South Bruce Peninsular - computers don't make mistakes - Comments

Culpability

garym — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:38:55 -0400

Taking the blame and taking responsibility are not the same thing, and that's exactly the point I was making. If you designed and built the car your inspectors used to reach their sites or the building where they keep their offices, and that car or building ceased to function due to a manufacturing error, you would be held responsible and be asked to pay the cost of the repair; if the fault caused damage, the purchaser could sue you for damages and likely get them granted, and if you caused a lot of damage, you could face a class-action suit. But you won't because, as you say, your license agreement nips that kind of responsibility in the bud, and while you do fix your errors and verbally apologize, and we do too, there's nothing in the contractual agreement that forces your hand, it is entirely just your descretionary kindness.

Is there any other professional domain where all the vendors are so universally excused from all culpability? The military maybe.

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

clarification

mxyzptlk — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:57:34 -0400

hi gary, no we dont reimburse anyone for lost revenue. our software licence is much like all other software licences. the point i was trying to make is that if there is a problem, it boils down to one of two things, garbage in - garbage out (ie user error), or a programming bug. if it is the later, we dont blame the 'computer', we acknowledge the programming error, fix it, and update everyone. i would not retain many customers if we did not accept responsibility for our coding errors. unfortunately the government is a monopoly (of sorts) so i cant go to another supplier (without moving) when they make ludicrous statements like 'the computer did yada-yada...' and dont accept real responsibility for their mistakes. again, most people do their banking online, vote in annual stock holder meetings, etc., so why dont we have electronic voting in this day and age?
cheers
kltpzyxm

Real responsibility

garym — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 23:09:42 -0400

Really? the InMotion stuff? No I didn't know about that and no it had nothing whatsoever to do with my comment, I was just hoping one of the others who was up on the goings on in council might know, just because I was curious.

So if InMotion crashes or loses data, you reimburse those building inspectors? Man that's rare. It's great, but wow, it is very very very rare. If our software messes up, we give people a few free credits, but there's no way we take responsibility for messing up a RoseBowl; it's not my choice of course, but it also isn't software that I wrote.

I know it's just inspections, but man, your insurance must be considerable to indemnify you against claims made against you for costs due to errors in the software. There is certainly no such responsibility in the Microsoft EULA that your code likely runs over, and true, it is very likely that when your tablets do fail, it is a bluescreen from MS code rather than your own, but costs are costs, and the industry stats tell us that the costs incurred by using these labour saving devices (sic) are pretty substantial as is, and far higher when they fail.

Now, to be more accurate, when costs have been incurred by our suppliers or our customers due to our own errors, our company does fess up and confess the fault, but we then beg for, and so far (knock on wood) always get mercy, at worse the time I inadvertently used Rackspace to host a new-release RH ISO torrent, they graciously agreed to split the (substantial) bandwidth cost. But confession isn't quite the same as taking the responsibility, so my hat goes off to you for showing the other IT corps how the ethics here should run.

Maybe you should consider diversifying into building voting kiosks ;)

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

responsibility

mxyzptlk — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 08:33:35 -0400

hi gary, it was the misinformation that bothered me. it aint the computer, its the program and the data it was asked to process. it does not surprise me that no one is raising the issue of responsibility and that elections canada is trying to blame the freaking hardware. like i said, it is a good thing we didn't have online voting, it is scary to think what might have happened with such incompetence behind the scenes. to err is human, of course, but the proper reaction is to admit your mistakes and correct them, not blame the computer. i would not be in business if i blamed every software bug on the computer. not sure what project you were referring to with bill jones as sbp is not a client of mine. i have a lot of building inspectors that use our InMotion software to record inspections in the field using tablet pcs with integrated mapping.
kltpzyxm

To Err is Human

garym — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:30:38 -0400

.. but admit it Mxy, to really mess things up on a massive scale, you really do need a computer.

I think what the news item was trying to tell us is not so much that the computers became sentient and spontaneously inflicted all these bizarre and extraneous constraints on the data, but rather what they are priming us to accept blindly is that no human beings will be held responsible for this error so the programmers, and their managers (who could well have forced the errors due to scheduling and cost cuts) will still be paid in full with not even the faintest entertaining of the most distant thought that they should be held accountable to the public purse for the massive costs their incompetence has spawned.

But read your Microsoft EULA ... there's nothing new in all this, this is just the way the Information Society (sic) operates. People are kept thinking computers are somehow the policy makers that mess up everyone's life, funding money gets fleeced into a private enterprise purse, at most someone will blame the poor civil servant who just happened to show up for work that day.

btw ... whatever ever became of the old Bill Jones project to have GPS mil-grade handheld flatpanel tablets for our Public Works to use in check-pointing potholes? I'm just curious.

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

computers don't make mistakes

mxyzptlk — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:02:06 -0400

in today's sun times, Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound chief returning officer Linda Van Aalst says:

Van Aalst confirmed computers caused enormous inconvenience for both election workers and a large percentage of especially rural voters. The computer program that created the voter cards and lists electronically could not seem to accept many rural addresses, often sending voters to polling stations often far from their homes.

Even after local Elections Ontario workers rewrote addresses to remove lot and concession numbers and used new county fire numbers and updated municipalities since amalgamation eight years ago, the computer in many cases added wrong addresses, Van Aalst said.