I used to work for municipal government in a major American city. The database for the entire city downloaded query results to your desktop formatted as Excel 95. Still does.
At one point I had to install special R packages because someone retired and I was tasked with taking over the worksheet they had been maintaining forever and the usual R packages to read data from Excel can’t parse Excel 5.0.
There was also someone in the office who still used a typewriter on the regular.
Yup, I had someone print off Excel sheets, manually highlight and write in corrections, and them bring the pages over to my desk to have me fix them in the file.
I also once had the city reject a report I submitted because the width of the columns in the Excel file were different from the previous year and they wanted to print it all off on one page.
Some number of years ago, I was an intern within a department of state government. I was tasked with helping to enrich their databases. So they sent over an Excel file. I did my thing and added new columns, then I had to send it back over to someone within each division so they could do the data entry. To my horror, when I went to visit one of the division heads, I saw their admin sitting at a computer with a printout of my changes sitting on a document holder next to the screen…manually typing geographic coordinates into a data entry form.
True, I work in ecomm and we definitely have database exports being passed around relatively freely. No passwords obviously, but segmentation data, emails, addresses, phone numbers, etc.
We have good IT security but it still doesn’t feel great.
My company used Google for a few years. Higher level Excel users hated Sheets and didn’t give up Excel. But for the rest of us riffraff Sheets was great. The collaboration features work really well, better than Office 360.
I’m one of the Excel guys, I live by tables, PowerQuery, VBA/UDFs, and loading data from APIs and SQL databases. If any of that functionality lives in Sheets I’ve never been able to figure it out productively.
My last contract used Sheets and I felt like a toddler, it’s too different for my tastes.
This seems to be a serious downside to this system. Anyone who values a persistent profile is putting their precious data in the hands of some random instance that may or may not go bust in the near or (perhaps worse) distant future.
I’m on lemmy.world because it’s the most likely to survive
I’d love there to be a Trust on first use signed user record and a DHT of associated servers that would allow profile references to point to the most recently made user profile with the same key as the oldest one.
This seems to be a serious downside to this system. Anyone who values a persistent profile is putting their precious data in the hands of some random instance that may or may not go bust in the near or (perhaps worse) distant future.
Isn’t this the downside to any system reliant on remote operators?
For any truly valuable data, the solutions remain the same, keep local copies, create backups, and store some backups offsite. As-is it seems like perhaps too many people rely strictly on offsite solutions as their singular data store, which is as bad practice as only having local backups, tbh.
I’m never closing mine as long as it has active users. Please come if it’s a good location for you - western USA. Performance and uptime is really good but you will have some network latency if you are on the other side of the world.
True, but, for most Americans, the “need” to become bilingual simply wasn’t a thing until recently. (It became a thing mainly because US Spanish-speaking communities are slowly moving northward from where they began in the southernmost states.)
In Europe, it’s much easier to run into someone who speaks a different language than you simply by driving to another town.
For the most part, the only two languages Americans have to worry about learning if they want to communicate with neighboring countries is French (because of Canada, although they also speak English) and Spanish (because of the countries to the US’s south, including Mexico and others).
Americans almost never even hear other languages, let alone need to understand them. There’s has been a culture here for over a century for immigrants to integrate and learn the language and culture of America as a replacement for their own. Three generations ago my relatives did this - they literally abandoned their last name in the process.
Games (mostly MMO) feel like chores to me now, sometimes it even like a second job. Grinding the same endless tasks for hours, go there, do this, kill that.
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