Imagine, if you will, an enormous online technical manual from which you need to extract a few key points. Some of these are easily visible but most are hidden in obscure hyperlinks. You can control+f but not search the entire site in any way. Some points are labelled in an obvious way but others require reading and understanding to extract the relevant detail. You'll need at least a dozen different pages from which to extract all the information, but maybe not all at the same time and you can't minimize windows or have multiple desktops (because frak you, that's why). Some information can't be extracted directly from the manual but only by running a series of long, complicated tasks which then require you to check yet more extremely long web pages that are incredibly poorly-labelled and use a program which just plain doesn't work for no reason. The result of all this is access to data which doesn't interest you and you're not allowed to use in any case, and the absolute best you can hope for is that someone will eventually write you a thank-you email.
That's what ALMA QA2 is like.
Nope nope nope.
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Well, that's disappointing. It looked so promising.
ReplyDeleteWell, what is ALMA QA2 supposed to do?
ReplyDeleteVerify to ALMA (http://www.almaobservatory.org/) users that their data has reached the required sensitivity and resolution, or tell the telescope operators to keep observing if it hasn't.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor Is it some sort of very old program ported through decades of computer OSs?
ReplyDeleteMatter Beam Nope, it's an fairly new program plus a whole bunch of new but arcane combination of webpages apparently designed by people who have never heard of the concept of a "bottom line" and wouldn't know an intuitive interface if it engaged them in conversation about that popular local sports team for twenty minutes. As in, let's just display ALL the technical data on this page but not even bother to label the project title, just the number...
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor that sounds like people asked to design webpages without any formal training or experience... The short of thing a research team does to save costs on a limited budget...
ReplyDeleteMatter Beam I have the opposite impression, that it's a make-work plan to keep as many web designers employed as possible...
ReplyDeleteyou manage to summarize my experience with academy so far..well without the morons, straight-out-of-the-box idiots and a bunch of random people that somehow tagged along without real sense of purpose to their existence!
ReplyDelete