Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 March 5

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March 5

What helps search engine optimization

Does the repeated mention of a website or name help with search engine optimization even if it is not a link to somewhere? See the collapsed contnet here for an example. Many thanks, Anna Frodesiak (talk) 01:44, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Google, the most important player, keeps its ranking algorithm secret and works hard to prevent sites from using tricks to increase their ranking, so the answer is difficult and ever-changing. The honest way to increase the ranking of a site is to persuade other legitimate web sites to link to it because they value the content that it contains. Looie496 (talk) 16:19, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Fair enough. Thank you kindly for the thoughtful answer. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:12, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Visitors hacked in Sochi

Does this imply that visitors returning from Sochi will spread malware to many other devices in their home countries?

• NBC: All Visitors to Sochi Olympics Immediately Hacked - YouTube (3:46)

—Wavelength (talk) 03:45, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

The story is a sham according to the security researcher Robert Graham, who I'm inclined to believe in this case: [1][2]. -- BenRG (talk) 05:55, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply and those links. Now I am wondering (a) why NBC would devise and report a false story, and (b) how the exposure by Robert Graham has affected its reputation as a reliable news source.

—Wavelength (talk) 19:22, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't know a lot about it. Here's some meta-reporting: [3][4], including a reply from an NBC spokeswoman that doesn't say a whole lot. All of the major news outlets publish irresponsible stories about hackers all the time, and rarely retract them. They do the same with non-scary topics that most people don't understand, like quantum computing and cosmology (and probably everything else—those are just two subjects I happen to know well enough to catch the mistakes). -- BenRG (talk) 00:03, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your second reply and those additional links.

—Wavelength (talk) 21:00, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia extremely slow to load and freezing tonight and last?

Wikipedia has been extremely slow to load, several minutes per page, any page, on any browser tonight for 6 hours or so ending at about midnight EST and the same last night. This is independent of four different browsers, and only for wikipedia, no other sites. I see nothing at help or on line when I look at google news. Is it just me? What is the page one looks at for such trouble reports? Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 05:33, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

This resource [5] will tell you if a site is "down" to the world, or just you. In my experience, it will also sometimes report excessive slowness as "down", due to request timeouts SemanticMantis (talk) 16:27, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

I am used to (well not very,) timeout errors. This was really weird. No error message, just very slow loading, often with half a page loaded and frozen but the prcessing icon still spinning. I have bookmarked the page you gave me. Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 18:57, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem. Wikipedia has been loading slowly the last three days or so. I've been having the problem on Firefox and Chrome on multiple Windows 7 computers. Login pages and images take especially long to load, and the browser says "transferring data from bits.wikimedia.org" and "...upload.wikimedia.org". I would appreciate any explanation or help. Thanks! --Albany NY (talk) 17:31, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

How do I write fancy equations and quotes on Wikipedia without resorting to bland plain text?

The "fancy equations" refer to the typographical form of mathematical equations without speaking like this: sqrt(100)=10. The quotes refer to the typographical form of ginormous quotes for emphasizing a particular line from a block paragraph. 140.254.227.87 (talk) 15:38, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

WP:MATH tells about this, and WP:HELPDESK is the place to ask further. Jim.henderson (talk) 15:56, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

The gist is that by using math tags, like so: <math> \int_0^1 x \; \mathrm{d}x </math> , you can write most things as you would in LaTeX, and they render like this: $\int _{0}^{1}x\;\mathrm {d} x$ . SemanticMantis (talk) 16:23, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Physical bitcoins

Often, news stories or articles about Bitcoin will be accompanied by a picture, such as the one on the right, of actual, physical bitcoins. My question is: Do such physical bitcoins actually exist, and what is their use? I thought part of the appeal of bitcoin was that it was an entirely digital currency that didn't require the physical transfer of cash. 168.120.4.239 (talk) 15:47, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

A bitcoin, reduced to its essence, is a very long number. Anybody who knows that number can spend the bitcoin. These physical coins are called Casascius coins. According to a New Yorker article: "they are sold by Mike Caldwell through his Web site, casascius.com. These coins contain a private key on a card embedded in the coin and sealed with a tamper-evident hologram." Looie496 (talk) 16:15, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Any relation to User:Casascius? —Tamfang (talk) 04:53, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Apparently so—see the image description page. -- BenRG (talk) 08:57, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

The appeal of bitcoin for some people is that it isn't controlled by any government. Also I suspect that people buy these coins simply as novelties. -- BenRG (talk) 08:57, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

I think that's true - although splurging around $500 (or whatever the exchange rate is today) for one physical BItCoin is quite a bit for a 'novelty' item. These coins are really only fancy ways to keep a record of the BitCoin's ID. Once the coin with that id has been 'spent' - the physical coin's value is zero. Hence all of the messing around with tamper-evident holograms and such. SteveBaker (talk) 16:26, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Upgrading from Fedora 17 to Fedora 20?

I am thinking of upgrading my operating system from Fedora 17 to Fedora 20. However I am not sure my computer will be able to run it, as it's already almost seven years old. It has a two-core 64-bit AMD Athlon 6000+ CPU at 3.0 GHz, 4 GiB memory and a 2 TB hard disk. 2 TB is plenty of space to install Fedora 20, but will the CPU and the memory be enough? Are the system requirements for Fedora 20 significantly higher than those for Fedora 17? JIP | Talk 16:31, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Per Fedora's minimum system requirements, you should be fine. Looking at the release notes, I very much doubt you'll have problems with the new build. Justin15w (talk) 16:11, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Computer game naming

Why were so many computer games developed in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s marketed under completely different names in the USA? Is this still being done today? (I stopped following the computer games market in the late 1990s.) JIP | Talk

Sure, it still happens. It happens for movies and things too. The people in charge are convinced that different marketing is needed for different regional sensibilities. I don't have current examples for PC gaming, but here's an interesting and long-running set of example from the Kirby_(series) games. The names are fairly similar in USA and Japan, but, Japanese Kirby is cute and friendly looking, while American Kirby is generally much angrier. [6]. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:13, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes it's because of regional sensibilities - some word in the name in one language might be an obsenity in another, for example - or it might be that the name is already being used in that country for some other product. It might be that the name is licensed in some way (eg from a movie company) and that the name had already been licensed to someone else in that country. I know of one situation (from a company I once worked at) where the name, when translated into another language, was simply too long - so the game was renamed there to make it be a 'catchier' title. There are lots of reasons. The games themselves often vary in content from one place to another too. For example, all games marketed in Germany are legally BANNED from showing either blood or NAZI symbols such as the swastika. Hence the German versions of US, UK and Japanese games almost always have green stuff ("ectoplasm") splattering from dismembered bodies instead of red - and WWII games have to use some other symbol for the emblem of the German forces! In one game I worked on, the Dutch translation of an item on one of the game menus was too long to fit into the space we had allocated for the English word and an entire game feature was removed from the Dutch version in order to avoid the grief of having to redesign the menu layout for such a relatively small games market! Games companies have a heck of a time handling all of this messiness - and changing the name is really the least of their problems! SteveBaker (talk) 16:22, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

audio player question

You utilize a great small audio player (e.g. see link at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Easter_Festival_Overture). Can you tell me which player it is so I can utilize it in music blog postings?

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Rcdunnii (talk • contribs) 21:24, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

We use the TimedMediaHandler MediaWiki extension, which in turn uses the open source Kaltura player. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 21:42, 5 March 2014 (UTC)