Posts by jwenting

true. But it's far from unstable.
It's in fact far more stable when used in the correct environment (meaning the one it was designed for) than any of those "modern" IDEs, and of course far more performant even on the limited hardware of the time.

It's just a file, so reading it using the standard Java IO API should be child's play.
Figuring out what all those bytes mean is going to be more tricky, but I'm pretty sure someone's done that already and published the file format specification for you to find using your favourite search engine.
It's also more than likely that that search engine could find you a library that does that decoding for you.

and of course it should be able to generate new games with different difficulty levels on a sliding scale, adjustable by the user.

weird "university" where there's noone to shed light on project proposals...

Sounds more like a lack of willingness to admit to your teacher that you've no clue to me.

And oh, there's already a "MicroJava compiler", it's included with the SDK.

could use. The core libraries now also contain logging functionality.

All you need to do is read the tutorials and documentation, it's very simple.
And no, we're not going to do it for you.

Look at the logging API that's no part of the language (or products like Log4J).

so you liked the sound of it but haven't got a clue what it actually is?
Why not ask the person who wrote the proposal?

Or maybe find something that you do actually understand?

"reading a .jpg file like a normal file does not give me the file header in any kind of format visible instead it comes out with a lot of random characters"

Hardly random. There's a definite structure there which is well defined in the JPEG file format specification.
Same for all other file formats. Of course the specification may not be public.
And of course there may be more information scattered across the rest of the file determining its makeup and layout, again well defined in the file format specification.

Your task is to find that specification some way and write some software to read it.

I was too, but considering that she could live off the interest of the bank accounts and never have to work a day in her life while still providing for the future of the family, I think I'd choose the gifts.

given that this is a modern kid without any sense of responsibility (else she wouldn't have gotten herself wanked by a wanker like that) she'd probably blow through it in a few weeks at most.

at last newsies killing eachother instead of others in pursuit of a story.

Shame about the helicopters though.

you'd read them the same as any other, and then pull them through some decryption system...
It's just bits and bytes after all, same as any other part of any other file.

such science in the current scientific/political climate is sadly impossible as the budgets are controlled by religious envirofreaks.

no, we're not going to do your (home)work for you.
That's pretty basic functionality, anyone should be able to figure it out for themselves.

Regular expressions to find URLs are scattered all over the web if you want them.

the best way to reduce CO2 emissions (which seems to be all the greenies are concerned about, showing just how shortsighted and illinformed they are) is to kill all those greenies (taking away all their emissions from breathing as well as all other activities) and use their ground up bodies as fertiliser.

he marries the kid, one way or the other.
No buying off your responsibilities.

But I've been raised in what these days is apparently a rather oldfashioned way.

I doubt anyone there would be willing to help him if he doesn't provide more information than that though (if only because it's far from enough to say more than that he's done something wrong somewhere).

and if you want to build it, why ask for someone else to do the work for you?

It's already here. As I type, I am watching a "Mega-Disasters" on History channel predicting exactly that.

Also, don't forget "The Day After Tomorrow".

That show is a load of BS, scaremongering. Sure bad things happen, but no more or less than they always have (if more people are involved it's because of increasing population density in coastal and mountenous areas, if you hear more about them it's because of better communications).

That movie is a complete fabrication, theoretically impossible, designed as scaremongering and propaganda for the "green" movement.
While ice ages can indeed develop rather rapidly, it will take decades at least.
And the extreme cold they show won't happen no matter how bad an ice age gets.

IT will cause more pollution, as MS and Intel keep making people upgrade their computers every 3 years.

And don't forget all of the NTSC TV set solid waste when HDTV becomes mandatory (thanks to Bill Gates - we had a compatible system until he stuck his nose into it).

Then why are computer makers complaining that Vista is bad BECAUSE people aren't buying more computers to run it?
HDTV has nothing to do with Microsoft either. And of course we don't use NTSC here, nor does most of the world.

big supermarket chain.

but of course you shouldn't do any of that in a JSP as it's not what they're meant for.
In JSTL you could just use < and > to compare context fields containing Dates of course.

why has noone told him yet that "the DOS command" will never be available from Java for the simple reason that Java doesn't work on DOS based machines?

No, Hibernate abstracts away all that nitty gritty JDBC code to access the database.
http://www.hibernate.org

You shouldn't care whether you're talking through RMI or whatever, use an existing system to worry about that.

Spring makes for a lot of very nice capabilities. http://www.springframework.org/

If you back up your work before experimenting you can always revert to a version that worked and start from there...

At the very least get rid of that hardcoded dictionary in your main class, and separate the business logic from the user interface.

why reinvent the wheel when there are perfectly good solutions like Hibernate and Spring already out there?

you should have said so... You asked for people anywhere in the world to mention any Mustangs available for purchase or stealing, didn't specify you required a left hand drive vehicle located in the UK.

Be more precise next time. How are you going to get that thing to the Sudan anyway? Not exactly the most common trade routes, and a more than even chance some dockworker or customs official in the Sudan will keep it for himself when he notices it on some cargo manifest.

don't worry about it all... In a few years the "environmentalists" will have a new scare program centered around "global cooling", just as they did in the 1980s ("global warming" wasn't invented until the 1990s, or rather reinvented as they'd also had it in the 1950s but quite correctly noone took them seriously back then).

obviously. For starters he's missing an include for his very own headerfile...
I didn't look further than that.

not only are many books out of date, I also seriously doubt the publishers like the way this guy aggregates their content without giving so much as a source reference.

no, it is NOT urgent.

The thing to do is to read the documentation, which explains it all in detail.
The steps for using ANT to retrieve the WSDL and generate your classes has already been outlined above though not every option you could use mentioned, use the manual to find out about those.

Guys, sorry but just give me exactly how the code should be written, so i cn turn in my assignment by tonight!

That's NOT how things work. If you're incapable of or unwilling to (sounds not the case here) doing your work you SHOULD fail early, to prevent worse failure later on.

and now you put that into code.
And when you've done that and it actually works (instead of pasting something you pilfered out of a newsgroup or website without actually seeing if it does anything close to what you're supposed to do), you try to make it look like you want it to.

It's very easy, far easier than anything you're likely to have to do if you ever get a job doing anything at all requiring any intelligence.
So if you can't even pull this off you might start training your wrist to flip burgers without throwing them on the floor as that'll be the highest paying job you'll be capable of.

well, it all depends on your operating system of course...

For Windows, Microsoft Visual C++ is pretty much the standard, with Codegears C++ Builder (or the cheaper (there's even a free version) Turbo C++ Explorer) as a good alternative.

You will need to add the required jarfile for the servlet API to your classpath.

Is there a way java automatically detects classes

yes, kinda, depending on what you mean

is there a way I can access a class at runtime by a string so that I can just read a text file and know what classes to get

yes

You can set up a directory and have your application scan that for jarfiles, then use a special classloader to load classes from any jarfiles it finds there.
Such classloaders exist but you'll have to look for them (or write your own).

Use reflection to load classes by name.

and why should we do your research for you?
You have the entire internet at your disposal to figure things out, use it.

I know that full well. The BINARIES are platform specific.
A lot of the SOURCE of the JVM however isn't.

hmm, so you need to control a touch screen, electronic payment terminals, and things like that as well?

because there's no need to. It's plenty fast enough as it is, and the way it's coded now a lot of the codebase is platform independent (meaning it compiles equally well for all platforms Sun supports), reducing lead time and investment drastically.
If written in assembly (or worse, Visual Basic) they'd have to rewrite the entire thing for each hardware and operating system platform supported, which by now has reached quite a number (Sun supporting both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows, Solaris, and Linux, for a total of something like 10 different distributions).

I tried:
Old school VS. Old school VB6 looks dated now but i like it. It does exactly what it says on the tin but unless you specifically want to edit an old project or make smaller, faster code, there is no real reason to use this instead of VB.NET.

Old school C++ was also a wierd one. Nothing at all like C++.net but very good once you learn how to use it. Doesnt adhere to ANSI though. The MFC Appwizards rock.

VS.NET is IMHO the best. It has the largest amount of wizards and is the easiest to use for RAD and is consistent interface throughout.

Never knew you could compile Java programs using Visual Basic 6 (or Visual C++ 6)...
Besides being some of the worst development tools ever to hit the professional tools market, and in the case of VC6 being utterly useless for people trying to write standards compliant C++, they're completely irrelevant for writing Java so have no place here (but then, neither do you with your insistence on noting in every thread that if only VB6 had been used everything would be perfect).

Ok, I'm not trying to say that knowing the API and being able to read a stack trace is useless. What I specifically meant is that I think having tools to help with such things makes it faster to learn with less frustration.

Not in my experience. People end up learning the tool instead of the language and are utterly lost when that tool isn't available to them in the exact same version and configuration at a later date.

Once you can do it yourself those tools can speed up your workflow, and at that point pretty much any tool that's decent will be easy to master, but if you rely on that tool to the exclusion of learning to do it yourself (what IDE based teaching almost always ends up doing) you're useless in the real world.

an, the BBC Acorn. Had a friend who had one of those. Later as a student one of my fellows was fond of the later models, the Archimedes line.
So fond in fact that he ran a small business supporting them and creating software for them.

and the ultimate proof that he is a conspiracy theorist is given by his insistence that every bit of scientific evidence debunking his claims is false for no other reason than that it's not coming from his sources.

Yeah but it sounds like you belive the things that your son tells you when it comes to computers. You have been able to get PC's for 25 years?

The first IBM PC was introduced in 1981, so 26 years ago.
So yes, they've been around for 25 years :)

And before that the term "PC" or "Personal Computer" was used more generally to indicate any computer for the individual (rather than mainframes and minis).
The Apple ][ for example was marketed as a PC, so were the highend Amiga models and some top line Ataris (among others).

so do I... Guess he wants Sun to take over every single project and company that has anything to do with Java and consolidate everything into a single massive package.

Why that would be required to make Java any good while it's obviously not required for someone to do that to make C++ or C good baffles me though.

But it baffles me a bit less than someone recommending VB6 as a serious language to learn, not just at this stage when it's no longer supported by even its creators but at any time at all.

And no, we're not here to do your homework for you...
And I will NOT open zipfiles presented to me by total strangers, as such usually contain trojans and other nasties I certainly don't want on my system.

yes, you will loose a lot.
Not in the least you loose the platform independent nature of the classfile format.
You almost certainly also loose a lot of things to do with reflection and introspection, which are also lost when employing obfuscation.

And you loose an excellent opportunity to learn about the platform.

Memorizing API functions and trying to decipher exception messages from a text stack trace only slow down the process of learning the language and how to use it effectively. Some would say "bah, that's all part of the trials a beginner must face!", but I don't think that necessarily enhances learning - it just creates frustration.

Absolutely not.
If you don't learn the language, it's syntax and APIs, and always have to look up each and every command as soon as you don't have a tool to do it all for you, you don't know anything.

If you can't read and understand a stacktrace or compiler error, you are utterly useless as a programmer.

If you can't handle frustration and keep functioning regardless, you're utterly useless in any job or any part of life for that matter.
You're instead a spoiled little brat who isn't used to maybe not getting his way once in a while, who starts whining and sulking at the slightest setback instead of facing up to the challenge and overcoming it.

Even still i know all this although there was a very limited amount of things that could burn in those buildings for safty reasons.

Make it hot enough and anything will burn... The limitations on flamable materials are only related to things like carpeting and non-structural wall panels.
Desks, chairs, paperwork, computers, human beings, everything burns quite well.
And flame resistant (which is how requirements are set up) doesn't mean non-flamable, it just means it takes a while before it starts burning.

encountering molten metal in the debris for up to a week after the collapse and that it is strange because there would have been nothing hot enough to cause this.

Again you're wrong. Isolated pockets can easily be far far hotter than the surrounding area, there doesn't even have to be open flame.

the strain above it makes it sound as if there was some massive amount of extra mass in the floors above.

Which there was, the floors themselves and everything located there.
Plus the roof containing things like elevator machinery, airconditioning equipment, etc. etc.
And as the already weakened joints weren't designed to take much more weight than the floor itself and the people and their equipment stationed there, having to bear the weight of everything over it suddenly would make any floor collapse.
That's basic physics and mechanical engineering 101.

Surely the lower levels which are still reasonably in tact are going to be able to hold …

To your parent you'll always be the little kid who has to have his diapers changed every few hours.
Better get used to it, they'll still think of you (subconsciously) like that when you're 50 and they're 80 or so.

Sigh, I never had one...
My parents could easily afford them but never pampered us kids (and didn't think computers were important for education which at the time was quite correct).
First computer I had (or rather my parents) was an original IBM PC Portable, back in 1984.
Before that I'd used the Apple II a friend had at home.