From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Oct 27 19:28:17 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 86CCF16A4CE for ; Wed, 27 Oct 2004 19:28:17 +0000 (GMT) Received: from s1.ofdeng.com (adsl-66-137-123-97.dsl.hstntx.swbell.net [66.137.123.97]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3592743D1F for ; Wed, 27 Oct 2004 19:28:17 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from kevin_lyons@ofdeng.com) Received: from ofdeng.com ([192.168.254.17]) by s1.ofdeng.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id i9RJTgEo086967 for ; Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:29:43 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from kevin_lyons@ofdeng.com) Message-ID: <417FF6CA.2020802@ofdeng.com> Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:28:10 -0500 From: Kevin Lyons User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: Re: Serious investigations into UNIX and Windows X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 19:28:17 -0000 > I'd read that article before posting. I can find no reference in that > article or elsewhere that says the entire OS crashed. Unless the divide by > zero exception occurred in the kernel, the OS would not crash. > > I say again, this problem was the result of bad third-party software, not > the platform it was running on. Well, we are off on a tangent here, but since you persist, here's some more from the article... "That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units, the memo said." LAN consoles crashed. Presumably the LAN consoles were NT boxes? What else would they be? Would you expect a PLC man-machine interface box to crash due to a divide by zero or even a network congestion. No way. And Citrix wasn't around then. "The program administrators are trained to bypass a bad data field and change the value if such a problem occurs again, Atlantic Fleet officials said. But “the Yorktown’s failure in September 1997 was not as simple as reported,” DiGiorgio said. “If you understand computers, you know that a computer normally is immune to the character of the data it processes,” he wrote in the June U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings Magazine. “Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of instructions. It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed to tolerate such a simple failure.” So given the above statements it is hard believe wholly the 'official' report about a third party app divide by zero crashing the LAN consoles and/or the network. As I said, Microsoft has done a great job of obscuring/confusing the issue.