Recent content by ScottSalley

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    Software engeneering vs Software technology

    Can you post the official descriptions from the university catalog? I've never heard of "Software Technology".
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    Different Node Deletion/Insertion in a Binary Search Tree

    The github link didn't work for me, but the description sounds like a 'threaded binary search tree'.
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    Recursion: Avoiding Stack Overflow Errors

    There is no guarantees as it depends upon: 1. How much stack space is there to begin with? 2. How much space does each call take? While you can measure these for a particular use case, in general you can't rely on this. For any of the products I work on, I try to avoid using recursion and use...
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    Do you need a decent PC for college level computer science?

    Note that most computer science classes don't demand much from the machines -- the demands are upon the student. If you write a compiler, a database, a client / server, it will be mostly you writing code and the computer doing a little bit of the final work. There are exceptions (machine...
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    Are local variables generally preferred over global?

    Yes. I've been working as a professional software developer for 20+ years and global variables are used sparingly and the more global variables a program has, the lower the perceived quality and ease of maintenance (also, your peers will make fun of you or deny you the rights to check in your...
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    Can the constness be changed in the middle of the program?

    Do you ever take the address and use a pointer to access the variable(s)? Maybe you have an improper cast? const char foo[] = "hello"; char *bar = (char*) foo; strcpy(bar, "world"); // Oops!
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    Video Image Processing: Algorithms for Motion Detection

    Yes, such algorithms exist and are present in commercial products -- such as Microsoft's XBox and Kinnect system. Note that neural networks can be used, but so are various forms of decision trees with Harr-like features and other techniques. You may want to find a general text on Computer Vision...
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    Python Python Strings: Revising & Altering for AI Programming

    The Python system automatically handles this and there won't be any memory leaks. Some of the benefits of 'immutability' (not just for strings) is: functions can't modify the data itself (no side effects), data is thread safe, easier to cache, and it simplifies everything for the for the...
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    Python Python Strings: Revising & Altering for AI Programming

    I don't understand the problem here with immutable strings. Let's say you did something like a = "hello" b = "world" a = a + b print a You'll see "helloworld" Now if you have something that was like this 1. a = "hello" 2. b = a 3. a = "world" 4. print b You'll see "hello" because 'b' was...
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    My C program has turned into a monster

    I'll try to be as 'condescending' as possible. As I took the prisoner downstairs, I said "You should leverage the standard C library. Your function index_of is very similar to strchr. The function parse_int is very similar to atoi. The rest of the code doesn't seem unreasonable for a hand...
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    Are the two definitions of "bit" compatible?

    Shannon introduced the term and used it in both manners (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf ): The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or...
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    Term to express a range of fluctuation

    I think you are looking for the term 'scale factor'. Most APIs I've seen would express '150%' as a scale factor of '1.5'.
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    Is it Possible to Learn Programming Quickly Without Excessive Reading?

    Programming is programming -- defining a problem, breaking it down into small sub-problems, and then building up a set of instructions that deals with these problems. I started with Turbo C (which makes this sound like a thread that time traveled from 1993) and have been doing systems...
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    Text file with all English words and their part of speech

    You might want to search for the 'Brown Corpus', one of the earliest best known corpus with parts of speech. I don't think any two groups of computational linguists agree on the parts of speech; you may not even need parts of speech data depending on what you're doing.
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    Why Does Bit Shifting in Win32 API and C# BitConverter.ToInt32 Act Differently?

    The Win32API MAKEWORD is from a long time ago when Windows applications were 16-bit so a 'WORD' was a 16-bit integer (which would be considered a 'short' with modern compilers). It is taking two bytes (each 8 bits), a 'high' byte ('h') and a low byte ('l'), and shifting them into the proper...
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