Quand j'apprends qu'en californie, l'antre du capitalisme libéral, une juridiction veut forcer Uber à réinstituer ses agents en employés à plein temps :

extrait : "California’s attorney general and three city attorneys brought the lawsuit against the companies under the state’s new law, Assembly Bill 5, that aims to provide benefits to gig workers core to a company’s business by classifying them as employees."

et que la direction de Uber a menacé de fermer son activité locale si tel devait être le cas :

extrait : "Uber would likely shut down temporarily for several months if a court does not overturn a recent ruling requiring it to classify its drivers as full-time employees, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an interview with Stephanie Ruhle on Wednesday on MSNBC."

je me dis dans un premier temps que voilà enfin dévoilée la triste réalité de l'exploitation à l'extrème des individus, chose que l'on connait en France avec le fait d'être obligé quand vous êtes un agent Uber d'être autoentrepreneur, c'est-à-dire de payer vous même votre couverture sociale, alors que vous recevez des ordres d'un employeur tous les jours.

Et puis je réfléchis, et je me dis que non ce n'est pas ça.

Ce n'est pas ça qui se trame en réalité.

Ce qui fait Uber c'est nous. Uber propose un service pas cher, et il faut en constater toutes les conséquences. Ce faible prix, quelqu'un l'absorbe. Et celui qui l'absorbe ce n'est ni la direction, ni les investisseurs, ni les traders. Ce sont les agents Uber par leur précarité.

Par conséquent il y a une solution simple. Ne pas utiliser Uber. Si suffisamment de gens prennent cette décision, citoyenne, en mettant de côté leur intérêt en tant que consommateur pendant deux secondes, la société Uber s'effondre d'elle-même.

Car elle a besoin de participants pour jouer.

Alors ne participez pas ! A bon entendeur !!

Mozilla announced today that they are laying off 250 employees. It comes as no surprise for me.

A web browser that intentionally hides options from the user, such as disabling auto-updates, and that shows as many icons as it can, for instance in the address bar, that can't be removed, is a web browser that passed the annoyance threshold by far and needs to be taken over, or killed.

Good action Mozillos. If I were to suggest something, make your web browser light and clean, that's all what users need.

Si lors d'un achat par un site de e-commerce vous vous retrouvez devant la possibilité de choisir un transporteur privé pour vous faire livrer, et que dans cette liste figure DPD, je vous conseille vivement de ne pas prendre DPD.

Vous prenez en effet un énorme risque que votre colis se retrouve purement et simplement perdu par la conjonction d'une sorte de brouhaha artistique fait des éléments suivants :

- aucun suivi international : le suivi d'un colis s'arrête aux portes d'un pays

- autant de numéro de colis que de pays traversés

- bien évidemment aucun respect des délais de livraison

- support technique indigent qui vous demandera A VOUS de contacter l'expéditeur de votre colis, alors que c'est lui LE TRANSPORTEUR qui n'a pas fait son boulot et qui doit rendre des comptes au destinataire et à l'expéditeur


DPD = Passez votre chemin. Jamais, never, nunca.

Il y a quelques jours, twitter se faisait prendre au petit jeu du phishing et le hacker a usurpé des personnalités en leur demandant d'envoyer des bitcoins.

Quelques jours plus tard, on apprend qu'une des entreprises qui participe au forgeage des bitcoins, réputés pour être décentralisés, a stoppé le paiement des bitcoins en question.

Bref, qu'il est possible qu'un tiers intervienne dans un service pourtant décentralisé pour dicter sa loi.

My friends, ceci est la meilleure preuve que le bitcoin comme objet décentralisé, c'était du flan.

Passez votre chemin.

With Apple pushing hard towards an ARM only future for personal computing, some out there are wondering about who is going to show the more muscles between ARM and Wintel. They are simply wrong headed. The reason ARM is getting more attention these days is because Wintel is just an old and deeply flawed system that should be put to death. Wintel is just Intel CPUs and Microsoft Windows. Intel CPUs are inherently flawed, we now know that some of speed improvements that came with it were at the expense of doing things properly and computers using Intel CPUs simply expose themselves to infinite vulnerabilities. Windows ? Where do I begin with ? Old, clunky, patched almost daily with red alerts all over the place. Really anyone in IT actually recommending to use Windows? Would you qualify this person as sane ?
So this is not a win for ARM for its magnificence etc. it's really just a lose for that deeply flawed Wintel trash.
Thanks to security researchers for exposing it btw.

I can't help but think over the news that Microsoft is to shut down its Twitch competitor known as Mixer, that the writing was on the wall.

Virtually everything that Microsoft went with since early 2000s got shot down since then. And sometimes within the same year.

It was just written on the wall.

Do not trust those guys, especially if you are trying to run a business.

Do not trust those guys, do yourself a favor.

Intel is now globally known for a company shipping flawed CPUs, flawed memory caching and instruction branching, and lately even a flawed encryption enclave.

Now this wonderful and trustable corpotation is announcing a CPU class with built-in anti malware protection. What could possibly go wrong ?

Build 4.5.0.95 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to calculating the INDEX() function. Under certain circumstances, the function would be unable to calculate at all.

Build 4.5.0.94 of xlsgen is a fix pack. It has the following :

- fixed "fit to page" print scenarios in real and virtual printing

- fixed rendering of merged cells at edges of pages

- improved row height computation (autofit) in presence of merged cells

- improved row height computation (autofit) scenarios

Build 4.5.0.93 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to rendering large pieces of strings in PDF, in the native PDF rendering. The clip region could become too small if the print scale was causing great shrink (fit to x page scenarios).

Searching files being sometimes a lengthy process, especially if you apply search to very large files, it becomes obvious that a user interface mechanism should make it possible to interrupt/abort the search process at any moment while searching. The search tool now supports hitting the ESC keyboard key for that matter.

Build 4.5.0.92 of xlsgen adds read, write and calc support for the new LET() function.

Microsoft announced earlier in march that they would add the LET() function to the arsenal of Excel functions. Announcement is here.

The point of the LET() function is to able to name expressions that are often used multiple times in the formula and use the name instead of the expressions, improving the readability of the formula not just for the person who wrote the formula, but also for everyone else who will be tasked to update the Excel spreadsheet.

Microsoft made clear that this LET() function will only be made available on a subscription basis to Office 365 and none of the existing Excel versions out there will obtain it (we are talking about Excel 2019, 2016, 2013, ... none of which will ever get it).

xlsgen ships with support for the LET() function so you can write and calculate those formulas.

Here is an example :

LET( name1, expression1,
name2, expression2,
...
expression)

this function calculates expression where a number of smaller expressions appear, namely expression1, expression2, ... Instead of using the expression, this function lets the formula writer use name1, name2, ...

The ability to use names instead of literal expressions may improve the readability of the formula. And in addition to this, if a smaller expression is used multiple times in the global expression, using names instead improves the readability as well. And it improves the performance of calculations by caching (internally) smaller expression evaluations.

Build 4.5.0.91 of xlsgen adds the option related to updating formula specs whenever there is a row or column insertion or deletion.

By default, formulas in the workbook are updated to reflect the new rows or columns, and doing this keeps the integrity of the spreadsheet. But sometimes, depending on your scenario, it may be needed to keep the formula specs intact. That's what you can obtain by setting False to a new property we are making available at the workbook level, i.e.

workbook.FormulaDefinitionUpdate = False

These days there is no normal way to surf the web anymore. It's a UI web hell. Popups everywhere. You often have to close more than one modal window before you can actually get to any content.

I am somewhat a supporter of the Esc key for closing the front modal window or banner. Hitting Esc multiple times would automatically close everything and pave the way for reading actual content.

We are at a crossroads now. Either something like this to save the web as we grew to know and love it, or this current state of affairs will go down in flames with nothing coming to replace it.

It can't be that hard to implement this. In fact this should be part of any web browser, this should not be up to the people behind each and every website, because in the other that would guarantee it does not work properly.

So again, let's ask for the Esc key to become a control key for browsing the web.

Build 4.5.0.90 of xlsgen adds a new property to pictures, the ability to set a RGB-based chroma key in order to make transparent all pixels in that picture with that RGB color. This works with all Excel files.

Here is how it works. Assuming you have a picture to be inserted, where you know in advance that the red color is used as chroma key :

(C++ code follows)

xlsgen::IXlsPicturePtr picture1 = worksheet->Pictures->Add( L"input\\a.gif" );
picture1->LeftColumn = 1;
picture1->TopCell = 1;
picture1->ChromaKeyColor = 0xFF0000; // RED chroma key



Setting the chroma key color lets one see through the picture

extrait : "Microsoft’s Defender software will become available for Android and iOS devices later this year."

Translation : since this sniffing tool does so great for the NSA with Windows, it's now poised to become available on Android and iOS, therefore potentially claiming virtually 100% of connected devices out there. Well done NSA ! erm Microsoft !!

Build 4.5.0.89 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to the calculation of a special operand used in the TEXT() function. It's the case where the operand uses a percent-formatted number.

Build 4.5.0.88 of xlsgen improves how linking behaves in duplicate scenarios involving external workbooks.

Before this build, any link from an external workbook, for instance a chart series formula, would be expanded to literals and copied over to the destination sheet. Beginning with this build, links are brought as is, as long as the links depend only on the sheet being duplicated. When the link depends on a sheet not being copied over, the link is expanded as literals and brought over as literals.

This build also exposes the text boxes collection inside charts. So far only pictures and vector shapes were exposed (for querying purposes).

Build 4.5.0.87 of xlsgen adds support for copying hyperlinks (url, file, sheet location) stored in text boxes, vector shapes and pictures in duplicate scenarios.

Pour ceux qui ne comprennent pas l'implication du fait que l'entreprise privée fournisseuse de certificat de chiffrement était en fait possédée par la CIA, c'est qu'un certificat est comme la clef de votre porte. Un tiers qui fabrique cette clef spécialement pour vous ne devrait conserver aucun exemplaire. Mais en informatique, c'est le contraire qui se produit. L'entreprise garde un double de la clef.
Et comme par ailleurs la CIA aspire les tuyaux internet 24h/24. Les deux mis ensemble, c'est la possibilité d'ouvrir n'importe quelle porte dont la clef a été fournie par ce fabricant.
Or, comble d'ironie, cette entreprise suisse Crypto AG, avait tout d'une superbe success story informatique.
Trop beau pour être vrai.
Il serait peut-être temps que, même pour les choses les plus simples, les pays qui ont des choses à dire sans que cela ne se voit, développement leur propre système de chiffrement de bout en bout. Y en a un peu marre de cet amateurisme.