On the downside the best of MBA programs demand full time of your 2 years and you can not really work as full timer and still pursue MBA degree from a coveted business school. It might not turn out to be a big career boost if you are already from business or finance background. To top it all you need to spend over $150,000 as tuition and opportunity cost. Now that is a massive amount.

Pros and Cons of CFA

You get easy entry in the field of equity research and portfolio management as CFA is almost a must in these fields. On completion of the course you become an expert in specialized knowledge, which gives you great recognition in finance sector. The best part is you need not sacrifice your full time work to study the course; in fact you can give the exams while working as a full timer.

That being said, it definitely takes over 1000 hours of hard work to get through all the 3 levels, so you are hardly left with any free time. Building network can only start after you get into a CFA Society. The value of CFA is limited to finance, outside which it might not fetch you much.

The Bottom-Line

So from the above discussion it’s quite evident that deciding between CFA vs MBA should not be a big dilemma for a student as they are vastly different from each other in almost all the possible ways. The only similarity probably is that they both can be pursued as post graduation.

Finally, it boils down to what you want to be and where you want to be in few years. Another big deciding factor can be the huge cost difference between the two. While enrolling and exam fees for CFA should not cost more than $2,200, MBA can cost you over $150,000.

So, we’d recommend CFA to those who’re looking for a quick recognition without spend a lot of money, and MBA to those who’re serious about building their career in the management field.

Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5.

The announcement, however, does not say anything about the unsatisfactory performance of Flash on different mobile browsers. It instead stated that HTML5 is increasingly becoming more and more capable of doing what Flash was capable of. The latter statement is very true, but the fact also remains that Flash enabled phones have showed degraded performance after the different plug-ins installations.

Adobe will be anyway continue working on their cross compiler that helps Flash developers to make native applications that run on different iOS devices. So, it finally proves that Steve Jobs made the right decision of not including Adobe Flash in Apple devices.

Steps to Develop the Program

1. Dates are entered as strings.
2. Convert the dates into integer values.
3. Check for validation of dates.
4. Sort the dates with respect to their integer values.
5. Display the sorted dates.

To increase the range of dates, we have stored it in 4 bytes using a long integer variable (Under DOS dates are stored in 2 bytes).

So to store the day the lower 5 bytes are used. Now to store a month in next 4 bytes we need to multiply the month by 32.

Similarly, to store the year it is multiplied by 512. This is done because we are required to store the entire date in one single entity, which is later used to sort the dates.

/* Sorting of dates using bubble sort. */

#include  < stdio.h >
#include  < conio.h >
#include  < stdlib.h >
#include  < string.h >

int d, m ;
long int y ;

void main( )
{
char dates[5][12], temp[12] ;
long int arr[5], t ;
int i, j, valid ;

int isvalid( ) ;
long int getnum ( char * ) ;

clrscr( ) ;

printf ( “Enter any five dates (dd\\mm\\yyyy) :-\n” ) ;
for ( i = 0 ; i  < = 4 ; i++ )
{
printf(“%d) “,i + 1 ) ;
scanf ( “%s”, dates[i] ) ;

/* Converts date in string to equivalent integer values. */
arr[i] = getnum ( dates[i] ) ;

/* Checks for valid date. */
valid = isvalid( ) ;

if ( !valid )
{
printf ( “This date does not exists. ” ) ;
printf ( “Enter any other date.\n” ) ;
i– ;
}
}

/* Sorting of dates using Bubble sort method. */
for ( i = 0 ; i  < = 3 ; i++ )
{
for ( j = 0 ; j  < = 3 – i ; j++ )
{
if ( arr[j]  >  arr[j + 1] )
{
t = arr[j] ;
arr[j] = arr[j + 1] ;
arr[j + 1] = t ;

strcpy ( temp, dates[j] ) ;
strcpy ( dates[j], dates[j + 1]) ;
strcpy ( dates[j + 1], temp ) ;
}
}
}

printf ( “Dates in sorted order are :- \n” ) ;
for ( i = 0 ; i  < = 4 ; i++ )
printf ( “%s\n”, dates[i] ) ;

getch( ) ;
}

/* checks valid date */
int isvalid ( )
{
int isleap ( long int ) ;

if ( y  < = 0 || m  < = 0 || d  < = 0 || m  >  12 || y  >  16384 ||
( m == 2 && !isleap ( y ) && d  >  28 ) ||
( m == 2 && isleap ( y ) && d  >  29 ) ||
( ( m == 1 || m == 3 || m == 5 || m == 7 || m == 8 || m == 10
|| m == 12 ) && d  >  31 ) || ( ( m == 4 || m == 6 || m == 9 ||
m == 11 ) && d  >  30 ) )
return 0 ;
else
return 1 ;
}

/* checks whether the given year is leap or not */
int isleap ( long int y )
{
return ( y % 4 == 0 ) ^ ( y % 100 == 0 ) ^ ( y % 400 == 0 ) ;
}

/* converts dates in string into equivalent integer values */
long int getnum ( char *date )
{
char *p, str[15] ;
long int num = 0 ;

strcpy ( str, date ) ;

d = m = y = 0 ;
p = strtok ( str, “\\” ) ;
if ( p != NULL )
d = num = atoi ( p )  ;

p = strtok(NULL, “\\”);
if ( p != NULL )
m = atoi ( p ) ;
num += m * 32 ;

p = strtok(NULL, “\\”);
if ( p != NULL )
y = atol ( p ) ;
num += y * 512L ;

return num ;
}

So, wasn’t it one of the cool c programs that we have given out so far?

Well, this is quite faster when compared to any of the other sorting techniques.

One of the major disadvantages associated with this technique is that it’s not stable for equal elements, as in it does not preserve the original order. F

or instance if we consider having a list of messages in your inbox then, then you would want the sort by both time and date as well as in an alphabetical order. Then in such cases, you can first sort it as per the date and time and then sort as per the alphabetical order.

Let us illustrate the above scenario with an example:

From: a@qwerty.com sent: 1/1/2011
From: b@qwerty.com sent: 1/1/2011
From: c@qwerty.com sent: 2/9/2009
After sorting using heap sort
From: c@qwerty.com sent: 2/9/2009
From: b@qwerty.com sent: 1/1/2011
From: a@qwerty.com sent: 1/1/2011

As we can see that “b” is ahead of “a” which does not happen in any other sorting techniques as such which indicates that the sort is unstable. A stable sort should look like:

From: c@qwerty.com sent: 2/9/2009
From: a@qwerty.com sent: 1/1/2011
From: b@qwerty.com sent: 1/1/2011

Code Snippet to Implement Heap Sort in C Programming Language

void HSort(int num[], int size)
{
int j, temp;
for (j = (size / 2); j >= 0; j–)
shift(num, j, size – 1);
for (j = size-1; j >= 1; j–)
{
temp = num[0];
num[0] = num[i];
num[i] = temp;
shift(num, 0, i-1);
}
}
void shift(int num [], int head, int tail)
{
int ok, max, temp;
ok = 0;
while ((head*2 <= tail) && (!ok))
{
if (head*2 == tail)
max = head * 2;
else if (num [head * 2] > num [head * 2 + 1])
max= head * 2;
else
max = head * 2 + 1;

if (num [head] < num[max])
{
temp = num[head];
num[head] = num [max];
num[max] = temp;
head = max;
}
else
ok = 1;
}
}

So, that was a simple illustration of heap sort in c – stay tuned for more useful code snippets!