Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 December 17

= December 17 =

BLOCKED
I WORK IN AN OFFICE WITH BLOCKED INTERNET LINE. I CAN USE THE INTERNET BUT FOR SOME CERTAIN APP.ONLY CAN SOME TEACH ME HOW TO UNBLOCK THIS RESTRICTION.219.94.83.162 (talk) 08:54, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Please don't SHOUT. Typically, a company will employ a firewall to limit internet access, either for security, to increase (perceived) productivity, or both. A firewall normally blocks most ports, allowing only connections to certain ports (and hence the associated services). What works for me is to go to the responsible system administrator and say "I need to access service X, please adapt the firewall". Success depends on the skill and workload of the admin, and your relative standing in the organisation. If some ports are open, you can always use a proxy and tunnel blocked services. The amount of technical skill needed for that varies, depending on what services are open and closed, and which services you want to use. You can use a virtual private network for this tunnelling, but in either case you need an unrestricted server somewhere for the final connection to the the internet. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:10, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Note that any attempt to circumvent your employer's firewall is likely to result in disciplinary action, and could cost you your job. If you need access to a web-based resource to assist you in your work, ask your line manager to liaise with the IT dept. to add it to the whitelist of permitted sites. CS Miller (talk) 15:23, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

How to determine if I have new mail in Gmail
Yes, it lists the number of new messages and puts them in bold text. However, when I log in from a new location, it lists messages as new that were previously listed as new at the previous location. Is there a way to make it recognize that this mail is no longer new, since I already viewed the titles and decided not to read them ? StuRat (talk) 17:33, 17 December 2014 (UTC)


 * In my Gmail, messages stay new until I either read them or delete them, and this is the same wherever I access them from. Are you using POP?  If so, there's a setting to mark as read on the server (settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> 2. When messages are accessed with POP -> Mark Gmail's copy as read).    D b f i r s   10:39, 19 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Yep, that seems to have fixed it, thanks ! (I wonder how I got stuck with that odd setting.) StuRat (talk) 02:17, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

GPRS at 35 kbps (k not K)
If you have 35 kbps, what can you do with that? Can you at least send and receive emails?--Senteni (talk) 18:45, 17 December 2014 (UTC)


 * As long as the emails are plain text, yes. Full HTML might take a while, but it will probably work.  Konveyor   Belt   18:55, 17 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Your "(k not K)" comment confuses me. Either way, "k" or "K" both mean 1000.  I'm guessing you meant "(b not B)", where "b" is a bit and "B" is a byte (typically 8 bits).  So, 35 kbps is 35,000 bits per second.  A character of text is typically encoded as an 8-bit byte, so that would mean you could send 35000/8 or 4375 characters per second.  Allowing for some overhead, let's say 4000 characters per second.  That's a lot of text.  Possibly you could also send some sparse vector line drawings, like a map.  Or you could even send some heavily compressed bitmap images, provided they had large areas of constant color, to make compression work best.  Something like newspaper cartoons, perhaps.


 * There's also some possibility of sending animations, although they would be severely limited, and again use only sparse vector images or heavily compressed bitmaps. Let's say you send 10 frames per second, that means some 400 bytes per image.  Each 2D vector on a 256x256 grid could be represented by 4 bytes, or 32 characters.  Let's add 5th bit for the color of the line, allowing 256 different colors.  That's 40 bits per line.  So, you could have maybe 10 lines on the screen at a time.  Maybe you could send an image of a rotating pyramid with that.


 * And many games don't require exchanging much info between players. Chess moves, for example, only require a few bytes of data each.  Or each placement of a letter on a 19x19 Scrabble board requires only about 15 bits of data.  So, entire game histories could be downloaded in a second.  StuRat (talk) 19:12, 17 December 2014 (UTC)


 * yes, I meant kbits, not kbytes.Senteni (talk) 19:19, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 * When I were a lad, we had 2400 bps - not "k", not "K", not anything. And that was perfectly OK for text and the occasional picture. Tevildo (talk) 21:50, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, I remember those days (in fact my dial-up phone line connection used to run around that speed until a few years ago), but we had problems when trying to download "big" files of perhaps 50KB.   D b f i r s   23:44, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 * You folks are too young. I remember when 1200 bps was a high-speed modem, normal ones being only 300 bps. And then there was 134.5 bps... --65.94.50.4 (talk) 04:51, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Well didn't home modems start out at 75 bps and reach 300 bps by about 1980? I can't remember the speed of the first one that I used, only that it was slow and unreliable.    D b f i r s   12:24, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
 * In my day we had to get our internet in buckets! We'd go down to the information well, uphill both ways, rain or shine, and get one bucket full of internet to pour into our computers. Of course, to save on buckets when talking about the internet, we got rid of the "uck" and bucket got abbreviated to "bit", which is where the modern term comes from. MChesterMC (talk) 09:22, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I started doing 110 bps in 1974. Two years later, 300. Messages became less terse. Two years later, 1200. Vroom! Email really worked well at such supersonic speeds. Jim.henderson (talk) 12:36, 18 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Sure many of us remember using that speed modem and slower. Here's a list of things of the top of my head that you could do with those speeds-- FidoNet, Telnet, BBS, IRC, Usenet, Gopher_(protocol), You also might be interested in the various standards, e.g. Xmodem, Ymodem, Zmodem, Kermit_(protocol). For games we had MUD, MUSH, BBS door, Play-by-mail_game. Actually many of those things above worked at 300baud, and by the time you get to the late 80s/early 90s, services like Prodigy_(online_service), compuserve and America Online were already rather popular. I'm probably leaving out several interesting things but these links might be more helpful than my stories of first connecting my 2400bps modem :) SemanticMantis (talk) 16:19, 18 December 2014 (UTC)