Re: New-Gen "IT" People ... Think DISASTER

Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:

The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets of A4, fed through the document path sort edge first. It could reading up to

As a result, the design of the input document could be fairly free- form:I've seen them used:

- by delivery drivers where marks on the OMR document were printed using a standard lineprinter to encode the delivery note with details in both readable text and hyphens as OMR marks and with boxes for the van driver to mark the number of items of each type delivered. The delivery note was then brought back and scanned by the OMR to generate invoices.

- used by staff in the Wellington hospital heart unit to record case notes. Staff in theatre found this easier to do with OMR forms than with pen and paper when wearing their surgical kit in theatre. Their OMR forms were then read and added to the hospital's surgical notes database

- I've also seen examples used for car repairs: the OMR document was a copy of an exploded view of a carb, gearbox, etc with an OMR box associated with every item in the exploded view: this was for replacement parts control: the mechanic just added a mark into a box for every item he'd replaced before the form when through the OMR to update the spare parts database.

See BBC Radio 'Sounds' for a pretty good audio version

Cool.

Oh I know - we had a lot of multiple guess exam papers marked by those things when I was at school.

It's time for a 21st-century re-write:

This is the dawning of the age of the psychopath Age of the psychopaaaaaaath....

Speaking of songs, there's that one by Bruce Cockburn:

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

And people just love complexity. Remember, complexity is a weapon. The KISS principle is a countermeasure, but KISS advocates are loudly shouted down at every opportunity.

The all-card shop I started out in would buy cards wherever they could get them the most cheaply. This meant we got a lot of overruns and surplus, which enabled me to build an interesting collection of printed cards, which I still have somewhere.

We got a few million OMR cards from the phone company, apparently used by telephone operators to record details of the calls they handled.

Interesting. I was only aware of two implementations in NZ.

Its biggest drawback was that ICL never provided any explicit interface packages for languages such as COBOL. Fortunately the PLAN Macro Generator, which we'd already used to build a fairly comprehensive salary analysis application and so were familiar with the Macro Generator. As a result our our first step to implementing a set of COBOL Mark Reader interfaces for the Surgical Notes database system, which was written in COBOL, was to write a set of Macro Genersator macros to interface the Mark Reader to 1900 COBOL's suproutine calling structure.

Heh, heh .... yea ... more true than you know ! :-)

Looking, I keep being reminded of the early 20th century. Loons and anarchists and fanatics galore. Everyone was eager to roll the dice in hopes of coming out better. The TOLL however .......

Glad somebody noticed that ....

Yep. They RUIN it for so many others.

There is political/economic POWER in that Gordian knot of "complexity". It can hide SO many things.

Ok, "The World" IS very very complex these days. Not just a small handful of mega-powers. Political, military, economic power and the web of INTERACTIONS/LINKS make things VERY complicated. Maybe TOO complicated.

I don't think there's "A Solution" anymore.

So, like with "IT" issues, you HAVE to have several layers of backup. If The Global System cracks/breaks then you must have at least a functional alternative on the more local level. Won't be everything the big existing system offered - but it'll keep you alive and kinda competitive.

Any who DON'T have that ... they're goin' DOWN ... dark-ages down. Dung huts and plagues and tyrant kings down .....

Not entirely sure what this has to do with rPI's though ... however they may be the highest level of computing power left after a Fall.

Well, it's not entirely bullshit ... but it's RELEVANCE to What's Going On is often rather tenuous these days.

It's a sci/stat/theory look at "computing". However it rarely PRODUCES anything of relevance. At best it might tell you what just CAN'T be done with conventional computing (which may NOT be true for quantum computing).

Now some time back, esp what Turing was doing, that WAS more relevant to The Future. Possibilities, and Limits, were defined. Computing can't do EVERYTHING, but it CAN do a LOT ........

And, often, it's those little 13-year-old nerds in the basement who are most relevant as to what CAN be done. Lots of sugar/caffeine and "Dammit, how to get around this problem ?" attitude ..........

I think this one is different. We're not dealing with loons or anarchists. The people to watch for are very smart (in a frightening way), and have a well-thought-out game plan. I believe it all started with the hard swing to the right in the '80s, and the "Me Generation" that developed around it. Greed became redefined as a virtue, and money the only moral yardstick. Yes, these things have been around since the dawn of time, but never have they been so mainstream.

Thanks.

Sing it, brother!

Definitely too complicated. That's why, wherever possible, I eschew shiny solutions in favour of simple ones that work - and will keep working.

Stuff that works Stuff that holds up The kind of stuff you don't hang on the wall Stuff that's real Stuff you feel The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall -- Guy Clark

Yup. It's frighteningly close already - especially in our shining (and increasingly unaffordable) metropolises. Suggested reading:

Patrick Saint-Paul The Rat People: A Journey through Beijing's Forbidden Underground ISBN 9781551528038

Or just about anything by Cory Doctorow.

See another thread in this group about spammers rendering many more appropriate groups nearly unusable.