Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 December 9

= December 9 =

Links opening in new tabs
Does anyone know a way of forcing Firefox to not open links in a new tab when the site tries to force things that way? I'd just like it to open the links in the same tab. Is there something in about:config that I need to change? This is on a Mac, if it matters though I would think that the settings would be the same between PC and Mac. Thanks, Dismas |(talk) 14:11, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


 * This worked for me in Firefox 25.0.1, which is all I can test at the moment. Open the configuration settings (type about:config into the address bar and hit enter). Search for browser.link.open_newwindow, and double-click it to change the value to 1. A Mozilla article describes this behaviour. I used this page to test. -- Kateshortforbob talk  15:12, 9 December 2013 (UTC) ETA: oops, didn't realise you already mentioned about:config. Sorry!--  Kateshortforbob talk  15:16, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks! That worked perfectly!!  Dismas |(talk) 21:19, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Gizmodo web pages not displaying properly
Last week, all of a sudden, my web browser isn't displaying any of the Gizmodo web pages (Gawker, Lifehacker, etc.) correctly. The pages still load, but all of the pictures and links are on the left-hand side of the page, with the text displaying in one or two very long lines. It's functional, but not really readable.

I have this problem in both Firefox and IE Explorer. I also have it when I start Firefox in safe mode (and the only add-on that I have is Adblock). I tried clearing the cache, but that didn't fix it. A Google search shows that this has been a problem in the past for several browsers, but I'm not seeing anything mentioned in 2013, so I don't think the results are relevant. If anyone has any advice on how to fix it, I'd be very grateful. OldTimeNESter (talk) 19:04, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Can you try connecting from another Internet Access Point and checking for the issue? --Gryllida (talk) 20:42, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Private domain registration
The question, boiling down to how to do this, is located here. Thanks! --Gryllida (talk) 20:40, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
 * If you don't know how to do this already, then one shouldn’t risk it. However,  if you're determined, start off like some where  here: --Aspro (talk) 21:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Would the article contain details about how this works? Probably you may be able to give hints, few sources on its talk page. --Gryllida (talk) 08:41, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Decline to add further. What may be legal in my country, may not be legal in yours. Therefore, I don't want to lead you into a situation where you spend the rest of your life in Guantánamo Bay.--Aspro (talk) 22:17, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

UAE questions
I was feeling nostalgic today, so I loaded up an AMOS game I had made almost two decades ago on E-UAE on my Linux PC. The first thing that happened, was that all the graphics were messed up. This is a problem that was known to me already when my real Amiga still worked - AMOS is incompatible with the AGA chipset, but repeatedly pressing the "Left Amiga" and "A" keys (to toggle between AmigaOS proper and AMOS) usually fixes the problem. But I couldn't locate any key mapped to "Left Amiga" on my Cherry Linux keyboard. What the heck are the Amiga keys mapped to?

After I restarted E-UAE in ECS mode, the game's graphics showed up properly. But when I actually played it, I noticed that the game, in particular the sound, ran slower than on a real Amiga. This on a PC with a 3 GHz dual core 64-bit CPU and 4 GiB of RAM. And, as I played the game further, it only slowed down even more. The E-UAE process started consuming over 90% of the system's CPU time, and the sound was almost painful to hear. Why does this happen? Is it because my computer is not powerful enough? The game worked fine on a plain, common-or-garden A1200 with a 14 MHz single core 32-bit CPU and 2 MiB of RAM, but then some of this is accountable for the emulation of a foreign processor itself taking some time. But why the heck was it slowing down even further over time?

And lastly, my real Amiga used a 640×512 desktop, and this is what E-UAE also opens up as. My current Samsung LCD monitor can easily display a resolution twice as much per direction, i.e. 1280×1024. Is there any way in E-UAE I could double the pixel size for a better on-screen experience? J I P &#124; Talk 22:06, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The most likely reason it's slow is that the 3GHz CPU in your PC is emulating not just the 14MHz CPU in the Amiga - but also all of the other chips, such as the graphics and sound chips in the machine - which means that you're emulating hardware functions (which can be crazily fast) in software (which mostly isn't!).  Consider that your PC has only 214 clock cycles in which to emulate one clock cycle on the Amiga.  That includes things like translating the instruction set of the 68000 CPU as well as mimicking the sound and graphics chips using the PC's (very different) sound and graphics hardware.


 * As for why it's slowing down gradually, I'm not quite so sure. One possibility (since you're running this on Linux) is that you have some other process consuming significant CPU cycles at the same time.  Linux gives new processes a particular process priority, and if there is competition with another process, then it'll gradually reduce the priority of CPU-hungry tasks over time to let other tasks run.   This kind of load balancing isn't usually very noticeable unless two or more CPU-heavy tasks are in competition though.   Another possibility is that your original game also slowed down gradually - there are many plausible reasons for that - but that you didn't notice it on the real Amiga because it still ran fast enough to produce an acceptable frame rate.


 * It is a bit odd though - recent versions of UAE use "JIT" (just in time compilation) of the emulated code - which means that the emulation should get gradually faster as more and more of the original code is converted to native x86 code so the emulator has to do less and less code translation work in each iteration of the game.


 * Our article on UAE (emulator) says that there are quite a few forks of that code - and it's possible that the one you've chosen is not the best available. SteveBaker (talk) 15:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I didn't exactly "choose" E-UAE - it came as default when I installed Fedora 17 Linux. It looks like I should give PUAE or FS-UAE a try, but how do I do that? At least PUAE doesn't seem to be available through a package manager, or even as an installable package at all, only via GIT, and I'm just barely learning how to use that. Are there any official PUAE distribution packages available, or do I have to get the source code via GIT and build it myself? J I P  &#124; Talk 19:08, 10 December 2013 (UTC)