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Comment Timing? (Score 1) 48

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.

Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 66

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.

Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 66

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.

Comment Re:Why not X1? (Score 1) 66

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.

Comment Re:Enough Already (Score 2) 126

The hypnosis:

```
If I am not smart enough to understand what my code will do I am not responsible for very bad things it does under CFAA. Even if I know it is likely to do very bad things.
```

The psyop is that it is an independent intelligence free from the societal constraints of Justice.

This is analogous to some head of a corporation going, "We just dump the waste in the drain that says 'waste', the PCB's in the River aren't my fault."

Both groups are paying off governments to look the other way. We won't find justice there, apparently. (do prove me wrong, that would be great)

Comment Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealh (Score 3, Informative) 82

Here's a free book for the politicians in DC to read to learn why central planning always fails.

I mean it's only been out 106 years, so maybe they haven't heard of it yet.

TL;DR local cities have more information about what they need.

Of course corruption happens at all levels and some folks in cities still have DSL for that reason.

Comment Re:Performance or nostalgia? (Score 1) 137

I saw it with a group of four people.

Three of us enjoyed it quite a bit.

I didn't mind it but nothing was surprising to me.

I saw several scenes that could have been more cleverly written but I was glad to support the group that saved a creative work from the burn pile. The idea of killing a movie for accounting losses seems sinful.

The motion-control photography, practical effects, and integration of animation were at least as good as Roger Rabbit.

If you enjoy the craft of filmmaking it's at least worth seeing.

I didn't see any marxist social commentary. Perhaps folks in the "Flock does nothing wrong" camp might feel otherwise.

Comment Crashes (Score 1) 82

Would be lovely if they could take a breath and spend a release fixing Dr. Konqui or Akonadi or whatever crashes that show up a few times a month for me (regardless of hardware).

This has been going on for half of its 30-yr release cycle.

I must admit ignorance of how this can persist for so long. FLOSS developers typically obsess over stability but seemingly not in the KDE culture.

I used to install symbols and submit bug reports but they're not interested if you're not running the latest tip.

Not that there is an obvious better DE right now. XFCE could stop corrupting its preferences files too. I used to have a script to restore a config from a previous ZFS snapshot when it self destructed but that gets old too.

If I'm building a device for production I'll use something simple like openbox/devilspie2 to get stability.

Lots of folks seem to get fed up and start a new project but momentum is a real thing. I hear Omarchy is stable and not withering but tiles just aren't my thing. More power to those who love them.

Comment Re:Avoiding bubble collapse consequences (Score 1) 372

Spot on, well said.

Also his family is invested in these zany ventures and 'can't' lose out.

Making them part of the MIC ensures endless graft.

Ted Postol has a good analysis of the Patriot PAC-3 and shows how the vendor has failed to tell the truth about their systems for decades while collecting endless taxpayer funds based on the lies.

Soldiers die, we get poor, they get rich. Zoomers aren't having any of it.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 45

Engineers need to remember that time exists.

You have three months to teach a teen how to control a robot with a microcontroller.

OK, how much of that do you budget to CS and assembly?

Month 1: Architecture and data structures? You have 18 40 minute periods and maybe homework assignments.

Half of the class won't even gain mastery in that time. By time your class is over they will still be having memory management problems.

So then you've failed to achieve the goal.

There are engineers who remember that time exists and for the rest we have engineering managers. Not ideal, just how it is.

To be sure engineering schools are doing a bad job at teaching reality. Even in a dx/dr environment, it's so weird.

Comment Re:Flock is building 1984 (Score 4, Insightful) 254

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

Comment Re:Task is cheap (Score -1, Troll) 73

He seems like a real scumbag but it's worth keeping in mind that the people who told us that have a massive incentive to pin their crimes on a scapegoat.

Since we pretty much know that FTX was the #1 donor to a party's political action committee with money laundered through Ukraine, he would have been smarter to wait for that conflict to conclude.

The people who benefited from the crime also prosecuted him which is never reliable.

It might not be FedSlop but unless it is proven that both parties didn't benefit we shouldn't trust this government either.

We do know that Ladybug Graham got $18M straight into his bank account from Ukraine so there is certainly smoke.

It's only since a dead man can't sue for libel that people are willing to print that nugget now.

Comment Re:Who will pay for this? (Score 5, Insightful) 33

Not in a Corporate Democracy.

The people who would prosecute OpenAI want to use OpenAI to maximize their power and wealth at your financial and legal expense.

Remember when they tried to extradite Gary McKinnon for twenty years for looking at a spreadsheet when he accidentally got RDP access to an unsecured NASA desktop with a simple Perl script? Intent is not relevant for prosecutors (mens rea should be an element in a Constitutional case).

The legal basis is there but the will to power is not.

Two systems of courts for different classes of people (yet again). It would be an error to call that a Justice System.

n.b. the Culture War psyop is there to try to convince you that the classes are something else.

Comment Re:I can explain away Dark Matter/Energy in 4 word (Score 1) 88

There are corrections to gravity that include the current size of the Universe as s term that gives extremely small differences in calculations but explains most observations.

It has a certain allure from an Information Theory perspective and is extremely parsimonious in ask.

But funding is for finding wimps and axons and evidence of mysteries that use the old equations so you are called crazy if your simple theory threatens that gravy train.

Some people say useful physics is too dangerous to fund and we're better off wasting time and money.

Twenty years ago Dark Energy seemed like a good idea to me. So did Supersymmetry. Most new ideas that can be tested and used or disproved probably should be. That LHC found no Supersymmetric pairs is a good thing.

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