I recently filed an Apple Bug Report, which was marked as a duplicate. The actual bug isn’t terribly important, but the difference between the serial number of the bug I filed (10426480) and the serial number of its alleged duplicate (3323328) – about 7 million – surprised me. Just how old was this still-unfixed bug?
I slogged through the lists.apple.com archives and the bugs users have manually posted on Open Radar to compile a list of Radar Numbers and the dates they were filed, and ended up with this:
The graph is surprisingly well-described by the following exponential function:
n = 60258e10-9t
…where t is the Radar Date represented in seconds since the Unix Epoch, and n is the Radar Number.
This implies at least three things:
- The original bug was filed somewhere around June 2003.
- Apple has had about 60,000 bugs since the beginning of time, Thursday, January 1, 1970.
- By the year 2070, the ratio of Radars to Earth’s population will reach 1.
Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.