Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 January 26

= January 26 =

Smartphones
Did companies other than Apple envision anything like a smartphone before the iphone? And did Apple take a big risk by releasing iphone? Clover345 (talk) 01:18, 26 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Smartphone -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 01:21, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Google DMCA notices
There are times that, whenever I search on Google, when I get at the bottom, I see a "In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed X result(s) from this page." This can get somewhat annoying, especially if I search deeper and the notices pile up (for example, there can be 5 notices like that on top of each other). Is there a way to disable this message? Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 04:01, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Not that I know of but I'm sure places like China will eventually be able to supply you with a plug in for your browser to eliminate all traces of censorship. In fact I'm sure it would be such a nice app that all browsers there would be supplied with things like that by default and eliminate any annoying or disturbing information. Anyone up to writing such an app? Dmcq (talk) 12:51, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * On a quick try with two entries from chilling effects I got nine of those notices on the google page and I wonder why they couldn't merge them, but they were all at the bottom of the page. Bing just had one line saying entries were removed an not saying why, and on another try still had the entry for which removal was being explicitly requested so perhaps the copyright owner only bothered with the notice to Google. Dmcq (talk) 14:04, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I wonder if anyone views/uses these notices as helpful search results. The URLs being mentioned in such a DMCA complaint (first one I tried contained 134 URLs covering 10 copyright claims) likely contain exactly what the complaint alleges. A bit like marking a download/link as "Verified". （￣ー￣）. Ssscienccce (talk) 15:12, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Oh dear, this is straying off-topic. The question is, is it possible to disable or at least hide these notices? Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 15:15, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * And an answer was use Bing instead and it won't be so noticeable. What's the big problem anyway? Dmcq (talk) 15:34, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * As I mentioned earlier, it can get somewhat annoying to see, especially when they start piling up. It's repetitive. But I don't like Bing. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 15:44, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I have no experience writing scripts for greasemonkey, but managed to get the wanted result by altering this script. First saved it locally, edited in two places: (edits in bold): document.getElementsByTagName("p") instead of "a", and one of the lines removeNodeByID("mfr"); saving the changes, then opening it in Firefox (with greasemonkey enabled) and installing it as script. Of course most of the other lines in the script are rendered useless by the first change, so you can trim it further, but with those two changes it worked for me. (I'm assuming that "mfr" is always the id for these lines). If you use other scripts as well, you probably want to change the name of the script to a more descriptive title. Ssscienccce (talk) 18:07, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * That script should already have remove it by removing 'botstuff' I think. Personally I feel unhappy about doing things like that as I believe site owners are entitled to live or die by what they want to show rather than have people automatically removing ads for instance. Dmcq (talk) 13:20, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Oops, you are right, the "botstuff" should have worked, no need to change the script it seems (although with the original script you lose more than just the DMCA stuff). Hadn't noticed it, I had already made the changes before realizing I was testing on a saved copy of the page, so the url didn't contain "google".
 * I may agree with you when it comes to individual sites, one can always choose not to visit them. But for me google doesn't fit that category. They have a quasi monopoly, leaving most people little choice than to accept them and their policies. And that includes for example America's prudish attitudes toward nudity. In europe, nudity in commercials, on tv or magazines is pretty normal, but it isn't on european forums anymore, because it takes just one person submitting complaints to google ads about every bare nipple they find to enforce censorship on all the users. This happened for example on the dutch Fok! forum. Ssscienccce (talk) 22:12, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I just tried 'nude' in image search an it warns about a facility called safesearch, if you just continue on you get all the pictures of nudes you could ever want, well at least far more than I wanted for certain. There's lots of other search engines. Dmcq (talk) 01:29, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
 * ? Im not talking about google image search, I'm saying because of google ads, forums change their policy and people can't post pictures or use avatars that nobody objected to a few years ago. Just because prudish americans control the ads. If you read dutch: http://forum.fok.nl/topic/1668191/3/25#98328626 Ssscienccce (talk) 04:12, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

PC not displaying content
Hello all, I could really use help please. My pc is a Dell inspiron 530, although the motherboard and hard drive are the only remaining original components. Today I installed two new sticks of 1gb ram to replace two 512mb sticks and bring it up to the max of 4. I had some trouble with 1 of them, and I think I pushed up against the graphics card, an ATI radeon 4850 which is directly against it (a bit like this, not my pc but my graphics card is a similar size). When I plugged everything back in I could hear it start up fine, but the monitor remained in standby mode. I checked and the cards fan is working but there is no display. I tried plugging the vga cable into the default vga port, but from what I have been able to gather it was likely disabled in the bios which I can't see to get to. I've tried removing the graphics card but can't it out, when I pull to remove it from the port it stays in at one side, from this picture you can see a sort of hook on the bottom right, there is some kind of lever/tab/thing in this holding the card in place, but I can't get to it well enough to push/pull it back and remove the card. So in summary, no display, can't use onboard vga port, can't remove graphics card. Hoping somebody has some similar experience or other insights before I resort it to taking it in to a shop, having trouble finding similar questions around the web. Thanks--90.208.112.248 (talk) 21:41, 26 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I've had similar problems, the most likely explanation is that either the graphics card or the memory isn't properly seated in the motherboard, really my first port of call would be to remove and reinsert them. Yes there is a clip holding one side of the graphics card, but you generally only have to push it to one side, which is fiddly, but not much force is required usually. However, sometimes to push the graphics card in you need a bit of a push even when it is properly lined up. Bear in mind while handling memory etc, that its best to be earthed!  nonsense  ferret  21:58, 26 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I think I'd put everything back the way it was originally, including the original RAM. If you still can't get it to work, then a stray spark might have damaged something. StuRat (talk) 04:11, 27 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Had another go at it today, managed to get the graphics card out and put it back, reconnected and the display came up fine. Thanks for your advice folks--90.208.112.248 (talk) 12:40, 27 January 2013 (UTC)


 * OK, great. I'll mark this Q resolved.  Please remove the resolved tag if any more issues come up. StuRat (talk) 14:49, 29 January 2013 (UTC)