Darkfeign

I am using a HDD for installation and setting up a small SSD for SRT caching. From this I realised the RAID setup was causing issues. However I think I have managed to solve this problem: When updating my BIOS, it appears to have added a 'Secure Boot' option that 1) restricted my operating systems to Windows 8 only - linux mint would not boot in this mode 2) seemed to cause constant crashing of windows 8 which appears to have been resolved. Despite the fact that the secure boot is meant for Windows 8, if anybody runs into this issue I suggest selected 'Other OS' in Secure boot for ASUS motherboards. Thanks again guys.

Hi guys, So I've recently decided to take the jump and move I windows 8 (not really sure why I decided to do that and regretting it now). Anyway, I've even experiencing constant crashes from a clean OS before even doing anything. Just updating the system I'm getting DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION blue screens and even when I've updated drivers it'll still crash. At completely arbitrary times (during update downloading, browsing the Internet etc.) I did notice however, on the countless time I reinstalled the OS that I forgot to set the motherboard to RAID mode (installed in AHCI, usually raid because of a cache drive I was setting up). So in AHCI mode I was able to install all drivers without these annoying, constant crashes. I've already updated my BIOS but when I reinstalled it again in RAID it keeps crashing. Any ideas? I'm stuck.

With C-style strings it's far more common to attempt to read from memory that has not been initialised as part of the array (for example, having requested an array of size 10 and requesting the 10th element, actually being the 11th) where as using the library data structures you have more restriction on your uses with predefined methods that allow you to interact with them. By using strings you are presented with the functionality that is applicable and will receive an error if this is not deemed possible, something you won't necessarily get with C-strings.

You can get yourself virtual machine software, such as VirtualBox from Oracle (free) that you can then run linux in to try out different distributions. It won't run as fast as if you had installed linux alongside Windows but it does let you try out their features and decide which distribution is right for you. I would recommend Linux Mint as it sticks very closely to a traditional desktop environment. Maybe Debian but Linux Mint retains better update cycles.

Could implement maybe a basic IRC bot that makes use of sockets etc. so that could be a worth-while project that will get you into Java nicely. Or you could implement some kind of protocol in java - either network based or just message passing in general.

You have this written in the books section: Modern C++ - Scott Meyers I think you meant Modern C++ Design - Andrei Alexandrescu (from my previous mention). Also, an invaluable book for anybody looking to get into Artificial Intelligence would be "Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach" by Novig as it's a course book that pretty much covers every aspect of AI.

Sublime has jump-to-line and stuff so it'll do for me! Man you say you're not even a programmer by profession and you're already putting in more effort than me, haha.

A footpath? It looks like a bramble-covered badger hole. My sublime text gives me words.. and I can click them :P

Vim always looked great to learn but man, does it take some will power to stick with. hjkl for moving the cursor feels so off for me. But anyway, you can get sublime text for text editing as an alternative to Vim should you want to stick with something you (may already?) know as it looks the same across all platforms. Something you might find pulls you into linux more is looking at installing Guake, where you can simply hit F12 and be presented with multiple terminals as a drop-down overlay, greatly increased productivity for me.

Nice in-depth post alpenwasser, covered pretty much what I was trying to say, but put it better! I'm interested in looking at C# and how Microsoft's CLI works but at the same time Microsoft are often tying down developers and forcing the use of their platform that I really dislike learning languages designed for the developer's O/S only (I know you can get linux versions of C# but it shouldn't have to be a port). Primarily, on my point about linux being unpolished, proprietary drivers for things like graphics cards are still very limited. In particular, for my Nvidia, watching films and any form of video really bugs me, as horizontal frame-tearing is horrendous on all the linux distributions i've tried. I also had a nightmare trying to install Arch Linux, as attempting to manually boot to the drive never works for me.

Definitely right with your main statement about Linux being entirely unpolished. It really is. However most compilers run well under linux, I mean it's open-source like the majority of software out there now so it encourages a lot of community development and support. The terminal (bash) is really powerful and so it's great to use for interacting with a compiler that doesn't tie you into Microsoft's versions of software like C++. Most compilers are also available as a GNU port (such as GCC) so you can often get the standard implementation of your language's compiler rather than a platform-specific version like you would find with Visual C++. This makes porting code from linux to windows easier than the reverse. That's my reasoning anyway. There are a lot of things I've grown to enjoy using linux for revolving around programming. The free software that supports most aspects of work is a real bonus.

Nice to see some Prolog, haha.

You need a 'main' function to run a python program. If you try writing out your program straight into the interpreter you won't run into this problem.

I'd usually recommend Learn Python the Hard Way (google). The HTML copy is free and introduces you nicely to programming in general.

Still not the same size as the python program.

Man the difference in amount of code required between C and python becomes so apparent in the above two examples.

I know you might get confused with all the terms at first but you will need to learn them so I'd recommend just diving into it and googling all the terms you aren't sure of, writing them down and learning them. Like I said, you'll need them to understand concepts in any language at some point.

Hurray for whiteboards. Just plan out methods and their inputs and outputs, and it should start coming together.

I heard about it a while ago, stumbled across it by accident and it sounds quite promising but seems to lack a lot of community support. The idea of C++ with a controllable garbage collector sounds quite appropriate for all kinds of uses. It just seems a shame barely anybody actually knows or has used the language that I know.

So this was just a general topic of discussion that I was hoping people might have some insight into. Some of you might know of Andrei Alexandrescu from his work with C++ (particularly with Modern C++ Design etc.), anyway he's been working on the D language (http://dlang.org/) with its original creator for a while now as a proposed successor to C++ attempting to provide memory safety while still enabling low-level access (including in-line assembly) and I was just wondering if anyone has had much experience with the D language? I know it's not yet gathered any where near as much support to be taken as a serious successor to C++ but i'm interested in people's experience with the language as I was thinking of taking it up in the summer once I finish university. The ability to combine functional and imperative programming in the same language is definitely of interest to me as this may be important if I take up the PhD offer for next year.

Exactly this. Why on earth would you complain about the inability to assign a long to an int? The whole point is that type-safety is enforced. Though when you say it crashes, I hope you mean the compiler complains about it.

Companies are far more reliant on making use of libraries than they are on demanding you reimplement them. It's like the number one rule of software development; do not reinvent the wheel. If libraries exist (particularly open-source libraries that can be modified) then the company would be happier with the higher productivity than forcing you to reimplement such data structures. I think knowledge of data structures is purely for either implementing your own libraries for context-specific applications, modifying existing data structures, or simply because you need to know what is the most appropriate choice between a set of data structures for implementing your idea. If you know that in your project you need some functionality and there are several methods that may achieve this then it is wholly dependent on your knowledge of the data structures and their varying performance for you to decide which one will perform best for the suited purpose.

Notch has done something similar with his new game where he emulates an old 16-bit CPU. As it's essentially a collection of logical operators it shouldn't be too hard to form, but again you'll need a good knowledge of the operators and the cpu architecture you wish to implement as they all differ.

In our Data Structures classes we had to implement linked lists and things like that in Java and again in C++ later on. It was really difficult, but worth the lesson.

C# to me seems too.. Microsofty. Then again Java has its own issues. I started with Java as my first comprehensive programming language and then moved into C++ to learn the good stuff. C# could be your alternative to Java (both share a lot of features) so i'd start with the more user-friendly of the two (C#) then hit C++.