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SA Explorer 8000SD/HD Experiences Y2K-like Bug
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at Audioholics, a firmware bug was just discovered in the Scientific Atlanta 8000SD and 8000HD DVRs (Digital Video Recorders) which renders them unable to record. This firmware bug was discovered when the units attempted to recognize February 29th on the programming guide. The units are apparently unable to recognize this date, and as a result, shut down all record functions. All other aspects of the 8000 will continue to work. So far, it looks like no previously recorded material was lost.
Scientific Atlanta is apparently in "Emergency Session" working on a software patch. The problem began occuring on the 23rd when the 7-day program guide first began to encounter the February 29th programming."
i have this model. It's been great otherwise.
To quote a widely-used software development guideline document*:
"Well-written applications include error-handling code that allows them to recover gracefully from unexpected errors. When an error occurs, the application may need to request user intervention, or it may be able to recover on its own. In extreme cases, the application may log the user off or shut down the system."
Now, I figure encountering a nonexistent date may well qualify as an "extreme case." Still, a developer might want to at least think a bit about calendars before qualifying February 29th as nonexistent.
(* It's from a Microsoft Developer Guideline. I put that as a note, since if I started with it, I'd be suspected of troling).
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I have the 8000 model, and it runs Pioneer Passport ECHO software, from Brighthouse Central Florida. From what I've been hearing on the SA8000 mailing list, this type of issue only affects those loaded with SARA software. The Passport software has some issues, where it won't display the showings for Sunday in the guide (it just skips from Sat to Mon.)
No word on if they're going to fix that for the Passport models as well.
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
I recall I had a whole discussion with my friends about whether 2000 had a leap year. Most of those who got it wrong weren't the most computer literate, but it took about 5 minutes to figure it out from the internet.
It's needless bugs like this, which give programmers a bad name.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
How is this a Y2K-like bug? This seems more like a date calculation bug. Before you flame, I understand that Y2K bugs were date realted also, but this is not related to the end of a millennium, more like the calculation of a leap year.
-CowboyNick
I only just got one of these (Explorer 8000) last Friday. In the few days I've had it, it's been doing some really quirky things with the scheduled recordings. After having this only for four days, I've gotten in the habit of double-checking my recording schedules since on more than one occasion I've noticed the times or the programs have changed. That, or it refuses to save some (but not all) schedules if certain recording options are used. I don't know if this bug is cause of the problem, but I'll wait until after Feb. 29th to see if it starts behaving better. More likely buggy code...
It's sad that this Y2K bug wasn't caught. And make no doubt, this *is* a Y2K bug. In one of the companies I worked for, the Y2K date testing started with Sept. 9, 1999 (9999 - some programs used four nines as a exit/quit/terminate), with dates right through to Feb. 29th, 2004.
Hey I have that. I was watching TV yesterday it it wouldn't record. I pressed the button then select, it right away went back to the guide or show. Manual recording did work though. Luckely TW "rebooted" my machine for me and it works fine now. I didn't even think that it was a "y2k" or feb 29th issue thou it did start just before the end of Sunday. Regardless of what you say about TW or other big companies it was fixed within 24 hours of the problem. And it still worked mostly before that.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
So, I did something like
and it spat out a whole bunch of rows, and I was about to send off the results as "complete," until suddenly I noticed quite a few entries for people who has graduated from the university in the 1970s.So I looked more closely at the various columns, and noticed that quite a few of them had a graduation date of 09/09/1999 and that the field indicating that they had gotten a GED instead of graduating normally was filled.
Apparently, back then the database server they had didn't allow a field to remain blank (since it was all legacy which had been migrated between at least a half a dozen architectures by the time I'd had any part in it), so of course if there was no information available they just put in 9/9/99.
I bet that when the report was run in 2000, a lot of students who had already gotten their degrees decades before were quite surprised to get a mailing informing them that they had qualified for the scholarship!
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
Why does it not surprise me that of all the OEMs they could have gone with, TW cable manages to pick the one that's going to have technical problems?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So this explains the odd behavior of mine yesterday. The display showed it counting down in hex digits, then it put something else on the display (I don't remember what), and it finally reset itself, flashing code 6680 as it usually does when it crashes.
At the time, I figured Cox was doing a software update to it, but now I find that it's a serious bug.
Maybe they can make the scheduling a little smarter at the same time, like, say being able to record a certain program only once a week at a set time, repeating weekly. If I want to record the Simpsons on Sunday night, I either have to manually program it every week, or it'll record all Simpsons episodes on each week (the local Fox affiliate plays 3 episodes every weekday), which interferes with other recordings. (After all, VCRs managed this trick two decades ago...)
--RJ
This box is the one Rogers is using here in Ontario. My unit is also affected.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
you'd be fired now!
And yes I do check on that sort of thing.
Stop making it hard, you moron. Do you code like that? Don't be such a retard.
As Pope Gregory put it in 1582 when the decision was actually made:
"lest the equinox recede from XII calends April [March 21st] in the future, we establish that a bissextile [intercalation day] shall be inserted every four years (as with the present custom), except in centennial years. Those, although they were always bissextile until now, will not be from now on, although we decree that year 1600 is still bissextile; after that, however, those centennial years that follow are not all bissextile, but the first year is, and then three centennial years have no bissextile [intercallation] performed, and, then, the fourth centennial year is indeed bissextile. Thus, the years 1700, 1800 and 1900 will not be bissextile, and then, as with the habit with which we are now accustomed, the year 2000 will have a bissextile intercalation day, as the day February 29, and that the same order of intermittent bissextile intercalations in each four hundred year period will be preserved in perpetuity."
Your algorithm is as efficient as Gregory's Bull.