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I am fairly new to JavaEE, so I have some concepts still missing. I am learning Docker to use it in our DEV / CI Build environments. I could make it work on my machine. But for it to work in the CI server, my current approach would be to store the docker-compose.yml and dockerfiles in git and, in the CI server download it, build the images and start it. To setup the docker image for the web container (Wildfly) I had to add: * DB Drivers (.jar files) * Standalone.xml (.xml file) * Modules we use (mix of .xml and .jar files) But these files are not present in the CI server. I could download the DB drivers when building the image, but the modules and standalone.xml are not available online. Is this approach the reasonable? If so, where would one store these files so they get updated when needed and the CI Server is able to download them to build the image?

2016/01/28

For point 1. and 3. You could create private Ivy repository and fetch DB Drivers and Modules from it via your Build tool ( Mvn, Ant, Gradle support getting dependencies from Ivy repos ) when building your app. And for `.xml` files - you can have git repository for your Test Environment config files. Or have them encrypted in your app repository, and configure CI script to encrypt those files with key that will be embedded in that CI script. ( encrypt, so people with git access to your app won't get password to your test DB )

You need a reproducible build - this means you do not want your CI server downloading things from the internet on demand. You need to download them and otherwise collect everything needed for the build and store it somewhere accessible to the CI server. Now the easiest and most future-proof way of doing that is to store these things in their own source-controlled repository. Then you can update it or create a new set from different configurations with ease. You can also build a historical version if necessary. So: create a new repo for your Docker config, put what you need in there, and have your CI server grab both the docker config and application files from both repositories when it builds. You could even put the docker config in your source repo in a different directory if it makes more sense to you. Alternatively, you can store these things on the CI server directly as an installation of build tools (eg you already have to install a JDK) and simply keep it referenced as a known pre-requisite to setting up your system. The decision over which to use usually comes down to the size of the files.

We have ants in our house, and nothing I've tried so far has been sufficiently successful. Now I'm considering using ant traps, but only under the kitchen cabinets behind the plinth, a place where neither my cats nor my kids (a baby and a toddler) would ever be able to reach them (no chance of them getting in there). Would that be safe? Are there other aspects we'd need to consider?

2017/05/09

I don't think it is overstocked at the moment. But these are all schooling fish and they might be happier if the schools are a bit bigger. A better mix would be to remove 2 species (eg the tetra's and the barbs) and replace them with the other species (more corys and rainbows for example). 6-7 fish for a 'school' is usually really them minimum.

Yah. Not overstocked but it will be if you have their appropriate schools. Try two or three schools of the smaller species like zebra danios and turquoise rainbows. You could possibly put some guppies in if you are interested.

We have ants in our house, and nothing I've tried so far has been sufficiently successful. Now I'm considering using ant traps, but only under the kitchen cabinets behind the plinth, a place where neither my cats nor my kids (a baby and a toddler) would ever be able to reach them (no chance of them getting in there). Would that be safe? Are there other aspects we'd need to consider?

2017/05/09

I don't think it is overstocked at the moment. But these are all schooling fish and they might be happier if the schools are a bit bigger. A better mix would be to remove 2 species (eg the tetra's and the barbs) and replace them with the other species (more corys and rainbows for example). 6-7 fish for a 'school' is usually really them minimum.

So, I'm going to slightly disagree with the idea to keep AND add to the rainbows pop. This is one of my favorite breeds of freshwater community fish too, so although my heart says keep those beauties, my experience says differently. They get about 4" (10 cm) in length and need a decent sized school to be happy. It's said that if you have a proper school a 50+ gallon (190+ liters) tank is what's necessary. Volume isn't the issue with these guys, it's the length of the tank that's needed for their swimming patterns. They are lateral swimmers, middle dwellers, and need the length of 48" (around 120 cm) of more unfortunately. I'd say remove the two turquoise rainbows (especially since they'll get the biggest), two more zebra danios and add two more corys. I think your 5 cherry barb and 5 serpae tetras WILL be fine the way they are. Since it's a 30 gallon, and since your question shows your concern for overcrowding. Good luck and have fun!

We have ants in our house, and nothing I've tried so far has been sufficiently successful. Now I'm considering using ant traps, but only under the kitchen cabinets behind the plinth, a place where neither my cats nor my kids (a baby and a toddler) would ever be able to reach them (no chance of them getting in there). Would that be safe? Are there other aspects we'd need to consider?

2017/05/09

So, I'm going to slightly disagree with the idea to keep AND add to the rainbows pop. This is one of my favorite breeds of freshwater community fish too, so although my heart says keep those beauties, my experience says differently. They get about 4" (10 cm) in length and need a decent sized school to be happy. It's said that if you have a proper school a 50+ gallon (190+ liters) tank is what's necessary. Volume isn't the issue with these guys, it's the length of the tank that's needed for their swimming patterns. They are lateral swimmers, middle dwellers, and need the length of 48" (around 120 cm) of more unfortunately. I'd say remove the two turquoise rainbows (especially since they'll get the biggest), two more zebra danios and add two more corys. I think your 5 cherry barb and 5 serpae tetras WILL be fine the way they are. Since it's a 30 gallon, and since your question shows your concern for overcrowding. Good luck and have fun!

Yah. Not overstocked but it will be if you have their appropriate schools. Try two or three schools of the smaller species like zebra danios and turquoise rainbows. You could possibly put some guppies in if you are interested.

I received a new iPhone yesterday and connected it to my home Wifi network. On content heavy sites it runs perfectly fine, but if I use either the Youtube site or the Youtube app I can't watch anything. It takes forever to watch 5 seconds of video. My first question is, how can I be sure that my phone is using local Wifi for the internet connection and Youtube app (it says connected in the settings, but is there an icon in the display etc. to confirm Wifi connection)? Any suggestions as to why Youtube runs slow when other heavy sites load without problem?

2011/03/22

Yes, you can have both versions. In fact you can install the new Firefox in your home directory's Application folder (and it will be only accessible with your account). If you don't have ~/Applications folder, you can create it (and Finder will mark it with the same icon as the /Applications one). Note that you cannot use both versions simultaneously. You can also rename the Firefox.app to Firefox 4.app, and install it in /Applications - it'll work flawlesly. ps. I prefer the first method - Install applications that I'm testing in my home Applications folder, and when I'm sure they're ok, move them/replace application in /Applications.

Once you install it in separate directories, you can in fact **run them both simultaneously**. It just takes a little Firefox flags magic as explained here in [this article](http://www.shankrila.com/firefox/howto-run-firefox4-firefox3-simultaneously/).

We have a Honeywell whole-house humidifier attached to the duct directly above the heating element/electronics of our furnace. A few possible pertinent facts: * The water intake is attached via a saddle valve. * The drainage line leads to a pump. The intake for the pump is a PVC pipe, which the drainage line rests inside. The drainage line for the pump resides in a sink in another room. * The humidistat is attached to the intake duct. Whenever we run the humidifier, we end up with a small amount of water on the floor. It doesn't tend to appear for some time, but it consistently appears within 4-8 hours. I have never actually observed the water exiting the humidifier, so I don't know where it's coming from precisely. Part of my concern (and the reason that we don't currently use the humidifier) is that the water is draining down the interior of the duct. I'm reasonably certain that the pump is not the reason for the leak. I've poured water directly into the pump's intake pipe and it proved capable of handling the water as fast as I supplied it. I've also changed the filter in the humidifier, but the leak persisted. The final wrinkle is that we had a plumber in for an unrelated issue who observed that the water pressure in our house is abnormally high (I believe he said it was 150 PSI, but I may remember incorrectly). My questions: 1. What are the likely reasons for the leak? 2. How can I definitively determine where the leak is originating from without watching the humidifier for hours? 3. Is the high water pressure a possible culprit?

2015/03/12

I can only provide anecdotal answers to questions 2 & 3. 2. I have successfully used a few drops of concentrated food coloring, at different places I suspect for leaks in a water softener and its related valves and plumbing. I used 3 different colors if memory serves me right. We had a very slow/unnoticeable leak, apart from the puddle of course. I was able to determine which valve is was based on the color dye that showed up in the leak (blue in this case). 3. The failed water softener in this case did fail due to high water pressure. I would see if there is any manufacturers rating for the humidifier's working water pressure. There is no telling what parts, valves or plumbing inside the unit make be deforming/failing under such high pressure. Good luck in your troubleshooting and fix.

Our humidifier leaks in a similar manner, but the only way I could figure it out was to run the humidifier and watch for it (sounds awfully boring). I tracked it down to a tiny leak in the spout that feeds the overflow tube. The drops were running down the tube and leaking off the lowest point (where it curves), which was a few inches away from the humidifier. Good luck!

When another moderator sends a direct user message, the notification appears for all other moderators as a dropdown alert. This is somewhat distracting, and also impossible to get back to once it's closed. I feel like this type of alert makes more sense *for moderators* as a global inbox notification, since it's more of a "you should read this message" inbox type item. For users on the receiving end, it should probably be *both* a global inbox notification *and* a dropdown message, to ensure that they receive it.

2011/06/30

The users **also typically get an email -- you know, a real, physical email in their email inbox** -- and that contains the text with a link to the moderator message URL, so I'm not sure I can agree with this. It is the default option when sending a moderator message.

*When I logged in today I could swear I saw a moderator message appear* right before Firefox died loading another page\*. I don't know what it was. I can't find anything in my inbox which would generate such a message. Perhaps it was a badge notification or a notice on an open bounty? or? But I don't see any recent badges that I didn't already know about. My bounties still have a few days to go...?? (and haven't generated much interest anyways...) It would be awesome if there was some simple way just to keep a record of which notifications I recently *should've seen* barring the gamma ray burst which just hosed my browser... Note: This doesn't have to be a queue, it could simply be listed in the profile under **activity** as a separate sub-tag **system notifications** (or perhaps simply **system**).

When another moderator sends a direct user message, the notification appears for all other moderators as a dropdown alert. This is somewhat distracting, and also impossible to get back to once it's closed. I feel like this type of alert makes more sense *for moderators* as a global inbox notification, since it's more of a "you should read this message" inbox type item. For users on the receiving end, it should probably be *both* a global inbox notification *and* a dropdown message, to ensure that they receive it.

2011/06/30

As per [Moderator message notifications should be red in the global inbox for those involved](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/133837/moderator-message-notifications-should-be-red-in-the-global-inbox), this has now been implemented as a "notification" (not an inbox message), and will be changed to a proper inbox message soon.

*When I logged in today I could swear I saw a moderator message appear* right before Firefox died loading another page\*. I don't know what it was. I can't find anything in my inbox which would generate such a message. Perhaps it was a badge notification or a notice on an open bounty? or? But I don't see any recent badges that I didn't already know about. My bounties still have a few days to go...?? (and haven't generated much interest anyways...) It would be awesome if there was some simple way just to keep a record of which notifications I recently *should've seen* barring the gamma ray burst which just hosed my browser... Note: This doesn't have to be a queue, it could simply be listed in the profile under **activity** as a separate sub-tag **system notifications** (or perhaps simply **system**).

I have a Ph.D. in pure math (interested in Harmonic analysis and operator theory). I am looking forward some proper references to lead me get the foundation of discrete/signal processing more and more. Actually, I had a review of the Heppenheim's books (both signal and digital ones) and (rather) got what he is saying in these (very nice) book. Now, I am going to develop my knowledge concerning this context and do need to cover some more advanced ones. Thanks in advances for you suggestions. Probably based on my own field, I would like to read on some texts whose approaches are focused on theoretical bases. However having some (proper) references which make me feel (realize) some real applications are in priority.

2020/10/23

You have already read those Oppenheim's Signals & Systems, and Discrete-Time Signal Processing books. I'm not sure what you mean by *foundations* but in some sense these two are also the foundations on signal processing. In other words, there are no (popular & successful) graduate level DSP books that discuss at an advanced level the *same topics* that are covered on them. However the following books (or subjects) will enhance your understanding, or broaden your appreciation of the subject. First of all, the very first graduate level course on DSP, Communications, and Control is called **Linear System Theory** which brings together all the undergraduate mathematical stuff from a new, advanced, deeper, and foundational point of view of the Hilbert (linear vector) Spaces, Linear Mappings, and Matrix theory. It does not have a definite book but a bunch of books on Linear Algebra & Matrices, Measure Theory, and Diferential Equations were used. Note that there's a control theory oriented bunch of Linear System Theory books (Desoer's crew) that I do not recommend for DSP, unless you will be designing control systems on the field. Signal processing does not make much use of state-space approach, unless it's absolutely necessary. Then the second refresher/deepener is on **Probability, Statistics and Random Processes**. Fortunately it has two very strongly recomended books though: * Statistical Digital Signal Procesing \_ Monson HAYES * Discrete RaNdom Signals and Statistical Signal Processing \_ THERRIEN The first book is a must read, the second one is following the style of Oppenheim series but is harder to follow, and less practical than the first. Then the following books / subjects will be awating you : * Adaptive Filter Theory \_ HAYKIN * Multiresolution Signal Decomposition \_ AKANSU * Multirate Digital Signal Processing \_ RABINER * Estimation & Detection Theory \_ KAY * Pattern Classification \_ DUDA * Theory and Applications of Digital Signal Processing \_ RABINER & GOLD Then the following applications will make your day : * Speech and Hearing for Communication - FLETCHER * Digital Processing of Speech \_ Rabiner * Speech and Audio Signal Processing \_ GOLD * Discrete-Time Processing of Speech \_ PROAKIS * Advances in Speech Coding \_ GERSHO * Two-Dimensional Signal and Image Processing \_ LIM * Digital Image Processing \_ GONZALES * Fundamentals of Image Processing \_ JAIN * Signal Compression\_JAYANT * Introduction to Data compression \_ SAYOOD Of course the list is by no means complete...

I found these books to be very good in their respective field: [J.R. Ohm - Multimedia Communication Technology](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/3540012494) This has focus on representation and transmission of signals. It follows a practical approach hands down and features very good, informative illustrations. In general, Ohm's books are recommendable. His newest one is about feature extraction, but I have not read it yet. [Cover and Thomas - Elements of Information Theory](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0471241954) As the title suggests, this has more of a theoretical approach. It is not about signal processing per se, but I found it very insightful. It covers the mathematical and stochastic aspects of any kind of information transmission. As I said, this is not about DSP, but more about how to get signals over a channel of some kind. As theoretical as it is, it provides extremely useful background knowledge in my everyday work as an engineer. [Vary and Martin - Digital Speech Transmission](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0471560189) As the title says, this is all about speech communication. If you are interested in this particular field, this is a good overview. All these are quite special and not directly about DSP, but with Oppenheim you already have the basics and to dive deeper into *everything*, the field is just to broad for one book to cover it all.

I am traveling from Stockholm to Dubai and Dubai to Nairobi using two different airlines. I have Kenyan nationality and can't go through Immigration because I don't have a Dubai visa. How I will get my luggage?

2015/02/27

If your luggage is not checked through, then I am afraid you will have to collect it and to do that you'll need a visa as the baggage carousels are *after* the immigration counters. The sequence is: 1. De-plane. 2. Depending on the terminal, you'll have a long walk (and then go down a few flights of stairs) or a short one, or really no walk at all (if you are at Terminal 2, as the bus will drop you right at the immigration counter). 3. The bank counter where you pay for the on-arrival visa will be on your right (Terminal 3, 2), or on your left (Terminal 1). 4. Go through immigration, then turn right to go through the metal detectors where they will scan your carryon luggage (in Terminal 3 its a straight walk). 5. Collect your baggage. 6. Go through either the Green Channel or the Red Channel (depending on what you have to declare). 7. Welcome to Dubai. I'm afraid you'll need a visa - the good news is a transit visa is available at the counter if you can show a continuing ticket/itinerary.

Do you plan to actually immigrate into Dubai (will you leave the airport)? Without a visa you will not be able to leave the transit area of the airport. It sounds like you are just passing through Dubai on a layover. You will be forced to go through arrival security check after you deplane no matter what your Nationality is. Whether or not you are flying with airlines in the same alliance, you will need to pick up your bag from the customs baggage drop, which will be after the security check but before immigration. Don't worry you'll see a lot of people in the same situation as you. Follow the crowd if in doubt. Or just ask one of the airport staff. They speak many languages. The next step will depend if your itinerary was booked with the same airline or alliance or not. If your bags are checked through, your bag should already have a tag indicating your final destination (NBO). If it already has a tag for NBO, then just drop it off at the baggage intake. If not, then you will need to go to the transfer desk (still in the "sterile" zone, within the transit area) of the airline you have your final flight on to issue your luggage documents, and then you will take your tagged bag to the baggage intake. As long as your baggage has a tag with NBO marked on it, you will be OK.

A friend of a friend has on multiple occasions aggressively asked how my self-study for software engineering interviews is going. Most recently I answered very briefly, because I find it too nosy and the person to be arrogant and presumptuous. I don't like for example that he's convinced that I seem too calm about the job interview preparation process and that I don't push myself hard enough. Initially I just listened to him rant over the phone, and after he realized he was doing all the talking he then asked for my input and I answered honestly. Then he would "check in" with me over Messenger or when I ran into him at a party it would be the first topic of conversation. Since he didn't change, one thing I did when he was doing the same to someone else right in front of me was I asked "What do you mean?" and he simply acknowledged he was rambling. I've been distancing myself from him as of late which is tricky since he's in a few of my friend groups - I have no desire to "win." How do I convey that I'm not interested in him essentially interrogating me and opining in career-related matters?

2019/11/11

It sounds like you have already figured out this person's *motivation* for asking you questions - they want to give you advice. "Advice-giver" is a [recognised personality trait](https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/evolution-the-self/201308/what-you-should-know-about-advice-givers), and many do it for their own ego gratification. As the opportunity to give advice is evidently what is prompting the questions, if you stop fuelling him by answering them, the advice will hopefully stop. [This article](https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201506/9-ways-handle-nosy-people) on Psychology Today suggests various ways of dealing with nosy people. Two of those ways are: 1. **Tell the truth** This could be the best approach if you don't want to be rude to the person. Answer their questions, but severely limit what you tell them. If they ask how it is going, you could just say "*it's going great, thanks*". Give yes/no answers to their questions if you think that will cut him short. If he persists then you could cut it short by saying something like "*that's a lot of questions, shall we talk about something else?*" 2. **Deflection** If you are comfortable being more direct in telling them that you don't want to talk about this, this approach is about not answering any questions at all. Change the subject - perhaps say "*I'm bored with study, I'd rather talk about something else"*. Other techniques include stating your discomfort about the questions, but that may send the message that your self-study is not going too well, and that may not be the message you want to send. Ultimately though, not allowing an 'advice-giver' to give you advice is like starving them of their oxygen. They will not be interested in pursuing you for answers if they aren't getting what they want out of it.

From the way you describe it in your question, it sounds to me like you're already dealing with the situation perfectly well. As you yourself have said: you let them ramble on, you were honest with them when asked for feedback, then later you distanced yourself from them. It sounds like you have already "convey[ed] that [you're] not interested in him essentially interrogating [you] and opining in career-related matters". It also sounds like this person is just one of the many random people you'll run into in your life. This guy could be an arrogant loudmouth, or he could be clumsily and unsuccessfully trying to make friends; we can't know. In short: keep on doing what you're doing - he'll get the message and leave you alone. If you don't feel that's good enough - that you've already tried the polite approach - then you can more forcefully reiterate your disinterest, or simply ignore them and go and talk to someone else. You're not obliged to entertain every person who wants to talk at you, after all.

I need to monitor open and closed ports on dozens of hosts. I've found a [Nagios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios) plugin that does what I need, but I would have to use this script through [NRPE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios#Nagios_Remote_Plugin_Executor). Some of the hosts are powered by Linux and they all have Perl installed. But some of them are Windows machines, and it's not convenient for me to install Perl on every one of them. That's why I can not use this plugin. I hope that there's Nagios plugin that uses [Nmap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap), or something similar, so it could check ports on every host remotely, without installing plugins on remote hosts, only on the server.

2010/03/30

What do you mean to check ports on hosts remotely? Do you just want to connect to the port to see if it is open? The check\_tcp plugin will do that, if, that's what you want to do. Not quite sure what you mean.

i really like nagios. have been using it for years. i even do some oracle database management with it, but what nagios really is is an availability monitoring tool. i think what you are asking for is better fulfilled by another software like [openvas](http://www.openvas.org/) or [snort](http://www.snort.org/).

I need to monitor open and closed ports on dozens of hosts. I've found a [Nagios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios) plugin that does what I need, but I would have to use this script through [NRPE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios#Nagios_Remote_Plugin_Executor). Some of the hosts are powered by Linux and they all have Perl installed. But some of them are Windows machines, and it's not convenient for me to install Perl on every one of them. That's why I can not use this plugin. I hope that there's Nagios plugin that uses [Nmap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap), or something similar, so it could check ports on every host remotely, without installing plugins on remote hosts, only on the server.

2010/03/30

What do you mean to check ports on hosts remotely? Do you just want to connect to the port to see if it is open? The check\_tcp plugin will do that, if, that's what you want to do. Not quite sure what you mean.

I suppose what you want is to make sure that there is no "positive" response on any port apart from a short whitelist. I can see how you would prefer not to have 65000 check\_tcp:s on each host :) Mind you, I'm not sure nagios is really your best bet for this. Partly, it risks being a test that is always red and also, if you are serious about it, you should not limit the check to hosts that you actually know about. This sits awkwardly with Nagios which expects a host as the basic unit of configuration. Personally, I would probably have a separate tool that mailed me when something new shows up. In its most trivial form, this would be just a script that reacted to a non-zero diff of nmap output between today and yesterday and mailed me. In more complex form, such software tend to be sorted as IDSes which are not my expertise, but Google may be able to help.

I need to monitor open and closed ports on dozens of hosts. I've found a [Nagios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios) plugin that does what I need, but I would have to use this script through [NRPE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios#Nagios_Remote_Plugin_Executor). Some of the hosts are powered by Linux and they all have Perl installed. But some of them are Windows machines, and it's not convenient for me to install Perl on every one of them. That's why I can not use this plugin. I hope that there's Nagios plugin that uses [Nmap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap), or something similar, so it could check ports on every host remotely, without installing plugins on remote hosts, only on the server.

2010/03/30

What do you mean to check ports on hosts remotely? Do you just want to connect to the port to see if it is open? The check\_tcp plugin will do that, if, that's what you want to do. Not quite sure what you mean.

It sounds like you need a nagios check for changes/alerts in [pbnj](http://pbnj.sourceforge.net/) Use nagios to monitor the tool that tracks the changes, don't try to shim Nagios to track the changes.

I need to monitor open and closed ports on dozens of hosts. I've found a [Nagios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios) plugin that does what I need, but I would have to use this script through [NRPE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios#Nagios_Remote_Plugin_Executor). Some of the hosts are powered by Linux and they all have Perl installed. But some of them are Windows machines, and it's not convenient for me to install Perl on every one of them. That's why I can not use this plugin. I hope that there's Nagios plugin that uses [Nmap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap), or something similar, so it could check ports on every host remotely, without installing plugins on remote hosts, only on the server.

2010/03/30

I suppose what you want is to make sure that there is no "positive" response on any port apart from a short whitelist. I can see how you would prefer not to have 65000 check\_tcp:s on each host :) Mind you, I'm not sure nagios is really your best bet for this. Partly, it risks being a test that is always red and also, if you are serious about it, you should not limit the check to hosts that you actually know about. This sits awkwardly with Nagios which expects a host as the basic unit of configuration. Personally, I would probably have a separate tool that mailed me when something new shows up. In its most trivial form, this would be just a script that reacted to a non-zero diff of nmap output between today and yesterday and mailed me. In more complex form, such software tend to be sorted as IDSes which are not my expertise, but Google may be able to help.

i really like nagios. have been using it for years. i even do some oracle database management with it, but what nagios really is is an availability monitoring tool. i think what you are asking for is better fulfilled by another software like [openvas](http://www.openvas.org/) or [snort](http://www.snort.org/).

I need to monitor open and closed ports on dozens of hosts. I've found a [Nagios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios) plugin that does what I need, but I would have to use this script through [NRPE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios#Nagios_Remote_Plugin_Executor). Some of the hosts are powered by Linux and they all have Perl installed. But some of them are Windows machines, and it's not convenient for me to install Perl on every one of them. That's why I can not use this plugin. I hope that there's Nagios plugin that uses [Nmap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap), or something similar, so it could check ports on every host remotely, without installing plugins on remote hosts, only on the server.

2010/03/30

It sounds like you need a nagios check for changes/alerts in [pbnj](http://pbnj.sourceforge.net/) Use nagios to monitor the tool that tracks the changes, don't try to shim Nagios to track the changes.

i really like nagios. have been using it for years. i even do some oracle database management with it, but what nagios really is is an availability monitoring tool. i think what you are asking for is better fulfilled by another software like [openvas](http://www.openvas.org/) or [snort](http://www.snort.org/).

I need to monitor open and closed ports on dozens of hosts. I've found a [Nagios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios) plugin that does what I need, but I would have to use this script through [NRPE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios#Nagios_Remote_Plugin_Executor). Some of the hosts are powered by Linux and they all have Perl installed. But some of them are Windows machines, and it's not convenient for me to install Perl on every one of them. That's why I can not use this plugin. I hope that there's Nagios plugin that uses [Nmap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap), or something similar, so it could check ports on every host remotely, without installing plugins on remote hosts, only on the server.

2010/03/30

This guy has developed a nagios script for linux that does exactly what you are asking: <http://www.altsec.info/check_scan.html> I'm trying now to find a Windows equivalent Miguel

i really like nagios. have been using it for years. i even do some oracle database management with it, but what nagios really is is an availability monitoring tool. i think what you are asking for is better fulfilled by another software like [openvas](http://www.openvas.org/) or [snort](http://www.snort.org/).

I need to monitor open and closed ports on dozens of hosts. I've found a [Nagios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios) plugin that does what I need, but I would have to use this script through [NRPE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios#Nagios_Remote_Plugin_Executor). Some of the hosts are powered by Linux and they all have Perl installed. But some of them are Windows machines, and it's not convenient for me to install Perl on every one of them. That's why I can not use this plugin. I hope that there's Nagios plugin that uses [Nmap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap), or something similar, so it could check ports on every host remotely, without installing plugins on remote hosts, only on the server.

2010/03/30

This guy has developed a nagios script for linux that does exactly what you are asking: <http://www.altsec.info/check_scan.html> I'm trying now to find a Windows equivalent Miguel

I suppose what you want is to make sure that there is no "positive" response on any port apart from a short whitelist. I can see how you would prefer not to have 65000 check\_tcp:s on each host :) Mind you, I'm not sure nagios is really your best bet for this. Partly, it risks being a test that is always red and also, if you are serious about it, you should not limit the check to hosts that you actually know about. This sits awkwardly with Nagios which expects a host as the basic unit of configuration. Personally, I would probably have a separate tool that mailed me when something new shows up. In its most trivial form, this would be just a script that reacted to a non-zero diff of nmap output between today and yesterday and mailed me. In more complex form, such software tend to be sorted as IDSes which are not my expertise, but Google may be able to help.

I need to monitor open and closed ports on dozens of hosts. I've found a [Nagios](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios) plugin that does what I need, but I would have to use this script through [NRPE](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagios#Nagios_Remote_Plugin_Executor). Some of the hosts are powered by Linux and they all have Perl installed. But some of them are Windows machines, and it's not convenient for me to install Perl on every one of them. That's why I can not use this plugin. I hope that there's Nagios plugin that uses [Nmap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap), or something similar, so it could check ports on every host remotely, without installing plugins on remote hosts, only on the server.

2010/03/30

This guy has developed a nagios script for linux that does exactly what you are asking: <http://www.altsec.info/check_scan.html> I'm trying now to find a Windows equivalent Miguel

It sounds like you need a nagios check for changes/alerts in [pbnj](http://pbnj.sourceforge.net/) Use nagios to monitor the tool that tracks the changes, don't try to shim Nagios to track the changes.

I’m curious if I have a legitimate concern or if I’m just being overly paranoid. I have a rechargeable Lithium-Polymer battery (prismatic shaped) rated for a max charging temperature of 45 °C. The battery rests against a circuit board that I know can generate some heat when charging the battery (500 mA current via an MCP73831 IC). It can get up to around 49 °C in a single location on the board (say about 1/4”x1/4” in size) and a dissipated temperature around that (I even measured 63 °C once on the hot spot but haven’t been able to reproduce it). That is for the back of the board where the battery rests (the front side can get up to 80 °C at the charger IC). Is there any legitimate concern that this will heat the battery during charging? There is nothing between the LiPo and the board. Using a thermal camera, it doesn’t seem like any heat really transfers well to the battery, so it seems like it should be okay, but I’m no expert in heat transfer, especially if it remained in the described state/position for a few hours. The battery and board would sit inside a plastic enclosure.

2019/06/01

Lithium-Polymer service life is seriously degraded at high temperatures, especially when fully charged. The cooler you can keep the battery the better. I suggest using a more efficient switch-mode charging IC such as the TP5000.

Now, the question is: How much of it do the powerful chips that generate a lot of heat ("heat" is thermal energy) transfer into the battery; that's a question of considering where the heat goes. First thing to realize is that if you have a perfectly sealed, perfectly thermally isolated box, it's going to heat up forever, and at one point break down/melt/outshine the sun in its temperature. Obviously, that's not happening, because the enclosure of your device isn't a perfect thermal isolator. Conversely, your board itself isn't a perfect thermal conductor, either: if that were the case, all spots on the board would instantly have the same temperature! So, in a first step, it'd be important to model how warm your overall device gets. Lets consider it as a black box: Inside, someone converts \$P\$ watts of electrical power to heat, and these will need to be dissipated to the environment in order to stop the infinite heating up. Now, the way we model that actually uses similar terminology as we're used from Ohm's law: There's *thermal resistance*, that tells us how much something is in the way of heat flow. Its unit is typically "K/W", or "°C/W" and tells us how much hotter something gets if a specific power is converted to heat inside. You'll often find IC datasheet specifying something like a "junction to environment thermal resistance 45 °C/W", and together with an estimate of how much power the IC uses (for example, voltage drop times current in a linear voltage regulator), you can tell how much hotter than ambient things get. So, our process goes like the following: 1. Estimate how much power is converted to heat in your system. 2. Estimate the thermal resistance of your enclosure; that times the power from 1. gives you how much hotter the inside of the enclosure is than the outside From here, I'd guess that in any typical device, improvements are minor by being more detailed: If you're already above 45 °C, then you're not colder anywhere inside the box (after a while, at least), and your device needs better cooling. If you're sufficiently below, and there are enough places heat can go without going through the battery, you honestly don't need to worry too much. Problematic would be if you're close below 45 °C inner-enclosure temperature; then you'd need to calculate further: 3. Estimate how much warmer the components in close proximity to the battery are than the in-box environment: same procedure as above, but ambient temperature is the already elevated one of the inside of the box. 4. calculate the heat transport that reaches the battery by putting all thermal resistances in parallel between the heat source and the battery and calculate how much heat will flow into the battery. Step 3. and 4. are pretty often done in simulation, because estimating how much heat a complex PCB and a battery fixation will transport is hard. Step 1. and 2. can be done pretty well by hand: For the outside of the box, you can often assume something like "well enough ventilated place" and hence assume cooling by *convection* and maybe radiation. There's ready-to-use formulas that relate horizontal and vertical surface area to the resulting thermal conductivity and resistance.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

Seems like the answer is NO. While others here have helpfully suggested workarounds to try, the answer as to whether the piece of hardware I asked about exists in a single piece is NO.

The emulator that you want does exist. You are looking for an emulator that emulates a USB Floppy Drive. So the emulator connects to the computer via a USB cable, and the storage media is a USB Flash Drive. Do a Google search on "UFA1M44-100" and you will find one model of emulator that emulates a USB Floppy Drive. You can find another company that sells these if you do a Google search on "IntelliRob Systems". Look in the menu on the left side of their pages for "1.44 MB (USB) acts as USB Floppy Drive". I was trying to find a way to get a USB Flash Drive to act as a floppy without any emulator, but I finally gave up and started to look for a regular USB Floppy Drive. That is when I stumbled upon these USB Floppy Drive Emulators. I've already bought a USB Floppy Drive, but these emulators still interest me, so I may yet buy one. If you do buy one, please let us know how well it works out.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

There's no way a USB anything can transparently emulate a floppy drive without a driver being preinstalled. The traditional PC floppy drive was an ISA device and appeared on specific I/O ports (0x3F0 to 0x3F6 IIRC). Reading and writing to these ports was how you talked to the floppy drive. USB peripherals talk to a USB controller, but do not otherwise have a connection to the system bus. So they cannot appear at the x86 I/O addresses where something expecting a traditional floppy would be trying to read/write. USB keyboards and mice look like PS/2 device to DOS and BIOS by a sleight of hand called "System Management Mode" - unfortunately this is part of BIOS/UEFI firmware and not easily/publicly available to operating systems to customize. It may be possible for a device or software to hook into BIOS routines that read/write to the floppy, but by the time you get to that prompt in the Windows XP installer, Windows is already running and not using the BIOS to read/write to devices. Really doing this would at least require a direct connection to the ISA or PCI/PCI-E bus. And many motherboard chipsets already have a Super I/O chip or equivalent that acts as a floppy controller, and already appears in those locations. The HxC devices mentioned by @tofro are probably what you want. Search for "cf card floppy emulator."

You can install XP in IDE mode and install the AHCI drivers afterwards, I did this on my netbook several times. I think it goes something like: * Set disk controller to IDE mode in bios, and install XP. * In device manager go to the disk controller and manually change the driver to the AHCI one. * Reboot into bios and change disk controller to AHCI mode. * Save and reboot, XP should now load successfully. If you miss any step you will likely get the BSOD.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

I don't think anyone sells something like that in one piece. There are, however, components on the market that should allow you to build that from scratch: 1. A GoTek or HxC that behaves like a "real" floppy 2. An *old* Floppy-to-USB adapter that was used to connect "real" floppies over USB. I don't think they're still made, so you would need to source one from eBay. Newer USB floppy drives no longer have this as I have learned from answers to [this](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5428/is-there-anything-useful-for-a-retro-in-these-cheap-chinese-floppy-drives) question. 3. Some sort of external power supply, as the GoTek/HxC will not be willing to live from the USB power supply. Putting it all together would end you up with something that behaves like a real floppy, connected over USB. This is, however, never going to be a full replacement for a "real" floppy disk drive. Old computer's abilities to for example boot from USB floppies have always been very limited (even if they could always boot very well from standard floppy drives). Once you find one that does this, it will most probably also boot from a standard USB flash stick. You'd probably be much better off by buying a bunch of HD disks and storing them well. Another, entirely different, but possibly long-term method to make Windows XP think it has a floppy drive would be a *[virtual floppy driver](http://vfd.sourceforge.net)*. This just emulates a floppy based on an image stored on hard disk and could be a solution for many problems. You'd obviously need to have a drive and disk first in order to pull the images from "real" disks.

You can install XP in IDE mode and install the AHCI drivers afterwards, I did this on my netbook several times. I think it goes something like: * Set disk controller to IDE mode in bios, and install XP. * In device manager go to the disk controller and manually change the driver to the AHCI one. * Reboot into bios and change disk controller to AHCI mode. * Save and reboot, XP should now load successfully. If you miss any step you will likely get the BSOD.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

I don't think anyone sells something like that in one piece. There are, however, components on the market that should allow you to build that from scratch: 1. A GoTek or HxC that behaves like a "real" floppy 2. An *old* Floppy-to-USB adapter that was used to connect "real" floppies over USB. I don't think they're still made, so you would need to source one from eBay. Newer USB floppy drives no longer have this as I have learned from answers to [this](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5428/is-there-anything-useful-for-a-retro-in-these-cheap-chinese-floppy-drives) question. 3. Some sort of external power supply, as the GoTek/HxC will not be willing to live from the USB power supply. Putting it all together would end you up with something that behaves like a real floppy, connected over USB. This is, however, never going to be a full replacement for a "real" floppy disk drive. Old computer's abilities to for example boot from USB floppies have always been very limited (even if they could always boot very well from standard floppy drives). Once you find one that does this, it will most probably also boot from a standard USB flash stick. You'd probably be much better off by buying a bunch of HD disks and storing them well. Another, entirely different, but possibly long-term method to make Windows XP think it has a floppy drive would be a *[virtual floppy driver](http://vfd.sourceforge.net)*. This just emulates a floppy based on an image stored on hard disk and could be a solution for many problems. You'd obviously need to have a drive and disk first in order to pull the images from "real" disks.

The emulator that you want does exist. You are looking for an emulator that emulates a USB Floppy Drive. So the emulator connects to the computer via a USB cable, and the storage media is a USB Flash Drive. Do a Google search on "UFA1M44-100" and you will find one model of emulator that emulates a USB Floppy Drive. You can find another company that sells these if you do a Google search on "IntelliRob Systems". Look in the menu on the left side of their pages for "1.44 MB (USB) acts as USB Floppy Drive". I was trying to find a way to get a USB Flash Drive to act as a floppy without any emulator, but I finally gave up and started to look for a regular USB Floppy Drive. That is when I stumbled upon these USB Floppy Drive Emulators. I've already bought a USB Floppy Drive, but these emulators still interest me, so I may yet buy one. If you do buy one, please let us know how well it works out.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

Seems like the answer is NO. While others here have helpfully suggested workarounds to try, the answer as to whether the piece of hardware I asked about exists in a single piece is NO.

You can install XP in IDE mode and install the AHCI drivers afterwards, I did this on my netbook several times. I think it goes something like: * Set disk controller to IDE mode in bios, and install XP. * In device manager go to the disk controller and manually change the driver to the AHCI one. * Reboot into bios and change disk controller to AHCI mode. * Save and reboot, XP should now load successfully. If you miss any step you will likely get the BSOD.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

There's no way a USB anything can transparently emulate a floppy drive without a driver being preinstalled. The traditional PC floppy drive was an ISA device and appeared on specific I/O ports (0x3F0 to 0x3F6 IIRC). Reading and writing to these ports was how you talked to the floppy drive. USB peripherals talk to a USB controller, but do not otherwise have a connection to the system bus. So they cannot appear at the x86 I/O addresses where something expecting a traditional floppy would be trying to read/write. USB keyboards and mice look like PS/2 device to DOS and BIOS by a sleight of hand called "System Management Mode" - unfortunately this is part of BIOS/UEFI firmware and not easily/publicly available to operating systems to customize. It may be possible for a device or software to hook into BIOS routines that read/write to the floppy, but by the time you get to that prompt in the Windows XP installer, Windows is already running and not using the BIOS to read/write to devices. Really doing this would at least require a direct connection to the ISA or PCI/PCI-E bus. And many motherboard chipsets already have a Super I/O chip or equivalent that acts as a floppy controller, and already appears in those locations. The HxC devices mentioned by @tofro are probably what you want. Search for "cf card floppy emulator."

The emulator that you want does exist. You are looking for an emulator that emulates a USB Floppy Drive. So the emulator connects to the computer via a USB cable, and the storage media is a USB Flash Drive. Do a Google search on "UFA1M44-100" and you will find one model of emulator that emulates a USB Floppy Drive. You can find another company that sells these if you do a Google search on "IntelliRob Systems". Look in the menu on the left side of their pages for "1.44 MB (USB) acts as USB Floppy Drive". I was trying to find a way to get a USB Flash Drive to act as a floppy without any emulator, but I finally gave up and started to look for a regular USB Floppy Drive. That is when I stumbled upon these USB Floppy Drive Emulators. I've already bought a USB Floppy Drive, but these emulators still interest me, so I may yet buy one. If you do buy one, please let us know how well it works out.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

There's no way a USB anything can transparently emulate a floppy drive without a driver being preinstalled. The traditional PC floppy drive was an ISA device and appeared on specific I/O ports (0x3F0 to 0x3F6 IIRC). Reading and writing to these ports was how you talked to the floppy drive. USB peripherals talk to a USB controller, but do not otherwise have a connection to the system bus. So they cannot appear at the x86 I/O addresses where something expecting a traditional floppy would be trying to read/write. USB keyboards and mice look like PS/2 device to DOS and BIOS by a sleight of hand called "System Management Mode" - unfortunately this is part of BIOS/UEFI firmware and not easily/publicly available to operating systems to customize. It may be possible for a device or software to hook into BIOS routines that read/write to the floppy, but by the time you get to that prompt in the Windows XP installer, Windows is already running and not using the BIOS to read/write to devices. Really doing this would at least require a direct connection to the ISA or PCI/PCI-E bus. And many motherboard chipsets already have a Super I/O chip or equivalent that acts as a floppy controller, and already appears in those locations. The HxC devices mentioned by @tofro are probably what you want. Search for "cf card floppy emulator."

To boil down what others are saying: A USB device itself is incapable of *making itself appear* as a traditional floppy drive, because USB devices don't have that kind of access. However, if you're lucky, your BIOS will have support for USB floppy drives and *it* can apply the same virtualization trick that it uses to present USB keyboards and mice as PS/2 keyboards and mice for compatibility with old OSes. If your BIOS *does* support that, then the USB floppy can appear as A: or B: for anything which uses the interfaces the BIOS's compatibility mode is providing. If that isn't enough, then you need to search up how to slipstream stuff to build a custom XP install disc with the driver you need already present.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

I don't think anyone sells something like that in one piece. There are, however, components on the market that should allow you to build that from scratch: 1. A GoTek or HxC that behaves like a "real" floppy 2. An *old* Floppy-to-USB adapter that was used to connect "real" floppies over USB. I don't think they're still made, so you would need to source one from eBay. Newer USB floppy drives no longer have this as I have learned from answers to [this](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5428/is-there-anything-useful-for-a-retro-in-these-cheap-chinese-floppy-drives) question. 3. Some sort of external power supply, as the GoTek/HxC will not be willing to live from the USB power supply. Putting it all together would end you up with something that behaves like a real floppy, connected over USB. This is, however, never going to be a full replacement for a "real" floppy disk drive. Old computer's abilities to for example boot from USB floppies have always been very limited (even if they could always boot very well from standard floppy drives). Once you find one that does this, it will most probably also boot from a standard USB flash stick. You'd probably be much better off by buying a bunch of HD disks and storing them well. Another, entirely different, but possibly long-term method to make Windows XP think it has a floppy drive would be a *[virtual floppy driver](http://vfd.sourceforge.net)*. This just emulates a floppy based on an image stored on hard disk and could be a solution for many problems. You'd obviously need to have a drive and disk first in order to pull the images from "real" disks.

To boil down what others are saying: A USB device itself is incapable of *making itself appear* as a traditional floppy drive, because USB devices don't have that kind of access. However, if you're lucky, your BIOS will have support for USB floppy drives and *it* can apply the same virtualization trick that it uses to present USB keyboards and mice as PS/2 keyboards and mice for compatibility with old OSes. If your BIOS *does* support that, then the USB floppy can appear as A: or B: for anything which uses the interfaces the BIOS's compatibility mode is providing. If that isn't enough, then you need to search up how to slipstream stuff to build a custom XP install disc with the driver you need already present.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

You can install XP in IDE mode and install the AHCI drivers afterwards, I did this on my netbook several times. I think it goes something like: * Set disk controller to IDE mode in bios, and install XP. * In device manager go to the disk controller and manually change the driver to the AHCI one. * Reboot into bios and change disk controller to AHCI mode. * Save and reboot, XP should now load successfully. If you miss any step you will likely get the BSOD.

To boil down what others are saying: A USB device itself is incapable of *making itself appear* as a traditional floppy drive, because USB devices don't have that kind of access. However, if you're lucky, your BIOS will have support for USB floppy drives and *it* can apply the same virtualization trick that it uses to present USB keyboards and mice as PS/2 keyboards and mice for compatibility with old OSes. If your BIOS *does* support that, then the USB floppy can appear as A: or B: for anything which uses the interfaces the BIOS's compatibility mode is providing. If that isn't enough, then you need to search up how to slipstream stuff to build a custom XP install disc with the driver you need already present.

I'm aware there are floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5″ bays where disk images are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite: essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize. The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5″ bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop. I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy. Does anyone make/sell these?

2018/01/20

Seems like the answer is NO. While others here have helpfully suggested workarounds to try, the answer as to whether the piece of hardware I asked about exists in a single piece is NO.

To boil down what others are saying: A USB device itself is incapable of *making itself appear* as a traditional floppy drive, because USB devices don't have that kind of access. However, if you're lucky, your BIOS will have support for USB floppy drives and *it* can apply the same virtualization trick that it uses to present USB keyboards and mice as PS/2 keyboards and mice for compatibility with old OSes. If your BIOS *does* support that, then the USB floppy can appear as A: or B: for anything which uses the interfaces the BIOS's compatibility mode is providing. If that isn't enough, then you need to search up how to slipstream stuff to build a custom XP install disc with the driver you need already present.

I want to write the following sentence in a compact way: "The difference between the old scheme and the new scheme lies in..." Which one of the following is correct? 1. The difference between the old and **new scheme** lies in... 2. The difference between the old and **new schemes** lies in... 3. The difference between the old and **the new scheme** lies in... 4. The difference between the old and **the new schemes** lies in... Option 1 sounds more natural to me but I cannot explain why. More important, English is not my mother tongue. In other words, I would like to know: * Is it necessary to repeat the definite article for each element of the list? * Does the common object (in this case, the scheme) become plural when it is listed multiple times with different pre-modifiers (in this case, old and new)?

2019/12/04

All are variations of parallelism, with two distinct wrinkles: * Whether the determiner or article must be repeated or not * Whether the head noun is singular or plural All four constructions are valid, but produce slight differences in emphasis. --- > > The difference between **the old and new** scheme lies in... > > > The difference between **the old** and **the new** scheme lies in... > > > In the first example, *the* is a determiner modifying "old and new scheme." Readers will generally understand that it breaks down into "the old scheme and the new scheme." The second example repeats the determiner and further emphasizes it. Generally, readers will still understand "the old scheme and the new scheme." In this case, the difference is slight because no other modifiers are interrupted when the determiner repeats. Fiction editor Beth Hill, in a post on this subject at [The Editor's Blog](https://theeditorsblog.net/2015/08/08/one-adjective-paired-with-multiple-nouns-a-readers-question/), shows how repeating the determiner can mark a further difference between two items: > > **The flat footballs and soccer balls** had been stored in the basement for a long time. (Both footballs and soccer balls are flat.) > > > **The flat footballs and the stained soccer balls** had been stored in the basement for a long time. (Only the footballs are flat—the soccer balls are stained but not flat, at least not that we know of.) > > > **The flat footballs and the soccer balls** had been stored in the basement for a long time. (We have no clues about the condition of the soccer balls. From this wording—with just the addition of the article the—we can’t assume that they’re flat.) > > > Repeating **the** is a clue that other premodifiers like "flat" may only pertain to the first noun. In your case, that is not relevant since the only premodifiers for "scheme" are already distinguished by "and." --- > > The difference between the old and new **scheme** lies in... > > > The difference between the old and new **schemes** lies in... > > > Both work, but with some caveats. Plural signals that there are *two or more* schemes, at least one is old, and at least one is new. It does not limit the potential number - there could be two old and three new schemes. If the existence of only two schemes is evident from context (you've only been discussing two schemes so far in your text), it should provide no confusion. Singular is acceptable because readers will understand that the two adjectives are mutually exclusive, such that it is not one scheme that is both old and new, but two: *the old scheme* and *the new scheme*. Take note: if the adjectives could both describe the same noun, this might be confusing: > > The difference between the hot and wet car lies in ... > > > Some readers might expect "the hot and wet car" to be followed by a second item, like "the cold and dry car," since technically a single car could be both hot and wet. In this case, adding the article avoids the issue ("the hot and the wet car"), since the duplicated determiner could only pertain to a second car. (As described above, duplicating the determiner helps mark further differences between items.) Confusion can also be avoided when using mutually exclusive adjectives (e.g. user-centric and network-centric).

Replacing the premodifiers with less esoteric ones (and assuming that that does not affect the analysis too greatly): > > 0' *The difference between the old model and the new model* ... > > > is the undeleted (part-) sentence, obviously correct for a single new model. ........................................................................... Deleting the head noun only, firstly with no adjustment to the singular-form 'model' (deletions usually leave the remaining sentence unaltered): > > 3' *The difference between the old and the new model* ... gives 319 000 hits in a Google search > > > while > > 4' *The difference between the old and the new models* ... gives 178 000 hits. > > > While there is the clear possibility that 4' refers to more than one new model (and perhaps more than one old model), and that this is thus a poorer choice when just two models are being compared, the following from a [2017 Carvoy review](https://blog.carvoy.com/28-old-vs-new-lexus-rx350/) shows that the plural-form noun *is* used in such situations: > > Although the 2017 version of the RX350 carried over all the things we > got to know and loved about the 2015 version, the main point of > difference between the old and the new models is the new safety and > technology features integrated into the new model. > > > This compares with the totally grammatical > > 4" *The difference between the two models* ... > > > So in summary, both forms are used, but there is a reasonable preference for 'model' here. ........................................................................... Going further, > > 1' *The difference between the old and new model* ... gives 269 000 hits > > > while > > 2' *The difference between the old and new models* ... gives 156 000 hits. > > > So both further-deleted forms also seem to be accepted by many. I'm surprised by the fact that 1' seems preferred to 2', as I feel 1' sounds incongruous.

I want to write the following sentence in a compact way: "The difference between the old scheme and the new scheme lies in..." Which one of the following is correct? 1. The difference between the old and **new scheme** lies in... 2. The difference between the old and **new schemes** lies in... 3. The difference between the old and **the new scheme** lies in... 4. The difference between the old and **the new schemes** lies in... Option 1 sounds more natural to me but I cannot explain why. More important, English is not my mother tongue. In other words, I would like to know: * Is it necessary to repeat the definite article for each element of the list? * Does the common object (in this case, the scheme) become plural when it is listed multiple times with different pre-modifiers (in this case, old and new)?

2019/12/04

I would say that you do not require the last two articles, as neither is the focus of identification. What is being identified is 'the' difference : > > The difference between old and new schemes lies in ... > > > --- It could be argued that this is an example of the zero article, that is to say the absent article regarding 'old' and 'new'. See elsewhere on this site for 'null' and 'zero' articles and for references to Peter Masters. For example : [Should 'one' be considered an article ?](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/425829/should-one-be-considered-an-article)

Replacing the premodifiers with less esoteric ones (and assuming that that does not affect the analysis too greatly): > > 0' *The difference between the old model and the new model* ... > > > is the undeleted (part-) sentence, obviously correct for a single new model. ........................................................................... Deleting the head noun only, firstly with no adjustment to the singular-form 'model' (deletions usually leave the remaining sentence unaltered): > > 3' *The difference between the old and the new model* ... gives 319 000 hits in a Google search > > > while > > 4' *The difference between the old and the new models* ... gives 178 000 hits. > > > While there is the clear possibility that 4' refers to more than one new model (and perhaps more than one old model), and that this is thus a poorer choice when just two models are being compared, the following from a [2017 Carvoy review](https://blog.carvoy.com/28-old-vs-new-lexus-rx350/) shows that the plural-form noun *is* used in such situations: > > Although the 2017 version of the RX350 carried over all the things we > got to know and loved about the 2015 version, the main point of > difference between the old and the new models is the new safety and > technology features integrated into the new model. > > > This compares with the totally grammatical > > 4" *The difference between the two models* ... > > > So in summary, both forms are used, but there is a reasonable preference for 'model' here. ........................................................................... Going further, > > 1' *The difference between the old and new model* ... gives 269 000 hits > > > while > > 2' *The difference between the old and new models* ... gives 156 000 hits. > > > So both further-deleted forms also seem to be accepted by many. I'm surprised by the fact that 1' seems preferred to 2', as I feel 1' sounds incongruous.

I want to write the following sentence in a compact way: "The difference between the old scheme and the new scheme lies in..." Which one of the following is correct? 1. The difference between the old and **new scheme** lies in... 2. The difference between the old and **new schemes** lies in... 3. The difference between the old and **the new scheme** lies in... 4. The difference between the old and **the new schemes** lies in... Option 1 sounds more natural to me but I cannot explain why. More important, English is not my mother tongue. In other words, I would like to know: * Is it necessary to repeat the definite article for each element of the list? * Does the common object (in this case, the scheme) become plural when it is listed multiple times with different pre-modifiers (in this case, old and new)?

2019/12/04

All are variations of parallelism, with two distinct wrinkles: * Whether the determiner or article must be repeated or not * Whether the head noun is singular or plural All four constructions are valid, but produce slight differences in emphasis. --- > > The difference between **the old and new** scheme lies in... > > > The difference between **the old** and **the new** scheme lies in... > > > In the first example, *the* is a determiner modifying "old and new scheme." Readers will generally understand that it breaks down into "the old scheme and the new scheme." The second example repeats the determiner and further emphasizes it. Generally, readers will still understand "the old scheme and the new scheme." In this case, the difference is slight because no other modifiers are interrupted when the determiner repeats. Fiction editor Beth Hill, in a post on this subject at [The Editor's Blog](https://theeditorsblog.net/2015/08/08/one-adjective-paired-with-multiple-nouns-a-readers-question/), shows how repeating the determiner can mark a further difference between two items: > > **The flat footballs and soccer balls** had been stored in the basement for a long time. (Both footballs and soccer balls are flat.) > > > **The flat footballs and the stained soccer balls** had been stored in the basement for a long time. (Only the footballs are flat—the soccer balls are stained but not flat, at least not that we know of.) > > > **The flat footballs and the soccer balls** had been stored in the basement for a long time. (We have no clues about the condition of the soccer balls. From this wording—with just the addition of the article the—we can’t assume that they’re flat.) > > > Repeating **the** is a clue that other premodifiers like "flat" may only pertain to the first noun. In your case, that is not relevant since the only premodifiers for "scheme" are already distinguished by "and." --- > > The difference between the old and new **scheme** lies in... > > > The difference between the old and new **schemes** lies in... > > > Both work, but with some caveats. Plural signals that there are *two or more* schemes, at least one is old, and at least one is new. It does not limit the potential number - there could be two old and three new schemes. If the existence of only two schemes is evident from context (you've only been discussing two schemes so far in your text), it should provide no confusion. Singular is acceptable because readers will understand that the two adjectives are mutually exclusive, such that it is not one scheme that is both old and new, but two: *the old scheme* and *the new scheme*. Take note: if the adjectives could both describe the same noun, this might be confusing: > > The difference between the hot and wet car lies in ... > > > Some readers might expect "the hot and wet car" to be followed by a second item, like "the cold and dry car," since technically a single car could be both hot and wet. In this case, adding the article avoids the issue ("the hot and the wet car"), since the duplicated determiner could only pertain to a second car. (As described above, duplicating the determiner helps mark further differences between items.) Confusion can also be avoided when using mutually exclusive adjectives (e.g. user-centric and network-centric).

I would argue for one of the following forms, my preference being for the first. > > 1) ... the old scheme and the new scheme ... > > > 2) ... the old and the new schemes ... > > > 3) ... the two schemes, old and new, ... > > > This is because the difference is between a scheme and a scheme, not between "an old" and "a new." So this should be emphasized by the sentence structure.

I want to write the following sentence in a compact way: "The difference between the old scheme and the new scheme lies in..." Which one of the following is correct? 1. The difference between the old and **new scheme** lies in... 2. The difference between the old and **new schemes** lies in... 3. The difference between the old and **the new scheme** lies in... 4. The difference between the old and **the new schemes** lies in... Option 1 sounds more natural to me but I cannot explain why. More important, English is not my mother tongue. In other words, I would like to know: * Is it necessary to repeat the definite article for each element of the list? * Does the common object (in this case, the scheme) become plural when it is listed multiple times with different pre-modifiers (in this case, old and new)?

2019/12/04

I would say that you do not require the last two articles, as neither is the focus of identification. What is being identified is 'the' difference : > > The difference between old and new schemes lies in ... > > > --- It could be argued that this is an example of the zero article, that is to say the absent article regarding 'old' and 'new'. See elsewhere on this site for 'null' and 'zero' articles and for references to Peter Masters. For example : [Should 'one' be considered an article ?](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/425829/should-one-be-considered-an-article)

I would argue for one of the following forms, my preference being for the first. > > 1) ... the old scheme and the new scheme ... > > > 2) ... the old and the new schemes ... > > > 3) ... the two schemes, old and new, ... > > > This is because the difference is between a scheme and a scheme, not between "an old" and "a new." So this should be emphasized by the sentence structure.

I have some basic questions about my 1-year-old pug. 1. How much should he eat? Typically he should eat 2 times, but he always keeps some food in his bowl and whenever he wants he eats. Is this a good practice? (I use Royal Canin Mini Adult) 2. Now-a-days he always wants what I'm eating. How to stop this? I'm too new (being my first pet) in this area, so your views are appreciated.

2017/02/08

1. As Gone2 has stated, you should definitely regulate your pug's intake by removing the food after 15-20 minutes with each feeding. All kibble has feeding directions on the back, so you should follow the feeding recommendations on the bag for his weight unless otherwise directed by a veterinarian. Dogs should generally have a thin layer over their midsection but not so thick you can't feel their ribs. The ribs also shouldn't be visible while they're relaxed. 2. For begging, you can try redirecting by rewarding him when he doesn't beg. Or teach him a down stay. Another method is to give him a toy, himalayan chew, or bully stick to work on while you eat in peace.

1. Leaving food out beyond the two set feeding times is not a good practice. You should go by the recommended amount on the bag for his weight and split that in half; one portion each feeding. 2. To prevent begging you should avoid reacting to the begging and if necessary physically separate yourself from the him while you are eating as most of what we consume can be extremely unhealthy for a dog to consume (salts, sugars, and artificial byproducts they aren't meant to have). Lastly, have you looked into raw feeding?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

I think you're vastly underestimating just how different a truly non-deterministic universe would be. **Case A** If the god's influence is sporadic enough that you can still discern a "default" set of laws that nature follows most of the time, then scientists would simply study those laws. **Case B** If the god's influence is *so* omnipresent that you can't discern any underlying patterns at all, then frankly good luck with your story. I don't think the human mind is really capable of imagining a *completely* non-deterministic universe. Everything we take for granted would be gone - things like "objects fall when dropped" and "solid objects can't pass through each other". It's not just that things would have to occasionally behave differently to how we expect them to behave, it's that there could be *no trends whatsoever*. The very notion of causality would be effectively meaningless. And how could life even arise in such a world? In order to justify the existence of humanoid life, you need to assume that on most days, the skeleton can support the muscles, things move when tendons pull them, blood moves when the heart contracts, and so on. But if you assume all that, you're basically already in Case A. You mention, for instance, that he can resurrect people. But the very fact that this is worthy of mention implies that you're assuming dead people still stay dead *most* of the time. So you're already implicitly in Case A. In order to truly be in Case B, you'd need to be assuming that basically, the concept of death doesn't exist, because "life forms tend to die after a while" is already enough of a pattern to place our universe squarely in Case A. In conclusion: either you assume this god's influence is small enough that *yes*, the scientific method would still apply, or you set yourself the task of writing a story taking place in a universe so incomprehensibly different to our own that I'm not sure any human reader will be able to follow the thread of the plot. You'd essentially be writing a work of highly experimental surrealist sci-fi.

This is actually a very common misconception about the scientific method that we seem to teach in schools. The scientific method is not *just* about identifying the "right" laws governing the universe. It is also about building useful models of the universe. In fact, if you are willing to sit down with any real scientist, and use the right philosophical buzz words, you can even get them to admit that they can never provably achieve the former. So let's start to play with some of those philosophical terms! Philosophers call the study of reality "ontology." The word "reality" gets treated many different ways, but intuitively, ontology is looking for what is actually real, not just what appears to be real. Epistemology, on the other hand, is the study of knowledge. Empiricism, a word you may have heard with reference to science, is a branch of epistemology. It studies what we can know through observation of the world around us. The line between these can be seen several ways, but I find the most impressive of them to be the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Consider the possibility that you are actually just a brain, sitting in a vat somewhere, being fed neural stimulus like you were part of the Matrix. Ontology would be very interested in the "real world" where you are a brain in a vat, and would call the neural stimulus you are receiving a "simulation." However, just as we saw in the The Matrix, it is remarkably hard to make definitive statements about this reality while you're still jacked into the matrix, and have never observed the outside world. This is the epistomological side: how can one *know* the state of reality? An empirical approach would focus entirely on what can be observed, the stimulus. A 100% empirical scientist would actually not really care whether they are a brain in a vat or not until they identify an observation to defend it (although, in reality, no human is ever 100% anything!) How do we get confused? There are three major categories of thought in logical philosophy. You're almost certainly familiar with deduction and induction. Deduction is going from the general to the specific (all swans are white, so this swan must be white too). Induction is going from the specific to the general (these swans are white, so perhaps all swans are white). There is a third you hear very little about: [abduction](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/). Abduction is the ability to infer the best explanation is true. In many discourses, such as science, you end up with many explanations. Maybe your empirical results line up with your theory because your theory is ontologically right, or maybe someone is cleverly massaging the world behind the scenes to fool you. At some point, you may decide the best explanation is that you've found something useful, so you *infer* your theory to be correct. This mode of logic is a fascinating little puzzle because the term "best explanation" leaves so much room for alternatives (read the SEP link above if you're interested). However, any claim of an empirical method, such as science, yielding an ontological truth *must* go through this abductive step. So where does that leave us for the scientific method in the presence of your Mad God Shegorath? Well, from an abductive perspective, the alternative explanations of "Shegorath is just fooling us" starts to become a better explaination, so it becomes harder to use abduction to claim you have arrived at the only worthwhile best possible explanation. You would see additional questioning of scientific results. Enter the Engineer. Engineering and science are tied together intimately, like husband and wife, or perhaps even like conjoined twins. While science provides epistemological ways to "know" things, engineering uses that knowledge to build up the world around us. Of course, science never feeds us perfect knowledge. Only recently did we find out that all of our equations of motions we've been using for a long time get gummed up by relativity. Only recently did we find out that much of the world is non-deterministic thanks to quantum mechanics. Yet what we created from that era is still useful. How? Engineers have a phrase, which I commit to my heart: "All models are wrong, some are useful." We can assume that every model we come up with can be ontologically wrong, because the track record of scientific "knowledge" being revised as new data comes along is 100%. That's not a shortcoming of science, that's actually its strong point: it *always* tries to incorporate the new observations, no matter how undesirable they might be. However, it turns out that for almost everything you or I could want to do, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be close enough to be worth doing. Take teflon, PTFE. Science can develop the molecular structure of PTFE, and say "this is how PTFE works." However, never once will we create a magical perfect PTFE molecule. Every process to make it is slightly flawed. The engineering side is worried about how to use what the science knew about PTFE to coat a non-stick pot. If the science is a *little* wrong, that's okay. We'll do a test run first, to make sure the pots are useful, before selling them! The science is just treated as a guideline -- what really matters is whether the process works or not, not whether it matches exactly the predictions of science. If the science turns out to not be useful for engineering, it will just sit on the shelf until it becomes useful, or dispelled. This is, for example, how we managed to make electronics work for hundreds of years, despite getting the flow of current backwards the entire time. Ben Franklin had to make a guess as to which way the charge was flowing. He guessed wrong, so technically everything we've done with electronics is incorrect. However, his model of electricity was useful enough that there was no need to correct it, until the semiconductor era, where paying attention to what is an electron vs a hole can actually matter. So the scientific method would still be viable in this world with a Mad God. It would simply gravitate towards applications where behaviors are *still* relatively predictable, even after the Mad God. Consider the fact that you're looking at a computer screen right now. If the Mad God were to make the laws of physics too unpredictable, photons would not go in straight lines, and you couldn't read. Of course, it's possible the Mad God decides to only screw with science. He might decide that every science experiment is going to go awry. In this case, he creates all sorts of interesting looping structures as we try to define what a scientific experiment "is." He may actually disappear in a poof of logic, akin to Douglas Adam's god in *Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy*! Or he might form a strange loop a. la. Douglas Hofstadter, where he controls the universe, and the universe decides what he will do. If you're going down this path, you're going to have to describe what "viable" means in the question "is the scientific method viable...." If you are presuming an ontological world with such a crazy powerful entity, you are going to have to define your term "viable" in a way which makes sense in their presence. There may also be the question of whether the viability, once defined, can be known by a mere mortal. These questions oft leave philosophers awake at night. As a final fun tidbit, what's to say he hasn't already acted? The ultimate observation, in philosophy, is one done by a being that can think. The ability to do this is called perception. As silly as it may sound, philosophers do not have a clear sense of what perception is, nor how it behaves. Maybe we are just a brain in the jar. Could we perceive it?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

**Caveat**: I've made some assumptions in order to make this work as a potential world. Like many have pointed out, a truly mad god acting without care would probably manage to kill off the human race pretty quickly if they acted often enough to have a tangible effect on the world (by triggering a catastrophic imbalance in the environment). The only way to make this really work as an interesting world would be if Sheogorath was particularly careful in what he did, and only set out to mess with the experiments of scientists and their inventions, and changing the laws of physics/reality over very focused areas, rather than screwing with reality at random. --- Scientific method relies on consistent results, and to a large extent on statistical modelling and probabilities; if I perform 1,000,000 tests of a hypothesis and all come out true, I can say with pretty reasonably probability that it is correct. If Sheogorath's influence is obvious, or at least discernable without *too* much effort (As in, I can tell when something was caused by him rather than being natural), then it would make scientific advancement (or indeed pretty much anything relying on facts) cripplingly slow - I would have to double and triple check every experiment to ensure that no "spoiled" data made it into the calculations, and I'd have to ensure that the calculations themselves weren't spoiled, and every time I read a book I'd have to ensure that the words/results hadn't been changed since they were written down. In other words, everything would take forever. **In this case, scientific method would be possible, but very, very slow**. If his influence is impossible to distinguish from "reality", then all scientific research would be virtually impossible — whenever I get a result, I have no idea whether it's real or Sheogorath is screwing with me. All you could do is note hypotheses and keep as much data as possible, hoping that some day it might be useful. In this case, **Scientific Method would be impossible**. The damage on society is hard to predict. There's a chance that society would fall apart completely depending on whether people are aware that it is the Mad God's doing, or whether they think reality is ending. Then there's the Monotheistic religious crisis, the fact that noone can trust anything they see... theoretically all of civilisation could fall apart if critical things are warped. If he's just messing with science however, and we ignore the other effects on society he would have, then yes, science would recover, probably. 20 years isn't that long a time - people would still be alive that remembered how the methods worked. It's long enough to give up, but not long enough to have forgotten. So long as it is obvious that he is gone, Scientific Method would pick up again. Of course, you'd have to contend with the thought of whether he'd be back. Some people would probably give up saying that there isn't a point, maybe all of them, but I would think that it's likely that at least **SOME** people would take the risk. EDIT: The point of Scientific Study would depend largely on the level of change being effected by Sheogorath: * If major changes were made to reality constantly, society would effectively collapse for those 20 years, if it survived at all. Daily life would be hard enough to predict, let alone finding the time to perform and log scientific experiments. * If minor/minimal changes were made, reality would be deterministic enough that scientific development could probably still be deemed worthwhile. If enough people repeat the experiment, the chances are that eventually there will be enough data to make a probable correct statement. It might be wrong, but it's worth a try... provided Sheogorath doesn't then on a whim decide to make it the opposite just because you've made the discovery. * In an increasing range between the two extremes, Scientific discoveries would be increasingly more unlikely, because everything would be increasingly untrustworthy.

As a writer and reader, if I'm dealing with a being with what we might call "godlike powers", they still have to operate within a larger reality. For example in your setup, Sheogorath builds a tiny "Perpetual Motion Machine" but is actually cheating because in some mysterious god power way, it is perfectly converting a few molecules of MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to Energy at the nano-level. Maybe there's even enough MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to last a thousand years and it's really really hard to detect. MysteriousInvisibleSubstance can also alter visible reality so that Darwin is now stuck in what appears to be a monkey body. Sheogorath can also in some odd way travel in time and use his nifty MysteriousInvisibleSubstance powered MatterReasssembler to screw with the fossils just to screw with the human's of the future's heads. Then Sheogorath disappears. Until the sentients are clever enough to figure out how to detect and then use MysteriousInvisibleSubstance at the molecular level, no "laws of reality" in that fictional world disturbed. That said, for the WorldBuilding exercise to be any fun to read, etc. When the sentients or others of Sheogorath's species figure out what he's been up to and how, Sheogorath is going to be in BIG BIG trouble, right?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

I think you're vastly underestimating just how different a truly non-deterministic universe would be. **Case A** If the god's influence is sporadic enough that you can still discern a "default" set of laws that nature follows most of the time, then scientists would simply study those laws. **Case B** If the god's influence is *so* omnipresent that you can't discern any underlying patterns at all, then frankly good luck with your story. I don't think the human mind is really capable of imagining a *completely* non-deterministic universe. Everything we take for granted would be gone - things like "objects fall when dropped" and "solid objects can't pass through each other". It's not just that things would have to occasionally behave differently to how we expect them to behave, it's that there could be *no trends whatsoever*. The very notion of causality would be effectively meaningless. And how could life even arise in such a world? In order to justify the existence of humanoid life, you need to assume that on most days, the skeleton can support the muscles, things move when tendons pull them, blood moves when the heart contracts, and so on. But if you assume all that, you're basically already in Case A. You mention, for instance, that he can resurrect people. But the very fact that this is worthy of mention implies that you're assuming dead people still stay dead *most* of the time. So you're already implicitly in Case A. In order to truly be in Case B, you'd need to be assuming that basically, the concept of death doesn't exist, because "life forms tend to die after a while" is already enough of a pattern to place our universe squarely in Case A. In conclusion: either you assume this god's influence is small enough that *yes*, the scientific method would still apply, or you set yourself the task of writing a story taking place in a universe so incomprehensibly different to our own that I'm not sure any human reader will be able to follow the thread of the plot. You'd essentially be writing a work of highly experimental surrealist sci-fi.

As a writer and reader, if I'm dealing with a being with what we might call "godlike powers", they still have to operate within a larger reality. For example in your setup, Sheogorath builds a tiny "Perpetual Motion Machine" but is actually cheating because in some mysterious god power way, it is perfectly converting a few molecules of MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to Energy at the nano-level. Maybe there's even enough MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to last a thousand years and it's really really hard to detect. MysteriousInvisibleSubstance can also alter visible reality so that Darwin is now stuck in what appears to be a monkey body. Sheogorath can also in some odd way travel in time and use his nifty MysteriousInvisibleSubstance powered MatterReasssembler to screw with the fossils just to screw with the human's of the future's heads. Then Sheogorath disappears. Until the sentients are clever enough to figure out how to detect and then use MysteriousInvisibleSubstance at the molecular level, no "laws of reality" in that fictional world disturbed. That said, for the WorldBuilding exercise to be any fun to read, etc. When the sentients or others of Sheogorath's species figure out what he's been up to and how, Sheogorath is going to be in BIG BIG trouble, right?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

**It very much depends on your god's sense of humour.** If he's decided for example that [da red wunz go fasta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ork_%28Warhammer_40,000%29) and anything blue can fly then you've pretty much had it. All the rules that you come up with are going to be wrong. If his logic has an internal consistency and lasting effect even after he's gone, messing with the fossil records etc, then the damage is done and you can never get a right and proper answer. If there's no consistency and he's just randomly poking experiments and giggling then it's all about spotting and excluding the results that don't fit. If on the other hand, the red ones continue to go faster even after he's gone and you can ignore aerodynamic lift and just paint it blue instead, perhaps the scientific method remains valid. You just won't get the answers that maybe you did before he came along.

This is actually a very common misconception about the scientific method that we seem to teach in schools. The scientific method is not *just* about identifying the "right" laws governing the universe. It is also about building useful models of the universe. In fact, if you are willing to sit down with any real scientist, and use the right philosophical buzz words, you can even get them to admit that they can never provably achieve the former. So let's start to play with some of those philosophical terms! Philosophers call the study of reality "ontology." The word "reality" gets treated many different ways, but intuitively, ontology is looking for what is actually real, not just what appears to be real. Epistemology, on the other hand, is the study of knowledge. Empiricism, a word you may have heard with reference to science, is a branch of epistemology. It studies what we can know through observation of the world around us. The line between these can be seen several ways, but I find the most impressive of them to be the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Consider the possibility that you are actually just a brain, sitting in a vat somewhere, being fed neural stimulus like you were part of the Matrix. Ontology would be very interested in the "real world" where you are a brain in a vat, and would call the neural stimulus you are receiving a "simulation." However, just as we saw in the The Matrix, it is remarkably hard to make definitive statements about this reality while you're still jacked into the matrix, and have never observed the outside world. This is the epistomological side: how can one *know* the state of reality? An empirical approach would focus entirely on what can be observed, the stimulus. A 100% empirical scientist would actually not really care whether they are a brain in a vat or not until they identify an observation to defend it (although, in reality, no human is ever 100% anything!) How do we get confused? There are three major categories of thought in logical philosophy. You're almost certainly familiar with deduction and induction. Deduction is going from the general to the specific (all swans are white, so this swan must be white too). Induction is going from the specific to the general (these swans are white, so perhaps all swans are white). There is a third you hear very little about: [abduction](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/). Abduction is the ability to infer the best explanation is true. In many discourses, such as science, you end up with many explanations. Maybe your empirical results line up with your theory because your theory is ontologically right, or maybe someone is cleverly massaging the world behind the scenes to fool you. At some point, you may decide the best explanation is that you've found something useful, so you *infer* your theory to be correct. This mode of logic is a fascinating little puzzle because the term "best explanation" leaves so much room for alternatives (read the SEP link above if you're interested). However, any claim of an empirical method, such as science, yielding an ontological truth *must* go through this abductive step. So where does that leave us for the scientific method in the presence of your Mad God Shegorath? Well, from an abductive perspective, the alternative explanations of "Shegorath is just fooling us" starts to become a better explaination, so it becomes harder to use abduction to claim you have arrived at the only worthwhile best possible explanation. You would see additional questioning of scientific results. Enter the Engineer. Engineering and science are tied together intimately, like husband and wife, or perhaps even like conjoined twins. While science provides epistemological ways to "know" things, engineering uses that knowledge to build up the world around us. Of course, science never feeds us perfect knowledge. Only recently did we find out that all of our equations of motions we've been using for a long time get gummed up by relativity. Only recently did we find out that much of the world is non-deterministic thanks to quantum mechanics. Yet what we created from that era is still useful. How? Engineers have a phrase, which I commit to my heart: "All models are wrong, some are useful." We can assume that every model we come up with can be ontologically wrong, because the track record of scientific "knowledge" being revised as new data comes along is 100%. That's not a shortcoming of science, that's actually its strong point: it *always* tries to incorporate the new observations, no matter how undesirable they might be. However, it turns out that for almost everything you or I could want to do, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be close enough to be worth doing. Take teflon, PTFE. Science can develop the molecular structure of PTFE, and say "this is how PTFE works." However, never once will we create a magical perfect PTFE molecule. Every process to make it is slightly flawed. The engineering side is worried about how to use what the science knew about PTFE to coat a non-stick pot. If the science is a *little* wrong, that's okay. We'll do a test run first, to make sure the pots are useful, before selling them! The science is just treated as a guideline -- what really matters is whether the process works or not, not whether it matches exactly the predictions of science. If the science turns out to not be useful for engineering, it will just sit on the shelf until it becomes useful, or dispelled. This is, for example, how we managed to make electronics work for hundreds of years, despite getting the flow of current backwards the entire time. Ben Franklin had to make a guess as to which way the charge was flowing. He guessed wrong, so technically everything we've done with electronics is incorrect. However, his model of electricity was useful enough that there was no need to correct it, until the semiconductor era, where paying attention to what is an electron vs a hole can actually matter. So the scientific method would still be viable in this world with a Mad God. It would simply gravitate towards applications where behaviors are *still* relatively predictable, even after the Mad God. Consider the fact that you're looking at a computer screen right now. If the Mad God were to make the laws of physics too unpredictable, photons would not go in straight lines, and you couldn't read. Of course, it's possible the Mad God decides to only screw with science. He might decide that every science experiment is going to go awry. In this case, he creates all sorts of interesting looping structures as we try to define what a scientific experiment "is." He may actually disappear in a poof of logic, akin to Douglas Adam's god in *Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy*! Or he might form a strange loop a. la. Douglas Hofstadter, where he controls the universe, and the universe decides what he will do. If you're going down this path, you're going to have to describe what "viable" means in the question "is the scientific method viable...." If you are presuming an ontological world with such a crazy powerful entity, you are going to have to define your term "viable" in a way which makes sense in their presence. There may also be the question of whether the viability, once defined, can be known by a mere mortal. These questions oft leave philosophers awake at night. As a final fun tidbit, what's to say he hasn't already acted? The ultimate observation, in philosophy, is one done by a being that can think. The ability to do this is called perception. As silly as it may sound, philosophers do not have a clear sense of what perception is, nor how it behaves. Maybe we are just a brain in the jar. Could we perceive it?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

**Absolutely** To quote some mouseover text from a certain webcomic: 'We don't use science to prove we're right. We use science to *become* right'. The scientific method is just as valid in your crazy mixed up world as it is now, and will remain so unless the world becomes so crazy that no logical sense can be made of it *at all*. This is because science *isn't* something that we use to show a particular result, it's the way we can explore the world around us. If, suddenly, the rules don't seem to apply because a mad god is messing with us, then the scientific method can still be used to tell us whether or not there is something messing with us. Then it can be used to explore the limits of this entity, and even it's psychology. This then forms a new paradigm of the world, and new theories start to form around that, bolstered by the scientific explorations mankind is making into the nature of our environment *with the mad god in it*. The only way in which this doesn't work is if the mad god is randomly changing everything, all the time, to the point where everything that humanity could possibly know breaks down. At that point it's a somewhat moot point, because the universe will have become a tumultuous maelstrom summoned from the fever dreams of a crazed god. As an example: The mad god has decided to break all experiments that require electrical measurements. Scientists notice that while all their lab equipment is broken, the lights are still on. A simple experiment therefore becomes: when I turn the light switch: do the lights turn on and off? My hypothesis is that the light switch controls the flow of electricity to the light. Now the mad god has a choice. Either the lights continue to work as normal (hooray, the scientific method worked!) or he chooses to change how lightswitches work. If he goes for completely random on-off for lights and light switches, either *the world now works in a different way*, namely, nobody can control the lights, or it's just our scientists that are affected. Either way we then know more about the world around us, either something powerful is messing about with rigorous scientific experiments, or that lights now turn on and off at random, and nothing can stop it. TL:DR: The scientific method is used to figure out how the world works. If the way the world works is that we're captive to the whim of a god who doesn't like science, that's what we'll find out using it. From that point on it's one for the theopsychologists.

As a writer and reader, if I'm dealing with a being with what we might call "godlike powers", they still have to operate within a larger reality. For example in your setup, Sheogorath builds a tiny "Perpetual Motion Machine" but is actually cheating because in some mysterious god power way, it is perfectly converting a few molecules of MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to Energy at the nano-level. Maybe there's even enough MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to last a thousand years and it's really really hard to detect. MysteriousInvisibleSubstance can also alter visible reality so that Darwin is now stuck in what appears to be a monkey body. Sheogorath can also in some odd way travel in time and use his nifty MysteriousInvisibleSubstance powered MatterReasssembler to screw with the fossils just to screw with the human's of the future's heads. Then Sheogorath disappears. Until the sentients are clever enough to figure out how to detect and then use MysteriousInvisibleSubstance at the molecular level, no "laws of reality" in that fictional world disturbed. That said, for the WorldBuilding exercise to be any fun to read, etc. When the sentients or others of Sheogorath's species figure out what he's been up to and how, Sheogorath is going to be in BIG BIG trouble, right?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

**Caveat**: I've made some assumptions in order to make this work as a potential world. Like many have pointed out, a truly mad god acting without care would probably manage to kill off the human race pretty quickly if they acted often enough to have a tangible effect on the world (by triggering a catastrophic imbalance in the environment). The only way to make this really work as an interesting world would be if Sheogorath was particularly careful in what he did, and only set out to mess with the experiments of scientists and their inventions, and changing the laws of physics/reality over very focused areas, rather than screwing with reality at random. --- Scientific method relies on consistent results, and to a large extent on statistical modelling and probabilities; if I perform 1,000,000 tests of a hypothesis and all come out true, I can say with pretty reasonably probability that it is correct. If Sheogorath's influence is obvious, or at least discernable without *too* much effort (As in, I can tell when something was caused by him rather than being natural), then it would make scientific advancement (or indeed pretty much anything relying on facts) cripplingly slow - I would have to double and triple check every experiment to ensure that no "spoiled" data made it into the calculations, and I'd have to ensure that the calculations themselves weren't spoiled, and every time I read a book I'd have to ensure that the words/results hadn't been changed since they were written down. In other words, everything would take forever. **In this case, scientific method would be possible, but very, very slow**. If his influence is impossible to distinguish from "reality", then all scientific research would be virtually impossible — whenever I get a result, I have no idea whether it's real or Sheogorath is screwing with me. All you could do is note hypotheses and keep as much data as possible, hoping that some day it might be useful. In this case, **Scientific Method would be impossible**. The damage on society is hard to predict. There's a chance that society would fall apart completely depending on whether people are aware that it is the Mad God's doing, or whether they think reality is ending. Then there's the Monotheistic religious crisis, the fact that noone can trust anything they see... theoretically all of civilisation could fall apart if critical things are warped. If he's just messing with science however, and we ignore the other effects on society he would have, then yes, science would recover, probably. 20 years isn't that long a time - people would still be alive that remembered how the methods worked. It's long enough to give up, but not long enough to have forgotten. So long as it is obvious that he is gone, Scientific Method would pick up again. Of course, you'd have to contend with the thought of whether he'd be back. Some people would probably give up saying that there isn't a point, maybe all of them, but I would think that it's likely that at least **SOME** people would take the risk. EDIT: The point of Scientific Study would depend largely on the level of change being effected by Sheogorath: * If major changes were made to reality constantly, society would effectively collapse for those 20 years, if it survived at all. Daily life would be hard enough to predict, let alone finding the time to perform and log scientific experiments. * If minor/minimal changes were made, reality would be deterministic enough that scientific development could probably still be deemed worthwhile. If enough people repeat the experiment, the chances are that eventually there will be enough data to make a probable correct statement. It might be wrong, but it's worth a try... provided Sheogorath doesn't then on a whim decide to make it the opposite just because you've made the discovery. * In an increasing range between the two extremes, Scientific discoveries would be increasingly more unlikely, because everything would be increasingly untrustworthy.

**Absolutely** To quote some mouseover text from a certain webcomic: 'We don't use science to prove we're right. We use science to *become* right'. The scientific method is just as valid in your crazy mixed up world as it is now, and will remain so unless the world becomes so crazy that no logical sense can be made of it *at all*. This is because science *isn't* something that we use to show a particular result, it's the way we can explore the world around us. If, suddenly, the rules don't seem to apply because a mad god is messing with us, then the scientific method can still be used to tell us whether or not there is something messing with us. Then it can be used to explore the limits of this entity, and even it's psychology. This then forms a new paradigm of the world, and new theories start to form around that, bolstered by the scientific explorations mankind is making into the nature of our environment *with the mad god in it*. The only way in which this doesn't work is if the mad god is randomly changing everything, all the time, to the point where everything that humanity could possibly know breaks down. At that point it's a somewhat moot point, because the universe will have become a tumultuous maelstrom summoned from the fever dreams of a crazed god. As an example: The mad god has decided to break all experiments that require electrical measurements. Scientists notice that while all their lab equipment is broken, the lights are still on. A simple experiment therefore becomes: when I turn the light switch: do the lights turn on and off? My hypothesis is that the light switch controls the flow of electricity to the light. Now the mad god has a choice. Either the lights continue to work as normal (hooray, the scientific method worked!) or he chooses to change how lightswitches work. If he goes for completely random on-off for lights and light switches, either *the world now works in a different way*, namely, nobody can control the lights, or it's just our scientists that are affected. Either way we then know more about the world around us, either something powerful is messing about with rigorous scientific experiments, or that lights now turn on and off at random, and nothing can stop it. TL:DR: The scientific method is used to figure out how the world works. If the way the world works is that we're captive to the whim of a god who doesn't like science, that's what we'll find out using it. From that point on it's one for the theopsychologists.

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

*Is the scientific method still possible in this world?* More or less. The scientific method depends heavily on being able to prove things are either true or false (at least it used to) with as many few "maybe" in between as possible. Those "maybe" being mostly regarded as proof of falsehood. Simply put, it depends on what has the Mad God touched. If all it does is punctually changing one thing, then scientific method can still be applied to everything else, with the warning that this all powerful being can have messed with it for fun and giggles. So the scientific method would take exceptions into account and distrusts single fact as proof - one way of another - even more than today. The problem would come if the mad god changed some fundamental things so that they permanently gave random results. If she made it so that light passing through a prism changed color randomly, all science related to this particular field would be devastated. *After 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore scientific methods?* It depend directly on the permanence of the effects : killing zombies, deciding that once occurring tankosaurus are proof of nothing is easy. Restoring laws of physics bent by the will of a god is another matter. *A short conclusion :* All in all it could be regarded as pranks from a couple ten year old mischievous, all powerful kids. Fear and annoyment would be the main feelings toward the results. Oh, and hate of those responsible. If it's linked to a scientific group, then the whole scientific community could be seen as responsible, thus creating a huge problem.

As a writer and reader, if I'm dealing with a being with what we might call "godlike powers", they still have to operate within a larger reality. For example in your setup, Sheogorath builds a tiny "Perpetual Motion Machine" but is actually cheating because in some mysterious god power way, it is perfectly converting a few molecules of MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to Energy at the nano-level. Maybe there's even enough MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to last a thousand years and it's really really hard to detect. MysteriousInvisibleSubstance can also alter visible reality so that Darwin is now stuck in what appears to be a monkey body. Sheogorath can also in some odd way travel in time and use his nifty MysteriousInvisibleSubstance powered MatterReasssembler to screw with the fossils just to screw with the human's of the future's heads. Then Sheogorath disappears. Until the sentients are clever enough to figure out how to detect and then use MysteriousInvisibleSubstance at the molecular level, no "laws of reality" in that fictional world disturbed. That said, for the WorldBuilding exercise to be any fun to read, etc. When the sentients or others of Sheogorath's species figure out what he's been up to and how, Sheogorath is going to be in BIG BIG trouble, right?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

**Caveat**: I've made some assumptions in order to make this work as a potential world. Like many have pointed out, a truly mad god acting without care would probably manage to kill off the human race pretty quickly if they acted often enough to have a tangible effect on the world (by triggering a catastrophic imbalance in the environment). The only way to make this really work as an interesting world would be if Sheogorath was particularly careful in what he did, and only set out to mess with the experiments of scientists and their inventions, and changing the laws of physics/reality over very focused areas, rather than screwing with reality at random. --- Scientific method relies on consistent results, and to a large extent on statistical modelling and probabilities; if I perform 1,000,000 tests of a hypothesis and all come out true, I can say with pretty reasonably probability that it is correct. If Sheogorath's influence is obvious, or at least discernable without *too* much effort (As in, I can tell when something was caused by him rather than being natural), then it would make scientific advancement (or indeed pretty much anything relying on facts) cripplingly slow - I would have to double and triple check every experiment to ensure that no "spoiled" data made it into the calculations, and I'd have to ensure that the calculations themselves weren't spoiled, and every time I read a book I'd have to ensure that the words/results hadn't been changed since they were written down. In other words, everything would take forever. **In this case, scientific method would be possible, but very, very slow**. If his influence is impossible to distinguish from "reality", then all scientific research would be virtually impossible — whenever I get a result, I have no idea whether it's real or Sheogorath is screwing with me. All you could do is note hypotheses and keep as much data as possible, hoping that some day it might be useful. In this case, **Scientific Method would be impossible**. The damage on society is hard to predict. There's a chance that society would fall apart completely depending on whether people are aware that it is the Mad God's doing, or whether they think reality is ending. Then there's the Monotheistic religious crisis, the fact that noone can trust anything they see... theoretically all of civilisation could fall apart if critical things are warped. If he's just messing with science however, and we ignore the other effects on society he would have, then yes, science would recover, probably. 20 years isn't that long a time - people would still be alive that remembered how the methods worked. It's long enough to give up, but not long enough to have forgotten. So long as it is obvious that he is gone, Scientific Method would pick up again. Of course, you'd have to contend with the thought of whether he'd be back. Some people would probably give up saying that there isn't a point, maybe all of them, but I would think that it's likely that at least **SOME** people would take the risk. EDIT: The point of Scientific Study would depend largely on the level of change being effected by Sheogorath: * If major changes were made to reality constantly, society would effectively collapse for those 20 years, if it survived at all. Daily life would be hard enough to predict, let alone finding the time to perform and log scientific experiments. * If minor/minimal changes were made, reality would be deterministic enough that scientific development could probably still be deemed worthwhile. If enough people repeat the experiment, the chances are that eventually there will be enough data to make a probable correct statement. It might be wrong, but it's worth a try... provided Sheogorath doesn't then on a whim decide to make it the opposite just because you've made the discovery. * In an increasing range between the two extremes, Scientific discoveries would be increasingly more unlikely, because everything would be increasingly untrustworthy.

This is actually a very common misconception about the scientific method that we seem to teach in schools. The scientific method is not *just* about identifying the "right" laws governing the universe. It is also about building useful models of the universe. In fact, if you are willing to sit down with any real scientist, and use the right philosophical buzz words, you can even get them to admit that they can never provably achieve the former. So let's start to play with some of those philosophical terms! Philosophers call the study of reality "ontology." The word "reality" gets treated many different ways, but intuitively, ontology is looking for what is actually real, not just what appears to be real. Epistemology, on the other hand, is the study of knowledge. Empiricism, a word you may have heard with reference to science, is a branch of epistemology. It studies what we can know through observation of the world around us. The line between these can be seen several ways, but I find the most impressive of them to be the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Consider the possibility that you are actually just a brain, sitting in a vat somewhere, being fed neural stimulus like you were part of the Matrix. Ontology would be very interested in the "real world" where you are a brain in a vat, and would call the neural stimulus you are receiving a "simulation." However, just as we saw in the The Matrix, it is remarkably hard to make definitive statements about this reality while you're still jacked into the matrix, and have never observed the outside world. This is the epistomological side: how can one *know* the state of reality? An empirical approach would focus entirely on what can be observed, the stimulus. A 100% empirical scientist would actually not really care whether they are a brain in a vat or not until they identify an observation to defend it (although, in reality, no human is ever 100% anything!) How do we get confused? There are three major categories of thought in logical philosophy. You're almost certainly familiar with deduction and induction. Deduction is going from the general to the specific (all swans are white, so this swan must be white too). Induction is going from the specific to the general (these swans are white, so perhaps all swans are white). There is a third you hear very little about: [abduction](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/). Abduction is the ability to infer the best explanation is true. In many discourses, such as science, you end up with many explanations. Maybe your empirical results line up with your theory because your theory is ontologically right, or maybe someone is cleverly massaging the world behind the scenes to fool you. At some point, you may decide the best explanation is that you've found something useful, so you *infer* your theory to be correct. This mode of logic is a fascinating little puzzle because the term "best explanation" leaves so much room for alternatives (read the SEP link above if you're interested). However, any claim of an empirical method, such as science, yielding an ontological truth *must* go through this abductive step. So where does that leave us for the scientific method in the presence of your Mad God Shegorath? Well, from an abductive perspective, the alternative explanations of "Shegorath is just fooling us" starts to become a better explaination, so it becomes harder to use abduction to claim you have arrived at the only worthwhile best possible explanation. You would see additional questioning of scientific results. Enter the Engineer. Engineering and science are tied together intimately, like husband and wife, or perhaps even like conjoined twins. While science provides epistemological ways to "know" things, engineering uses that knowledge to build up the world around us. Of course, science never feeds us perfect knowledge. Only recently did we find out that all of our equations of motions we've been using for a long time get gummed up by relativity. Only recently did we find out that much of the world is non-deterministic thanks to quantum mechanics. Yet what we created from that era is still useful. How? Engineers have a phrase, which I commit to my heart: "All models are wrong, some are useful." We can assume that every model we come up with can be ontologically wrong, because the track record of scientific "knowledge" being revised as new data comes along is 100%. That's not a shortcoming of science, that's actually its strong point: it *always* tries to incorporate the new observations, no matter how undesirable they might be. However, it turns out that for almost everything you or I could want to do, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be close enough to be worth doing. Take teflon, PTFE. Science can develop the molecular structure of PTFE, and say "this is how PTFE works." However, never once will we create a magical perfect PTFE molecule. Every process to make it is slightly flawed. The engineering side is worried about how to use what the science knew about PTFE to coat a non-stick pot. If the science is a *little* wrong, that's okay. We'll do a test run first, to make sure the pots are useful, before selling them! The science is just treated as a guideline -- what really matters is whether the process works or not, not whether it matches exactly the predictions of science. If the science turns out to not be useful for engineering, it will just sit on the shelf until it becomes useful, or dispelled. This is, for example, how we managed to make electronics work for hundreds of years, despite getting the flow of current backwards the entire time. Ben Franklin had to make a guess as to which way the charge was flowing. He guessed wrong, so technically everything we've done with electronics is incorrect. However, his model of electricity was useful enough that there was no need to correct it, until the semiconductor era, where paying attention to what is an electron vs a hole can actually matter. So the scientific method would still be viable in this world with a Mad God. It would simply gravitate towards applications where behaviors are *still* relatively predictable, even after the Mad God. Consider the fact that you're looking at a computer screen right now. If the Mad God were to make the laws of physics too unpredictable, photons would not go in straight lines, and you couldn't read. Of course, it's possible the Mad God decides to only screw with science. He might decide that every science experiment is going to go awry. In this case, he creates all sorts of interesting looping structures as we try to define what a scientific experiment "is." He may actually disappear in a poof of logic, akin to Douglas Adam's god in *Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy*! Or he might form a strange loop a. la. Douglas Hofstadter, where he controls the universe, and the universe decides what he will do. If you're going down this path, you're going to have to describe what "viable" means in the question "is the scientific method viable...." If you are presuming an ontological world with such a crazy powerful entity, you are going to have to define your term "viable" in a way which makes sense in their presence. There may also be the question of whether the viability, once defined, can be known by a mere mortal. These questions oft leave philosophers awake at night. As a final fun tidbit, what's to say he hasn't already acted? The ultimate observation, in philosophy, is one done by a being that can think. The ability to do this is called perception. As silly as it may sound, philosophers do not have a clear sense of what perception is, nor how it behaves. Maybe we are just a brain in the jar. Could we perceive it?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

**It very much depends on your god's sense of humour.** If he's decided for example that [da red wunz go fasta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ork_%28Warhammer_40,000%29) and anything blue can fly then you've pretty much had it. All the rules that you come up with are going to be wrong. If his logic has an internal consistency and lasting effect even after he's gone, messing with the fossil records etc, then the damage is done and you can never get a right and proper answer. If there's no consistency and he's just randomly poking experiments and giggling then it's all about spotting and excluding the results that don't fit. If on the other hand, the red ones continue to go faster even after he's gone and you can ignore aerodynamic lift and just paint it blue instead, perhaps the scientific method remains valid. You just won't get the answers that maybe you did before he came along.

As a writer and reader, if I'm dealing with a being with what we might call "godlike powers", they still have to operate within a larger reality. For example in your setup, Sheogorath builds a tiny "Perpetual Motion Machine" but is actually cheating because in some mysterious god power way, it is perfectly converting a few molecules of MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to Energy at the nano-level. Maybe there's even enough MysteriousInvisibleSubstance to last a thousand years and it's really really hard to detect. MysteriousInvisibleSubstance can also alter visible reality so that Darwin is now stuck in what appears to be a monkey body. Sheogorath can also in some odd way travel in time and use his nifty MysteriousInvisibleSubstance powered MatterReasssembler to screw with the fossils just to screw with the human's of the future's heads. Then Sheogorath disappears. Until the sentients are clever enough to figure out how to detect and then use MysteriousInvisibleSubstance at the molecular level, no "laws of reality" in that fictional world disturbed. That said, for the WorldBuilding exercise to be any fun to read, etc. When the sentients or others of Sheogorath's species figure out what he's been up to and how, Sheogorath is going to be in BIG BIG trouble, right?

Consider our world at 18-19 centuries. Our civilization knows how to print books, build steam machines, we have made first experiments on electricity. And one day the [Mad God Sheogorath](http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Sheogorath) is emerged. He can bend the reality by his will. For example, he can violate the principles of conservation of energy - build Perpetuum Mobile just to irritate scientists. He can convert Darwin back into the monkey just to help him prove his theory. He can make forgery of dinosaur skeletons, so we have found caterpillar riding tankosaurus instead of diplodocus. He can resurrect people. And, do a lot of things we are not aware. So, in potential he can spoil every scientific acquired experiments result in a way, that is hard to see. So, the question is: is scientific method still possible in this world? UPD: after 20 years Sheogorath have just vanished. Can we undo his trickery and restore science methods?

2016/01/21

**Absolutely** To quote some mouseover text from a certain webcomic: 'We don't use science to prove we're right. We use science to *become* right'. The scientific method is just as valid in your crazy mixed up world as it is now, and will remain so unless the world becomes so crazy that no logical sense can be made of it *at all*. This is because science *isn't* something that we use to show a particular result, it's the way we can explore the world around us. If, suddenly, the rules don't seem to apply because a mad god is messing with us, then the scientific method can still be used to tell us whether or not there is something messing with us. Then it can be used to explore the limits of this entity, and even it's psychology. This then forms a new paradigm of the world, and new theories start to form around that, bolstered by the scientific explorations mankind is making into the nature of our environment *with the mad god in it*. The only way in which this doesn't work is if the mad god is randomly changing everything, all the time, to the point where everything that humanity could possibly know breaks down. At that point it's a somewhat moot point, because the universe will have become a tumultuous maelstrom summoned from the fever dreams of a crazed god. As an example: The mad god has decided to break all experiments that require electrical measurements. Scientists notice that while all their lab equipment is broken, the lights are still on. A simple experiment therefore becomes: when I turn the light switch: do the lights turn on and off? My hypothesis is that the light switch controls the flow of electricity to the light. Now the mad god has a choice. Either the lights continue to work as normal (hooray, the scientific method worked!) or he chooses to change how lightswitches work. If he goes for completely random on-off for lights and light switches, either *the world now works in a different way*, namely, nobody can control the lights, or it's just our scientists that are affected. Either way we then know more about the world around us, either something powerful is messing about with rigorous scientific experiments, or that lights now turn on and off at random, and nothing can stop it. TL:DR: The scientific method is used to figure out how the world works. If the way the world works is that we're captive to the whim of a god who doesn't like science, that's what we'll find out using it. From that point on it's one for the theopsychologists.

This is actually a very common misconception about the scientific method that we seem to teach in schools. The scientific method is not *just* about identifying the "right" laws governing the universe. It is also about building useful models of the universe. In fact, if you are willing to sit down with any real scientist, and use the right philosophical buzz words, you can even get them to admit that they can never provably achieve the former. So let's start to play with some of those philosophical terms! Philosophers call the study of reality "ontology." The word "reality" gets treated many different ways, but intuitively, ontology is looking for what is actually real, not just what appears to be real. Epistemology, on the other hand, is the study of knowledge. Empiricism, a word you may have heard with reference to science, is a branch of epistemology. It studies what we can know through observation of the world around us. The line between these can be seen several ways, but I find the most impressive of them to be the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Consider the possibility that you are actually just a brain, sitting in a vat somewhere, being fed neural stimulus like you were part of the Matrix. Ontology would be very interested in the "real world" where you are a brain in a vat, and would call the neural stimulus you are receiving a "simulation." However, just as we saw in the The Matrix, it is remarkably hard to make definitive statements about this reality while you're still jacked into the matrix, and have never observed the outside world. This is the epistomological side: how can one *know* the state of reality? An empirical approach would focus entirely on what can be observed, the stimulus. A 100% empirical scientist would actually not really care whether they are a brain in a vat or not until they identify an observation to defend it (although, in reality, no human is ever 100% anything!) How do we get confused? There are three major categories of thought in logical philosophy. You're almost certainly familiar with deduction and induction. Deduction is going from the general to the specific (all swans are white, so this swan must be white too). Induction is going from the specific to the general (these swans are white, so perhaps all swans are white). There is a third you hear very little about: [abduction](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/). Abduction is the ability to infer the best explanation is true. In many discourses, such as science, you end up with many explanations. Maybe your empirical results line up with your theory because your theory is ontologically right, or maybe someone is cleverly massaging the world behind the scenes to fool you. At some point, you may decide the best explanation is that you've found something useful, so you *infer* your theory to be correct. This mode of logic is a fascinating little puzzle because the term "best explanation" leaves so much room for alternatives (read the SEP link above if you're interested). However, any claim of an empirical method, such as science, yielding an ontological truth *must* go through this abductive step. So where does that leave us for the scientific method in the presence of your Mad God Shegorath? Well, from an abductive perspective, the alternative explanations of "Shegorath is just fooling us" starts to become a better explaination, so it becomes harder to use abduction to claim you have arrived at the only worthwhile best possible explanation. You would see additional questioning of scientific results. Enter the Engineer. Engineering and science are tied together intimately, like husband and wife, or perhaps even like conjoined twins. While science provides epistemological ways to "know" things, engineering uses that knowledge to build up the world around us. Of course, science never feeds us perfect knowledge. Only recently did we find out that all of our equations of motions we've been using for a long time get gummed up by relativity. Only recently did we find out that much of the world is non-deterministic thanks to quantum mechanics. Yet what we created from that era is still useful. How? Engineers have a phrase, which I commit to my heart: "All models are wrong, some are useful." We can assume that every model we come up with can be ontologically wrong, because the track record of scientific "knowledge" being revised as new data comes along is 100%. That's not a shortcoming of science, that's actually its strong point: it *always* tries to incorporate the new observations, no matter how undesirable they might be. However, it turns out that for almost everything you or I could want to do, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be close enough to be worth doing. Take teflon, PTFE. Science can develop the molecular structure of PTFE, and say "this is how PTFE works." However, never once will we create a magical perfect PTFE molecule. Every process to make it is slightly flawed. The engineering side is worried about how to use what the science knew about PTFE to coat a non-stick pot. If the science is a *little* wrong, that's okay. We'll do a test run first, to make sure the pots are useful, before selling them! The science is just treated as a guideline -- what really matters is whether the process works or not, not whether it matches exactly the predictions of science. If the science turns out to not be useful for engineering, it will just sit on the shelf until it becomes useful, or dispelled. This is, for example, how we managed to make electronics work for hundreds of years, despite getting the flow of current backwards the entire time. Ben Franklin had to make a guess as to which way the charge was flowing. He guessed wrong, so technically everything we've done with electronics is incorrect. However, his model of electricity was useful enough that there was no need to correct it, until the semiconductor era, where paying attention to what is an electron vs a hole can actually matter. So the scientific method would still be viable in this world with a Mad God. It would simply gravitate towards applications where behaviors are *still* relatively predictable, even after the Mad God. Consider the fact that you're looking at a computer screen right now. If the Mad God were to make the laws of physics too unpredictable, photons would not go in straight lines, and you couldn't read. Of course, it's possible the Mad God decides to only screw with science. He might decide that every science experiment is going to go awry. In this case, he creates all sorts of interesting looping structures as we try to define what a scientific experiment "is." He may actually disappear in a poof of logic, akin to Douglas Adam's god in *Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy*! Or he might form a strange loop a. la. Douglas Hofstadter, where he controls the universe, and the universe decides what he will do. If you're going down this path, you're going to have to describe what "viable" means in the question "is the scientific method viable...." If you are presuming an ontological world with such a crazy powerful entity, you are going to have to define your term "viable" in a way which makes sense in their presence. There may also be the question of whether the viability, once defined, can be known by a mere mortal. These questions oft leave philosophers awake at night. As a final fun tidbit, what's to say he hasn't already acted? The ultimate observation, in philosophy, is one done by a being that can think. The ability to do this is called perception. As silly as it may sound, philosophers do not have a clear sense of what perception is, nor how it behaves. Maybe we are just a brain in the jar. Could we perceive it?

I'm currently building a functional Lego escalator that is minifigure-scaled and with staircases transitioning from flat platform to stairwell. Here's my progress so far: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OOvDG.png) But with the design of the staircases hopefully out of the way for now, I've come into an issue with the slope as it is seemingly improbable to build. I tried multiple iterations: technic bricks, technic beams, snot, … but there's only so much I can do on Mecabricks. I don't have the necessary bricks available at my disposal, nor does my local area has any retails which offers the Pick-a-Brick service, therefore I couldn't physically test this build out. Is there any way of building a framework for this slope to hold up at a precise angle of 39.5 degrees? Preferably one that is legal or at least doesn't cause immense stress on the bricks, due to the technical nature of this build? EDIT: Extra images for elaboration: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gmcxy.jpg) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/g30r0.jpg) I aim to have this escalator to be roughly 4 bricks in width and its height will be dependent on how tall a story might be (probably 9 bricks tall). I don't intend to use the new dedicated escalator piece because I want to design an escalator that is flat at the base and transition into a moving stairwell then back into a flat platform at the top (and vice versa). Basically something of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAjFw7v8QhE) complexity , but at a minifigure scale. EDIT 2: These are the results I yielded when I tried hinge pieces for building a slope: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WSkiJ.png) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/k4Vvq.png) Connector peg with [plate 1x2 with pinhole on bottom](https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=18677&name=Plate,%20Modified%201%20x%202%20with%20Pin%20Hole%20on%20Bottom&category=%5BPlate,%20Modified%5D#T=C) or any other hinge designs yield the same results. Maybe it could work but since I don't have local access to Bricklink and the likes, I couldn't physically test this out and have only Mecabricks to work with.

2021/10/15

Could this work in you case? Using snot brick to build it vertically. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9mNeE.jpg) EDIT 1: The only way I managed to get your angle and snap it correctly is like that. I used stud.io with collision turned on to be sure it could work. I hope this can help you. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nyvem.png) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/L6vPG.png) EDIT 2: I found another solution using bar and bar with clip. This one is much more modulable but maybe less stable. Let me know what you think. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/K7UNh.png) EDIT 3: Adapted to use technic beam. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uJpO7.png) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2xxMy.png)

**Update:** Now that I have stud.io installed, I've finally got an upright design for the slope's framework as follows: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MTQh3.png) This design was based off of @Hugo 's suggestion, but modified to use Technic pegs and Technic bricks for better stability.

I learned British English, but I work exclusively with Americans. I'll often say "Fat lot of good X did for us", and I get confused looks from others. For example, the other day, I said "I think we should have had them take the web development course; fat lot of good the algorithms course did for them" and people have no idea what I mean. A coworker told me that what I'm saying sounds like what someone British would say, and I'm not sure how to Americanize this statement. First: Am I using the term "Fat lot of good" incorrectly? Second: How should I say this in American English?

2022/12/30

**Just leave out the fat**, in speech, and use a sarcastic tone. "I think we should have had them take the web development course; a lot of good the algorithms course did for them." The fact is that this is an idiomatic expression. And **many Americans** *would in fact understand* "a fat lot of good". Who cares what a coworker says? The expression is not essentially British at all. It's in Merriam Webster like this: a (fat) lot of good idiom informal : no use or help at all "I've brought an umbrella." "A (fat) lot of good that will do now that it's stopped raining!" [Merriam Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/a%20%28fat%29%20lot%20of%20good)

A whole lot of good would also work. I'm guessing the confusion comes from the fact that "fat" generally refers to being overweight.

I must develop a simple web application to produce reports. I have a single table "contract" and i must return very simple aggregated values : number of documents produced in a time range, average number of pages for documents and so on . The table gets filled by a batch application, users will have roles that will allow them to see only a part of the reports (if they may be called so ). My purpose is : 1. develop a class, which generates the so called reports, opened to future extension (adding new methods to generate new reports for different roles must be easy ) 2. decouple the web graphic interface from the database access I'm evaluating various patterns : decorator, visitor, ... but being the return data so simple i cannot evaluate which apply or even if its the case to use one. Moreover i must do it i less than 5 days. It can be done if i make a so called "smart gui" but as told at point 1, i don't want to get troubles when new roles or method will be added. --- thank you for your answers. I'm sorry, i realize i haven't provided too much infos. I live in a Dilbert world. at the moment i've got the following info : db will be oracle (the concrete db doesn't exist yet) , so no EF, maybe linqtodataset (but i'm new to linq). About new features of the application,due to pravious experiences, the only thing i wish is not to be obliged to propagate changes over the whole application, even if it's simple. that are the reasons i've thougth to design patterns (note i've said "if it's the case" in my question) . I'll KISS it and then will refactor it if needed , as suggested by ladislav mrnka, but i still appreciate any suggestion on how to keep opened to extension the data gathering class

2010/08/30

KISS - keep it simple and stupid. You have five days. Create working application and if you have time refactor it to some better solution.

The road to good code is not paved with design patterns. Good code is code that is readable, maintainable, robust, compatible and future-proof. Don’t get me wrong: Design patterns are a great thing because they help categorise, and thus teach, the experience that earlier generations of programmers have accrued. Each design pattern once solved a problem in a way that was not only novel and creative, but also *good*. The corrolary is *not* that a design pattern is necessarily good code when applied to any other problem. Good code requires experience and insight. This includes experience with design patterns, and insight into their applicability and their downsides and pitfalls. That said, my recommendation in your specific case is to learn about the recommended practice regarding web interfaces, database access, etc. Most C# programmers write web applications in ASP.NET; tend to use LINQ-to-Entities or LINQ-to-SQL for database access; and use Windows Forms or WPF for a desktop GUI. Each of these may or may not fulfill the requirements of your particular project. Only you can tell.

I must develop a simple web application to produce reports. I have a single table "contract" and i must return very simple aggregated values : number of documents produced in a time range, average number of pages for documents and so on . The table gets filled by a batch application, users will have roles that will allow them to see only a part of the reports (if they may be called so ). My purpose is : 1. develop a class, which generates the so called reports, opened to future extension (adding new methods to generate new reports for different roles must be easy ) 2. decouple the web graphic interface from the database access I'm evaluating various patterns : decorator, visitor, ... but being the return data so simple i cannot evaluate which apply or even if its the case to use one. Moreover i must do it i less than 5 days. It can be done if i make a so called "smart gui" but as told at point 1, i don't want to get troubles when new roles or method will be added. --- thank you for your answers. I'm sorry, i realize i haven't provided too much infos. I live in a Dilbert world. at the moment i've got the following info : db will be oracle (the concrete db doesn't exist yet) , so no EF, maybe linqtodataset (but i'm new to linq). About new features of the application,due to pravious experiences, the only thing i wish is not to be obliged to propagate changes over the whole application, even if it's simple. that are the reasons i've thougth to design patterns (note i've said "if it's the case" in my question) . I'll KISS it and then will refactor it if needed , as suggested by ladislav mrnka, but i still appreciate any suggestion on how to keep opened to extension the data gathering class

2010/08/30

KISS - keep it simple and stupid. You have five days. Create working application and if you have time refactor it to some better solution.

How about you use strategy pattern for the retrieving data? And use interfaces like following to keep it extendable at all times. * IReportFilter: Report filter/criteria set * IReportParams: Gets report parameters * IReportData: Gets the report data in a result set * IReportFormat: Report formatting * IReportRender: Renders the report Just thinking out loud.

I have to run Mac OS on virtual box for a class and it keeps giving me errors stating "VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration not available on your system. Certain guests (e.g. OS/2 and QNX) require this feature and will fail to boot without it." If there is a solution, I am not used to windows 8.1 and will need detailed instructions on how to fix it. Thank you

2014/01/08

For anyone else who may look this up in future. I had the same problem. Turns out virtualization had been disabled in the bios. Check if this is the case. If so, just enable it and the error is gone

As previous replies have said, check if your processor supports VT-x virtualization. If it doesn't, then you just won't be able to run Mac OS on VirtualBox. If that is the case, consider VMWare Player, which is a decent alternative for VirtualBox, and is also free. It is commonly used in computers whose processors don't support VT-x to emulate Mac OS.

I recently switched to a new PC at work, one with two (identical, Dell 23") monitors. I'm running Linux Mint 15 64bit / Cinnamon. Is there a way to set it up in such a way that, instead of both monitors sharing the same huge workspace, they are on separate smaller ones? E.g. left monitor on workspace 1, right monitor on workspace 2, and I could switch either monitor to workspace 3 if needed? Failing that, is there a way to duplicate the bottom panel onto the second monitor? Currently it is only displayed on the left one.

2013/06/26

Found this on the Ubuntu Forums in a thread titled: [gnome panels on two monitors](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1417900). *excerpt* I believe what you want is the following: 1. You have to right click the panels on Monitor #1 and choose "New Panel" 2. Then hold Alt and click and drag the new panel to Monitor #2. **NOTE:** "Expanded" Panels always "cling" to the edges of your physical screens and hence are unable to span across 2 monitors, this is by design. I believe all of the dual head screenshots that appear to have 2 panels stretched across are just clever layouts of 4 separate panels. ### Issue with MATE? I also came across this ticket in the Linux Mint issue tracker, which to summarize is saying that currently in MATE this feature isn't available. * [Taskbar on second monitor](https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/130) ### References * [Create new panel on second monitor](http://scott.cm/create-new-panel-on-second-monitor/) * [Adding the panel to the second monitor](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/56523/adding-the-panel-to-the-second-monitor)

The simplest solution is to use Docky on second screen, Docky by default calls apps on screen it is on :)

I'm trying to chart out a song, just so I have a chord chart to use for comping. It's in 4/4, and most chord changes happen on the strong beats (1 and 3), but there's a couple of places where beat 3 is anticipated (by an 8th note). For reference, the song is "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straights. Is there any sort of convention used to notate, in this example, that the Bb in measure 16 should be anticipated, rather than played right on beat 3? [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ravs7.gif)

2015/12/05

(I don't have enough reputation points yet to comment, so I'll make this an answer instead. Will convert to comments on other answers later, or to edits on other answers, once I have enough cred to ask those answers' authors whether they welcome the edit.) I don't see any convention specified in either the "Concise Dictionary of Music" (Wm Collins Sons) or the "Essential Dictionary of Music Notation" (Alfred). Seems like you're on your own to come up with an approach that works best for you. As pointed out in the answer from @Tim, if you're already using staves, then why not jot out just those notes that are pushed, tying them to the downbeat chords to which they push? Or if you want to go with chord notation, maybe just use that same "Ant." abbreviation that you saw in the examples given at <http://www.musicarrangerspage.com/1493/how-to-use-anticipation-in-music/>, not as markings on written-out notes in the staff as they do there, but as stand-alone markings prior to the anticipated chord, e.g. > > Bb     Bb     Dmi     ant. Bb > > >

Since you're using a stave (don't know why), you can write in the last quaver of the bar previous to the chord to be pushed, with a tie mark across the barline. Write the actual chord over that quaver, thus before the bar. Shortly after that part, there's a syncopated Bb to C part, which really needs writing out in dots, as that rhythm pattern is crucial to the piece. Use notes as suggested by jjmusicnotes to show exactly how it's played. It's the only way.

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

What you see around the corners is most probably not glue, and certainly not put there to hold the chip in place during automated assembly. Some SMD components need to be glued down after the soldering, as in case of a PCB with components on both sides, when you flip it upside down to assemble the other side some components might fall when the solder is liquid. This happen in case the surface tension of the molten solder is not enough to hold them in place. That said, it is possible that it is just a sealing compound that is put there to avoid moisture penetrating below the chip, especially for chips that might get hot, such as a CPU or GPU. Moisture can penetrate below the part, and diffuse inside the chip itself, depending on the package technology, and when the chip heats up the water can become steam, and crack certain parts of the chip. To avoid this, you bake the parts before soldering, you solder, and then shut the sides to avoid any moisture ingress. How can you solder your BGAs is not a single-answer question. This entirely depends on what pitch we are dealing with, PCB thickness, PCB status (new/used) and equipment you have. A good recipe is to use a very (very very very) thin amount of really thin (as in runny) flux on the PCB, place the part, hot air & pray. You might need a hot plate if the PCB is particularly thick/big, and if it is small enough you can get away with the hot plate only. And absolutely, categorically, no glue.

The main reason for using staking or underfill is to 1) reduce the stress on the BGA solder joints caused by CTE differences between the package and the board, 2) reduce the possibility of the part detaching from the board during a high shock (depth charge near a submarine) or vibration (rocket launch) event and 3) in the case of underfill, provide a better thermal path from the package to the board. As others have said, you want the part to be able to move a bit during the solder reflow operation, so any staking or underfill is done after soldering and after initial testing shows that the unit works properly. Whether staking or underfill is needed, and the specific material used, can only be determined after a rigorous structural (for staking) and thermal (for underfill) analysis has been performed. Staking is preferred to underfill because of the difficulty/impossibility of reworking a BGA that has been underfilled. **Edit 1** Note that on double side SMT boards that go through a solder reflow operation, it is usual practice to use a small bit of adhesive under components to hold them in place, especially those on the underside of the board. However this adhesive is not meant to serve a structural or thermal need.

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

To add on to the other excellent answers, and to answer your third question: the red glue you see is likely to be some kind of **corner staking** or **underfilling**. After soldering, an adhesive compound is added to mitigate in-the-field failure, particularly when packages are subjected to thermal or physical stresses. It's not intended to improve solderability. See [the ANSYS website](https://www.ansys.com/blog/bga-and-qfn-failure-mitigation-underfilling-edge-bonds-and-corner-staking-physics-of-failure) for more info.

What you see around the corners is most probably not glue, and certainly not put there to hold the chip in place during automated assembly. Some SMD components need to be glued down after the soldering, as in case of a PCB with components on both sides, when you flip it upside down to assemble the other side some components might fall when the solder is liquid. This happen in case the surface tension of the molten solder is not enough to hold them in place. That said, it is possible that it is just a sealing compound that is put there to avoid moisture penetrating below the chip, especially for chips that might get hot, such as a CPU or GPU. Moisture can penetrate below the part, and diffuse inside the chip itself, depending on the package technology, and when the chip heats up the water can become steam, and crack certain parts of the chip. To avoid this, you bake the parts before soldering, you solder, and then shut the sides to avoid any moisture ingress. How can you solder your BGAs is not a single-answer question. This entirely depends on what pitch we are dealing with, PCB thickness, PCB status (new/used) and equipment you have. A good recipe is to use a very (very very very) thin amount of really thin (as in runny) flux on the PCB, place the part, hot air & pray. You might need a hot plate if the PCB is particularly thick/big, and if it is small enough you can get away with the hot plate only. And absolutely, categorically, no glue.

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

What you see around the corners is most probably not glue, and certainly not put there to hold the chip in place during automated assembly. Some SMD components need to be glued down after the soldering, as in case of a PCB with components on both sides, when you flip it upside down to assemble the other side some components might fall when the solder is liquid. This happen in case the surface tension of the molten solder is not enough to hold them in place. That said, it is possible that it is just a sealing compound that is put there to avoid moisture penetrating below the chip, especially for chips that might get hot, such as a CPU or GPU. Moisture can penetrate below the part, and diffuse inside the chip itself, depending on the package technology, and when the chip heats up the water can become steam, and crack certain parts of the chip. To avoid this, you bake the parts before soldering, you solder, and then shut the sides to avoid any moisture ingress. How can you solder your BGAs is not a single-answer question. This entirely depends on what pitch we are dealing with, PCB thickness, PCB status (new/used) and equipment you have. A good recipe is to use a very (very very very) thin amount of really thin (as in runny) flux on the PCB, place the part, hot air & pray. You might need a hot plate if the PCB is particularly thick/big, and if it is small enough you can get away with the hot plate only. And absolutely, categorically, no glue.

The "red" glue you are seeing is an SMT red glue and it's a certain type of temperature-set adhesive. Normally most assembly houses will not be using these adhesives, as surface tension will position the components correctly. However that is the "theory" ... In practice and depending on the circumstance, it may be required or used sometimes. I know for sure that hand soldering small BGAs based on the common idea of "surface tension will center it naturally - don't worry" is pie in the sky ! If the hot-air gun blows too strongly, as they often do, even on minimum setting, you will quickly blow the part away, quicker then you can sneeze ! In this case, some sort of manual positioning on your prototype PCB might be the answer ... its not easy to say what type of glue works best (if you really had to go that way), but the temperature sensitive red glue is used because it hardends very quickly over 130 - 150 Celcius, so there's a reason for it being used in some cases ... Having said that, bigger BGA components, say with over 160 BGA balls you hopefully don't need any adhesive at all as the surface tension etc will do the job once the solder is melting ...

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

What you see around the corners is most probably not glue, and certainly not put there to hold the chip in place during automated assembly. Some SMD components need to be glued down after the soldering, as in case of a PCB with components on both sides, when you flip it upside down to assemble the other side some components might fall when the solder is liquid. This happen in case the surface tension of the molten solder is not enough to hold them in place. That said, it is possible that it is just a sealing compound that is put there to avoid moisture penetrating below the chip, especially for chips that might get hot, such as a CPU or GPU. Moisture can penetrate below the part, and diffuse inside the chip itself, depending on the package technology, and when the chip heats up the water can become steam, and crack certain parts of the chip. To avoid this, you bake the parts before soldering, you solder, and then shut the sides to avoid any moisture ingress. How can you solder your BGAs is not a single-answer question. This entirely depends on what pitch we are dealing with, PCB thickness, PCB status (new/used) and equipment you have. A good recipe is to use a very (very very very) thin amount of really thin (as in runny) flux on the PCB, place the part, hot air & pray. You might need a hot plate if the PCB is particularly thick/big, and if it is small enough you can get away with the hot plate only. And absolutely, categorically, no glue.

* 1. No, absolutely no glue should be used on BGAs prior to reflow. BGA solder balls collapse slightly during reflow, increasing contact with the pad, and any adhesive would interfere with that. * 2. The solder paste holds the chip in place prior to the melt, then surface tension during. No need for anything else. * 3. For backside components, limit the BGA size / weight depending on the solder paste contact area. If you can’t avoid this, you may need to do a 2-pass reflow with higher melt solder on back for pass 1, then lower-melt solder on top for pad 2. This adds cost of course. You can consider using NSMD pads to increase solder-to-pad contact area (and thus, surface tension) during reflow. NSMD pads have proven more mechanically robust than SMD pads for very fine-pitch BGAs. Finally, make sure your board planarity is well controlled. Also your package planarity needs to be specified and assured by the vendor. The glue you're seeing isn't for soldering. It's 'corner staking' applied after the reflow process for improved shock-and-vibe mechanical robustness. It's a reduced type of underfill where adhesive is injected between the corners of the soldered BGA and the board, as opposed to complete underfill which is injected underneath the entire IC. More here: <https://www.ansys.com/blog/bga-and-qfn-failure-mitigation-underfilling-edge-bonds-and-corner-staking-physics-of-failure>

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

What you see around the corners is most probably not glue, and certainly not put there to hold the chip in place during automated assembly. Some SMD components need to be glued down after the soldering, as in case of a PCB with components on both sides, when you flip it upside down to assemble the other side some components might fall when the solder is liquid. This happen in case the surface tension of the molten solder is not enough to hold them in place. That said, it is possible that it is just a sealing compound that is put there to avoid moisture penetrating below the chip, especially for chips that might get hot, such as a CPU or GPU. Moisture can penetrate below the part, and diffuse inside the chip itself, depending on the package technology, and when the chip heats up the water can become steam, and crack certain parts of the chip. To avoid this, you bake the parts before soldering, you solder, and then shut the sides to avoid any moisture ingress. How can you solder your BGAs is not a single-answer question. This entirely depends on what pitch we are dealing with, PCB thickness, PCB status (new/used) and equipment you have. A good recipe is to use a very (very very very) thin amount of really thin (as in runny) flux on the PCB, place the part, hot air & pray. You might need a hot plate if the PCB is particularly thick/big, and if it is small enough you can get away with the hot plate only. And absolutely, categorically, no glue.

Personally, I'm intimidated by the whole idea of BGA rework with hobby grade equipment, and really wouldn't do it. But, no, if I were doing it, I would be very hesitant to glue the chip in place. Surface mount soldering relies on letting the surface tension of melted solder being able to pull the chip into alignment. Gluing would prevent that from happening. The issue is that with hot air, you may have problems getting all the balls molten at the same time. I really wouldn't even consider personally trying it without using a board heater to bring the temp just below the eutectic point, and then using hot air to nudge the region of the board over melting. Note that facilities that do BGA rework often have xray devices to check the results. Certainly, you would need to be able to tolerate errors, and be able to run a functionality test to verify correct placement.

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

To add on to the other excellent answers, and to answer your third question: the red glue you see is likely to be some kind of **corner staking** or **underfilling**. After soldering, an adhesive compound is added to mitigate in-the-field failure, particularly when packages are subjected to thermal or physical stresses. It's not intended to improve solderability. See [the ANSYS website](https://www.ansys.com/blog/bga-and-qfn-failure-mitigation-underfilling-edge-bonds-and-corner-staking-physics-of-failure) for more info.

* 1. No, absolutely no glue should be used on BGAs prior to reflow. BGA solder balls collapse slightly during reflow, increasing contact with the pad, and any adhesive would interfere with that. * 2. The solder paste holds the chip in place prior to the melt, then surface tension during. No need for anything else. * 3. For backside components, limit the BGA size / weight depending on the solder paste contact area. If you can’t avoid this, you may need to do a 2-pass reflow with higher melt solder on back for pass 1, then lower-melt solder on top for pad 2. This adds cost of course. You can consider using NSMD pads to increase solder-to-pad contact area (and thus, surface tension) during reflow. NSMD pads have proven more mechanically robust than SMD pads for very fine-pitch BGAs. Finally, make sure your board planarity is well controlled. Also your package planarity needs to be specified and assured by the vendor. The glue you're seeing isn't for soldering. It's 'corner staking' applied after the reflow process for improved shock-and-vibe mechanical robustness. It's a reduced type of underfill where adhesive is injected between the corners of the soldered BGA and the board, as opposed to complete underfill which is injected underneath the entire IC. More here: <https://www.ansys.com/blog/bga-and-qfn-failure-mitigation-underfilling-edge-bonds-and-corner-staking-physics-of-failure>

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

To add on to the other excellent answers, and to answer your third question: the red glue you see is likely to be some kind of **corner staking** or **underfilling**. After soldering, an adhesive compound is added to mitigate in-the-field failure, particularly when packages are subjected to thermal or physical stresses. It's not intended to improve solderability. See [the ANSYS website](https://www.ansys.com/blog/bga-and-qfn-failure-mitigation-underfilling-edge-bonds-and-corner-staking-physics-of-failure) for more info.

The "red" glue you are seeing is an SMT red glue and it's a certain type of temperature-set adhesive. Normally most assembly houses will not be using these adhesives, as surface tension will position the components correctly. However that is the "theory" ... In practice and depending on the circumstance, it may be required or used sometimes. I know for sure that hand soldering small BGAs based on the common idea of "surface tension will center it naturally - don't worry" is pie in the sky ! If the hot-air gun blows too strongly, as they often do, even on minimum setting, you will quickly blow the part away, quicker then you can sneeze ! In this case, some sort of manual positioning on your prototype PCB might be the answer ... its not easy to say what type of glue works best (if you really had to go that way), but the temperature sensitive red glue is used because it hardends very quickly over 130 - 150 Celcius, so there's a reason for it being used in some cases ... Having said that, bigger BGA components, say with over 160 BGA balls you hopefully don't need any adhesive at all as the surface tension etc will do the job once the solder is melting ...

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

To add on to the other excellent answers, and to answer your third question: the red glue you see is likely to be some kind of **corner staking** or **underfilling**. After soldering, an adhesive compound is added to mitigate in-the-field failure, particularly when packages are subjected to thermal or physical stresses. It's not intended to improve solderability. See [the ANSYS website](https://www.ansys.com/blog/bga-and-qfn-failure-mitigation-underfilling-edge-bonds-and-corner-staking-physics-of-failure) for more info.

Personally, I'm intimidated by the whole idea of BGA rework with hobby grade equipment, and really wouldn't do it. But, no, if I were doing it, I would be very hesitant to glue the chip in place. Surface mount soldering relies on letting the surface tension of melted solder being able to pull the chip into alignment. Gluing would prevent that from happening. The issue is that with hot air, you may have problems getting all the balls molten at the same time. I really wouldn't even consider personally trying it without using a board heater to bring the temp just below the eutectic point, and then using hot air to nudge the region of the board over melting. Note that facilities that do BGA rework often have xray devices to check the results. Certainly, you would need to be able to tolerate errors, and be able to run a functionality test to verify correct placement.

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

To add on to the other excellent answers, and to answer your third question: the red glue you see is likely to be some kind of **corner staking** or **underfilling**. After soldering, an adhesive compound is added to mitigate in-the-field failure, particularly when packages are subjected to thermal or physical stresses. It's not intended to improve solderability. See [the ANSYS website](https://www.ansys.com/blog/bga-and-qfn-failure-mitigation-underfilling-edge-bonds-and-corner-staking-physics-of-failure) for more info.

What others have said. We use a small under-board preheater (my technician says that is essential) so minimal airflow is needed on top using a hot air pencil. We just bought one of those inexpensive reflow ovens (under USD$500), which with some controller modifications can be quite good for doing small board runs. I saw one in use an an OSHWA meeting a couple years ago and was quite impressed. It has actual profiles and you can add thermocouples etc to do it right but on a small scale. For double sided boards surface tension should hold the upside-down parts on but you can of course use a slightly lower temp solder for the second side. Also you may find a local assembly house that can do small runs for you, and they should even have x-ray inspection for BGAs. There's such a place in Salt Lake City.

I have often see ball grid array (BGA) chips, mostly those from CPUs or GPUs, being glued around in the corners with some red glue or to the perimeter with a translucent one. Having to manually solder BGA chips using hot air, should I glue the chips to the board before heating? In their answers to a quite similar question about soldering small electronic parts (but not specifically BGA chips), some users mention that glue can cause additional problems when it is not applied properly: [adhesive glue before soldering](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/71682/adhesive-glue-before-soldering) Not having an assistant, such soldering process remains currently challenging for me, as I hold the hot air gun (from a rework station) in one hand and the tweezers in the other one. Without using glue, I see at least three difficulties: * positioning and aligning the chips precisely * maintaining the surface of the chips parallel to thus of the PCB when bringing them to it * remaining stable during the soldering, without false move nor trembling So, my questions are: 1. Is the use of glue recommended, given the context? 2. Are there possibly alternative compounds to help keeping the chips into place during the soldering, like a kind of "butter" that would progressively melt when reaching high temperatures? 3. Are there other improvements that I can make to facilitate the soldering of the BGA chips?

2023/02/21

To add on to the other excellent answers, and to answer your third question: the red glue you see is likely to be some kind of **corner staking** or **underfilling**. After soldering, an adhesive compound is added to mitigate in-the-field failure, particularly when packages are subjected to thermal or physical stresses. It's not intended to improve solderability. See [the ANSYS website](https://www.ansys.com/blog/bga-and-qfn-failure-mitigation-underfilling-edge-bonds-and-corner-staking-physics-of-failure) for more info.

The main reason for using staking or underfill is to 1) reduce the stress on the BGA solder joints caused by CTE differences between the package and the board, 2) reduce the possibility of the part detaching from the board during a high shock (depth charge near a submarine) or vibration (rocket launch) event and 3) in the case of underfill, provide a better thermal path from the package to the board. As others have said, you want the part to be able to move a bit during the solder reflow operation, so any staking or underfill is done after soldering and after initial testing shows that the unit works properly. Whether staking or underfill is needed, and the specific material used, can only be determined after a rigorous structural (for staking) and thermal (for underfill) analysis has been performed. Staking is preferred to underfill because of the difficulty/impossibility of reworking a BGA that has been underfilled. **Edit 1** Note that on double side SMT boards that go through a solder reflow operation, it is usual practice to use a small bit of adhesive under components to hold them in place, especially those on the underside of the board. However this adhesive is not meant to serve a structural or thermal need.

We have a scenario One Main e-commerce website - currently attracting a lot of visitors. Three sub "brand specific" sites which will hang off this site - each of these sites will potentiall have the same level of traffic over time. The client requires order processing for each brand site to happen in one place (i.e. one backoffice). What topology should we choose? We think that perhaps having a main sql server with both reads and writes from the backoffice, and replicate that data to "brand specific" sql server instances might work. Each brand specific site would have its own dedicated sql server for Frontoffice "reads". Any writes we perform would go back to the main database to keep stock concurrent Any thoughts? Future scalability is a major factor.

2009/02/04

Without having a more detailed understanding of how your application is to function it is difficult to provide you with clear direction. Your proposed implementation of having a central server (Publisher) supporting reads and writes, with a number of additional site specific servers (subscribers) for reads only, is certainly plausible. This has the added benefit of giving you the flexibility to replicate only the tables that would be required for read queries i.e. your central server will likely manage data such as supplier information, billing etc. that may not need to be pushed to subscribers. Your central server is likely going to be your sticking point if any, as all other servers will directing write activity back to it. The location of your distributed sites i.e. how far they are from the central server will also affect the transactional latency of your replicated environment. If you wish to present all of your database data as read only at the distributed sites then you may wish to consider using Log Shipping for this. The disadvantage of this implementation if that your application needs to be aware that only read activity can be processed on the local server and all write activity needs to be routed to the central server. I hope this helps but please feel free to pose additional questions. Cheers, John

Not a specific answer to your question but [Youtube scaling](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6304964351441328559) is an interesting video about youtube scaling. Prehaps it will give you some ideas.

So I'm making a game using love2d where the player will find himself in an zombie infested city but I don't want the city/map to be just the same all the time, so I want to create a random map/city generator, but I don't know where to start, I maybe can make my own but the result would probably be not what I wanted, as I don't want tiles getting placed all over the place messily(it won't look like a city then), I want random set of tiles getting placed in the world/map like buildings get placed randomly throughout the world/map, I hope someone can help me with this as this is really hard for me...

2015/08/19

Like stated by Shiro in a comment , it's difficult to give a precise answer. I can suggest a possible starting point. Use random [voronoi](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagramma_di_Voronoi) generation where , given a set of random points P , each point in space is weighted relative to the distance from the nearest p in P. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JWgJh.png) Now , instead of considering euclidean distance use [Manhattan distance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry) and you get something like this : [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/koXjs.png) then adjoust the gradient to obtain this [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/83aDs.png)

You should do some research about l-systems, they allow you to specify some basic rules and then procedurally generate the map. You could for example specify that every building must be surrounded by roads, and every road must continue in a straight line or eventually end, and every road is surrounded by buildings or empty space. Then, the algorithm will start "substituting" a building with a building surrounded by roads, a road piece with a full road... until you have a complete city. Read the answer to this question for a more detailed explanation: [Using L-Systems to procedurally generate cities](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/86234/using-l-systems-to-procedurally-generate-cities)

So I'm making a game using love2d where the player will find himself in an zombie infested city but I don't want the city/map to be just the same all the time, so I want to create a random map/city generator, but I don't know where to start, I maybe can make my own but the result would probably be not what I wanted, as I don't want tiles getting placed all over the place messily(it won't look like a city then), I want random set of tiles getting placed in the world/map like buildings get placed randomly throughout the world/map, I hope someone can help me with this as this is really hard for me...

2015/08/19

There are simple ways to generate cities, depending on your needs. Some time ago, I wanted to generate cities for a fantasy setting, so I started [playing with a generator](http://rpg20.com/cityGen.php?imgStyle=3&citySize=very_large). Like I said in [another SE post](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/57695/modern-floorplan-generator/59603#59603): "rough on the edges" is an understatement. But it suits my needs (it may meet your needs too). **This is what it looks like:** [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jEOXQ.png) Some terms I use internally: * A tile is the smallest unit I handle; on the image one of the small houses fills almost a full tile. * A block is a group of NxM tiles. **And this is how I generate it:** First I generate a central feature, such as the block with the "fountain" (let's call this block a town square). I decide its width and height and place it near the center. Then I try generating "blocks" for as long as I can: 1. Generate a block size (somewhere between 2x2 and 5x5). 2. Iterate through the image and decide where to place it. For this a weight is assigned depending on adjacency to other blocks (similar to what I explained on [this post](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/82059/algorithm-for-procedureral-2d-map-with-connected-paths/87569#87569)). 3. Place the block if a suitable location is found. When no suitable location is found, go on to the next step. Once all blocks have been placed, I can add houses and buildings for each block. I took care of leaving a gap between blocks and another between houses. Some buildings use four tiles (2x2). Finally, I do the actual drawing in an image.

You should do some research about l-systems, they allow you to specify some basic rules and then procedurally generate the map. You could for example specify that every building must be surrounded by roads, and every road must continue in a straight line or eventually end, and every road is surrounded by buildings or empty space. Then, the algorithm will start "substituting" a building with a building surrounded by roads, a road piece with a full road... until you have a complete city. Read the answer to this question for a more detailed explanation: [Using L-Systems to procedurally generate cities](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/86234/using-l-systems-to-procedurally-generate-cities)

Expanding on [How can I make Windows 8 use the classic theme?](https://superuser.com/questions/513492/how-can-i-make-windows-8-use-the-classic-theme) and [Windows 10 TenForums: Windows Classic Look Theme in Windows 10](http://www.tenforums.com/customization/11432-windows-classic-look-theme-windows-10-a.html) -- how does one use Windows 10 with the old classic theme? [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cwmlt.png) There's a [Windows 10 theme over at DeviantArt](http://kizo2703.deviantart.com/art/Windows-classic-theme-for-Windows-8-RTM-8-1-10-325642288) but it does not work with the final RTM: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dUZHw.jpg) Also, your vote over at [Windows 10 UserVoice: Windows Classic Look Theme in Windows 10](https://windows.uservoice.com/forums/265757-windows-feature-suggestions/suggestions/9193677-windows-classic-look-theme-in-windows-10) would be much appreciated.

2015/08/06

Have a look at this thread: <http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=113024&p=777781&hilit=classictheme#p777781> They're discussing/testing how to modify windows binary files to "get back" to classic interface by "unusual" methods, rather than just turning colors into gray! But it appears to be very complex due to totally different structure of explorer, windows manager and whatelse in Windows 10 w.r.t. previous versions. Note: be sure to create a restore point before running ClassicTheme.exe for testing! It can screw up whole interface! For the start menu, things are easier thanks to ClassicShell: <http://www.classicshell.net/gallery/> Additionally, try googling for: Classic AE by Saarineames (download from deviantart) Aero Lite Theme (among other things, make windows border larger than one pixel, for better resize and better visibility) You can also play (carefully) with registry keys: * HKEY\_CURRENT\_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM *(you can add **AccentColorInactive** key here, or edit existing keys)* * KEY\_CURRENT\_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\Personalize <http://www.thewindowsclub.com/get-colored-window-title-bar-windows-10> Ultimate Windows Tweaker is also an amazing tool: <http://www.thewindowsclub.com/image-gallery-for-uwt4>

Its impossible to change it to: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YMIdr.png) If you are REALLY desperate for the classic theme, [downgrade to Windows 7](http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/windows/roll-back-windows-7-from-windows-8-3459580/). Or go along with this [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/irtmo.jpg)

Expanding on [How can I make Windows 8 use the classic theme?](https://superuser.com/questions/513492/how-can-i-make-windows-8-use-the-classic-theme) and [Windows 10 TenForums: Windows Classic Look Theme in Windows 10](http://www.tenforums.com/customization/11432-windows-classic-look-theme-windows-10-a.html) -- how does one use Windows 10 with the old classic theme? [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cwmlt.png) There's a [Windows 10 theme over at DeviantArt](http://kizo2703.deviantart.com/art/Windows-classic-theme-for-Windows-8-RTM-8-1-10-325642288) but it does not work with the final RTM: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dUZHw.jpg) Also, your vote over at [Windows 10 UserVoice: Windows Classic Look Theme in Windows 10](https://windows.uservoice.com/forums/265757-windows-feature-suggestions/suggestions/9193677-windows-classic-look-theme-in-windows-10) would be much appreciated.

2015/08/06

Have a look at this thread: <http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=113024&p=777781&hilit=classictheme#p777781> They're discussing/testing how to modify windows binary files to "get back" to classic interface by "unusual" methods, rather than just turning colors into gray! But it appears to be very complex due to totally different structure of explorer, windows manager and whatelse in Windows 10 w.r.t. previous versions. Note: be sure to create a restore point before running ClassicTheme.exe for testing! It can screw up whole interface! For the start menu, things are easier thanks to ClassicShell: <http://www.classicshell.net/gallery/> Additionally, try googling for: Classic AE by Saarineames (download from deviantart) Aero Lite Theme (among other things, make windows border larger than one pixel, for better resize and better visibility) You can also play (carefully) with registry keys: * HKEY\_CURRENT\_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM *(you can add **AccentColorInactive** key here, or edit existing keys)* * KEY\_CURRENT\_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\Personalize <http://www.thewindowsclub.com/get-colored-window-title-bar-windows-10> Ultimate Windows Tweaker is also an amazing tool: <http://www.thewindowsclub.com/image-gallery-for-uwt4>

On Windows 11 and Windows 10 version 1903 and above I suggest to use [Explorer Patcher](https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher) and [ClassicThemeTray](https://github.com/spitfirex86/ClassicThemeTray): [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7CACo.png) Check [this GitHub discussion](https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/discussions/167) for a detailed tutorial.

I copied 3.62 GB of data on to a re-writable DVD instead of erasing it. Now there is no data on the disc but it shows used space as 3.62 GB and 690 MB of free space. Now I am unable to erase my disc. What should I do to erase the disc and get the space back?

2009/11/25

You aren't supposed to format a DVD-RW. Use something like [CDBurnerXP](http://cdburnerxp.se/)'s erase function: 

As stated elsewhere, you need to erase the DVD-RW before using it again. I have a very simple low profile program I use called Active@DVD Eraser located here:<http://www.ntfs.com/dvd_eraser.htm>

I copied 3.62 GB of data on to a re-writable DVD instead of erasing it. Now there is no data on the disc but it shows used space as 3.62 GB and 690 MB of free space. Now I am unable to erase my disc. What should I do to erase the disc and get the space back?

2009/11/25

Another free alternative: [ImgBurn](http://www.imgburn.com/) 

As stated elsewhere, you need to erase the DVD-RW before using it again. I have a very simple low profile program I use called Active@DVD Eraser located here:<http://www.ntfs.com/dvd_eraser.htm>

I copied 3.62 GB of data on to a re-writable DVD instead of erasing it. Now there is no data on the disc but it shows used space as 3.62 GB and 690 MB of free space. Now I am unable to erase my disc. What should I do to erase the disc and get the space back?

2009/11/25

if you don't want to install additional software, use **[InfraRecorder](http://infrarecorder.org/)** Portable. Go to **Actions** > **Erase/Format Disc...**

As stated elsewhere, you need to erase the DVD-RW before using it again. I have a very simple low profile program I use called Active@DVD Eraser located here:<http://www.ntfs.com/dvd_eraser.htm>

Someone moved a very important page on my website into the trash, and I do not know who did it! It was not deleted permanently so I don't need to worry, in that sense. The revisions, when I restored it, show that someone edited it 3 days prior to today, so it could have been them, but I can't be sure. Does WP keep track of who clicks the trash button? If not, I presume I'd have to write a custom script to hook onto the trash button, when clicked.

2014/06/20

No, natively WordPress does not log any activity. While plugins for it exist, they won't work retroactively. However don't forget that any action taken in WordPress is technically a HTTP request, such as page load, form submit, or Ajax request. These are often logged pretty thoroughly in web server's access log and if available it's pretty realistic to reconstruct action that happened and details like user's IP from them.

There is a free plugin called *Stream* that will make your life much easier. Search within the WordPress plugins page. It logs all changes to posts and who is responsible for them.

Someone moved a very important page on my website into the trash, and I do not know who did it! It was not deleted permanently so I don't need to worry, in that sense. The revisions, when I restored it, show that someone edited it 3 days prior to today, so it could have been them, but I can't be sure. Does WP keep track of who clicks the trash button? If not, I presume I'd have to write a custom script to hook onto the trash button, when clicked.

2014/06/20

WP can not do it, but you can go to the server logs and find the user's IP. It may take some effort and success is not guaranteed but this is the only possible way. Will's answer will help you in future mistakes. Finding a user based on their IP is not usually hard especially if the number of authors is limited.

There is a free plugin called *Stream* that will make your life much easier. Search within the WordPress plugins page. It logs all changes to posts and who is responsible for them.

I'm setting up a projection map for a non-profit that will have images projected onto angular and unusually shaped walls. I use modul8 on my mac in the past, but this case is different. They use PC (in fact their whole show runs off of a laptop) and they want the ability to change the images based on the theme of the show. They have an A/V guy, but I don't want to suggest complex software that is going to be hard for a beginner to use. What software should I recommend and then use to set up their show so they don't have to keep calling little old expensive me? EDIT: I should also mention that this is a small non-profit, so free or really cheap would benefit them greatly.

2017/04/20

It is certainly possible to use FCPX and AfterEffects as part of the same workflow. To do this effectively, you will need to use an intermediate codec that preserves image quality across successive generations. ProRes HQ 422 is a good baseline as an intermediate codec. There are higher quality ProRes codecs (XQ 4444) and lower quality ones (ProRes LT 422). But ProRes HQ should be a good starting place.

While Adobe and Apple each link their editing software with their own respective compositing software, saying 'AE is to Premiere as Motion is to FCPX' glosses over the strengths and differences of each package. Sure, AE is a powerful compositing app, and it's dynamic link to Premiere is convenient, but Adobe is still playing catch up to Apple when it comes to application interoperability. Say, for instance, you'd like to make a transition between two clips, and you'd like this transition to be a stylistic element of your production which you can re-use as often as you like. This is something at which Motion excels and at which AE struggles. After Effects is more powerful when it comes to a lot of VFX work, and its scriptability is a powerful feature which is unmatched in Motion. However, I would argue that the "bond" between FCPX and Motion is stronger than the one between Premiere and AE. But when you're talking about using FCPX with AE, there is NO link and you have to render bi-directionally.

I'm making a malware software in my final thesis at the university. I won't use it ever, and it was made by educational and scientific purposes only. But my university will publish it, giving the opportunity for everyone to use it. If someone commit a crime with my software, can I get in trouble?

2018/12/07

> > my university will publish it, giving the opportunity for everyone to > use it. If someone commit a crime with my software, can I get in > trouble? > > > I would say "No" for three reasons. I will assume that you are in a jurisdiction of the U.S. or reasonably similar thereto. First, the malware code is part of your thesis, which in turn is a prerequisite (already [approved by the university](https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/34160/can-i-get-in-trouble-for-making-a-malware/34197#comment62964_34160)) for graduation. If anything, the entity that would be knowingly broadcasting the material is the university, not you. Any liability in the vein of [MCL 750.540f](http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(2ubfmtd5hibnrarwrhdecvcs))/mileg.aspx?page=getobject&objectname=mcl-750-540f) would fall on the university, as it knows better than you about the presumed "risks" as to whether third-parties might abuse your research. In the context of a *public* university with its typical status of "arm of the state", it would be untenable if one arm of the state (the university) authorizes you to proceed, and subsequently another governmental agency prosecutes *you* once your thesis reaches completion. Second, your thesis with all the source code therein expresses ideas which are protected by the First Amendment. A serious discussion of malware necessarily requires that these ideas be expressed in assembly code (often intertwined with excerpts in machine code) of the architecture for which it is devised. Anything short of that makes a discussion of malware meaningless because this topic depends so heavily on the particulars of the targeted family of processors. Furthermore, the academic context evidences your pursuit of educational & scientific advancement rather than a direct or indirect intent to encourage criminal activity. A person whose ultimate purpose is to promote computer crimes has many alternatives which are quicker and more effective than enrolling in a university, pay tuition, and undergo years of academic study. Third, (without minimizing your merits) it is doubtful that no solution could ever exist for the malware you devise, or that no one else from a "clandestine" setting would ever come up independently with an akin variant of that malware. Thus, publications of malware made with the openness and formalities of a university thesis are likelier to be viewed as a heads up to IT security companies about enhancements they might need to make on products & services they offer.

There's not much I can say without knowing where you're operating, but I would suspect the charges would fall on the party who used it, not the developer. Especially if you could prove your university sanctioned the project's creation and lack of ill intent. I know this isn't the place for opinions, but I could find no legal precedent here in the US, and I can't assume the cyber crime laws for any other country.

I am working to integrate data from an external web service in the client side of my appliction. Someone asked me to test the condition when the service is unavailable or down. Anyone have any tips on how to block this site temporarily while we run the test to see how the service degrades? For those curious we are testing against Virtual Earth, but Google Maps but this would apply to any equally complicated external service. any thoughts and suggestions are welcome

2009/11/24

Create some Mock-Webservice class or interface (and [inject](http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html) [it](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBVJbzAagfs)). In there, you could test the response of your system to webservice failures and also what happens, if a web-service request take longer than expected or actually time-out. DeveloperWorks article on mock testing: <http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-mocktest.html>

How about blocking the domain name(s) in question by putting a nonsense entry into the `hosts` file?

I am working to integrate data from an external web service in the client side of my appliction. Someone asked me to test the condition when the service is unavailable or down. Anyone have any tips on how to block this site temporarily while we run the test to see how the service degrades? For those curious we are testing against Virtual Earth, but Google Maps but this would apply to any equally complicated external service. any thoughts and suggestions are welcome

2009/11/24

You need to be sure to test the most common failure modes for this: 1. DNS lookup fails 2. IP connection fails (once DNS lookup succeeds) 3. HTTP response other than 200 4. HTTP response incomplete or timeout 5. HTTP response 200 but RPC or document returned is invalid Those are just a few common failure modes I could think of that will all manifest themselves with different behaviors that you may wish to have your application handle explicitly. If you set up a computer between the caller and service that routes between them, you can simulate each of these failure modes distinctly and modify your application to handle them.

How about blocking the domain name(s) in question by putting a nonsense entry into the `hosts` file?

I'm making a game with target (orbit camera). I want to limit camera movements when in room. So that camera don't go through walls when moving around target and along the ground. What are common approaches? Any good links with tutorials? I use Unity3D, nevertheless I'm good with a general solution to the problem

2012/08/31

Make a snake game with it. Make a shooter game with it. Make some simple well known games to start off. Once you've done this, you should be more confident with your engine, and making these games will give you ideas on where to keep going.

This is one of the classic problems of game engine development - your engine most probably is too generic. Pick your favorite genre, perhaps even your favorite game - and look at how things work there. Try to copy a thing or two. Make something good, make something bad. Create experiments and problems. Experiments are useful for finding a good direction to take, an unexplored path. Problems have a tendency to keep developers interested for a long time. Pick something you've never done before to make space for both.

I'm making a game with target (orbit camera). I want to limit camera movements when in room. So that camera don't go through walls when moving around target and along the ground. What are common approaches? Any good links with tutorials? I use Unity3D, nevertheless I'm good with a general solution to the problem

2012/08/31

Make a snake game with it. Make a shooter game with it. Make some simple well known games to start off. Once you've done this, you should be more confident with your engine, and making these games will give you ideas on where to keep going.

Proceeding with levels seems like a good next step, it can teach you how to create data structures to fit your game, and file input/output. Also, I would just have tried to build the engine with a set target game in mind. You don't have to be very specific, but say just make the engine for a specific genre that you like. When you know what to make with your engine, you have a better idea of what actually works in your engine and what doesn't. A good engine would have been "battle-tested" already, and usable in real-world cases. I have been making a game around sample framework code- as I added more features to it that the game would definitely use, it became clearer which parts can be re-used for future games.

I'm making a game with target (orbit camera). I want to limit camera movements when in room. So that camera don't go through walls when moving around target and along the ground. What are common approaches? Any good links with tutorials? I use Unity3D, nevertheless I'm good with a general solution to the problem

2012/08/31

Make a snake game with it. Make a shooter game with it. Make some simple well known games to start off. Once you've done this, you should be more confident with your engine, and making these games will give you ideas on where to keep going.

I disagree with @William 'MindWorX' Mariager regarding the nature of the question. It's game design and game programming related and belong here. @Tomas, you created the egg before the chicken. You want your coding to have a purpose first. This is how project and business works. Most game development team will create the game design (most of it)(like a Game Design Document) before starting the programming of the game. My studio has the inverse problem. We got a large amount of viable ideas, largely documented, and no game engine, modules or programmers to run/code it. I am even considering learning coding myself instead of waiting for the arrival of a miraculous coder. I remember my first game idea. I was playing a Zynga game on Facebook and I thought: "The game is okay, but it could be more fun" and then: "I could easily create a better game than this". Shortly after, I started creating it. I suggest you think about what game you could improve (without copying or breaching copyrights) and start focusing on this with your game engine. Also, try using brainstorm technics to stimulate and generate ideas and innovation.

I'm making a game with target (orbit camera). I want to limit camera movements when in room. So that camera don't go through walls when moving around target and along the ground. What are common approaches? Any good links with tutorials? I use Unity3D, nevertheless I'm good with a general solution to the problem

2012/08/31

Go to LudumDare and see games that got a lot of positive attention in previous competitions. Play them and see which ones you like and simply develop on those ideas. Taking ideas from one game is stealing, taking from two or more is research.

This is one of the classic problems of game engine development - your engine most probably is too generic. Pick your favorite genre, perhaps even your favorite game - and look at how things work there. Try to copy a thing or two. Make something good, make something bad. Create experiments and problems. Experiments are useful for finding a good direction to take, an unexplored path. Problems have a tendency to keep developers interested for a long time. Pick something you've never done before to make space for both.

I'm making a game with target (orbit camera). I want to limit camera movements when in room. So that camera don't go through walls when moving around target and along the ground. What are common approaches? Any good links with tutorials? I use Unity3D, nevertheless I'm good with a general solution to the problem

2012/08/31

This is one of the classic problems of game engine development - your engine most probably is too generic. Pick your favorite genre, perhaps even your favorite game - and look at how things work there. Try to copy a thing or two. Make something good, make something bad. Create experiments and problems. Experiments are useful for finding a good direction to take, an unexplored path. Problems have a tendency to keep developers interested for a long time. Pick something you've never done before to make space for both.

Proceeding with levels seems like a good next step, it can teach you how to create data structures to fit your game, and file input/output. Also, I would just have tried to build the engine with a set target game in mind. You don't have to be very specific, but say just make the engine for a specific genre that you like. When you know what to make with your engine, you have a better idea of what actually works in your engine and what doesn't. A good engine would have been "battle-tested" already, and usable in real-world cases. I have been making a game around sample framework code- as I added more features to it that the game would definitely use, it became clearer which parts can be re-used for future games.

I'm making a game with target (orbit camera). I want to limit camera movements when in room. So that camera don't go through walls when moving around target and along the ground. What are common approaches? Any good links with tutorials? I use Unity3D, nevertheless I'm good with a general solution to the problem

2012/08/31

This is one of the classic problems of game engine development - your engine most probably is too generic. Pick your favorite genre, perhaps even your favorite game - and look at how things work there. Try to copy a thing or two. Make something good, make something bad. Create experiments and problems. Experiments are useful for finding a good direction to take, an unexplored path. Problems have a tendency to keep developers interested for a long time. Pick something you've never done before to make space for both.

I disagree with @William 'MindWorX' Mariager regarding the nature of the question. It's game design and game programming related and belong here. @Tomas, you created the egg before the chicken. You want your coding to have a purpose first. This is how project and business works. Most game development team will create the game design (most of it)(like a Game Design Document) before starting the programming of the game. My studio has the inverse problem. We got a large amount of viable ideas, largely documented, and no game engine, modules or programmers to run/code it. I am even considering learning coding myself instead of waiting for the arrival of a miraculous coder. I remember my first game idea. I was playing a Zynga game on Facebook and I thought: "The game is okay, but it could be more fun" and then: "I could easily create a better game than this". Shortly after, I started creating it. I suggest you think about what game you could improve (without copying or breaching copyrights) and start focusing on this with your game engine. Also, try using brainstorm technics to stimulate and generate ideas and innovation.

I'm making a game with target (orbit camera). I want to limit camera movements when in room. So that camera don't go through walls when moving around target and along the ground. What are common approaches? Any good links with tutorials? I use Unity3D, nevertheless I'm good with a general solution to the problem

2012/08/31

Go to LudumDare and see games that got a lot of positive attention in previous competitions. Play them and see which ones you like and simply develop on those ideas. Taking ideas from one game is stealing, taking from two or more is research.

Proceeding with levels seems like a good next step, it can teach you how to create data structures to fit your game, and file input/output. Also, I would just have tried to build the engine with a set target game in mind. You don't have to be very specific, but say just make the engine for a specific genre that you like. When you know what to make with your engine, you have a better idea of what actually works in your engine and what doesn't. A good engine would have been "battle-tested" already, and usable in real-world cases. I have been making a game around sample framework code- as I added more features to it that the game would definitely use, it became clearer which parts can be re-used for future games.

I'm making a game with target (orbit camera). I want to limit camera movements when in room. So that camera don't go through walls when moving around target and along the ground. What are common approaches? Any good links with tutorials? I use Unity3D, nevertheless I'm good with a general solution to the problem

2012/08/31

Go to LudumDare and see games that got a lot of positive attention in previous competitions. Play them and see which ones you like and simply develop on those ideas. Taking ideas from one game is stealing, taking from two or more is research.

I disagree with @William 'MindWorX' Mariager regarding the nature of the question. It's game design and game programming related and belong here. @Tomas, you created the egg before the chicken. You want your coding to have a purpose first. This is how project and business works. Most game development team will create the game design (most of it)(like a Game Design Document) before starting the programming of the game. My studio has the inverse problem. We got a large amount of viable ideas, largely documented, and no game engine, modules or programmers to run/code it. I am even considering learning coding myself instead of waiting for the arrival of a miraculous coder. I remember my first game idea. I was playing a Zynga game on Facebook and I thought: "The game is okay, but it could be more fun" and then: "I could easily create a better game than this". Shortly after, I started creating it. I suggest you think about what game you could improve (without copying or breaching copyrights) and start focusing on this with your game engine. Also, try using brainstorm technics to stimulate and generate ideas and innovation.

I am currently in the planning stages for a fairly comprehensive rewrite of one of our core (commercial) software offerings, and I am looking for a bit of advice. Our current software is a business management package written in Winforms (originally in .NET 2.0, but has transitioned into 4.0 so far) that communicates directly with a SQL Server backend. There is also a very simple ASP.NET Webforms website that provides some basic functionality for users on the road. Each of our customers has to expose this site (and a couple of existing ASMX web services) to the world in order to make use of it, and we're beginning to outgrow this setup. As we rewrite this package, we have decided that it would be best if we made the package more accessible from the outside, as well as providing our customers with the option of allowing us to host their data (we haven't decided on a provider) rather than requiring them to host SQL Server, SQL Server Reporting Services, and IIS on the premises. Right now, our plan is to rewrite the existing Winforms application using WPF, as well as provide a much richer client experience over the web. Going forward, however, our customers have expressed an interest in using tablets, so we're going to need to support iOS and Android native applications as clients, as well. The combination of our desire to offer off-site hosting (without having to use a VPN architecture) and support clients on platforms that are outside of the .NET ecosystem has led us to the conclusion that all of our client-server communication should take place through our own service rather than using the SQL Server client (since we don't want to expose that to the world and SQL Server drivers do not exist, to my knowledge, for some of those platforms). Right now, our options as I see them are: * Write a completely custom service that uses TCP sockets and write everything (authentication, session management, serialization, etc.) from scratch. This is what I know the most *about*, but my assumption is that there's something better. * Use a WCF service for transport, and either take care of authentication and/or session management myself, or use something like durable services for session management My basic question is this: ### What would be the most appropriate choice of overall architecture, as well as specific features like ASP.NET authentication or Durable Services, to provide a stateful, persistent service to WPF, ASP.NET, iOS, and Android clients?

2011/05/06

*(I am working on the assumption that by "stateful" you mean session-based).* I guess one big question is: Do you want to use SOAP in your messaging stack? You may be loathe to, as often there is no out-of-box support for SOAP on mobile platforms (see: [How to call a web service with Android](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/297586/how-to-call-web-service-with-android)). No doubt its similarly painful with iOS. Calling SOAP from a browser ("ASP.NET") can't be fun. I'm not even sure its possible! Unfortunately if you aren't using SOAP, then that quickly rules out most of WCFs standard Bindings. Of the one that remains, "[Web HTTP](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb412169.aspx)", sessions are not supported because obviously HTTP is a stateless protocol. You can actually add session support by hand using a solution [based on Cookies](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb412169.aspx). You could use the TCP transport (it supports sessions), and build you own channel stack to support a non-SOAP encoding (for example [protocol-buffers](http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net/)), but even then you need to be careful because the TCP transport places special 'framing' bytes in it, so that would make interop non-trivial. What sort of state do you need to store in your sessions? Maybe there are alternative approaches?

1) consider stateful utility services using singletons, but keep the request/response pattern at the facade level stateless. 2) consider distributed caching, perhaps Windows Server AppFabric Cache.

[The Axis of Awesome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Axis_of_Awesome) has a song called "4 Chords", a medley of various songs all written, or so it's claimed, using the same four chords. Now, from what I understand, a chord is just a bunch of tones played at the same time so they sound like one. For example, a 300 Hz note and a 500 Hz note played simultaneously will be a 100 Hz sound (because 100 is the greatest common factor of 300 and 500) with a lot of nuance in it, and that's called a chord. So the songs in the medley all have the same chords, that is, the same sounds with the same… what I called nuances. They don't. Never mind the lyrics: there are clearly more than four sounds in any of the songs when sung: just listen to 'em. But even watching the keyboardist's hands on the electronic keyboard (for [the one segment where you get to do so for any significant length of time](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ#t=310s) (warning, foul language in that clip)), you can see he hits more than four chords. What gives? Am I hearing and seeing wrong, or is my definition of *chord* wrong, or is Axis of Awesome lying, or is there some explanation of how the songs in this medley are considered to have but four chords even though they have more?

2012/11/27

**tl;dr - your definition of chord is wrong.** Your initial assumption > > a 300 Hz note and a 500 Hz note played simultaneously will be a 100 > Hz sound > > > is unfortunately incorrect. When you play a 300Hz note and a 500Hz note what you will get is a 300Hz note, and a 500Hz note, **and** a 200Hz note (the difference between them) **and** an 800Hz note (the sum of the two frequencies) (Have a listen to the demos on **[this page](http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/beats.htm)** for examples) In addition to that, a chord can have any number of notes in it (typically on a piano it usually has 10 or less notes, and on a guitar you're usually expecting 6 or less) And finally, a chord can be played in many different ways, so if I wanted to I could play a 4 chord song using 20 different variations of that chord. **Update** After watching the actual video, the keyboard player is only playing 4 chords, and not really playing any variations of them. He is sometimes accenting certain notes more than the others, but the 4 chord shapes he is using are consistent throughout that segment. He is hitting and releasing **keys**, sure, but only as parts of the same chords.

Well, I don't know about all this hertz stuff, that's never interested me as a musician. A chord is a harmony that is created with a SET of usually three or four different notes (tones) that are not repeated. It does not matter which order you play them as long as they are played simulataneously. Now sometimes a band will have a song that is based on a three or four chords - these are the underlying changes - but often the musicians take liberty with this and insert additional chords, substitute chords, and so forth, so in fact they are not playing "just four chords." The guitarist or pianist might be playing more. It just depends.

[The Axis of Awesome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Axis_of_Awesome) has a song called "4 Chords", a medley of various songs all written, or so it's claimed, using the same four chords. Now, from what I understand, a chord is just a bunch of tones played at the same time so they sound like one. For example, a 300 Hz note and a 500 Hz note played simultaneously will be a 100 Hz sound (because 100 is the greatest common factor of 300 and 500) with a lot of nuance in it, and that's called a chord. So the songs in the medley all have the same chords, that is, the same sounds with the same… what I called nuances. They don't. Never mind the lyrics: there are clearly more than four sounds in any of the songs when sung: just listen to 'em. But even watching the keyboardist's hands on the electronic keyboard (for [the one segment where you get to do so for any significant length of time](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ#t=310s) (warning, foul language in that clip)), you can see he hits more than four chords. What gives? Am I hearing and seeing wrong, or is my definition of *chord* wrong, or is Axis of Awesome lying, or is there some explanation of how the songs in this medley are considered to have but four chords even though they have more?

2012/11/27

The chords are I, IV, V, and vi (not in that order) which together contain every note in the key. So any extra notes could be considered to be part of one of those chords. Regardless though the idea is not that the keyboardist plays only a specific set of notes. It's that four chords (in the broader sense Dr Mayhem mentions, which includes inversions and so on) are the basis for the songs, forming the major progression and sound. Other chords (if any) serve only to transition to one of the 4 main chords. And of course this is only true for the portion of the song being played — they never get to the part of Don't Start Believing that uses a iii chord! None of those song snippets could be played recognizably without one of those 4 chords. But they could all be played without any other chords and be recognizable. --- Summarizing some discussion from comments: There are 7 notes in every Major/minor key. Capital-numeral (e.g., IV) denotes the Major chord starting on the numbered note, and lowercase-numeral (e.g., iii) denotes the minor chord starting on the numbered note. Every note in the key is used by at least one of the four chords above (I, IV, V, vi), meaning that any note you play in the key could be considered to be functioning as part as one of those 4 chords rather than independently or as part of a different chord. In the key of C Major, any combination of any C's, E's, and G's could be considered a I chord. (Similarly any such combination would be a V chord in F Major, and so on.) Most commonly you'll have one of each note very close together, but it's not necessary. You might consider individual notes part of an arpeggiated chord, but it's important to note that notes can be left out without making it "not a chord". This general sense of "chord" we're using is limited to specific notes, but not specific combinations or positions of said notes. So, one "chord" in the general sense covers an entire subset of chords in the specific sense. The class "G Major chord" covers the specific "G4 B5 D5" chord as well as many many others — "G4 B6 D7", "G4 B5", "D3 G3 B4", etc.

Well, I don't know about all this hertz stuff, that's never interested me as a musician. A chord is a harmony that is created with a SET of usually three or four different notes (tones) that are not repeated. It does not matter which order you play them as long as they are played simulataneously. Now sometimes a band will have a song that is based on a three or four chords - these are the underlying changes - but often the musicians take liberty with this and insert additional chords, substitute chords, and so forth, so in fact they are not playing "just four chords." The guitarist or pianist might be playing more. It just depends.

We have a point-of-sale system that was developed using ado.net, our current concern is to make the application real fast in creating transactions (sales). Usually there are no performance concerns with high end PCs but with with low end PCs, the transactions take really slow. The main concern is on saving transactions which usually calls a lot of stored procedures for inserting records within a single transaction. This usually takes time on low end PCs. We need to improve the performance since most clients will only use low end PCs to act as cashier machines. One solution we are thinking is to use entity framework for data access. The entire project is written using ado.net and development time if we shift to entity framework would be alot. Any suggestions?

2013/07/05

I would like to point out that Entity Framework (full name: [ADO.NET Entity Framework](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb399572.aspx)) is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) that uses ADO.NET under the hood for connecting to the database. So the question "should we use ADO.NET or EF?" doesn't really make sense in that respect. Unless you re-architect your application, adding EF to the mix is simply adding another layer on top of ADO.NET. I sincerely doubt that ADO.NET is the source of your performance problems, however. It sounds like the problem exists in your stored procedures themselves. I think [Luc Franken's comments](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/203829/ado-net-or-ef-for-a-point-of-sale-system#comment398288_203829) are on the right track, though. You need to measure and determine exactly where the delays are happening. Then concentrate on fixing exactly that problem. Anything else is groping around in the dark.

If you are looking for performance stay away from EF. It is the slowest ORM out there and uses a lot of memory to keep the database metadata. Most [benchmarks](http://www.servicestack.net/benchmarks/) out there show that -

We have a point-of-sale system that was developed using ado.net, our current concern is to make the application real fast in creating transactions (sales). Usually there are no performance concerns with high end PCs but with with low end PCs, the transactions take really slow. The main concern is on saving transactions which usually calls a lot of stored procedures for inserting records within a single transaction. This usually takes time on low end PCs. We need to improve the performance since most clients will only use low end PCs to act as cashier machines. One solution we are thinking is to use entity framework for data access. The entire project is written using ado.net and development time if we shift to entity framework would be alot. Any suggestions?

2013/07/05

If you are looking for performance stay away from EF. It is the slowest ORM out there and uses a lot of memory to keep the database metadata. Most [benchmarks](http://www.servicestack.net/benchmarks/) out there show that -

How necessary is it that each transaction require a database call? At what point is the db insertion being performed? Is there one call per transaction or is it inserting with every addition to the order causing a major lag throughout the user's interaction? Can the db call be handled through private HTTP requests to a dedicated server on the client's own LAN? Perhaps a better approach would be to save the transactions in a repository and post them to the server all at once using the Unit of Work pattern that is triggered as soon as there is a pause of more than 5 seconds. Or perhaps the slow client machines could post to a service that can handle the database insertions. What else could be slowing the machine? Is the GUI processor intensive? It's a POS, not a graphic designer's portfolio piece.

We have a point-of-sale system that was developed using ado.net, our current concern is to make the application real fast in creating transactions (sales). Usually there are no performance concerns with high end PCs but with with low end PCs, the transactions take really slow. The main concern is on saving transactions which usually calls a lot of stored procedures for inserting records within a single transaction. This usually takes time on low end PCs. We need to improve the performance since most clients will only use low end PCs to act as cashier machines. One solution we are thinking is to use entity framework for data access. The entire project is written using ado.net and development time if we shift to entity framework would be alot. Any suggestions?

2013/07/05

I would like to point out that Entity Framework (full name: [ADO.NET Entity Framework](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb399572.aspx)) is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) that uses ADO.NET under the hood for connecting to the database. So the question "should we use ADO.NET or EF?" doesn't really make sense in that respect. Unless you re-architect your application, adding EF to the mix is simply adding another layer on top of ADO.NET. I sincerely doubt that ADO.NET is the source of your performance problems, however. It sounds like the problem exists in your stored procedures themselves. I think [Luc Franken's comments](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/203829/ado-net-or-ef-for-a-point-of-sale-system#comment398288_203829) are on the right track, though. You need to measure and determine exactly where the delays are happening. Then concentrate on fixing exactly that problem. Anything else is groping around in the dark.

You say you are calling a "lot of stored procedures". If every call includes a seperate trip to the database, that is your performance issue, because trips to the database are always expensive, no matter what they do. You should have one stored procedure to save a transaction. If that procedure has to call other procedures, fine, as long as you don't have to make a seperate trip to the database.

We have a point-of-sale system that was developed using ado.net, our current concern is to make the application real fast in creating transactions (sales). Usually there are no performance concerns with high end PCs but with with low end PCs, the transactions take really slow. The main concern is on saving transactions which usually calls a lot of stored procedures for inserting records within a single transaction. This usually takes time on low end PCs. We need to improve the performance since most clients will only use low end PCs to act as cashier machines. One solution we are thinking is to use entity framework for data access. The entire project is written using ado.net and development time if we shift to entity framework would be alot. Any suggestions?

2013/07/05

I would like to point out that Entity Framework (full name: [ADO.NET Entity Framework](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb399572.aspx)) is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) that uses ADO.NET under the hood for connecting to the database. So the question "should we use ADO.NET or EF?" doesn't really make sense in that respect. Unless you re-architect your application, adding EF to the mix is simply adding another layer on top of ADO.NET. I sincerely doubt that ADO.NET is the source of your performance problems, however. It sounds like the problem exists in your stored procedures themselves. I think [Luc Franken's comments](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/203829/ado-net-or-ef-for-a-point-of-sale-system#comment398288_203829) are on the right track, though. You need to measure and determine exactly where the delays are happening. Then concentrate on fixing exactly that problem. Anything else is groping around in the dark.

How necessary is it that each transaction require a database call? At what point is the db insertion being performed? Is there one call per transaction or is it inserting with every addition to the order causing a major lag throughout the user's interaction? Can the db call be handled through private HTTP requests to a dedicated server on the client's own LAN? Perhaps a better approach would be to save the transactions in a repository and post them to the server all at once using the Unit of Work pattern that is triggered as soon as there is a pause of more than 5 seconds. Or perhaps the slow client machines could post to a service that can handle the database insertions. What else could be slowing the machine? Is the GUI processor intensive? It's a POS, not a graphic designer's portfolio piece.

We have a point-of-sale system that was developed using ado.net, our current concern is to make the application real fast in creating transactions (sales). Usually there are no performance concerns with high end PCs but with with low end PCs, the transactions take really slow. The main concern is on saving transactions which usually calls a lot of stored procedures for inserting records within a single transaction. This usually takes time on low end PCs. We need to improve the performance since most clients will only use low end PCs to act as cashier machines. One solution we are thinking is to use entity framework for data access. The entire project is written using ado.net and development time if we shift to entity framework would be alot. Any suggestions?

2013/07/05

You say you are calling a "lot of stored procedures". If every call includes a seperate trip to the database, that is your performance issue, because trips to the database are always expensive, no matter what they do. You should have one stored procedure to save a transaction. If that procedure has to call other procedures, fine, as long as you don't have to make a seperate trip to the database.

How necessary is it that each transaction require a database call? At what point is the db insertion being performed? Is there one call per transaction or is it inserting with every addition to the order causing a major lag throughout the user's interaction? Can the db call be handled through private HTTP requests to a dedicated server on the client's own LAN? Perhaps a better approach would be to save the transactions in a repository and post them to the server all at once using the Unit of Work pattern that is triggered as soon as there is a pause of more than 5 seconds. Or perhaps the slow client machines could post to a service that can handle the database insertions. What else could be slowing the machine? Is the GUI processor intensive? It's a POS, not a graphic designer's portfolio piece.

I recently bought a Sandisk Cruzer USB drive. Part of the drive (6.66 MB) is formatted with CDFS and shows as a CD drive. Why do they do this ? Is it to protect the software on that part of the disk to trick the OS (Vista) into not overwriting or amending, because it thinks this is a read-only CD ? Is the 6.66 MB significant. Apart from being associated with the Devil ? How can I format a partition on a USB drive to be CDFS ? Why would I want to do something like that myself on my other flash drives ? I'm a programmer, so how can I leverage this new knowledge ? Any Ideas ?

2009/09/01

This is part of the U3 software that comes on it. It is garbage and I always remove it, the link for the removal tool is here:<http://u3.com/support/default.aspx#CQ3> Keep in mind, this will format your drive.

Most likely the reason they did this was to prevent overwriting their software from the flash drive. If desired, you should be able to change the partition scheme to fully utilize the drive. The easiest way to do this is to boot into [a Linux LiveCD](http://www.ubuntu.com/) and use [gParted](http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Gparted) to fix it. Offhand I can't remember any [free partition managers for windows](http://www.google.com/search?q=free+windows+partition+managers).

I recently bought a Sandisk Cruzer USB drive. Part of the drive (6.66 MB) is formatted with CDFS and shows as a CD drive. Why do they do this ? Is it to protect the software on that part of the disk to trick the OS (Vista) into not overwriting or amending, because it thinks this is a read-only CD ? Is the 6.66 MB significant. Apart from being associated with the Devil ? How can I format a partition on a USB drive to be CDFS ? Why would I want to do something like that myself on my other flash drives ? I'm a programmer, so how can I leverage this new knowledge ? Any Ideas ?

2009/09/01

This is part of the U3 software that comes on it. It is garbage and I always remove it, the link for the removal tool is here:<http://u3.com/support/default.aspx#CQ3> Keep in mind, this will format your drive.

Does the pseudo-CD have an autorun.inf file on it? This is sometimes done to take advantage of the CD autorun feature. When one of these devices is plugged into a computer that has autorun enabled, a program on the drive will start automatically. This is typically a small pop-up menu that allows the user to run, install, or uninstall programs from the drive.

In the comments to [this answer](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/5258/85) to [the question of why Abraham lied to Pharaoh about his relationship with Sarah](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/3524/why-did-abraham-lie-to-pharaoh-about-sarah-being-his-sister-in-gen-12/5258#5258), the following question which I am about to pose, appeared: **Was the marriage between Abraham and Sarah incestuous?** In two separate occasions, Abraham told the local ruler that Sarah was his sister. These two passages are found in in [Genesis 12:10-20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) and [Genesis 20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV). Let's examine the first passage: [Genesis 12:10-20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) > > 10 Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. 11 As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. **12 When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13 Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.”** > > > 14 When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. 15 And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16 He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels. > > > 17 But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. **18 So Pharaoh summoned Abram. “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!”** 20 Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had. > > > This seems to imply that since Abraham told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister, Sarah was believed to be his sister only and not his wife. This, in turns, makes me draw the conclusion that marriage between siblings was unusual. Let's head on to the second passage: [Genesis 20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV) > > 1 Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and > lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, **2 and > there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then > Abimelek king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.** 3 But God came to > Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as > dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.” > > > 4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you > destroy an innocent nation? **5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my > sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this > with a clear conscience and clean hands.”** > > > 6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a > clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That > is why I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return the man’s wife, for > he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if > you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to > you will die.” > > > 8 Early the next morning Abimelek summoned all his officials, and > when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid. 9 > Then Abimelek called Abraham in and said, “What have you done to us? > How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me > and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should never be done.” > 10 And Abimelek asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?” > > > 11 Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of > God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ **12 > Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not > of my mother; and she became my wife. 13 And when God had me wander > from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show > your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.”’”** > > > 14 Then Abimelek brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves > and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 > And Abimelek said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.” > > > 16 To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels[a] > of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are > with you; you are completely vindicated.” > > > 17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelek, his wife and > his female slaves so they could have children again, 18 for the LORD > had kept all the women in Abimelek’s household from conceiving because > of Abraham’s wife Sarah. > > > This second passage also tells us that marriage between siblings was unusual. It also tells us that Abraham did not really lie when he said that Sarah was his sister, since she was his half-sister. *Also note that nowhere in the two passages Abraham is accused of lying!* This is a quite interesting fact. In any way, it is clear that our definition of incest in today's western society, is not the same as it was in that time and place. Still, [Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NIV) clearly states that for a man to marry his father's daughter (as Abraham did) is a sin! How does one reconcile these passages? Was Abraham's and Sarah's marriage a sin? Was it considered incest?

2012/01/13

Sibling marriage, and later, "near kin" marriage, was the only initial option; the limited selection repeated with Noah's 3 sons and their wives following the great flood. Just 340 year later Abram, was 10 when his half-sister Sarai was born. During this time period sibling and "near kin" marriage was less common, but not certainly accepted and not prohibited yet; even forms of endogamy was still practiced at this time. Genesis 19:30-38 shows a good example of the times when the daughters of Abram's nephew, Lot, sleep with their father Lot out of necessity of circumstance; endogamy is demonstrated when Jacob, then Abraham's grandson, was instructed by his father Isaac to seek a marriage within the family, and Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the son of Milcah, the wife of Abraham’s brother Nahor was chosen by God to be Isaac's wife. It was over 500 years later that near kin marriage was declared as wrong within Leviticus 18, 20 and Deuteronomy; it's interesting to note that marriage between a man and his step sister, his wife's niece or daughter are not prohibited specifically anywhere in those texts.

Abraham married his wife before his calling from God and before the 10 commandments. Every wrong action after the 10 commandments is a sin.

In the comments to [this answer](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/5258/85) to [the question of why Abraham lied to Pharaoh about his relationship with Sarah](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/3524/why-did-abraham-lie-to-pharaoh-about-sarah-being-his-sister-in-gen-12/5258#5258), the following question which I am about to pose, appeared: **Was the marriage between Abraham and Sarah incestuous?** In two separate occasions, Abraham told the local ruler that Sarah was his sister. These two passages are found in in [Genesis 12:10-20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) and [Genesis 20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV). Let's examine the first passage: [Genesis 12:10-20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) > > 10 Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. 11 As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. **12 When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13 Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.”** > > > 14 When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. 15 And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16 He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels. > > > 17 But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. **18 So Pharaoh summoned Abram. “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!”** 20 Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had. > > > This seems to imply that since Abraham told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister, Sarah was believed to be his sister only and not his wife. This, in turns, makes me draw the conclusion that marriage between siblings was unusual. Let's head on to the second passage: [Genesis 20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV) > > 1 Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and > lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, **2 and > there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then > Abimelek king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.** 3 But God came to > Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as > dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.” > > > 4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you > destroy an innocent nation? **5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my > sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this > with a clear conscience and clean hands.”** > > > 6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a > clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That > is why I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return the man’s wife, for > he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if > you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to > you will die.” > > > 8 Early the next morning Abimelek summoned all his officials, and > when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid. 9 > Then Abimelek called Abraham in and said, “What have you done to us? > How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me > and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should never be done.” > 10 And Abimelek asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?” > > > 11 Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of > God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ **12 > Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not > of my mother; and she became my wife. 13 And when God had me wander > from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show > your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.”’”** > > > 14 Then Abimelek brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves > and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 > And Abimelek said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.” > > > 16 To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels[a] > of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are > with you; you are completely vindicated.” > > > 17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelek, his wife and > his female slaves so they could have children again, 18 for the LORD > had kept all the women in Abimelek’s household from conceiving because > of Abraham’s wife Sarah. > > > This second passage also tells us that marriage between siblings was unusual. It also tells us that Abraham did not really lie when he said that Sarah was his sister, since she was his half-sister. *Also note that nowhere in the two passages Abraham is accused of lying!* This is a quite interesting fact. In any way, it is clear that our definition of incest in today's western society, is not the same as it was in that time and place. Still, [Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NIV) clearly states that for a man to marry his father's daughter (as Abraham did) is a sin! How does one reconcile these passages? Was Abraham's and Sarah's marriage a sin? Was it considered incest?

2012/01/13

During Abraham's time the law hadn't been written against a man taking his father's daughter as his wife. After the law was written in: > > **[Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NKJV)** (NKJV) > > 22 ‘Cursed *is* the one who lies with his sister, the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother.’ > > “And all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’ > > > it forbade such a practice even today, but the lineage of Christ was coming through Abraham and Sarah. This also shows what happens when we are faced with fear that our faith is too weak to overcome.

In Genesis 11:31 the KJV reads "And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there." Why would it say "Sarai his daughter in law" if she was in fact Terah's daughter? It would be shorter and more accurate to say "Sarai his daughter, his son Abram's wife" rather than "Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife" as it does. Was the fact that she was married to Abraham more relevant in a patriarchal society, so that it should be repeated twice while leaving out the father-daughter relationship? Or perhaps the author of Genesis 11 wanted to obscure the fact that Abraham had committed incest? None of these seem very satisfactory to me. This induces me to consider that in Genesis 20:12, Abraham is lying again to Abimelech, in order to cover up the fact that he lied about Sarah being his sister. He said she was his sister in order to deceive Abimelech about her being his wife, and now he's saying that she's his half-sister in order to deceive Abimelech about the fact that he lied to the king. However, the first lie was justified (albeit through the mouth of Abraham, not the narrator). That the second lie would not be explained to the reader at all seems jarring. I guess another interpretation is based on something that other posters have asserted, that the words for "daughter" and "father" should be read loosely according to the languages spoken by the people involved. In that case, Sarah could have been Terah's grand-daughter; then maybe 11:31 left out this detail because the genealogies were being precise about lineage; while Abraham was being imprecise with Abimelech partly to cover up his first obfuscation. However, I would like to see where else in the Bible a granddaughter or grandson, for example, is referred to as a daughter or son.

In the comments to [this answer](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/5258/85) to [the question of why Abraham lied to Pharaoh about his relationship with Sarah](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/3524/why-did-abraham-lie-to-pharaoh-about-sarah-being-his-sister-in-gen-12/5258#5258), the following question which I am about to pose, appeared: **Was the marriage between Abraham and Sarah incestuous?** In two separate occasions, Abraham told the local ruler that Sarah was his sister. These two passages are found in in [Genesis 12:10-20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) and [Genesis 20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV). Let's examine the first passage: [Genesis 12:10-20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) > > 10 Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. 11 As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. **12 When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13 Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.”** > > > 14 When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. 15 And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16 He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels. > > > 17 But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. **18 So Pharaoh summoned Abram. “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!”** 20 Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had. > > > This seems to imply that since Abraham told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister, Sarah was believed to be his sister only and not his wife. This, in turns, makes me draw the conclusion that marriage between siblings was unusual. Let's head on to the second passage: [Genesis 20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV) > > 1 Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and > lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, **2 and > there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then > Abimelek king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.** 3 But God came to > Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as > dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.” > > > 4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you > destroy an innocent nation? **5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my > sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this > with a clear conscience and clean hands.”** > > > 6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a > clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That > is why I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return the man’s wife, for > he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if > you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to > you will die.” > > > 8 Early the next morning Abimelek summoned all his officials, and > when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid. 9 > Then Abimelek called Abraham in and said, “What have you done to us? > How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me > and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should never be done.” > 10 And Abimelek asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?” > > > 11 Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of > God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ **12 > Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not > of my mother; and she became my wife. 13 And when God had me wander > from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show > your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.”’”** > > > 14 Then Abimelek brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves > and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 > And Abimelek said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.” > > > 16 To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels[a] > of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are > with you; you are completely vindicated.” > > > 17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelek, his wife and > his female slaves so they could have children again, 18 for the LORD > had kept all the women in Abimelek’s household from conceiving because > of Abraham’s wife Sarah. > > > This second passage also tells us that marriage between siblings was unusual. It also tells us that Abraham did not really lie when he said that Sarah was his sister, since she was his half-sister. *Also note that nowhere in the two passages Abraham is accused of lying!* This is a quite interesting fact. In any way, it is clear that our definition of incest in today's western society, is not the same as it was in that time and place. Still, [Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NIV) clearly states that for a man to marry his father's daughter (as Abraham did) is a sin! How does one reconcile these passages? Was Abraham's and Sarah's marriage a sin? Was it considered incest?

2012/01/13

Abraham just lacked faith at that time and was telling lies. He did not trust God to protect him, so he used his wife and her beauty instead – that's why God kept revealing and exposing him where ever he went.

Abraham married his wife before his calling from God and before the 10 commandments. Every wrong action after the 10 commandments is a sin.

In the comments to [this answer](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/5258/85) to [the question of why Abraham lied to Pharaoh about his relationship with Sarah](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/3524/why-did-abraham-lie-to-pharaoh-about-sarah-being-his-sister-in-gen-12/5258#5258), the following question which I am about to pose, appeared: **Was the marriage between Abraham and Sarah incestuous?** In two separate occasions, Abraham told the local ruler that Sarah was his sister. These two passages are found in in [Genesis 12:10-20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) and [Genesis 20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV). Let's examine the first passage: [Genesis 12:10-20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) > > 10 Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. 11 As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. **12 When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13 Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.”** > > > 14 When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. 15 And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16 He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels. > > > 17 But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. **18 So Pharaoh summoned Abram. “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!”** 20 Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had. > > > This seems to imply that since Abraham told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister, Sarah was believed to be his sister only and not his wife. This, in turns, makes me draw the conclusion that marriage between siblings was unusual. Let's head on to the second passage: [Genesis 20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV) > > 1 Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and > lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, **2 and > there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then > Abimelek king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.** 3 But God came to > Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as > dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.” > > > 4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you > destroy an innocent nation? **5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my > sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this > with a clear conscience and clean hands.”** > > > 6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a > clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That > is why I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return the man’s wife, for > he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if > you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to > you will die.” > > > 8 Early the next morning Abimelek summoned all his officials, and > when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid. 9 > Then Abimelek called Abraham in and said, “What have you done to us? > How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me > and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should never be done.” > 10 And Abimelek asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?” > > > 11 Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of > God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ **12 > Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not > of my mother; and she became my wife. 13 And when God had me wander > from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show > your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.”’”** > > > 14 Then Abimelek brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves > and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 > And Abimelek said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.” > > > 16 To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels[a] > of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are > with you; you are completely vindicated.” > > > 17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelek, his wife and > his female slaves so they could have children again, 18 for the LORD > had kept all the women in Abimelek’s household from conceiving because > of Abraham’s wife Sarah. > > > This second passage also tells us that marriage between siblings was unusual. It also tells us that Abraham did not really lie when he said that Sarah was his sister, since she was his half-sister. *Also note that nowhere in the two passages Abraham is accused of lying!* This is a quite interesting fact. In any way, it is clear that our definition of incest in today's western society, is not the same as it was in that time and place. Still, [Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NIV) clearly states that for a man to marry his father's daughter (as Abraham did) is a sin! How does one reconcile these passages? Was Abraham's and Sarah's marriage a sin? Was it considered incest?

2012/01/13

Like my answer [here](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/5049/did-adam-and-eves-progeny-commit-incest), you need to keep the chronology right. There is no levitical law at the time of Abraham. Thus, even if he did marry his sister, remember that he was breaking no covenantal restriction on doing so. As I said in that answer, you don't convict someone of a crime *ex post facto*.

During Abraham's time the law hadn't been written against a man taking his father's daughter as his wife. After the law was written in: > > **[Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NKJV)** (NKJV) > > 22 ‘Cursed *is* the one who lies with his sister, the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother.’ > > “And all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’ > > > it forbade such a practice even today, but the lineage of Christ was coming through Abraham and Sarah. This also shows what happens when we are faced with fear that our faith is too weak to overcome.

In the comments to [this answer](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/5258/85) to [the question of why Abraham lied to Pharaoh about his relationship with Sarah](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/3524/why-did-abraham-lie-to-pharaoh-about-sarah-being-his-sister-in-gen-12/5258#5258), the following question which I am about to pose, appeared: **Was the marriage between Abraham and Sarah incestuous?** In two separate occasions, Abraham told the local ruler that Sarah was his sister. These two passages are found in in [Genesis 12:10-20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) and [Genesis 20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV). Let's examine the first passage: [Genesis 12:10-20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) > > 10 Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. 11 As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. **12 When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13 Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.”** > > > 14 When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. 15 And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16 He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels. > > > 17 But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. **18 So Pharaoh summoned Abram. “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!”** 20 Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had. > > > This seems to imply that since Abraham told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister, Sarah was believed to be his sister only and not his wife. This, in turns, makes me draw the conclusion that marriage between siblings was unusual. Let's head on to the second passage: [Genesis 20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV) > > 1 Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and > lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, **2 and > there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then > Abimelek king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.** 3 But God came to > Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as > dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.” > > > 4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you > destroy an innocent nation? **5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my > sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this > with a clear conscience and clean hands.”** > > > 6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a > clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That > is why I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return the man’s wife, for > he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if > you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to > you will die.” > > > 8 Early the next morning Abimelek summoned all his officials, and > when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid. 9 > Then Abimelek called Abraham in and said, “What have you done to us? > How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me > and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should never be done.” > 10 And Abimelek asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?” > > > 11 Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of > God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ **12 > Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not > of my mother; and she became my wife. 13 And when God had me wander > from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show > your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.”’”** > > > 14 Then Abimelek brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves > and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 > And Abimelek said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.” > > > 16 To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels[a] > of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are > with you; you are completely vindicated.” > > > 17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelek, his wife and > his female slaves so they could have children again, 18 for the LORD > had kept all the women in Abimelek’s household from conceiving because > of Abraham’s wife Sarah. > > > This second passage also tells us that marriage between siblings was unusual. It also tells us that Abraham did not really lie when he said that Sarah was his sister, since she was his half-sister. *Also note that nowhere in the two passages Abraham is accused of lying!* This is a quite interesting fact. In any way, it is clear that our definition of incest in today's western society, is not the same as it was in that time and place. Still, [Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NIV) clearly states that for a man to marry his father's daughter (as Abraham did) is a sin! How does one reconcile these passages? Was Abraham's and Sarah's marriage a sin? Was it considered incest?

2012/01/13

Marrying a close relative was not forbidden at that time. The old question of "Where did Cain get his wife?" is answered by saying that he married a sister of his. It was not immoral at that time, since there was no law forbidding it. Leviticus is where we find such laws, which was written over 400 years after the time of Abraham. We now understand that as the genetic pool has become degraded, it is best not to marry a close relative because of the possibility of both husband and wife having the same genetic deficiencies. Early on in human history, these genetic deficiencies were quite minimal, so there wasn't an issue. Marrying a sister may have been uncommon at that time, so Abraham appears to be fudging a bit to justify Sarah as his sister. He has to explain how she is his sister, because she isn't his direct sister. So, he's trying to justify his lie by a tenuous explanation. So again, there was no law that he was breaking at that time. It would be as if the government passed a law against eating twinkies and then rounded up everyone who had ever eaten one before it was outlawed. The American Justice system strictly forbids this practice (Ex Post Facto).

In Ancient times, the word for "sister" also means "cousin" in Semitic languages. Aramaic word "Khtha" can mean sister or cousin. I believe the intended meaning here was Cousin. Genesis 11:26-27 (NIV) - "After Terah had lived 70 years, he became the father of **Abram, Nahor and Haran**. This is the account of Terah’s family line. Terah became **the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran**." If Sarai (later Sarah) was the daughter of Terah, then Sarai would have been listed along with Abram, Nahor, and Haran. So we can confirm that the intended meaning was cousin. In ancient Semitic languages, it must be noted that the word for father can also mean ancestor. For Example, Aramaic word "abba" can mean "father" or "ancestor/progenitor" (Source - Book "Introduction to Syriac" by Wheeler Thackston, Page 65) Abraham was an Aramean (Deuteronomy 26:5) and Arameans spoke Aramaic. Abraham spoke Aramaic before he came to the land of Canaan where Old Hebrew was spoken. Laban the Aramean spoke Aramaic ("Jegar Sahadutha" in Genesis 31:47). Check on Footnotes (at the bottom of the website) for ["Jegar Sahadutha"](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2031&version=NIV). I also want to point out that the commandments were established as early as the time period when Noah lived. For Example, Noah knew about clean animals and unclean animals. Genesis 7:2-4 - Take with you seven pairs of every kind of **clean animal**, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of **unclean animal**, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.” God gave Abraham commands, decrees, and instructions. Abraham obeyed God and kept all of what God taught him. Genesis 26:4-5 - "I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because **Abraham obeyed me and did everything I required of him, keeping my commands, my decrees and my instructions**." This is the same type of instruction God gave to Moses in Deuteronomy 11:1. Deuteronomy 11:1 - "**Love the Lord your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always**." But you may ask what about Moses' father marrying his aunt? In Hebrew Masoretic Text, it says this. Exodus 6:20 (1917 JPS Tanakh English translation of Hebrew Masoretic Text) - "And Amram took him Jochebed **his father’s sister to wife**; and she bore him Aaron and Moses. And the years of the life of Amram were a hundred and thirty and seven years.“ This is confirmed as an error by Scholars, because Septuagint and Peshitta Tanakh (Aramaic Old Testament used in first century Israel) says Amram married his cousin. Exodus 6:20 (Samuel Bagster & Sons' Translation from Septuagint) - "And Ambram took to wife Jochabed **the daughter of his father's brother**, and she bore to him both Aaron and Moses, and Mariam their sister; and the years of the life of Ambram were a hundred and thirty-two years." Here is a [link](http://ecmarsh.com/lxx/Exodus/index.htm) to check this information. Exodus 6:20 (Lamsa translation of Peshitta Tanakh)- "And Amram took **his uncle’s daughter** Jokhaber, and she bore him Aaron, Moses, and Miriam; and the years of the life of Amram were a hundred and thirty-seven years." But Peshitta Tanakh (Aramaic Old Testament) agrees with Hebrew Masoretic Text about Ambram’s age. Cousin Marriage is permitted in the Bible. It is not in the prohibited marriage list mentioned in Leviticus Chapter 18. Aside from Exodus 6:20, we see cousin marriages in Genesis 29, Joshua 15:17, Numbers 36:1-11, 1 Chronicles 23:22.

In the comments to [this answer](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/5258/85) to [the question of why Abraham lied to Pharaoh about his relationship with Sarah](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/3524/why-did-abraham-lie-to-pharaoh-about-sarah-being-his-sister-in-gen-12/5258#5258), the following question which I am about to pose, appeared: **Was the marriage between Abraham and Sarah incestuous?** In two separate occasions, Abraham told the local ruler that Sarah was his sister. These two passages are found in in [Genesis 12:10-20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) and [Genesis 20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV). Let's examine the first passage: [Genesis 12:10-20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%2012:10-20&version=NIV) > > 10 Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. 11 As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. **12 When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13 Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.”** > > > 14 When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. 15 And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16 He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels. > > > 17 But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. **18 So Pharaoh summoned Abram. “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!”** 20 Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had. > > > This seems to imply that since Abraham told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister, Sarah was believed to be his sister only and not his wife. This, in turns, makes me draw the conclusion that marriage between siblings was unusual. Let's head on to the second passage: [Genesis 20 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2020&version=NIV) > > 1 Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and > lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, **2 and > there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then > Abimelek king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.** 3 But God came to > Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as > dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.” > > > 4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you > destroy an innocent nation? **5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my > sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this > with a clear conscience and clean hands.”** > > > 6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a > clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That > is why I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return the man’s wife, for > he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if > you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to > you will die.” > > > 8 Early the next morning Abimelek summoned all his officials, and > when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid. 9 > Then Abimelek called Abraham in and said, “What have you done to us? > How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me > and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should never be done.” > 10 And Abimelek asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?” > > > 11 Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of > God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ **12 > Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not > of my mother; and she became my wife. 13 And when God had me wander > from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show > your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.”’”** > > > 14 Then Abimelek brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves > and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 > And Abimelek said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.” > > > 16 To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels[a] > of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are > with you; you are completely vindicated.” > > > 17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelek, his wife and > his female slaves so they could have children again, 18 for the LORD > had kept all the women in Abimelek’s household from conceiving because > of Abraham’s wife Sarah. > > > This second passage also tells us that marriage between siblings was unusual. It also tells us that Abraham did not really lie when he said that Sarah was his sister, since she was his half-sister. *Also note that nowhere in the two passages Abraham is accused of lying!* This is a quite interesting fact. In any way, it is clear that our definition of incest in today's western society, is not the same as it was in that time and place. Still, [Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NIV) clearly states that for a man to marry his father's daughter (as Abraham did) is a sin! How does one reconcile these passages? Was Abraham's and Sarah's marriage a sin? Was it considered incest?

2012/01/13

During Abraham's time the law hadn't been written against a man taking his father's daughter as his wife. After the law was written in: > > **[Deuteronomy 27:22](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2027:22&version=NKJV)** (NKJV) > > 22 ‘Cursed *is* the one who lies with his sister, the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother.’ > > “And all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’ > > > it forbade such a practice even today, but the lineage of Christ was coming through Abraham and Sarah. This also shows what happens when we are faced with fear that our faith is too weak to overcome.

"If Sarai (later Sarah) was the daughter of Terah, then Sarai would have been listed along with Abram, Nahor, and Haran. So we can confirm that the intended meaning was cousin." Hmm, but in Genesis 20 Abraham says ... Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ 12 Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife. ... So I guess she was his half-sister and the marraige very much was an incestuous one.