There's an easy solution to that problem if/. wants it. What you do is get an editor who doesn't look at the Firehose, but gets to see what others have approved for the front page. That person could perhaps also read the summary, make sure it makes sense, check that the links work, and maybe (there aren't that many stories that make the front page each day) do a quick dupe check. That person gets the final say on postings. In other words, get an editor in chief and make that person a real editor.
Ah, who am I kidding? The easier solution would be to just change the title given to editors to something that more appropriately sets expectations.
That's no hole in the resume, it's a conversation piece. A person doing this would probably get at least a few good stories and those seem to be good for free food and drink anywhere.
Many years ago, I had a sales rep who sold me Nissan thermos bottles. During one of his visits, he showed me (not to try to sell it to me, but because he thought I'd think it was cool) a new titanium dent-proof bottle that was really light and marketed at cyclists. When it came to demonstrating that it was dent-proof, he took his sample in hand and whacked it three times on one of my tables. "Now watch, those dents will just pop right out." Well, by the time he left, those dents were still there. In fact, he recently sent that bottle to me. The dents are still there.
Another sales rep was showing off glasses that didn't break when dropped. She demonstrated this by flinging the glass across the shop. While the glass didn't break, she did say, "One of these days I'm not going to get away with that."
Really? I had a (completely useless) mandatory programming class in the 7th grade (it was in BASIC on an Apple//e and I had already been offered programming jobs at that point [not that they could have hired me, but they didn't know how old I was]) which if memory serves, all in the class managed to pass. I also managed to teach most of my 4th grade class basic HyperTalk (on an Apple IIgs) when weather made outdoor recess unappealing. The problem here isn't that the students won't get it (assuming the class is kept accessible and the teacher is engaging). The problem here is that high school is pretty late to start doing this. By that time, students interested in this will have already learned the material of the class (if the class is mostly kept to basic concepts and problem solving) or students who have not previously been exposed to programming will get lost pretty quickly (if students who have already figured out the basics are going to stay engaged). My advice would be to keep things basic so that those who haven't been exposed to programming can still get some value out of the class while being flexible enough to let students who can demonstrate that they don't need that develop more advanced skills (perhaps separate them off, toss them a reference manual, and give them a moderately challenging project to do instead).
I doubt it's the TV. I have a relatively ancient television (it doesn't do closed captions or parental controls, but it does have color) and am not getting those black bars. It's probably the converter box. You may want to see if you can dig up the instruction book that came with yours and see if there's some setting you can change to get rid of those.
Starting with System 5 (since you mention Multifinder) there was multitasking, however this was cooperative multitasking, meaning that the applications had to relinquish control for background applications to run. A naughty program might not do this and an older program that doesn't call any of the system functions which were modified to support this multitasking model would, as you describe, stop background applications. However, by System 7 (1991, Windows for Workgroups wasn't released until 1992) the cooperative multitasking model was well understood by programmers writing Mac applications and background applications would periodically get a chance to run. However, since these applications were in the background and not getting new events from users, well behaved applications would give up control in such situations very quickly. It wasn't preemptive multitasking, but it was multitasking. (Of course, it was still possible to write a program that would not relinquish control and in these limited cases you're right, it wasn't multitasking.)
The trick, of course, is to dehydrate that water before it leaves Mars. Your liter of water turns into a small packet of dust which your customers simply need to reconstitute before use.
If all you have is Starbucks and supermarkets that could be fine, but the old Arbuckle's ad had it right when it claimed that you cannot roast good coffee at home. In the case of popcorn poppers, to get any kind of control it needs to be modified in such a way that you'll end up burning out the heating element frequently, but that still doesn't provide the same versatility as real commercial roasting equipment. Leaving aside the issue of home roasting machines even being able to get good results, people roasting at home generally are not buying enough of any given lot of coffee to even figure out the best way to roast it. A commercial specialty roasting firm should, for each lot of coffee, be roasting at least one batch and pulling samples across a range of too light to too dark (additional roasts pulling a range of samples with different patterns of airflow adjustment or modifying the time spent in important temperature ranges) and then cupping all of these samples before deciding how to roast that coffee for sale. A tiny place buying even a single 60-70Kg sack of each lot can afford to do that and for a mid-sized operation that's purchasing several such sacks of each lot the cost of doing that is negligible. Home roasters are typically only buying a few pounds at a time and use equipment that doesn't lend itself to taking samples during the roast, making such a procedure cost prohibitive. Now, if you enjoy roasting coffee, that's great. Keep at it. The coffee will at least be really fresh, but you'll get better tasting coffee from a good local roasting firm (assuming you have one) that follows a procedure such as the one above.
While it is very easy to make coffee too strong, the most common coffee brewing mistake is not using enough coffee. In the case of drip brewers, there's also the problem that many on the market will not get the water hot enough for proper extraction. Brewing technologies that leave you in control of heating the water (manual drip, press) or ones that don't work without sufficiently hot water (vacuum, moka pot) or something with an adjustable thermostat (here we're mostly looking at commercial grade equipment) will work better than the $15 drip brewer that's designed to be thrown away. Proper extraction depends on the coffee:water ratio, the time the coffee is in contact with water, how the coffee is ground, and the temperature of the water (add resistance of the ground bed and dispensing pressure in the case of espresso). The ideal parameters will depend on the brewing technology being used. Extra nerd points for measuring the total dissolved solids and bringing your brew in line with golden cup standards. Some people think that's too strong, but it's far better to add some hot water to the coffee after it's brewed than to try to get a weaker coffee with an improper extraction.
Oh, and if you're making espresso, you really owe it to yourself to take some coffee while it's still hot from roasting, run it through an all-metal construction burr grinder, watch the smoke pour out of it, and get a shot of espresso less than 1 minute after the end of roasting. It's a unique flavor experience that only home roasters and people who work at a coffee firm ever get a chance to try. For any other brewing method, however, it's best to get the coffee cooled and then wait a few hours (roast the morning coffee the night before). Some people like that green flavor that you get brewing the coffee right away, but it masks the true character of the coffee.
You jest, but I've done that. My first harvest, after the non-trivial processing needed to get from the cherry to something that can be roasted (and avoiding mold and ferment defects while doing the processing) produced enough coffee to turn into about 6 ounces of brewed coffee (I could get more now). I didn't have my sample roaster at the time and it wasn't enough to do anything with in the big roaster so I used a little toy home roasting machine. I won't say it was the worst coffee I've ever had (and oddly enough, I encountered a coffee that tasted just like it a few years ago cupping at the CLU in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) but it was the worst coffee that my employees who were misfortunate enough to be working that day had tried. Now I just eat the cherries which are pretty good. Coffee is not meant to grow in Wisconsin.
That isn't bad, but it isn't best. Best, of course, would be quickly cooling the beans down to -40 (F or C, your pick) and storing them at that temperature. At that point, all known staling reactions in coffee stop. Granted, this is in no way practical.
Don't refrigerate your beans. They'll pick up any nasty foreign odors in your fridge and get damaged by humidity. Freezing is better, but that still causes some instant damage and someone who isn't careful will cause extra damage by thawing and then refreezing. Better to just not buy so much from your local roaster and drink it while it's still fresh.
Don't worry. Qt has support for changing how widgets look with style sheets. While there are some legitimate uses for this, it also makes it easy to use Qt to produce a consistently inconsistent and awful UI.
What kind of information do my readers want to know?
If you get a serious answer to that question, please do your readers a favor and ignore it.
I had a discussion about this a few years ago with someone who worked at the local paper. I had remarked that the World section had gone from being a full section of the paper to taking up an area about the size of a postcard buried part way through the front section on a page that was otherwise completely filled with advertisements. It was very easy to miss that it even existed. This might have been a gradual transition. I had already switched to reading a better newspaper (at the time a rather bulky paper made close enough that local news was still relevant but of sufficiently high quality that it had national readership). This employee happened to be in a position to know why this change was made.
Seeing declining readership and with competitive pressure from a better (but not exactly good) paper from the neighboring city which had been expanding news coverage to be more of a regional paper and the above mentioned paper with national readership and good reporting, the local paper decided to conduct a survey to find out what readers wanted. Once the survey was finished and the results tabulated and analyzed, the decision makers had a report summarizing what the readers wanted. Or rather, what readers thought they wanted. The paper was changed to reflect the results of the survey. This was a terrible mistake.
I suspect in most businesses, and at least in the market for this local newspaper, customers do not know what they want. They think they know what they want and will be happy to tell you if you ask, but if you offer them what they ask for they won't buy it.
For what it's worth, I still read a competing newspaper every morning and find it superior to the alternatives for general news. The alternatives certainly do have a place. Web sites and feed aggregators do a better job of covering niche topics, radio is a great medium for delivering interviews, and television... well I'm sure it's good for something but I only get local over the air stations which used to have some good news programs, but all I've seen lately provides less news in an hour than you'd get just reading the headlines of the first page of three sections of a newspaper (and often news headlines that were in the newspaper days ago). If I had to choose between a newspaper and any or all of these other news sources, I'd still pick the newspaper. The employee in the story above no longer works for a newspaper. As readership continued to fall, jobs were cut, retirees were not replaced, and he found himself doing a lot more work without additional compensation. He left the paper for a better job with another company. The local paper is still around, but it has fallen foul of financial reporting rules, has been renegotiating terms on its debt, no longer pays a dividend, and it's still not a very good paper. They do get a lot of local traffic to their web site, however.
Presumably you're planning on using a different name, logo, and such for your product. It isn't hard to avoid trademark issues. You've already pointed out that you're not taking code, so that rules out copyright issues. If the old company has been patenting aspects of the project, this could be a potential for legal trouble as having worked on the old project might make it easier to claim willful infringement on any of these. It sounds like your plan is to change things up enough that this probably isn't an issue. There are many examples of people leaving a company and taking the concepts behind their project with them either to work on at another company or to form a startup. That said, these days it seems you can be sued for anything and I am not a lawyer. You may want to consult one before making the jump. If you haven't started a company before, you may want to consult one anyway.
It probably just depends on where you are. For a long time my town had a Best Buy but no Circuit City. It was terrible. The lighting was terrible (too dark) and once when I wanted a price check on something I flagged down an employee who quickly shouted, "I don't know nothin'," and tried to escape before I told him I just wanted a price check (which it turned out he could do). I made it my last place to look for things they carried even though the location was convenient for me just because the shopping experience was so bad. Then, a Circuit City moved in next door. They sold pretty much the same products at pretty much the same prices with a better atmosphere and the new competitive pressure really woke up the management at the Best Buy. Before long they replaced the light bulbs, lightened up the interior color scheme, and improved the product selection. I still wouldn't try to get any useful information out of an employee, but the place is a lot better than it was. Hopefully the loss of this competitor in such close proximity does not convince the local Best Buy management that they can go back to not replacing burnt out lights or kill the product selection.
If you want to get documentation out of both CWEB and Doxygen, write the Doxygen comments in the source files like @=//! Comment for Doxygen.@> to prevent ctangle from stripping the comment out, then use sed 's/@=\/.*@>//g' input.w > output.w to strip those comments out so they don't end up in the output from cweave.
Back when I was in high school, several times each year quite a bit of time was wasted in school assemblies. These always recognized the various sports teams, even the ones that were really not that good. It wasn't until my senior year that any academic achievement was recognized at an assembly. We had two students who (one that year, one the year before) had gotten perfect scores on the SAT and the academic decathlon team brought back a trophy. The two who had gotten the perfect SAT scores later told me that they would have rather not been singled out at the assembly. Never mind students who were going to various math and science competitions and bringing back awards. Who cares about that? (Not that any of the students really cared about anything at the assemblies. All it did was shorten the classes so that nothing meaningful could be done in any of them.)
In fact, he could use Audacity on a Mac (the download page is the first hit when using Google to search for Audacity Mac) and it would be just as easy.
Though my day to day work is mainly on Macs these days, Linux desktop development has come a long way over the past decade and there is still a lot of interest in making it better. It's great to see funding to keep these improvements coming and look forward to making the switch back to a new, improved Linux desktop at some time in the future.
High school wasn't bad. Once I had figured out that I wasn't going to get anything out of junior high school, I went back to directing my own education. When it was time to choose a high school, I went back into the public system (the computers weren't as good, but they let the students touch them and the other students were more interesting). There the problem was largely in the administration until my senior year when a new principal (who was also a nationally ranked chess player) took over. I had to test into the advanced track because I had attended a private school, but they didn't want too many people testing out of the lower levels so I was not allowed to test into a higher math course even after getting a perfect score on the science placement test.
While there, I went into every academic extra curricular that was offered and helped to get new ones started. I got out of a lot of classes to take tests and participate in other sorts of competitions. I was able to spend a month in Panama doing rainforest studies. By my senior year I was on good terms with the math department head and was able to get into an IB math course (she had already seen me beat students in calculus while I was in geometry for positions in math competitions so I asked her to sign off on the course selection instead of teacher I had for math). I suspect the teacher knew that I didn't have the prerequisites for the class, but I was getting an A so he never said anything about it.
The best teachers I had there have now either retired or have moved onto other things (one of the English teachers is now a novelist with two published novels and a third coming soon), but the worst teachers I had (such as the one who would leave his morning classes unattended to drink in his office and spend his afternoon classes passed out at his desk. I can understand how the job could drive one to drink, but that was not fun.) also did not stay long. I don't know who's there now.
The elementary school I went to had what I think was a good way to handle this. The teacher would figure out which students didn't really need the lessons and put us to the side of the class with work and materials to learn at our own pace. We were expected to help each other figure things out, help tutor students who only needed a little extra help, and lead some of the group projects. In the later years of elementary school, we would do things like read to the earlier grades (freeing the teacher to grade assignments or help students who needed a lot of help) and while I don't know how common it was, I ended up teaching a basic programming course in my fourth year (attendance optional, ungraded, open to anybody who was interested). We were kept busy and stimulated and the extra effort the teachers took to arrange this was paid back.
Sadly, this story does not have a happy ending. The junior high school could not figure out what to do with a small group of motivated students who had already learned what they wanted to teach. The school recommended that two of us be committed. My parents decided that they were the crazy ones and had me waste a couple years in a private school. The other's parents took the advice. He was pumped full of drugs which started him on a path of substance abuse that ruined his life for many years. He's clean now, working minimum wage jobs and just getting by. The year after I left, the elementary school was renovated, but this program was stopped along with creative dramatics and foreign language. The teachers went into early retirement.
I see a lot of comments already jumping on fancy POS systems, but if a basic cash register is really all that is needed, get to your local office store and take a look at what's there. A basic Sharp cash register (and probably registers from other makers as well) will store this data on a SD card or allow a USB connection to a computer. The software they (Sharp, don't know about others) provide is crap, but the data you get back is CSV which can be imported into any spreadsheet program. It's basic, but if that's all you need it does the trick.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an easy solution to that problem if /. wants it. What you do is get an editor who doesn't look at the Firehose, but gets to see what others have approved for the front page. That person could perhaps also read the summary, make sure it makes sense, check that the links work, and maybe (there aren't that many stories that make the front page each day) do a quick dupe check. That person gets the final say on postings. In other words, get an editor in chief and make that person a real editor.
Ah, who am I kidding? The easier solution would be to just change the title given to editors to something that more appropriately sets expectations.
Speaking of karma whoring, I'm just posting this for the achievement.
That's no hole in the resume, it's a conversation piece. A person doing this would probably get at least a few good stories and those seem to be good for free food and drink anywhere.
Last time I was on a jury, we got a printout of that information. I don't know if that's normal or not, but it was certainly useful.
Many years ago, I had a sales rep who sold me Nissan thermos bottles. During one of his visits, he showed me (not to try to sell it to me, but because he thought I'd think it was cool) a new titanium dent-proof bottle that was really light and marketed at cyclists. When it came to demonstrating that it was dent-proof, he took his sample in hand and whacked it three times on one of my tables. "Now watch, those dents will just pop right out." Well, by the time he left, those dents were still there. In fact, he recently sent that bottle to me. The dents are still there.
Another sales rep was showing off glasses that didn't break when dropped. She demonstrated this by flinging the glass across the shop. While the glass didn't break, she did say, "One of these days I'm not going to get away with that."
The lesson: shit happens in product demos.
Really? I had a (completely useless) mandatory programming class in the 7th grade (it was in BASIC on an Apple //e and I had already been offered programming jobs at that point [not that they could have hired me, but they didn't know how old I was]) which if memory serves, all in the class managed to pass. I also managed to teach most of my 4th grade class basic HyperTalk (on an Apple IIgs) when weather made outdoor recess unappealing. The problem here isn't that the students won't get it (assuming the class is kept accessible and the teacher is engaging). The problem here is that high school is pretty late to start doing this. By that time, students interested in this will have already learned the material of the class (if the class is mostly kept to basic concepts and problem solving) or students who have not previously been exposed to programming will get lost pretty quickly (if students who have already figured out the basics are going to stay engaged). My advice would be to keep things basic so that those who haven't been exposed to programming can still get some value out of the class while being flexible enough to let students who can demonstrate that they don't need that develop more advanced skills (perhaps separate them off, toss them a reference manual, and give them a moderately challenging project to do instead).
I'm trying to picture an MPAAer with foot in mouth and head in ass. It looks very painful.
I doubt it's the TV. I have a relatively ancient television (it doesn't do closed captions or parental controls, but it does have color) and am not getting those black bars. It's probably the converter box. You may want to see if you can dig up the instruction book that came with yours and see if there's some setting you can change to get rid of those.
Starting with System 5 (since you mention Multifinder) there was multitasking, however this was cooperative multitasking, meaning that the applications had to relinquish control for background applications to run. A naughty program might not do this and an older program that doesn't call any of the system functions which were modified to support this multitasking model would, as you describe, stop background applications. However, by System 7 (1991, Windows for Workgroups wasn't released until 1992) the cooperative multitasking model was well understood by programmers writing Mac applications and background applications would periodically get a chance to run. However, since these applications were in the background and not getting new events from users, well behaved applications would give up control in such situations very quickly. It wasn't preemptive multitasking, but it was multitasking. (Of course, it was still possible to write a program that would not relinquish control and in these limited cases you're right, it wasn't multitasking.)
The trick, of course, is to dehydrate that water before it leaves Mars. Your liter of water turns into a small packet of dust which your customers simply need to reconstitute before use.
If all you have is Starbucks and supermarkets that could be fine, but the old Arbuckle's ad had it right when it claimed that you cannot roast good coffee at home. In the case of popcorn poppers, to get any kind of control it needs to be modified in such a way that you'll end up burning out the heating element frequently, but that still doesn't provide the same versatility as real commercial roasting equipment. Leaving aside the issue of home roasting machines even being able to get good results, people roasting at home generally are not buying enough of any given lot of coffee to even figure out the best way to roast it. A commercial specialty roasting firm should, for each lot of coffee, be roasting at least one batch and pulling samples across a range of too light to too dark (additional roasts pulling a range of samples with different patterns of airflow adjustment or modifying the time spent in important temperature ranges) and then cupping all of these samples before deciding how to roast that coffee for sale. A tiny place buying even a single 60-70Kg sack of each lot can afford to do that and for a mid-sized operation that's purchasing several such sacks of each lot the cost of doing that is negligible. Home roasters are typically only buying a few pounds at a time and use equipment that doesn't lend itself to taking samples during the roast, making such a procedure cost prohibitive. Now, if you enjoy roasting coffee, that's great. Keep at it. The coffee will at least be really fresh, but you'll get better tasting coffee from a good local roasting firm (assuming you have one) that follows a procedure such as the one above.
While it is very easy to make coffee too strong, the most common coffee brewing mistake is not using enough coffee. In the case of drip brewers, there's also the problem that many on the market will not get the water hot enough for proper extraction. Brewing technologies that leave you in control of heating the water (manual drip, press) or ones that don't work without sufficiently hot water (vacuum, moka pot) or something with an adjustable thermostat (here we're mostly looking at commercial grade equipment) will work better than the $15 drip brewer that's designed to be thrown away. Proper extraction depends on the coffee:water ratio, the time the coffee is in contact with water, how the coffee is ground, and the temperature of the water (add resistance of the ground bed and dispensing pressure in the case of espresso). The ideal parameters will depend on the brewing technology being used. Extra nerd points for measuring the total dissolved solids and bringing your brew in line with golden cup standards. Some people think that's too strong, but it's far better to add some hot water to the coffee after it's brewed than to try to get a weaker coffee with an improper extraction.
Oh, and if you're making espresso, you really owe it to yourself to take some coffee while it's still hot from roasting, run it through an all-metal construction burr grinder, watch the smoke pour out of it, and get a shot of espresso less than 1 minute after the end of roasting. It's a unique flavor experience that only home roasters and people who work at a coffee firm ever get a chance to try. For any other brewing method, however, it's best to get the coffee cooled and then wait a few hours (roast the morning coffee the night before). Some people like that green flavor that you get brewing the coffee right away, but it masks the true character of the coffee.
You jest, but I've done that. My first harvest, after the non-trivial processing needed to get from the cherry to something that can be roasted (and avoiding mold and ferment defects while doing the processing) produced enough coffee to turn into about 6 ounces of brewed coffee (I could get more now). I didn't have my sample roaster at the time and it wasn't enough to do anything with in the big roaster so I used a little toy home roasting machine. I won't say it was the worst coffee I've ever had (and oddly enough, I encountered a coffee that tasted just like it a few years ago cupping at the CLU in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) but it was the worst coffee that my employees who were misfortunate enough to be working that day had tried. Now I just eat the cherries which are pretty good. Coffee is not meant to grow in Wisconsin.
That isn't bad, but it isn't best. Best, of course, would be quickly cooling the beans down to -40 (F or C, your pick) and storing them at that temperature. At that point, all known staling reactions in coffee stop. Granted, this is in no way practical.
Don't refrigerate your beans. They'll pick up any nasty foreign odors in your fridge and get damaged by humidity. Freezing is better, but that still causes some instant damage and someone who isn't careful will cause extra damage by thawing and then refreezing. Better to just not buy so much from your local roaster and drink it while it's still fresh.
Don't worry. Qt has support for changing how widgets look with style sheets. While there are some legitimate uses for this, it also makes it easy to use Qt to produce a consistently inconsistent and awful UI.
If you get a serious answer to that question, please do your readers a favor and ignore it.
I had a discussion about this a few years ago with someone who worked at the local paper. I had remarked that the World section had gone from being a full section of the paper to taking up an area about the size of a postcard buried part way through the front section on a page that was otherwise completely filled with advertisements. It was very easy to miss that it even existed. This might have been a gradual transition. I had already switched to reading a better newspaper (at the time a rather bulky paper made close enough that local news was still relevant but of sufficiently high quality that it had national readership). This employee happened to be in a position to know why this change was made.
Seeing declining readership and with competitive pressure from a better (but not exactly good) paper from the neighboring city which had been expanding news coverage to be more of a regional paper and the above mentioned paper with national readership and good reporting, the local paper decided to conduct a survey to find out what readers wanted. Once the survey was finished and the results tabulated and analyzed, the decision makers had a report summarizing what the readers wanted. Or rather, what readers thought they wanted. The paper was changed to reflect the results of the survey. This was a terrible mistake.
I suspect in most businesses, and at least in the market for this local newspaper, customers do not know what they want. They think they know what they want and will be happy to tell you if you ask, but if you offer them what they ask for they won't buy it.
For what it's worth, I still read a competing newspaper every morning and find it superior to the alternatives for general news. The alternatives certainly do have a place. Web sites and feed aggregators do a better job of covering niche topics, radio is a great medium for delivering interviews, and television... well I'm sure it's good for something but I only get local over the air stations which used to have some good news programs, but all I've seen lately provides less news in an hour than you'd get just reading the headlines of the first page of three sections of a newspaper (and often news headlines that were in the newspaper days ago). If I had to choose between a newspaper and any or all of these other news sources, I'd still pick the newspaper. The employee in the story above no longer works for a newspaper. As readership continued to fall, jobs were cut, retirees were not replaced, and he found himself doing a lot more work without additional compensation. He left the paper for a better job with another company. The local paper is still around, but it has fallen foul of financial reporting rules, has been renegotiating terms on its debt, no longer pays a dividend, and it's still not a very good paper. They do get a lot of local traffic to their web site, however.
Presumably you're planning on using a different name, logo, and such for your product. It isn't hard to avoid trademark issues. You've already pointed out that you're not taking code, so that rules out copyright issues. If the old company has been patenting aspects of the project, this could be a potential for legal trouble as having worked on the old project might make it easier to claim willful infringement on any of these. It sounds like your plan is to change things up enough that this probably isn't an issue. There are many examples of people leaving a company and taking the concepts behind their project with them either to work on at another company or to form a startup. That said, these days it seems you can be sued for anything and I am not a lawyer. You may want to consult one before making the jump. If you haven't started a company before, you may want to consult one anyway.
It probably just depends on where you are. For a long time my town had a Best Buy but no Circuit City. It was terrible. The lighting was terrible (too dark) and once when I wanted a price check on something I flagged down an employee who quickly shouted, "I don't know nothin'," and tried to escape before I told him I just wanted a price check (which it turned out he could do). I made it my last place to look for things they carried even though the location was convenient for me just because the shopping experience was so bad. Then, a Circuit City moved in next door. They sold pretty much the same products at pretty much the same prices with a better atmosphere and the new competitive pressure really woke up the management at the Best Buy. Before long they replaced the light bulbs, lightened up the interior color scheme, and improved the product selection. I still wouldn't try to get any useful information out of an employee, but the place is a lot better than it was. Hopefully the loss of this competitor in such close proximity does not convince the local Best Buy management that they can go back to not replacing burnt out lights or kill the product selection.
Sim Ant, on the other hand, can get quite violent.
Here's one I came up with recently:
If you want to get documentation out of both CWEB and Doxygen, write the Doxygen comments in the source files like @=//! Comment for Doxygen.@> to prevent ctangle from stripping the comment out, then use sed 's/@=\/.*@>//g' input.w > output.w to strip those comments out so they don't end up in the output from cweave.
Back when I was in high school, several times each year quite a bit of time was wasted in school assemblies. These always recognized the various sports teams, even the ones that were really not that good. It wasn't until my senior year that any academic achievement was recognized at an assembly. We had two students who (one that year, one the year before) had gotten perfect scores on the SAT and the academic decathlon team brought back a trophy. The two who had gotten the perfect SAT scores later told me that they would have rather not been singled out at the assembly. Never mind students who were going to various math and science competitions and bringing back awards. Who cares about that? (Not that any of the students really cared about anything at the assemblies. All it did was shorten the classes so that nothing meaningful could be done in any of them.)
In fact, he could use Audacity on a Mac (the download page is the first hit when using Google to search for Audacity Mac) and it would be just as easy.
Though my day to day work is mainly on Macs these days, Linux desktop development has come a long way over the past decade and there is still a lot of interest in making it better. It's great to see funding to keep these improvements coming and look forward to making the switch back to a new, improved Linux desktop at some time in the future.
High school wasn't bad. Once I had figured out that I wasn't going to get anything out of junior high school, I went back to directing my own education. When it was time to choose a high school, I went back into the public system (the computers weren't as good, but they let the students touch them and the other students were more interesting). There the problem was largely in the administration until my senior year when a new principal (who was also a nationally ranked chess player) took over. I had to test into the advanced track because I had attended a private school, but they didn't want too many people testing out of the lower levels so I was not allowed to test into a higher math course even after getting a perfect score on the science placement test.
While there, I went into every academic extra curricular that was offered and helped to get new ones started. I got out of a lot of classes to take tests and participate in other sorts of competitions. I was able to spend a month in Panama doing rainforest studies. By my senior year I was on good terms with the math department head and was able to get into an IB math course (she had already seen me beat students in calculus while I was in geometry for positions in math competitions so I asked her to sign off on the course selection instead of teacher I had for math). I suspect the teacher knew that I didn't have the prerequisites for the class, but I was getting an A so he never said anything about it.
The best teachers I had there have now either retired or have moved onto other things (one of the English teachers is now a novelist with two published novels and a third coming soon), but the worst teachers I had (such as the one who would leave his morning classes unattended to drink in his office and spend his afternoon classes passed out at his desk. I can understand how the job could drive one to drink, but that was not fun.) also did not stay long. I don't know who's there now.
The elementary school I went to had what I think was a good way to handle this. The teacher would figure out which students didn't really need the lessons and put us to the side of the class with work and materials to learn at our own pace. We were expected to help each other figure things out, help tutor students who only needed a little extra help, and lead some of the group projects. In the later years of elementary school, we would do things like read to the earlier grades (freeing the teacher to grade assignments or help students who needed a lot of help) and while I don't know how common it was, I ended up teaching a basic programming course in my fourth year (attendance optional, ungraded, open to anybody who was interested). We were kept busy and stimulated and the extra effort the teachers took to arrange this was paid back.
Sadly, this story does not have a happy ending. The junior high school could not figure out what to do with a small group of motivated students who had already learned what they wanted to teach. The school recommended that two of us be committed. My parents decided that they were the crazy ones and had me waste a couple years in a private school. The other's parents took the advice. He was pumped full of drugs which started him on a path of substance abuse that ruined his life for many years. He's clean now, working minimum wage jobs and just getting by. The year after I left, the elementary school was renovated, but this program was stopped along with creative dramatics and foreign language. The teachers went into early retirement.
I see a lot of comments already jumping on fancy POS systems, but if a basic cash register is really all that is needed, get to your local office store and take a look at what's there. A basic Sharp cash register (and probably registers from other makers as well) will store this data on a SD card or allow a USB connection to a computer. The software they (Sharp, don't know about others) provide is crap, but the data you get back is CSV which can be imported into any spreadsheet program. It's basic, but if that's all you need it does the trick.