Follow-up on EVE's Boot.ini Issue

Krinsath writes "CCP, publishers of Eve Online, have posted a Dev Blog detailing the circumstances leading up to the deletion of XP's boot.ini file, which was earlier discussed on Slashdot. The blog post has intimate details about how the mistake occurred (a new installer from their normal one), how they responded and what CCP has learned from it. While fairly dry, it is to the company's credit that they're being open about one of the more serious bugs to crop up in gaming's recent history."

Straightforward, sure.. but... | also, the bug

[Animaether]

what of the users who did lose valuable computer time due to this problem? The proverbial kid handing in their homework (or dissertation paper or whatever), for example. Apologizing and willing to pay for a third party tech support service (e.g. Geek Squad) is nice and all, but does that cover damages incurred? doubtful. Perhaps that EULA will finally get a test.

As for the bug itself... the installer code is NSIS script; quite powerful, but you do need to know what you're doing. Especially with a command such as "Delete", I can't help but wonder who failed to RTFM (TFM reads, as they point out, that "Delete" requires a full path to be safe or else it expects the path to be root) and instead made an -assumption- on how it would work.

Now, to their defense, NSIS is also a little inconsistent (RMDir needs /r to be recursive, but DeleteRegKey needs /ifempty to NOT be recursive; whatthe.) and I've wiped my entire root myself while developing an installer with it, although via a more complex bug.. NSIS simply doesn't have any built-in "you dumbass"-protection like most commercial installers.

Although I think it's nice of them to say that they're not blaming Windows for their own mistake, I do honestly think that Windows should protect such vital files at all cost - including against Administrator level process (e.g. a prompt "you dumbass - are you sure?" will do).

Re:Straightforward, sure.. but... | also, the bug

[TooMuchToDo]

what of the users who did lose valuable computer time due to this problem? The proverbial kid handing in their homework (or dissertation paper or whatever), for example. Apologizing and willing to pay for a third party tech support service (e.g. Geek Squad) is nice and all, but does that cover damages incurred? doubtful. Perhaps that EULA will finally get a test.

Almost never will damages be covered. Come to think of it, I think in this case I can say "Damages will never be covered." You have to show value and proof of destruction of that value. Your homework being destroyed? Your dissertation being destroyed? While it may have a large amount of value to you, monetarily it has very little value.

Re:Straightforward, sure.. but... | also, the bug

[Thomas M Hughes]

Almost never will damages be covered. Come to think of it, I think in this case I can say "Damages will never be covered." You have to show value and proof of destruction of that value. Your homework being destroyed? Your dissertation being destroyed? While it may have a large amount of value to you, monetarily it has very little value.

Lost homework is usually only about 1-3 weeks of lost work. Often less. Dissertations are a whole different beast.

A lost dissertation has a lot more value than sentimental value. You've spent X years of your life working on it, with the clear expectation that you have a high probability of getting a PhD. Having a PhD means getting a job that pays better than the pay of a graduate student. If graduate student pay is $Y, and reasonable post-doctoral pay is $Z, and you lost X years of work due to the bug, the monetary value of a lost dissertation is X*(Z-Y). This is assuming the entire dissertation can be recreated again, which in some cases is not possible.

As a PhD student in the social sciences, my graduate student pay is ~$15k on average. Starting PhD pay is ~$40k. It takes 7 years to get a PhD on average, but for realistic sake, lets say I've been working on my dissertation for 2.5 years (ignoring the time spent on comprehensive exams and coursework). Using these values in the formula above, I'd expect to lose $62,500 dollars if I had to start my dissertation from scratch. These values go much higher in the hard sciences, with little question.

Knowing this, I've got backups of stuff, because I'm not an idiot. But were I to lose everything, it'd be really, really hard for you to claim that my loss was minimal in monetary terms, and only a large loss in personal sentimental value. If someone were to maliciously burn down my home, including a large portion of my notes and drafts for my dissertation, you better believe I'm going to claim monetary losses on those. I fail to see how it's any different if a corporation's negligence does similar damage.

Re:How is that even possible

[RulerOf]

Didn't Quake have an autoexec.bat file as a startup script?

Quake 3, and I assume for 2 and 1, contained a file called "autoexec.cfg." I always thought it was aptly named, being a DOS veteran myself, because it contains game configs like default keybindings (e.g. bind w +move) and such that actually allow you to control the game in the first place, and it's always called during game startup. Very similar in function to the file that it is named after.

Re:Only half the answer we need

[Anonymous Coward]

It was reported in a forum - why oh why would you report a bug such as this one in a forum the developers might or might not read instead of using the proper bug report tool is beyond me.

That was a very, very good analysis of the problem

[Antique Geekmeister]

Having violated /. policies and actually Read The Fine Article, it was a good analysis. I wish more people would write their bug reports this well, and explain how they're going to address the problem.

I also wonder if they wouldn't benefit from a nice virtual environment system to do QA testing of new releases with? Capturing the full graphical behavior of an OS is difficult in virtual systems, due to the overhead of the virtualization itself, but it might be a lot cheaper than keeping a dozen different hardware configurations around.