Slashdot Mirror
Competiton: Mozilla's 200,000th Bug
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla's 200,000th bug will soon be reported. Not terribly exciting in itself, but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported to Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug reporting tool. The prize is a Mozilla 1.0 CD that might actually be worth something one day. Anyone can enter, so let's see if we can have a Slashdot winner (we can all share in the glory)! To help you, they're up to 178,325 and 51 bugs have been filled today. (NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.)"
At the risk of feeding:
For crashes, Mozilla has the talkback feature. If Mozilla crashes, and it hardly ever does anymore, all you need to do is type the url you visited, and click send. That's it.
For other bugs: people will, and do, report them if they are really annoyed with a bug and want to see it fixed. Even if only one in a thousand take the time to file a bugreport you'd still have a pretty large number.
Got brain?
According to the whois database :
;-)
Record created on 24-Jan-1998.
So, 1747 days have gone since this creation (I assume nobody could file bugs on mozilla.org before this date).
We now have 178,325 bugs, so the average is 102 bugs per day.
So, the next 21,675 bugs will be files in approximately 212 days, making the 200kth bug being filed around June 5th...
Now of course, we could assume that as Mozilla becomes stabler and stabler, the filings should now slow down logarithmically, making the filing so late that we'll have have switched to Phoenix 4.0+gno/kMutt in the meantime...
But why expecting a CD when we have apt-get ?
How, yes : because it would not be the 1.0 version but rather a subsequent one.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Competiton: Slashdot's 10,000,000th Typo
Posted by CmdrTaco on 08:00 AM November 5th, 2002
from the VA's-lowered-budget-can't-afford-spellcheckers dept.
CmdrTaco writes "Slashdot is about to see its 10,000,000th typo. Tis is the 9,999,999th one. Not terribly exciting in itself, but we're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the slashdot hoard will notice the milestone-breaking spelling mistake. The prize is a poster-size copy of Mrs. Malda's revealing low-cut shot." The typo will show up anytime now - good lukc everyone!
This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. The incentive is just to encourage fake bug reporting, with costs rather than benefits, to the whole project.
A better choice would have been to pick a random winner from valid bugs filed from today until bug 200K.
What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale
Each Bugzilla entry carries a "severity" anywhere from "enhancement" (request for additional functionality) to "trivial" (slight misalignment of text in form pushbuttons) to "minor" to "normal" to "major" to "critical" (usually a crash or data loss) to "blocker" (a build fails smoketests).
Will I retire or break 10K?
That figure represents all feature work, enhancements, dupes, metabugs, Chimera, CCK. Mozilla.org, Bugzilla (bugs about Bugzilla), internationalization, platform specific, mail/news, browser, embedding, chrome, documentation and actual bugs in existence. The number of genuine bugs of any importance in the browser is likely to be a small fraction of the total.
...and at about 12.30pm GMT, my inbox was suddenly deluged with entries. Even without looking, I knew why that would be... :-)
Gerv
Given some of the above comments, this needs saying. This is a fun contest, and the prize is small. Anyone who tries to spam the database in any way will only mean that we can't have this fun any more. So please don't. And it won't work anyway, because we'll notice and stop you.
:-)
If you have an automatic bug creation script, please point it at Landfill, the Bugzilla test installation, which needs all the test bugs it can get
Gerv