Spreadsheets are good for anything, even disarming bombs!



  • Perhaps this has been posted already (probably), but still it amazed me so much I just have to make a post about it.

    We all know spreadsheet applications are good for a lot of things. Bookkeeping, making complex calculations, keeping lists of all sorts.

    But who would've known they're actually good for disarming bombs? It's the latest thing:

    So always remember the secret pass code for disarming bombs: "[ojhg685e"!

     

    PS. this is a snapshot from Unthinkable, at around 1h29m.

     



  •  clr budget and expenses? I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this laptop was stolen by the props department from the administration or accounting department and excel was simply open when they got it.



  • I dont see any screen shot? Am I blid


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PsychoCoder said:

    I dont see any screen shot? Am I blid
    Yes. It's spreading to your N key as well by the looks of it.



  • Well, I know someone who designed a 2-page newsletter with Excel, and then wanted to use that as a template....



  • @PJH said:

    @PsychoCoder said:
    I dont see any screen shot? Am I blid
    Yes. It's spreading to your N key as well by the looks of it.

    Touche, ow my key doest work at all



  • @ari said:

    Well, I know someone who designed a 2-page newsletter with Excel, and then wanted to use that as a template....

    I can imagine formatting which would make that a sensible solution. I can also see Word being a better choice in most cases. There may be other benefits to using Excel as well, if you want to automatically update some of the content.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    @ari said:

    Well, I know someone who designed a 2-page newsletter with Excel, and then wanted to use that as a template....

    I can imagine formatting which would make that a sensible solution. I can also see Word being a better choice in most cases. There may be other benefits to using Excel as well, if you want to automatically update some of the content.

    TRWTF is that some "word processing" situations are easier to do in Excwl than Word.




  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    @ari said:

    Well, I know someone who designed a 2-page newsletter with Excel, and then wanted to use that as a template....

    I can imagine formatting which would make that a sensible solution. I can also see Word being a better choice in most cases. There may be other benefits to using Excel as well, if you want to automatically update some of the content.
     

    As long as someone doesn't try to disable an explosive with a Powerpoint presentation.




  • Fucking macs, how do they work?





  •  Speaking of disarming bombs... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtCe-Szsj0c



  • @PsychoCoder said:

    @PJH said:

    @PsychoCoder said:
    I dont see any screen shot? Am I blid
    Yes. It's spreading to your N key as well by the looks of it.

    Touche, ow my key doest work at all

     

    The h key looks a lot like the 'n' key, so you could say "Touche, how my h key doesh't work at all"



  •  Any time I need to disarm bombs, I do it by creating a GUI interface in Visual Basic.



  • @EJ_ said:

    @PsychoCoder said:
    @PJH said:
    @PsychoCoder said:
    I dont see any screen shot? Am I blid
    Yes. It's spreading to your N key as well by the looks of it.
    Touche, ow my key doest work at all
    The h key looks a lot like the 'n' key, so you could say "Touche, how my h key doesh't work at all"
    The letter m sounds more like an n, though.
    Touche, mow my m key doesm't work at all
    Except... hm, I guess "mow" and "now" dom't even rhyme or evem have assomamce. Momsensical Emglish lamguage...



  • Touche, |\|ow my |\| key does|\|t work at all.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    @ari said:

    Well, I know someone who designed a 2-page newsletter with Excel, and then wanted to use that as a template....

    I can imagine formatting which would make that a sensible solution. I can also see Word being a better choice in most cases. There may be other benefits to using Excel as well, if you want to automatically update some of the content.

    I could see needing Excel if you're updating the content from a OLAP cube. I guess. Is that a common need?

    As far as normal mail merge goes, Word does that fine on its own.



  • @Bumble Bee Tuna said:

     Any time I need to disarm bombs, I do it by creating a GUI interface in Visual Basic.

    Plz send me teh codes. I'm on a to disarm bombs project now, and need them asap.



  • @TGV said:

    @Bumble Bee Tuna said:

     Any time I need to disarm bombs, I do it by creating a GUI interface in Visual Basic.

    Plz send me teh codes. I'm on a to disarm bombs project now, and need them asap.

     

    Do you nedd a help? We hæv it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
    @ari said:

    Well, I know someone who designed a 2-page newsletter with Excel, and then wanted to use that as a template....

    I can imagine formatting which would make that a sensible solution. I can also see Word being a better choice in most cases. There may be other benefits to using Excel as well, if you want to automatically update some of the content.

    I could see needing Excel if you're updating the content from a OLAP cube. I guess. Is that a common need?

    As far as normal mail merge goes, Word does that fine on its own.

    I wasn't thinking mail-merge, but, say, scraping various web-pages, documents of different types, etc for data that is then processed. Excel has some pretty nifty built-in tools for accessing data from all kinds of places in all kinds of formats. Word can do it to an extent (particularly when using linked-in documents), but in the same way that Word's better for formatting, Excel is better for data access and processing.

    I have no idea if data-access this way is a common use, but it's certainly not an uncommon need. It's depressingly common to see documentation where a section is created and updated in one Word doc, and then C&Pd to another master document whenever anyone remembers, or unless someone edits the section in the wrong document. Whenever I see this, I put a link in the master document to display the section-document inline, and from then on they can't differ - editing one will edit the other. If people can get something that simple wrong, you can bet they never do anything sensible with anything more complicated.



  • @dhromed said:

    Touche, ||ow my || key does||t work at all.

    Quick, fetch Ninhursag or all Sumer is doomed!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:
    @ari said:

    Well, I know someone who designed a 2-page newsletter with Excel, and then wanted to use that as a template....

    I can imagine formatting which would make that a sensible solution. I can also see Word being a better choice in most cases. There may be other benefits to using Excel as well, if you want to automatically update some of the content.

    I could see needing Excel if you're updating the content from a OLAP cube. I guess. Is that a common need?

    As far as normal mail merge goes, Word does that fine on its own.

     

     It's a newsletter for a youth organisation. All the data in there is five lines of a calendar with special events. The rest is two colums of text. Which was the reason to use Excel, because 'Word can't do that'... TRWTFEBKAC...



  • That spreadsheet also proves that actors simply mash keys when typing/"hacking" etc in TV/movies.

    @Bumble Bee Tuna said:

     Any time I need to disarm bombs, I do it by creating a GUI interface in Visual Basic.

     

    TRWTF is that I wrote a GUI app to "trace an IP" in VB.net (really just a multiline text box that takes redirected output from a hidden/windowless tracert.exe instance).

    Possibly even more WTFy was that for a few days, Norton Internet Security though it was malware (in .net, srsly? maybe it was the hidden window...).



  • Personally I just don't understand why they have chosen to use Excel (or whichever spreadsheet application that may be), instead of just creating a "Visual Basic GUI Interface" themselves. A movie is a project which generally costs millions of dollars. Let 1 person tinker with Photoshop for an hour and let another person make a "GUI Interface" out of it (another hour work) and you're done. And let's say these guys are really, really expensive and both cost $1000 an hour. You've lost $2000 on $50M (or more) but at least don't have the entire "geek" community pointing at you and laughing.



  • @pbean said:

    You've lost $2000 on $50M (or more) but at least don't have the entire "geek" community pointing at you and laughing.

    But that's the best part of the movie! I love movies that are so bad at hacking. I even love it when I can identify the operating system and such that is running, for example in the movie X-Men (I think it was in the second movie) when someone was activating a 3D image of "the room" I could see a couple of console widows popping up (linux). I think it was X-men 2, I will post pics when I find the scene.

     



  • @dr spock said:

    That spreadsheet also proves that actors simply mash keys when typing/"hacking" etc in TV/movies.

    TRWTF is that I wrote a GUI app to "trace an IP" in VB.net (really just a multiline text box that takes redirected output from a hidden/windowless tracert.exe instance).

    Possibly even more WTFy was that for a few days, Norton Internet Security though it was malware (in .net, srsly? maybe it was the hidden window...).

    There was a time where most .NET apps were flagged because they ran like JVM stuff but weren't. Windows actually pulls some mean things to make .NET work



  • @TheThing said:

    @pbean said:

    You've lost $2000 on $50M (or more) but at least don't have the entire "geek" community pointing at you and laughing.

    But that's the best part of the movie! I love movies that are so bad at hacking. I even love it when I can identify the operating system and such that is running, for example in the movie X-Men (I think it was in the second movie) when someone was activating a 3D image of "the room" I could see a couple of console widows popping up (linux). I think it was X-men 2, I will post pics when I find the scene.

     

    I watched an episode of MI-5 last night, in which a computer genius was hacking into MI-5's computers. At one point, he was trying to figure out how to defeat the security measures, which were "attacking bad code like white blood cells", and he had the brillant idea of sending a decoy program to distract the "white blood cells". So he typed into a command line something to the effect of "SEND DECOY-PROGRAM TO MI-5 MAINFRAME". And obviously, it worked. But at the end, the intrepid MI-5 agent cancelled the bad program (just as it was 99% complete, of course) by pressing "Esc". How lucky that this rogue computer genius decided to bind the Esc key to "Immediately abort this harmful program and stop hacking MI-5" function!



  • @pbean said:

    Personally I just don't understand why they have chosen to use Excel (or whichever spreadsheet application that may be), instead of just creating a "Visual Basic GUI Interface" themselves. A movie is a project which generally costs millions of dollars. Let 1 person tinker with Photoshop for an hour and let another person make a "GUI Interface" out of it (another hour work) and you're done. And let's say these guys are really, really expensive and both cost $1000 an hour. You've lost $2000 on $50M (or more) but at least don't have the entire "geek" community pointing at you and laughing.

    Because they don't care. If it's not naked, exploding or flying though the sky (before exploding or getting naked), it's not something you invest money in.



  • @pbean said:

    Let 1 person tinker with Photoshop for an hour and let another person make a "GUI Interface" out of it (another hour work) and you're done.

    There are actual professional designers out there who do just this. Why not in this scene? Who knows, maybe they thought the screen was not visible for long enough time to bother wasting time and money on it. Maybe the editors didn't even notice it (disclaimer: I have not seen the movie so I don't know how long the screen was visible).



  • @SlyEcho said:

    There are actual professional designers out there who do just this.
     

    +1 amusing trivia



  •  TRWTF is posting screenshots as PNGs.

     



  • @Zylon said:

     TRWTF is posting screenshots as PNGs.

     

    Why?



  • @SlyEcho said:

    There are actual professional designers out there who do just this. Why not in this scene?

    To their credit, that's one thing that the makers of the Australian soap opera Neighbours have always been very good at. When characters are surfing online, it's often on Erinsborough Net (Erinsborough is the name of the fictional suburb where the soap opera is set) or something similar, and they NEVER use Google when searching, it's always some 'fake' search engine. They even have fake e-mail apps.

    (And yes, I do know that TRWTF is that I watch Neighbours, before you decide to tell me that!)



  • @SlyEcho said:

    (disclaimer: I have not seen the movie so I don't know how long the screen was visible).

    About half a second.
    Would be easy to miss if you're not looking for it. Still... it wouldn't have hurt to at least build a fake GUI.



  • @Lingerance said:

    @Zylon said:

     TRWTF is posting screenshots as PNGs.

     

    Why?
     

    Edit: TRWTF is posting this screenshot as PNG, because the JPG at PS's 100% quality weighs in at 390K, and 180K at 80%.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    @ari said:

    Well, I know someone who designed a 2-page newsletter with Excel, and then wanted to use that as a template....

    I can imagine formatting which would make that a sensible solution. I can also see Word being a better choice in most cases. There may be other benefits to using Excel as well, if you want to automatically update some of the content.

    TRWTF is that some "word processing" situations are easier to do in Excwl than Word.


    I think many situation can also be done better by using TeX.


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