Posts by jbstarbug

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

Alternative?

Whats the alternative to Excel then? Is there a simple bit of software that allows you to create tables for data classification and statistical analysis without having to know SQL or Python etc?

My wife is using Excel for some casework analysis (how many cases were apealed, overturned etc along with various reasons). She is not very familiar with it and when I have been helping her it really strikes me just how easy it is to screw up and Excel spreadsheet/pivot table.

HMRC's switch to AWS killed a small UK cloud business

Are those figures correct?

Computer Weekly said it had an investment of only 1m in 2016 and previous to that its turnover was under 200K:

"In October 2016, DataCentred received a £1m investment from Barclays, the Greater Manchester Authority and others. Its annual revenue increased significantly from £171,000 in 2015 to nearly £1.2m in 2016, but it recorded losses of almost £1.8m in the last financial year."

Where did the 9m come from?

The company has only been trading for 4 years according to CW.

SETI Institute damps down 'wow!' signal report from Russia

Orders of magnitude

"(1 GHz bandwidth is “a billion times” the bandwidth typical SETI searches use)."

1GHz is 1 Billion Hz, so normal SETI searches only have a bandwidth of 1 Hz?!?!!

Or maybe someone got their orders of magnitude wrong.

UK military buys third £4m Zephyr drone for 'persistent surveillance' trials

Wrong County

Last time I checked Farnborough was in Hampshire not Surrey so how is it Farnborough built but designed and manufactured in Surrey?

TV techies proudly display their MIGHTY BENDERS in Berlin

Why so bendy?

Curved screens don't seem to make any practical sense in a normal living room. I'd just like a TV that you can still see when the sun shines through the windows. I think it was sony that had projector screens that only reflected artificial light, why can't they bring some of that tech into TV's that you can actually fit in the living room?

Shocked Zynga investors get a penny per share

what the hell are they spending it on

$1.28bn in revenue and they still can't turn a profit? how can they spend that much money? Its not like their games require development of a cutting edge 3D engine or anything.

No Apple TV this year: Media moguls still won't cough up content

££££££

If Apple are that serious about it why don't they use some of their vast cash horde to buy one of the cable companies?

Apple profits almost double on iOS product sales leap

Re: How big does Apple need to be...

I say the bigger they are the more snark required!

Prehistoric monster snake crushed prey under 1.5 Brooklyn Bridges

Have they done the Math?

Now please feel free to point out any elementary mistakes I made but my back of an envelope calculations don't come anywhere near to theirs.

to work out the equivalent weight lying on top of you to give a pressure of 400lbs per sq inch:

Area of person lying down: assume 72 inches (6ft) tall and 30 inches wide and approximating that a person lying down is a uniform rectangle gives total area of 2160 sq inches. Multiply by 400lbs gives 864000 lbs or 391904 Kg or about 392 tons. Weight of Brooklyn bridge is approx 14,680 tons so it actually equated to 0.0267 Brooklyn Bridges.

Have I made some fundamental mistake or are they just making shit up?

Honda beats rivals to hybrid coupé launch

56.4mpg?

I have a Honda civic diesel which is quoted around 56mpg and does 0-60 in 8.9s. Whats so good about these hybrid cars with rubbish performance and still only middling fuel consumption?

Where are all the fuel cell cars?