User lubed PC with butter, because pressing a button didn't work Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday foray into a mailbag stuffed full of readers' recollections of being asked to fix things that should never have broken. This week, meet “Bill” who can't forget the time, about a decade ago, when someone from the marketing department “couldn't figure out how to eject a floppy disk …
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
"I am a user of libreoffice, and was a user of openoffice. I am still a user of Microsoft Office.
The quality difference is huge, sadly.. and I DO contribute with money to libreoffice."
Maybe. But if you ever have to deal with telephone numbers in a spreadsheet, you can be rest assured Excel will make your life a living hell...
"Only if you don't know how spreadsheets actually work, and know the difference between what's stored and what's displayed.
Living hell. For god's sake get a grip old boy, there are Americans watching."
Yes. You would think it was that simple, wouldn't you? And indeed, assuming that I must be ignorant of how spreadsheets work because something this simple MUST be down to user error. Obviously Excel users area a class above LibreOffice users because LO never caused a fuss with my ignorance.
Don't use MS office products unless forced to, only OpenOffice on the Stevielaptop, but that bit of political autocorrection notwithstanding, if you can't make phone numbers appear as phone numbers in any spreadsheet program with consumate ease you should just give it up.
Seriously.
Get a grip.
This upsets people I see.
I suggest you never go into testing as 'works on my machine' is a banned term around here.
As is sending a spreadsheet, correctly formatted, from Open/Libre office to a client, who then opens it in excel and complains the hell about the way they can't use the numbers. This is after copying and pasting the numbers to compound the issue.
But hey. I should get a grip because, well you know, Excel is just a simple spreadsheet program, right?
"DVDs come in cases with writing on the side. Often, this makes a reference to the content. So merely by putting the DVDs next to another on a shelf, you get a self-maintaining list of them."
I tried that, but reordering by title or artist or genre proved to be a bit too time consuming.
I now just use random access
I tried that, but reordering by title or artist or genre proved to be a bit too time consuming.
WHAT? You mean you didn't buy a new copy every time you changed your mind? Don't you know that's illegal and that funds terrorists!!!!111!11!1!!111!!!111!!! and is the ultimate in piracy? Do you know that artists are missing out on whole dollars and will only be able to buy two Maserati's for each of their five mansions because you ripped them off?
For shame. I hope the RIAA sues you for at least 100 gazillion dollars for your illegal piracy!!!!!
"So merely by putting the DVDs next to another on a shelf, you get a self-maintaining list of them."
I'm currently trying to organise my nearly 2,000 DVD's - so that similar ones are on the same shelf. Now - does "The Rocky Horror Show" go in fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or musicals?
Then again "Flash Gordon" is definitely for the children's section - but also could go in the sci-fi group. On the other hand "Flesh Gordon".....
I'll settle for an Excel-style spreadsheet with multiple category tags and an indicator to a physical shelf. With that I can put it on a tablet and check a DVD title in the charity shop - before mistakenly adding it to my collection for the second or more times.
Had a thousand dvd collection backed up on the largest hard drives I could buy at the time. Breathed a sigh of relief when hurricanes cost me the originals. Was not quite so pleased when the backups died without warning, but then realized that I never watched the backups so I ceased the practice of backing up (dvd's, not everything) saving me plenty of money not buying any more Seagates.
I used to have the same problem, but with only 400 disks or so.
My solution was to create a database in the cloud with full info, and queryable by title, multiple categories, actors, etc.
Then, you remove all the DVD case inserts, and put in plain white ones with the disk # on the spine.
Collectorz.com. If the newer product is like the one I had a few years ago and neglected to copy over to my new machine before erasing the drives...it does a lot of the work for you. Key in the title, it goes to the Internet (if you let it, of course) and retrieves the cast and crew data, runtime, release year, and in many case, images of the front and back of the DVD case. Serious collectors (in the old version) could use a scanner to read the barcodes directly, so you didn't have to type in each title. If you have 2000 plus, that could get tedious.
With 2000 DVDs, why would you suppose that? Commercial DVDs average about 6GB each and would take a long time to rip to a streamable format, and it's not as if DVD players are in any danger of becoming obsolete.
Incidentally I can recommend DVD Profiler instead of Excel, it's cross-platform, networkable, cloudable, reads the barcodes and has a large following. It even has a lending library system built-in so you don't forget who you've lent what to. The Windows version has at least one glaring bug, but nothing new there!
@AC - Rocky Horror - musical - no debate (Tip - just because someone is, or claims to be, an alien in a tale does not automatically make it SF. Indeed, most stuff that Hollywood, TV and the theatre call SF is actually either Space Opera or pure Fantasy). Flash Gordon - Space Opera - also no debate, whether you're talking about tehoriginals I recall from childhood at the cinema, the film with Brian Blessed as a winged man, or the TV series with the irritating wee robot for comic relief, and also fantasy in teh case of the former two.
What? No, I don't need a glass of water, thank you, the shuddering will stop in a few minutes, it's just my OCD over genre categorisations giving me the twitches.. :-}
The writer-standard is, if you can tell your story by taking known technology and extrapolating it to a reasonable degree, you're writing Science Fiction. If you are inventing new ways around the known laws of physics, its fantasy. There is, really, very little real science fiction...and much of what is out there is just an Earth tale being told with the characters on some other non-Earth planet, maybe with weapons using magnetic fields to accelerate projectiles instead of a chemical explosion, and advanced forms of body armor. But...essentially stuff we humans could pick up and understand without any problem should one suddenly appear in the garden.
In my case it's my book list.
Yes, I could probably develop something but a multi-sheet workbook in Excel with one sheet per author or subject matter and varying data structures works for me. It's also easily portable as it sits in the cloud and can be opened on any device, typically the mobile when I'm browsing the second hand and charity bookshops.
Take a few days and using C++ and/or any other language of choice and write a special database. Extra points for some assembly language tossed into the mix. You're here at El Reg so it shouldn't be hard.
Oh.. and store it in the cloud so the CIA can give you a restore if your hard drive crashes.
I work with "VIPs" in gubment circles and let me assure you that they are never, ever, ever at fault no matter what stupidity they commit. Regardless of whether its user error or lack of technical awareness (as they never, ever, ever see the need to engage with training), it's always the IT that is faulty, even when they are found trying to use a mouse upside down...
"You should have better designed mice! These are clearly not fit for purpose! Why is IT so crap?!"
"You mean they're permitted to view classified documents whilst illuminating them with their phone cameras?"
At [redacted] Air Force Base, I was an IT contractor. Didn't seem to occur to some of the military staff that maybe they shouldn't leave classified documents on their desk while the foreign national with no clearance was upgrading their web browser. Yes, the Technical Sergeant sometimes with me did have Top Secret clearance, but......
In fact, on the team, we even joked about the black briefcase I brought to and from work, but was never seen opening....[contained my lunch]
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
