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  • Free-flow Alternative to Powerpoint?

    - by Nick Klauer
    So I've been digging around the net trying to find a good set of alternatives to Powerpoint. Part of my interest is that I found one, Prezi, that I liked for it's free-form style. Part of the power of it was that I can zoom out and select any part of the presentation to continue from and it feels much like a mind map or association of thoughts. Are there any other tools that offer anything similar in vein to this way of presenting material? I'm looking for something that just pops differently than a death-by-powerpoint-style presentation, so I would be happy to find tools that help present information in more fluid styles. It doesn't have to mirror Prezi, and I wouldn't want that, but after seeing what Prezi does, I have to think there are other ways of presenting information to a group of people than one square slide at a time.

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  • What is the name of this screw? (from HP ProLiant quick-deploy rail kits)

    - by kockiren
    I need the name of the screw for the HP quick deploy rail kit. The screw clicks into the square holes of the rack. It is a Gen4 Rail kit but the screw is like the Gen8 Rail kit ones. I called HP support, but they couldn't really help me. Unfortunately the rack manual does not name this screw either. After googling a while, I found the compatible "Thumb Style Rack Screws". It would do the job but isn't exactly what I am looking for. So, what is the name of the pictured screw.

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  • AutoHotkey media button for the NextSong button on Pandora

    - by Christian
    I tried doing the same thing that had been advised to do on the Play/pause pandora.com with a media key answer page. I simply replaced the XXX with 119 after running GetMediaKey - instead of 122 (it was same for me), which worked just fine for its play/pause purpose. I also replaced the YY with 11 since it was the appropriate (and next) tab. It does put the small, orange, dotted square around the next song button, but instead of going to the next song, it just acts like play/pause. Is there another modification required? Using Google Chrome in Windows 7 on an Alienware m14x r2.

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  • Hidden characters inserted after pipe (|) followed by a space

    - by nifty
    Very often, on my Mac, when I use the pipe (|) character followed by a space character, an invincible character will be inserted in between. This is especially annoying when using the terminal, as it makes commands invalid. If I type the following in iterm2, I often get the following: ls | cat zsh: command not found:  cat If I hit the up-arrow-key to get my previous command, and then remove and reinsert the space between | and cat, the command will work. When I copy paste the working and non working commands into a file, like this: non-working: ls | cat working: ls | cat and open it in Hex Fiend it shows the following: non-working: ls |¬†cat working: ls | cat I've also experienced the same kind of issue in SublimeText2 using the square brackets ([]) followed by a space. So I don't believe its an issue with iTerm2.

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  • Can I use a cheap inverter for my laptop?

    - by Georg
    I'm going to travel in a car this summer. It would be very nice if I could charge my laptop using the cigarette lighter. Because my computer is from Apple, there's no way to directly connect the two, therefore I need an inverter that provides 120V alternating current. There are many different models, ranging from very cheap to really expensive. The wave forms are: (from most expensive to cheapest) sine modified sine trapezoid square Can I use just any inverter or does it have to be a sine inverter? If so, what happens to my computer in case I use the wrong one. The laptop is a MacBook witch needs 60W.

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  • 12-24 rack, 10-32 server thumbscrew. How to mount?

    - by JJ.
    We have just purchased a APC rack (model AR204A) with 12-24 threaded holes. We couldn't get a "square hole" model in time for our setup deadline. Unfortunately our rack servers (Lenovo RD240) appear to have 10-32 thumbscrews for securing the server to the rack. We've successfully mounted the server rails to the rack using 12-24 screws however the 10-32 thumbscrews in the server front won't "grab" the 12-24 holes in the rack, thus there is nothing to stop the server from sliding right off the rack if pushed from the back. The thumb screws on the server don't seem to be removable, so we can't simply use 12-24 screws instead. Any suggestions on how to work around this problem? Is there any way to "convert" a 12-24 hole to a 10-32 thread (or similar approach)? Thanks in advance.

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  • Various problems with software raid1 array built with Samsung 840 Pro SSDs

    - by Andy B
    I am bringing to ServerFault a problem that is tormenting me for 6+ months. I have a CentOS 6 (64bit) server with an md software raid-1 array with 2 x Samsung 840 Pro SSDs (512GB). Problems: Serious write speed problems: root [~]# time dd if=arch.tar.gz of=test4 bs=2M oflag=sync 146+1 records in 146+1 records out 307191761 bytes (307 MB) copied, 23.6788 s, 13.0 MB/s real 0m23.680s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.932s When doing the above (or any other larger copy) the load spikes to unbelievable values (even over 100) going up from ~ 1. When doing the above I've also noticed very weird iostat results: Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 0.00 1589.50 0.00 54.00 0.00 13148.00 243.48 0.60 11.17 0.46 2.50 sdb 0.00 1627.50 0.00 16.50 0.00 9524.00 577.21 144.25 1439.33 60.61 100.00 md1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md2 0.00 0.00 0.00 1602.00 0.00 12816.00 8.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 And it keeps it this way until it actually writes the file to the device (out from swap/cache/memory). The problem is that the second SSD in the array has svctm and await roughly 100 times larger than the second. For some reason the wear is different between the 2 members of the array root [~]# smartctl --attributes /dev/sda | grep -i wear 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 094% 094 000 Pre-fail Always - 180 root [~]# smartctl --attributes /dev/sdb | grep -i wear 177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 070% 070 000 Pre-fail Always - 1005 The first SSD has a wear of 6% while the second SSD has a wear of 30%!! It's like the second SSD in the array works at least 5 times as hard as the first one as proven by the first iteration of iostat (the averages since reboot): Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 10.44 51.06 790.39 125.41 8803.98 1633.11 11.40 0.33 0.37 0.06 5.64 sdb 9.53 58.35 322.37 118.11 4835.59 1633.11 14.69 0.33 0.76 0.29 12.97 md1 0.00 0.00 1.88 1.33 15.07 10.68 8.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md2 0.00 0.00 1109.02 173.12 10881.59 1620.39 9.75 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md0 0.00 0.00 0.41 0.01 3.10 0.02 7.42 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 What I've tried: I've updated the firmware to DXM05B0Q (following reports of dramatic improvements for 840Ps after this update). I have looked for "hard resetting link" in dmesg to check for cable/backplane issues but nothing. I have checked the alignment and I believe they are aligned correctly (1MB boundary, listing below) I have checked /proc/mdstat and the array is Optimal (second listing below). root [~]# fdisk -ul /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 512.1 GB, 512110190592 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 62260 cylinders, total 1000215216 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00026d59 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 4196351 2097152 fd Linux raid autodetect Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda2 * 4196352 4605951 204800 fd Linux raid autodetect Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda3 4605952 814106623 404750336 fd Linux raid autodetect root [~]# fdisk -ul /dev/sdb Disk /dev/sdb: 512.1 GB, 512110190592 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 62260 cylinders, total 1000215216 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0003dede Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 2048 4196351 2097152 fd Linux raid autodetect Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sdb2 * 4196352 4605951 204800 fd Linux raid autodetect Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sdb3 4605952 814106623 404750336 fd Linux raid autodetect /proc/mdstat root # cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md0 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0] 204736 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU] md2 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0] 404750144 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU] md1 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0] 2096064 blocks super 1.1 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: Running a read test with hdparm root [~]# hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 664 MB in 3.00 seconds = 221.33 MB/sec root [~]# hdparm -t /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing buffered disk reads: 288 MB in 3.01 seconds = 95.77 MB/sec But look what happens if I add --direct root [~]# hdparm --direct -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 788 MB in 3.01 seconds = 262.08 MB/sec root [~]# hdparm --direct -t /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 534 MB in 3.02 seconds = 176.90 MB/sec Both tests increase but /dev/sdb doubles while /dev/sda increases maybe 20%. I just don't know what to make of this. As suggested by Mr. Wagner I've done another read test with dd this time and it confirms the hdparm test: root [/home2]# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1G count=10 10+0 records in 10+0 records out 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 38.0855 s, 282 MB/s root [/home2]# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=1G count=10 10+0 records in 10+0 records out 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 115.24 s, 93.2 MB/s So sda is 3 times faster than sdb. Or maybe sdb is doing also something else besides what sda does. Is there some way to find out if sdb is doing more than what sda does? UPDATE Again, as suggested by Mr. Wagner, I have swapped the 2 SSDs. And as he thought it would happen, the problem moved from sdb to sda. So I guess I'll RMA one of the SSDs. I wonder if the cage might be problematic. What is wrong with this array? Please help!

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  • How can a single disk in a hardware SATA RAID-10 array bring the entire array to a screeching halt?

    - by Stu Thompson
    Prelude: I'm a code-monkey that's increasingly taken on SysAdmin duties for my small company. My code is our product, and increasingly we provide the same app as SaaS. About 18 months ago I moved our servers from a premium hosting centric vendor to a barebones rack pusher in a tier IV data center. (Literally across the street.) This ment doing much more ourselves--things like networking, storage and monitoring. As part the big move, to replace our leased direct attached storage from the hosting company, I built a 9TB two-node NAS based on SuperMicro chassises, 3ware RAID cards, Ubuntu 10.04, two dozen SATA disks, DRBD and . It's all lovingly documented in three blog posts: Building up & testing a new 9TB SATA RAID10 NFSv4 NAS: Part I, Part II and Part III. We also setup a Cacit monitoring system. Recently we've been adding more and more data points, like SMART values. I could not have done all this without the awesome boffins at ServerFault. It's been a fun and educational experience. My boss is happy (we saved bucket loads of $$$), our customers are happy (storage costs are down), I'm happy (fun, fun, fun). Until yesterday. Outage & Recovery: Some time after lunch we started getting reports of sluggish performance from our application, an on-demand streaming media CMS. About the same time our Cacti monitoring system sent a blizzard of emails. One of the more telling alerts was a graph of iostat await. Performance became so degraded that Pingdom began sending "server down" notifications. The overall load was moderate, there was not traffic spike. After logging onto the application servers, NFS clients of the NAS, I confirmed that just about everything was experiencing highly intermittent and insanely long IO wait times. And once I hopped onto the primary NAS node itself, the same delays were evident when trying to navigate the problem array's file system. Time to fail over, that went well. Within 20 minuts everything was confirmed to be back up and running perfectly. Post-Mortem: After any and all system failures I perform a post-mortem to determine the cause of the failure. First thing I did was ssh back into the box and start reviewing logs. It was offline, completely. Time for a trip to the data center. Hardware reset, backup an and running. In /var/syslog I found this scary looking entry: Nov 15 06:49:44 umbilo smartd[2827]: Device: /dev/twa0 [3ware_disk_00], 6 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Nov 15 06:49:44 umbilo smartd[2827]: Device: /dev/twa0 [3ware_disk_07], SMART Prefailure Attribute: 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate changed from 171 to 170 Nov 15 06:49:45 umbilo smartd[2827]: Device: /dev/twa0 [3ware_disk_10], 16 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Nov 15 06:49:45 umbilo smartd[2827]: Device: /dev/twa0 [3ware_disk_10], 4 Offline uncorrectable sectors Nov 15 06:49:45 umbilo smartd[2827]: Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error Nov 15 06:49:45 umbilo smartd[2827]: # 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 6576 3421766910 Nov 15 06:49:45 umbilo smartd[2827]: # 2 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 6087 3421766910 Nov 15 06:49:45 umbilo smartd[2827]: # 3 Short offline Completed: read failure 10% 5901 656821791 Nov 15 06:49:45 umbilo smartd[2827]: # 4 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 5818 651637856 Nov 15 06:49:45 umbilo smartd[2827]: So I went to check the Cacti graphs for the disks in the array. Here we see that, yes, disk 7 is slipping away just like syslog says it is. But we also see that disk 8's SMART Read Erros are fluctuating. There are no messages about disk 8 in syslog. More interesting is that the fluctuating values for disk 8 directly correlate to the high IO wait times! My interpretation is that: Disk 8 is experiencing an odd hardware fault that results in intermittent long operation times. Somehow this fault condition on the disk is locking up the entire array Maybe there is a more accurate or correct description, but the net result has been that the one disk is impacting the performance of the whole array. The Question(s) How can a single disk in a hardware SATA RAID-10 array bring the entire array to a screeching halt? Am I being naïve to think that the RAID card should have dealt with this? How can I prevent a single misbehaving disk from impacting the entire array? Am I missing something?

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  • Windows 7 Home Premium - Unable to View Chinese Characters Properly

    - by David
    Is there a proper and permanent fix that will restore the display of Chinese Characters on a Windows 7 Home Premium Laptop computer? This problem has been occurring frequently now and a simple reboot no longer does the trick. The square boxes viewed on many applications and websites has been constantly bothering me and I wish to fix it asap. I have done a lot of research on it but have not been successful. Many responses were to install the language packs for Windows 7 Ultimate Users which apparently is not my case or to configure the "Region and Language" settings of the Control Panel, changing the system locale. Does anyone have any suggestions? All would be appreciated!

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  • What software works well for viewing massive TIFF images on Windows 7?

    - by nhinkle
    Today I saw an article about a half-gig, 24000 square-pixel high-res composite image of the moon. (This is a much smaller version of the image) I find astronomy interesting, so I thought I'd download it and take a look. With 4GB of RAM and an i5 processor, I figured my computer could handle it. Unfortunately, the built-in Windows Picture Viewer didn't do such a great job. While it opened the file without a problem, zooming in was ineffective. The zoomed out image loaded, but zooming in just showed a scaled-up version of the zoomed-out version, not any detail: Closing the picture viewer also took a very long time, and the whole process used up much more RAM than the 500MB of the picture (usage went from 1.3GB to 3.8GB). What other software would work better for this? I would prefer something that is free and fairly simple. I don't really want to use an editor (like photoshop or GIMP), just a nice lightweight viewer. Any suggestions?

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  • Lotus Notes: Searching email by fields

    - by themel
    I'm using Lotus Notes 8.5.2 in a large corporate deployment. I'm trying to figure out how to search my email in a structured manner, e.g. by specifying criteria on fields. The help seems to suggest that I can use fields in square brackets and a list of operators, e.g. to find all mail where the From field contains John, I'd search for /[From] CONTAINS John However, I can't get this to work - any operator style query I've tried returns zero documents. "Web-style" queries (e.g. typing John into the search dialog) work, but I'd really prefer a way that would let me search more precisely. Potential issues: I'm assuming that the field names can be taken from the list of things I see when I open a mail and look at its Document Properties. Full text indexing is turned off for my mailbox, and all my attempts to create my own have failed. Does anyone have better information on searching by from/date/subject conditions in Notes?

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  • Why do people like widescreen when it is, de facto, less space?

    - by Kerry
    I find that many of my friends/non-programmers or designers like widescreens. It makes very little sense to me as you in fact have less space than a 4:3 (do the math). The closer to a perfect square the more space you actually have on your screen. I got a 21" 16:9 and two 19" 4:3 The 21" is nearly the same height, but I think its a tenth of an inch shorter if I'm correct. I forget the calculation but it is nearly the same actual space. I can understand if you're using your computer for constant movie-watching but I think that's more of people's "ideal" than a reality. Thoughts?

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  • Identify what's painting the empty space in my Windows notification area?

    - by lance
    I have an "icon" in my Windows (XP, if it matters) notification area (by the clock) which renders no image, but rather an empty square space (no borders -- nothing rendered at all in the space where you'd expect an icon). Upon mousing over this space, it immediately collapses (disappears), preventing me from gathering any information about it. I'm assuming the collapse (on mouseover) indicates the process is no longer running. How can I learn what process is painting this "void" in my notification area? I don't control the workstation, so I can't control what launches when.

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  • Table Formatting in Excel 2007: How do I remove it?

    - by RocketGoal
    I've used the new Table Formatting option in Excel 2007. Now I can't remove it. I've dragged the little blue square up to the last cell on the top left, but it just won't go any further. In fact it just won't go at all. Clear all doesn't remove it. What does? I want my table back! I'm not a beginner with Excel, but this little annoyance has made me feel like on. Surely there must be some way to remove table format without deleting something or clearing all! Thanks Mike

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  • When resizing Windows Explorer on Windows 8 it crashes?

    - by Tural Teyyuboglu
    I have following problem: When I try to change size of any explorer window from maximized to some size getting following screen It blinks 20-30 times, then crashes. Also it changes it's size every time into this square size. Here is event viewer result: The program Explorer.EXE version 6.2.9200.16384 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Action Center control panel. Process ID: 10f8 Start Time: 01cd9e3e189fe3d1 Termination Time: 0 Application Path: C:\Windows\Explorer.EXE Report Id: ea71d13a-0a32-11e2-be92-3859f90026b6 Faulting package full name: Faulting package-relative application ID: What can be issue? Is there any way to fix explorer crashes? Or only way is reinstalling windows?

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  • Why can't I access the WebUI of my DNS-323 NAS after a firmware upgrade?

    - by anonymous2
    Hi Everyone, I just bought a D-Link DNS-323 NAS Enclosure, and have run into a problem. I read that the firmware that had shipped with (1.07) did not support 2TB drives, so I downloaded firmware 1.08. Turned on the device for thwe first time and went straight to the WebUI (everything looked/worked fine) Proceeded with the firmware update, completed successfully. Rebooted and I cannot access the WebUI. I can see the NAS connected via my router interface I can also ping the ip adress assigned, but I cannot access the WebUI or find it via D-Link easy search software. I have tried the factory reset button, but that does not seem to be doing anything, the square blue light just keeps flashing from the moment the unit is powered on, whether I press the reset button or not, and the symptoms remain the same... PS. I did/do not have any drives installed yet. Please help?

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  • Customising Windows 8 Start Screen Tiles

    - by Joe Taylor
    We are looking for an effective way to manage the start screen in Windows 8. So far using WSIM we can add certain start tiles by using the OOBE System - shell setup - SquareTiles and WideTiles properties. However this only seems to work for square tiles and not wide tiles, if anyone has any insight on this it would eb appreciated. However the main question is has anyone managed to modify this screen using a GPO, we can add application shortcuts to the Start menu list on the All Apps page using a create shortcut to all users start menu policy. However as we occasionally deploy apps throughout the year in line with the courses requirements we would want to be able to put a shortcut on the home screen. Is it possible?

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  • Why should I use $[ EXPR ] instead of $(( EXPR ))?

    - by qdii
    On the paragraph explaining arithmetic expansion, Bash's user guide uncovers 2 different ways of evaluating an expression, the first one uses $((?EXPRESSION?)) and the second one uses $[?EXPRESSION?]. The two ways seem pretty similar as the only difference I have found is: $[?EXPRESSION?] will only calculate the result of EXPRESSION, and do no tests: Yet, I am intrigued because the same document recommends using $[?EXPRESSION?] rather than $((?EXPRESSION?)). Wherever possible, Bash users should try to use the syntax with square brackets: Why would you want that if less tests are being done?

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  • Paying great programmers more than average programmers

    - by Kelly French
    It's fairly well recognized that some programmers are up to 10 times more productive than others. Joel mentions this topic on his blog. There is a whole blog devoted to the idea of the "10x productive programmer". In years since the original study, the general finding that "There are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers" has been confirmed by many other studies of professional programmers (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and McGarry 1989, Boehm et al 2000). Fred Brooks mentions the wide range in the quality of designers in his "No Silver Bullet" article, The differences are not minor--they are rather like the differences between Salieri and Mozart. Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, cleaner, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude. The study that Brooks cites is: H. Sackman, W.J. Erikson, and E.E. Grant, "Exploratory Experimental Studies Comparing Online and Offline Programming Performance," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 1968), pp. 3-11. The way programmers are paid by employers these days makes it almost impossible to pay the great programmers a large multiple of what the entry-level salary is. When the starting salary for a just-graduated entry-level programmer, we'll call him Asok (From Dilbert), is $40K, even if the top programmer, we'll call him Linus, makes $120K that is only a multiple of 3. I'd be willing to be that Linus does much more than 3 times what Asok does, so why wouldn't we expect him to get paid more as well? Here is a quote from Stroustrup: "The companies are complaining because they are hurting. They can't produce quality products as cheaply, as reliably, and as quickly as they would like. They correctly see a shortage of good developers as a part of the problem. What they generally don't see is that inserting a good developer into a culture designed to constrain semi-skilled programmers from doing harm is pointless because the rules/culture will constrain the new developer from doing anything significantly new and better." This leads to two questions. I'm excluding self-employed programmers and contractors. If you disagree that's fine but please include your rationale. It might be that the self-employed or contract programmers are where you find the top-10 earners, but please provide a explanation/story/rationale along with any anecdotes. [EDIT] I thought up some other areas in which talent/ability affects pay. Financial traders (commodities, stock, derivatives, etc.) designers (fashion, interior decorators, architects, etc.) professionals (doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc.) sales Questions: Why aren't the top 1% of programmers paid like A-list movie stars? What would the industry be like if we did pay the "Smart and gets things done" programmers 6, 8, or 10 times what an intern makes? [Footnote: I posted this question after submitting it to the Stackoverflow podcast. It was included in episode 77 and I've written more about it as a Codewright's Tale post 'Of Rockstars and Bricklayers'] Epilogue: It's probably unfair to exclude contractors and the self-employed. One aspect of the highest earners in other fields is that they are free-agents. The competition for their skills is what drives up their earning power. This means they can not be interchangeable or otherwise treated as a plug-and-play resource. I liked the example in one answer of a major league baseball team trying to field two first-basemen. Also, something that Joel mentioned in the Stackoverflow podcast (#77). There are natural dynamics to shrink any extreme performance/pay ranges between the highs and lows. One is the peer pressure of organizations to pay within a given range, another is the likelyhood that the high performer will realize their undercompensation and seek greener pastures.

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  • Where to Store the Protection Trial Info for Software Protection Purpose

    - by Peter Lee
    It might be duplicate with other questions, but I swear that I googled a lot and search at StackOverflow.com a lot, and I cannot find the answer to my question: In a C#.Net application, where to store the protection trial info, such as Expiration Date, Number of Used Times? I understand that, all kinds of Software Protection strategies can be cracked by a sophiscated hacker (because they can almost always get around the expiration checking step). But what I'm now going to do is just to protect it in a reasonable manner that a "common"/"advanced" user cannot screw it up. OK, in order to proof that I have googled and searched a lot at StackOverflow.com, I'm listing all the possible strategies I got: 1. Registry Entry First, some users might not have the access to even read the Registry table. Second, if we put the Protection Trial Info in a Registry Entry, the user can always find it out where it is by comparing the differences before and after the software installation. They can just simply change it. OK, you might say that we should encrypt the Protection Trial Info, yes we can do that. But what if the user just change their system date before installing? OK, you might say that we should also put a last-used date, if something is wrong, the last-used date could work as a protection guide. But what if the user just uninstall the software and delete all Registry Entries related to this software, and then reinstall the software? I have no idea on how to deal with this. Please help. A Plain File First, there are some places to put the plain file: 2.a) a simple XML file under software installation path 2.b) configuration file Again, the user can just uninstall the software and remove these plain file(s), and reinstall the software. - The Software Itself If we put the protection trial info (Expiration Date, we cannot put Number of Used Times) in the software itself, it is still susceptible to the cases I mentioned above. Furthermore, it's not even cool to do so. - A Trial Product-Key It works like a licensing process, that is, we put the Trial info into an RSA-signed string. However, it requires too many steps for a user to have a try of using the software (they might lose patience): 4.a) The user downloads the software; 4.b) The user sends an email to request a Trial Product-Key by providing user name (or email) or hardware info; 4.c) The server receives the request, RSA-signs it and send back to the user; 4.d) The user can now use it under the condition of (Expiration Date & Number of Used Times). Now, the server has a record of the user's username or hardware info, so the user will be rejected to request a second trial. Is it legal to collection hardware info? In a word, the user has to do one more extra step (request a Trial Product Key) just for having a try of using the software, which is not cool (thinking myself as a user). NOTE: This question is not about the Licensing, instead, it's about where to store the TRIAL info. After the trial expires, the user should ask for a license (CD-Key/Product-Key). I'm going to use RSA signature (bound to User Hardware)

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  • Need help with BOOST_FOREACH/compiler bug

    - by Jacek Lawrynowicz
    I know that boost or compiler should be last to blame, but I can't see another explanation here. I'm using msvc 2008 SP1 and boost 1.43. In the following code snippet execution never leaves third BOOST_FOREACH loop typedef Graph<unsigned, unsigned>::VertexIterator Iter; Graph<unsigned, unsigned> g; g.createVertex(0x66); // works fine Iter it = g.getVertices().first, end = g.getVertices().second; for(; it != end; ++it) ; // fine std::pair<Iter, Iter> p = g.getVertices(); BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, p) ; // fine unsigned vertex_count = 0; BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, g.getVertices()) vertex_count++; // oops, infinite loop vertex_count = 0; BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, g.getVertices()) vertex_count++; vertex_count = 0; BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, g.getVertices()) vertex_count++; // ... last block repeated 7 times Iterator code: class Iterator : public boost::iterator_facade<Iterator, unsigned const, boost::bidirectional_traversal_tag> { public: Iterator() : list(NULL), handle(INVALID_ELEMENT_HANDLE) {} explicit Iterator(const VectorElementsList &list, unsigned handle = INVALID_ELEMENT_HANDLE) : list(&list), handle(handle) {} friend std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream &s, const Iterator &it) { s << "[list: " << it.list <<", handle: " << it.handle << "]"; return s; } private: friend class boost::iterator_core_access; void increment() { handle = list->getNext(handle); } void decrement() { handle = list->getPrev(handle); } unsigned const& dereference() const { return handle; } bool equal(Iterator const& other) const { return handle == other.handle && list == other.list; } const VectorElementsList<T> *list; unsigned handle; }; Some ASM fun: vertex_count = 0; BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, g.getVertices()) // initialization 013E1369 mov edi,dword ptr [___defaultmatherr+8 (13E5034h)] // end iterator handle: 0xFFFFFFFF 013E136F mov ebp,dword ptr [esp+0ACh] // begin iterator handle: 0x0 013E1376 lea esi,[esp+0A8h] // begin iterator list pointer 013E137D mov ebx,esi 013E137F nop // forever loop begin 013E1380 cmp ebp,edi 013E1382 jne main+238h (13E1388h) 013E1384 cmp ebx,esi 013E1386 je main+244h (13E1394h) 013E1388 lea eax,[esp+18h] 013E138C push eax // here iterator is incremented in ram 013E138D call boost::iterator_facade<detail::VectorElementsList<Graph<unsigned int,unsigned int>::VertexWrapper>::Iterator,unsigned int const ,boost::bidirectional_traversal_tag,unsigned int const &,int>::operator++ (13E18E0h) 013E1392 jmp main+230h (13E1380h) vertex_count++; // forever loop end It's easy to see that iterator handle is cached in EBP and it never gets incremented despite of a call to iterator operator++() function. I've replaced Itarator implmentation with one deriving from std::iterator and the issue persisted, so this is not iterator_facade fault. This problem exists only on msvc 2008 SP1 x86 and amd64 release builds. Debug builds on msvc 2008 and debug/release builds on msvc 2010 and gcc 4.4 (linux) works fine. Furthermore the BOOST_FOREACH block must be repeaded exacly 10 times. If it's repeaded 9 times, it's all OK. I guess that due to BOOST_FOREACH use of template trickery (const auto_any), compiler assumes that iterator handle is constant and never reads its real value again. I would be very happy to hear that my code is wrong, correct it and move on with BOOST_FOREACH, which I'm very found of (as opposed to BOOST_FOREVER :). May be related to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1275852/why-does-boost-foreach-not-work-sometimes-with-c-strings

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  • jQuery sequence and function call problem

    - by Jonas
    Hi everyone, I'm very new to jquery and programming in general but I'm still trying to achieve something here. I use Fullcalendar to allow the users of my web application to insert an event in the database. The click on a day, view changes to agendaDay, then on a time of the day, and a dialog popup opens with a form. I am trying to combine validate (pre-jquery.1.4), jquery.form to post the form without page refresh The script calendar.php, included in several pages, defines the fullcalendar object and displays it in a div: $(document).ready(function() { function EventLoad() { $("#addEvent").validate({ rules: { calendar_title: "required", calendar_url: { required: false, maxlength: 100, url: true } }, messages: { calendar_title: "Title required", calendar_url: "Invalid URL format" }, success: function() { $('#addEvent').submit(function() { var options = { success: function() { $('#eventDialog').dialog('close'); $('#calendar').fullCalendar( 'refetchEvents' ); } }; // submit the form $(this).ajaxSubmit(options); // return false to prevent normal browser submit and page navigation return false; }); } }); } $('#calendar').fullCalendar({ header: { left: 'prev,next today', center: 'title', right: 'month,agendaWeek,agendaDay' }, theme: true, firstDay: 1, editable: false, events: "json-events.php?list=1&<?php echo $events_list; ?>", <?php if($_GET['page'] == 'home') echo "defaultView: 'agendaWeek',"; ?> eventClick: function(event) { if (event.url) { window.open(event.url); return false; } }, dayClick: function(date, allDay, jsEvent, view) { if (view.name == 'month') { $('#calendar').fullCalendar( 'changeView', 'agendaDay').fullCalendar( 'gotoDate', date ); }else{ if(allDay) { var timeStamp = $.fullCalendar.formatDate( date, 'dddd+dd+MMMM_u'); var $eventDialog = $('<div/>').load("json-events.php?<?php echo $events_list; ?>&new=1&all_day=1&timestamp=" + timeStamp, null, EventLoad).dialog({autoOpen:false,draggable: false, width: 675, modal:true, position:['center',202], resizable: false, title:'Add an Event'}); $eventDialog.dialog('open').attr('id','eventDialog'); } else { var timeStamp = $.fullCalendar.formatDate( date, 'dddd+dd+MMMM_u'); var $eventDialog = $('<div/>').load("json-events.php?<?php echo $events_list; ?>&new=1&all_day=0&timestamp=" + timeStamp, null, EventLoad).dialog({autoOpen:false,draggable: false, width: 675, modal:true, position:['center',202], resizable: false, title:'Add an Event'}); $eventDialog.dialog('open').attr('id','eventDialog');; } } } }); }); The script json-events.php contains the form and also the code to process the data from the submitted form. What happens when I test the whole thing: - first user click on a day, then time of day. Popup opens with time and date indicated on the form. When user submits the form, dialog closes and calendar refreshes its events.... and the event added by the user appears several times (from 4 to up to 11 times!). The form has been processed several times by the receiving php script?! - second user click, the popup opens, user submit empty form. Form is submitted (validate function not triggered) and user redirected to empty page json-events.php (ajaxForm not triggered either) Obviously, my code is wrong (and dirty as well, sorry). Why is the submitted form, submitted several time to receiving script and why is the javascript function EventLoad triggered only once ? Thank you very much for you help. This problem is killing me !

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  • Database - Designing an "Events" Table

    - by Alix Axel
    After reading the tips from this great Nettuts+ article I've come up with a table schema that would separate highly volatile data from other tables subjected to heavy reads and at the same time lower the number of tables needed in the whole database schema, however I'm not sure if this is a good idea since it doesn't follow the rules of normalization and I would like to hear your advice, here is the general idea: I've four types of users modeled in a Class Table Inheritance structure, in the main "user" table I store data common to all the users (id, username, password, several flags, ...) along with some TIMESTAMP fields (date_created, date_updated, date_activated, date_lastLogin, ...). To quote the tip #16 from the Nettuts+ article mentioned above: Example 2: You have a “last_login” field in your table. It updates every time a user logs in to the website. But every update on a table causes the query cache for that table to be flushed. You can put that field into another table to keep updates to your users table to a minimum. Now it gets even trickier, I need to keep track of some user statistics like how many unique times a user profile was seen how many unique times a ad from a specific type of user was clicked how many unique times a post from a specific type of user was seen and so on... In my fully normalized database this adds up to about 8 to 10 additional tables, it's not a lot but I would like to keep things simple if I could, so I've come up with the following "events" table: |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | ID | TABLE | EVENT | DATE | IP | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 1 | user | login | 201004190030 | 127.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 1 | user | login | 201004190230 | 127.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | created | 201004190031 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | activated | 201004190234 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | approved | 201004190930 | 217.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | login | 201004191200 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | created | 201004191230 | 127.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | impressed | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | blocked | 201004200319 | 217.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | deleted | 201004200320 | 217.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| Basically the ID refers to the primary key (id) field in the TABLE table, I believe the rest should be pretty straightforward. One thing that I've come to like in this design is that I can keep track of all the user logins instead of just the last one, and thus generate some interesting metrics with that data. Due to the nature of the events table I also thought of making some optimizations, such as: #9: Since there is only a finite number of tables and a finite (and predetermined) number of events, the TABLE and EVENTS columns could be setup as ENUMs instead of VARCHARs to save some space. #14: Store IPs as UNSIGNED INT with INET_ATON() instead of VARCHARs. Store DATEs as TIMESTAMPs instead of DATETIMEs. Use the ARCHIVE (or the CSV?) engine instead of InnoDB / MyISAM. Overall, each event would only consume 14 bytes which is okay for my traffic I guess. Pros: Ability to store more detailed data (such as logins). No need to design (and code for) almost a dozen additional tables (dates and statistics). Reduces a few columns per table and keeps volatile data separated. Cons: Non-relational (still not as bad as EAV): SELECT * FROM events WHERE id = 2 AND table = 'user' ORDER BY date DESC(); 6 bytes overhead per event (ID, TABLE and EVENT). I'm more inclined to go with this approach since the pros seem to far outweigh the cons, but I'm still a little bit reluctant.. Am I missing something? What are your thoughts on this? Thanks!

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  • Managing highly repetitive code and documentation in Java

    - by polygenelubricants
    Highly repetitive code is generally a bad thing, and there are design patterns that can help minimize this. However, sometimes it's simply inevitable due to the constraints of the language itself. Take the following example from java.util.Arrays: /** * Assigns the specified long value to each element of the specified * range of the specified array of longs. The range to be filled * extends from index <tt>fromIndex</tt>, inclusive, to index * <tt>toIndex</tt>, exclusive. (If <tt>fromIndex==toIndex</tt>, the * range to be filled is empty.) * * @param a the array to be filled * @param fromIndex the index of the first element (inclusive) to be * filled with the specified value * @param toIndex the index of the last element (exclusive) to be * filled with the specified value * @param val the value to be stored in all elements of the array * @throws IllegalArgumentException if <tt>fromIndex &gt; toIndex</tt> * @throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if <tt>fromIndex &lt; 0</tt> or * <tt>toIndex &gt; a.length</tt> */ public static void fill(long[] a, int fromIndex, int toIndex, long val) { rangeCheck(a.length, fromIndex, toIndex); for (int i=fromIndex; i<toIndex; i++) a[i] = val; } The above snippet appears in the source code 8 times, with very little variation in the documentation/method signature but exactly the same method body, one for each of the root array types int[], short[], char[], byte[], boolean[], double[], float[], and Object[]. I believe that unless one resorts to reflection (which is an entirely different subject in itself), this repetition is inevitable. I understand that as a utility class, such high concentration of repetitive Java code is highly atypical, but even with the best practice, repetition does happen! Refactoring doesn't always work because it's not always possible (the obvious case is when the repetition is in the documentation). Obviously maintaining this source code is a nightmare. A slight typo in the documentation, or a minor bug in the implementation, is multiplied by however many repetitions was made. In fact, the best example happens to involve this exact class: Google Research Blog - Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken (by Joshua Bloch, Software Engineer) The bug is a surprisingly subtle one, occurring in what many thought to be just a simple and straightforward algorithm. // int mid =(low + high) / 2; // the bug int mid = (low + high) >>> 1; // the fix The above line appears 11 times in the source code! So my questions are: How are these kinds of repetitive Java code/documentation handled in practice? How are they developed, maintained, and tested? Do you start with "the original", and make it as mature as possible, and then copy and paste as necessary and hope you didn't make a mistake? And if you did make a mistake in the original, then just fix it everywhere, unless you're comfortable with deleting the copies and repeating the whole replication process? And you apply this same process for the testing code as well? Would Java benefit from some sort of limited-use source code preprocessing for this kind of thing? Perhaps Sun has their own preprocessor to help write, maintain, document and test these kind of repetitive library code? A comment requested another example, so I pulled this one from Google Collections: com.google.common.base.Predicates lines 276-310 (AndPredicate) vs lines 312-346 (OrPredicate). The source for these two classes are identical, except for: AndPredicate vs OrPredicate (each appears 5 times in its class) "And(" vs Or(" (in the respective toString() methods) #and vs #or (in the @see Javadoc comments) true vs false (in apply; ! can be rewritten out of the expression) -1 /* all bits on */ vs 0 /* all bits off */ in hashCode() &= vs |= in hashCode()

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  • being able to solve google code jam problem sets

    - by JPro
    This is not a homework question, but rather my intention to know if this is what it takes to learn programming. I keep loggin into TopCoder not to actually participate but to get the basic understand of how the problems are solved. But to my knowledge I don't understand what the problem is and how to translate the problem into an algorithm that can solve it. Just now I happen to look at ACM ICPC 2010 World Finals which is being held in china. The teams were given problem sets and one of them is this: Given at most 100 points on a plan with distinct x-coordinates, find the shortest cycle that passes through each point exactly once, goes from the leftmost point always to the right until it reaches the rightmost point, then goes always to the left until it gets back to the leftmost point. Additionally, two points are given such that the the path from left to right contains the first point, and the path from right to left contains the second point. This seems to be a very simple DP: after processing the last k points, and with the first path ending in point a and the second path ending in point b, what is the smallest total length to achieve that? This is O(n^2) states, transitions in O(n). We deal with the two special points by forcing the first path to contain the first one, and the second path contain the second one. Now I have no idea what I am supposed to solve after reading the problem set. and there's an other one from google code jam: Problem In a big, square room there are two point light sources: one is red and the other is green. There are also n circular pillars. Light travels in straight lines and is absorbed by walls and pillars. The pillars therefore cast shadows: they do not let light through. There are places in the room where no light reaches (black), where only one of the two light sources reaches (red or green), and places where both lights reach (yellow). Compute the total area of each of the four colors in the room. Do not include the area of the pillars. Input * One line containing the number of test cases, T. Each test case contains, in order: * One line containing the coordinates x, y of the red light source. * One line containing the coordinates x, y of the green light source. * One line containing the number of pillars n. * n lines describing the pillars. Each contains 3 numbers x, y, r. The pillar is a disk with the center (x, y) and radius r. The room is the square described by 0 = x, y = 100. Pillars, room walls and light sources are all disjoint, they do not overlap or touch. Output For each test case, output: Case #X: black area red area green area yellow area Is it required that people who program should be should be able to solve these type of problems? I would apprecite if anyone can help me interpret the google code jam problem set as I wish to participate in this years Code Jam to see if I can do anthing or not. Thanks.

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