Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 August 16

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August 16

Windows Update (may have) messed up my display...

Hey guys. Today, when I was using my laptop in the morning, everything was fine; nothing out of the ordinary. When I logged off, windows had to install some "important updates" - this happens all the time. I believe it got to stage 2/3 then shut down. This is normal too - it would normally just do stage 3 at startup next time I booted. However, here's what happened... I logged on and it took a little while longer than usual to get to the login screen, and it never showed an update screen at all. Then, here's the scary part: when I got to the desktop, I noticed that the taskbar was windows 98-style, rather than the see-through (aero?) style that my Vista Home Premium (SP2) machine usually has. In fact, all my windows and stuff displays in "windows classic." Also, there was a popup message at startup (from the lower right corner of my desktop) saying that something had failed to connect (or something like that, the message went away too fast for me to see) and also something about since I'm an administrator I can see what went wrong. I tried to click the message but it just faded away and I could do nothing to bring it back. "Okay, I'll just go to preferences and switch back to aero!", I thought. Not so - aero's gone!!!! In preferences I only have the classic themes and high-contrast themes to choose from; none of the modern ones are there! I don't know what went wrong, the only logical explanation is that something happened with the Windows Update. The last time I downloaded something was a few days ago, and they were trusted files, and I noticed nothing until the update. My AV (AVG) is up to date and hasn't given me any warnings or anything. I don't think (or don't want to think!) that this is a virus - my computer is just as slow as it usually is. However, this removal of the newer themes has got me rattled, to say the least. Does anyone have any ideas? Sorry for writing so much. Thanks! --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 01:38, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

In the words of Maurice Moss: "What kind of operating system does it use?" "Vista" "We're going to die!". Anyway, on with the show: This isn't actually too much of an issue, but it catches many people out. It should be quite easy to resolve, as Microsoft have built a tool just for it. You can download if from their support site at this address. If that doesn't work, there a few manual options to try, so come back here and I'll explain them for you if you need them. I hope this helps.  drewmunn  talk  09:10, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

My recent experience might be relevant to the OP's situation. I recently reinstalled Vista on my laptop and had a lot of problems, including Aero disappearing from the themes. I found the reason was a) the video driver was the Microsoft default driver and b) it had not yet run the "Windows experience" tool. Once I had downloaded and installed the correct driver, Aero was still missing from the list of themes. Windows experience was still showing "1.0" (out of 5), so re-running the analysis resets the experience measure and that enabled Aero. Astronaut (talk) 14:17, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

This is very peculiar - when I logged on today, looks like everything is back to normal!!? Everything appears to be running just as it did before, aero's back; I didn't even have to go and re-select it, my laptop just booted as if nothing last night had happened at all. Unfortunately, I wasn't next to it when it was getting to the login screen, so it is possible it did some sort of update process which in turn fixed my problem. Maybe not. At least it's working... which is really something to be thankful for when you are working with a (supposedly!) buggy OS (I actually rarely have problems with Vista, to be honest.) I'll keep your advices in mind for if this ever happens again and it doesn't fix itself! ;) Thanks, guys! --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 16:32, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

reset firefox

i have version 8.0 and the mozilla support page on reseting firefox offers an inaccurate answer. also, does the probability of getting a captcha depend open how much one edits? thanks, 70.114.248.114 (talk) 01:53, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm not really sure what you are asking about Firefox, but I will mention that you are a few updates out of date. Though it isn't required that you update, doing so may help you solve whatever problem you are having. Mingmingla (talk) 02:15, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

See Special:Captcha for when you can expect to get a captcha at Wikipedia RudolfRed (talk) 04:30, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Coincidentally, I linked this a few questions above ("Firefox 23"); see this page to reset Firefox. Hope this helps, --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 16:34, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

sorry, i didnt phrase the questen well. i want to reset firefox (version 8.0), and this page does'nt have an acurate answer, posibly because i have an outdated version. 70.114.248.114 (talk) 19:46, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Try the things listed here, which don't seem to specify requiring the latest release (as that other support page did); if that doesn't work then you'll have to upgrade to the latest release - which will probably fix the problems you are facing anyway. --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 01:22, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Web server performance evaluation

I would like to evaluate a few hardware/software configurations for a web server, under different load profiles. The web server software I'm thinking of trying includes Apache HTTP Server, Nginx, and lighttpd. What are some good, free tools for the job? I'm looking for recommendations on both web server performance measurement tools and test load generation tools. Thanks. --173.49.10.42 (talk) 04:38, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Audio not synched with video

I don't think it's just me that has an issue with this video on YouTube. What causes the audio and the video to be out of synch like this? Dismas|^(talk) 06:23, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

It's not just you, it's an encoding issue. The audio track is significantly misaligned, an issue that can be caused by dropped frames (if the video editor used was incorrectly set up), a bad original recording (it was from broadcast onto tape, by the looks of things, so that is most likely), or a mistaken click-and-drag by the editor (thereby progressing the video and not the audio) when they were trimming it for YouTube. The first cause is the least likely, as this will change the sync by a few milliseconds over a period of hours, rather than by around a second (by my quick estimate). The second is highly likely, as the timecode track on a VHS tape (the track that keeps everything lined up and running at the correct pace) is not to be relied on. Similarly, the hardware recording onto or off of the VHS may have been laggy, so transcoded it wrong. The final option is again unlikely, as the video and audio would probably have been ripped together from the VHS. As such, most consumer editors would link these together irrevocably. Only higher-end editors (i.e. Final Cut Pro or Premier Pro) would allow for the audio to be "unlinked" from the video, and even then, this requires a user action. It is still possible, however, as the user who created the recording may have collected audio from a different source than the VHS, or as a separate entity, and then not lined them up correctly in their editor to begin with.  drewmunn  talk  09:02, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't think it can be a bad original recording. It was to videotape. Before digital video, the sound and image were never out of sync on videotape. With digital, just about everything is out of sync by at least fraction of a second. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 14:13, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

I think it was probably an error that occured in the video editor. It's scary how easy these mistakes can happen. I used to work with those types of software quite a bit, and more than once was suprised to find a huge error in the final video just because I inadvertently dragged something a little to the right or hit a key when I was distracted. --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 16:40, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Almost everything on TV now has the audio and video out of sync. At least on my cable TV. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 17:08, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm I don't notice that very often (except IIRC there was once a space documentary series I watched (it got canceled) that was always out of sync). Well, that may be because I have satellite rather than cable TV and don't watch overmuch of it! ;) --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 17:50, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

You are fortunate then. I don't know where in the process it gets out of sync, but it is probably because of all of the processing in the video. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:04, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

I just checked a few channels and it isn't nearly as bad as it was a few years ago. Of the few I checked, the only one that was noticeably out of sync was CNN (both regular and HD). Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:46, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Might have something to do with the satellite signal versus cable... though I am not an expert in that area by any means! ;) --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 01:24, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps the cable company compresses it to send to me. On the other hand, CNN was the only out-of-sync channel of the several I checked today. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 01:39, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

That's probably it. Drewmunn's note about altering the audio sync is quite intriguing; I don't know about American cable boxes but I don't think we can do that here where I am in Canada. Then again, I haven't had cable for a very long time since back when I had to use a VCR every day - still use that old beast once in a while, but I practically forget how to operate it in between uses! ;) --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 18:26, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

The problem's not usually on the actual VHS, usually an error caused transcoding that (importing) to the video editor used. As far as cable TV channels being out of sync, I'm not sure what sort of options American hardware has, but newer English BSkyB boxes (admittedly not cable, but that never really took off here) allow you to alter audio sync.  drewmunn  talk  18:07, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

64 bit mobile

What are the pros/cons to having a 64-bit CPU in a mobile device as opposed to 32-bit? Mobile devices have much less than 4GB of RAM. I thought 64-bit was more complex and therefore less energy efficient than 32bit. --208.185.21.102 (talk) 16:46, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Having 64-bit wide registers can, in theory, make certain operations more efficient, especially those involving large integers or double precision floating point numbers. In practice, I suspect the difference (for the average user not interested in specialised cryptographic applications) is likely to be unnoticeable. More practically, it'd let programmers make wider use of memory-mapped files. Horselover Frost (talk · edits) 19:00, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

People want to do all sorts of complicated things on mobile devices like take panorama pictures or translate languages. The difference in performance isn't very large. Having lots of room makes many things easier, e.g. garbage collection doesn't happen anywhere near so frequently.

I tell my friends that having lots of rooms in my mansion means I can organize and find things easier, far better than living in some suburban hovel where things have to be all stuffed together. ;-) Dmcq (talk) 20:58, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

What do you mean by 'Mobile devices have much less than 4GB of RAM'? Many of last years Christmas season and beyond, high end Android smartphones have 2GB of RAM, e.g. the HTC One, Nexus 4, Galaxy S4 and even many of those 1080 Chinese smartphones like the Umi X2, Oppo Find 5 and ZTE Grand S [1] and some of these are using MediaTek SoCs which sort of tells you they aren't intended to be extremely high end devices (and in fact i think some lower spec MTK phones have 2GB of RAM). The first 2GB Android device was said to be the LG Optimus LTE2 released mid last year. [2] [3]) Because of people not knowing how to read RAM specs, there was much hype about the second generation Nexus 7 having 4GB of RAM, said to be the first Android device [4], but it turned out to just be 2GB but there have been more credible suggestions a 3GB or 4GB device could show up this year [5] [6] [7] (although one of the rumoured devices, the LG G2 didn't pan out but the Note 3 is still up in the air AFAIK) which since 2GB ones showed up last year wouldn't be that surprising. This means 6GB or maybe 8GB could easily show up next year or 2015 so a lack of support for more than 32 bit addressing would be limiting. The Cortex-A15 has LPAE as do/will related CPUs I believe, but while this will enable the kernel/OS to address more than 4GB but apps will generally be limited to 4GB (how likely it is for an app to need more may be an open question but I'm sure so people will find a use). Even the Lumia 1020 has 2GB of RAM so high end Windows phones (the Lumia said to be the first) are not that far behind. [8] amd ai think some Blackberries have too altough whether Blackberry will survive to see more is anyone's guess (the Z30 was another rumoured 3GB device but that seems to have been confirmed to be wrong and I'm not that sure the rumours were particularly credible). Nil Einne (talk) 23:02, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

What does any of that have to do with the original question? Desktops had >4GB RAM with 32bit CPUs for more than a decade. --208.185.21.102 (talk) 22:06, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

blocking faces from video

I know it can be done pretty easily and well now, there's plenty of programs out there to do it professionally, even automatically, but I'm wondering, does anyone know of programs that can do it free and yet still easy to use? it's only for a little bit of fun, so doesn't need to be the best quality, but I don't really want to have to pay for something I'll use once or twice then forget.

thank you,

213.104.128.16 (talk) 18:49, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

it's possible but doubtful. facial recognition software takes alot of time and effort to write, and very few programers have the skills to do so (knowing how the face works and such.) but some free software is written by many ppl who each put little effort into it, see github. 70.114.248.114 (talk) 19:41, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

It's possible, but due to the reasons for facial blurring, it's unlikely you'll get anything automatic. Free software may exist, but it would probably require frame-by-frame tracking, which is an exceedingly arduous process. Profession software like After Effects allows you to do this, but again, it's manual. Professional users cannot rely on automation, as a computer glitch may result in lawsuits or loss of licensing. If you don't want to have to spend the large amount of money required for such software and then learn how to use it, you may find it easier to hire someone if you ever find yourself in desperate need of facial blurring.  drewmunn  talk  21:56, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Searching the web or video face blur suggests YouTube can do it automatically (with disclaimers that it isn't always perfect). Similar searches find software that help you do it - a program called "Wax" seems to come up (apparently you track the face manually at key frames.) 88.195.194.226 (talk) 09:32, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

youtube not working

when i went to a video, the video window said "plugin missing", and did nothing else. i uninstalled adobe flash player (did not reinstalled it). now when i go to a video, sometimes it plays fine, other times it says "plugin missing". i think it plays only when there are no ads (excluding the video links in yellow at the top.) i have Firefox 8.0, the only enabled plugin is Microsoft silverlight. i have windows 7 ultimate (unknown service pack). how might i fix this? thank you, 70.114.248.114 (talk) 21:03, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Is there a reason that you have not updated Firefox? As someone else said before, you are several versions out of date. I would tend to think that your issue might have something to do with being so far behind. Dismas|^(talk) 22:12, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

I have no idea how the videos could be playing without the flash plugin; but besides that, Dismas is right: your issues probably all stem from the fact that you are many versions behind. If you really don't want to get the newer version of Firefox, you could try reinstalling flash and see if that works. --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 01:27, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

It's definitely not the Firefox version. I use 1.5.0.8 (November 7, 2006) primarily at home, and it plays videos fine. Granted, the YouTube layout is a little broken, but that's not important here. It might have been the Flash version; try reinstalling it again, and do not rely on Silverlight. -- 140.202.10.134 (talk) 15:32, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Extracting Google Books images

This book, page 146, has a PD-old image of the Hiram Bell Farmstead which I'd like to upload — but how? I can do a screenshot, but I'd like to use a better method if possible. Nyttend (talk) 21:44, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

This Safari extension claims to do just that; I've never used it, so I can't vouch for its usefulness. If that doesn't work, then the only other way is probably a screenshot. Hope this helps, --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 01:31, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

In Firefox, it can be done without an addon. Open Tools > Page Info > Media and hunt through the list of images until you find the right one. Bobmath (talk) 15:28, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Wow, I had no clue that it would be so easy. See File:Hiram Bell Farmstead in the 19th century.jpg, and thank you. Nyttend (talk) 21:00, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

New PC...

My existing PC is in the process of dying, so I'll need to replace it.

I am really not very fond of Windows 7. It seems to make everything I want to do ether harder or impossible. Indeed I have several 16-bit applications that I like & use a lot.

Is it possible to get a new PC and then install old XP on it? If so, what constraints are there on the PC? I presume it would have to NOT be a 64-bit machine. Does XP support SATA disks? What else? -- SGBailey (talk) 22:10, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

This will not work (and to the extent that you can contort things to get it to work, doing so is folly):

• You can't buy Windows XP
• It is very unlikely that there will be XP drivers for key elements of the hardware of any new PC (crucially, the chipset drivers)
• In April of next year Microsoft will stop issuing any security patches for XP. Running it after that will be a dangerous business indeed. Here's what will happen - Microsoft will still continue to issue patches for Vista, 7, and 8 (at a rate of more than one a week); criminals will look at those patches and see what they fixed; then they'll try to exploit those same weaknesses on XP; they'll then write malware which exploits that, and Microsoft will never (they say) fix those holes.

-- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:43, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't get the relevance of 16 bit software. 16 bit software should generally work fine on Windows 7 x32 or even I presume Windows 8. It won't work on Windows 7 x64 of course, just the same as it didn't work on Windows XP x64. Since it's unlikely 16 bit software is particularly demanding and thankfully even Intel is supporting VTx or whatever they call it on most of their CPUs now, a good option for compatibility is to run Windows XP or an even older version of Windows in a VM. Depending on your Windows licence, you may be able to do this legally for free, see XP mode. Nil Einne (talk) 00:47, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

The 16-bit software I still have won't run on 64-bit Windows 8. It might run on the 32-bit version. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:52, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Sorry I thought that was a given from my statement. P.S. [9] seems to confirm it's supported albeit disabled by default and they ask you to enable if you try to run a 16bit app. Nil Einne (talk) 00:52, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

So to clarify, if I bought a Win7 Pro PC, I could legitimately install XPMode and my antiquated program should run? -- SGBailey (talk) 12:25, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Most likely yes although no one could guarantee all random programs will work, of course they may not work on any other PCs even if you could get Windows XP to run natively. Nil Einne (talk) 12:52, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Thx -- SGBailey (talk) 13:11, 17 August 2013 (UTC)