Bruce F. Webster

My dad, John Webster, got involved in electronics nearly 70 years ago. He enlisted in the Navy in 1941 and after surviving both Pearl Harbor and the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, he was sent stateside, where he received initial training in radio communications. During his 29 years in the Navy, he worked largely in electronics, [...]

Roger Sessions has published a white paper, “The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity” (PDF). It’s created a bit of a stir in tech circles, largely because Sessions estimates that “worldwide, we are already losing over USD 500 billion per month on IT failure, and the problem is getting worse” (page 1; emphasis in original). [...]

In the first part of this three-part series, I briefly outlined the parallels between developing software and crafting legislation, while pointing out the great risks and issues in the latter. I also indicated what I felt were some of the general structural flaws  in HR 3200, the House bill on health care reform — not [...]

[Welcome Slashdotters -- feel free to leave comments here or there. But no debates on health care reform or what HR 3200 does or does not do, please -- just on the concept itself.] [Part II is now up.] On the occasions where I have reviewed the actual text of major legislation, I have been [...]

A few decades back, when handheld electronic calculators were still pretty neat, someone did a study on the authority people gave to them. As I recall, those conducting the study built some normal-looking calculators that were designed with specific errors in the calculation circuits such that in certain cases the calculators would give wrong answers. [...]