Posts by jwenting

if you don't know any programming languages inside and out, trying to write a game is not something you should attempt. Set your goals a lot lower...

Wow sounds like you needed to vent.

after having 3 tanks in a row pull half a dungeon and then quit mid-fight in a single run, yah.

yah, typo :)
Most airlines I think either didn't collect the taxes, or refunded them if prepaid, for the period.

And of course most things listed as "tax" on your ticket isn't, it's an extra charge levied by the airline to pay the flexible part of their running cost (mostly fluctuations in fuel prices).
Even the "security tax" isn't a tax at all in most places, as it's paid to the airport operator who in turn pays the security company (or the government agency performing the role) on a contract basis.

is there any youtube "tutorial" that has anything of any value in it? Wouldn't think so...

same way you connect to any other mySQL server, you just need to have it hosted somewhere it can be connected through over the internet (and of course have it properly secured).

But if you have to ask that, don't even bother trying to set something like that up as it'll end in tears.

Is it wrong to laugh while reading this? :D

Anyway the kid does have a point and maybe he'll earn some extra bucks from the right people

Sadly the kid is quite correct in his assessment about the current state of user "communities" in online gaming. Cooperation, even within teams that need to cooperate in order to win, is usually non-existent.

My own recent experience is mostly limited to WoW battlegrounds, and it's just stunning how utterly incapable of working together many (most, even) people are even in situations where not working together guarantees you'll lose the scenario.
Reading forums, people whine and qq about others not helping them succeed and survive, then immediately go out and rant about people needing help in order to survive and succeed.

If they'd think a moment before rushing off and starting to hack at random opponents, build a game plan and get some teamwork started, things would be much less frustrating.
But the current generation of players (mostly the younger ones I think, judging from their language usage) seems utterly incapable of grasping even the concept of putting the team before themselves, of lending a hand so the entire team benefits (and in the end, they will as well).
Hyper individualism, overinflated sense of ego, massive sense of entitlement ("everyone must help me even if what I do is not beneficial to the team as a whole"), etc. etc. seem the attitude of pretty much everyone you meet.

either that or have him connect to a publicly accessible server where the database will be running.

The first Clinton-era shutdown had 800,000 workers furloughed. Social Security kept about 5,000 workers on but had to recall 50,000 because of all the backlogs, new claims, and delays.

When we were about to get shutdown at the IRS, all the managers and supervisors were going to be furloughed but those of us on the phones were considered essential.

similar happened when the FDA went into shutdown for a while last year or earlier this year.
All non-essential services (meaning most anything except traffic control) were shut down, all contract workers canceled at the earliest opportunity (meaning as soon as their contracts could be terminated), no purchase of anything not directly needed to maintain essential services at minimum levels were authorised.

I'm working on traffic control software for our highways agency.

Neither programming nor networking are games where you gain "levels" as you get experience.
And there's no "max level" programmer who can one-shot a noob by just looking at them.

too late, far too late...

Nope, nothing.

yah, looks more like a poorly dressed Michael Stipe than an anorexic Bill Gates.

If the work was affordable in the first place, that may make a difference.

sadly, it won't. I've worked a volunteer job supporting from low priced game addons in the past (we got free access to the products, that's it), and we had major problems with piracy.
Some of us made it a job to look for pirated products on eBay and shut down the vendors, what they found was huge quantities of freeware (but not public domain) being sold there, often alongside products released by us and colleagues.
Most of our stuff cost like $30, hardly something to break the bank, some other companies sold things for $10 or less and still had to deal with piracy.
Of that $30, a full third was taken up by means to deter at least casual piracy and to cover the cost of dealing with it (increased load on customer support, increased bandwidth for the support forums and download servers, etc.).

If the US gov't shut down, basically all public sector employees would stop being paid and all gov't services would be shut. This includes
some low importance things like passport offices,
some moderately important things like EI, pension payments, research/scholarship payments, the military, prisons,
some highly important things like border controls (shut down of international trade and tourism), police, firefighters, medicare/medicaid,

most pension plans are outsourced to the private sector and would continue to be paid out.
most r&d and scholarship funding comes from the private sector as well
without border control, international trade etc doesn't stop, in fact it will flourish as there'll be no more duties, tariffs, etc. increasing the price of imported goods. Of course the flow of criminals from Mexico won't even be slowed down again, providing work for a lot of former police and military personel in the private security industry (and for the weapons industry to supply them).
many hospitals and fire services are already privately funded, this will increase rapidly, with service levels depending on what the customer is willing to pay for them rather than what's pushed through his throat by government decree.

Under the constitution, the federal government has 2 functions:
- international relations (thus, allowing the states to have a single voice in the world at large for things like trade agreements)
- defense
I'd add interstate infrastructure to that as a duty that couldn't have existed at the time …

you at least got that pin, all I got was a plastic card with the signature of some vp from Sun proclaiming me certifiable.

either an organisation trains and equips their staff to work with company supplied equipment only, they accept the security risk inherent in demanding employees supply their own devices for corporate activities, or they ban all corporate activity outside the office (and all private devices from the office).

Each comes with a tradeoff, and the cost to the business of both the first and last option are far easier to calculate than the cost of the middle option, causing that one to be the one most often chosen.
It used to be the last one was the one most often chosen, but the cost of not allowing working on the move or from home has gone up so much, at the same time as the availability of relatively cheap laptops, notebooks, and smartphones that it's no longer a commercially viable option for most companies.

The best option for security would probably be option #1, have the company supply the equipment and train their staff in using it securely.
But even in companies that do supply equipment, the training is often forgotten or "postponed" (indefinitely) because of timing problems.

From personal experience I know that most people will not let their children use company owned equipment, and will be more careful with it than with privately owned equipment (even if it's identical equipment).

Robert Lafore is the best for me

20 years ago he was good, didn't know he was still active :)

I dont think the console can print this. Try using it in a GUI application.

would depend on the console, but most indeed support only 7 bit ASCII

I don't know how much money Mr. Gates has, Mr. Jordan, or God, so can't draw that comparison :)

I do know Mr. Gates, though living comfortably, doesn't live "the high life" like Mr. Jordan is want to do.

the only reason they had piracy seemingly go down is because they lost all means to track it...

But yes, the cat is out of the bag and has been since the introduction of the CD-ROM some 20 years ago.

I won't however support any law that forces me to pay a "download fee" through taxes or otherwise, as that gives a free pass to lawlessness, legitimises disrespect for private property, and forces me to pay for other peoples' piracy so they can pirate all the want when I refuse to do it (I DO respect other peoples' property).

As is the only things that can possibly work is very active enforcement of existing laws, removing the business licenses and shutting down any ISP, hosting provider, and software or hardware creator or vendor who helps or shields pirates, and convicting pirates to penalties equivalent to the penalties enacted for stealing similar amounts of physical goods (so if you're caught with 20.000 tracks of pirated music, you're dealt with the same way as you'd be when being caught with 1000 CDs).
Education also plays a part, teaching kids respect for property, that it's NOT ok to steal and vandalise, and graphic examples of the consequences to them if they do it anyway.

google...

and even then there's no guarantee the browser won't simply ignore it and still cache it.
And even if the browser doesn't cache, there's always a good chance of the request going through some proxy server that does cache (and they tend to be more likely to ignore no-cache commands than are browsers).

Bill Gates money: school computers in African bush villages without electricity
Michael Jordan money: 200mph capable Ferrari stuck in an LA traffic jam

Both actual, Bill Gates donates a lot of money to organisations buying computers and medical supplies for developing countries, Jordan spends it all on expensive toys for himself...

- learn English
- take some lessons in communications skills

You're incapable of describing or maybe even formulating your proposal in a way that other people can understand, resulting in rejection upon rejection.

both numbers are just examples, and not to be taken literally :)

So yes, there exists a cryptographic function f(a,x) that yields a result b.

do what you read about, as you read about it.
There's no substitute for hands-on experience.

you're supposed to do your own homework, and coming up with a project title IS part of your homework.

If you can't even do that, how can you be expected to be a creative professional?

he can't answer right now, all his fingers have been reduced to bloody stumps by all the typing he's done over the last 3 years and he's still only 20% done with his 6000 page work :)

So if I did buy it in the US, I could still get the store if it comes out in the UK, I don't need a region specific device? And I could use a US proxy if all else fails.

No, you'd need a US billing address and a credit card issued by a US bank attached to your Amazon account.

no. Expect to pay about twice as much for something like an HTC Flyer or Samsung Galaxy tab.

With your sloppy English, you'll never even get your job application letter past an initial screening.

There's tons of jobs that don't require background checks or security clearances, which you'd fail.
There's also a lot of companies that won't hire people with a criminal record on general principle (whether right or wrong, they reason that if you did something bad once they can't trust you to not do it again even if it's decades later).

But you're planning to go into security jobs, with a criminal record. Worst possible combination.

anyone in the know would be under a strict NDA to not talk about it.

The store will be international, since you will be downloading app from its Amazon store.

no, the Amazon app store is not available for customers outside the USA and maybe Canada.
No indication when and if that will change.

You will also have no access to any of the streaming services (so no movies, music, etc.) through the Amazon cloud and Amazon Prime, which also are at the moment unavailable outside the US (and seem to be unavailable outside the US even for US customers).

This may of course change over time, but there's no indication from Amazon as to if and when that will happen (Amazon doesn't usually release such information, customers suddenly finding capabilities unlocked they previously couldn't use, with a press release following a few days after once everything has been shown to indeed work to expectations).

Amazon is very strict (and rightly so) in enforcing intellectual property rights of their vendors, and at current there are no contracts in place allowing the distribution of that media to customers in the EU (and the same for many eBooks, though that situation is evolving as more and more publishers consolidate their electronic publication rights).

Sony has a newer Android tablet (Tablet S) that I would like to get my hands on.

I tried one, and wasn't impressed.
The supposed "ergonomic design" means it's a lot thicker on one side than the other, with a curved back.
This makes it impossible to use in portrait mode, as it's nearly impossible to hold well.

It's surprisingly heavy for a 10" tablet, weighing in at a whopping 1/3 more than the Samsung Galaxy tab 10.1 (the featherweight in the market).
The Sony is also priced high, compared to other 10" Android tablets (and slightly over the Samsung, which used to be the top priced generally available one).

In all, I decided to purchase the Samsung. Mainly because of its weight, combined with an overall very good experience with other Samsung devices (and some trouble with Sony computer hardware, mostly their Vaio laptops).

I've had the same thing for several years with my old Vaio (though a different model), and read since on the web it seems quite common (Google search on "Vaio hang" returns the usual flood of nonsense but filtered out over half a dozen cases of the exact same symptoms for all different models on just the first few pages).

What I've found is that
1) the machine will hang some 5 minutes after initial boot of the day
2) after that continue running until some time after midnight, at which time it hangs again
3) see 1 :)

Now the weird thing, which might point to the problem:
When I tried to load Ubuntu 11 on the laptop, the installation went without a hitch, but on first boot it failed on a battery check and hung there every time, irrespective of whether a battery was installed or not.
This I think indicates a problem with the loading circuitry. Of course mine is long out of warranty so I'm probably not going to pursue getting it fixed as this would probably be more expensive than replacing the machine with a more current model (in fact the problem didn't start until some time after warranty had ended, as usual).

Reinstalled from the recovery CDs, ran system diagnostics from the recovery partition, found nothing out of the ordinary (but it only checks hdd and ram).

OEM licenses are linked to specific hardware, it's quite possible those keys will not work on any hardware except that specific type of laptop.
And as caperjack says, most likely the machines were delivered to your dealer with W7 installed, and they just took a few hours or days to reload them all with XP instead.

I know that's what our IT department does with new machines, whatever they come with is wiped and replaced with a preconfigured image, the license stickers on the bottom no longer relating to what's actually installed on them (but relating to what used to be installed on delivery from the factory).

It works that way with Vista at least. There's a license sticker on the bottom of my old Vaio, but I never have to enter the number when reloading it from the recovery discs (I would need it if I ever installed Vista on it from a Vista installation disc set), meaning it's pre-activated before delivery to the customer.

So no, those keys will not likely work for other machines for a variety of reasons.

are you sure you're actually overriding it and not overloading?
Check your source, especially argument lists.
And check your spelling, a typo in the name of the function that was supposed to override the one in the base is easy to make and the compiler won't catch it.

keep dreaming. Perfection is impossible to achieve, and trying for it will only frustrate you immensely.
It's also not wanted, as it would be far too expensive. So we try for "good enough" for some definition of "good enough".

you can't get such protection, unless you register all possible variants of the name you want in all countries that allow domain registration.

And it is probably impossible to not break the law somewhere, as laws can and often do contradict between countries.
But IANAL, just applying common sense here :)

Any project which is written in C/C++/PHP/JAVA

wrong attitude. Find something that interests you on a functional level, not some randomg project just because it is created in a specific programming language.

guidelines? Stop waiting for people to do your homework for you and get to doing it yourself is the only one you need.
You have everything you need to do pretty much predigested in your assignment text, even a picture of what it should look like.
As homework assignments typically don't ask you to do things you're not supposed to know yet, you should already know everything you need to do the work, IF you've been paying attention in class.

1) find a project
2) join the mailing lists
3) read the bug database
4) download the source
5) get working
6) submit patches/bugfixes
7) eventually, maybe, get commit status

easier still (and much more secure) to just buy one of the plethora of available commercial products to handle license key generation and distribution...

that'll never compile...

once you get into the real world, certifications are pretty much useless as professionals generally understand that most people holding them didn't study to understand the subject matter but merely crammed to pass the exam.

with disk images and/or virtual machines, it should be a breeze.
Just make a vmware image, and for each candidate remove the used image and put a new one with the same name in its place.

Of course if you're inviting a thousand people over for the test your recruitment process is fundamentally flawed, as 990 of them should have been set aside before ever getting to that stage.

quality pays for itself, and I'd rather spend a bit now than have to survive on a disability pension in a few years...

and most likely you'll then never be able to play it again without that hack as Steam has a tendency to lock things to the system it was first used on, which would be registered as an Oz based machine.

page number is relative to the number of posts you configure to be displayed per page :)

Let's keep it at: a mac mini can be useless for specific purposes :)

we have no idea what he needs it for... It is just that discussion after it grow in other directions :)

pseudorandom mentioned it being useless to play Quake III :)