Posts by Gravesender

What I did in the Army

This reminds me of my time in the US Army back in the late 1960s. I was assigned to a second echelon electronics repair section of a training unit at Ft. Benning GA.

At the time policy dictated that our supply room have in stock exactly the number of each item as specified in some document or other. The supply room was subject to regular "surprise" audits and there would be hell to play if any of the prescribed quantities were off in either direction. (I put surprise in scare quotes because for some reason or other our supply sergeant always knew about the audits a day or two in advance.)

There were two consequences of this arrangement. The first was that we were never allowed to draw spares from the stock room. If we needed so much as a new fuse we had to fill out a complicated legal size multi-copy form and send it up to Brigade. The item needing repair would sit on the shelf until a week or so later when the single fuse would arrive packed in military grade multi-layered moisture and mold resistant packaging. If the fuse blew again when we tried it we went back to step one.

The other fun bit was that the stock room had to carry excess inventory of some items to keep the unit running at all. When word of the audit came down two guys were s=dispatched to the motor pool to check out a large truck. All the excess inventory would be piled into the truck along with a case of C rations. The drivers were instructed to disappear into the boonies for a day or two until the audit was over. Great fun!

I remember a similar story involving a PDP-11 installed on a mezzanine in a warehouse that was experiencing random restarts. Eventually someone figured out that the event was occurring whenever a fork lift with a gasoline engine passed underneath the computer. The fault was with inadequate EMI suppression on the fork lift ignition wiring. The solution was to post a "No Lift Trucks" sign under the mezzanine.

Who is going to pay for all this stuff?

I recently read of a request by Foxconn that the State of Wisconsin apply for a grant of $246 million from the US Transportation Department to upgrade 19 miles of Interstate highway and associated access roads and such so Foxconn can operate driverless shuttle buses around its new factory. This works out to about $13 million per mile. Extrapolating this to the 47,000 miles of interstate highways in the US yields a total cost of $616 billion to upgrade the interstate system alone, or 37 times the discretionary budget of the whole of the Transportation Department for 2018. The Foxconn report can be found here: https://news.thomasnet.com/featured/foxconn-needs-driverless-infrastructure-for-wi-plant

Nothing new

When I was at college 50 years ago I picked up beer money by working as a transmitter minder for various broadcast stations around Pittsburgh. It was common practice there to use waste heat from the transmitters to heat the transmitter buildings.

There was one AM station that used plate modulation. The 5KW modulation transformer made enough noise that you could monitor the programming in cold weather by the sound coming from the heating vents. In the summer, when the transmitter was vented to the outside, you could hear it all over the antenna farm.

I'm with you Trevor. After 30+ years in the computer business, working at everything from developer to network management I'm fed up with the whole business.

This goes beyond security. It seems that nothing works right anymore--hardware, software, you name it. And please don't get me started on the quality of documentation these days.

For the last 5 years or so it seems I spend all my time on the telephone talking to idiots, trying to fix problems caused by their crappy products. No one cares about quality anymore. It seems everyone is so busy trying to become a billionaire by coming up with the next "Yo!" app that nobody is left to mind the engine room.

I started out life as an electrician. I'm ready to go back.

I've always thought that a cloud infrastructure dominated by the oligopoly of the big three providers presents unacceptable risks beyond the threat to data security for a particular user. Think what might happen if a terrorist or state-sponsored actor should somehow inject some kind of system-wide disruptive malware into one of these systems. Microsoft brags about how their security apparatus depends on a single global Active Directory instance. What if it became corrupted somehow? These systems present single points of failure and therefore attractive targets for all kinds of problems, both intentionally malicious and accidental. The mind boggles!

Sheep farming

There was a time when I very much enjoyed working in IT. Those days are long gone. The job no longer involves solving interesting problems and making the world a better place to live. I now spend all my time dealing with idiots. That's why I've decided to give up on being a computer geek and take up technical writing.

Just what we need--more cockups!

I wish people would start having conferences to figure out why our Information Society is already so hopelessly screwed up and what to do about it.

It seems to me that the FAA, not the FCC, would have the last word here