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

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January 22

How painful will the upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 be?

How painful will the upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 be? That is, will applications have to be reinstalled? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:57, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we can't really a make predictions as per WP:CRYSTALBALL, but from what I've seen, you don't need to reinstall anything, and it's free for the first year, so it shouldn't be any more painful than using Windows normally is. On the right side, the start menu is actually back. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie | ^{Say Shalom!} 2 Shevat 5775 06:04, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

I upgraded from Windows 7 to 8 when it came out. I wasn't supposed to have to reinstall things. But it never worked very well until I did a clean install and reinstall everything. It takes me about two weeks, working several hours a day to reinstall everything - tracking down the original CDs, finding downloaded installation programs, installing updates, and setting options. That is my least favorite thing to do. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 06:27, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I never upgrade Windows. Each version tends to be even more bloated than the last version, so, in addition to all the pain of an upgrade, the old PC likely couldn't handle that level of bloatware anyway. So, the only way I get new versions of Windows is if I buy a new PC which has it on it. StuRat (talk) 15:04, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

I know that is probably a good idea. But I would like to get the improvements w/o having to buy a new computer, which would require reinstalling and setting everything. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:39, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

The nature of bloatware like Windows is that the "improvements", if any, are quite minimal, and not worth the pain of installing a new O/S. Of course, their marketing department works very hard to make you think your life will be incomplete without them, but they are lying. StuRat (talk) 23:50, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

I also do not recommend to upgrade existing installations of Windows. Since WinXP there's a tool, called MIGWIZ, renamed in never versions of windows and upgradeable for WinXP. It backups and transfers userprofiles data and settings to other machines. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 18:36, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, but I need programs transferred too. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:39, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

What happened to Windows 9 ?

I don't recall hearing anything about it. StuRat (talk) 15:04, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Following your own link will give you the answer, it never existed, they're skipping straight to 10 for reasons that haven't been explained beyond (paraphrased) "It's such a different product that it wouldn't be right". Of course, they could have just gone all the way up to 11 MChesterMC (talk) 15:15, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like they were falling into a predictable pattern of release numbers and couldn't risk that. So now we have Windows 3.X, 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10. I think they need to do Windows Z next, then Windows -3.14159. :-) StuRat (talk) 15:22, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

And then there's this. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:24, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

That looks like the truth to me, that they don't want to break legacy code looking for Windows 95/98, which only examined the first character of the version number. I wonder why they felt the need to lie about it, though. StuRat (talk) 15:31, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Just a convenient marketing device, I'm guessing. They want distance from the failure that 8 is, and 10 is twice as far from 8 as 9 is. I'm surprised they didn't skip to Windows 15, going retro to the 95/98 meme. That would work thru 2094. (Or 2089, if the legacy code is still there.) ―Mandruss ☎ 15:36, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Appears to be a well decission by giving Windows versions of Millenium Edition, Vista and Eight a closer review. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 18:41, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

One thing to keep in mind is that "Windows 7" etc. are marketing names. Microsoft also keeps an internal version numbering for Windows. In this scheme "Windows Vista" was 6.0, "Windows 7" was 6.1, "Windows 8" was 6.2, and "Windows 8.1" was 6.3. So in a certain sense you could argue that what is called "Windows 8.1" actually "should be" "Windows 9". ("Windows 10" will be 10.0, as they're apparently changing the scheme to be matching from here on out.) -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 20:00, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Windows 10 Preview identifies as version 6.4.9879. Anyone else remember Microsoft Word going from 2.0 to 6.0? Presumably to compete against WordPerfect 6.0. --  Gadget850 ^talk 20:42, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

So it's a point release. --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:08, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

What industries are the social networking sites part of?

What industries are the social networking sites part of? WJetChao (talk) 11:03, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Do you mean which industries use them ? Retailing is a big one, with just about every retail business (restaurants, clothes stores, etc.) trying to create an "online presence". StuRat (talk) 15:00, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Entertainment industry, Information technology, mobile technology, marketing, telecommunications, leisure industry, among others. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:12, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

It is Information technology. There are differents in the business to customers and cooperations. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 18:30, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

I can't understand that last sentence. Did you mean to say "There are branches of social networking which specialize in either consumers and corporations" ? StuRat (talk) 18:34, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

In a social network are lots of user data and stored interaction. The way information is being aggregated should answer the question.[1] --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 21:37, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

It answers a part of the question. The social sites get paid directly by selling info, but that info is only valuable in the context of the industries that provide and purchase it. Someone in the tourism industry wants to promote Hawaii and their competitor wants to know when, why, where and how they can copycat. Whether you're marketing cake, music or global domination solutions, you have to get the word out. And the word is "social". InedibleHulk (talk) 22:00, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Remote desktop without a domain name and static IP address?

Hi there,

I have a Remote Desktop inside my LAN at home but I am wondering if I can do it from outside, from my office at work or whatnot or I have to have a domain name and static IP for that? Thanks, --AboutFace 22 (talk) 19:04, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

See these instructions from MS [2]. My "dynamic" IP somehow has stayed the same all year. Some people end up getting several IPs a day. If yours is rather stable, you might be mostly fine to stop there. If IP changes a lot, you can use a DNS dynamic update service -- Dynamic_DNS#Standards-based_dynamic_DNS_update. There are various more and less complicated ad-hoc ways to hack together things yourself, so that you can tell what the IP of your home PC is when you are out of town, but I don't know much about those. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:17, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

If you're going to open your computer to remote control from anywhere on the Internet, I'd strongly advise you to follow all of the instructions here to protect yourself from automated port scanners looking for vulnerable machines. Also set an account lockout policy, as described here for example (steps 1 and 3). -- BenRG (talk) 20:09, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

I use the free version of TeamViewer. --  Gadget850 ^talk 20:30, 22 January 2015 (UTC)--AboutFace 22 (talk) 02:07, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you much. I think a stable (unchanged) IP address should always be if you don't turn your computer off. I doubt the provider will change an IP address in this case. Besides all you posted is very intgeresting and I appreciate it. Sort of a revelation.

Th IP address in question is the one assigned by your ISP to your router— turning your computer off has nothing to do with it. Turning your router off for a period of time may result in a new IP address. I have seen that after a long power outage and the client thought they had a static IP assigned. --  Gadget850 ^talk 11:24, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

"the client thought they had a static IP assigned" - this is very hilarious. You've made my day :-). It is good to know about the router. I used to have a static IP. I paid close to a hundred bucks a month, I believe. I should check if I have a static IP address "assigned" now. Thank you. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 17:21, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

@Gadget850: TeamViewer, unfortunately, is not suitable for me. I don'w want to install anything on my employer's computer (aside from some desktop links :-). --AboutFace 22 (talk) 17:28, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

@SemanticMantis & @BenRG, thank you for the links. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 17:37, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Security and remote access, OSX tips?

Hi, motivated a bit by the question above, I thought I'd ask a few questions about access security on OSX (10.7.5). The computer used to live behind a nice strong firewall maintained by someone else, and I was confident that a) my computer was relatively secure and b) it wouldn't bother me much/not be my fault if anyone gained access to it. Now let's just say I'm not so sure.

I use ssh to login remotely (and also to log in to some linux virtual machines). I have "remote login" enabled on the sharing pane of system preferences. I have an NAT firewall enabled on my router (that also does port forwarding for my xbox and laptop), but I'm not using the firewall available through the OSX system settings. The questions:

1. Any recommendations for a way to scan my own ports for vulnerabilities? Preferably the quickest/easiest option.
2. Is there anything obviously insecure with the setup I describe? My intuition was that there was no need for the local firewall when I have one on the router.

Thanks! SemanticMantis (talk) 22:13, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Buy a hardware firewall, Cisco or whatnot. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 22:48, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Website design and online memberships

Once upon a time, many online websites required no registration and had no cookies. How did websites develop online memberships? What technical knowledge is required to create and host members' data on servers? How does online membership work? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 22:40, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Simply that we're expecting web sites to do more these days. Initially, they had information, like "We have this widget on sale for $10 and you can buy it at 1234 Main Street, Newtown, TX"...then they made it so you could order the item right from the web site - but that required collecting information from you, name, address, credit card, billing address, phone number. But now you don't have just a single web page anymore - and when you go from one page to the next, the system needs to know that the person who entered this shipping address is the same person who chose the purple extra-large widget - and to maintain that knowledge of who you are from one page to another requires that there is some means for the site to know who you really are. So it dumps a cookie on your computer that says "The Person Who Presents This Cookie Is Steve Baker". Now, whenever you visit their site, they know that you are that person. This works quite well - but fails if you have multiple computers - or a phone, tablet, whatever. If each device has it's own cookie, how does the website know that "Steve Baker on this Android Phone" is the same person as "Steve Baker on this laptop"? For that to work, it needs some utterly unique identifier to link them together. Names are not unique - neither are addresses (two people can live at the same address) - so they either demand that you create a unique 'handle' - or, increasingly, ask for your email address. Email addresses are presumed to be unique - and they mostly are. So now, the cookie says "This person logged in as steve@sjbaker.org" and when you log in from multiple computers, it can know that you're still the same person.

Now, there is a problem...anyone could come along and use your email address to log in and access your account - so you also need to provide some other piece of information that nobody else would know...your password. Furthermore, you don't want some evil person to create an account with your email address...so you end up with the business of sending you an email that you use to verify that you really are the person with that email address.

Hence, we've arrived at a point where you need to create an account, give up your email address and verify that it's yours.

The technical knowledge to do this isn't too bad. Most sites store their user's names and other account information in an 'SQL' database. For most simple sites, you can write software on the server - probably using the PHP language - to generate the login/logout/register/verify-email/change-email/change-password pages - which in turn requires a knowledge of HTML, and possibly JavaScript. The mechanisms to generate cookies and send verification emails are built into PHP, as is the means to communicate with the SQL database. What information you choose to store in the database, and what you choose to ask the user for each time is entirely up to you. Generally, it would be extremely stupid to store passwords in plain-text in SQL, so you should use a 'hashing' function to encrypt the password and only store the encrypted version. Ideally you choose a 'one-way' encryption/hash that provides no possible way to de-crypt it. When the user logs in, you use the same hashing function to generate a hashed version - and compare that to the hashed version you have in SQL. That makes it hard for hackers to get people's passwords by hacking your SQL server.

You could store the users' email address and hashed password in the cookie on their computer...so when they come to the site again, your software asks for the cookie - and uses it to veryify that this person is in your database - and if there is no cookie - or if it doesn't match any real accounts - then you offer them a login or regitster-new-account option.

I'd say that a competent programmer could figure out how to do all of this in a couple of days...maybe a week. But if they are already familiar with SQL and PHP, then a day should be plenty.

SteveBaker (talk) 17:39, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

I suppose this is why companies simply hire a few or a lot of IT people to handle all the computer technical issues. This requires some skill, man, unless the webmaster is also a computer programmer who understands SQL and PHP. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 18:13, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

That's a great explanation, and even though I already know alot of that stuff, I found it very readable and interesting. Thank you. 76.17.126.154 (talk) 05:33, 27 January 2015 (UTC)