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?"

Comments

The best

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Genuine Advantage

Re:The best

[TerranFury]

>Windows Genuine Advantage

No, that's a feature that acts like a bug. ;-)

404

[Jordan Catalano]

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.

Re:404

[Anonymous Coward]

From DOS:

Keyboard not found.
Press to continue.

Whenever I boot my windows machine

[antifoidulus]

it pops up all sorts of porn pages I never even asked for!

Re:Whenever I boot my windows machine

[nick_davison]

Not sure it's my favorite... but props to Microsoft for having the balls to market Windows ME as one giant bug-as-a-feature.

rm

[KillerCow]

rm * .old

Not a software bug but a design flaw

[jimicus]

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.

Linux

[stratjakt]

It was supposed to be a unix clone, but actually came out useful in the end.

My Karma isn't low enough...

[EWIPlayer]

Sendmail

One of my favorites, from console gaming...

[foxtrot]

From the Blue Sky Rangers website:

FUN FACT: While testing the game, Bill came across a bug: every now and then, the game would, seemingly at random, hyperspace you. He and his boss, Mike Minkoff, went over the code with a fine-tooth comb before realizing what the problem was: the Intellivision hand controllers encode button presses in such a way that an action (side) key pressed at the same time as particular directions on the disc will be interpreted instead as a numeric key being pressed. There was no software way around this; shooting while moving would occasionally be interpreted as pressing 9 -- the hyperspace button.

After several days of puzzling over a solution, the bug was ultimately "fixed" by including the following note in the instruction manual:

"Every once in a while, your space hunter will move near a 'black hole,' and the computer will automatically put him into HYPERSPACE. This will cost you the same number of points as if you had pressed the HYPERSPACE key yourself. On the other hand, it will save your hunter."

This led to an axiom frequently heard around Mattel: If you document it, it's not a bug -- it's a feature. Anytime a game in development crashed -- no matter how badly or bizarrely -- witnesses would invariably turn to the frustrated programmer, shrug, and calmly say "document it."

-JDF

Re:Perl versus Python

[badfish99]

As a mathematician, I'm always surprised by people who think that 4 and 4.0 should not be equal.

Re:Perl versus Python

[zappepcs]

As a mathematician, I'm always surprised by people who think that 4 and 4.0 should not be equal. Well, one is just a number, the other is the SP version identifier that tells you when its safe to upgrade to a new version of windows.

Re:Perl versus Python

[rootofevil]

As a programmer, I'm always surprised by mathematicians who think that 4 and 4.0 should be equal.

If You Can't Fix It, Feature It

[adavies42]

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.

Re:VW close the sunroof bug

[sconeu]

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.

Re:Personally, I like... Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess he didn't get the memo...

Elevator bug

[Col. Klink (retired)]

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.

Re:Second Life camera

[Mike Micelli]

I don't know what's creepier, the fact that he's a virtual peeping Tom, or that he has a Second Life account.

Software developer here

[hotsauce]

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. :)

Re:Software developer here

[jimbojw]

In case you were wondering, "4" * 4.0 yields:

• "4444" in Ruby
• 16 in PHP and JavaScript
• Exception:The operator * is undefined for the argument type(s) String, double in Java

... And "4" + 4.0 yields

• TypeError: can't convert Float into String in Ruby
• 8 in PHP
• 44 in JavaScript
• "44.0" in Java

Which I just find amusing all around.

Re:Software developer here

[cjjjer]

As a project manager I am amused by how much time has been spend talking about this. Clearly developers need more work and shorter deadlines.

Re:Perl versus Python

[Zabu]

As a hooker, I can tell you that anything with a diameter of 4.00cm or 4.00000cm is always a few hundred dollars