Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 July 5

= July 5 =

What is this website?
What is this website? Is it continued to Facebook? Will has an impact on the personal data of its users? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk • contribs) 08:45, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Hard to say who's behind it or what it does. This Go UFO company seems to have no offline presence and make webpages and apps for anyone. Anyone can want to do anything with any data. Generally speaking, if you don't know what something does, the answer to "Are you ready?" is "No." InedibleHulk (talk) 14:15, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Subscribe to an RSS feed on Firefox
I have two computers. One (XP) has a news feed that I like. I would like to replicate it on the other (Win 7) PC. However I can't track down the original website that lets me subscribe to it.

I would therefore like to install a new RSS feed with manually edited Site location and Feed location. I can't do this in Properties as it shows as read only. How can I manually set up a subscription that works fine (on FF on XP)? -- SGBailey (talk) 16:11, 5 July 2014 (UTC)


 * In the Old FF, Go to the Bookmarks toolbar, right click on the button for the feed, go to its properties, and copy the URL. In the new FF, paste this into the addressbar, it should load the feed, with a "Subscribe Now" button. Press that, and voilà!, you will be subscribed to it. CS Miller (talk) 17:11, 5 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Which location? The Site location or the Feed location? -- SGBailey (talk) 17:43, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I think it is the Site Location; if they are different then the feed seems to redirect to site. CS Miller (talk) 18:09, 5 July 2014 (UTC)


 * I'll try that. Thanks. -- SGBailey (talk) 20:01, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Name of the transparency indication pattern?
You know that checkerboard pattern that's ubiquitously used by raster image editors to indicate transparency? Is there a "technical" term for it (such as with marching ants)? Is there any documented history of its origin/usage (it seems like there would be at least some info on how it became the de facto transparency indicator)? --70.178.117.73 (talk) 17:09, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Computer Scientist who did research on Intelligent Design, can't remember his name
I'm editing the article on Knowledge based engineering there is currently a section on design problems in general that I was just going to trash because as is it really says nothing but I was thinking there was a guy I read back in the 80's and 90's who just did outstanding research on general design issues. My research area was CASE and his stuff was relevant to that but also to manufacturing product design, in fact if anything most of his examples tended to be more in that domain. He had lots of students and they did really interesting work that was, and IMO this isn't that common for computer science software research, actually practically useful as well as theoretically relevant. The thing is I can't remember the guy's name. He was scandanavian and all I can think of is Ivar Jacobsen who of course it's not, he's the OO guy, but I think the name is somewhere in the space of scandanavian names. He had a software tool, kind of like the MIT Programmer's Apprentice or the Kestral KIDS system that got re-used in many projects and for various prototypes and uses in the real world. As I'm writing this I realize I'm not leaving much to go on but I'm remembering conferences where I always so his work. I can look up some of those in my books (I always like to say that sound like Mr Giles) and refresh my memory but if anyone has any ideas please drop me a note. He tended to be in HCI conferences a lot. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 19:56, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
 * (Not an answer to the question, but Intelligent Design is a variety of creationism, and probably wasn't what your engineer worked on.) Tevildo (talk) 22:23, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
 * it is a pity that the mad religious folks have made this term theirs. Now any intelligent design makes you look stupid. OsmanRF34 (talk) 18:04, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
 * There's still Smart Design. It's a longshot, but maybe the scientist works there. Even Intelliphone realizes "smart" is the more ergonomic (gooder) word. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:27, 6 July 2014 (UTC)