How COVID-19 is affecting society

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

If I believed in God, I would think...

 

[Pancake]

My neighbour got a Karaoke machine about 4 months ago.

How is it effecting me?

Well, every night about this time, after listening to him sing “used to be someone you love” for the 40th time I debate going over with an axe and smashing the machine, or with a joint and a condom and smashing him. Either way this needs to end soon.


edit Heh I posted this in the wrong thread. Thought I was in the Covid community support thread. Awkward.

 

[Free]

Botched Excel import may have caused loss of 15,841 UK COVID-19 cases

Agency reportedly lost data after exceeding maximum rows for a spreadsheet.

arstechnica.com

 

[Arkady Arkright]

Meanwhile, in the UK, the government's contact tracing debacle goes from bad to worse.
They're trying to "Ran out of columns on the spreadsheet"do the right thing but are just completely hopeless

England Covid cases error means 50,000 contacts may not have been traced

‘Shambolic’ failure resulted in 15,841 cases not reported for over a week

www.theguardian.com

ETA

"Ran out of columns on the spreadsheet".. This will have been some know-all middle manager thinking s/he was being clever by writing their own Excel code. When I was managing PC software for a large UK company 40 years ago, I spent half my life explaining to these idiots about the limitations of spreadsheets and the dangers of not getting their code checked by people who actually had a clue - and the other half correcting their cock-ups...

eta - Shock and despair follow revelations that ‘world-beating’ Test and Trace system is being run on Excel

I particularly liked the comment "Next they'll tell us it's run on Windows 95 and they manually back it up on floppy disks each night."

 

[Innula Zenovka]

"Ran out of columns on the spreadsheet".. This will have been some know-all middle manager thinking s/he was being clever by writing their own Excel code. When I was managing PC software for a large UK company 40 years ago, I spent half my life explaining to these idiots about the limitations of spreadsheets and the dangers of not getting their code checked by people who actually had a clue - and the other half correcting their cock-ups...

eta - Shock and despair follow revelations that ‘world-beating’ Test and Trace system is being run on Excel

I particularly liked the comment "Next they'll tell us it's run on Windows 95 and they manually back it up on floppy disks each night."

That was what boggled my mind.

You don't use Excel to store that amount of data. You use a SQL database, which Excel can read if you need to do more sophisticated number crunching than SQL can readily manage.

While it wouldn't be my first choice for something like this, MS Access is part of the MS Office suite, for heaven's sake -- it's a real newbie mistake.

(I'm not an IT professional, but I've always it my business to understand whatever business software I've been using, so I know how use it to make my life, and that of the IT department, that bit easier).

ETA


God almighty -- did they get one of the interns to do it for them?

 

[Free]

You don't use Excel to store that amount of data. You use a SQL database, which Excel can read if you need to do more sophisticated number crunching than SQL can readily manage.

*You* might. When I was doing contract/temp work as a developer, it wasn't unusual to hear a higher-up in a company ask if the project I was putting time into would store records in Excel or "some sort of CSV." That was only like 6-8 years ago.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

SNP MP who is already in trouble for failing to self-isolate after testing positive now seems in even deeper trouble

 

[Innula Zenovka]

When the cult is too cultish even for Fox

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

"Ran out of columns on a spreadsheet..."

I swear, if religion had any use in a modern age, it would incorporate the best data management practices and come up with a set of commandments, the violation of which would get people fired for heresy.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

a set of commandments, the violation of which would get people fired for heresy.

This is how it ended up on Excel.*

*I mean Excel is all you need for a huge number of things, like that bank reconciliation that that spills into a simple set of ledger entries that's worked just fine like this since Office 3.1 with modifications made on the fly by the accounting clerk as needed. Programmers can keep their filthy hands off that. Gigantic data things with entries in the millions and life and death on the line? Yeah, get a real database.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Some time a few months after Iraq 2, I remember watching a documentary on British tv about the problems the occupation was running into.

A major point of friction, it seems ,was the amount of time people and goods spent stuck in traffic jams trying to negotiate US military roadblocks.

The reporter shot a scene with a very harassed young midwesterner, who obviously wasn't enjoying the desert sun one bit, trying to run the checkpoint, looking up people's names on his laptop, while an ever growing and ever angrier traffic queue built up at the road-block.

Part of the problem was, he said, that so many Iraqi surnames begin with "al" (actually, they all do, as any Iraqi would have told them), which left me wondering why they hadn't written a simple macro to ignore "al" at the beginning of names when it was searching, and part of the problem was that searching all the names took an age on his computer, which kept freezing.

Then the camera zoomed in on his laptop screen to demonstrate the problem.

Yep, they were using Excel.

(I would say, it was at that point I realised the occupation was doomed, but that happened quite some time earlier.).

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Free]

Fauci: There could be 300,000 to 400,000 Covid deaths unless precautions taken

He added that a vaccine likely won’t be widely available until next summer or fall.

www.politico.com

Speaking at a virtual event hosted by American University, the White House coronavirus specialist said: "If we don't do what we need to in the fall and winter, we could have 300,000-400,000 Covid-19 deaths," according to excerpts tweeted by the school.

More than 200,000 people have died from the disease in the United States, and over 7 million have been diagnosed with it. A University of Washington study found in August that as many as 300,000 people could die of the disease by Dec. 1.

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

 

[Rose Karuna]

We need a little tiny violin emoji for this kind of person.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

"Our leaders"

They've fucking had it, but can't mention Trump by name even once. Yeah...