry due to the proprietary nature of Macs. Remember that Windows became popular before the rise of mass Internet piracy.--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 10:33, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that's how they got big - and I'm 100% sure piracy had nothing to do with it. You have to look at the history. They were a fairly small company with essentially one product (their BASIC interpreter) that they'd ported to a number of personal computers (of the kind that mostly used cassette tape for storage). As 5.25" floppy disk drives started to become dirt cheap, CP/M (from Digital Research) became the 500lb gorilla - nearly everyone used it on 8 bit floppy-based hardware. When 16 bit hardware started to appear, CP/M-86 was a minimal port of CP/M and was (frankly) a bit pathetic - and when IBM decided to make their PC, they wanted to talk to Digital Research about getting it on their new hardware - but somehow Digital Research didn't pay them enough attention and Microsoft stepped in. It also helped that IBM wanted a BASIC interpreter in ROM as an alternative to the floppy-based operating system - and it's a little-remembered fact that the original IBM PC could be booted into a ROM-based BASIC interpreter just like an Apple ][ or a TRS-80 - since Microsoft were already the number one shipper of ROM-based BASIC interpreters, that must have helped IBM's decision.

The first version of DOS (PC-DOS - for the IBM PC only) wasn't much more than a clone of CP/M-86 - and it was just as pathetic - but Microsoft at least took the time to work with IBM where Digital Research just said "here is our CP/M-86 product - use it". I suspect that was because Microsoft had the experience of dealing with computer-makers and DR did not. Remember that every home computer had needed a slightly different version of BASIC - where Digital Research had written their "BIOS" layer that allowed the computer vendors to write their own BIOS and then take an unmodified copy of CP/M and it would just work without porting. That meant that Digital Research didn't need to work with the hardware vendors - where Microsoft did. That one fact (which was pretty much luck on the part of Bill Gates) explains 100% of the remaining history. The BIOS in your modern PC shares a lot of ancient history with the CP/M BIOS.

MS-DOS was just PC-DOS with a different label on it - and it was a way for Microsoft to sell clones of PC-DOS to clone PC makers. The success of PS-DOS was simply due to the success of the IBM PC. Businesses had been sticking to big mainframes and minicomputers - even though the desktop computer revolution was in full swing because they didn't know who to talk to or what to do. When IBM stepped into the market with their PC, businesses loved it to death...that pushed PC-DOS to fame. When IBM didn't bother to stamp on clone-makers - and their add-on board hardware made it possible for third parties to make cards to plug into the IBM PC (a thing that was unheard of at the time!) - this fed the PC-clone fire. As PC's took off, MS-DOS took off too - and before you could blink, the PC and MS-DOS were the only game in town. CP/M-86 was forgotten and cassette-tape machines went the way of the dodo (except perhaps in the UK where Sinclair was hitting the ultra-low-end market) - and the only competition for the PC were the AtariST and the Amiga - whom businesses simply ignored (stupidly, IMHO). By the time Apple woke up and made the Mac, Microsoft had gotten big enough and evil enough that they could dominate the market by simply leveraging their near-monopoly. When their competitors tried to sell applications that competed with Microsofts' own applications - MS simply changed the OS so that the competitor's software either wouldn't run or would run so badly that it would be unusable. The rest is just a continuation of that trend.

SteveBaker (talk) 14:02, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

The reference desk is usually for factual information... not for biased essays, incorrect assertions ("pretty much luck on the part of Bill Gates"), incorrect information ("MS-DOS was just PC-DOS with a different label on it") and blatant lies ("MS simply changed the OS so that the competitor's software either wouldn't run or would run so badly that it would be unusable"). {{rpa}}. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 21:25, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm - aside from the fact that you are being incredibly rude (and have violated WP:NPA in a pretty serious waythere's never an admin around when you need one) - you are also wrong:

• PC-DOS versus MS-DOS: According to PC-DOS "PC-DOS remained a rebranded version of MS-DOS until 1993."...so I guess I'm right on that one.
• Luck: You took issue with my statement that: "That meant that Digital Research didn't need to work with the hardware vendors - where Microsoft did. That one fact (which was pretty much luck on the part of Bill Gates) explains 100% of the remaining history.". So are you telling me that Gates planned it that way? I'd like to see evidence for that. He chose to rewrite the same BASIC interpreter over and over again for different home computers - rather than providing a clean portability layer and shipping the same interpreter to everyone. I think most programmers would tell you that what Microsoft did would ordinarily be a poor strategy. So was that a cunning plan? Well, no - the way I understand it, IBM executives tried to get DRI to sign up to work on the IBM PC - and it literally came down to the owner of the company not bothering to come to the meeting with the IBM executives. Microsoft stepped in and filled the gap - but the fact that there WAS a gap - was not a clever strategy of Bill Gate's making - they were just lucky that DRI dropped the ball. Had DRI gotten the contract for the IBM PC - it would be DRI who owned 90% of the PC operating system market - not Microsoft. So I think it's a perfectly reasonable statement that 100% of what followed was down to sheer luck on the part of Gates.
• Microsoft have an extremely nasty reputation for crippling other people's software. Take WordPerfect - when Windows added truetype fonts, Microsoft provided two ways for scrolling text efficiently. The one that they documented and made public for WordPerfect to use was dog slow...for no particularly good reason. WORD on the other hand used a secret, undocumented, Windows function that scrolled truetype fonts at acceptable speeds. It's hard to justify why you'd fail to document the efficient interface - or indeed why you'd have the horribly inefficient version in the first place. One might argue that they considered the fast interface to be somehow 'iffy' - but yet Microsoft used that interface for their very own flagship product. In that case, it worked. Word Perfect went from dominating the market to being used almost nowhere within a year. Word just wasn't that much better...except that Word Perfect became almost unusuable overnight. I could come up with many MANY occasions when MS did that - but rather than get further off-topic, I'll just refer you to the many court cases that Microsoft have lost for doing this exact kind of thing.

So, I stand by what I wrote - it's fact - and I can prove it sentence by sentence. If you have other reasons for wishing for my imminent scrotectomy - feel free to say specifically what you mean and I'll do my best to reply to them ^{possibly in a high, squeaky voice}. SteveBaker (talk) 02:24, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

I can't believe I just read all of your two posts. Talk about long! Anyway, I disagree with the statement, "That one fact ... explains 100% of the remaining history." Apple could have won the war with Microsoft if they had sold their OS to other vendors from the beginning. As it turned out, though, their products were too expensive. Windows 95 was the best OS on the market when it was introduced, and Windows 3 was pretty darn good. It wasn't until Mac OS 10.4 Tiger (2005) that Apple regained an edge. When Apple finally made competitive products, they were able to justify their higher prices, and they began to regain market share. So it's not an issue of making a deal or two with the right partner. It's really about building a good enough product and selling it at a fair price. You also mentioned uncompetitive behavior. But in cases such as browsers, Microsoft really beat Netscape into the ground after they started building a better browser (IE 4 on).--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 04:44, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft was already well established as a monopoly with DOS - long before Windows 3. We're talking about back in the era of DOS. It's debatable as to whether Apple could have turned things around - by releasing their OS to other vendors - but Apple are not (nor have ever been) a software company. They make their money from the hardware. Actually, Apple did Microsoft a favor there - when Digital Research tried to get back into the game with their "GEM" windowing system on the PC, Apple sued the pants off of them and that resulted in a GEM that was so crippled as to be practically unusable. When Microsoft infringed Apple's IP in the exact same way with early versions of Windows - Apple let it slide. As for the "better browser" argument - I agree that IE4 made an impact by sheer feature growth - but that was not the finding of the monopoly hearings in the US. SteveBaker (talk) 15:28, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

{{rpa}} - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 06:31, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

(If there is an admin handy - can we please take this to Jimmi's talk page and explain that he's not allowed to talk like this?) SteveBaker (talk) 15:28, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

I removed two personal attacks above. EdJohnston (talk) 16:25, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

You may already know of it, but for a good overview of the early days and evolution of the microcomputer, including the rise of Microsoft, I highly recommend the 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds. Check the video section of your local library. If they don't have it, ask a librarian - they might be able to get it. -- Tcncv (talk) 00:44, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

download

I can't find any downloads for the game Fuji Golf. Could you please direct me to one? 121.219.2.201 (talk) 10:18, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

That's not free software - I think it would be illegal to do that. SteveBaker (talk) 14:08, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

It was released in 1991, so I doubt Microsoft is going to make any more money off of it. 136.165.49.119 (talk) 21:46, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

There are always torrents. But I really don't think that's a good idea--Dlo2012 (talk) 17:56, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

The Pirate Bay [1] --wj32 ^t/c 09:02, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

AOL

Why the **** has AOL Hometown been shut down?! There are some pages on there that I really need to visit! 121.219.2.201 (talk) 11:21, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

AOL isn't required to host Hometown if they don't want to. Check the Wayback Machine and see if the pages you want are cached. Also, keep in mind that the Internet is not static. There is no guarantee that anything you find today will be there tomorrow. -- kainaw™ 18:04, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

a gentle start to versioning....

For the past few years, the only programming I did was quick systems administration tasks (and a few other things) in Perl from the Windows command line. Everything was a one-liner. My only form of versioning was the up and down arrows (ie the command history). I would run it, if it worked, I added the next part. If it didn't work anymore I just pressed up and tried to get it working, repeating this until until it worked (this was great: I could just guess at what "might" be the syntax and if I was wrong I'd have it right soon enough) but if I really messed up with the change I tried to introduce and couldn't get it working no-how, I would just press up twice to get to the version before that. Worked great.

Well, recently I decided to start using Python, and it isn't as conducive to the one-liner.

So I started doing this. Instead of up and down arrows, every single change I made I copied the py file, like this: 1something.py 2something.py etc. If I really broke for example 23something.py then I would delete it and go back to 22something.py

It works okay but it's more work after my next change is okay to copy a file and iterate the number it starts with, close the project, and open the copied version, than to just press the up arrow and continue editing!

So I'd like a gentle introduction to a real versioning system. I want something that I can use my old, test-heavy approach, where every single change I immediately tested (and thereby committed as a version in the command history), and this only took a press of the up key and the return key.

Can anyone give me an easy introductory tip (windows or an online service) that would be just as simple. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.124.209.97 (talk) 13:21, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

If I were you - I'd install 'Subversion' (often abbreviated to the name of the command-line version: 'svn'). Its a full-blown, industrial-strength version control system with all the bells and whistles - but it has a fairly low entry-point on the learning curve and it's OpenSourced and fully portable across operating systems. Once you've created your repository, you can boil down the (huge) command set to just four commands: add, remove, update and commit. Use 'add' and 'remove' to add and remove files from the directory you're working in - use 'commit' to put your changes into the repository - and 'update' to get an updated set of files from the repository. This will get you started - then you can learn about reversion, making branches, tagging versions in various ways, resolving changes made by two or more people at the same time, etc, etc. You can use Subversion remotely over the net - but you can also keep your repository on your local machine where you can easily wipe it out and start over if you make a mistake. There are many great SVN tutorials on the net. If you have a strong aversion to command-line tools, you can use one of the many graphical front-ends to subversion such as 'SmartSVN' - I believe some of those are OpenSourced, but I don't use any of them because I'm a command-line junkie. I've worked on million-line-of-code projects that used subversion - and I keep all that I do at home using it too (even my firefox preferences file and letters to the bank are version controlled and kept in my repository!) SteveBaker (talk) 13:39, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

For a windows explorer-integrated graphical interface, you might want to try TortoiseSVN. After reading Steve's recommendation, I decided to try out subversion, and use my linux box as the server. I downloaded TortoiseSVN on my windows box as the client. First impression: very promising. To get it working with this setup requires some work though, and reading the docs carefully, as well as googling for error messages. Probably, getting TortoiseSVN working on a single machine is easier, but I haven't tried that. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 17:54, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Getting TortoiseSVN to work on a single Windows machine is easy. Installing is just point-and-click. TortoiseSVN adds its own menu to the Explorer, and you use the option "Create repository here" to initialize a repository (where the versions are stored). Then you check out the repository with the option SVN Checkout and now you have a versioned working directory. Put your Python script there, and select "SVN commit" after each good version, or "SVN revert" if you want to go back to the previous version.

As noted, a command line subversion client is also useful, and may be easier to add into your workflow - the key commands there are svn commit -m "testing" and svn revert. One approach would be to replace your command python something.py with svn commit -m "testing" && python something.py in order to really save a version before each and every test run, but this has drawbacks: first, it stores a version even if nothing changed, and second, after a test run it's now a bit more complicated to get the old version back. 84.239.160.166 (talk) 18:30, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

reset Keyboard

i dropped my laptop, and now some letters come out different from how they should, eg, a b c d e f g h 5 1 2 3 0 n 6 - q r s t 4 v w x y z. please help me, how can this be fixed, at the moment i have to copy and paste 50% of my letters. took me 25 mins to write this —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.18.34.11 (talk) 20:22, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

uh, your num lock is on? If you look VERY carefully at the letters that come out as 5, 1, 2, 3, instead of i, j, k, l you should see (maybe in a very different color that's for example blue on black keys, or a weird part of the key [upper-left, etc]) the numbers will be painted on them. They might be hard to spot. Just press num lock again (it should be in the top row somewhere) and you'll be all set. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.124.214.224 (talk) 20:42, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you so much, you are a real life saver! If i can ever do anything for you just say the word! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.18.34.11 (talk) 20:59, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

"The word". Sorry. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 07:58, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Squid cache

Can someone help me understand the sorts of things squid cache does by perhaps giving me examples of what it is used for on Wikipedia --RMFan1 (talk) 23:07, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Squid is used by wikipeda as a cache. When you ask for a Wikipedia page, you don't ask the php scrips and database directly, you ask the squid cache. The first time you do this is passes the request on to the php and database to really generate the page. Squid remembers the contents of that page, so the next person that requests it can just get the copy which squid has remembered, without needing to hit the php and database again. Using the cache reduces the load that wikipedia's main servers have to cope with. --h2g2bob (talk) 00:08, 5 November 2008 (UTC)