This is what happens when you use Windows NT to run a battleship!

8 posts / 0 new

Topic locked

Thu, 2006-06-15 08:01

The US Navy once used Microsoft Windows NT to run a battleship, no, really, it's completely true, they did!
Anyway, as you can imagine it was an absolute disaster! I've written a funny story about it, and uploaded it. It'll be in abctales recently uploaded section in a minute! This is a funny story!

Hilarious Tale of Woeful, Warlike Computing
Who Deleted My Battleship? Was it you?
Footnote:
In September of 1997, the USS Yorktown died in the water when its network of NT
machines experienced a cascading failure due to a divide by zero. The Navy's Smart
Ship program was meant to reduce the number of people needed to operate a ship.

pat

Thu, 2006-06-15 08:02

patmac

My webpage is at: http://www.bookscape.co.uk

My latest killing is:
http://www.bookscape.co.uk/short_stories/human_sacrifice.php

Thu, 2006-06-15 13:46

maddan

Dirty as it makes me feel to rush to the defence of microsoft, but an unhandled exception will cause any process to crash on any OS. Plus, are you sure about the true story?

Thu, 2006-06-15 13:58

patmac

Yup! I'm sure! (True story) http://www.gcn.com/print/17_23/33541-1.html Exception handling! - Better programming is needed, isn't it! If your programmers don't provide enough error handling routines in their code, you can't go blaming the poor old sailors on the USS Yorktown when their battleship fails in the middle of an exercise! My webpage is at: http://www.bookscape.co.uk

My latest killing is:
http://www.bookscape.co.uk/short_stories/human_sacrifice.php

Thu, 2006-06-15 14:28

maddan

Well I certainly wouldn't blame the sailors. I stand corrected on the true story aspect. Interesting article (though I'd like to know how a dive by zero caused a buffer overflow - sounds like shoddy journalism to me). In the fact there are three obvious weakensses, it didn't validate the data entry, it didn't handle the exception, and wasn't robust enough to cope with a process going down. Amused to see it was provided my Intergraph. I used to work with some ex-intergraph people, they produced some damn shoddy code. Still, not a M$ bug though.

Thu, 2006-06-15 17:00

patmac

Wondering if we should go offline with the techie-talk? Most people on the board probably don't know (or care) what we're talking about! If you want to mail me that's ok. pat My webpage is at: http://www.bookscape.co.uk

My latest killing is:
http://www.bookscape.co.uk/short_stories/human_sacrifice.php

Fri, 2006-06-16 01:14

maddan

Nah, they deserve it.

Tue, 2006-06-20 15:28

patmac

OK, here are some more! These computing stories are completely mad! http://www.bookscape.co.uk/articles/hardwired.php My webpage is at: http://www.bookscape.co.uk

My latest killing is:
http://www.bookscape.co.uk/short_stories/human_sacrifice.php

Topic locked