The Big Technical Mistakes of History 244
An anonymous reader tips a PC Authority review of some of the biggest technical goofs of all time. "As any computer programmer will tell you, some of the most confusing and complex issues can stem from the simplest of errors. This article looking back at history's big technical mistakes includes some interesting trivia, such as NASA's failure to convert measurements to metric, resulting in the Mars Climate Orbiter being torn apart by the Martian atmosphere. Then there is the infamous Intel Pentium floating point fiasco, which cost the company $450m in direct costs, a battering on the world's stock exchanges, and a huge black mark on its reputation. Also on the list is Iridium, the global satellite phone network that promised to make phones work anywhere on the planet, but required 77 satellites to be launched into space."
What no Windows Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rim shot...!
Re:What no Windows Vista? (Score:4, Funny)
You wound ME.
Re:What no Windows Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
That's not my XPerience. At least 95 - 98% of the time.
I think thou DOS protest too much.
Re:What no Windows Vista? (Score:4, Funny)
No, he doesN'T.
Re:What no Windows Vista? (Score:4, Funny)
All these bad puns are making me WinCE.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This isn't deserving of a Troll, I think. Windows ME edged out AN EXPLODING OIL PIPELINE.
Pentium 90 for sale (Score:5, Funny)
I still have one of the Pentium 90 chips with the math flaw. The bidding starts at $1.
Re:Pentium 90 for sale (Score:5, Funny)
I thought the bidding would start at $0.99999574
Re:Pentium 90 for sale (Score:5, Funny)
I thought the bidding would start at $0.99999574
Well, that would be a higher bid than $1. We need to work up to $0.99999574
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Re:Pentium 90 for sale (Score:4, Funny)
I offfer 1.50000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
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Iridium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Iridium? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now, if only they had sales to match the business plan, they'd be billionaires.
They had a great sales plan. Make your primary customer the US Military, build a massive satellite network, declare bankruptcy after it's built, reform Iridium LLC, and continue operations through today offering satellite phone service at a price comparable to US international roaming prices.
Satellite will always have limitations until we can get congress to raise the speed on light (stupid greenies worried about photon pollution), can get rid of the line-of-sight issue, and can build the very strong radio
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Is that even a problem? There are 30 GPS satellites apparently, plans to upgrade it, and Europe wanted to launch its own alternative system too. I'm not sure if the better military GPS is using different sats currently. We've also invested in a ton of phone cell masts, satellite phones, etc. Taking an uninformed guess, might not Iridium have worked out cheaper, when the final bill was added up?
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I'm not sure if the better military GPS is using different sats currently
The "military GPS" uses the same satellites. aka P signals are transmitted with 10 times the resolution and on two frequencies. The civilian C/A is transmitted at 1/10 the resolution of the military and only one frequency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Navigation_signals [wikipedia.org]
Note that from an EE perspective, there is no design tradeoff between high accuracy, and encryption, that's just how the chips fell.
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It may have been cheaper but you don't even want to know what the 3g data plans were going to cost!
Re:Iridium? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Latency with satellite communication would make this an annoying way of having a phone conversation. I wouldn't like it.
Re:Iridium? (Score:5, Informative)
You're probably having it quite often without even knowing it. Latency to low-earth isn't the same as geostationary.
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But latency through multi-hop LEO is potentially as bad as geostationary. Absolute distance may be less, but add per-hop packet store-and-forward times.
In my (admittedly limited) first-hand experience, the US military tends to use Iridium for data comm. Stuff which, 20 years ago, would have been landlines with modems. Except you can't really string landline to some mountain in Upickastan, can you?
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Even with per-satellite latency, you're nowhere near GEO delay.
You can get close to the flight-time delay of geo (250ms or so) if you include enough instances of per-node transmission time in your back-of-the-envelope calculations. Each node requires a non-zero amount of time to transmit its packet of data to the next hop. For a geostationary, that's a single fixed chunk of latency. (Only one hop). For Iridium et al, that's once per lateral hop. And Inmarsat BGAN has pretty good throughput: 64kbps. Iridi
Re:Iridium? (Score:4, Funny)
Actually it only took 66 satellites [wikipedia.org] due to changes in orbit configuration that increased coverage. They didn't bother to change the name to Dysprosium.
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The only "flaw" (besides the multi-billion-dollar goof in estimating the market size), was the name: They knew they really only needed 66 satellites, but who's goi
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Um. Iridium didn't actually work that well at all.
1. By the time it was operational mobile / cell phones could be carried in your pocket. An Iridium handset was a brick. It was HUGE. Flaw here is that they did not factor in current / future accepted form factors. A blatant missing requirement. AKA a technical flaw.
2. They don't work indoors. Yep you heard me right the system does not work in doors. Again someone didn't bother with that requirement. A fairly major one as it turns out.
3. Very poor ope
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As well as not working indoors, not working well in cities, and having a huge handset (mostly because of the huge antenna), there is also the issue that the satellites need to have a very low and hence unstable orbit. Hence, they burn up on a regular basis, and need to be replaced regularly. This is enormously expensive.
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There was no technical flaw in Iridium. It was stated what it would do. It did it. Someone screwed up the business plan, but there was no technical mistake. They knew it took 77 satellites for what they wanted. And they launched them all and they worked flawlessly. Now, if only they had sales to match the business plan, they'd be billionaires. But again, unrelated to any technical issue.
They launched 66 satellites, not 77 (which was the original plan), as they came up with a cheaper orbital configuration. The cool-sounding name "Iridium" was taken from element 77, since the 77 satellites reminded people of its 77 electrons. When they reconfigured the constellation to 66 I was disappointed that they did not rename it "Dysprosium".
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Actually, the first cellular mobile phones were as big as a brick as well; I wouldn't say that this was a "technical error", again, it's a failure of marketing to recognize that they wouldn't sell.
And even the phone wasn't the biggest problem; the problem was the huge cost to make a phonecall... it was simply prohibitive. Had it been reasonably cheap, I'm sure there woulb've been plenty of uses (if only for enabling people in isolate places, adventurers, ship & oil platform crew etc. to communicate).
Re:Iridium? (Score:5, Interesting)
The really early cell phones were the size of briefcases, so heavy that you needed a separate handset part -- I guess calling them "mobile" would be a bit too much. See the (Nokia) Mobira Talkman 450 [about-nokia.com] in all its beauty...
I remember my dad buying one and us being pretty damn impressed when it actually worked at the summer cottage in the middle of the forest. We had to lug the damn thing to the roof to get a signal, but it did work.
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But they were mobile.
By the definition, mobile is something with one carry handle, semi-mobile has got two handles.
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Chubby Rain.
Re:Iridium? (Score:4, Funny)
Had it been reasonably cheap, I'm sure there woulb've been plenty of uses (if only for enabling people in isolate places, adventurers, ship & oil platform crew etc. to communicate).
Most adventurers I know buy one sword once, and then get all of their equipment updates from loot and drops. I guess the people in isolate places would have to buy double to replace the phones adventurers took, though, so maybe it balances out.
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Though, given the same size, Iridium phone is destined to be worse than typical terrestrial cellular one; if the latter has the range (which in large part of the developed word, the area of the world that spends the most, is a given...I don't remember ever noticing "loss of range" in my 6 years of using mobile phones, except in a pretty serious "cellar", one of a castle)
With comparable size of the phone & battery, the satellite one will have very notably shorter talk time. And works only outside buildin
Therac-25 (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget the Therac-25 [wikipedia.org]
Poor software design and development led to radiation overdoses for 6 patients being treated for cancer, with 3 dying as a direct result.
Sadly, mistakes still keep on happening [bbc.co.uk].
Patriot Missile (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I would immediately classify any error that caused deaths to be more important.
Another interesting case was the Patriot Missile failure [umn.edu]. The system clock counted in 1/10th second increments. However, it added 0.1 to a floating point number. Unfortunately, 0.1 in binary is a repeating number, similar to 1/3rd in binary being 0.333333333...
So, ten times every second the time drifted just the tiniest bit. The missile that missed had been running for days, so its clock was one third of a second off, and a Scud travels a long way during that time.
Let that be a lesson to all of you: use an integer counter, and divide by 10 to get the time in seconds.
The article is right about FDIV (Score:2)
Re:The article is right about FDIV (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem Intel had with the FDIV bug was one of PR. The Pentium range was the first CPU family to be directly marketed to the general public in a big way.
While anyone with knowledge of the chip design and production processes understood that such bugs are not particularly uncommon (many much simpler chips have well documented errata and workarounds for unintentional behaviour, like the 286's "gate A20" bug that actually turned out to be useful) the general public and the popular press had no such understanding so were very surprised - they assumed that all CPUs were (or should be) completely 100% perfect and therefore taking issue with what they saw as being sold defective goods.
Before the first generation Pentium FDIV issue, such relatively minor problems were dealt with by the error, including any extra side-effects and possible workarounds, being documented, those errata being sent to the chip makers customers and relevant software developers, and things would get patched up without the general public ever being aware there was an issue in the first place aside perhaps from a small number of users who by shear chance were noticeably affected by the one-in-a-few-billion problem before their software was patched (those people would be given replacement chips and/or other recompense). A costly replacement program simply wouldn't have been needed in this case.
Re:The article is right about FDIV (Score:4, Insightful)
Though wasn't the issue in case of Pentium FDIV bug specifically that Intel didn't publish the errata or...any other information after Intel researchers discovered the error? It took one independent one, to whom Intel didn't even respond initially...
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Though wasn't the issue in case of Pentium FDIV bug specifically that Intel didn't publish the errata or...any other information after Intel researchers discovered the error? It took one independent one, to whom Intel didn't even respond initially...
I could be remembering wrongly, as much time has passed and I'm not in a position to spend time double checking right now, but I have the impression that the delay in acknowledging the problem was mainly due to being very slow to verify and analyse it and not wanting to acknowledge it until the analysis was complete. While failing to acknowledge the issue in a timely manner was bad, it was more due to slowness/stupidity than actively trying to cover it up. That is part of it being a PR issue as much as anyt
Re:The article is right about FDIV (Score:5, Informative)
One-in-a-few-billion problem ?
At that time, I was programming a network game about trucks, and when when replaying a demo on the network, the players desynchronized after a few minutes.
I spent a lot of time looking into the logs, and discovered that there was a floating point error that desynchronized the trucks.
I still believe that the FDIV bug was much more frequent than publicized, and it had more impact than what Intel originally described.
Intel released a software patch to Watcom C++ library, but the patch was terrible, with the FDIV replaced with a lot of instructions just to detect the cases where the bug might appear, and use shiftings instead of FDIV.
I think that the bug was much publicized because it was the beginning of Internet, where a lot of new information went unfiltered, and Intel completely missed their communication on this bug discovered by Thomas Nicely.
Here is the whole story behind this bug:
http://www.trnicely.net/pentbug/pentbug.html [trnicely.net]
they forgot the black marker (Score:5, Interesting)
They forgot the cd protection cracked with a black marker...
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/1069/black_marker_cracks_cd_protection/ [zeropaid.com]
Pound has dimensions [M][L]/[T]2 and [M] ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Human History has more than 10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
When I saw the title, I immediately imagined the Maginot line [wikipedia.org]. Thousands more examples could come to mind.
Could somebody please explain to the author of the articles that Technology is more than computers/gadjets and older than 10 years? It is an epic history that goes along with mankind.
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope - the Maginot Line did *exactly* what it said on the tin: persuaded the Germans to avoid a frontal assault on France & invade Belgium instead.
The problem was that the strategy didn't think through the next move, which is that the Germans would continue into France via Belgium.
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Who could have guessed that the $enemy would pass through impassable terrain and precisely hit the single weak point
Someday maybe we’ll stop falling for that one.
Just kidding.
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Who could have guessed that the Germans would pass through impassable terrain and precisely hit the single weak point between the strong Maginot Line and the first-string armies in Belgium?
The Germans, it seems, had no trouble guessing it at all.
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The Germans would never risk invading Belgum! They need to preserve there supply of those delicious waffles!
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Human History has more than 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
So how do you protect against a missile?
Anti-missile systems, of course. We have those, and we're working on better ones.
But what you fail to realize is that carriers are for a lot more than just planes landing and taking off from the water. Carriers are the modern US military's pack mules: if something is going from A to B and not by C130 or similarly large aircraft, it's going by ship. If it's going by ship, that probably means it's on a carrier.
Food, water, ammunition, gear, and various other supplies travel on carriers. The things have weeks if not months of supplies for their fleet in reserve, as well as excess for things like emergencies (see: hurricane/tsunami relief). They are self-contained international emergency response units and, aside from wielding immense military power, are the biggest thing keeping the teeth in the US military's international and sea presence.
A city can be destroyed by a missile that costs less than what a single city skyscraper would cost, but that doesn't (necessarily) make cities an antiquation.
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IBM PS/2 (Score:3, Interesting)
I had some of those growing up and it wasn't really an engineering failure, it was a mentality failure. IBM didn't built PCs, they built tanks. Their keyboards are infamous and still equally usable today 20 years later as when they were new.
That was equally much the case with the rest of their PCs, using very high quality equipment operated under very less than ideal random home/office conditions and with very much consumer software of consumer quality, not server quality. In short, it made no sense.
The result was that IBM priced themselves way out of the market of cheaper clones. It was cheaper and better to buy a clone, throw it out if it failed and buy another. You just don't do that with big iron or servers, but with desktops hell yeah.
Like the article said, it wasn't more of a failure than that PS/2 ports become the dominating keyboard/mouse connector. If there was every a silly move by IBM there it was giving away the software market to Microsoft, but the average desktop market was doomed long before the PS/2.
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Have to disagree to a point. The PS/2 range sold big time in the business/corporate and education worlds (at least in the UK until RM/Viglen got their toe in the door). Built like tanks, yes - but they were very reliable in my experience.
The biggest failing within the PS/2 world was the licencing arrangements for the MCA (microchannel architecture) bus which made it expensive for other manufacturers to use and so few did. MCA was technically great, but the way IBM brought it to market ended up with is getti
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In other words, they're famous. I'm typing this on an IBM 1391411 (Swedish version of the PS/2 1391401) - best keyboard I've ever had. I got it about 3 years ago after many many "modern" keyboards of different kinds and I'll never go back to some low-profile, "high tech" (=useless mediakeys) keyboard.
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VGA still is one of the most persistent standards of desktop computing. Many popular (read: cheap) LCDs still use it exclusivelly; however little sense, when it comes to price of manufacture (but not when it comes to artificial product segmentation) this has. Plus you can almost count on VGA in laptops; other connectors - hit & miss.
Capacitor Plague? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, no Capacitor Plague? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague [wikipedia.org]
Hubble telescope, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of all time?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, we have got to stop with the hyperbole before our children don't know the difference between a War on Drugs and a War in Iraq.
We we say of all time, I think of things like lead plumbing in Rome, or the suspension bridge that got tore apart by a mere breeze.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History [wikipedia.org]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3932185696812733207# [google.com]
Re:Of all time?!? (Score:4, Informative)
That's the Tacoma Narrows bridge [wikipedia.org]. And it wasn't a mere breeze, it was a 40 mph wind, i.e. a gale on the Beaufort scale [wikipedia.org].
Apart from that, I agree.
Re:Of all time?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
People always like to attach more value to events in their times than is due...
Re:Of all time?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those weren't mistakes per se. Rome's lead problem was due to a lack of knowledge about the effects of lead. You can't blame people who don't consider information that is not known to mankind at the time.
Galloping Gertie was an unfortunate situation, but since there were no tools to do dynamic modeling at the time, it wasn't quite a mistake.
Therac-25 was a mistake. The dangers were known, the problem was well defined. All the information was there to make the right choices and we knew how to make appropriately safe software at the time.
I'm lost (Score:4, Interesting)
Digital watches. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's that, and there's also the whole "the world is flat" and "disease is caused by imbalances in the four humours of the body" ideas. The article's examples seem pretty trivial in comparison.
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I have a great digital watch. The band is integral with the body of the watch so I can wear it in bed and it won't catch on anything. It has up and down timers, world clock and multiple alarms. It cost 30 bucks on line.
I wear it when travelling. I use the stopwatch to time my medication and the world clock to schedule calls home. It does things which no mechanical watch can do.
Re:Digital watches. (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes they did, just not so long as is commonly assumed. Babylon, Ancient Egypt, Ancient (really ancient) Greece, India, China even untill quite modern times [wikipedia.org]; large part of some of the greatest civilisations (and who knows how large part of people who formed tribal-type societies) thought the Earth is flat.
OMG Internet BBS (Score:5, Interesting)
The virus is thought to have been developed in 1986 by two brothers in Pakistan named Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who were looking to protect some medical software they had written from disc copying. They had found some suitable code on an internet bulletin board site and adapted it so that if someone used the software then the malware would be installed.
I'm guessing "Iain Thomson" is not a day over 25, not very versed on the history of the Internet, and too busy to look up the meaning of "BBS". Am I right?
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I can mow it while I'm standing here, if you like.
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I think your sig isn't quite true for that one - the title of your post sounds sarcastic, and the content surely was derisive.
Of course, mine's wrong too - I actually wanna be treated like a cat: food, sunbeams, naps and belly-rubs on demand.
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Ob (Score:5, Funny)
When I tried to work it out it came out as $449.9999867' million.
Re:Ob (Score:5, Funny)
endianness and types (Score:2)
We still live in a world of CPUs that are either little endian or big endian: affects binary compatibility and performance (from having to swizzle).
We still live with the primitive C/C++ type system with code like this in just about any SDK:
#ifndef _BOOL // TRUE_AND_FALSE_DEFINED // true and false
typedef unsigned char bool;
#if !defined(true) && !defined(false)
#ifndef TRUE_AND_FALSE_DEFINED
#define TRUE_AND_FALSE_DEFINED
enum {false,true};
#endif
#endif
#endif // _BOOL
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
HP-35 (Score:3, Informative)
HP-35 calculator 2.02 log/antilog problem.
Not big in a disaster sense but noteworthy.
Electrons... (Score:2)
...have negative charge. To be fair to Franklin though, it was a 50/50 chance.
The article has the metric mix-up mixed up (Score:3, Insightful)
FTFA:
It turned out that while most of the programming and mission planning had been done in units of measurement from the Imperial system used in the US, the software to control the orbiter's thrusters had been written with units of measurement from the metric system.
And that is WRONG! It was the software that had the archaic units, and the rest of the spaceship was built with international units.
The software was working in pounds force, while the spacecraft expected figures in newtons; [wikipedia.org] 1 pound force equals approximately 4.45 newtons.
The software had been adapted from use on the earlier Mars Climate Orbiter, and was not adequately tested before launch.
I did not read the rest of that article, since they're not fact-checking their mocking of people's inability to double-check things.
Unix (Score:2, Informative)
The biggest failure to date which didn't get mentioned is Unix. If we had Multics, with it's B2 security rating, we might have actually had secure operating systems in the hands of the public at this point in time. We wouldn't be dealing with spam, or virii.
But no..... it was soooooo complicated.... K&R had to stick us with a piece of insecure crap... and everyone else was stupid enough to copy it.
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Bob. :)
Let's not forget Apple's "Lisa". I know the Apple III was in the list but the Lisa cost more to develop and probably sold less units. I know a lot of the Mac UI came from Lisa underpinnings but the "Epic Fail" tag is deserved.
Disclaimer: Apple user for 20 years.
Re:Microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of technical flaws and Lisa... You could plop the boot drive into the Dumpster, and it would format it. The tech savvy devs who designed the "drag-to-trash = format" function never imagined that users would be stupid enough to do something like that! Little did they know about how giving someone a mouse transforms them from someone who can use a line based editor to set up printer drivers and networking into the horror that is a modern user.
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Come on Node 3, refute this guy's anti-apple rhetoric!
The quirkiness of the 8086 affected all of us. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just before the time of the introduction of the 8086 I knew a chief of technology of a high-tech company who was waiting for the 8086 as though it were a combination of Christmas, his birthday, and the birth of his child. He would start every conversation by telling everyone Intel's release date for the 8086.
The day of its release, he was miserably unhappy. Intel chose to continue an architecture that made assembly language programming and debugging of high-level languages more difficult.
Wikipedia says about the 8086 [wikipedia.org]: "Marketed as source compatible, the 8086 was designed so that assembly language for the 8008, 8080, or 8085 could be automatically converted into equivalent (sub-optimal) 8086 source code, with little or no hand-editing. The programming model and instruction set was (loosely) based on the 8080 in order to make this possible. However, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085."
The problem was that the quirkiness has been extended to the 32-bit processors of today. The Wikipedia article says, "The legacy of the 8086 is enduring in the basic instruction set of today's personal computers and servers..."
And, "Programming over 64 KB boundaries involved adjusting segment registers
Everyone on the planet who used or were affected by computers then suffered because the debugging was much more complicated than if Intel had chosen to make the operation of the 8086 simpler.
"Such relatively simple and low-power 8086-compatible processors in CMOS are still used in embedded systems."
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Re:The quirkiness of the 8086 affected all of us. (Score:4, Funny)
Hell yeah. The 8086 and the MSDOS legacy made more 680x0 fanboys that Motorola marketing ever could have.
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Well, that and the 68000 just being a really good chip in its own right. Motorola were smart enough to stick to flat memory architectures, and it had a really nice, obvious instruction set, and was powerful to boot.
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One lesson though: Always use metric in science stuff. Understood NASA?
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The MCO [wikipedia.org] Investigation Board report [nasa.gov] is a quick read and an interesting case study.
Re:There is no way NASA mixed the measurement syst (Score:2)
You've got this right on a number of levels. Most obviously because the probe was a JPL project, not NASA. Despite their close ties, they are separate entities.
Secondly, it was not a JPL mistake either. JPL is a pure metric shop. This pervades everything they do; if you walk in the front door and ask the receptionist where the toilet is, he'll tell you that it is "Thirty meters down the hall and to your left"
So what happened? How was this mistake made? Politics. When the mission was funded, some congre
Embedded systems (Score:2)
From the article: "The Mars Climate Orbiter, and the Mars Polar Lander it contained, would have advanced our knowledge of the Red Planet immensely...."
Ouch. Mars Climate Orbiter did not "contain" Mars Polar Lander. They were two separate missions.
Saying it was a "simple" mistake is a little simple. The mistake could also be stated as the error of using heritage software in an embedded system, without examining it and testing its validity.
Strider wrote:
When the mission was funded, some congressman saw that it was an opportunity to give some pork to his district and put in some language essentially requiring JPL to hire Rockwell (as I recall, though it might have been Boeing) as the prime contractor.
Neither one; MCO was Lockheed-Martin.
Furthermore, it
Re:There is no way NASA mixed the measurement syst (Score:4, Informative)
To quote Wikipedia:
The metric/imperial mix-up that destroyed the craft was caused by a human error in the software development, back on Earth. The thrusters on the spacecraft, which were intended to control its rate of rotation, were controlled by a computer that underestimated the effect of the thrusters by a factor of 4.45. This is the ratio between a pound force–the standard unit of force in the imperial system–and a newton, the standard unit in the metric system. The software was working in pounds force, while the spacecraft expected figures in newtons; 1 pound force equals approximately 4.45 newtons.
The software had been adapted from use on the earlier Mars Climate Orbiter, and was not adequately tested before launch. The navigation data provided by this software was also not cross-checked while in flight. The Mars Climate Orbiter thus drifted off course during its voyage and entered a much lower orbit than planned, and was destroyed by atmospheric friction.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter [wikipedia.org]
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Close, but the real problem is the electoral college that pretty much ensures that any vote NOT for one of the two major-party candidates is a wasted vote.
We don't technically have a two-party system, we have an election system that is rigged such that only two of the parties count.