Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 August 25

= August 25 =

Mmorfe, DVD Burner Specifications
I'm confused about DVD burner specifications including all the writing and reading speeds and what they actually mean.

Appreciate your help.

Mmorfe 00:33, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The speeds are maximum speeds for doing the specified action: reading, writing a R, or writing a RW disc. For CD the numbers are a multiplier for a CD playing audio in a CD player.  However in normal burning the speed is nowhere near the claimed speed, and gradually increases as the burn continues.  If you have a slow computer or slow disk drive you will have to set a lower speed for the burn.  For example when I had a Pentium 166, the burn would always be reliable at 4x, and would work some of the time at 8x.  Also for RW disks the speed may not be the maximum speed of the burner or the disk, but some other lower speed that the firmware thinks it can do with that brand of disk. All the new burners for sale now are fast, any faster and the disk would disintegrate.  At the fast speed they are very noisy. Graeme Bartlett 11:16, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

japanese.exe
About 8 years ago, I bought a computer which had several games installed in it. One of them was named japanese.exe. In that game, a Japanese girl has to whack squid-like things with a hammer. Where can I find that game again?


 * Good luck. Its probably a Dōjin soft. If it were a well known game its filename would probably be different. &mdash; Shinhan  &lt;&thinsp; talk &thinsp;&gt; 15:24, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

CDs
I have this CD that plays on a CD player but when I try to play it on my laptop it first registers as a blank CD, then when I try to access the CD drive it asks me to insert a disk. All other CDs work, but not this one. There isn't supposed to be any protection on the disk. What could be the problem? LCecere 06:09, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Is it one of those 'special' cds that have extra things on them like photos/etc? If so I understand that some of them don't always get recognised by your PC as they aren't sure what to treat them as (audio or data). Alternatively try it another PC/Computer and see if it works there. It could be that your CD player is less bothered by small scratches than your PC is. ny156uk 14:20, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * One obvious thing to check is the extent of damage on the CD, are there any obvious scratches? The other thing to consider is that your Computer's CD drive might need to update its drivers etc. What operating system are you on? Some software can scan CDs and pick up what's on them, and be able to tell you how many audio tracks / data tracks there are etc- for example using Nero's diskinfo (That is, the 'diskinfo' function inside the Nero program). If you're in Windows, try this: Insert the CD, go into My Computer, find your CD drive's icon, right-click it, and see what options you have. For example you can click on "Open" to see if it can read any contents. Another idea is that your CD has an autorun statement for computers - what this does is it will automatically do something when you insert your CD, and, if your operating system can't support the actions of the autorun, it might fail or just do nothing. That's why using the right-click "Open" command you're telling it to just access the drive - ignoring any autorun files. Rfwoolf 17:24, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

PNGout
Hi. I downloaded the PNGout and I don't know how to install it and how to use it. -- Jack l  11:34, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * If you have the command line version, then the easiest way to use it is to drag a PNG file to the pngout.exe program icon. The dragged file will be optimized using the standard settings. This only works with one file at a time, but you can write a batch file to run pngout in several png files at once:

for %%f in (*.png) do pngout.exe "%%f" "optimized\%%f" Get a .bat file with this and pngout.exe in the same folder, along with a bunch of png files. Then just run the bat file, and pngout will throw the optimized versions in the "optimized" folder that will be created. &mdash; Kieff | Talk 06:03, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

newsgroup reader for windows XP
Hi, my 2 newsgroups that i look at are now subject to lots of spam.

1) is it possible to set up a kill file with "google groups?"

2) if not, is there a FREE safe newsreader (free agent has been cancelled)

3) (unrelated) how i do get my name to come up when i post rather than my email (yes i'm that good!)

TIA


 * I don't think Google Groups supports any killfile functionality. Wikipedia has a list of news clients, many of which are free software. I'm not sure which to recommend. I use Thunderbird, but its killfile support is pretty limited (which hasn't been a problem for me). Since you'll need an NNTP server for your client, you might just want to find one that does a good job of filtering out spam for you. I think many of them do, but again I don't know which to recommend. -- BenRG 00:13, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Changing just the container of a video
I occasionally download 720p versions of television shows (that's right, I'm bad to the bone!), and are encoded in H.264 in a Matroska container. I'm thinking of getting an Apple TV and I know that plays HD H.264 videos in whatever container apple uses (mov, is it?) Here's my question: to reencode such a video would take a ginourmous amount of time, but since it is already encoded in H.264, is there any easy way to just simply change the container so that it would work on an Apple TV? I imagine that would be MUCH quicker. --Oskar 13:42, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Apple TV plays back .mov Quicktime containers as well as 'naked' .m4v (h264) files. If you can open your Matroska (?) movie in Quicktime Player Pro, select all, copy and paste into a new movie (File -> New Player) and save it as a self contained .mov, that might work.  Also you can do Window > Movie Properties -- select the video stream, click the 'extract' button and save out that file.  Again, I've never even heard of Matroska, so I don't know if it will work.  But good luck! --72.202.150.92 18:31, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I think you can use VLC's Streaming and Exporting Wizard for this, but I've never needed to even play a Matroska file, so I'm not sure. --M1ss1ontomars2k4 16:59, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
 * VLC plays Matroska fine (oh, and by the way, it's an excellent container) and it would work to do that, it's just that it would reencode the entire thing. As I said that would take a humongous amount of time, and I don't want to reencode it. I just want to change the container. --Oskar 14:16, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

IP Adress?
What is the danger of revealing one's IP Adress? When I do a WHOIS search on many, all I get is their ISP's adress and info.

Perfect Proposal Speak out loud! 15:02, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Did you read about WikiScanner? You can find out the approximate location of the IP. And, if you are law enforcement agent you may be able to ask the ISP to tell you who used that IP address at some precise time (Which they may not want/be able to give you). &mdash;  Shinhan  &lt;&thinsp; talk &thinsp;&gt; 15:28, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * If you're doing something illegal, then law enforcement can get a court order to force your ISP to look up who had that IP address as a certain time, and they'll give the police your name. No other danger really, though it's possible to "be hacked". A hacker can run nmap on your IP address and get a list of what programs are listening to internet traffic on each port, then look up buffer overflow vulnerabilities and the like for those programs, and possibly run arbitrary code on your computer. Just stick with windows, while it might be much easier to find a vulnerability, I'd think there'd be much less to do after gaining access. What are you going to do, inject shellcode? Oops no shell. Hm. --⁪frotht 16:26, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Hooking a laptop 2.5" drive to a desktop PC
Hi, I am looking for a way to connect a laptop hard drive to my PC. For this, I must know the connector on it and get the necessary adapter. Unfortunately, I can't detect what type of connector it is (Wikipedia is rather lacking images of connector types). I don't think it's either IDE or SATA. In the picture to the right is the hard drive in question and its connector (apparently wafer-like, with 44 pins), taken from a SCENIC 510 Mobile AGP laptop computer, somewhat old, fabricated before the year 2000. The initial problem was that it didn't boot from the hard disk (a "NTLDR missing" error), and since the laptop won't boot from anything else, even though the BIOS settings instruct it to, I want to see whether I can save some of the files on it by connecting it to my desktop computer.

My desktop computer has internal IDE cables, but I have the possibility to attach a SATA drive to the PC by using a rack connected to it by USB already holding a SATA hard drive. So, I would need an adapter for whatever connector type my laptop drive has to either IDE of SATA.

If anybody has any advice on how to fix the drive and make it bootable (it won't boot from the Windows boot diskette), or if somebody knows the connector type on the drive, it would be of immense help. Thank you in advance, Danielsavoiu 15:04, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * SCSI? &mdash; Shinhan  &lt;&thinsp; talk &thinsp;&gt; 15:31, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Are you sure that the drive is not inside some kind of custom enclosure with a proprietary plug? My laptop hard drive is like that. If you take the drive out of the little mounting enclosure you might find a standard 2.5" PATA connector (If this is the case, you will need to buy a little adapter to plug it into your desktop's IDE cable.) -- Diletante 15:48, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I can't believe that your BIOS won't boot from anything else. Are you sure that your boot order has cd rom before hard drive? Just boot from your windows xp disk and enter the recovery console, then type fixmbr and fixboot. That should restore ntldr. --⁪frotht 16:21, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I have seen plugs like this on early 2000s laptop hard drives. Note that the hard drive has not connector other than the IDE-like socket. I believe the plug combines the functionality of power and data transfer, thus 40 pins equivalent to the IDE standard and 4 pins for power. Your best bet is a 2.5" external USB enclosure. I have one that I like very much and works with drives similar to this, but I can't recall the model number and can't seem to find it. Scratch that, closer examination reveals minor dissimilarity to my hard drives, making my suggested USB enclosure incompatible. Very likely proprietary in shape, if not in design function. Freedomlinux 04:24, 26 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Take the hard drive out. I'm guessing there will be a little plastic piece that will come off the front of the drive, and behind that, a regular PATA connector.

Before SATA arrived, 2.5" drives used a 44-pin connector that was electrically compatible with ordinary 40-pin PATA (IDE) connectors but physically smaller. It also contains the power connection so there's no big honking 4-pin Molex connector that's practically as big as the rest of the drive.

Computer shops can sell you an adapter that will let you plug a 2.5" drive onto an ordinary 40-pin PATA cable and its associated 4-pin power connector.

Atlant 11:34, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

You can try this. Feel free to ask me further questions, I'm a freelance pc professional--Doktor Who 12:42, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Upgrading to Xbox360 Elite
I currently own an Xbox360 and am considering buying an Elite for the HDMI and larger hard drive. How can I transfer my game saves and purchased Live Arcade games from my old HD to the new one? --72.202.150.92 15:14, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Says here in Xbox 360 Elite and Xbox 360 accessories that you can buy the 120GB drive by itself and it comes with a special transfer cable for this exact purpose. Don't know if the full Elite box comes with the cable or if you can buy the cable by itself. Perhaps you could borrow the cable from someone who bought the drive? CaptainVindaloo t c e 21:44, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * The cable is free from Microsoft (click "How to get your Free Transfer Cable" at the bottom"). Josh Holloway  23:10, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

echo
What's the term for unnecessarily calling echo in a shell script when you can equivalently use the < operator? --⁪frotht 17:08, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * < is usually an input operator, I don't see how you can use it equivalently to echo, which is a program that displays a line of text. -- Diletante 17:41, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * It's like when you want to write a line to a file. You can either:

echo EXAMPLE | filename filename<EXAMPLE
 * Apparently the first one annoys purists to no end since it actually starts an additional process, while the 2nd stays within bash. I know theres an article on this specific topic on wikipedia, but I can't find it. I think it's a 4 letter acronym that has something to do with useless echos --⁪frotht 18:18, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah I found it eventually, sorry. It was UUOC, and cat not echo. And streaming text from a file into a command, not from text to a file. x_x --⁪frotht 18:26, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * But those two statements are not equivalent, with the piped echo the program will get the string "EXAMPLE". With < the program will get the contents of the file named EXAMPLE. Maybe you are thinking of using cat? edit: ok I must have started wrting this reply right after you found the answer which I didn't see. -- Diletante 18:30, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * In some shells (bash and ksh at least), you can replace the first of these lines with the second:


 * ...as another simplification. Here documents are more generally applicable, but look less pretty.  --Tardis 17:41, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Infinities, NaNs and IEEE 754
Why does the maximum value of a floating-point number have to be cut in half just to accommodate infinities and NaNs? Why not declare that (a) NaN occurs only when the exponent is 2e – 1 and the fraction 2f – 1, and (b) infinity occurs only when the exponent is 2e – 1 and the fraction 2f – 2? Are there any alternative floating-point standards that do this? Neon Merlin  23:05, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
 * At a guess you are referring to the maximum value of floating point number is being cut in half to take into account negative and positive numbers. That is why. Mathmo Talk 08:05, 26 August 2007 (UTC)


 * As far as I remember all special values have the maximum characteristic, so you loose far far less than half of the number space.


 * No, I'm not talking about signs. I mean that apparently if the exponent portion is all 1s, it's either infinity or NaN, which means that a lot more than two bit patterns are being assigned to two values, in each sign. Neon  Merlin  00:03, 27 August 2007 (UTC)


 * There is the potential to use the mantissa to signal different things with signalling NANs, but I don't know if this standard.