GeneT45's comments

Agreed. It's also worth pointing out that Effective C is the most current in terms of being up to date with present-day C standards.

K&R is so obsolete it's now wrong about some things. It's a pretty good read sometime down the road - when you can recognize its shortcomings - but it's not a book from which to start learning C.

A big part of the aforementioned book is the manner in which differing steels produce a burr, or even micro-burr that can be mistaken for an edge, but cuts poorly and/or deteriorates quickly. A number of deburring techniques are tested on a number of steels and it is noteworthy that there is no single best method - each category of steels responds best to a different manner of deburring. Great longevity was achieved with proper deburring (as shown in the book with a host of SEM photos.

Excellent (aftermarket) plane irons of known alloy are widely available (at least here in the U.S.). I know some woodworkers value having all original parts, but if the primary goal is paper-thin even-width shavings it's hard to beat modern metallurgy.

>>I wish someone would do a similar study for wood plane irons/blades (including their different steel types) versus various grinding techniques,

I think you're looking for the book "Knife Deburring: Science behind the lasting razor edge" by Vadim Kralchuk. The author had a good website, but it appears no more and my cursory web search indicates that he has passed away. He has / had a YouTube channel as well.

Your comment can only be truly appreciated by plumbing the bizarre depths of "high-end audio" where nitwits (errr... customers) will pay $700 for a 6' Kapton-insulated power cord for their stereo. You know, to plug into the wall where it connects to 100 ft of Romex that cost $0.20/ft...

Looks like my favorite example has disappeared, but there are always these: http://www.audio-consulting.ch/?Parts:Woodlenses

This is a fun book. I've read the 'Early Access' e-book and I think it should appeal to both engineers and hobbyists. I particularly enjoyed that they devoted a chapter to how they went about preparing and taking the pictures.

Sounds like 60-80 hour weeks to me. However, ime, not always for nothing. Back when I was willing to work those kinds of hours I was well compensated for it.

I don't buy everything in dead-tree format, but I always have a few books for evening reading in bed. (My reading is almost exclusively tech books.)

Your employee is a good person - let's just call her 'honest'. And you are a liar. Any questions? Make all the excuses you want, your company policy is dishonesty, and I hope you fail.

You should fire the employee immediately and advertise for a liar, there are plenty of them out there.

99% of them had the last name 'Pelosi'...

They are the government, so clearly there is no will to do anything about it. The same cretins are re-elected (perhaps because the single, viable, alternate option is even more despicable.

If we, the electorate, are not prepared to oust those that are clearly thieves and liars, than we shall receive that which we deserve.

Enhancing government surveillance while solving zero problems. Seems par for the course for "California Governor" (Gavin Newsom)

I favor Amazon on this. No company has a "right" to sell on Amazon, so they're free to go and advertise elsewhere. If they want to use Amazon's enormous market presence a few concessions seem reasonable. Expecting Amazon to stock, advertise, and manage your product while you work to undersell them is **you** being unreasonable.

"... all university rankings are essentially worthless. They’re based on data that have very little to do with the academic merit of an institution . . . "

So much this. The biggest value of a prestigious university is the name, not the education. Prestigious universities crank out top-notch graduates (and the occasional complete incompetent) because they accept only top-tier students (and the occasional complete incompetent).

As a parent, know that if you get your child into a 'good' school you've probably done all you can. The outcome has more to do with your child than the stultifying, enervating, curriculum to which they'll be subjected.

Education from -1 to 24 is horribly broken (at least in the U.S.).

Your age is off just a bit - I almost thought you might be the founder of a trio of C64 (and C Pet) programmers with the same idea. It was an exciting time to be 'into' computers!

I avoid Altera altogether because Intel doesn't seem to care much about them. Quartus has either been abandoned, or received the barest minimum updates. Setting up a new system is an adventure in patches & workarounds.*

*It's possible that some of this has been remedied, I gave up on them a few years ago and haven't checked back...

I ordered one just a couple of months ago and received a ship notice a week or two ago. (Delivery expected next week!). It appears they're shipping.

My first digital camera was a Kodak. Purchased around '97(?) for the princely sum of $1000. It was 1.1Mp IIRC and took excellent photos for the time. It also consumed AA batteries with the same alacrity that its ancestors consumed film.

You'll never hold on to everything, but if you achieved understanding once, it will come back pretty quickly. The good news is that what you know/knew about electronics doesn't age as badly as what you know about SW.

Yes! Solid guidelines that will last ages. This is the sort of practical company I would be looking to work for, if I were looking for work. It's refreshing to see a company that isn't chasing the next great language as if it were a solution to the "problem" of producing quality code.

re other comments: There's nothing "cultish" about hewing to C. Yes, C has (had) some atrociously unsafe string manipulation libs, but that's a straw man. Those libs only exist to allow C backward compatibility. There are many modern, yet mature, libs that handle strings safely. Contemporary C programmers aren't struggling with strings, they're struggling with the very same problems as programmers of Forth, Lisp, Python, and every other language. Which is to say - the language is neither the problem, nor the solution.

Don't get me wrong, I have my favorite languages: Forth, Common Lisp, C# (really!) and, yes, C. But, at the end of the day it's the difference between leather and cloth seats in your Jag. You probably feel more comfortable in one than the other, but they both get you where you're going, and it probably wasn't that much worse if you had the one that wasn't your preference. The "traffic" wasn't altered by your choice of vehicular amenities and the real problems in programming don't really change with your choice of language.

I have a similar tool called a 'Speedy Sharp' - I think it was about $5. I like it for hasty sharpening at the expense of removing what I'd consider 'too much' metal. Much more than a conventional stone (and hence, much faster). I would never touch a precision edge, such as a plane iron with one.

I have a drawer-full of sharpening gizmos, but after many years I'm convinced that there's really no substitute for stones - although there are poor to great stones. They all require some understanding of developing an edge, particularly if a fine edge is wanted. Probably the easiest (for knives) is the Spyderco Sharpmaker. Probably the best is anything that helps you hold an angle, high quality, flat, stones, and developing a little skill.

I strongly commend "The Technique of Clear Writing" by Robert Gunning. I don't think it's in print anymore, but copies are still inexpensively available through Amazon and elsewhere.