May 2008

Obama, Clinton, Microsoft Excel, and OpenOffice.org

politics, technology / /

I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:

Thought y’all would find this interesting – from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:

“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel 2003 and Lotus 1-2-3.

Those programs can’t download data files with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns.

Obama’s January fundraising report, detailing the $23 million he raised and $41 million he spent in the last three months of 2007, far exceeded 65,536 rows listing contributions, refunds, expenditures, debts, reimbursements and other details. It was the first report to confound basic database programs since 2001, when the Federal Election Commission began directly posting candidates’ fundraising reports online in an effort to make political money more accessible and transparent to voters.

By March, the reports filed by Clinton, a New York senator who attributes Obama’s victories in several states to her own lack of money, also could no longer be downloaded into spreadsheets using basic applications.

If you want to comb through Obama or Clinton’s cash, you either need to divide and import their reports section-by-section (a time-consuming and mind-numbing process) or purchase a more powerful database application, such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel 2007, both of which retail for $229.”

Interestingly, OpenOffice.org 2.0 has the same limitation. OpenOffice.org 3 will expand the number of columns to 1024, according to http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html. No idea about how many rows. Anyone know?

OK … looked it up … it appears that the row limit is STILL in place, so you can’t use OOo to open Obama’s or Hillary’s spreadsheets. Of course, you could use MySQL …

Oh yeah … and here’s one more note, from the same Salon article quoted above:

“In a revealing insight into the significant fundraising disparity between the two Democrats and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, it is still possible to download his reports with plain-old Excel.”

Ouch!

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Web design contrasted with graphic design

art, business, technology / /

From Joshua Porter’s “Do Canonical Web Designs Exist?” (Bokardo: 14 November 2007):

… web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.

Graphic designers can judge by looking. Web designers cannot. Web designers must judge by doing (or observing others doing). The problem is that too many people judge web designs without actually using them. Instead, they look. When you use the shortcut of looking, you tend to judge what you’re looking at: the visuals. But when you use something, your relationship to that thing necessarily changes. I wonder how often Armin uses Google.

That’s why web design is different. Peer production, in particular, is extremely different. When I buy a book on Amazon, when you buy a book, we change the way the site works for someone else buying books, which is in turn changed by the reviews we write afterward. Is this not amazing design?

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What Dell learned from Wal-Mart

business, technology / /

From Fake Steve Jobs’ “Why Dell will not bounce back” (11 May 2008):

On the manufacturing side, Dell figured out faster than the others in its space how to squeeze component suppliers and play them off each other. They brought in loads of former Wal-Mart people to refine this practice. One example: If you want to sell parts to Dell you must agree to ship your parts to Round Rock, Texas, and store them in Dell-owned warehouses (paying rent to Dell!) and to hold them until the very moment Dell needs them at which time you drive your tractor trailer to the Dell manufacturing facility and unload your parts through the shipping bay — and only then, as the parts go across the threshold, does Dell take ownership of them. Thus you, Mr. Parts Supplier, end up paying rent to Dell for the privilege of carrying its inventory on your books. Nice, right?

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