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Re: the importance of the timer rollover bug in Win9x


Matthew Woehlke wrote:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641

Oy, hadn't run across that before :-).

The fact that the problem wasn't fixed until 2000 or so made this more than just an embarrassment for Microsoft. It was an inflection point.


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. It takes a lot of explaining to get from 1e11 to 1e-7. I tried. The "good reasons" got me down to about 1e2. Maybe you can get down to 1e0. You're still left with so many zeroes as to constitute objective evidence that Win9x boxes experience...erm, unscheduled restarts...*a lot*.

To this point, you had all kinds of anecdotal evidence of Win9x's instability. The arguments raged on, as those based only on anecdotal evidence will. This incident provided objective proof of the sort you don't see ignored outside of politics and religion.


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