ok, if you're not a geek/programmer, this may mean nothing to you. but one of the google software geeks recently made this post. kind of scary.

for those of you who don't want to read code, here are the highlights...

there are many standard algorithms (or techniques ) developers use. It's similar to cooking... you have to know a few basic things, like how to make a white sauce, a red sauce, etc. from these basic concepts, you build upon them your masterpiece.

imagine if somebody today found out that the way you make a white sauce could, possibly, sometimes, in a rare case but a case that could start happening more and more often, cause the mixture to EXPLODE!!!!!

that's kind of what is happening here. a binary search is a quick way to find something in a list of sorted records. now that we're getting to the point where we want to search billions of records (think google), the binary search sometimes blows up.

the fix is pretty easy, and pretty trivial. but nobody realized there was a problem until a few weeks ago.

it kind of shakes your belief that you really know and understand anything...