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June 3

Follow-up about SSD not having a drive letter

File:Screenshot - TEMP.jpg

screenshot

This is a follow-up from my question of about a week ago. To recap, my wife got a new computer at work. It has a 500GB SSD and a 2TB HD. The SSD shows up in Speccy, but not under Computer, etc. A few months ago one of her coworkers got one speced out the same and she got me to go down there and look at it. On it, Speccy doesn't show the SSD, but it shows a 2TB drive, RAIDed. I opened the case, and the two drives go to a RAID controller card. So on that computer, they RAIDED a 500GB SSD and a 2TB HD. Does that make any sense (it doesn't to me)?

My wife said that the other employee told them that he wanted RAID. My wife told them that she didn't want RAID - she wanted Windows and installed programs on the SSD. So what I believe is that although the SSD is in her computer and hooked up, it isn't doing anything. That also doesn't make sense to me.

Do both of these approaches seem to be absurd? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:45, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm still confused about one thing from both of your threads. What does disk manager actually say? Surely that's the first thing to look at not 'Speccy' (whatever that is), where the hard disk is connected or even what shows up in Explorer/My Computer? Nil Einne (talk) 01:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't looked at Disk Manager on that computer. I'll have my wife do it tomorrow (or I'll go by). Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 01:43, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes a RAID (0) of two disks that different is absurd. It could be somewhat useful if it was a RAID 1, where one HDD is a fallback for the other, but even then, you'd prefer two similar drives, at least in capacity. If it is indeed a symmetical RAID 0, you'd end up with slow accesses of the HDD and an overall capacity of only ~1TB. The SDD would be vastly superior for access time, and the HDD for capacity.

~~If we didn't have WP:AGF~~ oh wait, AGF doesn't include 3rd parties... I'd call malicious compliance – a case that's aimed at the customer. Maybe someone at Dell thinks the average customer isn't going to see the difference anyway? "Users are Morons"?

"Customer asked for a box with SSD/HDD mix and RAID? Sure, let's RAID the two together, rather than calling them back and ask if they want two SSDs."

OTOH, poor training could explain this one, too. Whatever it is, that's one of the reasons why most companies have a dedicated IT guy: to avoid that kind of mess. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 06:49, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Screenshot of disk manager added. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 14:22, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely a non-standard install, with the system on the drive without letter. AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong), this is only possible if the "system" partition on the SSD is actually mounted, but via path rather than drive letter. These configs are disasters waiting to happen.

The latter may or may not be true with the most recent OSes, but most late "development" at MS was of the "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Another GUI" kind (google Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades if you don't know the meme), rather than useful features. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 15:08, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I looked it up - it was very finny. After two-blade ones came out, Saturday Night Live had a parody one with three blades. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 19:51, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I accidentally flagged the other edit as "minor" :( - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 15:10, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"System" doesn't mean Windows is installed on that drive. It means the Boot folder is on that drive. See here. The fact that it's not mounted after bootup is normal, but obviously this is a really stupid use of the expensive SSD. -- BenRG (talk) 17:24, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oopsie. I ASSumed the 90-something gigabytes were the OS and ASSorted CRAPware... SCNR. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 13:40, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dell really should set up this system from scratch, but if you can't wait for that to happen, you could probably boot from a live CD, shrink the HD partition to 465.76 GB, move the SSD partition to the HD (and shrink it too while you're at it), move the HD partition to the SSD, make a new data partition using up the rest of the HD space, and reboot. And hope that it still boots. I'm not completely sure it will. -- BenRG (talk) 17:24, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Does your wife's laptop come with Dell's standard business-class 3-year on-site support? She should be able to get a technician on-site to reinstall that system in a way that makes sense for her needs. It certainly wasn't configured in any reasonable way from Dell, so this should be covered under the support contract. Katie R (talk) 17:59, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To answer some questions: (1) She doesn't have a laptop - it is a desktop. (2) They had an IT person on site until a couple of years ago. They thought it would be cheaper to contract it out to Dell. But it is more expensive and they have to go through a lot of bureaucracy to get anything done. She ordered the computer last August and got it about a week ago. (3) The Dell guy is coming Monday to fix it. He says that he will have to research it first. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 19:10, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note however it is still possible it's mounted. From what I know and seems to be confirmed by a few tests, ¡Ouch! is correct that the partition could be mounted under an empty NTFS directory and it wouldn't show in disk manager. You'd either need to check mount points for the specific volume ('Change Drive Letters or Paths') or look at 'Drive Paths' under 'View'. IIRC, Microsoft doesn't even try to stop you mounting the system partition like they do with recovery partition. That said, considering the inanity of the set-up, I agree it's unlikely it's mounted. And in any case, even if it is mounted it's unlikely it's doing anything useful. Nil Einne (talk) 04:32, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

asside: My wife and her coworker ordered these computers last August. They were speced out the same - one four-core Xeon, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD, 2TB HD. Her coworker got his some months ago - his was like that. My wife got hers a week or so ago. In the meantime, Dell discontinued that model, which made it available cheaper. But the Dell people they contracted with wanted to get the price up to the original agreed-upon price. So they replaced the single four-core Zeon with two six-core Xeons! (for the same original price.) Since they are hyperthreaded, she can run 24 threads! Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:13, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nuke and pave for the win! I'd do it if it were my box, but since you/your wife have the all-inclusive package, you can let Dell handle it. That's the way that gets you into less warranty issues, too.

p.s. You should aim a bit lower if you want to shuffle the partitions around. I'd shrink the big C: partition to 465.75GB (wasting some megabytes is better than resizing to a size that's a few MBs larger than the SSD due to rounding). - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 13:40, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

p.p.s. asside?

Chrome's notification bell in the quicklaunch bar of Windows XP

I can't remove it. When tried disabling the notifications in chrome:flags, it went away then came back. When I click the little bell, and then settings, it no longer has the chrome tickbox. Now only the gmail tickbox. Advice? Thank you very much. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 07:00, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, as a workaround, if you don't normally use the audio on your computer, you can turn the volume down until you do need the audio. StuRat (talk) 13:22, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm so sorry. I wasn't clear. There is no bell noise. It is a grey bell icon that appears in the quicklaunch bar at the bottom right. An example is in the graphic in this link right at the top next to the birdy. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 13:35, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

transliteration service?

Sometimes Google Translate isn't what you want. On a tangent from yesterday's question about translations of Mouse (computer): Is there a service that will transliterate a foreign script rather than translating the words? I want to know whether or not these words

Մկնիկ (Armenian)
마우스 (Korean)
ເມົາສ໌ (Lao)
മൗസ് (Malayalam)
ମାଉସ (Orissa)
சுட்டி (Tamil)
మౌస్ (Telugu)
เมาส์ (Thai)
ჭუკია (Georgian)

are pronounced something like /maus/. (I'm not sure of all the language labels.) —Tamfang (talk) 09:55, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you click on the speaker icon at the ~~bottom-left~~ bottom-right of the input (or output) text boxes, it will play a speech synthesis approximation of the pronunciation. CS Miller (talk) 10:39, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Google did once offer this service (Google Script Converter) but they retired it with the closure of Google Labs. There's a list of websites that might help at Transliteration#Online transliteration. —Noiratsi (talk) 15:27, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Google Translate does have a transliteration feature. Go to translate.google.com, select the source language, and input some text. If the transliteration option is available, then in the bottom right of the text entry box there will be a Ä icon with a hover label of "read phonetically". If you click on this icon, a transliteration will be shown below the input box. For the languages Google Translate supports:

Մկնիկ = Mknik
마우스 = mauseu
ເມົາສ໌ = mao s
சுட்டி = Cuṭṭi
మౌస్ = Maus
เมาส์ = Meās̄̒
ჭუკია = chukia

--Bavi H (talk) 01:00, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Google Translate messed up for Thai here. To answer your query, เมาส์ is a direct borrowing from "mouse" and is pronounced somewhat like the original. (It isn't phonemically possible to represent an ending "s" sound in Thai script.) --Paul_012 (talk) 18:12, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Firefox extension "Identify Character" tells me that മൗസ് and ମାଉସ are also maus. —Tamfang (talk) 09:21, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

gameover zeus

please urgent

how can i detected if i have "gameover zeus" virus on my windows?

antiviral program says no detection but gameover zeus hides from it maybe? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.116.25.10 (talk) 12:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know specifically about that virus, but generally a virus can't hide once the anti-virus software knows what to look for. That's why you need to update your anti-virus software often. StuRat (talk) 13:20, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Earning money from Internet

I am a Computer Science Post Graduate student. How can i earn money from Internet? What are thesse different sources or way where i can apply my skill and earn money. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.212.49.25 (talk) 16:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your question is too broad to have a useful answer as-is. Your school may provide free career counseling for its students. -- BenRG (talk) 17:56, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The key point to understand is that "the Internet" doesn't have any money. It's the people using it that have that. So the trick is to find ways to provide something that people will pay for. The Internet can make that easier (and sometimes it makes it harder!) - but in the end, you're basically doing traditional marketing of some product or service.

If you have a great product in mind - then crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo can help you fund making it and get you an initial customer base - but you still have to do a certain amount of promotion and it doesn't get you out of all of the other parts of a classical business model.

SteveBaker (talk) 20:50, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Making money on Internet Content is possible. You could create a popular game or software tool. You could draw a webcomic. You could write a popular blog. You could sell music or become a video blogger on YouTube.

All of these things could theoretically make money, all without ever having a "boss" or a traditional contractor arrangement. ... but don't bet your house on it. A lot of people are trying this, and you'll need a lot of luck, talent, and marketing know-how to make it work for you. And in any case, it'll probably take years of hard work before it yields anything other than "beer and pizza money" (if it ever does!).

Finally, if you want to make a very small amount of money right away, you could try the Amazon Mechanical Turk. I understand that typically pays out much less than (USA) minimum wage, though. APL (talk) 23:50, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to make money then I think you be better off heeding SteveBaker's advice. You need to provide a unique service or product that people are willing to pay for rather than climbing on band-wagon that everyone else is climbing on and hope that your wagon is popular enough to earn you a living. Modern capitalist America seem to be foundered up the philosophy of Napoleon Hill, [1] and Dale Carnegie [2]. The Chinese have taken note and moved it to the next level. Any answer you get to your question will be so obvious that you'll will all ready will have competition (unless you're very, very talented). Look towards people that had very mediocre technical skills like henry ford, edison, bill gates, donald trump etc., and look at how they made their money. --Aspro (talk) 15:23, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Aspro: I don't believe that Gates or Edison had mediocre technical skills, although their success was certainly built upon their business skills, in the same way like the others you cite at the end of your post.OsmanRF34 (talk) 16:57, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Saving Usenet

Are there any present efforts underway to expand access, participation, and technical quality of Usenet? For example, are there other free interfaces, or interfaces with web interface, besides Google Groups? Wnt (talk) 19:21, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See List_of_Usenet_newsreaders and Category:Usenet_clients (I guess categories can't be wikilinked with normal double brackets?). There are lots of other ways to access it outside of Google Groups. Last I checked anything there though, it was mostly a wasteland of spambots, even on relatively obscure threads. Not sure if anyone has the collective will and power to clean it up. Someone the other day suggested to me that Reddit has many similarities to old Usenet, with the main difference that Reddit was immediately born into a Long September. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:23, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To link a category with normal double brackets, put a colon inside the brackets, like this: Category:Usenet clients ([[:Category:Usenet clients]]). JIP | Talk 16:32, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@SemanticMantis: I understand there is free client software - the main issue is that, although provided free by sites like universities with other services, Usenet is not provided free by many NNTP sites. Wnt (talk) 08:29, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

On the whole, the internet has trended towards technologies and use-cases that rely on centralized distribution, as opposed to a peer-to-peer traffic pattern. Most internet traffic flows from just a tiny handful of major websites to n different users, with large n, and growing. In the early days of internet technology, this scalability was not practical or cost-effective. Peer-based data transfer made sense: in 1988, your dial-up connection to the BBS at the local college was usually faster than an internet connection to a major server at NASA or IBM or Stanford. If you wanted news from NASA, you'd get it faster by pulling from a local server who had already cloned the latest content. But today, chances are high that you'll get a 50 megabit-per-second sustained downlink data transfer from NASA - or more likely, Netflix or Youtube or iCloud or your favorite mega-website - from any computer in the world. Even weirder - you probably can't/won't get that kind of high-bandwidth, fast and reliable datalink to an anonymous peer at a nearby university - even if it's geographically closer, your "local server" may be farther away on the network topology, or may simply be connected by lower-performing hardware. Commercial internet providers have built networks that encourage this centralized model, concentrating traffic to a few major providers, because it is more profitable.

The economics of this trend have been incredibly thoroughly studied. For example, Braess's paradox expresses why a Pareto optimum is never met for the network, because it doesn't coincide with the Nash equilibrium. Using less techno-jargon, it means that the networks that get built trend towards sub-optimal traffic patterns. A similar paradox was written up by the oft-cantankerous ex-AT&T engineer, David Isenberg, in his paper "The Rise of the Stupid Network [3] and the related paper, "The Paradox of the Best Network." Historically, economists described Jevon's paradox for the general case of resource-consumption and efficiency.

The moral of this story: peer-to-peer network infrastructure and hardware - and peer-to-peer software protocols like bittorrent, or even NNTP and UseNet - are mathematically provably more efficient at flowing traffic between n different nodes. If the goal is to copy the same data to n users, Usenet-style many-to-many data transfer will require dramatically less network-resources than a centralized HTTP-style server that must single-handedly serve all users individually. Now that we use computers to stream large binary files - like videos and music - it's even more true that a many-to-many distribution network would be more efficient at sharing the data. At the same time, economic forces tend to discourage building these sorts of provably more efficient networks. Compound this with concerns about intellectual-property ownership - yet another reason that providers opt for centralization - and throw in the enforcement of digital restrictions management, and it is evident why our internet infrastructure takes its present form.

Nimur (talk) 09:51, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Surely you know that high-traffic web sites use content delivery networks to serve users from data centers that are geographically close to them. As far as I can tell, Bittorrent is much less efficient in practice since it ignores geographical proximity when choosing peers, meaning that popular data travels many times over transatlantic cables instead of being cached once on each side. Bittorrent has an advantage only when the uploader doesn't want to pay the bandwidth costs (e.g. Linux distributions) or when content delivery networks would refuse to host the data for legal reasons.

NNTP is inefficient because it's push-based: instead of requesting articles from peers on demand and caching them, you have to take the entire contents of every group you subscribe to and store it locally for as long as possible because once you delete it there's no way to get it back from a peer. I think that most of those article copies expire without ever being read by anyone, so the total Internet traffic might actually be lower if there were a single Usenet server for the whole world. It would certainly be lower if the articles were served from a CDN that could be designed for efficient caching instead of being forced to use NNTP.

I don't think any of the technical articles you linked are relevant to any of this. -- BenRG (talk) 17:44, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear though, this isn't a choice between two identical products. I remember people back in the early 90s laughing at someone (I can't remember who) who said that the Internet would be a few hundred channels of cable television. No one respects a prophet when they don't like what he has to say, eh? People never stop coming up with reasons to take things off a centralized server, each flimsier than the last - Wikipedians certainly have reasons to know this. All the things you say are reasons why we shouldn't just accept Usenet going away as some bland technocratic change, but recognize that it is something to be actively opposed. Wnt (talk) 17:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes, I seem to have misunderstood your question. But Nimur's explanation makes a lot of sense why there aren't as many free/public NNTP News servers as there used to be. FWIW, we don't have a list of news servers, but the previous article has a link to this site, which has some other info [4]. I'm a little surprised I can't easily find a list of public news servers. I mean, I can easily find active Gopher_(protocol) pages [5]! Actually, since Nimur brought up BBS, I'm reminded a bit of the trouble I had finding my first BBS phone #. Once I had one, I could get many. But since the main repository of BBS numbers was on BBSs, there was a decent bootstrapping problem! SemanticMantis (talk) 14:24, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The trouble with open NNTP servers is that they're easily abusable, like open SMTP servers. -- BenRG (talk) 17:44, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not necessarily saying open at the protocol level - I mean, does anyone other than Google not charge people for viewing or posting to Usenet? (And don't tell me colleges unless you know one that doesn't charge tuition and let's anyone sign up online) Wnt (talk) 17:48, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe one of these services fits your needs [6] [7], [8]? SemanticMantis (talk) 19:19, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The last link provides useful leads. It is definitely reassuring to see some public projects like http://aioe.org and http://www.eternal-september.org - the more proprietary the access becomes, the greater the risk that an attempt to innovate would fall victim to rent-seeking. News-Portal is a decent effort to present news in a sensible web format, though for some reason I don't understand, eternal-september doesn't make the output available directly for the bulk of the groups it contains.

My feeling is that the way to save Usenet and the way to save Wikipedia may be one and the same: to work out a way to fuse NNTP and MediaWiki into a single hybrid organism, with some added torrenting DNA to work out the optimal way to spread the load. Whether that can be done directly I have no idea, but for example, I can easily picture adding a line to assign a Usenet post to a Wiki page, where it could be treated as a revision (with the added wrinkle that many different people should be able to specify their idea of which revision is "top"); to enable transclusion of one post into another rather than tracking threads, to enable display of images in other posts, and complex CSS, to very nearly the degree we do here on Wikipedia. To be deprecated and lost: the newsgroup as it was, with its ponderous and mostly empty hierarchy filled with overloaded crossposts. Usenet needs to develop mechanisms of central planning; Wikipedia needs to lose its central authority; at the middle, a method of decentralized centralization, authority without authority, should arise. Wnt (talk) 22:25, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Wnt: have you looked at freenet? Maybe a bit of a sketchy place, but it is an interesting idea on how to do decentralized hosting and retrieval. As I understand it, it's like an entire substitute for www, and uses some torrent-like concepts as well as integrated encryption. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:18, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It may be that that aspect would provide useful ideas. In general, freenet isn't really useful for what I'd like to see - it requires installation, a FAQ is why is it so slow?, it has to stay running to improve performance. Above all, as I understand its model, if lots of people ever started using it, it would collapse in a mass of spam once some company arranged to run enough computers requesting their ads 24/7. The main requirements for a hybrid wiki usenet would be accessibility and participation, with the key mystery being how to fund it without the central donation revenue stream of WMF and without resorting to the subscription model of the Usenet providers. It might need an advertising model that reliably protects user reading privacy, but allows for sites to subsidize public access to blocks of content that interest them by serving semi-targeted ads. (I think that as a society we desperately need a whole new theory of advertising, something that can supplant the diminishing returns of the 'Guantanamo Bay' approach) So we'd want a design that mirrors content around in a way that works in accordance with monetary incentives. So for example, a sci-fi site might host copies of all known sci-fi newsgroups - or in my dreaming above, sci-fi Wiki article or discussion titles - and post ads to recently published book titles to fund it. The amount of revenue brought in from doing that ought to be more if there are few sites hosting the sci-fi posts and less if there are many, so that sensible business decisions tend to drive the hosts to try to cover every niche. But there would need to be extensive curation of resources by users and ultimately good default choices of curations from the access sites in order to avoid being swamped by spam and biased content, and it would be key to define the hybrid in such a way that the advertising holds within strict limits, including privacy and rewarding the site that actually hosts the content copy rather than only the one you happen to request it from... I don't claim to have a complete idea at this time, just a desire for one. Wnt (talk) 20:19, 6 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]