Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 February 27

= February 27 =

Formatting hard drives
Hello everyone. I want to format the two hard drives on my computer, which now uses Windows XP, and then set up the Ubuntu OS. I have already formatted my secondary hard disk from my Windows XP OS. Now, how can I format my primary hard disk, which I obviously can't format from within Windows XP? Please note I have no Windows XP installation disk available, so I need an alternate solution. Thanks in advance.--Leptictidium (mt) 15:50, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It's a little unclear exactly what your setup is and what you want to do. Are you trying to set up a dual boot?  Is your second hard drive internal or external?  Assuming you want a dual boot, do you want Ubuntu to live on the first hard disk, or the second?
 * In any case, you shouldn't need a Windows install disk, just a Linux one, which you can just download, so whatever it is you want to do can almost certainly be done. But how to do it depends on the details of what you want. --Trovatore (talk) 15:55, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Someone messed up with this computer a long time ago, setting up Windows XP both on drive C:\ and on drive H:\. I've accessed Windows XP on drive H and have used it to format drive C, so that's one less to go. My question is: what should I do now to format drive H too? But now that I know it can be done with a Linux install disk too, I think I already know. Thanks. Leptictidium (mt) 16:02, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Be sure to back your data up first! As for the format itself, most (if not all) mainstream Linux installers give You the opportunity to partition Your hard disk accordingly in order to prepare it for the installation. I found this back from the day when I was a newbie at this partitioning stuff. Cheers, Ouro (blah blah) 17:24, 27 February 2012 (UTC)


 * All you need is an Ubuntu install disk. It will format and partition your hard disk if you tell it to.  Of course this erases everything on the hard disk.  Comet Tuttle (talk) 01:04, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Size Of Wikipedia

 * What will be the size of complete Wikipedia (English)? I mean all articles, talk pages, templates, projects etc.. 1 TB, 10 TB, 100 TB? You can add a template in my page. --Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 18:46, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Best answer provider will get a barnstar.. if interested and permitted! Strikeout this paragraph if this violates any guidelines here.--Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 18:49, 27 February 2012 (UTC)


 * See Special:Statistics. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 20:12, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Have a look here too though why the data for ENWP is so out of date, I don't know. Thincat (talk) 22:50, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * So the English Wikipedia should be around 20GB now. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 23:07, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

According to Database download all English Wikipedia pages in 2010 were ~280 GB compressed, and "expand to multiple terabytes of text" when uncompressed. This does not include images. There is also Size of Wikipedia but it seems to be several years out of date AvrillirvA (talk) 00:08, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * That's presumably all versions of all pages? --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:10, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes. Database download says 7.3 GB compressed, 31.0 GB uncompressed for "Current revisions only, no talk or user pages". Thincat (talk) 00:19, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * As of the English Wikipedia Jan 04, 2012 dump, the uncompressed size of " Articles, templates, media/file descriptions, and primary meta-pages" is 33.1 GB. Avic ennasis @ 06:08, 5 Adar 5772 / 06:08, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

I thought I uncompresed the "all articles, current version" dump a year or so ago and it was around 50GB then, so it would be bigger now; maybe that dump included stuff like user pages. The "all pages, all versions" dump was around 6TB but it has a stupendous amount of redundancy. However, if you want your own personal Wikipedia copy, having just the page text isn't so good, since most of the better-developed articles have one or more images. Commons last time I looked was around 10TB or 12TB (again probably more now), so you need three or four 3TB or 4TB hard drives to hold everything. 4TB drives have been available for a few months but are still pretty expensive (the Thai flood issues just make it worse) so most people I know still use 2TB drives. 67.117.145.9 (talk) 09:20, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Getting URL of link
At http://www.spanair.com/Default.aspx?language=es I'm trying to get the URL of "Descargar instrucciones" but I haven't figured out how. When I right click it doesn't show a URL. WhisperToMe (talk) 22:04, 27 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The reason is because it doesn't really contain a link. It's a submit element that sends a form request to the server. The server then takes a look at what is sent to it and acts upon it — in this case, sending back the PDF. Because it is sent via the POST method there's no way to represent that as a simple hyperlink. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:37, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Okay, so how could one best represent it? I'm trying to get it archived on http://www.webcitation.org WhisperToMe (talk) 01:58, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * You can either 1. upload the PDF somewhere else, 2. just link to the URL above as the citation. Those are your options. The site has not given you any way to direct link to that file. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:08, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * When some browsers download (like Google Chrome or Firefox) After you download you can get the download link (Often those "direct links" are deleted when it finished downloading, it's to avoid direct linking. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.60.93.218 (talk) 12:34, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * They may not even exist depending on how the coding works. I suspect it just streams the file to the browser. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:24, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The correct URL for the PDF is in fact http://www.spanair.com/Default.aspx?language=es - but as the OP and others are already aware, this will only deliver the PDF if accompanied by an HTTP POST request (that is, the invisible part that happens behind the scenes when you click on the form submission button). The technical name for this type of URL is a "non-idempotent locator."  In other words, the same URL will cause the server to do something different depending on the type and format of the HTTP request.  Such URLs are indeed part of the HTTP standard (RFC 2616 §9.5), and are recommended for serving content that can vary from time to time, user to user, and so on; and for serving content that should not be cached by a proxy or cache.  Whether this particular document satisfies such criteria, I am not sure... it looks like a pretty static PDF document to me.  Nonetheless, the website operator may still choose to use this type of URL for other reasons - as has been noted, this discourages "hot-linking."  In the spirit of standards-compliant pedantry, though, this does not prevent hot-linking.  The scheme in use entirely depends on the user-agent, knowing that most user-agents use graphically displayed "links" to mean HTTP GET.  Because most major web browsers don't have a user-interface for "bookmarking" an HTTP POST request, this sort of forces you to load the page and click the download button.  Nonetheless, one could build a custom web-browser that does allow bookmarking and hot-linking with HTTP POST support.  In fact, any HTML element that supports an "action" attribute could be used on a third-party web-page, allowing a hot-link to the document. Nimur (talk) 17:52, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Indeed, but unfortunately I imagine webcitation has done no such thing. :/ ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:03, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I know - this is frustrating, because it's silly semantics. But, the citation is valid even if it doesn't link directly to the document - a citation cites, not links, to its source.  Furthermore, what you are citing is a web resource who provided a document.  A URL is intended to locate a resource, not to identify a document.  So, it's fair to cite the document and point to the resource that provided it.  If you intend to identify the specific document (and not the resource who provides it) then what you want is a Uniform resource identifier, or its similar commercial counterpart, the digital object identifier, to specifically identify the PDF.  Keep in mind: having a URI identifies an object but doesn't always tell you where it is located!  Unfortunately for all involved parties, the PDF in this question doesn't have a unique identifier, (the author never assigned it one!)  so this PDF cannot have a unique locator.
 * So - just because your citation won't contain a valid hot-link, don't worry. You have still created a valid citation.  Nimur (talk) 20:07, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm wondering.. can I submit that request from the url? 190.158.184.192 (talk) 23:17, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * A lot of times you can figure out the POST data and send it as a GET and have it still work. 67.117.145.9 (talk) 09:21, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I found out this was the post request when you clicked button.

POST http://www.spanair.com/Default.aspx?language=es HTTP/1.1 Host: www.spanair.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://www.spanair.com/Default.aspx?language=es Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=ditq44utdidhfv45sj1kqe45 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 695 __EVENTTARGET=&__EVENTARGUMENT=& __VIEWSTATE=%2FwEPDwUKMTk1NDQwODUzMQ9kFgJmD2QWAgIDD2QWAmYPZBYGAgMPFgIeCWlubmVyaHRtbAVGTGVhIGF0ZW50YW1lbnRlIGxhcyBpbnN0cnVjY2lvbmVzIHBhcmEgY3VtcGxpbWVudGFyIGVsIGZvcm11bGFyaW8gd2ViOmQCBQ8PFgIeBFRleHQFHURlc2NhcmdhciBpbnN0cnVjY2lvbmVzIChwZGYpZGQCBw9kFgJmD2QWCAIDDw8WAh8BBSdDcmVhciBhbHRhIGRlIGluZm9ybWFjacOzbiBkZWwgY3LDqWRpdG9kZAIFDw8WAh8BBS1Nb2RpZmljYXIgaW5mb3JtYWNpw7NuIGRlbCBjcsOpZGl0byBleGlzdGVudGVkZAIVDw8WAh8BBQlNb2RpZmljYXJkZAIXDw8WAh8BBQZWb2x2ZXJkZGTo1RIo6TWHLaUZt9qs4EOLG4%2BJag%3D%3D&__EVENTVALIDATION=%2FwEWBQLY5%2FWyCgKHhqW2CQLwhbS%2FCwLR876DDgLzzKGhCYTVs9oXWEkyfnXiUTsQeY9hmEL0&ctl00%24MainContent%24downloadInstrucciones=Descargar+instrucciones+%28pdf%29 I'm still figruring out 190.84.182.165 (talk) 03:14, 22 March 2012 (UTC)