Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 October 3

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October 3

Facebook

Hey! I have a huge doubt. Probably it is the dumbest question ever made but... If registration in Facebook is free, how is that the company earn money? Yes, like I said, the dumbest question ever made by someone here at the Ref Desk. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 14:14, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

One word: Advertising. Facebook allows companies to take out adverts on their platform. They charge the companies advertising fees. Companies want to advertise on Facebook because they feel they have access to Facebook's 1 billion members through a number of mechanisms. For example, if you "like" something from a company they can paste a comment - I mean advert - on your wall with the idea that you liked the product so might go out and buy it and so might your friends (I'm not a Facebook member, so maybe someone else can confirm that part). For a company, it is a cheap way of getting their advert in front of millions of people, and each time Facebook rakes it in. Astronaut (talk) 14:52, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Astronaut :D Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 15:21, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

The same thing is true of other sites as well, notably Google. Advertising is a huge portion of their business. Dismas|^(talk) 21:42, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there is an adage here which applies rather neatly: "If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold". I would also add that the particular attraction of Facebook and Google to advertisers is that they know so much about their users - advertisers can target their ads quite specifically, ensuring maximum efficiency (i.e. sales per ad) e.g. they are not restricted to "people who watch a particular TV program", they can go for stuff as specific as "female extreme sports enthusiasts aged 30-35" etc. etc. See targetted advertising for detailsEquisetum (talk | contributions) 22:06, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Some companies (I think one of them was Instagram), do not offer ads, nor charge their users, but live with the hope of selling the company to someone who could monetize the company. OsmanRF34 (talk) 22:29, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

And for those annoyed with ads, there is always Adblock. However it is good practice IMHO to disable it on sites which you support. --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 02:53, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Dimensions of central screw arrangement of monitor mounting plate

Hello,

I realize this is rather a long shot, but does anyone happen to know where I might find the dimensions of the central screw hole arrangement of this type of monitor mounting plate (i.e., the spacing of the four screw holes in a cross arrangement around the central hole)? This type of plate is used to attach monitors to stands by several different monitor manufacturers, so I suspect it's based on a standard (perhaps the VESA standard that defines the family of VESA mounts includes this plate as well).

I should mention that I've already tried contacting the manufacturer of a specific monitor I have that makes use of this type of mounting plate. As you might guess, that attempt has yet to yield useful information.

Any help would be appreciated! 142.20.133.199 (talk) 15:55, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

MIDI files

Is there any program/software on earth which could be used for converting mp3 files to MIDI? I really need it to convert a song to use it on Guitar Pro. Thanks! Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 20:07, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

In general, a skilled person is needed to reverse-engineer an MP3-formatted song and create a MIDI cover of it. There exist low-quality automatic converters, such as Dream MP3 to MIDI Converter, that you could try. --Mark viking (talk) 20:26, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

This has been brought up many times before, see this thread and the many other ref desk links that were provided in that old conversation (the last reply.) It's really too bad that there isn't a reliable and effective way to convert MP3 to MIDI. --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 02:59, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Going with the above, there is nothing that's going to do it and do a good job of it- it'd, most likely, be easier to write the midi yourself than fix the output of anything claiming to do mp32midi. However, for many songs, a midi version is likely to exist and be freely available online; I'm not sure if there's a copyright issue lurking in that, so if you have concerns about such, I have no idea.Phoenixia1177 (talk) 04:16, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. And also, instrumental songs probably would yield a slightly better output MIDI; as vocals just further complicate things. --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 22:19, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

The problem is, MIDI is like a player piano roll, while MP3 is like a phonographic record. This "conversion" is somewhat like playing a song for a computer, then having it make a musical score. While some audio digital signal processing can be used to make computerized guesses, this problem still requires a human to do solve it well. Mentioned above, this is basically a problem of reverse engineering. SemanticMantis (talk) 22:08, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

'git' on a command line

I downloaded the Pywikibot, and used the command prompt to run login.py. While it successfully logs in, it complains that "'git' is not recognized as an internal or external command..." Is 'git' a valid command or not? -- Ypnypn (talk) 23:10, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Not on Windows. Maybe on another operating system. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 01:40, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

See Git (software). A command line git client is probably called "git" or "git.exe" depending on how your operating system specifies executable extensions. You need to install such a client.-gadfium 01:53, 4 October 2013 (UTC)