the importance of the timer rollover bug in Win9x

[Dave Korn]

Warren Young wrote on 11 September 2008 21:17:

> What you had was a bug that was absolutely deterministic, which affected
> hundreds of millions of machines over many years.  Multiply it out and
> you come to something like 100 billion times the bug could have
> happened.  Sounds like a programmer's dream, right?  A bug you can count
> on to happen that reliably with such a huge installed base....yet it
> took ~5 years to diagnose and fix.
> 
> For such a bug to last so long, you're looking for probability of
> discovery down around 1 in 10 million.  

  You make it sound as if win95 actually /did/ have a one in ten million
chance of staying up for fortynine days!  I can assure you, it was a lot less
than that ...  :)

    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
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