I'm not a fan of that at all. I hate it when schools teach using stuff that you can't easily access if you're not in that school.
[we also had Visual Studio licenses etc. as students]

Our Prolog classes used Sicstus which is undoubtedly one of the best/most optimized ones but why not just use the FLOSS Swi-Prolog?

I'm also pretty tilted if closed source stuff is used for research if there's a suitable FLOSS alternative. I mean isn't the whole point of science being easily reproducable/testable/repeatable/falsifiable. I could easily rant about this topic for hours

Eclipse has worked amazingly for me since I got my new macbook pro a couple of years ago with SSD.

I guess schools could pretend that they are teaching students how to program and force them to use the command-line and make-files instead of a full-blown IDE for C++? I don't know which is best for this programming language.

LOL the free aspect raises the level to pretty good. I have had few problems using it.

That is a good IDE in my view but I don't want to pay the $ either, seriously.

No counter argument there. Probably the best IDE in its price class.

https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archiv...14/000780.html

Really interesting post about GMails spam filtering and how it would relate to end-to-end encryption of email.

I opened up an email account at openmailbox.org yesterday. Seems pretty basic, but then again, I don't need much. Certainly can live w/o Google Docs.

What are the chances of totally screwing up my computer using fdisk to dual-boot? My computer doesn't support UUID, so I have to use MBR to create new partitions. Every time I look at the result, it shows /sda1 = 15G, which is what I want, and sda2 as 450G, which is all the storage I have left. I'm afraid to press 'w'. I don't think I'm ever going to get dual-booting done. Scary stuff.

A little sketchy, needs more context. A UUID is a number not a feature. Features may require a UUID to uniquely identify something. MBR is the master boot record and you may be running software that modifies it. It sounds like somehow you are getting into boot loader issues. Lots of Linux boot loaders so it would be helpful to know which one. I assume you do not want to boot Windows as one of your OSs but if so that is important. The fdisk program partitions your hard disk. The info is part of the MBR. The partition sizes depend on the storage required for each OS. Not sure why you need to dual boot but I assume it involves two different distros. Lastly how old is your machine? Newer ones involve secure boot. Could you create a VM on your current machine in lieu of a dual boot setup?

In my view using a tool for coding that you are comfortable with is the most important thing. So yeah a stand alone editor that suits your needs is great. Again IDEs are a lot about convenience. I will say that using command line interfaces and how to build make files has value maybe even lots of value.

There's a free, full version of visual studio 2013 available for students. Or rather, people with access to a student email, as I prefer to use my old email just to see if any of these places can check to see if I'm a current student. So far, none have/can.

Also, is it me or does this forum generally see better use of proper punctuation, capitalization, etc.?

Makes sense, to me at least, that it might. But it could also be a lot of people using devices that auto-correct.

Yeah, I meant to say GPT. For some reason, my computer doesn't support GPT, so I have to use MBR.

Ah yes, the bootloader... fml. I've ruined 10 DVD-Rs so far...

I'm using Arch on a VirtualBox, I'd like to put Linux on the metal, and I do need Windows for certain things.

Eh... forget it. I think this dual-booting thing is going to be too hard. This computer already has 4 partitions and there doesn't seem to be a decent way to get extended partitions going without the feeling that I'll nuke my computer.

If you have 4 primary partitions on a disk already, yes forget it.

buy a new disk for what, $30?

Yeah this the route I took more or less. I bought an SSD 256GB for $110 but yeah hard drives are really cheap. I then just installed a Linux distro on the SSD right out of the box. When I looked at what you are trying to do, the dual boot option was the least preferable but seemed doable. If you go that route the other forum on computer issues is a good source and google is your friend. You can run Windows from a Linux hosted VirtualBox as Windows 7 and 8 are available as selections.

If your machine is new enough you may have to disable secure boot. I would do that as standard operating procedure. If you have to, just get into the BIOS and find the selection, disable it, and save your settings. Some Linux distros are digitally signed and will install with secure boot enabled. Any OS installation without the right signature is not going to install with secure boot enabled.

One of the partitions will have to be shrunk just make sure it is the right one . It should be fairly obvious. I assume your target machine is a desktop. I'd just get another hard drive, install the Linux distro out of the box on it, use your other as an auxiliary drive, and run Windows from a VM on Linux.

I setup a dual boot (Windows 7 and xubuntu). It took about 20 minutes with no prior knowledge. I just used Windows 7 to resize the partition that I had already split years ago then let the xubuntu setup handle the rest.

It installed GRUB by default and everything just worked. This is on a 7 year old machine.

The NTFS partitions are accessible from linux too. To be safe I mounted C: as read-only.

Im looking to improve my ability to interact programatically with websites. Beyond just downloading the code, Id more like to be able to do things like login, click buttons, etc. I use Html Agility Pack in .net to download things now, but this seems like its not going to get the job done for interactivity. I have some PhantomJS experience, but it seems cumbersome, though that is probably my total lack of web dev knowledge.

Right now, I think Im looking at splinter: http://splinter.cobrateam.info/. Has anyone used it? Thoughts?

Also, I think the biggest hurdle is going to be my lack of understanding of web tech. Is there a resource anyone recommends for learning how to read the code of a website with the goal of interacting with it, without caring about actually developing?

The target machine is a laptop, about 3 years old, running Win7. No safe boot.

For some reason, there are four partitions built into the machine. I allocated 160GB for Linux, but GParted wasn't able to do anything with the reserved space. Maybe I can go the CTH and see if I can get any advice there.

Well you have to shrink the correct partition, the largest one, and create another one for your linux installation. How much you shrink the partition by depends on how much storage you want to allocate for windows including free space. An Ubuntu installation I know will handle all of this for you as it will query you during installation about partitioning you want. You could install Ubuntu or XUbuntu I guess and then after installing it, install ArchLinux on the Ubuntu partitions.

That is, unless he already has 4 primary partitions on the disk - which unless something has changes recently is the maximum possible. I guess this is the case, since 4 partitions are mentioned as present and extended partitions have not been "got going".

Of course it's just as likely there is a single primary partition, an and extended partition with two logical partitions in it. but who knows!

A boot partition, probably a windows recovery partition, and two more for for the remainder of the disk that he actually reads and writes from. Just a guess though. More context would be helpful.

Turned in a project today for c++ that was basically a comparison of golf scores followed by announcing the best, or lowest, score. My program worked, but I feel like I didn't have the most elegant solution for figuring out who was best.

I did the whole program basically discarding anyone with higher scores, so only the lowest score was kept track of. To start, I initialized a variable for the low score to 0, then did an if, else to have player 1 always put as the best score, followed by any subsequent player' scores compared against player 1.

I would have preferred to do this all in one bit of code, and I could easily do it if we were comparing high scores. (high = 0, if score > high, high = score) But I couldn't for the life of me figure out a way to do it for scores where lowest is best. (Other than maybe initialize the best score to some absurdly high number, but again, that doesn't seem all that elegant)

I'm sure I'll probably get full credit since it works the way it's supposed to, but it bugs me that I couldn't figure out a better solution, even with my prodigious google skills.