Ambient is another company just like Color Kinetics that is using their MIT pedigree to make their simple technology seem a lot cooler than it actually is, and charge accordingly. Ambient puts hobbyist-class devices in IDEO-class packages and calls them "revolutionary" products, while Color Kinetics attempts to convince us that mixing RGB LEDs using pulse-width modulation is somehow worthy of a patent (their patents actually cover a theater lighting networking protocol). If only I had a Brass Rat on my ring finger, perhaps I could sell you a nifty color-changing doohickey for hundreds of dollars!
MIT Tech Review's July 2002 cover story was titled Why Is Software So Bad?"(registration required to read whole article). The article makes the point that because there is no liability to the makers of faulty systems, there isn't any real incentive to build systems that never crash.
What if we could bill the HW, OS, and apps vendors for our lost time due to crashes? I'm sure systems would improve in a hurry!
What's needed is legislation making vendors liable for losses due to faulty computer systems. Remember, carmakers cared more about styling than safety until Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed alerted the industry and consumers to the need for things like safety belts. Now we have federal safety standards for automobiles.
I'm sure the libertarian-leaning tech community will freak out as soon as they read this. But "self-regulation" will only take the computer industry so far towards total reliability. As computer systems govern more aspects of our modern lives, government regulation seems inevitable in my view.
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Ambient is another company just like Color Kinetics that is using their MIT pedigree to make their simple technology seem a lot cooler than it actually is, and charge accordingly. Ambient puts hobbyist-class devices in IDEO-class packages and calls them "revolutionary" products, while Color Kinetics attempts to convince us that mixing RGB LEDs using pulse-width modulation is somehow worthy of a patent (their patents actually cover a theater lighting networking protocol). If only I had a Brass Rat on my ring finger, perhaps I could sell you a nifty color-changing doohickey for hundreds of dollars!
What if we could bill the HW, OS, and apps vendors for our lost time due to crashes? I'm sure systems would improve in a hurry!
What's needed is legislation making vendors liable for losses due to faulty computer systems. Remember, carmakers cared more about styling than safety until Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed alerted the industry and consumers to the need for things like safety belts. Now we have federal safety standards for automobiles.
I'm sure the libertarian-leaning tech community will freak out as soon as they read this. But "self-regulation" will only take the computer industry so far towards total reliability. As computer systems govern more aspects of our modern lives, government regulation seems inevitable in my view.