At 11:37 AM 9/28/2004, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
Got to love the spin...
"The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times." That would be 49.710269618055555555555555555556 days, or (curiously enough) 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF) milliseconds. Known problem with Win95 ('cept they call Win95 a "server").
I've heard some people say that there was a different problem that was causing them to need to reboot about that often, having to do with the applications rather than the core OS, but I don't know enough of the details to be sure. Either way, if they knew the system was going to crash every 49.7 days, and they had a process to have a technician reboot it every 30 days, and the technician shuts it down during quiet nighttime hours, that guarantees that the 49.7 day crash will be at a _bad_ time of day. They could at _least_ have done a workaround that tells the system to shut itself down at 2am on Day 45, after giving the operators a warning about "Hey, I need to shut myself down for an hour for maintenance some time in the next 4 days, is now a good time? Yes/No/Wait-5-min/Wait-1-hour" Disclaimer: I worked on the FAA's AAS debacle in the 80s (fortunately not on the unlucky "winning" contractor's team), and a number of my coworkers worked on VSCS projects - not sure if they won that round, or who their partners were.