Hacker News went offline before I could finish editing the introductory sentence. The point was that a software project with the same time and cost requirements would also have interesting constraints: once it's launched, it can't be patched, and has to run for ten years. Would you as a manager really risk a failure?
Don't forget that the software can fail at any time during the year it takes for the software to install, too. Any failure before installation or after would require the project to be rebuilt for millions of dollars and months of delays.
Given that receiving a confirmation that your input was accepted already takes hours, and that returning output as textual data will serve the project's purpose for the next ten years, then the company should probably not delay the launch of the project even further just to be able to return .BMP screen shots of the text files, just to impress the media with how much raw data was found.
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Hacker News went offline before I could finish editing the introductory sentence. The point was that a software project with the same time and cost requirements would also have interesting constraints: once it's launched, it can't be patched, and has to run for ten years. Would you as a manager really risk a failure?
Don't forget that the software can fail at any time during the year it takes for the software to install, too. Any failure before installation or after would require the project to be rebuilt for millions of dollars and months of delays.
Given that receiving a confirmation that your input was accepted already takes hours, and that returning output as textual data will serve the project's purpose for the next ten years, then the company should probably not delay the launch of the project even further just to be able to return .BMP screen shots of the text files, just to impress the media with how much raw data was found.