A bit of an odd question...

[Anonymouse]

Can a bug be time-dependent?

To explain:

On my Amazon Fire tablet, running Android, I have Microsoft Solitaire. I'm very much an IT user of the old school (i.e. when I first started with IT, 5 1/4" floppies were the in thing, AI was a pipe dream a la Clarke, the whole of Houston Mission Control had less computing power than a modern mobile, and the Internet in its current form wasn't imagined or even possible!).

<aside>I refuse on principle to pay to have ads removed. Throughout my 40+ years in IT Solitaire was free with Windows, and I see no reason why it should not remain so. I regard the low cost (less than £10/year) as irrelevant. It's the principle of the thing.</aside>

There's a facility whereby you can double the number of points you get for each challenge, lasting for a week - you have to play a number of games to unlock it. But there's a bug: the facility will not work before 1am on a Monday. But I've just played it now, and it was perfectly happy to allow me to unlock double points before 1am.

Does this, I wonder, happen only on Mondays?

Logically I can only say 'nonsense'...except I have experience which suggests otherwise. At an institute I was studying at in the '90s, there was one room with 16 PCs in it, networked together and linked to the VAX. As a cost-cutting exercise, all 16 were identical - same hardware, same software, same setup.

One would not work before 10am on a Tuesday.

Any other time, it was fine. All the others were fine at any time. This one PC - between 9am and 10am, it didn't want to know. The IT staff never did get to the bottom of it.

So can bugs be time-dependent? In my experience, yes, they bloody well can!

[Itshim]

My works fine

[newapollo]

Originally Posted by Anonymouse

Can a bug be time-dependent?

To explain:

On my Amazon Fire tablet, running Android, I have Microsoft Solitaire.

There's a facility whereby you can double the number of points you get for each challenge, lasting for a week - you have to play a number of games to unlock it. But there's a bug: the facility will not work before 1am on a Monday. But I've just played it now, and it was perfectly happy to allow me to unlock double points before 1am.

Does this, I wonder, happen only on Mondays?

What happens if you change the time, time zone, or location on your Fire tablet, so it thinks it's after 2am on a Monday?

[Dude111]

Yes that may very well do it.......

[Anonymouse]

Or I can just wait until 1am on a Monday.

Then again, we got a free double points day (Bank Holiday Monday- I still hate BHMs, but even I have to admit they have their points), hence my unlocking double points on a Tuesday - and it lasts a week. I wonder if this will happen before 1am on a Tuesday, or have I effectively sidestepped the bug? I'll let you know!

[tweetiepooh]

0100 or 1am sounds like a BST sort of issue. 0100 BST is 0000 GMT. I see this in games where the 0800 contest now starts at 0900 until BST ends.

[Anonymouse]

[FONT="Arial"]Okay, I am officially confused. Double XP should've lasted till Tuesday morning. It hasn't. And getting double points is still showing the bug. Update after 1am.
- Yep, I thought so. Playing a game now DOES work. The damn bug persists./FONT]

[Dude111]

Originally posted by Anonymouse
I refuse on principle to pay to have ads removed.

It is possible to DL an earlier version of the game that didnt have ads and run it in compat mode??

Like solitare for XP and 98se did not have ads.... Could you run that on your device and run it in compatibiity mode?? (I dont know much about those)

[Anonymouse]

I don't think so; it's on my tablet, not my laptop. There seems to be no getting away from ads these days. Oh well.

[Edward27]

Originally Posted by Anonymouse

Can a bug be time-dependent?

To explain:

On my Amazon Fire tablet, running Android, I have Microsoft Solitaire. I'm very much an IT user of the old school (i.e. when I first started with IT, 5 1/4" floppies were the in thing, AI was a pipe dream a la Clarke, the whole of Houston Mission Control had less computing power than a modern mobile, and the Internet in its current form wasn't imagined or even possible!).

<aside>I refuse on principle to pay to have ads removed. Throughout my 40+ years in IT Solitaire was free with Windows, and I see no reason why it should not remain so. I regard the low cost (less than £10/year) as irrelevant. It's the principle of the thing.</aside>

There's a facility whereby you can double the number of points you get for each challenge, lasting for a week - you have to play a number of games to unlock it. But there's a bug: the facility will not work before 1am on a Monday. But I've just played it now, and it was perfectly happy to allow me to unlock double points before 1am.

Does this, I wonder, happen only on Mondays?

Logically I can only say 'nonsense'...except I have experience which suggests otherwise. At an institute I was studying at in the '90s, there was one room with 16 PCs in it, networked together and linked to the VAX. As a cost-cutting exercise, all 16 were identical - same hardware, same software, same setup.

One would not work before 10am on a Tuesday.

Any other time, it was fine. All the others were fine at any time. This one PC - between 9am and 10am, it didn't want to know. The IT staff never did get to the bottom of it.

So can bugs be time-dependent? In my experience, yes, they bloody well can!

Yes, bugs can be time-dependent, as your experiences with the Microsoft Solitaire game and the PC from the '90s demonstrate. These errors can be difficult to diagnose and may seem illogical, but they can arise from various reasons such as software updates, system clocks, or specific conditions met only at certain times.