Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 March 11

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March 11

Windows 98 SE with NTFS disk partition

I just put a drive with an NTFS partition into an old computer running Win 98 SE. Its started behaving badly and will not now run as a server. any suggestions? It says there is no network. Am I doing something wrong?--SlipperyHippo 01:56, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

98 doesn't read NTFS drives, is not for servers and basically you shouldn't be doing what you're trying to do. --antilived^{T | C | G} 02:40, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Windows isn't a very good server platform, and Windows 98 is a terrible server platform. Also NTFS is only readable by the NT family (not 95, 98, or ME) --froth^t 07:32, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Quite. MS no longer even issue security patches for 98. Update to a newer OS, like XP ($$$$) or some type of Linux (free!). Also, as Froth says, 98 does not have support for NTFS by default, only FAT. --h2g2bob 01:02, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes but I did have my other computer working as a server running Win 98 SE. Im just wondering why it has given up--SlipperyHippo 23:47, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

When you put the new disk in, the drive letters assigned to each partition of the original hard disk may have changed. --Carnildo 22:31, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes I know that, but I just cant get my network to work now. I remember having to fiddle endlessly when I originally set it up, but Im wondering whether swapping drives has now confused Windows 98 SE somewhat?--SlipperyHippo 05:11, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh yes. I forgot to say that Itried installing Xp on the slow computer to acces s the NTFS partition. But it didnt load properly, so i reverted to 98 SE nad I reinstalled 98 SE to boot. This seems to have messed up the autoexec.bat file 9maybe other things also)--SlipperyHippo 05:50, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

moved to curren page

Voice Software

Is there any software that I can say a sentence and it will type it onto the computer? 68.193.147.179 04:23, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking? --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 04:36, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Vista has this built in. After a lot of voice training it does get pretty good --froth^t 07:30, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Be warned --Ouro (blah blah) 08:24, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Hah, yeah you really do need to train it extensively. But it's pretty intelligent- you can just jump in without any training at all and it'll train itself after awhile. Looks like that guy didn't run the training utility at all though. --froth^t 19:30, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Also that news reporter is ridiculous --froth^t 19:31, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Isn't he? Guess they maybe weren't sure at all how to deal with it. Reminds me kinda of the Windows 98 presentation when they were suddenly surprised by the blue screen. Anyway, I wonder if it'd be difficult to train it to listen to a different language than English. --Ouro (blah blah) 19:36, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Hm interesting idea. I remember the BSoD demo by the way :D And take a look at this clip, the rest of his voice demo went fine --froth^t 19:48, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, that wasn't so bad. However, I'm wondering if it'd work this well in real life with day-to-day stuff, or at the office where you sometimes don't have as much time to wait until it comprehends you. I guess we'll have to wait and see how this develops. As for the other languages, I was just wondering about the differences in phonetics and the way a language is spoken (take French or German, two languages where the spoken word tends to sometimes not at all resemble the written word, because some of the vowels are silent or pronounced in a way that they seem not to be there). Heck, I'd be even interested to see how this software'd handle a person speaking proper British English. --Ouro (blah blah) 20:34, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Actually it's not Vista exclusive either, as long as you have Office XP or 2003 (or only 2003, forgot which), you can get speech recognition in XP and probably Win2000. --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:18, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

I'd say it's not at all exclusive to these products, as there are surely apps out there that deal with voice recognition (a company called Lernout & Hauspie springs to mind). Thing is, I am just wondering if the rechnology is ripe enough for languages other than the fairly easily comprehensible English. --Ouro (blah blah) 09:28, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Query regarding Sun Certification(SCJA)

Type:-Computer Prgoramming

Respected,

I want to give SCJP exam.I have never given SCJA exam.Is it neccessary to give SCJA exam before SCJP.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jyotishejawal (talk • contribs) 06:58, 11 March 2007 (UTC).

Proxy

how can we enter to a filterd site217.219.78.129 12:35, 11 March 2007 (UTC)uniqoehidden

See http://www.boingboing.net/censorroute.html --h2g2bob 00:56, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

copyright question witha bit of html

i am a member of a band , we actually wrote and made a few songs on our own we decided to write the songs on to DVD's and sell them but the problem was that those who bought the dvds shared the music with thier friends and we ended up making a huge lose about indian Rupees 3000 . i want to know if there is any software that can allow a cd to be played only in one computer and the contents of the cd shouldnt be allowed to be modified or copied by another computer ,does a software like that exist is it free because unless it is free we cant afford it since taking loans is out of the question because our liabilities are more than our assets .

i would like to design a website for the band but i have no clue of html ,can someone help me learn html and where i can get acess to free books on html in the web.

thank youAuldlangesyne 15:14, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Hello. To answer your first question: there is actually no way to allow playing a specific CD only on one machine (as this could sometimes prove detrimental to the end user, as when he would have two machines in two rooms he could only play the CD on one of them; among other things that is). There is also no unbreakable copy protection scheme for CDs. As for HTML, there's a basic course over at Wikiversity, with links, try that one, it looks okay. Cheers, Ouro (blah blah) 16:19, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Music piracy cannot really be stopped — major companies spending millions of dollars on finding an answer to it have yet to come up with a truly workable answer, and you can bet that if there was an easy workable technical fix they would have done it already. That being said it is not the end of the world — you can't assume that those people who pirated the songs would have otherwise have bought it, so you are losing potential revenue rather than actual revenue, and the fact that people want to pirate it says good things about the music (many musicians would love to have people want their music, free or not). In my mind the best way to capitalize on the situation is to think of it as free publicity -- set up a good website, give away some of the music, try to make up the revenue by alternative means (selling t-shirts, posters, etc., for example), put some "value-added" things together with the CDs you sell (nice booklets, things that would be harder to pirate) so that actually buying the real ones are worthwhile. But I am not a businessman or an economist, but it seems to me that if it is an impossible problem for big companies it will likely be an impossible problem for small groups as well; better to adapt than to fight. --24.147.86.187 17:11, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

This isn't a problem - the more people know of your band, the more sales you'll get. The real problem would be if nobody hears your music. Technological methods just piss off your paying customers, as shown by digital restrictions management technology over recent years. The most effective solution is including a note with the CD or DVD saying "please buy our CDs, we need the money to continue!" perhaps even as a track on the CD so ripped copies get it too. These techniques are sometimes used by some indie record labels.

If you want a proper website, you'll probably need to pay for it. Ask some of your geeky friends to help design it. However, there are some other ways to promote yourself to the online community. One is to allow remixes of some of your work - for example get in touch with ccmixter - as this raises your profile. To tell your fans where your gigs are, find an online blogging service (free), like blogger.com (there are many others). Finally, MySpace: you may love or hate it, but many bands use it, so it may be worth a go.

Finally, visit magnatune to see how online record labels should work. --h2g2bob 00:54, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

My thoughts: you should just enjoy playing music and encourage others to pay if they like the music. By encourage I mean don't go "if you don't buy our music we'll kill you". I mean "if you like it, please consider paying". Like geeks who write free software and encourage you to donate! --wj32 ^{talk | contribs} 09:34, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

CGI mailers

My mother's husband is designing a website for their friend, who owns a B&B hostel in Estonia. He is trying to add an HTML form that uses a CGI mailer to send the reservation as an e-mail. He wrote the form but couldn't get the actual mailing to work, so I took a look at it. I found a freely available CGI mailer script and installed it to his homepage, but it looks like the server doesn't support user CGI scripts, so it just dumps the source code at me. Is there a freely usable CGI mailer installation somewhere, so I just have to point an HTML form at it, with the recipient field properly set, and it would e-mail the reservation to the B&B hostel? JIP | Talk 18:42, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Hm, good question. I don't know of any free solutions but here's a for-pay service that will do what you want. I would suggest signing up with a good free web host that provides the cgi support you need (what is it? python, php, perl?) and just hosting your script there. Have the form submit to the free web host and then have the script send the email and redirect back to the official homepage. It's going to be tricky (and awful unsecure) if you have to pass reservation data to the free web host but for a generic email it's easy --froth^t 19:45, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Sorry if this is all obvious stuff, but have you set the "x" permission for the script (assuming it's a Linux/Unix server) - see Unix permissions. Also check the scripting language it uses is available on the server. --h2g2bob 00:38, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Sound on the internet

How do I disable random internet noises? I'm talking about those random talking advertisements, pages that automtically play music, etc. I would still like to be able to listen to imbedded viedeos in quicktime or whatver, and to listen to songs on sites like myspace and on other sites with imbedded sound that I actually choose to play. But all these irritating sounds that interrupt my music as I'm surfing the internet are really annoying. Any ideas? I've got XP and firefox. Thanks, Sashafklein 19:01, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Install Adblock Plus, from the FireFox extensions page. I like it a lot! —EncMstr 19:09, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Looks good Sashafklein 19:18, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah. Wow. That really works well. Sashafklein 19:20, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Another option is NoScript or Flashblock, which will only allow Flash to run on pages where you explicitly allowed it. --cesarb 19:22, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't visit myspace pages terribly often. But I too have been annoyed by these occurrences. I have installed Stop Autoplay (ext. link) which seems to work pretty well. I also just recently discovered a Firefox Plugins manager (ext. link), which I've found works better than Flashblock (due to possibility of javascript loading flash in the background through a event handler), although I think it disables flash for the whole Firefox program instance, instead of attempting to disable flash for any particular page.

Root⁴(one) 04:33, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Looks like this (www.gozer.org) is a better place to get the Plugins manager.

Root⁴(one) 04:55, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Viruses

If I download a program but don't run it, can a virus in it infect me? The question really is--if I download something and scan it with a AVG and some spyware things before I run it, am I safe? Or can it infect me before I even run the program? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sashafklein (talk • contribs) 19:12, 11 March 2007

Viruses have to be executed somehow before they can do anything, so if you downloaded a suspicious .exe file, and didn't execute it, chances are you are fine. Cyraan 19:22, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Virus and spyware scanners are mostly reactive, so you will not be safe if the program has a virus or is some other sort of malware your antivirus/antispyware doesn't know about. --cesarb 19:27, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Well scanners don't actually execute the code if you just scan the file. I think you mean that if you actually run the program the realtime protection might not kick in- that's true. --froth^t 19:34, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

From what he said, he has the intention of running the program after scanning it, if it comes clean. I'm pointing that a negative from the scanners is not enough. The realtime protection is irrelevant, since it uses the same database as the standalone scanner. --cesarb 20:49, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Generally no, even if you open up the virus executable file in a text editor. But that text editor might have a hook that executes a different virus, so that virus will be executed. x42bn6 Talk 15:34, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Antiviruses

Why can an antivirus kill execution of a virus and not the other way around? They both run in usermode do they not? So nothing in hardware enforces the antivirus's power.. Also I would think that it wouldn't be a very good idea to let user mode programs terminate each other- how to antiviruses assert their authority? --froth^t 19:37, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Most antivirus stop execution of a virus/malware by preventing it from running. Since the virus/malware is never executed, it's not able to kill the antivirus. About terminating other processes, user mode processes can always terminate other user mode processes if they have the correct permissions (usually, one process can only terminate other process if both are owned by the same user); however, most antivirus are not normal user mode processes (they usually run as the System account, and often use things like kernel hooks to have more control than a normal user mode process could have). --cesarb 20:59, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

It's not uncommon for a virus to target and attempt to disable any antivirus software if it does manage to run. Vespine 23:54, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Bogus spyware

I wanted to buy some anti-spyware software and had heard that spybot was a good package. However the link that came up was to spywarebot. Being new to the internet I didn't expect this sort of trick. After installing and registering, for $19.95 + vat, I thought it strange that after scanning and quarantineing parasites the quarantined parasites didn't register on the list. The page said zero for any thing that was supposed to have been removed. I thought this odd so I looked on web for possible bogus spyware and yes there it was Spywarebot. What possible damage have I done and what should I do? I have given them my e-mail address and used my credit card, am I at risk? Please can someone advise me please?82.16.101.160 20:52, 11 March 2007 (UTC)rob

Download the real spybot search and destroy at [1] and scan and do the normal stuff. Uninstall Spywarebot, and request a refund from the company if you can. -Wooty Woot? contribs 21:27, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Never click on links claiming your system (may) be infected by spyware, you should almost never buy anti-spyware programs especially ones that blow up ads all over the place on their site, and Google up any software you intend to download or buy but append the word "fake" or "spyware" to your search string to get a gist of whether it is a threat or not. x42bn6 Talk 15:31, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

iTunes play count

I've been turning all of my music files on iTunes into MP3s. However, each time this is done the play count in the MP3 copy starts over at zero. Is there a way to change the play count? I tried editing the XML file with all of the variables, but it doesn't appear to save the changes. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 21:53, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I think you'll need QTFairUse6 to rip your itunes music --froth^t 00:20, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

daylight saving time

Dear Wikipedians:

Isn't today supposed to be going on daylight saving time according to the new energy law passed by the States?

Why is it that all the Internet time servers are still reporting the old time?

70.50.141.29 22:11, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

If by internet time servers you mean NTP servers, which are the source for time on the Internet, they use UTC, so whether or not it's daylight saving time/summer time in some remote country doesn't matter at all for them. --cesarb 22:46, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

It is your computer that is not adding the correct number of hours for daylight saving time. --Spoon! 22:48, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

How to host my own website using a domain name I registered?

I've registered a domain name, say example.com, with a registrar (DomainZoo.com). And I've set up my PC as a host, and told DomainZoo to forward example.com to my IP address (well, actually to my DynDNS.com subdomain). Now how do I make it so that a user types in example.com and it feels to the user that they're on example.com, rather than seeing "example.dyndns.org" in the address bar? I know there's domain cloaking using a frame, but that's not at all what I'm looking for. This seems like it must be a basic question that comes up all the time, but I just can't find the info. Thanks for any help. --Allen 23:26, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Try using a CNAME instead of their HTTP redirection. --cesarb 23:38, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

More specific link: Domain_name_system#Types_of_DNS_records --froth^t 00:22, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! So far it acts the same way it did with the HTTP redirection (that is, it goes to example.dyndns.org and shows "example.dyndns.org" in the address bar) but maybe that will change once everything gets, uh, propagated or whatever over the next few days. Either way, I've learned a lot from googling "cname dyndns", so thanks for pointing me in that direction. --Allen 02:20, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh yeah, now it works. Just needed to propagate. Thanks again. --Allen 03:09, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Do you have a regular ISP account? It's usually in the fine print so you may not be aware but as far as I know most 'home provider' ISPs do not allow hosting and you may have your account suspended, or worse, if you are breaching your terms of use agreement. Vespine

Hard Drive Bits

I've just replaced one of my hard drives, and decided to take the old one apart. I didn't get very far due to proprietry screw heads, but I did find something interesting.

Just above the edge of the platter and the actuator arm is a capsule that slots into the main housing. It's abount 2cm long and 0.5cm wide. It's full of tiny ball bearings. It's clear plastic all around, except one side, which is made of some white plastic or paper. It seems to be quite thin and easily penetrated. This side was facing inwards. What is this capsule for? →Ollie (talk • contribs) 23:39, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

It's probably the internal air filter, which traps any stray particle flying around within the drive. --cesarb 23:45, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure it's ball bearings? It almost sounds like silica gel. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 23:46, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, I don't know exactly what they are. Lots of small (~0.5mm radius) black spherical things. I wondered if it was silica gel, but in my experience that is clear and much larger. An air filter seems a plausible explanation though. →Ollie (talk • contribs) 23:50, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

The screw heads probably aren't proprietary but are, in fact, Torx screws.

Atlant 11:59, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

wouldnt that be proprietry to the manufacturers of Torx screws though :) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 88.111.194.25 (talk) 20:32, 14 March 2007 (UTC).