Posts by oldandgrey

Would banning ransomware insurance stop the scourge?

Have a look at: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavenkas_van_Zierikzee

An insurance company founded in 1735 to pay the ransom for sailors who were enslaved by Barbary pirates.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Re: Owners of Fastrack FS1 smartwatches have reported the clocks being stuck

Well, my 1989-vintage Casio F-91W digital watch isn't aware of leap years. At midnight it jumped to the 1st of March. I had to put it back to 29th of February. Now let's see if it's smart enough to know what to do when the 29th ends.

GNOME 46 beta has more tweaks than a coffee shop

Interesting headline

"... more tweaks than a coffee shop."

Being a Dutchman, the headline caught my attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeeshop_(Netherlands)

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Concept from the 1970's? Spreadsheets are much older!

The MS Excel spreadsheet is just a metaphor for the traditional big sheet of paper, ruled with rows and columns and folded down the middle, that has been a tool of accountants and auditors since the beginning of time. Numbers were written and calculations were made by hand. I'm old enough to have used them extensively. These manual spreadsheets were also prone to misuse and errors. There's nothing new under the sun. I could tell some real horror stories about MS Excel from the days when I did 2nd line support for ERP software. Customers would complain that the data they extracted from the ERP system was all wrong when, in fact, they mangled the extracted data in their spreadsheets. My company didn't support MS Excel (you have to call Redmond for that, haha) but every now and then I had to go over to a client for some handholding, because they couldn't be convinced otherwise that the ERP system was not to blame. Now, of course, these customers messed up in MS Excel, but most times I also had to remind them of the rudimentary principles of accounting. Having no clear picture of what you are doing, that's where the silly tinkering starts.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Re: remove GNOME

That's what Patrick Volkerding did in March 2005 when he removed the GNOME desktop from Slackware, it being a "moving target" that was too hard to follow for his small team. Removing the GNOME desktop, however, still leaves us with GNOME's GTK widget toolkit, that is being used all over the place, like in the XFCE desktop. They lost me when they incorporated GTK's client-side decorations in XFCE's dedicated window manager, fouling up existing applications. That's when I went back to my simple, well behaved window manager from back when: Blackbox. Let others frob with the Heath Robinson contraption / Rube Goldberg machine that is a desktop environment.