Can I install on Dell Studio 1535 laptop? I have an old Dell Studio 1535 laptop running Vista.  It runs like garbage.  I'm thinking of purchasing a new laptop for most purposes, but thought I would repurpose the old one as a media player/backup/kids machine.  Any issues installing Ubuntu on it?  I've never installed linux before, and want it to be an easy installation experience.  I'm mainly worried about the wireless lan card and the HDMI output working.  If I can get online and use the HDMI output to a tv, I could use it as intended.  These are the rough specs I pulled:  Studio 1535 Broadcom 1397 wlan?? 3 GB ram 2.16 GHz Intel graphics
How do I know if a laptop will work with Ubuntu? I want to buy a laptop at some point in the near future, but not knowing beforehand whether it works with Ubuntu makes the whole operation risky and tiresome. I would like to know if there is some kind of official hardware database where I can enter the name of the laptop I'm interested in and see if it's 100% compatible out of the box, or in case it isn't what is it exactly that doesn't work (ideally also if there is a way to fix it).  Does Canonical have a project along these lines?
Easier way to debug a Windows service I am asked to determine if a series converges or not:  $$\displaystyle\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{(2^n)n!}{(n^n)}$$  So I'm using the $n$th root test and came up with $\lim_{n \to {\infty}}\frac{2}{n}\times(\sqrt[n]{n!})$ I know that the limit of $\frac{2}{n}$ goes to $0$ when $n$ goes to infinity but what about the $(\sqrt[n]{n!})$? What are some examples of manifolds that do not have boundaries and are not boundaries of higher dimensional manifolds?  Is any $n$-dimensional closed manifold a boundary of some $(n+1)$-dimensional manifold? Profile changes in Q&A are not pushed to Area 51 I just noticed that the info text on  is an older version of the text in .  I found  from April 2016 where Adam Lear says:     Area 51 is a separate codebase. It's also heavily outdated. Currently we can push a profile update from Q&amp;A to Area 51, but not the other way around   I think the pushing isn't working anymore. I just updated my text on SO again and it was changed in all my accounts, except Area 51. How to install Python 3.6? Please will someone explain what time dilation really is and how it occurs? There are lots of questions and answers going into how to calculate time dilation, but none that give an intuitive feel for how it happens. As opposed to the generic polynomial form for utilizing the Eisenstein Criterion ($a_nx^n+a_{n-1}x^{n-1}+\dots+a_0\in\mathbb{Z}[x]$ is irreducible in $\mathbb{Q}$) how do we prove that if $p$ is a prime, $x^{p-1}+x^{p-2}+\dots+x+1$ is irreducible over $\mathbb{Q}$? Sometimes, I write the name of an author in a sentence before the citation. For this reason, I'd like to suppress it in the citation. How can I do that?  Is the only solution to create a new macro, e.g. \citewoauth, similar to \cite but without author names, or am I missing something? [The MWE (non-working actually) below is with \parencite but the general idea is similar.]    \begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}   @article{doe_2011,     title = {A title},     author = {John Doe},     journal = {Journal},     number = {99},     pages = {483--488},     date = {2015},   } \end{filecontents}  \documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage[french]{babel} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage{csquotes} \usepackage[style=verbose-trad2,language=french,backend=biber]{biblatex}  \addbibresource{\jobname.bib}  \begin{document} Some text\footnote{According to John Doe, it is \enquote{a complete nonsense} \parencite[485]{doe_2011}}  \printbibliography \end{document} Browse local copies of websites when possible (Firefox with slow internet connection) I am on a slow internet connection. I would like to use Firefox to load local copies of websites when it exists and is relatively recent (say one week).   An example usage would be browsing a lot of Wikipedia webpages, coming back to the same ones on a regular basis.  I would like to avoid having to manually specify to save single pages on each website I visit (which is what I guess I would need to do with a plugin like ). And I would also like to avoid having to switch between "work offline" or "work online".   Any suggestions? Determine when $\sum_1^\infty \frac{(2n)!x^n}{n(n!)^2}$ converges. By ratio test, when $|x|&lt;1/4$, the sum converges, $|x|&gt;1/4$ diverges. But I'm not sure about $|x|=1/4$. By Stirling's approximation $\frac{(2n)!(1/4)^n}{n(n!)^2}\sim\frac{4^n}{n{4^n}\sqrt{ \pi n}}\sim\frac{1}{\sqrt{\pi}n^{3/2}}$, so when $|x|=1/4$, the sum converges. But I haven't learned Stirling's approximation yet, so how to prove that when $|x|=1/4,$ the sum converges, without using it? Rename all the files within a folder with prefix “Unix_” i.e. suppose a folder has two files a.txt and b.pdf than they both should be renamed from a single command to Unix_a.txt and Unix_b.pdf Quantify Difference/Distance between Lognormal distributions I am trying to determine a metric that quantifies the distance between two continuous lognormal distributions. The data is actually a mixture of two lognormal distributions (I am not sure if this can be called bimodal). The individual distributions have different means but the same standard deviations. I have 20 data sets that can be divided into 4 groups, with each group having a constant standard deviation, but the 5 data sets in each group are made up of two distributions with different means. Some examples:      I am in search of a metric that accounts for the contrast (difference in means) and the standard deviation. I have tried out some parameters like coefficient of variation (of the mixture), Ashman's D etc. I have also tried percentage of overlap. However the problem always is that, at the end when plotted against the results I end up with 4 trend-lines again, corresponding to the 4 different standard deviations. Is there some other way I can quantify this?  Just to make myself clear, I want to quantify the difference between two distributions in a single case (between the red and green PDFs in the above image). What is the difference between a URI, a URL and a URN? People talk about URLs, URIs, and URNs as if they're different things, but they look the same to the naked eye.  What are the distinguishable differences between them? Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init Why don't players get extra xp for large encounters? Based on the table Encounter XP Multipliers from the Basic Rules' DM section, Page 57, when you're building encounters in 5E, you include an XP modifier depending on the number of creatures your PCs will be fighting: 1.5x for a pair, 2x for 3-6 and so on. However, the PCs only get the base XP as a reward.     This doesn't change the actual xp reward ... just your calculations of how difficult the encounter is.   Why is this? After acknowledging that battles vs multiple opponents are more difficult, why not reward them as such? footnotes at the end of the book Is it possible to have all footnotes placed at one specific place in my document instead of bottom of each page? I have multiple footnotes scattered in the article and it would be clearer if all of them are at the very end of the article  Edit (moved from an ``answer'')  is it possible in endnotes to have links in each number where I placed footnote to the actual footnote at the end? Blog Overflow database error , which is linked from site-specific blogs, says  Error establishing a database connection  I believe this is an error. How must I deal with anti-virus software on Windows 7 I know this question is looking like an easy question or not a question at all but it's not really easy question. I'm not related to security and anti-viruses and just don't trust every provided anti-virus.  So first question is a real question - Is it OK (safe) to not use anti-virus at all. I know how to use firewall, usually I use only trusted connections and surfing trusted sites. My chances to get virus is really low. Even I've got a bit outdated PC and don't want to pay the performance for it. I can do monthly scans without having one installed - is it OK to be safe ?  If not can you recommend a good free antivirus solution? I've got about a billion rows of data in a table with a name and an integer in the range 1-288.  For a given name, every int is unique, and not every possible integer in the range is present--so there are gaps.  This query generates an example case:  --what I have: SELECT * FROM ( VALUES ('foo', 2),               ('foo', 3),               ('foo', 4),               ('foo', 10),               ('foo', 11),               ('foo', 13),               ('bar', 1),               ('bar', 2),               ('bar', 3)      ) AS baz ("name", "int")   I'd like to generate a lookup table with a row for each name and sequence of contiguous integers.  Each such row would contain:  name   --  the value of the name column start  --  the first integer in the contiguous sequence end    --  the final value in the contiguous sequence span   --  end - start + 1  This query generates example output for the above example:  --what I need: SELECT *  FROM ( VALUES ('foo', 2, 4, 3),               ('foo', 10, 11, 2),               ('foo', 13, 13, 1),               ('bar', 1, 3, 3)      ) AS contiguous_ranges ("name", "start", "end", span)   Because I have so many rows, more efficient is better.  That said, I only have to run this query once, so it isn't an absolute requirement.  Thanks in advance!  Edit:  I should add that PL/pgSQL solutions are welcome (please explain any Fancy Tricks--I'm still new to PL/pgSQL). can I reflectively instantiate a generic type in java? Is it possible to reflectively instantiate a generic type in Java? Using the technique described  I get an error because class tokens cannot be generic. Take the example below. I want to instantiate some subclass of Creator that implements Creator. The actual class name is passed in as a command line argument. The idea is to be able to specify an implementation of Creator at runtime. Is there another way to accomplish what I'm trying to do here?  public interface Creator&lt;T&gt; {     T create(); } public class StringCreator implements Creator&lt;String&gt; {     public String create() { return new String(); } } public class FancyStringCreator implements Creator&lt;String&gt; {     public String create() { return new StringBuffer().toString(); } } public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {     Class&lt;?&gt; someClass = Class.forName(args[0]);     /*ERROR*/Class&lt;? extends Creator&lt;String&gt;&gt; creatorClass = someClass.asSubclass(Creator.class);     Constructor&lt;? extends Creator&lt;String&gt;&gt; creatorCtor = creatorClass.getConstructor((Class&lt;?&gt;[]) null);     Creator&lt;String&gt; creator = creatorCtor.newInstance((Object[]) null); }   Edit: I like Marcus' approach as being the most simple and pragmatic without circumventing the whole generics thing. I can use it in my situation because I can specify that the class passed must be a subclass of StringCreator. But as Ericson pointed out the generic information is still there at the type level, just not at the runtime level so it is still possible to reflectively examine whether a given class implements the correct generic type.