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Admin
two monitors are for developers with two heads
Admin
The process to get errors in and around websphere fixed is generally a horror, in my opion. We've once needed one year just to get them to admit their product had a serious issue (and it was easily reproducible on any installation, even completly new ones). And once they finally admitted the error, they outright refused to fix it...
Admin
TRWTF is not straight out resolving this as "won't fix" in the first place. Then the entire exchange wouldn't happen.
Admin
Admin
That sounds like quite the story. Like, did they straight up say "We know about the issue, but we're not going to fix it" without further clarification, or did they also give some kind of excuse why? "We're not fixing it, because we use that bug to crash our own laptops when it's time for lunch since that's faster than waiting for the screensaver to lock the screen" "We're not fixing it, because while it is a fairly serious issue, only your company has complained so far" "We're not fixing it. The guy in charge of the issue list has told us that he'll have our jobs if we add even one more serious issue"
Admin
(ref: https://youtu.be/Eq-r1xEhsPI?t=1599 )
Admin
The average developer has 2.839 warheads.
Admin
"Won't try to reproduce. Required equipment would cost more than a cup of coffee."
Admin
At least the IDE works with devices like keyboard, mouse, CPU, RAM, hard disk, and the motherboard.
Admin
Ah Websphere, yet another delightful Enterprisey product from IBM. If it's anything like the other ones I've dealt with it's more Goat Simulator than Development Environment.
It at least explains how you would get a roomful of "techies" who had never seen anyone plug a second monitor into a PC.
Admin
And that's when you escalate to a public complaint. One that the PHBs get to see.
Admin
We had a "colleague" at my work, who didn't want a second monitor, because she wasn't sure that she could handle two mice at the same time...
Admin
My beef with IBM isn't Websphere, it's ClearCase.
Admin
Oh the plus side, this is a pretty good indication of the quality of their software (if Matt wasn't already convinced). Organizations that can't get the little stuff right can't get the big stuff right.
If Matt's B is not PH, hopefully he'll be able to take this up and move away from this POS.
Admin
Obviously the common sense is lacking in this one.
All this one needs is a wooden table.
Why is a QA engineer trying to reproduce a problem? What happened to tech support, customer support of software support before QA?
Admin
Clearcase was the first source control I was exposed to. Somehow I wasn't immediately turned off the whole concept
Admin
Tell her that mice are fine, but she should not do anything with gerbils.
Admin
Heh. In the early days of the web, I was developing a plugin (!) for Netscape Navigator (!!) v2 (!!!) on a Windows 95 PC (!!!!). I had some problems rendering output, so I got my boss to pay for a support ticket with Netscape Inc.
I sent an elaborate bug report with all kinds of how-to-reproduce issues.
The answer: "Here in Netscape tech support we all have Silicon Graphics workstations, so we can't reproduce your bug. Closed."
Sili Valley is sometimes Silly Valley.
Admin
s/sometimes/always/Admin
OP here.
I did in the end (after having submitted this anecdote) manage to persuade someone to actually take this bug on, and indeed, try it out on the multi-screen environment so as to be able to repeat the bug.
Unfortunately, the general message I got back was: "There are many places in the code that this would need to be addressed. We will probably not be able to find them all unless we spend a great deal of time hunting through the whole code. Best bet is just to report instances of exactly which dialogs get misplaced and we'll get round to them in due course, perhaps."
Admin
Right? ClearCase is the biggest piece of garbage I've ever worked with.
Admin
That's interesting, were there cases where dialogs would open on the correct screen?
Admin
Why throw shade at Goat Simulator?
Admin
I'm doing a quick check to make sure I'm not on the "Not Always..." website. :-)
Admin
Why is QA trying to reproduce it? Because someone has to reproduce it to fix it, and QA are (1) cheaper than developers, and (2) usually have more equipment to verify problems. Like my QA has about eight phones on his desk and I have only two. So the idea is that QA verifies the problem and tells a developer the exact steps to reproduce. Very cost effective.
Of course for desktop software you'd expect that QA has a system with two monitors. (I worked at a place where they had one computer set up with six monitors). So this here is quite pathetic.
Admin
It made a lot of money despite being literally a joke. It is fun though.
Admin
What is a "complaint"? Cannot reproduce.
Admin
This reminds me of a time when I was a game tester, many years ago. We were working on a multiplayer game that supported a lot of players in a single match. We had found a bug that required some specific timing, but when it happened, it crashed the game on everyone's machine in the match. One of the associate producers saw it and closed it out as a tester bug, unlikely to happen in the field. Of course, the day the patch came out with that bug in it, the forums lit up like a Christmas tree. Sure, if the bug has like, a 1% repro, but crashes 30+ machines when it happens, then you have something more akin to a 33%+ repro rate. The best part was when the executive producer himself came down to yell at QA for missing such a pervasive crash.
Admin
Many years ago I ran into a hardware manufacturer who had no idea it was supposed to be possible to mount two video cards in a machine. At that time trying to mix manufacturers would likely fail, but two cards from the same line only meant jumping through hoops to get the drivers installed (you almost always had to install one of them through Windows rather than the provided installer and even then it could be tricky. The worst was install driver A. Install driver B, causing a BSOD. Install driver A. Roughly 50% chance of success, if it fails uninstall and try again--apparently a timing issue with whether everything was written out before the BSOD.) Two basically matching cards (same base model, but they could vary on AGP/PCI, installed memory and the like) would simply work. That is until I hit one where none of my hoop-jumping accomplished anything despite having almost identical cards. I contacted the manufacturer about it, I was never able to get them to understand they were supposed to play nice.
Admin
Bugtrackers are not an appropriate place to discuss one's biological limitations. Have they no shame???
Admin
Entirely believable. Just a few years ago I was negotiating with the vendor of some rather swish, modern software (which I still rather like though didn't get approval to go with), developed and supported by an international team spread over a few countries. I happened to be travelling to India for other reasons, so I arranged to visit their Indian development team. The staff seemed capable, sensible, knowledgeable. But the work environment was in line with their Indian salaries. Computers were definitely not the newest, and desktops had screens only about 15". The meeting room had a whiteboard and no projector or big screen. Hey, it works, and they achieved stuff. At least they wouldn't be expecting all clients to have ridiculously overspecified hardware.
Admin
Multiple monitors....
Back in (as I recall) 1987, I was introduced to a Mac II and my nephew hooked TWO monitors to it. The nice mouse arrow moved seamlessly from one to the other. I was impressed. At the time one graphic monitor on a PeeCee was difficult. I guess these are pretty common now as my setup at work is two large monitors, and the screen on the laptop. I lose track of where the mouse arrow is all the time. On a Mac, if you shake the mouse enough times, the arrow gets REAL BIG for a brief moment and it is a help to locating it. My how times have changed.
Admin
I wish there was a way to easily use two mice, one for each hand, and each with its own mouse pointer.
And an easier way to use four or six monitors. As long as I don't get them, I can't work without paper notebooks.
Admin
OTOH, they wouldn't be able to reproduce an error that only creeps up on 1600x1200 + monitors.
Admin
Basically, yes. Most dialogs worked as you'd expect (although a lot of them didn't remember their size when you closed them last, so you had to resize them every time, which was a pain). The point is that the dialogs appeared not to use a lot of common code, and each time a paradigm was invoked, it was reinvented. So whenever something got developed and improved in one area, it was not consistently followed through to all the other dialogs so as to present a consistent look and feel. This made development harder work than it ought to have been.
Admin
On the other hand, it was quite possible (and several IDEs/debuggers etc supported it) to have both Hercules/MDA and CGA/EGA/VGA cards as they used different video memory location. So you would have e.g. developed game on VGA monitor and debugger on Hercules one.
BTW about finding mouse on multimonitor Windows: there is a setting in Windows, that it will show you the mouse position after holding Ctrl key for a while
Admin
I was working on an adware program back in '92 or so. Having a second monitor on a Mac was still relatively new, but both having a Mac II and a second monitor was expensive enough that I didn't have access to one. A second monitor was like 500 bucks or so, but it usually required a second graphics card to plug it into. I think I had a IIci back then, which had on-board video, but no card for a second monitor.
I had some code that iterated through the list of screens to figure out which one had the window in it, to figure out pixel depth and stuff, but didn't have real hardware (with a second monitor!) to test it on. How hard could it be? It turns out I had forgotten to do a p=p->next type thing in my loop, so it hung if you had two monitors. Oops.
Admin
Fortunately it a brief moment in time when mixing video cards was a hassle.
By Windows 2000, I recall pairing the AGP Matrox G400 with a PCI Voodoo3 2000. Those RAMDACs were really the best you could do for picture clarity without ghosting on expensive 25ms LCDs.
Admin
P. Wolff: If you're running Linux with X11 you can use the "xinput" program to configure multiple input groups, each of which may have one or more mice and/or keyboards associated with it. It generally works pretty well as long as you don't try to use multiple input groups with a single application simultaneously since most applications weren't written to do that.
But if you want to copy from one thing with one hand and paste into another thing with the other hand, that works. Or if you want to turn your three screens into three seats for three different people, all using different programs on the same computer simultaneously that works pretty well too.
Admin
You forgot the obligatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/583/
Admin
This was after months of refiling the issue, is what the article states. So it was probably finally escalated to the point where a QA engineer had to have a look at it.
Admin
That's silly. Next thing you're going to tell me people plug up secondary keyboards or maybe an extra mouse these "docking stations"
Admin
In 1992 OS/2 could run a second monitor in text-only mode. There was a debugger that could run on it, and it would blow the Windows users minds that not only would a crashed app not bluescreen the whole computer, I could have it running on one screen and debug on the other.
Admin
I just found the opposite for windows. Mouse without borders. One mouse three computers, each with their own monitor. Install software on each of them and go!
Admin
Remember that Windows had a "feature" that windows were not really minimized, but instead moved to some distant coordinates (like at 32768x32768) not visible to the user. Couple that with being able to hook up multiple monitors and the relative availability of multi-head video cards (like some freak Matrox cards able to drive 9+ monitors) and hilarity ensues.
Oh wait, Matrox is still alive and still making these cards!
Admin
The IDE is notepad++? Because this bug is on there! :)