First thing I do on any fresh install of Linux is to turn off virtual desktops. My experience has been that if I've got so much going on at once that it makes a single desktop instance seem too cluttered, that's a sign that I need to reconsider how I handle my time.

Having to close and reopen tools forces you to cut down on context switching. At least for me, that helps productivity.

Jetbrains makes a number of popular IDEs and related dev tools. IntelliJ (Java IDE), ReSharper (VS extension for inspection/refactoring), TeamCity (CI/build tool), etc. Their tools are pretty well known in certain segments of the development industry (Java, Python, .Net), and TeamCity is quite popular as a less painful alternative to tools like Bamboo.

Is the article correct?

According to the settings in OneNote, I'm not opted in to CEIP, but I can still see KB3068708 in the update list. Additionally, it is Optional, not Recommended.

Perhaps what the article meant is that it only shows up in Recommended if you are enrolled, and is Optional otherwise.

I'm kinda in the same boat. I've had subs for PyCharm and WebStorm both personally and through work for years. I don't think I'm gonna renew them when they expire. I'm finding more and more that the free alternatives are just as good now.

Latest problem: PyQt on Windows. There's no intellisense in PyCharm using the binary install of PyQt. Getting it working, as far as I can gather, requires grabbing the library's source, finding everything I need to build the source in VC2010 and then (hopefully) it works. I don't know, because after half a day I was stuck on build errors and said fuck it, I'm not putting this much work into something that should be simple. Fired up VS2015, installed Python Tools, it scanned my python modules and bam, intellisense out of the box. I've had this exact issue repeatedly over the years with different libraries in PyCharm.

VS turns out to be a great IDE for Python, and for web work I'm finding that Sublime Text is pretty damn good with the right plugins. Haven't touched Java in years, thank god, so I can't speak to IntelliJ.

JetBrains IDEs were the sweet spot between lightweight text editors and the clusterfuck that was Eclipse. As time has gone on, those lightweight tools now do most of what made Jetbrains products so awesome.

So if acronyms are always pronounced separately, do you mean I should say "enn aa ess aa" when referring to NASA? "arr aa emm" instead of RAM?

In the English language at least, acronyms are by definition pronounceable as words (if they weren't, they'd be initialisms), so why wouldn't you pronounce them that way?

BTW, out of curiosity, is there another query language in use called SEQUEL other than the one from the 70's that became SQL?

The only people I ever see who say "ess you" are the same ones who say "ess queue ell" instead of "sequel". Just like in DOS it was "dell" not "dee eee ell", "rem" not "arr eee emm", etc.

Commands and acronyms that can be pronounced as words usually are.

This. The standard worker smarter vs work harder dilemma.

I did the whole groove thing when I was in my twenties and just starting out. As I gained experience, it became obvious that the groove is far from ideal. I produce better code when I take frequent short breaks. Get up, stretch, take a quick walk, give your brain time to process everything you've been doing. Then you're in the right mindset to see what's what. So I don't work late, especially on Fridays. If I'm in the middle of a tricky bit and 5:00 hits, I'm gone. By the time Monday rolls around, I know how to proceed because the problem has been rolling around my subconscious for 2.5 days.

I see a few coworkers who work long hours in the groove, and they always seem to be rewriting four hours of work for the third time because they get into the groove, churn it out and a day later realize it isn't gonna work long-term. Meanwhile, if they'd just stopped an hour in and pinged one of their colleagues for a 5-minute sanity check they'd have realized it sooner and saved their evening.

Prime Music is even worse. I added a song to my library. It says it is there, but it isn't. And I can't remove it and add it again because while I can pull up a track through searching and see that it is in my library, I can only remove it from my library from within my library. But it isn't there, so I can't remove it. Can't play it, can't remove it, can't re-add it. This has happened multiple times.

I'd been trying it out as a possible replacement for other streaming services mainly because I already pay for Prime so why not use it, but the quality just isn't there at this point.

It isn't about "fixing" someone, any more than you "fix" an alcoholic or "fix" a schizophrenic. That latent trait will always persist. Treatment is about managing the condition, keeping it controlled to the point that it no longer presents a severely negative impact on your quality of life.

There are different treatment methods, but which one a person will respond to is largely a guess, even for an experienced therapist. The goal is avoid the process of spending months trying Method A to no effect, then months of Method B, then three years later finally finding a winner with Treatment G. The goal is to predict which treatment they are likely to respond positively to.

The scan ties to CBT in particular because right now that is the preferred treatment for SAD and is usually the first one tried.

Mistype, should have been 2.5mm

Yeah, god forbid I waste one of my 10 USB ports on something. Better save it for, umm, what exactly?

Yes, I'm familiar with 3.5mm plugs, that's what my speakers are plugged into. They don't have a plug to chain a headset, so I use a USB headset instead of having to swap cables.

I've had a somewhat similar experience.

Linux was my full-time OS starting in 2002 (Gentoo for about 8 years, then bouncing between Fedora, Mint and Crunchbang). About four months ago I switched my main PC to Windows 7. I actually like it, enough to keep using it. When my laptop finally needed replacing, I went with an SP3 which has been quite nice (Windows 8's interface actually makes sense on a tablet whereas I hate it on desktops/laptops).

Linux-the-OS is still mostly nice. Linux-the-userland reached its zenith about four years ago and has been declining in quality ever since. I found myself spending more and more time dealing with issues stemming from buggy applications and shoddy drivers, enough that it felt like I was back in 2008 again. NetworkManager loses all my VPN passwords, my USB headset doesn't work properly, video driver quality is getting worse instead of better, Flash somehow manages to keep getting worse, even though you'd think that wouldn't be possible at this point, etc.

Windows 7, meanwhile, just works. The biggest gripe I've had so far is the continued lack of support in Explorer for long paths, which causes issues for my nodejs projects (given that their module dependency system has all the sophistication of a high school midterm project). I can work around that easily enough, though. I'm not a twenty-something with time to kill anymore, I can't spend three days tracking down why my USB headset stops outputting sound when the system volume drops below 20% (unless I launch Virtualbox, at which point it magically works again). I like tinkering when time permits, but nowadays I want my system to just work. Linux doesn't do that right now. I still love the OS, but it is no longer practical for me to use it.

I used to be rabidly anti-DRM, but my mindset has mellowed somewhat and is similar to your's now. When I'm buying a game for $5 in a steam sale, more often than not it is a game I'm not likely to ever replay. Same with digital purchases on XBL. The games I know I'll replay (Baldur's Gate, IWD, Mass Effect, etc) I have physical discs for or have purchased through GOG.

DRM is perfectly fine for something you only want to play once and can get at rental prices.

Err, should have read "less than $1.00/gal".

You could get gas $1.00/gal in Georgia in the early 90's. Georgia was the cheap state in that area, so when driving north from Florida you always timed your stop so that your first fillup was across the Georgia line.