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.

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.

So to be clear, it's more awful to have 1 out of every 9 people have to pass two people if they want to use the bathroom than to have 2 out of every 6? Because that's typical economy seating plans are 3-3.

It's not a religion, it's a principle. When it makes sense, you put it aside and get work done. The argument against systemd is that it doesn't make sense. systemd is a simple case of NIH because it provides absolutely nothing which could not be implemented with the existing daemons and some small shell scripts.

That's right.

That's not the complaint. The complaint is that the process at PID 1 should be simple. You people running around screaming about a bunch of different processes are only compounding the proof that you do not understand Unix. It's not a problem to have many processes.

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.

Bullshit, they're still letting licensed commercial vehicles use the HOV lane. The fact is that HOV lanes are shit. They're a waste of space which accomplishes none of the stated goals. Simply adding another general lane does more to reduce emissions, because it does more to reduce congestion, and thus reduces idling — where vehicles without start-stop systems get 0 MPG and thus are producing pure pollution. They're always trying to justify the existence of HOV lanes with bullshit like this, but they still are unjustifiable.

I've seen plenty of "fear driven development" over the years, but the "fear" was usually on the part of incompetent employees who were afraid they'd be caught out as idiots and fired. They'd churn paperwork and documentation rather than touching a line of code, because if they broke something, their incompetence would become apparent.

Fear is the mind killer.

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.

Windows had this too, it was just never a default part of an official release. It was a part of PowerToys or some such as I recall. It didn't work that well at times but it just needed some evolving.

OSX seems to be going downhill though. More and more iphone like, lack of innovation, bugs not getting fixed. At least it's free.

My Windows 7 laptop does everything I need for Windowsy stuff, so I won't be replacing or upgrading it unless I win the lottery.

Sadly, my 10+ year old 3.8GHz Pentium-pre-Core2 box is finally dying, so I'm in the midst of shifting my development and personal stuff over to the laptop. I've used Windows for years as a developer so it's not *too* painful, but I'm going to miss Linux. Linux just *works* without getting in my way; I can't say the same for Windows, even on trivial issues as to which widgets get auto-focused when you open them up (who is the brilliant idiot who came up with the idea that the file browser should focus on that damned library panel instead of the list of files?)

Rather than creeping you out by peering over your shoulder waiting for you too blunder so he can offer unsolicited advice instead He just sits there and serenades you with the Beatles song "Number Nine" until ask him a question

Phones have big screens now, so they need armor anyway. So since you're going to put armor on the phone, you want the phone to get thinner, so that the phone with a case on it is still thin. Just making the phone thin allows the user to put whichever case on it they like, so they get to personalize their phone and you don't have to try to anticipate their needs, instead letting the whole world do that. And that's why having the camera really doesn't matter. In fact, having the bezel around it protrude from the camera probably helps protect that side from scratches. What's the problem, planned to slot-load the phone?

Is there anything in this whitelist?

Yup, and the solution available to any rational being is the same: since by hypothesis the two choices are indistinguishable, flip a coin to create a new situation in which one of them has a trivial weight on its side.

Starving to death (or letting everyone die) is obviously inferior to this to any rational being (which the donkey and the robot are both presumed to be) and adding randomness is a perfectly general solution to the problem.

Buridan's donkey is not in fact an example of a rational being, but rather a passive, uncreative being, who must for some unspecified reason decide without acting on the situation, as if it was living in some bizarrely unrealistic world like Plato's Cave, where it could only know the world via shadows on the wall which it cannot act on in any way.

Why anyone thinks thought-experiments about such limited beings, which are completely unlike humans in their inability to act on the world to change their situation, is beyond me.

"is it really possible to express an idea in code that one cannot express in one's native language?"
Yes.