Multiple of my D&D players are not paying attention

Question: As the title says, multiple of my players are not paying attention during our d&d campaign. Most of the time they will simply talk to each other about unrelated things in the middle of combat and other times, and I have to continuously ask them where they want to go next, and have to ask them to roll dice multiple times. More than once a player will have no idea what is happening and I have to constantly repeat myself. Any solutions, tips, or advice is very welcome.
Comment: I've voted to close this primarily as unclear (but the close reason will be as duplicate, due to majority votes on that). Genuinely everything here *could* be a description of completely normal non-problematic experience. It's clear it occurs to you as a problem, but I don't know how to distinguish *to what extent* it is a problem, or in what way, from what you've said. I can't tell if this is a massive or minor problem, or if it's totally normal stuff that is just part of what a GM notices and handles.
Comment: Hmm.  That one's slightly different - it is about people engaging with the game only one-on-one and ignoring the group aspect.  This one seems more about general social distraction.
Comment: Welcome to the site. Please take the [tour] as it's a useful introduction. Most importantly is that we're a Q&A that works a bit differently to discussion forums. We aim to provide expert answers to questions with a specific focus or problem without getting caught up in the chit-chat that a forum warrants. As such, questions asking for general advice, tips or ideas don't work too well here as they break our voting system that helps the community sort the good answers from the bad. Thankfully your question has a specific problem we can help with but it may need a little bit of rewording.
Comment: The more detail you can give us about the problem caused by your player's inattentiveness, how it's affecting game play for yourself and others (is anyone else getting frustrated that others aren't paying attention or is it just you, etc) and what you may have already tried, the more likely it is that you'll receive answers better tailored to help solve your specific problem.
Comment: Also - there are a bunch of posts in RPG SE about speeding up D&D combat and/or making combat more interesting. For starters:  http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/58/how-can-i-speed-up-dd-3-5e-combat?noredirect=1&lq=1.
Answer: Session 0
It sounds like a classic case that everyone has different expectations of the game.  Typically, holding a session before the campaign begins to talk about what everyone wants out of the game helps everyone to know what the expectations are.  Maybe, those players expect the game to be more loose and social — played more like a light board game than an intense story telling session — and they are getting out of the game what they came for while frustrating you.
Session zero would allow you to know this expectation and to plan more OOC social time at game sessions — maybe more breaks, or just being alright with more OOC table talk because you know to expect it as it is what the party finds fun.
Even though the campaign has started, it might not be a bad idea to either hold a session 0, or informally talk to each player and just get a sense of what they are looking for in the game, and letting them know what you expect of the players.
How Interested in the Game Are They?
Are they playing because they like the game, or are they playing because they like the people? If it is the latter, maybe it makes sense to do one of the following:

Ask those members to leave.
Instead of doing D&D night, do general "game night", and D&D is just one game you cycle through, but with clear expectations that on D&D night things are more in character and less chatter.
Shorten session and add social time at a break or at the end.

Let Them Know They are Next
First, before trying these changes, let the table know about the change ahead of time. That way it isn't a shock when someone gets pushed.
At the end of each turn, don't just tell the player who is up that it is their turn, tell the next player their turn is coming. Do this for all players, so it doesn't seem like you're singling people out.

"Joe, it's your turn. Sally, you're up next. Be ready."

If someone is lost, and doesn't have their turn ready (a minute or so of "umm") when you get to them; give them a warning "You gotta do something, or you'll lose initiative"); after a few seconds more of indecision they get moved to the end of initiative order. If they are moved to the end of initiative order, and they still don't have a move, skip them for the round.
Maybe it's You...
One unpleasant possibility to consider is maybe it isn't them. It could be that you currently lack the thing they play D&D for. Maybe it's RP, maybe they want more combat, maybe they want less combat, etc. Perhaps there is part of DMing that you get bogged down in and lose them.
I used to be a terrible GM.

I would over plan a single thread, and then the party would walk away from the clear hook I laid for them because it wasn't as interesting/clear/fun as they wanted and they take some other action I wasn't expecting — so I didn't know what or where to go with the story line I planned in the trash.  I fixed that by having events ready, but not necessarily one full complete story, but a lot of different hooks to different stories ready.
I would get bogged down in the numbers and system (I was playing a complex system with new players, and the system was getting in the way of story and play). It took me forever to realize that it is more important that the story move on than that I find the right answer for how X behaves in this situation.  Now, I make sure I know the basics ahead of time, make an on the spot ruling, check it after the game for next time it comes up. 5e makes this a lot easier, as the rules are generally simpler.
I didn't have a GM/DM before I DMed my first time. I didn't know how to be a good story teller. My descriptions sucked. I didn't know how to build in side plots well, and NPCs were a lot like NPCs in MMO games where they would simply exist to tell the player this one bit of info they need.  I've spent a lot of time watching other DMs and how they hold the table's attention and build the world with the players — both by being a player in other games and watching online games.

Whatever the case, if it is a mismatch or weakness in you DM style, the only way to know is to ask.  I'd suggest talking to your worst offender and asking some basic questions:

Why do you like playing D&D? What is your favorite part?
Why are you more interested in talking than paying attention to the game?
Are you interested in more social interaction with the people at the table (longer breaks and such), would that let you keep your attention more on the game when it matters?
What can I do, as DM, that would make the game more exciting for you?
Comment: Yep, always be cognisant that if a group is doing one thing and you are expecting another, the fault usually lies with the individual not the group I.e. Be aware you might be boring the crap out of them.
Comment: Thanks for answering my question! I will attempt to use this advice at our next game session.
Answer: Establish If It's A Problem
I get it.  You're the GM and you're trying to get something done, and people are going on 10 minute long diatribes about Rogue One during a villain's monologue.  But — some people, and some groups, want different things out of gaming. For some folks, getting together and talking geek is the point, and the game is just something else you're doing as a backdrop.
I wrote a blog post comparing RPGs to sports, and in sports you have local pick-up games, league games, etc. And different levels of engagement are expected in them. Some folks are just there to mess around, not to play seriously. And that's valid, even if it's not what you want to do.
But on the other hand, this can verge over into just being plain rude.  If you were playing poker or Xbox or basketball or Uno or anything else in the world and someone interrupted play to jibber jabber for that long someone would tell them to shut the heck up and take their turn.  Gamers are sometimes not super high on the social skills/cues end of the spectrum and, regardless of how "serious" the game is, can be engaging in behavior distracting in any other situation.
What you want to do is get group buy-in on what you're doing and what the general tone of the game is.  But if in general everyone in the group is happy with the current mode of operation, it may be you that has to change. You don't have to accept pure-play rudeness — if someone interrupts what you're doing, especially as the GM, get over the geek social fallacies and call them out.  "Hey Beavis I was talking, simmer the hell down."  But some groups play games as an excuse to come together and geek talk for 6 hours, and if you want something different you may have to switch/cull groups.
For a while, I was a single dad who had to pay a babysitter for my once-every-two-weeks break, and I wanted to spend it gaming.  I certainly looked for a group that spent their time on task; I don't need to pay $20/hour to listen to some fatbeard talk about George Lucas; I can get that for free on the Internet at home. It's fine for you to want that too, you just have to understand that you may want something different and valid from what the others in the group want.  Get that hashed out.
Fix What's Wrong
If you can get the group to generally say "Oh OK, we should probably stay a little more on task during the game, some people are here to play the game and not just chat, fair enough" then you can do a couple things.
First, take breaks.  I ran a super serious "everything is in character" campaign for years, and I'd run for 45 minutes and take 15 minute breaks, so people could get the talking (and snacking and whatnot) out of their system. If you try to bull through 4 hours without distraction you're always going to be disappointed.
Second, maybe divide groups.  To run that serious campaign, I had to take a large group and split it into a "funsies group" and a group of people willing to accept a less screwing-around premise.
Third, do other smart logistics things like have the group get together for lunch beforehand to get some of the jabber out of their system.
Fourth, if you're running the game,  you can simply start enforcing a variety of moves — like "What do you do?"  "Well if this were Deadpool I'd blah blah..."  "Ok, you spend your turn engaged in fantasies.  Next player in the initiative order, what do you do?"  Or a variant on that, insist on things being in character — random joking and blathering will bother the NPCs, give you away to the monsters, etc. Just keep running the game, and those not participating will miss out.  Again you need buyin for this to not backfire, but it's fine to do.  Force action in-game. Interrupt the misbehaving dialogue with "an orc shoots you with a crossbow!"
Fifth — general small group skills.  There's any number of articles on the internet about small group behavior/small group discussion that you can learn techniques from that are useful in leading any small group and keeping them on task. Stress goals, redirect disruption, basic management/meeting facilitation skills.  These are out of scope of this SE but there's plenty out there to learn (bonus: helps you in management, teaching, etc. in other parts of life).
Answer: Try to engage your players as much as possible. Create roles and create challenges so that specific characters in your party can feel like they are involved intimately in the story or campaign that you're trying to tell.
If you can get each of them more involved on an emotional and story level with the campaign they will likely be more willing to pay attention even when their character is not the focus of the game.
In order to get people to pay attention as much as possible:

skip them in the initiative order if you mention to them that its
their turn
if they don't have an action prepared or haven't been listening to
the state of combat skip them

If they have their cell phones out at the table and are paying too much attention to them (aside from using them to look up an odd rule or spell effect), institute a "no electronics space." It's considered quite rude in a game to pay attention to your phone more than you are to the other players and the GM. First and foremost, you're there to tell a story and play a game. If they're spending a lot of time on a laptop or a phone it might be something to bring up to them.
If the problem is that they're geeking out about things not related to the game which you're currently playing, and not paying attention to combat, another thing you could do is force your creatures to engage them.

If Person A and Person B are paying attention, but Persons C, D, and
E aren't, your monsters just found themselves new targets.
Instead of telling them the things that led up to there being
monsters in their face, tell them that while they were distracted, a
monster appeared adjacent to them ... this should get their attention.
You can exaggerate this at the table by pounding on the table
with your fists (to simulate a large creature moving up towards the
players).
They won't know how the monster got there, but they'll have to deal with it regardless of the situation.  What doing the above achieves is creating tension and surprise related to the in game situation.  This provides and incentive to pay attention what is playing out on the table.


What's a word for a person who denies all knowledge?

Question: For example, assume that Charlie stole a bicycle and you saw it or know it. Next week you speak with Charlie and he denies all knowledge of stealing a bicycle. Of course he does, and he's evasive. Is there a good word for such a character?
Comment: The simplest answer is 'liar'.
Comment: Possibly related: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/64614/idiom-phrase-which-means-to-pretend-not-to-understand-or-know
Comment: Sergeant Schultz.
Comment: I can't help but note that there is a very distinct proverb in my native language (german): http://german.about.com/od/idiomsandproverbs/a/German-Expression-Mein-Name-Ist-Hase.htm
Comment: It should be noted that the above scenario could be describing someone who is a bona-fide psychopath, especially if his denial is remarkably convincing.  This is typical behavior for a psychopath.
Comment: I have always wondered why there are not more people who believe in solipsism.
Answer: Within the UK police force this is (sometimes) known as 'the Shaggy defence', in reference to the song "Wasn't Me".
I can't find an online source for that. I only know it because a police officer friend of mine told me about it.

Oh, actually, here we go:
The Shaggy defense

"I predict that in the decades to come, law schools will teach this as the 'Shaggy defense'. You allege that I was caught on camera, butt naked, banging on the log cabin floor? It wasn't me."

Slate

PESCA: Good. R. Kelly's defense is really pretty simple. He's just
  saying it wasn't me, and the defense team also says the girl in the
  video, or the girl the prosecutors are pointing to, it wasn't her. You
  saw the tape. The jury saw the tape. How does that defense work? What
  - does the guy look like him?
Mr. LEVIN: The guy definitely looks like him. As he said, it - the
  it-wasn't-me defense, which I'm calling the Shaggy defense, after the
  popular reggae song.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90755482

Meet the Shaggy Defense: Lying in the face of overwhelming evidence.

http://www.aolradioblog.com/2010/09/11/100-worst-songs-ever-part-three-of-five/

The defence favored by the protagonist in Shaggy's song "It Wasn't Me". Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he maintains his innoncence by simply saying it was somebody else. Also liked by R. Kelly, O.J. Simpson, and Phil Specter

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Shaggy%20Defence

It's now official: The "Shaggy defense" is a term of art
When Danville U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser rules that the "Shaggy defense" won't fly in a summary judgment motion, we can safely assume the term is now ensconced in the annals of legal terminology.
For those whose musical tastes don't include R&B, the "Shaggy defense" refers to a 2000 hit by reggae star Shaggy (Jamaica native and U.S. Marine) who counseled a wayward lover to deny everything with the phrase "It wasn't me," despite all evidence to the contrary. The term is helpfully explained in footnote 3 in Kiser's opinion in the case of Preston v. Morton. Kiser notes the term "Shaggy defense" gained popularity when used to describe another musician's defense in a criminal case.
In the civil case before Kiser, Preston claimed he was working on traffic signals in a bucket truck and was injured when his bucket was hit by a passing tractor trailer driven by Morton. Morton's main defense was, you guessed it – "It wasn't me." Kiser said the issue of whether Morton was the driver in question was a disputed material fact, holding "the so-called 'Shaggy defense' is inappropriate for summary judgment."

http://valawyersweekly.com/2010/05/25/its-now-official-the-shaggy-defense-is-a-term-of-art/
Answer: since the person in question is putting up that act i suggest that person should be called 'knowledge refuter'.
Answer: In England, such a person might be termed "a Manuel" after the character in Fawlty Towers, whose most popular catchphrase (delivered with brio in a cod-Spanish accent) was, "I know nothing."
Answer: In philosophy, the school of thought which denied the possibility of knowledge is the Skeptics, so the word would be Skeptic or Skeptical.
From Wikipedia:
It is generally agreed that knowledge requires justification. It is not enough to have a true belief: one must also have good reasons for that belief. Skeptics claim that it is not possible to have an adequate justification.
Skepticism is not a single position but covers a range of different positions. In the ancient world there were two main skeptical traditions. Academic skepticism took the dogmatic position that knowledge was not possible; Pyrrhonian skeptics refused to take a dogmatic position on any issue—including skepticism. Radical skepticism ends in the paradoxical claim that one cannot know anything—including that one cannot know anything.
In medicine, the phrase "in denial" is used to describe a psychiatric condition.
From The Free Dictionary:
denial [dĕ-ni´al]
in psychiatry, a defense mechanism in which the existence of unpleasant internal or external realities is denied and kept out of conscious awareness. By keeping the stressors out of consciousness, they are prevented from causing anxiety.
ineffective denial a nursing diagnosis accepted by the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association, defined as denial that is detrimental to health when a person makes a conscious or unconscious attempt to disavow the meaning or even the knowledge of an event in order to reduce anxiety or fear.
Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. © 2003 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.
In Law, a general denial rejects all the material elements of a petition, whereas a specific denial rejects particular elements.
From The Free Dictionary:
Deny
To refuse to acknowledge something; to disclaim connection with or responsibility for an action or statement. To deny someone of a legal right is to deprive him or her of that right.
A denial is a part of a legal Pleading that refutes the facts set forth by the opposing side. A general denial takes exception to all the material elements of the complaint or petition, and a specific denial addresses a particular allegation in issue.
West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Comment: Skeptics you say?  ;^q
Answer: acatalepsy, acataleptic
from Wiktionary
Answer: You can call him a denier in general but it is not always the case in law. For example, below excerpt explains the difference between "denial" and "refusal to admit":

"Formulaic guilt" simply by "being a denier" has been castigated by English judges and academics. The main objection is that denial theory is founded on the premise that that which the supposed denier is denying is truth. This usurps the judge (and/or jury) as triers of fact.
It is important to note what makes denial denial and not just refusal to admit to or accept a truth or fact rests in the degree of individual's awareness of the existence of the truth or fact. In denial, an individual does not see or is mostly unconscious of existence of the truth or fact. The choice to refuse reality, then, is unconscious as well. Refusal to admit to or accept a truth or fact differs from denial in that the individual recognizes or is conscious of the existence of the truth or fact but consciously refuses to accept it as such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial

There are also cases that people use dissociative identity disorder as a defense mechanism. This behavior is also called dissociating.

Like the temporary insanity defense, the use of dissociative identity disorder as a legal defense seems almost perfect: yes, the defense counsel can say, the body defendant committed a crime, but the mind that committed that crime is not the mind on trial.
[Neulaw.org]

Dissociating is also mentioned as a defense tactic when there is an external threat. Below excerpt is from a book called "Human Conflict: Disagreement, Misunderstanding, and Problematic Talk" By C. David Mortensen:

Willful ignorance is a more general term also beyond your example. It is denying any knowledge or fact willfully:

It differs from the standard definition of "ignorance" — which just means that one is unaware of something — in that willfully ignorant people are fully aware of facts, resources and sources, but refuse to acknowledge them.
It is sometimes referred to as tactical stupidity.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Willful_ignorance


Rewriting Link with mod-rewrite

Question: I have a link being sent to users in one format, but I need to make sure it passes through a main index page for login purposes. I figured mod rewrite was the way to go.
Link being clicked on by user:
https://sub.domain.com/link/link.jsp?pageId=1234567&id=12345

Where it needs to go:
https://sub.domain.com/index.html?o=(full original URL from above, including query string)

The o= in this case will let the user login and pass them along to that original URL. Now, there are also some images and a style sheet involved, so I need to have the rewrite ignore them.
After reading documentation and a number of code examples (many from this site), I tried to just get a basic code going to see if my rewrites will even work, as I'm new to this.
This appears to force the URL to rewrite but isn't passing the user along to the original link:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sub.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* https://sub.domain.com/index.html?o=%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}?%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

Also please note this is all going inside a virtual host, not htaccess. As I said, the code above appears to redirect when I test it, but it might be unintended and not at all how I should write it.
I also tried adding in this code for images/stylesheet ignores
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(css|jpg|jpeg)$ [NC]

At that point everything went crazy, but I know it's because I'm slapping code together and thinking it's going to work. From that point I tried a lot of changes, but most resulted in a loop condition and I kept falling back to square one (original code you see above). Apologies for the long winded post, but I'm hitting my head against a wall at something I thought wouldn't be difficult. Obviously, despite reading, I'm lacking some understanding. Any guidance would be very helpful.
Answer: The problem with your current solution is: an URL is only allowed to have one ? inside.
Note that your code will send a redirection status code to redirect inside the browser, because you provided a FQDN. Try doing an internal redirect by just using /index.html?o=.... If that doesn't work either (not sure right now), URL-Encode the second ?
[Edit]: rewrite, guess I got the question wrong.
Comment: Thank you for the answer. Before I saw this, I poked around more and managed to get this code to solve all but one issue (the ? issue). RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sub.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://sub.domain.com/index.html?o=$1 [QSA,R=301,L]

Rewriting Link with mod-rewrite


How do you "shrink" electronic components, such as transistors, resistors and diodes?

Question: I realize that these components have been shrinking in size. How is this process done? Should all electrical engineers know this?
Answer: Semiconductors are fabricated using process technologies. The invention of these technologies has led the shrinking transistor sizes that have so greatly benefited the electronics industry. They have been shrinking so fast that the rate has actually been exponential, following Moore's law since their invention. In 1970, manufacturing processes reached the 10 µm node. In 2013, we are moving below 22 nm. At over 450 times smaller, you can see that you can do so much more with a chip than you could in 1970 with the same size.

But what is process technology? Put simply, a process is a lot like a recipe. Many steps are performed to process a silicon wafer until individual packaged circuits are the result. Many mature processes are more than 100 steps. The silicon process has been an enormously valuable research topic and there are many resources to start learning. When a process technology is advanced, allowing smaller feature sizes, we say that process is shrunk. That is the actual word that process scientists and engineers use. When a process is shrunk there is usually at least some advancement in the photolithography stage, allowing smaller details to be patterned. But many steps may be affected by a process shrink since it is such a complicated process.
Who needs to know? Surprisingly, few people need to understand process technology, and most electrical engineers can remain largely uninformed about it without it affecting their careers. ASIC developers and researchers who design devices to be fabricated must understand the design rules imposed by the process, but don't necessarily need to know the details of manufacturing, although this knowledge certainly gives them an edge. Of course, the process engineers must have detailed understanding, and the process researchers must have more detailed understanding still.
Whats next? Moore's law is unsustainable for silicon processes. We are already approaching the limits of silicon because of physical limitations. Its possible that quantum computing will allow us to continue making computing smaller and more efficient. In the other direction, researchers are finding new uses for silicon: micro- and nano- electromechanical systems MEMS/NEMS. These devices open up applications that are impossible with electronics alone, and give credence to predictions of fantastic scifi-like ideas such as nanobots.
Comment: Two additional remarks, 1/ not only few people need to know the details of manufacturing, but few people have access to them, they are a very well kept trade secret.  2/ even polygon pushers are working at greater abstraction than usually though, the shapes they draw are transformed before manufacturing to ensure manufacturability (see [OPC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction))
Answer: Electronic components aren't shrunken.  You don't start with a large transistor, mutter some magic incantation, then end up with a small transistor.  To end up with a small transistor you make a small transistor in the first place.
No, all engineers do not need to how electronic parts are shrunken since they aren't, and many types of engineering disciplines have little to do with electronics parts anyway.
For electrical engineers it is useful to have some idea about the semiconductor fabrication process, but there is no particular reason to know the details, unless of course you deal with semiconductor fab processes directly.  If you design chips, then a bit more familiarity with the processes is a good idea.
Comment: The term "shrink" isn't to be taken literally. That is the correct term.
Comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_shrink
Answer: Transistors and diodes are already pretty tiny.  The ones you see are in (relatively) huge packages so they can be easily handled.
Integrated circuits consist of many (sometimes a great many) transistors and diodes made on a single piece of silicon, complete with all necessary interconnections, again placed in relatively large packages, with connection points spaced around the edges so that the package can be soldered to a PC board.
Unless you are designing or manufacturing integrated circuits, I don't think detailed knowledge of the process is of importance to the average engineer or technician.
Answer: If you question is related on historical progress of semiconductors - Many scientist and engineers was involved in development of modern semiconductors and that is very long and complicate story.  For today electrical engineer is not essential to know whole history. There are specific fields where engineers are directly involved in low level technological process.. for example designing and making integrated circuits.
If you think on designing process - in development engineers use prototypes which are often looking very differently from end product. Sometimes they using bigger packages (if available) , debugging tools and circuits.. In final product all that unnecessary parts of circuit are removed, bigger packages are substituted by smaller(witch are usually more suitable for pick and place assembly) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyh9u-t7yvQ


.htaccess. deny root, allow specific subfolder. Possible?

Question: How can I deny access to http://sub.mydomain.com/, but allow for (completely) http://sub.mydomain.com/test (or http://sub.mydomain.com/test/)
There is a magento back-end behind http://sub.mydomain.com/test/
Answer: .htaccess directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof, so you should disallow access in your DocumentRoot,
http://sub.mydomain.com/.htaccess:
Order deny,allow
Deny from all

And override that in any specific subdirectories you would like to allow access to,
http://sub.mydomain.com/test/.htaccess:
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

Comment: This is an untested assumption but you just need that second `.htaccess` in any subdirectory that is supposed to be web accessible
Comment: Doesn't work for me - adding .htaccess with "Allow from all" in a subdir still requires a password for it.
Comment: However, adding "Satisfy Any" in addition to the above did fix it.
Answer: How about a .htaccess at the root directory, with the following lines?
RewriteEngine On
# check if request is for subdomain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sub.mydomain.com$ [NC]
# check if  'test' isnt part of request
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/test/?(.*)$ [NC]
# if subdomain and no 'test' part, redirect to main domain...
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R,L]

So if the '/test/' section is present, no redirect takes place...
Comment: NC means case insensitive, R = redirect, L = last (stop applying rules from htaccess after this)
Comment: Looks pretty interesting. I have to admit, i'm not realy familiar with mod_rewrite. So I have absolutely no clue what [NC] and [R,L] stands for...
Answer: Try create .htaccess file in sub.mydomain.com for deny, and in sub.mydomain.com/test for allow.
Or you can redirect from http://sub.mydomain.com/ to deny subdir.
Answer: I know this is a very old thread, but I've been struceling with exactly this scenario for several days and finally got it to work, thus I thought I'd share my solution for further reference.
As of Apache version 2.4 (I guess), it's possible to use directive <RequireAll> and <RequireAny>.
This can be used to allow access to specific subfolders.
My solution for .htaccess (inspired from this site: https://www.the-art-of-web.com/system/apache-authorization/):
SetEnvIf REQUEST_URI "^/test/.*" PUBLICACCESS
# Use for multiple subfolders:
# SetEnvIf REQUEST_URI "^/(?:test|test2|test3|test4)/.*" PUBLICACCESS
<RequireAny>
    <RequireAll>
        # Public access
        Require env PUBLICACCESS
        Require all granted
    </RequireAll>
    <RequireAll>
        # Require user and password
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Secured"
        AuthUserFile /var/www/example.com/.htpasswd
        Require valid-user
    </RequireAll>
</RequireAny>

Answer: I'm using a cpanel powered server which will add .htaccess entries like the following:
#----------------------------------------------------------------cp:ppd
# Section managed by cPanel: Password Protected Directories     -cp:ppd
# - Do not edit this section of the htaccess file!              -cp:ppd
#----------------------------------------------------------------cp:ppd
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Protected"
AuthUserFile "/home/****/.htpasswds/sites/****/passwd"
Require valid-user
#----------------------------------------------------------------cp:ppd
# End section managed by cPanel: Password Protected Directories -cp:ppd
#----------------------------------------------------------------cp:ppd

I wanted to allow access to a specific subfolder, and the solution was creating an .htaccess file within that subfolder and placing the following inside:
Satisfy any

Answer: If you have protected your DocumentRoot by Auth, then you can allow your Subfolder by follow:
http://sub.mydomain.com/test/.htaccess:
require all granted
Order allow,deny
Allow from all


mDNS on OpenBSD; resolving names in the ".local" domain using the standard resolver

Question: I have a collection of macOS, Ubuntu Linux, and OpenBSD systems. They use mDNS to publish their dynamic IP addresses to the local network, making themselves available under the .local domain name.
My OpenBSD 7.1 machines can publish their host information to the LAN using Avahi or OpenMDNS, and I'm able to connect to them by name from Linux and macOS.  However, the OpenBSD systems cannot resolve the names of neighbouring devices seamlessly.
The OpenBSD systems can resolve names through the Avahi utilities when they are running Avahi 0.8:
$ avahi-resolve-host-name eeyore.local pooh.local laban.local
eeyore.local    192.168.1.127
pooh.local      192.168.1.101
laban.local     192.168.2.100

When using OpenMDNS in place of Avahi, I can use its mdnsctl command to look up names from OpenBSD:
$ mdnsctl lookup pooh.local
Address: 192.168.1.101

However, no matter if I use OpenMDNS or Avahi, the normal resolver does not see these names, so I can't, for example, use ssh, ping, or any other tool to reach them by name from OpenBSD.
I wonder whether one could get OpenBSD's default resolver, or possibly unwind or unbound in the base system, or some other DNS resolver from packages, to use mDNS as an alternative "forwarder".
Additional info: The local router is an EdgeRouter X from Ubiquiti Inc. (I also have a spare EdgeRouter Lite).  This is what acts as the DHCP and DNS server in the local network.  It forwards DNS queries out of the LAN.  One could enable the dnsmasq DHCP+DNS server on the router to provide the hostnames and/or IP addresses from the DHCP leases as responses to DNS queries from the LAN, but this is more of a work-around than a solution to the abovementioned problem (since it does not make the OpenBSD system resolve using mDNS).
Answer: You could check - https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/013e174a3726f5dfc8d86cfb0c801d83d8f77ad6/lib/libc/asr/asr.c#L625
OpenBSD supports only 'file' and 'bind' options in the name resolver (resolv.conf) :-(


ERC20 exchange support

Question: how can you add support for erc20 tokens on your own exchange, so that users can perform transactions between themselves? There are many services that make it possible to work with BTC and ETH, but there is no information how to work with ERC20 tokens
Comment: Trading tokens on exchange is not any different from trading other assets.  What is different is deposit, withdraw, and holding tokens.  Could you add more details to your questions about what do you have already, what do you want to have, what did you try, and what obstacles did you encounter?
Comment: @MikhailVladimirov Судя по нику, вы русский, так думаю будет проще, суть в том, что я не знаю как добавить возможность заводить/выводить, проводить транзакции между пользователями токенами ERC20. Кто-то пишет, что нужно поднимать свою ноду эфириума, кто-то говорит, что можно обойтись и без нее, информации очень мало и не совсем понятно как это реализовать, точнее совсем непонятно.
Comment: @MikhailVladimirov вы поможете?
Comment: I'm not sure that non-English posts are allowed here.  The topic looks too wide and too generic for single question.  Though, if you need assistance, feel free to contact me personally, my contacts are easy to find on Web.
Answer: This question is too wide and probably should be split into parts:

How to deal with Ethereum from within back-end application
1.1. How to monitor Ethereum blockchain event effectively
1.2. How to securely deal with private keys in back-end applications
1.3. How to manage hard forks
How to implement ERC20 token deposits for users
2.1. How to generate unique deposit addresses for users
2.2. How to effectively collect tokens deposited by users from multiple addresses into single one
2.3. How to track tokens deposited by users to guarantee that no deposit was missed and no deposit was processed twice
How to implement token withdrawals by users
3.1. How to ensure that successful withdrawal transaction will not be reverted
3.2. How to ensure that failed withdrawal transaction will not be finally executed
3.3. How to track withdrawal transaction to guarantee that no withdrawal was missed and not withdrawal was processed twice
How to hold tokens on exchange
4.1. How to hold tokens on multisig wallet
4.2. How to hold tokens on paper wallet
4.3. How to hold tokens on hardware wallet
4.4. How to sign transaction on offline device

Each item is a search query you may want to perform on stackexchange or Google.
Comment: This is not really an answer even if you are trying to help the asker to find relevant information.
Comment: It is roadmap.  For questions as wide as this one, roadmap might be the answer.  And real detailed answer could be far too long to be posted on stackexchange.
Comment: @MikhailVladimirov do u have a telegram?
Comment: Yes, @Mikhail_Vladimirov

ERC20 exchange support


How to support multiple locale buffer with UBreakIterator

Question: How can I use UBreakIterator with a buffer having different locale?
eg: 金魚 わたしワタシ മലബാറിൽ കെട്ടിയാടപ്പെടുന്ന महाभारत हिन्दुओं का स्मृति
वर्ग में, is having multiple locale strings. How can I use
UBreakIterator so that it will break on every word by considering its
locale?
I tried this with "ja_JP" in a C program and it is working as
expected, but not with "en_US". What should be the correct locale
value to ubrk_open so that this will work for every language?
Any help appreciated.
Thanks,
Manoj Marathayil
Answer: You might break the string apart by script (uchar.h) and then run a break over each script run.


asp.net cannot find class

Question: I have some asp.net that I developed and is working just fine on a windows machine but now I'm trying to run it on a machine running Ubuntu and Mono 2.4.4 and ASP.NET 2.0 and getting errors.
I have some classes in my App_Code directory, such as DatabaseSingleton.cs, Functions.cs and NotAllowedException.cs. All of them are using the namespace aspapp.
Anyway, when trying to run a file (Login.aspx.cs) that uses the DatabaseSingleton class, I get that CS0103: The name 'DatabaseSingleton' does not exist in the current context. However, in a different file that isn't using DatabaseSingleton but is using NotAllowedException, I get a similar but a different error: CS0246: The type or namespace name 'NotAllowedException' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?. All the files are in the namespace aspapp and has using aspapp in the files.
Are there anything I need to add in the web.config to be able to access these files on mono?
Answer: Be sure you are pointing to mod-mono-server2 in your .conf file You can compile the .cs in one dll and move it to Bin directory

asp.net cannot find class


How do I enable a forced stop & disabled Bluetooth Share app on Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

Question: Over enthusiastic to disable many distracting apps on my Sony Xperia U (ST25i) I went "settings>apps>all" and disabled away.  Where no disable option was available, I clicked on force stop.  With Bluetooth Share I stupidly took it to be a social networking app and disabled it, later force stopping it.  Dumb, I know, but how do I get it back?  I'm fairly new to all of this, obviously, so please be very specific in responding.  Many thanks.
Comment: Click the "Enable" button that is located at the same point where you clicked "Disable"?
Comment: Thanks Robert, but clicking "Disable" and "Force stop" buttons extinguished their lights and made both inoperable. "Disable" did not change to "Enable". Clicking a button with an extinguished light does nothing, of course. But installing Syncios Manager to allow my Xperia and PC to talk has, at least, brought the "Force stop" button light back on again. The "Disable" button, however, remains dead.
Answer: For apps that are forced stopped, locate them in the Play Store and click Enable button to enable them.
Comment: I think you mean *For apps that are disabled* and not *forced stopped*.


A SharePoint page that shows all the lists on a site

Question: Is there a way to show all the list on a site?  Basically like the Site Content page except with only lists (in other words a customized Site Content Page).
Comment: you can create a custom solution using SharePoint REST API or JSOM to fetch the lists and show it on custom site page.
Answer: I recommend you using a Content Search web part in a custom page.
Edit page and insert a Content Search web part:

Then add the web part and click "change Query" button in the left pane. Click "Switch to Advanced Mode" in the Basic Tab, then type the text in the Query text box:
<code>path:"http://sp"  (contentclass:STS_List AND contentclass<>STS_List_DocumentLibrary)
</code>
Besides, since STS_List including document libraries, picture libraries and other libraries, you can add "AND contentclass<>STS_List_XXX" behind the text based on your libraries.
Here is a refer: SharePoint Power Searching Using ContentClass
If it's not feasible for you, you can use rest API to retrieve all lists in SharePoint, here is a post for your reference: Retrieve All Lists And/or Libraries in SharePoint Using REST API


Files and Folders - all new created or changed show dates one hour after system time!

Question: This is Magento 22.214.171.124. Here is the current situation:

Server time is correctly set up. I can check it from Terminal.
PHP time is correctly set up as timezone. I created a php file for showing the date.
Time for Magento frontend is correctly set up. I can check it in any phtml template.
In Magento database time for Created At and Updated At fields are UTC time

Here is my issue:
In Magento file system all changes to files or folder show a time one hour after system time. I deleted the files in /var/cache then reload the frontend and current system time/Magento is 14:42 and files were created 15:42. "Someone" is adding one hour to every file/folder created or changed. I uploaded a product image again 1 hour after system time.
Does anyone have a solution for this?
Answer: Solved. This issue is coming from WinSCP. If you get this issue use this solution: in "Login" window after filling up all your server information click on [Advanced ...] button. In "Advanced Site Settings" window click on Environment and in section "Daylight saving time" choose "Preserve remote timestamp". Now login to your server and dates should be listed correctly.


How can I spectate VS games in Left 4 Dead 2?

Question: Is there a way to enable players to connect to connect as spectators to a VS game in Left 4 Dead 2? And how can I do it myself?
Answer: They can connect normally and choose to spectate but they are still counted towards the "Players" count of up to 8.
So to answer your question, no. You cant have additional spectators connected.
Comment: Is there now way to configure the server so it will allow the connection of more than 8 people?
Answer: You can't spectate a full game unless the server has enabled SourceTV.  If SourceTV is enabled, the server will have it listening for connections on a different port, usually 5 above the server's normal port (so, port 27020 by default).


Is there a way to make a kill cooldown in Minecraft?

Question: I am building a murder mystery type map, and I was wondering if there was a way to make a 25-second kill-cooldown. I am giving the murderer team strength 127. I need this to be where when one person (murderer) kills someone from the other team (innocent), their effect goes away, and after 25 seconds, comes back.
Comment: I don't think it's a duplicate, Cronut also needs to know how to reset the schedule after a kill.
Comment: Possible duplicate of [How to delay or slowly loop commands?](https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/363578/how-to-delay-or-slowly-loop-commands)
Comment: Let me guess, is it an Among Us map?
Answer: How Can I Do This
Have a command block system check when someone dies. For more info check this answer.  (It's for the bedrock edition but should still work, instead of testfor use /execute if). Obviously change the selector form an @e zombie one to an @a. When someone dies you can then run a command that is to take away the strength. You can then use a comparator and repeaters to make a delay and then give the selected player strength again. A repeater set to 4 ticks gives a 0.4 delay, so use 62 4-tick repeaters and 1 2-tick repeater for 25 seconds.
Limitations
If someone leaves the kill cooldown will reset.


Can I get a masters degree if I drop my PhD?

Question: I am an undergraduate right now, looking to apply to Grad schools. I am just confused about the kinds of degrees offered by graduate schools. Some state they have a "M.S, M.S/PhD, and PhD" programs. I have read a lot that students who quit their Ph.D in between after realizing that the program is not for them can leave with a masters but is this available for (almost) any PhD program or just the M.S/Ph.D program? Does a university that simply states an offering of a "Ph.D" program also allow students who quit in between to leave with a masters?
Comment: This is going to vary widely by both field and country.  Can you update your post with that information?
Answer: My field (economics) in the US generally works the way you're describing - you can quit in the middle of your PhD and leave with your masters.  At my program, once we completed some number of graduate credits (I think it was around 2.5 years worth) we simply filled out an application on the student management portal for a masters, and they awarded it.  It was like five extra minutes of work, so I think all of my classmates did it.  They called it an "incidental masters degree"
That said, PhD programs frown heavily on entering a PhD with the goal of leaving in the middle with a masters degree.  They offer funding to PhD students with the goal of putting quality applicants on the job market, which masters students can't do.  Conversely, students who enroll in a masters program not only aren't funded, they usually pay a lot in tuition.
It does make for a nice consolation prize for the few classmates I have who never finished though, since they at least come out of the program with a masters.
Comment: Sounds like it's heavily incentivized to enroll in a PhD program to get the masters degree. Frowning upon ppl that don't want to pay for something they can get paid for instead of solving the underlying problem sounds like an, er, interesting approach.
Comment: @DonQuiKong I mean, you're not wrong.  I've never been on an admissions committee, but I imagine they expend a fair bit of effort looking for students who will actually finish their PhD.
Comment: So you're saying they are additionally favoring good liars? ;)
Answer: This varies, but in my experience (US/Canada, biology/math/statistics),

entering an "M.S." program assumes that you will want to complete the Master's degree and leave (for industry or a PhD program elsewhere).

in an "M.S./Ph.D." program you are initially enrolled for a Master's; if, toward the end of the Master's program, it looks like you are doing well and you want to continue on with a Ph.D. in the same program, you can do some paperwork (in my old institution this was called a "Master's bypass") and be automatically enrolled in a PhD, without writing your Master's thesis, defending it, re-applying for the PhD program, etc.. In this case your Master's work would typically be rolled into the first chapter (or two) of your Ph.D. thesis.
Under this option there would not be any stigma associated with stopping with a Master's degree; part of the intention of an M.S./Ph.D. program is precisely to allow students to decide whether they want to continue with a Ph.D.
This option may be limited to students who plan to continue with the same supervisor.
There may also be an option for students who want to go through the process of getting their Master's degree (written thesis, defense, etc.) and then start the Ph.D. program; not much difference except that you do have to do the write-up and defense, and you get to add a degree to your CV.

In programs with an M.S./Ph.D. program, entry into the Ph.D. program would typically be reserved for students who already had a Master's degree in the relevant field.

Many schools will "offer" a terminal master's; this is a consolation prize for students who enrolled in a Ph.D. program but for some reason are unable to complete it (e.g. they are performing so poorly that they are being kicked out of the program, but well enough that some level of certification of achievement seems appropriate, or because they decided they were unhappy). "Terminal" means that such students would not typically be eligible to apply for a Ph.D. in the same program.
At most programs that offer both MS and PhD degrees, whether or not they have a formal MS/PhD track, it is usually pretty easy to get accepted into the PhD program if you do well in a Master's degree.

As may be clear from all of the above, these programs are usually flexible; if you started a "Ph.D. only" program and decided to drop out, you might have the option to write up your work and finish with a Master's. The M.S./Ph.D. is somewhat less stressful as it gives an explicit choice point.


Bad spackle job on wallpaper

Question: My kitchen (late 90's contruction) has wallpaper that was glued to wallboard.  I know this because all homes in my neighborhood have had same and I learned this when I had a bathroom remodeled.   The bathroom, I had all the wallpaper removed, areas were spackled/sanded/ painted and is perfect.  Since the bathroom  was done several years ago and is perfect but was  expensive for the small area, I knew  as large as the kitchen is I  needed to check see my other options.   Two months ago I hired painters to paint my home  interior and to paint over the wallpaper.  I was told they would tear any lose areas, spackle the torn areas , and  spackle the seams.    They applied kilz and  2 coats of paint.   Once the work was completed, there are large areas where the spackle was not smoothed and the areas are  very visible. Several seams have areas  that were  not been spackled.  I called the owner of the company, he came to the house  and  said they don't do drywall (which is odd since their invoices also mention wall board and the fact they took the job saying they could do it).   I am at a loss with messed up kitchen walls and will be out even more expense to get it fixed.   The only thing the owner offered to do is to repaint once I have the dry wall repaired.  At this point I am not sure what is my best course for repair- I am concerned with the wallpaper on wallboard, the spackle, the kilz, and 2 coats of paint what will happen if someone says they can sand the areas and repaint.   Any input regarding this will be greatly appreciated.
Comment: Some formatting would make this easier to read please.
Comment: A picture or two would help us to have a perspective on the magnitude of the problem. If it just us a matter of getting a competent finisher to skimcoat the walls that would be far better than new drywall. After the finisher finishes it will be necessary to prime and repaint all walls. I'd choose a low sheen paint.
Comment: Thanks.  I tried to get good shots of the wall areas but they really didn't show the true detail of the problem areas.
Answer: "they would tear any lose areas, spackle the torn areas , and spackle the seams". Sadly, this never works. The fact that there are loose areas means that more can appear at any time. The painters should have done whatever was necessary to remove the wallpaper. Instead, they compounded the problem. The easiest solution and probably the least expensive would be to add new drywall over the entire wall. Good luck.
Comment: Thank you - I have a guy coming today to look at the walls.  I am going to be very careful who I get to do the repair work.  It's obvious the man who did the work didn't know what he was doing even though he said he did.  Of course there were references given but I am thinking they were bogus.  That's the problem anymore with references and reviews - you don't know what's legit and what's not.  Thanks and believe me I learned my lesson.
Answer: I suspect from the way you worded the text of your question...

Two months ago I hired painters to paint my home interior and to paint
  over the wallpaper.

... that it was partly your decision to do the paint over to avoid the cost of removing the existing wall paper. It has been my experience that painting over wall coverings like this is always a risky proposition and leads to unsatisfactory results in most cases. Based upon that I can see why the paint contractor would not want to take much responsibility for results that you got.
Your best way forward may very well be to take down the existing drywall to the studs and then install new to refinish the walls. Demolition and re-install of drywall is a bit of work but something that really can be done as a DIY project if you have any capabilities in this direction. The tools needed are not that expensive and you can save a lot doing such work yourself.
I am suggesting the removal and replace for a number of reasons as follows:

Trying to add another layer of drywall on top of a compromised wall always leads to problems with thickness around electrical outlets.
Trying to remove the paint and old wall paper can cause so much damage to the old drywall paper surface that it can be very difficult to get a decent wall surface for painting. (Believe me I've had to do that a few times and can attest to the amount of time sucked up trying to doctor up a compromised surface).
Replacing drywall up to installed cabinetry can be done without having to remove the cabinets if you leave a narrow band of the old drywall adjacent to the cabinetry and then install backer strips to allow a screwed joint between the old and new drywall.
Comment: Painter didn't want to remove the wallpaper because it was glued directly to wallboard.  Another guy several years removed in a bathroom - all paper glued to wallboard during builder's construction.  Bathroom wall was perfect when finished but that guy has retired/moved.   The painter recommended the process he did and said he had done this at other homes.  Based on what he told me was bogus.  The only areas that had lose paper was at the corners and that was when the corner protector strips were removed and pulled the paper lose.  I have a wall guy coming today to look at the walls. Thanks

Bad spackle job on wallpaper


Apache2 and proxy_balancer BalanceMember

Question: I've got this Apache2 site configuration, allowing me to "run Apache as a proxy" of the localhost:8080 service.
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName foo.mydomain.com
    RedirectPermanent / https://foo.mydomain.com/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName foo.mydomain.com

    RewriteEngine On

    RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://upstream%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

    <Proxy balancer://upstream>
        # following directive generates the error
        BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8080
    </Proxy>

    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyVia On
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    RequestHeader set X_FORWARDED_PROTO https

    <Proxy *>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Proxy>

    SSLEngine               on
    SSLCertificateFile      /etc/apache2/certs/foo.mydomain.com/host.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile   /etc/apache2/certs/foo.mydomain.com/host.key

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error_foo_mydomain.log

    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access_foo_mydomain.log combined
</VirtualHost>

When I restart Apache2 with service apache2 restart an error is returned.

I saw that the problem is related to the following directive:
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8080

If I comment that line, the error is gone and the server is started.
Nevertheless, the proxy is not working.
Syntax should be correct, so I don't exactly know how to solve this.
Of course, both proxy and proxy_balancer modules are enabled.
Answer: I've found a solution allowing me to proxy the localhost:8080 service.
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName foo.mydomain.com
    RedirectPermanent / https://foo.mydomain.com/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName foo.mydomain.com

    ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/

    SSLEngine               on
    SSLCertificateFile      /etc/apache2/certs/foo.mydomain.com/host.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile   /etc/apache2/certs/foo.mydomain.com/host.key

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error_foo_mydomain.log

    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access_foo_mydomain.log combined
</VirtualHost>


Installing pdf-tools on Windows

Question: I am new to Emacs and I am trying to install pdf-tools on Windows. I am following this, but I just couldn't understand what to do from the step 3. Could someone explain to me in very simple language what to do? I have very little experience and don't really understand this language.
Comment: For the start, do `echo $PATH` in that shell and see if the directory to `emacs.exe` appears.
Answer: You need Emacs and cask installed before compiling pdf-tools.
pacman -S python
pacman -S git
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cask/cask/master/go | python
git clone https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools
cd pdf-tools/
export PATH=/home/<your username>/.cask/bin:/c/emax64/bin:$PATH
make -s

Even then the build process might fail once or twice. If you can't get it to work, download just the pdf-tools melpa repo compiled for 64-bit Emacs on Windows here: https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64/releases/tag/20180529
PS: I maintain the emax64 distribtion, which comes with imagemagick7 and pdf-tools and other packages (emax.7z) pre-compiled and ready to use: https://github.com/m-parashar/emax64

Installing pdf-tools on Windows


Is it OK if normal users can see and access "staff login" page in a website?

Question: My website has 2 types of users: Customers and Staff. I want each type of user to be able to login in a separate page. Is it OK if I show a "staff login" link next to the normal users (customers) login link? Or should I somehow hide the staff login link from normal users?
Answer: I am assuming that the vast majority of your users will be customers. In this case, the most common practice I have seen is to have a very visible form for customer login, with a smaller link below it or elsewhere on the page that takes the user to a separate staff login form. If, for technical reasons, you want to have both login forms on one page, I think this would be alright as long as you do take steps to keep the emphasis on the customer login form. Maybe the customer form has a bright red or blue login button, while the staff form has a grey one? I would not go so far as hiding the staff login; you want to avoid customer confusion by accidentally using the wrong login, but you don't want to add too many extra hoops for staff users either.
Answer: Simplicity is the key. So, you should apply the principle of Occam's razor here. For example, how WordPress and other CMS are not distinguished login types: There is a single log-in page and everyone gets to the page that corresponds to their user role.
The other typical solution is using subdomains like: software.com > yourcompany.software.com In this case, everyone who is accessing the page through the subdomain has a different user role and the subdomain can be secured as well. Everything depends on what you really want to achieve by separating the user groups not just by their roles, but redirecting them to different log-in pages.
But this is not a UX issue. It is rather technical and it is handled as a business issue.
Answer: Since majority of the users are customers prominence must be given to customer users and then on a side you can include staff login as they are also in a way customers but of a different type.


Webkit GTK: Using the DOM Tree Walker

Question: So, I'm experimenting with Webkit GTK DOM functions.  It's pretty straightforward, except for one thing: there's a useful part of the API called the WebKitDOMTreeWalker which, I assume, lets you walk over each node in the DOM, just like the TreeWalker object in Javascript.
Now, in Javascript a TreeWalker is created by calling:
document.createTreeWalker(root, nodesToShow, filter, entityExpandBol)

So, in WebKit GTK, there is an obvious counterpart in the API - a function called webkit_dom_document_create_tree_walker.  The function signature is:
WebKitDOMTreeWalker* webkit_dom_document_create_tree_walker(WebKitDOMDocument* self, WebKitDOMNode* root, gulong what_to_show, WebKitDOMNodeFilter* filter, gboolean expand_entity_references, GError **error);

So creating a TreeWalker with WebKit GTK seems pretty straightforward - except for one big problem: the fourth argument in the webkit_dom_document_create_tree_walker expects a filter object, that is, it wants an instance of WebKitDOMNodeFilter.  Well, the Javascript function also takes a filter, but you can pass null if you don't want to use a filter.  With the Webkit API, passing NULL doesn't work.  If you call:
WebKitDOMTreeWalker* walker = webkit_dom_document_create_tree_walker(doc, root, SHOW_ALL, NULL, false, err)

You get the error message:

** (webkit:3367): CRITICAL : WebKitDOMTreeWalker* webkit_dom_document_create_tree_walker(WebKitDOMDocument*,
  WebKitDOMNode*, gulong, WebKitDOMNodeFilter*, gboolean, GError):
  assertion `filter' failed

So, the WebKit API won't accept a NULL pointer for the filter argument.  Evidently you need to pass an instance of a WebKitDOMNodeFilter.  Okay, again - this wouldn't be a problem either, except I've searched far and wide through the WebKit API, as well as Google, and I can't find anyway to create a WebKitDOMNodeFilter object!  The header file for WebKitDOMNodeFilter.h doesn't expose any constructor for WebKitDOMNodeFilter.  It seems like the API doesn't ever expose anyway to actually construct a WebKitDOMNodeFilter object at all.
Yet... the API exposes many functions (like webkit_dom_document_create_tree_walker, and webkit_dom_document_create_node_iterator) which require a WebKitDOMNodeFilter.  So... is the API just incomplete right now?  Or, is there some way to create a Filter object which I'm just not seeing?
Answer: Can you try casting your null to the WebKitDOMNodeFilter type by calling
WEBKIT_DOM_NODE_FILTER(null)?
Comment: No, it still fails with an assertion failure.  Internally, WebKit GTK is checking if the pointer is NULL.

Webkit GTK: Using the DOM Tree Walker


Feast of the Holy Innocents traditions?

Question: Outside the Sacrifice of the Mass and the use of the Roman Ritual, are there any Catholic historical traditions that are have been or are in use amongst the Catholic faithful for the feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28), either within religious communities or the domestic church?
Answer: Religious Customs in the Family: The Radiation of the Liturgy into Catholic Homes by Fr. Francis X. Weiser, S.J., mentions this regarding the Feast of the Holy Innocents (a.k.a "Childermas day"):

December 28, the feast of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem, is a festive day for little children, according to ancient tradition. In Catholic families, December 28 should be the "feast of babies." The babies themselves cannot consciously celebrate it, of course; but the rest of the family can, with some appropriate observance like decorating the baby crib, having a party "for the baby," and/or blessing the baby with the Sign of the Cross; and everyone can pray to the Holy Innocents for their intercession, that God may bless the baby in body and soul.

Dom Guérenger's The Liturgical Year says this:

In Rome, the Station for the Feast of St. Stephen is in the Church dedicated to the holy Protomartyr, on Monte Celio; that for St. John is in the Basilica of St. Mary Major; today, the Station is made at St. Paul's beyond the Walls, which possessed several of the bodies of the Holy Innocents. In the 16th century, Pope Xystus the Fifth caused a portion of these Relics to be translated to St Mary Major's, and put near the holy Relic of our Lord's Crib.
Answer: On the Feast of the Holy Innocents, it has became a custom, not only in the homes of the faithful, but also in convents and monasteries to serve an extra dish consisting of a white porridge (some kind of pabulum, usually cream of wheat with milk, sugar and cinnamon) to the youngest ones children in families and to the novices (a novice in some communities is any religious not yet in solemn vows) in religious houses, at the evening meal. This tradition is known as the Holy Innocents' Pabulum tradition. In know of some traditional (Extraordinary Rite) monastic communities that follow this tradition.
Other Holy Innocent customs include the superiors of some Religious Orders serving the noonday meal to the brethren. For example in some communities the abbot, prior, cellerar, and novice-master serve at table, while the sub-prior will do the table reading. The abbot of Westminster Abbey in Mission, BC serves tables of the brethren on this feast.
Just as the Magi fooled Herod, so this day is one of the most popular and entertaining Christmas traditions in Spain. December 28 is the day when everyone is allowed to play practical jokes and when it is customary to buy joke articles in Christmas markets like the one in the Plaza Mayor square in Madrid.

One of the most widespread jokes on this day is to stick a figure cut out of white paper on someone's back (without them realising). The word in Spanish for this practical joke is an "inocentada". And, in the numerous Christmas markets (usually located in the large squares in the cities) you can find a whole range of joke articles (wigs, itching powder, false ink…).
Many areas in Spain also have other typical local celebrations on 28 December. Examples include the festivity of Los Locos (or "lunatics") in Jalance (in Valencia, the mayor of the lunatics governs the town for 24 hours); the festivity of the Holy Innocents in Nogalte (in Murcia, with popular dancing and bands of singers); the Danza de Los Locos, or "dance of the lunatics" in Fuente Carreteros (in Cordoba); the "Obispillo", or "little bishop" (celebrated in places such as Burgos, Palencia and Murcia, where a small boy is chosen to carry out the functions of the bishop for one day); and the "Festa dels Enfarinats" de Ibi (in Alicante, involving a "battle" fought with eggs, flour and firecrackers). - The Day of the Holy Innocents

Feast of the Holy Innocents traditions?


How to use quickly with c++

Question: I wanted to know that how can i create application using c++ with quickly.
Recently i wanted to use pyside with it so i deleted all the files in the main folder expect init.py
And it works
I wanted to know i paste all my files there that i have worked with qt creator c++ will it work.
If not tell me other ways.
I seriously want to use c++ as it is more powerful and easy(at least for me) then python
Answer: Sorry, currently quickly don't have any stable templates for c++ . So you should create and package apps manually

How to use quickly with c++


Why wasn't Charles de Gaulle President of France during the 4th Republic?

Question: As we all know Charles de Gaulle was the commander of the Free France that liberated France from the Vichy regime and from the German occupation. After that victory, though, he was the chairmen of the Provisional Government for only 1 year, 268 days before he disappeared from the political scene. So why wasn't the liberator of France and the hero of the nation during WW2 the President of the 4th Republic?
Comment: This would be more appropriate on history SE.
Comment: And what exactly are you asking? Why he quit in '46? Why he formed no party immediately after that? Why the party he did form in '47 didn't do better? Why it took a crisis for other political parties/forces to back him in '58? It seems to be another unclear/under-researched question that is easily answerable in any respect from Wikipedia. The only difficulty being which passage to quote in the answer, because the q is unclear.
Comment: ... or why de Gaulle chose not to run for a position he thought didn't have enough constitutional powers, unlike the later (5th Rep.) presidency? Or why didn't push for a presidential system in '46?
Comment: I think no because its a politcal decision from Charles de Gaulle . @Fizz
Comment: Note that the 4th Republic was a parlamentary republic, not a presidential one. So, while the post of the president formally existed, it was largely a symbolic one - like the president of Germany nowadays or the Queen of the United Kingdom.
Answer: It's unclear what exactly this q is asking. But de Gaulle quit in '46 and his plans for a constitution closer to his vision didn't get much traction back then (unlike later in '58):

About a week after the second assembly began working on a new
  draft, de Gaulle finally spoke out on his desired constitution in a
  speech at Bayeux on 16 June 1946. His proposal actually fell short of a
  true presidential system[...]. Its
  basic features were a separation and balance of powers, a president
  elected by an electoral college including the members of parliament, a
  government named by the president, and several mechanisms to give
  the government greater stability and independence from the legislature. Meanwhile, the Constituent Assembly continued its work, basically ignoring de Gaulle's plan.

So yeah, one could say he retired just so he could "write his memoirs", but this came in a context of his constitutional vision being rejected by the political forces of the day in '46.
Interestingly, a single public opinion poll was conducted in this period (roughly) on de Gaulle's constitutional ideas/vision, namely in Oct '45:

In response, 46 percent favored the presidential system, 39 percent opposed it, and 15 percent offered no opinion.

This was in fairly stark contrast with de Gaulle's personal popularity back then (which was measured by more than one poll), e.g.

one from August 1945, in which 71 percent wanted de Gaulle as provisional president

Some historians thus argue that if only de Gaulle had pushed harder for his constitutional vision in public speeches etc., he might have prevailed even then.

Throughout 1945, de Gaulle made only
  vague statements about his constitutional program, while the parties
  campaigned energetically, calling de Gaulle a dictator and urging approval of their own political blueprints. [...]
Many of the general's supporters urged him to form a party in
  1945, only to be turned away. They understood what de Gaulle did
  not understand: namely, that because the new constitution would be
  written by an elected assembly, only those inside that assembly would
  be able to determine its content. [...]
With no plans to field candidates for a
  third Constituent Assembly, de Gaulle lacked any legal mechanism for
  putting his constitutional ideas into place.

In this context, it's probably less surprising that de Gaulle chose to fund his own party (the RPF) in April '47, as he (finally) understood/accepted [that] the lack of a party base made him vulnerable to outmaneuvering in representative contexts like the Assembly.
His decision to (instead) quit in '46 did damage his standing with public though, at least for the next year:

Polls taken
  just after he resigned in January 1946 showed people split roughly
  evenly on whether they were pleased to see him leave the government,
  although by 47 to 28 percent, people felt he was justified in doing so.
Soon, however, his popularity began to decline, suggesting that directly or indirectly, quitting damaged his reputation. A poll taken just before his resignation found 32 percent wanted him to head the next government. [...] Two months later, only 16 percent wanted him to lead the government, though he still topped the list.  During the general's retirement, pollsters continued to ask if people wanted him to return to power, with negative responses prevailing by about a 5 to 3 margin.
[...]
In the November 1947 elections, the first in which de Gaulle's newly
  formed Rassemblement du peuple francais (RPF) competed, the party
  finished first, with 38 percent of the popular vote.

However, that result would not have been enough to upturn the constitution of the 4th Republic to de Gaulle's vision.
Presumably de Gaulle was unwilling to be a president in a constitutional system (4th Rep.) he seems to have substantially disapproved of, although I'm not sure if there are any crystal clear statements of his in this regard. (His "Joan of Arc" analogies being a bit vague in this respect.)
Answer: Edit: So, I originally misunderstood your question. You're asking about before the Fifth Republic what he was doing.
Wikipedia says this about that time:

After monopolizing French politics for six years, Charles de Gaulle suddenly dropped out of sight, and returned to his home to write his war memoirs. De Gaulle had told Pierre Bertaux in 1944 that he planned to retire because "France may still one day need an image that is pure ... If Joan of Arc had married, she would no longer have been Joan of Arc".[163]

So it seems he was planning to not come back in French politics for a while, having had some disagreements with how the Fourth Republic should be run.
That doesn't mean that he was totally inactive during that time:

In April 1947, de Gaulle made a renewed attempt to transform the political scene by creating a Rassemblement du Peuple Français (Rally of the French People, or RPF), which he hoped would be able to move above the familiar party squabbles of the parliamentary system. Despite the new party's taking 40 percent of the vote in local elections and 121 seats in 1951, lacking its own press and access to television, its support ebbed away. In May 1953, he withdrew again from active politics,[17] though the RPF lingered until September 1955.[165]

Finally, the Fourth Republic started to collapse, and de Gaulle came back into power, instituting the republic he had intended nearly 10 years ago.
I'll leave my original post here, in case anyone finds it interesting and informative.
Original Post:

That's because he founded the Fifth Republic of France not very long into his term as President of the Council of Ministers. He was the first president of the Fifth Republic. He would be so for another 10 years (1959-1969).
De Gaulle died a year or so after leaving office (in 1970), which is probably why you never heard a lot about him in French politics after that.
Comment: Okay, I edited my answer and tried to answer your question.
Comment: Yes i know that , but the Fifth Republic was founded 13 years after the end of the war. So what was his political work during this time and why he did not participated in the political scene during the 4th republic.
Comment: He did. The Fourth Republic ended during his term as President of the Council of Ministers. The Fifth Republic started when his term ended. Are you asking what he did before becoming President of the Council of Ministers?
Comment: yes because he was the president of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1959


Can you use someone else's idea in your own youtube video without citing it?

Question: If I were to watch a video on how to do something on youtube, is it legal to post that same method in my own video? Say, for example, I saw a minecraft video on how to create something. Would I be able to make my own video creating the same thing in the same way without citing the source? What are the bounds?
Comment: Ideas are not copyrightable, and plagiarism is not (usually) illegal.  It's unethical, though.
Comment: @Trish That's very misleading. Plagiarism is when you misrepresent ideas as original when they aren't. The question of whether or not copying text is legal has nothing to do with whether it's misrepresented as original or not. The question of whether it's legal or illegal and the question of whether it's plagiarism or not plagiarism will be completely different questions.
Answer: An "idea" is not copyrightable, though the video itself is.
There's nothing legally stopping you seeing a video about a villager apartment, for example, and making your own "How to make a villager apartment block" video. That said, some people will consider it unethical- provoke Youtube drama at your own risk.
However, there are some things you can't steal. The script, for example, can be covered by copyright. If you were to repeat the wording of large sections of the video, that would not be allowed. Similarly, including clips of the video itself would be problematic.
Comment: Awesome! Would would I be free to use someone else's commands (basically lines of code) or would this also be considered taking a large portion of a script?
Comment: @dogking57 How much code are we talking about?
Comment: Pretty much one line of code. It really depends. I was just curious because the code has keywords which many people would use. If you want make a similar (for example) custom potion, they would likely have to copy the command because there is really only one way to write it. They could try and make there way around it by using more than one line of code, but it would be much easier to just copy that one line.
Comment: @dogking57 Probably fine, though you could just ask permission.


Polycarbonate resistance to acids

Question: If polycarbonate plastic is a polar material with ester bond linkages which usually hydrolyze in acids, why is it resistant to both weak and strong acids (as polar substances)?
Answer: Looking at what has been published about hydrolysis of polycarbonate resins to recover bisphenol A, typical conditions involve water, heat, optional base catalyst (or more rarely, acid, which probably further degrades BPA), and very often a cosolvent such as tetrahydrofuran that itself is stable to hydrolysis. So your intuitions about whether polycarbonate should be susceptible to acid hydrolysis are correct.
There has been a lot of attention paid to whether polycarbonate in household items (e g. baby bottles) releases bisphenol A into foods, causing health concerns- which it certainly can.
On the practical side, such as preparing dilute aqueous acids or bases in a polycarbonate container at ambient temperature (e.g.for lab use), degradation would be very slow due to the density, hydrophobicity,  and perhaps cross-linking of polymer chains into a tight matrix. This prevents the aqueous acid or base from physically contacting the bulk polymer, although slow surface degradation is still likely.

Polycarbonate resistance to acids


What is a "sprite"?

Question: I am studying Fundamentals of Multimedia by Ze-Nian Li and Mark S Drew.  They use the term "sprite" but I don't understand the meaning.  Can someone explain to me what sprites are and how they are used?
Comment: I'm not familiar with the book, but I'm wondering if you're asking about sprites for computer graphics and video games? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(computer_graphics)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(computer_graphics))
Comment: If you vote a question down, leave a comment explaining why.  This helps people ask better questions, and it's just plain courteous.
Answer: If in the book they are talking about image sprites for the web they are images that contain multiple images, like for instance a series of icons to be used in a navigation bar.  You would have one http request for the "sprite" and use CSS to display the icon needed.  You can have sprites that contain all of the images for a given page if you wanted.  The main reason for using them is to lower the amount of files to be downloaded for the website or webpage.
See CSS-tricks article
Hope this helped:)
Comment: the book was published in 2003, so it's not likely referring to CSS background image sprites (though that is a valid definition of the term in modern usaage)
Answer: Technically and historically, a sprite is an animation (not an individual frame of one). I have never seen an actual authority cite the origin of the term, but it has to do with scanline priority queues and graphic display hardware.
A sprite sheet is a well-structured single image (usually a series of animation frames laid out in a grid of n Rows and n Columns, but often a grid with one row and many columns)  which allows a program to store all the animation data in contiguous memory and to easily animate it by incrementing the pointer by a well-defined amount.
A paper and pencil analogue to this is a roll of paper tape with drawings on it, pulled behind a frame which is set up so that only one drawing is visible through the frame at any given time. If you pull the tape rapidly enough, you see an animation.
Sounds a lot like a movie reel.
Comment: It's NOT an animation. In fact, I believe it *can't* even be an animation. Think of old video games, like mario. There would be a sprite for standing still, two for running, one for jumping... etc etc. *Toghther*  they can be made/simulated into an animation.
Comment: Look into it more. It can certainly refer to an animation of 1 frame, but sprites and sprite support were developed to handle movable items.
Comment: sprite is just a term, they weren't 'developed'.
Comment: A sprite is a term coined by a Texas Instruments chip developer. It refers to the hardware superposition of video elements. Look it up.
Answer: From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_%28computer_graphics%29
In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene. Initially used to describe graphical objects handled separate from the memory bitmap of a video display, the term has since been applied more loosely to refer to various manner of graphical overlays.
Comment: In this case, I think this general answer is the correct one
Answer: A sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene. A sprite is basically an animation. The main reason for using sprite is to lower the amount of files to be downloaded for the website or webpage.

What is a "sprite"?


What is Superman's "normal" lifespan under the effects of a yellow sun?

Question: Assuming Superman doesn't die in battle, and lives out his life under the effects of our yellow sun, what is his expected lifespan? Has DC Comics ever provided or suggested an answer?
Comment: Roughly 5 billion years, assuming biological immortality, since that's about how long our sun has until it turns into a red giant.
Comment: he'll just swap out our sun for a new one, obviously. like changing a light bulb.
Comment: He'll ultimately die after all light bulbs in the universe goes off.. And, it will, according to Hawking..
Answer: There is definitely no consistency in how long he is expected to live.
As Dharini said in DC One Million he is alive:

In the DC One Million series (1998), Superman's Fortress of Solitude in the 853rd Century resides within a tesseract located at the center of Earth's sun. By this time, Superman has lived in self-imposed exile within the Fortress for over 15,000 years.

In the Kingdom Come Epilogue he seems destined to live for a little more than 1000 years.

In the epilogue, Superman is shown to have survived 1000 years after his return, and as an old man, he watches the fly-pass of the future generation of superheroes.

In the Batman Beyond episode "The Call" the 50 years in the future Superman is shown to have grey highlights in his hair, suggesting that he may only live to be 200 or so.

Bruce Wayne: I could use some Kryptonian DNA.
  Superman: You'll outlive all of us Bruce, you're too stubborn to die.

In the TV series Smallville in the third season a highschool kid who has the power to see people's deaths touches Clark Kent and sees him just traveling on forever. The implication is that in the Smallville universe Superman will never die.
Paperjam makes the point that Superman may die as soon as the Sun transforms into a Red Giant. Superman could ultimately leave to a different yellow star if his intention is really to live forever.
Comment: I'm late to the party, but in "Superman: Red Son" he does indeed live until the sun turns red, at which point he simply grows weaker and closer to being human. In that story, the twist is that Earth was Krypton's past, and Superman lives to see the planet's destruction.
Comment: [Dr. Zod-us Dr. Zod-us](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlmzUEQxOvA)
Answer: I can't find any canon sources which states his actual lifespan under the yellow sun, but in the 1998 comic story "DC One Million", Superman was shown to be alive in the year 85,271. So he could live at least that long.
But he is hale and healthy then, so it might not be the maximum.
Comment: That could also have been due to his spending a thousand years in the center of the sun absorbing pure solar radiation too though.
Answer: Actually in Smallville it was mentioned, when Clark meets Dr. Fate and Dr. Fate says he will outlive everybody. And I'm pretty sure with the boy, it literally meant Clark will live forever. Plus, there was that future thing where Clark sees his future from that old lady. Remember in season 1 or 2  he sees that:

"I will outlive everyone I love".
Answer: I don't think you're going to find one consistent answer. It has changed wildly over the years. I think the best you're going to be able to do is compile a bunch of examples of the different ways Superman's aging has been portrayed.
As one example, the Batman Beyond universe shows him aging relatively normally.
Here he is in an episode of the original Batman Beyond cartoon:

You can see that his hair is starting to gray, implying that he does indeed age.
This is continued in the Batman Beyond comics:

The above is technically a Superman from a parallel universe, but he looks the same as the Superman from the regular Batman Beyond universe.

Answer: As is apparent there literally is NO canonical response to this... (not unless the original creators come back from the grave and tell us).
Smallville: "I see you travelling on forever Clark..."
Lois & Clark: There is one episode which I think leads on for a few more where (I can't remember the scientist's name) tries to figure out the affect of ageing on Clark (due to him and Lois eventually wanting to have a kid) - the scientist states something like: "... At least a few thousand years... who knows... maybe you will never die..." and then something major happens and Clark stops it... goes back to the lab because he is weak? and the scientist says "... that (whatever it was) was so strong that your life span is less than 500 years now... you may even live a normal human life"
And then all those mentioned above (Red Son/Batman Beyond/etc) but there is another story (can't remember) where he does live 1000s of years... (not the one where he exiles himself... the one where he/Batman/whoever builds him a yellow sun reactor so he can always heal when damaged... and I think they make it into a portable ring eventually and he lives on and on and on.
Answer: In a Smallville episode, a boy sees how people will die by touching them; and when he touched Clark, he saw nothing but a cape flying, and not him dying. He said to Clark, "like you have no end."
Comment: @JackBNimble included this in his earlier answer.


Measure length of "curve" (or similar) by drawing on mesh

Question: I know there are a million answers on here about measuring the length of a curve (like this one, which is pretty much what I want to do) but I feel like this situation is a tiny bit different.  I have a scene like this:

Which is the real top of a skull, imported in "real" units.  I'd love to measure the circumference of that hole in the skull and return the length in centimeters, preferably by drawing on it.  I was drawing a curve by eyeball and using the CurveTools addon to get the length, but as you can imagine, its often hard to tell if you're in a correct 3d Plane and actually touching the surface and I often had to manually adjust each point I drew.  What I would love to do is "paint" like so:

And then have Blender measure the length of that, I imagine by creating a curve where that selection is? I tried separating the mesh by selection and then converting that new chunk into a "curve" and that technically happened, but the new curve couldn't be measured by Curvetools, not sure why.
Blender 2.9 if it matters.
Answer: Nevermind, found my solution here:
How can I make curves "stick" to a model?
Instead of drawing a selection and then creating a curve from that, you can draw your curve and have it snap to the object as you're drawing.


"They have great senses of humor" or "They have a great sense of humor"

Question:
1-They have great senses of humor
2-They have a great sense of humor
Answer: Welcome to ELL!
In the UK we generally avoid "They have great senses of humour." In conversation we will go all round the houses to avoid it. We might say, "She has a great sense of humour. They both have". Or we'll simply say, "They have a great sense of humour."
When you Google "have great senses of humor", the examples found are mostly from social media rather than literary sources. Switch to Google Books and the result is similar. (In the UK, with 'humour', the first few books include 'Your Best Friend – Is You' and 'Catvinkle'.)
In the UK, although we speak of our senses of humour and their senses of humour we avoid great senses of humour and good senses of humour.
Although the US and the UK seem to be in agreement about this, "have great senses of humor" is used more frequently in the US than in the UK:
US (got,have,their)
UK (got,have,their)
Comment: Very informative answer. Thanks.
Answer: "They" can be used collectively, e.g. "The editors of The Onion have a great sense of humor," becomes "They have a great sense of humor." Or you could talk about two friends with very different senses of humor, e.g. on is droll and the other slapstick, so you might write, "They have great, though antithetical, senses of humor."
It's like "fish" or "fishes".

He caught two salmon and ate both fish.
Salmon and trout are related fishes.


Installing Kaldi on a mac

Question: While trying to install the kaldi asr toolkit on my mac I always stumble over some issues.
(OS: 10.8.4, xCode and command-line tools are installed)
My approach was pretty much as recommended in the kaldi tutorial:

checking out the repository via svn (I've tried both the trunk and the stable version)
in the tools directory running $ make or $ ./install.sh depending on on what the installation instructions said in the specific version
(I also tried the ./install_atlas.sh approach)

Step 2 seems to work for the non-optional libraries except for openfst for some reason...
To get openfst to work I installed it via homebrew (version 1.3.3), I think kaldi by default would install version 1.2.10 ... is this a problem?
Anyway, assuming that kaldi can work with this openfst as well, I tried to run configure in the src directory like $ cd ../src; ./configure; ... but the configuration command always returns 'You must run "configure" from the src/ directory.'
So has anybody an idea what's the problem about the configuration or my total installation approach?
Answer:
Step 2 seems to work for the non-optional libraries except for openfst for some reason... To get openfst to work I installed it via homebrew (version 1.3.3), I think kaldi by default would install version 1.2.10 ... is this a problem?

Yes, it is a problem. To understand what went wrong you need to study build log. To get help on build issues you need to provide build log with the problem.

Anyway, assuming that kaldi can work with this openfst as well, I tried to run configure in the src directory like $ cd ../src; ./configure; ... but the configuration command always returns 'You must run "configure" from the src/ directory.'

You are probably missing some dependencies, for example you might miss basename binary and that would break the script. You can add
set -x
to configure script to find out what was wrong exactly to collect commands trace. Running complex software on Mac without understanding how shell works is like shooting yourself in the leg. Try to run on Linux or prepare to understand what the script actually does.

Installing Kaldi on a mac


How can you improve an Excel workbook that leverages PowerPivot

Question: I have an Excel workbook that has 30 plus pivot tables and 10 plus slicers connected to PowerPivot.  When we filter data based on these slicers the performance is sub par, 30 sec to 2 minutes.  Is there a strategy for improving this performance?
Answer: Things I did to improve the performance of my PowerPivot files:

check for unecessary calculated columns on table-level
check and re-check measures (is every measure necessary? are they calculated in an efficient way?)
are the slices only connected to the relevant tables and don't
interfere with each other?

Another strategy could be to save a backup of the original file and delete some of those tables or slices step-by-step to narrow down if there is a specific set of slicers which are especially time-consuming and focuse on those first.
For more general statements than that it would be helpful to see some examples.


How am I supposed to reinstall gpu drivers when there is no integrated graphics?

Question: Ok, So I just got my first desktop pc, And I'm Loving it. There's an major ptoblem tho. After I installed the new gpu drivers almost every game crashes and some games just crash my whole pc. It is an gpu driver problem and How am I supposed to uninstall it? I mean Im thinking that cuz my hdmi cable is connected to the gpu (3070) And After I uninstall the drivers to install it again then there will be no display. Cuz the system wont recognize the gpu because I uninstalled the drivers. And I cant just plug the Hdmi to the motherboard cuz there is no integrated graphics. If the solution is hard then I will just reinstall the windows 11. I hope you can understand that whats happening in my mind, Also if there is an method to just uninstall directX and reinstall it directly then please tell it to me. I hope there is an solution to this.Note: Roll back driver is grayed out, And I installed the driver manually.
Answer: Your assumption that you will lose all video through the GPU without a GPU driver installed is wrong. Basic functionality, without hardware acceleration, will work if the driver is uninstalled.
Windows 11 has an older NVIDIA Graphics driver integrated and it will be automatically resinstalled, although updating to the most recent driver is generally recommended.
It is not possible to unistall DirectX and install it only, or to use DirectX for meaningful acceleration without a driver. DirectX is an API that allows games to use GPU features for acceleration without having to programed to each and every GPU ever manufactured.
Suggested course of action:

Download the latest driver for your GPU from www.nvidia.com/drivers
Install the newer driver, select the "Custom (Advanced)" installation option, and then the option to "Perform a clean installation"
Reboot as required, and again after the installation is completed
Answer: You can return to the previous driver version for a device like this:

Run Device Manager
Right-click your device and select Properties
Position to the Driver tab
Click Roll Back Driver.

If the drivers were updated automatically by Windows (not through your
actions), to block such update see
this answer.
Comment: In this case, you could uninstall the display driver and lose your display, then do a short press on the Power button to shutdown the computer. On reboot Windows will install its own driver. You may afterward, if you want, install another driver version.
Comment: I have done it myself and it worked. There is no guarantee when dealing with computers, but it should work. If there is a problem, you could then try other connections. If you wish to be double-protected, [Create a Bootable USB Recovery Drive](https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4200-create-recovery-drive-windows-10-a.html) (which is always a good idea to keep in case of future errors).
Comment: Can't Roll back driver is grayed out. And I installed it manually.
Comment: Are you really sure that I wont brick my pc? Do I need to do additional steps like plugging the hdmi to motherboard or something like that?
Comment: Do you have another pc on your network that you can use to remote into the one you are trying to re-install the GPU driver on? I find MSTSC (Microsoft Remote Desktop) will always display graphics regardless of GPU driver being present or not. So you should be able to remote into your PC using MSTSC (Run Menu), type in the IP address of your PC, log in and install the desired driver remotely. NVIDIA drivers under "Custom" has a "Perform Clean Installation" checkbox that can be ticked. This removes the old driver and installs the new all in one go.