• The Big Picture Thinker (unregistered) in reply to Racemaniac

    This WTF makes no sense to me.

    Mary went over to her computer, opened a spreadsheet and selected a lot of rows. Sure enough, the screen went curvy.
    How does selecting a certain number of rows have anything to do with the contrast nob on the monitor?
    Sure enough, the screen went curvy. Then Steve noticed that the margins on her screen, normally black in color, were grey. And the scan lines on the CRT were visible. Steve just stood there for a moment, letting a tsunami of emotions wash over him. Then he reached out to the monitor and turned the contrast knob down to a normal level. Sure enough, the screen miraculously fixed itself. The margins were black again. The scan lines were gone. And the screen was no longer curvy, even with all of the rows selected.
    How does the "contrast" nob have anything to do with the screen being curvy?
    This Sisyphean cycle of torment when on for weeks. A great deal of effort was expended attempting to chase down the cause. Or even reproduce it.
    A team would never spin its wheels "for months" on a bug report like this. One guy from the team would simply fire up the spreadsheet, select max rows, and notice right away that the screen is not curvy. Then he would immediately close the ticket ...OR... ask Mary for more information. It would take 5 minutes.

    Come on tdwtf, at least make them believable...

  • PG4 (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    sd:
    Why would you ever close a bug report just because it hadn't been worked on yet?

    Because you are rated based on how long bug reports are open. If you close the bug report and the user re-opens it, the clock is reset.

    So many silly people try to get ahead by working really hard and doing a good job. The secret is to figure out how the scoring system works, and then do the things that boost your score.

    No!

    No one would ever have been doing this since the late 1980s! You would never wait until the customer has gone home to call them, then you put the ticket back into wait for customer status.

    Uncle Larry and Oracle would never do that for the past 25+ years.

    Next you are going to say is the Easter Bunny isn't real.

  • (cs) in reply to The Big Picture Thinker
    The Big Picture Thinker:
    This WTF makes no sense to me.
    Mary went over to her computer, opened a spreadsheet and selected a lot of rows. Sure enough, the screen went curvy.
    How does selecting a certain number of rows have anything to do with the contrast nob on the monitor?
    See WhterThanWhite's [sic] comment on how CRT's synched. More than likely, the rows were highlighted as black text on a white background when selected, and selecting lots of rows would fill the screen with a lot of white.
  • Kiwi (unregistered)

    As CRT monitor electronics age, the high-voltage supplies get less efficient and struggle to supply enough voltage for a full white screen. This drags down the other voltages and the screen image shrinks, pincushions and sometimes distorts. This is exacerbated by having the brightness and contrast right up. The more inverse video, the smaller the picture! It was noticeable at the DOS/Windows 3 transition as EGA monitors which had already had a useful life as (mostly) white on black were suddenly trying to run black on white and unable to fill the monitor with the raster unless turned right down.

  • AC (unregistered) in reply to Your Name
    Your Name:
    Ryusui:
    Not the ROVER, the ORBITER.

    The Climate Orbiter malfunctioned and broke up in Mars' atmosphere because someone wrote the guidance software to give results in Imperial units when the flight software was expecting metric.

    So metric is TRWTF?

    TRWTF is the three countries in the world that do not use metric. Two of these three countries are Liberia and Myanmar (Burma). Finding the name of the third country is left as an exercise for the reader.

  • GuruJosh (unregistered)

    "Turns out it was easier to find Mary then the cause of the bug." *than

  • EvilSnack (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    TRWTF was not attempting to contact Mary by employing the techniques of telephonic communication (I'm fairly sure such technology was available in those days, although whether it existed between Texas and California is anyone's guess) to attempt to get her to explain how she duplicated the bug.
    +1 this. Any in-house trouble reporting system that does not make the bug submitter available to answer the technician's questions is fundamentally flawed.
  • rob (unregistered)

    I had a CRT monitor replaced once because after I changed desks, the monitor had an annoying flicker. Called the help desk, they came and saw the problem, and ordered a replacement monitor. The new monitor arrived, and within a few days it was doing the exact same thing. After looking around for the source of the interference, I found that my desk had a place for a fluorescent tube in the shelf above the monitor, but no tube. I turned off the power switch, which turned off the ballast, which then stopped interfering with the monitor. I never mentioned this to anyone.

  • rob (unregistered) in reply to EvilSnack

    Umm,most bug reporting systems deal with this situation by documenting the contact attempts, and then closing the ticket after a certain number of attempts.

    The other thing is that the developer did not say if they tried to contact Mary by phone; I have had experiences with Mary(s) who never answer or return calls.

    The only solution to a problem like this is to attempt to reproduce it and contact the user, when neither succeeds (after reasonable effort), close the report and move on.

  • Friedrice The Great (unregistered) in reply to rob
    rob:
    I had a CRT monitor replaced once because after I changed desks, the monitor had an annoying flicker. Called the help desk, they came and saw the problem, and ordered a replacement monitor. The new monitor arrived, and within a few days it was doing the exact same thing. After looking around for the source of the interference, I found that my desk had a place for a fluorescent tube in the shelf above the monitor, but no tube. I turned off the power switch, which turned off the ballast, which then stopped interfering with the monitor. I never mentioned this to anyone.

    I worked in an office with a large radio and TV broadcasting antenna about a block away. All CRT monitors with their backs facing the antenna had "televators" - horizontal bands of distortion that crept slowly up the display.

    CRTs at right-angles to the antenna didn't have the problem.

  • Chris Q (unregistered)

    I had a very similar experience once - I was the only person stupid enough to claim any knowledge of a legacy system situated in the data centre of a large government department that processed payrolls for prison officers.

    The system ran on an old CCP/M machine with dial up modem and was used to post details of overtime claims.

    One day I got a panicked call from the data center - "all of the menus on the system have disappeared and we need to run today to get the payments through to the payroll system"

    I grabbed my bag, stuffed it with OS disks and manuals, jumped in a taxi and headed off to the data centre. After eventually being admitted I walked up to the machine, examined it for a minute or two, turned up the contrast on the monitor, and walked out again.

    They had had a team in that morning to clean the keyboards and monitors of all of the systems on site, and the cleaner had turned the contrast down while cleaning the screen.

  • Jibble (unregistered) in reply to Racemaniac
    Racemaniac:
    So can anyone explain what was exactly happening? how the contrast control has anything to do with the screen deforming? i'm old enough to have had various CRT's, but i don't remember anything like that...

    Many CRTs had power supplies which were on their limits if you turned contrast to max on a white screen.

    (In fact this was usually one of the 'tests' in magazine reviews of CRT monitors)

  • Jibble (unregistered) in reply to EvilSnack
    EvilSnack:
    QJo:
    TRWTF was not attempting to contact Mary by employing the techniques of telephonic communication to attempt to get her to explain how she duplicated the bug.
    +1 this. Any in-house trouble reporting system that does not make the bug submitter available to answer the technician's questions is fundamentally flawed.

    Would it have helped?

    How to duplicate: Select a lot of rows. Result: Screen goes curvy.

    The only to 'fix' it is to go to Mary's office and see it in person.

  • My name (unregistered)

    Turns out it was easier to find Mary then the cause of the bug.

    • than
  • (cs) in reply to sd
    sd:
    Why would you ever close a bug report just because it hadn't been worked on yet?

    Why would you keep an item open that is not being worked on, and does not have enough information in order to be worked on????

  • Jim Blog (unregistered)

    This is why there needs to be direct communication between Devs and QA.

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to Kiwi
    Kiwi:
    As CRT monitor electronics age, the high-voltage supplies get less efficient and struggle to supply enough voltage for a full white screen. This drags down the other voltages and the screen image shrinks, pincushions and sometimes distorts. This is exacerbated by having the brightness and contrast right up. The more inverse video, the smaller the picture! It was noticeable at the DOS/Windows 3 transition as EGA monitors which had already had a useful life as (mostly) white on black were suddenly trying to run black on white and unable to fill the monitor with the raster unless turned right down.

    The other reason is that when displaying lots of bright spots on the screen, the CRT mask behind the phosphors would heat up - the mask collects a fair number of electrons after all. As it heated up, it distorted creating curvy images but usually psychedelic images as the red gun started spraying the green and blue phosphors. Most of the "bounciness" in CRT displays is due to inadequate power regulation causing the deflection yokes to not have sufficient power to deflect the beams.

    The best were the Trinitron displays (Sony) because they didn't do that (instead of a mask, they used highly taut wires strung vertically. If you look closely at a trinitron screen, you can see two fine lines about 1/4 and 3/4 down the screen - these were from horizontal support wires. Of course, Sony used better electronics for their power supply so they tended to be better in the blooming and shrinking.

    AC:
    Your Name:
    Ryusui:
    Not the ROVER, the ORBITER.

    The Climate Orbiter malfunctioned and broke up in Mars' atmosphere because someone wrote the guidance software to give results in Imperial units when the flight software was expecting metric.

    So metric is TRWTF?

    TRWTF is the three countries in the world that do not use metric. Two of these three countries are Liberia and Myanmar (Burma). Finding the name of the third country is left as an exercise for the reader.

    And scientific/engineering pursuits have all been switched to metric for a long time now. About the only use of imperial measurements is in the trades and common usage.

    Something like that should never happen because it is expected that all measurements are in metric. The only time it varies is when you're designing something to be built by a trade - e.g., a blueprint might be drawn in imperial because you're going to get ironworkers and carpenters who only know imperial to build it.

  • Pedant (unregistered)
    quibus:
    Turns out it was easier to find Mary then the cause of the bug.
    TRWTF is the editing/proofreading in these articles, amirite?!
    Actually, it seems both "then" and "than" could be correct in this instance. Let's consider both sentences.
    Turns out it was easier to find Mary than the cause of the bug.
    This sentence compares the effort of finding Mary to the effort of finding the bug. Obviously, it was less effort to find Mary than to find the bug. However, the surrounding context gives no mention of the effort required to find Mary, though it did detail the effort taken to find the bug. Also, the starting phrase, "Turns out", implies that most readers will agree finding the reporting QE is harder than finding a reported bug. One sincerely hopes this is not the case, making the sentence is quite redundant.
    Turns out it was easier to find Mary then the cause of the bug.
    This sentence compares the effort expended based upon two different event timelines. It contrasts the effort of "find the bug, then find Mary" with the effort of "find Mary, then find the bug". Obviously, the approach of "first find Mary" took less effort than the initial approach of "first find the bug". However, the surrounding context lacks the implicit need to find Mary after finding the bug, vital to establishing the first event timeline. If this was the intended sentence, it should use other clues to more explicitly show the comparison of timelines. An example would be: Turns out it was easier to first find Mary then the cause of the bug.

    Which sentence was really intended? Neither appear completely appropriate in context. Perhaps it should read like this:

    Turns out it was easier to find Mary thæn the cause of the bug.
  • Old joke (unregistered)

    I'd rather cuddle then have sex.

  • (cs) in reply to Jim Blog
    Jim Blog:
    This is why there needs to be direct communication between Devs and QA.

    If you mean co-location I can vouch for the downside of this. That being a QA person like Mary who basically then use dev as tech support. (Oh I can't figure out to use this USB device, Umm plug it in?)

  • Jan (unregistered)

    I had to google PBKAC so I guess I need to destroy my developers license... Where I come from we have "ERROR 40" meaning: the error originated 40 centimeters from the screen.

  • Nakke (unregistered)

    What, they didn't have telephones in the 1980's in US?

  • Z (unregistered) in reply to AC
    AC:

    TRWTF is the three countries in the world that do not use metric. Two of these three countries are Liberia and Myanmar (Burma). Finding the name of the third country is left as an exercise for the reader.

    The third country, despite being "crippled" by using imperial units, somehow seems to have amassed the largest economy in the world. By GDP, it more than doubles the next largest economy, despite having only a quarter of the population. It is nearly as large as the economy of the entire European Union.

    Apparently, metric IS TRWTF.

  • JustSomeGuy (unregistered)

    I remember a problem we had with a computer that would randomly reboot, but ONLY when it was placed on a specific part of the desk (underneath a shelf carrying lots of 'lectrics).

    The rocket scientists at this place (company starting with S and rhyming with demons) had out all sorts of equipment for measuring magnetic fields and other esoteric electromagnetic phenomena convinced there was some massive interference, despite the fact such a field would probably need to be strong enough to suck up every piece of metal in a 4km radius.

    Turns out it was simply a loose contact in the keyboard connector which, when the cable was stretched, caused shorting on the motherboard.

    Sometimes, it's not as obvious as you think.

  • JustSomeGuy (unregistered) in reply to Z
    Z:
    AC:

    TRWTF is the three countries in the world that do not use metric. Two of these three countries are Liberia and Myanmar (Burma). Finding the name of the third country is left as an exercise for the reader.

    The third country, despite being "crippled" by using imperial units, somehow seems to have amassed the largest economy in the world. By GDP, it more than doubles the next largest economy, despite having only a quarter of the population. It is nearly as large as the economy of the entire European Union.

    Apparently, metric IS TRWTF.

    Yes, because it's SO much easier to remember things like 16 oz/lb, 14 lb/stone, 1.5151 links/ft and 22 yards in a chain. I suppose we should be thankful that they're at least partially decimal with 100 links/chain :-)

  • (cs) in reply to Z
    Z:
    The third country, despite being "crippled" by using imperial units, somehow seems to have amassed the largest economy in the world. By GDP, it more than doubles the next largest economy, despite having only a quarter of the population. It is nearly as large as the economy of the entire European Union.
    If it's only nearly as large as the economy of the European Union, how can it be the largest economy in the world?
  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    Z:
    The third country, despite being "crippled" by using imperial units, somehow seems to have amassed the largest economy in the world. By GDP, it more than doubles the next largest economy, despite having only a quarter of the population. It is nearly as large as the economy of the entire European Union.
    If it's only nearly as large as the economy of the European Union, how can it be the largest economy in the world?
    The EU isn't a country.
  • (cs) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    The EU isn't a country.
    "Z" was comparing economies, not countries.
  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    anonymous:
    The EU isn't a country.
    "Z" was comparing economies, not countries.
    "Z" was comparing the economies of countries.
  • AC (unregistered) in reply to Z

    The third country is the world's richest third world country; :-)

  • mh (unregistered) in reply to lolwtf

    +++

  • smf (unregistered) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    If it's only nearly as large as the economy of the European Union, how can it be the largest economy in the world?

    "The economy of the European Union generates a GDP of over €12.894 trillion (US$16.566 trillion in 2012)[1] according to Eurostat, which would make it the largest economy in the world if it were considered a single economy. The European Union (EU) economy consists of an Internal Market and the EU is represented as a unified entity in the World Trade Organization (WTO)."

  • Yeah, right (unregistered) in reply to WhterThanWhite
    WhterThanWhite:
    CRTs operate with an analog signal that contains the video and the sync information. A sync signal would consist of a pulse that is "whiter than white". The width of the sync pulse determined whether it was a horizontal sync pulse (scan line) or a vertical sync pulse (full screen sync).

    Sync pulses get filtered, and an excessively wide bright white would start to leak through the filters and get interpreted as a sync pulse. This causes the horizontal sync circuit to see a less than perfect sync pulse that wasn't consistent, but tended to vary, creating a wavy look on the screen.

    I have no idea if this is correct but I am damned impressed if you just made this up.

  • ezra (unregistered) in reply to QJo

    right you are - thought that 1/3 thru the story, and kept looking for some punchline, like we wern't allowed to use the phone..

  • Peev (unregistered)

    My 24" monitor was dancing and wavering on certain time of the day. It turns out the old lady next door was using a space heater.

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    reminds me of a story where a user complained about "weird stripes on the screen"...the tech went to her office, and adjusted the Venetian blinds!

Leave a comment on “There's Something About Mary”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article