Excel is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets like Excel are first and foremost aimed at accounting sort of tasks. Whether they actually need Excel versus something like Google Docs or Libreoffice is another thing. The big thing with Excel is that it gets used (and abused) to do things that it’s not really intended for doing such as those spreadsheets that are full of macros trying to be an application, or those spreadsheets that are trying to be a database, and so forth.

From an engineering perspective, I find Excel to be annoying because it’s clearly first and foremost an accounting tool, and some of its behaviors like the way it rounds numbers and tries to turn everything into a date is downright obnoxious. I still use it from time to time for quick and dirty things like whipping up a couple of plots quickly (and this doesn’t really need Excel… but at work all the computers have Excel), but otherwise for anything more complicated I’d probably switch to something else.

The size increase in hard drives around that time was insane. Compared to the mid-90’s which was just a decade ago, hard drives capacities increased around 100 times. On average, drive capacities were doubling every year.

Then things slowed down. In the past 20 years, we’ve maybe increased the capacities 30-40 times for hard drives.

Flash memory, on the other hand, is a different story. Sometime around 2002-3 or so I paid something like $45 for my first USB flash drive - a whole 128MB of storage. Today I can buy one that’s literally 1000 times larger, for around a third of that price. (I still have that drive, and it still works too!)

That chart doesn’t really show the recent price hike. Late last year, I bought an 8TB Samsung SATA SSD for $350. If I wanted to buy that same drive today, it would be $630.

The Samsung monitors we get at the office still appear to be just dumb screens. No remote or anything like that. But that’s from their business lineup of monitors. Wouldn’t surprise me too much if their consumer/gamer lineup would be different.

I have to say, they really should come up with a different name. Searching and finding the website for a company named “Why!” is pretty much impossible with today’s search engines.

Most of those apps could be replaced by a website that will work anywhere. But a website can’t spy on you as easily… so they push apps instead.

The worst one I remember was having to read Great Expectations in high school. Maybe I might appreciate the book more today, but at the time I found it incredibly boring and it just seemed to drag on and on and on. It really felt like a written soap opera from the 1800’s, which it kind of was as it was originally published a serial where the reader got a small part of it every week. Which probably accounted for how slowly the plot seemed to move.

Perhaps an honorable mention would go to “Triton”, as that’s the first book I remember where I started reading and actually got a decent way into it before putting it down as it was absolutely boring me out of my mind. Though I was a teen at the time, and one of my main sources of reading material was whatever I could find at garage sales for cheap. But nevertheless, almost always if I thought a book was interesting enough to buy it was also interesting enough for at least one read through, but that one stood out as an exception. Though I have to wonder if I tried reading it again today if I might manage to get through it this time.

I have to rank Children of the Mind as one of the just plain weirdest books I’ve ever read. Just when I thought it couldn’t get weirder, Orson Scott Card manages to throw something else at you. After I finished Children of the Mind, I decided at that point I was going to move onto some other book series.

I’ll still recommend Ender’s Game as that’s a classic, but I wouldn’t bother with the sequels.

That sounds like a problem with whatever edition you read. I had to read it a long time ago for school and the version we read was more like a short novel and I found it an interesting read.

It probably has to do with whether the driver’s license is Real ID compliant or not. Here in Minnesota, you have the option of getting the Real ID license that can be used as a federal ID card for things like flying, or the regular old driver’s license which soon will really only be good for showing you’re allowed to drive a car.

I only have the regular driver’s license so I don’t know what all getting the Read ID involves, but having your biometric data scanned and stored seems like something they’d require.

Naw, the best software they’ve ever produced is 6502 BASIC.

Though Flight Simulator does get an honorable mention.

The supreme court left it kind of vague in their ruling. The courts are supposed to decide, but for something like this no matter what the lower courts decide, any ruling would almost certainly get appealed up all the way up to the supreme court. So what is or isn’t an official act is basically boils to whatever the supreme court decides it to be.

Personally, I didn’t really mind Wesley in the later seasons and a few of the Wesley-centric episodes were pretty good. It’s really the first season, and even more so the first few episodes of the first season where he was annoying as all hell. Oh look, boy wonder saves the ship, yet again. Unfortunately that kind of seems to have stuck with the character, despite the show toning down his antics significantly after that.

If you think that’s fun, just wait until you get to the verbs of motion.

That’s my experience with Asus going back over 25 years now. To me, Asus has always been substandard products sold at premium prices. If I wanted a substandard motherboard, I’d buy ECS and save a bunch of money. And to be fair to ECS, I’ve had some of their boards that have worked just fine, which is more than I can say about the Asus stuff.

It certainly could. That’s the gamble you’re taking.

I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.

I have an old film scanner (was pricy back in its day) that doesn’t have drivers for 64 bit Windows, and anything newer than Vista. So I have an old XP box that can talk to it.

That’s all I use that computer for, so it’s otherwise fine with its circa 2009 configuration. Haven’t had to do any fixes or workarounds.

I’d say not really, Tolkien was a writer, not an artist.

What you are doing is violating the trademark Middle-Earth Enterprises has on the Gandalf character.

How do they compare to TVs? At least the last time I looked into it, pretty much every TV was terrible compared to even a halfway decent computer monitor.

That’s actually just what I did. New PC runs Manjaro Linux. So far all the games I’ve thrown at it work just fine.

Maybe I should have done that with the old PC, but I’m lazy and Windows 7 was working well enough.