One of the books I’m currently writing is Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering, a greatly expanded and updated version of a book I published back in the 1990s. I’ve been posted new and revised pitfalls over at my Bruce F. Webster & Associates (bfwa.com) website. To make the pitfalls a bit easier to browse, I’ve […]
In case you’re not aware, Microsoft is being sued for allegedly setting misleading levels of hardware compatibility for “Vista Capable” computers. In other words, the suit claims that Microsoft knowingly set low levels of Vista-compatibility for hardware, even though many of the computer models so designated would not be able to run anything above Vista […]
As noted in Works in Progress, I’m writing a book called Surviving Complexity, which deals with the challenges of IT development and deployment. Over at my personal website, I’ve posted material adapted from the first chapter of that book: In my forthcoming book, Surviving Complexity, the very first chapter is called “The Wetware Crisis”. This […]
CNet in the UK picked Vista as one of its ‘Top Ten Terrible Tech Products‘ — and the products on this list stretch back many years: Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor’s reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced […]
InsideCRM has a list of the 20 Worst Capital Investments of All Time. As someone who actually helped successfully raise venture capital for a software startup — a total of $7 million, which lasted us for five years — it hurts to see the vast sums squandered on some of these companies: Pets.com: This icon […]
From Slashdot comes a link to this postmortem by the Princeton University team competing in the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles: It was the closest thing to a memory leak that you can have in a “managed” language. C# manages your memory for you by watching the objects you create. When your code no […]
I’ll bet. The American Society of Civil Engineers is demanding that a video spoofing their investigation of the levee failures in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina be removed from YouTube: A long-simmering dispute about whether a leading engineering organization whitewashed the role of the Army Corps of Engineers in the failure of the levee system […]
MIT is suing the architect and construction firm responsible for their (relatively new) computer science complex: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has filed a negligence suit against world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, charging that flaws in his design of the $300 million Stata Center in Cambridge, one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in […]
Headline: “Gov’t IT project ‘failed’ with $12mil misappropriated” Location: Vietnam. VietNamNet Bridge – More than 20% of the funds already disbursed for a multi-million dollar project that aimed to computerise Government offices nationwide has been misallocated, according to a new report from the State Audit Agency. The State Audit Agency said Project 112 had misallocated […]
DC: the house of cards starts to crumble
I lived in Washington DC — yes, right in the District itself — for just under six years (1989-2005). To say that DC is bipolar and disfunctional doesn’t begin to capture the true weirdness of how the city runs (or fails to). This is a city with one of the highest per-student spending rates in […]
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