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September 1

Why is the www gone from urls?

recently I've noticed that urls and Web browsers have stopped showing the www. Part of the url entirely and it's not necessary to enter anymore. Why? Wordsonwordsonpagesonwordshello (talk) 13:33, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

www is the host for the domain. To be clear, in a url like www.example.com, example.com is the domain name and www is the host name. If you do not supply a host name, your request goes to the default IP address. If the default IP address is the IP address of the www host server, there is no need to supply www because without it you get to the same server. Also, modern systems do routing seamlessly. If you hit the default IP address on port 80 or 443, it knows you are making a web connection and it can redirect you to the web (www) host. If you hit on port 52, it knows you want DNS and redirects you to that host. So, most of the time, adding www is simply redundant. ~2026-46630-01 (talk) 13:51, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware the domain levels are counted backwards, so every child field is followed by its parent field behind. You can think of the dot as meaning "of", e.g., en.wikipedia.org is "English (version) of Wikipedia, (an instance) of (an) Organization website".

Therefore to include the www (world wide web) or not in their namespace is purely up to the website owner themselves. When your browser redirects to a URL without 3W, it's likely that website owner simply made a redirect at the www. namespace. 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk / Uploads} 13:53, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

In addition to the other replies, it is not mandatory to use www as the name of the host. For example, https://vtwg.cap.gov/ is the official website for the Vermont Wing Civil Air Patrol. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:05, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

That is only true if it is configured as such. In your example. vtwg is the host name (the actual server) for the domain cap.gov. If you used www.vtwg.cap.gov, the host name would be www.vtwg. They might not have defined a host name www.vtwg on their end. If so, www.vtwg.cap.gov would not work. Further, they could point www.vtwg to a completely different server than vtwg. Then, going to www.vtwg.cap.gov will point to one server while vtwg.cap.gov points to another. There is no variation. The last part (.gov) in this example is a category of domain names. Add the part before it (cap.gov) in this example. That is the domain name. Someone purchased vtwg.gov (or had it assigned because this is a .gov domain) and has permission to set up the host names. There will be one default assignment for vtwg.gov and then an assignment for every host name. They can point vtwg.cap.gov to one server, news.cap.gov to another server, downloads.cap.gov to another server, mike.cap.gov to another server, etc... They can even point all of those to the same server if they like. They can also expand to as many values in the host name as they like such as this.is.a.rather.silly.example.of.a.complex.host.name.cap.gov. They just assign that long host name to a server. ~2026-46630-01 (talk) 16:21, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

this reminds me of the URL for PubMed Central: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

PubMed Central (of the)

National Center for Biotechnology Information (of the)

National Library of Medicine (of the)

National Institute of Health (of the)

United States Government. 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk / Uploads} 16:39, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Thank you! Wordsonwordsonpagesonwordshello (talk) 16:28, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

See 2018's https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-69-kills-off-www-in-urls-heres-why-googles-move-has-made-people-angry/ —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:02, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

September 3

I finally may have found the first phone with polyphonic ringtones!

ASTEL AJ-32

https://asteler.web.fc2.com/PS_3.htm

Can a japanese speaker please confirm?

Apparently it's from august 1999

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9D%80%E4%BF%A1%E3%83%A1%E3%83%AD%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3

I'm still not convinced to be honest...

pls no ban, i wanted closure but it took a while

Also, shoutout to the nokia 8877 & 8887 for maybe being the first phones to maybe ship with miniBAE (pls confirm as well) -xh-xe-xg- (talk) 12:25, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

The ASTEL AJ-32 was a PHS handset, not a cellular phone. I feel the original request implied you were interested in cellular phones. If you allow any hand-held, cordless phones, then we have to look at wireless phones as well. If you drop the requirement for it to be wireless, we have to look at wired phones - which brings right to the niche phones of the 1970s and 1980s. I personally think they were monophonic. They played songs, but one note at a time. It is possible one of them was polyphonic because, at that same time, there were four-note novelty car horns. Were they monophonic? I don't really know. But, the point is that the technology was advancing in the 1970s and 1980s, so by 1999 there could very well have been a non-PHS, non-cellular phone with polyphonic capability. My personal opinion is that it was a byproduct of the video game market, trying to get technology to play more complex sounds to attract more players. That technology spread to other devices. ~2026-46630-01 (talk) 16:52, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Indeed. The Commodore 64's SID chip had three channels in 1982. Matt Deres (talk) 17:45, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Don't forget about the wonderful atari TIA, with two channels in 1977 -xh-xe-xg- (talk) 05:22, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

The old push button (DTMF) phones produces two distinct sine waves per key press. They were actually eight channels, but most of them could only activate two of the eight. Some could activate all eight at once. Regardless, they could all activate a minimum of two sine wave channels at the same time, producing the well-known two-frequency oscillation. ~2026-38520-51 (talk) 10:29, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Indeed i believe there were, multiple of them actually.

I had another source with a later phone. https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/mobile/column/catchup/1999/12/09/ (i believe this was it)

And this slightly later release https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/mobile/column/hidouki/1999/12/10/jsky.htm (somebody answered that the first one was likely to be this phone's direct succsesor, the J-SH03, this older one has polyphony as well, so it definitely isn't that newer one)

Maybe there were even car phones with that feature. -xh-xe-xg- (talk) 05:20, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Wait i confused myself it's the second link the J-SH02 one, i'm not that good at this... -xh-xe-xg- (talk) 05:26, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Four-note novelty car horns: (five, even) - yes, they were monophonic. They had an electric rotating valve which pumped air to each horn in turn. I think you could select the order, to get different tunes. MinorProphet (talk) 20:48, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Similarly, don't forget train horns. --~2026-48361-01 (talk) 00:06, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

September 5

mp3 size

When I download new music, I use DOS's DIR command to get a snapshot of the file's name, date, and size in bytes, which I then transfer to an Excel file that lets me manage my media file as flexibly as I'd like. All good. Today, I was performing that action as usual when I realized I hadn't cleaned the file metadata first: I like to go in and correct the file's year/genre/track/etc. and I also usually remove any cover art attached to the file as it's often some stupid "3000 Hits from the 1970s!" type garbage anyway. So, out of curiousity, I kept the original data and compared it to the data reflecting the corrected files and noticed some oddities: removing the album art does not change the file size by a single byte and correcting the metadata, including blanking or filling in fields may affect the file size, but in other situations doesn't. In short, what's happening here? Why wouldn't the file size change when an image is deleted from it? If it matters, I'm doing the clean up in old-school Winamp. Matt Deres (talk) 15:39, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

It really depends on the details of how winamp works. For example, to delete an ID3 tag containing an image, they might choose to just overwrite it with a comment tag rather than actually removing it from the file, which would require writing an entire new copy of the file. Of course, overwriting the original file would be risky and I'd be surprised if they actually did that, but even if they write a new file, it might be simpler to modify the picture tag rather than removing it, if other data in the file depends on the file size or the location of other data. By just modifying the content of the original tag, none of that would change. This is all just a guess though; I don't know how winamp works. If your curiosity is high enough, you might try some other mp3 tag editors and see how they behave. CodeTalker (talk) 03:38, 7 September 2026 (UTC)