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And knowing how to get the version of an application (which used to be in Help -> About).

For group chats in Microsoft Teams with more than seven participants, if you click on "View and add participants" (an icon with two people and a plus sign) you see a list of seven participants. At first I didn't know that you could scroll in this list.

Then it turns out that the book was written by an LLM.

I checked! Copyright 2013. Phew.

Why don't we instead focus our energies on the user. For some very important software applications the customer is not the user. Let the sales department focus on the customer.

The user is always a customer of the product in my mind. I don't use the term to mean a purely financial relationship.

The hospital information system Millenium from Oracle was bought by two regions in south of Sweden for around 400 million USD. It turned out to be unusable for Swedish healthcare and had to be shut down after just three days. Actual users of the software (doctors and nurses) were not involved in the procurement.

Something that would be useful in my case is a monitor stand stand. Does anyone know why almost no current monitor can be raised so that the upper edge is at eye level? Is it due to incompetence among the current breed of designers? Quite a few of my colleges have a stack of books beneath the monitor stand.

I bought this Hyper HyperStand some years ago:

https://techaeris.com/2020/11/01/hyperstand-review-solid-por...

It's perfect: nice looking, highly functional, beautifully designed, and collapsible.

$29.99.

Alas, discontinued.

Perhaps eBay?

Edit: I just found a tricked-out version on eBay here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/226769239456?_skw=Hyper+HyperStand+...


Law suits / claims, I'd expect, as tall is unstable.

If I sell a Monitor With Really Tall Monitor Stand and then you lightly bump your desk and break your monitor, you might want a replacement and call my stand "an unstable PoS".

If I sell you a Monitor and you stack books under it and your monitor falls... well... dummy, tall stuff falls over. Time to buy a new monitor.


Isn't the manufacturer to blame if I get neck problems then?

Nonsense, that's your seat height. Lower your seat and magically the monitor is the right height.

Your keyboard may be chin-height but hey, your monitor height is no longer a problem. ;)


Many monitor arms on gas struts have extended range and this is no problem. Ergotron was one of the first

Try getting “Enterprise” monitors like Dell UltraSharp or HP EliteDisplay. Not they only come with better feet (height adjustable & pivoting), they are calibrated and have really good panels which you can stare at for hours without fatigue.

Monitor arms are cheap enough and better than a stand. Clamp the arm to an edge and you can put things under the monitor, plus put the monitor where you want it.

Postconditions are in conflict with programmers' love of early returns.


Formally, it doesn't appear to be so (tests can be added to each early return); in practice, encouraging the reorganization of messy early returns would be zero cost developer reeducation.


It's also worth noting that statements like

  for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
    S;
    if (P) {
      break;
    }
  }
are just as bad since `break' (and `continue' and early `return') are a just gotos in disguise.


They are just gotos, but does that mean that they are bad (along with their friend try/catch, who is also a goto?), or does that mean that gotos can be useful when used with restraint?

Gotos get a bad rep because they become spaghetti when misused. But there are lots of cases where using gotos (or break/continue/early return/catch) makes your code cleaner and simpler.

Part of a programmer's job is to reason about code. By creating black and white rules like "avoid gotos", we attempt to outsource the thinking required of us out to some religious statement. We shouldn't do that.

Gotos can be useful and can lead to good code. They can also be dangerous and lead to bad code. But no "rule of thumb" or "programming principle" will save you from bad code.


Yes, break, continue, and return are all "just" gotos in disguise. But they restrict the power of the goto enough to not cause the problems that goto causes while providing a good deal of semantic power to users. Namely, all of these are essentially variations on early return (you can also throw in the logical && and || operators here, albeit they are slightly different in having two exit points rather than one--they're a fusion of if and break, essentially). And it sort of turns that there are a lot of cases where "return when any of these conditions, tested in a particular order, holds" turns out to be the most natural way to express an algorithm, and these goto-like constructs are the most natural way to write them.

(FWIW, this is essentially the argument that Knuth makes in his defense of goto paper)


The argument in the article was that the for loop is (potentially) "lying" and that is still true in my example. Niklaus Wirth's Modula-2 had a LOOP statement in which an EXIT statement could occur anywhere. That statement was at least not misleading. In Wirth's last revision of his last programming language Oberon the loop statement is removed and return is no longer a statement but a clause at the end of a function procedure. This makes Oberon a purely structured language.

https://miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html


"universal access to a large universe of documents"

It's a sad fact that a large part of the web doesn't work without Javascript, a technology which enables privacy-invasive practices (and surveillance capitalism). It wasn't as bad when progressive enhancement was the norm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement


With so many ready meals to choose from I don't understand why anyone nowadays would cook anything from scratch.


Should be easy to correct the default behavior for the next release if the issue is reported.


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