I'm by no means an expert, but I doubt the ability of modern universities to teach community in any meaningful, successful way. This seems like a course correction that's way too late, enacted by the same people responsible for the original problem.

They already tried that -- our ultra-woke (or whatever they're calling it these days) hard left sociology largely came from universities. They've already created a social community. One that did not work. How are the same people going to now teach a society that DOES work?

It feels like universities are a dead concept, they just don't know it yet. The required changes to renew relevance have become too large to be practical.

Obviously added by a programmer who'd been around for a while.

Daughter is a big fan of physical media, both CDs and DVDs. She doesn't buy blu-rays because her TV wouldn't really benefit and her current DVD player, which "works fine" doesn't support them. I have to remember that when I buy movies for her for birthday or Christmas, they have to be on plain DVDs.

I'm a photographer, and at one time daughter wanted to follow suit. I got her a "prosumer" digital camera which she used for a while but didn't really get into it. What she really wanted was my old film camera. This led to lomography, a series of vintage medium format cameras, and a lot of prints. All physical media.

A few years ago she won a bid on a Nintendo 64 with one controller. She found another controller somewhere, and started investing in old game cartridges. I pointed out that those games are available now on modern hardware via emulation, but she says there's something satisfying with having physical cartridges of single games.

I understand her views partially. I shoot Nikon, currently Z series (mirrorless) but earlier this year I invested in a Nikon F4 film camera because I wanted to re-experience film. I love the feel of the thing and the completely different workflow of film vs digital. I still get paid to take digital photos, but I play with film.

Similarly, I still buy CDs instead of streaming music. Older CDs are dirt cheap right now, so in the last couple years I've picked up a lot of music that I used to have on vinyl years ago. I will still dump the CD into itunes and put the mp3s on a thumb drive for the truck, but there's something satisfying in having a physical copy.

Instead of "reusable", the engineers thought they meant "self-recycling".

Reruns of Home and Away. Check.

So there's an actual law in California that you can't have an unlicensed school? That raises all kinds of questions, like, what constitutes a school?

I don't live in California, but after the local school system failed my child (diagnosed by several doctors as severely dyslexic, a diagnosis that was not recognized by the school despite a mountain of paperwork, diagnosed BY THE SCHOOL as ADHD in third grade and "retarded" (the teacher actually used that word) in fourth grade) I pulled her out of the system and started looking for alternates.

We applied to a private art school but they were full at the time. Then I learned of a homeschool consortium close by, a collection of high tech families banded together to teach their children, with each parent teaching the subject they knew best. For instance, daughter's math teacher was formerly a nuclear engineer.

Many of the children were outcasts from the school system for various reasons. Daughter thrived there for three years, then transferred to the art school when they had an opening, and thrived there. I would read the assignments to her in the evenings and she would dictate responses to me. Her papers were good enough to prompt an investigation for cheating, but alone in front of the board she could recite from memory and draw conclusions on the subject. (Having a good memory was a way to compensate for a fifth grade reading level.) Her hour long capstone presentation was made without notes. The principal attended.

Sorry, I drifted from the point. Which was, without those three years at the consortium, she would not be the person she is now, and considering how terrible the local school system was (in fairness, I don't know what Palo Alto is like), I just can't imagine a law that requires children to attend broken schools.

I'd argue that Apple has been making low-cost laptops for some time. They've just been charging a lot for them.

That's a really good point. If you create the content yourself, it might be slower and headache inducing, but you will at least know the material.

Seriously, it's hardly a surprise. Doing research and putting words together takes cogitation which stimulates the brain. A stimulated brain is a sharp brain. We've known this for decades, perhaps centuries.

The people in my workgroup lean heavily on ChatGPT and Copilot and the like because it's faster and easier, but I wonder if it's more effective. Is it faster only initially? After we've used these tools for a while, and our brains have atrophied, maybe we slow to the point where the time saved is a wash.

Where does this lead? Are we condemned to become Eloi?

They were going down on their own.

I wasn't aware that Calc didn't do live pivot tables. Heck, even I've done that in various jobs. I'm working a project right now that requires we pick up a huge spreadsheet, pivot and burst.

I can see where Excel might be a special case, as there are people who really use a large number of its features, which don't necessarily translate to Calc. I'm glad your wife found a solution, and hopefully she won't get stuck when Microsoft changes the file format or something.

Another reason for having the bits local, I'm really uncomfortable with my content being solely in the cloud. I do occasionally use the free cloud version of Visio (for probably similar reasons why your wife uses Excel -- a long history with the tool) but I always save local.

Ok, yeah, that's fair enough. Point taken.

I personally think that Microsoft Office is way over valued. I have a license for Office 2000, and had been using that way beyond its sell-by date [1] before switching to LibreOffice, with which I've been very happy.

I'm aware that the web version of MS Office is technically free, but I prefer to have my bits local and LibreOffice fits well into my workflow. In my opinion, there's no technical reason to use MS Office anymore, except that large entities tend to fall to pressure from Microsoft.

[1] In fairness, the REASON I'd been able to use Office 2000 for so long is that Microsoft for a long time kept it up with patches to support new file format and so forth. But it was finally time to move on.

Oh yeah, wrong environment. There should be a way to like an article.

I honestly did not know that AOL still existed. I'm astonished that it's market value is so high.

I listened to a security guy's podcast yesterday, and he went over why security programs like Norton and Mcafee were useful at one time but are just junk bloatware these days. It was his opinion that Windows Defender is good enough for most things. The same with PC vpn software -- most of them don't do what you think they do. Apparently the security and privacy industries are big scam opportunities.

To be honest, I've been out of that industry long enough that I don't have a feel for the current status. So I note without commenting.