Sunday, April 05, 2015

CITY COMPUTER FLUMMERY Humor: LETTER FROM MAINE From Dr. Dwight Hines, Ph.D.

From: Dwight Hines < dwight.hines@gmail.com>
Date: March 26, 2015 4:46:57 PM EDT
To: Ed Slavin < easlavin@aol.com>
Subject: Re: Request No. 2015-67: Pattern of City Open Records Violations; Florida AG Mediation of City's illegal attempt to charge for simple IT search re: Commissioner Leanna A.S. Freeman -- All text messages, e-mails, notes and web searches during City Commission regular and special meetings, December 1, 2015-date

Sure.

d

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 3:04 PM, Ed Slavin wrote:
May I publish your email as humor article!

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 26, 2015, at 2:08 PM, Dwight Hines < dwight.hines@gmail.com> wrote:

I love it. Just think, you will be able to demonstrate in court that a 9th grader from Maine* could retrieve the emails, assuming the Emails are in English and stored in an electronic system established within the past 10 years, and are not irreversibly encrypted, and are not electronically corrupted or distorted, within 3 American minutes for e-copies, with more time required for hard copies, like 30 seconds.

Ah yes, i remember when the head of administration told me that there computers did not talk to their printers. He did so with a straight face.

Ed, glad to hear from you and I would still like to know if St. Augustine's "information systems" are as expensive as they were 5 years ago. Are the IT staff, who still don't know the standard ways of computing cpu time and employee directly related time**, still enjoying going to exotic places to earn their required Continuing Education credits? Is there still no monitoring of internet use to, at the least, screen out the real ugly stuff? I would love to look at their logs by IT user to see who spends the most time web surfing during working hours. To give the staff credit, and this may apply to the county more than the city, after four hours of "acceptable" surfing, they must get truly bored and need to check the porno for a "mental break".

Ed, part of the problem is that the size of data sets has slowly developed into massive beastlies from the time we bought our first computers, back in 19ought 80 or so, til the present day. The data set you requested is likely measured in kilobytes (1,000 bytes). These are trivial and don't require enough CPU or operator time as to be billable. Now, if you were asking for Mega or Giga or Tera or even Pico sized copies, there would be no concern about size until the Giga and Tera are reached and you had computers built in last three to five years. If you were asking the City to provide you with Fourier based calculations and approximations for the Fort in St. Augustine to fire 18 of their cannon accurately at incoming ships coming from 800 different directions, each firing depending on temperature and humidity, calculations of estimate that take real horsepower and, hence, CPU time, requiring the employee to be at the console to changes, then you might be able to use enough CPU and actual employee time to charge money for the results.

Have a great day,

D

Footnotes:

*Maine Public Schools have led the nation and the world in teaching their students computers and information systems going back to when Senator Angus King was Governor. They are suppled with an individual computer with a wide variety of software as their own and the teachers integrate the specific subject with the computer, and vice-versa. Maine still leads the nation and the world and I've yet to hear a tax-payer up here complain about the extra costs.

**Employee direct time is when they must be there at the keyboard of voice input to make decisions that the computer can not make. So, in extracting emails το respond to public records request, the IT staff must, pursuant to Florida Administrative Rules, have the software in place to do just that. A request for copies would require that the operator call, say, Routine Open Emails, provide the Commissioner's name, dates of interest, and go drink and surf the web for exciting porno. The employee direct time required is less than one minute, far less depending on typing speeds. Because the Florida Rules require that software be public records friendly or made so at the first upgrade of the system creating and processing and storing the records, and since St. Augustine loves to spend money upgrading their systems, even when a cost-benefit analysis does not approach justification for the particular upgrade, it appears to me that St. Augustine has made your case against them for violation of rules and statutes with irrefutable facts. Call the jailer, or pitch them overboard. At the least, publish a humor article about it.

1 comment:

Warren Celli said...

Alas professor...

Nothing for your students to do here.

Saint Augustine computer information is indeed irreversibly encrypted, electronically corrupted, and distorted beyond belief. Why? Because it is based on using garbage in garbage out deception protocols registered in Killobites (concealing 1000 bites that cause death by a thousand cuts).

Killobites are not a trivial measure.

They are first a measure of the garbage in garbage out deceptive and deflective ruse information that intentionally goes into the computers hard drive.

And they are second a measure of harassments that cause slow and early death committed by fake hero Judas sell out cops at the direction of gangsters that have immorally and illegally hijacked the city government for their own selfish gain.

Students are not needed here professor.

What we need is for the pretend Green Wall Of $ilence 'adults' to get up off their knees, look the truth squarely in the eye, and stop the bullying murderous genocide.