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...
“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
171–180 of 216 posts
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#172Some 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…
How funny - exactly the same thing happened to me, which I wrote about in my first comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12482834
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#173I'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.
I wish filesystems would commonly support to store the Mime type. File extensions seem to me still a residue from MS DOS times. That would also make working with static (file) webservers much easier. (It's such a breeze to work with blob stores that allow to save the mime type...)
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#174Some 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…
Remember exactly same thing happening to me some 18-19 years ago lol! It was in the time when mice still had balls, so the reading sensor got blinded by sunlight in at least one direction - sometimes mouse won't work at all, sometimes would but only on X or only on Y axis. Fix: install window shutters.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, those idiots! They buy something from Apple, and then find it doesn't work. What did they expect. This, of course, is passive-aggressive snark. Suffice to say that I disagree with you; why shouldn't people expect software they buy from Apple to work? People buy from Apple because they don't want to have to deal with all this sort of crap; they just want it to work.
I am more surprised Apple doesnt invest in their own Unix utils packages honestly. Its not like they dont have the money to do so.
I can understand the attitude that 99% of their userbase will never touch the command line, but that last 1% represents the developers that keep the whole ecosystem going.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#176Of 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!
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I must confess that the eleven year old me didn't realize it would be a problem to put a screwdriver through the PSU grid to stop the fan from making noise and that it may have been preventing that musheen from working properly at some point. Yeah, I am sensible to some sound :/.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure? I am pretty sure a lot of printers support text directly, they use control codes for additional capabilities.
I'm fairly certain (minus Linefeed Printers of the old days) most modern printers are either Host-rendered (ie, the host renders text and tells the printer what to print) or use something like PCL, which even in the most plaintext mode, still requires some setup to describe and format the page. You can't just pipe a textfile into printer port and hope your printer spits out anything useful.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish filesystems would commonly support to store the Mime type. File extensions seem to me still a residue from MS DOS times. That would also make working with static (file) webservers much easier. (It's such a breeze to work with blob stores that allow to save the mime type...)
Well one advantage of the "file extension" mechanism is that it is the stupidest thing that will work [0]. It's just like having a type code only it is embedded in the file name so it doesn't require any special features from any filesystem. [0] Actually, UNIX's "everybody just guess" mechanism is probably the stupidest, but it is so stupid I didn't even consider it.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is why you should engineer things properly. Not duck tape them together with shell scripts!
*duct, ironically.
("Duck" refers to the water-resistant nature of the tape. Duct doesn't actually mean anything other than sounding like "duck". Ironically, duct tape is the wrong type of tape to use on heating ducts.)
If you're going to be pedantic, then get it right. ;-)