School - I026: I - 3 unsuccessful projects in the history of IT

It's been a while when I posted here, didn't have any good challenges to write about, but I guess I've taken up one of the major one now - started school again. Target - get into Tallinn University of Technology masters program and learn cyber security. Before this I need to finalize my bachelors degree.

We have one topic called I026 which translates into Social, Ethical and Professional Issues in IT. In here we need to publish posts every week about different topics. Today's topic is to write down, in my opinion, 3 unsuccessful projects in the history of IT.

#1 Downfall of Nokia N9

I think that the major failure was discontinuing Nokia N9 mobile phone. This phone had everything what a proper smartphone needs: Slim design, custom built operating system (MeeGo OS, v1.2 Harmattan), OLED display which reduced power consumption, quite open platform with big online forum support. The team behind it started their own company called Jolla and the operating system Sailfish. This company hasn't really kicked off in the scale as I have hoped, but that is another topic.

Coming back to Nokia N9 and MeeGo OS then it was truly good achievement, the platform was quite open and perfect tool to play around. People even hacked Debian to be ran there in virtual machine. I also made it to work in my N9. After that things got really interesting when, following many tutorials, I installed 6 different operating systems. My phone had hexaboot. Nokia made a big mistake for killing this project. I really hope that they are coming back to senses and reboot the efforts. World needs another good mobile operating system, which can also handle natively different mobile platform applications. Sailfish is trying but they don't have hardware to support the efforts.

#2 Nasa Challenger Disaster

What can be worse - exploding space shuttle with astronauts on live TV. The reasons why it happened is actually not very IT related, rather than mathematics and physics, but I believe that with proper analysis tools and computing power, it could have been prevented. Namely, nobody thought that weather on that day is colder than in the days when they did test runs. I even don't know if people today calculate weather factors in complex mathematical and physical models. I mean, we have the power to calculate, we have computers linked in to major GRID system we have the possibility to harvest community and get the calculations done, but why not? It is costly and somebody needs to drive it.

Imagine if we could give to community that please review our materials, review our mathematical models, we pay you when you find out what can be wrong, what may fail and prove it. Simple as that. I bet if they could have done it in 1986 then most likely somebody had come to that that O-rings  may fail due misuse of the materials. What prevented them? I could think only the cold war. Fear of sharing knowledge to the world. FEAR costed 7 lives, impacted thousands, or even millions. Why are we scared to share secrets?

#3 Car tax policies

Governments are looking different ways how to get more taxes from people and they have implemented in many places car taxes, either from emitted carbon dioxide or what is worse - power of the car. If you have more KW that some X amount, you need to pay higher tax to the government. Reason is simple - you use more fuel, you pollute the environment more, you pay for the luxury.

What actually happens is that car producers will not limit the KW with engine build, but they are doing it via programming car chip to give less fuel to the pistons. Engine is the same, pollution levels are higher. Is the environment really cleaner? I don't think so, we only fake it to cut down the costs of making cars and still sell it. Car tax policy in the name of cleaner environment has failed big time, since we have smarter cars than few decades ago and we can use programmatic way to show the numbers which are required to avoid unnecessary taxes.