Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:28:10 -0500 From: Kevin Lyons <kevin_lyons@ofdeng.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Serious investigations into UNIX and Windows Message-ID: <417FF6CA.2020802@ofdeng.com>
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> 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.
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