This post highlights the issue with overly zealous mods on SO who marked the question as off topic. Nothing about this is off topic, and it turned out to be very interesting answer.
To have it reopened, all the OP needs to do is give the community all the information they need to reproduce the issue. Should we ask any less?
It's also worth noting that the question was not closed by moderators (denoted by diamonds next to their name), but by members of the community with high reputation (> 3000). These users have community moderation powers by virtue of their reputation, but are not moderators per se.
If you have over 3000 reputation, you could vote to reopen.
Full disclosure: I am an elected moderator for Stack Overflow: http:stackoverflow.com/users/16587/george-stocker
B) Someone is gifting free interesting content to the site; even if it's imperfect does the reaction have to be so harsh? This is, personally, exactly why I never post on stack overflow. You're acting like you're doing them a favor by letting them post there, when they're doing you a favor by giving you interesting content in the first place.
A user can gift all the free interesting content they want. But if it's not scoped or on topic, then it's not scoped for the site or on topic and would be closed and/or deleted. Just because Rodney Dangerfield turns up to your bedroom and starts making jokes doesn't mean it's the time or place.
The reason it was marked as such was so that other people didn't waste time on an unreproducible problem until it was fixed to be reproducible.
At worst, it sits there and wastes many people's time, thus getting in the way of actually reproducible questions getting seen and answered.
Note, that this is not regarding this one question, but thousands - certainly there are a large number of items selected for moderator action.
This sort of community moderation exists in an attempt to proactively ensure a high signal to noise ratio (SNR), by discouraging noise. While it's an entirely valid stance to say they're overreacting and that the ratio is fine, that there's no slippery slope, etc., here's another viewpoint:
I don't read from the raw Stack Overflow firehose of posts. It doesn't even have a 1% SNR to me. Higher SNR sources (searches, specific links from my communities) will occasionally take me there, but as a primary source of information I don't even think of consulting it. I took a stab at participating in one of the far more niche subtopics - gamedev, relevant to me both professionally and unprofessionally - and still found it didn't have a high enough SNR to hold my interest beyond gathering a few hundred internet points. I found myself ignoring the majority of these sorts of questions, and quickly progressed to the natural conclusion of ignoring the site entirely.
And that's fine: Not everything is for everyone. But there are presumably those who still participate in the site directly who would prefer to remain doing so, yet find the SNR low enough to be pushing their own tolerances.
If I have a problem that I can't reproduce but is related to programming, and there's a chance that someone else has also had a similar problem and found the solution, SO does not offer a way for me to connect with that person.
On the other hand, if an unreproducible problem is posted and allowed, and multiple answers are given, there's a good chance one of those will point the OP in the right direction, and in turn, someone else that faces that same issue. There should be nothing wrong with this type of interaction. If someone feels it's a waste of their time, by all means, move on.
I know this has been argued ad nauseam, both here and on meta, and is likely something that will never change, but that's not the point of my post here. I just think it's worth defending the stance that the SO community is too quick to close programming related topics that may not be completely black and white.
By the way, programmers.stackexchange.com also suffers from this same fate, and I don't think this question would have received a much different response there, even though it's supposed to allow more open-ended questions.
What do you do with a quarter K? It was basically a very slow beamwidth analyzer for LEDs using a photodiode and a R/C servo. So the 3 dB down aka half power beamwidth of this integrated LED and diffusion lens system measures as X degrees. Kind of important if you're making LED based signs. I believe I was only using about 4 bytes of memory. No need for interrupts as it had a rather advanced hardware timer system that made excellent PWM for driving servos. The world is full of interesting problems that require lots of computation but very little stored state.
Yes, that's the "I'm pretty sure it's this without even attempting to replicate the result" possibility (and also probably the most likely).
"People say to me, 'Rodney, what's it like being a zombie?' and I say, 'It would be better if I didn't have to send half of every brain I find to my ex-wife!' No respect for the dead. No respect."
"People say you gotta hit zombies in the head. I definitely agree. All I know is that when I was alive, and someone kicked me, it didn't take me all night to find where my nuts landed. I get no respect."
Disagree. OP failed to exclude some possibilities by doing multiple randomized trials and so on (or at least stating whether he had done so), but he supplied the source code and a description of the behavior that was perfectly adequate to understand the issue. Nothing personal, but your post above is the epitome of deflecting a question instead of engaging with it.
I think adoption of a tool that just lets one share their dev environment would discourage this sort of due diligence, and encourage the useless "here's a dump of my code please fix it"-type questions.
While I know you were coming from a good place -- I'm all about automating a testable problem (i.e. TDD, write failing tests first), and I think in the right hands, this would be a nice tool -- I could only see SO using this to further enforce strict requirements in what they consider a "valid" question.
"You must set up a lab environment that fully replicates the issue in question."
Maybe they wouldn't let it go that far (I would hope), but I think it would head in that direction.
Most likely his problem is due to his terminal (my guess: cmd.exe/powershell in Windows) and not his program code at all.
FWIW here's my non-reproduction of his problem, on Linux amd64, Sun Java 1.6.0, running in urxvt:
real 0m3.568s
user 0m0.616s
sys 0m1.152s
real 0m3.393s
user 0m0.648s
sys 0m1.060s
Well in real life, those are the tough ones and where help is more appreciated.
The only bugs that I remember are the ones that were random or that nobody else could reproduce and yet were there.
Why close other's question because of your own incompetence? Why the fuck prevent a question from been answered because only five retards can't get it?
Isn't the solemn purpose of the site is to wait until someone who is capable of reproducing it and solve it?
It's a pet peeve of mine. At least 10% of the time I google for a answer to a programming question it takes me to a StackOverflow question... which has been marked off-topic.
Give your interlocutors the benefit of the doubt, it makes for a much more productive conversation.
If a future person were to run into that problem I think that is the most appropriate location for the answer to reside.
It was mostly Assembly, Turbo C, Microsoft C or DJGPP in the later games
Making the sound card work -> sucked (especially with interrupts >= 10)
Multithreading -> Non existent / roll your own
Graphics -> VGA or Vesa. Vesa was nice except for one small detail (next point)
Real mode -> Awful! The bane of developers! Going from "16-bit" to 32-bit protected mode is like going from the worse stick-shift car to an automatic modern car.
The reason this also influences VESA is that VGA fits into a segment 320*200 = 64k anything bigger doesn't.