Posts by jwenting

maybe my paranoid self, but someone anonymously pays for my food or drinks I start getting suspicious :)

either will (or at least should) reject that XML as it is invalid :)

congratulations on 101 posts in 16 hours since your 10k mark :)

and if you ask on facebook and twitter 95% no doubt thinks the entire universe revolves around them...

Actually, you can create an inner class instance without an outer class instance, BUT the inner class needs to be defined as static as well (which technically might mean it's no longer an inner class but a static nested class).

This for example works:

package sandbox;

public class Sandbox {

    static public class Inner {
        public void log() {
            System.out.println("Foo!");
        }
    }

    /**
     * @param args the command line arguments
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // TODO code application logic here
        new Inner().log();
    }

}

For all other cases you'd get the rather weird syntax of

        Outer.Inner n;
        Outer n1 = new Outer();
        n = n1.new Inner();

sow shi set dad reeding things alowed reduses errors in writtuhn teksts?

allocating less memory may well make the application slower as the garbage collector kicks in much more frequently...
Each run may go quicker, but the higher number of total runs can be detrimental.

not quite sure, but I think you can get 20 round magazines for some Glocks. Not 30, but same order of magnitude.
It's one reason the US Army went with them to replace the M1911, larger magazine capacity for the same weight category (and no doubt gear commonality with DHS...).

Most idiotic movie for that infinite ammo syndrome must be the Matrix.
And of course in Hot Shots Part Deux they do a rather nice joke on the theme :)

1) "which do you use more". Since when are we in a popularity contest between interfaces and abstract base classes?
2) implementation dependent. Wouldn't expected to need to know that in detail unless I'm to write a JVM.
8) "better" is relative to what you want to achieve...
9) last several years, none related to the language or platform, applications are generally faster than the networks and databases they rely on.

Not an interview that'd give me much confidence in the expertise of the people putting the questions together.

if you lack the knowledge you need, get the knowledge... It's really that simple.
You're now at a stage in life where you're no longer being led by the hand, but expected to be able to figure out on your own what you need to know and find ways to acquire that knowledge.

look closely at your code... You're trying to call a method "display" in your Local inner class, but that inner class has no method named "display", it has a method named "msg".

and what about talking with your coordinator? When I was at that point they had a selection of projects to choose from, based on requests for graduate students from companies and research institutes willing to host people for their graduation work.
For example I was offered a position to do research in nuclear waste classification technology based on my stated preferences and available projects.
Of course that didn't prevent people with contacts elsewhere from submitting projects of their own, dependent on the same criteria as the presubmitted ones.

Defining a file format that is forward and backward compatible may be easy, writing a parser for it is harder than writing one that only has to take a single version into account (though it may not be much harder depending on what you want to do with unrecognised elements) :)
But consider this in case of a word processor. You've typed a paragraph of text, then added some modifier to it that an older version of that word processor doesn't support.
What should it do with your paragraph? Output it in plain text, delete it entirely (that's the easiest option, but I doubt your end users will be very happy), or mark it in some way as being not shown as intended by the creator (the hardest option)?

And with modern XML parsers all being validating parsers, and automatically rejecting documents containing data not matching their given XSD as invalid, what do you think the default operation for a word processor written using an XML based document format will be when presented with a document created in a later version of that same software that has enhanced its definitions?

I'd just use the javax.crypto package instead. Provides all you need for most encryption requirements most people will ever have.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/javax/crypto/package-summary.html
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/security/crypto/CryptoSpec.html

yes, importing an entire package can make the compiler (javac that is) a bit slower, the JIT never knows as it only gets to see the compiled class file which doesn't know what import style you used.
Unless you are compiling a very large project (thousands or tens of thousands of sources) with a large number of imported packages in each, that's going to be completely irrelevant (if you are, you might notice a tiny fraction longer compilation times and increased memory consumption during compilation, probably not a problem unless your build environment is seriously starved for RAM).

or more likely, you're going to want to have a method to determine the grade based on the score. A switch would be rather impractical...
Something like

if (score < 11) { 
  result = "A";
} else if (score < 21) {
  result = "B";
} else // ... etc ...

would be much more efficient.

Lag is almost always network related. Sometimes simply resetting your router will cause things to get better, sometimes you're stuffed because there's some upstream problem.
Some games let you throttle the amount of data the client will accept, effectively telling the server "I can only receive x bytes per second, please don't send more".
If D3 has that, reducing that value might give relief, but at the potential loss of things in the game environment (things rendered on the server but not critical).

Not likely -- each new version of Word has it's own doc format which is incompatible with previous versions

Another reason I hate Microsoft. Our control centre had to exchange documents with several other control centres in the central and northern states. All it took was once group to upgrade to a new version of MS Office to screw up everyone else.

you could just have set a corporate policy to use the old format for all communications.
Works wonders.

And why not change file formats (which btw isn't done with every version) to support new functionality? Or would you want everyone to still use a 20+ year old file format from WordPerfect 1.0 for everything, doing away with everything that's been added over that time that required changes to the file format to persist?

I prefer to import individual classes.
Why? Because it gives some documentation on the top of your source file indicating which classes are used in your application.
Might not always be needed, but I've seen places where that was parsed into a document and used to determine dependencies between parts of the application and 3rd party libraries.
IDEs make it a lot easier to keep up to date of course. When coding quick prototypes or working in a simple text editor I often resort to just importing entire packages for convenience. Later an IDE (if needed) can then reorganise that.

hmm, I've Office 2010 installed on Win 8.1 and it runs just fine :)

pay to win is the standard business model for MMOs now.
And yes, it is caused by the attitude among people that they don't want to pay for things. So you draw them in with a free game, then have an item mall where to buy what you need to win (experience boosters, super weapons, bad ass armour, you name it).
The Koreans are masters at it.

Elder Scrolls Online is going for a subscription model, every gaming website out there screams that "they're committing suicide by not giving it away for free"...
Of course most of those "free to play" games (which are all "pay to win") only last a few months before the in game situation is completely poisoned and the users leave, the game then being relaunched under a slightly different name by the same company using a slightly different trade name and the process starts again.

security policies prevent me from taking part in surveys about security policy :)

You can't start marketing something without at least a prototype.
You can't start marketing something without at least a cost indication.

And you can't get either without a recipe and at least a price quote from a production facility.

It's all well and dandy to want to design a bottle and logo, but I'd start with brewing up some actual product and getting some people to give their honest opinion about it (and no, that's not your dad and mom who'll say how much they love it so as not to hurt your feelings).

When you have that, and can make it to the same taste consistently in your kitchen (not your bathtub, that's not hygienic), take that to a production company (after applying for a patent) and ask for quotes on production runs (which might well turn out to be impossibly expensive), or get out and build your own factory (which for local distribution only may well be enough).
Either will require a major investment.
Bottles you can buy in all shapes and sizes. For that small production run at least initially hiring some kids to spend a few afternoons a week gluing labels on bottles works well, or get a labeling machine.
Labels and printing company can make, there's some in every town and city. They often also have connections to graphic design firms that can design the logo for you, if you lack the skills.

Initial layout? Tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds …

Santa or father Christmas represents St. Nicolas.. However the red coat comes from a Coca Cola advert... He used to be green

the red coat and hat are corruptions of the red robes, cloak, and myter of a catholic bishop.
St. Nicholas was just that, bishop of Myra (in modern day Turkey).
His saints day is 6 December, still celebrated in the Netherlands, Turkey, Belgium, and parts of Germany as a children's festival with presents being brought for them on the evening of the 5th, the good man sending his helpers down the chimneys in days prior to check whether the kids have been good during the preceding year.

If all that sounds pretty much like the SantaClaus stories, no surprise. They're adopted from that, then moved in time a few weeks to coincide with Christmas.

Go to a decent store selling musical instruments, ideally one specialising in stringed instruments, and talk to the staff.
Try multiple guitars, have the staff play some for you, get a feel for the size, weight, and sound of them.
Then decide which would best fit your needs, wants, and budget (and oh, set yourself a realistic budget before going in, it's easy to get carried away and end up buying very expensive gear you don't need right away, but be realistic and don't think $150 is going to get you a decent instrument).

Don't rely on online stores with a few pictures and maybe a short soundtrack, those don't tell you anything and the "reviews" are carefully tailored to make the items the store wants to push seem the best (which is usually the items with the highest profit margin, or those that have been gathering dust in the warehouse).

So according to Rick, Obama is giving everyone free health care (it isn't free) because if he doesn't, poor people will get sick and die and not be able to vote against him.

No, he's stating that that's how Obama is trying to sell the ACA to his constituency, that it means they're getting free healthcare and that "the rich" are going to pay for it through higher taxes and premiums (his intended constituency of unemployed, low income, etc. etc. people are all getting such high subsidies on their premiums under the ACA they're effectively getting free healthcare, at least free health insurance which will often turn out to not cover the care they need when they need it).

It's the same way government run healthcare and health insurance is sold to the electorate in many countries, telling people "it's free" when in fact it's anything but.
Ask most people in the UK and they'll tell you the NHS provides "free healthcare". They've forgotten that that healthcare is paid for out of their taxes over the decades.
Same in Canada.
In the Netherlands, many people think their doctors are basically free. But they're not, they just get their healthcare paid for out of their health insurance completely and transparently, never seeing a bill, and the insurance bill is automatically taken from their bank accounts so they never see it (except once a year when a new policy arrives listing the new premiums).
etc. etc. …

It tells me that, that is not a valid command

Which means you either don't have Java installed, or don't have it installed correctly.

eBay and PayPal have a reputation lately of siding with the buyer - much to the detriment of some sellers. They should make it right.

PP being owned by eBay, not surprising they follow the same policies.
And I can fully understand they're wary of buyers, there are so many people filing fraudulent complaints against reputable companies, they should be careful.

IMO declaring Christmas as a federal holiday violates that law. (Public Law 90-363)

it doesn't, unless the federal government dictates that everyone join a specific religious group and forces them to celebrate Christmas within that group.

That's what the establishment clause means, that congress can't create (or declare) a state religion, a religion that all citizens MUST be a member of.

Just declaring Christmas day to be a day off for federal workers doesn't do that (and that is what congress did).

Note that this is about the federal government only, individual states under the establishment clause are not preventing from demanding their citizens be a member of a specific religious group, and indeed several states have had such requirements at one point or another.

I haven't seen any articles about him having a nervous breakdown because some journalists made fun of him.

banning people who're critical of him from the white house press room takes care of that.

maybe his ambition is to be banned?

The Peoples' Cube put it best: Obama, putting the Fun back in Funeral.

If you can't take the heat about using a funeral for self agrandisement, you're not worthy of holding political office, and Obama can't.

Having a degree is not required, but it sure helps getting a foot in the door.
Doesn't have to be an IT related degree though, anything in the sciences especially will teach you valuable skills unrelated to the exact discipline, effectively teaching you to learn and think independently and outside the box, making you more likely to be a valuable addition to the team.

31 members can't be wrong ;)

they can, but in this case...

a cancer doctor treats cancer, a heart doctor treats hearts, a love doctor treats love?
So he's trying to get people to stop loving?

Maybe he's bragging about how much sex he is getting :) Young men like to do that, whether it's true or not.

If your sample size is 1 after 20 years, it's a major leap over the previous sample size :)

well said. It's the mindless reification that sickens me, not the fact that people think he did some good things.
He wasn't perfect, he was neither divine nor demonic. As every human being he was a bit of both.
Stalin did good and bad, Hitler did good and bad, Mandela did good and bad. No doubt if you look closely at Sister Theresa she did some naughty things as well.

Huck Fin isn't racist. But under the PC police state, it's considered racist because of the way it's worded. They never look beyond the fact that it contains the word "nigger", never read the context in which it is used.
A word btw that blacks among themselves use extensively to refer to themselves to this day, yet when a white person uses it even when literally just quoting a conversation between two black people he's called a racist.

And even were it racist, it's a historical document and has a right to exist just because of that.
If we wipe out any part of our past just because we don't like it, we forget it and it's bound to happen again.

good riddance to another terrorist pushed into premature sainthood by a world press totally oblivious of reality.
While apartheid in the RSA was a Bad Thing (tm), the terror campaign of the ANC was no better and has led to what now is a regime that is no better except that now non-blacks are the victims.

"ain't" is no word, it's a coloquilised version of a contraction.

and remember that your requirement to show 3 DIFFERENT ones each time means you're not looking at something random. If it were random, there'd be a chance of the same showing up multiple times.

that'd depend on who's in charge of changing the law... If those guys and gals think it in their own best interest to change the law they will.
And languages do change, usually through being influenced by other languages. And English being a language that's spoken more by non-natives than natives, there's quite a lot of potential for that.

yes and no.
Creating something like

<E extends Object>[] arr;

might work (I've not tested this, not interested), but isn't really useful as you might as well write

Object[] arr;

The problem is that gov't large scale IT projects aren't centralized enough! If the project was completely centralized: designed & developed by a single company/gov't entity rather than broken up and handed out to several independent contractors and getting imput from dozens of independent consultants/lobbyists there would be far fewer problems.

don't you love having to spread out the dollars to as many congressional districts as possible to buy as many votes as possible...

Almost always? More like always, unless science has invented artificial sperm. I'd like to respond to the logic here, but I'm having trouble properly putting it into words. Sorry.

artificial insemination. Sperm donors are anonymous for a reason, which is to prevent them ending up being held up for child support.
So why should they be held up for maternity care through a backdoor?

Of course such is the natural consequence of a one size fits all package.
Alternative would be different packages based on sex, race, marital status, age, etc. which would be even more unwieldy as the whole thing already is (and likely lead to screams about sexism, racism, and age discrimination as many specific groups of people who are not young single white men will end up with either reduced coverage and/or higher premiums because they are more susceptible (in fact often uniquely susceptible) to specific and often expensive to treat conditions that young single white men are not subject to (there are diseases that specifically target blacks, maternity care specifically targets women, etc.).

Are we allowed to live for an eternity?

were it possible, no doubt there'd be laws mandating euthenasia for anyone who's not paying more in taxes than they get in government benefits...

That's just stupid! How can Toco Bell NOT prove that their tocos contain beef? What else could they contain -- kangaroos or horsemeat? All the inspectors have to do is watch them make it and test the ingredients.

exactly the same idiocy as the urban legend that KFC changed its name to KFC from Kentucky Fried Chicken because "they don't actually serve chicken and are thus not allowed to use the word in their advertising", which is utterly bogus as they never changed their name, and use the word chicken liberally in all their marketing (including their own website).

Especially since there was no way to know that the insurance companies would respond by cancelling policies.

right... There was no way to know insurance companies were going to cancel policies if they were forced to do so because those policies were not in line with the ACA diktats...

If you're providing coverage beyond what ACA allows, at a price above what ACA allows, and now you're told by the ACA that you have to lower the price but aren't allowed to reduce the coverage, you as a company have but one option: cancel the policy.
The alternative would be to offer the policy below cost, which would hurt your business.
What kinda does surprise me is that not more insurance companies offered customers ACA compliant policies in exchange for their previous policies as a company policy (when a similar change happened here insurance companies did just that).
Maybe many of them left the health insurance industry, I don't know, but that could well be the reason.

Lowest bidder.

if only... The contract was granted to "the correct party" which was a company headed by an old college friend (of the correct skin colour of course) of Michelle Obama, which just happened to be a large campaign contributor to the Obama campaign.
A company with an international record of failed websites just like healthcare.gov.

oh, spicy foods are great. The spices are a good way to preserve foods that would otherwise go off and become unsafe to eat (yes, that's what spices were originally used for, as preservatives, just like smoking and freezing).