How Software Fails: A Field Guide to Understanding Complex System Disasters
Why Systems Break in Ways Their Creators Never Imagined.
Software failures aren’t accidents, they’re inevitabilities. In a universe governed by probability rather than certainty, even cosmic rays from distant stars can flip bits in computer memory, causing election machines to miscount votes or video game characters to jump impossibly high. But cosmic interference is just the beginning of how our most critical systems fail in spectacular and unpredictable ways.
Through gripping real-world case studies, this field guide reveals the hidden laws governing complex system disasters. Discover how Knight Capital lost $460 million in 45 minutes due to a single misplaced software flag. Learn why the Therac-25 radiation machine killed patients despite passing every safety test.Understand how a 40-kilobyte configuration file crashed 8.5 million computers worldwide, grounding flights and shuttering hospitals across the globe.
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