I've seen this hundreds if not thousands of times, but what does it actually mean?  Are there other strategies that I can use, perhaps variants on mine or their?    What is the syntax for using different strategies and in what situations should I choose one over an other?
From the man page on git-merge, there are a number of merge strategies you can use.     resolve -  This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch and another branch you pulled from) using 3-way merge algorithm. It tries to carefully detect criss-cross merge ambiguities and is considered generally safe and fast. recursive -  This can only resolve two heads using 3-way merge algorithm. When there are more than one common ancestors that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a merged tree of the common ancestors and uses that as the reference tree for the 3-way merge. This has been reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without causing mis-merges by tests done on actual merge commits taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history. Additionally this can detect and handle merges involving renames. This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging one branch. octopus -  This resolves more than two-head case, but refuses to do complex merge that needs manual resolution. It is primarily meant to be used for bundling topic branch heads together. This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging more than one branches. ours -  This resolves any number of heads, but the result of the merge is always the current branch head. It is meant to be used to supersede old development history of side branches. subtree -  This is a modified recursive strategy. When merging trees A and B, if B corresponds to a subtree of A, B is first adjusted to match the tree structure of A, instead of reading the trees at the same level. This adjustment is also done to the common ancestor tree.   When should I specify something different than the default?  What scenarios are each best for?
Ugly 'post date' alignment on user profile when the date wraps into multiple lines How to describe "object" arguments in jsdoc? It is becoming more common for people to explicitly state the pronouns to be used in addressing themselves: he/him, she/her, or they/them. For example, a name tag for a conference might read:  Cory Lopez Some Company She/Her   Usage seems to have settled on the singular they and them as gender neutral pronouns. Alternatives that were once widespread in niche communities, such as sie/hir, seem to have died out.   Whether or not one agrees with this language  shift, the pairing between subject and object case is fixed.  It's difficult to imagine someone who uses "he" as his subject case using anything but "him" as object case, and it's even harder to imagine that such a person would succeed in getting people to use a non-obvious collection of personal pronouns. (And you may see what I did -- flat out assumed that "he" and "his" automatically go together.)  What are the roots of the practice of presenting subject and object case pronouns as opposed to just subject case, subject and possessive, or some other combination?   (Note: I am not interested in a discussion of the gender politics and cultural shifts involved, just the mechanics of how the current representation was chosen.) guess the color of the next card There are 26 red cards and 26 black cards on the table which are randomly shuffled and are facing down onto the table. The host turns up the cards one at a time. You can stop the game any time (even at the beginning of the game). Once you stops the game, the next card is turned up: if it is red, you get $1; otherwise you pay the host one dollar. What is the payoff of this game? Non academic career options for PhD in Math I am thinking of getting my M.S. in Computer Science. I chose C.S. because I enjoy programming and because its a solid choice, career wise.  Low unemployment, good pay, all that jazz.  But my real passions has always been math and lately I have been thinking about swapping and going for my graduate degree in Math. If I went the math route I would probably go full PhD (since I don't think there is much you can do with just a Masters in math).  But as much as I love math, I can't see myself being a math teacher. I would want to work in research or industry, applying math to solve real world problems.    What kind of non-academic jobs are there for someone with a PhD in math (or what is the best resource to see what jobs are out there)? Given: $a = qb + r$. Then it holds that $\gcd(a,b)=\gcd(b,r)$. That doesn't sound logical to me. Why is this so?    Addendum by LePressentiment on 11/29/2013: (in the interest of  and averting a duplicate)  What's the intuition behind this result? I only recognise the proof and examples solely due to algebraic properties and formal definitions; I'd like to apprehend the result naturally. Let: $P(x) = a_nx^n + a_{n-1}x^{n-1} + ..... + a_1x + a_0$ where $a_0a_n &lt; 0$ I have to prove that the Polynomial $P(x)$ has at least one positive root how can I prove it? Any ideas? AWS S3, Paperclip missing required :bucket option Is JavaScript's "new" keyword considered harmful? In another , a user pointed out that the new keyword was dangerous to use and proposed a solution to object creation that did not use new. I didn't believe that was true, mostly because I've used Prototype, Scriptaculous and other excellent JavaScript libraries, and everyone of them used the new keyword.  In spite of that, yesterday I was watching Douglas Crockford's talk at YUI theater and he said the exactly same thing, that he didn't use the new keyword anymore in his code ().  Is it 'bad' to use the new keyword? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using it? Compare two dates with JavaScript Can someone suggest a way to compare the values of two dates greater than, less than, and not in the past using JavaScript? The values will be coming from text boxes. What's the easiest way to figure out if a window is opened modally or not?  CLARIFICATION:  I open a window calling   myWindow.ShowDialog();   I have a footer with an "OK" &amp; "Cancel" button that I only want to show if the window is opened modally. Now I realize I can set a property by doing this:  myWindow.IsModal = true; myWindow.ShowDialog();   But I want the window itself to make that determination. I want to check in the Loaded event of the window whether or not it is modal.  UPDATE  The IsModal property doesn't actually exist in a WPF window. It's a property that I have created. ShowDialog() blocks the current thread.   I'm guessing I can determine if the Window is opened via ShowDialog() by checking if the current thread is blocked. How would I go about doing that? This is what I'm trying to do:  I have a website A where I make configuration changes and add other stuff. Now I create a website B. I would like to add the configuration changes from website A to this website.   I know the UUID of both websites have to be the same (like staging &amp; production environment). In "" they explain how to do this with drush cget system.site.   The problem is when I run drush cget system.site in my website A I get the following drush error:     Command config-get needs a higher bootstrap level to run - you will need to invoke drush from a more functional Drupal environment to run this command.                                                               [error]   The drush command 'cget system.site' could not be executed.                                                                                                                                                           [error]   Drush was not able to start (bootstrap) the Drupal database.                                                                                                                                                          [error]   Hint: This may occur when Drush is trying to:    * bootstrap a site that has not been installed or does not have a configured database. In this case you can select another site with a working database setup by specifying the URI to use with the --uri parameter   on the command line. See drush topic docs-aliases for details.    * connect the database through a socket. The socket file may be wrong or the php-cli may have no access to it in a jailed shell. See  for details.   Drush was attempting to connect to:  Drupal version         :  8.0.0-rc1  Site URI               :  http://default  Database driver        :  mysql  Database hostname      :  localhost  Database port          :  3306  Database username      :  root  Database name          :  s_1  PHP executable         :  /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.5.10/bin//php  PHP configuration      :  /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.5.10/conf/php.ini  PHP OS                 :  Darwin  Drush script           :  /Users/myname/.composer/vendor/drush/drush/drush.php  Drush version          :  8.0-dev  Drush temp directory   :  /tmp  Drush configuration    :  Drush alias files      :  Drupal root            :  /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/s1  Site path              :  sites/default  Sync config path       :  sites/default/files/config_bZM1aJhLcWGpFZJEzfEw_pKF4g71jOdkSRti30k540BAwE9GQ4U6p469a9VxyJS4j4JVfC58qg/sync   I've installed the latest version of drush .. . I'm working with the release candidate of Drupal 8. Is there another way to get my UUID? Or do you have a tutorial or a video/blogpost of somebody who already did this?  UPDATE:  Ok, I was able to retrieve the UUID from website A and changed the UUID in website B so they have the equal UUID.  After that I changed the system site slogan of website A.  Then I did an export of the configuration in website A. But when I tried to import it in website B I got 137 new files to sync .. . The UUID is different in all files like this:    When I tried to synchronize I got the following error: $\sigma$-algebra vs. $\sigma$-field: is there any difference? The subject says it all: is there any difference between the two concepts of $\sigma$-algebra and $\sigma$-field? In probability theory, they seem to be used more or less interchangeably. If there is no difference, is there any historical reason why some people/schools use the term $\sigma$-algebra, while others use the term $\sigma-$field? "(" or "\left(" parentheses? What is the difference between ( and \left( in LaTeX? Sometimes, when the content is small, it does not seem to matter which pair I use.  What is the best practice when it comes to which parentheses use? Intuitive explanation of unit root How would you explain intuitively what is a unit root, in the context of the unit root test?   I'm thinking in ways of explaining much like I've founded in .  The case with unit root is that I know (little, by the way) that the unit root test is used to test for stationarity in a time series, but it's just it.   How would you go to explain it to the layperson, or to a person who has studied a very basic probability and statistics course?  UPDATE  I accepted whuber's answer as it is what most reflect what I asked here. But I urge everybody that came here to read Patrick's and Michael's answers also, as they are the natural "next step" in understanding the Unit Root. They use mathematics, but in a very intuitive way. How to apply a regex on a column fetched from DB I am using IBM DB2.  So, I am retrieving a column named SSN from a table. I have to apply the following regex on that column:  ([1-57-8][0-9]{2} |0([1-9][0-9] |[0-9][1-9]) |6([0-57-9][0-9] |[0-9][0-57-9])) ([1-9][0-9]|[0-9][1-9])([1-9]\d{3}|\d[1-9]\d{2}|\d{2}[1-9]\d|\d{3}[1-9])   Someone suggested to me that I have to write a function/procedure in the query to validate that the SSN picked from the db follows this regex else it should not be stored in the result set of the query.  I don't know how to write a function or a procedure in SQL, can you please help me out here? How do I emit light from inside a object? How do you deal with a player that's determined to play the game in a way that is detrimental to the advancement of the story? Including package to create MATLAB labels using LaTeX Word for a smart and stubborn person? I'm trying to find a single adjective that would fit the best to the following person's trait:     One who thinks knows everything/best, and often doesn't listen to orders and instead completes some task his/her own way.    This person, while intelligent, is right about 50% of the time, when doing things its own way.   So far I've thought of independent, idiosyncratic and stubborn, but these words don't imply the "knows everything/best" part of the trait.