Keeping up appearances in tech The word "rant" is used far too often, and in various ways. It's meant to imply aimless, angry venting. But often it means: Naming problems without proposing solutions, this makes me feel confused. Naming problems and assigning blame, this makes me feel bad. I saw a remarkable pair of tweets the other day. In the wake of the outage, the CEO of CrowdStrike sent out a public announcement . It's purely factual. The scope of the problem is identified, the known facts are stated, and the logistics of disaster relief are set in motion. Millions of computers were affected. This is the equivalent of a frazzled official giving a brief statement in the aftermath of an earthquake, directing people to the Red Cross. Everything is basically on fire for everyone involved. Systems are failing everywhere, some critical, and quite likely people are panicking.…