Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Steven, thanks for this article.
For many years I have been "that guy using OpenOffice / LibreOffice" in a group of other people who use the main commercial suite. From this experience I can tell you that this has NEVER worked well. Partly it's because there are endless slightly incompatible versions of the main commercial suite, and because of that, it's probably impossible for OO or LO to work 100% successfully with any one of those. Share documents across two different languages and things get even worse (I get W*rd documents with Spanish style elements in them, next to their English language equivalents - that's just one example).
Couple this with the move from Arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman and other if-not-open-at-least-distributable fonts to Calibri & co that require a license of said office suite and things get even worse.
I wish I could convince my colleagues that we would all be better off working with OO/LO and then doing the .docx conversion at the last minute, for the client.
I could go on about this for a very long time but I'm going to stop now.
Thanks for the comment, KoshNaranek. You will see the same link from Benchmark above in my article.
I know a fair bit about mathematics and I (somewhat reluctantly) consider myself an audiophile, but I respectfully disagree with your perspective that this is a matter that can be solved by mathematics. Rather, I think it is a matter of opinion, where some are willing to see their music wrapped in a proprietary package that they must license if they wish to enjoy it in full, and others would prefer to continue receiving their music in open formats that do not require licensing; in both cases, no matter the pros and cons of the MQA technology itself. But I could well be wrong!