Messages

1

Off Topic / Re: Debian using XFBurn won't burn .iso to a CD

« on: July 06, 2013, 12:54:33 PM »

Try a different CD. The one you're trying to burn to may already have data or a lead-in on it. A multisession CD is a CD where you try and burn in additional information after information that's already been burned in. It wastes some space and doesn't work on some older CD drives. Not a lot of programs support burning them.

2

Off Topic / Re: I really need to stick with a Linux Distro

« on: July 06, 2013, 12:46:16 PM »

I switched back and forth between Fedora, Ubuntu, Scientific Linux, Mint, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu.

I put Xubuntu on everything that I don't intend to run Windows on now because it's got a basic window manager, a fairly small list of default programs, and uses ubuntu's debian repositories because they're more popular and up to date than most other repositories. I can't be bothered to compile stuff from source although I do if I have to. Being able to use apt-get and get most software I need is a plus.

I currently have a car computer running Xubuntu with a USB GPS that works pretty well. I also have a few live CDs and run it in a VM at work for data recovery. I also keep it around so I can run Octave (I misplaced my MATLAB license) and elinks without having to deal with cygwin and to communicate with serial devices at a very low level using cutecom.

Good luck with your distro search.

3

Off Topic / Re: Need new laptop for college

« on: May 26, 2013, 10:45:50 AM »

Knowing a lot of people in computer science and software engineering, you'll have no problem completing the curriculum with a $300 netbook. If you want to buy something fancier that's up to you. Having something with 4 to 6GB of RAM can be useful if you need to run a linux VM for a class (I know a few people who had to do it) but 2GB is fine if you just dualboot instead. If they require you to do any programming that requires 3D rendering, parallel processing, or using linux then they should give you access to lab computers that will be able to do whatever you need it to do.

I can tell you that in fall and spring semesters I have very little time to play games. I don't know about other people but I would not recommend buying a gaming laptop.

If I could go back in time and buy a new laptop for college, (I currently have an Inspiron 17R), these would be my criteria:

- Easy to disassemble and service parts - those hard drives trays that are on the side of laptops that require you to only remove 1 or 2 screws to pop out the hard drive are amazing but unfortunately they're mostly on business/enterprise laptops.
- Small and lightweight (not a 17 inch screen)
- Something with long battery life
- 2.4 and 5ghz dual band wireless card

I have 4 computers that I use at college.
- My gaming desktop. It's hooked up to a TV in the living room. I built this with the income from my first job and have upgraded it over the years. Mostly use it for netflix, youtube, spotify, and DVDs, but now that it's the summer again I have time to play games.

- Low power "media center" mini-ITX PC with a 40gb ssd running linux. Sits on my desk and I use it for doing research and classwork. Someone gave it to me for free because they bought a new media center for their TV and the resell value on a barebones mini-ITX machine that was originally worth $150 and has no hard drive is basically nothing. I spent maybe $60 on an ssd for it and another $20 for a wireless card and that's it. The computer actually stutters if you try and do anything as demanding as play a youtube video full screen at 720p, so it's a great computer to use for classwork because you won't get distracted by anything else.

- Laptop I bought my first year of college. It's got 8GB of ram and a widescreen so I could use it for AutoCAD. I switched majors, I mostly use it for browsing the Internet now and occasionally typing papers and running simulations in Multisim. The 8GB is ram is useful for running lots of virtual machines.

- Netbook that I got for free because someone caused a head crash on the hard drive (probably by squeezing the keyboard). They bought it on sale so time required to replace hard drive + parts would cost more than replacing the netbook. Someone gave be an old 16gb ssd for free so I've got the computer working again. Bought a USB GPS for it and put maps and all my car's repair manuals on it, it is now my car/travel computer. Eventually I'd like to build a car mount for it. I increasingly use the netbook around the apartment because a netbook is just such a convenient form factor.

4

Off Topic / Re: No Network Adapters... ANYWHERE

« on: April 25, 2013, 08:36:47 PM »

I dunno which drivers to install as I can't see the devices.


Would they be under Other Devices? I don't see a wifi device in there :c

Yes. It will just show up as unknown device under other devices because your computer has no idea what it is.

Just look up the model number of your laptop on the manufacturer's website, download all of the drivers for your operating system, put them on a flash drive, and install all of them.

5

Off Topic / Re: No Network Adapters... ANYWHERE

« on: April 25, 2013, 08:22:43 PM »

If you check the device manager you'll see a bunch of unknown devices, not just wireless card. You'll need to find and install all of them if you want the computer to work properly.

6

Off Topic / Re: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu

« on: April 22, 2013, 11:22:07 AM »

Apple did well because they were able to successfully brand themselves as a premium computer supplier while Microsoft was able to gain a foothold in the enterprise and business world by marketing MS-DOS for IBM PCs and then eventually cornering the whole PC market. Linux is pretty cool and free but developers do dumb things like throw config files all over your hard drive and install to various folders inconsistently.

The best designed OSes were probably AmigaOS and BeOS but unfortunately neither are around anymore in any significant form. Performance wise they were both running circles around both Microsoft and Apple in the 90s and early 2000s.

7

Off Topic / Re: OH NO

« on: April 10, 2013, 02:06:25 PM »

Keep in mind these are North Korean missiles. Regardless of their theoretical range, one will fail to fire, one will blow up on the launchpad, and the third will go way off course and fall into the Sea of Japan without exploding.

8

Off Topic / Re: I forgeted up hard on my first time driving.

« on: April 10, 2013, 01:59:49 PM »

This next turn is super sharp, so I attempt to turn, overturn it, and drive up on a curb, my dads yelling at me, tells me to get in the passenger seat, and I just feel like stuff. He drives me home asking me why I drove up on the curb, I tell him I had no experience, he starts telling me about how he was able to drive so easily his first time.

I did the same thing when I was learning to drive except I also ran over a stop sign that was posted at the corner. Nobody yelled at me though (other than yelling slow down before I turned and also just in general when they thought I was going to hit a fence), and I drove the rest of the way home (after meeting with the police and explaining why I ran over a stop sign).

I was terrified of driving after that but I just kept driving anyway. It's years behind me now, I haven't been in an accident or even ticketed since. So take it seriously, because you could have hit a pedestrian standing on the corner, but also realize that you're not alone, people make mistakes, and you'll be able to drive fine once you get more practice.

I wouldn't call your dad out on it or argue with him or anything, but that's a pretty mean thing for him to say to you. Just understand that he's probably pissed and was scared at the time and take it as a challenge to do better.

So... you got AC in your car? WTF

He's not explaining it very well. There's something called an inverter that takes the 12 V DC output from your car battery and converts it into your standard 120 V 60 Hz output you get out of a power outlet in your house. You can run a cell charger, laptop, TV, fan, whatever off of it, but it's really inefficient and doesn't put out a lot of current (especially if you use a cigarette lighter based one instead of a direct connection to the battery), so you can't plug things like a washing machine, fridge, or wall mounted air conditioner into it. Also they get hot. If you're powering a laptop or charging a phone it's better to use a DC-DC converter, which is exactly what a car charger is.

9

Off Topic / Re: Dear "Females"

« on: April 10, 2013, 01:44:07 PM »

Clearly the only reasonable explanation can be that the women of the world are all in on a vast conspiracy to keep you out of relationships forever.

Or perhaps the problem is you just need to get off your ass and ask someone you like out and not buy into this whole nice guy/bad guy/game theory/PHEROMONES/PUA pop-psych bullstuff that the idiots in the Internet spoon feed to everyone.

seriously forget reddit forever

10

Off Topic / Re: The Computer Megathread V2 - Looking for a budget monitor? Crossover 27Q!

« on: April 10, 2013, 12:46:06 AM »

I don't think the whole hertz argument on LED and LCD monitors comes down to flickering, it really comes down to frames a second.  120hz monitors, provided that you're running a game at 120 fps, would display a much smoother game (ignoring the whole argument of how many frames the eye can see).  Correct me if I'm wrong though, as you seem to have done much more research on the topic.

I don't get the recent craze for cheap monitors, though.  I don't care what panel they use, it's still more prone to failure.  If I'm staring at it for hours at a time, I'm probably not going to spare any expenses on it.  It's like buying a car because it has the same engine as a Bentley, but is constructed entirely of rejected 2x4s.

Frequency is independent of fps, and you can use PWM on a monitor run a game at 300fps if you like and still get 300fps out of it because not all the LEDs are turning on or off at the same time. If you run it at full brightness the LEDs are always on and change the moment the graphics card gives them new information. Same with an LCD monitor, it just changes the intensity of the backlight, you can run some game at 300fps with the back light off if you modify the monitor. You won't see anything, but the frames are still being updated 300 times a second.

I guess technically if you run an LED monitor at a really low brightness, all the frames that are being shown on the off part of the PWM cycle are being thrown away so that would cap your frame rate but I'm not really sure. LCD monitors actually have a bit of a fade between the bulb turning on and off so I imagine it would be less noticeable.

Here is an example of using PWM to change the brightness of an LED:
http://www.waitingforfriday.com/index.php/Controlling_LED_brightness_using_PWM
It's 1 LED but its the same thing as a monitor with just one pixel on it.

Here's another page on PWM (and it's much better than the one I linked to in the previous post):
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/pulse_width_modulation.htm

You'll see that the 2009 MacBook actually doesn't show any lines at all at different brightnesses. PWM isn't the only way to change brightness, so it's always on. The only limit on the framerate you could really show on this monitor is how fast your graphics card can send data to the monitor and how fast the transistors on the circuits in the monitor can switch. There is probably some awesome calculation that we could derive to figure out the theoretical max framerate of a monitor at full brightness but I don't know where to start and it's probably something insane like 10[sup]6[/sup] fps anyway.

When we look at frequency of the display in LCD/LED monitors the only thing it effects is brightness.

EDIT: I didn't get to post everything I wanted before I lost my connection.

I think part of the issue here is that I'm not talking about frame rate but focusing on frequency and flicker. The problem is a lot of people built up knowledge about how CRTs worked and then tried to apply it to LED and LCD monitors and it doesn't carry over because they're not the same thing. One's a vacuum tube with a beam of electrons that excites a phosphor on a screen, the other is transistor based and can turn every pixel on at the same time if you want it to. On an LED or LCD monitor, you won't notice the difference between a monitor with a refresh rate of 5 Hz and one with 500 Hz unless there is actually change in the screen, for example, if you type a word or watch a video. On a CRT, you're going to see flicker. There may be flicker introduced from PWM power source but this will not effect the number of fps you can see, especially if you run it at full brightness.

EDIT 2:
[quote author=devildogelite link=topic=218177.msg6516285#msg6516285 date=1365565289]
I watched a video from Linus from NCIX about 120hz vs 60hz. He was able to pretty accurately tell the difference between 60 and 120. He said there was a difference in how smooth it was. Though they brought someone in who never used 120hz and they couldn't tell the difference.
[/quote]
I watched the video. There is something I want to say about this but I need to make sure it's right before I say it.

Okay, so here's the issue.

Frame rate and frequency are not the same thing. Frame rate is a measure of how fast your graphics card can dump out frames to the monitor. You can run this as fast as you want, in 2D applications I've seen frame rates well over 1000 fps. If your frame rate is greater than the frequency your monitor runs at, you're not going to see those extra frames, they just get thrown out. So if you're running a monitor at 60 Hz, there is no point in having more than 60fps. Everything else gets thrown out, and you'll get the visual effect known as tearing. I think this may be related to PWM in LED and LCD screens.

EDIT 3:

All of these different terms are far more complicated than I thought and I'm seeing a lot of contradictory information. I'm going to read through a couple of monitor patents and some specifications and then I'll go ahead and come back when I actually know what I'm talking about. It doesn't help that frame rate and frequency are used interchangeably when sometimes they're the same thing and sometimes they're not. I'm going to go ahead and leave in the old information in small text for reference here.

I'll make a new thread when I figure it out. This stuff is awesome and it's fun reading about it but it's not straightforward at all.

11

Off Topic / Re: The Computer Megathread V2 - Looking for a budget monitor? Crossover 27Q!

« on: April 09, 2013, 10:26:06 PM »

Haha. To make it more complicated, I should also mention that LED monitor brightness is set by turning the LEDs on and off really fast, so technically they do flicker, but not for the same reason or in the same way a CRT does. It actually uses something called pulse width modulation, and that sets the brightness. You will never be able to see the flickering if you look at an LED monitor, and it only effects brightness and power consumption, not image quality. Same goes for LCD monitors but they use cold cathode fluorescent lamps as a back lights.

Many monitors on the market use PWM even on full brightness, so they technically "run" at 200 Hz.

Source and further reading: http://www.squidoo.com/led-backlight-flicker

EDIT: See this post

12

Off Topic / Re: The Computer Megathread V2 - Looking for a budget monitor? Crossover 27Q!

« on: April 09, 2013, 10:00:34 PM »

[quote author=NalNalas link=topic=218177.msg6514986#msg6514986 date=1365548646]
How many hz is the crossover monitor
[/quote]
This is an interesting question because there are a lot of people on the Internet who think they know what they're talking about but they're just making things up. So I'll go ahead and just clear this up once and for all. I'm pulling this straight out of Scot Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs. It's a book a highly recommend to anyone even remotely interested in building computers. There's some people here who might think "Oh, I've been doing this for years, I know everything about computers," but you don't, and this book will show you that when you start reading it. I know this because I was one of those people, I've been working on PCs since the mid 2000s and do it professionally, and I still learned a lot from the book. You can probably find some edition of it in a library, although it may not talk about LED/LCD screens (there are over 20 editions of it!).

LCD and LED screens do not have a scanning frequency (or a refresh rate, or whatever you call it). The frequency refers to the number of times an electron beam rescans an entire image on a cathode ray tube. This actually involves moving a beam of electrons around and pointing it every single individual pixel at some point or another. LCD and LED screens are solid state (transistor based) technology that refresh every single pixel all at once. This occurs either continuously (basically instantly as the changes are made with no frequency), or at a very, very high frequency (much faster than how fast your graphics card can actually send data to the monitor).

Video cards just pretend it's around 60 Hz and work at that. 60 Hz would be really slow for a CRT and would cause flickering and eyestrain, but an LCD or LED screen doesn't care and looks fine. You will get no benefit from running it at a higher frequency, in fact, you'll actually just waste energy running your graphics card at a higher frequency with no image improvement.

If you look online you'll see people telling you that running an LCD/LED screen at 75 Hz will make it look better and flicker less. They have no idea what they're talking about and you should just ignore them. Or better yet, you can tell them they're wrong and then refer them to Scot Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs 21st Edition, page 659.

You can get weird blurring/ghosting/flicker effects on an LED/LCD monitor, but this is not a refresh issue. Make sure you're running it at the native resolution and also check to make sure you are using a DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort connection and not a VGA cable. If you have to use VGA and the monitor is looking weird, try and use a shorter or heavie gauge VGA cable. You can also try and put a ferrite core on it.

So to wrap it up and answer your question, I'm not sure what a crossover monitor is but I bet it's an LCD or LED monitor, so the answer is it's no hz because that's something that isn't really applicable to it.

EDIT: I see the Crossover 27Q is a monitor mentioned in the thread title. I don't know if it's meant to be a joke or serious. It's not a bad monitor especially for the price, but it's also almost $500 dollars, which is definitely not a budget monitor. It's also DVI only. Last time I bought a monitor it was [url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236052]this one[/url] for $179. I think that'd be a better price for a monitor although there are probably nicer and cheaper monitors than that one. The sound quality on it was also not very good (laptop speakers were better!), but I have a pair of headphones and speakers I use with it anyway.

EDIT: See this post

13

Off Topic / Re: The Computer Megathread V2 - Looking for a budget monitor? Crossover 27Q!

« on: April 08, 2013, 11:16:25 PM »

Hey guys I heard you all liked lots of RAM and CPUs so...

Just a heads up for anyone seriously considering using multiple physical processors: You will need to be using either Windows 7 Professional, or Ultimate, or Windows 8 Professional. All of the Windows 7 Home editions and regular Windows 8 do not support more than one physical processor. Windows desktop operating systems don't support more than two physical sockets period, but I haven't seen many boards with more than two sockets (and certainly none on newegg). If you want more than two physical processors you'll need to run Server 2012/2008/etc. There is technically a limit on the number of cores logical processors* Windows can use as well (I think it's 256), but you will never run into this issue on a 2 socket board running Windows straight on it. The only time I think you might run into it is if you've got a huge server running VMWare and you tried to allocate 257 cores to a Windows VM.

* Small error here, because both physical cores, physical processors, and virtual cores from hyper-threading are all considered logical processors.

There's also memory limits. Windows 8 is limited to 128GB, Professional is limited to 512GB. Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate are both limited to 192GB. With 16 8GB sticks you can max out Windows 8's (not professional) RAM limit.

For both Windows 7 and 8, enterprise is almost identical to professional, but enterprise is pretty much only available in volume licensing.

The limits on RAM and processors are mostly artificial to encourage you to purchase the server operating systems. It's a little weird but it makes sense when you think about it, putting Windows on a machine with 8 processors and 1TB of ram is not a good idea. It's not a desktop, it's a server, and people cutting corners on cost by buying Windows Vista/7/8 for servers are going to be disappointed with the quality and performance, especially when you compare it to linux server OS which you can just run on there for free.

14

Off Topic / Re: STUPIDEST STATE AWARDS 2013 - ROUND II

« on: April 06, 2013, 06:07:53 PM »

I voted for - because it is the dumbest state.

15

Off Topic / Re: The Computer Megathread V2 - Looking for a budget monitor? Crossover 27Q!

« on: March 28, 2013, 06:05:09 PM »

what resistance would i need to slow down a fan to make it less noisy? would it vary on the fan and RPM?

It varies. I don't know of any calculation to determine it off the top of my head but I'm sure if you calculated the voltage drop across the resistor and then looked at the fan datasheet you could figure it out.

I would go with variable resistors or a control panel because it's simpler and adjustable.