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[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Subject:  RE: [thelist] AOL/netscape was:Netscape 6 loads page twice




>Now let's take that out to the Real World. In the real world, there
>are two types of software - software that can be used where people's
>lives are at stake and software that can't. You'll notice in all  the
>licenses for Windows that they disavow its use in places such as
>nuclear power plants and medical facilities, and in general provide
>absolutely no guarantee that their software will work as advertised.
>If you read their licenses, you might as well have bought a rock from
>them, because that is just as compliant with their license as the
>software on the CD. And you _still_ wouldn't own it. But there does
>exist software that people's lives depend on, and bugs are much rarer
>in such software.

Phil Greespun has a few rants on this (particularly about the reduction
in reliability when middleware is brought in), with reference to air traffic
control systems.

The recent deal for MS to provide software to manage weapons systems
in the US navy is kind of worrying, isn't it...


Cheers
Martin


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