Dear Blick and WeatherCat faithful,
Good comments from both of you. The thing I hope makes this different that the WU debacle is that Davis is known for higher quality weather stations than the $99 garden variety and they have tens of thousands of installs with hobbyists. . . . . .
Sadly, I think it is all too simple to understand the Weather Underground meltdown. I don't know what would have happened had the acquisition by the Weather Channel had been left alone. It seems reasonably certain to me that the trouble came from the IBM acquisition of the Weather Channel with the apparent intention to use Weather Underground data to demonstrate the prowess of IBM's artificial intelligence systems. Since IBM is not a world leader in weather forecasting, I think we can safely conclude that their AI platform utter failed to improve weather forecasting. This is perfectly consistent the critique of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus of artificial intelligence. Recently Google was caught lying about their machine intelligence capabilities when actually the actions were performed by humans. At the risk of once more showing my age, we seem to be suffering from a new generation of computer science types who are repeating the same AI follies that I found myself caught up in the late 1980s and 1990s.
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Inasmuch as none of us have noticed any changes in service since this happened, I take that as a good sign. However, I must point out, one of the changes they need to make soon is a complete redesign of their website, with customers in mind. I cannot think of a more difficult website to find something on than their current iteration. Even when you know exactly for what you are searching, you can't find it without a healthy dose of sheer luck.
I'm certainly not going to disagree about the incompetence of the Davis website, but that raises a very personal concern with respect to my station and WeatherCat. Everybody likes the robustness and accuracy of Davis instruments. Their consoles are boring but get the job done. Where Davis has always been weak is software. WeatherLink even for the PC was the worst of the Windows software to manage a weather station. On this forum I don't think I need to say anything more about WeatherLink Mac.
Davis is a skilled hardware manufacturer, but they are once more venturing into territory that they lack historical experience: cloud computing. By my thinking this is even more dangerous that WeatherLink for your computer. For better or worse, you control your backups of data on your own hardware. Who is guaranteeing that Davis hosting will be as robust as what you can provide for yourself? The web interfaces that Davis is coming up with once more is hardly state of the art. For a generation that doesn't know about software like WeatherCat it may suffice, but they are missing out.
It isn't like I have any editorial authority, but I do hope that Davis will recognize its strengths and not poison its relationships with 3rd party developers like Stu. Davis stations have a much wider appeal when managed by well-designed 3rd party software, and Davis makes much more money on stations than they ever have on software. They are betting a great deal on the idea they can get people to pay an annual subscription for the
"privilege" of accessing their very own data. However, I don't think I'm the only person will never enter into that sort of arrangement. Between the needs of researchers to write dedicated software for their data analysis needs and the hobbyists that wants control over their data, I hope Davis continues to provide an open and well-documented station API so that Stu and others can continue to thrive along side Davis.
Cheers, Edouard