51–60 of 216 posts
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
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 Edit: And the FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
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…
Back in middleschool, when JavaScript's window.open allowed you easily to launch a fullscreen window with no browser chrome, and setting the background-image to a screenshot of the desktop... it was so entertaining watching students and teachers alike try to use the machine and thinking it was frozen!
https://www.kepner-tregoe.com/blog/help-my-car-is-allergic-t...
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.
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.
Yes, this is why you should engineer things properly. Not duck tape them together with shell scripts!
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably OpenOffice could pass along a thing that says "please print this PostScript file" so that the printer software knows which type of file it is printing and doesn't have to guess with "file". OpenOffice knows what type of file it's outputting, after all. But your point arguably stands: if a user says "print file X", and you want different files printed using different logic (e.g. PDFs and PostScript files sh…
I think the issue here is the question that should be being asked is: "is this a postscript file?". `file` answers a different question, "what is the most likely type for this file?"
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