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The Big Technical Mistakes of History
An anonymous reader tips a PC Authority review of some of the biggest technical goofs of all time. "As any computer programmer will tell you, some of the most confusing and complex issues can stem from the simplest of errors. This article looking back at history's big technical mistakes includes some interesting trivia, such as NASA's failure to convert measurements to metric, resulting in the Mars Climate Orbiter being torn apart by the Martian atmosphere. Then there is the infamous Intel Pentium floating point fiasco, which cost the company $450m in direct costs, a battering on the world's stock exchanges, and a huge black mark on its reputation. Also on the list is Iridium, the global satellite phone network that promised to make phones work anywhere on the planet, but required 77 satellites to be launched into space."
Rim shot...!
No sig today...
Bob. :)
There was no technical flaw in Iridium. It was stated what it would do. It did it. Someone screwed up the business plan, but there was no technical mistake. They knew it took 77 satellites for what they wanted. And they launched them all and they worked flawlessly. Now, if only they had sales to match the business plan, they'd be billionaires. But again, unrelated to any technical issue.
Learn to love Alaska
Don't forget the Therac-25
Poor software design and development led to radiation overdoses for 6 patients being treated for cancer, with 3 dying as a direct result.
Sadly, mistakes still keep on happening.
The article is right about FDIV. The chance of it happening was infinitesimal and it was really any worse than other bugs in contemporary CPUs of that time. A bug in Excel is a much bigger issue for most folks and I for one never bothered to have my P60 replaced.
They forgot the cd protection cracked with a black marker...
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/1069/black_marker_cracks_cd_protection/
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
... and you still use it to do rocket science?
When I saw the title, I immediately imagined the Maginot line. Thousands more examples could come to mind.
Could somebody please explain to the author of the articles that Technology is more than computers/gadjets and older than 10 years? It is an epic history that goes along with mankind.
I had some of those growing up and it wasn't really an engineering failure, it was a mentality failure. IBM didn't built PCs, they built tanks. Their keyboards are infamous and still equally usable today 20 years later as when they were new.
That was equally much the case with the rest of their PCs, using very high quality equipment operated under very less than ideal random home/office conditions and with very much consumer software of consumer quality, not server quality. In short, it made no sense.
The result was that IBM priced themselves way out of the market of cheaper clones. It was cheaper and better to buy a clone, throw it out if it failed and buy another. You just don't do that with big iron or servers, but with desktops hell yeah.
Like the article said, it wasn't more of a failure than that PS/2 ports become the dominating keyboard/mouse connector. If there was every a silly move by IBM there it was giving away the software market to Microsoft, but the average desktop market was doomed long before the PS/2.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What, no Capacitor Plague? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
Somehow the article got slashdotted, but I wonder: is the launch of the Challenger space shuttle included in the list? Or doesn't that count as a technical mistake because it was a human decision to launch at no-launch temperatures?
The technical error here was that there was no test on the real thing. The company that made a part of the telescope had only a separate testbed that was made to specifications. Alas, these specifications were exactly one inch misunderstood, so the result was a part that was incredibly accurately one inch out of position.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Seriously, we have got to stop with the hyperbole before our children don't know the difference between a War on Drugs and a War in Iraq.
We we say of all time, I think of things like lead plumbing in Rome, or the suspension bridge that got tore apart by a mere breeze.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3932185696812733207#
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
More commercial but still, how about giving almost whole pc-software industry under one private company's control 20 years ago?
As with the PS/2 mentioned by someone earlier, the failure will be mitigated heavily by those who will buy it based on the name of the company making it and nothing else.
Where's Microsoft Bob? Novell Groupwise? Lotus Word Pro? Lantastic?
There's that, and there's also the whole "the world is flat" and "disease is caused by imbalances in the four humours of the body" ideas. The article's examples seem pretty trivial in comparison.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Not one in a million years would that happen to NASA. Using different measurement systems yields totally different results, and it should have been obvious right from step 1.
Something else happened, someone made an error too silly to let it out and they chosen the measurement units excuse to cover it up.
The virus is thought to have been developed in 1986 by two brothers in Pakistan named Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who were looking to protect some medical software they had written from disc copying. They had found some suitable code on an internet bulletin board site and adapted it so that if someone used the software then the malware would be installed.
I'm guessing "Iain Thomson" is not a day over 25, not very versed on the history of the Internet, and too busy to look up the meaning of "BBS". Am I right?
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I still have one of the Pentium 90 chips with the math flaw. The bidding starts at $1.
When I tried to work it out it came out as $449.9999867' million.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
At one time I owned a Hyundai Elantra (2000), Honda Civic (2004) AND Nissan Versa (2009) ALL had bad FPRs...
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
We still live in a world of CPUs that are either little endian or big endian: affects binary compatibility and performance (from having to swizzle).
We still live with the primitive C/C++ type system with code like this in just about any SDK:
#ifndef _BOOL // TRUE_AND_FALSE_DEFINED // true and false
typedef unsigned char bool;
#if !defined(true) && !defined(false)
#ifndef TRUE_AND_FALSE_DEFINED
#define TRUE_AND_FALSE_DEFINED
enum {false,true};
#endif
#endif
#endif // _BOOL
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
Maybe NASA wouldn't have made that mistake, but the sub-contractor could. OTOH, maybe the sub-contractor had a button to pass from Imperial to Metric units for its navigational controls, but maybe NASA didn't RTFM, and that may have caused the mistake.
One lesson though: Always use metric in science stuff. Understood NASA?
The lack of authentication before forwarding/sending mail has to be one of the biggest issues today. If only the original designers of the software would have thought ahead and verified the sender of the message was legit and that the mail came from the domain specified before blindly sending it along.
Intel's 8086 CPU, Intel's first 16-bit processor, was possibly much worse than any of those mentioned because it affected all of us. Intel chose to continue the quirkiness of the 8008 rather than abandon it.
... and was therefore fairly awkward (and remained so until the 80386)."
Just before the time of the introduction of the 8086 I knew a chief of technology of a high-tech company who was waiting for the 8086 as though it were a combination of Christmas, his birthday, and the birth of his child. He would start every conversation by telling everyone Intel's release date for the 8086.
The day of its release, he was miserably unhappy. Intel chose to continue an architecture that made assembly language programming and debugging of high-level languages more difficult.
Wikipedia says about the 8086: "Marketed as source compatible, the 8086 was designed so that assembly language for the 8008, 8080, or 8085 could be automatically converted into equivalent (sub-optimal) 8086 source code, with little or no hand-editing. The programming model and instruction set was (loosely) based on the 8080 in order to make this possible. However, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085."
The problem was that the quirkiness has been extended to the 32-bit processors of today. The Wikipedia article says, "The legacy of the 8086 is enduring in the basic instruction set of today's personal computers and servers..."
And, "Programming over 64 KB boundaries involved adjusting segment registers
Everyone on the planet who used or were affected by computers then suffered because the debugging was much more complicated than if Intel had chosen to make the operation of the 8086 simpler.
"Such relatively simple and low-power 8086-compatible processors in CMOS are still used in embedded systems."
Aliens, man.
Ohhh yeah, that's it men. It's because of the big face on the surface of Mars that threw a tornado at the orbiter because it was sending a signal that was NOT human DNA. Now I remember the thing...
some of our biggest mistakes have been the indignities surrounding some of our genuine revolutionary thinkers. The trials and tribulations they are/have/were put through...
what's that quote 'lions led by donkeys?'
... not forcing AT&T to sell us the telegraph and telephone wires and make them a contractor for the publicly owned network. Because of that mistake we can never have true network neutrality.
I understand it and agree with it for the most part. I also think that if the same device were released by any other company it would be a commercial failure as well.
A man I worked for many years ago, one of my engineering mentors, told me about a mistake made during World War Two, where a large number of very large castings were discarded because the specification called for a much smaller tolerance on the location of an exhaust port than was actually necessary. As I recall, the spec allowed it to be 1/4" away from its nominal location, but it actually was connected to a flexible hose and it could have been a couple inches off in any direction without causing any problem. This mistake wasn't discovered until several millions of dollars worth of tank bodies had been scrapped and melted down unnecessarily.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The two party political system? Admittedly a defacto standard, yet so very bad.
You've got this right on a number of levels. Most obviously because the probe was a JPL project, not NASA. Despite their close ties, they are separate entities.
Secondly, it was not a JPL mistake either. JPL is a pure metric shop. This pervades everything they do; if you walk in the front door and ask the receptionist where the toilet is, he'll tell you that it is "Thirty meters down the hall and to your left"
So what happened? How was this mistake made? Politics. When the mission was funded, some congressman saw that it was an opportunity to give some pork to his district and put in some language essentially requiring JPL to hire Rockwell (as I recall, though it might have been Boeing) as the prime contractor.
The trouble is this contractor would have normally failed JPL's requirements, as they did not operate metric internally, and being a good patriotic defense contractor, there was no way they were going to make an exception. As such, the contractor hired an intern who's job it was to interface the two cultures (meteric and imperial) and that intern screwed up. Had the contractor stuck to metric as normally required by JPL, we would still have another probe in orbit around the red planet.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
from the summary:"such as NASA's failure to convert measurements to metric, "
from the article:"It turned out that while most of the programming and mission planning had been done in units of measurement from the Imperial system used in the US, the software to control the orbiter's thrusters had been written with units of measurement from the metric system."
Wrong..
NASA's deep space nav and planning software has been metric for decades. I doubt it ever used customary units. The vendor (Lockheed Martin) provided data in U.S.Customary units (pounds) when the contract called for metric (Newtons). Screwup on LMA's side is providing the data in the wrong units (even though the interface control document said metric). Screwup on NASA's side is not checking.
And, a fine point, the spacecraft software doesn't know anything about navigation. It just says "turn on thruster at time X for Y seconds". The nav calculations are done on the ground
Oh I dunno. I would be hard put to find something sillier than a inches/cms mixup on a mission of that importance.
"The time has come" the walrus said " for a GOOD swim."
The version I heard was that a subcontractor didn't know that NASA uses metric, so the parachute deployed at x feet instead of x meters.
The MCO Investigation Board report is a quick read and an interesting case study.
Only those who dare to fail can ever achieve greatly. This was the fundamental difference between the US and most of the rest of the world. Americans were independent "can-do" types who were willing to take what others would consider ridiculous risks. We are not doing our foam and bubble-wrapped children any favors. fiftydangerousthings.com
Yeah, I would immediately classify any error that caused deaths to be more important.
Another interesting case was the Patriot Missile failure. The system clock counted in 1/10th second increments. However, it added 0.1 to a floating point number. Unfortunately, 0.1 in binary is a repeating number, similar to 1/3rd in binary being 0.333333333...
So, ten times every second the time drifted just the tiniest bit. The missile that missed had been running for days, so its clock was one third of a second off, and a Scud travels a long way during that time.
Let that be a lesson to all of you: use an integer counter, and divide by 10 to get the time in seconds.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
but damn I learned a whole new bunch of similes today like "as welcome as a refrigerator salesman at McMurdo". :)
And of course let's not forget the infamous Denver International Airport Baggage System fiasco.
HP-35 calculator 2.02 log/antilog problem.
Not big in a disaster sense but noteworthy.
OK a new size TV
The NASA team was expecting metric units and the contractor, Lockheed Martin, who was operating the spacecraft, submitted english units to the navigation system instead of metric.
Lockheed Martin, which was performing the calculations, was sending thruster data in English units -- in this case, pounds -- while NASA's navigation team was expecting metric units, Newtons. One pound is equal to 4.48 Newtons. Over the course of the journey this led to the spacecraft being something like 60 miles off course when it reached Mars.
Lockheed martin was mostly to blame, but there should have been a safeguard to detect this somehow on the nasa side.
To quote Wikipedia:
The metric/imperial mix-up that destroyed the craft was caused by a human error in the software development, back on Earth. The thrusters on the spacecraft, which were intended to control its rate of rotation, were controlled by a computer that underestimated the effect of the thrusters by a factor of 4.45. This is the ratio between a pound force–the standard unit of force in the imperial system–and a newton, the standard unit in the metric system. The software was working in pounds force, while the spacecraft expected figures in newtons; 1 pound force equals approximately 4.45 newtons.
The software had been adapted from use on the earlier Mars Climate Orbiter, and was not adequately tested before launch. The navigation data provided by this software was also not cross-checked while in flight. The Mars Climate Orbiter thus drifted off course during its voyage and entered a much lower orbit than planned, and was destroyed by atmospheric friction.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
One lesson though: Always use metric in science stuff. Understood NASA?
NASA always uses metric.
The Subcontractor used Imperial, against the spec.
So... your complaint is... what, again?
...have negative charge. To be fair to Franklin though, it was a 50/50 chance.
May the Maths Be with you!
no one mentioned Ben Franklin.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
From the article: "The Mars Climate Orbiter, and the Mars Polar Lander it contained, would have advanced our knowledge of the Red Planet immensely...."
Ouch. Mars Climate Orbiter did not "contain" Mars Polar Lander. They were two separate missions.
Saying it was a "simple" mistake is a little simple. The mistake could also be stated as the error of using heritage software in an embedded system, without examining it and testing its validity.
Strider wrote:
When the mission was funded, some congressman saw that it was an opportunity to give some pork to his district and put in some language essentially requiring JPL to hire Rockwell (as I recall, though it might have been Boeing) as the prime contractor.
Neither one; MCO was Lockheed-Martin.
Furthermore, it wasn't "some congressman giving pork to his district." The mission was competed using the standard competition; it may b hard to believe this, but NASA uses competitive bidding, a lot. Unfortunately, the bidding was done under the mandate of "faster better cheaper", and the two elements of that which could be numerically quantified on the bid were "fast" and "cheap." Mars Climate Orbiter was required to be flown at half the price of the previous (Mars Pathfinder) mission-- which was already the cheapest Mars mission flown since the 1960s.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
FTFA:
It turned out that while most of the programming and mission planning had been done in units of measurement from the Imperial system used in the US, the software to control the orbiter's thrusters had been written with units of measurement from the metric system.
And that is WRONG! It was the software that had the archaic units, and the rest of the spaceship was built with international units.
The software was working in pounds force, while the spacecraft expected figures in newtons; 1 pound force equals approximately 4.45 newtons.
The software had been adapted from use on the earlier Mars Climate Orbiter, and was not adequately tested before launch.
I did not read the rest of that article, since they're not fact-checking their mocking of people's inability to double-check things.
You can't take the sky from me...
What could possibly be sillier than not converting to metric?
The biggest failure to date which didn't get mentioned is Unix. If we had Multics, with it's B2 security rating, we might have actually had secure operating systems in the hands of the public at this point in time. We wouldn't be dealing with spam, or virii.
But no..... it was soooooo complicated.... K&R had to stick us with a piece of insecure crap... and everyone else was stupid enough to copy it.
The company that NASA paid was the one that fucked it up. NASA always uses metric internally so no need to convert.
Believing in some unseen entity who supposedly created existence, and basing all societal calculations on that. That has to be the mother of all errors.
As others have pointed out below, while it it true there was a units mix-up, this error wasn't caught due to other, more wide ranging problems. IEEE did a great writeup of this a while back (article link - didn't link to IEEE directly since you probably have to be a member to see the article). Very interesting reading. In summary...
First the spacecraft was asymmetric, causing some issues with the stabilizing flywheels and the onboard thrusters (used for major course corrections). Second, the person doing the calculations for the major course corrections noticed that the burn time (calculated using the bad units) didn't look right compared with previous missions. However, his management made him prove that the calculations were wrong, instead of proving they were right (presumably knowing that they would be different, given the first point about the asymmetries). He didn't catch the units error, and since he couldn't prove they were wrong they went along as if nothing happened. The article was really pointing out that while this was a technical error, the more fundamental issue was a management and culture issue. To me this made for an interesting case study in how to handle unknowns in a mission critical system - assuming things are wrong until proven otherwise, not vice versa.
(I don't seem to have the Spectrum issue with me, but I seem to remember it had some other articles about related management/culture failures).
There were no manuals before the announcement date.
At the time, as is true now, Motorola was badly managed. Apple moved away from Motorola CPUs. Quote: "Motorola had promised Apple to deliver parts with speed up to 500 MHz, but yields proved too low initially."
Companies don't want to depend on Motorola because Motorola does not seem dependable, in my opinion.
Even if so, when NASA got the subcontractor's work, didn't they check if the results are ok? didn't they use the work of the subcontractor?
I have worked for defense applications and every tiny piece of code that is produced is thoroughly checked by both the subcontractor and the contractor.
Ooh, doesn't it just grind your gears when clone gets modded up. If I had modpoints, I think I'd spend them on him just to make you mad.
Typical Commonwealth snootiness; not surprising for an article from Australia.
Unlike the old Imperial units, US measurements are defined in metric; for example, a US foot is EXACTLY 30.48 centimeters. The old Imperial foot was more like 30.4799472 cm.
Thus, 10,000 feet is 3048 meters. Exactly.
Now, mixing feet and meters in the same calculation is a blunder; but no more so than mixing centimeters with meters or meters with kilometers. It may be the case that a factor of ~3 calculation error may be more difficult to spot than one that is two or three orders of magnitude; but the real blunder here is carelessness rather than the system of measurement used. An unspotted factor of ~3 error should not be blamed on the measurement system.
Oh, and while the metric bigots are jumping up and down, shall we talk about the utterly unscientific definition of the kilogram and the embarrassing fact that the kilogram is not a constant unit???
Back in the day when Intel was designing 16-bit PC's, someone had the brilliant idea to use the segment:offset model for memory addressing. And this was great - for a couple of years. Back then, a megabyte of memory was almost inconceivable. However, 64K just wasn't enough. So instead of using all 32-bits of a two 16-bit words, these guys decided, hey! Let's just multiply the segment by 16 and add that to the offset. This resulted in a theoretical cap of 1MB. (Actually around 1088KB, but that's obscure stuff that no one cares about.) So, instead of using all 32-bits, giving us a maximum of 4GB (which only recently went out of style), we hamstrung ourselves with something far smaller and much more cramped.
Well, it was quickly learned that 640k was not nearly enough for everybody. I think you guys know the rest of the story.
Yeah, unless it's really important. Like Apollo. Then you'd better use U.S. Customary Units.
Seriously, though, the "metric is so much better for science" argument is old and tired. We had no problems getting to the moon and back using our "Standard" measurement system. The only reason we are using metric now is that the newer NASA folks who went to school more recently were all indoctrinated into believing that Metric units had some sort of scientific advantage. They don't. They are just arbitrary units of measurement (albeit slightly less useful in the real world).
A more logical approach, instead of "always use metric" would be "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". AKA just use Standard and quit your crying.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
I did y2k review on Iridiumat the Satcom facility in Chandler. Worked with software developers, QA and project managers mostly.
Technically, it was amazing... very much a Bond-villian scale project. There were a number of firsts on the project, first satellite assembly line, first common off-the-shelf (mostly) desktop processor used in space, first use of mixed/hybrid launch vehicles (Boeing, Orbital Sciences, Soviets, Ariane... Probably some Long-March thrown in too)
As far as business plans goes, it was a cluster-f*ck.
They sold rights to a hundred or so nations to get downlinks to terrestrial networks.
They FAILED to mention that it worked best with a clear horizon (no canyons or city streets)
They provided limited modem capability
So... Sales never were what they projected (I do remember seeing dozens of sales-reps making calls from the field adjacent to the facility using actual Iridium phones, just to impress customers), the hundred-odd nationalist companies folded and the US Military ended up with a useful asset.
If you ask me, that was the plan all along... Freakin Brilliant!
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Yes, my 9500 handset is large, with a huge phallic antenna. Yes, minutes are expensive ($1.49). But I have coverage where literally nobody else does. That's what it's for.
MicroChannel architecture (MCA) was the problem like the heavy IBM PS/2 P70 386 Mhz portable. ISA wasn't like PS/2 model 30 286 desktop.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
e.g.: if (incomingMissiles = true) launchCounterAttack();
This technical mistake nearly cost a whole 767 full of passengers:
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-gimli-glider
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
[NT]
A British electrical engineer once told me that when he was in college they said one of the biggest mistakes of all time in their field was the UK domestic power plug (BS 1363). While it was designed by some of the brightest engineering minds of the day to be as safe as possible, it's caused more domestic injuries than any other plug design ever.
Why? Because the engineers never thought about what happened when the plug was left in a "safe" state, unplugged and on the floor. As such, the upturned pins inflict nasty puncture wounds when accidentally stepped on, and have provided a steady stream of visits to accident & emergency wards (and likely some deaths) ever since.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
See subject. Happens here all the time. It's no huge trick to have 2 diff. accounts and to change your IP address. Turning off most connections, unless they have some hugely long lease of the IP address? Cake. It's obvious this moronic jobless libeller named clone53421 does so and thinks he's clever. Not too clever libelling others clone is all I can say and clone certainly got burned when FireFox had to issue 3 updates in less than 1-2 weeks time vs. Opera.
This sort of stuff happens with the software that's difficult to test properly. The bug is introduced but then there's no way to detect the bug except under extreme or unlikely conditions. Or your tests also have bugs; say your code used imperial measurements, but you also wrote a test case that used imperial measurements, then your module would pass the tests correctly but then fail when it was integrated into a complete system. In this instance perhaps code borrowed from the earlier orbiter also came with the test cases.
That's why testing should always be done independently from the development, as well as simulators and emulators. Too often I see QA people working a bit too closely with developers to get test cases written so that they could end up with the same faulty assumptions the developers have. Then you need people to debug the specs and requirements to make sure they're right, and so on.
removing asbestos from the Challenger O ring, and replacing it with a "safe" substitute
The metric system is so advantageous because there are no alternate units for the same thing. I'm just dyne to hear of another metric unit for the newton. I gauss I'll just have to live with the Tesla.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Because you can't. Get over it. You're full of it, and your link shows no sock puppetry either over there so what on earth were you talking about? Please: Get a clue fool, as you're not fooling anyone clone53421 in your replies as anonymous coward now. I am doing the same, from a registered account too (but we have the option of posting as ac too, like you are doing clone) because I don't feel like being libelled by an idiot like yourself clone53421 as you are doing to the ac named apk in your signature. By the way, I know he wrote a good security guide for Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 as I've read and applied it years ago to all my systems and for those of my friends and family too. No need to sock puppet pimp perfection on his part. The guide's good. I use it myself in near full detail (except for the fact I do use javascript but a lot less than I used to, and in turn because of that, I also get less infections by malwares too, but I can't resist it on various sites, and that suckers me sometimes). So get used to one thing. You don't own this forums, you don't have the right to order anyone about, so get over it and grow up clone53421. You started it and someone is finishing it, and you with it.
In 1980 the broadcast business was just about to go digital but not quite ready. There was a world class competition between B format from Bosch-Fernseh in Germany and C format from a conglomerate of Japanese manufacturers. C format had the advantage of being able to hold a still frame when the the tape stopped. B format needed a digital frame store to do the same, but the quality was far superior. C format was a totally inferior format. Low frequency noise caused video to be considered unusable for multi-generation special effects and millions of dollars of equipment was sold across the world for a format that disappeared in 5 years or so. Quality rules when it comes to production. The filmakers have always understood this, but the video manufacturers are always looking for the C-heap way out. This carelessness about quality continues today with digital recording formats.
They missed a huge one that we're still paying for. Until MS (in spite of warnings from the wise) made e-mail potentially executable the e-mail virus was half joke and half urban legend. That mistake (and the related mistakes for Word documents and ActiveX) is still costing us billions a year and there's no end in sight.
What exactly is so "informative" about clone53421's post here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1632188&cid=31998708 ? I see nothing of value there other than his typical buffoonery. This only leads me to believe what others are stating about clone53421 here using alternate accounts to mod himself up with, no questions asked.
Do you think you're fooling anybody replying as AC now clone53421? Your now posting as AC is now caught too clone53421 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1639038&cid=32085082 where you admitted to posting as clone53421 on another forums to troll and stalk me, and in your reply in the url above you give that away clearly.
APK