Interesting Links for 24-10-2023

[andrewducker]

1. A checklist for managers

(tags:management advice lists )

2. Excel now lets you disable its "helpful" turning of letter/number combinations into dates.

(tags:date excel GoodNews )

3. Four of the five developers for the original Mario game worked on the most recent one

(tags:Mario games development history )

4. The pandemic's true death toll (around 27m people. So far.)

(tags:Pandemic death )

5. The UK criminal justice system has now failed

(tags:UK law epicfail austerity )

6. Edinburgh University failing over sexual misconduct complaints

(tags:Edinburgh university abuse sex )

7. UK Government using AI to decide on benefits and driving licences

(tags:ai OhForFucksSake law government uk )

8. 'Failure to act' on suicide website linked to 50 UK deaths

(tags:suicide uk web )

Comments

[hairyears]

Excel date conversions have been a known bug for a quarter of a century, and the largest corporate users have tried to raise the issue with Microsoft repeatedly...

And they haven't fixed it now:

The feature does not support disabling these conversions during macro execution.

...And that's half of the automated bulk database imports, right there.

The other half is database drivers that read spreadsheets directly into database tables and queries, and SSIS (SQL Server's data import toolkit); there's no mention of the 'fix' for that, and the high-profile Excel errors in genetics are set in stone during bulk data imports.


Beyond that, there is no mention of Microsoft's failure to follow the ASCII standard for CSV data files; and I'm not convinced that anyone in Redmond actually knows what happens out of sight in Excel's idiosyncratic implementation of copy-and-paste.

[andrewducker]

Yikes. That's a real shame.