Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 November 12

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November 12

Internet History on Firefox on a Mac

How do I stop my Mac from deleting my internet history on Firefox whenever I shut it down? It does it automatically, and I can't figure out how to stop it doing that. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 06:24, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Preferences → Privacy → Clear history when Firefox closes. Good luck; I have it set to clear cookies on closing, but it no longer consistently does that. —Tamfang (talk) 09:07, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

LastPass

I use the LastPass password manager. Since a few days ago, I've been unable to access the site; it times out. Then I read about their security breach from last June. Is there anything I can do to gain access to the site now? Halcatalyst (talk) 07:05, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

I have been using it without interruption for a long time, including the last few days. The site and service are not down. 209.149.114.132 (talk) 13:58, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the remark.It may be because I'm currently in Europe? It's hard to imagine why that would matter? Halcatalyst (talk) 14:08, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Chrome tells me this page is not available. Halcatalyst (talk) 14:13, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Under such circumstances, I strongly recommend: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com - if a site is not responding, go there and type in the URL you're trying to reach. It'll let you know if the server it's running on can access the site - which will give you some confidence as to whether the site you're trying to reach is having problems (so nobody can reach it) - or whether the problem is at your end and other people are not having problems. SteveBaker (talk) 14:26, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

It IS just me.

Though I get the error message "An error occurred while logging into LastPass. Please check your Internet connection," I can get other sites. Just out of curiosity, I wonder, how does this sort of thing happen? Halcatalyst (talk) 18:23, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Broken i5 PC, cheap fix options

My PC is broken. It's a few years old, and I'm trying to work out the very cheapest way of getting it working. I am on a VERY limited budget at the moment.

The CPU is an Intel core i5 2500k 'Sandy Bridge'. Motherboard is Asus P8P67LE.

Memory 4 x 2b (total 8Gb) DDR3 PC3-10666.

Graphics Radeon HD 6850 1024Mb.

It has a couple of 1Tb SATA drives, a Blu-ray thing, a 500W PSU.

The motherboard is definitely broken. The CPU may be faulty. I think the graphics card, RAM, and everything else is fine. Reason: The PC had started shutting down unexpectedly; in removing the CPU to clean the fans out, the socket was damaged. Bent pins on the motherboard.

I'm trying to work out a cheapo-fix, but am confused about all the sockets and compatibilities etc.

My own research/googling indicates the CPU is 'socket 1155' (right?), and I see there are quite cheap motherboards avaiable with that (about 40 UK pounds) , although some of the cheaper ones only support 2 DDR memory instead of 4. But then I guess DDR memory is pretty cheap now, so maybe the RAM doesn't matter (if I just use 2 of them, or just buy 2x8 or something later)

I think those boards would support that graphics card?

If one of those pretty cheap motherboards can take the CPU and RAM (or half the RAM, and more is also cheap), and - importantly - that graphics card, then that might be my best option.

Or is it so unlikely to be a successful 'fix' that I'd be better putting that money toward a more modern motherboard+processor+RAM combo? I can't afford much more - maybe I can manage £200.

Is that Radeon Graphics card kinda OK-ish?

I do realise that the entire system is now about 5 years old, so obsolete/a dinosaur, but I can't afford a complete new system right now.

I've done my best to research this myself, but there's so many permutations that it's confusing - so I'd really appreciate experts saying e.g. 'yeah, get a new mb for 40 quid and try it...if the CPU is broken you can get those too for not too much more' or 'don't even bother, just get a new xxx', or that type of thing.

It's suprising to me that I could get a brand new laptop for not much more than the cost of a board+processor, but it seems that's the way things are now. But I'd still rather have a desktop system. And I feel like I want to make use of the hard drives, case, power supply and probably the graphics card for a bit longer. If this is a silly idea, please tell me!

Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.152.145.136 (talk) 15:46, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

The problem you described (shutting down randomly) can be the fault of several things in your computer. Anything from unseated RAM, to bad RAM, to a faulty PSU, to overheating. Unfortunately, the motherboard is actually broken, so it's difficult to diagnose the health of the other parts. Old computers sometimes suffer from replace-everything syndrome, where replacing one or two parts precipitates poor performance or failure of the other parts in an avalanche of replacements until you suddenly end up with a basically brand new computer and less $700 in your wallet.

I'd say your best bet is to grab a new motherboard with enough of a feature set to support your things. It's likely that if you're running windows that you'll have to strip out your old drivers & replace them, but that's (hopefully) easy enough.

If you have the extra cash, I would think about upgrading the processor up to the Haswell series (4xxx) and grab an LGA 1150 motherboard. It'll at least keep part of your hardware up with the times, and then you'd have a little more breathing room for the future.

As for the graphics card, this might help with your decision. I know that 1GB of VRAM is barely adequate anymore, so you might consider upgrading that if you're planning on playing the newest stuff at the highest detail levels. Though, if this machine isn't primarily for gaming, then it's fine. FrameDrag (talk) 16:25, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Minimum cost , find a used machine, preferably in the dumpster/ashbin. Lots of people upgrade. Check classified ads. Swap parts between machines till you get working system. GangofOne (talk) 01:48, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Your machine is not as obsolete as your think. A SandyBridge CPU from 2011, 8 Gb of RAM and 1 TB hard drive – it is actually pretty good and can run the vast majority of applications! Did you attempt to straighten the pins? Ruslik_Zero 20:12, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

You can check the PSU voltages fairly easily. The drives are unlikely to be the problem. If you get a cheap mobo and CPU you could come in under £100 I guess (CPUs on ebay can be a good buy) - if you don't need the CPU so much the better. You can then try the RAM in pairs.

I echo Ruslik0 - it's a nice machine. And GangofOne - free is good. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:49, 17 November 2015 (UTC).

Videos and Music app don't work in Windows 8.1

Whenever I open videos app or music app, the start screen is seen automatically. I am using Windows 8.1 . It used to work but suddenly it stopped and started displaying start screen. When I drag the left side, it show Videos/Music working. But it doesn't load. How to solve this issue? Thanks in advance. AmRit GhiMire "Ranjit" 16:06, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Moreover none of fullscreen app are not running. AmRit GhiMire "Ranjit" 11:41, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

base64-encoding every email?

I've noticed that more and more mail services are sending every email over the wire in Base64 encoding, whether it needs it or not. Anybody know why? It seems to me that good old quoted-printable encoding is still perfectly fine for most plain-text and HTML parts, and it leaves the on-the-wire representation human-readable (and it's more efficient, to boot). --Steve Summit (talk) 22:04, 12 November 2015 (UTC) [edited 23:56, 12 November 2015 (UTC)]

Well for one, in this day and age, leaving email as 'human readable' on the wire is actually a feature that is generally not desired. Vespine (talk) 23:01, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Baseless speculation: rather than scanning the document to figure out which encoding is more compact it's easier to just pick one, and quoted-printable is 125% bigger than base64 in the worst case while base64 is only 33% bigger than quoted-printable in the worst case, and quoted-printable is only smaller if >5/6 of the bytes don't need quoting, which probably isn't true of Chinese emails even with lots of HTML tags. -- BenRG (talk) 23:41, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Steve said "whether it needs it or not", but I think the main change is that simply that one or another form of encoding is being needed more often, because fewer messages (even in English) are limited to the ASCII characters. In particular, some widely used software, seeing UTF-8 as preferable to ASCII, is rendering apostrophes as ’ instead of ', and similarly with quotation marks. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 03:46, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

The efficiency argument is weakened when one considers how much is really saved or cost by the text encoding scheme. The text portion of almost all emails is pretty small; if you have a large email, it's overwhelmingly likely that it's large because it has large binary attachments. So even halving or doubling the size used to represent the text portion won't really make most people's email traffic, or email storage, significantly larger or smaller. We can considered the inverse case: if emails had always been specified to only be encoded in chunks of base64, and someone proposed (today) to add additional support so that text chunks could be encoded as quoted-printable - I think such a proposed would be dismissed pretty promptly as adding complexity without enough gain. In any case, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP all support a TLS-1 layer, and TLS-1 can (and hopefully does) negotiate a pre-encryption DEFLATE step, which mitigates the base64 bloat some. Everyone's using encrypted email transmission, right? right? right... -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 21:32, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

TLS compression is a security liability because the compression ratio can leak information. See e.g. the CRIME attack. Because of this, Google's SSL library doesn't support compression, and neither does draft TLS 1.3. But I think it's true that textual email is a drop in the bucket regardless. -- BenRG (talk) 22:40, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Wow. I remember hearing about CRIME when it came out, but had never read of the details. That is... an awesome exploit (if I can be forgiven for describing an exploit as "awesome"). But it's even sneakier than the old page-fault password attacks, which were themselves pretty darn awesome in their day.

(Note, by the way, that I confined the mention of efficiency in my original question to a parenthetical, because it is indeed a marginal concern at best.) --Steve Summit (talk) 23:01, 13 November 2015 (UTC)