Alright I'll give it a try... (do I get any prize? :) ) Let the original expression be X. Then X > sqrt(1 + 3 * sqrt(1 + 4 * sqrt( 1 + 5... ))) Observe that the RHS can be expressed as (X^2 - 1) / 2 Now, Solve the inequality X > (X^2 - 1)/2 <=> 2X > X^2 - 1 <=> (X - 1)^2 < 2 <=> -sqrt(2) + 1 < X < sqrt(2) + 1 However, also we can see from the original expression that X > 1. Since X is an integer, then X must equals to 2. Eddie!

Dear all, I'm a junior developer writing mixed C/C++ based applications in Windows (using the VC++ command line tools, but not the DevStudio GUI). One of the question that I have the most trouble understanding is how does the build process really works. What is a precompiled header file? What's the difference between an .obj, a .dll, and a .lib file? How is an export table defined? How do a link all the .lib and .dll file together to make an executable? In many occasions it takes much more time finding out how to build and link properly than the actual coding part. I'm sure there are a lot more questions of this kind that are alluding junior developers everyday, since no good books are available and websites on the Internet (like CodeProject) rarely mentions anything on this subject. The MSDN website has a big chunk of reference manuals online about Compiling and Linking, but it offers almost little help for beginners who tries to learn this subject. Can anyone point me to some useful printed or Internet resources available? I'm hoping that someone in the CodeProject community can write an article on this subject too :) Thanks.

Hi all, I have a dialog which has a static textbox that says "The file c:\foo\bar.txt cannot be loaded. You must decide what to do now." and a few buttons beside the textbox to present the user with the choices. There is no problem with the dialog except when the pathname is really long (i.e. 4095 characters long), then the textbox cannot include the whole sentence. What do I do? I have think of a few ways already but these won't fix the problem: 1. Use a messagebox(but I need more buttons than just OK and Cancel) 2. Use a ellipsize function. (but I want to present the user with the full filename, that's the whole point of having another dialog box) 3. Use "Resizing text to fit in rect" in an earlier article by Jason Phillips. (but this will result in some really ugly code and break a lot of other codes) What I'm thinking of is, is there some GUI design techniques that will solve this common problem of long filename? Thanks in advance.

If you still remember high school trigonometry, this problem is easy to solve!! OK, here we go.. Let the endpoint of the 1st line be (x1, y1) and (x2, y2) Let the endpoint of the 2nd line be (x3, y3) and (x4, y4). Let the slope of the 1st line be m1 and the 2nd line be m2. [the slope can be calculated by m1 = (y2 - y1)/(x2 - x1)]. Then the angle between the two lines is given by arctan[(m1 - m2)/(1 + m1*m2)]. Of course you have to deal with many other factors and boundary conditions, the type of coordinate system you're using, and convert radian to degree, etc... Hope this helps. Eddie