[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!