Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 March 25

= March 25 =

Game Maker Help
Moved from Miscellaneous

Using Game Maker, How do i make the screen follow a powered up, or down, version of my player? I am trying to make a Mario-like game, so when the player gets hit by one of the enemies he shrinks, and i found out how, but the screen stands still when i move the shrunk player around. Also, how do you make power ups, like the fire shooter in mario, and what should i do Path-wise for the fireball? Thank you.DruhDrizzle (talk) 19:31, 24 March 2009 (UTC)82.45.1.217 (talk) 20:41, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

You would be alot better off asking on the Game Maker Comunity forums: Gmc.yoyogames.com Although you will need to register yourself a free account, they have thousands of members just buzzing to raise their post counts by debating every aspect of your problem. good luck82.45.1.217 (talk) 20:41, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

DVD drive woes
Well..to make a long story short..all my hard drives stopped functioning i was about to pay for them to get recovered when someone on the reference desk suggested it was the PSU. Installed a new PSU now alll but one of the drives are fine (dead due to other reasons).

The dead drive had windows, so i had to reinstall onto another drive. I consider myself pretty decent with computers and every time ive reformatted same process..install windows..pop in motherboard driver cd..install drivers.

I can see the DVD drive in hardware devices and my computer but as soon as i pop in a CD it doesnt change..like the icon..and when i do click it every single time explorer crashes. I've been running a linux live CD off the drive for a week off and on..so i know its not the actual drive hardware. (usually the drivers make everything work..but the drivers are on the cd..which i cant read..)

I tried installing firmware..to no avail.

Any ideas?

Drive is 111D Pioneer and motherboard is 965p DS3 Gigabyte (Rev 1.0) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.220.48.94 (talk) 11:39, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Try checking the event log for insight into why the computer is crashing. To get to the event log, right click on "My Computer" and click "manage". Then click the little "+" sign next to "Event Viewer" and check the Application/System logs. I've seen explorer crash with a faulty autorun, or even certain video files. If we access your drivers without triggering the autorun we just might be able to get it to work. One thing you could try is to access the drive from command line (start, run, cmd, then type the driveletter and a colon). ←  Spidern  →  12:57, 25 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The driver detected a controller error on \Device\CdRom0.
 * For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.as
 * Not very helpful log eh. Ive tried it in someone elses laptop and the cd works fine.
 * Ive tried dvds and other discs in my drive to the same result. (crashing) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.220.48.94 (talk) 13:13, 25 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Maybe the faulty PSU fried the controller. Try moving the DVD to the other connector on the IDE cable or onto the other IDE port if it is spare (making sure you get the right master/slave jumper settings).
 * Maybe the Windows DVD driver or controller driver got lost somewhere. Visit the websites of the manufacturers and see if you can download the latest drivers.  Astronaut (talk) 18:08, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Citing works from the Commons in a research paper
I have several questions.


 * 1) If a picture or something is licensed under multiple identical licenses (such as the CC-BY-SA 2.0, 1.5, and 1.0), do i need to cite all the licenses or just the most recent one?


 * 2) If a picture or something is released under the GFDL, would i be required to release my paper under the GFDL and include a verbatim copy of the license with the paper itself?


 * 3) Would not citing the licenses constitute plagarism?

Any help would be appreciated...my teacher frowns on plagarism (and by frowns i mean suspension or worse). Thanks. Buffered Input Output 13:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) If a picture is multi-licensed, you may comply with whichever license you wish, ignoring the others.
 * 2) You would certainly have to include a verbatim copy of the license to comply with the GFDL. I think that you should be able to leave the image GFDL-licensed and the rest of the paper not, but I'm not sure. The GFDL is even less well-suited to licensing images than it is to licensing Wikipedia articles, and it's hard to interpret.
 * 3) To my mind, plagiarism (note spelling) is the passing off of another's work as your own, so as long as you're attributing, you aren't plagiarizing. You teacher may disagree, and even if you aren't plagiarizing, you may be in violation of copyright (I am not a lawyer and I know nothing about the copyright status of class research papers).
 * Algebraist 13:43, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Whoops on the spelling. Thanks. Buffered Input Output 16:23, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

2. You need a verbatim copy of the GFDL to be included (which is lame and why images shouldn't be licensed under the GFDL), but you don't have to license the whole paper if the GFDL content is easily segregated out (in which case your paper becomes a collection of separately copyrighted works, which is fine under the GFDL and CC). So putting an image into a paper — no problem, don't have to license the whole thing. Putting a bunch of text into a paper — cannot be easily separated out, thus the whole text must be licensed that way. Make sense? 3. No, it's not plagiarism. Not citing the source would be plagiarism. Not citing the license is a matter of copyright law, not academic conduct. In any case though using such a thing in a class research paper almost certainly counts as fair use so you don't likely need to stress about copyrights too much here. (If it is a paper between you and your teacher, and not, say, being published, then I don't think anybody cares about the copyright stuff.) --140.247.240.69 (talk) 18:42, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Don't take this as legal advice because the law is untested and this is Wikipedia, but in answer to questions 1 and 2, if you are including the commons-licenced work for the purpose of review or academic/educational/scholarly purposes, you have the same fair use rights as you would with commercial material, regardless of whether you obey the specific terms of the licence (for including copies of the licence etc). Commons licensing gives you the copier additional rights, over and above the statutory provisions for fair use or fair dealing (note these will vary from country to country and may be more limited than you require for your purposes).  GPL v3 explicitly states "This License acknowledges your rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law." --Maltelauridsbrigge (talk) 15:57, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Viewing the MFT
I noticed that Defraggler can very quickly go through the MFT and list every single fragmented file. I'm interested in viewing every single file regardless of fragmentation. Are there any programs or commands I could use to do this? Thanks, --VectorField (talk) 15:51, 25 March 2009 (UTC)


 * HDView may do what you want. -- BenRG (talk) 17:59, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Running Applications over a Network
Is it possible to run applications such as games etc on a terminal where they haven't been installed onto, from a terminal where they have been installed onto? For example, could i run MS Word from the computer that has it installed, onto my computer that doesn't have it installed?

Thanks in advance. 86.172.124.73 (talk) 16:36, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

There are Thin Client setups that do this, there is (forgetting the term exactly) streaming-programs that run 'in browser' or 'on the network'. Things such as google-docs are access-anywhere word-processors and a version of excel is avaialble 'in browser' online (again I forget the name). In short, yes it is very possible to run a whole host of programs from a 'thin-client' terminal. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 16:42, 25 March 2009 (UTC)


 * See VNC and other entries in Category:Remote desktop. Astronaut (talk) 18:00, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * You will want to look at VNC, like Astronaut said. If your server is running linux, bsd, or even, i think, mac os x, you can use X11 forwarding to view the application.  If your client is windows, you need a ssh client like PuTTY and a X host like Xming. -Zeus-u 19:19, 25 March 2009 (UTC)


 * You don't have to have putty or any other ssh software. You could open up the VNC ports and connect directly. It's just a little risky to do over an insecure network (like, the internet). Shadowjams (talk) 19:03, 26 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I am not trying to remotely control the other computer, but just use a program that is stored on it on my computer without installing it on my computer.86.129.218.220 (talk) 17:19, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

.NET HTML table problem
This problem has come up at work. I need to make this kind of HTML table using Microsoft .NET:

The important thing is the  and   elements around the table rows. I can't just type the table statically into the page because the rows are dynamically generated. I don't even know in advance how many of them there are. The ASP.NET  control doesn't seem to be able to do this. I have read that in .NET 3.5 the  HTML control has child objects   and , but they don't seem to exist anywhere on my .NET 3.5 installation, and the Microsoft .NET online documentation doesn't even mention them. Is there some unofficial .NET extension I need to install to get access to them, or do I have to resort to writing the entire HTML rendering myself? J I P | Talk 20:12, 25 March 2009 (UTC)


 * There are probably a few ways to do this. I don't know if this is the best way to do it, but this should work.  First, create an ASP table:

 


 * Then in your code-behind, code something like this:

TableRow newRow = new TableRow; TableCell checkboxCell = new TableCell; checkboxCell.Controls.Add(checkBox); newRow.Cells.Add(checkboxCell); Table1.Rows.Add(newRow);
 * This works in at least .NET 2.0 and 3.5. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 16:28, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
 * This doesn't generate the  and   elements around the table rows.  J I P  | Talk 16:27, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * This doesn't generate the  and   elements around the table rows.  J I P  | Talk 16:27, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

I ended up writing my own ASP.NET control anyway. It's a subclass of, with an overridden   method. The method writes the  and   elements by hand, but calls the ,   and   methods for the  s to take care of the actual content in the table. It works exactly as I wanted, but I would have thought Microsoft would have taken care of this for me. J I P | Talk 15:25, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

About top university's in "MIS" Major
Hey guy's

i want to ask you about the top university's in mis major "management information system's" (master)

and i have another question,

am graduated with information system major "Bachelor"

what do u PREFER for major's in master, for the future market needs

regards —Preceding unsigned comment added by Saleh1986 (talk • contribs) 23:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * If you specify where you want to study that might help. Here are the world's top for Engineering and IT, which should be a start.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Maltelauridsbrigge (talk • contribs) 16:09, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

i would like to study eather in USA or Canda —Preceding unsigned comment added by Saleh1986 (talk • contribs) 17:53, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Tunebite
When using a program like Tunebite, will using a higher bitrate than the original file make it sound better?--Bluehippo (talk) 23:57, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Nope, that is impossible. No matter what format you use. (audio/video/etc). If the source is low quality, the output will never be high quality. SF007 (talk)

Yeah I know, it will never be as good as the original, there will also be quality loss. However, will using a higher bitrate minimize quality loss? For example lets say the original file is 192 kbps. Will there be a difference if I convert to 256 kbps instead of 192 kbps? Or are they both the same? To be honest I can't even tell with my own ears, but I just like to make sure :) --Bluehippo (talk) 02:46, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I think what SF007 was saying is that you cannot re-encode a file with a higher bitrate to improve quality. An example would be if you started with an .mp3 file encoded at 128kbs. If you took this file and re-encoded it at 192 or 256 kbs, you will hear no difference in quality yet will have created a file significantly larger in size.


 * Your best bet is to take your source CD and rip-encode it at a higher bitrate of your choice (ex 192kbs or 256kbs). Since you are directly encoding from the source, your output file will have more definition than a similar file re-encoded from a low bitrate mp3. You may also want to check out some of the Lossless codecs which promise no detectable audio degradation in the encoding process. A few examples of lossless codecs are available here. Hope this helps. aszymanik   speak!  19:25, 26 March 2009 (UTC)