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• JavaScript loaded external content SEO

  - by user005569871

  I wonder what is the best way to have Javascript loaded content indexed by search engines. I know that search engines don't execute Javascript, but I am thinking more of an progressive enchantment. I am creating a responsive website, and on the home page I will have some sections about most visited products and recommended product that I plan to load depending on the device detected. These products will be in sliders with thumbnail images and names of the products. If mobile is detected slider content will not load, ant the link to the external page will be shown. I know that external content will be indexed via link to those resources. Where will the users be directed from search in this case? To the external page or home page? Will it be bad for SEO if I show only product names on front page so they can be indexed and hide them with CSS? What is the best way to index that content and possibly direct users from search to home page? Also, i've seen the Ajax crawling but iI would like not to use that if there is any better way.

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• Inheritance vs composition in this example

  - by Gerenuk

  I'm wondering about the differences between inheritance and composition examined with concrete code relevant arguments. In particular my example was Inheritance: class Do: def do(self): self.doA() self.doB() def doA(self): pass def doB(self): pass class MyDo(Do): def doA(self): print("A") def doB(self): print("B") x=MyDo() vs Composition: class Do: def __init__(self, a, b): self.a=a self.b=b def do(self): self.a.do() self.b.do() x=Do(DoA(), DoB()) (Note for composition I'm missing code so it's not actually shorter) Can you name particular advantages of one or the other? I'm think of: composition is useful if you plan to reuse DoA() in another context inheritance seems easier; no additional references/variables/initialization method doA can access internal variable (be it a good or bad thing :) ) inheritance groups logic A and B together; even though you could equally introduce a grouped delegate object inheritance provides a preset class for the users; with composition you'd have to encapsule the initialization in a factory so that the user does have to assemble the logic and the skeleton ... Basically I'd like to examine the implications of inheritance vs composition. I heard often composition is prefered, but I'd like to understand that by example. Of course I can always start with one and refactor later to the other.

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• Are certain problems solved more elegantly with AOP?

  - by Winston Ewert

  I've come across the idea of Aspect Oriented Programming, and I have some concerns with it. The basic idea seems to be that we want to take cross-cutting concerns which aren't well modularized using object and modularize them. That is all very fine and well. But the implementation of AOP seems to be that of modifying code from outside of the module. So, for example, an aspect could be written that changes what happens when a particular object is passed as a parameter in a function. This seems to go directly against the idea of modules. I should not be able to modify a module's behavior from outside of that module, otherwise the whole point of modules are overturned. But aspects seem to be doing exactly that! Basically, aspects seems to be a form of code patching. It may useful for some quick hacks; but, as a general principle perhaps its not something you want to do. Aspect Oriented Programming seems to me taking a bad practice and raising to a general design principle. Is AOP a good practice? Are certain programming problems solved more elegantly with AOP?

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• ROI in choosing a CMS solution

  - by Tio

  At the company I work for we need a CMS. The question is, what to choose, for me I think the best solution is to develop one of our own, but we ( my boss and I ), talked about using Drupal. But my boss is completely non-technical, and want's to take a lot of shortcut's which for programming is utterly bad. Too many shortcut's ( and that's why just last Friday we had a bug on one of our systems that caused a lot of panic ). So I'm trying to investigate on the ROI of using already existing CMS solutions VS developing our own customized CMS ( based on a open source library or not ). So that I can sell this to my boss. I'm almost sure that developing a customized CMS is the best for our small company. After a search on google I found this: Choose between a commercial, open source, or customized CMS, but the link is from 2003, it has some truth's, but the world changed a lot from 2003. But I can't seem to find anything else about it. I've developed my own CMS, so I know it's not the most easy thing to do, and that it takes time. Can someone give me any tips? EDIT: With CMS I mean Content Management System, to manage the webpages of our clients.

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• Working with a company as a Junior Developer [closed]

  - by user1601973

  We all have started our careers in some way or other. Well, I am a college student based in North America & I am doing my second internship with the same company with which I did my first internship. I came back here because people here were helpful always and supportive. But it just happened today, and I wanted to share this on SO. Well since I started I have been doing documentation and that kind of stuff only as compared to my first internship in which I actually worked along with the developers & learned so many things. Well, I was in a conversation with my Team lead, and he asked me if I completed that particular work or not? Well, That particular work had slipped from my mind. He was indeed I kind of pissed, and said "You don't have to worry about it, I will figure out". Well, I felt so bad and was about to literally cry. I stopped my lunch and then went on to complete that work. I always ask for work in office, and I always try to be an asset for whoever I am working but this was the first time that it happened. What are your thoughts on this and should I apologise or not? I think I should.

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• Chainloading GRUB2 from BURG

  - by WindowsEscapist

  I have an old PC with Puppy Linux in addition to Ubuntu and Windows XP. THis creates a LOT of menu entries (all of which I would like to keep): Ubuntu 10.04 Ubuntu Recovery Mode Memtest x86 Memtest Serial Windows XP Pro Precise Puppy Linux Precise Puppy TORAM Puppy 4.3.1 Puppy 4.3.1 TORAM Plop Boot Manager (for booting to USB, PC doesn't have BIOS option). Now, in my fancy shiny laptop I've gotten really attached to BURG, and would like a setup where I have a Windows icon, an Ubuntu icon, and an arrow that chainloads GRUB2 so that I can boot from USB or run Puppy if need be (all these entries will obviously not fit into the BURG theme I use, Lightness). The problem is, GRUB2 can't install the the beginning of a partition like it used to be able to (I am reluctant to specify andything with --force at the end), at least, without warning that warn: This is a BAD idea!. So I'm kind of at a loss here. I can't see how the folding option would work, because all of those other options would have the same icon once I unfolded (Lightness is non-text-based). If I do embed GRUB using grub-install /dev/sdax --force, how do I chainload it with BURG? Is there another way?

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• from MS Biology to BS Computer Science [on hold]

  - by Air Borne

  I'm Marco from Italy and I'd like to ask you a piece of advice about my career. I hold a Ms degree in Biology, I enjoyed a lot studying it and I got very good grades but I didn't know what to do with my degree in the real life. Few months ago, I began to read a book about Python programming (Introduction to Computer Science, Zelle J.) and I've great fun learning Python as a beginner, I wake up in the morning thinking about doing excersies and writing simple programs with python :) I'm also watching free lectures from MIT open courseware, and I'm feeling a certain degree of regrets for never asking myself what was computer science, since it seems to me it's a magic world. After weeks of doubts, I made a move :) I applied for a CS bachelor degree abroad, I got an interview and I'm going to start this great adventure next September. I feel incredibly excited at it, but a little bit scared too. Scared because sometimes I think I'm making a great mistake for my life restarting from a bachelor in a completely different area of study. Sometimes I hear people saying the IT market is bad, sometimes I hear other ones saying quite the opposite instead. Moreover, some colleagues of mine suggested me to try to get into Bioinformatics, instead of CS. My question is: I want to really discover if CS is for me, I mean the passion of my life. I know I'm just a beginner and I can't say nothing about it yet. What do you suggest me: CS or Bioinformatics? If I get a Bs in CS, could I get into bioinformatics without relevant experience, taking into account I have a Ms Biology degree? Any comment is appreciated, thanks in advance.

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• What does "fully supported" mean in context of Radeon Opensource Video Driver?

  - by stevecoh1

  UPDATE: This is not a request for support of my specific issue. Details of that issue are here: How to recover from bad upgrade to 13.04 (Unity very slow) . I have "solved" that issue, for the time being anyway, by loading alternative lighter weight desktops. This question was opened specifically to question the meaning of the documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver . END OF UPDATE There it is, in Black and White: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver Fully Supported All these Radeon(HD) cards and derivatives have good 3D acceleration support. This is not an exhaustive list: ... RV610/RV630 Radeon HD 2400/2600/2700/4200/4225/4250 Yet in my case (the HD2400) this proves to be manifestly untrue, at least if "Fully Supported" means sufficient to run Unity in Ubuntu 13.04. It runs all the applications I can launch under Unity, but Unity itself is unbearably slow. It's quite striking really. Click on the "Dash" - go get a cup of coffee. Type a key in the Unity search box, wait five seconds for it to appear. Type Alt-tab and wait five seconds for the screen to finish painting. None of these issues appear outside of Unity components. As you all know, there are complaints about slow performance all over the Internet about Unity. Shouldn't this page somehow address this issue? Especially if "fully supported" doesn't mean sufficiently to run the default modern Ubuntu release. What does "fully supported" mean?

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• any online service and/or application to develop a story line for an adventure game?

  - by Gajet

  I with a bunch of friend were talking about an adventure game. there will be too many possibilities in the game and the player can pick from wide varity of choices at each stage to do somthing. there will be consequences for each decision and they may or may not end the story. the result would be somthing like (picture from flashforward series S01E17)or if any of you watched hereos season 1 there is also similar time lines represented as strings in isaac mandez workshop. sorry for bad quality examples but right now I can't think of any better one. do you know any website or application which we can use to create the timeline? these features the least required ones: the ability to represent events as boxes. the ability to connect distant events to each other. the ability to move events on a scene freely the ability to expand the scene easily there should be some color options for the lines representing connections between events easily shareing the idea with one another it's much more better to have a WYSIWYG editor easily explore in the large scene of events in the end if you know any application which could let me create a board just like the one in my sample picture and share it whith other freinds it could help us a lot.

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• Check parameters annotated with @Nonnull for null?

  - by David Harkness

  We've begun using FindBugs with and annotating our parameters with @Nonnull appropriately, and it works great to point out bugs early in the cycle. So far we have continued checking these arguments for null using Guava's checkNotNull, but I would prefer to check for null only at the edges--places where the value can come in without having been checked for null, e.g., a SOAP request. // service layer accessible from outside public Person createPerson(@CheckForNull String name) { return new Person(Preconditions.checkNotNull(name)); } ... // internal constructor accessed only by the service layer public Person(@Nonnull String name) { this.name = Preconditions.checkNotNull(name); // remove this check? } I understand that @Nonnull does not block null values itself. However, given that FindBugs will point out anywhere a value is transferred from an unmarked field to one marked @Nonnull, can't we depend on it to catch these cases (which it does) without having to check these values for null everywhere they get passed around in the system? Am I naive to want to trust the tool and avoid these verbose checks? Bottom line: While it seems safe to remove the second null check below, is it bad practice? This question is perhaps too similar to Should one check for null if he does not expect null, but I'm asking specifically in relation to the @Nonnull annotation.

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• Is these company terms good for a programmer or should I move?

  - by o_O

  Here are some of the terms and conditions set forward by my employer. Does these make sense for a job like programming? No freelancing in any way even in your free time outside company work hours (may be okay. May be they wanted their employees to be fully concentrating on their full time job. Also they don't want their employees to do similar work for a competing client. Completely rational in that sense). - So sort of agreed. Any thing you develop like ideas, design, code etc while I'm employed there, makes them the owner of that. Seriously? Don't you think that its bad (for me)? If I'm to develop something in my free time (by cutting down sleep and hard working), outside the company time and resource, is that claim rational? I heard that Steve Wozniak had such a contract while he was working at HP. But that sort of hardware design and also those companies pay well, when compared to the peanuts I get. No other kind of works allowed. Means no open source stuffs. Fully dedicated to being a puppet for the employer, though the working environment is sort of okay. According to my assessment this place would score a 10/12 in Joel's test. So are these terms okay especially considering the fact that I'm underpaid with peanuts?

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• Planning milestones and time

  - by Ignas

  I was hired by a marketing company a year ago initially for link building / SEO stuff, but I'm actually a Web developer and took the job just in desperation to have one (I'm still quite young and just finished 2nd year of University). From the 3rd day my boss realised that I'm not into that stuff at all and since he had an idea of a web based app we started to plan it. I estimated that it shouldn't take me longer than two months to do it, but as I was making it we soon realised that we want to add more and more stuff to make it even better. So the development on my own lasted for about 4 months, but then it became an enterprise size app and we hired another programmer to work along me. The guy was awesome at what he did, but because I was assigned to be programmer/project manager I had to set up milestones with deadlines and we missed most of them, because most of the time it was too much work, and my lack of experience kept me setting really optimistic deadlines. We still kept adding features and had changed the architecture of the application twice. My boss is a great guy and he gets that when we add features it expands the time frame in which things should be done so he wasn't angry at me nor the other guy. But I was feeling bad (I still am) that I suck at planning. I gained loads of experience from the programming side, but I still lack the management/planning skills which make me go nuts. So over the last year I have dedicated probably about 8 months of work to this app (obviously my studies affected it) and we're launching as a closed beta this month. So my question is how do I get better at planning/managing a project, how do you estimate the times? What do you take into consideration when setting goals. I'm working alone again because the other guy moved from the city. But I'm sure we'll be hiring to help me maintain it so I need to get better at it. Any hints, points or anything on the topic are appreciated.

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• What You Said: How You Find New Books

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this week we asked you to share your tips and tricks for finding fresh books to enjoy. Now we’re back with tips ranging from the old school to the digital. SJ highlights several of the most popular web-based tools for finding new books: Goodreads.com is quick and easy. Yournextread.com is fun and helps a lot. But I gotta be honest, Amazon’s suggestions are probably the most useful to me. TheFu suggests checking out award-winning lists and one rather quirky way to pick a good Sci-Fi book: For scifi, see Hugo winning books. Life is too short to read bad books. Sometimes that leads to an author with an entire series of books to enjoy. I really enjoy some of the scifi from the 40s and 50s. Wells stuff is always timeless too (and free). I’m less happy with Nebula winners–-different type of writers and not my personal taste. Secure Yourself by Using Two-Step Verification on These 16 Web Services How to Fix a Stuck Pixel on an LCD Monitor How to Factory Reset Your Android Phone or Tablet When It Won’t Boot

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• Page Spamming via locations

  - by codemonkey

  Hi guys I am new here so please be gentle :) I have created a web page for a small mail order business. The page asks the reader if they are in need of a supplier for products in their "area" and if they have ever been let down by a supplier in that "area" etc. It also lists all the local villages and hamlets around the [area] where they can also supply too. This page is dynamically created and the [area] changes and so do the small towns that are local to the town. The page also contains information on the products so the word count vs town names is not stupid. An example of one of the URL would be www.website.com/1014/Halesowen/ It basically covers the whole of the UK so around 800 main towns with 28,000 local villages. The URL changes, so does the title and h1 tags, also each page is Geo coded for that town. My question really is this a good or bad idea? Is it a black hat technique ? I have been told if I have to ask the question then it probably is but the site does supply to all these areas just as any mail order company does and would like to get listed higher in each town for the products. I have seen this done on a few sites but only with a few targeted towns and not the whole of the UK so I would be really interested in your guys thoughts on this. I would post the URL to the site but as I am new here I am a bit unsure of the rules regarding posting links. The whole site needs a lot of other onsite SEO work doing and I will be doing that over the next few weeks. I look forward to your views on this. p.s. If I am allowed to post the URL without getting into trouble so you can see it someone let me know? Thanks in advance

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 29, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud: Advanced I/O Virtualization Architecture for Consolidating High-Performance Workloads This new white paper by Adam Hawley (with contributions from Yoav Eilat) describes in great detail the incorporation into Oracle Exalogic of virtualized InfiniBand I/O interconnects using Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology. Developing Spring Portlet for use inside Weblogic Portal / Webcenter Portal | Murali Veligeti A detailed technical post with supporting downloads from Murali Veligeti. Business SOA: When to shout, the art of constructive destruction Communication skills are essential for architects. Sometimes that means raising your voice. Steve Jones shares some tips for effective communication when the time comes to let it all out. Centralized Transaction Management for ADF Data Control | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director and prolific blogger Andrejus Baranovskis shares instructions and a sample application to illustrate how to implement centralized Commit/Rollback management in an ADF application. Collaborative Police across multiple stakeholders and jurisdictions | Joop Koster Capgemini Oracle Solution Architect Joop Koster raises some interesting IT issues regarding the challenges facing international law enforcement. Architected Systems: "If you don't develop an architecture, you will get one anyway…" "Can you build a system without taking care of architecture?" asks Manuel Ricca. "You certainly can. But inevitably the system will be unbalanced, neglecting the interests of key stakeholders, and problems will soon emerge." Thought for the Day "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. " — Frederick P. Brooks Source: Quotes for Software Engineers

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• How to disable visual effects and compiz 100%

  - by oshirowanen

  UPDATE 1: The problem is not a monitor refresh rate flickering problem, as then the whole screen would be flickering. For me, only the application windows flicker in and out of view, then most of the time, when there do decide to show themselves, they only partly show themselves, like just top half, bottom half, left half, corner missing, window disappears when you try moving it or mouse over it even etc etc. I know it is a visual effect problem as I know my computer cannot handle visual effects and for some reason when the windows do appear partly, I can see the shadows behind the windows. Those shadows are part of the visual effects which are turned on by default for some reason. I get the same problem with 10.04, but can quickly turn off the visual effects by right clicking the desktop, selecting change background image, and in the visual effects tab, I can click on none, which stops all the visual problems. ORIGINAL QUESTION: I am having problems with 11.04 on my computer. For some reason it is enabling visual effects by default in the live cd when it should not be as my computer cannot support such effects. My computer cannot support Unity either, but it defaults to standard gnome with visual effects for some reason. It should be defaulting to standard gnome with no visual effects. THerefore, all I get is a very flickery live cd which makes it very difficult to see anything. So my question is, how do I disable the visual effects from the live cd? To put it simply, the live cd flickering is so bad, that I had to log back into my standard 10.04 install just to write this question, as I just couldn't see enough of the screen because of the flickering in 11.04 to even get to askubuntu.com...

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• C++ and system exceptions

  - by Abyx

  Why standard C++ doesn't respect system (foreign or hardware) exceptions? E.g. when null pointer dereference occurs, stack isn't unwound, destructors aren't called, and RAII doesn't work. The common advice is "to use system API". But on certain systems, specifically Win32, this doesn't work. To enable stack unwinding for this C++ code // class Foo; // void bar(const Foo&); bar(Foo(1, 2)); one should generate something like this C code Foo tempFoo; Foo_ctor(&tempFoo); __try { bar(&tempFoo); } __finally { Foo_dtor(&tempFoo); } Foo_dtor(&tempFoo); and it's impossible to implement this as C++ library. Upd: Standard doesn't forbid handling system exceptions. But it seems that popular compilers like g++ doesn't respect system exceptions on any platforms just because standard doesn't require this. The only thing that I want - is to use RAII to make code readable and program reliable. I don't want to put hand-crafted try\finally around every call to unknown code. For example in this reusable code, AbstractA::foo is such unknown code: void func(AbstractA* a, AbstractB* b) { TempFile file; a->foo(b, file); } Maybe one will pass to func such implementation of AbstractA, which every Friday will not check if b is NULL, so access violation will happen, application will terminate and temporary file will not be deleted. How many months uses will suffer because of this issue, until either author of func or author of AbstractA will do something with it? Related: Is `catch(...) { throw; }` a bad practice?

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• Team Foundation Service Preview now open for all!

  - by Tarun Arora

  The concept of TFS in the cloud was first presented back in early 2010, the product team worked hard to preview a constantly evolving solution at the BUILD conference last year and after having completed 31 Sprints today the preview service has been opened for all. No more invitation codes required, TfsPreview has been made public! “Since we announced the Team Foundation Service Preview at the BUILD conference last year, we’ve limited the on boarding of new customers by requiring invitation codes to create accounts.  The main reason for this has been to control the growth of the service to make sure it didn’t run away from us and end up with a bad user experience.  In this time period, we’ve continued to work on our infrastructure, performance, scale, monitoring, management and, of course, some cool new features like cloud build. ”   - Brian Harry Since the service is still in preview, it is free for all… If you haven’t, now is the best time to try out the offering. There is no fixed time line on how long before service becomes chargeable but the terms of service support production use, the service is reliable and the product team committed to carry all of your data forward into production. “The service will remain in “preview” for a while longer while we work through additional features like data portability, commercial terms, etc but the terms of service support production use, the service is reliable and we expect to carry all of your data forward into production. ”  - Brian Harry As of today it’s possible to use TFS Preview with VS 2012 RC, VS 2010 SP1, VS 2008 SP1, the service currently does not work with VS 2005, this is something the product team is actively working on. You can refer to Brian’s announcement blog post here, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/06/11/team-foundation-service-preview-is-public.aspx

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• Customer retention - why most companies have it wrong

  - by Michel Adar

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

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• Using Mercurial repository inside a Git one: Feasible? Sane?

  - by Portablejim

  I am thinking on creating a Mercurial repository under a Git repository. e.g. ..../git-repository/directory/hg-repo/ The 2 repositories Is it possible to manage (keeping your sanity)? How similiar is it to this? I am a computer science student at University. I manage my work in Git, mainly as a distribution mechanism (after realizing that rsync fails when you have changes in more than one place) between my desktop and usb drive. I try use of Git as a VCS as I do work. I have finished a semester where I did a small group project to prepare for a larger group project next year. We had to use Subversion, and experienced the joys of a centralised VCS (including downtime). I tried to keep the subversion repository separate to my Git repository for the subject**, however it was annoying that it was seperate (not in the place where I store assignments). I therefore moved to using an Subversion repository inside my Git repository. As I think ahead (maybe I am thinking too far ahead) I realise that I will have to try and convince people to use a DVCS and Mercurial will probably be the one that is preferred (Windows and Mac GUI support, closer to Subversion). Having done some research into the whole Git vs Mercurial debate (however not used Mercurial at all) I still prefer Git. Can I have a Mercurial repository inside a Git one without going mad (or it ruining something)? Or is it something that I should not consider at all? (Or is it a bad question that should be deleted?) ** I think outside of Australia it is called a course

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• Generalist Languages: Dying or Alive and Well?

  - by dsimcha

  Around here, it seems like there's somewhat of a consensus that generalist programming languages (that try to be good at everything, support multiple paradigms, support both very high- and very low-level programming), etc. are a bad idea, and that it's better to pick the right tool for the job and use lots of different languages. I see three major areas where this is flawed: Interfacing multiple languages is always at least a source of friction and is sometimes practically impossible. How severe a problem this is depends on how fine-grained the interfacing is. Near the boundary between the two languages, though, you're basically limited to the intersection of their features, and you have to care about things like binary interfaces that you usually wouldn't. Passing complex data structures (i.e. not just primitives and arrays of primitives) between languages is almost always a hassle. Furthermore, shifting between different syntaxes, different conventions, etc. can be confusing and annoying, though this is a fairly minor complaint. Requirements are never set in stone. I hate picking a language thinking it's the right tool for the job, then realizing that, when some new requirement surfaces, it's actually a terrible choice for that requirement. This has happened to me several times before, usually when working with languages that are very slow, very domain specific and/or has very poor concurrency/parallelism support. When you program in a language for a while, you start to build up a personal toolbox of small utility functions/classes/programs. The value of these goes drastically down if you're forced to use a different language than the one you've accumulated all this code in. What am I missing here? Why shouldn't more focus be placed on generalist languages? Are generalist languages as a category dying or alive and well?

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• Is there ever a reason to do all an object's work in a constructor?

  - by Kane

  Let me preface this by saying this is not my code nor my coworkers' code. Years ago when our company was smaller, we had some projects we needed done that we did not have the capacity for, so they were outsourced. Now, I have nothing against outsourcing or contractors in general, but the codebase they produced is a mass of WTFs. That being said, it does (mostly) work, so I suppose it's in the top 10% of outsourced projects I've seen. As our company has grown, we've tried to take more of our development in house. This particular project landed in my lap so I've been going over it, cleaning it up, adding tests, etc etc. There's one pattern I see repeated a lot and it seems so mindblowingly awful that I wondered if maybe there is a reason and I just don't see it. The pattern is an object with no public methods or members, just a public constructor that does all the work of the object. For example, (the code is in Java, if that matters, but I hope this to be a more general question): public class Foo { private int bar; private String baz; public Foo(File f) { execute(f); } private void execute(File f) { // FTP the file to some hardcoded location, // or parse the file and commit to the database, or whatever } } If you're wondering, this type of code is often called in the following manner: for(File f : someListOfFiles) { new Foo(f); } Now, I was taught long ago that instantiated objects in a loop is generally a bad idea, and that constructors should do a minimum of work. Looking at this code it looks like it would be better to drop the constructor and make execute a public static method. I did ask the contractor why it was done this way, and the response I got was "We can change it if you want". Which was not really helpful. Anyway, is there ever a reason to do something like this, in any programming language, or is this just another submission to the Daily WTF?

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• Why is Desktop Unity using the global application menu?

  - by Kazade

  It was announced in another question that the desktop version of Unity will keep the global menu by default. Here are the facts: The global menu was introduced into UNE to save vertical screen space because at Netbook resolutions the vertical space is limited. On a modern desktop with a high resolution, there is ample vertical space making this unnecessary On the announcement of UNE global menus, Mark Shuttleworth himself said the following: "There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very far apart." The benefits of a global menu don't seem to carry across to a high-resolution desktop and instead seem to bring draw backs (increased mouse travel, large distance between the menu and its associated window). The other worrying factor is that applications seem to be moving away from having a menu bar, and instead of innovating on this and defining new guidelines for moving away from the menu, we are giving it prime place right at the top of the desktop. If applications continue moving away from the desktop we will have an inconsistent experience concerning where to locate application related options/tools depending on which app you are using (e.g. Chrome). Finally, the current global menu bar implementation doesn't work for all apps, and doesn't even work for all apps in the default install. This means that the default desktop implementation will be inconsistent. So, there are a bunch of reasons why moving to a global menu is a bad idea, so we need some pretty convincing arguments for why it is a good idea. What are the reasons for the global menu implementation in the desktop version of Unity?

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• RPi and Java Embedded GPIO: Hooking Up Your Wires for Java

  - by hinkmond

  So, you bought your blue jumper wires, your LEDs, your resistors, your breadboard, and your fill of Fry's for the day. How do you hook this cool stuff up to write Java code to blink them LEDs? I'll step you through it. First look at that pinout diagram of the GPIO header that's on your RPi. Find the pins in the corner of your RPi board and make sure to orient it the right way. The upper left corner pin should have the characters "P1" next to it on the board. That pin next to "P1" is your Pin #1 (in the diagram). Then, you can start counting left, right, next row, left, right, next row, left, right, and so on: Pins # 1, 2, next row, 3, 4, next row, 5, 6, and so on. Take one blue jumper wire and connect to Pin # 3 (GPIO0). Connect the other end to a resistor and then the other end of the resistor into the breadboard. Each row of grouped-together holes on a breadboard are connected, so plug in the short-end of a common cathode LED (long-end of a common anode LED) into a hole that is in the same grouping as where the resistor is plugged in. Then, connect the other end of the LED back to Pin # 6 (GND) on the RPi GPIO header. Now you have your first LED connected ready for you to write some Java code to turn it on and off. (As, extra credit you can connect 7 other LEDs the same way to with one lead to Pins # 5, 7, 11, 13, 15, 19 & 21). Whew! That wasn't so bad, was it? Next blog post on this thread will have some Java source code for you to try... Hinkmond

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• Problem Installing Ubuntu 12.04 - [Errno 5]

  - by Rob Barker

  I'm trying to intall Ubuntu 12.04 to my brand new eBay purchased hard drive. Only got the drive today and already it's causing me problems. The seller is a proper proffesional company with 99.9% positive feedback, so it seems unlikely they would have sold me something rubbish. My old hard drive packed up last Tuesday and so i bought a new one to replace it. Because this was an entirely new drive i decided to install Ubuntu as there was no current operating system. My computer is an eMachines EM250 netbook. There's no disc drive so i am installing from a USB stick. The new operating system loads beautifully, and the desktop appears just as it should. When i click install i am taken to the installer which copies the files to about 35% and then displays this: [Errno 5] Input/output error This is often due to a faulty CD/DVD disk or drive, or a faulty hard disk. It may help to clean the CD/DVD, to burn the CD/DVD at a lower speed, to clean the CD/DVD drive lens (cleaning kits are often available from electronics suppliers), to check whether the hard disk is old and in need of replacement, or to move the system to a cooler environment. The hard drive can be heard constantly crackling. When i booted Ubuntu 12.04 from my old faulty hard drive as a test, i didn't even make it past the purple Ubuntu screen, so it can't be that bad. Any ideas? Message to the moderators. Please do not close this thread. I'm well aware there may be other threads on this, but i don't want it closing as the others do not provide the answer i am looking for. Thank you.

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