Slashdot Mirror
Long Uptime Makes Boeing 787 Lose Electrical Power
jones_supa writes: A dangerous software glitch has been found in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. If the plane is left turned on for 248 days, it will enter a failsafe mode that will lead to the plane losing all of its power, according to a new directive from the US Federal Aviation Administration. If the bug is triggered, all the Generator Control Units will shut off, leaving the plane without power, and the control of the plane will be lost. Boeing is working on a software upgrade that will address the problems, the FAA says. The company is said to have found the problem during laboratory testing of the plane, and thankfully there are no reports of it being triggered on the field.
Finally!
IT support advice that's useful!
"have you tried turning it off and then back on?"
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
I call BS. No WIndows 98 machine could possibly stay up for 7 weeks, so this was a non-issue.
The company is said to have found the problem during laboratory testing of the plane, and thankfully there are no reports of it being triggered on the field.
The spokesman continued, "The battery would have caught fire long before that integer overflow."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You must not fly United.
And this is why C should never be used for mission critical software.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I guess this might be due to a 32-bit signed integer being incremented at 100 Hz: 2^31 / 24 / 3600 / 100 = 248.5 days.
Yes, the moment the big bird would shut down was correctly prognosticated by the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. While testing a crowbar circuit he ran out of time and came to while munching on phattened feasant at Medieval Times, in a daze of King Arthur. He noticed an unused carrion bit, and realized that birds of prayer who managed the King's affairs were hard-sinewed to pluck quills for signing and always discarded the carrion bit. He caught the underflow was heralded by the people and befriended by the King, who set him to work hacking the Code of Chivalry and cracking the Y1K problem. In that time there were only punch cards and knights on horseback only had a resolution of 1 bit, so tournaments were long the fields were full of snakes, to avoid spooking the horses the knights would dismount and cleave them with sword, leaving half-adders strewn about. It was Pendragon who had built the famous Round Table with 12 seats, two complete I Chings, where Arthur and the knights would drop in and punch out binary sums in a rudimentary form of patty-cake, which inspired the mechanical circular adder of later years. The Yankee's refinement was a 13th chair left unoccupied to mark the betrayal of Judas, and also to serve as a carrion bit.
There is a great deal more about gum-powder and 99 cent gamut of Steampunk-driven micro commerce, a Debian release called 'Guinevere' and a whole lotta Lancelot, but time is fun when you're having flies.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>