Is there is any special meaning for raw pointer?  Is normal pointer variable and raw pointer are same?
I am programming with normal pointers, but I have heard about libraries like Boost that implement smart pointers. I have also seen that in Ogre3D rendering engine there is a deep use of shared pointers.  What exactly is the difference between the three, and should I stick on using just a type of them?
Nothing can ruin your day like a poorly-written bug report.  I've seen several sets of guidelines for bug reporting in different organizations. In your opinion, what guidelines/steps are most essential for good bug reporting?  Feel free to share complete guideline recommendations from prior/current projects/organizations. I am always confused about where to put adverbs in sentences. For example, consider the questions below:        Why did they target us specifically?   Why did they target specifically us?   Why did they specifically target us?      I believe all these sentences mean the same. Am I correct? I am always confused about where to put adverbs such as always and specifically, etc. Is there a particular grammar rule for this?  Funny, you see, I can even form the above sentence in different ways.         I always confuse where to put this kind of adverb   Always I confuse where to put this kind of adverb How to pass an ArrayList to a varargs method parameter? Will $\sum^{\infty}_{n=1}|a_n|^p$ converge? Can I award user with special bounty after accepting his anwer? I have a , and I haven't start a bounty for this question. After I got my answer I'd like to give a user a special bounty, because I consider his answer very helpful and it saved me a lot of time. I've already accepted the answer. Is there a way how can I give him some bounty?  Thank you What component to use for audio signal switching? I'm looking to build a guitar pedal switcher based on a Raspberry Pi or Arduino (have not yet decided, but I have an unused Raspberry around and I lean towards that). Anyway, digital logic.  Now, I need to switch audio signal obviously and I need to do it quietly (both physical silence and electrical silence). Please note that the signal is line level throughout most of the build, except for the input which is much lower. I will probably have 2 or 3 loops before the preamp so those may not encounter line level signal.  From what I read and know, so far, mechanical relays are not really an option due to the clicking noise they make. I also read something about FETs, but that's a bit out of my league and I would appreciate any info on these.  PS: I will probably use different power rails for the digital and analog paths.  PS2: The whole thing will be mounted in a 1U rack enclosure, so please tell me if I should take into consideration any thermal issues. Do electrons move around a circuit? We could imagine a simple electronic circuit composed by a power source and a resistor.   It is usual find descriptions as "The moving charged particles in an electric current are called charge carriers. In metals, one or more electrons from each atom are loosely bound to the atom, and can move freely about within the metal. These conduction electrons are the charge carriers in metal conductors." (wikipedia ). That made me imagine electrons going from power -, running by the wires, crossing the resistor and returning to power +, where they suffer a new kick to power -. All that at near the speed of light.  In this model, it is easy to define "electrical current intensity" as proportional to the number of electrons per second that cross one specific point of the circuit.  However, looking for the physics of resistivity, I can read the phrase "The actual drift velocity of electrons is very small, in the order of magnitude of a meter per hour." (wikipedia ). This is a complete different point of view, where electrons are more or less fixed around a fixed position (or moving very slowly), an electricity is a wave of "collisions" or "jumps" of electrons, like in a Newton's cradle (or "do the wave" as public in a football match). Obviously, we do not need severals hours from the switch on to the light on.  So, the question is, do electrons move around a circuit ? References to band theory are welcome.  A related question is: if electrons doesn't moves along the circuit, what is "electrical current intensity"?  Note: I known there are similar questions already posted, but answers of the ones I've read are not very detailed (could be I've not found the best ones). Please, be a few patient before "close vote". I'm always on the hunt for free stock images to use while I design, what are some good resources for images that are under a a royalty free or creative commons licence? I'm trying to create a unit test to test the case for when the timezone changes on a machine because it has been incorrectly set and then corrected.  In the test I need to be able to create DateTime objects in a none local time zone to ensure that people running the test can do so successfully irrespective of where they are located.  From what I can see from the DateTime constructor I can set the TimeZone to be either the local timezone, the UTC timezone or not specified.  How do I create a DateTime with a specific timezone like PST? A very basic ring theory question, which I am not able to solve. How does one show that    $\mathbb{Z}[i]/(3-i) \cong \mathbb{Z}/10\mathbb{Z}$. Extending the result: $\mathbb{Z}[i]/(a-ib) \cong \mathbb{Z}/(a^{2}+b^{2})\mathbb{Z}$, if $a,b$ are relatively prime.   My attempt was to define a map, $\varphi:\mathbb{Z}[i] \to \mathbb{Z}/10\mathbb{Z}$ and show that the kernel is the ideal generated by $\langle{3-i\rangle}$. But I couldn't think of such a map. Anyhow, any ideas would be helpful. How do I restore the sources.list file? Can you use Skyrim Legendary Edition mods on the normal edition? I just figured out I had Skyrim in my Steam games. It's the 32-bit non-Legendary Edition Skyrim without any DLCs. Can I still use Legendary Edition mods on it? Why do I get the error "failed unmounting /var" during shutdown? I have a fresh install of Debian 9.0.0. It has a separate 1 GB partition for /var formatted at ext4. When I shutdown from the terminal, using shutdown -h now, there is a bright-red error message stating "failed unmounting /var".  What is the fix for this error? I'm designing an algorithm to do the following: Given array A[1... n], for every i &lt; j, find all inversion pairs such that A[i] &gt; A[j]. I'm using merge sort and copying array A to array B and then comparing the two arrays, but I'm having a difficult time seeing how I can use this to find the number of inversions. Any hints or help would be greatly appreciated. Error : Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Offset not contained in string - can not find solution Naive visualization of space-time curvature I need a binary search algorithm that is compatible with the C++ STL containers, something like std::binary_search in the standard library's &lt;algorithm&gt; header, but I need it to return the iterator that points at the result, not a simple boolean telling me if the element exists.  (On a side note, what the hell was the standard committee thinking when they defined the API for binary_search?!)  My main concern here is that I need the speed of a binary search, so although I can find the data with other algorithms, as mentioned below, I want to take advantage of the fact that my data is sorted to get the benefits of a binary search, not a linear search.  so far lower_bound and upper_bound fail if the datum is missing:  //lousy pseudo code vector(1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,0) //notice no 5 iter = lower_bound_or_upper_bound(start,end,5) iter != 5 &amp;&amp; iter !=end //not returning end as usual, instead it'll return 4 or 6   Note: I'm also fine using an algorithm that doesn't belong to the std namespace as long as its compatible with containers. Like, say, boost::binary_search. Suppose that I have a group $G$ of order $p^{2}q$ for two distinct primes $p$ and $q$.  I need to first show that one of its Sylow subgroups is normal.  I start by letting $H$ be a Sylow $p$-subgroup and $K$ be a Sylow $q$-subgroup.  If $K$ is not normal, then letting $r$ denote the number of Sylow $q$-subgroups, I have that $r|p^{2}$ and $r\equiv 1$(mod $q$).  I also have by the second Sylow theorem that $r\neq 1$.  So $r = p$ or $p^{2}$.  If $r = p^{2}$, I can write out the Sylow $q$-subgroups, and count their combined elements to show that $H$ is uniquely determined and then again imply Sylow number $2$ to obtain that $H$ is normal.  But if $r = p$, then I cannot see how to proceed.  Can anyone give any advice?  Thank you.  ( I am happy to provide more detail for the $r = p^{2}$ case if it is desired or appropriate. ) Unity-like Dashboard for Gnome fallback? Is there any way I can run the Unity dashboard (or something similar, like Bolt for Gnome 3) in Gnome Fallback? Prove that $u\cdot v = \frac{1}{4}||u+v||^2 - \frac{1}{4}||u-v||^2 \forall u,v \in \mathbb{R^n}$ I am trying to prove the above statement but I'm not sure if my proof is correct. My proof is as follows,  Given $u\cdot v$, we know by the C-E Inequality that $|u \cdot v| \leq ||u|| \ ||v||$  Consider $\frac{1}{4}||u+v||^2 - \frac{1}{4}||u-v||^2$  We can manipulate this as follows $$\frac{1}{4}(||u+v||^2 - ||u-v||^2) = \frac{1}{4}(||u+v||- ||u-v||)(||u+v||+||u-v||)$$ Using the triangle inequality the above can be written as follows, $$...\leq \frac{1}{4}(||u|| +||v|| -||u||+||v||) (||u|| +||v|| +||u||-||v||) = \frac{1}{4} (4||u||||v||) = ||u||||v||$$  As such both $u\cdot v$ and $u\cdot v = \frac{1}{4}||u+v||^2 - \frac{1}{4}||u-v||^2 \forall u,v \in \mathbb{R^n}$ are $\leq ||u|| ||v||$  I'm not sure whether I've proven this correctly because I ended up proving that both sides of the equation are less than or equal to something entirely different (the magnitude of v multiplied by the magnitude of u). Is this acceptable? I don't think it is, since if both can be less than or equal to the magnitudes multiplied then they do not necessarily have to be equal to each other. If this is the case, can someone give me a hint on how to move forward with this proof?