Comment On How Helpful Was This Bug?

How useful was this bug? Definitely a five.

All together now: "That's not a bug; that's a feature!"

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Since the second one is one a health-related site, I wouldn't count it as a WTF. It seems they're just being very optimistic about the life expectancies of people who use their site.

Lol, i wonder if anyone is still around from 1859

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Well, the oldest living person is 114, so, no -- it's a WTF.

Come on, stop picking on Windows Vista already.

How would you feel if everybody picked on you Down Syndrome little brother?

TofuMatt:

Well, the oldest living person is 114, so, no -- it's a WTF.

Hmm? So the oldest living person was born in approximately 1893. Why's that justify going back to 1857 again?

rbowes:

TofuMatt:

Well, the oldest living person is 114, so, no -- it's a WTF.

Hmm? So the oldest living person was born in approximately 1893. Why's that justify going back to 1857 again?

No, no no.. :D

Use the #1 trick on the book: You can always betray common sense with laws.

Make it better. Some guy born in 1957 whas bad registered as 1857. So Is legal born date is in 1857.

rbowes:

TofuMatt:

Well, the oldest living person is 114, so, no -- it's a WTF.

Hmm? So the oldest living person was born in approximately 1893. Why's that justify going back to 1857 again?

Maybe the site designer set it up so it would always go back 150 years from the current year so he would not have to update it later when this fabulous site results in people living much longer than they do now.

Of course, he may still run into an issue a few hundred years from now and have to update it for even longer life expectancies, but that's what maintenance contracts are for.

The oldest properly validated person ever was 122 at death, but there have been people whose papers claimed that they were older than that. I don't think it's THAT silly to have it like it is.

RE the Vista CD burner thing, I assume it's a case of the driver or hardware being a bit silly, rather than Vista itself.

rbowes:

TofuMatt:

Well, the oldest living person is 114, so, no -- it's a WTF.

Hmm? So the oldest living person was born in approximately 1893. Why's that justify going back to 1857 again?

It doesn't. Hence TofuMatt saying "it's a WTF".

Bugs can be useful.
Let's say you are behind schedule, but a bug with software you use is causing some of that.
Blame all the delay on the bug; you look better, and have time to fix your problem.
Useful bug.

jkohen:

Come on, stop picking on Windows Vista already.

How would you feel if everybody picked on you Down Syndrome little brother?

If my parents told everyone that that little brother is a genius with an IQ of 160, then I wouldn't be surprised if people started picking on him.

Perhaps they wanted to insure that nobody found an exploit to get around the intended license limitations of the software :). "Yes, it was extremely helpful. I managed to trick your product into running on all our servers. Course their butt slow now because they keep asking me if their bugs are useful."

If Methusila were alive, he'd eat vitimans.

CAPTCHA: Atari... ohhhh boy... a whole new list of WTFs :).

I can't think of a specific example right now, but there have been numerous occasions in life where I have made use of a bug in some system. It's just that you have to remember to address the lower ranked bugs before the higher ranked ones.

So what if I am a turtle and was born in 1830, then I can't use their site? How unfair is that?

Hey, here's a radical idea - why not let people _type in_ the year rather than scroll through a long list? I'm sure that clever computer will be able to check whether it's a valid year..

rbowes:

TofuMatt:

Well, the oldest living person is 114, so, no -- it's a WTF.

Hmm? So the oldest living person was born in approximately 1893. Why's that justify going back to 1857 again?

When the site was first published, 40 years ago!, it was valid. Obviously the site since then is poorly updated.

Someone is trying to pick on this Operating System.

[Allow] [Deny]

CAPTCHA: scooter

The fewer ways you give users to screw up, the better. Putting it in a drop-down isn't going to stop anybody who wants to mess with the site, but it will double check simple mistakes and stop twits (in the Monty Python sense).

Usually a WTF is a dumb or negligent act leading to a catastrophe or impending doom. Or, it's a typo, translation problem, or just the result of too little sleep that winds up in a hilarious or inappropriate message.

The age thing doesn't really fit those... it's kinda funny, but not really, and the person who did it probably had other things on his mind, like making sure his site didn't wind up being displayed here for some other reason... like only going back to 1957.

150 years seems pretty reasonable.

Just because the oldest KNOWN person is 114, doesn't mean somebody else is older that might someday want to use the site!

poochner:

The fewer ways you give users to screw up, the better. Putting it in a drop-down isn't going to stop anybody who wants to mess with the site, but it will double check simple mistakes and stop twits (in the Monty Python sense).

Then you must be a fan of this.

I have no experience with Healthspace, but I have to wonder if perhaps they have (a few) records for deceased people that go back to 1857. That doesn't excuse a combobox with 150 items in it, but it would explain why dates going back that far are allowed to be entered.

Erik:

Of course, he may still run into an issue a few hundred years from now and have to update it for even longer life expectancies, but that's what maintenance contracts are for.

Hahaha, that's great. You're saying the site designer expects to live for several hundred more years!

awt:

Hey, here's a radical idea - why not let people _type in_ the year rather than scroll through a long list? I'm sure that clever computer will be able to check whether it's a valid year..

For all you GUI designers out there, 150 items in a pull down is too many. As a rule of thumb, 25 is good limit for this type of control.

Gene Wirchenko:

How useful was this bug? Definitely a five.

All together now: "That's not a bug; that's a feature!"

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

As a software tester, I have the opposite opinion, naturally.
My favorites are:
1. "huh, funny, it works on my machine"
2. "well, it compiled!"
3. "sorry that is out of scope and does not apply to my code"


Sincerely,

Wene Girchinko

Rick:

awt:

Hey, here's a radical idea - why not let people _type in_ the year rather than scroll through a long list? I'm sure that clever computer will be able to check whether it's a valid year..

For all you GUI designers out there, 150 items in a pull down is too many. As a rule of thumb, 25 is good limit for this type of control.

Though people are very fond of adding states to dropdowns (Please
can I just type the two letter abbreviation?)

VGR:

Then you must be a fan of this.

Hey, thats the complete Interface Hall of Shame - Thanks, I've been looking for that for years...

As someone who writes healthcare software for a living, I can tell you that going back 150 years isn't completely without merit. It is not uncommon to import or input historical data particularly with registries that look at longitudinal data. I know that one of the systems I worked on had to allow date of birth back to 1870, so this doesn't seem too out of line.

I would guess they started the list with the earliest date they had collected. All that being said, I'm not a fan of the dropdown for dob year either - I prefer using validation.

The REAL WTF is trying to burn a disc with Vista's unbelievable joke of a burning "feature" that makes no damn sense. When my newest laptop came with Vista on it, I was seriously SHOCKED to see that they hadn't improved it and it still does the stupid crap it did on XP:

- You have the files you want to burn on your hard drive

- To burn them, they need to be copied to the temporary directory that represents your burner. You now have a second copy of the files on your hard drive for no reason.

- When you click burn, Windows then uses those temporary files to create a disc image before it burns them. You now have a THIRD copy on your hard drive for no reason.

That's right folks, to burn an 8 GiB DVD, you need an extra 16 GiB of buffer space just because Windows is psychotic. So God help you if you don't have any third-party burning software, you can't find an open-source solution that works well for you on Vista, and you needed to burn things to disc because your hard drive is full! you are pretty much fucked, because "built-in" means "shitty and useless in the hopes that you go out and buy a Roxio product"

Andy Goth:

Erik:

Of course, he may still run into an issue a few hundred years from now and have to update it for even longer life expectancies, but that's what maintenance contracts are for.

Hahaha, that's great. You're saying the site designer expects to live for several hundred more years!

No, the designer obviously runs a father & son web design consultancy, and needs to secure work for his unborn grandchildren.

1857 makes sense. Well, actually, 1858 makes sense and 1857 is probably a fencepost error. November 17, 1858 is day 0 of the <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day">Modified Julian Day</a> counting system, which is a fine timekeeping reference. <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS">MUMPS</a>, one of the pioneers in medical recordkeeping, kept time in a pair of integers, representing MJD and seconds since midnight. So many medical systems have developed with 1858 as the limit case for dates.

haha it means that programming is stupefying :)

Can you blame them for catering to zombies and vampires? The undead need healthcare too you know.

Wene Girchinko:

Gene Wirchenko:

How useful was this bug? Definitely a five.

All together now: "That's not a bug; that's a feature!"

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

As a software tester, I have the opposite opinion, naturally.
My favorites are:
1. "huh, funny, it works on my machine"
2. "well, it compiled!"
3. "sorry that is out of scope and does not apply to my code"


Sincerely,

Wene Girchinko

My favorite is "It was present in the last version". It's a great way of getting out of fixing difficult bugs.

The first one actually makes sense -- companies often refer to a record in a bug-tracking database as "a bug." In this case they are asking if that record was helpful.

Brandon:

Usually a WTF is a dumb or negligent act leading to a catastrophe or impending doom. Or, it's a typo, translation problem, or just the result of too little sleep that winds up in a hilarious or inappropriate message.

The age thing doesn't really fit those... it's kinda funny, but not really, and the person who did it probably had other things on his mind, like making sure his site didn't wind up being displayed here for some other reason... like only going back to 1957.

Exactly! A few extra years don't break the program, but too few years would make it unusable by some users, and I have seen some pretty short year-of-birth lists in the past. It's not like it goes back to the 14th century.

However, I do agree with Rick, that any more than about 25 items in a drop-down list is becoming difficult to use, and with awt, who suggested letting the user type in a year and then just validating the input.

The too-few-years error reminds me of some sites that ask you to identify your whereabouts and list the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia, leaving no choices for people in Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, New Zealand, various other island nations, and (on the off chance) Antarctica.

kindall:

The first one actually makes sense -- companies often refer to a record in a bug-tracking database as "a bug." In this case they are asking if that record was helpful.

Yes, kindall, you're right; companies often do that, but they shouldn't. One should never use internal industry language in a public user interface. To the Web site visitor, a problem resolution is not a "bug". It's best to try not to use "bug" in that oxymoronic way even at work, because inevitably the usage ends up leaking out to the public and creating a WTF.

Sgt. Preston:

The too-few-years error reminds me of some sites that ask you to identify your whereabouts and list the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia, leaving no choices for people in Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, New Zealand, various other island nations, and (on the off chance) Antarctica.

The companies could be located in the US, and broaden the categorization to continents for their international customers.

As someone who writes healthcare software for a living, I can tell you that going back 150 years isn't completely without merit. It is not uncommon to import or input historical data particularly with registries that look at longitudinal data.

I thought of that. It would make sense EXCEPT that the page is intended for people who have forgotten their user IDs. I seriously doubt any dead people will be using such a page.

Anonymous:

Sgt. Preston:

The too-few-years error reminds me of some sites that ask you to identify your whereabouts and list the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia, leaving no choices for people in Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, New Zealand, various other island nations, and (on the off chance) Antarctica.

The companies could be located in the US, and broaden the categorization to continents for their international customers.

No doubt this is true, but what do they expect people to do who don't fit into the companies' limited sense of geography?

The problem is not that it dates back 150 years, but that they use a drop down to do it.
It's bad enough that they use three separate input fields for a date (come on, displaying a date format above and validating the input against that shouldn't be expected too much from everyone).
However letting the user scroll like a maniac through an incredibly long list instead of just letting him type four digits is ridiculous.

misguided:

The REAL WTF is trying to burn a disc with Vista's unbelievable joke of a burning "feature" that makes no damn sense. When my newest laptop came with Vista on it, I was seriously SHOCKED to see that they hadn't improved it and it still does the stupid crap it did on XP:

- You have the files you want to burn on your hard drive

- To burn them, they need to be copied to the temporary directory that represents your burner. You now have a second copy of the files on your hard drive for no reason.

- When you click burn, Windows then uses those temporary files to create a disc image before it burns them. You now have a THIRD copy on your hard drive for no reason.

That's right folks, to burn an 8 GiB DVD, you need an extra 16 GiB of buffer space just because Windows is psychotic. So God help you if you don't have any third-party burning software, you can't find an open-source solution that works well for you on Vista, and you needed to burn things to disc because your hard drive is full! you are pretty much fucked, because "built-in" means "shitty and useless in the hopes that you go out and buy a Roxio product"

Try WinRar on for size - it's nearly as bad. Download a huge file to your E drive because you have a relatively small OS drive, and want to unrar it? Forget about it; it insists on uncompressing the entire file to a temp directory on the root drive, and then copying the whole shebang back to the target.

On occasions when I've grabbed 12, 13gb+ archives, the operation requires an extra 20gb of space and takes an extra 20 minutes. Thanks, idiots.

Steve:

I thought of that. It would make sense EXCEPT that the page is intended for people who have forgotten their user IDs. I seriously doubt any dead people will be using such a page.

It seems to me that dead people would be the MOST likely to forget their user IDs.

Actually WINRAR doesn't do the temp file thing if you use the "Extract To" button and specify a destination for the uncompressed files.

It does the temp thing only if you drag/drop probably because the drop target might not be something that you can uncompress directly to (like an FTP folder).

PeriSoft:

Try WinRar on for size - it's nearly as bad. Download a huge file to your E drive because you have a relatively small OS drive, and want to unrar it? Forget about it; it insists on uncompressing the entire file to a temp directory on the root drive, and then copying the whole shebang back to the target.

On occasions when I've grabbed 12, 13gb+ archives, the operation requires an extra 20gb of space and takes an extra 20 minutes. Thanks, idiots.

I'm happy to be corrected, but I think that's only if you use the "drag'n'drop" method of extracting - creating a temp file allows you to drag archived files into applications, like dragging and mp3 from WinRAR straight into Winamp, say.

If you use the "Extract to" button, it should extract straight to the destination.

Well - drop down lists have their place.
I.e. you don't want to mess around in the database with multiple values for the same thing, like "Germany", "Deutschland", "BRD", "GER" and "Allemangne".

But Numbers are easily checked (> 1856 ?), and typed fast.
But but...
But sometimes drop-down-lists allow navigation by typing "185" - some will jump to 1850, some to 1859, and some to "5..." - if possible.

captcha: Interoperability

I just assumed that 1857 was some sort of metric date having to do with centiweeks or milliyears or what have you, or ,aybe that it had something to do with that wacky 12-pence-to-the-shilling, twenty-shillings-to-the-pound money system they used to have. Who knows what kind of wacky date system they use in the UK!

;)

DeckerDK:

VGR:

Then you must be a fan of this.

Hey, thats the complete Interface Hall of Shame - Thanks, I've been looking for that for years...

I love the irony of that page. It is a huge, unorganized, and unsorted blob of random vignettes without any navigation helps whatsoever. It really deserves to include itself in its hall of shame.

Our bugs are very helpful. How do you think we found so many innocent people to put in Guantanamo? Some we found by bugging phones, some we found by bugging NTLM, some we found by bugging WTF comments, ...

awt:

Hey, here's a radical idea - why not let people _type in_ the year rather than scroll through a long list? I'm sure that clever computer will be able to check whether it's a valid year..

That's a web page, you'll have to check the date anyhow, be it from a drop-down list or typed by the visitor.