What is the Best Bug-as-a-Feature?

Bat Country wonders: "The workflow system, at the department I develop for, was hand-coded by my predecessor in a rather short amount of time, resulting in somewhat unreadable code with a number of interesting 'features.' When I took over maintenance of the code base, I started patching bugs and cleaning up the code in preparation for a new set of features. After I was done, I got a pile of complaints about features that had disappeared, which turned out to be caused by the bugs in the code. So, that leads me to ask: what is your favorite bug that you either can't live without or makes your life easier?"

The best

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Genuine Advantage

404

[Jordan Catalano]

My favorite:

"404 File Not Found
The requested URL (askslashdot/07/03/30/0116246.shtml) was not found."

That little error saved me from having to read a bunch of replies.

Whenever I boot my windows machine

[antifoidulus]

it pops up all sorts of porn pages I never even asked for!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Windows?

[cmeans]

Microsoft keeps trying to clean up their code, and as a result, sometimes, features that SPAMmers etc. are relying on stop working.

rm

[KillerCow]

rm * .old

GPOW

[SinGunner]

I remember getting Godly Plate of the Whale in Diablo at the sacrifice of a single potion with the duping bug. I can't think of anything better than that.

Easy!

[carn1fex]

They screwed up alot of our web-based financial software. If i set the number of items purchased to zero, the whole thing reboots and i get to go home for th

Personally, I like...

[ZiZ]

Error

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Nothing beats a good dose of pot-kettle interaction.

Ping of Death

[thomasdn]

Ping of Death (http://insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html) entertained me quite a while :)

Not a software bug but a design flaw

[jimicus]

Not a software bug but a design flaw in a car I used to own.

The Vauxhall Astra Mk.2 (Opel Kadett E) had a design flaw in the steering column. Specifically, the steering column was rather weaker than the steering lock.

The upshot of it was when some little scrote decided to try and steal my car (this was way before cars were fitted with immobilisers), when he tried to break the steering lock the steering column snapped and the steering wheel came straight off in his hand.

Re:The best

[TerranFury]

>Windows Genuine Advantage

No, that's a feature that acts like a bug. ;-)

Linux

[stratjakt]

It was supposed to be a unix clone, but actually came out useful in the end.

Re:Whenever I boot my windows machine

[nick_davison]

Not sure it's my favorite... but props to Microsoft for having the balls to market Windows ME as one giant bug-as-a-feature.

My Karma isn't low enough...

[EWIPlayer]

Sendmail

Re:Personally, I like... Actually...

[Spudtrooper]

PC LOAD LETTER? What the f*ck does that mean?

Re:404

[Anonymous Coward]

From DOS:

Keyboard not found.
Press to continue.

EMACS movemail

[robbkidd]

Without that mail forward bug [ualberta.ca], I'd never have been able to get root [wikipedia.org] when I wanted it.

One of my favorites, from console gaming...

[foxtrot]

From the Blue Sky Rangers website [intellivisionlives.com]:

FUN FACT: While testing the game, Bill came across a bug: every now and then, the game would, seemingly at random, hyperspace you. He and his boss, Mike Minkoff, went over the code with a fine-tooth comb before realizing what the problem was: the Intellivision hand controllers encode button presses in such a way that an action (side) key pressed at the same time as particular directions on the disc will be interpreted instead as a numeric key being pressed. There was no software way around this; shooting while moving would occasionally be interpreted as pressing 9 -- the hyperspace button.

After several days of puzzling over a solution, the bug was ultimately "fixed" by including the following note in the instruction manual:

"Every once in a while, your space hunter will move near a 'black hole,' and the computer will automatically put him into HYPERSPACE. This will cost you the same number of points as if you had pressed the HYPERSPACE key yourself. On the other hand, it will save your hunter."

This led to an axiom frequently heard around Mattel: If you document it, it's not a bug -- it's a feature. Anytime a game in development crashed -- no matter how badly or bizarrely -- witnesses would invariably turn to the frustrated programmer, shrug, and calmly say "document it."

-JDF

Re:Perl versus Python

[badfish99]

As a mathematician, I'm always surprised by people who think that 4 and 4.0 should not be equal.

OOB Windows bug (WinNuke)

[c0d3h4x0r]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnuke [wikipedia.org]

This was the handiest thing for getting rid of idiots on chat.

Runner-up: ALT-F4 to close a window. Also handy for getting rid of idiots on chat:

Idiot: Hey, my computer is broken, how do I fix it?
Me: Well, first, hit ALT-F4
*** User 'Idiot' has left the room. ***

Re:Perl versus Python

[zappepcs]

As a mathematician, I'm always surprised by people who think that 4 and 4.0 should not be equal.

Well, one is just a number, the other is the SP version identifier that tells you when its safe to upgrade to a new version of windows.

Re:Perl versus Python

[rootofevil]

As a programmer, I'm always surprised by mathematicians who think that 4 and 4.0 should be equal.

Re:Yes

[soft_guy]

I'm unclear how Windows qualifies as a feature.

Re:The best

[jhfry]

This system has to use a 1990's version of the software package. These hundreds or thousands of machine generated forms and letters were composed using this level of software that contain known software bugs and will not format correctly if they execute using a later copy of the package.

Your not using MS Word are you?

If You Can't Fix It, Feature It

[adavies42]

A couple of friends of mine in high school CS wrote a Tetris clone for class, but they had a bug where occasionally, blocks would spontaneously appear or disappear. They couldn't figure out how to fix it, so they claimed (in the docs, not to the teacher) that they had AI adjusting the difficulty to match the players' skills.

Re:OOB Windows bug (WinNuke)

[brunascle]

Ah yes, how many times have we seen this:

User A: how do i kick someone out of the channel?
User B: type /leave [their name]
*** User A has left the room (User B) ***
*** User C has left the room (User B) ***
*** User D has left the room (User B) ***
*** User E has left the room (User B) ***
*** User F has left the room (User B) ***
User B: :(

Re:VW close the sunroof bug

[sconeu]

Back around '79 or so, a buddy of mine had a VW Bug with a different bug in it. It had some kind of short, so that if you touched the steering column with another key on the same ring as the one in the ignition, it sounded the horn.

Re:Much greetings to you Respected Sirs.

[Clazzy]

You should've just claimed it was a bug in /. that turned out to be an interesting feature of some sort. Problem solved!

Re:Linux

[Mr. Underbridge]

It was supposed to be a unix clone, but actually came out useful in the end.

Well, I know Linux isn't particularly useful NOW, so I can only assume that you are from the future. Is your name Marty? Would you care to tell me who wins the Super Bowl in 2035?

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[Yoooder]

His post was funny, yours sounds more like a troll... and if you love Windows so much why don't you marry it

Re:Yes

[Yoooder]

It really is more of an amorphous blog of bugs & features. It's a bug, comprised of features that are buggy features and feature bugs. This is one of those things where if you think about it too hard, the Mac / Linux ambulance will have to try to reassmble the fragments of your exploded head.

Re:Personally, I like... Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess he didn't get the memo...

Elevator bug

[Col. Klink (retired)]

My college dorm elevator had bug/feature. If you briefly pulled and then reset the "emergency stop" button as the elevator was stopping at a floor it would skip that floor. I lived on the third floor and we routinely skipped folks on the second floor waiting for the elevator. This was a great time saving feature (except, of course, when the fourth floor residents would skip the third floor).

The only misfeature of this bug was that the bell would briefly ring alerting those waiting that they had been skipped. One time, some second floor residents heard us skip their floor and we heard them running down after us. We skipped the lobby and went back to the fourth floor. We could have kept it going all night if they tried chasing us, but they didn't. Anyone too lazy to walk to the lobby from the second floor sure isn't going to race up to the fourth floor.

Eventually, they upgraded the elevator and we had to stop for the second floor whenever they wanted.

Re:BMW MINI CD player as burglar alarm trigger

[Anne Thwacks]

Sir, you lie.

The Mini Cooper dates from about 1968, very considerably before the advent of the CD player, and furthermore had even less security than Windows ME. Even if the doors were locked, you could still open them by pushing hard, because the entire door would bend such the lock mechanism no longer held the door shut! It certainly did not have an alarm.

Not only that, the electrics were so poor, it was not unknown for condensation to completely flatten the battery overnight.

Re:rm

[alta]

I'm guilty of this one once, missplaced space, and I typed 'rm -rf /etc /*.tmp'

Yes, this was done on my first slackware box. Not sure what version it was exactly, but it was somewhere between 96-98, and i installed by downloading about 15 or so floppies...

The first command I typed on that box was 'help.' It wasn't.

aMSN

[Placebo Messiah]

aMSN has a cool bug that pops a window open on your end as soon as someone clicks on your name on their end

it's fun to pre-empt conversations with girls:

me: hey how's it goin?

her: OMG I was just thinking about you

me: ya right

her: I'm serious!

me: *gush* (L)

Re:buffer overflow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but that's only so you could exploit the buffer overflow and get root on slashdot.

Re:Second Life camera

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a +1 creep. Mod?

Re:The best

[Anonymous Coward]

Your not using MS Word are you?

Either way, we know you aren't.

(I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I couldn't resist. I'm sorry.)

Re:Personally, I like... Actually...

[mstahl]

*whooooooosh!!!!*

Re:Second Life camera

[Mike Micelli]

I don't know what's creepier, the fact that he's a virtual peeping Tom, or that he has a Second Life account.

Re:rm

[Bandman]

I did the same thing to a web directory. *poof*

The worst part is the ice cold blood running through your veins as you stare at the screen, desperately hoping that you are misreading the command line.

Re:Windows?

[UNIX_Meister]

Thought you said... features that SPAMmers etc. are relaying on stop working.

Re:I dunno

[Elbows]

My company writes effects plug-ins for film/video post-production, and a while back we got an email from one of our customers with a similar story. He had been playing around with our effects trying to simulate a look of noisy or damaged video. Suddenly his render failed with an "out of memory" error, and the screen filled with random digital garbage -- it was exactly what he wanted!

So he rendered it out the way it was, and we gained another happy customer. ;-)

Bug in a system I hacked

[Anonymous Coward]

This one time, I was hacking into this system, and I decided to play a game I found called "Global Thermonuclear War". Needless to say, I think next time, I'll just try a nice game of chess.

Re:Nameless Firefox Bookmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for finding this one! I just submitted a patch and it should be fixed in the next build.

Back in the modem days....

[Groo Wanderer]

N00B: How do I get feature X to work in this chat room?
Clued in 1: Try +++ATH
N00B: Than......(N00B has left the chat)

            -Charlie

Email subscriptions

[sm8000]

"Click here to be removed from our mailing list" Can't figure out why I still get emails from you...

Software developer here

[hotsauce]

As a software developer, I am amused by you all. "4" is quite obviously a string, and can not be compared with 4.0 without a set of business rules.

Multiplying it in silly ways will not help you either. :)

Super Mario bros.

[Socguy]

My favorite bug-as-a-feature occurred in the original Mario bros. game for the NES. I suppose it wasn't so much a feature as simply a bug in the game Since it was only availible at one point in the game. Somewhere, I thing in the third world, as you were climbing the end pyramid you could jump on a descending koopa and, provided you did it just right, Mario would keep bouncing off the koopa shell as it would ricochet back and forth off the step. Soon, you would begin receiving credit for your continued bouncing in the form of extra lives. After a time your number of lives would climb so high that the game began representing them as various other graphical elements from the game; bricks, pipes etc. Unfortunately, if you left it too long (20 mins. +) the game would simply kill Mario. I suspect that the console simply ran out of memory to hold your fantastic number of lives and this was a safeguard to prevent the console from locking up.

The only time I've ever been able to exploit this was on the original NES. Even the Super Mario all-stars SNES version will not reproduce this.

As a much younger individual, this nearly unlimited lives 'feature' was the only way I could beat Bowser and it led to some interesting conversations with my school friends at the time.

Me: So I beat Bowser last night!

Friend: Cool! How many lives were you down to?

Me: Uhhh, pipe?

Friend: Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Re:The best

[mandelbr0t]

I really miss nimda.dll. Talk about a distributed backup network. Not to mention the depths of personal information I had access to.

Re:buffer overflow

[Crizp]

If I could mod you +65537 Funny I would.

Re:OOB Windows bug (WinNuke)

[Anonymous Coward]

The trouble is that "/leave [reason]" doesn't always work, and it may expect a channel name.

My personal favorite is the ever popular variant on bash.org [bash.org].

Re:Perl versus Python

[Zabu]

As a hooker, I can tell you that anything with a diameter of 4.00cm or 4.00000cm is always a few hundred dollars

Re:Software developer here

[jimbojw]

In case you were wondering, "4" * 4.0 yields:

• "4444" in Ruby
• 16 in PHP and JavaScript
• Exception:The operator * is undefined for the argument type(s) String, double in Java

... And "4" + 4.0 yields

• TypeError: can't convert Float into String in Ruby
• 8 in PHP
• 44 in JavaScript
• "44.0" in Java

Which I just find amusing all around.

Re:rm

[wirelessbuzzers]

Just don't create a file called -rf.

-- Larry Wall

Re:Perl versus Python

[ncohafmuta]

You're all mad.

4*1200 = 42 2+2 = 42

anything +-/* anything = 42

the answer is always 42 (*)

(*) to 2 sig. digits

-Tony

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The Easy to Interpret Save Files in X-COM

[Rei]

People discussing old X-Com bugs reminds me of the horrible, and occasionally horribly amusing, bugs in Masters Of Orion (the original, for DOS). Sure, some were annoying -- for example, the sound cutting out. However, some were either amusing or annoying, depending on the circumstances. Let's see -- there was the bug in which a race would sometimes try to extort a negative amount of money from you. Oh, and there was the bug in which you'd sometimes fight fleets of zero ships, negative ships, or maxint ships.

Still, twas a fun game. :)

Re:Perl versus Python

[DarkManaX]

As a graphic designer and long-time computer hobbyist, I find it to be simultaneously amusing and ridiculous. Time to go draw cats having sex.

Re:Perl versus Python

[Adambomb]

tolerance versus significance versus discretion in a no holds bar battle royale, SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!

Re:Software developer here

[ConceptJunkie]

Which is why C++ is the best language because you can overload operators, so, "4" * 4.0 can yield whatever you think makes sense:

• 16
• "16"
• "4444"
• 208
• or, if you prefer, a nice game of Nethack

Re:Perl versus Python

[75th Trombone]

Oh, you would not write "4.999...", you only put that there to trick some poor Slashdot bystander who doesn't know any better into arguing with you. Tsk tsk.

Re:Perl versus Python

[Tablizer]

As a hooker, I can tell you that anything with a diameter of 4.00cm or 4.00000cm is always a few hundred dollars

Damn, this is one time I'll get a big discount without being proud of it.
       

Re:GPOW

[adrianmonk]

How about that great bug in many 8-bit ninendo games where you could "scroll" and enemy off the screen instead of killing it. I think SMB had this bug [ ... ]

Why not -- I mean, I don't see how a file-sharing protocol like SMB really has characters that can scroll or be killed, but SMB has so many bugs, it probably has this one (as well as most others you can think of).

As an accountant....

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Well we can cook the books for 4 to be whatever gives you the best tax break. You want 4 to equal 5? Sure no problem.

Re:BMW MINI CD player as burglar alarm trigger

[Dread_ed]

I work at a MINI dealership and we had a similar situation.

One client was continually getting upset because his MINI alarm would go off repeatedly in the middle of the night, seemingly at random intervals. This was perplexing because MINI uses internal motion sensors for their alarms which are not prone to false alarms. Most cars use crappy vibration sensors that will go off at the slightest provocation (thunder, cars too close, birds landing on the roof, etc.) The electrical system, coding, and settings for the alarm were checked and rechecked but nothing was found to be faulty.

Our service technicians tried unsuccessfully to replicate the phenomena, even going so far as to put the car into their own garage at night to listen for the alarm going off. Alas this was all in vain. No one could get this to replicate and the cuystomer got more and more upset until one day he arrived at our dealership after a semi-sleepless night, threw the keys on the service manager's desk, and said fix it or else.

Only this time, in his haste and anger, he neglected to take his trusty DISCO BALL with him. Apparently, our fastidious client had been removing the aforementioned accessory from his MINI'S rearview mirror before bringing it in for service. The reasons for this are the subject of much juvenile speculation. Regardless, it turns out that the subtle motions of the disco ball were activating the alarm.

You don't happen to have a disco ball on your mirror, do you Ian? :)