Posts by jwenting

Keynes has been utterly discredited decades ago. It's a nice fantasy of course to think that the government can "steer" the country to prosperity by punishing business, taxing it to destruction and then giving that money to other people who'll make use of it to generate wealth for all until they too get taxed to death.
But that's not how the world works.
That's in fact why the world is now in the near perpetual economic crises we have been in for years and isn't getting any better for the very reason that governments are clinging to their Keynesian dream and pumping money into "green jobs" and "quantitive easing" while taxing productive companies and citizens into poverty, preventing them from investing and generating jobs.

if you don't know Java, you're not going to be able to ask meaningful questions about and know if the answers you get are correct.
So start learning Java.

it's one of the better surprises you can have returning from holiday.
From my experience they're usually a lot nastier...

no need for gratuitous ad hominem attacks, Grimjack, though I know you can't help yourself.

A change was made recently so that you have to hover your mouse over the ads for a time period before this happens, so if you just move your mouse around normally you should be unaffected.

if that change was made, it's not working properly, or the interval is extremely short (like a fraction of a second).
Just moving my mouse across the screen causes it to flash black on and off, extremely annoying.

which doesn't explain why he's getting an errot instead of an error :)
What's an errot anyway?

technically, only 1 class instance is created for any class per classloader.
After that, any number of instance of that class can also be created, as needed, discarded, reused, serialised, deserialised, etc. etc.

in other words KFC used a 3rd party API that came to them loaded with a worm that targets a different operating system than the one for which the API was created?

Brilliant, worthy of the dailyWTF. The creator of the API that is, and likely the one of the worm as well.

there are browser specific CSS bits that only work in specific browsers.
There are also bits of the standard that aren't implemented in all browsers.

IE8 doesn't implement all of CSS3, neither do old versions of Chrome and Firefox.
So either work around the problem by not using things that aren't supported in the browser versions you're targeting or change the browser versions you target to include only those that support what you're using.

XNA is not future proof, last I heard it's being discontinued. And please don't keep reviving zombies like this.

no, it doesn't.

The "most powerful" tool is the one that gets the current job done on time, on budget, and on spec with the least future expense (maintenance, runtime environments, etc).
And that's hardly ever just a programming language, but an entire infrastructure.
If all you have to use is nails, a screwdriver is useless despite being arguably 'more powerful' as you can screw screws with greater precision using less energy than driving nails.
If I tell you to create something that has to run on a 20 year old IBM mainframe, you may scream that "Java is the most powerful so I want to use it" but you're never going to get that application written because you can't run Java on that machine.
It's going to be PL/1, like it or not. So PL/1 is the most powerful as it's the only tool in town.
CSS3 is very powerful for rendering websites, but if your website has to be accessed by people using netbooks over a satellite hookup in the African bush, it's again useless as those netbooks won't render that CSS3, leaving the site useless to its target audience. All those graphical niceties also of course cause a lot of extra bandwidth use, which you don't want over that satcom connection as bandwidth is very slow and expensive there.
And yes, I've written web apps for situations like that. Not netbooks the African bush, but PDAs over a dialup connection charged …

a society where every person has a computer on them on them at all times and recording video of everything

which is not so different from what we have already, and as is now known the FBI/NSA/whoever can turn on your cellphone camera and microphone remotely and listen in on anything you do.
Welcome to the Brave New World of 1984, move alond THX, nothing to see, and don't forget to take your medication so you remain properly sedated...

The US won't even identify who the enemy is.

oh, it's the NRA, small business owners, investors, basically anyone who's guilty of not sending enough campaign contributions to Obama favourites.

Yeah, POTUS is essentially a slightly right of center politician but is played up by both sides as a far left activist

he is in fact the stereotypical far left radical. What he does, how he acts, is no different from how people like Brezhnev, Jaruselski, Mao, Mugabe, Chavez, and Castro would have acted if they'd had the means.

People, this is a signature spam post, look at the OP's signature.

Makes it all the more ironic that he's quite right in saying that there's a lot of underqualified people "graduating" in India.

And yes, we've all encountered them. And yes, they exist elsewhere as well, just (at least in my experience) elsewhere they tend to be a smaller percentage of those you encounter.

I've seen very good people from India, and very bad ones.
Same with everywhere else, though again the balance trends towards larger differences between top and bottom as well as a higher percentage towards the bottom with people from India (and especially with people from India who are in India and got their education there, many of the best of them leave the country and/or get an education in the US or Europe and stay there after (this is in part a result of their caste system which more of less closes the top universities in India to those of higher castes, who tend to thus send their children abroad to get an education instead at places like Harvard and Oxford)).

It's overall cultural as well, unwillingness to admit lack of knowledge to foreigners leading to misinterpreted specs, bugs that could have been avoided by asking a few questions, etc..

And don't think you know anything, don't assume that just because you had Java classes in school you're a Java expert and/or only suitable for Java jobs.
Apply to entry level jobs in your general field of interest, and don't cherry pick the companies to be only the top brand names because those companies aren't going to hire snot nosed kids whose sole experience is writing out some homework assignments and maybe making a small flash game during a vacation.
So apply to JoeSmoe DataServices Inc. of SmallTown, Nebraska instead of Amazon.

To recap the audience problem/issue:

You have some good people here, but they're so annoyed with the flood of homework kiddos they're discouraged from posting anything of value.
And that leads to a situation where quality questions, when asked, don't get answered either.
Which is a death spiral.
You might be able to revert that, but it will mean less traffic at least initially as you're going to have to very actively work to dissuade the homework kiddos from coming here and dumping their assignments, then never returning except to look if they got a ready made answer a few days later (and maybe make a nasty comment when they got snark instead of the ready to turn in solution they were asking for).

Of course that puts you right in competition with SO unless you can find a niche besides it (maybe the serious hobbyist, rather than the die hard professional), which is so well established you're small fry.

/me mutters something unspeakable about Turbo C 1.5

yes, but not during a first interview. I'd reserve that for a follow up talk where financials, work conditions, etc. are discussed.
Of course if it comes up from their side during the first interview, feel free to ask.

Except that for every real coyote shot how many people's innocent pet dogs will be mistaken for coyotes and shot as well?

From the reality in places where people do have the right to defend themselves, hardly any at all. Certainly far fewer than get arrested and put in prison on false accusations, far fewer than get harmed by the coyotes in society in places where the sheep don't have claws.

Short version - nobody saw me as a threat.

that's the crux. People think you're after your job, they'll start trying to get rid of you, and if those people are higher up in the corporate pecking order than you are (which they'll be if they think you're after their job, of course) they'll have better access to people who can make that happen.

I always stress I'm not interested in management positions, lack the personality for it.
Sadly too many people just can't get their heads around the idea that people do NOT want to be the boss, and think you're just sneaky and moving behind their backs when you say so.

Indeed. I've had rejections for being "too nervous" which apparently according to the rejection notice made me seem "desperate".
Next day I got a rejections for being "not nervous enough" which made me apparently "disinterested".

I was feeling the same in both interviews, acting the same. It's a lottery, more or less, with your career at stake as the grand prize and very little you can do to influence where the ball will drop apart from knowing your stuff and not trying to bluff.

why should there be a ready made method for something that specific, that limited in scope?
It's not too hard to write your own using some regular expressions and a bit of knowledge of the core Java APIs.

And no, I'm not going to do that for you.

Should we not draw from this, as proof, that removing one’s privacy is a dehumanizing act and restoring that privacy is a privilege of rank?
Or does it suggest that many of us have inflated egos and could use some leveling?

both.
And that governments have every intent, and ever more the means, on dehumanising their constituents in order to perpetuate their own power.

Sixth: What do we do about those who use their privacy to plot mayhem and destruction, as the coyote has served on the local turkey population?

There is a price to be paid for liberty, and that's being at some risk from the coyotes. I'd take that risk over being a slave.
Of course that risk should be mitigated by giving people the means to defend themselves, shoot the coyote, without being hit by lawsuits from environmentalists thinking coyotes have more right to live thn turkeys or humans.

Obviously you shouldn't intentionally write slow code, but fast has a price, and if an employer doesn't understand that, they're not worth working for.

I've had one instance where we did intentionally have to write slow code, but that was a very special case where the code had to be slowed down so as to not get ahead of the ADC that fed it with data from an external sensor.
The code could read say 1000 bytes per second, but the ADC could only supply 100 bytes per second, the sensor supplied only 10 bytes per second.
So we had to slow our code to the point where it wouldn't flood the ADC and cause the hardware to crash.

Similarly: I've had to rework underperforming code more than once. Most significant here, an application that needed to run once every 24 hours but took 36 hours to run to completion.
I could have done more, but by the time it ran to completion in 16 hours the customer was happy and we stopped trying to optimise further, throwing more money at what was no longer a problem.

Overall, you write code to be fast ENOUGH, good ENOUGH. Perfection is unattainable and striving for it only leads to missed deadlines, cost overruns, and exploding budgets.

yes, stopping the spamming you're doing is a good start. And then starting to write things people actually can read without getting a headache.

the reason those classes aren't heavy on teaching math is because they assume you already know the math...
Which tells a lot.

start by reducing your ambitions from creating the next multi-billion dollar revenue first person shooter in your bedroom during a few weekends to creating a text based maze.'

What language you implement that in is utterly irrelevant.

no, not that I know of (of course if I were I'd say the same thing, lol), just a programmer and at the time was working as a contractor.

Some companies are just extremely secretive and don't want it known they're hiring. And many recruiters are secretive as well, don't want candidates to know who they're applying to a job for so there can be no direct contact between the company they're representing and the candidate (fear that the company and candidate will cut out the middle man to save money is part of that...).

It's not as bad lately as it used to be a decade or so ago, but it still happens.

One of our (Canadian) prime ministers once said "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation"

and then went on to regulate the size of beds, the age of consent, gay marriage, marriage to foreigners, the minimum size of windows for bedrooms, allowed materials for blankets, and come what may.
After all, he was a politician...

now why doesn't that surprise me...
Of course you can just wait for the conspiracy theorists to come out of the woodworks to accuse Trend Micro of wanting to destroy Tucktail...

from asking "duh koduz" for "media prayers" to asking cracks for "strong decoders". Interesting progression.

show us what you've done, and tell us where you're stuck, and who knows, someone might enlighten you.

But we're NOT here to do your homework for you (and yes, we can tell that this is a homework assignment, you didn't even bother reformatting it before you pasted it here verbatim).

might also want to move this to the mobile forum, as it relates to Android development.

I've just visited SO and I don't like it. They seem to be too hung up on conventions and standards, or where such standards are necessary they castigate the inexperienced user without taking into consideration their inexperience. It's a breeding ground for anal retentives.

SO is for and by professionals, and doesn't like (rightly so) kids coming in and dumping their homework questions. Those get ridiculed to the point they never return. Harsh, but deliberate.
If you put in some effort, overall people are more than willing to help there.

Daniweb looks and feels more amateurish, for the hobbyist. Few times I posted a serious question here, answered it myself because after 2 weeks nobody'd even bothered to try to respond to it.
Yet homework kiddos get a flood of solutions to their assignments, despite an official policy to not help them in that way and if you try to dissuade them you get downvotes and in cases even banned here.
Caused me to stop posting here for a long time btw, and I guess others as well who'd been here for years I no longer see.

Choose your target audience, professionals or homework kiddos. But choose wisely. The one group has you compete with SO, the other with roseindia.
Choose which you'd rather be known as, a place with quality people helping each other or a place where you get crap in response to questions that are equally crap.

a major annoyance is that the ad banner on top of the page blacks out the entire site and blocks navigation whenever you hover over it with your mouse.
This doesn't happen in all forums, or maybe with all banners, but it's something needs to be looked at.

yes, it is. Poorly worded on my part. Think someone advising to use the latest and greatest hyped whatever, which get a dozen upvotes.
A year or two later, someone discovers that thread and starts ridiculing it because something else is now the latest and greatest, coming in with the usual me2! crowd who all downvote it into obscurity causing it to end up at -12 instead in the space of a few hours.

You shouldn't ask what they are looking for, as an interviewee you should know about the company and what they want and that you fulfill those things otherwise you shouldn't have applied.

right in theory, in practice I've been called in blind into job interviews through recruitment agencies and headhunters where I didn't know until a few hours before the interview that there was to be an interview, and didn't know what position or even company I was interviewing with until the person I was to talk with introduced themselves (and in several cases not even then, as that person was was a recruiter who was not permitted to tell me the name of his client).

They can either get it by closing loopholes for the wealthy and forcing large corporations (some of which are reaping in record profits and still getting tax rebates) to pay reasonable taxes

and what is "reasonable"? 100%? 10000%? Even if you were to take every last cent everyone and every company owns that owns more than a million or so you'd only balance the budget for a few months, the hole is that deep!

IOW reducing the entire part of the population that has any power at all to invest and create jobs to abject poverty, totally destroying any incentive to invest and create jobs in the process, will only keep the money drain that is Washington DC in its crack to smoke for a few months at most.

No, the only way to reduce the deficit and balance the budget is to go with a chainsaw and a massive axe through the entitlement spending, reducing the size of the government at all levels by like 70-80%.

And that includes the postal services, which could be a lot more efficient than they are now.

which one? The server that's been running for 5 years apart from the occasional power outage (yes, should get me a UPS, I know), or the spare laptop that's only booted up once in a while to update the software installed on it so it can take over when needed if another machine fails?

you can get arrested for that, you know...

of course there's a danger of posts receiving a flood of unwarranted downvotes that over time become invalid because of changes in infrastructure or technology.

you really want him to end up arrested and in prison for assault and maybe attempted manslaughter?

I told you explicitly it's only the latest such attempt...
It's been tried before and no doubt will be tried again, and at some point it will succeed when some government somewhere gets either greedy or desperate enough for cashflow in a digital world in which the sale of postage stamps no longer brings enough revenue to keep the postal service union wages paid and still make a profit.

But as usual you can only resort to ad hominem attacks rather than present valid arguments yourself.

AFAIK you can't, that's something you'll have to ask your service provider to disable for your account.
What you experienced is simply that the message was indeed received for you by the network, and sent on to your device, where it was received.
After reception it is then simply discarded because you told the device to discard those messages.

There is no "best". In fact there's never any universal "best" of any broad category.

Just think: IF there were a universally "best" programming language, why are there still others out there that are used at all, or at least by more than a few diehard survivors with a religious adherence to something suboptimal?

Same with everything else.

Therefore any question asking for "the best" without a very strictly delimited problem domain is unanswerable (and even then, there are often multiple equally applicable choices).

please don't revive old threads, and certainly not by posting such utter nonsense.

it also sounds like a very dirty hack, bordering on trying to perform some sort of trojan attack.
AFAIK you indeed can't get a list of all class INSTANCES loaded by a JVM or ClassLoader, only a list of Classes loaded.
If you think it through logically, you can also see why it is impossible to get in Java a list of class instances available in the JVM.

As already pointed out, any instance that's no longer referenced becomes available to the garbage collector.
IF such a list were obtainable however, no instance would ever be without a reference, so there could be no garbage collection.

Such a list is of course available internally to the JVM, but it's not exposed through any Java API.

wow, facebook has mechanisms in place to detect people buying "friends" now?
You're violating the TOS and being punished for it, tough luck. If people really like you, they'll find you.

If you need to pay people to be your "friend", you're not worth having as a friend.

which is why the idea of taxing email comes up over and over again...
Just one of the latest proposals: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2013/03/07/wozniaks-email-tax-good-sense-or-nonsense/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/27/should-government-tax-email/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/08/email-tax-post-office-gordon-wozniak_n_2838324.html
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/berkeley-councilman-proposes-email-tax-to-fund-postal-service/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/110837/article.html