Posts by W.S.Gosset 953 posts • joined 18 Nov 2016
If HR or any objecting manager was white, taking action would be tantamount to malfeasance and a sacking offence.
A reality of the various overlapping Virtue-Memes including Multiculturalism and White Privilege. Both very big deals to the shouters in California and indeed a lot of other places.
To get a glimpse of the sort of stuff that has Excel users ditching LO after 10mins of growing frustration and disappointment (kinda like going to walk through a door and bouncing off a photo of one), read my posts below this link below, which embed some low-level basics on which we daily casually rely:
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/06/30/libreoffice_70_beta/#c_4062568
> massively disingenuous
No. Quite the opposite.
You just haven't tried to solve, or even have never encountered, the problems I and many others use these tools for. Weighted average portfolio risk on a correlation matrix? 1 formula in 1 cell, in MSExcel; in LO, a vomitous spray of 1 or more additional hardwired sheets plus location-/assumption-hardwired links farted throughout, with massive eye-watering bum-clenching fragility.
The average tech-focussed individual quite literally has no idea how shallowly they're scratching the surface of the tools. For the simple and non-negative reason that their normal day involves solving very different (and to my mind much harder) problems.
The reverse is true too. Try explaining to a quant or admin why vagrant is awesome for development. "Oh ok it's some sort of VM thing. So what." Or to an accountant why shell kicks arse. Then YOU blank out as they explain that unregulated transfer pricing is a major driver of globalisation rorting the smaller countries, if you understand how it's used.
Key Point: Until you have a problem to solve, you don't fully understand the various tools' relative usefulness or value.
E.g., I couldn't stand vi when I first had to use it. What a piece of shit! Then I had to do a lot of major wide and deep work in a hurry on raw Unix installs, HAD to learn its details to solve peculiar Deep problems, and promptly fell in love with it. Even today 30yrs later, I'll casually do something in 15secs and modern admins who'd scoffed at my offer to do their half-hour ballache for them in vi (and they laugh) will lean forward and say "how the hell did you do that so quickly".
E.g., trying to explain to a DOS Command File guru why unix's shell makes it look agonisingly broken, brain-dead, and incapable of doing anything non-trivial, but them pointing out that it's feature-for-feature identical with shell.
Unless you're trying to solve a particular problem AND have used the competing tools back-to-back for same, you won't really grok what that problem's problem-solvers value.
But what are scientific writers doing using Word in the first place?? Wrong tool. Should be using LaTEX. Word's only ever been intended for smaller less complex stuff. LaTeX, FrameMaker, InDesign etc for the big stuff. Hourses for corses.
2 very different aspects here so I'll split my reply in 2. Part the First: (to paraphrase Douglas Adams)
I agree with most of your objections to current MSOffice.
Massive ++ re the ribbon interface! An absolute excrescence and a vile festering gangrenous fuckup. Hate it!!! Never met anyone who thinks otherwise.
Fortunately the coders quietly kept all the menus under-the-hood so the old Alt keystrokes still work. Eg Alt I N D to get the Name window in MSExcel, wherein you spend a lot of time in any major modelling work.
And that's a key point. Old versions.
See, serious workers keep and use the old versions because they are so much more functional. It's like MS binned all the core architects after 2000, and everything since then has been a marketing-dumbarse directed charge backwards. Excel in particular peaked significantly at 98/2000. God the nonfunctional misery of 3D graphs now... And the catastrophic bandaid stickontop that is the "new" Tables "feature". Which is in the presentation layer (like 99% of everything added since 2000) so it's a deadend; can't build on/with it. And irrelevant tat if you understand Excel's intersections.
Essentially, MS has just been vomiting graphics and instability onto MSOffice for 20yrs, while also actively REMOVING capabilities and functionalities.
Tip re Word: yes, corruption in big files has always been an issue; you can sharply reduce your exposure by switching off the Fast Save option (on by default). If you open the file in a text editor, you'll note a Fast Save file is actually now a bundle of 2 files, the latter an appended transaction log reassembled on the fly.
Nowadays that would be "NoSQL". Sorry.
Modern syndrome: endless re-inventions of "discoveries" and "innovations" which were situation-dependent bodges 70yrs ago, acknowledged as same and rejected for a purer & better technique as soon as technically feasible. By people who actually understood.
I wouldn't mind so much being called old, if only the kids didn't keep dragging our old discarded clothes out of the attic and dancing around in them screaming that this is and THEY ARE on the ultimate bleeding edge of fashion.
Now, Grasshopper, consider that Excel's engine has no concept of Cells, only of Arrays ("Ranges")(a raw Cell is treated in calc as a 1:1 Array), then consider that you have only ever used its Default For Donkeys auto facility for lazy people: Implicit Intersection.
Explicit Intersection is very powerful.
The syntax is "[Range] [Range]". Ie, 2 ranges (which encompasses 2D array, 1D vector, and 0D Cell) separated by a space. (Put it/use it anywhere where you would currently use what you would call a cell-reference. The engine evaluates and collapses all such references to a single array before passing on.)
Have a play with that. Notice a lot of what people proxy via INDEX() goes away.
Then consider that built-in since version 1 is refs to other spreadsheets and files. The full syntax (IIRC -- no excel here to check) for EVERY cell reference is "[filename]sheetname!cellref". In fine relational tuple style, this is stored with EVERY cellref, albeit for diskspace parsimony via pointers (re-evaluated at calc-time). So if you routinely have data files coming in which you need to do Excel mungling on, you don't need to import them/copy them into a copy of the template workbook first. Which is A/ a ballache; B/ introduces serious risk of tired/fuckedoff user error; C/ creates 2 copies of the same data with all the concomitant risks of eg downstream undetected modification of "source" data, accidental or otherwise; D/ is just ick.
You can simply create an always-external workbook which looks externally for the datafile by name. And can then maintenance-simply embed exactly, only, and no more than the desired downstream processing.
For bonus points, consider that you could replace the formulae's references via INDIRECT () to simply lookup a single "Please Input Datafile's Name Here:" field. Type a new filename, see the new processing's results. SaveAs (for audit purposes), done.
Actually, everyone should know about at least that tiny but powerful aspect:
To get a glimmering of the power under-the-hood:
Create 2 Cols of numbers (eg A+B) where you want to multiply each pair together then add up the total of those per-tuple products. Yes, roughly just a simple Average (sum for i of weight times value).
Do =SUM(A:A * B:B). Note the result is borken.
Now do =SUM(A:A * B:B) (identical , ie) but this time hold down control+shift when you hit return to tell Excel to treat this as an array formula. You'll see it denoted by having {} shown around it.
Note the result is now perfect.
And yes this example is trivial. The point is that MSExcel is startlingly atomic at its core and absolutely cleanly so, like original unix's core tools. And just as you can build up indefinitely complex pipes and commands and scripts in shell using its clean primitives and It all Just Works, so too Excel.
No, B.A.G., you are entirely correct, and valid. BUT only looking at one part of it (cf 4 blind men and the elephant). I speak as someone who's used and stretched MSExcel since vn 1.04a. Who remembers and uses explicit intersections, for example.
I describe Excel to people as a range-based matrix engine with an embedded 2D database (with ISAM-style 3GL-primitives linking between data files (intra-db + external)) with an integrated presentation layer.
99.9% of people mistake the presentation layer for the spreadsheet (cf. Libre Office) and miss all the power.
And most people only ever use one tiny aspect or another of its full scope. No problem with that. It's not a dick waving exercise; it's a tool, intended to be used any way you bloody like to solve YOUR current problem.
If I buy a Lamborghini and then use it to pop down the shops to grab some milk, or to tow a trailer of junk to the tip, or to stand on to clean out the guttering, the Lamborghini doesn't suddenly become a shit car. I'm just not using its full potential; I'm just using it for my current micro problem. It's still an awesome piece of kit.
----
Having said that:
The depth and integration of the core maths' and matrix engine's intelligence of design, and even of how the dependency graph's lazy compilation interprets cells' content (they're converted to raw text then built-up till the last moment then passed to eval())(have a look at INDIRECT() to twig it's a user-accessible EVAL. And yes that does in fact mean everything it might) is truly and never-endingly awesome and inspiring.
Put it this way. I replaced a custom program in a fund manager to calculate portfolio risk, and an equivalent spreadsheet using multiple whole sheets, with a single formula. Simple matrix multiplication of a covariance matrix and a weights vector. = weights-range (click, drag) * covariance-matrix (ditto) * transpose weights-range (ditto again), and hold down control shift when hitting return to have it treated low-level differently as an Array Formula. Job done.
Name the Ranges and you're now also Robust to future changes.
LO is a magnificent credit to the unpaid coders doing it in their spare time.
But vs MSWord or --CHRIST!!-- MSExcel, it's like a Trabant dressed up with racing stripes.
Imitative graphics do NOT create functionality.
If you're doing non-trivial work, you run so far so fast off LO's capabilities, it makes your head spin.
It's like putting a Tai Chi "black belt" into the Octagon. "Whooooo, look at ME, I am throwing all these SHAPES, look at me styling, I have all the MOVES."
*PUNCH*
*splat*
Spot on.
This is just crap coding by the receiver library. To a degree which makes my gut hurt.
More-general point: MSExcel (rather unusually) exports CSV in correct full CSQDV form, but do also note my post below. Which is useful for anyone seeking to create their own CSV/text export file.
Ah, that's because you don't know how to do CSV correctly.
See, the _correct_ name for the format is Comma-Separated Quote-Delimited Values, wherein all strings have to be wrapped in double-quotes. Mandatorily. "CSV" is just a shorthand term.
From what you've described, you simply set IFS to comma and created a file. Well, yeah: broken.
TSV eliminates this problem since essentially zero text fields embed a Tab character.*
Just set IFS=^i, print (as we used to say re export to FS)**, job done.
Less work, better result. Parsimony. Hallmark of a good coder.
.
* In the extraordinary event that you have an embedded tab, the format provides for, but unlike CSV does NOT require, quote-delimitation of text strings.
Please note that any success you've ever had with non-quotedelimited CSV is purely the destination system being forgiving -- you have sent a broken protocol file and it rightly should reject it.
** interestingly, the financial markets just in the last year or so have adopted the same term for the same purpose/reason: any explicit issue of data. So analysts and economists now routinely talk about, eg, the last print of unemployment data or the last print of a company's results.
In my experience (>30yrs of what is now called bigdata), I have never even heard of such a thing nor am I able to comprehend how it's possible unless you're using some mad manky v.old tool. It's certainly got precisely 0 to do with how you delimit or encode data fields. Non-ascii is non-ascii no matter what you wrap around it, and no matter whether you write the payload _en claire_, base64, or raw binary.
If your destination can't cope with non-ascii, that's not a problem with the data file's format.
God, I miss MacOS. You just got things DONE.
I remember a Unix admin legend and LaTEX guru at work labouring over a formula for his thesis for 2 weeks, with many yet to come, and he couldn't get it right. Took him into my uni Mac Plus (I was working 2 jobs during my Masters), handed him the whole lot in less than half an hour."I _could_ have done that in LaTEX, you know...."
"Yeah. But that quick, that easily?"
"..."
This used to be trivial knowledge for everyone. People so un-tech they wouldn't notice the power cord was unplugged and complain the computer had crashed, casually banging out stuff like this, and casually hacking their kernel. Without even realising that that was what they were doing, let alone how awesome it was.
Your now-ubiquitous Autocorrect, btw, was originally just a casual MacOS kernel hack. Thunder II, IIRC. I can't remember right now whether it was Apple or Microsoft first nicked and reimplemented the idea and issued it for free and built-in (in MS's case, first in MSOffice: the MacOS GUI recreated-ish on Windows), but either way, those poor bastards got rolled.
Oh hey! A new Mac OS X feature which is actually useful!
Of course, built-in since 1984 MacOS 1.0 is the ability to enter almost ANY accented character in 2 keystrokes. So maybe they just assumed people remember that.
Eg, hold down Option and press "e", then press "e". Voila!
Option i , i. Option u, u. Option a, a. Etc.
Fire up KeyCaps (now renamed) and press Option key to see at a glance all the options available. Note Option-Space might be a bit cryptic; it's the non-app-specific nonbreaking space.
:D
I honestly don't think I could have created a more hilarious piss-take on the China Apologist/Useful Idiot than that which you so brilliantly provided. Thank you!
BTW, I'm not American nor British nor European. I'm from a culture which has had serious major embedded interaction with not just China but many Asian cultures. I'm speaking from 40+ yrs experience, not Virtue-Meme.
Nah, I'll take the truly legendary Raymond Chen's word over an random and rather strained story :
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42943
> headache... optician
Could be because you're seeing colour more clearly than normal. IIRC ClearType works by intrapixel antialiasing around the core character's border, taking advantage of the 3 micro pixels for each of RG&B. So all of the antialiasing"fill-ins" are a colour, non-black. Until I taught myself to ignore it, I had problems with the constant impression of rainbow out of the corner of my eye.
(Likewise, I can't tolerate panning shots on any movie. Eyes watering, feels like someone levering my brain out. 25 Hz... Experimenting with a magnificent LaCie monitor back in the day, I established that the minimum refresh rate my brain can comfortably tolerate is 150 Hz. And faster is _much_ more comfortable. )
God, I missed that entirely. Thanks.
Just read today: satellite photos show China has already built a number of structures on Indian territory. Same tactic as South China Sea.
ParTICularly damning re long-term plan (rather than their claimed "retaliation") since China recently negotiated with India for both sides to remove all buildings in the area, and India had done so.
There's also "many" thousands of soldiers massing just behind the border; been building up for weeks.
That tiny casual link intra-story, to Twitter post... Bloody hell!!
Everyone should take 30secs and read it.
One paragraph in particular will have your hair standing up on end. Not just for what it says, but for the country-level implications. Holy. Crap.
https://mobile.twitter.com/d1rtydan/status/1277081198624337920
Something rarely reported is that, over and above being well across and into Indian territory, the Chinese brought a squad 6 times larger than both sides' standard border patrol. Both sides surveil each other continuously so this is well-known.
I.e. yet another passive aggressive piss-take by China.
If you'd wondered why the Indian army seemed to perform so poorly (China's military has been a startlingly poor combat performer in every military action for hundreds of years), consider how well YOU'D do vs 6 guys attacking you unexpectedly with pre-prepared long weapons customised for lethality.
Worse and increasingly easy and cheap:
A flock of them, all with bicycle chains attached and dangling, with the aircraft directed to perform an emergency deviation through the flock.
Bang. Crash. Carnage.
Cheap. Easy. Fantastic news drama globally. Next on the list for any tryhard would-be backyard terrorist.
Yes, and for nearly 2 decades consistently, but more for Virtue-Display purposes than actually caring about the user.
Example: I finally broke and bailed out of the make-you-cry subfunctionality vs MacOS that is Mac OS X, at version {Lion? 10.6?}, due to a similar Apple spasm. I'd been 1 of 3 tech guys on the London & Oxford Uni Mac User Groups, and Lion suddenly disappeared everyone's NASs. Unreachable, invisible. Turned out Apple'had unilaterally decided everyone should have then-military-grade security on NASs, and had created a mini-firewall to block any then-normal consumer-grade NAS.
No warning, no recovery.
The only way I found round it was to get a "correct" NAS disk and plug it in, at which point the daemon opened up fully its API, so you could tweak its config manually via shell, and add to the firewall's whitelist the old NAS's protocol.
It was like a piss-take on everything that MacOS was specifically designed and intended to let users not have to do. And I'd hit too many of them unremittingly since Panther 10.3 (Mac OS X's UI peak). I finally broke, finally ran out of camels, broadcast my fix then bailed out from both lists after ~10yrs with apologies. Every contact with Mac OS X since then has only underscored that it was the right decision -- it just gets worse and worse. User-contempt, as a corporate policy.
"Take It From Here" (TIFH). 1947 onwards.
And my memory cocked up the dates. It was only definitely from the 60s.
The early Sixties was, of course, the period when a breakthrough was made in the language and subject matter considered acceptable in BBC TV. This relaxing of strictures was greeted with delight by progressive liberal minds and with horror by 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' (who was, incidentally, an off-stage character in _Take It From Here_, played by Wallas Eaton-- "A Kentish Lad", F.Muir (autobiography), 1997, p261 of 427 in the 1998 Corgi edition, Great Britain
May or may not have appeared before the 60s but from this (with ref to the coruscating and geniusly inventive gentle satire of FM&DN) (Frank Muir's _My Word_ story/ramble for Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner is burned into my brain) , I personally lean towards believing that this was his/her/its first appearance.
IIRC, HSBC was the initial whistle-blower.
But yes, the banks.
Basically, they were following up some oddities and uncovered the fake and falsely interstitial shell companies, and determined that the transactions were not just being hidden but had no other possible outcome or purpose than to weasel past US sanctions, but were still being piped through channels subject to US law. (Dumb as.)To be fair, there was no patriotism or higher virtue in the banks' decision to flag it up, it was pure self-interest/self-protection. The banks at that point were themselves looking at major fines if it came to light later and it was clear they'd known. And the structure was so primitive and shitly done that it was like the Chinese had just read about the technique and had copied it but hadn't really understood it. So it was just a matter of time before it came to light.
If you haven't been paying attention, might be a good idea not to issue judgements about it or to attempt extremely self-embarrassing snark.
BTW, if you DO decide to dig in, don't piss about going sideways, you'll be there forever and a day, lost in the morasse of "I need to protect my grant/job/mortgage" metoo's. AKA"tertiary research" AKA noise. You need to find out where the door is and if it's in the right place (primary research), not what colour someone's painted the doorknob. To put it another way:
Run up the reference tree. Find out what the Foundations are, then assess THEM.
I found 3 core and critical problems, any one of which destroys the entire meme.
I mentioned 1, earlier.
Ahhh, mate... you're trying to engage with the modelling and data.
Don't.
If you're not a freak, you'll have a lot of somethings-not-right episodes, like this.
If you're trained and experienced and you dig in hard, you'll have a period of blank bewilderment followed by your head exploding with rage.
And you'll find yourself standing next to Copernicus shouting that the earth goes round the sun rather than the accepted FACT that the sun goes round the earth (it rises every day, you MORON!), as the meme-trained trusting mob scrambles for stones.
In a larger (centuries; anthropological) sense, it's frightening.
In other news, it was 3 degrees C hotter when William the Conqueror invaded England than in the 70s. Yes, the game-over endoftheworld level now being screamed about (2degC hotter than today). Apparently we all died just under 1000yrs ago. Dammit. If you're uk-born, read the the accounts of a freak snowstorm ~300yrs later the year before Agincourt. It was SO savage and harsh and unprecedented, they had snow in the north of NORFOLK!! FIRST TIME in at least 700 years of recorded history of England!!
And the North Pole melted completely in 1959. Such that a classic photo went global of a nuclear submarine in open water there the same year. Eg front cover of Time magazine. Global temps tanking for 15yrs, at the time, btw, such that Ehrlich & co were running around screaming about the Ice Age Apocalypse.
Hit Google Images with something like "USS snipe north Pole 1959" for the photo. Typically also catches the 1962 photo where the melting was SO large, they got THREE nuclear subs in the photo: 2 yank, 1 brit. If it happened today we'd all be dead tomorrow. Apparently.
"Amusingly", this local behaviour was what Phil Jones relied on when they replaced HADCRUT2 with a model to create HADCRUT4, which is what is now being presented as the "data" generally. Consider that the Arctic is ~50% out of phase with the larger 30yr cycle (which would imply HADCRUT4'S numbers turning over and tipping down from ~2015), then dump and graph HADCRUT4's annual averages.
Do not have a cup of coffee or tea in your mouth or I will not be responsible for the consequences for your keyboard.
Rephrase in case you're a pure IT chap:
Smart Meters are an IoT device allowing remote control at power/current-delivery levels of every individual/separate circuit attached to it, from a remote location.
The traders were crowing 10yrs ago that their screens let them casually control not just by area, but way past the substation level they used to pine for, but effortlessly down to postcode level. "You just click down!" For non-UK people, bear in mind that UK postcodes are per-street or part thereof for "long" ones (eg over 200 houses). And you could keep clicking...
Head Trader on one desk when the software was first installed, first day early morning , exclaiming, kept clicking down and "switched off" his own fridge. An hour's drive away. "AWESOME!!" Had to re-buy a week's worth of food. "Worth it! That's awesome!"
That was 10yrs ago.
Smart Meters are the first mass IoT rollout.
Wrong.
Smart Meters are an active upstream control for circuits in your home.
That is a core design objective and POINT of their creation and then mass roll-out.
They are active upstream not merely passive downstream as you have been led to believe.
Bear in mind modern regs require major appliances like fridges to be on separate circuits. What you won't see unless you dig is
A/ the regs also want you the electrician to identify them via standard codes (allowing sensible centralised control) ,
B/ who it was pushing for this change (hint: not the govt or the regulators)
Next you'll be suggesting Canary Wharf/Docklands is not grimy Cockney-homeland slumtown and that no German city has ever even considered setting up high-tech districts in existing industrial areas which are startlingly close to town by UK standards.
*cough*
Also, it's in Arschlochheim in Einsteinesring!
:D
Well, I was just thinking back to my own time hands-on ~10yrs ago in a small ISP + MgdSvcs. 2 main routers public-facing, each north of £25k at the time per the boss, who paid for them. So...what... about US$40k back then, plus 10yrs inflation. So, what, about US$60-70k each, now?
We were tiny. And laying off traffic upstream on every opportunity. Yet they were periodically rammed.
So many many many things we COULD have done, if it wasn't for all that traffic. We had a 12 page iptables config (9pt font Courier) just to safely manage our VoIP commitments.
Given all the mandatory crap you're already doing, yeah sorry we didn't have a shit-ton of freely magic spare capacity to wave the magic ultra resources wonderment Wand Of Nothing Else To Do over.
But yeah I agree with you: if we didn't have clients, they could have smashed it. Absolutely smashed it.
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