On 5/11/2007, at 14:16, Matthew Poole wrote:
On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Neil Gardner wrote:
Anyone else pretty pleased and impressed with how well the people and organisations involved dealt with a failure in the automated systems? Personally it makes me a bit happier to realise that some genuinely critical services have pretty solid backup processes that by all accounts so far were followed and performed satisfactorily.
I'll chip in here with something that may or may not amuse/enrage/ bemuse people on the list: Some communities, especially ones that are becoming affluent as townies move out of the cities in order to get a better lifestyle, are complaining about the traditional volunteer fire siren - the big pole-mounted beastie that is fit to wake the dead. They don't like the noise, it wakes the children, they look ugly, etc. A consequence of the paging failure in Auckland/Northland is that those sirens were the only way of notifying volunteer fire fighters in affected communities of a call. Take those sirens away, and it'd be back to the old telephone tree, assuming that the communications centres could find a phone number for someone in the brigade to kick it off in the first place.
Moral? If someone objects to something because it offends their aesthetics, consider the consequences if it's removed and things break. Some "ugly" solutions have their place, if you have need for a truly robust system.
I'd like to have a militant approach to such silliness. Take down the siren, set fire to their house and say "Gee, wouldn't it be great if we had some siren that could alert the firemen to the call?". Same goes with power pylons. Remove them all, especially the ones to their house. I don't have much patience for people who want all the benefits to modern life but none of the downsides, and I still look at people building on the unused land next to railway lines and wonder how long it'll take for them to figure out why nobody had that 'brilliant' idea before. -- Phillip Hutchings http://www.sitharus.com/