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Examples of Programming Gone Wrong?
LightForce3 asks: "I'm a beginning CS student, and in my studies I've come across examples of programmer error causing very large problems, such as the Ariane 5 failure and the Therac-25 accidents, often as tales of caution to beginner programmers such as myself. My (morbid?) curiosity has been piqued, and I'm looking for other examples of programmer error leading to serious problems. After all, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others than from your own, right? ;) What programming-related accidents, incidents, and failures, both well-known and obscure, do Slashdot readers know about, and are there any good resources for researching these?"
Windows.
When Programming goes Wrong 2! Thrill to our latest reality TV series where we show REAL LIFE footage of poorly thought out database schemas, unchecked buffers and even explicit shots of forbidden goto statements.
Professor Falkin was always saying, "Leave a backdoor in any program you write, just in case your code becomes self-aware."
couldn't find it either, huh ? ;)
I used to work for a 1999/2000 'golden child' dot-bomb which dealt in file trading... a proposed legal form of napster. It was a fucked company from the start, but it still had a lot of traffic in the early days.
:)
:)
We always had problems with downloading files from the site.... the files kept getting corrupted, and occasionaly, a member would complain that they tried to download a powerpoint presentation and ended up getting 4 way anal porn.
This perplexed the developers, and it was not until 9 months after going online with the site, did they realise that the java class that dealt with the downloads was a single process shared by all users!
So, your download would go ok IF nobody else tried to download at the same time. If two people clicked download at about the same time, you would download the file that the second person wished to download.
No wonder they went bankrupt
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
When they played Heidi over the end of the greatest come-back in football history. Oh wait, you didn't mean that kind of programming, did you?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
was born with three kidneys. DNA processor race condition I guess.
Yes but the lander was friggen funny, you can u just see the guy sitting there, taking a hit off a bong then stateing. "Dude dude, comehere, got a problem" "whats that?" "*giggle* Well you know the lander *gafaw* the navigation was in meters....but i programmed the lander in feet, so instead of landing *grin* fsck'er burried..... I wish there woulda been another lander there to see that one hit, woulda been the shot of a lifetime. Besides, nasa crashes things into things on perpose:)
Jesus saves, everyone else takes full damage from the fireball.
a different toilet story from about 10 years ago:
This appeared in today's (2/17) Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
It was a flush with a rush.
Toilets and urinals in the King County Courthouse exploded yesterday after a worker in Metro's downtown bus tunnel mistakenly connected an air compressor to the building's water line. As soon as hapless individuals flushed the pressurized privies, the plumbing started popping in restrooms throughout the 72-year-old building, said building services manager Bill Kemp. "They started blowing at about 11:30 (a.m.) and it took us awhile to figure it out," he recounted."We knew it had to be air in the system but the Water Department said that was impossible." It wasn't. The source of the problem was finally tracked to the tunnel under Third Avenue, and the errant air compressor was shut down. But not before employees on every floor in the 10-story courthouse had stories to tell about gushing geysers in the john. "We think we've lost about 20 to 25 toilets," said Kemp. "The porcelain is actually cracked." Kemp said no one has admitted being hurt by the unusual blast, although several people were badly drenched. Or very surprised. Explained Kemp, "The urinals acted more like bidets." We had other reports that people were not necessarily on the toilet but close." "This has not exactly been a good day for Metro," he noted. by Mary Rothschild --P-I Reporter
link(story is near bottom, pun intended.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Indeed. The Slashdot search engine seems to OR the search terms together, which is of course very stupid. It is a prime Example of Programming Gone Wrong.
I don't know which is funnier, this post, or the fact that it's modded "+4: Flamebait".
Especially considering that SI is short for the French term "Système International". :P
Well, yea, but what about that worm that was going to sink oil tankers all over the world?
It was covering up for some dood and his old lady that were stealing billions from some evil corporation.
They tried to blame it on Zero Cool and Emmanuel Goldstein, but they got caught.
I saw a documentry about it a while back on SciFi.
Funny... that's the same defense the NASA guy used during the postmortem.
A period in the wrong place and they steal to much money?? Who can leave that off their list?
Carpe meam simiam!
When something like this happens, it's little more than an embarassing public relations problem. If the news can't be completely supressed through advertising, perhaps it can be kept off the evening news and relegated to the back pages. It requires a well-coordinated PR firm, but hey that's what they're around for.
Sure, a few independent news agencies might pick it up and make a big deal about it - until someone goes whaling or starts cutting down redwoods. Few people pay much attention to the independent media anyway. Joe Sixpack doesn't subscribe to The Progressive.
On the local front, shut down the plant, and evacuate your American/European workers. Split them up and transfer them around. If someone makes noise, force them to sign an NDA for their severance packages. Spread liberal bribes on the local front, write the whole venture off, and wait for the hubbub to die down. If you want to stay in the region and resume operations, do so under the umbrella of a subsidiary. If it's too risky, simply relocate to another third-world region. It's not like there's a limited supply.
Unless you stay in the region, you really don't have to worry much about the local population. They're too poor to pursue legal action or be a security threat.
Besides, it's not as if they're white Christians, is it?
</sarcasm>
Here are some of the best examples of windows crashing on high visibility systems that are relied upon:
in the street
At the airport
at the atm
on CNN
At disneyland
On your phone
In an airplane
At the bus stop
And why do you think that everyone should spoon feed you?
I agree! What's the point of having people spoon feeding us information like little babies when we can just go out and find it ourselves. "News" sites like Slashdot are the worst at it, "spoon feeding" us entire stories and links to relevant information. The laziness! Everyone should just pick a topic of the day when they get out of bed and proceed to Google to find all relevant information. People that research, distill, and provide useful information in an organized manner are just exaserbating the problem. Bravo to you, sir, for saying what needs to be said!
Slashdot Math!
cause we all know 50 + 1 - 1 = 49!
Ok, that was lame, go ahead and mod me down...
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After all, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others than from your own, right?
Not better, but more comfortable. You will generally remember better what you learn from making your own mistakes.
Not that I would discourage your approach (or curiosity).
You want 'eke.' 'Eek' is like when your mom comes in your room and she's not wearing any pants.
Oh yeah...
At a previous job , we where having some after work drinks, and I started fking around with a RAD app we had developed for a military contract. In a fit of semi drunken bordeom we whacked in lots of pink fluffy clouds and a "my little pony" logo on the boot up screen.
Forgot to restore it.
Next morning the mil guys came in to look at how the prototype was going, and on boot up, up pops "my little pony" with all the little clouds and all. Extremely campy.
Khaki guy not impressed.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Hey we sold you this! Top of the range! But it's broken, even before we sold it to you. If you pay us £500000 we'll fix them all, but if you don't your blood will boil and your head will explode, all your kids will die of pestilence, your wife will sleep around, your plane will try to reach the moon and all your elevators are belong to us.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
wherein a technique to save memory on older computers resulted in a massive media panic twenty years later.
Yeah, we fleeced 'em pretty good, eh. We should do that again in 2038 in order to pad my retirement account!
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
-- Nathaniel Borenstein
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Hey we sold you this! Top of the range! But it's broken, even before we sold it to you. If you pay us £500000 we'll fix them all, but if you don't your blood will boil and your head will explode, all your kids will die of pestilence, your wife will sleep around, your plane will try to reach the moon and all your elevators are belong to us.
Careful. Quoting from a Microsoft EULA like that without proper attribution could get you tossed into jail for a DMCA violation, sport.