[cap-talk] Ariane 5 meme

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

David-Sarah Hopwood wrote:
> Jed Donnelley wrote:
[...]
>> Butler was discussing how there is well understood technology
>> for increasing dependability through redundancy.  He was noting,
>> however, that you need independence of the failure mechanisms
>> which is often difficult to achieve with software.  Since I was
>> just taking notes, here is what Butler said literally about
>> Ariane 5:
>> _____
>> The reason for that <destruction of Ariane 5> was that
>> there was an overflow in the floating point to integer
>> conversion inside a module that was actually not being
>> used for anything.
> 
> As I said, it was fixed point, not floating point [...]

I'm mistaken. It was in fact floating point (surprisingly). Sorry for
the waste of bandwidth.

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood