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July 22 Information

How apartheid affected people's lives and how people respond

Group areas act(1950) 41.114.250.185 ( talk) 19:01, 22 July 2024 (UTC) reply

Your question is unclear but have you read our extensive article on apartheid? Shantavira| feed me 19:11, 22 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Please do your own homework. 41.23.55.195 ( talk) 06:40, 23 July 2024 (UTC) reply
@ 41.114.250.185: The OP's first language is obviously not English, and possibly not their second language either. How many languages do you speak? Why don't you create a WP account rather than carping anonymously from the sidelines? I'm sure you failed some homework assignments yourself. MinorProphet ( talk) 19:14, 23 July 2024 (UTC) reply
This is the Computing Reference Desk. HiLo48 ( talk) 06:49, 23 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Well spotted, top marks! Hurrah! This is indeed the Computing Reference Desk. In 1995 (nearly 30 years go) I was fortunate and privileged enough to be in the group of the very first technical instructors from IBM to present that company's latest hardware offerings (laptops, desktops and PC servers) after the general international embargo ended, the same year when SA won the Rugby World Cup at home. I wasn't employed by IBM directly. It was a joyous occasion, taking place immediately after the 1994 South African general election. South Africa was open to the world again. But all the white people drove around in cars, including the taxi-drivers, and all the black people walked. That's how apartheid affected people's lives. All the techies I taught were white as well. MinorProphet ( talk) 19:14, 23 July 2024 (UTC) reply
"At least that's slightly relevant to this page. I'll keep it that much off topic by saying that in 1994 I (on behalf of my employer at the time) was one of the first customers for IBM (not Lenovo) ThinkPads in Australia. I still have two of them and they still work!!!! (On mains power of course.. The batteries are long gone.) HiLo48 ( talk) 21:24, 23 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Yah, but can you still source those replacement red nipples? They wear out, you know. The feel of a brand new one under your fingertip is simply astounding. MinorProphet ( talk) 02:28, 24 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Do you mean the red nipples that everyone I know immediately removes? Martin of Sheffield ( talk) 14:22, 24 July 2024 (UTC) reply
We have articles on the Group Areas Act, and apartheid, and Category:Apartheid in South Africa lists many other relevant articles. If you have more questions, then the Humanities Reference Desk is probably the best place to ask. DuncanHill ( talk) 23:18, 24 July 2024 (UTC) reply

July 24 Information

Can't Back Up System Files

I have a Dell Inspiron 3910 with 16 GB of RAM and approximately 216 GB of solid-state storage as the C: drive. I just got a pop-up message saying something to the effect of "We can't back up your system files". It says that if I free up some space on my "hard drive" (which is hard because it is solid-state), it will be able to back up my system files. I don't recall having seen that message before. I do see that I have 10.1 GB free on my solid-state C: drive out of 216 GB. I also see that my pagefile.sys on the C: drive has grown to 26.6 GB, which is what is taking up the space. My question is: What system backup function is there that was trying to back something up, and was unable to back something up? The message was a pop-up, and I can't bring it back, although maybe that isn't important. So: What system process was trying to back something up to my C: drive and didn't have space for the backup? I will, in the very near future, be getting something like WINDIRSTAT to get a better view of how the 206 GB is being used, to see what if anything to move to my F: drive. So what is trying to back up my system files automagically? Robert McClenon ( talk) 18:15, 24 July 2024 (UTC) reply

You've probably told us before, but which version of Windows are you using? Is there a load of Dell stuff in your Start Menu? Do you ever use such apps? Could be a cause. Maybe try disabling them sequentially in Services via Windows Task Manager. To reduce disk usage, perhaps try the resident Disk Cleanup app. Try using a fixed-size paging file. Delete the contents of your Temp folder and Recycle Bin. Purge your browser's cache frequently (In Firefox, press Ctrl+Shift+Delete, select 'Cache' only.) Your mileage may vary. MinorProphet ( talk) 22:19, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply
User:MinorProphet - You have addressed a question which I might have reasonably been asking, but not the question that I was asking. You have told me how to free up space on my disk. I already have plans for freeing up space on my disk. What I am asking is what process was trying to back something up on my C: drive. But thank you for useful general advice. Robert McClenon ( talk) 07:06, 27 July 2024 (UTC) reply
I am running Windows 11, and I think that I have the personal version. (Are there a personal version and a business version?) Robert McClenon ( talk) 07:06, 27 July 2024 (UTC) reply
@ Robert McClenon: Hi, sorry for the slow reply, I don't come here every day. Last question first: You probably have the 'Home' version as opposed to the 'Pro/Professional' version. It's mostly to do with Pro's office networking capabilities. My main question may have been camouflaged by my suggestions: Does your PC have any pre-installed Dell software? If so, I found this page from Dell with plenty of screenshots which might prompt some memory of that transient pop-up, in case it wasn't anything to do with Windows. Just attempting to eliminate likely suspects. MinorProphet ( talk) 16:46, 1 August 2024 (UTC) reply
Hi I just noticed your query further down: You said you had Norton Safe Web installed. Do you have any other Norton apps/utilities installed? Might they have been attempting to back up your hard drive? MinorProphet ( talk) 16:56, 1 August 2024 (UTC) reply
Take a screenshot of the message when it happens again. That should definitely help identify what is trying to do this backup - I'm pretty sure you have paraphrased the error rather than given the exact wording. My first guess would be: disable OneDrive on your system. In this video at 00:44 you can see an option at the top that says "back up important PC folders to OneDrive" - something you can check and consider whether you want to disable it. My opinion: all unencrypted backups are data breaches waiting to happen, and data breaches for online data always happen given enough time. Komonzia ( talk) 00:25, 4 August 2024 (UTC) reply

Fourier transform

Can the Fourier transform, using the Fourier series, analyze a function f(x) on a bounded interval x whose members are -P/2 and P/2 for some positive real number P, with frequency being the reciprocal of period (f=1/T or T=1/f), be programmed in PL/1? Afrazer123 ( talk) 23:43, 24 July 2024 (UTC) reply

no, as the frequency goes to infinity for this, and the coefficients are real numbers that can be calculated, but not with perfect accuracy. However PL/1 could be used to approximate a finite number of coefficients approximately. see Square wave#Fourier analysis for the calculation. Graeme Bartlett ( talk) 12:47, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply
The question is not entirely clear. Does T stand for the variable x or for the constant P?  -- Lambiam 13:45, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply
T doesn't stand for the variable x. T does stand, however, for the constant P. Afrazer123 ( talk) 02:55, 28 July 2024 (UTC) reply

July 25 Information

Are there apps or any software, that can identify one's accent?

E.g, software that can identify a person's native language, when they are currently speaking in a non-native language (e.g. English), rather than in their native language we want to identify.

Yesterday, I presented this question at the language reference desk. However, no one has given me a positive answer yet, except for a possible direction via AI, but without a certain answer. 2A06:C701:7B31:C100:7D63:C50F:C3A5:9744 ( talk) 10:18, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply

You received a comprehensive answer at the language desk. The answer is no. Shantavira| feed me 11:48, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply
AI is used for pattern matching and classification. If there is some pattern that classifies speech as having a specific accent, AI can identify the pattern and classify the accent. AI is not magic. It won't do any more than identify a pattern using one of the many methods of pattern matching and then classify using one of the many ways of clustering and classification. 75.136.148.8 ( talk) 12:12, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply
A more precise answer is that no respondent here is aware of the existence of such an app. Perhaps the NSA has developed one but is keeping it under wraps. If so, how would we know?  -- Lambiam 13:33, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply
It is likely that, for the moment, it is far easier and cheaper to employ non-Artificial Intelligences, i.e. people, with linguistic expertise that enables them to make such identifications. This of course would only apply to specific instances – an AI-like application would be needed for automatic surveillance on a mass scale. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.235 ( talk) 00:18, 28 July 2024 (UTC) reply
People on Hugging Face have created some accent related models but putting that into some piece of software you can use will be a very much do-it-yourself task. Models found there also have rather variable quality, most of them are research projects not intended for wider consumption. With enough data, classifying existing accents in order to infer other accents should be possible. But, speaking anecdotally as someone who grew up in world cities, the way someone learns a language hugely influences their accent... possibly about equally to the languages they spoke before that, and the possibility for error is huge.
Again speaking anecdotally: You should think of accents as individual but similar to each other - usually a property of how that specific person has used and learned their languages, but sometimes completely learned and how that person wishes to speak. You should approach whatever problem you are trying to solve with this in mind, it is not just a symptom of a person's previous languages. Komonzia ( talk) 21:13, 3 August 2024 (UTC) reply

How to automatically search and replace text in Linux CLUI in a multi-lined way?

We can automatically search and replace single-lined text in Linux CLUI with awk and sed, but I need a way to do it multi-lined.

  • File A has several HTML structures.
  • File B has this HTML structure:
    <footer class="site-footer">
      <div class="site-footer__inner container">
        {{ page.footer_top }}
        {{ page.footer_bottom }}
      </div>
    </footer>
  • File C has this HTML structure:
    <footer class="site-footer">
      <div class="site-footer__inner container">
        {{ page.footer_top }}
        {{ page.footer_bottom }}
      </div>
      <span class="globalrs_dynamic_year">{{ 'now' | date('Y') }}</span>
    </footer>

How to automatically search in file A and if it contains the text of file B then replacing that text with the text of file C?

How would you do this with C/Perl/Python/PHP/Node.js or something else? 103.199.70.159 ( talk) 19:06, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply

While it would be trivial to do this in Python or any other reasonable programming language, if I wanted to do this with a script, my approach would be:
  1. . Convert all three files to a version which eliminates newlines, using sed. For convenience, I would replace the newline character with some character or string which would not occur in the HTML, call it '~' (tilde).
  2. . Now add a newline to change the tilde in every occurrence of "</footer>~" to a newline in each of the three converted files. Do the same for "~<footer class="site-footer">". You end up with files where the html of interest is on a single line.
  3. . Use sed to do the substitution of the single line file C text to replace the single line file B text in the single line file A text.
  4. . Use sed to convert single line file A back to the original formatting by replacing '~' with newline.
This won't work if files B and C are not marked with the exact footer head and tail as you have shown.- Gadfium ( talk) 20:46, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply
In any programming langauge, A, B, and C are just text. So, you use a string replace function. In C++, it is (from memory) replace(A,B,C);. In Perl (again from memory), it is A=~s/B/C/;. In PHP, it is $A=str_replace($B,$C,$A);. In Python, it is A = A.replace(B,C);. In Node.js it is A = A.replace(B,C) as well. Note that in a programming language, a string is just a string of characters. It doesn't care if there are newline or return characters in it. So, replacing a substring replaces it all, including the return and newline characters. But, the text has to match perfectly. For example, if A is using two spaces for indentation and B is using tab characters, it won't match. Similarly, if one uses all lower case tag names and another uses all upper case tag names, it won't match. In that case, you need to reformat the text so it is all the same or use regular expressions. 75.136.148.8 ( talk) 13:31, 26 July 2024 (UTC) reply
The Unix/Linux utility sed can do this; see sed § Multiline processing example. The search ["sed" multi-line replace] gives some more examples.  -- Lambiam 23:01, 26 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Since the OP asked for a Perl solution, here is a simple one.
my $orig = `cat $ARGV[0]`;
my $repl = `cat $ARGV[1]`;
my $text = `cat $ARGV[2]`;
$text =~ s:$orig:$repl:g;
print $text;
CodeTalker ( talk) 18:57, 27 July 2024 (UTC) reply

July 27 Information

Fast Fourier transform

Can a relational database, with its set of rows and columns, support the computerization of the Fast Fourier transform ? Afrazer123 ( talk) 04:40, 27 July 2024 (UTC) reply

No. The FFT algorithms require computations based on the indices. This is not supported by relational databases. The notion of index is in fact alien to the relational model, which is essentially an unordered set of tuples (the rows) of named values (as identified by the row names). One can add the index as a key, basically an extra column, but this does not help. The SQL-type languages that come with such databases also do not support the recursion used by FFT algorithms.  -- Lambiam 13:18, 27 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Thanks for the reply. How pulsating! It seems there's a discharge of some sort which apparently isn't taken into consideration by the RDB while using an extra column (key) only exacerbates things. Also, SQL appears to be to confining, off-limits for the algorithm's recursion. Afrazer123 ( talk) 02:09, 28 July 2024 (UTC) reply

July 28 Information

Turning Off Ad Blocker

If I am using Firefox and Windows 11, and a web site asks me to turn off my ad blocker, and I don't know what ad blocker I am using, how do I determine what ad blocker I am using, so that I can turn it off? This is sort of a strange question, because I don't want to deal with ads, but I would rather just ignore the ads than deal with web sites that aggressively fight ad blocking. I do have Norton Safe Web. I don't know if it tries to block ads. Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:23, 28 July 2024 (UTC) reply

Hi, Robert McClenon! In Windows 10 which I'm on, such blockers appear (with other things) in a drop-down list of 'Extensions' found by clicking a jigsaw-puzzle corner piece at the top right corner of the Firefox window. I had a similar problem (with YouTube) until I discovered that Malwarebytes had added ad blocking to its functions. Hope this helps. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.235 ( talk) 20:54, 28 July 2024 (UTC) reply
The better way to get around this is to reconfigure your RAM firewall to exclude cloud analytic encryption on your virtual platform. Pretty simple fix, will take about 30 seconds. Jidarave ( talk) 21:49, 28 July 2024 (UTC) reply
The above post is nonsensical. Philvoids ( talk) 22:53, 28 July 2024 (UTC) reply
This is probably the same troll who reappears here periodically to post gibberish like this before getting blocked. CodeTalker ( talk) 06:52, 29 July 2024 (UTC) reply
It looks like perfectly legit response from AI. Maybe someone is training their bot to replace human editors on Wikipedia. 75.136.148.8 ( talk) 12:50, 29 July 2024 (UTC) reply
The responses by LLMs tend to read like something a human could actually have written as a reasonable response, using terms from the question. This response does not. It looks contrived to sound impressive while making no sense whatsoever.  -- Lambiam 22:51, 29 July 2024 (UTC) reply
I'm glad it's confirmed to make no sense, because although I didn't understand it, I feared that to be because of my limited knowledge of IT.
This sidetrack being dealt with, can anybody give a better answer than mine to the OP's query? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.235 ( talk) 18:03, 30 July 2024 (UTC) reply
A long shot, but are you using NoScript in Firefox by any chance? It's a kind of an ad-blocker on steroids and because it completely blocks scripts (unless you allow them) it can be difficult to know what's getting blocked. Using the "temporary allow" function usually gets me past things, but sometimes I end up having to switch to incognito mode (which I have setup to run without NoScript). Matt Deres ( talk) 16:02, 31 July 2024 (UTC) reply
In Firefox's Privacy and Security settings, if you have tracking protection set to Strict, try setting it back to Standard. This should help. win8x ( talking | spying) 20:19, 31 July 2024 (UTC) reply

July 29 Information

Can you delete and then undelete your twitter account?

This is about the incident with Pete Souza and an intactly-eared Donald Trump photo. [1] Souza apparently deleted his twitter account after both he and the Trump photographer took heat. Question: can he undelete it later, and get his old tweets back? I mean using normal Twitter features. Presumably someone famous like Souza could get Elon's, um, ear for a special request, but let's not count that. Thanks. 2602:243:2008:8BB0:F494:276C:D59A:C992 ( talk) 23:39, 29 July 2024 (UTC) reply

According to [2] you have 30 days to reactivate your account. After that, it cannot be recovered. RudolfRed ( talk) 15:50, 30 July 2024 (UTC) reply


July 31 Information

Alternating between dark and light mode?

I work on Google Sheets spreadsheets all day and I don't like how bright light mode gets during sunset. I don't like the look of dark mode either, so I'd prefer to only use dark mode during the sunset time or night. Does anyone know if this is a thing that Google has allowed for? Is there an extension that does this? I could try making a Chrome extension but this is not something I have done before. ― Panamitsu (talk) 05:46, 31 July 2024 (UTC) reply

Google Maps does this automatically when in satnav mode, but I don't know if it is extendable to other products. -- Verbarson   talk edits 10:30, 31 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Neither of the above are exactly what you want, but it might come close. The "colour temperature adjustment" apps might be closer to what you actually want, since it isn't dark mode. Things get slightly more 'red' when it is active, but your eyes will get used to it - I use it myself. Komonzia ( talk) 20:57, 3 August 2024 (UTC) reply

August 1 Information

Tweaking the "Format Axis" options in Excel

If you have a chart or pivot chart in Excel, you can double click on the X axis to bring up a pane that gives you all kinds of formatting options, including setting minimum and maximum bounds for the graph. So, you can set the maximum value to be $1,000 and any values that go above that either don't display or are cut off (depending on the chart type). My problem is that, I need to set such a maximum, but I want it to truly act like a maximum value instead of a set number. Like, if the user's choice of filters means that the chart never comes near the boundary I set, then the upper and lower limits should behave dynamically. Is there a way to do that?
If that's hard to picture, here's an example: we sell 10-20 apples and 200-300 oranges each month, so the monthly totals are mostly around 250 or so. But one month we had a crazy value: we sold 10,000 oranges. The chart is unreadable if we leave the defaults in, so we set a maximum value of, say, 350. Now we can read it. But if the user selects "apples" from the filter, the graph becomes unreadable the other way around: we've forced the upper bound of the X-axis to be 350 and the apples are now just a ripple across the bottom of the chart. What I want is for Excel to dynamically resize the chart like it normally does, but not go past my maximum. Can it be done? Googling has not been fruitful so far. Matt Deres ( talk) 19:11, 1 August 2024 (UTC) reply

I understand that you do not want to chart dynamically all the monthly apple totals. Instead you may chart dynamically the minimum of two values, viz. each month's apple total and a numerical limit of 350. Use the Excel MIN function. Philvoids ( talk) 18:19, 2 August 2024 (UTC) reply
Sorry, that is completely unrelated to what I'm talking about. I'm trying to control the way the graphs establish limits to the X-axis. Matt Deres ( talk) 01:43, 3 August 2024 (UTC) reply

August 3 Information

newline

If you use {{subst:Welcome-newuser|heading=no}} it insert an extra newline at the top. Can that be fixed? Thanks, Polygnotus ( talk) 02:20, 3 August 2024 (UTC) reply

This is not a good place to ask; try instead Template talk:Welcome, or, if that yields no response, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). I can report that the extra newline issue already appears for just {{ Welcome|heading=no}}.  -- Lambiam 11:47, 3 August 2024 (UTC) reply
Thank you, I moved it there. Polygnotus ( talk) 15:09, 3 August 2024 (UTC) reply

August 4 Information

Karnaugh map/gates

As of now, is the 'or' gate better at handling electricity vs the 'and' gate? Afrazer123 ( talk) 01:29, 4 August 2024 (UTC) reply

That will depend on the implementation, and what electrical state represents the 0 or 1. And it also depends on what you mean by "better". (faster, less energy wasted, smaller, least noise, least sensitive to noise, fan out, tolerance of power supply variation, cheaper, higher yield). Graeme Bartlett ( talk) 10:47, 4 August 2024 (UTC) reply