Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 April 11

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 11

Make your own movie by hacking

Is there such thing as putting a scene in a movie that you alreadly saw made by somebody —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.23.137.200 (talk) 02:53, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Comedy TV shows will often show a real scene followed by a fake one, for comic effect. StuRat (talk) 03:04, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

If you're asking how to do it you only need a movie editor program.--92.251.215.5 (talk) 11:28, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

...and also some way to capture the starting movie in an editable format. StuRat (talk) 12:19, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

You mean you want to make a fan edit? 66.127.52.47 (talk) 22:31, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes,Like can you put Lindsay Lohan in the Nutty Professor 2:The Klumps in a computer —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.23.137.200 (talk) 22:49, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

When Industrial Light & Magic did this in the movie Forrest Gump, putting Tom Hanks in pre-existing film clips of people like John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, it was the state of the art in CGI. It is now 16 years later and is easier to do because the tools have gotten better; if Lohan participated in the effort and posed and spoke her lines, you could do it, if you had millions of dollars, yes. Without her cooperation, you could do it with further millions of dollars by creating the highest-resolution possible textured model of Lohan, and you'd mocap an actress to do the animation of Lohan walking around and saying her lines. She would not look perfect. She would look OK. Her face in particular would look more plastic and unconvincing than Lohan's actual face, because of the uncanny valley effect. Possibly the hardest problem, though, would be her voice. You can't synth another person's voice this decade with a computer and have it sound convincing. You would have to hire a soundalike imitator actress. So, the short answer is, "Yes, with many millions of dollars and a couple of years' work." Comet Tuttle (talk) 05:31, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I think you are exaggerating the cost. With digital editing, it does not cost "millions of dollars" to do compositing. Depending on the source material and the destination material, it can take a lot of TIME, to be sure, but even then it's hard for me to imagine it taking a million dollars worth of man-hours. It is not trivially easy to do this well but it is not even close to being that labor or technology intensive. You can accomplish this with off-the-shelf software these days. There are lots of YouTube examples of this—e.g. this one overwrites characters from Law Abiding Citizen with characters from Team Fortress 2. Tough work to pull off, but not millions of dollars worth of tough work... kids do things like this as their final project in film school all the time. (Though, of course, maybe trying to scale that up to feature-film length would be pretty time intensive. But my point is that this is not just "only film companies can do it" technology anymore.) --Mr.98 (talk) 12:59, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Awesome Team Fortress clip. I would assert again it'd take millions of dollars to insert a live-action actor into a live-action feature film. Assuming we are talking about a lead role or something and not a cameo. Time is money, and I don't think we want to get into time<->money conversion rates. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:14, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

To see this taken to the extreme, watch the comedy spoof Kung Pow! Enter the Fist. The entire movie is an old Chinese film into which Steve Oedekerk added himself, re-dubbed the entire original dialog and basically turned it into something of a cult classic. The "See also" at the end of the aticle has more examples. Zunaid 12:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

c program

please suggest to build this program: There is a book stall where 5 different books present in 5 different bookshelf .1st book in A,2nd book in B,3rd book in C, 4th book in D, 5th book in E.the MRP of books are Rs.50.00, Rs.60.00, Rs.80.00, Rs.100.00, Rs.120.00 respectively.Write a c program in terbo c to calculate following :

1) If I input names of book and each quantities then calculate the total amount to perches and print it

and also print in which bookshelf it stored.Supriyochowdhury (talk) 05:41, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like Turbo C homework, but I can give you some general ideas:

1) You'll want arrays of 5 book names, 5 shelf names, and 5 prices, all in corresponding order. (You could skip the shelf names, technically, if they are A-E, in ASCII order, but the array makes the program simpler and more flexible.)

2) Recognizing the name of a book to purchase will be the hardest part. You may want to convert the name to upper or lowercase and do the same for the typed name when comparing. It's also important to limit the comparison of the strings to the length of the book names, as random characters may exist past that point. Typos and leaving off words like "the" will still be a problem, though, so presenting a menu which lists all 5 and has the user type in a number is safer, if allowed. StuRat (talk) 12:03, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

My 1440x900 has decided it's a 1280x720

Resolved

I use a monitor with a resolution of 1440x900, and it has always worked fine up to now, but this morning I turned it on and it's stuck at 1280x720, in the middle of the screen, with huge empty black areas at each side. I'm using windows 7 with an ATI Radeon HD 3650, when I go into display settings 1440x900 is no longer available. Something about the aspect ratio get changed? How can I fix this?--92.251.215.5 (talk) 11:19, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

(ec) Have you tried a reboot ? Have you tried changing the color depth and refresh rate ? (Some resolutions are only supported at certain color depths and refresh rates.) StuRat (talk) 11:48, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah i tried both of those before I finlly fixed it.--92.251.143.238 (talk) 19:57, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Aha using CCC I managed to detect a new monitor (my current and only one oddly enough), and then force it to 1440x900, problem apparently fixed.--92.251.215.5 (talk) 11:44, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Gmail in Mail (Mac)

Resolved

In Mail I have configured it to work with my Gmail account. It works OK, but how can I get rid of the 'Gmail' folders that have duplicated the 'inbox', 'outbox' etc...basically it has it's own section on the left at the bottom and I want to remove it. This screenshot should help but I was thinking maybe there's other Mail users out there who have also set up their Gmail accounts to work with Mail and so have experienced this as well. Chevymontecarlo. 12:49, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

VB v6, Excel reference and components, server-side program

I have a copy of VB v6 with Excel and FrontPage references and components. The New Project screen in VB shows a bunch of Active X and IIS Application wizards and the server is FrontPage enabled and also runs ASP pages. With these resources it seems that I should be able to use a client side form and script to send data to a server side copy of Excel and get a web page spreadsheet returned with the processed data. Is there a Wikipedia reference I can consult that will help me do this? 71.100.3.207 (talk) 14:25, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Before trying to help you find information on using these technologies, I would like to point out that if your only goal is to build a form that submits data to a server, processes it server-side, and returns a web page in a spreadsheet format with the data, there are many, many, many better ways to do it. If you are really certain that you need to use all of those systems, others may be able to give further advice. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 18:15, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Exactly how are those better? He's already set up his server to run ASP. He's already learned VB. Now you want him to learn those languages and set up his server to run them. Why? He's using a server, a scripting language (VBScript) and an IDE (VB6). That's quite a lot of "systems" for you?--Chmod 777 (talk) 19:09, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

This link may help: [1]. This article is less relevant, but may still help: [2].--Chmod 777 (talk) 19:16, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

"Floating server"

What is a "floating server"? I tried searching but there doesn't seem to be an article on them 82.44.54.83 (talk) 19:52, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

That is not a specific name for a specific item. You need more information to get a definition. Where did you hear the term "floating server"? If we know where you heard it, we may be able to tell you what it means in that context. Without context, it could refer to a lot of things - including computers designed to float in the middle of the ocean. -- kainaw™ 22:06, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

It was on Stargate SG-1 episode "Chain Reaction". Maybourne said the NID delivered orders to it's cells via encrypted newsgroups hosted on "floating servers" 82.44.54.83 (talk) 22:49, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

It's technobabble, then; it's something they made up to make it sound plausible. Now, they didn't actually need to make anything up, it's perfectly possible to use public key cryptography to ensure that no one aside from the intended recipient knows what you're talking about. In the context, it sounds somewhat like a real-life botnet. Paul (Stansifer) 02:49, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

It sounds like they mean that the address of the servers change constantly so tracing traffic through them or tracking down the owners is impossible. It is possible to mimic that sort of behaviour, but using a "server" for it is silly. You'd use a laptop and drive from one wireless connection to another - some people do that. Those doing real illegal stuff don't bother. They just send emails out to millions of people (for free) with attachments that ignorant fools open. Then, they use those computers to do illegal work and send out more emails to more ignorant fools. -- kainaw™ 02:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

[I am revising the section heading from Question to "Floating server". See WP:TPOC, "Section headings".
-- Wavelength (talk) 03:47, 12 April 2010 (UTC)]

Adobe Reader

Hi, I'm trying to read a form on Google Chrome, and an Adobe Reader warning popped up saying something about "Compadibility" and I clicked "Don't Show Message Again." Well, I NEED to see this message again, because now the form won't open at all. I really need to fill out the form, so can anyone tell me how to open that Adobe Reader pop up again? Moptopstyle1 ("I Feel Fine.") (talk) 20:16, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Could you be a bit more specific on what it said about compatibility? It may be possible that you are running an older version of Reader than the document is stored in; you can download the most recent version here. Intelligentsium 23:51, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, I actually didn't read the whole thing, I just read the word Compadibilty, but I think you're probably right about the whole "Older version" thing. I'll download the new version and see if that helps! Thank you Sir!:) Moptopstyle1 ("I Feel Fine.") (talk) 01:41, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I downloaded the new version of Adobe, but it still will not open the form I want. It opens Adobe, but the form is not displayed? Now what? Moptopstyle1 ("I Feel Fine.") (talk) 04:28, 12 April 2010 (UTC)