Barry Schuler, an entrprenuer and board member of Synthetic Genomics, gives a compelling talk about how genomics will change in the coming years at TASTE3. Embedded in his talk (below) is a great joke about "bad" software. The lead up starts at 5:50 into the main presentation, with the punch line starting at 6:10. The whole talk is worth listening to, but the joke is especially powerful.
To quote:
"...if you convert that [the human genome] to binary...just to give you a little bit of sizing... we're actually smaller than the program Microsoft Office. It's not really all that much data. I will also tell you we're at least that buggy."
In Geekonomics, I refer to software as the DNA of technology (a point Mr. Schuler also makes quite elegantly early in his talk)...without DNA, a cell is just a bunch of proteins; without software, the Internet is just a bunch of cables and microchips.
But while we race to reverse engineer DNA and undue all the bugs Mother Nature left in her biological code base, we are not nearly so driven to remove the bugs we create ourselves in our technological code base. Whether we are speaking of defects in biological DNA or technological DNA however, "bad" code can wreak havoc on our welfare. Advances in genomics are understandably attractive and promising; software asurance, should be no less so.
