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And here I thought I was the only one with a vertical side monitor. Then again, did you mean that both are vertical?


Nope, just the smaller of the two. It's great for viewing a whole class or several slide packs at once. Or a single remedy ticket as long as it's not too big...


Before the industrial revolution, almost all manufacturing of common goods, including food, was performed by human hands and feet. This limited output capacity to that of human strength and endurance; and it was exhausting for humans, preventing most humans from having time or energy for intellectual activities.

On the contrary, there were a handful of areas where humans had already begun to exploit motion and force outside of human muscle to carry out work. One long-time example is using horses, mules, and other animals to provide force for transporting goods over distances. Even humans were payloads transported upon animal backs. Another key advancement for humans was using water and wind to transport large amounts of goods from one place to another. Sailboats allowed for transporting of goods a very long distance. In today's age we may take self-driving transport for granted, but once upon a time humans actually had to transport goods by hand and foot.

Why the industrial revolution was a powerful next step in exploiting nature is because it allowed not only transport of goods, but also finer, more complex tasks to be carried out without requiring human muscle. Now sewing, grinding, cutting, molding, bending, digging, and drilling could be done by machine in large quantities with good reproducibility.

Hence, first humans exploited nature (and other animals) for transporting goods. Then humans began exploiting oil, coal, and electricity for carrying out more complex physical tasks that require large amounts of force. As machines grew finer, they were able to manufacture smaller, more precise goods.

The next stage was to allow humans to carry out not only large scale physical tasks without continuous human effort, but also to carry out intellectual tasks in mass without continuous human effort. This is where computers come in. They exploit nature to get information processed quickly and reliably.

At least a few areas remain where humans are doing the heavy lifting. One is reproduction. Humans are still required to take care of new humans while they are brought from incapacity to self sufficiency. This is still a difficult, time-consuming task, especially if the goal is having quality output. Another area where humans still do heavy lifting is learning. Unfortunately learning has not become much more efficient or quicker than it was in the past. Humans are very slow at learning, and a massive human effort is generally involved.


Imagine a search engine that not only gave you search results, it used advanced AI to tell you in brief how each result applied to the problem you are currently trying to solve. Currently, you have to waste time thinking about each result to classify the contents, as for example, entertainment, product marketing, opinions and rants, purely factual, legal, political, social networking, media, API/interface, et cetera.

It would also be useful if the search engine could verify statements made on pages and give an accuracy/honesty score for each result. This is particularly important when the author of a page has a serious conflict of interest. Perhaps the search engine could tell you what that conflict is -- to help protect you from deceptive or incomplete information.


WPF is superior to Windows Forms in many ways, particularly layout responsiveness. I would not recommend anyone entering the Windows Desktop scene to use this old paradigm of UI design springing from Win32 (or older). Moreover, since WPF uses XAML, learning it (as opposed to Windows Forms) better prepares one for other popular UI frameworks these days, including for Web and Mobile. Also, if only newer OS versions are of concern, consider using Universal Apps (UWP) instead of WPF. They are both very similar, but UWP is newer.


There is a much steeper learning curve for WPF, if all you are doing is a simple front end to a command line WinForms is a very easy way to get started.


Is this a scientifically supported assessment? I say this because I have heard it often, but in thinking about it, I cannot see this necessarily being true. WPF uses XAML, which is similar to HTML or other markup languages in structure. Sure, this is much different than the paradigm where you specify coordinates for all window elements (Win32, WinForms, et al.), but is it proven than a person having no background knowledge or experience in software would find markup-based layout more difficult than coordinate-based layout? Even if so, is the difference big enough to warrant telling all newcomers to use a coordinate-based layout, despite its inherent lack of responsiveness? Yes, XAML has many additional features, particularly in terms of effects, but these need not be used.


Wasn't WPF discontinued?


So they say, but that doesn't mean its support is about to end. If you look at how long MS supports technologies, you can be pretty sure it has plenty of usable life. Plus, UWP is practically the exact same thing from a design and coding perspective, so the knowledge is by no means lost.


Indeed a product often has value, but an idea without execution is an untested gamble.


If so, then promote the idea as an untested gamble, while scrutinizing the potential gamblers for an individual who is actually more of a wise investor than a risk-taker at heart.


The basic idea here is that arguing with reality is counter-productive. To be effective, one should embrace those changes that cannot be avoided.


For many in the field, a bigger issue than commoditisation is probably wage gaps between higher and lower cost regions of the globe. While it should not be expected that the average person can or even could compete with top-notch developers, for most of us, we still have to compete with good developers in extremely low-cost regions. Until the globe evens out in cost-of-living, this issue should continue to exist. Until quality programming and engineering do not require substantially above-average intelligence, these professions should not become a commodity.


In theory, a larger organisation would have more communication going on, and having messages that stand out among the noise would definitely set you apart. Moreover, the more people you communicate with, the less you know each person on a personal level -- the more impersonal each correspondent is. The less you know someone, the more important proper, clear language is.


> I don't really know of a defense other than ...

One way is to make sure you (a) provide real value and (b) know how to convey that knowledge effectively in tense situations. If you're not sure you provide real value, then BS talk may be your only hope. Even if you know you provide value, you need to be able to convince others of this or else you may be in trouble.


The underlying message here is very important to consider in this discussion. In many ways, the average human may already be outputting intelligent information about as fast as he or she can. If we really could think substantially faster than we can speak or type, then surely we could speak in mathematical formulae and in beautiful poetry at all times. When solving a complex mathematical problem, it seems most people have to stop and think periodically while writing steps and results. The processing is slower than the output. The main area where most humans are quick seems to be in visuospatial cognition, and this is perhaps the main area where we lack proper output capabilities. We need a parallel output system to complement the current serial output. Maybe if we had 64 mouths and ears we could convey information more quickly. Alternatively, a high resolution EEG could perhaps read all our muscle tones simultaneously. The tricky thing would be in training ourselves to output with all our muscles simultaneously, and the result might be a show in itself.


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