Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx04.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Eric Sosman Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: please coin a term for a lower order bug Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:39:54 -0500 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 31 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:40:00 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx04.eternal-september.org; posting-host="HSlJAUb3pGXi3i7ZL/HoAw"; logging-data="5514"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/MvL4DkyL9QWtZJJr+kYZu" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0) Gecko/20111222 Thunderbird/9.0.1 In-Reply-To: Cancel-Lock: sha1:FHt3znwKUgRPNeHLT9eSc5okLtM= Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:11339 On 1/15/2012 7:21 AM, Wanja Gayk wrote: > In article, noone@lewscanon.com says... > >> A bug is a bug. > > If something runs correctly, but slower than necessary, but still > acceptable, how can it be a bug? As a preliminary, let's note that the phrase "but still acceptable" was not part of the bug description until you added it. With that in mind, on to the story: In 1981 I was peripherally involved with a system that did interactive searches of a newspaper's content. (If that doesn't sound remarkable, take note of the era: Before Google, before Yahoo, before Altavista, before the Web itself, before the first IBM PC.) One gang of PDP-11 computers handled the searching, and another gang digested the newspaper's daily data flow and updated the indices. At one major metropolitan newspaper, the system was running smoothly and doing its job pretty much as intended. Sure, there were hiccups, but they did not seriously inconvenience the system's users or operators. Yet despite the mostly correct functioning, the installation was an abject failure. Why? Because feeding one day's worth of copy through the indexer took about twenty-eight hours. -- Eric Sosman esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid