Our system uses Remote Desktop and we had such difficulty with our large actuarial spreadsheets that they created a special Remote Desktop for “Actuarial High Performance” but it can still be fairly slow.
I was doing a mortality study in R (we have R on both the regular and AHP servers) and during the day it took roughly 2X longer on the regular than on the AHP version. After hours they were much much closer in speed, like maybe within 5%. I don’t know why that happens but most of the Actuaries use the AHP version for Excel. I use local (not either version of the Remote Desktop) most of the time and only go to one of them when there are things that can only run on the remote desktop, usually where the spreadsheet runs queries to data that can only run in the cloud and not locally.
So, you’re connecting to…another desktop running excel? Or an actual server?
If it’s another desktop, that just seems cumbersom. If it’s an actual server, that’s the part I was unaware of, I didn’t know excel had a server based entity.
It can connect to a Remote Desktop, server or virtual server (in the cloud). It allows a company to buy a small amount of powerful servers (or cloud space) that multiple employees can connect to, without each employee needing a powerful PC.
I imagine it might have similarities to the early days when each employee had a dumb terminal and all the heavy lifting was done by the mainframe.
I understand how it works. It just seems that if this is connecting to a windows 11 desktop, that’s a bit nonsensical. Like, they’ve got windows 11 running on some supercomputer ,and people are connecting to that? Bizarre.
Or, excel has a server version that doesn’t run on a desktop OS, and you’re connecting to that. Which does make sense, but I wasn’t aware that a server version exists.
Or, you guys just aren’t explaining it to me very well lol.
Sorry, just checked that we do have excel installed on our laptops.
I can however access the same files via a browser using sharepoint but it does lag a bit, which slows you down (I used that all through COVID). Excel on sharepoint is run on a server and does have the advantage of allowing multiple users and the user not needing to run excel on their machine.
In theory I guess I could run bigger excel files on the server if my desktop couldn’t handle it, but we try to avoid having files that big and use other applications (like sql) to do the heavy lifting.
What I had during covid was a virtual desktop that existed on a company server and I accessed via a browser using my Apple MacBook Air. I didn’t have windows installed on my Apple but it was installed on the company server. The browser served as an interface - accepting my inputs and rendering the updated excel spreadsheet (with a slight lag) but all the calculations were done on the server
A current incarnation is Microsoft azure virtual desktop although I can’t speak to it personally.
I wanted to replace my battery operated toothbrush’s head and none on hand
I didn’t see anything that looked correct at CVS, so I ordered from Amazon.
They didn’t fit (will return those)
So I went to ProClean Spinbrush directly, went into the chat
She said my model is obsolete (could be, had this a long time.)
The are shipping me a new brush and two replacement heads gratis.
I guess their margin comes from getting me to buy heads
I booked our family vacation for a time I technically should “be available”, although my boss has a loose definition of “being available” (checks/responds to email). A big meeting was scheduled to occur during my trip, and I was preparing how to respond if pushed about going, but it just got rescheduled to the following week.
We use Microsoft Azure. We started with everyone having a virtual desktop hosted on their servers and the theory was that Microsoft can scale the servers to the power we needed for our virtual desktops. But we also had Office installed locally so we could attach to the network drives through our internet connections. Theoretically, it was supposed to be faster to use the virtual desktops since they would all be on the cloud and shouldn’t be constrained in their accessing the data on the network drives since they were hosted by Microsoft Azure as well and that should be faster than downloading to your local version of excel over your internet connection.
But everyone hated the virtual desktops and as soon as they got access to the network drives so they could run excel locally that is what everyone did. Eventually they did away with the virtual desktops and we use Remote Desktop to access certain programs somehow in the cloud.
I think they might still be virtual desktops on servers but as it was explained to me, initially they would assign so much resources to you but if you started taxing the resources you have (cores and memory mostly) that they could dynamically adjust your resources to meet your demand, at a price of course.
My son said the gluten free cheez-its I made were better than any of the other crackers I’ve brought home (low bar, but still). I think I’ll try sprinkling them with garlic salt and bake them a little longer (the thicker ones are a bit chewy). I’m tempted to get a pasta maker to roll the dough uniformly thin.
Our dog was very interested when I was making them, and she was happy to eat any rejects.
Have you tried Milton’s? They make some kind of gluten free cracker with just sea salt and I freaking love them. I wish I could still get them at Costco.
And I’m not gluten free, so I’m not comparing to just gluten free options. They are just really good.
I’ve seen them at Costco, but I didn’t buy any…yet. I was mostly on the hunt for a replacement for extreme flavor cheese goldfish crackers. There’s an overflowing bag of assorted GF crackers that I think I’ll bring on our family camping trip, and we can all do a taste test.
Finally getting a brand new, custom built to my specs work laptop this Thursday. My current one (Dell i7) was really straining under my typical workload.
yesterday I was looking at hardware for AI. Holy crap, you guys better start producing some ad dollars if I’m going to be able to afford that kind of thing.
I just asked for a new one, my current laptop is pretty old and I could use a bit more RAM. Fingers crossed, my current company doesn’t really pinch pennies.
My last company sent me a $300 Dell and told me if I needed more RAM I could install it myself, great.
That being said, my overseas grandboss was amazed when we were discussing my US server.
I described the specs for it and its backup in the context of it being scheduled for hardware upgrade/replacement next year (768GB RAM, a beast of a processor, etc). Grandboss, concerned about what this would do to her budget, asked “how much will this cost”.
My response: “it’s included in the IT support charge you see for me. We aren’t billed specifically for it. I demonstrate the business need; IT gives it to me; the cost is socialized across the US.”
The other regions of the company don’t do that.
Back in the history of our US predecessor company, after a couple of years of a LOT of finance and IT energy expended on cost allocations and squabbling with business leads on the logic/algorithms to be used, the powers-that-be decided that the cost of the allocations/squabbling were excessive, and they decreed that hardware and networking costs would be allocated on a flat per-employee basis.
Of course, this was also the place where, at one point, I had the oldest laptop in the company because for a couple of years, every time “my” new laptop was sent to my office, it got diverted to be given to a new hire for a team that was staffing up.
I suppose this is the wrong time to mention that I’m about to do some work in what is now the largest spreadsheet I ever built – currently a 1.8GB xlsb file.
(Yes, it should be done in something else…but it’s a one-unique project thing that I started building in Excel so I could see/audit the logic…and every time I say “I should move this to SQL”, I realize that it will take more time to do that than to tackle the next step in this now-obscene spreadsheet.)