True Story: Before the Internet existed, a company called Tandem
Computers was started by some database exports on the West Coast for the
purpose of developing and selling fault-tolerant computer systems to
support non-stop database applications. One of the pioneers of such
work was Dr. Jim Gray and he conducted a series of real-world studies
based on *all* problems cited by Tandem customers over multi-year
periods. The overwhelming conclusion of those studies was that people,
not hardware, were the cause of most problems. Bear in mind, disk
drives crashed in those days relatively often, compared to modern disk
drives, so Tandem computers had duplicates of everything, including
disks, CPUs, power supplies, back-planes, etc.
In many situations, the trained maintenance personnel themselves were
responsible for crashing the system. More often than not, the person
shutting down half the system to replace a failed disk or power supply
(which was routine back then) would shut down the wrong half. The
ironic solution was to eliminate certain types of routine maintenance
and just let the system keep running. For example, they might need N
disks to run, but started with N+4 disks. When the first and second
disk fails, they do nothing, waiting until the 3rd disk fails to replace
all three. That way, they reduced the likelihood of stupid mistakes,
without compromising system reliability.
Based on those studies, we should remove all humans from the equation
and just let the tanks battle each other. Unfortunately, that means
that the Pittelli X-Prize Problem (i.e., autonomous tank operation)
needs to be solved and that probably won't happen anytime soon :-)
On 11/17/2014 12:57 PM, Mike Lyons wrote:
Then we need to solve the correct problem.
I propose a remote-controlled device be attached to each operator
with the capability to remove said operator from the control process.
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