Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 October 20

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October 20

SPACE BAR

I started looking for a better answer than Shantavira's, but even the space key of the Hansen Writing Balls of the 1870s just has a big space on it. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:10, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Why the space bar on a computer key board is not marked? Any idea? Thank you.123.231.41.145 (talk) 06:08, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Mine has a big space on it. What else would you mark it with?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 07:26, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

A possible ident could be ANY, because non of my keyboards have had an key marked as such. Yet during an install when the comand comes up to press the ANY key, just pressing the space bar always seems to work. --Aspro (talk) 20:35, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Humans are inconsistent. :p ¦ Reisio (talk) 07:46, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Mine is marked with "␣" 66.46.213.4 (talk) 20:17, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Tradition is involved, as with many other aspects of keyboards (e.g. Querty). In the past, keyboards were designed for trained typists, so there wasn't a requirement for the keys to be clearly understood by people glancing at them. Particularly when touch-typing, there's no need to mark it. For some manufacturers, there are probably internationalisation issues - an A is an A in any language, but "space" is something different in German (these days keyboards are very language-specific, but in the old days when you'd type diacritics by backspacing and overtyping, you could type most European languages on the same typewriter). Some typewriters didn't mark the shift key either.[[1]] --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:49, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Doing something a second time in java

Why does a java program or a specific part of a java program usually run much faster the second time it is run, than the first time it is run? Widener (talk) 08:58, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Probably because Java is a runtime compiled language; the first time its run the Java Virtual Machine is actually having to interpret the java byte code, on subsequent executions of that section of code its already compiled and in memory. Benjamint 09:43, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes. Just-in-time compilation is our article on this. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:02, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

SLI

Resolved

I just bought a 27" 2560 x 1440px monitor so my old GTX 460 won't quite cut it for Battlefield 3. I've just had a quick read up on SLI, and it seems that since either scan lines or frames are shared between the cards there would be no point getting a second card better than the existing one (e.g. a 560). Am I right that running in SLI the 560's performance would be limited to what the 460 can do anyway? Benjamint 09:43, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• Will SLI be smart enough to give the 560 a larger share of the workload than the 460 or shall I just save the $40 and get a second 460?

• I see you can actually only run two of the same card in SLI anyway. -- Benjamint 07:59, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Internets

[edit conflict] how internet function? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.210.139.39 (talk) 09:33, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• Feel free to elaborate on your question, its hard to answer with no context. Benjamint 09:57, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
• Data, e.g. Websites, are hosted on server computers. When A browser on a device, e.g. home computer or a phone, accesses a website it sends the address to a DNS which gives an IP Address which can be used to find the server hosting the website that we are looking for. The device can then request to be sent the website data from the server, and the web browser can then interpret that data and display it in a human readable form. Benjamint 09:57, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

That's how the World-wide web works, not the Internet. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 13:58, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Have you looked at our article on Internet? It is rather extensive. Please feel free to ask us to clarify anything in that article. --Mr.98 (talk) 11:32, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Does Internet ever has a plural form? 88.8.75.87 (talk) 13:13, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Internet (with a capital I) is what we call "the Internet". However, internet (with a lower case i) is a network of computers that usually use the Internet Protocol (commonly referred to as TCP/IP). So, it is possible to refer to a bunch of internets since there are more than one of them. -- kainaw™ 13:42, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

So George W. Bush was not wrong when he said: "We can have filters on Internets where public money is spent. " or "We can have filters on internets where public money is spent. " 88.8.75.87 (talk) 14:00, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Referring to the Internet limits what you talk about to strictly what we call "The Internet". If you say internets, you are referring to all networks running Internet Protocol. When I work with the military, I often refer to "internets", not "The Internet". Usually, a couple newbies giggle and assume I'm an old fart that doesn't get it. This happens all the time in politics. For example, a very good explanation of network slowdown due to exceeding network bandwidth is stating that it is like having your pipes clogged. But, as soon as an old politician refers to excessive spam as "clogging the email pipes", everyone laughs and says he is an old fart that doesn't get it. -- kainaw™ 14:05, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I think the incident you're referring to involved a series of tubes, not "pipes". Still, fair point, to some extent. Even Dan Quayle's famous remarks about Mars, though poorly expressed, were not entirely wrong and did relate to some good reasons for a mission. --Trovatore (talk) 02:08, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

I think I've mentioned this beofre somewhere... The common mocking of the tubes bit as suggesting he had no idea idea what he was talking about is misplaced even if it is funny. However the statement still reveals he had no idea what he was talking about as his 'internet' arriving 4 days late was most likely little to do with saturated connections (i.e. not counting servers) anywhere nor streaming movies. Even if the delay was caused by someone overloading email servers by sending lots of movies, that's not exactly 'streaming movies'. (That's presuming it really arrived 4 days late and it wasn't that his staff simply had taken to pretending they'd sent stuff earlier if they got behind schedule since they knew he wouldn't realise.) Our article mentions both points. More generally it seems clear he didn't really get what net neutrality or the bill either and I think many on both sides would agree with that. It's not like companies just dump stuff in to the 'tubes' or don't pay at all, ultimately both sides have to pay for their connection and the reason why the tube is filled with streaming movies is because one side is requesting the content from the other side. Nil Einne (talk) 06:13, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

With reference to the "series of tubes" gaffe: it is evident to me that Ted Stevens had been recently briefed on network neutrality. He attempted to regurgitate an abridged version of the briefing; and the result was a little awkward-sounding, for those who are unfamiliar with network neutrality issues. In truth, he's actually not far off the mark; his terminology was perhaps a bit off, and his specific hypothetical example was not a perfect example. But, network neutrality is a very very very complicated technical topic; and he did manage to summarize it in just two or three sentences. Politicians do not need to convey technical details with precision: that's the role of politically-appointed technical committees. Ted Stevens' brief speech was sufficient to convey this message to people: "there is currently an active debate regarding the role of Government policy-intervention with respect to technical details of the Internet. This debate will affect you, even if you don't understand its technical underpinnings." Many people chose to mock the messenger, instead of listening to his message. Nimur (talk) 17:41, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree that network neutrality is a very complicated issue, but disagree that there was much merit to his message having listened to nearly the entire thing (the end of the 10 min+ audio I listened to seem to be cut off). See for example [2] who is trying to take him seriously but still finds his message flawed. (A more verbatim transcript [3].) The part about letting ISPs manage the issue and don't regulate if there isn't evidence it's needed are relevant but most of the rest of what he was saying falls flat. In particular, his examples are flawed. This leads to the connection congestion (series of tubes/truck) thing being irrelevant since frankly anyone who didn't know that basic level already shouldn't have been taking part in the debate so hopefully it didn't clarify stuff for anyone.

Remember his message was to a meeting of the committee, not say something that came up randomly when he was speaking to a constituent or during a general TV debate during re-election or whatever. And I'm presuming the agenda was known before hand, it's not like he didn't have time to prepare and understand the issues, as I understand it it was after a vote on an amendment. I don't think anyone expects him personally to already understand the specifics of each issue that comes before the Senate or his committee in particular. But part of being part of the legisature means getting the right people to advise you and being able to understand their advice, but it seems this fell down somewhere in the case at hand. And since he was a Senator this is more important then if he was part of the house (and I believe he appropriately has more resources). Whether he had the wrong advisors or just didn't understand their advice I don't know, it doesn't really matter.

Note that the actual technical details of how the internet works are a lot less important then the specifics of what the bill does, how it will affect things etc but you do have to some basic understanding to appreciate the former and unfortunately it seems he didn't really have either. If the only reason for his decision and all he wanted to say was 'don't regulate if there isn't good evidence it's needed' and 'ISPs should be free to manage their traffic how they see fit', then that's all he should have said and it's a decent message although it leads open the question of 'is there really no evidence?' and disagreement over when to regulate so may not convince others who believe differently. (And if you listen to his whole speech it was a far part of what he said.) Instead, he made comments which suggest he didn't really understand several of the other issues at hand which lead to legitimate questioning of whether he understood what he was voting for and why.

As I said earlier, if you believe your 'internet' or e-mail arrived 4 days late because of saturated connections then you don't really understand the issues involved. Similarly, when you start to discuss 'not paying' you have to have some idea of how things work in the first place, like the mix of peering, backbones, etc. You don't have to understand the nitty-gritty technical details, I clearly don't, but it is rather sad if someone who has never worked in the field and has only limited understanding seems to understand slighly more then the person helping draft the law while they were drafting the law. I haven't looked that well in to the amendment since it doesn't concern me and I'm not the one who was drafting it, but as I understand it the amendment was more about who ISPs are allowed to charge not whether they are allowed to charge. If ISPs want to increase the fee to connect to them, the bill didn't stop them and ultimately that costs filters down to everyone. Yet from what was said, it's not clear if it was even understood that both the companies serving content and the customers receiving the content do pay for their connections, the cost of which depends somewhat on that complicated mix of free peering and paid interconnection. (This doesn't mean ISPs shouldn't be allowed to charge third parties for priority access to their customers, simply that it's a different issue.) I don't believe the amendment prevented ISPs from limiting in a traffic neutral per customer basis (so your far less likely to be affected by other people streaming 10 movies). And while I didn't get in to this before, his apparent belief of some sort of gulf between the 'commercial internet' and the 'personal internet' for communication doesn't seem to reflect the realities for a large percentage of internet users even in 2006, heck even his speech where he talks about small businesses seems to hint at that (it's not like all small businesses who use the internet are solely using it for communication). Then there's his flawed suggestion for why the DOD need their own net....

I don't live in the US so perhaps in the US the expectation that those making the laws will have some understanding of the laws they are making or rejecting and their reasons for doing so is for some reason not expected of law makers in the US, if so I guess it's just a cultural issue. (I'm not saying no MP in NZ will make such a stupid speech in parliament or in committee, simply that I think few in NZ would try to argue their speech didn't suggest they didn't know what they were talking about and so probably shouldn't have been involved in drafting the law.)

And on that note, here in NZ net neutrality is nearly unheard of. My current ISP manages traffic very heavily and selectively, bulk downloads or uploads including P2P and quite a few https sites can be heavily restricted at peak times. Youtube is supposed to be fast enough to prevent the need for buffering although in the past this didn't seem to work properly. Microsoft and a few other high priority sites however are very fast (sometimes close to line speed) even at peak times. It's frustrating at times but I put up with it because of the low cost, my traffic cap is a very, very high (for NZ) 250GB but for a fairly low cost and so I clearly don't want this forbidden. On that point, two sites (my ISP's backup site and one TV companies on demand service) are unmetered. All this is fairly common in NZ [4] [5] [6] although my ISP is one of the more extreme when it comes to shaping. (In Malaysia it's even worse, P2P usage can make the connection virtually unusable at least with Telekom who the incumbent telco, as the ISP takes to cutting off connections at random even if they are for normal browsing.)

In other words, I'm not some sort of net neutrality advocate who hates TS, I just think if we look beyond his 'tube' gaffe, his message itself was still rather flawed and was of limited help in furthering the debate. And the debate was after all among those making the laws while making the laws, so I don't think it's unresonable to expect those involved to actually obtain some understanding of what they were talking about which he apparently did not. To be fair, he may not be the only one, there may very well have been other people who said similar things which revealed they didn't understand the issues, but because of his gaffe and the viral effect he is the one people are aware of.

A better example of someone who's message seemed fair (which I came across while researching this answer) but has been mocked would be Al Gore's "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", which have after all been defended by some of those extensively involved in the early days and in the context were the statement was made seems fair comment. In other words I'm not saying that this doesn't happen, in fact even in TS's case this is true, as I myself said the 'tubes' part while funny isn't really so big a deal (it's what else he said that is). I personally have always found the 'internet' part funnier anyway, even my mother who's ability to use computers is frustratingly limited doesn't talk about sending or receiving 'an internet' and I'm not sure whether even public speaking will make her do so.

Nil Einne (talk) 00:17, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

OP wins one (1) free internets!-- Obsidi♠n Soul 17:53, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Sending SMS for free

Do these web-sites offering to send SMSs for free have to pay for sending the SMSs? Somewhere down the line, they will have to connect to a the cell-phone network and pay for it, wouldn't they? 88.8.75.87 (talk) 13:31, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Most (if not all) cell phone companies that support SMS also support email-to-SMS. So, you send a "free" SMS by actually sending an email that the cell phone company converts to an SMS. Soon, this nice service will be killed off by spammers, but for now it is working well. -- kainaw™ 13:35, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Microsoft Office 2010 Product Key

Resolved

I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2010 with my laptop and activated with the product key. I've been using MS Word and Power Point happily for almost a year now. I've just tried to open a MS Publisher file (I've never used this program until now) and it's telling me that the trial version has expired and is asking for my MS Office product key again. I can't find the box anywhere. Is there a way of seeing what product key I entered originally? — Fly by Night (talk) 15:12, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Publisher is not always part of Microsoft Office and might not be covered by your license. See the Office Edition Comparrison Table TheGrimme (talk) 15:17, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I've just twigged... I have the Home version and not the Professional one. Thanks for the speedy reply. — Fly by Night (talk) 15:18, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Permissions on a moved NTFS hard disk

Argh. I've removed my Windows Vista hard disk from my laptop, installed a new hard disk, formatted it, and installed Windows 7 from scratch on the new disk. I installed the Vista hard disk in an external USB case, plugged it in, and can see it as F:. My Windows 7 account is an admin account. When I try opening F:\Users\Tuttle I am told "You don't currently have permission to access this folder. Click Continue to permanently get access to this folder." After clicking Continue, I get another amusing error dialog saying "You have been denied permission to access this folder. To gain access to this folder you will need to use the security tab." Hmm. I didn't use BitLocker, so that's not the problem. OK, so I right-click "Tuttle" and pick the Security tab and click the "Continue" button that says it gives me admin privileges to change the security settings. I choose "Add" then "Everyone" and choose to give it the defaults: "Read & execute", "List folder contents", "Read". I say a short prayer to Kali and click "Apply". I get an "Error Applying Security" alert saying "An error occurred while applying security information to: F:\Users\Tuttle\AppData\Local - Access is denied." That's funny; I thought I was an admin. I click "Continue" and get the same error dialog for a different folder, but this time instead of "Access is denied" at the end, I get "The system cannot find the file specified." Each time I click "Continue" I get a new one of these, either saying that access is denied or the system can't find the file. This repeats hundreds or maybe thousands of times.

Googling and the lamentable Microsoft Answers support site have not helped. Help! Comet Tuttle (talk) 15:58, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

You can go through the security dialogs, but I use the Take Ownership reg file to just do this quick and simple. See http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-take-ownership-to-explorer-right-click-menu-in-vista/ ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:38, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Actually the problem is that the security dialogs aren't working. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:52, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Right click on the drive or folder, select properties → security → advanced → permissions → change permissions → select the name → edit. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 17:12, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

This worked! Thank you! I don't know why this didn't work without the "Advanced" controls. I still got a number of insanely great error dialog boxes complaining that access was denied on particular files, but this time it was only for those "special" shortcuts like "My Pictures". Thanks! Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:56, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

You are welcome. I can't remember what the difference is, but sometimes you just have to start the process from a different point. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:03, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia atom

After suggesting to another user to use atom to see changes in real time, I tried it today. Everything I've tried to view either the atom or rss feed, I have found a delay of up to 10 minutes between the time I see a change on Wikipedia and the time it becomes available in the feed. I have hit refresh/reload on the feed to update them. I've quit and restarted programs to refresh/reload the feed. Nothing gets the latest changes. So, is there a delay in the feeds? If so, can the delay be shortened? -- kainaw™ 17:10, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't see any delay. The following Python program fetches the changes ATOM feed for User:Finlay McWalter/sandbox and shows changes immediately.

#!/usr/bin/python

import feedparser,time
known=set()

while True:
    #print 'fetching...'
    p = feedparser.parse('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Finlay_McWalter/sandbox&feed=atom&action=history')

    for x in p['items']:
        v = x.title+" "+x.date
        if v not in known: print v
        known.add(v)

    time.sleep(10)

-- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:42, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

It must be built into the readers. I gave up and wrote my own reader. It updates in real time. The annoying thing is that all the readers have a "refresh" button, but when you click it, you don't get new items in the feed. They must be caching the feed and refusing to load a new copy. -- kainaw™ 18:32, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

"True" automatic line breaks

Greetings and salutations! I have a query regarding a method to "truly" force line breaks after a given character space. To clarify: I am using WordPad to create .txt files which are later supposed to appear on the web, among other things (and yes, this should be TXT, not HTML, anything but TXT is out of the question). WordPad has a nifty function to automatically break lines at the ruler, window edge, or other such places as defined by the user. Problem: These aren't really line breaks. When I open the files in WordPad, sure, the breaks are still there. But if I open it in Firefox, the line breaks are gone, and since I have whole paragraphs, you can imagine what a horrendous horizontal scroll space this causes. However, I have seen numerous TXT documents on the web before which were much longer than my document but had a regular line break inserted after a certain length, which looked exactly like the WordPad one, but it also displayed that way in Firefox. Considering the length of some of these documents, I strongly doubt the breaks were inserted by hand. My question, thus: How do I do this? Is there a function for it in WordPad, or do I need an additional application for it? --89.204.152.53 (talk) 18:54, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that you are creating txt documents in an rtf writer and then trying to view them in an html reader. The html reader will absolutely ignore line breaks. That is by design. It only responds to the <br> tag. The rtf writer adds overhead to the file that has preferences about the display, such as word-wrapping. It will wrap long lines of text on the screen at a specific point. That is stored in the preferences for the program, not in the text file itself. The txt file, if it is truly a txt file and not an rtf file with the filename abused to have a txt extension, will have no formatting at all. It is just long lines of text. So, the html browser obeys and shows the long lines of text.

The solution depends on where exactly the problem is - since it can be anything along the line from a messed up writer to a messed up file to a messed up reader. The first step is to open the txt file in notepad and see what it looks like. Notepad is a txt writer, not an rtf writer. That will give you an idea of that is actually in the file. After doing so, please let us know if it is long long long lines of text or if it is broken up. Is there overhead stuff in the file besides just the text. Very important, does anything have < and > around it? -- kainaw™ 19:08, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

No, no, don't worry. I know my stuff in that regard. It shows up in Notepad exactly the same way it does in Firefox. There is nothing except pure text in that file. I know what the problem is, myself: The line breaks aren't in the file, they are generated by WordPad's interface every time I load the file. What I am asking is: Where can I find a program that, rather than making automatic line breaks in its layout, will actually insert line breaks into the text and save them as such.--89.204.152.53 (talk) 19:34, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

The difference is commonly referred to as a soft-break vs. a hard-break. A soft-break is just a visual thing in the interface, not in the file. A hard-break is in the file itself. I do not see any way to force either WordPad or Notepad to do hard line breaks. I searched for text editors with hard line break capability, but I didn't see any for Windows. I assume a programmer's file editor will have that ability. Have to keep searching. -- kainaw™ 19:53, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

If you were in unix/linux etc. you'd use the fmt command, e.g.: fmt -w 70 foo.txt to break at words with a max width of 70 chars. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:02, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Try Notepad++. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:04, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Regarding Wordpad, assuming you save as a text file (suffix ".txt"), it does not remember the choice of word wrapping (set with the "view" menu) according to the file name, it remembers it according to the view that was last used, no matter what file was being edited.

For a free editor, available for Windows, that will insert hard breaks, try "Emacs". In Emacs, the process of inserting hard breaks, and redoing them when inserting new text, is called "filling". However, the user interface for Emacs is much different than other Windows programs; it can take a long time to learn. (On the other hand, it does have a choice of several ways to edit Wikipedia articles). Jc3s5h (talk) 22:27, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

SciTE will also do this - select some text, then do edit->paragraph->split. Oh, I see Notepad++ is Scintilla based, so I guess this is not surprising.  Card Zero  (talk) 06:32, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Command to start applications in Linux

Is there an easy way to find out what command I would use to open a file or start a program in Linux? For instance, if I want to watch a movie, I can type totem foobar. But what if I want to open Open Office's document writer? Or what if I had a pdf file that I wanted to open from the command line? Is there a list somewhere? Dismas|^(talk) 22:09, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

The UNIX philosophy really discourages the strong linkage between program and data - the idea is that the same data can be processed by many different programs. Historically, that was particularly true for the UNIX "everything is a bag of bytes" text-oriented data formats, but in a lesser sense is still true today. You can open a PDF with xpdf or ghostview or evince, or any number of ImageMagick programs. If you have an existing launcher on a Desktop system like Gnome or KDE, you can usually right-click it and go to "Properties" or similar, which will show the command associated with the launcher. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:18, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Specifically, OpenOffice.org writer is oowriter. PDFs can be viewed with evince, okular, xpdf, gv, google-chrome, or acrobat (and opened for some kind of editing with gimp and inkscape). More generally, you can see which binary is invoked from a given GUI menu option with the graphical environment's menu editor (on GNOME 2 platforms that is Alacarte; I dunno about others). Now to which program(s) have told the GUI they can deal with a given file: on GNOME 2 (which means the file manager, and desktop shell, is Nautilus) you right click on a file of a given type, preferences, openWith. I don't know of a way to see the full list that shows all the extensions and their related types (it's a config file somewhere). The full list of executable programs on your system is unhelpfully vast (the bash interpreter on my desktop reports 4704 binaries or scripts on my $PATH). But mostly there's no shame in Googling. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:23, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses! Dismas|^(talk) 02:30, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Another good method is to use your distribution's package manager to search by description. For Debian derivatives (including Ubuntu), use apt-cache search search-term; e.g. to find a PDF reader, you can use apt-cache search pdf. The advantage is that if you don't have a program installed to do the job, you can immediately see which ones are available for installation through your package manager. Also, if you know which package needs to be used, but the command is different from the package name, your package manager should have a command to display all files installed by a package. You can use dpkg -L package-name for Debian/*buntu/anything else using APT. Grepping for "bin" will probably help filter the output of that; e.g. dpkg -L imagemagick | grep bin. --Link ^(t•c•m) 11:53, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

and in true Unix spirit there must be a million ways to do something: "xdg-mime query default image/png" Richiez (talk) 21:00, 23 October 2011 (UTC)