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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."
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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
"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."
Haha. You even got +5, Insightful. Why don't we look at the rest of the sentence?
Brodie figured out that a document is really just a collection of pieces of text, and that it didn't really matter where each piece of text is physically located within the document's file.
I.e., if you're going to have "The dog is red." appears in the document, it doesn't matter if "The" occurs in the file before "red", or vice-versa.
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.
So what he figured out is not as straightforward as your out-of-context quotation makes it out to be. He was, at least, being a little creative. The article then goes onto explain multiple ways in which this design was useful in Word processing software.
I realize you're just being an asshole and that you probably didn't read the article, but just looked for a way to use it to make fun of Microsoft. "Standard Operating Procedure" at Slashdot, I know.
But, moderators, this guy doesn't deserve Insightful. He should be Flamebait.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Obviously you've never tried to make big documents with Word.
Writing a book with pictures in Word is extremely difficult. It randomly moves stuff around, changes fonts, and deletes sections of the code when you exceed somewhere around 2MB file size (or 10 pages...I'm not really sure about the limit).
The interface isn't the whole problem either. Exporting to rtf format creates files that don't actually meet the rtf specification (which has been defined by Microsoft, by the way), so have errors (even when read by Microsoft's rtf importer), and html output is even worse.
Latex has more features than Word without any of these problems. Also, given the original "find a bug and win money" challenge, I think I can say it is probably one of the most stable pieces of software on the planet, and it has an extension mechanism built in (Word does too, by the way - several of them).
There are some things that Microsoft makes that beat the competition, but I don't think that Word is one of them.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I call BS on this. I've not been a fan of MS for years, but recently I had to write a business plan and due to decisions out of my control I had to do it in Word and Excel. I am quite good with both but have generally avoided using them since my previous job of training others to use them. After extensive use I can tell you that they are NOT better, people just are willing to put up with more shit from MS. If it's not from MS it has to be perfect, just to be considered. All MS's hand waving about being able to conviently put Excel charts and such in Word documents is BS. It can be done, but not with out a lot of effort to make it worthwhile. I prefer OpenOffice and am more then willing to admit it has issues. However, whenever I have to choose between the two, I'll take the latest version OpenOffice.
Mike Scanlon
Do you realize how many essential web components, many of them from companies that are now out of business, would stop working if ActiveX were turned off altogether?
There is no excuse, ever, for using ActiveX. If your web site depends on or even uses ActiveX, you need to hang yourself from your server rack with a cat5 cable.
ActiveX is not cross platform, and therefore by no means suitable for web purposes. If you can't accomplish the task with DHTML/JavaScript, then you need to find another way.
As for the atrocity against humanity that is stateful programs embedded into web sites, if you're going to commit the crime, Java better be your weapon of choice.