bluenose69

Re the title possibilities: some films have multiple titles. "The F Word", a Canadian film, was called "What if" in the USA ... I guess to avoid scaring away people who thought it was porn. (It's not. It is funny and sweet. And realistic, in a quite-unrealistic way.)

The Canadian government uses tab-separated values quite a lot.

I get this sometimes when I ask the agent on GitHub to suggestion improvements to my Julia code. It's kind of fun to watch it struggle to please. I'm reminded of the old "Doctor" mode in Emacs.

Yes, that's a great book.

Ah, thanks for the information.

The curve on your diagram makes me think that you've fitted a normal (Gaussian) curve to the data. By eye, the distribution looks a bit more like log-normal, and so if you're still working on the data, you might want to try that to see. Not that anything you've said or concluded seems wrong, though.

They are doing this also for the science version, the 15C.

I bought a 15C in the 1980s, and have enjoyed it ever since. It is like a rock. Despite being treated roughly over the years, nothing is wrong with it apart from some dents in the metal parts and my name, scratched on the back. I suppose I've replaced the batteries a couple of times, but that's it. This thing just refuses to die.

The main thing is that the keys still work like on day 1. And I've never seen a calculator with keys like this, with such feedback that you never need to worry about double-presses or missed-presses.

I just love the thing. If it died, I'd buy one of these new versions in a flash. But I think it will outlast me!

I agree with this entirely. I suppose it was partly an issue of limited floor space, but maybe the largest factor was that if a store sold junk mixed with good items, they could get a bad reputation.

Another factor of purchasing in "the old days", particularly for Sears, was that it was usually quite easy to get replacements for faulty products. None of this business of packaging things up, mailing them away and waiting. Walk up to the counter, show that the item was nonfunctional, and a cheery salesperson would go out back and get a new one for you. Sometimes they didn't even ask for a receipt. Sears had products that were "good enough", and they wanted customers to keep coming back. Of course it didn't last, but that wasn't just this particular company.

The article starts out by saying that Notepad++ "is a text editor popular among developers". Really?

The cursor changes when you get to resizing corners and edges, so I don't suffer from the problem pointed out in the original article. However, I do find something annoying: sometimes when I'm resizing (or maybe dragging) a window, it gets expanded to fill the whole screen.

I think that kind of behaviour ought to be controlled by the green dot at the top-left of windows, not by some particular mouse movements.

There was a time when the changes to the mac UI were quite good, or at least not annoying. Sometimes it seems as though they are changing stuff just to change stuff.

I work in a university environment.

The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).

I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.

I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.