Comments on The Art of Control
So, what? The Chinese have better wallpaper on their desktop?
The one with Northgate on the screen is Seattle.
I don't get it. The Mandarins like looking at pretty fish, and the Seattlites are actually monitoring the God-damn traffic?
This makes perfect sense. Anyone who's been in any city in China knows they don't give a fuck about traffic. Try driving or breathing there.
Why is is considered advantageous for our traffic engineers to have these huge screens just showing street cams? That seems like a huge waste of technology to me. If they're going to go with this "control center" model, why don't their wall screens have useful information, like maybe a detailed map, instead of something trivial and stupid like this?
God forbid they should spend their money on, y'know, road gear and stuff. I wonder what the traffic managers are doing from their command center about the disaster currently going on down the whole length of 45th.
Typical City of Seattle stuff. The last time I was in a City building, I saw an entire room full of brand new Dell workstations, still in boxes, never opened, that had been sitting there for six months. Over a hundred of them. Genius.
As for the Chinese, yeah right. I see one square of traffic, surrounded by a huge JPG. You can even see the desktop icons; they're running Windows 2000. Do you even think there's even anything computer-controllable there? He's just going to call Party Headquarters and tell them to avoid Deng Avenue today, right? Fascinating, I'm sure.
With our primitive technology, how will we protect Seattle from giant sharks?
Wait a minute... who was the stupid morom from a year or two ago who told me that Seattle doesn't have a traffic control center? Fucking liar.
@7,
It certainly seems like we don't.
It looks like the Chinese can't afford shiny new computers, or they're not so stupid as to waste their money.
We need a lot more street cams than we have. Lat night (5ish) the freeways looked clear but it took me 2.5 hours to get from the UW to Stone Way & 42. I traffic cam on 15th would have been helpful.
And don't tell me to walk. I'm fucking handicapped.
OK, I'll tell you to pay attention to the news when they say things like 'The University Bridge is closed.'
And I'm guessing the images aren't always that large; I count 8 panels, so presumably the "big board" could show that many separate cam placements simultaneously, which would in fact be quite useful when monitoring traffic flow.
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