News.com: Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes.
Okay this is supposed to be a good thing – Microsoft trying to figure out why its software or other products crash and trying to fix the bugs – but I find it mildly disturbing that Microsoft could be the dreaded big brother. I should not fret too much – I use a Mac, and perhaps this will be the ultimate switching campaign for Apple.
That quote from news.com isn’t exactly accurate. Gates happend to be reffering to the “Dr. Watson” debugger already in Windows, when an app or driver crashes and you get thoes funky windows asking if you want to send the info to Microsoft.
He was making the analogy of that being likened to the onboard flight recorder of a plane. And how they are using the mass data being collected to work on bugs and problems in Windows to find out where people are having problems and what they can do to reduce the problems.
Does the press ever get the story right anymore? I am starting to really wonder.
In the vein of “Why don’t they just make the whole plane out of the black box…” why don’t they just spend more time making software that doesn’t crash instead of making software to watch their other software as it keeps crashing?