Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 June 11

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.

June 11

WinXP notebook throttling

Hey all,

does anyone know a software for Win XP 32bit which reduces CPU frequency on modern Intel C2D (a T7250 here) for real instead of just applying some "soft throttle" like NHC does?

Thanks, HardDisk (talk) 01:33, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

PS: Bonus points for a software also capable of throttling NV 8600 M GT - the NV CPL is not able to.

What do you mean by "soft throttle"? It should already throttle clock rate out of the box (at least SP2 does), try using CPU-Z to view the clock rate. Setting your power management settings in your control panel to "Minimum" might also help. --antilived^{T | C | G} 01:34, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

help with a userbox

I'm working on a userbox for Wikipedia. Since I don't know html, I do this by editing the colors and words of existing userboxes' source codes. My (not yet published) user box currently looks like this:

DOGGY!

This user enjoys reading the webcomic Freefall (webcomic).

Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 June 11

I would like to do two things:

1) Add a thin yellow box around the square containing the word "Doggy"

2) Turn the white box on the right into blue

Could you help me do this? --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 02:40, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I modded your code according to what you want.93.104.111.161 (talk) 03:46, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Cool! Thanks! --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 04:33, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm surprised you can find a long enough ethernet cable to read a webcomic freefall. I suspect you really ought to link your userbox to Freefall (webcomic) instead. SteveBaker (talk) 01:19, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Oops, you're right. Thanks! --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 00:13, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Download Wikipedia

I tried downloading wikipedia 3 times from two different locations, I get "corrupt media" error, while trying to extract the file.

I got the download information from this place [1]. Please let me know if there's a known resolution to this problem.ceo 06:24, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Possibilities include:

• you're storing it on a volume formatted to FAT32 - FAT32 limits file sizes to 4GB, so trying to put any file bigger than that (and most of the dump files are much bigger) will fail. Using an ancient version of windows, like 98 or ME (which don't support NTFS) thus will always fail. Storing the file on an intermediate storage like a USB flash drive or a DVD may also fail, depending on the filesystem type.
• the file has been truncated for some other reason - check that the size your computer reports reports the file is exactly the same as shown on the website. If it isn't, it's either been truncated by the filesystem or by the program (browser, probably) that you're using to download it
• the file has been corrupted in transit; verify that the md5sums shown for the file downloaded match the md5 checksum you calculate on the file you downloaded

87.112.85.8 (talk) 10:18, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

How to put save file on Wii

I'm trying to transfer a save file (LoZ: Twilight Princess) to my Wii, following the instructions here. I've downloaded the file as a .bin file, and I've verified that it is a North American file; then on my SD card I made a folder called "private", then in that a folder called "wii", then in that a folder called "title", then in that a folder called "RZDE", and then I put the file in that. But when I put the SD card in my Wii, the file doesn't show up; it's as if the SD card is empty (but it's not). What am I doing wrong? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 06:44, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Are you trying to use the Twilight Hack? If you've upgraded your Wii to the version 4.0 software (the first version to include support to play games off the SD card) then I'm afraid the Twightlight Hack simply isn't possible anymore as 4.0 will remove the file automatically if detected before you have a chance to copy it to the Wii's internal storage. Bannerbomb is supposed to work as a replacement for the Twilight Hack (depending on your needs), but I have no experience with that I'm afraid. ZX81 ^talk 11:20, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

No, it's just a regular save file from wiisave.com. It downloaded as "data.bin". --Lazar Taxon (talk) 16:35, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Hope this helps. Rgoodermote  00:00, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Eh, not really. I've followed all the standard instructions, but my Wii just won't recognize any files on my SD card. --Lazar Taxon (talk) 01:10, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Not all saves work, I believe they are encrypted for the Wii they come from, some homebrews will let you transfer the saves regardless. Rgoodermote  03:18, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Touchpad freezing

Hello all. For no discernible reason, the touchpad on my laptop has suddenly stopped working; both for clicking and moving the cursor around. Is there any reason why this would happen? How can I fix it? I have restarted the computer a few times but no change.

If it helps, it is a VR6oI, and I'm using XP Home edition. Many thanks =)114.77.68.9 (talk) 07:40, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Have you checked the settings to make sure it hasn't been 'turned off'? Should be in the control-panel. Similarly some have an option to "ignore trackpad whilst typing" - if you have a key that is inadvertently lodged-down it may be that it is that causing the issue. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 09:15, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I've checked the control panel and my keyboard. I don't seem to have any of those problems, and the touchpad is still frozen =(114.77.68.9 (talk) 09:36, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I would look in Event Viewer (Control Panel, Admin Tools) for messages at boot up. --69.254.66.245 (talk) 21:18, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I looked through the errors and there is no (relevant) errors in event manager. Does anyone have any other ideas?114.77.68.9 (talk) 05:29, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Go to "My Computer" and open up "Device Manager". There might be a hardware fault or address error. That would be harder to fix. Possibly a recently installed program is causing a problem. ~~ Ropata (talk) 08:06, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

The device manager doesn't show a touchpad under 'mouse and other pointing devices'; it only shows my USB mouse. Is it supposed to show? I otherwise cannot find an error.114.77.68.9 (talk) 09:21, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes it SHOULD be in that section. You could try and install a generic touchpad, if Windows has one (Use the New Hardware wizard). Or get the manufacturer's driver software from their website. ~~ Ropata (talk) 09:40, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I would be inclined to crack the case and reseat the cable to the touchpad. But I'm that kind of guy. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 13:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Another drastic step would be to re-install windows wtih the manufacturer's CD. ~~ Ropata (talk) 03:14, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm really not that good at fiddling around with the wires... But if I was to reinstall, would it have to be a clean reinstall (Format everything then install) or just a reinstall? Another thing(which may be a clue, I don't know) is that the laptop's keyboard has been ocassionally 'crashing' since the touchpad problem began. It will suddenly stop working (on all keys) even while the rest of the computer is running fine. Also, thanks for all the input so far. You're all being a great help =) But the problem still remains =( 114.77.68.9 (talk) 07:14, 13 June 2009 (UTC) Forgot to mention-I tried installing a (Synaptics) driver, and that had no effect.114.77.68.9 (talk) 07:17, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

A couple of other things to try:

• roll back to a previous restore point http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306084
• start up Windows in diagnostic or 'safe mode': press F8 during the boot sequence.
• call the shop where you purchased it, they might help for free

That's pretty much all I can think of. Best of luck. ~~ Ropata (talk) 00:22, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Favicons in IE8's InPrivate mode

I've noticed that favicons (the little icons in the address bar and on tabs) do not work in IE8's InPrivate mode (but the icon in favourites still works). Does anybody know if this problem can be fixed, and does Microsoft know about the problem? Thanks. 144.138.21.133 (talk) 09:43, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Well presumably, when you're "InPrivate", you don't want the favicons of all the nasty pr0n sites you just went on to be cached by the program ;), and have people work out from those images which sites you went to. ~fl 07:23, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Folders of JPEG to PDF

I have folders of JPEGs with names like IMG_8333.JPG, IMG_8334.JPG. I have many folders each with JPGs like such in them.

What I'd like is to be able to run a quick script (OS X) that takes the JPGs and makes them into multi-page PDFs. So each folder would result in one PDF with all the JPGs from the folder in it, in the order as they would be sorted by their filename. The PDF would the name of the folder plus a .PDF extension.

Is there an easy way to do this? I've been doing this with Acrobat, Create PDF from Multiple Files, but doing that 80 times is going to drive me crazy. Any thoughts? I am using OS X 10.4.11 on an Intel processor. I don't see any way to do this with Automator. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 13:47, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

For each folder, use Imagemagick: convert *.jpg foo.pdf 87.115.156.60 (talk) 14:14, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

And for several folders in one go, for v in `find . -type d `; do convert $v/*.jpg $v.pdf ; done 87.115.156.60 (talk) 14:30, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

This last one doesn't seem to work for me because the folder names have spaces and periods in them (e.g. "Joe Schmoe to John Doe (12.1.90)"). Is there a way to modify it so that it will work with that? Thanks so much, this seems like it will save me a lot of time. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:57, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

...OK, I got it to work. I had to change the IFS variable and now it works. hurray. thanks. It almost seems to work but it's not actually processing the full wildcard? It's just making a PDF with the first image in it. help? --98.217.14.211 (talk) 17:12, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I ended up doing this and just pasting the output back in again. Annoying that I couldn't get it to work any other way but this method worked... for v in `find . -type d `; do echo cd \'$v\'\; convert *.JPG \'$v.pdf\'\; cd ..\;; done --98.217.14.211 (talk) 17:30, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

What you wanted (so long as there are no newlines in the directory names, which makes it even harder) is find . -type d | while read; do convert "$REPLY"/*.jpg "$REPLY".pdf; done. --Tardis (talk) 23:39, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7

Hi All,

Does anyone know if a mac version of Photoshop Elements 7 is planned or will be available soon? When trying to download from the adobe website, Photoshop Elements is available for PC only, unlike its bigger brother CS4. I assume that if you can't get it from the adobe website it isn't available at all.

Many thanks Lukerees1983 (talk) 16:01, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Adobe does make Photoshop Elements for the Mac. That software is on a different track than the Windows version, so the most recent version of PS Elements for Mac is v6. The full name of the product is Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh. --Zerozal (talk) 18:12, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

EU, Antitrust, Browsers

Why is the inclusion of IE with Windows considered antitrust by the EU, but the inclusion of Firefox with most Linux distributions isn't? Why doesn't the EU sue, for example, Canonical for including Firefox with Ubuntu? Is it because Windows is more widespread? Is it because Linux is free? But that wouldn't make sense. You can't add free software to commercial software but you can add free software to free software?
Another question, why is only the EU concerned with antitrust but no one else in the world is? 95.84.64.174 (talk) 17:54, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Linux does not have a near monopoly in the desktop operating system market. Antitrust is about abusing a monopoly in one area (in this case, the operating system market) to gain advantage in other areas (in this case, the browser market). I don't know why the EU is the only jurisdiction that seems to be taking any action in these matters, but US law is generally more friendly to big corporations than European law. I don't exactly know why - cultural reasons, I guess, whatever that means. --Tango (talk) 18:15, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

You seem to be mistaken that the EU has taken the lead on this issue. The US has been on Microsoft's case regarding bundling IE for antitrust reasons since the 1990s. See United States v. Microsoft. They have additionally be involved in antitrust suits in South Korea. See Microsoft litigation.

But anyway, yes, as Tango says, it's about market share, not about the practice of bundling a browser per se. It's of note as well that it is EXTREMELY easy to uninstall and remove Firefox and other browsers, and for ages it was nearly impossible to uninstall IE (I believe this has changed to some degree because of the US suits, but I haven't tried it myself). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 18:31, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

It's simple (now) to uninstall IE, however I think one of the issues was that if you did do that various other things broke. Can't confirm this , and not trying either..77.86.10.194 (talk) 19:11, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

IE exposes parts of itself like the HTML rendering engine and URL fetching as libraries that other programs can use. Deleting it will break any software that uses it, just like, say, deleting Direct3D or the Crypto API. -- BenRG (talk) 20:35, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I think when MS says (in stories like this) that they'll ship a version of Win7 without IE, or allow IE to be uninstalled, they're only talking about the Trident shell that we call "Internet Explorer" (the user interface). I don't think they're seriously talking about not shipping the MSHTML component, as that would break too many things. 87.113.129.162 (talk) 21:53, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

And similarly, also for antitrust issues, when MS says it distributes a version of Windows without Windows Media Player I don't think that means they also rip out the underlying Windows Media/Media Foundation stuff on which it (and a bunch of 3rd party media players) rely. I can find very little real info about the neutered XP-N/Vista-N versions to know if they've really torn this out; I really doubt it. 87.113.129.162 (talk) 22:10, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

A lot of the trouble here is that these court cases have been dragging on for too many years - when they started, there was no FireFox - there was Netscape's Mozilla. Microsoft were doing all sorts of extremely nasty things to try to kill Netscape at all cost - and they undoubtedly abused their monopoly in so doing. They'd previously done utterly egregious things in order to push WordPerfect out of it's number one slot in favor of WORD (the put code into the operating system to prevent WordPerfect from running - later claiming it was an innocent bug - they made scrolling of large quantities of text excruciatingly slow and put undocumented 'back door' tricks into the OS so that Word would scroll text more smoothly and efficiently than WordPerfect could via the documented interface. There have been hundreds of cases of this kind of thing. The company who invented (and patented) the idea of doing runtime compression and decompression of disk partitions was making good money selling their Windows application - Microsoft came along and infringed the patent and when the little guys tried to sue, Microsoft simply bought their company and shut it down in order to avoid what would have been a sure-fire loss for them in court.

Microsoft were very lucky indeed that the Democrats didn't make it back into power after they lost their monopoly case against Netscape and the Republicans quietly dropped the whole thing during the sentencing phase of the trial. Had that not been the case, the company would have been split into two or three parts for sure. What you're seeing now is the final end of a legal process that's taken over 8 years to unfold. In the meantime, Netscape dropped Mozilla and Mozilla became FireFox - and somehow the process resulted in FireFox becoming much more powerful. If those court cases were started now, Microsoft wouldn't have a case to answer. However, Microsoft's abuse of it's monopoly continues in other ways.

The solution is what we should have done 8 or 9 years ago - which is to split Microsoft into a purely operating system company and an entirely separate applications-oriented company. The applications company - rid of the corporate pressures to run only under Windows would almost certainly provide better ports for the Mac and new ports for Linux. Similarly, the near-monopoly of the operating system domain by Windows would be tempered by their new-found inability to lock people into the operating system by tying them down to specific file formats such as WORD and Windows-Metafile. Both applications and operating system would have to compete on a level playing field. An application-neutral Windows wouldn't have a monopoly on Microsoft applications - and they would have to start producing solidly reliable, efficient operating systems that people actually want - rather than the junk they produce right now. The applications house - now having no ability to crush their competitors by changing the operating system to prevent their programs from running well - would also have to start competing for real.

If you think for a moment that Microsoft have mended their ways - consider the DirectX-10 situation. Windows XP has DirectX-9 and even if you buy a DirectX-10 capable graphics card - it'll be forced to run in DirectX-9 compatibility mode. Why? Because Microsoft refuse to release DirectX-10 for Windows XP. Why on earth would any sane company prevent the latest and greatest graphics techniques from being used on their most popular operating system? Because they are trying to FORCE people to upgrade to Vista/Windows-7 against their will. They may make claims that DX10 can't run under XP - but that's an outright lie. Many people have seen Microsoft's internal port of DX-10 running under XP - and there is a 3rd party port of DX-10 to WinXP - so it's certainly possible. The decision not to release it is simply an abuse of their monopoly. It cripples people like me - who are trying to write video games for the masses (which means Windows XP) because a huge chunk of the capabilities of modern graphics cards is simply unavailable to me through DX9. It's just pathetic.

This makes the whole legal situation a little ethically difficult. Their original crime had been and gone - and the world has managed to recover. Sure, they put Netscape out of the browser market and came close to shutting down their entire company - but fortunately the OpenSource/Linux crowd pulled the world away from the awful specter of Microsoft "owning the Internet" by taking over Mozilla and calling it "FireFox". Fining MS for doing that today is pretty pointless. However, they have not learned their lesson - and they STILL need serious punishment for their exceedingly nasty behavior.

Linux has Firefox as it's most popular browser - but it's NOTHING like a monopoly. You can not bother to install any part of Firefox - and everything else runs just fine. About half of Linux installations use the KDE desktop - and on those systems, the Konqueror browser is installed by default. My SuSE 11 machine has probably half a dozen browsers that came with the 'full' install. That's about as far from a monopoly as I can imagine.

Being a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing your status as a monopoly by cross-linking one product to another, locking people in, deliberately making changes to your system to unfairly prevent further competition, dumping product at below cost in order to push out your competition....that's illegal.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't think that splitting up Microsoft into Baby Bills would create the rosy situation you imagine. An independent Microfice Inc. would probably make an independent and rational decision to continue to support only Windows and Mac OS, just like Adobe does with Photoshop. Word would still dominate the word processor market and DOC format lock-in would not be affected in any way I can see. Windowsoft could bundle third-party applications instead of first-party applications (they've done that often enough in the past) and it would give the same unfair advantage to the company involved, because Windows would still control the desktop market.

Microsoft not releasing DirectX 10 for XP is clearly bad, and it would probably change if Windows and DirectX were split into separate companies, though I don't know if that particular split was ever on the table. But why are you using DirectX in the first place? Is OpenGL an inferior platform for cutting-edge games? If so, aren't you basically blaming Microsoft for making a superior product? You'd be even worse off if they hadn't released it for Vista either. Or is the problem not the OpenGL spec but the Windows drivers? Then you should be blaming ATI and Nvidia. Microsoft doesn't write the drivers. The problem isn't Microsoft, it's everyone. Everyone is lazy. Microsoft doesn't try to make Windows the best it could be, just good enough to convince people to upgrade. ATI and Nvidia don't bother to make OpenGL a viable alternate gaming platform. They have no reason to care because gaming companies don't bother to put the pressure on them. You'd rather write games for Linux and OpenGL, but not enough to quit your job and work for a company that does. The Justice Department can't fix human nature. If you want to render future versions of DirectX meaningless, just do it. It's not that hard. -- BenRG (talk) 17:52, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

"But why are you using DirectX in the first place?" Because you want your game to run on X-Box? APL (talk) 19:46, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Emailing a file

Is it possible to email a file that is printable but not copyable? The program the file belongs to is Excel. 90.221.255.251 (talk) 20:30, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Depends on what you mean by "copyable". You could, for example, download PDFCreator, print to a picture format like PNG, and email the PNG file. But I would add that this could be considered unfriendly/rude and there is always a way people can get the data - OCR or just punching it back into the computer. You could also look into the "protection" features of the PDF format, but I do not know if there are any free programs that support generating documents with that feature. If you mean "not copyable" as in "the receiver should not be able to pass it on", I would say that is near impossible. Jørgen (talk) 20:59, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Some companies sell plugins for Office that support enterprise wide rights management for MS Office documents, allowing pretty fine-grained control over who can do what. Unless you're in a large organisation that has such a setup (it's intended for outfits like insurance companies and hospitals) then there's not much degree of control you can practically exercise. The mere act of emailing someone a file is giving them a copy, and there's nothing to stop them duplicating it similarly. 87.113.129.162 (talk) 21:44, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

You can use something like Adobe Digital Editions. Basically you create a PDF or EPUB file that is registered on an internet server. Each person who downloads the file is registered and the rights are managed on the server. If set to no copy, the file won't open on a different PC. You can also set to no print, or a number of pages in a period. It will cost you to manage all of this, and there are other ways to do this, but they are similar. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 13:05, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Querying an Access database for upcoming deadlines

I'd like to set up an MS Access query that will return deadlines within a week from the current date. I've created my database and filled it with events, each of which has a deadline for further action. The deadline is a separate field in each record, of course. I know how to query the database for a fixed date range, by putting the following in the "criteria" field" of the query:
Between #1/1/09# And #15/1/09#
but I don't know the syntax to use for "today" and "seven days in the future". Can anyone help please? 86.166.68.203 (talk) 23:30, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

The function Now() returns a date representing now. You can use the function DateAdd to add some number of days to Now(). For example, the criterion could be that the deadline is

<= DateAdd("d",7,now())

This will return rows where deadline is not null and contains a date that is less than or equal to 7 "d"ays added to now. Outriggr (talk) 00:00, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

More specific to your example, try

Between Now() And DateAdd("d",7,Now())

Outriggr (talk) 00:04, 12 June 2009 (UTC)