Comments on: If US government contractors had designed the iPhone

By: Harris Engineer

Harris Engineer — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:55:15 +0000

@Mike- I’m a Harris software engineer freshly out of college, and I think that most of the engineers I’ve worked with here are pretty smart (not all). Yes they do hire quite a bit of Engineers from lower tier engineering schools such as UCF and FIT, but lately it seems they have been hiring from the better known engineering schools such as Florida, Georgia Tech, Auburn, and Clemson (mostly south eastern schools, it’s hard to get people to relocate too far from home).

By: The Most Painfully Scarce Resource « Doctor Zero

The Most Painfully Scarce Resource « Doctor Zero — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 05:10:58 +0000

[...] The census decided that one of these crazy new smartphone/PDAs that all the hepcats are using would help in their counting. But simply writing a new piece of software for an existing Blackberry or Iphone was�way�too elegant a solution. So the governent threw millions at a military contractor and produced 525,000 of what looks like the Trabant of smartphones. The bottom line: [...]

By: Maribago

Maribago — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:39:36 +0000

About Census results and confidentiality:

Nothing wrong with the Census maintaining confidentiality about personally-identifiable information.

What’s weird is that they also want to keep the x,y coordinates of houses confidential. Seems like the *outside* of our houses should be considered public as long as the *inside* is private, no?

By: Giovanni

Giovanni — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:41:36 +0000

The nationwide census “Tiger” maps are inaccurate and incomplete, and the errors were propagated into countless other state, local, and private map and GIS products. The labor involved in unwrinkling these data repeatedly at those local levels was immense, and can’t be accepted back upstream to the TIGER product.

Government solution:
Hire the untrained army to walk around and attempt good GPS fixes under front porches.

Google solution:
Add an “edit” function to google maps.

A common refrain at Census (from a full-timer:)
“Never enough time to do it right; always enough time to do it over again.”

By: donkey kong

donkey kong — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:22:40 +0000

Well I had fun reading all this good stuff, can’t wait to get mine tomorrow! Yes, I am working for the Census (started today) and will receive my HHC tomorrow. A week of training and then we start verifying what has been done so far by the “production listers”. I’m going to be a “QC lister” meaning checking the addresses which another has verified. My thought was, what will become of the 525,000 devices after the Census? Will they be useful for anything? Paperweights?…

By: All Points Blog

All Points Blog — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:20:42 +0000

The Census’ PDA: “Ugliest Cellphone” with “inaccurate maps”…

From Ethan Zuckerman’s blog (via the Boston.com) comes a scary description of the device Harris put out for the first phase of the 2010 Census: the Harris HTC. Remember, the real door to door part will use pen and paper after the hardware was not sati…

By: Henry

Henry — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:00:55 +0000

The amazing thing here is bureaucracy! From the ground up in 2.5 years AND KEPT THE DEVELOPMENT SECRET. Given that this Digital Census Enumerator timeline–spec’d in 2002 and bid in 2005–shows the underlying inefficiency of government.

“Government is not the solution to our problem. It is the problem.” -Ronald Reagan

By: Tracy Boudreaux

Tracy Boudreaux — Sun, 03 May 2009 13:10:49 +0000

Its not the military that is at fault. You can blame our current congressional “leaders” for that. Common sense doesnt enter into anything that Congress gets its hands on. Especially the dems. Remember they dont CARE about the Constitution, what the Constitution actually SAYS or means. They are there to remain in power (and if out…to get back into power). Nothing else comes into play. How else do you explain true idiots like Teddy “last one standing” Kennedy, Nancy “grandma” Pelosi, or Harry “gambler” Reid. And of course the current President is being led around by his handlers who do nothing but inflate his large ego. Instead of weeding out the incompetents (Harris for example)…they keep their friends in business..

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 03 May 2009 03:48:41 +0000

Something non-DoD people don’t know: Harris Corporation is famous for employing incompetent engineers. They all went to third rate schools like the Florida Institute of Technology or Embry Riddle. You’ve not really met dumb until you’ve had a meeting with Harris engineers. I don’t know if they weed out the smart ones and drive them away, or whether the smart engineers never apply there at all.

Harris stays in business because Florida is a swing state. So whoever is in the White House that year (Democrat and Republican) tries to buy votes by ensuring they don’t go completely out of business.

Every single company and government procurement agent I know that has worked with Harris Corporation’s Florida engineers swears off ever calling them again.

Contrary to an assertion earlier, there is no federal acquisition regulation saying they could use commercial components. I’ve worked in government acquisition for twenty five years and we are in fact encouraged to use commercial components and products.

Harris employs third rate engineers and they did a fourth rate job. No surprise to those who know the shoddy quality of their work.

By: cc

cc — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:39:12 +0000

I am not as technically astute as many of you… But I am employed by the census and use this device everyday for hours a day. I gotta say, it isnt that bad. There are issues w/ the GPS device used to map addresses, sometimes it’s literally moving across the screen as I am attempting to map spot and address..or shows me across the street from where I KNOW am standing, in which case we can manually override, and I have heard of folks having issues with it being slow…but all in all I have not experienced any more problems with it than any other computer. Just had to weigh in.