Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 November 10

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November 10

Unbreakable Access Denied

Basically, I've tried everything I've known, I've taken ownership, and set it to "everyone", everyone has "Total Control", but, I can't move it, it always gives me an Access Denied, I've also used the "Unblocker utilty, with the reboot checkbox and no luck. I've also killed most processes, and antiviruses. I really don't know why I can't read it, or move it. I can seem to move it between the drives folders, but I can't read it or move it to main drive. PS:I'm using windows 7, I'm using administrator permissions. --190.156.177.251 (talk) 03:17, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Um, what is "it"? Looie496 (talk) 16:07, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

It's a text file. 190.156.177.251 (talk) 17:33, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Okay, what I just found was the most bizarre thing ever. This was a bat file, when it's a bat file it's unlockable, unmovable, unreadable, but when it's renamed to a text file, it can do just about everything.. however when it's a .bat file again, it gets the unbreakable status again..., I wonder how can I find out what's causing this behaviour. --190.156.177.251 (talk) 00:11, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

What is the name of the file? Use of reserved filenames can causes problems similar to what you describe. A list of the names and how to deal with them is available here 82.44.76.14 (talk) 00:23, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

What photo manipulating program is this?

[edit: Possible NSFW, just a model being altered, but the point of the video is work safe I think... anyway, just a heads up just in case bosses are flying about...) YouTube link here, time starts automatically at 27 seconds in. What program is this, does anyone know? The word "photoshop" is practically genericized, and as a user of the actual program Adobe Photoshop, I don't see any correlation. It doesn't appear to be PortraitProfessional either (though I could be wrong). Anyone know what program is being used here, where slices of image seem to be made and the program seems to automatically fill in the blanks with any alterations?Reflectionsinglass (talk) 06:34, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

The user interface for the photo editing utility looks "intentionally generic." It is not Photo Shop or GIMP. I suspect it is fictitious. The actual image processing could have been performed in a variety of tools, and the intermediate results were composited with a brand-neutral user interface overlaid. Nimur (talk) 18:36, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

That is bizarre. But ok, thanks, that makes sense considering no "tools" are ever selected, just a hand and some slicing-looking lines. Reflectionsinglass (talk) 06:13, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it's a real program -- there are a ton of obscure freeware/shareware image editors out there, but it might also be custom-written software that was never distributed. The video is an extreme time-lapse of a process that probably took a couple of hours, so a lot of the actions happen too quickly to be seen. Looie496 (talk) 17:21, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it's *not* a real program. There are plenty of obscure freeware/shareware image editors out there, but most of them have horrible user interfaces (see GIMP, Inkscape, et al). It would be very rare for a shareware editor to be functional *and* have a well designed, minimal user interface. I have a feeling this was screen recorded using Photoshop and its tools, but the toolbar was replaced in post production with a generic, though reminiscent, Photoshop-esque toolbar to avoid any direct finger pointing at a specific product like Adobe Photoshop, but rather make a broader statement about image manipulation. --209.203.125.162 (talk) 20:17, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Nimur and .162. I've used a variety of graphics programs over the years and have never seen one with a menu called "Styling" and Googling that brings up nothing. It's also quite strange for there to be no icon on the menu bar/header bar whatsoever (e.g. at the top right or top left). Matt Deres (talk) 22:54, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

After a bit of research, I found that the video was created by Tim Piper, a very successful director of commercials, with his wife as the model. He has a Youtube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/tpiper, and is famous for making a commercial called "Dove Evolution", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U. That commercial does clearly make use of PhotoShop. I suspect he has access to a lot of software. Looie496 (talk) 04:16, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Using Excel to obtain a median

I have an Excel sheet with several thousand rows on it regarding lot information of various products. Each row contains, among other things, a quantity and an age and both values could vary widely. What I would like to do with the sheet is produce the median age for all the products. Now, Excel has a median function, but it would not weight the median by the quantity of pieces, which is what I want. To take an extreme example, if I had one case of grommits that was 7 days old and one case of framistans that was 10 days old, and a hundred cases of foo that were 1,000 days old, the median age should be 1,000 but Excel will give me the value of 10 because it doesn't take into consideration how many cases I have of each. Is there a way to do this? Obtaining the mean is no problem, but I would like to examine the median. Matt Deres (talk) 20:59, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Excel's MEDIAN function is giving you the median of the input values - one "count" per input entry. It sounds like what you want is the median of a "meta-entry" - a composite histogram whose element-count is defined in one cell, and whose value is defined in another cell. It would be great if an automatic histogram function existed to perform that, without requiring you to manually construct the entries for the intermediate histogram as thousands of distinct rows! Unfortunately, the biggest downside is that it requires the Analysis tool pack, which is notoriously difficult to install. Here are instructions: "Load the Analysis Toolpak".

Once that's set up, you can generate a "median" by specifying "50%" and enabling cumulative percentage data. You can also directly compute the median using the PERCENTRANK.INC (percentile) function, with an argument of 50%. Nimur (talk) 21:22, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

I had a feeling it would be tricky. Thanks for the heads up; I'll have a look at those options. Matt Deres (talk) 02:39, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Let's say the setup is column A: name, column B: age, column C: quantity. First sort by column B (ascending or descending, doesn't matter). Then, in column D, calculate the cumulative sum of column C. The row where this number passes half the total sum of column C has the median observation. Of course, this is a bit cumbersome and works best if you're only going to do this once. You can use quite basic formulas to search for the right row using the sum and the info in column D and present this information in a separate cell. Jørgen (talk) 10:36, 11 November 2013 (UTC)