Ariane 5 and the Denver luggage handling system
What do these monster cock-ups have to do with you? Hopefully, absolutely nothing, because they’re all examples of major software system failures which resulted in major loss of kit (a space rocket) or hard cash ($200m in project overrun). But in your organisation, how sure are you of the resilience, protection and ‘proper …
Well my favorite blunder is the Mar Climate orbiter where on set of instructions programed were in English and the other in Metric causing the loss of the spacecraft. With the money quote "People sometimes make errors," said Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science, there in no patch for stupid.
"This report traces the history of some major software projects and identifies the flaws that led to their failure. Could things have been done differently...?"
http://www.scism.lsbu.ac.uk/inmandw//past/9697/projects/prj127.html
True. I really wonder why any scientist worth its salt would use anything other than the metric system, though...
I did a quick search and found this which I used to colour the above article..some good stuff in here: http://infotech.fanshawec.ca/gsantor/Computing/FamousBugs.htm
