Posts by jwenting

As a Windows replacement for non-technical users, Mint or Ubuntu would be a better choice as there's less hacking in config files etc. to be done to get (and keep!) things working.
For servers, Debian is a better bet as it's more tweakable for optimal performance.

Been there, done that, now generating pay slips for some 20.000 people.

But not going to do your homework for you, do your own.
Lazy schoolkids like you have no place getting passing grades and fouling up the job market.

As said, why would you want to have the latest everything all the time?
There's no need to upgrade every 6 months, let alone every few days.
Just pick a release that works for you (which will usually be the latest release at time of installation) and stick with it.
My old Linux server ran the same Debian release for several years before I replaced the entire machine with another one which then got installed with a version of Ubuntu I'd lying around. That one never got upgraded either until it was thrown out.
Current server runs Windows Vista simply because I couldn't be bothered to try to get Linux running on that laptop (usually I push old machines into a server role).

As to X vs. Y, I'm always extremely sceptical against anyone claiming such things.
There is no fight, there is no war, both can, do, and will coexist. Each has its purpose, each has its niche, its market.

Without knowing how that answer was arrived at it is as worthless as the other sentences.
In fact it's far less useful than the advice to try different distributions and pick the one that works best for you.

Are they telling you to use ubuntu or fedora based on personal experience? Or maybe they read that they were the "best" right here on this site?
Or do they just get paid most by the marketing departments of companies pushing those distros?

That sounds suspiciously like you're having some problems relating to the built-in firewall functionality of Windows causing some port redirects of blocks.

Check there, see if you have to open up something for things to work as expected.

Being an accomplice means actively contributing to the commission of a crime. It has nothing to do with whether or not someone is a parent. Failing at parenting through negligence is not a crime. Even if it was a crime, it is highly subjective.

Parent are legally responsible for the acts of their children. That's written into law.
So raising your child to become a criminal through either intent or neglect is a crime, it is the exact same crime for which that kid gets arrested.

and don't expect us to do your research for you.
If you're indeed a university student about to start work on his thesis you should by now be fully capable of doing original research.
A bit of library study and using some search engines would be child's play in comparison.

Of course many seem to get by in university without ever doing anything except plagiarising the work of others and handing it in as their own.
But those don't deserve the name "student" let alone deserve to get a degree, wouldn't you agree?

If the parent hasn't committed a crime, then they cannot and should not be charged with a crime.

Maybe. But in some (many?) countries the parents are the legal guardians of their offspring and legally responsible for their actions.
Thus the parents can indeed (and sometimes are) charged with the crimes comitted by their children on the premise that they were negligent in not preventing those children comitting those crimes.

There's a debate here now as to whether parents of children with a foreign passport should be thrown out of the country if their children turn into repeat offenders.
Personally I hope this happens, as more often than not these parents are both fully aware of their childrens' actions and unwilling (rather than incapable) of stopping them.
Similarly, parents of any child unwilling to stop that child comitting criminal acts should be treated as an accomplice to that act even if they were not actively involved in the crime.
For first offenders that's hard to prove of course, unless maybe the child was driven to a place where he mugs and kills someone, then driven home bloodie and with bags of loot, for repeat offenders it's often a lot more clear cut.

Parents are responsible for raising their children to be law abiding citizens. If they fail through negligence or deliberate act in achieving that, they should pay the price along with their child.
If they fail to achieve that despite best effort, …

no.

Also, if you're indeed without any real knowledge or experience programming, picking up game programming to start with is not a good idea.
It's one of the most complex areas of programming overall, requiring expertise in a multitude of fields that are the trickiest things of all (like high performance animation and artificial intelligence).

Is it so hard to find relation between set theory and databases ?

For kids like op any effort that involves their brain is hard.

So you're repeating what I just said.

no, I'm specifying and expanding on it, not repeating it.

you're not going to get your homework done for you, no.
If you have problems with specific parts of it, show what you've done and what is not working, and we can help you with hints on how to fix that.

code outside of methods....

now to change that code to actually match the coding standards.

• class names should be in CamelCase with a starting capital
• method names should be in camelCase without a starting capital
• all classes should be inside a package
• etc. etc. etc.

how does asking nicely affect one's chances of getting an answer to one's questions?
how does doing one's own homework affect one's chances of actually learning something?

don't bother to answer here, we know the answer. But thinking over the answers would teach you a lot.

Of course it isn't.
You need to first get the value of that variable from the environment yourself, and then use that to construct the actual path to write to.

So why did you do the lazy homework kiddo's homework for it?
To show how stupid you are by falling for the oldest trick in the book?
Or a misguided attempt to impress that kid with your brilliance in solving its problems for it?

...
I was just asking for an idea for a program that I could make, not for someone to make a program for me.

That's always the first step...
You're apparently unwilling or incapable of original thought, so what makes you willing and capable of implementing a project idea into an application?
Especially as that would require a lot of independent and original thinking in order to first create the design, then find out how to turn that design into code.

That is interesting. Although I'm assuming you would have to declare the fact that you're going to be passing the Exception in advance (and either way, JOptionPane would have no code to deal with the Exception even if you could otherwise pass it).

Agreed, which voids the point of using an Exception to begin with. In that case, in whatever method that generates the Exception, you may as well get rid of the Exception and just print an error message to a JOptionPane to begin with.

In general, I prefer handling Exceptions to dealing with return codes.
If a method runs to completion, no need to handle the return code and check if there's an error.
If not, the exception is propagated to a level where it can be handled with minimum fuzz :)

Dell dont have ageing PC's sitting around gathering dust and devaluing, they actually build and then thoroughly test PC's to order.

Some retail outlets sell Dell PCs (here in the UK PC World sell some models) but you're limited to what the store happens to have and you certainly wont get the absolute latest kit like you can get directly from the manufacturer.

I know that. Still a month seems excessive :(
Some stores here carry them too, but only entry level models, some of the same Dell have available for 48 hour delivery (Inspiron 15 mostly, not the Studio 17 I ordered).

Especially I think it weird that they'd not have stock of machines currently on special offer for which they should expect to get a rush of orders.

Create a hidden form field, and on clicking the button run a bit of Javascript that first sets a value to that field depending on which button it is, then submits the form.

or do something to get yourself a permaban (it's hard, but a lot of people do seem to manage).

hmm, had it somewhere. But I think it's on an 8" floppy. Must hunt down some 30 year old hardware so I can read it.
Will probably require me to first invent and build a time machine to go back those 30 years.

Week 0: come up with a different product name.
The name "Tetris" is trademarked worldwide and the owners are extremely agressive in enforcing that trademark, taking anyone using it without permission to court even if there's no commercial interest.

Read the entire entry, it tells you what's expected of classes implementing the interface.

You can't pass an Exception to a method. The point of an Exception is to signal that something went wrong and to give the person who called the method the opportunity to deal with it.

False yet true.
You CAN pass an Exception to a method. In fact that's exactly what many logging APIs do all the time to properly log them :)
I can fully understand someone wanting to pass an Exception to a GUI control in order to have that control show a proper error message to the user.

A JOptionPane however doesn't know how to do that. You'll instead have to have the method that pops up that JOptionPane analyse the Exception and generate a String with the error message to be shown, then pass that String to the JOptionPane.

dude i was just asking.. how does this make me not deserve to get into the course?

Unwillingness to do your own work, or incapacity to do so.
Tons of others out there who are willing and capable, therefore more deserving of a place in that course than you are.

If you do get in, you're just going to post every bit of homework on forums like this one, expecting others to do it all for you so you can get a nice diploma without ever having to lift a finger.

unfortunately thats not the case, the teacher gave us this problem and just told us to read a chapter that we never covered. The chapter she gave us is 9 chapters after the last chapter she covered with us, so reading it hasn't exactly helped.

Good, so your teacher expects you to be at least somewhat capable of learning without handholding.
You say you're at the stage where you're prepping your final exam and you're still not able to read or think for yourself?
And you honestly expect to deserve to pass that exam?

Get reading, get studying, read those other chapters as well and understand them.
IF you ever graduate there'll be tons and tons of learning and reading to do with noone ever holding your hand.
Let this be a first attempt at doing so where the penalty for failure is having to retry the exam rather than loosing your job.

If they're not breaking the law, there's something seriously flawed with the law that allows them to pay below the minimum wages set down in that law.
Still no reason for me to award someone for services not delivered, which is exactly the current situation.
You get to pay excessive "voluntary mandatory" "tips" and get nothing in return except a scowl.

so he/she hasn't been wrong all those years! ;)

he was, he used EMACS as his editor!

uh, not necessarilly. That will give the size in bytes of a single instance of the class, not the "size of the class" whatever that might be (op never gave any indication what he means by the term).

if you can't even come up with your own project ideas, you deserve to not get that into that course.

I was in a restaurant a week ago (in Avon, England) and had 10% option gratuity added to the bill. How the hell is it optional - they added the bloody thing to the bill. Am I now going to make a fuss and put a damper on the evening by asking them to take it off? It's my money, I decide if I want to tip, bloody cheek.

If I see a line item like that on a bill I don't ASK to have it taken off, I take a pen and strike it out, calculate a new total without the item, and pay that.
The restaurant (only place I've ever seen in) can also forget about me leaving a tip on the table (though I might give something to the waiter who helped me directly).

And no, I'm no cheapskate.
If warranted, I'll tip anyone whose service I enjoyed individually resulting in a total tip far higher than the "required amount".
But I won't be bullied into tipping any set percentage or amount determined by someone else, instead always letting the service provided determine what if anything the person gets.
Last Christmas, we tipped the musician in the restaurant €10 (in addition to something like €50+ for the waiters and cooks). Guy was astounded to get anything at all, NOONE in 2 days had thought of doing that (and I doubt he'd get anything from the communal pot of tip money as he …

No, that is why they get a salary under minimum. Because they get tips.

I'd never accept such a work situation, and I'd report the employer to authorities for breaking the law (as minimum wages ARE a legal requirement, there is no provision in the law stating that minimum wages can be lowered if the employee can get performance related bonusses which raise his income over it).

If you can't understand how the status quo (if it indeed exists, which I doubt) is severely flawed legally and morally there's nothing I can do to help you.

Don't think I'll be installing Visual Studio 2010. I don't use C++ or C# extensively enough to make the upgrade from VS 2008 Pro an economical one.
And as I don't do development targetted specifically at Windows 7 there's no technical reason for the investment either.

write good English first. Once you've managed that use that knowledge to read some good books and tutorials.
After that, you might be able to write decent code after some practice.

how were you doing it!? there are always different correct solutions! :)

He did it the hard way. He wrote an assembler, used a kernel debugger to compile that.
Used it to compile the C compiler he wrote.

Unless this is already well known from you programmers, removing the get/set methods and making variables public would defeat the purpose of 'Object-Oriented' Programming.

not necessarilly, but you would need a good explanation as to the why of the omission to convince me of it being a good design decision.

For example when creating something where the extra overhead (call stack creation...) of using getters and setters would yield unacceptable performance (think a raytracer or 3D animation package) you might want to have some class members in the core of that system that are called at extremely high rate to be publicly accessible.

indeed it doesn't.
There is no such concept as an "empty array" of primitives.
Every element of an array is always initialised to something.
In case of object types, that's null.
In case of primitive types, that's 0 (zero).

have your class Photo implement Comparable in some way.
Read the JDK documentation (and especially the API documentation for the Comparable interface) on how to do that, as well as the Java tutorial and your instructional material your teachers told you to buy.

> Change is relative, not absolute.

But it's still good. At least for someone/something. If it weren't, it wouldn't be called change, we already have `disaster` for that. :)

Not necessarilly. Iran building nuclear weapons and setting one off in say Washington DC, would be a change to the current situation which, while having some positive side effects, would overall be quite bad.
And that's just one example that comes to mind.

that should indeed work, if the stream contains objects of that type and none other.
More correct would be to read in an object, check if it's the correct type, insert it into the container if it is and somehow handle the error if it's not (log it, notify users, gracefully terminate with an error message) without crashing the program with an exception.

Where is this "getting penalized" concept coming from? I don't know about anyone else's system, but if I were designing the system (obviously it wouldn't be me doing it in real life) the bonuses would be slanted towards people like yourself who willingly teach the non-high-ability kids. You're getting penalized NOW by not having the bonus system. I'm suggesting we correct that by slanting it by giving people like you higher bonuses and more money per pupil.

It won't, in fact can't, work like that.
1) base salary would drop, penalising everyone.
2) with the average bonus, a teacher would end up at about what his prior base salary was
3) any system that identifies "low ability kids" as such WILL be classed as discriminatory as it always identifies a large proportion of kids from minority backgrounds (mainly blacks and in Europe north Africans). This is shown time and again. It will hence be abandoned as discrimination, and compensation regulated to be equal irrespective of the "inherent quality" of the raw material.

3) is in a way happening here already. It's got to the point where there are plans to FORCE parents to send their kids to "black schools" if they're white, in order to raise the average quality of kids in those schools ("black schools" are schools with a predominantly black pupil population, which happen to also be schools with universally abysmal records in education results).
This in violation of laws allowing free choice …

how we make the software through c++?

you can't. We can, but not you.

but they still served you.

which is why they're salaried.
If they were not paid a salary, you might have a point, but they are paid already to do exactly that.
If they consider that salary too low, they should try to raise it, not expect me to supplement it through social pressure and "mandatory voluntary tipping".

Does Acer laptops endure 24 hours and 7 days a week?

Depends on what you do with them. Mine's been up 24/7 for the last year, ever since I turned it into a print and file server and never use the keyboard, screen, DVD drive, etc. etc. any longer.
Before that it was rather unstable.

If you really want a reliable shop for Dell, try to check their site and buy from there.

Really? Who'd have thought :P

Did just that, expected time to deliver: 1 month. And I didn't even require any customisation of the system...

I actually doubt myself too much when it comes to programming that is why I say that I am not that smart, but what I really want to be is a java or dot net developer. Now I am confused. I was quite sure that I would be picking UNIX during the past few days but when you said this to me I reconsidered once again.

Most professionals know both Unix and Windows reasonably well (at least at an end-user level).
When you choose .NET you're going to need more in-depth Windows knowledge more likely, but Java is pretty operating system agnostic (though many Java shops are Unix-heavy when it comes to deployment/server environments).

@all:
sorry for the late reply y'all isp connection was down for a week D:

No problem. At least you did come back unlike so many who don't get the answer they desire (meaning they get reaffirmed in their delusions more often than not) and slink away into the night.

Those are pretty clear compiler errors.
I'd suggest you try to resolve them, and ask specific questions about them if you can't figure out how to go about that.