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One of the hard things about computers is that things often work perfectly right up until they don't. If you're driving a car a little bit too far between main
by juliansimioni 6y ago
One of the hard things about computers is that things often work perfectly right up until they don't.
If you're driving a car a little bit too far between maintenance checkups, it might start making some concerning noises, feel off, etc.
But no one not intimately familiar with spreadsheets would think anything is near failure when they have 65534 rows (showing my age, it's a bit higher now, right? :) ).
This has happened to lots of people that "should know better", like when Slashdot hit a 16M comment limit in 2006: https://slashdot.org/story/06/11/09/1534204/slashdot-posting-bug-infuriates-haggard-admins https://slashdot.org/story/06/11/09/1534204/slashdot-posting...
- dividedbyzero 6y agoFor that amount of money I think standards should be way higher than for Bob from accounting who built a clever Excel sheet. I don't expect perfection, but there are ways and techniques to build and run software in a way that minimizes the likelihood of such problems, and this really doesn't make the impression that they followed any best practices at all. They should (but of course won't) be held accountable for that.
- zimpenfish 6y ago> But no one not intimately familiar with spreadsheets ...should be given £345M to run a vital data intensive response to a pandemic?