Famous Programming Mistakes
as the title suggests i am looking for and infomation on programming mistakes on company sites or programs that ended in a nasty court case and possibly all over th news. im thinking potentially it would be because of a breach of data protection of a customer but it doesnt matter too much.
can anyone help me?
Benji
Y2K was well known, it was a huge problem that was bigger than most people believed. Fortunately the majority of problems were fixed long before the actual tick-through because virtually any machine out there will have post-dated transactions: in other words, people schedule things in advance, which also would not work past 2000 on a non-Y2K-compliant device. Some companies had the problem fixed five years in advance because their ordering systems projected that far in advance. This forced us to fix problems much earlier than 1999.
Hershey Foods paid a heavy price for trying to let inexperienced in-house developers modify their brand-new SAP installation back in 1999. (This was not with IBM, by the way, I know about this because I have family that works for Hershey). As a result they has truckloads of candy waiting to be shipped to stores for Halloween, and a bunch of computers saying they were out of stock. The result was a disaster. Some stores claimed breach of contract and moved M&M Mars and other candies into shelf space normally allotted for Hershey candy and the biggest candy-selling season of the year was wasted, along with a mountain of unsold stock. [URL=http://www.cio.com/archive/111502/tl_hershey.html]Story here[/URL].
Similar to Y2K is the roll-through of Unix time, which will happen in 2038. Unix time is stored as a single number - the count of seconds since midnight between December 31, 1969 and January 1, 1970. This count is currently a 32-bit number, which can count from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. If you add up that many seconds, it's a bit longer than 68 years. At 3:14:08 GMT on January 19, 2038, the number will roll through to a negative value, setting the date back into December of 1901. Fortunately, this problem will be easier to fix than Y2K because instead of representing a number in text, it's already in binary format. This means you just have to modify the type from 32 to 64 bits, and you've got a length of time that supercedes everything that has happened since the big bang. [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time]More here[/URL].
thats some good picking right there, thanks guys 
it's maybe not a kind of programming mistake but it's a good story anyway.
it's about Atari's ET vieo game. it was made in a hurry to be ready soon after movie premiere. but you can't make a good game in 3 months. Soon after game was published lot of clients wanted their money back. Aari decide to get rid of this crap by burring it somewere on Nevada desert.
after that Atari went to big financial problems and soon stop exsisting.
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