Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Re: How many Excel users does it take to format numbers?

At least that's obvious

for LibreOffice it's 12/30/99 and GSheets is 1899-12-30

Re: Based on my observations

> at best it's the second-best tool for the job.

Where the first-best tool would be COBOL

Re: Dunno

Assuming that alongside a knowledge of SQL the user had the authorization to buy and the permission to install SQL server

Then if you are in a government agency, this involves calling Crapita/Cap-Gemini/Fujitsu and telling them that you need a database to do XYZ and wait for a quote which is equal to the price of small aircraft

carrier

Re: When you need a spreadsheet...

Libre's graphing is nicer - at least for sciencey type plots. And I can have Greek chars in labels !

Do they need Excel or just a spreadsheet.

Most of the users I have with Excel can just as easily use Libre / GSheets. I suppose custom programs are more common in finance?

UK finally vows to look at 35-year-old Computer Misuse Act

>appears to simply be a digital version of "casing a target for burglary"

Or trespassing onto the railway line to find that the train full of oil takers on the hill above Lac-Mégantic is on fire - and then calling 911 ?

IBM drops $11B on Confluent to feed next-gen AI ambitions

Re: Job prospects in Confluent take a turn for the worse

Does confluent have enough staff for IBM to rif to make the purchase profitable?

IBM straps AI to Db2 console in bid to modernize the old warhorse

Re: "AI-powered"

The problems is that RDBMS admins are 1, old. 2, rare. 3, expensive. 4, disinclined to give a fsck about you or your latest management trend

And so are prime candidates to be replaced by some vibe coding. I look forward to the outcomes

UK moves to strengthen undersea cable defenses as Russian snooping ramps up

Re: Whose word must we take?

>Which country has repeatedly threatened to attack NATO countries?

Well if you're including Canada and Greenland...

Re: Whose word must we take?

>which country invaded Crimea?

Wasn't that us? I seem to remember a poem-worthy, if somewhat ill-advised, cavalry charge.

Re: Whose word must we take?

Actually the plan is to form a National Dads Brigade.

Made up of 50 year olds who are somehow convinced they fought at Arhem because they watched war movies on Saturday afternoons growing up.

Sports direct will be contracted to produce XL camo football tops they will (eventually) be equipped with their own F35 after they have collected the parts from a weekly magazine

They will be stationed along the border to see off any invaders with interminable stories of how the Hurricane was better than the Tiger tank

Amazon keeps the pressure on Intel, AMD with 192-core Graviton5 CPU

Re: old is gnu again

Well if a Tea Shop can have it's own computer design I don't see why a book shop shouldn't

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

Re: Why argue ?

>You have to be kidding me that you decided to go with software from such a well known malware and spyware author

Back in reality land:

Option 1: Every corporation in America and Europe uses Windows.

Option 2: Convince every customer, every FDA lawyer, every FDA equivalent lawyer outside the USA, that this Open Source stuff is OK. Discover that eg. S. Korea's medical device licensing agency has never approved a Linux product so you are now the test case for proving that Linux is "safe" - spend $Infinity doing this - go bust

For the same reason we went with Intel's NUC platform. Since we are selling HW, we are responsible for proving the 'server' meets all the electrical safety and emissions standards. Repeating all the tests Intel have already certified that they meet. So turn up with an "Made by Intel" box and the testing lab rubber stamp it (still charging you $$$$). Turn up with something you assembled from a motherboard + Intel CPU + PSU + case and you are going to be spending $250K measuring that it meets FCC specs.

Re: A few things will always be missing

>the GPLv3 actually permits such digital handcuffing scheme (as for some reason, businesses wanted that)

Because otherwise Open source would be banned from any regulated industry, medical devices and software defined radio

I can't sell a FDA approved device and enable the user to go in and change the dose limits in the software

A lot of submitted comments don't show up for a day or so at the weekend, and don't show in your "my posts" page but they do add to the comments count

Seems to happen mostly over the weekend when the PFY isn't around to give the server a kick

Re: Why argue ?

I did run into that once with an IP lawyer

We were building a medical imaging server, it was entirely our own code + BSD modules but I wanted to run it on Debian

The lawyer wasn't sure that a link to debian.org was enough, and that the GPL meant we would have to supply all the upstream sources

In the end we had to go with Win10 Enterprise

Why argue ?

Visio puts up a link to linux.org and sticks some bits of code on github

It's not like anyone is going to build a competing cheap Chinese L:CD TV and the only thing holding them back was Visio's version of some embedded kiosk mode browser

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

Re: Yay

Wasn't he more of a moustache type?

One thing WWII taught us - beware of chaps with upper-lip growth

Re: Youtube as a tool...

Nein, zat would violate zee Warranty

Re: A case in point.

Drachinifel has a beard, you can always trust a chap with a beard.

I should also recommend "Lord Hardthrasher" similarly factual with a more el'reg comment section sensibility

FTC schools edtech outfit after intruder walked off with 10M student records

Re: Really 10M Student's (children's) data exposed -- and no fine?

You can't have a Federal agency criticising the free market

Re: I blame the parents

You wish to prevent anyone using "German Tank Wheels" to determine how many offspring were spawned?

I blame the parents

This data is only valuable because it contained the children's name

In my simple and elegant proposal - all children are incrementally numbered at birth.

A hacker stealing this data would in future only have the integers n -> n+m which is hardly a revelation

It is shocking that this data was leaked for free - reducing its commercial value to shareholders

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

Re: A defining moment for the President

I think Texas has solved the problem by simply burning the books

Re: Rubber bands

It says "committed to move the Space Shuttle Discovery to Houston," it doesn't say anything about arriving in one piece

My knowledge of US Civil War battles is based purely on - if there was a tank named after them, they were presumably on the winning side ?

A defining moment for the President

"We choose to move a Shuttle to Houston in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are stupid"

On a similar mote, might I suggest a presidential motorcade through Dallas ?

How difficult could it be for a force from Washington to sweep through the confederacy south, dragging a Shuttle and destroying everything in their path ?

We could call it Operation Sherman

UK sinks to fifth in ESA funding league behind Spain

Whichever party is putting out election leaflets saying "we must stop them(*) out-breeding us"

* Presumably the Catholics ?

> A shrinking population is not a bad thing.

Unless you have a pension system to fund, a national debt to maintain or elders to care for.

We must reduce Britain's birth rate ...... to make room for immigration ?

Are you sure you read the leaflet properly ?

Re: Ok

But you have that extra £350M/week - right ?

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

Re: Redefinition of airliners

As the man said: If it flies, floats or fscks - rent it

Re: Redefinition of airliners

That explains a lot about the Stansted experience

Re: So ?

Imagine if you ran it anticlockwise, what would you summon?

French AI shop Mistral rolls out full suite of Apache-licensed models

French AI

It announces Ceci n'est pas une AI, then shrugs and goes on strike

University of Pennsylvania joins list of victims from Clop's Oracle EBS raid

Oracle announced

That all 1,488 affected Maine residents were now liable for Oracle's new per-victim license fee

Samsung reveals its first tri-fold phone – and its desktop mode

Re: So, now it's tri-fold

Or the new Mobius phone with only one screen

London grid crunch delays new housing amid datacenter boom

>It wasn't just nu labour, the tories had 14 years of doing nothing too

But somehow it's really all Corbyn's fault

>Solution: big datacentres must provide their own power

That's what's happening in freedomland Texas.

With no functional electrical grid and a ban on communist central planning - innovative free marketeers are installing "temporary" (unpermitted) on-site gas turbine generators.

ie jet engines in freight containers in parking lots, should be fine in West London. They have Heathrow, they won't mind a few 1000s of engines at take off thrust

At least under decades of Tory rule we had massive promotion of coal extraction

Waymo chalks up another four-legged casualty on San Francisco streets

>You rarely see cats in traffic, with out without their butlers.

With self driving you will see a lot more cats out and about - expect to see a lot of Waymos in trees

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Re: please America .....

Does "literally" now literally mean figuratively ?

Re: please America .....

We don't know the OP's attitude to the aforementioned feline - it's entirely possible he could care less or not less

Fortunately the code also resulted in a fatality rate of -32768

IIRC bookpool. You could buy US programming books that were priced at $1 = 1£ for 30-40% off the US price and have them delivered (very slowly) for almost nothing by book post

I stocked an entire library of animal covers in the early 90s

>Sounds like Jim came very close to booking a trip to the job center.

Why? the 50000% increase in sales meant that the companies share price should have gone up by $Billions

Next month he should have upgraded the crawler to buy even more books from themselves

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

In the UK doesn't your computer have to be over 18 to read el'reg ?