O (n^2) Canada! Code bugs knacker buses, TV, broadband, phone lines Canadians have had a mildly frustrating week as a pair of IT problems derailed broadband connections, blacked out TVs, cut off phone lines, and halted buses in America's hat. Nationwide telco provider Shaw said a botched software update was behind an outage that left thousands of customers across the country without home …
>They laid off their best and most experienced techs, who, of course, cost the most.
>Bureaucracy at it's most short-sighted.
I heard directly from an insider that they merged two types of technicians which accounted for some of the layoffs.
To over simplify there were those who visit little old ladies and program their remotes and those that climb poles and drill holes. Anyone found to be unwilling or incapable of the new tasks found themselves lacking employment (as well as just a general purge of wankers).
>> "A significant number of Shaw customers across Western Canada [were] impacted," said the comms giant, which has more than two million subscribers and employs 15,000 people. <<
That is one employee for every 130-odd subscribers. Seems a tad high to me - is this a normal ratio in the telecoms business or is the headcount larger because of the distances involved?
Pint: to anyone made redundant for whatever reason
It's not much of a surprise the TTC is having problems, they're been massively underfunded for years and now it's over-packed and underfunded. Something's gotta give sometime. You have to feel for those people riding the buses today, that are normally packed to the brim and now will be overflowing.
I will admit that the middle of the night would probably be the best time but the middle of the day isn't that bad for TV as most of the viewers are at work or school. You aren't going to do it during the evening as that's when prime viewing time is. The morning probably has people catching up on news.
Actually, why aren't there extra systems in place to handle failures or extra load? They've shown with this upgrade that their system has a single point of failure.
What a weird story - would you report on, oh, a major TalkTalk outage and something going wrong with London buses in the same story? Cos that's basically what you're doing here. There's absolutely no link whatsoever between Shaw and the TTC besides "they're both in Canada" (the world's second-largest country by area, fact fans!) and "they both have computers". I dunno, just seems weird.
Eh, we kinda wanted to do both stories and decided to save time and roll them together. No harm, no foul, right?
That should probably read "Yeah eh, we kinda wanted to do both stories and decided to save time and roll them together, eh. No harm, no foul, eh? W'doncha take a seat 'n the chesterfield ni'll getcha beer."
They were two events causing inconvenience to a large number of people relating to software problems. Two wildly different things yes but that's the good thing about the article. A telephone network needing a software upgrade yes, but a bus?
I can see how they are related and why you'd report them in the same story for that reason.
"or maybe the issue wasn't widespread."
According to the article, "1000's" of about 2 million were affected, nationwide, so the odds are pretty good for an individual to not be affected. In their favour though, they said a "significant" number were affected instead of the more usual and mealy mouthed "a small number" we usually see.
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It's "has gotten" that drives me to distraction. When an item was obtained from a retail store (rather than as a gift, or an item made by its owner), my mother used to use the adjective "boughten". "It's boughten goods." She would never, however, use "Them's boughten botten" (to mean those are Japanese robots purchased as such, not Pi robots made in a garage), because "Them" is ungrammatical.
I have Shaw Internet, but didn't notice a slowdown. I was scanning, so that was a lucky afternoon activity choice. Mrs. Bunch noticed some outage, but not enough to complain to me at the time. Shaw is expensive, but has offered good service. Then they cut facilities (no Usenet, no member pages) but claimed we weren't paying for them anyway. Yeah, right. Going forward, I don't know how this is going to pan out. With vastly fewer employees, they will be unable to offer the same levels of service. They'll be just like their competitors. Yuk, race to the bottom. The one thing Shaw still does have is "Shaw Go", which allows subscribers to connect mobile devices to internet via wi-fi all around town, including at bus stops. Last time our service went down at home, about a year ago, I walked to the nearest bus stop, sat in the shelter protected from the rain, took out a tablet and engaged in online chat with the Shaw rep. Way less noise than a phone support call. Besides, since our phone is Shaw VOIP, the service outage meant that it wasn't working anyway. For the technically-minded, our issue was that the service was marginal due to oxidation, corrosion on parts up in the pole. When Shaw TV Cable went digital, deficiencies were unmasked. Even though we don't subscribe to Cable TV. The technician, to his credit, identified the problem pretty quickly, and it was also repaired soon enough.
I hope you've all got(ten) a down home flavour from this and do not feel the need to downvote me too strenuously. If you do feel the need to downvote, please go ahead, accept my apologies in advance, and may the pasta deity bless you.
Being a government agency, run by people with civil service attitudes (we run this for our convenience, not yours) technology has always challenged them.
The automatic track-side breaking systems, that trigger the train brakes, failures have cost several lives, especially when trains rear-ended each other.
But they do have bus and train cleaning down pat! They have humongous vacuum houses that they feed in through one set of doors which makes like the UK's Great Storm of 1987, sucking everything out - even loose advertising posters.
And a recent report suggests employees are 'happy' in their work following the results of 11,000 drug and alcohol tests of its employees since 2010 “indicate that drug and alcohol use continues to be a significant problem for the TTC.
And then there the hills and snow! Just as bad as the wrong British leaves.
TTC aka Take The Cab
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