What I can't find is a nice iphone scaled real time strategy like total annihilation or warcraft.
I did angry birds and I got my dollar worth but I won't be doing it the rest of my life. Same for physics free. There was a nice star fleet battles type space combat simulator, "empire" but it is a bit heavy just to get started.
I'd like something like the old star trek game where you went from sector to sector -- it was fairly light compared with today's games.
Or something like tradewars. The learning curve needs to be shallow.
Start with a ship, a cargo, one weapon with a simple "fire" button for when you see you are in range, some wimpy shields which you can rotate like a dial to rebalance against incoming fire.
Then as you buy things, you get a little bit of rules around each upgrade at a time-- not a 27 page manual just to start playing.
Likewise, for a RTS game, I'd like something very much like "Empire" more than "Civilization". But which scales up over time with more units. It wouldn't have to be a full on total annihilation-- that would be too much.
* the irony of "taking it back for mexico" is that most of them are not related to the native american tribes who originally owned the land but are instead related to the aztecs or incas.
In the u.s. the hispanics openly talk about taking back their land for mexico* and are growing their population faster than the native population. In a few years they will have peacefully taken over the land.
In Europe islamic immigrants are breeding much faster than the natives. You could see an islamic europe in 50 years without a shot being fired.
I think it is happening in some asian and middle-eastern areas as well.
I can't see how my children and grandchildren won't suffer. But there isn't anything we can do about it.
Water isn't the only basis for arable land. As we use the land harder, it becomes poisoned with mineral salts and well salt. It needs time to rest- it needs rainwater irrigation to clean it. Good land is like a fully charged battery and we've been discharging it too fast for a couple hundred years now.
If we use geothermal on a massive level, then won't we discover unintended effects?
Solar isn't just photovoltaic- the stirling engine version provides a lot of energy with mirrors and salt. I think they should take the efficiency hit and go with passive parabolic mirrors tho. They have some lower efficiency technology (11%ish) which uses no rare metals if I recall correctly.
Energy use per person is dropping for now. Devices are much more efficient than they used to be. When I was younger, we used to trip 20 amp circuit breakers all the time. Now, I never do. CFL (even better the new LED's), and high seer A/C make a big difference.
However- our lower usage would be a lot higher for large parts of the world- I agree.
I don't think we have to replace all. It can happen on a price basis partially. Every time the price of fossil goes too high, more people go to alternative energy and then fossil fuels drop in price (because demand drops).
On the disease issue- I do not think a disease will come along that will significantly stop our population growth rate. Diseases will come along that annoy us. That's what I meant by "beat".
And it's only beat as long as organized society doesn't break down. So you are right- I'm a bit contradictory there.
Again your are right that we might not adapt fast enough and at some point have a lot of deaths from low quality food. But I think it's more of a degradation. I don't think water or oil. I think strategic metals or rare earths. And arable land perhaps.
Right now we have this weird "move in and out breed the natives" form of warfare going on.
Yea- I agree nothing will be done in time.
How can you make something that kills people?
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
Asked of a tobacco grower on cnbc.
The first thought in my head was "okay but so does booze, sugar, fatty food".
I don't smoke but if I want to smoke, or skydive, or stay up 24 hours, or drink, or eat cream smothered bacon-- get the hell out of my private life.
You need to stop them at the tobacco level- or when it falls, the next thing will be sugar and fat. In fact they are already starting on them now.
I think we have disease beat. War the likely start- possibly driven by resource conflict. Famine would be the largest cause of death.
I think 1) a war that causes disruption 2) mass starvation because the food supply is disrupted (it can happen *really* fast these days- from full shelves to nothing in a few days).
Possible minor social breakdown as a result. 3) Even tho disease is beat (so no plague as the start), once the medical system is disrupted- I think population will be so high that disease will be opportunistic- cholera especially (and there is a new incurable form getting going in india now).
I don't think we'll die form poor nutrients- we would get smaller and adapt to the new diet over time. Parts of the population would die- but net net population would keep increasing.
What gets me is we will have to stop and in much more ugly ways if we run this out to max population before we address it.
Right now, if we just went to a net birth rate of 75% (1.5 children per family) we could mostly fix this in 40 years.
The longer we put off having a smaller young generation the worse its going to be . At some point, a lot of old people are going to have to fend for themselves. And they are not really capable of it.
I'm arguing that we are actively incenting births now.
I'm not going for the aggressive 'disincent births' position-- just "stop paying people to have children and stop providing them free food and medical care just because they got pregnant." Only 15 years ago, we gave them free housing as well- and that lead to a lot of extra teen births (get pregnant, get your own free housing, food stamps, and welfare).
Just stop incenting for a start-- then go from there.
(and my real belief is that we reproduce until things break and billions die and nothing we do can stop that.. so this is mostly jawboning... I am lucky and will be dead by that break point most likely).
I really don't think we need to go back to 500ad levels.
With current pollution controls and efficiency improvements we can have a viable population in billions tho I'm a bit concerned about potash and fertilizers.
Why do you think we would need to get down to 250 million? What systems started failing or what isn't sustainable in your opinion?
Close. The right starting and ending letters...different middle, "pula".
po----tion
Cut po-pula-tion.
Nothing we do will matter if we don't stop incenting new babies and let the population naturally fall to 3 billion (even 2 billion- the planet would be a paradise with 2 billion).
If you don't take these measures now- you STILL have take them when we hit 9 billion (10 billion... 11 billion) and life will be a lot more miserable then with dead fisheries, high cellulose fruits and vegetables and no meat except for the wealthy.
We can fix most of these problems in one generation.
In this case, putting a solar panel on every plot of 299ksq (so a 15 k square or hex grid) should do it.
To be fair-- you are including mountains (darn high installation expenses!), swamps, etc. I'm sure there will be a subset. And there are multiple kinds of solar power.
And if the power isn't 100% sufficient, you apparently need to keep the gas/oil turbines spinning at a low rate so they can ramp up when the wind dies or the clouds block a section.
Still, most houses could be powered for less than 10% of their lot size. In my case, I'll be powering during the day with a grid tied system with no batteries. That should reduce my power costs by about $500 per year and payback the system in 20 years assuming no increases in the cost of power (which in my area have doubled to tripled over the last 20 years).
The anti-solar side overstates things to the negative. The pro-solar side overstates things to the positive.
But photo voltaic solar is getting cheaper every year now and we are about to hit a period of inflation. $10k in a solar power system could pay for itself in 15 years and then produce a 50% to 75% return over the next 10 years. Plus- saved money- you don't pay taxes on. So saving $500 is like earning $750.
It could be that way. Personally, I think we should let go of the 40 hours week now and drop to 35 hours with an hour for lunch (so an 8 hour shift). It wasn't that long ago that people worked "9 to 5".
We should also put in place overtime for salaried workers making under $250k at 50 hours. Salary used to be a tiny percentage of the job market- - companies have found ways to abuse "salary" that creates unemployment.
If companies had to pay overtime for salary workers at 50 hours, unemployment would drop pretty dramatically for a few years.
And... I do think things will get temporarily better from 2016 to 2024. The available employees will shrink by 4 million per year during that period (vs 2 million historically).
Eventually productivity gains will catch up with that tho.
I'm not as worried about offshore/overseas-- they are inflating rapidly-- another 8 years and it won't be a no brainer to shoot work overseas like it is now.
Many "thinking" jobs are really quite simple and can be reduced to expert rules sets of 50 to 100 rules when studied carefully. At that point, the job can be automated or broken into lower skill chunks.
A $200k degree in some cases (now- not in the future) won't get you a job which returns $200k. What's the value if it doesn't get you a job that pays much over $50k? If you have to take on so much (currently unforgivable, unbankruptable) debt that you will be unable to pay it off over the course of your entire life. (already happening too).
Were you getting the degree because you had a sincere interest in a field or just because it pays well? If you are just looking for a paycheck, you probably won't love your work and you probably wont' excel at it.
I don't foresee the "kill all humans"- but I do foresee a collapse of the mass markets. Right now- today, we have some multi-billion dollar companies (and I'm not talking about Google) which have 1/70th the number of employees. That's great for the salary of their CEO and (sometimes- but not always) their shareholders but money is just disappearing into them. It's not coming back out in the form of wages.
The hypothetical future world is that only the connected get to work, most people are unable to find a decent job, and eventually things get violent (as they have repeatedly over history whenever all the benefits of society were going to only a tiny sliver of the population).
Okay- I had the impression there were minor differences however you are correct.
Libre is a fork of OO and has these notable additions.
* SVG image import
* Lotus Word Pro and MS Works import filters
* Improved WordPerfect import
* Dialog box for title pages
* Navigator lets you unfold one heading as usual in a tree view
* "Experimental" mode that allows users to test out unfinished features
* Certain bundled extensions (including Presenter View in Impress)
* Color-coded document icons
What are the features which are so spectacular that OO is now trash and Libre is Zomg the best?
To me they seem 99% the same. There is some comment of new bugs in Libre as a result of adding the Gooo ( something around PDF's which made LO unusable for someone).
I don't hate LO. I don't love OO. I have both on my computer but haven't had time to open and test drive LO.
Since I can afford to have both, even at double the price, I will.
I like the visual cropping. I can see exactly what is happening instead of cropping, exiting the cropping menu and seeing what effect it had, then going back in.
Likewise I got really used to the format menu structure right away- it made sense in a way the new word ribbon didn't.
The last serious problem was something around formatting tables in excel. I can't remember the exact feature I was trying to use but it used to be on the menus and for some reason I couldn't find the damn thing in the new ribbon structure. If I remember later I'll repost.
I haven't used google- I've been using the word help files which are usually sufficient but they didnt' work in that case. I guess i should try google next time.
They are getting farther apart- I really struggled badly for the first six months but I only stumble on something about once a month now. I had used Word since 1998 and I found the ribbon change very painful. It's the way that things are hidden or contextual- you have to figure out what to hit to get the right options to come up. I'm not explaining it very well.
But it comes up on a minor basis still- I'll hit "view" and I need to be in "design" and I need to be in the table or out of the table while I do this.
Teachers get no respect and are being unfairly laid off in droves right now.
They also suffer under massive bureaucracies which won't let them work the way they want to work.
It used to be a nice job when they had freedom to teach as they liked, they had awesome retirement benefits, and they didn't take a status hit for low pay.
It's not really a dichotomy. I'm not dividing it into two parts. I'm saying getting a Comp Sci degree leads to the set of jobs which suck.
I agree- Comp Sci != IT... except (speaking as a person with a computer science degree) it really is for most Comp Sci graduates. Very few actually do true Comp Sci work.
You must go on to an advanced degree to work on Comp Sci. So most become software engineers, software designers-- IT people.
Now TRUE Comp Sci on the other hand... well.... it also has no dating prospects and little respect. But, you don't have to work holidays. So there is that.
why is LibreOffice already so much better than OpenOffice ever was?
Listen, I tried open office from 1.04.
It wasn't quite there yet.
But as of 3.00 I went to OO and had no need to look back.
I even had a large series of Word 1998/2000/2003 documents which would not work in Word 2010 and 2007. No explanation-no error message - they just hung.
I loaded them into OO (which I'd used since as early as 1.04 to fix broken Word documents which crashed word by loading and resaving them) and the problem was apparent. The bounding boxes on the artwork was overlapping the tables. These did not display in Word so it would have been nearly impossible to fix.
So.. I bit the bullet and converted my 100 page document from Word to OO. It took about 8 hours. I got to learn about what the "little grey lines" meant and about styles. I figured out the replacement for techniques like "styleref".
So then I converted my next 130 page document. It took 2 hours.
Then I converted all the rest of my documents- each taking under 2 hours.
Bonus? They printed MUCH faster than in word. Seriously- these things were taking 15 minutes to print in Word before they became unusable- now they printed in seconds in OO.
Libreoffice-- well it's different (not necessarily better- it does some new things OO doesn't- OO does some new things LO doesn't.). I'm okay with EITHER since either will load my OPENDOCUMENT format documents.
I'm no longer LOCKED IN to word. I no longer have to pay HUNDREDS of dollars for new versions every 3 years.
I've gotten in to Openoffice draw and created lots of maps and pictures and have developed a basic tool set of objects I can use in the documents.
I've gotten into Openoffice Calc and written a starfleet battles damage allocation program (complete with sound effects) which I can port to Excel if I ever felt the need to.
In business- I'm forced to use Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I *still* (after 12 months ) am struggling with these new interfaces. I'll be fine then I want to do something that used to be easy and it's very hard. I waste a few hours trying to find out where the hell they moved the command in Word.
And when I use word, I look for OO features which are not implemented in word and it's jarring since Word is supposed to have everything including the kitchen sink.
Libre office, Open office. They are both excellent and SUFFICIENT programs even if they cost up to $75. But they don't- they are free.
Slashdot Mirror
What I can't find is a nice iphone scaled real time strategy like total annihilation or warcraft.
I did angry birds and I got my dollar worth but I won't be doing it the rest of my life. Same for physics free. There was a nice star fleet battles type space combat simulator, "empire" but it is a bit heavy just to get started.
I'd like something like the old star trek game where you went from sector to sector -- it was fairly light compared with today's games.
Or something like tradewars.
The learning curve needs to be shallow.
Start with a ship, a cargo, one weapon with a simple "fire" button for when you see you are in range, some wimpy shields which you can rotate like a dial to rebalance against incoming fire.
Then as you buy things, you get a little bit of rules around each upgrade at a time-- not a 27 page manual just to start playing.
Likewise, for a RTS game, I'd like something very much like "Empire" more than "Civilization". But which scales up over time with more units. It wouldn't have to be a full on total annihilation-- that would be too much.
* the irony of "taking it back for mexico" is that most of them are not related to the native american tribes who originally owned the land but are instead related to the aztecs or incas.
In the u.s. the hispanics openly talk about taking back their land for mexico* and are growing their population faster than the native population. In a few years they will have peacefully taken over the land.
In Europe islamic immigrants are breeding much faster than the natives. You could see an islamic europe in 50 years without a shot being fired.
I think it is happening in some asian and middle-eastern areas as well.
I can't see how my children and grandchildren won't suffer. But there isn't anything we can do about it.
Water isn't the only basis for arable land. As we use the land harder, it becomes poisoned with mineral salts and well salt. It needs time to rest- it needs rainwater irrigation to clean it. Good land is like a fully charged battery and we've been discharging it too fast for a couple hundred years now.
If we use geothermal on a massive level, then won't we discover unintended effects?
Solar isn't just photovoltaic- the stirling engine version provides a lot of energy with mirrors and salt. I think they should take the efficiency hit and go with passive parabolic mirrors tho. They have some lower efficiency technology (11%ish) which uses no rare metals if I recall correctly.
Energy use per person is dropping for now. Devices are much more efficient than they used to be. When I was younger, we used to trip 20 amp circuit breakers all the time. Now, I never do. CFL (even better the new LED's), and high seer A/C make a big difference.
However- our lower usage would be a lot higher for large parts of the world- I agree.
I don't think we have to replace all. It can happen on a price basis partially.
Every time the price of fossil goes too high, more people go to alternative energy and then fossil fuels drop in price (because demand drops).
On the disease issue- I do not think a disease will come along that will significantly stop our population growth rate. Diseases will come along that annoy us. That's what I meant by "beat".
And it's only beat as long as organized society doesn't break down. So you are right- I'm a bit contradictory there.
Again your are right that we might not adapt fast enough and at some point have a lot of deaths from low quality food. But I think it's more of a degradation.
I don't think water or oil. I think strategic metals or rare earths.
And arable land perhaps.
Right now we have this weird "move in and out breed the natives" form of warfare going on.
Yea- I agree nothing will be done in time.
Asked of a tobacco grower on cnbc.
The first thought in my head was "okay but so does booze, sugar, fatty food".
I don't smoke but if I want to smoke, or skydive, or stay up 24 hours, or drink, or eat cream smothered bacon-- get the hell out of my private life.
You need to stop them at the tobacco level- or when it falls, the next thing will be sugar and fat. In fact they are already starting on them now.
I think we have disease beat.
War the likely start- possibly driven by resource conflict.
Famine would be the largest cause of death.
I think
1) a war that causes disruption
2) mass starvation because the food supply is disrupted (it can happen *really* fast these days- from full shelves to nothing in a few days).
Possible minor social breakdown as a result.
3) Even tho disease is beat (so no plague as the start), once the medical system is disrupted- I think population will be so high that disease will be opportunistic- cholera especially (and there is a new incurable form getting going in india now).
I don't think we'll die form poor nutrients- we would get smaller and adapt to the new diet over time. Parts of the population would die- but net net population would keep increasing.
What gets me is we will have to stop and in much more ugly ways if we run this out to max population before we address it.
Right now, if we just went to a net birth rate of 75% (1.5 children per family) we could mostly fix this in 40 years.
The longer we put off having a smaller young generation the worse its going to be . At some point, a lot of old people are going to have to fend for themselves. And they are not really capable of it.
I'm arguing that we are actively incenting births now.
I'm not going for the aggressive 'disincent births' position-- just "stop paying people to have children and stop providing them free food and medical care just because they got pregnant." Only 15 years ago, we gave them free housing as well- and that lead to a lot of extra teen births (get pregnant, get your own free housing, food stamps, and welfare).
Just stop incenting for a start-- then go from there.
(and my real belief is that we reproduce until things break and billions die and nothing we do can stop that.. so this is mostly jawboning... I am lucky and will be dead by that break point most likely).
250 million ...
I really don't think we need to go back to 500ad levels.
With current pollution controls and efficiency improvements we can have a viable population in billions tho I'm a bit concerned about potash and fertilizers.
Why do you think we would need to get down to 250 million? What systems started failing or what isn't sustainable in your opinion?
Close. The right starting and ending letters...different middle, "pula".
po----tion
Cut po-pula-tion.
Nothing we do will matter if we don't stop incenting new babies and let the population naturally fall to 3 billion (even 2 billion- the planet would be a paradise with 2 billion).
If you don't take these measures now- you STILL have take them when we hit 9 billion (10 billion... 11 billion) and life will be a lot more miserable then with dead fisheries, high cellulose fruits and vegetables and no meat except for the wealthy.
We can fix most of these problems in one generation.
For certain spacings, yes.
In this case, putting a solar panel on every plot of 299ksq (so a 15 k square or hex grid) should do it.
To be fair-- you are including mountains (darn high installation expenses!), swamps, etc.
I'm sure there will be a subset. And there are multiple kinds of solar power.
And if the power isn't 100% sufficient, you apparently need to keep the gas/oil turbines spinning at a low rate so they can ramp up when the wind dies or the clouds block a section.
Still, most houses could be powered for less than 10% of their lot size. In my case, I'll be powering during the day with a grid tied system with no batteries. That should reduce my power costs by about $500 per year and payback the system in 20 years assuming no increases in the cost of power (which in my area have doubled to tripled over the last 20 years).
The anti-solar side overstates things to the negative.
The pro-solar side overstates things to the positive.
But photo voltaic solar is getting cheaper every year now and we are about to hit a period of inflation. $10k in a solar power system could pay for itself in 15 years and then produce a 50% to 75% return over the next 10 years. Plus- saved money- you don't pay taxes on. So saving $500 is like earning $750.
We can hope!
It could be that way. Personally, I think we should let go of the 40 hours week now and drop to 35 hours with an hour for lunch (so an 8 hour shift). It wasn't that long ago that people worked "9 to 5".
We should also put in place overtime for salaried workers making under $250k at 50 hours.
Salary used to be a tiny percentage of the job market- - companies have found ways to abuse "salary" that creates unemployment.
If companies had to pay overtime for salary workers at 50 hours, unemployment would drop pretty dramatically for a few years.
And... I do think things will get temporarily better from 2016 to 2024. The available employees will shrink by 4 million per year during that period (vs 2 million historically).
Eventually productivity gains will catch up with that tho.
I'm not as worried about offshore/overseas-- they are inflating rapidly-- another 8 years and it won't be a no brainer to shoot work overseas like it is now.
Many "thinking" jobs are really quite simple and can be reduced to expert rules sets of 50 to 100 rules when studied carefully. At that point, the job can be automated or broken into lower skill chunks.
No- that's the cost-- not the value.
A $200k degree in some cases (now- not in the future) won't get you a job which returns $200k. What's the value if it doesn't get you a job that pays much over $50k? If you have to take on so much (currently unforgivable, unbankruptable) debt that you will be unable to pay it off over the course of your entire life. (already happening too).
Were you getting the degree because you had a sincere interest in a field or just because it pays well? If you are just looking for a paycheck, you probably won't love your work and you probably wont' excel at it.
I don't foresee the "kill all humans"- but I do foresee a collapse of the mass markets. Right now- today, we have some multi-billion dollar companies (and I'm not talking about Google) which have 1/70th the number of employees. That's great for the salary of their CEO and (sometimes- but not always) their shareholders but money is just disappearing into them. It's not coming back out in the form of wages.
The hypothetical future world is that only the connected get to work, most people are unable to find a decent job, and eventually things get violent (as they have repeatedly over history whenever all the benefits of society were going to only a tiny sliver of the population).
Would you grant that someday.. not now... but someday, machines will be able to replace all manual labor done by humans?
How many humans are suited to "brain" work when that time comes? 5%? 10%?
What's the value of a $200k degree when everyone has to have one just to get a job?
Not everyone can be a rocket scientist- and... even if they could, the demand for rocket scientists is actually quite low.
lol. funniest post in ages. too bad you posted anon.
They don't see it. They are blinded by luddism as a fallacy.
It's worse than you think. Robotics and automation is accelerating.
Why do men die before women?
They want to!
As they were singing back in the 1950's....
If you wanna be happy
For the rest of your life,
Never make a pretty woman your wife...
Same thing happened with telephone bills here back in the late 1990's.
I imagine at some point, they will rediscover this for bandwidth.
Okay- I had the impression there were minor differences however you are correct.
Libre is a fork of OO and has these notable additions.
* SVG image import
* Lotus Word Pro and MS Works import filters
* Improved WordPerfect import
* Dialog box for title pages
* Navigator lets you unfold one heading as usual in a tree view
* "Experimental" mode that allows users to test out unfinished features
* Certain bundled extensions (including Presenter View in Impress)
* Color-coded document icons
What are the features which are so spectacular that OO is now trash and Libre is Zomg the best?
To me they seem 99% the same. There is some comment of new bugs in Libre as a result of adding the Gooo ( something around PDF's which made LO unusable for someone).
I don't hate LO. I don't love OO. I have both on my computer but haven't had time to open and test drive LO.
Since I can afford to have both, even at double the price, I will.
I've heard this before.
What would be a good wysiwyg editor? I see a reference to LyX in google.
What do you recommend?
I like the visual cropping. I can see exactly what is happening instead of cropping, exiting the cropping menu and seeing what effect it had, then going back in.
Likewise I got really used to the format menu structure right away- it made sense in a way the new word ribbon didn't.
The last serious problem was something around formatting tables in excel. I can't remember the exact feature I was trying to use but it used to be on the menus and for some reason I couldn't find the damn thing in the new ribbon structure. If I remember later I'll repost.
I haven't used google- I've been using the word help files which are usually sufficient but they didnt' work in that case. I guess i should try google next time.
They are getting farther apart- I really struggled badly for the first six months but I only stumble on something about once a month now. I had used Word since 1998 and I found the ribbon change very painful. It's the way that things are hidden or contextual- you have to figure out what to hit to get the right options to come up. I'm not explaining it very well.
But it comes up on a minor basis still- I'll hit "view" and I need to be in "design" and I need to be in the table or out of the table while I do this.
Creative. I like it.
Teachers get no respect and are being unfairly laid off in droves right now.
They also suffer under massive bureaucracies which won't let them work the way they want to work.
It used to be a nice job when they had freedom to teach as they liked, they had awesome retirement benefits, and they didn't take a status hit for low pay.
It's not really a dichotomy. I'm not dividing it into two parts. I'm saying getting a Comp Sci degree leads to the set of jobs which suck.
I agree- Comp Sci != IT... except (speaking as a person with a computer science degree) it really is for most Comp Sci graduates. Very few actually do true Comp Sci work.
You must go on to an advanced degree to work on Comp Sci. So most become software engineers, software designers-- IT people.
Now TRUE Comp Sci on the other hand... well.... it also has no dating prospects and little respect. But, you don't have to work holidays. So there is that.
why is LibreOffice already so much better than OpenOffice ever was?
Listen, I tried open office from 1.04.
It wasn't quite there yet.
But as of 3.00 I went to OO and had no need to look back.
I even had a large series of Word 1998/2000/2003 documents which would not work in Word 2010 and 2007. No explanation-no error message - they just hung.
I loaded them into OO (which I'd used since as early as 1.04 to fix broken Word documents which crashed word by loading and resaving them) and the problem was apparent. The bounding boxes on the artwork was overlapping the tables. These did not display in Word so it would have been nearly impossible to fix.
So.. I bit the bullet and converted my 100 page document from Word to OO. It took about 8 hours. I got to learn about what the "little grey lines" meant and about styles. I figured out the replacement for techniques like "styleref".
So then I converted my next 130 page document. It took 2 hours.
Then I converted all the rest of my documents- each taking under 2 hours.
Bonus? They printed MUCH faster than in word. Seriously- these things were taking 15 minutes to print in Word before they became unusable- now they printed in seconds in OO.
Libreoffice-- well it's different (not necessarily better- it does some new things OO doesn't- OO does some new things LO doesn't.). I'm okay with EITHER since either will load my OPENDOCUMENT format documents.
I'm no longer LOCKED IN to word. I no longer have to pay HUNDREDS of dollars for new versions every 3 years.
I've gotten in to Openoffice draw and created lots of maps and pictures and have developed a basic tool set of objects I can use in the documents.
I've gotten into Openoffice Calc and written a starfleet battles damage allocation program (complete with sound effects) which I can port to Excel if I ever felt the need to.
In business- I'm forced to use Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I *still* (after 12 months ) am struggling with these new interfaces. I'll be fine then I want to do something that used to be easy and it's very hard. I waste a few hours trying to find out where the hell they moved the command in Word.
And when I use word, I look for OO features which are not implemented in word and it's jarring since Word is supposed to have everything including the kitchen sink.
Libre office, Open office. They are both excellent and SUFFICIENT programs even if they cost up to $75. But they don't- they are free.