Reminds me of an old Rabbinic saying: Wisdom comes to us when we are too old to use it.

I always pay in full every month, and it caused me to be refused a higher line of credit. Bank of America told me that I didn't have a record of monthly payments (which I did, as I paid in full every month on every credit card, but I guess that doesn't count as they weren't installment payments or loan payments) and therefore didn't qualify for more credit. Then they said that they ran a credit check, and my credit score was 820 (850 is the max you can have), and appended tips for improving my credit rating!

Of course Bank of America is one of the more evil players (they too highlight the minimum balance and have no "auto-pay full balance" option), but then again most of the players are evil to some degree.

That was one of the main points in my posting earlier in this discussion. Slicker is not better unless it communicates more effectively, and often it does the exact opposite. Back in the day, some people used WordStar and were happy enough with it. Slick? Hardly. Could you communicate with it? Yup. (Not that I recommend it today, but that isn't my point.)

Another poster made the point that LibreOffice and predecessors don't break the paradigm, and instead try to more or less mimic MS Office (sans ribbon). That is an interesting observation and could generate a long discussion of its own. Even AbiWord, which prides itself on being small and lightweight, has an MS Office feel. That leads me to ask, where could office software go that is new and different, and most importantly, allows for easier and better communication, if the paradigm were to change?

There was an important paradigm shift between the older systems, such as the aforementioned WordStar, and the fully-GUI systems of today, although there are those who argue that this did not enhance communication. But clearly usability for the average user is higher.

What might the next paradigm shift be?

I respect everyone's choices and if you say you need MS Office then go ahead and use it. You use what you find best, I'll use what I find best.

However here's my question. First let's compare current MS Office and a version from, say, 10 years ago. What is getting done better that matters with the newest version? Has productivity increased? Are presentations and documents slicker? Does that mean they communicate their information better? Are spreadsheet models a lot better (maybe they are, I don't know)? Or are they just more complex and maybe buggier?

Now do the same comparison between the latest MS Office and the latest LibreOffice.

There was this guy I used to work with who was considered the organization's PowerPoint guru. He did all sorts of amazing tricks, effects, and whatnot. I will be the first to say there is no way those tricks, effects, and whatnot could have been done with Impress. His presentations wowed his viewers just about 100% of the time.

So, was he getting his message across better?

What actually happened is that the viewers were so busy watching all the pyrotechnics that his message often got lost.

So think about the true value of all the "extras" in MS Office. Certainly there are edge cases where they present value, but is that true for 90% of users 90% percent of the time?

Holy bloatware, batman.... 32GB for Win 8.1? Is it really that much?

Isn't that the most important lesson from all of this? Google cancels stuff willy-nilly (admittedly with decent notice). Other stuff disappears completely. Even paid services get acquired, merged, destroyed.

If you rely on a free web service for personal use, you could be in for a shock. If you rely on a free web service to run a business .... I don't want to buy shares of your company.

That said, I use gmail and Google calendar. I should know better....

What's the answer? I suppose I should say, "do it all yourself" but that can be a tall order, especially if you need to sync mobile devices or multiple operating systems. The truth is, I don't know of an easy answer.

I actually said this once (except it was ten years) and got the job. I pointed out that this was a "standard" interview question that didn't apply to everyone, and the interview committee liked that answer. Guess I was just lucky.

Free for sure, but generally automated? Not on every distro. It's often easier to do a full save, a fresh install, and then restore whatever you need. My Linux Mint upgrades take about a day of work to get everything back to where I want it. That occurs maybe every 18 months, so I don't mind it so much, and I have complete control over the process and a very high probability of complete success (100% success so far, going back many years before Mint, to Ubuntu and Suse before that). It's an annoyance, but hardly fatal.

To "The Toe" : terrific list. I've read some and now will plan to read the rest. I'll add one: The Difference Engine.

Here in Hawai`i, where electricity in Honolulu is about $0.32/kWh right now (over $0.40 on some of the other islands), ditching the incandescents was for us a really easy decision.

Sagemath seems like quite a good freeware alternative as well. I've come to prefer it to Scilab (though the Scilab simulation feature is pretty awesome).

Wish I still had my Epson 286. It was actually good for doing work.... I mean real work, not writing a letter with 100 fonts in it or making a spreadsheet so large and complex that no one could ever find all the errors in it.

That's exactly what corporate people do all the time. Salespeople blitz into big corporation/government manager's offices and sell a bill of goods. The managers are hardly competent enough to know if anything is any good. Then later when staff complains the same salespeople are back to sell upgrades or consulting.

Granted that open source projects sometimes lack something in the user interface, I'm not sure that closed-source proprietary products are necessarily better, although the big companies do have the resources for significant usability testing and design. But that can be seriously abused, too. MS changes interfaces at will. Look at the "ribbon" and even worse, Windows 8. Where was the usability testing there?

"Because when you are handicapped and you do something great it's not the great thing they talk about it's the being handicapped part. It's patronizing"

You have a point and I can't myself speak to that aspect. However, the rest of us can learn something from these stories, which is that you can overcome the odds and saying "I can't" is just an excuse. This woman would have had all kinds of excuses but she doesn't think that way. Like I said, something big to learn from that.