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I am considering converting my desktop computer into a dedicated server, and my laptop into a portable desktop. If I do this, can I turn my desktop's GeForce 7600 card into something external that I can plug into my laptop, ideally in addition to its existing video accelerator? Will USB latency be an issue? Neon Merlin 01:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
What is the easiest/cleanest way to count lines in bash? I have:
grep -c "" ~/info.txt
But I just got this working by chance and I'm not sure is there is a "better" or "canonical" way of doing this. I know there is wc -l ~/info.txt however, that also prints the filename, and I only want the number of lines. Thanks _ Hacktolive ( talk) 03:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I'm having some trouble working out computer benchmarks. The way I figured, an off the shelf computer bought today (with an Intel Core i7) is roughly equivalent to the Cray-2 supercomputer of 1985. A five year old computer (2004) with a Pentium 4 would have the same computing power as 1982's Cray X-MP. I realize it's difficult to compare, what with FLOPS, Instructions per second, etc., but am I roughly correct? Also, is there a trend (say, a supercomputer to desktop in 25 years) that can be measured? The question came to me as I was trying to figure out in what year the computing power of the IBM Roadrunner will be available as a laptop. Of course, you never know what will happen in the future, the singularity, quantum computing, etc, but a rough estimate would be nice. Taggart.BBS ( talk) 09:27, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
What do I type to make iMacros run a script at a specific time, say 10pm? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Obakfiames ( talk • contribs) 11:53, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
According to this BBC article Windows 7 will come without IE, supposedly to make it easier for people to choose another browser. How will this happen? If Windows doesn't come with a browser, how will the average non-techie download a browser without having a browser to download it with? Will there be a special program which lets people browse for software downloads or something? -- KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) ( talk) 12:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
My Alienware has died again, after 2 years of constant problems which have led me to conclude that there are inherent problems in the system due to poor manufacturing processes, and I have asked for a refund. I want to get a new one with:
I do not want another Alienware, or a Dell (as I hear that Dell make poor laptops, and they now own Alienware - hence my problem!) are there any good suggestions? SGGH ping! 12:31, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I spotted a 2 gig Dell with a non-integrated graphics card for about £759. How is the cooling system on yours, Excirial? Also, Jorgen, I am not looking so much for a "gaming" laptop, merely one that one be comfortable running a couple of games every now and then. I want it for good internet connection and University work primarily, but with a 2 gig'er and a good graphics card so it can play games if I want to. SGGH ping! 13:47, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Samsung R710
HP DV7-2050
Any thoughts? Both similar prices. SGGH ping! 12:43, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Funny. I see what y'all are saying about Dell, and I find it a bit strange. I run a small business (hobby) selling people computers, and I had way too many bad experiences with them to be coincidental. Yet there are some Dells (purchased at the same time) that have never had any issues. So let me throw a few things at you- 1- I propose that there isn't anything wrong with Dell,, just their QUALITY CONTROL. You may get unlucky. If you must buy Dell, get a Small Business brand and not a Home Office brand. You get better tech support from Small Business as a rule, and almost always a better price. 2- I was surprised that no one mentioned ASUS. They have the best prices that I've seen for specs, almost always have dedicated video, may have free 2 year warranty, and may come with a sleeve. 2 of 2 satisfied laptop customers. Note that thee ones I've seen recently have 14.1" screens. They do have all kinds, though. As for their established business, they only recently started selling ready-made computers, but they sold parts for years. They were responsible for INVENTING the netbook (with Intel), and they have the best battery life among them (9 hours so far). Try 'em. Mxvxnyxvxn ( talk) 22:56, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Googling for a freeware that converts lot of images to a pdf resulted in a software that lets you a drop a lot of images into it and it generates a pdf document. This is a nice way to do it, except that there are no table of contents for the document. The images are arranged in alphabetical order. As a result, the document looses the intended structure and it cannot be navigated with a table of contents. Anyway to get around this?. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.220.46.24 ( talk) 14:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
The freeware is called i2pdf 1.0 and i downloaded it from http://luis.no-ip.net/i2pdf/. From what I gather from the help manual, the software cannot do what i intend to do. My objective is to create a pdf document using images, the document would have a table of contents, clicking an entry there would take it to the page containing that image. i2pdf certainly does well what it is supposed to do though (ie, creating a pdf doument from images). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.220.46.26 ( talk) 09:48, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Dear Wikipedians:
I'm thinking of making an Excel data input wizard for a Win32 application I'm developing. But I am loath to wade through 230+ pages of Excel file format material supplied by openoffice.org.
Since the excel files I work with are just tables of straight numbers, with no formulas, no macros or anything else. I'm wondering if there is an API that Excel supplies that would allow me to easily extract these numbers. I am developing my software using Dev-C++.
Thanks.
70.31.157.47 ( talk) 15:39, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I am currently in the process of producing some .ogg files for Wikipedia. Of course, to satisfy our NFCC, the files have to be lower quality than the originals. Around 64kbps seems to be the norm. What would be the best way to do this? I'm using Audacity. Thanks, decltype ( talk) 17:02, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I have one working scanner, a HP ScanJet 3300C. I have three scanner software CD discs: the HP ScanJet 3300C disc (dated 1999, non-XP), an HP ScanJet 2400 disc (dated 2004), and a Umax Astra 2200 SCSI disc (dated 1999, non-XP, non-USB). These were either given to me, or survive from hardware which burnt out and stopped working. I have spend a few days trying to get the ScanJet 3300C driver including the latest versions downloaded from the HP site to work with XP Sp3, but it will not - that is a dead end I have fully explored. The HP ScanJet 3300C is currently using WIA which can do plain scans only. WIA does not do OCR or even photocopying, although the latter can be done in a long-winded way.
My question is, might it be possible to get any of the OCR software on the software discs working on its own? That is, without the rest of the HP or Umax software, and perhaps using a different scanner than that envisioned? Similarly with photocopying software. As an asside, while my HP printer works very well and is very robust, the HP scanner software I've come across has on both ocassions been very bad and would not work, and my previous HP scanner hardware stopped working quite soon too. 78.151.118.12 ( talk) 17:14, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Silverfast does not seem to cater for my scanner. But I have found the freeware SimpleOCR although I have not tried it yet. 78.147.243.144 ( talk) 19:32, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I like to use Firefox's "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox" option to delete cookies, cache, passwords, histories, etc. However, I notice that data pertaining to my usage is somehow being saved. For example, when I go to this site: < http://www.goroo.com/goroo/index.htm>, it remembers things I typed in the past under "Your Recent Locations". Perhaps it saved that data to its own database and associated it with my IP address. But would they really do that for every instance of someone using their site? Especially when I didn't ask to them save any info? And what if I don't have a static IP? Another possiblity is that it somehow saved data to the Windows system?! That seems even more intrusive.
Similarly, I have DownloadHelper, a Firefox extension which somehow remembers how many times I used it (even though it has a "Disable download count cookie" option which is checked). It may not be doing it in a cookie, but it's counting in some way.
Neither of these examples are a big deal, but it is kind of aggravating that they seem to try to sneak around behind your back. I would appreciate any ideas on how they do this (and how I could stop it, if I wanted to). TresÁrboles ( talk) 21:16, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
(Yikes, it looks like I typed out a whole story. I apologize for the length, but I hope that someone somewhere can read it and give me some good suggestions.)
My Sony Vaio SZ780 is useless right now. When I try to bring it up, the power lights come on, but the screen remains black; it doesn't even bring up the Sony /Intel / Phoenix Technolgies splash screen which comes on before I would normally get the option to boot either Windows XP or Ubuntu (which pretty much indicates it's a hardware problem). I don't hear the startup sounds for either Windows or Ubuntu, so I'm positive it's not just the screen that has the problem. So I brought it to a Sony Style store to have a service person look at it, and of course what happens but it starts up right away with no problems! He doesn't give me an explanation, just suggests taking the battery out and then putting it back in. So I take it back, start it up again at a restaurant during lunch, take it home and start it up, so far so good, but I leave it alone the whole day since I was using another computer. When I finally look at it later, it looks like it's suspended. Nothing unusual, but then I discover that I can't unsuspend it. I have to power off by holding the power button down, and then when I try to power up again, it won't work! But wait, the craziness continues! After a couple of days of trying, I come back to it after a week or so, try it again on a whim, and it works! And it continues to work until I take it to a meeting and show off stuff on my laptop, when it of course fails again. Someone there has a suggestion: take out the battery and the AC, hold down the power button for 20 seconds, and then try again (with battery and/or AC back in obviously). It sounds like a strange idea, but it works! I'm confused as to what is happening, but at least I have now have a workaround. Or so I thought up until the point when I got back home and tried my laptop again. Same problem, even after trying the new "solution". And this is the point where I am at today. Power does get delivered to the laptop since the power and Bluetooth lights come on, and the fan, but that's the only thing that happens. I have to hold the power button down to turn off the power.
Even though this is a laptop, I had used it pretty much as just another home computer, and I've never really taken it outside and around with me. So I'm pretty suspicious that the first time this problem occurred was after I had taken it to a meeting (it worked well there though) and back home. Also, after working for a while, the problem manifested itself again after taking it away to another meeting (as detailed above). I wonder if the traveling jiggered something loose? (But this is a laptop; it's SUPPOSED to be taken around with you!) It has only been a few months since I've gotten the laptop back from Sony Service for another problem!! (FYI this heinous one: < http://vaio.wikidot.com/rationale>)
Thanks for reading! Signed, Desparate For A Solution! TresÁrboles ( talk) 22:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I guess the very first thing I'd try would be to look carefully at the copper contacts on the battery and on the laptop. Are they dirty or corroded - discolored? If so, you might very gently polish them with the finest grade of emery board or sand paper...VERY gently. You might also find that the contact is maintained by the springiness of the metal - if so, VERY gently bend them outwards - use something like a wooden toothpick or cocktail stick to get behind them (nothing metal - nothing fat!)...I can't over-emphasise how gentle you need to be. The problem (if I'm right) is - that if the contacts are bent a bit flat - fixing it this way won't be a permanent solution - once they get bent - they get soft and lose their springiness - so in a few weeks it'll probably do it again. SteveBaker ( talk) 00:11, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi all,
I wrote a query a while ago about printing onto canvas using an Epson R2880. Having got it working, I find that the prinouts are much darker on the canvas than onscreen (much darker!). I take this to be because of the absorbency of the canvas. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Would it suffice to brighten up the image considerably using the levels tool in photoshop to get better results?
Lukerees1983 ( talk) 22:32, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Well, there are really three ways to "lighten" a picture. I'm not really familiar with photoshop - but in GIMP there is a tool that shows a graph of how you are altering the brightness.
| * | * | ******** | * | * | * | * | * | * | * | * | * | * |* | * | * | * | | * | * |*___________ |______________ |*____________ |*______________ No change Less Contrast More brightness Gamma adjustment
(Within the limits of ASCII art!)
The "No change" situation has the graph of input-brightness (along the bottom axis) to output-brightness (on the vertical axis) at 45 degrees.
The other three represent three common ways in which you might "lighten" the image...and unless you understand why your image is dark, it's hard to guess which one is the right thing:
If the canvas isn't too expensive, I would try all three and see which one looks best. If you're trying to save the stuff - I would try the gamma adjustment first. SteveBaker ( talk) 23:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Computing desk | ||
---|---|---|
< June 11 | << May | June | Jul >> | June 13 > |
Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives |
---|
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages. |
I am considering converting my desktop computer into a dedicated server, and my laptop into a portable desktop. If I do this, can I turn my desktop's GeForce 7600 card into something external that I can plug into my laptop, ideally in addition to its existing video accelerator? Will USB latency be an issue? Neon Merlin 01:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
What is the easiest/cleanest way to count lines in bash? I have:
grep -c "" ~/info.txt
But I just got this working by chance and I'm not sure is there is a "better" or "canonical" way of doing this. I know there is wc -l ~/info.txt however, that also prints the filename, and I only want the number of lines. Thanks _ Hacktolive ( talk) 03:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I'm having some trouble working out computer benchmarks. The way I figured, an off the shelf computer bought today (with an Intel Core i7) is roughly equivalent to the Cray-2 supercomputer of 1985. A five year old computer (2004) with a Pentium 4 would have the same computing power as 1982's Cray X-MP. I realize it's difficult to compare, what with FLOPS, Instructions per second, etc., but am I roughly correct? Also, is there a trend (say, a supercomputer to desktop in 25 years) that can be measured? The question came to me as I was trying to figure out in what year the computing power of the IBM Roadrunner will be available as a laptop. Of course, you never know what will happen in the future, the singularity, quantum computing, etc, but a rough estimate would be nice. Taggart.BBS ( talk) 09:27, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
What do I type to make iMacros run a script at a specific time, say 10pm? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Obakfiames ( talk • contribs) 11:53, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
According to this BBC article Windows 7 will come without IE, supposedly to make it easier for people to choose another browser. How will this happen? If Windows doesn't come with a browser, how will the average non-techie download a browser without having a browser to download it with? Will there be a special program which lets people browse for software downloads or something? -- KageTora - (영호 (影虎)) ( talk) 12:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
My Alienware has died again, after 2 years of constant problems which have led me to conclude that there are inherent problems in the system due to poor manufacturing processes, and I have asked for a refund. I want to get a new one with:
I do not want another Alienware, or a Dell (as I hear that Dell make poor laptops, and they now own Alienware - hence my problem!) are there any good suggestions? SGGH ping! 12:31, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I spotted a 2 gig Dell with a non-integrated graphics card for about £759. How is the cooling system on yours, Excirial? Also, Jorgen, I am not looking so much for a "gaming" laptop, merely one that one be comfortable running a couple of games every now and then. I want it for good internet connection and University work primarily, but with a 2 gig'er and a good graphics card so it can play games if I want to. SGGH ping! 13:47, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Samsung R710
HP DV7-2050
Any thoughts? Both similar prices. SGGH ping! 12:43, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Funny. I see what y'all are saying about Dell, and I find it a bit strange. I run a small business (hobby) selling people computers, and I had way too many bad experiences with them to be coincidental. Yet there are some Dells (purchased at the same time) that have never had any issues. So let me throw a few things at you- 1- I propose that there isn't anything wrong with Dell,, just their QUALITY CONTROL. You may get unlucky. If you must buy Dell, get a Small Business brand and not a Home Office brand. You get better tech support from Small Business as a rule, and almost always a better price. 2- I was surprised that no one mentioned ASUS. They have the best prices that I've seen for specs, almost always have dedicated video, may have free 2 year warranty, and may come with a sleeve. 2 of 2 satisfied laptop customers. Note that thee ones I've seen recently have 14.1" screens. They do have all kinds, though. As for their established business, they only recently started selling ready-made computers, but they sold parts for years. They were responsible for INVENTING the netbook (with Intel), and they have the best battery life among them (9 hours so far). Try 'em. Mxvxnyxvxn ( talk) 22:56, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Googling for a freeware that converts lot of images to a pdf resulted in a software that lets you a drop a lot of images into it and it generates a pdf document. This is a nice way to do it, except that there are no table of contents for the document. The images are arranged in alphabetical order. As a result, the document looses the intended structure and it cannot be navigated with a table of contents. Anyway to get around this?. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.220.46.24 ( talk) 14:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
The freeware is called i2pdf 1.0 and i downloaded it from http://luis.no-ip.net/i2pdf/. From what I gather from the help manual, the software cannot do what i intend to do. My objective is to create a pdf document using images, the document would have a table of contents, clicking an entry there would take it to the page containing that image. i2pdf certainly does well what it is supposed to do though (ie, creating a pdf doument from images). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.220.46.26 ( talk) 09:48, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Dear Wikipedians:
I'm thinking of making an Excel data input wizard for a Win32 application I'm developing. But I am loath to wade through 230+ pages of Excel file format material supplied by openoffice.org.
Since the excel files I work with are just tables of straight numbers, with no formulas, no macros or anything else. I'm wondering if there is an API that Excel supplies that would allow me to easily extract these numbers. I am developing my software using Dev-C++.
Thanks.
70.31.157.47 ( talk) 15:39, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I am currently in the process of producing some .ogg files for Wikipedia. Of course, to satisfy our NFCC, the files have to be lower quality than the originals. Around 64kbps seems to be the norm. What would be the best way to do this? I'm using Audacity. Thanks, decltype ( talk) 17:02, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I have one working scanner, a HP ScanJet 3300C. I have three scanner software CD discs: the HP ScanJet 3300C disc (dated 1999, non-XP), an HP ScanJet 2400 disc (dated 2004), and a Umax Astra 2200 SCSI disc (dated 1999, non-XP, non-USB). These were either given to me, or survive from hardware which burnt out and stopped working. I have spend a few days trying to get the ScanJet 3300C driver including the latest versions downloaded from the HP site to work with XP Sp3, but it will not - that is a dead end I have fully explored. The HP ScanJet 3300C is currently using WIA which can do plain scans only. WIA does not do OCR or even photocopying, although the latter can be done in a long-winded way.
My question is, might it be possible to get any of the OCR software on the software discs working on its own? That is, without the rest of the HP or Umax software, and perhaps using a different scanner than that envisioned? Similarly with photocopying software. As an asside, while my HP printer works very well and is very robust, the HP scanner software I've come across has on both ocassions been very bad and would not work, and my previous HP scanner hardware stopped working quite soon too. 78.151.118.12 ( talk) 17:14, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Silverfast does not seem to cater for my scanner. But I have found the freeware SimpleOCR although I have not tried it yet. 78.147.243.144 ( talk) 19:32, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I like to use Firefox's "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox" option to delete cookies, cache, passwords, histories, etc. However, I notice that data pertaining to my usage is somehow being saved. For example, when I go to this site: < http://www.goroo.com/goroo/index.htm>, it remembers things I typed in the past under "Your Recent Locations". Perhaps it saved that data to its own database and associated it with my IP address. But would they really do that for every instance of someone using their site? Especially when I didn't ask to them save any info? And what if I don't have a static IP? Another possiblity is that it somehow saved data to the Windows system?! That seems even more intrusive.
Similarly, I have DownloadHelper, a Firefox extension which somehow remembers how many times I used it (even though it has a "Disable download count cookie" option which is checked). It may not be doing it in a cookie, but it's counting in some way.
Neither of these examples are a big deal, but it is kind of aggravating that they seem to try to sneak around behind your back. I would appreciate any ideas on how they do this (and how I could stop it, if I wanted to). TresÁrboles ( talk) 21:16, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
(Yikes, it looks like I typed out a whole story. I apologize for the length, but I hope that someone somewhere can read it and give me some good suggestions.)
My Sony Vaio SZ780 is useless right now. When I try to bring it up, the power lights come on, but the screen remains black; it doesn't even bring up the Sony /Intel / Phoenix Technolgies splash screen which comes on before I would normally get the option to boot either Windows XP or Ubuntu (which pretty much indicates it's a hardware problem). I don't hear the startup sounds for either Windows or Ubuntu, so I'm positive it's not just the screen that has the problem. So I brought it to a Sony Style store to have a service person look at it, and of course what happens but it starts up right away with no problems! He doesn't give me an explanation, just suggests taking the battery out and then putting it back in. So I take it back, start it up again at a restaurant during lunch, take it home and start it up, so far so good, but I leave it alone the whole day since I was using another computer. When I finally look at it later, it looks like it's suspended. Nothing unusual, but then I discover that I can't unsuspend it. I have to power off by holding the power button down, and then when I try to power up again, it won't work! But wait, the craziness continues! After a couple of days of trying, I come back to it after a week or so, try it again on a whim, and it works! And it continues to work until I take it to a meeting and show off stuff on my laptop, when it of course fails again. Someone there has a suggestion: take out the battery and the AC, hold down the power button for 20 seconds, and then try again (with battery and/or AC back in obviously). It sounds like a strange idea, but it works! I'm confused as to what is happening, but at least I have now have a workaround. Or so I thought up until the point when I got back home and tried my laptop again. Same problem, even after trying the new "solution". And this is the point where I am at today. Power does get delivered to the laptop since the power and Bluetooth lights come on, and the fan, but that's the only thing that happens. I have to hold the power button down to turn off the power.
Even though this is a laptop, I had used it pretty much as just another home computer, and I've never really taken it outside and around with me. So I'm pretty suspicious that the first time this problem occurred was after I had taken it to a meeting (it worked well there though) and back home. Also, after working for a while, the problem manifested itself again after taking it away to another meeting (as detailed above). I wonder if the traveling jiggered something loose? (But this is a laptop; it's SUPPOSED to be taken around with you!) It has only been a few months since I've gotten the laptop back from Sony Service for another problem!! (FYI this heinous one: < http://vaio.wikidot.com/rationale>)
Thanks for reading! Signed, Desparate For A Solution! TresÁrboles ( talk) 22:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
I guess the very first thing I'd try would be to look carefully at the copper contacts on the battery and on the laptop. Are they dirty or corroded - discolored? If so, you might very gently polish them with the finest grade of emery board or sand paper...VERY gently. You might also find that the contact is maintained by the springiness of the metal - if so, VERY gently bend them outwards - use something like a wooden toothpick or cocktail stick to get behind them (nothing metal - nothing fat!)...I can't over-emphasise how gentle you need to be. The problem (if I'm right) is - that if the contacts are bent a bit flat - fixing it this way won't be a permanent solution - once they get bent - they get soft and lose their springiness - so in a few weeks it'll probably do it again. SteveBaker ( talk) 00:11, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
Hi all,
I wrote a query a while ago about printing onto canvas using an Epson R2880. Having got it working, I find that the prinouts are much darker on the canvas than onscreen (much darker!). I take this to be because of the absorbency of the canvas. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Would it suffice to brighten up the image considerably using the levels tool in photoshop to get better results?
Lukerees1983 ( talk) 22:32, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Well, there are really three ways to "lighten" a picture. I'm not really familiar with photoshop - but in GIMP there is a tool that shows a graph of how you are altering the brightness.
| * | * | ******** | * | * | * | * | * | * | * | * | * | * |* | * | * | * | | * | * |*___________ |______________ |*____________ |*______________ No change Less Contrast More brightness Gamma adjustment
(Within the limits of ASCII art!)
The "No change" situation has the graph of input-brightness (along the bottom axis) to output-brightness (on the vertical axis) at 45 degrees.
The other three represent three common ways in which you might "lighten" the image...and unless you understand why your image is dark, it's hard to guess which one is the right thing:
If the canvas isn't too expensive, I would try all three and see which one looks best. If you're trying to save the stuff - I would try the gamma adjustment first. SteveBaker ( talk) 23:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)