Turned out to be because it was generating a date by calling a general purpose astronomical routine, then parsing the date out of that. The astronomical routine among other things included the phase of the moon, and during some phases you would overflow the buffer that was passed in.
Another classic was a tech support call from the 1990s where the person's computer rebooted every time they flushed the toilet. Turns out that the person was at the end of the electrical line..and on a septic system. Flush the toilet, the septic system came online, causing a power dip, and that was enough to reboot the computer. A UPS fixed that.
They thought it might be static electricity, or some mechanical problem, or "problem exists between keyboard and chair", but finally they noticed something else was amiss...
It turns out some joker had re-arranged the 1234567890 keys to be 0123456789, so when the user was standing up, they looked down at the keyboard and typed their password (which contained a digit, of course) by looking at the keys. But when they were sitting down, they touch typed without looking at the keys, and got their password correct!
So, eventually, just decided to stay at lab for the night. At 5AM the air conditioning came on (it was shut for the night). The ISDN circuit got stuck.
It was electromagnetic interference from the massive AC unit fan which was not too far above our lab table. Improving the grounding of the ISDN chip helped.
Want to convert acreage into MWh of annual solar electric potential, or figure out the oil equivalent energy in a nation's poop? Units can do that. And much more.
Two [BeOS] test engineers were in a crunch. The floppy drive they were currently
testing would work all day while they ran a variety of stress tests, but the
exact same tests would run for only eight hours at night.
After a few days of double-checking the hardware, the testing procedure, and the
recording devices, they decided to stay the night and watch what happened. For
eight hours they stared at the floppy drive and drank espresso. The long dark
night slowly turned into day and the sun shone in the window. The angled sunlight
triggered the write-protection mechanism, which caused a write failure. A new
casing was designed and the problem was solved.
Do you have a name for this program? It sounds a lot like an urban legend - when would you ever find it easier to parse a date out of an astronomical program than to use actual date handing capabilities from the system or a library?
The one that I described I first remember hearing about in undergrad. I heard it from an astronomy student. I guess that makes it an urban legend, but a highly believable one. In my experience inexperienced programmers are very good at unexpectedly repurposing whatever they happen to know for new purposes. And in an astronomy department it is easy to find inexperienced programmers with astronomical routines at hand.
The `file` utility failed to recognize PostScript files due to conflicting signature data at the magic file. The issue has been resolved long ago.
The answer is "None - Microsoft simply change the standard to darkness"
------------------------------------------
Also reminds me of the fact that there are no bugs in Microsoft software - only "Features".
See _The UNIX-HATERS Handbook_ for more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook
The power button is on the opposite side (at the bottom left of the lid) so it can't be getting a pressure when lid is pressed after closed.
I could go on to write a love-letter to how a number of HN posts make me want to be a better programmer, but I'll keep it a simple as possible.
Being here, even now, and even though I do sort of feel like one of the 'older crew' suspiciously eyeing what appears to be an influx of 'others', to put it vaguely, ultimately what I love most about this place is reading about the 'old-timers' and how they worked, the 'oldest code that is still in use', the argument for and against LISPs, the problems of the JS/Node ecosystem (bit sick of that), the crazy shit some programmer created, and so on.
I'm pretty much addicted to HN, while I managed to cut out Facebook and Reddit. What keeps me here is the intense desire to be a hacker, and how, even now, HN fuels it. To not just make websites or work with the latest framework, but to geek out on things and become better at what I truly believe is a craft.
If at some point the noise overpowers the substance that I care for, I hereby request anyone who takes pity to let me know where to move on to. But so far, with dangs good moderation, I'm impressived with how well HN is holding out.
(from the link)
Resolution
To resolve the issue, do not create a user account contains the string "user" on the computer.
Applies to
...
Windows 8.1 with Bing
Google shares ad revenue from bundled searches, if you use Google on Firefox then Mozilla takes 20%. Likewise for Windows OEMs and Apple Safai.
In the spirit of POC||GTFO, I created a user called "testuser" on my work machine (running Windows 8.1) today, and I couldn't reproduce the problem. It seems the missing "with Bing" part may be responsible...
Yesterday, we had a story about Microsoft's disk management service using lots of CPU time if the username contained "user". Microsoft's official reply was not to do that.
I once found a bug in Coyote Systems' load balancers where, if the USER-AGENT ended with "m", all packets were dropped. They use regular expressions for various rules, and I suspect someone typed "\m" where they meant "\n". Vendor denied problem, even after I submitted a test case which failed on their own web site's load balancer.
Many, many years ago, I found a bug in 4.3BSD which prevented TCP connections from establishing with certain other systems during odd numbered 4 hour periods. It took three days to find the bug in BSD's sequence number arithmetic. A combination of signed and unsigned casts was doing the wrong thing.