Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 May 5

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May 5

Information technology in society

what are the positive and negative impacts of information technology in society?60.228.150.165 05:42, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

One negative impact is that students look to the internet for other people to do their homework for them. Why don't you have a look at information technology and come up with some of your own ideas... Dismas|^(talk) 05:48, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Please make it sound like something other than a homework question.--Ryan 14:51, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Going to be building a new computer soon..

..and it'll be my first. I've got roughly $1300 invested in this thing, huge 8800GTX, C2D, 2GB ram, you get the picture. I'm wondering if anyone has advice on doing this or links to tutorials that reference installing a 8800GTX- I'm pretty scared of doing something wrong (short or something) and ruining everything, the extent of hardware stuff I've done is replacing an laptop LCD and installing RAM. Second question: should I be using the case's stock 500W PS? it'd save me about $100 and it's more than required for the card (450W). I plan to be using this case (may change to something with more fans if needed, I don't want to roast my computer) and this card. Any advice would be appreciated :) EDIT: also, should I save my money and get a GTS instead? Is there a substantial difference worth the price (two times as much for the GTX)? I could invest that money in 4g of ram, a monitor, etc etc. -Wooty Woot? contribs 06:01, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Do not skimp on the motherboard and powersupply (which seems to be how you're getting it for only 1300$, half of that cost would be the graphics card), they are very important parts of your system. Especially do not skimp on the case or motherboard as they will be the longest lasting parts of your computer. Keep in mind you'll also want a new hard drive (better transfer rates = faster gaming) and other media options. http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/PublicWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=5225486 is what I bought recently, motherboard was DOA and is being sent in for RMA, but it will be a nice system when it's working. Big pieces of advice, when you get your case, make totally sure that the spacers are in before you install the motherboard, installing the motherboard directly on the case can short it out. Other than that it's fairly plug and play. Keep in mind that even though the stock supply SAYS 500W, it might not actually be 500W because of the way some companies rate theirs. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 10:16, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, NVIDIA recently announced a new 8800 card that's above the GTX, called the Ultra, which is a GTX with faster clock speeds, so if you wait a few weeks you might make a significant savings on the other 8800s going down in price. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 10:17, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

What are spacers? Down M. 11:34, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

A spacer is a piece of hardware that rises something above a point where it would be naturally screwed in. For example, one would put a spacer on the screw behind the motherboard so it doesn't come in direct contact with the case. 12:17, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Little thingies that go between motherboard and casing. So, when you are screwing your motherboard, screw goes through the motherboard first, then through the spacer and only then to the casing, so there is always space between motherboard and casing. Little googling found [1] from [2] and [3]. Shinhan 12:19, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Right, if you screw that up I heard Bad Things happen :) I was planning to use [4] as my HD (I don't need a lot of space, I don't have many large files, and I'm currently using 2% of my 160GB on my file server) and [5] as my mobo. Both seem relatively well-priced and well reviewed so I should be OK in that department. I'm going to be waiting at least two weeks anyway so I'll watch the prices. Who needs better than a 8800GTX!?!?! Crazy gamers, I guess. Thanks. :) -Wooty Woot? contribs 18:34, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Hey:) I play a lot of games, save your money and get a GTS, never buy the best card, it's a waste of money since nothing uses the technology yet anyway, it's MUCH better to stay one step from the top, save the money and upgrade more often. Also, why that mobo? It's not a big brand and has SLI, look up gigabyte DS3, it's a great board and even cheaper then the one you chose. Vespine 00:37, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

The EVGA board is the nVidia reference board for the 680i chipset and does perform well, however, the chipset used for the dual gigabit ethernet isn't exactly smooth, so you'll notice a spike in cpu usage when hammering the lan, this can be an issue if you plan to game online. Personally, I'd put a dedicated NIC in your bundle and disable the onboard stuff, go for a decent 100mb card unless you NEED gigabit ethernet at home (and have a gigE switch of course). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.86.38.170 (talk) 16:23, 10 May 2007 (UTC).

Massive Ext. Hdd mess!

Over the pass 2 years i have been backing up my windows xp pc to a 300GB External hard drive. Every time my pc stopped working i would copy everything onto the Ext. Hdd and clean wipe the pc clean (format C:). This worked great for a time....until my hdd filled up. So i found alternative ways to fix my pc (i.e Bartpe and Norton Systemworks) but now unfortunately i am left with a really messy hdd. Many files duplicate multiple times (of course in different directories) and many are important work files and home photos that i can not afford. And In a attempt to clean the Hdd up i have made it much worse.

Question: Can anyone recommend any software (i.e. File Explorers) that would aid in the recovery process of my hdd? Or any advice? Thanks heaps! :) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by I.scheme.a.lot (talk • contribs) 09:47, 5 May 2007 (UTC).

Depends on whats wrong, spinrite from grc.com is good at recovering unreadable sectors from hard disks, recovering them to somewhere spare and marking the sector as bad (so it wont be re-used in the future). A company called OnTrack produce data recovery tools which will help recover deleted files (ontrack.com). Finally, as for helping with your massive deleting mission, its not going to be easy, you have to be CERTAIN that the files are the same before deleting them, and I can't think of any tools which will do this. The last time I did the job, I created a folder on my main hard disk (e.g. My Documents) and then copied all the other My Documents backups into the 1 folder, this made windows ask me which to keep when duplicates were found, but you are likely to spend many hours clicking Yes and No. The only other method is to write a script which creates an index of everything on the hard drive (path, filename, date modified) then parse the file to find duplicates to create a list of files to discard and then delete them for you. 81.86.38.170 16:30, 10 May 2007 (UTC)Phill Upson (support@expertrepair.co.uk)

XP Remote Desktop

In my computer the Remote Desktop Option when I see the other desktop (my friend) can I copy or

cut any file(any size) from my friend desktop and paste on my computer normally as inside

my computer ? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 195.229.236.215 (talk) 12:02, 5 May 2007 (UTC).

Nope. You need to use Samba or set up some file server on one computer. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 149.135.28.77 (talk) 12:12, 5 May 2007 (UTC).

I remember that if you tinker with the preferences you can mount your own harddrives onto the remote computer and copy and paste between them. --antilived^{T | C | G} 12:21, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Yes, you can copy files to and from a computer you're Remote Desktop'ed into. Before you connect, click the Options button, go to the Local Resources tab and check Disk drives. The disk drives on your computer will show up on your friend's computer when you connect. You can then copy and paste to and from them as you would normally. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 12:26, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

This obviously won't work with rdesktop, however. 12:36, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes it does. Have you read the man page? -r disk: option --Spoon! 21:25, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

No parallel port for dongle

Can a USB/parallel port adapter be used for a dongle?Kmk57 12:54, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

In your question you say "adapter", so do you mean that you want to know if you can have say a parallel port dongle and use an adapter to make it work with your USB port? (Or visa verse?). I'm not sure, but I think it depends on how the software is programmed to detect the dongle. If it's programmed to specifically communicate with your parallel port and you offer it a USB (with the dongle attached) I don't know if it would have the intelligence to check the USB instead. Hmmm... Rfwoolf 14:00, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

The device drivers that USB/serial and USB/parallel adapters supply will implement the legacy PC serial/parallel IOspace/IRQ interface pretty well, so most legacy software that thinks it's talking to an old piece of hardware will be perfectly happy talking to what is in essence a software port. But dongle implementers are twitchy paranoic psychotics, who sometimes try to implement weird features meant to thwart both software emulations of dongles and mapping/reverse-engineering of dongles. If they try to do some weirdism that exceeds the reasonable-but-basic emulations the USB adapter's drivers provide (nonsense like timing-based stuff or walking around in the IRQ handler to see if they like the look of it) then they might decide there's something fishy with the dongle and refuse to work. Such cleverdickieness also explains why dongles were never very reliable even on real parallel ports with unmediated access to the hardware (i.e. DOS), and why you always had to contend with stupid conflicts between dongles and printers, for example. So the answer is a very strong "maybe". -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:59, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

SHA-1 hash time vs. input size

How is the number of CPU cycles taken to compute an SHA-1 hash related to the size of the input file, if the entire file is loaded into memory first? NeonMerlin 14:26, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

SHA-1 algorithm indicates that it's linear with the size of the input. Reading from memory rather than disk will make it faster, but not change the complexity. --TotoBaggins 17:04, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Google Sketchup and Blender

Does anyone know of a way I can take a scene I've constructed in google sketchup and import it into blender for animation and rendering? Thanks!--Ryan 14:50, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

You can export the models from SketchUp into .obj files (or other files, not sure which particular one though), import it into blender and voilà. Beware though that the models will be very very messy and unbelievably big in blender. --antilived^{T | C | G} 01:47, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't have Sketchup pro. Exporting to .obj isn't available, and I definitely don't have

$500 for this.--Ryan 03:00, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Use a real graphics program, www.gimp.org - free, open source, windows and linux, with the power of photoshop, manuals and tutorials are available online also :) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.86.38.170 (talk) 16:33, 10 May 2007 (UTC).

Precise Determination of Graphics Card

I need to know exactly which graphics card I have in my PC but don't fancy the hassle of extracting it from its slot. I know it's a PCIE Leadtek PX6600GT (from Windows Hardware Manager) and uses DDR3 (from an old forum post that listed all the hardware I was going to use (£108.37 Novatech GeForce 6600GT 128MB DDR3 128bit SLI PCI-E TVO/DVI Grpahics Card)) but Leadtek have produced a few variations of this card, and stupidly in my opinion, havn't named this card precisely. SiSoft Sandra gave me the same name as Windows Hardware Manager. Is their a WinXP or Linux tool that might give me enough info to discern exactly what card it is? --Seans Potato Business 16:29, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Probably not. PCI devices are identified by poking around in the PCI config space (with OUT cf8H) which gives a bunch of really obscure info (the vendor ID and the subsystem ID, both numbers). Windows and Sandra (and other PCI-smart programs) then look this info up a big database (that's how windows figured out which driver to install). The PCI bridge's interlocutor in that PCI config discussion is the PCI-capable device on the graphics card (in this case a GeForce 6600GT), which in many cases has no idea what the brand name or product name of the board its installed in. As you say, there are lots of cards that have that part, and the PCI info doesn't distinguish one from the other, nor the specific buildout on the card (the type and amount of memory on the card, for example). For most devices all you can find out is the basic PCI stuff. For fancier devices (particularly graphics adapters) the driver can interrogate registers in the device's own IO space to recover more info, which the driver typically uses to fine-tune its expectations of the card. So you might find out more if you look in nVidia's specific control thingy (the rather complicated thing that lets you set all kinds of obscure parameters and OpenGL defaults). That said, looking at the equivalent for my ATI card and it still only identifies the card generically. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:46, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

I threw the BIOS version (5.43.02.16 in the nvidia config thingy and 5.43.02.16.00 in SiSoftSandra) into google and it appears that the only Leadtek PX6600GT with this BIOS is the TDH non-extreme version. I'm actually quite annoyed now, 'cause Novatech tried to pass it off as their own but it came with a Leadtek driver CD but the nvidia utility-quoted BIOS implies that it was made by ASUS. I just checked the Wikipedia page on SLI and it says that they only need to use the same chip to operate in SLI so all this fretting was actually unnecessary? When I was first deciding on my components, I was told that they had to be the EXACT same card... I just checked it out on the nvidia website and seems Wikipedia is right... this is good news but I still wasted a chunk-o-time! Thanks for your insight (although config space and cf8H goes a bit over my head) :) Seans Potato Business 19:14, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

See PCI Configuration Space for the "config space". As to the I/O port 0x0cf8, it's one of the methods used to do configuration space reads/writes. --cesarb 15:56, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Search Engines

How do you create a search engine like Google and Ask? Do you know any books that help/teach you on the language script that needs to be learnt? Please could you tell me:

- Either there are any books

Also could you tell me what software to use pleae :) Thank You, Email at —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.43.112.229 (talk) 19:26, 5 May 2007 (UTC).

I believe googlebots run a mix of C++ and py, although I could be wrong. Trying to make your own search engine is like trying to find the next digit of pi though, it takes a lot more resources than your single PC has. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 20:17, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

There are plenty of books on search engine theory in the computer section of your local chain bookstore. As for software, it doesn't really matter. You need a programming language (any major one can do this sort of thing, though some would be faster, but if you are asking about how to do it I don't exactly picture you creating the next hot thing on the first try) and a database schema. If you were just trying to figure out how it works and how to do it, PHP and MySQL would work fine for a small experimental project. --24.147.86.187 13:32, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

See Search engine#How search engines work --h2g2bob (talk) 13:57, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I threw together a basic search engine after dinner one evening using a mixture of sh, awk, and a few C programs I had lying around. It's really not that hard. Once you understand the concept of an inverted file (also known as a full text index), everything else follows easily. —Steve Summit (talk) 15:08, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

IPod Syncing

I know how to get songs from a computer to an IPod. But is there a way to transfer songs from an IPod to a computer?

--70.228.84.67 19:34, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Through navigating hidden folders on the ipod, kindof, but it's such a PITA it's not really worth it unless you have to. It's easier to turn your ipod into a USB flash drive to carry data. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 20:18, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

For a Mac, try Senuti--Ryan 21:19, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

The .MP3 or .AAC files are stored under /iPod_control when you view the iPod in Windows Explorer, you just need to enable the "See hidden files option". If you want to pull the songs off while keeping their original filenames and tags intact, though, you'll need Yamipod (which is freeware). Down M. 02:52, 10 May 2007 (UTC)