The first language I used to write a non-trivial program was (Quick)Basic, in 1991, I think. I wrote a text-based adventure game and a little program that did some basic math, to do my school homework for me. ;-) Laziness for the win. I was 11 at the time... good times. Later on in the early '90s I hacked a couple of games (infinite lives!) by running them in DOS's "debug", so I dabbled with x86 assembler. Then I moved on to Visual Basic and Hexen-C (the C-like scripting language for modding the game Hexen), and then started doing proper programming in C and C++.

-+ HHexo +-

In my company, we did an evaluation of SSDs a few months ago. We built all our C/C++ projects with VS 2008 and 2010 (on Windows 7) on a RAID-ed HDD and on a SSD, and the results were mixed. For the operating system, swap file, and temporary directory, OH YES! You definitely want SSDs. They really make a massive difference in booting time and general performance of the OS. However, for repeated Visual Studio builds the improvement was not as good as we expected. If you just time the first build, then yes, SSDs completely overwhelm HDDs. However, if you build the same project several times and average them out, then the performance becomes comparable (with a slight improvement with SSDs, but nothing major). The reason for this is that Windows 7 keeps a file cache in memory, and if you have enough free memory it is able to cache all the files in your project. Which means that after the first compilation, if you change only a small number of files, it reads the others from memory rather than disk. In your day-to-day programming, what you do is mostly a rebuild at the start of the day, and incremental builds later. Of course, you might change a header file and have to recompile a lot of cpp files, but if you haven't changed them they will still be in the memory cache. Therefore, SSDs tend to save you some time only in the first build. Our conclusion was that you definitely want your OS on an SSD, but it's not too necessary to have your VS projects and source code on it. Still, if you have the cash to buy them, why not? :-)

-+ HHexo +-

You have studied AI, so you should know that AI does not try to replicate human intelligence anyway. Mostly for one reason: Artificial Intelligence is hard, but Artificial Stupidity is much much harder. :-) Jokes aside, in AI we want to write systems that solve problems as well as or better than humans do. We do not want to create a human mind with all the unnecessary baggage that comes with it. So in a sense it doesn't quite matter whether it's possible or not, research in the field is not going in that direction because it wouldn't bring any benefit.

-+ HHexo +-

Compilers do remove comments, but they also generate useful debugging information, which I would argue is a sort of generated documentation. :) I take the opposite stance: if something is not documented, it doesn't exist. Maybe it's because I tend to work developing APIs, even ones that are used internally within the company. The end users in that case are developers, so you could make the point that they could just look at the source code (even just at function prototypes, class/interface definitions etc), but it's dangerous to do so, for two reasons: 1) It's a slow process when all they want to do is use your API; so they will ask a lot of questions, grumble about it being hard to use, and generally waste developer time with "how to" support requests. 2) They'll access protected stuff (especially in languages like Python where nothing is really private), or use stuff that I forgot to make private by mistake; then I change the implementation of a member, thinking that I have encapsulated it well, and I discover I have broken everybody's code, because they have hacked around my design. High level documentation should cover at least the use cases you intend to allow. Then your users are either satisfied with the documentation they've got, or if they're not they will file feature requests rather than hack about and find undocumented ways of using your software. For code documentation, I tend to use Doxygen which is great for producing reference pages. Yes, there's the issue of keeping documentation up to date, but code documentation is localised (especially if you use Doxygen comments). So the idea is: you changed that function? Review its Doxygen comment! You just allocate five more minutes for your task, and you save a new developer hours of trying to figure out what's going on. If you have a code review process, you can even make this part of the code review: the reviewer is an additional pair of eyes that can verify whether your change needs a documentation change. But this is just my opinion. :-) Do what works best in your company / for your project.

-+ HHexo +-

Hi guys! My rant of the day... Today I received an email which was sent to my work address. The mail is from a recruiter who contacted me saying that they have job opportunities and even attaching the job descriptions. Nothing particularly annoying. Except for the following facts. 1) I have never published my work address anywhere. It is strict company policy and I follow it. Googling for it returns no results. 2) The person who contacted me found me through LinkedIn.com (we are both members), where I do have a visible profile, but I do not disclose my email address (not even the personal one). 3) I do however mention the company I work for in my profile (duh!). 4) LinkedIn provides an internal messaging service where members can send each other letters without using proper email. Now, this recruiter guessed my email address by trying name.surname@company.com and sent me an email. Ok, it is not hard to guess an address formatted that way, I agree, but... LinkedIn has an internal messaging system! Why did he not use that? LinkedIn is specifically set up so that you put your resumé online and people send you messages using the system! He just had to click a button, but no, he went through the trouble of guessing my email address, opening an email client, and sending me an email. Now I find myself with an unsolicited email in my inbox. Spam, basically. Oops, it went into the trash can. Oh well. I don't deal with unprofessional recruiters. :-)

-+ HHexo +-

This is quite an interesting problem actually. Everything anybody writes is automatically protected by international copyright law. Which means that in theory Google, or any other search engine which caches web pages, can copy the word document to an html page ONLY if the author authorizes it. Governments and companies are making an awful lot of noise about people downloading mp3s - and what about search engines which create copies of copyrighted documents? Sometimes copyrighted documents are published on web sites because of an agreement between the writer and the publisher, e.g. when a novel writer puts the first chapter of his novel online to advertise his book. The writer has not made any such agreement with Google, so if Google makes a cached copy of it, it is breaking the law. Or at least, that's what I think, but I am not a lawyer. Is there any lawyer here in CP who can give us some advice on the matter?

-+ HHexo +-

And note that he can actually use the "I" if he wants to! :) "... SÝMPLE 2D(LÝKE SIMPLE RECTANGLE) ..." Anyway, even though I agree that reading this causes me to sigh, I wouldn't have posted a private message to the boards. It's not exactly nice, especially since the sender can read the boards. :)

-+ HHexo +-

Hang on... think about it, man. How is this different from printing the numbers from 0 to 99? Or from 0 to 9? It's just a simple loop. Ok, you have to use long long integers because the numbers are big, but it's just a 'for' loop, isn't it? Anyway. Let it not be said that I am not willing to help. #include <stdio.h> int main() { unsigned long long x; for (x = 0; x < 100000000000000ULL; x++) { printf("%lld\n", x); } return 0; } P.S. Hang on again... if you print that to a file you will end up with an average of 7 * 10^14 bytes and no hard disk is that big. And by the way, this takes ages to run. Why do you want to have such a list? Do you realise how long it is? P.P.S. If you don't even know what to do with the C code and you just want an executable... well, sorry chap, we are not a charity. We are a community of developers.

-+ HHexo +-

I don't think you can re-define the rectangle and the rhombus, it would be cheating... :-) The only difference between the Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries is the 5th postulate, but the other ones stand. So you must have a definition of "right angle" in every geometry, which means you can define the rectangle in every geometry. Admittedly, the definition may become very obscure and complicated... and you probably would not be able to measure the right angle in degrees or radiants... So I think the multiple inheritance holds in every geometry. The square is defined to be something that is both a rectangle and a rhombus, and because you can define the rectangle and rhombus in every geometry, you can define the square in every geometry. [edit] I realised this may not be very clear... my point is that when you change geometry, the only thing you re-define is the basic concepts like line, lenght, and right angle, but the rectangle, rhombus and square have the same definitions, just expressed in the new interpretation of line, lenght, and angle.

-+ HHexo +-

Some time ago I found this very interesting article: http://www.computer.org/portal/cms\_docs\_transactions/transactions/tpami/freecontent/taskoftheferee.pdf It mainly talks about the task of a referee for scientific papers, i.e. the person who reviews articles in order to decide whether they should be published. However, if you look at the things the referee has to check (section "Evaluating a research paper") you can self-check your article to see if it meets good standards. Now, obviously CP is a community more than a scientific organization, and your articles are published anyway, so you don't have to worry about a very strict reviewer... but I think that what scientific reviewers expect is what normal readers expect as well, maybe unconsciously. So I hope this will help you.

-+ HHexo +-

There is a variety of ways they could have heard the term, even in different contexts. For example, the first thing I thought about when reading your question was "Ah, yes, it's the problem with Verilog". That's because I work on an EDA tool that parses hardware descriptions written in the Verilog language, which is prone to race conditions. Then I thought about multithreading. So I find strange that every candidate hasn't heard it somehow. I believe however that one should not draw the conclusion that "if they haven't heard about this technical term, they don't know what multithreading is". My impression is that software engineering is still a bit chaotic when it comes to naming things. In a text you may find the term "race condition" actually defined, in another one you may find that it is classified as just another problem arising from the pre-emptiveness of the thread system.

-+ HHexo +-

Hi everybody! First post in the forum... great web site anyway. I browsed most of the FAQs on CodeProject.com but could not find its copyright policy regarding the source code users attach to their articles. Somewhere the FAQs say that CodeProject is a place where users can "share" their code. Now, does that mean the source code in the articles is public domain? GPL licensed? MIT? BSD? Or is every case different and do I always have to check with the author first?

-+ HHexo +-