Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 December 17

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December 17

PayPal problem

In PayPal, after I had mistyped the amount of deposit needed to confirm my bank account to remove limit on withdrawals, my linked bank account suddenly disappeared. When I try to re-attach my bank account, I repeatedly receive "Sorry, we are not able to process your request. Please try again later" after I fill the "Link bank account" form. I've already emailed PayPal, but received an unhelpful automated reply. Any ideas how to fix that? Thanks. 93.174.25.12 (talk) 12:08, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't want a to alarm you unnecessarily, but the first thing that I would do is to run a good anti-virus and anti-malware scanner on the computer where the problem occurred. Alternatively, see if you can carry through the process on another computer. I'm not too familiar with PayPal so perhaps someone else here has other suggestions? Dbfirs 18:47, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Maybe PayPal anti-fraud algorithm concluded that someone was testing the system. Somehow they have to exclude people who cannot verify their bank account. --Scicurious (talk) 19:07, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, perhaps they've locked the account, but shouldn't they have sent an e-mail to inform the OP of this? Dbfirs 08:48, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

I have so many phishing emails attempting to get into my PayPal account that I have closed it completely.92.26.97.12 (talk) 08:17, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Reading e-books on Linux

I recently bought an e-book about ASP.NET MVC to read at home so I could learn how it differs from ASP.NET Web Forms. It turned out that the download link didn't give me the actual e-book but instead a proprietary urllink.acsm file that Adobe Digital Editions could use to download the actual e-book. Well, Adobe Digital Editions isn't available for Linux. I had to install Wine and use Winetricks to download and install Adobe Digital Editions 1.7. This version must be hopelessly obsolete by modern standards but none of the newer versions would even start up under Wine.

Adobe Digital Editions 1.7 started up nicely under Wine, and I dragged and dropped the urllink.acsm file to its window. It downloaded the actual e-book, which I could read at my leisure.

Can I somehow read this e-book without Adobe Digital Editions, for example under Calibre, a native Linux e-book reader? I didn't find an EPUB file that the e-book would be stored in (as the webstore claimed), but I found a password-protected PDF several megabytes in size. Is this the e-book? Evince couldn't open it without the correct password, which I don't even know. Is there a way to get rid of this DRM nonsense so I could read the e-book freely?

I am of course not going to redistribute this e-book, that would be software piracy. This is only so that I could freely use the content I bought fully legally and paid good money for, for my own use. JIP | Talk 18:41, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Use Windows.--Scicurious (talk) 19:06, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

I suggest you give feedback to the book publisher, and to the website you purchased the book from, saying that you find the limitations on reading the book a problem, and if these conditions were not made clear up front, you may be able to ask for a refund.-gadfium 21:09, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

What publishing house is this, if I might ask? I know DRMs just from library books. I even got the impression that publishers had abandoned completely the idea, since lots of users (also Windows based) have problems with it.--Denidi (talk) 22:57, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

The e-book was published by Wrox, and the distributor I downloaded it from was a Finnish e-book store called AdLibris. JIP | Talk 15:24, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

A couple of thoughts, in no particular order. Your friend when it comes to DRM is apprentice alf, whose tools can deal with the "Adobe Adept, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and eReader DRM schemes". Otherwise you're probably stuffed. If at all possible, I'd follow gadfium's policy, then give this store a very wide berth in future. On the other hand (while I'm not at all defending the bone-headed store and/or publisher), it seems that all you are intended to be able to do with this document is read it on a computer, rather than transferring it to an ereader, or whatever else you might want to do with it. You can read it on your computer, so you have all they intended to give you; the question then is whether you were led to believe that you would get more. Henry^Flower 17:02, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

if your books are using Adobe Digital Editions then you should be able to remove the DRM. At least on Windows, one you've set up Calibre with the appropriate plugins the presuming you can open the book, you just have to import it in to Calibre, everything else should happen automatically. Nil Einne (talk) 07:13, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

I am not sure this is legal everywhere.--Denidi (talk) 18:54, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

But assuming it is legal, how would I go about importing the e-book from ADE to Calibre? JIP | Talk 08:28, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

On the contrary, the vast majority of fiction ebooks from most major distributors & publishers still have DRM. There are some specialist distributors who promise all their books are without DRM [1], as well as stuff like Humble. Similarly there are some specialist publishers who may promise their books have no DRM and some of those self publish who likewise may choose not to use DRM [2]. (I think pretty much all the major distributors like Amazon, Kobo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Barnes & Noble, do allow people to publish without DRM, so it's dependent mostly on the publisher or author except for those distributors which promise their books have no DRM.)

Note that I suspect most people are reading them on non-Windows tablets or ereaders, so problems on Windows get much less attention then they used. For tablets at least, most people probably just use the distributor provided app and don't notice they DRM. Ereaders can be a little more complicated (particularly when old versions of the DRM are killed and there are no more firmware updates).

Funnily enough, as much as it means anything, Adobe's ADEPT DRM is actually one of the better ones here. In the sense that it's open for anyone willing to comply with the requirements to use it. Unlike Amazon or Apple's DRM where you're basically completely locked in to their ecosystem. (Kobo, Barnes & Noble and Google are somewhat inbetween. They provide Adobe DRM ebooks but their apps and devices use their own DRM.)

I'm not so sure about text books but my impression is it's often the same.

The only area where DRM has been mostly abandoned is music files. (Although the move now is to subscription based music services which still have it in some ways.)

Nil Einne (talk) 07:06, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, you are right. I hastened to the conclusion of a world with DRM-free books just based on my own experience. --Denidi (talk) 18:52, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Errors: Relative, mixed or absolute cell reference in spreadsheets

What leads to more errors: referring to cells with an absolute location ($B$3), mixed ($B3 or B$3) or relative? That is in a spreadsheet that's being working on, data is being added, it's being processed.--Scicurious (talk) 19:03, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

The distinctions between "absolute" and "relative" references (are those even the right terms?) are complicated. I don't know if I've ever seen the distinctions described completely and understandably; I've kind of worked them out for myself.

About all I can say is that if you've got a spreadsheet where the distinctions matter, you're going to have lots of problems if you ever use an "absolute" reference when you needed a relative one, or vice versa. I can't imagine distilling out a simple rule saying that one or the other form is somehow more (or less) error-prone; that sounds like it would inevitably end up being endlessly misleading advice.

If you or your users are having trouble with this, I would suggest either (a) learning more about the distinctions so that you can remember and use them reliably, or (b) restricting yourself to the simple, regular, homogeneous spreadsheet layouts which don't end up needing "absolute" references at all, meaning that you can always and safely use the "relative" ones. —Steve Summit (talk) 19:34, 17 December 2015 (UTC) [tweaked 13:57, 18 December 2015 (UTC)]

Those are indeed the correct terms, and they have been in use at least since the early days of Lotus 1-2-3. Example here. --LarryMac | Talk 18:08, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! I was skeptical because when you create them and when they're sitting there working, both styles are pretty "absolute" in my book. The difference shows up only -- and as the nicely vintage reference you cited clearly explains -- when formulas containing references are copied to new locations. —Steve Summit (talk) 18:39, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

My experience is that absolute and relative references have more to do with copy/paste operations than anything else. If it is a relative reference, it changes as you paste. If it is an absolute reference, it doesn't change. So, you choose the one that does what you want. 209.149.113.52 (talk) 15:46, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, from my (now vague) memory of early spreadsheets, one used to ask "absolute of relative?" when asked to copy, and another used "duplicate" for an absolute copy and "replicate" for a relative copy. These days the default is relative, and you only need to use absolute for special situations of data that appears only once in the sheet but is used many times. Dbfirs 08:39, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

How to deal with wired.meraki.com

On a library computer with Firefox, I have been told the problem is one of updating the version of Firefox. The problem seems to have been at least partly solved.

But on those sites where it hasn't, the screen is white with the words "Connecting to wired.meraki.com" or something similar (probably ads, since the various sites are almost never related to the content I want) for the longest time before the actual content finally shows up. On a library computer with only Internet Explorer, on one of the same sites, there is no such explanation but the screen stays white for a long time.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:46, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Update: it was happening today with Firefox. I kept seeing the circle go round and round, stop, and then start up again, with "not responding" at the top of the screen. I was trying to do other stuff too, but nothing would happen. I clicked on the red X in the upper right corner, and when I restarted, all was well, but that's not always an option.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:29, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

That website is designed only for Cisco Meraki appliances. Any DNS request addressed to that website gets intercepted, and redirected via a local network. It sounds as if your library computers are not set up properly, or fail to use the correct routing, or perhaps there is just extreme local congestion. Dbfirs 23:39, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

The meraki site is only one example, of course. But why can't the correct content come first and then the ads later, if there's going to be a problem?— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:21, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Some of it is probably just low bandwidth on a public machine. However, third-party ads often use scripts to set cookies (or for other targeting purposes): these are executed early in the loading sequence, and the browser won't continue parsing the HTML until all the scripts are finished. Here is a good overview of the general sequence of web page loading (scroll down about 2 pages): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28635141/sequence-in-which-html-page-loads. OldTimeNESter (talk) 13:20, 22 December 2015 (UTC)