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Distributed Statistical Debugging
Luis Villa writes "The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project at UC Berkeley and Stanford is working on statistical debugging techniques to report, find, and fix the bugs that drive the most users crazy every day. A handful of outside bug volunteers have been running the project's special feedback builds for a few weeks, and that has generated some really interesting data. But for strong results they need more runs. /. has been known to generate those kinds of big numbers ;) Their site has feedback builds of several open source applications, and the entire project is open sourced. Read more about it, then install some applications, and help them make our free software better for everyone. I'm really looking forward to the end results."
if you want to track a lot of bugs try to hook it into windows :)
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
How can they tell which bugs are the culprits driving the users crazy every day? Do they monitor large numbers of keys being pressed and map out the physical keyboard layout to determine how hard the users head is smacking into the keyboard?
...
They patented error/bug feedback software or something last month.
this isn't the same thing at all.
the "stanford bug checker" is a static source analysis program. this is something else entirely, and arguably more useful.
debugging techniques to report, find, and fix the bugs that drive the most users crazy every day.
Can you do something about these ladybugs that are driving Midwesterners nuts, then?
personally i think that projects such as this are a good thing. the more people test software the small the chance of bugs being in the final release. now if only microsoft would follow suit...
sig censored by america
I guess it is a distributed project....
What if the feedback system has bugs in it?
It's a feature
Sorry...had to be said
Jason
When I boot my computer at work, it loads up Windows. Make it stop!
--- Ban humanity.
I didn't see any of the really interesting data referred to in the article on the website... anyone care to share a link?
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
A debugger that FIX BUGS?
What's next? A compiler that brews beer?
Isn't this what microsoft was trying to do when they implemented the error reporting?
This might be really cool in combination with things like distributed genetic programming. =) Are there any open source projects that combine various distributed programming/bug tracking techniques with a central web interface to track stats/view results, etc..?
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
From my reading of this, it sounds like the data is going to be architecture specific (i.e. x86, PPC). So that means that those hundreds of thousands of samples that are needed, would be needed for every architecture.
Hmph, mean they probably won't figure out why some programs are seemingly less stable on PPC :( But, I guess many bugs effect every architecture, so I can be happy about that ;)
Duplicates on Slashdot. ;-)
Not Americans. Americans only chimed in when it became clear that the Russians are kicking the crap out of Hitler. You can't imagine how seriously all this talk about Americans "winning" the WWII pisses off the people who fought with Wermacht for 5 years and lost 35 million brothers and sisters in combat to actually win the war.
I wager this is violating Microsoft's newly issued patent on crash reporting.
@de_machina
"/. has been known to generate those kinds of big numbers"
No, no, no!
Slashdot will MAKE YOU debug your app to see why it crashes under load. We don't actually help you figure out the problem.
Maybe if you'd incorporate your test into the slashdot website proper, then maybe you'd be on to something...
In my calculations Microsoft must have gotten at least 30,000 reports of this bug and it is still not fixed yet...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
so /. will stop losing comments into thin air like it did two of my replies to this article. :-|
More correct figure is about 35mln. Most of Stalin's repressions occured in late 30's, and they're not a part of 35 mln. There was no "alliance" with Hitler. There was, hovewer a pact that USSR and Germany won't attack each other which made a lot of sense, because in early 40's Germany had more military power than any single other country on the planet, and it was pointless for Russia to even try to defeat them alone.
Nobody turned over Jews, SS troops were good at finding them themselves. Nobody protected them much either, that's true. And nobody "enslaved" anybody. Yes, they've established socialist regimes in some Eastern European countries, but this is FAR from what one would call "enslavement" (the nations weren't even economically related). Merely a change of political regime (kinda what the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq TWICE, horribly shooting themselves in the foot in process of doing that).
These Berkeley pinkos really fooled me. I installed this "debugger" on my system. I was working with GIMP for about 15 minutes processing an innocent collection of pictures and suspiciously I got an email for a free sample issue of Enormous Ass Fancier Magazine. Let me tell you, I felt so violated. You can bet that as soon as I am through reviewing my sample issue, Berkeley will be hearing from me.
from the grasping_for_something_to_say_besides_innovation dept.
Viruses are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and the time between the delivery of a patch from Microsoft until hackers figure out workarounds is becoming dangerously short. In the case of the Blaster virus it was 25 days, Ballmer said
"When it gets down to five or 10 days a lot of our users will be in a tough position. Their [hackers'] exploits are getting more sophisticated," Ballmer said.
you wonder how these fauxking corepirate nazi payper liesense stock markup FraUD ediots can stay out of jail for yet another daze? defense lawyers. that's how. you're paying for it, as well as everything else.
What you'd read in high school history textbook wasn't true. :0) And no, Americans did not win WWII. They only chimed in in the end when it was already won.
Freedom of speech should not be extended to those who seek to curtail the freedom of speech
Why the hell not!? Freedom of speech is a right. Not a luxury good to be traded.
From reading the FA it appears that this is for RPM based distros only. Any plans for alternate distos?
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
I really hope slashdotters go out of their way to use this software, because I know the people working on it and they are great, and due to the complexity of the problem, it works best when there's insane amounts of people running it. The best part is that you don't have to do anything, just run your favorite programs to help out the study. And as for extending this to other architectures and stuff like that, you have to realize this is just a bunch of researchers who are starting to work on this issue, and that things like that will come to pass down the line. If you're really interested in the methodology, check out the site for everything you could possibly want to know on it!
What - no ebuild distribution? Just RPM?
I guess they don't want the thousands of gentoo users to participate... Shame - they're the sort to be likely to contribute something to said bug reports since they are more likely to know something about programming...
That's too bad, because the open source application most needing high reliability is Open Office. Don't get me wrong - Open Office is quite useable, and I experience fewer reliability problems with it than with Microsoft Office. However, making Open Office extremely reliable (far beyond most software) would help far more people than getting the GIMP more reliable.
I wish these folks well on their research. I also hope that they extend their tool enough to handle Open Office in the future.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Moooo.
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The value of American liberty lies not in the fact that we value or agree with the KKK, but simply that we allow them to exist on their own ideological merits. The value of the KKK is determined in a free and open manner by a free society, something 98% of the world apparently abhors.
So, you agree that the US is undemocratic then, and that the constitution is not fairly representing the majority of American's who abhor free speech?
(For the slow: If only 2% of the world doesn't abhor free speech, even if every single one of those people were in the US, they'd still be a minority as the US has 5% of the worlds population.)
I downloaded MozillaFirebird in spanish and I get the netscape quality feedback agent each and every time mozilla dies, I try to answer the questions but I never get the feeling something good is actually working
It is a widely known fact that 9 out of 10 German casualties were on Eastern (to them) front. Even when (in the end of the war) Allies landed in western Europe Hitler was still sending 80% of his troops towards the East. It sure was easy to liberate France considering the fact they fought with less than 20% of the worst-trained German troops. Americans weren't kicked out of Europe by Russians only because after the relentless 5 years in this war (yes, FIVE years) the economy and troops were so taxed it wasn't the time to start another war, especially with someone who provided you with financial support (however insignificant) and even with political support towards the end of the war.
So who defeated Hitler again?
Forget the propaganda you've read in your high school textbook. The US winning this war sound like if someone joined a fight when those fighting were already on the ground tired catching up with their breath and kicked the butt of the guy who seemed more tired. Had Hitler won in the USSR, there's little doubt the US would have joined him instead.
Actually... First time I remember seeing anything like this was from a company called FullCircle, who had a bug reporting tool that Netscape had packaged up into its client and called it the Netscape Quality Feedback Agent - but it was indeed FullCircle. Those crash reports got logged, and people actually did go through on a regular basis, especially after beta releases and milestone releases, and go looking through at all of the top crashers; top crash analysis days were regularly held, and people did honestly get a lot of useful information out of these crash reports. I sincerely wish there was something like this in open source land; something that tracked all of the crashes and created crash logs in open source software, that we could all use in our software. Hell, just imagine how much quicker games like EverQuest, WOW, or Shadowbane would get fixed if we didn't have to go through the headache of manual reporting to guarantee any kind of report whatsoever; if the company knew, within hours of a software release, that their software release was utterly fscked. (Which Netscape did, on occasion. :)
-- A mind is a terrible thing.
MS had this idea first? Netscape did this back in '98, maybe before.
Never mind, we asked for Stalin's help to fight Japan. Which he did. After the atomic bombs were dropped.
Yes, the app was at fault because that is what crashed. But the Windows API is famous for weak defensive programming practices, and while the app did something "wrong", often times you get crashes in API functions, which is something that shouldn't be happening.