Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 March 27

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March 27

clock

The clock was moved 1 hour forward recently, and I moved all my clocks, but my computer keeps switching back to the old time. What should I do? : I got windows xp / and this never happened in the 5 years that i own my computer 65.93.104.242 02:24, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Your computer may update its time from the Internet once in a while. (I am guessing that this is what is happening?) If so, you should not manually set the time on the computer; all you need to do is tell it the correct time zone. If you are changing it because of daylight saving time, Windows has an option to adjust for DST automatically. If you live in a country that has its DST rules changed recently, you need to install a Windows Update from several months ago that updates those rules. --Spoon! 02:34, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

On that, be sure that you've got the correct timezone set as well as having the DST option checked. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 03:59, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Or you can just let your computer be an hour off for a few weeks each year, between when it thinks DST starts and ends and when it really does. That's what I decided to do. StuRat 04:09, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

You should probably get this update for Windows XP if you haven't already got it. Johnnykimble 09:52, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Online community

I want to start a web site with forums, photo galleries, calendars, etc. for local enthusiasts of various different, though slightly related, hobbies. I was originally thinking of going with just a simple forum like phpBB but then thought that it would be nice to have calendars available for local events and things as well as a place for users to upload photos. I realize that there are many content managers out there but I was hoping that people here could help me narrow down my research a bit. I don't know any PHP but I'm alright with figuring computer related things out. So any help? Dismas|^(talk) 02:47, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Invision Power Board offers a forum just like phpBB, but also has a calendar in which you can add events. In fact, I'm pretty sure phpBB has an addon of some sort which can do this too. JoshHolloway 09:30, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Some sort of PHP-Nuke system with gallery2 and phpBB addons? Or something like Moodle? --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:46, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Decide whether you like the wiki, forum, or weblog paradigm, they can all acomplish the same thing. Look at Comparison_of_content_management_systems, decide on finalists that meet your requirements. If its a open source php/mysql system you can try it out at opensourcecms.com . I just did this for a small news site and decided on drupal, I have been very suprised how easy it is use. -- Diletante 15:55, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I bought two CDs long ago, Warcraft III and its expansion, they exploded; can't play now

I lost my two CDs because apparently they were of very low quality, I didn't use them in any bad way, but they began to develop cracks from the inner part of the CD to the outside. I tried downloading the game from p2p and using a no-cd crack but it won't work, since the gaming network is unable to identify my application version (due to the no cd crack), despite I have two legal CD keys. The game(s) was very expensive, and simply can't play now due to their anti-copy policies. What can I do? I just posted a message in their forums for this reason, and I'm waiting a response. Thanks. --Taraborn 09:23, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Are they really genuine Warcraft III? I think you can request a copy of the game cd from blizzard at a cost if you explained your situation to them. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:43, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, you can. They will want the bad CDs in return. Most companies do this. Activision replaced both my Quake and Quake II CDs for me. I asked the operator when I asked for replacements and she said that out of a good 1,000 requests to replace broken CDs, only 1 will really have the original CDs. Everyone else is just trying to get a no-cd hack working. --Kainaw ^(talk) 14:42, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Warcraft III Battle Chest (original game + the expansion) costs a whopping $35 on Amazon. Personally I don't think that counts as "very expensive", but that's just me. Which is not to say that you shouldn't try to get replacements from Blizzard; I'm just pointing out that the price has probably gone down a lot since you originally bought them (as is common with software). Replacing defective merchandise is good policy in general, though it can often take a long time to process. --140.247.249.200 15:50, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Just FYI: Very high speed CDROM drives operate near the limits of how much centrifugal force a disc can withstand. And balance/vibration is also a problem; that's why most high-speed drives have some sort of dynamic balancing mechanism.

Atlant 16:12, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

To all: I guess nobody has understood my question and almost all were assuming bad faith. I'm not stupid, if I were cracking the game I wouldn't ask here, I would have already done it by myself (by spending more time trying to crack it instead of spending it talking to the company) and would be asking at a much better place. They were expensive when I bought them, now they are much cheaper. Anyway, I'm not going to spend my money because of a stupid "assuming bad faith" behaviour by the part of the company. To the $35 dollar guy, well, I guess you are rich, because I simply can't afford giving away that money, even worse when there's no reason for doing that. And again, yes, they are original Warcraft III CDs. I asked in the Battle.net forums and received some useful responses, even one by a Blizzard employee. I don't want to sound rude, but thanks for nothing, buddies ;) --Taraborn 09:17, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry. I assumed you wanted to play the game. So, I suggested you get new CDs from the company. When I did it, it was free. I called a 1-888 number (free). They asked me to fax a copy of the CDs to their toll-free fax line (free). Then they sent me new CDs (free). So, if your intent is to do something other than play the games, please rephrase your question so we can better understand what it is that you want. --Kainaw ^(talk) 16:38, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Then this is out of its place "I asked the operator when I asked for replacements and she said that out of a good 1,000 requests to replace broken CDs, only 1 will really have the original CDs. Everyone else is just trying to get a no-cd hack working." --Taraborn 17:50, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

See assume good faith. You assumed that I stated "I asked the operator about Taraborn and she said he is just trying to get a no-cd hack working." If you assumed good faith, you would have assumed that I stated "I asked the operator when I asked for replacements and she said that out of a good 1,000 requests to replace broken CDs, only 1 will really have the original CDs. Everyone else is just trying to get a no-cd hack working." without any mention of you at all. --Kainaw ^(talk) 19:39, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Y!M problem

I can log in and start conversations. But when I send messages, they do not appear in the conversation window. I can see when the other person is typing a reply, but when the reply is sent, I do not see it in the conversation window. Yet I know that messages I send or receive go through because when I save the conversation as a text file, and open it, I can read the messages.

How can I fix this problem so I can see messages I send and receive in the conversation window? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 218.186.8.10 (talk) 11:42, 27 March 2007 (UTC).

Perhaps somehow the text color got changed to the same as the background. If that is the case, (based on YM version 7) click on the icon that looks like an artist's palette and select a text color that will show up against your background. --LarryMac 12:59, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

A question on history of vector software

I'm seeking for information on history of vector graphics software.

I'm interested in the following question: when and in which product, such features as the brush and stroke (applied to a path) were availible for the first time. I suppose it was somewhen in 80-s. Maybe it was in Fontographer or Adobe Illustrator? Thanks in advance. Crocodealer 17:39, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Can it be Freehand? Crocodealer 19:03, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Do you really mean "product"? Things typically appeared in research papers/software long before being copied commercially. And if you did in fact mean "available in a commercial product", are you interested only in consumer products, or even just Windows products? Because features typically appeared in non-Windows products first (Macintosh MacPaint, Amiga Deluxe Paint, etc). Also there were some high end graphics systems on IBM PCs in the DOS days, so first appearance of certain things could easily have been pre-Windows even on PCs.

The feature/features you're asking about seems fairly vague. "Brush"? If you really want to know the first use of something that could be considered a digital brush, well, Ivan Sutherland's circa 1960 landmark Sketchpad system certainly had such a thing.

Extremely sophisticated brushes/path strokes were supported in the digital sumi-e (Japanese brush painting) software done at the MIT Media Lab circa 1986, give or take a year or three.

Stroking along a path was supported in version 0.0 of Postscript, which, IIRC, preceded Windows, and it in turn appeared earlier than Postscript in Xerox Parc software in the 1970s.

A lot of early graphics firsts happened in CAD software and in flight simulators done for the military by e.g. Evans and Sutherland.

Clarifying exactly what you want to know would be rather helpful. Dougmerritt 21:54, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. By product, I mean commercially available product, for any operating system. By brush, I mean something resembling the "calligraphic brush" tool in Adobe Illustrator: a short line or an ellipse moves along some user-drawn path. Here is an illustration: Image:AI calligraphic brush.png. By stroke I mean a more simple thing: a medium is painted on some defined distance from the path. Crocodealer 14:53, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I think the majority (although not 100%) of early paint systems did that much. Identifying "firsts" in history is notoriously difficult, but here are some contenders to consider:

The very earliest "painting/drawing" systems were purely vector based and did not leave a trail of pixels behind the "brush" in the way I think you mean, so we'll skip those.

Apparently the world's first raster graphic/bitmap paint program was "Superpaint" by Richard Shoup at Xerox PARC; Shoup later left for New York Institute of Technology, where he and others produced the paint program "Paint", which was sold to Ampex, and became the commercially available Ampex Video Art (AVA) paint program.

Although later than AVA, people have also claimed a first for personal computers in particular: Todd Rundgren's Utopia Graphics System paint program for Apple II, which used a digitizing tablet for input.

There is almost never a single authoritative source for finding out about firsts; each such is often aware of other similar but different authorities. Thus many people would say the answer is "MacPaint", but are unaware of earlier non-Mac development.

P.S. I forgot to be explicit: no, I don't think that Fontographer nor Adobe Illustrator nor Freehand could be contenders, although one would want to find and compare introduction dates to firmly prove such things. Dougmerritt 20:12, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

DPMS off mode

The computer I use at work (and since my work does not require a computer I only use it during down-time to play solitare and so on) will suddenly shut itself off every time I use it- maybe seconds after startup, maybe minutes. When it shuts itself off the screen says "DPMS off mode", although I tend to think that's just the monitor informing me that the computer shut itself down, and not related to the cause. Any thoughts? Simple solutions befitting a computer I don't own? Thedoorhinge 19:49, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

The message probably relates to this - VESA Display Power Management Signaling. Check the system power management settings if you can. --LarryMac 19:54, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Maybe it's intentional, to prevent employees from wasting time...DPMS = "Don't Play Much Solitaire". :-) StuRat 19:55, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Free Wrapper Induction Software?

A wrapper, in the sense relevant to my question, is a piece of code that can extract data from a web page. For instance, one could construct a wrapper (perhaps using regular expressions) that could take the HTML from Amazon.com's checkout screen and parse out which items you ordered and how much they would cost, so you could use that information programmatically. Wrapper induction is the process of automatically generating a wrapper from examples. For instance, you might download your Amazon checkout screen today, again the next time you order books, again the next time you order books, and so on, until you'd collected several different examples. Probably after adding some markup code to those examples, you could run your examples through a wrapper induction algorithm, and it would generate a wrapper that, hopefully, would be reasonably successful at extracting any checkout screen information that might come its way in the future.

Wrapper induction should probably have a Wikipedia article. For now, though, my question is where can I find some free, concrete implementations of wrapper induction. I can find all manner of academic papers describing different approaches to the problem, but almost no code that I could actually throw my current dataset at. I could write my own, of course, but I'm lazy and would rather at least try something that already exists first. --Ryguasu 22:04, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps a page on wrapper is due before an entire page on wrapper induction is created. Our current page on "wrapper" does not include the definition you use above, though googling around certain shows it to not be a fanciful term. --24.147.86.187 22:12, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

@Ryguasu and 24.147.86.187 ... The topic you mention is a subset of Information_extraction, which is a subset of Natural language processing, both of which already have articles. Apparently, AFAIK this specific sub-topic is not yet linked. As far as pre-existing free software, your best bet would probably be to look for cites specific to your sub-topic, and see what they reference. You might also try your search under Perl, compiler generator, BNF, any variety of other similar areas. HTH. dr.ef.tymac 22:24, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I would also suggest doing searches on "screen scraping", the term I've usually heard for this concept. —Steve Summit (talk) 22:49, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

...and, lookit that, we gots an article on it already! —Steve Summit (talk) 22:52, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

The term "wrapper" is heavily misused in this example. In the realm of computers, a wrapper is something that wraps an existing item and adds (or sometimes limits) functionality. For example, I've written many PHP wrappers that take C++ code, wrap it, and make it usable as a PHP object. The term, as used in this question, is closer to "screen scraping" than anything else. He only wants to extract info on a single screen. He doesn't want to do "spidering" to find pages that contain information and then use "information extraction" or "data extraction" to pull it out. --Kainaw ^(talk) 23:50, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

@ Steve Summit and Kainaw. Although the term "wrapper" is indeed replete with alternative meanings, the OP did ask about specific software that is the subject of research in the field of Natural language processing and computational linguistics. Not to nitpick your answers, but "screen scraping" is a different (generally much simpler) concept. Anyone can knock together a "screen scraping" program with javascript and a few well-constructed regular expressions. Wrapper Induction Software is not the same thing, and it's not (necessarily) an off-the-cuff term coined by the OP just for the purposes of this question. If it was off-the-cuff, then probably "screen scraping" is indeed enough for his uses. Since he said he had seen the academic papers, it seems logical that his question merited more than the glib "go look at screen scraping" answer. I was tempted to give that answer as well, but the questioner seemed to be looking for something more.

Anyway, screen scraping may indeed be what he's after, but I just thought I'd add that caveat in case it sheds any additional light. For other searches, he might also want to try "hidden Markov models", "probabilistic context-free grammars", and "n-gram analysis."

If you want, do a google search on "Boosted Wrapper Induction" filetype:pdf for more details and background on the academic papers in question. HTH. dr.ef.tymac 02:40, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Teamspeak or Xfire

can someone tell me some advanteges and disadvanteges of using xfire instead of teamspeak for voice communication? I know xfire is cheaper since u dont need a server but maybe the sound quality is worse?--Taida 23:53, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly how xfire does it, but with most p2p programs, you're transmitting to everyone and recieving from everyone seperately. This means it uses more and more bandwidth (or, if the bandwidth is limited, results in worse and worse quality) the more people you're talking to at the same time. I wouldn't try to talk to more than two or three people this way, especially if you're gaming at the same time.

With a server-based service like teamspeak, the server's load increases as more people join, but the individual clients still only have to send and recieve everything once. FiggyBee 03:56, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Speaking from experience, having tried all three, all I can say is Ventrilo all the way.