I'm not a fan of the downvoting feature in general; frankly, I think it should be removed from all of the stackexchange sites.  Negative feedback leads to negative results. I recognize that the intent is not to provide a means of giving negative feedback, but that's what downvoting does. "The community's way of telling peers that their content can be improved" isn't an accurate description of downvoting: people who downvote other people with no explanation as to why (the usual practice) generally consider them not their peers, but their inferiors.   I fear that the downvoting feature panders to the worst aspects of human nature, to an extent that far outweighs any possible benefit that it can provide. I recognize that the intent of downvoting is to make a form of constructive criticism available, but that it fails to do. It simply says "this is bad" without any explanation. If someone really wants to offer constructive criticism, he can do so in the comments, or by closing questions with an explanation of how to bring them up to par. If he does that, it is that that has the value, not a downvote that might or might not go along with it.  I submit that the increasingly negative "elitist" reputation of many of the stackexchange sites (stackoverflow, the "bread and butter" site, in particular) is due more to unexplained downvotes than anything else: downvoting is (much) more often than not a way of telling new people that they aren't welcome in the club. This isn't conducive to growth.  It seems to me that the recently introduced admonishment to "be nice" to new members acknowledges the problem without really doing anything about it. It would be given more teeth if the downvoting feature were removed entirely — people have to give a lot more thought to a comment than a downvote decision. Furthermore, the (apparently many) "serial downvoters" who contribute little if anything else to the site would take themselves elsewhere.   Thoughts? What are the positive contributions (are there any?) that downvoting makes to the stackexchange sites?
I understand the purpose of up/downvoting answers -- some answers are better than others, some answers may be wrong, .etc.  With regard to questions, though, there are other mechanisms to deal with "bad" questions:  comments, close, flag.  A poorly written question should be improved.  A bad question should be closed/deleted.  Often, though I see poorly written questions downvoted. I'm not sure what this accomplishes.  I get loss of rep for offensive or spam questions, but for an off-topic question?  or one that is just poorly written?   Why?  It seems to me that rep ought to be based more on answers on a site of this type.   Fundamentally, it seems that rep ought to be based on what you add to the site, not what you ask of it.  A particularly good question does add to the site, but a poor question doesn't really detract from it in the same way that a bad (wrong) answer does. Sure, go ahead and give people more rep for asking a particularly good question, but why punish people for asking bad questions when there are other ways of handling that.  Why not handle questions more like comments and allow upvotes, but not downvotes?  It seems to me that many, if not most, of the downvoted questions are first timers.  It's more likely that your first introduction to the site will be in asking a question, rather than answering. There is a significant risk to alienating new users when their questions are downvoted -- there's a visceral response to seeing that negative number next to your question.  Why not let the close/flag system weed out questions that don't belong and the comment system work to improve poorly worded questions.
Is there a way to test an application where you simulate a hundred different clients connecting to a IIS server and asking the same data? At the customer where our project is running they have 400 computers and they often do stress tests with all computers. I on the other hand have only got my laptop... (and a development server).  (In my case the data is asked through a WebORB Gateway). I've been using mac for years, but prefer to do software development on windows. I'm really used to is using the folowing shortcuts on windows very much:  &lt;CTRL&gt;  + INSERT: Copy &lt;SHIFT&gt; + INSERT: Paste &lt;SHIFT&gt; + DELETE: Cut   Of late, I've taken to doing even my development work on the Mac. However, as a matter of habit, I'm missing these shortcuts very much. Actually, I find these a lot more convenient than COMMAND + (C/V/X) combo.  Is there a way to reassign these three shortcuts at least?   I've look all over the internet and in the "Keyboards" system preferences but I did not find anything.  PS: If you're wondering where I find the INSERT keys on a mac book pro, I use a wireless keyboard. Notification email from stackoverflow contains "<3" after zip code I noticed "&lt;3" appears at the very end of the my stackoverflow notification emails (after the zip code). Is this problem related to gmail? Solving "The ObjectContext instance has been disposed and can no longer be used for operations that require a connection" InvalidOperationException Entering U.S. exactly on the day of visa "expiration date" I'm a bit surprised from my US Visa. I plan to go to a conference on 3rd of April. Amazingly though, the visa expiration date is written as April 3rd.  So what does that mean. Can I enter the US on April 3rd? or should I enter one day earlier? An inequality involving 4 real or complex numbers complex number question involving modulus Let $z, w$ be distinct complex numbers. Show that if $|z| = 1$ or $|w| = 1$, then $$\frac{|z − w|}{|1 − z^*w|} = 1$$ [Hint: Note that $|a|^2 = aa^*$.]  Hey guys, couldn't get my thinking cap on for this question. Any helpful input? Will appreciate it! How do I remove the proprietary ATI drivers? I've installed 11.10 and the proprietary ATI drivers using "additional drivers" The performance of my system is absolutely awful and it shouldn't be. I tried to remove the proprietary drivers using the Additional Drivers tool and it appears to remove them. However after I reboot I cant get back into my desktop properly (the panel and launcher go missing). This doesn't seem to be an isolated problem in 11.XX.  covers how to restore the desktop (panel and launcher), but the guide doesn't fix my problem though.   Whenever I do sudo unity --reset it runs through its normal processes until it hangs at setting update "run_key" and never gets past that. I must reinstall the proprietary drivers using jockey-text or jockey-gtk in order to get back to my proper desktop.   Interestingly enough the system performance seems improved while it is in its "broken" state (missing panel and launcher).  I think restoring the default drivers may solve my problems but I cant figure out how to do it. SQlite: select into? SQL query that concatenates values from duplicate rows in a single table Let's say I have a table of employees, like this:  Name     Sex     Role  Bob      M       Developer Joe      M       QA   Now, I have a problem with duplicated rows in this table. I will fix it sometime but it's not the issue. What I currently need is something that queries such a table:  Name     Sex     Role  Bob      M       Developer Bob      M       Janitor Joe      M       QA Joe      M       CEO   And will output the following rows:  Name     Role  Bob      Developer, Janitor Joe      QA, CEO   It doesn't matter to me if the "Role" will be split to separate columns or be a single column with multiple values.  Using SQL Server 2008 if it matters. How to create wifi hotspot in Ubuntu 17.10 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? Are the off-world colonies really a "golden land of opportunity"? In Blade Runner, there seems to be quite a  for emigration to the off-world colonies, e.g.,      "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, a chance to begin   again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure."   Is there any evidence that people emigrating are actually better off than staying on Earth?  The job descriptions of the replicants Deckard is tasked with "retiring" don't seem consistent with the colonies being wonderful places. If the colonies offered a good life, would they have to do so much advertising? Chat Feature-Request: Thumbs-Up Add an additional form of "I agree" besides starring or pinning (since pinning is restricted to a smaller subset to begin with) or something that we can use to not clog up the right hand star bar.  This is because sometimes you want to say "I agree" but you don't want to star it because ... let's face it, that's not star-worthy, and you don't want to clutter the stream with fifty thousand "like totes for sure, hella right!" because then it becomes one big back-patting party and you lose all semblance of conversation.  So I would propose a fourth "flag" for chat, that allows us to say "I {agree with|like|am of the same opinion as} this comment" and that it would only be useful in the live-chat (and maybe but not really in the transcript) and that it have no other useful semantics (no badges, no list of's [unless the list is of comments you've upthumbed]). Display each sub-directory size in a list format using one line command in Bash? I want to get a list of the directories and their sizes in a list format like how you get when you do a ls -l.  The thing is that is there a one line command that can do this? I see others have long commands just to output this. That's just too long.  What command can do this or combination of commands that can be easily typed? du -h gives it, but it displays all of the sub-folders which is not what I want. just the current directories folders. If $a$ divides $bc$ and $\gcd(a,b) = d$ then $\frac a d$ divides c I'm trying to prove that if $a$ divides $bc$ and $\gcd(a,b) = d$ then $\frac a d$ divides c. I tried using Bezout identity but couldn't get anywhere. (Reference : Fraleigh, A first course in abstract algebra)     Prove that a nonempty set $G$, together with an associative binary operation * on $G$ such that $a*x=b$ and $y*a=b$ have solutions in G, $\forall a,b\in G$, is a group.   Because * is an associatie operation, we have to prove that: there exists $e\in G$ such that $e*a=a=a*e$ for any $a\in G$, and that for any $a\in G$ there exists $\alpha \in G$ such that $a*\alpha=e=\alpha *a$.  This is very confusing, first I tried to prove the identity exists. If we consider a=b, then $a*x=a=y*a$, and because of the hypothesis $x,y\in G$ always exists, now we have to show that $x=y$, but I just can't do this with out inverses, so I tried to prove that the inverses exists, however I have no idea how the identity looks like, I'm stuck.  And I tried to get unstuck, so I thought particular cases, first if $G$ had only one element, then what would happend if it had just two elements... but I remembered that we don't know if G is finite or not, and I think this makes things a little bit more complicated.  What can I do? Calendar link to different page views I have seen other similar questions but they don't seem to be what I want, please correct me if I'm wrong.  For simplicity: delete the default cube, NumPad7, add cylinder, rotate X 90, then add torus with ext/int 1/0.75 and raise it above the cylinder. It should look like this:.  What I want is to deform the torus against the cylinder, but make it as if it's a projection. This means that, when looked from above, it will look like a normal, undeformed torus (volume changes), but when viewed with NumPad1, it will look like a round-end tube following the curvature of the cylinder, while still having the same round cross-section. To make it worse, my object needs to be deformed by a more complex surface, such as sin(x).  If I'd use soft body, it will look shrinked when looking from above, i.e. it will preserve the volume. If I use shrinkwrap, it either does a projection with its circumference intact, but all flat, or it will project it (similar to what I want), but only the bottom side vertices, like a curtain.  Mesh modifier gets me nowhere since I have to manually tweak the surrounding mesh, and curve modifier also preserves the length/volume, while also squishing the section of the torus at the bending points.  My question(s): is there a way to project (mold) the torus onto the cylinder while preserving it's cross-section? Can this be extended for more complex meshes to be projected or to be projected on?    This is, roughly, what the side view (along Y axis in the 1st pic) would look like after the deforming of the torus:    The unselected shape above is the torus (as it is in the first picture), and the selected shape is what it would look like after the deform, or molding, whatever you want to call it.  And here is what it would look like when seen from above (top view, along Z axis)): i.stack.imgur.com/HVOCo.png (can't add more than 2 pics)  The view would be the same before and after the torus is deformed. I recently spilled water on my computers keyboard, and as a result the left shift key seems to be stuck in the on position. This means that the system always boots into safe boot unless I hold down the option key. I have managed to change my password to one which is all caps and once I login I use keyremap4mac but it is still very annoying. Is there anyway which I can remap the keyboard during boot? Possibly with a startup bash script or something similiar? If that is not possible is there any way to use a script to bypass safe boot? I was planning on installing a new bootloader anyway in order to dual-boot linux, I don't know if this will help. Advice is appreciated.