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Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds?
theodp writes "Ever get a workaround for a bug from a vendor that's so rigoddamndiculous that there has to be a clueless MBA or an ornery developer behind it? For example, Microsoft once instructed users to wiggle their mouse continuously for several minutes if they wanted to see their Oracle data make it into Excel (yes, it worked!). And more recently, frustrated HP customers were instructed to use non-HP printers as their default printer if they don't want Microsoft Office 2007 to crash (was this demoed in The Mojave Experiment?). Any other candidates for the Lame Workaround Hall of Fame?"
HP and Microsoft repeatedly suggest re-installing the operating system to cure a network configuration issue.
... involve microsoft office?
urban dictionary = idiots making up words.
At 27 years old I am now an old fart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Biggest work around? I'd say having to use windows to do my job.
A profiler was crashing when I tried to find bottlenecks in my code. The support rep. told me I should turn off optimization.
Whomever invented that term (rigoddamndiculous) deserves to be ruthlessly beaten in public. Sure it sounds inhumane, but we do need to set an example.
but it was back in the days of Windows 95. I was working in software Localisation for a Lotus Notes product. We had several machines working in the test lab based on ghost images, so they were all pretty much identical.
One of the machines kept dying on us during the test phase, but none of the others did. Very confusing, for about a day. Until we realised that the machine which was crashing had an audio CD in the drive. (Not playing, not in Explorer. Just present in the drive.)
We verified it by swapping the audio cd into other machines, and running the same tests. Invariably, the machine with the CD in, crashed when we tried to perform task "x" in Lotus Notes.
It was escalated up, as I recall. And we eventually got a note back saying "Don't put CD's in the CD-Rom drives."
I still remember it (as a recent graduate) as my first exposure to management-style thinking.
Double click on a document. Word sits there for what seems like hours saying something like "Connecting to default printer. Press ESC to stop" so you give up and press ESC and start editing the document. Word promptly crashes. The workaround - set the default printer to Microsoft XPS and select the printer manually when you need it and wait the eternity it takes to communicate with the network printer. And sometimes it crashes again. WTF?
IIRC, a few GNU encryption programs do the same thing while collecting entropy, and yell at you if you don't wiggle enough.
In March, the Google Docs team introduced the Drawings feature. Now you can create drawings, schematics etc. in your Google Docs document. Now when you want to print your doc, or export it to some other format than HTML, then you get a nice error message.
If you want to export or print, the workaround for the last three months has been... not to use drawings in your documents! Great feature!
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
1932 called, They want their word back, it's like the depression, you know.
I just spent 2 hours on the weekend getting my Mom's HP Printer to work on Windows Vista. I didn't even try Office yet and I'm guessing the headache will not stop.
Well I agree HP makes nice printers, I just don't see how they make them so hard to install on the Windows platform. Usally you have use there automatic Printer driver installer which takes 2 hours to run, it tries to find the printer N times every time failing and then the 1 time it finds the printer is connected the install freezes.
Well I haven't had any experiance with the bug, I would have to say that maybe HP should be going back to the drawing board with these printers and drivers because there causing enough trouble as it is.
Thanks
LinuxOverWindows
Oh yes:
We run a database-oriented app in a number of branches. It's so flaky that runtime errors are a daily occurrence.
The devs' response to reports of errors is usually:
a) Defrag the disk.
b) Stop the users typing so fast.
Seriously!
AT&ROFLMAO
Yesterday a friend was frustrated with some ways PHP casts and compares values. Such as PHP would compare hexadecimal numbers in strings, but can cast only decimal, "0" == false, and apparently nan == nan on some compilers, and so on. His solution? A 150-line equals() method which uses the casting rules of Python and the coercion rules of JavaScript. At first he said it's just a joke experiment, but today when I asked him he said he might use it...
Funny, I've had people tell me to reinstall the new Linux(here, uBuntu) updated set instead of updating it.
Maybe I'm a bad luck magnet, but last time I tried to update it pulverized X.
With apologies to Staples:
"That Was Fun!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
When I used to play Diablo II, I was having continuously video issues which dumped me down to the desktop. When I looked for support in the official site, there was a solution everywhere: defrag your full disk, update your OS to the latest patches, run an antivirus...
Gosh, all that for broken driver issues. And I tried multiple video driver versions. Nah. Defrag the disk, dude.
Dumped both D-II & Blizzard. The game was original; I gave it to another guy. Never knew anything from him.
Lotus Domino server installations (circa 2000) would complete at about four to five times their "normal" speed if someone just sat there moving the mouse around whilst the install wizard was copying files. Go figure.
I'd suggest trying the hates-software website at we.hates-software.com, but the software crapped out over a year ago and the guy running the site can't be arsed tracking down the no doubt obscure bug in Mariachi and fixing it. Since all of the users are too busy hating software they have to work with to fix software they're not actually responsible for, it's probably never going to get fixed, which is hateful but somehow satisfying, in a kind of Zen way.
I quite like the workaround that's always given for content management systems that can't strip out the humongous amount of invisible HTML cruft that comes with text that's copied to the clipboard from MS Word or Outlook.
Content editor: "Hey, why is the formatting of this page completely borked? And why can't I use the CMS's editor to fix the borkage?"
Me: "Where did you get the original text from?"
Content editor: "I copied it from a Word doc that somebody sent me. I just pasted that in. It was just plain text..."
Me: "I see. Well, delete the page and start again. This time, copy the stuff from Word, then open Notepad, past the text from Word into Notepad, then copy/paste into the CMS from there instead."
Content editor: "Oooh, voodoo!"
Me: "Indeed."
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Microsoft recommends increasing your system stability by leaving your scanners not plugged in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzFUcDKC64E
I remember when Microsoft put a crappy 32-bit front-end on MS-DOS 7.0 to make it more useful. It completely sucked. It hogged memory and crashed all the time. Luckily you could boot directly into DOS to avoid the GUI and get real work done.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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Back in my Fedora Core 2 or 3 days, I had a Dell Inspiron 9300 (?) with some kind of bug that required me to wiggle my mouse, otherwise the network connection would stop completely. Solution: Install Ubuntu. Haven't looked back much since.
On the fun side, it made me feel like I could physically speed up or slow down my network, but that was only fun for 2 minutes.
I used to have a network with windows NT 3.51 box and several 95 workstations.
Several times an hour I would see on the NT box a log error saying "An unexpected error has occurred on virtual circuit X."
NT 3.51 came with an online ref book you could use to look up things like that. When looking up the error code the page only said something like:
"If you expected this error ignore it."
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
Profiling has to be done with same flags enabled as for the production code. Otherwise the result will be meaningless.
Just thought of another one:
Many years back I was working as a freelancer developing the training material for a customer service app.
The agents input customer details, the app identified the nearest call-out contractor, sent the contractor a text message, started the clock ticking and updated the log.
Unfortunately, the devs used their own GUI and in the top row the 'submit' button was right next to 'form clear' and call centre staff kept clicking the wrong button, erasing the customer details and having to ask for them all again. This did not go down well with customers who'd called due to a domestic emergency (plumbing etc.)
I suggested that the workflow through the form meant that the agents would be better served by a submit button at the bottom.
The response to my submission: "Can't see a need to move the button during this development cycle - agents to be told to stop clicking the wrong button."
AT&ROFLMAO
Gah.
There's one program I have to use that's got some awesomely evil rules for what HTML is allowed in pasted text. It also uses one of those hacks to let you edit HTML in a text box as rich text. Combining these two features means that whenever you edit text on anything but IE, even if you don't need to use the rich text feature, it won't accept the text because it contains a non-allowed tag.
What's the tag?
<body>
seems like an obvious feature it should have shipped with. A product called Offline Review for a medical imaging device for a cancer treatment system. The problem: it shipped before the "offline" part was implemented. Recommended workaround: have the physician available to review the image during the treatment rather than on his own time. Yeah, because physicians can stop having clinical hours so that they can watch each treatment that therapists' do, and oh yeah patients from the same doc have to be secheduled at different times to allow for this. Nice.
The program Solaris Skunk Werks (A Battletech mech-maker program) currently has this annoying bug (or triggers an annoying bug in Java) that makes Drag and Drop functionality not only crash, but lock up X11, to the extent that I have to magic-Sysreq out if I forget and accidentally drag something.
What's worse is, the button for allocating items to slots stays grayed out if there's only one item. So, essentially, I have to either put two of everything on a Mech, or else reboot in Windows just to use a stupid roleplaying accessory.
One particular version of Nero 6.6, which also was the latest version of that major release for a long time before a final update, had a serious but silly bug in the Audio CD creation dialog. When you tried to shift change the order of tracks via drag & drop, it only switched the position of the selected track and the track before or after that back and forth. So you either had to insert the tracks in the desired order from the start or you had to switch the position between two tracks, then between the next two and so on. Hilarious!
Software problem: The autorun feature in Windows only works for CD drives.
Hardware solution: Make a flash drive with an extra partition that presents itself as a CD drive to the OS.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
When you used a computer as a time clock (running the client software and using a card swiper, instead of buying the special timeclock hardware), the licensing system on the "server" (which had to be logged in to run, as it wasn't a service but a running process) would lose track of a particular computer's license if more than one computer was running the timeclock client - and issue a new one the next time the client was run.
So, if you had purchased 15 licenses and were running 2 or more clocks (but less than the 15 you were supposedly allowed), you'd run out of licenses after a couple of days, even with light use.
After working for a month or so with the company to resolve the issue, what was their long term solution?
Give us a code that would give us "unlimited" (or somewhere in the area of 32,000 licenses).
After several years (like 8 or so) and much griping from me to switch to something else, we're still using the software, actually (but with only one swipe station, and only for our student workers in our biggest department), but will supposedly switch to something hosted and web based "soon".
I talk about stuff.
I guess many would be aware of the case of the 500-mile email. An office was not able to send emails to places which were physically located at a distance greater than 500 miles from the office! Entire story and the logic behind it can be read here - http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
The worst workaround I got was a while back with old Canon inkjet printers. I think it was with the BJC-250.
Sometime the printer would got stuck and there was no way to make it print. The led would be orange and even unplugging it would not work.
We had a whole bunch of these and they were under warranty. When we called tech support. The told us this:
Please disconnect every wire from the printer. Take the printer over your head and balance it from left to right 4 times. Put back everything ant test.
And it worked every time we did that ! The printer unstuck and began to print again.
It was really a hardware bug because we could reproduce it on each of thoses printers !
So, I gave my girlfriend a wacom tablet a few years back, and she notices they have a deal to get an half price upgrade from photoshop element to full photoshop CS4 by using her bundled serial number. That sounds like a good deal, photoshop CS4 for 300$...
So, go through the registration process, download photoshop from the site, it asks for the serial of the software we're upgrading from. Doesn't work. After going back and forth through support (who keep saying we don't qualify for the upgrade even though we do), they finally give us the "workaround".
You have to hit a bunch of keys at the same time to make a code pop on the screen, give the code to the support agent, who then give you another code, which you input in the "secret" box, which activates photoshop. And that will have to be done every damn time we reinstall even though we have a legitimate copy we purchased.. Oh yeah, great copy protection you have there, Mr. Adobe.
Makes me want to pirate the damn thing...
How about Ubisoft and RB6 Vegas? Remember that their fix around a big DRM issue was basically to install a no-cd crack by Reloaded? They just took the crack, renamed it, and then released as an official patch.
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The "Turn off menu animations" policy does not work as designed. This fix removes the policy interface from the console.
This one was great (it still runs through my mind to this day). Credit to Greg Reese for picking this one up.
Now, this would be the only time I have seen them do this, but it's still funny nevertheless.
From citrix's support site
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
This was a memorable bug: it cost my company a whole day of a senior Oracle DBA just to discover that if you wanted to go further on the magnificent Oracle installer, you add to make sure the "Num Lock" key was disabled. The look on his face when I came with the workaround was ... priceless ...
I was working for a database driven software company before y2k. Company was very old and did not want to spend money on y2k problems their software had. Borland database engine, Novell 3.x, Dos, NT 4, you get the idea.
Discovered a bug in internal testing where if you rolled the system date back before upgrading (this was common practice if you could not afford a y2k compliant computer) it would automatically overwrite the database and all data in it without warning. With our companies clients, this was much more of a concern than with a typical software companies. If a place like Ontrack could not help you, you were screwed.
The software was in lots of places like prisons where the budget to upgrade to y2k compliant computers literally did not exist. This was software used for things like determining who got out of prison or met requirements to earn rank in the military, a loss of data would have significant negative affects on people. Upgrades were commonly released every summer and this would have easily affected thousands of institutions.
Management knew the company had significant y2k issues and decided their path to resolving them was to refuse to allow anyone to document anything y2k related in case they were sued. I brought up the bug and was told not to document anything, not to do anything, that the company lawyers were working these issues. Needless to say company lawyers were not filing bug reports with programmers.
Solved the problem by going to one of the programmers I worked with from time to time. I grabbed a 20oz of mountain dew and appeared at his desk, and explained the issue. I asked how long it would take to have an undocumented date check built into the installer/upgrader that would cause it to fail if the date was before that given day. In less than 5 minutes we had one tested that would give off an undocumented error code and he snuck it into the release code.
It worked - the clients that tried it figured out what was going on and figured out a different way to resolve their y2k problem than rolling the date back. The company was saved from the clients, the clients were saved from themselves, and their clients were saved by a 20oz bottle of Mountain Dew.
We labeled 3000 free handout CD roms "Apple Mac only" when we discovered that there was a windows virus on all of them. Clever huh?
My laptop has a known and ongoing issue. According to the manufacturer, it's a problem with the power-saving code of the operating system. According to the OS manufacturer, it's a problem with the wireless access point not fully supporting a new OS manufacturer feature. According to the access point manufacturer, the OS vendor are a bunch of mouth-breathing morons.
(Dell laptop, Windows Vista, Linksys access point)...
The solution the OS vendor has proposed is to set my power saving features to high-performance even on battery. This shortens the useful charge from about 2.5 hours to about 45 minutes, which is just about useless to me.
The other solution was to use the wired adapter.
In Windows 98SE, at least, if you don't save every 5 minutes, the game will crash and disappear. You then have to reset your screen resolution manually AND you've lost all that gameplay, which may be bad if it was a particularly difficult part. Just before the crash, it will slow down to half speed for a few seconds, just enough time to hit the keyboard shortcut for quicksave, then all is good again.
The most recent version seems to have some kind of bug with Heretic where it keeps resetting the MIDI volume to max, no matter what you configured it to be.
I figured a work-around would be faster, so I slapped a 10-minute app together in C# that keeps resetting the midi volume to what I tell it to.
Hey, it works. ;)
Workaround: change the keyboard layout to slow down the typist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwerty
These weren't official ones. I developed them on my own.
The tape recorder was notoriously difficult to get the data to load right. Some tapes, saved on a different recorder, would require special tricks to get the readout "within specs".
One, I had to mute audio in the TV set to which the Atari was hooked up. I guess electromagnetic interference from the speaker was a problem. :)
On another, I'd have to hold the label with key functions on the recorder. The label was metal and connected to the recorder ground. By holding it, I was providing extra grounding that reduced the noise just enough to get the game to load. Luckily that one took only like 5 minutes to load
The best one was copied from a floppy. The copy was good, but there was no 'loader' program and the game was too big to fit with a copier to copy it to a different tape, and recorded from the beginning of the tape, no room to save the loader. The solution was to take a random different tape with a generic loader, start loading it, then after counting 6 "beeps" QUICKLY remove it and put the right tape in - the timeout tolerance was like 2-3s, so you really had to hurry.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The workaround: we canceled the meeting and faxed the 40 pages of a physical printout to the people involved, so we would all be looking at the same thing when the meeting was rescheduled.
where BSOD = big screw of death... I was serving under the Army, and in our office we had a 8086 PC who had a sistematic HD failure. It was finally solved when the technician found a memo from the PC manufacturer, recommending to install the HD in the PC case using shorter screws. The screws enclosed with the HD actually caused friction against the HD head mount, and this eventually fried the HD motor. The very same PC producer issued an installation sheet for adding a 8087 math coprocessor. If one followed the instructions, the 8087 would ended up installed at reverse in the coprocessor socket, causing its immediate failure. Needless to say, the manufacturer went belly-up a few years later.
Really, I never seen a case where updating isn't possible using an updater. I once got a 3 year old version of Arch Linux to update using pacman and many package updates, I was impressed with my self it only took 4 hours.
Oh, 9.04 was crap and everybody knows it. At least on the Intel driver front, and that's just for starters.
Rule of Slashdot #42:
Never engage in the Operating System war, it is the one thing next to first posts that will definitely get you modded down.
Oh, 9.04 was crap and everybody knows it. At least on the Intel driver front, and that's just for starters.
They said that about 8.10, and 8.04.
1. Call of Duty 4 would crash in Vista with a certain on-board soundcard unless you plugged something into the microphone port (headphones would do).
2. Visual Studio has this bug where occasionally Find in Files keeps returning zero results unless you press Ctrl-ScrollLock or Alt-ScrollLock (depending on which version of VS you have)
"My guess is that Excel implements some non-OS sleep functionality similar to their non-OS multiple document window." - by dna_(c)(tm)(r) (618003) on Monday May 25, @09:28AM (#28082393)
The "EnableBackGroundRefresh" setting for Excel's "work-around" while waiting on Oracle returned recordsets here -> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702
(Thus, if that settings is set "OFF", this setting prohibits anything else from occurring, probably leaving the app in what APPEARED to be a "hung" state, while processing incoming data from a return recordset from Oracle's middleware)
AND, that sounds more like it is using something called an application's "idle loop" (& I know this responds to mouse movements DIRECTLY OVER AN INVOLVED APP's WINDOW, because I have used it in code before via the creation of an IdleHandler to do so in my code in the past).
To do this, you have to create what is called an "Idle Handler" in your code!
(MY guess is this is what MS had in mind when they had you reset that configuration setting for Excel, so you would NOT see what appears to be a "hung app" while it is working punching the data into the spreadsheet cells from a returned recordset from Orcle's middleware layer)...
APK
Requiring the use of Windows in order to run their client app.
VMWare Infrastructure runs on top of Linux.
Well, the problem here is that nobody cares enough to wait for 9.04 to stabilize like the others did. It didn't change anything important. Ubuntu could have skipped the release entirely and saved a lot of headaches and mellowing press.
When a release doesn't need to exist, there's definitely some issues stirring about in the project.
Most recently: Having to click on the comments link instead of the "Read more..." as the latter took me to a blank page.
In general there have been several times where I had to actually edit someones source code and recompile to work around some bug. Unbelievable!
Windows 95 and 98 (and probably the first NT/2000 versions) had a famous bug, which was that the computer was unstable after 49.7 days.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.9430.16
49.7 days corresponds to 2^32 milliseconds.
What was recommended was to reboot your computer more frequently, not very bad for uptime records.
Let's note that I still have similar bugs on my laptop, where IIS tends to be unresponsive when I put the computer in standby mode two or three days consecutively.
I've destroyed X when I tried upgrading Ubuntu (i think it was from gutsy to intrepid). Unfortunately, I'm relatively new to Linux and couldn't get anything useful from the forums to fix it and I had no clue how to do it on my own, so I had to do a complete reinstall as well.
I had an older version of Word and I wanted to make an A3 document - but my printer only supported A4.
You're lucky in that you appear to live in a locale that uses ISO 216 (A-series) paper sizes. ISO paper, unlike the U.S. letter series, has a nice mathematical definition: all sizes are the same aspect ratio of sqrt(2):1, and each size has twice the area and sqrt(2) times the length and width of the size below it. So make your document on A4 and print it on A3 at 141%.
Vista has a slider to adjust the line-in record volume, but it doesn't do anything. I had to dig out an old Radio Shack mixing console and put it between the source and the sound card so that I could record without distortion. (MS appeasing RIAA???)
Maybe I'm a bad luck magnet, but last time I tried to update it pulverized X.
Hence the recommendation to reinstall.
Linux isn't really designed to handle big updates. Small and frequent, yes, but don't even think about lagging more than 3 versions behind on any given package. Before you flame me, I've had this experience on many different distros over the last five years, and GoboLinux was just about the only one shielded from the breakage by cleanly separating versions, and keeping the old one.
I remember being new to Linux and the wonderful errors I use to get. It's funny when you come to Linux from a Windows enviroment and you see how just one package can bring down the system.
It's a good learning experiance to see how the system needs to interact properly and once you see how a system works in and out you never really seem to never go back.
Do you have any idea how hard random data is to collect?
If your PC has a sound card, an entropy gathering service can hash the microphone input and derive at least 1 high-quality random bit per sample from ADC dither noise alone. So that's 96 kbps for a typical 48 kHz stereo ADC.
Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, ok not really, but in the late 80s, Sun had a problem with some of their hard drives. When they would park they heads they would stick and you couldn't unpark them. Sun's solution was to tell you to HIT the computer. They even sent us a letter showing you where on the "pizza box" enclosure one would strike.
Arch updates better than Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Ubuntu is rather infamous for being nearly un-updateable without a fresh install. Often users are advised to just backup their home directory and do a clean format (I like Ubuntu, don't get me wrong, but let's call a spade a spade here: This is a problem which many linux developers and ubuntu community members seem to gloss over, from what I've seen).
In one of our products, I found that the other developer had hacked in some code to give himself admin privileges, because it was a real pain to go through the setup process for every build. I beat on him for that, because the workaround was to simply delete the user database to get admin priveleges.
I ended up with a new set of hard drives (long story) and had to reload my data and reinstall my programs. I was impressed with how fast the system seemed with the new drives. That was until I installed McAfee anti virus software. Solution: wait a few weeks and you won't remember how fast it was.
A couple of years ago I was testing network collaboration software in a high security environment. We were using Win 2k3 Server which shutdown the application due to a complex security tree. The solution? Log in all users as local administrators! It worked of course. Fast forward to the following year, 2k3 again shutdown our apps, and guess what the solution was? You got it - local admin access to all of the users. I know it's pretty easy for the users, but for the security guys it was bizarre to say the least.
I once worked on a project where they had a Tempest room to shield the VAX-11/780 and so forth from spies. The room had a heavy metal mechanically operated door which was supposed to latch shut when it closed. Unfortunately, the way the thing was designed, the door bounced open before the latch mechanism could trigger. Our manager solved the problem by carving a backstop from a pink eraser and gluing it in place. Worked great. Then we had a demo for the visiting brass, and they demanded that the eraser be removed, because it was not in the spec. The manager objected, explaining that it made the door seal properly, but was overruled.
As to best vender workaround for a software problem? On a project for NOAA, we reported that the InterData FORTRAN compiler took the bytes it needed for long integers at runtime out of whatever followed the space reserved by it for a short integer. Their response: "It works in New Jersey".
P. Orin Zack
+ + +
Read my short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
whenever I boot my ubuntu linux (which is once a day since it's my main OS) the progressbar gets stuck several times. You can wait for hours but nothing would happen or you can press Alt and it will continue like nothing happened. I use 8.10, not 9.04 because that one for the first time really let me down. Looks like this one was Canonical's answer to Vista (imho)
When I want to answer an email from our exchange server, and I want to do it with inline replies, I have to send me the mail converted from rich to normal text format, and then answer on that mail.
Go figure, that's the devil blue line of that crappy email client.
These days it is Linux that's full of these:
- 802.11n panics kernel, so use only g
- Certain USB drives panic
- Use gnome network manager in KDE because the plasmoid does not work on encrypted networks
- Find beta drivers because HDMI does not work on official release
- Use kwin in gnome because compiz does not refresh window contents... Even with the "workaround" turned on.
The list goes on forever.
On Win XP open "Windows Explorer" and click on "My Network Places", there is no "Entire Network" icon.
Workarounds:
1) Hit Refresh.
2) Open Windows Explorer and navigate with the keyboard to that folder.
After upgrading a server, we watched a client verify the server through his daily application. The client entered data and clicked on submit, the next screen appeared instantly. "This is not possible" said the client "it takes about two seconds to submit data to the database"!
"But the new server is much faster!" we said. It didn't matter, the client refused to believe the data was really submitted.
We held a meeting about this 'problem'. One developer suggested to add a two second 'do nothing' loop to the submit button.
So we patched the server and asked the client to verify again. He entered data, clicked 'submit' and was very happy to have his two second delay back! "Now it works..." he said "...now the data is entering the database!".
We admitted our fault (knowing very well that all we added was a two second delay).
cheers
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
I worked for 3com in the late 90s. /home/dtam/testing/BUG12345."
One developer left in some test code which loaded a shared library out of his home directory.
We told customers "copy the foobar.so file out of the install directory and put it into the following directory on your machine:
I used to manage Digital UNIX (later called Tru64) systems for a large, now bankrupt, telecom back around the turn of the millennium. The filesystem used, AdvFS, was pretty cool and advanced for the time but under the version of the OS we were running we found that free space would shrink at a faster rate than used space would grow. I had filesystems report full even though a df would show only 60% used.
It turned out that when small files were deleted all of the space wouldn't become free. My customer wrote thousands upon thousands of 150-200 byte files a day and deleted just as many. The entire team and my customer agreed this was clearly a bug.
When brought up with Compaq (who had recently aquired Digital) the technical rep investigated and reported "this is not a bug, the code is being executed exactly how it's written." Seriously, this was his response. I would have been more amused if he seriously argued it was a "feature."
I never could get a definition of what a "bug" really was from him. I became rather infuriated when he reported to me that this issue was "fixed" in the latest major release of the OS. If there was no bug, why was it fixed?
I never got a straight answer and was left on my own to find my own work-around which involved inserting a new volume into the filesystem thus growing it and then deleting an old volume. When this was done to all volumes in the filesystem, the problem was resolved for a few more months. This was an incredibly labor intensive and, as far as I'm concerned, incredibly risky to move data around like that on a hot system with insane uptime requirements. There was also a massive performance hit while this was happening and my customer's application was already VERY IO intensive.
I'm still just as angry about that conversation with the rep today as I was back then.
Use ubuntu
Sometime back in 93-94 I had a HP Computer, I wanted to install a second Harddrive on. The new harddrive was also produced and bought from HP. However they did not work together. The answer from HP Tech support was that the new drive was not supported by the computer, so they suggested I bought a drive from Seagate instead...
Ofcourse I should have understood that HP computers does not support HP Harddrives... Stupid me...
I called Electronic Arts once because a game kept giving me a no-cd-in-drive error. Their solution? Copy the Cd to the hard drive, then go download a no-cd crack from the web.
Often users are advised to just backup their home directory and do a clean format (I like Ubuntu, don't get me wrong, but let's call a spade a spade here: This is a problem which many linux developers and ubuntu community members seem to gloss over, from what I've seen).
It's typically simpler to have /home on a separate partition for workstations.
Then you can install whatever system you want.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I'm sorry, sir. I'm anuspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctious to have
caused you such pericombobulations
Believe me, both Mac OS and Linux have the history of stupid workarounds. Though as the OSs evolve much faster than Windows, none of such workarounds ever had reached such epic proportions. Windows is pretty much unique in the way MS sticks to all the mistakes they ever made.
P.S. With Vista they decided though to break completely backward compatibility - and replace old broken interfaces with new incompatible but equally broken interfaces. Otherwise God only knows how many people in R&D and IT would have lost their jobs, supported solely by vast number of Windows bogosities.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Kaspersky Enterprise solution support advised me to turn off their active protection because it was not necessary.
The company I work for has an email server we bought. I know next to nothing about it, I can't comment on it. But when we bought it we also bought from the same company software to manage mailing to large client lists. It's this piece of software, which I'll call Bob's Mailer, that this post is about.
We've had numerous problems with Bob's Mailer over the last two or so years. The guy who is our support contact for the software, who I'll call Bob (hence the software name), is very hard to get in contact with. He doesn't respond to emails very fast, at all.
What we've found out over time, as we complained loudly to the company that sold us this software, is that they don't write or own Bob's Mailer, they just sell it as an add on (or they used to, they don't seem to any more, hint hint hint). Bob is the sole developer.
The problems we find are... fun. Like when the software was running so slow it couldn't, under some circumstances, send any emails. At all. Bob was taking forever to get back to us, and basically didn't seem to get it. His responses were of the variety "It works for other people." I got on the server, watched the MySQL server for a few minutes, and found the problem. It was running the query ".... WHERE email LIKE '%some@email%'" quite a bit. That causes a full table scan. I had to show him proof this was happening before he'd fix it.
That turned into a big incident about upgrading to a new version and this and that.
But the best response from Bob was the last big one we went though. We couldn't upload large lists of new customers (1000s) to the software. It would take HOURS and eventually the connection would drop (this is all a web interface, of course). We asked Bob to fix this or at least give us a work around. The request came from someone in Sales, asking him what they were doing wrong.
He came back with a word document of instructions. We (in IT) were copied in on the email. It's a good thing we read the instructions before someone got a change to use them. They were, essentially:
He wanted end users to log into the server by command line and run all sorts of SQL commands, because he didn't want to fix the web based GUI. He fixed it pretty fast when we raised a stink about his solution.
But one of the worst things is the email that contained those instructions. Sent to various people, it contained the root passwords for the server and MySQL, in plaintext.
Easily the stupidest work around I've seen. Every time something comes up, we consider dumping Bob's Mailer. I keep hoping we will. Dealing with Bob is a major pain.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I nominate having to run a suite of sold-separately (or at least downloaded-separately) programs to watch for viruses, detect spyware, replace the apparently-not-good-enough included firewall... This is a workaround for broken DOSisms that's made itself into and entire industry.
we're talking about two different things here. on the one hand you have reinstalling the same operating system to solve existing problems, on the other hand you have installing a new release of an operating system to solve existing problems.
in other words, i don't think it's possible to update windows xp to windows vista. with ubuntu one tries to make it possible to update 8.10 to 9.04, for example, but there are certain problems (for example if you install software that isn't in the repositories).
It's better to just reinstall, but it's not something that is technically required. I personally reinstall just so that I don't have to worry about inconsistencies popping up latter because I changed a few settings.
Well, that and the fact that an upgrade is a good time to dispose of software that's just sitting there, and a lot less work than trying to track down unused dependencies after you remove said programs.
Problems upgrading ubuntu? How are you doing it? I've upgraded via the alternative CD and also over the web on several machines over the last few years without any problems. Sheesh. My 73yo Dad upgrades the system himself without dramas. Either you're running hardware with hit-and-miss support, or you're doing something weird...
sudo mount --milk --sugar
An old game (Win95/98 era), supposedly it was supported on Windows 2000. Unfortunately the DRM system that came with it wasn't supported correctly (Macrovision Safedisc - I hate you). It would take a long time to verify the game CD in the drive. The original Microsoft knowledgebase article helpfully suggested that the solution was to wait "up to 15 minutes" for it to validate before the game started. Problem was, about half the time it wouldn't work at all, but you had to wait in order to find out.
They have other solutions now, but in less time than that I could download and install a no-cd patch.
Microsoft once instructed users to wiggle their mouse continuously for several minutes if they wanted to see their Oracle data make it into Excel (yes, it worked!)
Funny, I had a similar problem in a DOS program called Trans64, used to transfer data between a PC and Commodore 1541 disk drive through a link cable plugged to the PC printer port. The cable worked just fine if I wanted to transfer small individual files, but if I wanted to transfer whole floppies, it got about halfway before it bombed with a weird error. The thing is, if I kept wiggling the mouse while the data was transferred, the transfer did complete successfully...
(This was on a Pentium 166MHz machine with Windows 95 and PS/2 mouse and probably just as obsolete printer port with probably some weird sort of a cable that was not supported by anything else but Trans64. If that matters in any way.)
Try to install Office 2000 over Office 97, and you'll get a 'license not found' error for Access. You then have to uninstall both, delete a FONT, and reinstall 2000.
A fucking font. Hattentaler or some such German name.
You do realize there is a difference between reinstalling the same OS to solve a problem and installing a newer release of an OS to gain the changes and updates of the newer release?
Reinstalling Windows to resolve an issue may be necessary because either nobody has a clue WTF is wrong and the only solution is to punt or the work necessary to repair a broken install exceeds the work of simply starting from scratch. Both situations can occur with a linux installation as well but installing the latest release is not the same as reinstalling the same release.
As far as updating releases I've had good experience with several Fedora updates but I usually prefer to go with a fresh install and only retain the user data. You should also be prepared to resolve issues whether your installing or updating when your running a bleeding edge linux distribution. What is not acceptable is to have similar issues with a product from a multi billion dollar corporation that you paid good money to purchase.
Now if you really want a ridiculous solution from linux advocates I'll give you one that is close to your anecdote. It never fails that when somebody is working through some problem on their linux install, whether its a bug, configuration issue or simply a lack of knoledge, the question will come up "What distro are your running?". And when the answer that comes back is not the favorite distro of the individual on the other end of the support conversation the solution suddenly becomes "Install $distroX."
Its likely that 99% of the code between $distroX and $distroY are the same, installing X to resolve a problem in Y will have a high probability of producing similar results if the problem lies in the code. If its a configuration issue then $fanboiX should be pointing the troubled user to the correct support channel.
"WinXP has issues connecting to Win98 SMB printers via TCP or NetBEUI when connected to a DOS6 network running LANtastic. It would take about 15 minutes to find the printer and about 10 minutes to send a small document. There was no problem browsing the network, though."
So what, in the end, did the one person to ever have this problem do about it? Sorry! Couldn't help myself.
Ubuntu's update system is definitely lacking. If you put /home on a separate partition though you can do a fresh install without losing your data or settings. I've done this several times, and never had a worse problem than an occasional program complaining of an outdated config file.
A complete reinstall takes maybe 20-30 minutes, and since you keep all your settings, all you'll need to do is use apt-get to reinstall whatever non default programs you use and you'll be ready to go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction
This problem didn't stop in the 80's. I serviced Apple products from 1992 to 1997 and we would frequently take in machines whose SCSI hard drives had stopped running. The solution was a good swift kick, followed by data transfer to another drive.
Well, with 9.04 I can now hook my laptop up to a projector and make it work by hitting a button instead of fiddling with resolution settings and logging out and back in. Of course 9.04 also broke compositing for my graphics card, which is mildly annoying. On the whole I'd rather have easy to use external monitors than eye candy, so it's a net plus. The external monitors issue has been a long time and serious problem with Ubuntu, so the fact that that's improving suggests to me that they're on the right path.
Must concur that this also happened to me EVERY SINGLE UPGRADE SINCE 5.10.
So yes, I always dreaded upgrading, but since the purpose of my Ubuntu pc is merely "seeing what's this ubuntu thing is all about" + playing mp3 files (Amarok rocks), I always tried to keep up with (major) versions... if it takes me 2 weeks to get X back up & running, who cares.
However, going to 9.04 was painless and except for some messages that some .ini file was 'changed manually' according to the install process (-- when diffing all differences turned out to be comments --) it went quick & flawless!
A big thank you & congratulations to the guys that created 9.04 !
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
This is currently Cisco's work around for it's latest IOS, they said the next release should fix it (bug CSCsz32366), in the mean time just don't use ssh to login to the router...
Especially when the "Get A MAC" argument has not been used here.
Here's an example of using an Idle Loop Handler (in Borland Delphi code):
(I use it to update my screens (makes more sense than using, say, a timer to do so, or other methods (like KeyPress etc. et al) when an app of mine IS in a state where data is being populated into a Grid for example (which is much like Excel is anyhow)):
----
{ EXECUTE A TASK IN THE IDLE LOOP OF THE SYSTEM AND PROGRAM } //APKIdleHandler
procedure TForm1.MyIdleHandler(Sender: TObject; var done: Boolean); register;
begin inherited;
try
If GlobalIdleLoopFlag 0 then
begin
Panel7.Update;
Panel7.Refresh;
StringGrid1.Update;
StringGrid1.Refresh;
StatusBar1.Update;
StatusBar1.Refresh;
Form1.Refresh;
Form1.Update;
end;
end;
try except
Screen.Cursor:=crDefault;
ShowMessage(Trim('Abend in APKIdleHandler'));
end;
finally
Screen.Cursor:=crDefault;
Application.ProcessMessages;
end;
Screen.Cursor:=crDefault;
end;
----
There's other potential uses of it as well, which in my opinion (as to HOW Microsoft's using it in Excel) was to allow the dataset/returned recordset to fill the Excel sheet's grid(s) with said data, even using idle time to do so...
*There is also an Application.OnIdle event one can use, shown here -> http://www.delphifaq.com/faq/delphi/vcl/f742.shtml , but, I did mine "the old-fashioned way" above!)
APK
P.S.=> Nice part is, this is also "thread safe", in using application idle time OR systemwide idletime to help get a job done, rather than using, say, another thread to do so (which can be "dangerous" because technically, Delphi's GUI controls are NOT guaranteed to be "multiple thread safe" (though I have used threads to do such tasks, this does the job just as well in this case, for screen updates))... apk
Apple with their Apple III
the machine was overheating because Jobs insisted on a no vents design.
Well the logic board did bend and the socketed chips went out of their sockets. Apple could not figure it out what happened (well one engineer did and did not tell because jobs told him flat in the face that he did not deserve any raise because he was a lowly engineer) so he told the support to thump the machine against the table. This worked in many cases because the chips often went back into their sockets.
Apple support then told the customers for months in case of an Apple III failure (which it always did) thump the machine against the desk!
I've heard that there's this huge epidemic of software incompatibility in OSX that manifests as Just Not Enough Useful Software. Apparently the workaround suggested by Apple is to install a fresh copy of Windows XP onto the machine. This workaround is so popular that several companies now offer ways to work around this outstanding bug by enabling many different ways of installing fresh copies of Windows XP within OSX.
Da Blog
Intel Gigabit NIC could be irreversibly damaged by the Linux driver, so buy a second NIC.
It may be nerdy but I still host the occaisonal LAN party. With laptops being more popular it combines the fun of online gaming whistle still physically hanging out within poking distance. Anyways, with alot (and I mean ALOT) of old video games, (StarCraft, Aliens vs Predator, Age of Empires, etc) they wouldn't run without the CD, they would either blue screen asking you to re-insert the CD or pop up with an error message and crash. The funny workaround is that if you load a game, and turn the music setting to its lowest, or off, it no longer requires the CD to run, just to start it. Thus, LAN Gaming jumps forward with a single cd.
-1 pedantic
Sure it's a pain and there are many more I'm forgetting, but at least it's not Windows :)
...to suppress the output of a particular gdb feature. With a particular combination of kernel and gdb versions, single-stepping broke control flow, but enabling this feature (which produced a line of output per instruction) fixed it. The customer apparently had very strict change control, so rather than update the kernel, they preferred to have hundreds of their developers use a debug switch they didn't really want, and then use a second switch, found nowhere else in the world, to hide the debug data they had just requested, so it wouldn't clutter the output and hide what they really cared about.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
We had this with some SGI drives, I think in the mid 90s. What the SGI folks recommended was taking the drives out and whacking them down on the desk.
I ran into that little gem while researching TF2 server optimizations and saw this as a solution to be able to use tickrate over 66 on Windows while scrolling through the wiki. Although I am personally using Linux for my TF2 server. :)
http://whisper.ausgamers.com/wiki/index.php/Tickrate
Reminds me of the time when I recall hearing about some games' servers actually requiring a full 3D graphics card in the box in order to run even though the game server program didn't render anything, just ran in a command prompt window.
This space is not for rent.
As an official old fart for real, the silliest I ever encountered was technically a hardware bug. Not sure you youngins can relate being raised on surface mount technology, but on the Apple III the sockets on the motherboard were defective so the chips would slowly work loose and the machine would stop working. Apple's official solution ran along the lines of "Unplug the machine. Lift about six to eight inches off the table holding it level and let go." The fall and sudden stop at the end hopefully would cause the chips to reseat themselves. I used to have the actual service notice they sent out with those instructions but lost it in a move. Then there was the Ethernet card that would occasionally stop working. This is back in the Thin/Thin coax days, 10-base5 and 10-base2 for those of you with 802.3 fixations. The vendor's (long since out of business and forgotten for obvious reasons) solution was to have you remove the terminator from the cable for at least 5 minutes. That of course would bring the entire network segment down during that time, just the sort of thing you want to do in the data center with all the servers. Rebooting at least would only effect the one host, but that was "not recommended" by the vendor.
Now, the single stupidest thing I've ever seen crash an OS - HP Memory Disc Creator. Came with our printer, installed in WinXP by the parental units and foregotten about until three years later when it caused Windows XP to BSOD with stop errors on boot. I checked online, and this was a known issue by Microsoft with an update. (Facepalm) Now, couldn't the updater check for this known issue and warn/uninstall the useless software? Apparently not. And what was a "Memory Disc Creator" (whatever that is) doing in a key enough location to cause boot crashes? It didn't even launch anything at startup!
"Most linux distros" have to worry about the versioning and configuration of these packages.
And how does that change the fact that they all fail? Gentoo, for example, moved to autobuilds because the last release doesn't update cleanly (if you force it, you break both init and networking, and you need a livecd to recover).
7.10 and 8.04 worked great with my intel GMA950 based laptop. 9.04 was a royal pain in the ass. Using the xorg-edgers driver fixed me right up, though.
before many of the readers here were born, even before the PC was invented, when I worked for a large organization that shall remain nameless, a bug report came in: the program corrupts every other input line. The programmer responsible for the code issued a fix: she added a sentence to the documentation, saying "the input should be double-spaced".
OP made the suggestion that Linux was the best OS. And he gets modded down as flamebait? WTF?
I've updated from every version of Ubuntu since Feisty; that's Feisty->Gutsy, Gutsy->Hardy, Hardy->Intrepid, Intrepid->Jaunty beta 2 (->Jaunty, but that isn't a distro upgrade). Intrepid->Jaunty was the only one which actually went smoothly, but in two of the others it was my fault (one was a stray file with a significant name in /usr/local/lib, I don't know how I did that; the other was due to a hardware problem causing my computer to shut down in the middle of an upgrade, but nevertheless it was possible to resume the update (in text mode) once the computer came back up). So I don't think updating Ubuntu is necessarily doomed to failure; although it doesn't seem to be quite as good as certain other distributions.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
It's wise to take a system image with clonezilla now and then - especially before fooling around with updates to major systems.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
While running Beavis and Butthead Virtual Stupidity on my first Windows computer, a Compaq Presario Pentium 75, the game would sometimes not respond to my mouse clicks. Either the game did respond or it didn't, it wasn't a situation where the mouse clicks would work and then they wouldn't within the game.
I finally figured out the problem myself. Windows 95 didn't support TCP/IP out of the box, and when I dialed into my university, I used a program called Trumpet Winsock. Well, lo and behold, when Trumpet Winsock was running, the Beavis and Butthead game worked flawlessly. But if Trumpet Winsock was not running, the game would not respond to mouse clicks.
Bizarre, huh?
With 9.04, suspend now works on my Acer Aspire One. A serious boon.
Separate home partition is that one thing that you should have, if nothing else. Does the auto-partitioning do this in Ubuntu, though? (I've never used it)
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
That's gotta be a euphemism for something else.
Have gnu, will travel.
I agree. 9.04 is almost a regression for many things, and would have been better as a "service pack" / bugfix release than trying to add so many broken features.
Really? My parents have had Ubuntu on their machine since about 6.04 or 6.10. No problems updating so far. I have to assume sticking to vanilla applications keeps it simple, but how much do you have to deviate from the "norm" before upgrading becomes un-updateable?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
It's only hypocritical if he, himself does it, not if some random FLOSS developer does it.
At least, I would assume a name like theodp would be a guy.....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
... with SQL Server Data Transformation Services.
The DBA's excuse: it's less of a pain in the ass.
What really happened: the DBA obviously didn't know how to RTFM.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
hmmz, on my laptop I installed 8.04 then upgraded it to 8.10 wich almost foobared it. done a new 8.10 install, later tried upgrading it to 9.04 and it worked perfectly...
.10 releases they seem to go bad. not just because of this one time but many others...
my advice is skip the
I remember when we got an SGI Octane at work and thumbed through the nice printed manual. Like their bigger brethren the Origin, these machines has a significant "graphics subsystem" which was almost like another embedded host inside the workstation. As I recall, the recovery procedure for a crashed/frozen GL rendering session was:
1. Press the hot-key sequence to reinitialize the graphics subsystem.
2. If the previous step did not work, restart the X server process.
3. If the previous step did not work, invoke the shutdown command.
4. If the previous step did not work, press the hot-key sequence to reboot the system.
5. If the previous step did not work, press the power button.
6. If the previous step did not work, remove the power cable.
This was right at the bottom of a page, and we were always hoping that upon turning the page, there would be a step 7. I suspected it would require contacting an exorcist.
One of the most useful features of Windows XP was the ability to do an in-place upgrade. Basically you re-install the system over the existing one, so it refreshes all the system files/bundles apps, resets a load of registry settings and yet leaves all the user files and installs programs there. It's actually not a bad way to install a service pack and updates, and it can fix a variety of problems.
Unfortunately they took it out of Vista, so now your only option is to do a fresh install. Sometimes Vista gets stuck in a restart loop with updates, which is the kind of thing an in-place upgrade usually fixes.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I really love my MAC, I've completely switched over after using PCs since early dos days.
Lately I've been trying to install parallels so I can run a few Windows games.
Parallels struggles for a while, then says that there are "unmovable files" and that I need to back up my hard disk and re-install OS-X!
After looking into it, The problem is that the mac drive is fragmented and the mac has no way to defragment some system files (the file in question appears to be the latest OS upgrade which seems to be kept inside it's original file).
So, I looked around for defragmenting programs, but nearly every reference is either Apple or Apple fanboys telling you that the mac doesn't need defragmenting.
Well, I guess it's true, the mac does NOT need defragmenting, just the occasional wipe and re-install!
I'm not really disagreeing with the concepts here--the OS does self-defragment to a degree, the file IS a system file and shouldn't be movable, etc. What I hate is the damn arrogance, every reply to a post on defragmenting was along the lines of "Man are you STUPID, MACs don't need defragmenting! That's so PC" (and yet apple itself recommending a re-install to force a defragment when it is needed).
Makes me hate this cult I appear to be a member of.
I write software documentation for a living. After getting laid off from my job, I started doing some independent contract work, so I purchased Adobe Technical Communication Suite for about $1500. I made sure to check the system requirements before purchasing the product and it stated that it needed Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2. I *thought* I was fine as I had Windows XP with Service Pack 3 installed, however, when I tried to install the program, it would give me an error stating that I did not meet the system requirements.
When I called Adobe to sort this out, I was informed that it was a problem that they were aware of, and that the solution was to uninstall Service Pack 3, install Adobe Technical Communication Suite, then reinstall Service Pack 3.
So in order to install the program, I had to downgrade my computer, install their software, then return my computer to its original state??? WTF? And this is a program that I paid $1500 for?
Supposedly they have fixed this with the release of Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2 (which was released about 4 months after I purchased the program), however, in order to get that version I would have to pay the $949 upgrade price.
Amazing....
Excel 2007 is a failure beyond compare. Try plotting more than say... 2800 data points in an x-y scatter plot with curve smoothing on? Works right? You can see it. Now try and print it, or export it to PDF using Microsoft's built in PDF exporter. Whoops, it either just crashed on you or you got all the axes, legends, and titles, but no curves on the page. This, along with the previous 65k boundary issues leave me in shocked awe. Workaround? Don't use curve smoothing (not a big loss) or...
Install OriginPro. I liked the latter more.
(PS Just waiting for MS support to call me back and ask why anyone would need more than 640 points)
In a Microsoft text editing product with a long document, click and hold with the mouse and drag down below the bottom of the text field to select more than one page of text. It doesn't work. If you want it to select with any speed you have to wiggle the mouse back and forth.
I had a debian system that upgraded without issues across three major releases. Debian stable afaik is the only distro that actually handles major release upgrades without a hitch.
The only caveat with debian stable is that you're years behind the times. When they ship it it's already a cycle behind everyone else. Still, if it does what you need ...
It's funny when you come to Linux from a Windows enviroment and you see how just one package can bring down the system.
I've seen more than one windows program bring down a whole system...
Strangely enough it's happened to me for every single upgrade single 5.10 as well, this is on multiple computers (desktop, laptop etc.) and multiple methods (alt disc, upgrade manager, normal disc). I always have to do a reinstall, upgrades either fail during the upgrade process or once completed missed a bunch of packages making the system un-updateable and with many broke features (audio, video drivers, X11 issues, ghost dependencies)
If your hard drive is fragmented and you try to partition it with bootcamp,it tells you to backup your data,reformat the drive and then try bootcamp again...
Really?If I'm gonna wipe my drive I might as well re-partition it too and just forget about bootcamp.
Can I submit THIS as the reason there isn't yet a Year of Linux on the desktop?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Can anyone else confirm this? I've heard about the famous .0 release meme from Windows, but this is completely new to me.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It needs some gentle guidance. The language has too many words which have the same sound or spelling, or spellings that have nothing to do with the sound. The language lacks gender neutral pronouns, except possesives. the ending --ough.. pick a sound we have maybe 6ish cough hiccough through brough...
America needs to do some clean up on the language in a careful manner that makes the spelling and meaning of the language clearer.
The Dennis Leary part of my brain is compelled to add the last parcel.
Worcester mass.. BITE the Bullet, Either spell it Wooster, or say it WHORK-Ester --sounds like some violent crime against Ester--.
Storm
Someone make a band!
Linux & the Distro Packages.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The two dumbest bugs I ever saw:
1) Package deal PC + monitor + printer + scanner + etc. Defrag and scandisk were crashing the system, often BSODing. (Windows ME, no commments please.) I called tech support, and the guy told me to download and install a new printer driver. I thought he was nuts, but tried it. Worked a treat. Ah, the early days of USB printing.
2) During my time doing HP Deskjet printer support, I saw a genius move. HP had reorganized internally, and rather than each department doing its own media design for the printers it built, one consolidated unit did all the ink cartridges. It presumably cut costs, but also cut decent design. The first or second call I fielded on one of the new printers built under this grouping involved the print carriage crawling into its hidey-hole and refusing to come out.
And that's when I found out something fascinating. The media group hadn't designed the cartridges to be different shapes, like the older ones were. (The older ones were different in every way possible - color was bigger than black and various protrusions meant they each only fit one way without the assistance of a hammer.) Now the color and black carts were damnear identical, and they slid into each other's spots just fine. So they built a complex carriage with spring-loaded sliding doors keyed to the tiny differences between the carts as a workaround to try prevent people from loading color and black in the wrong spots.
For a workaround, it worked okay. Except.... They'd been so busy designing for the possibility of someone putting the carts in the wrong spot that they'd never even considered all the other ways the ink carts could be installed incorrectly. The cartridges were also symmetrical - they could be installed into the right spots BACKWARDS. Contacts don't meet contacts but the workaround spring-doors shut just fine, which I gather was the only metric the printer used to determine if a cart was installed. So printer tries to talk to cart, cart refuses to talk back, printer goes "WTF?" and goes into a coma until you turn it on, unplug it WHILE ON, move the carriage manually (can't be done without the unplug-while-on step - it locks into place on a proper power-off) and fix the carts.
Not even updating for "existing problems", more updating because that's supposed to be good practice and full of new fun features.
My problem is arising from the current "install, don't upgrade" is making a disincentive to follow the StayCurrent theme.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I have never had to reinstall Ubuntu ever since I first installed Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10) on my Macbook and I've even been upgrading to alpha-versions of Ubuntu every now and then just for the fun of it. Of course, there have been occasional problems (especially with the alpha-versions), but nothing that made the system unusable. I guess, however, that I'd probably be considered a power-user since I've been messing with Linux for nearly 10 years now, so I know how to fix the occasional X-crash and I prefer working in a terminal and stuff.
My girl friend has been running Ubuntu since Edgy Eft also, and I can't recall her ever having problems with upgrades - and she's definitely not a power-user and I've never had to help her with anything upgrade-related except for stuff like, "it's asking me if I want it to foo - what do I say?"
I think calling Ubuntu "rather infamous for being nearly un-updateable without a fresh install" is an over-generalization (at best), since I've only heard about people having to do a reinstall because they've really, really messed up their installation to the point where it's actually un-upgradable (e.g. force-removing packages that other packages depend on, mixing repositories etc.), in which case I'd say that it's the user who's in fault.
"Live free or don't."
I may not have been clear enough in my original post.
In Windows I see the environment as something like:
XP-Original (Terrible)
Misc updates for XP-Original (neutral effect)
XP-SP1 (Unclear, Never used it)
Misc updates for XP-SP1 (neutral effect)
XP-2 (Colossal improvement, basically the StartOver point.)
Misc updates for XP-SP2
XP SP3 (Kinda useful, but nothing amazing) .......
Misc updates for XP-SP3
All those updates were generally through Microsoft Update. Except maybe a fluke here&there, none of those updates themselves really broke anything in the upgrade process itself. That's because these are all the same "lineage".
Notice Vista is absent. That is a new OS in a different lineage, and I avoided it. So is Win7. Jury's out there.
So I liken Gentoo/Slackware/Redhat/Fedora to those "totally different OS's", which I also avoided. I had hoped that getting new updates in the ubuntu lineage would be comparable to getting service packs and smaller misc updates for XP.
If it's not, that's a problem.
(Quoting you for context)
"You should also be prepared to resolve issues whether your installing or updating when your running a bleeding edge linux distribution."
Then I decline. For learning "Linux & the Packages", I want ANY distro that is THE most famous for comparable update stability per my previous computing experience.
I will not tolerate random breakages. For that tradeoff, I am willing to go slower than drunken snails and evolve slower than microbes from the cambrian age.
(Someone else mentioned Debian Stable without the ubuntu branding. Poll, gang?)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What the Hell is "uBuntu"? It's one thing when people butcher this beautiful Zulu word by pronouncing it as if it were English (by treating the first 'u' like /a/), but spelling it like some made-up product name boggles my mind.
What's his name?
What food does he likes best?
Any photos?
Please, continue to entertain us!
factor 966971: 966971
I reported an issue to our software vendor that their BDE backed application would give an out of disk space error when trying to run a repair on the tables and I was told that I needed to increase the pagefile size! As I understand it, what was actually happening was that I had 4GB free disk space which wrapped the 32bit int, and by increasing the swapfile changed the amount of freespace - Cargo-cult tech support at it's best!
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
If my file server starts behaving funky (i.e., shutting down for no particular reason), it usually happens after an auto update. Sometimes logging in and running the updater will fix whatever the problem is, or I need to reinstall to the current version (which been once a year for the last three years). Not sure if the six-year-old hardware might be a factor. Otherwise, works fine enough between update problems.
If you know ahead of time that you'll be re-installing you can save/restore your package selections and save a bunch of time: http://jwoffenden.blogspot.com/2009/03/yet-another-great-trick-with-apt-get.html
/home partition brought my time from re-install to up and running like normal to practically nothing.
Essentially you just dump a list of installed packages to a file then when you re-install you tell apt to install them. Tricks like that and having a separate
Slashdot has rules?!
head explodes
My fire district implemented a new laptop based Emergency Medical Services reporting system and lets just say, geek that I am, I find myself yearning for the days of old where we used flattened pulverized wood pulp. There's five different ways to affirm you have completed entering data into a field, no way to tab between fields, some numbers must be entered using an on screen keypad using the TabletPC's stylus, and if the data submission button isn't there for whatever reason, the "cancel" button directly under where it should be deletes the whole damned report.
Damn developers should be flogged. Or treated by and ambulance that has to deal with their crappy software.
In that case several linux distributions have Windows beat hands down. I have little experience with Ubuntu but in SuSE, Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS not only do you easily get updates for the lineage of OS your running but the updates for virtually all of the installed applications. Whether its a desktop application like firefox, gimp, blender, rythmbox, etc. or its a server application like mysql, postgresql, apache, openssl, etc. all that is required is a few clicks through the desktop menus and entering the root password or on a server a command line yum update. After you finish with your Windows updates you still have to worry about all the other applications your running on your Windows OS as well as malware, spyware, virus scanning software and their databases.
In that case I would suggest avoiding the distributions that are on the edge, i.e. Fedora, and opt for something more stable and tested like CentOS or RHEL.
You know, funny thing is, although I'm not a big Windows user myself I have assisted with at least one debacle cause by one of the Microsoft patches you listed. I assisted in resolving the sudden death of a Windows cluster that was configured to perform processor intensive modeling for libraries used to measure profiles on a broadband spectrophotometry measurement tool. It turned out that the installation of SP2 on the cluster made it impossible to do its job because the central machine storing the data to be processed could no longer accept the connections needed to support the clusters running the modeling. I'm not sure which is more absurd, the breakage caused by the Microsoft patch or the fact that the only work arounds were to either remove the SP2 patch or hack a Windows OS system file with a hex editor. Heh, and people pay for that crap.
We were having issues with a web based (.net) app running on IIS 6.
The vendor said that our web servers were too powerful with dual-quad core processors. Their solution ... disable one of the CPUs!!
First time I had ever heard a vendor say a machine was too powerful for their software.
In a company I worked for, we had a deamon crashing from time to time. We just added an entry in clients crontabs that checked every minute if our deamon died, and restart it if necessary. Ugly, but works great.
My weirdest workaround was, ages back win98:
I had a new AGFA 1212P scanner which could only be operated with the included Scanwise software. Problem was the software crashed when I started using it. I called tech support. They told me to open Wordpad and to always have Wordpad running if I didn't want it to crash. I asked them if they were serious. They were, and it worked.
Eventually I wrote a batch script to automatically start both at once. I believe there was also some kind of regimen about having the power turned on only before or after the boot (can't remember anymore). It did work but it didn't give the air of reliability or professionalism. There was even a patch for the Scanwise program but that didn't solve the Wordpad issue (just made the GUI buttons more simple) so I kept using my batch script to load the scanner software.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Had the same thing with one of the v8 releases. Can't remember which one but all hell broke lose and it just all went wrong.
Did you read the article on Microsoft website?
"WARNING:This information is preliminary and has not been confirmed or tested by Microsoft. Use only with discretion. Some or all of the information in this article has been taken from unconfirmed customer reports."
Worst part is that I'm pretty sure that if there was a "known solution" in the "community" that was not published by Microsoft you would complain as well. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
lucm, indeed.
It's been a dozen years since then, but I think Quantum drives also had the problem.
Oh, 9.04 was crap and everybody knows it. At least on the Intel driver front, and that's just for starters.
That problem with Intel is with X.org, not Ubuntu itself.
In Ubuntus defense. I just installed ubuntu over a Windows system and it performed admirably. My only issue right now is finding drivers for an outdated POS sound card. Really I think Im gonna just drop the 80 bucks and upgrade it.
And this has been another installament of Captain Obvious!
Ah yes, the ubuntu "please mash my setup so I need to reinstall (aka upgrade)" option. Every time I've worked up the courage to hit the damn upgrade button I've regretted it. My advice: if the system works then stick with it until support/updates cease. Then (and only then) backup, wipe, and do a clean install. Don't even *think* of using the upgrade option!
For some versions of OE the string "begin " at the start of a line would cause the remainder of the email to be erroneously interpreted as an attachment. It would prove to be not a valid attachment and so not show up at all.
At first they suggested, in all seriousness, "do not use the word 'begin' in emails". Later they updated the workaround to basically:
I had an optical wireless mouse that turned off when tilted. I assume that was to save power when it got overturned. After a few months, the sensor somehow got messed up and the mouse didn't work on horizontal surfaces. I had to operate it on a tilted surface. That was tiresome and I switched to using my pants as the mouse pad.
I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 9.04 today. It totally screwed up the X configuration, probably due to misidentifying the video chip set. It picked a video mode that the hardware didn't support, resulting in the right and bottom portions of the virtual screen being off the physical screen. I tried picking a lower screen resolution, only to end up with a totally-garbled display. I then tried to manually reconfigure X using dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xconf, only to find out that, in version 9.04, this only allows you to reconfigure the keyboard, not the video setup. After tweaking the settings for about an hour, without ever getting a readable X display, I gave up and reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04. Fortunately, I did have /home as a separate file system, so my personal settings were intact. I just had to reinstall a few programs.
Photoshop: You can't have a network printer as your default printer if you want to open more than one file.
You know the solution.. Hit up the hardware vendors and put the pressure on them. Its their product! Do not endorse sub standard support. Yet it seems you did this with the 802.11n device (I can't comment on the N gear under *Nix as my budget hasn't stretched for new hardware yet). Beta HDMI- hit the manufacturers up for the Main board/VGA card- do you actually think this is acceptable? Manufacturers keep claiming not enough users are using Linux and keep selling gear with Win* drivers only. Every bloody trade/tech show I go to and they show off the Shiny New Must Have (tm) the first question is, "Does it support Linux or Have Linux drivers?"... If the answer is no- walk away. You as a consumer have the power to support those that support your OS. The OS is free- the Lifestyle is free- Spend some money on a programming/hardware courses and give back to the community (read write your own drivers).... Why should the hardware not work out of the Box? You don't mention which OS you have chosen- try SUSE,SLACKWARE, FEDORA, MANDR*.. Sometimes you may just get a shock... It took 3 months (many moons ago) to get my SAA7134 based TV tuner working under Slackware- Some Christmas present hay >:) now it's supported straight from the kernel.
Slackware- Its not just an OS; its a lifestyle
I've just gone back to 8.04 after skipping 8.10. 9.04 gives me random hard locks.
Kubuntu 8.04 is the last version to support KDE3.5. I'll stick with it until I die, unless KDE4 magically improves hugely. :-)
Usually I'd agree, but in this case it's not pedantic. Linux is a kernel. There are several different distributions of software that include the Linux kernel. Many of these distributions have many different updating mechanisms. It's not really possible to generalize them as a group. It would have been one thing if the GGP had said "apt doesn't handle massive upgrades well." But that's not what they said. They made a blanket assertion without even an anecdote's worth of backup.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
This is how you go from being "relatively new to Linux" to being "power linux user", if that's your goal. If you read all the logs and figure out the errors, and fix them one by one until X works again, you win. If your goal is to just have a stable system that works, ignore what I just said, but if you can fix it without rebuilding from scratch, you gain lots of knowledge, usually at the expense of only an evening.
I like music
This is really a hardware bug, but the "workaround" is a classic. Back in 1982 I was a sales rep. and technician at a ComputerLand store in the Silicon Valley. When the Apple III first came out, being a fanless system its heat sink was critical to thermal control. Unfortunately, the heat sink was too small (not enough surface area) in the early systems. The result? Heat expansion of the chip carriers and motherboard made the socketed chips (memory, mostly) pop up in their sockets, causing the system to fail. We got a service bulletin from Apple about this with a workaround so that the system did not need to be disassembled to repair. It was? Lift system unit 6-12 inches above a sturdy wood table, and then let drop so that it lands squarely on the table. That will reseat the chips and allow the system to be restarted.
After a lot of laughing and chortling, we tried it. After all, the "fix" was certified (or is that certifiable?) by Apple! To our wonderment, it worked, saving much time and $$ fixing these under warranty. We also made copies of the bulletin to give to our customers to they could "apply" the fix without bringing them back to the store for service.
So, even if this isn't a software workaround, I felt that the story belonged here.
Back in the late '80s I was taking beginning comp-sci class in Pascal. Being that I worked for the University at the time, I used my account on the univerisity DPS-90 (CP-6) to write/compile/etc my programs. One program (really an example of how to call procedures) had about 10 1-to-3 line procedures. During the day, when the system was busy: hundreds of users, etc. everything was fine. During the evening, when I essentially had the entire machine to myself, the program wouldn't compile. In fact, if I compiled it three times in a row, it would fail at different places... After an hour or so, I give up and decide to try it again before I had to go to class the next morning. So, I recompile it in the morning, and what-do-you know, it compiles.
It turns out that the Pascal compiler was using the system clock to generate function names, and when the system was lightly loaded, it would compile consecutive functions quickly enough (remember, only a couple of statements) that it would use the same timestamp for both function names, which of course would cause the compiler to abort. After opening a case against the compiler and attaching code to reproduce the problem, IIRC the first note asked why i had half-a-dozen 1-line functions (read: Are you STUPID?) However a patch modified the function naming routine and eliminated the problem.
I bought a cell phone from some outfit in California last year, and the damn thing can't handle MMS! I've had MMS ability on other phones for over five years. I can't send them at all, I can only send emails, which most people don't have on their phones. I can receive MMSs, but only as an SMS message with a link to a web page where the MMS is stored. BUT, the link isn't clickable--it's blah.com, not http ://blah.com, in the message, so the SMS program doesn't turn it into a clickable link--and since this otherwise great phone also lacks copy and paste (?!?!?) you've got to write down the web address and launch a browser to see your MMS. Crazy, huh?
So the workaround seems to be:
- don't send or receive MMSs
- have a paper and pencil handy
- wait until Summer 2009 for fixes
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I still get upset about the error messages that say to contact your Network Admin and don't give any more info than that. When you are the Network Admin being told to go contact yourself is a bit off putting.
I think you'll find Rule #42 is:
"DON'T PANIC"
The rule in question is, I believe, #38. Perhaps you should take a moment to review the rules that have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.
Take a flashlight.
Caution: May contain nuts.
(in house standing unwritten rules)
If running ADP application, don't update Java.
If archive manager won't load open task manager & kill xxx and xxx launched by archive manager.
When logging in to the application it will prompt you to update the install. Click NO and call tech support.
A complete reinstall takes maybe 20-30 minutes, and since you keep all your settings, all you'll need to do is use apt-get to reinstall whatever non default programs you use and you'll be ready to go.
To install exactly the same programs, before you blow it away, be sure to dpkg --get-selections >selections to find out what's installed, then dpkg --set-selections <selections ; apt-get -u select (or similar) to restore.
As has been mentioned, if you have a separate /home partition , reinstalling clean on a system / partition and updating from there will be far FASTER than updating an old distro, and less likely to have configuration weirdness after install--- I would venture a guess most of not all linux distros (hell, ANY OS) would see much the same.
Mandriva has been pretty solid as to version updates of the distro working for as long as I have been using it, but a ONE live CD can be tested on the hardware and installed in 30 minutes even on far less than modern hardware, and 10 min on a fast machine.
Updating from say 2008.0 to 2009.0 can take hours.
Either it's my computer or the drivers are funny, but my new Logitech USB mouse works only in Linux and not in Windows. In linux it works out of the box, in Windows you need some kind of driver that isn't even mentioned on the box.
For the most stable system, allways go for the LTS releases of Ubuntu.
The Long Term Support releases are usually proceeded with 6 months of intense bug fixing, testing, and overall stability improvements. The releases immediately following an LTS release are usually full of new stuff and the bugs that come with it all. Other releases are usually less revolutionary and more evolutionary in nature.
I would wager that LTS to LTS upgrades will be almost flawless as the customers that actually pay Canonical for support will typically stick to LTS releases (Regular releases are only supported for 18 months which is less than many organisations take just to plan an OS upgrade).
8.04 was the last LTS release, 10.04 is planned to be the next LTS. (thats April 2010 if you didn't know the release number was the year.month or release)
It is entirely possible that they could announce an earlier LTS or push it back later if there are too many upstream bugs (bugs that need to be fixed by other development teams, like the Gnome Devs.)
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
"Destroying X through upgrade" has become much, much more common in recent years. It used to be (pre 2006 or so) that an upgrade meant added functionality, support, and stability. Very rarely was anything taken away.
* and other misc. hardware support or functionality. I've got a list longer than I can count with one hand of devices I've had "not work" which really should (ie not ancient crap) after an upgrade. No errors, usually - just like the devs replaced the driver functionality with an empty loop.
I blame Ubuntu's break-neck development cycle (regression control? what's that?) and the kernel's "let the distros fix it" mentality since 2.6 came out. It's a bad combination.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well I worked as IT assistant at an unnamed company for a few months and every time we installed a particular program that remotes into a UNIX server, we would have to then log in as Admin and open a particular font in the font folder.
The fucking program wouldn't work right without it. All you would get were ungodly huge menu options, half of which you couldn't even see.
Every fucking computer....
I worked for a large bank here in the US. I was a phone banker. The main program we used ran in Internet Explorer. Sadly that wasn't the horrible part. If we set our wallpaper to anything other then one of the Windows XP preinstalled images (ie: something from the internet) the computer would randomly crash. The work around of course was to turn off our wallpapers, but they removed our ability to set wallpapers. So a lot of us were stuck with our cute little pictures from the net but couldn't change it and had random crashes.
https://www.speakservers.com/
I've had two very irritating md raid issues lately (both on ubuntu 9.10 *spit*) that I've never heard of before.
I installed the system to a single disk, mirrored it to another disk shortly afterr, and then made that disk have software raid partitions. Reboot, add the first drive's partitions to the arrays.
Only problem was that I'd initially set up the swap partitions as a single raid swap device. Very silly. In attempting to fix that w/ two separate swap partitions for the kernel to stripe, I could not remove one of the partitions from the array - the boot process (initramfs, maybe? I hate that thing) kept making the second disk unavailable and joining it to the partition - and then due to hibernate functionality, would remain unable to unmount. I went through a dozen cycles of reboot, single-user, make partition table changes, format, reboot to try and get md to ignore it. It didn't matter whether the partition was in fstab as swap, or if it was in mdadm.conf as a raid device.
Ultimately I had to disable mdadm from scanning the disks for raid superblocks, AND I had to dd if=/dev/random of=swap_partition to get the kernel to leave it alone.
The second I have yet to resolve. I've got an array (the one for the system root) which is (according to /proc/mdstat) degraded, but when I --examine each disk, they all checksum, etc. properly. I'm thinking this might be traceable to GRUB root= declarations, but I've yet to sort it out.
I also once had a network with a disparate variety of Windows workstations (100+ w98/2k/xp w/ a smathering of OEM/image/etc. installs) have systems which would randomly throw up that friendly message about only one domain controller being allowed per domain (re: SBS licensing issue). It was just the XP and 2k systems, not the older crap, which gave the message. Ironically 2k3 and 2000 Server installs didn't seem to notice. The solution was to pull the 2003 SBS server out a little sooner than planned, and migrate all of its services over to the new 2k3 Server system.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Don't forget the best encoding detection bug ever --
Bush hid the facts / this app can break
This causes VS2005 to flip out every once in a while, as it clearly does this encoding detection on a per-line basis.
DrPascal: Not the language, the mathematician.
I have a good one from today. A webserver with an application that requires WebDAV on IIS. New vulerability in the WebDAV service announced by MS, no current patch. Workaround - umm, turn off WebDAV.
Cheers MS.
But in-place updates always left you with a steaming mess of a huge registry, tons of unused files laying around, and so on.
Nowadays (unfortunately) nothing beats portage (except the better clones of it, like paludis). You even get slots, like on BSD's ports (I heard it's from there).
While I'm far from a fanboy of portage and Gentoo (many maintainers are simply asses), I must say, that I never ran into a problem that I could not solve, in the 8 years that my small server, and the 1 year, that my desktop ran it. Including changing all hardware below it (on the server) twice, and major architectural changes.
The trick -- which you will never learn with Windows, OS X, Ubuntu, Suse, etc (and I did never learn with them) -- is to understand the system and what you're doing on it. I do all my updates with this commands:
eix-sync
emerge -auDNtv
revdep-rebuild -p
emerge -atv --depclean
And then I look at the portage elog output for package notifications of any manual changes to do, and do them. This is the key think to keep the system working, and I think 90% of all Gentoo users just ignore those (at least at first). Hence the problems.
Sure it's not easy-peasy one-click and done. But it's never easy. It's just that with above mentioned "colorful clickable" OSes, when you get to such a problem, you have no chance of getting unstuck, because you never learned to work without the GUI training wheels on, and simply reinstall.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If you're writing a program and using the default print preview control, then according to Microsoft you have to enforce all of your customers set their measurement to the U.S. imperial system in the regional options: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=814355 .NET programming frustrations/woes (binding anyone?) that made me decide to never go back to .NET ever again if I can help it.
This was the final straw in a series of
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
8.04 -> 9.04 -> 8.10 .... 8.04, here.
:-(
On a four year old Thinkpad.
I suppose it's a matter of weighing the regressions against other things that have been fixed.
And all I wanted was NetworkManager 0.7
I know, the coordination is not what it used to be, and it's not that easy to swap cassettes that fast nowadays. Luckily, one good thing came out of MS Word---the magical Cut & Paste mechanism---which can help you to continue to enjoy your favorite games on your favorite minicomputer...
A. Record the loader on a new cassette.
B. Open the loader cassette, and cut the magnetic tape after the location of the generic loader.
C. Open the game cassette, and carefully paste the tape of the generic loader just before the game tape starts.
D. Et voilà, you have a new loader to your Atari game.
Slashdot users crash the servers when they report experiences on "Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds?" ;)
Another one :
LG cdrom firmawre guys found right to use write ATAPI standard (like CDRW) as command to flash firmware on the CDROM drive (RO)
Workaround : update the firmware, or with a special procedure if the firmware was overwrite
due to Linux CDRW packet writing patch that testing write capability to found if drive is eligible to be used.
np
Argh, I hate this. Why is it that so many programs make copying the formatting when pasting the default? In my experience, it's almost never what I want. Now, granted, I'm a programmer, so I'm normally much more concerned with the content of the text than its appearance. But even when I am created a formatted document, 9 out of 10 times I want the pasted text to confirm to the formatting I'm already using, rather than creating an ugly mismatched clash of styles.
I'm not wholesale against copying formatting, but it shouldn't be the default option. Unfortunately, it's often much more difficult (e.g. 3-4 clicks deep through a menu option) or impossible (falling back to the aforementioned copy-through-notepad hack) to paste without styling.
The helpful people at ESRI protect their monopoly in GIS software with a method of copy protection based on your system clock. If you ever set your Windows time >3 hrs. into the future (say, to test how an app. with unique calendaring will behave on New Year's Day), the GIS software checks three system files and finds a modification date in the future. Now your $2,500 software will not run because it's convinced that you're trying to fool an annual license (regardless of the fact that you have paid for and are trying to run a "permanent" software license). ESRI's solution? Reinstall Windows and everything else and never change your system date! Fortunately, after wasting half a day determining what the issue is, you can find an undocumented workaround to change the file mod. dates.
Yea so I totally have an epic story about this topic.
I am IT helpdesk leader for a company that uses a practice manage system owned by a company named GBA. The system prints out claims, manages schedules, etc. Medical claims are read by computers and need to be specifically aligned. One day I got a ticket about claims being rejected because they were not aligned properly.
So I check out the print alignment, the page size, etc. After a couple hours of playing with it I couldn't get the claims to come out aligned properly.
I then innocently decided to call GBA support as we had a service agreement with them at the time. After an hour arguing with level 1 and 2 support and 30-45 min on hold I was put on with an "engenieer" who after 20 min of debating over the finer points of network security and its supposed relation to print alignment he tells me "our official solution for this bug is to use a typewriter to manually correct the claims."
I just about died. I was left speechless at the idea of using a typewriter to correct something that is so simple to fix.
Seriously....wtf. a typewriter? Sorry sir, your washing machine is broke I would suggest using this wash board for your laundry.....
I've found that in place upgrade on Ubuntu using update manager to update from distro version to newer distro version works only once. The 2nd upgrade usually is so radically different and you carry enough cruft to make things difficult. So I basically just backup my home dir and etc dir each time a distro upgrade comes up. If it works out then I leave it alone, but it seems every other time I have things partially break and I mucked things up worse going from 8.10 to 9.04 when the drive UID's moved around and screwed with my mounts for my data drive partitions. I had to reinstall after that. Meh no big deal. I decided to take out my ide and just live off the 750 gig sata instead.
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that a physical measurement based on a transcendental number is "nicer" than one based on rational numbers, though in a measurement system you may not like.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
WD31000 drives - got them down to a tap on the side, but yes, they were terrible about this too.
Got them in a bunch of Zeos PCs, manufacturer recommended taps, kicks, etc. When they were removed from service, majority of them had kick and scuff marks all over the cases. Zeos has been out of business for a few years now (using BIOS versions labeled as developmental on custom manufactured motherboards I'm sure didn't help).
We were one of the beta testers for "32 bit Windows" back in 1993 / 1994 ..... this later became Windows 95 of course. As we did computer animations for television, we copied large numbers of files on a regular basis. We noticed that the Windows 32 machines locked up after two hundred or so files and dutifully reported it to Microsoft.
They still haven't fixed it. I dare you to try and copy 20,000 or more files from one hard drive to another on a Windows XP machine. Go on .... I'll wait.
On the other hand, my Macbook Pro (thank GOD I finally dumped Microsloth!) easily copied over 100,000 files the other day with no issues, no lock-up, no BS.
So the astoundingly stupid Microsoft work-around is to open a command prompt and use XCopy for large numbers of files ... which is obviously much easier than fixing the actual bug ... I say the work around is to use a different OS.
"Linux" does not have packages. "Linux" is a kernel.
"Most GNU/Linux distros" have packages. "Most GNU/Linux distros" have to worry about the versioning and configuration of these packages.
Fixed that for you. The funny thing about being a pedant is that someone else will always try to do it better.
Updates work most all the time. I have fortunately had enough experience in the past two years that the need to wipe and start over from scratch is mostly pointless. However, I would not expect the average user to be able to watch Xserver fail to startup and have any perception of why, or how to resolve it. The EASIEST thing to do, and what I usually do before even looking at a log or the configuration is to backup xorg.conf, and re-autoconfigure. Xserver to non-techies is scary. Loose internet, and you get no internet... which is pretty bad if you were expecting to find the solution online. Loose Xserver, and you loose your entire graphical environment. Fortunately, in 9.04 (maybe earlier) when you enter single user mode, you are prompted with a menu of common problems, one of which is "try and fix Xserver", which really just runs the autoconfigure like anyone else could have typed into the command line, but sometimes asking people to remember to type something can be a big much.
I'll admit, it is so convenient to have that there that I have switched to run level 1 just to use the item menu, then select "resume normal boot", as long as it was necessary to log out anyway.
Reinstalling means never having to figure out what went wrong. It never fails, short of a hardware problem, or issues that CAN NOT be resolved. My personal problem with Windows was that well after a decade of use, it was always easier to reinstall. When I first got into Linux in a dedicated way (before Ubuntu existed), I would keep breaking things I did not know how to fix. Often trying 10 different ways to fix something unsuccessfully, I had really left a mess behind me that meant reinstalling was easier. It was less then two years before I had hit a point where any problem encountered (whether I created it myself or not) never really required a restart. My thought today is why restart the computer when the bios will keep doing the same thing it was doing before?
Your best Windows techs simply keep better images on hand. Windows problems are easy: You either explain to the user it was an id10t error, or reimage the computer.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
The Intel driver front is one very small piece. This is also an issue that Intel is working on with X. It isn't an Ubuntu issue in so far as everyone waiting for Cannonical to do something about it. Personally, even when I used to used and "promoted" Windows, I always discouraged people from getting computers with Intel graphics cards simply because the drivers have never been all that great (assuming there are no fundamental issues with the hardware, which I would not be too quick to rule out.)
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Linux isn't really designed to handle big updates.
I'll assume since the topic is Ubuntu, you mean aptitude. There can be issues, but I have never had an issue with aptitude itself. I have had packages that were incompatible, or had packages with software that didn't work, but even in the worse cases, aptitude itself was rock solid. If there is an issue on a computer, and you manually fixed it, there is a chance that an update will over write your fix without fixing the problem requiring you to go back and put it back in, but that is dependent on 1) how much you customize your system, and 2) how well you keep track of how much you have customized your system. So the chances of something being set back to a non-working default is only statistically more likely when you are doing 2000 updates rather than just 3. But calling it "Linux isn't designed to handle large updates" is a gross misstatement, in my opinion.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
probably why forcing packages is highly discouraged with warnings of "only do this if you are absolutely sure you know what you are doing". Sometimes good updates have poor transitions, and typically the good update has to be completed and tested before all the case scenarios for transition can be developed, and in that case, it is a timing issue.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Oh, and further, Gentoo is the BLEEDING edge of Linux development. If source is available,, it is available for Gentoo. That just is what it is, good and bad. But complaining about something breaking in Gentoo (particularly something easily fixed) is a little like arguing political philosophy in war trenches on the front line. Sure, it may seem the most appropriate place to talk about it, but be mindful of your context.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
It is an option in the guided setup in the alternate expert install :) Personally, I don't see why not to just use the manual setup, but it is in there.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
The only reason I can see for this is that there are so many people diving into Ubuntu these days that are non-techie people. I have many friends that love Ubuntu that really are not even computer people (very limited experience with Windows). When they have problems, I see things that they are unlikely to have caused, and are very simple to fix, and obvious.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Those that wouldn't necessarily know how to handle a "bad update" or whatever you want to call it should turn on auto install of security updates only, and otherwise leave things alone. If someone ever asked me if they should go ahead and update to a major release, I would say no, simply because if they have to ask... you get the idea.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
To be fair, I have never had any problem with quality computers. The place I have had the most issues is with cheap computers that any tech savvy person would discourage anyone from buying. Any Sony Vaio I have put Ubuntu on has had major issues with sound, and if it has a low end integrated graphics card, proper configuration is a nightmare because the firmware doesn't give you ANY information about the cards capabilities.
I don't consider it to "elite" to blame Sony for those issues, but it does mean that if you already bought one... you just SOL.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
This rule is applicable to most software releases. Avoid .0 releases. In Ubuntuland the X.10 releases tend to equate to X.0 releases. I tend to only upgrade on LTS releases.
This sig. intentionally left blank.
Higher ed setting I was at was completely Dell, and for the most part they were reliable but every few years or so there was a lemon model. The OptiPlex Gn+ was the worst of them all, a P200 or so in the Win95/98 days. Details are hazy, but there was something extremely niggling about how the network drivers had to be installed, and doing it wrong resulted in a mess of manually removing files and editing .ini's.
Linux usually works better with small, constant updates.
Windows usually works better with massive, all-at-once updates.
There are nearly as many horror stories of linux machines breaking on a major update as there are on windows machines, and there are a hell of a lot more windows machines out there. Giant updates of Windows - unless it is jumping to a completely new version (i.e. Win2000 to XP, XP to Vista) - are recommended even if you have been keeping up with the updates. In fact, aside from major version upgrades, windows updates seem to be more likely to resolve odd issues rather than perpetuate them.
Upgrading to a new minor version in Ubuntu is often like upgrading to a new major version of Windows - broken libraries, files all over the frickin place just hanging there, no longer utilized, etc. I made the mistake of upgrading to 9.04 from 8.04 - I actually had to do 8.10 and right after do 9.04, and all kinds of crap was broken (like wireless, after 8.04 fixed it, damnit!). I upgraded because I heard about all kinds of UI updates, which was one of the things that bugs me about ubuntu, and I found it was just some relatively minor tweaks and changes.(The wireless UI is a big improvement though)
The one thing I like about windows is how interconnected everything is. Most people know one or two ways of getting to certain aspects of the OS, but there are often dozens because such and such is related to such and such, etc. I suppose that is what having a registry does for you. Philosophical differences between the OS's means we'll likely never see that in linux, or at least not to the same level. The flip side for Linux is fixing a problem is often just a config file away, so they each have pros and cons.
Something that just popped into my head thinking of pros and cons of each OS there, but is there any kind of automated cleanup of files, old libraries, etc. for linux (or just Ubuntu, I don't care, it's what I use)? That would be handy.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
...a lot less work than trying to track down unused dependencies after you remove said programs.
In Synaptic, on the bottom left, click 'Status'. Lingering dependancies are under Installed (local or obsolete)*, and uninstalled packages that you didn't remove the config files (when you used 'Mark for Removal', instead of 'Mark for Complete Removal') are under Not Installed (residual config).
*Careful, software not installed from a repo (Opera, Skype, libdvdcss2...) will also appear here.
WinXP to WinVista is definitely NOT the same as Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 is a minor version upgrade, like a small service pack or large set of hotfixes in windows; whereas XP to Vista is a completely different OS. Because they are built around the same methodologies and base technologies an upgrade from XP to Vista is possible; it's basically a conversion. It's also not recommended, because maintaining the linkages between the OS and programs is a nightmare, and sometimes bad things happen. The registry helps, but it often ends up getting jacked in the process.
The equivalent, though I don't like using it because it's a lateral move instead of a vertical move (vista issues aside, it is, technologically at least, an upgrade), would be "upgrading" from Ubuntu to Gentoo. That's just not going to work well, if at all.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Yeah, Fuck the fucking fuckers! When you think about it it's not a bad thing, Get Fucked slashdot readers, I hope you all get fucked, tonight!!!
Something is a-miss here! How on earth can sex be in the same sentence with Slashdot?
are you REAL? Someone demand him to show his geek badge please!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
How the hell is this a troll? It's a fact. Examples; Norton Antivirus 2000, McAfee Antivirus (many of their versions) both of these products repeatedly caused systems to crash. These are just a few examples and while they have got much better in their later versions the internet is full of junk that mucks up windows pretty bad... Registry cleaners come to mind.
I also worked for Canon in 1999 doing tech support and the Canon Creative software also caused a lot of windows 98 systems to totally crash that and the Canon 610/620 Windows Printing System. Canon had to make special drivers after it broke so many peoples computers.
Whoever modded the above troll is a troll,
ae
small service pack? i doubt a single package in ubuntu 9.04 is the same as in 8.10. i'm not sure you can say the same about windows xp s2->windows xp s3.
Based on your "latest performance" (more like a clown, than that of an actual competent programming professional in this art & science)?
Well, in THIS thread -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1243941&cid=28083149
What with YOU typing "9 9 9 9 9 9" only (instead of being able to recognize the use of a background idletime loop usage in Excel, as I had here):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1243941&cid=28084275
AND here just before that one above:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1243941&cid=28082575
No... No WAY you are a professional programmer (@ least, not a competent one, despite your claim of it, & yet your failure to prove you are below)...
No way you are.
HOWEVER, by way of comparison???
Ion.simIAn.c - First: Prove what you claimed about being a professional programmer below
AND??
Tell us more about the Gigabyte IRAM being a piece of trash...
(Because the IRAM works fine on Windows, but not Linux according to YOU @ least, so what is the "trash" here? Obviously the OS you use & its SATA access most likely)
Based on your stupidity in your statement quoted below in regards to the Gigabyte IRAM? Well - I am leaning towards YOU not knowing what you're doing with the IRAM, or Linux, because the reasoning involved is VERY simple, yet YOU? You fail to grasp it...
So answer the 2 questions below!
First, by providing verifiable PROOF of your professional status as a programmer (which you asked me for & I provided volumes of it no less) & then about the Gigabyte IRAM:
-----
"I'm a programmer." - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Saturday May 02, @11:17PM (#27803057)
-----
Really? Prove to us you are a professional programmer, ion.simIAn.c, won't you? After all, you CLAIMED that you are above, & demanded others do so as well, here:
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"You claim that you're a professional. Prove it" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Sunday May 03, @08:52PM (#27811101)
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I did so, & you no longer question that much... from here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1234703&cid=27981921 ...
I DO QUESTION YOUR ABILITIES TO RUN & UNDERSTAND LINUX period... why? This:
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"Heh. The i-RAM is a finicky chunk of trash." -by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Saturday December 13, @09:55AM (#26102285)
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So, since you said that? Well, back it up, vs. these 3 simple questions you now refuse to answer:
-----
1.) Does the IRAM run on Windows reliably? ANSWER = YES...
2.) Does the IRAM run on Linux reliably?? ANSWER (per your sources no less) = NO...
3.) Since the IRAM runs on Windows well, but not Linux, well... what is the "piece of trash" here (what is it YOU called the IRAM? A "finicky piece of trash"??)??? ANSWER (obviously) = LINUX...
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Funny - That 'piece of trash' (what you called the GIGABYTE IRAM SSD) works FINE on Windows... & yet, it does not on Linux!
(Explain that, & it appears the "finicky piece of junk", IS LINUX, not Windows OR the IRAM... well, it's that or what I am STARTING to lean towards, & that is that YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING WITH ONE (or, Linux apparently either)).
(And, just like the 3 questions I asked you there, and you RAN from them also? Again/once more - You're also STILL running from providing proof you are indeed, what you said you are - a professional programmer (not, no way, not with the tremendous amount of technical
I suppose that Dilbert is not published in your country of residence:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011027002011/http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2001182781025.gif
"I suppose that Dilbert is not published in your country of residence:" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Wednesday May 27, @10:14AM (#28109213)
Is that the "best you have"? Apparently so... non-technical "humor", but since you are a clown? It makes absolute sense.
Thus, again: NO WAY you are a programmer, or, you would have recognized the ability to use SystemWide/Application "idletime" & how/why/when/where it is used, per my noting it here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1243941&cid=28108607 , & here -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1243941&cid=28084275 , & here -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1243941&cid=28082575
(That, alongside your other numerous errors in that thread & others the past week or so now here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1234703&cid=27981921 to which links are provided there for verification of my statements now, in case anyone is reading & is interested)
LOL, man - YOUR blatant, outright avoidance of answering SIMPLE questions, many of which you outright blundered on no less?
No ion.SIMIAN.c - you're not a programmer, though you state you are (& based on your statements about the Gigabyte IRAM + Linux? Apparently, you're not much of a tech either...) & yet, you DEMANDED I prove I am, so I did... you, by way of comparison? You RUN FROM THAT PROOF & PROVIDING IT, on your part....
(Gee, why is that? Are you a liar?? Apparently so!)
APK
P.S.=> Remember: YOU ASKED FOR THIS, here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1230601&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=28076381 & I am only supplying it upon request (I was going to "lay off" on you too, & stated it, when you said what you said to MEK_LoveBug, whose questions you also avoid (proof of your statement that you are indeed, a professional programmer (which you asked MYSELF as well, & I provided it freely))... apk
Unfortunately they took it out of Vista, so now your only option is to do a fresh install.
Huh? I did an inplace upgrade of Vista from XP just fine when I first purchased Vista.
You misunderstand. With XP you can do an in-place upgrade of XP. With Vista you cannot do an in-place upgrade of Vista again.
The term "upgrade" is a bit misleading, since you are installing the same OS (even if it can be a newer or even an old service pack level).
An upgrade from XP to Vista is actually a bit of a cop-out. Rather than try to migrate all your apps and settings, it just renames your old Program Files and Windows folders, copies your data files (My Documents etc) to the new Vista personal folders and the does a fairly clean install of Vista. Older versions did try to keep your apps and registry stored settings, but perhaps wisely MS didn't try to do that with Vista.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I once worked in a school running a domain with Win2000 desktops and roaming profiles where, for some reason, users couldn't access their Clipart unless they happened to also be local machine administrators or domain admins. We tried all kinds of things to make it work for the "standard" users, but it wouldn't work for anyone who wasn't an admin.
After a few calls to Microsoft's help-line, we finally found out that, since the component was installed by an admin (and we couldn't use any other set of permissions to install it for some reason I can't remember off the top of my head, it's been a few years), the level of access that was needed to use it was the same as the installer. So they could run the application without issue, and do just about anything else to or with it, but they couldn't use the clipart components to include the installed clipart images unless they were administrators.
Microsoft's solution: "Just make all of your users domain administrators"
Our response: "You mean, remove all aspects of the network security that we have in place just so users can use the clipart that was installed through the Office installer? Fat chance!"
Our response to our users: "Sorry, no clipart until Microsoft can get us a patch or fix to make it work again."
You misunderstand. With XP you can do an in-place upgrade of XP. With Vista you cannot do an in-place upgrade of Vista again.
The term "upgrade" is a bit misleading, since you are installing the same OS (even if it can be a newer or even an old service pack level).
Hmm... I don't think I've ever tried that, only the repair options.
An upgrade from XP to Vista is actually a bit of a cop-out. Rather than try to migrate all your apps and settings, it just renames your old Program Files and Windows folders, copies your data files (My Documents etc) to the new Vista personal folders and the does a fairly clean install of Vista. Older versions did try to keep your apps and registry stored settings, but perhaps wisely MS didn't try to do that with Vista.
Again, what are you talking about? I didn't have to re-install anything, Program Files was still Program Files, with everything I installed from XP. The Documents and Settings was renamed Users, and some profile directory stuff was resuffled... but it still contained all the stuff it did before.
I'm a long-time Microslave. Whenever I install a distro of BSD or *NIX I quickly encounter problems I never see with Win2k and any solutions are apparently above my patience... so back to Win2k I go. I had hopes Ubuntu would finally give me what I and my wife need to make Linux a new home, but it hasn't happened yet and that's just damn sad.
I dunno if anyone already suggested this (or even if it's still the case) but the only way to trash a Blackberry and get it back to its default settings is to get the password wrong ten times. It really is an insight into how thick some people must be, in that after the fifth attempt, it stops hiding the password, and it still gives you another five tries at getting it right.