Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11
From: Troy <gimmespam () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 12:41:20 -0700
On Sat, 25 Sep 2004 10:35:34 -0400, joe <mvp () joeware net> wrote:
Even if there was poor function documentation, if you have a function, any function returning a constantly increasing counter you know, as a skilled programmer, that eventually it has to do something other than increase.
In this case, the function is very well documented. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sysinfo/base/gettickcount.asp
From the documentation, "The elapsed time is stored as a DWORD value.
Therefore, the time will wrap around to zero if the system is run continuously for 49.7 days. "If you need a higher resolution timer, use a multimedia timer or a high-resolution timer." Even without that documentation, common sense would tell you that it will only count for up to 49.7 days. The function returns a DWORD. The largest number that can be held by a DWORD is FFFF FFFF or 4,294,967,295 decimal. Since you know those are milliseconds, divide by 1000 to get seconds, then by 60 for minutes, 60 again for hours, and 24 for days and you get just over 49.7 days (or just go to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=4294967295+milliseconds+in+days). You can't blame the OS. The developers of the application used an obsolete API call that was probably only left in for older applications. Sure, there have been times when Microsoft programmers have screwed up, but this is not one of them. Microsoft clearly documented it as a DWORD with a finite value. I think the worst thing about this is that the FAA and the developers of the app knew about the problem for quite some time, knew what the problem was, and, rather than fix the code, they just rebooted the system to work around it and ignored the main problem. -- Troy _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Current thread:
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11, (continued)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 joe (Sep 24)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 bashis (Sep 24)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 joe (Sep 24)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Ron DuFresne (Sep 24)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 James Tucker (Sep 25)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Ron DuFresne (Sep 25)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 joe (Sep 25)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 devis (Sep 25)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 joe (Sep 26)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Georgi Guninski (Sep 28)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Troy (Sep 25)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Ron DuFresne (Sep 25)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Barry Fitzgerald (Sep 24)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Frank Knobbe (Sep 24)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Barry Fitzgerald (Sep 24)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 joe (Sep 24)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Nancy Kramer (Sep 24)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 joe (Sep 24)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Ron DuFresne (Sep 24)
- Re: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 Frank Knobbe (Sep 24)
- RE: Windoze almost managed to 200x repeat 9/11 joe (Sep 24)