Sunday, June 7, 2009

Recipe for cheap smug satisfaction (for linux).

1: read this article about a bug. Holy cow.
"At the international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were—they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers – they tried to reset their systems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad."

"It was a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes."
Its a wonder our world too isn't gone in nuclear war over a leap second or something, given such practices.

2: If you use 32 bit Linux, set time to 2038-01-19 03:14:00 UTC and wait 7 seconds (overflow). Alternatively, set whatever date windows overflows on. Guaranteed to glitch your pc a lot. Media player will skip, browser might lose cache, something might crash. I tried that back when I used 32-bit system, there was no major failure.
3: Enjoy your smug satisfaction that your pc doesn't fully phail when few lines out of million have a glitch, due to the clever ancient engineering practice known as memory protection.

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