Oakland Changes License Plate Reader Policy After Filling 80GB Hard Drive 275
An anonymous reader writes: License plate scanners are a contentious subject, generating lots of debate over what information the government should have, how long they should have it, and what they should do with it. However, it seems policy changes are driven more by practical matters than privacy concerns. Earlier this year, Ars Technica reported that the Oakland Police Department retained millions of records going back to 2010. Now, the department has implemented a six-month retention window, with older data being thrown out. Why the change? They filled up the 80GB hard drive on the Windows XP desktop that hosted the data, and it kept crashing.
Why not just buy a cheap drive with an order of magnitude more storage space? Sgt. Dave Burke said, "We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you're going to drown in the amount of data that's being stored."
Why not just buy a cheap drive with an order of magnitude more storage space? Sgt. Dave Burke said, "We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you're going to drown in the amount of data that's being stored."
Bureaucracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bureaucracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah but the amount of occurrences where it does good is swamped by those where it does awful things to everyone.
There are good reasons for gvt bureaucracy, rememb (Score:5, Insightful)
There are, however, good reasons for bureaucracy in government. If government officials can just do whatever they think makes sense, without any accountability to the people, you end up with North Korea. Efficient, but at a cost.
One reason we have processes in place is so that Sgt Blow doesn't buy a $5000, 200 GB hard drive from his brother. Another reason is that doing bad things on a wide scale costs money. With specific budget items, the citizens of Oakland could decide to cut the budget for license plate readers to $0, and end the program.
So all the red tape in government in the US is inefficient and annoying, but it's there for a good reason - a few good reasons in fact. Where we get into trouble is in when we pretend it doesn't exist. Like a few years ago, people saying "we can all have healthcare like VA provides, they do a great job". Well, the VA is a giant government bureaucracy, with all of the problems that come with a giant government bureaucracy. It's when we pretend that more government bureaucracy will make things more efficient, less costly, or faster that we get in trouble.
so the red tape means (Score:3, Insightful)
1) they can spy on everyone in perpetuity
2) they can't make rational buying decisions
Yay?
Re:There are good reasons for gvt bureaucracy, rem (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and project management, properly-tracked procurements, and approval processes make sense; bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't. I'd just as soon have them start troubleshooting, identify the problem, carry out a Kepner-Tregoe decision analysis to figure on how to address it, and then buy drives on Amazon to load up an empty SAN chassis and mount storage through an HBA. If the drives meet spec--not "oh these are cheap, they'll probably explode under load," but "We were going to get WD Caviar Black drives from HP, but Amazon sells them for $80 instead of $350; we're buying them from Amazon and self-insuring because we have 400 of them"--then go for it.
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bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't.
You clearly are not aware of how bad a no-bid procurement process can get. Sadly I've seen it in action and let's say it would put third world countries to shame. Not that the current system eliminates the problem, but it does reduce it's magnitude.
Also, you can't do social engineering w/o approved vendors sources (not that I approve of social engineering by government, but apparently a large majority of people seem to want it). Things like minority or woman owned businesses contract/sub-contract set-as
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There are decision systems you can use to make clean, traceable decisions. Analytical hierarchy is basically a pile of shit; pugh matrices evolve to weighted pugh matrices, which then evolve to attribute-baselined weighted pugh matrices--what Kepner-Tregoe claims as their "decision analysis" process.
Pugh matrices take a baseline alternative and rate each alternative as better, worse, or similar to it. Weighted pugh matrices specify, numerically, how important each attribute is. The KT Decision Analysis
1 hard drive. Hire a consultant or go to Walmart? (Score:3)
I see where you're going and in some sense I agree. I had to laugh at this, though:
> approval processes make sense; bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't. I'd just as soon have them start troubleshooting, identify the problem, carry out a Kepner-Tregoe decision analysis to figure on how to address it,
The problem is that the 80 GB drive in a PC is full. Super Walmart (an approved supplier) sells Western Digital 1 TB replacement drives for $100. They could either:
A) Stop at Walmart while they're
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B) Carry out a Bulshet-Hokey determination analysis process, with the help of a consultant.
Actually, those decisions were made when they selected their contracts. They now have these endless procurement processes which they should probably shorten.
The concept of no-bid contracts versus endless bidding wars is separate from this bureaucratic procurement process. You've conflated the spot purchase of a hard drive, which doesn't need any sort of contract bid, with a comment made about contract bidding. Your argument is thus ridiculous and unfounded.
unless it's a contract for hard drives, but funny (Score:3)
> Your argument is thus ridiculous and unfounded.
It's not really an argument, it just struck me as funny. Like a Dilbert comic. I used to work for the government, so I'm familiar with ridiculousness in procurement.
> The concept of no-bid contracts versus endless bidding wars is separate from this bureaucratic procurement process. You've conflated the spot purchase of a hard drive, which doesn't need any sort of contract bid, with a comment made about contract bidding.
Well if it's a contract to provide
Re:There are good reasons for gvt bureaucracy, rem (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait a second.
I don't mind paperwork.
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it. Paperwork's done, tracked, everyone's happy.
Bureaucracy is fine as long as it doesn't become ridiculous. Processes need to be streamlined and efficient. When they become cumbersome and tedious, they need to be rethought.
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Wait a second. I don't mind paperwork.
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it.
Yeah, let that non-IT guy do the procurement process. I mean, how much worse can it get than what they’ve already done (implementing a critical system to run on a desktop) anyway?
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In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it. Paperwork's done, tracked, everyone's happy.
No, in this case, Sergeant what's-his-name looked at the time he'd have to spend filling out a purchase requisition and decided the data just wasn't worth that. Five years of historical license plate location data is not as valuable to his department's investigations as a coffee break.
What are license plate scanners actually good for? The present location of stolen cars. Maybe some location data for crimes currently under investigation (ie, a few weeks). Not last year's crimes. Strangely, this is what
Re:There are good reasons for gvt bureaucracy, rem (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahhh...
But the Sergeant really does not want another hard drive on the existing PC
He wants to force a situation where they consider 'long term needs' and end up with multiple image processing workstations, a central server, terabytes of SAN storage and a searchable metadata database
He will only get this by killing the current system and then driving through a study on future needs, meeting current needs with an inexpensive hard drive will not procure the millions of dollars that he wants
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favour of this particular surveillance program, but it is frustrating to see minor IT issues becoming roadblocks. I have seen similar situations to this o
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There are, however, good reasons for bureaucracy in government. If government officials can just do whatever they think makes sense, without any accountability to the people, you end up with North Korea. Efficient, but at a cost.
Using North Korea as an anti-bureaucratic example is bizarre. It's the ultimate bureaucracy. It's just that they are accountable to government higher-ups and ultimately a dictator that can have you killed on a whim.
Re:There are good reasons for gvt bureaucracy, rem (Score:4, Insightful)
Communism sucks, yes. But Communism != Socialism. Socialism certainly does allow for a reasonably free market. It just makes sure that said free market doesn't fuck over the people, and only takes control of or at least heavily regulates those things that would be detrimental to society to simply hand over to the free market, such as roads and healthcare.
Re:There are good reasons for gvt bureaucracy, rem (Score:5, Interesting)
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The problem is when power is in a relatively few hands. If everything is controlled by a Communist/Fascist dictator, that's a bad thing. If everything is controlled by 5 giant corporations, that is also bad.
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Does it? The US got nation-wide railroad network, flush toilet, telegraph, commercial air-travel, and massively-affordable personal car [wikipedia.org] under laissez-fair economy. Was that wrong?
You mean, bullies and cutthroats like Che Guevara and Stalin? Or those like Warren Buffet and the Koch brothers?
Which of the two groups I listed has actually cut a throat in your opinion?
Re:There are good reasons for gvt bureaucracy, rem (Score:5, Informative)
Let's see:
Nation-wide railroad network: To incentivize its' constrcution, the US government gave away huge land grants (much of it land of various Indian tribes) to corporations. The US maintains a federal bureaucracy to support rail transportation.
Flush toilets: Flush toilets existed for hundreds of years before the US did. Improved designs became popular and mass produced as governments built water supplies and sewers run to each house.
Telegraph: Before it was commercially built in the US, a demonstration line between Washington and Baltimore funded by Congress was built by Morse. Early commercialization was protected by patents.
Commercial air travel: Early commercial air travel was supported by US mail delivery. Massive government investments in airports, air traffic control, and safety bureaucracy support it now.
Massively-affordable personal car: Useful for travel because of the government construction and control of roads and bridges.
Re:There are good reasons for gvt bureaucracy, rem (Score:4, Informative)
Those things happened with a regulated economy. The government was significantly involved in the railroad network in particular.
Moving to laissez-fair gave us Enron and the forced banking bail-out of 2007.
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Re:Bureaucracy (Score:5, Funny)
[citation needed]
www.facebook.com
Re:Bureaucracy (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you for your request for a [citation needed]. Your satisfaction with our services is of utmost importance to us. Please go to our Web site and download the necessary form or forms in order to complete your request. Obtain the signatures necessary, in the appropriate order, and within the time-frame dictated by the guidelines set forth in the terms of service of your participation in the activity leading to your request. When you have completed the forms, send them by certified mail using the approved services to the appropriate departments, making sure to follow the steps outlined in your training. Your request must include appropriate citations which can be obtained by contacting us. We look forward to providing you with the best [citation needed] possible.
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I thought this was going an entirely different direction.
Thank you for your request for a citation. Please fill out form 132-B if you would like a citation for a traffic offense, 132-G if you would like a citation for a parking violation, or form 132-Q if you would like a citation for improperly posted signage outside your place of business. We would be happy to issue you a citation, and we thank you for your self-reporting. The fees from these citations for self-reported infractions help fund our depar
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Or an old POS Chevrolet.
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"We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget."
And this, my friends, is how you end up with $6500 price tag for $70 hard drive. Bureaucracy, it's good for you!
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"We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget."
And this, my friends, is how you end up with $6500 price tag for $70 hard drive. Bureaucracy, it's good for you!
No, this is what happens when you don't have at least one competent IT person on your staff.
As someone else pointed out, it's important to have purchasing rules in place to prevent things like spending $6500 on a $70 hard drive that is purchased from a company run by some politician's brother. That's why you need to employ a competent IT person who can say "I can buy a hard drive from Amazon that's exactly the same as the one you'll get from HP, but we'll pay a lot less".
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That's why you need to employ a competent IT person who can say "I can buy a hard drive from Amazon that's exactly the same as the one you'll get from HP, but we'll pay a lot less".
And then the supply-chain bureaucrats say "you won't be installing anything in City-owned IT assets unless it was bought through the supply chain organization, and you'll be terminated with cause if you try."
What, do you really think the bureaucrats would actually allow you to circumvent them? The essence of being the middleman
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Or you could.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Or you could.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Now you are headed somewhere - and not just for Civil Liberty reasons.
Years ago I worked for a clinic. They were going through reams of paper and toner cartridges. Their vendor said that the printer is no longer supported by the manufacture and that drums and cartridges are no longer available. I told them that Amazon sells them for about 30% less. Nope. They had an account and buying from Amazonmp means using personal CCs and getting reimbursed and paper work.
I looked at the workflow and all of those print
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Just stop keeping data on average citizens for which you don't really have any justification.
So, why are they collecting all that data in the first place? Is it really necessary for them to do their jobs and protect the public?
Storing it all because some sales rep told them a great story about picking up a cold case, going back through the records, and finding that Thuggy McBadguy had been close to a convenience store when it was robbed in 2011. Five years later, they're out of disk space, and it turns out they've never actually looked at any of that archived data.
The more interesting question is why this department finds the 20 minutes to fill out a purchase order a more compelling reason to review their perpetual data retentio
Re: Or you could.. (Score:5, Insightful)
because public outrage is just noise, whereas additional paperwork takes up valuable sit on your ass time.
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It' called COTS (Score:5, Insightful)
Common off the shelf.
You it department needs to learn about and be authorized to use COTS for items less than $100.
Re:It' called COTS (Score:5, Interesting)
but but but how can CIOs and Directors get free stuff if they don't allow private companies to power fist a publically funded organization?
In the past these were discounts. Now they're licenses to steal.
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In the past these were discounts. Now they're licenses to steal.
We seriously need procurement reform and standardization across government at all levels. Not sure there is a silver bullet there, since more procurement regulations have often meant less and less competition as fewer people are making purchasing decisions and fewer and fewer companies can afford to play the bidding game. Just saying that government needs to get the best deal doesn't make it so.
For things like a hard drive which should be considered a commodity I would think there should just be some comb
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I liked the terms quoted: "reputable source" and "certified." These are great BS words that many people actually believe guarantees higher quality. This product must be good because we have a contract with its supplier. Windows XP is certified and thus much more reliable than, say, Windows 7, CentOS 7, or Arch Linux. Perception dominates.
Of course the OS and hardware make very little difference compared to the application software they are using, whatever that may be.
Re:It' called COTS (Score:5, Interesting)
Honest Sgt (Score:5, Insightful)
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Please... (Score:2)
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stop trying to correct this with the obvious suggestions to shell out $60. This is a good thing.
Problem is when they get a new hard drive and the policy becomes "as long as we got the space"... the part about Windows XP should have been the red flag in the story. These records are very likely not well secured. Policies on record retention and archiving should reflect the risk that old systems can become compromised and only what is really needed should be kept online. Policies on record retention that merely reflect the physical limitations of hard drives are bad.
Backups (Score:3)
So is this PC the *only* place the data's held? Really? So there's no backup, no analysis system, nothing like that?
Is Oakland twinned with Keystone?
If only they weren't in the boondocks (Score:5, Funny)
It's a shame they don't live near a major technology hub. These little backwater towns just don't have the resources to lure competent IT staffers away from the cities where you have large computer-savvy people.
Where did they say this was?
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80GB still being sold? (Score:2)
I might be completely out of touch here. But are 80GB drives still being sold? If so, is the price that prohibitive for Oakland?
Don't care much for surveillance ad nauseam. But this seems to be a 3rd world problem. Which is worse? Or is the one perhaps causing the other?
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Yes they're still being sold because we're still getting those in some Dell machines here. You can still buy 17-19" 4:3 monitors too even though wide screens are cheaper!
Having worked with .gov agencies, the amount of bull shit that they need to go through to purchase ANYTHING some days is mind numbing. We had to:
Buy from specific vendors who had a contract (so no amazon/newegg options)
Only buy specific products (ex: GSA merchandise)
Fill everything out in triplicate by hand and wait for signed approval (t
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Hell, I have a 300GB in my PS2 (yes 2, not 3)! Cost me about $30. While I understand having to go through vendors, it shouldn't cost more to upgrade the drive than it does to go through the hassle of revising the retention policy.
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I prefer 1280x1024 to 1440x900.
But 1920x1080 is better than either and in my experiance also cheaper.
No one should *ever* wonder why... (Score:2)
conservatives think that government is dangerous: the idiocy that manifests itself here in this humorously benign manner too often manifests itself in other, more evil forms.
Re:No one should *ever* wonder why... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I agree government is dangerous -- so is anything that is powerful. Max Weber defined the state as the organization that has a monopoly on violence.
But the blame isn't with the liberals, or the conservative libertarians, neither of whom want this kind of data collection. It's with the conservative authoritarians who want to expand the power of the police.
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It's with the conservative authoritarians who want to expand the power of the police.
There are damned few in power -- no matter their stripe -- that want to reduce their power. It's just a matter of where they focus their expansion of power. (Liberals naturally say, "but we know best, and that's why government -- with us at the head -- *needs* to expand". Besides, how many Democrats voted against the PATRIOT Act or to defund the NSA?)
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The blame goes to both liberals and conservatives who keep adding size and red tape to the government.
Sure, conservatives want more cops and cop gear. The liberals get upset with cops and their solution is regulating the cops into the ground.
The liberals or "progressives" want to create a whole new social experiment with health care or their plan for ending racism or something. They increase the government to do it. The conservatives oppose this. Their solution? More laws to complicate the implementation
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It is, to some people. For example, with more funding, the IRS could cut down on tax fraud and increase tax revenues by far more than the cost of employing the additional tax inspectors. Or the EPA could investigate more violations of and enforce environmental laws, etc, etc..
That's at least part of the "conservative" pitch to reduce government: starve the executive branch of the resources it needs to actually enforce the law.
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Don't forget: "cut taxes so that spending must be cut so we don't run deficits".
That's "Delusional" cranked to 11.
that second paragraph (Score:2)
This is why local governments should do less.
But when they absolutely must do something to serve the public (and this is not one of those times), they should probably contract it out.
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But this sort of thing happens at the State and Federal level as well.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... [slashdot.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.gao.gov/products/GA... [gao.gov]
Just to name a few....
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Don't do it at the Federal or State level either. Stop governing and policing every minute of everyone's life.
Anyone else having a WTF moment here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget the idiotic complaint about the horrors of a government purchasing process: who is responsible for the security of this "system"?
If a real argument could be made for the need of this data, the system would have been quietly upgraded, and we would have even more information at risk.
he lack of the upgrade is the best evidence that there is no compelling reason to keep this information at all.
Six months? I guess I'm OK then, having not been through Oakland in the last six months. So what other municipalities are quietly using this same hopelessly lame system?
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Who knows? Maybe they had the same problem getting an ethernet card for it.
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Yup, they are complete idiots.
Where the hell is their "backup procedure" ?? Don't they have one??
Likewise their bureaucracy retarded. Buy 5x cheap 1 TB drives and Raid'em (either hardware or software), and if 1 or 2 go bad, you're STILL good to go.
But no, let's overpay 10x for some magical "certification" when the reality is that there are only 3 hard drive manufacturers [buzzfeed.com] left in the world. [wikipedia.org]:
* Seagate
* Western Digital
* Toshiba
Everything else is rebranded, rebadged, or relabeled, not an OEM.
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Seriously? This is a networked Windows XP computer storing data on the movements of private individuals until they run out of space...
Yes: "Support for Windows XP ended April 8th, 2014" [microsoft.com]
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Don't really have to worry about the security of the machine when, according to the article, they released the data set publicly.
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If you're horrified about the possible privacy leaks, be glad they're using XP. Imagine if they were using Windows 10!
Actually, the exact opposite is true. Microsoft quit releasing security patches for XP [microsoft.com] over a year ago. The only thing preventing anyone who wants to pwn that box from doing so right this second is if its too busy doing its botnet work to service any other requests.
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Windows XP = open to privacy violations by cyber criminals
Windows 10 = systematic privacy violations by Microsoft
Actually, this second issue about Microsoft having lots of access to your private information is not new. At least as far back as Windows 2000 sp3, there were concerns that the EULA would violate HIPAA [gilweber.com] (US law protecting the privacy of health information). You would have to have what HIPAA calls a "Business Associates Agreement" (BAA) with Microsoft in order to be
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Are you sure it's not a 300bauds linked to a CB? I saw this kind of crap not too long ago...
Actual upside to government contract requirements (Score:2)
Finally, some good comes from pain-in-the-ass government purchasing requirements!
Blind leading the blind (Score:2)
"Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything."
Certified, eh?
I'd like to speak to the "certified" moron who chose to install a Windows XP desktop with an 80GB hard drive intended for collecting massive amounts of data.
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This is government work. XP was probably the latest OS to make it through their 10-year IT software approval process.
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Indeed - and that makes the communist 5 year plan look positively agile by comparison...
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It was probably re-purposed from their "Solitairy-confinement" monitoring system.
How many license plates is that? (Score:2)
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But you're forgetting the space taken up by the OS, anti-virus, MS Office trial (unactivated), various other pre-installed trial software, pinball and his stash of 'barely legal' porn.
Re:How much space for each license plate? (Score:2)
Also, there can be more info in each data entry, like the camera it came from, the velocity of the car, the time, and instead of longitude and latitude, each entry could have the name of the street or intersection, recorded as text, over and over again, as set up when the camera was installed.
By the way, you were allocating all of the 80GB space for license plate data, b
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You are also assuming that they are only storing the license plate date. Chances are, they are storing lat/lon data, direction of travel, and more than likely, a picture of the scanned license plate. Also, the OS, software for the reader, DB software of some kind, etc. etc.
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More like "two bytes for camera ID number". You don't need to log lat/lon for each pic, when you know the lat/lon of the camera.
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The camera is on a car so you need to keep track of the location when the picture was taken.
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You would also want the state and country to capture out of state drivers. And also the expiry on the plates, if available.
Which shows how much they actually wanted it... (Score:2)
Given that they could have gotten a bigger drive for $40 from NewEgg (either out of petty cash, or just taking up a collection), shows how much they really think the data is needed.
Cops buy stuff out-of-pocket all the time to help out with their jobs; if they actually wanted more space for these logs, they would have gotten it, purchase-order or know.
I think that the whole "teh bureaucracy is teh worst" excuse was just an angle to make purchasing easier general, not because they are really upset about not k
Must be fat-finger day (Score:2)
I also typed "know" instead of "no"...
Dave has set the bar high (Score:5, Funny)
"You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget"
The poor guy is exhausted just thinking about it. He has my sympathy.
Incompetence and the red tape mitigates abuse (Score:3)
incompetent (Score:2)
If you don't have a petty cash budget for these departments then you're idiots.
That doesn't mean your petty cash budget doesn't get audited. It means you can draw the money NOW do what you need to do... and then worry about it later.
What is more, I've personally bought things for my own organization out of my own money because I've felt confident that they'll reimburse me later.
I've never had a problem with that. I explain to whomever later on "hey I bought this for that reason and it cost this... here is a
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That's fine... that said, why is this in the media then?
The whole thing is bizarre.
IT support (Score:2)
According to TFS, this program went back to 2010. And in all that time, nobody with a modicum of IT experience looked at the growth of the dat, calculated the estimated time to fill the disk and pot a new hard drive on the department budget?
Oh yeah. Windows XP. Nobody thought to plan budget for an upgrade from an out of support system?
Security concerns? (Score:2)
He acts like buying a $150 hard drive will break the bank and if its not "certified" it won't work in an XP box. Any standard hard drive you buy would work. And you can now get a 5TB drive for $130. That could store 2 decades worth of data or more. I would suspect they may very well be retiring user's desktops that have 250GB+ drives in them that they could get for free, are certified, and would work just fine.
Like most people here, I don't think they need to keep this data forever, but just say that. Don't
Ignorant people are ignorant. (Score:2)
Sgt. Dave Burke said, "We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested.
But you should. Looking at the data provided by one of the largest consumers of hard drives, there is little or no difference between Consumer drives and Enterprise drives. The only thing you get with Enterprise is higher prices, used to offset warranty replacements. Replace your drives every 36 Months.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog... [backblaze.com]
Cops are stupid. (Score:2)
This right here is why the Police across the country are horribly ineffective.
Sadly, they are more interested in revenue generating than actually stopping crime.
Confused. (Score:2)
We should be throwing a ticker-tape parade, not giving them advice on how to get it rolling again.
Begging Human Attention (Score:2)
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If you work at a large enough company, you can't just take the company credit card to shop with whenever the whim strikes you. Otherwise the IT staff would end up with their own company Lamborghini. There has to be a process. That prevents abuse, but of course it bogs things down. The more potential for abuse, the more "process" there has to be, and the more ridiculous the resulting process looks to someone used to doing their own shopping.
Back when I worked for LMC, I had one vendor who could simply not u
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> If you work at a large enough company, you can't just take the company credit card to shop with whenever the whim strikes you. Otherwise the IT staff would end up with their own company Lamborghini.
That's pretty easy to avoid. Just have a purchasing limit for the employee. It's nice and simple and easily avoids the "lamborghini problem.
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