Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 January 19

= January 19 =

clearing stuck print queue
An item that the print queue (Windows 7) says is "deleting" won't go away when I Cancel All Documents. How can I get rid of it? Thanks, --Halcatalyst (talk) 01:37, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I've often had the same problem. Sometimes connecting the relevant printer allowed me to delete the stuck document, and sometimes I've needed to restart the computer (or even delete and reinstall the driver in Vista).    D b f i r s   09:02, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I have clients who have this issue every week. You can do it the long way, or create a batch file. --  Gadget850talk 12:52, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, gadget's solution is better than mine. I like the batch file. That would have saved me a lot of time when I was having problems (years ago).    D b f i r s   13:24, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Came back to it after turning off the computer overnight and "deleting" was gone. Cancelled All Documents, and the item disappeared. However, I am going to write down how to create the batch file. Thanks to you both. --173.16.18.137 (talk) 16:39, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * For advanced uses, I have a version that adds an entry to a log file. I then have the Print Spooler service call the batch file whenever it crashes. I also have a version that elevates the command prompt to admin level. --  Gadget850talk 18:00, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Answers above are more than sufficient, but here's Microsoft's official answer (from XP days) which includes the solution that works for me: my printer seems to be one that I can just turn off/on to clear the spool. --&mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  |  14:53, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

What came before the Unix shell?
If there were no windowing system at the time, how did users at that time interacted with the system? Only with punch cards or is there any missing link between shell and cards?? OsmanRF34 (talk) 14:29, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Let's not confuse the user input device with the shell. Technically, you could scan a set of punched cards to provide input to bash or any other Unix-style shell.  If you wanted, you could add a punched-card machine to provide very inefficient I/O for a modern operating system - even replacing mouses and touchscreens - because of the abstraction tthat serialization of data allows.
 * Before the bash shell there was a long line of similar shells. Before that, there were command-line monitor programs.  Before that, most computers had very simplistic user-interfaces that were designed to be controlled by programmers - there were no users who didn't also program.  Computers programs were a lot less interactive, because they were slow, and they shared resources; so in the very early days of computing, programmers wrote codes and ran them; the only input and output were stored files.
 * Files could be stored on a deck of punched cards, or on magnetic tape, or on another computer. For example, the IBM 1401 was commonly attached to the IBM 7090 so the bigger processor could be working at full utilization, while a programmer provided data on the smaller and cheaper system.
 * Since the early 1950s, the file system abstraction has allowed programmers to design code that is agnostic to the physical storage medium. An early program did not need to know whether its input came from a punched card deck or a serial magnetic tape.  Of course, there have always been pesky cases of broken abstraction, and they were more problematic in the era when hardware limitations were much more severe.  Nimur (talk) 16:18, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Quoting from our shell (computing) article: The first Unix shell, Ken Thompson's sh, was modeled after the Multics shell, itself modeled after the RUNCOM program Louis Pouzin showed to the Multics Team. Looie496 (talk) 16:36, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * An interface that was more interactive than punch cards, but less interactive than video terminals, was the printing terminal. Some of these were teletype machines. One, the IBM 2741, was based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:27, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Before the GUI windowing system (invented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center), people usually interacted with computers using dumb terminals. For example, the IBM 3270 and VT100 terminals connected to mainframe and minicomputers, and DOS like environments running on PCs.  These were not really shells but command line interfaces where you type commands to make the computer perform an action such as edit a file, compile a program, or run a shell script (a collection of these commands in a file).  The use of dumb terminals is far from dead, though it is more often done today using a terminal emulation program (PuTTY is one such emulator).
 * Before dumb terminals, there were teletypes which were used to produce programs and their input data on punched card or paper tape.
 * Astronaut (talk) 23:48, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia-like software for writing academic papers
Does anyone know if there is a way to use the wikipedia software to write academic papers? I find that it's easier if I use my sandbox, and then it generates a nice looking page with the footnotes and then references at the bottom...or have I answered my own question? Hires an editor (talk) 14:39, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * You can install your own instance of MediaWiki to run on your own computer. You can even configure it to keep all your data totally private, instead of sharing it like a public website. You can use it to write your own papers, or your own encyclopedia, or any other writing task that you see fit.  Nimur (talk) 16:21, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Bear in mind though that much of what you may regard as standard functionality on wikipedia, including part of the citation system comes from templates. Simply installing MediaWiki even with all the added extensions like [//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite/Cite.php cite.php] may not give you what you expect from wikipedia. You'd need to install these templates on your own wiki which may take a bit of work since there's a fair few of them often dependant on a main template (although I believe this is changing with the rise of lua).
 * However writing it in your sandbox yourself here on en.wikipedia isn't a good idea. Beyond the fact you may not want to share this info so publicly, WP:wikipedia is not a webhost so you're likely to find your sandbox deleted at any time if you use it for that purpose. So if you do want to use a MediaWiki like system, it may be your best bet.
 * Nil Einne (talk) 21:33, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I think you're going to find that you have great difficulty getting your document into the format needed for submission. If you like the "wiki" style of doing things, I recommend LaTeX.  That can get you into difficulties too, but thousands of people have figured out ways of solving them. Looie496 (talk) 18:31, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Likewise: In the long run, I think you would be better off learning the simple coding of LaTeX. It creates very professional results, which is why perhaps, so many professionals use it for creating their academic papers.--Aspro (talk) 18:33, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * LaTeX is powerful, but it's quite clunky compared to the numerous alternatives. I would only recommend learning and using LaTeX if you are working among a community who also uses it.  LaTeX is intended for typesetting printed documents.  That is, the final product will go on paper.  Compared to MediaWiki markup, HTML, or even just a hyperlinked Microsoft Word document, LaTeX produces very poor digital document.  Its file-format is esoteric; its rendering system is slow; its hyperlinking featureset is limited; embedding dynamic content, like an animation, video, or software simulation in the document is nearly impossible; its portability to modern operating systems (like Windows, Android, iOS, for example) is very poor.  Many people work around this limitation by rendering, and then exporting, rendered LaTeX documents to PostScript (or Enhanced Post Script); or to PDF; this yields a static document that cannot be easily reflowed, re-edited, or re-typeset on different types of screens.  Nonetheless, many people still use LaTeX - especially in fields related to mathematics - because some authors find LaTeX syntax for mathematics very convenient, and they do not wish to learn how to use a LaTeX plug-in for Microsoft Word, or MediaWiki, or Open Office.
 * If you're looking to author journal submissions, check your journal's recommendations for digital document formats. Many journals now prefer a rendered PDF document, or a Microsoft Word file, rather than raw TEX markup.  Nimur (talk) 18:45, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * In the spirit of full disclosure, I have a well-known bias against LaTeX, as evidenced by our archived discussions on this topic. In my defense, I have learned and used LaTeX extensively - so intensively that I can identify its shortcomings.  I have successfully compiled the LaTeX processing pipeline from source (...and many more times, I have tried to do so unsuccessfully).  I have backported document layouts and TeX wrapper scripts; I have operated all the bibtex workarounds and tex2html hacks too many times to count.  I freely admit that the TeX-style mathematical equation syntax is quite convenient.  Everything else about TeX is stuck three decades behind its competition.  Mathematicians and physicists would do the world a favor if they would write HTML instead of TeX.  If mathematicians desire more compact syntax for writing mathematical formulae, they ought learn MATLAB or FORTRAN or C, because there is not an equation yet expressible in human-readable format that cannot be equally-well-represented as a valid computer program.  If mathematicians desire more "beautiful" equation rendering, they ought to learn how to write better style-sheets; and if there is truly something deficient in the rendered document, then they out to design a specialized HTML layout engine.  Nimur (talk) 19:05, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Ugh! LATEX does exactly what you tell it. Academic journals will thus, be happy to accept it for the foreseeable future or until microsoft comes up with something better. Why when one can create Latex doc's should one have to learn all these other things? LATEX for academics and researchers who (think they) don't need it--Aspro (talk) 19:12, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Do you find it surprising that your link is a PDF document, and not a TEX document? Or, that when I view it on my 64-bit Unix supercomputer, the document's footnotes are not hyperlinked?  This document's author painstakingly crafted \ref links, and then destroyed their functionality by rendering to a not-very-portable-document-format.  The author could equally have typed "Footnote 1” in a plain-text document.  I could then set my font to Computer Modern, and the document would be equally functional, and use fewer bytes.   Nimur (talk) 19:15, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * To clarify, I didn't intend to give a ringing endorsement of LaTeX. It has huge advantages over MediaWiki, but in the modern world I believe there are numerous better alternatives. Looie496 (talk) 19:24, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for clarifying. There may well be, better applications than Latex but we (I and every-bodies else’s dogs) would be interested in examples, rather than a 'belief' that such other applications exist. Then we can discus them and so answer the OP's question more fully.--Aspro (talk) 20:14, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The OP asked for "Wikipedia-like" software - which would be a private instance of MediaWiki. I have used the same set-up for documenting hobby projects and collaborative projects.  Sometimes, wiki-syntax is exactly what I need for document preparation, instead of a word-processor.
 * If the OP is looking for alternative word-processors of the more conventional variety, there are numerous choices. Microsoft Word is the obvious market-leader; and OpenOffice/LibreOffice are free software alternatives.  These offer many of the advantages of TeX, with generally better usability and better platform portability.  If your primary computer runs iOS or OS X, Apple's Pages software is very convenient and is now available at no charge.  Mathematicians who need symbolic mathematical formatting, but also need to do useful work, can purchase Waterloo Maple - which, in the hands of a skilled operator, produces fantastic documents that can also execute complex calculations.
 * If what you must have is a mark-up language (as opposed to a word-processing software tool), there are many alternatives: other mark-up languages, like XML, MathML, HTML, or Wiki syntax, or even JavaDoc; all of these are better defined than TeX (in the sense of having a complete formal grammar), and that encourages documents that are more well-formed than TeX. Nimur (talk) 09:39, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I've been using LaTeX for more than 20 years, and there are a number of (what I consider) good reasons for it. All journals and conferences I work with accept either LaTeX or LaTeX-generated PDF, and they provide LaTeX style files that make it easy to conform to their typesetting requirements. Typically, they even suggest LaTeX as the preferred format for preparation, even if they want the result in PDF. Secondly, LaTeX makes easy things (plain text, lists, definitions) easy and easy to get consistent. It makes hard things (mathematical typesetting) possible, and with some practice, bearable. LaTeX also is compact - the typing and reading overhead is a lot less than for XML-based formats. Thirdly, LaTeX is plain text. I can use my favourite text editor, which is both powerful, responsive, and unobtrusive. Being plain text, I can write code to generate LaTeX output - most of the tables in my papers are generated directly from experimental results using a bit of Python or AWK or shell. And again, being plain text, I can use standard version control software like git or subversion for both version control and collaboration. And thirdly, LaTeX is open both in theory, but also in a practical sense. I can still open and process files from 20 years ago. Even if, for some reason, the file won't compile anymore, I can still look at the source and typically get all of the content. And because LaTeX is an open and transparent format, I don't suffer from vendor lock-in - which is bad if the vendor is good, but catastrophic if the vendor goes out of business. Finally, LaTeX is pretty much standard in my field. Everyone can get it, it's free, and exchanging documents is painless (unlike documents that passed through, say, 5 different versions of Word). Now the fact that I use Beamer (LaTeX) for slides has to have something to do with stubbornness and irrationality ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:18, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Nimur, if you've used LaTeX extensively you must know that PDF supports hyperlinked footnotes/references and LaTeX supports them in PDF output. Why that particular document doesn't have internal hyperlinks I don't know, but it isn't because they used LaTeX and/or PDF. Also, distributing documents as PDF, instead of in editable source form, is not exactly peculiar to the TeX world. -- BenRG (talk) 07:06, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * They may accept it, I don't know whether all are happy about it. Consider these two guidelines from prominent journals /. Both prefer Word or Wordperfect. The latter won't even accept the TeX file wanting a PDF (well I imagine they have no problems if you convert it to another format they accept like RTF or TXT). The former will accept the TeX file in addition to the PDF or PS for your final submission (it requires a PDF for the initial submission, I think most expect that to make it easier for reviewers). And while I don't know how old it is, they say they want it simple because 'converting LaTeX files to Word format relies on a DOS-based utility that converts to HTML as an intermediate format'.
 * Another prominent journal albeit with a narrower focus, doesn't mention TeX at all, and although they accept TXT, since they require an editable/modifable format and prefer Word, it's unlikely they accept it. Of course you could publish it to TXT or perhaps RTF yourself like you're basically doing with Nature but the fact they didn't mention it suggests it's not something they wish to concern themselves with.
 * Sure some are happy with TeX, but clearly the idea all journals are happy with it doesn't seem to be supported when some don't even accept it and others seem to indicate it's not something they really like to deal with. This doesn't seem to be a new thing either. An article from 1996 in the same LaTeX journal you linked to above says something similar.
 * Nil Einne (talk) 21:22, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Nit: TUGboat is not a LaTeX journal, but rather a journal on digital typography with a focus on TeX in general. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:00, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't have an opinion but a similar question has been lurking in the back of my mind. I'm very surprised to read that Compared to MediaWiki markup, HTML, or even just a hyperlinked Microsoft Word document, LaTeX produces very poor digital document. Its file-format is esoteric [...]. I'd thought that the DOC format was impossible to manipulate with a text editor and that DOCX (with ODT) in practice was too. I like a file format manipulable by a (more or less) WYSIWYG editor when convenient and a text editor when convenient: HTML is an example (although most of the WYSIWYG editors I've seen are horrible). LyX sounds interesting; is it?  (I'm unconcerned about usability in iOS or Android.) Morenoodles (talk) 08:52, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * To sum up: It looks like LaTeX will be the prime choice for the foreseeable future.--Aspro (talk) 00:22, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Forgive me for being cynical. Yet, I wonder if some editors know (rather than believe or visa versa) that as Bill gates 'invented' all on his very own (not bought form other companies -as that is not microsoft's  kosher version of history) the PC, the Word Processor, Spreadsheets, video games, the internet, computer viruses, the blue screen of death  and everything else, then, therefore, one must only look to microsoft for the one's solutions (and assurance of  future licensing problems, API problems, security problems etc,).--Aspro (talk) 00:57, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Um you realise only one single Microsoft programme was mentioned in a long list of other programmes mentioned or implied right? The whole 'evil Microsoft/Bill Gates' shtick is a little old and boring, particularly considering Nimur was one of the key participants in this thread and even Nimur recommended many possibilities whereas you are the one who suggested LaTeX is best for everything. Nil Einne (talk) 13:53, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Psiphon 1 fails to display HTTPS websites
Dear Wikipedians:

I set up a Psiphon 1 server. I logged onto my Psiphon server from another computer and browsed a few HTTP websites, they all worked well. However, when I attempt to browse an HTTPS website, I got an error page that says:

HTTP Error 501/Not Implemented.

I am wondering what is going on and how I can resolve this error?

Thanks,

184.147.43.3 (talk) 23:48, 19 January 2014 (UTC)