Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 July 9

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July 9

Unicode 6.0

At the risk of sounding like a total idiot, how do I go about installing/running Unicode 6.0.0? I can't seem to get it up and running on my computer (I use Firefox 5.0 and IE 8, if that's any help). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 00:33, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Unicode is a standard, not a software package. There's nothing you can install to force any program (such as Firefox) to follow any particular version of the standard. -- BenRG (talk) 01:03, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

That's what I suspected, but I wanted to make sure. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:05, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Dual video cards and gaming

I have a Dell XPS 15 laptop with 2 video cards, an integrated Intel HD card for low-intensity things and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M card for high-intensity things, like games. When I installed PES 2011, it seems to only be able to detect the integrated card, so it won't run on high settings, even though it will use the NVIDIA card when it actually runs. Any ideas on how to fix this? Simeon24601 (talk) 03:24, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, but are you 100% sure about the 2 video cards part? It's just that I've never heard of a laptop having 2 different video cards (the lack of space being the main reason, but a graphics card can easily be underpowered to save battery as well as scaled up to full speed when needed for games etc). I went along to the Dell website just to be sure though, but I couldn't see anything that suggested it has two cards. The basic configuration does have an Intel HD graphics card, but the majority of configurations of the XPS 15 laptop seem to come with various NVIDIA cards instead (not in addition). So to answer your question about improving the performance of the game, you said it's using the NVIDIA card (which makes sense as that's probably the only card in there) so as long as you're using the latest video card drivers, I'm afraid the performance is probably about as good as you're getting to get. Although laptop video cards are considerably better than they used to be, they're still nowhere near the performance of graphics cards that fit in desktop computers. Obviously it depends on what exactly it's doing, but I looked up some benchmarks for the GT 540M, but in comparison it's under half the speed of a GTX 260 that I have in this machine which is over 2 years old now (which in turn looks terrible compared to the latest GTX 580). The only other things you can try are making sure you have plenty of system RAM (not usually much of an issue these days with new computers, but worth mentioning anyway) and also just make sure you don't have anything processor intensive running in the background whilst you're trying to play.  ZX81  ^talk 04:35, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

It is now quite plausible for a laptop to have multiple graphics cards. Right now, I am using a 2yr-old Lenovo W500 that has integrated Intel GMA4500 and a discrete ATI FireGL V5700. I can switch between them without restarting the computer, so it is quite effective for power management.

Switchable graphics are much more common on workstation / desktop replacement laptops, which I am quite sure includes the Dell XPS. Freedomlinux (talk) 07:45, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Oh cool, I stand corrected on that part then! Thanks, learnt something new today! :)  ZX81  ^talk 15:02, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

As Freedomlinux wrote, you need to look up how to set your laptop to use the high-performance, high-power-using Nvidia chipset instead of the low-performance, lower-power-using Intel chipset. Unfortunately, at least some laptops with dual video chipsets do not let the user configure this. I bought an HP Sharp laptop within the last two months which had dual chipsets, and *the software* on the laptop decided when to switch. When playing my game of choice, the idiotic laptop decided to always use the Intel chipset rather than the fancy Nvidia chipset, so I could only play my game of choice with slow graphics. Amazingly, HP Sharp did not include an option for me to manually switch between the chipsets. I returned the laptop to the store immediately. Comet Tuttle (talk) 06:42, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Edited: Not an HP laptop, but a laptop from Sharp. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:07, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that tip. I have done that; however, the game seems to think that my video card isn't good enough to run the game, when I'm pretty sure it clearly is. Also, I can't manually override the settings. A GeForce GT 540M should be enough to run PES 2011 at fairly good graphics, right? Simeon24601 (talk) 21:46, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Can you identify the country location in mail addresses on the Internet?

Hi I always thought that you could identify a country location by addresses on the Internet e.g. .uk (United Kingdom), .cy (Cyprus), .au (Australia), .tc (Turks & Caicos), etc. I have been trying to identify .cc with no luck. Is there a listing anywwhere that lists all the .??s against country location? Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimjamdog (talk • contribs) 12:43, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

.cc is the top level domain for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The islands only have a population of ~596 people, and almost all the websites and email providers that use .cc are from other countries. So it's overwhelmingly likely that an email you get from a .cc address are in fact from some other country; you really can't figure out much about where such an email comes from. But then you can't tell much about the geographical location of any email sender - just because someone has a .com email address, or even an email server located in the US, doesn't mean the original sender is the US - they can be anywhere. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 12:48, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Here is a Country code top-level domains AvrillirvA (talk) 14:10, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Modem Too Far

Hello. If I wire my computer, which is 15 ft from the nearest phone jack, to the modem, my Internet connection is unreliable. My computer cannot connect to the modem wirelessly. What should I do? Thanks in advance. --Mayfare (talk) 19:04, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

What kind of modem do you mean? How long is the cable you are using to connect your computer to the modem? Are you sure that the cable isn't broken? (Cheap Ethernet cables can break pretty easily.) Looie496 (talk) 22:08, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Move the modem nearer the computer. In the UK its easy to buy an extension cable that you plug in to the phone plug or "jack", so that the modem is near the computer and only needs a short cable from it to the computer. Don't know if you can do that where you are. 2.101.12.198 (talk) 10:20, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Voice-picking program

Is there a software which allows to pick the voice pitch from a song and them make a new phrase from that voice sample (and probably replace some part of the song with the words I want)?--46.204.100.73 (talk) 21:58, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

There are programs to remove vocal tracks entirely, but those only occasionally work. (It depends how the song was mixed.)

But if you're looking to extract the voice, use it as raw material for a speech synthesizer, and use that to make a new song with new words? No. There is nothing that can come close to doing that. APL (talk) 22:12, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

To do this type of extraction using existing technology and software would require lots of manual editing of the waveform. It might take several hours (not to mention, years of audio signal-processing expertise) to produce a few seconds of useful, extracted audio. The reason this process is not (and probably never can be) automated is similar to the reason that audio signals can not be easily converted to MIDI. See this archived discussion for some detailed explanation why the audio-extraction problem is theoretically hard. Nimur (talk) 00:11, 12 July 2011 (UTC)