Meaningful error messages



  • XCode 4.2 is (unfortunately) my primary IDE these days. This morning my project refuses to build. Nothing has changed since yesterday when it built fine. The only error message I get from the compiler is this:

    Build task failed without generating error messages.

    Given my experience thus far with XCode, restarting the iMac will probably fix it. Which is annoying because the hipsters on the Mac-vs-PC television ads said I should never have to restart for anything ever and only Windows has that problem and that clearly makes Macintoshes superior. 

    Meanwhile, I have a Windows Vista system at work with an uptime of over 40 days according to Task Manager, and this was on what many people regard as the worst, buggiest, least-stable Windows OS ever (pedantic dickweed alert, I know Windows ME was worse but no one ever talks about it anymore).



  • @mott555 said:

    the Mac-vs-PC television ads said I should never have to restart for anything ever and only Windows has that problem and that clearly makes Macintoshes superior.




  • I'll take your Build task failed without generating error messages. and raise you a Unexpected exception





    Got this today while trying to setup remote debugging from eclipse. I still don't know what's wrong...



  • It is actually doing you a favor, knowing the Vista machine needs rebooting so it is requiring a reboot by proxy.  Because mac machines will reboot so much better.



  • I'll take your [b]Unexpected exception[/b] and raise you [b]Nullpointerexception[/b]



  • @nexekho said:

    I'll take your Unexpected exception and raise you Nullpointerexception

    What, because you don't check the result of loadStrings?



  • Nah, you've not used the Arduino IDE. That's not my code. It throws NullPointerExceptions maybe once in every 100 compiles, for seemingly no reason.



  • @mott555 said:

    Meanwhile, I have a Windows Vista system at work with an uptime of over 40 days according to Task Manager, and this was on what many people regard as the worst, buggiest, least-stable Windows OS ever (pedantic dickweed alert, I know Windows ME was worse but no one ever talks about it anymore).

    Windows Vista just got a bad reputation for "not being fully compatible with Windows XP" (it's a major release of an OS, of course it's going to break compatibility somewhere), "using too much memory" (the memory is actually cached applications and will be yielded if needed), and "requiring too much powerful hardware" (it's been five years since the last major version of Windows, Moore's Law and all that).

    Taking into account the few regressions in Windows 7 (maximized windows are still transparent, there's no obvious way to sort lists of files in Explorer) makes Windows Vista my favorite OS.



  • Vista also got slammed because it runs WORST in its first few days-- it's asking UAC prompts all over because people are installing stuff, it's indexing your files, it's determining what to put in the predictive cache, etc.

    After the first week, it's smooth as silk. But reviewers only run it a few days before writing their review.



  • First impressions mean a lot.  Does not matter if Vista was a good operating system after a month, what mattered at the time was the now.  When it came out, it had compatibility problems with programs which at the time were not that old, so people did not like that.  One of my friends who had Vista also was a classics gamer and loved playing older games which almost all of them had some form of compatibillity issues which caused them not to work with Vista (so he hated Vista).  There was one thing that really sealed my personal dislike for Vista, which was trying to get a class mates' laptop to connect to the college's wifi.  The wifi had a complicated setup requiring a very specific setup inorder to work and one very important setting (which normally is not used) that had to be set.  I could locate and change the setting in XP in under a minute, so I figured it would take only 5 minutes to find it in Vista, since I thought I knew what I was looking for.  She passed me her laptop, and I went into the wifi settings and was stumpt, I could not find the setting anywhere.  I ended up having to look online at the school's page to get the steps to get to the setting to change it.  It was burried under several nested advance menus which were hidden under very misleading top menu.

     Also looking back at things with 20/20 hindsight you realize things probably were not actually that bad, but it does not change the fact at that moment (at least to me) Vista was bad. 



  • @Daid said:

    Got this today while trying to setup remote debugging from eclipse. I still don't know what's wrong...

    I found the problem.



  • @Anketam said:

    the time was the now.  When it came out, it had compatibility problems with programs which at the time were not that old, so people did not like that.  One of my friends who had Vista also was a classics gamer and loved playing older games which almost all of them had some form of compatibillity issues which caused them not to work with Vista (so he hated Vista). 

    WHAT? HIS GAMES FROM 1980 DIDN'T WORK ON A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM?! HOW DARE YOU MICROSOFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111


  • @nexekho said:

    Nah, you've not used the Arduino IDE. That's not my code. It throws NullPointerExceptions maybe once in every 100 compiles, for seemingly no reason.

    The GWT compiler makes the JRE segfault once every few compiles. Running the compile again will work (although sometimes it will segfault a dozen times in a row, so I eventually wrote a shell script that just looped until it successfully compiled). It doesn't matter what version of the JRE is used, either. Which is awesome and kind of scary because a Java app running in the JRE shouldn't be able to screw up the runtime's memory like that, which implies there is some nasty bug deep inside the JRE.



  • @Sutherlands said:

    @Anketam said:

    the time was the now.  When it came out, it had compatibility problems with programs which at the time were not that old, so people did not like that.  One of my friends who had Vista also was a classics gamer and loved playing older games which almost all of them had some form of compatibillity issues which caused them not to work with Vista (so he hated Vista). 

    WHAT? HIS GAMES FROM 1980 DIDN'T WORK ON A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM?! HOW DARE YOU MICROSOFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111

    Just more M$ planned obsolescence. I can run my Linux and OSX games from 1980 just fine.



  • @Sutherlands said:

    @Anketam said:

    the time was the now.  When it came out, it had compatibility problems with programs which at the time were not that old, so people did not like that.  One of my friends who had Vista also was a classics gamer and loved playing older games which almost all of them had some form of compatibillity issues which caused them not to work with Vista (so he hated Vista). 

    WHAT? HIS GAMES FROM 1980 DIDN'T WORK ON A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM?! HOW DARE YOU MICROSOFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111

    I never said his hatred was justified.  Humans are irrational and emotionally driven machines.

    I love how human logic breaks down in this case:

    • I am enjoying my old games with no issues
    • I upgrade my operating system.
    • Games no longer work

    Only thing that changed was the operating system therefore it is the operating systems fault.  Since it is the operating systems fault I now hate the operating system.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Anketam said:

    I love how human logic breaks down in this case:

    • I am enjoying my old games with no issues
    • I upgrade my operating system.
    • Games no longer work

    Only thing that changed was the operating system therefore it is the operating systems fault.  Since it is the operating systems fault I now hate the operating system.

    I'm missing the part where the logic breaks down. Presumably, you want him to hate himself for doing the upgrade? Maybe he does. But why should that change his opinion of the OS? Or even be relevant when discussing his opinion of the OS?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Just more M$ planned obsolescence. I can run my Linux and OSX games from 1980 just fine.

    ha, funny



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Anketam said:

    I love how human logic breaks down in this case:

    • I am enjoying my old games with no issues
    • I upgrade my operating system.
    • Games no longer work

    Only thing that changed was the operating system therefore it is the operating systems fault.  Since it is the operating systems fault I now hate the operating system.

    I'm missing the part where the logic breaks down. Presumably, you want him to hate himself for doing the upgrade? Maybe he does. But why should that change his opinion of the OS? Or even be relevant when discussing his opinion of the OS?

    it doesn't when this is all you know, but it actually does, because most of the "my program doesn't work after OS upgrade" is caused by the program exploiting a bug/undocumented ( = unofficial, internal, not to be used by public) feature to work, and that feature/bug getting changed/corrected, so most of these are really program's faults, not operating system's.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    Filed under: also why is it that my post sometimes doesn't show up after submitting the form and i have to reload the page again to see it?

    You've been here awhile. You should be well-aware that CS sucks.



  • @pitchingchris said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Just more M$ planned obsolescence. I can run my Linux and OSX games from 1980 just fine.

    ha, funny

    It's even funnier when you realize that, due to a lack of binary compatibility, Linux probably can't run a program from 3 years ago, let alone 30.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    It's even funnier when you realize that, due to a lack of [b]designing a system that works and sticking with it[/b], Linux probably can't run a program from 3 days ago, let alone 30.
    FTFY



  • @nexekho said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    It's even funnier when you realize that, due to a lack of designing a system that works and sticking with it, Linux probably can't run a program from 3 days ago, let alone 30.
    FTFY

    Aren't you saying the same thing I am? Besides, lack of compatibility is a goal of GNU/Linux. It permits more flexibility in new development.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    it doesn't when this is all you know, but it actually does, because most of the "my program doesn't work after OS upgrade" is caused by the program exploiting a bug/undocumented ( = unofficial, internal, not to be used by public) feature to work, and that feature/bug getting changed/corrected, so most of these are really program's faults, not operating system's.

    And you still haven't explained why it would be illogical to dislike the OS for this. Note that I haven't disagreed with anything you've said.



  • @Anketam said:

    One of my friends who had Vista also was a classics gamer and loved playing older games which almost all of them had some form of compatibillity issues which caused them not to work with Vista (so he hated Vista). 

    That's why I have a PC I built out of scraps of older systems that runs Windows XP and 98. Games have always been the forefront of foregoing established frameworks* in the name of either performance or "being unique".

    I give it the same rationale anyone who still has a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis or similar hooked up to their TV has. (Don't you know you can emulate all those games on a cheap PC or hacked modern console?)

    * A tangent I'll save for another time that oddly enough doesn't apply to late-90's era Windows games.



  • @Sutherlands said:

    WHAT? HIS GAMES FROM 1980 DIDN'T WORK ON A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM?! HOW DARE YOU MICROSOFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111
     

    I wish to throw in a plug for Intel compatability. I run Qemu under Ubuntu Linux. I have a boot disk image for CP/M-86 that I downloaded from the Internet. Supposedly it contains the last actual CP/M-86 binary, with a wrapper to let it handle larger diskette sizes.

    The thing runs. One-year-old hardware running a 25 year old operating system, and it works! That's COMPATABILITY. Hurray for Intel! 

     



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @nexekho said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    It's even funnier when you realize that, due to a lack of designing a system that works and sticking with it, Linux probably can't run a program from 3 days ago, let alone 30.
    FTFY

    Aren't you saying the same thing I am? Besides, lack of compatibility is a goal of GNU/Linux. It permits more flexibility in new development.

    Linux almost certainly can run a program from 3 days, 3 years or 15 years ago (it's not much older than that, so no 30 years). GNU system also can run a program from 3 days, 3 years or 15 years ago, but depending on which libraries it uses, the dll-hell may manifest anything from not at all to requiring a chroot with the old set, depending on how well those libraries were versioned. Lack of compatibility is only goal inside kernel. Still GNU/Linux people don't go out of their way to keep binary compatibility the way Microsoft used to, because most GNU/Linux software can be recompiled, since sources are available.

    Microsoft actually used to spend a lot of effort on keeping old software working up to Windows XP and to get it running again on Windows 7 after it turned out the customers did get angry when they neglected it for Windows Vista.



  • @Anketam said:

    I love how human logic breaks down in this case:

    • I am enjoying my old games with no issues
    • I upgrade my operating system.
    • Games no longer work

    Only thing that changed was the operating system therefore it is the operating systems fault.  Since it is the operating systems fault I now hate the operating system.

    The logic does not break down. The only thing you can return for refund is the operating system, so you will. Who's fault it is does not matter, it does not work.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    The GWT compiler makes the JRE segfault once every few compiles. Running the compile again will work (although sometimes it will segfault a dozen times in a row, so I eventually wrote a shell script that just looped until it successfully compiled). It doesn't matter what version of the JRE is used, either. Which is awesome and kind of scary because a Java app running in the JRE shouldn't be able to screw up the runtime's memory like that, which implies there is some nasty bug deep inside the JRE.
     

    Or some JNI code with bugs.



  • @Bulb said:

    @Anketam said:
    I love how human logic breaks down in this case:
    • I am enjoying my old games with no issues
    • I upgrade my operating system.
    • Games no longer work

    Only thing that changed was the operating system therefore it is the operating systems fault.  Since it is the operating systems fault I now hate the operating system.

    The logic does not break down. The only thing you can return for refund is the operating system, so you will. Who's fault it is does not matter, it does not work.
    I think people misunderstood me when I said breaks down.  I meant break down in the sense of breaking something into its smaller parts so that it could be easierly understood, not this is how it fails.


  • @Anketam said:

    One of my friends who had Vista also was a classics gamer and loved playing older games which almost all of them had some form of compatibillity issues which caused them not to work with Vista (so he hated Vista).

    Everybody seems to remember the old times as somehow magically everything was working correctly.



    I still remember some of the shit I'd have to go through when I wanted sound to work in DOS games under Windows 98. Not to mention the games that could not use higher memory and all that mess with config.sys and autoexec.bat.



  • @Bulb said:

    @Anketam said:

    I love how human logic breaks down in this case:

    • I am enjoying my old games with no issues
    • I upgrade my operating system.
    • Games no longer work

    Only thing that changed was the operating system therefore it is the operating systems fault.  Since it is the operating systems fault I now hate the operating system.

    The logic does not break down. The only thing you can return for refund is the operating system, so you will. Who's fault it is does not matter, it does not work.

    Actually, you probably can't bring it back for a refund because most retailers won't accept opened software packages.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

     Oh boy! An OS debate! Sure, I've heard these exist, but you never think you'll get to see one with your own eyes.

    Please. Continue. It's facinating.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Oh boy! An OS debate! Sure, I've heard these exist, but you never think you'll get to see one with your own eyes.

    Please. Continue. It's facinating.

     

    What I find amusing is I assumed it would be an OS X vs Windows debate. Instead it's all about obsolete versions of Windows.

     



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I can run my Linux and OSX games from 1980 just fine.

    OSX existed in 1980?



  • @ekolis said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    I can run my Linux and OSX games from 1980 just fine.

    OSX existed in 1980?

     

    Linux existed in 1980?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @nexekho said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    It's even funnier when you realize that, due to a lack of designing a system that works and sticking with it, Linux probably can't run a program from 3 days ago, let alone 30.
    FTFY

    Aren't you saying the same thing I am? Besides, lack of compatibility is a goal of GNU/Linux. It permits more flexibility in new development.

    I attribute most of Linux's compatibility issues to open-source pride.

    "Yeah, the only way to do it is the source, man. Leave your corporate closed-source binaries behind."

    "What, you don't want to update the OS again? But, man, it's free! It's not like Micro$haft is charging you thousands of dollars for it. If it breaks compatibility, just recompile everything!"



  • @erikal said:

    @ekolis said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    I can run my Linux and OSX games from 1980 just fine.

    OSX existed in 1980?

    Linux existed in 1980?

    Another few hours and Erikal might get the joke. Let's watch!



  •  @boomzilla said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    it doesn't when this is all you know, but it actually does, because most of the "my program doesn't work after OS upgrade" is caused by the program exploiting a bug/undocumented ( = unofficial, internal, not to be used by public) feature to work, and that feature/bug getting changed/corrected, so most of these are really program's faults, not operating system's.

    And you still haven't explained why it would be illogical to dislike the OS for this. Note that I haven't disagreed with anything you've said.

    He should be blaming the games for not being future-proof and being written with Vista compatiblity in mind.



  • @Medinoc said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    The GWT compiler makes the JRE segfault once every few compiles. Running the compile again will work (although sometimes it will segfault a dozen times in a row, so I eventually wrote a shell script that just looped until it successfully compiled). It doesn't matter what version of the JRE is used, either. Which is awesome and kind of scary because a Java app running in the JRE shouldn't be able to screw up the runtime's memory like that, which implies there is some nasty bug deep inside the JRE.
     

    Or some JNI code with bugs.

    Possible, although I'm pretty sure it's just written in pure Java.



  • @Bulb said:

    Linux almost certainly can run a program from 3 days, 3 years or 15 years ago (it's not much older than that, so no 30 years).

    Sure, if it doesn't link any external library and uses POSIX syscalls. I don't know of any useful program that doesn't.

    @Bulb said:

    GNU system also can run a program from 3 days, 3 years or 15 years ago, but depending on which libraries it uses, the dll-hell may manifest anything from not at all to requiring a chroot with the old set, depending on how well those libraries were versioned.

    Unless it was compiled for the same version of the same distro, then it won't "just work". If you manage to corral all of the libraries and their dependencies and set up the chroot right, it might work, but at that point you're just running another OS inside of your host OS.

    @Bulb said:

    Lack of compatibility is only goal inside kernel. Still GNU/Linux people don't go out of their way to keep binary compatibility the way Microsoft used to, because most GNU/Linux software can be recompiled, since sources are available.

    It's obvious the glibc people don't give a shit about binary compatibility, either. And the source compatibility thing is 1) useless to most users and 2) only true if you manage to track down old versions of all dependencies. At that point, you might as well say "Yeah, Vista can run 30 year old software because I can just load it in a VM."

    @Bulb said:

    Microsoft actually used to spend a lot of effort on keeping old software working up to Windows XP and to get it running again on Windows 7 after it turned out the customers did get angry when they neglected it for Windows Vista.

    I'm aware of this, which is why I was complaining about GNU/Linux not giving a fuck. So basically, your points are irrelevant. I take it from your response that you've never tried to get a binary compiled for one system to run on another.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    I attribute most of Linux's compatibility issues to open-source pride.

    "Yeah, the only way to do it is the source, man. Leave your corporate closed-source binaries behind."

    "What, you don't want to update the OS again? But, man, it's free! It's not like Micro$haft is charging you thousands of dollars for it. If it breaks compatibility, just recompile everything!"

     

    I think the real issue is that it's nigh-on impossible to develop an OS that's fully backwards compatible and not break a few things. With Vista, it was a complete overhaul of the OS, and a big leap from XP, so a lot of things broke where vendors weren't ready for all the changes. Windows 7 wasn't such a leap away from Vista, so all the changes various software and hardware vendors made to ensure compatibility with Vista also worked for 7.

    The situation is the same for Linux too, although because of the way it is developed (in small parts which fit together, there's no one company developing the whole distro) things can break here and there rather than a huge bunch of things at once.Vendors still get caught with their pants down, but it does seem to happen less and less as the communities gel a bit more.

    I've not found a lot of problems with backwards compatibility on Linux, for me it tends to be forward compatibility (i.e. running the very latest Chrome on an old version of Fedora has some issues). I don't use Windows 7 as my main OS now, so I'm not installing old games and software on it much, so I can't really make much of a call on that front.

     



  • @Anketam said:

      .... and one very important setting (which normally is not used) that had to be set. ....It was burried under several nested advance menus which were hidden under very misleading top menu.

     Also looking back at things with 20/20 hindsight you realize things probably were not actually that bad, but it does not change the fact at that moment (at least to me) Vista was bad. 

     Looking at the first part, I would say that was a good thing...why should users who will rarely (by your admission) see it on a regular basis.

     At lease the end of your post acknowledges it was a subjective reaction, and not an objective analysis.



  • @ASheridan said:

    think the real issue is that it's nigh-on impossible to develop an OS that's fully backwards compatible and not break a few things. With Vista, it was a complete overhaul of the OS, and a big leap from XP, so a lot of things broke where vendors weren't ready for all the changes.
    Over the years, Microsoft has done a pretty good job of maintaining backward compatibilty.  Right now I have a program that was written in 1995 and it runs just fine on Windows 7.  Microsoft did make some (in my opinion) questionable design decisions with Vista and changed a lot of things that pissed me off and seemed like they changed them just for the sake of making them different.  But as far as actual compatibility goes, the biggest problem was that developers dragged their feet.  They had plenty of time to update their software so that it would work with Vista -- but they didn't.  Maybe they were complacement and didn't think it would be a big deal.  Maybe they were just fucking lazy.  And so Microsoft got blamed for things that really weren't their fault.

    When I installed Vista for the first time, in June 2007, I immediately discovered that my anti-virus program didn't work with Vista and there was no new Vista-compatible version available, even though it was 6 months after the official retail release of Vista and nearly two years after the first beta was made available to developers.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    Maybe they were just fucking lazy.
    Either that, or oblivious - there's still people asking how to prevent installing to Program Files on Vista and newer in certain free installer's newsgroups, though at least this doesn't happen more than once or twice per month anymore (used to be practically a daily occurence).



  • @El_Heffe said:

    When I installed Vista for the first time, in June 2007, I immediately discovered that my anti-virus program didn't work with Vista and there was no new Vista-compatible version available, even though it was 6 months after the official retail release of Vista and nearly two years after the first beta was made available to developers.

    I would be questioning the outdatedness of their signature database if they slack that hard



  • @ender said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    Maybe they were just fucking lazy.
    Either that, or oblivious - there's still people asking how to prevent installing to Program Files on Vista and newer in certain free installer's newsgroups, though at least this doesn't happen more than once or twice per month anymore (used to be practically a daily occurence).

    But there ARE times your do NOT want your program to install in "Program Files"!!!!

    (hint: I am not talking abount insalling in a custom/user specified directory, it is a real technical situation that is a personal pet peeve)



  • @TheCPUWizard said:

    But there ARE times your do NOT want your program to install in "Program Files"!!!!
    These people only want to prevent installing to PF on Vista and newer - guess why.



  • @TheCPUWizard said:

    But there ARE times your do NOT want your program to install in "Program Files"!!!!

    (hint: I am not talking abount insalling in a custom/user specified directory, it is a real technical situation that is a personal pet peeve)

    I hate it when people do this. "There's a very good reason for wanting to do X!!! I'm not going tell anyone what that reason is, I'm just going to sit here and wait for someone to ask.." Please don't do this. If you have a point, then explain it. This forum isn't more fun as a guessing game. Nobody cares about your "hints".



  • Well the only possible reason is "I'm a luddite who likes to pretend I'm still running Windows 3.1!" So.

    There are valid reasons for moving your Program Files folder to another drive, I'll give you that.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Vista also got slammed because it runs WORST in its first few days-- it's asking UAC prompts all over because people are installing stuff, it's indexing your files, it's determining what to put in the predictive cache, etc.

    After the first week, it's smooth as silk. But reviewers only run it a few days before writing their review.

    Exactly. I was a fairly happy user of XP, which has (I think) [u]never[/u] BSOD-ed on me. Then I downloaded a preview or whatever Microsoft like to call it of Vista. Now I've been using operating systems since NewDos/80, but few irked me so much as Vista did. Every single time you do as much as move the mouse, you get another one of those bloody pop-ups.

     Windows 7 does this a lot better. Windows 7 is also less stable (and this is on a Supermicro motherboard, not just something you pick up with your order of Sezhuan beef and noodles) than XP is; even this morning, it BSOD-ed on cdrom.sys. Considering that the optical drive hasn't been used in months, it is a little disappointing.

     


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