[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.