That seems like a false sense of safety: when doing arithmetic, your program is most likely not going to be handling overflows correctly anyway. Also, when using unsigned ints, any code involving subtractions can lead to subtle bugs that only occur when one value is larger than another. I'd recommend sticking with signed ints for all arithmetic code.
It might be pretty safe if you're only ever adding, multiplying or dividing with other unsigned numbers. Once you start doing subtraction it could get ugly.
I think when smaller companies have patents, they tend to be closely related to their core business, and they have them precisely in order to use them 'offensively' - or, in other words, to protect their core business from companies that want to 'copy' them.
In principle, that is sort of what the patent system was intended for. (I still don't agree with it, but that's another story).
I don't think smaller companies can be offensive with patents, because they don't have the money to litigate. Maybe your definition of small and mine are different, though. I'm thinking of < $10M/yr. In that case, I don't believe a company of that size would have the resources to go after alleged infringers.
Yes, I suppose for this system to work companies'd have to commit some non core patents, that would be the "price to pay" for the insurance the system provides.
I've never applied for a patent, mostly for ethical reasons since I don't believe in the system the way it's structured right now but it has always seemed to me that getting a few patents was not so difficult for someone with a bit of "innovation capacity".
Wording is a bit sloppy: "Extending R (the inner while loop) takes at most a total of N steps, and positioning and testing each centers take a total of N steps too. Therefore, this algorithm guarantees to finish in at most 2*N steps, giving a linear time solution."
What he means is that the total time taken by ALL executions of the inner loop combined is at most N, not that each run of the inner loop takes at most N steps (otherwise it would become quadratic).
> Where can i find more information regarding this.
The C++ standard, of course :) But if you prefer some lighter reading, either http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/mutex/mutex/unlock/ or http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/mutex/unlock explain what happens, in slightly different ways. I usually prefer the cppreference version, because it uses terminology from the standard more consistently, but there is no harm in reading multiple explanations about difficult concepts like these :)
I'd repeat the explanation here, but I think you'd best be served by reading one of the two links above.
> Will Windows run on it? Well... Yeah. Windows runs on everything powered by an x86 processor.
I've tried installing Windows 7 on an old Dell laptop a while ago. I got it working eventually, but had to hunt around for drivers for various things -- rather important things, like network, and video. In the end, I had to persuade some download site to give me the Windows XP drivers for the video card, and it worked with that (which, btw, is pretty awesome).
Of course, this is just anecdote, just like any story about Linux not working immediately on some modern laptop is -- but my experience is that these kinds of issues are much rarer than 10 years ago. Especially with Linux (with which I have most experience), but also with Windows.
In fact, the animation draws attention away from the text, which you are probably supposed to read (otherwise, why bother with an alert). I really don't understand this infatuation with distracting unnecessary animations that people have nowadays...
