Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 December 26

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December 26

If there's only one cursor, what's the other thing?

Cursor (computers) tells us:

In computing, a cursor is an indicator used to show the position on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input from a text input or pointing device.

From then on, there doesn't seem to be a suggestion that there can be more than one cursor at a time, or that something often called a cursor is more properly called something else.

In order to type in this box, I click the mouse cursor somewhere within it, and type. As I type, as long as I neither move the mouse nor move backward to edit what I'm writing, the mouse cursor stays where I put it, while a text cursor (?) lies to the immediate right of what I'm typing. (If I were instead typing Arabic, then I suppose to the immediate left.) Precisely what I see depends on the particular browser; but in my experience, the former is an elaborated but non-winking vertical line whereas the latter is a winking and longer version of "|".

Do I (and probably you) have two cursors at one time, or one cursor and one something else, or what? (If an article covers this, please direct me to it.) Thanks, Espresso.powered (talk) 04:30, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Sure, you can have many cursors. Your user-interface manages focus, so there's usually only one "active" cursor at any time; but that's an implementation detail of the interface. In principle, you can have an n-to-m mapping of human input devices to cursors. At least a few games use multiple cursors. Even the text editor, vim, can use an abstraced concept of the cursor for some advanced text operations, like navigating and editing multiple buffers. Nimur (talk) 05:08, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

I haven't used vim (or its ancient rival), but I see what you mean, yes. Thank you. Actually I'm interested in the position of the winking cursor in my example. Would it be called the "text insertion point"? Whatever it's called, now and again it spontaneously jumps to where it shouldn't be--though that's a matter for another thread (if it's a "reference desk" question at all, and I doubt that it is). Espresso.powered (talk) 05:35, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

In my experience, I've heard it being called a "cursor" or a "caret". See Cursor (computers) for details. →Σσς. (Sigma) 06:17, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. Espresso.powered (talk) 07:27, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Also note that the thing that follows the mouse movements on the screen is called the pointer. StuRat (talk) 12:41, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

There is a cursor showing where mouse clicks will go, and a different cursor showing where typed text will go. In BiDi editing there are sometimes two text cursors in situations where added LTR and RTL text would appear in different places. -- BenRG (talk) 04:31, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

MS Office partial load on start

I'm rather unfamiliar with Windows and completely unfamiliar with MS Office. But I'm working in an institution that has a lot of computers on which both are installed. (I usually manage to use some alternative.) And I have a shared, indirect responsibility for them.

After the power button has been pressed so that they are turned on (from off, not from hibernation), these (slightly ageing) computers take as long as four minutes (yawn) to get to a usable state (in Windows 7) . This may be in part because of an overstuffed registry. (Very many programs are installed: at least four web browsers, etc.) It's certainly in part because of "antivirus" software and some other paranoia-assuaging program provided by the hardware maker. However, they also load up some module of MS Office (2010, I think) during start-up, and this must surely be a factor. It's true that the majority of users intend to use some ingredient of MS Office; however, some don't. Googling for info on this takes me to a lot of pages about obsolete versions of MS Office, pages about how to get the whole of MS Office to load on start-up (which doesn't happen), and other irrelevance. The people directly responsible for setting up the computers this way seem to know what they're doing, but it still strikes me as odd. Unfortunately I can't play with one of these computers myself; I can only ask others to do this. (I'm free to do whatever I want with my own, non-Windows computer, and then to have it use the LAN. So I shouldn't complain.) Is this partial load on Windows start-up necessary for recent versions of MS Office? If not, is it nevertheless desirable? (E.g. does this part of the load process take less time as a final stage of start-up than it would at a later time?) Espresso.powered (talk) 07:27, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

As to whether it's desirable, it might be. Here's one scenario:

You come in each day, hit the boot button, then go get your cup of tea/coffee, and say good morning to your coworkers, etc. When you finish with this routine, the boot is complete. You don't need to reboot again for the rest of the day. In this setup, you might as well get as much done during the boot as possible, so you don't have to wait for things to load later, say when somebody calls and asks for info in a MS Word document.

On the other hand, if you need to reboot several times a day, or rarely use MS Office, then it is a waste of time to load any part of it at boot time. Unfortunately, the systems guys who set up how a PC will boot probably have no idea how that particular employee will use it, so it's not likely to be optimized for them. StuRat (talk) 12:47, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Older versions of MS Office used to come with a piece of software that was installed to run at boot time. Unless you were careful to skip that during the initial install, you got it by default and all it did was present a few document templates for you. Pretty useless in a corporate environment in my opinion; especially as all corporates I have worked at have their own templates for the company's style. Unfortunately, too many corporate IT departments simply stick in the media and hit default install, or do the equivalent when building their standard PC image. Astronaut (talk) 21:56, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

I want to Have My Own Bot

I Want to Have my Bot to run AWB (auto wiki browser) automatically. Just want to know that what should i do first. I had created an account named User:ShitiBot , what's next ?--Shiti (talk) 18:38, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

WP:BOT have a navigation-box on top that seems to be linking to most (if not all) relevant pages. WegianWarrior (talk) 18:43, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

I had already read those pages, and I don't think those actually helpful. Thats why i'd asked here. I just want to know what should i do first and then what ? (just step by step) --Shiti (talk) 18:56, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

It has been a long time since I was in the mainspace but I believe what is being asked here is how to automate an existing "assisted editing" tool to run on its own. It is my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that these tools are specifically designed to require user input for actions to prevent them from making dozens of mistake edits. Thus, making a "bot" to run it automatically would mean bypassing user input controls and essentially just be a macro clicking "yes/confirm" to everything, even edits which may be nonconstructive since it won't know which ones are good or bad (that is the point of forcing a consciousness to verify the edits). This will no doubt result in the "bot" being banned pretty quickly, and it will certainly not be approved by the Bot Approvals Group. In regards to actually creating this bot/macro, generally the first thing to do would be to learn a programming language in which to write it. Wikipedia bots are often written in PHP and Python, however something like AutoIt would probably be more suitable for the task you describe. Just be sure your bot conforms to Wikipedias bot policy before running it anywhere but the sandbox! 82.44.76.14 (talk) 21:08, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks "Mr. Sandbox" for responding. I do respect wikipedia and its policies. I'm not gonna make any non-sense edit here. I will try it on test-wiki first. Even i'm not going to use it on English Wikipedia. Well even i want to use this bot for interwiki link correction on my wikipedia. Just want to know the procedures. --Shiti (talk) 08:38, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

You should note this is discussed at WP:AWB. Most people are required to run AWB with human-interaction save for some monotonous and well defined tasks. AWB's general changes are broad enough that they require a human to make some decisions about them which is why AWB fully-automated access is treated as is all BOT access. Shadowjams (talk) 17:39, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Please close the discussion. And thanks.--Shiti (talk) 14:25, 28 December 2013 (UTC)