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• How to Control the Order of Startup Programs in Windows

  - by Sysadmin Geek

  You are probably very familiar with the startup programs function of Windows. While you can specify the applications you want to launch at the start of Windows, the ability to control the order in which they start is not available. However, there are a couple of ways you can easily overcome this limitation and control the startup order of applications. Note: this tutorial should work for any version of Windows, including Windows Server Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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• What is the oldest living piece of unaltered production code? [closed]

  - by user1598390

  It's come to my mind that parts of the code in, say, Unix, has maybe passed unaltered from one version or flavor into another. Maybe some pieces of the source code of the ls command is the same, unaltered, than was written years ago. Have any of you read or learn about this ? What would be the oldest living piece of unaltered production code still running, passing from version through version of a program or system ? Will the code we write outlive us for decades ?

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• My Big Break - this is my story and I am sticking to it ;)

  - by dbasnett

  The value of undertaking new and difficult tasks can have many wonderful consequences, don't you agree? Here is the story of my big break. Remember yours? During the mid 70's I was in the Navy and worked as a computer operator at the CNO's Command and Control computer system (WWMCCS) in the Washington Navy Yard. I was a tape ape, but knew that I wanted to be a systems programmer. One day the Lieutenant in charge of the OS group was running a test that required the development system to be re-booted, and I was politely hinting that I wanted out of computer operations. As he watched the accounting tape rewind to BOT and then search for where it had just been (severalminutes) he told me if I would fix "that" he would have me transferred. I couldn't say "Deal" fast enough. Up until then my programming experience had been on Edsger Dijkstra's favorite computer (sic), an IBM 1620. It took almost 6 months of learning the assembler for the Honeywell 6000 and finding the code responsible for rewinding the tape and then forwarding it. After much trial and error at o’dark thirty I succeeded. The tape barely moved and my “patch” was later adopted by many other sites. Lieutenant Jack Cowan kept his promise and I have gone on to have a varied and enjoyable career. To Jack, and the rest of the crew (Ken, Stu, Neil, Tom, Silent W, Mr. Jacobs, Roy, Rocco, etc.) I’d like to thank you all.

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• Is there any evidence that drugs can actually help programmers produce "better" code? [closed]

  - by sytycs

  I just read this quote from Steve Jobs: "Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." Also a quote from that article: He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Now I'm wondering if there's any evidence to support the theory that drugs can help make a "better" programmer. Has there ever been a study where programmers have been given drugs to see if they could produce "better" code? Is there a well-known programming concept or piece of code which originated from people who were on drugs? EDIT So I did a little more research and it turns out Dennis R. Wier actually documented how he took LSD to wrap his head around a coding project: "At one point in the project I could not get an overall viewpoint for the operation of the entire system. It really was too much for my brain to keep all the subtle aspects and processing nuances clear so I could get a processing and design overview. After struggling with this problem for a few weeks, I decided to use a little acid to see if it would enable a breakthrough, because otherwise, I would not be able to complete the project and be certain of a consistent overall design"[1] There is also an interesting article on wired about Kevin Herbet, who used LSD to solve tough technical problems and chemist Kary Mullis even said "...that LSD had helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences." [2]

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• Where does the term "Front End" come from?

  - by Richard JP Le Guen

  Where does the term "front-end" come from? Is there a particular presentation/talk/job-posting which is regarded as the first use of the term? Is someone credited with coining the term? The Merriam-Webster entry for "front-end" claims the first known use of the term was 1973 but it doesn't seem to provide details about that first known use. Likewise, the Wikipedia page about front and back ends is fairly low quality, and cites very few sources.

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• How was programming done 20 years ago?

  - by Click Upvote

  Nowadays we have a lot of programming aids that make it easier to work, including: IDEs Debuggers (line by line, breakpoints, etc) Ant scripts, etc for compiling Sites like Stackoverflow to help if you're too stuck on a bug. 20 years ago none of these things were around, which tools did people use to program and how did they make do without these tools? I'm interested in learning more about how programming was done back then.

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• Literature in programming and computer science

  - by Peter Turner

  I hope, gentle programmers, that you'll forgive me for not asking a "Soft Question" on theoreticalCS.SE and asking this here. It has recently come to my attention that bigendian came from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I was pretty surprised when listening to the book on my commute to hear something I'd only heard before in Comp Sci / Engineering classes. I thought it was some sort of nouveau-politically incorrect piece of holdover jargon like Master and Slave drives or Polish Notation. Are there any other incidents, not of politically incorrect jargon, but of literature influencing aspects of computers, programming or software development?

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• Less Useful Soft Skills

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction This post is the fifty-sixth part of a ramble-rant about the software business. The current posts in this series can be found on the series landing page . Over a career that spans decades, one encounters useful and “less useful” soft skills in the modern enterprise. I thought I would share a few of the less useful variety: Free Advice If someone asks another for advice, that’s a cool compliment. The person asking has seen something that compels them to seek information about how-another-does-or-sees-things....(read more)

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• First languages with generic programming support

  - by oluies

  Which was the first language with generic programming support, and what was the first major staticly typed language (widely used) with generics support. Generics implement the concept of parameterized types to allow for multiple types. The term generic means "pertaining to or appropriate to large groups of classes." I have seen the following mentions of "first": First-order parametric polymorphism is now a standard element of statically typed programming languages. Starting with System F [20,42] and functional programming lan- guages, the constructs have found their way into mainstream languages such as Java and C#. In these languages, first-order parametric polymorphism is usually called generics. From "Generics of a Higher Kind", Adriaan Moors, Frank Piessens, and Martin Odersky Generic programming is a style of computer programming in which algorithms are written in terms of to-be-specified-later types that are then instantiated when needed for specific types provided as parameters. This approach, pioneered by Ada in 1983 From Wikipedia Generic Programming

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• Historical origins of Scala implicits

  - by Frank

  Scala has been called complex with its rich feature set by many of my colleagues and some even blamed all those new features of it. While most programmers are aware of the OO-features, and at least the decent ones also know about functional programming, there is one feature in particular in Scala for which I am not aware of its historical origins. Given that a major mantra of our profession is to not reinvent the wheel, I am rather confident, that Scala does not have any actual unheard-of-before features, but I stand to be corrected on this one if necessary. To get to the actual question, while I am aware of the origins of most of Scala's features I have never seen something like its implicit declarations before. Are there other (older!) languages out there which also provide this feature? Does it make sense to distinguish the different cases of implicits (as they may originate from different sources), namely implict conversions and implicit parameters?

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• Origins of code indentation

  - by Daniel Mahler

  I am interested in finding out who introduced code indentation, as well as when and where it was introduced. It seems so critical to code comprehension, but it was not universal. Most Fortran and Basic code was (is?) unindented, and the same goes for Cobol. I am pretty sure I have even seen old Lisp code written as continuous, line-wrapped text. You had to count brackets in your head just to parse it, never mind understanding it. So where did such a huge improvement come from? I have never seen any mention of its origin. Apart from original examples of its use, I am also looking for original discussions of indentation.

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• What was the first consumer-oriented hardware/software solution?

  - by Maksee

  We all know the story of the personal computer as a consumer-oriented product. But I just thought that real end user solution should have appeared before that time. So a product that was probably expensive, but allowed using it as a service charging for it, for example computer-terminal for transport time-table access or game machine. On the other site, the video terminals as we know them appeared not so long ago. So if there was something like this, this could be hardware/software most likely offering no interactivity, but probably printing some information based on user actions.

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• What platform were old TV video games developed on?

  - by Mihir

  I am very eager to know how TV video games (which we all used to play in our childhood) were developed and on which platform. I know how games are developed for mobile devices, Windows PC's and Mac but I'm not getting how (in those days) Contra, Duck Hunt and all those games were developed. As they have high graphics and a large number of stages. So how did they manage to develop games in such a small size environment and with lower configuration platform?

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• How long was Microsoft working on .NET before they released it?

  - by Richard DesLonde

  With the whole CLI, CTS, CLS, etc., not only did they release a powerful platform/infrastructure, but they released all the specs that describe it etc. It supports potentially infinite myriad languages, platforms, etc. This seems like an insane amount of work, even for a behemoth like Microsoft - especially since it turns out they did a damn good job. How long were they working on this before releasing it (.NET 1.0)?

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• Why is filesystem preferred for logs instead of RDBMS?

  - by Yasir

  Question should be clear from its title. For example Apache saves its access and error logs in files instead of RDBMS no matter on how large or small scale it is being utilized. For RDMS we just have to write SQL queries and it will do the work while for files we must decide a particular format and then write regex or may be parsers to manipulate them. And those might even fail in particular circumstances if great care was not paid. Yet everyone seems to prefer filesystem for maintaining the logs. I am not biased against any of these methods but I would like to know why it is practiced like this. Is it speed or maintainability or something else?

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• Why isn't DSM for unstructured memory done today?

  - by sinned

  Ages ago, Djikstra invented IPC through mutexes which then somehow led to shared memory (SHM) in multics (which afaik had the necessary mmap first). Then computer networks came up and DSM (distributed SHM) was invented for IPC between computers. So DSM is basically a not prestructured memory region (like a SHM) that magically get's synchronized between computers without the applications programmer taking action. Implementations include Treadmarks (inofficially dead now) and CRL. But then someone thought this is not the right way to do it and invented Linda & tuplespaces. Current implementations include JavaSpaces and GigaSpaces. Here, you have to structure your data into tuples. Other ways to achieve similar effects may be the use of a relational database or a key-value-store like RIAK. Although someone might argue, I don't consider them as DSM since there is no coherent memory region where you can put data structures in as you like but have to structure your data which can be hard if it is continuous and administration like locking can not be done for hard coded parts (=tuples, ...). Why is there no DSM implementation today or am I just unable to find one?

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• Google Closure Compiler - what does the name mean?

  - by mikez302

  I am curious about the Google Closure Compiler. Why did they name it that? Does it have anything to do with lexical closures? EDIT: I tried researching it in the FAQ and documentation, as well as doing Google searches such as "closure compiler name". I couldn't find anything definite, hence the reason I am asking. I don't think I will get a profoundly helpful answer but I was hoping that I could at least satisfy my curiosity. I am not trying to solve a specific problem. I am just curious.

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• What triggered the popularity of lambda functions in modern mainstream programming languages?

  - by Giorgio

  In the last few years anonymous functions (AKA lambda functions) have become a very popular language construct and almost every major / mainstream programming language has introduced them or is planned to introduce them in an upcoming revision of the standard. Yet, anonymous functions are a very old and very well-known concept in Mathematics and Computer Science (invented by the mathematician Alonzo Church around 1936, and used by the Lisp programming language since 1958, see e.g. here). So why didn't today's mainstream programming languages (many of which originated 15 to 20 years ago) support lambda functions from the very beginning and only introduced them later? And what triggered the massive adoption of anonymous functions in the last few years? Is there some specific event, new requirement or programming technique that started this phenomenon? IMPORTANT NOTE The focus of this question is the introduction of anonymous functions in modern, main-stream (and therefore, maybe with a few exceptions, non functional) languages. Also, note that anonymous functions (blocks) are present in Smalltalk, which is not a functional language, and that normal named functions have been present even in procedural languages like C and Pascal for a long time. Please do not overgeneralize your answers by speaking about "the adoption of the functional paradigm and its benefits", because this is not the topic of the question.

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• Why is the sudden increase in number of Git submitters on Debian popcorn graph in 2010-01?

  - by Jungle Hunter

  Almost every article I've read 1 comparing Git and Mercurial it seems like Mercurial has a better command line UX with each command being limited to one idea only (unlike say git checkout). But at some point Git suddenly became looking super popular and number of Git submitters on Debian popcorn graph (see graph image below) literally exploded. Source: Debian What happened in 2010-01 that things suddenly changed. Looks like GitHub was founded earlier than that - 2008.

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• First languages with generic programming support

  - by oluies

  Which was the first language with generic programming support, and what was the first major staticly typed language (widely used) with generics support. Generics implement the concept of parameterized types to allow for multiple types. The term generic means "pertaining to or appropriate to large groups of classes." I have seen the following mentions of "first": First-order parametric polymorphism is now a standard element of statically typed programming languages. Starting with System F [20,42] and functional programming lan- guages, the constructs have found their way into mainstream languages such as Java and C#. In these languages, first-order parametric polymorphism is usually called generics. From "Generics of a Higher Kind", Adriaan Moors, Frank Piessens, and Martin Odersky Generic programming is a style of computer programming in which algorithms are written in terms of to-be-specified-later types that are then instantiated when needed for specific types provided as parameters. This approach, pioneered by Ada in 1983 From Wikipedia Generic Programming

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• How to Tweak the Low Battery Action On Your Windows 7 Laptop

  - by The Geek

  If you’ve got a netbook with really great battery life, you’ll probably still have loads of time left even with only 10% of the battery remaining. Here’s how to tweak the settings so it alerts you or goes into sleep mode at a more reasonable time. Note: obviously if you don’t have a great battery in your laptop, you should probably be careful with these settings or you might lose data. If anything, you’d be better off making the notifications happen sooner in that case Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper Enjoy Christmas Beyond the Holiday with Christmas Eve Crisis Parrotfish Extends the Number of Services Accessible in Twitter Previews

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• How to Setup Software RAID for a Simple File Server on Ubuntu

  - by Sysadmin Geek

  Do you need a file server on the cheap that is easy to setup, “rock solid” reliable with Email Alerting? will show you how to use Ubuntu, software RAID and SaMBa to accomplish just that Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC Install LibreOffice via PPA and Receive Auto-Updates in Ubuntu Creative Portraits Peek Inside the Guts of Modern Electronics Scenic Winter Lane Wallpaper to Create a Relaxing Mood Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video] Convert or View Documents Online Easily with Zoho, No Account Required

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• Examples of "Lost art" on software technology/development

  - by mamcx

  With the advent of a new technology, some old ideas - despite been good - are forgotten in the process. I read a lot how some "new" thing was already present in Lisp like 60 years ago, but only recently resurface with other name or on top of another language. Now look like the new old thing is build functional, non-mutable, non-locking-thread stuff... and that make me wonder what have been "lost" in the art of development of software? What ideas are almost forgotten, waiting for resurface? One of my, I remember when I code in foxpro. The idea of have a full stack to develop database apps without impedance mismatch is something I truly miss. In the current languages, I never find another environment that match how easy was develop in fox back them. What else is missing?

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• How much time do you spend in this site with work on your desk?

  - by David Conde

  This is a simple question, because I want to see if there is a collective tendency to do this: How much time do you spend snooping around in StackOverflow, Programmers, and all those heavenly sites even when having work on the desk? Are these sites becoming facebook, in our case? I used to enter facebook from time to time... it's been like 20 days now and I dont even care about it. All I want to see is what are the latest post of my geeky friends around here..! Is this collective?

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• Is MUMPS alive?

  - by ern0

  At my first workplace we were using Digital Standard MUMPS on a PDP 11-clone (TPA 440), then we've switched to Micronetics Standard MUMPS running on a Hewlett-Packard machine, HP-UX 9, around early 90's. Is still MUMPS alive? Are there anyone using it? If yes, please write some words about it: are you using it in character mode, does it acts as web server? etc. (I mean Caché, too.) If you've been used it, what was your feelings about it? Did you liked it?

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