Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 October 15

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October 15

yellow lights in infenion

I saw today in the tv a small clip inside the infinion company and it was shown that they are building the computer chips in a small place and the lights are shining only something like yellow / orange light, it is not white, it is like I would turn of on my TV the Blue color, than I see the same yellow light. Why do they built this computer chips under yellow light?--185.51.85.16 (talk) 14:12, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

"The lithography room is lit with yellow light to avoid interference with the UV light used with the photomasks". See photolithography and safelight. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 14:33, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

What Finlay said. I used to work in a chip fabrication facility and the lights are indeed yellow in that section of the fab. Though throughout the rest of the cleanroom, they are standard white. Dismas|^(talk) 14:46, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

But what that article says is now not particularly accurate. The UV light used by photolithography machines is used to expose resist on the silicon wafers. The wafers (when they are not in the photolith machines) can be exposed to the light in the clean room. If this is normal white light, they will become slowly exposed, which is not what's wanted. So yellow light is used to prevent exposure of the resist: rather like the red light used in photography "dark rooms".--Phil Holmes (talk) 07:52, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

The "reign" of a non-royal duke

Hello.

Is there a good word for the time a non-royal duke holds his title, from when he inherits it until he dies?

I doubt "reign" is usable in that context.

HandsomeFella (talk) 15:47, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

I would go with "time as duke" or "period as duke" since those terms are ones that people without a training in the arcane language of European aristocracy will understand, but I suspect that the dignity is (somewhat obscure) term that could be used in the way you indicate. Marco polo (talk) 18:06, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

A duke does "reign" over a duchy. There are complications (such as being a duke over a duchy that doesn't exist or the duke of a duchy under someone else's reign). Regardless, the point of a duke is to reign (be the leader of) over a duchy. 199.15.144.250 (talk) 19:14, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

• I'd use dukedom (Duke#Duchy_versus_dukedom) or ducal reign. μηδείς (talk) 19:18, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks guys, I think I'll go with "Ducal reign". HandsomeFella (talk) 07:40, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Before they inherit, they are a commoner and after, they are a peer.
Sleigh (talk) 10:12, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

• Tenure? —Tamfang (talk) 06:38, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

HandsomeFella This is complex. The Duke of York cannot sensibly be said to rule over York, but Philip the Good really did rule the Duchy of Burgundy. I'd use words like "reign" carefully. If you're looking for a word that works as a one-size-fits-all, go for something less direct like "tenure". --Dweller (talk) 14:29, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I actually had tenure in mind too, but I'm not entirely comfortable with that word either. Sounds more like an appointment or a political position of modern time. So I have just changed back to the previous and more neutral "Period" (from "Reign"). See Duke of Manchester. HandsomeFella (talk) 14:45, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

solo game play

I play only game PC offline. How can I install a game without online registration? Caleb Bennett — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.228.22.133 (talk) 19:16, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

You may not be able to anymore. About 7-8 years ago, the entire model of video gaming (especially PC gaming) changed from a single-copy "you purchased the software, it's yours, you install it on your machine and play whenever you want" model to what is known as the Digital rights management model of gaming. You actually don't buy the software anymore. If you have bought any PC game in the past several years, you have not bought the software. What you have bought is a licence to the right to use the software. What that means is that the company from whom you bought that license will only let you use their software if they can track your use of it. Ostensibly, this is to reduce the incidents of software piracy, since they can now keep live tracking of your unique installation of the software, and prevent unauthorized piracy of their software. The greater profits come in, however, with all of the microtransactions and Downloadable content the company can sell you once you have bought the game. The entire DRM system allows companies to continue to make you pay for a game you've already bought. It's just the way the system is set up now. PC games require an always on, always live internet connection to play, and more often than not, require you to run the gaming company's DRM software in order to play the game. The industry leader is in the new way of gaming is probably Valve Corporation, whose Steam DRM software runs almost all of the most popular games. The concept of a game you can just buy and play on your PC is dead and gone, sadly. If you're interested in still doing that, you're stuck buying old legacy games which predate the DRM revolution. --Jayron32 19:49, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Let's not forget the list of open-source video games, and related content. They may not have the same glitziness as commercial games, but you can play them where and when you like. And hacking and improving them is part of the game, potentially a lucrative skill if you get good at it, not something that gets your investment banished to a prison server. Someday, all the commercial software will stop working, servers temporarily down try again later, be forever gone as if it had never been. Probably by then they will have found some way to ban or auction off the entire public domain, in which case, history will record that mankind had no sense of art or literature or music at all until it learned them from the screams of ever-so-slowly tortured copyright enforcers and politicians and rich people of the world. But maybe not, in which case your play is part of something that matters, unlike all the rest. Wnt (talk) 21:58, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Steam really only needs the internet connection to install the game. Once it's installed on a system, you could disconnect it from the internet and run it in offline mode. That does require the initial online registration, but they've got an option to do offline backups of games that you can reinstall from. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:47, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

As I understand it (though I've no personal experience, and I'm certainly not in a position to recommend anything) games from GOG.com are delivered as DRM-free single-exe install blobs. So I think (try it with a super cheap one yourself to confirm) it should be possible to move the .exe to an offline computer (e.g. with a flash drive) and install and use it there, without internet. GoG's Galaxy client, which is comparable to the Steam client, is optional. GoG's range, particularly for newer stuff, is limited - but there's still a lot there. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 22:24, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Humble Bundle also offers many games DRM-free. And then there's always console gaming, which doesn't require "phoning home" to play games, although you have to buy the console (I'm grouping handhelds like the Nintendo 3DS and Sony Vita in with "consoles" here). If money is a factor you can always buy used, older consoles and games. Games don't have an expiration date. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 05:15, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

I own ~100 games on GOG, I always block them from accessing the Internet, and as far as I can remember they all work that way (some complain at startup about the lack of a connection, though). GOG's policy is that once you buy and download a game, it can't be taken away from you, and that precludes a game's requiring a connection to any particular online server to function, since servers may disappear, but I'm not sure it precludes a game that (probably because of insufficient testing) fails to run if there's no Internet access at all. Based on my experience, your odds should be very good, and if you do run into a game that doesn't work, I suspect you could petition to have it fixed or get a refund; they are pretty sympathetic to this kind of thing. Disclaimer: I don't speak for GOG and may be wrong about everything. -- BenRG (talk) 00:39, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm fairly sure a game obtained from GOG which requires an internet connection to play single player would be considered violation of their DRM free promise. The GOG Galaxy page for example [1] says "GOG Galaxy will always work without an internet connection, and so will your games." And the FAQ [2] "It basically means that you actually own the games bought at GOG.com. Once you download a game, you can install it on any computer and re-download it whenever you want, as many times as you need" which technically doesn't say you can actually play it on those computers (without internet connection) but taken as a whole, would seem to imply it. This doesn't preclude flaws in games [3] or possibly fiddling but I'm pretty sure a refund would be an option if the problem can't be fixed. However I'm not sure whether GOG will extend this to multiplayer. It's possible GOG will allow the multiplayer components to require an internet connection, even if people just want to player over LAN considering it would require a more substanial change to the way the game works to add proper LAN without internet support. (Although this would only apply if it's the way the game is made, rather than if the game does actually have proper LAN support, but simply refuses to play without an internet connection.) I don't know if this has even came up though, since those companies who do this sort of thing aren't generally releasing those games on GOG. Nil Einne (talk) 03:33, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

One open-source game I like to to plug: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:11, 16 October 2015 (UTC)