Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 December 8

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[edit] December 8

[edit] Coloured text in console mode

Is there any provision for coloured text in the standard, cross-platform C libraries for console mode? What about C++? NeonMerlin 02:45, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

  • The closest thing to this will be ANSI escape codes. Post back if you don't get the hang of it. -- Sean —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.144.151.247 (talk) 03:10, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
There are libraries, such as curses, that will help you with this — it's not standard in the sense that e.g. libc is, but it's fairly well established and available on pretty much any system that has a console mode at all. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:10, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] DSL 10-day warmup?

I just installed DSL in my home and the modem had an interesting sticker on it. It said, "Attention! To achieve maximum speed, leave moden connected for 10 days." Can someone explain what this is about? The thought of a computer device needing 10 days to do anything is rather astounding. --208.189.34.45 (talk) 02:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

The modem itself certainly won't need 10 days to "warm up". The only explanation I can think of is that your ISP is, for some reason, limiting the connection speed for new installations and removing the limit after (at most) 10 days. I'm not sure why they'd do that, though, unless perhaps it's to deter users from working around some elaborate traffic shaping scheme that needs several days to decide whether your connection speed should be throttled or not. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 03:00, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
The explanation I've heard is that it needs to monitor the connection to determine the speed it can handle. Since that may vary with the load, it's necessary to monitor it over a long period of time to check what speeds work at various load levels. StuRat (talk) 03:53, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Card Making Program

Is there another program besides Microsoft Publisher to make and print cards? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.121.107.55 (talk) 03:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Sure, see the list of desktop publishing software. Many word processors — especially presentation-oriented ones like Apple's iWork — can probably also do it to a varying degree. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:55, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Space of hard disk consume by operating system

Why operating system consume some part of hard disk which is don't shown by computer? —Preceding unsigned comment added by San sharma (talk • contribs) 04:21, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

It'd certainly be nice to have an operating system that didn't consume any disk space, but that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. (Although one might, perhaps, consider an OS running from a live CD to qualify, and some older computers, such as notably the Commodore Amiga, did store a significant part of their OS in ROM.) As for the space not being shown, I'm not sure why that would be the case — perhaps it's so you wouldn't be tempted to go around deleting those important files in order to "save space". —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
There are lots of ways for the OS to leach away your disk space:
  • The software that makes up the operating system itself requires some disk space.
  • There are overheads involved with storing files on the disk. A file that contains (say) 12,345 bytes first gets rounded up to some exact number of disk blocks (suppose a disk block was 1000 bytes, a 12,345 byte file would actually require 13,000 bytes). If you have a lot of tiny files, the disk will fill up faster than if you have a few large files.
  • Each file needs a corresponding directory entry of some kind. Some file formats reserve space on the disk for these directory entries (in Linux/Unix they are called 'inodes').
  • Most disk drives have some bad blocks - these are redirected off to some other places on the disk resulting in some 'lost' space.
  • Space must be allocated on the disk for 'swap space' - a place to park programs that are sitting around in RAM but not running at the moment.
  • Increasingly (especially with laptops) the manufacturer will partition off a section of the disk drive for a copy of the operating system so that you can restore the OS from it rather than having to carry CD's around with you.
I'm sure there are bunch more ways.
SteveBaker (talk) 17:50, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Based on an earlier question, I think the questioner is referring to the part of the hard-drive capacity that is "don't shown by computer" (i.e. an 80 gig HD showing as 74 gig where not all of this is to do with 1024 vs 1000). I think it has something to do with the filesystem --Seans Potato Business 22:42, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Then all but the first and second things on my list above. SteveBaker (talk) 01:10, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Video Encoding

Any idea wether we can combine Xvid or Divx video with M4A audio into one video file with Avi extension?? Also what are the best settings to encode a video for playback in a nokia E62??59.92.248.15 (talk)

[edit] Photoshop pixelation effect

I'm a moderately experienced Photoshop user, but I can't figure out how to make this effect. I'm looking for an arty pixelation, like the Rubik's Cube sculptures of Space Invader (as found here: [1] I want to make one of these sculptures, but I'd need a guide first. Anybody know how to do this? Thanks! -ParkerHiggins ( talk contribs ) 04:50, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

For simple pixelation just use the mosaic filter, or down size the image using bicubic interpolation and then upsample the image, using nearest-neighbour interpolation. Then you can add the grid by drawing a single grid and make that a pattern and repeat it. That's just one way of doing it.--antilivedT | C | G 09:30, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Is huge amount of physical RAM necessary for getting better FPS in games?

As for as today's latest games are concerned, do they really require about 2GB of memory?.I have 1GB+xfx 8600GT(256MB)+Pentium D 3.00GHz running winxp. I don't get sufficient FPS as shown in benhmark. The difference in config of theirs and mine seems to be RAM and processor. I guess cpu doesn't meddle much here as an issue. Can I get more FPS with another 1 GB RAM?. or is it time to go for high end GPU?.Thanks in advance —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balan rajan (talk • contribs) 11:57, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, it depends what games you want to play, and if you have Vista or XP (Vista eats RAM). Definitely upgrade your CPU before RAM or GPU though, that's what's bottlenecking you most (even if you use Vista). Dual Cores are pretty inexpensive nowadays. · AndonicO Talk 12:00, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
I'd make a general statement that Windows eats RAM. I run Win98 on a machine with 512 mb RAM - enough to have switched off the swap file altogether. Satisfied with the results. --Ouro (blah blah) 13:46, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
No - the frame rate isn't the thing that's driving RAM requirement. (Trust me, I'm a game designer!) It's to do with the amount of content in the game. If the game says it needs 2Gb on the box - then that's how much you need. There is no incentive for game designers to demand more memory than they need. As a games company, the more demands you make, the fewer people can run the game, the fewer games you'll sell and the less money you'll make - and it's definitely all about making money. So if it says you need X Gbytes- then X Gbytes is what you need. If you try to run with less than it says on the box, the game MIGHT still run - but be swapping from disk. If that happens then the game won't run smoothely at all and will in all likelyhood be almost unplayable.
The reason games need more these days is because graphics chips are getting faster at a rate that is outstripping even Moore's Law and every time the speed of the hardware doubles, you can draw twice as much stuff in the scene and therefore you need twice as much memory to store it (unless you are planning on drawing a lot of the same thing over and over - but that's getting unacceptable to games players too). Worse still, in addition to the throughput rates going up, the display resolution that people are using is increasing too - and that means that you need higher resolution textures - and higher resolution textures need more storage space. As if that were not enough, we're also being tempted by things like high definition lighting algorithms that need more of the graphical data to be stored in floating point instead of single bytes - which can double or even quadruple your storage needs at a stroke. Sadly RAM sizes are not increasing anything like as fast as Moores Law - and our needs are increasing more rapidly than Moores Law - so overall, we're being squeezed into tighter and tighter spaces and having to get more and more creative about saving RAM. There is a game-complexity/quality versus RAM-needs trade-off - and where that trade-off is set depends on another trade-off which is that if you demand too much RAM then fewer people will be able to run your game - but if you set the quality bar too low in order to use less RAM, then it won't be such a good game and you'll sell a lot less. One of the attractive things about writing games for consoles like the Wii, Xbox360 and PS3 is that you know exactly how much RAM every user has - so no more ikky trade-offs.
The CPU speed and the GPU (graphics card processor) are both critical to getting a high frame rate - if you have the required amount of RAM then either the CPU or the GPU is the bottleneck. Which it is depends on the game you are playing and the setup you have. If the GPU is the bottleneck, then it may either be the GPU's pixel draw rate or it's "vertex processing rate" that's limiting you. If it's the former, then reducing your screen resolution even by a small amount will dramatically improve your frame rate ("fps") - so it's always worth trying that to see if it solves your problem. If the game goes faster when you reduce the display resolution - then a newer, faster graphics card might be the way to spend your money. If reducing the resolution doesn't help then it's hard to say whether the CPU or the "vertex processing" stage of the GPU is limiting you. Worse still, if you have an older motherboard with an AGP graphics card slot then it's possible that the AGP performance is the limiting factor and neither CPU nor GPU upgrades will help. That's much less likely to be the case if you have PCI-express with the graphics card plugged into the 8-lane connector as it should be.
Sometimes, the feature-set of the graphics card matters a great deal. There is a feature in the game I'm working on now that works really elegantly on cards that support "full floating point" math - but has to be implemented differently for cards that only have "half float" math. The alternative implementation is a lot more complicated - and therefore runs more slowly. However, there are other games that don't need full floating point support which run just fine on either sort of card. So switching out to a more fully-featured card - even one that is a bit slower in raw performance terms - would probably speed my game up a little bit (not a whole lot - but noticably)...but with other games it might slow them down. A large fraction of my job is avoiding ikky problems like this!
As you can tell, this is a horribly complicated business.
SteveBaker (talk) 14:44, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
..Unless you're Microsoft and hardware manufacturers are paying to you exaggerate system requirements --ffroth 21:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm sorry - I should have started by saying "Never, ever, buy ANYTHING from Microsoft". SteveBaker (talk) 23:35, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
You can buy their products, just don't buy the crap they spew daily --ffroth 00:05, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I wrote a more detailed explanation of games performance on my private Wiki here: http://www.sjbaker.org/wiki/index.php?title=Graphics_cards_and_Games SteveBaker (talk) 17:30, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 2D designer program

hi,

does anyone know of a free/internet downloadable 2D designing program...something like the actual program 2D designer.............?

thanks.....--84.67.229.4 (talk) 12:15, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

How about looking here for starters? --Ouro (blah blah) 13:52, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
The standout winner is inkscape - but there are a lot to choose from. Just make sure that the artwork is stored in SVG and you can fairly easily switch from one to another until you find the one you like best. SteveBaker (talk) 14:08, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] MKV problems in Win Vista

Hello there. I'm just wondering if anyone here has the same problem, or how I can fix it. Thing is, I cannot open .MKV files on my PC (running x64 Vista). I can play them on my mac, works fine, but on the PC.. nah. I'v tried the might VLC player and a load of 3rd party codecs, with no success. Not even the Media Player Classic worked. Oh, yeah, one player did work - the one in Azureus (bittorent client). Though that one isn't the most optimised player and it can't play HD videos w/o lagg.

Vista just ain't compatibe with MKV? 90.231.145.160 (talk) 15:57, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

You need a MKV splitter to use the container format in directshow players like Classic. As for the actual media you need the different codecs that the audio and video are encoded with within the container. --ffroth 21:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] JPEG, web spiders and the wonderful Avril Lavigne

I wana download images from http://avril-images.net but the site is is a weird format and all the links are javascripted, meaning that normal web spiders like httrack dont work for it. It uses Coppermine Photo Gallery. I have no idea how to do this. All I really want is to download all the JPEG images from the site, not the html. Any good programs for this. Thanks xxx Hyper Girl (talk) 16:11, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Probably a bad suggestion, but cant you just use printscreen, or Snippet? 90.231.145.160 (talk) 16:13, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Completely tangentially, check their copyright status first before you download them if you intend to do anything at all with them, of course. :) ++Lar: t/c 18:20, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
I have Windows XP and wget. Entering the following command at the command prompt seems to work:
for /l %n in (1,1,22474) do @wget -nc -p -A jpg http://avril-images.net/displayimage.php?pos=-%n
It takes a long time though. I gave up after around 500 files. --Bavi H (talk) 00:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Points for whoever can find the worst picture of her. Or do I already win? Also please tell me you realize that celebrities are never the people that they portray in their work. --ffroth 00:30, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your help everyone! I haven't been able to get wget going yet (I'm not very good at compiling source code) but I'm working on it. ffroth, I do realize that celebrities put on a certain amount of acting in their public life, but I think Avril is one of the more "real" celebrities around. Hyper Girl (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
So download a binary. --ffroth 03:53, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Hey thats great!! :) Thanks ffroth so much! Hyper Girl (talk) 13:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shell script - Windows/DOS or Unix/Bash

I need a script (either DOS or UNIX ,I don't mind) to look through a directory and all subdirectories, if there is only one .jpg file in the directory to rename that file 'folder.jpg', while keeping it in the same directory. Simple I'm sure, but scripting is not my forte. Can anyone help? Jooler (talk) 17:20, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

  • Something like this should do:
for dir in $(find -type d); do
    num_jpgs=$(find "$dir" -type f -name '*.jpg' -maxdepth 1 | wc -l)
    if [ $num_jpgs -eq 1 ]; then
      mv -i "$dir"/*.jpg "$dir"/folder.jpg
    fi
done
It's not tested, so back up your directory first! --Sean 18:14, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Hi Thanks, but it complains that the maxdepth should occur earlier on the line and it doesn't work with directory names with spaces in. Jooler (talk) 18:49, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
This should take care of most of the weird filename problems.
find . -type d -print | while read -r dir; do
  if [ `ls -f "$dir" | grep -c '\.jpg$'` = 1 ]; then
    mv "$dir"/*.jpg "$dir"/folder.jpg
  fi
done
It'll still barf on filenames with newlines, and there's a race condition between checking for a single .jpg and expanding the glob. If I wanted to fix those problems and make it really robust, I'd switch to perl. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:35, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, that's just the ticket. Jooler (talk) 23:04, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Installing python modules, windows

Howdy, I am working on installing python modules on a windows XP machine. I have tried to follow the instructions here, which seem to be to 1. decompress the file, 2. use the DOS commandline to navigate to the folder, and 3. use the command python setup.py install from the commandline. Each time I try this, however, I get the error "'python' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." The python interpreter (through the IDLE Gui) runs perfectly however. Tried restarting after decompressing the file, but with no luck. Any thoughts on what I could try next? Thanks, --TeaDrinker (talk) 18:19, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Got part of this one figured out; I had to add python to the path (not part of the installation process, I guess...). Now it is a whole new problem; it builds (using python setup.py build -c mingw32), but does not install (the command python setup.py install -c mingw32 gives me the error "invalid command 'mingw32'"). Any other thoughts? Thanks, --TeaDrinker (talk) 21:20, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
It seems that you're trying to install a Python extension written in C; you'll need to get a compiler for it (like the MinGW it seems to be trying to use) so that the Python module can compile itself. However, if it manages to build, maybe you just need to pass it some other program's name (instead of "mingw32"); I'm not sure. Are there any *.c files in the module? --Tardis (talk) 16:11, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Laptop choice

Laptops

Which brand is the best in terms of performance and which package deal is considered the best?

1) Sony Viao 2) Acer 3) Hp 4) Compaq 5) Or Lenovo notebooks

Kindly let me know the rationale behind the choice of the laptops? Garb wire (talk) 18:43, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Why not consider AppleMac amongst your choices?--88.111.112.161 (talk) 19:33, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Didn't 3 buy out 4? 68.39.174.238 (talk) 20:02, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
They're now their brand, yes. I'd go with five if I didn't have the possibility of getting a nice tasty Apple. --Ouro (blah blah) 20:23, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
PC World said the fastest Vista laptop is a MacBook! See here [2] --208.189.34.45 (talk) 00:54, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Hate to bring up the Mac/PC deate again, but the new macs have bootcamp pre installed, meaning you can run both OSs on a fast portable system for what is ( in my mind ) a healthy price ( about £700 ) 86.154.89.103 (talk) 01:13, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh really? There's quite a few laptops for less than the Macbook's exorbitant $1099 starting price with a Core 2 Duo, a gig of RAM, and a decently sized hard drive. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 04:14, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
But you only get what you pay for!
gag --ffroth 00:40, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
Why are you not considering ASUS laptops?217.168.5.7 (talk) 19:16, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Word.docx

I have received a document name.docx which I understand is Word 2007. How do I open it using word 2000? What do I need to download? - Kittybrewster ☎ 18:52, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Get either Word Viewer or the Office Compatibility Pack, both from Microsoft. Hope this helps! CaptainVindaloo t c e 19:03, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Crashing of windows explorer

My windows explorer hangs every time i open up the windows.... My computer Whats the problem i m faced with? 19:09, 8 December 2007 (UTC)~

You'll have to give us more details - like, what OS are you on, which version of IE are you using, and whether you've recently installed something that you've downloaded from the web. First things you can do that are always good are a) switch to Mozilla Firefox and b) download NOD32, a relentless anti-virus app. --Ouro (blah blah) 19:41, 8 December 2007 (UTC)


The moment I open 'My computer' after a transitory period of say 5 minutes, it gets stuck.... Hangs virtually , how to avoid this from happening? 16:16, 9 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Garb wire (talk • contribs)

What software is running in the background? What operating system are you using? Did you install anything new recently, especially downloaded from the Internet (from an unknown source)? Of the more obscure, is your system in order hardware-wise? Does everything that needs a cooler have a cooler? Is the place clean and safe to operate electronic equipment? --Ouro (blah blah) 18:35, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

-General Help: This can be caused by any number of problems. To troubleshoot this, you'll have to: 1)Scan for virus' (Google AVG) 2)Scan for spyware (Google Ad-aware personal) 3)Make sure any drives that are attached to your pc are correctly installed and compatible. 4) Check any network devices and make sure they sut up properly.

When you open the 'My Computer' your system searches for all virtual and physical hardware (such as Hard drives, floppy and cd-rom drives, network folders and connections, and any removable media). If there is a problem with one of these, it will cause a hang during the resource search that windows undergoes when you open 'My Computer'.

[edit] LAN

how would i be able to establish a LAN connection between my computer and laptop so that I and a friend would be able age of empires (rise of rome) multiplayer without an internet connection. thx70.51.60.87 (talk) 20:46, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Find the ethernet ports on each computer and onnect a cross over cable between them. Then you will have to configure the network, with a fixed IP number on each. You can use 10.0.0.1 on one and 10.0.0.2 on the second. Use the same netmask (255.0.0.0). I don't know about age of empires though, what it needs. If one computer is missing an ethernet socket, you can use serial to serial port connection. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:32, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
With fairly recent PCs you can use a normal ethernet cable rather than a ethernet crossover cable, as the NICs will almost always have autosense capability. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:02, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ipod Video Converter

What are some reliable free video converters that are available for download that can convert avi video to mp4 so they can be put onto an ipod? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.87.200.184 (talk) 22:34, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Try HandBrake, MediaCoder, or MEncoder. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:58, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Also try iTunes itself. If it's viewable on your computer, then you can use iTunes > Advanced > Convert Selection to iPod format. --208.189.34.45 (talk) 01:00, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
iSquint does this very easily and quickly as well. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 21:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)