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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

#231

Post by edward_rolf »

mirimir wrote: post #170
brlewis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours is the first comment in this chain that I can say pretty confidently isn't sarcasm. So it kind of breaks the chain, making the sarcasm in this chain non-recursive. Which means maybe you were being sarcastic after all? Actually I don't even know if my own comment is sarcasm or not.

Your comment comes across as sincere. Mine was sincere, but an overstatement. I should have said that sarcasm tends to be recursive, until broken by sincerity. Anyway, here's my take on the chain: SomeHacker44 -- sincere CGamesPlay -- sincere blktiger -- sarcastic i_cant_speel -- mildly sarcastic jazoom -- sincere

Yes because what we have always known about sarcasm and what this thread is a perfect example of is how you can define something as sarcastic/not sarcastic just by how it subjectively "comes across".

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

#232

Post by glandium »

chesserik wrote: post #79
scandox wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a beautifully simple problem and one born of success.

Indeed. I'm not sure that anyone here at Chess.com at the beginning thought we would hit a billion games played in our lifetime. But I guess after 10 years....

To put things in perspective, 2 billion games in 10 years is half a million games per day on average over the 10 years. Considering you didn't start at that rate and that it's an average, it means you have way more than half a million games per day now. (that's also more than 6 per second!)

Congrats on such a success.

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

#233

Post by thaumasiotes »

creepydata wrote: post #220
thaumasiotes wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dandruff has a barely noticeable impact on your life. Following medical advice can do much more.

Some problems aren't worth trying to fix.

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

#234

Post by vizeroth »

rovr138 wrote: post #207
zeta0134 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Y2K was a software issue. In short and very simple terms, some software stored date as DD/MM/YY. It would asume that for year it would always prefix 19. The problem was when you reached /00. Any calculations or software decisions that happened based on that date, it would be off. Way off. Some solutions where expanding the date to YYYY or adding a prefix to the new dates. Dates without the prefix would be 19xx. Date…

Another solution was to set the prefix for 2-digit years on a sliding scale, so they are interpreted as a date within a specific 100-year period (date windowing). For example, see the 2029 rule: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/214391/how-excel-wo...

This turned out to be one of the most cost-effective methods of fixing the problem, and was probably one of the most likely to be implemented. This was especially the case in situations involving software which ran closer to the hardware (for example, BIOS or firmware) or on systems where RAM or storage couldn't be increased and/or the change might increase the software's requirements beyond the system's capabilities.

32-bit Unix timestamps have the 2038 problem.

Despite how common these problems have been in the history of computers, we keep making them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu...

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

#235

Post by sowbug »

sbov wrote: post #46
glhaynes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to how much effort goes into dealing with things like dangerous strains of bird flu, only to have people complain about how much money was spent on "nothing" when an outbreak doesn't occur.

This is a whole class of problem - I wonder if there's a name for it. More examples include: talking about welfare being unnecessary because no one is starving. Or people on medications stopping because they feel better (while still on them).

Maybe the expression "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," discussed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence.

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

#236

Post by new299 »

ianamartin wrote: post #184
davidgerard wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it's not the good systems that stick around - they're cleanly replaceable. It's the quick hacks and bodges that stick around forever.

As someone who just wrote a quick hack for a temporary problem, I agree. It's not just the shitty programmers who do this. Sometimes we have shitty product managers who won't push back against this kind of thing. And you're forced into a creating something evil because most of the job is very good but this one time, you have to suck it up. My response to that, though I agree with you, is that when a supervisor or PM…

Shitty solutions are usually the right answer. At least in the areas I work in (mostly startups). I would estimate 99% of the code I write gets thrown away. Most of it is trying something out. Even for code that was intended to hit production, the company/project often gets cancelled before it ever hits production.

I'm not saying this is true in your case. But there are so many different classes and types of programmers and projects that it's hard to generalize.

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

#237

Post by eicossa »

vxxzy wrote: post #3

How many other examples like this have occurred throughout computing history?

IIRC the whole "Gandhi is gonna nuke the rest of the world" meme came from such a bug occuring in the world-domination strategy game Civilization 2.

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

#238

Post by Godel_unicode »

logn wrote: post #215
ChickeNES wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> _may_ be less drying than detergent (Emphasis mine) Did you miss the part where GP asked people to stop spreading pseudo scientific falsehoods?

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

#239

Post by InTempWeTrust »

acheron wrote: post #139
sbov wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a whole class of problem - I wonder if there's a name for it. More examples include: talking about welfare being unnecessary because no one is starving. Or people on medications stopping because they feel better (while still on them).

I mean, yes, but from the outside some examples can look an awful lot like "my tiger-repelling rock works because we haven't been attacked by tigers".

I find your lack of heuristics disturbing.

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

#240

Post by vizeroth »

MichaelGG wrote: post #200
nandemo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people were. But it's worse than that. In the 90s a lot of code used 16-bit values, character strings. That is, it stored a char(2), parsed it as 2-digit number and then converted it to a date by adding 1900. So it was only really "saving space" when compared with storing a char(4).

But if they wanted to save space why not store a 8 bit number? I imagine it must have something to do with punch card compat or some binary coded decimal nonsense. Still seems inefficient.

If a system gives you two options for storing a date (using 2-digit or 4-digit years), how many dates do you need to store and use in calculations before you end up saving space by creating a new data type and all of the supporting operations to make the storage of the date itself more efficient? In recent years, it's more common to make this type of decision because something else is causing an issue, otherwise we rarely consider the space required for a date (and many languages no longer have a separate type for dates).
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