Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds? 655
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?"
Profiling? (Score:5, Informative)
A profiler was crashing when I tried to find bottlenecks in my code. The support rep. told me I should turn off optimization.
Re:rigoddamndiculous ? (Score:5, Informative)
John Wayne made it up:
http://www.celebrityrants.com/premium/celeb_wayne.html
Re:wiggle their mouse continuously (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, a few GNU encryption programs do the same thing while collecting entropy, and yell at you if you don't wiggle enough.
Feature. Not a bug.
Do you have any idea how hard random data is to collect?
Re:Don't have the details (Score:5, Informative)
Depending on what else they did, that might be a good response. A proper IT service desk should do two things in a situation like this:
1. It should find a quick workaround for the incident at hand, which is to recomend all customers to not put an audio CD in the drive of a server running notes.
2. The should perform root cause analysis to determine the underlying problem and remove it permanently.
If the Service desk isn't doing both these things, it's not doing its job properly.
Re:Run Linux much? (Score:5, Informative)
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!"
Re:wiggle their mouse continuously (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:PHP's == operator (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't have the details (Score:3, Informative)
Re:HP Printers and Windows are a No Go (Score:3, Informative)
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.
I helped a guy with an HP printer and it seems they install crap to check the ink status and give you "helpful" messages about it. I recommend installing the drivers through the add printer interface, that way you avoid the extra bloatware.
Re:wiggle their mouse continuously (Score:4, Informative)
Quite easy, actually. Creating it with a standard computer is the hard part.
My solution is most of the time pinging some computers around the globe and using the times as salt. They are fairly random, actually.
Re:Ok, (Score:3, Informative)
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.
... and the proper attribution for this quote is : Denis Leary - No Cure For Cancer.
Re:"Get A Mac" (Score:3, Informative)
Never engage in the Operating System war, it is the one thing next to first posts that will definitely get you modded down.
Reboot Every 49.7 days (Score:3, Informative)
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 [joelonsoftware.com]
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.
Re:Run Linux much? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Run Linux much? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Profiling /= Debugging (Score:4, Informative)
"like using EBP for computations instead of its normal use (or is it ESP? I forget)"
EBP is correct. For anyone interested: normally the [extended] base pointer points to the top of your stack frame I think where you will find your return address (address of where you were CALLed from, or IRETurn if you were called by an INTerrupt). You can then use fixed offsets from EBP to access function parameters, which are pushed onto the stack before the CALL. Local variables go onto the stack after that, so with each local variable used, the [extended] Stack Pointer moves further (down in the case of x86). This way, you know that you just need to move the stack pointer back to the base pointer in order to return.
Of course this isn't needed if you have a compiler that keeps track of local variables placed onto the stack and knows at any point the different between what EBP and ESP should be. In this case, you can use ESP-VariableOffset instead of EBP+/-FixedOffset to access variables on the stack, which frees up EBP for you to use as a generic register for use, and saves you wrapping your functions in commands to manipulate EBP (in GCC you pass the -fomit-frame-pointer argument to enable this, but this destroys debugging, as the knowledge of what's-on-the-stack that the compiler uses to calculate the offsets aren't stored in the binary)
Randomness at 96 kbps from an ADC (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Run Linux much? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Run Windoze much?? (Score:5, Informative)
OMG. This problem is old ... I do not know how old it. It was so many years ago.
With some NICs under Win9x one had to do some hand waving to make it working. And two reboots. (Good NICs with good OEM drivers (e.g. Intel) had no the problem - setup.exe did it all for you. But e.g. RealTek was shipping only drivers, without any fancy installation program.) I already forgot what to do precisely, but yes, it was caused by Win9x not installing something during setup since network wasn't present (but some dummy stuff was installed instead). The installation of missing pieces could be triggered artificially later - with minimum two reboots - but how and what were the step I already forgot. Haven't seen Win9x for 10+ years now....
I still remember though the impression of people when I did extra redundant reboot and Win9x network was magically coming to life. (*) (*) Not always, as Win9x's DHCP/WINS was atrocious and sometimes also causing the effect as if network was down.
Re:Run Linux much? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
contrafibularities ? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sorry, sir. I'm anuspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctious to have
caused you such pericombobulations
Re:HP Printers and Windows are a No Go (Score:4, Informative)
Because they come with so much crap you don't need. I've had HP driver setup program completely fail to run before. Using 7zip (highly recommend) extracting the files from the .exe is easy, and allows you to use Windows own driver installation procedure (eg, from Add New Printer or from Device Manager etc) to point to just the directory where the driver .inf file is in, which will install a much smaller amount of stuff that's needed than the full .exe will. I find this gets around a load of driver installation problems. I generally do the same with all kinds of hardware (eg, display drivers). Also saves your systray getting totally cluttered with branding icons and increases bootup speed.
Re:Veterinary Clinic App (Score:2, Informative)