Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 March 20

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.

March 20

In Windows, can you indefinitely suspend/awake/suspend/... without rebooting?

I suppose Windows updates will forcibly make you reboot. And some programs could need a reboot after installation. And so it's also the case with a frozen system. But excluding such issues, could we suspend-awake-suspend-... as many times as we wish, or is there some issue creeping into the system by doing this? --Scicurious (talk) 00:56, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Memory leaks, or, more broadly, resources which are allocated but never released, until the resources are all in use. StuRat (talk) 01:49, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Theoretically, yes. Realistically, eventually your system performance will degrade to the point of unusability due to memory leaks and other bugs, as well as other issues like memory fragmentation. This is generally true for any commodity software, not just Windows. And of course there are the security risks from continuing to use an unpatched system. Embedded systems are often designed to run for years or more without restarting, which imposes a lot of constraints on the design of the systems. For instance see the MISRA C standards for software in automobiles, which among other things require use of only global variables to prevent stack overflow. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 01:52, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

I've had this machine running for months without a restart in the past, but I agree with the above replies. Indefinitely is a long time! Dbfirs 16:26, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

I think you'll enjoy reading our article uptime. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:18, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Theoretically you should be able to do it. I keep my Mac laptop running for months and (if I'm lucky) years at a time, in exactly this way. I use it at home in the morning, and on the train to work, and on the bus for the last mile to work, and at work, and on the bus and train home, and at home in the evening, putting it to sleep between each stretch, so it typically gets put to sleep and woken up at least seven times a day, for months and months on end.

AFAIK Windows should be more or less the same. (Now, of course, in practice, between (a) major software upgrades and (b) occasional bugs/crashes, on a consumer-grade system you're usually not going to achieve uptimes measured in years, whether on Mac, Windows, or Linux. But of course "real", server-grade computers do this routinely.) —Steve Summit (talk) 14:27, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

You can disable automatic rebooting after installing Windows updates in the Windows Registry. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 18:23, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Or from the Control Panel. But the problem is you need to reboot for many updates to be installed. This is because of the design choices embedded in Windows. System files can't be modified while in use (this is informative). Turning off automatic rebooting doesn't change that (and Windows will still bug you to reboot, because the updates aren't installed until you do). Not installing security updates is a Bad Idea. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 20:31, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Using downloaded package in Eclipse

Hello,

I've downloaded a jar file containing a Java package. when I try to import this package in an existing project in Eclipse ("import package_name"), Eclipse doesn't recognize the package name. How do I specify the package's location so Eclipse will recognize it? Thanks 212.179.21.194 (talk) 07:06, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Maybe this helps. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 21:56, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Video calling on ipad

Is there a way I can do video calling directly through my iPad browser without having to download a separate app? Also,aside from that,I want to ask a question at the humanities desk, but I can't edit either it nor the talkpage— Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.175.112.132 (talk) 07:55, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

I think FaceTime is preinstalled. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 14:12, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

But facetime works seperately from the browser. I want to be able to do video chatting directly through my browser, the same way as with a computer. On a computer, I can just simply do online video chatting through the web browser without having to download seperate software. I just plug in my webcam. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.175.112.132 (talk) 15:05, 20 March 2016 (UTC) To clarify, I want to do video calling through sites like chat roulette67.175.112.132 (talk) 15:10, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Try web.skype.com. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 15:57, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

If you're referring to Chatroulette the premise of your question seems to be incorrect. Chatroulette uses Flash on the desktop so if your browser does not natively include Flash you will need to download seperate software. Even where Flash comes with the browser, it's still basically seperate software. Flash is dead on the mobile and was never in the iPad and even where it did exist on Android didn't AFAIK support webcams so it's not a helpful solution for such mobile devies. Nil Einne (talk) 13:09, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

BTW, as shown with Skype, there are various ways this could be implemented in browsers without Flash, new APIs to allow access to the mic and webcam [1] as well as stuff like WebRTC. However since much of the mobile world is still very app-centric, it's not suprising many have yet bothered to replace their old Flash webcam stuff with more modern alternatives. (Although I'm not sure if chatroullete has an app.) There are sites which claim to not need Flash [2] [3]. Nil Einne (talk) 13:18, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Raj Bansal

Name  : Raj Bansal <private info removed> — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rajbansal1999 (talk • contribs) 10:01, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Raj, hi. You can put this information on your user page (here), but please see WP:NOTCV. If you have any questions about using Wikipedia, you can ask them at the Help Desk. Tevildo (talk) 10:35, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

I have removed the extraneous info from this page. Note that because of the way wikipedia works, it's quite problematic to permanently remove such info once it's been a page with after a lot of edits and also whatever we do it can easily end up on other pages which we have no control over. Also the reference desk including archives is indexed unlike userpages. If you really want to post the info on your userpage, probably no one is going to stop you although I suggest you consider the implications of posting personal info for anyone to find now and possibly far in the future, but the reference desk isn't a place to post it. Nil Einne (talk) 14:24, 22 March 2016 (UTC)