Yeah, I can relate to this. I eventually dumped Facebook because of the flood of inane posts and the dumping I got from news vendors when I 'liked' them. Oh, I read and enjoy the info from SciAM, the Globe&Mail and so forth. But finding my Facebook page becoming an unreadable dumping ground was too much. In the end I shut down my Facebook page because it was nothing but clutter. 'Liking' anybody was just an invite for a nonstop dump of everything they were flogging -- better off to stick with email. At least THAT could be controlled.
The problem with the commerce or nothing view is that someone has to expend the risk capital to make the initial discoveries that justify the subsequent commerce. Looking back at history this has pretty much been governments.
Sure, private companies built all the stuff. But NASA drove the projects and the taxpayer paid for it. And the technology spinoffs that came as a result of trying to solve the hard problems have enriched us all.
I suspect that is the lifetime of the physical media after it has been moved to landfill. There has been a huge amount of work over the last 20+ years to suggest that the information recorded on this media may not be readable for anything close to this term. Interestingly, the last time I was doing a media useful life survey I could not find a lot of the detailed stuff that used to be out there. I am suspicious that the manufacturers are trying to obscure this key detail.
For my own stuff I am keeping digital stuff on spinning magnetic media -- easy to make multiple copies. But I keep the physical media for anything spooled to digital (despite complaints from my significant other) in case I have to redo the dump and cleanup. I have a bunch of Ektachromes that were taken back during WW2 that are as bright and clear as the day they were fished out of the soup. And a bunch of CD-R archives of my early digital pictures that have already coastered.
I guess that like clay tablets, what survives of today will be governed as much by chance as intent.
I can only read this with horror -- yet another lossy image format to burden everyone. When I setup a media management system the number of different formats I need to accommodate already makes my head hurt. We are all dancing around the black hole that says the ultimate lossy compression can be achieved by writing to the null device. I guess that is the problem of software -- since it is intangible one can claim better by making it different (and incompatible). One sees few cars on the road with five wheels -- that standardized pretty quick and a long time ago. And I guess everyone likes keeping it art rather than science. Means 'engineer' is just a courtesy.
And I think this is a Bombardier production, a Canadian company with high speed train installs almost everywhere except in Canada. Here we are still ripping out track and degrading passenger service even more by routing it over old freight lines and making passenger trains wait on sidings so the freight can go through. And the fare for regular service across a distance of roughly 200km is $95 one way -- takes 2.5 hours vs 2 in the car or $50 on the bus. Passenger service to a whole raft of cities was discontinued and the passenger trains routed by an old freight route that makes a wide swath away from population centers. So passenger train travel is still declining here -- but we read about what the rest of the world is doing and have severe envy.
Am afraid that I would have to agree with you. Whatever their reasons for the various decisions being made they are being bloody quiet about them. We cannot tell what the real driver is, perhaps to push as much public money into private hands as possible or some suite of crackpot theories. But no recognizably rational arguments seem to be made and the results appear to be destroying institutions and raising costs. He did make a comment some years back that we would not recognize Canada when he was finished. That seems to be happening -- unfortunately I don't think it was most people thought they were voting for.
Human factors are critical for effective staff performance.
One other low tech item to not forget is to have plenty of whiteboards available. The high tech variety with automagic copy is very cool but your basic panel and markers will do it. Everything breaks -- especially in the control center. It is helpful to have some place to keep track of things when the power goes out or an ill-timed lighting strike fries everything.
And this bunker is above the 100 year flood line, yes?
Twentyfive years ago I worked for a database and application vendor doing internals (Amcor in case anyone cares). Filtering for correct input and preventing long scale logical errors was a major fetish. Much of this was not difficult, just a group agreement to use library routines for all user interaction that had input validation and condition handling. Programs were built from shells that had standard condition handling embedded -- you added custom branches as needed. What made the whole approach successful was an agreement on standards of program behavior and a willingness to share common code. Errors like the ever popular buffer overflow just didnt happen because moves into buffers checked first, etc. The move to RISC processor architecture attenuated synchronous error handling, to be sure. But in the large, it is the obsession that in IT, experience is a handicap (just ask any recruiter about experience that is not 110% matched to what they want NOW) -- so junior programmer mistakes become institutionalized. The budget is a convenient excuse, but I think the real root is the inexperienced lack of appreciation for what matters.
One problem with technology solutions at any level is the number of possible approaches. Without clear articulation of goals and success criteria, making 'right' choices is more a dispute of taste. The view from one perspective selects A, B, C as the 'right' things and A', B', C' as 'wrong' -- but change the viewpoint and the set composition changes. The benefit of experience that a client should be paying for when engaging a consultant is their understanding of the messy choices and ensure that the client makes the choices that are best for him. It is, as many posters have pointed out, the clients nickle we are spending. It is their problem and in the end the client must live with what is created. But it is always a delicate matter to suggest to a client that they might want to consider approaching the problem differently than originally conceived. THis can work if the benefits as expressed in the clients terms are greater than the original conception.
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Yeah, I can relate to this. I eventually dumped Facebook because of the flood of inane posts and the dumping I got from news vendors when I 'liked' them. Oh, I read and enjoy the info from SciAM, the Globe&Mail and so forth. But finding my Facebook page becoming an unreadable dumping ground was too much. In the end I shut down my Facebook page because it was nothing but clutter. 'Liking' anybody was just an invite for a nonstop dump of everything they were flogging -- better off to stick with email. At least THAT could be controlled.
The problem with the commerce or nothing view is that someone has to expend the risk capital to make the initial discoveries that justify the subsequent commerce. Looking back at history this has pretty much been governments. Sure, private companies built all the stuff. But NASA drove the projects and the taxpayer paid for it. And the technology spinoffs that came as a result of trying to solve the hard problems have enriched us all.
I suspect that is the lifetime of the physical media after it has been moved to landfill. There has been a huge amount of work over the last 20+ years to suggest that the information recorded on this media may not be readable for anything close to this term. Interestingly, the last time I was doing a media useful life survey I could not find a lot of the detailed stuff that used to be out there. I am suspicious that the manufacturers are trying to obscure this key detail. For my own stuff I am keeping digital stuff on spinning magnetic media -- easy to make multiple copies. But I keep the physical media for anything spooled to digital (despite complaints from my significant other) in case I have to redo the dump and cleanup. I have a bunch of Ektachromes that were taken back during WW2 that are as bright and clear as the day they were fished out of the soup. And a bunch of CD-R archives of my early digital pictures that have already coastered. I guess that like clay tablets, what survives of today will be governed as much by chance as intent.
I can only read this with horror -- yet another lossy image format to burden everyone. When I setup a media management system the number of different formats I need to accommodate already makes my head hurt. We are all dancing around the black hole that says the ultimate lossy compression can be achieved by writing to the null device. I guess that is the problem of software -- since it is intangible one can claim better by making it different (and incompatible). One sees few cars on the road with five wheels -- that standardized pretty quick and a long time ago. And I guess everyone likes keeping it art rather than science. Means 'engineer' is just a courtesy.
And I think this is a Bombardier production, a Canadian company with high speed train installs almost everywhere except in Canada. Here we are still ripping out track and degrading passenger service even more by routing it over old freight lines and making passenger trains wait on sidings so the freight can go through. And the fare for regular service across a distance of roughly 200km is $95 one way -- takes 2.5 hours vs 2 in the car or $50 on the bus. Passenger service to a whole raft of cities was discontinued and the passenger trains routed by an old freight route that makes a wide swath away from population centers. So passenger train travel is still declining here -- but we read about what the rest of the world is doing and have severe envy.
Am afraid that I would have to agree with you. Whatever their reasons for the various decisions being made they are being bloody quiet about them. We cannot tell what the real driver is, perhaps to push as much public money into private hands as possible or some suite of crackpot theories. But no recognizably rational arguments seem to be made and the results appear to be destroying institutions and raising costs. He did make a comment some years back that we would not recognize Canada when he was finished. That seems to be happening -- unfortunately I don't think it was most people thought they were voting for.
Human factors are critical for effective staff performance. One other low tech item to not forget is to have plenty of whiteboards available. The high tech variety with automagic copy is very cool but your basic panel and markers will do it. Everything breaks -- especially in the control center. It is helpful to have some place to keep track of things when the power goes out or an ill-timed lighting strike fries everything. And this bunker is above the 100 year flood line, yes?
Twentyfive years ago I worked for a database and application vendor doing internals (Amcor in case anyone cares). Filtering for correct input and preventing long scale logical errors was a major fetish. Much of this was not difficult, just a group agreement to use library routines for all user interaction that had input validation and condition handling. Programs were built from shells that had standard condition handling embedded -- you added custom branches as needed. What made the whole approach successful was an agreement on standards of program behavior and a willingness to share common code. Errors like the ever popular buffer overflow just didnt happen because moves into buffers checked first, etc. The move to RISC processor architecture attenuated synchronous error handling, to be sure. But in the large, it is the obsession that in IT, experience is a handicap (just ask any recruiter about experience that is not 110% matched to what they want NOW) -- so junior programmer mistakes become institutionalized. The budget is a convenient excuse, but I think the real root is the inexperienced lack of appreciation for what matters.
One problem with technology solutions at any level is the number of possible approaches. Without clear articulation of goals and success criteria, making 'right' choices is more a dispute of taste. The view from one perspective selects A, B, C as the 'right' things and A', B', C' as 'wrong' -- but change the viewpoint and the set composition changes. The benefit of experience that a client should be paying for when engaging a consultant is their understanding of the messy choices and ensure that the client makes the choices that are best for him. It is, as many posters have pointed out, the clients nickle we are spending. It is their problem and in the end the client must live with what is created. But it is always a delicate matter to suggest to a client that they might want to consider approaching the problem differently than originally conceived. THis can work if the benefits as expressed in the clients terms are greater than the original conception.