6 ms·

So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appe

by pp19dd 8y ago

So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would never happen. But overall, I get the feeling that people today are afraid of things they can't vendor out, things they can't replace cookie-cutter style. Sometimes that concern is justified, when you think in terms of support spanning decades, but overall I see it as a vertical integration of bureaucracy all around us. It's not just this control system, it's everything. Was it Caltrans that hit a modernization roadblock because the agency hand-built railway sensors and circuits around that same time and now can't find replacement parts because people don't build things in-shop anymore?

appleiigs 8y ago
They should get their students to build the replacement.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  And not pay them 1.5-2 million [minus hardware], I wager.
  - dsamarin 8y ago
    How about 20 raspberry pis connected to the Internet and pay them 2 thousand?
    - Groxx 8y ago
      And then explain why their heater hacked the entire network, or helped DDoS the governor's site during an election? Probably not the best idea to hook things like this up to the internet.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
wrs 8y ago
Three (oh crap, closer to four) decades ago our high school minicomputer (DG Nova 2) handled all the grade reporting, class and athletics schedules, and alumni development mailings — all programmed and operated by a few students, in BASIC no less. It was a rare and invaluable experience to be essentially a trusted professional at that age.
iamgopal 8y ago
Every company and government try to build wall of laws, standards, compliance, safety etc to save their ass and also so that they can loot it from inside.
- Shacklz 8y ago
  > so that they can loot it from inside. That's one way to view it, another point of view would be that all those people whose jobs we're automating away still get to work somewhere doing something.
zbaylin 8y ago
I worked for my local school district (second largest one in Georgia) and wrote production software while in high school. Much of it is still in use. That was only two years ago.
coldtea 8y ago
>So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would never happen. What remarkable faith? It's a program to start/stop AC/heat units based on temperatyre readings, not to send people to Mars. A talented high school student can write one today, and do it with a Rasberry Pi and for much less than $1 million (more like 5-10K). Not as a student, but as a temp in a secondary education unit, I maintained and updated the payroll system used to pay ~50 schools and over 1000 teachers every month. It was a VB/MS SQL thing written by another temp a few years earlier, but it did the job.
- pp19dd 8y ago
  Rhetorical question: were you a licensed CPP, CPA or an actuary when you were a temp in your secondary education unit? That's literally my point. Yes, these things can all be done by amateurs. By tinkerers. We all here know it. We've done it. You've done it. Simple devices with telemetry and some logic. Simple programs that do complex things in the aggregate. Take it to your back yard, and either one of us or a highschool student could make a traffic light cheaper than $250,000 - $500,000 per intersection (WA state estimate). But neither one of us could build, install and maintain a quarter million of them, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to mobilize an army of nerds to make it scalable. Yeah, for all we know a PE was involved in oversight of the project. That's an unknown that TV reporters didn't dig into and should have, because I think the story would discover a much more relaxed time. But if one wasn't involved, I'm saying it took faith on behalf of the administration to assume responsibility for risk in backing this project, whether consciously considered or not. And there are risks with electrical projects beyond the computers, namely things catching on fire. What were the safeguards here? What if a logic error burned out a fan? What if someone hesitated to use the radios during a regular comm window out of habit and there was a medical emergency? Faith here was well-founded because obviously nothing burned down and no one died. But who today would accept that risk without going to a licensed professional?
  - ValleZ 8y ago
    Seems you have to much faith in licensed professionals.
datavirtue 8y ago
Yeah. Why have a high school kid program an Amiga when you can drop $2MM of someone else's money on something just as good?

by pp19dd 8y ago

appleiigs 8y ago

They should get their students to build the replacement.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
drdeadringer 8y ago
And not pay them 1.5-2 million [minus hardware], I wager.
- dsamarin 8y ago
  How about 20 raspberry pis connected to the Internet and pay them 2 thousand?
  - Groxx 8y ago
    And then explain why their heater hacked the entire network, or helped DDoS the governor's site during an election? Probably not the best idea to hook things like this up to the internet.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

wrs 8y ago

Three (oh crap, closer to four) decades ago our high school minicomputer (DG Nova 2) handled all the grade reporting, class and athletics schedules, and alumni development mailings — all programmed and operated by a few students, in BASIC no less. It was a rare and invaluable experience to be essentially a trusted professional at that age.

iamgopal 8y ago

Every company and government try to build wall of laws, standards, compliance, safety etc to save their ass and also so that they can loot it from inside.

Shacklz 8y ago
> so that they can loot it from inside. That's one way to view it, another point of view would be that all those people whose jobs we're automating away still get to work somewhere doing something.

zbaylin 8y ago

I worked for my local school district (second largest one in Georgia) and wrote production software while in high school. Much of it is still in use. That was only two years ago.

coldtea 8y ago

>So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would never happen. What remarkable faith? It's a program to start/stop AC/heat units based on temperatyre readings, not to send people to Mars. A talented high school student can write one today, and do it with a Rasberry Pi and for much less than $1 million (more like 5-10K). Not as a student, but as a temp in a secondary education unit, I maintained and updated the payroll system used to pay ~50 schools and over 1000 teachers every month. It was a VB/MS SQL thing written by another temp a few years earlier, but it did the job.

pp19dd 8y ago
Rhetorical question: were you a licensed CPP, CPA or an actuary when you were a temp in your secondary education unit? That's literally my point. Yes, these things can all be done by amateurs. By tinkerers. We all here know it. We've done it. You've done it. Simple devices with telemetry and some logic. Simple programs that do complex things in the aggregate. Take it to your back yard, and either one of us or a highschool student could make a traffic light cheaper than $250,000 - $500,000 per intersection (WA state estimate). But neither one of us could build, install and maintain a quarter million of them, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to mobilize an army of nerds to make it scalable. Yeah, for all we know a PE was involved in oversight of the project. That's an unknown that TV reporters didn't dig into and should have, because I think the story would discover a much more relaxed time. But if one wasn't involved, I'm saying it took faith on behalf of the administration to assume responsibility for risk in backing this project, whether consciously considered or not. And there are risks with electrical projects beyond the computers, namely things catching on fire. What were the safeguards here? What if a logic error burned out a fan? What if someone hesitated to use the radios during a regular comm window out of habit and there was a medical emergency? Faith here was well-founded because obviously nothing burned down and no one died. But who today would accept that risk without going to a licensed professional?
- ValleZ 8y ago
  Seems you have to much faith in licensed professionals.

datavirtue 8y ago

Yeah. Why have a high school kid program an Amiga when you can drop $2MM of someone else's money on something just as good?