Posts by jwenting

The entire rep thing is pretty useless. I've yet to see a site where it doesn't lead to strive and popularity contests to get the highest rep.

Believe it. If even one in a thousand fall for it they're in business and the rate is higher than that.

Pyramid schemes thrive on the greed that's inherent in most people. Remember many people are poor at math, especially when it comes to big numbers.
They don't notice that you and your tree will have to recruit the entire population of the country before you run a profit coming near the quoted figures.

Pretty hard to electrocute somebody for having a bootleg copy of Windows, no?:eek:

no harder than to electrocute them for whatever else.
Technically that is :mrgreen:

Having someone executed by death penalty is more expensive than keeping him in prison doesn't it? I mean, all the procedures in court and everything cost a lot!! You don't just apply death penalty to someone because you want to....

That depends on
1) how long the person would otherwise be in prison
2) how many delaying actions you allow. Arrest at noon, convict at sunset, execute at dawn. Quick, saves on cells, and reduces the demand for lawyers :cool:

They don't just buy a bullet and kill these people.

Maybe not in the US. In China they bill the family or relatives of the convict the bullet, reducing the cost even more.

A third opinion that I share is that making evaluation software available is a good thing. You can use it until you are sure that it is going to be something that will help you in the long run and then purchase the product and get support.

Evaluation versions are a good thing and might stop some people from using a pirated version.
BUT it would not stop most and it has been shown time and again that most evaluation versions are very easy to crack and remove the limitations on their use (thus effectively making piracy easier and increasing the likelihood of it …

in the short term yes. In the long term those companies have to hire people to do a non-productive job (so a job that doesn't help in the production of the company's products) which hurts profitability and leads to more bankruptcies and/or higher prices.

That costs jobs...

Actually that act was an act of Genocide, not an act of terrorism.

The two terms aren't mutually exclusive. Terrorism is the use of usually seemingly random violence against a civilian population for political reasons, genocide is the wholesale killing of a population for whatever reason.

To get back on track: it seems the attitude of mistrust in the Islamic world where people don't believe anything that doesn't come from an Islamic source (and are thus very likely to become polarised against outsiders resulting in violence against non-Islamic peoples) has been shown here to be a major cause for concern.
This doesn't just affect Muslems in mainly Muslem countries but also smaller groups elsewhere.
With countries like Iran and Sudan exporting fundamentalist mullahs to mosques around the world where they preach hatred and recruit potential terrorists for local cells this situation is getting worse fast.

There's old DOS mouse libraries. Maybe they still work.
But of course if you have a console application you implicitly never have mouse support.
If you have mouse support you have a textmode fullscreen application or a full graphical user interface.

If you work in DOS mouse support is easy to write yourself using some embedded assembler btw.

yes, JDBC is part of the standard API.
Unless he means javax.sql which is an optional addon API that's part of the J2EE API of course. In that case he needs to install J2EE and have j2ee.jar on his classpath (or install just the JDBC extensions which used to be and maybe still are available separately as well).

If it sounds too good to be true...

This site reads like so many scams and pyramid schemes, don't fall for it.

The cost of lawsuits should indeed be charged to the loosing party (as they are in case of civilian suits in many countries).
A person in prison costs a lot, but that same person out on the street potentially does a lot more damage making the imprisonment economically viable.
If you want to reduce the cost of prisons, apply the death penalty to smaller offenses. I somehow doubt many people would agree to the death penalty being applied for stealing a car though.

Some people will give a negative rep on anything they don't agree with in an attempt to force their own agenday.

And if you consider the shipping of military equipment to a combattant an act of war (which I do) the US had been in the war a lot longer than that.
Shipments of supplies (including oil) and equipment to the UK started in 1940, maybe 1939. This is what prompted the Germans to attack American ships despite there being no declared state of war between the countries (earlier US ships had been left alone by German forces to prevent drawing the USA into the European conflict).

While the Japanese actions indeed prompted the largescale involvement of US forces in both theaters in an offensive role, they'd been involved in the fighting in a defensive and support role for a year or more prior in the Atlantic.

yes, but the punishment should fit the crime. Spamming is certainly not hurting anyone, at best it is a minor annoyance.

not hurting anyone?

Today on Foxnews.com: AOL inadvertently blocking hurricane warnings because the volume triggered a spamfilter.

minor annoyance?

500 pieces of spam a day on a single account that gets maybe a dozen legitimate messages is hardly a "minor" annoyance.
I'm lucky I'm no longer paying by the second for my connection and don't have a datalimit or I'd be paying a LOT of money just to download spam.
Companies are loosing business because their mailservers are overloaded and legitimate messages are flagged as spam.
Many companies are having to buy extra computers and software just to act as multilayered spamfilters in the mail gateways, and pay for extra bandwidth and extra staff to handle it all.
For a company with maybe a hundred employees this would cost them tens of thousands of Euros a year, hardly a minor annoyance.

It's the same with all crime effectively. When a murderer gets only two years in prison because he was declared mentally unstable (which seems easy enough, just act weird during the interview with the shrink I guess) there's something fundamentally wrong with the justice system.

The "rights" of criminals in our societies are now more important than the rights of their victims. The number of cases thrown out because of technicalities is skyrocketing, and these include cases where the evidence is overwhelming and the accused has admitted guilt more often than not.

In such an environment enforcing laws where the evidence is often ethereal is tough. If the criminal claims the evidence was planted he's more or less guaranteed to walk free.

indeed. A colleague was looking at buying a portable DVD player on eBay. Found one that cost 100 pounds plus 150 pounds shipping...

JScrollPane is your friend :)

They probably need it only for a short while until they reprogram the car to accept their own fingerprint.
And I'd expect these systems to be able to be programmed to accept a range of prints as valid, so telling it that your wife is allowed to drive it (OK, that might not be the best choice) is almost certainly possible.

And even if noone can get in, there's bound to be an emergency entry code known only at Mercedes headquarters where the dealership (on verifying the person asking for the car to be opened is indeed legal to do so) can request it. That's how it works with electronic keys as well and for getting replacement keys for most cars these days (and even bikes now...).

Dell and Compaq (especially Compaq) are the market leaders.

I'd not buy anything off eBay, the risk is just too high.
Not only a lot of scammers and bait&switch operations, but what if you need service?
Will that reseller be around to take in your warranty repair and handle it? You don't know their business at all, is it a real company or someone who bought a box of the things from a stolen shipment and is selling them under an assumed name before disappearing forever.

Go to an electronics or computer store after browsing compaq.com to find out which models you'd consider and check them out then buy it there.
The price difference won't be a lot with the online stores and you're helping local businesses survive for when you need to talk to someone for advise or service.

remember that JFrame is derived from Frame which derives from Component (or something like that), many core methods are inherited from a parent class.

If it can't find core packages there's something seriously wrong with your installation.

hmm, let's see...
He didn't bomb Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Oman, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaidjan, etc. etc. etc.

Seems your far left political views are seriously clouding your judgment almost as much as your fundamentalist treehugger views do.

hmm, it's not that hard :)

I think there's a sample in the J2EE documentation. If not get the book "the art of Java" ISBN 0072229713 which contains a complete EMail client created using JavaMail and Swing (as well as some very interesting other applications showing off some of the things Java can do that many people never realise).

I know it will not happen tomorrow. Note I did mention Window 2010 :)
But all or most of the component technologies are in place at this time.

Several were mine. Tested it at work but the JS and CSS compliance meant our application doesn't work.
Now temporarilly using it at home because IE is corrupted by a failed installation of a .NET update while I'm waiting for my XP disk to be delivered (which should be next week).

Problem is that now I can't even load my own homepage (which is valid according to the W3 HTML and CSS validators)...

yes, you can have mechanisms that prevent piracy.

You can have software that runs solely on a remote machine maintained by the selling company. Customers log into that machine with their password and username and are charged by the hour with a minimum fee per logged in user.
It's called ASP (application server provider) with subscription based services.

Imagine your computer having just a stub of an operating system and connecting to a central server at Microsoft headquarters when you turn it on.
It logs in and the meter starts ticking. If you have a good creditrating on your account (creditcard, prepaid, whatever) your machine starts to load Windows 2010.
You get your desktop (your profile is stored at your own machine or maybe at a server elsewhere where you rent some space).
You start Photoshop XCL. The loader contacts a server from Adobe who checks your credit rating. If it's good Photoshop loads (with only the plugins you have indicated you want a permanent subscription to) from the server.

Both Windows and Photoshop regularly contact their owners over a secure connection to see if you're still OK on your credits and warn you if you're running out of money.

Now, if you give your license codes to someone else he logs in using your account details and you get charged for their use as well as your own.

Um... when America was tasting Imerialism in the 19th century, thats just what we did with the Philippines. It was transfered to US control after the Spanish-American war, but when they didn't just go quietly,

The US didn't conquer the Philipines though, they just threw out insurgents :)
They then went on to give the people there a choice whether they wanted independence or become a part of the US and the people chose (and got) independence.

The capitalist World Economy. On a global scale, that's just what we have, and it's a big worry. Capitalism basically and fundamentally depends upon continued growth for its continued existence. We live on a ball of rock with finite resources. And we're not even thinking about alternatives

The alternative is a Soviet style centrally controlled corruption (sorry, I can't call it an economy. It's been tried and tested and it's been proven to not work.
There may be possible alternatives but none I think that would work without a single global non-democratic government imposing them and that's not a situation I'd want to see as it would severely limit freedom.

And let's not forget that the US and all other UN members had a mandate (and in fact a duty) from the UN to do what the US dating back to 1991.
The treaty terms for the ceasefire in the first war against Iraq clearly stated that Iraq was to provide unimpeded access to UN arms inspectors and not to have any weapons in the designated zones in the north and south. They violated both provisions constantly.

In fact, the US and allies should have acted against Iraq 10 years ago.

Disbelieve me? Then tell me why, recently, Microsoft decided to have a promotion for MS Office and allowed Academic version to be sold at retail on the open market here in Australia, for a limited promotional period of time, and sold it to anybody regardless of whether they were eligible or not!

Ever heard of marketing? Do you claim that the fact that the supermarket has a temporary discount on cans of soup means that cans of soup are overpriced?
It's exactly the same thing.

The development cost of software is huge, which is what I was pointing out. Indeed in case of Microsoft or other companies selling mainly in the mainstream the development cost is a smaller percentage of the purchase price BUT that doesn't mean that price is not "fair" (whatever "fair" means in this).
Their support cost is FAR higher than ours. Microsoft probably has hundreds of supporting staff for every developer, compared to our ratio of about 1:1.
Those people also have to be paid and they cost a lot of money.
We get most of that money from paid for support contracts, Microsoft has to figure all that cost into the purchase price for most of their products. I doubt many people would be willing to pay $50 a year for a mandatory support contract for Windows to allow them to download updates and use the support website. If customers were to accept such contracts the initial purchase price would …

Check out JavaMail. It's a complete email API for Java, can work with just about any protocol (SMTP and POP3 are built in, MAPI and IMAP too I think).

I am not a treehugger, neither am I a gas and coal powered maniac. But global warming does exist and in the long term it is the most influential current affair. :-|

Wrong. The TOTAL effect of human activity on the global climate is so small as to be impossible to measure against the inaccuracy of the data used.

While the climate is indeed changing, that's not because of any human activity but purely due to natural changes that would happen no matter what we did to either accellerate it or slow it down.

For example, the entire benefit of the Kyoto debacle (which will destroy the economies of the countries foolish enough to have comitted to it) will be AT MOST a 0.7 degree drop in average global temperature over a 50 year period.
That's about 3 times smaller than the minimum detectable change over such a period that's statistically significant.

Remember that we're living in an interglacial. That's a period of time between two glacial eras. Such periods can last anywhere from a few thousand to over 20.000 years. We're currently well past the halfway point in one.
The main thing interglacials have in common is wild and unpredictable climate swings. Global average temperatures can varry by as much as 10-15 degrees over a few decades. Other climate factors can varry by similarly large numbers.

You might be surprised that the warmest climate of the last several hundred years was BEFORE the …

Realworld example:
We have 5 people working fulltime for 2 years creating an application.
On average those people make about €35000 a year, which in our country means they cost the company about €80000 a year EACH.
So we have an investment in that product of €800.000 just for development. This doesn't include marketing, customer support, etc. Total cost is likely to have been over a million Euro before the first customer takes delivery.
At an estimated market of maybe 50 customers over 3 years, that means just to break even we have to price the product at €20.000 per customer. Our actual price is about €25.000 per customer, plus a support contract.
I'd not call that massive margins, and certainly not an indication that software doesn't cost anything to create.

And that's in a market where there is NO piracy. Each customer gets a highly customised product which is specific to their situation and won't work anywhere else.
Had we to figure in piracy into the equation at the rate which is common in the consumer software industry we'd have to charge 10 times that amount as piracy causes a loss in sales of up to 90%.

You mean a request or session attribute?
It's easy.

<c:if test="${not empty someVar}">
  <%-- do what you need to do when the attribute is there --%>
</c:if>

Actually if it's just to prevent errors when outputting something you don't need to check, JSTL is smart enough to ignore anything that's not there so

<c:out value="${someVar}"/>

would just output nothing at all if someVar weren't there.

Apparently you know nothing about the cost of building software, which for a small kid is somewhat understandable.

Most software companies have margins of no more than 10% on their products. At the high end the margin on a successful product may be 30% but that's offset by only one out of 3-5 products turning a profit at all.

If you don't like the free market, I suggest you emigrate to North Korea, the PRC, or Cuba and experience firsthand what the alternative means.

If freeware were really a viable alternative it would have long since driven all other software out of the market.

that's exactly why you should not use a lockfile UNLESS you also include a mechanism to remove the lockfile forcibly (which should then also cause any other instances of the application to terminate for example).

If another program tries to use that port it's out of luck, pure and simple.
The programs you mention are I think smart enough to hop to another port if the one they want isn't available (and in a mission commercial environment shouldn't be installed anyway).

Global warming is just a lot of hot air, it doesn't exist (at least not in the way the treehuggers claim).

The world economy isn't any worse overall than it has been in a long time, though there are local problems in Europe.

There's never been less wars and conflict than now and what there is doesn't affect me directly.

Crime is bad, but not a lot worse than in the past.

Overall, economics and crime affect me the most but not at a global scale.

The only worries I have about "global warming" is the incredible amount of resources being wasted on it that could be far better spent fighting crime and improving the economy.

I don't get it. They sue people for downloading songs which cost 1$ a piece, but there is server software on P2P networks worth 6-10,000$.

They also get sued but that doesn't make the media. After all, it's not the Big Bad Music Industry going after the innocent little schoolkids...

If people are so worried about the price of software, why not buy OEM?

OEM software isn't for general sale. It's only licensed for sale in combination with something else, usually hardware but sometimes other software.
A store selling OEM software separate (and yes, I know they exist) are as much perpatrating theft as the person selling CDs with pirated software.
Maybe even worse in fact because they also deprive the person who purchased that hardware that should have had bundled software from retrieving what they paid for.

Edit: Thread clean - Catweazle

At one point security firms estimated 90% of files on Kazaa had malicious payload.
I believe it's gotten a bit better but noone's ever done a similar survey on bittorrent and similar networks AFAIK.

You know the most dangerous substance known to man?
It's Oxygen, without which we couldn't live.
But it's also extremely corrosive, a required component to maintain any fire, and a deadly poison to many lifeforms (and in fact the increase in oxygen content in the atmosphere due to green plants caused the wholesale extinction of many lifeforms back in the old days. Were Greenpeace to have been in existence at the time they'd have campaigned for the destruction of green plants and an international pact to reduce atmospheric oxygen levels).

The majority of virusses spread via pirated software and other crap people download over P2P networks.
Email virusses used to be big but have been on the decline for a year or more.

Direct infection through websites is low and generally not viral in nature but limited to installation of spyware or trojans that are usually not self replicating (though they may take actions to trick others into infecting themselves) and therefore don't class as virusses.

Pretty much any medication when used incorrectly can cause serious problems.

People have died from vitamin C for example, thought the dose needed there is so extreme only terminal health nuts would ever be at risk :)

Well said Marty, and my opinion exactly.

If you can't afford or can't be bothered to pay the price for highend software use a free or cheaper alternative.

I work in software development myself.
My company does provide staff with corporate licenses for many packages we have at work, so we can get them free or cheap. Similarly for students and educational staff educational licenses cover the same ground, offering them cheap access to high end software they may need (usually the same software used in classes and labs).

Whether you need to send proof of purchase depends on where you are, who you're talking to and how often you've called before and from where.

If the same code sequence has been used to install machines in many different places they'll want to know why of course :)

If you can get the firewood admin here to plug a hole in the firewood I'll be happy to install mIRC at work :)

You can create instances of a static inner class, but not of an abstract class.

When you have a static inner class the Class instance for the inner class is static, but that has nothing to do with any instances of the inner class itself.

Consider an inner class to be a data member of the outer class.
In case of non-static inner classes you'll get a Class instance for the inner class for each instance of the outer class.
When you have a static inner class you'll get a single static Class instance at Class level for the outer class, therefore accessible without an instance of the outer class itself (enabling you to do new A.B() instead of new A().new B() for example).

don't use Vector, it's a legacy class that should have been deprecated years ago.

If you get that message you have to contact Microsoft support to get it reactivated.
This may require you send them proof of purchase.

Give them a call.

no, each CD contains the operating system in just one language (which means that in some countries like Canada and Belgium there'll be several language versions on sale).
Even the versions in the MSDN subscription are not multilingual, if you get the entire thing you'll get several dozen installation CDs.

But why get the English version? Far cheaper to get a Portuegese-English dictionary :lol: :mrgreen:

>actually I don't believe they are...
The mad literalists answered the only question that was posed:

Since it's clearly a homework assignment, nobody with half a brain would just give away the answer. ;) Unless of course the answer is given in such a way as to be too cryptic to be useful, such as my answer.

But how can one answer a statement? The OP's question was whether someone can answer something which turns out to not be a question :mrgreen:

Yesterday evening Windows Update crashed telling me 2 updates had failed to install.
After rebooting IE no longer seems to support Javascript or any plugins (Flash, Java, etc. all fail), HTML Help no longer works, popups don't pop up (that's often nice), etc.

Is there any solution to this except reinstalling Windows from scratch?

I'm running Win2K pro, already tried reinstalling IE from the original installer telling it to overwrite everything but that had no effect.

When trying to look at Javascript errors I get "Error 58, unable to load DLL".

If you can't afford the price, use a cheaper alternative...
There's PSP, Gimp, etc. etc.

Theft is theft also if it's "because I need it and can't afford it".

crosspost.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html