Tracking the Blackout Bug

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday April 10, 2004 @07:02AM from the hindsight-is-20-20 dept.

Alien54 writes "This earlier Slash story cited a CNN news report on how the August blackout was preventable. But, as seen in this Security Focus article, things are not so simple. 'In the initial stages, nobody really knew what the root cause was,' says Mike Unum, manager of commercial solutions at GE Energy. 'We test exhaustively, we test with third parties, and we had in excess of three million online operational hours in which nothing had ever exercised that bug,' says Unum. 'I'm not sure that more testing would have revealed that. Unfortunately, that's kind of the nature of software... you may never find the problem. I don't think that's unique to control systems or any particular vendor software.' Which leads to a number of other questions."

3 of 207 comments (clear)

For the 21st century... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-10 07:10 · Score: 3, Funny

If a bug exists in the code, but it's never triggered, is it really a bug?
Bug free! by Ghoser777 · 2004-04-10 07:43 · Score: 4, Funny

int main()
{
return 0;
}

Because I have shown you bug free software, does that invalidate the rest of your argument?

Matt Fahrenbacher

--
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Re:The American jackasses who blamed Canada by spinkham · 2004-04-10 08:11 · Score: 3, Funny

We blame you, you blame the Newfies. It's the pecking order around here, deal with it ;-)

--
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.