2008 ends with a flurry of tech blunders
Sidin Vadukut -
Thursday, January 01, 2009 1:33 PM
Remember the ominous final days of 1999 when we all celebrated the passing of the year with the certain knowledge that at the stroke of midnight the Y2K bug would kick in and planes would fall from the sky, bank accounts would be wiped out and, thank god, our academic records would be purged from the databases of the CBSE forever? And then nothing happened at all?
Well perhaps computers were waiting for the end of 2008 to act up instead. There have been a flurry of computer misdemeanours these past few days reassuring us once again that while artificial intelligence may still be a generation away, artificial nincompoopery is well within human grasp.
Tech Nincompoopery No.1 from the AFP:
A man was left reeling in shock Tuesday when his bank statement showed him to be 100 billion pounds (144 billion dollars, 102 billion euros) overdrawn.
As if the credit crunch was not hitting Britons hard enough, Donald Moffat was temporarily in deep, deep, deep financial trouble -- due to a "technical error".
The 38-year-old, from Irvine on Scotland's east coast, said his wife noticed the somewhat "major discrepancy of two 50-billion-pound debits" after he logged on to his account online.
"When I saw it... I've been shaking, I've been feeling sick -- everything," the stunned student and part-time care worker told the BBC.
Tech Nincompoopery No.2 from Reuters:
A computer glitch at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China gave gold traders a 23-minute bonanza that cost the bank dearly last week, sparking a debate on Monday as the bank reclaimed the windfall.
ICBC, the world's biggest bank by market value, was left red-faced after its trading system went awry in the early hours of Friday, quoting a bid price for gold of 848 yuan per gram, nearly six times the going rate it had offered moment earlier.
Alert traders using the bank's online trading platform pounced on the bank's misfiring system and raked in easy profits, according to local media reports.
One lady in the western city of Xian made a tidy 126,540 yuan in a single minute, the Beijing Times said, estimating that the bank's total losses ran to 10 million yuan ($1.46 million).
And our winner for the most outstanding end of the year tech blooper comes from, where else, the hallowed corridors of Microsoft. Again from the AFP:
Thousands of the MP3 music players froze on New Year's Eve around the world due to what Microsoft described as a bug in the device's internal clock.
The bug only affected the original, 30-gigabyte version of the music player that was introduced by the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft in 2006 as its answer to Apple's wildly popular iPod.
Later devices with 80GB and 120GB of memory were not affected.
Microsoft was alerted to the problem when Zune forums and discussion boards lit up overnight with complaints from Zune owners around the world that their devices players had stopped working.
Many of the messages were signed "Victim of the December 31st 2008 Zune 30 Meltdown!" and the mass Zune stoppage gave rise to puns such as "Zunesday" and "Z2K," a reference to the millennium Y2K bug.
Seriously... you can't make this stuff up.
From all of us here at the PlayThings blog have a fantastic 2009 full of shiny new touch-screen enabled products, internet goodness, electronic ecstacy and digital delight.
HUG!