Via the Register comes this post at the website of Ross Anderson (PhD), a computer science professor and scholar at Cambridge who also serves as an expert witness. Anderson was asked to opine in a criminal case in which an individual wearing a tracking bracelet (as an alternative to spending time in jail) was accused […]
Barry Ritholtz, over at the always-worth-reading The Big Picture, posts the latest “hype cycle” from Gartner and where current proposed/emerging/developing technologies stand. I wasn’t familiar with Gartner’s stages of hype (as shown along the bottom of the chart), but they’re very useful. The overall concept meshes well with an article I wrote back in 2009 for Baseline […]
Seven years ago, in discussing the struggles between the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats, I set forth some rules on what it takes for an new technology to displace an entrenched one: The alternative has to be clearly superior in one or more ways — so much so that the consumer has to be willing not […]
The second personal computer I ever owned[1] was an Apple II, with no floppy drive. I bought it, along with a small color TV, from my close friend Robert Trammel while we were both living in Houston sometime around 1980.We had already spent hours together programming on it, then carefully (though not always successfully) saving […]
John Markoff in the New York Times has a detailed article on the emergence of software tools to help in the analysis of electronic documents (and, one could easily presume, scanned and OCR’d physical documents) in litigation: Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time […]
Classic patterns in disputed IT project: Hertz v. Accenture
Just ran across this article at the always-irreverent-but-usually-spot-on Register, an IT news site out of England. The standard patterns of a troubled IT project are so evident in this one report that I may well use it as a case study for my CS 428 (“Real-world software engineering”) class this fall. Here are some of […]
Neverending Story pattern: School District ERP system late, over-budget
A story a few days ago caught my eye, not because it was unusual, but because it follows so familiar a pattern. Here are a few excerpts from the article: MANATEE — Late nights, hefty contracts and humming computers are a norm in the district’s School Support Center, where employees are working to fix a […]
Minnesota DMV software project: Faulty Towers/Neverending Story patterns
In my 2000 white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: System Failure (1976-2000)” [PDF], which I researched and wrote while at PricewaterhouseCoopers, I describe six broad fact patterns to classify the types of software system implementation failure. One of those patterns I named “Faulty Towers”: The client buys the system from [or has the system developed […]
![The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]](http://bfwa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/intel-cpu-150x150.jpg "The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]")
Back in 2000, PricewaterhouseCooper published my research white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: Systems Failure (1976-2000)” (PDF). This paper reflected research I and my staff had done over several months on roughly 120 two- or three-party lawsuits involving information technology. I found that almost all of these lawsuits fell into one or two of six […]