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Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

theregister.com

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Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#211

Post by Lanolderen »

bayindirh wrote: post #193
Lanolderen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember back in the 00s Excel could support millions of rows on an office PC used in a bank department to check approvals for loans. I don't want to know what perversions they're doing now but at some point all that needs to get in normal DBs.

Excel has native DB connectivity for quite some time. Maybe they were using that, actually? Libreoffice Calc also supports the same thing over ODBC AFAIK.

Damn, you might be right. I even made a tutorial on Excel ODBC for our sales department recently and completely forgot it's ancient tech. But even then, why in the hell would you query that much shit outside of management diagrams...

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#212

Post by andsoitis »

Ragnarork wrote: post #78
baq wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally dread the world in which physical supply chains get decentralized. A multi-polar world is a tinderbox.

> A multi-polar world is a tinderbox Meanwhile, a unipolar is totally fine....

These things exist on a spectrum, and interdependency, collaboration, partnership, make for a more prosperous and safe world.

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#213

Post by eitland »

mstipetic wrote: post #111
belter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dump Office and Teams. Easy to do and a great start to move outside of Windows OS. LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst, if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....

I’m all for open source but suggesting libre office is perfect is a bit too much for me

It is not perfect, but in a number of areas it is significantly better than MS Office, and this has been the case since it was still OpenOffice back in 2005: I'd import collaborative schoolwork into Open Office to fix the mismatch of styles that other students had used[1] and then (to be fair) I'd export it back to Word format and do final formatting in Word to get the exact layouts and page numering options that was demanded from us.

Today MS Office is still broken in a number of crazy ways. One of the most annoying ones is that if whoever packages and deploys Office to our computers use localization for the user interface, suddenly all formulas are in some broken local language variant making it next to impossible to search for it.

If I know the solution with standard Excel language it is doable to translate it to this broken "Norwegian BASIC" language, it is just really really annoying.

A quick and easy solution then is to write it in Libre Office Calc, export it to xls and import it and done.

With Libre Office I can also choose if I want cute "Ribbon" menus or easy-to-use menus.

List probably goes on, this was just the things from the top of my head.

[1]because it felt almost impossible to do in an efficient way in MS Office even if I had significantly more experience with it)

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#214

Post by hylaride »

bayindirh wrote: post #167
hylaride wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people realize how much of the world runs off of excel, especially the financial world. Excel still "supports" buggy issues from versions in the 1990s as to not break financial models. IBM mainframes do the same thing with COBOL because modernizing core code means having to notify and test all the downstream users that have their own code to deal with the legacy issues in the current stack. I was once e…

I know what you mean, but now you're talking about a very niche market. Finance, which uses Excel or spreadsheets since 90s. You can't replace these, I agree. But for other uses of Excel, I can say it can be easily exchanged. This is why I used 99.99% percent, but not more nines. The remaining "three nines" are the niches you're talking about. It's like how we say "Nah, it's a small set of matrices. just 2 , 3000x300…

It sounds like a niche market, but every company in the world has a finance department that plugs everything from sales forecasts, various inputs (goods, employment, supply chain components, etc), to things we don't even think of that flow through it. At some point these companies are talking with other companies and a shocking amount of data interchange is done by emailing excel spreadsheets around (or CSVs exported from excel).

I forget about it myself as I've worked for modern tech companies since 2008, but outside of that world is a very different place where old ways of doing things stick around. Anecdotally, about 2 years ago I got a cold email from a co-op job that I had in 2002 for a manufacturing company that I wrote a perl script for asking for help modernizing it. The perl script consolidated raw EDI(1) files coming into some ancient HP-UX machine, then exported it...to an excel file, MS Access DB, and a SAP DB so that the accountants and the manufacturers could simultaneously get work processing the order. When I started people were inputting these all manually.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#215

Post by throwaway798214 »

bayindirh wrote: post #143
baq wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets. Google sheets is better, but comes with its own set of issues and dumb limitations. Excel is at this point in time irreplaceable.

Genuinely curious. Can you elaborate?

Client company of mine likes to document server rack layouts with Excel sheets (not a bad idea really). I used LibreOffice for years to _read_ those Excels, but any time I would write the smallest change the whole Excel sheet broke... In the end I just bought Office (one-time payment still exists) and while that company is using Macs and I'm using Windows we never have any problems sharing and modifying those xls files.

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#216

Post by belter »

baq wrote: post #136
belter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dump Office and Teams. Easy to do and a great start to move outside of Windows OS. LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst, if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....

LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets. Google sheets is better, but comes with its own set of issues and dumb limitations. Excel is at this point in time irreplaceable.

Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#217

Post by eitland »

baq wrote: post #136
belter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dump Office and Teams. Easy to do and a great start to move outside of Windows OS. LibreOffice is perfect, and government officials wont govern better or worst, if their PowerPoint presentations don't have the latest MS fonts....

LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets. Google sheets is better, but comes with its own set of issues and dumb limitations. Excel is at this point in time irreplaceable.

> LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets.

Citation very much needed :-)

Excel on the other hand is barely usable for anything that involves formulas for us who are forced to used the localized version.

In fact if one is stuck with a localized Excel the easiest way is often to write in LibreOffice Calc and then export it to xls format.

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#218

Post by BjoernKW »

While this might sound reasonable on the surface, here's the thing: Not only are there hardly any homegrown options in the EU, but the EU is actively regulating against such homegrown alternatives.

At the same time, people regularly call for the authorities to pitch in and provide such alternatives.

There are numerous ridiculously expensive - and now defunct - projects (e.g., Quaero and Theseus, just to mention two of those) that have tried to achieve something to that effect already, with little - if anything - to show for.

Why people seem to think this is going to work this time around is beyond me.

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#219

Post by FlorisWie »

jeromegv wrote: post #57
cinntaile wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't remove posts that discuss European tech sovereignty. It was probably flagged by the community instead.

This feature has definitely been abused by fans of the current US administration. Anything close to being critical gets flagged and needs manual intervention to be brought back.

The post disappeared from my home page, though I can still find it when searching. Is anyone else experiencing this issue? I hope the free speech administration recognizes the flagging as satire, but such nuance will probably go over their heads

Re: Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

#220

Post by andsoitis »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #126
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that Russian gas is not a closed topic. Several European countries are still financing Russia's war economy by buying Russian gas. There is no 100% embargo ... yet. I see a lot of people discussing this as if we are all running on windmills and nuclear, it is absolutely not the case... yet.

I know, but it's always former Russian colonies that fall for their propaganda—partly because some still see Russia as an "old friend." These countries are also much poorer than those in the West, which is pretty ironic since the Russian gas they get isn’t even that much cheaper. It’s more about having the infrastructure in place and simply being used to living next to the Russians. Nord Stream 2 is beyond repair—jus…

> but it's always former Russian colonies that fall for their propaganda—partly because some still see Russia as an "old friend."

The largest importers of Russian gas in the European Union are Germany and Italy, accounting together for almost half of the EU's gas imports from Russia. Other larger Russian gas importers in the European Union are France, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and Slovakia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...

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