No joke.
If you look how Excel actually is used, it's basically a platform for user-built data+calc-procedures. Very much what SQL was intended to be in the 70ies.
If the Sheet isn't too bloated, this might even be feasible.
The key problem I would have would be the proprietary nature of the software. If someone can migrate that sheet to a small FOSS DB, then the new NZ healthcare system is ready to run for a century.
... a 10" display, detachable controller(s), sturdiness and battery life (8 hours is my hallmark) over thinness, docking-station/HDMI compliant USB-C connectivity, 1TB of storage and at least the performance of the XBox One X, preferably the XBox Series S with a little extra on top. I also want full compatibility with all my XBox peripherals, including controllers, headphones, etc.
1080p resolution is enough for me, but I want it to run snappy.
Let's see what you can do, M$, and I might just give you my money, believe it or not.
Disclaimer: reasonably happy XBox user here. In case you didn't notice.
They lull unsuspecting young people from around asia to some backwater area with promise of a fair paying job to help them and their families, then capture them and take them away to some labor-prison built somewhere on nomansland on the southern chinese border. This is hardcore prison slave-labor and those who manage to escape tell that they either where forced to build Temu-trash for basically no income or forced to scam people which they don't want to do.
The truth is, today we have slaves just as we had 1000 years ago, only more of them because the overall population has grown. The stories I run into about this has me twitching to leave my dayjob, arm myself, find some likeminded people and start violently liberating these people and putting some bullets into the heads of those responsible.
Our cushy life is but one sliver of niceness in a history (and present) of gruesome existence.
Think twice before you buy Temu-junk. If it's too cheap to be true, someone had to pay a _very_ hard price and that likely wasn't some teenager happy to support his family in some doorstep country, these days it's increasingly likely that that someone was a bona-fide enslaved worker.
I remember getting excited about Wine and other "let's run Windows stuff on FOSS" attempts. Like, for instance, the official Corel Draw 9 for Linux, which was quite impressive and even came with the Corel Font Manager, a thing which Linux was desperately lacking at the time. (I still have the CDs, licence and all btw.). Anyway that was more than 20 years ago(!) and the need for this sort of thing has loooong since past.
These days there are more than enough games for Linux and some special case software aside, most options on FOSS are notably better than any Windows sh1te.
Inkscape for Vector GFX, Blender for 3D/CGI, Kdenlive for Video (excellent!), Scribus for multi-page print, GOG.com and perhaps Steam for Gaming
My current run-ins with Windows were like a throwback to those times. I personally fundamentally don't get how Windows still has such a market over macOS or Linux. It's that bizarre, even today. That's my impression anyway.
Bottom line: No FOSS Windows clone needed in 2025. Really not.
... of TTIP. And now this. You have to give him that.
But this is a return to baseline. Keep in mind: The US has "legal" food additives that are classified as toxic waste in Europe.
From the top of my head ( Doom and Half Life 2 being hard contestants for #1 IMHO ):
(Adventure/Action)Sim & FPS:
Elite
BattleZone
Doom
System Shock
Mechwarrior 2
Deus Ex
Half Life 2
GTA
Adventure:
Rogue
Zork
Zelda
MMO:
MUD
Ultima Online
EverQuest
WoW
Eve Online
Arcade:
PacMan
Asteroids
Strategy:
Empire
Dune
StarCraft
Moba:
DOTA (that's easy
Arena:
Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena
Tribes
Fortnite
Apex Legends
Point & Click:
Leisure Suit Larry, Day of the Tentacle
VR:
Half Life Alyx
The ultimate end-game of capitalism: Its own decommission.
Matt is a good guy.
As far as FOSS businesses and leadership goes, Matt is a prime example of how to do things right:
Listen to your users and not some aloof ueber-nerds. Iterate in small steps. Listen to feedback. Avoid breaking userland as much as humanly possible. Don't give in to software fads easily. If you take do on new stuff for solid and well-evaluated reasons, go in full and manage that new dependency like it's your own.
Anyway, I digress. Matt Mullenweg took a small blogging engine and built it out to a 7-billion dollar operation that holds fast and true to its FOSS core values to this very day. WP & Automattic are among the top 10 of most influential internet (mega)corps, and for quite some time now. To emphasize: His rag-tag band of a measily 2k+ remote-work pioneers is playing in the same league as Google, Apple, MS, Amazon, IBM and Oracle when it comes to Internet and Web mindshare and user-power. WP has approx. 50 Milllion active setups hooked to the Web, run by all kinds of people and orgs, from large Corps. down to single web freelancers and private folks. That's 30%+ of the _entire_ Web. They are the FOSS bastion against F@keb00k, Tw0tter, TrashTok and all the other commercial surveillance apps the regulars are hooked on these days.
I could go on, but I think you're catching my drift.
So effing what if he screwed the PR-pooch a little? He admitted his faults on that part and promised to be more careful in the future. Case closed. Move on. Nothing to see here.
Matt Mullenweg is a gallion figure of FOSS leadership, right up there with Linus Torwalds, Ton Rosendaal and perhaps a few others. He's been doing his thing for decades and has epic megatons of results to prove the validity of his general approach.
So unless you want to look like a Type-A epic-style douche, I suggest you take the noisemaking and name-calling down a notch or two.
EOM
How on earth do you get the idea that I live in "far-right fantasy land"?!??
It might surprise you, but there is a plethora of "left-leaning" intellectual schools that have anti-theism, atheism and secularism as core values. You might want to read some intellectual non-fiction on occasion.
My comment didn't even include a value judgement. If anything it actually made somewhat an argument _for_ old-school abrahamic revelation cults. In that regard the cult doesn't even matter all that much, as long as it holds family and offspring as a higher or the highest values.
By and large it's happenstance that the cult making the most noise in our time is 1sl4m. It could just add well be some variant of Christianity, Judeism or some other cult some came up with and managed to bring up to speed.
People using automation, especially for things they can't do themselves in similar quality? No waaaaaay! OMG, I'm so glad we have academic studies for this sort of thing.[/sarcasm]
By premium Apple laptop for 4k Euros. Boot up, press play button, get blasted with Apple Music ad.
Get nagged by same laptop at least once a week because something something iCloud, give us your subscription money.
Need IT expertise and FOSS demons/services installments to reclaim play button and stop iCloud ads, like on some cheap-ass discounter Windows trash top.
Unacceptable. They've lost me as a customer.
Not only is this a dupe from a few weeks back, I think it even has the exact same wording in the title. Not sure if I've ever seen that in my 25 years on slashdot.
To be fair, ever since Firehose dupes have gotten less, I'll give them that.
There is no two ways about it: Blender is a gallion-figure FOSS project and Ton and the Blender crew deserve all the accolades they're getting.
Once something like that comes along it causes - often overdue - disruption. That's the way it goes.
Look at Git for such an example. If anybody came about with Perforce today they'd be laughed out of the room. Subversion and BitKeeper aren't even actively developed anymore. There's simply no point. The CGI space is seeing that with Blender in recent years.
... 3D, anim, composite, NLE and all. Final master render done on a single workstation PC, averaging
ROTFL!
Remember when a single RenderDrive used to cost as much as a brand-new mid-range car and had less FLOPS that a current-model Apple Watch?
I do. We've come a long way. I like this.
If Machiavelli were a hacker, he'd have worked for the CSSG. -- Phil Lapsley
