Dem Candidates' FEC Filings Too Big For Old Software
We all knew that the Democratic money game was breaking records, but how's this: It's crashing software, too.
Earlier this year, Barack Obama filed an FEC report with so many donor entries that spreadsheet programs as recent as Excel 2003 couldn't open them -- an upgrade to Excel 2007 was required. Later on, Hillary Clinton filed a similarly oversized report, as well.
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This says more about the "quality" of Microsoft products than anything else.
May 26, 2008 8:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
That last line is funny.
Camp Hillary:
"Hey! We would've crashed the software too."
May 26, 2008 9:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Obama campaign uses Microsoft products? I thought I was voting for Mac.
May 26, 2008 10:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know what software the Obama camp uses, but in this case we're talking about the FEC's computers.
May 26, 2008 10:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, FEC computers. They hadn't been upgraded because no one had received any significant donations from Microsoft or from their lobbyists.
Just because MAC products are superior doesn't mean you should look down on those of us who are using $200 computers, that have fast Pentium 4 chips and lots of memory. The Microsoft product "kind of" works most of the time.
May 26, 2008 2:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
This entire premise of this article is BOGUS.
Spreadsheets are not meant to work with data sets with 1.6 million records.
There are UNIX tools, standard on Macs and Linux machines, that can easily analyze this data.
Yes, you can install Linux on your $300 computer and analyze this data.
If you have Windows, you can install cygwin and do the same.
For example, to print a list of states and the number of contributors in each state, this is all you have to type:
cut -c 81-82 itcont.dta | sort | uniq -c
This operation takes 16 seconds on my two year old computer. I am sure it will be much faster on a new Mac.
May 26, 2008 8:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, and by the way, Excel 2007 won't work either. It will only handle 1 million records.
May 26, 2008 8:28 PM | Reply | Permalink