Immerse yourself in a workplace setting where Excel is the first thing that people grab for anything but text editing. You'll see how insanely productive people are. Now actually try switching to LO Calc.
I've done this several times during my career, to see if LO Calc would ever come up to the performance of Excel. To be fair, I haven't done so since I switched to Python.
Here's the experiment I would conduct. Generate a column of 5000 numbers. Now graph them. Now make a few token changes to the graph such as modifying some of the aesthetic parameters. The difference in processing time was profound, last time I tried it. Also, there was a noticeable "latency" between clicking something, and seeing something happen, that made it quite un-ergonomic if not physically painful to use. I'm sensitive to this because I get eyestrain headaches easily.
I didn't quickly find the entrance requirements for the OMSCS program and the other similar programs. I know someone who has an undergraduate arts degree and is learning programming and CS voraciously, but not in any organized fashion.
My thought is that licenses were similarly cheap for historical programming tools like Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic. My dad got me Turbo Pascal for my birthday, for $39, after reading about it in the Wall Street Journal.
But it seems like the proprietary languages have all withered, regardless of price. Even $195 for Mathematica is an obvious concession to this trend. I don't ever remember it being that cheap.
I could write an essay on the benefits of free tooling, but enough has already been written. I'll spare you the slop. ;-)
In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
One issue might just be money. "Forcing" us to buy new laptops every 3 years has to be planned well enough in advance for the new OS and hardware to be ready, but meanwhile, it may have occurred to a lot of people that hanging onto the old stuff for a few more years might make the most sense right now.
Also, even many home users may be finding that they interact less and less with the "platform" now that everything including MS Office runs from a browser. I can barely remember when the differences between Windows and Linux were even relevant to my personal computer use. This was necessitated by having to find a good way to accommodate Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android all at once.
Yep. My personal laptop is 12 years old and my work laptop is 6. A replacement battery, some extra RAM, and a replacement fan (kind of hard to get) for my personal laptop a few years ago and it still does everything I want it to do.
I cracked the screen on my work laptop last year, but IT set me up with a replacement screen. It's so much nicer having discrete buttons than a clickable trackpad, so I skipped on an upgrade. Still does everything I need it to do for work (including working with Windows 11).
And the vast majority of things I do on either laptop involves a web browser.
As I'm in my 60s, I have elderly friends and relatives who have spent time in hospitals and rehab facilities. The patient needs to have an advocate who is informed of their situation and is present when the doctor makes their brief daily or weekly visit. I've seen decisions made, that contradicted the information in their "chart" such as exercise sessions for a person with a documented broken spine, treated as inviolable by the nurses and other clinical staff. Only the doctor can change the facts of the case.
What I suggest is that if you have a friend or relative visiting you, they should bring a "flip chart" -- the old fashioned 2 x 3 foot pad of paper -- and write down in huge letters the most important details of the case. Ask the doctor to help you fill it in.
I've done this several times during my career, to see if LO Calc would ever come up to the performance of Excel. To be fair, I haven't done so since I switched to Python.
Here's the experiment I would conduct. Generate a column of 5000 numbers. Now graph them. Now make a few token changes to the graph such as modifying some of the aesthetic parameters. The difference in processing time was profound, last time I tried it. Also, there was a noticeable "latency" between clicking something, and seeing something happen, that made it quite un-ergonomic if not physically painful to use. I'm sensitive to this because I get eyestrain headaches easily.
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