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  • Priority Manager&ndash;Part 1- Laying out the plan

    - by Patrick Liekhus
    Now that we have shown the EDMX with XPO/XAF and how use SpecFlow and BDD to run EasyTest scripts, let’s put it all together and show the evolution of a project using all the tools combined. I have a simple project that I use to track my priorities throughout the day.  It uses some of Stephen Covey’s principles from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  The idea is to write down all your priorities the night before and rank them.  This way when you get started tomorrow you will have your list of priorities.  Now it’s not that new things won’t appear tomorrow and reprioritize your list, but at least now you can track them.  My idea is to create a project that will allow you manage your list from your desktop, a web browser or your mobile device.  This way your list is never too far away.  I will layout the data model and the additional concepts as time progresses. My goal is to show the power of all of these tools combined and I thought the best way would be to build a project in sequence.  I have had this idea for quite some time so let’s get it completed with the outline below. Here is the outline of the series of post in the near future: Part 2 – Modeling the Business Objects Part 3 – Changing XAF Default Properties Part 4 – Advanced Settings within Liekhus EDMX/XAF Tool Part 5 – Custom Business Rules Part 6 – Unit Testing Our Implementation Part 7 – Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and SpecFlow Tests Part 8 – Using the Windows Application Part 9 – Using the Web Application Part 10 – Exposing OData from our Project Part 11 – Consuming OData with Excel PowerPivot Part 12 – Consuming OData with iOS Part 13 – Consuming OData with Android Part 14 – What’s Next I hope this helps outline what to expect.  I anticipate that I will have additional topics mixed in there but I plan on getting this outline completed within the next several weeks.  Thanks

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  • How is software used in critical life-or-death systems tested?

    - by waiwai933
    An airplane, as opposed to, for example, a website, is a system where any failure in certain systems is completely unacceptable, since errors in e.g. flight monitoring can cause the autopilot to malfunction and do a dive. Obviously, this doesn't happen since the brilliant engineers at Boeing and Airbus have checks in the autopilot to make sure it doesn't suddenly decide a dive is a perfectly acceptable and safe maneuver. Or perhaps the computer crashes, and the pilots in the newer fly-by-wire aircraft can no longer actually fly the plane. Of course, there are various safety procedures and redundancies built into these systems to prevent a crash (of both the software and the aircraft). However, on the other hand, it's quite obvious that software isn't perfect—both open source and closed source software do crash regularly, and only the simplest "Hello World" program doesn't fail. How can the engineers who design the software systems in the aeronautic, medical, and other life-or-death industries manage to test their software so that it doesn't fail (and if it does fail, at least fail gracefully)? I'm desperately hoping that you're not all going to go: "Oh, I work for Boeing/Airbus/(some other company) and it's not! Have fun on your next flight/hospital visit."

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  • Resize a pendrive Linux?

    - by user11239
    I'm running Ubuntu from USB media, which has a drive capacity of 250 GB, all existing as one FAT32 partition. However, when I created the bootable Ubuntu drive, only 4.79 GB were allocated for usage. Rather than put files directly into the /cdrom where the drive is mounted, I want to expand what is listed here in aufs to be at least 200 GB. I'm hopeful that I can do this live. Output of df : Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on aufs 4051904 4050108 0 100% / none 1542852 284 1542568 1% /dev /dev/sdb1 244076800 4901648 239175152 3% /cdrom /dev/loop0 688000 688000 0 100% /rofs none 1547840 1496 1546344 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 1547840 4828 1543012 1% /tmp none 1547840 80 1547760 1% /var/run none 1547840 0 1547840 0% /var/lock none 1547840 0 1547840 0% /lib/init/rw Output of fdisk -l : Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00083fe4 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 30401 244196001 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) So basically what I want to do is get /dev/sdb1 to be entirely, or almost entirely read as aufs. I'm confused over how to do this, as the file systems are all part of /dev/sdb1 on one big partition, rather than separate partitions for separate file systems.

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  • Is dependency injection by hand a better alternative to composition and polymorphism?

    - by Drake Clarris
    First, I'm an entry level programmer; In fact, I'm finishing an A.S. degree with a final capstone project over the summer. In my new job, when there isn't some project for me to do (they're waiting to fill the team with more new hires), I've been given books to read and learn from while I wait - some textbooks, others not so much (like Code Complete). After going through these books, I've turned to the internet to learn as much as possible, and started learning about SOLID and DI (we talked some about Liskov's substitution principle, but not much else SOLID ideas). So as I've learned, I sat down to do to learn better, and began writing some code to utilize DI by hand (there are no DI frameworks on the development computers). Thing is, as I do it, I notice it feels familiar... and it seems like it is very much like work I've done in the past using composition of abstract classes using polymorphism. Am I missing a bigger picture here? Is there something about DI (at least by hand) that goes beyond that? I understand the possibility of having configurations not in code of some DI frameworks having some great benefits as far as changing things without having to recompile, but when doing it by hand, I'm not sure if it's any different than stated above... Some insight into this would be very helpful!

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  • Social-network, online community, company and job reviews, salaries statistics and much more.. Do we have it? Do we need it?

    - by Vlad Lazarenko
    I have many friends from Ukraine who are programmers. So I found out that they have a web site that collects, organizes and analyzing information about IT companies, which includes location, feedbacks, company reviews from current and former employees etc. They also collect programming salaries and organize them by language, region etc. That web site is ran by programmers and for programmers, all information is absolutely public and free. Plus, web site has forums, and people can discuss (more or less social than specific programming stuff) things, publish articles, news etc. I personally think that is useful, especially for those who are new in this industry. For example, you may do a small research and find out that, for example, Java programmers getting paid more than PHP programmers but demand is lower. Or you get an offer from the company, is about to accept it, but read reviews and find out that they don't even provide internet access at work and if you need to download something, you have to ask your manager to do it for you, and managers share a single computer that has internet connection to get that stuff for you (there is only one such company in Kiev, Ukraine, called SMK, for Software Mac Kiev, a big shame). So the question is - do we have something like it in US? Or at least, say, for New York region? Or state? All information I managed to find online is inaccurate or not full. Forums are very specific. If we don't have it, would you be interested in creating such a portal? Thanks!

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  • Samba new file ownership, permissions configuration

    - by Martin Melka
    I have recently installed Samba on my server. Now I have a question about permissions and how to set it up. Currently I mount the Samba shared drive to my laptop with this line in /etc/fstab: //<host>/share /mnt/melka-server-data/ cifs username=<usrname> password=<passwd> _netdev 0 0 This works, as I can read from the files and create them (as root). The problem is when I want to create files as a regular user. I always get a Permission Denied error. These are ll outputs of the mounted folder: magicmaster@magicmaster-kubuntu:/mnt$ ll total 8 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 lis 11 14:15 ./ drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 4096 ríj 26 11:01 ../ drwxrwxrwx 8 magicmaster magicmaster 0 lis 12 22:12 melka-server-data/ and the inside: magicmaster@magicmaster-kubuntu:/mnt/melka-server-data$ ll total 4 drwxrwxrwx 8 magicmaster magicmaster 0 lis 12 22:12 ./ drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 lis 11 14:15 ../ drwxrwxrwx 5 magicmaster magicmaster 0 lis 12 09:35 downloads/ drwxrwxrwx 2 magicmaster magicmaster 0 ríj 28 12:57 lost+found/ drwxrwxrwx 15 magicmaster magicmaster 0 lis 12 09:45 movies/ drwxrwxrwx 2 magicmaster magicmaster 0 lis 1 21:15 newest/ drwxrwxrwx 3 magicmaster magicmaster 0 lis 2 23:14 photos/ drwxrwxrwx 2 magicmaster magicmaster 0 ríj 30 12:44 software/ -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 0 lis 12 22:12 zdar I called sudo chown -R magicmaster:magicmaster melka-server-data/ to try and change all the files to belong to me. Then the file zdar was created by magicmaster just by calling touch. I got the Permission Denied, but it was still created, though it belongs to nobody and I can't write into it. When I create a file as root, it still belongs to nobody, but at least I can write into it. What am I missing? I didn't notice anything in Samba config that would be related to this and I don't like the idea of having to log on as root in order to copy files.. Thanks

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  • How is the Ubuntu installation supposed to work?

    - by Bob D
    I have given up on installing Ubuntu 12.04.01 for the sixth time. I finally got Windows XP to work again. So I blitzted the Ubuntu partition and the swap partition and was about to install the sixth try when it occurred to me that ought to ask how is is "supposed" to go. My installer will install Ubuntu on the Linus ext4 partition I created by hand in Windows on my C drive. But the installer keeps insisting on installing the OS on my D drive unless I intervene. So if I choose "do something else" it will accept installing Ubuntu on the C drive in the partition I previously created, but it insists on putting the "Device for boot loader installation" on the D drive. I can select a different drive at this point (where I could not with the "along side windows choice) but what drive to I choose??? It lists sda, sda1, sda5, sdb and sdb1. The five times before this all ended in disaster letting the installer choose. So I need human intervention. Where is the safe place to do this. The results from the previous attempts left me with only the Ubuntu that would boot, the boot to windows from the grub menu failed every time. Is there a better version of Ubuntu I can use? Is V12.04.01 messed up? My goal is still to use Wine on it to run PC programs. I would like to find a shell or skin or something that makes it seem like windows but have the security and power of Linux under the good. I have seen this type of system and it worked very well. I know I am getting long winded but I have been though at least four of the seven rings of hell already, so I want this install to be the last.

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  • Strange and erratic transformations when using OpenGL VBOs to render scene

    - by janoside
    I have an existing iOS game with fairly simple scenes (all textured quads) and I'm using Apple's "Texture2D" class. I'm trying to convert this class to use VBOs since the vertices of my objects basically never change so I may as well not re-create them for every object every frame. I have the scene rendering using VBOs but the sizes and orientations of all rendered objects are strange and erratic - though locations seem generally correct. I've been toying with this code for a few days now, and I've found something odd: if I re-create all of my VBOs each frame, everything looks correct, even though I'm almost certain my vertices are not changing. Other notes I'm basing my work on this tutorial, and therefore am also using "IBOs" I create my buffers before rendering begins My buffers include vertex and texture data I'm using OpenGL ES 1.1 Fearing some strange effect of the current matrix GL state at the time of buffer creation I've also tried wrapping my buffer-setup code in a "pushMatrix-loadIdentity-popMatrix" block which (as expected) had no effect I'm aware that various articles have been published demonstrating that VBOs may not help performance, but I want to understand this problem and at least have the option to use them. I realize this is a shot in the dark, but has anyone else experienced this type of strange behavior? What might I be doing to result in this behavior? It's rather difficult for me to isolate the problem since I'm working in an existing, moderately complex project, so suggestions about how to approach the problem are also quite welcome.

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  • How do I trust an off site application

    - by Pieter
    I need to implement something similar to a license server. This will have to be installed off site at the customers' location and needs to communicate with other applications at the customers' site (the applications that use the licenses) and an application running in our hosting center (for reporting and getting license information). My question is how to set this up in a way I can trust that: The license server is really our application and not something that just simulates it; and There is no "man in the middle" (i.e. a proxy or something that alters the traffic). The first thing I thought of was to use with client certificates and that would solve at least 2. However, what I'm worried about is that someone just decompiles (this is build in .NET) the license server, alters some logic and recompiles it. This would be hard to detect from both connecting applications. This doesn't have to be absolutely secure since we have a limited number of customers whom we have a trust relationship with. However, I do want to make it more difficult than a simple decompile/recompile of the license server. I primarily want to protect against an employee or nephew of the boss trying to be smart.

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  • Most effective way to do daily standup meeting when a few people are remote

    - by Burhan Ali
    I am a software developer in a small team of seven. We are not an Agile (with a big 'A') team but are experimenting with some aspects of agile. One of these is the daily "standup" meeting. The difficulty here is that for two days of the week we have at least one person working from home so the full team isn't available in the same room. What is the best way to carry out a daily standup in this situation? Some facts that may be relevant: We all work in a single open plan room. We use Skype in our company. We don't have any video conferencing capability. We all work the same hours so there are no timezone complexities involved. The development manager is one of the people who works from home one day a week. Things we have tried: Conference call using Skype: This is tricky for those in the office because you can hear people speak in the room and then a split second later through the headset. This can e very distracting. Conference phone: Awful experience. Hard to get them to work and poor quality audio. Text-based updates using Skype. This is not as engaging and is no different than just firing off a status email in the morning. I have seen other questions about remote collaboration but they are mainly about completely remote teams and/or teams that span multiple time zones. We are not affected by either of these problems. What can we do to make our standup meetings better in these circumstances?

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  • Ubuntu 13.10 AMD/ATI proprietary driver slow boot time, lengthy login/logout delays

    - by NahsiN
    Ubuntu 13.10 is causing me major headaches with my AMD/ATI HD 5770 GPU. Below is a list of problems I am currently encountering. 1) The boot time is extended by at least 25s after installing catalyst 13.4. Using open source radeon drivers, my boot time till the login screen is ~10s. With catalyst 13.4 installed, the boot time increases to ~35s. This was not the case in Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 or 12.04. I have done the driver installation manually (instructions from wiki.cchtml.com) and using software center and there is no difference. I have not tried the catalyst 13.8 beta driver. 2) After manual installation of catalyst 13.4, I get stuck at a black screen after logging in. I have to purge fglrx to resolve the problem. I tried sudo amdconfig --initial -f but it didn't help. 3) The delay between logging in and unity being displayed is ~10-15s for BOTH open source and proprietary drivers. During the delay, it's just a black screen. Whenever I logout, there is again a ~10-15s delay with the login screen appearing stuck before lightdm allows me to enter my password again. This is ridiculous! Yes, I could stick with open source radeon drivers but I would like to install Steam and play my Valve collection on the machine. Is anybody else encountering similar issues?

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  • Should you put personal beliefs in your program?

    - by TheLQ
    Recently I've found two examples of programmer's personal beliefs in programs that have removed or crippled useful functionality uTorrent using KB (rarely used) vs Kb (what most ISPs and other programs use as their metric) in their current connection speed. Various attempts by others and me to give options to at least give an option to show in Kb have ended with "ISPs should use KB" Kleopatra (gpg4Win key manager) not having PGP Key Pictures since they "give a false sense of security" and "increase the size of certificates". While the latter is true, the former is debatable. Both of these hurt the program and its usefulness to me. uTorrent's forums used to be filled with people saying they have 10 Mb download pipe but uTorrent only goes up to 2 MB (not knowing that Mb != MB), and with feature requests to show in Mb. Kleopatra has lost usefulness to me since I don't have the functionality to add pictures to PGP keys. These all are political statements; developers attempting to make change in, in their minds important, issues. But should this come at a cost to end user functionality? If a programmer heavily believes X but everyone else believes Y, should the programmer refuse to add support for Y because in their mind X is horrible? In short, should a programmer make political statements in their program?

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  • XNA for life!

    - by George Clingerman
    Or until my arm falls off at least…. I’ve been meaning to get a new tattoo for quite a while. And I wanted it to be geeky and to represent some memorable milestone in my life. So I was thinking, mulling over some various ideas, sketching some things out. And then it hit me. XNA. Specifically the XNA logo. It’s super geeky (so geeky I’ll probably have to explain to 90% of the people that say it what it even means) and I’m not sure that anything has been so memorable and made such a change in my life as XNA. Cheesy but true. When the XNA framework came out, thing started happening quickly. I stumbled into a geek community and started going to code camps, MSDN events, code-a-thons. I got an XNA MVP award. Met huge geek idols in my life (like Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman) and just really started getting integrated into this fantastic development community. Then to add to all of that I became part of this fantastic XNA community. It’s really just been one of the best things to ever happen to me and I’m having the time of my life right now. So sure, it’s permanent. Sure Microsoft could cancel XNA, rebrand it to Flimmer Flammer or some other name. Sure my arms are going to be wrinkly and flabby when I’m older and for sure I’m going to have to explain to people over and over again just what in the world “xna” means. But you know what, every time I look at that tattoo and every time I’m telling somebody what xna means, I’m going to remember all these awesome things that have happened to me. All the tremendous things I’m seeing people do with the XNA framework and more importantly all the stories and friendships I’ve formed in the XNA community. And I think that deserves a little permanent recognition.

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  • How can i get my KVM switch to work? (win7 & ubuntu 10.10)

    - by Will W.
    i bought a KVM switch and i'm trying to use it to have it connected to my main PC (win7) and my new machine i just installed ubuntu on. I hooked it up properly, and tried using it. It worked when switching from the win7 machine to the ubuntu one, but after the (1st and only) successful switch, ubuntu just didn't seem to recognize my mouse or keyboard. Basically when i tried it the easiest was to explain what happened was it only worked with Win7. When i switched over to ubuntu by doing a [scroll-lock] [scroll-lock], my keyboard and mouse were not recognized. However, the lights on the keyboard and mouse did work when on ubuntu, but they didn't function, and since keyboard wouldn't function, i couldn't do a [scroll-lock] [scroll-lock] to switch back to the win7 machine. So i was basically locked in to ubuntu with no mouse or keyboard, and i had to unplug the keyboard/mouse usb's and d-sub to plug the monitor d-sub back into win7 computer to type up this thread and google the issue. Seems some people have had this issue before but i couldn't find a fix... I am 80% sure it has to do with drivers... but there isn't any for KVM switches, at least not this one also i never was unable to find ubuntu drivers/firmware for my mouse and keyboard (Logitech G15 and Razer Deathadder 3500). I don't know how to fix this, perhaps someone super-savvy could write/code a script or work-around or something? I really need to get this thing working, my back is getting sore from bending over and plugging in / unplugging usb/monitor/usb/monitor/usb/usb over and over again lol... and i really would be sad if the constant plugging unplugging of the usb's or the d-sub port would over time damage the ports... i don't want that... There has to be some way to get this working.. Can anyone help? The KVM is a IOGEAR GCS632U Win7 x64 Ubuntu 10.10

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  • Finding most Important Node(s) in a Directed Graph

    - by Srikar Appal
    I have a large (˜ 20 million nodes) directed Graph with in-edges & out-edges. I want to figure out which parts of of the graph deserve the most attention. Often most of the graph is boring, or at least it is already well understood. The way I am defining "attention" is by the concept of "connectedness" i.e. How can i find the most connected node(s) in the graph? In what follows, One can assume that nodes by themselves have no score, the edges have no weight & they are either connected or not. This website suggest some pretty complicated procedures like n-dimensional space, Eigen Vectors, graph centrality concepts, pageRank etc. Is this problem that complex? Can I not do a simple Breadth-First Traversal of the entire graph where at each node I figure out a way to find the number of in-edges. The node with most in-edges is the most important node in the graph. Am I missing something here?

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  • OpenGL sprites and point size limitation

    - by Srdan
    I'm developing a simple particle system that should be able to perform on mobile devices (iOS, Andorid). My plan was to use GL_POINT_SPRITE/GL_PROGRAM_POINT_SIZE method because of it's efficiency (GL_POINTS are enough), but after some experimenting, I found myself in a trouble. Sprite size is limited (to usually 64 pixels). I'm calculating size using this formula gl_PointSize = in_point_size * some_factor / distance_to_camera to make particle sizes proportional to distance to camera. But at some point, when camera is close enough, problem with size limitation emerges and whole system starts looking unrealistic. Is there a way to avoid this problem? If no, what's alternative? I was thinking of manually generating billboard quad for each particle. Now, I have some questions about that approach. I guess minimum geometry data would be four vertices per particle and index array to make quads from these vertices (with GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP). Additionally, for each vertex I need a color and texture coordinate. I would put all that in an interleaved vertex array. But as you can see, there is much redundancy. All vertices of same particle share same color value, and four texture coordinates are same for all particles. Because of how glDrawArrays/Elements works, I see no way to optimise this. Do you know of a better approach on how to organise per-particle data? Should I use buffers or vertex arrays, or there is no difference because each time I have to update all particles' data. About particles simulation... Where to do it? On CPU or on a vertex processors? Something tells me that mobile's CPU would do it faster than it's vertex unit (at least today in 2012 :). So, any advice on how to make a simple and efficient particle system without particle size limitation, for mobile device, would be appreciated. (animation of camera passing through particles should be realistic)

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  • How does a CS student negotiate in/after a job interview?

    - by Billy ONeal
    Alright, I've gotten to the second step in the interview process. At this point I'm working under the assumption that I might be offered a position -- flying my butt to Redmond would be quite an expense if they weren't at least considering me for something (*crosses fingers*). So, if one is offered a position, how should a CS student negotiate? I've heard a few strategies about dealing with software companies when you are being considered for a hire, but most of them are considering the developer in a powerful position. In such examinations, (s)he has lots of job experience, and may even be overqualified for what the employer is looking for. (s)he is part of a small job market of qualified developers, because 99% of applications companies receive are from those who are woefully under qualified. I'm in a completely different position. I think I compare favorably to most of my fellow students, and I have been a programmer for almost 10 years, but often I still feel green compared to most of my coworkers. I'm in a position where the employer holds most of the chips; they'd be doing me quite a favor by hiring me. I think this scenario is considerably different than the targets for most of the advice I've seen. Above all, I don't want to be such a prick negotiating that it damages my chances to actually operate in a position, even if it means not negotiating at all. How should one approach a scenario like this? P.S. If this is off topic feel free to close it -- I think it's borderline and I'm of the opinion that it's better to ask and be closed than not ask at all ;)

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  • Pushing complete notifications to client

    - by ton.yeung
    So with cqrs, we accept that consistency is eventual. However, that doesn't mean that the user has to continually poll, or that eventual means an update has to take more then 500ms to sync. For the sake of UX, we want to at least give the illusion of consistency, or if not possible, be as transparent as possible. With that in mind, I have this setup: angularjs web client, consumes webapi restful services, sends commands to nservicebus command handlers, saves to neventstore, dispatches events to nservicebus event handlers, sends message to signalr hub, sends notifications to angularjs web client so with that setup, theoretically some initiates a request the server validates the request sends out the necessary commands In the mean time the client gets a 200 response updates the view: working on it gets message sometime later: done, here's the updated data Here's where things get interesting, each command could spawn multiple events. Not sure if this is a serious no, no, or not, but that's how it is currently. For example, a new customer spawns CustomerIDCreated, CustomerNameUpdated, CustomerAddressUpdated, etc... Which event handler needs to notify the client? Should all of them in a progress bar style update?

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  • KISS principle applied to programming language design?

    - by Giorgio
    KISS ("keep it simple stupid", see e.g. here) is an important principle in software development, even though it apparently originated in engineering. Citing from the wikipedia article: The principle is best exemplified by the story of Johnson handing a team of design engineers a handful of tools, with the challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these tools. Hence, the 'stupid' refers to the relationship between the way things break and the sophistication available to fix them. If I wanted to apply this to the field of software development I would replace "jet aircraft" with "piece of software", "average mechanic" with "average developer" and "under combat conditions" with "under the expected software development / maintenance conditions" (deadlines, time constraints, meetings / interruptions, available tools, and so on). So it is a commonly accepted idea that one should try to keep a piece of software simple stupid so that it easy to work on it later. But can the KISS principle be applied also to programming language design? Do you know of any programming languages that have been designed specifically with this principle in mind, i.e. to "allow an average programmer under average working conditions to write and maintain as much code as possible with the least cognitive effort"? If you cite any specific language it would be great if you could add a link to some document in which this intent is clearly expressed by the language designers. In any case, I would be interested to learn about the designers' (documented) intentions rather than your personal opinion about a particular programming language.

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  • Complexity of defense AI

    - by Fredrik Johansson
    I have a non-released game, and currently it's only possible to play with another human being. As the game rules are made up by me, I think it would be great if new players could learn basic game play by playing against an AI opponent. I mean it's not like Tennis, where the majority knows at least the fundamental rules. On the other hand, I'm a bit concerned that this AI implementation can be quite complex. I hope you can help me with an complexity estimation. I've tried to summarize the gameplay below. Is this defense AI very hard to do? Basic Defense Game Play Player Defender can move within his land, i.e. inside a random, non-convex, polygon. This land will also contain obstacles modeled as polygons, that Defender has to move around. Player Attacker has also a land, modeled as another such polygon. Assume that Defender shall defend against Attacker. Attacker will then throw a thingy towards Defender's land. To be rewarded, Attacker wants to hit Defender's land, and Defender will want to strike away the thingy from his land before it stops to prevent Attacker from scoring. To feint Defender, Attacker might run around within his land before the throw, and based on these attacker movements Defender shall then continuously move to the best defense position within his land.

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  • How to cover the widest range of computers when publishing?

    - by DevilWithin
    When you plan a game, or even when you already made a game, and its time to publish, you wonder how much of your audience is covered by the game technology demands. I'm directing this essentialy to casual games, as I constantly see people having old laptops and being unable to replace them. Laptops with integrated cards whose OpenGL version doesn't even support textures larger than 1024x1024. These people may be avid gamers as well, and a reasonable share of the audience to consider giving them the chance to play casual games, once they cannot play any blockbusters. As I've seen happening, a very "noticeable" example is Angry Birds. It's gameplay is merely casual (I think nobody disagrees here) and still, it uses so high resolution textures that at least OpenGL 2.0 or around is needed, which blocks away a lot of people. So, the actual question is: what is a good tradeoff for this issue? Would it be better to just sacrifice the texture resolution for everyone, but have more supported hardware? Would it be better to keep the high quality and just slice the textures into smaller ones, sacrificing the performance a little bit? What else? Any ideas about this topic are welcome for discussion.

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  • Customer retention - why most companies have it wrong

    - by Michel Adar
    At least in the US market it is quite common for service companies to offer an initially discounted price to new customers. While this may attract new customers and robe customers from competitors, it is my argument that it is a bad strategy for the company. This strategy gives an incentive to change companies and a disincentive to stay with the company. From the point of view of the customer, after 6 months of being a customer the company rewards the loyalty by raising the price. A better strategy would be to reward customers for staying with the company. For example, by lowering the cost by 5% every year (compound discount so it does never get to zero). This is a very rational thing to do for the company. Acquiring new customers and setting up their service is expensive, new customers also tend to use more of the common resources like customer service channels. It is probably true for most companies that the cost of providing service to a customer of 10 years is lower than providing the same service in the first year of a customer's tenure. It is only logical to pass these savings to the customer. From the customer point of view, the competition would have to offer something very attractive, whether in terms of price or service, in order for the customer to switch. Such a policy would give an advantage to the first mover, but would probably force the competitors to follow suit. Overall, I would expect that this would reduce the mobility in the market, increase loyalty, increase the investment of companies in loyal customers and ultimately, increase competition for providing a better service. Competitors may even try to break the scheme by offering customers the porting of their tenure, but that would not work that well because it would disenchant existing customers and would be costly, assuming that it is costlier to serve a customer through installation and first year. What do you think? Is this better than using "save offers" to retain flip-floppers?

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  • How to get sharing options to stick - ubuntu 12.04

    - by Devin
    I'm having a really hard time trying to get my sharing set up on my 12.04 system. I've tried both desktop version and server - I'm a bit of a linux n00b, so I need a GUI, command line is beyond me and no time to learn it (not till after I get the shares setup, at least) My problem is, whenever I try to set permissions in Nautilus, it just reverts back to the default which is to "none" Basically when I choose an option... it doesn't stick. I can create shares, and it asks me if I want to add permissions automatically - but they do not stick either. When I go to look at the shared folders in Windows (or even on my Android Phone, or Mac) it gives me permissions errors and doesn't let me log in, despite me clicking "allow guest access" I have no idea what to do or where to go. I've tried searching forums and google, and I've tried everything I come across - no avail. I've even tried Mint builds to see if it's different, no change there either. Please help! I really want to setup a server to share my media files and do backups in my house. Thanks for your help!

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  • NVIDIA Graphics - resolution problems with new 12.04 LTS installation

    - by Daveisuser56810
    I've been trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on my desktop most of the day. The desktop uses a NVIDIA GEFORCE 9800 (GT I think) graphics card. I am unable to set the correct resolution (1680 x 1050) for the display. The first problem I had was that of the "Black Screen" during install. I overcame this by utilising the "nomodeset" switch on the install options (once I'd found how to do that). The second problem of course was the "Black screen" following the first reboot. Once again this was overcome by using "nomodeset", this time by "editing" the GRUB. This gave me a resolution of 1280x768 which, the Displays GUI allowed me to change to 1280x720 (appears to fit on screen). I then tried to install the NVIDIA drivers. 1) using additional drivers 2) manually by downloading driver and installing in root As soon as NVIDIA drivers are installed - resolution become restricted to 640x480 (max). At this resolution Ubuntu GUI is not usable as most screens are larger than the display. Removing the NVIDIA driver and removing the XORG.CONF file does not lift this restriction. I have tried most things that I have found and that were vaguely intelligible, but nothing appears to get me closer to a resolution of 1680x1050. UPDATE: reinstalled Ubuntu 12-04 and used the "NoModeSet" in the Grub to restore the resolution to 1280x720, which is at least usable. Will live with this for now.

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  • Prepared statement alternatives for this middle-man program?

    - by user2813274
    I have an program that is using a prepared statement to connect and write to a database working nicely, and now need to create a middle-man program to insert between this program and the database. This middle-man program will actually write to multiple databases and handle any errors and connection issues. I would like advice as to how to replicate the prepared statements such as to create minimal impact to the existing program, however I am not sure where to start. I have thought about creating a "SQL statement class" that mimics the prepared statement, only that seems silly. The existing program is in Java, although it's going to be networked anyways so I would be open to writing it in just about anything that would make sense. The databases are currently MySQL, although I would like to be open to changing the database type in the future. My main question is what should the interface for this program look like, and does doing this even make sense? A distributed DB would be the ideal solution, but they seem overly complex and expensive for my needs. I am hoping to replicate the main functionality of a distributed DB via this middle-man. I am not too familiar with sql-based servers distributing data (or database in general...) - perhaps I am fighting an uphill battle by trying to solve it via programming, but I would like to make an attempt at least.

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