And, unlike engineers in manufacturing whose deep-pocket corporations bought an exemption, Engineers in the A/E/C field are licensed. And if you screw up you can lose your ability to work in your field…forever.

You could say the same for a finite element model. A junior engineer with just 4 years of training can solve, explicitly, the deflection at the center of a slender, simple-simple beam of prismatic section and produce an exact (if slightly incorrect) answer. Building a FEM of the same can solve the problem and take longer (to make the model) with similar accuracy, both of which are good enough for design work.

Only a fool wouldn’t have a FEM around though, as it can solve problem that would take centuries for a human to solve. They may as well make a cartoon with the child digging a 3” hole in beach sand and then showing a backhoe making a jagged edged hole of the same size.

It ticks the boxes - not Amazon, stylus, and eInk.

You’re going to need an os, even if it’s just embedded to access a file system and manage resources.

I bought one and it kinda sucked. I wanted a digital library for the tens of thousands of pages of references I use at work, and a sketch pad would be a bonus. It’s a cool device but the screen is just too slow to be useful and the application space for android and drawing is…thin.

You can get a reliable plug and play printer for as little as $500-600, though it will take 15-20 hours, if you’re technically minded, to learn to get the files to print. The material will be around $30-40 at retail prices (it’s generally only sold by the kg).

You can likely send the files to a print house and get them printed for just $100-200.

(Someone will claim that the $99 Ender and a roll of $9.99 genetic PLA will work. They are technically correct in the same way that your grandmother can edit photos for free by setting up Arch Linux on a $100 PC from Goodwill.)

Isn’t that a Boox? eInk, stylus, android, can buy direct.

Even the biggest phones, imo, just don’t have the real estate for decent note taking. Tablets, esp with low aspect ratio screens, are the sweet spot.

Yeah, but can you do it offline/without an active internet connection - the preinstalled windows Netflix app can.

Most of the things you say are missing are installed by default, though some require you to know how to use the command line. Which reminds me…how do you install the Netflix app on Linux? I’d like to watch some shows on my new laptop while I’m on the train.

They’re wrong, of course.

You don’t have to enter a license key.

IKR? For what they wanted I could get a faster full size machine with better expandability. I get the value in a small box, but unless you had some commercial application or wanted some special architectural aesthetic in your home that required that size, it was a waste of money.

That’s sort of how I do mine. I put all my data onto dropbox/onedrive. I’ve got a $100 HP USFF hooked up in my office that is a 100% online mirror for those cloud accounts, and it backs up to an 8TB external each week. I rotate that drive with a spare each month (give or take), putting the “offline” one in a firesafe. It means I have a live copy (my pc), a cloud copy (OD/DB), a second hot copy (USFF PC), a near-line backup no more than 7 days old that isn’t “live” and a cold storage copy that is no more than a month old (aka less than Apple’s deleted-pictures and Dropbox’s previous version storage time). It cost me two external drives and the mini-pc. And if all those fail I’ll probably be roaming the radioactive wasteland looking for food and losing that data won’t matter.

Oh, and that little box also runs a small FTP server and my Torrents for my Linux distro collection.

SCNNER HALT:LOAD YELLOW INK TO RESUME

Except for you Adobe. That’s a cost issue.

AutoDesk had entered the chat

The unRaid forums are the place to go. TBH, it’s so bullet proof I only ever do anything with it when I rebuild my server. The last time was ~3 years ago.

The management is a nice gui, the docker setup is mostly automatic, but doing anything beyond basics is command line. I almost never use *ix but it’s really not that bad.

As long as someone replies “Hey, you’re finally awake…”

Pretty much my method. On an unRaid server so that I can have a flat user space interface and expand as needed.

My collecting isn’t as automated and only my video media is aggregated into a viewing platform (Plex), but it’s pretty easy to find anything on a moments notice.

As someone who learned to do the most basic things in assembly on a 6502 and was so broke that I couldn’t afford an assembler so I hand coded to ML with a pencil and legal pad, I salute you and your persistence.

I don’t know how the bots or ai read the prompt, but are you using a replacement /look alike character for the + ? Would that even make a difference?

As is tradition.

Nothing but pictures of John Oliver in maritime garb.