Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 14:13:48 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>, FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: someone should be starting an archive of these... Message-ID: <19980724141348.X716@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <35B80E36.D5D5D549@softweyr.com>; from Wes Peters on Thu, Jul 23, 1998 at 10:31:50PM -0600 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> <35B80E36.D5D5D549@softweyr.com>
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(moving to -chat) On Thursday, 23 July 1998 at 22:31:50 -0600, Wes Peters wrote: > 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. ;^) Yes, I like that one. Check out the vinum sources: there's a function in there called throw_rude_remark. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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