Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 November 5

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November 5

current form

Is current in its original pristine state considered to be AC or DC? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.35.19.104 (talk) 00:28, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

That's a strange way to describe current! Electric current refers to any movement of electric charge. So, there isn't an "original state" from which we produce AC or DC current. If we produce the current in a way that we can approximate as a constant movement of charge in one direction, like a battery, then we have DC current. If the method of production causes a time-variation, like most electric generators, then we have AC current. If we want to use a very generalized method to describe movement of charge, we solve Maxwell's equations, constrained by the physical conditions of the system under test. When we formulate our equations this way, neither "AC" nor "DC" is commonly used; instead, we talk about time-variations and steady state conditions of the moving charge. You can stretch this terminology to correspond roughly to AC and DC, but that's not common. Nimur (talk) 03:04, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

If you mean natural occurrences, like lightning, then I'd go with D/C. (While it might reverse direction at some point, it's not going to reverse continuously at a fixed interval, like A/C does.) StuRat (talk) 19:54, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

There's An App For That

Hi. Where can I find a searchable database of all the apps available to humans in the handheld digital tablet cyberniverse, including iPad/iPod/iAnything, Blackberry, Samsung, Android, Smartphone, etc., based on keyword mechanism or function/patent data transfer? Thanks. ~AH1 ^(discuss!) 19:42, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

...I suppose maybe there isn't an app for that. ~AH1 ^(discuss!) 18:53, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Printing text files in Excel to be read by C/C++

I would like to have an Excel/VB macro which writes certain cells of a spreadsheet to a file, so that they can be read by a C/C++ program.

I've been using the unfortunate Print #1, ActiveWorksheet.Range("range1").Value, ActiveWorksheet.Range("range2").Value, ... but it fails miserably if "range" has more than one cell. Any ideas? (It would be nice to have lines end only when I want them to, which Print doesn't handle properly, but that's not essential.)

— Arthur Rubin (talk) 20:57, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

This macro exports a range to CSV, which is nice to read in an external program. 46.208.87.106 (talk) 21:01, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm looking for multiple ranges, but that will certainly work for the data area. The parameters to be output are approximately 82 selected cells in 10+ areas. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:09, 7 November 2012 (UTC)