qid int64 1 74.7M | question stringlengths 12 33.8k | date stringlengths 10 10 | metadata list | response_j stringlengths 0 115k | response_k stringlengths 2 98.3k |
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5,723 | Visible colors are caused due to the discreteness of energy levels in molecules and complexes, and scattering.
However, I am not sure how physicists explained color before they understood this (before 1900).
From what I know, they were able to understand the concept of wavelength. I also know that they knew that white light consisted of different "colored light."
So, what was the predominant theory in explaining color? | 2017/02/22 | [
"https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/5723",
"https://hsm.stackexchange.com",
"https://hsm.stackexchange.com/users/5426/"
] | I am sure that there are some good and fairly complete histories of the thinking over time of what light is, and specifically the colors. The following site is a simple and quick summary of the highlights: <http://photonterrace.net/en/photon/history/>
It goes from Aristotle (white and black combinations for the colors), to Newton identifying refraction and how it splits light into its colors (his theory: particles with different refractivity), to Hyguins and Young determining that it is a wave and explaining refraction due to it and wavelengths, to Maxwell proving that it is electromagnetic and color was freq and equivalently wavelength, to Einstein who identified it as photons in the photoelectric effect - the start of anything quantum.
Of course there was also the study and theories of how the eye saw colors, that different colors affected different retina parts -- that took some time, and it actually was Goethe who first theorized that each person may see colors somewhat differently. Since that's less about physics than about biology I won't add more on that.
I saw elsewhere a spectrum from different substances back before Maxwell, with sharp lines. See it in the link at <http://library.si.edu/exhibition/color-in-a-new-light/science>
It's from the Smithsonian, see the spectrum shown for Spectrum Analysis, Six Lectures, in 1868. Don't know what the thinking was on sharp lines in the spectrum, maybe you can get that from the Smithsonian and read. What they said in 1868 on the spectral lines. Somewhere there it says it allows one to identify different materials. Not too shabby for 1868.
Only after Bohr atom was there some explanation of discrete lines and jumps and orbitals, leading of course to QM.
So, the theories changed over time, and became more scientific really after Newton. | Actually Goethe had a very interesting and ususual [theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours#Goethe.27s_theory) to rival Newton's.
"Unlike his contemporaries, Goethe didn't see darkness as an absence of light, but rather as polar to and interacting with light; colour resulted from this interaction of light and shadow. For Goethe, light is "the simplest most undivided most homogenous being that we know. Confronting it is the darkness" (Letter to Jacobi)." |
43,875 | I'm remodeling my bathroom. The sink drainage come up from the floor. The alignment between that and the drain coming from the sink doesn't have enough space for a p-trap to be installed so it just falls into place and connects the two (prior to remodel there was no p-trap).
I was thinking having a 45 degree pipe come out of the sink, forward then down, then attach the p-trap, and that would allow enough space for overflow to go back and down to floor drain pipe. My crude image of what I mean, circled in red.
Would this allow for proper drainage? | 2014/06/10 | [
"https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/43875",
"https://diy.stackexchange.com",
"https://diy.stackexchange.com/users/23014/"
] | When you purchase a P-trap from the hardware store, you'll end up with these pieces (or something similar).
You'll also want to pick up a 1-1/2 in. PVC 90° slip-joint elbow while you're there.
You'll then want to connect the pieces something like this...
You'll then have to twist the pieces around, until you can get them to fit together. You'll end up with something similar to this.
[](http://www.terrylove.com/forums/showthread.php?56412-Is-twisting-a-P-trap-to-offset-redirect-it-ever-quot-too-much-quot-WWTD-See-mockup-pics)[](http://www.nachi.org/forum/f22/p-trap-s-trap-disagreement-33015/)
Though I'm not sure this is code compliant anymore.
In the 2003 version of International Residential Code (IRC), there was this section.
>
> International Residential Code 2003
> ===================================
>
>
> Chapter 31 Vents
> ----------------
>
>
> ### Section P3105 Fixture Vents
>
>
> **P3105.3 Vertical leg for waste fixture drains.** A vertical leg (see Figure P3105.3) is permitted within a fixture drain of a waste fixture in accordance with the following criteria:
>
>
> 1. Minimum trap diameter shall be in accordance with Table P3201.7.
> 2. The diameter of Section A shall be equal to the diameter of the trap.
> 3. The length of Section A shall not be less than 8 inches (203 mm) and in accordance with Table P3105.1.
> 4. The diameter of Section B shall be one pipe size larger than the diameter of Section A.
> 5. The length of Section B shall not be more than 36 inches (914 mm).
> 6. The diameter of Section C shall be one pipe size larger than the diameter of Section B.
> 7. The total length of Section A and Section C shall not exceed the distance allowed in Table P3105.1.
> 8. Bends shall be the diameter of the largest connected section.
>
>
> 
>
>
>
However, in the 2006 version, this section is gone. | When the drain goes vertically like this, it is often called an S-trap, since it is shaped like a letter S instead of a letter P.
That center connection in the S-trap is a swivel. You can do it without the 45-degree section if you rotate the center connection. You can see that in this example:
The more you rotate the center joint, the closer together the input and output are.
Will this be visible to the room, or enclosed in a cabinet? If it is visible, I can imagine perhaps wanting the aesthetics of a straight symmetrical drain. If it's hidden inside, just use the S-trap without the 45-degree lead-in. |
43,875 | I'm remodeling my bathroom. The sink drainage come up from the floor. The alignment between that and the drain coming from the sink doesn't have enough space for a p-trap to be installed so it just falls into place and connects the two (prior to remodel there was no p-trap).
I was thinking having a 45 degree pipe come out of the sink, forward then down, then attach the p-trap, and that would allow enough space for overflow to go back and down to floor drain pipe. My crude image of what I mean, circled in red.
Would this allow for proper drainage? | 2014/06/10 | [
"https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/43875",
"https://diy.stackexchange.com",
"https://diy.stackexchange.com/users/23014/"
] | When you purchase a P-trap from the hardware store, you'll end up with these pieces (or something similar).
You'll also want to pick up a 1-1/2 in. PVC 90° slip-joint elbow while you're there.
You'll then want to connect the pieces something like this...
You'll then have to twist the pieces around, until you can get them to fit together. You'll end up with something similar to this.
[](http://www.terrylove.com/forums/showthread.php?56412-Is-twisting-a-P-trap-to-offset-redirect-it-ever-quot-too-much-quot-WWTD-See-mockup-pics)[](http://www.nachi.org/forum/f22/p-trap-s-trap-disagreement-33015/)
Though I'm not sure this is code compliant anymore.
In the 2003 version of International Residential Code (IRC), there was this section.
>
> International Residential Code 2003
> ===================================
>
>
> Chapter 31 Vents
> ----------------
>
>
> ### Section P3105 Fixture Vents
>
>
> **P3105.3 Vertical leg for waste fixture drains.** A vertical leg (see Figure P3105.3) is permitted within a fixture drain of a waste fixture in accordance with the following criteria:
>
>
> 1. Minimum trap diameter shall be in accordance with Table P3201.7.
> 2. The diameter of Section A shall be equal to the diameter of the trap.
> 3. The length of Section A shall not be less than 8 inches (203 mm) and in accordance with Table P3105.1.
> 4. The diameter of Section B shall be one pipe size larger than the diameter of Section A.
> 5. The length of Section B shall not be more than 36 inches (914 mm).
> 6. The diameter of Section C shall be one pipe size larger than the diameter of Section B.
> 7. The total length of Section A and Section C shall not exceed the distance allowed in Table P3105.1.
> 8. Bends shall be the diameter of the largest connected section.
>
>
> 
>
>
>
However, in the 2006 version, this section is gone. | You're going to have to use an AAV... S-traps have long ago been illegal for the siphon issue that you mentioned.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/obSY6.jpg) |
43,875 | I'm remodeling my bathroom. The sink drainage come up from the floor. The alignment between that and the drain coming from the sink doesn't have enough space for a p-trap to be installed so it just falls into place and connects the two (prior to remodel there was no p-trap).
I was thinking having a 45 degree pipe come out of the sink, forward then down, then attach the p-trap, and that would allow enough space for overflow to go back and down to floor drain pipe. My crude image of what I mean, circled in red.
Would this allow for proper drainage? | 2014/06/10 | [
"https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/43875",
"https://diy.stackexchange.com",
"https://diy.stackexchange.com/users/23014/"
] | When you purchase a P-trap from the hardware store, you'll end up with these pieces (or something similar).
You'll also want to pick up a 1-1/2 in. PVC 90° slip-joint elbow while you're there.
You'll then want to connect the pieces something like this...
You'll then have to twist the pieces around, until you can get them to fit together. You'll end up with something similar to this.
[](http://www.terrylove.com/forums/showthread.php?56412-Is-twisting-a-P-trap-to-offset-redirect-it-ever-quot-too-much-quot-WWTD-See-mockup-pics)[](http://www.nachi.org/forum/f22/p-trap-s-trap-disagreement-33015/)
Though I'm not sure this is code compliant anymore.
In the 2003 version of International Residential Code (IRC), there was this section.
>
> International Residential Code 2003
> ===================================
>
>
> Chapter 31 Vents
> ----------------
>
>
> ### Section P3105 Fixture Vents
>
>
> **P3105.3 Vertical leg for waste fixture drains.** A vertical leg (see Figure P3105.3) is permitted within a fixture drain of a waste fixture in accordance with the following criteria:
>
>
> 1. Minimum trap diameter shall be in accordance with Table P3201.7.
> 2. The diameter of Section A shall be equal to the diameter of the trap.
> 3. The length of Section A shall not be less than 8 inches (203 mm) and in accordance with Table P3105.1.
> 4. The diameter of Section B shall be one pipe size larger than the diameter of Section A.
> 5. The length of Section B shall not be more than 36 inches (914 mm).
> 6. The diameter of Section C shall be one pipe size larger than the diameter of Section B.
> 7. The total length of Section A and Section C shall not exceed the distance allowed in Table P3105.1.
> 8. Bends shall be the diameter of the largest connected section.
>
>
> 
>
>
>
However, in the 2006 version, this section is gone. | My 2 cents:
Mine didn't line up. I did the following, but check for your local code....
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmmeT.jpg) |
17,944 | In reference to the patent: [US8863947](https://patents.google.com/patent/US8863947B2/en)
According to claims 1 & 11 the controlled substance is placed into a plastic bag prior to sealing the pop-top can. If a plastic bag is not used and the controlled substance is loose in the can is it patent infringement? | 2017/06/13 | [
"https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/17944",
"https://patents.stackexchange.com",
"https://patents.stackexchange.com/users/19237/"
] | **No.**
One of the basic sections of the patent law is 35 USC 102. It describes some of the requierements for getting a patent, especially novelty. While the law is mostly short and doesn't offer a lot of explanation, there is a manual for patent examination (MPEP). The relevant section is [this one](https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2131.html).
>
> A claimed invention may be rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102 when the invention is anticipated (or is “not novel”) over a disclosure that is available as prior art. To anticipate a claim, the disclosure must teach every element of the claim.
>
>
>
Almost every publication in any language impedes patents (for the same thing) all over the world. To some extent oral publications don't meet that criteria, but something which is written and in English makes it impossible for anyone to get a valid patent on the disclosed invention.
But there is one issue - examiners don't always find all the relevant prior art and sometimes, sources are not traceable back to their publication date. You could file for a patent or write a paper to have more certainty, but in this case I would advise you to just make sure you can prove at what point in time you had what part of your open source project available to the public. If really you got sued by someone who was able to patent your invention after your disclosure (note: not likely), you could still easily defend yourself with that prove.
For some more reading on novelty and publications, check [this answer](https://patents.stackexchange.com/a/17636/18033). | You may also find that filing the algorithm with the [copyright office](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright) is useful because it makes the content a matter of public record. Copyright isn't going to protect a procedural mechanism because mechanics are the domain of patents, but as a [prophylactic](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prophylactic), it may be quite effective, and provides iron-clad evidence of the date of the public disclosure.
Submissions to the copyright office in the US cost $35, and [the process can be done online in a few minutes](https://www.copyright.gov/registration/), and does not require an attorney.
---
This technique alone may not help, because as DonQuiKong points out, an examiner may not find the documentation that shows the malefactor's claims to be non-novel.
Thus, you should probably also heavily publicize the algorithm, what it does, and links to documentation. (Publicization in this case may be simply a matter of posting on forums, etc., using basic SEO strategies such as relevant key-words, and utilizing high-traffic forums so that the posts show up on search engines.) |
14,510,299 | For a newbie, how would you explain the difference between a controller command and a task command? What are the purposes of each? What might be an example of using the two types of commands? | 2013/01/24 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/14510299",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/783377/"
] | See this documentation: <http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v6r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.commerce.developer.doc%2Fconcepts%2Fcsdcommand_framework.htm>
Basically a task is a step in the larger process. A controller generally calls the tasks necessary to complete the entire process. If you have two processes (command controllers) that need the same task, they each call the task and no need to replicate that task's behavior in each controller.
Think of making a peanut butter sandwich and making a ham sandwich as your two command controllers. Getting a plate, putting bread on plate, and place top bread slice on sandwich would be shared. Getting ham, or getting PB would be tasks only used in the appropriate command controller. | The Controller Command is the command that gets called upon a request, just like we have actions in struts and controller in Spring. A task is a step in the bigger process. Task commands are the commands that perform specific tasks for a controller command, like service classes in other frameworks. In order to complete the request, a controller command may invoke multiple task commands.
Other differences are -
a. There is a url mapping for a controller command whereas Task commands don't have URLs mapped to them.
b. Controller command gets invoked before the task command. |
14,510,299 | For a newbie, how would you explain the difference between a controller command and a task command? What are the purposes of each? What might be an example of using the two types of commands? | 2013/01/24 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/14510299",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/783377/"
] | See this documentation: <http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v6r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.commerce.developer.doc%2Fconcepts%2Fcsdcommand_framework.htm>
Basically a task is a step in the larger process. A controller generally calls the tasks necessary to complete the entire process. If you have two processes (command controllers) that need the same task, they each call the task and no need to replicate that task's behavior in each controller.
Think of making a peanut butter sandwich and making a ham sandwich as your two command controllers. Getting a plate, putting bread on plate, and place top bread slice on sandwich would be shared. Getting ham, or getting PB would be tasks only used in the appropriate command controller. | **Controller Command**
* Holds the complete business logic for an action. Cannot be executed
as an independent request but should be invoked from another command.
Needs resource level access control policies to be defined and
executed.
Ex -
UserRegistrationAddCmd is used to Register a user.
**Task Command**
* Holds a part of logic involved in an action i.e; to execute a
specific task. Can be executed as an independent request. Does not
need access control as this is executed from a controller command
which already has the policies defined.
Ex-
UpdateCredentialsCmd is invoked from UserRegistrationAddCmd to encrypt and update the credentials of the user. |
14,510,299 | For a newbie, how would you explain the difference between a controller command and a task command? What are the purposes of each? What might be an example of using the two types of commands? | 2013/01/24 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/14510299",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/783377/"
] | The Controller Command is the command that gets called upon a request, just like we have actions in struts and controller in Spring. A task is a step in the bigger process. Task commands are the commands that perform specific tasks for a controller command, like service classes in other frameworks. In order to complete the request, a controller command may invoke multiple task commands.
Other differences are -
a. There is a url mapping for a controller command whereas Task commands don't have URLs mapped to them.
b. Controller command gets invoked before the task command. | **Controller Command**
* Holds the complete business logic for an action. Cannot be executed
as an independent request but should be invoked from another command.
Needs resource level access control policies to be defined and
executed.
Ex -
UserRegistrationAddCmd is used to Register a user.
**Task Command**
* Holds a part of logic involved in an action i.e; to execute a
specific task. Can be executed as an independent request. Does not
need access control as this is executed from a controller command
which already has the policies defined.
Ex-
UpdateCredentialsCmd is invoked from UserRegistrationAddCmd to encrypt and update the credentials of the user. |
34,110,621 | Is possible to get data from the users browser, like all of his facebook messages, and something like that. Or downloading html where user is logged in on some random webiste. | 2015/12/05 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/34110621",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4480244/"
] | You can't due to Same Origin Policy. | Theoretically a browser plugin could be used to harvest information like that to some extent. The user would have to consent to it and install the plugin though.
I hope you're not thinking of doing anything naughty... |
23,601 | Why are deep cycle batteries rated in amp-hours instead of watt-hours? For example if I see a 85Ah battery, I multiply 85Ah x 12V to get 1020 watts. As household electricity use is measured in watt hours (hence a kill-a-watt) this information seems more useful. What is the important thing that I am missing with the amp labeling? | 2011/12/13 | [
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/23601",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/users/5802/"
] | Simply put, watts measures a rate of consumption, and amp-hours or kilowatt-hours measures the total energy consumed. Batteries store energy, so a unit that quantifies the amount of energy stored is useful.
Watts are 'Joules per second', so 1 Watt is the consumption of 1 Joule per second. Watt-hours is the energy consumed by a load with 1 Watt power consumption for one hour. This is the same unit that the power company uses to determine your electric bill.
So the question may be altered to be "Why are batteries expressed in Amp-Hours instead of KiloWatt-Hours", and there's a good reason for that as well. By specifying voltage separately, the unit of 'Amp-Hours' allows convenient recalculation for different series/parallel combinations of batteries, as well as easier calculation of battery lifespan (measuring load current is easier than load power). | Amp hours better specify what the battery stores and provides what Watt hours do.
Amp hours relate to the basic chemical reaction of the battery whereas Watt hours are much more affected by state of charge when charging and discharging and by rate of charge and discharge.
In a LiFePO4 battery the Ah efficiency can by 99.5%+ but the Watt hour (energy efficiency) can be 70% - 90% depending on various conditions and parameters. A standard liIon battery is somewhat similar and a lead acid battery can achieve over 90% current (= Ah) efficiency.
---
A battery will vary its voltage across its charging range.
Internal resistance x charge current squared = internal resistive losses
which is totally wasted energy.
On discharge,
internal resistance x discharge current squared = internal resistive losses
which is totally wasted energy.
In one case the waste energy is reflected by a RISe of Vterminal and in the other by a drop.
When charging, in the earlier part of the cycle the internal resistance is relatively low. The AH (Amp hours) put into the battery are largely recoverable AND the Watt hours also.
But as charging progresses, internal resistance rises, charging **energy** efficiency drops BUT charging **current** efficiency is still reasonably high.
---
Taking a LiFePO4 (also known as *“LFP”*) battery as a superb example, when new the CURRENT charge to discharge efficiency is about 99.5%. As the battery ages this efficiency **INCREASES!** i.e. almost all the amps × hours put in can be taken out. BUT the Watt hours put in and Watt hours taken out depend where in the cycle they are put in and how fast they are out in. Watt hours in the early part of the cycle are reasonably efficient but decrease in efficiency as voltage rises
---
### Solar
A Photovoltaic / PV / Solar panel for charging a 12V system typically has 36 cells, an unloaded voltage of > 20V, an "MPP" = maximum power point voltage of perhaps 15V, so that the optimum fully loaded voltage is well in excess of 12V. Attach this panel to a 12V battery and the voltage will fall to a value which depends on battery parameters and state of charge.
When loaded beyond its maximum power point the PV panel will approximate a constant current source.
If a PV panel operates at say 3A, then regardless of the Wattage that the panel produces (V x I) whether say
18V x 3A = 54 Watts or
15V x 3A = 45W or
13V x 3A = 39 W,
what the battery sees is the 3A.
The 3A is what drives the chemical storage reaction and regardless of terminal voltage when the battery is discharged, you will not get more than 3Ah out for any 3Ah put in, and in practice will get less because charging and also discharging never is 100% efficient.
If the battery voltage is at say 12.1V when you draw 3A for one hour and it was charged with a panel that would have charged at 15V x 3A "if allowed"
then the returned versus available energy efficiency is
12.1 x 3A / (15 x 3A) x Kah
=~ 81% x Kah
where Kag is the amp hour efficiency.
If Kah is 0.9 (90%) then overall Watt hour efficiency relative to what the panel COULD have made is 0.81 x 0.9 =~ 73%
It can be argued that it is "not fair" to say a panel "could have made 15V x 3A" when it is loaded down to say 12.5V by a battery, and that is a valid point, BUT of a 15V battery had been used or id=f an MPPT controller which allows the panel to work at its optimum point had been used then the panel would have produced th15V x 3A claimed. Which approach is "right" depends on what you are trying to determine. |
23,601 | Why are deep cycle batteries rated in amp-hours instead of watt-hours? For example if I see a 85Ah battery, I multiply 85Ah x 12V to get 1020 watts. As household electricity use is measured in watt hours (hence a kill-a-watt) this information seems more useful. What is the important thing that I am missing with the amp labeling? | 2011/12/13 | [
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/23601",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/users/5802/"
] | Simply put, watts measures a rate of consumption, and amp-hours or kilowatt-hours measures the total energy consumed. Batteries store energy, so a unit that quantifies the amount of energy stored is useful.
Watts are 'Joules per second', so 1 Watt is the consumption of 1 Joule per second. Watt-hours is the energy consumed by a load with 1 Watt power consumption for one hour. This is the same unit that the power company uses to determine your electric bill.
So the question may be altered to be "Why are batteries expressed in Amp-Hours instead of KiloWatt-Hours", and there's a good reason for that as well. By specifying voltage separately, the unit of 'Amp-Hours' allows convenient recalculation for different series/parallel combinations of batteries, as well as easier calculation of battery lifespan (measuring load current is easier than load power). | AH is the amount of current that can be drawn by the load in one single hour. Or the current that can be supplied by the battery in one single hour.
WH would be the consumption of power by the load in one single hour.
Voltage will be the amount of potential required to drive the current. It should be noted that the load voltage should be less as compared to battery as fundamentals of potential difference suggests.
As far as why batteries are rated in AH is because every load works on different voltage. By rating the battery directly in WH would not signify on what voltage the load is running at.Voltage is applied and current is drawn.
All these three parameters are fundamentally different but technically they are required to be together to understand the abilities of any electrically powered system :). |
23,601 | Why are deep cycle batteries rated in amp-hours instead of watt-hours? For example if I see a 85Ah battery, I multiply 85Ah x 12V to get 1020 watts. As household electricity use is measured in watt hours (hence a kill-a-watt) this information seems more useful. What is the important thing that I am missing with the amp labeling? | 2011/12/13 | [
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/23601",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/users/5802/"
] | Amp hours better specify what the battery stores and provides what Watt hours do.
Amp hours relate to the basic chemical reaction of the battery whereas Watt hours are much more affected by state of charge when charging and discharging and by rate of charge and discharge.
In a LiFePO4 battery the Ah efficiency can by 99.5%+ but the Watt hour (energy efficiency) can be 70% - 90% depending on various conditions and parameters. A standard liIon battery is somewhat similar and a lead acid battery can achieve over 90% current (= Ah) efficiency.
---
A battery will vary its voltage across its charging range.
Internal resistance x charge current squared = internal resistive losses
which is totally wasted energy.
On discharge,
internal resistance x discharge current squared = internal resistive losses
which is totally wasted energy.
In one case the waste energy is reflected by a RISe of Vterminal and in the other by a drop.
When charging, in the earlier part of the cycle the internal resistance is relatively low. The AH (Amp hours) put into the battery are largely recoverable AND the Watt hours also.
But as charging progresses, internal resistance rises, charging **energy** efficiency drops BUT charging **current** efficiency is still reasonably high.
---
Taking a LiFePO4 (also known as *“LFP”*) battery as a superb example, when new the CURRENT charge to discharge efficiency is about 99.5%. As the battery ages this efficiency **INCREASES!** i.e. almost all the amps × hours put in can be taken out. BUT the Watt hours put in and Watt hours taken out depend where in the cycle they are put in and how fast they are out in. Watt hours in the early part of the cycle are reasonably efficient but decrease in efficiency as voltage rises
---
### Solar
A Photovoltaic / PV / Solar panel for charging a 12V system typically has 36 cells, an unloaded voltage of > 20V, an "MPP" = maximum power point voltage of perhaps 15V, so that the optimum fully loaded voltage is well in excess of 12V. Attach this panel to a 12V battery and the voltage will fall to a value which depends on battery parameters and state of charge.
When loaded beyond its maximum power point the PV panel will approximate a constant current source.
If a PV panel operates at say 3A, then regardless of the Wattage that the panel produces (V x I) whether say
18V x 3A = 54 Watts or
15V x 3A = 45W or
13V x 3A = 39 W,
what the battery sees is the 3A.
The 3A is what drives the chemical storage reaction and regardless of terminal voltage when the battery is discharged, you will not get more than 3Ah out for any 3Ah put in, and in practice will get less because charging and also discharging never is 100% efficient.
If the battery voltage is at say 12.1V when you draw 3A for one hour and it was charged with a panel that would have charged at 15V x 3A "if allowed"
then the returned versus available energy efficiency is
12.1 x 3A / (15 x 3A) x Kah
=~ 81% x Kah
where Kag is the amp hour efficiency.
If Kah is 0.9 (90%) then overall Watt hour efficiency relative to what the panel COULD have made is 0.81 x 0.9 =~ 73%
It can be argued that it is "not fair" to say a panel "could have made 15V x 3A" when it is loaded down to say 12.5V by a battery, and that is a valid point, BUT of a 15V battery had been used or id=f an MPPT controller which allows the panel to work at its optimum point had been used then the panel would have produced th15V x 3A claimed. Which approach is "right" depends on what you are trying to determine. | AH is the amount of current that can be drawn by the load in one single hour. Or the current that can be supplied by the battery in one single hour.
WH would be the consumption of power by the load in one single hour.
Voltage will be the amount of potential required to drive the current. It should be noted that the load voltage should be less as compared to battery as fundamentals of potential difference suggests.
As far as why batteries are rated in AH is because every load works on different voltage. By rating the battery directly in WH would not signify on what voltage the load is running at.Voltage is applied and current is drawn.
All these three parameters are fundamentally different but technically they are required to be together to understand the abilities of any electrically powered system :). |
50,327,936 | I get this error when I connect with RDP
This could be due to CredSSP encryption oracle remediation.
For more information, see <https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=866660>
How to solve it ? | 2018/05/14 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/50327936",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/9787545/"
] | Microsoft made this bad change but I will solve it for you :-)
Run cmd as Administrator (Search for cmd and right click with the mouse to choose RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR).
You can also use powershell admin.
Copy and paste this command to run it and rate my answer if succeed :-)
REG ADD HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\CredSSP\Parameters\ /v AllowEncryptionOracle /t REG\_DWORD /d 2 | create a text file: **rd\_patch.reg**
Paste following content, save and double-click it.
>
> Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
>
>
> [HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\CredSSP]
>
>
> [HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\CredSSP\Parameters]
> "AllowEncryptionOracle"=dword:00000002
>
>
>
Solution from: <https://serverfault.com/a/911645> |
163,077 | I have a mesh, a plane, and it is supposed to be a landscape with grass. It has some ups and downs not a flat plane. When adding the hair(grass). I did some weight paint to tell where the grass should grow. It seems to be more grass on lower parts of the mesh for some reason. The strange thing is that it looks fine in the viewport but not after rendering in Eevee. I have played around with the settings but can't find any solution. Would appreciate any help here.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Us3Ye.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iycrp.jpg) | 2020/01/07 | [
"https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/163077",
"https://blender.stackexchange.com",
"https://blender.stackexchange.com/users/83932/"
] | This was caused by another plane that forgot to disable in render, as well as in the viewport. | Sometimes reloading/reopening your blender file helps to force eevee to use the recalculated particles. It might be using a cached version. |
1,750,676 | I'm noticing that my django development server (version 1.1.1) on my local windows7 machine is using a lot of CPU (~30%, according to task manager's python.exe entry), even in idle state, i.e. no request coming in/going out. Is there an established way of analysing what might be responsible for this?
Thanks!
Martin | 2009/11/17 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/1750676",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/102181/"
] | Hit Control-C and crash the process. It will probably crash somewhere that it's spending a lot of time.
Or you could use a profiler. | The standard approach is to use a profiler. If, for some reason you can't (such as there is no profiler available in the Apache modpython that is running your Django) your best bet might be simply to instrument your program with logging. Watch the messages from your program, and see what you can learn from them.
If you see a message "Entering CalculateFoo()" and then five seconds later "Exiting CalculateFoo()" that's a major clue there. Or if one particular function keeps printing over and over and over.
Here's a short discussion of Python logging.
[[Python debugging tips](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623039/python-debugging-tips/1623243#1623243)](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623039/python-debugging-tips/1623243#1623243)
EDIT: I just noticed that you specifically said this is on your Windows 7 desktop. So, use a profiler. But I'll leave this answer up to cover the general case. |
1,750,676 | I'm noticing that my django development server (version 1.1.1) on my local windows7 machine is using a lot of CPU (~30%, according to task manager's python.exe entry), even in idle state, i.e. no request coming in/going out. Is there an established way of analysing what might be responsible for this?
Thanks!
Martin | 2009/11/17 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/1750676",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/102181/"
] | FWIW, you should do the profiling, but when you do I'll bet you find that the answer is "polling for changes to your files so it can auto-reload." You might do a quick test with "python manage.py runserver --noreload" and see how that affects the CPU usage. | Hit Control-C and crash the process. It will probably crash somewhere that it's spending a lot of time.
Or you could use a profiler. |
1,750,676 | I'm noticing that my django development server (version 1.1.1) on my local windows7 machine is using a lot of CPU (~30%, according to task manager's python.exe entry), even in idle state, i.e. no request coming in/going out. Is there an established way of analysing what might be responsible for this?
Thanks!
Martin | 2009/11/17 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/1750676",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/102181/"
] | <http://docs.python.org/library/profile.html>
That's the standard approach. | The standard approach is to use a profiler. If, for some reason you can't (such as there is no profiler available in the Apache modpython that is running your Django) your best bet might be simply to instrument your program with logging. Watch the messages from your program, and see what you can learn from them.
If you see a message "Entering CalculateFoo()" and then five seconds later "Exiting CalculateFoo()" that's a major clue there. Or if one particular function keeps printing over and over and over.
Here's a short discussion of Python logging.
[[Python debugging tips](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623039/python-debugging-tips/1623243#1623243)](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623039/python-debugging-tips/1623243#1623243)
EDIT: I just noticed that you specifically said this is on your Windows 7 desktop. So, use a profiler. But I'll leave this answer up to cover the general case. |
1,750,676 | I'm noticing that my django development server (version 1.1.1) on my local windows7 machine is using a lot of CPU (~30%, according to task manager's python.exe entry), even in idle state, i.e. no request coming in/going out. Is there an established way of analysing what might be responsible for this?
Thanks!
Martin | 2009/11/17 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/1750676",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/102181/"
] | FWIW, you should do the profiling, but when you do I'll bet you find that the answer is "polling for changes to your files so it can auto-reload." You might do a quick test with "python manage.py runserver --noreload" and see how that affects the CPU usage. | <http://docs.python.org/library/profile.html>
That's the standard approach. |
1,750,676 | I'm noticing that my django development server (version 1.1.1) on my local windows7 machine is using a lot of CPU (~30%, according to task manager's python.exe entry), even in idle state, i.e. no request coming in/going out. Is there an established way of analysing what might be responsible for this?
Thanks!
Martin | 2009/11/17 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/1750676",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/102181/"
] | FWIW, you should do the profiling, but when you do I'll bet you find that the answer is "polling for changes to your files so it can auto-reload." You might do a quick test with "python manage.py runserver --noreload" and see how that affects the CPU usage. | The standard approach is to use a profiler. If, for some reason you can't (such as there is no profiler available in the Apache modpython that is running your Django) your best bet might be simply to instrument your program with logging. Watch the messages from your program, and see what you can learn from them.
If you see a message "Entering CalculateFoo()" and then five seconds later "Exiting CalculateFoo()" that's a major clue there. Or if one particular function keeps printing over and over and over.
Here's a short discussion of Python logging.
[[Python debugging tips](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623039/python-debugging-tips/1623243#1623243)](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623039/python-debugging-tips/1623243#1623243)
EDIT: I just noticed that you specifically said this is on your Windows 7 desktop. So, use a profiler. But I'll leave this answer up to cover the general case. |
33,724,003 | Good day!
I'm doing some work on composite structure diagram(CSD) and I can't figure out differences between CSD and component diagram. Both look same to me. Or am I wrong?
Could I model all situations with CSD that I can with component diagram? If not, which are the cases?
When it's better to use CSD over component diagram? (Vice versa)
Component diagram is intended to model architecture. Can't I model same architecture with CSD?
Thanks! | 2015/11/15 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/33724003",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4507247/"
] | UML does not strictly define the various diagram types ("the boundaries between the various kinds of diagram types are not strictly enforced").
In general however, it is a good practice to create diagrams that present only one view on the subject.
Suppose you have a component 'Car', component 'Wheel' and component 'Engine'. The Engine drives the front wheels, not the back wheels.
*Component diagrams* show components and their relationships. A component is a special kind of class. The diagram does not show component instances. In the example, we would show three components. Car has a 1:4 composition association with Wheel and 1:1 composition association with Engine. Engine has a 1:2 association with Wheel. It is not trivial to specify that the engine is only connected to front wheels and that both wheels must belong to the same car. You will need to write some OCL constraints for that.
*Composite structure diagrams* show the component instances contained within another component and the links between these instances (in fact, I should use the word *part* instead of instance). This diagram shows the Engine and the four Wheels as separate blocks inside the Car component. Now it is easy to show how the Engine is only connected to the front Wheels of the same car. | Actually most of all UML diagrams are alike (except SDs and Timing Ds) and you are allowed to put in whatever you like. It is more sort of a convention to use certain subsets in certain diagrams but there is no restriction (except see above).
Annex A of Superstructures (2.5) states:
>
> A UML model consists of elements such as packages, classes, and associations. The corresponding UML diagrams are graphical representations of parts of the UML model.
>
>
> ...
>
>
> **NOTE.** This taxonomy provides a logical organization for the various major kinds of diagrams. However, it does not preclude mixing different kinds of diagram types, as one might do when one combines structural and behavioral elements (e.g., showing a state machine nested inside an internal structure). Consequently, the boundaries between the various kinds of diagram types are not strictly enforced.
>
>
> |
543,781 | The number of hidden layers increases the number of weights, also increases the terms in the back-propagation algorithm, i.e. more derivatives, hence more computation. Can we say that neural networks learns slower with the addition of more hidden layers? | 2021/09/07 | [
"https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/543781",
"https://stats.stackexchange.com",
"https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/327943/"
] | It'll have more weights and in each new added layer you're getting more complex functions that's in NN sense your function will be a more complex composition of another functions and your output will be hardier to optimise so its convergence will be slower. I'd say that convergence getting slower is mainly due to complexity composition, the number of weights will not change its speed very much. | Let’s say the set of functions that a neural network with k layers can learn is F (this is called your parameterized function space, since it’s all the functions with the parameters of the weights of your network). With k+1 layers, the set of functions you can learn, let’s call it F\*, is all the functions in F, plus any new functions from the new layer (just have the new layer be the identity to reach all the functions in F). So F\* is strict larger than F.
It might be that you can more quickly converge in the larger function landscape by chance- but in expectation (on average) since the landscape is larger, it should take longer to converge to a local minima in loss. This the larger network will learn slower. |
66,693,892 | I am trying to setup an CICD from our Azure Devops to the Azure Subscription owned by our Client.
But the subscription is not appearing in the list of Azure Subscriptions even if I already have Owner level of role:
My CICD Subscription List Available:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NttxZ.png)
The Subscription where I want to deploy:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tA7hg.png)
My current role to our Client Active Directory:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SlSQc.png)
**Also note that I am a Member of their Active Directory not just a Guest.**
I also checked this article but no luck:
<https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/release/azure-rm-endpoint?view=azure-devops#the-user-has-only-guest-permission-in-the-directory> | 2021/03/18 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/66693892",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2086345/"
] | The problem is not with the roles and permissions, for some reason AAD with MFA enables somehow prevents smooth integration with Azure DevOps, on my case i disabled deleted my MFA options then tried to add the subscription again via Azure Pipeline. | [Some subscriptions are missing from the list of subscriptions](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/release/azure-rm-endpoint?view=azure-devops#some-subscriptions-are-missing-from-the-list-of-subscriptions):
To fix this issue you will need to modify the supported account types and who can use your application. To do so, follow the steps below:
1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. If you have access to multiple tenants, use the **Directory + subscription** filter in the top menu to select the tenant in which you want to register an application.
3. Search for and select **Azure Active Directory**.
4. Under **Manage**, select **App registrations**.
5. Select you application from the list of registered applications.
6. Under **Essentials**, select **Supported account types**.
7. Under **Supported account types**, *Who can use this application or access this API?* select **Accounts in any organizational directory**.
8. Select **Save**. |
150,581 | Due to the lack of generic variance in the .NET framework, is it more "correct" to have methods that handle the non-generic versions of the System.Collection interfaces, if the methods are being designed to handle multiple types?
Ideally, once moved to .NET 3.5, the code would modified to change these methods into extension methods. | 2008/09/29 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/150581",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/8505/"
] | No, the more "correct" thing to do is to make the methods that handle multiple types generic themselves. | Define "Multiple types" do you mean, for example, a List that contains both Cars and Dogs? Or one List that contains Cars and another that contains Dogs? Unless you're doing something "special" I'd say the correct thing to do is to implement the Generic version and not the non-generic version. |
150,581 | Due to the lack of generic variance in the .NET framework, is it more "correct" to have methods that handle the non-generic versions of the System.Collection interfaces, if the methods are being designed to handle multiple types?
Ideally, once moved to .NET 3.5, the code would modified to change these methods into extension methods. | 2008/09/29 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/150581",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/8505/"
] | In this case (IEnumerable), implementing the generic version is better, as it derives from IEnumerable (non-Generic), so it becomes a moot point, both are available to you. | Define "Multiple types" do you mean, for example, a List that contains both Cars and Dogs? Or one List that contains Cars and another that contains Dogs? Unless you're doing something "special" I'd say the correct thing to do is to implement the Generic version and not the non-generic version. |
150,581 | Due to the lack of generic variance in the .NET framework, is it more "correct" to have methods that handle the non-generic versions of the System.Collection interfaces, if the methods are being designed to handle multiple types?
Ideally, once moved to .NET 3.5, the code would modified to change these methods into extension methods. | 2008/09/29 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/150581",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/8505/"
] | No, the more "correct" thing to do is to make the methods that handle multiple types generic themselves. | [Here is a decent article explaining it.](http://blogs.msdn.com/rmbyers/archive/2006/06/01/613690.aspx)
The only solution that I can see is to follow the advice of the article, and make the method a generic method as well.
But, I am not sure how well it will stand up to being an extension method. |
150,581 | Due to the lack of generic variance in the .NET framework, is it more "correct" to have methods that handle the non-generic versions of the System.Collection interfaces, if the methods are being designed to handle multiple types?
Ideally, once moved to .NET 3.5, the code would modified to change these methods into extension methods. | 2008/09/29 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/150581",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/8505/"
] | In this case (IEnumerable), implementing the generic version is better, as it derives from IEnumerable (non-Generic), so it becomes a moot point, both are available to you. | [Here is a decent article explaining it.](http://blogs.msdn.com/rmbyers/archive/2006/06/01/613690.aspx)
The only solution that I can see is to follow the advice of the article, and make the method a generic method as well.
But, I am not sure how well it will stand up to being an extension method. |
138,270 | When he was young, it hurt:
* when Voldemort was close to him
* when Voldemort felt strong emotions
>
> It is my belief that your scar hurts both when Lord Voldemort is near you, and when he is feeling a particularly strong surge of hatred\*.
>
> *(Goblet of fire, Chapter 30, The pensieve)*
>
> \* *or joy, as we discover later - but that is off topic*
>
>
>
Also, he had "dreams" about Voldemort, that were in fact incursions in Voldemort's mind and let him see what Voldemort saw, heard, did.
>
> The evidence suggests that at times,
> when your mind is most relaxed and vulnerable — when you are
> asleep, for instance — you are sharing the Dark Lord’s thoughts and
> emotions.
>
> *(Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 24, Occlumency)*
>
>
>
But neither the scar nor the dreams were ever anything like divination features. He could not see the past, nor the future, not even what might be the future.
So after Voldemort is fully dead, he shouldn't feel any of these signs anymore.
In the Cursed child,
>
> actions take place that induce a risk of Voldemort "coming back" or at least "be there".
>
>
>
And, as a "warning signal", Harry's scar hurts and he's having weird dreams. Why?? | 2016/08/18 | [
"https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/138270",
"https://scifi.stackexchange.com",
"https://scifi.stackexchange.com/users/64082/"
] | **By all accounts Harry's scar *should not* be hurting...**
As seen in the answers to [this question](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/22902/why-did-harrys-scar-hurt/22904#22904) on why Harry's scar hurts:
>
> **J.K. Rowling:** Well, of course the pain he feels [in his scar] whenever Voldemort's particularly active is this piece of soul seeking to rejoin the master soul. When his scar is hurting him so much, that's not scar tissue hurting him. That's this piece of soul really wanting to get back out the way it entered. It really wants to- it entered this boy's body through a wound, and it wants to rejoin the master. So when Voldemort's near him, when he's particularly active, this connection, (JN: Oh, my gosh!) it was always there. That's what I always imagined this pain was. Yes, so there you go.
>
>
> J.K. Rowling - [**[THE LEAKY CAULDRON - POTTERCAST'S INTERVIEW WITH J.K. ROWLING]**](http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/12/23/transcript-of-part-1-of-pottercast-s-jk-rowling-interview) - 12.23.2007
>
>
>
**However**, we have time travel involved in this new story. So it is possible that with the creation of a new timeline where Voldemort is still alive, that the piece of soul *is* still inside Harry.
It is also possible the *Cursed Child* may have undone the previous reasoning, and that the scar is simply a warning of "bad things relating to Voldemort".
We do not have an official explanation from any of the contributors, and since "canon" in the Potterverse is fast and loose to begin with, there may not be a canon answer. | It has been addressed in Act Four, Scene Fifteen - A Beautiful Hill:
>
> Harry: You know, I thought I'd lost him - Voldemort - I thought I'd lost him - and then my scar started hurting again and I had dreams of him and I could even speak Parseltongue again and I started to feel like I'd not changed at all - that he'd never let me go -
>
>
> Albus: And had he?
>
>
> Harry: **The part of me that was Voldemort died a long time ago, but it wasn't enough to be physically rid of him - I had to be mentally rid of him.** And that - is a lot to learn for a forty-year-old man.
>
>
>
So, it seems like a psychological issue, an after image of real trauma which may resurface after years. Why did it happen exactly during this time? Well, it can be coincidence or because of fights with Albus or because of The Force prophecy. |
138,270 | When he was young, it hurt:
* when Voldemort was close to him
* when Voldemort felt strong emotions
>
> It is my belief that your scar hurts both when Lord Voldemort is near you, and when he is feeling a particularly strong surge of hatred\*.
>
> *(Goblet of fire, Chapter 30, The pensieve)*
>
> \* *or joy, as we discover later - but that is off topic*
>
>
>
Also, he had "dreams" about Voldemort, that were in fact incursions in Voldemort's mind and let him see what Voldemort saw, heard, did.
>
> The evidence suggests that at times,
> when your mind is most relaxed and vulnerable — when you are
> asleep, for instance — you are sharing the Dark Lord’s thoughts and
> emotions.
>
> *(Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 24, Occlumency)*
>
>
>
But neither the scar nor the dreams were ever anything like divination features. He could not see the past, nor the future, not even what might be the future.
So after Voldemort is fully dead, he shouldn't feel any of these signs anymore.
In the Cursed child,
>
> actions take place that induce a risk of Voldemort "coming back" or at least "be there".
>
>
>
And, as a "warning signal", Harry's scar hurts and he's having weird dreams. Why?? | 2016/08/18 | [
"https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/138270",
"https://scifi.stackexchange.com",
"https://scifi.stackexchange.com/users/64082/"
] | As Delphi is Voldemort’s daughter, it is possible that the connection they share will lead to Harry’s scar hurting when Delphi is particularly near or emotional.
As we have learned, family and love have very strong magical connections in Harry Potter so maybe the emotional connection between Delphi and Voldemort resulted in Harry’s scar reacting to Delphi’s emotions. | It has been addressed in Act Four, Scene Fifteen - A Beautiful Hill:
>
> Harry: You know, I thought I'd lost him - Voldemort - I thought I'd lost him - and then my scar started hurting again and I had dreams of him and I could even speak Parseltongue again and I started to feel like I'd not changed at all - that he'd never let me go -
>
>
> Albus: And had he?
>
>
> Harry: **The part of me that was Voldemort died a long time ago, but it wasn't enough to be physically rid of him - I had to be mentally rid of him.** And that - is a lot to learn for a forty-year-old man.
>
>
>
So, it seems like a psychological issue, an after image of real trauma which may resurface after years. Why did it happen exactly during this time? Well, it can be coincidence or because of fights with Albus or because of The Force prophecy. |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | All of these games play excellently as one-shot games. I've run many of these at cons, sometimes as part of my "RPG speed dating" event (Indie by Storm) where I'll run 4-6 games in 4 hours. If I can give you a feel for a game in 40 minutes, then you can have a blast with it in 5 hours!
I have updated this answer with other folks' excellent answers, but added my own understanding of the rules.
I have also annotated each game's entry with a three-plus scoring mechanism in four categories:
* RPG -- is this recognizable as an RPG? compare to D&D to get more pluses.
* 1Shot -- can you play this to a satisfying conclusion in 4-5 hours?
* GM -- does this game require very little GM prep?
* Play -- does this game require very little player prep?
The more pluses, the better! + is okay, ++ is good, and +++ is great!
**[The Shab-al-Hiri Roach](http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/roach/)** RPG+ 1Shot+++ GM+++ Play+++ (by the creator of Fiasco) is set in a sleepy northeastern college in the early 1900's. You play professors, vying for status. It'd be silly enough, but one of your colleagues unwittingly brought back an ancient Sumerian god in the form of a cockroach. The roach travels from person to person, forcing them to do terrible things that only it can understand. Chaos (and comedy) ensues. Zero prep required. The rules are short and simple. Characters take 15 minutes to make (2 minutes if you know what you're doing).
**[Carry](http://www.ndpdesign.com/carry-a-game-about-war/)** RPG+ 1Shot+++ GM+ Play+++ is a Vietnam War game, but it's not a tactical fighting game. It's about the hardships soldiers face. You play members of a company of Marines. The characters are pregenerated. The players add Burdens to the stock characters to flesh them out. Takes 15 minutes. Play is serious, often brutal, always rewarding. The rules are fiddly, so the GM will have to know the rulebook.
**[Montsegur 1244](http://thoughtfulgames.com/montsegur1244/index.html)** RPG+ 1Shot+++ GM++ Play+++ is set in a Cathar city in southwestern France in 1244. Catholic crusaders have surrounded the city in a siege. You play some of Montsegur's inhabitants, mostly Cathar religious fanatics. Are you willing to burn for your beliefs? Pregenerated characters, no dice. The game requires some material prep (like printing out and cutting out cards and stuff) but it's a one-time thing that can be done whenever. Fantastic, serious game.
**[Shock:](http://glyphpress.com/shock/)** RPG+ 1Shot+++ GM+++ Play+++ is a game of social science-fiction. It's more Asimov than Piper, if you follow my meaning. Thin details of setting are created in play and developed throughout play. The rules are fantastically simple but produce complex stories.
**[Misspent Youth](http://misspentyouthgame.com/)** RPG+++ 1Shot++ GM+++ Play+++ is set in a dark science-fiction world that you create in play. Setting creation and character creation takes up the first hour or so, if you let people gab and discuss. It's worth it for the buy-in it creates. You play disaffected teenagers who are fighting The Authority. The dice system is simple and can be explained in minutes. The GM's role is mostly narration; no game balance or any of that stuff. Extremely easy to run.
**[Lady Blackbird](http://www.onesevendesign.com/ladyblackbird/)** RPG+++ 1Shot+++ GM+++ Play+++ is Firefly meets Steampunk. The game is extremely easy to learn. The characters are pregenerated. Lady Blackbird was designed to fill this near-zero-prep niche, in fact.
**[Fiasco](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/64016/fiasco)** RPG+ 1Shot+++ GM+++ Play+++ lets you play ambitious people with strong motivations and poor impulse control. Essentially, it's the Coen Brothers movie game. Zero prep is necessary and one read-through of the rules will be enough for you to facilitate a game (everyone plays; there is no GM!).
**[Zombie Cinema](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/54318/zombie-cinema)** RPG+ 1Shot+++ GM+++ Play+++ is light-hearted zombie horror. It's less complex than most family board games and way more fun. It's more toward the "storytelling game" continuum of the role-playing game spectrum, but I think most role-players would see it as an RPG. Everyone plays; no GM.
**[In a Wicked Age](http://lumpley.com/wicked.html)** RPG+++ 1Shot+ GM++ Play+++ is hard-hitting swords & sorcery in the vein of the old novels. You pick an Oracle (a set of setting and character tables) and roll -- presto! setting! Within ten minutes, everyone has a character and is playing. The rules are fiddly, so the GM will have to know the rulebook.
**Minimalist games** RPG+++ 1Shot++ GM+++ Play+++ like [1PG](http://www.pigames.net/store/default.php?cPath=43_50_53) and [TWERPS](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/1170/twerps) can get you playing quickly. These either have no setting or provide simple supplement books to focus play on a setting. Their simplicity is both a boon and a curse. On the one hand, there are hardly any rules to learn and the GM can just run whatever he or she wants. On the other hand, that puts all the burden on the GM to make the game fun. You're a step or two away from cops & robbers here, but if that's your thing, awesome. I personally think the games I mention above provide just enough structure to focus play and provide much-needed support to the players. | [Being a role-playing game on the topic of the High-Flying adventures
of Beatrice Henrietta Bristol-Smythe, DBE, daring Aviatrix and
accomplished Exploratrix, and her Gentleman Companion,
who for a Modest Fee, accompanies Beatrice Henrietta
Bristol-Smythe, DBE, when the Occasion warrants her an Escort.](http://www.victorianadventureenthusiast.com/dbe.html)
That's the actual game title. It's fun enough. It's just a couple of pages long. What more could you possibly ask for?
Also, there's [Stalin's Story](http://lilith.gotdns.org/~victor/?q=content/stalins-story) and [Chamber](http://www.simplephrase.com/games/chamber/) (by [Simple Phrase Press](http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?board=42.0), now apparently missing), although they're not for everyone, the former being too experimental and the latter being too horrific for most people. |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | (Editing in Adam's excellent rating system.)
The one-page [GHOST/ECHO](http://www.onesevendesign.com/ghostecho/)
RPG+++ 1Shot+++ GM+++ Play+++ from the same designer of Lady Blackbird is great fun -- I played it with my parents and it worked well. It's based on the Otherkind Dice system by Vincent Baker which is a precursor of Apocalypse World which one of your other respondants mentioned, but it provides just enough color and system for you to sit down and go -- and your game is likely to be quite different than the way I played it. I keep meaning to get this out and play more, with other groups.
[Universalis](http://www.ramsheadpublishing.com/) RPG++ 1Shot+++ GM+ Play+++ is great fun. Depending on how sticky you want to be about your first criterion, you might rule it out, but most people do assert it as a role-playing game. It's GMless and the first thing you do is create the type of game -- setting, genre, special rules, etc. It seems to be played most often as a one-shot but occasionally as a campaign. I've played it maybe twenty times as a one-shot and twice as very short (2-3 session) campaign games. I have never once had Universalis fail to deliver! | [Being a role-playing game on the topic of the High-Flying adventures
of Beatrice Henrietta Bristol-Smythe, DBE, daring Aviatrix and
accomplished Exploratrix, and her Gentleman Companion,
who for a Modest Fee, accompanies Beatrice Henrietta
Bristol-Smythe, DBE, when the Occasion warrants her an Escort.](http://www.victorianadventureenthusiast.com/dbe.html)
That's the actual game title. It's fun enough. It's just a couple of pages long. What more could you possibly ask for?
Also, there's [Stalin's Story](http://lilith.gotdns.org/~victor/?q=content/stalins-story) and [Chamber](http://www.simplephrase.com/games/chamber/) (by [Simple Phrase Press](http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?board=42.0), now apparently missing), although they're not for everyone, the former being too experimental and the latter being too horrific for most people. |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | Adam Dray's list is excellent, almost most (all) require the GM to have read the game in advance. None should require knowing the rules "in and out". I will note that many of them require the GM to be a bit pushy if you're going to squeeze in a whole game in 5 hours if your players tend to mosey through their games. For example, Shock is technically GM-less, but someone acting as a facilitator to encourage people to take bold actions and aggressively frame scenes can help.
To Dray's list, I will add:
**[Awesome Adventures](http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/awesome-adventures/5324537 "Awesome Adventures")** - Action and adventure with a story focus. *Spirit of the Century*, aggressively streamlined and made generic. To do as a spur-of-the-moment one shot, the GM will either need to have a solid session idea up front, or be good at improvising.
**[Penny for My Thoughts](http://www.orphicinstitute.com/?page_id=65)** - A group of amnesiac's try to help each other remember in an experimental treatment involving a bit of mind-reading. Designed to be learned by reading as you play! Errs a bit toward a storytelling game than an RPG, as player agency is more limited.
**[The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen](http://www.magnumopuspress.com/?page_id=8)** - Implausible adventures in the 1800s. Helps to have seen the Terry Gilliam movie. The rules are simple enough that I taught them from memory after a single read through. Works well as a party game for gamers. Down side: Very much a competitive story telling game, but nominally an RPG as you are telling a story about "you" as a character and other people inject complications you must narrate out of. | I've had quite a lot of fun with [Ninja Burger](http://ninjaburger.com/) as a beer and pretzels RPG. In a more serious no-prep vein, Baker's [Poison'd](http://theunstore.com/index.php/unstore/game/3) is grim, gritty, and fast. Baker's [In a Wicked Age](http://lumpley.com/wicked.html) also satisfies the no-prep criterion, if you want a fantasy game. |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | Here is my short list of games that make a good one-shot:
* [InSpectres](http://www.memento-mori.com/inspectres/)
* [Zombie Cinema](http://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/zombiecinema)
* [My Life with Master](http://www.halfmeme.com/master.html)
* [PTA (Prime Time Adventures)](http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10903.phtml) (this works pretty good for a one shot)
* [Toon](http://www.sjgames.com/toon/)
* [3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars](http://boxninja.com/) (space marine game a la *Starship Troopers*)
I have played all these successfully. | [Great Ork Gods](http://www.greatorkgods.co.uk/) is a very fun game about Orcs and the Gods who hate them. There's no GM. Players play the role of Orcs trying to accomplish various Orc-like scenarios (Destroy the Village, etc). They also play the role of Gods who adjudicate the difficulty of the actions of the other players. It's cooperative, in that all the Orcs are against their enemies, and competitive, in that there are victory points for accomplishing various scenario goals.
Loads of fun!
I'm a little bit [biased](http://redvan.wikidot.com/), but I think Basic D&D fits your requirements very well. Character generation is 10-15 minutes, tops and the Moldvay edition (possibly Mentzer too) has a random dungeon stocking table in the back. All you need is a map and some dice. And everyone knows D&D as a genre, so there isn't much explaining to do. |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | A lot of the games listed above are pretty great. You might also want to try these as well:
[Murderous Ghosts](http://theunstore.com/index.php/unstore/game/128) is a light-weight game that doesn't require preparation, as it's sort of in a choose your own adventure format, and can be just about as short as you want it to be (there's a narratively sound escape hatch of everybody dies). It's a 2 person game, though I've played it with 3 before.
[Dread](http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net/) requires what I'd consider essentially no prep--the GM needs to pick 5 or so char-gen questions to give the players, but that's it. And there are example questions around worth borrowing if you don't feel like writing them. I've definitely decided to run a session and played it in the same evening. The rules mechanic is basically a jenga tower, so that obviously gives the game (and your characters) a very short half-life.
Horror games like this tend to work well for 1-offs, because you only see the characters in a very narrow, specific situation that's still engaging and the characters' arcs are pretty computable.
On a totally different note, BADASS might be another candidate, though I haven't gotten to try it out yet. It's very much what it sounds like--robot-ninjas punching each other in space, that kind of thing. | [Great Ork Gods](http://www.greatorkgods.co.uk/) is a very fun game about Orcs and the Gods who hate them. There's no GM. Players play the role of Orcs trying to accomplish various Orc-like scenarios (Destroy the Village, etc). They also play the role of Gods who adjudicate the difficulty of the actions of the other players. It's cooperative, in that all the Orcs are against their enemies, and competitive, in that there are victory points for accomplishing various scenario goals.
Loads of fun!
I'm a little bit [biased](http://redvan.wikidot.com/), but I think Basic D&D fits your requirements very well. Character generation is 10-15 minutes, tops and the Moldvay edition (possibly Mentzer too) has a random dungeon stocking table in the back. All you need is a map and some dice. And everyone knows D&D as a genre, so there isn't much explaining to do. |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | I quite enjoy the [1PG game line from Deep7](http://www.pigames.net/store/default.php?cPath=43_50_53). Very recognizable as a tabletop RPG. Takes a handful of minutes to make a character (double-digit seconds if you know the system already). The individual games come with pre-made adventure seeds that have enough detail to be worthwhile without being railroading modules. | For zero-prep on the player side, [Paranoia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_%28role-playing_game%29) is your best bet - part of the rules is that players aren't allowed to admit to knowing the rules!
On the judge/DM side, it's not bad either - there's a random adventure generator in one of the supplements, and anytime you need or want to wing it, you can (since you're explicitly allowed to kill character/players who admit to knowing too much about the rules - see above!)
Also well suited to one shots since most of the party isn't expected to survive the night. |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | A case for [Dungeon World](http://dungeon-world.com)
All you need to do is print the character sheets (1 page double sided or 2 pages if you're a spellcaster) and follow the character creation instructions there. It's dead simple.
The GM parts require minimum reading (read Playing the Game and the [First session chapter](http://www.dungeonworldsrd.com/gamemastering/first-session)) and maybe watch this [actual play](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooa-apRt2wk) to give you an idea.
I play one shots all the time and Dungeon World is great because it works better with minimum prep. If you have too much preparation, it will backfire. The best thing is to ask questions about the players' choice (ok so you're a Paladin, tell me about your order). Almost every one shots I played (mainly to show them an alternative to Pathfinder) turned out to become an on-going game.
It is the most popular and known child to Apocalypse World but in my opinion Dungeon World is easier to wrap your head around because it uses HP and stats people know from many mainstream RPGs.
So point by point:
* RPG: 100% pure AAA grade RPG.
* Time: I played my first shots in less
time than that. Character creation takes 20-30min and you're good to
go.
* Player prep: 0 prep required. You walk in, quickly glance at the classes and go for it.
* GM prep: 0 prep required. Print the character sheets and read the 2 chapters I mentioned (they are short and simple) | A particularly good one, tho' out of print, not legally in PDF, and getting hard to find, is the old [Judge Dredd](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/663/judge-dredd-the-role-playing-game-games-workshop) by Games Workshop.
Character generation, presuming you have the character sheets, it's just roll 1d10 (S 1-3=2, 4-8=3, 9-0=4), 7 sets of 2d10+20 (I, CS, DS, TS, MS, SS, PS). If 40 on a particular stat, pick one special ability. Add a name. Boom, done.
In the Judge Dredd Companion, there's the "59D Table" which is an instant investigation starter... You just start a routine house to house search and go from there. It gives you random perps, no problem.
Heck, just pick up the newspaper, find the police blotter, and pick any two at random, and turn your judges loose on them...
Don't try this with either of the Mongoose versions, tho'... both take FAR more effort for characters which are so damned disposable (despite being tougher than most of the perps). |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | I'd recommend [Durance](http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/store/#97).
It's billed as a "fast-paced, low-prep, highly collaborative game in the tradition of Fiasco. It is designed to play fast and be easy to learn with a detailed, engaging science fiction setting."
That doesn't even begin to cover it. To go over your points - you make up the game during the game, along with the setting. You definitely role-play, but it's situational, really designed towards ending the game. There are definite end of game goals/objectives that are reached, and they can be reached brutally fast. But where it really shines is the concept.
Durance takes place on a prison penal colony. And in that environment, a sort of Lord of the Flies vibe takes place, and the players are deep into it. There are two ladders of power- one on the side of the Convicts, and one on the side of the Authorities. Each player gets one notable on each side, but they have to be at a different rung on the ladder. Each of these notables is defined by a Name, and an Oath (and a Number if you're a convict). That's it. Everything else is narrative as far as characters. The interesting thing is that normally you don't choose your character when you're choosing an Oath- another player chooses it based on how you've described the character in a round-robin type fashion.
These Oaths drive the game- each scene is a narrative opportunity where the character is put in a position that tests the Oath. This brings us to the other good thing about this- though the Host (GM) drives the game at the beginning, he also plays. As you play different scenes, the position of Guide- the player that frames the scene, but his characters are not in the scene. This framing takes the form of a question that challenges and Oath- if the Oath is an allegiance, put the two characters of the allegiance in a position where to betray the other character would be in the character's best interest. Then the scene is played out- for the most part narratively.
Though there is a dice mechanic, it is very lightweight, so as not to drag things out. When crafting the session (background and world), there is a triangle of drives- on one side, you have servility, on another savagery. The last drive is one that is chosen during the session creation by a round robin of elimination of drives from a list, with the last drive being the one chosen. 1d6 is rolled for each of the the drives, and then compared to the next in clockwise order. If the die for a drive is higher than the next die, that drive is an option to use to resolve the scene. Using that drive you narrate the result of the conflict. If dice tie, then a twist is added to the resolution. If all three dice tie, then an epic event ends the scene. It's that simple.
As Oaths are broken, notables change places on the ladder, drives change, and the notable that broke their Oath is no longer a notable- fading into the background. All of this leads towards the end of the game, which is triggered when a combined number of notables break their oaths, die, and/or are out of the game by other means is greater than the number of players in the game. At that point, you wrap up the game by going around the table and narrating the final wrap up based on the big event that is triggered at end game.
It's a blast to play- it has many advantages of a board game (lack of setup, round robin type play, finite play time), but with the narrative nature of an rpg built in. I'd highly recommend it.
For an example of play, check out the Walking Eye's podcast- [session 1](http://www.thewalkingeye.com/?p=1720) and [session 2](http://www.thewalkingeye.com/?p=1724). Though they take two sessions, it could have easily been wrapped up in one, and I have done so several times. | [Dragon age](http://greenronin.com/dragon_age/) is a great rules simple system for a dark gritty fantasy adventure IMO. There is prewritten adventures included in the box set. If you go as far as to get the GM Screen (which really helps cut down on the prep time for the gm, it's got all the rules on it) it's got another adventure written for it included. Lastly there are pre gen characters that can be downloaded here: [pgc](http://grfiles.game-host.org/dragon_age_rpg/DragonAge_SampleCharacters1.pdf) |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | Adam Dray's list is excellent, almost most (all) require the GM to have read the game in advance. None should require knowing the rules "in and out". I will note that many of them require the GM to be a bit pushy if you're going to squeeze in a whole game in 5 hours if your players tend to mosey through their games. For example, Shock is technically GM-less, but someone acting as a facilitator to encourage people to take bold actions and aggressively frame scenes can help.
To Dray's list, I will add:
**[Awesome Adventures](http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/awesome-adventures/5324537 "Awesome Adventures")** - Action and adventure with a story focus. *Spirit of the Century*, aggressively streamlined and made generic. To do as a spur-of-the-moment one shot, the GM will either need to have a solid session idea up front, or be good at improvising.
**[Penny for My Thoughts](http://www.orphicinstitute.com/?page_id=65)** - A group of amnesiac's try to help each other remember in an experimental treatment involving a bit of mind-reading. Designed to be learned by reading as you play! Errs a bit toward a storytelling game than an RPG, as player agency is more limited.
**[The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen](http://www.magnumopuspress.com/?page_id=8)** - Implausible adventures in the 1800s. Helps to have seen the Terry Gilliam movie. The rules are simple enough that I taught them from memory after a single read through. Works well as a party game for gamers. Down side: Very much a competitive story telling game, but nominally an RPG as you are telling a story about "you" as a character and other people inject complications you must narrate out of. | Check out the Fast Character Creation rules on page 28 of *Spirit of the Century*. They will literally get you going in about 2 minutes. |
3,849 | What games are out there that could be played in a single night, with no prep?
I have [Spirit of the Century](http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/43811/spirit-of-the-century), but it really takes too long to make characters. So, in my opinion, it's great if you've got characters ready in advance but that wasn't the case for me.
I also have [Og](http://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/373/og) and [Dirty Secrets](http://rpggeek.com/rpg/649/dirty-secrets) either of which would have worked, especially if I'd had my regular 4-player game instead of a 2-player.
But what else is there? To qualify a game must:
* Be recognizable as a tabletop RPG
* Be playable in a single evening's sesson - say 5 hours
* Require no prep from the GM
* Require no prep from the players
By "no prep" I mean the following:
* For GMs: All they'll need to do is have the rulebook and character sheets (or other resources) available. It may be beneficial for the GM to have read the rules prior to play, but I consider knowing a rulebook in-and-out to be prep.
* For players: No. Prep. Period. If you walk into your GM's house all ready to play *X* and find out that for some reason you're going to play *Y*, you can't be punished for having not done your homework. | 2010/10/25 | [
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3849",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com",
"https://rpg.stackexchange.com/users/696/"
] | A few suggestions, all of wich are free:
[Lady Blackbird](http://www.onesevendesign.com/ladyblackbird/), sort of a cross between steampunk and Firefly, a game and scenario in one with pregenerated characters (and the possibility of making your own)
[Archipelago II](http://norwegianstyle.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/archipelago-ii/) - a rules-light game inspired by the Earthsea chronicles.
[Risus](http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/risus.htm) - bills itself as the "anything rpg".
These three are all easy to learn and easy to play, and can be played for one session, or more if you want to. Lady Blackbird offers the most structure in term of pre-determined content (characters, locations etc.) while Risus offers the least (ie. none - you have to build stuff yourself, but that is exceedingly easy). All three are excellent and well worth checking out. | It's a long shot, because the game's out of print -- but if you can land a copy of West End Games' 1986 marvel of Ready-To-Play RPG goodness, *Ghostbusters: A Frightfully Cheerful RolePlaying Game*, you can't go wrong. It is meant to be opened up and played in a matter of minutes. |
24,061 | I recently read about how even the non-RTC-equipped Amiga computers has some sort of "clever trick" in them which caused the timestamps for saved files and whatnot to still be "internally consistent".
What exactly does this mean?
My only guess is that the Amiga would regularly, or perhaps every time it performed a file operation, also save the current timestamp to some sort of minimal persistent memory chip, just big enough to hold this minimal data, and then would fetch and auto-set the clock to this timestamp whenever the Amiga was powered on the next time. That way, at least timestamps would not "go backwards in time", even though they still would not be accurate since the Amiga would have no idea how long the computer had been powered off.
Is this what they meant? Or did they assume that the average user would power on their Amiga once a day after roughly 16 hours, so they added 16 hours to the last timestamp when setting the clock on boot?
Or did this mechanism work in some completely different manner? What does "internally consistent" mean anyway? And what's so clever about simply storing the "last known time"? I think I must have misunderstood this. | 2022/03/09 | [
"https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/24061",
"https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com",
"https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/users/24213/"
] | If there is no RTC in the system, the date/time defaults to the date/time of file that was last saved on the boot disk. | The general solution, which was used in a specific way by Amigas, is to use a timestamp on the system disk to record either the shutdown time (simpler, but not as reliable) or the last modification time of anything on the disk (more complicated, but more reliable). If done correctly, this allows the OS to ensure that disk timestamps are properly sequential relative to each other (which is *usually* what most software that cares about timestamps cares about), but not that they are ‘correct’ from a user perspective.
On historical Amiga systems, this was done by saving a last modified time in the filesystem metadata of the boot disk. Whenever a file was updated, this timestamp got updated as well, and when the system started up the system clock would be initialized to that time (if there was no RTC).
A similar approach is actually used on some more modern systems. For example, the official OSes for the Raspberry Pi all initialize the system time based on a file timestamp on the root volume on startup so that they have consistent timestamps before NTP synchronization kicks in. Some other Linux distributions (for example, anything that uses OpenRC as it’s init system, such as Gentoo or Alpine Linux) even support this out of the box generically, without having to be purpose built for the hardware. |
24,061 | I recently read about how even the non-RTC-equipped Amiga computers has some sort of "clever trick" in them which caused the timestamps for saved files and whatnot to still be "internally consistent".
What exactly does this mean?
My only guess is that the Amiga would regularly, or perhaps every time it performed a file operation, also save the current timestamp to some sort of minimal persistent memory chip, just big enough to hold this minimal data, and then would fetch and auto-set the clock to this timestamp whenever the Amiga was powered on the next time. That way, at least timestamps would not "go backwards in time", even though they still would not be accurate since the Amiga would have no idea how long the computer had been powered off.
Is this what they meant? Or did they assume that the average user would power on their Amiga once a day after roughly 16 hours, so they added 16 hours to the last timestamp when setting the clock on boot?
Or did this mechanism work in some completely different manner? What does "internally consistent" mean anyway? And what's so clever about simply storing the "last known time"? I think I must have misunderstood this. | 2022/03/09 | [
"https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/24061",
"https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com",
"https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/users/24213/"
] | If there is no RTC in the system, the date/time defaults to the date/time of file that was last saved on the boot disk. | @Justme's answer is correct, but there is more to the Amiga's implementation of this and that's necessary to work when floppy disks are the main media.
In the early years of the Amiga (1985-88), hard disks were very expensive and quite rare. Almost all Amiga users relied on floppy disks at the time. As with other floppy-based home computers of the time, two drives was a common setup (Amiga supported up to four), and you'd normally use some combination of boot disk, application program disk, and data disk if you were doing "real work" on the Amiga (as opposed to just booting a game floppy). Because of this, disk swapping was very routine during a session. If you launched multiple programs, you may alternately insert many disks over the course of the session. So, simply setting the clock at boot time, from whichever floppy disk that happened to be, is insufficient.
So, the actual implementation of the clock setting functionality was hooked into the floppy disk validation routine. This routine ran for every new floppy inserted into any of the drives during the session. The filesystem was checked for errors, and the last modified timestamp was noted. Occasionally, the validation would fail, and you'd get a popup telling you to run "DiskDoctor".
If the newly inserted floppy had a later timestamp than the current system time, then the system time would be updated, **unless** the system time had been set explicitly by the user or by RTC. Therefore, you were always assured that any disk file writes would have timestamps greater than the latest time for **ANY of the floppies you'd inserted** in any drive. |
6,498 | I've compiled and installed DARP branch. Is there any data example to test it?.
I've used some data based on document instructions <http://www.pgrouting.org/docs/1.x/darp.html> but no results return.
* What's the difference between depot\_id and depot\_point\_is?
* In distance query i don't understand fields from\_order and to\_order.
* If i add a request for going from point A to point B, is necesary to add in distances table the cost of going from point B to point A?.
* The field values in distances query, what time units should be?, minutes?, seconds?, miliseconds?.
* Where do darp.c and darp\_solver.c leave log messages?.
I know that maybe darp branch is a RC version, but please could you help me with this?. | 2011/02/24 | [
"https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/6498",
"https://gis.stackexchange.com",
"https://gis.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
] | You know what they say about being on the bleeding edge of technology ;-)
Looking through the branch, it looks like its fairly rough at the moment and doesn't have documentation or other refinements which would make the code telegraphic. The [core C code](https://github.com/dkastl/pgrouting/blob/darp/extra/darp/src/darp.c) does have a couple of things that may be helpful: it currently has all debugging commented out, if you enable the commenting consistently throughout the code and run Postgres [at a DEBUG level](http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/wiki/DevWikiGettingABackTrace) may be of help to identify what the code is doing, but without unit tests or documentation, this will be arduous.
Your (perhaps better) option is to contact the author listed in the header file, and see if he'd be willing to answer your question here -- the pgrouting folks explicitly [list this site](http://www.pgrouting.org/support.html) as the place to go for related issues. | I cannot answer all you questions, as I have no experience with DARP, but for the error log I would check /var/log/postgresql on debian/ubuntu, or whatever location you have set for logging:
<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/runtime-config-logging.html> |
6,498 | I've compiled and installed DARP branch. Is there any data example to test it?.
I've used some data based on document instructions <http://www.pgrouting.org/docs/1.x/darp.html> but no results return.
* What's the difference between depot\_id and depot\_point\_is?
* In distance query i don't understand fields from\_order and to\_order.
* If i add a request for going from point A to point B, is necesary to add in distances table the cost of going from point B to point A?.
* The field values in distances query, what time units should be?, minutes?, seconds?, miliseconds?.
* Where do darp.c and darp\_solver.c leave log messages?.
I know that maybe darp branch is a RC version, but please could you help me with this?. | 2011/02/24 | [
"https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/6498",
"https://gis.stackexchange.com",
"https://gis.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
] | You know what they say about being on the bleeding edge of technology ;-)
Looking through the branch, it looks like its fairly rough at the moment and doesn't have documentation or other refinements which would make the code telegraphic. The [core C code](https://github.com/dkastl/pgrouting/blob/darp/extra/darp/src/darp.c) does have a couple of things that may be helpful: it currently has all debugging commented out, if you enable the commenting consistently throughout the code and run Postgres [at a DEBUG level](http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/wiki/DevWikiGettingABackTrace) may be of help to identify what the code is doing, but without unit tests or documentation, this will be arduous.
Your (perhaps better) option is to contact the author listed in the header file, and see if he'd be willing to answer your question here -- the pgrouting folks explicitly [list this site](http://www.pgrouting.org/support.html) as the place to go for related issues. | As scw said, you best chance will most likely be to contact the author directly. If you use [pgrouting mailing list](http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/pgrouting-users) other users will probably be able to profit from your exchange. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | If we assume, as mentioned in other answers that things like the industrial revolution would still have progressed in more of less the same way, although perhaps a bit slower, we might make it to the start of the 20th century in more or less the same way. However once the first World War kicks off, we run into some serious trouble.
As much as we hate to admit it in Europe, the American support was a major influence in beating back the Germans (and then once more). The resources supplied by an entire continent beyond the reach of the Germans played major part in lasting out the war of attrition.
Nevertheless, the allied forces might have been able to bring Germany to its knees with a longer war. But what if Nazism (or something similar) would still have arisen? I'm no historian, but I don't think WW2 could have been won without a steady supply chain from the America's. England would have been starved in no time, which would possibly have stopped Russia from switching sides.
I'm sure the Nazis would have ruined things for themselves eventually, since they weren't actually that good at running a country, but from that point on the landscape would definitely have looked very different. From that point on there's any number of "what if the Nazis had won" scenarios to choose from. | If Columbus ships disappear without a trace, few years (latest few decades) someone else would be more successful. History **would** be **slightly** different if that next explorer was from other country, like Portugal or Netherland. But not that much different: world powers of the time would try to colonize new continent in exactly same way. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | It's an implausible scenario, but, given the premise...
I'm going to say that neither technological movement or government evolution would have been significantly affected by the Americas not being discovered and colonized, but there would have been effects.
Technology: There really wasn't anything about the Americas that spurred technological progress, except possibly military technologies. Most of it was building upon established European technology. (In fact, some of the progress was due to European nations deliberately obstructing exportation of technology, so the colonists had to come up with a way on their own.)
Government: Most of the philosophy was iterative from European philosophy. I have seen it argued that the Iriquois confederation MIGHT have influenced the constitution of the US, but, even if so, it was slight. The American independence success did encourage other democratic movements in Europe, like the French revolution, but the ideas were already there, and percolating, and England was already on its slow, steady progression towards the very democratic government with vestiges of monarchy that we see today. On this front, though, there are two important things to consider:
* American colonization was an important 'safety valve' for European nations. A lot of people who would have otherwise caused trouble (Puritans in England, Hugonauts in France, later on Socialists in Germany) got punted across the pond. The history of Europe would have likely been a lot more bloody, and some of that colonization pressure could have been directed at Africa or Asia, resulting in those areas having more European culture. (Think of how much more 'European' South Africa is than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.)
* Spain would have developed much differently. In addition to the aforementioned safety valve, a lot of resources (especially precious metals like gold and silver) were siphoned from Spanish Americas directly to Spain. This gave Spain enormous riches, but, for those economics geeks, also caused massive inflationary issues--many countries were on gold standards, and the Spanish import of gold on a massive scale messed with the price of gold. | There is one event that might not have happened if America wasn't "discovered" or at least colonization didn't happen : Industrial revolution
Thanks to European colonialism, many European countries, especially Great Britain became extremely rich thanks to trade with and exploitation of their overseas colonies in both Americas, India and Asia. It all started with America, so if America wasn't colonized, it would mean Europe would be much poorer compared to Asian and Indian countries (especially China). This drastically shaped the world and made it massively Europe-centric (until at least WW1 and 2).
And it was possible for Industrial revolution to happen in Britain, because it was the richest country in the world at the time and they had lots of capital to invest into new technology, they could cheaply import raw materials from overseas colonies (cotton from India) and they could export finished goods back. This kickstarted industrial revolution. Without Europe and Britain not having those possibilities, the technology would probably not progress much from how it was pre-colonization and China would be world power instead of US or Europe. Or at least, Industrial revolution would happen much later and much slower. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | It's an implausible scenario, but, given the premise...
I'm going to say that neither technological movement or government evolution would have been significantly affected by the Americas not being discovered and colonized, but there would have been effects.
Technology: There really wasn't anything about the Americas that spurred technological progress, except possibly military technologies. Most of it was building upon established European technology. (In fact, some of the progress was due to European nations deliberately obstructing exportation of technology, so the colonists had to come up with a way on their own.)
Government: Most of the philosophy was iterative from European philosophy. I have seen it argued that the Iriquois confederation MIGHT have influenced the constitution of the US, but, even if so, it was slight. The American independence success did encourage other democratic movements in Europe, like the French revolution, but the ideas were already there, and percolating, and England was already on its slow, steady progression towards the very democratic government with vestiges of monarchy that we see today. On this front, though, there are two important things to consider:
* American colonization was an important 'safety valve' for European nations. A lot of people who would have otherwise caused trouble (Puritans in England, Hugonauts in France, later on Socialists in Germany) got punted across the pond. The history of Europe would have likely been a lot more bloody, and some of that colonization pressure could have been directed at Africa or Asia, resulting in those areas having more European culture. (Think of how much more 'European' South Africa is than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.)
* Spain would have developed much differently. In addition to the aforementioned safety valve, a lot of resources (especially precious metals like gold and silver) were siphoned from Spanish Americas directly to Spain. This gave Spain enormous riches, but, for those economics geeks, also caused massive inflationary issues--many countries were on gold standards, and the Spanish import of gold on a massive scale messed with the price of gold. | If we assume, as mentioned in other answers that things like the industrial revolution would still have progressed in more of less the same way, although perhaps a bit slower, we might make it to the start of the 20th century in more or less the same way. However once the first World War kicks off, we run into some serious trouble.
As much as we hate to admit it in Europe, the American support was a major influence in beating back the Germans (and then once more). The resources supplied by an entire continent beyond the reach of the Germans played major part in lasting out the war of attrition.
Nevertheless, the allied forces might have been able to bring Germany to its knees with a longer war. But what if Nazism (or something similar) would still have arisen? I'm no historian, but I don't think WW2 could have been won without a steady supply chain from the America's. England would have been starved in no time, which would possibly have stopped Russia from switching sides.
I'm sure the Nazis would have ruined things for themselves eventually, since they weren't actually that good at running a country, but from that point on the landscape would definitely have looked very different. From that point on there's any number of "what if the Nazis had won" scenarios to choose from. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | It's an implausible scenario, but, given the premise...
I'm going to say that neither technological movement or government evolution would have been significantly affected by the Americas not being discovered and colonized, but there would have been effects.
Technology: There really wasn't anything about the Americas that spurred technological progress, except possibly military technologies. Most of it was building upon established European technology. (In fact, some of the progress was due to European nations deliberately obstructing exportation of technology, so the colonists had to come up with a way on their own.)
Government: Most of the philosophy was iterative from European philosophy. I have seen it argued that the Iriquois confederation MIGHT have influenced the constitution of the US, but, even if so, it was slight. The American independence success did encourage other democratic movements in Europe, like the French revolution, but the ideas were already there, and percolating, and England was already on its slow, steady progression towards the very democratic government with vestiges of monarchy that we see today. On this front, though, there are two important things to consider:
* American colonization was an important 'safety valve' for European nations. A lot of people who would have otherwise caused trouble (Puritans in England, Hugonauts in France, later on Socialists in Germany) got punted across the pond. The history of Europe would have likely been a lot more bloody, and some of that colonization pressure could have been directed at Africa or Asia, resulting in those areas having more European culture. (Think of how much more 'European' South Africa is than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.)
* Spain would have developed much differently. In addition to the aforementioned safety valve, a lot of resources (especially precious metals like gold and silver) were siphoned from Spanish Americas directly to Spain. This gave Spain enormous riches, but, for those economics geeks, also caused massive inflationary issues--many countries were on gold standards, and the Spanish import of gold on a massive scale messed with the price of gold. | If Columbus ships disappear without a trace, few years (latest few decades) someone else would be more successful. History **would** be **slightly** different if that next explorer was from other country, like Portugal or Netherland. But not that much different: world powers of the time would try to colonize new continent in exactly same way. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | There is one event that might not have happened if America wasn't "discovered" or at least colonization didn't happen : Industrial revolution
Thanks to European colonialism, many European countries, especially Great Britain became extremely rich thanks to trade with and exploitation of their overseas colonies in both Americas, India and Asia. It all started with America, so if America wasn't colonized, it would mean Europe would be much poorer compared to Asian and Indian countries (especially China). This drastically shaped the world and made it massively Europe-centric (until at least WW1 and 2).
And it was possible for Industrial revolution to happen in Britain, because it was the richest country in the world at the time and they had lots of capital to invest into new technology, they could cheaply import raw materials from overseas colonies (cotton from India) and they could export finished goods back. This kickstarted industrial revolution. Without Europe and Britain not having those possibilities, the technology would probably not progress much from how it was pre-colonization and China would be world power instead of US or Europe. Or at least, Industrial revolution would happen much later and much slower. | If Columbus ships disappear without a trace, few years (latest few decades) someone else would be more successful. History **would** be **slightly** different if that next explorer was from other country, like Portugal or Netherland. But not that much different: world powers of the time would try to colonize new continent in exactly same way. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | What is "modern society"?
America rules the world these days, basicly since the Sowjetunion colapsed as antagonist but you there are already signs of decay. EU und China are getting more powerful and even Russia is still a factor.
but thats not the point.
Let's do not focus to much on the situation of this exact time we are living in, but how it has come to what is now.
The colonial era has gained a giant boost due the exploration of America but this event hasn't started it. The technological improvments have. Ships where able to load more and more cargo, travel faster (further) and could be build cheaper and cheaper.
Also there, finally, was a proof that earth is round. (It's a common myth that medival europeans thought it was flat, they did not. But they did not know for sure if it's round or not.)
The first intention of seaexploration was India. European countries got access to indian spices and also heard of an incredibly rich country named China. Trading with this nations was extreme expensive and there had been the powerful (enemy) arabs in between the europeans and their tradingpartner.
So seaexploration started just to lower the costs on the long run (so you might imgine how expensive these spices had been).
While exploration they found many locations they did not know about and everywhere they where technically overpowered and able to rule the people. (Africa, America, later India and China...) So this power, which gave them access to rich resources, is the reason they had that high motivation to explore further.
From this point it's very unlikely that they did not explore America. But even if, we must ask why europe lost this power.
Answer is: Europe was not an Empire but several rivaling countries.
The rivalry has also lead to many wars, which often where fought in collonies.
This is a point where the Americans had implified a plot twist.
As the settlers in America wanted to get autonom and no longer be ruled by the empire, the war begun which the British Empire lost(!) Never bevore something like this had happened. (The struggle was real ;-) )
But in the end the "rule the world" power of Europe where lost in the World War I. The leading countries (Great Britain, Netherlands, Spain and France) which forced the countries to take the focus off their colonies on europe itself.
After World War Two there where practically no more collonys (only a few). Europe still where "some kind of powerful" compared to Africa, South America and South Asia, but America and Russia have become the real forces.
As we assume that America doesn't exist and thus the Wars had endet different, we must assume that one partie of the Wars had completely rules Europe.
In WW1 there surely had no one been the "real winner". The attrition warfares bleedet the nations dry and at any point they surely had done any kind of peaceagreement.
WW2 had surely not starden with such an end of WW1, but if, Nazi-germany had surely ruled europe. The technical advantages and motivation was way to high. Sowjetunion had not been able to hold the first time of the war that good without american material (Yes, the Sowjets got a lot of guns, tanks, artillerie,... from the US in the early years of war). Only the USA, or the american material in other nations armies, had been a *real* problem for Hitler due they've been master of aggressive tactics. Same where the german troops. Good engagers, bad defenders.
Everything after WWII is younger history wich I don't want to speculate about but I think with an unified Europe under the Hakenkreuz, not much good had been in our Wold now. | Contrary to the question, quite a lot of technological development went on in Europe too, although undoubtedly we would be missing a few things. The major changes I can think of:
* **Space exploration**
Much of space exploration was pioneered by NASA, so we'd be missing a fair chunk of space knowledge. I also doubt we'd have the ISS - the U.S. contributes around half of its annual maintenance cost.
* **Computer parts manufacture**
The majority of the computer's **development** went on in Britain (Google "Bletchley Park computing" or "Alan Turing" for some more detail). However, we'd be lost today if Silicon Valley suddenly got destroyed. If it never existed in the first place, all the parts manufacturing would have to go on elsewhere.
I think we'd still have the Internet (as we think of it today), though maybe in a lesser state of development. The Internet itself was developed in the US, but our current definition of 'Internet' (i.e. the World Wide Web) was invented by a Brit, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
* **Medicine**
Medical treatments would be less advanced. Universities in the US have done lots of work towards new technologies for medical practitioners, so medical care would be less automated. However, we'd still have medicines (penicillin was invented in Scotland and other antibiotics developed in Europe).
**Government**
I think we'd still have similar governments. Due to human nature, we'll always look for ways to have our own will, and a ruling monarchy or upper class denies this completely. The revolts and revolutions would still have happened, but again, probably in a different timescale without the big spark of the American success. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | There is one event that might not have happened if America wasn't "discovered" or at least colonization didn't happen : Industrial revolution
Thanks to European colonialism, many European countries, especially Great Britain became extremely rich thanks to trade with and exploitation of their overseas colonies in both Americas, India and Asia. It all started with America, so if America wasn't colonized, it would mean Europe would be much poorer compared to Asian and Indian countries (especially China). This drastically shaped the world and made it massively Europe-centric (until at least WW1 and 2).
And it was possible for Industrial revolution to happen in Britain, because it was the richest country in the world at the time and they had lots of capital to invest into new technology, they could cheaply import raw materials from overseas colonies (cotton from India) and they could export finished goods back. This kickstarted industrial revolution. Without Europe and Britain not having those possibilities, the technology would probably not progress much from how it was pre-colonization and China would be world power instead of US or Europe. Or at least, Industrial revolution would happen much later and much slower. | If we assume, as mentioned in other answers that things like the industrial revolution would still have progressed in more of less the same way, although perhaps a bit slower, we might make it to the start of the 20th century in more or less the same way. However once the first World War kicks off, we run into some serious trouble.
As much as we hate to admit it in Europe, the American support was a major influence in beating back the Germans (and then once more). The resources supplied by an entire continent beyond the reach of the Germans played major part in lasting out the war of attrition.
Nevertheless, the allied forces might have been able to bring Germany to its knees with a longer war. But what if Nazism (or something similar) would still have arisen? I'm no historian, but I don't think WW2 could have been won without a steady supply chain from the America's. England would have been starved in no time, which would possibly have stopped Russia from switching sides.
I'm sure the Nazis would have ruined things for themselves eventually, since they weren't actually that good at running a country, but from that point on the landscape would definitely have looked very different. From that point on there's any number of "what if the Nazis had won" scenarios to choose from. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | What is "modern society"?
America rules the world these days, basicly since the Sowjetunion colapsed as antagonist but you there are already signs of decay. EU und China are getting more powerful and even Russia is still a factor.
but thats not the point.
Let's do not focus to much on the situation of this exact time we are living in, but how it has come to what is now.
The colonial era has gained a giant boost due the exploration of America but this event hasn't started it. The technological improvments have. Ships where able to load more and more cargo, travel faster (further) and could be build cheaper and cheaper.
Also there, finally, was a proof that earth is round. (It's a common myth that medival europeans thought it was flat, they did not. But they did not know for sure if it's round or not.)
The first intention of seaexploration was India. European countries got access to indian spices and also heard of an incredibly rich country named China. Trading with this nations was extreme expensive and there had been the powerful (enemy) arabs in between the europeans and their tradingpartner.
So seaexploration started just to lower the costs on the long run (so you might imgine how expensive these spices had been).
While exploration they found many locations they did not know about and everywhere they where technically overpowered and able to rule the people. (Africa, America, later India and China...) So this power, which gave them access to rich resources, is the reason they had that high motivation to explore further.
From this point it's very unlikely that they did not explore America. But even if, we must ask why europe lost this power.
Answer is: Europe was not an Empire but several rivaling countries.
The rivalry has also lead to many wars, which often where fought in collonies.
This is a point where the Americans had implified a plot twist.
As the settlers in America wanted to get autonom and no longer be ruled by the empire, the war begun which the British Empire lost(!) Never bevore something like this had happened. (The struggle was real ;-) )
But in the end the "rule the world" power of Europe where lost in the World War I. The leading countries (Great Britain, Netherlands, Spain and France) which forced the countries to take the focus off their colonies on europe itself.
After World War Two there where practically no more collonys (only a few). Europe still where "some kind of powerful" compared to Africa, South America and South Asia, but America and Russia have become the real forces.
As we assume that America doesn't exist and thus the Wars had endet different, we must assume that one partie of the Wars had completely rules Europe.
In WW1 there surely had no one been the "real winner". The attrition warfares bleedet the nations dry and at any point they surely had done any kind of peaceagreement.
WW2 had surely not starden with such an end of WW1, but if, Nazi-germany had surely ruled europe. The technical advantages and motivation was way to high. Sowjetunion had not been able to hold the first time of the war that good without american material (Yes, the Sowjets got a lot of guns, tanks, artillerie,... from the US in the early years of war). Only the USA, or the american material in other nations armies, had been a *real* problem for Hitler due they've been master of aggressive tactics. Same where the german troops. Good engagers, bad defenders.
Everything after WWII is younger history wich I don't want to speculate about but I think with an unified Europe under the Hakenkreuz, not much good had been in our Wold now. | If Columbus ships disappear without a trace, few years (latest few decades) someone else would be more successful. History **would** be **slightly** different if that next explorer was from other country, like Portugal or Netherland. But not that much different: world powers of the time would try to colonize new continent in exactly same way. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | If we assume, as mentioned in other answers that things like the industrial revolution would still have progressed in more of less the same way, although perhaps a bit slower, we might make it to the start of the 20th century in more or less the same way. However once the first World War kicks off, we run into some serious trouble.
As much as we hate to admit it in Europe, the American support was a major influence in beating back the Germans (and then once more). The resources supplied by an entire continent beyond the reach of the Germans played major part in lasting out the war of attrition.
Nevertheless, the allied forces might have been able to bring Germany to its knees with a longer war. But what if Nazism (or something similar) would still have arisen? I'm no historian, but I don't think WW2 could have been won without a steady supply chain from the America's. England would have been starved in no time, which would possibly have stopped Russia from switching sides.
I'm sure the Nazis would have ruined things for themselves eventually, since they weren't actually that good at running a country, but from that point on the landscape would definitely have looked very different. From that point on there's any number of "what if the Nazis had won" scenarios to choose from. | Contrary to the question, quite a lot of technological development went on in Europe too, although undoubtedly we would be missing a few things. The major changes I can think of:
* **Space exploration**
Much of space exploration was pioneered by NASA, so we'd be missing a fair chunk of space knowledge. I also doubt we'd have the ISS - the U.S. contributes around half of its annual maintenance cost.
* **Computer parts manufacture**
The majority of the computer's **development** went on in Britain (Google "Bletchley Park computing" or "Alan Turing" for some more detail). However, we'd be lost today if Silicon Valley suddenly got destroyed. If it never existed in the first place, all the parts manufacturing would have to go on elsewhere.
I think we'd still have the Internet (as we think of it today), though maybe in a lesser state of development. The Internet itself was developed in the US, but our current definition of 'Internet' (i.e. the World Wide Web) was invented by a Brit, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
* **Medicine**
Medical treatments would be less advanced. Universities in the US have done lots of work towards new technologies for medical practitioners, so medical care would be less automated. However, we'd still have medicines (penicillin was invented in Scotland and other antibiotics developed in Europe).
**Government**
I think we'd still have similar governments. Due to human nature, we'll always look for ways to have our own will, and a ruling monarchy or upper class denies this completely. The revolts and revolutions would still have happened, but again, probably in a different timescale without the big spark of the American success. |
6,683 | Supposing explorers from Europe either never sailed to the Americas, or were all [killed off and never seen again](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6625/killing-all-the-explorers), could the world resemble the way it is today?
A couple things that may have been affected:
* Technology - while some concepts started in Europe and China, the United States had a key role in developing modern technology. Computers especially were developed extensively in the US.
* Government - democracy in Europe did not really begin to take off until countries in the west began revolting in order to form democratic nations. It is possible that without these revolutions, monarchy would still be the most common form of government in Europe today.
These are just two examples, but I would be interested in finding out about more. Is it possible for these changes to have occurred without expanding to the western hemisphere? | 2014/12/18 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6683",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2661/"
] | It's an implausible scenario, but, given the premise...
I'm going to say that neither technological movement or government evolution would have been significantly affected by the Americas not being discovered and colonized, but there would have been effects.
Technology: There really wasn't anything about the Americas that spurred technological progress, except possibly military technologies. Most of it was building upon established European technology. (In fact, some of the progress was due to European nations deliberately obstructing exportation of technology, so the colonists had to come up with a way on their own.)
Government: Most of the philosophy was iterative from European philosophy. I have seen it argued that the Iriquois confederation MIGHT have influenced the constitution of the US, but, even if so, it was slight. The American independence success did encourage other democratic movements in Europe, like the French revolution, but the ideas were already there, and percolating, and England was already on its slow, steady progression towards the very democratic government with vestiges of monarchy that we see today. On this front, though, there are two important things to consider:
* American colonization was an important 'safety valve' for European nations. A lot of people who would have otherwise caused trouble (Puritans in England, Hugonauts in France, later on Socialists in Germany) got punted across the pond. The history of Europe would have likely been a lot more bloody, and some of that colonization pressure could have been directed at Africa or Asia, resulting in those areas having more European culture. (Think of how much more 'European' South Africa is than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.)
* Spain would have developed much differently. In addition to the aforementioned safety valve, a lot of resources (especially precious metals like gold and silver) were siphoned from Spanish Americas directly to Spain. This gave Spain enormous riches, but, for those economics geeks, also caused massive inflationary issues--many countries were on gold standards, and the Spanish import of gold on a massive scale messed with the price of gold. | Contrary to the question, quite a lot of technological development went on in Europe too, although undoubtedly we would be missing a few things. The major changes I can think of:
* **Space exploration**
Much of space exploration was pioneered by NASA, so we'd be missing a fair chunk of space knowledge. I also doubt we'd have the ISS - the U.S. contributes around half of its annual maintenance cost.
* **Computer parts manufacture**
The majority of the computer's **development** went on in Britain (Google "Bletchley Park computing" or "Alan Turing" for some more detail). However, we'd be lost today if Silicon Valley suddenly got destroyed. If it never existed in the first place, all the parts manufacturing would have to go on elsewhere.
I think we'd still have the Internet (as we think of it today), though maybe in a lesser state of development. The Internet itself was developed in the US, but our current definition of 'Internet' (i.e. the World Wide Web) was invented by a Brit, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
* **Medicine**
Medical treatments would be less advanced. Universities in the US have done lots of work towards new technologies for medical practitioners, so medical care would be less automated. However, we'd still have medicines (penicillin was invented in Scotland and other antibiotics developed in Europe).
**Government**
I think we'd still have similar governments. Due to human nature, we'll always look for ways to have our own will, and a ruling monarchy or upper class denies this completely. The revolts and revolutions would still have happened, but again, probably in a different timescale without the big spark of the American success. |
3,931,757 | In the last few days I was trying to write small program to monitor the audio line-in using win-api (winmm.dll).
I can pinvoke api functions such as waveInOpen but I can't figure out how to use these functions to achieve my target.
the question is - can someone can briefly tell me how can I get the data from the audio line in using these API (C#). | 2010/10/14 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/3931757",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/475562/"
] | Well I finally found what I was looking for here.
<http://www.codeguru.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-264694.html>
Although this is a C code example, it is depicting the simple outline of using the windows audio api to read data from the sound-card line-in/microphone device.
I am now working on recodeing this C code to C#. if successful I will post it here. | You don't have to!!!
Look this:
[Measure speaker volume by recording playing sound with microphone](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3955253/measure-speaker-volume-by-recording-playing-sound-with-microphone/3979900#3979900)
Join forces with the guy :) |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | There's a post over on meta.se that I like to link in to discussions like this: it's worth a read in full, and I'll excerpt it here in part:
[What you do here isn't *just* about solving one person's problem.](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/244534/311001)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> See, once you realize that it's not just about the one asker, or the four voters, but rather the fifteen thousand searchers with the same problem... Well, suddenly, a whole ton of things that seem prickly and self-important, like editing out "Thanks in advance!" aren't about being "a bunch of power-happy pedants," they're about *helping all the people who will ever have that problem to find the best answers.* (Emphasis in the original.)
>
>
>
**Yes,** we're *partially* about helping the original querent. And we're *more* about helping the long tail of readers who will ever see a post. Which leads us to a tricky balancing act: each one of us--editors, voters, answerers--comes to an individual, personal understanding of where they draw the line between those two priorities that sometimes exist in tension.
Some people ( o/ ) think that a quick close-edit-reopen cycle are good for the site and good for the querent. Others think that the "sting" of seeing their question "on hold" is too great a harm to visit upon new users. This Network, I believe, has room for both sorts of stackizens.
**Yes, we're about helping people.** And we sometimes have different ideas about how best to do that. Vote your conscience, trust that others are doing the same, and ask questions when something doesn't pass your "smell test." | Or we could close questions because they are not of sufficient quality to stay on the site, help the asker improve the question so it's worthwhile keeping around for the long term, and then answer it with thorough explanations and maintain high quality in answers too.
The result is that we get good questions that end up open, good answers that are worth voting for, and more users staying around to repeat the process.
If it's really about helping people, perhaps a clever quote will help you in turn.
>
> Give a person a fish, and they are fed for a day; teach them to fish and they are fed for life.
>
>
>
And if that doesn't suit some people's preference for unjustified one-liners and the decline of decent content they are, as some have ironically been happy to say, quite free to leave. |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | Maybe it's time we get review audits? These quickly weed out "reviewers" who never ever move the cursor away from the Close button. The rest of reviewers will think twice before closing a question, and (also very important) will favor community-agreed standards for closing over their personal standards. | I think there are different matters here.
>
> Too often, a close mob comes in and just shut things down. One
> member in particular seems to think that two different post are
> duplicates if vowels can be found in both.
>
>
>
This is a likely a matter to be handled by mods if there is a form of abuse.
>
> To make matters worse, questions that do not pertain to IT seem to get closed > quickly, as the attitude seems to be "If I can't answer it, it must not be >clear or answerable".
>
>
>
Two possibilities here :
* Maybe the fact that knowing a bit the field to be able to answer don't make it off-topic isn't clear enough. And this should be address in the guide lines and eventually off-topic reason (with an addendum like : "Note : requiring a bit of knowledge of the field don't make it off-topic").
* Specific behaviour -> mods.
>
> The problem this creates is that close votes draw more close votes. We have hundreds of questions here on meta asking why a question was closed, with a massive chunk of them being reopened without any editing or cleanup.
>
>
>
People which have their close votes cancelled too much should probably bring attention to the mods.
Of course I know what you think : "It's the community that manages, mods are exception handlers" but the problems is that, unless the point about the domain, you're clearly pointing a very specific set of users, and you can try to put all the anonimity you want, The Workplace community know who they're and this will finished in poiting fingers.
Another possibility would be for the community to change the rules and policies apply there, even if it makes them quite more different from others sites, and having mods enforce them, because they're the ones that have the tools for that. (Ex : people that don't try too often to help users to salvage their question will lose their close vote privilege for a period of time). |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | There is a time limit on offering a bounty, there should be a time limit to be exceeded before voting to close.
Too often, a close mob comes in and just shut things down. One member in particular seems to think that two different post are duplicates if vowels can be found in both.
The problem this creates is that close votes draw more close votes. We have hundreds of questions here on meta asking why a question was closed, with a massive chunk of them being reopened without any editing or cleanup.
To make matters worse, questions that do not pertain to IT seem to get closed quickly, as the attitude seems to be "If I can't answer it, it must not be clear or answerable"
We had a few blue collar questions, and one maritime question closed for these reasons. What made the maritime question's so egregious is that it was easily answerable by anyone in the shipping industry, cruise industry, or anyone remotely familiar with maritime law.
Putting a delay on the close votes would enable people with knowledge of industries outside of IT to get in some answers before the close mob rushes in because they're unfamiliar with those industries. | Or we could close questions because they are not of sufficient quality to stay on the site, help the asker improve the question so it's worthwhile keeping around for the long term, and then answer it with thorough explanations and maintain high quality in answers too.
The result is that we get good questions that end up open, good answers that are worth voting for, and more users staying around to repeat the process.
If it's really about helping people, perhaps a clever quote will help you in turn.
>
> Give a person a fish, and they are fed for a day; teach them to fish and they are fed for life.
>
>
>
And if that doesn't suit some people's preference for unjustified one-liners and the decline of decent content they are, as some have ironically been happy to say, quite free to leave. |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | Maybe it's time we get review audits? These quickly weed out "reviewers" who never ever move the cursor away from the Close button. The rest of reviewers will think twice before closing a question, and (also very important) will favor community-agreed standards for closing over their personal standards. | Closure does not (always) mean "this question is bad".
It often simply means "this question needs to be improved".
If you think a question is good, don't just instantly vote to reopen.
Try to understand why someone voted to close.
Try to edit the question to improve it, to address the reasons why it was closed.
Try to turn it into something that others with the same problem will be able to find if they search for it, and that those people will find useful.
Try to avoid focusing exclusively on what the asker asks in answers and instead write answers that will be helpful to others with the same problem, while also covering the details specific to the asker's situation, either as a footnote, a comment or a link to another post.
---
And sometimes closure *does* mean "this question is bad" (not objectively bad, just bad for this site).
Sometimes [trying to help many people](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/244534/were-working-on-a-new-stat-to-help-convey-the-reach-of-your-posts-here) means getting rid of off-topic questions even when the asker has a problem you really want to help with.
This is not to say you can't help them by posting an answer or leaving a comment before getting rid of it.
But the decision to keep it, i.e. reopen it, shouldn't be whether or not the question is answerable, but rather whether the question, in its current state (taking the answers that's been posted into account), falls within the scope of the site, increases the overall quality of the site, and will be useful to others.
---
Sometimes you might not understand why a question is closed, sometimes you might understand but just disagree - that's okay too. We can't all always see eye to eye.
---
Regarding the current state of affairs:
I feel it's roughly turned into a battleground - people who focus primarily on long-term value against people who focus primarily on short-term value. Focusing *too* much on either one or the other is bad, but having each side see the other as the "enemy" means they likely gravitate towards the edges (i.e. closing too many questions, including good ones, and reopening and answering too many questions, including bad ones) as opposed to trying to find some middle ground or understand the perspective of the other side.
That's not really good for anyone. |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | Or we could close questions because they are not of sufficient quality to stay on the site, help the asker improve the question so it's worthwhile keeping around for the long term, and then answer it with thorough explanations and maintain high quality in answers too.
The result is that we get good questions that end up open, good answers that are worth voting for, and more users staying around to repeat the process.
If it's really about helping people, perhaps a clever quote will help you in turn.
>
> Give a person a fish, and they are fed for a day; teach them to fish and they are fed for life.
>
>
>
And if that doesn't suit some people's preference for unjustified one-liners and the decline of decent content they are, as some have ironically been happy to say, quite free to leave. | I think there are different matters here.
>
> Too often, a close mob comes in and just shut things down. One
> member in particular seems to think that two different post are
> duplicates if vowels can be found in both.
>
>
>
This is a likely a matter to be handled by mods if there is a form of abuse.
>
> To make matters worse, questions that do not pertain to IT seem to get closed > quickly, as the attitude seems to be "If I can't answer it, it must not be >clear or answerable".
>
>
>
Two possibilities here :
* Maybe the fact that knowing a bit the field to be able to answer don't make it off-topic isn't clear enough. And this should be address in the guide lines and eventually off-topic reason (with an addendum like : "Note : requiring a bit of knowledge of the field don't make it off-topic").
* Specific behaviour -> mods.
>
> The problem this creates is that close votes draw more close votes. We have hundreds of questions here on meta asking why a question was closed, with a massive chunk of them being reopened without any editing or cleanup.
>
>
>
People which have their close votes cancelled too much should probably bring attention to the mods.
Of course I know what you think : "It's the community that manages, mods are exception handlers" but the problems is that, unless the point about the domain, you're clearly pointing a very specific set of users, and you can try to put all the anonimity you want, The Workplace community know who they're and this will finished in poiting fingers.
Another possibility would be for the community to change the rules and policies apply there, even if it makes them quite more different from others sites, and having mods enforce them, because they're the ones that have the tools for that. (Ex : people that don't try too often to help users to salvage their question will lose their close vote privilege for a period of time). |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | >
> We're at least partially about helping people aren't we?
>
>
>
I'd like to think that was the most important thing. But sometimes I wonder.
>
> I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 15
> minutes or something before a question can be closed.
>
>
>
I think this is a good idea, but 15 minutes is not long enough. 2 hours feels more right to me. Mods can always close a question quickly, if there's some sort of "question emergency".
Unfortunately I don't think this will change things much. As long as we have folks who would rather close questions than actually ask or answer questions, we'll still have too many closed. Kinda sad. | I think there are different matters here.
>
> Too often, a close mob comes in and just shut things down. One
> member in particular seems to think that two different post are
> duplicates if vowels can be found in both.
>
>
>
This is a likely a matter to be handled by mods if there is a form of abuse.
>
> To make matters worse, questions that do not pertain to IT seem to get closed > quickly, as the attitude seems to be "If I can't answer it, it must not be >clear or answerable".
>
>
>
Two possibilities here :
* Maybe the fact that knowing a bit the field to be able to answer don't make it off-topic isn't clear enough. And this should be address in the guide lines and eventually off-topic reason (with an addendum like : "Note : requiring a bit of knowledge of the field don't make it off-topic").
* Specific behaviour -> mods.
>
> The problem this creates is that close votes draw more close votes. We have hundreds of questions here on meta asking why a question was closed, with a massive chunk of them being reopened without any editing or cleanup.
>
>
>
People which have their close votes cancelled too much should probably bring attention to the mods.
Of course I know what you think : "It's the community that manages, mods are exception handlers" but the problems is that, unless the point about the domain, you're clearly pointing a very specific set of users, and you can try to put all the anonimity you want, The Workplace community know who they're and this will finished in poiting fingers.
Another possibility would be for the community to change the rules and policies apply there, even if it makes them quite more different from others sites, and having mods enforce them, because they're the ones that have the tools for that. (Ex : people that don't try too often to help users to salvage their question will lose their close vote privilege for a period of time). |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | There's a post over on meta.se that I like to link in to discussions like this: it's worth a read in full, and I'll excerpt it here in part:
[What you do here isn't *just* about solving one person's problem.](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/244534/311001)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> See, once you realize that it's not just about the one asker, or the four voters, but rather the fifteen thousand searchers with the same problem... Well, suddenly, a whole ton of things that seem prickly and self-important, like editing out "Thanks in advance!" aren't about being "a bunch of power-happy pedants," they're about *helping all the people who will ever have that problem to find the best answers.* (Emphasis in the original.)
>
>
>
**Yes,** we're *partially* about helping the original querent. And we're *more* about helping the long tail of readers who will ever see a post. Which leads us to a tricky balancing act: each one of us--editors, voters, answerers--comes to an individual, personal understanding of where they draw the line between those two priorities that sometimes exist in tension.
Some people ( o/ ) think that a quick close-edit-reopen cycle are good for the site and good for the querent. Others think that the "sting" of seeing their question "on hold" is too great a harm to visit upon new users. This Network, I believe, has room for both sorts of stackizens.
**Yes, we're about helping people.** And we sometimes have different ideas about how best to do that. Vote your conscience, trust that others are doing the same, and ask questions when something doesn't pass your "smell test." | Maybe it's time we get review audits? These quickly weed out "reviewers" who never ever move the cursor away from the Close button. The rest of reviewers will think twice before closing a question, and (also very important) will favor community-agreed standards for closing over their personal standards. |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | There is a time limit on offering a bounty, there should be a time limit to be exceeded before voting to close.
Too often, a close mob comes in and just shut things down. One member in particular seems to think that two different post are duplicates if vowels can be found in both.
The problem this creates is that close votes draw more close votes. We have hundreds of questions here on meta asking why a question was closed, with a massive chunk of them being reopened without any editing or cleanup.
To make matters worse, questions that do not pertain to IT seem to get closed quickly, as the attitude seems to be "If I can't answer it, it must not be clear or answerable"
We had a few blue collar questions, and one maritime question closed for these reasons. What made the maritime question's so egregious is that it was easily answerable by anyone in the shipping industry, cruise industry, or anyone remotely familiar with maritime law.
Putting a delay on the close votes would enable people with knowledge of industries outside of IT to get in some answers before the close mob rushes in because they're unfamiliar with those industries. | >
> We're at least partially about helping people aren't we?
>
>
>
I'd like to think that was the most important thing. But sometimes I wonder.
>
> I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 15
> minutes or something before a question can be closed.
>
>
>
I think this is a good idea, but 15 minutes is not long enough. 2 hours feels more right to me. Mods can always close a question quickly, if there's some sort of "question emergency".
Unfortunately I don't think this will change things much. As long as we have folks who would rather close questions than actually ask or answer questions, we'll still have too many closed. Kinda sad. |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | Maybe it's time we get review audits? These quickly weed out "reviewers" who never ever move the cursor away from the Close button. The rest of reviewers will think twice before closing a question, and (also very important) will favor community-agreed standards for closing over their personal standards. | >
> We're at least partially about helping people aren't we?
>
>
>
I'd like to think that was the most important thing. But sometimes I wonder.
>
> I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 15
> minutes or something before a question can be closed.
>
>
>
I think this is a good idea, but 15 minutes is not long enough. 2 hours feels more right to me. Mods can always close a question quickly, if there's some sort of "question emergency".
Unfortunately I don't think this will change things much. As long as we have folks who would rather close questions than actually ask or answer questions, we'll still have too many closed. Kinda sad. |
5,665 | I think the fast closures impact on the quality of answers in some cases and encourage shooting an answer in quickly.
I do this every so often, because if I don't the question may well be closed before anyone gets a chance to help the OP. I understand that some peoples primary objective is about the site etc,. but we're also at least partially about helping the OP solve an immediate problem aren't we?
I wonder if it's possible to put a time limit on closures, like 2 hours or something before a question can be closed. Might let some troll questions hang around, but plenty of those seem to hang around anyway. All the fuss about the HNQ is over my head, I've rarely bothered looking at it, unsure how many people actually do so I could be wrong. | 2018/10/27 | [
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5665",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/users/40669/"
] | There is a time limit on offering a bounty, there should be a time limit to be exceeded before voting to close.
Too often, a close mob comes in and just shut things down. One member in particular seems to think that two different post are duplicates if vowels can be found in both.
The problem this creates is that close votes draw more close votes. We have hundreds of questions here on meta asking why a question was closed, with a massive chunk of them being reopened without any editing or cleanup.
To make matters worse, questions that do not pertain to IT seem to get closed quickly, as the attitude seems to be "If I can't answer it, it must not be clear or answerable"
We had a few blue collar questions, and one maritime question closed for these reasons. What made the maritime question's so egregious is that it was easily answerable by anyone in the shipping industry, cruise industry, or anyone remotely familiar with maritime law.
Putting a delay on the close votes would enable people with knowledge of industries outside of IT to get in some answers before the close mob rushes in because they're unfamiliar with those industries. | Maybe it's time we get review audits? These quickly weed out "reviewers" who never ever move the cursor away from the Close button. The rest of reviewers will think twice before closing a question, and (also very important) will favor community-agreed standards for closing over their personal standards. |
11,080,253 | What is saved into AUC file (cache file) of Axapta / Dynamics Ax 2009?
Does it save only objects, or maybe also column layout of the users? | 2012/06/18 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/11080253",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/141579/"
] | The [AUC file](http://www.axaptapedia.com/index.php/Object_caching) stores object data, but no user defined data.
Basically it copies used objects from the servers AOD file to the clients AUC file. | Column layouts are MorphX settings, which are stored in the syslastvalue table. I think it is application specific stuff, like window position, file location, etc.of a specific user. Delete the files, then open AX and you will see a screen flash briefly. Try and screen cap that and I think you will have your answer. |
4,729,642 | Is it possible to create an Android app for an existing web application which doesn't provide any API?
Webview just provides a crude view of the same web app in Android, but interface with webview looks crappy. | 2011/01/18 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/4729642",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/203018/"
] | What you're asking is very possible. Just load up your URL in the webview and then redirect all clicks to go back to the same view. There you have an embedded website into an application.
What do you mean by interface for WebView looks crappy? You can make it look like anything native on the phone. | If you want your web page to have the look and feel of a native android app without creating the native app, you'll need to do so using javascript on your served page. Take a look at <http://jquerymobile.com/> which seems to do a lot of the leg work. You can use that javascript and a little elbow grease to accomplish what you describe. |
108,237 | A book that I'm currently writing called Surge, my protagonist, Joseph Norton is an ["Ascended"](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DifferentlyPoweredIndividual), a human that is able to draw upon an energy source called the [Nexus](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BackgroundMagicField) (à la the Force) to enhance his physical abilities as a byproduct by having his soul bound to an incredibly powerful and ancient weapon referred to as a [Divine Tool](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin). As an Ascended, Joseph can tap into the Nexus to perform superhuman and physics-defying feats such as moving faster than the human eye can track, throwing multi-ton cars with some degree of difficulty and being able to take a rocket-propelled grenade to the chest at point blank (which nearly kills him). Each Ascended has 3 - 4 primary abilities that embody their most dominant personality traits.
Joesph's powers include:
* Precognition (representing his cautiousness and pragmatism) that only works if he's aware of what's going on around him and his senses are unimpaired.
* A healing factor (representing his willpower) that automatically repairs broken bones, internal bleeding, and damaged organs and allows his immune system to resist toxins. But, Joesph can't regenerate limbs, survive decapitation or reform his body from a single cell.
* Replicating weapons from his memories (representing his analytic nature) such as swords, maces, lances, halberds and axes but due to a bad case of [Anterograde amnesia](https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/amnesia4.htm) and the fact that they have hundreds of components, he can't recreate guns or grenades (think [Tracing](http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Gradation_Air) from *Fate/stay night*). Joseph later learns [how to take on the powers of other Ascended using this ability](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PowerCopying), although his amnesia only allows him to create flawed imitations limited by his fragmented memories and shut off his original powers when using a duplicated power.
* Electrokinesis (representing his inner emotional turmoil) that allows him to shoot bolts of energy from his fingers, fire beams of electricity from his palms, hurl lightning bolts like spears and call down lightning strikes. This ability has its limits as Joesph can't absorb electricity from other sources and can still be harmed by electric attacks.
Joseph's Electrokinesis also allows him to channel the Nexus through his hands and feet to transform his fingers and toes into [electrified claws](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlySharpClaws), which complement his kickboxing and parkour skills by allowing him to rapidly [scale vertical surfaces](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Wallcrawl) such as brick, concrete or glass walls. I've been trying to figure out what sort of claws would be practical for such purposes. I originally settled on hook-like talons similar to those of eagles (which would've tied into the [eagle motif](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimalMotifs)) attached to his character), but when I did research on eagles, I learnt that their claws evolved primarily to restrain large struggling prey, and were poorly suited for combat or climbing.
Are there such claws that allow for both close quarters combat (CQC) and fast climbing?
**NOTE:** Keep in mind that Surge's setting is modern day | 2018/03/30 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/108237",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
] | Your hero's claws manipulate electricity. Give him **electroadhesive claws.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UcQtG.jpg)
<http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/06/electroadhesive-robot-climbers>
>
> By now, most roboticists are familiar with the myriad gecko-type
> robots that employ Van der Waals forces (created by microscopic
> synthetic setae) to cling to walls. Less well-known is the work on an
> electrically-controllable alternative developed by researchers at SRI
> International (formerly called Stanford Research Institute) called
> "electroadhesion". Impressively, the electroadhesive can support 0.2
> to 1.4 N per square centimeter, requiring a mere 20 micro-Watts per
> Newton. This means that a square meter of electroadhesive could hold
> at least 200kg (440 lbs) while only consuming 40 milli-Watts, and
> could turn on and off at the flick of a switch! Read on for pictures,
> videos, and discussion.
>
>
>
Your hero maintains a strong charge on his claws opposite to the surface that he is climbing, and so is supported by electroadhesion. Surface area is king here and so the claws should be many and small. Sharp points might help concentrate charge, in a manner akin to a lightning rod.
As regards combat: instead of clawing with nails and pulling hair, use the electroadhesion property - in reverse. Electrorepulsion would pack a wallop and send an opponent flying. Of course your hero would receive the opposite energy but this is true for a blow with a fist also. | If you want to have CQC and fast climbing you have to heavily sacrifice (or compromise) on the latter.
Think if squirrels or geckoes: excellent climbers but with no CQC skills.
Now think of cats or bears: still decent climbers, deadly claws but surely more limited in their climbing than the first two.
Lucky for you, your character is human, so he can have climb appendices and then wear suitable gloves in case of CQC is needed. |
108,237 | A book that I'm currently writing called Surge, my protagonist, Joseph Norton is an ["Ascended"](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DifferentlyPoweredIndividual), a human that is able to draw upon an energy source called the [Nexus](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BackgroundMagicField) (à la the Force) to enhance his physical abilities as a byproduct by having his soul bound to an incredibly powerful and ancient weapon referred to as a [Divine Tool](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin). As an Ascended, Joseph can tap into the Nexus to perform superhuman and physics-defying feats such as moving faster than the human eye can track, throwing multi-ton cars with some degree of difficulty and being able to take a rocket-propelled grenade to the chest at point blank (which nearly kills him). Each Ascended has 3 - 4 primary abilities that embody their most dominant personality traits.
Joesph's powers include:
* Precognition (representing his cautiousness and pragmatism) that only works if he's aware of what's going on around him and his senses are unimpaired.
* A healing factor (representing his willpower) that automatically repairs broken bones, internal bleeding, and damaged organs and allows his immune system to resist toxins. But, Joesph can't regenerate limbs, survive decapitation or reform his body from a single cell.
* Replicating weapons from his memories (representing his analytic nature) such as swords, maces, lances, halberds and axes but due to a bad case of [Anterograde amnesia](https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/amnesia4.htm) and the fact that they have hundreds of components, he can't recreate guns or grenades (think [Tracing](http://typemoon.wikia.com/wiki/Gradation_Air) from *Fate/stay night*). Joseph later learns [how to take on the powers of other Ascended using this ability](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PowerCopying), although his amnesia only allows him to create flawed imitations limited by his fragmented memories and shut off his original powers when using a duplicated power.
* Electrokinesis (representing his inner emotional turmoil) that allows him to shoot bolts of energy from his fingers, fire beams of electricity from his palms, hurl lightning bolts like spears and call down lightning strikes. This ability has its limits as Joesph can't absorb electricity from other sources and can still be harmed by electric attacks.
Joseph's Electrokinesis also allows him to channel the Nexus through his hands and feet to transform his fingers and toes into [electrified claws](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlySharpClaws), which complement his kickboxing and parkour skills by allowing him to rapidly [scale vertical surfaces](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Wallcrawl) such as brick, concrete or glass walls. I've been trying to figure out what sort of claws would be practical for such purposes. I originally settled on hook-like talons similar to those of eagles (which would've tied into the [eagle motif](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimalMotifs)) attached to his character), but when I did research on eagles, I learnt that their claws evolved primarily to restrain large struggling prey, and were poorly suited for combat or climbing.
Are there such claws that allow for both close quarters combat (CQC) and fast climbing?
**NOTE:** Keep in mind that Surge's setting is modern day | 2018/03/30 | [
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/108237",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com",
"https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
] | Your hero's claws manipulate electricity. Give him **electroadhesive claws.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UcQtG.jpg)
<http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/06/electroadhesive-robot-climbers>
>
> By now, most roboticists are familiar with the myriad gecko-type
> robots that employ Van der Waals forces (created by microscopic
> synthetic setae) to cling to walls. Less well-known is the work on an
> electrically-controllable alternative developed by researchers at SRI
> International (formerly called Stanford Research Institute) called
> "electroadhesion". Impressively, the electroadhesive can support 0.2
> to 1.4 N per square centimeter, requiring a mere 20 micro-Watts per
> Newton. This means that a square meter of electroadhesive could hold
> at least 200kg (440 lbs) while only consuming 40 milli-Watts, and
> could turn on and off at the flick of a switch! Read on for pictures,
> videos, and discussion.
>
>
>
Your hero maintains a strong charge on his claws opposite to the surface that he is climbing, and so is supported by electroadhesion. Surface area is king here and so the claws should be many and small. Sharp points might help concentrate charge, in a manner akin to a lightning rod.
As regards combat: instead of clawing with nails and pulling hair, use the electroadhesion property - in reverse. Electrorepulsion would pack a wallop and send an opponent flying. Of course your hero would receive the opposite energy but this is true for a blow with a fist also. | You would need claws capable of moving up on a separate joint with suction pads underneath them. That way if they hit a surface they cannot penetrate like glass, the suction pad gets a grip instead while the claw is pushed up. Lock the joint while fighting or climbing using the claws, unlock it when you need to.
Composition of your claws should be a substance that can impact on concrete or metal without damage. Obviously it has to conduct electricity as well so probably a metal is best.
If you can throw a car I'm not really sure you need claws for melee fighting, that sort of strength would enable you to tear people's limbs off I would think and then hit them over the head with their own arm/leg etc,. |
185,827 | We have several users on linux computing pool, are there way to "shape" the IO per user(like a net shaping analogue..)?
Is it possible?
Can we restrict the number of IO threads per user?
Thanks.
Arman. | 2010/09/29 | [
"https://serverfault.com/questions/185827",
"https://serverfault.com",
"https://serverfault.com/users/43265/"
] | You can use the [cgroups](http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/cgroups.txt) feature to set up a "fair share" hierarchy for disk bandwidth. | Not that I'm aware of at an OS level, but VMware allows I/O limits per virtual machine, if that is of any use. |
185,827 | We have several users on linux computing pool, are there way to "shape" the IO per user(like a net shaping analogue..)?
Is it possible?
Can we restrict the number of IO threads per user?
Thanks.
Arman. | 2010/09/29 | [
"https://serverfault.com/questions/185827",
"https://serverfault.com",
"https://serverfault.com/users/43265/"
] | You can use the [cgroups](http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/cgroups.txt) feature to set up a "fair share" hierarchy for disk bandwidth. | You should be able to use [quotas](http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialQuotas.html) to set a limit on space, but that doesn't limit IO. |
6,835 | I would like to control the locking of a gear, using a solenoid. My original idea was to simply activate the solenoid to pull back the lock (a tooth that sticks into the gear), but that means that I'd need to keep applying current to the solenoid as long as I want the gear unlocked.
Now, I'm thinking it would be better to have a mechanism between the solenoid and the gear, so that a pulse to the solenoid would unlock the gear, and another pulse would lock it. Kind of like the mechanism in a click type pen. What would be a good choice of mechanism to accomplish this, considering how solenoids have a very short stroke distance? | 2016/01/08 | [
"https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6835",
"https://engineering.stackexchange.com",
"https://engineering.stackexchange.com/users/4410/"
] | I wouldn't suggest putting objects into gear teeth if the object engages the teeth while a motor is powering the gear, the gear will likely be damaged. If there is compressed air available, I would suggest a solenoid valve operated air cylinder pushing a brake pad against a rotating shaft. Also, electric brakes are available: <http://www.mcmaster.com/#brakes/=10l6j16> | Your toggle design has the disadvantage that the same input from the controller both locks and unlocks the gear. This can be problematic if the state of the lock is not what the controller thinks it is.
Instead using an actuator that remains in position you can move it forward to lock and backwards to unlock. Whether the locking mechanism is a brake pad or a pawl that meshes with the gear is irrelevant to this. |
12,514 | A user is trying to update some records in Salesforce, he is getting this error:
>
> OrderHistory: System.LimitException: Too many DML rows: 10001.
>
>
>
He added that he is not able to insert 100 records at a time in Salesforce.
I checked OrderHistory Apex Trigger code, took the SOQL query out of the for loop (that may be causing the governor limit hit), still no luck.
Please can someone suggest how can i get rid off this error? | 2013/06/06 | [
"https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/12514",
"https://salesforce.stackexchange.com",
"https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/users/2864/"
] | Your error doesn't have to do with a SOQL query in a for loop (although you really don't want that either). Your error has to do with too many records being inserted or updated at once. It sounds like the trigger has not been properly [bulkified](http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/Best_Practice%3a_Bulkify_Your_Code). If you have a trigger that is trying to update that many rows, you should really look into turning it into batch apex. | Your whole transaction can at most perform DML (run insert/update/delete) of at most 10000 records.
I suspect it's data specific - do you have lots of child objects for example? Is update of these particular records causing lots of workflows or rollup recalculations to fire?
It's really hard to advise without knowing your whole situation (probably even posting the body of trigger won't help, it'd be more of "Debug log + relationship diagram for the involved objects please".
If there are some updates that you could delay - read about `@future` methods. It'll also be good for the end user perception (it'll appear that the transaction has completed faster). If it really has to be in all or nothing - you might have to move your "whatever recalculation is happening" into batch Apex. |
3,170 | You always see the general "you can't list family members" when it comes to references, but what if you're working at a company where your dad is also your boss? Is it alright to list them in that way, or is it never acceptable to list a family member?
I can see how listing them as a personal reference would never be acceptable, but it would make sense that if they're your boss they'd be able to verify you working there as at least a job reference without becoming biased about your work habits as a professional reference. | 2012/08/10 | [
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/3170",
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com/users/128/"
] | If you've worked in a family-owned business for a number of years and your boss happens to be a family member, you can certainly list them as a reference. Of course, it's likely that people calling the reference are going to tend to discount a positive reference coming from a family member since it is rather likely that a family member would, if not lie, then at least shade the truth when describing the applicant's work history. If you are solely interested in someone to confirm dates of employment and/or a job title, it would be preferrable if you could find someone employed at the company that can do that who is not a family member or is at least a more distant family member.
The less formal and less longstanding the employment arrangement, the more problematic a reference from a family member gets. If you've been employed in the family business for 20 years, for example, a reference from a supervisor that happens to be related to you isn't going to raise many red flags. If you've for a few months on-and-off building a web site for your father's company, on the other hand, the reference is likely to be much more suspect because your the relationship will be much more personal than professional and the work experience is likely to be much less similar to what you'd find in the "real world". A reference from some other customer that you had done work for that wasn't related to you would carry much more weight. | Many companies prefer the professional references to be people who were not your supervisor. This is because they will also ask you for the contact information for every company you worked for and the supervisor's name.
Do not list you dad as a professional reference. However, if they ask you to fill in a form that lists the supervisors in various jobs, feel free to put his name there. He was, after all, your supervisor. |
30,209,745 | I know how to download a file from a server using FTP with PHP.
I have a list of files to download from the ftp to an internal storage.
I use `ftp_get()` to download the list of files,
the first file size is: 126 mb, successfully downloaded to my internal storage.
However the PHP function throws an error 500, and then dies without continuing.
The error I get:
>
> Internal Server Error
>
>
> The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was
> unable to complete your request.
>
>
> Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@zzz.com and inform
> them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done
> that may have caused the error.
>
>
> More information about this error may be available in the server error
> log.
>
>
> Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to
> use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
>
>
>
Any idea what I should do in order for the function to complete its run successfully? | 2015/05/13 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/30209745",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4796229/"
] | I don't know how well Javascript itself (through libraries) can use compressed data, but *it doesn't need to*.
When you GZip the data server side and set the "Content-Encoding" header value to "gzip", then the browser will decompress it before handing it over to your js code. So you have the benefit of small transport size and fast decompression.
Check beforehand whether the browser can do it, by checking the request header value "Accept-Encoding". If that contains "gzip" (which is usual), then the browser will decode it.
Further reading (specific for WebApi):
<http://blog.developers.ba/asp-net-web-api-gzip-compression-actionfilter/>
and <http://benfoster.io/blog/aspnet-web-api-compression> | Yes, you can pick any compression algorithm you want, implement that algorithm in C# to compress, and then again in javascript to decompress. Changing between C# and JavaScript does not cause you any difficulties, except the fact that you need to implement it in both languages of course.
I recommend you search for LZ compression algorithms. |
447,635 | Is there any way for developer to send data to the iPhone's USB port? | 2009/01/15 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/447635",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/53839/"
] | No. There is no way to do this with the SDK. If this is something you'd like to see, you should [file an enhancement request](http://bugreporter.apple.com). | Not currently. USB functionality is expanded in [iPhone OS 3.0](http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/). |
85,970 | I want to create simple network consisting of 1 master and up to 16 slave nodes. Project will be based on PIC MCUs.
Network has the following specs/requirements:
* Relatively low speed
* Inexpensive
* Cable lengths up to 20m
* 4-line limit (2 power + 2 data)
* Slaves connected directly to Master (Star network)
* Master initiates any transmissions (if it matters)
I have considered 1Wire, I2C and RS485, and my final choice fell onto RS485 as it seems the best for the task at hand.
However, I've been reading that using Star topology with RS485 is not recommended due to reflection and some other issues.
What would you recommend as the best option in this case? Stick with RS485 or look somewhere else? | 2013/10/20 | [
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/85970",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/users/30692/"
] | ### Use switch
RS485 has a bus topology. The big problem is that if you have star topology, every ray of the star has to be terminated. This way, the master transmitter will be loaded with 16x||120Ω = 7.5Ω. Of course such small impedance will overload the transmitter.
There is another solution however. You should use a switch and connect the master only to the ray you want to communicate. I am not sure how exactly this schematic has to be implemented...
One of the solutions is to use a multiplexer and 16xRS485 transceivers - such as SN75176 or similar.
Another way is to use one transceiver and some analog multiplexers with low enough internal resistance.
(Or even electromechanical relays as a some kind of ultra-conservative design :) )
### Connect the network in star without termination
It is clear, that if there is no termination resistors, the RS485 network can be safely wired in star topology.
The additional research lead me to [this article](http://ltxfaq.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1382), that states that for relatively short lines, the termination resistors can be omitted. The term "relatively short" depends on the transmission speed and for 9600bps is about 600m (stated in the article).
I made the same approximated calculations and for 20m line the transmission speed is around 1Mbps.
The condition is that the delay of the signal in the lines for 3 or 4 full trips (enough to dump the reflections) must be shorter than the half time of 1bit transmitted.
Well, in the article there is a presumption that the bit is checked near the middle of the bit width, but some receivers make several sampling of the bit in order to decrease the errors. In this case probably the acceptable speed will be even lower. | Star connected networks have a limited operating distance at which point "reflections" will cause problems. This can be broken down to unit A transmitting to unit B - if there is nothing terminating the cable at point B, there will be reflections of energy back up the cable to point A. This can corrupt the data and make life difficult and really boring actually.
On short cable lengths reflections quickly die down and for slow speed data (a few kbps) you might get away with no terminators providing you slew rate limit the data edges being transmitted both ways - this largely gets rid of the high frequency content of the signal and things can just about work. So if you are going to transmit and receive a couple of kbps then use a 485 driver with slew rate control such as [this](http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ds36c280.pdf) the DS36C280. Rise and fall times can be as long as 3 micro seconds. This might work and there may be others than can provide even slower slew rates.
Alternatively, would sir be interested in using radio? It means the cabling is much simpler - just power to all the slaves and no need to worry about the power interfering with the data (it can happen). Nordic produce a decent array of radio transceivers at what appear to be insanely low prices. [Here](http://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/Sub-1-GHz-RF/nRF9E5) is an example, the nRF9E5 but there are probably other choices too. |
48,226 | I'm looking for a way to represent chords in a MIDI file.
Note that I'm not looking to represent chord voicings. That can be trivially done with multiple note-on messages. But if I do that, then I have to do some sort of note-on to chord analysis every time I read the MIDI file back in, and that's a major nuisance especially since I already know the chord structures when I write the file.
Rather, I'm looking for something more akin to guitar tablature or fake books. That is, I want to record "C" or "Cm" or "I" or “iii7" at a particular point in time.
So my questions...
Is there a standard way to do this? (I'm not finding one, but I don't know the current spec thoroughly.)
Is there a non-standard way of doing this?
I'm considering using the "tag" facility of the lyric/display meta event. It appears as though I can invent {@chord=Cm} and that should be transparent to any reader, past, present, or future, who doesn't understand this usage. Am I reading the standard right? Would this be a reasonable, essentially private, non-standard extension? | 2016/08/23 | [
"https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/48226",
"https://music.stackexchange.com",
"https://music.stackexchange.com/users/32812/"
] | yeah, you're on the right track. that should way should do fine.
all you need is the time, root, chord quality. (maybe /bass)
although midi is a standard format, it's a really loose standard.
there's no standard way of storing fingering, for example.
so pick the best text event you can (which ya did).
other midi sequencers don't store chords exactly the same way, either. which, i mean, really is pretty dumb. you'ld think by now they could agree on a standard. midi has been around since the 80s shoish. | The text event in a midi file does not contain absolute position of the text. It just contains text. Squeezing them between note events could work or you could also mark the position of the start of the chord with the text event each time you have a chord change, but that is going well out of the way for this format. Midi strong suit is that it's lightweight and compact. The basic information about the instrument used, each note, the duration, and velocity are all at the core of midi. Any extra (meta) info is outside of the scope of what midi is for. Even key and time signature which are important for notation doesn't have an affect on the midi events themselves. Notation programs typically use them to display the midi events in a way that makes sense to musicians.
There are other file formats out there that may work better for you depending on what your goal is. If you just want to notate this then there are plenty of notation softwares out there that can do chord symbols fine in time like Finale, Sibelius, Musescore, and Lilypond. If you really just want a file format to hold this information for a project, MusicXML has a much better representation for chord symbols. |
4,527 | Does this even make sense what I translated into english?
PS. I am probably gonna delete this question eventually | 2009/11/07 | [
"https://mathoverflow.net/questions/4527",
"https://mathoverflow.net",
"https://mathoverflow.net/users/462/"
] | I am not sure I understand the question, but if you are talking about linear algebra over the complex numbers, then it is true that normal matrices (those which commute with their hermitian adjoint) are precisely those which can be diagonalised by a unitary transformation.
(This is proven in Herstein's *Topics in algebra*: §10 of the 1964 edition.) | I think I understand the question in Serbian (my native language is from the same Slav family) and he is really asking about normal matrices and their diagonalization by a unitary transformation. |
4,527 | Does this even make sense what I translated into english?
PS. I am probably gonna delete this question eventually | 2009/11/07 | [
"https://mathoverflow.net/questions/4527",
"https://mathoverflow.net",
"https://mathoverflow.net/users/462/"
] | I am not sure I understand the question, but if you are talking about linear algebra over the complex numbers, then it is true that normal matrices (those which commute with their hermitian adjoint) are precisely those which can be diagonalised by a unitary transformation.
(This is proven in Herstein's *Topics in algebra*: §10 of the 1964 edition.) | Other people have already answered the mathematical question. I'll point out a possible source of linguistic confusion: the word "eigen", in eigenvector and eigenbasis, is German for something like "own" or "self". I would guess that the poster may have been translating "eigen" into English rather than leaving it alone. |
4,527 | Does this even make sense what I translated into english?
PS. I am probably gonna delete this question eventually | 2009/11/07 | [
"https://mathoverflow.net/questions/4527",
"https://mathoverflow.net",
"https://mathoverflow.net/users/462/"
] | I think I understand the question in Serbian (my native language is from the same Slav family) and he is really asking about normal matrices and their diagonalization by a unitary transformation. | Other people have already answered the mathematical question. I'll point out a possible source of linguistic confusion: the word "eigen", in eigenvector and eigenbasis, is German for something like "own" or "self". I would guess that the poster may have been translating "eigen" into English rather than leaving it alone. |
4,613 | A party is being held at a local mansion. The host is very rich and his success is because of one thing ~ his famous recipe for spaghetti!
The spaghetti recipe is kept in a secret room inside the mansion, which is only accessible from the kitchen, which can be only reached from the party lounge, which is separated from the security lobby by a floor where [elephants have been reported to occasionally trample fishy guests](https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/4001/).
The mansion has two entrances to the security lobby, and all adjacent rooms are connected by two doors.
Your task is to enter the mansion, sneak into the secret room, steal the spaghetti recipe and get out again. Here is a plan of the mansion.
In this puzzle, you start as the number 1 outside the mansion and each time you pass a door, an operation indicated on the door will change your number. After leaving the mansion with the recipe, you must be again number 1 as when you came in.
You can pass all doors multiple times in both directions, but the less, the better, otherwise the security may become suspicious and you don't want them to release the elephants :) The shortest solution wins. | 2014/11/14 | [
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/4613",
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com",
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/users/4394/"
] | 12 doors. Total number of steps must be even. And problem can not be solved in 10 doors or fewer.
>
> Step 1 : 1 + 11 = 12 Security
>
> Step 2 : - 7 = 5 Elephant
>
> Step 3 : + 4 = 9 Party
>
> Step 4 : - 1 = 8 Kitchen
>
> Step 5 : - 6 = 2 Secret
>
> Step 6 : - 6 = -4 Kitchen
>
> Step 7 : - 1 = -5 Party
>
> Step 8 : \* √2 = -5√2 Kitchen
>
> Step 9 : \* √2 = -10 Party
>
> Step 10: / 2 = -5 Elephant
>
> Step 11: \* 2 = -10 Security
>
> Step 12: + 11 = 1
>
>
> | >
> 1 + 11 \* 2 / 2 - 1 - 6 - 6 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 / 2 - 7 + 11 = 1
>
> 14 doors, but sort of achieved with a quick and dirty program and some thinking (that also proved that there is no 10-door-possibility, so Jan's answer is the optimum.)
>
> <http://pastebin.com/VraSrJ9R> contains a neat little list of all 1024 "10-door-possibilities", 0 being the left option, 1 being the right option.
>
>
>
Another 12-door-solution I like a lot:
>
> 1 + 11 - 7 + 4 - 1 - 6 - 6 - 1 - 1 - 1 + 4 - 7 + 11 = 1
>
> Essentially only take addition/substraction and go through the -1 door twice (three times, you know what I mean).
>
>
> |
4,613 | A party is being held at a local mansion. The host is very rich and his success is because of one thing ~ his famous recipe for spaghetti!
The spaghetti recipe is kept in a secret room inside the mansion, which is only accessible from the kitchen, which can be only reached from the party lounge, which is separated from the security lobby by a floor where [elephants have been reported to occasionally trample fishy guests](https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/4001/).
The mansion has two entrances to the security lobby, and all adjacent rooms are connected by two doors.
Your task is to enter the mansion, sneak into the secret room, steal the spaghetti recipe and get out again. Here is a plan of the mansion.
In this puzzle, you start as the number 1 outside the mansion and each time you pass a door, an operation indicated on the door will change your number. After leaving the mansion with the recipe, you must be again number 1 as when you came in.
You can pass all doors multiple times in both directions, but the less, the better, otherwise the security may become suspicious and you don't want them to release the elephants :) The shortest solution wins. | 2014/11/14 | [
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/4613",
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com",
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/users/4394/"
] | 12 doors. Total number of steps must be even. And problem can not be solved in 10 doors or fewer.
>
> Step 1 : 1 + 11 = 12 Security
>
> Step 2 : - 7 = 5 Elephant
>
> Step 3 : + 4 = 9 Party
>
> Step 4 : - 1 = 8 Kitchen
>
> Step 5 : - 6 = 2 Secret
>
> Step 6 : - 6 = -4 Kitchen
>
> Step 7 : - 1 = -5 Party
>
> Step 8 : \* √2 = -5√2 Kitchen
>
> Step 9 : \* √2 = -10 Party
>
> Step 10: / 2 = -5 Elephant
>
> Step 11: \* 2 = -10 Security
>
> Step 12: + 11 = 1
>
>
> | If we are not allowed to temporarily exit and re-enter the lobby, then there are
>
> 28 distinct shortest (12 step) solutions,
>
>
>
illustrated in this diagram:
>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7WKHO.png)
>
>
>
The diagram was created with the assistance of a computer program.
Each column represents a distinct combination of room, whether we have the recipe, and whether we have backtracked once yet. Every step moves from left to right by either one column or two. The gray boxes contain the number at that point in the path, where R = √2. Red lines correspond to going through the left door and green lines correspond to going right. Thick lines denote backtracking.
The purple boxes indicate the number of paths from that point forward for some points, usually near choice points. (There is some inconsistency in their placement for diagram layout reasons.)
If we *are* allowed to temporarily exit and re-enter the lobby (just after starting or just before finishing) despite the number not being 1, then
>
> there are even more 12 step solutions; I have not tried to count them all.
>
>
>
One example path that leaves the lobby near the start is:
>
> 1, 12, 4 (here we are outside), 15, 30, 34, 33, 27, 21, 20, 10, 3, 1.
>
>
>
One example path that leaves the lobby near the end is:
>
> 1, 12, 5, 9, 8, 2, -4, -5, -1, -2, 9 (here we are outside), 3, 1.
>
>
> |
4,613 | A party is being held at a local mansion. The host is very rich and his success is because of one thing ~ his famous recipe for spaghetti!
The spaghetti recipe is kept in a secret room inside the mansion, which is only accessible from the kitchen, which can be only reached from the party lounge, which is separated from the security lobby by a floor where [elephants have been reported to occasionally trample fishy guests](https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/4001/).
The mansion has two entrances to the security lobby, and all adjacent rooms are connected by two doors.
Your task is to enter the mansion, sneak into the secret room, steal the spaghetti recipe and get out again. Here is a plan of the mansion.
In this puzzle, you start as the number 1 outside the mansion and each time you pass a door, an operation indicated on the door will change your number. After leaving the mansion with the recipe, you must be again number 1 as when you came in.
You can pass all doors multiple times in both directions, but the less, the better, otherwise the security may become suspicious and you don't want them to release the elephants :) The shortest solution wins. | 2014/11/14 | [
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/4613",
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com",
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/users/4394/"
] | >
> 1 + 11 \* 2 / 2 - 1 - 6 - 6 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 / 2 - 7 + 11 = 1
>
> 14 doors, but sort of achieved with a quick and dirty program and some thinking (that also proved that there is no 10-door-possibility, so Jan's answer is the optimum.)
>
> <http://pastebin.com/VraSrJ9R> contains a neat little list of all 1024 "10-door-possibilities", 0 being the left option, 1 being the right option.
>
>
>
Another 12-door-solution I like a lot:
>
> 1 + 11 - 7 + 4 - 1 - 6 - 6 - 1 - 1 - 1 + 4 - 7 + 11 = 1
>
> Essentially only take addition/substraction and go through the -1 door twice (three times, you know what I mean).
>
>
> | If we are not allowed to temporarily exit and re-enter the lobby, then there are
>
> 28 distinct shortest (12 step) solutions,
>
>
>
illustrated in this diagram:
>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7WKHO.png)
>
>
>
The diagram was created with the assistance of a computer program.
Each column represents a distinct combination of room, whether we have the recipe, and whether we have backtracked once yet. Every step moves from left to right by either one column or two. The gray boxes contain the number at that point in the path, where R = √2. Red lines correspond to going through the left door and green lines correspond to going right. Thick lines denote backtracking.
The purple boxes indicate the number of paths from that point forward for some points, usually near choice points. (There is some inconsistency in their placement for diagram layout reasons.)
If we *are* allowed to temporarily exit and re-enter the lobby (just after starting or just before finishing) despite the number not being 1, then
>
> there are even more 12 step solutions; I have not tried to count them all.
>
>
>
One example path that leaves the lobby near the start is:
>
> 1, 12, 4 (here we are outside), 15, 30, 34, 33, 27, 21, 20, 10, 3, 1.
>
>
>
One example path that leaves the lobby near the end is:
>
> 1, 12, 5, 9, 8, 2, -4, -5, -1, -2, 9 (here we are outside), 3, 1.
>
>
> |
20,882,426 | I have a collection view that displays 3 images, two labels, and 1 attributed string(strings are of different colors and font sizes and values are not unique for every cell). One of the images is coming from the web and I used AFnetworking to do the downloading and caching. The collection view displays 15 cells simultaneously.
When I scroll I can only achieve 25 frames/sec.
Below are the things I did:
-Processing of data were done ahead and cached to objects
-Image and views are opaque
-Cells and views are reused
I have done all the optimizations I know but I can't achieve at least 55 frames/sec.
If you could share other techniques to speed up the re-use of cells.
I was even thinking of pre-rendering the subviews off screen and cache it somewhere but I am not sure how it is done.
When I run the app on the iPhone it is fast since it only shows at least four cells at a time. | 2014/01/02 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/20882426",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1539874/"
] | The first thing you need to do is fire up instruments and find out if you're ***CPU-bound*** (computation or regular I/O is a bottleneck) or ***GPU-bound*** (the graphics card is struggling). . depending on which of these is the issue the solution varies.
Here's a [video tutorial](http://vimeo.com/channels/melbournecocoaheads/59729571) that shows how to do this (among other things) . . This one is from Sean Woodhouse @ Itty Bitty Apps (they make the fine [Reveal](http://revealapp.com/) tool).
NB: In the context of performance tuning we usually talk about being I/O bound or CPU bound as separate concerns, however I've grouped them together here meaning "due to either slow computation or I/O data is not getting to the graphics card fast enough". . if this is indeed the problem, then the next step is to find out whether it is indeed related to waiting on I/O or the CPU is maxed-out.
Instruments can be really confusing at first, but the above videos helped me to harness its power.
And here's another great tutorial from [Anthony Egerton](http://sydneycocoaheads.com/2012/09/26/anthony-egertons-introduction-to-instruments-at-september-sydney-cocoaheads/). | What is the size of the image that you use?
One of the optimization technique which would work is that
Resize the image so that it matches the size of the view you are displaying. |
308,873 | Below is the schematics of a circuit so far I finalized and soldered on a perfboard:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/quZDy.png)
*(please left-click to enlarge)*
Basically the circuit converts 0...10V input voltage to 10mV pk-pk square-wave. The goal is to obtain a linear relation between the output frequency and the input voltage. Since [LM331](http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm331.pdf) known as quite linear, I used it as a voltage to freq. converter. But when varying the freq., LM331 also changes the duty cycle a lot. That was a problem in ADC side at the output. So to overcome this and to obtain around 50% duty cycle a 74HC74 follows LM331 by halving the frequency. Halving freq. is no problem because it will not affect the linear relationship between the input voltage and output freq.
The circuit works fine both in simulation and in real. I mean it does the job at first look.
But if you wait enough you see a drift in freq. output(at Q or at Fout).
Here are some observations from yesterday for 2.5V constant input voltage:
At 17:00 o'clock 924Hz
At 18:00 o'clock 918Hz
At 19:00 o'clock 919Hz
At 20:00 o'clock 913Hz
At 21:00 o'clock 917Hz
At 22:00 o'clock 912Hz
And today after powering on the circuit with again 2.5V input I measure the freq. output as: 936Hz which keeps increasing to 945Hz ect.
Here is the circuit soldered on perfboard(I marked some ports and components with red color):[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ye3GD.jpg)
What I have noticed is, when I touch slightly with my finger or a pencil to the capacitor C1 or C3 I see dramatic changes at the output. The other components do not make such difference in response to a physical interaction.
For C1 I'm using a ceramic capacitor as you can see in the photo.
In the data-sheet of LM331 C2 is recommended 1u Mylar capacitor which I use ceramic. But interacting it physically does not make such change as C1.
In another forum I found this comment(in the quote I modified his cap names to be consistent with my schematics):
>
> Finally I solved it.
>
>
> I used C1 = 10nF NPO (very stable with varying temperature) capacitor
> in place of C1 = 10nF X7R (high temperature coefficient). As my
> circuit contains lot of transistors and Transformer, due to increasing
> temperature, the frequency was gradually increasing, which doesn't
> happen now after changing it to NPO.
>
>
> Also, I added 47 Ohm resistor in series with C2 = 100 nF capacitor,
> which increased the stability further.
>
>
>
Does anybody have experience or idea about the issue? The capacitor types and tolerances are critical for LM331 in this circuit, I would be glad to hear your suggestions on these. | 2017/06/03 | [
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/308873",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/users/16307/"
] | Ceramic capacitors have considerable temperature, voltage, and aging dependency. Even an NP0 would change by a few fractions of a percent (more than enough to justify what you are seeing).
If you want stability you need to move away from ceramics, I have found that mica capacitors are extremely stable in comparison. I once put together a 1000Hz linear oscillator with 0.1% precision and stability across +-20ºC variations for testing purposes. One year later it had moved by less than 0.1%. Even as I placed a soldering iron near the capacitor to see if it would move. | The temperature coefficient of the capacitor can have a profound effect on the accuracy and stability of the output. This is what the other thread that you quoted is referencing.
However, some of you data seems to suggest that you are getting noise into your circuit or that your input reference voltage has some fluctuation or that your method for measuring the frequency has some instability. If you haven't already done so, you should assess these error terms.
You may find it helpful to determine the Hertz/Volt transfer ratio and assess your variation in light of this. You may find that the output frequency variations may account for a very small input fluctuation. This could help you to track down the cause of the fluctuations. |
189,967 | I am software developer and from time to time I am required to participate in the requirements interviews with internal or external customers for the product the we develop and maintain.
I tend and my approach is to gather as much as possible information before the session. Both from the customers and from the documentation and codebase of our product. I am trying to guess what the customer can ask from us, what our proposals could be. And also I am devoting much time to grasp the possible constraints, possible and prohibited uses cases.
So, from the one hand I am quite prepared for such interviews and my look is down to earth and I can go into details of uses cases, data models, etc. From the other hand there are 2 drawbacks. The extensive preparation exhaust time from our company's resources, it certainly costs something. And my mind is somehow shut closed. It may be possible, it may not be possible - who knows - but maybe good preparation extinguish the free flow of ideas and the creativity. These are fine matters, but still they matter a lot in good product design.
So - how much one should prepare for the requirements interview if e is participating from the developer's side? | 2023/02/10 | [
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/189967",
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com/users/78196/"
] | note: this is a short answer, before more information is added to the question.
>
> Is it acceptable to prepare...?
>
>
>
YES! Yes. Even more, in our universe is almost always better to prepare, than to be unprepared. It does not matter for what you prepare, you need to prepare.
When you prepare, you do not only make a list of what you know, you also make a list of what you do not know. And a list of questions. And a list of answers to potential questions that yo might receive. And you try to understand in which corners you might get trapped. And how to get out of there. And do on, and so on...
>
> ... how much one should prepare ...
>
>
>
As much as possible. The more important the problem, the more important the preparation.
>
> The extensive preparation exhaust time from our company's resources...
>
>
>
Did you try to find out the "exhaust time" wasted when your company start building products based on the wrong requirements? If not, have a discussion with you managers, they surely can estimate.
>
> but maybe good preparation extinguish the free flow of ideas and the creativity
>
>
>
Just wait until you find out the amount of creativity you will have when you are asked questions and you do not have answers. Especially in a "big" meeting between companies, when the managers expect "magic", and you do not even have coal. | First, I'd like to remind you of the 6 Ps:
Proper
Planning
Prevents
Piss
Poor
Performance
You can swap out Planning with Preparation and the message is the same. You should absolutely plan for a client meeting. There are 2 sub-questions that essentially form the Main question:
* Does this preparation bias you towards one solution or another and
* What is the value (in terms of your time/resources) for this Prep?
I'll address the first one - Yes, it sort of does, but if you are aware of this, it's likely to be less of an issue than you think. For starters, we as Humans always have a bias - whether it's re-using known working methods or discounted other methods we've had bad experiences with - we all do it. In the majority of cases, the differences between what might be 'optimal' and what we actually deliver is so miniscule as to be mostly irrelevant.
All we can do, is be aware of our preferences and regularly ask ourselves if there are better solutions available.
Onto the next question - in terms of how much time to Prep for a meeting - 2:1 and 3:1 are the regularly cited ratios, however I've seen ratios up to 20:1 for technical/legal issues.
That is to say that for every hour of Meeting, you potentially could spend 20 hours preparing. If I think about big/critical presentations I've made to key stakeholders in the past, 20 hours of prep (2 and a half working days) seems about right.
So long as your clients and your management are happy with the time spent - then it's time well spent. |
189,967 | I am software developer and from time to time I am required to participate in the requirements interviews with internal or external customers for the product the we develop and maintain.
I tend and my approach is to gather as much as possible information before the session. Both from the customers and from the documentation and codebase of our product. I am trying to guess what the customer can ask from us, what our proposals could be. And also I am devoting much time to grasp the possible constraints, possible and prohibited uses cases.
So, from the one hand I am quite prepared for such interviews and my look is down to earth and I can go into details of uses cases, data models, etc. From the other hand there are 2 drawbacks. The extensive preparation exhaust time from our company's resources, it certainly costs something. And my mind is somehow shut closed. It may be possible, it may not be possible - who knows - but maybe good preparation extinguish the free flow of ideas and the creativity. These are fine matters, but still they matter a lot in good product design.
So - how much one should prepare for the requirements interview if e is participating from the developer's side? | 2023/02/10 | [
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/189967",
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com",
"https://workplace.stackexchange.com/users/78196/"
] | >
> ... maybe good preparation extinguish the free flow of ideas and the creativity. These are fine matters, but still they matter a lot in good product design.
>
>
>
Creativity *depends* on a good grasp of the possibilities and impossibilities of the domain, the strengths and weaknesses of the tools and resources used. That information is your stage and actors, your orchestra, your paintbrushes and your chisels.
Sitting in a meeting inventing fanciful solutions that could never *possibly* work isn't creative, it's a waste of time.
The one risk of over-preparation is if you take without question some "generally-accepted knowledge" that certain things are impossible rather than merely difficult, usually-undesirable, or simply novel. Now you know that's a danger, you can head it off by digging a little deeper when something is claimed to be obviously impossible. | First, I'd like to remind you of the 6 Ps:
Proper
Planning
Prevents
Piss
Poor
Performance
You can swap out Planning with Preparation and the message is the same. You should absolutely plan for a client meeting. There are 2 sub-questions that essentially form the Main question:
* Does this preparation bias you towards one solution or another and
* What is the value (in terms of your time/resources) for this Prep?
I'll address the first one - Yes, it sort of does, but if you are aware of this, it's likely to be less of an issue than you think. For starters, we as Humans always have a bias - whether it's re-using known working methods or discounted other methods we've had bad experiences with - we all do it. In the majority of cases, the differences between what might be 'optimal' and what we actually deliver is so miniscule as to be mostly irrelevant.
All we can do, is be aware of our preferences and regularly ask ourselves if there are better solutions available.
Onto the next question - in terms of how much time to Prep for a meeting - 2:1 and 3:1 are the regularly cited ratios, however I've seen ratios up to 20:1 for technical/legal issues.
That is to say that for every hour of Meeting, you potentially could spend 20 hours preparing. If I think about big/critical presentations I've made to key stakeholders in the past, 20 hours of prep (2 and a half working days) seems about right.
So long as your clients and your management are happy with the time spent - then it's time well spent. |
83,176 | I plan using a AC to DC converted with constant current output (LED driver AUBIG A8HH20317) in order to light high-power LEDs (about 12\*3W LEDs). The more LEDs, the higher voltage at the output, but the current is supposed to be stable (680mA). This will light a fish tank so the setup will be close to fresh water. I can protect the 220V side easily but on the other side of the converter, there will be much more wiring so that may be difficult.
Given the high humidity, am I risking electric shock if I put my hand on the constant current side ? Is my cat risking electric shock if he puts his tongue (...) in the same place ? I understand the final choice is up to me and of course you won't be responsible if I (or the cat) experience electric shocks. | 2013/09/23 | [
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/83176",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com",
"https://electronics.stackexchange.com/users/29495/"
] | In Europe there is the Seperated Extra Low Voltage specification that places limits on DC and AC voltages. It also specifies isolation from earth thus preventing a return path through ground if you touch a bare conductor carrying the voltage. The voltage limit is 60V in dry conditions but this voltage is lower in higher humidity conditions.
Your set-up is neither so it could not be regarded as falling into this category. What about direct AC powered fishtank U.V. lights - what techniques do these use to prevent shock at 230VAC - maybe you should research this and apply some of their techniques when wiring the fish tank.
I have a U.V. inline water purifier on my Koi pond and it runs from AC mains - it uses rubber power cable and rubber seals at each end of the U.V. strip. Underwater pumps are directly connected to AC mains power and I sure have worries (now and then) about the integrity of the cable feeding underwater but I use a residual current trip.
If you can ascertain that your AUBIG A8HH20317 output is isolated from earth or anything else then I believe the only reasonable chance of an electric shock is if you come into contact with both positive and negative feeds simultaneously. Try and put silicone bath sealant over exposed connections. | High humidity can turn into moisture, liquid H2O, in a very short time under the right conditions, even if only occasionally in the situation of your aquarium. So for the sake of a prudent design, I would assume this could happen at some point in time and avoid using a series topology in which voltage greater than, say, 35 volts can possibly be present. Even then you may get some conduction directly thru the moisture if there are certain mineral impurities present where the moisture condenses into liquid H2O. This may create electrical problems on its own independent of any human contact.
Even if the voltages present are not enough to cause actual harm, the "surprize factor" can be dangerous in itself. If someone gets even a harmless "tickle" when contacting your lighting system under certain conditions, they may jerk back involuntarily and knock into something or knock a nearby object over, perhaps with disastrous consequences.
If a cat's tongue is anything like a human tongue, it can be extremely conductive at very low voltages. (Take my word for it!) In my earlier days I had read in a science book that you could test the viabilty of a "dry cell" battery by touching its terminals to your tongue. I tried this with a 9-volt transistor radio battery and it knocked me off my feet. If your cat has a good sense of humor and is as curious as you indicate, you might set up a simple tempting experiment with a single AAA cell to see his reaction to even that level of voltage. |
455,239 | I am just curious of this, so:
if I change my "root" password using passwd, does this by default change my telnet and ftp password?
Also, is it possible to change telnet and ftp "root" account password differently from the system "root" account password? | 2012/07/30 | [
"https://superuser.com/questions/455239",
"https://superuser.com",
"https://superuser.com/users/149095/"
] | usually telnet ftp and so on on Linux rely on PAM.
root will therefore always have the same password to be
used with different services.
Some ftp implementations maintain their own user db and may not rely
on PAM and you may have different passwords then.
Anyway it's verly likely that services as telnet, ftp will not
allow root user, as they do not transfer data encrypted but plain
and anyone on the network could read the passwords | Telnet and ftp servers usually use Linux users for login. So if you change root password, root passwords for telnet and ftp will also change.
For the second question. You can add another user, login as him and run su command to change user to root. Or you can use sudo for commands that need root privileges. |
39,042 | There should be bronze, silver and gold badges awarded to accepted answers with a certain number of downvotes.
Take a look at [this one](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104/can-you-bring-the-color-back-to-meta/119#119), an accepted answer with a whopping of -42 downvotes! It's not easy to get your answer downvoted 30++ times, and it is not easy to get your answer accepted. Don't you think to get both is an accomplishment? | 2010/02/11 | [
"https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/39042",
"https://meta.stackexchange.com",
"https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/3834/"
] | No.
I don't see why we would like to reward a bad answer (judged so by the community) which is taken as accepted (depending only on the asker's judgment).
The opposite makes sense, and this is why it is rewarded ([Populist badge](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/badges/37/populist)).
Badges exist to "encourage" a good behavior, remember that. | As Gnoupi said, we don't want to reward bad answers.
If you were proposing new Badges for SO/SF/SU, your example shouldn't have been taken from Meta, where downvoting means something different.
Jeff's answer wasn't *technically* bad, it was just unpopular. |
433,068 | I have an Acer Aspire 6930G with an Nvidia 9600MGS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Every time I turn off my computer and then turn it back on the brightness is always set back at the lowest possible level. I like to use max brightness but the computer keeps reverting back to minimum brightness after I turn it off.
I installed Ubuntu on this computer a week ago and this has been happening since the first day.
Can anyone offer some solutions? I've tried a few and none of them worked for me, that's why I'm asking here | 2014/03/12 | [
"https://askubuntu.com/questions/433068",
"https://askubuntu.com",
"https://askubuntu.com/users/257396/"
] | The nmap tool will help you to draw a map of the services available from the outside world to your server. As such, it won't help you to protect your server but will tell you where to pay attention. The more open ports you have, the more potential problems you may have.
An open source tool like [OpenVAS](http://www.openvas.org) will be certainly more helpfull to you. OpenVAS is vulnerability scanner that will not only show which ports are open on your server(s) but also try various kind of well-know attacks on these services and report what he found, with link to official security news explaining what the vulnerability is and how to overcome it.
Running this tool on your server will certainly help you to understand how it is possible that your server is regularly hacked.
To secure the servers I'm responsible for, I follow these guidelines :
1. Reducing the number of open ports
2. Reducing the number of installed software to what is stricly necessary
3. Removing unwanted users and groups
4. Be sure that each users has a good password or are locked in case of system accounts
5. For each application running, review the security guidelines available in their official documentation
6. Performing software update when available
7. Enabling a valid logging and auditing mechanism to be able to determine how the hacking was done
An successful attack can be a combination of multiple factors : e.g. : weak password allowing unwanted FTP access, bad FTP configuration allowing to go the web root, bad permissions on filesystem allowing to write in the web root.
At your place, I would review all my users password, my FTP setup, my web server setup, the permissions in use and also I would have a look to the log files to see if I can find back a trace of the commands that were run to try understand where the weakness really lay.
A tool like OpenVAS will help you to figure out what is possible to do on your server you'd never thinked about. | If you have an active intrusion, scanning with Nmap is not going to get you anywhere. You need to replace the server with a properly-secured one and do forensics on the old one to determine the way the attackers got in. Linode has a decent guide to securing a server [here](https://library.linode.com/securing-your-server). |
3,348 | Since I'm investing in time to replace valve cover gasket, should I have mechanic inspect/repair/replace anything else related to valve cover assembly/dis-assembly?
Vehicle is 1997 Toyota Sienna. | 2012/04/20 | [
"https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/3348",
"https://mechanics.stackexchange.com",
"https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/users/963/"
] | Usually you check for the following:
* Brake disk thickness. All disks have a minimum thickness and when they reach it they need to be changed. Normally the minimum thickness should be marked on the disk itself, but you should find it stated in the workshop manual for your car as well
* Same for the brake pads, they should exceed a certain minimum thickness
* You also should check the condition of the friction surface and check that the whole pad sweep area is in good condition and not corroded. On some cars the calipers can corrode and you suddenly get the pad applied to only one side of the disk, for example
* Condition of the brake fluid. Normal fluid[1] should be roughly the color of cheap honey (light amber), if it's dark you want to change it. In fact, you should normally change it every two years anyway as it's hygroscopic.
* Check the condition of the brake hoses. Unless someone already fitted braided hoses, check that the rubber on the hoses isn't cracked.
All that said, if you haven't worked on brakes before it might be better to either have a pro work on them or get someone who knows what they're doing to help you. Brakes aren't really something you want to have fail on you...
[1] There are a couple of exceptions like the ATE blue stuff but people who put that sort of fluid into their cars tend to remember when they worked on the brakes last. | Perhaps this can be a bit of help:
>
> Brake squeal that goes away when you apply the brakes and comes back
> when you release them is the wear indicators meaning that your brake
> pads need to be replaced.
>
>
>
**Source:** [Squeaky Brakes: How much of a concern are they? answered Mar 21 '11 at 3:03 by Larry](https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/a/475/1643)
Also this video provides some good information on what to look for:
<http://www.ehow.com/video_5225926_car-brakes-need-replacing.html> |
4,923,446 | I have to get all words and their frequency from a web page and the other pages which are linked. Will I have to use any web crawler for that? Any simple open source solution? | 2011/02/07 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/4923446",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/506303/"
] | Open amplify should work perfectly for you.
<http://www.openamplify.com/> | In PHP you might get the content of the web page (using [file\_get\_content()](http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php) or curl), then [strip\_tags()](http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php) and [str\_word\_count()](http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.str-word-count.php) |
4,923,446 | I have to get all words and their frequency from a web page and the other pages which are linked. Will I have to use any web crawler for that? Any simple open source solution? | 2011/02/07 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/4923446",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/506303/"
] | [httrack](http://httrack.com)'s `%I` (create searchable index) option does exactly that.
The [documentation page](http://httrack.com/html/fcguide.html) explains this about half-way down, sorry, no deeplink available. Jump to the sentence fragment
>
> Still in testing, this option asks the engine to
>
>
> | In PHP you might get the content of the web page (using [file\_get\_content()](http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php) or curl), then [strip\_tags()](http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php) and [str\_word\_count()](http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.str-word-count.php) |
14,174 | So I understand that cooking sous vide has a potentially high risk of botulism due to the anaerobic environment (vacuum). As such, you need to be careful with time and temp combinations. If you are storing food for service later, you need to flash chill it and then keep it in a fridge below 4C. This is easy enough at a restaurant with a walk-in, but is somewhat difficult in a home fridge as opening the door creates wide temperature swings.
Douglas Baldwin proposes the following [temperature / time guideline](http://www.douglasbaldwin.com/sous-vide.html#Safety_Pathogens_of_Interest) for "safe" wrt botulism:
>
> [S]pores of Clostridium botulinum, C. perfringens and B. cereus can all survive the mild heat treatment of pasteurization. Therefore, after rapid chilling, the food must either be frozen or held at
>
>
> below 36.5°F (2.5°C) for up to 90 days,
>
> below 38°F (3.3°C) for less than 31 days,
>
> below 41°F (5°C) for less than 10 days, or
>
> below 44.5°F (7°C) for less than 5 days
>
>
>
So a couple of questions about those guidelines:
1. How big should I expect the swings in my home fridge to be with normal usage?
2. If I have a second fridge and the door rarely opens, what will the temperature swings be there?
3. Since the botulism concern is due to the vacuum, am I correct in thinking that this concern will disappear if I remove the meat from the vacuum to store it? Obviously, this approach would reintroduce all the normal safety concerns with storing cooked meat. | 2011/04/20 | [
"https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/14174",
"https://cooking.stackexchange.com",
"https://cooking.stackexchange.com/users/1259/"
] | Flash chilling is very simple. Just make sure you have a fairly large ice bath (ice and water that is at least 50% ice) and put the meat immediately from the heated bath into the ice bath. This will rapidly chill the meat prior to refrigeration. Make sure you leave the meat in the ice bath long enough for it to chill to the center if it's a thick cut or a roast.
**1 How big should I expect the swings in my home fridge to be with normal usage?**
The mild swings from opening and closing your refrigerator door a couple times a day aren't going to really make big difference. Just make sure you don't leave the door open for extended periods of time.
**2 If I have a second fridge and the door rarely opens, what will the temperature swings be there?**
There are a lot of things that influence the temperature of a refridgerator besides opening and closing the door. A refrigerator goes through cycles for chilling (and for defrosting) etc where the temperature varies. Some brands of refridgerators (i.e. Samsung) have separate cooling systems for the freezer and fridge portions so freezer defrost cycles do not cause swings in temperature in the fridge section.
Also, an empty refrigerator loses a lot more heat than a full refrigerator when the door is open. Storing plastic bottles of water or cans of soda and beer on empty shelves will actually make the temperature more constant over time since they retain more heat (or "cold") than air. Of course, if you turn a fridge into a beer-fridge, chances are that the door is gonna get opened a lot more.
**3 Since the botulism concern is due to the vacuum, am I correct in thinking that this concern will disappear if I remove the meat from the vacuum to store it? Obviously, this approach would reintroduce all the normal safety concerns with storing cooked meat.**
Sous-vide cooking should pasteurize the meat if it was cooked long enough and kill most . Keeping the pastuerized food that is sealed at a controlled temperature is going to preserve it for much longer than breaking open the seal and allowing any pathogens in before keeping it at the same temperature.
---
The most important thing is to follow the established safety charts for cooking times, temperatures, using correct flash chilling and then following the safety charts for storage temperatures and duration as well. | I'm not sure about your question 3, but as I thought about 1 and 2, I figured the swings would not be too big if you don't open your fridge for extended periods of time: how much air is really exchanged between the inside and the outside if you open your fridge door for 5 seconds - which already gives you plenty of time to get something out?
I figured the internets would have to know something about this so I set about searching for some graphs. Turns out Berkeley has a class that includes an experiment where students measure the temperature in their fridge over a 24 hr period. Most graphs look somewhat like [the one on this page](http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/courses/fa10/arch244/?p=2085), where indeed the swings in temperature from the [hysteresis window](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis) are larger than occasional increases because of opening the door.
I found two outliers. [The first one](http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/courses/fa10/arch244/?p=2045) is from a fridge catering to a large group of students, and the article suggests someone might have put a warm dish in the fridge. [The second one](http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/courses/fa10/arch244/?p=1205) is potentially very interesting - the author says she thinks the big upswing is from a wall defrosting cycle in the attached freezer, but that meal time opening of the fridge door didn't do anything to the temperatures.
So it looks like there are only two potential causes for raising the temperature of your fridge by more than a degree or so:
1. putting hot or warm food in your fridge;
2. having your fridge do a wall defrosting cycle for the attached freezer.
Other swings are negligible when compared to the natural operating cycle for your fridge. |
35,704 | Preamble
========
I recently bought a new AT2020 USB condenser microphone. Tossed up going with the XLR and getting a dedicated interface, but I'm not a sound engineer - I'm a computer programmer - and this is just a hobby, so I went with the easy and cheaper route (the microphone was heavily discounted).
The Problem
===========
The device at first seems fine. It can be used for a variety of purposes without issues arising. However, after about 5 minutes (rough estimate) of "using" the device - constant use in voice chat or recording software - it introduces a peculiar buzzing noise which seemingly cannot be fixed with software, but immediately disappears if I unplug the device and plug it in again.
Debugging
=========
* It seems that the problem may only arise on the USB3 ports on my motherboard's IO plate. I'm yet to do any proper testing, but to my memory, I've had no complaints of horrible static/buzzing over voice chat when it's been plugged into the case ports.
* I thought at first it may be a software issue with Hangouts, but last night I witnessed it while spending a protracted period listening to the device in Reason to tune a filter
* I'm yet to investigate the issue on devices other than my desktop, but I'll look into that and note my findings
Cheers :) | 2015/07/23 | [
"https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/35704",
"https://sound.stackexchange.com",
"https://sound.stackexchange.com/users/15011/"
] | Had the same problem *for years*, until I read this thread and decided to try some diagnostics testing before buying a new mic. Whaddya know? Problem basically solved.
Mic AT2020 USB
DAW: Reaper
Same thing, every 5 minutes, crackling for about a minute.
I tried different USB ports but that didn't help.
The problem, for me, turned out to be the ASIO driver. Didn't matter what settings, same problem. I tried installing a new ASIO, didn't help.
I switched to WASAPI driver (in Reaper) and the problem disappeared! I tried it with DirectSound and there was also no problem, other than the latency. But on WASAPI, the latency was barely audible.
Please respond if this helps!
Post edit: I found that going through a USB splitter also causes problems. | It could be some process that is particular noisy in your computer, which would explain the periodic nature of the noise.
You might get lucky with a USB Noise filter, e.g. like this one:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eBdhg.jpg)
<http://www.ebay.com/itm/Elfidelity-USB-Boosters-USB-audio-interface-Hi-Fi-Power-Filter-for-PC-DAC-AMP-/261827131893> |
18,895,348 | My client program wants to send a huge file to the server and in return the server program returns a double or triple sized file.
My question is, which approach should I use? Either TCP or UDP. | 2013/09/19 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/18895348",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2745755/"
] | This question is too broad, but the answer is *probably* TCP; if you're needing to transfer a file, TCP provides ordering and retransmission services that UDP doesn't, and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Along those lines, though, why reinvent HTTP? This sounds like a classic case for using a Web server. | UDP programmin but it will be difficult to implement |
18,895,348 | My client program wants to send a huge file to the server and in return the server program returns a double or triple sized file.
My question is, which approach should I use? Either TCP or UDP. | 2013/09/19 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/18895348",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2745755/"
] | You could utilize [**FTP (File Transfer Protocol)**](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol) for your use case.
It is very common and you can use it with java to get or to upload
files to the FTP server.
Also take a look at this question on SO: [**File upload in Java through FTP**](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11739153/file-upload-in-java-through-ftp)
---
If you still want to implement it yourself, I would recommend using **TCP**, since it offers you some services:
* Ordered data transfer — the destination host rearranges according to sequence number
* Retransmission of lost packets — any cumulative stream not acknowledged is retransmitted
* Error-free data transfer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#Data_transfer> | UDP programmin but it will be difficult to implement |
18,895,348 | My client program wants to send a huge file to the server and in return the server program returns a double or triple sized file.
My question is, which approach should I use? Either TCP or UDP. | 2013/09/19 | [
"https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/18895348",
"https://Stackoverflow.com",
"https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2745755/"
] | You could utilize [**FTP (File Transfer Protocol)**](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol) for your use case.
It is very common and you can use it with java to get or to upload
files to the FTP server.
Also take a look at this question on SO: [**File upload in Java through FTP**](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11739153/file-upload-in-java-through-ftp)
---
If you still want to implement it yourself, I would recommend using **TCP**, since it offers you some services:
* Ordered data transfer — the destination host rearranges according to sequence number
* Retransmission of lost packets — any cumulative stream not acknowledged is retransmitted
* Error-free data transfer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#Data_transfer> | This question is too broad, but the answer is *probably* TCP; if you're needing to transfer a file, TCP provides ordering and retransmission services that UDP doesn't, and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Along those lines, though, why reinvent HTTP? This sounds like a classic case for using a Web server. |
58,732 | Below are seven patterns in a sequence, 1 through 7.
Which of the patterns A through F would be number 8 in that sequence?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rb3eq.png) | 2018/01/04 | [
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/58732",
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com",
"https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/users/28756/"
] | I think it is
>
> **B**
>
>
>
Why:
>
> Composite positive integers are **4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, ...**. Each pattern contains figures with number of edges equal to factors of corresponding composite number (line represents number 2, triangle number 3, etc). The next one is 15, which is 3 \* 5 (triangle and pentagon).
>
>
> | An alternative answer suggested by the sequence index numbers:
>
> **A**
>
>
>
Explanation:
>
> Each sequence number is represented by its prime factors, including unity where fewer than two factors are present. Factors are represented with this substitution: *1*: a single line, *2*: triangle, *3*: pair of lines, *5*: pentagon, *7*: septagon. So *1* is represented as two single lines (1x1), *3* is a single line and a line pair (1x3), *4* is 2 triangles (2x2), *6* is a triangle and line pair (2x3), etc. The next number in the sequence is *8*, and the corresponding symbol would be three triangles (2x2x2).
>
>
>
This scheme is maybe a bit less intuitive than the accepted answer, but could be an interesting alternative. |
45,385 | If you were to attempt to define the rules of the grammar of a language, what would be the lowest level “unit” of syntax of which every valid utterance is some subtype? | 2022/10/21 | [
"https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/45385",
"https://linguistics.stackexchange.com",
"https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/35670/"
] | I think that phrase structure grammar assumed a symmetry or regularity in that all the fundamental units of syntax were phrases. SP’s are made of NP’s and VP’s; etc. It probably seemed theoretically self-consistent to have one unifying concept for all components of the sentence, and the sentence seemed like the top-most element.
But the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says that the fundamental unit of syntax is the clause, not the sentence, and that sentences are not a type of clause.
The grammar provides no explicit definition of “sentence” because it’s not part of their theory of syntax. Instead, what are commonly called sentences may be either **clauses** - *Kim likes beer* - or **coordinated clauses** - *Kim likes beer and she runs*. These two terms are not unified by some higher category. They are the top level. Which means that the clause, as the unit in which the rest is defined in relation to, have both a substructure and a superstructure.
By observation, five types of clauses are identified: declarative, closed and open interrogative, exclamative and imperative.
Each has its own “characteristic use” and a number of particular grammatical properties. | In the Minimalist approach, the *most* fundamental unit is "the set". An utterance may contain only one set ("Yes"), or three ("good boy" – the sets "good" and "boy" which merge into one set). To this, you can add "categories" like "noun", "verb", etc. and eventually you can arrive at groupings like "NP", "DP" and so on.
An alternative way of interpreting your question is whether there is some one node-type that is present in every grammatical derivation. That presupposes that there is a universal set of categories (not universally assumed, and the content of which is almost universally variable amongst practitioners who hold to a universal list of categories). The other problem is that "utterance" is really not a unit of syntax, it is a unit of human behavior. Thus "cat" is (can be) an utterance, but not necessarily a "valid syntactic unit". A speaker may be able to utter a fragment of a word, like "ish", but that does not mean that the grammar of the language generates that output (unless you insist that all speaker behavior has to be generated by the grammar). |
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