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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 1st, 2023

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  • I work in the SAP industry, so obviously I’m quite biased but looking at the competition, SAP really isn’t that bad. I saw many competitor products in various projects (Workday, Oracle, Microsoft…) and from my personal view, SAP is still the superior, most feature-complete and (in the non-public-cloud version) best enhanceable software.

    However, I also learned over time that many SAP customers are not trained properly and/or the software is poorly configured by implementation partners which often leads to a bad user experience.

    Definitely not saying SAP is perfect by any means but I still havn’t seen a better solution for big companies with complex requirements.


  • I don’t think being interested in the (ancestors’) race of a co-worker is necessary racist. I worked with people with all kinds of cultural backgrounds and it might be just an interesting topic to talk about. If someone has family in Iran, Senegal or Indonesia that’s definitely more interesting to me than a conversation about weather or last night’s football game.



  • Unpopular opinion: I hate Elon Musk and basically never thought I’d consider buying a tesla. But to be fair, I did quite some research and a couple of test drives with various cars and overall the model 3 is the best deal for my requirements. Especicially, it seems to be the most energy efficient car in that size and cost range. You can drive a model 3 with around 15 kWh / 100 km even in winter on the highway where competitors range around 18-22.

    Regarding the two buttons for the turn signals: yes I’d probably prefer the old-fashioned approach with a lever but the two buttons are definitely not as bad as claimed in all the articles. I got used to it pretty quickly during the test drive and also in roundabouts it is practicable even thought not the most ideal approach.


  • Some time ago a client of me was looking for a solution to add watermarks to PDF files from their local on premise ERP system. The ERP system itself is a standard software. Obviously, they have a license to use that ERP but they definitely do not own the source code of it. Thus, they cannot change the license to AGPL or integrate it somehow.

    I thought about writing a little plugin with Java in iFile to do that which is published unser AGPL. Using something under AGPL would mean that we have to make the entire solution available under that license.

    Question 1: What is the entire solution in that scenario?

    • Is it the part of the plugin that deals with watermarks?
    • Is it the entire PDF handling plugin?
    • Is it the entire process in the ERP system?
    • Is it the entire ERP system that calls the plugin?
    • Would it include sattelite systems that are connected to that ERP system that indirectly use the PDFs and thus potentially ‘infest’ the entire IT landscape?
    • If the PDFs are send automatically to business partners of my client and they process it internally in their systems, are their systems now part of the solution?

    Question 2: AGPL says users must have access to the source code of the solution no matter if they use it locally, over network etc. But Who is the user in such a scenario?

    • The IT department of my client?
    • The end users of the ERP system of my client who are only interested in the PDF but definitely not in the source code?
    • Everyone at my client?
    • Including business partners who might have access to the PDFs?
    • Everyone?

    Question 3: My client is not a software company, so they never published ANY source code or software. Where would you publish the code?

    • The plugin for PDF creation would be called only in the background. The frontend is only standard ERP so I couldn’t easily put a link to the source code in the GUI.
    • My client’s intranet?
    • My client’s homepage?
    • GitHub or a similar platform?

    There is a lot of uncertainty when using AGPL software in a business context which will - in many cases - lead to the decision not to use the software at all.


  • I think that question is hard to answer as there are very few topics of everyday life that aren’t at least remotely political.

    Big cars, weapons, traditional family models (e.g. stay at home moms), focussing on traditional industries such as petrol than new technology such as solar etc. are all typical conservative topics. I mean conservative already implies with its name that you want to conserve the ‘as is’.

    Contrarily, progressive and liberal people will be more open to changes and trying new things: food, new ways of transportation, new business models, other family concepts.


  • Unfortunately, I cannot answer that.

    Maybe my gut feeling ist wrong and we indeed have a significant number of people living at dangerous temperatures. But from my perspective the entire statistic is useless if we don’t have more information. I just tried to find statistics with groups of the household incomes along with the number of households in that group. If we knew the average household income of someone who is +/- in the 38th percentile of people in Germany, that might be a starting point. However that would still contain many simplifications (How modern is the flat in terms of isolation? What’s the primary energy source etc.? How big is the flat? How many people live in the household?).

    It is very difficult to judge on a total number of a statistic unless you know the assumptions and methodologies behind it. In this case they apparantly didn’t even try to work with scientific evidence. They just wanted to create a clickbaity article and thus made the question as broad as possible so as many people as possible will anwer with “yes, I’m affected”.

    By the way: wasn’t this thread originally liked to an article from the newspaper “Die Welt” rather than DeStatis? DeStatis from my perspective is much more reliable souce than “Die Welt”. Also the original post reported 38% of people freezing while DeStatis writes about 5.5 million people. 5.5 million would be around 7% which is a HUGE difference and sounds far more realistic.


  • I don’t want to regulate heating. I just find it unfortunate that the survey doesn’t mention the target temperature that people couldn’t afford. If someone says “it’s too expensive nowadays to heat my flat to 25°C” it’s a completely different story to “I had to live in constant fear of my water pipes bursting from frost”.

    We have an ongoing climate crisis and at the same time there’s an energy crisis due to the war in Russia. I think keeping that in mind, it should be obvious that we have to cut back a bit in terms of comfort.

    If it’s indeed more than a third of Germany sitting in their flats freezing that’d be dramatic. But my feeling here it’s at least partly people whining around about their horrible fate.

    Headlines like this are perfect propaganda for pro Russian politics and in a second step may harm the people in Ukraine - which in many places are REALLY suffering from cold temperatures. Because they are cut off the grid and/or because their flats were damaged in battle.