While I despise MATLAB for a large set of reasons, I agree that a large variety of toolboxes is available for pretty much anything you might want to do. And those are what most of the MATLAB users look for, in my experience: they might dislike the language, but MATLAB provides/they can purchase toolboxes that do what they need for their research.

I wish FreeBSD added support - however minimal, disabling the power-hogging dedicated graphics card - for hybrid graphics. That would be pretty much enough for me to at least dual-boot FreeBSD on my laptop.

I would like to see how it stands against current CPUs. Aside from making it available for open-source projects which could benefit from testing on not-very-common architectures, I don't see much use for it either.

Some erasing will eventually happen. Smaller forums, newsgroups etc... will eventually die (domain expires, owner loses interest, they become spamfests and then are punished by Google's algorithms etc...).

posting to undo wrong mod

Not only legacy: for BIOS/firmware updates it's often the only choice. There is flashrom (http://flashrom.org/Flashrom), for flashing from within Linux, but I don't dare using it.

At the university I go to, I recall a computer architecture teacher that used handouts/slides from when the Pentium 4 was the highest-end CPU available and some introductory programming classes that used 16-bit Turbo Pascal (so the students that were using a 64-bit OS - most of them, those days - were screwed) or non-.NET Visual Basic. Kinda says something about their CS program.

My bank and some other applications (which I rarely use) require Java applets. Thus I keep it disabled until explicitly needed.

I have a Dell XPS 15 (the only laptop with a non-1366x768 display I could find here in Brazil - the other choices would be from Apple, whose Brazilian operation is known for overpricing stuff, or gamer stuff which I don't need/want).

Not much to complain about it, really: almost everything worked out-of-the-box on Linux (except for the 'hybrid graphics' bullshit which requires a little hacking to get going, and the card reader - which I don't use that much - which won't automount until you run a command, then it works until the next reboot).

Of course, YMMV, the plural of anecdote isn't data, yada yada yada.

Internet filters/blocks. Low-quality hardware/software. Phone calls. People that do not realize that IM is not for chit-chat. Endless meetings. Noisy people (I've resorted to earplugs quite a few times). Etc etc...

CP/M.

The important stuff: around 40 GB (photos, [home]work, repos, the /home I have had since forever etc...). The rest (music, videos, games I have bought, etc...) can be re-ripped/downloaded if needed - even though this would be a major chore. Haven't used a CD/DVD in quite a while: external hard drives (even an old HDD in a case) become more convenient for storing not-very-useful data.

The required first-aid kit was tried in Brazil some years ago. Until someone with a little bit of common sense realized that, for serious injuries, it was better to call an ambulance than have someone unskilled attempt care (which could turn the injury into something worse).