Computing desk
< February 2	<< Jan \| February \| Mar >>	February 4 >

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.

February 3

Keeping all applications

If i were to upgrade to vista home basic is it possible to keep all your applications from XP like the internet, virus software, and games. or should you backup all the files. My computer seems to be secure from losing any data.--Biggie 00:24, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Upgrading, everything SHOULD be kept, and everything is MEANT to work. that does NOT mean it will, and if at all possible, you should back up everything important to you. 24.0.52.44 00:39, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

All right Thank You--Biggie 05:31, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Rule number 1 of protecting data is that hard disks fail. Sooner or later your hard disk WILL fail. So make sure anything you want to keep is backed up. --Gerry Ashton 05:49, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Your use of capital shoulds and nots makes me funnily think of "RFC 2119 - Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels". Go on! -- DLL ^{.. T} 15:44, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hahaha! That's a gem for sure --⁪froth^T 06:25, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The eternal Linux distribution question

I'm planning to reinstall Linux on my laptop. I'd like a nice, painless distribution; one that doesn't require too much fiddling, one that doesn't choke on suspend/standby, one that supports Xen, and one that doesn't cause me to wish to tear my hair out. The desktop is for fiddling, I don't want any inordinate pain on my laptop.

I've recently used Ubuntu the most, and before that Gentoo and Debian (go go Debian distros). However, the latest version of Fedora Core has caught my eye, as it apparently comes with Compiz and a nice GUI for Xen by default. Would Fedora meet my needs, and if so, what should I keep in mind making the switch from using Ubuntu (and other Debianish distros before it)?

I also need EAP-TTLS support, though I assume I'll probably need to install something else for this. Right?

Thanks for any assistance. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 03:56, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If you don't want any trouble installing and you don't want choking, don't use FC. Try Suse if you don't want any pain whatsoever, though it's not the best distro all-around --⁪froth^T 04:18, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hrmm. After more reading and considering, I'm probably going to give Ubuntu another shot. Xen installation [1] looks obnoxious though. I've got a weekend with nothing planned, so it's probably not going to be too bad. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 04:44, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Though the situation with Linux, ACPI (formerly APM!), and notebooks has improved significantly since I first fiddled with *nixes on laptops ten years ago, how well everything works together is going to depend largely on your hardware. ACPI S3 (suspend/resume) is a tricky thing, and quite often will mess something up. You really ought to google a bit on your laptop model and Linux compatibility so you know what to suspect. Intel chipsets usually work well, ATI display adapters often have little issues with DRI and S3 (that is, if you want 2D/3D acceleration, many ATI chips won't get along very well with suspend/resume). Check your 802.11 radio chipset to make sure it's supported. While some distros may make things a little "easier" for an unacquainted user, it all boils down to how well various drivers for your core hardware will play along together. You may have to engage a few tricks to get things to work reasonably, though these days, you can get many laptops working pretty well without having to even mess around with kernel patches. You may be fortunate enough to have a laptop that uses well-supported hardware, but I'm afraid that you usually shouldn't expect a seamless experience complete with all the bells and whistles with *nixes and notebooks. -- mattb @ 2007-02-03T04:53Z

I have a thinkpad (probably the best linux supported laptop) and everything worked out of the box (including standby and "hibernate") except madwifi for some reason wasn't installed or running or something so I had to install the rpm. Also the volume buttons on my computer didn't work until I installed some thinkpad tools module --⁪froth^T 04:57, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It (a Dell M1210) worked well, last time I checked. The issues were namely that Suspend2 took ages and occasionally failed, and that startup/shutdown time was unreasonable. Considering that I'm now less of a laptop idiot and know to just Suspend, it should be okay. The main concerns I have regard the pain in installing Xen and Compiz, as well as various other little packages, and the general ease of use; they're not directly related to laptops except in that I don't want to waste time fiddling with it. Battery life may be an issue though. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 05:02, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Suse comes with xen set up already --⁪froth^T 19:47, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Be careful with ACPI S3. There's a well-known problem with Linux and some ACPI BIOSes in which the system will still use a lot of power when its suspended. I'd check on that. -- mattb @ 2007-02-03T21:54Z

Just my two cents. I used ubuntu 6.06 on my Thinkpad T42. Worked great, I had great battery life and all power management features worked as they should including intel's speedstep. Wireless (I used wpa2) and all the fn buttons worked as well. --Sish 22:54, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Right, I'm on Ubuntu 6.10 now. Power consumption might be slightly higher than Windows (including Windows Vista, surprisingly); using compiz takes quite a lot out of it, so I'm not using it. I'm also using Parallels Workstation rather than Xen, as both Xen and VMWare caused strange stability problems; Parallels has fast direct graphics performance, which is a fair tradeoff. Suspend seems to be having issues with my network chipset though, which is still something I'm trying to fix. I think disabling the hardware switch before suspending the computer works. It's definitely fully asleep when it does work. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 01:54, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

div-tag

Can anyone tell me how you make a div-block the same size of the surrounding table, and how you put a margin of x cm or inches around the text in it? - Mgm|^(talk) 09:08, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think in order to make the DIV block exactly the same size as the surrounding table you will have to set the padding/margin tags of the table to zero, or else set the div padding/margin tags to a negative number to offset the table's margins/padding. As for the margins, does the "margin" tag not do what you want? --24.147.86.187 13:40, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, TABLE should be avoided for simply formatting a page, as the float and clear CSS styles often do a better job. DIV elements are set at 100% width by default, but if it is problematic, then using another TABLE instead of a DIV may fix it. Or just apply the formatting to the TD element with the padding, margin, border styles, etc. See the W3C's specifications for CSS and W3Schools' CSS tutorial for more. --h2g2bob 19:00, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Also, don't forget that the TD may have padding in addition to the DIV having a margin. --h2g2bob 19:01, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Looking for browser plugin!

I want a way to be able to download and locally play videos from YouTube. I tried downloading a few extensions but... they didn't work! Why not? [Mαc Δαvιs] X (How's my driving?) ❖ 12:06, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There are a few Firefox extensions (e.g. [2]) which will download YouTube videos as FLV files. You will then need to find something that plays FLV files (I can use VLC but I have heard of people having trouble with it for this purpose) or converts them into something more manageable (i.e. MOV or AVI or whatever). --24.147.86.187 13:37, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The KMPlayer plays FLV files well. Someoneinmyheadbutit'snotme 18:18, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Any ffmpeg-based ~~audio~~ media player should be able to play flv now, so add MPlayer to the list. Anyway, this is another good opportunity to plug my UnPlug firefox extension again. --h2g2bob 18:45, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In that vein, download mplayer and use mencoder to convert the flv video into xvid h.264 or something and then you can play it in windows media player (if you have the appropriate codec and directshow filter set up) --⁪froth^T 19:49, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Transcoding video results in an incredible loss of quality. I would recommend against it. If you install FFMPEG you can use _any_ player to play .flv videos so long as you go into the FFMPEG video settings and turn on FFMPEG decoding of .flv's. --Sish 22:51, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not in this case, FLV is just a container for H.263 or VP6, so you just replace the FLV container for an AVI container with no loss of quality. I use ffmpeg to do this, but mencoder is the same just with a different front-end. See this guide for a howto. --h2g2bob 02:23, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

crystal ball?

1. Will x86 architecture ever cease to be the dominant (only) architecture used on desktops/PC's etc?

2. Are there any likely candidates to replace it?

3. Or will rolling improvements to the architecture eventually produce something that is totally unrecognisable from the instruction set architecture in commom use today?

4. Is using such an old instruction set architecture such a bad thing? (especially in terms of improvements such as multicore, SMP and whatever else may come along)

All comments appreciated, thanks.87.102.9.55 13:49, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It is already being replaced by the AMD64 ISA, which fixes some of the worst annoyances of the older IA32 architecture. --cesarb 14:21, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Since the inception of protected mode with the introduction of the 80386, the very worst (most challenging to program) features of the 8086 architecture can be ignored: the segmentation model. It required loading a segment register with a new value to address each different 64 K window of the memory space. Protected mode made it possible to load the segment registers once and forget them and have direct access to a 4 GB address space (or more). Alas, there are still nuisances in the current instruction set, like only the ECX/CX/CL register is connected to the LOOP instruction, or that the internal register order is EAX ECX EBX EDX instead of alphabetical (which is only a concern to the most picky aspects of a code generator, and code which inspects the stack after a PUSHA instruction). However, these are easily dealt with and worked around. Converting to a "golden architecture" wouldn't gain enough advantage to be worth the pain of conversion.

What's happening is more like the history of the PDP-11 and VAX: The original VAXs (11/730 and 11/780) could directly execute the much older PDP 11 instructions, even though the architectures were rather far apart. Later models of VAXs dropped the emulation (at least in hardware) as the migration period ended fairly swiftly, probably because the VAX architecture had so much more to offer that developers and users embraced the new—and abandoned the old—as soon as replacement applications were stable and data were migrated. —EncMstr 18:57, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Now more than ever before, ISA is becoming less and less relevant. There are plenty of ISAs that one could call "better" than x86 in principle, but the more abstraction we pile on to hardware, the less that matters. x86 won't die any time in the near future simply because it's difficult to get away with breaking backwards compatibility in the PC world. -- mattb @ 2007-02-03T22:07Z

The next best thing is new IA-32 instructions as introduced by MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, etc --⁪froth^T 09:34, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Those are all examples of SIMD extensions, which don't in themselves really "improve" the ISA from a programmer's point of view. They merely add extra functionality. Some of the qualms one could have against x86 aren't really related to its support of vector math... -- mattb @ 2007-02-04T20:38Z

Computer ethics

I have two questions in InformationTechnology,databases & artificial intelligence 1.please inform me about the ethical concernes about the use of database 2.the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence

Please ask a specific question. If you simply desire information, use a web or Wikipedia search instead.--Redlock 17:29, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They look pretty specific to me.. --⁪froth^T 19:53, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'd tend to disagree. Entire books on similar subjects have been written. -- mattb @ 2007-02-03T22:07Z

For databases it's mainly privacy (spying, misuse of data, etc) and security (identity theft, etc). See the Data Protection Act for the UK's legal protections in this area. For evidence that people get annoyed at databases containing their personal information, just look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its efforts in many areas including the NSA call database. Also check the Schneier on Security blog, as it must have at least something on this issue.

As for AI, there's quite a bit on the artificial intelligence page. While Hollywood worries about the risks to civilisation from AI ("three laws safe"; "Skynet became self-aware"; etc), the economic impact of AI technology allowing for automation of service industry jobs which currently require a human are more concerning the the current time. --h2g2bob 02:20, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what you mean by the "ethical dimensions" of AI. I have not researched the subject, but I can think of a few ethical questions without trying too hard:

If important decisions are entrusted to an intelligent machine, and the machine makes a bad decision with disastrous consequences, who should be responsible for the decision?
If an intelligent machine has an independent will, do we equate it with a person? Should such a machine have rights? If someone destroys such a machine, should the act be treated as murder?
Does an intelligent machine have an identity, like a human being? If so, if someone records the state of the machine, shuts down the hardware, and then reloads the state of the machine onto two different machines to create two independent instances, what happens to the "identity" of the original instance? --71.175.23.226 06:59, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

—

Food for thought... Artificial intelligence is mostly used to discriminate between a series of "Yes-or-No" questions. Can naive software be accused of being racist, sexist ....or otherwise ...err... discriminatory?

That's just a limitation of the current state of technology. Intelligent systems that have commonsense, that can augment its knowledge by unsupervised learning, and that can generate as well as test interesting hypotheses are well within the goals of AI. As technology advances, it is possible that in the future, we can build machines that understand human values, that have values of their own, and that will choose what goals to pursue based on their own values. --71.175.23.226 20:56, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Professional ethics & I.T

please explain to me how an organization's functional department,tasks and management levels for that organization and inform me the information systems and information technology ethical decisions they make

Please ask a specific question. If you simply desire information, use a web or Wikipedia search instead.--Redlock 17:30, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They look pretty specific to me.. --⁪froth^T 19:54, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If wikipedia is the organisation and we are the functional department: Then the information systems and tecnology ethical decisions we make is not to answer your homework questions because that's cheating and you won't learn anything. But if you are not clear about any of your own research, we'll be gald to help. :) Vespine 11:12, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I.T and proffesions

tell me how information technology has been used & applied in the following areas 1.health and medicine 2.commerce and money 3.entertainment and arts

Please ask a specific question. If you simply desire information, use a web or Wikipedia search instead.--Redlock 17:31, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They look pretty specific to me.. --⁪froth^T 19:54, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't mean to be rude but this seems like a homework question.

I am going to give you some hints to point you in a direction but I won't give you a cut and paste answer.

Any time you use a computer to partially or fully automate a task that was once manual, that is essentially IT.

1. electronic patient records

2. Stock exchanges are online, ie online trading

3. The kiosks that print out tickets at movie theaters and online ordering.

While you can cut and paste what i just said, you will definitely get a poor mark if you do. --Sish 22:44, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

1) The movement of medical records from paper to computers allowing for easy movement of them to other doctors/instant sending of them to hospitals. It also helps the insurance industry who can receive repots faster and at cheaper cost.

2) online banking, online share trading, online stores, online commerce is pretty much the biggest change the world has undergone in recent years. IT obviously plays a part with organising the web, faster networkings/servers for improved sites - more advanced, more 'appealing' to the consumer etc. eBay, Amazon are great examples of success stories boo.com is an example of a high profile failure.

3) The raging war of online piracy of entertainment/arts ranging from songs/films to books and copyrighted material. In the legit world IT has allowed for stores like iTunes Music Store to sell hundreds of thousands of tracks in one place, giving consumers a new way to purchase entertainment/music. Indeed Apple has recently launched a new device labelled Apple Tv which will stream your movies from your computer to your tv - perhaps the beginning of the end for DVDs?

I would be amazed beyond belief, however, if somebody who knows how to get onto Wikipedia and post a question does not already know the vast majority of the above. ny156uk 22:52, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You could also mention that the £12 billion that the UK government is spending on the NHS IT programme (See Private Eye, Issue No.1170, pg 10) has definately increased some consultants' pot of "money", but, due to massive delays, has not yet had much success in benefiting "health and medicine"!

SanDisk Player Worst/Best Case Scenario

What's the worst that could happen if I were to reformat the flash drive of my mp3 player? Would it still work, etc..--71.249.19.4 16:47, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The worst that could happen is that a freak overload triggers a chain reaction subnuclear explosion and destroys the universe. :-) The worst that's probable is that the new format would be incompatible in some way with the original format and the mp3 player would refuse to access the drive, though that is fairly unlikely. Why do you ask? Specific models of player and flash drive would help. —EncMstr 18:32, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

THe SanDisk players that I've seen just have a simple FAT16 filesystem. So long as you format it back to the same FAT16, it should work fine. The players usually keep their 'operating system' somewhere else safe, so formatting the storage that is exposed by USB won't do anything bad. Mdwyer 22:40, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be more worried that the best case is deleting all the files on the disk :P --h2g2bob 08:09, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Water Level Indicator That uses a quad analogue switch (CMOS 4066)

Where can i find detailed information(circuit diagrams, layouts, component information etc)on a water level indicator?? The kind i am referring to uses IC 4066 which is basically a CMOS series quad analog switch.Daniel

Do you already have one that you want to service or modify? If so, maybe you should post the make and model # here. Otherwise, why is it a requirement that the design uses a 4066 quad switch IC? (If this is a homework exercise, you should not ask for a complete solution. Tell people where you get stuck and some people may help you.) --71.175.23.226 17:44, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

no u see i have already soldered the circuit and figured out how to make it work.But i need to present a printed project file also and so i require material in the the form of circuit diagrams and other stuff that i can print out.

Please help!!

If you have already built one, then you must have a circuit from which you worked. If you need to prepare a report for a design project, the diagram(s) should reflect the actual circuit built, not just any similar design that you find from another source. If your problem is in capturing your circuit in a printable file, what you need is some sort of diagramming tool. Dia [3] is a free diagramming tool that can also be used to draw simple electronic circuits. A Windows version is also available (see [4]). The tool may not be very advanced but should be good enough for simple diagrams like the kind you're dealing with. You can also use the drawing functions of popular office suites like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. They are rather basic but again should be good enough for drawing simple diagrams. --71.175.23.226 19:02, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks that solves all my circuit diagram and layout problems.But when it comes to actual written material about the quad analog switch, water level indicator etc. i'm having difficulty locating anything.Links maybe??

You can find datasheets for common ICs on the web quite easily. Try search for it using

4066 quad switch datasheet

as the query terms. In your case, the IC is/was manufactured by multiple manufacturers. You can find the datasheet published by a particular manufacturer by including the manufacturer's name in your query. Different manufacturers' datasheets may include different application examples. --71.175.23.226 06:32, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

c++ in asp

how do i embed a C++ executable(.exe) file in my asp page?

59.180.95.113 19:12, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please clarify what you mean. Your question is quite vague. Splintercellguy 19:13, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I wish to provide a link to an external c++ executable file on my asp page such that it runs as soon as the client requests it. What is the code that i have to include in my asp file? Will it work even if the client does not have turbo c++ (or similar) loaded on it?

C++ is a compiled language, which means that the exe will run directly by giving the processor instructions (opcodes) it can directly understand. In other words, you don't need a compiler to run exes, then there would be no point in compiling it in the first place. But to answer your first question, it's not possible to have a customer click a link and have an executable instantly run on their computer. This would be probably the most insecure feature that is even possible to think up. You'd need them to download the file and then run the executable from their computer. However, if you want their clicking the link to run the executable on the server machine, that's very possible. Link to a php file and do:

exec('/path/to/executable');

--⁪froth^T 20:00, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that was quite useful, something I couldn't find elsewhere on the net. If you could be so good as to clarify this:
Being a novice in web technology, I am not familiar with php. Will the code work in html or does it have an equivalent in html?

Sort of. You have to set your web server to run .php files through the PHP interpreter (you have to download it from php.net) before the final HTML is outputted to the client. But the PHP code itself is embedded in the HTML of the page- the client just never sees it because it's processed by the interpreter and removed before the page is served. Because the php interpreter (php.exe) is running on the server machine, it can issue commands to the system through exec(). --⁪froth^T 21:40, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The only way I can explain is by an example. A PHP file on a server may be:

 <H1>Hello World</H1>
 <?php
    $n = 1;
    print "The <I>number</I> in the script is ".($n+1);
 ?>
 More stuff here...

It's just HTML with <?php ... ?> tags added. Inside the php tags is script, and the output from this script is added to the HTML output. The client (end user) sees this HTML file:

 <H1>Hello World</H1>
 The <I>number</I> in the script is 2
 More stuff here...

The php code can include the output of exe files - the exe will be run on the server and the output can be used in the script by using the exec function. For example:

  <?php print exec(uptime) ?>

will print the output of the uptime program, that is to say, the uptime of the webserver. You can include the output of any .exe file, eg one created yourself with C++.

If you wanted to run a program on the end user's machine - such as printing the uptime of the end user - you would probably need to write some sort of java applet, and pray the end user has java applets enabled. To use PHP on your webserver, you will need to make sure it is installed, and name the file something.php. See php.net and PHP for all the salacious details. --h2g2bob 01:35, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot. I'll check it out.

Checked it, downloading PHP not possible. Could you possibly give the code to be put on the asp page which allows the client to download the executable (and run it on their computer).

Just put the file on your server and link to it like any other file. The browser will probably decide to offer it to the user as a download, and if they select Save then it'll download it to their computer --⁪froth^T 22:21, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I tried that, it doesn't work. It gives the option to download it when you run it as normal HTML. But when you put it on the server and click on the link, it just opens to a "you are not authorized to view this page" page. Is there any simple code which will in some way make the executable run either on the server or on the client computer?

Windows Vista Ultimate download

Is it possible to properly download and install Windows Vista Ultimate by Bittorrent? Jamesino 19:38, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It may be possible to download it, but unless you have a legit product key, you could potentially be breaking the law or at least Microsoft could sue you for breach of copyright. In fact, it's possible it may be illegal in some countries even if you did have a legit key. It's rather unlikely you have a legit product key, because if you did, you would either have a DVD or you could access MSDN. Having said that Vista does have a 30 day trial mode and I'm not particularly sure on whether it would be illegal or whether Microsoft could sue you for downloading it if you're only going to use the trial mode for 30 days and then either buy Vista or install a OS you can legally use. However I presume Microsoft has a way for you to get Vista for trying. Also, unless you have a DVD burner or perhaps a CD burner (I believe Vista has a CD version but not sure) your installation options will be limited. Oh and BTW, bittorent has nothing to do with installing products 203.109.240.93 19:47, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's not a trial; it's to give you 30 days to activate. Ideally you activate immediately after installation but some people don't yet have internet access so they need to call in --⁪froth^T 20:07, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it's possible (and extremely easy) to download a Vista dvd image from bittorrent and install it. You'll only be able to use it for 30 days but most scene groups package cracks that stop the 30-day-countdown. You'll need to keep finding more cracks, though, as MS patches vista, which is why I bought legit. I remember reading about some study that found that most stop-countdown cracks on public trackers were fake or included malware --⁪froth^T 20:06, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wonder if the old "Windows is gonna die dude" "Wait, let me turn back system clock...There! Another ten years." trick still works in vista. Haha, knowing MS they probably left it in for kicks. -- feb^talk 03:47, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No, it probably replaces an INC EAX with a NOP somewhere that ticks that countdown forward --⁪froth^T

Most people on this reference desk page probably did not buy Vista. --Proficient 08:33, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

:( --⁪froth^T 22:20, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Most people on this reference desk page probably do not use Vista, because franky, it sucks. Aetherfukz 13:58, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Crontab - simple question

I could probably find this by searching but a quick search didn't find anything and it's so simple hope someone doesn't mind answering. When you specify a range for hours for crontab, how do you specify a range past midnight if at all possible. E.g. if I want to do something from 10 am to 1 am, do I do 10-25 or 10-01 or is it not possible? OS is FreeBSD 6.2 if that's necessary. Cheers 203.109.240.93 19:55, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Valid values for the "hours" field—the second of the five time and date fields in your crontab file—is 0 to 23, with 0 being 0:00 AM (midnight) and 23 being 11:00 PM. To execute a command every day at 11:00 PM, again at 0:00 AM (midnight), and again at 01:00 AM, specifying the range "23-1" should work just fine. For example:

* 23-1 * * * echo blah

Alternatively, you can specify a list of hours instead of a range of hours, by separating the hours at which time the command should be executed with commas. So the above can also be achieved by specifying "23,0,1", like so:

* 23,0,1 * * * echo blah

Ranges and lists can even be combined, like so:

* 23-0,1 * * * echo blah

All of the above should have the same effect. For more details and some examples, see crontab, or the crontab(5) manpage here. Hope this helps! —Xhantar^Talk 02:55, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Whoa there! The first column, minutes, is a * in your examples. That means the command will run every minute as long as the hour matches. You should definitely specify a 0 in the first column so it'll only run at 23:00, 0:00, and 1:00. Those "23-1" and "23-0" ranges, where the second number is smaller than the first, look suspicious to me too. They don't work with Debian's cron, which shares the same ultimate source as FreeBSD's cron. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 04:47, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I stand corrected. My apologies. —Xhantar^Talk 05:30, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, 10-01 doesn't work. Instead I used 10-23,00-01 which does work. Thanks everyone 203.109.240.93 14:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Radeon Mobility X1600

My laptop has a Radeon Mobility X1600. How powerful is this card, and can it play the current games (macintosh)?Thanks!--Ryan 22:18, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Apple's website says that it's up to 256MB, there should be a program on your computer that will tell you everything that's in it. If not look at the box! Jackacon 23:22, 3 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

For more information about your computer, click the blue apple in the upper left hand corner, click about this mac, the click more info. A program calle system profiler should come up that has any information about your computer you could ever possibly need to know. schyler 00:36, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have an x1400 (the previous px shader version I think) and combined with a 2.16ghz Core Duo and 2GB of memory, it plays every game that's out right now. Half-Life 2 and CSS I can play with maxed graphics settings (except it doesn't handle FSAA or ASF very well) and great framerates. F.E.A.R. and Prey and Oblivion are really choppy though unless I turn the settings way down to get good framerates. But it still plays fine. Of course there's a caveat- gaming on a mac sucks ;) --⁪froth^T 06:01, 4 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming it's an Intel Mac, you should be able to install Windows XP or Vista somehow (Bootcamp comes to mind). Of course, even installing Vista/XP isn't going to change the fact it's a POS Mac but it's better then nothing I guess 203.109.240.93 15:00, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]