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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
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
The guy who wrote the Windows version actually allows you to turn it on! Overpay the money lender and your money grows at 10% a month! The bug was in the original Apple 2 version and then subsequent ports, like the one to Palm, removed it.
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.
buffer overflows are great - they allow you to get root on all sorts of devices that some bastard tried to lock you out of.
ncpmount on linux... at least in our configuration... allows us to overwrite files that have "locks" on them by users. It appears to be happy to ignore the locks. I'm guessing this is a bug... because I can't do it with the same user from Windows.
This allows us to deploy our java Jar's to our Folders on our network where the users launch the app from.
Yay.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
And although, ultimately, its a pain in the arse that they're there at all, when you get get down to the practical day-to-day business of writing/maintaining websites, some of those bugs turn out to be very handy in concocting freaky work-arounds for inconsistencies in the ways that browsers support (or don't support) the standards.
- you-out, then there can hardly be a better place to look than Internet Explorer 6.
I'll leave the provision of an exhausitive list to somebody else, but suffice to say if you're looking for a sizeable seam of bugs-which-simultaneously-screw-you-over-and-help
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Easily the best bug ever. Its been paramount in enabling continous "innovation" as people speed jump through maps.
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.
The famous undocmented 320x240 VGA video mode, pre-VESA, and other tweaked VGA modes.
I've heard the 6502 (or, more specifically, RP2A03) had some useful undocumented opcodes. I think they weren't intentional, so they might count.
On the software side...how about exploitable buffer overflows on the Xbox and PSP to enable execution of arbitrary code?
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!!!!
"Subscribe to view" webpages that are still visible to users browsing as GoogleBot.
User agent switcher extension + Browse pretending to be GoogleBot = Annoying "register/pay to see me!" pages go away. I have no idea how many sites it works on now, but I think it still gets into a lot of archived newspaper articles and suchlike.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
For me, the physics bug that enabled "skiing" in Starsiege: Tribes was the best bug as a feature. It's a bug that became a key defining point of the series.
A description of skiing is here.
Sendmail
This sig used to be really funny...
PC LOAD LETTER? What the f*ck does that mean?
Perl is perhaps one large bug that works so well that it's a great feature. For example in perl when you compare two things you get an answer that is stable no matter what the items are. In python you can't and even when you can the answer is not stable. The order of a sorted list can depend on it's orginal ordering! You cant compare floats to Complex numbers but you can compare strings to complex numbers. Sets are grouped by equality not identity so 4.0 and 4 are the same thing for a set. Which one stays and which one get added to the set depends on the ordering of the lists that were put in the set.
it's nuts. And the origin of the nutty ness is an obsessive desire not to have default behaviours. Whereas perl is all default behaviours. In the end perl does what you really meant, and python does what you told it.
in case you think I'm python bashing google what python evangelist david mertz says about python warts.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This barely qualifies as bug, more on an inconsistency, but...
In Firefox, when you make a new bookmark, you need to give it a name. FF grays-out the OK button until you do. This implies that bookmarks weren't meant to be nameless. Here's the "bug": if you go to rename the bookmark, you can make it blank and the OK button remains active.
So what good is a nameless bookmark? I place all of my frequently-visited bookmarks on the menu bar, to the right of the menus (it's normally wasted space). I have over 25 bookmarks marks there, and if they had names (even one-letter names), they wouldn't fit by a long-shot. The favicons are all I need, so this ability is pretty helpful, and isn't likely to be fixed.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
In Second Life, if you zoom your camera up to a wall, you will normally just zoom in to see closer detail of the wall. But once up against the wall, swing the camera around to the side, and you can "back your way in" through the wall. Release and click again, and the camera is now "mounted" inside the house. Its so much fun to watch people inside their homes, especially when your avatar is prevented from entering the property. Some even pay for a little orb that still tells them that no one is detected within 30m. Its fun because the clicks still work, too, like right clicking on someone and IM'ing them.. to tell them that you liked their last outfit more than this one, or the couch looked better in the other corner.. really freaks them out. That is definitely a "bug" (or feature) I couldn't live without... not in SL at least.
Intelligent Life on Earth
There were two oversights in the older VW's electrical system:
... ooops, that's more hardware than software. sorry.
(1) You needed the key to close the sunroof.
(2) But.. a sneak path in the headlight wiring meant you could instead just turn on the headlights and pull on the high-beam flasher (on the turn-signal lever). Enough electricity would flow backwards through the sneak path to operate the sunroof motor.
A related "bug" is the ability to boot Linux "fail safe" with the notation 'initrd=/bin/sh' on the boot line. As MVS would say, "Thou art God!"
-JDF
I'd have to go with strafe jumping in Quake2. What better way to get the 100 health pack in q2dm1 w/out having to sacrifice precious life w/a rocket jump. w00t!
In high school I wrote a program for a physics project that showed electromagnetic wave propagation and interference. Nothing that special, the end result was basically a pretty screensaver with some relevence to physics. In light of that, one of the features I added was a pull-down menu for selecting what color you wanted to use. This was back in the VGA days with a 256 color pallette and manually poking the VGA frame buffer. Due to an off-by-one error in calculating the bounding box of the pull down menu, it was possible to select an invalid index for the color, so instead of selecting a row of the pallette with my nice color gradients set up, it was one of basically random colors. The result was really trippy, so when I discovered the bug, I decided to leave it in. At the open house where my program was running through a projector some bystander discovered the bug and thought it was indeed cool and trippy.
:)
That's about it. Most of my bugs just break shit.
The enemies of Democracy are
I used to play too much Starsiege: Tribes about five or six years ago. It is a multiplayer first person shooter with enormous maps. When it first came out, everyone walked around, or hitched a ride on a vehicle. The game was fun, but it was a bit slow for my tastes (I grew up on NetQuake). Somebody discovered a physics bug that allowed players to move very fast over terrain by rapidly tapping the jump button as players slid down a hill. This process was scripted, and the overall dynamics of the game (terrible pun) changed dramatically. The game went from being fairly slow to being one of the most intense games I've ever played. Different hills would give different amounts of speed, and the process of 'skiing' itself required that you constantly look for ways to maintain your speed while fighting off other players.
When the developers saw the potential it gave the game, they left it in. They realized how it made the game unique and exciting, and this bug became the standard feature that sets Tribes far apart from almost all FPS games out there, even to this day. This bug resulted in probably the closest simulation to virtual athleticism that I have ever seen, which was responsible for the fanatical, but small fanbase the Tribes series had.
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.
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
Not me, but one of my colleagues took over maintenance of a system which included a date library. The dates and times were treated as floating-point, leading to much conversion and adjustinging. Eg. 12:30 was 12.30, so when adding 40 minutes getting 12.70, and then adjusting that to 13.10, No input validation was done. My colleague tried cleaning that up, but then got complaints from the users. They had discovered the "features" and were now using eg:
January -6th
meaning december 24th the previous year.
My colleague had to remove the input validation again and keep the features.
The Rockwell 6502 was a hard-wired processor; there was no "illegal instruction" check. So, any bit-patter you loaded as an instruction would try to do something. Sometimes, because of the internal open-collector busses, you'd get neat "something OR something" that wouldn't normally happen.
Here's the I'm Feeling Lucky hit on it: 6502 Opcodes.
Thing is, the results might vary from implementation to implementation. So they might not work usefully on the 6510, which was otherwise a 6502 with an I/O register at $0000-$0001.
In the olden days (DOS) version of X-Com: UFO Defense, a save game consisted of a whole bunch of individual files in a directory tree. After some tinkering around, I realized that one particular file stored nothing except a list of what equipment you had "on order" and after how much more game time it was going to arrive.
By ordering a bunch of equipment and saving your game just before it was due to arrive (call that save game A) then saving again immediately after it arrives (call that save game B), and then copying this file from save game A to save game B, you could get whatever equipment you had ordered to arrive again. And again, and again. And you could turn around and sell all the extra stuff for cash.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. I used to start off a game by repeating this trick until I had maxed out my cash. I found the corresponding file that allowed you to improve your tech without actually performing the research, but that was less of an advantage, since the game used your tech-level to decide how difficult the scenarios it gave you should be.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
This was a fun one. I had one of the first MINI Coopers, and ordered it with the CD player ('Wave' option? Seem to remember that name). I forget exactly when I took possession of the car, but I think it was around September or October. Something like that.
Anyway, at roughly 2:00am every morning the car alarm would go off, much to the 'delight' of myself, my neighbours and everyone in the vicinity. I'd go out, stop the alarm and then try to sleep. After which it would go off again, every hour or so.As if we weren't losing enough sleep with our then new-born daughter.
The cause was eventually traced, and it's one of the more obscure bugs I've ever come across. Turns out that the car had a low-power rather than completely off mode, and the CD player retained a tiny amount of power going through it. When it was cold, say at 2:00am on an autumn morning for example, the CD player would detect that condensation was forming and would wake up the car's electrics to create some warmth to clear the condensation. This is deliberate, and quite clever I think.
However, the problem came in that it did this too often and started causing a big drop in battery reserves. The security system interpreted this as an attempt to start the car by hotwiring it, and so the alarm would be set off. I'd come out to switch it off, then go back to bed on the cold autumn night at which point condensation would form again, the CD player would switch itself on again, the security system would sound the alarm again and a bleary-eyed version of me would stagger out to turn the alarm off again. At which point condensation would start to form again and...
Bah.
Cheers,
Ian
I'd argue that C++ Template Metaprogramming as a fully Turing-complete functional programming language was probably an unintended result of the definition of templates.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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...
though Windows does this with flying (Blue) colors, I would nominate DRM. it screwed music and spurred development of P2P
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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!
If you do a regex search and replace in Open office and replace all contents of cells with themselves (search for .*, replace with &, or something like that) the contents of the cells will be reformated to whatever default you set for the columns. You can use it to change a column of numbers into a text field (to sort alphanumerically) or vice versa,, (if you have a spreadsheet that imported numbers as text and and you want to change them back into numbers)
This trick is even included in the help documentation.
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)
I was writing code in lisp to remove duplicates from an unordered list.
How do you do it? Well, here is one reasonable way.
Sort the items in the list.
Duplicate items will be adjacent, so scan through the list and add items when they aren't equal to the last item.
Since it was lisp, I naturally started writing a recursive quicksort.
My code looked something like.
quicksort (list)
if list has size less than 2, return list
Pick pivot from list
L = filter items in list < pivot
G = filter items in list > pivot
return quicksort(L) + pivot + quicksort(R)
However, my quicksort had a bug in it.
Look closely.
It didn't append copies of pivot to the returned sorted list. Thus, it removed them. Since every item eventually ends up as the pivot, all duplicates are removed. It's the only bug that has ever ended up saving me time.
Don't start modifing code until you understrand how the users use the product.
It is only refactoring if the users sees no change, with the sole exception of performance gains.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The bacteria in my digestive tract are bugs I would definitely miss.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
With the key in or out of the ignition (don't turn it to ACC or ON) hit the AC button and turn your fans to full. Then pull your highbeams. Your fans will suddenly turn on. Found it on a forum years ago...was pretty funny the first time I tried it.
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
I do ctrl+alt+del and kill explorer.exe. Then I use File: Run in task man and do "runas /user:administrator explorer.exe". This restores the desktop as the admin user. When I'm done, I do another ctrl+alt+del, either kill explorer or choose "Log Off Administrator" from the start menu, and then run "explorer" from the run dialog again to restore the old session.
This is faster than logging off and back on, leaves the users programs open, but gives you the full admin desktop, not just a shell or explorer window.
It's too bad gksudo doesn't work on Windows...
As a programmer, and a former student in at least one other math-related discipline, it's clear to me that 4 and 4.0 are equal. But they are not equivalent. Knowing 'Accuracy', 'Precision' and 'Proper Use Of Units' like the back of your hand will help you in any career.
[Ego]out
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
I always enjoyed cars with "child-safe rear windows" which don't roll all the way down. In many cases, this is because the rear wheel well cuts into the door, reducing the space available for the window.
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.
Hows about triple faulting the 80286 processor to drop out of protected mode?
AT&ROFLMAO
Your assumption seems interesting to me. In a production environment end users are using an application that obviously is useful. In your attempt to "clean up unreadable code", it no longer works. What you did instead was make the code perhaps more readable, but you changed the functionality. Perhaps more pejoratively, you broke what was previously working. Instead of looking at your self to see what you broke, your assumption is that it all worked by accident.
Before committing any changes to a production system, I would expect that a developer would test the functionality before making change and compare the results after changes were made. This would have uncovered that you changed functionality. Another tact would have been to create unit tests before making your changes, and then run those test as you were making changes. You have have discovered that you changed functionality. Instead, you did neither, and you broke a feature.
I'm a little long in the tooth, working 18 years as a programmer. I've seen this situation many times. Every young new hire thinks that they are smarter than the people hired before them and that all of the existing code is crap. It all needs to be rewritten because the previous coders were bad programmers and if it were redone, it would be cleaner. So they rewrite existing code and they break things. I can only assume that you work for a PHB.
Any manager worth their salt would initially halt a rewrite of WORKING code. If you want to modify something that is working and has been working and has had the bugs worked out, you will really need to prove that there are benefits to doing so. And as a manager of a development group, anytime someone who is still wet behind the ears wants to rewrite code, I tell them to step back and look at the code again. Is the code really crap or is it that you just don't understand what it is doing? Perhaps having an older coder walk through some of the code, maybe explain why the code was written a certain way, might shed some light on how it is really functioning. The fact that in your case you changed functionality, it shows that you didn't understand what was going on in the first place.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
On a real VT100 (no emulators, please) send an ESC [137q
In other words, even though your keyboard only has 4 LEDs, pretend you wanted to turn on the 137th one. Don't ask, just do it.
Now your keyboard will repeat at an insane rate. Go into Setup B, and turn on keyclick (which might be kind of hard given how crazy your keyboard is acting; maybe you should do that before you send the weirdo escape sequence).
Now hold down a key. Listen. Hold down a different key. Listen. Hey, it sounds a little different.
Now play music.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.