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Some people are gonna be mad.

Let me enlighten you: http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/7593/141396.aspx

other peoples' code...b sure 2 post the good stuff on http://thedailywtf.com/;-)

I should have explicitly stated that I meant software written by sane people. Are you a WTF reader, perchance?

He said he had a lot of arguments, but perhaps he just uses really long names

Originally from http://thedailywtf.com/

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Blake_Ross_on_Popup_Suppression.aspx

In an interview doing a coding problem, and I suddenly bark out to the interviewer: "Quick, recite the man pages for fopen(3) and open(3)!"

If they aren't giving me a reasonable coding environment for the practice problems, I may as well fix it.

And your link should have been thedailywtf.com. Yours goes to some Christian site that has no coding section.

I'll second that.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx

No matter what I think of my code, I always know (pray) that it'll never be bad enough to be submitted to Worse Than Failure.

That said, I do revisit code that I'd written a few years back and think "WTF were you thinking?!"

I have a Desktop Search Engine. The Gurus just can't stand the code.

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/124349.aspx

It's the only program I need and I don't give a shit.

Also known under the better old name http://www.thedailywtf.com/
The DNS record is still active, just forwards to new site. He should've just told his grandma or whoever that WTF stood for "Worse than Failure" and left the site name alone. That's TheRealWTF(TM)...........I've been reading too many of the comments there.

Internally, I use DNS and I would never replace it. Just secure it. All my Internal Updates for my home DNS System work like this. Using the LDAPDNS system, my reverse lookup zones become distinguished containers, like

relativeDomainName=1+zoneName=0.168.192.in-addr.ar pa,dc=0,dc=168,dc=192,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa

You set this up for your freakin' home network!?!?!? Brother, there's this wild and wonderful thing out there called the world and you really, REALLY need to get a taste of it!

Some of the highlights that you'd do well to consider:

First, there's the Woman. Life with a good woman is a life with greater extremes. Good moments are way better, bad moments are way worse.

Another good thing to try while roaming the wild, real world: Beer! This can be a good way to land a woman, if only for a night.

Put the two together under the right circumstances, and you just might be able to experience perhaps the greatest pleasure of them all: SEX! Many would argue that this is the point of having a woman. I'd argue instead that basic physiology has the point belonging to the man, but I digress...

Seriously, implementing an LDAP backend to DNS for a home network is about like using a jet engine for a ceiling fan. I'd love to know all the details of your implementation, since it would likely make a good candidate for submission to another good website.

Lastly, to do "secure" DNS updates is pretty simple. I keep the DNS zone files on my laptop. All my DNS nameservers are configured identically, as master servers. I use a script to SCP the files to the nameservers when I do a DNS update. Stupid simple, excellent security a la SSH.

I'm very happy to see it linked as thedailywtf.com, as the more links on the web posted to thedailywtf.com the lower the pagerank on worsethanfailure.com will be as a result of domain redirects on inlinks. Since the name change was obviously advertising motivated, the more inlinks to thedailywtf.com the better, as this will be counterproductive to the original goal as long as the old domain still points to the same site as worsethanfailure.com. So the owner eventually will have to relinquish the thedailywtf.com domain for use by a non sell-out, or point it to a static page with a link to the new domain, or capitulate and return to the use of the original name. So.. keep linking it as thedailywtf.com everyone!

I'm very happy to see it linked as thedailywtf.com, as the more links on the web posted to thedailywtf.com the lower the pagerank on worsethanfailure.com will be as a result of domain redirects on inlinks. Since the name change was obviously advertising motivated, the more inlinks to thedailywtf.com the better, as this will be counterproductive to the original goal as long as the old domain still points to the same site as worsethanfailure.com. So the owner eventually will have to relinquish the thedailywtf.com domain for use by a non sell-out, or point it to a static page with a link to the new domain, or capitulate and return to the use of the original name. So.. keep linking it as thedailywtf.com everyone!

I'm very happy to see it linked as thedailywtf.com, as the more links on the web posted to thedailywtf.com the lower the pagerank on worsethanfailure.com will be as a result of domain redirects on inlinks. Since the name change was obviously advertising motivated, the more inlinks to thedailywtf.com the better, as this will be counterproductive to the original goal as long as the old domain still points to the same site as worsethanfailure.com. So the owner eventually will have to relinquish the thedailywtf.com domain for use by a non sell-out, or point it to a static page with a link to the new domain, or capitulate and return to the use of the original name. So.. keep linking it as thedailywtf.com everyone!

I'm very happy to see it linked as thedailywtf.com, as the more links on the web posted to thedailywtf.com the lower the pagerank on worsethanfailure.com will be as a result of domain redirects on inlinks. Since the name change was obviously advertising motivated, the more inlinks to thedailywtf.com the better, as this will be counterproductive to the original goal as long as the old domain still points to the same site as worsethanfailure.com. So the owner eventually will have to relinquish the thedailywtf.com domain for use by a non sell-out, or point it to a static page with a link to the new domain, or capitulate and return to the use of the original name. So.. keep linking it as thedailywtf.com everyone!

I'm very happy to see it linked as thedailywtf.com, as the more links on the web posted to thedailywtf.com the lower the pagerank on worsethanfailure.com will be as a result of domain redirects on inlinks. Since the name change was obviously advertising motivated, the more inlinks to thedailywtf.com the better, as this will be counterproductive to the original goal as long as the old domain still points to the same site as worsethanfailure.com. So the owner eventually will have to relinquish the thedailywtf.com domain for use by a non sell-out, or point it to a static page with a link to the new domain, or capitulate and return to the use of the original name. So.. keep linking it as thedailywtf.com everyone!

Waiting passively for the programmers to change their bad habits isn't the best strategy that could have be taken by microsoft.

As you state those problems stems from bad programming habits. Developers that have taken the habit of writing critical data just like in the old DOS days : wherever it pleases them, ignoring the fact that some place are supposed to be reserved for admins only.
It has worked up to WinXP because either there wasn't any protection (older DOS based Windowses) or all users did run as admins by default (newer NT based Windowses). Now that VISTA finally tries to correct this and approach something that looks like Unix' habits - using admin-level privileges for doing ... admin work on the machine as intended. They found thousands of bad-behaving softwares that can work under this envrionment.

BUT THEY'VE TAKEN THE WRONG ROUTE AROUND THE PROBLEM !!!

With such problems you have three solutions :

- IGNORE THEM. Let the bad-behaving software just crash or display error message. That would attract attention to the fact that those software are broken. BUT ! Most users will believe that errors appear because Vista is buggy. The new version will get a bad reputation (as if the rest wasn't enough) and no users would like to switch. Microsoft would loose valuable market shares.
-> So that's why microsoft doesn't do it.
This behavious only works on Unices because most of the other software function correctly and users guess that the problems comes from the badly-behaving software and they try to download a corrected newer version or a better alternative.

- ASK USER'S PERMISSION. Do some 'sudo'-style privilege escalation for every single action that would require admin rights. And hope that developer will notice and produce more Vista-compatible softwares.
-> This is what microsoft has done, BUT THIS IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG.
Because concerning users :
- It floods them with a mass of annoying blocking popups asking for privileges. The users ends-up first answering OK to everything (and the Unix style protection is completly lost) and then they disable the whole UAC to stop the flow of popups. So it is as if it wasn't introduced in vista in the first place.
And concerning developers :
- As pointed by other /. developpers will be slow to change. They don't write code "perfect by the book", code that "somewhat works" is enough for most of them. Read sites like this if you don't believe.
- Changing may be difficult for them, because it would require re-doing the whole program architecture. Or it could pose problem to migration between the older bad-behaving version and the newer vista-compatible version, and there's a huge users pool that the developpers want to avoid pissing because of a non-trivial migration.
- And finally, they aren't compelled to change this, because users are running with UAC disabled anyway.

The last solution would be :
- VIRTUALIZE IT. Put all old-world (pre-Vista) software in a sandbox, a chroot jail, or whatever it is called in Windows. Whenever some pre-Vista software tries to access stuff it shouldn't in a normal user context, just do it - but on a dummy local copy to both avoid damaging the system and avoid annoying the user. That's the route that Apple has went were pre-OSX apps are ran inside some kind of emulator. But that is easier for them because of the radical shift in architecture : older software rely on a such different API, that it had to be emulated anyway, throwing a sandbox in the mix was only an added bonus.
Microsoft could do it as easily, because, fundamentally, Vista is XP with a shiny interface and some DRM thrown in. It would have annoyed users : They used to ran perfectly well behaving software writen for NT-Kernel under XP and suddenly, under Vista which uses mostly the same internal structure they have to run the same software inside a sandbox.
Microsoft SHOULD have spent a lot of time planning well the transit

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/55879/PostAttachment .aspx

Caption says "Error fetching resource list from repository.

Reason:
I/O exception occured: Connection refused: I HATE YOU.

• User Friendly
• Cryptome
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• Stupid Security
• This Is Broken
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• Tribe
• Slashdot main page
• Ask Slashdot
• Worse Than Failure (formerly known as the Daily WTF)
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Of these entries, RISKS, Cryptome, Slashdot, Ask Slashdot, Worse Than Failure, and the Sidebar WTF section of Worse than Failure are all also subscribed in my RSS feed reader, along with BBC News, the Public Daily Brief and some select search terms in Google News.

The reasons that Y2K could be considered a joke is that, the urban legends that were repported by news outlets at that time were that, once 2000 arrived, the end of world would happen, with planes crashing, nuclear centrals blowing up and such.

Whereas, most of the sensitive code tends to either not be calendar-sensitive, or use some more stable representation of time (unix epoch, to give an exemple) because there are way to much problems with date-as-string format (like day time savings create both holes and duplicate entries).
Plane didn't crash because a plane reactor doesn't need a calendar to fly (only kersone) and on ground, an analog radar image can also be processed visually be the operator if the computer fails for some obscure reason.
Nuclear centrals didn't blow because their time-dependent routine use robust time format.

The code affected by the bug is legacy code which date back several decades. Which already tended to be rare (and not some much the case in critical applications). Or usually crappy, badly written software. The kind that ends up on the Daily WTF. This is very common in corporation. Often didn't get patched anyway (because CEOs were occupied stock-piling food provision in case of global disaster ?) and thus ensured public embarassement (like date being displayed as 19100-01-01). But sledom was in control of critical stuff. Without patching, more company may have had difficulties and maybe even go bankrupt. But those companies will nonetheless still die when the dot-com bubble bursted or when the web2.0 buble will burst. With stories ending up on website for bringing laughs and lessons to fellow programmers.

"Apparently on Monday they discovered tax fillings submitted electronically where the social insurance number, and the date of birth were swapped."

Can I assume that somebody has already sent this in to WTF's Error'd, or should I do it?

Yup, it's *really* easy to build an entire shadow-replica of your site on a separate set of servers and "accidentally" make sure it has only the higher prices. It's not like they were trying to bait & switch or anything.

And it would be *totally* unreasonable to maintain only one website instead of two. Just like with database normalization, you want as many redundant copies of the data as possible, so that if you accidentally delete a few, you always have extra copies floating around. I mean, isn't that how everyone does their database replication? You just make extra tables in the database, like TABLE1, TABLE1_BACKUP, TABLE1_OLD, TABLE1_OLD2, and so on...

Where did I learn all this about databases, you ask? There's a great website with example code--it's called the Daily WTF :]

If I was really serious about Perl scripting I would have used "Paula" as a variable.

here at work we use websense, they blocked slashdot one day for proxy avoidance!
then there is this image: http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/200612/pup/msmj. jpg

oh well...without "developers" like that, I guess we'd have no thedailyWTF.com

Try asking here http://www.thedailywtf.com/

XML has become pervasive in the computing world and is buried more and more deeply into modern applications and operating systems.

Man, that's the scariest thing I've read all day. IT'S BURROWING INTO THE SYSTEM!! AHHHH!!!! ANGLE BRACKETS EVERYWHERE!

Seriously, the first thing that came to mind was the type of stuff you read on thedailywtf.com.. something like: "And then Joe realized that the reason the string_to_upper() was so slow was because it was calling a SOAP service on a machine at the lead developer's previous employer, passing 23K of XML in both directions...." .. And then INVARIABLY, there's a reply that says "Hey, that isn't such a bad idea...."

So, no thanks, I don't want XML burying itself in my code any more than I want my music player to squirt songs.

Everybody knows some footballers are worth a million dollars and others are not worth a fig, but somehow hardly anyone realises that some programmers are worth a million dollars but with some others it would be worth a million dollars to get shot them (see the daily wtf for details).

Link directly to the source

You're confusing your memes. The wooden table running gag is from the Daily WTF. Or is your real name Paula? ;-)

It seems to me that the energy savings would be more beneficial to whoever pays the bill on the huge server farms rather than individual "normal people" who have a small ethernet running at their house or small business and whatnot. I hope they will shift away from this and focus on another area where they can actually make a difference that would noticeably benefit everyone; I especially like the idea of improving power supply efficiency (which is a bigger problem that just ethernets, IMO). One way to do this would be to get devices running directly off of direct AC current. IIRC, you can avoid a 20% penalty hit incurred from during the conversion from AC->DC that you get with normal power supplies.

Beware of the gloves of the over-complicators :p

--
Wi-Fizzle Research

Probably here

The problem there is that often the Sales and Marketing side of the business doesn't understand just what the Technical side can and can't do, and in what amount of time they can or can't do it. So they start promising the moon, when the Technical side can produce maybe the Rocky Mountains. This creates all sorts of worthless and stupid demands on Technical side. (Many of them wind up on TheDailyWTF)

The reason a CIO can't be a CEO is the same reason the CEO you described shouldn't be a CEO- they're too one-sided. A good CEO has handled all parts of a company, from overseeing a development project to handling sales of things to international relations and maybe even helping to clean the bathrooms once or twice. Unfortunatly, too many CEOs (and other members of the board) wind up as you describe.

Also, I put forth that you don't need superior Sales and Market if you have a high quality product. I have never seen a single advertisement for Pez, yet those things sell like... well, like candy. Even the tie-ins with comics or games or movies don't get any advertising from Pez themselves.

>> "People want technology to be magically easy to configure and re-purpose. But it isn't."
> Let's ignore the faction that benefits from the status-quo.

While you can make good technology that works well, ultimately it does rely on a user who knows what they're doing. There are plenty of untrained users who can't figure out anything beyond the wall plug. You can make up new meanings for words like "faction" all you want, but it won't change the fact that I know these people and I answer their illogical questions constantly. Alas, it's what I do all day, for the most part.

>> "Computers don't "think" like people do and it takes a lot of work for a person to think the way a computer does."
> It's easier to change computers than it is to change people.

And who's going to change the computers? Oh, right, the same people who don't want to or can't adapt. Actually, it's easier to train people than to try to code up a DWIM instruction. Been there, done that, plenty of times. You bend over backwards trying to make the computer explain everything to them, they get some message because they tried to do something that makes NO sense whatsoever, and then they ask you what the message means. The root cause here is muddled thinking at least as often as program error.

>> "Being pretty much accurate for most of the data most of the time is what you get when the untrained person attempts it."
> They're usually better domain experts than the turf-protecting programmers.

Doesn't help much. I have a huge mass of legacy code written by "domain experts" who were not programmers. There's no error checking, they apparently don't know how to allocate memory (malloc() is apparently unknown to them) and do nice things line making an array of 1,000,000 of a certain struct. They have huge masses of effectively dead code, require people to enumerate all possible options in a configuration file (then proceed to silently overwrite all of the data in the file with hard-coded, recalculated values). But maybe that's not so bad, because they slurp in the file with scanf() and don't bother to check ANY part of anything for stupid things like error codes. And no, it's sure as hell not some speed-critical loop, nor is the application carefully isolated by other things which DO check for errors.

Fact of the matter is that you have to be both. If you're not a programmer, you'll create a brittle, WTF of a program. If you're not an expert on the problem you're trying to solve, well, you probably won't finish your application and no one will use it because they prefer the old piece of crap they've been using the whole time.

But anyhow, the proper role is to have the domain experts write the specs and do the testing, while the programmers write the actual code. Otherwise, I'll probably end up submitting your code to The Daily WTF if I'm unfortunate enough to come across it :P

In a side note, given the nature of his site, I'm honestly not surprised the Daily WTF's maintainer is the fanboy of Windows that he is...

Virtudyne/Simdesk???? http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Best_of_2006_0x3a_ _The_Virtudyne_Saga.aspx

You should contact the "project manager" from this job..... http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Secure_and_Well- Ventilated_Location.aspx

If you can read some of the code on the daily WTF and feel the horror and the "F" - then your code is not bad.

I shoot her. Immediately.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula _Bean.aspx

From: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Data_Cleanup.a spx

UPDATE OWNER_USER.all_candidates SET name = filter(translate(REPLACE(REPLACE
(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(r eplace(replace(replace(replace
(REPLACE(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(r eplace(replace(replace(replace
(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(r eplace(REPLACE(REPLACE(
        name,
CHR(1),null),CHR(2),null),CHR(3),null),CHR(4),null ),CHR(5),null),CHR(6),null),
CHR(7),null),CHR(8),null),CHR(9),null),CHR(10),nul l),CHR(11),null),CHR(12),
null),CHR(13),null),CHR(14),null),CHR(15),null),CH R(16),null),CHR(17),null),
CHR(18),null),CHR(19),null),CHR(20),null),CHR(21), null),CHR(22),null),CHR(23),
null),CHR(24),null),CHR(25),null),CHR(26),null),CH R(27),null),CHR(28),null),
CHR(29),null),CHR(30),NULL),CHR(31),NULL))), ...I hope.

Just in case you where living under a rock these past few years, here is the link:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula _Bean.aspx

This needs to be posted to the daily wtf (not sanity safe)

Just like Slashdot, though, make sure you read the comments. Often, people's "solutions" to the original post will be even funnier and more of a WTF than the original. One of the best ones for "stupid comments" is setDirty( true ) where, after nearly 200 posts, the general consensus is that the original code was basically correct, and the number of "corrections" that failed to duplicate the original functionality is rather amazing.

Spoiler: For those that don't want to draw out the truth table that the submitter for the linked story apparently needed to do, the code calls "setDirty(true)" only if the value it's called with is different from the old value. So any "correction" that can ever execute "setDirty(false)" is broken.

Security by Insanity.

I know the poster was looking for funny/interesting anecdotes directly from our community, but for those of you who haven't stumbled across The Daily WTF, hop on over to that site and make it a part of your daily reading. While the focus used to be mostly on programming, it's abstracted itself to the generic IT level in recent months, and you'll see all sorts of bizarre stories there.

The Daily WTF is to IT workers what Jerry Springer is to everyone else. Just when you think you're having a bad day and your life is in the crapper, you can take a few minutes to soak in a situation where somebody else has it much, much worse... :)

We already have robots in our internet tubes! Sometimes, though, it's not for the best, damn googlebot!

you mean like this?