10. Hubble Space Telescope
A 2.5 Billion dollar device, which finally goes to space, sends back some pictures and which shockingly enough, are all blurry. The problem was with the telescope’s calibration instruments, as later it was found out. The problem was fixed using corrective lenses three years later.
9. Dell laptop explosions
At a conference in Japan, Dell’s laptop suddenly burst into flames. There were multiple explosions and the fireworks continued for a good 5 minutes or so. It turned out that batteries were the ones that exploded and eventually Dell announced recall of 22 thousand of their notebook batteries. Fortunately, there were no casualties.
8. Nokia N-gage
Being a gaming platform and a cell phone at the same time was good, but its weird when-calling pose was not so cool. Secondly, there were just a handful of decent games for it and it was a total disaster. You can still buy one of these though.
7. Asimo – The Humanoid Robot’s Embarrassing Fail
This robot by Honda failed embarrassingly in front of a packed auditorium in 2006. As a demo, Asimo moved towards the stairs, took few steps up and then suddenly freezes as if it would turn around and start singing. But, it didn’t sing, it teetered backwards and fell over horribly. The Honda presenters quickly turned off the lights and took the robot away.
6. Cloud Computing Disaster
In October of 2009, Microsoft servers holding data for thousands of T-Mobile SideKick users crashed without a warning. And, there was no back-up either. Many Law-suits were filed over data loss, with users alleging that company failed to protect the data entrusted to them. While Microsoft eventually recovered most of the lost data, this collapse severely hurt the future of cloud computing.
5. Pepsi’s Computer Glitch
Pepsi ran it’s “Number fever” promotion back in 1992 in Philippines, a number was announced at the end of each day and whomever’s number matched this would be awarded 1 million Philippine currency. Unfortunately, the number 349 produced thousands of winners and all of them reached Pepsi’s bottling plant to collect their prize money. Pepsi could never pay such money to thousands, so the situation turned ugly; the Pepsi plant was bombed and more than 30 trucks were burned down. The famous “Pepsi 349” case is still hanging in the balance. One woman and child were killed when a grenade was tossed at a Pepsi truck during these horrible riots.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.