Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 August 22

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August 22

Palm Centro

I've been thinking about buying a Palm Centro to replace my current phone. I was wondering if I install a Palm OS application, will it access the internet through the phone if I go with an unlimited internet plan? I'd like to install a telnet/ssh app to remotely log into my ubuntu machine. I've tried googling but no luck. Thanks!

96.236.7.246 (talk) 00:28, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the Palm OS apps that run on Centro will make use of your phone's data connection to connect to the Internet if the application uses it. Search for Palm OS SSH and you should find some apps that do this. ——Mitaphane _{Contribs | Talk} 04:56, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Windows Xp Relevancy

I have SQL2005 &2008 now running on SP3 but having SP2 also having NET frameworks 2.0,3.0,and 3.5.Which i will use and which to remove but still will perform at its peak? Ty. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Leocancy (talk • contribs) 01:19, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Google

Why does Google have duplicates of hits with things like brackets and punctation marks missing? 124.181.254.143 (talk) 01:36, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Can you give an example? Algebraist 01:37, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Google ignores punctuation, see [1]. Not sure if that's relevant without an example. iames (talk) 22:14, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

IRC

What do I have to do before I can use IRC? 124.181.254.143 (talk) 01:36, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Get an IRC client. Algebraist 01:38, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

OpenOffice.org

Where can I find an easy-to-understand answer to this question?

"As a complete techno-dunce, will I be letting myself in for problems I don't understand/anticipate by taking advantage of the Java offer to free-download OpenOffice.org?????"

I've already noticed that when I've twice previously hit the button to commence downloading, it was doing so verrrrry slooowly which gave me plenty of time to re-visit my misgivings and change my mind and cancel.

I also don't know how to find out how much of my monthly usage it will take to download, (currently 400mb, dropping to 256 from 25/8 - see, I really don't use my computer much!).

I'm a firm believer in the adage "there's no such thing as a free lunch", so already feel negatively about it; on the other hand, I don't have WP on my computer and feel it would come in handy - one day - probably. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikurious (talk • contribs) 03:58, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

When it comes to Open source (please read it) you DO get a free lunch. If you do not have Microsoft Office and do not plan to pay for it I recommend Open Office. --mboverload@ 04:46, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Open Office is quite a well-known and well-respected software; it will not affect other programs and I too would recommend it. As for bandwidth, the Windows installation file is 127 MB, a significant portion of 400 MB.

As for having a free lunch, the open source Apache HTTP Server is used by almost half of all servers (see http://news.netcraft.com/). There's even an entire operating system offered for free. --Bowlhover (talk) 10:11, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Not to mention Wikipedia, which is of course one gigantic free lunch. 83.252.191.103 (talk) 11:17, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

If you're worried about the size of the download, there are a number of distributors listed here who will send you a CD-ROM copy for a small fee to cover costs and postage. the wub "?!" 12:20, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

The closest thing to having to pay for your lunch with open source is that often the interfaces are poorly developed, the installations can require arcane understandings, and the bugs can be rampant. I have often spent about as much money on open source software with my time (calculated by my hourly wage) as I would have in just buying something that worked right the first time. That being said, a small select group of said projects have good reputations for getting around all that bad stuff, and OpenOffice.org is one of them. Not every part of it works that well—last time I checked, its spreadsheet graphing and chart capabilities produced abominations, and Base seems to operate half-heartedly at best, but if you only plan to use it as a Microsoft Word replacement, it's no worse than Microsoft Word. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 13:43, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Downloading OpenOffice will require about 200MB of your monthly bandwidth if that is an issue to you. Otherwise the software really is provided completely for free with no strings attached.

What you've got a hold of here is Open Source software. Open Source software is generally community-built software, but the "community" in question often includes corporations, that for one reason or another would rather contribute to the community instead of attempt to sell to it.

In this case, the software is primarily developed by Sun Microsystems (creators of Java). Their motivation for this altruism is almost certainly to provide a viable alternative to MS Office. Microsoft Office does not work on Unix computers and this is a serious problem for companies who sell unix computers like Sun Microsystems does. This is their way of making the world understand that you don't need Microsoft to do word processing.

I use OpenOffice on my machine at home, and often bring stuff back and forth to work where I use Microsoft Office. I'm perfectly happy with both products and I'm glad I didn't have to pay big bucks for a word processor.

However, I do have to mention the big downside to using open source software : No telephone tech support. (There is some online support here.) APL (talk) 17:50, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

OpenSource software really is given away free and without any catches. It's a true free lunch. It's actually even better than a free lunch - it's free lunch with the recipe for the lunch given away free too! More even than that - you can give copies of your free lunch (and it's recipe) away to your friends and nobody will mind in the slightest! If you were a computer programmer you could look inside the software and change any bits you didn't like. There are lots of other OpenSource programs you might find useful. Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, Thunderbird instead of Outlook, GIMP instead of Photoshop, etc. You could even replace the entire Windows operating system with Linux if you wanted to. I'm writing this on a laptop that originally had WindowsXP on it - now it runs Linux and I'm writing this in Firefox. It's been 10 years since I last bought a piece of PC software - and every program I run is legal...no piracy in this house! SteveBaker (talk) 04:23, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

If you're worried about bandwidth, you could ask someone to download it and put in on a cd for you. Open source software (ie free software) is quite common: the computers which run Wikipedia use mostly or only open source software; and one in five people use Firefox, the open source alternative to Internet Explorer. --h2g2bob (talk) 13:42, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

OpenOffice is great when you have to submit documents in MS Word format, and don't want to pay hundreds for a copy of MS Office. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 02:46, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Upload speed limiter

Does limiting your upload speed affect the download speed while downloading torrents? I use Azureus Vuze and my bandwith sucks so the download speed is usually crap but the upload speed is always high. I limit the upload speed to 20 kbps and I'm not sure if I'mm limiting my download speed as well. Any advice? --59.96.205.173 (talk) 08:13, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I think your download speed also depends on the supply and demand of the segment of the data you are looking for. I don't understand what you mean when you say "the download speed is usually crap but the upload speed is always high" because that seems unlikely unless you have too few seeders with a decent connection. Is it just on a few torrents or is it with every torrent? If it is just a few torrents, the best thing to do would be to wait for the seeders to come back. Kushal (talk) 10:40, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you are actually correct! Maxing out your upload speed will (sometimes severely) limit your download speed. Bittorrent (like pretty much everything else on the internet) uses the TCP protocol to transfer information. The TCP protocol is designed to be able to deal with things like dropped packets or packets that come in the wrong order. One of the ways it does this is that it sends so-called acknowledgement packets back to someone who sends you stuff. These packets basically just say "Hey, just so you know, I recieved packets X through Y". If a sender doesn't get these packets, it assumes that you haven't recieved the data yet and waits until it does get an acknowledgement packet (I think it even resends packets after a period of time, but I'm not sure).

When you completely max out your upload speed, it becomes much, much more likely that the acknowledgement packets are lost because of all the other traffic clogging up the tubes. As such, the people that send you information think that you are recieving data much slower than you actually are, and they will wait with sending you more. If you limit your upload speed (there's no optimal amount, but limit it to about 80% of your max speed works fine) you can sometimes see dramatic improvements in speed. I mean, dramatic, I tested this once, and one of my torrents jumped from ~200 kb/s to around 1 mb/s in seconds.

This is no magic solution for aneamic bittorrent speeds though. If you're on a torrent with few seeds and a small swarm, you're not gonna get good speeds. But if you are on one with lots and lots of seeders and still can't get near your capacity, this may very well be the reason. 83.252.191.103 (talk) 11:11, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Another thing: don't limit your upload speed too much, because bittorrent works on reciprocity: send people stuff and they will send stuff to you. With 20 kb/s upload, you probably wont get much action (unless you're on a private tracker, which is a whole 'nother thing). As I said, 80% of your maximum upload speed is a good rule of thumb. 83.252.191.103 (talk) 11:16, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

For many cable-modems 80% of their upload works out to 24 kb/s. Not a big improvement. APL (talk) 17:22, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

On my current (cable) connection, 80% is about 100 kb/s, but point taken :) 83.252.191.103 (talk) 18:19, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

GB

1 GB = 1024 MB. Is it right?--202.168.229.243 (talk) 11:44, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

It depends who is talking - see Gigabyte for (un)clarification. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 11:46, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Generally though, yes, 1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes (and 1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes and 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes). Really the only people that don't follow this convention is advertisers. But if you check how big a file is on your computer, or how much space you have left or anything like that, it's always 1024 megabytes. However, when people talk about how fast a connection is, they generally use megabits or gigabits, where 1 gigabit = 1000 megabits. This makes everything very confusing, this mixing of bits and bytes and 1000 and 1024. See also binary prefix. 83.252.191.103 (talk) 12:07, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

The only people who do follow that convention are software engineers. Well, and RAM manufacturers. But with RAM it makes some sense, since RAM is actually sold in power-of-2 sizes. For reporting the size of disks and files it makes as much sense as displaying numbers in hexadecimal. People think in decimal, not binary. I've been programming computers for 25 years and I can read this without a crib sheet and even I think in decimal. The hard drive manufacturers are the ones with the right idea. -- BenRG (talk) 14:32, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Here's the way I see it: every measure of file-size on a computer is invariably in binary sizes. Click a file and see the filesize, it'll be in binary. Check how much space you have left on your HDD, it'll be in binary. If you download a file from the internet, it'll be in binary. Every single time! And it makes perfect sense, since that's the way computers think. Example: a 32-bit processor can address precisely memory that can be described using 32 bits. In other words, 2³² bytes, or exactly 4 gigabytes. Since every serious use on a computer itself uses binary prefixes, it's extremely dishonest for a computer company to sell a hard-drive advertising 160 gigabytes, when it's really 149 gigabytes. Suppose you had to make a backup of a bunch of files, and you had 155 GB of them and you figured that a 160 GB drive would be more than enough? Or a 155 GB music collection that you want to put on an iPod? It's deceptive (although not strictly false) advertising, and it's really very unethical 83.252.191.103 (talk) 16:47, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the trick here is that they can claim that the power-of-two units are "only for nerds". That's a debate technique that wins just about any argument ever. APL (talk) 17:20, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

In part because it's true. I mean, I do think the nerds set themselves up for teh fail by using SI prefix in non-standard ways. Look up the term "giga"—in all other contexts it means 10⁹, not 2³⁰.--140.247.240.157 (talk) 20:58, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

We're all aware of the meanings of the "giga" prefix. We don't need to be told to look them up. Most measurements (such as length or weight) do not suggest a way of counting. Disk capacity is an intrinsically power of two measurement. It is silly to measure it in any other way. Measuring binary data in powers-of-ten units is like defining a "dozen eggs" to be twelve and a half eggs. APL (talk) 21:57, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

All I'm saying is that it's irregular use of terminology. The whole point of SI prefixes is they are standards and don't change. You start changing them, because you know better than the metric system, and it's your own dang fault when all sorts of confusing things arise. As for what units one expresses things in, I don't see the problem. You convert or you round. It's not that hard. Y'all are supposed to be smart with numbers, anyway, I heard. ;-) --98.217.8.46 (talk) 13:53, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

In what way is disk capacity intrinsically a power-of-two measurement? Hard drives are sold in sizes like 120 gigabytes and 750 gigabytes. I don't agree that computers think in binary units—it strikes me as meaningless anthropomorphization—but even if I granted that, it wouldn't justify the use of binary units in user interfaces. Computers are better than people at converting between units, and decimal units are better for people, so the computer should do the conversion. That's what computers are for. People do just fine without binary units in cases where there's no tradition of such units. For example, the range of a Java int is −2³¹ to 2³¹−1. Sometimes people say the maximum value is about two billion, or about 2.147 billion. There are no binary prefixes available, and it's fine. We could just as well say that 32-bit processors have a 2³² byte address space, which is about 4.295 billion bytes, i.e. about 4.295 gigabytes. It's easy. -- BenRG (talk) 23:04, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

All you're really saying there is that people don't care about exact numbers, they just need a handy word to refer to them. That works either way. That's no argument for changing the value an established unit of measure. (Besides, the examples you just gave are often stated in 2^[power] notation, just like you just did.)APL (talk) 03:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I always just say 1 GiB = 1024 MiB. That way there's no ambiguity. --71.141.151.155 (talk) 03:11, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

• Why GiB? Why not 1 GB = 1024 MB? The abbreviation of Gigabyte is GB and Gigabit is Gb. So, if I say 1 GB = 1024 MB (Which we frequently use) and 1 Gb = 1000 Mb, will they be wrong? GiB says, it is closely related to Gigabyte.--202.168.229.243 (talk) 17:44, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

You'd be wrong in the sense that no one would know what the heck you were talking about. Don't use a decimal Giga for one unit and a binary Giga for another unit, it's crazy enough without being inconsistent. You're correct that Gb is also confused. Best to say "decimal Gb" or "Gib" so people know what you're using. APL (talk) 18:12, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks APL. Actually, I had an argument with someone. S/He said, 1 GiB = 1024 MiB and 1Gb = 1000Mb. S/He thinks this is correct. On the other hand, S/He assumes 1 GB = 1024 MB is incorrect. So, Is S/He was right in this sense? I found it confusing. I just wanted to get specific answer regarding on this issue.--202.168.229.243 (talk) 18:48, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

In theory, yes. In practice, no. Although the person you're talking about is correct, Gibibyte, mibibyte and other "bi" units are rarely used and the 1000x meaning is usually conveyed only by hard disk manufacturing companies. It is mostly assumed that 1 GB = 1024 MB (also 1 Gbit = 1024 Mbit), although it technically isn't correct. Admiral Norton ^(talk) 18:56, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, that last part isn't necessarily true. When people talk about connection speed ("dude, I have a 10 Mbit connection!") Mbit virtually always means 1 Mbit = 1000 kbit (note: all this is technically incorrect, it should be 1 Mbit/s = 1000 kbit/s, but people don't bother). This is advertising cropping up its ugly head again, since a megabit in the decimal sense is more than a megabit in the binary sense. As I said, way back a few posts ago, all this confusion between bits and bytes and 1024 and 1000 makes everything very confusing. 90.235.4.253 (talk) 01:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Essentially, in some contexts the metric-friendly 1000 units are used, in others the more traditional 1024 units are used. You sort of just have to know. (Networks speeds are usually the 1000 units, but ram or rom is measured in the 1024.) Both are "correct" in the sense that there are standards documents defining them. This is obviously less than ideal. APL (talk) 02:49, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Help with Unicode symbols

What does this symbol look like on your screen? ⅎ To me it looks like this: . Many other symbols look similar, and this only happens on this computer. I am running Windows XP and using Firefox 3. How can I fix it? Mike R (talk) 13:24, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Looks like an upside down F to me, apparently it is one of the Claudian letters. Unfortunately I can't help you on fixing it, these Unicode things have always confused me. I'd also be interested in tips, I have the same problem on Firefox 3 under Ubuntu. the wub "?!" 14:00, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

You're seeing The Unicode BMP Fallback font or something similar. It's intended to help identify code points your system doesn't support. This code point is U+214E; the little glyphs in the box are 2,1,4,E. To get the correct character you need to install a font that supports the language in question. If the language in question is supposed to be English then you have a different problem. Try fiddling with the character encoding (in the View menu). It might have gotten set to UTF-16 somehow. -- BenRG (talk) 14:45, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks for the link to the fallback font thingy. I have no idea how or why that is what I'm seeing. Yes the language is English and I have all the standard fonts that come with Windows.

Here is what the table at Claudian letters looks like to me:

Weird, huh? Here is what the same table looks like in IE7. Note, I have encoding set to Unicode UTF-8 in both browsers.

Thanks for any help you can offer, Mike R (talk) 16:07, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I see the same thing in Firefox and almost the same thing in IE, except that it does show the turned capital F. The fallback code point display is a new feature of Firefox 3 and IE7 has nothing similar. I don't think it's actually using a font because it works even for code points outside the BMP (like 􏿿). The reason I suspected UTF-16 is that 21 and 4E are common ASCII characters (! and N respectively). The sequence "N!" aligned at an even offset in the document would come out as U+214E if the encoding was set to UTF-16LE. Aside from that I have no idea what might be wrong. Are there particular web pages causing this problem? -- BenRG (talk) 17:41, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

embedding Wikipidia?

Is there a wikipidia widget that enables one to embed a wikipidia page on another website and recieve editing updates in real time? Or even to edit the wikipidia page from another website? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.215.186.204 (talk) 14:21, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

No, Veripedia takes content from Wikipedia, verifies, and posts it (not in real time). --Mayfare (talk) 14:44, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, you can... you can use a PHP script to watch the RSS feed from a particular page and use that to keep the page up to date. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 17:56, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

You could presumably do this with a Frame that reloaded periodicaly. (Except when "action=edit" appeared in the url.) APL (talk) 17:08, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

You can use the API - it's quicker and better than using the RSS, which includes the diffs of the last few versions. I'd suggest getting the revision id of the latest version, and then only download if that changed since the last time you downloaded it. There's database dumps too, which you can use to get the current revisions of all pages. --h2g2bob (talk) 12:46, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but if you're running a MediaWiki wiki with $wgEnableScaryTranscluding set to TRUE then you can transclude content from the Wikipedia into your wiki. ——Mitaphane _{Contribs | Talk} 05:01, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Program Similar to Messenger Plus! Live

Hello. Is there a program similar to Messenger Plus! Live where I can bold my name and everyone on my contacts list regardless whether they have the software installed can see it? My contacts who do not have Messenger Plus! Live see my name as scripting. Cheers. --Mayfare (talk) 14:41, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

No, because Windows Live Messenger doesn't support that thing. (And I hope it never will.) --grawity 17:33, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Ubuntu installation problem

I have had the bug described [| here]. There is still no general solution. People try to reformat/repartition its HDD or burn a new CD. I would like to obtain more - even if they are only speculative - possible suggestions/solutions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mr.K. (talk • contribs) 16:03, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

You can try using the Ubuntu alternate CD instead of the LiveCD. Akamad (talk) 09:26, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Page with self made certificate

We have a page in an intranet with a self-made certificate (not recognized by any authority). People accessing the page with Firefox don´t have any problem accepting exceptionally this certificate.

However, IExplorer users are not able to do it and therefore cannot access this page. What should they do to view this page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mr.K. (talk • contribs) 16:10, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Give this a shot — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 16:43, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Java

Hello, I'm a bit confused about what stuff means in Java. How about I tell you what I kinda think and then you tell me how I'm doing? Here goes:

int a = 1;

means create me a variable called a which is of type int (for integer) and assign it the value 1.

SomeThing someThing = new SomeThing();

means create me an object of class SomeThing and also create me a variable called someThing which is of type pointer-to-a-SomeThing and points to the object just created.

SomeThing someOtherThing = someThing;

means create me a variable called someOtherThing which is of type pointer-to-a-SomeThing and points to the very same object that someThing points to. Compiler will check that this is okay.

someThing.GetSomeMember;

means dereference the pointer someThing and then get me the value of the underlying object's GetSomeMember.

Am I right? If I am, it's confusing, no? If I'm not, I'm now even more confused.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.164.115 (talk) 17:17, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

You're right. Yes, it is somewhat confusing. Java variables can hold references to objects or values of special types like int, but not values of object type or references to special types. This is different from C and C++, where a variable can hold either a value or a reference of any type, and the pointer syntax (* and ->) is used to distinguish the reference case. The C++ equivalent of the above would be

     int a = 1;
     SomeThing* someThing = new SomeThing();
     SomeThing* someOtherThing = someThing;
     someThing->GetSomeMember;

Java doesn't need the pointer syntax because there's only one possibility for each type. It doesn't need new either for the same reason, but for some reason they left it in. -- BenRG (talk) 18:21, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

You have to use a new because in theory Java allows you to have a method with the same name as a class, although that is bad naming style. --71.141.151.155 (talk) 03:14, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Programmatically look up driver details

Using the windows api (enumservicestatus, queryserviceconfig, queryserviceconfig2), I have obtained a moderate amount of information about the drivers that are running. For example, I know that "nvlddmkm" is currently running, is started manually, uses "nvlddmkm.sys", and is part of the "Video" load order group. I can go a step further and look up the file properties of nvlddmkm.sys programmatically. On the other hand, Opening it in Vista's Device Manager (or in an older OS's device manager), I can also find out what driver files it uses and can look up a huge number of properties like, "Device class," and "Driver Node Strong Name." How can I look at this information using a C++ or VB program? I want my program to work properly on XP, too. THus, Function Discovery is not the answer. Thanks.--72.85.235.162 (talk) 18:08, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

What version of Explorer do I have? What is my speed?

I just got my own computer but I haven't figured out where things are.

I often see references to different versions of Explorer on the Help desk and I was wondering where I click when I am on the computer to see what I have.

Also, I asked the man who installed my Internet whether I had the slowest version because I don't want to pay any more than I have to. But it sure seems fast. I asked when I paid my phone bill yesterday (no bill yet for the Internet) and was told their records show I have 128K. I was told that is not Broadband, and yet the sheet I go in the mail said I am paying for Broadband if I pay this price, and the paperwork I was given my the man who installed the Internet says it's Broadband. I looked around at stuff I could click on and look on my computer and the only speed I found was 100MB. That must refer to something different. Where do I find the actual speed?Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:08, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Explorer is different from Internet Explorer. IE however, is not THE internet, it is a browser which lets you see the information on the internet. The latest version of Internet Explorer is Version 7 which you can download from the Microsoft Website. You have many choices for an internet browser, you can choose to download Mozilla Firefox from the Mozilla website or Opera among other brands of software. Most if not all browsers are free to download. Your ISP provides the service of connecting you to the internet. You can easily check your download and upload speed at a special website which will test those speeds and give you a report. One such site would be Speedtest.net. Coolotter88 (talk) 19:31, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I have Internet Explorer, but where do I click on the computer to find out what I do have? I didn't find anything on the box the computer came in.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:46, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

In Internet Explorer, click "Help" (or hit Alt-H), then click "About Internet Explorer". -- Coneslayer (talk) 19:50, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:02, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

The 100MB bit means that your computer is wired to be able to take connections up to 100MB/s, I believe. That's just a maximum or something along those lines—it's not necessarily what you're getting. As far as I know the only way to find out exactly what speeds the ISP is giving to you is by doing a "speed test" (google "speed test internet" and you'll find a bunch of them). Even those can be somewhat unreliable (they measure how fast data is sent between you and the speed test site, which can depend on where in the world you and the site are and not be the same speed as other sites). --140.247.240.157 (talk) 20:53, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

You should call your Internet Service Provider again and express your concerns. Who is your ISP anyway? Some services (such as Roadrunner) only provide high-speed connections. If you get Internet from your cable provider, you've probably got high speed. Plus, as far as I know, the only ways to get an Internet connection is dial-up, DSL, and cable. If you want slow and relatively cheap, you have to go with dial-up.--El aprendelenguas (talk) 21:40, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

The 100Mb number is merely the capacity of the pipe between your computer and your router/modem. The pipe between your router/modem and the interwebz is a lot smaller. And as you can see from the pipe analogy, the huge pipe capacity between your computer and your router/modem has almost no effect on the total amount of water (data) you can push through the pipe. You can check your actual internet speed using sites like [2]. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:51, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Reading/editing PC game files

If I owned a game (DinoPark Tycoon) for the PC, and the "saved games" files were in some crazy file type (xxx.000, xxx.001...), how could I read/edit these game files? When I open it in Notepad, its just a bunch of squares with the occasional foreign letter. Is there a software thing that can help me? 75.66.48.112 (talk) 23:09, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

First, you need a hex editor. Second, you need a basic understanding of what bytes are and how numbers are stored in them. Take a look at Hexadecimal and Endianness#Examples of storing the value 0x0A0B0C0D in memory. Then, if you want to change something that has an obvious representation as a number (like an amount of money), you can try searching for the byte sequence corresponding to that number and changing it. This simple trick works in many cases, but not always. Saved games are sometimes checksummed to prevent changes; unless you know where the checksum is and how to recompute it, the modified save file won't work. Save files may even be encrypted. In those cases you generally have to disassemble the game executable to reverse engineer the file format, which requires more sophisticated tools and a lot of arcane computer knowledge. Your best bet is to search the web for a ready-made save game editor from someone who knows how to do this stuff. -- BenRG (talk) 01:36, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

It might be encrypted or compressed - but it may just be some kind of ad'hoc binary format. If that's true then you may be able to figure some stuff out. If you save a game - copy the save file someplace - then continue playing the game from that exact point just long enough to make one teeny-tiny change - like maybe you score just one point or earn a dollar - then, immediately save the game again. Using a hex editor you can make a text dump of each of the files. Now you can compare the two files. If the two files are TOTALLY different - then the odds are good that it's encrypted or compressed and you really have very little chance of figuring it out. If a number in the middle of the file and another at the end of the file are different - but the rest is the same - then it's probably checksummed. It's possible to figure out how the checksum works - but it would be tough to do if you don't have programming skills. If you get lucky, just one number in the file changed. Now you know something - you know that scoring a point changes that number - so that's probably where the score is saved. Try changing that number in your hex editor and reload the save file - if you're lucky, it'll load and the only thing that'll be different is your score. If that works you can try other things in the game - one at a time - and gradually figure out how a bunch of things are stored. It's likely to be pretty painstaking detective work though...you've got to really want to do it for some major reason. SteveBaker (talk) 04:05, 23 August 2008 (UTC)