Jesus Christ that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. The submarine in the game Iron Lung was safer to drive than this thing.
But Wilby said that for the Titan, the coordinate data was transcribed into a notebook by hand and then entered into Excel before loading the spreadsheet into mapping software to track the sub’s position on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage.
The OceanGate team tried to perform these updates at least every five minutes, but it was a slow, manual process done while communicating with the gamepad-controlled sub via short text messages.
Updates every FIVE MINUTES?! I wouldn’t even trust this thing in a damn swimming pool.
I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can’ be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically. The navigation system just had to have some digital or even analog output, then it would be just the problem of interpreting the signal with some script and writing it into a file.
When Wilby recommended the company use standard software to process ping data and plot the sub’s telemetry automatically, the response was that the company wanted to develop an in-house system, but didn’t have enough time.
I like how the company didn’t consider using standard software to do it, and then switch to the in-house system that they made later, instead of just having it done by hand instead.
There are better ways to do that even in Excel!
Right? I work with plenty of users in non-technical roles who have at best rudimentary Excel skills, and even they could figure out a better way to manage this. The whole thing with Excel is to make basic data work accessible even to a rube, and let them do an incredible amount of things otherwise outside their skillet.
Using Excel like this is like giving someone a microwave and they only use it as a kitchen timer.
What’s worse is that half the coordinates probably ended up as dates…
Man if it wasn’t for that kid that was probably dragged into this, I’d be fucking rolling rn. How fucking stupid do you have to be to not see the sea of red flags???
According to Ross, six days before the Titan submarine imploded, the sub’s pilot and the company’s cofounder, Stockton Rush, crashed the vessel into a launch mechanism bulkhead while the vessel was attempting to resurface from dive 87. […] but Ross said he did not know if an inspection of the sub was carried out afterward.
How does every new detail about the excursion keep getting worse? Next week I’m going to learn they used Saran wrap for the windows.
The sub was totaled. Like you need to change a helmet after a crash even it it looks fine
It is my understanding that Rush also hard-bottomed the sub (crashed into the sea floor) while diving to the Andrea Doria. And was a little piss baby about it the entire time.
That’s apparently a shorter version of the video I’d seen previously; eventually Rush does hand over the controls, by throwing the playstation controller at the guy’s head.
As if I needed more reasons to be happy he was reduced to a fine paste
i wonder if it would have made the trip without that crashing. not that it matters much, but wow. how insanely stupid!
It was always a matter of when, not if.
And the week after that, we’ll find out that the sub didn’t even go into the ocean. They crushed it in a car compactor.
It’s a good thing that no serious company uses excel spreadsheets to manage their data, right? Right?
Of course not! We employees of Fortune 500 companies use Google Sheets to manage critical data.
It’s in the cloud, that’s how you know it’s good.
(I’m not even joking…our VP said this)
Excel effectively forces cloud usage now if you want to use autosave. And frankly, Microsoft is doing everything it can to shift users to cloud based Office apps.
They really, really want users and business owners to think of the local data storage and desktop computing as secondary to OneDrive and Webapps. I swear at some point in the future the consumer version of Windows will be little more than the Edge browser in a wig.
Companies now prefer cloud storage because they will still have the data if they fire you as your access will be lost immediately. You could delete all local files and it will take lot of time and effort to recover them.
I bet, they think about surface running edgeOS, lol
I swear at some point in the future the consumer version of Windows will be little more than the Edge browser in a wig.
Does that mean the install size might wind up being less than 23.2 gigs?
There are teams where I work that are basically using Excel as a database and SharePoint as S3 in automated processes… But at least no one is going to DIE when those things fall over!
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Not us, ours are google sheets
I think it’s a hole in education. Unless you go to school for IT or programming the most advanced thing you’re probably going to be taught is spreadsheet, and yet out in the world of business you need actual database software, and Excel can kinda sorta look like it’s somewhat accomplishing that for a while so that’s what gets used.
When the only tool society has been taught exists is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
One of my seniors uses xls as a word processor. I screamed but Teams was on mute.
As in, would type up a memo in Excel? Woof.
Sometimes I want a more free-form tool that can be a journal or a checklist or a spreadsheet so that I can plan and calculate and such. My personal journal sometimes reads like The Martian, “Okay, my solar panels make 165 kilowatt hours per sol, and I need 47 of it for my project, meaning I have 108 kilowatt hours per sol left over…” But I look at things like OneNote and fall right off them.
So do 90% of corporations.
Man, a hand typed spreadsheet must have been hard to navigate with the PlayStation controller.
What an incredible sentence.
It wasn’t even a PlayStation controller, it was a knockoff Logitech controller shaped like a DualShock but with Xbox colored buttons.
Everything I hear about this contraption is worse than I expected.
Come on now, Excel isn’t that bad.
Good thing the world didn’t lose anything valuable.
Hey, that was an ok controller they used to navigate
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I agree, which is why I use the f310 instead. best in price. I’ve got 6 of them for smash bros.
There were so many things relating to this incident that bewildered me. The titanium end caps were stuck on using glue, by hand. Also, while carbon fiber is great at handling tensile loads at 14 PSI, it’s not so great at handling compressive ones at 5500 PSI. For such a delicate mission, the whole thing seemed unprofessional in so many ways.
The more you hear about this sub the worse it gets.
I’m not surprised, of course, given the shortcuts Rush was determined to take.
Also it’s the first time I saw the picture in that article of the other crushed remains. I’m pretty impressed they could get pictures that deep.
Of course it did!
I’m ready to weep from this.
Every time any problem comes up, my current manager insists we must use Excel to solve it.
Wait, I didn’t even realise Williams F1 was involved…
I love it!
The schadenfreude, I mean.
