Posts by jwenting

Can you emagine a world without the great pyramids? What a pitty for humanity if those 2,000 year-old objects were destroyed in a war.

won't happen in a war, though they might get damaged.
But the "friendly" muslim brotherhood (aka al qaeda, aka the taliban) were planning to blow them up as signs of heretical religions before their guy morsi was thrown out by the army (once the army remembered its duty is to the constitution, and the guys in power were violating that constitution) similarly to them blowing up those statues in Afghanistan.

Not saying they'd have succeeded, would take a larger amount of high explosives than is likely available in Egypt, but they'd have been able to blast some serious holes in the pyramids.

Arrest Asad and his high command for war crimes, and put them on trial.

what war crimes?
1) there's no evidence chemical weapons were used in combat, let alone by government forces, let alone under orders from the president.
2) there's actually strong indication that the victims are the victims of the rebels (al qaeda that is...)
3) even if the Syrian government were responsible, Syria is no signatory of any treaty barring the use of chemical weapons, therefore can't be held responsible for violating such a treaty.
4) it's an internal affair in an independent nation. Why are we so upset about this when there's a rumour that someone used weapons against civilians that …

sheesh, still at it trying to land that job at a high profile company after being supposedly already rejected by all of them?

first learn to write coherently. Your wall of text causes most people (including me) to simply give up after a few sentences (if they even get started).
So the only thing I got from your rant was that you want to become some sort of super programmer without ever actually putting in any effort to get the training to become one.

Not a good impression, is it?

what about just looking at http://www.hibernate.org ?

Obama wants a war, Al Qaeda gives him an excuse to attack a sovereign nation state.

And nobody thinks it weird that we're in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Tunisia are supporting the very people we're fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, supplying them with weapons that they're sending there to use against us?

if this kind of threads is what they need to 'advertize' their product, .... , might tell us something about the quality of said product.

quality of sad products you mean? :)

At the time development of Win8 started, market research showed that by 2012 there would be such a demand. And an even greater demand for laptops with touch screens which were projected to have almost replaced desktops and traditional laptops by now.
That was 5-6 years ago.
If their marketing firm misread the market, you can't blame Steve Balmer for it, not the Win8 dev team who just built what they were told to build based on long term market projections that turned out to be wrong.

you could start saving up for all the books, software, and computer equipment you're going to need...

not if the software were designed as such. I'd consider it a failure of my firewall to detect the intrusion attempt, and as anyone on the internet should have I've a hardware firewall as well as a multilayer software firewall in place to prevent just that.

And you've still posted nothing but vague rumours and accusations.
EU (and especially German and French) government agencies are not unknown to post lies and other falsehoods about US companies in order to stir up political sentiment for more trade restrictions and forcing EU countries to "buy European".

so now because of some rumoured secret chip in PCs that allows the government to control your computer an operating system is not safe?

you're still trying to get that job at a high profile company, despite being turned down time and time again, and people telling you to start looking for some lower hanging fruit?

You're just going to get more rejections that way. There's a reason Amazon and others turned you down, and Google's going to turn you down for the same reason.

if Shaw uses a US based hosting provider, chances are good the data ends up in some NSA program even if he's a Canadian based company.
Even if his traffic passes through the US on its way somewhere else it'll end up in an NSA program (though possibly another one).
And for that traffic, there's not even any protection under the national security act of 1948, which put down that US foreign intelligence services are not to launch operations on US soil. IOW not just the NSA (which from its conception was not listed as a foreign intelligence service precisely to excempt it from that law's restrictions) but the CIA as well are allowed to read your mail.

And that's the big one, why even using a non-US service doesn't mean you won't get your mail read by Obama's snoops, your cellphone calls not recorded.
And of course many countries (UK, Netherlands, I think Germany, France, Belgium, etc. etc.) are clammoring to install similar programs and have already admitted to sharing their own residents' records with the NSA.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.html good tutorials, documentation, etc.

Yes, it's a bit of a dry read if you're young and want to just jump into the thick of things, but just jumping in isn't going to make you a decent developer, you need a solid background.

@Plazmotech this is no place for religious wars between languages. C++ isn't "much, much better" in general, or even in many specifics, to Java. It might be more appropriate for some things than Java, for other things it's decidely inferior.
And without knowing what OP wants to use his knowledge for in detail, it's impossible to make that assertion. For example if he wants to write for Android, C++ knowledge will be pretty much useless to him.

in my experience, with experience you get more cynical, more fatalistic, more focussed on getting the job done at all rather than whatever high ideals about beautiful results you may have had in the past.

"started learning java through youtube" does not bode well for someone wanting to make a career out of software development.

And no, you should not look at specialised game programming curiculi, they're far too narrow and you're almost certain not to find employment in the field, certainly not long term employment.
It's an incredibly fast paced industry, most people entering it burn out or leave within 5 years, those with overly narrow training finding themselves unemployable.

Game programming sounds like fun, but once you realise it's just another job and you're not being paid to play games all day the novelty quickly wears off, yet the incredible work pace, the massive stress brought on by deadlines that are known to be impossible to meet even before development starts, the constant push from on high to make those deadlines tighter while adding more and more to the release, that never changes.

Rather than 'conquering' the Tibetans the plan is to overwhelm them with numbers. At the end of the current phase, the Han Chinese will outnumber the Tibetans and there will no longer be a 'Tibetan' culture

which is taken directly from the Soviet system of supplanting Russians into central Asia in order to "Russify" the central Asian republics.
Of course the Soviets combined this with forced migration of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of the original inhabitants of those republics to Siberia where most of them succumbed to disease and exposure (they were literally dumped in the forest along the side of the railroad with nothing but some shovels and other tools and told this was their new home).
I'd not be surprised if China is using similar "relocation programs" to move Tibettans to their northern plains, near the Mongolian border, where entire cities are crumbling to dust that were constructed there in the last decades without any reason other than to meet targets on construction of new houses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

It succeeds, but you're using the result incorrectly.

uh, no. You're wrong on all counts there...

ORIGINALLY the javax packages were eXtensions (or some people say eXperimental) to the language which were distributed separately.
Rather than cause all the code that was already using them to break when they were integrated into the core distribution, the package names were kept.

It's a lesson in careful design of your public interfaces, what not to do when designing a naming system :)

at least in Canada, you would not be required to decrypt files either for cloud or locally hosted files unless a search warrant was first produced.

AFAIK the same is true in the US. E.g. for telephone records, to get the duration and sender/recipient data the government needs no search warrant, to get a wiretap installed and listen in on a conversation they (for now, the Holder injustice department is trying to change that) do need one.

DropBox has admitted that unless you encrypt your files before uploading they can be accessed by the authorities upon request.

which is not surprising as they're legally required to provide such access...
In fact encrypting the content might leave you liable to criminal charges of obstruction of justice in case there is a court order to access those files and you refuse to supply the means to decrypt them.

Dropbox works for me, and doesn't have the problems some people are having with Skydrive where trying to load a file into their applications that's hosted on Skydrive causes their computers to crash (which is probably due to those applications, not Skydrive).

you might well be able to send email directly from your database from a trigger on the table that you're monitoring.

well, you're trying to read from the resultset (on line 10) before you've progressed the pointer to the first record, which is what's causing that error.

define "better" :)
It's certainly convenient, if the files aren't very large.

you're going to have to learn Java if you're going to use it, there's no way around it.
Trying to push an entirely different development model into the language isn't going to get you very far.
With your attitude you're setting yourself up for a very rapid failure.

Follow some Swing and applet tutorials, and you'll see instantly that what you're trying to do isn't going to work.

hey, if the opposition expects you to do something, do something so completely different they'll never suspect it were you even if they discover it.
I'd call that smart, not embarrassing ;)

and another miracle cure from some bozos who no doubt will start selling it to gullible fools who have been talked into believing that real medicine is out to kill them.

the best energy drink is water :)

yup. My 10 year old machine's still chugging along nicely as a file and print server. Been rebooted twice in the last 5 years, both times after a blackout caused it to lose power.
Only other real trouble I've had with computers since like 1995 have been triggered by hardware failure or other reasons external to Windows as well.

I have been told that when entering the US, customs officials can insist that you reveal the password for an engrypted file or partition. I am not aware if anyone has successfully challenged the legality of this, for example, by claiming that the encrypted information contains priviledged lawyer-client communications.

you'd just be detained even longer and probably end up with a terrorism charge just to get you to cooperate.

best way to avoid trouble is to have nothing to hide, so no pirated stuff, no pr0n, and no bomb making plans.

I remember a quote from a 1949 Popular Mechanics Magazine (yes, I realise this was 20 years prior to 1969) that read "In the future, computers may weigh no more than five tonnes."

similar to IBMs statement around that time that "there will never be a need for more than 5 computers in the world" :)

He did become the richest and most powerful man in modern history.

AH actually was quite rich from the royalties on Mein Kampf...

and what nobody's mentioned yet:

• stay hydrated
• have your eyes checked

One of the things that put me off Linux was the large amount on information that is assumed to be common knowledge. If I asked a question I only ever got 50% of what I needed for the solution

you got lucky. 90% of questions are answered with a rude "read the f*ing manpage, idiot", including questions on how to use man to read manpages.
Of course half those manpages either don't exist or are years out of date because nobody bothered to keep them up to date, documentation not being "fun".

yes, the contains() method checks whether a Collection contains a specific item, not an item that's just of the same type.

It's like putting marbles in a jar, each marked with a number. You check the numbers when retrieving marbles, not whether you got a marble.

just reset the position to where you started and reuse the instance :)

which is exactly the same BS people spewed about the move from Windows 3.x to Windows 95, NT4 to Win2K, Vista to W7, ad nauseum.
And then a few months later complain when the new game they want doesn't run on their now outdated operating system.

Using that logic, you'd still be using CPM 1.0 (if not something even more ancient) because everything that came after can only have been worse.