Re: Software Engineering News Brief

["Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-93" <condicma@PWFL.COM>]

Paul Eggert <eggert@TWINSUN.COM> writes:
>This hilarious (and obviously false) claim reminds me of the confident
>announcement I found in Sun's bug database a few months ago to the effect that
>Solaris doesn't have any year-2000 problems because the kernel merely
>counts seconds since 1970.  Well, that's true as far as it goes, but it
>turns out that several Solaris applications (SCCS and xterm, for example)
>_do_ have year-2000 problems because the application developers saw fit
>to take the year modulo 100, or subtract 1900 from the year, or some
>such nonsense.  To Sun's credit when I pointed out some of these
>problems they quickly toned down their announcement, and they are
>testing the next Solaris release more carefully for year-2000 bugs.
>
    I am reminded of a statement made by some CEO of some nameless
    computer manufacturer. The claim was: "So far as I know, we've
    never had an undetected error in the operating system..."

    I wish I could recall who said this and when so I could add it to
    my quote list. (For some reason, Honeywell comes to mind - but I
    couldn't be sure it wasn't Burroughs or someone else... Ahh the
    memory leaks I seem to have with no garbage collection operating
    in my brain!)

    MDC

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer    ATT:        561.796.8997
M/S 731-96                                      Technet:    796.8997
Pratt & Whitney, GESP                           Fax:        561.796.4669
P.O. Box 109600                                 Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
West Palm Beach, FL 33410-9600                  Internet:   CONDIC@FLINET.COM
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