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From: Stefan Skoglund <stetson@ebox.tninet.se>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: How Ada could have prevented the Red Code distributed denial of
 service attack.
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 22:23:40 +0200
Organization: Telenordia
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Date: 2001-08-13T21:25:47+00:00
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Kaz Kylheku wrote:
> I hear you. But again, ``error'' has a weakened meaning in the context
> of computing, because it's sometimes used to mean ``an environmental
> condition that software has to deal with'' like running out of memory,
> bad sector on a disk, unreachable server, etc.

I learned while in school to differ between weakness, error and failure.

Weakness is some point somewhere in the program which can cause problems
error is when the weakness rears its head but things still works because
of some sideeffect in the same/or some other part.

Failure is when nothing helps.

An example:
one of the attitude sensor in JAS gripen has tripple redundancy.
Why because the mtbf for this sensor is such that it will cause at least
two complete failures (ie unintentional contact with ground) over the
lifeline of this system. The failuremode of this sensor is easily
detectable
and so the system will log the error and change over to the next one.