I nearly cost my employer several million by fixing a bug.

The first task I was given in my new job was to look at an old system that printed labels to be put on containers of car parts. A message would come in on a serial cable saying what part was going to be needed within a few hours at a car assembly line, the parts were packed into stillages (a frame designed to hold a certain number of a certain part, like bonnets, bumpers, doors panels, etc.) and when a stillage was full, or when a certain amount of time had passed since the first part was picked, then a label was printed, applied to the stillage, and it was dispatched over the road to the factory.

Every time the serial number rolled over 9999 to 0001, the system would go wrong and stop working. This happened about once a month, and the help desk had a sheet of instructions on how to fix the problem. Some of the staff knew the fix off by heart.

I looked at the code, found a roll-over bug, and fixed it. Everything was fine, and a couple of years went by with no problems.

Then, at 3 in the morning, the help desk called me and said that it had happened again. They didn't have the sheet of paper any more, and no-one could remember how to fix it. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and tried to get my brain into gear and remember what to do. It took me about an hour talking with a couple of help desk people, and between us we figured out what the fix was, and they called the warehouse and talked them through it.

The next day I talked with my colleagues, and found out that we had come within a few minutes of triggering a penalty clause for halting the production line that could have run into millions of pounds. This was back in the '90s when millions of pounds were a lot of money!

I looked back over the code, and found that there were actually two very similar bugs in the code, one of which happened fairly regularly, and one which only happend much more infrequently, but the same fix worked for both of them.

Back when I first started working in IT, my boss told me, "One day, you will probably make your million pound mistake. In our business, we build systems that, over the course of our careers, will save millions of pounds in lots of small ways. Eventually you will make a mistake, and one of those systems will go wrong, and it might cost millions. Your employer will bear the cost of it, which is why we don't earn those millions ourselves. You have to be prepared for that eventuality. If it happens while you're working for me then I will kick your arse, and maybe I will fire you, but I'd be wrong to do so, that's just the nature of the business that we are in."

A judge. They's what the word means. They make judgements, it's their job.

or the show's off.

And they should stop all the calling. Not telephone calling, but when the TV news people "call" an election for a particular candidate. We don't have that over here in the UK, and I think we're better off for it.

That's a great way to encourage investment. This company has spent tens of millions developing this technology. Sure, that pales into nothing compared to billions, but it's still a lot of money, and denying them any return from it is ridiculous. Also, the ISS is not the USSS. If the ISSP gets some of the money from this company, then great, and they probably have already paid them a chunk of cash.

...and this.

The ISS goes around the earth at something like 20 times the rate of the Earth's rotatiuon, so you couldn't really show the Earth rotating from the ISS, the natural rotation would be swamped. Someone else does that kind of thing, anyway.

You can particularly see it in the shape of the London Eye, the big wheel at the top of the London video.

So all boycotts are pointless, because no single individual is significant? Raindrops are really really tiny, yet floods happen.

Agreed. I will start taking notice of polls once more when they go back in the sidebar.

I'm prettty sure his heart is the same as everyone else's. TL;DR: it's an organ that pumps blood around his body. Unless he has an artifical heart, but would that really exonerate him of responsibility? It's his brain that made the decisions, and that almost certainly isn't artificial.

Too lazy, didn't run. What's the conclusion? Does this mean that nuclear power is awesome or awful?

And when the last new woman born runs our of eggs, we end up stuck with the existing population and no more humans can be born, ever. As we die due to accidents, the population dwindles to zero. Good riddance to us, I say, for being so stupid!

The old have to make way for the young. Stop desperately grasping hold of the dry, dusty moments of increasingly stretched existence. Step aside and let the next generation have their turn. Upload your consciousness into a computer, and believe the illusion that that's still you in there, if that makes you feel happier, but get your corpse underground you selfish old coot.

Vi Hart

Anything that is in the public domain, and anything that is "basic research", is exempt.