User talk:Plugwash

I have a strong dislike for splitting up conversations if i have posted on your talkpage i WILL have it on my watchlist Plugwash 15:24, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

archives
 * /archive1

Electronics
Hi plugwash, I notice that you contribute to Electronics articles. Have you considered joining WikiProject Electronics? That would be a good place to talk about the BJT control Snafflekid 23:53, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Transistor operation
We know about the relationship between base current and collector current. But the correct explanation is that the collector current is exponentially dependent on the BE voltage. See Bill Beaty's site. amasci.com. --Light current 00:34, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
 * exactly whereas that WP article seems to say the opposite that the current control is the real reason and the voltage is just a way of modelling it in other words it has it backwards! Plugwash 00:40, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Can you re-phrase your last comment please?--Light current 02:10, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Nice to meet you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.92.126.184 (talk) 04:21, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

PNG
Sorry I didn't respond earlier to your question about PNG...I've been out of town for a while. Your supposition about my original interlace proposal is correct. I had experimented a lot with interlacing because the original Piclab was developed on a small 286 DOS machine, and had to be able to de-interlace GIF images that were larger than memory. --LDC

Lossy data compression
Please see my additions to the discussion on Talk:Lossy data compression. --Shlomital 22:32, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Removal of discussions
If you don't want people to delete stuff from your talk page, then why don't you state it on your user page? Or is there some policy about this that I don't know about? --logixoul 12:56, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Apparently there isn't. --logixoul 14:53, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Not going to reply, are you? :-D --logixoul 21:13, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
 * All righty then, I'm not watching anymore. :p --logixoul 08:02, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Manchester vote
I noticed your comments on the City of Manchester page. Please vote about the Manchester - City of Manchester situation at Talk:City of Manchester. G-Man 20:58, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Moving Pages
Oh, I didn't know that. I thought I could only move a page to a new page that was not on the server. If it was there, I thought I got the admin message. All DONE. Moved George Kelly (gangster) to Machine Gun Kelly

Thanks! WikiDon 17:08, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

FAT - "i don't belive this is correct"
About your last edit to File Allocation Table. Do you have a source? AlistairMcMillan 15:36, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
 * From memory the mention of FAT sotring extended attributes in a large file was mentioned in the cygwin docs (in a cautionary note about turning on a feature that used them). The mention of filesharing for macs being only supported on ntfs was in the windows 2K (may have only been 2K server) help somewhere. I don't have exact locations though. Plugwash 15:39, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I've tested in Windows 2000 on moving a file with Macintosh Finder Info and Macintosh Resource Fork streams to a FAT32 drive and Explorer informed that the extra streams (and listed them) will be lost on the copy.
 * I never tested behaviour with EAs but ASAP I will install an OS/2 in HPFS and NT 3.51 and move some files with EAs to a NTFS drive and then to FAT drives with various versions of NT (3.51, 4.0, 2000, maybe XP a.w.)
 * Should you need me to test also behaviour with NT 4 about Mac resources? I think I can install it with SFM and a old MacOS 8.1 and do some testing.
 * &mdash; Claunia 16:56, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I've just tested and wrote a section about the ADS in FAT.

Honeypot
I like what you added. At the time of my honeypot I specifically notified Alan Brown, operator of ORBS, that he could test and list my system any time. The list of open relay addresses he published was the "aged" list, IP addresses that had been listed for more than 30 days. He theorized that some spammers used blocklists as a readily-available source of open relay IP addresses. These would be fully useful to send spam to recipients not portected by that list. If the block list is operated responsibly (my bias is in effect in this statment) it's no problem at all for the honeypot to be listed. My honeypot was actually also a server and I was a bit cavalier in what I said. Still, ORBS was so little used by the operators of the servers to which most of my users' email went that there were very few instances of legitimate email being blocked. It is far better for a honeypot ot have no valid SMTP function: then it's pure and easier to run. Being on that list increased the chance that I could block spam.

I got listed by MAPS, too, for announcing my honeypot (long discussion of what that meant left out.) I dealt with that by creating another server that was used as a smart host by my actual server: that other server's IP address never ended up on any list.

Listing entire subnetworks may be done, but it's way too harsh against a single open relay. In my opinion.

But, as open relay abuse seems to be a very small part of the current spam picture it's all pretty much academic, anyway. I know of one Jackpot site, and it mostly traps spam from Asian IP addresss to Asian email addresses. Perhaps operators of open proxy honeypots and zombie honeypots should heed your warning. The latter, in particular, may not need to care, as they may be in a block of IP addresses that would already be blocklisted just because of the nature of that block of addresses (e.g., dynamic.) They're listed either way.

Minasbeede 19:31, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Ken Kutaragi
I'm requesting your opnion about this dispute. Lot of POV-Pushing, the article is currently blocked. --GroundZero 23:58, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
 * hmm i know very little about sony and i've never edited that article any particular reason you are asking me? Plugwash 00:03, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Village Pump data loss
A recent edit of yours appears to have nuked both my comments on other threads. I'm wondering... what happened? &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 22:54, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Such things have happened before when db slaves get out of sync i'm not sure if thats the case here though. Plugwash 23:17, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

PNG's Not GIF
I hope this is proof enough: PNG (Portable Network Graphics) Home Site

My personal recollection is that Tom Boutell came up with the name, intending both the recursive acronym for GNU-folk and the "official" one for the record. I suggested we do a lossy one as well to replace JPEG, which I called "PNP" for "Portable Network Photo" and colloqially pronounced "pinup", but that never caught on. --LDC 22:05, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

ISO/IEC 8859-*
Why did you move all the articles to ISO/IEC 8859-*? ISO/IEC 8859-15 and other articles doesn't mention IEC at all, and I've never seen it used on the net with IEC. I question whether it's even pedantically correct to call something created by ISO, maintained by ISO/IEC, and now not maintained at all "ISO/IEC". More importantly, they're not called ISO/IEC in the Wikipedia pages, they're not called ISO/IEC by the IETF charset group, and they're not called ISO/IEC on the net. I plan to move these back shortly unless given a good reason otherwise, which would probably mean some evidence that this was discussed and agreed upon.--Prosfilaes 19:55, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
 * all i did was merge in a load of (mostly) stubs that basically said "iso-8859-? is the ianas name for iso 8859-? combined with the C0 and C1 control codes" and/or duplicated information from the C0 and C1 control codes article. the change from ISO 8859-? to ISO/IEC 8859-? was not made by me and i'd personally be happy to see them moved back. Plugwash 20:06, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Comment
I cannot sufficiently comment on your reversion of WP:AUM without violating No personal attacks. Lucky you. -- Netoholic @ 04:26, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * personally i have very little sympathy for you, you shaped that page through revert wars then convinced arbitrators to side with your interpretations. in the meantime you tried to implement it through revert wars which lead to protection making life difficult for those who wan'ted to edit templates. I just wish brion (who seems to have been the only one with sufficiant authority and knowlage to resist you) had got involved sooner. Plugwash 04:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Recent edit
Regarding this edit, can you provide a link to the discussion (or at least which village pump it's in and the name of the section it's under)? Thanks! —Locke Cole • t • c 14:49, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * it seems it either wasn't on the village pump or someones deleted it and i'm having trouble tracking it down. Plugwash 15:23, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Well if you happen across it, please let me know. It couldn't be the discussion at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css could it? —Locke Cole • t • c 15:25, 23 January 2006 (UTC)


 * got it MediaWiki_talk:Common.css Plugwash 15:28, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Ah okay, thanks! =) —Locke Cole • t • c 15:36, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

who is that?
Before you, um, got involved on WP:AUM, I don't ever remember bumping into you, but you speak about subjects that very few people know about. Who are you? Did your username get changed? Are you a sock puppet? -- Netoholic @ 20:38, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * nope not a sock and this is the only username i've ever used on wikipedia. What exactly are theese "subjects that very few people know about" Plugwash 01:51, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

ASCII
Thanks for your good work on the ASCII article, especially on the list of external links. I've just suggested on Talk:ASCII that we drop the link to www.asciivalue.com. I would value any comments you might have. Chris Chittleborough 05:31, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Image:Polizia_di_stato.png
Would you like me to delete this image, now the discussion is over? ed g2s &bull; talk 17:16, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Manual of Style (China-related articles)
Hi there! I noticed your edits to the guidelines. What is this "update to 1.5"? Does that mean that we could wave goodbye to those weird &1234#'s and simply type in foreign characters as they are, and people from around the world can still view them without distortions?

This Unicode issue is very confusing for intellectually challenged people who know virtually nothing about encodings (yes... that's me) and has led to many unnecessary, time-wasting conflicts among editors. *SiGh* I'm so frustrated =|

Thanks!

(btw, the language spoken by people in China is spelt "Chinese" :P) 199.111.230.195 20:24, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
 * In a nutshell yes you can now type chinese straight into the wikitext and it will be stored fine. Browser support should be pretty similar for either the entites or the characters used directly though there will undoubtablly be exceptions both ways. Most other wikimedia wikis were on utf-8 already but due to the way things were handled at the time and ens size converting en before the 1.5 upgrade would have been prohibitively time consuming. Version 1.5 of mediawiki got the final bits of infrastructure for converting existing text on demand in place and made some pretty deep changes to other tables meaning the conversion came essentially free as part of the upgrade process. Plugwash 20:33, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Ahhh... thanks =) 199.111.230.195 00:06, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Code pages
Hi Plugwash,

I just realized all articles on 8xx code pages (Code page 857, Code page 858, etc.) seem to say cps's lower 127 code points are the same as ASCII's, which, regarding the graphical characters, is not 100% correct - would you favor to correct this? I would. Bye, --Abdull 19:15, 19 February 2006 (UTC) (P.S. this comment is on my watchlist :)
 * Sure though i don't particuarlly like the curent layout of code page 437 etc either. i think we should show both grids for the 0x00-0x1F range and then describe where each of them fits in. Plugwash 19:54, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Like this?


 * Abdull 21:38, 19 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Not bad though could do with a little tweaking for a more even look ;)

Images of "distribution boards"
I've got some. Want any of them? 68.39.174.238 08:35, 20 March 2006 (UTC)


 * IE, a pic of one with the front on, since I think you were the one talking about duplicate images on that page. 68.39.174.238 16:41, 21 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Sure provided the person who made them is prepared to release them under [|a license acceptable to wikipedia] etc


 * BTW if you log in then you can upload them yourself. Plugwash 17:10, 21 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Yea its my board and I can do WHATEVER I WANT WITH IT AHAHAHHAHHAH (Well, the image(s) anyway). 68.39.174.238 00:17, 23 March 2006 (UTC)


 * ? 68.39.174.238 22:53, 27 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Never mind, I got someone else to upload the pics. 68.39.174.238 01:25, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Ohm
There's a vote at Talk:Ohm (unit) to reinstate as the primary topic after a move from Ohm. Have an opinion to share? Femto 16:56, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Caron/hacek vote
There's a vote on Talk:caron where the article should be if you're interested. +Hexagon1 (talk) 10:07, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Fixing of RTL text on Scrabble letter distributions
Thank you! Soo 15:50, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

What exactly I changed
Hello, some users of German Wikipedia wanted to use the animation in personal Babelboxes on their user pages. User:Dudenfreund reported trouble with this combination. The .gif was displayed in incorrect size, and the animation was stuttering. I don´t know the exact reasons for the trouble until today, but I know some settings which may cause strange displaying in some browsers (especially the Internet Explorer). So I changed the method of pixel removal (I hope I translate that correctly) from "never" to "background", the number of repeats from "65535" to "never ending" and I increased the speed a little bit. The first change was (I think) what caused the trouble. The second setting would have made the animation stop after 65,535 repeats, now it will rotate forever 8-). And the 3rd change is one for the eyes, it runs faster now, so the rotation looks smoother.

All changes were made with Ulead Gif Animator 5.0. If my changes caused any other trouble, feel free to revert, but please report me, so I can edit my .gifs with a maximum of compatibility. The rotating earth is displayed now in some babelboxes like here. I hope I could help you. And sorry for my bad English, I´m just a stupid German

Owly K


 * Hmmm... I don´t know gifsicle, but I compared the first version and your edit. I think, the changes you made were the reason for the trouble. But I´m not sure. I think we should try and look what will happen. Owly K06:01, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

UTF-8-MAC
Thank you for fixing up the UTF-8-Mac area of the UTF-8 article. I knew somewhat what was going on there and knew it was important enough to be mentioned, but you definetly seem to understand it better then I do :D - The DJ 18:41, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

CSS and mirrors
Actually the bit about CSS and mirrors (as seen in WP:HIDE) was a result of a comment by Brion VIBBER. I guess many mirrors use their own CSS and not Wikipedia's (OTOH, installing an extension like ParserFunctions is a lot less controversial; and templates such as qif are copied along with all the other data AFAIK). I think Brion's quote is on Don't use hiddenStructure. —Locke Cole • t • c 18:01, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Mirrors that just copy everything and dump it into a fairly plain mediawiki install will be fine. As will those that keep and eye on wikipedias css and merge changes as needed. OFC there may be mirrors in between that use thier own css without watching whats going on but i can't imagine that covers all mirrors. Plugwash 18:05, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Tesla Suggestion
Hi, Plugwash. I'd just like to remind you to not bite the newcomers. I understand that the edit war over Nikola Tesla's nationality is stupid, but it's nothing worth losing your head over. Elitism over whether someone does or doesn't have a registered account and talking in caps will only provoke people into being stubborn. Maybe it's time to think about contacting an admin about making the page semi-protected. --Rocketgoat 20:38, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Right if its a genuine newbie who doesn't understand that this is a colaborative editing site thats one thing. But this person clearly knew that it was and that he could get away with bossing us arround and pushing his pov. Plugwash 21:00, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Major programming languages
You might be interested in Templates for deletion/Log/2006 May 25. Cheers, —Ruud 21:51, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

from your userpage
I am from INDIA...my doubt is "why is that a Ground or earth pin is of greater diameter when compared to that of Phase or Neutral"

If found the answer to this plz mail me to odaysuresh@lancogroup.com.

thanking you. Odaysuresh 12:16, 19 June 2006
 * I don't know for sure why BS546 did it that way but i'd guess it was to make sure that under no circumstances could the ground pin go in the wrong hole.

Flag Template
Regarding your idea, how would you go about doing that in the template? You're absolutely right, and I think it's a great idea. Any way I can help? Uris 17:09, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Page move
Another proposal to move Caron is currently underway. Since you participated in a past discussion of this, you may be interested. Jonathunder 17:26, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Linux
I thought you might be interested. Best wishes, User:Samsara (talk • contribs) 17:53, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Meth Mouth image
Hey, I saw you removed the meth mouth image from the dental caries article. Meth mouth is an example of rampant caries. The same thing is the case with xerostomia-related caries. With this in mind, do you think it would be ok to put the image back up? (and coincidentally, I took that picture from one of my patients.) :) - Dozenist talk  21:57, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok sorry didn't realise that put it back if you wan't but at least label it as such. Plugwash 11:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, will do. I did not want to touch it until I heard from you, and so I will put it back up. - Dozenist talk  20:28, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Domestic AC power plugs and sockets
I see you've been active at Domestic AC power plugs and sockets, which is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. If you can help us address the issues raised on the FAR, perhaps the article's featured status can be retained. Regards, Sandy 13:20, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

That FAT 512 root dir entries discussion
Hi, you had started the discussion on the FAT page, but have not replied recently. Are you convinced now that it's possible to have more than 512 root dir entries in a FAT disk? If so, what argument convinced you? -- Tempel 09:07, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
 * The discussion so far hasn't convinced me either way, it appears to me that it is possible to generate a disk with more entries (and for that we can cite mkdosfs's man page) but it also appears that windows may have problems with such disks. Plugwash 11:10, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of Template:8 bit charset comparison
Hi,

I tagged Template:8 bit charset comparison for deletion. Thought to notify you, in case you have then worked on it without committing your changes. &mdash; Gennaro Prota &#8226;Talk 19:55, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Go ahead and delete it, i don't remember exactly what it was going to be but i belive it was something that involved conditionals and my idea for creating conditionals didn't work out. Plugwash 22:19, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

PCI Express
Can you explain your removal of the ref in the PCI Express article? I looked at the ref and it seems both accurate and authoritative to me. It also directly covers the claim it's attached to, although to be honest that claim is non-controversial and doesn't really need a ref anyway. (respond here, I'll see it) Maury 20:34, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Our article states "PCIe transfers data at 250 MB/s per lane. With a maximum of 32 lanes, PCIe allows for a total combined transfer rate of 8 GB/s." which to the best of my knowlage is correct and is consistant with PCI-e being intended as a superior replacement for PCI, PCI-X and AGP. The linked articles figures are all lower than ours by a factor of 8 which I am pretty convinced is wrong (and someone else posted on the talk page to point out). Plugwash 20:42, 2 February 2007 (UTC)


 * So is this a bits/bytes issue? That was not clear. Here is a better ref then: Sadly it too mixes bits and bytes at random. BTW, it does disagree with the highest speed, slighly, putting it at 6.4 MBps. Maury 20:55, 2 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Picking that new reference apart it is frankly terrible.


 * "Although this sounds limiting, it can transmit at the extremely high speed of 2.5 Gbps, which equates to a burst mode of 320 MBps on a single connection." <-- first screwup, quoting the value which has not been 8b10b corrected in bytes and describing it like that is highly misleading.


 * "This encoding explains differences in the published spec speeds of 250 MBps (with the embedded clock overhead) and 200 MBps (data only, without the overhead)." <-- it gets worse, he's now gone from not applying the 8b10b encoding at all to applying it twice!


 * The 6.4 GBps figure in his table seems to be a result of him counting both directions for an x16 slot (our figures are the bandwidth in one direction which is more realistic since symetric traffic patterns are rare) but then applying 8b10b TWICE (as mentioned above).


 * Finally despite being on the site of a well respected computer company note the disclaimer at the bottom of the page it really seems like this was written in a hurry for some tutorial series.


 * The real problem is that few wikipedia editors have the access needed to make proper cites (proper cites defined here as citing the actual standards which are unfortunately in many cases pay to access) but there is huge pressure from the wikipedia cabel be to have cites for everything. The result is that articles end up full of cites from sources that are full of inaccuracies and in many cases no more authoritive than wikipedia itself! Plugwash 21:24, 2 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Well this seems odd to me. Don't you find it strange that otherwise authoritative sources like Emulex and IBM would be so full of mistakes? Maury 14:39, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Well i've never heared of Emulex before but as for the IBM article given the disclaimer at the bottom which essentially implies that its the unchecked work of one person it doesn't entirely surprise me that the content is extremely poor quality. Plugwash 21:07, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

"Pins" in the root canal
Please see Talk:Crown (dentistry) for an answer to your question. DRosenbach (Talk

TfD nomination of Template:Unicode Latin
Template:Unicode Latin has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. — &#9993; Hello World! 06:38, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Ethernet
Hi... I'm sorry you found my edit objectionable. I think I understand your position and it's a fair one. I'll think about it more and propose something better on the Talk page.

Paul Koning 01:45, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * BTW do you know where the section on bridges is in the spec, i had a quick look but couldn't find it.


 * Multicast awareness of switches and failopen may not be mentioned explicitly in the spec but they are both issues that can cause an inadvertant flood of packets that act like broadcast.


 * As for spanning tree the impression i get is standardised or not its a feature only seen in high end switches, am i wrong? Plugwash 14:29, 13 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Bridges are in 802.1d. Not 802.3, because bridges are not specfic to Ethernet.  I don't have my copy at hand, unfortunately.  They are also discussed in detail in chapter 3 of Radia Perlman's excellent book "Interconnections".


 * Spanning tree -- at one time I remember things called "simple switches" which left out spanning tree. Those are non-conforming -- the bridge standard requires implementation of spanning tree. (Perlman says "to conform to 802.1d, a bridge must implement both learning and the spanning tree".)  I haven't heard about these non-conforming switches lately, so I don't know if they exist anymore.  But I would certainly not view spanning tree as a "high end" feature.  For example, EVERY bridge from DEC has always had spanning tree.


 * Fail-open -- I view that as simply a bug. Whose bridge does that?  The correct behavior in learning is that, if you get too many addresses to learn them all, you learn what you can.  That implies, of course, that traffic for any unlearned address is flooded.


 * Multicast-aware -- do you have a reference for that? Bridges can have address entries (such as multicast addresses) set by management.  That's a feature described in 802.1d (it's optional), and common on managed bridges.  Is that what you meant?  Multicast is usually viewed as traffic that wants to be treated like broadcast, so the flooding of multicast would not be seen as a problem in that case.  Of course, with either broadcast or multicast, if the sender goes far enough out of control that your whole bridged LAN is overloaded, that's a problem.  If that risk is a major issue then you'd use routers, not switches.


 * Paul Koning 15:55, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * As i said i was under the impression that low end switches didn't support spanning tree but i could be wrong. I was also under the impression that there were high end switches that could send multicasts to the relavent nodes without flooding the whole network but again i don't know for sure. Plugwash 23:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think you may be right about "low end" switches doing such a thing, at least some of them. How about dealing with this in the Ethernet article by describing what the bridge standard says about it?  In other words, the standard says it's required though some people may have sold switches that don't conform.  And on multicast, how about dropping it until there is a reference that can be quoted?  That's the Wikipedia guideline as I understand it.  Paul Koning 01:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Apropos dual speed hubs, the devices are essentially obsolete, but perpetuating the term simply repeats marketing-speak to try to convince customers that they can do something more cheaply. Hubs use circuitry that repeats bits based on the timing information recovered, by a phase locked loop or similar function, from the frame preambles. They have no separate higher speed clock. In dual speed, a frame is sent, by a bridge circuit, not running STP, that stores and forwards the frame to a higher- or lower-speed repeater. Howard C. Berkowitz 14:16, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Pidgin protocols revert
Have to ask, since I spent a decent amount of time setting that table up: What exactly about the table was misleading? Would it have been possible to bring it up on the talk page before reverting it, or bringing it up on my talk page first? Any misleading statements that may have existed were purely accidental, and for the sake of preventing said mistake from happening again I ask what exactly was misleading. (Note: reply here, I have your tp watched.) // 3R1C 16:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Please copyedit your edit to "Operational amplifier"
There are a number of misspellings and punctuation errors in your latest edit to the Operational amplifier article. If you have the time and don't mind, would you please take a look at the edit and make the corrections? Alfred Centauri 02:46, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Geneseo Technology
If you have a chance, could you please take a look at Geneseo Technology page & do what is appropriate--it's been stagnating with a "notability" tag but from what I can tell on google, it's still at least potentially important--I'm out of my depth there. DGG 02:08, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Never heared of it. Plugwash 14:10, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Spelling
Hi. Please mind your spelling when editing articles. Your recent edit to Square root has introduced 2 spelling errors. When in doubt, Wiktionary is your friend. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 23:08, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Ethernet Hub
Shall we discuss the term "dual-speed hub"? It was never used by more than a few manufacturers, and it is inherently wrong. Cabletron, in particular, liked to any interconnect shelf a "hub", even if that shelf had a combination of layer 1, 2, and 3 devices. Just as one obsolete marketing term was "switch when you can, route when you must", the cost differences have disappeared. I've had trouble finding even a single-speed switch when I wanted to use it as a fan-out for multiple instruments on Ethernet. 10/100 "switches", with 5 ports or so, can be gotten for USD $20 or so.

Why insist on perpetuating a term that was never widely used, and is misleading to the beginner? Incidentally, I have worked on repeaters/hubs, bridges/layer 2 switches, and routers/layer 3 switches at the component level, and designed router internals. Other than here, I don't think I've heard, in an industrial setting, anyone refer to a "dual speed hub" in years. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:12, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I realized you called "dual speed hub" POV. Could you please provide a link to any current, vendor-independent, authoritative source that documents this definition? Howard C. Berkowitz 16:20, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

NAT vs PAT
Like you, I dislike 'split conversations', so can I suggest we conduct our discussion on the 'Network address translation' page. thanks. Mercury543210 19:36, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Same here -- I can continue here or elsewhere. There are some rather fine nuances to IP versus TCP/UDP checksumming, and the wording might be better. It makes good sense to discuss it. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:23, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The current wording doesn't make much sense, I was under the assumption that each IP packet or packet fragement had a header checksum and that each TCP/UDP packet had a checksum covering the data, TCP/UDP header and a psuedo header containg the IPs. I know this is correct for UDP but the article implies that the situation is more complex for TCP. Also the current text seems to imply a UDP packet can't be fragmented when I was under the impression that it was more likley to get fragmented than a TCP one. Plugwash 15:28, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Well i've taken a read of the TCP rfc and it seems to confirm what I thought so I have edited the article to match. Plugwash 16:04, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

rv:Bullshit
Hi there.. i'd have to contend with your decision. I've nullified your arguments about a non-lower-bounded lossless compression argument through prime number dictionary reassessment.. do you actually have anything else left? An 'rv:Bullshit' just isn't enough.

i'll reiterate the logic for the class..

counter-pidgeons:

a prime number factor that takes 50,000 bits to encode in a dictionary. a series of prime number factors that take 4,000 bits each * 20 factors + 3,000 expression bits to run inside the algorithm to stitch them together along with an indicator of position of fragment 64 bits long = 23,064 bits. take another 2,000 bits for the id of the compressed file, number of total fragments, algorithm version, etc.

25,064 bits < 50,000 bits.

it's leveraging the fact that the index values, factors, and expression bits compared to the internal reconfigurations do indeed reach more than parity with very large data sets.

you cannot utilize this argument into the lower ranges, thus the lower-boundaries.

counter-counting:

to more precisely hone into the qualities that make this tech work, all the possible combinations of values under the threshold are definitely not guaranteed to compress. they function, with regards to various algorithms, as prime number dictionary pools, where the combinations of values above the threshold are going to contain with total surety some portion that can be reconfigured, even taking into account the index size needed to specify the fragments.

More, as soon as the size moves past 1,000,000 digits, it takes 20 bits to specify the index. At 144,000,000 digits, it takes 28 bits to specify the index. You can see what i'm saying here. 144:1 in terms of possible subsets to choose from, 1.4:1 in terms of the amount of information needed to specify the position of those subsets. big gains.. doesn't work on smaller files.

this is my contention, come up with an actual response, 'rv:Bullshit' just doesn't work, and you're totally not representing properly as a moderator of Wikipedia.

UmbraPanda 03:20, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I concur with Plugwash's assessment of these bovine fæces. ΔιγυρενΕμπροσ! 09:11, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * that's nice.. but without any counter arguments, you're now both wrong. you sorta have to meet the challenge if you want to have any credibility. UmbraPanda 06:27, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Want a second opinion? Word salad. ΔιγυρενΕμπροσ! 08:12, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Lol.. yes. You are capable of referencing nonsense.. that's great! I'm not referencing nonsense in my argument however, so if you actually have counter arguments, i'll be all for taking them into proper account. But you haven't yet, so I figure you probably don't. Increase your skills, take a look at the problem again. UmbraPanda 02:40, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Disputed fair use rationale for Image:Rawmeat classic.png
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Disputed fair use rationale for Image:Rawmeat polymost.png
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Domestic AC power plugs and sockets
Hi, Plugwash. I understand that you are one of the main contributors to the Domestic AC power plugs and sockets article. This article is rated as an A-class article after downgrading from the FA status. I think that it is worth to be re-nominated to be FAC, if it will be better referenced. However, without additional references it should be downgraded to the B-class. I see the problem to find references, however, maybe you could help with this? Beagel (talk) 07:04, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * The problem is that most of the authoritive references are 1: national standards that cost money to access (which most editors are not prepared to pay when editing wikipedia is just a hobby) and 2: apart from the british and american plugs not in english. That leaves the main sources of information for most editors as a combination of personal experiance and other websites neither of which are really any more authoritive than wikipedia. Plugwash (talk) 22:34, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Pidgin protocols
Hi. I've started a discussion on the Pidgin talk page regarding my edit and my views on the matter. Your views would be most appreciated. [Jam] [talk] 09:49, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Gray Code Example
Hi Plugwash,

Some time ago you deleted from the article on Gray Code a 3-line example of how the Gray Code could be calculated using a popular high-level language, such as VBA/VB. Your argument was that since there was a pseudo-code example, a practical example in a specific programming language did not contribute anything to the value of the article.

However, since then I have been alerted to the fact that the above assumption might not have been correct. Why? Because the example in pseudo code only treats the rare case when the binary code is contained in an array, one bit in one array member. This is very rarely, if at all, the case in reality, when the binary number is usually contained in a single variable. Converting from an ordinary variable to an array, with just one bit in every member of the array is not efficient and therefore the given example does not find any practical application in high-level programming languages. I also fear, that even in assembly language the given example will not be practical, since even in assembly language the loop, specified in the example, will be out of place (there is no need for the complicated approach of using a loop, which the example seems to suggest, when the entire calculation could be performed without any loops using the XOR bitwise operator).

In fact, at least two of my friends/colleagues have remarked to me that from the pseudo code examples they had not been able easily deduce the correct implementation for a high-level programming language. I can understand and sympathise with you, that an expert of a high calibre, such as yourself (judging from your in-depth contributions) might be easily annoyed by this fact that novices or beginners fail to grasp something, which is so obvious to you. And it is because of my sympathetic attitude to you, that I decided to write to you and kindly ask your permission to reinstitute the example for calculating the Gray Code using a high-level programming language. The example takes only three lines and will not dilute the article, but will give at least some practical knowledge to beginners and novices to the field. Would you allow me to insert the example in VBA/VB?

And if you are wondering why VBA/VB and if you are going to recommend C++ or Java or Perl, do please consider that most novices and beginners, especially those who are not advanced programmers, use Excel for their engineering calculations and therefore have some basic knowledge of VBA/VB, but hardly any knowledge of C++, and what is more, they hardly have any means to use C++ (VBA comes free with Excel, but in order to use C++ they will need a dedicated development environment plus knowledge how to create XLL libraries from DLL and how to load them as add-ins into Excel, which is not an easy task even for a seasoned developer). I can understand that you could perhaps easily dismiss Excel and suggest Matlab, Mathcad, Mathematica or some other tool, however it is a hard fact, that there are many times more engineers who use Excel, than who use Matlab, Mathcad and Mathematica taken together.

I hope that you will look favourably on my small request and will allow me, for the sake of readers who are not complete experts in programming, to reinstate the example of calculating Gray Code using a high-level programming language. After all it is only three lines. (Please do not insist on C/Java, as every seasoned C++ user will be able to understand a VBA/VB example, but few beginners with Excel will be able to understand a C++ example.)

Yours, Plamen Grozdanov (talk) 23:18, 26 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Language selection is always tricky in such articles. Everyone wants an example in thier pet language but to put it in everyones pet language would make the article insane. There already seem to be some exaples in pretty plain C that aren't too hard to follow. Maybe add some extra comments to those to make it easier for those who aren't C experts to follow them. Plugwash (talk) 00:27, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your prompt reply. I am disappointed, that you chose to insist on something, which may not be helpful to readers of Wikipedia. I would like to comment on your statements above, if you would allow me:


 * 1) You say, that "Language selection is always tricky", as if you have considered a great variety of languages and you have decided that C/Java was the best compromise solution to the 'difficult' problem of choosing a language for the examples. This, of course, cannot be true. The author of the article has provided the examples in C simply because this was perhaps the language of choice for him/her -- for an expert with knowledge of programming and of Gray Code (I think we can agree that the author of the article was not a novice to Gray Code or to programming). The C language for the examples was not chosen, because the author thought it was most popular one or because it was the easiest to be understood by beginners and novices. Therefore, it appears that your statement that the language selection is "always tricky" is not true at least in this case -- the language selections must have been easy and straightforward, without any alternatives considered. Would you disagree? Or would you suggest that actually a wide range of possible languages were considered impartially and C/Java were chosen as the best means to illustrate to an uninitiated reader the concepts of the article? I think that we can agree that the examples in the article are intended to be most helpful not to experts, but to uninitiated and novices to the field.


 * 2) I felt that your implied suggestion that I am simply dragging into the article my 'pet' language was a bit denigrating. I carefully explained my reasons -- they are not because I like VBA/VB or because I see it as superior or preferable to C/Java (usually people who insist on C/Java are guilty of this assumption that their 'pet' language is the best). The reasons, for which I asked your permission to reinstate the deleted example, were because the vast majority of beginners or novices do not have knowledge or even access to C/Java. Think about people, who do calculations and modelling in the most popular tool for easy calculations Excel, and not in coding using a programming language. Usually it is these people, who will be lacking knowledge both of Gray Code and of C/Java. Is the purpose of the article not to help people who do not have enough knowledge?


 * 3) You statement that other examples exist in "pretty plain C that aren't too hard to follow" appears to be somewhat (if not highly) subjective. For example, would you insist, that for a person, who has been taught at school the meaning of the mathematical symbols of greater than (>) and significantly greater than (>>) it would be easy to grasp the meaning of the C/Java expression b ^ (b >> 1) which is given in one of the current examples? I, perhaps like you, have been using C and C++ since 1984, so for me this is a very natural and easy to understand expression (it is also elegant, because C has this easy way of shifting the bits of a number -- many other high-level languages do not have operators for bit shifting, they use functions). But this is not the point. The point is that this little expression is not the easiest to be understood by people who do not know C/Java and we must not presume that just because we think C/Java to be great languages that they indeed are the most popular among all readers of Wikipedia. Even more, the point is that while an example in C/Java requires specialised knowledge (that of the peculiar and mathematically counterintuitive notation of C/Java) an example in another high-level language may be more readily understood by larger number of uninitiated readers. This is why I am asking you for a permission to reinstitute the example in VBA/VB. Please note, that I am not advocating re-writing the examples from C/Java into VBA/VB (although this could perhaps make the article more understandable for greater numbers of Wikipedia readers). I am only asking your permission to make the article a bit more practical by inserting just a single additional example. Would you rather deny me this small request?


 * 4) Your suggestion that putting into the article "everyones pet language would make the article insane" sounds as if you had a number of requests for a number of different languages to be included into the article, or that you would expect such requests to be immediately made, following my suggestion. This, of course, cannot be true -- it is almost certain that you did not have such requests in the past and also that no such requests will be prompted by reinstitution of the deleted example. In fact I found this argument quite exaggerated and unconstructive. (I also was disappointed by your seeming attempt to ridicule my suggestion by repeated use of the phrase "pet language".)


 * I would appreciate, if you could answer the following questions (thanks for your time and attention):


 * (a) Would you insist that the expression in C/Java b ^ (b >> 1) is clear to a person who has not studied C/Java? Food for thought:
 * in mathematics the notation "$$\gg$$" stands for significantly greater than;
 * the symbol "$$\and$$", which resembles the symbol "^" used here, in ordinary written texts stands for logical and, while here it stands for xor.


 * (b) Would you claim, that the expression in VBA/VB b Xor (b / 2) is as unclear as the previous example to an ordinary person, who has not studied VBA/VB?


 * (c) Do you really insist that if one example in VBA/VB is given in the article that there will be numerous other requests for examples in numerous other languages?


 * (d) Do you genuinely not see the difference in this particular case between C/Java and VBA/VB, which difference is that in C/Java the expression uses non-standard mathematical notation and in VBA/VB the notation is closer to that commonly used in ordinary (non-C/non-Java related) written texts, and for this reason it is closer to a larger number of high-level programing languages (this would make the example in VBA/VB easier to be undesrstood by users of other languages)?


 * (e) Do you seriously maintain that the above proposal was made because "Everyone wants an example in their pet language"?


 * Once again, thanks for your response and for your time.


 * Yours, Plamen Grozdanov (talk) 11:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

request for input on AT Attachment article name
Greetings, you have contributed in the past to the "AT Attachment" article. That article is now the subject of a rename (move) discussion. Your input would be appreciated here. Thanks! Jeh (talk) 03:49, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with Image:Iomega zip drive logo.gif
Thanks for uploading Image:Iomega zip drive logo.gif. You've indicated that the image is being used under a claim of fair use, but you have not provided an adequate explanation for why it meets Wikipedia's requirements for such images. In particular, for each page the image is used on, the image must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page. Can you please check


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 * That every article it is used on is linked to from its description page.

This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Media copyright questions. --FairuseBot (talk) 04:59, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Please take a look at the Stray voltage article
(This is being CC'd to both Wtshymanski's and Plugwash's talk.) :-)

Due your background in electrical systems I think you could provide valuable edits to the Stray voltage article, which is just a mess right now. I am trying to put in some objective science discussion of eddy currents, inductive heating, capacitive coupling, ground loops, etc, but it really needs more work. I will dig through my public domain Hawkins/Audels illustration collection to see if I can help flesh out the science better. DMahalko (talk) 19:56, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Parallel port
I noticed you asked a question at Talk:Parallel port some time back. I answered it in the next question. --—— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk  -  14:36, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Copyvio of Three-phase
When contributing to Wikipedia, never copy text or equations from a copyrighted website, as you appear to have done to Three-phase with content from http://www.3phasepower.org/3phasepowercalculation.htm. All content on Wikipedia falls under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License. Contributed content must not be stolen from elsewhere on the Internet, and sources must always be properly cited. &mdash;Voidxor (talk) 21:54, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I have pretty clear memory (as clear as one can reasonablly be about stuff I wrote 6 years ago) of writing that text from scratch based on my knowledge of three phase from my lectures at university, I have no memory of ever seeing the site you accused me of copying from before.
 * There is plenty of readily available evidence that they copied from us rather than the other way around. Firstly I wrote the bulk of the content in that article back in december 2004 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Three-phase&oldid=8910622 ) at which time the site you accuse me of stealing from didn't even exist ( http://whois.domaintools.com/3phasepower.org ). Further the equations look virtually identical on the two sites, since the equations on wikipedia are generated by mediawiki this is also an indication that they copied us.
 * Please make some effort to figure out who copied who before making such accusations in future. Plugwash (talk) 12:50, 27 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Plugwash, I apologize if I have accused you of something you have not done. But I don't think I have. The 3 Phase Power Calculation website is copyrighted and makes no mention of using material from Wikipedia. As I'm sure you know, the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license precludes the use of Wikipedia's content in copyrighted material. So somebody here has plagiarized. Personally, I would rather it be them than you. Perhaps Wikipedia's attorneys could intervene it that turns out to be the case.


 * However, you have a nasty history of getting copyvio accusations. Just skim your talk page. Also, you didn't bother to cite your sources.


 * I am not looking for an argument, but I do think we need to get to the bottom of this. If you have hard evidence, like from WikiBlame, that clears your name, I would love to see it. &mdash;Voidxor (talk) 06:26, 5 March 2010 (UTC)


 * On closer inspection, I think I was wrong. I deeply apologize for the accusation. It looks like http://www.3phasepower.org/3phasepowercalculation.htm is closest to this edit of the article. Although most of the copied text comes from your edits and not from the edits of other active editors at the time, you wrote the majority of the article text. I had seen that the stolen text came from your edits, and then jumped to conclusions when I saw your user talk page. Sorry. Anyway, I think the 3 Phase Power Calculations folks really hang themselves by leaving the following paragraph in the stolen article, broken links and all:


 * This article deals with the basic mathematics and principles of three-phase electricity. For information on where, how and why three-phase is used, see three-phase electric power. For information on testing three-phase kit, see three-phase testing


 * Blame aside, I'll leave the copyvio tag posted and see what happens. I'm sure there would be a conflict of interest if either of us decide the fate of the article now that I've nominated it for copyvio. &mdash;Voidxor (talk) 06:54, 5 March 2010 (UTC)


 * "you have a nasty history of getting copyvio accusations. Just skim your talk page." <-- There are a couple of cases where I used the most popular game based on an engine to demonstrate a quirk of the engine and the powers that be disagreed that was a valid fair use claim. There was also a claim about a missing fair use rationale for an image that I didn't perform the initial upload on but I don't see any other accusations of outright copyvios. Plugwash (talk) 11:54, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

CfD nomination of Full-duplex Ethernet
I have nominated full-duplex ethernet for merging into another category. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at the discussion page. Thank you. Publicly Visible (talk) 00:59, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

CfD nomination of Full-duplex Ethernet
I have nominated full-duplex ethernet for merging into another category. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at the discussion page. Thank you. Publicly Visible (talk) 01:02, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

File:Karte_Etzenricht_in_Deutschland.png listed for deletion
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Karte_Etzenricht_in_Deutschland.png, has been listed at Files for deletion. Please see the to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Common Good (talk) 19:15, 19 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I presume I transferred this at some point to add an image to an article that didn't have one but I really don't remember why I was looking at the article or even what article it was (searching for the name at the start of the file doesn't reveal any articles here now). Plugwash (talk) 22:20, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Talk:Isopropyl_alcohol
Hi there

Thanks for catching the problem. I think I've fixed it with the archivebox. I've undone your last edit since the archive box is now visible. --Rifleman 82 (talk) 05:33, 29 September 2011 (UTC)
 * That wasn't what concerned me the most though. It was the fact the bot archived almost all the sections on the page. I've now discovered the reason for that is that the archive timer is in hours. IMO 720 hours (=30 days) is way too fast for such a low traffic talk page. Plugwash (talk) 09:53, 29 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure if it is useful to leave discussions open for a year, but okay. --Rifleman 82 (talk) 15:01, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

RiscPC
-- Trevj (talk) 10:52, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

MfD nomination of CSS and Javascript hacks
CSS and Javascript hacks, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:CSS and Javascript hacks and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes ( ~ ). You are free to edit the content of CSS and Javascript hacks during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you.--Rockfang (talk) 06:45, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:49, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Nomination of UTF-9 and UTF-18 for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article UTF-9 and UTF-18 is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/UTF-9 and UTF-18 until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Jc86035 (talk) 16:44, 23 April 2018 (UTC)