csmuk

I think that the left/right distinction is silly myself. A typical red vs blue flag waving exercise rather than solving anything.

Both labour and conservatives seem to mix the tenets of the two freely based on whim rather than manifesto.

On one hand we have Big Society and smash socialism.

On the other hand we have Big Society and smash socialism.

Same turds, different coloured glitter.

All parties have sold out to their corporate sponsors and are as bent as anything.

What's that got to do with it? (genuinely interested).

This only happened after various scandals about privacy invasion by councils.

Spot on. I wrote to my MP about RIPA. Not a sausage back.

Yes SciPy (although I usually end up with Mathematica).That's a generic encoding. ASN.1 is a specific and compact encoding of the data.

Ick. I wonder if anyone has actually heard of ASN.1 BER before?

Seems like ridiculous encoding and structures are the in thing at the moment.

Yeah but 32x the original data size...

That's IMAP, CalDAV, SMTP isn't it?

Where does JSON even need to come into it?

Ouch.

They're probably encoding in XML and several nested layers of base64!!

(yes I have actually seen people doing this in a finance company's integration platform).

Perhaps they could make it lean towards people if you raise your voice? Or if you shake your head in disgust it could wiggle?

To be honest though, email is still pretty much the best communication method over distance. It allows you to think, revise and reference other information easier. Many a time I've torpedoed a face to face meeting with a single email.

Nope. Just missing quality workers.

Hospitality sector is one off the top of my head.

Never tried. Don't need that feature myself.

Yes you do get and can resolve the conflicts.

Despite common knowledge you can diff and merge office documents with TortoiseSVN. All it does is fire up their built in review/diff tools.

Odd considering if you look at my other posts you'll find quite the opposite. I sit here writing this on a CentOS ThinkPad...

Being fair and balanced and unbiased is considered a shill now...

Shill is word of the year.

Fair enough - they should probably add this.

I'm not getting a 5 second delay here. It's instant (~0.5 seconds).

You're right about the changes not being marked up, although it does do this on Office 365 so perhaps it's a market segregation thing.

Yeah I have actually. It's horrible and really unreliable when document sizes get realistic (40+ pages). Not only that it's so easy to fuck up the document structure badly.

I wouldn't use Excel files on a network. I'd use a database or chuck the xlsx into SVN. Changes to complex data need to be managed. Don't expect miracles. There are edge cases where Google Docs will get this wrong. Sync needs human decisions made occasionally.

See my other comments about usage of SVN/Sharepoint and the use cases.

Office 365 is sharepoint. Skydrive is actually a variety of sharepoint. The interface isn't great but neither is google docs, which is why larger companies tend to just use Sharepoint Workspace which is a desktop app for accessing sharepoint portals.

Yes if you want it you can. Then again you can also enforce change tracking by policy.

Regarding SkyDrive, you're talking rubbish. It's been there for literally years.

Right click a document in skydrive and select "Version history". You can review every version, restore earlier versions and open the changes up in Word if you have it installed and review there.

If you go "big" and use O365 you can review and accept, annotate all changes and commit to sharepoint for example from your desktop app.

You can even wire it into review workflows so that commits are staged and reviewed by an editor, people are notified etc. This is great for legal documents, contracts etc.

Google Docs doesn't get a look in.

We have many non technical users doing just fine with TortoiseSVN on windows...

If it's a command line app they'd be lost so that might be the basis of your argument.

Actually this is a hang back from the COM interface. There is a Name property which is used to uniquely identify the document.

To be fair, I don't think I've ever had a problem with this unless I was being thrown Sheets/Docs via email which is a really bad thing to do to start with. Email is not a suitable document archival system!

Right tool for the job, or it's: http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm

Not really. It's a known problem since the dawn of computing: How do you control multiple users accessing a binary file cleanly over the network?

The solutions that are generally accepted as the right solutions are:

1. Version control systems. So in this case, SVN or Sharepoint (yes it is a version control system for documents).

2. Collaborative editing.

3. Synchronisation.

In favour of point 1 which I always suggest using, history is possible to tie to a user always, centrally controlled, archivable on your own site, actually really easy to manage and allows people to work entirely offline. It scales to mega-sized documents as well. Imagine our typical formal specs (sorry we're too finicky about quality to do agile) which are 200-280 pages long in Google Docs?

Point 2 can lead to odd corruption. If you've ever actually done any collaborative editing with 2 or more people on Google docs or dealt with the crock of shit that is Numbers or Pages and iCloud on the Mac you'll know where I'm coming from.

Point 3 is just the transport layer for 2 and 1. OneNote does this, very well.

So the point is moot. Just because it complains at you that you're doing it wrong, doesn't mean the technical solution doesn't require some work on your part.

Care to expand on this rather than draw a baseless analogy?

The ecosystem was poor. It's pretty good now. In fact Nokia HERE is a killer that wipes the floor with all other platforms.

Who the hell needs 100,000 iOS fart apps anyway.

Have you actually used office? It has change tracking, diff and merge and has done for over 10 years. The problem here is network locking which is totally different.

You're doing it wrong.

sharepoint/svn avoids these issues.

The $0 skydrive facility (gives you Excel, PowerPoint, Word) is the same on the MS side of things. Hell even a WP8 handset with office is $80 now.

If you want to pay for it you get a crap load more from O365.

Fed up of all the Google Docs fanfare...

Excel features...

fast - check. Powerful - check. Works offline - check.

Let's get a little closer to google docs...

Works online - check. Edit in browser - check. Edit on mobile device - check. Share with other people - check. Cheap - check (o365 sub is really cheap per seat). Can customise the UI - check. Can deal with huge sheets - check. Can extend, script etc - check.

Google docs buys me nothing.

As someone who uses CentOS 6 on the desktop, people really should take a look at this.

For me, it's the only Linux desktop which I can find which is reliable and works out of the box with all my hardware.

Yeah but they're all crap.

This is great news!

It means I can actually have a full java plugin installation and just activate the applets I know are safe!

I can have my java and eat it, but people can't make it eat me :)