UK Politics - It's a bit glitchy

[Which Tyler]

As you were (preferably without the personal tit for tat that goes nowhere)

[Heartofice]

If only it was a glitch and not something much more stupid 

 

[A wilding]

Wearing my IT hat: that is truly shocking.

"Don't use Excel for proper databases" is pretty much IT development 101.

 

[Which Tyler]

Not to mention the "glitch" that initially meant that the NHS T&T app was incompatible with NHS tests, only Serco's.

 

Obviously, I have full confidence that there will be no similar glitches in passport control, import/export duties etc etc in 3 month's time...

[Alarich II]

14 minutes ago, A wilding said:

Wearing my IT hat: that is truly shocking.

"Don't use Excel for proper databases" is pretty much IT development 101.

 

Come on: the solution to Excel is always more Excel. This is IT user 101.

[A wilding]

And if you work in IT you will be well aware just how many tears of blood have been sweated because someone knocked something up in Excel that then got more and more complex and embedded into infrastructure too deeply to be wrinkled out.

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

As you were (preferably without the personal for or tat that goes nowhere)

Yes please, it’s getting really old having people just looking for an argument with HoI where there isn’t one.

57 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

If only it was a glitch and not something much more stupid 

Ho. Ly. Fuck. That’s ridiculous. 

[Fragile Bird]

Makes the errors we’ve seen in Canada look like  amateur hour... 

[Alarich II]

1 hour ago, A wilding said:

And if you work in IT you will be well aware just how many tears of blood have been sweated because someone knocked something up in Excel that then got more and more complex and embedded into infrastructure too deeply to be wrinkled out.

I don't work in IT, but as a student I did some VBA programming in the tax department of one of the biggest reinsurance companies in Germany (seated in Munich), and it was a mess of truly epic proportions. They offered me what back then was a great salary for a 35h/week including all sorts of benefits etc straight out of uni, just to keep it runninng. Which I graciously declined. /threaddrift

[mormont]

  

4 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

For a mod your condescending tone is really off putting.

I'm not seeing the relevance.

Anyway it was more sarcastic than condescending.

4 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Unfortunately, that doesn't answer the question I was asking. If a 'safe' space has been requested, what has driven that, are BAME staff less safe? I cant find anything to say they have requested it so your 'maybe' would have been helped by linking something, the link you provided didn't really clear anything up.

Yeah, except there isn't any further information publicly available. I'm guessing that's because Sainsbury's haven't seen the need to provide any, seeing as how it's not really any of our business. I can't think of any other instance of a company publicly providing that level of detail on a staff initiative.

But yeah, I'm going to suggest it's likely that BAME staff in any retail environment are less safe. As a policeman, you might have some knowledge of the rate of assaults and incidents of abuse they suffer? This USDAW survey, for example, finds BAME staff (specifically Asian/Asian British) are verbally threatened or abused much more often when asking customers for ID to purchase alcohol.

But anyway. The point is, what we can take from the linked public statement is quite clearly different from the various ramblings condemning this on Twitter. The public statement suggests* that this was a one-off event for a specific purpose, not a room set aside in every store for the rest of time. A fuss over nothing, as so many of these things are.

 

*no, it doesn't definitively state this, I know.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, A wilding said:

Wearing my IT hat: that is truly shocking.

"Don't use Excel for proper databases" is pretty much IT development 101.

Given the IT budgets they have to work with they're doing well not to still be running Windows XP, let alone still using Excel.

[Fury Resurrected]

Oops wrong thread

[mormont]

27 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

Oops wrong thread

And there I was looking forward to some biting Fury commentary on our sad body politic. :p

[Heartofice]

50 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Given the IT budgets they have to work with they're doing well not to still be running Windows XP, let alone still using Excel.

Wouldn’t be surprised. Having to update and upgrade systems is probably such a big task they probably simply didn’t bother 

[Raja]

World beating, was it?

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

Scottish comedian Janey Godley has been overdubbing Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid briefings.

Some are hit and miss; she’s clearly trying to press home the message about keeping safe while spoofing the briefings. whole bunch of them on youtube:

 

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Ferrier hasn't resigned, yet?

That's disappointing.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Raja said:

World beating, was it?

It was very clearly never going to be, because the government's history with IT projects is pretty terrible.

The problem is that any ordinary corporation is going to have, maybe, thousands to tens of thousands of customers, so upgrading their systems to account for that is usually doable (although still an absolute metric fuckton of work). Anything involving government systems is going to be involving the records of tens of millions of citizens, and they can't afford to fuck up and lose all that data, especially if the paper backups are gone; I was part of a system of digitising hospital records for my local NHS trust and it involved manually scanning hundreds of thousands of patient files, some of them absolutely huge, and pulping them afterwards for data security and because the literal warehouse the hospital was using to store them was no longer affordable. So when they said they'd have a world-beating track and trace system up and running within weeks of the start of lockdown it was manifestly bullshit. If anything, I'm mildly surprised the system is coping as well as it is at the moment, even if it's far off what is needed.

[ants]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

It was very clearly never going to be, because the government's history with IT projects is pretty terrible.

The problem is that any ordinary corporation is going to have, maybe, thousands to tens of thousands of customers, so upgrading their systems to account for that is usually doable (although still an absolute metric fuckton of work). Anything involving government systems is going to be involving the records of tens of millions of citizens, and they can't afford to fuck up and lose all that data, especially if the paper backups are gone; I was part of a system of digitising hospital records for my local NHS trust and it involved manually scanning hundreds of thousands of patient files, some of them absolutely huge, and pulping them afterwards for data security and because the literal warehouse the hospital was using to store them was no longer affordable. So when they said they'd have a world-beating track and trace system up and running within weeks of the start of lockdown it was manifestly bullshit. If anything, I'm mildly surprised the system is coping as well as it is at the moment, even if it's far off what is needed.

I remember when I was at a previous company and they were moving files from one system onto a new set of servers.  So no change in system, just moving data from A to B.  I thought this would involve a cut and paste, and was roundly disabused of that notion by the IT team.  When you have to be absolutely certain that every file is the same before/after (so not your normal Windows move files), the work involved got exponentially bigger.  And this was a relatively simple task.  

[DaveSumm]

So I guess if it’s as big a job as you say, that means the problem is currently being solved with ... a second Excel spreadsheet? Or if they’ve really got some experts to hand, a second tab.