Originally Posted By jmoore1966 << But there was a great deal of work that went into making sure that nothing did happen. >> <<<Exactly. Action was taken. The problem was largely averted>>> My main point was that that was never going to be as serious as the doomsayers were reporting. Nuclear bombs were never in danger of blowing up because they had the year wrong. Dams were not going to release all the water because they thought it was the year 1900. Anyone who knew anything about programming would know that when a computer program fails, those results do not happen.
Originally Posted By jonvn "Perhaps because he was a member of the IPCC." So what? It's a consenus. That does not mean unanimity. This has only been said about 11 jillion times now. And this guy is a reviewer of ECONOMICS, which is part of the report. This means he was not reviewing the science part of it which we are discussing.
Originally Posted By jonvn "let's not cry foul when I don't get off my rear immediately and change my entire lifestyle because the worls is going to end in 20 years" No one said the world is going to end in 20 years. No one said you had to change your entire lifestyle, either. But you can start by giving up on the denial of this scientific finding and start trying to help figure out what you can do. This is not something you are going to be able to fix personally. You just do what you can. This issue is not going to be fixed tomorrow. It's going to take a while, but it won't start getting fixed until we start doing something to fix it.
Originally Posted By jonvn "My main point was that that was never going to be as serious as the doomsayers were reporting." A lot of that was the press, and some things MAY have not worked right, if they were not fixed. But the world was not going to end, no. "Anyone who knew anything about programming would know that when a computer program fails, those results do not happen. " I know a lot about programming. And what happens when a program doesn't work right depends on how the program is written.
Originally Posted By jmoore1966 <<No one said the world is going to end in 20 years. No one said you had to change your entire lifestyle, either. But you can start by giving up on the denial of this scientific finding and start trying to help figure out what you can do.>> OK, then we are all pretty much in agreement. What the heck are we arguing about? Oh yeah, the severity of the situuation, I guess...
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh <So what? It's a consenus.> He's not arguing about what the report concluded; he's pointing out the process, which he knows because he experienced it, does not necessarily lead to a consensus.
Originally Posted By jonvn "he's pointing out the process" Let us assume, for the moment, that he is correct, and that the IPCC process is flawed. You only then have every other credible organization who also is finding the same things, as well. Unless the process by which we make scientific discovery is fundamentally flawed, and only in this one case, then I would have to say that what this economics professor has to say about this one report is not all that relevant to the entire body of scientific opinion the world over. If in fact there was not a consensus of opinion on this, and the IPCC rode roughshod over what most people actually thought on the subject, there'd be a lot of controversy on it, not some op-ed piece in Newsweek. It'd be published and peer reviewed. That's how you advance scientific understanding, as I've said before. You don't advance by arguing over it in a sour grapes manner in lay magazines.
Originally Posted By CrouchingTigger >>My main point was that that was never going to be as serious as the doomsayers were reporting. Nuclear bombs were never in danger of blowing up because they had the year wrong. Dams were not going to release all the water because they thought it was the year 1900. Anyone who knew anything about programming would know that when a computer program fails, those results do not happen. << You're kidding, right? NASA Decides That A Software Error Doomed The Mars Global Surveyor Spacecraft: <a href="http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1185" target="_blank">http://www.spaceref.com/news/v iewnews.html?id=1185</a> The Explosion of the Ariane 5: <a href="http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html" target="_blank">http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold /disasters/ariane.html</a> The Ariane 5 rocket exploded on its maiden flight in June [4], 1996 because the navigation package was inherited from the Ariane 4 without proper testing. The new rocket flew faster, resulting in larger values of some variables in the navigation software. Shortly after launch, an attempt to convert a 64-bit floating-point number into a 16-bit integer generated an overflow. The error was caught, but the code that caught it elected to shut down the subsystem. The rocket veered off course and exploded. Navigational software glitch forces Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors back to Hawaii, abandoning first foreign deployment to Japan: <a href="http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/02/14/212102/pictures-navigational-software-glitch-forces-lockheed-martin-f-22-raptors-back-to-hawaii.html" target="_blank">http://www.flightglobal.com/ar ticles/2007/02/14/212102/pictures-navigational-software-glitch-forces-lockheed-martin-f-22-raptors-back-to-hawaii.html</a> Software Bug Contributed to Blackout: <a href="http://www.securityfocus.com/news/8016" target="_blank">http://www.securityfocus.com/n ews/8016</a> A previously-unknown software flaw in a widely-deployed General Electric energy management system contributed to the devastating scope of the August 14th northeastern U.S. blackout, industry officials revealed this week.
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh <You only then have every other credible organization who also is finding the same things, as well.> I believe most other credible organizations have been more reserved in their predictions, and in their assessments of cause. <It'd be published and peer reviewed.> It has been. I mention somewhere recently that Professor Lindzen's views were published in a scientific journal, although they were first rejected by one of the biggest.
Originally Posted By jmoore1966 OK Crouching Tiger. You have correctly pointed out that software and computers are currently an integral part of our everyday life, and even a more important part of our hi-tech machines. Software bugs can definitely cause things to mal-function with devestating effects. Which I would be a fool to disagree with. None of the catastrophe's you pointed out had anything to do with the millenium bug. Those behind the millenium scare were leading us to believe that when the computers thought the date was 1900 instead of 2000 it would set off a chain of events that could lead to things like our nukes launching to Russia, or the dam gates opening up, etc. So, we are led to believe that the defense department either: A) Has a one step push button type launch procedure and a single program error could erroneously set the launch variable to TRUE. B) Has programming so incredibly horrible that an incorrect date would trigger a set of events that would bypass all safeguards and trigger the multi-step procedure to launch the rockets. Were you one of the people stocking up on food and water until the stores ran out of survival gear? How many cars blew up or had their accelerators stuck because they thought it was 1900? I can't recall a single one, and they all have computer chips in them. It was always more of a banking nightmare than a catastrophic end of the world problem. I'm not saying that computer malfunctions cannot have devestating affects, but I am saying that the millenium bug was not the end of the world scare it was made out to be. I would bet that if anyone ever broke down how the billions of dollars were spent, I bet that 90% went to accounting and record-keeping processes, and less than 10% went to catastrophy avoidance.
Originally Posted By CrouchingTigger >>None of the catastrophe's you pointed out had anything to do with the millenium bug. << Nope. My post was directed at your rather ridiculous statement that "Anyone who knew anything about programming would know that when a computer program fails, those results do not happen." >>Those behind the millenium scare were leading us to believe that when the computers thought the date was 1900 instead of 2000 it would set off a chain of events that could lead to things like our nukes launching to Russia, or the dam gates opening up, etc. << Those were examples of possible outcomes, had the problem not been addressed. The fact is, no one _knew_ what might happen. >>So, we are led to believe that the defense department either: A) Has a one step push button type launch procedure and a single program error could erroneously set the launch variable to TRUE. << Unlikely, I agree. >> B) Has programming so incredibly horrible that an incorrect date would trigger a set of events that would bypass all safeguards and trigger the multi-step procedure to launch the rockets. << Bad code exists, and it's everywhere. Recheck that link about the Ariane 5. Also go and look up what caused the USS Yorktown to be stranded dead in the water - one guy put entered the wrong value into a single field. You want more warm fuzzy feelings? Understand that a lot of military systems, including battleships, are run with off the shelf copies of Microsoft Windows. >> Were you one of the people stocking up on food and water until the stores ran out of survival gear? << As a matter of fact, while I didn't buy a lot of survival gear (too expensive) I did create a cache of canned food and water, and stockpile a little cash in our house at the millenium. Why? Because I program these things for a living, and have been doing so for over 25 years. I was on the Y2K mitigation team for my current company (satellite communications). I know how much work we had to put in to send out updates to customers because we _knew_ that some of our older systems would fail. Had that happened, we could have lost control of some satellites.
Originally Posted By jmoore1966 <<Nope. My post was directed at your rather ridiculous statement that "Anyone who knew anything about programming would know that when a computer program fails, those results do not happen.">> OK, you got me. In fact, when I was typing that line I thought maybe I should revise it to put it completely into the proper context, (of how a nuclear bomb would not launch if a program had the date wrong, etc.) but due to time constaints I posted it anyways. I really should know better as that is exactly what happens on message boards. Next time I'll try to completely elaborate so that we do not get into another ("You said", "No, what I actually said", "Then you were lying when you said") argument that seems to waste about 50 posts and we have seen numerous times on this site.
Originally Posted By mrichmondj << You want more warm fuzzy feelings? Understand that a lot of military systems, including battleships, are run with off the shelf copies of Microsoft Windows. >> Battleships certainly aren't run with off-the-shelf copies of Microsoft Windows since they have been moth-balled since the end of the 1st Gulf War. Even our most modern AEGIS Destroyers and Cruisers don't have Microsoft based weapons systems. Most of these weapons systems had their computer architecture designed in the 1970s, and the networks resemble the technology of that time. UNIX has been the predominant operating system for most weapons systems since it is typically more stable than Windows. Recently, there has been a move towards "open-architecture" systems that utilize commercial networking gear and systems, but very few weapons systems have migrated to any Windows based code. I think a lot of people would be very surprised at how rudimentary the computer architecture is for a lot of our military's weapons. On the positive side, the computer architectures are very stable and not susceptible to the glitches of more complex network environments. On the negative side, these systems aren't user friendly at all and rely on hardware and software that isn't at the forefront of today's computer network design.
Originally Posted By CrouchingTigger I don't deal with weapons systems, so I don't know exactly what they use. Let's see... I did deal with a target tracking system back in the '80's, and I'm pretty sure it used home grown Z8000 assembly language. But I know, personally, of military satellite tracking systems that rely on Windows NT 4 to run. And Windows gets used all over the place in C3, AFAIK.
Originally Posted By jmoore1966 What's wrong with Windows? If a computer does not crash periodically, we would not appreciate it when it worked...
Originally Posted By CrouchingTigger >>If a computer does not crash periodically, we would not appreciate it when it worked... << So true. I always tell users, "The application is _supposed_ to be hard to use. It was hard to write it!" (That's along with "That's not a bug. It's a feature.")
Originally Posted By mrichmondj << And Windows gets used all over the place in C3, AFAIK.>> In some cases, mostly in the 3rd C, not so much in the first 2. Systems that involve weapons are generally not programmed in Windows, but that is starting to change. The bulk of the weapons systems out there are still based on legacy computing platforms. It takes a long time for modernization efforts to make their way through the armed forces. Even for benign computing processes, we're often very far behind. They just installed Office 2003 on my network late last fall. I am guessing this was in response to no more support for Office 97 moreso than any desire to use modern word processing tools.
Originally Posted By DAR So did anyone hear of noted scientist Sheryl Crow's plan to save the earth? She suggested that when using the bathroom 1-3 squares of toliet paper. Yeah let me know how that's going to work out for you.
