Disney is raking its customers over the coals with a 75% price hike for their annual subscription (originally $80.) People wonder why piracy is on the rise.
I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that a memory bit flipping has caused any problems past 2008 or so. Maybe another person has found some case where it has, but when I was researching for my own server, I couldn’t find a single one.
Not server-related, but an instance where an inexplicable bit flip caused a stir is Super Mario 64 speedrunning. There is a level that is notoriously slow to navigate and during a playthrough a community member “discovered” a skip that warps you about halfway through the level. There is a video of it happening on live stream, but to this day someone has yet to reproduce the skip. Fiddling around with the game’s memory showed that the behavior happens when a single bit is flipped. All in all, it was likely a one-off error on the hardware that happened at exactly the right time in exactly the right place. The incident is known as the “TTC upwarp” and there is a $1000 bounty to claim if you can provide a working set of instructions to reproduce it on real hardware.
I mean, that was actually pretty cool to read about! Speedrunning community always does the most crazy things as far as hardware memory dumping and analyzing to drop time in a speed run. 😅 that is passion.
It did happen on a device from 1996 though where in the time, programming and error checking was so barebones and efficient that a single bit could really mess a lot of things up.
That’s why I specified a time period 😉. Originally bug were called bugs because literal bugs would get in the holes of punchcards and make programs not run. Not a problem anymore! In the same way, systems have implemented checksums and error checking such that it really isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of applications.
