软件错误导致4.4亿美元损失：史上最贵bug？

纽约（CNNMoney）——当骑士资本集团的软件bug最终发展成为致命缺陷，并导致其损失4.4亿美元之后，这个bug的危害就跟採採蝇一样大（译注：tsetse fly，一种很小但是很危险的昆虫）

In less than an hour, Knight Capital's computers executed a series of automatic orders that were supposed to be spread out over a period of days. Millions of shares changed hands. The resulting loss, which was nearly four times the company's 2011 profit, crippled the firm and brought it to the edge of bankruptcy. Knight (KCG) only survived after a group of investors swooped in with a $400 million lifeline.

骑士资本的计算机在一个小时内就执行完了原本应该在好几天内完成的交易，导致短时间内百万股票易手，最终导致的损失额将近骑士资本2011年利润的四倍，直接将其推向了破产的边缘，所幸投资人紧急注资4亿美元才得以幸免。

Reversing the errant trades cost almost half a billion dollars. Which raises the question: Where does this fall on the all-time list of history's most expensive computer meltdowns?

恢复这些错误的交易耗费了将近5亿美元。这引出了下面的问题：这次灾难在人类计算机崩溃灾难的历史列表上排在什么位置？

There have been a few epic debacles. For instance, in all the excitement of Monday's Mars rover landing, people have largely forgotten the fiascos of previous Mars missions.

过去也有一些巨大的灾难。例如，当人们沉浸在周一火星探测车着陆的兴奋中时，很少有人记起先前火星探测任务的巨大失败。

In 1999, NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter overshot its target when trying to move into orbit around the red planet. It burned up in the atmosphere. The reason: One engineering team working on the spacecraft used metric measurements while another team used Imperial units.

1999年，NASA的火星气象卫星在进入预定轨道时跑过了，冲进了大气层，挂了。原因是（传输数据时）两个工程组一个用英制单位而另一个用公制单位。

Later that year, the Mars Polar Lander crashed due to a malfunction that caused it to shut down its main engines before it had reached the planet surface. Total cost of the two failures: $357 million.

过了几年，火星极地登录者号坠毁，原因是功能缺陷导致其在达到行星地表之间就关闭了主引擎（导致撞毁）。两个加起来一共是3.5亿美元的损失。

Other space agencies have had their own meltdowns. The 1996 maiden flight of the European Space Agency's state-of-the-art Ariane 5 rocket ended in a spectacular explosion over French Guiana. The rocket's inertial guidance system failed to convert a piece of data from a 64-bit format to a 16-bit format. Estimates on the cost of the lost rocket and cargo run to $500 million.

别的宇航中心也出过事。1996年在法国圭亚那，欧洲宇航局最先进的阿丽亚纳五号运载火箭升空后不久自爆，原因是惯性制导系统无法将一个64位的数据转换到16位格式。这次事故烧掉了5亿美元。

Then there was the 2003 blackout in North America, which deprived an estimated 50 million people of power. The blackout was made possible by a bug in General Electric's Unix-based monitoring software that kept operators from learning of a local power outage. The glitch's domino effect cut off power in eight U.S. states and in Ontario, Canada.

类似的事故还有2003年的北美大停电，影响到了大约五千万人。灾难起源于通用电器的一个基于Unix的监控软件错误，使操作人员没有意识到一个地方电站断掉了，电力缺口导致了多米诺骨牌效应，最终导致了加拿大安大略州和美国八个州断电。

"Computers do what they're told," says Lawrence Pingree, an analyst at Gartner. "If they're told to do the wrong thing, they're going to do it and they're going to do it really, really well."

“计算机执行人的命令，”Gartner分析员Lawrence Pingree说。“如果你让它们执行错误的指令，它们也会去做，而且会做得非常非常到位。”

The cost of some IT failures has climbed into the billions. Last year news broke that the U.S. Army's $2.7 billion cloud-computing system for intelligence sharing among troop commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan was all but useless.

一些IT错误导致的损失已经超过十亿。去年新闻爆出美国陆军花了27亿美元，为驻伊拉克和阿富汗美军指挥官分析和分享情报的云计算系统，完全打了水漂。

"Almost any commercial solution out there would be better," one analyst told Politico.

“任何一个商业系统都比这个好，”一个分析师告诉Politico网站。

The single most expensive computer problem of all time may be the Y2K bug. Research firm IDC estimated that U.S. businesses, government agencies and individuals spent nearly $200 billion dealing with the problem.

史上最昂贵的计算机问题应该算是千年虫问题。IDC研究测算出处理千年虫问题给美国商业、政府和个人带来了将近2000亿的开销。

The costs for such huge, systemic issues are hard to pin down. One widely cited study on the 2003 blackout puts its total cost at around $6 billion. Most of that price tag, though, comes from "lost income," a hard-to-measure variable.

像千年虫这样巨大、系统性的问题，很难界定到底带来了多少损失。一个被广泛引用的研究测算2003年大停电的损失是六十亿，但是测算的价格依据都来自于“损失的收入”，一个很难准确衡量的变量。

When computer bugs affect the financial markets -- something that's happening more and more often -- the losses can be tallied precisely.

当计算机bug影响的是金融市场时——这种情况越来越多了——损失就能够被精确的度量了。

Investment firm AXA Rosenberg shelled out $217 million last year to cover investor losses from what it called a "significant error" in the computer code for one of its investment models. It paid an extra $25 million penalty to regulators after it was caught trying to hide the mistake.

AXA Rosenberg投资公司去年砸出去了2.17亿美元来补自己投资模型实现代码的一个“严重bug”导致的投资者损失。由于试图掩盖此错误，又被监管者罚了2500万美元。

Nasdaq is still dealing with the fallout of its glitch-plagued Facebook (FB) IPO. The exchange operator earmarked $62 million for reimbursing investors and says it expects to incur significant costs beyond that for system upgrades and legal battles. Investors say their actual losses are much higher that what Nasdaq plans to cover; Knight Capital, for example, says it lost $35 million.

纳斯达克还在收拾Facebook错误缠身的IPO残局。交易员估计需要6200万美元赔偿投资者，而后续的系统升级和法律诉讼费用将是更大的数字。投资者说他们的损失比纳斯达克打算赔的要多多了，例如一开始提到的骑士资本就说自己损失了3500万美元。

Some glitches have taken down entire markets. Derivatives trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange stopped for 95 minutes on Tuesday morning after a computer glitch was found to be affecting a crucial server. The day before, Spanish exchange Bolsas y Mercados Españoles was halted for five hours because of a glitch.

有些计算机故障挂掉了整个交易系统。东京股票交易所衍生品交易在周二早上中断了95分钟，一个电脑故障影响到了一个中心服务器。在此之前的一天，西班牙 Bolsas y Mercados Españoles交易所由于计算机故障停止交易5个小时。

Stock markets have become increasingly vulnerable to bugs over the last decade thanks to financial firms' growing reliance on high-speed computerized trading. Because the trading is automated, there's nobody to apply the brakes if things go wrong.

由于金融公司越来越依赖于高速计算机进行交易，现在的股票市场变得越来越容易收到计算机bug的影响。由于交易是自动的，即使出错了也没人发现。

"The growing complexity is a huge contributor," says Pingree, a former currency trader. "You really can't have proper risk management until you have visibility."

“系统的复杂性是一个很大的原因，”前现金交易员Pingree说，“除非你看到了（错误发生），否则你根本无法进行风险管理。”

He's not optimistic that things will get better unless government regulators step in to slow down most trading activity. Financial firms and stock exchanges test new software, but in trading, "the risk universe could change so dramatically within minutes that it's not humanly possible" to plan for every eventuality, he says.

他对于政府监管机构出面降低交易速度是唯一出路的看法持悲观态度。金融公司和股票交易所会对新软件进行测试，但是在交易中，分秒之间事情就可能发生灾难性的变化，对所有可能的风险的管理“超出了人类的极限”。

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