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• How often does Dreamhost change IP Addresses

  - by pjreddie

  So I just migrated our site to dreamhost because they are free for non-profits. However, right after I switched the nameservers over to them they changed the IP address of the site. So first they propagated out IP address x.x.x.180, then they switched it to x.x.x.178 and had to propagate that out. Point being it meant a lot of downtime since a lot of big DNS servers (like google) thought the address was still x.x.x.180 for up to 5 hours after they switched it. This is compounded by the fact that most our visitors to the site live here in Unalaska and we have local DNS servers that take a LONG time to update (like a day or more) since we get all our internet over satellite. So every time Dreamhost changes our IP address it can mean a day of downtime for us in our community. So my question is, how often do these changes take place? I asked Dreamhost support and they gave me a vague response: I wish I could say, however those changes happen at random times. They're not that frequent, maybe even months between updates, but there's no way to know for sure. First, I hardly believe that they don't know their own system well enough to give me at least some estimate or average. Second, is it worth looking at other providers so that I can get a static IP address? We were hosting the site here originally and hadn't run into this problem since we have a static IP here. We don't get a ton of traffic but usually around 500 hits a day or so, sometimes more if our stories are featured on statewide or national news broadcasts. So hours of downtime every time Dreamhost "randomly" decides to move our server location can be bad for our readership.

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• Why does everybody hate SharePoint?

  - by Ryan Michela

  Reading this topic about the most over hyped technologies I noticed that SharePoint is almost universally reviled. My experience with SharePoint (especially the most recent versions) is that it accomplishes it's core competencies smartly. Namely: Centralized document repository - get all those office documents out of email (with versioning) User-editible content creation for internal information disemination - look, an HR site with current phone numbers and the vacation policy Project collaboration - a couple clicks creates a site with a project's documents, task list, simple schedule, threaded discussion, and possibly a list of all project related emails. Very basic business automation - when you fill out the vacation form, an email is sent to HR. My experience is that SharePoint only gets really ugly when an organization tries to push it in a direction it isn't designed for. SharePoint is not a CRM, ERP, bug database or external website. SharePoint is flexible enough to serve in a pinch, but it is no replacement for a dedicated tool. (Microsoft is just as guilty of pushing SharePoint into domains it doesn't belong.) If you use SharePoint for what it's designed for, it really does work. Thoughts?

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• How do I make time?

  - by SystemNetworks

  I wanted to output a text for a certain amount of time. One way is to use threads. Are there any other ways? I can't use threads for slick2d. This is my code when I use threads for slick: package javagame; import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer; import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics; import org.newdawn.slick.Image; import java.util.Random; import org.newdawn.slick.Input; import org.newdawn.slick.*; import org.newdawn.slick.state.*; import org.lwjgl.input.Mouse; public class thread1 implements Runnable { String showUp; int timeLeft; public thread1(String s) { s = showUp; } public void run(Graphics g) { try { g.drawString("%s is sleeping %d", 500, 500); Thread.sleep(timeLeft); g.drawString("%s is awake", 600,600); } catch(Exception e) { } } @Override public void run() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub run(); } } It auto generates a new run() And also when I call it to my main class it has stack overflow!

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• How to remove seams from a tile map in 3D?

  - by Grimshaw

  I am using my OpenGL custom engine to render a tilemap made with Tiled, using a well spread tileset from the web. There is nothing fancy going on. I load the TMX file from Tiled and generate vertex arrays and index arrays to render the tilemap. I am rendering this tilemap as a wall in my 3D world, meaning that I move around with a fly camera in my 3D world and at Z=0 there is a plane showing me my tiles. Everything is working correctly but I get ugly seems between the tiles. I've tried orthographic and perspective cameras and with either I found particular sets of parameters for the projection and view matrices where the artifacts did not show, but otherwise they are there 99% of the time in multiple patterns, depending on the zoom and camera parameters like field of view. Here's a screenshot of the artifact being shown: http://i.imgur.com/HNV1g4M.png Here's the tileset I am using (which Tiled also uses and renders correctly): http://i.imgur.com/SjjHK4q.png My tileset has no mipmaps and is set to GL_NEAREST and GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE values. I've looked around many articles in the internet and nothing helped. I tried uv correction so the uv fall at half of the texel, rather than the end of the texel to prevent interpolating with the neighbour value(which is transparency). I tried debugging with my geometry and I verified that with no texture and a random color in each tile, I don't seem to see any seams. All vertices have integer coordinates, i.e, the first tile is a quad from (0,0) to (1,1) and so on. Tried adding a little offset both to the UV and to the vertices to see if the gaps cease to exist. Disabled multisampling too. Nothing fixed it so far. Thanks.

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• How does one escape the GPL?

  - by tehtros

  DISCLAIMER I don't pretend to know anything about licensing. In fact, everything I say below may be completely false! Backstory: Recently, I've been looking for a decent game engine, and I think I've found one that I really like, Cafu Engine. However, they have a dual licensing plan, where everything you make with the engine is forced under GPL, unless you pay for a commercial license. I'm not saying that it's a bad engine, they even say that they are very relaxed about the licensing fees. However, the fact that it even involves the GPL scares me. So my question is basicly, how does one escape the GPL. Here's an example: The id Tech engine, also known as the Quake engine, or the Doom engine, was the base for the popular Source engine. However, the id Tech engine has been released under the GPL, and the Source engine is proprietary. Did Valve get a different license? Or did they do something to escape the GPL? Is there a way to escape the GPL? Or, if you use GPL'd source code as a base for another project, are you forced to use the GPL, and make your source code available to the world. Could some random person take the id Tech engine, modify it past the point of recognition, then use it as a proprietary engine for commercial products? Or are they required to make it open source. One last thing, I generally have no problem what-so-ever with open source. However I feel that open source has it's place, but that is not in the bushiness world.

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• Dependency Analyser

  - by tsutha

  I have been watching 3 videos put together by SSIS team on Dependency Analyser. I am happy Microsoft have made an effort to do something about it. I have been asking for this feature since SQL 2005 TAP. Still a long way to go before they catch up with competetion. It looks like it currently supports SSIS and SQL dependencies. Release note states its still in development and support only limited sets of tasks. You still would not know the impact of dropping a column on cubes, reports etc. I hope that changes by the time RTM comes out. I am struggling to understand why it is impossible to do it across the solution. Ideally if you have a BI solution which holds DB, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS & PPS projects I would like to right click and execute a dependency analyser, stating what impact would have if I drop / rename a specific column. Has anyone else looked at it and what are your thoughts? ThanksSutha  

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• What is Mark Shuttleworth's "Easter eggs" blog a reference to? [closed]

  - by fluteflute

  I saw this blog post today, and I was wondering if there's some meaning within the Ubuntu community that I've missed? (I know what an easter egg is in a computer context.) One of our ducks has started dropping eggs in random locations in the garden. I don’t know which duck, but I assume it’s one of the new females we took in from the SPCA, who hasn’t figured out “nesting” yet. I do love ‘em but they’re not African Grey’s in the IQ department. Anyhow, I think I finally understand why people hide eggs in the garden at Easter. Because ducks used to do it for them! I suppose, for millennia, this has been the season to go hunting for eggs. Now we just substitute chocolate ones instead. For the moment, I’ve kept them in a cool shady spot while I keep an eye out for an actual nest. If a polecat doesn’t find them first, I may be able to slip them onto the nest in time for them to get hatched along with some cousins.

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• Security Issue in LinkedIn &ndash; View any 3rd profile without a premium account.

  - by Shaurya Anand

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shauryaanand/archive/2013/06/25/153230.aspxI discovered this accidently when my wife forwarded a contact on LinkedIn from her tablet, using the mobile interface of the website. On opening the contact on my desktop, I was surprised to see, I need to upgrade my account to view the contact. Doing some research along with my wife, I found this simple security vulnerability from LinkedIn that can let anyone view a contact’s full profile even when you have a “not upgraded” LinkedIn account and that the contact is a “3rd + Everyone Else”. Here’s an example of what I am talking about. I just made a random search on LinkedIn for a contact whose name starts with Sacha. Do note, this is just a walkthrough and I am not publicizing any Sacha. I check the “3rd + Everyone Else” and find a “LinkedIn Member”. On clicking this person’s profile to view, I am presented with the following page, asking me to upgrade. Make a note of this page’s web address and you get the profile id from it. For example, for this contact, the page address is: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=868XXX35 The Profile Id for this contact is 868XXX35. Now, open following page where the Profile Id is the same as the one we grabbed a moment earlier. https://touch.www.linkedin.com/?#profile/868XXX35 The mobile page exposes this contact information and you even get the possibility to connect to this person without an introduction mail (InMail). I hope someone from LinkedIn sees and issues a fix for this. I am pretty sure, it’s something that they don’t want the user to do without purchasing an upgrade package.

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• A Panorama of JavaOne Latin America

  - by reza_rahman

  As you know, JavaOne Latin America 2012 was held at the Transamerica Expo Center in Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 4-6. It was a resounding success with a great vibe, excellent technical content and numerous world class speakers, both local and international. Various folks like Tori Wieldt, Steve Chin, Arun Gupta, Bruno Borges and myself looked at the conference from slightly different colored lenses. It's interesting to put them all together in a panoramatic collage: Tori wrote about the Sao Paulo Geek Bike Ride held the Saturday before the conference here (enjoy the photos and video). She also discusses the keynotes in great detail here. Steve looked at it from the viewpoint of someome instrumental to putting the event together. Read his thoughts here (he has more geek bike ride photos as well as material for his JavaFX/HTML 5 talk). Arun had a more holistic view of the conference. He covers the geek bike ride, the GlassFish party (organized by Bruno Borges), his Java EE talks, and more. Check out the cool photos as well as the technical material. Bruno provides the critical local perspective in his 7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012. He discusses the OTN Lounge, the hands-on-lab, the Java community keynote, Java EE technical sessions and of course the GlassFish party! I covered the GlassFish booth, the lab and my technical sessions (as well as Sao Paulo's lively metal underground) here.

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• Desktop switcher appears to be broken for quick double-switches

  - by Jon Blackburn

  I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this. I have three virtual desktops aligned in a horizontal row. In the middle desktop I have only a single application window. I have keyboard shortcuts mapping to navigate between the desktops. Obviously, I never use the up/down arrows because I only have one row of workspaces. Here's the problem, which only started to happen after I installed 12.04.1: When I rapidly hit to go from workspace 1 to workspace 3, the window on workspace 2 gets moved to workspace 1. I have checked using both Unity and Gnome3, and the behavior is the same under both. If I change back to the default workspace setup (a 2x2 grid of desktops) things seem to settle down (i.e., no wandering windows). Not every type of application window behaves the same way. I couldn't get a Chrome browser to jump from 2 to 1, but both Terminal and Terminator exhibit the behavior. Any thoughts? Better workarounds? Thanks in advance.

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• Which platform to choose, Java or .NET?

  - by salman

  I am working in a private bank, a leading mid size bank in local market. We are going to create our core banking solution. Existing solution has been developed on Java using IBM Visual Age 4.0. It is very important to discuss architecture first, we have currently more than 350 branches working in standalone mode, and it means they are working in self contained environment. They have their own database server (IBM DB2 9.7) and they are communicating with other branches via sockets to send and receive data. Having experience of .NET for more than 5 years I am trying to convince my superiors to choose .NET platform, but they are reluctant and unwilling. It is my job to encourage them for choosing best available platform to create large scale enterprise application. In simple word, we are going to create a very large scale enterprise financial application, a centralize and integrated which connects all branch networks plus having scalable, solid architecture that easily evolve over time. I want professional people to comment on above scenarios. Which platform to choose .NET or Java? Our all resource is currently working in Java, we have homogeneous environment (no Linux, no Mac and no UNIX). Any idea, any thoughts, any points technical or non-technical i.e. administrative or management point of view will be really appreciated.

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• Duplication of code (backend and javascript - knockout)

  - by Michal B.

  We have a new developer in our team. He seems a smart guy (he just came in so I cannot really judge). He started with implementing some small enhancements in the project (MVC3 web application using javascript - jquery and knockout). Let's say we have two values: A - quite complex calculation C - constant B = A + C On the screen there is value B and user can change it (normal texbox). When B changes, A changes as well because C is constant. So there is linear dependency between A and B. Now, all the calculations are done in the backend, but we need to recalculate A as user changes B (in js, I would use knockout). I thought about storing old A and B and when B changes by 10 then we know that new A will be old A + 10. He says this is dirty, because it's duplication of code (we make use of the fact that they are dependent and according to him that should be only in one place in our app). I understand it's not ideal, but making AJAX request after every key press seems a bit too much. It's a really small thing and I would not post if we haven't had long discussion about it. How do you deal with such problems? Also I can imagine that using knockout implies lots of calculations on the client side, which very often leads to duplication of the same calculations from the backend. Does anyone have links to some articles/thoughts on this topic?

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• SEO + international sites? country.domain.com or domain.country?

  - by Pure.Krome

  Hi folks, is it better to have seperate country specific domains (which costs more money) or subdomains which define the country, for better SEO? eg. stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com.au stackoverflow.co.uk vs stackoverflow.com au.stackoverflow.com uk.stackoverflow.com Assumption: int the search engine web master tools, each subdomain are associated to a country. eg. au.stackoverflow.com is associated to the country Australia. cheers! Update I understand that both methods do work, especially when i utilize the assumption, listed above. The question is about: Which method is better? Is there such a small SEO difference between them? Is the first method way way way better than the second with getting better SEO results? Update #2 A number of folks have suggested that the following is a good/better approach: stackoverflow.com/ stackoverflow.com/au stackoverflow.com/uk By adding a country specific iso code to the end of the url/the first folder of the domain can be recognised as the country. But a number of SEO mates have suggested that this is a valuable waste of folder level space. Er.. how can i explain. Ok, it's been suggested by some SEO experts that if the number of levels or folders in the domain exceeds 5 then the page drops dramatically in importance. Basically, you don't want to make it deep. As such, adding the country as the first level can be considered a waste, especially when it can be handled by the domain OR subdomain - hence the question :) So, any more thoughts on this? (Maybe SO is the wrong place to ask this question?)

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• Diablo 3 "freezes" periodically

  - by Shauna

  I'm running Diablo 3 (start edition, digital download) on the following: Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit (stock Unity, Gnome, etc; kernel version 3.2.0-29-generic) Wine version 1.5.11 (base, from Wine's PPA, game started with setarch i386 -3) Intel i7 920 CPU nVidia GTX260 with driver version 295.49 ("post-release updates" entry within the proprietary drivers tool), dual monitors 6GB RAM Every so often (and what appears to be at random), the game video will freeze up. I can still move the mouse, and it reacts to ctrl+alt+f2 to drop into text mode, but I can't get back to the desktop (which means I can check terminal to see what's going on after launching from terminal, especially since even in windowed mode, the secondary screen gets shut off by the game), and I can't continue to play the game. In order to get it running again, I have to restart lightdm, then relaunch the game (or, in a couple of rare cases, I had to restart the computer entirely, because running sudo service lightdmn [stop/start] doesn't appear to react). Turning down the video settings seems to have helped in some cases, but not all of them. Times it's frozen on me: The beginning of The Fallen Start quest part 6 - kill the Wretched Mother, right as you walk out of New Tristram and engage in the monsters on the northern path (repeatedly froze here until I adjusted the graphics down) Within the cinematic/event upon finding Deckard Cain While fighting the skeletons to protect Deckard Cain When about to enter Leoric's passage after Cain sends you back to where you found him That's as far as I've gotten through the game so far. Additionally, this doesn't happen on other games I play and seems to only occur with Diablo 3. Has anyone else run into this issue and know a possible cause or fix, or at least know where I can look (and what to look for) to figure out why this is happening?

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• Is /home encryption useful on a server?

  - by Dennis

  I've got a question about the use of encryption: I set up a Ubuntu 12.04 server to use it as a router, file server for backups and webserver. Of course, it is probably not the best idea to put backups on the same system as a web server, but it is only for private usage and I don't want to spend too much money. So I thought it is not a bad idea to set up /home-encryption for the backup-user-account with which I do my backups. But in the same moment, another quesiton arises: Does it still makes sense? Via SSH, root login is disabled. And access to the /home-folder of that user is reduced to the user itself. So the only scenario to access the /home-folder is to connect keyboard/display to the server, login as root and change to /home. Or have I overseen a scenario? In case I am right, you can only access the /home-folder from "outside" as the backup-user. But than, encryption also doesn't make sense anymore. Am I right about that thoughts? Or do you still see a way to access the /home-folder of the backup user so that encryption still makes sense? Thanks for your help in advance!

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• Strange spam posts not making sense

  - by Paaland

  I'm running a web site with a forum where one small part is open for posting from unregistered users. The site uses captcha, but still some spam posts get through every day. Here is the thing. All of the messages follow the same pattern, but all also come from different IP's. That makes me thing this is some sort of automated scripted "attack" from a botnet of some sorts. The strange thing is that all the messages start with six random characters and contains a couple of links. The words have no meaning and the domains in the links does not even exist. Why would anyone use time and resources spreading these things? Below you can see two of these messages: A5Zfs6 exrzvrbspntz, [url=http://nktqoqllnuab.com/]nktqoqllnuab[/url], [link=http://wtrenldadvsy.com/]wtrenldadvsy[/link], [http://rnlrqfgdvdot.com/] O2oLpL nqeffxhryfdk, [url=http://jutyurbpfxow.com/]jutyurbpfxow[/url], [link=http://jpcdtmdalpow.com/]jpcdtmdalpow[/link], [http://qopqwqxwjdjx.com/] Since all the messages come from different IP's I can't see blocking those will help much. For now I'm considering just dropping all messages following this pattern since it's quite easy to match with a regexp. Have anyone else seen these kinds of messages or know the point of posting them?

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• Why isn't there a culture of paying for frameworks?

  - by Marty Pitt

  One of the side effects of the recent trend of "Lean" startups, and the app store era, is that consumers are more acclimatised to paying small prices for small games / products. Eg.: Online SAAS that charges ~$5 / month (the basecamp style of product) Games which are short, fun, and cheap ($0.99 from the app store This market has been defined by "doing one thing well, and charging people for it." DHH of Rails / 37 Signals fame argues that if your website isn't going to make money, don't bother making it. Why doesn't the same rule apply to frameworks? There are lots of software framework projects out there - many which are mature and feature-rich, which offer developers significant value, yet there doesn't seem to be a market or culture of paying for these. It seems that the projects which do charge money are often things like UI component toolsets, and are often marginalized in favour of free alternatives. Why is this? Surely programmers / businesses see the value in contributing back to projects such as Ruby, Rails, Hibernate, Spring, Ant, Groovy, Gradle, (the list goes on). I'm not suggesting that these frameworks should start charging for anyone who wants to use them, but that there must be a meaningful business model that would allow the developers to earn money from the time they invest developing the framework. Any thoughts as to why this model hasn't emerged / succeeded?

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• Huge procedurally generated 'wilderness' worlds

  - by The Communist Duck

  I'm sure you all know of games like Dwarf Fortress - massive, procedural generated wilderness and land. Something like this, taken from this very useful article. However, I was wondering how I could apply this to a much larger scale; the scale of Minecraft comes to mind (isn't that something like 8x the size of the Earth's surface?). Pseudo-infinite, I think the best term would be. The article talks about fractal perlin noise. I am no way an expert on it, but I get the general idea (it's some kind of randomly generated noise which is semi-coherent, so not just random pixel values). I could just define regions X by X in size, add some region loading type stuff, and have one bit of noise generating a region. But this would result in just huge amounts of islands. On the other extreme, I don't think I can really generate a supermassive sheet of perlin noise. And it would just be one big island, I think. I am pretty sure Perlin noise, or some noise, would be the answer in some way. I mean, the map is really nice looking. And you could replace the ascii with tiles, and get something very nice looking. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks. :D

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• Google Image Search Quick Fix

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you tired of unneeded webpage loading and extra link clicking just to access an image found using Google Image Search? Now you can jump directly to the image itself with the clickGOOGLEview extension for Google Chrome. The Problem When you find an image that you like using Google Image Search you always have to go through extra hassle just to get to the image itself. First you have an entire webpage loading in your browser and then you have to click through that irritating “See full size image” link. All that you need is the image, right? Problem Fixed Once you have installed the clickGOOGLEview extension you will absolutely love the result. Find an image that you like, click the link, and there is your new image without any of the hassle or extra link clicking. Big or small having direct access to the image is how it should have been from the beginning. Conclusion The clickGOOGLEview extension does one thing and does it extremely well…it gets you to those images without the extra hassle or additional link clicking. Links Download the clickGOOGLEview extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Firefox Quick Search Use Google’s Beta Search KeysChange Internet Explorer in Windows Vista to Search Google by DefaultMake Firefox Built-In Search Box Use Google’s Experimental Search KeysQuick Tip: Show PageRank in Firefox while Google Toolbar is HiddenQuick Tip: Use Google Talk Sidebar in Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher

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• Infrastructure to effectively set up experiements and learn from them

  - by David

  Open-org.com is in the early stages of creating our first product, a place on the web, where one can ask lawyers questions at a fraction of their normal costs. An early stage front page can be found here. I got inspired by this video, which is recommended by Jeff Atwood, which talks about getting feedback faster, which is the reason for this question. The problem Needless to say, we want our conversion rates to be as high as possible. Therefore, we want to be able to rapidly set up a new experiment where we change something on the site (like moving an image slightly, rewriting a sentence etc.). We then want to present the modified page to a random subset of the users. After that we will compare the conversion rates of the experiment with another version. I could very well imagine that we want to run 10-100 experiments simultaneously and it would be nice to have features, where experiments that obviously have worse results will be ended before schedule. My question Does infrastructure to support the whole process exist? A short description of our infrastructure... We use EC2 and PHP and have a script to automatically start up new instances with all needed software. Still, starting up a new server for every experiment, seems like a bit of overkill, so I am wondering what other options exist. Btw. If you feel like working for Open-org.com, you can pick a task, and start working, or suggest a new task. All profits are given out to the contributors.

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• Controlling a GameObject from another GameObject's script component

  - by OhMrBigshot

  I'm creating a game where when starting the game, a Cube is duplicated GridSize * GridSize times when the game starts. Now, after the cubes are duplicated I want to attach a variable to them, say "Flag" which is a bool, from another script component (let's say I have a Prefab that generates the cloned cubes). In short, I have something like this: CreateTiles.cs : Attached to Prefab void Start() { createMyTiles(); // a function that clones the tiles flagRandomTiles(); // a function that (what I'm trying to do) "Flags" 10 random cubes } CubeBehavior.cs : Attached to each Cube public bool hasFlag; // other stuff Now, I want flagRandomTiles() to set a Cube's hasFlag property via code, assuming I have access to them via a GameObject[] array. Here's what I've tried: Cubes[x].hasFlag = true; - No access. Making a function such as Cubes[x].setHasFlag(true) - still no access. Initializing Cubes as a CubeBehavior object array, then doing the above - GameObjects can't be converted to CubeBehaviors - I get this error when I try to assign the Cubes into the array. How do I do this?

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• Permanent death in a MUD (think command line MMORPG)

  - by Luke Laupheimer

  I have considered writing a MUD for years, and I have a lot of ideas my friends think are really cool (and that's how I'd hope to get anywhere -- word of mouth). Thing is, there's one thing I have always wanted, that my friends and strangers hated: permanent death. Now, the emotional response I get to this is visceral revulsion, every time. I'm pretty sure I am the only person that wants this, or if I'm not, I'm a tiny minority. Now, the reason I want it is because I want the actions of the players to matter. Unlike a lot of other MUDs, which have a set of static city-states and social institutions etc, I want the things my players do, should I get any, to actually change the situation. And that includes killing people. If you kill someone, you didn't send them to time out, you killed them. What happens when you kill people? They go away. They don't come back in half an hour to smack talk you some more. They're gone. Forever. By making death non-permanent, you make death not matter. It would be similar if a climax to a character's arc is getting a speeding ticket. It cheapens it. Non-permanent death cheapens death. How can I: 1) Convince my players (and random people!) that this is actually a good idea?, or 2) Find some other way to make death and violence matter as much as it does in real life (except within the game, of course) sans character deletion? What alternatives are there out there?

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• Failure to Boot 12.04 on HP AMD Dual Core. Rescue Mode doesn't even come up

  - by L R Bellmore Jr

  I have 12.04 installed on HP 64 bit dual core AMD laptop.. worked great until about 1-2 months ago.. now takes 1/2 hour to 25 hours to boot if it ever does. A minor number of times I get the HP logo with hash lines on screen and it just hangs... When it finally boots 95% it will run until I turn it off days later to see if any of the upgrades fixed the problem. Currently, if it boots, it is random.. .left on over night .. 2 nights ago and came back to a HP logo with Hash Lines horizontal across the screen.. frozen.. rebooted back to black screen.. no HP logo... Most often when it does boot.. no HP logo.. just cursor shows up.. and then I know it will finally load... computer has been made worthless and it is my work computer..HELP PLEASE... Rescue Mode can't be invoked.. computer doesnt respond.. has shown up 3 times in about 100 and when I have tried it... 1 time it resulted in a boot up but then failed in a couple hours.

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• Do I need social networks to be an expert developer? [closed]

  - by Gerald Blizzy

  This question may sound odd, but do I need twitter, facebook and google+ if I am a web-developer? I see many expert developers nowadays using it in working order. It seems like it's harder to stay in touch with customers, co-workers and potential customers if you don' use social networks. Am I right? Reason why I ask is that I am totally not a facebook/twitter person, I find it boring and annoying. I understand that linkedin is usefull for career, but what about twitter and facebook? Are they needed for web-developer career? What I am trying to ask is if I only use linkedin, own portfolio website, google talks, gmail and something like github, would I actually miss anything professionally/job-wise? My thoughts are that I can just have my portfolio website where I list all my projects aswell as contacts page with my google talks/gmail account. It can suit both fulltime job, freelance and own projects. So this way email and google talks is just enough. Am I right or not? Thanks in advance!

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• Minimizing data sent over a webservice call on expensive connection

  - by aceinthehole

  I am working on a system that has many remote laptops all connected to the internet through cellular data connections. The application will synchronize periodically to a central database. The problem is, due to factors outside our control, the cost to move data across the cellular networks are spectacularly expensive. Currently the we are sending a compressed XML file across the wire where it is being processed and various things are done with (mainly stuffing it into a database). My first couple of thoughts were to convert that XML doc to json, just prior to transmission and convert back to XML just after receipt on the other end, and get some extra compression for free without changing much. Another thought was to test various other compression algorithms to determine the smallest one possible. Although, I am not entirely sure how much difference json vs xml would make once it is compressed. I thought that their must be resources available that address this problem from an information theory perspective. Does anyone know of any such resources or suggestions on what direction to go in. This developed on the MS .net stack on windows for reference.

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