Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 June 22

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June 22

When I am asked to unsubscribe from a junk/spam email list, are they simply using a deceptive way to get me to actually verify/confirm my email address?

I was not sure where to place this question, so I settled on this Computers Help Desk. I get a lot of junk/spam email in my email inbox (like everyone else does, I'm sure). Sometimes, at the bottom of the email, it will say: "If you wish to unsubscribe – or if you wish to be removed from our email mailing list – click here and enter your email address. You will then be removed from our email mailing list." (or some such wording). One part of me says: "Great, if I fill in this form, I will be removed from their mailing list. And I won't get junk/spam email from them anymore." Another part of me is skeptical and wonders if this is actually an underhanded and sneaky way for them to actually solicit (and confirm) valid email addresses (and make my junk/spam email problem even worse). I don't know much about junk/spam email. I imagine that "they" try out and test out all sorts of word/letter/number character combinations. Some are real email addresses, some are not. So, the method I just described is a good (or bad, depending on your perspective) way to filter out which email addresses are valid. No? Does anyone know how all this works? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk)

Your suspicions are correct. If the vendor/retailer/organization is one that you recognize (e.g. Wal-mart, your local pet food store, Etsy, Kickstarter, etc.) then clicking on the unsubscribe link will work. If it's just spam that you did not sign up for, then clicking on those links does verify that they got a real person's email address. Dismas|^(talk) 01:56, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

And, if you don't recognize the vendor, etc., then just add it to your spam file and forget about it. You will keep getting all this crap, however . . . just from different people! The joys of technology . . . 50.101.127.176 (talk) 02:40, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Side note in the realm. Many email providers have tailored filters you can set (as a supplement to the program's internal spam filter). I got on some scam Indian drug company's radar a few years back and they and their associates/related company's they sold my email address to send me at least 30 emails a day of this shit. Almost all go directly into my trash folder because I have set my filters to recognize about 40 different words in the body of the email they just can't resist including, that I doubt any email I would actually want would ever contain. You can Google how to set spam filters for whatever email provider you have.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:53, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I have made a distinction between what I call mainstream spam and what I call rogue spam. Mainstream spam is sent by reputable merchants under their own names. Rogue spam is sent by rogues, usually using false domains. The CAN-SPAM act requires bulk mailers to remove you from their mailing list on your request. Mainstream spammers will comply. (A few make it difficult, by using some sort of CAPTCHA, but most will comply readily.) Rogue spammers will not, and, in fact, responding to the Remove link is actually a way to confirm that you are a live mailing address. (Because of the way that spammers recycle mailing lists, a lot of their mailing addresses are dead.) Unless you know who the bulk mailer is and that they are reputable, it is probably a device to get you to confirm your email address. This hasn't changed much in nearly two decades. The rogue spammers either don't comply with the CAN-SPAM requirement to allow you to request removal, or they aren't subject to it at all. (They aren't subject to it if they are outside the United States.) Don't request removal of your name from spam unless you know who the merchant is. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:39, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:10, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Suddenly have almost no space on my hard drive!

I went away for the weekend but forgot to shut my computer down. Tonight when I got back I saw that I went from 100GB of space available on my drive to 45 GB! How do I determine what got downloaded and when so I can clean up some space? 50.101.127.176 (talk) 01:44, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Try WinDirStat. After it runs for a few minutes, it gill give you a visual presentation of how your disk space has been consumed. With a little exploring, you should be able to find the culprit. Other disk space analyzers are listed at the bottom of our WinDirStat page. -- Tom N talk/contrib 03:36, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Something ate up 55GB while he was away. Is there an easy way to show recent new files? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:38, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

I just list folders and files in order of date modified, though there might be a better way. Dbfirs 08:12, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

First stay offline and clear some caches manually: Run %TEMP% to enter the temporary files folder. Use Shift+Del to bypass the trashcan when deleting files. Run %APPDATA% delete the folder macromedia when not designing flash files yourself. If not enough space and using Firefox at any time, leave the Roaming folder, and change to the folder Local. Delete the folder Mozilla. Never delete this one in the Roaming folder when not willing to loose history, bookmarks, addons and other settings. Run chkdisk to test for filesystem problems. Backup Your data first before fixing with chkdsk /f. Use CCleaner to drop caches and useless garbage on the drive. When using several user profiles on the computer, each user needs to run CCleaner. Check the folders windows\catroot and windows\catroot2. Look for Microsoft KB articles only to do troubleshootung with contents of these folders. Then search for any file inside the users folder. Sort by date. Check what was changed or created. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 12:12, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Why is Bing so shit compared to Google?

huh? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Le petit fromage (talk • contribs) 13:32, 22 June 2015‎

I would venture to say they have better Web_crawlers and indexing than the other search providers. Here is a link to explain how search engines work - Google just does it better. http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing.html "When it comes down to it, searching the web without Google is like straining sewage with your teeth." http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20140607 196.213.35.146 (talk) 14:24, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I think the problem is user-preference and brand identity. Search quality is very subjective. In a study conducted in 2013, when the formatted HTML is made to look like Google's web page, people preferred Bing's algorithmic search results by a factor of 2 to 1 over Google's algorithmic search results in a double-blind experiment. Many web users have been conditioned to look for Google styles and branding, to the exclusion of actually reading the content of the web-page they're reading. This is why Google hires research psychologists to study all the data they collect, including the fonts you see on their page. When you use a search engine and participate in "big data," you are proverbially a rat in a maze, and your responses and preferences are being studied.

Personally, I avoid using web search engines whenever possible. I find that knowing good web resources (by reading extensively) results in dramatically superior information quality, compared to having a computer spit commercialized algorithmic results at me. Nimur (talk) 14:53, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't have much faith in your Bing link/reference. I call Promotion_(marketing) on that one. 41.6.60.241 (talk) 18:04, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Any study that challenges your assumptions, which is funded by and published by the commercial entity it benefits, should cause serious skepticism (see e.g. Tobacco advertising and how every toothpaste brand is recommended by [x] out of [x+1] dentists). In fact the Bing study, sponsored by Bing, was a sample size of only 1000 people but in the ads they combined it with their "bing it on" campaign inviting users to choose which they prefer. Millions of people participated in that one ... but they didn't release the results -- they just advertised the "millions" along with the results of the study of 1000 (and who knows how many sets of 1000 they had to test before finding one with favorable results). See: Freakonomics and Network World for a couple stories about this. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:22, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

While that is a fair rebuttal - I won't pretend the Bing study was funded by an impartial observer - it does not in se invalidate the result. It does suggest that we should study the issue in greater depth. In fact, one of the articles I linked to earlier already was the rebuttal to your rebuttal: Challenging the Challenge to the Bing It On Challenge. Nimur (talk) 20:16, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Justifying your point... According to research like this... The universe of results that a search engine will spit out is actually very very small. There is a lot of technical stuff in that paper and similar ones that demonstrate that the top 10 search results are shown between 20% and 30% of the time. In my opinion, that means that the general public is being directed to the top 10 sites at least 20% of the time. Therefore, the search engine isn't really helping you search for anything. It has a very small set of sites that it emphasizes and it is using your query to try and direct you to one of those sites. 199.15.144.250 (talk) 16:06, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

By the time anybody had heard of Bing, Google was already a household name and, since it worked very well, what motivation is there to switch? Add to that the historical ethos of Microsoft and Google, with the latter being viewed largely positively whereas the former was the "evil empire" of technology in the 90s-early 00s. The harder question is what Bing would have had to do in order to overtake Google. The more answerable question is how Google rose to prominence when it was newer. e.g. this article and others (tl;dr - it provided noticeably better search results). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:37, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Loop Problem In Python 3.4

Resolved

Hello everyone. I am now able to successfully write a Square wave to a wav file at any frequency I want. However, I am having a Problem with the main loop. When I write the data to the file, I first get the amount of samples that I will keep the output high, and keep the output low. For example, Lets say that I have a Frequency of 220Hz. I will use the formula of: Freq or 220 / (8.8 * (pow(Freq or 220 / 440.0, 2.0))) = 100(I have to round up to 100) So this means that for 100 samples, I have to write the High byte which is \xff7f. Then at sample 101 I start to write low bytes which is \x0080 for another 100 frames. This pattern will continue until the main loop is finished. Now the problem is the code I have misses one of the samples in the transition from Low to High. For example, In the pattern I described above for 220Hz, my setup will write 100 audio samples for the first part(High to Low) but the next part screws up. It writes low samples from 101 to 201 not 200 like its supposed to. Its only supposed to write 100 samples for the low, not 101. Here is the code I have for the loop. Whats wrong?

    counter = 0
    Max = 100 #This is calibrated for a test frequency of 220 Hz
	for i in range(44100):
		if counter == Max + 1:
			if High == True:
				High = False
			else:
				High = True
			counter = 0

		if High == True:
			File.writeframes(HighSample)
		elif High == False:
			File.writeframes(LowSample)
		counter += 1

Thanks for your help in advance, —SGA314 I am not available on weekends (talk) 16:05, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Your count is from 0 to 100, that is 101 iterations. Change "Max + 1" to just "Max" or set your counter to 1 instead of 0 when you set the value both times. 199.15.144.250 (talk) 16:14, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

@StuRat:You were right. I never though of it that way. I tried to follow both of 250's suggestions but that made it worse but then I set the counter = 0 line to counter = 1 and it works. I don't quite understand you explanation of why this works, but It does make partial sense. Thank you very much. Now I have a perfectly working home built, Square wave generator. Thanks, —SGA314 I am not available on weekends (talk) 16:28, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

(I had said to reset the counter to 1, while leaving the initialization at 0, but reverted myself when I saw there was already an answer, not noticing that the previous answer mistakenly said to change the initialization to 1.) StuRat (talk) 16:44, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

See off-by-one error. Gandalf61 (talk) 16:31, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Also, you'll want to learn about dithering, or else your sampling (in the time domain) will cause slight frequency errors for any wave whose frequency is not an exact integer factor of the sampling frequency. Nimur (talk) 16:51, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Resolved

StuRat (talk) 16:56, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

How to detect keyboard key presses in python 3.4?

Resolved

Hello again. Now that I have finished my square wave generator, I am now going to build a synthesizer that will detect keyboard presses, synthesize a square wave, and play it back from memory. I know how to synthesize audio and write/play it back from memory but I don't know how to detect keyboard key presses. Does anyone know how to do this in python 3.4? Thanks for your help in advance, Sorry for the endless questions and thank you all for your patience, —SGA314 I am not available on weekends (talk) 17:30, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Are you on Windows? Are you running in a window (not command-line)? The keyboard is part of the environment, so we need to know your environment to give a correct answer. 199.15.144.250 (talk) 18:45, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I am running a commandline python console on Windows 7. —SGA314 I am not available on weekends (talk) 19:51, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

If you just need key-down events, and just letters/numbers/symbols and not special keys, you can use msvcrt.getwch(). If you need more than that, you may have to call ReadConsoleInput via ctypes. -- BenRG (talk) 05:47, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't need to read special keys, so i will just use msvcrt.getwch(). Here is what i wrote using that function:

while True:
	Key = msvcrt.getwch()
	print(Key)
	# Check if the CTRL+Q key has been pressed
	if Key == "\x11":
		break

Thanks for your help, —SGA314 I am not available on weekends (talk) 12:42, 23 June 2015 (UTC)