Posts by jwenting

correct. If you can't stand any criticism at all and expect to be spoonfed everything by someone holding your hand, you should not look for it online but hire an extremely thick skinned private tutor.

JPEG doesn't know anything about transparency.
If you create an image in Photoshop, save it as a JPEG, then open it again, you'll also see a solid colour whereever you didn't place content earlier.

>> Is there a free compiler / interpretter for Delphi (if any, which) and / or an IDE?

Yes, a somewhat limited version is available for free. An interpreter isn't needed as the compiler produces Windows native code.
Delphi, being a complete product, comes complete with an IDE.
http://www.codegear.com/ (for the full thing)
http://www.turboexplorer.com/ (for the free thing)

>> Is Delphi easy to learn, or hard?

As everything, it's easy to learn the basics but you can spend years mastering it.

>> Is there a way to make graphical applications in Delphi?

Of course.

>> And also, what about full blown applications?

Of course.

>> Is it a full language like C++,

Borland's C++ compiler is written (in part) in Delphi...

the page loaded into the iframe is a completely separate entity, and has nothing to do with the page in the main frame.

While they can communicate using cookies and Javascript, that's not recommended (just as the use of iframes is not recommended, and in fact in the latest html standard they've been removed).

has education really gotten so bad over the last decade that EVERY single "student" has only bad teachers?

Somehow I can't believe that, more likely the teachers are just as good but the students have gotten worse (a phenomenon I observed when I was a senior student, and seems to have gotten worse and worse as time went by).

Maybe if you'd actually paid attention in class you'd have learned something...

If you've gotten an assignment to write a game, your teacher will have taught you (or at least attempted to) everything you need to know, or certainly enough that you should be able to figure the rest out for yourself with the help of your books and the library/internet search engines.

no, endl should be the standard way to do things.
\n is not portable, it's a throwback to C.

well said Rashakil. Next they're going to demand their kids get free meals at posh restaurants each day...

And you expect an unbiassed answer here?

VB isn't really a programming language at all, it's a rapid prototyping tool for user interfaces.
Anyone using it for more than that is asking for trouble.

That said, C++ isn't perfect. Nothing is.

yup. A PC with a wireless card AND a normal card acting as a bridge.

who is this "many"?

Sounds like your typical FUD piece by someone who can't get "it" and blames that on his internet addiction.

Get away from those porn sites and into a bar.

where do you change orderNum in order to ever leave the recursion?

I see your point -- in a professional setting. But
tells me your apprehension is unfounded and the OP may be using a technique beyond him at this time. I may be wrong, but it's worth pointing out.

IMO you should start people by teaching them the right way to do things, rather than teaching them a quick hack now and later trying to explain that they were taught to do things incorrectly because the right way takes a few more lines of code.

No, it is NOT incorrect.
The flag has nothing to do at all with the KKK, which exists everywhere equally.
It also has little to do with slavery and racism (certainly traditionally) as both existed equally in north and south (and still do).
If the south had more slaves per citizen that was because 1) there was more labour intensive unskilled work to be done and 2) the population density in the north was far higher.
The attitudes of the people towards their slaves were no different (if anything, house slaves in the south were likely better off than many of their opposites in the north).

The left claims that the north attacked the south to abolish slavery there, which is completely bogus.
The north had slavery until well after the civil war, the war was purely a war of agression against a group of states that had decided to leave the union (which was their right, as every state has that right).

Racism is rife everywhere, and is fueled by the leftist policies of "equal opportunities", "affirmative action", or as we call it here "positive discrimination".
Such policies make that minorities get hired based not on merits but skin colour, causing tension in companies where they are viewed suspiciously (did he earn his right to that job or was he born into it) and especially among the jobless who feel they are passed over by someone else simply because they're white …

And we're not going to do the homework for lazy kids who can't even be bothered to try and hide that it's homework nor try to come up with a title that's even remotely descriptive.

We WANT such kids to fail so they won't bother us as potential colleagues later.

Starting with VB will only teach poor practice, don't do it.
Java is a better option, but will take you as long to master as does C++.
C# seems to be a slightly smaller language to learn.

What language you start with hardly matters as long as it's a good one, which C or C++ certainly is, and you have good teachers and documentation.
"Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours" and similar books don't count, those books aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

When you start, don't get caught up into learning an IDE thinking you're learning the language, which is what happens to a lot of beginners.

Get a good book or two, like "Accellerated C++" and "Objects, Abstraction, Data Structures, and Design using C++" and go through them one step at a time from beginning to end, repeating everything until you understand it.
This won't take 2 weeks, or even 2 months, but you'll soon grasp the basics.
You may also want to get you a copy of Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" in the latest edition (3rd I think by now), which is THE standard reference for the language.

You're both despicable.
You're destroying company property and wasting company time.
You should both be fired on the spot.

args.length is the length of the array of commandline arguments.
If you don't pass any arguments that length will be 0 ;)

Don't do other kids' homework for them, it only leads to stupid lazy people gaining diplomas.

well, a lot of application manuals tell you something like "click with the mouse on the printer to print".
Someone's bound to take that literally :)

A blank vote is the traditional way to oppose all candidates.
Your vote is registered that way but goes to noone. If enough people do it every candidate will feel it in their percentages, showing them they're unpopular.

But the only way to maybe influence who's on the lists of candidates is to join a party and take part in the party congress where the candidates are selected.

Yes, there are elections coming up here as well. And I'm inclined to vote for someone I don't like one bit.
Not because there's noone I would rather vote for but to prevent someone I like even less from getting the majority.
Would that happen we'd face a communist government here, which is worse than the alternative.

do your own homework kid.

an attempt to pinpoint the simplest and most usefull applications for people who for the most part don't necessarily need a desktop computer.

In other words the greatest common denominator of all the dumbed down features of every wizzard.
Proves my point :)

people who deliberately (which means in large quantity, and despite being told not to) continue to use SMS speak should be banned.

There is no "best", at best there might be a "best" for some specific purpose.

I constantly wonder why people can't get that simple fact into their brains (or what passes for one).

Best current free compiler/editor for Windows is Microsoft Visual C++ Express linked with the Windows 2003 Platform SDK.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/

More standards compliant than older (free) compilers, which is about all that counts for people learning to program.
And if you're using it commercially you might as well pay a bit for a current Intel or Borland compiler (or a more advanced version of Visual Studio).

You should be with your nose in your books rather than surfing the web.

You seem to have no concept of English at all yet think you're perfectly capable of reading it and judging others in their skills.

Go back to school little kiddie, and pay attention in classes for a change instead of looking under the skirts of the girls in front of you.

"What i've been hearing lately that if you want to become a Software Engineer, you have to get a B.S. in Computer Science"

hmm, never noticed that. 90% of the people I've worked with over the past 10 years (and about 95% of those who were any good to work with) didn't have a computer related degree at all.
Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, ex-teachers, a butcher, but hardly any computer related degrees.

In fact the people with computer related degrees I met more often than not were completely useless. They thought they knew everything but in fact were so narrowminded that what they produced more often than not was worse than useless.
Beautiful theoretically perfect designs that were impossible to implement while retaining any performance, overly complex solutions that would never work (and certainly not be done within budget), pompous attitudes towards everyone else because only they with their degrees could possibly know, etc. etc.

I don't use diagrams (especially implementation diagrams like class diagrams) that ridigly.

They're great for visualising concepts and planning things, but don't see them as the final product.
For me they're more quick sketches of what I'm intending to do, rather than a dictate of what's really there.

They'll therefore also be rather sketchy, often containing only the bare minimum in fields and methods needed to convey the core functionality of a class rather than every smallest detail.

Overly complet diagrams are a pain, precisely because of the effort needed to keep them in synch with the code.
And remember that documentation that's out of synch with the thing it documents is often worse than no documentation at all as people will not know the documentation is incorrect and therefore assume that your code does what the documentation says it does (which obviously it won't if the two are out of synch).

Class diagrams should be thrown away IMO after the code is complete.
When needed they can always be recreated from the code, every halfway decent UML system has an import feature for that.

A major problem in many large organisations though is too great a separation between the people thinking up the system architecture and the people implementing it.
A mass of documents and diagrams (often way too detailed for a document that should be an architectural overview rather than documentation for an existing system) is shoved down the …

A class diagram has no direct relationship to the usecase diagrams.

A single usecase may use classes from several class diagrams (typically you'd have one class diagram per package for example, plus several linking packages together maybe).
similarly a single class diagram may provide classes that are used on several use cases (or even all use cases in case of highlevel classes and interfaces).

write a distributed generator for project titles.
Should come in handy for websites like this, kids could just click a button and get a random project.
Saves us a lot of work answering the dozens of questions each semester from kids having to think of a project to do for school and too unimaginitive or lazy to think for themselves.

he does need the PSDK, as the versions shipped with VC6 are so far outdated that VC2005 will not work with them.
VC2005 requires the latest version of the PSDK.

any code you write during office hours belongs to the company, not just complex code.
Depending on your contract (and legal conditions in your locale) they could even claim that any code you write during your spare time belongs to them as well.

Java is case sensitive, keep that in mind.

Standard convention is to use CamelCase for everything except constants.
ClassNames start with a capital letter, and have every First Character of Every Word capitalised.
method and attribute names start with a lowercase letter.
CONSTANTS are in all uppercase.

This isn't enforced by the compiler but is generally accepted. The number of people who don't do it is very small and they're disliked by everyone else.

Classpath should contain the current directory (".") as the very least. You can add downloaded libraries you use a lot, though adding those dynamically when compiling and running is often preferred.

http://www.fred.net/tds/noodles/noodle.html

And someone's response to the above:

Whoa, man. This guys' conclusions are all wrong. There is absolutely no reason why Noodleous Doubleous should be construed as a separate species, when it should be patently obvious that the Penne and Rigatoni are simply conducting their mating ritual.

Let's examine each pasta's physical characteristics.
The Penne is small, has a smooth carapace, and two pointed ends: all features designed to facilitate penetration.
The Rigatoni is larger (so to protect her brood, similar to the red-tailed hawk), has a ribbed outside to ward off wayward Penne (since it would be evolutionarily unfavorable to pass on such incompetent genes), and is just the right size to sheath the Penne.
The Rigatoni is oriented vertically, while the Penne is at a 45° angle. This allows the Rigatoni to remain in place and conserve nutrients for the gestation period, while the more aerodynamic Penne needs to come to the female, undoubtedly a goal attained only after fighting off all other competing Penne in the area. The fact that all Rigatoni were oriented the same way (and likewise the Penne) suggests the pasta have either a genetic or societal aversion to same-sex relations, as such unions would not bear offspring. The bubbles coming from the dorsal end of the Rigatoni clearly indicates the Rigatoni's willingness to mate and serves much the same purpose as cats caterwauling, or cows balling.

Further, let's examine the conditions under …

Don't use Paypal, they're a known scam operation. Thousands of people get their bank accounts cleared out every year by Paypal (all legal under the usage agreement too, you give Paypal complete control over your bank account when you sign up with them).
If Paypal is required to use eBay, don't use that either.

You can get the mouse coordinates of the mouse.
That will give you the location on screen.
From that you could get the Component the mouse is over.
From that you can retrieve a Graphics object which can draw that component.
From that you can retrieve an offset Graphics object which can draw that component somewhere else (if I read the API docs correctly).

What I don't know is whether any of that will do you much good :)

You could test it of course by setting something in one program, then running another program to check whether that setting is still there :)

My GUESS is that they do persist, as the call can be influenced by a security manager. But I must admit I never tried it. If I need system props at all (usually file.separator, path.separator, and line.separator and little else) it's readonly.

I've 5000+ slides in my private collection. That's enough to allow me to change my desktop once a week for almost a hundred years.
And I photograph enough to add to that collection at a rate of maybe a hundred a week on average, so I'll never run out :)

Problem

Due to a rather annoying and very old bug in JTable you will never get a horizontal scrollbar on a JTable even if the table is wider than the JScrollPane you placed it in. According to the bug report this is due to an error in the handling of the autoresize functionality of JTable.

Solution

There are two ways around this: the first and easiest (which may be good enough for most people) is to turn OFF autoresize on your JTable using table.setAutoResizeMode(JTable.AUTO_RESIZE_OFF); (where 'table' is a JTable).

The second (more involved) way is to fix the responsible function in JTable (which would involve creating a custom subclass of JTable).

The code that you need is listed (I haven't tried it!) in bug report #1027936

Override JTable.getScrollableTracksViewportWidth() to honor the table's
preferred size and show horizontal scrollbars if that size cannot be
honored by the viewport if an auto-resize mode is selected. Here is
the suggested change:

/**
     * Returns false to indicate that horizontal scrollbars are required
     * to display the table while honoring perferred column widths. Returns
     * true if the table can be displayed in viewport without horizontal
     * scrollbars.
     * 
     * @return true if an auto-resizing mode is enabled 
     *   and the viewport width is larger than the table's 
     *   preferred size, otherwise return false.
     * @see Scrollable#getScrollableTracksViewportWidth
     */
    public boolean getScrollableTracksViewportWidth() {
   	if (autoResizeMode != AUTO_RESIZE_OFF) {
 	    if (getParent() instanceof JViewport) { …

And of course them sending veritable floods of CDs all over the world, including to countries where they don't even operate (don't ask me why).
That too may have declined, at least I've not seen them here (or maybe they've become smart and realised they don't operate in this country).

But Troy has it right. Their non-standard service causing immense trouble for communication, the general morosity of their members (to the point where "aol!" became equivalent with "watch out, idiot in the room"), that's the reasons right there.
It'll probably take a generation or more for it to wear off.

Cain, you can never tell who is a "future terrorist".

Maybe you'll one day come to the conclusion that the only way to get your point across is to blow up something, does that mean noone should ever hire you for a job?

Bin Laden didn't receive any funding from the west (at least directly, organisations he was involved with during the liberation war in Afghanistan agains the Soviet invasion may have).
He doesn't need such funding as he has quite a bit of money of his own (estimated several hundred million, probably less now).
Saddam got funded by everyone at some point, first because he was opposed to the fanatics in Iran (who WERE funding terrorism at that time and still are today), later because there was money in it (oil sales to Russia, France, China, North Korea, etc.).

As a nation you support other nations (and groups in nations) that share your interests.
You can't tell what will happen with those nations or groups years or decades later.
I'm sure the Soviets would never have helped the Chinese in Korea if they'd known those same Chinese would a few years later use that equipment and training to attack the USSR in order to gain access to the mines and oilfields in Siberia (a war that lasted for over 20 years yet was never reported in the west despite involving at its height tens of thousands of troops on either side (making …

Of course those translations are usually of a very poor quality and completely useless for technical stuff, humour, etc. etc.

Best thing is to learn the other language. German isn't that hard, especially reading it.
I've been speaking German reasonably well since about the age of 4, and I'm very bad at learning languages (in fact I didn't master English until I was 17).

ah, another terrorist sympathiser trying to turn Iraq into Vietnam.

Like it or not bozo, but there are less people dead in Iraq from violence than there are people dead from traffic accidents.
In fact, the number of troops hurt in Iraq due to accidents that would happen in peacetime is higher than the number hurt in Iraq (per 1000 people).
The daily casualty count due to Saddam's violence against his own people was several times higher than the number of people being hurt right now (and most of those are terrorists).
Of course you don't want to acknowledge that because it doesn't fit your agenda.

And then we don't even mention the good our troops do there.
Building schools, hospitals, providing education and healthcare to scores of people that never had it before because Saddam didn't like them.
But then you don't want that known do you?

Because all you want is to turn the world against the US and in favour of Muslim fundamentalists, to establish Muslim law as the law of the land all over the world and mullahs as the rulers of the planet.

interesting site, will have to see how objective they are though (oftentimes individual quotes from the Qu'ran (and other religious scriptures like the Bible) are taken out of context to make them appear to say something they don't).

wrong :)
Nuclear reactors use nuclear fission (the splitting of heavy isotopes into lighter ones), stars use nuclear fusion (the combination of light isotopes into heavier ones).

Asif, Server_crash, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all pray to the same god. Islam and Christianity are both offshoots of Judaism in fact, with Islam being hundreds of years younger.
In fact, Islam is now (at an intellectual and spiritual level) where Christianity was during the Crusades (so the early to mid middle ages in Europe, around 700-800 years ago) and Judaism was somewhere around 2000-2500 years ago.

All 3 are heavily fractured, and suffer from severe infighting among these factions/sects (which makes them less dangerous to the outside world because a lot of effort is spent in killing each other which would otherwise be directed in joint efforts to kill people adhering to other (or no) religion.

Unix will suffer its own version of the Y2K problem in 2038. Because of the way it represents dates internally as an integer it will in 2038 roll over.
This doesn't affect 64 bit versions but those are still (and will likely be by then) not universally used (given that there are still 30 year old Unix machines operating today, 32 bit machines purchased now will likely be in operation in 2038).

The entire rep thing is pretty useless. I've yet to see a site where it doesn't lead to strive and popularity contests to get the highest rep.

I don't get it. They sue people for downloading songs which cost 1$ a piece, but there is server software on P2P networks worth 6-10,000$.

They also get sued but that doesn't make the media. After all, it's not the Big Bad Music Industry going after the innocent little schoolkids...

If people are so worried about the price of software, why not buy OEM?

OEM software isn't for general sale. It's only licensed for sale in combination with something else, usually hardware but sometimes other software.
A store selling OEM software separate (and yes, I know they exist) are as much perpatrating theft as the person selling CDs with pirated software.
Maybe even worse in fact because they also deprive the person who purchased that hardware that should have had bundled software from retrieving what they paid for.

Edit: Thread clean - Catweazle