Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 April 9

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April 9

Does mining for bitcoins count as a server?

I am interested in joining a pooled group of users to mine for bitcoins with a secondary computer that I would like to set aside solely for this purpose. I am on a US university campus internet system. Our policy states that we are not allowed to connect a server to the school internet system (to prevent bandwidth hogging I'm assuming). Does mining for bitcoins count as using my computer as a server? Does it hog large amounts of internet bandwidth relative to using a computer for more "normal" usages? Acceptable (talk) 00:14, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

You're basically trying to use the university's facilities for a private moneymaking (literally!) enterprise, and I don't think we ought to advise you on the legalities of that. Looie496 (talk) 03:50, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

That's not the question the OP is asking though; it is a technical one, not a legal one. Even in terms of "legalities," this is less a matter of the law per se than it is the university's IT policies. (There is no law against making money at university; there are sometimes internal policies regulating it.) --Mr.98 (talk) 13:04, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

My understanding of Bitcoin pooling is not great, but from what I can tell, it seems to involve:

• Downloading a little bit of information
• Processing that information
• Uploading a little bit of information when you're done

If the above is true, then none of that ought to use very much bandwidth, and none of which ought to count as a being a server. And today, "normal" usage means things like streaming movies or music, which take huge amounts of bandwidth by comparison. But if you are really concerned about violating your university IT policies you should contact them. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:04, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

"Server" is a bit og a loose term in IT today. However barring any clear indications otherwise I would interpret it to mean a machine or process that waits for and acts on "requests" that originates "elsewhere". Mining for bitcoins will not match that definition if you are just operation alone. If you are part of a mining pool then it depens a bit more on how the programs are set up, but in that case it's quite possible that you will be running a server. Taemyr (talk) 12:29, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Word 2007 - Headers & Footers

I have a document for translation, and the original has headers and footers on each page, which also need to be translated. Normally, this would not be a problem, but it appears that on the first page only, there is a title above the header. This title is not part of the header, nor does this title appear on any other page. How is it possible for me to add this title in above the header, and only on this one page, so that when I move onto the second page, the header for the second page will be at the top, with nothing above it? KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 08:11, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

You can have a unique header for the first page only (demo). So on that first page, you'd duplicate the normal header, and then add in the additional matter at the top of the header. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 08:29, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Ｔｈａｎｋｓ！　Ｊｕｓｔ　ｗｈａｔ　Ｉ　ｎｅｅｄ．--KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:04, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Router: current UK pronunciations?

Hi folks. I'm retired from editing WP, and am here as a consumer. Posting at the computing desk rather than the language desk because I want accurate answers from real UK speakers of computer jargon, not from "official" sources.

How is "router" (the computer term, not the woodworking term with the different etymology) pronounced in the UK? I had assumed that it would rhyme with "doubter" (as in the US, and here in Australia), not with "looter"; but I have checked several British dictionaries, and they want it to rhyme with "looter".

So, actual UK geeks: how do you say it? (₰?) Many thanks.

Noetica^Tea? 11:21, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

In this episode of Channel 5's The Gadget Show, Jason Bradbury and Ortis Deley both pronounce it like "looter". -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 11:33, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

In the episode of the BBC's Click from the 30th of March (it's off iPlayer, but you'll find it on YouTube), reporter Dan Simmons says it like "looter" too (2 minutes 40 in). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 11:39, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

And as a British IT pro I can personally confirm (is OR OK this once?) that that's how we say it. For the record, we also pronounce "route" the same as "root". Rojomoke (talk) 12:13, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Yup, it's a 'Rooter' - which helps us distinguish it from a 'Rowter', or, as Handy Andy would say, a raah'er. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 12:35, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

"Rooter" :) --Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 12:47, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Plenty of people in the USA pronounce it “rooter” as well, though probably a minority. “route” (as in a road) is frequently pronounced “root”. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:14, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

As in Route 66, for example. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 18:51, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

I'll confirm, you're in the minority in the U.S. if you pronounce it that way. Shadowjams (talk) 21:37, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Not sure you’re an authority :p but it wouldn’t surprise me. ¦ Reisio (talk) 05:16, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

I am grateful for the information, guys. Seems the dictionaries have it right. In Australia we are generally aware of British and American differences, and of where our own pronunciation and vocabulary choices fit on the linguistic map. But there are exceptions. Here's what I think now: Normally, we would follow the British norm for such a word. We, like the Brits, say "root" for the well-established word "route", of course. But the computer term "router" is a newcomer, and we take advantage of its general Americanness and its novelty to avoid an awkward echo of "root" meaning "fuck" (both noun and verb). That is very coarse old Australian; so we prefer the American pronunciation almost exclusively. On the other hand, this would not explain our pronunciation of "cache" the American way: "caysh", not "cash" or "cahsh". Hmmm.
Noetica^Tea? 09:30, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Not really following this last. I have never heard any pronunciation other than "cash" in the States (I guess you mean /kæʃ/ for "cash"). What you mean by "caysh" I'm not really sure; could be either /kaɪʃ/ or /keɪʃ/, but in either case it would sound very odd to Americans as a pronunciation of "cache". --Trovatore (talk) 01:09, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Trovatore. A few points: As I say, I posted here and not at the language desk because I want actual usage from computer specialists (and incidentally, because I have retired from editing and want to stay away from my usual haunts). I avoided IPA, for the convenience of non-linguists. By the naive form "caysh" I intend /keɪʃ/, of course. No native speaker without linguistics exposure is likely to take it as /kaɪʃ/, especially since I also used the crass naive form "cahsh" nearby. Now, I was mistaken about the dominant US pronunciation, which prompted by you I have since checked. I knew that British usage avoids /keɪʃ/ (OED: "/kæʃ/, formerly also /kɑːʃ/"; other sources agree). But I did not know that /keɪʃ/ was mostly confined to Australia. I don't know where we got it! I remember my own surprise, decades ago, being "corrected" by a highly literate Australian editor and computer expert: /keɪʃ/, he insisted.

I edit professionally to both British and US norms, and am well versed in the differences on the page: lexical, syntactical, morphological, and all the rest. But as I say, we can still get certain "foreign" pronunciations wrong, for terms that are mostly confined to written texts unless they are spoken locally. Like "router", and also "cache". Hence my enquiries.

See here for quite diverse opinions on the case of "cache"; and here for a sample of opinions from tech-savvy Ozfolk.

Noetica^Tea? 05:28, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Compatibility of add-ons/extensions/plug-ins across browsers

If they are in javascript, shouldn't that be the case? However, you normally get browser specific add-ons offered. Why is it like that? OsmanRF34 (talk) 13:17, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Basically, if a plugin is written in Javascript (which not all are!), it requires an environment to run in. Each browser has its own way of making plugin environments for the Javascript. You can't just take raw Javascript and have it act as a plugin. (You can run it on a webpage, but that's not the same thing.) Because there is no universal plugin environment, each browser handles it somewhat differently, and thus each plugin needs to be written for the specifics of each browser. Basically. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:15, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

external HD SMART results

Above I was talking about problems with making a Carbonite mirror image to an external HD. I thought they were saying that my internal HD was having problems. It looked OK under HDTune. I ran it on all my drives (2 internal, 4 external) and the external HD I was making the mirror image to gave some strange results:

HD Tune Pro: Seagate GoFlex Desk      Health

ID                                  Current  Worst    ThresholdData         Status   
(01) Raw Read Error Rate            119      99       6        223195006    ok       
(03) Spin Up Time                   89       89       0        0            ok       
(04) Start/Stop Count               98       98       20       2791         ok       
(05) Reallocated Sector Count       100      100      36       0            ok   *    
(07) Seek Error Rate                77       60       30       55977040     ok       
(09) Power On Hours Count           90       90       0        9035         ok       
(0A) Spin Retry Count               100      100      97       0            ok   *   
(0C) Power Cycle Count              100      100      20       94           ok       
(B7) (unknown attribute)            1        1        0        119          ok       
(B8) End To End Error Detection     100      100      99       0            ok   *
(BB) Reported Uncorrectable Errors  100      100      0        0            ok       
(BC) Command Timeout                100      84       0        12386497     ok   *    
(BD) (unknown attribute)            100      100      0        0            ok       
(BE) Airflow Temperature            33       28       45       1127809091   ok       
(BF) G-sense Error Rate             100      100      0        0            ok       
(C0) Unsafe Shutdown Count          100      100      0        25           ok       
(C1) Load Cycle Count               99       99       0        2930         ok       
(C2) Temperature                    67       72       0        67           ok       
(C3) Hardware ECC Recovered         23       4        0        223195006    ok       
(C5) Current Pending Sector         100      100      0        0            ok   *  
(C6) Offline Uncorrectable          100      100      0        0            ok   *
(C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count      200      200      0        0            ok       
(F0) Head Flying Hours              100      253      0        2565         ok       
(F1) LifeTime Writes from Host      100      253      0        -1605911949  ok       
(F2) LifeTime Reads from Host       100      253      0        -794413361   ok       

Health Status         : n/a

I put * by the ones that the SMART article says are crucial. Look at the (BC) Command Timeout. On my other drives, this is 0-5. On this one it is over 12 million. Also, it is running hot at 67C (others are in the 35-47 range, and I've read that 55 or so is too hot). Right now I've got it unplugged to let it cool off. So does it look like this drive is having a problem? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 14:36, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Phone

How do you get room to work on a windows phone 7.8? --80.161.143.239 (talk) 15:15, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Windows v. Unix Copy

I'm working in a mixed environment of windows and Unix machines, with a Samba server making the Unix files visible to the Windows clients. I've been told that I must use the Unix command line interface to copy Unix binaries between directories, as dragging and dropping them in Windows may result in the files getting corrupted.
Is this true? Is Windows really incapable of copying a binary file from one location to another? Is Samba the culprit? I assume .exe files and others that Windows realises are binaries are somehow protected? Rojomoke (talk) 16:18, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Copying files is rather hard, really. And doing so when calls are mediated through a foreign interface like Samba makes it harder. It's tempting to think copying a file is a matter of reading blocks of data from one file to another. And mostly this works just fine. But files are more than bytestreams, and handling them in a way that treats them as if they were risks some weird cases where the result isn't what a someone might expect. On Unix a file has, or can have, metadata, ACLs, extended file attributes and may be sparse, a symlink, or a hardlink. On Windows, NTFS files can have ACLs too (but a different kind). On Mac files can (but usually don't, now) have resource forks and on Windows (also, luckily, rarely) alternate data streams. Fancier modern file systems like Btrfs can implement copy-on-write. Sometimes you want to copy this stuff, sometimes you don't, and sometimes you want a choice. So rather than read-then-write, you really want a pre-written utility that's aware of all this scary stuff and just does "the right thing". Windows has library calls for this (CopyFile and CopyFileEx) as does OS-X (copyfile(3)). POSIX does not, and neither (as far as I know) does Linux or glibc (Linux has the rather basic sendfile(2) kernel call); see this entertaining LKML discussion about adding such a call; it mostly concludes "sendfile does some of it, we don't want to reimplement all of cp in the kernel, and it's lots of work so you go do it". Perhaps the safest thing is to call cp iself, which has tons of horrid special-case code to worry about this stuff. But it practice most of the above is super-rare, and lots of people just do read-then-write followed by some ioctls to set attributes (I just checked the source of Python3's shutil.copyfile, and that's what it does). I don't know what Samba does - the folks who write it are exceptionally smart, but given all the complexities above, it's very possible they couldn't think of a "clever" solution, and just did the obvious thing. It may simply be that those issuing the edict in question got burned once (in some hard to diagnose way) because some version of Samba didn't do things in a way they'd expected (on a file they didn't know was special). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:28, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

not familiar with samba, but depending on the configurations of the unix and windows networks and their connection with each other, it might be a huge load on the windows network to move giant files around when the unix network can handle them without breaking a sweat. (that, I have had experience with) Gzuckier (talk) 19:16, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

That's an excellent point... if you're moving a file on samba share A to samba share B, your local machine will do all the io on that (I'm pretty sure this is what's going on with my own network...). Samba has a lot of consideration for filesystem idiosyncrasies. The way it handles case-sensitivity has been brought up on this desk before, and it's more complicated than you'd think at first glance. The filelocking/atomic question is some low level stuff that Finlay explained nicely. A relevant follow up question is how many people are accessing these files at the same time, and how big are the pipes between them, etc. Some knowledge of the environment would probably shed some light on the impetus for the rule. The other thought I had that's not mentioned yet, is perhaps they're concerned about file permissions being consistent. There are lots of ways to handle this with samba (and I don't mean the complicated ACL stuff Finlay mentioned), but sometimes it's just easier to make a rule. Shadowjams (talk) 21:35, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Free software to upscale images in bulk?

What's a good program to upscale a large quantity of images? By "upscale", I mean to increase the dimensions of a given file to a specified size. Quality degradation is not too terribly important, and I'm looking for a free (as in beer) program to do this, ideally without some silly watermark. Any suggestions? -71.37.142.66 (talk) 17:22, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Imagemagick - docs -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:29, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! - 71.37.142.66 (talk) 17:33, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Just in case you don't know, this isn't a very good idea, in general. You are increasing the file size without increasing the actual resolution. This is the opposite of the normal goal, to pack as much information as possible into a minimal space. If you need to display the image at a larger size, many display programs can do that without permanently increasing the file size. StuRat (talk) 03:52, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

golden ax

how can i win golden ax, what are best tricks techniqes, what surprises are there and wich is the best character, is t best to run and leep or to stand and fight and when is best to use magic? on megadrive Horatio Snickers (talk) 20:40, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Here you go. Tarcil (talk) 21:17, 9 April 2013 (UTC)