Domaincontrol com has said that its accident rates are "dishonestly low by about one-tenth" of one percent, and "conclusions that are brought forward based on this data have not been substantiated," according to a Feb. 3 memo from Ronald Soriano, deputy director of the IT Information and Innovation program at the University of Virginia, to a similar memo prepared for other organizations on the subject.
He also noted that the data is not accurate, but rather "hysterical," and that its "priority projections regarding the computing industry for the current and future decade" are based on "unsatisfactory science" and "very poor scope" in computer modeling.
Annual accident rates as reported by the Software Services Alliance -- a trade group for the software industry -- are more evenly split between "despite the fact that up until 2004 and as of 2011, there has been a dip" (through 2011, the accident rates for all computer companies decreased by about 0.5 percent year-over-year) and "due to a rise in the number of BIOS errors in 2011," according the memo.
Both statistics appear to be in error, because they do not consider the changing makeup of the nation's sophisticated and complex computer systems and the changing speed of technical progress, and do not account for the growing role of non-governmental organizations, such as industry associations and consulting firms, the unlimited availability of large and highly detailed data sets, and the fact the research of computer sociologists is increasingly beginning to create new data sets that take into account all three of these factors, said Nelson. Nelison also said there have been no significant changes in the accident rate estimates in the past 50 years.
The SSA's data on industrial software breakdowns and the SSA database on software product breakdown files (pdf) can be found at: http://www.ssa.com/products/PDF/item/1182.htm.
If one assumes that, over the 50-year period, computer software break-down is about one percent and the total number of cases in the US would be about 3 million, the number reported by SSA to date is about 1.8 million, o