[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Bizarre Bugs: Nine of the Strangest Software Glitches Ever here

[tuomoks]

Ever? Personal? Some of those from (a long) time ago, sorry, can't tell all. Anyway - all the 4 millions bills sent through post office to just one city with about 20K residents. So, post office had to lease two more airplanes to deliver this, they didn't even fit to the mailing room in that town, etc - we got kind of huge bill for that. All because a "small" change to a printing program, not even anything logical but just because one manager didn't like how the operators handled the printing! Of course you can't blame software for that but if you know the "root cause" - it was the programmer who got blamed. not the manager?
Same company, real "software" or at least code glitch - a bug in microcode! The only hours (very few) I slept in those 3+ weeks were in office - fortunately at that time we had offices, not cubicles. Like clockwork, every 6 hours the system just crashed taking thousands of online users and 12 partitions (jobs running in background for youngsters) batch down with no reason in software or hardware logs, remember EREP? Proves that even the mainframes can have problems?
Ouch, actually accelerate that a little - a government / state system where after getting it running they fired (downsized?) the people who knew something! A call, proves how low we have to go to support customers, their 24x7 system is down, must be the system / programs / code! How about changing your three (3!) feet network cable? A huge fight, lawyers involved, etc - until they really tried it and, amazing?????, it wasn't a code problem after all but a hardware problem - almost three days down!
Yes - there are / can be software glitches, seen some weird compiler bugs, but my 40+ year experience tells me that even those are are mostly management problems! Prove me wrong - I'll guarantee you fame and fortune (well, maybe not much but a little anyway..)

[rohnski]

My bug wouldn't make it on your list, but it is a pet peeve of mine.
Word processors are supposed to produce "nice" documents. One measure of a "nice" document is "Full Justification". That is when both the left and right margins are lined up neatly, like in a newspaper and some books.
Way back in the 80's (and DOS), MS introduced full justification as a "me too" feature, copying something that it's main competitor WordPerfect was already offering in order to make it "easier" for people to move from WP to Word. But the way MS designed the feature was a "fast and dirty" fix, not actually learning how to do it correctly before doing the programming.
Try doing it in MS Word, even in the newest version, Word 2007. It simply increases the spacing between words, by large increments until the margin is "justified". The margins are nice, but the words look "spacey".
On the other hand, their formerly biggest competitor WordPerfect, has "always" done full justification "right". Even back in the days of DOS, full justification printed "correctly", as it was in the "old" days of setting type to be printed on paper. WP does full justification by DECREASING letter AND word spacing. Typically WP full justification puts more words on a line, slightly reducing the total length of the doc.
Eventually, in one of the early versions of Word for Windows MS finally acknowledged there was a better way. They introduced an option to "Do full justification the way WordPerfect 6.x for Windows does". But they have buried the command to turn this feature on so deep that the average user will never know it exists let alone find it (it is located under "Compatibility Options").
Of course MS will say it is not a bug, it is "working as designed". I admit that, but the way it "works" doesn't work for me, so I call it a bug.
There is another "working as designed" non-bug that bugs me. You would think that applying color to various parts of a Word document is the same. In Word 2007 the "highligher" feature can still only apply one of 16 preselected colors. Other features that apply colors like font color or background color are "unlimited". The 16 limit is left over from the 80's and EGA resolution which could display very limited colors, ie in binary 16 is 2 to the power 4, 1 half byte. Over the years, MS updated the color portion of various features at different times. At one point features that applied colors had 3 different color limits in the save program. Apparently the color portion of each one is coded separately rather than using shared code (code bloat).

[rwexelblat]

Nonsense, these pale in the light of some of the real bugs of the past -- like the "bug heard round the world" that caused the very first space shuttle launch to abhort.

I used to work for the Treasury Dept. too bad I can't describe some bugs found in IRS software...

[tuomoks]

Yeah, you are right. Some of those, sw used by government, etc - daylight
saving on spring, government (and banks, stock exchange, etc) relational
database systems failing round the globe - seldom seen people reacting that
fast – started about midnight in an island in Pacific, we were in California – you
can calculate the time difference (which caused another problems, try to
explain that to some(?) managers!) . For some strange reason some of those
database systems still keep timestamps in local (?) time even today? And it was
(and is, IMHO) a "code bug" – a bad one!
Of course in government environment we could have even more stories - IRS
systems failing (not just in US but in some other countries also), know one
where the returns were delayed 6 months because of sw problems - hilarious (to
some) but because too many people with right kind of influence were involved
more tax money was wasted instead of using a working system. Some stories where
post office optical recognition software sent letters flying (what a sight, I
was there) and after fixed, mailed them to all but correct addresses (millions
of them - by the way, the friend of the a current top official wrote it - heh).

Actually, the QA people would / could / should have good stories – I wonder
why we seldom hear those? As good (almost) as mixing metric and standard
measurement would be what really happened in software when the first new
tactical fighter systems were tested flying to south over equator, funny and
not really serious but scary for pilots, I'm sure. Or maybe the Windows
problems which caused military ships towed back to harbor in UK
and US – urban myth except for those thousands of sailors, photographers, etc.

[ccamc1]

When I opened your site I received a box that asked me if I wanted to debug. I have been receiving this question quite frequentely over the bast 2 weeks. What does it mean? I have not opened a lot of sites due to that question; however, I have had great confidence in your site for a long while. Can you answer my question regarding "Do you want to debug?"
entek@aol.com

[steve6375]

I heard of a new navy intelligent missile that on it's maiden test voyage failed to fire from the deck of the ship. As no one knew what to do, they headed back to port for the boffins to fix it. The missile promptly blew up, as it had been programmed to self-destruct if it detected a 180 turn in case it headed back towards it's own ship!

[Oldmaven]

This one is pre-PC--CP/M, in fact:

I had a Kaypro 10, with a hard drive; my fiancee had a Kaypro without. Files written on either machine could be seen in the other's directory but were invisible to the other machine's apps. It took days of studying manuals to find the problem: User levels, which where user identities used by CP/M to keep each user's files from being accessed or overwritten by other users. Kaypros with only floppy drives--that is, all Kaypros, at one time--used just one user level. The Kaypro 10's operating system naturally accessed all -- but each of its apps was assigned a different user level. To make its files usable by the same apps on the earlier machines, you had to run a level-conversion program before saving the file to floppy.