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."
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Maybe "Worlds nine most calamitous logic cock-ups and that Intel FPU bug" then?
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Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Bob was an interface, not an OS. It ran on top of Windows. The rest, however, is true.
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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.
It looks like you're writing a Slashdot flame. Would you like help?
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Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Here are a few more "logic cock ups":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501 [wikipedia.org]
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/25/2038217 [slashdot.org]
And Wired's list: http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2005/11/69355 [wired.com]
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Informative)
I'm surprised they didn't mention incidents where people actually died, such as the Therac-25 [wikipedia.org] incident.
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:4, Funny)
To be fair, the PATRIOT manufacturer didn't think it would stay assembled for weeks without falling apart, thus requiring a restart.
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Feb 25th is my birthday, I was watching the television here in the UK before going out with friends. I remember well the footage of 'incoming' as they were broadcast live on the BBC. I've always been curious about this tale though. What I saw was not a Scud coming down (pretty unlikely) but a number of Patriots launching and one of them suddenly veering off-course and smashing into the adjoining part of the base. It was in the air for approximately 1/2 a second before it turned left (on my screen) and wa
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.
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Ariane rocket buffer overflow: http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html [umn.edu]
That's what I thought of when I saw the headline. They thought they could simply reuse Ariane 4 software for the new, bigger, faster Ariana 5 rocket. But some speed was higher, a value overflowed, and all of a sudden, there's nonsense values all over the place. Not good for such a big and expensive rocket.
Not always (Score:3)
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.
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The FDIV bug, however, was the direct consequence of a person at Intel screwing up. Everything after that was just more crap rolling downhill.
It is very seldom indeed that a computer makes an actual error. It happens - ram bits flip, gamma rays arrive and cock up what was perfectly operating circuitry for a cycle... but FDIV = 100% human error.
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garbage in, garbage out...
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Would you consider inadequate shielding the cause of a gamma ray changing a value?
Yes. I'm sure under normal conditions it is considered to operate in its human decided parameters. So if you were going to use chips in an environment with more gamma rays and failed to use more shielding that would be a human error.
By that logic, all computer fuck ups are really human error.
That does seem logical. Even the random component randomly failing is within a range determined by the engineering and quality of the manufacturing of those components.
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Given that all computers are human designed and constructed, how can they possibly be anything else?
PEBKAC (Score:2)
That's unfair. It could be the operator's fault.
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Fuck ups are generally avoided by the designer following a careful course that takes into account the laws of physics. Certainly those laws define the playing field; but they in no way say that the best course of action is to bang your head against the goalposts.
Generally speaking, it's down to human error in almost all cases. You assume the computer is always going to give you the right answer? Your error. I've designed a lot of small computer systems, and if you, or anyone else, ever asked me if I expecte
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I understood your post. What you wrote is a simple truism; and I agree, yes, everything obeys the laws of physics. It's a given. Yet within those bounds remain enormous room for screwing up or getting things done as intended. Which explains why I wrote what I did.
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The laws of physics are not a person (nor any other form of sentient entity) and therefore have no responsibility, legal or moral, for anything.
They merely are, they do not do.
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TFA article
I believe you mean "The TFA article"
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Informative)
No, he clearly meant "The Fucking TFA Article."
Kids today.
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Insightful)
Another aspect to this is a common property of most "digital" computations. I've seen it expressed as "Digital errors have no order of magnitude". Another phrasing is "Getting one bit wrong is generally indistinguishable from randomizing all of memory". So when a digital calculation goes wrong, a tiny, inconsequential error is just about as likely as a total meltdown of the entire system.
Programmers tend to get familiar with this phenomenon very early in their career. They write a small chunk of code that does a simple calculation, and the result is orders of magnitude wrong. When they investigate, they discover it was caused by a one-character typo, perhaps an "off by one" error such as using '<' instead of '<=', or vice-versa. This quickly leads to what many "normal" people consider the major character failure of software geeks, the insistence that everything be exactly right, no matter what, and the willingness to spend long hours discussing insignificant minutiae as if they mattered. In their work, it's usually such insignificant minutiae that brings the whole house of cards tumbling down.
If you're unwilling to take the difference between a comma and a simicolon seriously, you have no future as a software developer. This is often why something goes badly wrong and we have events like those described in this story.
OTOH, it is interesting that, despite all the software disasters like the metric/imperial-units story, the software world has never insisted that programming languages include units as part of variables' values. It's not like this is anything difficult, and it has been done in a number of languages. But none of the common languages have such a feature. It is a bit bizarre that we can get into long discussions of complex, obscure concepts such as type checking or class inheritance, when our calculations are all susceptible to unchecked unit mismatches (without even a warning from the compiler or interpreter). There's a lot of poor logic when the topic is the relative importance of various sources of bogus calculations.
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.
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What surprises me is that we have no proper first class fractional numbers, everything is done in decimals and suffers rounding error eventually. 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. Sure, you can technically abort on rounding in IEEE floats, but you won't get very far that way.
I can well understand why we didn't do it 10 or 20 years ago, but these days our biggest problem is getting memor
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Informative)
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 [plover.com] 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.
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not necessarily. It depends on where the one bit went wrong - if it's in a system that has redundancy, the system could recover from the error. If it's in a piece of text, it could result in a spelling error. If it's in a kernel module, it could freeze the system. An application could crash, etc...
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I would agree but my computer's gone wrong and wont let me.
Re:Computers do what they are told to (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Wow ! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Oh, I dunno; I thought this definition was at least equally ignorant:
floating-point numbers (numbers too large to be represented as integers)
This pretty much tells us what we need to know about the author's depth of mathematical understanding. In general, there's a lot in TFA to make your average geek go "WTF?" and wonder if the rest is worth reading.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage [wikipedia.org]
Inaccurate title (Score:2, Interesting)
as of now, its just the logic they were programmed with that is being executed
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Your suggestion would be accurate if the title was implying that the computers themselves were responsible, something like "Computers' biggest failures" or something. But it's not. It essentially means "world's ten most calamitous cock-ups INVOLVING computers as their primary feature". There are worse problems with the article than the title.
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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
I agree, but shit flows downhill.
You're right about the mistakes being made by human, but the poor helpless computers will get blamed.
Our propensity to leave the low man on the totem pole holding the ball is what may ultimately cause the revolt of the fully autonomous AI against us.
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Sure, but I can make the same argument, with exactly the same precursors, for people. Yet in the end, it doesn't matter -- what matters is how what individuals do affects others. If the individual is biological or silicon, it's really neither here nor there. Assuming, of course, that we ever get to silicon individuals, which is another
therac 25 (Score:5, Informative)
List fails without the therac 25
Re:therac 25 (Score:5, Informative)
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Somebody did their research using Wikipedia? From the first line of the floating point article [wikipedia.org] as it currently stands:
In computing, floating point describes a system for representing numbers that would be too large or too small to be represented as integers.
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On the first page, while describing the bug on said Intel CPU, the author defines floating-point numbers as "numbers too large to be represented as integers".
I believe they meant a number that would take a crapload (or infinite amount) of screen space to display, not the other kind of "large".
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These kind of lists always fail, period. Just see it as an interesting collection of failing software.
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: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?
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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.
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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 . . .
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Ruh-roh. Someone compared US and metric systems.
That's ridiculous! A country is not a system of measurement.
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.
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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
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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,
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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.
Re:Imperial - Metric (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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. ;)
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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 ch
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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.
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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 a
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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.
Re:Imperial - Metric (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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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.
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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 la
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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 e
Ariane 5 missing on the list (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Ariane 5 missing on the list (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, those kind of conversions should be banned from any managed programming environment. It's fine that you need to work with bytes, shorts etc. or heck maybe even machine words, but lets only do that when absolutely required, shall we.
It amazes me that the many programming languages still don't define acceptable ranges, accept null pointers, and use round robin two-complement numbers etc. etc.. It's just asking for errors just like these. Sure they have their uses for lower level functions, but I would certainly like to have something better for API's and general use business logic. They are just another pointer arithmetic or GOTO waiting to be erased from mainstream programming (and for sure, in many newer languages, they indeed are).
1 Page Read (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363580/when-computers-go-wrong/print [pcpro.co.uk]
It's a simple rule (Score:5, Funny)
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."
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Under-rated
Re:It's a simple rule (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And of those 90% people, at least 80% to 100% probably made a mistake that cause and overrun even though they would swear that they would never make that mistake. The idea of the perfect programmer still lives on. At my company though I've made sure that for newer Java projects, checkstyle & findbugs are used. It's amazing to turn them loose on your own older libraries, that's for sure.
It's funny to see outside programmers that have turned them off from the start, only to find out that there are over 70
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Are you sure it was an error in silicon, and not merely a software bug [intel.com] in the microcode of the ALU?
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Repeat (Score:2)
Haven't we seen this posted on /. before?
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. :)
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Also try searching for "The Hacker Crackdown" which tells the whole story.
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I'm the result of an integer overflow in a Fortran electron-orbitals program (with attendant flashing error light on the console) so far as I know. Programmer (f) meet researcher (m), cue music, flashing lights (oh, already had that), music (possibly Teletypes and card readers for percussion), ..., profit.
Does that count? B^>
Rgds
Damon
Re:The creation of the EFF (Score:4, Funny)
Should this be modded "+1 Too Informative"?
MS London stock exchange crash (Score:5, Informative)
Don't tell me this stuff, please... (Score:3)
"...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.'
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]
1982 explosion did not happen (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
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Translation (I don't know how accurate it is, but it's readable enough):
http://tinyurl.com/2d8eyto [tinyurl.com]
English page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage [wikipedia.org]
Interesting to compare the two.
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Cold War DRM (Score:2)
No kidding. DRM these days looks pathetic by comparison. :P
"Black day for power programmers" Windows virus (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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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. As for the blackout, they would not say directly there were computer viruses to blame but after reading the news reports and blogs at the time and reading the commission report along with th
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People used two digits for years before Microsoft was even a company.
Re:The best parts of the article were... (Score:5, Insightful)