Search Results

Search found 20785 results on 832 pages for 'idea'.

Page 567/832 | < Previous Page | 563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574  | Next Page >

• Why is Java the lingua franca at so many institutions?

  - by Billy ONeal

  EDIT: This question at first seems to be bashing Java, and I guess at this point it is a bit. However, the bigger point I am trying to make is why any one single language is chosen as the one end all be all solution to all problems. Java happens to be the one that's used so that's the one I had to beat on here, but I'm not intentionality ripping Java a new one :) I don't like Java in most academic settings. I'm not saying the language itself is bad -- it has several extremely desirable aspects, most importantly the ability to run without recompilation on most any platform. Nothing wrong with using the language for Your Next App ^TM. (Not something I would personally do, but that's more because I have less experience with it, rather than it's design being poor) I think it is a waste that high level CS courses are taught using Java as a language. Too many of my co-students cannot program worth a damn, because they don't know how to work in a non-garbage-collected world. They don't fundamentally understand the machines they are programming for. When someone can work outside of a garbage collected world, they can work inside of one, but not vice versa. GC is a tool, not a crutch. But the way it is used to teach computer science students is a as a crutch. Computer science should not teach an entire suite of courses tailored to a single language. Students leave with the idea that all good design is idiomatic Java design, and that Object Oriented Design is the ONE TRUE WAY THAT IS THE ONLY WAY THINGS CAN BE DONE. Other languages, at least one of them not being a garbage collected language, should be used in teaching, in order to give the graduate a better understanding of the machines. It is an embarrassment that somebody with a PHD in CS from a respected institution cannot program their way out of a paper bag. What's worse, is that when I talk to those CS professors who actually do understand how things operate, they share feelings like this, that we're doing a disservice to our students by doing everything in Java. (Note that the above would be the same if I replaced it with any other language, generally using a single language is the problem, not Java itself) In total, I feel I can no longer respect any kind of degree at all -- when I can't see those around me able to program their way out of fizzbuzz problems. Why/how did it get to be this way?

  Read the article

• How to deal with fellow programmer who likes to delegate task with lack any support from boss [closed]

  - by Rudy

  I have a problem with my fellow programmer. We are currently working together in a small project that need to be shipped every 2 weeks. She has a tendency to ask for help for every issues that she is facing. Whether it's a compile error, algorithm problem or even sync/merge issue that caused by herself. She does not even bother to check Google or try to find out by herself. I can be asked to help her for 5-10 times a day. Everyday her husband keeps calling (4-6 times a day), and most of the code that has been delivered by her are actually incorrect. Today she framed me for sending the wrong delivery product. She went home after lunch on the delivery day without telling PM and other team member on that day and her code she commited does not work at all. It's not even tested. I have no choice to roll back her code and cleaning her code just for sake to able to run the product. I have warned her about her defective codes for almost 3 iterations. She said when she was not around I should be able to test her module for her. I snapped and yelled that I am not her slave and directly reported to my boss. However, my boss is not a person that can manage and care about software quality. What is the most important thing to my boss is delivery of product, whether it tested or not. He can even asked us to deliver something that not even tested by QA to the client, on the next day. Most of our suggestion is not followed by him. He even asked me to apologize to her because I snapped. I am tired of the whole situation. This kind of thing keeps repeated. I do have saving to be able to survive for 6 months and the idea of resigning is keep haunting. There is nothing else that can be learned in my current job and I had been in a better environment than this. What should I do with the situation?

  Read the article

• Some Problems Can't Be Outsourced

  - by mikef

  More and more companies are becoming attracted to the idea of Infrastructure as a Service (or IaaS). It would seem that you can outsource the provisioning and management of your services, encompassing everything from Email, through to your servers, workstations and software, all the way down to your LAN and internet services. This type of outsourcing can be a very attractive option for companies who have tight budgets who are short of technical skills or don't have the means to provide long-term IT support. Essentially, they can outsource your services at low short-term costs that are knowable and controllable, are quickly and easily scalable, and generate a minimum of hassle for your internal staff. If you want to get a sophisticated IT infrastructure set up in a hurry without the usual high buy-in costs, or the task of finding and hiring the right specialists. It would seem the way to go, particularly when their salesmen are hypnotizing you with oleaginous phrases such as "we are closely aligned with our client organization's core business requirements, providing agile services". It sounds too good to be true, and so it is. Whereas the costs will have initially been calculated on the annual renewal fees and service fees for ongoing support, there are other charges too which aren't so obvious. It can end up costing far more than the conventional solution once you take into account the extra costs, the fees for customization and upgrades. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) only becomes apparent when it is too late to extract the company easily from the arrangement. After a few years, these annual fees can add up to more than the initial cost of implementing a traditional in-house system. Worse than that is that you can then lose your power to determine your priorities: When you become reliant on this company, with its own schedule of priorities, to implement every change, however simple, you have effectively lost control of your technical infrastructure. This will make senior management very nervous. There is definitely a requirement for this sort of service. If you urgently need an exceptionally high class of service or more expertise than you currently possess, then outsourcing is probably for you. You and your IT colleagues will always have something to do, be it user assistance, smoothing out integrations with an external provider, or working on something entirely new. Heck, if you outsource to IBM, the SysAdmins can go along for the ride and polish their expertise. What you need to figure out is how much your time is worth, because time is ultimately all that outsourcing will buy you and your organization. Now you just need to convince your nervous CEO. Cheers, Michael

  Read the article

• "You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run: libc.so.6" The common fixes don't work,

  - by M_Steam_User

  So I know this is a problem that has been asked around a lot, but I've tried a bunch of solutions with no success. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit), and I just installed it yesterday. This is my first time working with linux. The error is: You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run: libc.so.6 Things I've tried. First, I had downloaded from the steam website. I uninstalled it, and tried again from the ubuntu software centre. sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ia32-libs sudo apt-get upgrade This installed a bunch of the 32 bit libraries, but did not fix the issue. This seems like the major fix for most people. The direct approach of sudo apt-get install libc.so.6 returns this: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package libc.so.6 E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'libc.so.6' I guess libc.so.6 isn't a package, just a single file or something? I also tried gksudo gedit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/steam.conf Added these two lines, those the second one was all ready in the file, but copied over: /usr/lib32 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa Then executed: sudo ldconfig But nothing seemed to happen, steam still doesn't work. So, I feel like it is more likely that I have the library and steam isn't looking in the right place. One thing I've seen is people usually reference /usr/local/lib/ for your library locations. However, I can't find where to cd into /usr/, it isn't in my home folder. If /usr/ is the home folder, there is only a /.local folder which only has /share, no lib anywhere. Sorry for my linux ignorance. I appreciate any help, I honestly have no idea how to confirm I have the library and point steam to it, or if that is even the right thing to do. Edit: Tried this, not entirely sure what it means ~$ ls -l /lib32/libc* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1721832 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libc-2.15.so -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 185928 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libcidn-2.15.so lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libcidn.so.1 -> libcidn-2.15.so -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34316 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libcrypt-2.15.so lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libcrypt.so.1 -> libcrypt-2.15.so lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libc.so.6 -> libc-2.15.so

  Read the article

• New grad; To overcome complete lack of experience, should I ditch a creative pet project in lieu of one that would demonstrate more applicable skills?

  - by Hart Simha

  I am currently working on a project on github that I think would be a good demonstration of my initiative, creativity and enthusiasm. It is an educational game I am developing in pygame that enables the user to learn to improve their development productivity by using vim, specifically with python, though learning to code faster with vim should be transferable to any language. I think this is something that might have a mass appeal and benefit to a lot of people in a measurable way. -However- I am graduating from college in a month (my degree is computer science with a minor in English), with no experience that is relevant to helping me get any kind of job in the field, and a gpa that doesn't tout my merits. I could pursue a career in game development, but it's not necessarily what I'm most interested in, and see myself applying to startups around the country. To the places I am looking at applying, showing that I have experience with pygame is going to be largely irrelevant, except in demonstration of my ability to code, period. A lot of skills that ARE more marketable, such a data modeling, GIS, mobile application, development, javascript, .net framework, and various web development technologies, are not going to be showcased by this project (on the upside, employers do like to see familiarity with git and python). I'm wondering if I should sink all my free time in the next couple of months into this project, since I'm motivated and interested in it, and if the value of being able to demonstrate ambition and 'good ideas' (for lack of a better term, and in my own opinion) will compensate for the absence of demonstrating more sought-after skills. I am probably at a point where I should either commit fully to this project now, or put it on the backburner in favor of something else, and I am leaning towards continuing with what I am already working on, because I think it's a great idea, and something achievable to me with enough dedication over the next couple months. But the most important thing to me is being able to get a job out of college, which I am exceedingly concerned about as the professional landscape which I am navigating for the first time is a lot more intimidating than I could have anticipated, with almost every job (even short-term contract positions) requiring years of experience which I lack. So in brief, the common denominator to answering the question "How can I overcome experience requirements for a job" seems to be "Show off your own project." I want to know WHICH project I should work on to best increase my chances of getting a job out of college, keeping in mind that I have no experience. I believe this question is applicable to any new grad that lacks demonstrable experience.

  Read the article

• Website directory structure regarding subdomains, www, and "global" content

  - by Pawnguy7

  I am trying to make a homemade HTTP server. It occurs to me, though, I never fully understood what you might call "relativity" among web pages. I have come across that www. is a subdomain, and I understand its original purpose. IT sounds like, in general, you would redirect (is that 301 or 302?) it to a... non-subdomain, sort of. As in, redirecting www.example.com to example.com. I am not entirely sure how to make this work when retrieving files for an HTTP server though. I would assume that example.com would be the root, and www manifests as a folder within it. I am unsure. There is also the question of multi-level subdomains, e.g. subdomain2.subdomain1.example.com. It seems to me they are structured "backwards", where you go from the root left in folder structure. In this situation, subdomain2 is a directory within subdomain1, which is a directory in the root. Finally, it occurs to me I might want a sort of global location. For example, maybe all subdomains still use an image as a logo. It makes more sense to me that there is one image, rather than each having a copy. In the same way, albiet more doubtfully, you might have global CSS (though that is a bit contrary to the idea of a subdomain in the first place), or a javascript that is commonly used. (more efficient than each having its copy and better for organization purposes). Finally, mabye you have a global 404 page. I think this might be the case where you have user-created subdomains (say bloggername.example.com), where example.com still has a default 404 when either a subdomain does not exist or page does not exists under a valid blogger. I am confused on what the directory structure for this should be. To summarize: Should and how it have a global files not in a subdirectory, how should www. be handled, (or how a now www or other subdomain should be handled), and the pattern for root/subdomain, as well as subdomain within subdomains (order-wise). Sorry this is multiple questions, but I feel at the root they are all related to the directory.

  Read the article

• Taking a Projects Development to the Next Level

  - by user1745022

  I have been looking for some advice for a while on how to handle a project I am working on, but to no avail. I am pretty much on my fourth iteration of improving an "application" I am working on; the first two times were in Excel, the third Time in Access, and now in Visual Studio. The field is manufacturing. The basic idea is I am taking read-only data from a massive Sybase server, filtering it and creating much smaller tables in Access daily (using delete and append Queries) and then doing a bunch of stuff. More specifically, I use a series of queries to either combine data from multiple tables or group data in specific ways (aggregate functions), and then I place this data into a table (so I can sort and manipulate data using DAO.recordset and run multiple custom algorithms). This process is then repeated multiple times throughout the database until a set of relevant tables are created. Many times I will create a field in a query with a value such as 1.1 so that when I append it to a table I can store information in the field from the algorithms. So as the process continues the number of fields for the tables change. The overall application consists of 4 "back-end" databases linked together on a shared drive, with various output (either front-end access applications or Excel). So my question is is this how many data driven applications that solve problems essentially work? Each backend database is updated with fresh data daily and updating each takes around 10 seconds (for three) and 2 minutes(for 1). Project Objectives. I want/am moving to SQL Server soon. Front End will be a Web Application (I know basic web-development and like the administration flexibility) and visual-studio will be IDE with c#/.NET. Should these algorithms be run "inside the database," or using a series of C# functions on each server request. I know you're not supposed to store data in a database unless it is an actual data point, and in Access I have many columns that just hold calculations from algorithms in vba. The truth is, I have seen multiple professional Access applications, and have never seen one that has the complexity or does even close to what mine does (for better or worse). But I know some professional software applications are 1000 times better then mine. So Please Please Please give me a suggestion of some sort. I have been completely on my own and need some guidance on how to approach this project the right way.

  Read the article

• Legal concerns with orchestrating a music submission contest

  - by Amplify91

  My team and I are getting pretty far along in the development of our latest game and have been thinking about audio. We decided to host an audio submission contest where we will offer a little cash and some equity stake in the game as prizes. We are also giving away copies of the game to participants. We hope not only to find audio for our game, but to meet some cool sound artists and promote the game a bit through the process. First of all, is this even a good idea? What are some potential dangers in doing this? Will it even be well received among artists? Secondly, I wrote up some Terms and Conditions in my best legal-speak to try to protect us and clarify how the contest will be run. Are these sufficient to make sure everyone involved is treated fairly and is legally protected? They are as follows: All submissions (The Submission) must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-3.0) By applying a CC-BY-3.0 license, you (The Submitter) expressly give Detour Games (and all members wherein) permission to copy, distribute, transmit, modify, adapt, and make commercial use of The Submission. The Submitter must own all rights to The Submission and be within their rights to license it as specified and submit it. The Submitter claims responsibility for the legality of The Submission. If The Submission is found to infringe on the rights of a person or entity other than those of The Submitter, Detour Games will not be held liable as all responsibility and liability for the legality of The Submission is that of The Submitter's. No more than two free copies of The Game per submitter. All flat cash prizes will only be disbursed pending the success of our first $5,000 Kickstarter campaign. These prizes will be disbursed 30 days after Detour Games receives the Kickstarter funds. All equity prizes (percentage of profits) are defined as the given percent of total profits after costs for a period of one year (12 months) after the release of RAW. These prizes will be disbursed semi-annually. All prize money will be disbursed through either an electronic fund transfer through a service such as PayPal or by a mailed money order. It is The Submitter's responsibility to cooperate with Detour Games in the disbursement of the funds. Detour Games reserves the right to change these Terms and Conditions at any time without notice. By participating in the contest, The Submitter agrees to and accepts all terms and conditions listed. What else could I do (legally) to protect everyone involved?

  Read the article

• Changing Your Design for Testability

  Sometimes I come across a way of putting something that it is pithy good, not Hallmark trite, but an impactful and concise way of clarifying a previously obscure concept. A recent one of these happy occurrences was when I was reading the excellent Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove. After going through the basics of why youd want to test code and how to do it, Roy confronts a frequent objection to having unit tests, that it ends up changing how you design your components: When we write unit tests for our code, we are adding another end user (the test) to the object model. That end user is just as important as the original one, but it has different goals when using the model.  The test has specific requirements from the object model that seem to defy the basic logic behind a couple of object-oriented principles, mainly encapsulation. [emphasis added by me] When I read this, something clicked for me. I used to find it persuasive that because unit tests caused you to change your design they were more disruptive than they were worth. The counter argument I heard is that the disruption was OK, because testable design was just obviously better. That argument was not convincing as it seemed like delusional arrogance to suggest that any one of type of design was just inherently better for the particular applications I was building. What was missing was that I was not thinking of unit tests as an additional and equal end user to my design. If I accepted that proposition, than it was indeed obvious that a testable design was better because now all users of my component would be satisfied. Have I accepted that proposition? Id phrase it slightly different. I find more and more that having unit tests helps me write better, less buggy code before it gets to production or QA. As I write more unit tests, it gets easier to see how to create testable components, so I dont feel like its taking me as much extra time up front. I pick and choose components that seem most likely to benefit from automated tests and it is working out nicely. If you already implement Test Driven Development, this whole post was probably a waste of your time <g> If you hate the idea of unit tests, well, probably not a great value prop for you either. However, if you are somewhere in between, at least take a minute and check out a sample chapter from Roys book at: http://www.manning.com/osherove/.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Collision rectangle response

  - by dotty

  I'm having difficulties getting a moveable rectangle to collide with more than one rectangle. I'm using SFML and it has a handy function called Intersect() which takes 2 rectangles and returns the intersections. I have a vector full of rectangles which I want my moveable rectangle to collide with. I'm looping through this using the following code (p is the moveble rectangle). IsCollidingWith returns a bool but also uses SFML's Interesect to work out the intersections. while(unsigned i = 0; i!= testRects.size(); i++){ if(p.IsCollidingWith(testRects[i]){ p.Collide(testRects[i]); } } and the actual Collide() code void gameObj::collide( gameObj collidingObject ){ printf("%f %f\n", this->colliderResult.width, this->colliderResult.height); if (this->colliderResult.width < this->colliderResult.height) { // collided on X if (this->getCollider().left < collidingObject.getCollider().left ) { this->move( -this->colliderResult.width , 0); }else { this->move( this->colliderResult.width, 0 ); } } if(this->colliderResult.width > this->colliderResult.height){ if (this->getCollider().top < collidingObject.getCollider().top ) { this->move( 0, -this->colliderResult.height); }else { this->move( 0, this->colliderResult.height ); } } } and the IsCollidingWith() code is bool gameObj::isCollidingWith( gameObj testObject ){ if (this->getCollider().intersects( testObject.getCollider(), this->colliderResult )) { return true; }else { return false; } } This works fine when there's only 1 Rect in the scene. However, when there's move than one Rect it causes issue when working out 2 collisions at once. Any idea how to deal with this correctly? I have uploaded a video to youtube to show my problem. The console on the far-right shows the width and height of the intersections. You can see on the console that it's trying to calculate 2 collisions at once, I think this is where the problem is being caused. The youtube video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA2gflOMcAk also , this image also seems to illustrate the problem nicely. Can someone please help, I've been stuck on this all weekend!

  Read the article

• Threads slowing down application and not working properly

  - by Belgin

  I'm making a software renderer which does per-polygon rasterization using a floating point digital differential analyzer algorithm. My idea was to create two threads for rasterization and have them work like so: one thread draws each even scanline in a polygon and the other thread draws each odd scanline, and they both start working at the same time, but the main application waits for both of them to finish and then pauses them before continuing with other computations. As this is the first time I'm making a threaded application, I'm not sure if the following method for thread synchronization is correct: First of all, I use two global variables to control the two threads, if a global variable is set to 1, that means the thread can start working, otherwise it must not work. This is checked by the thread running an infinite loop and if it detects that the global variable has changed its value, it does its job and then sets the variable back to 0 again. The main program also uses an empty while to check when both variables become 0 after setting them to 1. Second, each thread is assigned a global structure which contains information about the triangle that is about to be rasterized. The structures are filled in by the main program before setting the global variables to 1. My dilemma is that, while this process works under some conditions, it slows down the program considerably, and also it fails to run properly when compiled for Release in Visual Studio, or when compiled with any sort of -O optimization with gcc (i.e. nothing on screen, even SEGFAULTs). The program isn't much faster by default without threads, which you can see for yourself by commenting out the #define THREADS directive, but if I apply optimizations, it becomes much faster (especially with gcc -Ofast -march=native). N.B. It might not compile with gcc because of fscanf_s calls, but you can replace those with the usual fscanf, if you wish to use gcc. Because there is a lot of code, too much for here or pastebin, I created a git repository where you can view it. My questions are: Why does adding these two threads slow down my application? Why doesn't it work when compiling for Release or with optimizations? Can I speed up the application with threads? If so, how? Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• git workflow for separating commits

  - by gman

  Best practices with git (or any VCS for that matter) is supposed to be to have each commit do the smallest change possible. But, that doesn't match how I work at all. For example I recently I needed to add some code that checked if the version of a plugin to my system matched the versions the system supports. If not print a warning that the plugin probably requires a newer version of the system. While writing that code I decided I wanted the warnings to be colorized. I already had code that colorized error message so I edited that code. That code was in the startup module of one entry to the system. The plugin checking code was in another path that didn't use that entry point so I moved the colorization code into a separate module so both entry points could use it. On top of that, in order to test my plugin checking code works I need to go edit UI/UX code to make sure it tells the user "You need to upgrade". When all is said and done I've edited 10 files, changed dependencies, the 2 entry points are now both dependant on the colorization code, etc etc. Being lazy I'd probably just git add . && git commit -a the whole thing. Spending 10-15 minutes trying to manipulate all those changes into 3 to 6 smaller commits seems frustrating which brings up the question Are there workflows that work for you or that make this process easier? I don't think I can some how magically always modify stuff in the perfect order since I don't know that order until after I start modifying and seeing what comes up. I know I can git add --interactive etc but it seems, at least for me, kind of hard to know what I'm grabbing exactly the correct changes so that each commit is actually going to work. Also, since the changes are sitting in the current directory it doesn't seem like it would be easy to run tests on each commit to make sure it's going to work short of stashing all the changes. And then, if it were to stash and then run the tests, if I missed a few lines or accidentally added a few too many lines I have no idea how I'd easily recover from that. (as in either grab the missing lines from the stash and then put the rest back or take the few extra lines I shouldn't have grabbed and shove them into the stash for the next commit. Thoughts? Suggestions? PS: I hope this is an appropriate question. The help says development methodologies and processes

  Read the article

• Help recovering broken OS (permissions issue)

  - by Guandalino

  (At the bottom there is an important update.) I was doing experiments in order to backup a remote account to my local system, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I'm not confident with duplicity and probably, due to wrong syntax, some local files have been replaced with remote files. This is just a supposition, I'm not sure this is the real cause of OS corruption. The corruption happened after experimenting with backups, so I think I did something wrong at this regard. I was aware there was a problem when I tried to access a command using sudo: $ sudo ls sudo: unable to open /etc/sudoers: Permission denied sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin This is how /etc/sudoers looks like: $ ls -ald /etc/sudoers -r--r----- 1 root root 788 Oct 2 18:30 /etc/sudoers At this point I tried to reboot and now this is the message I get: The system is running in low graphics mode. Your screen, graphics card and input device settings could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure these yourself. I tried to follow the wizard to configure these settings, but without luck (the system prevents me going on when I press "Next"). The thing that makes me a bit less worried is that all the data on the disk seems readable and I'm able to access them using a live cd. I run memtest and RAM seems to be OK. Do you have any idea about how to recover my system? I'm very glad to provide further information, just let me know what info could be helpful. UPDATE. The issue is about wrong permissions and this is how I discovered: I mounted the root partition of the broken OS on /mnt/broken/ (live CD) and did ls /mnt/broken/. I got a permission denied error, while I expected to have the directory listing. I had to do sudo ls /mnt/broken/ and this worked. Thus without having root permission via sudo it's impossible to access the root of broken os. The current output of ls -ld /mnt/broken/ is: drwxr-x--- 29 1000 812 4096 2012-12-08 21:58 /mnt/broken Any thoughts on how to restore the old (working) set of permissions?

  Read the article

• Does OO, TDD, and Refactoring to Smaller Functions affect Speed of Code?

  - by Dennis

  In Computer Science field, I have noticed a notable shift in thinking when it comes to programming. The advice as it stands now is write smaller, more testable code refactor existing code into smaller and smaller chunks of code until most of your methods/functions are just a few lines long write functions that only do one thing (which makes them smaller again) This is a change compared to the "old" or "bad" code practices where you have methods spanning 2500 lines, and big classes doing everything. My question is this: when it call comes down to machine code, to 1s and 0s, to assembly instructions, should I be at all concerned that my class-separated code with variety of small-to-tiny functions generates too much extra overhead? While I am not exactly familiar with how OO code and function calls are handled in ASM in the end, I do have some idea. I assume that each extra function call, object call, or include call (in some languages), generate an extra set of instructions, thereby increasing code's volume and adding various overhead, without adding actual "useful" code. I also imagine that good optimizations can be done to ASM before it is actually ran on the hardware, but that optimization can only do so much too. Hence, my question -- how much overhead (in space and speed) does well-separated code (split up across hundreds of files, classes, and methods) actually introduce compared to having "one big method that contains everything", due to this overhead? UPDATE for clarity: I am assuming that adding more and more functions and more and more objects and classes in a code will result in more and more parameter passing between smaller code pieces. It was said somewhere (quote TBD) that up to 70% of all code is made up of ASM's MOV instruction - loading CPU registers with proper variables, not the actual computation being done. In my case, you load up CPU's time with PUSH/POP instructions to provide linkage and parameter passing between various pieces of code. The smaller you make your pieces of code, the more overhead "linkage" is required. I am concerned that this linkage adds to software bloat and slow-down and I am wondering if I should be concerned about this, and how much, if any at all, because current and future generations of programmers who are building software for the next century, will have to live with and consume software built using these practices. UPDATE: Multiple files I am writing new code now that is slowly replacing old code. In particular I've noted that one of the old classes was a ~3000 line file (as mentioned earlier). Now it is becoming a set of 15-20 files located across various directories, including test files and not including PHP framework I am using to bind some things together. More files are coming as well. When it comes to disk I/O, loading multiple files is slower than loading one large file. Of course not all files are loaded, they are loaded as needed, and disk caching and memory caching options exist, and yet still I believe that loading multiple files takes more processing than loading a single file into memory. I am adding that to my concern.

  Read the article

• Keeping the meshes "thickness" the same when scaling an object

  - by user1806687

  I've been bashing my head for the past couple of weeks trying to find a way to help me accomplish, on first look very easy task. So, I got this one object currently made out of 5 cuboids (2 sides, 1 top, 1 bottom, 1 back), this is just for an example, later on there will be whole range of different set ups. Now, the thing is when the user chooses to scale the whole object this is what should happen: X scale: top and bottom cuboids should get scaled by a scale factor, sides should get moved so they are positioned just like they were before(in this case at both ends of top and bottom cuboids), back should get scaled so it fits like before(if I simply scale it by a scale factor it will leave gaps on each side). Y scale: sides should get scaled by a scale factor, top and bottom cuboid should get moved, and back should also get scaled. Z scale: sides, top and bottom cuboids should get scaled, back should get moved. Hope you can help, EDIT: So, I've decided to explain the situation once more, this time more detailed(hopefully). I've also made some pictures of how the scaling should look like, where is the problem and the wrong way of scaling. I this example I will be using a thick walled box, with one face missing, where each wall is made by a cuboid(but later on there will be diffrent shapes of objects, where a one of the face might be roundish, or triangle or even under some angle), scaling will be 2x on X axis. 1.This is how the default object without any scaling applied looks like: http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/4293/defaulttz.png 2.If I scale the whole object(all of the meshes) by some scale factor, the problem becomes that the "thickness" of the object walls also change(which I do not want): http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/9073/wrongwaytoscale.png 3.This is how the correct scaling should look like. Appropriate faces gets caled in this case where the scale is on X axis(top, bottom, back): http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/163/rightwayxscale1.png/ 4.But the scale factor might not be the same for all object all of the times. In this case the back has to get scaled a bit more or it leaves gaps: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/9/problemwhenscaling.png/ 5.If everything goes well this is how the final object should look like: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/856/rightwayxscale2.png/ So, as you have might noticed there are quite a bit of things to look out when scaling. I am asking you, if any of you have any idea on how to accomplish this scaling. I have tried whole bunch of things, from scaling all of the object by the same scale factor, to subtracting and adding sizes to get the right size. But nothing I tried worked, if one mesh got scaled correctly then others didnt. Donwload the example object. English is not my first language, so I am really sorry if its hard to understand what I am saying.

  Read the article

• Are there any good Java/JVM libraries for my Expression Tree architecture?

  - by Snuggy

  My team and I are developing an enterprise-level application and I have devised an architecture for it that's best described as an "Expression Tree". The basic idea is that the leaf nodes of the tree are very simple expressions (perhaps simple values or strings). Nodes closer to the trunk will get more and more complex, taking the simpler nodes as their inputs and returning more complex results for their parents. Looking at it the other way, the application performs some task, and for this it creates a root expression. The root expression divides its input into smaller units and creates child expressions, which when evaluated it can use to build it's own result. The subdividing process continues until the simplest leaf nodes. There are two very important aspects of this architecture: It must be possible to manipulate nodes of the tree after it is built. The nodes may be given new input values to work with and any change in result for that node needs to be propagated back up the tree to the root node. The application must make best use of available processors and ultimately be scalable to other computers in a grid or in the cloud. Nodes in the tree will often be updating concurrently and notifying other interested nodes in the tree when they get a new value. Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to discuss my actual application, but to aid understanding a little bit, you might imagine a kind of spreadsheet application being implemented with a similar architecture, where changes to cells in the table are propagated all over the place to other cells that need the result. The spreadsheet could get so massive that applying multi-core multi-computer distributed system to solve it would be of benefit. I've got my prototype "Expression Engine" working nicely on a single multi-core PC but I've started to run into a few concurrency issues (as expected because I haven't been taking too much care so far) so it's now time to start thinking about migrating the Engine to a more robust library, and that leads to a number of related questions: Is there any precedent for my "Expression Tree" architecture that I could research? What programming concepts should I consider. I realise this approach has many similarities to a functional programming style, and I'm already aware of the concepts of using futures and actors. Are there any others? Are there any languages or libraries that I should study? This question is inspired by my accidental discovery of Scala and the Akka library (which has good support for Actors, Futures, Distributed workloads etc.) and I'm wondering if there is anything else I should be looking at as well?

  Read the article

• Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API

  The past couple of projects I've been working on have included the use of the Google Maps API and geocoding service in websites for various reasons. I decided to tie together some of the lessons learned, build an ASP.NETstore locator demo, and write about it on 4Guys. Last week I published the first article in what I think will be a three-part series: Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps (Part 1). Part 1 walks through creating a demo where a user can type in an address and any stores within a (roughly) 15 mile area will be displayed in a grid.The article begins with a look at the database used to power the store locator (namely, a single table that contains one row for every location, with each location storing its store number, address, and, most important, latitude and longitude coordinates) and then turns to usingGoogle's geocoding service to translatea user-entered address into latitude and longitude coordinates. The latitude and longitude coordinates are used to find nearby stores, which are then displayed in a grid. Part 2 looks at enhancing the search results to include a map with markers indicating the position of each nearby store location. The Google Maps API, along with a bit of client-side script and server-side logic, make this actually pretty straightforward and easy to implement. Here's a screen shot of the improved store locator results. Part 3, which I plan on publishing next week, looks at how to enhance the map by using information windows to display address information when clicking a marker. Additionally, I'll show how to use custom icons for the markers so that instead of having the same marker for each nearby location the markers will be images numbered 1, 2, 3, and so on, which will correspond to a number assigned to each search result in the grid. The idea here is that by numbering the search results in the grid and the markers on the map visitors will quickly be able to see what marker corresponds to what search result. This article and demo has been a lot of fun to write and create, and I hope you enjoy reading it, too. Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 1) Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 2) Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• is a factory pattern to prevent multuple instances for same object (instance that is Equal) good design?

  - by dsollen

  I have a number of objects storing state. There are essentially two types of fields. The ones that uniquly define what the object is (what node, what edge etc), and the oens that store state describing how these things are connected (this node is connected to these edges, this edge is part of these paths) etc. My model is updating the state variables using package methdos, so these objects all act as immutable to anyone not in Model scope. All Objects extend one base type. I've toyed with the idea of a Factory approch which accepts a Builder object and construct the applicable object. However, if an instance of the object already exists (ie would return true if I created the object defined by the builder and passed it to the equal method for the existing instance) the factory returns the current object instead of creating a new instance. Because the Equal method would only compare what uniquly defines the type of object (this is node A nto node B) but won't check the dynamic state stuff (node A is currently connected to nodes C and E) this would be a way of ensuring anyone that wants my Node A automatically knows it's state connections. More importantly it would prevent aliasing nightmares of someone trying to pass an instance of node A with different state then the node A in my model has. I've never heard of this pattern before, and it's a bit odd. I would have to do some overiding of serlization methods to make it work (ensure when I read in a serilized object I add it to my facotry list of known instances, and/or return an existing factory in it's place), as well as using a weakHashMap as if it was a weakHashSet to know rather an instance exists without worrying about a quasi-memory leak occuring. I don't know if this is too confusing or prone to it's own obscure bugs. One thing I know is that plugins interface with lowest level hardware. The plugins have to be able to return state taht is different then my memory; to tell my memory when it's own state is inconsistent. I believe this is possible despit their fetching objects that exist in my memory; we allow building of objects without checking their consistency with the model until the addToModel is called anyways; and the existing plugins design was written before all this extra state existed and worked fine without ever being aware of it. Should I just be using some other design to avoid this crazyness? (I have another question to that affect I'm posting).

  Read the article

• Physics Engine [Collision Response, 2-dimensional] experts, help!! My stack is unstable!

  - by Register Sole

  Previously, I struggle with the sequential impulse-based method I developed. Thanks to jedediah referring me to this paper, I managed to rebuild the codes and implement the simultaneous impulse based method with Projected-Gauss-Seidel (PGS) iterative solver as described by Erin Catto (mentioned in the reference of the paper as [Catt05]). So here's how it currently is: The simulation handles 2-dimensional rotating convex polygons. Detection is using separating-axis test, with a SKIN, meaning closest points between two polygons is detected and determined if their distance is less than SKIN. To resolve collision, simultaneous impulse-based method is used. It is solved using iterative solver (PGS-solver) as in Erin Catto's paper. Error-correction is implemented using Baumgarte's stabilization (you can refer to either paper for this) using J V = beta/dt*overlap, J is the Jacobian for the constraints, V the matrix containing the velocities of the bodies, beta an error-correction parameter that is better be < 1, dt the time-step taken by the engine, and overlap, the overlap between the bodies (true overlap, so SKIN is ignored). However, it is still less stable than I expected :s I tried to stack hexagons (or squares, doesn't really matter), and even with only 4 to 5 of them, they hardly stand still! Also note that I am not looking for a sleeping scheme. But I would settle if you have any explicit scheme to handle resting contacts. That said, I would be more than happy if you have a way of treating it generally (as continuous collision, instead of explicitly as a special state). Ideas I have: I would try adding a damping term (proportional to velocity) to the Baumgarte. Is this a good idea in general? If not I would not want to waste my time trying to tune the parameter hoping it magically works. Ideas I have tried: Using simultaneous position based error correction as described in the paper in section 5.3.2, turned out to be worse than the current scheme. If you want to know the parameters I used: Hexagons, side 50 (pixels) gravity 2400 (pixels/sec^2) time-step 1/60 (sec) beta 0.1 restitution 0 to 0.2 coeff. of friction 0.2 PGS iteration 10 initial separation 10 (pixels) mass 1 (unit is irrelevant for now, i modified velocity directly<-impulse method) inertia 1/1000 Thanks in advance! I really appreciate any help from you guys!! :)

  Read the article

• Do functional generics exist and what is the correct name for them if they do?

  - by voroninp

  Consider the following generic class: public class EntityChangeInfo<EntityType,TEntityKey> { ChangeTypeEnum ChangeType {get;} TEntityKeyType EntityKey {get;} } Here EntityType unambiguously defines TEntityKeyType. So it would be nice to have some kind of types' map: public class EntityChangeInfo<EntityType,TEntityKey> with map < [ EntityType : Person -> TEntityKeyType : int] [ EntityType : Car -> TEntityKeyType : CarIdType ]> { ChangeTypeEnum ChangeType {get;} TEntityKeyType EntityKey {get;} } Another one example is: public class Foo<TIn> with map < [TIn : Person -> TOut1 : string, TOut2 : int, ..., TOutN : double ] [TIn : Car -> TOut1 : int, TOut2 :int, ..., TOutN : Price ] > { TOut1 Prop1 {get;set;} TOut2 Prop2 {get;set;} ... TOutN PropN {get;set;} } The reasonable question: how can this be interpreted by the compiler? Well, for me it is just the shortcut for two structurally similar classes: public sealed class Foo<Person> { string Prop1 {get;set;} int Prop2 {get;set;} ... double PropN {get;set;} } public sealed class Foo<Car> { int Prop1 {get;set;} int Prop2 {get;set;} ... Price PropN {get;set;} } But besides this we could imaging some update of the Foo<>: public class Foo<TIn> with map < [TIn : Person -> TOut1 : string, TOut2 : int, ..., TOutN : double ] [TIn : Car -> TOut1 : int, TOut2 :int, ..., TOutN : Price ] > { TOut1 Prop1 {get;set;} TOut2 Prop2 {get;set;} ... TOutN PropN {get;set;} public override string ToString() { return string.Format("prop1={0}, prop2={1},...propN={N-1}, Prop1, Prop2,...,PropN); } } This all can seem quite superficial but the idea came when I was designing the messages for our system. The very first class. Many messages with the same structure should be discriminated by the EntityType. So the question is whether such construct exists in any programming language?

  Read the article

• Lazy Processing of Streams

  - by Giorgio

  I have the following problem scenario: I have a text file and I have to read it and split it into lines. Some lines might need to be dropped (according to criteria that are not fixed). The lines that are not dropped must be parsed into some predefined records. Records that are not valid must be dropped. Duplicate records may exist and, in such a case, they are consecutive. If duplicate / multiple records exist, only one item should be kept. The remaining records should be grouped according to the value contained in one field; all records belonging to the same group appear one after another (e.g. AAAABBBBCCDEEEFF and so on). The records of each group should be numbered (1, 2, 3, 4, ...). For each group the numbering starts from 1. The records must then be saved somewhere / consumed in the same order as they were produced. I have to implement this in Java or C++. My first idea was to define functions / methods like: One method to get all the lines from the file. One method to filter out the unwanted lines. One method to parse the filtered lines into valid records. One method to remove duplicate records. One method to group records and number them. The problem is that the data I am going to read can be too big and might not fit into main memory: so I cannot just construct all these lists and apply my functions one after the other. On the other hand, I think I do not need to fit all the data in main memory at once because once a record has been consumed all its underlying data (basically the lines of text between the previous record and the current record, and the record itself) can be disposed of. With the little knowledge I have of Haskell I have immediately thought about some kind of lazy evaluation, in which instead of applying functions to lists that have been completely computed, I have different streams of data that are built on top of each other and, at each moment, only the needed portion of each stream is materialized in main memory. But I have to implement this in Java or C++. So my question is which design pattern or other technique can allow me to implement this lazy processing of streams in one of these languages.

  Read the article

• The type of programmer I want to be [closed]

  - by Aventinus_

  I'm an undergraduate Software Engineer student, although I've decided that pure programming is what I want to do for the rest of my life. The thing is that programming is a vast field and although most of its aspects are extremely interesting, soon or later I'll have to choose one (?) to focus on. I have several ideas on small projects I'd like to develop this summer, having in mind that this will gain me some experience and, in the best scenario, some cash. But the most important reason I'd like to develop something close to “professional” is to give myself direction on what I want to do as a programmer. One path is that of the Web Programmer. I enjoy PHP and MySQL, as well as HTML and CSS, although I don't really like ASP.NET. I can see myself writing web apps, using the above technologies, as well as XML and Javascript. I also have a neat idea on a Facebook app. The other path is that of the Desktop Programmer. This is a little more complicated cause I really-really enjoy high level languages such as Java and Python but not the low level ones, such as C. I use both Linux and Windows for the last 6 years and I like their latest DEs (meaning Gnome Shell and Metro). I can see myself writing desktop applications for both OSs as long as it means high level programming. Ideally I'd like being able to help the development of GNOME. The last path that interests me is the path of the Smartphone Programmer. I have created some sample applications on Android and due to Java I found it a quite interesting experience. I can also see myself as an independent smartphone developer. These 3 paths seem equally interesting at the moment due to the shallowness of my experience, I guess. I know that I should spend time with all of them and then choose the right one for me but I'd like to know what are the pros and cons in terms of learning curve, fun, job finding and of course financial rewards with each of these paths. I have fair or basic understanding of the languages/technologies I described earlier and this question will help me choose where to focus, at least for now.

  Read the article

• Is multiple domain names and links from same IP causing poor search engine rankings?

  - by John

  I have an ecommerce website which is not doing so well in Google. I am trying to improve this of course, and am looking at some possibilities for why it isn't doing well. The website has four domain names, all of which have been indexed by Google. A few months ago I applied 301 redirects to any requests for two of the domain names so now it is down to two domain names (one is a .net, the other is a .com.au, the others were .net.au and .com). I prefer to use my main domain name (the .com.au), but one of the names has been around for a long time and has more inbound links. According to a PageRank tool, both are PR2. It is a Classic ASP site and up until recently had a lot of querystring parameters. In the last week or so I added URL rewriting so there is now no parameters for most pages. I don't do 301 redirects from the old URLs but instead I add the META canonical tag indicating the preferred new URL. At the same time I redesigned the site and improved title tags, META descriptions, and H tags but it hasn't been long enough yet for Google to index many of these yet. I also looked at what pages Google has indexed and strangely it has some strange pages in the index, there are a lot of pages which are actual keyword searches (more a bunch of random letters than an actual word). What I mean is that it is as if they had typed in something to search for in my search box - there are no links to pages like this and the only way of getting this is to type something in to the search box). So I added a META robots tag with noindex,nofollow anytime that I render pages like this. Years ago I set up a fake price comparison site which lists all my products and links back to my site. It has a different keyword rich domain name but is on the same server and same IP address. It's a completely different layout but does have the same product categories and product descriptions (although I have stripped formatting out of them so they are not identical except in text). I also have a few blog sites which again are on the same server/IP and all have advertising for the website. My questions are: What should I do with the multiple domains, just use one, or continue with two or more? Should I add 301 redirects, not just the META canonical tag? Any idea about Google indexing my search results page, and did I do the right thing with the META robots tag? Is the fake price comparison site likely to be causing problems? Are all the links to the site from other domain names but the same IP address likely to be causing problems? Thanks for any help. Sorry for so many questions in one.

  Read the article

• Help with DB Structure, vOD site

  - by Chud37

  I have a video on demand style site that hosts series of videos under different modules. However with the way I have designed the database it is proving to be very slow. I have asked this question before and someone suggested indexing, but i cannot seem to get my head around it. But I would like someone to help with the structure of the database here to see if it can be improved. The core table is Videos: ID bigint(20) (primary key, auto-increment) pID text airdate text title text subject mediumtext url mediumtext mID int(11) vID int(11) sID int(11) pID is a unique 5 digit string to each video that is a shorthand identifier. Airdate is the TS, (stored in text format, right there maybe I should change that to TIMESTAMP AUTO UPDATE), title is self explanatory, subject is self explanatory, url is the hard link on the site to the video, mID is joined to another table for the module title, vID is joined to another table for the language of the video, (english, russian, etc) and sID is the summary for the module, a paragraph stored in an external database. The slowest part of the website is the logging part of it. I store the data in another table called 'Hits': id mediumint(10) (primary key, auto-increment) progID text ts int(10) Again, here (this was all made a while ago) but my Timestamp (ts) is an INT instead of ON UPDATE CURRENT TIMESTAMP, which I guess it should be. However This table is now 47,492 rows long and the script that I wrote to process it is very very slow, so slow in fact that it times out. A row is added to this table each time a user clicks 'Play' on the website and then so the progID is the same as the pID, and it logs the php time() timestamp in ts. Basically I load the entire database of 'Hits' into an array and count the hits in each day using the TS column. I am guessing (i'm quite slow at all this, but I had no idea this would happen when I built the thing) that this is possibly the worst way to go about this. So my questions are as follows: Is there a better way of structuring the 'Videos' table, is so, what do you suggest? Is there a better way of structuring 'hits', if so, please help/tell me! Or is it the fact that my tables are fine and the PHP coding is crappy?

  Read the article

• Is it dangerous for me to give some of my Model classes Control-like methods?

  - by Pureferret

  In my personal project I have tried to stick to MVC, but I've also been made aware that sticking to MVC too tightly can be a bad thing as it makes writing awkward and forces the flow of the program in odd ways (i.e. some simple functions can be performed by something that normally wouldn't, and avoid MVC related overheads). So I'm beginning to feel justified in this compromise: I have some 'manager programs' that 'own' data and have some way to manipulate it, as such I think they'd count as both part of the model, and part of the control, and to me this feels more natural than keepingthem separate. For instance: One of my Managers is the PlayerCharacterManager that has these methods: void buySkill(PlayerCharacter playerCharacter, Skill skill); void changeName(); void changeRole(); void restatCharacter(); void addCharacterToGame(); void createNewCharacter(); PlayerCharacter getPlayerCharacter(); List<PlayerCharacter> getPlayersCharacter(Player player); List<PlayerCharacter> getAllCharacters(); I hope the mothod names are transparent enough that they don't all need explaining. I've called it a manager because it will help manage all of the PlayerCharacter 'model' objects the code creates, and create and keep a map of these. I may also get it to store other information in the future. I plan to have another two similar classes for this sort of control, but I will orchestrate when and how this happens, and what to do with the returned data via a pure controller class. This splitting up control between informed managers and the controller, as opposed to operating just through a controller seems like it will simplify my code and make it flow more. My question is, is this a dangerous choice, in terms of making the code harder to follow/test/fix? Is this somethign established as good or bad or neutral? I oculdn't find anything similar except the idea of Actors but that's not quite why I'm trying to do. Edit: Perhaps an example is needed; I'm using the Controller to update the view and access the data, so when I click the 'Add new character to a player button' it'll call methods in the controller that then go and tell the PlayerCharacterManager class to create a new character instance, it'll call the PlayerManager class to add that new character to the player-character map, and then it'll add this information to the database, and tell the view to update any GUIs effected. That is the sort of 'control sequence' I'm hoping to create with these manager classes.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574  | Next Page >