Posts by David-M 43 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2019
They lost the plot a good many years ago.
Perhaps the transition from the old Office 2003 to the ribbon of 2007 is an approximate time to place it, respectively representing the old "the user defines how they want it to be" to "we'll decide it for the user".
But it's more than that. When the default windows now have white edges so you cannot tell where your window ends and the one behind begins you know there is some serious illness come about.
On a related topic, we're all familiar with how TVs would suddenly get clear reception when you touch the aerial to adjust it or come very close, but when you move away satisfied it all goes fuzzy again. When I was younger I figured plants might do the same, and used to have my radio connected to an aloe vera plant which gave perfect reception.
For reference my test was on this 2-line .ps1 file -
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
[System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox]::Show('Hello, World!')
#3 obviously I'm referring to basic to moderate tasks - VBScript is instant, powershell isn't on my test.
#1 this would be news to people on the web where I found people unable to find ways to run powerscript without the console, I checked to see if AI could find a way and it couldn't. Perhaps you can suggest how (or a reference)
#2 a launched .ps1 'hello world' popup (above) has a sluggist start with a large footprint; VBS is minimal. Maybe powershell is small without any module loaded but then maybe that is not an ordinary scenario where it needs user interaction, like saying a car is perfectly light without any engine.
However I will look into whether there's anything invisible in the launch that could reduce the considerations I mention...
This is a really wrong move. Maintaining VBS should be part of maintaining legacy situations.
If people are using it rather than say powershell, there's probably a reason for it, like when people build a nice path and people cut across the grass and don't use the path.
From a cursory test I suspect the reason is that -
1. VBS runs without opening a large black console window (powershell seems to open an unsightly large black window with scrawl, very unhelpful for the end user experience)
2. VBS has a tiny footprint (powershell is huge just to popup hello world)
3. VBS runs instantly (powershell is sluggish)
Current general AI (as distinct from specialised AI) has its uses if its severe limitations are understood by the user, but most of it is totally overblown. I mean I'd never use it for anything factual, but it can produce a fun story line for entertainment or an enjoyable initial brainstorm. It's a great shame it's being relentlessly pushed out into areas of factuality where it is currently inappropriate.
But it might get somewhere in the end, especially if fact and imagination are properly seggregated instead of being fused together...
Happy with my tiny physical number generator which lasts virtually forever, HSBC, and must have cost very little to make, no doubt less than all those OTP texts added up.
Benefits: not hackable, and you don't carry it around with you so won't get it lost or stolen like a phone.
As I don't have a smart phone it also suits me well compared to app use.
AI is something I sometimes use for fun - getting a film suggestion, writing an imaginative story or news report on some concept in another language so I can learn the language - but would never use it in a serious capacity. The thought of it on my machine makes me shudder, it would be like having Peter Sellers or Jim Carrey running around the system...
JS has a lot of uses, I don't think it should go. People need to implement things thoughtfully, and ideally write their own code so that they understand how it works, instead of using large libraries for trivial tasks which involves a lot of code the user is using but imprefectly aware of the mechanics of.
As to security problems, one of the biggest risks I think is requiring people to install add-ons to do commonly needed tasks. For example you want to be able to highlight a bit on a page with a highlighter - a common wish - so you install an add-on from an unknown source and have to permit it to have access to all your page data, whilst adding on a large memory footprint. Is that wise? if such essentials were part of the program (even if optional with a setting) the memory footprint would be miniscule (how much footprint does a command to change the background colour of some text actually take..) and the security not a problem.
Yes that's why I continue with my HSBC physical number generator and don't use a phone app (I don't have a smart phone anyway) despite the logon always encouraging the changeover.
And you can lose/have stolen your phone when you're out but you're unlikely to take your number generator around with you to lose.
Given the article I think in principle the code could still steal such a generated number when you type it and report that the website is down for 12 hours whilst they make use of it though it would require quite a bit of achievement if you have to match IP etc unless the computer is remotely controlled whilst the website is 'down'.
Similar thing with passwords - have part electronic and part physical so you can match them together when you're out and about but if someone steals either they haven't got your password. Or you could even use passwords generated from the text of an online book and you only know which book and your passwords when written would just be a sequence of page-line-letters, or have a random letter grid and your password would be a sequence of row-column cells, or have letters written down but a non-public online script that transforms the input into an actual password...
d
I don't want to have to click to reply about cookies for every single site I visit. It destroys the web.
Just give us some detailed browser settings that the website interrogates and then follows in 99% of cases.
Anyone with illegitimate intentions is going to ignore what we want anyway.
d
I've a feeling it was an early version of Word but at Uni it only had an American-English spell-check on it and in the end it confused my British-English spelling so much I lost a sense of spelling a lot of words generally (relevance/relevence and so forth) and never really recovered that ability. Fortunately the spell-checkers are better tuned now and make up for that... all moot as the new generation seems to spell quite chaotically now anyway. d
Never been a problem, and I still use 2003 (no ribbons). What you've always needed to do is change your template to be how you want.
For example have in the template a tab called "Auto" (which converts) and a tab called "Text" (which is text only) so whenever you create a new spreadsheet you choose the tab appropriate for pasting/typing into. Or do it ad-hoc with Ctrl-1 Text on the columns/sheet.
Making this as easy to set up as possible is a good thing and I'm sure the new improvements will help that.
LibreCalc has improved over the years and is good at imports but LibreOffice has never been as nimble as Office with even small files sucking the life out of your computer.
d
It would be interesting to assess failure rate per £ in some meaningful way, to see how much more reliable expensive ones are, as there's always the choice of cheaper ones being bought more often versus pricier ones slightly less so.
As an extra note I've taken to doing a lot of my work in RAM (on a RAM disk) and then just committing it at intervals (with browser cache switched to memory only) - otherwise working on large files can create a lot of writing. For laptops this is unlikely to be a problem, for PCs with stable electricity supply, vary rarely. I wonder if the resulting reduction in writes has any meaningful benefit in regards to lifespan.
d
I used to use it for quickly generating barebones RTF to cull for snippets/templates for no-frills programmatic RTF output.
I suppose they are killing it off because it doesn't meet the modern standard of being bloated. I mean, what's a program if it doesn't require 100 meg of code and 1 GB of RAM to create 'Hello World'?
d
My bot prevention is to reject anything that is completed too quickly or too slowly (too slowly indicating it's been saved for later), using an MD5 encrypted timestamp, with JS being used to create the submission feature. There is no captcha for people to do, and I've never had anything non-human get through. I'm sure if I was a major site though people would take note and get round it but as an individual site it's perfect. d
I tried it out on an SQL task. Very basic ones it did well - still a really impressive achievement - slightly more complex ones it required a few prompts until it got the correct answer.
However I found it very useful for learning a new JS-type data management script since you could repeatedly ask it for various simple code tasks like "Show me how to look up a sales order" or "loop through the customers" and it would do so, and the short codes it gave you could learn from: so very educational as a learning tool. But clever coding for end product not good.
However, it was amazing at doing some donkey work of converting PHP to JS so focus and time could then be spent on the difficult bits of the code translation.
d
Having seen my wife's challenge with Amazon wrongly disabling her selling account (due to a customer complaint - some customers just complain a lot and take advantage of services like Amazon's tendency to favour complaints so as to get free orders), you might as well be talking to fruit flies. You can provide them with completely overwhelming provable evidence that shows the complaint is wrong and it will go through many eyes and still they can't see it. It is very worrying their lack of accountability, opaqueness and lack of communication skills. You read some real horror stories. d
I asked ChatGPT to put it into plain English. It immediately gave this -
"Alright, everyone, let's come together and brainstorm some new ideas and work collaboratively across different departments to make the most of our strengths and achieve better results. Let's think creatively and make the most efficient use of our resources while staying focused on our goals. Make sure to keep each other updated on the easier tasks that can be accomplished quickly, so that we can stay on track with our overall strategy. It's important to use our flexible solutions and rely on data to make big changes and reach our ambitious targets. Let's delve into the specifics, analyze the details thoroughly, and adjust our approach if needed, all while promoting a culture of constant improvement."
I agree; quite often the test of anything is its greatest stupidity, because whilst unexpected reasonable mis-steps etc are forgiveable (if stepped back from once known), something like having all the windows with no borders and a white titlebar matching the white of underlying windows so you can't tell where anything is, begins or ends, is so obviously stupid to anyone that uses it for even a moment, it points to something very very serious going wrong with quality control. Presumably management/designers driven, I don't think programmers would have opted for it and probably resisted it unsuccessfully.
The colours can be fixed in settings + the registry (which gives more control) but clearly that should be unnecessary.
d
Well I can't abide ribbons, they utterly destroy all productivity for me because things move about and they're generally not decently customisable.
I stick with MSOffice 2003 - whose menus and bars I have customised to death and now bear little resemblance to the originals - and when I need certain features, LibreOffice...
d
I use a very old laptop with 4Gb RAM and W10 (64bit) runs very smoothly with 2.5 Gb free to start.
The killers on it are browsers and LibreOffice.
Older versions of MS Office up to 2003 all of which I use, are ultra-light on resources and very fast, they were engineered very well in that respect.
Other programs you just choose things like foobar2000 and other functional but low-resource programs and the memory usage is all kept low.
d
Layout differences that you describe are mostly likely to be caused by different fonts installed v substituted or different print page sizes.
As you say PDFs should always be sent for view-sharing rather than wordprocessor files, it's a real problem that people have not learnt to do that yet.
d
I tried the reading a docx file in with the latest version, I'd give it a score of about 6.5/10 as it mangled everything up all over the place. I'm helping a person with a book which is basically text, pictures, some arrows and labels. They were all over the place. I suspect basic text files work out mostly fine. But clearly it's hard work and I'd give 10/10 for ongoing effort, and really hope the project eventually succeeds in its goals, so can only encourage it. d
I use LibreOffice because I detest the MS ribbon and so stick to office 2003, but O2003 doesn't create PDFs which losslessly preserve the images.
However the bugs in LibreOffice related to tables, images and undoing are absolutely horrendous. They've improved since a year ago when I was constantly having to close and reopen documents every 10 mins to recover what it had trashed, but even now I dare not do anything beyond elementary actions because it will get mutilated, and I'm always saving so I can revert it.
In a few years' time hopefully it will be good. But in the present my experience is that LibreOffice is not a good experience for competent productions, whereas Office is - except for the completely unusable ribbon - God knows why they didn't provide a choice of both ribbon and menus.
David
Thanks to the stupidity of changing to a ribbon and not retaining menus as an alternative for those who want them, I am stuck on pre-ribbon versions of office. The ribbon whilst suitable for learners is quite simply totally unusable for anyone who wants to do anything advanced or knows what they want, and to suggest 10 years should have got people used to using it like a breeze is really showing a terrible ignorance of the huge handicap the ribbon imposes on productive users. d
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
