Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 22:31:50 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: someone should be starting an archive of these... Message-ID: <35B80E36.D5D5D549@softweyr.com> References: <19980722212025.20301.qmail@hyperreal.org> <19980722212025.20301.qmail@hyperreal.org> <19980724093021.J716@freebie.lemis.com> <19980724003043.22764.qmail@hyperreal.org> <19980724101026.K716@freebie.lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey wrote:
>
> > - yet a whole ship was more or less incapacitated (it had to be
> > *towed* to port!)
>
> Claims were made to that effect. I personally think that a problem of
> that magnitude would have become known earlier.
Hah! Little do you know! I used to work as a test engineer and
programmer for defense contractors. We had one night in a test
lab when a fellow test engineer, Sue Duhring, was idly tapping the
enter key on the keyboard for the U.S. Air Force Airborne Launch
Control Center -- the "doomsday bird" that is the backup control
center for the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile wings. The
system crashed. She happened to hit on a rate that caused the system
to read the keyboard buffer slowly due to a pathological problem,
and the keyboard buffer overflowed and overwrote something *very*
important.
We caught this in testing by sheer luck.
> > for days because of this.
> >
> > There shouldn't be *anything* that can be typed into the
> > system that could have such an effect, intentional or not!
>
> Sure, but is that an OS problem? GIGO: write bad software for FreeBSD
> and it'll run badly too.
>
> I think Microsoft's "operating systems" stink. But we've got to
> remember that applications aren't just operating systems, and this one
> just doesn't look like an OS problem.
Exactly right: it looks like a combination "bonehead programmer" and
"inadequate testing" problem, which cannot be attributed to Microsoft,
but rather to the application developers. They need to change their
GIGO to GIDO: Garbage In, Diagnostics Out (or to my favorite variant
of this, GIAO: Garbage In, Abuse Out. ;^)
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr wes@softweyr.com
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