Twitter "Twitpocalypse" Snags Mac, iPhone Apps 160
awarrenfells notes coverage in Macworld of what is being called "the Twitpocalypse" — Twitter applications breaking as the number of tweets exceeds 32 bits. "The first apparent victim of the Twitpocalypse was The Iconfactory's Twitterrific for iPhone, which stopped working immediately following the event. ... Atebits Software's Tweetie has also been affected by the Twitpocalypse. The program continues to function for browsing and posting tweets, but searches no longer work in the Mac version and results appear one at a time in the iPhone version."
Strangely reminiscent of a facebook group (Score:3, Interesting)
Correct name should be Twitterdammerung (Score:4, Funny)
RLA (Score:2)
And three words of warning for programmers and system designers: "Reasonable Limits Aren't".
I look forward to the day where this can be said with just the letters RLA. Then maybe we'll see fewer examples of it needing mention.
Well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You might start thinking about it around 1 billion though. Maybe even at 500 million (especially if you are in some sort of obscene growth phase...).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
AFAIK, Twitter itself was unaffected, it's just client applications that failed.
Most client apps probably only handle the number internally, and never show it anywhere, so the developer possibly never even saw that it was getting close to the limit.
"Twitter itself was unaffected" (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. When I first saw mention of this I got my hopes up but they were soon dashed.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. When I first saw mention of this I got my hopes up but they were soon dashed.
Same here. I think the only people calling it the 'twitpocalypse' and sensationalist journalists. Only two apps were affected and we can presume, as other free apps are available according to the article, that the number of users affected is rather small.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I was one of them. I use Twitterific.
Figured it was just overhyped but around 6:30pm my time last night, the app just died. And of course with the Appstore having such a stupid approval process it'll take a while for any fix to appear.
Re: (Score:2)
Right from CSI /.
"Looks like we have anothe double fashioncide here....
Hey!!! You lieutnant! move your fat donut ass and get all these people from the scene, for goddamn's sake!
I think that we will get those web 2.0 gang's assess this time."
Re:Well. (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to know who setup twits as signed. Are there going to be negative twits? Twits by your evil twin?
THINK about what your code does and choose the appropriate data type.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
typedef unsigned int UINT32;
(Adjust UINT32 depending on system).
UINT32 as 64-bits? (Score:2)
if you adjust a name that is literally like "UINT32" you should probably change its name along with its size.
Re: (Score:2)
In later testing, it should be detected, but to overflow 32 bits that's over 2 billion messages. For being founded as a not-so-major project, I don't think they would think that in 3 years that it would reach that much.
It doesn't get said often enough: Reasonable Limits Aren't. Whatever limit you think is reasonable will be exceeded. If you can't be unlimited, think up a reasonable limit, then choose a limit that it outrageously unreasonably large and maybe you'll be OK.
The move to IPv6 is because we're running out of space in IPv4 which is 32 bits (unsigned). Surely you should be able to handle a tweet count larger than one tweet per IP address over the life of the Internet.
Were the applications being bit by this bug wri
Overflowing 32 bits (Score:5, Funny)
So that means there are 2-4 billion messages (depending on if they meant signed or unsigned)? There goes the last of my faith in humanity.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
... nothing of value was lost.
Actually what was lost was any hope left I had for humanity. More than 2,147,483,647 'tweets' have been 'tweeted.' God, I feel stupid just saying that. But what is that? Like half the population of earth?! And then they go so far as to call lack of mobile Twitter applications apocalyptic? Humanity has officially jumped the shark, people. Some other animal should have been given a shot at ruining the world.
...
I mean at least I can derive cheap entertainment from cell phone texts [textsfromlastnight.com] but Twitter transcripts have little to no value in my eyes. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the backyard building a rocket ship to seek out another planet free of Twitter. Hopefully it'll just have more minor problems like being covered in methane or a flesh eating silicon based virus
Re: (Score:2)
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the backyard building a rocket ship to seek out another planet free of Twitter. Hopefully it'll just have more minor problems like being covered in methane or a flesh eating silicon based virus ...
You can't escape. Twitter travels at the speed of light. But this is a generational thing. For my sister, her neurons have been modified by consumption of ecstasy. Mobile phones have been cheap and available since she was 15 or so. Emailing small bits of crap around the world is a way of life for her.
Sure, I would like to live 1000 years but I am not going to like the world that distance into the future.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
You feel stupid saying 'tweet', but you're posting on a site called 'Slashdot'.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Let's see (Score:5, Informative)
2^32 * 140 char is approx 2^40 = 280Gb so all the actual tweets would fit one smallish (new) hard drive
Amount of time used - a lot
Benefit? Unknown.
What do people get out of it? I thought about it and don't see the point unless I am desperate for continual updates about everything. I just took a week off from my regular news sources (website - bloomberg and newspaper types), because I am not having a holiday this year and needed a break. There a few hundred unread rss messages waiting for me (/., groklaw and so on).
Educate me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
2^10 = 1 KB (1024)
2^20 = 1 MB (1024^2)
2^30 = 1 GB (1024^3)
2^40 = 1 TB (1024^4)
2^40 != 280GB. 2^40 != 280 Gb
((2^32)*140)/(1024^3) = 560 GB, or using 1000 instead of 1024, 601 GB.
Including some other stuff, lets make it 160 bytes/tweet for things like username or something, 640 GB.
Still, you can by drives that can hold that much for under $100.
Re: (Score:1)
At this level of analysis being out by less than a factor of 10 is fine
Looks like I screwed converting 140 2^6 = 64 2^7 = 128 2^8 = 256 and used 2^32 instead of 2^31
Re: (Score:2)
It's mainly chatter, so if you could fit it in a few gig with some nice compression.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It just seems to me if have something worthwhile to say 140 char isn't enough.
With the volume of information I am interested in increasing I know there is a sacrifice between speed, completeness and size. I can't see getting good info from 140 char to make it worthwhile - unless we are going to play follow the link and I would rather hit a big blog (eg /. ) that has summaries and many links than try and follow a vast volume of little stuff and piece it together.
Maybe it just won't work for the way I want m
Re: (Score:2)
Admit it, you just added that second paragraph to make your post longer than 140 characters to try and prove your point. In reality your first 78 characters said it all.
Re: (Score:2)
Admit it, you just added that second paragraph to make your post longer than 140 characters to try and prove your point. In reality your first 78 characters said it all.
The first 78 characters:
"It just seems to me if have something worthwhile to say 140 char isn't enough."
The first 140 characters:
"It just seems to me if have something worthwhile to say 140 char isn't enough.
With the volume of information I am interested in increasing I know th"
The entire post (about 560+/- characters, depending on how you count spaces and endlines):
It just seems to me if have something worthwhile to say 140 char isn't enough.
With the volume of information I am interested in inc
Re: (Score:2)
It's "having an IRC window open to the channel all your buddies hang out in all day long", without the part where it is actually happening via this cryptic old protocol called IRC.
Re: (Score:2)
It's "having an IRC window open to the channel all your buddies hang out in all day long", without the part where it is actually happening via this cryptic old protocol called IRC.
So it's still a Sartric hell.
(I.e, to layer paraphrases upon paraphrases of Jean Paul Sartre, "Hell is being locked forever in a chat room with your friends.")
"Yes, it's... wonderful, isn't it?"
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. I participate in neither Twitter nor IRC!
Re: (Score:2)
What do people get out of it? I thought about it and don't see the point unless I am desperate for continual updates about everything.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. These days you can be a twat and twit from your mobile device, so you can be connected all the time.
Eventually, everyone will be connected all the time. We'll all grow up with ubiquitous, always-on high speed internet access wherever we go (well, or civilization will collapse first, but let's be positive) and we'll all want to be talking to people we know (and maybe people we don't) all the time.
Google allows you to know what people are doing and thinking about; Twitter lets you
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously: you value your RSS news feeds - but can't understand the value of updates from people that you actually know?
Oddly enough, I have personal conversations (in real life, or online) with my friends rather than just reading "status updates" broadcast as summaries to the masses. Generally I couldn't care less about the status of people who aren't my friends, let alone people I don't even know (there seems to be a trend for people to follow celebrities on twitter that I just don't get...).
Re: (Score:2)
You don't get the trend for following celebrities? When you follow them you, like, get to, like, be their friend and say you're, like, friends with them and everything...
Hang on, no, you get to "follow them". That'd make you sound more like a stalker! I suspect the lives of celebrities are about as interesting as every other person I know - i.e. not. I'm quite happy with my own life, thank you very much, without trying to follow someone else's life.
Re: (Score:2)
1. My research computer cluster at work twitters to tell me simulations are done.
Seems that something like XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE, or maybe even email, might be a better and more standard solution. Your mileage may vary though.
2. The journal of the American Chemical Society twitters updates on interesting papers and news
Wouldn't a professional organisation be better off running their own server providing this sort of update by a standard protocol (RSS, ATOM, etc.) be more sensible than relying on a third party service of which they have no control (especially one run by an organisation that doesn't really seem to have a viable business plan)? I know this isn't your decision, it's the
I must be getting old... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I must be getting old... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Just to see, I punched out 2^64 in the calculator. That's a really big number, that's over 744 trillion. By "over 744 trillion", I mean that there are 5 other digits in front of the 744 trillion, but I don't know how to say those.
18,446,744,073,709,551,616
Re: (Score:2)
Well I guess if you want to get political about it, it could also be the % increase in debt from Clinton to Bush.
Re: (Score:2)
This is not a Twitter problem (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The clients not smart enough to use 64-bit integers will have their day in a couple years.
Wait the most important thing was left out... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
fml
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Presumably it was this one ((2^31)+1, ids around 2.2 billion don't exist yet, so apparently the broken apps were using signed numbers):
http://twitter.com/nk/status/2147483649 [twitter.com]
Don't worry, they are rather simple to find:
http://twitter.com/statuses/show/2147483649.xml [twitter.com]
(The first url can be constructed with information from the second...)
Re: (Score:2)
That's so perfect. The message that broke poorly-written clients is one that said "The tweets must flow" with a link to a lolcat. This is like critical mass for a pop-culture black hole.
Twitter uses 64bits, 3rd party apps do not (Score:5, Informative)
I'm kind of tired with reading that this is Twitter's fault. Twitter actually uses 64 bits ID internally. The "problem" is with 3rd party apps that interface with Twitter's API and expect to receive only a signed 32 bit integer.
http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/2048659057 [twitter.com]
Disclaimer: I've never used twitter.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't surprise me. Even if they started out on 32 bit IDs, they must have realized this was coming at some point and upgraded everything to 64 bits. It's no surprise Twitter was ready for this.
It's interesting that 3rd party apps broke. Why would anyone store the ID of something in a signed variable? I can understand not thinking of using a long, but why a signed int?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Most occasional programmers don't think about these issues or even, god forbids, check the API's documentation. They just happily use "long a,b,c;" all over the source code. I even bet that version 0.1 of some of those apps used "int a,b,c;" ...
Re: (Score:2)
You ever read the comments in the documentation on php.net?
I weep for humanity.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you realize that most of those applications were made in languages where programmers don't even need to know what a unsigned int is, don't you?
Come on.... I saw a lot of applications out there use floats to store ammounts of money, calculate compound interests.
Let's not be that harsh with those app writers.
Re: (Score:2)
I once wrote one that stored my finances in 16 bit ints. The sad thing is that it actually worked.
Re: (Score:2)
The sad thing is that I could do the same right now, living from month to month sucks.
As a sidenot, I live in Brasil, and yesterday I just found out, that discounting the inflation since 2001 I am barely making no more than 20% of the 2001 earnings today. This, after having being promoted or changing jobs for better positions and bigger companies from year to year.
Re: (Score:2)
No, you need to be harsh with those app writers. If you don't swat them with a rolled up newspaper while they're peeing on your rug then they'll never learn.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of scripting languages don't have an "unsigned" modifier. PHP and Perl do something stupid at 2^31, Python is smart enough to typecast the number to arbitrary-precision. This isn't just scripting languages being lazy; PostgreSQL doesn't do unsigned types either.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember encountering a similar problem years ago. An installer for Microsoft Word 5.1a for Mac refused to install because the hard drive was too big. The amount of free space in bytes was larger than could be stored in a signed 32 bit integer and it reported the remaining capacity as a negative number. I ended up repartitioning to create a volume small enough for the installer to handle.
Back in the days of multiple-floppy installers.
Deadly Alphanumeric (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, any seasoned DBA or database application developer will tell you that any numeric designator/ID number issued by someone other than yourself should always be represented and handled as a string value to deal with the situation of a numeric designator suddenly going alphanumeric.
If Twitter switched to alphanumeric designators for records, all the existing apps would not only not handle the tweets, some less well written apps would probably crash altogether.
Re: (Score:2)
So what you're saying is that you can't see any possible drawback to that change either. Let's go with it.
Re: (Score:2)
The funny thing is that these are probably the same poeple who then complain about personal privacy and pubic safety cameras watching them.
I agree with everything you said up until this point - I think you have completely missed the point here.
Giving a running commentary on your life, using credit cards, store loyalty cards, filling in questionnaires etc. (all of which can be used to gather data about you) are personal decisions. The governments legislating the requirement to track everyone is very different as you do not have a choice - if the government suddenly turned evil (lets say they do something completely unheard of and unlikely to e
On a related note (Score:4, Funny)
I'm quickly running out of synonyms for 'pointless' to troll all these Twitter stories.
Twitpocalypse? (Score:4, Insightful)
Man am I glad I never got on this bandwagon.
Re: (Score:2)
It's up there with "Blogosphere"...
Re:Twitpocalypse? (Score:5, Funny)
why use a signed integer for that? (Score:2, Insightful)
if you know you're getting a positive number back, why not just use uint?
Re: (Score:2)
Because you're using a language where all variables are signed by default?
Because the CS course at the prestigious University you attended thought that they should adapt to the market and teach you Java, Python, RUP, Scrum and the PMBOK?
And that because of that, you use floats to store money because, well, they have cents....
Like what language (Score:2)
Because you're using a language where all variables are signed by default?
The Mac and iPhone API's use NSUInteger all over the place for ID values - you can guess the typedef...
If developers had followed that lead they wouldn't have run into this wall.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe -1 would be a code for something, like, post not found? I know it doesn't seem to make sense to used a signed integer for things that can only be positive at first but here's a few things about using signeds instead :
Didn't Affect Twittering From My C64 (Score:2)
Funny... Breadbin64 was not affected by this issue:
http://www.vandenbrande.com/wp/2009/06/breadbox64-a-twitter-client-for-the-c64/ [vandenbrande.com]
Doh (Score:2)
Some clients didn't plan for growth?
Never understood the animosity... (Score:2)
Nerds seem to have a good bit of hate towards Twitter. I've never really understood why. It could be because of the ridiculous names associated with it. Twitter, tweeting, twits, etc. But these are the same people that have no problem whatsoever using Google, Yelp and even WYSIWYG apps.
Names aside, perhaps its because the 'common' people use it and find it enjoyable. Ditch the air of superiority and embrace what communication is becoming. For better or for worse, it's here to stay like e-mail. That fad from
Re:Is it just me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably because they realize as soon as this fad passes, pretty much the only value they'll have are those upgraded servers.
Why is twitter hate so cool around /. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I see a lot of "what does Twitter really do??" posts. Either these posters are simply being obtuse or /. IQ's have plummeted recently.
Re:Why is twitter hate so cool around /. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some fads last long. See Second life, or SUVs. Both useless but it took a long time for most people to realize that.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that Marx was a real spawn of Satan.
Lookit - unless they actually find some way to make real money off of Twitter (actual profit not just venture marketing), those servers are going to be consistently overloaded.
Re: (Score:2)
Eh, I know what it does. It's essentially one gigantic IRC chat room.
What I'm having a hard time figuring out is why so many people think it's such a big deal.
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's part of new media and as such also part of the new economy; that is, for the cynical, selling hype with grade A marketing. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
I love it when twitter fans imply that twitter haters have low "IQ's".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Everything has a life cycle. How long does something need to live before you can no longer declare it a fad? Is Linux a fad too?
Disclaimer: I am a Linux user and I've contributed to open source Linux/Unix apps.
Re: (Score:2)
Urgh, Slashdot posted my reply under the wrong topic. Bug?
Re: (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I am a Linux user and I've contributed to open source Linux/Unix apps.
What are you disclaiming?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm disclaiming any association with trolling.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, I see.
I would suggest that is a 'claimer' then ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about it, it's following the progression of the net - primarily social media platforms. MySpace was the first big social media explosion, they had bullitens to send mass messages. Cue Facebook, they had status updates, remember "Joe Brown is..."? Twitter coming in as a 'status updater' is just following a growing trend. The retarded thing is, it's so stripped down that people often resort to public, shortened, grammarless conversations pretending like they're text messaging.
Source: I work at a company
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Is it just me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Also, you seem to be suggesting that attempting to elevate one's self above others is a bad thing. Okay, so ivory towers and arrogance are bad, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't think that dumb things are dumb.
Re: (Score:2)
Great. Now all of your molecules can join in on the fun!
Re: (Score:2)
Apps that treat it as an unsigned int won't be affected for another year or two (when the count passes 4 billion and change).
One would hope that the authors of such apps would treat this as a canary in the coal mine and fix their apps before they become affected. It's still a RLA bug.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you kidding? There are people who haven't learned from the Y2K bug as it applies to storing the year!