I like the ideas of this article but would not use SPARC as a main badguy in my examples. A naive and probably popular takeaway would be, "Thank goodness I am not writing for SPARC and don't need to worry about these SPARC architectural concerns!"
I went through elementary and middle school using MECC software on Apple II, and of course had no idea at the time what a treasure it was. My generation was at the beginning of the computer-education revolution; we had "gamified" learning before that was ever a thing.
An Apple II on a wheeled desk-cart was always popular in elementary school.
I don't know your definition of "rolled in", but the actual successor to the SE is the e line (iPhone 16e, 17e, etc).
I agree that the SE was a great iPhone and a great form factor. I didn't have one, but my kid did. Whenever I had to do something on their SE, I found it so much more usable than my own whatever Pro phone of that time. It wasn't enough to get me to go to an SE, however.
Tangentially related, if anyone has Sun nostalgia but only a bit, find a Sun Type 6 USB keyboard on eBay and plug it in. Great keyboard for a Mac. Unfortunately, the left-hand function keys (Stop, Again, Props, etc.) do not emit any usable keycodes. But everything else works.
There is a difference between Chinese model and Chinese service.
Your company most likely is banning the use of foreign services, but it wouldn't make sense to ban the model, since the model would be ran locally.
I wouldn't allow my employees to use a foreign service either if my company had specific geographic laws it had to follow (ie, fin or med or privacy laws, such as the ones in the EU).
That said, I'm not sure I'd allow them to use any AI product either, locally inferred on-prem or not: I need my employees to _not_ make mistakes, not automate mistake making.
In private sector yes. Anything that touches public sector (government) and it starts to be supply chain concerns and they want all american made models
The only problem is that the American models are super fracking dumb. Arcee Thinking Large (398B) is orders of magnitude worse than even Qwen 3.5 35B, getting stuck in thinking loops with incredibly basic questions that Google could answer in 500ms.
LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft.
It's still the only free as in freedom office suite option I'm aware of. I do try my best to avoid needing such software at all (I prefer to stay inside vim), but it has its uses when dealing with files from other people, or niche stuff like importing XML and saving as a CSV.
Gnumeric is great. It's the only one that holds up with massive CSV files and remains snappy. So I tend to prefer it. Functions are more limited than Calc though.
About 10 years ago the Ubuntu package manager borked my installation of LibreOffice (or maybe it was OpenOffice then). I only used it for spreadsheets and Gnumeric was able to open the ODS files just fine. There was only one function that I need to change (DaysInYear for handling leap years).
If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.
None of the tools that you mentioned except for LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free-as-in-freedom, and if you’re using Linux on the desktop, then Microsoft Office and the Apple iWork suite are unavailable as desktop applications.
For three or four endpoints all within the home, you could do this with just ATAs and not even need a SIP server. Many ATAs have a configurable "dial plan" that will let you map a number to an IP address, thus giving you the ability to call the other terminals directly within the LAN.
Janky is directly proportional to cost. Grandstream are the jankiest and least expensive. I like the Cisco 191; it is a fine unit but costs about $100-120.
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