
“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009) - beshrkayali
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161/comments/28
======
hazeii
Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't
work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the
issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed
the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse
"works fine for me".

Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the
mouse; guessing it was probably swamping the optosensors I made sure I covered
the side of the mouse with my hand when using it. His puzzled looks as the
mouse worked for me but not for him were priceless (I did let him in on the
secret after a few minutes).

~~~
DoubleGlazing
I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of
these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were
cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the
rest of the company.

Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense.

Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office
was empty and with no a/c background noise one of the other admins noticed the
PCs in the problem row weren't making any fan noise. A quick investigation
revealed that the PSU fans had been blocked with paperclips and bits of paper
causing the CPU to overheat.

An older member of staff who was in that row found the PSU fan noise
irritating and just decided to take action to stop it. She genuinely didn't
realise she was breaking the PCs.

~~~
dantheman0207
I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to
the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but
later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally.

I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found
it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the
noise. When I came home the thing was in danger of burning down the house and
the video card had failed.

~~~
aphextim
I am not sure if the following is true or one of those stories that gets
recycled.

While I was working at Best Buy - the Geek squad told us a story of an older
Lady who brought in a computer wrapped entirety in plastic saran wrap, to
prevent the virus from escaping the computer and infecting people. She thought
it was okay as she containing the virus and continued to use the computer
before it turned off and didn't turn on again, which is whys she brought it
in.

~~~
outworlder
Oh, never underestimate people.

On the Pentium Overdrive! days, a guy came to my father's shop complaining
that the computer wouldn't turn on. Turns out that he had installed the
process in a different orientation "to see if it would go faster". Spoiler
alert: it didn't.

Neither the CPU nor the motherboard failed (nor did the fancy overdrive
socket). Once the CPU was installed correctly, it worked again.

------
guhcampos
I had a user once calling me real desperately saying she was hacked. Got to
her desk and nothing was going on.

She then sit or her desk and started talking me through what she was doing,
then suddenly the screen started to move by itself, stuff getting typed
everywhere, applications opening and closing all around.

Turns out she had accidentally turned on speech recognition on her mac, and
the laptop was simply trying to parse - in English - everything we were saying
- in Portuguese - into valid commands.

Nice little havoc.

~~~
tabtab
Gee, I thought she was a Perl programmer ;-)

------
soared
Arguably the most famous example of a bug like this is the person who would
drive to the store to buy ice cream and depending on what flavor of ice cream
they bought, the car would or would not start back up.

[https://www.kepner-tregoe.com/blog/help-my-car-is-
allergic-t...](https://www.kepner-tregoe.com/blog/help-my-car-is-allergic-to-
vanilla-ice-cream-a-study-in-problem-solving-the-complete-case/)

~~~
teddyh
That’s an old urban legend:

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-
silence/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/)

~~~
RealStickman
100% of what is in the link you sent is in the original link.

~~~
vinaypai
Except the part where it says that it's a "Legend", and the fact that the
explanation and problem are reversed in older and newer versions of the
legend.

\---

It’s interesting to note how the “vapor lock” explanation reversed itself over
time. Earlier versions mentioned a flavor of ice cream that required
handpacking (while all the others were prepackaged and ready to go); the vapor
lock was said to form because it took so much longer to get out of the store
with this one flavor. In newer versions, we’re told that vanilla was a popular
flavor and was kept in a special case near the door, making purchasing it and
getting back out to the car take considerably less time; the car then wouldn’t
start because the vapor lock did not have enough time to dissipate.

------
gnicholas
I had a 2011 Macbook Air that would go blank randomly. After some
investigation, I determined it was often when I was moving it from one place
to another (sometimes even just repositioning on my lap), and that it was
going to sleep, not completely crashing.

Of course, MBAs have no moving parts, and there were no rattles when I shook
the machine and listened. Apple also could not figure it out. After replacing
several parts, they eventually replaced the unit with a newer model (it was
2014 at the time).

Soon after getting my new MBA up and running, it experienced the exact same
glitch. I knew it had to be something environmental, since the odds would be
astronomical that they would have replaced my unit with one that had the same
rare glitch. But I was traveling, which eliminated anything relating to my
house, neighborhood, power lines, etc.

Then I looked at my wrist, on which I wore a Seiko Kinetic watch. It was
triggering the magnetic lid-closure detector, which is on the sides of the
base of the MBA. When I picked up my computer with my left hand (I'm right-
handed, so this was less common), it would trip the sensor.

Interestingly, there is a very easy fix for this (and similar issues,
mentioned in other comments in this thread), which is to only sleep the
machine if both left AND right sensors are triggered. If it seems like the
left side of the lid is closed and the right side is not closed, probably it's
a false positive!

~~~
ianferrel
My wife had effectively the same issue where her macbook would "die", but only
during video calls. We replaced it, then it happened again with the new one. A
smart Apple tech eventually had her bring in _everything_ on her desk and make
a mockup video call in the store. The glitch happened when the magnetic cover
she had curled up to use as a stand on her mini iPad (for her notes for the
call) got a little too close to the latch sensor.

------
chasd00
One of my favorite pieces of debug folklore was the story of a minicomputer or
some other serious machine rebooting in the middle of the night. I can't
remember exactly but it was in some university during the 70s/80s. An
important server would spontaneously reboot in the middle of the night on some
days but not all.

Finally, someone sat up all night to watch what happens and observed a
cleaning lady unplugging the machine from power in order to plug in a vacuum.
When she was finished, she plugged the computer back in and left.

Another on of my favorites, not bug but more malicious, was someone wrote a
program to swing the heads on one of those old giant hard drives back and
forth. At the right frequency, the back and forth momentum would cause the
drive to walk away from the wall and eventually unplug itself.

~~~
tabtab
Re: _" someone wrote a program to swing the heads on one of those old giant
hard drives back and forth. At the right frequency...cause the drive to walk
away_"

On some TRS-80 models I discovered a certain POKE command would make the
screen flash, click, and "bounce" the image, similar to a power spike. So in
the university lab I wrote up a small BASIC script with a delay timer to
repeat "DANGER: Computer Overheating!" as the clicking/flickering increased in
rate. I stood back to watch and waited for the timer to kick in. Nearby
students would freak out. When the script was done, it deleted itself in case
they got the lab assistant to come over. I was a stinker.

~~~
Starwatcher2001
That was the port that switched the screen from 64 columns to 32. A different
bit in the port also controlled a physical relay that was used to switch the
cassette tape recorder on and off. Toggling the pair together quickly did
indeed look and sound quite dramatic - and would probably knacker the relay if
left for long enough.

------
variaga
I had a bug on a small system (basically an embedded computer with some custom
I/O hardware), where the report was a unit "wouldn't reboot if it was turned
off for too long(!?)".

Focused testing easily reproduced the problem. If you power cycled the machine
and the off time was less than 30 seconds, it always rebooted correctly. If
the off time was greater than 2 minutes, it ALSO always rebooted correctly,
but if the off time was around 1 minute, it would reliably hang during the
boot process. This behavior was rapidly confirmed on a number of other units
taken off the production line.

Needless to say this was very confusing.

The eventual root cause was that during boot, a file-system was created in
DRAM, similar to what a modern system would use initramfs for. The file system
creation routine had originally been written for non-volatile memory, so it
would by default check for a superblock to see if there was already a file
system in place at the creation location and if there was, just use that
(after unlinking all pre-existing files). If no pre-existing FS was found it
would create a new one.

But this was in DRAM, not non-volatile memory so:

\- if the off time was less than 30 seconds, the filesystem was STILL IN THE
DRAM and the ramfs_create() routine would happily re-use it.

\- if the off time was over two minutes, there were enough bit errors in the
DRAM that ramfs_create() would fail to recognize the superblock, overwrite it
with a new one, and everything STILL worked fine.

\- in the critical timing zone, the number of bit errors in the superblock in
DRAM would be small enough that the FS creation would recognize that there was
a pre-existing filesystem, but large enough to cause the ramfs_create()
function to error out. The boot would then hang when the DRAM filesystem was
accessed.

Of course there was no error checking on the ramfs_create() return.

The solution was to change the flags to ramfs_create() to overwrite
unconditionally. After that, booting was reliable with any amount of off time.

Lesson is - cold boot attacks on DRAM contents are real, and we managed to do
it to ourselves by accident.

------
geek_at
I love bugs like this. As a developer or Sysadmin you'd think the users are
crazy again but then you dig deeper until you lose all hope and already book
flights to become a farmer in the midwest and then you find something like
thís

~~~
sdrothrock
Maybe you've already seen this one, but maybe there are some people who
haven't... I get a kick out of it every time I reread it, anyway. :)

[http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles](http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles)

Edit: And the FAQ: [https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-
faq.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html)

~~~
ascar
Fun to read. Thanks for sharing!

With the risk of sounding a bit arrogant, am I the only one who immediately
thought about a timeout issue on the first description of the problem?

As a fan of online gaming I'm painfully aware that ping (and distance to
server) matter. Especially when I was in Japan and tried to play with my
friends in Germany, the fact that packets were routed over the US to Europe
resulting in ~250ms pings was a constant annoyance.

------
im3w1l
I'm gonna argue that the bug is not in "file". The bug is that the workflow
_uses_ file, which by it's very nature must be based on heuristics and will
get things wrong occasionally.

EDIT: Well file really had a bug in this case, where they didn't detect what
they thought they were, but the point stands.

~~~
jakobegger
I agree that you should use care when using file. My app relied on "file" to
identify file types, and in some cases it mis-identified some Microsoft Office
files. The problem was that Apple ships a very old magic file with macOS, and
when I reported the bug they said they don't care.

~~~
DonHopkins
Excel mis-identifies CSV files whose first column is named "ID" as SYLK files.

But who would _EVER_ think of naming the first column of a spreadsheet "ID"?

[https://www.optibrium.com/community/forums/6-general-how-
do-...](https://www.optibrium.com/community/forums/6-general-how-
do-i/21-unable-to-open-csv-files-in-excel)

>Q: I have saved the result table from admensa into .csv format. However I am
not able to open in excel. It is said that SYLK: file format is not valid. Do
you have any experience on it? Thanks.

>A: This is an Excel 'feature.' I would guess that the first column of your
data is entitled "ID". For some reason, Excel interprets any CSV file
beginning with "ID" as an SYLK format file (not really sure what that is!). If
you edit the file in, say, Notepad and change the name of the first column in
the header row, you should find that it will load without a problem.

>This will happen if you save a CSV file from any application with the first
characters "ID". So, unfortunately, there's not much we can do about it, other
than to recommend that users don't call their first column "ID"!

~~~
dfox
Excel actually mostly ignores the extension and relies on heuristics to detect
the file type on load. Many web applications used to implement "XLS export" by
writing out CSV file with .xls extension.

This magic detection of file type has one unfortunate side effect: it is not
exactly obvious how to convince Excel to load plain text data that is not CSV
with delimiters from the current locale. (which is major PITA with most
European locales where Excel uses "Semicolon"-SV and not "Comma"-SV but still
calls it CSV)

~~~
wmoser
You’ll have to excuse me because I’m not in front of a windows computer right
now, but if you open excel first, there is a data tab on the ribbon and an
import data wizard or something like that and you can tell it what the
delimiter is. You can also apply types to columns and whatnot before
importing. Not the quickest but does help extract the data.

~~~
Symbiote
This is a fairly new feature in Excel.

The lack of this feature pushed a lot of scientists to OpenOffice/LibreOffice
Calc. At first, just to open the file and "Save as Excel", but of course, then
they start using Calc.

(At least that's my experience writing scientific software in Europe. Excel
localized not just display, but the input and output. With Calc you could just
open a file as "pipe separated UTF-8" and be done with it.)

~~~
buckminster
If you rename your .csv as .txt then you get a wizard where you can choose
delimiters, etc. This works in Excel 2000. I don't have an older version to
hand.

------
angrygoat
I ran into another strange doesn't-work-at-this-time issue at my first job,
network/systems admin in the early 00s. We had a point to point microwave link
that would go down at about 4:30pm every day. It was really bizarre; this was
on kit on the roofs of two hospitals, and a pain to physically access.

We spent quite a bit of time chasing down various options for it to be a
software issue. Someone went and checked the kit and visually saw that we had
clean line-of-sight for the link.

It kept happening.

Eventually, a colleague went out while it was down. It turned out that there
was a crane on a building site, and when they parked it stationary it blocked
line of sight.

~~~
mark-r
I once worked with a guy who had been a computer tech early in his career. He
told a story of moving a computer on a military base up one floor. After the
move, the tape drive stopped working - it would glitch every few seconds. He
tried everything he could to diagnose the problem. Then one moment while deep
in thought he wandered over to the nearest window, where he saw a radar
antenna sweep around. Sure enough, the glitches were occurring when the
antenna was pointed his direction. The location on the lower floor didn't have
direct line-of-sight to the antenna.

------
notacoward
This is why one of my favorite features in the original MacOS filesystem was
type/creator fields (four uppercase letters each). Yes, it was possible for
developers to create collisions, but it was _still_ better than the UNIX
method of applying fragile heuristics to the file contents. IMO it would still
be a good idea to replicate this (minus the four-character limitation) with a
standardized extended attribute, falling back to the heuristic method only
when that fails.

~~~
yrro
The separation between type and creator had other beneficial side effects. The
Type code told you which apps _could_ open a file (by drag and drop or via the
file chooser dialog). The creator code told you which app _would_ be chosen
when the file was opened in the Finder (e.g., double-clicked). So HTML
documents I had created in some web authoring tool would open in it for
editing, whereas those I had saved from a web browser would open in it for
viewing.

I don't remember it being possible to change either code using tools that
shipped with the OS. I obtained a tool on one of MacFormat's early cover
disks...

~~~
dgacmu
ResEdit was the apple program that could change it. Unfortunately, I don't
remember off the top of my head if it shipped with the system or only with
some of the developer tools. I _think_ early versions had it.

~~~
wlesieutre
Fairly sure later versions didn't include ResEdit, but you could also set them
via AppleScript in a pinch and they did ship with Script Editor

------
TheMerovingian
In my first install of Arch linux, I figured that using the bleeding edge
software meant everything was supported. Upon plugging in an external monitor
into my Dell laptop, it, indeed worked.

Well, until I moved my mouse cursor over to that monitor. It then turned off.
Move the mouse back to the laptop screen; external monitor turned back on. My
first foray into Arch linux ended up with a bug report against Intel's
graphics driver.

Luckily, it was fixed very quickly and I'm proud to say it's finally time for
Linux on the deskt---- err laptop.

------
widforss
Reminds me of the traditional "gimme gimme gimme" easter egg.

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-
man...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-
gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030)

------
NicoJuicy
I got some legacy applications of work. One of them needed a new feature for
something. Including database update scripts. So it was changed, very carefull
because it had to use a database trigger ( ms sql) which i haven't used
before.

It was released in demo/test environment, for 1-2 months and there was never
an error.

When it got deployed into production, the integrating applications with it
went to shit. Rollbacked everything and it was fine again. Made me seriously
doubt myselve. I contacted the older devs that touched parts of the database
and application, they didn't saw any issues.

Fast forward 2 months, i heard it was deployed again into production without
any issues.

1 month afterwards, a colleague found an "issue" with the deployments. In
short: if you deploy to production, for some applications it would deploy and
older version ( 50% chance since a swap happened).

Urgh

------
hbbio
Funny, but can someone add (2009) in the title?

------
mcv
I wonder why anyone thought that `file` should have hard-coded custom
behaviour on that one very specific type of Erlang file, and how something
like that ever ended up getting accepted into the general code base. It sounds
like either a very personal workaround for a personal problem, or completely
the wrong way to solve a possibly more common problem.

Fixing the bug by properly escaping the string that matches the special file
still sounds like the wrong solution to me.

------
agateau
I hit a similarly puzzling bug a few years ago in Gwenview (an image viewer)
when a user reported it could not open some PNG files of a certain width.

I wrote about it here: [https://agateau.com/2012/qt-image-decoders-stepping-
on-each-...](https://agateau.com/2012/qt-image-decoders-stepping-on-each-
others/)

------
darekkay
There is a GitHub repository that collects such debugging stories (this one
included) [1].

[1] [https://github.com/danluu/debugging-
stories](https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories)

------
shanecleveland
Problems like this make us IT folk seem magical. I routinely remove blank
spaces from "empty" fields, rename files without slashes, quit and reload
applications "doing something weird." The list goes on. Just this morning I
changed an exclamation point a "1" to fix an error with a calculation.

Many of these things can and should be programmed to work, despite the user
error. But just as it can be hard for users to understand the fault in their
ways, it is difficult for the programer to consider many of these
possibilities when deploying applications.

------
d2p
Reminds me of a bug in PostSharp.. After making some changes our app would
throw a NullReferenceException Mondays. It turned out to be a bug in some
optimisation, but it only occurred on Monday because they skipped licence
checks unlocking "full functionality" on a Monday (Happy Monday!) which
enabled the optimisation.

[https://plus.google.com/113181962167438638669/posts/QF5pDB4X...](https://plus.google.com/113181962167438638669/posts/QF5pDB4XY6F)

~~~
beshrkayali
i can't remember exactly now, but webpack had a monday-only bug as wellat some
point last year.

~~~
foota
Probably [https://github.com/webpack/webpack-
cli/issues/962](https://github.com/webpack/webpack-cli/issues/962)

------
dodo6502
I had a fun bug once where some functionality involving self sign certificates
stopped working on Feb 29th. It came down to us simply adding +10 to the year
for the expiration. There is no Feb 29th 10 years into the future, only 4, 8,
12, etc... That was a good lesson on why to always use a date library when
adding or subtracting time. We weren't the only ones... Azure went down for
the same reason that day.

------
sebastianconcpt
_So it 's not a problem w/ openoffice.org, cups, or the brother printer
drivers. It is a bug in the `file` utility, and documented at
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619.*](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619.*)

------
aubreykilian
I used to work as a Network Admin at a big university in Cape Town years back,
and one of the urban legends at the time (late '90s) was that one of the long
distance wireless (microwave? Line of sight required) network links were
reported to drop every day at the exact same time for a a few minutes only.
Lots of hours of troubleshooting hardware etc. later, and still no solution.
Eventually a site-visit was done at both sides of the link, binoculars entow.
The problem? The line of sight was going dangerously close to the top of a
hill where a farmer had led his cattle every day at the same time. The cattle
blocked the line of sight for 5 minutes every day. No idea if this is true
though.

------
rramadass
Windows 3.1 16-bit multi-functional modules app i.e. skeleton app which loaded
multiple DLLs one for each type of functionality. When printing on a dot-
matrix printer everything would work fine. However when printing on a (then
new) Laser printer the entire system would hang randomly. Didn't matter which
module was the initiator. Spent 2 weeks poring over the code in our common DLL
used for printing and found nothing. Then started checking rest of the code in
each module and found it. Each module called into the common "print dll" to
print its graphs. On return back it would call a local function to print the
"graph legends" and thats where the problem was. The last line of this
function called "ReleaseDC" but the parameters "hWnd" and "hDC" were switched
by mistake so Windows released some unexpected memory giving rise to the
problem. This code was cut and pasted into each module with minor
modifications and therefore existed in all the functional modules.

I was somewhat proud of solving this :-)

------
knolan
I had an intermittent printer issue recently. As a Mac user I have to submit
jobs to the University printers via a web portal. I try to print very little
so it’s not something I use a lot, however I end up printing large numbers of
midterm scripts every semester.

On occasion I would log into the portal, upload my file and select the printer
and it would tell me the file was printed. However when I went to the printer
there were no jobs to be seen. IT insisted that my files were somehow corrupt
but eventually they sent someone over to see my issue and they too were
stumped.

Finally they logged the server side activity of my printer interaction and
they noticed that there was a space appended to my username, presumably by
iCloud Keychain and the behaviour was possibly changing between OS updates.

The web portal would let me log in, the server managed the files but the
printer would ignore the job all because of that space.

------
annoyingnoob
These are always fun. I've seen a number of them over the years.

1\. Speech Recognition typing random garbage - user claims to be hacked.

2\. Ambient light sensor on laptop turns off screen - user says my computer
works at home but not at the office.

3\. Set email background and font to white - user says he can't type new
emails but can type replies.

------
krick
That's disturbingly fragile filetype heuristic TBH. Couldn't they use
_anything_ better?

~~~
syncsynchalt
The heuristic was _supposed_ to be checking for the full string "Tue Jan 22
14:32:44 MET 1991", but the bug was that the spaces weren't escaped in that
string, and only "Tue" was checked for.

The proper heuristic seems odd but reasonable to me.

diff for reference:
[http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff](http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff)

------
aaronscott
I love these debug stories. My interesting one was from a job repairing
computers in high school.

My older colleague was upgrading a 486, and couldn't get the system to boot on
the first try, but if you hit the reset button after it was already on then it
would boot just fine. All the hardware tested fine in other systems.

I figured out the problem by listening to the hard drive. I could tell it
wasn't spinning at full speed when it was initially booting. The system would
get through the POST process before the hard drive could finish spinning up.
So the initial boot from power-off would fail.

The solution ended up being to upgrade the hard drive (or downgrade the
motherboard).

------
sarah180
I once spent quite a long time tracking down a bug that would only occur if
the time between 10:00 and 12:59 because of the extra character that occurred
in the date formatting, leading to an unexpected line wrap that led to a
lookup bug later on during a session.

If I'd known that time of day was the variable causing the behavior change, it
would have been fairly easy to resolve—but that wasn't the case. Instead it
was only resolved by the large-scale collection of failure and success cases
coupled with the careful correlation of bytes sent & received across an entire
session.

------
tabtab
I now suspect he made it up for devious reasons, but I had a professor who
told about the time random characters and cursor movements kept appearing
during data input from a lady at a remote office at his org.

Phone support couldn't solve the problem after many tries, including asking
her to try a different work-station. So they flew in a technician. The
technician arrived and sat to observe the lady as she did data entry. The
technician eventually realized her rather large breasts were bumping the
keyboard from time to time.

------
m4r35n357
So the check for Erlang magic numbers ended up being passed before the
_existing_ checks for other file types? Nice bit of pushing in, there. Still,
it was accepted by the "file" devs . . . .

~~~
syncsynchalt
Looking at the patch
([http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff](http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff)),
the issue was that the string "Tue Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991" is matched to
check for an Erlang file, which seems weird but reasonable. The bug is that
the spaces weren't escaped in the string, so it was only looking for "Tue"
instead of the full string.

------
blemasle
This thread from last July has a link about it.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344655](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344655)

~~~
1_player
And this one from 2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010)

------
paulintrognon
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010)

------
AllNightLong
I've only had issues with the software for school in the nights before I had
to submit work.

For exemple, I recently had to give back a work on matlab. And at 9 pm it
didn't show up in the windows menu. So I tried to run the installer that was
too long, until I found out you had to use a flash drive.

Then it returned a lot of errors saying I didn't have the modules.

And I have the same issue with every damn software.

What should I do ?

------
eesmith
From 2009-04-28. No activity on that bug, or on the bug it duplicates ('file'
misidentifies a Postscript file as a Haskell file) for many years.

Any news since?

~~~
kalleboo
Looks like a fix was released in `file` later the same year
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619)

------
runxel
Great! Reminds me of the bug with the car, that won't start if the owner buys
a certain type of ice cream :D

~~~
teddyh
That’s an old urban legend:

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-
silence/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/)

------
diegoperini
1\. Override `toString()` for a commonly used object in Java

2\. Run the program and attach a debugger

3\. Set up watchers for the object

4\. Watch the world burn for your profiler :)

~~~
dajohnson89
Could you explain what happens there?

~~~
LorenPechtel
Infinite recursion.

------
jp1016
when i got the computer for the first time , there was mcafee antivirus that
came with it, i scanned the PC and found a virus, i was shattered and cheated
by the computer seller as i thought it would damage the PC and i wont be able
to use it ever again.I'm a software engineer now

------
musicale
Who needs to print on Tuesdays? Usually M/W/F are normal printing days. ;-)

------
tzs
If you think the heuristics in "file" are sometimes a bit scary, take a look
at how PC hardware used to work back before the PCI bus become dominant. The
heuristics there ended up bricking two expensive motherboards for me.

The older ISA bus, which was quite common until at least the end of the '90s,
did not have any way standard way for software to identify cards, nor any way
for software to specifically talk to the card in a specific slot.

PCI cards have a required Vendor ID assigned by the PCI-SIG, and a Device ID
assigned by the vendor, and the PCI bus has a way to address by slot. A driver
that supports a particular kind of card can scan the bus by slot, checking
Vendor ID and Device ID to find cards it works with.

With ISA cards, all that driver would know is that the card it is looking for
has, say, 4 registers that appear at consecutive I/O addresses, and that there
are jumpers on the card that can set the base I/O address to 0x200, 0x240,
0x280, or 0x2CO.

The safe way to use a card was to install it in the PC, noting the jumper
settings, and then install the driver and tell the driver what jumper settings
you used. To know what jumper settings to use, you had to know what other
cards were in the system and what I/O addresses they used so you could pick
settings that didn't conflict with an existing card.

No one wanted to make someone installing a new operating system on a working
system open up the thing, find all the settings on all the cards, and report
that to the OS. They wanted to just automatically work with cards that had
drivers built-in to the OS.

So what the OS installer would do is go through each built-in card it
supported, and use heuristics to figure out if it is installed. For example,
take that card I mentioned earlier that can be at 0x200, 0x240, 0x280, or
0x2C0. The OS might now that after reset that card should have 0x1F in
register 0, 0x00 in register 1, and random values in registers 2 and 3. So if
it doesn't see 0x1F at 0x200, 0x240, 0x280, or 0x2C0, it knows that the card
is not present.

But suppose there is 0x1F at 0x200 and 0x00 at 0x201. Then the card _might_ be
there. So now the driver would have to write to some of the registers, and see
if the card responds the right way. Mostly it would do this be setting various
modes, and then reading those mode settings, and see if they are right. If the
card is not the right one, hopefully some of those commands don't make any
sense to it, and so its responses are different.

Think about this for a moment. Suppose the OS is looking for a network
controller, and the card at that address is actually a disk controller that
happens to have the same read values in its registers after a reset, so the
probe for the network card has to go on to the writing part of the test.

It's then writing network controller commands to a disk controller. If the
command for "set status" on the network controller happens to be the same as
the command for "write to disk" on the disk controller--you may have just
trashed your disk. Oops.

And so the OS vendors had to very carefully construct their device probes. If
writing commands for card X to different kind of card Y could trash things on
Y, they needed to make sure that they had probed for Y first, and so if any Y
were present skip them when probing for X.

Note that this doesn't necessarily work if you have any cards that the OS does
not know about. If you card is going to need a third party driver installed
after the OS is installed, it was best to take that card out during OS
installation if having random junk written to it could cause harm.

One day at work, we bought two very expensive top of the line motherboards.
The box said that they required Windows 98 or later. I tried to install
Windows 95 on one of them. The install went fine until it got to one of the
places where it reboots, and the reboot failed utterly. It did not even show
the BIOS messages. The system appeared to be thoroughly bricked.

Figuring one of the motherboards was defective, I tried the other one. Same
damn thing. Bricked during Windows 95 install!

We eventually found out what happened. The Windows 95 searching for devices on
the ISA bus ended up writing to some registers that on this machine controller
the BIOS flashing. It had erased the BIOS. Windows 98 and later knew about the
flash controller in the chipset used in this motherboard, and avoiding
trashing your BIOS. (Not sure why the motherboards either didn't have a jumper
to disable BIOS flashing, or shipped with that jumper set to enabled).

------
aritmo
Likely it was fixed in file

------
jp1016
i used to create virus on my school computer labs , a batch file with command
to delete a critical windows file like ntldr.dll or somthing and restarts,
then i rename it to fifa or GTA and put an icon of the game as well. someone
from any other class when using the computer think they got a new game and
click on it and it won't boot again. yeah , i was a bad kid

------
rhacker
It kinda pisses me off that the second line of the body became a sexist joke
phrase title in hacker news.

If you're not clued in on sexism: The stereotype reinforcement that women are
dumb with technology is the punchline. It doesn't matter that there was
actually an issue with the pipeline from OpenOffice -> Cups, but the hacker
news title was cleverly crafted to reinforce a stereotype.

I don't care that this will be downvoted to oblivion, but the seeds of sexism
exist everywhere.

~~~
jessaustin
In general I agree with you that "unconscious" sexism is common, but TFA is
not an example. TFA describes a user who has accurately isolated the
conditions that generate errors. That is a capable user.

Arguably, the title would be improved by adding the third sentence as well...

