From kragen@dnaco.net Fri Sep 11 07:56:13 1998 Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 07:56:12 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: "Bradley M. Kuhn" cc: clug-user@clug.org Subject: Re: life depending on code In-Reply-To: <19980910210004.D23540@ebb.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1826 Status: O X-Status: On Thu, 10 Sep 1998, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > Thus spoke Jeffrey S. Gilton: > > > Hubris at its worse. :( > > > Not really hubris. Anyone who designs something thinks it works. That's > > why you want independent testing organizations. It's hard to switch > > gears. A good tester assumes the code is broken and his job is to find > > out where. Asking some to do that with his own code is not fair (and it > > doesn't work). Testing wouldn't have prevented the Therac-25 accidents. It might have prevented the up-arrow ones, but even those required completing a fairly large amount of typing inside 8 seconds, and that in a particular entry-error scenario that didn't occur very often. It almost certainly wouldn't have caught the other one. Open source code could have prevented both. The manufacturer refused to provide source code even after all the accidents. This could be quite a gruesome advertisement for open-source software. [photos of Therac-25 victims with radiation burns] Announcer: These people were killed by radiation burns from faulty software that had only been proofread by people in the company that wrote it. The company that wrote the software refused to allow its users to check it for errors, insisting it was not at fault. Does your business depend on software nobody outside the vendor has ever proofread? It doesn't have to. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker I don't do .INI, .BAT, .DLL or .SYS files. I don't assign apps to files. I don't configure peripherals or networks before using them. I have a computer to do all that. I have a Macintosh, not a hobby. -- Fritz Anderson