From owner-freebsd-advocacy Thu Jul 23 21:33:03 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id VAA10851 for freebsd-advocacy-outgoing; Thu, 23 Jul 1998 21:33:03 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from obie.softweyr.com ([204.68.178.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id VAA10756 for ; Thu, 23 Jul 1998 21:32:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from softweyr.com (zaphod.softweyr.com [204.68.178.35]) by obie.softweyr.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA05192; Thu, 23 Jul 1998 22:31:50 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Message-ID: <35B80E36.D5D5D549@softweyr.com> Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 22:31:50 -0600 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr llc X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.6-RELEASE i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Greg Lehey CC: Brian Behlendorf , advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: someone should be starting an archive of these... 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> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message