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memory is subjective

Don't you remember when the Navy's ship was dead in the water
because the Navy chose Doze?
mole@pcweek.co.uk - NT the destroyer
newmedia newmedia, vnunet.com 12 Aug 1998
More problems with NatWest cash machines, many of which
have now been "upgraded" to run Windows NT. News of two
more malfunctions reached Mole last week. If greeted with the
message "C:/Program Files/NCR/NCR.exe", do not attempt to
withdraw cash as whoever used the machine last has probably
lost his card. A possible, though drastic, solution would be for
Natwest to fit Ctrl, Alt and Delete keys, allowing customers
simply to reboot the errant machines. Alternatively you may
prefer the strategy adopted by Mole's programmer pals as part
of their year 2000 preparations and resort to the Quality Street
tin under the bed.

In the overall scheme of things, the inability to withdraw cash
may be the least of our worries.

According to a newspaper which reports on US governmental
matters, the Aegis missile carrier, USS Yorktown had to be towed
into port recently after it was left crippled with computer failures
which put its propulsion system out of action. The computers
were running Windows NT.

The Navy has been understandably keen to play the problem
down and there are a few discrepancies between the official
account of the incident and the account offered by Anthony
DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet. For
instance, the Navy claims the Yorktown was out of action for
only two hours. DiGiorgio says two days. The Navy also insists
the boat never had to be towed. DiGiorgio remembers things
differently.

A Navy source breezily pointed out that this is only the second
time the Yorktown has suffered a potentially catastrophic system
failure. A leaked memo about the first crash, which happened
last year, traced the problem to "bad data", which caused the
computer to attempt an abortive divide by zero operation. The
result was a database overflow which brought down everything
on the network.

Navy engineers see this as minor glitch in the application code.
DiGiorgio disagrees. It's an operating system problem, he says.

"Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you
try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the
next set of instructions.

It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed
to tolerate such a simple failure."

The Yorktown is only one of a number of US warships
undergoing "modernisation" - a euphemism, apparently, for a
quick refit with cheap computers - and NT figures large in the
programme.

Mole has never been to a Microsoft product demonstration at
which the operating system of the moment did not crash, so
there is a certain inevitability about the Yorktown's problems. So
regular are these crashes that Microsoft officials have even taken
to joking about them. At a recent demonstration of Windows CE
to devotees of the ARM RISC core, the Microsoft presenter
quipped that he had built in a spoof crash to his demo routine
so as not to disappoint his audience. In the event, the machine
stubbornly refused to boot at all, so we may never know what
one of Microsoft's spoof crashes looks like.

The clearly partisan Mr DiGiorgio argues that the computer
blunders that afflicted the Yorktown would never have been
made by a proper operating system, Unix for instance. His
complaints are falling on deaf ears. Understandably, US Navy
officials have an innate respect for a company as dedicated as
they are to world domination.

You might think Mole is scare-mongering, but he is not the only
one worried about the potential for a computer activated
catastrophe. US military chiefs are seeking multilateral
agreements with other states, including the old enemy Russia, to
guard against the possibility of war breaking out by accident as
the clock passes midnight on 31 December 1999. The fear is
that, in their disorientation, muddle headed computers will set
off the world's early-warning systems. Forget planes falling out
of the sky at the dawn of the millennium, it might be raining
missiles.

On a more cheery note, if the year 2000 is to be our last laugh
we might as well have a few more laughs at its expense. Among
the less well-known by-products of millennium chaos Mole has
discovered an insidious "paragraph cloning" virus, a severe
outbreak of which has taken place at the Sunday Times.

In the Business section, a journalist by the name of David Parsley
has re-used the following description of the causes of the Y2K
crisis several times since the beginning of the year. "The
millennium-bug problem has arisen because many computer
systems use only two digits, not four, for their internal calendar.
When the year changes from 99 to 00, many applications may
crash and create indecipherable data."

Now the virus has spread from "Indecipherable" Parsley to his
colleague Robert Winnett in the Money section. In an article
entitled "Insurers turn their back on 2000 bug" Mr Winnett takes
the Parsley standard paragraph and improves on it with the
addition of two well-chosen words: "The bug occurs because
computers only use two digits, not four, for their internal
calendar. When the year changes from 99 to 00, experts say
many applications will crash and create indecipherable data,
causing chaos."

Perhaps the death and destruction scenario is wrong after all.
The world will end not with a bang, but with a Winnett.

Advice on how to survive the millennium and other catastrophes
is available free of charge from Underground Bunkers and
Tinned Foods 2000 Ltd, a subsidiary of Molesoft Corp. The
captains of becalmed warships should call Microsoft and ask for
Windows NT Technical Support. Enjoy the hold music.

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