Comair Done In by 16-Bit Counter

Gogo Dodo writes "According to the Cincinnati Post, the Comair system crash was caused by an overflowed 16-bit counter. Perhaps Comair should have paid for the software upgrade to MaestroCrew." You heard it here first...

Comments

Maybe it had "worked just fine" for them?

[EvilStein]

Maybe the existing system was working just fine? Upgrades too expensive?

Perhaps this was something that they never anticipated in a thousand years?

I bet *now* they'll upgrade, but until this particularly hairy situation arose, they didn't really see a need to upgrade a computer scheduling system that had been working great for them.

Dunno why this is interesting, aside from seeing "16 bit" in the headline.

98

[kg_o.O]

That's what you get for using a buggy and OLD OS for such important tasks. Grats!

Comair?

[babbage]

For those of us that weren't necessarily spending the holidays keeping up with Slashdot, or the news in general, would it be that bad to spell out what Comair is and what happened to them in the article summary? Would it?

Come on, basic 4th grade reporting rules should apply to Slashdot as well: every article summary should mention Who, What, Where, and When; bonus points for How and Why, though those usually take longer to explain and can be omitted from a 100 word summary. But can we at least cover the basics?

Nah, forget it, Slashdot's editors obviously have no interest in improving the editorial quality of the site...

Re:Comair?

[babbage]

Yeah, but that's my point -- the majority of Slashdot's summaries don't adequately explain what they're pointing to; covering Who / What / Where / When would do it, but one or more of these is almost always missing.

I, and most other people, don't have time to read every single article just to figure out what the Slashdot editor was posting about. Moreover, in a lot of cases -- not this one, but lots of others -- the befuddled herd of Slashdot visitors has trampled the site in question, so it's not even possible to look up the original article. Admittedly, that isn't the case here, but it's true more often than not.

All of this could be avoided easily if the Slashdot editorial staff were forced to sit through the first week of an introductory journalism class, where the grad student teaching the class on a professor's behalf will drill in the mantra of Who / What / Where / When until the students finally get it.

Jayson Blair

[AtariAmarok]

"Nah, forget it, Slashdot's editors obviously have no interest in improving the editorial quality of the site"

Don't worry. Eventually, Slashdot will be up to the standards of the "New York Times" that you so love. In fact, they have hired Jayson Blair as a consultant to work on the problem. Not only that, we'll have to login as "elmer fudd" with pw "90210" in order to read even the worst trolled response.

The far bigger snafu...

[tjgrant]

...was over at US Air, where a large number of selfish and uncaring union employees decided to mess up a huge number of their customer's Christmas plans.

While stupid stuff like this software problem is embarrassing, and the SBS and the people who wrote the software should hang their heads in shame it was still unintentional and is nowhere as shameful as the deliberate sabotage done to US Air's customers by their union employees.

Readable version

[Anonymous Coward]

http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/30/1 330230