Posts by jwenting

Ms.Pacman tied for first place with Total Annihillation (and yes, I'm old enough to have played those old table top console games).

Enum to the rescue?

So you want a List of Lists of integer numbers?
Why not make a List<List<Integer>>?

Indeed. In such cases, placing the funds in escrow with a mutually trusted 3rd party is the way to go.
Or get a contract under which you pay him a fee for securing you property, repayable in part or full towards the lease on that property.
Any trustworthy estate agent will offer such a contract (or simply work on an hourly wage).

There have been many cases of people scammed into paying for houses that the "agent" didn't own, in several they were even given keys and moved in on the property only to find the legal owners return later and demand they leave (the 'agent' in those cases had stolen keys or broken in and replaced locks).

I do not believe in the existence of G/god(s), but neither do I believe in their non-existence.
And as my (I know stricter than used by some) definition of an atheist is "a person who holds a religious belief in the non-existence of God" I am not an atheist.

Any God wanting my allegiance will have to come up with more proof of his/her existence than "it says in this book that I exist and am the only one, which book was written by me so it must be true as it says so" (which is pretty much the only thing any religion has).
Of course any God that actually exists would not need me to believe in his/her existence, it'd be fact and there's no reason to believe in facts (that's the very definition of a fact, something that is whether we believe in it or not).

all depends on the context. Some things/people/situations I can endure for days to months without losing my temper, other things get me worked up in seconds.

1) wrong forum
2) impossible to answer without knowing a lot about your network and especially its security settings that you don't want known outside your organisation.

According to the Chevy Volt spiel you should be able to drive the first 35 miles (after fully charging) electrically, then the gas motor kicks in.

Worse, they sell it as an electric car, never in the commercials mentioning the gasoline engine or mileage at all. The only hint it's not a real electric is the note that when the batteries run dry something else kicks in (I think they call it a "range extender device" or something like that).
Pure and simple fraud if you ask me.

If you are rich enough to buy one of those new electric cars, you most likely won't mind paying 8 to 10 bucks for gas/petrol.

The Volt has worse mileage than the average European non-hybrid car :)
The Leaf is terrible, no performance or range.

I drive a hybrid myself, without the tax credit I wouldn't as without it the cost of purchasing, maintaining, and driving one would be higher than that of a one class smaller regular car, which for me is still large enough, a regular car that is more fuel efficient btw..

Tons and tons of document management systems out there, from the very basic to the extremely elaborate.
No need to write things yourself, just take an off the shelf product, install it, and run with it. If you want to be fancy, you can configure to your heart's content (or your budget :) ).

everything can be decompiled into machine instructions, that's what the operating system does after all (and you can hook into the operating system and see exactly what it is doing) :)
Someone with an understanding can read those and figure out what is happening.

The only way to prevent decompilation completely is to not provide any executable code to the user.
This is what web applications do, all the business logic is executed on a server in a trusted environment.

Try to find a compromise. Be comfortable while not being so outrageous that you get reprimanded, fired, or passed over for jobs.
If the company tries to push you in directions you don't want to go, seek other jobs.
E.g. one company I worked for tried to force a strict dress code on all male employees (after several years of no policy except "look presentable to customers" (we only had customer contact through phone and email, so this was irrelevant to us). Dark suit, white shirt, tie, black leather shoes and knee length socks would be mandated (they even tried to mandate the style and colour of our underwear...).
This in a company where at that moment the standard clothing style had been jeans and T-shirts, sandals or sneakers (the thing was presented to us by the CEO, dressed in jeans, sports sneakers, and a sweater).

Several people left, the rest of us got together and successfully fought the thing under anti-discrimination laws (they launched it for men only, women were not restricted at all in their choice of clothing).
Most of those who did fight were forced out later, including me (though I was already looking for other work and didn't end up unemployed) of course.

Not to forget Sir Albert Einstein's hair, Dennis Ritchie's long beard, or Steve Jobs' simple blue jeans black T. They never cared about all these things , because they were busy "working", and eventually people started caring about their work too rather than their looks.

Einstein's portrait with that hair was done very late in life, well after he retired from having to go to job interviews or get "performance reviews" done.
Same with Ritchie's beard.
Jobs of course no doubt would wear a suit when on serious business, like when visiting venture capitalists or politicians whose favours he needed.

Looks matter, A LOT, unless and until the people you're dealing with already know and respect your credentials.
Which means that unless you're very near to retirement you'd best try to be able to look your best in a suit and tie if you're in this business if you want to have a broad base of potential employers open to you. And that means no pierced nose, lips, tongue, eyebrows, etc., no large or offensive tattoos you can't cover up.

There is no "best". Any such lists are either subjective and/or based on who paid the person creating the list the most money to be on it.

and, a lot of the contributors, not at all.
they're being "paid" (or maybe rewarded is a better term) by having their name as co-author. just doing their bit to make Linux all it can be.

Most of the real contributors to Linux (and other major OSS projects) are being paid a salary to do so by the companies they work for.
Companies that use that product a lot and this way can get it improved relatively cheaply as the workload is shared with other users.

The amateurs who also also contribute usually don't get much done at all (at least in comparison). The occasional patch or bug report, not much more.

support contracts and training, usually.
Extra documentation not included with the free product, book publishing rights, etc. etc.

sure, but it won't do as an "excuse" for not being constantly working on production systems when it comes to job interviews, which was your claim.
Not that anyone is going to bother asking you why you weren't permanently on production projects unless maybe the intervals are extreme.

There is no universal "best", period.

And that's a generic answer to any thread asking for what's the "best" whatever.

well ... certifications are good if your in between projects and don't want a gap on your resume.

not really. Employers expect you to do the study and exams in your spare time, rather than take time off for them.
A few days maybe for a full time course, but no more (and at least here noone's going to ask you day by day what you were doing, so ending one job at the 25th of a month and starting the next on the 1st of the next month is not going to be questioned, and that's more than enough for a 3 or 5 day course.

using arrays at all is a terrible design decision... Should use a List or maybe a Set.

Lenovo is IBM's laptop line, rebranded after they stopped selling them themselves to the Chinese factory's name.
Quality is largely unchanged, price went down a bit, don't know about support (especially consumer support, we have a corporate support contract that's top notch, but with nearly 1000 of their machines in our company they'd better offer good support).

I agree with happygeek in this case. Yes, its true most of the companies will consider your looks while recruiting you. But personally, I believe that looks really don't matter.

I agree that looks SHOULD not matter, but I know all too well that they do.
Send 2 people with exactly the same credentials to a job interview, and the one who had a haircut done yesterday and shined his shoes this morning will have a better chance than the other guy who's wearing his hair half an inch too long and comes in an old pair of sports sneakers, even if they're wearing the same suit and tie and it fits perfectly.

Add some piercings, tattoos, or one guy being even a tad overweight and the equation flips completely towards the "better looking candidate".
Only exception in those cases would be if the persons performing the interview also had piercings, tattoos, or were overweight, as they'd know it doesn't matter (but even then, and (unwritten, because of equal opportunities laws) corporate standards change so they might be required to reject you even if they themselves wouldn't mind).

@Jwent,

What do you think of the home terminal/mainframe idea? Is Windows 7 equipped to handle such a task?

If it's stable enough to meet the uptime requirements (and in my experience W7 is quite stable, but I've not had it running for years, I have however had Vista running without reboot for >2 years now as a file/print server) I don't see why not.
I'd prefer a dedicated server OS for the improved management capabilities and reduced overhead of the user interface, but for soho use W7 should suffice.

The web browser running a web application is a dumb terminal connecting to a mainframe.
A "Rich Internet Application" communicating with an application server is a client/server system.

Old ideas don't die, they just get reused time and time again.

replace "might" with "will"... Most larger companies won't hire you, especially as a junior, if you have piercings, tattoos, etc. in places that will be visible to customers (they couldn't care less if you've the name of your SM mistress tattoo'd on your butt or have a pierced penis).

Which IS better?

you still don't get it? NEITHER is "better" in general. For a specific scenario one or the other (or neither) might be preferred, but there's no overall "better".
Unless you include REXX of course.

so,You mean to say that, it's worthless to trust some proxy..

is there no way out?

sure there is: cut your internet connection permanently, destroy your cellphone, ATM card, creditcard, anything else that can be linked to your persona (travel cards, memberships, etc. etc.), cancel your rent or sell your house, empty your bank account, and go live as a homeless wanderer and beggar without ever resorting to asking for help from any agency.
Do choose a country where you aren't required to have an ID card of some sort.

And oh, a tin foil hat can help a lot too.

REXX

If you really want to use a proxy service, you may be take a look at this? Not sure if this is the kind of service you mean :)
http://www.bestproxyandvpn.com/?gclid=CNWtt83a0q0CFQSGDgod52S-lA

Kind regards,

Of course when you do that, all that information is still saved and sold to marketing firms (or worse) but now it's all in the hands of a single entity, the operator of that proxy...
I'd rather a thousand people had a little bit of knowledge about me than a single person knowing everything...

both meet your criteria :)
Personally, I prefer Ruby over Python (after trying both). Just "clicks" better with my brain I guess.

many people hate success (but only in others of course, that "hatred" is born out of jealousy and jealousy alone), yet recognise and admire it at the same time.

So they claim to hate Bill Gates and Steve Jobs while actually admiring them for what they have achieved.
Without Gates the computer would likely not have become commoditised to the degree it has been, without Jobs the handheld device market would not have matured as quickly as it has.

Facebook was neither the first nor the greatest of its kind however, hence its creator is hated more than admired. It's also a company that is far more negatively in the news currently for its treatment of personal data (privacy concerns), which is a very hot item overall in Europe (far more so than in say the US).

most hobbyists (which is most of the people here) don't have access to the tooling needed to use asp.net, hence they tend to ignore its very existence.
The Microsoft "hatred" many religiously claim doesn't help (all the while using Windows, MS Office, and other Microsoft products...).

what about actually doing your homework so you have a chance of fixing those failing grades and actually graduating?

advise: forget about it.
You're in way over your head if you think 2-3 hobbyist schoolkids can create a viable competitor to facebook in their lunch breaks.

I want to know is this window will be secure from .exe virus or spyware attacks.

it's the user who's vulnerable to those, not the operating system. That's been the case for at least a decade now.

You forget another effect, and a big one, that's especially prevalent in Apple buyers: replacement envy.

Many of them will buy every single new Apple device that gets released, whether it is an improvement (let alone an improvement warranting the cost of replacement on any objective basis) or not.
Thus I would estimate that possibly as many as 75% of iPhone 4S models sold are replacements for older iPhones (and most of them for iPhone 4 models).
While this happens to a degree in the Android market as well, it's not nearly as big an effect (and where it happens it's often people skipping to another Android vendor because of problems with an older device, or because of a major leap in functionality).

whatever is needed and available for the job at hand... Windows, Solaris, HP-Ux, AIX, Linux, you name it.

personally, I don't think any employer will go look at the exact grades.
sure, they might check on whether or not you had honours or not, but going over every exam, to check every grade for each candidate ... that would get a lot of overhead for their part.

it's also utterly irrelevant. Noone cares whether you got a 7 or a 9 (B or A) for music tuition or English literature when you're applying for a software development function.

The majority of junior jobs are created under the assumption that the candidate who gets the job knows nothing whatsoever except how to learn and learn quickly.
Having a degree from an established college or university (is supposed to) shows that, which is all that matters.

Walk into any group of programmers and the majority won't even have degrees in CS or SE. You'll find mostly physicists, biologists, the odd mathematician or economist, a few rare concert musicians (yes...), and chemists.

I am enrolled in a school that is internationally recognized because it is ABET Accredited

noone outside your own country recognised that "international accrediting" scheme.
Just another "certification" that's given to a company by itself to make it appear more than it is I'm afraid.

Learn how to use the command prompt for your operating system. The "NoClassDefFoundError" indicates it can't find the classfile you just compiled, so you're in the wrong directory.
This can be solved either by changing to the right directory to launch the program or by changing the command line of the Java command to include the proper directory on its classpath or by modifying your system classpath to include that directory (the last is not recommended, but included just to be complete).

Also learn to always put your classes in packages, but that's secondary.

I don't live in the US, live in India, so Head First C#(O'Reily) is out of hand. I am trying to download a PDF. Any other resources?

O'Reilly will sell you a PDF version of most any of their publications.

this program print random values from 100 to 0 and not repeats any printing value
check that

that's not random... A random distribution can have multiple of the same number in it :)

No, fortunately I do not know of anyone who has met one - it is just a weird bit of news that I wanted to pass along so that, no matter how bad things get, a fish did not bite your balls off while you were swimming.

sounds more like an urban legend than anything else to me. No fish will have evolved to do that, no evolutionary pressure to do so :)
And of course it'd be rather hard to target people wearing swimwear :)

indeed. After working with Java non-stop since 1997 I've been working in Unix shell scripting and C++ since november last year and hopefully will be until the end of next year (depending on budget and changing policies at the customer).

if you don't trust your kids to the point where you think you need stuff like this, you've no business giving them cellphones, tablets, or indeed any device with internet capabilities.

In my experience (limited, I've not tested many models and devices from each brand), Lenovo offers better quality than does Acer, but at a price of potentially lower performance (specs) for higher price.

Google is not at all Evil! I think the millions of spammers out there is making google look like one, if the honest practices are used, the google wont work so much on changing algorithms and site drops!

that's not what we're talking about. It's Google's collecting and handling of private information about everyone, and what they can and are likely to do with that data.
If a government department were to collect all that data they'd be villified (and rightly so) and in many countries be in direct violation of the law, yet Google (despite in many countries violating laws by doing this) gets away with it.

We discussed personal websites, not business solutions :)

OP was talking about a big website that would possibly need to scale in the future. That's business talk (or an overinflated expectation of future developments in his traffic) ;)

Nope. Since you hold the copyright on your own code you can distribute it however you like. (Unless you have signed a contract with somebody such as an exclusive licensing deal which says otherwise, of course.)

The GPL constitutes such a deal, or at least lays claim to that.
Effectively any GPL code will be in the public domain, or rather owned by the people owning the GPL (the EFF I think).
By placing your code under GPL, you give up ownership of it and replace it with "stewardship" (until someone decides to take your code and run with it ("forking") that is, or you are dethroned by your committers.

Programming without Google? Hard to imagine!

I've been doing just that for over 20 years...