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Comment Re:No, no. Let's not go there. Please. (Score 1) 937

Is there a difference between knowledge and belief

Yes. Always.

Knowledge is based, either directly or through a proxy, upon known facts that are some combination of repeatable, consensually experiential, and testable. Sound travels at a particular speed in our atmosphere. This is knowledge.

Beliefs are based upon faith, and cannot be proven, although they can be described and so passed along. Animals cross the rainbow bridge when they die. This is belief.

Either one can be mischaracterized as the other, but examining the issue at hand for the required elements of knowledge will very quickly determine just what it is you're dealing with. Likewise, conviction isn't the issue.

The thing to remember is that just because you have an idea in your head, that doesn't qualify it as knowledge.

Comment Not answered in review (Score 1) 216

Did they enable nested folders yet? The current single level folders are limiting and create unnecessary clutter.

For instance, it'd be nice to have one games folder, inside which might be a folder for board games, one for shooters, one for tower defense, etc.

One that would be of interest to me would be arranged around photography. One main folder, then one for editors, one for astrophoto conditions and apps, one for auroral conditions and apps, one for IR work, one for special effects, etc., one for a DB of my lenses and cameras, one with my portfolio, one with links to photography websites, etc.

Folders within folders is a very natural way to arrange things in a hierarchy; I have never understood Apple's resistance to giving its customers tools they can use to make using IOS easier. In the case of nested folders, you don't *have* to use the feature if you don't want to, anyway... but if you need it, you probably *really* need it.

So here's hoping.

Comment Re:Wow... (Score 1) 232

As for FDD... standard on the east coast USA and many other parts of the world. It works for unthinking peons but utterly fails for jobs that require imagination.

If you treat your employees like unthinking peons, they will respond by behaving like that - and that means turning a blind eye towards the innumerable small irregularities and problems a workforce that doesn't actively hate you could easily correct before they have a noticeable effect on production. That is the difference between workplaces where everything seems to work as if by magic and one that does a passable impression of being haunted by an evil spirit because it is, specifically yours.

There are no jobs that don't benefit from thinking about how it fits to the bigger picture.

Comment Re:Experience counts (Score 1) 232

But if you're afraid to do your job, it's because you have a problem with confidence in your own skills. Blaming management for such fears just takes the incompetence you exhibit to a whole new level of blame-gaming.

Unless it's not just you, but every one of your fellow employees. Then the problem is systematic in that workplace, and thus must be in the system itself.

The thing is, managers are humans and sometimes have serious issues or even outright mental problems, such as ego too powerful for them to handle. And sometimes they're simply afraid of their superiors. Competence only matters in a healthy organization where everyone is trying to meet its goals; in an ill one they concentrate on covering their ass, not just against mistakes but also against backstabbing.

Comment Re:Wow... (Score 1) 232

It seems like you're extrapolating from that experience, to thinking "FDD" is a current trend. AFAIK it's not.

Sure it is. What's happening to programming is what happens to anything when there's more supply than demand: a race to the bottom. Personal computers used to be rare, so programmers could rely on their skills being so as well; now they're ubiquitous, and the industry is entering the same phase others did during the Industrial Revolution. The only known solution is to unionize and bargain collectively, but of course that requires giving up the cherished illusions of being able to make it on your own.

Comment Re:Virtual Desktops (Workspaces) (Score 1) 545

It is a matter of taste; but the proliferation of 'widescreen' has really made multiple orientation setups more attractive. In particular, the ubiquitous 1920x1080 is cheap as dirt and nice and wide; but actually throws fewer vertical pixels than a nasty old 1280x1024 17' from about 2001. If you read or write a lot of text, or code with reasonably short lines, taking a cheapo 1920x1080 and rotating it gives you a 1080x1920: this is handy because it's still wider than 1024(so even old and horrible programs/layouts generally won't break, since anything that old and horrible probably expects 768 or 1024 pixel wide screens); but provides more vertical resolution than even substantially more expensive monitors in their native orientation.

I prefer my 'primary' monitor to be unrotated; but the amount of vertical resolution you can get for the money, without totally sacrificing width, from a rotated secondary monitor is pretty compelling.

Comment Re:Natural immunity (Score 1) 122

In this case, you might want to go after the vets before the doctors...

It's not an accident that they were looking at agricultural workers (rather than, say, elementary school teachers, who would be seeing the worst of it from antibiotics-for-the-sniffles patients), nor is it an accident that there are 'livestock-associated' drug resistant strains.

Comment Re:COBOL: Why the hate? (Score 2) 270

However, since if it is still being used, then it still has some capability that is not available in other solutions.

No, no, no, no!

COBOL is still in use because because mid-to-large corporations spend many millions of dollars on systems that WORKED, and now it's far cheaper to keep them working, the same old way, than it is to do it all over again with modern equipment and languages.

This is called "installed base" and it's a particular problem for COBOL because that was one of the first business languages, and has one of the largest, large-corporation "installed bases".

COBOL has nothing to offer that newer languages don't do better. Not. One. Thing.

Comment Re:The UK Cobol Climate Is Very Different (Score 4, Insightful) 270

Every professional workplace has an expectation of a formal atire.

No, they don't. This is a statement made by someone about ready to REtire.

Most high-paying tech jobs today do not require a suit and many not even an office to go into. Often you can work at home in your pajamas, if you like.

Yes, really.

Comment Re:Lifetime at 16nm? (Score 1) 66

seems like the average life expectancy of SSDs are well beyond the needs of most people at the moment, unless you're doing some serious content creation with massive amounts of read/writes.

The lifetime has been exaggerated from Day 1. Further, multiplying this problem manyfold, is that when an SSD fails, it tends to fail totally. In contrast, when a hard drive i failing, you tend to get a few bad sectors which flag an impending problem, and you main lose a file or two. Bad SSD usually means "everything gone with no warning".

If you use SSD you should have a good HDD backup.

Comment Re:Virtual Desktops (Workspaces) (Score 2) 545

Aside from price, which makes accepting multiple monitors rather compelling(you can get physically big ones for relatively small amounts of money, because of TVs; but if you want resolution the cost goes up fast and things really start to misbehave if you go high enough that DP MST or the like is required to drive the thing), it mostly comes down to how good your windowing system is at tiling and how well applications that expect 'full screen' can handle playing with others.

A good window manager makes carving up a single large monitor into chunks suitably sized for your various programs easy and painless. If you are enduring a less obliging one, it can be a fairly ugly business, actually less pleasant than getting some help from multiple physical displays, which are more widely respected even by poorly behaved programs.

That said, the 'two side by side, giant bezel in the middle' configuration is not my favorite. A larger primary screen, with ancillary screens on one or both sides gives you plenty of room for assorted lesser windows; but also avoids annoying bezels in the center of your field of view.

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