I've been wanting to write about this for several days now, but this was my first opportunity.
ZDNet ran an article this week blaming Microsoft for responsibility in a three-hour shutdown of Souther California air traffic recently. But reading the article clearly points out that the problem wasn't the Microsoft operating system, instead it turned out to be the traffic management application would gradually consume more and more server resources, until it consumed all of them. (BTW -- That's not an OS problem, it's a programming problem.)
Why aren't reporters willing to look at issues such as the one they're covering and get the real facts straight from the very beginning? Isn't it a problem to have someone puting a bad program into service in the first place? Do you really want to tell people that the success of your critical application is dependant on the ability of someone to remember to reboot the machine each week? The fact is, memory leaks can be created by any programmer using a low-level language regardless of the target OS. (BTW, if they had used a language like VB.NET to write the application in 100% managed code, there would be NO possibility for memory leaks at all)
Rather than rant about this further, check out Dana Epps' take on the same problem. He's expressing nearly every one of my thoughts on the matter.