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Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

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Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#211

Post by ChickeNES »

yamaneko wrote: post #209
Jedd wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not merely an insightful repository of analysis and explanations around the more profound aspects of our world, John Ralston Saul's exquisite Doubter's Companion includes some answers - acerbic accusations bundled free - to the more pedestrian issues: "DANDRUFF: The ANSWER is usually vinegar. To some problems there are solutions. "What we call dandruff is often the result of a PH imbalance on the skin, which shampoo…

I suffer from dandruff, tried a bunch of shampoos but they didn't work well. I saw this tip about vinegar, which I tried a single day then I gave up thinking this could be popular saying. I'll try again and report.

Have you tried going to a dermatologist?

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#212

Post by asveikau »

zeta0134 wrote: post #132
eponeponepon wrote: post #16

It's fascinating... the Y2K problem never came to fruition because - arguably - of the immense effort put in behind the scenes by people who understood what might have happened if they hadn't. The end result has been that the entire class of problems is overlooked, because people see it as having been a fuss over nothing. I sometimes think it would've been better if a few things had visibly failed in January 2000.

Maybe it's because of how young I was at the time, but I remember media outlets reporting on the Y2K problem, and showing video of hundreds of older computing devices that were being retired (thrown in landfills) because they wouldn't work properly after the date change happened. Maybe this isn't a "real" failure, and the symptom of some IT departments working diligently to solve the problem before it happened. In an…

The problem was that media reports at the time seemed to assume that anything with a computer would completely blow up, instead of rationally thinking through much more benign consequences of a date or calendar being wrong.

The image of a bunch of perfectly capable computers being discarded for no reason describes this media frenzy wonderfully.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#213

Post by tripzilch »

mort96 wrote: post #199
xapata wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% of all programmers Many dynamically typed languages have an automatic change from int to bigint rather than allowing overflow. For example, Python.

Others, like JS and Lua, just use doubles, meaning they'll never overflow - instead every 2 numbers start to be considered equal. Then a while after that every 4, etc. Not exactly optimal behavior when using incrementing IDs.

however, doubles represent integers accurately up to 53 bits. so that's still quite a lot before you run into that problem.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#214

Post by wpietri »

MichaelGG wrote: post #148
wpietri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Definitely not goofy. My dad was a programmer in the early days. The machines he started on in the 1960s had 8 KB of RAM. Saving a byte then is the equivalent today of saving 1 MB on an 8 GB machine. Multiply that times, say, the thousands of customer orders you're trying to process and the goofy thing would be burning a lot of additional RAM because it might help somebody 35 years later. Who among us is writin…

But a 2 digit date should take less than 7 bits. Were they using systems that didn't use 8 bit bytes? Why wouldn't the dates work from, say 1900 to 2155?

My understanding is that the actual number of bits used would generally have been 4 bits per digit, as they were using Binary Coded Decimal [1]. So dropping the 19 would save you a byte per date.

Sure, they could have used a custom encoding. But that increases maintenance cost and extra development work. All to solve a problem that nobody cared about at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#215

Post by logn »

ChickeNES wrote: post #210
Jedd wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not merely an insightful repository of analysis and explanations around the more profound aspects of our world, John Ralston Saul's exquisite Doubter's Companion includes some answers - acerbic accusations bundled free - to the more pedestrian issues: "DANDRUFF: The ANSWER is usually vinegar. To some problems there are solutions. "What we call dandruff is often the result of a PH imbalance on the skin, which shampoo…

Stop spreading psuedo-scientific alternative-medicine falsehoods. Dandruff is in no way caused by a "PH imbalance on the skin": http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dandruff/diagn...

Wikipedia says one cause of dandruff is yeast-like fungus. Perhaps PH plays a role in that. Also vinegar has cleansing properties and may be less drying than detergent, and dry skin is another cause of dandruff.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#216

Post by wpietri »

justin66 wrote: post #62
wpietri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Definitely not goofy. My dad was a programmer in the early days. The machines he started on in the 1960s had 8 KB of RAM. Saving a byte then is the equivalent today of saving 1 MB on an 8 GB machine. Multiply that times, say, the thousands of customer orders you're trying to process and the goofy thing would be burning a lot of additional RAM because it might help somebody 35 years later. Who among us is writin…

- Who among us is writing code today worried about how it will be used in 2052? The good programmers who are fortunate enough to be working on software that matters.

I doubt that's true, unless you mean it tautologically.

There are plenty of good programmers working on software that matters that should absolutely not be trading off hazy possible benefits in 2052 for significant costs now.

It's occasionally necessary. When I wrote the code for Long Bets [1], I took a number of prudent steps to make sure things would have a good shot at surviving for decades. But I only took the cheap ones; the important thing was to ship on time.

And I think that's the right choice for most people. Technological change has slowed down some, but 35 years is still an incredible amount of volatility. Betting a lot of money on your theories of what will be beneficial then is very risky.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#217

Post by quakeguy »

MikeHolman wrote: post #195
syncsynchalt wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your link discusses 2^64, which applies to languages that have native integer types. The 2^53 problem was for Javascript, which has no native integer type, and is thus limited by the mantissa size of Number (which is defined as an IEEE double-precision float). Twitter ids are unsigned 64-bit, since they're generated using Snowflake. That link must pre-date the move to snowflake ids, and is speaking to the count of tw…

I'd be incredibly surprised if they overflowed 9 quadrillion tweets. That's like a million tweets per person on earth.

Its the retweets, dude. /s

On a more serious side, that number won't be reached anytime soon..

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#218

Post by kodablah »

fpgaminer wrote: post #81
rdtsc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self-confidence as a programmer is when starting a new project, storing the transaction ID as a long rather than an int... uint64_t even Or a UUID as others have suggested. Technically C spec doesn't really say exactly how many bits int, long and long long should be. If you want specific sizes and your code to be somewhat portable use the specific bit sizes to make that clear. There are also types for size-like thi…

> If you want specific sizes I would go further and say you should _always_ use specific sizes, unless forced otherwise. There's no reason not to.

There are reasons not to when creating RDBMS schemas.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#219

Post by yamaneko »

ChickeNES wrote: post #211
yamaneko wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suffer from dandruff, tried a bunch of shampoos but they didn't work well. I saw this tip about vinegar, which I tried a single day then I gave up thinking this could be popular saying. I'll try again and report.

Have you tried going to a dermatologist?

To be honest, I only went to see a single dermatologist, but my experience was bad. The dermatologist kinda overlooked and shrugged. I received a shampoo recommendation, but the dermatologist didn't say we should monitor the treatment or anything. From what I saw, she would keep recommending shampoos and I would try until I found one that worked. so I decided to try by myself.

Not my wisest moment. I should probably have seen another dermatologist.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#220

Post by creepydata »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #161
Sonorous wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a pop-culture name, I'd call it the Head & Shoulders Problem, after those old shampoo commercials: "You use Head & Shoulders? But you don't have dandruff!" "Exactly!"

I wish. I do have dandruff (depending on where in the world I happen to be). Head & Shoulders does absolutely nothing.

Have you seen your doctor about this problem? There's quite a lot they can do.
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