h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's the DOS disk partition utility, the only way to really and truly and absolutely destroy the contents of a hard drive, including the boot sector (and any viruses dwelling therein).

After you run FDISK to create one or more partitions, you have to format the hard drive. I might be wrong about this, but to reformat without first running FDISK leaves boot sectors intact.

And then after you format you start installing the OS and then your software.

That is correct Lil.

I've simulposted with GDZ.

FDISK is very obtusely designed. I have a copy of the Sybex DOS 6 textbook in the house for those times when I have descend below stairs and use those utilities.

Remember the days when dot com meant something else??

fdisk transcends the DOS platform. You use it in *nix as well.

Ah, remember the yahoo.com virus of a few years back? That was due to people not knowing that the .com was also a file extension for an executable. Fun stuff that.

I remember the original .com. Still use it on occasion.

*peeks round the door*

Hi all, may I ask a question? Should Real Player be this rubbish? See, I want to watch Mighty Boosh on the BBC website, but it only made it to about 3 minutes in before pausing with the explanation that it was "Communicating". On top of that, the picture tends to freeze or go partly blocky.

Sounds like it isn't buffering properly. Personally, I don't like the RealPlayer.

I won't allow it on my computer. If something is offered in realplayer only, I give it a miss. Which is a shame, because NPR is all Realplayer. But I've been prejudiced against it since the days when it used to insert itself all over the place without asking, as well as pre-empting default preferences.

Not to mention the ads.

Do you have a broadband connection Bagpuss? If not then it will do as you say it does as it gets little bits of the data then has to wait to get some more and so on. It's not as bad for the radio stuff (speech programmes rather than music programmes I mean). If you do have broadband and you're trying to do all sorts of other network things as well (download stuff, read hootoo etc) then these also will take some of the bandwidth away from realplayer. If you're not doing those things then there is a problem somewhere between you and the BBC that's causing it to happen (or it may be at the bbc end if everyone is trying to get the same stuff all at once - see all the hootoo glitches and earthquakes when big stuff happens).

Yes, broadband. I just experimented by downloading something and it seems to have settled down at 35KB/s, which is probably a lot less than it should be. I suspect that there's a problem between me and the BBC. I call the problem "NTL".

Anyone know anything about programing in java? Specifically, I need info on if-then-else.

Ping Courtesy. He will know. But then he might charge ya

I studied java for a couple of terms I don't know if this is what you're after, and you might have found the solution already, but this is how to do if statements in JAVA...

if (condition1) {
statement1;
statement2;
}
else if (condition2) {
statement3;
statement4;
}
else {
statement5;
statement6;
}

if you've only got one statement to do for one condition, the following shortcut works:
if (condition) singlestatement;
else singlestatement;


Oh and Lil, have you ever tried RealAlternative? It plays real player files, but without trying to take over your life, and is free:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

We use it on all the machines at college.

Does Java have that strange 3-in-one if-statement, or am I thinking of PHP? It looks something like

condition ? statement A : statement B;

I find it terribly confusing and never use it, so can't remember to which language it belongs.

C certainly has that ? thing for if. I could never remember it and it makes much more readable code to use the full IF, ELSE etc.

Phil, that is SUCH a good point! Inheritable code may not be as compact, and it doesn't show off skill as much, but boy, is it easier to read by the person who has to add things to it!

I can still remember code I had to change where the I'm-too-sexy-for-my-shirt programmer had written the code in impenetrable blocks using all the most extreme shorthand methods. This was in C. The result was that the code couldn't be changed; the whole set of routines had to be re-written so that we could make it more flexible.

OK java gurus

I have a method call set up and have run into a problem. I've listed the code below.

*
OutputFile answerFile;

answerFile = new OutputFile("c:\\documents and settings\\Ben\\My Documents\\School\\1st Semester Summer 2005\\CIS 1030\\answers.txt");

answerFile=("c:\\documents and settings\\Ben\\My Documents\\School\\1st Semester Summer 2005\\CIS 1030\\answers.txt");
*

The third line in there is giving me an incompatible type error. It says it found java.lang.String and requires Programs.OutputFile, I've got all my method calls in the same folder and am not having any problems with any of the other method calls.

Thanks for the assist.

/* Loosens collar */

Hmm, lets see. Now keep in mind that when I learned programming Pascal was the "it" language. And all this talk of "instances" and "classes" is still confusing.

But I'll take a guess that since you've declared answerFile to be an instance of an OutputFile class that you can only assign other OutputFiles to it - the 3rd line is unnecessary since (presumably) the second line already made answerFile reference that particular file, plus if you really wanted to do that you would have to cast it from a string to an OutputFile in some way.

I'm also guessing that if I blather on enough I'll sound like I know something about this, and only the real Java programmers will be able to call me out. So I'll continue.

Think of the famous line:
A rose is a rose is a rose.

What you are trying to say is:
A rose is a rose is the word "rose"
The 3rd part is not true.

That was the solution d'E, I'd already gotten it fixed before your post, thank you though.

Yeah, like what was said just before (but you knew that anyways )

The biggest problem I have with that code fragment is the use of hard coded file paths in the declaration of answerFile.
You might find it much easier in the long run to have something like:

answerFile = new OutputFile("$homedir/$this_class/$my_answers");
where you've already declared the variables somewhere near the start or in some sort of class/header file

homedir = "c:\\documents and settings\\Ben\\My Documents\\School";
this_class = "1st Semester Summer 2005\\CIS 1030"
my_answers = "answers.txt"

This means that if you ever want to reuse the code in a similar but not quite the same way or you're going to be writing to multiple files in the same directory or even just a single change to a filename you don't have to go through the code and change every instance.
This is good if you ever have to take on someone elses code or write code for someone else to maintain. Much easier to maintain that way.
Having inherited a fair chunk of php code when I took on this job I can say it would have been much easier dealing with it if the guy who wrote it had done those kind of things.