Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 March 11

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March 11

Laptop Dimming

My Toshiba laptop, running Windows 10, has always dimmed the display when the power cable is removed, to conserve battery power. As of this morning, it's suddenly reversed, dimming when I insert the cable. Can anyone suggest why?

The Intel HD Graphics control panel shows that it's set to "balanced mode" for both battery and mains operation. No combination of "balanced", "maximum battery" or "maximum performance" modes seems to make any difference. Nor does disabling the "Display Power Saving Technology" feature.

Rojomoke (talk) 07:58, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Some BIOS' have a setting for this. Else see the power management profiles and its settings in the Control Panel (Windows). --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 12:08, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Some laptops have a keyboard shortcut to raise or lower the screen brightness (for example, with my 2006 laptop, Fn+Up/Down did it). While the power cable is in, raise your screen brightness to its maximum using that function, then unplug, and lower it to its minimum. It should remember your "settings" from now on. -- 143.85.169.29 (talk) 15:36, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

If you want something done right...

For a project I'm working on, I need a website, it's a relatively simple site, five pages of text and pictures linked to from the homepage, and a link to an ecommerce page I've already got (provided by a friend that wasn't able to do the rest of the site), only trouble is it needs to look professional, better than I've managed to do playing around with Wordpress and Drupal templates. I've tried asking around friends in the business or commissioning people to do the job, with no success, I've had long, needless delays, people that lose interest or forget about the work half way through, or that don't bother responding to messages, and now I've only got a couple of weeks before the thing has to go live. I'm reluctant to go to yet another 'professional' web developer, tell them my requirements and trust in them to get things done to such a tight schedule, especially when they likely have other work to be doing, so it looks like I'll have to do it myself.

Can anyone recommend resources where I can learn to do this? All I need is a banner image and buttons linking to each page along the top, a consistent colour scheme and visual style, to be able to position text and images where I want them, and some way of editing a fully functional but rather bland page of complex ecommerce features to match that visual style. I'm already familiar with working from templates, Wordpress and forum software mostly, where everything is run through an admin dashboard and downloaded add-ons, but I find those sites never quite look as good, the design and layout options limited to a set list, and the name of the company providing it emblazoned clearly across every page.

86.24.139.55 (talk) 10:18, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Pro tip: It will take a while to learn this stuff, hiring someone will probably save you a lot of time. I am currently working on a website that has to be finished in about 30 minutes. I´ll be back in 30 minutes. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 11:20, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

OK, I am finished. I would like some more information about the project and the technical requirements. The turnaround time for a simple yet good-looking website with 5 pages of content is 48 hours or less. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 11:49, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

@The Quixotic Potato: Yeah I'm not sure they are asking for someone to come along, ignore their questions and solicit for business. IP, codeacademy.com and Mozilla's Learning web development tutorial are both awesome resources, and given a day or so of learning you could be in a position to really start working on this. A great place to ask questions is stackoverflow. Good luck! -- samtar ^{talk or stalk} 13:23, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

@Samtar: Answering the questions that people ask is often not very helpful (as an example I would use your comment immediately above this one). It is often better to answer the questions they should've asked. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 13:32, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

I have been doing web design since the mid-90s and one of the courses I teach is business web design. I am vehemently opposed to using Wordpress (or anything similar) for simple websites. It is not a web design program. It is a content management system. All you need to learn is HTML. It would be nice to also learn some CSS. Then, if you get a little crazy, you can pick up a little JavaScript. At that point, you will know everything you need to know about the client-side of the whole thing. That is all you need to know. If you really really wanted to, you could learn server-side scripting, but you don't need to learn any of that. In reality, HTML and CSS are very very easy to learn. I teach HTML in two classes and CSS in two classes. Yes, I am teaching college students, but it still only takes 2 hours to teach each of them. If I were to teach Wordpress, it would take an entire semester because Wordpress is hard, real hard, damn hard. Even when you think you know Wordpress, you will find that it takes months to figure out how to do that one thing that you really need it to do - and then your solution breaks with the next update. Another metric: Compare the number of Wordpress queries on StackOverflow to the number of HTML and CSS queries. But, instead of busting out a website in an hour with just HTML+CSS, please ignore me and pay attention to whomever it is that responds next and says that Wordpress is God's gift to all web designers (or worse - someone who uses this as a chance to rant about the evils of PHP). 209.149.113.194 (talk) 13:05, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

It is 2016, the world of webdesign has changed a lot since the mid-90s. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 13:32, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Enterprise-grade data storage server for personal use?

My workplace just recently bought an enterprise-grade data storage server from Violin Memory. It cost about 200 thousand €, weighs over 30 kg and stores about 30 to 70 TB of data.

Now I got to thinking, if it weren't for the prohibitive cost, would it be theoretically possible for me to buy such a server for my own personal use? How does one buy such a server anyway? How does one run it, does it have a familiar Unix-compatible OS? And since I wouldn't be interfacing with it directly through a system console, but rather from my own desktop PC, what sort of connectivity could I use between the two?

Here's a link to Violin Memory's data storage server range: http://www.violin-memory.com/products/violin-flash-storage-platform/

JIP | Talk 20:24, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Those kind of things (including the one I looked at) have either iSCSI or FibreChannel interfaces, so you could buy one (or two, usually) iSCSI or FC host-bus-adapters to connect to it. You'll get HBA drivers for most business-class OSes. Management is usually over ethernet, and various units will have a web interface, control from a command line via SSH, or using SNMP. It will surely have a conventional OS on its motherboard (in times past something embedded like pSOS or WindRiver, these days probably Linux or another Unixalike) but you won't interact with that. For enterprise class stuff like this, you'd almost always have to buy it through the company's own sales force (or some agent, if you live in a territory where they don't have their own folks). For cheaper enterprise stuff (say server computers at €5,000) a company's own sales force probably wouldn't be interested in talking to someone who wanted a one-off single unit, and would palm you off on a reseller - but for €200K, I'm sure they'd be happy to talk. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 20:54, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

As to how your OS would see it - depending on how the storage appliance was configured, its storage would appear to the OS as one or several large block devices (pretty much identical to a locally connected SATA or SCSI disk) and you could just mkfs and mount that as you would them. In practice many installations will run an enterprise file system like GPFS or ZFS. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 21:02, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

I should say that these devices are SAN not NAS, and while in common usage one typically calls a NAS system a "server" (because it serves a network file system like NFS or SMB), a SAN is usually called a "device" or "array" or just "disk" (because it pretends it's just a massive honking SCSI disk). -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 22:08, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

You could buy these if you had the money, but you also have to have the environment. A stand alone unit would be rack mount. It would require dual or more power. It would need air-conditioning. It may make too much noise for you to want to have it in your house. And as Finlay McWalter suggests you will have to have a management station of some sort. This will likely need an obsolete version of Java and an old browser to support it. They will also expect you to have a maintenance contract, and regular contact with a salesman. For hobbyists, the second hand market is going to be more affordable, but does not remove environment considerations. Do you have a way to fill it with data quickly? For some of this Violin flash, it connects directly to the PC internal bus to cut down latency. Putting it in an external box defeats that advantage if you need to use iSCSI or SMB. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:27, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

As for how you buy one, contact the sales team: [1]. If they can't sell to you directly, they can refer you to a partner who can. RudolfRed (talk) 02:33, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes. For personal use, there are the right tools for the job also. Finlay McWalter mentions NAS. So, take a look at [2] . Not exactly Enterprise Grade but installing a very complicate system (with all the bells and whistles) in a domestic environment and you will spend all your time just maintain it – as in a commercial environment – where they employ cheap foreign labour on 'green card to do this. With very high read/write traffic/multiple data bases inquiries etc. Yet, how many people in your home are going to want to use you system all at once ? 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11? So something like NAS should suffice. So a NAS would more than likely satisfy you domestic requirement. Anyway, use this critter as your starting point. It has a low power ARM processor – so can be left running 24/7 with out braking the bank. Linux operating system, so no costly updates. Can be configured to provide auto-back-ups. Load of storage space etc. Not perhaps the bees knees in a commercial environment but it works in the domestic.. and is very, very cheap and affordable. Further, situate it in a low part of the house, surround it with ash-blocks/bricks etc. Then if the home burns down or gets blown away by a twister – one doesn't even need to down load and install the cloud back up. You're up and ready to go as soon as the utilities get the power back on, and at 24 watts you could do that on you camper’s solar array immediately.--Aspro (talk) 12:26, 12 March 2016 (UTC)