******** Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2001 12:14:28 +0100 From: David Cantrell <davidat_private> To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> Subject: Re: FC: Unix has turned one billion! (seconds, that is) You may be surprised to learn that contrary to popular belief, there *is* a chance that some things will have gone wrong when we went from 999,999,999 to 1,000,000,000. If you sort those numbers in ASCII order as opposed to numeric order, then 1,000,000,000 comes first. Programs written in languages which don't rigourously enforce the difference between numbers and strings, such as many scripting languages and programming languages like perl may therefore sort dates wrongly if the programmer is insufficiently careful. This will lead to all sorts of fun and games if - for instance - such a script is being used to delete the ten oldest files in a directory, as it'll suddenly start deleting the ten newest. It's unlikely, however, that such scripts are doing anything of earth- shattering importance. Most of these errors will, I imagine, do nothing more than embarrass people when their websites start sorting things incorrectly. But there have been a few commercial products found to have this bug. One of the tools making up an old version of the Veritas backup software, for example. In that case, it was written in Java (a strongly typed language so the programmer must have been monumentally stupid to compare numbers ACSII-betically) and was only a tool for looking at backup sets and wouldn't affect the integrity of backups. No doubt you would expect that any organisation sensible enough to be using backup software would also be sensible enough to keep it patched up-to-date. But I doubt it. There *will* be a few failures due to this bug in commercial software, but considering how rare the bug is in the first place and that manufacturers have mainly caught it and patched it, then the risk is very very minor indeed. -- David Cantrell | davidat_private | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation. -- Johnny Hart ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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