Forum upgrade

[Thierry Martin]

We performed a software upgrade on Thursday night and Friday morning. It has been a few months since we did this, but even though we went from version 3.7.0 beta 4 to 3.7.4 patch level 1 there shouldn't be too many changes that most users would notice. Let me know if you experience any problems. This version of the software should actually reduce the number of bugs. And feel free to make any suggestions on how to make the forum even better.

[concrete]

Here is a summary of the 10 worst software bugs in chronological order:

1962 — Mariner I space probe. A bug in the flight software for the Mariner 1 causes the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch.

1982 — Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the CIA allegedly plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet’s history.

1985-1987 — Therac-25 medical accelerator. A radiation therapy device malfunctions and delivers lethal radiation doses at several medical facilities.

1988-1996 — Kerberos Random Number Generator. The authors of the Kerberos security system neglect to properly “seed” the program’s random number generator with a truly random seed.

1990 — AT&T Network Outage. A bug in a new release of the software that controls AT&T’s #4ESS long distance switches causes these mammoth computers to crash.

1993 — Intel Pentium floating point divide. A silicon error causes Intel’s highly promoted Pentium chip to make mistakes when dividing floating-point numbers that occur within a specific range.

1995-1996 — The Ping of Death. A lack of sanity checks and error handling in the IP fragmentation reassembly code makes it possible to crash a wide variety of operating systems by sending a malformed “ping” packet from anywhere on the internet.

1996 — Ariane 5 Flight 501. Working code for the Ariane 4 rocket is reused in the Ariane 5, but the Ariane 5’s faster engines trigger a bug in an arithmetic routine inside the rocket’s flight computer.

2000 — National Cancer Institute, Panama City. In a series of accidents, therapy planning software created by Multidata Systems International, a U.S. firm, miscalculates the proper dosage of radiation for patients undergoing radiation therapy.

[Albert0373]

Image resizing where you have to click on the dialog bar to view it full size.

Doesn't really help IMO and kind of annoying that it opens in a new window.

[Thierry Martin]

Originally Posted by Albert0373

Image resizing where you have to click on the dialog bar to view it full size.

Doesn't really help IMO and kind of annoying that it opens in a new window.

It doesn't affect most of the images posted here. What happens is that if the image is a link to an external site, and the image is greater than 620 pixels across, it breaks the layout for a lot of users. Especially for people on portables. I used to comb through the posts looking for images like that, then I would re-save them as attachments with the smaller dimensions. This is going to save a lot of time.

I would say this will only affect about 10% of the images posted on the forum.