Craziest thing I ever saw was for an astronomical observatory. It consisted of about 66 dishes, each one the size of a house and full of different units producing data such as wind speed, humidity etc They had to save all this data in case anything went wrong and they had to correct the measurements. And this produced an awful lot of data. Being on top of a plateau in Chile, most hard disks didn't work because of the low air pressure. But it was still more cost efficient to buy 10, throw away 9 and use the 1 that did work rather than buy a ruggedised hard disk.
All well and good.
Except they used a 19 digit number to record a Julian date. That is all the microseconds that had passed since 4713 BCE. Even unix time from 1970 was only 12 digits! And they had to throw away the data after 2 or 3 days at most because they couldn't store all that data. And to make it worse, none of the data changed. It was just endless rows of the same number repeated again. They did not come up with any encoding solution, they just tried to save the raw data. I came up with a method in less than an hour which would have reduced the amount of data to 10% of its size in the normal case, and in the worst case not reduced it at all.
But it was ignored because the decision to record a Julian date to 19 digits was too prevalent in the system apparently. Or because it was Germany and I'm a woman. Fuck 'em.
All well and good.
Except they used a 19 digit number to record a Julian date. That is all the microseconds that had passed since 4713 BCE. Even unix time from 1970 was only 12 digits! And they had to throw away the data after 2 or 3 days at most because they couldn't store all that data. And to make it worse, none of the data changed. It was just endless rows of the same number repeated again. They did not come up with any encoding solution, they just tried to save the raw data. I came up with a method in less than an hour which would have reduced the amount of data to 10% of its size in the normal case, and in the worst case not reduced it at all.
But it was ignored because the decision to record a Julian date to 19 digits was too prevalent in the system apparently. Or because it was Germany and I'm a woman. Fuck 'em.
