As counterintuitive as it might seem, George Candeas "crash-only software" concept may actually help keep software crash free. According to Candea, software crashes and subsequent reboots neednt be catastrophic, systemwide events. He has described software that can be trained to monitor itself and, if it detects something amiss, to launch a surgical, or "micro," reboot of just the problematic application element, while the system as a whole functions uninterrupted. "Microrebooting allows software to react to failure in machine time as opposed to human time," says Candea, who recently got his doctorate in computer science at Stanford University.