Favourite huge software failure

what's your favourite software disaster?

Is it those occasions when the cold war almost turned hot? or aborted space missions? how about the massive blackout by Lake Erie a few years ago?

I want to know of more such disasters, tell me.

i know its horrible to say but one of the funniest glitches has to be helicopters colliding, look it up i've heard of it happen like twice in iraq, mabey once in the gulf war and one with jimmy carters botched rescue. it can't all be pilots error.

In the 60's NASA lost the Mariner 1 Venus probe because of one missing minus sign in one line of computer code.

I'm particularily fond of the one where a simulation of a Soviet attack was being run on one machine. One machine that hadn't been isolated that is.

It took almost 10 minutes to figure out that there wasn't an attack. It should have taken three minutes. Hello nuclear winter (almost).

Windows! :wall:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lazul

Windows! :wall:

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Touche

More of a conversion error then the software itself:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CNN

NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday.

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Mars Imperial to Metric Mishap

I'm just reading about the therac-25, nasty.

http://neptune.netcomp.monash.edu.au...~tgallagh.html

Shouldn't this be in the Frontroom? I hate to bring it up, but a juicy topic like this, that doesn't involve abortion, the death penalty, religion, or any other contentious issue, could liven up the otherwise drab lives of the Frontoom patrons.

Unless, of course, you're afraid this will degenerate into a Linux Versus Windows Holy War sort of thing ...

And my favorite software disaster would have to be the time that the U.S. Navy's Smartship Program, which ran into some problems when attempting to run an Ageis-class warship off Windows NT. Funny stuff! They had to get a tugboat to bring the ship back into harbor. Enough said.

I find the power station outages to be very boring. discuss.

(an attempt to keep this thread going)

I don't like power outages...

We don't have them. Nyah. :balloon2:

I was sitting in the middle of one of the great lakes when the infamous one from 2003 (was it 2002?) happened.

I got back to shore and I was very surprised to say the least. I had a big drive ahead of me and not much gas. No electricity == no gas pumping.

It was an adventure.

Anybody fancy shifting this to the front room as suggested earlier?