Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 March 30

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March 30

The character ꞵ

What is this character? A search through Google tells me that it's "latin small letter beta" and points me to a French Wikipedia article, fr:Ꞵ, which uses it as its title. How is this different from the ordinary beta character, β? The voiced bilabial fricative article seems to distinguish between β and Ꞵ, saying that a certain sound can be transcribed β "or more properly Ꞵ", so I hesitate to redirect Ꞵ to Beta. Nyttend (talk) 03:49, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Interesting -- it seems to be used exclusively for some Bantu languages. Latin large letter beta appears to have a descender. I hope someone knows what this is about; I'm quite curious. --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 04:37, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

It's already mentioned in the beta article, so I think it makes sense to redirect there. The proposal to add it to Unicode (which is linked from the French article) lists some uses and points out that it's likely to be rendered differently from Greek beta (more upright, and with a serif on the descender). Unicode has always distinguished letters of different scripts even if they look almost identical (like o, ο and о). -- BenRG (talk) 04:40, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Apparently it was added to Unicode in version 8.0. In the relevant code chart, it's in a section titled "Letters for African languages" --69.159.61.172 (talk) 08:18, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

MS Word: remove spurious dictionary entry

In MS Word (2010 2011 Mac) I seem to have added lisinurad (a misspelling of lesinurad) to my list of accepted words. How can I remove it? —Tamfang (talk) 05:16, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@Tamfang: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-remove-words-from-the-word-2010-custom-dict.html The Quixotic Potato (talk) 06:03, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. —Tamfang (talk) 08:19, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Resolved

Please recommend hardware.

I have this rack mount R5400 Dell machine and my internal hard drive crashed. Now the data is recovered but I need to purchase a new drive. I want a 15,000 rpm, 3.5" (the old one was a VelociRaptor 10,000 rpm). Could anybody recommend something that will work for me a long time? Thanks, - --AboutFace 22 (talk) 21:47, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

How big is the drive that you want?--Phil Holmes (talk) 11:07, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

300 GB.

Hardly seems worth speccing a high speed hard drive for something that tiny. Get an SSD.--Phil Holmes (talk) 17:39, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

HGST IDK Deskstar 3.5 inch 3TB Internal Hard Drive looks like a good choise. Some stat's are here: [1]. VelociRaptor may be OK in an enterprise system when it is going to be replaced in the 3 year hardware recycle. Whereas for your requirements Deskstar is probable better. However, I would welcome other comments. I take it that 300 GB was a typo. Can I take it also, that this for a small business that doesn’t want the hassles and cost of frequent hardware replacements. After all, I'm still using my Grandfathers slide rule and I haven’t had to change the batteries even once, yet it still delivers accurately, answers to 3 sig figs.--Aspro (talk) 17:52, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the answers. I am surprised. What is wrong with having internal boot drive of 300 GB. I checked Amazon and found that they don't even make 300 GB VelociRaptors anymore. They start with 600 GB. Am I so out of sync with modern times? As a matter of fact I've had half of my disk empty and the disk is full of software I either downloaded or created myself. I keep my SQL server on three external hard drives. Everything has worked fine until a month ago. I will look into your recommendations but large gigabytes scare me. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 21:39, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

@Aspro's joke about the slide rule is very much appreciated. A very reliable tool indeed. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 21:44, 31 March 2016 (UTC)