On the one hand, the development of technology has improved people's living standards, but on the other hand, it has hidden great hidden dangers.
For example, in the traditional field, the influence of a small group of people on the company is extremely small, but in the Internet field, sometimes the mistakes of one or two people can push the company to a point of no return.
There are too many such examples. Today, I will give you an inventory of these famous bugs in software history:
The biggest bug - Y2K
In the last century, developers never imagined that their code and products would make it into the new millennium.
Therefore, many developers omit the first two digits "19" representing the year in order to save memory.
And as the calendar drew ever closer to December 31, 1999, fears grew that everyone's computer systems would crash on New Year's Eve of the millennium.
Because the system date will be updated to January 1, 1900 instead of January 1, 2000, this could mean countless catastrophic events, even the end of the world.
The massive Y2K bug ended up doing very little damage, except for:
Parking meters are broken in Spain;
Météo-France published its weather forecast for January 1, 19100;
In Australia, the bus ticket checking system has collapsed.
After passing through this bug, we seem to have reason to believe that we will not encounter the next millennium bug, or the 10,000-year bug?
A base worth of bugs
During the first Gulf War in February 1991, an Iraqi-launched Scud missile accurately hit the U.S. base at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia.
28 American soldiers were killed on the spot and more than 100 people were injured, causing the only loss of more than 100 casualties in the US Gulf War.
A later investigation found that a simple computer glitch disabled the base's anti-missile system and prevented it from intercepting airborne missiles.
At that time, the anti-missile system responsible for defending the base had been working continuously for 100 hours.
Every hour of work, the clock in the system will experience a tiny millisecond delay, which is the root cause of this failure tragedy.
The clock register of the anti-missile system is designed as 24 bits, so the time precision is limited to 24 bits. After working for a long time, this small precision error is gradually enlarged. After working for 100 hours, the system delay is 1/3 second.
For the average person, 0.33 seconds is insignificant. But for a radar system that needs to track and destroy airborne missiles, it's disastrous.
The speed of the bomb is Mach 4.2 (1.5 km/s), and the "tiny" 0.33 seconds is equivalent to an error of about 600 meters.
In the missile example, the radar detected the missile in the air, but the base's anti-missile did not fire because of a clock error that did not accurately track it.
Bugs Worth a Spacecraft
The Mars Climate Orbiter was launched in 1997 to study the Martian climate, but failed to complete the mission, which cost more than $300 million.
After several months in space, Explorer disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere due to a navigation error.
The probe's control team sends navigation instructions in imperial units, while the probe's software system reads them in metric units, an error that could significantly alter the navigation control path.
The spacecraft eventually entered Mars' low-Earth orbit (with an error of up to 100 kilometers), where it disintegrated under the pressure and friction of the Martian atmosphere.
The bug that almost started World War III
The alarm system of the former Soviet government falsely reported that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles.
Fortunately, the Soviet watchman deduced that if the US government really attacked them, there must be more than 5 missiles fired, so he concluded that this was just a false alarm.
The truth after excavation is: a bug in the software of the former Soviet Union gave a wrong alarm message due to the reflection of sunlight on the top of the cloud.
Thank you for the wise deduction ability of the Soviet duty officer, otherwise, when you encounter a "short-hearted person", you will tremble when you think about it.
Pepsi's $42 billion bug
In May 1992, Pepsi launched a promotion in the Philippines.
The company told customers that if they bought a bottle of Pepsi and found the number 349 on the bottom of the cap, they could win 1 million pesos (about $1 million).
Unfortunately, due to a software error, 800,000 bottle caps were wrongly marked as 349, which is equivalent to an overpayment of $42 billion in bonuses.
That led to some people taking PepsiCo to court over the bonus payments, and PepsiCo ended up paying millions of dollars in damages, but also costing the company a lot.
Bugs are things that Internet companies can't avoid, but just like Murphy's law, what should happen will happen naturally. But it is impossible for any Internet company that has not experienced bugs.
To deal with bugs, there must be plans and occasional drills, just like fire drills. It's a good thing if it doesn't happen, but once it happens, it will definitely be a big test.
How to make the Taishan collapse in front of the front without changing color and heartbeat, and quickly formulate a reasonable and effective solution is a standard to measure whether the person in charge of the company is competent.