Search Results

Search found 2012 results on 81 pages for 'impossible'.

Page 37/81 | < Previous Page | 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44  | Next Page >

• how to choose a web framework and javascript library?

  - by Trylks

  I've been procrastinating learning some framework for web apps w/ some library for AJAX, something like django with prototype, or turbogears with mootools, or zeta components with dojo, grok, jquery, symfony... The point is to spend some of my spare time, have "fun" and create cool stuff that hopefully is some useful. I think maybe I wouldn't like something like GWT or pyjamas because I wouldn't like to "get married" with some technology, I want to keep my freedom to add another javascript library, and so on. I didn't decide even the language yet, but I think I'd prefer python. PHP could be fine if there is some framework that is nice enough. Besides that, I don't even know where to start. I don't feel like learning a framework to then realize there is something that I cannot comfortably do, switch to another framework then find that a third framework has something really cool, etc. And the same goes for javascript libraries. So, some guidance would be really appreciated. I don't really know why are so many options available and what do they aim for, I guess some of them focus on some aspects and some on others, but I just want to make cool and nice apps that I can easily maintain, without spending too much time on coding or learning and avoiding the "trapped in the framework" feeling, when doing something is awfully complicated (or even impossible) with compared with the rest of things or doing that same thing on a different framework. I guess in the end I'll go for django and jquery since they are the most widely used options, afaik, but if I was going for the most widely used options I guess I should choose Java or PHP (I don't really like Java for my spare time, but php is not so bad), so I preferred to ask first. I think the question has to consider both, framework and library, since sometimes they are coupled. I think this is the place to ask this kind of things, sorry if not, and thank you.

  Read the article

• Software design of a browser-based strategic MMO game

  - by Mehran

  I wonder if there are any known tested software designs for Travian-like browser-based strategic MMO games? I mean how would they implement the server of such games or what is stored in database and what is stored in RAM? Is the state of the world stored in one piece or is it distributed among a number of storage? Does anyone know a resource to study the problems and solutions of creating such games? [UPDATE] Suggested in comments, I'm going to give an example how would I design such a project. Even though I'm not sure if I'm proposing the right one. Having stored the world state in a MongoDB, I would implement an event collection in which all the changes to the world will register. Changes that are meant to happen in the future will come with an action date set to the future and those that are to be carried out immediately will be set to now. Having this datastore as the central point of the system, players will issue their actions as events inserted in datastore. At the other end of the system, I'll have a constant-running software taking out events out of the datastore which are due to be carried out and not done yet. Executing an event means apply some update on the world's state and thus the datastore. As scalable as this design sounds, I'm not sure if it will be worth implementing. For one, it is pointless to cache the datastore as most of updates happen once without any follow ups. For instance if you have the growth of resources in your game, you'll be updating the whole world state periodically in which case, having incorporated a cache, you are keeping the whole world in RAM (which most likely is impossible). So can someone come up with a better design?

  Read the article

• Dell XPS 15 L502x and Ubuntu 11.04 - HDMI output

  - by Jones

  Recently I've bought my dream's notebook, a Dell XPS 15 but since then this dream became a kind of endless nightmare. I'm almost getting crazy to make my graphic card driver work properly, but it seems to be just impossible. Yes, I have a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540m (Optimus) in it! It simply doesn't work. Every time I generate the xorg.conf Ubuntu hangs on while starting up, which forces me to remove this file to be able to start the notebook with the standard graphic settings. Another problem is that the Dell XPS 15 does NOT have a VGA output, but a HDMI. So, to be able to use a second monitor I have to configure it by the NVIDIA X Server Settings, which just works if the driver is properly initialized with the xorg.conf. I've also tried to make it work with the Bumblebee, but unfortunately it didn't help me much with the HDMI output. Do you guys have any idea to solve this deadlock? Is there any way for me to use my second monitor?

  Read the article

• How to fix AVI index error

  - by Tim

  I try to open an AVI file. The first software I tried is VLC media player. It reports some error about AVI index: This AVI file is broken. Seeking will not work correctly. Do you want to try to fix it? This might take a long time. I chose yes, and it began fixing AVI index and existed when the repair progress bar reaches 20% or so. Then the video started playing and stopped much earlier than when it is supposed to finish. Next I tried to open it in Totem Movie Player, which also stopped earlier at the same place as in VLC player. I tried to play it in GMplayer. Now the entire AVI file can be played from start to finish, but it is impossible to drag playing progress bar while it was possible in VLC player and Totem player. I heard that Avidemux can fix AVI index error, but later discovered it even failed to open the AVI file before it could try to fix the error. So I was wondering how I can fix the AVI index error, or at least drag the playing progress bar in GMplayer? Thanks and regards!

  Read the article

• New partnership allows auto-transposition of client/server application to Windows Azure

  - by Webgui

  The economics of IT is changing rapidly, and organizations are searching to widen and secure availability of their systems and at the same time lower costs which is exactly what the cloud meant to do. Running your systems on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud for example would improve and secure the availability, accessibility and scalability (both up and down) of your systems and support the new IT economics. However, in order to take advantage of the cloud's promise of lower cost of ownership, the applications must be built or adjusted to work on that platform and in most cases this is not a simple task.  Even existing web applications cannot always be transferred to Azure without some changes, and for client/server applications, the task is way more challenging even to the point where it seems impossible. The reason is the gaps between the client/server desktop technology and the cloud's. For that reason, most of the known methodologies to migrate existing client/server applications actually involve rewrite of the desktop systems for the cloud. A unique approach is introduced by Visual WebGui which creates a virtualization layer atop ASP.Net web server, it moves the transformed or generated .Net code to that layer, and then using a patent pending protocol it renders a user interface within a plain browser. The end result is pure .NET code that is a base code for a pure rich web application and now due to a collaboration with Microsoft Windows Azure Visual WebGui provides the shortest path from client/server to the Azure cloud by being able to handle close to 95% of the transformation to the cloud platform in an automatic way. Application Migration to Azure without migraines More information about the Instant CloudMove Azure solution here.

  Read the article

• More Tables or More Databases?

  - by BuckWoody

  I got an e-mail from someone that has an interesting situation. He has 15,000 customers, and he asks if he should have a database for their data per customer. Without a LOT more data it’s impossible to say, of course, but there are some general concepts to keep in mind. Whenever you’re segmenting data, it’s all about boundary choices. You have not only boundaries around how big the data will get, but things like how many objects (tables, stored procedures and so on) that will be involved, if there are any cross-sections of data (do they share location or product information) and – very important – what are the security requirements? From the answer to these types of questions, you now have the choice of making multiple tables in a single database, or using multiple databases. A database carries some overhead – it needs a certain amount of memory for locking and so on. But it has a very clean boundary – everything from objects to security can be kept apart. Having multiple users in the same database is possible as well, using things like a Schema. But keeping 15,000 schemas can be challenging as well. My recommendation in complex situations like this is similar to a post on decisions that I did earlier – I lay out the choices on a spreadsheet in rows, and then my requirements at the top in the columns. I  give each choice a number based on how well it meets each requirement. At the end, the highest number wins. And many times it’s a mix – perhaps this person could segment customers into larger regions or districts or products, in a database. Within that database might be multiple schemas for the customers. Of course, he needs to query across all customers, that becomes another requirement. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• How do you encode Algebraic Data Types in a C#- or Java-like language?

  - by Jörg W Mittag

  There are some problems which are easily solved by Algebraic Data Types, for example a List type can be very succinctly expressed as: data ConsList a = Empty | ConsCell a (ConsList a) consmap f Empty = Empty consmap f (ConsCell a b) = ConsCell (f a) (consmap f b) l = ConsCell 1 (ConsCell 2 (ConsCell 3 Empty)) consmap (+1) l This particular example is in Haskell, but it would be similar in other languages with native support for Algebraic Data Types. It turns out that there is an obvious mapping to OO-style subtyping: the datatype becomes an abstract base class and every data constructor becomes a concrete subclass. Here's an example in Scala: sealed abstract class ConsList[+T] { def map[U](f: T => U): ConsList[U] } object Empty extends ConsList[Nothing] { override def map[U](f: Nothing => U) = this } final class ConsCell[T](first: T, rest: ConsList[T]) extends ConsList[T] { override def map[U](f: T => U) = new ConsCell(f(first), rest.map(f)) } val l = (new ConsCell(1, new ConsCell(2, new ConsCell(3, Empty))) l.map(1+) The only thing needed beyond naive subclassing is a way to seal classes, i.e. a way to make it impossible to add subclasses to a hierarchy. How would you approach this problem in a language like C# or Java? The two stumbling blocks I found when trying to use Algebraic Data Types in C# were: I couldn't figure out what the bottom type is called in C# (i.e. I couldn't figure out what to put into class Empty : ConsList< ??? >) I couldn't figure out a way to seal ConsList so that no subclasses can be added to the hierarchy What would be the most idiomatic way to implement Algebraic Data Types in C# and/or Java? Or, if it isn't possible, what would be the idiomatic replacement?

  Read the article

• How to write constructors which might fail to properly instantiate an object

  - by whitman

  Sometimes you need to write a constructor which can fail. For instance, say I want to instantiate an object with a file path, something like obj = new Object("/home/user/foo_file") As long as the path points to an appropriate file everything's fine. But if the string is not a valid path things should break. But how? You could: 1. throw an exception 2. return null object (if your programming language allows constructors to return values) 3. return a valid object but with a flag indicating that its path wasn't set properly (ugh) 4. others? I assume that the "best practices" of various programming languages would implement this differently. For instance I think ObjC prefers (2). But (2) would be impossible to implement in C++ where constructors must have void as a return type. In that case I take it that (1) is used. In your programming language of choice can you show how you'd handle this problem and explain why?

  Read the article

• Be liberal in what you accept... or not?

  - by Matthieu M.

  [Disclaimer: this question is subjective, but I would prefer getting answers backed by facts and/or reflexions] I think everyone knows about the Robustness Principle, usually summed up by Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept. I would agree that for the design of a widespread communication protocol this may make sense (with the goal of allowing easy extension), however I have always thought that its application to HTML / CSS was a total failure, each browser implementing its own silent tweak detection / behavior, making it near impossible to obtain a consistent rendering across multiple browsers. I do notice though that there the RFC of the TCP protocol deems "Silent Failure" acceptable unless otherwise specified... which is an interesting behavior, to say the least. There are other examples of the application of this principle throughout the software trade that regularly pop up because they have bitten developpers, from the top off my head: Javascript semi-colon insertion C (silent) builtin conversions (which would not be so bad if it did not truncated...) and there are tools to help implement "smart" behavior: name matching phonetic algorithms (Double Metaphone) string distances algorithms (Levenshtein distance) However I find that this approach, while it may be helpful when dealing with non-technical users or to help users in the process of error recovery, has some drawbacks when applied to the design of library/classes interface: it is somewhat subjective whether the algorithm guesses "right", and thus it may go against the Principle of Least Astonishment it makes the implementation more difficult, thus more chances to introduce bugs (violation of YAGNI ?) it makes the behavior more susceptible to change, as any modification of the "guess" routine may break old programs, nearly excluding refactoring possibilities... from the start! And this is what led me to the following question: When designing an interface (library, class, message), do you lean toward the robustness principle or not ? I myself tend to be quite strict, using extensive input validation on my interfaces, and I was wondering if I was perhaps too strict.

  Read the article

• 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?

  Read the article

• Sucking Less Every Year?

  - by AdityaGameProgrammer

  Sucking Less Every Year -Jeff Atwood I had come across this insightful article.Quoting directly from the post I've often thought that sucking less every year is how humble programmers improve. You should be unhappy with code you wrote a year ago. If you aren't, that means either A) you haven't learned anything in a year, B) your code can't be improved, or C) you never revisit old code. All of these are the kiss of death for software developers. How often does this happen or not happen to you? How long before you see an actual improvement in your coding ? month, year? Do you ever revisit Your old code? How often does your old code plague you? or how often do you have to deal with your technical debt. It is definitely very painful to fix old bugs n dirty code that we may have done to quickly meet a deadline and those quick fixes ,some cases we may have to rewrite most of the application/code. No arguments about that. Some of the developers i had come across argued that they were already at the evolved stage where their coding doesn't need improvement or cant get improved anymore. Does this happen? If so how many years into coding on a particular language does one expect this to happen? Related: Ever look back at some of your old code and grimace in pain? Star Wars Moment in Code "Luke! I am your code!" "No! Impossible! It can't be!"

  Read the article

• How do you name your projects?

  - by Corey

  Naming is hard. Really, really hard. Even StackExchange is a prime example of this -- remember the huge domain name controversy that occurred when SE sites first started graduating? Anyway, I've got a project I'm working on but I have no idea what to name it! This simple fact has caused production to cease, because I'm at the point where I want to create repositories and database tables, and I don't want to name everything "Untitled project" and have to change potentially hundreds of lines of code in the future. Also, I would like to collaborate with others but it's difficult to be taken seriously if I refer to this as "some project I'm working on." It makes it seem like a new project in its infancy and doesn't garner a lot of interest. Just the simple fact act of having a name will make a huge impact in how it registers in others' minds. How do you guys name your projects? This particular one is a website, so not only do I need to find a good name, I need to find one with an available domain, which is next to impossible these days. How do you brainstorm? Who do you talk to (or not talk to)? Is there an "eureka!" moment when you stumble across something that works?

  Read the article

• Apache DVB http video Streaming bandwidth or priority problem

  - by igino manfre'

  I'm streaming few precompressed DVB videos from cloud. The streams are generated from VLC on "impossible" ports (such as 64085, 64086 etc) reverse proxed by Apache on port 80 and 8080. All the generated streams are listed in "http://95.110.164.61/indexv.html". From an ADSL connection with enough downlink bandwidth, recalling the stream generated by VLC (such as "http://95.110.164.61:64087/mpg2_6.4") it flows fluently. Recalling the same stream proxed by Apache ("http://95.110.164.61/mpg2_6.4") the stream stops and goes. The only situation in which the Apache proxed streams flow regularly is from a site connected through 64 Mbps warranted bandwith with RTT to the server less than 10 mseconds. Please note that streams below 2 Mbps are fluently proxed. The system is a single core xeon with windows 2008 R2 on 4 GB of RAM with 1 Gbps of network bandwidth. The drain of computational and bandwidth resources is negligeable, the RAM usage always lower than 50%. On the system I run many VLC streamers. Any of them drains a variable amount of RAM (from about 25 to 70 MB). On the contrary the couple of httpd.exe processes drain no more than 7 MB. Using Wireshark (on the server) I see that VLC directy send to the client much more packets than Apache, and the stream is framgmented on many frames. I'm not a programmer, a newby of Apache. Can anyone please address me to a specific portion of the Apache's huge documentation? Thank you. igino

  Read the article

• Did Oracle make public any plans to charge for JDK in the near future? [closed]

  - by Eduard Florinescu

  I recently read an article: Twelve Disaster Scenarios Which Could Damage the Technology Industry which mentioned among other the possible "disaster scenarios" also: Oracle starts charging for the JDK, giving the following as argument: Oracle could start requiring license fees for the JDK from everyone but desktop users who haven't uninstalled the Java plug-in for some reason. This would burn down half the Java server-side market, but allow Oracle to fully monetize its acquisitions and investments. [...] Oracle tends to destroy markets to create products it can fully monetize. Even if you're not a Java developer, this would have a ripple effect throughout the market. [...] I actually haven't figured out why Larry hasn't decided Java should go this route yet. Some version of this scenario is actually in my company's statement of risks. I know guessing for the future is impossible, and speculating about that would be endless so I will try to frame my question in an objective answarable way: Did Oracle or someone from Oracle under anonymity, make public, or hinted, leaked to the public such a possibility or the above is plain journalistic speculation? I am unable to find the answer myself with Google generating a lot of noise by searching JDK.

  Read the article

• Real life example of an agile game development process outputs

  - by Ken

  I'm trying to learn about applying agile methodologies to game development. But seems to be impossible to find real life examples. There seems to be plenty of material discussing how 'in principle' agile is applied to a game. But that is NOT what I am looking for. I have the Keith book. What I AMlooking for are real EXAMPLES of things like; Initial user stories Final user stories (complete, covering the entire game requirements) Acceptance criteria Task list Sprint backlogs (before and after each sprint) The agile books seem to have some limited examples, many of which seem contrived or limited. In this era of open source software, there must be a publicly available documented example of the process applied to a real game. I am asking specifically about games because they are so different from normal applications. Regular applications are built to all users to complete specific tasks in order to get stuff done(book a room, print a report etc). People play games for much less tangible reasons, so I think the process is significantly different. [it doesn't have to be scrum, it could be any process, just needs to be a real life example game and be reasonably complete]

  Read the article

• Dependency Analyser

  - by tsutha

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

  Read the article

• How to show or direct a business analyst to do data modelling?

  - by AaronLS

  Our business analysts pushed hard to collect data through a spreadsheet. I am the programmer responsible for importing that data. Usually when they push hard for something like this, I never know how well it will work out until a few weeks later when I have time assigned to work on the task of programming the import of the data. I have tried to do as much as possible along the way, named ranges, data validations, etc. But I usually don't have time to take a detailed look at all the data and compare to the destination in the database to determine how well it matches up. A lot of times there will be maybe a little table of items that somehow I have to relate to something else in the database, but there are not natural or business keys present that would allow me to do so. Make the best of this, trying to write something that can compare strings and make a best guess at it and then go through the effort of creating interfaces for a user to match the imported data to the destination. I feel like if the business analyst was actually creating a data model, they would be forced to think about these relationships, and have an appreciation for the need of natural or business keys to be part of the spreadsheet for the purposes of smoothly importing the data. The closest they come to business analysis is a big flat list of fields, and that would be fine if it were like any other data dictionary and include data types+relationships, but it isn't. They are just a bunch of names. No indication of what type of data they might hold, and it is up to me to guess. When I have pushed for more detail, they say that it is just busy work. How can I explain the importance of data modelling? How can I tell them what it is and how to do it? It feels impossible, because they don't have an appreciation for its importance. They do however, usually have an interest in helping out in whatever way they can, it's just this in particular has never gotten a motivated response.

  Read the article

• How stoper one annimation model on XNA?

  - by Mehdi Bugnard

  I met a Difficulty for one stoper annimation. Everything works great starter for the animation. But I do not see how stoper and can continue the annimation paused. The "animationPlayer.StartClip (clip)" is used to choke the annimation but impossible to find a way to stoper Thans's a lot Here is my code to use. protected override void LoadContent() { //Model - Player model_player = Content.Load<Model>("Models\\Player\\models"); // Look up our custom skinning information. SkinningData skinningData = model_player.Tag as SkinningData; if (skinningData == null) throw new InvalidOperationException ("This model does not contain a SkinningData tag."); // Create an animation player, and start decoding an animation clip. animationPlayer = new AnimationPlayer(skinningData); AnimationClip clip = skinningData.AnimationClips["ArmLowAction_006"]; animationPlayer.StartClip(clip); } protected overide update(GameTime gameTime) { KeyboardState key = Keyboard.GetState(); // If player don't move -> stop anim if (!key.IsKeyDown(Keys.W) && !keyStateOld.IsKeyUp(Keys.S) && !keyStateOld.IsKeyUp(Keys.A) && !keyStateOld.IsKeyUp(Keys.D)) { //animation stop ? not exist ? animationPlayer.Stop(); isPlayerStop = true; } else { if(isPlayerStop == true) { isPlayerStop = false; animationPlayer.StartClip(Clip); } }

  Read the article

• How to associate all file types within Wine with its corresponding native application?

  - by MestreLion

  This is easily done for a single file type, as answered in How to associate a file type within Wine with a native application?, by creating a .reg for the desired filetype. But this is for AVI only. I use some wine apps (uTorrent, Soulseek, Eudora, to name a few) that can launch a wide range of files. Email attachments, for example, can be JPG, DOC, PDF, PPS... its impossible (and not desirable) to track down all possible file types that one may receive in an email or download in a torrent. So I neeed a solution to be more generic and broad. I need the file association to honor whatever native app is currently configured. And I want this to be done for all file types configured in my system. I've already figured out how to make the solution generic. Simply replacing the launched app in .reg for winebrowser, like this: [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.pdf] @="PDFfile" "Content Type"="application/pdf" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PDFfile\Shell\Open\command] @="C:\\windows\\system32\\winebrowser.exe \"%1\"" Ive tested this and it works correctly. Since winebrowser uses xdg-open as a backend, and converts my windows path to a Unix one, the correct (Linux) app is launched. So I need a "batch" updater to wine's registry, sort of a wine-update-associations script that I can run whenever a new app is installed. Maybe a tool that can: List all Mime Types types in my system that have a default, installed app associated Extract all the needed info (glob, mime type, etc) Generate the .REG file in the above format The tricky part is: i've searched a LOT to find info about how association is done in Ubuntu 10.10 onwards, and documentation is scarce and confusing, to say the least. Freedesktop.org has no complete spec, and even Gnome docs are obsolete. So far I've gathered 4 files that contain association info, but im clueless on which (or why) to use, or how to use them to generate the .reg file: ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list ~/.local/share/applications/miminfo.cache /usr/share/applications/miminfo.cache /etc/gnome/defaults.list Any help, script or explanation would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

  Read the article

• Installing Skype on 12.04 64 bit causes errors

  - by Wolfy87

  Hi there I am trying to install Skype through apt-get but I am having some trouble. The Skype package depends on skype-bin which is not found in my list of packages. So when trying to install Skype I get the following error. $ sudo apt-get install skype Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: skype : Depends: skype-bin but it is not installable E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Does anyone know why this might happen? Am I missing a repository? I get similar results when downloading the .deb from their site. But it complains about ai32-libs not being installable. This is because it depends on another package that does not exist in my list. Please bear in mind that this is a custom install from the company I work for. They have secured it and I think they have updated it over time and skipped versions, possibly breaking things.

  Read the article

• Are there any concrete examples of where a paralellizing compiler would provide a value-adding benefit?

  - by jamie

  Paul Graham argues that: It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old Moore's Law back, by writing software that could make a large number of CPUs look to the developer like one very fast CPU. ... The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that will parallelize our code for us. There's a name for this compiler, the sufficiently smart compiler, and it is a byword for impossibility. But is it really impossible? Can someone provide a concrete example where a paralellizing compiler would solve a pain point? Web-apps don't appear to be a problem: just run a bunch of Node processes. Real-time raytracing isn't a problem: the programmers are writing multi-threaded, SIMD assembly language quite happily (indeed, some might complain if we make it easier!). The holy grail is to be able to accelerate any program, be it MySQL, Garage Band, or Quicken. I'm looking for a middle ground: is there a real-world problem that you have experienced where a "smart-enough" compiler would have provided a real benefit, i.e that someone would pay for? A good answer is one where there is a process where the computer runs at 100% CPU on a single core for a painful period of time. That time might be 10 seconds, if the task is meant to be quick. It might be 500ms if the task is meant to be interactive. It might be 10 hours. Please describe such a problem. Really, that's all I'm looking for: candidate areas for further investigation. (Hence, raytracing is off the list because all the low-hanging fruit have been feasted upon.) I am not interested in why it cannot be done. There are a million people willing to point to the sound reasons why it cannot be done. Such answers are not useful.

  Read the article

• Graph data structures and journal format for mini-IDE

  - by matec

  Background: I am writing a small/partial IDE. Code is internally converted/parsed into a graph data structure (for fast navigation, syntax-check etc). Functionality to undo/redo (also between sessions) and restoring from crash is implemented by writing to and reading from journal. The journal records modifications to the graph (not to the source). Question: I am hoping for advice on a decision on data-structures and journal format. For the graph I see two possible versions: g-a Graph edges are implemented in the way that one node stores references to other nodes via memory address g-b Every node has an ID. There is an ID-to-memory-address map. Graph uses IDs (instead of addresses) to connect nodes. Moving along an edge from one node to another each time requires lookup in ID-to-address map. And also for the journal: j-a There is a current node (like current working directory in a shell + file-system setting). The journal contains entries like "create new node and connect to current", "connect first child of current node" (relative IDs) j-b Journal uses absolute IDs, e.g. "delete edge 7 - 5", "delete node 5" I could e.g. combine g-a with j-a or combine g-b with j-b. In principle also g-b and j-a should be possible. [My first/original attempt was g-a and a version of j-b that uses addresses, but that turned out to cause severe restrictions: nodes cannot change their addresses (or journal would have to keep track of it), and using journal between two sessions is a mess (or even impossible)] I wonder if variant a or variant b or a combination would be a good idea, what advantages and disadvantages they would have and especially if some variant might be causing troubles later.

  Read the article

• New "delay" keyword for JavaScript

  - by Van Coding

  I had a great idea for a new javascript keyword "delay", but I don't know what I can do to bring it to the new specification. Also I want to know what you guys think about it and if it's even realistic. What does the delay keyword ? The delay keyword does nothing more than stop the execution of the current stack and immediately continues to the next "job" in the queue. But that's not all! Instead of discarding the stack, it adds it to the end of the queue. After all "jobs" before it are done, the stack continues to execute. What is it good for? delay could help make blocking code non-blocking while it still looks like synchronous code. A short example: setTimeout(function(){ console.log("two"); },0); console.log("one"); delay; //since there is currently another task in the queue, do this task first before continuing console.log("three"); //Outputs: one, two, three This simple keyword would allow us to create a synchronous-looking code wich is asynchronous behind the scenes. Using node.js modules, for example, would no longer be impossible to use in the browser without trickery. There would be so many possibilites with such a keyword! Is this pattern useful? What can I do to bring this into the new ECMAscript specification? Note: I asked this previously on Stack Overflow, where it was closed.

  Read the article

• My First Post with Windows Live Writer

  - by geekrutherford

  I receive daily newsletters from DotNetSlackers regarding various .NET topics.  Today I read an article from an apparent Microsoft employee who gave some insight to the organizational culture within the company.  Always on the lookout for new tools and technologies I noted that he used Windows Live Writer for editing and managing his blog content.  I thought I’d give it a try. Let’s try adding a picture and adjusting it’s placement within this blog post relative to this text. … Adding the image is quite simple using the “Insert” options given to the right of the blog content editor.  Inserting without using a table makes aligning text just so impossible, but that’s inherent with any WYSIWYG editor.  Instead using a table with at least 2 columns (1 for text and 1 for the image) works best.   Let’s try adding a map!   That’s pretty sweet!  You can map to any location within the editor itself.  A dialog opens which utilizes Bing! allowing you to enter the address, etc. Well, that’s enough for me.  Time to pimp this to my wife for use on our family blog.  BTW, Windows Live Writer allows you to post content to a number of blogging sites…fantastic!!!

  Read the article

• How to test the tests?

  - by Ryszard Szopa

  We test our code to make it more correct (actually, less likely to be incorrect). However, the tests are also code -- they can also contain errors. And if your tests are buggy, they hardly make your code better. I can think of three possible types of errors in tests: Logical errors, when the programmer misunderstood the task at hand, and the tests do what he thought they should do, which is wrong; Errors in the underlying testing framework (eg. a leaky mocking abstraction); Bugs in the tests: the test is doing slightly different than what the programmer thinks it is. Type (1) errors seem to be impossible to prevent (unless the programmer just... gets smarter). However, (2) and (3) may be tractable. How do you deal with these types of errors? Do you have any special strategies to avoid them? For example, do you write some special "empty" tests, that only check the test author's presuppositions? Also, how do you approach debugging a broken test case?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44  | Next Page >