Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 December 5

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December 5

What were the reasons for Motorola, Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson to drop their support for Symbian OS?

What were the reasons for Motorola, Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson to drop their support for Symbian OS? They could have easily stuck with Symbian instead of switching to Android.Whereismylunch (talk) 04:17, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

You might as well ask why computer manufacturers moved away from OS/2 or MSDOS. The operating system wasn't designed to handle powerful CPUs and graphics hardware that modern phones contain, and in general its entire design wasn't very modern. Being closed source it was also hard to modify, so even if the phone makers wanted to there was no easy way to update it with modern features. 81.138.15.171 (talk) 11:53, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Android is the reason. By any meaningful rational criterion you could think of Android is utterly superior to Symbian. There is literally nothing that Symbian does better than Android. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:05, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

More to the point, it is the Android App store. Even if Android was inferior to Symbian, the developers adopted Android and pumped out tons of games for Android. As a (non-Apple) phone manufacturer, you want your phone to have the most developer support possible. That is why OS/2 failed. The programs that people wanted were MSDOS. Alternatives do not work. They never have and never will. There are many examples: GIMP is just as good as Photoshop for most people, but most people prefer to purchase (or steal) Photoshop. OpenOffice is just as good as Word/Excel for most people, but most people feel that something is wrong if you don't use an official copy of Word. Firefox is just as good (if not better) than IE, but IE is still preferred on desktop computers (I know, Chrome is exceedingly popular now due to Android). 209.149.114.72 (talk) 13:44, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

For one, Android is more open. Another is that from what I gather the likes of iOS and Android are a tad easier to develop for, and while obtaining a developer licence from Apple costs $$$ at least some developers seem comfortable with the SDK. Android appears to be a bit more complex but this is more or less negated by how flexible it is compared to Apple's walled garden. Blake Gripling (talk) 15:14, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

hacking via skype

Can a computer be hacked while someone is using Skype or some other such application? 99.250.118.116 (talk) 13:33, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Of course. Why would you think that running Skype would suddenly make a computer unhackable? 209.149.114.72 (talk) 14:13, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

If you mean hacked via Skype, then it depends on how carefully they have written Skype, to avoid buffer overruns and other ways to inject hostile code, etc. CS Miller (talk) 15:34, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

It might be helpful if you clarify what you mean by "hacking," because this term is widely used and abused to mean many totally different things. It sounds like you are asking about malicious exploitation of an error in software to gain unauthorized access to a computer system or its data - and whether Skype has such an exploitable flaw.

For that type of question, the authoritative reference is the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, mirrored by NIST's National Vulnerabilities Database. At this time, a search of the database finds twenty-seven documented software flaws that pertain to Skype. Nearly every one of these pertains to a very old version of the software, (greater than five years old). This is not an exceptionally high number of documented flaws or vulnerabilities, and no current version of Skype software has any documented problem in the CVE database. Among the most heinous historical problems was CVE-2005-3265, in which a very old version of Skype was susceptible to a buffer-overrun in the callto:// and skype:// handler; this could allow execution of arbitrary code if the user clicked on a specific type of malformed link. This issue was resolved by a software fix almost a decade ago. Many of the other documented cases were actually flaws in other software and not actually attributable to Skype at all. For example, a common form of social engineering-, phishing-, or "spoofing"- attack employs malicious software or UI to convince a user that they are using Skype, when they are actually using some other web-based or locally-installed malware. This is so common that Skype's official web-page publishes information on the problem.

Nimur (talk) 19:09, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

XFS AG

What's the maximum size of an allocation group in an XFS filesystem? All online sources seem to agree that the minimum size is 16 megabytes, but there seems to be some disagreement about the maximum size.

• The OSS SGI XFS page says that it "can be up to 4 GB in size".
• Linux.Die.Net claims that it's "just under 1TiB"
• The Wikipedia XFS AG page states it to be 1TiB

I would just test it out myself by trying to create an XFS filesystem with 1TiB allocation group, but I can't because I don't have any spare HDDs larger than 160GB. Thanks all for the help. 81.20.145.100 (talk) 13:43, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

You could do your experiment by creating the XFS filesystem in a 100TiB sparse file on your 160GB disk. -- BenRG (talk) 06:14, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

What are the longest-lived consumer electronic standards to be superseded/surpassed in the near past or future?

Like hard disks (1956-c. 2010), HTML4 (1997-2014), 32-bit (1980s-c.2004), DVDs (1996-c.2007), C99 (99-2011), music CDs (1982-2000s), cellphone 3G, non-UHD HDTV, LCDs, websites or software from the 1900s that suddenly became unhip or non-existent most recently... I don't know which of Python, JavaScript, Perl, Ruby on Rails or any of the numerous other non-minor languages had high-longevity versions, explaining the paucity of examples. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:29, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

You're comparing apples and oranges. For example, HTML4 is an actual standard. A specific organization - the World Wide Web Consortium - publishes and maintains and publishes a Specification, in the form of a published technical report that outlines exactly what HTML4 is. "32 bit" is not anything like that! It's a vague adjective used to describe many different things. Compact discs are somewhere in the middle: a standard exists - it was created and published by a consortium of interested manufacturers; but the term "CD" refers to many technologies whose adherence to any standard stretches far and wide!

So, you'll have to reformulate your question if you want to get meaningful answers.

Nimur (talk) 23:41, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Also hard disks have been far from superceded in 2014 (and from strong looks of it 2015 or even 2016) let alone 2010. They're still very common and a better fit in many use cases, even if replaced by SSDs in some use cases with the replacement perhaps increasing. Of course hard disks in 1956 didn't have these use cases anyway, so it makes little sense to refer to them as being from 1956-c. 2010. I would suggest the same for 32 bit (although as Nimur said, that's a very undefined thing to talk about) and perhaps DVD as well. Nil Einne (talk) 01:28, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

On the software side of things, FORTRAN is still going strong. For example, I work with a simulation system that was originally written in C then ported into fortran ~2010, in part to be more compatible with key systems used at NCAR. XML is extensible by design, and was at least intended to be around for a long time. As for consumer electric standards that have specifications from a standardizing body, the International_Electrotechnical_Commission is pretty old, and there's probably some plug/socket combo standard that has been used for many decades. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:21, 8 December 2014 (UTC)