Crackberry on Ice

Blackberry confesses software bug for email blackout:

Ruling out those causes, the company has "determined that the incident was
triggered by the introduction of a new, noncritical system routine that was
designed to provide better optimization of the system's cache." In computing
terms, a cache is a temporary storage area for that allows data to be served up
quickly.

Those "easy fix" can quickly turn into a meltdown. Never underestimate the power of a software change to completely bring down a system. I remember my (former) boss making a quick, simple patch for our manufacturing folks (he used to maintain the code but was away from it for some time when he did the fix) but didn't thoroughly test it and guess what? It broke the system so bad, there had to be another fix made while holding up a production in the meanwhile. My coworkers and I had a good chuckle over that one...

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Kaiser Software falling down.

LA Times reports "Kaiser has aches, pains going digital: Patients' welfare is at stake in the electronic effort, experts say."

Like any big software project, it's never easy to replace an existing system, be it manual/paper system or software [mainframe] system. Either way, the problem is always with the software people: the architects and business analysts since their understand of the requirements are never complete and always behind the curve plus the programmers learn new things in the process of coding and want to do things better [and should be done so that it will be easier to maintain in the future]. Even something as small as web programming can take an inordinate more time than estimated, as we're finding out with my current work.

Copyright, 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.