I can't think of any official documents I'd be getting in Office file formats. Forms are mostly web ones or in some cases PDF, read-only documents are PDF. Maybe you can submit some documents or attachments in the Word format as a citizen but I wouldn't be surprised if PDF is already required anyway, or an image format for scans.
I'd be more worried about document interoperability between government agencies and other organizations such as companies that do work for the government. The government could of course mandate contractors to use an open source office suite which would extend the need for training to those companies.
Also, I've seen some orgs make heavy use of Office formats in terms of e.g. surprisingly elaborate formatting, document history and comments, and although I haven't tried to use those in LibreOffice, I wouldn't be sure it supports all of those in the same extent some people have learned to use them in Office.
There are lots of ways of "just not working" but IME the problem with corporate Windows laptops is often the enterprise software crap on them rather than the hardware, necessarily.
My work laptop with a high(ish)-end AMD laptop CPU and reasonable hardware quality drains the battery in a couple of hours. It also doesn't feel any faster than my personal three-year-old more lightweight (also AMD, same brand) laptop. In some cases the private device is faster despite its lower specs. Its battery would also easily last 5 times longer than the work one, probably, if I used it on the road.
(Incidentally, the poor battery life isn't much of a practical concern with the work device either because I need to use it at the desk 98% of the time anyway. But I can certainly see how crappy software and configurations can make using those devices a pain.)
> Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.
I'm okay with that, even if I'd personally prefer the serviceability. But I'm honestly not okay with the idea that it's fine to just toss a laptop after two years. I want people who do that to get their own planet.
Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.
> IME the problem with corporate Windows laptops is often the enterprise software crap on them rather than the hardware, necessarily.
I work for a small org, the laptop was bought from Dell and shipped to me. It's running vanilla Windows 11 with OpenVPN and Windows Defender, with a decent sized dev drive. There are so many issues with it - keypresses being 10-20 seconds delayed, random window tearing/partial display updates, the machine deciding to ignore sleep and just dying while the lid is closed. These aren't things that will be solved by replacing the SSD, or the RAM, they're likely CPU (and as a result motherboard) replacements.
> Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.
There's practically no devices (framework is the only one that comes to mind) that will ship with that little RAM and allow an upgrade by that much, even in the desktop space. My 2015 Macbook pro (the device before this) has 16GB RAM , giving it an extra 32GB isn't really going to help it much, the problem is that it's "i7" is an order of magnitude slower than a 3/4 year old replacement device (and ironically probably closer to the Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 258V which is in my work machine)
I think the difference is that if an autistic person learns to mask, that's probably useful as a coping mechanism but doesn't remove the autism in the sense of making the fundamental neurological difference go away. Anxiety (even in anxiety disorders) can be fundamentally reduced by exposure therapy, not only in the sense of finding more effective coping mechanisms but in the sense of the anxiety itself diminishing or ceasing to exist.
For what it's worth, exposure therapy is a real term and it's an actual part of cognitive behavioural therapy.
Obesity may increase the risk of Alzheimer's but it's far from a requirement for the disease. I can't find a link between Alzheimer's and being overweight except in case of obesity.
Lots of organizations have a blanket ban on any third-party software that wasn't specifically approved by IT. Being free might help it get cleared but that's nowhere sufficient. Since Notepad comes with Windows, it's probably always there and never banned. (Although of course the cloud-based LLM integration might actually be a problem.)
With that said, I think I've also had NotePad++ made available by IT at all employers and clients that had me use Windows even when the desktop setup was otherwise quite restricted. It's a rather established tool after all and probably considered a safe and reputable bet even by somewhat conservative IT leadership.
Now that we're ranting, I wonder what's up with the right-click context menu in Windows 11 on my machines. It literally takes a noticeable fraction of a second (in the order of several hundred ms) for the menu with fewer than ten items to appear. (The first time might take around a second, I'd suppose due to disk I/O. But subsequent clicks also have a noticeable delay.)
All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.
> An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
I think that depended (and still depends) a lot on the organization and the nature of the product.
I distinctly remember doing backend and some frontend development, requirements specification, database design, customer interfacing and even a bit of ops, all on the same job and with the same title in the 00's. That was in a small-to-medium company and my clients were on the small side so the projects might not have even had half a dozen people to begin with.
Larger organizations and more enterprisey projects would have had more specialized and limited roles: customer/specs people, possibly frontend and backend devs, DBAs, testing people, and those in charge of ops and environments. In my experience, that's still more or less true in enterprisey development today.
I think a part of the problem is that while new technologies have emerged and reduced the need to manually work with some older or underlying technologies, they haven't replaced previous skills.
Containers have reduced the amount of work needed to deal with deployments and environments but they haven't removed the need to know servers or operating systems. Cluster management can reduce the amount of manual work on setting up containers but it doesn't remove the need to know the underlying container engine. So now you need to know Linux servers and containers and k8s and whatnot just in order to manage a local backend development setup. At the same time, frameworks have made a lot of frontend work more manageable but they haven't made JavaScript or other underlying stuff disappear.
Thus the scope of what being a fully-versed full-stack developer entails has grown.
No doubt, but the breadth of required knowledge today is vast.
Sure, we were "webmasters", but there is a huge difference between tinkering with some PHP, MYSQL, HTML, and Apache, and being an expert on the latest cloud offerings, security practices, etc. One could spend six months in analysis paralysis these days without writing a line of code.
IMO it's not even quite right in its description. The first picture that describes virtual memory shows all processes as occupying the same "logical" address space with the page table just mapping pages in the "logical" address space to physical addresses one-to-one. In reality (at least in all VM systems I know of) each process has its own independent virtual address space.
I'd be more worried about document interoperability between government agencies and other organizations such as companies that do work for the government. The government could of course mandate contractors to use an open source office suite which would extend the need for training to those companies.
Also, I've seen some orgs make heavy use of Office formats in terms of e.g. surprisingly elaborate formatting, document history and comments, and although I haven't tried to use those in LibreOffice, I wouldn't be sure it supports all of those in the same extent some people have learned to use them in Office.
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