Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 July 26

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July 26

Websites and money

How do you make money by running a website? Heegoop, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Offer something from your website that people are willing to pay for, or at least accept annoyance of advertising. -- Kainaw^(what?) 02:25, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

If your site does not sell anything and is popular enough then Ads are a good way to bring in money. I've tried google ads and they work nicely, it is your choice what the ads look like (text/image/size). There is many other Ad websites to use. Also you could try dealing with a adveriser directly or partner with another money making site.--64.40.88.131 15:03, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

In general if you want to make money at anything you have to have a business model. What are you "selling"? Why would people visit your site? Think about that for awhile and then try to figure out where you'd be making money. Note that overloading a site with advertisements is a sure-fire way to get people not to come back, unless the content is pretty wonderful to begin with. --140.247.238.102 15:15, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Mainly, by advertising. Selling advertising is an art in itself. Gzuckier 19:14, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Proprietary software vs free software

Have we seen any case where a proprietary software company stole code from free software? If yes, how they proved it (cause we can't see the source code of proprietary software)? roscoe_x 06:13, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Proprietary software companies use free software all the time. You need to define stealing code. There is indeed a problem where companies use free software and do not comply with the license. Most companies do comply with the licensing, but some unscrupulous companies haven't (such as in the PearPC case), or some companies aren't aware of their legal obligations.

Indications that free software has been used contrary to the license requirements involve searching the binaries that the company provides (and are necessary to actually run the program) for strings that describe symbols or particular names of functions that are common to both projects. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.135.42.160 (talk • contribs)

If by "stealing" you mean copyright violation (which is actually a different kind of act), there have been several cases, ranging from the CherryOS mentioned above to the Sony rootkit. --cesarb 12:16, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

It's not really stealing code, nor is it FLOSS, but the example sound files in Windows XP have metadata that shows they were made with an illegal version of some Sony product --L^augh! 12:22, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

The GPL Violations project tracks this issue. -Arch dude 02:13, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but not all free or open (depending on how the OP uses the word) software is GPL, and hence would not always result in a GPL violation.

Yes but GPL is one of the licenses most frequently violated. For many other popular license such as the BSD one, the vendor would have to be particularly stupid to violate it and even if they do, it's easily rectified Nil Einne 00:00, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

For example, the oft-told tale of Microsoft's use of a BSD variant of the ipstack. 165.234.180.57 16:11, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Date format in MS Excel

The date format of my system is mm/dd/yy.

I have some data in MS excel in which one of the column has the date in the format dd/mm/yy. I need to convert this to mm/dd/yy format. Is there any way so that I can do this without changing the system date format; like some formula/function in MS Excel itself?

Select the column, Choose "Format Cells", then either select Category "Date" and the "mm/dd/yy" sub-option (if it exists) or select custom and type "mm/dd/yy" into the sub-option box. (Please note that mm/dd/yy is a stupid date format as it doesn't strictly increase or decrease in unit size, dd/mm/yy or yy/mm/dd are much better choices. -- 08:13, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Note that this assumes you had an actual date format column. If it's just a text column where someone has entered dates, you will need to do something different to fix them. StuRat 14:30, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

If the latter, just create a new column which is the formula: "=MID(A1,4,3) & LEFT(A1,2) & RIGHT(A1,3)" Note that this assumes that you are using exactly mm/dd/yy format (two digits each!). --140.247.238.102 15:12, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

If you just want to format via another column a simpler way would be to do =text(CELL,"MM/DD/YYYY") and it will format it appropriately. So to show A1 it would =text(A1,"MM/DD/YYYY") ny156uk 19:41, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

IP Address v6

How does one use V6, rather then v4?--Honeymane_{Heghlu meH QaQ jajvam} 10:49, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

It is just an addressing scheme. Instead of using the IPv4 address, use the IPv6 address. However, I don't know many people who use either one. They use a hostname that maps to either an IPv4 or an IPv6 address (or usually both). -- Kainaw^(what?) 12:52, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

OK then - Is IP6 up and running now? Is there an example of a guest wikipedia edit by someone with an IP6 address? -- SGBailey 13:58, 26 July 2007 cv(UTC)

Yes, it is up and running. For example, my computer has two addresses:

• 128.23.114.39
• fe80::208:74ff:fe37:7f4f

Of course, if I were to edit Wikipedia without logging it, it would show my address as 128.23.114.39. I've heard, but haven't verified, that strict use of IPv6 (without IPv4 running in tandem) has only been widely accepted in China. -- Kainaw^(what?) 14:04, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

It's not just an addressing scheme, there's more to it than that - the protocol is a bit different. The ipv6 article has more information. You can probably make your computer talk ipv6, but it's unlikely that your broadband router (if you have one) supports it unless you've done some shenanigans, and there are almost no ISPs that I'm aware of that offer it. If you want to use ipv6 you'll probably need to set up tunnelling of one sort or another - the article has more info. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 14:47, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually, IPv6 addresses beginning with fe80: are link-local addresses; if you only have these, you aren't really using IPv6 (you can use link-local addresses only to talk with other machines in the same link-layer network). If you want to use IPv6, just set up either 6to4 or teredo (teredo in particular is very simple to setup). As on editing with IPv6 on Wikipedia, IIRC only the "test" wikipedia has IPv6 enabled. One major obstacle would be that squid does not work well with IPv6 yet. --cesarb 18:46, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

If you use Windows XP, Open Run from the start menu and type "cmd". This will open a command prompt. Type "ipv6 install". This will turn on ipv6 for your computer. You wont notice a thing (except when you try to see you IP address, then it will show in a different format). That's pretty much all you can do to help further the cause of ipv6 adoption. --Oskar 15:42, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Video formats

Hello,

I use my pc to record tv programs and films and then use the VideoReDo software to remove the advert breaks to reduce the file sizes. The default setting then saves them as MPEG files but i get a choice of many different file types. Iwas wondering what the best file type would be for me to use. I don't especially want super quality just good quality and able to be written to dvd. thanks Scraggy4 12:43, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

For video I'd recommend Xvid, for audio I'd recommend Vorbis or MP3, and for a container format either Ogg or AVI. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 14:50, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

WMV work well too. ~ Wikihermit 00:16, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

...but isn't WMV defective by design? --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 12:27, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Do you suppose a Pentium III @ 1 GHz can run any VM?

Is there any virtual machine software for which a Pentium III @ 1 GHz with 256 MB RAM would be sufficient for? Preferably with windows 2000 host operating system. (with linux being the second choice, especially if it's possible to set up from just booting into knoppix).

Thanks!

-84.0.158.245 22:20, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

256 Mb isn't enough to do anything useful while running one copy of windows- it would only get worse when running multiple OS's. Add more RAM and VMWare should work. Friday (talk) 22:40, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

This does not mean that it won't "run" it. It will run prety much anything but very slowly using Virtual memory so make sure you set your virtual memory to something big to accomodate both the host and guest OSes. If you are looking for specific software try vmware. --racergr 04:53, 27 July 2007 (UTC)