Slashdot Mirror

This could be the incident you speak of. :)

(Or at least super similar.)

Hmm... that reminds me of this DailyWTF. Who knew that Mr. Test User was such a big customer? :-P

Are you telling me that you can't do enterprisey architectures in ADA? But where would we get our daily dose of humor (http://thedailywtf.com/ from then? This has to be stopped!

This is the first time I saw a story posted on /. and www.thedailywtf.com at the same time!

You know when http://thedailywtf.com/ picks up a story, then it is linked on /. , it's going to be an especially delicious IT failure.

the said that here

Don't worry. The Replicators run on JavaScript.

you need it to be javascript....

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Stargate-Code-of-the-Replicators.aspx

As we speak, the Daily WTF hits my feedreader.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Halifax-Bank-Security.aspx

Antivirus and tools are no match for this kind of idiocy, if it's true.. They just don't expect the bold nerve and fall prey to social engineering and scams sooner or later. This is a bank teller, for chrissake.

If anybody's trusting enough not to verify the authenticity of any kind of claim that hits them financially, then online business is not even their worst problem. Yes, people who forsake their identity this easily should eat the consequences. But I'm saying, in the context of TFA, that online banking, with the right tools, is more secure than withdrawing cash in person. Providing the security measures is the responsibility of the bank, demanding those measures is the customer's.

It'll never happen, will it? :(

I've got to admit, it's creative. Stupid, but creative.

So's this, to pick a recent example. Creativity alone doesn't save you from criticism.

Get off the internet if you don't want to see anything stupid. Don't leave the house...

I would say the same to anyone who can't handle criticism. I replied to someone who was "sorely disappointed by the negative responses in this article", and was speaking as if it was a brilliant idea, and we were all morons for not getting behind it -- as if we only criticize it because the hardware doesn't exist yet.

It's a moronic idea, which does not work yet, and may never work. As such, I reserve the right to point and laugh, and wonder how it managed to get to the front page of Slashdot.

hahaha.

For those not getting this joke, its in reference to an article on The Daily WTF:
The Sage - http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Sage.aspx

Disclaimer -- I'm a systems guy. I think I have a unique perspective though -- I get to deal with lousy software after it's been released.

I came into IT through the back door. I was a science major in college, messed with computers all the time as I was growing up, and realized I could make a better living in IT than I could in science. So yes, I don't have a ton of programming experience. I have picked up a lot of information over the years on how operating systems actually work under the hood though.

  If I'm given another internally-developed desktop application that does simple database calls requiring a dual-core processor and a minimum of 512 MB of RAM to run, I'm going to go crazy.

I agree with Stroustrup. There really isn't enough good computer science education these days. Computers have gotten so fast and powerful that there's no need to optimize code anymore. This explains why everyone's programming in Java and .NET. Without super-fast computers, any programmer would shy away from compile-at-runtime software. The solution for making a program run faster these days is to throw a bigger box at it. I deal with this every day, trying to explain to project managers and CIOs why we need more money in the hardware budget again.

And I agree with everyone who correctly points out that this isn't 1981. Sure, we don't have to squeeze an entire video game into a 4K Atari 2600 cartridge anymore. But I've seen stuff written internally that's just total garbage, and all of it could be solved by thinking a little bit before attacking the problem. Most of the stuff I deal with is straight from http://www.thedailywtf.com./ Think of massive switch() statements that check hundreds of possibilities, iterating over each entry in a million-row database query result, etc. Everyone in corporate-land has dealt with apps like these...click the Submit button and wait 3 minutes for a result. :-)

Some of this can't be avoided. Most corporate IT departments don't understand the difference between good and bad applications. But I think that if we get people interested in embedded systems or something, things may fix themselves. I highly recommend not teaching CS students Java as their first language....

"...is that C++ is a rather complex and brittle language. :-) ..bruce.." That's not so much a problem as it is the nature of computers. Computers and the logic that runs them is complex and brittle, thus why it is important that developers understand a lower-level language like C++. If you don't understand the underlying system for which you are developing, you won't be efficient or effective at doing what you're attempting to do.

It reminds me of this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/It-Had-Too-Many-Functions.aspx

Conveniently, the DailyWTF steps in to provide some anecdotal evidence:

When I showed my lead the old code and the new, he responded, ah, that must have been Jed Code; yeah, he really hated anything that had to use arrays or loops, he couldn't see the point of them ... I think each month he would uncomment the next month and redeploy the application

Incidentally, I didn't mean to denigrate web developers, who come in great, good, adequate and DailyWTF, just as everyone else in IT does. But I'd be surprised if including them in "developers" didn't further drive down the percentage with experience in parallelization.

My response to all the people who claim what a "problem" the design of WoW is and how much better their pet game is is the same one another poster made in this thread: 10 million users. They are doing something right.

That is an old argument, and not a particularly good one. That they are doing something right doesn't say anything about what they're doing wrong.

Look at MySpace. Tour dates have been broken on band MySpace pages for over a week now, going on two weeks. It seems like every attempted fix just breaks them in different ways -- I suppose MySpace is running a developmestruction environment, because I honestly can't imagine how it would be taking them weeks to fix this feature, let alone why they can't test it all in some staging environment before they screw up the live site.

Yet MySpace is hugely successful. There are better alternatives, yet MySpace still wins out of sheer network effect. The lock-in is worse than Windows -- if you go off MySpace, you lose your MySpace messages, your MySpace friends, everything. The same is true of WoW -- all your epic crap, and your character, and all your in-game friends, skills you've developed (both you and your character) go away if you switch to another game.

I haven't played nearly enough WoW to appreciate what problems there are (or aren't) with it, but merely pointing to the number of users proves nothing.

Sorry, here's the first entry in the DailyWTF series. Be sure to read through to the part where the business plan evolves to strapping a laptop, solar cell and satellite dish to a donkey and sending it through rural India!

Check out

http://thedailywtf.com/

They have a whole section on screen captures.

Premature optimization is the devil.

Wrong. Premature peephole optimization is the devil.

At the design stage choosing a good algorithm that scales is entirely appropriate. This is particularly true when you don't know how much data you'll be working with. Like any scripting language.

Performance criteria are always part of a design and cruddy programmers who hide their incompetence with the above mantra should be fired. See dailywtf for examples.

---

Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.

This story reminds me of yesterday's WTF...

I think the interface is starting to remind me of filematrix:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Enter_The_Matrix.aspx

Maybe they should take Mozilla's lead and implement the kitchen sink?

How about any of these ... all spawned into existence by giving a novice too many tools to play with :-(

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Enterprisey-Null-Test.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/His-Own-Way-to-Newline.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/OurBoolean.aspx

I could go on ...

How about any of these ... all spawned into existence by giving a novice too many tools to play with :-(

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Enterprisey-Null-Test.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/His-Own-Way-to-Newline.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/OurBoolean.aspx

I could go on ...

How about any of these ... all spawned into existence by giving a novice too many tools to play with :-(

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Enterprisey-Null-Test.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/His-Own-Way-to-Newline.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/OurBoolean.aspx

I could go on ...

Five years of experience at a minimum is required to work with telephone keypads.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/5_years_C-pound_experience.aspx

On the flipside, I do often get a laugh when I read some of the overcomplicated "Enterprisey" code the is all too often featured on sites like http://thedailywtf.com/. It is amazing what some "enterprise" programmers will write to justify their overly inflated hourly rates (and egos). Not that I haven't see my share of Ruby WTFs. But it gets taken to a whole new level once you get "enterprise" programmers involved.

Working in the "enterprise" sucks. Partially because large corporations are soulless hells, but mostly because of arrogant pricks like you. I'm sure you'd have to pay someone more than $100 an hour just to put up with your shit.

This is hilarious. You should submit this story to The Daily WTF.

http://www.example.com?var=http://www.1337h4x0r/script.php

JavaScript

You should check out neural networks. They work based on the "do a bit and pass it along" principle. They're only good, however, for a certain subset of problems.

Nonsense, Neural Networks are the wave of the future!

So You Hacked Our Site!?

I think someone should trademark the term "Hacking," as people take it to mean both "trespassing online" and "breaching our illusion of security."

The Daily WTF published an article very similar to this, where a web site's "security" model involved simply having a user fill in their username and password (which was processed by client-side javascript) and then forwarding them to an unsecured URL. WTF Security.

When the article's author pointed out to the company how bad their security was, he was accused of "hacking" in. A very, very funny article...

Cheating is the IP theft of the academic world.

With one difference: If the student somehow makes it out of there with a degree, we're the ones who have to deal with them.

Oh, and it's far easier to prevent than DRM.

Sounds like your teacher is a grade A asshat and your 'policies' are borderline RIAA/MPAA stupid.

Every single university I visited had the same policies. I know mine did. And the penalty is exactly the same, whether you're the original author or the cheater, because they can't tell, after the fact, who's who on that. It's also the same whether it was intentional or not, the assumption being that if you care about your academic career, you'll secure your computer and your university account -- which also prevents someone from using the excuse of "accidentally" letting someone else into their account.

Your best way to deal with it is to make that information 'useless' and move on.

Maybe so, but if you get caught, far as I'm concerned, you should be gone -- whether or not it was useful. What happens when you hit the Real World? Going to leak corporate secrets because "it's going to happen"?

I can see both sides here...

I've been in that situation where I'm one of the only ones to actually get some assignment, but the other students aren't interested in learning, they're interested in grades. Never mind that they aren't returning any value to the group -- what pisses me off is that they are actually just writing down what I say without making any effort to learn what it means. (That, and if they actually do just write down what I say, I could get in trouble for plagiarism.)

On the other hand, we all want a free exchange of information on the Internet. We want Freenet, or the moral equivalent. Which means that teaching methodologies must be worked out such that plagiarism of answers simply doesn't work.

In some cases, this is reasonably possible -- anything that requires a paper or a project should be obvious when it was copied and pasted from something else. But in others -- take math, where there often really is one right answer, and not very many ways of arriving at it -- I really don't know how to bulletproof that against cheating, other than to ensure that exams are a big enough chunk of your grade that if you've been cheating the rest of the semester, the exam will flunk you.

But at the same time, exams can't test everything that a homework assignment can -- often, they also test whether you're good at taking exams.

So I don't really have a solution. About the only thing I can know for sure is that I'm not cheating. Which is, maybe, valuable enough -- a word of advice, to anyone who likes to copy and paste, or simply write down answers -- just what do you think you're going to do when you get out into the Real World and don't know shit, other than how to copy and paste? If you're lucky, you'll last a month before you enter the exciting world of fast food.

Oh, also: IM and IRC can have archives, and can just as easily be copied/pasted from as email. It's not about time of retention.

Whoops, let's try that again with the proper markup.

"what's the most speed optimization you've realized?"

At my last job, the boss had the brillant idea of outsourcing some of the coding to an Indian team. Now some Indian coders are good enough to overcome the various disadvantages of being several time zones away, but these guys weren't.

I did a one-line fix to one of their routines, along the lines of

// old code
loop through each record in a file
if starts with (desired prefix) then do something
end loop

// new code
loop through each record in a file, starting at (desired prefix) and ending at (desired prefix + CHR(255))
do something
end loop

Of course, you know they only tested this on a file with like 10 records in it, whereas the live file had more like 150,000 (and typically only a dozen or two for any given prefix).

"what's the most speed optimization you've realized?"

who can forge hard-working programmers into good and hard-working programmers.

Not going to happen unless they were already decent. Not good, decent.

Let's take an example from my interview... How would you check that a string is a palindrome?

A clever programmer might do something like:

sentence.reverse == sentence

A programmer somewhat more concerned with efficiency might iterate over the string, character by character, comparing the first half with the second half.

A more thorough, correct programmer would do either of the above, but stick a

sentence.downcase!

in front of it -- probably also strip out punctuation and spaces.

And then there are the WTF programmers, who will do something like:

i = 0
result = true
while i < sentence.length
case sentence[i]
when 'A'
if sentence[sentence.length-i] == 'A'
# yup
else
result = false
end
when 'a'
...

Oh, and the above won't actually work as written, aside from being absurdly inefficient both in coding time and in runtime if it did work. The amount of effort it would take to mold someone who would actually write the above into a decent programmer is not worth it.

Compare that to someone who wrote the first example (sentence.reverse == sentence) -- remind them about whitespace, punctuation, and capitalization, and they'll be able to work it out.

Now, absolutely, if you can't do this stuff yourself, hire someone who can. That part is tricky, but the complaint of the original article was not that they didn't know how to find any good programmers (or even superstars), but that they couldn't find enough.

And absolutely, one "star programmer" is not as important as a team that works well together -- but a "star project manager" isn't a silver bullet either.

Microsoft... air... just in time for a daily wtf

Found it. Clueless users FTW (and the WTF).

But how much is enough to be useful, versus "just enough to be dangerous"? I can imagine a programmer knowing a bit of assembly and therefore spending too much time trying to (over-)optimize some particular thing, when a) it's already optimized as much as it can be, or b) putting effort into another part would yield much greater returns. You need look no further than the daily wtf for proof.

As for the article itself, I think the main point is correct--not that no one anywhere needs to know these things, but that fewer and fewer people need to know them, and that lots of us who've been around a while know lots of stuff that will never again be useful. I'm a huge believer that knowing history is a good thing and it gives you useful perspective and good general knowledge but these things just won't be day-to-day useful the way they once were. I am by no means the oldest guy in the room but I was working with computers in the mid-90s and I do remember fiddling with the dipswitches on the back of a 14.4 modem, then working out the proper AT commands, and moving IRQ jumpers on an ISA sound card, futzing with SCSI IDs and terminators on Mac equipment, etc etc etc. Many, many things that I'll never, ever, ever have to do again.

"online" payment, which in practice means that a physical check is printed somewhere in the US, mailed to the recipient who then drop it of at her/his bank to cash it. The bank then probably send the check off to another location where it is *scanned* so it can be archived and verified later. That is what I call an efficient bank system

A "real" email requires a printer, a wooden table and some photography, as regular readers of http://www.thedailywtf.com/ are well aware. A "virtual" email is simply an electronic copy of one of those photo's, preferably in .doc or .ppt format.

"I no longer use a PC" - What did you make your website with? A pencil and pad?

Also known as Web 0.1...

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Calculatorating-in-Las-Vegas.aspx

I've got to say, this doesn't surprise me at all. In the time I've spent at my job, I've been repeatedly floored by the amazing conduct of other companies IT departments. We've only encountered two people I can think of who have been hostile. Everyone else has been quite nice. You'd think people would have things setup well, but they don't.

We've seen many custom XML parsers and encoders, all slightly wrong. We've seen people transmitting very sensitive data without using any kind of security until we refused to continue working without SSL being added to the equation. We've seen people who were secure change their certificates to self-signed, and we seem to consistently know when people's certificates expire before they do.

But even without these things, I can't tell you how many people send us bad data and flat out ignore the response. We get all sorts of bad data sent to us all the time. When that happens, we reply with a failure message describing what's wrong. Yet we get bits of stuff all the time that is wrong, in the same way, from the same people. I'm not talking about sending us something that they aren't supposed to (X when we say only Y), I'm saying invalid XML type wrong... such that it can't be parsed.

We have, a few times while I've been there, had people make a change in their software (or something) and bombard us with invalid data until we we either block their IP or manage to get into voice contact with their IT department. Sometimes they don't even seem to notice the lockout.

Some places can be amazing. Some software can be poorly designed (or something can cause a strange side effect, see here). I really like one of the suggestions in the comments on the article... start replying really slow, and often with invalid data. They won't do it. I wouldn't. But I like the idea.

For the majority of applications that use it, it's overboard.

You mean like this?

If they found only one middle state, they could implement { true, false, file_not_found } enum

Hey! Adding features and improving performance are non trivial tasks, mind you!

With a real network, hand out your own addresses and make them random in the third and fourth hex digits so that hackers will have to guess out each and every terminal on your net.

Now add MAC security to your router so that the hacker not only has to correctly guess from a crore of non standard addresses to address it,