Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/05/25/07:35:46
Sean wrote:
>
> Endlisnis wrote:
> >
> > Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia wrote:
> >
> > > >> >Outcome #3: Something terrible might happen. Worst case scenario (never known
> > > >> >anyone it has happened to, but it's possible): overwriting some buffered portion
> > > >> >of a hard-drive or memory mapped io could desroy data or hardware.
> > > >> Hardware? You must be joking.
> > > > Well, there's the old story about the non-multi-sync monitors that you could
> > > >break if you switched the mode too fast.
> > > OK, I get the idea. But I think it is just too difficult to make any
> > > of these things happen.
> >
> > You can usually just ignore it, and most of the time screwing with memory will do
> > nothing or make your program crash. I've talked to many programmers and I've never
> > actually hear of a recent even of hardware breakage, so you can put it out of your mind
> > unless you are working on an old machine or on a VERY CRITICAL system. All-in-all, it
> > is practically impossible to accidentally hurt hardware, but my point was to show you
> > that it was still possible under certain very unlikely conditions. (odds around 1 in
> > 2^10000)
> > --
> > (\/) Endlisnis (\/)
> > s257m AT unb DOT ca
> > Endlisnis AT HotMail DOT com
> > ICQ: 32959047
>
> 2^10000?? I doubt that a lot. Since ummm, I doubt there's anywhere
> near 2^10000 bits on your hard drive... and if you had an equal chance
> of changing each one... but anyway, I doubt there's 2^10000 programs out
> there and I'm also sure that more than one has done that. Sorry for the
> nitpicking. But if 2^100 were written every second (that's 1.27 *
> 10^30) for the last 50 years, then only 2 * 10^39 would be written or
> less than 1.5 * 2^130. And even that's a gross exaggeration.
Oh, excuse me, somehow that got on the wrong thread, I'm very sorry.
Sean
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