RE: When is a bug a bug?

You want another one?  Say you're running Windows XP Pro SP2 with all
patches and Office 2003 with all patches.  Say your printer is
LAN-attached (HP 5Si; doesn't get more standard than that).  Say you log
in to your PC & the network but don't authenticate to the server hosting
the printer.

OK, now open Word, Excel, Outlook - they are all guilty - and open a
document.  Print it to the LAN printer (the one you're not connected
to).  The app will crash.  Not the print spooler but the app itself.

I can recreate this one at will.

1. MS Office has bugs - it doesn't trap for all printer error
conditions.
2. The Windows print spooler, which can hold jobs across a reboot,
apparently goes all goofy when it can't talk to the printer.  Why does
it not just accept the spooled job and print it when the printer becomes
available like OS/400?
3. The generated error message is misleading and does not mention
anything to do with printing.

John A. Jones, CISSP
Americas Information Security Officer
Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc.
V: +1-630-455-2787  F: +1-312-601-1782
john.jones@xxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Pluta [mailto:joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 6:23 PM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: When is a bug a bug?

There was some discussion of bugs in the last couple of days.  The
direction the discussion took made today's events particularly ironic.
I needed a bio of an IBM exec, and so someone at IBM sent it to me, but
as is often the case in IBM, he sent it as a .lwp file, which is a Lotus
Word Pro file, I believe.

Well, hoping that Word had a built-in conversion agent, I tried to take
advantage of the integration of Outlook and Word, and simply dragged the
attachment from the email to a blank Word document.  It showed up in the
document as an icon.  I double-clicked on the icon, and Word popped up a
warning that it might have a virus, did I want to continue?  Being
pretty sure that the document wasn't infected (although one never knows
-- those IBM guys are pranksters!), I told it to go ahead.

Reboot.

Not a warning, not "this application is generating an error report", not
even a blue screen.  A hard, cold reboot.

Luckily, I didn't have any unsaved work open at the time, or I'd be
handling this with considerably less equanimity.  But even so, I think
this goes to show the difference between a "bug" and a missing feature.

The completely documented and consistently enforced lack of
multi-threading in the interactive environment is simply a design
decision that resulted in a missing feature.  A hard boot from a
Microsoft application running on a Microsoft operating system regardless
of the situation, but certainly in this case from simply opening a
document, is a "bug".  In my opinion, it is a perfect example of the
astoundingly shoddy code that Microsoft wants people to run their
business on.

(You wonder how many millions of hours of productivity a year are lost
to this sort of thing.)

Anyway, I just found it appropriate.

Joe

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