Re: Warrant?
In the UK they will take your computers and not give them back for months. If you won't unlock them they will simply assume you're a terrorist and prosecute you on that basis.
889 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2016
True but then that's the nature of Excel. A database can handle missing or extra columns as long as they are correctly named. If you send out a load of blank Excel files asking people to put their data in them, you'll get them back modified and incompatible with your master spreadsheet.
Lotus Notes was the tool that people now use Excel for. If you want to quickly gather and organise data then create a Lotus Notes DB and email the link to your people. They can fill in the form you created and the data is all nicely arranged in your central database. Do that with Excel and you will have big problems.
Most complex business processes done in Excel would be better done in MS Access. However my clients have mostly not been computer literate enough to do these in a database. Excel is quite a good tool for business people to prototype what they want before I come along and turn it into a database.
MS Access is pretty easy to use but there are plenty of hurdles that the Excel user finds too challenging. If MS did some really good development work on the Access user interface Excel users could be creating competent business specific database applications.
I suspect there is a conspiracy against such a thing. Years ago Lotus had Lotus Notes which was a far better database generator that allowed the boss's personal assistant to knock up a database application in the morning and have data coming back by the afternoon from those emailed the link. That was 25 years ago but they killed Notes and replaced it with MS Office.
The contemporary equivalent of that is the secretary creates a spreadsheet template and emails it to people asking them to send it back filled in. She will then use copy and paste to merge these individual sheets into her main one. A time consuming and error prone task when the users can add and delete columns to their liking.
You're spot on. There are loads of things a robotic machine should be able to do when connected to your computer. Why is it limited to printing on one side of A4 paper? Why can't it print a brochure or paperback book? Load it up with blank business cards and have it print them, or postcards or a birthday card.
All of these examples are a total pain to do on a printer but at least if they wrote their own drivers there was a chance printers would one day do these tasks easily.
Selective enforcement. They don't just lock people up because they broke a law. They lock people up because they want to and they look for a broken law in order to do so. As long as they like you then you're free to break laws. It's called Abuse of Process and it's an essential and integral feature of our Justice System so don't knock it (or they might lock you up).
The PCI test that card companies require if you have a credit card machine is like that. It's just a port scan carried out from the Internet but it costs £40/year and does not really do much of any use. I have a customer who regularly fails this every time they set their router back to factory settings. The default is the router has a remote login page which fails due to an old version of encryption. £40 for me every time I fix this. Every time I say get a new router and they never do.
Every time a company switches to IPv6 they free up some IPv4 making it easier for the people who don't want to switch. Not everyone can be on IPv4 but some people can stay there for ever. Only once you can't do something you need to do will the IPv4 people be forced to switch.
It gets increasingly difficult to resist giving them power. Lloyds Bank came out with a system where you could photograph a cheque with your phone and they'd pay it in. Wonderful. Except I want to do it from my computer because I don't have that sort of phone. Just one example of the constant pressure to get a spy phone.
No, I'm sorry, Reg readers disagree that there could be a logical tactical reason for holding on to these documents. It's obviously simply because Orange Man has a big ego and any other failing they can include.
Personally I believe he is using the secret nuke plans to build a bomb in his garage. It could not be anything more mundane like holding dirt on his enemies.
It's interesting living history. There is no business case to upgrade unless they intend to upgrade their business practice too. If they took electronic payments then it would pay to have that integrated into the same system but honestly a stand alone card system payment could be entered manually.
A great deal of what we do as a computer industry is to obsolete working systems and replace them with something we claim is better. We know it's better because 32GB is better than 8GB but then that's only true because we did something that makes 8GB not as capable as it was when it arrived. Now we have 32GB we're at liberty to make any 8GB system unable to keep up. Perhaps not 8GB obsolete yet but 2GB is.
The attack code is probably as old as Windows so still contains all the old attacks. It has grown to keep up with the latest Windows but has not had the old attacks removed. Who knows the developers may accidentally open up an old vulnerability on the next release.
MS Access is excellent although the most sensitive and demanding of all MS Office. I've got most of MS Access 2010 working on Linux and I expect I could get 2019 to work since that's a good one.
The reason we do this sort of thing is the client is happy with the business app they are using and don't wish to change simply because the computer industry demands they do.
I have a customer we've kept on Windows 7 32 bit because they have a DOS program that interfaced to old hardware on the serial port.
Windows 7 32 bit was the best I could do upgrading from XP.
I recently regraded them to Windows 10 64 bit and discovered DOSBOX could run the program and interface to the serial port.
I expect that it's not Windows programs keeping people on XP but DOS programs. Windows programs will generally work on newer versions of the OS.
However I await the arrival of WINE for Windows so it can run old Windows programs natively.
PCs are not the cheapest hobby but they start quite cheap and scale up to not that expensive. You would spend more doing up your bathroom. The fact that the PC is still with us essentially the same as it was 40 years ago is wonderful. AI is yet another thing we can do with it and it encourages hardware upgrades. It really is a Personal Computer unlike a Smartphone which is a person tracking device.
There is a fundamental problem with Cloud Gaming as shown in in the 2009 movie Gamer. It's ping time or latency. It's probably the case that most latency is caused by the IP packets moving through buffers than the physics of the speed of light but it's an insurmountable problem.
Yes it's possible to play games remotely via a terminal, which is what cloud gaming is but it's much better if the game is running on the local hardware.
Google tried to do this with Stadia and have now given up. As far as I can tell they did it well but it was ping that defeated them.
RAD or Rapid Application Development used to be a very useful way of knocking out a business application soon enough to make it useful. There was a time that the secretary could write a data base in the morning and have it emailed to users by the afternoon with responses coming in the next morning. Very rapid thanks to Lotus Notes. Those days are gone and only highly paid coders can create such things taking them weeks or even months.
I used to rapid develop databases in MS Access which is fine for Windows but deployment is protracted.
It's good to see there is a Delphi alternative but that was never as rapid as MS Access let alone Lotus Notes.