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Re:Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days (2020) by renw0rp on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @10:37AM (#27118603)
Reminds me of patriot missiles:

> The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters.

> The radar system had successfully detected the Scud and predicted where to look for it next. However, the timestamps of the two radar pulses being compared were converted to floating point differently: one correctly, the other introducing an error proportionate to the operation time so far (100 hours) caused by the truncation in a 24-bit fixed-point register. As a result, the difference between the pulses was wrong, so the system looked in the wrong part of the sky and found no target. With no target, the initial detection was assumed to be a spurious track and the missile was removed from the system. No interception was attempted, and the Scud impacted on a makeshift barracks in an Al Khobar warehouse, killing 28 soldiers, the first Americans to be killed from the Scuds that Iraq had launched against Saudi Arabia and Israel.

So such things happen also in military (although this was early nineties)

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot

Re:Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days (2020) by 35fbe7d3d5b9 on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @11:05AM (#27118939)
Which then reminds me of a classic:

> I was once working with a customer who was producing on-board software for a missile. In my analysis of the code, I pointed out that they had a number of problems with storage leaks. Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said "Of course it leaks". He went on to point out that they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number. They added this much additional memory to the hardware to "support" the leaks. Since the missile will explode when it hits it's target or at the end of it's flight, the ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention.

https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ad...

Re:Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days (2020) by mousepilot on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @10:34PM (#27125982)
that post contains a pretty serious error, the sig should start with two dashes and a space.
Re:Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days (2020) by bellyfullofbac on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @10:50AM (#27118749)
Ouch, imagine dying because of a rounding off error...

More detail in 1 link from the article: https://web.archive.org/web/20100702180720/http://mate.uprh....

Re:Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days (2020) by interestica on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @05:45PM (#27123950)
Kind of related. I always found it interesting that the Terminator's heads up display noted no casualties as "0.0" -- and I always wondered how a computer/killing-machine from the future might calculate casualties.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oolP65DLQLY

Re:Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days (2020) by heavenlyblue on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @04:06PM (#27122844)
Taking a contrarian point of view: people die for far simpler reasons.