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What Futurama level bureaucrat do I need to be to get assigned this post?
Scientists in 1985: "This data can now all fit on a computer thanks to CDs. Get a few of them pressed at Gramozávody Loděnice every year and keep the index plus updates on a HDD or tape."
Scientists in 1990: "With CD-R, you don't have to pay a fortune to have a few copies of the database pressed every year. You don't need the magnetic storage buffer either, updates can be written on the disks."
Scientists in 2000: "Screw CDs. Many-gigabyte HDDs are decently cheap. You can store full scans rather than transcripts."
Scientists in 2010: "You can afford terabytes in SSDs now, and keep a few copies off-site for backup, all in a cloud solution with access from anywhere with less latency than the HDDs."
Central Social Insurance Institute Card File in Prague-Smíchov in 2013:
No shit? I always wondered where Futurama got the floating buerocrats from.
I'm glad they kept the cabinets grey
Don’t see an easy way of walking around those counterweights as it looks pretty tight or you get smacked in the chin as he suddenly rockets up
Here's a video of them in action - you can see the Nazis tried to create popular high-budget movies despite the war costs. They weren't very fast even back in the day and now that they are only used for historical records, they probably go even slower. I'm pretty sure their usage is very restricted and still they likely needed an exception from the European equivalent of OSHA.
Part of me wistfully mourns for the loss of edifices like this, caused by computers. Another part recognizes that those guys would probably have given their left nut to get out of those desks and in front of a computer.
I'm sitting here wondering what modern safety programs would find wrong with the processes involved here. Looks amazing though.
The obvious one is an enclosure or latches door to prevent accidental falls. They might be wearing fall protection that we can't see but I doubt it.
There's a good chance nobody ever fell from one of these but those regulations exist for a reason.
Maybe less obvious is fail-safes for any elevator system so if the brakes fail it doesn't freefall into the ground.
It is still in use. I had to revisit this video where you can see it. (It has eng subtitles)
Amazing. They say the records are digitized but they still use the paper version as the authority for court cases and things like that. That's amazing because the rest of the world is rushing to jettison the idea of paper as authority and everyone accepts easily faked electronic documents.
Cryptography and PKI makes it pretty feasible to authenticate digital documents.
When used completely and properly. Which rarely, if ever, happens because it requires end-users to know how to use keys and keep them offline somehow.
This system hasn't lasted ~90 years because they just throw someone in a chair and let them figure it out on the job.
Any reliable system, electro-mechanical or digital, needs thorough user training and checks.
The worry with this one is it's a single authoritative record with no easy way to backup or replicate it. They say there are non-authoritative (at least legally) digital versions of most(?) of the records. I hope/assume they're actually more consistent with that than the video makes it seem because those are the only feasible off-site backups they really have. If not one fire is all it would take to wipe out an entire countries SSA program.
This is a government office. A government should be able to build the technical knowledge required to keep a private signing key secure.
I do agree that individual-to-individual cryptography is more difficult, but how often do you need to check the authenticity of a document from a friend or acquaintance, digital or otherwise?
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Very Brazil
Not enough pipes!
Hey! Prague was one of the last cities ever to operate a public pneumatic mail system (until 2002).
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Damn what a brilliant film
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That looks kinda dope ngl.
I'd be a 1937 file clerk
You're gonna have a real blast in 5 years
2 years.
alright, I'll bite, what do you mean.
He's just saying it'll be great when there's some management changes and you'll get promoted to chief Jewish inspector ... That is if you know German and aren't Jewish yourself.
im so austrian i forgot ww2 existed for a second
Well you guys technically didnt exist during the war itself so fair enough.
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1942 is the middle of WW2. 1937 in Central Europe is not somewhere i want live, because things are about to go sideways.
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“The offices of the Central Social Institution of Prague, Czechoslovakia with the largest vertical letter file in the world. Consisting of cabinets arranged from floor to ceiling tiers covering over 4000 square feet containing over 3000 drawers 10 feet long. It has electric operated elevator desks which rise, fall and move left or right at the push of a button. to stop just before drawer desired. The drawers also open and close electronically. Thus work which formerly taxed 400 workers is now done by 20 with a minimum of effort.
^DAMNIT^ ^KEVIN^ ^STOP^ ^LEAVING^ ^THE^ ^FUCKING^ ^DRAWERS^ ^OPEN^
I can see how that'd inspire Kafka
Made in 1936 and Kafka died in 1924. He would probably have died in a concentration camp if he lived to see this. Nazis did not give special treatment to Jewish writers, for example Josef Čapek (✝ approx. 14 April 1945 Bergen-Belsen). Still, there must have been other bizarre filing systems in his era, a multi-story vertical conveyor belt of filing cabinets is used in some town halls to this day.
🎵They say the world looks down on the bureaucrats,
They say we’re anal, compulsive, and weird,
But when push comes to shove,
You’ve got to do what you love,
Even if it’s not a good idea!🎵
Workers of the Adeptus Administratum. Terra, 937.M1
What Terry Gilliam movie is this from?
This must unironically be the first "big data", where it is cheaper to move the computation than the data.
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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