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When Computers Go Wrong
Barence writes "PC Pro's Stewart Mitchell has charted the world's ten most calamitous computer cock-ups. They include the Russians' stealing software that resulted in their gas pipeline exploding, the Mars Orbiter that went missing because the programmers got their imperial and metric measurements mixed up, the Soviet early-warning system that confused the sun for a missile and almost triggered World War III, plus the Windows anti-piracy measure that resulted in millions of legitimate customers being branded software thieves."
TFA article should have been named the 'Worlds ten most calamitous logic cock-ups' instead. Because in the end, malformed, ill-tested or and unforeseen logic compensation(s) caused those issues, not computers themselves.
I can't imagine the well known and documented story of U.S. exploding the gas pipeline could be put in such a backward way.
Next in news: U.S. thoughtful placement of Manhattan skyscrapers dealt a heavy blow to international terrorism, two terrorist planes down.
K.L.M.
Title would have been accurate if the computers had fully autonomous AI, and then messed up.
as of now, its just the logic they were programmed with that is being executed
List fails without the therac 25
Due to the imperial-metric mash-up, the sums were so far askew that when Ground Control initiated boosters to secure the pod in orbit, all they succeeded in doing was firing it closer to the planet, where it burnt up in the atmosphere.
When I see the Imperial-Metric confusion shit, I just want to slap the shit out of someone. That waste because some engineers are incapable of using Metric or some vendor just doesn't want to spend the money to modernize their machinery. I know of an aerospace contractor that is using machinery from the 50s - yep, they're constantly being recalibrated and sometimes they don't notice - ooopsie!
And when I see that we, the US, are one of two countries still on Imperial - one is some Third World non-industrial country, I want to barf.
And then, when I have to buy two sets tools to work on a car, I wish for the entire US auto industry to go bankrupt and be replaced with some modern companies.
I love Metric. It makes measurements and calculations much easier - quick! What is the mass of 329 mL of water? You'd need a calculator to do something similar in Imperial.
It isn't smart to assign a 64 bit floating point to a 16 bit integer - unless you want to crash you first flight of the heavy Ariane 5 rocket... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Notable_launches)
should Be named "when The Test Departments Budget goes wrong"
"This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error." ...
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363580/when-computers-go-wrong/print
Dont Forget Skynet....
Garbage in, Garbage out.
As a fellow programmer I worked with years ago was fond of saying, "Computers don't make mistakes. They do, however, execute yours VERY carefully."
Haven't we seen this posted on /. before?
The biggest computer mistake of all time has to be Microsoft's using 2 digits for the year! How quickly we forget!
Wow, you really didn't understand Y2K issues, if you blame them on Microsoft.
Perhaps "Computers Going Wrong" is more in the form of modern presentation, in which to read 50k of text, you have to scroll and click through 5 pages of ads...
Radiation overdoses caused by the Therac-25
Three Mile Island....a classic case of poor computer-machine interaction where the meaning of an indicator was poorly understood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Human_factors_.E2.80.93_confusion_over_valve_status
The "Switchboard meltdown" problem sounds like the incident which led to the creation of the EFF.
Basically, someone forgot to include a ";" in a C program, which led to the problems at ATT. Originally, they thought it was due to "hackers", and called in the Secret Service.
The Secret Service in turn busted a gaming outfit called "Steve Jackson Games". Who was completely innocent, of course, but that has never mattered to the Secret Service when they need to look like they are actually useful. The SS confiscated the computers, all illegally.
The ACLU refused to get involved, so John GIlmore (formerly of Sun, and who worked with Richard Stallman to get out an open Operating System around that time) created the EFF to fight the unconstitutional raid on Steve Jackson Games. The EFF trounced the Secret Service in Court, and was thus born. I believe if you google for "Steve Jackson Games", you can still find the original story around.
So, in a way, you can say that the EFF was created due to the single misplacement of a semicolon in a C program. Would that all of our bugs have such results. :)
Unless the cars hacked into are accessible through a network, why would anyone waste the time to hack the car's computer controls when they can just do old fashioned mechanical damage?
The THERAC incidents should be at the top of any list of this nature; the error cost many lives, and took years to find root cause thanks to bureaucratic backpedaling and the assumption that the machines and their operating code were beyond reproach.
Amusing Zahir effect: just today, Userfriendly republished the "metric to standard calculator: $15, telescope: $270, mars lander: $135 million, the look on the scientists' faces: pricess" strip.
Now for most of these, you are correct, they were fuckups of input. Computers got the wrong data or had the wrong code written and screwed up. However computers can and do fuck up. The Pentium FDIV bug is an example. Yes I realize the silicon was doing what its transistors dictated, but at that level it is still the computer fucking up. You could write perfect code and get the wrong result in spite of that.
Are you kidding? Or are so young as to have not been in the workforce in 1999?
Due to the imperial-metric mash-up, the sums were so far askew that when Ground Control initiated boosters to secure the pod in orbit, all they succeeded in doing was firing it closer to the planet, where it burnt up in the atmosphere.
When I see the Imperial-Metric confusion shit, I just want to slap the shit out of someone. That waste because some engineers are incapable of using Metric or some vendor just doesn't want to spend the money to modernize their machinery. I know of an aerospace contractor that is using machinery from the 50s - yep, they're constantly being recalibrated and sometimes they don't notice - ooopsie!
And when I see that we, the US, are one of two countries still on Imperial - one is some Third World non-industrial country, I want to barf.
And then, when I have to buy two sets tools to work on a car, I wish for the entire US auto industry to go bankrupt and be replaced with some modern companies.
I love Metric. It makes measurements and calculations much easier - quick! What is the mass of 329 mL of water? You'd need a calculator to do something similar in Imperial.
I'd prefer to slap someone for saying "Imperial vs. Metric" when they're talking about US standards vs the SI -- which one certainly is when talking about the mars spacecraft failure. After all, the US system -- while derived from the Imperial System -- is not the same thing. Quick: how many l in a gal? Well, it depends, doesn't it? Did you mean Imperial gallon or US gallon? How many m^2 in an acre? What's the mass of a ton(ne)? And as I like to point out to people -- because I'm a pedantic nerd like everyone else here -- the US system is a metric system . . . see what I did there? I didn't use a capital "M" or say SI there?
I am not a crackpot.
Well I have to support part of what you've said, and contradict part.
I support you in that it is stupid NASA uses Imperial ever, anywhere. Metric is the method for science and with good reason. So it is stupid that they wouldn't use it 100% of the time. Any chemistry or physics class I ever took was all metric all the time. It wasn't even a "We do this to make you learn it," kind of thing, it was just the way it was, it was assumed.
However I have to contradict you on the "OMG the US is so stupid for not going Metric," thing. It doesn't really matter. What matters to normal people in every day life is having a feel for what a unit is, not inter-unit conversions. Your example is something people do not do. It does not matter the ability to do fast conversions on units of volume, it matters that you have a feeling for what they are. You can stick with a system that is not neat and regular and it works just fine.
Also if you think metric rules all in other countries you've just not looked. I have the occasion to visit Canada once a year and the imperial system is alive and well, lurking in the shadows. In some cases it is explicit, you find various food items sold in pounds, rather than kilograms. In some cases it is more hidden. Soda is sold in 12 ounce cans. Yes, they say 355mL on them as well (as they do in the US) but it is a 12 ounce can. 355mL was not the unit used to design it, 12 oz was. Sometimes people don't even know it. Alcohol is sold in units frequently referred to as "fifths". It is 750mL but why the the term? Because it is a fifth of a gallon (well 5.04 is you want to get technical).
That is why there's the apathy in forcing a change. You really gain very little for most people in every day operation. I'm not saying it would be a bad thing for a change to happen, but there isn't the incentive many geeks seem to think there is.
I work comfortably in both systems. I've done plenty of science so I've no problem with any metric units, but I also bake which is extremely imperial dominated. Doesn't matter to me. I can even work in both at the same time. If a recipe calls for 3 cups of bread flour, I know my chosen flour is 155 grams per cup. So when I weigh it out on my scale I weigh out 465 grams. I could do ounces instead wouldn't matter, my scale just reads grams. Likewise it wouldn't matter if the recipe instead called for 700mL of flour. Metric doesn't make it any easier because the nice "all units are 1" factor only applies to water. My flour converts volume to weight at about 0.664, of course that depends on how dense it gets packed. That conversion factor is no more, or less convenient than 155.
Really, working in the screwy imperial system just isn't a big deal to normal people. You don't do anything that needs inter-unit conversion which is where metric shines.
this story already been reported at least 10 times in past 3 years
We got to commend MS for the most expensive computer cock-up.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"but the WGA team didn't test that the fix resolved the problem before heading to the pub for TGIF drinkies."
The Brits have some of the finest writers in the world and then there's the magazine/news writers.
The Gas Pipe Piracy subheading appears to refer to the 1982 Siberian pipeline sabotage incident. This is something I've been meaning to do a bit of research on. Yes, every bad or even mixed story in the U.S.S.R. was hushed up as best it could be by the Soviets -- witness C.J. Chivers' recent problems tracing the history of the AK-47 in The Gun -- but did the incident actually happen?
I've seen it reported as the largest non-nuclear manmade explosion in history, but every source is weak and third-hand. Obviously the CIA's and NSA's files from the time would still be classified. It seems like the best way to establish the veracity of the incident would be by speaking to senior physicians in the surrounding cities. The casualties from the event -- if it did occur -- would have been extremely high. Burst eardrums alone would have radiated for miles.
Has anyone come upon a strong source for this story, or does it remain somewhere between Soviet coverup and CIA blowback?
When the pilot didn't put the plane into landing mode, but insisted on trying to land ... bad things happen.
Man-machine interface is a critical thing here. For get modes, unless the machine requests confirmation for human inputs that seem to demand a mode switch ... like landing.
http://www.airdisaster.com/movies/
"...Soviet early-warning system that confused the sun for a missile and almost triggered World War III..."
Yeah, file this under 'shit I never want to know.' I have enough stupid crap in my head without having to worry about 'The time a computer error could have wiped out the whole of human existence.'
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I'm an American who has been living abroad since 2002, and I've come to understand the metric system. Let me tell you my observations.
When is the last time anyone needed to know the mass of 329ml of water? Never. I'm sure it tickles some people pink that it works that way, but in the real world, it's utterly and completely useless. I have yet to use this "feature".
As for the vaunted "easy unit conversions", nobody ever uses that either. When I first started to surrender and actually USE the metric system, I made the mistake of actually USING the metric system. On one memorable occasion, some Europeans asked me where some restaurant was, and I said, "Oh, it's about a hectometer that way." They looked at me like I had just stepped off the Moon. When I explained that a hectometer was 100 meters, they laughed long and hard. They, despite never having used miles and feet in their lives, had never heard of a hectometer, nor did they ever use the "feature" of easily converting metric units. After asking around, none of my other Euro buddies did it either. Instead, they use utterly stupid phrases like "It's 1000 kilometers from here" or "I weigh 80 kilograms". Retarded, but that's reality for you. The fact is, nobody does unit conversions. You just use whatever measurement is convenient for the scale you're at. Long distance? Miles. Short distance? Inches. Fine measurements? Millimeters.
All the speedometers here have metric on the outside and mph on the inside. Strange, eh? When I ask a Canadian how tall he is, he responds in inches and feet. Even Brits and Kiwis will tell you how far something is in miles. When working on a project, the appropriate tools are used, and nobody seems to complain, much less wish wholeheartedly for an entire industry to go bankrupt. That's pretty fucked up, man. As for old machinery, the cost has been amortized long ago, the machines are producing pure profit. Why replace something that isn't broken, just so some vulnerable Windows piece of shit can take its place?
The more I read the parent comment, the more I think that the commenter is just an Ameriphobic idiot who grabs at any angle to support his preconceived notions. The truth is, converting to the metric system would be a nightmare of "Y2K problem" proportions, and when we finished, we would have gained no benefit. For that matter, why do we still use the ancient and unwieldy Gregorian calendar? Days are 24 hours? Who came up with that non-metric bullshit? 1 hour is 60 minutes, each of which divided into 60 seconds? Makes me want to barf. We can't even tell how many days are in a "month" without reciting a rhyme that goes back to medieval times, or using a comical knuckle-counting system. Measurements based on the human hand - what a stupid fucking idea! Leap days...are you kidding me? Talk about a hack! Scientists still use that antiquated idea of "360 degrees of a circle" instead of a sensible metric ten. I just don't see the anger about inches and feet when there are still so many fucking dumbshit ideas in the world...makes me want to slap the shit out of someone.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
(See title.)
:per directory (more or less equivalent to /dev on a *nix box) on a Data General mainframe machine running AOS/VS. While hundreds of users' processes disappeared off the system (which took about 90 minutes), I found it expedient to simply make my confession to the boss.
Any of us who have been in a sysprog or sysadmin role for a significant amount of time (by which I mean double-digit years) will often have at least one anecdote of some monumental cockup we've perpetrated.
My worst case in point is where I managed (IIRC after a long liquid lunch) to delete the
Fortunately, in this case, the escapade was more or less written up as "Shit Happens", which I thought was generous...
Oops, forgot to close the bold. Damn antiquated markup langauge!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Te Soviet pipeline explosion seems to be an urban legend, traced to a single source: At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War, by Thomas C. Reed.
There is no mention of this explosion anywhere else, either in Russian or Western sources. If you can read Russian, some debunking is here:
link
One of the facts mentioned there is that there was no SCADA on Soviet pipelines until late 80-s. All control was still pneumatic in 1982, with no software involved.
No kidding. DRM these days looks pathetic by comparison. :P
What's the mass of a ton(ne)?
A long ton or a short one? BTW, a long ton is fairly close to a metric tonne, but I have no idea what that amounts to in shit-tons.
Converting from one to the other takes time. Kids tend to think and work in metric. Older people tend to use metric selectively. I prefer cm these days for short distances although I was taught in inches and feet. But I think of longer distances in miles. I think of my car's fuel economy in miles-per-gallon, although I measure recipe quantities these days in ml. It's odd to think that people should use all metric quantities as we don't use all imperial quantities - I have never heard anyone using rods or chains as a measure of distance and I don't think I'd know what somebody meant if they did. It takes time to switch from one thing to another - in Britain it's only been 40-odd years since they started changing things in schools.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Of course, no measurement system is perfect, but regardless of measurements, be it kilos/slugs, newtons/pounds [1], or whatever unit, all that matters is everyone uses the unit. This way, no conversions are needed. No multiple sets of tools are needed. No bouncing around AI figures to try to convert stuff. This way, I can buy a case for something from one country made with their measurements and expect it to be the exact size needed to put stuff in from another nation.
A good example of this (mandatory auto analogy) are trailer hitch tow balls. Here in the US, you have three sizes of balls (1.875 inches, 2 inches, and 2.3125 inches.) In Europe, you have 50mm tow balls across the continent. It doesn't matter if you have a class 1 hitch on a Tata Nano, or a class IV hitch on a full size SUV -- there is no worry about European ball size. Because of this tow hitches bought in France will work with trailers in England.
If people still use fluid ounces for cans, great. As long as everyone else uses it, so it doesn't have to be converted often.
All I really ask is that globally there is a standard on one set of measurements. Metric, Imperial, who cares. All that matters is that I ask for "x" amount of something with "x/y/z" dimensions, and the other people are able to get that.
[1]: I'm being pedantic here -- weight != mass, so a kilo of mass wouldn't directly compare to a pound of weight.
From your post it sounds like you've been living somewhere that used to belong to the british empire, those people still tend to think of their weight in "stones" and various other oddball measurements but there are definitely countries where imperial units are barely used.
Here in Sweden the only people who use imperial units seem to be carpenters who call a 5x10 cm piece of wood a "tvåtumfyra" ("twoinchfour") but even they don't actually assume the actual size of it is 5.08x10.16 cm, it's just that "tvåtumfyra" is faster to say than "fem gånger tio centimeter".
As for degrees, most people tend to use degrees in everyday conversation (when it comes up) but degrees are not an "imperial" measurement, it predates most imperial units by centuries. And most people I've met who have taken "advanced" high school level math or college level math tend to use radians when actually doing any kind of math related to angles.
Also, you tell someone here in scandinavia that you're 5'10" tall and weigh 176 lbs and they're likely to either not understand you or they'll go "So, a foot is like, 30 cm, right? and how many inches are there in a foot? I know it's not ten but like, fifteen or something, right? And a pound's like, 0.5 kg? or was it less? maybe more? And aren't there two types of pound? Or was that pints?".
Basically, if you tell someone around here that something is "n <imperial unit>" they will have no clue no matter how "natural" you think it is because you happened to grow up with it.
Also, as for easy unit conversions, people do use them, just not in the uncommon ways you described, most people just aren't familiar with some of the less common prefixes but milli-, centi-, deci-, hecto- and kilo are all commonly used (and most people know that mega and giga are millions and billions, they just don't have much use for them, so rather than saying 1.5 megameters you say 1500 kilometers).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
to comments, I thought the deal with the big blackout was that the network(TCP/IP) was flooded with a Windows virus infection and if you know TCP/IP, it's not very good with lots of traffic. There was so much traffic that the computer( a UNIX box ) sending status messages to the control room display system could not get messages out of it's buffers. TCP/IP does this thing where the message isn't put on the network if there's going to be a collision and it waits some before trying again. With the network flooded with Windows based computers trying to infect each other, the warning messages were stuck in the UNIX box and eventually the buffers filled up as more and more warning messages queued up. They seem to be blaming the UNIX box software because the software ended up crashing because they didn't catch the situation where they buffers overflowed. IMO, that was caused by Windows and it's ability to be a great petri dish for viruses and the idiots who keep putting Windows systems on critical networks.
The second comment I have on this is about missing the LAX Communications system software crash which caused multiple near misses on the tarmac and in the air when air traffic controllers could not communicate with pilots because of the crash. The cause of the software crash was a UNIX system was replaced with a Windows based system which had a known flaw. The flaw was that the OS could not run for more than 39 days no matter what was running on it. The system and software was still approved and put inplace with a maintenance instruction of rebooting the computer every 30 days. In comes a new employee who sees things are working fine so he/she doesn't reboot the computer and 9 days later the system crashes. The backup does the same and both are unable to recover and it takes hours to get the system back running again. That should have been in the list IMO.
There was also the CSX Railway situation when lots of its signals go offline because they are run by Windows and their Windows computers got a virus.
It would be nice to see a more complete and more accurate list of these kinds of computer software failures.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Oh yeah, good catch! In US units, a can or bottle of beer is 12 fluid ounces. It's a standard, period. It translates to 355ml. Here in metric-land, you get 350ml in a "good" bottle. You get shortchanged by 5ml every single drink! It is NOT uncommon to see a 325ml bottle, and 275ml bottles are not unheard-of (alcopops mostly). Total ripoff. However, the coolness is the 5 deciliter bottle, which does not exist elsewhere, and wouldn't exist except for the metric system.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"Windows anti-piracy measure that resulted in millions of legitimate customers being branded software thieves."
I just had first hand experience with this. I got a brand new Dell laptop, I spent 2 days getting it all setup the way I wanted, and I just copied (Thank god I still had my data on another HD) my data to it. Everything was perfect! Then the next day I boot it up, everything works fine... When suddenly all the icons vanished off my desktop, and a message appears on the wallpaper telling me my copy of windows is not legit!
I called dell hoping for a simple fix... But NOOO they practically accused me of installing a virus or some other BS onto my machine!
Their solution? "RE-install the OS from the disks, and do not install any software onto it, or connect it to the Internet for a couple of days." What BS is that!!! Then risk having it piss on me again after I do start setting it up again? WTF is the point of spending $1,000 on a machine if I can't USE it?
SO I went and downloaded a pirated version of WIn7, and installed that onto my machine. It has been running smoothly for over a MONTH now!
The kick in the pants? After I got the pirate Win7 running I checked the "windows.old" folder for my files.... And all the user files had been wiped as well as all the apps! There was still folders for Windows and such, but all the stuff I installed had been purged!
I doubt I will be using a legit copy of Windows ever again. (OR at least I will crack it ASAP to prevent from getting blamed for using a legit copy of Windows).
Here that Microsoft! You accused me of being a pirate and stealing Windows, and you even punished me by deleting my data. So I might as well earn the blame and punishment! The only way you will get $$$ from me for one of your OS's is through a machine purchase.
Nothing new on this list that I haven't seen in similar articles over last ten years. Just do a google on "software failures top 10" and
"computer failures top 10", cherry pick ten items to regurgitate, and 'poof', met my deadline.
And when I see that we, the US, are one of two countries still on Imperial - one is some Third World non-industrial country, I want to barf.
It's actually two other countries.
Liberia and Burma are the other two.
People used two digits for years before Microsoft was even a company.
If a recipe calls for 3 cups of bread flour, I know my chosen flour is 155 grams per cup. So when I weigh it out on my scale I weigh out 465 grams. I could do ounces instead wouldn't matter, my scale just reads grams. Likewise it wouldn't matter if the recipe instead called for 700mL of flour.
In my experience metric recipes don't specify flour by volume, but by weight (unless for small volumes, e.g. tablespoons).
Really, working in the screwy imperial system just isn't a big deal to normal people. You don't do anything that needs inter-unit conversion which is where metric shines.
I find doing middle-advanced DIY tasks that I'm _regularly_ doing inter-unit conversions. Just yesterday, I had to work out how much water was in my central heating system. Measure the radiators in metres, estimate length of 15mm diameter pipe, quick calculations, quite easy. If I was working in feet and had to convert to gallons it would have been trickier.
My college physics and chemistry classes went as you describe -- for classwork, metric was assumed and no one thought anything of it. For everything else, Imperial was used. So you might hear something like (making up absurd example to shoehorn it all into one sentence) "I had to move my desk twenty feet just to get a measurement of less than one millimeter!" and it sounded perfectly natural to us. We're measurement-bilingual. ;)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"LoB" - by Locutus (9039) on Sunday December 12, @12:39PM (#34529428)
See subject line above: Additionally - Please, above all else, IF you're going to post the TOO obvious "Anti-Microsoft/Anti-Windows" trolling material, at least put up some backing articles from reliable, and reputable sources, acting as your proofs of your statements please. Your "anecdotal memories", though you may not like this with you having spouted them in your "anti-microsoft/anti-windows F.U.D. campaign" here? Let's see if they are as accurate as you think they are - put up proofs of the "fables you tell", prove they're not fables from YOU. Prove otherwise to myself here, and at least put up some backing proof of your statements via articles from reputable sources backing you instead of what you wrote that has no such backing. You do that, I won't rib on you as being a dementia or alzheimers victim, or just another "anti-windows/anti-microsoft" trolling (loads of) BULLSHITTER anymore here.
And as I like to point out to people -- because I'm a pedantic nerd like everyone else here -- the US system is a metric system . . . see what I did there? I didn't use a capital "M" or say SI there?
And because I'm a pedantic, too, I'd like to point out that the US system of weights and measures is officially based on SI units - units like yards and pounds are legally defined by the USA government in terms of SI units.
And because I'm a pedantic, too, I'd like to point out that the US system of weights and measures is officially based on SI units - units like yards and pounds are legally defined by the USA government in terms of SI units.
Defined in SI units now, yes . . .
I am not a crackpot.
Ruh-roh. Someone compared US and metric systems.
Of "No IBM Series 9000 computer has ever made a mistake.... the problem always turned out to be human error."
Well if they are by weight only, then that would make sense as to why imperial still rules the root in cooking. Most people don't have a scale for food preparation. I do because I approach baking as a science and I require precision (in fact my scale isn't precise enough for things like yeast and will be replaced with a chemical scale soon). Out side of baking the precision offered by a scale is not necessary at all and even in baking only the hard core (or the geeky) do it by weight. Volume is much easier, despite the accuracy loss.
Your DIY task is again not a good example because it is the sort of thing a normal person doesn't do. Also, when you are DIYing things, you do it in the units you like. What the country uses is of no real concern. When we do ethernet cable at work it is always in meters. I don't even know why cable is done in meters, it just is. It is of no consequence.
Day to day stuff just doesn't matter. All that matters is you have an understanding of the units.
To err is human. A royal fuck-up requres a computer.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
The best parts of the article were several in which the author gives incorrect explanations of what the computer terms he's using mean. Made my day! This is why I so seldom listen to the press when they're talking tech. :)
As a pro-American non-idiot who works extensively in feet and inches and fractions of inches, and in pounds force, pounds mass, gallons, etc. and has done some work in SI units, I would love it if US industry converted to SI, though I do realize that inertia means it just won't happen.
The fact is, it is not just a matter of which arbitrary units are familiar to you. The US/Imperial system requires a lot of magic numbers for conversion factors. The SI system is a lot more self-consistent, and therefore easier to use. (not just in adding fundamental measures, but also things like calculating pressure from velocity and density, etc.)
You have some reasonable points about things like months/days/hours/minutes/seconds. But Leap days are a natural result of the actual lengths of days and years; scientists and mathemeticians tend to use radians, not degrees; and adding and multiplying in feet, inches, and fractions of an inch is really a big pain in the ass.
In fact, there would be great benefit in the long run if American industry changed over to using SI units
in Britain it's only been 40-odd years since they started changing things in schools.
Yes, but there are things which there is no intention of changing too... for example miles vs km, and pints. There are things that have gone metric, but actually aren't - I've got a 3.408 litre container of milk in the fridge, and a 454 gramme jar of jam in my cupboard. Nice round numbers there, thank god we went metric.
I learnt my metric height and weight because it was so easy... 2 metres (exactly), 100kg (exactly). It made calculating BMI easy too... 100 / 2^2... 25. Unfortunately, I'm heavier now (not _all_ fat, honest), and I'm not that fond of round numbers to go on a diet.
However, the coolness is the 5 deciliter bottle, which does not exist elsewhere, and wouldn't exist except for the metric system.
Although the 5.68 deciliter Imperial (British) Pint is better still.
Ruh-roh. Someone compared US and metric systems.
That's ridiculous! A country is not a system of measurement.
I'm running a copy of Debian, installed from one of those evil writable CDs. Can someone please direct me to a service where I can make sure *I* am not a "software thief"? Bonus points if this service phones home and wastes my system resources. Even more bonus points if it pops up persistent nags to harass me while I'm trying to get work done.
Also, how is someone a "software thief" when they can't buy a PC without paying the supposed victims for a license to their imaginary property?
That's unfair. It could be the operator's fault.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd think the irrational factor of pi would be more of a problem than the 231 inch^3/gallon, or the factor of 12 for feet to inches.
Well if they are by weight only, then that would make sense as to why imperial still rules the root in cooking. Most people don't have a scale for food preparation.
You think? This must be a USA thing because here in the UK I'd be almost as surprised to walk into a kitchen and not see a set of scales as to walk into a kitchen and not see an oven.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Again, you seem to be in a special case which doesn't freaking matter to normal people.
Companies should indeed switch over new projects to metric.
Wood is even stranger. While a 3/4" sheet of plywood is indeed 3/4" thick, a two-by-four has a cross section of 1.5" x 3.5". The usual explanation is that 2" x 4" is the rough cut size, and they are later dried and planed down to 1.5" x 3.5". This is sometimes augmented with the claim that the original sawing is cleaner today than when the size was standardized, so modern two-by-fours were never actually 2" x 4". Having never seriously researched sawmills, I have no idea of the truth of these stories.
A 5cm x 10cm (actual) piece of finished lumber is thus significantly heftier than an American two-by-four.
I thought Cindy Margolis was the #1 computer cock-up
Here in the US, we have (among other sizes) bottles which are 1 US pint (16oz, 473ml), 1/2 L (16.9oz, 500ml), 20 oz (591 ml, 1.04 Imperial pint), 1 US quart (32 oz, 946 ml), 1 Liter (33.8 fluid ounces, 1000ml), and 40oz (1182ml, 1.04 Imperial quart). The "forty" is generally only used for malt liquor, though.
nuf sed
Yes, getting a decent kitchen scales in the US is a pain. In Europe, every reasonably equipped kitchen has a set of kitchen scales on the counter.
On the other hand, measuring certain ingredients by volume is better. For example, the specific weight of flour changes quite a bit with humidity, while volume stays pretty much the same.
AccountKiller
I'm surprised they didn't mention incidents where people actually died, such as the Therac-25 incident.
Radiation dosage mistakes like this make you wonder how well and how often
airport body scanners will be calibrated as machines remain in service for years.
List fails without the therac 25
Fatal radiation dosage mistakes like those involving the Therac-25 make you wonder how well and how often airport body scanners will be calibrated as they remain in service for years. Whose responsibility is this, if anyone's?
Here's a more recent example proving accidents continue to happen:
In October, 2009, news broke that CT scanners in several hospitals had been calibrated incorrectly and operated in the wrong mode for a year and a half, exposing hundreds of patients to 6 – 13 times the intended dose of radiation, putting many at risk for developing new cancer on top of their pre-existing conditions. These CT scanners were located in top-flight hospitals such as Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles and operated by the best-trained technicians following the manufacturer’s guidelines and yet nobody – in eighteen months – spotted this gross error. The lawsuits resulting from this egregious cock-up continue to wend their way through court.
"Ultimately, it was a patient who alerted Cedars-Sinai to the problem. In August, a stroke victim informed the hospital that he had suffered patchy hair loss after a scan."
"Your example is something people do not do."
Spoken like someone who has never had to fit the maximum amount of water in a pack without exceeding a weight limit.
I live in Australia, I've used the 1L/1KG water relationship many times in my life, and not just in the example of the pack above.
The carnage eventually left 256 power plants offline, causing cellular communication and media distribution.
how, might I ask, would power plants being offline CAUSE media distribution?
If the RIAA gets word of this, it's a safe bet that my municipal power plant will be the next lawsuit target.
What a poorly written article. There are some grammatical uglies that are (turn your head and hold your nose) like the word 'maths' when he really means 'math'. But there are incomplete sentences "The carnage eventually left 256 power plants offline, causing cellular communication and media distribution. ", incorrect statements "that was used for calculating maths problems using floating-point numbers (numbers too large to be represented as integers)." NO! Integers are cardinal numbers, floating point implies decimal point, even numbers like 1.1 is floating point, SURPRISE!, smaller than an integer like 2. ....clearly the author doesn't have a rudimentary understanding of computers, and sadly has questionable skill in literacy.
That's the first thing that comes to my mind when someone says "When Computers Go Wrong".
I am surprised that the infamous malfunction of the robotic cannon, Oerlikon GDF-005 in 2007 was not mentioned. This malfunction caused the robot cannon to wildly spray hundreds of high-explosive 0,5kg 35mm cannon shells around the firing range in a South African training exercise, killing 9 and wounding 14. To be fair, it was not clear if it was a software or mechanical glitch that caused the malfunction. In any case, this underscores the growing reliance on automated systems, and the life and death consequences. Could licensing for software developers - similar to that bestowed upon civil engineers - be far away?
...
I'd prefer to slap someone for saying "Imperial vs. Metric" when they're talking about US standards vs the SI -- which one certainly is when talking about the mars spacecraft failure. After all, the US system -- while derived from the Imperial System -- is not the same thing. Quick: how many l in a gal? Well, it depends, doesn't it? Did you mean Imperial gallon or US gallon? How many m^2 in an acre? What's the mass of a ton(ne)? And as I like to point out to people -- because I'm a pedantic nerd like everyone else here -- the US system is a metric system . . . see what I did there? I didn't use a capital "M" or say SI there?
I have yet to see anyone on this thread use the actual name of the system of weights and measures peculiar to the United States. It is called the "United States customary system".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Well I have to support part of what you've said, and contradict part.
I support you in that it is stupid NASA uses Imperial ever, anywhere...
United States customary system, not "imperial" actually.
Having discussed this with NASA engineers before (circa 1990), there is an explanation for why spacecraft are still (?) designed using this system at least. Their very highly skilled technicians are trained using the U.S. system, and their tools are calibrated in it. In the type of custom hand building used for space craft manual dexterity and the "feel" of the fit is important - components manufactured in thousandths of an inch increments are different from ones manufactured to, say, hundredths of a millimeter. It is actually a painful transition to go from using hardware designed using one system to the other.
There is an example of this issue when the Soviet Union attempted to copy the B-29 after WWII and built the TU-4. The problem was the B-29 was designed using the U.S. system, and sheet metal for the skin for example was some fraction of an inch. Skin being a major structural component, if the Soviets used the closest Metric thickness from below the airplane was too weak and would not fly. It the Soviets used the closest Metric thickness from above (as they did) made it too heavy with compromised perfromance.
That all being said, the flight control system should still be done Metric (it isn't dependent on the tooling of the spacecraft), and at some point NASA is going to have to bite the bullet on this (if they haven't already).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Ariane 5 Flight 501 was a pretty big disaster. It was caused by integer overflow due to re-using software from an earlier rocket that was physicly incapable of causing the overflow. The wiki article says $370 million lost, which sounds about right.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't have proof by Locutus (9039)
on Sunday December 12, @05:56PM (#34530786)
There you have it in his own words. LoB does really stand for "Loads of Bullshit", rotflmao!
prove my statements wrong before blowing out your bullshit. Just calling them FUD and bullshit and telling me I have to prove the statements does not make you even remotely correct. by Locutus (9039)
on Sunday December 12, @05:56PM (#34530786)
See subject above and my last post. We just ask you back your statements of FUD, with backing substantiation from reputable sources. Otherwise? Hehehe, "LoB" does really mean "Loads of Bullshit", lmao. Wait, wait - it gets better. Keep reading, lmao:
I could no longer find anything on the LAX computer crash, nor could I find the info on the CSX signal system virus issue but they happened by Locutus (9039)
on Sunday December 12, @05:56PM (#34530786)
That's what chicken little said. LOL!
LoB by Locutus (9039)
on Sunday December 12, @05:56PM (#34530786)
Remember everyone, what does LoB stand for? See above. LMAO!
Get proof instead of your 'tall tales of f.u.d.'
I believe that the finished dimensions for a "swedish" two-by-four are 50x100 mm before it's planed and approx. 45x95 mm after being planed. And according to wikipedia a "US" two-by-four is 38 x 89 mm which kind of makes me wonder why they call it a 2x4.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Burma uses its own historical set of measurements in addition to a mishmash of metric and imperial, but Britain has a similar mishmash. The Wikipedia page isn't clear on which of these are typically used in industry.
When I last bought some carpet the invoice said "5m x 20 feet". The roll comes from the manufacturer in 5m widths, the carpet fitter works in feet and inches...!
I have a 100g jar of coffee and a 500g box of sugar cubes on my desk, plus a 500ml bottle of water (which I fill from the tap), and in the fridge upstairs there are several 2 litre cartons of milk. Bottles of beer and cider tend to come in 500ml (although I'll accept that's by no means exclusive). Mince and the like comes in 250g or 500g packages.
It wasn't that long ago that it became a legal requirement to label goods in metric; round numbers are becoming increasingly common, although they've yet to completely replace the imperial versions. I suspect that people previously bought 1 lb of mince, and since the move to 500g of mince increased the amount of slightly, the shops were not willing to round it immediately since people would notice the increase in price. That's my theory anyway.
It was hardware design documents, not software, that made that Russian pipeline go boom.
And let's not forget my favorite: the gram. Since the actual SI unit for mass is the kilogram, the gram should not exist; it's a millikilogram.
Actually I was being paid for my coding for 3 years before IBM-DOS was shipped.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
So was it IBM who made the date on the IBM-PC have 2 digits?
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907190&cid=34532322
and
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907190&cid=34529734
Imported carpet, obviously :(
But a good example -- I didn't have any problem picturing the right size on the fly, and I'll bet you didn't either.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907190&cid=34532322
and this
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907190&cid=34529734
Here in Sweden the only people who use imperial units seem to be carpenters who call a 5x10 cm piece of wood a "tvatumfyra" ("twoinchfour") but even they don't actually assume the actual size of it is 5.08x10.16 cm, it's just that "tvatumfyra" is faster to say than "fem ganger tio centimeter".
Sorry, my Mac does not properly speak unicode.
I used to be a die hard fan of metric system is everything, and I even worked construction for a while, and then someone told me that one of the beauties of the english system for construction work is that you can _always_ take half measurements. Have of 1 inch, is 1/2 inch, 1/2 of that, is 1/4 inch, 1/2 of that is 1/8 inch, etc. Not 2.54cm, 1.27cm, 0.635cm, and 0.3175cm.
Half of a "twoinchfour" is typically a "oneinchfour", not a 2.5x10cm. If you need a 3*1/8" strip of wood, you say "Give me 3/8s of an inch strip of wood", not "Give me 3*0.3175cm strip of wood". Actually, the 3*0.3175cm is much more prone to error than the 3/8 version.
Computers store dates in binary. Fancy thing with binary, the upper limit (or rather, one above the upper limit) never ends on a zero. It always ends on a 2, 4, 6 or 8. Note how 2000 doesn't fit this pattern.
Even worse, most of the time, dates are stored not as a number of years, but number of seconds or even milliseconds or nanoseconds (ticks). This makes it even less likely to hit a round number as the cut-off date.
However, Cobol programmers use strings for everything. Numbers are declared as a numeric string of a certain length. No ints or longs. For Cobol programmers, a date is just a six-digit number. Two for the day, two for the month, and... two for the year. The Y2k problem was a problem with Cobol programs.
I don't recall Microsoft ever using Cobol.
Ok, there's also BCD, which has the same problem, but apart from some hardware clocks (possibly including those in PC's, but Microsoft isn't building the hardware), you basically only find BCD on mainframes. Which would be IBM area, not Microsoft. No surprise that mainframes often run Cobol programs.
A US 2x4 is 2"x4" before planing and finishing. Planing removes approximately 1/4" from each side, resulting in a final dimension of 1 1/2" by 3 1/2". Or about 38mm x 89mm.
Your Swedish 2x4 is probably the same dimensions after planing and finishing. It's just that the lengths are in metric (probably 2-3 metres, while US/Canadian lumber ends up around 10 feet, roughly. I don't know the exact values, but I do know it's still incompatible).
That reasoning only works if your country doesn't (fully) use the metric system.
Why should I care what the half of 2,54 is? Nothing around here is measured in multiples of 2,54 cm. (Okay, water pipes are. And tires. And screens. And disk drives.)
A 2 by 4 would be 5 cm by 10 cm.
Half of 1 meter is 5 dm half of that is 25 cm half of that is 125 mm. And if you want to be precise, half of that is 62500 um :P
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
On the original IBM-PC, running MS-DOS, Y2K was not a problem.
The CLOCK Driver was a 6-byte sequence, used to determine the current date and time, counting up from January 1, 1980. From the old MS-DOS documentation:
Byte 0: Days low byte
Byte 1: Days high byte
Byte 2: Minutes
Byte 3: Hours
Byte 4: Seconds/100
Byte 5: Seconds
This means that any date and time could be represented (with .01 second accuracy) between January 1, 1980 and 65535 days later. So within the parameters of original MS-DOS and IBM-PC, we could support dates to June of 2159.
Further, MS-DOS supported software interrupts to get and set the system date. This provided a little tighter limitation, according to the documentation, limiting the year to the range of 1980 - 2099. But still was Y2K compliant.
Int 21H Function 2AH Get System Date
Call with AH = 2AH
Returns:
CX=Year (1980 through 2099)
DH=Month (1-12)
DL=Day (1-31)
and under MS-DOS version 1.10 and above, the day of week was also returned in AL
Int 21H Function 2BH Set System Date
Call with:
AH=2BH
CX=Year (1980 through 2099)
DH=Month (1-12)
DL=Day (1-31)
Returns AL=00 if successfully set or 0FFH if date invalid.
PCs and PC operating systems weren't really much of a Y2K issue. Application software was. Mainframe software was. But PCs, not so much.
There was one Microsoft (Excel) Y2K issue. As Wikipedia says:
The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program had a very elementary Y2K problem: Excel (in both Windows and Mac versions, when they are set to start at 1900) incorrectly set the year 1900 as a leap year for compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3.[8] In addition, the years 2100, 2200, and so on, were regarded as leap years. This bug was fixed in later versions, but since the epoch of the Excel timestamp was set to the meaningless date of January 0, 1900 in previous versions, the year 1900 is still regarded as a leap year to maintain backward compatibility.
There wasn't anyone to "blame" Y2K on, really. In the 1960s and 1970s, space was very expensive, literally per byte. So it was an extremely wise move to use a 2-digit year, and bet that the software or the programmer would be retired prior to 2000.
Really, working in the screwy imperial system just isn't a big deal to normal people. You don't do anything that needs inter-unit conversion which is where metric shines.
Yes, but normal generally aren't trying to land probes on Mars.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Actually COBOL programs typically don't use strings (PIC X(length)) to represent numbers. They normally use PIC 9(length) data, which is a legit number. If there will be a calculation or comparison based on the numbers, which is usually the case for dates, PIC 9 is preferred. Heck, you could even represent the numbers in a binary format (PIC 9 COMP-3) if you fancy saving a few bytes and optimizing the calculation.
The actual arrangement of the month, day, and year values depends on the particular COBOL program, and would usually depend on how the data looks on the input file\DB. Many of them just so happened to use 2 digits, but it's not like that was set in stone. Lots of these programs and datasets had to be updated to add 2 digits to the date field, but it wasn't really a COBOL issue they were fixing. It was a program design issue that was being repeated all over the place.
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
Maybe, but they weren't the only ones who made that mistake. Countless COBOL programs and mainframe datasets made that "Optimization" before and after the PC came around.
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
1) Some new naval warship on its shakedown cruise had to be towed back to San Diego because its Microsoft OS bluescreened.
2) When NASA's shuttle engines were being tested, two of them blew up on the test stand. Some programmer neglected to factor in the fact that a large butterfly valve takes time to close. He issued the command to start closing at the time it should have been completely closed, and boom!, no more engine.
NHA
I'd think the irrational factor of pi would be more of a problem than the 231 inch^3/gallon, or the factor of 12 for feet to inches.
I know pi to enough accuracy for the task at hand. I'd have had to look up the conversion factor between cubic inches and gallons.
Offsets. You do know about those, right?
No, a Swedish "2x4" is 50x100 mm, after planing the approx dimensions are 45x95 mm. Those are the "standard" dimensions available.
According to Wikipedia the dimensions for a US "2x4" are actually 38x89 mm when planed and finished.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
"None of the common languages have such a feature". In the case of C++, it's debatable. Walter Brown (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) developed the SI Units library, which used C++ templates to enforce unit type checking at compile time. Adding 2 meters and 3 inches was still possible; it just produced the right results. Adding 2 meters and 3 seconds didn't compile. And since C++ can do compile-time arithmetic, variables could have crazy types like "meters squared per ampere cubed".
It never made it into the C++ standard, as it was judged a domain-specific library that would not directly benefit from inclusion in the C++ standard. But it's been around for quite a while (2001 or so) and it's widely seen as one of the prime examples of the benefits of C++ templates.
in the fridge upstairs there are several 2 litre cartons of milk.
Are you sure about that? All milk I've bought recently, from supermarkets and other places, in the UK is labelled metrically, but is in pints. I'd guess your 2 litre cartons of milk will actually be about 2.3 litres, if you're from the UK.
American imported drinks bottles, such as coke, pepsi and sprite, etc, have been 500ml for years, which is slightly ironic.
I do know that the change to metric is basically inevitable, and personally I generally welcome it. I was just pointing out the absurdities of _laws_ requiring the metric system resulting in stupid quantities.