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?"

RE

[Anonymous Coward]

Biggest work around? I'd say having to use windows to do my job.

Re:rigoddamndiculous ?

[Hognoxious]

Only 'cos Chuck Norris told him to.

Re:wiggle their mouse continuously

[laejoh]

I'm a debian user, you insensitive clod. Do you really have to remind me???

ornery?

[Anonymous Coward]

1932 called, They want their word back, it's like the depression, you know.

Re:wiggle their mouse continuously

[David Gerard]

Obviously we need an entropy generation program that feeds it the input from simulated mouse waggling. We can use /dev/urandom as the input! Of course, we have to take care to make it more randomer [thedailywtf.com].

Veterinary Clinic App

[Linker3000]

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!

Re:rigoddamndiculous ?

[cerberusss]

urban dictionary = idiots making up words.
At 27 years old I am now an old fart.

UUuuh hello??! Rigoddamndiculous is a perfectly cromulent word!

Re:ornery?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

If they want the depression back, they can have it.

It's almost Zen.

[argent]

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.

Two-stage Pasting

[gilgongo]

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."

Re:wiggle their mouse continuously

[MichaelSmith]

Obviously we need an entropy generation program that feeds it the input from simulated mouse waggling. We can use /dev/urandom as the input! Of course, we have to take care to make it more randomer [thedailywtf.com].

Don't do that. The extra entropy will feed right back into /dev/urandom before you know it you will have this perpetual entropy generator massively increasing entropy in the universe then it will all be over.

Don't plug in your scanner!

[jonaskoelker]

Microsoft recommends increasing your system stability by leaving your scanners not plugged in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzFUcDKC64E [youtube.com]

Re:Ok,

[iamdrscience]

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.

MS-DOS 7.0 workaround

[Anita Coney]

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.

Re:wiggle their mouse continuously

[Anonymous Coward]

Suddenly I now understand why random data made it into my Excel spreadsheet when I imported from Oracle.

Re:Veterinary Clinic App

[MichaelSmith]

20 years ago I worked with an application on VMS. It used some form based UI tool which you get with the OS. (was it ACMS? I can't remember now) anyway you could set a timeout on a form which kicked you back to another screen if you didn't complete it within a specified time. One form with 20 fields or something had a timeout of ten seconds. There was something strange about the guy who wrote that...

Not excactly a workaround

[sigxcpu]

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."

Re:MS-DOS 7.0 workaround

[Psyborgue]

Yeah, but they later removed the workaround without removing the root cause of the problem (Win ME). Of course they called it an "upgrade".

Customer Service App

[Linker3000]

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."

not really a bug but

[ILongForDarkness]

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.

Re:Profiling /= Debugging

[Opportunist]

"Then don't optimize your production code."

Ticket closed.

Re:Stupid MS Office 2007 bug

[DarkIye]

Yeah, he should have considered the alternative possible cause: the printer responded with evil electrical signals when it was told it was going to be used as the default printer (printers don't like being told that), which caused Word to crash.

Re:rigoddamndiculous ?

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

[...] 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...

The absolute worse: Adobe Photoshop

[Shados]

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...

Re:Customer Service App

[Jedi Alec]

Yeeeears ago, I worked in a callcenter where we had a typical homegrown CRM application for logging calls in.

This app had a function under the F6 key that allowed an agent to grab all his open cases from the server so he could work on them.

It also had a function under the F5 key that would grab all cases ever created, melting the server...

Re:rigoddamndiculous ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop trying to embiggen your ego.

Re:RE

[Anonymous Coward]

Biggest work around? I'd say having to use windows to try to do my job.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Don't have the details

[jfmonte]

what CD was it? did you try different artists/bands/music types? :)

Oracle 9i / SuSE 9

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ...

Caffeine solves almost anything

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Apple Mac only CD Rom

[kop]

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?

Re:rigoddamndiculous ?

[Nyall]

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.

Re:Run Windoze much??

[Big Nothing]

I remember back in the Windows days, there were various stability and malware problems that could only be fixed by installing Linux, *BSD or some other high-quality OS. Ridiculous, I know, but true nonetheless. As a bonus though, the TCO was significantly reduced, so basically it was a win-win situation.

Re:RE

[mcvos]

Biggest work around? I'd say having to use windows to do my job.

Fortunately I don't have to use Windows for my job, but I do like playing games at home. Games that have only been written for Windows.

My options for work-arounds are:

• Install an OS I don't want and reboot to a different OS if I want to play a game, or
• Try to get it working in Wine, Cedega or PoL

All of these workarounds are cumbersome and stupid, and none of them are particularly appealing.

BSOD, 25 years ago

[ctrl-alt-canc]

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.

Re:rigoddamndiculous ?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.

"Even when used as an expletive, the F-word's power to insult and offend derives from its sexual meaning," Scalia said.

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!

two second 'nop'

[cobbaut]

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

Re:rigoddamndiculous ?

[MrKaos]

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!

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!!!

Re:Don't have the details

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Really? Guess you never heard of Windows 98 Second Edition.

Re:Customer Service App

[twidarkling]

It also had a function under the F5 key that would grab all cases ever created, melting the server...

Why would you (in the general sense, not you specifically) code that? I mean, there had to be a better way to auto-kill the server.

Re:Apple Mac only CD Rom

[Opportunist]

So YOU are responsible for a friend literally tackling me when I tried to insert a Mac CD into my Windows machine because "Mac CDs kill Windows computers"?

Finally it makes sense!

Some SGI drives too

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Run Windoze much??

[Steauengeglase]

I remember buying an old BSD book some years ago that suggested installing Windows NT for the correct IRQ settings.

Re:rigoddamndiculous ?

[mdielmann]

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.

Until you discover that his girlfriend's nickname is Brilliant.

Re:I've JUST been seeing this on my MAC

[Sometimes_Rational]

Makes me hate this cult I appear to be a member of.

Sorry, you aren't a member of the cult until you have complained about someone using MAC (an acronym, most commonly for Machine Access Code) when they mean Mac (a computer).

Hey! I'm in!

Re:wiggle their mouse continuously

[MichaelSmith]

Fresh random crap is available free of charge from my sisters facebook page.

Re:wiggle their mouse continuously

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always get a hardware RNG, I'm happy to wiggle my mouse for a bit and save some money.

But what if you need more than one bit, huh? What then?