Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/05/22/08:15:39
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.
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