If you own a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and I'm sure many of our readers do, you should reboot it every 248 days. In fact, more frequently than that because at about the 248-day mark, the power system will fail due to a software bug.
Considering that 248 days is about 2^31 * 100, it is pretty reasonable to assume there is a timer with 100 microsecond resolution timer held in a 32-bit unsigned int. It would overflow every 248 days.
"Hell yeah, I did it! I saved 4 bytes every time we store a timestamp. Screw you. It's awesome.
Sincerely,
a software engineer that makes planes but doesn't have to operate them.
Reminds me of all the commercial software I've seen that was written by developers that didn't seem to care, or were ignorant of, the operational realities that their customers live with.
Last week at DevOpsDays NYC 2015 I was reminded time and time again that the most important part of DevOps is shared responsibility: The opposite of workers organized in silos of responsibilities, ignorant and unempathetic to the other silos.
I had a set of load balancers that had that problem. The vendor fixed it quick.