Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 September 1

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September 1

'Transcluding' forum posts, possibly through RSS?

Would it be possible to transclude (using the Wikipedia definition) posts on phpBB forums, say, or even Yahoo! Answers on blogs like Livejournal, or anywhere at all with some code? (I was thinking about RSS since that's sort of how it works, but not sure if it could be transcluded in this manner.) 62.255.129.19 (talk) 00:01, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Spam emails from myself

I get at least 20 spam emails every day from my own full name, first and last and I do not have a common name. It all stems from one Canadian pharmacy order years ago (the drugs when they arrived were shipped from India so I doubt the website was really Canadian). I get at least 100 spams a day, mostly for viagra and other drugs. Anyway, I've set my filters really well, so I only have about five spam messages that get through to my inbox. But I am a bit worried that if they're sending my name to me (which doesn't seem the best method for getting me to open up the email since I know it's not from me) they must be sending these to lots of people. If my name was like John Smith, I wouldn't worry, but anyone can Google my name and they will only find me. Is there anything I can do?--108.54.25.10 (talk) 01:45, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Nothing at all; the spammers and scammers have resold your name to one another (on massive lists) and now you, and random other people, get mails faked to look like you sent them. There's always drastic measures. 90.205.90.201 (talk) 10:27, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Spammers are not known for the sophistication of their marketing tactics, or their spelling or grammar. (Fortunately, this does make them rather obvious to most people.) Yes it's a pain and there's not a lot anyone can do about it, apparently. What I do is filter all that sort of spam into a separate folder/label and forward everything else to a new email address, and then only use the new address. (I hope you didn't ingest those dubious drugs.)--Shantavira|^{feed me} 15:25, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

It has been suggested that scammers use deliberately bad English because they're looking for stupid people. If you're the type of person who'd say "Come on, no one at the FBI would use that phrasing, and don't they think I've heard of Nigeria before?"— then the message is not intended for you. —Tamfang (talk) 04:46, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Those other people will get mails with their name as sender, not yours, otherwise you (and a lot of other people) would have received at least a few angry mails in return. It may just be a way to minimize traffic due to bounced mail (spammers don't want more bad press than they're already getting). Often there's a whole list of e-mail addresses in the to: or cc: field, if that's the case then your name may appear in other people's spam as well but I doubt people pay much attention to those. Ssscienccce (talk) 15:49, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

There is also a spamming technique in which the sender's email address is spoofed as the recipient's email address. I am not sure why this is done, but I suspect it is done to get through the filters. If any mail you 'sent' yourself contains words filtered out by the spam filter, it will most likely be delivered, because the server thinks you sent it yourself. On a side note, I have a btinternet address, which I used to use for work, but now I hardly ever use it, because I get 40-50 spam emails (from 'work on the internet' jobs, and all from btinternet addresses, including my own) every day, and BT only label it as spam, and send it to your inbox anyway. I wouldn't worry about it. I have a very unique name, too, but I don't get complaining emails, because it is such a well-known and widespread problem with this particular email service, that no-one cares. I would suspect that to be the case with yours, too. Just google 'spam [+ your email provider]', or contact them directly. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 20:29, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Disk usage differences between ext3 and ext4?

When I installed my new 2 terabyte hard disk, I copied everything from my two personal partitions (one for my main files, one for my photographs) across to the new disk. But after I had done that, disk usage reports (both du and System Monitor) reported slightly less usage on the new partitions than on the old ones. It was in the order of about .1% to 1% difference. I had made sure I copied all the hidden files and directories too by not using cp -rp /oldhome/jip/* . but instead cp -rp /oldhome/jip /home, as * fails to expand to any hidden files or directories (I think this is by design). But the cp command finished OK, and so far it seems that all the files are there. Is this because my old partitions were ext3 but my new ones are ext4, and ext4 somehow makes more efficient use of disk space? JIP | Talk 18:13, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

If your shell is bash you can make it match dotted files by issuing shopt -s dotglob (though simply specifying the directory to copy, as you have, is, of course, cleaner.) The difference in space usage may be due to many things - block size, fragmentation, treatment of sparse files etc (dumpe2fs will display tunable file system parameters.) You can make du display just the file sizes (--apparent-size.) If those numbers match the difference is surely due to filesystem internals. Finally, you can do something like diff <(find /mnt/oldhome|sort) <(find /home|sort)(I now see it's more complicated than this, but you get the idea) if you're unsure whether all files are there 92.226.93.192 (talk) 12:38, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Full version of MS Office or Starter for Netbook?

I recently purchased an ASUS Eee PC Seashell series with a 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor, Win 7 Starter and 1GB of RAM. I am looking to install Microsoft Office 2010 on it to take notes for class. Given the hardware limitations of a netbook, would you recommend that I install the full version or the Starter version? In other words, is there a difference between system resource usage between the two versions that will lead to a difference in speed? Also, would an earlier version of MS Office run faster?

Thanks. Acceptable (talk) 22:00, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

It seems that the Starter Edition is basically the full edition with various features disabled (but apparently not removed from the programs code)[1] and adverts added. If that is the case then it would presumably use similar resources as the full version. Older versions will certainly run faster; I use Word 97 and with a dozen documents open it is only consuming 6.8MB of RAM AvrillirvA (talk) 01:05, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

You may want to consider using web or 'cloud'-based software such as Google Docs which would presumably not require the system resources required for Microsoft Office. Chevymontecarlo 09:34, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

If you are just trying to take notes, Office is a bit overkill (and bloated). That being said, I regularly use Office 2003 in a Windows XP virtual environment that is very constrained on RAM and CPU speed, and it works fine. The more recent versions of Office in my experience are a bit more bloated and slow. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:19, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the help guys, I decided to go ahead and install the full version of MS Office 2010 on the netbook. So far, things are working very smoothly and I'm pleasantly surprised at how fast it's running. My reason for choosing MS Office 2010 rather than earlier version is for compatibility reasons when I am syncing the netbook with my other computers. Thanks! Acceptable (talk) 17:32, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Those netbooks are surprisingly powerful. I can even run Gimp on mine (in Linux), which is really a resource hog. Looie496 (talk) 17:40, 2 September 2012 (UTC)