Support for Office 2016 and 2019 ends October 14th of this year; I assume that the feature is dropping now; rather than either 20 years ago as part of ECMA-376 and eventually in a live product for either Office 2010 or 2013, or never if they didn't want to do that, in order to draw a hard line under the utility of those?

It otherwise seems like a kind of weird time to do it. In principle what a 'cell' is has never really had an obvious mandatory scale: it has essentially always been relevant that a 'cell' existed in relation to other cells, so that something like an array could be a row; but it has also long been allowed and encouraged to do things like substring operations that acknowledge that cell contents are 'larger' objects that contain smaller ones; and are not automatically spilled out for that reason alone. Not clear that the pragmatic use case for spreadsheets would ever have supported some sort of 'any data type that implies it can be decomposed into elements shall be' rule, strings getting broken up into substrings and so on; but it's also not clear that the pragmatic use case is going to be much clarified by a single cell being n levels deep of lists and arrays of lists and arrays being a fully supported thing rather than something you hack on by shoving JSON into text cells or whatever.

It definitely seems like asking for confusion when some, but only some, "excel spreadsheets" have cells that are arrays, potentially of arrays, while others have rows of cells with contents that, at least formally, are not acknowledged as arrays.

A good cop in a corrupt society is the same as a "good guy with a gun" in a society obsessed with guns and violence... such a tiny minority that they're pretty much non existent.

Cardinal Richelieu once a said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". Show me a cop in the US that's never taken a bribe, even just a sweetener for doing the right thing and I'll show you a liar. Even if just through the people who contribute to their pensions. Even if you can find someone who has managed to walk through that and some how remained completely clean (in the words of Londo Mollari "I can only assume you have not been paying attention") then back to what Richelieu said, he'll have still done something technically wrong even if it wasn't morally wrong. For example, the nice officer who let me off for speeding on the A4 near Heathrow a few years back with a bit of a tongue lashing, technically he broke the law as I was speeding and he should have wrote me up but he didn't as I wasn't a knob or driving like an idiot (and clearly the officer wasn't a knob either.. this is what happens when nice people meet).

And that's the UK, the US has long tolerated higher levels of corruption but in recent years that seems to be taken to truly herculean levels. With the egregious and obvious levels of corruption you're tolerating in your highest office, and there is no "I didn't know" excuse, you elected him twice... why would you expect the people with a little authority like beat cops to be goodly and honest when your entire country is no longer simply permissive of corruption, nor just expecting of it but openly supporting it.

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.

I'm always a little curious what the thinking/strategy is with the Chinese outfits. I don't necessarily expect much from the OrangePi guys; they ship a surprising number of different SoCs, including multiple architectures and multiple vendors, for their size, so are likely to be mostly at the mercy of the SoC vendors; but is the situation for someone like Allwinner such that people who want linux to work on their stuff could be a resource for them and they are just not taking advantage of that very well; or are they actively annoyed by GPL-related claims and really just want to shove minimum-viable android out the door as cheaply as possible to win cheap tablet tenders and really do not want to hear from SBC hobbyists.

SOP at Qualcomm. It has been literal years of hammering on them by Google and basically every Android handset OEM to even keep parts that ship with android support in support for more than a few years(I think the current timeline, at least for 'snapdragon 8 elite' flagship parts, is a princely 8 years from release; and that is with the 'project treble' stuff that attempts to reduce the number of changes that might potentially need to be supported). Especially with the, um, raging success, of Copilot+ AI PCs they are probably ready to pretend that X1 never happened and call it good. I'm not even sure how long the windows support on X1 is expected to last.

Often they're not even doing the design themselves but Google has never claimed to be a hardware company, their branded phones were always and openly, someone elses, right back to the Nexus series.

Of course they realise that... Which is why Palantir and AI have been blamed already, they know that they can't keep relying on the Republicans to keep them out of trouble so they're laying the groundwork to make sure when heads start to roll, it's not their head. That way they can retire and get a cushy private sector gig before the investigation even finishes let alone any kind of war crimes tribunal (which the US will still protect them from).

It's not just desperation but also greed. Especially in countries where workers don't have many rights and a lot of costs like the US.

Greed is the most successful attack vector in most scams. The temptation of more money tends to blind even some of the most astute people, especially in a mercenary culture.

It could be worse, Consumer.

This is pretty much the last media company Disney doesn't own... although it is owned by Larry Ellison so it's not really that much better.

Remember to consume mindlessly Consumer, and it can get worse, it can always get worse.

This is the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about, especially those who are benefitting from it.

Social media isn't just targetting kids, they're targetting everyone and it's not just the under 16 who are vulnerable. Loads of adults are as well, in particular the elderly. Social media is radicalising a large number of older people as well. If we're going to restrict SM for younger people, we should also be doing it for the older people who are just as susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, in many ways, more susceptible.

Top Of The Pops must have made many enemies over the years (and not just because of Jimmy Saville).

Jokes aside, this is largely an American problem as companies there are permitted to be as abusive as they like.

If a store tried to force me to use their app and refused to take an order via their web site they'd lose an absolute shitload of business (not just from me). Same with banks, however there are laws with banks that mean they must meet standards of accessibility and forcing people into a proprietary app is going to violate a few rules there. My bank still uses a OTP sent via SMS.

Obviously the long term solution is legislative, but good luck with that given you keep voting in corporate shills.

Yep, pretty much this.

When you have a physical datacentre, you take backup off site in case the site fails, when you're in the cloud you're really just in one physical location unless you're paying through the nose for co-location.

"Cloud" has pretty much taken the LCC (Low Cost Carrier, A.K.A. Budget Airlines) model to compute and Amazon is the Ryanair of that world. Sure, they advertise a £19 flight to Magaluf but want a seat that isn't shit, pony up, want to take luggage, gonna cost you, don't want to take the red eye flight from "London" Isle of Skye airport... you get the idea and before you know it that £19 flight is a £190 flight. Amazons price structure is the same, cheap headline price, what you actually pay is much, much higher.

A good manager would... Sadly there are a lot of bad managers out there.

There is a grey area here.

Yes, following someone around in public can be considered harassment if it were done with the intent of harassing or disrupting the person in question. A journalist with a legitimate interest can use that as an excuse provided they were not intentionally being disruptive or harassing in order to get a story. If a "reporter" starts getting in your way to force you to react and does so repeatedly, this is harassment.

Intent has a lot to do with it, if you're following someone around without cause then you're pretty much on the wrong side of it.

Also, a good investigative reporter (or private dick) doesn't want to be noticed by the person they're surveilling. It tends to taint the results of the investigation (and here in the UK the police can use the results of a journalists investigation in court) and this affects their livelihood as no legitimate news agency wants to deal with a reporter who is a well known nuisance (as they can be sued as well as the "reporter" in question).

In most countries, taxi services automated their dispatch years ago... This is not an excuse to support illegal services that are both against competition and seek to reduce the rights of workers.

Ever since I've lived in the UK, you've been able to book taxis and minicabs online. It is more recent to Australia but Australia is hopelessly stuck in the past.