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Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives |
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I heard someone claim that redstone circuitry in Minecraft is actually Turing complete. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Turing completeness (or, indeed, redstone) to actually verify this. Could someone more knowledgeable than I confirm/deny this? Thanks! 24.247.162.139 ( talk) 01:21, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I have a relatively modern DSL modem (provided by my ISP at a rather insulting rental fee) connected to a Windows XP computer using an ethernet cable. When I first set up the internet connection this modem enables in Windows, I selected Connect using a broadband connection that requires a user name and password as opposed to Connect using a broadband connection that is always on (the latter is described as not requiring the user to sign in and is the configuration I've generally encountered on computers at work and at other people's houses). This created a connection that, when opened, prompts for a user name and password as expected and only connects to the internet once those pieces of information have been provided.
However, I recently noticed that any software programmed to connect to the net (e.g., web browsers, any program that can check for updates, etc.) is able to do so even when the connection I created isn't active. A local area connection is present under Network Connections in addition to the internet connection I manually created; it appears to be active as soon as Windows starts and its record of bytes transferred clearly reflects internet activity.
Given this configuration, is there a clean way I can set up my network situation such that the computer is only connected to the internet when the user has signed into the manually-created internet connection? Simply disabling the local area connection predictably prevents the internet connection I created from working and googling this particular problem has proven fruitless (google seems quite keen on providing me with results pertaining to complete internet dysfunction, which is pretty much the exact opposite of this situation). Additionally, the modem's configuration page doesn't appear to contain any settings relevant to this.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Hiram J. Hackenbacker ( talk) 03:11, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I have a new Asus laptop running 64 bit Win 7. The whole thing is less than two weeks old and it's a relatively good unit, above the cheap end of the spectrum, with Core i7, 8GB RAM, etc. A problem I have noticed is that when I resume from sleep or hibernation the computer has a funny tendency to crash within about three minutes of the resume (not immediately mind you). And I mean a major crash, in that I have to do a hard boot, with the system becoming entirely unresponsive, even cntl-alt-del etc elicits no response.
OK, so analysing this I'm noticing two trends. One is that if I manage to have to the whole thing set up exactly the same as it was when I hibernated it doesn't seem to crash, and I mean things like power, mouse, wireless USB broadband connection, external drives either plugged in or not - if you change one of them either way while the thing's hibernating it's almost as if it gets confused on the resume. The other thing is that it always crashes while using Firefox, but that could just be that that tends to be the first thing I access on a resume.
Any ideas? As yet it has never crashed in any other circumstances. Is it just flakiness of Win 7 (I haven't used it extensively before, but I'm not entirely impressed with it)? -- 124.184.191.230 ( talk) 03:45, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
In investigating a problem with unexpected high disk I/O activities, I discovered that a WUDFHost.exe process is running on my machine under the LOCAL SERVICE user. The strange thing is, from Windows Task Manager, I cannot view its properties, nor does "Open File Location" open the folder that contains it (assuming that the image is C:\Windows\System32\WUDFHost.exe, not something malicious pretending to be it.) I also tried Process Explorer. It could not report the file path of the image either. What gives?
If you have a Vista or Windows 7 machine, could you check & see if you get the same result? Thanks in advance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.49.11.117 ( talk) 08:32, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
This is related to the problem that prompted my question about WUDFHost.exe. It seems that at times SearchIndexer.exe & SearchProtocolHost.exe are keeping my computer's hard drive busy. (Not 100% sure that they are the culprits, but I came to the conclusion from what I saw in Window's Reliability and Performance Monitor). When that happens, it would take quite some time for disk activity to die down.
Is that normal? How do you deal with it? (I tried lowering the priorities of the processes but was denied). I think the problem started recently, although I could be mistaken (I didn't observer/notice it in the past.) The only recent changes to the computer is installation of some Microsoft updates and software that came with a printer.
Thanks in advance. -- 173.49.11.117 ( talk) 15:54, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
For a few days, my computer (running Windows 7) has repeatedly displayed the hidden icons of the systray, when I clicked to have them displayed, in an oversized display area which almost filled half the screen; it's just a white area, at the upper left top of which the 3 or so icons are displayed A few times I've managed to re-shrink that area by clicking into its midst--with each click, the area can get a little smaller, as if one line of a text gets deleted, then the next etc. At the end, it's back to its normal size close to the systray. Very odd.
Anyone knows what's going on and/or how to avoid it? Thanks a lot: Thanks for answering ( talk) 12:16, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
How good should be a picture for the complete illusion of reality? Is it possible to achieve such a quality, so no one can see the difference between the 3d-image and a real window to the street?
How big should be a monitor resolution? 10000х10000? More?
How many colors should it have? Is true color not enough?
How many polygons should have the scene? - Ewigekrieg ( talk) 12:42, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I've seen plenty of renders that were virtually imperceptible from reality, but they no doubt took a great deal of time and effort to create. ¦ Reisio ( talk) 20:21, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I've asked something like this before. I was photographing the Helsinki Market Square and noticed that my eyes did a far better job at seeing the image than my camera did. I deduced that it wasn't really because of my eyes (they worked similarly to my camera), but my brain, which was constantly analysing what my eyes saw and constructing an image best suited for viewing on the fly. However, when looking at the image taken by my camera, my brain couldn't do this, but instead had to work on what was "really there". JIP | Talk 22:28, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
According to
naked eye, the angular resolution of the
fovea is about 0.02°. The eye doesn't have a linear resolution (like dots per inch) that you could directly compare to a monitor. Any monitor can match the resolution of the eye if it's far enough away. At a distance D, the monitor's resolution needs to be about 1 / (D tan 0.02°) ≈ 3000 / D. The
Galaxy Nexus has a 316-pixel-per-inch screen, which ought to match the resolution of the fovea at a typical reading distance. I have good eyesight and I've seen this phone and I can confirm that it looks pretty much as sharp as print.
If you wanted a cube map that would match the eye's resolution in every direction, each edge of the cube would have to be 2 / tan 0.02° ≈ 6000 pixels, for a total of 6×6000×6000 ≈ 200,000,000 pixels. Of course, the eye doesn't have nearly this many cones. A display that "drew" directly onto the retina with a laser could get away with a much lower resolution.
There are other things besides pixel resolution that contribute to the realism of a scene, such as:
-- BenRG ( talk) 01:55, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
Whatz up? -- Epipelagic ( talk) 12:53, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
What is a synthesizer "voice" more specifically ..? Electron9 ( talk) 15:46, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
When I perform a Google search, I expect to get a couple of (irrelevant) sponsored links at the top, with a yellow background. Fine. A friend of mine has a new Windows 7 laptop, and Firefox, and whenever she performs a Google search, whatever the subject, she has to scroll through a whole page of sponsored ads before she gets to the real results. And because there is a whole page of them, I mean like ten or twelve ads, she not surprisingly thinks she is getting irrelevant results. I've never come across this before, Google help seems to have nothing on this, and I cannot find a relevant setting among the search options. Does anyone know what is going on? Thanks.-- Shantavira| feed me 17:56, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Hi everyone!
I'm learning how to program in C++ and I had a question about how exactly to properly write destructors.
Lets say I have a very simple class that looks something like this:
class SomeClass {
private:
vector<int> some_list;
}
That is, the class has a vector in it because it needs to stuff with lists. Now, If I don't write a destructor for this class and instead just use the implicit or default destructor (or whatever it's called), it's going to automatically destroy that vector, right? Like, I don't have to worry about it?
But in the case I'm facing right now, I have to write my own explicit destructor, because it needs to do some other clean-up in addition to the class-variables. But in that case, how do I destroy some_list? It wasn't dynamically allocated, so I can't type "delete some_list" (right?). Is it automatically destroyed, even if I write my own destructor?
Also, another quick question while were on the subject of vectors: if I delete a vector (either by typing "delete some_vector" or it being destroyed in an implicit destructor or whatever), will all the objects in that vector be destroyed also? Or do I have to destroy those manually?
As I said, I'm very, very new at this so I appriciate any help I can get, especially when it comes to memory management. Thanks! 80.216.1.161 ( talk) 20:06, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
cout << "In ~SomeOtherClass\n"
. Execute the code and when the SomeClass object goes out of scope you should see the ~SomeOtherClass output occur for each element of the vector, without your having to explicitly destroy anything.new
, rather than as an automatic/stack variable. Eg auto/stack variable:class SomeClass {
private:
vector<int> some_list;
}
fn()
{
SomeClass sc;
// do stuff
} // the compiler will call sc.~SomeClass() here, which in turn will destroy some_list and its contents
fn2()
{
SomeClass *psc = new SomeClass;
// do stuff
delete psc; // the compiler will call psc->~SomeClass() here, which in turn will destroy some_list and its contents
}
Dear Math Wikipedians:
I myself am a failed IOI contender, I was able to only achieve a bronze medal at the national olympiad level and therefore was unable to make it into the IOI team of my country. Now I am in university and am ineligible to participate in olympiads anymore. While preparing for these competitions I have heard a lot about how people like Reid Barton did math and coded when they were still wearing diapers. I am wondering what I can do, as a future parent, to make sure that my kid grows up to be just like Reid Barton, doing math and programming in their diapers, and win the IMO and IOI when they are 8 or 9? I have looked up the corresponding Wikipedia pages, but other than providing information about the contests themselves, and a list of past contests that have happened and some notable winners and achievements, the Wikipedia pages did not have a section that taught people how to raise children that are capable to achieving those feats.
I hope that my future children will be able to walk further than I have in these endeavours.
Thanks for all your help and suggestions.
70.29.24.167 ( talk) 20:18, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I have a problem with a wired/wireless network. The desktop computers are wired. Yesterday one of them locked up and to make a long story short, when it got back to normal, other computers can't access it on the network but it can access the others. It shows up as \\name (where name is its name) on the network, but it can't be accessed. I checked all of the sharing settings that I know about and they are correct. All computers and the router have been rebooted several times.
I'm thinking about putting in a wireless network adapter to fix the problem, but it might have the same problem. Any ideas on how to fix this? Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 20:31, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Hi, I don't ever use Twitter ... not really interested in it ... but nowadays one often sees the "tweets" of well-known people quoted in other media. Hence I was wondering how, on Twitter, you know that someone is actually well-known person X, rather than random person Y who either happens to really have the same name, or deliberately intends to impersonate someone. For example, if I tried to set up an account called "RooneyManUtd", would anyone stop me, or actually check who I was? 109.151.39.98 ( talk) 21:42, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
They often post links to their profiles on their official pages elsewhere or whatever. I've also seen them take pictures of themselves identifying their accounts in the picture, thus proving they are that person. In regards to impersonators, usually they aren't challenged. However, I know of at least two cases where an impersonator account was usurped by the actual person, presumably with the help of the admins or whoever is in charge of running the site 82.45.62.107 ( talk) 01:05, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
........and who cares about the so called celebs anyway, only their mums probably, I certainly don't and would not touch Twitter with a barge pole. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.211.148.143 ( talk) 07:23, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
How many physical phones do they need? 0? (and use an emulator on a PC), 1? (and risk that his app only runs in his phone) a handful of popular phones? (just to be sure). 88.9.214.197 ( talk) 21:54, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Just wondering if anyones experienced any problems with Windows 7 when locking the screen where you have to type the password in twice to unlock it. -- 212.120.242.42 ( talk) 23:47, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Computing desk | ||
---|---|---|
< January 6 | << Dec | January | Feb >> | January 8 > |
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. |
I heard someone claim that redstone circuitry in Minecraft is actually Turing complete. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Turing completeness (or, indeed, redstone) to actually verify this. Could someone more knowledgeable than I confirm/deny this? Thanks! 24.247.162.139 ( talk) 01:21, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I have a relatively modern DSL modem (provided by my ISP at a rather insulting rental fee) connected to a Windows XP computer using an ethernet cable. When I first set up the internet connection this modem enables in Windows, I selected Connect using a broadband connection that requires a user name and password as opposed to Connect using a broadband connection that is always on (the latter is described as not requiring the user to sign in and is the configuration I've generally encountered on computers at work and at other people's houses). This created a connection that, when opened, prompts for a user name and password as expected and only connects to the internet once those pieces of information have been provided.
However, I recently noticed that any software programmed to connect to the net (e.g., web browsers, any program that can check for updates, etc.) is able to do so even when the connection I created isn't active. A local area connection is present under Network Connections in addition to the internet connection I manually created; it appears to be active as soon as Windows starts and its record of bytes transferred clearly reflects internet activity.
Given this configuration, is there a clean way I can set up my network situation such that the computer is only connected to the internet when the user has signed into the manually-created internet connection? Simply disabling the local area connection predictably prevents the internet connection I created from working and googling this particular problem has proven fruitless (google seems quite keen on providing me with results pertaining to complete internet dysfunction, which is pretty much the exact opposite of this situation). Additionally, the modem's configuration page doesn't appear to contain any settings relevant to this.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Hiram J. Hackenbacker ( talk) 03:11, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I have a new Asus laptop running 64 bit Win 7. The whole thing is less than two weeks old and it's a relatively good unit, above the cheap end of the spectrum, with Core i7, 8GB RAM, etc. A problem I have noticed is that when I resume from sleep or hibernation the computer has a funny tendency to crash within about three minutes of the resume (not immediately mind you). And I mean a major crash, in that I have to do a hard boot, with the system becoming entirely unresponsive, even cntl-alt-del etc elicits no response.
OK, so analysing this I'm noticing two trends. One is that if I manage to have to the whole thing set up exactly the same as it was when I hibernated it doesn't seem to crash, and I mean things like power, mouse, wireless USB broadband connection, external drives either plugged in or not - if you change one of them either way while the thing's hibernating it's almost as if it gets confused on the resume. The other thing is that it always crashes while using Firefox, but that could just be that that tends to be the first thing I access on a resume.
Any ideas? As yet it has never crashed in any other circumstances. Is it just flakiness of Win 7 (I haven't used it extensively before, but I'm not entirely impressed with it)? -- 124.184.191.230 ( talk) 03:45, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
In investigating a problem with unexpected high disk I/O activities, I discovered that a WUDFHost.exe process is running on my machine under the LOCAL SERVICE user. The strange thing is, from Windows Task Manager, I cannot view its properties, nor does "Open File Location" open the folder that contains it (assuming that the image is C:\Windows\System32\WUDFHost.exe, not something malicious pretending to be it.) I also tried Process Explorer. It could not report the file path of the image either. What gives?
If you have a Vista or Windows 7 machine, could you check & see if you get the same result? Thanks in advance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.49.11.117 ( talk) 08:32, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
This is related to the problem that prompted my question about WUDFHost.exe. It seems that at times SearchIndexer.exe & SearchProtocolHost.exe are keeping my computer's hard drive busy. (Not 100% sure that they are the culprits, but I came to the conclusion from what I saw in Window's Reliability and Performance Monitor). When that happens, it would take quite some time for disk activity to die down.
Is that normal? How do you deal with it? (I tried lowering the priorities of the processes but was denied). I think the problem started recently, although I could be mistaken (I didn't observer/notice it in the past.) The only recent changes to the computer is installation of some Microsoft updates and software that came with a printer.
Thanks in advance. -- 173.49.11.117 ( talk) 15:54, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
For a few days, my computer (running Windows 7) has repeatedly displayed the hidden icons of the systray, when I clicked to have them displayed, in an oversized display area which almost filled half the screen; it's just a white area, at the upper left top of which the 3 or so icons are displayed A few times I've managed to re-shrink that area by clicking into its midst--with each click, the area can get a little smaller, as if one line of a text gets deleted, then the next etc. At the end, it's back to its normal size close to the systray. Very odd.
Anyone knows what's going on and/or how to avoid it? Thanks a lot: Thanks for answering ( talk) 12:16, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
How good should be a picture for the complete illusion of reality? Is it possible to achieve such a quality, so no one can see the difference between the 3d-image and a real window to the street?
How big should be a monitor resolution? 10000х10000? More?
How many colors should it have? Is true color not enough?
How many polygons should have the scene? - Ewigekrieg ( talk) 12:42, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I've seen plenty of renders that were virtually imperceptible from reality, but they no doubt took a great deal of time and effort to create. ¦ Reisio ( talk) 20:21, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I've asked something like this before. I was photographing the Helsinki Market Square and noticed that my eyes did a far better job at seeing the image than my camera did. I deduced that it wasn't really because of my eyes (they worked similarly to my camera), but my brain, which was constantly analysing what my eyes saw and constructing an image best suited for viewing on the fly. However, when looking at the image taken by my camera, my brain couldn't do this, but instead had to work on what was "really there". JIP | Talk 22:28, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
According to
naked eye, the angular resolution of the
fovea is about 0.02°. The eye doesn't have a linear resolution (like dots per inch) that you could directly compare to a monitor. Any monitor can match the resolution of the eye if it's far enough away. At a distance D, the monitor's resolution needs to be about 1 / (D tan 0.02°) ≈ 3000 / D. The
Galaxy Nexus has a 316-pixel-per-inch screen, which ought to match the resolution of the fovea at a typical reading distance. I have good eyesight and I've seen this phone and I can confirm that it looks pretty much as sharp as print.
If you wanted a cube map that would match the eye's resolution in every direction, each edge of the cube would have to be 2 / tan 0.02° ≈ 6000 pixels, for a total of 6×6000×6000 ≈ 200,000,000 pixels. Of course, the eye doesn't have nearly this many cones. A display that "drew" directly onto the retina with a laser could get away with a much lower resolution.
There are other things besides pixel resolution that contribute to the realism of a scene, such as:
-- BenRG ( talk) 01:55, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
Whatz up? -- Epipelagic ( talk) 12:53, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
What is a synthesizer "voice" more specifically ..? Electron9 ( talk) 15:46, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
When I perform a Google search, I expect to get a couple of (irrelevant) sponsored links at the top, with a yellow background. Fine. A friend of mine has a new Windows 7 laptop, and Firefox, and whenever she performs a Google search, whatever the subject, she has to scroll through a whole page of sponsored ads before she gets to the real results. And because there is a whole page of them, I mean like ten or twelve ads, she not surprisingly thinks she is getting irrelevant results. I've never come across this before, Google help seems to have nothing on this, and I cannot find a relevant setting among the search options. Does anyone know what is going on? Thanks.-- Shantavira| feed me 17:56, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Hi everyone!
I'm learning how to program in C++ and I had a question about how exactly to properly write destructors.
Lets say I have a very simple class that looks something like this:
class SomeClass {
private:
vector<int> some_list;
}
That is, the class has a vector in it because it needs to stuff with lists. Now, If I don't write a destructor for this class and instead just use the implicit or default destructor (or whatever it's called), it's going to automatically destroy that vector, right? Like, I don't have to worry about it?
But in the case I'm facing right now, I have to write my own explicit destructor, because it needs to do some other clean-up in addition to the class-variables. But in that case, how do I destroy some_list? It wasn't dynamically allocated, so I can't type "delete some_list" (right?). Is it automatically destroyed, even if I write my own destructor?
Also, another quick question while were on the subject of vectors: if I delete a vector (either by typing "delete some_vector" or it being destroyed in an implicit destructor or whatever), will all the objects in that vector be destroyed also? Or do I have to destroy those manually?
As I said, I'm very, very new at this so I appriciate any help I can get, especially when it comes to memory management. Thanks! 80.216.1.161 ( talk) 20:06, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
cout << "In ~SomeOtherClass\n"
. Execute the code and when the SomeClass object goes out of scope you should see the ~SomeOtherClass output occur for each element of the vector, without your having to explicitly destroy anything.new
, rather than as an automatic/stack variable. Eg auto/stack variable:class SomeClass {
private:
vector<int> some_list;
}
fn()
{
SomeClass sc;
// do stuff
} // the compiler will call sc.~SomeClass() here, which in turn will destroy some_list and its contents
fn2()
{
SomeClass *psc = new SomeClass;
// do stuff
delete psc; // the compiler will call psc->~SomeClass() here, which in turn will destroy some_list and its contents
}
Dear Math Wikipedians:
I myself am a failed IOI contender, I was able to only achieve a bronze medal at the national olympiad level and therefore was unable to make it into the IOI team of my country. Now I am in university and am ineligible to participate in olympiads anymore. While preparing for these competitions I have heard a lot about how people like Reid Barton did math and coded when they were still wearing diapers. I am wondering what I can do, as a future parent, to make sure that my kid grows up to be just like Reid Barton, doing math and programming in their diapers, and win the IMO and IOI when they are 8 or 9? I have looked up the corresponding Wikipedia pages, but other than providing information about the contests themselves, and a list of past contests that have happened and some notable winners and achievements, the Wikipedia pages did not have a section that taught people how to raise children that are capable to achieving those feats.
I hope that my future children will be able to walk further than I have in these endeavours.
Thanks for all your help and suggestions.
70.29.24.167 ( talk) 20:18, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
I have a problem with a wired/wireless network. The desktop computers are wired. Yesterday one of them locked up and to make a long story short, when it got back to normal, other computers can't access it on the network but it can access the others. It shows up as \\name (where name is its name) on the network, but it can't be accessed. I checked all of the sharing settings that I know about and they are correct. All computers and the router have been rebooted several times.
I'm thinking about putting in a wireless network adapter to fix the problem, but it might have the same problem. Any ideas on how to fix this? Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 20:31, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Hi, I don't ever use Twitter ... not really interested in it ... but nowadays one often sees the "tweets" of well-known people quoted in other media. Hence I was wondering how, on Twitter, you know that someone is actually well-known person X, rather than random person Y who either happens to really have the same name, or deliberately intends to impersonate someone. For example, if I tried to set up an account called "RooneyManUtd", would anyone stop me, or actually check who I was? 109.151.39.98 ( talk) 21:42, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
They often post links to their profiles on their official pages elsewhere or whatever. I've also seen them take pictures of themselves identifying their accounts in the picture, thus proving they are that person. In regards to impersonators, usually they aren't challenged. However, I know of at least two cases where an impersonator account was usurped by the actual person, presumably with the help of the admins or whoever is in charge of running the site 82.45.62.107 ( talk) 01:05, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
........and who cares about the so called celebs anyway, only their mums probably, I certainly don't and would not touch Twitter with a barge pole. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.211.148.143 ( talk) 07:23, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
How many physical phones do they need? 0? (and use an emulator on a PC), 1? (and risk that his app only runs in his phone) a handful of popular phones? (just to be sure). 88.9.214.197 ( talk) 21:54, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Just wondering if anyones experienced any problems with Windows 7 when locking the screen where you have to type the password in twice to unlock it. -- 212.120.242.42 ( talk) 23:47, 7 January 2012 (UTC)