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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.
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.
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.
John Wayne made it up:
http://www.celebrityrants.com/premium/celeb_wayne.html
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?
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
urban dictionary = idiots making up words.
At 27 years old I am now an old fart.
UUuuh hello??! Rigoddamndiculous is a perfectly cromulent word!
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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
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 think this actually had a good reason.
A nice old PS2 mouse generates interrupts when wiggled. This breaks up the boring routines. (Blocking routines actually.) And presto, a little more progress on transfering your data...
This phenomenon is not gone btw.
1. Start notepad in a window, not full screen.
2. Open long text file
3. Mark your text from beginning of document and try to scroll down. When mouse exits window, keep holding but with mouse stationary. Nothing happens?
4. Wiggle mouse outside window and presto it continoues to mark text towards the bottom of your document!!!
Fun and entertainment for the whole family!
John Wayne's not dead - he's frozen! And when we find a cure for cancer, we're gonna thaw out the Duke and he's gonna be pretty pissed off. You know why? You ever taken a cold shower? Well, multiply that by 15 million times. That's how pissed off the Duke's gonna be.
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.
speaking of HP printers, especially the networked ones, why is it that the network driver is 350 megs in size? I had to download two of those damn things, even after using a custom install option, to remove as much of the cruft as possible I still installed some 700 megs of drivers for two printers, and a scanner.
Guess what happens when the drivers get corrupted. you have to manually uninstall the registry settings and deleted all files manually in order to reinstall the drivers or they won't work.
HP decent printers, Software coded by monkey banging on keyboards.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Profiling has to be done with same flags enabled as for the production code. Otherwise the result will be meaningless.
[...] self documenting and shouldn't have a definition [...] fan-fucking-tastic for example.
I understand what 'fan-fucking' means and 'tastic' is probably related to 'elastic' in some way, but the sexual perversities they invent these days...
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
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.
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?
Point taken.
I will say that self documenting words (just like self documenting code) require a minimum intelligence level. I'm wondering what percentile of the US population you represented to get the "fan fucking" + "elastic" conclusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
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.
I don't understand how people associate the word "fuck" so exclusively with sexual meaning. It seems to be a more prevalent attitude in America, affecting even supreme court justices.
Such a conclusion is a pretty unfair typecasting of such a versatile swearword. While "fucking" or "to fuck" is often used to describe sexual intercourse, the word has a great many other meanings. "Fuck off" being the most classic and familiar example, used to gruffly tell someone to remove themselves, or to desist from an action, etc, but perhaps only to express disbelief or some such. "What the fuck" shows the ability to use the word in an undirected fashion. Alone, "Fuck" can be an effective emotional outlet. "Fuckers" turns the verb into a noun, that is, if it were ever a verb in the first place. Things like "fan-fucking-tastic" show just how versatile this unique utterance can be, as it transcends classical descriptions.
So, "Fuck" is not just a sexual swearword. Perhaps, lacking any other terms, American's take it to primarily refer to intercourse. In fact, other english speakers have many other words at their disposal for describing sexual activities. "Shag","ride", etc. Lack of such words in someones personal or cultural lexicon should not be used to imbue unwarranted meaning to a speakers words in some kind of reverse irony.
When Bono said "fucking brilliant" at the Golden Globes, it was clear to any reasonable person that he meant the word as an adjective to brilliant, not as a sexual reference. This is doubly clear to anyone from Ireland. Nevertheless the FCC claimed that the word had and "inherently has a sexual connotation", in any context. And worse, the US supreme court agreed with them.
As someone who has been told on countless occasions by friends, family and countrymen to "Fuck off", or some such like, I'm personally offended far more by the suggestion that all these people's comments had an underlying sexual meaning than I am by any of the expletives themselves. But once again I find my culture, my traditions, my airwaves, and my internets subjected to the interpretations and censorship of conservative bible bashers in rural America. It's fairly insulting.
So please accept my sincerity when I say that you, and all those that would corral honest swearwords into narrow definitions, respectfully, Can All Fuck off with Yourselves!
May the Maths Be with you!
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%.
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.
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