RE: Can you say "World War III?"(You guys are wrong)

This is hard for me to say given my strong pro-AS/400 bias, but I'm not sure
that the operating system should protect you from division by zero.   Or to
put it another way, I'm not sure that AI is highly developed enough to
handle every conceiveable divide by zero situation.  

The operating system should provide a way to handle divide by zero errors,
but I think it's still up to the programmer to write the code to support it.
My calculator works differently from the guy in the article's calculator.
Dividing by zero doesn't crash it either, but it displays "Error 2" on
division by zero. 

This particular situation resulted from programming that's even below my
personal standard of excellence--allowing user entry of zero in a field that
is used as a divisor.  The thing that puzzles me is how the divide by zero
had any effect on other processes.  

But...


Just to help things along, I already have my hand up.  Raise your hand if
you've ever installed a program that turned out to have a divide by zero
bug.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mcrump@ballfoster.com [mailto:mcrump@ballfoster.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2000 10:40 AM
> To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
> Subject: Re: Can you say "World War III?"(You guys are wrong)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Ok, it's at the risk of making this an OS war and
>  it is a little dated but don't forget what happened
> in 1998 with the USS Yorktown............
> 
> <snipped from ZDNET>
>                                                       
>  <Let me lay it out for you. The Windows operating    
>  <systems don't work all that well. Yes, I mean all   
>  <versions of Windows--including NT 4.0. Don't        
>  believe <me? Ask the USS Yorktown's sailors.         
>                                                       
>                                                       
>  <Yorktown, an Aegis missile cruiser--the most        
>  <technically advanced surface ships in the US        
>  Navy--was <off the Virginia shore on maneuvers last  
>  fall when for <almost three hours it went dead in    
>  the water. What <happened? A single bad entry of     
>  zero in a database <program led to a catastrophic NT 
>  crash that left large <parts of Yorktown's           
>  Engineering Control System <Equipment and Integrated 
>  Bridge Systems network <dead, along with the ship's  
>  advanced propulsion <system.                         
>                                                       
>                                                       
>  <end snip>                                           
>                                                       
>                                                       
>  Here was an example of a non-AS/400's opinion of     
>  NT.........                                          
>                                                       
>                                                       
>  Here is the original article from Government         
>  news......                                           
>                                                       
>                                                       
>                                                       
>  http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/july13/cov2.htm 
>                                                       
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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