Slashdot Mirror
Anatomy Of A Bug In Microsoft Office
bender writes "An insightful look at what it is like to track down and fix a bug in Microsoft Office is available from Microsoft's Blog site."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I can already fix MS Office bugs by myself!
1. Does it affect Clippy? Fix immediately!
2. Does it affect features? Fix this week.
3. Does it affect security? Fix when you get around to it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
what it is like to track down and fix a bug
:)
Track a bug? Sounds like trying to follow a single mosquito in the ranforest.
Too bad more time isn't spent on removing bugs from Microsoft products. Now if they'd just spend time fixing BEFORE products are released!
Step 1: Deny existence of bug.
Step 2: Classify bug as feature.
Step 3: Cave to user demand and try to fix bug.
Step 4: Introduce new bugs during the fix.
Step 5: Classify those bugs as features.
Step 6: Pretend bugs are fixed and continue playing Minesweeper.
That's a first!
or fixes:g /
h ttp://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://www.gentoo.org/
http://www.vim.or
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Here, drive this Yugo instead.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
One of my favorite Chris Mason quotes comes from that memo, "Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do."
Then it would seem humans working at Microsoft are less debugged than everybody else. Because *boy*, at some point Microsoft was a bug factory.
To their credit though, this is changing fast. Microsoft is a huge company that can turn on a dime, and they've understood that having shite engineers onboard won't do much good to their latest "trustworthy computing" PR stunt. Not to mention, they actually have a nice R&D shop now, not just the pretense of one anymore.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
the most annoying bug in Office will still be with us.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
"Brodie figured out that a document is really just a collection of pieces of text"
Brilliant
Hey guys, here's a hint: The internet is just a collection of data packets.. now fix the bugs in Internet Explorer please.
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
Humans are bugs, err, humans are viruses. Correction: Humans have bugs.
Programs are like onions. Ogres are like onions. Donkeys like cake.
Mac Office X is the red-headed step child of Microsoft development efforts
Microsoft is a lot like the police.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Why don't they fix that awful formatting in MS Word?
You know, push enter twice and it returns to the default font/size. That really bothers me.
Click here for a free picture of an iPod!
What are you talking about? That was a programmed feature!
"And, always remember that I can't fix what I can't see. I have to be able to reproduce the problem while being able to run some kind of diagnostic tool. The key to fixing a bug is predictability. Without predictability, I can't fix it, because without predictability I have no way to understand how the complex interactions in modern software cause the specific problem to occur."
I wonder if they'll do another writeup when they fix the next bug.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Adding new features and abilities to Word would affect a complex system like this in totally unpredictable ways. And, trying to debug such a complex system seems like an almost impossibly complicated task.
Now I know sarcastic answers will abound to this, but I wonder how much MS invests in testing such complicated programs? It has to be way, WAY more than they invest in the development of the program.
Now, I'm no Microsoft fanboy, but I am seriously impressed with Word. It never crashes on me, features always work as expected with other features and the interface does rock. I had no idea how complex the program was, and I am even more awed.
By the way, if you don't know much about complexity or chaos theory I recommend reading the following books to give you a nice appreciation of complex systems like this: COMPLEXITY and CHAOS.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
I figured out the missing step: Marketing!
So, from this article, we learn that MS's big-shot software architect was so inept that the undo system he implemented can exhaust file system resources.
It's now 2004. It's time for MS to just study the implementation of NSUndoManager, and "invent" the paradigm of recording changes in an undo/redo stack.
They are opening up and writing about software bugs - which certainly aren't unique to ms products... ummm... I guess that means they are *giving away* information, of which any thoughtful person could make some use.
What the heck, it's so much easier to recycle lame old ms bashing rhetoric.
Bring it on.
What is so darn hard about clicking the actual link to see for yourself? Or at the very least googling for the site for a quick check of legitimacy.
Stupid stupid stupid ...
Do you want it buggy today or robust tomorrow? One need only look at the overclocking community and throngs of beta-testers to work out the answer. History is littered with technically superior failures in the marketplace (Betamax, Divx, BeOS) and the reason is that the consumer is more fickle about price and features than about technical superiority or stability.
Read any book put out by Microsoft Press and it's plain there are a number of people there that are as or more capable than most open source programmers. But the open source programmer doesn't have to appease any person or schedule other than those he sets himself -- and can therefore program under much better circumstances.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
1. Word's undo is drain bamaged by design.
2. This created a Heisenbug.
3. It took MS several years to figure the OS runs out of file handles.
Remember, a bug is just another word for "upgrade incentive".
From on of the comments from the blog:
By the way I did try to report the bug via our $500,000+/year global support contract with Microsoft, and was told directly by our Microsoft support representative, and I quote, "I wouldn't know how to file a bug report for that." Never was able to get it addressed, even though I had two good sample documents for reproduction of the problem.
Half a million? No wonder Bill Gates has billions - He's not spending the money on developers.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Am I the only one who read that and instantly thought "There are a million reasons why that's a bad idea"?
Interesting award system.
Rik
1. Get assigned bug to fix; get distracted and read slashdot instead.
2. ???
3. Bug is fixed; I profit.
Hmm....
I'm not a smorgasbord.
From the article
But there is a benefit to discussing complexity because it does seem to impact how many bugs arise and the maintainability, upgradeability, and usability of the software.
It's not merely a philosophical issue, either. This is a real, practical issue that impacts millions of people everyday.
The complexity of interacting software components is like the dark side of Metcalfe's Law about the usefulness of networks increasing quadratically with the number of participants in the network.
The maintainability of software decreases as the number of interacting components increase and as the number of ways of interaction increases.
I've developed code for a long time and seen great ideas turn into great code with creeping useful features gradually added on until a day comes when you wonder how you ended up working on such a monstrosity.
A good friend once told me years ago
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Microsoft Code Has No Bugs
what a perfect place for a south park reference...
//sig
"But, Mr. Gates, it isn't like this bug is the first troublesome thing to come out of Microsoft. Let us not forget Clippy(TM)"
"Now, now, Microsoft has apologized for Clippy on several occasions!"
Just because I dont' care doesn't mean I dont' understand. - Homer
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
Long article, definately worth the read if you're thinking about going into testing. I marvel at how 'thourough' testing can be and still there's these ellusive bugs because it's simply impossible to track down every tiny (or not so tiny) fault in the code. Say what you want about Microsoft but this guy certainly has a good head on his shoulders.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
Have you read about all the new bugs that are being found in SP2.
Yes, and most of what is written is junk.
There are compaints about how the SP2 security panel can be spoofed.
Yes, they are uninformed compliants.
This allows a person to trick people into thinking their firewall and virus scan are all on and working normally.
Any person?
Microsoft's response... (paraphrased quote) "We are busy with other more important bugs at the time, don't bother us with these tivialities."
Umm.. no, thats a blantant distortion.
Here is the story you don't want to know:
A program running locally on the XP SP2 machine has the ability to overwrite the data store used to track and display the various updated components in XP SP2.
This isn't a remote vulnerability. It means that, simply put, a program can constantly overwrite the data that would indicate a virus scan hasn't taken place in 15 days, or that the firewall is off or open on certain ports, etc.
To have this "vulernability" be "exploited", first the protection would have to be subverted/turned off by the user. Nothing in this "exploit" allows an application to disable the features, just make them look as though they are in place. So after a program infilitrates the system and is running as an Administrator, it would be able to make the user think that the protection they already disabled was in fact running.
This is not a big deal. For example, let's say I had a program I could find a way to get onto a box with root access. I could just easily, if not more easily, spoof the security center interface and make it say what ever I wanted. I could just as easily spoof it to say "OH NO, GO DOWNLOAD THIS PATCH".
The point being this is a hole in the design or implementation. It's a social engineering attack. To be useful, the user would have to disable the protection on the machine; the user would then have to be convinced to download the trojan; the user would have to be induced to run the trojan; and the user would have to believe that he/she was in fact protected despite knowingly disabling the protection.
The nature of any operating system is that it responds to users actions. If any person/program can convince any user on any operating system to run any malicious binary as root/Administrator/etc than that box is exploitable by means of social engineering. Big deal. That's not new, it's not a security vulnerability per se, it's not anything but human nature.
gl4ss is completely correct.
Win95 was THE MOST ADVANCED OS in the world!
Win98 fixed all the bugs in Win95.
Win98SE fixed all the bugs in Win98.
Windows2000 is crash proof and the Unix killer!
Windows XP is even more stable than Win2K and will be sure to slay *nix.
Go digging through the press releases and gushing "journalists" for every single release (except WinME) since (and including) Win95. You'll see the same quotes over and over and over.
Several bugs have been sighted near the southern perimeter and some of our QA staff have been wounded in a couple of minor skirmishes. Strategic Command said the enemy's main move will not come for weeks and certainly not in this sector, though I am beginning to doubt.
27-08-2004 08:26The skirmishes have intensified and several QA squads are trapped between an unknown number of bugs. We even had a few lightning strikes beyond our perimeter, which took out our BugTraq listening post. I tried to call in for assistence from StratCom, because I suspect the main strike is happening here as we speak. 27-08-2004 08:54
The minor skirmishes have ceased along all sectors. We are trying to evacuate the wounded and salvage what's left of some of our equipment. 3rd QA batallion took heavy losses, as did 6th QA and 8th Helpdesk. What is this, some cat and mouse game they are playing with us?
27-08-2004 09:06All hell broke loose! While we were trying to evacuate the wounded, we found our sector under attack from multiple vectors, including artillery and naval support. Whatever remained of 3rd and 6th QA that was stationed in the rear has now been wiped out. 8th Helpdesk has been decimated and I had no other option to commit 24th, 12th and 2nd Developer batallion to the battle, at least untill reinforcements arrive. The enemy seems to be using a superior number of SFU-506 "Sasser" class fighters with ActiveX payloads. I nearly begged StratCom to send some "KB900364" SAM batteries.
27-08-2004 15:56We have pulled back and regrouped in Sector 56. 3rd, 4th, 6th QA got decimated. 8th, 12th and 15th Helpdesk have been routed as well. 24th, 12th and 2nd Developer have been utterly destroyed to save the rest from annihilation. The few who remain are now en-route back home. Some are shell-shocked, one fat guy keeps jumping around yelling "Developers!"... Poor sod, this is war at it's worst.
"NT was 100% new code" ... except, I assume, for all that VMS code that DEC sucessfully sued Microsoft over.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Gee, I wonder why.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Describes a huge chunk of my life in Software QA. It's an example of what is great about MS software and what is awful:
Great: dedicated test resources to chase down corner cases/non-obvious scenarios, accountability for broken scenarios, etc
Awful: Iterations of releases built on legacy code means no one (or two, or three) people can understand the problem or scope the fix.
For all the complaints here about MS code I wonder that no one has noticed the Windows weakness that is not getting exploited..? If MS software is really as bad as everyone here makes out then why doesn't someone do it better? Blah blah Linux blah blah... Build software for Windows that people can use without rebuilding their systems. If you do it well enough tell them it's even better on Platform X.
I'm not enamored with everything MS does, but I spend far more time patching my Linux box and updating apps on my Linux box than I do my Win XP boxes. Of course part of that is "release early, release often" and part of it is adding new features to catch up with much of the usability that XP has. But anyone who post on this thread about MS products having more bugs isn't eally being honest with themselves or the community.
And in closing, OSS will never sucees until supporterd drop the "Anything But Microsoft" rhetoric and point out what Linux and OSS in general do better.
Memo to Microsoft: it may be spelled correctly, but that doesn't guarantee it's the right word.
...laura
I take it you haven't read the Bible?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
I do understand all the complexities involved in trying to fix a bug the way the article describes. That's exactly why Open Source is superior. Instead of wasting a decade while 3 or 4 guys look at the problem from different angles, we'd have 3 or 4 hundred guys working on it not because it's their job but because they need it fixed. That's why fixes usually take days or hours on Open Source products.
OTOH, lots of people know enough programming to solve that kind of problem to their satisfaction. We don't have to submit that fix, so we don't have to worry too much about the side effects of the fix. That enables us to keep working with the product until some official (and usually better) solution comes along.
Insert predictable rant here about how there are no bugs in Free software because any user could fix the bug themselves...
I agree. No doubt there will be a few who suggest the many-eyes approach will fix all the world's evils... it won't, it will let a developer who can be bothered to sift through the thousands/millions of lines of code necessary to fix the bug - this is a dedicated programmer and deserves credit for that... the world is not full of a large number of dedicated intelligent programmers who have time to do this for all, or even a small fraction of code they encounter - if you use Open SOurce (I use BSD/Windows with open/prop apps, don't bother with the 'jokes') do really look through every line of code looking for a buffer overflow exploit, do you pro-rata what you look through with the assumed userbase, do you assume others will do the QC/QA/peer review? Sure it could be made to be ultra-secure, and for this I am all in favour of Open Source (there is absolutely no security through obscurity, as those that need to know will know), but I really have a gripe with those that blindly use the many-eyes assumption and group-think, auto-mod others who disagree. If you want to criticise MS Office, then do something about it.
MS Office is massive, MS Office may be bloated to those who does not use all those features (and who does?!), but the idea of modulising Office suites, good or bad idea that may be, died miserabley in the last 90s.
MS Office is inferior, functionality and UI wise, to specialist applications made for a certain job - I would never do serious statistical analysis in Excel nor would i distribute a Word doc, nor would I make a webpage in Word(!).
Criticise it for valid reason, not knee-jerk group think, but it does serve as a good lowest-common-denominator suite that integrates OK for an intermediate solution. Open software may also suck at many tasks, but carries the benefit it is open. If I see the 'many eyes' justification for all opensource software refered to again, without proper justification I think I will throw my computer out of the window - please mods - don't just mod something down because you disagree with it, if you disagree contribute and bring effective discussion rather than pushing an opinion out of the room - save downmods for things which are clearly Offtopic, Flamebait or Trollish (and baiting discussion is not Flamebait, it is Discussion-Bait).
Very interesting read. One thing I have to dissagree with is about needing to see/reproduce a problem in order to fix it. It's true that not being able to reproduce makes finding a bug much harder but it's not impossible. As a server programmer I frequently have to debug race condition bugs, corruption bug or other problems that are not reproduceable at will. Sometimes good detective work can lead you to a find and sometime not. Often you end up having to add some diagnostic code that hopes to gather more information on the problem the next time someone encounters it. If it happened just once, often we cant fix it but then it's not that important... If it happens "once in a while" and/or "only in production at a large customer site" then we can usually fix it given enough time to work on it. I actually enjoy these kinds of bugs :-)
-Akiba
Wow - they have real people working there. I always imagined faceless robo-droids, mechanically barking out: I cannot reproduce the problem, please ring PSS...
Get your own free personal location tracker
This article could have been half the length, and it would have been just as informative and a lot more interesting.
It's for real. I normally don't go for these things but...Free ipods (click here to get yours) .
They spent years in the dark that the "disk is full" error was caused by too many open files.
You'd think that if the disk isn't actually full, you'd look at other places that can generate that error. Even though obviously the error should have been along the lines of "too many open files".
Note that this underlying problem isn't just a technical one. You get over-general error messages on windows (and with various badly designed software) all the time.
The least you can do when you pop-up an error is to give some additional information; like where it occurred ("Bad Thing Happened in somefile.c line #456"), so even if, like in this case, you can't reproduce the error in a debugger, you know where the error got kicked into being. Not quite as useful as a full stacktrace like in Java, but pretty usefull.
Compare this to how (non-Microsoft) geeks write error codes; from man ep;
ep0: 3c509 in test mode. Erase pencil mark!
This means that someone has scribbled with pencil in the test area on the card. Erase the pencil mark and reboot. (This is not a joke).
Even if you don't understand the error code, at least you can google for its pretty unique description "erase pencil mark".
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Actually, another missing step is:
PATENT IT!
wake up and hold your nose
I wonder how many programmers have run this scenario in their mind when doing some hypothetical designing of a hypothetical editor. Unfortunately, I bet its still patentable.
what a bunch of morons work at M$.
Let's see...
Introduce some gobbledeegook, heath-robinson-esq software design (ala piece-tables) just so the user can copy/paste ever so fast. <quote>For example, if you copy text from one document to another, you don't have to actually copy the text from one file to another--at least not right away</quote>
yes - therein lies the screw-up!!
They then live with this dog's breakfast of a code base for upwards of 10 (yes ten!!) years until its time to fix it. And the developers cant even work out which "Open file limit" has been reached. Well not very quickly anyway.
I have seen so much of this kind of "engineering" it makes me bleed from my ears. What's more, the author of this article portrays the story with so much nobility.
Things to always bear in mind I find are:
KISS
OCCAM's RAZOR
DONT TRY TO BE TOO SMART
END_OF_RANT
"Have you read about all the new bugs that are being found in SP2."
Have you also actually read and thought about the complaints? If so you would know that most of them are nonsense. Furthermore, where is that 'so-called' paraphrased statement from? I would highly doubt if that was an actual Microsoft employee that said that they're busy fixing other important bugs.
I am not a fan of MS' business practices, but it deserves to be said: MS Office is by far the best suite of office productivity applications available at any price.
My complaints with Office (and there are plenty) do not involve stability. Office is very stable, certainly more stable than OpenOffice or any other competitor. My complaints center around MS Office's tendency to get all up in my shit all the time: automatic spelling/syntax/formatting "correction" and the like.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Is this new? Is it news?? Lets see the link shows that it is dated 5/19/04. Wow way to stay current and up to date on what is going on. I just figured out why we should care, it gives us free reign to bash Microsoft. Wow and to think I actually wasted some time to look at it cause I thought it would be interesting.
It's pretty scary if this guy is one of the better programmer's at Microsoft. For his benefit, here is how you decode one of these uber tricky bugs:
Funny, I've never had this problem with vim.
For this unbiased and insightful news!
Isn't it great that the Mac unit can show the Windows guys the right way to fix a bug?
Wake up.
yeah... like google was the first one to come up with this...
good luck kiddo...
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
Open Office has crashed on me many more times than Word. I agree that Word is cluddered but their are many other people that use all those features. I tried Open Office... it crashed a lot, and even if it didn't I'm not all that impressed by it. It's basically Word with less (much less) features and it crashes more often (at least for me). I too am no microsoft fanboy, I'm not a fan boy of everything really. I like everything. Open Office is nice but their is a difference between being better and exaggerating something to fit ones own agenda. Personally I haven't seen anything come out of open source that doesn't have an equal closed source alternative. (in terms of each has it's goods and it's bads.)
I'll make you a deal. You pray to God for help and I'll stop the moment he shows up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you have auto-save turned on (it's on by default in Word for OS X), Word saves at N-minute intervals behind your back, and you get the same buggy behavior as you do when you do it manually. All you have to do is leave a document open for a long time.
I was asked by my supervisors to try and use MS tools to minimize their grief in reading my output. So, while I was debugging a program on a remote machine (via X11), I left a Word document open for my notes. After a few days, I suddenly couldn't save any more. I gave up and started keeping my notes in an emacs buffer (which has infinite undo, and can stay up for days with no trouble - go figure).
I remember thinking at the time, "this has got to be a file-handle leak problem". I'm surprised to see I was right!
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Sorry, but I was not impressed. It took these
guys months to figure out that they were
running up against an OS level error. I am not
a windows developer - but geesh don't these guys
have the equivalent of a core dump/stack trace
that could have pinpointed this in a few minutes?
The whole thing sounds like something a co-op/intern type person could handle in a week,tops.
"Just pick any line of code and you have a one in three chance of finding one."
Have you seen the source code to MS office? Do you have any basis for your claim or is it just some shit you just decided to say of the top of your head?
I was thinking all the programming was done by Borg drones who are the epitome of perfection after being assimilated by Bill-Gatus of Borg.
Looks like i was wrong...
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
2. Bug gets labeled "undocumented feature"
tags 682568 + wishlist unreproducable upstream wontfix help
thanks
I'm more a fan of Windws than Office. I find word (the only one I have much experience with) to be a complete pain in the butt that keeps sticking in options I didn't want.
I much prefer something much more simplistic, like ABI. But my documents are usually just 4-10 page papers, nothing impressive or fancy so I really don't need much at all.
I think those special needs people often get sick of some of the extra features that other special needs people use. Maybe Microsoft should have multiple versions of Word? Or at least, multiple modes.
We all know how to track down bugs in Microsoft programs... you use them! hey hey!
I think they meant in the code... that part's probably harder. Cause you have to not disturb any of the OTHER bugs in there! HEY HEY!
stuff |
I click on the article and get:
Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
---
Well, if you can't even debug a web server, I don't know if you have much of a chance with something as complex as Word.
Oh, the web server IS as complex as Word?
There's your problem.
Sigh.
D
If it were designed properly, it wouldn't be susceptible to attack. Not even social engineering.
What people expected out of the security panel is MAC, Manditory Access Control. There shouldn't be access for anybody, Administrator included, to mess with the insides. Those settings are supposed to be unmodifiable by anyone except the kernel through the proper channels.
Of course, Windows doesn't have MAC. (Neither does Linux, except for some Government patches.)
As for spoofing the security panel, it ought to be attached to a SAK, Secure Attention Key, somehow. That's how Windows defends against other spoofings, such as the login screen.
Sounds like the sort of pokey debugging processes I go through writing little programs in my spare time!
What about stuff like Test Driven Development and Unit Testing? Would that have made any odds here?
To a novice user, there is virtually no rhyme or reason to using Emacs. Yes, any number of minor modes can be added or deleted to Emacs, but the "beautiful adaptation" mostly relies on the user knowing exactly what to look for.
Word, on the other hand, is not as modular as Emacs because it is designed to be a total package for the user. When Microsoft adds the comments or highlighting feature to Word, this feature becomes apparent from the menus itself. Your typical office temp cannot use code highlighting in Emacs, but they can figure out how to use new features in Word.
I've used Emacs, Lucid Emacs and Xemacs for many years. Comparing Emacs to Word is like comparing Excel to Mathematica. They're for completely different uses and target audiences. Logically, the code bases have no relation or comparison to each other as a result.
And why even bother with such machinations, when you can merely send the user an email with: Dear Sir, Please first send this email to everyone you know. Then, click Start...Run Type format c: Thank you, Your Administrator. People will unlock PW protected zip files and execute whatever they find inside. No real need for tricky exploits. The bugs are in the user.
as i clicked on the
Details
SqlException
Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
This "epiphany" is probably the root of how messy the doc file format is.
Now back to the rest of the article...
(...) No doubt there will be a few who suggest the many-eyes approach will fix all the world's evils... it won't, it will let a developer who can be bothered to sift through the thousands/millions of lines of code necessary to fix the bug - this is a dedicated programmer and deserves credit for that... the world is not full of a large number of dedicated intelligent programmers who have time to do this for all, or even a small fraction of code they encounter (...)
It's not about actively doing it, it's about having the possibility to do so should 1) the need arise and 2) the person in question have the appropriate skills/willingness.
It's good to have possibilities. It's good to have choices. A free society is about choices (as you most likely have already heard countless times on Slashdot).
We can't reasonably expect every single Open Source to hunt for bugs, but we hope there are at least a few doing it in every fairly large open source project.
Score: i, Imaginary
I'd say the costs of testing complex programs are huge, but only a small portion of the total cost is borne by Microsoft. After all, where do you think most of their bug reports come from -- the testing department, or their users? Your testing department only needs to be big enough and thorough enough to make it run well enough for the users. The users then do the remainder of the testing as a matter of course in general use, and the bugs are dealt with using "service packs". There may also be the intermediate phase of "beta testers" who try the thing out in the real world, but prior to first official release.
I dislike Microsoft a great deal on a number of levels, but I don't actually see this pattern of behaviour as exceptional. After all, is Word any different to OpenOffice in this regard? If I were to snipe at Microsoft, I'd cast aspersions on their general attitude towards quality (especially security-related quality), but not their externalised testing, which seems pretty much par for the course. So although Microsoft's sins are many, this isn't an area where I'd single them out for criticism. That's not to say I like the status quo -- I think we're still pretty much in the dark ages of software engineering.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
This doesn't take into account the window of opportunity for a virus/worm infecting a machine between discovery of a bug and the release of the patch from microsoft onto windowsupdate
This also doesn't properly address the countless users on 56k dial up - how are they supposed to download all those patches?
Sorry, I couldn't resist. God knows these kinds of things can be tricky. You just carefully track down the root cause of the problem, and fix it structurally, right? Let's see:
So, um, no structural fix? Just local band aids to stop the bleeding? I suppose... that would work... If your program is so big and fragile that anything but the simplest fix might introduce a whole boatload of unknown problems... Yes, that's a common problem with closed source software. What would also have helped is a more meaningful error message. Why show a "Disk full" message when the file descriptor table is full? It would certainly be nice if Word was a bit more predictable. Maybe the complexity has something to with it.Ah, forget it. Probably just a philosophical quagmire.
Exactly! Making things modular, and limited to single operations with no side effects, allows you think about how they interact far more easily, in no small part because it makes the actual interactions fewer.
Read The Art Of Unix Programming, particularly the chapter on compactness and orthogonality, to fully understand this.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
You do realize that to properly patch any of the Suse/Redhat distros from their released CD bundle the download is much bigger than (sometimes 2-3 times) the 75mb one for SP2.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A WYSIWYG, structured document editor like FrameMaker is what is needed.
Yay for Microsoft and Apple! I'm glad they got together and cooperated. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs make a great combo! With Apple's coolness and Microsoft reliable software like WMP, Office and Internet Explorer, the world is a better place.
:)
The fact that their sofware works on my Mac makes Microsoft totally awesome in my book
Crimson
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
Guess what: Once you have arbitrary code running on your system, it can do whatever it wants (if you are running as root) including spoofing UI to make you think you haven't been pwned. This isn't new and isn't really a "bug" that can be fixed, it's just a fact of life. The fact that this is the worst complaint you can come up with about sp2 is demonstration of its quality, not its bugginess.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Because almost all of the people who are idiotic enough to click on the "Free screensaver!1!one!1eleventy!1" emails are too fucking lazy to follow instructions. I mean we are talking about people who are so dumb that they must be absolutely refusing any opportunity to learn about the machines they work with. In other words, it's hard to make people jump through hoops to destroy their machines. That's not to say a few people will fall for it, but we would not have the massive worm and trojan mess that we have today if it weren't for MS's idiotic marketing-driven email client design.
If you can't figure out what the hell could have possibly gone wrong given a few parameters and the general area, your code is too spaghetti-ed up. The only excuse is "we can't fix the bug because we suck at teh coding."
My spiffy new Mac doesn't have this bug. Maybe more Linux/Open Office users should switch. :)
That would mean like 3, maybe 4 write-ups a year.
Thank$ a lot. I wa$ almo$t out of them. Have to $pare at lea$t few of them $o that I can $ign.
But now I u$ed tho$e that you gave me. Can you by any chance $end me more $??? I mean, MUCH MORE.
Thanx
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
"...The least you can do when you pop-up an error is to give some additional information; like where it occurred ("Bad Thing Happened in somefile.c line #456"),..."
No, no, no, wrong, wrong, WRONG! Bad geek! [flourishes rolled-up newspaper]
This idea - dumping debug info into dialogs that will be seen and used by end users - went out with the ark. It''s probably worse than what it seeks to replace in that rather than being merely uninformative, it's downright confusing.
Remember that the vast majority of Word users do not have any idea what a source file is or how it relates to their computing experience. We - software developers - have no business expecting users to respond intelligently to the runes which rule our lives.
An error dialog should inform the user that there is a problem and if possible, focus on the solution to the problem. Eg. "Close down some apps before you try to run Doom 3" etc.
T&K.
Political language
I find it unbelievable that experienced developers would not think immediately about both an application and an OS limit on the number of open files. Maybe these Microsoft developers really weren't so experienced. Maybe the blog really is just as uninteresting as it seemed to me.
What about a meaningful error message? Of course they couldn't find the bug with the message "Disk full" if the problem was the number of open files.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
It's the worst of all possible systems, except for all the rest.
Truly, I wish they'd fix bugs that folks like Woody Leonhard and the crew in his "Lounge" have been harping about for a seven years, now (example: GetCrossReferenceItems in Word's VBA returns the wrong number of items in some circumstances -- still broken from '97 to 2003 versions).
On the other hand, Office isn't going away: few large corporations are going to drop it in favor of OpenOffice, especially when you deal with partners, contractors, etc. etc. who all use Word.
On the still other hand... I can build you a template that will avoid 90% of the pitfalls that out-of-box Word places in your way. The other 10%? That's when you paste into this nice safe environment text you'd created elsewhere.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Maybe this seems trivial to you, but I think most of us when designing a document format would try to put "The" before "dog", by instinct. It makes sense.
In an output format, perhaps. It's a good idea. However, you're not thinking about it properly, from a programmer's perpective.
Writing a text editor is actually quite hard, mostly because the text is not static. You can't just parse through the loaded text once, you have to keep it in memory and allow edits to it efficiently.
When writing editing software (such as vi, etc.), we programmers all thought the obvious answer was a "line table". A list of pointers to each line of text in the file. Each line is independently allocated. That way, a user can enter new text on the line, add, delete, etc., and we don't have to make a complete copy of all lines that follow it and shift them up/down in memory.
Likewise, scrolling is easy. Does the screen show lines 1250-1280? Just go to offset 1250 in the line table and get the next 30 line pointers, then render each line. You don't need to parse through then entire file to find each line.
When we moved from character-terminal line editing to wysiwyg, there's not much different, except the line table is no longer fixed to lines, but it's kind of random. It could be paragraphs, lines, pages, or a mix of all as the document gets cut-and-pasted about. Cut and paste within the document is just a case of splitting the lines on the selection borders and re-building the line table. You don't need to copy the actual text selection.
Finally, when you save to disk, you have two options:
1) Just make a nasty raw memory-dump or a fixed-up memory-dump, so it's quick to load back in. This is what Word does (or did).
2) Actually go through your document and generate a structured, easily parsable format without any of your internal gubbins. That makes loading and saving harder, but interoperability much easier.
So, because Word just makes a dump of its internal editing structures, they appear in the output format. Both having editing structures and just naively dumping your workspace to disk is very "trivial" and "obvious" to programmers.
Ahh. But the parent poster said:
So technically, it is stable (doesn't crash), has a lot of nice featurs (and a lot of annying ones) and is intuitive to use (for the most part). He was pointing out the positives of Office, of which there are many. There are also a lot of negatives. But that can be said of most software.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a web.config configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its mode attribute set to Off.
<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->
<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode=Off/>
</system.web>
</configuration>
Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the defaultRedirect attribute of the application's <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.
<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->
<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode=RemoteOnly defaultRedirect=mycustompage.htm/>
</system.web>
</configuration>
its microsoft. they don't have bugs
they have "unpublished features"
like the function office calls randomly called void
Randomly_Crash_And_Delete_Document(void)
right, just like that one
i wish they had at least made it predictable
like the paperclip guy could pop up and say
"it looks like word is going to crash. would you like to save
your document?"
In the blog comments Larry Osterman said three times that he was surprised that MAC OS X had a 'painful' open file limit of 256 - Even after 3 different people telling him it is otherwise(that it is a soft limit and can be changed)!
Talk about stubborn "NT is great all else is pity" mal-attitude!!
I mean hot damn! They found a bug and fixed it!
Let's pat those boys at Redmond on the back!
I hope it does not take another two years to find and fix the next one......
Ok, someone had better let these people into the secret.... http://www.vim.org/
From my experience with OSS, there are very few projects with more than three or four active developers. Sure, some like the Linux kernel, etc, get oodles of folks looking at the code, but for an average project most seem to have only a few active developers, with the rest being testers. So no, you don't have three or four hundred developers working on something.
On the other hand, if a major bug crept up in something a good deal of people used, e.g. Apache, then I wouldn't be surprised if there was a sudden surge of folks looking at the code to help with the bug hunt. But for day-to-day average projects? I don't think so buddy.
Damien
I've been using Notepad2. It's supports syntax highlighting and is fast, free and open source!
Tish and pish.
In 1979 Fairlight was providing sequencers with non linear editing that held data out of order in memory and reassembled it in real time, with a 2000th of a second margin for error.
Numbers, letters, what's the difference....
I remember thinking at the time, "this has got to be a file-handle leak problem". I'm surprised to see I was right!
It's not a leak if it's still using those files.
Boy, that sounded awkward. The problem does not reproduce. The problem is reproducible. You reproduce the problem. A bannana is edible. You eat a bannana. The bannana eats? No.
Why didn't the developer try running Word without the debugger? Didn't the developer know the debugger changed the OS's open file limit?
So the Word team was only able to figure out what went wrong thanks to Word's portability to OS X, where they could use different debugging tools.
Thats a good example to remember next time anyone questions whether cross-platform portability is worthwhile, particularly on projects where there isnt an immediate customer demand for more than one platform..... Does a single-platform approach cost you anything? yes - it locks you out of all the development, debugging, and testing options that are native to other platforms.
- logs (they always work even if it's time consuming to add them)
- build a release version with debug info (usually this will do the trick)
- run a debug version and try to attach the debugger when the error happens (for example if you use some 3rd party code that prevents you using the debugger (like Windows Media DRM), this is the best way to go)
When you have a consistent way to reproduce a bug half of the problem is already solved.
The real pain in the ass is when there is no consistent reproduction.
Oh, your Ferrari has a broken cupholder?
Here, drive this Yugo instead.
Which one is the Ferrari and which one is the Yugo? Don't think about this question for more than two seconds otherwise your head will explode!!
"Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do." We work to minimize the bugs in the software we ship, but they'll always be there.[emphasis mine]
And Microsoft thinks they're ready for the Enterprise Market....
I did RTFA. I'm trying hard not to flame, but this guy is a downright pathetic programmer. I've fixed more complicated bugs in the last week than this. And his defense - Word is complicated - just doesn't cut it:
There used to be a time when programmers were more professional.
Quite frankly, I hate to see this attitude in programmers. If you are charging for the code you write, you should at least have the professionalism to fully debug it before release. Your customers deserve better than to have your software ruin their business.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I'm getting
Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".
Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.
Engineers need structure to work in. There needs to be a good number of senior engineers for all the juniors. The right priorities need to be set and if necessary holding off on new functionality when it can't be delivered at a sufficient quality level. On the other hand it may be the fault of overall management for being too marketing driven.
It isn't an overnight shift. QA shouldn't be a department to itself, quality management should be integrated into the development proces with a total buyin from everyone, even Marketing who must understand that Microsft's image is being dented badly by poorly behaved software. This is why even if Microsoft is doing more than just going through the motions, it will take a long time for the changes to come through the company.
It is much more than, for example, the change when Microsoft finaally realised the importance of the Internet.
See my journal, I write things there
I actually read the article:-) I understand that MS Word is a large piece of software, even larger than the article about it. Still some of this hunting tail seems pretty amaturish. Like some guy getting an honorary title for implementing multilevel undo? I know a professor who had his 2nd year colledge students do that as a homework, for a vector-oriented drawing program. A homework, not even a project. Add all this crap about "not being able to debug without a debugger" and it makes a pretty good laugh - the guy sounds as if they are proud of inventing Heisenberg bugs there - right after they forgot all about debugging prints.
From the MSDN Blog:
.Net Framework. With .Net behind me, nothing can stop me! And, maybe I'll publish my source. More on this later...
Well, not directly, but they sure took the wind out of my sails with their new Picasa Photo Organizer and corresponding photo publisher Hello. I've been working on a photo editor/publisher application for personal use off and on for around 2 years. Lately, I've been think about how a lite weight, easy to use solution would be a big hit among new parents/grandparents like myself. Here they go giving it away for free. Who could do such a thing?
You know what? I will not be daunted. I will rise up from my defeat and create a better application. That'll show 'em. One that publishes your photos to your blog, other users of your application, or via email. Wait, Hello already does that? How about cropping and reformatting your photos and organizing them into an album. What, Picasa has that covered?
But, aha! I'll bet their solution doesn't use the power of Visual Basic.Net and the
Emphasis mine. having never read the MSDN blog before and seeing this now, all I can say is "OMFG"...
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Well, he ran it through the spell checker, but maybe the next innovation M$ should put in Word is a grammar checker.
Er...how exactly?
You made a claim (i.e. that Microsoft advertised 99.99999% uptime for their servers).
It was wrong. Someone pointed out it was wrong (including a short explanation).
Exactly how is that filling in the blank?
You made a mistake. It happens to all of us. My advice is to deal with it.
CSV, Perl, and LaTeX in emacs? And his sig is lisp!
Never trust a lisp programmer! Err... Correction, there are no lisp programmers, only true believers.
Second, it should be XML, Python, and LaTeX in emacs. And heck, while we're using emacs anyway, screw Python, let's use elisp.
However, the parent post really *is* informative: use LaTeX for anything you really care about.
I just do all my word processing in html.
No, really. They found out the reason for that bug ONLY LAST YEAR?
That's simply incredible. Unbelievable. I found out the cause of that bug BACK IN 1999.
I'm not joking. We had a lot of customers complaining of this bug in Word 6.0 and Office 98. My usual recommandation? "Upgrade to Mac OS 9, it will make it (mostly) go away."
That's because one of the significant improvements Mac OS 9 offered over previous versions was how Apple had increased the number of total open files in the system. See this article.
At the time, we surmised that the "disk full" error was probably not really a "disk full" error, and was probably caused by something else. Our initial uses and reports from OS 9 showed that this issue almost never occured in the new system, and since one of the major changes was to increase the number of open files, we easily guessed this was the cause of the error. This change was also shown to solve a number of issues in other software and situations.
Can someone explain to me why they only found solved the issue in 2003???
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I see this as a pity play by M$, wanting users to just chill about bugs because they're so damned hard to fix. Well, excuse me, but last time I checked Microsoft wasn't giving Office software away for free, and if someone is going to shell out beaucoup bucks for something they have a right to demand it works as advertised.
Cry me a river, Microsoft. I'll save my pity and empathy for people who do community or open source development.
"Don't matter how New Age you get, old age is gonna kick your ass." - Utah Phillips
Microsoft's so good at creating bugs that it has become art!
TextPad
It does a lot of the languages with keyword highlights, and the feature I like the best is it adds a menu item in the drop down menu when you click on a file, any file, it adds "Open in Tex Pad" menu item, so you can easily open any file in textpad. Also if the file you select to open in textpad is a binary file, it will open it in its hex editor.
Patches~
The worst part of being athiest.... You don't have anyone to talk to during orgasm!
Actually, this "your every disk is full" behaviour occured in Word6 with the very first and *immediate* save of a newly-created blank document that had not been edited *at all*.
The workaround was to load SHARE with absurd parameters (IIRC, files=512 and locks=4096, or something on that order -- I don't have my archived Win3.1 setup handy to check the exact numbers). Yes, this was M$'s official fix, which I got from their tech support way back when. Winword6 would ordinarily add the SHARE loadline itself, but occasionally failed to do so, and then you'd see the problem.
So M$ is still missing a critical piece of the diagnosis. I've contended for years that this bug hails from the DOS4 era (probably originating with Word286), and derives from some kludge that relies on the DOS4 SHARE fix to avoid leaving files open on disk. Witness not only how Winword6 required SHARE per above, but also how to this day SETVER sets the reported OS to DOS4.1 for winword.exe (and for excel.exe).
Friend of a friend who'd tracked the behaviour in a debugger said the root issue is that Word was writing to a null pointer.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Visio was better before Microsoft bought it and rolled it back one version (by cutting a lot of functionality that was in the last version). It's great again--even better than before the purchase--but the version rollback was sad and pissed off a lot of Visio users. The only thing they added was the MS logo.
Also, I spent 399.99 for Office:mac 2004 standard edition (no upgrade). No project, no access available. Unfortunately, I needed it for work (otherwise I just accept the few problems I have with OOo). The kicker was when OOo was able to open a file that Office:mac reported errors on.
Why do you think Project is great? I will grant that it is cheap, but have you ever used any other project management software? The *only* thing project does well is produce Gantt charts.
Powerpoint on the mac rocks. It's all about the rotating cube transition. Seriously. Also, have you ever used Powerpoint with a projector connected as a second monitor instead of as a mirror of your primary display? Doing so will allow you to see your speaker notes and outline while the audience just sees your slides. AFAIK, OOo doesn't have this capability (somebody please correct me).
When was the last time you used Access? I just trained a Psychologist to use it rather effectively with about an hour of training. I think Access is extremely usable, for what it does. Also, recent versions of Access allow you to use MSDE instead of Jet as the database engine. MSDE is SQL Server crippled, but it is still extremely capable.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
MS has the bet R&D dept in the world, and it's called Apple Computer. Take 280 South from SFO, get off at the De Anza exit in Cupertino. Right there. Can't miss it.
This is probably only becuz BillyG and SteveyB (or the "BB brains" as I like to think of them) don't read /. As soon as they find out that it has no near term ability to crush their competitors they'll shut it down and re-direct the funds to another sponsored analysis.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
haha, how random. I love it!
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
In 2001, my girlfriend was forced to do her honours thesis in Word. It was around 120 pages, split into two files. She had to split it at page 99, because if she opened the thesis with more than 99 pages in Word, it fell over, thankfully without corrupting the file but still losing the work done since her last backup (made at 98 pages fortunately) as she was unable to open the "99 page + new work" file :( This was 100% repeatable on four different Windows machines that I tried it on. Even crashed a Mac she tried it on.
It was at this point she switched to Mandrake + Openoffice and hasn't looked back since.
And this is how we are baited by the flame.
Nanogator's post (and all followup posts in the thread) should be mod'd flamebait.
Actually, the original one should be mod'd as troll.
Sorry that you're heavily involved here.
wow.
Is this a veiled reference to 12 Ways to Crush Your Own Testicles?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
"Derp de derp."
Insightful and Underrated?
I'm disappointed in you moderators.
In the spirit of "dumbing it down", here's a rundown of why I'm disappointed.
NG's comment is based on a response to NG's previous comment. In that previous comment, NG wrote 3 sentences (and included a quote):
QUOTE - "Windows2000 is crash proof and the Unix killer!"
1 - "I remember that."
2 - "They claimed that 2000 server had an uptime of 99.99999%. (5 nines, that was one of their slogans.)"
3 - "Heh I've had good luck with Windows servers, but that claim is misleading."
#1 is impossible to dispute.
#2 has specific values which can be easily disupted.
#3 is an opinion based on #2 and QUOTE.
FF exposes an error in #2 and is correct. 5N (or 5 nines) means "0." followed by 5 nines (0.99999 or 99.999%).
NG then gets PO'd about having "every single sentence" scrutinized (only one of three in this case). The entire rant is arrogant and pedantic.
And this is insightful or underrated? Sad.
It was flagged troll because Apple and Microsoft have paid astroturfers lurking on key message boards frequented by developer types.
RTFC
Anybody know of the Excel in OfficeXP network file save bug fix? When saving an excel file to a network drive, you occasionally (an unpredicably) get the unable to save temp file error. It also manifests itself as a file is in use error.
I've turned off oplocks on my SMB servers and it occurs less often but still rears its head on occasion. Anti-virus turned off, client oplocks turned off, etc... still same problem.
Clues????
The first rule of slashdot moderation is that you don't endlessly bitch and whine about slashdot moderation.
The author seems to be really attached to his debugger. He should learn to use the printf() the most powerful debugging tool ever devised.
Why does Slashdot keep banning me?
Just for the record:
.99999 , which is 6 seconds of downtime per week.
Five nine's is 99.999% =
Considering that one Windows virus can knock out a system for many,many,many seconds it's a absurd claim.
I doubt that anyone had a reliability study to back up that claim. It was most likely just marketing fluff.
vb
I gave up and started keeping my notes in an emacs buffer (which has infinite undo, and can stay up for days with no trouble - go figure).
Emacs keeps auto-save files, too.
IIRC, it's setup by default to be something like 300 keystrokes before autosaving.
Many, many years ago with NFS over a flaky network and fast typing I could detect a noticeable pause in Emacs when it did its autosave thing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
So technically, it is stable (doesn't crash), has a lot of nice featurs (and a lot of annying ones) and is intuitive to use (for the most part)
I would dispute #3, given that if I type my name and hit space then the document contains something other than my name (unless I grovel around in config options and turn off the "Autocorrect spelling" misfeature). At least that was true last time I used Word.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
...is a pretty good analogy when you thnk about it:
* MS Word/Office is built around a big, powerful and complex engine, just like a Ferrari. Both are high-performance but tempermental and quirky.
* OpenOffice is derived from another project (StarOffice) which Sun bought (through purchase of StarDivision) rather than invented itself. The Yugo is derived from the Zastava GTL from Eastern Europe, the design of which Zastava bought (from Fiat for the Fiat 128) rather than invented itself.
* The casual MS Word user is completely mystified by its exotic internal workings. When things go wrong they must contend with clueless and/or irritated tech support people who offer incomprehensible advice. Proper support is expensive. The Ferrari driver is also mystified by the internal workings of his car, and when things go wrong must contend with a clueless and/or irritated Italian mechanic who offers incomprehensible advice. Parts and labour are expensive.
* The dealer network was always sparse and is now non-existant, so Yugo drivers must fend for themselves by searching the wrecking yards for parts. The internal workings are primitive but well known to owners--there is no fancy, proprietary technology. Tech support for OpenOffice is sparse to non-existant, so OO.o users must fend for themselves by Googling for patches on the 'net. The source is less complex than that of MS Office and is open, so it is known to many of its users.
* A lot of people know and use MS office because it is more powerful and popular than the rest, so they put up with all the annoyances and pay a lot of money for it, even though they don't use it to its full potential. Most Ferrari drivers buy a Ferrari because it is powerful and a popular status symbol, so they put up with all the annoyances and pay a fortune for it, even if they can't legally drive it anywhere NEAR it's full potential--and seldom do.
* Properly cared for, a Yugo can serve you well as basic transportation--even though it has less features than a lot of other cars and is slow to start. OpenOffice, properly used, can serve you well as a productivity suite--even though it has less features than some other office suites and is a bit slow to start.
* Both the Yugo and OpenOffice can be obtained and used for basically no money and some amount of tinkering.
try any tool/word processor you know against LaTeX making complex equations and you will see why most of the (real) scientific papers are written with it.
,
Regards
A Colombian
There's more bug anatomy in the Open Office issue tracker than in most University entomology departments...
Baz
...and found none. A program gets an obviously incorrect error, and THE FIRST THING THE PROGRAMMER DOES AFTER REPRODUCING IT is something other than tracing the syscalls, to get the exact nature of the failure.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Irritating, for sure, but you could certainly have done that grovelling in the time it took you to write your post.
Just made me grin. Thanks for that at the end of a lousy week.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Sure. But it's hardly intuitive now is it? The intuitive interface would be the one where you type your name and it appears in the document. The unintuitive one requires you to go mess around in the options and tweak things before you can accomplish as simple a task as writing a letter home to mom.
Word is certainly powerful, but in a lot of ways it's not really all that intuitive.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
After a few days, I suddenly couldn't save any more. I gave up and started keeping my notes in an emacs buffer (which has infinite undo, and can stay up for days with no trouble - go figure.
(tounge firmly in cheek)
Yes, but after many arguments made on the internet, isn't Word classified as an application, and emacs as an os that runs under linux?
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Yes, yes, emacs is SOOO much easier to use than word.
Another pointyheaded unix nerd misses the concept of the average user yet again.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Nice article but author never mentioned another very important bug that would have save a lot of time: Correct error message. Why was Word saying 'Disk Full' when the error was 'Too many open files'..
...at least with most general purpose, commercial software. It's not quite the same as with more specific projects--even custom programming projects.
With a traditional "normal" project, in order to be successful you MUST spend time nailing down requirements, strictly defining the scope and budget, assigning the team, etc. In a custom software project for example, you can text on the exact hardware they will be using on site, and the exact user audience and have a good idea of the requirements--and STILL a great many of these projects do not live up to expectations. When the requirements are met, the project is done--end of story.
Nothing Microsoft puts out works like a normal project. Microsoft relies on a constantly shifting, growing scope for Office and Windows in order release new versions to maintain its revenue stream. Furthermore, the requirements are so complex as to be nearly impossible to define--there are thousands of variations in the target hardware (and in the case of Office, two very different architectures--Wintel and Mac). With Office the development team is very large and is actually two teams. As pointed out in the article, the left and right hands often don't know what the other is doing, and team members come and go and change roles. Also, unlike a "real" project, there is no end to development--it's an endless cycle of develop-release-patch.
Don't blame Microsoft either--it is just using the same "release early and often" strategy as Open Source--the difference is that MS is a marketing company more than anything else and marketing people can't sell something with "alpha" or "beta" or "version 0.x" in the title, so if it is even "kinda" working--well enough to get it out the door and get people's money, the marketers will put it out as 1.0 or a "model year" or whatever.
That works OK with open source because there isn't the same profit motive--people aren't paying cold hard cash and so don't expect perfection, and developers just want to make good, useful software so if they don't feel it is finished they'll release it as 0.1 to suggest a work in progress--never mind the fact that nearly every open source product is already better than a 1.0 MS product far before it reaches 1.0 itself.
However, since MS develops commercial products, markets them as prefection and people spend a lot of money to buy them, this model frustrates users, so now MS is pressured to change their model, and they have basically poured vast amounts of resources into fixing their pathetically broken current flagship product to pacify angry customers. If you look at the release cycle of Windows in the past there has been a 2 to 3 year cycle (Win 3.0 in 1990, 3.1 in 1992(?), 95, 98 in late 1997, Me/2000 in late 1999/early 2000, XP in late 2001). By the time Longhorn comes out it'll be DOUBLE the normal cycle period--they essentially skipped a release (or one could say decided to give the release away to users in the form of XP SP2). Longhorn BETTER be a good buy or MS could acually be in for a world of hurt for the first time in its history.
So how long SHOULD MS spend fixing instead of releasing? One could argue that Windows has NEVER been good enough to be called a "production release" by some standards, while others might say that MS has lost their way be delaying Longhorn for so long and dwelling on fixing an already long-in-the-tooth OS. With Open/Free software the answer is easier: if it compiles and the major stuff works put it out there--even as Ver 0.1. Nerds everywhere will download, compile and tinker, and some will even help debug, sending logs and patches and so on. Release cycles are commonly every six months (or faster!). That's OK if you can get the software for free and see the source, but it's intolerable if the source is inaccessible and you pay dearly for licensing costs.
Pay attention Linux developers: this are the kinds of things you'll have to deal with when your product matures to a level suitable for wide end-user distribution.
Being able to write a neat-o app and post it on sourceforge to impress your friends is only the most basic aspect of software development. Maybe 10,000 people will use your program, and most will be experts.
Now try distributing that program to 250 million people.
Look at Gimp.
Look at Star Office.
Look at Gnome.
'nuff said.
M$oft may be in it for the money and may be unscrupulous, but they are encountering issues that all maintainers of ultra-large SW projects face all the time.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I left a Word document open for my notes. After a few days,
Wait... you got a Windows box to stay up for a few days?!
I see some of this as quite true. The onion metaphor was quite true. Issues of reproducing the problem was quite true. Making minimal changes to localize disruptions is true. Minimizing ability to hit is true. Minimizing impact of a hit is true.
The problem is that their debugging methodology is just plain bad. They don't have any leads to follow? You're NOT policeman. You can create more leads. You have an unlimited budget on a computer except for time.
While you're in the process of identifying the problem, you're not limited by minimal changes. Change the world! Put in debugging output all over the place. Directly set variables while the code is running. Break the rules. Run it against every OS tool in the book (examples on Solaris would be truss, pfiles, lsof).
I like truss because I can see the direct OS calls and their result codes as they are being made by the code. (Also you can get some visibility with BSM enabled.) Yes, I'm primarily a systems administrator. But I help my application team debug a live production system problem all of the time. And we've got an SLA that puts the pressure on to fix the problem quickly and perfectly.
Just by looking at things from the OS perspective, and having no visibility to the code, I can many times tell them what is going wrong with their binary. (Of course, this particular problem would have been so terribly easy to find in a Solaris environment.) I could have got it with truss, lsof, or pfiles.
I guess I'm just surprised that the debugging tools aren't that great. But I do understand, as they pointed out, that it didn't reproduce with the debugger quite the same way. And that'd have me asking what the debugger does different to the environment. (But again, that's why I like lsof. I run it against a live production bionary that was never set for debugging in the first place.)
It seems their data structures are cobbled together and hacked together rather than based on sound theoretical models. The problem is deep in the design rather than just some misplaced lines of code.
Ha ha ha ha ha! That's a handsome tinfoil hat you have there.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Try this http://petz.com/
The deep problem this long standing bug points to in Microsoft's lack of vision into just what their applications are doing. A huge complex system like Office needs to be run within a debugging OS framework which can trap, monitor and display bottom line resource usage. Resource leaks are easy to induce and hard to find. Tools which monitor resource use and provide vision into what is really going on can make both detecting and fixing these performance bloats possible.
Apparently Microsoft doesn't budget much in the way of monitoring what they spend so much to build.
And Open Office seems to suffer as much or more in the way of resource bloat. I tried to switch from Excel, but graphing moderate amounts of data brought Open Offfice to a grinding halt.
Fairlight made samplers. Although they may have made sequencers, too, I don't know, but even modern sequencers don't have that kind of resolution because it's unnecessary.
Deconstruction? How 'bout some good ole nihilism? Way cooler! ;D
;) Heh, propaganda at work...
"Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history."
- Noam Chomsky
Tell me one thing - why is it that so many believe, or are led to believe, that anarchism implies a total lack of hierarchy/authority per se? There is the well known fact that anarchism denounce the State or any body of central government, but where in the anarchistic rationale do we find that the system indicate a social and political order, in which individuals should shoot each other on sight, for the sole purpouse of hindering any obscene act of communication or lewd workings of social interaction? If you suggest Anarchy == Chaos, I'll slap you silly with a fire extinguisher!
In essence, anarchism denotes that the role of a "leader" should be that of a "father figure", and not an office of supreme authority which warrants submission. The political part of the system utilizes authority, albeit temporary or till the assigned job is finished. The social part propose authority as a function of natural social interaction; we are genetically coded to aspire for the leadership of the pack, much like my dog is doing these days(Sit down, you stupid mutt! Obey my authori-tah!!!!!111!!!). Nothing intrinsically wrong with that sort of natural behaviour, it's when you mix it with political and economical factors that things tend to go south of heaven in a jiffy. This is where Anarchy really excel as a model for society, its strict adherance to a natural way of life, where distinct lines are drawn between the social, political and economical elements. A capitalist is, IMHO, an individual who wants superior capital, despite the laws of overpopulation, corporatism and industrialism which progressivly imply an inherant entropy of resources, thereby ruining the chance of an equal share of predefined valuables and goods. That is, if the capitalist really want to share, in which I suggest a thorough study of North America for consequential effects, in particular New York and Las Vegas.
But I digress. And concur: anarcho-capitalism is a baaad idea, much like democracy-capitalism. And no, I'm pretty sure that old fart God said nothing about having crypto-fascism and mobster-rule of monetary nonentities as precepts for the control of the unwashed masses! Hogwash, I say!
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
you had me at #!
I was hoping to post this on the blog instead of here. Unfortunately comments have been closed. My hope is to isolate some key mistakes that could have gone a long way to preventing this problem from taking so long to address, or perhaps ever happening.
// KB #123456 - "Disk is Full" Open FH bug
Granted I am judging from his description of how the system works and was assembled from scratch, but especially in reference to the multi-undo system, it was fairly obvious that the problem had absolutely nothing to do with the oversight of the developer regarding the open file limit, because the system was too complex to begin with.
Since (I hope) it's obvious that undo in an editor is such a unique and fundamental problem - a new pattern or a new assembly of smaller patterns needs to be applied to specifically address the undo issue. What I saw was a very typical problem in large and growing development environments, applying crow bar logic to implementing new solutions.
Proper use of exception handling and event-driven programming would have fixed the open file problem by itself, at least in my admittedly limited view. Instead of printing "Disk is full", the class exception or the file event itself could have caused a unique error to be printed with that information to aid the QA and developers. And of course, descriptive text for the user.
The second thing, Microsoft has this enormous knowledge base, would it have been too hard to do this in front of the 2 lines of code?
Since this bug had already been fixed and (hopefully) entered into the KB, the developer of the Mac fork (which I'll address in a minute) not only had a place to start, but a simple grep (or the MS equivalent) would have solved this problem in short order. I suspect if this pattern is not already adopted, it would fix a TON of these communication problems (which is really what this consists of), and code review would enforce that comments like these were injected on each bug fix. If they don't want to comment it (as many small bugs would prove prohibitive), properly address this in your CASE tool of choice.
Forks are ALWAYS bad in closed software development. If you have to fork your code, you have definitely done something wrong. I don't care how much system-specific code there is, it can be abstracted in almost any language - and a company like Microsoft which not only creates the applications but the development tools as well has no real excuse.
I know, a lot of this is "woulda coulda shoulda" stuff. Both Experienced and Novice developers and management have made these mistakes before, and it won't change anytime soon. Release pressures can really warp the logic of any member of the team - the "Get it out yesterday" school of logic rarely does any good in the long-term.
Oh right, IBM has RAS as is described in this old post.
Such a simple, useful idea. When things go wrong, make sure that you have a dump of the system's state to work with. It is amazing how many bugs can get resolved by starting with that information.
But this technique is apparently beyond Microsoft...
I doubt the average user is looking at the Emacs or Word source code.
"The tester ran the macro, and the problem was fixed. The first layer of the onion had been peeled away, but the fix still wasn't an "optimal" fix. As it stood, the chances that a user would run into the problem had been greatly reduced, but we still hadn't dealt with the "minimize the damage if they do hit it" side of the issue. That's because, at this point, we had yet to understand that the problem outside the debugger had to do with the OS' open file limit."
I'd say this about captures the entire nature of the M$ onion (which is an excellent metaphor - for the company.) The whole idea that one can fix a bug and then go on to minimize the damage if a user encounters the bug says it ALL!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Personally, I'm amazed when I come here and find that Taco's spelled his name correctly. Then again, I shouldn't be so harsh: the Error 500 message is spelled fine...
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The author never explains why the debugger did this; at first gues it sounds like a hack made because the debugger runs in the same process as the application, and needs to open files itself, but that sounds pretty crazy. (And it did this under both MacOS and Windows? WTF?!?)
I realize that the existence of a bug in the debugger doesn't mean the author could have magically solved his problem somehow else--he still had to solve the problem without ever knowing there was a bug in the debugger. But clearly the bottom-line fault lies there, yet he never points a finger at it (nor names the debuggers in question). Moreover, that means this is not the anatomy of a typical bug at all; it is the anatomy of an incredibly rare species of bug, one that owes to a bug (misfeature) of the debugger. (Or rather, the bug itself did not, but the difficulty in debugging it did.)
Maybe it is time for you to learn how to paste text without format. Instead of just using the Paste option, use Paste Special and pick Unformatted Text. That will do the trick.
What they say is a valid approach to software development. Developers cannot always totally correct the problems. Similar but more damning:
"In order to understand this, we have to understand a basic principle of fixes. You make the simplest code change required to fix the problem."
This again is a valid approach however it also encourages entrophy. You have to make occasional agressive changes to the code and stop patching it up. It is equivalent to painting a house for the 50 years, you eventually have to remove almost all the paint and start again. Where in the manual do they discuss this.
Where do you put the printf if you have no idea where the problem is?
Duck over to OpenOffice.org and throw a few printf's to fix some of the bugs in the code. I use this technique at work where I work on program line counts in thousands of lines. First you have to find the point to put the code, in millions of lines you cannot do this with a look at the code.
Did you describe the problem and solution to them.
Seriously this really is the problem now. I had a problem with IE not loading a webpage, it locked up totally. I had 5 attempts to get Microsoft to acknowledge that I did not have a problem (I changed my page to not lockup once I figured it out) and accept that it was a bug that they could escalate to the developers.
I have no idea whether the problem ever left the call centre. The ability to describe problems and solutions directly to the developers is a bonus for Open Source.
The latest versions have a LOT of changes to make the software more robust. It really is worth revisiting. If it crashes please let us know, we are interested in eliminating problems like this.
:-)
The software is not perfect but we are working on it
Load times are a real focus of attention by a lot of developers. You can expect improvements on this in the next major release.
Excuse me, but first of all, an "open file limit" and a "Disk is full" error are two slightly different things. The first thing that is wrong is that the wrong error message is being displayed. 10 years of debugging could have been cut short by actually reporting the correct error message.
So the only bugs Microsoft developers can solve in a reasonable amount of time are those that conveniently show up in their debuggers (otherwise it will take them 10 years)? Debugging without a debugger is one of the first skills that, what I would call, an "advanced coder" learns.
And if I understood the rest of the article correctly -- the fix is not a systemic deterministic fix. Its just a method for mitigating the problem in the scenario in the one way in which they have been able to observe it.
This is the unravelling of a convoluted web which they are tring to piece together with scotch tape, bandaids and spit. Its pathetic. Their problem is an "running out of file handles" issue. They need to solve the problem definitively -- if they cannot rewrite the architecture of the code, then they need to write a virtual file layer that can have an unlimited number of file handles. Or something comparable.
These pathetic one-off patches that seem to be just barely mated to the specific problem manifestation just increase the complexity of the code.
The whole statement is total crap.
In any office suite there are thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs, work out the combinations to test this. No-one proves anything but the most trivial code or if they have I bet it was an academic not someone that works at coding for a living.
Now if you talk about test suites wrapped around the individual functions to exercise things then yes there are instances of this but this is not classic 'proving' but testing.
gnome office run on windows?
I think you completely missed the guy's point. He's talking about the possible combinations of inputs. For both Word and emacs, an "input" would be something that modifies the state of the user's document. The several thousand commands you have in your various minor modes that do nothing but look up a key word in some documentation don't count.
No matter how elaborate an edifice you build on top of emacs, there are still only two basic operations within emacs that change the state of the user's document: insert and delete. The rest is all eye-candy.
To compare that to Word in terms of complexity, even with a smiley, is just plain idiotic. In terms of changes to the state of the user's document, Word has more complexity in one dialog box than you can possibly construct in emacs.
The result is a text editor that can cope with extremely long documents or lines without much difficulty, but it took 118KB of C code, 63KB of which is used to manipulate that fancy data structure.
Metamoderating today, I was asked to rate whether this deserved a moderation of "Troll".
In spite of the disagreement with my message I could not consider this to be "Fair".