One good story deserves another, from several years ago

There was this medical device manufacturer. It had an older product, pre-microprocessor. One day, the FDA came for an inspection. When they do that, they usually send at least one person with clue, but they cross train other people and send them too. On this inspection, one of the inspector's regular job was inspecting galleys in ships (another FDA function you may not know about). This guy had been cross trained.

So, they are walking down the manufacturing line, and the employee shows them the board from the product. One of the chips has a label on on. The inspector says "PROM"? Meaning, is that chip a programmable read only memory (like today's flash, but usually one time programmable and a lot smaller). The employee says "Yes, that's a PROM". The inspector says "Checksum?" and the employee says "yes, the checksum is on the label". The inspector says "Verify?" and the employee takes the board, pulls the chip, goes over to the programmer, plugs it in and verifies that the checksum is valid.

The inspector says "Source Code?". The employee is a bit stumped. He goes away to ask some engineers who were around for a while, then goes to the manufacturing engineering guys and finally goes back to the inspector and asks them to accompany him to a storage room.

In the storage room, there are a number of 4 drawer file cabinets. The employee searches around, and finally finds the right file.

The file has the right build data on the cover. He opens the file and triumphantly removes the floppy disk with the source code on it.

An 8" floppy disk.

You know what's coming right?








No 8" drive left in the company.

Increasingly, there is good data from local government. Both TeleAtlas and Navteq try to get this data. Not all governments make it available on reasonable terms. In some states, there is an organized effort to create good maps of the entire state. There is also some effort to coalesce mapping collection within government. Often there are four or five independently developed maps. A county may have a GIS department, your local town or city may have one, your local 9-1-1 PSAP has one, and often there is a state map. While today, they all are independent, with different "base maps", we do see some changes where there is sharing of map data among the government entities. The ideal is that local government has a single, accurate, up to date map, which feeds both state-wide maps, and is made available to the commercial companyies who depend on good map data. I work on the 9-1-1 system, and I can tell you that, for example, if the local utilities used the same base map as the PSAP, things would be A LOT better, and the utility crews could probably provide another great source of error checking, updates and additional information that would benefit other map users. It could be win-win: local government provides the base map and a set of public layers, which is given at low cost to commercial enterprises so long as they contribute errors, updates and layers appropriate for the government to have.