Credit: The Atlantic
There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.
The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.
Shortly before midnight on April 10, the counter exceeded that number, resulting in chaos. Because the counter was used to generate a unique identifier for each call, new calls were rejected. And because the […]
It’s a lack of methodology. Agile is part of the cause. When they outsourced to India they threw away a whole generation of very well-trained people. That knowledge was not transferred. Everywhere I go in large organizations all I see is spaghetti code.
Skype was down widely yesterday in its computer to phone system. It made it impossible to do my scheduled podcast. Very annoying.
I get frustrated with sensational headlines that have very little to do with the heart of an article. This happens a lot in science journalism. Great piece though.
Not a perfect piece to be sure, but important because it is one of the first reports on this issue. In terms of tracking trends that’s significant, and why I ran it.
I agree completely with your decision to run this. Thank you. Very informative. It was just an opportunity for me gripe about one of my pet peeves – sensational (read: miseading) writing about science, especially headlines. I see this tendency as contributing to the mistrust of science in general. Maybe it’s just me 🙂
This code problem exists more and more and I would rather have an old Model T than one of these newer cars, and would never fly on an airplane that used any type of computer technology. I also don’t like my TV set to be dependent on a computer: I’d rather have the old tube sets back when you could go to your local store and fix your own set if a tube was burned out. I don’t like any of these new modern technologies. They are also influenced by sun flares which can knock out any computer system in the world. Give me the old mechanical devices any day of the week.
If anyone wants to do some research on the subject I suggest suspiciousobservers.org or observatoryproject.com which both have some very interesting information about these solar flares can not only effect our computers and cell phones and other computerized devices, but also the connection between the flares and our volcanic eruptions and hurricanes here on earth because there is a direct connection between them, all involving not just x-rays but also the plasma/electrical connections involved.