"Death by Powerpoint"

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 01:30:48 -0800
From: Thomas Leavitt <thomas () thomasleavitt org>
Subject: "Death by Powerpoint"
To: dave () farber net

The LA Times ran an article documenting the process of investigating the
crash of the Columbia. It ends thusly:

***

When accident investigators sought out a report documenting details of the
shuttle's design or performance, they often found only PowerPoint
presentations.

Without the knowledgeable voice of the engineers who had originally
presented them, the slides were meaningless.

The board's investigators soon coined a phrase for this new institutional
amnesia.

"Death by PowerPoint."

***

Full article:

The fate of a wing shaped by politics
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-shuttle24dec24,1,7680698.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

An ironic twist compounding the normal problem of degrading digital storage
media and incompatible formats.

The article also mentions the interesting fact that the shuttles flight
recorder uses a technology the data recovery folk hadn't regularly worked
with in three decades: 1 inch tape.

Kind of scary to think that the shuttles would be dependent on such... on
the other hand, the tape was recoverable; I wonder if a more modern data
storage mechanism would have survived the fall to earth.

Regards,
Thomas Leavitt


--
Thomas Leavitt, Sr. Systems Admin For Hire
Resume at http://www.thomasleavitt.org/personal/resume/
Phone: 408-591-3342 / Email: thomas () thomasleavitt org / Fax: 815-371-2804

Wired since 1981. Internet-enabled since 1990. Web-enabled since 1993.
Older, wiser, and poorer, post-crash. :)

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