Staff told me why we crash

[PirateGhostShip]

I'm not surprised at all either. and girlwithspunk, i just wanted to let u know that one of my friends is a highschool musical fan too. u should look up his signature and the pictures on his thing. he is JoeBillyBob. take a look if u want.

 

[VirtuallyMe]

DementedRiku- I love the new avatar- that is too cute on so many levels lol

 

[qruthie]

No, I really do enjoy hearing your side! I never take anything personal!

I feel like we all dc because the computer can't tell who's idle and active. I keep going back to staff games and such but if one person is in line waiting they are technically being idle. Even if there at the computer waiting. It seems like the system confuses idle and active people. And note this is from the standpoint of 17 year old teenager who thinks she knows everything! lol

I'm interested in this hack/fix thing? Could you explain more about it?

I'm glad you understand this is just a discussion. I always worry that I will hurt someone's feelings with my strong opinions.

The hack/fix I had to code was to handle years that were stored as two digits instead of four. In the old days, it was very efficient to store years like 1961 as only 61. It saved a lot of space when disks and memory were expensive. The problem was a lot of programs used "greater than" and "less than" operations on the two digit years to compare dates. That worked great until the year 2000 started showing up. Suddenly the later years like 2001 looked like they were earlier years like 1901 when the comparisons were done. I recall an example of someone receiving the new registration papers for their car but it was listed as a 1901 something or other instead of a 2001 something or other! The problem was anticipated from the beginning but programmers figured their programs would be obsolete and replaced by new programs before the problem cropped up.

A huge customer (like a country's telephone company) needed a way to continue to use two digit years but have the comparisons work properly. They didn't want to have to rewrite their code (and I can't blame them, lots of time and money would be needed). The hack solution was to add code for a sliding century window which allowed the customer to define their own century rather than be forced to use 1901 to 2000. I did a lot of my testing using 1951 to 2050 as my century. This customer defined century was used to convert the two digit years to four digit years. I can't remember the exact code used but it was mostly allocating more memory to hold the new date, parsing the old date and the putting the new date together by sticking in the correct first two digits. It was much easier to implement than it sounds but it did require quite a few lines of code. I did try to make the process as efficient timewise as possible but there really was not much impact on the system performance anyway. Both dates and times were involved in this code because they were actually a single item. Think about all of the dates and times that show up on a telephone bill and you can begin to guess how often this new hacked code was executed. Just about everything has a date or time associated with it on a phone bill.

I suspect the lack of impact on the system performance was because most computers are idle most of the time. While I'm typing this message, my computer is probably 99% idle. That's because the computer can process my typing a gazillion times faster than I can type. The scheduler is always looking for processes to run but most of the time there is nothing to schedule. One operating system I worked on would have the scheduler toss in the "NULL" process when nothing else was available to schedule. Customers got upset when they saw the "NULL" process using up all of their system time. They assumed something else should be running instead of the "NULL" process. Well, there wasn't anything else to run! These were large systems with huge numbers of users yet most of the time the processor was idle. Eventually the scheduler was re-coded to hide the "NULL" process from the users. Then the complaints stopped coming in.

Well, this is boring enough to have pretty much put me to sleep. Hopefully you got some of what I wrote about. Feel free to ask more questions.

qruthie (the 'q' is silent)