I have just started "Game of Thrones" from season 1.  Most of the characters in "Game of Thrones" are saying Winter is Coming, Winter is Coming.  But I don't know the real meaning of that phrase.  Anyone can tell me about it?
It's my understanding that the phrase "Winter is Coming" is the motto of the Stark house, when the story first reaches the wall it's implied that the winter is not a periodic season like it is in our world.  Does the winter refer to a particularly severe season or does a winter only occur every few years?
Four tasks in parallel... how do I do that? I have a bunch of PNG images on a directory. I have an application called pngout that I run to compress these images. This application is called by a script I did. The problem is that this script does one at a time, something like this:  FILES=(./*.png) for f in  "${FILES[@]}" do         echo "Processing $f file..."         # take action on each file. $f store current file name         ./pngout -s0 $f R${f/\.\//} done   Processing just one file at a time, takes a lot of time. After running this app, I see that the CPU is just 10%. So I discovered that I can divide these files in 4 batches, put each batch in a directory and fire 4, from four terminal windows, four processes, so I have four instances of my script, at the same time, processing those images and the job takes 1/4 of the time.  The second problem is that I lost time dividing the images and batches and copying the script to four directories, open 4 terminal windows, bla bla...  How do that with one script, without having to divide anything?  I mean two things: first how do I from a bash script, fire a process to the background ? (just add &amp; to the end?) Second: how do I stop sending tasks to the background after sending the fourth tasks and put the script to wait until the tasks end? I mean, just sending a new task to the background as one tasks end, keeping always 4 tasks in parallel? if I do not do that the loop will fire zillions of tasks to the background and the CPU will clog. How do I remove this wall plate with no visible screws? I'm amazed how complicated this wall plate is to remove. It is made of plastic and accommodates a phone jack and a coaxial cable. Please see the images that accompany this question. I've searched it thoroughly and there are no tabs anywhere on the face or edges to press in. There are no screws. I've pulled on it pretty hard, hoping that it would pop off, but if I pulled any harder it surely would break. Of course, I had the coaxial off while I tried to remove the plate. The brand name on the phone jack part is &quot;KRONE&quot;. Has anyone seen a wall plate like this? If so, how do you remove it? I have to say, I'm absolutely blown away by how ridiculously difficult this is. Any help would be appreciated. How many times can American Tourist re-enter UK in same 6 month period? I've got some photos with quite random names, but the dates (not exif, but when they were last edited) are correct. I'd like to rename them in that order, preferably so that the first photo is named 1.jpg and so on, but anything goes. How can I do that? I have a bibliography in which a particular author wrote two papers in the same year. Bibtex is sorting them alphabetically by title, but I want them listed chronologically. (So in the example below 'universal grammar' should precede 'English as a formal language'.) What's the appropriate way to flip the order?  MWE:  \documentclass{article} \usepackage{natbib} \begin{document}  ... formal semantics in the  Montagovian tradition \citep{montague1970aug,montague1970befl,montague1973ptq}.   \bibliographystyle{harvard} \bibliography{test} \end{document}   This generates the text 'formal semantics in the Montagovian tradition (Montague, 1970b,a, 1973)' whereas I actually want '1970a,b,1973'.  test.bib file for MWE:  @incollection{montague1973ptq,   title={The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary {English}},   author={Montague, Richard},   booktitle={Approaches to natural language},   editor={Hintikka, K. Jaakko J. and Moravcsik, Julius M.E. and Suppes, Patrick},   pages={221--242},   year={1973},   publisher={Dordrecht} }  @article{montague1970aug,   title={Universal grammar},   author={Montague, Richard},   journal={Theoria},   volume={36},   number={3},   pages={373--398},   year={1970},   publisher={Blackwell Synergy} }  @incollection{montague1970befl,   title={English as a formal language},   author={Montague, Richard},   booktitle={Linguaggi nella Societa e nella Tecnica},   editor={Visentini, Bruno and others},   publisher={Edizioni di Comunità},   pages={189--224},   year={1970} } What is this electronics symbol (four triangles?) The below image is from a service manual for a mobile radio. Note the small symbols that appear to be four triangles, point to point. I've searched far and wide and cannot identify that symbol. I have a nagging feeling that I've seen something like it in hydraulics, but never in an electronics diagram. I know that my radio doesn't have a bunch of stars of David printed inside it, so what could this symbol be?  Some of them have a line through the middle, others don't. Compare for example the ones near the labels "mic int" and "mic ext". Does this represent something, or is it a typo? Show that every prime $p&gt;3$ is either of the form $6n+1$ or of the form $6n+5$, where $n=0,1,2, \dots$ What are good out of the box alternative geocoding solutions to Esri's services? Esri's  will retire at the end of the year, what are good GIS services that can replace the North American and US Streets geocoders?  I have totally excluded Esri's replacement, the  as it is a subscription service. I tried to use the usb-creator.exe from Ubuntu 10.10 desktop i386 ISO image and it does create an USB stick that doesn't boot. When I try to boot from it I get:     Operating System not found.   I try to do this from Windows 7 x64. I'm not looking to create a live Ubuntu media, only an installation USB disk.  I repeated the process several times and I even tried to reformat the USB drive (FAT32), no success yet.  The USB stick is a 8GB one. How do I keep my character centred on screen? Why does a free-falling body experience no force despite accelerating? Compute: $\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\sqrt{n}(A_{n+1} − A_n)$ where $A_n = \frac{1}{n}(a_1 + a_2 + \cdots + a_n)$ Let $\{a_n\}, {n\geq 1}$, be a sequence of real numbers satisfying $|a_n|\leq 1$ for all $n$. Define  $$A_n = \frac{1}{n}(a_1 + a_2 + \cdots + a_n),$$ for $n\geq 1$. Then find $\displaystyle\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\sqrt{n}(A_{n+1} − A_n)$ .    I proceed in this way  $$\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\sqrt{n}(A_{n+1} − A_n)=\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\sqrt{n}\left[\frac{1}{n+1}(a_1 + a_2 + \cdots + a_n+a_{n+1})-\frac{1}{n}(a_1 + a_2 + \cdots + a_{n})\right]=\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty}\left[{(na_{n+1}-a_1 - a_2 - \cdots - a_n})\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}(n+1)}\right]$$  Please help me to complete from here Nautilus does not show the left bar, how do I turn it back on? When I open nautilus does not open the left bar where it says computer and down markers such as music, documents, videos, downloads. I reinstalled nautilus from the synaptic package manager but nothing happened. What I can do to make that bar visible again? How can I delete my Stack Exchange account(s)? Also,  What happens to my content? Can I request it be deleted as well? What if I'm suspended, rate-limited, or banned from posting questions or answers? What will happen to my votes? Will other users be impacted? Why wasn't my account deleted immediately after the timer expiring? What will happen to my pending bounties and close, reopen, delete, or undelete votes? I want my account deleted on all Stack Exchange sites. How do I do this? Will my profile on chat be removed once I delete my site account?   For more information, see &quot;&quot; in the . I have an Ubuntu Server 10.10 32-bit in my home. I'm making SSH connections to it from my PC via Putty.  The problem is, sometimes I'm able to login seamlessly. However, sometimes it gives me an error like this: Network error: Connection refused.  Then, I dont't change anything, try to login a few times more, wait a while and try again. Sometimes I can log in, sometimes I cannot. It seems pretty random to me.  What can I do to solve this?  Edit:  And Sometimes, Putty gives Network error: Software caused connection abort error after displaying login as: text.  Here is the ping -t output:  Pinging 192.168.2.254 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=65ms TTL=6 Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=88ms TTL=6 Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64 Reply from 192.168.2.254: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64     I turned off firewall of router, and everything seems to work now. Except for that, I still can't enter my web server by typing external IP from my PC. I constantly have problems working with dates in Excel, I must be doing something wrong but I don't understand what.  I have a spreadsheet, exported from our exchange server, that contains a column with dates on. They have come out in US format even though I'm in the UK.   The column in question looks like this  04/08/2012 04/09/2009 04/01/2010 04/21/2011 04/05/2012 08/30/2009 08/29/2010 08/28/2011   In Excel, I have highlighted the column and selected Format Cells.... In this dialog box, I have selected the Date, selected English (United States) as the locale and chosen the matching date format from the list. I hit OK and try to sort the data by this column.   In the sort dialogue I choose this column, select sort on Values but the order only gives me options for A to Z, not oldest to newest as I would expect.  This in turn sorts the date data by the first two digits.  I am aware I could re-format this data to ISO and then the A to Z sort would work but I shouldn't have too, I'm obviously missing something. What is it?  EDIT: I messed up the bounty but this should have gone to @r0berts answer, his first suggestion of Text to Columns with no delimiter and choosing 'MDY' as the type of data works. Additionally, if you have a time (i.e. 04/21/2015 18:34:22), you need to first get rid of the time data. However after that the method suggested by @r0berts works fine. Help! My master database is corrupt, I can't even bring the SQL instance online! What are my options to get my server back up?   I do have a backup of master, but the  asks me to start the instance in single-user mode, which I can't do!  (Note: I'm leaving this question unspecified as to SQL version, so as to be a more widely-applicable reference. There are some similar questions on DBA.SE, but none that involve the server unable to start.) Question mark or bold citation key instead of citation number Save all render passes to EXR image? I am having an issue with EXR file export that I did not encounter in previous versions of Blender. I used to be able to render a render layer with all its passes and get all the passes included with the render layer with the EXR export; the problem I am finding now is that I am not able to "pack" the passes with the EXR file (see graphic below). I am working with "standard" EXR, as I understand that the EXR multilayer is for multiple file handling (packing all the image files into a single container), but I may be wrong.    In the screenshot, the graphic is an EXR saved from the rendered layer; you can see in the screenshot how the "extra" passes from the render layer has been ignored by the graphic and only shows the standard image, z and alpha passes. I found this issue for the first time with Blender 2.71; and maybe with Cycles; in the past I have never had an issue with EXR export.  Am I missing something? I hope EXRs still work with Blender, I wouldn't know how to composite without such invaluable aid. Sorry if this question has already been answered somewhere; I have really searched the site for information on EXR but I could not find an answer to my issue. Is there software on Macintosh for adding GPS data to RAW files?