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Admin
That's the problem with "Purpose Built" facilities...eventually the purpose goes away, and you're stuck with something that far less useful than just a generic space.
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| planning ahead for all the comment space i'm going to need | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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TRWTF is that they "hired" (interns usually work for little to no money) a couple of interns and did nothing of use with said interns. It's free labor people!
Admin
It would have been worse if the room question was the size of a single DVD.
CAPTCHA nisl.. didn't he fight frodo in lord of the rings?
Admin
So, where exactly is the WTF here? A room built 30 years ago is no longer suitable for its task because technology has moved on? So what? Right now there are architects all over the world designing rooms for computer equipment that is obviously going to be obsolete in 30 years time. Unless precognition is a requirement I don't really see it can be any other way.
As for the "solitary confinement" I would absolutely love it!!! The chance to have an area all to myself, bar some random kid who never speaks, sounds absolutely divine.
Admin
It's even better when you've been doing it for 300 years; PERME Waltham Abbey started off as a fulling mill, was then adapted for making vegetable oil and then in 1660s it was converted to manufacture gunpowder for use in the Second Dutch War.
It ended up - until its closure in the 1990s - being used for propellant research, the structures originally designed for nitroglycerine production were adapted for use in rocket testing.
But then, that's the point. Things can generally be re-purposed; you have a site that was originally for making cloth for an Abbey in the C12th ending up being used for military research.
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Free is not valued.
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The VAX part reminds me of replacing a VAX mainframe in a factory in the UK with a 486 PC.
Admin
Amusingly, some purpose-built facilities/standards remain... the 19 inch server rack is directly descended from the 19 inch wide relay racks originally used in the late 1800s for railroad track signaling systems. Most of that equipment would probably still mount in modern racks without issue. They definitely outlasted the punchcard, another late-1800s IT invention.
Admin
A room built 30 years ago for a purpose so specific that it can't do anything else is totally a WTF - designing a room like in the WTF above certainly qualifies. The real WTF, however, is the attitude - a room is a room, so if the purpose goes away, you should be able to adapt, but they didn't here.
Admin
Well, a 19" rack is fairly generic, which helps: all it does is hold stuff that's 19" wide and a standard height.
Admin
Maybe its a European vs American thing. When I drive by Picatinny Arsenal, I see tons of abandoned buildings and facilities left to rot and decay because the project they were built for is now over....Though the "Railgun Testing Facility" does look kinda cool from the road.
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Sorry, TRWTF is still this commenting system -- re-post to keep the conversation thread intact...
Maybe its a European vs American thing. When I drive by Picatinny Arsenal, I see tons of abandoned buildings and facilities left to rot and decay because the project they were built for is now over....Though the "Railgun Testing Facility" does look kinda cool from the road.
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Yes, but in this case the shelves were apparently just tall enough to accomodate punch cards, which makes them pretty useless for much of anything else.
As they did, in fact, evidently use the room for something else -- office space for two interns -- the shelves must not have filled the room. But they wasted a bunch of space.
That's why I don't like built-in furniture, wiring or plumbing that cannot be reached without tearing out walls, etc. I know that someday I'll want to turn that bedroom into an extra bathroom, or new technology will require that I install new cabling for the TV, or maybe I just want to add a new light switch. I'd like if it I don't have to burn the house down and start over to do that.
Which, by the way, is why I do so much better at writing software than at carpentry. When you cut a board wrong, you have to throw it away and get another, maybe dismantling a bunch of existing structure. When you write a line of code wrong, you just hit a few backspaces and re-type.
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The real WTF is that the article does not show the source code:
#define ' _
function string Yesterday's() {
}
private void Today's_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
}
This is a programming forum, you should let us see the codes! How can we comment on the WTFs? Is it because of the illegal characters? I fixed that already.
Admin
Commenter 1 (unregistered): OMG FRIST!!!1 captcha: imaloser
Grammar Nazi 1: dimely? completley? lern2spell!
Grammar Nazi 2: you improperly used gerunds and your punctuation is abysmal. I'm never coming back!
Poster 4: FIST!!!1 were the shelves wooden? did anyone take pictures of things on them?
Poster 5: who is Mike? Is he Chris or did someone fail at anonymizing? I bet someone made this entire story up. Jake sucks and I'm never coming back!
<fin>Admin
Latex glove dispensers and punch cards.
Aren't those objects decades apart?
Admin
even mythbusters use abandoned buildings/roads/etc for their experiments. If the shelves are too small to hold anything, use a hammer and replace them with something useful.
Admin
I really shouldn't be reading comments like this while drinking soda...You nearly ruined my keyboard!
Admin
That's kind of ironic, seeing as how we in the US have piles and piles of land compared to england.
Admin
Well, my TRWTF comment was that their attitude kept that room unused for decades.
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I thought that a lot of houses in england have their pipes on the outside, painted purple.
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Dim lighting.. deep shelves... latex glove dispenser...
Am I the only one who expected to find out that the room used to be a morgue?
Admin
Slightly OT but reminded me of an IT shop I did some work in years ago. The office supply closet was in a vault with a 1' thick steel door, very similar to a bank vault (purpose-built, so not OT I guess).
Apparently, this former bank was within the city limits of New Orleans, almost right to the border of Metairie (neighboring suburb), next to a railroad track. Bank robbers would wait until a train was crossing to rob the bank, because the call would go to the Orleans parish sheriff's office who would be conveniently blocked from a timely response by the train. They got hit too many times and closed up shop, leaving the highly secure office supply room. :-)
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It's England - the Thames hasn't frozen over in 100 years or so.
Admin
Still, Jay was on about plumbing and wiring inside the walls, unreachable. I hope he's not planning to run his wiring outside his house.
Admin
Well, not really. It's entirely the way round I'd expect it. If you have lots of land, you're going to care less about re-using it. Having first double checked Picatinny Arsenal was in the US (it's in NJ apparently).
It should be noted Waltham Abbey looks a lot like that now, it's been closed since the late 90s. Part of it is a museum and the other part of it is a SSI (some of the more interesting bits really, considering very few people are allowed back there and it's largely overgrown).
Admin
It is indeed apocryphal. I won't get into the other errors in it, but the shuttle addendum states the design was because it had to pass through a tunnel (unidentified tunnel, by the way) that was only "slightly wider than the track". This is impossible as no tunnel is built "just slightly wider" than 4 feet 8 inches. Besides, the SRB's are much bigger than that anyway (just slightly more than 12 feet in diameter). Even if a tunnel was a problem on one route to KSC, there are a number of other overland routes they could have used that wouldn't have required using a tunnel.
Even if a tunnel proved unavoidable on a cross-continental trip, they could have gone straight south to the Gulf and dropped them on barges to be taken to Florida.
Admin
I'm not sure that the Hudson has ever frozen either (not recently), but my pipes certainly have. I can't imagine that it's much different in the UK.
Admin
The phone service guy thought it was inventive, but laughed and wouldn't tell us why...
We thought it was funny, until we got our phone bills, and everyone was charged for every call that everyone made on any of the phones (the clerk at the local phone co was not amused when we had to sort that out).
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That, and track width wasn't determined by some random old rule of thumb. They needed to be wide enough to keep the center of gravity from making the train tip over on turns.
Admin
Why even a barge? They're FREAKING ROCKETS! Just launch them over to the Cape!
Admin
Maybe not in New York City; but near Albany it freezes over every winter. Icebreakers come.
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Allrighty then I see my true calling in life, to design rooms that are built for future technologies! I can build something and not have to explain why it is the way it is and not have to explain myself because obviously they just do not see far enough ahead!
Admin
Allrighty then I see my true calling in life, to design rooms that are built for future technologies! I can build something and not have to explain why it is the way it is a because obviously they just do not see far enough ahead!
Admin
They would, but they are one use only. Though I suppose they could be launched over and then refueled -- from a barge.
Admin
Why can't this room do anything else? Just rip the shelves out and use it as storage of some sort. I'm just confused how shelving took so long to put together that the project was scrapped before they finished the room.
The WTF might be that they'd never repurposed it other than sticking a couple of mostly unsupervised interns in it.
Admin
The perfect example of wrongness from the story is that "VAX" room. Instead of ripping up the floor and putting something like an employee gym or a cafeteria in there, they simply continued using it for its original purpose: i.e. housing the server that performs the tasks the VAX had been obtained for and that its replacement continued performing.
Completely boneheaded property and facilities management.
Admin
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It's "12 foot". The plural is in the "12" bit.
"slightly wider than the track" doesn't mean "slightly wider than the gauge of the track"; it means "slightly wider than the total width plus clearance of the trains that pass along that route".
Choosing a route isn't a matter of saying "we'll take this one!" For cargo like that, you have many constraints, particularly with regard to locality of conurbations and the interests of lobbyists. So, as one of many alternative routes, it's highly likely the dimensions of the smallest tunnel across all those routes were factored into the design of the booster rockets.
In other words, don't attempt to debunk what you don't understand.
Admin
However, in building contractor land, such things do not exist: pretend I never said anything.
When I design my own house, it will have recessed conduits for wiring and plumbing in the load-bearing walls. When something needs to be routed away from them, they'll be concealed in conduit proud of the wall. It's possible and highly desirable, because it means you don't need to be multiskilled in order to solve the task.
With regard to the GP: unlike in the US, a "house" in the UK is something that won't collapse in on itself when the big bad wolf comes huffing and puffing along.
Admin
Pot...meet Kettle.