History DarthWiki / IdiotProgramming

* ICL/Fujitsu Horizon is an accounting system developed for the British Post Office to comupterise the company's bookkeeping that has become infamous for catalysing what Creator/TheBBC [[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56859357 later described as]] "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal the UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice]]". The system is ''rife'' with recurring bugs that caused duplicate transaction entries and, as a result, shortfalls in the tens of thousands of pounds. Bugs that have cropped up include [[https://problemswithpol.wordpress.com/2020/04/21/fujitsu-and-the-dalmellington-bug/ the Dalmellington bug]], where the Forced Log Out script didn't remove the Post Log On script from the stack of incomplete processes, leading to transactions remaining in the queue; the receipts and payments mismatch bug, which was compounded by the lack of an explicit warning; and the Suspense Account bug, an issue where temporary data wasn't erased and was reused a year later.\\\

* ICL/Fujitsu Horizon is an accounting system developed for the British Post Office to comupterise the accounting system that has become infamous for catalysing what Creator/TheBBC [[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56859357 later described as]] "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal the UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice]]". The system is ''rife'' with recurring bugs that caused duplicate transaction entries and, as a result, shortfalls in the tens of thousands of pounds. Bugs that have cropped up include [[https://problemswithpol.wordpress.com/2020/04/21/fujitsu-and-the-dalmellington-bug/ the Dalmellington bug]], where the Forced Log Out script didn't remove the Post Log On script from the stack of incomplete processes, leading to transactions remaining in the queue; the receipts and payments mismatch bug, which was compounded by the lack of an explicit warning; and the Suspense Account bug, an issue where temporary data wasn't erased and was reused a year later.\\\
The scandal and miscarriage of justice came from Post Office Ltd.'s [[InspectorJavert terrible approach to investigating discrepancies]]: they simply assumed that Horizon was infallible and that any subpostmaster who reported an error must be ''[[InsaneTrollLogic stealing the missing money]]'', leading to hundreds of unfair civil and criminal convictions, subpostmasters having to remortgage their homes, and [[even multiple ''suicides'' https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/post-office-scandals-four-suicide-31830231]]. All the while, they continued to use Horizon despite evidence that the system is faulty, compounding the problems and the unjust treatment of subpostmasters.

The scandal and miscarriage of justice came from Post Office Ltd.'s [[InspectorJavert terrible approach to investigating discrepancies]]: they simply assumed that Horizon was infallible and that any subpostmaster who reported an error must be ''[[InsaneTrollLogic stealing the missing money]]'', leading to hundreds of unfair civil and criminal convictions, subpostmasters having to remortgage their homes, and even one ''suicide''. All the while, they continued to use Horizon despite evidence that the system is faulty, compounding the problems and the unjust treatment of subpostmasters.

* ICL/Fujitsu Horizon is an accounting system developed for the British Post Office to comupterise the accounting system that has become infamous for catalysing what Creator/TheBBC [[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56859357 later described as]] "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal the UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice]]". The system is ''rife'' with recurring bugs that caused duplicate transaction entries and, as a result, shortfalls in the tens of thousands of pounds. Bugs that have cropped up include the Dallington bug, where the Forced Log Out script didn't remove the Post Log On script from the stack of incomplete processes, leading to transactions remaining in the queue; the receipts and payments mismatch bug, which was compounded by the lack of an explicit warning; and the Suspense Account bug, an issue where temporary data wasn't erased and was reused a year later.\\\
The scandal and miscarriage of justice came from Post Office Ltd.'s [[InspectorJavert terrible approach to investigating discrepancies]]: they simply assumed that Horizon was infallible and that any subpostmaster who reported an error must be ''[[InsaneTrollLogic stealing the missing money]]'', leading to hundreds of unfair civil and criminal convictions, subpostmasters having to remortgage their homes, and even one ''suicide''. All the while, they continued to use Horizon despite evidence that the system is faulty, compounding the problems and the unjust treatment of subpostmasters.

*** Fast Startup in general can be more trouble that it's worth. If you migrated to a [[UsefulNotes/FlashMemory solid state drive]], you can easily turn it off without much extra delays. However, the real can-of-worms is that Fast Startup replaces the ability to perform a true shutdown, which is a good practice for starting Windows fresh without any bugs from save-stating Windows, even if it takes more time. Some usually pre-Windows 8 hardware wasn't necessarily designed with Fast Startup anticipated, which may lead to system anomalies. However, when Fast Startup became standard since then, using the Restart command equals true shutdown, as the CPU uptime is reset to 0.

* In August 2019 it was discovered that the identity and personal information, including phone numbers, e-mails, and even possibly home addresses of the literal thousands of journalists, media, and industry professionals that attended [[UsefulNotes/ElectronicEntertainmentExpo E3]] for years had been leaked out onto the internet, putting thousands of people at risk. How was it that this information was leaked out to the public? It turned out that it wasn't leaked at all. The ESA, the group that runs E3, had listed this information in an unencrypted spreadsheet file that was freely available on its website for years. This information was supposed to be used by vendors and industry professionals at the event, but the ESA had never required any sort of login or check to make sure it was only accessible by these parties. Without these, the file and directory were accessible by ''anyone.''

* You can't talk about idiot programming without mentioning one of the most infamous software glitches of all time. Most of the glitches on this page probably caused inconveniences, lost data, or locked someone out of using a product. But what about a software glitch that actually ''killed people''? That would involve none other than the infamous [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 Therac-25]], a piece of radiology equipment so poorly programmed that it gave everyone who used it massive (and often quite fatal) overdoses of radiation. The Other Wiki's article on it describes it as "involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation. Because of concurrent programming errors, it sometimes gave its patients radiation doses that were hundreds of times greater than normal, resulting in death or serious injury. These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems, and they have become a standard case study in health informatics and software engineering. Additionally, the overconfidence of the engineers and lack of proper due diligence to resolve reported software bugs, is highlighted as an extreme case where the engineer's overconfidence in their initial work and failure to believe the end users' claims caused drastic repercussions." This machine's shoddy programming was so infamous that it is cited in introductory programming classes to this day as an example of how '''not''' to program. One of the main causes was that while the machine's precedessor used hardware interlocks to make sure an overdose couldn't happen, the Therac-25 made that entirely in software by incrementing an 8-bit variable, which overflowed on every 256th increase. Furthermore, it used a series of magnets which needed about 8 seconds to realign. If the user made a correction within these 8 seconds, the control system would work with the new data while the hardware was still aligned for what was originally entered. Combined, this could result in the patient being hit with a high-current electron beam that was only supposed to be used with a tungsten target to produce X-Rays.

* MediaNotes/AdobeFlash (now known as "Adobe Animate"). Before it was discontinued, you may have once noticed it on this very site, taking up 100% of your CPU and 80 megabytes of your RAM to display a static image as an ad banner that would have taken maybe 12K of your RAM if it were a JPG. It was also seen on numerous video sites, as a Flash video player which dragged multicore, multigigahertz computers to their knees in order to jerkily fail playing h.264 video that would run silky smooth on Pentium [=IIs=] or [=G3s=] as unwrapped files. For comparison, playing a Flash video from Website/YouTube through VLC Media Player only needs 1/4 to 1/2 of the CPU on a Pentium IV 2.8[=GHz=] system, and with ''much'' less memory usage.

** On July 14, 2015, Mozilla announced that ''all'' versions of Flash were blocked by default in Firefox, citing Adobe's slow response to patching publicly available security exploits, to the delight of tech people the world over. However, Adobe soon issued patches, and Flash was unblocked -- though the general feeling is that this incident added another nail to a coffin that had been a '''long''' time coming. Website/YouTube gave the finger to Flash as well, and started using its own [=HTML5=] player by default. The memory consumption was reasonable for the budget-computers in that time (Budget Pentium and AMD APU systems, for example), considering they were running the full-featured [=YouTube=] site. Also, unlike the Flash player, it supported videos that play at 60 frames per second, as well as playback speed options. A good omen, perhaps.

* Website/YouTube has had its fair share of blunders over the years. One would think the largest video-sharing platform in the world would be more wary of things like this, but alas, no.

* Website/GOGDotCom's "Galaxy" client has certain issues with download size (namely, getting it wrong) and download speed (roughly comparable to having the code yelled at you over the phone and programming it yourself). For example, take the Diamond Edition of ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights''. This comes to about 2.5GB, a maximum of 3 if you count all the music and avatars and so on that come as freebies. Galaxy will report the game size as being 5GB. It will then take an obscenely long time to download that 5GB; on a connection where Origin can get a game of that size downloaded within an eight-hour period, Galaxy will take twelve. Read that again: [[InsaneTrollLogic 12 hours to download all five gigabytes of a three-gigabyte game]]. Thankfully, Galaxy is completely optional and you can just download games directly from your account on the site, saving time, frustration, and bandwidth.

* Many websites are distressingly bad at password security, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZtInClXe1Q as Tom Scott explains]]. The worst offenders will simply email a password to you in cleartext on request, which implies that the website is not hashing and salting user passwords, allowing password thieves to crack the easy passwords like "12345" to log in. Scott claims that handling passwords at ''all'' is Idiot Programming to begin with, and that programmers should use a third-party service like Website/{{Facebook}} if possible, because security is so hard to get right. A good sign that a website has insecure passwords is if it imposes a limit on password length: a hashing function always returns strings of the same length, whether you give it one character or a thousand.
* Browsing the Internet is a different experience depending on whether you're on a full computer or a portable device such as a smartphone or tablet. For this reason, many websites offer different page layouts for PC and mobile devices, making the mobile site more compact and easier to navigate with touch controls. The standard method of doing this is to automatically detect what web browser you're using, and load the mobile layout if it's a mobile browser. However, for whatever reason, some sites instead redirect you to a completely separate page (usually indicated by adding "m." to the URL), which always loads the mobile layout regardless of which device you're using. The result is that, if a mobile user wants to share a link to this site, they either have to manually edit the URL to the regular version, or every PC user who follows the link has to find the "Go to desktop site" button (which is often hard to find). Even giants such as Website/{{Wikipedia}}, Website/{{Twitter}}, and Website/{{Facebook}} do this, which can make one wonder why they can't just follow the more user-friendly standard method.

There are also a few things that often aren't examples, even though they might look like they are -- in particular, software that appears to use a lot of memory or storage space on your machine. Your operating system might use a gigabyte of memory on your machine, but that's not because it actually needs it -- what's actually happening is that it's using extra memory in exchange for a speed boost. Even the most resource-hungry consumer [=OSes=] used today can run on dinosaurs (although finding such a rig may prove difficult). Partisans in the UsefulNotes/ComputerWars will insist that everything the other company has done is Idiot Programming.

* UsefulNotes/AdobeFlash (now known as "Adobe Animate"). Before it was discontinued, you may have once noticed it on this very site, taking up 100% of your CPU and 80 megabytes of your RAM to display a static image as an ad banner that would have taken maybe 12K of your RAM if it were a JPG. It was also seen on numerous video sites, as a Flash video player which dragged multicore, multigigahertz computers to their knees in order to jerkily fail playing h.264 video that would run silky smooth on Pentium [=IIs=] or [=G3s=] as unwrapped files. For comparison, playing a Flash video from Website/YouTube through VLC Media Player only needs 1/4 to 1/2 of the CPU on a Pentium IV 2.8[=GHz=] system, and with ''much'' less memory usage.

* Similarly to the proprietary [=UIs=] and iTunes examples above, at the very least the default music players in some mobile device brands and how they become bloated with features as attempting to be Spotify clones without caring if someone will use them, and ballooning in the process to occupy up to ''hundreds of megabytes'' of storage, besides them eating the battery and causing the phone to become warm when other music players are much leaner and richer in features, consume less system resources, and aren't so CPU intensive.

* Mediatek-powered mobile devices with FM radio receivers, such as certain Lenovo tablets and Alcatel smartphones among others, come with an app to use it ("Transmission FM" as is often named) which if reception is anything but stellar will either emit an irritating and nasty if you're listening at high volume, static-like hissing without warning shutting down for a while or begin to cycle looking for a station with less interferences… except that pretty much anything will end up triggering said behaviour especially moving the headphone cables —unavoidable if you're walking or jogging, which ''is'' a pain in the ass when you're listening to a live event or important news. To add insult to injury, often the new station has a poorer reception than the earlier one and while it will often select the same station but emitting on a clearer frequency most of the times such selection is at random. Thankfully, such "feature" can be disabled in Qualcomm-operated devices with a FM radio receiver.

* Even if this not a fault of Android itself, the custom [=UIs=] some manufacturers put on top of such OS for their devices fall into this, including useless bloatware that cannot be removed or disabled, to be buggy messes that crash or freeze regularly and hog lots of system resources slowing it down a lot in the process, and to aggresively manage memory closing apps that are in the background for long despite unused memory being plentiful ''and without caring at all'' if they were being used or not.