I spent 20 years working in K-12 in a suport role. The issues vary greatly across population densities and social and economic status. The large district I worked for (~55,000 students) featured everything from schools where every kid must be prepared to go to college, to trying to arrest the pregnancy and dropout rates.

The problem is when education is treated as a monolithic bloc. Issues vary incredibly widely from school to school, from neighborhood to neighborhood. An additional problem is the attack stemming from the anti-tax crowd on public education, eroding budgets and thus paychecks, generating disrespect for teachers, and causing many to leave the profession for something that pays better. That leads to erosion of the system and it starting to break down.

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

*ow!*

uh, found it...

Not only have I seen that, but I have experienced it.

My socket set and ratchet isn't trying to convince me to be in a relationship with it, to be in love with it, to be something of an equal to it.

Even our pets as living beings capable of expressing themselves are not able to communicate at our level.

Large language model AI is attempting to spoof being human, to mimic being us. There are already examples of people becoming very, VERY upset when their AI-boyfriend or AI-girlfriend is taken away by companies revising the AI standards and interaction rules. This is unhealthy. The relationship needs to remain that of tool user and tool, because anything more than that is one-sided and subject to terrible abuse by anyone that managed to co-opt that system.

The Butlerian Jihad cannot come soon enough. Machines should be useful tools serving us, where our emotional connections to them are still based on tool-user and tool.

My current phone has three cameras on it, two for regular use and one for selfies. If they increased the resolution of the cameras, they could easily change it to two cameras.

I could. I don't look at it as a phone so much as a foldable tablet with a screen sufficiently large as to be actually useful.

If it also happens to work well as a smartphone when folded down then that could likewise be useful.

Trouble is, it needs to be no more expensive than a phone and a tablet separately purchased in order for most potential customers to justify it. If it costs more than both combined then scant few will bother adopting it.

The design of the mouse in general needs a rethink. When mice contained an actual ball in a 3/4" or so diameter it was necessary for a particular shape in order to facilitate that ball having somewhere to go, and that somewhere ended up being under the joints where the fingers meet the palm. This was not the most efficient place to put movement detection since that part of the hand doesn't move as much as the fingertips do.

A modern mouse would work better if it had wells for the four fingers, and each finger's well was also a button, with the optical pickup to the pad/desk located under the middle finger. Or even go with a couple of optical pickups to allow for tilt. But don't have the mouse go all of the way back to the palm anymore, and keep the finger buttons as close to the surface as possible.

Was going to say, there were split-spacebar keyboards back in the day, I worked with lot of Compaq Presarios with that arrangement.

As a lefty it sucked because if the keyboard was set up for that left-side to do something like backspace on a public kiosk computer it wasn't readily changed to be usable.

For someone's own personal computer fine, do what you want. But don't expect it to become an industry standard anymore than say, Dvorak layout is.

It's interesting that you took this to intelligence and software coding when I was talking about skill and had not limited my criticism to software coding. Honestly at the time I made my post, software wasn't even on my radar, and skill only weakly correlates with intelligence.

The insidious part about using free AI is that you're training something owned by someone else to do your work. That means whomever owns that AI now has the option of replacing some aspect of your work, rendering you redundant.

For the short term, free AI empowers the unskilled masses because they can use what skilled people misguidedly trained it to do. For the long term, AI only empowers the wealthy who own it, to the harm of the unskilled and skilled alike.