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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."
List fails without the therac 25
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)
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363580/when-computers-go-wrong/print
I'm surprised they didn't mention incidents where people actually died, such as the Therac-25 incident.
Yeah there really wasn't much computer related there. If you wanted computer related I would have added WinME, aka "what idiot thought mixing WDM and VXD drivers was a good idea?" along with Vista Capable, aka "We've got to let the OEMs dump their crappers on Best Buy, so pretend it runs, okay?" and finally the early Athlon without thermal monitoring aka "Heat problem? What heat problem?".
And of course if you wanted some real old time badness there was Bonzi Buddy, also known as "Kill that GODDAMNED MONKEY DEAD!!" and Geocities with the ever popular "WTF? Why is there a pocketwatch hanging off my mouse like a ball of snot and who thought pink OMG Ponies! text on a lime green background with sparkles and GIFs was tasteful?" and of course MSFT Bob, an OS made for the clueless that needed a fricking gamer rig just to run and spawned the electronic son of Satan known as Clippy.
Finally on the hardware side I'd add the Pentium 4, also known as "Mr Piggy Super Space Heater", the Geforce 5xxx Hoover Edition, which was famous for not only filling your PC with the sounds of sucking but thanks to cheating by Nvidia on rendering actually gave you REAL sucking as well! Quite an accomplishment that, the Seagate "I hope you didn't actually NEED your data for anything" bug in the early 1.5TB drives, the early Phenom "watch this patch suck away your performance" TLB bug, the iPhone 4 which gave us such lovely phrases such as "WTF do you mean I'm holding it wrong?" and finally to show they can still make incredible mistakes the Nvidia bumpgate, also known as "We do NOT have a problem with our GPUs, its a power saving feature! See it makes your computer shut down and everything!!". These I think would have been a little more computer centric than stolen code and a screwed battery on a Volvo.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And of course there is the Patriot missile software clock issue - that led to a failure to engage a SCUD on February 25, 1991 at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers.
This failure is rather similar to the Soviet defense and NORAD errors mentioned in the article in that it was a weakness designed into the system that did not account for the range of operational condition and issues. In the Petrov Incident case - a natural condition, in the NORAD case an easy to make operator error, in the Dhahran barracks Patriot incident it was a failure to consider that a unit might be operated for weeks without a restart.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
We got to commend MS for the most expensive computer cock-up.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
No, he clearly meant "The Fucking TFA Article."
Kids today.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
It's not confirmed that the gas pipeline blowup was due to computers going wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage#Hoax_Theory
Here are a few more "logic cock ups":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/25/2038217
And Wired's list: http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2005/11/69355
A system using proper fractions can actually get exactly the right answer every time OR it will overflow and we will know for a fact the answer isn't exact.
What theory of numeration are you using, that has all numbers rational? I'm sorry, but even the humble square root is something I don't want to give up, to say nothing of transcendental functions. The theory of exact arithmetic on the reals is not all that well developed. Bill Gosper makes a start, and a handful of researchers take it somewhat further, but actually using exact arithmetic for everything you'd want to do remains a mirage.
None at all. I just presumed it was understood that my statement applied to rational numbers.
You could take it to the next step and handle irrational numbers symbolically, but that's probably best left to software rather than hardware. You could keep a hardware function called squareish root though if you like that returns a fraction matching the current approximation. You won't actually lose anything that way.
I'm pretty sure we will at least be improving matters by not losing on simple division.
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