Isn't this why the cosigner exists on student loans? Basically the cosigner is the one with collateral, capable of meeting the terms of the loan. While IANAL, my understanding of reading a master promissory note for student loans is that basically the debt falls to the cosigner should the primary be unable to meet the financial obligations in any way (after wage garnishing, etc).
I apply a bit of hyperbole here, but I'm convinced that "national security" is a monotonic function that will eventually encompass everything in the federal government.
And a large part of it to cover up embarrassing details.
I think it was in the discussions related to one of the embassy cables that I found this concept of 3rd order facts that leads to things being classified. It goes something like this. Say US is supporting some brutal dictator somewhere. The fact that he is evil is the main fact (1st order). People in that country and all over the world know it. That's the 2nd order. However the knowledge that the US govt knows (3rd) order is classified. The reasoning is because then the US govt might have to explain its inaction in regard to all the brutalities inflicting by that ruler.
> And a large part of it to cover up embarrassing details.
Yes, but it is more than that. Way more.
Chinese ask me why in the world did Americans threw themselves on Saudis when they attacked them.
Chinese don't understand that. They cannot comprehend it at all. It breaks their mind. Chinese there think there must be some completely bizarre, terrible secret that is the reason for that.
I give them one popular explanation:
Imagine, some serious guy in the suit comes to completely shocked people after 9.11 and tells there is a "completely bizarre, terrible secret" behind this mess, and "this is why you trust me on this, and we must go help Saudis with Saddam."
Then years pass, US is in its 10th year of Iraq war. Everybody has since forgot Saudis, and can't care more why this has started when they have to finish this war at all costs. The guy serious guy in the suit keeps shouting "This is all Saddam who did all this! I have a proof, but is a state secret, just trust me!"
Imagine now somebody coming out and telling everybody: "there was no terrible secret" to begin with, and you had no reason to listen to that serious guy in the suit for all that 19 years long war.
I have a sneaking suspicion that xfinity does this. When signing up they said there were no password restrictions. So I generated ~64 character password using my trusty password manager, and used that. Went to log in and couldn't, wrong password. So I changed my password, again ~64 characters, with the old trusty companion. Again, couldn't log in.
Finally, I just changed my password to a randomly generated password of a commanding ~16 characters and haven't had a problem logging in since. I've spent more time than I care messing with my password on xfinity's site. There was exactly no scientific endeavor, and is purely conjecture. But it really feels as though there is some chicanery happening with passwords.
Not sure if you have access to it, but reaxsys[1] is an amazing database for stuff like this. I've used it many times for looking for (un)safe reaction paths for particular drugs. It looks like the ``free'' version might let you get a lot of information from it.
Also, pubchem[2] might be of help as well. This is entirely free.
Excel is the most widely used domain-specific language -- maybe even widely used "programming language" (if I'm painting with a broad brush, though it is turing complete) used to date. Getting people off, when a company's livelihood is literally at stake, is no small ask. Solve this problem and you'd be a bajillionare (official title).
I scan the comments and see a few anecdotal comments about how life is just fine with LO. But as many other comments point out: it's not the one-offs that make this hard, it's the fact that excel is the de-facto information exchange between people, businesses, and boards. To be a broken record: it's too ingrained.
The CS industry doesn't understand that the rest of the non-CS world runs on tools the employees learn once and never look back.
Coming from engineering, CS people never seemed to understand why someone used Matlab at all, when python existed or even the utility of 'R'/'Stata'.
The effort needed to onboard onto a programming/mathematical/computational tool, when you don't have a strong coding background to go with it, is extremely high. The users will hold on to them till their dying breath, because the is tied to more than 50% of their own value proposition.
Excel is the epitome of this phenomenon.
Also, excel is straight up a good tool. The only advantage of Libre office is the price, which is a non-factor for any major corp. Google's collaboration suite is better, but they lag behind in every other area.
I can see windows being completely replaced by competitor, but Office will stay. It is MSFT's stickiest product.
the most solid way to handle it is to use data import from text file (handles csv) so you can configure the columns while looking at them
Which recent excel versions you can bring that data table directly into power query as well, which is useful if youve got multiple csv you are trying to look at that are related
i think 'onboard' might refer to the wider context of using a tool in say, a research group. it's not just you learning the tool, it's about how the group uses the tool and the historical developments in place.
It's just a tech business language mannerism. People use it for the same reasons they use "price point" instead of "price", or "usecase" instead of "use", or "form factor" instead of "size": to show that they belong to the tribe, and to sound clever while saying something that could be expressed more simply and elegantly. The jargon adds nothing, except cringe.
People who code for a living are used to regularly teaching themselves new things, but there are lots of folks in other corners of the organization that expect to be taught / onboarded, and it's not an entirely unreasonable expectation. I think the word "onboard" implies a cost will have to be paid (e.g. time, money, man-hours, hiring new talent, etc.), and that's what the parent poster wanted to emphasize.
worked with a lot of techs this way. They get mad if you show them what you're trying to teach them shows up with very good instructions on the first page of google. At least half of them get pissed off :)
You’re right about Office being sticky, but that is changing. Heaps of people are using Google Sheets for basic spreadsheets these days. Advanced users will stick to the tools they know, but I’ve reached the same conclusion as the author of this post. Licensing issues, nagging about cloud subscriptions, inconsistencies between Windows and macOS and the lack of Linux support have become so painful in recent versions of Office that using LibreOffice no longer feels like a greater inconvenience – just a different inconvenience.
In my experience anyone in CS who was doing enough work for which Matlab and R to be relevant definitely found them useful, at least in the correct situations.
Proprietary math software, to which I'd add Mathematica, has the specific non-value proposition that you cannot take home your precious research work from the university lab without expensive, hard to buy and impermanent licenses and subscriptions.
Take all of this with a grain of salt: I'm an Excel and VBA developer. I'm a bit of a dinosaur and I'm looking to pivot to Java + JavaScript as I'm just a smidge underpaid.
However, I have this to say about Excel. MicroSoft is making a push to kill VBA with two prong. One, replace VBA with JavaScript through OfficeJS. Two, beef up Power Query and Power Pivot so that you can do enough ETL in Excel through a point and click interface.
But the nasty truth is that on the ground in offices worldwide, there are ETL flows that shouldn't exist, but middle managers do not possess the political capital, incentives, or technical skill to remove. And while Power Query, M, DAX and Power Pivot are excellent, in, let's say, 5% of workflows, you need some business logic in some language that is more flexible. And this is the real problem with VBA; it papers over dirty workflows, even if the data structures you are provided are not good.
What kind of software do you develop in VBA? I've used it a fair bit over the past few years to build spreadsheets and Access databases for people in locked-down enterprise environments who can't run arbitrary .exes. I wish I had just built web apps, despite the huge downsides of needing to trust a system administrator to secure user data, and being sandboxed into a browser.
Using VBA was much worse. I could manage with the VBA language alone, but the number of security controls and macro-related warnings I had to click through, the poor quality of free online documentation, the lack of version control support and the hacks I had to use to get things into Git, and the lack of decent libraries made the experience an overall nightmare. Have you found solutions to these problems? Or do you work in an environment where you control the users' computers?
There are other areas like this, too. I'm part of a firm that does grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses (http://www.seliger.com for the curious). Word and Excel are standard, especially for any documents that may touch governments. All narratives are written in Word and budgets in Excel.
I like and approve of LibreOffice but it doesn't seamlessly transfer complex styles or tracked changes to and from Word. When an organization is working with people who bill in the hundreds of dollars per hour and a grant in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, cost of MS Office is a non-issue. I approve of and generally support OSS (I'm writing this in Firefox), but the level of integration into the MSO world is ill-understood.
I've also written novels and the whole publishing industry and infrastructure is based around Word.
I don't think a lot of businesses are really that dependent on the sophisticated Excel features. And if they are it's concentrated in certain areas. You can buy per seat licenses (honestly no idea how MS prices this) for whoever needs it and out the rest of the enterprise on something else for their documents.
But why should they do this? MS Office 365 is 150 USD per year per user. For the vast majority of companies, large and small, this is a very small price for a software that is so engrained in daily business processes and activities. If a company is at the point of deciding about cost cutting by cutting excel, it probably is beyond salvation (certainly in the developed world, but i dare say even in developing countries). And the productivity loss of the first year would probably negate any saving.
> But why should they do this? MS Office 365 is 150 USD per year per user.
As someone in the Linux/Debian/Ubuntu area of my organization, the main headache with licensing from what I can see as an 'outsider' is not so much the price as the auditing/compliance overhead.
We can spin up/down as many Deb/Ub/CentOS systems as we want and not care, which as much RAM and (v)CPU as needed.
Trying to do the same with Windows and/or VMware seems to be something else.
Absolutely. 150 USD is a trivial amount of money in most bureaucracies, but the time cost of getting that expense approved and accounted for could be weeks.
To add another anecdote, I've noticed that many educational institutions (including government departments with tens of thousands of staff and hundreds of thousands of students) use G Suite. I'm sure some corporate staff in these organisations have Microsoft Office too, but there are many people in large bureaucracies who use Google Docs and Google Sheets daily.
The excel work I've seen finance gurus perform is absolutely programming. There's usually "that guy" who assembled it and understands how the massive 100 tab completely uncommented spaghetti mess works.
And then he retires or gets run over by a bus and I have to spend three months reverse engineering it only to find that it is really just an over complex UI hiding a bug ridden home made database management system. Which I then reimplement in SQL Server and C#/VB.Net in a week; and the new version is faster, properly multi-user, more reliable, and actually maintainable.
Nah thats when you hire a consultant to support the spreadsheet at twice the rate. You can even pay them to make a new spreadsheet and train the next unsuspecting victim.
That's in fact what I was hired to do. I told them the first day on the job that they really needed a database, even sketched the schema. But they were adamant that it had to be an Excel solution so I wasted three months trying to untangle the crap that was there all the while trying to persuade them that a DB and a simpler front end would be much better. Eventually they agreed.
..and people wonder why Google hasn't pulled the plug on Chrome OS and Chromebooks. It is essential for the next generation to prefer "Sheets" over "Excel".. only way to do that is to get in early.
That hasn't appeared to work. Students who are forced to use Chromebooks don't beg their parents to get them one for home. The ones who do care about laptops ask for PC's or to a much lesser extent Macs.
That also never really worked when Apple was much bigger in pre-college education.
Edit: Chromebooks in education are like Enterprise software. The end user never chooses to use it. The vendor is not incentivized to make a product that end user will like, only the corporate buyer.
How many teachers and administrators who do have a choice are using Chromebooks willingly?
Many. I’m on a K-8 school board and the #1 technology ask from the teachers is Chromebooks.
They like iPads up to around grade 2-3. After that, the keyboard makes the kids more productive.
Windows requires too much IT overhead and Mac is too difficult to do business with and expensive.
The real magic of Chrome is the management suite. It’s dirt cheap for .edu and works fantastic. Chrome devices on a cart are reconfigured by the time the cart is rolled into a different classroom.
It’s way too expensive for commercial customers though.
I agree. I'm not saying that Chromebooks aren't a good fit for education. I'm saying that using Chromebooks in schools aren't going to necessarily endear them to students to the point where the next generation is going to prefer either Chromebooks or GSuite when they have a choice at home or when they go to college or start working.
Teachers want Chromebook's for their students. When they have choice, they will use their own laptops for themselves.
Just like no one ever said they want to use Version One for their own personal projects. They would choose something like BaseCamp Personal or Trello.
G is making progress though - automation / building of tools is 100x better on google sheets than in excel.
I can make a g form, output to a g sheet, automatically email if an entry contains certain text, etc. All that takes ~20 minutes, 1 add on, and 0 lines of code. Excel simply cannot compete with that.
Edit - I still use excel all the time for heavy lifting though. They fill different use cases for me.
My initial post may have sounded more negative than I intended regarding the quality of Google Sheets. I have an Office365 subscription and Numbers is free and either could do the simple things I use a spreadsheet for, I still use Sheets.
Is there an easy way to set LibreOffice Calc to the Excel keybindings? It might not help for things like macros but at least sheet navigation could be consistent.
What exactly is the story of LO as regards Excel: do they want to emulate Excel's VBA, or do they have a different framework in place(for example using python)?
My advisor pseudo follows this. He does his best to bring in pairs of students that will be on _similar_ topics. (of course they are both responsible for their independent research and thesis). That way they can struggle together and find their way, it helps lesson the burden he has as idea generation now is covered and "getting stuck" is less worrisome as you are stuck with someone. As the students grow, they separate into their own thesis but the great part is they tend to still collaborate with their peer, so even by thesis end, both know each other's thesis pretty well.
In this context, I'd be encouraging my children to do this (and certainly take the blame for them); false positives ftw! It'd be a great, teachable moment where I can discuss many sociological, technological, and ethical issues at once. On top of that I can teach them a thing or two about opsec.
The school is really at a loss here for retribution: in many instance the students are required to use the school's equipment for completing assignments and projects. So the worst they can really do is "restrict" usage -- but that isn't really any different than what they already do. So it's a bit of a headache for me and the kid(s)? A small price to pay for demonstrating the hilarious shortcomings of implementing a technological solution to a purely human problem -- one that requires specially trained humans to fix.
(Of course I'd make sure the kid(s) give me their blessing before messing with the school)
On another note: I have extensive experience working for school districts. This is absolutely a CYA attempt with no foresight into what the outcome of this terrible experiment will be. These solutions tend to be hacked together, easy to circumvent, and poorly implemented. While I have no direct experience with the product mentioned, I do have experience with school-focused solutions. We had to pay the extra money for purely commercial solutions to get anything that was worth the money.
This is not a false positive, attempts to subvert or sabotage surveillance clearly indicate latent antisocial tendencies and should be punished to the full extent of the law. Please report yourself to the nearest Malcontent Utilization Facility, citizen!
That wasn't a joke of the, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" sort. Satire can be used to illustrate a point, often more effectively than plain-old words; hence, the comment is no longer grayed out.
Oh, hey. Are you me? I am wrapping my time in CS grad program, and I also, never took calculus as a formal class.
Now, I will say, save machine learning/AI, calculus isn't really necessary; the world is completely discrete.
That being said, that doesn't mean that knowing calculus wouldn't _enhance_ your ability to understand and digest some of the more difficult reductions and proofs in, say, a theory of computation course.
I relied on "The Calculus Tutoring Handbook"[0]. I wanted a book that had answers to _all_ the exercises for confidence building purposes. The book goes slow and provides a great amount of detail -- the authors are pretty good at not hand-waving.
I also found \r\learnmath useful as a "I have a problem and can't ask anyone" site. They are really friendly.
Am I wrong to say that even if the universe of your concern is discrete, calculus can at least describe the behavior of recursive discrete processes, among other things?
Depends on the process and the exact form of the discreteness.
Discreteness introduces discontinuities and errors, and it's usually possible to describe the errors analytically. But there are situations where discrete systems become numerically unstable and blow up while the smooth analytic equivalent has no problems.
Apparently I'm beyond the edit window of my original post. I mean the "world [in CS] is completely discrete[, in the context of mathematical modeling and abstraction.]"
I did not intend to imply that the world is discrete in the strictest sense. Just that, except for AI/ML, discrete math will prove much more helpful to understanding the concepts and material presented in a graduate CS curriculum.
The benefit studying continuous maths provides in the context of CS is the rigor and modeling skills one gains.
All of my thesis is rooted in Programming Languages, Compilers, and Type Theory. Continuous math is utterly useless in this context. It's all SAT/SMT, set theory, and graphs -- all of which are topics in discrete math.
I've really loathed my time driving in socal coming from the midwest. The idea that I cannot turn left on green is one of the more appalling "features" of traffic management here (the way the lights work, in general is abhorrent). But slowly, throughout socal, I've seen the flashing yellow left-turn arrow; a subtle change to the UX that I think is brilliant and should be adopted everywhere.
