"Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping." - Gertrude Stein
October 24, 2020
Good morning everyone!
@BCH.Serghere once again. Yesterday, Read.Cash funds became as low as $15. Everyone including me got confused. Is it a bug? Or the top donors walked away and withdrawn their pledges? Luckily, it's just a bug and around 12am (Philippine time), the funds got back to normal.
Btw, i am not talking about the insects when i used the word "bug". Lol.
In this digital world of age that we are in now, we heavily rely on technology and software. We use this technology and software by using a computer and phone applications. But sometimes, we encounter some problems where this applications doesn't work as it intended to do.
Who is the culprit why this application glitched?
The main suspect is a computer bug.
Bugs are any unexpected problems with software or with hardware. So imagine you are trying to complete a task but something goes wrong to the program and you end up having an unexpected result.
For example: the program just messes up whatever you are trying to do or it doesn't work the way it should be working or it simply prevents you from doing the task that you were hoping to be able to do.
These failures are called bugs and they can happen for a number of reasons and there's so many different types of this.
Syntax bug - the code is written wrong and all it takes is for someone to mispell a function or forget a semicolon at the end of the statement. In this case, debugging (getting rid of the bug) requires a lot of attention however it is more or less obvious
Logic bug - code doesn't make sense logically and the feature doesn't really know what to do. A good example is an infinite loop where the codes run forever in circles which may crash the computer
So why are they called bugs?
On September 9, 1945, Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist, discovered a moth stuck on one of the first digital computer in the world, "Mark 2". She reported in her journal that it os the first case of bug being found and since then everytime there were glitch in the system, they would say that they would need to debug the machine.
People said the term bug is distance prior to that but Grace Hopper hopes to popularize it. And until now, the bug word is still in used.
Now we understand what bug is, why it is called that way. Why it is difficult to debug something because it can came from a small spelling error, which is like finding needle on a haysack, to a much larger issue in the program.
Infamous bugs in history
The Millennium bug or Y2K
This refers to events related to the storage and formatting of calendar data beginning in the year 2000. Problems were predicted because many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900.
It affected, for example, to banks that calculate interest rates daily, centers such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, transportation, and a lot of things. Billions of dollars were spent around the world to upgrade computer systems and correct this error.
PayPal accidentally credits man $92 quadrillion
When Chris Reynolds opened his PayPal e-mail statement, the Pennsylvania PR executive’s account balance was $92,233,720,368,547,800.
The amount is significant in the world of 64-bit numbers suggesting a programming error. The error was quickly recognized, and his account had returned to zero by the time he had logged in.
PayPal offered to give an unspecified amount of money to a cause of Reynolds’ choice.
Patriot Missile Failure
On February 25, 1991, while the Gulf War, a Patriot Missile battery in Saudi Arabia failed to trace and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The scud missile hit an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around another 100 people.
The problem was an inaccurate calculation of the time since boot due to computer arithmetic errors. Precisely, the time in tenths of second, as measured by the system’s internal clock was multiplied by 1/10 to return the time in seconds, it calculated the incorrect time, and the missile failed to intercept the Iraqi Scud missile attack. Again another rounding error in the system.
That's it for today! If you have any suggestion or question, please leave a comment below and don't forget to suscribe, like and upvote this article! Thank you in advance.
I'm saying from heart "you're a genius" dear.