Posts by jwenting

I miss an option: "all of the above and then some" :)

Umm, your F-18 is really an F-16. Count the vertical stabilizers.

Val
(retired USAF)

That's 'tails' for you kids who don't know aviation terminology :)

Also count the engines, air intakes, and bullet holes.

yes, but you're nastier than Davey ;)
I too would have left it, and rejoiced at the slaughter.

That's why you want to cut down on the percentage of rubbish being posted, and doing that by discouraging it from being posted in the first place is the first step.

And we're not talking about a link they can click that sends them to some knowledge base to get answers.
We're talking about some algorithm that comes up with likely related threads already in the knowledge base that they have to read through before they're allowed to have a post placed in the forums at all.

Have that active for the first 25 (for example) posts someone makes, certainly for the first say 10 threads someone starts, and it would present a serious barrier to the lazy homework solution demanding kids as they're too lazy to bother clicking through all those posts in turn (set up a timer as well so they can't just scroll immediately to the end of the page for the next link but have to wait say a minute at least on each page of KB articles they're getting).

Is it nasty? Maybe.
Is it nasty enough to have the desired effect? Possibly.

still haven't learned how to behave in civilised society I see?

well, it says right there what you need to do. Couldn't be much clearer than what your teacher already told you.
If you don't understand it, tell your teacher and ask him to help you.

and your question was?
Give us the name, institution, and contact details of your teacher so we can save you the trouble of having to send him the completed homework yourself...

uh no. You're using the default LayoutManager of the Box you're creating, which is not BorderLayout.
If it were, you couldn't add those labels to it like that ;)
And the default (and indeed only allowerd) LayoutManager for a Box is BoxLayout.

To change the alignment of your Components inside the Box, you'll need to add those Components each to a JPanel, which you give a FlowLayout, which you set to the alignment you want.

of course another thing to consider is the fact that your design is extremely bad.
Such long lists of if-else blocks is an almost certain sign of something that's done wrong, especially when (like you're doing) what happens inside those blocks is (almost) identical.

yes, the "= =" IS wrong. You see it on all your if statements because you do it on all of them...

The idea of a knowledge base is definitely why there is the availability to mark threads solved and only show solved threads. But a KB and a forum are two different things. Just directing new users to the KB version would undermine the whole point of an online community of ongoing discussions. Also, by only showing solved threads to everyone, no new threads would be seen, hence no more threads would ever get solved.

That's not the idea. The idea is to force kids to first look at previously solved problems similar to their own before they make yet another request for "duh koduz" of a double linked list (for example) of which there have been thousands already, all replied to with the standard "search the forums, this has been answered last week".

That's one of the main problems, the vast majority of kids coming here to get help are too lazy to even search for an answer, let alone implement it themselves.
I'd guess that 90% of questions are of that kind, easily answerable by the kids themselves by doing 5 minutes of their own research. And that's the kind of question that annoys the hell out of your longterm members, who are exactly the members you want to keep happy as according to yourself they make you the most money.

Reduce that clutter and the higher quality, interesting, questions stand out more and get more responses. That in turn MAY attract more such interesting questions …

Generally speaking, it seems to me like the level of discussion at most websites as they grow is monotonically decreasing. And there's nothing you can do about it.

Correct.
It's not just Daniweb, it's everywhere.
It's almost as if there are no new, experienced, people starting to post and people who do start to post over the last 2-3 years haven't gotten any more experienced.
What we see here (a flood of posts in extremely childlike manner that are essentially cries to do kids' homework for them, even if it's not literally homework) is repeated all over the place.
Just about the only forums where that's not the case are highly specialised support forums for single products targetted at advanced users, products inexperienced users wouldn't even know exist.

Also, the people who joined X months ago are always likely to be displeased, because X months ago, the site was the best site they could find for their purposes, so any change in the community is probably going to disappoint them.

We've already established that of the people who joined say 6 months ago 99% are no longer around. They've posted their single "do my homework for me" post, perhaps a few aggressive rants about not getting help quickly enough, and were never seen again.
Those that do stick around would be happy to see such kids stay away.

This is known as the regression effect; it's the same reason that people getting 97 …

We pulled out the last guys from NI this year i think

NI is NOT Ireland. Ireland is the Republic of Ireland where you guys pulled out 80 years ago (if not longer).

With still a 5-10% failure rate (in which I describe failure as your vision after the procedure being worse than it was before) I call it definitely NOT safe.

>Yep, so we don't need more streaming in under the fence

you still don't get it, no one gets it! most of the illegal immigrants aren't even criminals. they're not scum, they're hard workers looking for job opportunities which they don't have in their own countries.

Wrong. They are ALL criminals by definition because they crossed the border illegally which is a federal offense.

Most are NOT hard workers either, and certainly not educated workers. They're day labourers and farmhands.
Some may work hard, but they do so at the expense of Americans who are now on unemployment benefits (if they're lucky) because they've been replaced by an illegal alien working tax-free which is cheaper for a company wanting unskilled labour they can just kick out the door without the worker having anywhere to complain.

APress has an excellent book on Swing.
O'Reilly I think has a good book on JDBC (I've never used such a book though, you hardly need it given the rather intuitive API and some logical thinking).

your options are to not use a HashMap. HashMap is not sorted.
You may try a TreeMap, but that's sorted on key only.

correct. Cheaters drive legitimate players away, which costs money.
Just look at the early days of Battle.NET, where cheating and PK'ing was extremely rampant.
As a result very few legitimate players remained, and those that did often organised themselves into guilds and set out to kill the cheaters out of the game as a way of self policing the servers.

Blizzard caught on with Diablo 2 and made it a lot harder to cheat and PK, which made the environment a lot more pleasant.

And Blizzard wasn't at the time charging for access...

the physics in any FPS I've played go no further than you sinking when you get into water.
The very best may see bullets of long range weapons drift with gravity and wind, but that's as far as it generally goes.

which has exactly nothing to do with the topic of this discussion...

It's too lazy to do its own homework, not surprising it's too lazy to start its own thread to ask someone to do it for it.

Good grief, how left can you go? What would you call these people? Superlefties? Were they a thread to world peace?

you don't get it, do you?
The communists called themselves "rightwing", they had the entire thing reversed from what's considered normal here.

this is typically something you want to do in C or C++... And indeed, it is probably WAY beyond you.

and what don't you understand? The compiler gives errors which couldn't be much clearer.

you still don't understand? You're only the fourth person presenting the exact same answer. Neither OP nor you seems interested in reading responses.
And you've quite a bad atttitude, cool it down a bit.

The Shah of Iran's opposition ironically was the "religious right" in Iran.

Who were an unholy mix of communists and religious fanatics...

In the USSR the opposition to the communists was termed the "left" as well.

somewhat. Move the creation of the database connection into the dbMethod as well though and delete it as a class field (instead making it local to the method).

Create a single array of characters to print that can print the entire sequence, then create a loop where the loop index is used to determine where in the array to start.

and on what you did in between showers...
If you've done digging or construction work for example you're going to be covered in sweat caked dirt and grime, which can be quite thick on your skin...

If France would have gone to Iraq with us, would we have actually won the war?

fundamental rule of French warfare: France only wins if America does the fighting...

And Iraq is quite winnable, jbennet. Unless you get the leftists in control in Washington who are going to turn it into another Vietnam by making the exact same mistakes they made in Vietnam (micromanagement of military operations from Washington, making it impossible for US forces to engage targets by declaring large areas off-limits to military operations (and openly stating what those areas are), etc. etc.).
As it is the situation in Iraq is going pretty well. Most sectarian violence has ended, what there is is mainly government friendly forces mopping up the Iranian sponsored terrorists.

Of course the mainstream media, under direct control by Al Qaeda and their cronies in the "Democratic" Partei don't want you to know that so don't report it.
They only mention every single bomb and suicide attack as if it were a great victory for the forces of freedom (a.k.a. Al Qaeda) instead of a last ditch jerk effort by a group of loosers who know they've lost all support and initiative but can't get it into their heads that now's the time to give up and go cry on the shoulders of Hillary Clinton and Teddy Kennedy, their Great Leaders.

Not all illegal aliens take to criminal enterprise beyond the federal crime of crossing the border illegally maybe, but it is a fact that those who do are often among the worst repeat offenders.
And they often get very light sentences, being usually just kicked out of the country only to come back in a few days later.

>> Do Irish policemen wear helmets suitable for such relieve?
The Gardaí (Irish cops), don't wear helmits normally ... Their role appears to be more symbolic ... don't think they actually do anything.

Their purpose is to serve as target practice for passing British troops.
Of course there have been no British troops in Ireland for almost a century so they've indeed lost their main purpose.
For a while they instead served as target practice for northern Ireland based terrorists of both sides, but that too seems to have died down lately.

and what makes you think you get only one panel to show if you do that?

and learn some English. How do you expect to read documentation if you don't know the language?

overwrite the canvas with a solid colour.

that's the worst thing you could have done.
Creating a Connection as a class member and initialising it. Then using it in one public method without closing it while closing it in another.
And in neither case checking whether it's open...

You're not closing your PreparedStatement, which you should always do.

1) NEVER have JDBC resources as class fields.
2) NEVER leave JDBC resources open longer than strictly required.
3) NEVER rely on the user to close those resources for you.

those errors aren't generated on that line. Find out the lines with the problems (the compiler gives you the line numbers even...) and fix them.

It's been true since at least de Gaulle, if not before. Sarkozy seems a breath of fresh air, but we'll have to see how long that lasts.

have you tried it? Have you actually gone out and built something in Java using the latest in available JVMs and libraries and done user experience testing on the result?

Of course you haven't. Your preconception of what would happen is all the proof you think you need.
Of course your lack of experience with Java also means you'd be unable to create that Java application to be optimised for performance, which is another problem for a new tool to gain acceptance in an established industry.

what's "Change"? That's not a class from the standard libraries, so you need to have it somewhere yourself.
And that's what the compiler is telling you, that you're referring to something it doesn't know about.

... and who the heck thinks that France is one thread to world peace? Maybe we have bad wine year or so? Frenchmen are lovers not warriors! Come foreward and I tickle you to pieces, or make your wife happy for a change!

France is a thread to world peace through their support for every terrorist and dictator out there.
That support is not because they actually like those people (I think) but as payoffs so they'll be left alone by them.
Just another way in which France always immediately surrenders when threatened.

For French history condensed: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

The perception that the USA is the greatest thread to peace might be due to the fact that the USA has at least 1000 times the means to destroy the earth, more than any other country. It is also one very war like country!

Also, see the thousands of bodies in graves we have added in Iraq since 2003!

The US lacks that power. There's no nation on earth that has (or ever had) such power.
In fact all the weapons on the world can't even destroy the planet once, let alone a thousand times or more.
Even if you narrow it down to "just" destroying all human life, it's incorrect.
All the nuclear weapons in the world might have been (at their peak) enough to do that, and if they'd all worked as advertised and actually reached their targets there might have been an overkill factor of 3-4 times.
Still a far cry from a thousand times.
And one reason they built so many was because they knew full well that the majority would never reach their targets, so they deliberately designed for overkill.

And oh, the US does not actually have the largest arsenal.
That would be Russia (though the operational status of many of their weapons is questionable).
Maybe in numbers of actual warheads the US is ahead, but they're generally smaller warheads, enough so that the throwweight and yield of the total US arsenal is quite a bit …

Which country are you talking about? The Netherlands is not the only country out there!

I'm talking about the US here. The bill was narrowly defeated but ready to be introduced again.

Intel is the one to beat.
But if you want the top the Core 2 Duo has been beat already by the Core 2 Quad, and 8 core CPUs are on the way.

Mobo is a beast, maybe overkill. Do make sure the Quad core will work with it, check Asus' website carefully (and specifically the BIOS version requirement list which lists is the actual list of supported CPUs, not the list in the manual (that's currently biting me, manual hints CPU should work, BIOS list says it doesn't).

Don't know the cooler. I purchased an Asus Silent Knight (you'd need a Silent Knight II I think). A beast, rather expensive, but very very good and you likely won't need those 2 chassis fans.

For the RAM check the mobo specs. I'd go for Kingston myself, if you're building a system with the other components you're looking at.

PSU may be overkill, which can cause heat trouble. Think 600W.

Get the roomiest, largest, case you can get. Can't find that case with my dealer. Their P190 looks nice (and comes with 2 PSUs as standard, a 650 for the motherboard and a 550 to power things like harddisks and DVD drives).

well said, thread closed.

innovative idea: think for yourself instead of slavishly waiting for others to think for you.
If you can't manage even the thinking up of a project idea you don't deserve to pass that exam.

what about thinking for yourself? Coming up with your own ideas?
Or are you going to sit here waiting for someone to write a complete proposal and when it's OK'd by your teachers come back here and wait for someone to implement it for you?

The anti-Java attitude of the C++ "fanboyz" is highly predictable. As are the utterly flawed arguments they keep repeating again and again to "prove" that "Java is slow".
Java WAS slow, back in 1999 and before. It no longer is.
We run realtime systems in Java, systems were seconds can mean loosing or making millions, systems that according to the "Java is slow" "wisdom" could never be built in Java, and not at all using EJBs. We've done it, it works, and it screams (if the database and network can keep up, sometimes they can't).
It's fast enough in fact that we had to artificially restrict the flow of data in order to prevent overloading our customers' systems.

It may not be a 3D game, but it's mission critical and realtime. And they told us it couldn't be done because it was going to be Java...
There are similar stories all over the world.

What's hurting Java for game development is mainly the lack of easy to use libraries like the ones that most game studios have had at hand for C++ for a decade or more.
Performance is used just as an excuse, "measured" by people with no practical experience in Java using deliberately skewed "benchmarks" created by people like them who had a preconceived conclusion ("Java is slow") in mind when they set out.
Run those against old JVMs (based on the also flawed preconception that noone has anything newer …

DirectX is more than OpenGL.
OpenGL is purely graphical presentation (and animation, to an extent), the scope of DirectX is far far wider, including networking, sound, and a lot of other game related services.

OpenGL knowledge will be valuable no matter what platform you're going to work on. DirectX knowledge is Windows specific.

OpenGL also seems to change its specs less often than does DirectX, making it maybe a better thing to learn for future use.