Tenure (was Re: MS explains)

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Thu, 25 January 2001, "Steven M. Bellovin" wrote:
> In message <E14LpXc-0000ET-00 () roam psg com>, Randy Bush writes:
> > > I'd love to see a detailed description of what went wrong, and I hope 
> > > that those in the know will be allowed to post it or present it in 
> > > Atlanta.
> >
> > was it not don knuth's turing aware lecture which consisted of a detailed
> > analysys of some recent bugs in his code?
> We all learn much more from failures than from successes.  To quote 
> Alfred E. Neuman, "Learn from the mistakes of others; you'll never live 
> long enough to make them all yourself."

Donald Knuth has tenure.  He can give all the lectures he wants about
his greatest mistakes.

Although all the "experts" say honesty is the best policy, the PR people
at publically traded companies feel less is more.

When the net was mostly operated and managed by academics, there was a
reward in publishing the resultes of your mistakes.  In today's net, you
are likely to be punished or fired for publically discussing what happened.
Ebay has never publically explained what went wrong with their equipment,
Abovenet has never publically explained what went wrong with their router
configuration,  Worldcom has never publically explained what went wrong
with their switches.  Juniper and Cisco have been trading router
interoperability bugs for a while, but they aren't publically discussed.
Sometimes you might get a little information under NDA,  but publish
a "white paper?" Never!

Admitly, there are exceptions.  AT&T did release a fairly detailed analysis
when they lost most of their 5ESSs switches due to a software bug.  But it
is so rare, we remember them because they are so rare.