Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, M. David Peterson wrote: > That and your not going to die if something goes wrong with each > built-in safety-switch in your test code... Its hard for me to think > of the implications of failed code compared to implications of a > failed flight. Please don't take offense by this as I understand what > it is you are suggesting but still have a hard time comparing a > computer crash to a plane crash. You should subscribe to the Risks Digest. More that a couple of deaths are attributable to broken software. People treat software like it isn't real. Software machines are just as real as hardware machines - and often control hardware machines. If you are killed by a radiation therapy machine because of broken software - you are just as dead as if the cause was broken hardware. <URL:http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose.html> And yes - commercial planes _HAVE_ crashed where one of the proximate causes was broken software (accidents are rarely 'one thing' - they are usually two or more things in unusual combination): Put American Airlines Flight 965 into a search engine. I'm of the opinion that software is where engineering was about a century ago: In demand, unregulated, and open to anyone who wants to call themselves a 'programmer', regardless of skill or training. Disasters directly traceable to poor 'engineering' by people with neither skill or training killed a number of people and laws were passed restricting who can legally call themselves an 'engineer'. By the end of this century, I will be amazed if you will still be able to call yourself a 'software engineer/progammer' without a legally mandated certification, license and professional standards. -- Benjamin Franz "All right, where is the answer? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you click and we both serve pages - and find out who is right, and who is slashdotted." - David Brandt
|
