Didn't Windows 95 do this too?!?
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@cstross I wrote one of those once.
We built some hardware, tested it using a daughter board with a PROM chip on it running some soak test software, and sent it to the customer. Who said:
"We accept that the contract says the board has to pass the soak test for 48 hours, and it does, but we are nonetheless curious to know, if you felt like telling us, why it crashes after 63 hours 22 minutes (or whatever it was)?"
It turned out to be a 32 bit counter overflow in the soak test software. Which we'd never run for more than 48 hours, because according to the contract we didn't have to.
Another one of those I came across was more subtle. There was a cross-language call, and there was a mismatch between the calling sequences expected on either side, such that four bytes more stack was allocated on each call than was freed. After several days this filled the maximum allowed stack size and crashed (always after the same number of days, hours, minutes). Not good in a system supposed to work 24/7 on a production line.
@TimWardCam @cstross Many years ago I had a set top box which would crash regularly in the middle of the night so I used a time switch to restart it at like 04:00. Amusingly I’ve worked on a lot of STBs and Smart TVs since then and they nearly all have a middle of the night “maintenance slot” when they check for updates etc. Restarting bits of the stack is quite common!
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@cstross Such bugs are far older than that.
The place I studied as an undergrad had a PDP-10 for campus-wide time sharing. ca. 1979 official IT staff (not that they were called that) moved most of their effort to getting new VAXes going as replacements. As part of that, they cancelled the weekly downtime to run diagnostics on the PDP-10.
That revealed a long-standing bug in TOP-10: some internal counter (I forget what, can't have been simple uptime in clock ticks on a system with 36-bit words) overflowed after about a month of uptime, causing havoc.
I forget whether DEC supplied a fix, IT staff (or us students helping keep the -10 running) rolled our own, or we just scheduled monthly reboots.
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RE: https://techhub.social/@rayckeith/116370449957346533
Didn't Windows 95 do this too?!?
For fuck's sake, Apple, get your shit together and stop reinventing 30 year old 32 bit Windows bugs!
@cstross
Can we crash macOS by creating a folder called "con" inside another folder called "con" as well?*Windows 95 peels off mask* "And I would have got away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling security researchers!"
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RE: https://techhub.social/@rayckeith/116370449957346533
Didn't Windows 95 do this too?!?
For fuck's sake, Apple, get your shit together and stop reinventing 30 year old 32 bit Windows bugs!
@cstross I've had multiple uptime durations in excess of 90 days on my current Mac mini....
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RE: https://techhub.social/@rayckeith/116370449957346533
Didn't Windows 95 do this too?!?
For fuck's sake, Apple, get your shit together and stop reinventing 30 year old 32 bit Windows bugs!
@cstross Ok, I went and read it and I’m still tentatively gonna call bullshit on that dev.
My primary laptop is currently running at over 4 months of uptime, I have over a dozen client (I’m in IT) machines with 5-9 months of uptime.
My work laptop doesn’t sleep/hibernate as it’s tethered to a screen so that’s a continuous 127 days.
I have an iMac Pro sitting next to me on the floor that’s been running for 245 days straight.
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@cstross Ok, I went and read it and I’m still tentatively gonna call bullshit on that dev.
My primary laptop is currently running at over 4 months of uptime, I have over a dozen client (I’m in IT) machines with 5-9 months of uptime.
My work laptop doesn’t sleep/hibernate as it’s tethered to a screen so that’s a continuous 127 days.
I have an iMac Pro sitting next to me on the floor that’s been running for 245 days straight.
@cstross And before anyone asks*, the client machines are wide spread of OS versions (because I’m kinda behind on bringing everything forward & I don’t quite trust macOS 26 fully yet
)*no one was going to ask.
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@cstross This is definitely not every Mac. We have a number of Macs running as servers with way more uptime than that. Plus I'd definitely have noticed if our FileMaker server that I manage was dying every month and half. Also the media server in my basement has way more uptime than that.
Edit: Seeing reports it may be Tahoe only.
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@JdeBP @oclsc @cstross for more context see Norman's paper here: https://vtda.org/pubs/AUUGN/AUUGN-V04.2.pdf
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@JdeBP @oddhack @cstross From 1984-1990 I worked in the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Group, the folks from whom Unix originally came. At the time we still ran our own Unix; colloquially we called it Research Unix for cultural reasons.
Our cat had no options at all; it just read as much as it could in each go and wrote the same amount, so -u was no longer needed. That's the way cat should be.
That the completely different group responsible for the commercial System V product, in a completely different part of the company in a facility four miles from Murray Hill accepted that abomination was irrelevant to us.
Research Unix wound down not long after I left, though there is no direct connection between those events.
My standards are unreasonably high, yes. We were an arrogant bunch, yes. But philosophically we were right.
The even-greater iconoclasm visible in Plan 9 comes from the same place.
