A miscellany of tech industry beats including patent and IP issues, Microsoft and mobile coverage. For the most recent
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Bubble Economics and Investment :
Microsoft :
China :
Engineering Values :
Offshoring :
Web Patents :
Phone Wars :
Israel :
Passport :
Will the WiFi Bubble hypesters kill WiFi?
Under-fire and unrepentant: American tech VCs turn nasty
"I was really calling the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, to check up on which weird and interesting drugs he was taking. Anderson bet me that in five years time, there will be more 802.11 chipsets then there will be mobile phone chipsets. Naturally, opportunities like this don't come up every day, so of course I took him up on the offer."
2/5/2003 [more » Techo Utopians ]
HP: following DEC's fate as a Microsoft VAR?
Capital went digital, fast and first, in the mid-1980s, and logically, it seeks rapid rewards. That's all that money wants to do. Financiers are now under greater pressure than ever to get return on investments, faster than ever, because now they get their asses kicked in real time. That, in a nutshell, is why the world seems poorer and more reductive than ever. Dumb money makes for a dumb culture, and tech is no exception.
25/9/2002 [more » Investment more » Engineering ]
DRM music goldrush is a race for losers - mp3.com founder
"Apple is leading a race of lemmings into the zero-profit business of closed music downloads, says the founder of MP3.com, Michael Robertson.
'This is a race where the winner gets shot in the head'
'This is a race where the winner gets shot in the head'
21/11/2003 [more » Music and Digital Rights more » Apple
Spitzer the Blitzer unseals more Bubble Era memos
"How successful has Eliot Spitzer been at achieving his goal of greater transparency in capital formation? Over Christmas, a lot of you had your doubts. You wondered how effective the reforms sought by the pugilist NY State Attorney General, who has been exposing the dot.com era corruption, could really be. With the next bubble just around the corner, it's a good time to be asking the question."
30/4/2003
Spitzer: Man Of The Year - Savior of Capitalism?
"Spitzer has demonstrated an important fundamental: that we shape society to our will, and not to some magical, all-healing invisible hand. Especially when that invisible hand stays in its invisible trouser pocket, jacking off."
22/12/2002
› Spitzer's "cure" doesn't fix Wall Street pestilence 24/12/2002
"You'd think that with the equities markets suffering a slow motion freefall on a scale of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, and with so much "new economy" hype now exposed as huckster hubris, that this would be a time for reassessment and introspection in investment circles.
Not so.
We can confidently, if not happily, predict that the next tech crash of 2010 is going to look remarkably similar to the one we've just endured.
The cream of American Venture Capital - once thought of as the wellspring of the nation's economic well being - isn't just unrepentant, it seems determined to remake the next bubble with the same muddle-headed assumptions as it spun the last one."
Not so.
We can confidently, if not happily, predict that the next tech crash of 2010 is going to look remarkably similar to the one we've just endured.
The cream of American Venture Capital - once thought of as the wellspring of the nation's economic well being - isn't just unrepentant, it seems determined to remake the next bubble with the same muddle-headed assumptions as it spun the last one."
31/8/2002
Why the Friendster bubble 'has peaked - will pop'
"The good times must be returning to the blighted technology industry. Silicon Valley's VCs are doing what they love best, and throwing investments at start-ups which don't know how to make money themselves"
5/11/2003 [more » Techno Utopians more » Bubble Economics and Investment ]
Strength through pessimism! Keeping your stuff safe
Doing The Right Thing: Apple UI history
David Rosenthal's LOCKSS project: a P2P systems designed for librarians to preserve the integrity of data. The contrast between today's lossy utopians, is illustrated by the piece which inspired it - below.
24/2/2005
Digital memories: we can forget them for you wholesale!
Christian Lindholm was at Nokia at the time, and is now at Yahoo! We was showing me LifeBlog, which he believes will persuade people to post pictures to the net.
... file formats are superseded. Storage media becomes obsolete. Recordable CDs rot and peel. Even inkjet paper turns to mulch after a few years. It's scary when you think about it.
We could be looking at a generation in fifty years time which has no family photo album. Your reporter suggested it might be twenty years, or even longer - two or three generations - whether we knew if such digital formats had at last won the public's trust. And who, exactly, could we trust with our memories in digital form?
Christian had an idea.
"Google is a bank, Microsoft is a bank - and Nokia could be a bank," he told us. As he saw it, a large part of his job was persuading businesses they could make money from this.
Only, we suggested, there was no guarantee that any of these companies would be around in the "digital media banking business" in five years, no matter how enthusiastic they might be on launch day. Christian agreed that building trust was very important. Make sure you're sitting down for the next bit.
"At one time, the banks weren't trusted," he told us. "So they built great marble buildings to prove they would be there in the future."
The implication was clear: all the digital banks needed to do was erect some similar portals, and the public would be assured of their durability. At this point we felt obliged to point out a bit of history.
21/2/2005
Apple User Interface Human Group alumni Gitta Salomon: "People get upset by bad design but the expectation is set so low. If you had a washing machine that worked as badly, you'd never buy from that manufacturer again. So we're losing a level of depth in product development. At Apple we had more time, which is good."
6/5/2003 [more » Apple more » Investment ]
Watching the Net's background radiation
"When the city sleeps, it's never completely silent. But when the Internet sleeps, what kind of static does it make? What does it sound like?" Background packet radiation charted.
3/3/2004 [more » Engineering]
Stalling net must dump TCP/IP and overlords
Utopians don't like to read reports like this, and do their best to ignore them.
"The study concludes that TCP - if not TCP/IP - needs to be replaced, probably within a five to ten year time frame," according to the authors in an interim report, Internet Mark 2. Migrating to the new internet will become an issue. Last week Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger called for a "superstructure" to be built on top of existing protocols.
More drastically, the authors conclude that the political and technical structures for solving these problems need to be overhauled. "IETF and ICANN have been unable to deal with the range of issues and concerns adequately," the project suggests.
14/9/2004
HP: following DEC's fate as a Microsoft VAR?
Capital went digital, fast and first, in the mid-1980s, and logically, it seeks rapid rewards. That's all that money wants to do. Financiers are now under greater pressure than ever to get return on investments, faster than ever, because now they get their asses kicked in real time. That, in a nutshell, is why the world seems poorer and more reductive than ever. Dumb money makes for a dumb culture, and tech is no exception.
25/9/2002 [more » Investment more » Engineering ]
Why Intel doesn't write stuff down
Why did Intel cut such a shrewd deal, while Microsoft let its garrulous dirty washing hang out to dry?
Perhaps it's down to how they communicate, and their modes of communication are worth a moment of comparitive analysis.
Perhaps it's down to how they communicate, and their modes of communication are worth a moment of comparitive analysis.
24/04/2003 [more » Language more »Engineering ]
Chip designers vow to cool overheating Gelsinger
Inspired by this. "If current Gelsinger models are obeyed by 2010, Intel's vice president of architecture may be producing enough thermals to bring microprocessor conferences to a grinding halt. And by 2015, the heat dissipation from future Gelsingers will require portable, industrial scale para-coolants to chill the hyperbolic Veep."
7/2/2001 [more » Itanic ]
› A Silicon Valley funeral for Be Inc. 17/1/2002
Motorola gambles big on Linux, Sinocapitalism
"Anyone who patronizes the Chinese or otherwise underestimates the potential of China's state-owned capitalism to own an increasing share of its IP could be in for a nasty surprise. (Beijing knows that the first and some of the most important Qualcomm patents expire in about six years. You can picture it counting down the days on the calendar)."
China's chip gaining GHz quickly - report
Godson-2, China's MIPS-derived CPU for desktops and servers isn't competitive yet. But it is now visible in Intel's rear view mirror. A chat with Microprocessor Report's Tom Halfhill.
25/7/2005
The Cell Chip
According to the Western technological consensus in the computer industr, Asian manufacturers are permitted to own the lower tiers of a model, such as manufacturing and assembly, while the United States 'owns' semiconductors and operating systems. But was only a question of when this would be challenged. The Cell chip poses some deep questions: "how does technology benefit us?" which we discuss at the social and economic levels.
3/2/2003
Feel My Pain! - mapping the mind of Chairman Bill
"Herb Caen once wrote that the sprawling night fog that
fills the San Francisco Bay could be precisely mapped in the mind of the listener from the sound of a dozen foghorns, each
one of which was tuned to a different pitch. You can build up a similar picture of the mind of Bill Gates from his epic
written deposition. For here, in no less than 43,000 words is Mappi Bill. Or 464 legal points, many of which are an anxious
toot or blast each tuned to a slightly differing pitch of paranoia."
23/4/2002 ]
"This MS Antitrust story was created by a computer program"
"Why not use Perl scripts to generate the copy, too?" Testing our automatic story generator, mkstory.
Microsoft's masterplan to screw phone partner - full details
"Sendo's 27-page filing in a Texas court - disclosed here for the first time - is a rich litany of double dealing,
betrayal and larceny - if the dramatic (and at times apoplectic) allegations can be believed. Until November, Sendo
was Microsoft's flagship phone OEM. It then announced that its four-times-delayed Z100 Stinger phone would be canned,
and threw its lot in with Nokia, terminating the Microsoft agreement."
5/01/2003 [more » Phone Wars more » ]
Microsoft monopoly says Apple monopoly is too restrictive
"Comparing the two monopolies - one horizontal, one vertical - is an interesting exercise.
Under which monopoly are users happier? ..."
20/10/2003 [more » Apple]
Israel slams the door on Microsoft
Apple Israel chief calls for 'Save Hebrew' write-in
"In a bold assertion of independence, Israel has thrown the full weight of its antitrust legislation at Microsoft.
The Israeli Ministry of Commerce has suspended all governmental contracts with Microsoft, and indicated that the ban will last throughout 2004. The de facto suspension means no upgrades for the duration, at a time when Microsoft is looking to roll out its Office 2003 upgrade; and the Ministry is said to be examining OpenOffice as an alternative.
It's a consequence of a much-anticipated legal verdict: Israeli Antitrust Authority director general Dror Strum has finally acknowledged that Microsoft is a monopoly.
Register readers play no small part in this remarkable story." See stories below ...
The Israeli Ministry of Commerce has suspended all governmental contracts with Microsoft, and indicated that the ban will last throughout 2004. The de facto suspension means no upgrades for the duration, at a time when Microsoft is looking to roll out its Office 2003 upgrade; and the Ministry is said to be examining OpenOffice as an alternative.
It's a consequence of a much-anticipated legal verdict: Israeli Antitrust Authority director general Dror Strum has finally acknowledged that Microsoft is a monopoly.
Register readers play no small part in this remarkable story." See stories below ...
14/10/2003
Israel accelerates free software migration
"The strategic decision to loosen dependencies on Microsoft software instigated by the Israel Department of Commerce is gathering momentum in other government departments. More intriguingly, departments are demanding that Microsoft follow suit with its Thai price cuts - which Microsoft has steadfastly refused to contemplate in the more affluent EMEA market."
15/12/2003
› MS scorns Israeli OpenOffice defection 24/11/2003
"'Can anyone explain why IE:mac and Outlook Express:mac support Zulu and Portugeuse but not Russian or Hebrew?' Or incredibly, Arabic and Korean too.
19/06/2002
Mac users to MS: your Right to Left defence is Upside Down
"'I share the frustration felt by those around the world who speak Arabic and Hebrew. I am an Iranian-American that has used a Mac for many years. My father has used Nisus Writer and the Mac (from System 7 to Mac OS 9) to publish several books in farsi. This summer, he will become a "switcher" and purchase a Windows system for the first time in ten years. '"...
2/7/2002
Microsoft's Mac chief explains Hebrew position
"'We therefore conclude that Hebrew, with far fewer users than Spanish, would not make sense for us. As much as we'd like to support Hebrew, we have to prioritize.'" - Kevin Browne, Microsoft Macintosh BU
4/7/2002
› Microsoft's Hebrew, Arabic snub: your pain 20/06/2002
We're being spanked by Nokia - Gates
Palm 'mulled Linux' for next-gen OS
Bill Gates has admitted Microsoft is "way, way, way behind Nokia", in the phone business. Three "ways" is significant - because Bill's "way"-scale is logarithmic. Not a lot of people know that
23/10/2002 [more » Engineering ]
Qualcomm monoculture is 'killing American wireless'
Reader's Letter: "If so, arguing about network standards isn't the way to go about it. It was the lack of a common network technology that was largely responsible for turning North America into a wireless backwater in the first place..."
23/10/2002 [more » Engineering ]
Iraq's mobile network - Qualcomm to follow the tanks?
And in a flash, the war on terror started to morph into the war for CDMA. North Korea, watch out - there's a jumping-off point right next door. US wireless company Qualcomm has often been described as the civilian wing of the military-industrial complex, so perhaps the only thing that should surprise us is how speedily its arrival in the wake of the tanks in Iraq occurred.
6/11/2002 [more » Wireless]
China to Qualcomm: er, you and whose army?
"The press conference, while sparsely populated, turned out to be the most intriguing of the show - giving us a fine display of both China's technical confidence and tact. It was only after some goading that we got a sense of how the Chinese manufacturers see the IP battlefield…"
… The subtext was that Chinese businesses don't simply pay up on demand - especially if that demand has been made through the press.
15/2/2006
Microsoft's masterplan to screw phone partner - full details
If Sendo's case progresses, it's likely to add new stars to the litigation firmament - one which has already brought us phrases such as "cut off the air supply", "knife the baby" and faked videotape evidence... "Microsoft refused [a further cash injection] with the full knowledge that this refusal would push Sendo to insolvency"
5/1/2003 [more » Symbian ]
Motorola to axe Palm smartphone
"Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Motorola executive told The Register that the Palm collaboration was 'extremely unlikely' ever to reach market, independently confirming other highly placed Motorola sources. The device was announced with great fanfare last September, uniting Palm's operating system with telephony expertise from its key microprocessor supplier."
12/4/2001 ]
Palm CTO rubbishes '3000 man years' of Symbian OS work
"Palm CTO Bill Maggs: "[Palm OS] is basically a good data network OS ... we can enhance that with new features. But we don't need to run a big MMU, we don't need to spend 3000 man years of effort trying to run a good application enironment, as Symbian has done, without much success it seems to me.'"
14/11/2000 [more » Symbian ]
› 'Mad' Maggs to quit Palm :: 16/1/2001
› Shoe salesman quits PDA company :: 9/11/2001
› Be Inc. completes takeover of Palm :: 25/6/2002
"'Palm had a Not Invented Here syndrome in spades,' a former staffer tells us, and the company spent much of 2000 in a funk, indecisiveness reigned over what should succeed PalmOS."
8/7/2002
Sony, Ericsson create 800lb phone gorilla
"Sony and Ericsson effectively pooled their mobile phone operations yesterday, creating a new joint company to handle the venture. This involves 2500 staff from Ericsson's phone division joining 1500 from Sony, with new multimedia phones promised for late next year."
25/4/2001
Can Club Nokia thwart .NET?
"But the Club Nokia parlay isn't just a case of the Finns catching portalitis - the peculiarly late-90s fashion where vendors aggregated as much useless content in one place as they could find, in the hope of capturing traffic. No, instead an expanded Club Nokia will become a marketplace to sell content and services, too, much as Redmond envisages all the disparate Windows tendrils leading back to its Hailstorm hub of web services."
Yeah, whatever happened to that plan?
Yeah, whatever happened to that plan?
27/11/2002
Motorola gambles big on Linux, Sinocapitalism
"Anyone who patronizes the Chinese or otherwise underestimates the potential of China's state-owned capitalism to own an increasing share of its IP could be in for a nasty surprise. (Beijing knows that the first and some of the most important Qualcomm patents expire in about six years. You can picture it counting down the days on the calendar)."
Monday night at the Single's Club? Apple's Real People
This story critical of Apple's ad campaign provoked a 10,000 message thread at PC Magazine's forum which is still going strong. " Here in unforgiving relief are a collection of scarred, terrified refugees from life - for whom the computer is alternately a punishment surrogate, a child substitute or a object. They're framed in high contrast and against a white background, perhaps an unconscious homage to Persona - with characters in states of psychological extremesÉ Apple has very expensively created a caricature of what PC users think Mac users are: people who just couldn't hack it, and have bolted for a niche." Subsequent 'switchers' were framed in a more positive, and much less dehumanizing light. But Apple needs switchers more than ever.
17/6/2002
Apple users demand higher prices, worse treatment
We started a campaign. Here you can find mail in support of the proposition. This is what the rest of you thought about it. Ten per cent eventually signed up for iTools, which had other consequences too; see Apple loses World's Most Valuable List.
23/7/2002
How I learned to stop worrying, and abandoned Mac OSX
Heresy at the time: : "We have to conclude that with OS X, you're buying Apple in spite of the user interface, not because of it." Two years later, Panther has solved almost every one of these issues. Although the placement of desktop icons is based on the Uncertainty Principle.
3/1/2002
There's a noose in the hoose - iTunes shoppers discover DRM
"So for Apple to pop up and grant the dying RIAA members a $99c toll on each song - when the distribution costs are zero, and when the RIAA is so manifestly corrupt - is a pill many find hard to swallow."
DRM music goldrush is a race for losers - mp3.com founder
"Apple is leading a race of lemmings into the zero-profit business of closed music downloads, says the founder of MP3.com, Michael Robertson.
'This is a race where the winner gets shot in the head'
'This is a race where the winner gets shot in the head'
21/11/2003 [more » Music and Digital Rights more » Bubble Economics and Investment
The Web standards consortium faced a major schism over royalty free licensing. An accomodation was
reached thanks to work by Bruce Perens and Eben Moglen
The free Web's over, as W3C blesses Net patent taxes
The W3C web standards committee considered a proposal to permit fee-bearing (RAND) patents. A revised draft was widely accepted in 2002 thanks to input from Bruce Perens and Eben Moglen.
1/10/2001
› We'll fork the Web to keep it free - Perens :: 3/10/2001
› Web standards schism 'terrible' - W3C patent policy boss :: 2/10/2001
› Tempers cool in Pay to Play Web row :: 15/10/2002
› Berners Lee: WWW royalties considered harmful :: 31/10/2002
› Net patent tax - W3C publishes new advice 25/1/2002
› W3C rejects net patent tax, avoids web schism :: 16/1//2002
› JPEGs are not free: Patent holder pursues IP grab :: 18/7/2002
› JPEG guardians vow to defend free images :: 20/7/2002
› No more JPEGs - ISO to withdraw image standard :: 23/7/2002
› What's wrong with this JPEG picture? :: 26/7/2002
Silicon Graphics Inc has transferred much of its 3D graphics patents portfolio to Microsoft. These form the heart of a mysterious transaction which showed up in SGI SECC filings last year, with Microsoft paying $62.5 million for unspecified "intellectual property" rights to SGI. SGI insisted at the time these are "non core" technologies, but sources close to the Mountain View are emphatic that these represent the bulk of SGI's 3D intellectual property assets, a view confirmed by documents disclosed to The Register.
16/1/2002
› SGI shoots the messenger :: 22/1/2002
› Microsoft's SGI 3D patents trickling back to Redmond :: 26/4/2002
› Open source developers wary of MS graphics patent grab :: 11/7/2002
Defensive, we presume. Google paid Yahoo! over $200 million, and took out a license, to settle litigation relating to Yahoo!'s Overture patents.
30/7/2005
IBM to outsource thousands of euphemisms
"IBM has warned staff not to use the word 'off-shore' when it starts to move white collar jobs from the US to China, India and Brazil this year, the Wall Street Journal reports today."
20/01/2004 [more » Language]
› Intel CEO admits: jobs aren't coming back to US 5/10/2003
› Adieu California - Intel CEO 22/10/2003
› Intel's Grove: US software, services face meltdown 11/10/2003
All your data (and biz plans) are belong to Microsoft
"The current Passport Terms of Use agreement not only fails to guarantee confidentially, but actually gives Microsoft and its business partners the right to own your information, and do pretty much what they want with it. That encompasses all your Hotmail and MSN Messenger communications today."
30/3/2001 [more » Microsoft]
Microsoft alters Passport Terms to stem Hotmail defections
Microsoft is to amend its Passport Terms of Use within the next day, a spokesman told The Register today. Corporate spokesman Tom Pilla said:- "People are confused, and rightly so. The Passport Terms haven't been updated to reflect our privacy policy. We're sorry."
4/4/2001
How Reg reader outrage prompted Microsoft's Passport volte-farce
"The problem with the Privacy Policy defense is that it isn't a defense at all. You can steal a person's idea without divulging information about their personal identity: or as our own John Lettice points out: 'Isn't invading my privacy - merely starving my children.'"
5/4/2001
Google revives discredited Microsoft privacy policy for Friendster clone
Two years later, an identical policy appears on Google's social networking site. "Orkut's terms of service harbor a nasty payload - 'By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.'
And hardly anyone objects.
And hardly anyone objects.
5/2/2004 [more » Google]
› Microsoft opts Passport holders into spam hell :: 17/5/2002
› Yahoo! Rips! Up! Privacy! Policy! :: 3/4/2002
› Who told Dean to scream for lock-down, TCPA computing? :: 27/01/2004
GUI wars return: Motorola, Sony Ericsson tie-up
"Motorola has licensed Symbian's UIQ ("Thin Quartz") user interface for its forthcoming Paragon 3G smartphone, industry sources have told The Register ... Symbian revised its strategy last year, essentially pulling out of the business of designing user interfaces. So what, you may wonder, is the future of the Ronneby lab? Well, a joint-venture looks the most likely, with SonyEricsson and Motorola taking joint ownership, and attempting to license it to other manufacturers.
2/8/2002 [more » Phone Wars ]
Palm creator 'calls' Symbian boss in OS' defence
"'Hey. I've got Colly's number. Why don't we ring him now?' said Hawkins. There followed spoof phone call to the Symbian boss, via a Visor, to a number in nearby Redwood City, Ca. The voice that answered was more Mike Myers than Colly Myers, however, with a newly acquired American accent.
14/12/2000 [more » Fun Stuff ]
Palm 'mulled Linux' for next-gen OS
Palm Inc was considering Linux as the foundation of the next-generation PalmOS as recently as last spring, sources tell us. Palm eventually acquired Be Inc's development team last August, but internal discussions on the viability of a Linux-based handheld OS were taking place up to fifteen months ago. These were squashed by the lawyers, who concluded that Palm couldn't reconcile the GPL with the in-house view of intellectual property.
8/7/2002
Nokia takes charge at Symbian
"... We noticed that Symbian has a new-look mission statement, the first change to the text since mid-1998. But companies don't usually change their mission statements unless there's an accompanying strategy shift, do they? ...Things seem to be moving on from the three family reference designs, or DFRDs (Device Family Reference Designs), which have been canned. Cockerton says the DFRDs are still current, but our money is on this line being one of these things that doesn't change, until it does. A bit like a mission statement.
22/11/2001
Symbian takes charge at Symbian
Symbian will remain in the user interface business, despite giving every indication over the past 20 months that user interfaces weren't really what it was all about. Last autumn Symbian confirmed that it had in fact ceased developing UIs business in 2001.
18/2/2003
Symbian moves US office to /dev/null
Symbian has closed its US office in Redwood City, CA and all but three of the staff have been made redundant.
19/12/2001
Archive Home Page
Start Here
Techno Utopians
The Balkanized Net : Wikipedia : "Web 2.0" : Googlewash : Blog Hype : Always-On Neurosis : Wi-Fi Bubble : Howard Dean
Music, Copyright
Flat Fee Licensing : Copyright : The "Stuckist Net" : Internet Radio : CPRM
Patents, antitrust and other beats
Bubble Economics and Investment : Microsoft : China : Engineering Values : Offshoring : Web Patents : Phone Wars : Israel : Passport :
Fun Stuff
Management and Motivation : Appreciations : Flying Cars : Itanic : Language & Semantics : Favourite Flames Of The Week : Badpress
Start Here
Techno Utopians
The Balkanized Net : Wikipedia : "Web 2.0" : Googlewash : Blog Hype : Always-On Neurosis : Wi-Fi Bubble : Howard Dean
Music, Copyright
Flat Fee Licensing : Copyright : The "Stuckist Net" : Internet Radio : CPRM
Patents, antitrust and other beats
Bubble Economics and Investment : Microsoft : China : Engineering Values : Offshoring : Web Patents : Phone Wars : Israel : Passport :
Fun Stuff
Management and Motivation : Appreciations : Flying Cars : Itanic : Language & Semantics : Favourite Flames Of The Week : Badpress
Compare and contrast: the approach of the real engineer with the values of the techno utopians, or the "Web 2.0" crowd. No technology deserves to be trusted unless it is reliable. We may walk away from a car crash, and replace the damage with an identical, generic car. But lost data can never be replaced.
The harm done to the public trust in technology by inadequate engineers is hard to calculate.
Footnote: I originally thought "wiki fiddlers" an excellent description of this mentality, where presentation-layers skills are appllied to system-level problems - with predictable consequences. Then I started writing about Wikipedia, and the term took on a life of its own...