On the surface, this seems like corporations fighting for a noble cause, personal privacy.
But why? You can make an argument that good privacy is good business, that customers will flock to a platform that provides privacy and security of data. Yet at the same time, vast numbers of people flock to platforms like Facebook and Google services that basically turn their privacy into a product to sell to others.
From a cost perspective, it would seem to be cheaper for corporations to just quietly going along with government surveillance requests. Lower legal costs and greater credibility with national security advocates would seem beneficial.
Sometimes I wonder if the privacy battle isn't a noble fight for my privacy, but just a naked power struggle between corporations and the government that only seems like it's about rights which might apply to the individual, but is really about corporations wanting to do their own thing. I'd wager libertarians would cast this as as a struggle against government intervention, but even if the private sector wins, are individuals actually winning anything?
While I'm sure the Colorado campuses have reactionary rules regarding marijuana consumption -- to mollify parents, and because they're so paranoid about alcohol they'd naturally extend the same confused Calvinistic moralism to marijuana -- how has it affected campus alcohol consumption?
I'm guessing it hasn't gone away, but I wonder if serious incidents have declined. Of course I would expect many people to "double their pleasure", smoking pot and drinking, I would kind of expect that pot consumption would temper the desire for alcohol consumption, either from a don't-want-to-get-off-the-couch perspective or simply because getting high got them 50% of the inebriation they could tolerate and the booze necessary for the other 50% manages to be below the puke-and-black-out level that using only alcohol would produce.
I'm not sure that even Apple can sustain smartphone upgrades as a trendy lifestyle item. As the market matures, people are keeping their smartphones longer, there are fewer blockbuster features or performance leaps that justify entirely new phones.
My sense is what kind of limits the smartphone ecosystem is exactly the closed nature of the devices and their inflexibility. The average consumer may not be interested in a modular phone, but that may not be the path of growth for smartphone vendors. They may need some kind of more open architecture and flexibility to sell smartphones in more places to more people, and then they're not really selling smartphones but pocket computers -- some chunk of an expansion market may want a wifi-only radio on the device.
As flawed as this idea may have been from existing consumer behavior or engineering limitations, I don't think it's a terrible concept. It may not be the right concept for Google now, but it does seem kind of inevitable that some merger between phones and computers happens and that modularity of some kind will be essential for it.
I'd guess the narrative was more complicated than that.
In the 1980s, many platforms were for the most part closed and never built that much of an expansion ecosystem. The C64 was a consumer product targeting the television as a display device, it was a novelty computer. The TRS-80 and others had the "big terminal" form factor enclosing nearly everything but your printer and Hayes modem.
The Apple ][ was hardly small and had a lot of expansion options; I think the footprint of a decked out ][ with external peripherals wasn't all that much smaller than a mini-tower form factor of today.
The later (90s) PCs came with almost nothing on-board, you pretty much had to throw in serial cards, parallel cards, video cards, and networking cards. With a full-height HDD and two 5.25" floppies it needed a large case. Plus I think the x86 "servers" of that era borrowed the full tower form factor in many cases, so there was kind of an economy of scale component to it.
The PC case shrunk as much devices came embedded on the motherboard, reducing the need for slots, and declining prices meant for most people that a computer became a disposable item. Consumers just replaced them rather than upgrading them when they needed to.
And why are corporations entitled to a specific level of profit? They're should be able to earn profit (sale price minus cost of production), but why are they entitled to some arbitrary level of net profit after expenses and taxes?
I'd argue that wages would be one of the last things to be suppressed by higher levels of taxation. Wages are tax deductable, the employees of, say, Apple, are highly skilled and in demand and suppressing their wages for increased shareholder or management payouts would result in poor competitiveness. In terms of macro effect it might suppress wage increases over time, but it seems unlikely to result in wage cuts.
They might try to raise prices to compensate for higher taxes, but most non-monopoly producers face competition and raising prices to maintain a fat profit margin can easily backfire, especially if your price increases crosses some threshold with consumers who will make some other spending choice -- a competitor with lower prices or spending on something else.
Less business investment doesn't seem likely for a company like Apple, they already sit on billions in hard cash as well as more billions in short term securities they aren't spending on business investment and expansion now.
IMHO, the group that would take it on the chin is shareholders and management, and neither has much recompense for increased taxation other than lobbying and buying politicians.
Personally, I think arbitrarily raising corporate taxes would be a mistake, but I struggle for an alternative that forces corporations to put their cash hoards back into the economy. I think some kind of corporate tax increase tied to cash and securities accumulation is probably a reasonable compromise. In theory, accrued cash is inefficient capital and it's supposed to be paid to shareholders so that they can find better uses than the the company holding it.
When I was thinking about this, I kind of wondered if they could come up with some kind of "inflatable" keyboard -- some kind of thin membrane that could be magnetically shaped into keys when in use but otherwise be flat when folded up. The magnetic resistance could provide the tactile feedback and key travel. Bonus points if it was possible to shape the keys into arbitrary layouts, although I suspect the membrane would need predefined key shapes. I don't know if anything like this is even possible.
I had a Surface Pro 2 with the TypePad 2 cover and while it wasn't great, it was better than some ultra-cheap full size USB keyboards I've used.
Just like there are plenty of 4:3 laptops and monitors available, smartphones with physical keyboard, ultrabooks with 6 USB ports, etc.
The OP has a point -- it's not that you can't avoid whatever the current dumb technology design trend is, but chances are your alternatives will be extremely limited because somehow these trends take on a life of their own and before you know it 95% of the market is following the rest of the lemmings right off the cliff.
My guess is these touch keyboard things won't gain any traction on laptops until they come up with some kind of system that provides a touch similar to a real keyboard, so it's unlikely to catch on, unlike ultrathin smartphones.
Using Docker images instead of VM images, this is easy.
Unless of course you don't want to or can't use Docker images.
I get that using cloud vendor integrated infrastructure elements like database service or specialized storage ties you in ways to the provider that are hard to break, but it sure seems like a lot of people have workloads that aren't easily redefinable as Linux Docker solutions.
But everyone on the Internet refers to BMWs by some "Exx" nomenclature, instead of their nameplate model designations.
I'm not sure why this is done, either, unless it's to show you're some kind of BMW sophisticate. I would assume the common labels with model year would provide the same information.
The unproductive people probably have dull, monotonous jobs with little to hold their interest. It's no wonder their phones distract them. The same people pre-smartphone would have had all other manner of distractions, from books to puzzles to hanging out at the water cooler.
When I'm working on an engaging task, I don't notice the time pass and have zero interest in my smart phone. If I get stuck with a dull task, it's amazing how easy it is to reach for the smartphone and how I'll even read the clickbait just for the hell of it.
If work could be made more engaging somehow, there would be less distraction.
Wasn't GE big on that management system Six Sigma? I don't know any of the details about it other than I think it involves shit-canning the bottom 10% or something of the workforce just because they're the bottom 10% of the workforce.
I also remember a business news story from the Welch era where they were doing so much business in financial services some analysts suggested the company's valuation should be judged as a bank and not as an industrial concern. That may have just been financial news clickbait but I think it was in an era where they were selling off long term industrial businesses and focusing a lot on GE Capital.
If these kinds of projects become more common, is there a risk that desirable landing zones on the moon will become junkyards of project flights and expired landers and rovers?
I'm guessing not, since the moon is about Asia's size in terms of surface area. But maybe due to all kinds of reasons some zone on the moon is easier to hit or more desirable to land on, actually making it something of a problem.
It's funny, but I could have sworn I read Intel actually demoing the technology at a media event, that it was already production ready and that it was beating NAND in all the significant measures, density, speed and durability.
The chatter was that it was *so* good that it was being considered as potential augmentation for RAM, allowing for huge RAM cuts in lower end devices since swapping to it would be largely indistinguishable from actual memory access on low end systems. Marginally believable as I have two SSD Skylake laptops running Win 10 with only 8 GB RAM and I've never gotten the itch to jack up RAM amounts because even generic SATA SSD makes paging transparent enough.
Or it was the next fast tier in enterprise storage, which, IMHO, has to be dreading the rise of cheap 3D-NAND largely obsoleting their tiering sales pitches and forcing primary flash storage down in price. I'm sometimes of the opinion that the latest hyperconverged trends have nothing to do with platform vendors aiming at SAN vendors but hardware vendors looking to boost profits by overselling compute by repackaging it as hybrid compute + storage.
I think the other oft-mentioned thing was that 3D Xpoint was actually going to debut in some kind of ultrabook design in Q1 or Q2 of 2017, so it wasn't necessarily going to be a technology dribbled out at high margins to enterprise markets before reaching pro-/consumer levels -- ie, someone had decided that it was all-around good enough that they could just gut the existing NAND market at once. Maybe that's just led to wishful thinking on my part, the idea that there really was a next big thing available universally and able disrupt the entire storage market.
I'm curious how this works now for foreign owners of business assets.
Are there rules in place now that prevent foreign investors from owning equity stakes in US companies (outside of sectors with existing statutory limits)?
If a foreign investor owns an equity stake in a US company, are they prevented from coming to the US for business purposes? Do they need a special visa? Are there limits on how long they can stay to participate in this business under current rules?
This proposal seems like a gold mine of loopholes that would seem to allow for further bulk import of workers. What's to prevent Tata from creating an XYZ Consultancy and selling the minimum share of the company to workers it wants to import? It's not hard to imagine all kinds of games they could play "loaning" the equity investment funds to the worker in India so that they appear in the US as legitimate stakeholders who have made their own investments.
A push into the MLC market with a miracle storage technology "just around the corner" seems an odd initiative. If 3D-Xpoint is as good as they say, I would think they would want to focus on stealing the market with a unique and superior product rather than trying for slivers of an existing market.
Of course the cynic in me assumes that 3D-Xpoint is nowhere near ready and if it is, Intel just want to milk the existing NAND technology for maximum profit and dribble out the new stuff at maximum price points for both their own benefit and the benefit of OEM customers who want to keep milking stratospheric "enterprise" pricing on even MLC flash devices.
I get the M.2 format's advantages, but I don't understand why they wouldn't offer the same drives in SATA packaging. It seems to me there's a hell of a lot more devices that accept SATA devices than M.2 devices.
Has anyone heard of NAS or SAN devices that now feature rows of M.2 slots instead of SATA sleds? I like the idea, I just don't see anyone making them at this point.
Strangely, those narrow and parochial activities have shaped history on 4 continents, including that of the Zulus and Aztecs who were both subjugated as part of European colonial expansion.
The Gupta empire faded partly as a result of invasion by the Huns and competition within the subcontinent. They had little contact outside the continent and mentioning them makes about as much sense as mentioning the global influence of the Aquitinians (which isn't to take away from cultural developments, which were significant).
It's a strange attitude to have, because it implies that everyone else should be trying to murder them to protect themselves.
Isn't that what we've been doing for most of human history? Family against family, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, village against village and so on for most of human existence?
Most of European history from the Greeks onward can be seen as some kind of action/reaction to this dynamic. Established civilizations expanding their territories for both economic accumulation but also attempting to build buffers against other expanding or migration civilizations that threaten their borders.
Roman history can easily be interpreted as a continuous defensive expansionism designed to check the destabilizing influence of Germanic migrations from the North and Parthians in the East from time of Marius all the way to Marcus Aurelius. Much of European history from the 7th century through the 12th century can be defined as action/reaction to Viking expansion, from then on attempts to fix borders against expanding Mongols and Islamic armies from the conquest of Hungary, the Crusades and through the Siege of Vienna.
You could argue that almost purely economic colonialism on the part of Europeans didn't even really start until the general borders of Europe were largely established and fortified and external threats were minimized in the 17th century and even then such expansion was motivated by political and territorial stalemates of a fairly established European states and borders. The "new worlds" were conquered for their economic value but this can easily be explained as defensive maneuvers to outflank their local European rivals as well.
And the European conflicts from the 100 Years War, 30 Years War, Spanish Armada, the Napoleonic Wars all the way through WW I and II are attempts to establish hegemony and secure borders within Europe itself.
It would seem that the entire course of human history can be interpreted as a series of conflicts designed to secure specific regions against outsiders who threaten territorial independence and economic security.
It would be nice to be able to define a data type and some rules and limits of progression.
I could see the value in defining an arbitrary data type that was comprised of a fixed set ("Apples", "Pears", "Oranges", "Bananas") with no progression (ie, no set member has precedence or rank) or perhaps some with progression or rank (fetus, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, adult, senior). Cells formatted as belonging to a data type would only accept those values as valid entries, and sorting would apply the set's rules of simple progression if there were any.
It might help for other numeric-based data types, such as IP addresses, where it would be helpful to define rules of progression around some kind of delimiter. If they could only add one new data type, I wish it was IP addresses.
There's probably complex ways of doing this with macro/scripting, but, they end up being complex and one of the main reasons so many people use Excel because it makes it trivial to manage lists. Trivial tasks that get made complex end up being done sloppy.
And in Office 2018, a new feature will be enabled by default that will automatically destroy your calendar based on a Bayesian analysis of your email content.
Slashdot Mirror
On the surface, this seems like corporations fighting for a noble cause, personal privacy.
But why? You can make an argument that good privacy is good business, that customers will flock to a platform that provides privacy and security of data. Yet at the same time, vast numbers of people flock to platforms like Facebook and Google services that basically turn their privacy into a product to sell to others.
From a cost perspective, it would seem to be cheaper for corporations to just quietly going along with government surveillance requests. Lower legal costs and greater credibility with national security advocates would seem beneficial.
Sometimes I wonder if the privacy battle isn't a noble fight for my privacy, but just a naked power struggle between corporations and the government that only seems like it's about rights which might apply to the individual, but is really about corporations wanting to do their own thing. I'd wager libertarians would cast this as as a struggle against government intervention, but even if the private sector wins, are individuals actually winning anything?
While I'm sure the Colorado campuses have reactionary rules regarding marijuana consumption -- to mollify parents, and because they're so paranoid about alcohol they'd naturally extend the same confused Calvinistic moralism to marijuana -- how has it affected campus alcohol consumption?
I'm guessing it hasn't gone away, but I wonder if serious incidents have declined. Of course I would expect many people to "double their pleasure", smoking pot and drinking, I would kind of expect that pot consumption would temper the desire for alcohol consumption, either from a don't-want-to-get-off-the-couch perspective or simply because getting high got them 50% of the inebriation they could tolerate and the booze necessary for the other 50% manages to be below the puke-and-black-out level that using only alcohol would produce.
I'm not sure that even Apple can sustain smartphone upgrades as a trendy lifestyle item. As the market matures, people are keeping their smartphones longer, there are fewer blockbuster features or performance leaps that justify entirely new phones.
My sense is what kind of limits the smartphone ecosystem is exactly the closed nature of the devices and their inflexibility. The average consumer may not be interested in a modular phone, but that may not be the path of growth for smartphone vendors. They may need some kind of more open architecture and flexibility to sell smartphones in more places to more people, and then they're not really selling smartphones but pocket computers -- some chunk of an expansion market may want a wifi-only radio on the device.
As flawed as this idea may have been from existing consumer behavior or engineering limitations, I don't think it's a terrible concept. It may not be the right concept for Google now, but it does seem kind of inevitable that some merger between phones and computers happens and that modularity of some kind will be essential for it.
I'd guess the narrative was more complicated than that.
In the 1980s, many platforms were for the most part closed and never built that much of an expansion ecosystem. The C64 was a consumer product targeting the television as a display device, it was a novelty computer. The TRS-80 and others had the "big terminal" form factor enclosing nearly everything but your printer and Hayes modem.
The Apple ][ was hardly small and had a lot of expansion options; I think the footprint of a decked out ][ with external peripherals wasn't all that much smaller than a mini-tower form factor of today.
The later (90s) PCs came with almost nothing on-board, you pretty much had to throw in serial cards, parallel cards, video cards, and networking cards. With a full-height HDD and two 5.25" floppies it needed a large case. Plus I think the x86 "servers" of that era borrowed the full tower form factor in many cases, so there was kind of an economy of scale component to it.
The PC case shrunk as much devices came embedded on the motherboard, reducing the need for slots, and declining prices meant for most people that a computer became a disposable item. Consumers just replaced them rather than upgrading them when they needed to.
And why are corporations entitled to a specific level of profit? They're should be able to earn profit (sale price minus cost of production), but why are they entitled to some arbitrary level of net profit after expenses and taxes?
I'd argue that wages would be one of the last things to be suppressed by higher levels of taxation. Wages are tax deductable, the employees of, say, Apple, are highly skilled and in demand and suppressing their wages for increased shareholder or management payouts would result in poor competitiveness. In terms of macro effect it might suppress wage increases over time, but it seems unlikely to result in wage cuts.
They might try to raise prices to compensate for higher taxes, but most non-monopoly producers face competition and raising prices to maintain a fat profit margin can easily backfire, especially if your price increases crosses some threshold with consumers who will make some other spending choice -- a competitor with lower prices or spending on something else.
Less business investment doesn't seem likely for a company like Apple, they already sit on billions in hard cash as well as more billions in short term securities they aren't spending on business investment and expansion now.
IMHO, the group that would take it on the chin is shareholders and management, and neither has much recompense for increased taxation other than lobbying and buying politicians.
Personally, I think arbitrarily raising corporate taxes would be a mistake, but I struggle for an alternative that forces corporations to put their cash hoards back into the economy. I think some kind of corporate tax increase tied to cash and securities accumulation is probably a reasonable compromise. In theory, accrued cash is inefficient capital and it's supposed to be paid to shareholders so that they can find better uses than the the company holding it.
When I was thinking about this, I kind of wondered if they could come up with some kind of "inflatable" keyboard -- some kind of thin membrane that could be magnetically shaped into keys when in use but otherwise be flat when folded up. The magnetic resistance could provide the tactile feedback and key travel. Bonus points if it was possible to shape the keys into arbitrary layouts, although I suspect the membrane would need predefined key shapes. I don't know if anything like this is even possible.
I had a Surface Pro 2 with the TypePad 2 cover and while it wasn't great, it was better than some ultra-cheap full size USB keyboards I've used.
Just like there are plenty of 4:3 laptops and monitors available, smartphones with physical keyboard, ultrabooks with 6 USB ports, etc.
The OP has a point -- it's not that you can't avoid whatever the current dumb technology design trend is, but chances are your alternatives will be extremely limited because somehow these trends take on a life of their own and before you know it 95% of the market is following the rest of the lemmings right off the cliff.
My guess is these touch keyboard things won't gain any traction on laptops until they come up with some kind of system that provides a touch similar to a real keyboard, so it's unlikely to catch on, unlike ultrathin smartphones.
Using Docker images instead of VM images, this is easy.
Unless of course you don't want to or can't use Docker images.
I get that using cloud vendor integrated infrastructure elements like database service or specialized storage ties you in ways to the provider that are hard to break, but it sure seems like a lot of people have workloads that aren't easily redefinable as Linux Docker solutions.
But everyone on the Internet refers to BMWs by some "Exx" nomenclature, instead of their nameplate model designations.
I'm not sure why this is done, either, unless it's to show you're some kind of BMW sophisticate. I would assume the common labels with model year would provide the same information.
How much virtual machine compatibility is there between providers?
Can you maintain a single image that easily runs on all providers, or does it involve micromanagement of differences between them?
The unproductive people probably have dull, monotonous jobs with little to hold their interest. It's no wonder their phones distract them. The same people pre-smartphone would have had all other manner of distractions, from books to puzzles to hanging out at the water cooler.
When I'm working on an engaging task, I don't notice the time pass and have zero interest in my smart phone. If I get stuck with a dull task, it's amazing how easy it is to reach for the smartphone and how I'll even read the clickbait just for the hell of it.
If work could be made more engaging somehow, there would be less distraction.
That would actually be great news if they didn't announce a phone refresh.
I'd buy a 6S+ and have a 3.5mm headphone jack for another 3 years.
Wasn't GE big on that management system Six Sigma? I don't know any of the details about it other than I think it involves shit-canning the bottom 10% or something of the workforce just because they're the bottom 10% of the workforce.
I also remember a business news story from the Welch era where they were doing so much business in financial services some analysts suggested the company's valuation should be judged as a bank and not as an industrial concern. That may have just been financial news clickbait but I think it was in an era where they were selling off long term industrial businesses and focusing a lot on GE Capital.
If these kinds of projects become more common, is there a risk that desirable landing zones on the moon will become junkyards of project flights and expired landers and rovers?
I'm guessing not, since the moon is about Asia's size in terms of surface area. But maybe due to all kinds of reasons some zone on the moon is easier to hit or more desirable to land on, actually making it something of a problem.
It's funny, but I could have sworn I read Intel actually demoing the technology at a media event, that it was already production ready and that it was beating NAND in all the significant measures, density, speed and durability.
The chatter was that it was *so* good that it was being considered as potential augmentation for RAM, allowing for huge RAM cuts in lower end devices since swapping to it would be largely indistinguishable from actual memory access on low end systems. Marginally believable as I have two SSD Skylake laptops running Win 10 with only 8 GB RAM and I've never gotten the itch to jack up RAM amounts because even generic SATA SSD makes paging transparent enough.
Or it was the next fast tier in enterprise storage, which, IMHO, has to be dreading the rise of cheap 3D-NAND largely obsoleting their tiering sales pitches and forcing primary flash storage down in price. I'm sometimes of the opinion that the latest hyperconverged trends have nothing to do with platform vendors aiming at SAN vendors but hardware vendors looking to boost profits by overselling compute by repackaging it as hybrid compute + storage.
I think the other oft-mentioned thing was that 3D Xpoint was actually going to debut in some kind of ultrabook design in Q1 or Q2 of 2017, so it wasn't necessarily going to be a technology dribbled out at high margins to enterprise markets before reaching pro-/consumer levels -- ie, someone had decided that it was all-around good enough that they could just gut the existing NAND market at once. Maybe that's just led to wishful thinking on my part, the idea that there really was a next big thing available universally and able disrupt the entire storage market.
Does this stop the head of Volkswagen from traveling to the US to work-related meetings with leaders of Volkswagen US?
I'm curious how this works now for foreign owners of business assets.
Are there rules in place now that prevent foreign investors from owning equity stakes in US companies (outside of sectors with existing statutory limits)?
If a foreign investor owns an equity stake in a US company, are they prevented from coming to the US for business purposes? Do they need a special visa? Are there limits on how long they can stay to participate in this business under current rules?
This proposal seems like a gold mine of loopholes that would seem to allow for further bulk import of workers. What's to prevent Tata from creating an XYZ Consultancy and selling the minimum share of the company to workers it wants to import? It's not hard to imagine all kinds of games they could play "loaning" the equity investment funds to the worker in India so that they appear in the US as legitimate stakeholders who have made their own investments.
Somehow the reliability of knockoff aftermarket adapters is less appealing than OEM SATA packaging.
Yeah, where IS 3D-Xpoint?
A push into the MLC market with a miracle storage technology "just around the corner" seems an odd initiative. If 3D-Xpoint is as good as they say, I would think they would want to focus on stealing the market with a unique and superior product rather than trying for slivers of an existing market.
Of course the cynic in me assumes that 3D-Xpoint is nowhere near ready and if it is, Intel just want to milk the existing NAND technology for maximum profit and dribble out the new stuff at maximum price points for both their own benefit and the benefit of OEM customers who want to keep milking stratospheric "enterprise" pricing on even MLC flash devices.
I get the M.2 format's advantages, but I don't understand why they wouldn't offer the same drives in SATA packaging. It seems to me there's a hell of a lot more devices that accept SATA devices than M.2 devices.
Has anyone heard of NAS or SAN devices that now feature rows of M.2 slots instead of SATA sleds? I like the idea, I just don't see anyone making them at this point.
Strangely, those narrow and parochial activities have shaped history on 4 continents, including that of the Zulus and Aztecs who were both subjugated as part of European colonial expansion.
The Gupta empire faded partly as a result of invasion by the Huns and competition within the subcontinent. They had little contact outside the continent and mentioning them makes about as much sense as mentioning the global influence of the Aquitinians (which isn't to take away from cultural developments, which were significant).
Widely adopted in the "cradle of civilization" and the birthplace of homo sapiens.
It's a strange attitude to have, because it implies that everyone else should be trying to murder them to protect themselves.
Isn't that what we've been doing for most of human history? Family against family, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, village against village and so on for most of human existence?
Most of European history from the Greeks onward can be seen as some kind of action/reaction to this dynamic. Established civilizations expanding their territories for both economic accumulation but also attempting to build buffers against other expanding or migration civilizations that threaten their borders.
Roman history can easily be interpreted as a continuous defensive expansionism designed to check the destabilizing influence of Germanic migrations from the North and Parthians in the East from time of Marius all the way to Marcus Aurelius. Much of European history from the 7th century through the 12th century can be defined as action/reaction to Viking expansion, from then on attempts to fix borders against expanding Mongols and Islamic armies from the conquest of Hungary, the Crusades and through the Siege of Vienna.
You could argue that almost purely economic colonialism on the part of Europeans didn't even really start until the general borders of Europe were largely established and fortified and external threats were minimized in the 17th century and even then such expansion was motivated by political and territorial stalemates of a fairly established European states and borders. The "new worlds" were conquered for their economic value but this can easily be explained as defensive maneuvers to outflank their local European rivals as well.
And the European conflicts from the 100 Years War, 30 Years War, Spanish Armada, the Napoleonic Wars all the way through WW I and II are attempts to establish hegemony and secure borders within Europe itself.
It would seem that the entire course of human history can be interpreted as a series of conflicts designed to secure specific regions against outsiders who threaten territorial independence and economic security.
And not just data formatting.
It would be nice to be able to define a data type and some rules and limits of progression.
I could see the value in defining an arbitrary data type that was comprised of a fixed set ("Apples", "Pears", "Oranges", "Bananas") with no progression (ie, no set member has precedence or rank) or perhaps some with progression or rank (fetus, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, adult, senior). Cells formatted as belonging to a data type would only accept those values as valid entries, and sorting would apply the set's rules of simple progression if there were any.
It might help for other numeric-based data types, such as IP addresses, where it would be helpful to define rules of progression around some kind of delimiter. If they could only add one new data type, I wish it was IP addresses.
There's probably complex ways of doing this with macro/scripting, but, they end up being complex and one of the main reasons so many people use Excel because it makes it trivial to manage lists. Trivial tasks that get made complex end up being done sloppy.
Microsoft, where innovation goes to die.
And in Office 2018, a new feature will be enabled by default that will automatically destroy your calendar based on a Bayesian analysis of your email content.