#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
using namespace std;

int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
	int number_of_items;
	cout << "How many pieces of data are in the list? ";
        cin >> number_of_items;
	float list[number_of_items];

	// get all the data items
	cout << "Please enter the data:" << endl;
	int i;
	for (i = 1; i <= number_of_items; i++)
	{
		cout << i << ". "; 		cin >> list[i];
	}

	// find the mean (average) of the data
	float xbar = 0;
	for (i = 0; i <= number_of_items; i++)
		xbar = xbar + list[i];

	xbar = xbar / number_of_items;
	cout << "The mean (average) is " << xbar << "." << endl;

	// find the standard deviation
	float numerator = 0;
	float denominator = number_of_items;

	for (i = 1; i <= number_of_items; i++)
		numerator = numerator + pow((list[i] - xbar), 2);

	float standard_deviation = sqrt (numerator/denominator);
	cout << "The standard deviation for the given data is "
		 << standard_deviation << "." << endl;

	return 0;
}

via Apple’s Support page

1. Someone on IRC (nick JHKKHJK or similar, I can’t quite recall it)  in a WWDC discussion channel told me that Snow Leopard’s UI would be darker. That started originally what seemed like a wild goose chase, but ended up being a lot more meaningful than that.
2. First up was MobileMe, which sported a dark toolbar. Knowing how Apple feels about design and a look of integration across all its products, I found it obvious that it was only a matter of time before other applications started going dark as well.
3. Next, interfaces began to merge with iTunes 8, which  in Grid View has a dark “sub-toolbar” and even darker scrollbars.
4. When QuickTime X’s new interface was announced I was sure that my ideas were no longer simply speculation and that Apple was giving way too many clus that they were going to give us a darker interfaces.
5. Now, Dock context menus are dark. Having five interface items be dark is interesting enough; I wonder what else will be darker in future Snow Leopard releases. Besides, all the iLife apps have dark scrollbars.

Oh, and there are new wallpapers available for Snow Leopard; I’m already using some of them.

The project originally went beyond a simple conception into a full-fledged stable desktop environment. Its last stable release (1.0.1), however, was in 2007. Its development seems to have virtually stopped, though. It’s plainly obvious, especially since its website hasn’t been updated in two years or so and we hardly hear anything about it. So what ever happened to Project Looking Glass? Why did the project stagnate?

After giving it some thought and research, here are a few reasons I came up with:

• There is a lack of user base. Sure, it’s interesting, but not many people felt the compulsion to switch from their two-dimensional desktop environment, one to which they had gotten completely accustomed, to something completely new. Besides, how many common users besides “techies” have heard of Looking Glass at all?
• There is a lack of interest. This builds up on the previous point. It seems Sun simply got tired of the project and promoting it. Besides, Sun has already accepted GNOME as the de facto standard desktop environment for its OS releases, such as OpenSolaris.
• It’s another platform. Modern developers, despite being relatively welcoming to new technologies, seem to have already found their niche and divided themselves into what they find suitable. Further more, Looking Glass and its APIs, as far as it seems, has a lot unique features that are not easily or readily deployable to other platforms, so it’s not a WORA (write-once-run-anywhere) situation.

Given these, and other reasons, such as the easier availability of other 3D desktop environments, such as Compiz, it’s relatively easy to see why Looking Glass died out. The project’s latency is still a loss for the world of development.

This program is Python 3-compatible. To make it compatible with earlier versions, remove the parentheses from the final print statement. It is released under the CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license).

5. What is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by all of the numbers from 1 to 20?

divisors = range(1, 21)
i = 1

while i:
\t for x in divisors:
\t\t if i % x != 0:
\t\t\t break

\t if i % x == 0 and x == 20:
\t\t answer = i
\t\t i = -1

\t i = i + 1

print(answer)

Before starting, though, I’d just like to mention what’s one of very few cons with this (pre-)release: a few preferences are scattered around other menus when they really should be in Opera > Preferences, namely Appearance and Mail and Chat Accounts.

I’ve never really liked built-in support for e-mail and chat, but Opera implemented it well. When I open up mail in the sidebar, the current page being viewed is still intact. From this sidebar, I can check if I have any new mail. If I do, I can open it in another tab. Once I’m done, I just close the tab and am back to browsing. No more switching between applications. Now, while I’m still a big Colloquy fan, I find that IRC chatting has been implemented quite well. Your favorite (or rather, recently-connected) rooms are listed in the sidebar and all you need is one click to connect to them.

For jotting down links you want to go back to later but don’t exactly want to bookmark, the notes tab on the side allows you to jot those down, as well as other notes or reminders. There’s also a built-in address book, which makes keeping contacts less cumbersome than it tends to be on Windows and Linux distros (I still prefer OS X’s Address Book.app, though).

Overall, Opera 10 Beta a very nice and stable release whose final build I would certainly recommend, especially to Windows and Linux users. Don’t get me wrong; it runs very well on OS X, and is about sixty megabytes smaller than Safari, but I just find that user interface doesn’t fit in very well with the rest of the system. Other than that, it’s great and the features are wonderful.

If I’m in my Documents folder and I start typing in the Spotlight toolbar item, I’ll want Spotlight to start searching within my Documents folder, not throughout my whole Mac. If I want to do that, I’ll either go into the root directory or search from the menu bar.

The following screenshot is taken from a now-removed YouTube video depicting Snow Leopard’s Finder preferences:

Thanks for the new feature, Apple!

To start off, I found the relations between countries and languages to be extremely interesting. From a developer’s point a view, this is great for knowing which language localizations should be more of a priority than others, what languages the project development or support team should have a basic hang of, and of the general future of the GNOME-using community. The number of Chinese users is almost the same as the number of American and European users combined.

It’s also easy to see that the GNOME community is being led by students and learners worldwide that want to know more, distribute more information, and have access to more information. The vast majority of users are currently attending a university or college, wish to learn more, and use GNOME not only as a work environment, but also for pleasure. This shows that it’s nice that GNOME is succeeding at reaching out to both sides of the spectrum.

Most of the users are connected to the internet, mostly with high-speed DSL or better. A lot use Windows as well and, by a small margin, tend to prefer desktop computers to laptops for working with GNOME and Linux. Many however, answered they’d like GNOME to follow in some of the steps of OS X: most notably, they want to be able to search for menu items within each program.

The GNOME team itself summarized a few important points, such as (just to name a few): more “professional” applications need to be written for the Linux desktop, GNOME should head for the cloud (integrating internet activities more prominently into the daily use of the desktop), the panels should be redesigned, and finding things (be it files, applications, etc) needs to be easier.

I hope GNOME 3.0 turns out to be an awesome release when it comes by, and that all the information gathered can be put into good use.