5 ms·

My favourite example of this is that for Babylon 5 the lawyers from Warner Bros insisted that the showrunners not retain any copies of the digital models becaus

by wmil 2y ago

My favourite example of this is that for Babylon 5 the lawyers from Warner Bros insisted that the showrunners not retain any copies of the digital models because they were WB property and WB would archive them. When they started working on B5 The Lost Tales, WB had lost all of the digital files.

yapyap 2y ago
Truly and authentically lost tales
walterbell 2y ago
It's sad when requests to official and unofficial archives are lost.
quitit 2y ago
This is also a common side effect of corporate policies that favour short term profits rather than retaining staff for the long term. I see this scenario play out constantly: 1. A team or staff member has a project's data located on their user account or hardware. 2. The team or staff member are made redundant when there is a dip in earnings. 3. IT make a backup of the user account/s and wipe the hardware, and because it's older usually move it on. 4. Months or years later that data is needed and at this point no one at the company actually knows where the data is - and even if they find something, they don't know if that's the latest or the full version. Now this wouldn't be a problem if there was a decent overlap in staff retention, but that simply isn't the case these days. Writing better storage policies doesn't help - it's the understaffed nature of their businesses which mean that there is no time for staff to keep up with basic data housekeeping. The types of data that clients should have on hand, but nevertheless have asked me to supply, are frankly embarrassing.
- NERD_ALERT 2y ago
  What company is allowing employees to have so much data locally? Almost all work is stored in a cloud now. Documents, spreadsheets, design docs, code… If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    > If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices. They probably just used now-outdated practices before those practices were outdated. This happened in the past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really think it's their fault for not knowing in advance how much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how outdated. Sheesh.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - codetrotter 2y ago
        Ah yes, git and mercurial – the perfect place to save 3TB of binary data that changes weekly.
      - LoganDark 2y ago
        You know tech savvy was not really a thing back then for the everyday uneducated person, right? You kind of had to have been a geek to have known this stuff. There are a number of dead-simple cloud solutions today, but you cannot just scold, say, WB for not using a company cloud back in checks Wikipedia 1993!
        mulmen 2y ago
        Ok but preserving media seems like a thing Warner Brothers should be really good at. Why did Warner Brothers have an everyday uneducated person in charge of archival?
        LoganDark 2y ago
        Why would an archivist back then happen to know computers that intimately? I'd be surprised if the average archivist knew much more than how to do data entry... and I wouldn't even hold it against them if they happened not to know how to do data entry.
- btrettel 2y ago
  There's been discussion on HN of "smuggling" the lost information back into the organization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452
- lizard 2y ago
  When I get frustrated enough to consider putting a kill switch in my work, I cool off by reminding myself that would prompt them to make a huge effort recovering from backups and have someone go through my code to get it working again. If I just do what they ask me instead, it will slowly decay without anyone having any idea what it even does, until its too late to fix or recover anything.
7thaccount 2y ago
Someone also redid all the ships from scratch I think in modern software and has to get rid of it due to WB. I still think B5 ships are some of the best in all of Scifi.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  I'm a big fan of the Vorlon ships, but I think The Expanse has the best space battles. (I also like the Lexx spaceship, though the series was somewhat of a mess)
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    Expanse battles were far more realistic of course. The B5 Star Fury combat scenes were pretty ground breaking for the time though. Expanse ships (at least where I'm at in the book series and show - kind of early) are a lot closer to current human tech of course. In B5 humanity had tech that was mostly believable (still used rotating mass for gravity), but you got to see some very unique looking ships from the other species like the Minbari and Shadows that truly looked alien and unsettling.
    - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
      Back in the day, I was proud of how they'd used Amigas to render the B5 graphics as I also was an Amiga user.

by wmil 2y ago

yapyap 2y ago

Truly and authentically lost tales

walterbell 2y ago

It's sad when requests to official and unofficial archives are lost.

quitit 2y ago

This is also a common side effect of corporate policies that favour short term profits rather than retaining staff for the long term. I see this scenario play out constantly: 1. A team or staff member has a project's data located on their user account or hardware. 2. The team or staff member are made redundant when there is a dip in earnings. 3. IT make a backup of the user account/s and wipe the hardware, and because it's older usually move it on. 4. Months or years later that data is needed and at this point no one at the company actually knows where the data is - and even if they find something, they don't know if that's the latest or the full version. Now this wouldn't be a problem if there was a decent overlap in staff retention, but that simply isn't the case these days. Writing better storage policies doesn't help - it's the understaffed nature of their businesses which mean that there is no time for staff to keep up with basic data housekeeping. The types of data that clients should have on hand, but nevertheless have asked me to supply, are frankly embarrassing.

NERD_ALERT 2y ago
What company is allowing employees to have so much data locally? Almost all work is stored in a cloud now. Documents, spreadsheets, design docs, code… If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  > If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices. They probably just used now-outdated practices before those practices were outdated. This happened in the past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really think it's their fault for not knowing in advance how much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how outdated. Sheesh.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - codetrotter 2y ago
      Ah yes, git and mercurial – the perfect place to save 3TB of binary data that changes weekly.
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      You know tech savvy was not really a thing back then for the everyday uneducated person, right? You kind of had to have been a geek to have known this stuff. There are a number of dead-simple cloud solutions today, but you cannot just scold, say, WB for not using a company cloud back in checks Wikipedia 1993!
      - mulmen 2y ago
        Ok but preserving media seems like a thing Warner Brothers should be really good at. Why did Warner Brothers have an everyday uneducated person in charge of archival?
        LoganDark 2y ago
        Why would an archivist back then happen to know computers that intimately? I'd be surprised if the average archivist knew much more than how to do data entry... and I wouldn't even hold it against them if they happened not to know how to do data entry.
btrettel 2y ago
There's been discussion on HN of "smuggling" the lost information back into the organization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452
lizard 2y ago
When I get frustrated enough to consider putting a kill switch in my work, I cool off by reminding myself that would prompt them to make a huge effort recovering from backups and have someone go through my code to get it working again. If I just do what they ask me instead, it will slowly decay without anyone having any idea what it even does, until its too late to fix or recover anything.

7thaccount 2y ago

Someone also redid all the ships from scratch I think in modern software and has to get rid of it due to WB. I still think B5 ships are some of the best in all of Scifi.

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
I'm a big fan of the Vorlon ships, but I think The Expanse has the best space battles. (I also like the Lexx spaceship, though the series was somewhat of a mess)
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  Expanse battles were far more realistic of course. The B5 Star Fury combat scenes were pretty ground breaking for the time though. Expanse ships (at least where I'm at in the book series and show - kind of early) are a lot closer to current human tech of course. In B5 humanity had tech that was mostly believable (still used rotating mass for gravity), but you got to see some very unique looking ships from the other species like the Minbari and Shadows that truly looked alien and unsettling.
  - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
    Back in the day, I was proud of how they'd used Amigas to render the B5 graphics as I also was an Amiga user.