The tech world is all too familiar with Twitter's "fail whale" and have become accustomed to Gmail failures (which are inevitably chronicled on Twitter.) And while sometimes it's infrastructure (such as routers and switches) rather than software that fails, it often seems as if we too readily accept that software will inevitably breakdown.

Mark Donsky, director of product management at Coverity, commented recently about a recent static analysis of open-source projects performed on the Scan site that showed a 71.9 percent correlation between the number of lines of code and number of defects found.

This is of course, not an open-source problem but a general issue that occurs as more code is integrated into products. I've been told that Windows is developed with two quality assurance people to every engineer as the product has grown over the years.

Coverity is focused on software integrity and advocates static analysis early in the development cycle. While testing of all kinds, including static analysis are obviously good ideas, the tools and methods vary dramatically by engineering organization. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University and the Object Management Group (OMG) recently paired up to form a consortium to establish standards for software quality. … Read more

Mozilla on Wednesday released two new versions of its browser, Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14, that patch three critical security holes and fix assorted other bugs.

The updates can be fetched through the Help menu's Check for Updates option, or can be downloaded directly.

Although Mozilla still supports the 3.0 version, it's pushing people to the 3.5 version, and support for the 3.0 series will end in a few months. Version 3.5, released in June, supports a variety of new Web page technologies and includes a faster JavaScript engine for running … Read more

Support for extensions to customize Chrome, the top-requested feature for Google's browser, has begun arriving for adventurous users.

Previously, extensions worked only for those who enabled the feature with a command line switch. Now the feature is enabled by default in the developer preview version of Chrome on Windows, Aaron Boodman, the Google engineer who oversees the extensions work, said in a blog post Wednesday.

"We're ready for a few more people to start using extensions--the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel," said Boodman, who earlier in his career developed the Greasemonkey tool … Read more

Updated on September 16 at 6:30 a.m. PDT: adding information from Hironori Kasahara, a professor of computer science at Waseda University

Large electronics companies are building a chip for consumer electronics devices in Japan, while a China-based device manufacturer said it is working on devices using the ARM chip design, according to reports.

In Japan, some of the country's largest electronics and chip manufacturers are collaborating in an effort to develop a new low-power processor design for consumer electronics devices, according to Nikkei, which Forbes reported earlier.

The Japan-based group includes Fujitsu, Toshiba, Panasonic Renesas Technology, NEC, … Read more

The National Hockey League franchise Dallas Stars announced on Wednesday that it has partly ditched standard ticket pricing in favor of a dynamic pricing model. Software developer Qcue plans to provide the technology the team needs to adjust prices.

The Dallas Stars have inked a one-year deal with Qcue for it to analyze several factors to determine the right price for each home game. The Stars want to ensure that as many people as possible are attending the team's games. The changes will affect only individual game tickets in the upper level. Season ticket holders and those in the lower level will pay a standard rate for all games.

According to Geoff Moore, Dallas Stars senior vice president of sales and marketing, Qcue's technology analyzes the Stars and its opponents' win-loss records, attendance, stats, opposing players, and more. Standings, supply of tickets left, and attendance also play a part. Combine all those factors (and more), and Qcue's proprietary algorithm spits out the suggested pricing on each seat.

In order to make the pricing as effective as possible, the Stars have decided that the team will sell tickets in two-month blocks only. The first block, for games in October and November, will be offered on September 12.

As the season progresses, Qcue will continue to tweak its algorithm while adding as much data as possible to the software. Ticket prices will change based on last year's information, as well as this season's performance. Moore believes that selling tickets through Qcue's service is the best way for the Stars to achieve its financial goals.

"Our goal is to increase the number of ticket-buying customers we have," Moore said. "We believe that Qcue's software will increase our revenue, but it's likely that the number of bodies in seats will increase at a much more rapid rate. That's exactly what we want."… Read more

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this week that it has finally completed a nine-year, $180 million project aimed at installing new supercomputers to aid in more accurately predicting weather. The primary IBM supercomputer is now called Stratus. Its backup is dubbed Cirrus.

The new supercomputers, based on IBM Power 575 Systems, are capable of making 69.7 trillion calculations per second. According to NOAA, the faster the calculation speeds, the greater the chances that meteorologists can rapidly update severe weather forecasts as dangerous weather affects local communities. Billions of bytes are entered into the supercomputers each day to help predict the weather more accurately.

Just how important NOAA's new supercomputers are to our understanding and prediction of weather is easily understated.

Right now, Stratus contains about 20 weather models that predict worldwide weather accurately for about five days. A few decades ago, weather models could forecast weather accurately up to only about two days.

Those 20 weather models rarely change. They analyze conditions such as temperature, humidity, and precipitation to give organizations ranging from the National Weather Service to local meteorologists data on which they can base forecasts.

According to Ben Kyger, director of central operations for the National Center of Environmental Prediction, a division of NOAA, "We analyze weather conditions on grids we lay over maps of the world. In order for meteorologists to accurately predict a hurricane's path, for example, NOAA needs to pinpoint weather conditions in 1-kilometer grids of distance." Right now, those spans "are not even close to that."

How does it work? In order to improve forecasting, a lot of work needs to be done. Right now, scientists from around the world are analyzing Stratus' weather models to find ways to improve them. When they think that they've come up with an improvement, NOAA analyzes the new models.

If it likes what it sees, NOAA takes it open source. It installs the new model on the Cirrus supercomputer to run in parallel with the approved model on Stratus. Scientists, weather experts, and even you and I can view the new model and inspect it for errors. Errors found are removed or tweaked. If no errors can be found, and the new data enhances weather forecasting, it will be put into operation and replace the existing model that it improved upon.… Read more

For companies that want to turn all that customer carping on Twitter and Facebook into something more constructive, Salesforce.com is bringing some new services to its cloud-computing infrastructure.

Salesforce.com, which sells Internet-based services as an alternative to business software companies install on their own computers, has added new Twitter and crowdsourced tech support options to its foundation for customer service work.

The Service Cloud 2 options, announced Wednesday, will give new Web-based options to those who pay Salesforce.com to run their customer-support infrastructures. About 8,000 clients use the earlier Service Cloud option, Salesforce.com said, and … Read more

Comcast announced Tuesday it will offer 100 Mbps broadband service to businesses in the Twin Cities as the company increases speeds on its network as a result of network upgrades.

The company is offering the service over its newly upgraded Docsis 3.0 network. The Minneapolis-Saint Paul region was selected as the first area to get the service because it is one of the most mature Docsis 3.0 deployments that Comcast currently serves.

Comcast hasn't provided a schedule for when the service will be expanded. But a spokesman said the company will eventually introduce it in all its … Read more

Updated at 2:15 p.m. PDT: adding information about Dell system.

The main message of the new Core i5 chip is simple: it's cheap--even cheaper than Intel chips based on older technology.

The i5, which brings Intel's new "Nehalem" microarchitecture into the mainstream PC market, immediately makes many, if not most, of the older desktop processors obsolete. Consumers need look no further than pricing on sites like Amazon. The i5-750 lists for $250, while the older--based on Intel's last-generation "Core 2" microarchitecture--Q9650 lists for $319.

The official pricing from Intel in quantities … Read more