When Computers Go Wrong 250
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."
Inaccurate title (Score:2, Interesting)
as of now, its just the logic they were programmed with that is being executed
Imperial - Metric (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe "Worlds nine most calamitous logic cock-ups and that Intel FPU bug" then?
The creation of the EFF (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :)
Re:Imperial - Metric (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Imperial - Metric (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
And sometimes it isn't the computers... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:4, Interesting)
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ada_(programming_language) [wikimedia.org]
I think the problem is that most of the hobby, and perhaps even commercial, programming happens on a "scratch itch" basis. Once it does what the programmer set out to do, the job is done no matter how nasty the code may look. And any language that allows the programmer to get there quickly get instant love. Then there are situations, mostly on the bare metal level tho, where doing things in crazy ways is the only way to get it done.
Re:It's a simple rule (Score:5, Interesting)
"Computers don't make mistakes. They do, however, execute yours VERY carefully."
That's a good way of phrasing it. But it does miss the fact that not all "computer errors" are due to software mistakes.
One example, of course, is the Pentium FDIV failure. That was a hardware failure, "programmed" into the CPU by Intel's experts in solid-state hardware design. There wasn't a whole lot that any software developer could do to defend against that failure.
Another, more subtle one, came up when I was a grad student back in the 1970s. At that time, most of the campus research computing was done on the big mainframe in the campus Computer Center. After discovering a number of (published ;-) results that turned out to be wrong, some researchers investigated, and found that they were due to undetected overflows in the calculations. Yes, the hardware could and did test for overflows, and set a status bit when they occurred. Almost all this calculating was done in Fortran, and the Fortran compiler had a run-time flag that could turn the status-bit checking on or off. It defaulted to OFF. They did a bit of analysis, and concluded that about half the runs of Fortran programs on that machine produced output that included numbers that were incorrect due to undetected overflow.
So why didn't they make the overflow-detection flag default to ON? Well, they did a little survey of the users. They found that the overwhelming response was that, if enabling overflow checking made the program run slower, then overflow checking shouldn't be done. Somewhere around 90% of the people asked said this. They weren't mathematically ignorant people; they were the people using the Fortran compiler for the data in their professional publications.
This told us a lot about the way such things are done. Since I left academia and worked in what passes for the Real World, I've found that this is a nearly universal attitude. Faster and cheaper is always preferable to correct. This is still true even when we have computers in commercial aircraft and hospital operating rooms. And you can't call this sort of thing a "human error". People don't decide to disable overflow checking by accident; they do it knowing full well what the effect will be. When the computer fails in such cases, it wasn't executing a human's mistake; it was doing what the human wanted it to do.
Re:Don't tell me this stuff, please... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd not heard of it nor the fellow involved (who as it turns out is still alive), so I went and looked it up, and learned all sorts of interesting stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov [wikipedia.org]
http://www.brightstarsound.com/world_hero/article.html [brightstarsound.com]
http://www.armscontrol.ru/start/publications/petrov.htm [armscontrol.ru]
Re:Imperial - Metric (Score:4, Interesting)
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. ;)
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Interesting)
Therac-25 deaths and airport body scanners (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised they didn't mention incidents where people actually died, such as the Therac-25 [wikipedia.org] 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.