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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?"
Professor Falkin was always saying, "Leave a backdoor in any program you write, just in case your code becomes self-aware."
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.
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.
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
Slashdot Math!
cause we all know 50 + 1 - 1 = 49!
Ok, that was lame, go ahead and mod me down...
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