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What is the Best Bug-as-a-Feature?
Bat Country wonders: "The workflow system, at the department I develop for, was hand-coded by my predecessor in a rather short amount of time, resulting in somewhat unreadable code with a number of interesting 'features.' When I took over maintenance of the code base, I started patching bugs and cleaning up the code in preparation for a new set of features. After I was done, I got a pile of complaints about features that had disappeared, which turned out to be caused by the bugs in the code. So, that leads me to ask: what is your favorite bug that you either can't live without or makes your life easier?"
Windows Genuine Advantage
My favorite:
"404 File Not Found
The requested URL (askslashdot/07/03/30/0116246.shtml) was not found."
That little error saved me from having to read a bunch of replies.
it pops up all sorts of porn pages I never even asked for!
Monstar L
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Microsoft keeps trying to clean up their code, and as a result, sometimes, features that SPAMmers etc. are relying on stop working.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
rm * .old
I remember getting Godly Plate of the Whale in Diablo at the sacrifice of a single potion with the duping bug. I can't think of anything better than that.
They screwed up alot of our web-based financial software. If i set the number of items purchased to zero, the whole thing reboots and i get to go home for th
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
Error
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Nothing beats a good dose of pot-kettle interaction.
This flies in the face of science.
Ping of Death (http://insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html) entertained me quite a while :)
thomasdamgaard.dk.
Not a software bug but a design flaw in a car I used to own.
The Vauxhall Astra Mk.2 (Opel Kadett E) had a design flaw in the steering column. Specifically, the steering column was rather weaker than the steering lock.
The upshot of it was when some little scrote decided to try and steal my car (this was way before cars were fitted with immobilisers), when he tried to break the steering lock the steering column snapped and the steering wheel came straight off in his hand.
It was supposed to be a unix clone, but actually came out useful in the end.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Sendmail
This sig used to be really funny...
PC LOAD LETTER? What the f*ck does that mean?
Without that mail forward bug, I'd never have been able to get root when I wanted it.
-JDF
As a mathematician, I'm always surprised by people who think that 4 and 4.0 should not be equal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnuke
This was the handiest thing for getting rid of idiots on chat.
Runner-up: ALT-F4 to close a window. Also handy for getting rid of idiots on chat:
Idiot: Hey, my computer is broken, how do I fix it?
Me: Well, first, hit ALT-F4
*** User 'Idiot' has left the room. ***
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
As a programmer, I'm always surprised by mathematicians who think that 4 and 4.0 should be equal.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
I'm unclear how Windows qualifies as a feature.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
A couple of friends of mine in high school CS wrote a Tetris clone for class, but they had a bug where occasionally, blocks would spontaneously appear or disappear. They couldn't figure out how to fix it, so they claimed (in the docs, not to the teacher) that they had AI adjusting the difficulty to match the players' skills.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Back around '79 or so, a buddy of mine had a VW Bug with a different bug in it. It had some kind of short, so that if you touched the steering column with another key on the same ring as the one in the ignition, it sounded the horn.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You should've just claimed it was a bug in /. that turned out to be an interesting feature of some sort. Problem solved!
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
His post was funny, yours sounds more like a troll... and if you love Windows so much why don't you marry it
It really is more of an amorphous blog of bugs & features. It's a bug, comprised of features that are buggy features and feature bugs. This is one of those things where if you think about it too hard, the Mac / Linux ambulance will have to try to reassmble the fragments of your exploded head.
Guess he didn't get the memo...
My college dorm elevator had bug/feature. If you briefly pulled and then reset the "emergency stop" button as the elevator was stopping at a floor it would skip that floor. I lived on the third floor and we routinely skipped folks on the second floor waiting for the elevator. This was a great time saving feature (except, of course, when the fourth floor residents would skip the third floor).
The only misfeature of this bug was that the bell would briefly ring alerting those waiting that they had been skipped. One time, some second floor residents heard us skip their floor and we heard them running down after us. We skipped the lobby and went back to the fourth floor. We could have kept it going all night if they tried chasing us, but they didn't. Anyone too lazy to walk to the lobby from the second floor sure isn't going to race up to the fourth floor.
Eventually, they upgraded the elevator and we had to stop for the second floor whenever they wanted.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The Mini Cooper dates from about 1968, very considerably before the advent of the CD player, and furthermore had even less security than Windows ME. Even if the doors were locked, you could still open them by pushing hard, because the entire door would bend such the lock mechanism no longer held the door shut! It certainly did not have an alarm.
Not only that, the electrics were so poor, it was not unknown for condensation to completely flatten the battery overnight.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
aMSN has a cool bug that pops a window open on your end as soon as someone clicks on your name on their end
it's fun to pre-empt conversations with girls:
me: hey how's it goin?
her: OMG I was just thinking about you
me: ya right
her: I'm serious!
me: *gush* (L)
Yeah, but that's only so you could exploit the buffer overflow and get root on slashdot.
Is there a +1 creep. Mod?
*whooooooosh!!!!*
I don't know what's creepier, the fact that he's a virtual peeping Tom, or that he has a Second Life account.
My company writes effects plug-ins for film/video post-production, and a while back we got an email from one of our customers with a similar story. He had been playing around with our effects trying to simulate a look of noisy or damaged video. Suddenly his render failed with an "out of memory" error, and the screen filled with random digital garbage -- it was exactly what he wanted!
;-)
So he rendered it out the way it was, and we gained another happy customer.
This one time, I was hacking into this system, and I decided to play a game I found called "Global Thermonuclear War". Needless to say, I think next time, I'll just try a nice game of chess.
Thanks for finding this one! I just submitted a patch and it should be fixed in the next build.
N00B: How do I get feature X to work in this chat room?
Clued in 1: Try +++ATH
N00B: Than......(N00B has left the chat)
-Charlie
"Click here to be removed from our mailing list" Can't figure out why I still get emails from you...
As a software developer, I am amused by you all. "4" is quite obviously a string, and can not be compared with 4.0 without a set of business rules.
:)
Multiplying it in silly ways will not help you either.
Lies about crimes
My favorite bug-as-a-feature occurred in the original Mario bros. game for the NES. I suppose it wasn't so much a feature as simply a bug in the game Since it was only availible at one point in the game. Somewhere, I thing in the third world, as you were climbing the end pyramid you could jump on a descending koopa and, provided you did it just right, Mario would keep bouncing off the koopa shell as it would ricochet back and forth off the step. Soon, you would begin receiving credit for your continued bouncing in the form of extra lives. After a time your number of lives would climb so high that the game began representing them as various other graphical elements from the game; bricks, pipes etc. Unfortunately, if you left it too long (20 mins. +) the game would simply kill Mario. I suspect that the console simply ran out of memory to hold your fantastic number of lives and this was a safeguard to prevent the console from locking up.
The only time I've ever been able to exploit this was on the original NES. Even the Super Mario all-stars SNES version will not reproduce this.
As a much younger individual, this nearly unlimited lives 'feature' was the only way I could beat Bowser and it led to some interesting conversations with my school friends at the time.
Me: So I beat Bowser last night!
Friend: Cool! How many lives were you down to?
Me: Uhhh, pipe?
Friend: Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
If I could mod you +65537 Funny I would.
As a hooker, I can tell you that anything with a diameter of 4.00cm or 4.00000cm is always a few hundred dollars
It's all good.
You're all mad.
4*1200 = 42 2+2 = 42
anything +-/* anything = 42
the answer is always 42 (*)
(*) to 2 sig. digits
-Tony
People discussing old X-Com bugs reminds me of the horrible, and occasionally horribly amusing, bugs in Masters Of Orion (the original, for DOS). Sure, some were annoying -- for example, the sound cutting out. However, some were either amusing or annoying, depending on the circumstances. Let's see -- there was the bug in which a race would sometimes try to extort a negative amount of money from you. Oh, and there was the bug in which you'd sometimes fight fleets of zero ships, negative ships, or maxint ships.
:)
Still, twas a fun game.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
As a graphic designer and long-time computer hobbyist, I find it to be simultaneously amusing and ridiculous. Time to go draw cats having sex.
tolerance versus significance versus discretion in a no holds bar battle royale, SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!
Ice Cream has no bones.
Oh, you would not write "4.999...", you only put that there to trick some poor Slashdot bystander who doesn't know any better into arguing with you. Tsk tsk.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
As a hooker, I can tell you that anything with a diameter of 4.00cm or 4.00000cm is always a few hundred dollars
Damn, this is one time I'll get a big discount without being proud of it.
Table-ized A.I.
Well we can cook the books for 4 to be whatever gives you the best tax break. You want 4 to equal 5? Sure no problem.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I work at a MINI dealership and we had a similar situation.
:)
One client was continually getting upset because his MINI alarm would go off repeatedly in the middle of the night, seemingly at random intervals. This was perplexing because MINI uses internal motion sensors for their alarms which are not prone to false alarms. Most cars use crappy vibration sensors that will go off at the slightest provocation (thunder, cars too close, birds landing on the roof, etc.) The electrical system, coding, and settings for the alarm were checked and rechecked but nothing was found to be faulty.
Our service technicians tried unsuccessfully to replicate the phenomena, even going so far as to put the car into their own garage at night to listen for the alarm going off. Alas this was all in vain. No one could get this to replicate and the cuystomer got more and more upset until one day he arrived at our dealership after a semi-sleepless night, threw the keys on the service manager's desk, and said fix it or else.
Only this time, in his haste and anger, he neglected to take his trusty DISCO BALL with him. Apparently, our fastidious client had been removing the aforementioned accessory from his MINI'S rearview mirror before bringing it in for service. The reasons for this are the subject of much juvenile speculation. Regardless, it turns out that the subtle motions of the disco ball were activating the alarm.
You don't happen to have a disco ball on your mirror, do you Ian?
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.