Computers and heat density

On Sun, 13 Aug 2006, Jules Richardson wrote: I was a telecom test engineer at my last job, and the software quality was atrocious. I once got a nice christmas gift from the engineering department of a Canadian company for finding ~30 critical (fails and doesn't come back up without operator intervention) bugs in their SIGTRAN product in less than 2 months; this after their sales department convinced our management that the product was deployed in "dozens of sites". Then there was the GSN we bought from an Indian branch of a big American defense contractor; once again "dozens" of prior deployments were promised, but the product would not interoperate with anything other than their (buggy) test software. Parts of this real-time system were written in embedded TCL! I still have my notes on how to construct SS7 frames that will crash their stack; they refused to fix these because "the far end shouldn't be sending malformed frames" :-) I quit that job 1.5 years after the GSN was acquired, and only maybe 80% of the worst bugs had been fixed yet, however we had already deployed the product to 2 of our own customers. Our own flagship piece of software hit 100% CPU at around 30-45 calls per second on a PIII 700 M CPU because every call control action has to update the Call Detail Records, and I gather there was a single spinlock over the whole (Microsoft Access) DB. I'm betting with my test experience, I could make better quality products than 90% of the telecom market with 1-2 handpicked RF engineers and 3-4 systems programmers. Of course the sales would still all go to the politically connected companies selling drek, so we would never make a profit. :-/ Alexey