Search Results

Search found 1880 results on 76 pages for 'alone'.

Page 29/76 | < Previous Page | 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36  | Next Page >

• Can windows XP be better than any Ubuntu (and Linux) distro for an old PC?

  - by Robert Vila

  The old laptop is a Toshiba 1800-100: CPU: Intel Celeron 800h Ram 128 MB (works ok) HDD: 15GB (works ok) Graphics adapter: Integrated 64-bit AGP graphics accelerator, BitBIT, 3D graphic acceleration, 8 MB Video RAM Only WindowsXP is installed, and works ok: it can be used, but it is slow (and hateful). I thought that I could improve performance (and its look) easily, since it is an old PC (drivers and everything known for years...) by installing a light Linux distro. So, I decided to install a light or customized Ubuntu distro, or Ubuntu/Debian derivative, but haven't been successful with any; not even booting LiveCDs: not even AntiX, not even Puppy. Lubuntu wiki says that it won't work because the last to releases need more ram (and some blogs say much more cpu -even core duo for new Lubuntu!-), let alone Xubuntu. The problems I have faced are: 1.There are thousands of pages talking about the same 10/15 lightweight distros, and saying more or less the same things, but NONE talks about a simple thing as to how should the RAM/swap-partition proportion be for this kind of installations. NONE! 2.Loading the LiveCD I have tried several different boot options (don't understand much about this and there's ALWAYS a line of explanation missing) and never receive error messages. Booting just stops at different stages but often seems to stop just when the X server is going to start. I am able to boot to command line. 3.I ignore whether the problem is ram size or a problem with the graphics driver (which surprises me because it is a well known brand and line of computers). So I don't know if doing a partition with a swap partition would help booting the LiveCD. 4.I would like to try the graphical interface with the LiveCD before installing. If doing the swap partition for this purpose would help. How can I do the partition? I tried to use Boot Rescue CD, but it advises me against continuing forward. I would appreciate any ideas as regards these questions. Thank you

  Read the article

• How to share problem solving knowledge in a multiteam group?

  - by jonathan

  I've been working in multiteam groups for as long as I'm a webdeveloper, for me a team can be a lonely soldier or several people, generally a company will have multiple teams working in different projects and once the project is out in the wild, any team can perform the maintenance. This is a small picture since I'm not talking only about project wise knowledge, but "craft wise" knowledge, but it gives the picture of how I'm used to work, so: Since we work on modularised teams, sometimes I feel like the teams are too tightly enclosed in their projects, I've seen cases where after an hour of discussion, someone asked the question aloud and other person totally unrelated answered in a much simpler fashion. The problem is not so simple to solve as people tend not to be available all the time, also sometimes people can't afford the time to go through a problem with the "asker", but could do it alone. I've thought about software based solutions, something in the lines of SE, but I'd like to know other programmers opinions on the subject. EDIT I don't know if this is a wikipedia complex, but I feel that Wikis don't encourage the user to actually ask questions, but rather to write articles, and sometimes we don't know the knowledge we need, before needing it.

  Read the article

• 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]

  Read the article

• What is a currently a good game stack for simple Javascript 2D multiplatform game?

  - by JacobusR

  I'm looking for advice from someone can help me avoid common pitfalls in developing light weight, quick-to-market games. Yeah, I've heard of Google ;-), but a trip down Google lane does not beat solid experience from someone who has been down this path. I'm looking for advice from someone who works alone, or in a small team, and has developed some 2D games for mobile. My game ideas don't require intensive graphics, just simple arcade style glyphs and collision detection. My experience is mostly with Scala, Java and web technologies (Javascript, CSS, SVG, HTML, etc). My question is: Is there a nice stack that someone can suggest that will be a good fit for my skillset? I'm considering Javascript for simple 2D shooter games with simple multiplayer games being supported with a Scala server-side written on Spray. Is this silly? Should I rather look into things such as Unity 3D, and use it in 2D mode? For the actual game engine, something like the Sparrow Framework would be great, but it needs to be multiplatform.

  Read the article

• How can I make sense of the word "Functor" from a semantic standpoint?

  - by guillaume31

  When facing new programming jargon words, I first try to reason about them from an semantic and etymological standpoint when possible (that is, when they aren't obscure acronyms). For instance, you can get the beginning of a hint of what things like Polymorphism or even Monad are about with the help of a little Greek/Latin. At the very least, once you've learned the concept, the word itself appears to go along with it well. I guess that's part of why we name things names, to make mental representations and associations more fluent. I found Functor to be a tougher nut to crack. Not so much the C++ meaning -- an object that acts (-or) as a function (funct-), but the various functional meanings (in ML, Haskell) definitely left me puzzled. From the (mathematics) Functor Wikipedia article, it seems the word was borrowed from linguistics. I think I get what a "function word" or "functor" means in that context - a word that "makes function" as opposed to a word that "makes sense". But I can't really relate that to the notion of Functor in category theory, let alone functional programming. I imagined a Functor to be something that creates functions, or behaves like a function, or short for "functional constructor", but none of those seems to fit... How do experienced functional programmers reason about this ? Do they just need any label to put in front of a concept and be fine with it ? Generally speaking, isn't it partly why advanced functional programming is hard to grasp for mere mortals compared to, say, OO -- very abstract in that you can't relate it to anything familiar ? Note that I don't need a definition of Functor, only an explanation that would allow me to relate it to something more tangible, if there is any.

  Read the article

• Server-side Architecture for Online Game

  - by Draiken

  Hi, basically I have a game client that has communicate with a server for almost every action it takes, the game is in Java (using LWJGL) and right now I will start making the server. The base of the game is normally one client communicating with the server alone, but I will require later on for several clients to work together for some functionalities. I've already read how authentication server should be sepparated and I intend on doing it. The problem is I am completely inexperienced in this kind of server-side programming, all I've ever programmed were JSF web applications. I imagine I'll do socket connections for pretty much every game communication since HTML is very slow, but I still don't really know where to start on my server. I would appreciate reading material or guidelines on where to start, what architecture should the game server have and maybe some suggestions on frameworks that could help me getting the client-server communication. I've looked into JNAG but I have no experience with this kind of thing, so I can't really tell if it is a solid and good messaging layer. Any help is appreciated... Thanks !

  Read the article

• Where to look for a programming partner?

  - by David

  Say that you want to start a new project (I'm talking about a serious project — e.g if you had an idea that seems good and profitable — not about something you start just to learn a new technology or just for your enjoyment) but you don't feel like you can do it alone since, for example, you lack the experience or the technical skills to go through all the phases needed to go from the idea to the final product. Say also that you don't simply want to hire someone. You want someone who can be as passionate as you in the job, that is “proficient” in and enthusiast of the same technologies as you are and that possibly has a background similar to yours (e.g. you both are students, you both come from a prestigious univerity or just you're both Star Trek nerds). So, basically you don't want a person to tell what to do (e.g. “implement this and that, slave!”) but someone who can be inspiring and bring something new and important to your project. Someone to go with you from the earliest stage — from clearly shaping the project's philosophy to drawing mockups etc. Someone who agrees to share the outcome of the project, that strongly believes in the idea behind it and is completely 50-50 with you. Now the question is: how to improve your chances of finding this person (or persons)? Where would you look at first? For example, if you had a lot of funds and were looking for someone to hire, you'd maybe post an ad in SO careers or jobs.73signals; if you already had a team and were looking for funding, you'd start a project on kickstarter or indiegogo, or you'd go to some startup event. But if you had to find a good partner (and programmer, of course) for you're project, where would you start looking? Which strategies would you use?

  Read the article

• Full screen blackout using allegro in codeblocks

  - by Armando Ortiz

  I'm very interested in game programming and I'm taking my first steps alone. So I installed allegro. Although Dev-C++ didn't work, Code::Blocks compiled successfully. I started out with this basic program: #include <allegro.h> int main(){ allegro_init(); install_keyboard(); set_gfx_mode( GFX_AUTODETECT, 640, 480, 0, 0); readkey(); return 0; } END_OF_MAIN(); The problem comes in when I try to run it. It opens the little window as always, but rapidly blacks out my whole screen. I press any key and it takes me back to the little window telling me that it finished, which means the program worked. But I try any other program with allegro, like: #include <allegro.h> int x = 10; int y = 10; int main(){ allegro_init(); install_keyboard(); set_gfx_mode( GFX_AUTODETECT, 640, 480, 0, 0); while ( !key[KEY_ESC] ){ clear_keybuf(); acquire_screen(); textout_ex( screen, font, " ", x, y, makecol( 0, 0, 0), makecol( 0, 0, 0) ); if (key[KEY_UP]) --y; else if (key[KEY_DOWN]) ++y; else if (key[KEY_RIGHT]) ++x; else if (key[KEY_LEFT]) --x; textout_ex( screen, font, "@", x, y, makecol( 255, 0, 0), makecol( 0, 0, 0) ); release_screen(); rest(50); } return 0; } END_OF_MAIN(); And the same thing happens over and over again! Is there something I'm doing wrong?

  Read the article

• SQL query. An unusual join. DB implemented in sqlite-3

  - by user02814

  This is essentially a question about constructing an SQL query. The db is implemented with sqlite3. I am a relatively new user of SQL. I have two tables and want to join them in an unusual way. The following is an example to explain the problem. Table 1 (t1): id year name ------------------------- 297 2010 Charles 298 2011 David 300 2010 Peter 301 2011 Richard Table 2 (t2) id year food --------------------------- 296 2009 Bananas 296 2011 Bananas 297 2009 Melon 297 2010 Coffee 297 2012 Cheese 298 2007 Sugar 298 2008 Cereal 298 2012 Chocolate 299 2000 Peas 300 2007 Barley 300 2011 Beans 300 2012 Chickpeas 301 2010 Watermelon I want to join the tables on id and year. The catch is that (1) id must match exactly, but if there is no exact match in Table 2 for the year in Table 1, then I want to choose the year that is the next (lower) available. A selection of the kind that I want to produce would give the following result id year matchyr name food ------------------------------------------------- 297 2010 2010 Charles Coffee 298 2011 2008 David Cereal 300 2010 2007 Peter Barley 301 2011 2010 Richard Watermelon To summarise, id=297 had an exact match for year=2010 given in Table 1, so the corresponding line for id=297, year=2010 is chosen from Table 2. id=298, year=2011 did not have a matching year in Table 2, so the next available year (less than 2011) is chosen. As you can see, I would also like to know what that matched year (whether exactly , or inexactly) actually was. I would very much appreciate (1) an indication (yes/no answer) of whether this is possible to do in SQL alone, or whether I need to look outside SQL, and (2) a solution, if that is not too onerous.

  Read the article

• Have you used nDepend?

  - by Nick Harrison

  Have you Used NDepend? I have often wanted to use it, but never spent the money on it.   I have developed many tools that try to do pieces of what NDepend does, but never with as much success as they reach. Put simply, it is a tool that will allow you to udnerstand and monitor the architecture of your software, and it does it in some pretty amazing ways. One of the most impressive features is something that they call Code Query Language.   It allows you to write queries very similar to SQL to track the performance of various software metrics and use this to identify areas that are out of compliance with your standards and architecture. For instance, once you have analyzed your project, you can write queries such as : SELECT METHODS WHERE IsPublic AND CouldBePrivate  You can also set up such queries to provide warnings if there are records returned.    You can incorporae this into your daily build and compare build against build. There are over 82 metrics included to allow you to view your code in a variety of angles. I have often advocated for a "Code Inventory" database to track the state of software and the ROI on software investments.    This tool alone will take you about 90% of the way there. If you are not using it yet,  I strongly recommend that you do!

  Read the article

• Commercial product using a GPL OS

  - by pfried

  we are planning to create a commercial product. The product consists of come MCUs and a small computer (we are developping on a raspberry pi at the moment). The computer needs an operating system as we would like keep things like WLAN and booting as simple as possible. We create some software running on this computer (node.js application). The most operating systems like Arch Linux are licenced under the GPL. The product we would sell contains the computer with preinstalled OS and software. This system operates as a central access point to MCU devices and is able to control them. We use other's software in our product. We do not modify their source code. The product (the computer part) consists of a computer, an OS and software we create. How does the use of an OS affect our own code (licence)? Is there a possibility of avoiding GPL for our own code? eg. shipping the software seperated? Are there any effects to other components of our product, eg. the MCU part? The node.js application delivers a WebApp to the client where it is executed. Are there any effects (As we would like to sell parts of the code as an additional App on the App Stores)? I know we make use of the work of the community and i respect this. The problem is: The software alone is kind of useless without the MCU devices. I do not expect a legal advice.

  Read the article

• Studentworker - being a superhero?

  - by Niklas H

  A couple of weeks ago I got a new job as a studentworker for a webagency. The job is 15-20 hours of week. Even though I am new in the company, I feel right at home and I enjoy working with my co-workers. To start of with, I was assigned to work on an internal tool in the company, in order to learn their systems and their development platform. The deadline for this project is this week, and I am right on time. But today (wednesday at noon) I received an email from my boss, asking me to do a new project that has a deadline at friday morning. The new assignment alone will be hard to finish on time, and on top of that I need to finish the other assignment on time. My question is: How do I handle my boss expecting me to be a superhero? EDIT: I will talk to my boss about delaying one of the projects. But another problem is that the new assignment will be hard to do on time (friday morning). I didn't have a say on the deadline - I just got a mail telling me the deadline. I am new in the company and want to stay, but I don't want to start off on the wrong foot with the boss.

  Read the article

• How to break the "php is a bad language" paradigm? [closed]

  - by dukeofgaming

  PHP is not a bad language (or at least not as bad as some may suggest). I had teachers that didn't even know PHP was object oriented until I told them. I've had clients that immediately distrust us when we say we are PHP developers and question us for not using chic languages and frameworks such as Django or RoR, or "enterprise and solid" languages such as Java and ASP.NET. Facebook is built on PHP. There are plenty of solid projects that power the web like Joomla and Drupal that are used in the enterprise and governments. There are frameworks and libraries that have some of the best architectures I've seen across all languages (Symfony 2, Doctrine). PHP has the best documentation I've seen and a big community of professionals. PHP has advanced OO features such as reflection, interfaces, let alone that PHP now supports horizontal reuse natively and cleanly through traits. There are bad programmers and script kiddies that give PHP a bad reputation, but power the PHP community at the same time, and because it is so easy to get stuff done PHP you can often do things the wrong way, granted, but why blame the language?. Now, to boil this down to an actual answerable question: what would be a good and solid and short and sweet argument to avoid being frowned upon and stop prejudice in one fell swoop and defend your honor when you say you are a PHP developer?. (free cookie with teh whipped cream to those with empirical evidence of convincing someone —client or other— on the spot) P.S.: We use Symfony, and the code ends being beautiful and maintainable

  Read the article

• How to Fix this specific Google "Fetch as Googlebot" error appearing on my Webmaster Tools?

  - by UXdesigner

  Good day, I'm currently finding out why I have lost all of my website's rank in google. I don't even appear in google results by the domain. But other sites do link me and they appear in the google results. I think it's all about leaving my site two months alone and finding out I had 20k in comment spam, which I completely deleted and fixed with filters and adding a new Disqus comment service. Thing is, I added my site to Google Webmaster Tools and I'm finding out several awful things. For example, when I click in Google Fetch As GoogleBot. I receive this error message below in response to my request. And I don't even know what's the real problem and how to fix it. I simply don't get it. This is what appears: Date: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 9:43:35 AM PDT Googlebot Type: Web Download Time (in milliseconds): 55 HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:43:36 GMT Server: Apache Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 248 Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 403 Forbidden Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Do you guys know anything about this problem ? I need to have Google crawl my site again. I used to have a really nice google result in the past three years. Now, there's nothing. thanks,

  Read the article

• Dealing with an Idiot [closed]

  - by inspectorG4dget

  I'm a 4th year University Computer Science student, and I have this problem, that I don't seem to be able to find a straight answer to: As a 4th year computer science student, I spend more time in the computer lab on campus, than even my own home. This means that getting along with everyone else here is very important to me. In most cases, this is not an issue because my interactions with almost all the people here fall into one of the following categories: Let me help you, junior Hi fellow student in a course I'm taking, I'm having trouble with this assignment question. Can you give me a hint as to how you solved it? Hi fellow student in a course I'm taking, This is how I solved the problem that you're stuck on. Hope it helps Hi fellow student, I noticed that you're working on a project, using a library that I'm interested in. Can we setup a time so I can learn about this library from you? This model of interaction works very well for me. However, there is one fellow student, who manages to make my life hell beyond all of this (his name is not important, let's just call him "Sam"). He seems to be always (pardon my crass description) high and completely unwilling to contribute to a constructive, academic conversation. He's a pretty smart guy, but just comes across as (I hate to say something like this about a fellow student, but) an imbecile. He also has ignorant opinions on important topics, some of which pertain to my specialization (AI, NLP, etc), and when I try to explain to him why he's wrong, all he does is insult me and put me in a foul mood. I have tried ignoring him (sitting somewhere else in the lab, headphones, etc), but he seems to like doing this because he approaches me and no amount of "leave me alone" seems to do the trick. Can anyone please suggest to me how to deal with this man in a civil way? Thank you

  Read the article

• Live chat solutions

  - by Lèse majesté

  What good live chat/live help solutions are available (preferably for use on a site hosted on a LAMP stack and free)? I'm looking for a way to allow our sales and customer service reps to talk directly with visitors to our site. I've looked at phpopenchat, but it looks very unpolished. The only other free live chat app I've come across looked egregious. The aesthetics and UI design alone made me shudder to think what the underlying code might look like. This isn't a critical feature, and it wouldn't be hard to code up myself, so I'm not really looking for commercial software or paid services (unless there's a really compelling reason to use them). I'm just wondering if any other webmasters have come across a satisfactory free/open source solution for providing live customer support on their website. As a side note, live voice chat would also be an option, but it has to be be designed (or customizable) for customer support rather than a public chatroom. Edit: Looking at the responses, it looks like there probably aren't going to be many free solutions for this type of business-oriented chat solution, so feel free to post answers even if they are commercial solutions as long as they're a good value. Also feel free to post any alternate live support solutions (such as the Skype recommendation) that could be in someway integrated with a website. This will give me a good lay of the land for what people are actually using for live support, and I think will be more helpful to others reading this question.

  Read the article

• Software development process for a part time University project for 1 developer?

  - by Pricey

  I will be doing a part time University project soon and the time frame for it is around 8 months with approximately 10-15 hours a week spent working on it, with a review by a tutor each quarter. My question is what software development process would you recommend using when the course requires you to work on your own in order to manage yourself as well as the project? I wanted to use a weekly or bi-weekly iterative approach to my work but a lot of the processes seem tailored to teams of people. I am looking at XP (Extreme Programming) OR Scrum as something that is less than the norm for University work but again Scrum I don't know a lot about yet, and a question I have is; can you say you are doing XP without pair-programming? because my tutor seems to think that I have to stick to all the practices otherwise I can't do it (nevermind if I am working alone). We can have external user input as well but due to the small timescales with part time work it may be more beneficial for myself to be the user as well, which is not what I prefer considering how I can get lost in the design.

  Read the article

• Chrome window controls in xubuntu 12.04

  - by Norbert

  I'm a long time ubuntu 10.04 LTS user, very used to having window controls on top left borders. New computer with new video card requires newer kernel. Unity doesn't suit and much googling turned up recommendations for xubuntu. Installed 12.04 and first aggravation is window controls at upper right a la Windows. No problem ... Settings Manager - Windows Manager - rearrange button layout Fixes everything until ... I abandoned firefox long ago because of memory leak issues and general fat. I fetch a current version of chrome (19.0.1084.52) and install. Once adblock is added and it's the default browser, everything's great. Except ... Alone among all applications, chrome will not honour the window manager's preferred button layout. Buttons are at upper right no matter what I try. Uninstall and then reinstall: nope. Trawl through /home/user/.config/google-chrome/* looking for a likely setting: nope. Search the web: nothing useful. How do I get chrome's window decoration in sync? Thanks very much for any and all help.

  Read the article

• Help Creating a Google Analytics Funnel for Check out process

  - by Drew

  have a funnel question. I am currently working on tracking (through GA) guest and logged in member activity once they get to my sites shopping cart. But need help with setting up funnels. Specifically to see; Total sales Logged in member total sales List item Guest member sales The urls associated to the check out proces are: Logged in members /cart (arriving to checkout) /checkout (checking out as a logged in member) /checkout/confirmation (thank you - confirmed sale) Guest members - /cart (arriving to checkout) - /checkout-guest (checking out as a guest) - /checkout/confirmation (thanks you - confirmed sale) I've tested the funnels set up for the above with 9 transactions. But the end maths doesn't seem to line up. Total sales funnel shows 9 completed transactions when only tracking these to urls: - /cart - /checkout/confirmation Which is great - cause it's working Logged in member sales show a total of 9 completed transactions based on each step of the logged in url steps (above) being tracked in a funnel. Not good because this number should be 3. Guest check out funnel (see guest steps above) shows 9 as well. What the?!?!?!? The results I am looking for should reflect the following - total sales = 9, logged in members = 3, guest members = 6 Is there any way to set these urls up so that the funnels report the correct results - or do I need to changed the urls and provide logged in members and guest stand alone purchase confirmation pages (this would mean I can not track total sales which combine results from both streams)? Any knowledge in this area is welcome. Thanks.

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools Screencast

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Microsoft just released the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools extension and it is awesome. A summary of all the features can be found here and it is available in the Visual Studio Gallery here. There are a bunch of great features but, in my opinion, the best one is the replacement for the Add Reference dialog. This gives sub-string search capabilities as well as the ability to add multiple references without having to continually re-open the dialog. For this feature alone, you should install the Pro Power Tools right now. There are a few blogs posts that do a good job describing all the features but what I wanted to do here was to post a quick screencast (7 minutes) that shows the features that I think are really cool. I show most (but not all) of the features focusing on the ones I think are the best. The features I cover are: Installation with the Extension Manager Add Reference Dialog replacement Tab Well including pinned tabs, pinned tabs in second row, fixed close button, colorized tabs, dirty indicator Highlight current line Triple Click for full-line selection Ctrl + Click for Go To Definition Colorized Parameter Help Enjoy! (Right-click and Zoom to view in full screen)

  Read the article

• Ten Classic Electronic Toys and Their Modern Equivalents

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Whether you’re looking to relive the toy exploits of your youth or pass your love of tinkering and electronics onto the younger generation, this list highlights ten great electronic toys of yesteryear and their modern equivalents. Courtesy of Wired’s Geek Dad, the description for the all-in-one electronics kit seen here: What is was: Arthur C. Clarke has said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. As a kid in the midst of an increasing technological revolution, electronics were at the heart of that. Learning electronics was made easy through the Science Fair Electronic Project Kits found at Radioshack. Through the project guides, kids could construct various ‘experiments’ by attaching wires to terminal springs that make circuits. The terminal springs would wire in components such as LED segment lights, photo sensors, resistors, diodes, etc. While it was fun getting the projects to work, the manuals lacked in depth explanation as to what was happening in the circuit to produce the project’s result. Why it was awesome: First, it was a simple buy for parents. Everything you needed to get your child interested in electronics was right in the kit. You didn’t need to breadboard or solder. I remember a distinct feeling of accomplishment making a high-water alarm or a light-sensor game with the realization that the bundles of wires springing up from the kit were actually doing something! Modern equivalent: You can still pick up variations of the 100-in-1 kits, but their popular replacement seem to be Snap Circuits by Elenco. All of the components are mounted on a plastic base with a contact on either end which interconnect with each other and the plastic base that projects can be mounted to. Each component also has the electrical diagram symbol for that component drawn on it so it can help you read schematics. For that reason alone, I like these better. HTG Explains: Why You Only Have to Wipe a Disk Once to Erase It HTG Explains: Learn How Websites Are Tracking You Online Here’s How to Download Windows 8 Release Preview Right Now

  Read the article

• What is the best type of c# timer to use with an Unity game that uses many timers simultaneously?

  - by Kyle Seidlitz

  I am developing a stand-alone 3d game in Unity that will have anywhere from 1 to 200 timers running simultaneously. For this game timer durations will range from 5 minutes to 4 days. There will not be any countdown displays or any UI for the timers. An object will be selected, a menu choice will then be selected, and the timer will start. Several events will occur at different intervals during the duration of the timer. The events will be confined to changing the material of the selected object, and calling a 1 second sound effect like a chime or a bell. If the user wants to save or end the game before all the timers are done, the start of the still running timers is to be saved to an XML file such that when the game is started again, any still running timers will have a calculation done to see if the timer is then done, where the game will change the materials appropriately. I am still trying to figure out what type of timer to use, and see also if there are any suggestions for saving and calculating times over several days. What class(es) of timers should I use? Are there any special issues I should look out for in terms of performance?

  Read the article

• Migration of PowerBuilder application to multiplatform

  - by Alex Bibiano

  I developed a client/server application with PowerBuilder in the past for medical clinics and done maintenance for it until now. Now, some clients are asking me to develop a release for Mac/Linux and need some advice about what programming language/technology is best suited for it and the learning curve. It’s not a very very big program but I’m the only developer and have done it in my spare time. PowerBuilder is very productive for this kind of projects (database centric), but it’s not multiplatform and it’s hard to sell PowerBuilder application now days (web, .NET, java sells a lot better with his marketing). My programming skills: - I studied C and C++ in the past (university) but never used it on real projects - Have some Java experience but not in desktop applications - Some experience with Ruby on Rails for web projects - Good skills with PowerBuilder and C# (.NET) (there are my main developing languages) My first dilemma is if I change the desktop application to a web interface, but I think the user will lose some user-experience, and some doctors don’t have a clinic (they are alone at home with my software). I think installing a web application (with webserver) for one user will be overwhelming. If I continue developing desktop application, what is at the moment a good framework/toolset to learn having my skills? Somebody has had similar experiences? A lot of thanks

  Read the article

• Standard ratio of cookies to "visitors"?

  - by Jeff Atwood

  As noted in a recent blog post, We see a large discrepancy between Google Analytics "visitors" and Quantcast "visitors". Also, for reasons we have never figured out, Google Analytics just gets larger numbers than Quantcast. Right now GA is showing more visitors (15 million) on stackoverflow.com alone than Quantcast sees on the whole network (14 million): Why? I don’t know. Either Google Analytics loses cookies sometimes, or Quantcast misses visitors. Counting is an inexact science. We think this is because Quantcast uses a more conservative ratio of cookies-to-visitors. Whereas Google Analytics might consider every cookie a "visitor", Quantcast will only consider every 1.24 cookies a "visitor". This makes sense to me, as people may access our sites from multiple computers, multiple browsers, etcetera. I have two closely related questions: Is there an accepted standard ratio of cookies to visitors? This is obviously an inexact science, but is there any emerging rule of thumb? Is there any more accurate way to count "visitors" to a website other than relying on browser cookies? Or is this just always going to be kind of a best-effort estimation crapshoot no matter how you measure it?

  Read the article

• How to provide value?

  - by Francisco Garcia

  Before I became a consultant all I cared about was becoming a highly skilled programmer. Now I believe that what my clients need is not a great hacker, coder, architect... or whatever. I am more and more convinced every day that there is something of greater value. Everywhere I go I discover practices where I used to roll my eyes in despair. I saw the software industry with pink glasses and laughed or cried at them depending on my mood. I was so convinced everything could be done better. Now I believe that what my clients desperately need is finding a balance between good engineering practices and desperate project execution. Although a great design can make a project cheap to maintain thought many years, usually it is more important to produce quick fast and cheap, just to see if the project can succeed. Before that, it does not really matters that much if the design is cheap to maintain, after that, it might be too late to improve things. They need people who get involved, who do some clandestine improvements into the project without their manager approval/consent/knowledge... because they are never given time for some tasks we all know are important. Not all good things can be done, some of them must come out of freewill, and some of them must be discussed in order to educate colleagues, managers, clients and ourselves. Now my big question is. What exactly are the skills and practices aside from great coding that can provide real value to the economical success of software projects? (and not the software architecture alone)

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36  | Next Page >