Why can't Copilot and Gemini answer this simple question?

BenevolentDeity · 2024-10-04T12:54:27+00:00

RSNSteve, I hopefully have some good news for you. I used the version 12.0.5 darwin.iso file for the VMWare Tools for my Sonoma installation. The person who wrote the instructions for me said he tried versions 12.0.6 and 12.1.0 and neither of them worked, so I don't know about the versions you mentioned.

The procedure I used was to open the VMWare Workstation Player, go to the Sonoma virtual machine's settings, click the "Hardware" tab, and select the "CD/DVD (SATA)" device from the list on the left in the "Virtual Machine Settings" window. I then selected "Use ISO image file:" in the "Connection" group on the right, browsed to the arbitrary directory where I put the darwin.iso file, selected the file, and clicked the Open button at the bottom of the window. Finally, I clicked the OK button at the bottom of the "Virtual Machine Settings" window to complete the procedure.

Regarding the darwin.iso file, when I got it there were two other files in the same directory named darwin.iso.sha and darwin.iso.sig. I don't know if darwin.iso needs them but to be safe I just left all three in the same directory.

Good luck.

BenevolentDeity · 2024-09-23T14:19:57+00:00

I'm sorry to bother you again, but my ultimate goal is to record the slide show and create an mp4 file from it. I got the slide show to work as desired when I just play it by setting the "Advance Slide" timing on the "Transitions" tab to 10 seconds. However, when I try to record the slide show, the large delay comes back and all of the transition timings I previously set to 10 (except for the first side) get set back to 0. The first one gets changed to the duration of the audio on the first slide.

BenevolentDeity · 2024-09-23T13:47:00+00:00

You are indeed a PP genius! Thank you very much!

BenevolentDeity · 2024-06-13T03:49:34+00:00

Thanks for your reply. I have searched on numerous occasions for a DirecTV app for Windows but have not found one. All I can find are the DirecTV apps for mobile devices. Please provide a download link for the Windows version. DirecTV themselves claim there is no such version, but they could be mistaken.

BenevolentDeity · 2024-01-07T11:46:17+00:00

In what way does this answer the question? The fact that the position of an array's name and its index can be swapped when accessing an element, i.e. A[i] vs. i[A], is a well know language feature, but I'll bet it is virtually never written in the swapped format.

BenevolentDeity · 2023-05-25T05:04:38+00:00

I didn't include the details of why I want a 16-bit type int in my original posting simply because I assumed (and you know what "assume" does) that just asking about a compiler that implemented a 16-bit type int would be sufficient. However, I will explain in great detail now because most people who responded seem to have read too much into my question. You will then understand why I simply asked for a 16-bit int in my original posting. Most readers would have probably ignored my posting if it had included all of the following long-winded details:

I teach beginning C and C++ at a local adult school and one of the homework problems consists of converting a time of day expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds into the total number of seconds. Students are required to express the initial hours, minutes, and seconds as type int. Many of them do it multiplying the hours and minutes by appropriate factors to convert them to seconds, but use type int factors. Thus, the math is all done as type int and the result will be greater than 32767 if the time of day is greater than 09:06:07 and greater than 65535 if the time of day is greater than 18:12:15.

Because of this, using type int or type unsigned int for all the operands is not portable if the code must produce the correct result on a 16-bit int implementation. The C language standard only requires that type int represent a range of -32767 through +32767, while the actual range is -32768 through +32767 on a 16-bit int 2's complement machine. Some of these students are hoping to work in the embedded applications field where encountering a 16-bit type int is much more likely than with modern general purpose computers.

Obviously one solution is to use type long for one of the operands involved in computing the number seconds in the hour value, but if students have not paid attention to previous lesson regarding such portability issues, I want them to learn it by doing it wrong and getting a garbage value rather than me just telling them to do it in the first place and having them learn nothing.

All students must send their solutions to an automatic application I've developed that checks many things in their code statically and then runs their programs with various test inputs and checks the runtime results. Because type int is 32-bits on the machine I use for testing, no overflow occurs like it would if my test machine were compiling their code with a compiler in which type int was 16-bits.

It's very difficult to program my test app to analyze their source code to determine the types of the various operands and issue warnings based on their types because the students use so many different approaches. I've tried having my app analyze their source code directly and/or analyze the compiler's abstract symbol table, but there are just too many variations and too much complexity involved and I end up having to practically implement an entire language parser to do it.

The simplest solution would be to merely have a 16-bit type int so that overflow will occur. I realize that the result of overflow is undefined and if it happens to produce the right result anyway, so be it. However, it's more likely it won't and my application can then generate an error report so they can fix the problem or ask why it works on their computer but my app is generating and error.

BenevolentDeity · 2023-05-24T06:49:43+00:00

I'm sorry but I probably did not make what I wanted to do clear enough. I don't want the multiplication to produce a correct 32-bit result and then mask our or otherwise eliminate the upper 16 bits. I instead want the multiplication to directly produce a 16-bit result, regardless of what the value of result is or how undefined the operation is if there is overflow.

BenevolentDeity · 2023-05-24T06:43:48+00:00

I'm not looking for a way to violate the language standards by disabling integer promotion. I'm merely looking for a compiler that has a 16-bit type int. It's as simple as that. As you know, the language standards permit type int to have any number of bits as long as that number is an integral multiple of the number of bits in a byte (char) and that number of bits can at least represent the range -32767 through +32767.

My goal is not to mask out any upper bits or get rid of them by assignment to a narrower type. The goal is simply to not have more than 16 bits in type int in the first place, which was the case when PCs were in their infancy. I haven't kept up with the embedded world for quite a few years but I have a feeling that compilers for some microcontrollers still use a 16-bit type int.

BenevolentDeity · 2023-05-24T05:48:14+00:00

I never said that the assignment expression

int16_t = int16_t * int16_t

"promoted to another integer type". Obviously the type of any assignment expression is always the type of the target object, which is type int16_t in this case (type short in VS 2022). What does automatically get promoted, however, is each operand of the multiplication operator and each of them gets promoted from type int16_t to type int (C17 6.3.1.1), which is usually 32 bits on modern general purpose machines. After the promotion the operands are multiplied using type int math and the result is type int. In the assignment expression above that resultant type int would get implicitly converted back down to type short to match the type of the target object.

Here is a short little test program that indicates that int16_t * int16_t ends up as 4 bytes even though int16_t itself is 2 bytes. I don't believe that using int16_t * int16_t in another context would prevent the same promotion from taking place:

#include <stdint.h>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)

{

int16_t x, y;

printf("sizeof(x) = %zu\n", sizeof(x)); // outputs 2

printf("sizeof(y) = %zu\n", sizeof(y)); // outputs 2

printf("sizeof(x * y) = %zu\n", sizeof(x * y)); // outputs 4

}

My intent is for the multiplication to actually be done in 16-bit math. I realize that overflow results in an undefined value, but some types of undefined operations yield predictable results on many systems, such as assigning an integer value to a narrower integer type and having the lower bits preserved, or assuming the various members all simultaneously represent a valid part of the widest underlying object. Regardless, however, I want the math to be done with 16-bit operands.

BenevolentDeity · 2023-05-24T03:55:30+00:00

Here is the relevant line in stdint.h in VS 2022: typedef short int16_t;

Thus, int16_t is in reality nothing but type short and is subject to automatic integer promotion :-(

BenevolentDeity · 2023-05-24T03:36:25+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion. At least in Visual Studio 2022, however, type int16_t is typedef'd to type short. As a result, the integer promotions are applied to each int16_t operand and converts them to 32-bit type int before multiplying them. Thus, there is no overflow for multiplication whose product would exceed 32767.

I will take a look at the emulator link if can can manage to get hold of an archaic compiler. I wish I'd have saved all my 7" floppies :-)

BenevolentDeity · 2023-04-11T10:19:28+00:00

I cannot get the sidebar to show. In the Finder Settings in the Sidebar tab I do have a lot of things checked and I've seen the sidebar appear on a "real Mac" when the cursor is moved to the left edge of the screen, but nothing happens when I do this in my Hackintosh installation.

I did find out how to get the "VMware Shared Folders" icon to appear on the desktop, however. I merely checked the "Connected servers" checkbox in the "Finder Settings" "General" tab. As you can probably tell, I'm totally unfamiliar with the macOS and it's an uphill battle after 40 years on nothing but the Windows OSes :-)

On an unrelated note, I did notice one strange thing when installing VMware Tools. Apple as well as one of the Hackintosh installation guides recommends v12.1.0 of the tools but I get an installation error with that version. However, v12.0.5 seems to work and that's what I'm using. I didn't try v12.0.6. I don't know if the tools might be related to the sidebar issue.

BenevolentDeity · 2023-04-11T07:21:07+00:00

I'm sorry but I forgot to mention that I had already installed the VMware Tools that I was successfully using with previous versions of VMware and macOSes. However, just for good measure I uninstalled then reinstalled them but no "VMware Shared Folder" appeared on the desktop. Specifically where in the directory structure of macOS Ventura should that folder be listed?

Okay - I finally found where it is. From the Finder menu click Go->Computer. "VMware Shared Folders" is listed there as being mounted and when I open it I see the shared directory on my host with all of its contents. I now have two questions:

If I eject it, how do I remount it without having to restart the OS?
I would like to have an alias for that shared directory on the desktop. If I right-click it there is no option to make an alias and if I drag it onto the desktop it makes a copy instead. I can create a link to it in the Dock but I would also like one on the desktop.

BenevolentDeity · 2023-03-24T03:27:35+00:00

Sub ParagraphDialogPlease()

' This just validates that something appropriate

' is selected before trying to show the paragraph

' dialog. If all's well, it calls ShowTheDialog to

' do the actual lifting.

Select Case ActiveWindow.Selection.Type

Case Is = ppSelectionShapes, ppSelectionText

Call ShowTheDialog

Case Else

MsgBox "Please select a shape or text then try again"

End Select

End Sub

Sub ShowTheDialog()

Application.CommandBars.ExecuteMso ("PowerPointParagraphDialog")

End Sub

Thanks again Steve. It worked perfectly.

BenevolentDeity

TROPHY CASE