Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 August 25

= August 25 =

NLB Browsers in Windows 7
Hey, I have access to several internet connections on my desktop computer and i have long been wanting to buy a few NICs and increase my bandwidth. Now I know Windows 7 will automatically load balance but i believe individual applications will still send all of their traffic through only one connection. That would still be nice for parallel downloads etc. but I'm more interested in increasing my download speed for just normal web browsing, does anybody know if its possible to load balance the traffic from a browser across multiple NICs, or do any of the browsers support load balancing natively? I know most applications will just automatically go through the default gateway. I know its possible go merge NICs into one virtual NIC with a single IP address but the way my network is configured they must each have their own unique IP (our bandwidth is shaped per IP address). Cheers Benjamint 03:39, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

What happens to files and programs when you install linux over windows?
My Vista PC has completely died whilst "updating" itself - I want to install ubuntu instead, hoping that I can retrieve my files. I've created a USB drive with ubuntu on it - if I choose to install it, what will happen to all my files and will installed programs still function? Also, to boot from the USB - do I just put it in a pot and then boot the computer? SmartSE (talk) 09:36, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * At first you should be able to boot into the Ubuntu installation on your USB drive. You may have to enter your computer's BIOS to enable booting from USB, though, and making a USB installation bootable can also be tricky, I believe. In the worst case you may have to boot from a CD ROM and chain boot into the USB drive.
 * Up to that point (running Ubuntu from the USB drive), you can still get back and nothing will have been deleted. You can use Ubuntu to make a copy of all your files on the Windows partition. Maybe put them on another USB drive, or an external hard disk. Or burn them to a DVD. (In that case consider doing it several times to avoid data loss when a disk goes bad.)
 * Once you instruct Ubuntu to install the operating system to the hard disk, you will lose your entire Windows installation, including all your files. An exception would be in case there is more than one partition on your hard disk (typically C: and D: under Windows, where D: is often empty or just contains the vendor's recovery files), and so you have an empty partition there that is big enough for a Linux installation that does not overwrite the main Windows partition. Hans Adler 09:53, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * You can use ntfsresize to resize the Windows partition to make room for an Ubuntu partition. How much room this will leave you to install Ubuntu is variable; depends partly but not only on how full the Windows partition was in the first place.
 * There is no warranty on this and you have to realize that data loss is a possibility, especially if the partition was already corrupted. However I have used it successfully (on an uncorrupted drive). --Trovatore (talk) 09:59, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the quick replies. Managed to get it booted up in Ubuntu and get to my files :) Think my days as a windows user are up! SmartSE (talk) 12:05, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Good luck! But before you do anything drastic, I recommend verifying that all your crucial hardware works. Some may need a bit of research, and very occasionally something is still not supported at all. Hans Adler 12:11, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, the support community for Linux is very broad, and there is a lot of help out there if you run into trouble (forums for example). Just make sure, before installing, that you don't lose (too m)any of your important data files, so as not to sour the first steps in Linux though :) and good luck! --Ouro (blah blah) 13:18, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm confused. The page you linked explains how to fix the update-of-death problem, making the system bootable again without a new OS install. The solution involves booting a Knoppix or Ubuntu live CD, but an Ubuntu live USB drive would work too, as would a Windows Vista install CD. If you can open a command prompt (Shift+F10 from Vista install) and have the ability to rename files on your boot volume, you're set. If you really want to install a second OS, or change operating systems, then go for it, but you don't need to. I guess I'm too late... -- BenRG (talk) 19:40, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Sometimes people take an event as just a little nudge. It's a good thing. --Trovatore (talk) 20:09, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * If he switched to Ubuntu sight unseen because of one bug in Vista's automatic update, he's not going to be very happy. Humans have a tendency to vote the bums out when things are bad without looking at the bums they're voting in, and that's not a good thing at all. I'll just assume he had been thinking about installing Ubuntu for a while, and chose this moment to do it. -- BenRG (talk) 20:45, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * There are many paths unto enlightenment, young grasshopper. Next stop, doing everything from the command line, and all documents in LaTeX.  --Trovatore (talk) 20:56, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Windows Media Player 11 - Resizing
How is it possible to resize Windows Media Player 11, and have it be that size next time I play a video, regardless of the actual size of the video? I make a lot of gameplay videos, and of course they are the same size as my screen. When I watch them myself in WMP11, the window is nearly full screen, even if I resize it to YouTube size, which I do, and have to do, every time. Is there a way to make it stay at the size I resized it to? --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  12:31, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * this may or may not be desirable to you, but i could write a program that quick detects if the program is open, and if it is it will resize it to your desired "default" and then close... I offer this just in case there is no way to do it naturally (eg, having windows remember the size)


 * 216.173.144.164 (talk) 20:26, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

How involved was Steve Jobs in technical design/architecture?
Was he known to have any knowledge or provide any direction on nitty-gritty things at the electronics level in the hardware domain or at the actual coding level in the software domain? 20.137.18.50 (talk) 12:45, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * See http://www.askstevejobs.com/.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 14:28, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Wavelength, posting links to random spam websites does not really contribute to an answer to this question. The website you linked is not a reliable source.
 * You can read Steve's official biography at the Apple Public Relations website. Nimur (talk) 14:38, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * How is that a spam website? How is Steve Jobs not a reliable source of information about Steve Jobs?  Does his official biography have more than three paragraphs?
 * —Wavelength (talk) 16:28, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * How can we be sure that's not a complete stranger who got incredibly lucky securing that domain name? 20.137.18.50 (talk) 16:32, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * The website you linked appears to be an email-harvesting machine. Nimur (talk) 16:31, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * The title bar of http://www.askstevejobs.com/ contains the expression "Alex Mandossian - Access To Leaders Presents".  My Google search for that expression found many similar websites.  (Alex Mandossian has his own blog at http://www.alexmandossian.com/.)  If he is only pretending to host questions by e-mail on those websites, then he is damaging his own reputation.  If someone else is doing so and using Alex Mandossian's name, then Alex Mandossian should know about it and do something about it.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 17:58, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Have you looked at those websites? "Make Money Online!"  "Ask Steve Jobs!"  ... The relevant article for this tactic is Spamdexing.  A junk web-developer creates a site stuffed with popular search phrases, and uses it to direct traffic to advertisers, or to harvest emails for use in spam, or to gain data for use in phishing attacks.  This garbage flies on the internet, but on Wikipedia, we have a very stringent set of rules: WP:BLP.  If you are not 100.0% certain that the material you cite about a living person is correct, reliable, accurate, ... do not post it.  Nimur (talk) 18:09, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I am sure that in terms of up-to-date technical knowledge the answer is "almost none". Jobs is a strategist and marketeer. When you possess a reality distortion field you tend not to worry about details at the "how the **** are we supposed to do that ?" level. Gandalf61 (talk) 15:24, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * If I remember Accidental Empires correctly, Jobs did a variety of technical tasks in Apple's early garage times, including stuffing circuit boards and writing assembly and basic software. But he hasn't done a technical job per-se since the Apple II project. But that doesn't at all mean it's not interested in, knowledgeable about, and often vexingly opinionated about, all kinds of technical subjects. Engineers at Apple tell (horror) stories where Jobs notices their little area, wherein he insists that the device be thinner, the boot time shorter, the number of ventilation holes drilled be fewer, the plastic a subtly different colour, and so forth. So while he couldn't do a given engineer's job, he knew (and crucially, cared) enough to have an intelligent conversation with that engineer on that subject, and to be able to insist on things the engineers were reluctant to do. Few senior managers in technical companies have such a willingness to wade in the technology with that width and depth, but Jobs isn't unique in that.  Where he is remarkable is that "marketing" word.  Many people (including, depressingly, all too many people whose job it nominally is) mistake "marketing" for "advertising" or "pre-sales". Really it's figuring out what can be made, what people want (or will want), how to make it and sell it to them, and how to sustainably make money doing so. The Napoleonic grasp of the whole business, and the similarly Napoleonic ego, it takes to bind all the wobbly warring bits of a company together to make this all work, that's Jobs' genius. So he's not a salesman, or a marketer, or a finance guy, or a technician: he's some wonderful, terrible chimera of them all. Apres Steve le deluge. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 17:06, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Nice word 'chimera' LOL! Mr. Jobs been one of the world's foremost computer pioneers. Forget everything he did in terms of pioneering font and Macintosh GUI design thirty years ago... what has impressed me most is that he has kept up to date against the new age pioneers (e.g. google and facebook), taken them all on, and transformed Apple into the world's most profitable company. Astounding when you see Microsoft struggling in the online space against the newcomers. You cannot be this sort of pioneer without having technical knowledge of your product. Now a certain Mr. Ellison of Oracle (the world's real Tony Stark) has many parallels with Mr. Jobs. He too is a slave-driver and expects a great deal out of his staff and more so his management. They are both chimeras (lol) of sorts and Uncle Larry as we call him in oracle circles has a vast technical knowledge in addition to his marketing genius. I totally agree with Finlay in that these gentlemen cannot have indepth engineer-type knowledge of every product (that is why they hire very clever people to do that) but they DO have an encompassing knowledge of their entire product line and do have the last say when new products are released. They also frequently demand new products from their employees and often make the time for innovative design. I think it was Jobs who said that innovation requires a lot of work and preparation! You can't go 'eureka' and expect someone else to be on your wavelength, even if he's technical. Sandman30s (talk) 12:03, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not aware of a single thing Steve Jobs invented himself. Most of the inventions were either taken from other companies (e.g., the Mac GUI, which he got from Xerox) or from employees (e.g., Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod, iPad, and iPhone). His talent, I think, was in recognizing the value in ideas of others and then marketing the product in an appealing way to consumers.&mdash;Best Dog Ever (talk) 00:39, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

school lab a little lost
learn how to configure a serial attached SCSI device.I need to research host adapters,SAS Backplanes,Cables, and Hard drives.


 * 1) i need to know what bus and motherboard to support a 5x150= 750 MB
 * 2) why i chose that bus,dose mother board have enough bandwith  to support amount of hard drives (5x150)
 * 3) what type of cables did i use?
 * 4) what are some advantages of backplane vs enclosure
 * 5) why do SAS hard drives have less capacity
 * 6) dose my host adapter support raid
 * 7) concidering the above parts how much storage cost is it comparable to pre-config NAS configs?

i am looking for help for this project not give info

1st time question asker — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ssrs68 (talk • contribs) 19:08, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I've formatted your question to be a little more readable. Why don't you start by taking a look at motherboards on a major commercial vendor website, like Newegg?  I also have found this review website, Tom's Hardware, useful and objective.  They have an entire section on motherboards, including comparisons and review articles.  Nimur (talk) 21:15, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm not used to new windows installs (formatting etc)
Hi, I had my computer goof up majorly recently, the sort of problem that causes it to blue screen indefinitely and fail to load windows. I just recently fixed it and installed a new version of windows....

The problem is I'm used to (perhaps VERY) old style windows installs; i seem to recall the installer reformatting the drive, resulting in an erase of all files on that drive. Windows didn't do that. Instead, i get a neat "windows.old" file, and all my other files still intact.

I sort of want the format, because then i start TOTALLY clean. Should i do it? is it the right way to go? I guess I'm just not used to all my old things being there still. I backed up what i need already and i just feel awkward trying to make this decision, when it used to not be a choice.

Any thoughts please? 216.173.144.164 (talk) 19:16, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Formatting a hard-disk and installing an operating system are two separate steps, conceptually. Strictly speaking, you can do either one, or both.  If you intend to do both, and need instructions, you might want to look here: the official help-guide from Microsoft, Installing Windows 7.  The section Using the Custom installation option and formatting the hard disk will provide you step-by-step instructions for a "clean" install.  Nimur (talk) 21:20, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

The install CD seems not to have a custom setting.... should i try formatting using 3rd party software? lol

216.173.144.164 (talk) 21:35, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Phone calculator
I noticed that the highest number my phone's calculator can manipulate is 999,999,999,999,999.93749. Is there any significance to the decimal portion of this number? 209.147.141.95 (talk) 21:47, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * It's very close to the value of 15/16, suggesting that the computer uses 4 bits for the fractional part in a fixed-point arithmetic scheme, but uses some other algorithm (e.g., conversion to binary coded decimal or some other intermediate representation) for computing or rendering the value in decimal. It's very difficult to know for certain, unless you can provide more information about the type of computer and/or software in your cell phone.  This sort of thing could be determined by hardware, or software, or a combination of both.  Nimur (talk) 21:55, 25 August 2011 (UTC)