• Osric (unregistered) in reply to Robin

    Frankly, there have been probably been a lot of british software developers bludgeoning their heads into the nearest table over their morning coffree this week

  • (nodebb) in reply to Simon

    my chances of being struck by lightning are about 1000 times higher than of dying from COVID-19

    That speaks very well of containment efforts in your area. The irony of prevention is that the better you are at it, the less necessary it seems.

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to Simon
    I have never been able to make my mind up whether Boris is totally mad or absolutely brilliant. I don't mean as a practical man, obviously there he is a total idiot. But he is a brilliant orator -

    Personally I think he's a terrible orator, it's bumbling confused nonsense usually because (like Trump) he has a very thin grasp of what he's talking about and is trying to disguise that by meandering about and changing the subject.

    He is good at chucking in mock Churchillian upbeat stuff that appeals to his base, even if it does sound like a banal, unconvincing cliche to many others. Maybe be better to say a terrible communicator, but an effective noise generator.

    I'd say he's benefited from rising to power at a time when most of the alternatives (in his own party and others) produce the verbal equivalent of Mogadon.

  • Diane B (unregistered)

    The four most feared words in IT: "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT"

  • Simon (unregistered) in reply to Richard

    Yes, it is a GDPR problem. Actually about thirty years ago when I was sixteeen I wrote my O level thesis on the Data Protection Act (1998), which the General Data Protection Regulations derive from, essentially. What you are suggesting, I think, is implied consent: that everyone who just willy-nilly taps on their smartphone has consented. In practice that is not the case: that is why for example the UK Advertising Standards Authority are rather keen to tell advertisers to make their ads clear and small print don't cut it, if there is "material information to the consumer" or something like that. Some of us do not want to share our details with all and sundry, and there is no public interest in letting anyone else know our test results. Medical records, in the UK at least, are kept private even from the patient, but one can specifically demand them. I have written to my local MP about this, in a very roundabout fashion (That coud be a WTF in itself, as I got a response saying I must use my real full name and address, which I did, then responded to me with the WRONG surname... his first reply was to say contact your local MP, then when I replied that YOU ARE MY LOCAL MP...... anyway that is a long story but might make a WTF one of these days).

  • Simon (unregistered) in reply to Diane B

    Hahahah yes. This is why exceptions exist, which are essentially COMEFROMs. But yes, "Oh, if it fails, just continue anyway".... so it can REALLY fail properly....

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to Simon
    I have never been able to make my mind up whether Boris is totally mad or absolutely brilliant. I don't mean as a practical man, obviously there he is a total idiot. But he is a brilliant orator - I don't know if he learned from Trump, but he can't put a sentence together without backwards running sentences until reels my mind.

    Well I'm not sure what your criteria are for brilliant oratory skills, but neither of those gentlemen qualify. If the point of speaking to people is to communicate information then they both fail miserably, for the same reason, neither of them have enough grasp on reality or respect for the truth. Unless, of course, oratory skills are defined as ignorant rabble rousing.

    Boris meanders around his subjects, bumbling and obfuscating, unfortunately because he doesn't have enough between ears to understand the topic. He can whomp up all the Churchillian style nonsense he likes, but he's no leader, the only fight he ever bled in was who got to go at the pig's head first in the Bullingdon bash.

    This is his mess, I don't know if he is porking Dido Harding, or one of his puppet masters is, but I think he may be genuinely stupid enough not to be filling his boots with whatever kickback her and Serco are getting for the £12M fiasco that is my country's track and trace system.

  • iPguru (unregistered)

    further investigation suggests that excel was only an intermediary for importing the data into a proper data base.

    CSV > excel > database. We have a High-tech wooden table!

  • (nodebb)

    Or you could switch to LibreOffice for free and use open standards: 210 columns, 220 rows and 2**30 cells.

  • (nodebb) in reply to damercer

    Formatting aside, is that supposed to be an improvement? It's the same number of rows as Excel allows, but only 1/16 as many columns.

    Mind you if you need more than 1000 columns you are probably doing something wrong. (I'm sure there are niche applications where it makes sense.)

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to Scarlet_Manuka

    Yes, although I remember years ago someone commenting on one of those WTF newbie "advice" forums (in this case for old school VB) that if you are needing to worry about range limits and work around them you are either doing it wrong or using the wrong tool.

    He got shouted down by the copypastafarians, natch, but I happen to think he was right. We need to be mindful of these things, but juggling around with how many columns you can have in a table, or buttons on a form is no different to using short ints everywhere and then screaming when you get overflows.

    Sometimes we are painted into a corner with backwards compatibility, but usually this happens because we've got a coder who learned two or three techniques and just repeats them in ever bigger iterations year after year after year and blames the platform for not keeping up with his "genus"

Leave a comment on “Excellent Data Gathering”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article