By bfwebster on Jul 21, 2010 in Maintenance, Risk management | 0 Comments
Since last November, I have bought three new, out-of-the-box systems preinstalled with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (and upgraded to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit at the end of May): an HP Pavilion e9237c desktop (quad-core 64-bit processor, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB hard drive) [purchased early November 2009] an HP Pavilion dv7 laptop (dual-core 64-bit [...]
By bfwebster on Mar 7, 2010 in Main, Maintenance, Quality assurance, Risk management | 1 Comment
I’ve actually been having this problem for some time, but I thought it might be some kind of hardware problem with the system. Now I think it’s Microsoft and/or ATI. As noted below, last fall I bought an HP Pavillion desktop (quad-core 64-bit processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) running Windows 7 (Home Premium [...]
By bfwebster on Feb 17, 2010 in Main, Maintenance, Quality assurance, Risk management | 1 Comment
My newest computer (an HP Pavillion desktop, quad-core processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) runs Windows 7, which I find to be a significant improvement over Vista. However, I ran into a problem with it a week or so ago. I was in the process of copying some files from elsewhere on my internal [...]
By bfwebster on Dec 28, 2009 in Complex systems, Main, Maintenance, Management, Project Failure, Risk management, Surviving Complexity, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
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). [...]
By bfwebster on Sep 8, 2009 in Architecture, Complex systems, Main, Risk management, Software engineering | 1 Comment
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 [...]