Depending on your level of experience, a college degree may not even be necessary for a technical position, so the popularity of your college is really not an issue. What they're really looking for is someone who'll be able to go in and do the job for which they've applied with little or no training. A college degree will help you later in your career should you decide to work your way into a management position. The best way to get into a large corporation, sadly enough, is to make a contact within the organization that can pass your resume onto one of the recruiters. It's that "not what you know but who you know, good ol' boy network". That's how I've gotten interviews with these big companies (Microsoft, Computer Associates, etc.). You should be aware that there are certain drawbacks when working for these large companies however, especially if you're just starting out. If you're just starting out, you may consider working for a smaller company first and building up your level of experience. The reason for this is that the large companies will offer very low salaries for recent college grads and it's very difficult to get large pay increases (without threatening to leave usually). It's been my experience that it's best to build up your resume first and then target the larger companies who'll be willing to pay you more when you walk through the door. When you've reached this level of experience on the other hand, you may naturally demand a little more respect than what a large company can provide to you as they see you as just another little fish in a big ocean. Best of luck!

Ian Darling wrote: and now they're like the Borg from Star Trek, but less entertaining at parties). Never been to an assimilation party before..... what are they like? :laugh: Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

It works because: * you are not accessing member data (not using 'this') * non-virtual functions are staticly linked by name Make the function virtual, it should fail then. Functions that are in your class but do not access member data, should be marked as static. It'll work the same. And at that point you can access it with: A::EvenNullPointerCanCallme() ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Peter Weyzen Staff Engineer [Santa Cruz Networks](http://www.santacruznetworks.com)

What Mike says is right. The member function is not called through the pointer unless its virtual (in which case it de-references the pointer to lookup the vtable pointer). As it knows that your pointer is of type X, it can call any non virtual function on it directly, its just that in C++ the first hidden parameters passed is the this pointer. Dereferencing the pointer in any way would cause the access violation. As the example given only had code accessing variables declared on the stack, there would not be any problems. Roger Allen Sonork 100.10016 Death come early, death come late, It takes us all, there is no reason. For every purpose under heaven, To each a turn, to each a season. A time to weep and a time to sigh, A time to laugh and a time to cry, A time to be born and a time to die. Dust to dust and ashes to ashes, And so I end my song.