A Microsoft system crashing. Who would have thunk it? An ad system in Times Square is one thing, but this is an entirely different matter altogether:
In tests, Diebold determined that when voters tapped the final “cast vote” button, the machine would crash every few hundred ballots. They finally intuited the problem: their voting software runs on top of Windows CE, and if a voter accidentally dragged his finger downward while touching “cast vote” on the screen, Windows CE interpreted this as a “drag and drop” command. The programmers hadn’t anticipated that Windows CE would do this, so they hadn’t programmed a way for the machine to cope with it. The machine just crashed.
Of course, programming as something to do with this, as does QA – but how about a graceful exit? Darwin Awards for all involved, please.
