Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Blaming a single cause (Score 1) 25

can the researchers really say with confidence that the civilization would still be with us today?

Nobody claimed it would otherwise still be around. You are putting words in their mouths. It only solved, or at least partly solves a mystery. Usually declines of ancient cities can be traced to invaders, civil war, damaged soil, plagues, etc. This one had no known comparable cause.

Comment Re:Put 100s of millions out of work... (Score 1) 35

people on benefits always find constructive things to do with their time, they never get depressed due to lack of purpose and end up on drinks, drugs or in prison.

You're not thinking it through -- the goal isn't just to put everyone on benefits and make them spend the rest of their lives clicking the TV remote and waiting for their next welfare check. If you want to do it right (and the robots provide sufficient surplus resources to support it), you go a step further and hire people to do the job they always wanted to do, whether it makes a profit for anyone or not. If that means we have 100,000 ski instructors and 300,000 mediocre artists, then so be it; the robots do the grunt work, and the people are paid to do their preferred avocation.

Not that I expect that to actually happen, of course; in the event the robots actually can replace all labor, the upper classes will make sure that economic surplus goes to themselves, with only the absolute minimum getting distributed to anyone else.

Comment Re:NO! NO! NO! (Score 1) 35

We all know China is only competing successfully with us by using slave labor. Why would they need robots?

Honestly, they don't "need" robots or anything else; they could just keep doing what they've always done and hope for the best.

However, unlike some countries I could mention, the Chinese government has a vision of what it wants its future to be like, and is willing to work and invest to realize that vision. Hence robots, and other economic development.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 1) 76

It doesn't matter if they know about other tools or not because most of the time their work machines are locked down to keep malware off of them so that they're not able to install Libre Office even if they want to. Excel is all they have so they do what they can to make it work, for some minuscule value of "work."

Comment Re:Puppetmaster is hidden (Score 1) 47

Another thing is China kind of "herds" factory workers in a way the US cannot. For example, they limit housing options near factory towns so the space can be dedicated to factories, large-scale NIMBY-ism. If a company folds, workers' temporary mini-housing makes it logistically easier to move to a new town, but it's hard on families.

Thus, biz owners have a kind of de-facto slave class that's relatively easy to shift around as needed.

This is also a form of subsidizing industry. China has managed to combine capitalism and communism in ways that give it an advantage, or at least keep it a manufacturing superpower.

Comment Randist (Score 1) 35

So ... China allows the financials to define the culture, rather than having the culture define the financial structure.  Sound like "somebody" we know ? That's a deliberate choice with known consequences. I mean, consumerism is no more a natural/ synthetic a'priori  population  phenomena than heroin addiction or deer-horn cults.  Yet  Chinese leadership has come to prefer productivity over -- say -- emotional insight or brook-trout fishing. How Randish of them and how foolish to learn the worst of American vices. Yes yes I know Chinese leaders were decadent and greedy while Americans still ran around in Dire-Wolfskins.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 1) 76

As mentioned elsewhere, spreadsheets are probably the wrong tool for the for that particular job. Just because one can make a giant sheet in a spreadsheet tool doesn't mean they should. It won't have sufficient indexes to quickly do JOINs or equivalent, for example. Nor proper caching of a data, having more of a file-centric design.

Comment Change happens (Score 1) 76

For one, if a handful of work-groups need Excel, that's not a reason for the rest of the company to use Excel. Most Excel uses will be mundane things. They can allow justifiable exceptions.

but the financial staff know Excel and they know it very, very well.

Software tools/frameworks I knew well were ordered tossed because the vendor or support structure faded. It happens. Why are financial people given that latitude when almost nobody else is? Change is annoying and creates a learning curve, but inevitable in the work-place. I knew cases where employees quit over frustration over replacement-ware, but management said "we are doing it anyhow, live or leave" (paraphrased).

And I'm surprised there are not products dedicated to big org financial analysis. There might be, but "we don't wanna learn something new" lobbying may be stopping it.

Excel probably has other scaling problems they didn't mention in the article but just learned work-arounds, yet they are likely stretching Excel to its limits risking more problems, familiarity or not. Oracle Essbase allegedly is a big-org financial modelling tool. I don't like Oracle the company, but Essbase & competitors may be a better tool for that particular job. See what other big orgs use.

Slashdot Top Deals

Dead? No excuse for laying off work.

Working...