132 karma · joined October 18, 2010
As far as I understand though, they have stopped offering support for non-subscribers, and they also seem to have stopped producing builds for ARM devices a couple of years ago (but the server software works even with new firmware versions). I am still betting on them supporting local installs for a while (based on my understanding that at least some of their corporate clients would want an on-prem solution), but am a little bit worried it might not be as openly available forever. I am therefore slowly researching my best migration path from a Raspberry Pi to some affordable and reasonably low powered x86 thing. Suggestions welcome.
P.S.: The biggest selling point for me compared with some other (more open) E-ink screens is the battery. I keep mine on the fridge with a magnet and can't really use one that needs to be plugged in all the time in the same place. If anyone knows of anything similar and controllable locally, I'd be very interested to read about it.
Their complaint is that Calc sometimes lags/hangs with a few thousand rows of heavily formatted data (they're not a data scientist, but still need to deal with government-issued xls[x] files). It wasn't a serious problem though and a great opportunity to "look under the hood" of what was happening and introduce them to CSV files. The other "problem" is that online shopping websites are often horribly slow, but again, I'd say there's a lesson in there and it could be viewed as a feature.
So all in all I am a huge fan. I think it's a great way to onboard people on good-enough-computing and open source. There is something magical about its form factor that resonates with "non-technical" people. Also quite cheap and accessible.
The article is basically begging the question of what capitalist markets prefer in terms of "properties" its actors should "hold". I don't know of any evidence that contemporary capitalism rewards "intelligence" apart from pop cultural and ideological claims. In that sense, the conclusions presented are in no way "new" or "informative".
It's just a restatement of a deeply seated wish that we could somehow explain away the largely immoral differences in the standard of living with some property suposedly outside of moral consideration (intelligence, gender, race - it doesn't really matter).